The day after my final beating, I walked into my barrack, only to be accosted by a German I had never seen before. He was a doctor, the kind whose job it was to play God in a medical ritual known as Muselmann inspection. Muselmann was the word we used in the camps to describe a walking, emaciated corpse. Doctors determined whether a sick or malnourished prisoner was salvageable or whether he should be gassed and burned. My heart jumped when I saw the Muselmann doctor.
The doctor spun me around, lifted my striped uniform and Nazi shirt, and fingered the loose meaty flap of flesh barely covering exposed muscle. “Tomorrow there is a transport going to Buna,” he said flatly. “Your number is on it. You will be on the transport.” He asked no questions and offered no explanations. But for whatever reason, that German doctor decided to save my life. I never saw him again.
Five miles from Auschwitz in Poland lay the subcamp of Monowitz, or “Buna.” The name Buna was derived from the butadiene synthetic rubber factory there that was owned by the IG Farben chemical conglomerate. The SS sold prisoners to IG Farben to work as slave laborers in their massive industrial factories where, among other things, the company manufactured the Zyklon B gas used to exterminate my people.
From factory work to excavation to bricklaying to bookkeeping, IG Farben demanded slave laborers with all manner of trades and skills. The work conditions were as grueling as at Auschwitz, complete with eleven-hour workdays most of the year and thirteen-hour shifts in the summer. But since IG Farben paid for the prisoners, the Nazis were less inclined to kill off inmates for fun. Instead, soldiers administered punishments by singling prisoners out for life-threatening labor assignments such as working in the mines. Nevertheless, in the little over two years of the Buna concentration camp’s existence, the Germans sent an estimated twenty-three thousand prisoners to their deaths.
When I arrived in Buna, I said nothing and complained to no one about my back. Buna had a hospital, but I reasoned that asking for medical assistance might be a one-way ticket to death. Suffering in silence was foolish; infection felled prisoners regularly. But the alternative—seeking medical attention—was a far swifter death sentence than the most virulent disease.
If I die I die, I thought.
The Buna barracks were overcrowded and shoddily constructed. During my first week there, I woke up drenched in sweat and trembling with the chills. With no way to hide my condition, I gambled and quietly asked a kapo for help. He said he would try to get me into the hospital to see a doctor without raising any alarms about my condition to the soldiers.
The doctor I saw was himself a prisoner. To my amazement, he said he knew my dad. The connection to my father—no matter how tenuous—lifted my spirits.
“Your assignments are reinjuring your back,” the doctor explained. “The weight, the bending, the lifting—your wounds can’t heal properly. They’ll never heal, so long as you’re doing hard manual labor.” He said he would have me reassigned to work inside the hospital. I was overjoyed.
Even though I’ll be around sick and dying people, I thought, at least there will be no more slayings inside the hospital.
I was wrong. Instead of gunshots, the Nazis in the hospital administered death sentences with a lethal dose of phenol injected into the heart.
Doctors often conducted morning roll call for hospital patients. There was a silent code of support among some of the prisoner doctors and inmates. When a doctor saw a prisoner with a dire condition or in distress, he would try to get the patient better medicines or extra food rations. I joined the discreet team effort in any little way I could. When a feeble patient was in danger of being singled out, I volunteered to stand in for him.
The doctors weren’t stupid; they knew what I was doing. Tragically, a lot of the sick ended up dying anyway because they were so weak. Only a few of the truly sick patients got well and returned to work in the camps. Still, even though my efforts weren’t much—I was just a kid—patients’ eyes glowed with gratitude every time I told them I would take their place in line. I guess it made them feel worth something and restored a sliver of their human dignity. It did the same for me, too.
One of my jobs in the Buna hospital was preparing and delivering rations of “soup.” With my Nazi shirt under my uniform, no one questioned my coming and going. Operating somewhat invisibly allowed me to get more food to more people. On one occasion I brought a person from my town extra portions several days in a row until he finally regained his strength. God helped him survive, not me. But it made my heart happy to have God use me in a small way to bring someone I knew back to health.
Working in the hospital, I saw every type of malady imaginable. Bloated bodies, corpses covered with disfiguring rashes, skeletons with skin stretched tight like a drum, bodies with limbs blown apart by bombs—I saw it all and helped haul carcasses out of the hospital.
Buna’s barrack conditions were no less bestial than those in Auschwitz. We were so tightly packed into our sleeping racks that everyone had to learn to turn or readjust in unison. Despite the Germans’ desire to prevent outbreaks of typhus or malaria, hygiene was horrific. One shower a week was a luxury. It was not uncommon while sleeping to be urinated or defecated on by fellow prisoners. Nighttime thefts were also a problem. Sometimes a prisoner might save and hide a scrap of black bread, only to have another prisoner pilfer and eat it.
After my back healed, I was taken off hospital detail and reassigned to work in the Buna Works factory and to do brick repairs on bombed-out buildings. Once, while working in the factory, I was assigned to feed wooden planks into a cutting machine. I got distracted and took my eyes off the boards. The machine severed one of my fingers and nearly took off my hand.
The industrial importance of Buna’s rubber factory made it an Allied bombing target. I recall at least twice being bombed at Buna. The first time was December 18, 1944. The warning sirens blared as the rumble of American B-17 and B-24 bomber planes thundered overhead. I scrambled to hide under something and prayed the bombs would miss us and kill our captors.
The shockwave and blast of bombs excited me. With every bomb the Americans dropped, I knew we were that much closer to liberation. Instead of manna, God dropped munitions. The aftermath was glorious. Fires raged, and black columns of smoke rose not from crematoria chimneys but from the rubble of the German factory.
The Americans pounded Buna with another massive payload eight days later. This time when the sirens sounded, I noticed something I had missed during the last bombing raid: the sight of the SS scurrying and hiding like cockroaches exposed to the light. How beautiful to see them fear for their own lives for once, I thought. How wonderful that they must finally confront a force superior to their own.
When the all clear sounded, the soldiers crawled out from their crevices and resumed their stations. But for that brief moment when the bombs rained down on Buna, they, too, were reminded of their own mortality, submissive to the might of the bombs, made to cower in fear. Seeing that felt good. Damn good.
CHAPTER THREE
THE DEATH MARCH
1945. Winter battered Buna.
Having grown up in the Carpathian Mountains, I thought I was adjusted to blistering winds and icy nights. I wasn’t. At night my hands and feet went numb clutching the thin blanket the Germans gave us. It was not uncommon to wake up to find prisoners frozen to death in the sleeping racks.
The bombing raids before the new year raised our spirits. But rumors of Russian and American forces tightening the noose on Hitler were common. Prior bombings had failed to bring liberation, but this time seemed different. This time, I’d felt the ground shake beneath my feet.
The blocks buzzed with chatter about a possible evacuation. By the middle of January the Russian cannons closed in on the camp. With over ten thousand prisoners still in Buna, where we would go or how we would get there no one knew. My hand injury had put me back working in the hospital. One thing I knew for certain was that the hundreds of infirmed prisoners could barely move, let alon
e survive relocation.
A few days later, our block leader assembled us to confirm the rumors: we would evacuate the next night. The Germans’ plan was to empty dozens of subcamps and march tens of thousands of prisoners to the central meeting point of Gleiwitz. The walking wake became known as the Death March.
What one wore could determine whether one lived. Prisoners scrambled to gather extra garments and to double-wrap wounds. Others stuffed straw from sleeping-rack mattresses or empty cement sacks into their uniform to insulate themselves against the brutal cold. I raced to the hospital and grabbed a coveted pair of socks, a shirt, and a jacket. Foot care was a major ordeal in the concentration camps. Prisoners were not issued socks. The only “shoes” we had were wooden, Dutch-style clogs with weak linen straps. After hours of walking or running, feet blistered and skin sloughed off on the wooden soles. I’d seen enough pus-filled foot infections and frostbite cases in the hospital to know foot care would be essential for surviving the roughly twenty-five snow-covered miles between Buna and Gleiwitz.
The Germans gave us extra bread and thin blankets. At sundown the SS organized the blocks into thousand-man columns. Fathers huddled with sons in the hopes of being put in the same group to Gleiwitz. How I yearned to be one of those father-son pairs.
I fell in with the hospital unit. Only the well and walking were allowed to make the march. We left roughly 850 ill prisoners behind in Buna. When the Russians arrived days later to liberate Buna, 250 of those prisoners had already died; others were too far gone to ever recover.
A doctor in our column ordered me to help push the medicine supply wagon. I tried to stay positive.
Maybe being close to life-saving medicines and having a cart to lean on will help steady my stride, I told myself.
A stillness fell over the column. Searchlights lit up the camp. I looked straight ahead toward the gate. Puffs of breath hovered in the icy air above rows of cap-covered heads standing and waiting in our column. I shook my arms and pumped my legs to keep my blood flowing in the bitter cold while we waited.
“Forward! March!”
I leaned hard into the wagon to turn the wheels just a few inches, lowering my head as we passed through the gate to let the bracing wind roll over my back. “Faster!” the SS yelled. I steadied my breathing and emptied my mind, just as I’d learned to do during so many bricklaying missions.
Gear inside the wagon clattered and clanked as I sloshed through the snow. I angled my body into the rolling pharmacy to shift my weight off my feet and onto the wagon. The wind whipped our faces as the snow fell hard against the blackness. The march would be the ultimate endurance test, one in which the mind must master the body. I paid no attention to the rumblings from my stomach and imagined warmth instead.
“Faster! Faster! Faster!”
The wagon rattled as I ran. Wheezing prisoners sucked cold air deep into their lungs. Huffing, hissing, tubercular coughing filled the night sky as we crunched through the unrelenting snow.
Slowing down or resting brought instant death. Anyone who faltered or fell was executed on the spot. The first couple miles brought intermittent pistol pops, but the farther we marched the more gunshots I heard. I had long since stopped flinching at the sound of gunfire. Slayings had become a common feature of our cursed existence. Our column had become a moving shooting gallery.
The medicine wagon’s wheels, slick with sludge, became easier to roll. Still, the cart’s weight and resistance wore on my arms, back, and atrophied leg muscles. The farther we went, the thicker the snow mounds grew until the wheels of the wagon stopped turning. Why we’d taken the medicine wagon in the first place was a mystery to me. The Nazis would have never permitted prisoners to use the rolling pharmacy; our health was hardly their concern. What’s more, most of the soldiers’ packs were loaded with vital emergency medicine kits and food rations, rendering the wagon’s contents useless to the SS as well.
Blasts of wind sent the snow slamming diagonally across our column, and I knew I would never make it to Gleiwitz pushing the medicine wagon. We pressed on. A doctor saw me grinding like a mule against the cart. “The wagon is of no use. Leave it,” he said. I lifted my hands off the cart and quickly stepped around it to avoid breaking stride or catching a soldier’s eye. My body lunged forward without the wagon’s weight, sending me bumping into the prisoner in front of me. “Watch it!” snapped the prisoner. The rest of the column veered around the sides of the cart like fish swimming around a rock.
About an hour after I ditched the wagon, I noticed that some German soldiers had begun ordering prisoners to haul their heavy rucksacks. A few minutes later a German trotted up alongside me. “Put this on and carry it,” he said without breaking stride. He slipped the pack on my shoulders. Its weight—at least thirty pounds, a significant burden given my small frame and condition—threw me off balance and nearly toppled me to the ground.
What is this bastard lugging? A dead body?
The twisted thought made me chuckle under my breath.
Gunshots now rang with regularity. My hunger was too intense to ignore. I slipped a piece of black bread from inside my jacket and ate it. I ran with my mouth agape in the hopes of catching a few snowflakes to wet my tongue.
While I was chewing the bread and licking the icy air, a gust of wind smacked the side of our column and temporarily bent our formation. The sting of the wind and force of the blast jolted me out of my tunnel vision, reminding me that there was a world surrounding the hallway of horror down which we clomped. I looked to my sides at the ghastly scenes on our flanks as bullet-riddled bodies lay strewn across the snow.
We trudged on. The soldier’s pack on my back was about to cause a crisis. I had to do something. Fast. The soldier it belonged to was nowhere in sight. I peered over my shoulder and spotted two boys I knew from the camp. I caught their eyes and motioned for them to catch up to me. “What is it?” the boy to my right asked softly.
“You hungry?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Starving!” said the other boy in a hushed voice.
“I think I can help,” I said. “I think this bag has food rations.”
“Are you crazy?!” the voice over my right shoulder said.
“He’ll kill you if he finds food missing!” said the other.
“Yeah, but at least I won’t die hungry!” I joked.
They were not amused.
“Fine,” I said. “Just unbuckle the sack and tell me what’s inside.”
“What if they see us?” the boy on the left said.
“They won’t. Besides, like you said, he’ll shoot me. Not you.”
Several paces later I felt a gentle tug against my back as one of the boys loosed the strap and unlatched the closure. Under the cover of darkness, he lifted the flap and rummaged through the bag with his hand. “There’s bread in there, wurst, a heavy metal ammunition box, and a medicine pack,” he said.
“No human head?” I quipped. My exhaustion was making me silly. “Grab the heavy box and toss it,” I said.
“You’ve gone mad,” one of them said.
“Fine, I’ll throw it away,” I said. “Just hand me the box low on my right.”
The boy on my right pressed the box against my hip and passed it to me. I marched ten paces or so before dropping the heavy object into a deep snowdrift and watching it disappear. My load felt much lighter.
The blasts of the Russian cannon pounding the German lines, like a military cadence, kept me motivated and moving. But the hunger—that damn hunger—wouldn’t relent. My feet were now frozen blocks. It felt as if I were jogging on stilts.
I needed energy. “Hand me the bread,” I said over my shoulder. “I will share.” The boy on my right wasted no time. His hand stabbed into the bag like a spear, poached the loaf, and handed it to me.
“Here,” I said, “share this.” I ripped off a chunk and passed the bread like a relay baton behind me. Both boys’ hands clawed for the German’s bread—far fresher
than our own fare. I slipped a piece of the soft loaf into my mouth and closed my eyes briefly to savor it. It was the best bread I ever tasted—even better than my mother’s and grandmother’s homemade loaves. I swirled my tongue over and around the fluffy morsel to soak up the taste.
I paused for a moment before requesting the wurst. My family kept kosher, but given the circumstances, I figured God would understand. “Hand me the wurst,” I said. I bit off a mouthful of salty meat. It tasted funny. I gnawed off two more pieces and handed them to the boys.
Our evening meal and reverie were short-lived. The front of our column was marching into walls of wind and snow. “March! March! March!” the SS officer barked. Bodies dropped fast in the worsening weather and were left behind. To quench their punishing thirst, prisoners ate the snow that piled up on themselves and the men marching in front of them.
“I have to rest,” I heard an unfamiliar voice say behind me. “Just a minute. It’s not in me to keep. . . .” The man fell forward, and I felt his fingertips brush my backpack, as if he was trying to break his fall. I kept marching. A few paces later I looked over my shoulder and saw a flash from an SS gun and the man’s body twitching in the snow.
Prisoners tumbled and were trampled in a crescendo of gun blasts. We passed corpse after corpse as drifts of snow covered the dead. We kept going. The more bodies I saw, the more paranoid I became that the soldier would reclaim his pilfered pack and shoot me in the head. The burn in my thighs and the sting of the cold in my eyes made me lightheaded.
If he shoots you, he shoots you, I thought. There’s nothing you can do about it. Might as well take the medicines too.
Where this idea came from I have no idea. It was risky. Despite working in the hospital and pushing the medicine wagon, I had no training in pharmacology. The pills could have been vitamins or poison. I wouldn’t have known the difference. Either way, the pills couldn’t worsen my condition. If they killed me, I was out of my misery. If they boosted my system, I had a better chance of survival. I decided I’d swallow them if and when we ever stopped.
Measure of a Man Page 3