The journey East was to take two days, the smell of human waste made me wretch as I watched my fellow countrymen and women reduced to tears. As the hours ticked by, any fight left in them had drained way as if water down a plughole. I watched as the life of two young babies was ebbing away, hour by hour they became weaker. Their mothers had nothing for them. I was helpless to intervene to save them. Eventually the first morning saw them blue faced as they became the first victims of the crush. There was no comfort offered just the pained expression of grief of those around them. I tried to blot out my feelings and taught by mind to become blank, thinking of windowless white walls with no way in or out. It worked for a while but every now and then the rolling and clanking of the wagons disturbed my mind and brought me back to reality.
Chapter 14
Auschwitz Poland 1942
The train finally came to a halt, as the wagon doors were unbolted and drawn open, those nearest fell onto the crisp white snow on the platform. Stinking, cold and hungry, they could hardly raise themselves as the snowflakes fluttered through the still air. In front of us stood a line of soldiers, guns across their chests, vicious dogs strained on their leeches as the order for the rest of us to get out echoed down the platform. Searchlights from the high observation towers cast shadows of the hundreds of frightened Jews who stood on the virgin white snow-covered platform. Orders were barked and as one we all trudged along the platform. I immediately recognised one man inspecting the rag bag of human misery as it made its way down the platform filtering bodies to the left and to the right, the cold penetrative eyes of my former University mentor, Dr Josef Mengele, now resplendent in his long well-tailored leather coat with SS insignia on the generous lapels.
I put his arms around my parents and hugged them before we were wrenched apart with a rifle butt. My father and I were separated immediately from the women. I remembered the final touch of my mother’s fingers as the women were led away to a line of long barrack huts.
The air hung heavy with the smell of cooking meat. It was only later that I realised that the aroma was always present in Auschwitz. It was burning human flesh.
‘There’s only one way to survive here and that is make yourself useful and keep your head down. Eye contact could get you a beating,’ whispered one old man, ‘particularly by Kapo Gurt Heidmann, the bastard who’s in charge of our hut.’
A large man who I had seen the previous night standing behind the German soldiers on the platform, Kapo Heidmann was dressed like us in his striped uniform, stood outside the hut waiting for us to emerge. It was still dark as we lined up to receive our first taste of Auschwitz food. I needn’t tell you how awful it was, but you’ll eat anything when hunger invades your body as it had ours. Within minutes the meagre ration had gone. Kapo Heidmann looked down on me, he demanded to know what I had done before. I insisted I had medical training and asked to join the hospital squad. He laughed in my face and spat on the ground. He grabbed my arm and lifted me up. I fell as he let go and the first blow hit me on the side of face quickly followed with several kicks to the body. I crawled away trying to escape, but he followed. Two soldiers ran passed, grabbing his arm and insisted he follow them. That saved me from further blows. After he had gone, taking a risk for my own life, I stood for seemed like hours outside the hospital block that morning in the cold, shivering. Kapo Heidmann returned and saw me standing by the entrance and hit me several times with the truncheon he appeared to wield with great menace in great circles as part of his job. I refused to move, standing my ground announcing that I and the Doctor knew each other from University. I goaded him by saying that it may be a big mistake and dangerous to ill treat me anymore.
Surprisingly, Mengele recognised me despite the recent bruising to my face, my shabby clothes and frail body gaunt with hunger and still dirty from the cattle wagon journey. As we walked off together into the hospital block, Mengele with his arm on my shoulder, I could not resist a side glance at Kapo Heidmann. It was a gesture that neither I nor Heidmann would ever forget. The same side but rival enemies. I would be taking a great deal of notice in the activities of Kapo Heidmann from now on.
Over the next hour, Mengele showed me the data from his anthropological studies. It struck me that rather than start with a blank canvas, Mengele had started from the false premise that the Ayrian race had the genetic superiority and he was going to statistically prove it. Maybe, I suspected, he had been instructed by his boss, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, to find ways to prove the theory, I had no intention of disillusioning Mengele, I had to remind myself that I was there to survive.
That night in the quiet of my hut, I leaned over the edge of the upper bunk and talked to my father who had been shipped out of the camp to work in the factory. He had seen my mother who had been allocated a role in administration, whilst Dad was sorting and labelling the manufactured goods for shipment back to Germany. Both had, like I, been given extra food over and above the meagre rations given to the very young, the old and infirm who were not long for this life.
The days passed into months, I witnessed the use of human guinea pigs for sometimes ill-thought out and what seemed to me as purely sadistic experiments that were carried out by Mengele and his assistant doctors. I was revolted by some, but I could only intervene when I thought my idea may produce a better result. It usually only involved palliative care during procedures.
Chapter 15
Auschwitz Poland 1944
It was getting late as the shadows of the building opposite started to cross his apartment window. Jonny Wightman looked at the remaining chocolate bar. He ripped it open and took a large bit.
This section Solomon had headed `Victim of Knowledge’.
I had the perfect opportunity whilst working in Auschwitz with Dr Mengele to use real human tissue and embryos. I was, of course, a Jewish prisoner to be exterminated in the fullness of time, but whilst I had this scientific opportunity, how could I deny myself.
I will tell you now that I did not and never would be directly or indirectly involved in the invasion of a healthy human being. My persecutors, later on, would never believe me but, Jonny Wightman, I am asking you to believe me.
Let me begin with what my studies at Munch University had taught me so far. Dr Mengele and I were interested in very different things. He, as I have already said, wanted to prove some races came from a sub-human anthropological base. I discussed this with him on many occasions but never contradicted him directly. Whenever I disagreed with him, it was more of a question that I wanted him to elaborate on, to tell me what he had discarded and why. He would never understand. His ego was high and his patronage came from Himmler himself. I could never believe that he would have overlooked the fact that I was a Jew, but he did. We were just two scientists, albeit just for some moments.
When we lived in Munich, well before I went to University, I was aware that nature has been cloning organism for millions of years. Let me give you a simple example, when a plant sends out a runner which is a modified form of a stem, a new plant grows where the runner takes root, a clone. People have been cloning plants in one way or another for thousands of years. Taking a leaf from one plant and growing it into a new plant. It has the same genetic makeup and is another example of a clone. This is where I began to think radically. Could I clone myself? When you are way ahead of the existing field of thought, as a scientist, there are sometimes no natural or legal barriers in place. It takes time to decide what is morally or ethically acceptable and what is not. If it hadn’t been for our persecution by the Nazi’s, my work would have been advancing rapidly in Munich’s academic environment. It might even be said that they missed their chance to start a super Aryan race.
So, one day I asked Mengele, when I thought I had gained enough of his respect, if I could run some experiments alongside his, to my surprise, he agreed. Our equipment was as good as I would have had in Munich. The invention of the electron microscope by Max Knoll and Ernst Ruska at the Berlin Technische Hochschule in
1931 had finally overcome the barrier to higher resolution that had been imposed by the limitations of visible light. Dr Mengele had requisitioned one very early on and had it shipped here from the University only after they received a more advanced version.
One day, he came to me and said that a young ‘healthy’ woman had been brought into the hospital soon after she had arrived from being rounded up by the SS but had died unexpectedly. He wanted me to carry out a post mortem to establish the cause of death. It was of course very urgent. He didn’t want some contagious disease sweeping through his part of the camp, out of control. If anyone was going to die finding out the cause, it was me not him. I had some experience of post mortem procedures as an undergraduate at the medical school, but it wasn’t ever going to be my subject.
I hesitated before being ordered to do so because the autopsy room was adjacent to a labyrinth of gas chambers. Earlier, I had witnessed the horrifying spectacle of the way that my countrymen were being exterminated. A new intake of Jews had just arrived by train and were being herded into the changing rooms as I arrived. They’d been told to remove their clothing and hang it all on pegs. All the while they were being told that new clothes will be provided, and hot tea would be served once they’d showered and were clean. Towels were piled on tables to elaborate the lies. A few kapos were needed to encourage each and everyone one of them, old men, young girls, mothers, fathers and babies in arms into the ‘showers’.
I was at the autopsy table starting to unravel the reason for this young girl’s death for Mengele when I heard the wailing and banging. It lasted about ten minutes until silence came. Then came motor noise of the extractor fans as they vented the toxic, Zyklon B gas into the air outside. Finally, I heard the bars securing the doors being dragged back and the doors were opening. Even having witnessed this before, I still wretched again at the smell of death, urine and faeces hung in the air as the Kapos with rags over their noses pulled and tugged at the dead bodies loading them onto shoots that took them to the crematoria. I stood and retreated into a space I had set aside in my head for such occasions, sitting with my head bowed, so ashamed at my own inadequacy.
The autopsy door opened, and I stood as a young boy about ten or twelve was carried in. He had survived amongst all the dead around him. I laid him out on the table to bring him back to life and started automatically to pump his chest forcing air into him. As I did so Kapo Heidmann pushed me aside and listen to the laboured breathing. There in front of me he placed his hand across the boy’s mouth and pinched his nose. His young chest heaved at first then gave way to silence. I stood transfixed at what had happened. There was no way I would again witness such callousness in what was my domain. He was aware as I stared at him that I had revenge in my eyes.
I turned away as they removed the young boy and walked over to the gurney and I pulled back the sheet and looked at the young woman peaceful in death out of this hell. I discovered that she has died of a twisted gut and that her complaints of stomachache and cramp were ignored as being dietary. I reported to matter to Dr Mengele. He nodded. During the course of that procedure, without his knowing, I removed her ovaries and put them in frozen storage. Strangely as I did so, I recall whispering to her dead body asking if it was all right. Did she mind?
‘At this point, Jonny Wightman, you may think that I stepped over the ethical boundary but remember this was a death camp and in the middle of a world war. Ethical boundaries are sometimes blurred at the best of times, but these times, here in Auschwitz, were extraordinary.
‘I now had the first part of the ‘Germ Line’. For your information that is the egg and sperm that combine to make the embryo. I had previously experimented with a technique in Munich to extract the nucleus from a cell and create an enucleated egg. Mengele was happy for me to use the electron microscope when he asked me to set up cultures of various matter so that he could make notes on his own absurd theories. I thought that it should be possible to fuse this egg with another cell using a small electric current. This technique had never been used before and it wasn’t to become widely known until the 1960s. I brought that innovation to England in 1946.
Jonny Wightman was now becoming aware that this man had remarkable intelligence, memory, speed of thought and reasoning and the ability to use it. Everyone in Solomon’s academic world up to 1942 had thought so. But for his accident of birth, this man would have been known around the world by now. Jonny couldn’t really believe what was to come next.
Chapter 16
Stalingrad Russia 1942
Ahead was the industrial city skyline of Stalingrad that stretched either side of the Volga river for 30 miles, it was a scene of mass of destruction, remnants of concrete jutting aimlessly into the sky supported by mangled legions of broken steel and crumbling cement, a chaos of twisted skeletons, that followed days of bombardment by German Stuka dive bombers and barrage after barrage of shellfire. It was 12 September 1942. Klaus Neidman and Captain Johann Bron watched as the oil storage tanks spewing flames high into the night sky. The silence that followed the bombardment was punctured by the advance whistle, the company scrambled over the waste land in front. Line after line of German infantrymen from General Friedrich Paulus VIII Corps. The snow was not due until later, but it was beginning to feel the cold at night. As they advanced into the streets, it was incomprehensible how anyone could continue in this hell. They were dead. Not a single green leaf survived, everything had perished in the flames. The horror encountered did not stop for days. It seemed like every visible movement was punished by death. Klaus and Johann did not know that this was the beginning of the end of their war. The fight for street after street became house after house. It seemed that any progress was measured in corpses.
The month of September slipped into October and then into November. It was soon clear that General Zhukov's order from the Kremlin to his Red Army ‘Not a step back.....The only extenuating circumstance is death’, had its stoical effect on morale as more and more troops came from the East to replace those who had fallen.
Each apartment block, each warehouse or factory had been converted into a series of well-defended strongpoints. Each manned by a dozen or so man units. Bitter fighting raged in each street. Johann and Klaus cleared bombed out buildings room by room, sometimes having to fire through holes in the floor above them to secure another stronghold. It became clear that they were never going to survive unless they started to think for themselves. The first priority after hours of exhaustion was to find a safe place to rest. They were now alone. They feared their fellow soldiers had not survived this assault. They went into a yard adjoining the building that had just been secured. In the porch lay the skeleton of a horse. It had been stripped of all but a few scraps hanging from its ribcage. Both of them leaped onto the carcass robbing it of the last vestiges cold raw red meat.
Klaus was the first to move slowly away from the courtyard stepping carefully round the immense cesspool of human waste that had nowhere to go, stuck waiting for someone to clear up. There ahead of them, he caught the sight of a human figure crouched over relieving himself. At the sight of Klaus, his wretched face, confused and suffering, disappeared into the darkness. To his right, piled high, he recognised the uniforms of his fellow soldiers. Inside them were the skeletal yellow wax like faces of men who had fallen weeks before in the first wave of fighting. There hadn’t been time for burial and there was no time for sentiment. Johann stared into their lifeless eyes. He shook his head and started pulling away at the corpses, searching their pockets. Between them Johann and Klaus stuffed scarves, socks, linings for their boots and a compass and several ID tags. As night fell, the two of them began the slow retreat away from the splintered ruins, monstrous monoliths of concrete bared to the sky, away from the incendiary bombardment that would light to sky and cremate those that had fallen that day.
The advance towards Stalingrad was beginning to falter. Throughout the summer the German army had advanced hundreds of miles towards the city. Killing a
nd burning everything in their path. News of the ruthlessness of the officers and their total disregard for humanity spread amongst the Russian troops and peasants in the countryside.
The morning bombardment from the Russians on two fronts like a pincer started before dawn. The frozen wasteland between the two sides now looked like the pictures of the western front in 1915. Craters now we’re filled with frozen water hiding the dead men of both sides below in their cryonic state. The night’s wind had caused thick drifts to pile against the sides of the craters. Shivering in their sodden uniforms, their feet ladened with snow, clutching feebly the heavy bolt action rifles, the two men waited for the order to advance. This time what lay ahead of them away from the ruins were the waters of the Volga. The natural barrier that had halted advance after advance over the last few months.
Supply lines were stretched too far and too long. Equipment was being lost and Blitzkrieg policy was now beginning to hamper any chance of survival.
A barrage of machine gun and cannon fire erupted in front of them. Men fell either side howling as life was taken from them. Shaking with fear the two men ran onwards leaving their fate in the hands of others. After a while running and dodging unseen missiles of shrapnel, ice and frozen earth, they found themselves alone and lost again, submerged in the icy waters of the Volga, where the waters flowed unceasingly southwards taking them with it.
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