At all this glorious news, our hearts sang with joy. But none of it improved our chances for survival; we knew that when the Russian front came nearer, the Germans would probably kill us all. We felt great bitterness, knowing that the whole world had witnessed the greatest massacre of innocents in history and done nothing to prevent it; but at least our murderers would be brought to account.
Winter came to an end, and spring arrived, in its full glory. I remember looking at the blooming trees and flowers and thinking how incongruous is the beauty of nature against the ugliness of man.
In the middle of May the Gestapo initiated a new and disturbing procedure. Every day after work they took us to a place where the river Huczwa widened almost into a lake. On its right bank was a large, open field surrounded by low hills. We were ordered to go into the water in our underwear, to swim and bathe. The first time we were certain it was a trap, so that they could shoot us while we were undressed and all gathered together. It was a perfect spot; all they had to do was set up a couple of machine guns on the hills, and there we were, caught between the guns and the water. It was a huge relief when the guards ordered us to get dressed and marched us back to the camp.
These “bathing” expeditions went on uneventfully for several weeks. Apparently the Gestapo were rehearsing in expectation of an order to kill us. They were afraid that this time, unlike during the first Hrubieszów action, we might resist, and they wanted us in a position where we could be mowed down with no trouble.
On May 13 the Axis armies, trapped in Tunisia, surrendered, the Allies taking a quarter of a million prisoners. Africa was free of the Nazi scourge. The big question now was when the Allies would open a second front in Europe. Suddenly it began to seem as though the Germans might collapse at any time. It was obvious that they no longer had any chance of winning the war. Hitler boasted about Festung Europa (Fortress Europe), but everyone knew this was mere bravado; he had lost his gamble and now was prepared to bring the whole German nation down with him if only he could delay, however briefly, the inevitable moment of defeat. And as all this was happening, our frustration could only mount. So near to rescue, and yet so far. Whatever happened, we felt that Hitler and his henchmen would kill us before their own end.
June arrived; days and even hours dragged maddeningly slowly. We were running out of work, and the Gestapo could find little for us to do. We knew our lives were in grave danger; any change in the routine was now ominous. So when they began marching us each morning to the yard of the new Gestapo building on Długa Street for the roll call, we felt they were setting us up; why had they changed the roll call from Jatkowa to the Gestapo yard?
On July 3, we got our answer. After the roll call, Waldner addressed us. Half of us were to be shipped to a labor camp called Budzyń, not far from Lublin. We shouldn’t worry, he told us; conditions there were good, and there was plenty of work. Then he selected the people who were going to be sent to Budzyń; our family was among those who were to remain.
Those who had been selected to go were loaded onto trucks. We were all convinced that they were going to be shot, but we were told they would be taken to the train station, and from there sent to Budzyń. Those of us who remained went back to Jatkowa in a state of utter confusion, unable to guess who was better off.
A few days later a message came from the Budzyń group. They had indeed arrived at a labor camp, but conditions there were very bad. Still, we rejoiced at this news; against all expectations, they were at least alive.
Early in the morning of July 10, the fifty or so of us who were left in the camp were on the way to the Gestapo yard for the roll call when my former teacher, who was our source of information, walked past us. When the guard wasn’t looking, he whispered, “They’ve landed in Sicily.” The Allied forces were back in Western Europe! But now even this great news had little impact on us; our fate would be decided in a matter of days, even hours. And in fact, after we arrived in the Gestapo yard and the roll call had been taken, the chief announced that the rest of us were to be sent to Budzyń as well. We were to leave directly from there, without returning to the camp. This time we thought he might be telling the truth, but we still didn’t fully trust him. Why hadn’t they sent us with the others, a week ago? Maybe the first group were the lucky ones; maybe we were the ones who were going to be shot.
My brothers and I had hidden a small package of ten or fifteen gold coins and about a hundred dollars in paper money in the cellar of a house on Jatkowa Street. We had buried it in the wall, about four feet above the ground and six inches deep. We needed badly to retrieve it; without money we knew we could scarcely survive in the new camp. Fred took a big chance. He went to Waldner and asked for permission to go to a bakery shop next to Jatkowa to buy some bread for the trip. The chief nodded, and ordered two members of the Gestapo to escort him. I remember thinking that at least we’d had a bit of luck in that it was he who was the Gestapo chief on this critical day.
After buying the bread, Fred asked his escort for permission to go to the house and get some clothes for the trip. Once in the house, he asked if he could go to the cellar for just a minute to get a jar of marmalade. That too was permitted. Fred went down into the cellar, which was really only a cave under the floor, and started digging in the wall with his hands, but he couldn’t find the package. The guard was yelling at him to hurry up. Fred was almost a foot into the wall, but the gold wasn’t there. That money might mean the difference between life and death to us; Fred got so anxious that he dropped the marmalade. He bent over in the dark to pick it up, and suddenly felt the package with the gold. It must have slipped out from the hole in the wall while he was digging.
Before his return to the Gestapo yard Fred managed to dig a hole in a loaf of bread and hide the package in it. When he was sure no one was looking, he gave it to me. Wagner had grown suspicious at the length of time Fred had taken to buy the bread. He came over to him and asked, “Did you bring anything else with you?” Fred looked him straight in the eye and said, “Herr Obersturmbahnführer, if you don’t believe me, search me.” Wagner looked back at him, hesitated, and then walked away.
A wagon with seven or eight small Jewish children, whom the Gestapo had found in Jatkowa after we had left for the roll call that morning, was now brought into the yard. “Do these children belong to anyone here?” the chief asked. A couple in our group were the parents of two of the children. It was a tragic moment. They knew that if they admitted to having hidden the children from the Germans while they were living at the camp, they would be killed—and that nothing could save the children anyway. There was silence. No one claimed the children. Waldner ordered them taken away.
We were loaded onto a waiting truck. “Don’t worry,” the chief repeated, “you’re going to Budzyń.” Still, we were very frightened; with the Germans, you never knew. To our immense relief, we saw that the truck actually was heading toward the railway station. At least they were not going to shoot us in Hrubieszów. There were about fifty of us on the truck, with the nice Gestapo man, the one who was opposed to Hitler, in charge. Fred, worried that in Budzyń the SS would search us and find the gold, took a calculated risk and told him about the gold hidden in the bread. He begged him to hold on to it and give it back to us after the search. The German was sympathetic, but refused to take the chance.
At the station we were loaded into a cattle car with bars on the window. The trip took about eight hours. It was hot and uncomfortable, but most of us were young and in good physical condition, and withstood it well.
Late in the day the train pulled into a station near Budzyń. We were taken out of the car and immediately surrounded by two SS men and a number of Ukrainian guards with dogs. They ordered us to form a column and start marching.
Budzyń
They marched us toward what was obviously a prison camp; in the distance we could see guard towers and rows of barbed wire. This looked like a labor camp, not an extermination camp; so far the Gestapo chief had told us the
truth. SS guards in green uniforms and Ukrainians in black uniforms were standing at the entrance gate. Over the gate was a semicircular sign reading Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes You Free).
In the yard we could see prisoners in civilian clothes. As we lined up at the gate, we came near enough to see their faces. A cold fear seized my heart. I had never seen human beings looking like that. Many of them were emaciated, with hollow eyes; their hands were covered with scabs. They didn’t walk; they shuffled. They had a look of degradation, stupor, and despair.
The fear I had known before, during the hunt, was a different kind of fear from this. Then it had been the fear of getting caught and shot, of instant death. And in Jatkowa we had expected every day that they would surround and kill us; we were used to living with the fear of violence against us. This was a new kind of fear—a fear of slow death from hunger, of filth and sickness, of a life of hell on earth. “I won’t last a month in this camp,” I remember thinking. I had always been considered something of a “softy”; I was never one of the tough athletic types who might have a chance in such conditions.
But then I noticed that there were some prisoners who seemed to be in somewhat better shape than the others. “Maybe there’s a way to buy food here,” I thought. After all, we did have some money with us.
We marched through the gate in rows of five, two SS men counting us as we passed. As soon as we entered the gate we were met by several men in Polish army uniforms. They were Jews—like the other prisoners, they wore yellow patches—but they looked well fed and strong. One of them, whom the others called Szczypiacki, had a pinkish face and a big mustache. He looked us over with great interest. Compared to the Budzyń inmates, we looked good. In the Jatkowa camp food had been plentiful, and we wore decent clothing.
“You guys really had it good in Hrubieszów. We’ll show you how different it is here,” declared Szczypiacki sarcastically. Without warning he hit the man nearest him with a stick. “Let’s do a little exercise now,” he shouted. “Let’s see how fast you can run. Let’s go, run, run, run!”
Bewildered, we started running. “Down!” screamed Szczypiacki. Some of us followed his command and threw ourselves to the ground. Others, who had never done this sort of thing before, stopped and stood still, confused. Szczypiacki started hitting them with the stick, and soon had us all running and falling all over the camp yard.
The SS guards and the Ukrainians watched this with delight, laughing and shouting obscenities at us. The show went on for about twenty minutes. A few of the older ones couldn’t continue and lay on the ground gasping for air. Some of the others who couldn’t keep up were kicked and beaten. Finally a tall, handsome Jew, also in a Polish army uniform, called a halt. From Szczypiacki’s demeanor we could tell that this man, Stockman, was in charge. He was about thirty, erect and calm, and seemed to be a decent person. He instructed Szczypiacki to take us to the reception barracks. As we were waiting in line to be registered, we had a chance to talk to a few of the other prisoners. They told us that the camp was run internally by a group of Jewish former Polish army prisoners of war. Some of them, such as Szczypiacki, could be genuinely brutal, but most of the time it was a show they put on for the benefit of their German masters.
One of the prisoners told us, “You guys don’t know how lucky you are. Feix left Budzyń just a few days ago.” “Who was Feix?” we wanted to know. “A mad killer and torturer.” “And who is the commandant now?” “Axmann—he’s a killer too, but nowhere near as bad as Feix—nobody could be.”
In the registration office they took down our names, assigned to each of us a number, and gave us yellow patches to attach to our jackets. They searched us, but not very thoroughly; I was able to hold on to the bread that had our fortune hidden in it.
Later we learned how thoroughly they searched incoming prisoners in the “official” concentration camps, and this information turned out to be of crucial importance to us. We were very fortunate that Budzyń wasn’t as yet in that category, otherwise we would have had all our money taken away from us.
After the registration, they ordered us to go to the barracks that was to be our new home. It was the last in the row of seven; only the camp latrine separated us from the barbed wire. No one had to tell us where it was; the stench was overpowering. Each barracks held about four hundred prisoners. The single women’s barracks wasn’t as crowded, because there were fewer than a hundred fifty women in the camp.
The barracks were of wood, and in the center of each was a small room, the “office” of the Stubenälteste (the prisoner in charge of the barracks), containing a table and chair; his bed was in there too. The rest of the barracks space was occupied by rows of three-tiered bunks. The top tier was the only one prisoners could sit on; the two lower tiers had just enough space to sleep in. We were not allowed to leave the barracks after the doors were shut for the night, so the latrine had to be used before that. In the middle of the barracks stood a large can for urinating at night.
There were many Jews from the Warsaw ghetto in our barracks. One group had arrived after a stopover at the dreaded Treblinka extermination camp. One of them, Richie Krakowski, introduced himself to me. He was very farsighted and wore glasses with thick lenses that made his eyes appear huge. Richie was of medium height and slightly stooped. One could tell immediately that the brutality of Budzyń had not affected his innate humanity, nor even his subtle sense of humor. He was very helpful, was up to date on all sorts of information, and I sensed at once that he and I would become friends.
Soon the work commandos began returning to the camp, and we were ordered to line up for the evening Appel (roll call). We lined up on the Appelplatz (the roll-call plaza) in columns, called “blocks,” five deep. Each block, consisting of prisoners from one barracks, was supervised by an SS man and a couple of Ukrainians, who ran around making sure that all the prisoners were out of the barracks and the latrine. They were barking out orders to line up in precise ranks behind one another so there would be no mistake in the count.
The minute I saw the SS man in charge of our block I knew he was a sadist. I don’t remember his name, but after more than forty years I can still see his face. He was a stocky man with thin brown hair, bulging eyes, and a cruel, mad-dog expression. One of the prisoners standing two rows to my left was a tall young man with a gaunt face. The SS man came from behind and noticed that he wasn’t standing exactly in line with the prisoners in front of him. He grabbed him by the shoulders, spun him around, and punched him in the face. Weakened by hunger, the young man fell to the ground with a thud. He looked up at his attacker, his eyes full of fear, afraid to get up. This seemed to enrage the German still further, and he began kicking his victim, aiming at the groin. The Jew howled with pain, trying to protect his testicles with his hands. The SS man pulled out his gun and screamed at the prisoner in a high-pitched voice, threatening to shoot him if he continued to use his hands to protect himself. Almost beside himself with pain and afraid of being shot, he took his hands away, and the SS man immediately kicked him again in the groin. On reflex, the prisoner brought his knees up, his body curled. In a frenzy the German ran around him, viciously kicking him in the back and head, continuing to kick him even after the man had stopped moving. His fury spent, the SS man walked away.
I was so mesmerized by this spectacle that I forgot all caution and kept staring at the now lifeless victim. Strangely, there was no sign of blood. Bencio Fink, who was standing next to me, whispered, “Don’t look—or you’ll be next.” I was trembling, my fists clenched, aching to tear the beast apart limb from limb. But of course before I got anywhere near him I would be shot, and my brothers and sister would be tortured and killed. I felt utterly helpless.
Meanwhile, the SS man in charge of the roll walked from block to block carrying a pad and counting the number of prisoners. When he came to our block our SS man pointed to the prisoner lying on the ground to make sure he was counted. The numbers must have checked out, because the commandant sign
aled that the Appel was finished. Our Blockälteste ordered two other prisoners to carry the body on the ground to the camp hospital. I don’t think the prisoner survived the kicking; I never saw him again.
Depressed by the incident, on the way back to the barracks some of us from Hrubieszów asked the others whether this was a common occurrence. “You think that was bad,” they told us; “that was nothing compared to what went on before Feix was transferred.” They said that Feix used to hang prisoners naked, head down, and beat them with bunches of barbed wire until the flesh was torn all over their bodies, while repeatedly kicking them in the head. After Feix had satisfied his sadistic urges he left, ordering the Ukrainians to stand watch and make sure no one tried to help his victims. A few begged the Ukrainians to shoot them, but the guards refused. Screams and moans were heard in the nearby barracks all through the night. Many died after a few hours; those who survived until the morning Appel were shot.
Another of Feix’s amusements was to visit the hospital, where he would get the sick and weak out of bed and order them to run and dance. Those who couldn’t move fast enough to suit him he would line up against the wall and shoot.
Back at the barracks after the Appel, two prisoners came in lugging between them a huge container of soup. This was our dinner. We lined up, and one of them would dip a big ladle into the can and pour its contents into our menashka, as we called our soup dish. Even before I got my ration I could see the soup was mostly water, but not until I tasted it did I realize why almost everyone in the camp was starving. It was nothing but salty water, with a few cabbage leaves in it and one or two little pieces of turnip. It tasted so bad I spat out the first mouthful. A Musulman (this was the nickname, in Yiddish, for prisoners who were in the last stages of starvation and had lost all capacity to resist and will to live) immediately came over, looked at me with sad eyes, and gestured to me to pour my soup into his empty menashka. Horrified, I did. After each prisoner had got his portion of soup, there was some left over. Pushing, clawing, and shoving, a line immediately formed to get seconds.
I Shall Live Page 16