Measure of a Man

by Martin Greenfield

  Buchenwald was bedlam. Prisoners were running in every direction as the remaining German soldiers scrambled to prepare their retreat. Commandant Pister and many other SS had already fled. Around ten o’clock a voice over the loudspeaker ordered, “All members of the SS leave the camp immediately!”

  A roar rolled through the barracks. Members of the underground prisoner resistance frantically handed out the modest collection of smuggled machine guns and weapons to block elders, and the children were ordered to stay inside the barracks. We found out later that a Russian officer and fellow prisoner had organized the uprising that took the SS officers off the watchtower and helped free us.

  Around eleven o’clock on the morning of the eleventh, we heard the sweet sounds of tanks from General George S. Patton’s Third Army pummeling the Nazis in the distance. The blasts grew louder and louder, our hearts fuller and fuller.

  I walked to the barrack door and looked out at the frenetic blur. Nazis ran in search of a life-saving change of clothes—clothes that would camouflage their bestial depravity. A well-known and dedicated SS sadist sprinted past me wearing a Russian uniform he’d raided from a Russian POW. Other soldiers shot prisoners for the striped wardrobe of oppression they made us wear. They hoped the rags would spare them from the gallows as war criminals.

  The shirt! I said to myself. I ran back to my rack and took off the soldier’s shirt I’d worn religiously under my striped prisoner uniform. The shirt had now lost its power. Not even the Nazis would wear it.

  I could hear the American tanks rumble as the concussions from the gun blasts echoed off the barrack walls. Nazi machine guns returned fire. I sat in my rack and prayed a simple prayer. “God, please let the Americans win. Please, God. Please,” I prayed.

  God answered my prayer around 2:30 that afternoon. The American tanks from the Sixth Armored Division reached the SS military barracks. At precisely 3:15 p.m., the white flag of surrender flew over Buchenwald. Ours was the first camp the Americans liberated. But the euphoric cries ringing across Buchenwald were muted by the extreme hunger we were suffering after nearly six days without food.

  Roughly twenty-one thousand prisoners remained on liberation day. Eight hundred fifty of them were children like Elie Wiesel and me. I remember seeing Elie at Buchenwald and thinking he was the skinniest kid I ever saw. I was a bag of bones, too. But at least we were teenagers. When the Americans arrived to take care of us children, to their utter shock, they found among the inmates a three-year-old boy.

  Food came quickly. So did the sickness. Our emaciated bodies and withered organs couldn’t handle the shock of food. People became severely ill from eating too much too fast. The American doctors examined my symptoms, tended my wounds, and placed me on a special diet designed for my smaller frame. Whatever the Americans told me to eat, I ate. Whatever they said to avoid, I avoided. I trusted them completely. How could I not? They were Americans. They saved me.

  Peace and gratitude came over me the minute I laid eyes on the American soldiers. The skeletons and stench mortified the GIs. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Their uniforms, their composure, their compassion—I loved them, wanted to be one of them.

  The next day, April 12, my future client and hero forever, Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower, rolled into Buchenwald at the nearby subcamp of Ohrdruf near Gotha. Eisenhower was ten feet tall in my mind. He is still. Ike brought General Omar Bradley and General George S. Patton along with him to see the nightmare firsthand. They saw the starved prisoners hobbling on pipe-stem legs. They saw the bodies charred on Ohrdruf’s pyre. They unlatched a door and surveyed a room stacked high with rotting corpses. Actually, that was one sight General Patton did not see. As Eisenhower wrote to General George Marshall a few days later:

  The things I saw beggar description. . . . The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where [there] were piled up twenty to thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”

  Ike toured the human ruins. He ordered every soldier in the area not on the front lines to do the same. “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for,” said Eisenhower. “Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.” During his walk through the camp, Eisenhower turned to a GI and said, “Still having trouble hating [the Nazis]?”

  Later, Patton informed Ike that the mayor of Gotha and his wife hanged themselves after touring the Ohrdruf concentration camp. “Maybe there is hope after all,” quipped Eisenhower.

  Wisely, the general displayed Buchenwald to the world. He designed an aggressive publicity offensive to prevent the Germans and others from averting their eyes in denial. Soon the Americans had German civilians touring the camps, smelling the bodies, walking through the death chambers, and digging mass graves to bury the Shoah dead.

  The Germans touring Buchenwald looked at us like zoo animals. Some women bore pained faces and shed tears. Others held their hands over their mouths and noses to guard themselves from breathing in our stench and germs. Many Germans feigned shock and surprise at the mounds of corpses that piled up when the crematoria ran out of coal. And perhaps some genuinely were surprised by the depths of depravity to which the SS had descended. But I will go to my grave believing that the many who lived in and around the camps knew what Hitler and his henchmen were up to. How could they not? From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany created twenty thousand camps of all kinds, including transit camps, forced-labor camps, and extermination camps. Companies bought us as slave labor. We were hauled in trains across the countryside. We were beaten and killed on labor sites outside the camps. And it took tens of thousands of Nazis to run the death machine—tens of thousands of Nazis who were genocidal monsters by day, family men by night. By 1945, 6,297 members of the SS and 532 female guards worked at Buchenwald alone.

  Trust me. People knew.

  In the days after liberation, I pondered these enraging facts. I desperately wanted to heal my body and locate my family. But my spirit needed mending too. When the Americans announced a U.S. Army chaplain would perform the first Jewish religious ceremony inside Buchenwald, I attended.

  On April 20, 1945, Rabbi Herschel Schacter conducted the first Friday night Sabbath service. There was singing, reciting of blessings, prayer, and much weeping. It was moving. Yet all through the service the question I could not escape that night on the Death March to Gleiwitz haunted me still.

  The next day Rabbi Schacter was mulling about outside the Czech barracks. In Yiddish he said, “Is there a Jew around here who can speak Yiddish?”

  “I can,” I said in Yiddish.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Where are the Jews around here?”

  “This is the Czech barracks,” I told him. “I’m one of the few Jews here. They let me stay here because I’m from Czechoslovakia.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “Rabbi, I attended your service last night. It was very beautiful. But may I please ask you a question?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Rabbi, I must know: Where was God?”

  He stood still and silent.

  “Look what happened!” I pleaded. “Where was God? Where?”

  “There are no answers to certain questions,” he said staring off in the distance. “That is a question for which there is no answer.” I lowered my head and cried. Rabbi Schacter wrapped his arms around me and held me.

  Not everyone who was alive the day the Americans rolled into camp lived to tell about it. Five days after liberation, the Americans counted the prisoners again. Despite the Allies’ heroic military and medical relief efforts, a thousand prisoners had already died. I still think about them, people who to
uched but could not clasp freedom.

  Today the Buchenwald clock tower’s hands are permanently set to 3:15, the time of our liberation. But what of those who met their fate just moments prior? Like the men who died on the death marches when the Nazis evacuated Buchenwald days before. Or the prisoners whom the Nazis shot for their striped uniforms only hours before the Americans arrived. Or the infirmed who died in the racks minutes before liberation’s dawn. They died in that shadowless moment just beyond the speed of grace. They died as terror’s last eyewitnesses.

  To have been so close, to have persevered so much, to have escaped the gas and the guns and the ovens, yet never to have been granted the chance to live free—I cry for them.

  I cry for the six million innocents who died in the clutch of darkness without warrant or repose.

  I cry for Mother.

  I cry for Father.

  I cry for Grandmother Geitel.

  I cry for Grandfather Abraham.

  I cry for Simcha.

  I cry for Rivka.

  I cry for the baby, Sruel Baer.

  I cry.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A TIME TO KILL

  Physically, I was free. Emotionally, I was in chains.

  The SS at Buchenwald had surrendered and fled. The German army had not. That meant we were free to leave and reenter the camp as we pleased, but our safety was far from certain.

  The Allies brought in caring people and organizations to help us piece together our shattered lives. But I couldn’t get my mind off the mayor’s wife. I couldn’t let go of my rage and lust for revenge. I’d made a promise to myself. And I intended to keep it. I would return to Weimar and kill her.

  I located two Jewish boys who were well enough to make the walk to Weimar. I told them what the woman did and what I was prepared to do about it. We could rummage machine guns from the mountain of German weapons seized by the inmates and Americans that lay in piles on the Appelplatz. The boys vowed solidarity. Having survived hell, they too were eager to see justice administered.

  We left Buchenwald on foot and set out toward Weimar. The newfound freedom was odd and unsettling. No longer were marches marked by insults, beatings, and killings. Indeed, we were not “marching” at all but walking, and of our own accord. The transition from slave back to civilian disoriented me. Captivity had made freedom feel disorderly, vulnerable. Even simple things, like hearing someone call your name instead of a number, took some getting used to.

  The streets outside camp were electric with an ominous sense of disquiet. A smattering of prisoners in striped pajamas ambled in search of noncamp food. I kept my eyes open for SS. We gripped our guns and got to Weimar as quickly as possible.

  None of us had ever fired a machine gun. I knew my way around a basic pistol from my father’s training before he tried to hide me in the forest. This gun, however, was a different matter.

  My heartbeat quickened the closer we got to the mayor’s house. Pent-up rage from all I had seen and experienced surged through me. Killing the mayor’s wife could not repay the Nazis for the terror they had inflicted on us. But it was a start.

  We walked a few miles before turning down the street the mayor’s home was on. I pointed to a house several paces down the road: “I think that’s it.” The big black Mercedes was not out front. It took me a moment to make sure I had the right house.

  “You sure this is it?” one of the boys asked.

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “What’s the plan?” the other boy asked.

  “The car isn’t here. Looks like the house is empty,” I said. “The plan is we take our guns and go in through the side door. Then we hide and wait so I can kill the blond bitch that had me beaten.”

  The boys nodded.

  “Okay, let’s go,” I said.

  We crept up to the side door. I slowly turned the knob. It was unlocked. I entered the house quietly, with my gun drawn. The boys fell in behind me and eased the door shut. We stepped softly to mute the sounds of our wooden clogs on the floor.

  “Hello?” a voice around a corner said. “Hello?”

  Just then the beautiful blond woman turned the corner and let out a screech. She had the baby in her arms again.

  “Don’t shoot!” she screamed. “Don’t shoot!”

  “Remember me?!” I yelled. “Do you?!”

  Her blond tresses shook violently. She hid her face behind her upraised hand as if shielding herself from the sun.

  “You had me beaten because of the rabbits. I’m here to shoot you!” I said, sounding like an SS.

  “No! Please!” she quavered. “The baby, please!”

  I aimed the machine gun at her chest. The baby wailed. My finger hovered above the trigger.

  “Shoot her!” one of the boys said. “Shoot her!” The woman’s outstretched hand trembled in the air. My heart pounded against my chest like a hammer.

  “Shoot her!” the other boy yelled. “That’s what we came here for! Do it!”

  I froze. I couldn’t do it. I could not pull the trigger. That was the moment I became human again. All the old teachings came rushing back. I had been raised to believe that life was a precious gift from God, that women and children must be protected. Had I pulled the trigger, I would have been like Mengele. He too had faced mothers holding babies—my mother holding my baby brother—and sentenced both to gruesome deaths. My moral upbringing would not allow me to become an honorary member of the SS.

  Still, extending mercy felt weak. I tried to save face in front of the boys. If I couldn’t be a hardened killer, I could at least be a car thief. “Where is the car?” I yelled.

  “There is nothing,” she said.

  “Where is it?!” I barked.

  “It’s not here,” she said.

  I lowered the gun and stomped out of the house and went around back.

  “You made us come here for nothing?” one of the boys huffed.

  “I couldn’t shoot her,” I said. “She had a baby!”

  “How many babies did they kill?” he retorted. He had a point.

  We walked to the large barn behind the house and unlatched the heavy wooden doors. There, covered with hay, sat the big black Mercedes. “That lying Nazi bitch!” one of the boys yelled. I was livid. I’d spared her life and she lied to my face.

  “Wait here,” I told the boys. I marched back in the house, gun drawn, and found her. “This time I’m really going to shoot you,” I said. “Give me the keys!” She gave me the keys. I jogged back to the boys and the car. “I got them,” I said, rattling the keys in my hand.

  “Who knows how to drive?” one of the boys asked.

  “Don’t worry, I do,” I said. We brushed off the hay and hopped in the car.

  “Hurry up! Let’s get out of here,” one of the boys said.

  I set my machine gun on the floorboard and slid the key into the ignition. I was a little rusty but knew how to drive from my auto mechanic days in Budapest. The big German engine cranked loud and strong. I pulled out of the Weimar mayor’s mansion driveway and punched the gas.

  What a sight we must have been: three teenage Jews in striped prisoner uniforms, armed with machine guns, driving a black Mercedes in Weimar, Germany, on our way back to the Buchenwald concentration camp. We smiled, laughed, and talked tough like the men we weren’t.

  “Did you see how scared she was?” one boy said excitedly. “I bet she made in her underwear!” We chuckled and drove on.

  “Look!” one of the boys said pointing out the window. “Two girls!” I pulled the car to the side of the street.

  We invited the German girls to take a ride. They must have been so mesmerized by the Mercedes that our raggedy uniforms failed to give them pause. To my surprise, they hopped in. This was the closest any of us had been to attractive girls in a long, long time. They rode with us a few blocks before we dropped them off.

  I contemplated ditching the car. After all, we were driving the mayor of Weimar’s Mercedes. If that didn’t give us away,
the license plates would. But then I thought, What the hell? When’s the next time you will get to drive a Mercedes? So I drove the car all the way back to Buchenwald. In fact, I drove straight through the camp gates. Today, the irony of the slogan emblazoned across the gates—“To each what he deserves”—makes me laugh.

  Prisoners stood motionless and stared as we coasted into camp. They must have assumed an important dignitary or the mayor of Weimar himself would step out of the fancy car. When they saw our striped prisoner uniforms, they rushed us. “How did you get a Mercedes?” someone asked.

  “Well,” I said smiling, “we just got it.”

  Later I noticed a prisoner on a motorbike with a sidecar eyeing my big black Mercedes. I liked his bike. He liked my car. I told him we should trade. He agreed. He taught me how to crank the motorbike and unhook the sidecar. I rode my new motorbike over to the Czech barracks and parked it outside. For weeks I drove anyone who wanted a ride in and out of camp. Fine piece of German engineering, that bike.

  The war came to a close on April 30, 1945, when a broken, desperate Adolf Hitler committed suicide by gunshot in his Berlin bunker. A week later the German army surrendered. I was grateful to be alive but anxious about my future. We all were. Our lives were in limbo. Going “home” was not an option for most. Hatred of Jews remained high. Everything we owned had been seized and stolen. Millions of our relatives had been murdered. I didn’t know what lay in store. I didn’t really care. My singular obsession was living free and finding my phantom family. Nothing would stand in my way.

  In May, Czechoslovakia sent officials to Buchenwald to retrieve its citizens. They boarded us on a bus and drove us to Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia.

  The Allies and the United Nations had set up displaced persons (DP) camps and other places of refuge throughout Germany, Italy, Austria, and elsewhere to take in the nearly quarter of a million displaced Jews. There you could sleep, eat, connect with fellow Jews, and receive educational training and relocation support. HIAS (which originally stood for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) also held Jewish gatherings where you always felt safe and welcome.