The homosexuals, who wore pink triangles, were another group who had been singled out by the Nazis and sent to camps without having committed any offense. They not only had to endure harsh treatment from the guards, but were constantly ridiculed by the other prisoners as well. One of them, “Mona,” managed to get hold of some lipstick and rouge and walked around defiantly swinging his hips like a woman. Mona seemed to enjoy the attention, even when it took the form of ribbing and abuse.
It was about October 7 when our professor finally showed up. We greeted him, needless to say, with great joy. He brought with him our machines and a new batch of sheets, and told Stark that he had worked out an arrangement for us with the SS Lagerkommandant. Since no suitable space was available outside the camp, a table would be set up in our sleeping barracks where we could do our work after the morning Appel was over and the other prisoners had left with their work commandos.
What a break! We didn’t even have to leave the camp to go to work! Stark was effusive in his thanks to the professor, who permitted himself a small, enigmatic smile. He wished us good day and left. Exultant, we slapped each other on the backs. The saga of our commando was still continuing, and we had just entered another chapter of it. There could no longer be the slightest doubt: the professor and his colleagues were putting one over on Hitler. What imagination and guts it must have taken, to invent this preposterous scheme and sell it to the SS! Or perhaps one or more of the key leaders of the SS were willing accomplices to it because one never could tell when it might prove advantageous to be part of a plan to save Jewish superbrains. It was mind-boggling: a ragtag crew of Jewish prisoners trying to save their lives by pretending to be scientists were saving a few Germans from having to fight on the battlefront in the eleventh hour of the war. I was full of admiration for the professor and his bunch. “You did it again, you bastards!” They must have had nerves of steel to continue this charade, considering the consequences of someone exposing their “sting.”*
The next morning after the Appel, the machines and a table were brought into our barracks, and soon we were back to punching the keys again. The female member of our commando had not rejoined us though. Apparently it was against the SS rules to have a woman work inside an all-male concentration camp. Karl, the Stubenäl teste, and the other prisoners stared at us in disbelief. Our farfetched story was true after all. Even the SS camp commandant came to see what was going on. When Stark showed him the envelope marked “High Command of the German Navy—Top Secret,” he just shook his head in wonder and left. At first Karl and the other prisoners regarded us with amusement, but after a few days we began to sense some resentment.
Hunger was now a serious problem. Ever since Fehringer had taken our last twenty-dollar bill in Płaszów, Sam and I had had nothing but the camp rations, which had a nutritional value of about five hundred calories a day. As the weeks went by I felt a constant gnawing in my stomach. My entire body yearned for food. There was a sensation in my mouth of wanting to taste bread, and every minute or so I would wet my lips and swallow. In the mornings when I received my daily ration of bread, I made sure to divide it carefully into three or four parts, in order to have at least a small supply of energy throughout the day. For some reason, the only food I longed for was bread. Bread was on my mind all the time. It was a great stroke of good fortune, which probably saved my life, that our working hours were spent sitting on the bench and punching keys, which didn’t consume much energy; I cannot imagine that I would have survived if I had had to do hard physical labor on the rations we received. As it was, I was steadily losing weight. In Ravensbrück I estimated my weight to be between a hundred and a hundred and five pounds; Sam was probably well below a hundred.
Food was the central topic of our conversations, and we all urged Stark to ask the professor to try to get us additional rations. After all, how could he expect seven experts, using all that brain power, to continue to give their best to the Third Reich while suffering from chronic hunger? On the professor’s next visit he seemed to be in a good mood, and Stark boldly brought up the subject of extra rations. Immediately the professor’s face fell; he was clearly troubled by the suggestion. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to help us, but he was probably too frightened of doing anything that might rock the boat. He promised to try, but with no conviction, and in fact nothing happened. Our only relief came from a Stubenälteste from another barracks who wanted someone to wash his socks. Sam was happy to oblige, and for this service every few days he was given a small slice of bread, which he shared with me. It wasn’t much, but every extra bite made a difference.
In our barracks was a former Polish army sergeant who entertained us in the evenings with tales of his prewar gastronomic exploits. His favorite story was about his Sunday breakfasts. Every Sunday morning, no matter where he was, the sergeant’s breakfast was the same: a large Jewish challah (white bread made with eggs and sugar) and a quart of milk. But it wasn’t so much what he ate, but the way he ate it. He would break off bite-size pieces of the challah with his fingers (he made a point of stressing that he never used a knife or fork for this purpose), dip the pieces in a large glass of warm milk, and slowly swallow them, allowing plenty of time between bites to digest them properly. His vivid descriptions of these Sunday breakfasts were works of art, mesmerizing, sensual. I used to follow his story bite by bite, eyes closed, experiencing in my mind this supreme event in all its deliciousness. We all admired this fellow: “Look at this. Here is a Polish sergeant, whom many people might perhaps unthinkingly assume to be not too bright—now see how smart he really is. He was clever enough to know, in good times, just how to eat such wholesome and delicious food.” I promised myself that should I by some miracle survive the war, I would follow the sergeant’s menu for the rest of my life and never deviate from it.*
Week after week went by during this period without anything decisive happening in the progress of the war. It was early December, and the Russians were fighting the Germans in the streets of Budapest. It was only a matter of time before the Allies launched their next big offensive. To us, of course, timing was crucial. The best thing for us would have been Hitler’s sudden fall from power. He would never surrender, I knew, no matter how hopeless his situation, not after such crimes as he had committed. But short of Hitler’s assassination or sudden toppling from power by a coup, it was hard to imagine a scenario where we would survive. Sometimes we discussed the chances of the eight of us becoming lost in the shuffle during the final stages of the war, but that was unlikely. Our chances were better now, of course, than they had been during the mass killings of 1942, but it was the difference between one chance in a million then and perhaps one in a hundred now. Still, having made it so far, we kept hoping. We spent so much time together that except for Stark, who was not friendly with anyone, and Arno, who was always withdrawn, I grew to know the others quite well. We talked a lot about the good life before the war, our favorite books and actors, and so on, but it was all escapism. The moment of decision was fast approaching.
One day in December there was a great commotion among the Gypsies. It seemed they had been given the chance to be released from the camp if they would agree to be sterilized. We had heard stories from other camps where Gypsies were being sterilized whether they liked it or not. After much vociferous discussion, most of them decided not to be sterilized and to remain in the camp. Talking over what we would do in their place, without exception we agreed that we would jump at the chance. We even debated the theoretical question of trading our chances of survival for a definite limited period of freedom. Again we all thought we would agree to the exchange, the only variation being in the length of time each of us would demand; it ranged from two weeks to one year of good life, with plenty of food. I was so consumed with the desire to see Hitler’s end that I would gladly have traded my chance of survival for just a few months of life in the postwar period.
But despite the hunger and the hardships and the bleakness of our prospects, Rave
nsbrück was not so bad as the other camps we had been in. The relative tranquility of our existence there, and the lack of any imminent daily threat to our lives, gave our nerves some badly needed rest.
On the evening of December 16, I overheard Karl talking about a German offensive in the West. This seemed ridiculous, impossible. To begin with, Hitler had nothing left with which to launch any attack; and whatever strength he might have had, he would certainly prefer to use against the Russians, his most hated enemy. Since by now I considered myself an expert military analyst, I presented this authoritative view to my mathematician colleagues, and then went to sleep. Over the next few days we all learned how mistaken I had been. The German offensive was indeed taking place; the Allies had been taken by surprise, and the Germans were on the move. They claimed to have penetrated about fifty miles along the Allied front. Although a prisoner himself, Karl was a German patriot, and predicted that the Germans would soon retake Aachen, Liège, and even Brussels—and should that happen, the entire Western front would collapse. I never took this seriously because I knew that as soon as the weather improved the Germans would have no chance whatsoever against the Allied command of the air. I thought of the first days of the German attack on the Soviets, when their Stukas roamed the skies of the Ukraine at will, putting an end to all Soviet ground troop movement. However, the mere fact that the Germans were still capable of a large-scale attack was disquieting; it showed that they had stabilized the Western front after all, which meant there was little chance of any imminent collapse.
As the days went by, it became clear that the Allied reverse was short-lived. About January 10 I got hold of a German newspaper containing a military communiqué, and when I saw the familiar “heavy defensive battles in the West,” I knew that everything was fine. It was also in January that we heard the news of the start of a new Russian offensive in Poland. On January 17 Warsaw fell, the Russians driving back the defeated Germans in western Poland. By the end of January virtually all of Poland was in Russian hands, and the Russians were approaching the Oder River; they were only about a hundred miles away from us. The speed of the Russian advance was surprising; apparently the Germans were completely unable now to stem the Russian tide. It was very exciting, but also very dangerous. What would happen to us as the Russians got still closer? Would the SS evacuate us again? Despite the risks to us, I could not contain my joy at the German rout. There was great historic justice in all this, and my heart was full of admiration for the Russians. I hoped fervently that it would be they who captured Hitler, not the Allies, who would be too humane. I wanted to see Hitler in a cage. In the meantime I rejoiced at the thought of him squirming like a trapped rat, knowing that soon he would have to pay for his sins against his fellow men.
Meanwhile, a transport of about eight hundred Hungarian Jews unexpectedly arrived from Auschwitz. It was good to see that so many Jews were still alive, and it also touched us more directly as an indication that at least some Jewish prisoners were being evacuated from Poland; perhaps Fred, Felek, and Hanka would be among the evacuees. On the other hand, hope dimmed for the eight of us somehow being able to mingle with non-Jews in the confusion at the end of the war. A critical factor was whether the Russians would continue their drive, which meant they would reach us soon, or halt again before the final assault. So far in the war, after every advance of a hundred kilometers or so they stopped to bring up supplies, and such a pause now would delay the liberation of the camp. A new evacuation now dominated all our conversations, especially the question of whether the SS might decide to kill us rather than go to the trouble of evacuating us. After all, how important could our commando be, no matter how persuasive our professor had been? The end of the war, of the whole German Reich, was near. There was great turmoil and fear in our hearts and minds.
One day in the first week of February 1945, after the morning Appel the SS ordered all Jews to line up at the gate. We desperately searched for someone who would ascertain whether there actually were orders that the eight of us were to be included, but no one would bother to check. The Lagerälteste personally made sure we were in the group that was assembling at the gate. The fact that only Jews were being sent away looked extremely grim for us.
What an incredible relief it was to see boxes of bread at the gate! As the first rows of the Hungarian Jews were marched out, each received a piece of bread and margarine. Our lease on life was being extended, however briefly. We went to the railway station, where the SS reenacted its familiar ritual of shoving us into the waiting cattle cars while beating and kicking us for good measure. This time we were not as crowded as during the trip from Majdanek to Płaszów. At least some of us could sit, and we weren’t pressed so tight against each other. We of the mathematicians Kommando kept together, still hopeful that whatever our destination, our work would continue.
After the SS locked us inside the cattle car, we remained at the station for several more hours. When the train started rolling at last, we had no idea where it was taking us, but after a while Zysman calculated from the change in the direction of the few rays of light coming in through the doors that we were moving south. This was a surprise—why would they evacuate us south and not west, away from the front?
The train progressed slowly, making frequent stops, and soon people started relieving themselves on the floor, but it was very cold and the smell wasn’t as bad as on the trip to Płaszów. At each stop a conductor called out the names of the towns to come; the last one was Berlin. We were moving south, and we couldn’t be far now, because the total distance between Ravensbrück and Berlin was only a hundred kilometers. It was growing dark, and soon we pulled into a station where the train stopped and didn’t resume its journey. Many hours passed.
Sometime late in the evening we heard the droning of planes. Then came the thunder of hundreds of antiaircraft guns and thousands of bomb explosions, first from a distance, then coming closer. Wave after wave of planes flew by, and soon the entire sky was lit up; the light coming in through the crack of the door was almost as bright as in daytime. Bombs were exploding all around us. We had heard of massive Allied bombings, but hadn’t expected anything like this. The rain of bombs went on for hours. It seemed as if hundreds of planes, maybe even several thousand, were pounding Berlin. How ironic, to be killed in the end by an Allied bomb! Somehow I wasn’t scared at all; in fact, I enjoyed it, knowing that Germany’s capital was being destroyed. At least if death came now, it would not be at the hands of the Germans.
The bombing stopped abruptly, but we spent the rest of the night at the station nevertheless. The train didn’t start rolling again until early morning, and it was only minutes before we reached our destination. The voices of the guards could be heard, and the door of our car was opened. We jumped out and saw a sign: “Oranienburg.” So they were taking us to the infamous Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg concentration camp. I had heard that this was the largest one of all. It was not a good omen. Why would they be taking us to a camp even closer than Ravensbrück was to the Oder River and the Russians?
The guards ordered us to form a column, and we marched out of the station. All about us was devastation from the bombing. To our surprise, the guards marched us right through the town of Oranienburg, not around it; windows opened as we passed through the streets, and people peered out at us. We marched for close to an hour, until a huge camp appeared in the distance. Soon we were standing at the gate, which bore the familiar sign over it: Arbeit Macht Frei.
Sachsenhausen
The gigantic Sachsenhausen concentration camp was built in an enormous semicircle, each of its numerous sections surrounded by high stone walls with guard towers, searchlights, and machine guns. We were led by the guards to the reception area, made to take hot showers, and given new striped uniforms, shoes, and prisoner numbers. Again we had to attach red and yellow triangles to our jackets. Our transport was divided among only a few barracks, and the seven of us in the mathematicians Kommando managed to stay together. Since all the
work commandos had already gone out before we arrived, we spent the rest of the day in our new barracks. Our Stubenälteste was a German criminal, like Karl, but he wasn’t as pleasant as Karl. We told him about our Kommando in the hope that he might know something about it, but he just brushed us off.
At the end of the day, after the work commandos had returned to the camp, we went out with the rest of the prisoners to be counted on the Appelplatz. It was so vast that it seemed to swallow up even the more than forty thousand prisoners who lined up on it by blocks to be counted. The Appel took only a little over an hour, an amazingly short time for such a large count. Afterward we walked around the camp to get the lay of the land. The guards didn’t seem to object to prisoners milling about, and we mingled freely with people from all over the camp. I had never seen such a variety of nationalities, from every part of Europe, by the thousands: Poles, Russians, Jews, Gypsies, Belgians, French, Dutch, Danes, Czechs, Bulgarians, Spaniards, Yugoslavs—each speaking his own language, a true Tower of Babel. There was also a large contingent of Norwegian students, who, we were told, had been sent to Sachsenhausen after they had demonstrated against the traitor Quisling. The German prisoners wore triangles of different colors, each representing a code for the type of “crime” they had committed against the Third Reich.
Sachsenhausen contained close to a hundred barracks, many housing up to five hundred men. There was a large kitchen and a bathhouse. A large barracks was marked “Pathology,” and here medical experiments were performed, frequently on German homosexuals. There was even a running track offering a variety of different surfaces, so that the many local shoe manufacturers could use the prisoners to test the effectiveness of various materials. Some prisoners had to walk forty kilometers a day on this track, checking wear and tear of different shoes. Sometimes, just for fun, the guards would give the prisoners who had been selected for the tests shoes several sizes too big, so they could enjoy the spectacle of their stumbling and tripping as they tried to run. There was a station Z, where the SS exterminated “undesirable” prisoners. There was even a permanent gallows. Everywhere were big signs exhorting us to diligence, obedience, cleanliness, and order. Our heads were spinning. This place was incredible. It was as if a talented writer had written a weird, crazy, futuristic, nightmarish movie script, and then the producer actually built a huge set for it.
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