Scheisshaus Luck: Surviving the Unspeakable in Auschwitz and Dora

by Pierre Berg; Brian Brock

  The train to Nice was crowded with Allied servicemen heading for a well-deserved furlough on the French Riviera. I rode in first class, courtesy of the French government, and was the only civilian in the dilapidated compartment. I sat next to a husky, barrel-chested U.S. Navy officer and remarked on all his medals and battle ribbons. The officer replied, ‘‘If Hirohito doesn’t throw in the towel pretty soon, I may still see some action and then I’ll run out of space on my chest.’’

  I stood alone on the Nice train platform that had been the start-ing point of my odyssey. There was no welcoming party for me.

  Wanting to put off the inevitable tears, hugs, kisses, smiles, and questions as long as I could, I made sure no one knew I was arriving home that day. On the way to the streetcar stop I passed the Hotel Excelsior. What room had Stella and her parents been locked up in before the Nazis marched them to the train? I wondered. The hotel windows were broken and bullet holes pockmarked the walls.

  ‘‘The Resistance killed some of those bastards when they stormed the building during the liberation,’’ an elderly gentleman with a red rosette of the Legion of Honor in his lapel volunteered.

  He noticed the tattoo on my arm, shook my hand, and saluted.

  Walking up my street, I found my apprehension compounded by the sight of our front yard overgrown with weeds. The front door was ajar and the doorknob was missing. I entered the vestibule and then the living room, both rooms bare of furniture. What had happened? A noise came from the dining room. My father was eating at a ramshackle table. We stared at each other in silence for EPILOGUE

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  a very long time. He raised himself painfully from his chair. Tears were running down his cheeks.

  ‘‘You just missed Claude.’’ He said in a trembling voice.

  My mother came in from the kitchen. She stood open-mouthed in the doorway and dropped the pan she was holding.

  I was home.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  At that time I had no desire to put my ordeal down on paper, no need to purge myself of Nazi-induced nightmares. Frankly, I’d re-acclimated rather nicely to my former life in Nice. I attended a branch of the University of Aix-Marseille so I could finish my philosophy degree (even though I still believed it was all crap), and took a night course in jewelry making (something practical). My parents had weathered the war relatively unscathed except for having our house looted and occupied by Gestapo goons.

  Claude had avoided the Gestapo and the milice and had become somewhat of a hero in the Maquis. Carlos was now working in a thermometer factory in nearby Menton. Bernard was gone. Like so many in France and throughout Europe, he was unaccounted for, and the likelihood of ever learning his fate was nil. His mother was hysterical. Bernard was her only child. Every time I went to see her, she’d ask if I was positive I hadn’t seen her son in Auschwitz. Finally I just couldn’t take it anymore and stopped coming by.

  In August 1945 a picture of the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima was framed and hung in the office window of the Nice newspaper Eclaireur. A few months later, the doctor who’d been treating my father’s cancer with radiation and loads of arsenic advised him to go to America, where they were fighting leukemia with the radioactive fallout from A-bomb tests. When our visas finally arrived in 1947, I was working part-time for the French army as an interpreter for German POWs and had been offered the position as head interpreter in Normandy. I would have gotten officers’ pay, but I 274

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  couldn’t abandon my parents at this critical juncture. So we flew to New York City, then made our way to Santa Monica, California.

  For me, America was a happy-go-lucky place where there was no bitterness and animosity toward neighbors who’d collaborated with the enemy, no postwar food rationing, and no embarrassment from being occupied by ‘‘the god with a moustache.’’ I was riding the buses and streetcars and walking the sidewalks of the country that had liberated mon pays (my country). I was in the land of giants.

  Naturally, the scars of war weren’t as apparent as they were in Europe, but now and then I’d see a man with an empty suit jacket sleeve or a young man with crutches instead of legs.

  Work was tough to get then. There was a depression on. Most jobs created by the war had vanished with the victory. Many GI’s stepped back into their old jobs while many more pounded the pavement alongside me. There were times, as I stood at bus stops, that I kicked myself for leaving such a plum job back in France.

  Finally, I got hired at the BB Pen Company in Hollywood as a maintenance man, which meant I did a little of everything.

  Every so often someone would notice the tattoo on my left arm and ask what it meant. A few would ask me more questions, but most didn’t care. It was painfully obvious that a majority of Americans knew very little about the 11 million men, women, and children who passed through the concentration camps. They were more concerned about the boys who died on Okinawa and other Pacific Islands that no one had ever heard of before and their country’s devastating new weapon.

  On the swing shift one night at BB, this riveter—a tall blonde who was in her forties—asked me if it was rough in the Nazi camps.

  ‘‘You have no idea,’’ I told her.

  ‘‘Did you get enough to eat?’’ she asked.

  When I told her I was half my body weight at the end of the war, she paused for a moment then said, ‘‘Yes, it was rough here, too. All we had to eat was chicken.’’

  I nodded, thinking that if in Monowitz somebody had given me EPILOGUE

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  the choice between a night with Miss America or a chicken leg, I’d . . .

  Well, by now you know the answer to that one.

  Riding the bus back to Santa Monica that night I decided to put to paper what I’d gone through, a belated diary if you may, so I wouldn’t forget. That was the fall of 1947. I’d write whenever I got the chance—on the bus to and from work, on my lunch breaks, and on a bench overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I wrote it in French. I could speak English pretty well, but the written language gave me fits. I wrote on notepads that my mother would then type. I titled it An Odyssey of a Pajama.

  In 1952, I paid a UCLA French-language student, a friend of a friend of my mother, two hundred dollars, and five months later my Odyssey was translated, but I was disheartened that somewhere, somehow, my manuscript had lost its meaning. So along with working two jobs and the seeming disinterest in the Nazis’ atrocities, I put the manuscript in a drawer. Living life just seemed more important than retracing the past.

  In 1954, I allowed a girlfriend, a librarian, to read my manuscript, and she convinced me to submit it to the Saturday Evening Post and Harper’s. Their rejection letters sent my Odyssey back in the drawer. And there it sat through the 1950s and the birth of the cold war, and the start of my career as a cine-technician, repairing and rebuilding film projectors, cameras, and developers. There it sat through the 1960s and the civil rights marches, the Vietnam War, and Suharto, the 1970s and Pol Pot and Pinochet, and the 1980s and Central American death squads, and countless massacres of innocent life in Africa.

  The Holocaust was now a household word, and many brave survivors had already done much to ensure that the world would never forget. I still wanted to weigh in, but to be blunt, I didn’t think anyone cared to hear the story of an atheist red triangle. I loathed the skinheads and neo-Nazis I saw on TV who proclaimed that the Holocaust never happened. Those morons couldn’t tell you what continent Germany is on, and they exalt a coward who committed suicide after ordering brainwashed youths to their 276

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  slaughter on the barricaded streets of Berlin. More than anyone else, those bigots made me want to get my manuscript out of the drawer and into the hands of someone who would help me shape it so it could sit on a library shelf.

  By the fall of 2001 I was retired but working part-time as an usher at the Cannon Theatre in Beverly Hills. I discovered that the brooding young man behind the concession st
and was a writer. I hadn’t spoken to Brian—he just didn’t seem the type to bother with idle chitchat—but when I told him I’d written about my time in the camps, he stopped setting up the cookies and candies. He said he’d really like to read it, and the next night I brought him my only copy.

  The next time I saw Brian he told me he’d read my manuscript in one night and wanted to help me develop and expand the manuscript so it could grab a publisher’s attention. He convinced me that this wouldn’t be an insurmountable task, but it was a tough road for both of us. The manuscript needed more description and explanation. I struggled with memories and feelings that I had long buried as Brian, a perfectionist, agonized over the choice of words and sentences. Having done his research, Brian asked the right questions and I filled in the gaps. Three years later my Odyssey became Scheisshaus Luck.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  We have never learned from history, so I hate to admit that I’m not optimistic that the genocide and enslavement on the scope orches-trated by the Nazis will never be repeated. ‘‘The god with a moustache’’ didn’t invent concentration camps and genocide. I have read that he used the U.S. government’s handling of Native Americans as one of his blueprints. The Jewish people will never let it happen to them again. Yet we all know that the extermination of innocent human beings designated as ‘‘the other’’—whether because of their skin, their religion or lack thereof, their politics, their ancestral tribe, or just because they’re the most convenient scapegoat—

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  continues unabated and unchecked. That doesn’t mean the voices of reason and the victims of atrocities should ever stuff their thoughts and recollections in a drawer. We’ll never find utopia, but that doesn’t mean we should stop seeking it. Just maybe, some day, the human race will conquer its learning disability.

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  A F T E R W O R D

  Joseph Robert White,

  University of Maryland University College, Adelphi, Maryland

  Although there are many French gentile accounts of Dora, the same cannot be said of Auschwitz-Monowitz. Two Jewish testimonies, by Georges Wellers and Paul Steinberg, have been published, but only Steinberg’s is available in English. For this camp, reliable gentile accounts of any nationality are rare. Most were contributed by Poles, in a few instances by prisoners allegedly complicit in the elimination of Jews. Pierre Berg’s account, therefore, makes a welcome addition to the Monowitz testimonies. 1

  Mr. Berg attributes his arrest and survival to ‘‘ Scheisshaus luck.’’

  If not eloquently expressed, it undoubtedly captures the feelings of many surviving victims. Too often, the general public and even historians insult survivors with the impossible question, ‘‘Why did you survive?’’ Mr. Berg’s emphasis upon the terrible misfortune leading to his arrest and to the rare moments of good fortune give a sense of the contingencies that always lurked beyond a prisoner’s control under the Nazi regime. As his account shows, confusion over a prisoner’s number or the mix-up over a brand-new shirt made the difference between life and death.2

  Mr. Berg’s privileges derived mainly from his facility with languages. Unlike Primo Levi, who passed a life-or-death interview 279

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  in academic German at the I.G. Auschwitz Buna Polymerization Detachment, Mr. Berg spoke the language fluently, after frequent childhood vacations in Germany. His multilingual experience underscored Levi’s memorable description of the I.G. Carbide Tower as a modern-day ‘‘Tower of Babel.’’ Besides French and German, Mr. Berg spoke Italian, English, and Spanish on the I.G. building site. His technical skills and problem-solving abilities likewise were fortuitous, although he endured months of backbreaking work in labor crews. 3

  The Monowitz Hospital Book records Mr. Berg’s admission to the Ha¨ftlingskrankenbau, or prisoners’ infirmary. The volume submitted into evidence at Nuremberg records 15,706 patient admis-sions between 15 July 1943 and 27 June 1944. Among them, it listed 766 patients as dying in hospital, as indicated by a cross stamped in the margin; and 2,599 selected for murder at the Auschwitz Main Camp or Birkenau, as indicated by the marginal annotations, ‘‘To Auschwitz’’ or ‘‘To Birkenau.’’ Patient entries recorded as returning to the general population were stamped ‘‘ Entlassen. ’’ Mr. Berg’s entry read: ‘‘Entry 21725, [Prisoner Number], Berg, Peter Isr[ael], 31.3.-13.4.44, Released.’’ Erroneously, it listed him as Jewish, so he was in greater danger than even he realized at the time, because after the fall of 1943 the SS confined hospital selections almost exclusively to Jewish prisoners. It is not clear whether the Angliciza-tion of his name was his idea or inspired in some way by the neighboring British POW camp, which had opened in September 1943. His hospitalization coincided with Primo Levi’s, although Mr. Berg states that the two never knew each other. By January 1944, the Monowitz infirmary comprised seven blocks, so it is not surprising that the two did not meet. Levi was admitted one day earlier than Mr. Berg, 30 March, after injuring his foot while haul-ing an iron fitting at the job site. He was released seven days later than Mr. Berg, on 20 April.4

  A minor detail furnishes a telling example of Mr. Berg’s memory. He is the first survivor to describe the raising and lowering of a ‘‘red and orange basket’’ before air attacks at the I.G. plant. Only AFTERWORD

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  days after the massive 20 August 1944 raid by the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force, Plant Leader Walther Du¨rrfeld issued a directive intended to augment the existing air-raid sirens with a visual warning system.

  Installed at one building in each quadrant, these baskets were intended to reinforce the alarm system. This small detail does not overshadow the import of Mr. Berg’s testimony—namely, that prisoners scattered helter-skelter around the plant because they were denied access to air-raid shelters. Their concern was more than theoretical, because U.S. and Soviet forces bombed I.G. Auschwitz six times between August 1944 and January 1945.5

  Like Levi and Paul Steinberg, the real-life ‘‘Henri’’ of Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, Mr. Berg met British POWs at I.G. Auschwitz. The POWs were held at a subcamp E715 of Stalag VIII B

  (Lamsdorf/Teschen). E715’s population rose to approximately 1,200 by December 1943, but declined to 600 in Spring of 1944, when about half were transferred elsewhere. Mr. Berg’s description of the POWs as healthy ‘‘strutting roosters’’ dovetails with accounts by Levi and Steinberg. The British were proud of their strong military bearing, in contrast to the shabby Wehrmacht guards who con-trolled them. As Mr. Berg recalled, the POWs quickly caught the attention of female civilian workers, most notably Poles and Ukrainians. Although Mr. Berg characterized the POWs as ‘‘Commonwealth,’’ they were mostly English with a small number of Canadians, Australians, and South Africans included. Realizing their special status among the plant’s forced laborers, particularly their protection under the Geneva Convention, and gathering significant details about the Nazis’ murderous activities, the British did what they could to aid the far more numerous ‘‘stripees’’ in their midst. 6

  With respect to Dora, Mr. Berg’s account complements Yves Beón’s Planet Dora. As Michael Neufeld observes, French memoirs have dominated the testimonies of this camp, despite the fact that the French were listed as the third most numerous nationality, behind the Soviets and Poles, in a 1 November 1944 SS report. What sets Mr. Berg’s testimony apart is the timing of his arrival, during 282

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  the winter of 1945, almost one year after the completion of the barracks and more than six months after the underground factory achieved full operational capacity. The barracks relieved the early prisoners, like Beón, of sleeping inside the tunnel. While many French prisoners were transferred to Dora after brief confinement in Buchenwald, Mr. Berg’s Monowitz experience sets ‘‘Planet Dora’’ in a different perspective, as he arrived after the production passed its peak but before the evacuations began.
Unlike many French prisoners, Mr. Berg had already experienced the shock of entering a concentration camp, after surviving one year at Auschwitz and a terrifying evacuation. 7

  As a recent immigrant to the United States, Pierre Berg wrote down his memories of wartime captivity in his native French. He started this memoir in 1947 with no immediate thoughts of eventual publication and remained somewhat reluctant, after its rejection in 1954 by the Saturday Evening Post, to publish it fifty years later. In the early 1950s, a University of California, Los Angeles, graduate student translated the French original into English under the title, ‘‘The Odyssey of a Pajama,’’ but Mr. Berg did not believe that the translator did justice to the nuances of his testimony. In preparing this testimony for publication, Mr. Brock combined

  ‘‘Odyssey’’ with extensive interviews conducted over three years. I have compared both versions and can attest that this memoir is faithful in most respects to the original, except that this version helpfully elicits detail that was glossed over in the original. Regret-tably, Mr. Berg misplaced the French original manuscript, but the Saturday Evening Post’s rejection letter of 16 April 1954 helps to date Mr. Berg’s original English account.8

  Although as literature or history his memoir cannot be compared with Primo Levi’s and Elie Wiesel’s canonical Holocaust texts, Survival in Auschwitz and Night, Mr. Berg’s Auschwitz experience reinforces these famous testimonies. Like Wiesel and Levi, Mr. Berg toiled at I.G. Auschwitz under unspeakable conditions in 1944. Like Wiesel, he was a teenager, but three years older and already well traveled. Like Levi, he drafted his original account AFTERWORD