There was no telling what was true and what wasn’t. No one had any contact with the outside world, but some of the SS guards inside the camp were passing information to a few of the prisoners. Everyone was talking evacuation, which I found hard to believe. Where would they take us? The Russians were coming in from the east and south—they were probably only fifteen kilometers from Berlin by now—the Allies from the west, so the only possible direction to go would be north, but to what destination? It didn’t make sense. If they wanted to kill us all, the best place for that was right inside the camp, where we were surrounded by high walls and machine guns.
On the morning of April 20 an announcement came over the loudspeakers that was repeated incessantly: All prisoners were to line up at the gate by nationality in columns of five. There was going to be an evacuation. Poles, Russians, French, Norwegians, Dutch, Jews, and so forth were to form separate columns. As they began to assemble, chaos ensued, with prisoners running around like crazy trying to find the column for their nationality.
The decisive moment had arrived. When I heard that Jews were to form a separate column, I said to Sam that we were not going to join it, no matter what. He agreed, and we tore off the yellow triangles that branded us as Jews, making sure no telltale threads remained, leaving on the red triangles signifying political prisoners. We had no idea whether they would be verifying nationalities at the gate, but with over forty thousand prisoners running all over the place, I couldn’t see how they would possibly have time to check. In any case, we were taking a lesser risk by not following these orders than by joining an all-Jewish column, which we were convinced would be the first to be killed.
Slowly the long columns were beginning to form. Since if there was any kind of check at the gate it would probably be by language, and since Polish was the only language Sam and I spoke perfectly, we went over to the Polish column. Several thousand Polish prisoners had already lined up. When we tried to join the column, a few rabid Polish anti-Semites recognized us as Jews and started to scream, “Parszywi Żydzi, idzcie do swoich!” (Rotten Jews, go to your own!) The last thing we needed was to attract any attention from the SS guards, so we quickly moved away and joined the column farther down, where the Poles didn’t object to our mixing in with them. We were as quiet and inconspicuous as possible, positioning ourselves in the middle of the column so as not to be too visible.
I was literally counting the seconds in my anxiety to get moving; once we were outside the camp, in a column of non-Jews, our chances to live would be greatly improved. The column on one side of us was Russian; on the other, German. In our column alone there were at least four thousand Polish prisoners. We were happy to finally see the prisoners up front starting to move out the gate. I could see that up ahead the guards were distributing food to the prisoners as they left the camp. All this activity was accompanied by the thunder of the Russian artillery; clearly the SS was in a great hurry.
It took more than an hour before Sam and I reached the gate, and we were careful not to catch anyone’s eye, still fearful of being unmasked at the last minute as Jews. We each received a large piece of bread, about three or four times our daily ration, a small jar of marmalade, and a small package of margarine, which the guards warned us had to last us three days. When I actually walked through the gate, a feeling of enormous relief came over me, as if someone had lifted a great weight from my shoulders. As we marched off, for the first time since the start of the Nazi extermination of the Jews in 1941, I felt that we might have a fair chance to survive: As far as the SS guards marching alongside us were concerned, Sam and I were not Jews. I said to myself, “I shall not die. I shall live. I shall tell the story!”
The March
We were on a road leading north, in a column of five prisoners to a row, half a mile long. The SS guards were walking on both sides of the column, fingers on the triggers of their machine guns. Two or three were marching ahead of the column and a few behind it. An officer on a motorcycle was riding up and down the road making sure everything was in order. Many military vehicles of all kinds were driving past. Some of the German formations seemed still intact, while others looked like the remains of a fighting force that had taken a bad beating. There were many stalled or abandoned vehicles lying on the shoulder of the road. Civilians were walking along carrying bundles; some had horse carts packed with their belongings. Allied planes and a few Russian ones flew continuously over our heads, but we didn’t see a single German plane. From time to time, when one of the Allied planes spotted a group of German military vehicles, the pilot would dive down and strafe them. It did my heart good to see Germans jump and dive for cover. Somehow we weren’t much concerned for our own safety; our column was very visible from the air, and our striped uniforms made it obvious that we were prisoners. Whenever the planes flew low over us, the guards stepped up to the column, feeling safer from air attack when closer to us.
Area of Germany between Berlin and the North Sea which shows the route of the Sachsenhausen death march.
After a while they led us onto a secondary road parallel to the main one, where things were much quieter. The peasants in the fields, almost all of them old men, women, and children, looked with curiosity but no surprise at the endless column of prisoners in their striped uniforms. I now weighed less than a hundred pounds, Sam, about eighty-five or ninety, and most of the others were in a similar state. But the guards kept us marching at a brisk pace.
It was not yet noon when an elderly Pole marching a couple of rows ahead of us suddenly tripped and fell. He got up again with the help of the others around him, but he must have sprained or twisted an ankle, because he continued walking only with great difficulty, heavily favoring one leg. For a mile or so his neighbors on both sides supported him, but he was in constant pain and after a while couldn’t walk at all—he had to be literally carried. An SS guard saw that he was holding up the column, and with his gun motioned him to step out of the ranks. When one of the prisoners who was carrying him wanted to stay with him, the guard pointed his machine gun at him in turn and ordered him to keep moving. The guard then pushed the man over to the side of the road and raised his machine gun. Realizing that he was going to be killed, the man fell on his knees and joined his hands together in a gesture of prayer. The SS guard, his gun about two feet from the man’s head, let loose with a burst of fire, and the Pole keeled over and lay still on the ground. Seeing that the other prisoners were slowing down, their heads turning to look at the man lying on the ground, the guard ran back to the column and started hitting the marchers within his reach to hurry them along.
Our mood changed abruptly. Conversation stopped, and all of us walked carefully, making sure not to stumble. Sam and I took turns holding each other’s arm. The incident had driven home to us that we were all still in mortal danger. Even though the war was in its last days, the SS obviously had orders not to let a single prisoner out of their control. The rule for this march was: Walk or die.
We continued walking nonstop for several more hours. Some of the weaker prisoners, unable to keep up the pace, began to fall back toward the end of the column. This, we knew, meant a bullet in the head. The stragglers at the end of the column were using their last drop of strength in a desperate effort not to get separated from the rest. Some were wheezing, gasping for air; others stumbled on until finally, all strength gone, they fell one by one to their knees, or simply dropped. Like angels of death the SS men at the rear of the column were looking for stragglers and shot them where they fell as if it were the most routine thing in the world. Their faces were blank. There was no hate in them, no pity, just business as usual. By the time they ordered us to stop for our first break, five or six prisoners from our column were gone, their bodies left behind on the side of the road, riddled with bullets.
Strangely, even though it was now clear that the march was going to be a murderous affair, I still felt far safer than I ever had in the camp. Here they didn’t know I was a Jew, and if they were going t
o kill me it would be because I couldn’t walk, not simply because I was a Jew. To my mind, killing a man because he couldn’t keep up the pace in a forced march somehow wasn’t as bad as killing him because he had been born a Jew. Such reasoning may seem lunatic, but under the circumstances it made perfect sense to me. Having lived for so many years under the gun, when any one of the guards had the clear and unquestioned right to murder me at any moment, at a whim, even for fun, even though I had done nothing to provoke it, for the sole reason that I was born a Jew, I had grown to yearn to have my right to live judged by some other criterion, any other—even whether or not I was able to walk.
Sam and I divided our food rations carefully into twelve portions, and we ate one portion during our brief rest. We knew that our lives depended on making it last as long as possible, on conserving every last bit of energy. However we saw many other prisoners, no hungrier than we, consume their entire three or four days’ ration in a few minutes.
We found that Warshawski, our fellow mathematician, was in our column as well, and when the guards ordered us to resume our march, he walked alongside Sam and I. Despite the shooting of the stragglers, I was more optimistic than ever about our chances to make it. The odds seemed good that the SS would not kill so many people, especially since as far as they knew there were no Jews among us. Besides, even if they had planned to execute us all, it would have been almost impossible for them to manage it. They couldn’t mow us all down at once out there in the open; thousands would escape, and their own lives would be greatly endangered. I even overheard some of the Poles discussing the possibility of suddenly jumping the guards, but they had their machine guns at the ready; whoever attacked them first would surely be killed, and no one was willing to die moments before liberation, to save the others. Besides, even if a substantial number of prisoners managed to escape, the SS might still have time to hunt down many of them.
As the sun began to sink slowly in the west, the guards led us off the road to a large farm, which was to be our resting place for the night. They pushed perhaps a thousand of us into a large barn. There wasn’t enough room for all of us to lie down, and some had to lay their legs over others’ bodies. Sam and I were especially cautious with our food, waiting until it was completely dark before we ate our next portion, and being very quiet about it. We were afraid that some of the prisoners who had no food left might jump us and take ours by force.
The hay in the barn smelled good, and even though we were packed in so tight, I had a good night’s sleep. Early in the morning the guards ordered us out, and we were once more on the march. Fortunately it wasn’t raining, and the weather was mild. We turned onto another road, on which we could tell another column was marching ahead of us; every few hundred feet we saw the bullet-ridden bodies of prisoners lying at the side of the road.
All day long the SS played their deadly game of march or die, with the killings increasing every hour. Some of the prisoners’ shoes were either too big for them or too small, and they were beginning to develop painful blisters; many walked barefoot, carrying their shoes tied together around their necks. Occasionally we heard the rumble of artillery, but now it seemed more remote and sporadic than it had just before we left the camp. I didn’t feel as hungry as I had in the camp either, perhaps because I was so absorbed in the life-and-death game with the SS. We were marching now on winding country roads; evidently the SS wanted to stay away from the highways. I felt good, and Sam was holding up fairly well too. We were on the north German plain, which was sparsely populated, and, luckily for us, very flat. The roads would have been much more thickly strewn with our bodies had the terrain been hilly. That night the guards again brought us to a large farm, but this time they let all of us sleep outside, so at least we had plenty of room to stretch our legs.
This went on day after day, except that the number of victims kept increasing hourly. Sam and I had enough food for four days, but many of the others had had nothing to eat since the first rest stop, and more and more were unable to continue the march. The pace was slowing, which helped a little, but still many prisoners, especially the older ones, were unable to keep up and were shot down in cold blood. The lack of any visible emotion in the killers continued to amaze me. Many of the victims fought for their lives until the very last minute, pleading in vain with their executioners for mercy, while others, having witnessed too many earlier killings with no mercy shown, accepted their deaths with resignation. Some prisoners were so hungry they started eating roots and even grass, which caused many of them to develop dysentery, weakening them still further. Most had started the march in fairly good spirits, but now many were losing hope. The battlefront seemed more remote, and we had no idea whatever as to what was going on.
By the sixth or seventh day, Sam was weakening; he had to hold on to my arm most of the time. If we didn’t get some food very soon, we wouldn’t be able to make it. We were marching in a heavily wooded area, and at night the guards were letting us rest on the edge of these woods.
The killings became very frequent now, as more and more people were collapsing from exhaustion. At least seven hundred in our column were shot to death in two days. We could see hundreds of other corpses alongside the road, left by columns marching ahead of us. The countryside was beautiful; spring was in full bloom. The incongruity between the radiance of the nature around us and the slaughter of innocent people was hard to reconcile.
It was still broad daylight at the end of the seventh day, April 26, and we were lying on the ground, exhausted and hungry, in a corner formed by the country road and a narrow cow path, when suddenly a small white truck appeared and turned onto the path. More trucks just like it, perhaps eight or nine in all, followed and stopped, lined up next to each other. They all had red crosses painted on their sides. It seemed like a mirage. A wild thought struck me: maybe they had brought food for us! But that could only be my hunger talking. It was too incredible even to contemplate. Why would the Germans want to feed us now? It was totally inconsistent with all their other actions, and, anyway, they themselves were short of food. Besides, why white trucks with red crosses? We saw a few civilians from the convoy talking to the SS officer in charge. Then the guards ordered some of the stronger prisoners to open the back doors of the trucks, and to my astonishment they started unloading corrugated white boxes marked with red crosses.
A surge of joy rushed through our ranks. Food! It looked like food! And in seconds we heard that it was, as the prisoners unloading the trucks passed the word along to the others. Most of us had risen to our feet. They were piling the boxes up. Hundreds of them were being unloaded, so it couldn’t all be for just the SS; it had to be for us!
The guards ordered us to line up, and soon the prisoners at the head of the line were receiving one box for every four people. The guards warned us that the prisoners themselves were responsible for dividing the food evenly, and that anyone who started a fight would be immediately shot. Sam and I were standing far down the line, but it was moving fast. We heard shouts of joy from the prisoners as they tore the boxes open, and cries of “Chocolate! Cheese! Meat!”
I was dizzy from excitement. It was a miracle, a real miracle was happening before our eyes. Someone wanted to save us! Having known for so long nothing but brutality, hardened by the daily inhumanity of the camps, the thousands of deaths, it was hard to take it in, this evidence of some good in man. What did it mean? Who had sent this food? How had they found us in the middle of nowhere?* Warshawski, Sam, a friendly Pole, and I received our box, and when we opened it we saw that it came from America. It was neatly packed with two different kinds of cheese, a can of sardines, three or four packages of crackers, including Ritz, a bar of Hershey’s chocolate, a can of Spam, a can of powdered milk, and a long package of small square slices of pumpernickel. We could not believe our eyes. I suggested that I divide everything in the box into four parts, and we would alternate choosing our shares. Everyone agreed, and so I set to work, conscious of my heavy responsibility to
make sure each share was exactly even.
I divided the crackers first, so we could get something inside us immediately. Next came the sardines, because we had no way to store them. We tried not to cram the food into our mouths, but it was hard to hold back. Our bodies were starved, every cell aching for nourishment. The sardines tasted fantastically good. Each morsel was a little piece of heaven, and every part of my body was crying out, “Thank you! Thank you!” to the food as it traveled through.
I used a spoon which I sharpened on a stone to divide the cheese and the Spam. We had never heard of Spam. It was delicious. How clever of the Americans to invent such a wonderful new kind of food! The chocolate was difficult to divide because it was very hard and crumbly, but I finally managed to cut it up into four equal parts. The powdered milk presented a storage problem, but we had some of it mixed with water and saved the rest. I kept the chocolate for last. It was so good I longed to eat my whole share at once, but Sam and I had decided that this food had to last us at least three days, and we each divided our share into little bits.
Since I was stronger than Sam at this point, when the march resumed the following morning I offered to carry his food as well as my own. As we walked along we could talk of nothing but the “miracle.” No one told us how the food had gotten to us, so we could only speculate. Something very unusual must be going on; never before had the SS permitted anything like it. Maybe Hitler was dead; were he still alive, he would never permit anything like that. Or perhaps the war was over. But if so, why were the guards still here? Perhaps the International Red Cross had arranged this, and if so it was a sign that a crack had appeared in the wall with which the SS had isolated us from the rest of the world. Whatever its source, the food not only fed our starving bodies, it gave a lift to our spirits as well. We had not yet reached the end of the road, but at least there was someone out there who cared. Knowing this, I felt more at peace than I had in a long time, and I fell sound asleep.
I Shall Live Page 27