Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora

by Pierre Berg; Brian Brock

  While the train sat idle one afternoon, I stepped over to our guard who was sitting in the doorway with a copy of Der Stu¨rmer and read over his shoulder. The bold headline gave me a shock:

  ‘‘Roosevelt Tot.’’

  Roosevelt was dead. I slumped down in a corner, crying. I feared his death would alter the outcome of the war, or at least prolong it. At this point every minute counted for a Muselmann.

  The train began to move slowly. Wheels squealing, our car wavered on the poorly repaired track. We were approaching the outskirts of a town when air raid sirens started to wail. The train lurched forward at full throttle in the engineer’s attempt to escape harm’s way. He was taking a hell of a chance on those unstable rails.

  Everyone in the car either plastered themselves against the walls or dropped to the floor as the train rocked and bounced through a burned-out train station. The guard’s newspaper scattered, then was sucked out the open door. I slid across the floor, expecting us to derail at any moment, but by some miracle the track got smoother and we hurtled onward to ‘‘Pitchi Poi.’’

  That night a young Romanian who was talking to himself woke me.

  ‘‘Let me sleep,’’ I grumbled.

  He looked at me with dull eyes and continued to mutter. Poor bastard, he’s out of his mind. Someone jostled him and he leapt to his feet howling like a rabid beast. The other man fell over backwards and the Romanian grabbed him by the throat. Foolishly I tried to separate them, and the Romanian came after me with a homemade knife. I grabbed his arm, but he twisted away. I felt a sharp sting at the nape of my neck. I knocked the Romanian over.

  Seeing the knife still in his hand, I jumped on top of him and kneeled on his arm. He tried to bite me, so I jammed my other knee PART IV | DORA

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  into his neck. I could feel blood streaming down my back as he scratched and hit me with his free arm. I sank my knee into his throat. Gasping for air, the Romanian finally let go of the knife.

  With my hand over the gash in my neck I rolled off him, exhausted.

  One of the Ha¨ftlinge circling us picked up the knife and threw it out of the car. A few others flung the Romanian out after it.

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  The loss of blood from the knife wound had debilitated me. A mal-nutritioned man needs to spill only a few drops to render him a useless shell. I was catatonic for the rest of our train ride. We could have traveled days, weeks, or maybe only hours, before I was overwhelmed by sunlight. I found myself staggering behind a procession of Muselma¨nner on a dirt road leading to a camp called Ravensbru¨ck. Once we were all inside, the guards locked the gate and stayed on the other side of the wire. I stumbled into a Block and passed out.

  When I awoke I was shocked to find myself not in the lowest tier of a bunk but in a normal bed. The whole Block was filled with single beds. Still weak and woozy, I slowly sat up. Other than the dandelions and wild onions, I’d had nothing to eat for five days. I asked the Muselmann in the bed next to me if the boches had passed out any rations. He didn’t acknowledge me. He was on his way out, and it looked like the rest of the men in the Block were heading in the same direction. I dragged myself outside. There was barely a soul in the yard, and the Ha¨ftlinge who were milling about seemed to have the same goal I did: finding something to eat. Young dandelions were sprouting around the Blocks and I filled my belly with them.

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  Back on my bed, I put my hand on my neck. My scabbed-over wound was swollen and hot to the touch. I scrounged around the Block for something to use as disinfectant. To my surprise I found dirty, ragged dresses, skirts, and blouses. Obviously. Ravensbru¨ck had been a women’s camp. I ventured into another Block. Most of the Ha¨ftlinge were lying motionless, and the few healthy ones were clowning with the women’s clothing that they had discovered. I came across the remnants of a make-up kit that must have belonged to the Blokowa. There was some toilet paper and a few drops of the famous German 4711 cologne in a lipstick-smeared bottle.

  Dizzy from the slight exertion, I crawled back into my bed with a scarf of cologne-soaked toilet paper around my neck and blacked out. I spent close to the next four days prone in that bed. The Nazis didn’t bother us, which was fine except that they also didn’t feed us.

  They also didn’t pick up the corpses, which made the camp a petri dish for an epidemic.

  A rumor shot through my Block that Red Cross packages had arrived for us. This made me sit up. ‘‘ C’est une blague!’’ (It’s a joke!) I laid back down and shut my eyes. A Parisian who was wearing a Greek mariner’s cap awakened me. Where he scrounged up that damn cap I will never know. ‘‘Get up. I need a partner to get a package. We have to split them up.’’

  I rolled onto my side and said, ‘‘Another joke? Leave me alone.

  I’m not getting up unless it’s absolutely necessary.’’

  He kept on insisting, but it wasn’t until other Ha¨ftlinge came in holding boxes with red crosses on them that I followed my ‘‘partner’’ outside. What a pair we made as we crossed the yard, him with his fishing cap and me with my flowing scarf of toilet paper. I followed him into a Block and was dumbfounded by the stacks of Red Cross boxes towering in front of us. With a contingent of German soldiers observing, members of the International Red Cross had us sign a ledger, then handed us each one of the cardboard boxes. A Gift from the American People was stenciled across the top. In German, Gift is ‘‘poison.’’ It took a lot of convincing to get some PART V | RAVENSBRU¨CK

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  of the Ha¨ftlinge in my Block to believe that the boxes weren’t filled with Zyklon B, the poison used in the Auschwitz gas chambers.

  Examining our treasure at my bedside, my partner insisted we open all the tins at once and divide the contents. I told him he was an idiot. We had no means of keeping the food from spoiling. Either we would have to stuff ourselves or watch it rot.

  ‘‘Let’s split a tin.’’

  ‘‘No.’’

  ‘‘Okay, you have the Spam, and I’ll eat those sardines.’’

  The fool wouldn’t hear of it, but after opening a couple of cans he yielded to my logic. I unwrapped a chocolate bar designed for U.S. paratroopers in the field. The label warned in English to consume only a small section a day because it was spiked with special drugs and vitamins. I dropped into a deep sleep after I ate some of the Spam and a small chunk of the chocolate bar.

  I awoke to a familiar scene. All around me were dead and dying.

  Our long starvation had caused many of my comrades to go at their food so voraciously that they had eaten themselves to death. Since most couldn’t read English, the chocolate bar became the coup de grace. Everywhere in the camp Ha¨ftlinge were losing their guts, some literally. There were some who were actually struggling to push their protruding intestines back inside. I opened one of the packs of Lucky Strike included with our tins of food, and blew the smoke of the American cigarette through my nose to mask the stench. Diarrhea would be a lethal scourge for days. Many men’s last thought had to be that their Red Cross package was a German Gift.

  All the Ha¨ftlinge in Ravensbru¨ck came from camps that had fallen to the Allies. Some of these men didn’t have triangles, others had only numbers, and most didn’t have a tattoo on their left arm.

  Outside the wire stood the guards from these different camps, a mix of SS and their mercenaries. These mercenaries were real bastards.

  With truncheon, rifle butt, jackboot, or fist, they were much more sadistic dealing out punishment than the boches. They had to prove themselves to earn their pay and the favor of their masters, but they 214

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  also seemed to get an orgasm from it.. With Ravensbru¨ck north of Berlin, it would be Soviet troops who would burst thro
ugh the gate, and there was no doubt what they would do to those mercenaries, since the majority of them came from Ukraine, Hungary, and the Baltic states. I and many of my fellow Ha¨ftlinge believed we were entitled to front-row seats for that bloodletting.

  Having no idea when we would be liberated, and with the Nazis not feeding us, that Red Cross food became treasures worth killing for. With safety in numbers, I talked my moron partner into banding with four fellow Frenchmen from Dora. I forged a true friendship with two in the group, Jean and Michel. They were in their twenties and single—construction workers from a small town in northern France—and they had been sent to Germany in a contingent of forced laborers. In an agreement between the Nazis and the Vichy government, they were classified as volunteers. For minor infractions like tardiness, absence without a medical excuse, or drunkenness, these ‘‘volunteers’’ would find themselves incarcer-ated in camps as black triangles. Because they were new arrivals in Dora, Jean and Michel were in better shape than the rest of us, and they would have been able to fight off any thief, but thankfully it never came to that. I valued Jean and Michel for their common sense and street smarts, and they were dependent on me because their German was limited to a couple basic phrases.

  There were moments, sometimes, while we heated our food at one of the campfires in the yard or when, perched like swallows over the shit trench, the six of us found the strength to be optimistic and plan for the future. But planning brought on apprehensions about what we would find or not find when we arrived home. Since I had given the Nazis a false name, I wasn’t concerned about the Gestapo harassing or arresting my mother or father. It was the errant bomb or bullet that troubled me. I knew through the POWs in Auschwitz that Allied troops had invaded southern France shortly after D-Day. But, as strange as it might sound, I was more concerned about how angry my parents would be with me for being dumb enough to get arrested and giving them over a year of grief.

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  The knife wound in my neck had gotten infected, and the egg-sized boil was affecting my hearing. It was unfortunate that the knife had been thrown out of the train along with the Romanian because I could have used it to lance the abscess. The camp’s infirmary was locked up. The doctor had left with the women Ha¨ftlinge. I had to find Martin, a French Canadian POW who had come with us from Dora. He was a stocky blonde from Vancouver who had driven an ambulance before becoming a paratrooper medic.

  The Germans had transferred him to Dora after his third escape attempt from a Stalag. Martin was also a homosexual with an insa-tiable sexual appetite. At Dora, he had a connection with a cook who provided him with boiled potatoes, and his many partners stuffed themselves with those morsels while he stuffed them.

  ‘‘It will take four guys to hold me down,’’ I informed him when he propositioned me.

  ‘‘That would ruin our romantic privacy,’’ he laughed.

  He had already tried to seduce half of Ravensbru¨ck, so I had no trouble finding him.

  ‘‘That boil looks mean,’’ he told me. ‘‘It needs immediate attention.’’

  Since the guards posed no obstacle, Martin and I walked over to the HKB, pried open a window, and slithered inside. Lucky for me, the infirmary wasn’t completely cleaned out. Martin found a scalpel and some rubbing alcohol, and with one deft stroke he opened the boil, sending green pus shooting everywhere.

  ‘‘Boy, that thing would’ve killed you if it had gone to your brain,’’ he said as he pressed and squeezed the poison out. He rolled strips of toilet paper around my neck.

  ‘‘What’s your fee, doctor?’’ I joked.

  ‘‘That’s all right, I won’t take it out in trade. You look like a young priest with that collar around your neck. Not my taste.’’

  Ironic that it was religion, or the appearance of religion, that saved my ass this time.

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  When the old men of the Landsturm replaced our SS guards, rumors flew.

  ‘‘They’re fighting in Berlin.’’

  ‘‘Berlin has fallen.’’

  ‘‘Hitler is dead.’’

  ‘‘The Russians will be here by morning.’’

  The red-starred fighter planes strafing barges on a nearby canal and the continuous flood of German refugees streaming by the camp gave some credence to the hearsay. The sounds of fierce battle delivered by the eastern winds made me ask if the heavy cannons I heard could be the same as those I heard four months ago in Monowitz. Over the last tin of Spam I told Michel and Jean how I feared that, even with defeat imminent, the boches would herd us once again on a death march. With a wink, Jean assured me not to fret.

  One day the Nazis ordered all the Jews to report to the Block where we had received our food packages. Word was that the Red Cross was going to transfer them to the neutral country of Sweden.

  I was shocked to see Ha¨ftlinge rush over. How could they be that gullible after all the Nazis’ deceit? Had these fellows gotten the wrong head circumcised? Hadn’t they learned anything? In my deadened heart, I felt this could be only a final, desperate attempt to exterminate what was left of ‘‘the Jewish problem.’’ But there was something inside me that hoped they would soon be sleeping on Red Cross cots. Maybe somewhere Stella was getting the same offer of safe haven.

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  ‘‘Come on, Jean,’’ I said, leaning out of the attic.

  Standing on a rickety chair, Jean reached for my outstretched hand.

  ‘‘A little more. Come on, I got you. Yes, there you are.’’

  Jean crawled past me as I pulled up the chair by the rope tied to its back. I handed it to Michel, then closed the hatch. I could still PART V | RAVENSBRU¨CK

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  hear German commands and the shuffling of fellow Ha¨ftlinge. The boches were evacuating once again, and Jean and Michel had made sure that the six of us weren’t going to be part of that flock of sheep.

  They had planned our escape well, finding a hiding place the day before where the dogs wouldn’t be able to sniff us out and ‘‘organizing’’ enough water and food to last us at least two days.

  Two hours later, we heard voices and the sound of footsteps in the yard. The Red Army so soon? I cautiously lifted the trap door and peered out. Our fellow ‘‘pajamas’’ were back. Curious and confused, the six of us came down from the musty attic and mingled with the others. The guards had turned them back because the road was choked with German refugees.

  When the bell for assembly rang the next morning, the six of us moved quickly for our hiding place, but sitting on the Block’s stoop were two Landsturm guards. We had no alternative but to follow the others out the gate. Where were these old men taking us? There couldn’t be any camps in the sliver of land that the Nazis still held. Michel and Jean told me not to be concerned; with all the pandemonium there would be plenty of opportunities for escape.

  The two-lane country road was so clogged with Germans and their horse-drawn carts that we stood more than walked. Going one way were young soldiers—cannon fodder pulled straight out of high school classrooms. It struck me that they appeared as cocky and brainwashed as that brown-shirted brat in Dora. Stupid boys playing with guns. We followed the refugees. There was no cockiness in their eyes. Many of them had stolen Slav land after the blitzkriegs, and now they were running scared from a vengeful enemy.

  Even back at Buna I heard German civilians fret about the retribu-tions the Red Army might exact.

  Residents of Ravensbru¨ck village stood on the side of the road, watching the parade. These farmers were resigned to their fate.

  They couldn’t afford to abandon their only valuable possession. A group of women with their children around them looked at us with genuine surprise. One said, ‘‘ Da sind ja Ma¨nner; wo sind den die Frauen?’’ (These are men; where are the women?) 218

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  A four-year-old girl with blond braids tied off wi
th blue ribbons waved at us. No one waved back, but one Ha¨ftling did lean toward her and smile. The girl held out her hand. ‘‘ Onkel, Bonbon?’’ she begged.

  He softy broke off a piece of paratrooper chocolate and the child grabbed it before her mother could pull her back.

  A Ha¨ftling standing near him hissed, ‘‘You Nazi lover.’’

  Others began punching and kicking him. Most of them I’m sure had lost their precious daughters, nieces, or sisters to the ovens. If it weren’t for the intervention of the guards, the fool’s benevolence would have cost him his life. There was no tolerance in our hearts for even the most innocent of Germans.

  To move us faster, the guards led us onto a path that cut through a dense forest of firs and oaks with heavy underbrush. They marched us in small groups, each guarded by a Landsturm and a dog, and those mutts did the job of ten guards. The trail narrowed as it followed the bank of a small brook, and we were forced to walk single file. I was between Michel and Jean. We agreed that the time was ripe to make our move. When the trail took a sharp turn, the three of us jumped across the stream and threw ourselves flat among the tall ferns on the other side.

  Our Landsturm, an old goat who was more concerned with keeping his porcelain pipe lit than doing his guard duties, came down the trail with his rifle catching on tree branches. He was oblivious to our disappearance. However, his guard dog sniffed the air, then sniffed our footprints on the bank. Michel, Jean, and I lay like corpses. It felt as if the dog were looking right at us. The guard whistled and the big beast pricked up his ears, dipped his tongue a few times in the clear water, and went off barking. More groups passed, and none of those dogs picked up our scent. We were safe among the ferns, but we knew it would be hours before we could make our next move.

  It began to rain. Hail beat down on the leaves, but I had ears for nothing except the distant Soviet batteries. Ragged bunches of civilians came down the trail. Many stopped at the brook’s bank to PART V | RAVENSBRU¨CK