Measure of a Man

by Martin Greenfield

  We’d marched for miles without ceasing. I’d pissed myself twice, the urine warming my legs as it trickled down. The SS must have been getting tired as well because a German finally ordered us to halt. Prisoners collapsed as if their spines had been yanked out by a string.

  I stretched out my arms and let my body fall backward like a spruce into a pillow of snow. My head spun as I stared up at the sky. Stars winked against the blackness. I’d never felt so alone. I wondered where God was, where He’d been these last nine months. Many of the older religious men in the camps had remained faithful, had prayed nightly. I admired their deep faith, their commitment to never letting go of God. I wasn’t having a crisis of faith. I was a child. I didn’t think grand, deep thoughts. All I knew was that I wanted to feel close to God, to know He hadn’t forgotten me and still loved me.

  Maybe God’s just been really busy, I remember thinking. Soon maybe He will remember me.

  I turned my head away from the sky and looked out across the frozen wasteland. Men lay heaving and writhing from cramps or illnesses unknown. I didn’t know the time but figured it must be hours still before dawn. I knew that long before any of us had a chance to replenish his broken body with rest, the SS would have us up and marching again. I wanted to sleep. The snow blanketing the ground reminded me of Pavlovo in winter, reminded me of Grandfather Abraham and his strong horses galloping through the snows. I sat up with legs bent to keep my pants dry and hugged my knees and rocked back and forth, lost in thought for nearly an hour until I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  “What are you going to do now?” a voice asked. I turned around. It was the boy on my right who’d marched behind me and retrieved items from the soldier’s pack.

  “What?” I said confused.

  “What are you going to do when light comes and he finds you?”

  “Who?”

  “The soldier! The one who owns the bag,” he said pointing to the sack. I’d forgotten I even had it.

  “The medicine kit!” I said. “I forgot to take the pills!” I unlatched the bag and tore open the kit and popped the pills into my mouth, forcing them down my throat with a handful of snow.

  “What in the hell did you just take?” the boy asked.

  “Don’t know. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Soon he’ll find you. What then? What will you say?”

  He was right. With the column thinned out from deaths, and sunlight just hours away, chances were I’d be caught and killed. My heart jumped.

  “I need you to bury me,” I said.

  “You’re not dead yet!”

  “No, I mean bury me while I’m still alive. Underneath the snow, before they start moving again. That way he won’t find me.”

  “You’ll freeze and then you’ll really be dead.”

  “We’ll wait as long as we can. I’ll pick out a place and get it ready while everyone rests. Then, when the time is right, you will hide me under the snow.”

  He promised to help and said he’d get the other boy to assist as well. I got up and stepped around resting prisoners to find the perfect spot, one that blended in so as not to arouse suspicion. The best plot for my snow burial was an embankment several paces back up the path we’d come down. The dip in the embankment would make digging out easier. The key would be smoothing the snow to cover the portal where I’d entered so that it looked natural and untouched.

  I tunneled into the slope, piling the snow next to the hole so the boys could cover me quickly. I rejoined the group and found the boys. “Be sure to smooth the snow after you bury me,” I urged. “Make sure to cover your footprints so they don’t see any tracks.”

  “It’s snowing so hard it won’t matter,” said one of the boys. “But yes, we’ll smooth it.”

  About an hour later, men started stirring about and gathering their gear. I wanted to give the boys enough time to smooth the snow properly. “This way. Let’s go!” I said. When we got to the spot, the hole had already refilled with snow. I dug it out and hopped in. “Remember to smooth it out and cover your tracks,” I pleaded. They nodded in unison and waited for me to crawl in. I pulled my jacket up over my head. “Okay. Cover me up,” I said. The boys had fun taking turns dumping piles of powder on my head. I sat crouched in a vertical fetal position and created a space between my knees to breathe.

  “We’re smoothing it now,” a muffled voice said from above. I sat still inside my crystalline cocoon. “We’re going back now. Good luck!”

  The makeshift womb that shielded me from the whipping winds wasn’t nearly as cold as I’d anticipated. I sat and listened intently. About a half hour later, I heard a faint noise that sounded like a call to march. But I wasn’t sure. I waited a little longer before slowly cracking the surface with a single finger, like a baby chick breaking its shell. I waited and listened but heard nothing.

  I pushed my body up slowly until my eyes could survey the quiet and colorless world outside. I burst through the snow pile and crawled on all fours down the embankment. I looked up the road. No one. I looked down the road. Nothing. “It worked,” I muttered softly. “It worked!”

  I dusted the snow off my clothes and wrung the wetness out of my shirt bottoms and socks before tromping up the track to where we had gathered hours before. The sight before me made me stop. Scores of frozen frames lay littered across the land, embalmed in glacial graves. The wind whistled past me as I stood and stared at the stiff, bloodless bodies. They looked so peaceful, like souls who had chosen to remain in their dreams rather than reawaken in this nightmare. A part of me envied their peace.

  I walked past the unburied and back down to the road. I was all alone. At that moment I could have escaped and run away. But to where and for what? I was an orphan and a target. I decided it was best to take my chances getting to Gleiwitz. The soldier probably thinks I died or got shot, I thought. My mind was made up: I would return to captivity.

  As it turned out, we were only a mile or two from Gleiwitz when we’d stopped. With waves of subcamps converging on Gleiwitz, the SS were exhausted from the marches and rattled by the Russians’ unrelenting onslaught—so much so that we were allowed to feast on the remnants of a hastily abandoned dinner in the Germans’ barracks. I helped dole out portions to the frozen, skeletal prisoners staggering into the camp. Months later a prisoner told me I saved his life by giving him double.

  I ate better at Gleiwitz than at any other time throughout my Shoah experience. I stuffed as much food in my clothes as possible. In time, I felt surprisingly healthy. I told myself that the soldier’s medicines must have been vitamins that boosted my system. Whether that was true or not, the pills at least acted as a placebo that strengthened my mind and emboldened me to carry on.

  After a night or two at Gleiwitz, the Nazis herded us to the train depot and packed us into roofless coal cars. We clacked along the tracks for four impossible days. The speed of the train made the wind chill colder than the Death March. Many people froze to death in the cars. The Nazis had long since pushed us past concern for ceremony. The minute a person expired, we chucked the corpse out of the car to free up space so we could crouch lower to dodge the brutal winds. I reminded myself to shift my legs and flex what was left of my muscles to keep the blood moving.

  I stared down the row of coal cars at the jostling cap-covered heads and pondered what a cursed lot we were. The faces inside my car were remote and waxen, their eyes vacant and fixed on nothing. Every few miles a car in front would hurl someone’s dead father or son to the tracks. Stoic German faces stared at us as we rode through small towns.

  When space allowed, we lit a small fire in the car. Prisoners clambered toward the flames to thaw themselves as the Germans hauled us to yet another destination unknown.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IKE ARRIVES

  Buchenwald concentration camp. Our train stopped on February 5, 1945, at a railway station in central Germany, five miles north of Weimar.

  We ascended the hill leading up to our new hell. Incor
porated into the iron gate was the slogan Jedem das Seine (“To each what he deserves”). Another sign on the gatehouse wall read Recht oder Unrecht mein Vaterland (“My country, right or wrong”).

  The camp’s grand scale and exacting design were a testament to the Nazis’ dedication to Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Buchenwald was one of Germany’s biggest concentration camps, holding eighty-nine thousand prisoners at its peak. When I arrived, there were half that many inmates. Of the 240,000 prisoners who entered Buchenwald’s gates, at least 55,000 perished.

  I schlepped forward in the processing line. All around me were bedraggled prisoners. The macabre routine had become all too familiar: strip naked, race to a bathhouse, sit while clippers rip out chunks of your hair, brace for the excruciating sting of disinfectant, don ridiculous prisoner pajamas and clownish wooden clogs, endure all manner of verbal degradation and physical brutality, receive your slave labor assignment, get a barracks number.

  Whatever fear was in me evaporated. I had come face-to-face with the Angel of Death at Auschwitz and seen my family torn away from me. I had survived the bombing raids at Buna, narrowly made it through the frozen Death March to Gleiwitz, and endured the brutal four-day train ride to Buchenwald in an open coal car. The Nazis’ ignorance and savagery enraged me. Enough was enough. All I wanted was all I’d ever known. I wanted my family and my freedom.

  I got Block 58 instead.

  Inside, Buchenwald was a typical Nazi death mill, complete with crematoria, execution rooms, and a hospital the Germans used for medical experimentation. The camp had one notable exception: it lacked gas chambers. The Germans fully intended to install them, but brave prisoners in the underground resistance groups stymied their plans by intercepting and destroying telegraphed directives. Without the prisoners’ courage, I and tens of thousands more would likely have been annihilated.

  My forty-five thousand fellow inmates came from thirty countries, and they included American, English, Canadian, and Russian prisoners of war. Hitler’s “undesirables” were there, too—Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, homosexuals, the physically and mentally disabled, and others.

  Block 58 sat in Buchenwald’s infamous “Little Camp,” a shoddily built quarantine overflow facility surrounded by barbed wire. Eating and sleeping conditions were deplorable. The only improvement: 44,999 new pallid faces among which to search for my father.

  Roll calls at Buchenwald were more frequent and meticulous than I’d experienced at the other camps. When the order to assemble blared through the loudspeaker, we swarmed out of our barracks like ants onto the massive Appelplatz near the main gate. Reeling from the Allies’ surge, the Nazis counted on slave labor more than ever, and their obsession with counting and recounting prisoners intensified. Even so, whippings were regular, and deaths from malnutrition and disease were constant. Buchenwald soldiers fixated on prisoners making their “beds” properly. Seeing inmates savagely whipped for creased blankets, I made sure my ratty blanket lay flat and smooth across my rack.

  The SS assigned me to work in the munitions factory. But early one morning after roll call, a soldier placed me on a twelve-prisoner team to perform repairs outside the camp in nearby Weimar. Working in the city was a welcome distraction from camp life. Sometimes you got lucky and spotted a potato in a field or smuggled a trinket to trade for food. Either way, it was a chance to see the sky, escape the stench of rotting corpses, and confirm that there was still a world beyond the barbed wire.

  We loaded our gear and marched the few miles to Weimar. The soldiers stopped us in front of a bombed-out mansion, home to the mayor of Weimar. A big black Mercedes sat out front. The soldiers commanded us to sift the rubble, clear the debris, and begin repairs on the mansion.

  I walked alone to the back of the estate to assess the damage. Dusty piles of broken bricks lay scattered across the yard. Seeing the cellar door ajar, I slowly opened it. A shaft of sunlight filled the dank cellar. On one side of the space sat a wooden cage wrapped in chicken wire. I walked closer and noticed two quivering rabbits inside the cage. “They’re still alive!” I said to myself with surprise. Inside the cage were the remains of the rabbits’ dinner.

  I unlatched the cage and pulled out a wilted leaf and carrot nub. The lettuce was browning and slimy, the carrot still moist from the rabbits’ gnawing. Excited, I wolfed down the lettuce and tried to crack the chunk of carrot in half with my teeth.

  My luck was short-lived. “What are you doing?” a voice yelled.

  I whipped my head around toward the door. A gorgeous, smartly dressed blond woman holding a baby stood silhouetted in the doorframe. It was the mayor of Weimar’s wife.

  “I . . . I found your rabbits!” I stammered with a cheerful nervousness. “They’re alive and safe!”

  “Why in the hell are you stealing my rabbits’ food?” barked the woman. “Animal!” I stood silent and stared at the floor.

  “I’m reporting this immediately!” she said, stomping away. My heart pounded in my emaciated chest. A few minutes later, an SS soldier ordered me to come out of the cellar. I knew what was coming, and the knowing made it all the worse.

  “Down on the ground, you dog! Fast!” yelled the German. He gripped his baton and bludgeoned my back. I do not know whether the mayor’s wife watched the beating. Given her cruelty, why would she want to miss it? On the hike back to Buchenwald, I replayed the scene over and over in my mind.

  How could a woman carrying her own child find a walking skeleton saving her pets and have him beaten for nibbling on rotten animal food? I thought.

  In that moment my numbness to death melted. In its place rose an alien bloodlust, a hunger for vengeance unlike any I had ever known. The surge of adrenaline and rush of rage felt good inside my withered frame. Then and there I made a vow to myself: if I survived Buchenwald, I would return and kill the mayor’s wife.

  Angular piles of bones wrapped in leathery skin cropped up around camp. The first time I saw a mound of corpses in Buchenwald, I stood and scanned the pile in search of my father. Rats scurried among the tangle of limbs while feasting on the rotting flesh. The Germans worried the rodents might infect the soldiers with diseases, so they dumped the bodies in mass graves near the Bismarck Tower.

  In March and early April, the word spread among the prisoners that liberation was near. Respected block leaders confirmed the reports, but rumors about Hitler’s final plans for our extermination tempered our excitement. “The Germans are planning to drop bombs over Buchenwald. They will kill us off and destroy evidence of war crimes,” I heard an older inmate say. “They will never let us make it out alive. We’re all going to die if we don’t mount an uprising.”

  “The camp is mined!” another warned. “They’re going to blow us up minutes before the Americans arrive to free us!”

  “I heard they have prisoners digging mass graves to bury us in,” said another.

  Everyone was frazzled and afraid. I didn’t know whom or what to believe. All I knew was that I hadn’t made it this far to be killed days or hours before regaining my freedom. I resolved to do whatever it took to stay alive.

  In early April, prisoners swapped barracks, exchanged names with other prisoners, and wreaked all manner of havoc at night in an effort to confuse the soldiers at roll call. The idea was to run out the clock before the Nazis could march us off to mass graves. Then, on April 4, something happened that I never thought I’d see. We stiffened our spines. When the voice came over the loudspeakers ordering all Jews to report for roll call, not a single prisoner went. The underground resistance had determined that the Nazis planned to machine-gun Jews on the Appelplatz.

  I expected the Nazis to inflict brutal punishment following the stand down. In a sense, they did. They stopped supplying our daily food rations and began evacuations two days later. But what I did not know—what only a handful of us knew—was that one of the underground prisoner organizations had forged a letter from the Americans and delivered it to the commandant of Buchenwald, Hermann P
ister. The phony letter promised leniency for Pister if he delivered us to the Americans without inflicting further atrocities against us. Instead of gunning us down, Pister evacuated prisoners in waves.

  I’d survived one death march. I refused to go on another. I learned there was a Czech barrack nearby. The Czechs let me mix in with them. On April 6, the Germans sent three thousand inmates marching out of Buchenwald. The next day seven thousand were evacuated. On April 9, nearly five thousand prisoners were sent on a transport, and over nine thousand left the next day.

  All the activity reminded me of an earlier conversation with an older prisoner, who had pulled me aside and whispered in my ear. “You’ve worked in the munitions factory, yes?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “The underground needs a special weapons part from that facility,” he said. “You are in that building. Perhaps you could get it.”

  I told him I knew nothing about weapons parts and probably wasn’t the best person for the job, but I would look around and see what I could do. “I can’t promise anything,” I stressed.

  “That’s fine. Just look for it, and let us know if you see anything or know anyone who could get their hands on it.”

  I had heard about the underground prisoner resistance from older inmates but knew very few details. Word was that they had a cache of stolen German guns ready for a prisoner uprising.

  April 11, 1945, was the day of my rebirth.

  I awoke to the din of prisoners racing between barracks. “Get up! It’s happening! Today is the day!” someone said. I crawled out of my sleeping rack and bounded to the floor before pulling on my prisoner pants and wooden shoes. I huddled behind the other prisoners peering out our barrack doors.