Slowly the women did as told, turning away from the line of men. Some of the men started muttering and making agitated movements. The officer at the men’s table, an ascetic, older man, tall and with his stiff hat pulled low on his head, jumped up and shouted, “Any man who moves from this line will be shot!”
The women were naked now, their clothes piled by their feet. The officer instructed them to turn and each did as told, blushing and embarrassed, hands attempting to cover their private parts. He walked down the line touching each one, sometimes squeezing a breast as if he were in a market, sometimes a buttock. Some were sent to the same door as the old women, while a guard herded the others across the courtyard to a distant portal. These were the young, pretty ones. Many were crying and looked over their shoulders toward their fathers, brothers or husbands.
Isaac had never seen a nude woman. To be confronted by a large group of them was unnerving. He wondered where they were being taken. Soon it was his turn at the table. He gave his name, his age, though he added two years and when asked his profession, answered Instrument Maker.
“Instrument maker?” the officer asked. “What sort of instruments? Like musical instruments?”
Isaac smiled, “Oh, no sir, scientific instruments.” He was thinking now as fast as he could. “Mostly laboratory instruments.”
“Really?” the officer mused, looking up at the boy standing before him. “Anything else?”
Isaac remembered how the guards had treated him back in Germany when he’d drawn pictures of them. “I am also a portrait artist and have designed jewelry.”
“Ya? Are you any good, boy?”
“If you give me paper and pencil, I will draw a very good likeness of you and you can send it to your wife, sir.” Isaac thought he had nothing to lose.
The woman leaned over and said something to the officer. Isaac could not hear, but the officer frowned at her. “Over there, boy.” He pointed to the far doorway. “See the Unterfeldwebel (sergeant) and tell him I said to send you to the representative from Siemen’s. They will find a place for you.” He cocked an eye at Isaac, “They will determine whether you are telling the truth or not, Jude.”
Isaac hurried through the far gateway and into a room where he was ordered to disrobe and put his clothes in a basket. Then he was herded into a shower room with other men. The door was closed and the showers came on. A guard stood with his back to the door, sub-machine gun in his hands. “What is this?” asked Isaac.
“It is delousing, cleaning. You will be deloused and cleaned once a week,” he replied.
After the shower, their heads were shaved with buzzing cutters like sheep shears, and they were led to another room with long tables with rough blue clothing on them. The guard shouted, “Dress now. Then form a line here.” They lined against a wall and were once again led to a series of tables. There were men and women seated behind the tables. Very few were in uniform and, on the whole, many of them looked decidedly uncomfortable. On the uniform shirts were numbers. Again the guard shouted, “You are now a number. Look and memorize it. From now on, that is you!”
Isaac looked at his number. He pulled the cloth away from his breast and read upside down 5133890, then looked at the tables.
An officer stood at the head of the line. “When I ask your primary work experience, tell me quickly and then proceed to where I point, ya?” The men mumbled assent.
When it was Isaac’s turn, he loudly said, “Laboratory instrument assembler.”
At a table near the end, a man raised a hand. He was a small man, had a thin mustache and wore a striped suit with a dark tie.
The guard shoved Isaac towards the table, “Schnell!” he shouted.
Isaac stopped and stood straight. There were two women seated with the man. One was in civilian clothes and one wore a uniform. Isaac noted that she had the feared SS death’s head insignia on her shoulders.
The woman soldier snapped, “Your name!”
“Uh, Isaac Rothberg.”
“Nein! Your number. You are now that number!” She stood and slapped Isaac hard as she said this.
“Yes, madam. I am number 5133890.” Isaac’s face stung from the blow, but he didn’t raise a hand.
The man at the table said softly, “Do you know how to assemble small parts?”
“Oh yes, Mein Herr. My family made jewelry. I assembled many of the pieces when I was younger. Then I was apprenticed to a company in my town that made laboratory equipment.”
The man frowned, “And what company would that be, young man?”
Isaac remembered the name stamped on a scale at his chemistry class at school. “Adolphus-Branden, sir.”
The small man flipped through his stack of papers, “Ah, yes, here it is. Ser gutt. You will come and work for us, ya?”
Before he could reply the woman soldier, berated the man. “You don’t ask a prisoner, a Jew, if he will work. Of course he will work. He is working for der Vater land.”
“Ya. Ya, I am sorry, Fraulein Schmidt. This is all quite new to me.” The other woman just scrunched her face closer to her notepad and said nothing.
The woman soldier scribbled a note on a scrap of paper and thrust it into Isaac’s hand. “Show that to the warder. Through that door.” She pointed at another in the endless succession of doorways. As Isaac marched through, he was in a long hallway with doors on either side. After closing the door behind him, and before he could proceed down the passage, a door opened on his right, putting him behind it. Two men in black uniforms came through, smoking. Through the crack in the door, Isaac saw a pile of naked bodies on a damp floor. There were women and children. A ventilator fan whirred.
“Ya,” said one of the soldiers, holding the door. “I will report to Berlin that the gas works quickly. And with no blood like from shooting them.”
The other soldier agreed, “Much better even than wasting petrol from exhaust fumes. I will go to the dungeon and get some of those strongback farmers to remove the bodies to the pit out back.”
“Gut, but keep your weapon handy. Some of those rats may be family. Take Karl with you. He likes shooting Juden.”
“Good idea. I’ll see you later at dinner. Perhaps we can play some cards after?”
“Oh, ho! You wish to take my pay once again, you scoundrel?” He laughed. One of the soldiers stepped back into the killing room and the other preceded Isaac down the hallway, his boots loudly clicking on the cement floor. Isaac waited until he was nearly through the door before he started after. He didn’t want the soldier to know that he’d seen what they’d done or heard them talking. The room contained some of the elderly prisoners and mothers with small children. He was shaken to his core, but not afraid. He would kill them all. All these black-suited soldiers, like he’d killed Mr. Bruger.
Isaac would remember.
Chapter 9
Over the meager supper consisting of a bowl of thin soup, a scrap of bread with a tiny smear of butter, a couple of the burly farm men admitted how they’d been forced to carry the naked bodies of those who had been asphyxiated out through a tunnel to a large pit dug by an earth-moving machine. There, they’d dropped the bodies over the side and returned to get more. All they’d been allowed were crude stretchers on which the guards ordered them to pile three and sometimes four corpses at a time, children piled on top of mothers.
They told of one man who grabbed a rock and tried to hit one of the guards named Karl. The other guard shot him with his pistol, and then the prisoners were ordered to roll his still breathing body into the pit with the corpses. And while they obeyed, the guards laughed and taunted them.
After supper Isaac slept on the cold stone floor with the crowd of other men. Some of the men, the ones who were on the burial detail, wept openly. Everyone else kept silent, allowing them their grief.
Isaac learned that most of the men he was quartered with, uneducated and strong, were to be sent to work in stone quarries. Only he and three others were spared this. He was to go with a small
man to the Siemens’ factory, while the two others were being sent to a factory making telephone equipment. He spoke with these two men and learned that they, too, had exaggerated their knowledge. He wished them luck and they him. Isaac figured that he would learn quickly by watching the others doing the same work.
However, until he was taken away, Isaac was forced to work each day with the others paving a road with cobblestones. They broke stones, dressed and bedded them with sand between. The guards forced them up at three in the morning and then made them stand in front of the barracks in a tight line sometimes for two hours. Then they were fed a scrap of bread and some water before they were led to the construction site. At any time, the guards might shove them, trip them, hit them with rifles, or otherwise make their lives hell.
Some of the men wanted to escape, but how? This place was an old castle with tall stone walls. They slept in the cellar, the dungeon. On the worksite, many soldiers guarded them constantly. Isaac couldn’t understand why they were paving this road. From the castle, it led down a hill to a main road, which was also gravel. In the evenings, the men discussed this, and decided it was a make-work project to keep them busy and wear them down before they were transferred to another facility.
It wasn’t long before two of the men, Yosh and Samuel, decided to try to make a run for it. There was a large thicket of trees not far from the bottom of the hill. When they were working near there, the guards let them go to the edge to relieve themselves. For a minute or two they were out of sight as they squatted. The two men came up with a plan. During the night they unraveled some yarn from their stockings.
The next day was cloudy, with rain threatening. Yosh, a short refugee from eastern Poland, dark haired with close set eyes, was first out and first to claim his pick for the road work. Samuel, a mild man, tall and heavyset, with long brown hair and a great beak of a nose, was right behind him. After their morning muster and feeding, the men trudged out to the road and began work. First, they picked and raked the thin soil, then others took the squared off rocks from a wagon and bedded them. Others hauled buckets of sand and poured them over the stones and the last were the sweepers who made sure each gap between the stones was filled. This last job. being less demanding, was usually left to the older men.
After an hour, Samuel stepped to a guard and, clutching his stomach, stated his case. The guard motioned him to the tall grass at the edge of the wood.
“Keep shaking the grass so I know you are there.” A few meters away, Yosh asked the same of another guard and was waved aside also, with the same admonition: shake the tall grass.
Isaac watched out of the corner of his eye. All the remaining men studiously kept their heads down and worked away. The two men disappeared into the grass. A few seconds later, the tops of the grass began waving. A guard occasionally glanced at the grass. After several minutes had passed, the grass grew still and a guard stalked over to where the men were supposed to be. They were gone; a length of yarn was tied to the clumps of grass. It led into the wood. The guard ran back, shouting that the men had run away!
The other guards screamed for the prisoners to lie down on their stomachs, hands behind their heads. Isaac thought that they were to be summarily executed. In his peripheral vision, he saw two of the soldiers join their comrade and dash into the wood. He hoped that the men would get away even though he knew that they would all pay the price for it.
Eventually, they were ordered to stand, form ranks and march back to the castle. They mustered again in the courtyard as a fine drizzle started to fall. The guards stood under a tin roof that jutted out from the wall. The hours passed and some men started to shiver as the rain got heavier.
A man with jutting ears, whom Isaac didn’t know, slid to his knees and fell on his side. A guard strode over and yelled, “Get up, old Jew!” He kicked him with the toe of his boot, but the man remained motionless. The guard shot him in the head, and then walked back to the shelter. Isaac watched the blood pool and get washed away by the rain. He was shivering now also.
A truck drove into the courtyard and stopped, its canvas cover over the bed sagging from the rain. Two soldiers jumped down and unlatched the tailgate. It fell with a bang, chains rattling. Slowly two men, shackled hand and foot, tumbled onto the rough stone ground. Though they’d been beaten, Isaac knew it was Yosh and Samuel, if nothing more than from the sizes.
A guard prodded them with a rifle until they staggered upright and stumbled over to the ranked men. One of the soldiers said, “I believe the count is accurate now, sir,” to an officer under the metal roof.
The officer nodded and strode back into the castle, where it was drier and warmer. The soldiers left the two men standing before us for almost another hour. As the rain let up, the soldiers motioned us all back towards the building’s wall. Then he shoved and kicked the two escapees to the side of the outer wall.
“Kneel!” he yelled.
Yosh fell to his thin knees, crying, but Samuel smiled at the guard, and said loud enough for us all to hear, “I am not a coward like you. Unshackle me and fight like a man. Any idiot can shoot a cuffed and beaten man. I will not kneel before such as you.” Then he spit at the soldier, who was now joined by several of his mates.
The first soldier was enraged and hit Samuel full in the face with the butt of his rifle. Samuel staggered back spitting out teeth and then, to the wonderment of all, laughed and said, “Is that all you can do, coward? Come, shoot me, you son of a mangy dog.” This time he spit blood at the soldier.
The soldier, a sergeant, was dismayed. This wasn’t how prisoners, Jews, swine, were supposed to act. He looked at his fellow soldiers.
One said, “So? Shoot him!”
The sergeant said, “Yes, all of us. Cock your rifles.”
One of the other soldiers said, “Sergeant, I believe only an officer can give the order to shoot a prisoner.” He looked decidedly uncomfortable.
Isaac remembered that only a short time ago, these men were civilians working in shops, fields, and factories. The training had not yet completely taken hold, and these men had never been to war or in combat.
The sergeant rounded on his men and screamed, “I am a non-commissioned officer! You will do as I say or suffer the consequences. If you do not do as I order, I will have you shot!”
Samuel laughed again, “You poor excuse for a man, your own men won’t even follow your orders.”
The sergeant pushed his men back with his rifle. “Go! Get away! I will do this myself!” Then he turned and quickly placed his rifle against Yosh’s head and pulled the trigger. Yosh sprawled backward on the wet cobbles, his hands by his side. There was silence amongst the prisoners and the soldiers. Clearly, everyone was in shock.
Then Samuel strode up to the sergeant and stood squarely before him, wrists shackled behind his back. “Come, coward, do it. My God will welcome me, and I shall come back and haunt you forever.” He spoke louder, “You will be forever impotent. You will never advance in rank. You will acquire a disease which will eat away at you, making you wish for death.” And again, through broken teeth, he laughed.
The sergeant went completely insane this time. He hit Samuel repeatedly with his rifle until the butt was smeared with his blood, his hands slippery with it and Samuel’s bulk on the ground before him. Then he turned the filthy rifle and fired into Samuel’s broken body until he’d shot the entire clip, spraying blood, bone and brain matter across the courtyard. Even afterward, when all that could be heard was the clicking of the firing pin against an empty chamber, the sergeant kicked and kicked the unmoving Samuel.
Finally when it appeared he was exhausted, the men moved in and took the rifle from his hands and led him away. Two of the other guards motioned us to our quarters.
There was neither food nor water that night.
Chapter 10
Later, Isaac sketched the sergeant’s face in his mind, knowing that if he ever got hold of paper and pencil, he could reproduce it accurately. They didn’t see hi
m again. The next day, one of the other soldiers was wearing sergeant’s stripes on his tunic.
Isaac overheard two of the soldiers talking. They said that the sergeant had been transferred to a new camp they were building to the south. It was to be known as Auschwitz and the sergeant would be put in charge of a sector, which wouldn’t put as much strain on him as dealing with escaping prisoners. He learned that the sergeant’s name was Rolf Boettcher. He committed this name to his memory also.
Two more days passed in backbreaking labor. Then a guard pulled Isaac off the road crew and made him jog back to the castle. There was a small 4x4 lorry waiting in the courtyard. A soldier and a civilian stood beside it talking. The civilian motioned to him to come over.
“Yes, sir?” Isaac asked politely.
The civilian was the man who had interviewed him more than a week before. “Number 5133890, I believe?”
Isaac nodded. Was this the transfer he’d been waiting for or was this merely a prelude to his death. He’d seen other men pulled away from the work party only to disappear. They never even heard what happened to them.
The man looked him up and down, then quickly winked at him. “Get in the rear of the vehicle, please. Let us get you out of here and to a place that can use your talents for the glory of the Fatherland.” This last he said dryly, turned to the guard and said, “Thank you. “ He raised a hand and said, just as dryly, “Heil Hitler.”
Isaac climbed into the rear of the truck where he joined three other men but no guard. After he’d settled himself, he cautiously asked, “Are you men prisoners, too?”
“Ya,” said one. He held out a hand, “Abraham Cohen.” He indicated with his head, “The ugly one is Yuri and the fat one is Lon.” They each shook Isaac’s hand limply. Lon merely grunted and Yuri, a boy near his own age, said nothing, a dead look on his face.
Long Lost Brother Page 5