Then Hans Wagner, Fred’s Gestapo patient, appeared at the fence, looked around, and noticed Fred standing in the yard. He motioned for him to come over. “What are you doing here, Doctor?” he asked, as if he didn’t know. “We just got tired of running and hiding,” Fred replied. “There was nowhere to go.” “Is your sister here with you?” Wagner asked. “Yes, she is,” Fred answered, “and so are my three brothers and my parents.” “Let me see,” Wagner said, and walked back into the side entrance to the jail.
An old Jew who was saying his prayers overheard the conversation. Sensing that Fred might have a chance to get out, he came over to him and surreptitiously placed a packet of money in his hand. “Here, take this money, Doctor,” he said. “Use it, if you can, to feed the Jews.” Then he blessed Fred, turned back, and with a serene face resumed his prayers.
Wagner evidently spoke about Fred to Ebner, the Gestapo chief executioner, for Ebner came into the yard from the back of the building and gestured to Fred with his stick, looking him over from head to foot. “Is this the elegant doctor?” he said mockingly. Even in the ghetto Fred had managed to look well dressed, but after a week of hiding he was unshaven and his clothes were rumpled. Fred motioned to Hanka, who stepped forward. Ebner remembered her too from the ghetto. “… and my brothers,” Fred continued. Felek, myself, and then Sam, who looked very tired, moved a little closer to Ebner. When he saw Sam he made a face. “He’s no good, he’s sick,” he said. “He just looks bad now—he is younger than I am,” Fred pleaded. Ebner seemed very displeased. “Vier Brüder” (Four brothers), he said, as if the mere thought of letting four Jewish brothers out, however briefly, gave him pain. Poor, desperate, courageous Fred pressed the matter, well knowing that by pleading on our behalf, he was jeopardizing his own chance for life. “And my parents,” he added. Mother and Father hesitated. They knew Fred was going too far, and they didn’t want to endanger this unexpected opportunity for their children to get out.
The whole thing began to annoy Ebner, who didn’t even look at our parents. “What do I need old Jews for?” he yelled. Now he changed his mind about letting any of us out. He pointed with his stick and shouted, “Alles zurück zum Haufen” (Everybody back to the crowd). Instantly Father and Mother realized that our chance was slipping away, and stepped back into the crowd. Our lives were all that mattered to them. Now Ebner spun around and went back into the building. It looked as if Fred had lost his gamble.
In the meantime, two trucks had pulled up to the fence and the Polish police started pushing the people toward them. The Gestapo chief came down the steps to see that the loading of the Jews into the trucks proceeded smoothly. We still stood in the same spot where Ebner had left us, and a Polish policeman stood nearby. He didn’t understand German, and wasn’t sure himself what Ebner had decided to do with us. The chief looked at us questioningly. “What are they doing here?” Almost simultaneously Fred and the Pole said, “Ebner.” The chief apparently understood this to mean that Ebner didn’t want us to be killed with the others. He himself was uncomfortable with that madman, Ebner. “If Ebner said OK—go.” He waved his hand at the staircase. As we turned toward the stairs, we saw Father helping Mother into the truck with the other Jews. We heard her call out, “Niuniek [Fred’s nickname], rateve di kinder!” (Fred, save the children!). Although she almost always spoke to us in Polish, her last words to us were in Yiddish. At the last minute, the chief picked out two others, two young girls, Jentka Cohen and Tobka Beker, and told them to join us.
I felt as if my heart would explode. I was gripped by an unendurable tension. Wild emotions were raging within me, almost tearing me apart—an overpowering desire to live, to save myself, and a terrible guilt at not joining my parents, at abandoning them when they were about to die. We started walking up the steps, seven or eight of them, turned right, three more steps, walked through the Gestapo office on the second floor, and down the steps leading to the street. A policeman told us to go to Jatkowa Street, where the Gestapo were setting up a small service camp of about thirty Jews to work for them.
Our parents and the others in the prison yard were loaded onto the two trucks and driven to the execution pits in the Jewish cemetery nearby. Bencio Fink, who later became a friend of mine in the camps, and Rechtshaft, a droshka driver before the war, were among the burial crew. They later described to us what happened at the cemetery.
The Jews were ordered to undress and lie down in a row at the edge of the pit. Demant, a short, fat, red-faced member of the Gestapo who sometimes filled in for Ebner as executioner, went from one end of the line to the other, shooting each one in the head. Among them were the Krajzer family. Krajzer was a druggist who had rented his shop, which was next to our fabric store, from my father. They had a daughter, Hela, a pretty, buxom, blond girl. The Krajzer family lay down next to our parents. After the shooting, Demant went up to Hela’s body, turned it over face-up, and rammed his fist into her vagina. The Jews in the burial crew were ordered to throw the bodies into the pit and bury them.
Meanwhile, we had arrived at Jatkowa Street, where we met the other Jews who had been selected by the Gestapo as members of the new work camp. Julek Brandt, Bluma’s brother, was put in charge, and Rabinowitz, an attorney, was made his assistant. They assigned rooms to us in several of the houses on Jatkowa Street that stood empty, their inhabitants having all been gassed or shot to death.
We were in a state of extreme exhaustion and shock. We knew our parents were dead and could only weep quietly. It was growing dark. There was no conversation in the room, only an occasional sob or a new outburst of crying. The door opened and Wagner appeared, flashlight in hand. “Where is the doctor?” he asked. Fred got up, his eyes red from weeping. Wagner tried to console him: “At least you still have your brothers and sister.” Then he went out. I was physically so exhausted and emotionally drained that I fell into a fitful sleep. Through the night I would wake up, remember what had happened, and cry myself back to sleep.*
In the morning Julek Brandt assigned various tasks to our group of about thirty, including eight or ten women. Julek was about thirty years old, very energetic and a good organizer. He had been one of the leaders of the Judenrat in the Hrubieszów ghetto. He dealt directly with Ebner, who had led him to believe that when the final action came, in appreciation for his services Ebner would allow him and a small group of other Jews to remain in town. To his surprise, when the time came, Ebner personally made certain that Julek was put into one of the cattle cars of the train used to carry the three thousand Hrubieszów Jews to the gas chambers of Sobibór.
After the train had started, Brandt, Rechtshaft, and some others succeeded in forcing open a few of the wooden slats that formed the sides of the cars and jumping out of the moving train. Some of them were shot by the guards, but Julek, Rechtshaft, and a couple of others managed to escape. For two or three days they hid in the fields about ten miles from Hrubieszów, but eventually they were spotted by Polish peasants, who alerted the local police and helped them to capture the Jews. They were brought to the nearby village jail, where Hy Silberstein, his girlfriend Mirka, and a few others were imprisoned after they too had been captured in a nearby forest.
Hy was a few years older than I, from a good family, and had been a good student in the Hrubieszów gymnasium. We knew each other well, but each of us had his own group of friends. Hy was the best-looking boy in Hrubieszów, and girls used to chase after him. His father worked for the Judenrat, and one day he was called in to the Gestapo headquarters. He never came back; Ebner shot him dead right then and there. Hy’s mother was killed by Demant in front of their house.
When the action started, Hy and Mirka had gone to hide at the home of a Polish friend of Hy’s, Wanka Adamiuk. After a few days Wanka’s family started hinting that they were afraid to keep them any longer, lest they themselves be shot by the Gestapo. Hy and Mirka were forced to leave, and at night went to hide in the woods near Czerniczyn, a small village not far from Hrubieszów. There
they ran into my school friend Chaim Ajzen and about a dozen other Jews. After two or three days they were surprised by a detachment of Ukrainian police. Some were killed; Chaim and a number of others escaped. Hy, Mirka, and a few others were captured and brought to the village jail.
The morning of October 28 they were all taken to the Gestapo headquarters in Hrubieszów. Ebner saw Julek and his group in the jail and was preparing to shoot them when Julek told him that he knew where a large cache of gold had been hidden by the Judenrat. He offered to show Ebner where it was on condition that he and a small group of Jews be permitted to stay in Hrubieszów. Ebner, who needed people to clean up the ghetto, agreed. Julek led him to the gold, and that was how the Jatkowa camp got started.
I was assigned to one of several small groups whose job was to go from house to house in the now-empty ghetto, remove the furniture and other belongings of the Jews who had lived there, and load it all onto wagons, which were then driven to one of the warehouses in which the Germans stored the possessions of the Jews they had killed.
I spent the next four or five weeks doing this work. It was eerie entering the empty Jewish houses. When the action had started, the Jews had been permitted to take very little with them, so almost everything in the houses was intact. Pots of food still stood on top of the stoves, clothing hung in the closets, most of the beds had been made. It was as if people had somehow felt obliged to leave everything in order.
We worked without much supervision, but no one thought of escaping; we were all too tired of running and hiding. It was unseasonably warm November weather.
Large-scale killing had now stopped. The great majority of the Hrubieszów Jews were dead. Many had gone to the Sobibór gas chambers; thousands of others, including my parents, relatives, friends, and neighbors, had been killed in and around Hrubieszów, most of them by one man, Ebner. From time to time the Gestapo still caught a few Jews in hiding and would take them to the cemetery to be shot. Sometimes they didn’t even bother to do that; one day on the way to work we passed two Jewish women lying in the middle of the street. Their faces looked as if they were asleep, but their heads lay in pools of blood. They had been found in hiding by Alex, a member of the Gestapo, who had taken them out on the street and shot them on the spot.
Alex was a strange man; he spoke perfect Yiddish. He must have been raised by a Jewish family to speak the language so well. Those few people who were still in hiding were by now in desperate need of water, and Alex would walk around the empty houses calling out in a low voice in Yiddish, to make them think he too was a Jew, and they would answer him. He would then shoot those poor souls he had been able to deceive. He was in his late thirties, with curly, dark blond hair and watery blue eyes. It was obvious from his swaggering walk and patronizing manner how he relished his power over the few Jews left alive.
During this miserable time one thing kept us going: the news from all the fighting fronts was great. Everywhere the tide of the war was turning against Hitler. Some of the Poles had shortwave radios on which they listened to the BBC. One very nice man, a former teacher of mine, was providing us with information, sometimes at considerable danger to himself. And although they distorted many facts, the German war communiqués, which were published in the local newspapers, accurately reported the names of the towns where battles were taking place, so we had a pretty good idea where the fronts were.
First came the news of Montgomery’s victory in the desert at El Alamein. Even the great Rommel, the Desert Fox, had been defeated. The BBC told the world of the tens of thousands of German and Italian prisoners taken. So the English had done it at last.
Then came another bolt from the blue. The Americans had landed in North Africa! Finally they were on this side of the Atlantic. Once again the New World had come to the rescue of the Old.
And then there was the incredible news from the Russian front. Stalingrad, where the remnants of the Russian army had held on for weeks in bitter house-to-house fighting, the city that had become an obsession with Hitler, now became his nemesis. While Russian soldiers sacrificed their lives among the ruins of Stalingrad, Stalin was moving fresh troops from Siberia, mostly under cover of night, to the two exposed flanks of the elite German Second Army under General Friedrich Paulus. So fanatically determined was Hitler to capture the city bearing Stalin’s name that he pushed Paulus’s army into the tip of a large enclave without adequately securing its flanks.
On November 19 the Russians struck. The ground was covered with snow, it was freezing, and the Germans and their allies were exhausted. The Russians broke through with tanks and infantry and poured through the gaps they had opened to the northwest and southwest of Stalingrad.
Four days later they closed the trap; three hundred thirty thousand Germans were surrounded. We could hardly believe it—invincible just a short time ago, Hitler was now actually losing the war. We assumed he would order Paulus to break out and rejoin the main German forces, saving his army, as the British had at Dunkirk. But no; the maniac’s dark soul was so consumed with hatred, with his contempt and loathing of his own generals, that he ordered Paulus to make a stand and fight on in surrounded Stalingrad.
Then he made a second big mistake; he ordered Field Marshal Erich von Manstein and his army to abandon their drive on the Caucasus and try to rescue Paulus and his men. This put an end to any chance the Germans had of capturing the Baku oil fields. The Russians held off von Manstein, and that sealed the fate of the German Second Army.
All this was balm to our broken hearts, and it gave us a wonderful feeling of satisfaction to know that the greatest murderer in history would soon have to pay the price and meet the terrible fate awaiting him. But as far as our own lives were concerned, the great war news was coming too late. Our parents and most of the people we loved were dead. We were living and working in a ghost town, and Ebner and the rest would never let us come through alive to bear witness against them. And even if by some miracle we did survive, what would it mean, to go on living in this cruel, heartless world? I turned these thoughts over and over in my mind during those terrible days.
In retrospect, I can see now that what kept me alive more than anything else was my intense, almost fanatic desire to live to see Hitler destroyed. As if by osmosis I could feel how he was squirming in agony, with the agony growing worse at every defeat. I wanted him to suffer, to pay for all the evil things he had done. Now the bastard was like a rat in a trap, lying to his countrymen, deceiving them, but knowing deep down that all was lost, and there was no way out for him. I used to lie awake imagining how this devil incarnate must be feeling, having reached the pinnacle of power, having basked in the subservient adulation of his fellow Germans, having all Europe prostrate at his feet, and now the nightmares he must be suffering night after night, in terror of the retribution that awaited him.
By the end of November our work of collecting the contents of the empty houses that had belonged to Jews was coming to an end, and at the same time the population of the Jatkowa camp increased. Julek got permission from the Gestapo for other Jews in hiding to join our group. Soon the number of Jews in the camp had grown to one hundred. We carried out a variety of assignments, and in effect served as a central pool of free labor for the Gestapo and the local police to draw upon at will.
Fred had a bad scare when Ebner summoned him one day to the Gestapo building. Usually such a summons meant death, so we were all extremely apprehensive. When Fred arrived, he was directed to Ebner’s office, where he found him sitting at his desk. Standing on one side of him was a Ukrainian policeman and on the other was Brenner, a Jewish lawyer from Lublin.
Brenner lived among the Poles as a Volksdeutsche (a German who had lived in Poland since before 1939), and Fred knew this. Ebner pointed to Brenner, and in his sharp, cutting voice asked Fred, “Ist er Jude?” (Is he a Jew?) Of course Fred knew that Brenner was, but to say so would have meant his death, so he tried to pretend he didn’t know him. Then Ebner gestured to Fred to inspect Brenner’s
penis. “Ist er Jude?” Ebner screamed again. Fred knew that to irritate Ebner when he was in such a mood was to risk his own life as well. He became so confused and frightened that instead of Brenner he went over to the Ukrainian and said to him, “Drop your pants.” The Ukrainian and Ebner burst out laughing. Realizing his mistake, Fred then turned to Brenner, who obligingly took out his penis. Fred tried to fudge, saying, “Well, it looks as if it might have been circumcised, but there are cases in which there is some question …”
This was too much for Ebner. “Raus!” (Get out!) he yelled at Fred. Now in complete panic, Fred took the wrong turn out the door and ran into the prison yard. He heard Brenner’s screams, and ran back through the building and out into the street. He returned to Jatkowa completely unnerved.
Many of the Jews in Jatkowa were the only survivors in their entire families. They were very lonely, and naturally befriended others in the same situation. A few marriages were arranged, but most of these couples simply lived together. Before the war most Jewish girls in Hrubieszów were virgins when they married. That had now changed; we all knew we were living on borrowed time, and the girls were eager to make love so that when the time came to die, they would at least have experienced one of life’s most talked-about pleasures.
I had always been very shy. Only twice before had I had the opportunity to make love to a girl: the first time was some months before the war, when a Polish maid let me know she wouldn’t be averse to a visit from me to her bedroom behind our kitchen. I was tempted, but my room was right next to my parents’ bedroom, and I was afraid of being caught. The second time was with Itka Kaufman in Włodzimierz during the Russian occupation. Now, at Jatkowa, I discovered that there were two girls interested in me. One of them was Sarah Shechter, a pretty girl of about seventeen (I was nineteen), with brown eyes, brown hair, pale skin, and a slim body. The problem was that in Jatkowa we worked all day, and at night we were not allowed to leave our quarters, where we slept two or three to a room.
I Shall Live Page 14