We left the square and drove around until we saw a group of English officers. These spoke broken French, which I could make out, and they directed us to a temporary shelter, where we found other English army officers who had been assigned to give aid to liberated concentration camp inmates.
We spent the rest of the day taking it easy and talking to other ex-prisoners. We were in a state of nervous excitement and exhaustion. Our hearts were filled with joy, but it was mixed with sadness. I thought of my parents and their cruel death, and of Fred, Felek, and Hanka. I was worried about what might have happened to them, and longed to find them alive and well.
Sam and I had been assigned a small room in the shelter, and I went to bed early that evening. I was dizzy with the thoughts and images that were whirling in my mind, but I finally fell asleep.
I woke up early in the morning not knowing at first where I was. A ray of light was shining through the window, and suddenly I remembered that I was free! The stone in the pit of my stomach that I had felt every time I woke up in the camps and realized where I was was gone. I started to cry. I had cried like that only once before—on October 28, 1942, the day my father and mother were murdered.
After a while I dried my tears and got up. I went to the door and looked outside. It was a beautiful morning in May. The sun was rising and the birds were singing. A new day was about to begin.
Epilogue
We spent about two weeks in Rostock recuperating from the effects of our imprisonment in the camps and the death march. The shelter was not very comfortable by normal standards, but compared to what we had known before, it was luxury. There was plenty of food, and we gained weight rapidly and soon started to look like human beings again. The UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) and the other international relief organizations treated us very well. But it was heartbreaking to see so many ex-inmates die after they were liberated. Some never recovered from the effects of extreme malnutrition; others died from the dysentery they had developed from eating grass during the death march, or from overeating after they had been freed. A few of the liberated prisoners took revenge on the German civilians around Rostock, beating them up and robbing them, but most of us didn’t. How could we tell a good German from a bad one? Suddenly it was impossible to find a German who had ever been a member of the Nazi party. I never even considered trying to hurt any Germans at random; what if one of them happened to be a person like Willie, the brave German political prisoner I had known in Ravensbrück?
There were rumors that the Russians were going to take over Rostock and the surrounding area now being occupied by the Allies. Sam and I were impatient to find out what had happened to the rest of our family, and as soon as we felt strong enough we decided to go back to Poland. We said good-bye to Warshawski and the others we had become friendly with, and went to the railroad station. Since no passenger trains were running, we struck out in the general direction of central Poland, traveling in cattle cars, army supply trains, and any other transportation we could find. When we were chased out of one, we changed over to another, as long as it was heading east.
We had heard that Warsaw had been completely destroyed, but that there were still Jews in łódź, the second largest city in Poland. By chance in łódź we found Motie Orenstein, a second cousin, who kindly invited us to stay in his apartment. While there we heard rumors that the entire contingent of Hrubieszów women who had been sent with us to Budzyń from Jatkowa had been murdered in Stuthoff, a concentration camp near Danzig. Hanka had been among them. Someone had heard that Fred was in Amberg, in Germany, and that Felek had been killed in the last days of the war. We had no confirmation of any of this, no witnesses. We learned too that a few Jews had gone back to Hrubieszów. Anxious for more information, we decided to return to our hometown. We found it virtually undamaged by the war, but out of the prewar Jewish population of Hrubieszów, some eight or nine thousand, we found only five Jews left in the town.
We stayed a few days in Hrubieszów, where we heard that the local Poles who had taken over the houses and property of Jews were worried now that those who had survived the war would return and reclaim them. We were told that three Jews who came out of hiding were killed by Poles. A man whom we had known well before the war came to see us and advised us to leave town. He heard talk that Poles who were living in our father’s building were planning to kill us. Sam managed to sell one small store in the building to a tenant at a ridiculously low price, and we left in a hurry, heading back to łódź. (The other Jews also left Hrubieszów, and today there is not one Jew living in our hometown.)
We stayed several more weeks in łódź, hoping for further news about our family, and in the meantime began to think about what to do with our lives. I wanted to leave for the American Occupation Zone in Germany, try to find Fred, and emigrate to the United States. Sam decided to stay in Poland, feeling that as a lawyer he could practice his profession only there, that in any other country he would have language difficulties. “In my profession,” he said, “language is our most important asset. What could I do outside Poland as a lawyer?” I told him that I didn’t want to live under the Communists, and furthermore that I was convinced that the great majority of Poles hadn’t changed and would always remain anti-Semitic. Although only about fifty thousand Jews remained in Poland out of the three million, three hundred thousand who had lived there before the war, that was still far too many for most Poles.
One day when I was sitting on a bench in a park in łódź reading a newspaper, I overheard a conversation between two Polish women who were having their lunch on the other side of the bench. “At least Hitler did one good thing: he got rid of the Jews,” one of them remarked. The other commented, “Yes, but he should have finished the job.”
That was the last straw for me. I went back to the apartment and told Sam that I was leaving for Germany immediately, to look for Fred. Sam was still determined to stay, so I got ready to leave and we hugged and kissed each other good-bye. It was a sad moment; we had never been separated since Felek and he had come to Ołyka for their summer vacation early in June 1941, just before the Germans attacked Russia.
I traveled through southern Poland, Prague, and western Czechoslovakia, finally arriving in Amberg, where I found Fred in a rehabilitation center for former concentration-camp inmates, wearing an UNRRA uniform and working as a doctor. He looked wonderful. Emotion overcame us completely. We both burst into tears, and hugged and kissed each other over and over. He confirmed the rumors we had heard that Felek had been killed by the SS. With a breaking heart I listened to his story.
About a week or two after Sam and I had left the Płaszów camp with the other “mathematicians,” the SS had evacuated the rest of the Chemiker Kommando to the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Germany. As with us in Sachsenhausen, it had taken a while but eventually their professor too had appeared, set up their Kommando in an empty barracks, and set them to work again on the same phony projects as before. After a few weeks the part of the Kommando that was working on the “immobilizing gas” was moved to Kraków, in Poland, where they continued their work until they were evacuated to Auschwitz. The others, including Fred and Felek, continued on in Flossenbürg until the end of April. Their professor ran out of projects for them, so during the last two months he arranged for crates of old World War I books on military strategy to be shipped to them, their new assignment being to search for weapons left over from 1918 that might have been stashed away somewhere and overlooked by the German army, and if found could still be brought out and used. The “sting” was still going on. At the end of April, Fred, Felek, and about two thousand other Jews from Flossenbürg had been put on a train that was destined for the Dachau concentration camp.
A few of the prisoners, knowing that the Allied planes were continuously bombing German trains, attached their striped jackets to the roofs of the cars as a signal to the pilots that theirs was a prisoner-of-war transport. This worked for a few days; the Allied fi
ghter planes were concentrating on attacking the locomotive, hitting none of the cars behind with the prisoners. The train made very slow progress because the locomotives kept getting hit and had to be replaced several times. The last attack occurred in the station at a small town, and this time the Allied pilot strafed the cars as well. About thirty prisoners were killed, and another hundred and thirty wounded, among them Felek. A bullet shattered his knee. The SS officer in charge of the transport decided that this time he would not try to get a replacement for the locomotive, and ordered the evacuation to continue on foot. The wounded prisoners were taken out of the cars and moved to one side of the track.
When Fred saw that the wounded were going to be left behind at the station, he went to the officer and told him that he was a doctor, and that many of the wounded needed immediate help. He requested permission to stay with them, but the officer refused, saying that it was unnecessary because the Americans would be arriving very soon and would take good care of the wounded. Fred persisted, telling the officer that some of the wounded couldn’t wait for the Americans but needed immediate help, and that as a doctor he had an obligation to stay with them. But the officer was adamant and ordered Fred to join the other prisoners, who were about to leave, surrounded by SS guards. So Fred was forced to leave Felek.
They marched for several days with nothing to eat. The prisoners who were unable to continue were killed on the spot, as had been the case with us. At night they were locked up in barns. Fred developed an infection in his elbow and became feverish with hallucinations. On the fourth morning of the march the SS guards ordered the prisoners to form a column. Fred was in the first row of five, with his friend Dr. Schindel. Suddenly a tank appeared on the road in front of the barn, only a few yards away. Fred noticed that, instead of the German cross, it bore a star. “Americans!” he screamed. He and the other four prisoners in the first row lunged toward the tank. The guards had seen the tank too. They threw down their weapons and started running into the fields. Some of the stronger prisoners ran after them and caught a few of them, whom they killed with their bare hands in a matter of minutes.
Fred simply sat down and leaned against the tank, feeling no emotion, only total exhaustion. An American soldier leaned out of the tank, patted him on the shoulder, and gave him a pack of Lucky Strikes. Fred started to weep. The soldier told the prisoners to return to the town where they had left the train; the American troops there had facilities to take care of them.
They walked back to the town, where they found that the SS had killed all hundred thirty of the wounded prisoners immediately after Fred and the others had been marched off. They machine-gunned them right where they were lying by the side of the tracks, and buried them in a mass grave. Immediately after the town was liberated the American officer in charge ordered the townspeople to open the grave and take the bodies out. He ordered caskets to be made for the murdered prisoners, but there weren’t enough workmen available to make a casket for each one, so two bodies were placed in each casket and they were buried again. So died my brother Felek, a few days before the liberation.
I stayed with Fred for a couple of weeks, and then we heard rumors of new pogroms in Poland. Once again the Poles were killing Jews; many of them were slaughtered in Radom. I hoped that now Sam would be willing to leave Poland, but I wasn’t sure that he could get out by himself; it was becoming more difficult to cross the borders.
I decided to go back to łódź. I traveled about ten days by train and on foot, and arrived at Motie’s apartment only to be told that Sam had left for Amberg two days before. I stayed and rested in łódź for a few days, and heard fresh rumors that Hanka had been killed in the Stuthoff massacre, but I refused to give up hope.
I couldn’t wait to get out of Poland, and promised myself that once I did I would never return. How could I bear to live in a country where Jews were so hated that even the slaughter of millions of us, children and old people too, didn’t soften the hearts of those with whom Jews had lived side by side for centuries?
Once again I started out on the long trip to Amberg. I stopped off for a while in Prague, where I met and became friendly with a Czech girl. We grew to like each other, and she wanted me to stay in Czechoslovakia. One day while walking with her in Prague, I ran into Hy Silberstein. He was on his way to Poland, but I convinced him that there was no future for him there, and he decided to go back to the displaced persons camp in Germany, where a few days later his brother Abram found him. Abram had lived in Palestine before the war. Along with the future leaders of the Israeli army, he had been trained in survival warfare by General Orde Charles Wingate, joined the British army, then the Jewish Brigade, and was promoted to the rank of major in the British army. He had been decorated many times during the war. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, commander in chief of the British forces, wrote him a personal letter commending him for his bravery. Somehow Abram was sure that Hy had survived the war, so he traveled all over Germany looking for him, and finally found him in a DP camp.
I was very fond of the Czech girl, but wasn’t yet ready to get tied down, and decided to rejoin my brothers in Amberg. Soon after I returned there we received confirmation of Hanka’s death from Pola Ries, one of the thirteen survivors of the Stuthoff death march.
After the Russian armies had cut off East Prussia from the rest of Germany in January 1945, the SS started to evacuate Stuthoff and all its satellite camps. They marched thousands of Jews, most of them women, in the bitter winter cold and howling winds toward the Baltic Sea. At night the prisoners slept on the snow, without cover. Thousands froze to death. Those who were unable to walk on were shot. Of all the death marches, this one was by far the worst. Those who survived the twelve days of this hell were literally driven into the Baltic Sea, where a thin layer of ice had formed at the shore. The ice couldn’t support the weight of so many people, and they drowned in the ice-cold water, while the SS shot them from the shore. So died my sister Hanka, not quite nineteen, just a few days before the Russians arrived.
The United States government opened its gates to more than a hundred thousand survivors of the Holocaust, and through our Uncle Morris (Moshe) Orenstein in New York, Fred, Sam, and I obtained visas. We spent about two years in various DP camps and in an apartment in Stuttgart along with Fred, who was practicing medicine there, waiting for our immigration papers to be approved. I spent the time reading, playing chess, going out with girls, and learning English words; I memorized over two thousand words from an English dictionary. Finally, on September 24, 1947, we boarded the SS Fletcher, a Liberty ship, in Bremen. After a stormy passage we arrived in New York harbor on October 2, 1947, and as the ship moved into the harbor we were on deck marveling at the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline. Uncle Morris and Adele Bigajer, a girl I had met in one of the DP camps in Germany, were waiting for us, and Morris took us to a room in Manhattan that he had rented.
This was all very exciting and promising, but I still had one big question: Was there any anti-Semitism in the United States? I had heard conflicting stories about it. To settle the matter, I immediately bought two newspapers, the New York Daily News and the New York Mirror (now defunct). I had been told that these two papers were somewhat anti-Semitic. I read both of them straight through, which took me far into the night, and found not a single anti-Semitic reference in either one of them. I sighed with relief. The stories of American anti-Semitism were exaggerated.
I soon found that even though I had memorized the meaning of more than two thousand words, I still had trouble understanding people. There was more to it, I discovered, than vocabulary; there were also the many idioms. But I learned fast. I was working hard; my first job was with Jonathan Logan, the dress manufacturer, lugging bales of cotton. I married Adele, worked at a few other jobs, and bought and sold a grocery store. Then Uncle Morris suggested that we go into business together. He put up $40,000, and I ran the business. In 1956 my daughter Annette was born, and in 1958 my son Mark.
O
ur business grew from a small novelty company to become one of the largest toy manufacturing companies in the country. I became a millionaire. Then I made some bad marketing mistakes and lost all my money. My marriage wasn’t working out, so Adele and I were divorced. I was lucky to meet and then marry Susie Vankovich, a girl from West Virginia. It was Susie who urged me to write this book. I gave up manufacturing and became an inventor of toys.
My new business was quite profitable, and I became active in charity work, particularly with the Metropolitan New York Coordinating Council on Jewish Poverty. Susie and I are interested in helping the elderly poor of New York, both Jews and non-Jews. We arrange for iron bars to be installed in the apartments of the poor, who are burglarized frequently; we buy beds for those in need of them; we provide money to move the elderly out of dangerous neighborhoods; and in general we do what we can to make their lives a little easier.
Recently a federally funded building with a hundred and forty small apartments for the elderly poor was under construction on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. There was no provision in the funding for a security system, guards, air-conditioning, or luncheon facilities, all of which are essential to the elderly, so Susie and I provided the money for these things. In appreciation, the management of the building named it the Lejb and Golda Orenstein Building, in memory of my parents. The eleven-story structure is on Bialystoker Street in Manhattan, between Grand and Delancey Streets. Above the main entrance is a sign, “Lejb and Golda Orenstein Building,” and there is a commemorative bronze plaque in the entrance hall. It gives the names of my parents and of Felek and Hanka, and the date on which each of them was murdered by the Nazis.
I Shall Live Page 29