The Dentist of Auschwitz

by Benjamin Jacobs

  The news from Poland was even grimmer. There anti-Semitism was still rampant. The spirit of Hitler’s teaching was alive and well. That he choose Poland as our grave was not a coincidence. The Polish Jews were the Nazis’ chief target. Many Jews who dared to return to their possessions were killed by those who seized their property when the Germans left. Though my brother and I were also heirs to property in Poland, we wanted none of it.

  Josek, Srulek, and I were the only Jews in Lüdenscheid. Though my spirituality was still undefined, having been adrift during so many years of squalid life, in darkness and away from my heritage, giving up God was still against my conscience. The spiritual vacuum in which we had been living during the past years had produced a certain void within me. I needed to confirm my faith. So when we heard that a Rosh Hashanah service would be conducted at a Jewish person’s home in the nearby city of Hagen—nearly all the synagogues in Germany had been destroyed—my urge to make peace with my heritage became irresistible. I knew that the time had come for me to face God and offer my apology. When we got to the house, about thirty people were praying. When the prayers Oshamnah and Agadnah—I have sinned before thee, I transgressed against thee—were recited, all began to chant, rhythmically pounding on their chests. I too prayed, begging the Almighty for forgiveness. There and then I finally made peace with God.

  When the service ended, the man who had led us through the prayers, Morris Teichmann, a handsome, well-respected, middle-aged businessman, came to shake each person’s hand and wish everyone a Lashonah Tovah, a good year. Then Mr. Teichmann invited us for kiddush at his home, where we met his family. Fortunately, they had all survived the war, but their memories were no less painful than mine.

  Mr. Teichmann immigrated to Germany from Poland in 1923 and settled in Westphalia. There he married a Christian woman, Herta Steinfort. She converted to Judaism. In 1938 he was arrested and sent to Poland in a mass deportation of Polish Jews. Herta was allowed a choice: to remain in Germany with their three children—Else, thirteen; Clara, ten; and Gerhard, eight. She, and the children went with him. When the Germans occupied Poland, Mr. Teichmann was imprisoned in a labor camp. Herta was threatened with arrest and being sent to a camp unless she divorced her husband. She resisted at first but eventually had to give in to the pressure, as it was the only way she could save their children. The children’s papers stated, “Jewish father and German mother.”

  Else blotted out the words “Jewish father” on her papers. To avoid being unmasked, she lived a nomadic life, moving from job to job. She maintained that disguise, and the war’s end found her in Prague. The Soviets, who had seized the city, did not believe her true identity, and they jailed her. Her family almost gave up finding her. But, one day she managed to return with him to Germany. Else became my fiance and Mr. and Mrs. Teichmann became my second parents.

  The one object of our lives then was to try to go to the United States. But the restrictive McCarron Act prevented us. Then in 1948 the more just Refugee Act replaced it. Else and I wanted to marry, but because we had separate applications pending, we would have had to have forfeited our turns and reapplied. In 1949 my brother and I came to Boston, to our sponsor, our great-uncle Mordechai Baily. On the first day in America, our names change from Jakubowicz to Jacobs. My brothers name became Joseph Jacobs, and my Benjamin Jacobs. A few weeks later Srulek went to his sponsor in Oregon.

  I recall August 22, 1949. The tugboats were slowly pushing our troop carrier, the USS Fletcher, through a shroud of heavy fog into New York Harbor. Suddenly the hand and the torch of the Statue of Liberty emerged. The emotion of stepping onto America’s soil after years of such struggle cannot be adequately described. It seemed as though we were leapfrogging into another age. We were grateful to the American people who opened their hearts and minds to us.

  Six months later I returned to Europe, and Else and I married. The town elders honored us by arranging for our wedding on a Sunday. Afterward, we both returned to Boston to face a new life together.

  Postscript

  Surviving as a prisoner of the Nazis was a hard and bitter struggle. In the face of the generous freedoms in America, our persecution was even more difficult to translate. I felt pain, lots of pain, but I had to suppress it. I envied everyone everywhere who had escaped this terrible ordeal. In America in 1949 people had already heard of Hitler and his deeds and were not eager to hear more. Only later generations wanted to know what had happened to the European Jewry. By this time a new term had arisen to identify the Nazis’ mass murder and torture of millions of European Jews: Holocaust.[6]

  My priority, of course, was practicing dentistry. I studied English and applied for admission to Tufts Dental School. Hearing of my experiences with dentistry, the dean, Dr. Joseph Volker, said that he regretted to advise me that an act of Congress, the so-called GI Bill, offered preference to the returning soldiers and that several years might go by before my application would be acted upon. It was not realistic for me to wait, as I expected my fiancée, soon to be my wife, to come to the United States soon.

  One day, while in a Boston hospital waiting room experiencing the discomfort of abdominal pains that still plagued me, I was offered a job in sales by the comptroller of an electronics firm. I held that job for two years. Then, with my brother’s, my father-in-law’s, and my wife’s help, I established my own company. In 1953, at the time of the Korean War, Tufts Dental School encouraged me to reapply for admission. My firm grew, however, and was successful. I remained a businessman until 1987. My brother, unfortunately, died in 1965 at age fifty-one.

  In 1972 I accompanied Else to Hamburg, where she was called to testify in a Nazi’s trial. By then Germany had gone through various stages in dealing with guilt. After many denials there was slow admittance. The most hopeful signs came in the 1960s, when West Germany perceived its obligation and began to help the Jewish survivors and the emerging state of Israel. Attitudes changed, but not all for the better. Some Germans remained true to nazism’s undemocratic principles, championing the idea that “enough is enough.” This is not to mention the neo-Nazis, whose threats are still the most unsettling. Of course, it would be unfair not to mention the many people who committed the past to memory and supported true democracy.

  After Else testified, we rented a car and drove from Hamburg to Neustadt. I wanted to know the exact place of the Cap Arcona catastrophe. A lot had changed there. One person directed us to a little hill in nearby Timmendorf. We walked along the shore and soon saw a sign in front of a set of stairs leading up a hill. There, tucked away, was a cemetery, overgrown and neglected, with a huge single grave of the victims who had washed ashore. The sign listed their nationalities only. Next we found another cemetery, in which the markers gave names from around the world. One placard told of the tragedy of the ships. Another listed the nationalities of all the victims. The entire area was overgrown with weeds. Compared with the crime it symbolized, it seemed rather obscure. The tragedy of many years past stared us in the face. I stood confused and bewildered. Those who perished there were not just prisoners: they were tough, tenacious, and unrelenting fighters, with hearts stubborn enough to survive all the Nazis cast upon them. Yet they died on the very doorstep of freedom.

  We later stopped at a small house that seemed to be a post office. I walked in and saw a small window with an elderly man behind it. Besides him no one was there. I thought he would remember. I asked him how long he had been living here. “All my life,” he answered.

  I decided not to say who I was. I would just act mildly interested, as any tourist would. I said, “I noticed a cemetery up the hill. I understand that a lot of people perished here?”

  He stepped away from the window and came to me. He led me to the door, pointed at the bay, and said, “Three ships sank here, and thousands of people drowned. I wasn’t here when it happened, but for years bones drifted up to the shore. Many a time I found some myself on the beach.” I was here on a pilgrimage, to recover all the secrets he had w
illingly shed. But then an elderly woman came in, and the man greeted her. I knew that our conversation was over and that this was all I would learn from him. I left with a heavy heart full of painful memories. I had revisited a nightmare.

  In July 1985 I joined a group of Jewish men and women from the United States on a fact-finding mission to Eastern Europe. We went to Poland. Each site brought back more bitter memories. This is where it all began. At Auschwitz, where civilization once ceased, time and weather had rotted the structures and watchtowers of the camp. Children now played there, unconscious that they were walking on the same spot where thousands of Jewish kids took their last steps. Lawns and houses had replaced the once bare landscape. In Birkenau lay shambles of the noxious crematorium. The sign over the gate, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” obscene and offensive, was still there. There were many tourists reading on a marker that four million people had been killed there. It didn’t tell the real story.

  The Block Smierci, the death block where I saw the showcase of inhumanity, was most poignant: stacks of clothes, shoes of all sizes—large, small, and even tiny baby shoes—suitcases with names, mounds of human hair, eyeglasses, canes, teeth, and other personal objects. I had not seen this before. It filled me with so much pain that I couldn’t fathom it.

  Outside the block, I stood transfixed and looked up to the sky. Where are the souls of the millions of people who rose up in ashes? Now, I thought, the guilty prosper, raise families, and are good fathers and grandfathers.

  I went to the museum’s archival offices. When I gave my name, Tadeusz Iwashko, the archivist, said to me. “We know who you are. You were the dentist in Auschwitz III, Fürstengrube.” Then he reached out and pulled a book from a shelf. Its title was Hefte von Auschwitz. “Look inside,” he said. “You’ll find your name and number there, and your father’s and brother’s.” I read with glassy eyes my name, Bronek Jakubowicz, number 141129, and the numbers of my father and brother. Another note told of my posting as a dentist in Fürstengrube.

  To fulfill a secret desire within me, I went to my former home, the little village of Dobra, where I was born and lived for nearly twenty-two years. When I was arrested in 1941, I left there with bitter memories. After the war, not a single Jewish person returned to Dobra, where Jews had lived for five hundred years. The gravestones from the Jewish cemetery paved the village sidewalks. I sat for a long time in silence, gripped with pain. Then I began to cry.

  When I raised my head, an old woman with a weather-beaten face stared at me. “I live just a couple of houses from yours. I knew your mother very well before she and your sister, Pola, were deported. Esther said to me, ‘Milka! If we are to see one another again, it will have to be in the other world.’” An irony suddenly struck me: Dobra means good in Polish.

  I drove the road to Chelmno that my sister and mother were once driven along. Suddenly Dr. Schatz’s confession unfolded before my eyes. There Mama and Pola suffocated, and there they died.

  Despite the sunny day Chelmno seemed bleak and dreary. It was a painfully morbid and desolate place. Four hundred thousand Jews were killed there, and in retaliation for the mid-1942 assassination of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, two thousand Christian children from Lidice, Czechoslovakia, were also murdered. One monument depicted the twisted faces of victims. With gut-wrenching indignation I read what was below, words written by the few Jews kept in a room to process the bodies arriving daily for the crematorium: “We are writing with our blood to let the world know that these are our last days. Here we are being killed by bullets and gassed—our bodies burned—our ashes are being spread in this forest!” Above this was a single giant word, Pamitamy (Remember). I will remember the images of that day forever.

  Chelmno’s crematorium was capable of turning 5,000 bodies each day to ashes, I also read, more even than those in Auschwitz. The maximum at Auschwitz was 4,600. Here were the souls of my mother and my sister!

  Seeing Chelmno was more painful for me than being at Auschwitz. A few German students were standing there at the monument, also visibly moved. I wondered how their fathers and grandfathers would explain this to them.

  I left the country where my family and my ancestors had lived for years, relieved that I did not live there anymore. I no longer looked upon Poland as my home, and I had forever cut my ties with my former homeland. I returned to Boston with a renewed spirit, with a sense of homecoming.

  I still can’t believe that all of this happened to me—in one lifetime. I have not spent much time examining the unanswered questions: Who was to blame for this? Could any of it have been prevented? If it could have been, why wasn’t it? These and many other remaining questions are the assignment for the future. Perhaps more light is necessary to explain this stormy phase in our people’s history.

  APPENDIX A

  The Sinking of the Cap Arcona

  In what is apparently the only English-language article on the Cap Arcona sinking, J.L. Isherwood writes in a British periodical:

  The Cap Arcona, launched on May 14, 1927, was probably the most luxurious ship on the Hamburg to South America route until the second World War….

  In April 1945, with the Russian quick advance, in three of her trips, she evacuated 26,000 Germans on the Baltic from east to west. Thereafter, in April 1945, she took on 6,000 concentration camp prisoners.

  It was while in this capacity, lying in Travemünde bay with a number of other ships, that on May 3 British bombers attacked the port. A number of ships were sunk, the largest being the Deutschland and the Cap Arcona. Including the prisoners, guards and ship’s crew, she had aboard at the time about 6,000 people.

  Severely damaged and set on fire by the bombs, the Cap Arcona eventually capsized and the appalling death toll was estimated at 5,000 people.

  The wreck of the charred and twisted steel of the Cap Arcona, the tomb of 5,000 bodies, lay for nearly five years. In 1949 it was broken up for scrap metal.[7]

  Isherwood’s account is borne out by British Operations Record Books, labeled “Secret” and obtained for me by the Hamburg-Südamerika Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft and the Hamburg-Amerika line.

  Detail of Work Carried Out by 197 Squadron for the Month of May 1945

  [Time up, 1515; time down, 1635] DD771. Shipping strikes in Lubeck Bay. All the bombs were dropped on a motor vessel of 15/20.000 tons at 0.0208. The ship was already burning as a result of attacks by 263 Squadron and we scored two direct hits. Now left burning in five places and later seen capsized and burning, CAT. I.[8]

  APPENDIX B

  For the Record

  From the Records of the Auschwitz Museum

  SS-Unterscharführer Karol Baga: Baga was the Sanitätsdientsgefreiter at Auschwitz I and at Fürstengrube between May 1944 and January 1945. In light of his willingness to cooperate with the Polish investigation authorities, he served only a brief sentence in the Kraków penitentiary.

  SS-Unterscharführer Gunther Hinze: His name was found in the Fürstengrube dentist reports as Sanitätsdienstgefreiter and in the records of the SS-Hygiene Institute.[9]

  SS-man Koch: A Fürstengrube kitchen chef, Koch was tried in absentia and, since no particular charges were filed, his trial was dismissed.

  SS-Hauptsführer Otto Moll: Arrested in 1945, Moll was tried by the Kraków High Tribunal and found guilty of terrible crimes. He was sentenced to death and hanged the same year.

  SS-man Ohlschlager: He was a guard at Auschwitz I and at Fürstengrube. He was tried in absentia but since no specific criminal acts could be established the trial dismissed.[10]

  SS-Unterscharführer Pfeiffer: As Rapportführer at Fürstengrube, Pfeiffer’s signature was found on camp records. But since accusations were not available, his trial was dismissed. [11]

  SS-man Unterscharführer Erich Adolf Voigt: According to dental station reports, Voigt was a Sanitätsdienstgard at Fürstengrube beginning in May 1943 and at Dora-Mittelbau in 1945. No specific accusation could be established. His trial was dismissed.[12]

&nb
sp; Many crimes at the hands of the SS men at Fürstengrube were not documented, largely because few Jewish survivors had returned to Poland after the war.

  For additional records of the Fürstengrube SS team, see Tadeusz Iwaszko, Hefte von Auschwitz (Auschwitz: Verlag Staatliches Auschwitz-Museum, 1978).

  Other Records

  Adolph Eichmann: After the war Eichmann escaped to South America and eventually settled in Buenos Aires. in May 1960 he was captured by israeli agents. In a Jerusalem court he was tried and found guilty of crimes against humanity. Sentenced to death, he was hanged on May 31, 1962.[13]

  Dr. Josef Mengele: A long-awaited U.S. government report on the case of Nazi war criminal Mengele confirms that the “Angel of Death” of Auschwitz, wanted for the murder of 400,000 innocent victims, was in fact detained by American authorities as early as 1945 in two P.O.W. camps, but was released because his true identity was unknown. Mengele fled to South America in 1949 and found asylum in numerous countries there, including Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina. On February 7, 1979, he was found dead on a beach near Sao Paulo.[14]

  Walter Rauff: Rauff organized the development and production of the mobile gas vans estimated to have killed 97,000 Jews and Russians. He died of lung cancer in Santiago, Chile, in May 1983 after the failure of several attempts to secure his extradition.[15]