Surviving the Reich

by Ivan L. Goldstein

  Once in awhile I still used laughter the wrong way, and Mother would have to come down to the school and answer for my latest prank. But the confidence and personality I acquired were worth it. At least I thought so.

  But nothing was funny at Gerolstein prison camp. The only time I heard my fellow prisoners exploding with mirth was when some poor guy fell into the huge latrine. The joke spread like wildfire through the entire building. We needed so desperately to laugh.

  Though this was no place for jokes, my naturally droll state of mind had the power to uplift me and those around me, at least for a moment or two. Harking back to Mrs. Feltner’s advice, this was the right way to use laughter. Use your talents for good, my inner voice told me; every quality can be used in the right way, if you try.

  A strong sense of right and wrong had been inculcated in me throughout my life. Mother allowed us a lot of freedom, but she also had rules and was very strict sometimes. My brothers and I had responsibilities and learned to be accountable at an early age. Mother would let me know when I did something wrong, usually applying her lesson to the seat of my pants. The concrete values of hard work and self-sacrifice she taught me surfaced even before I went into the Army.

  As a boy, I used to mow lawns to earn money. Our neighbors trusted me, and I always worked hard to do a good job. And like so many kids of that era, I was an “agent” for Liberty magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, and Collier’s Weekly, selling subscriptions and delivering the magazines to my customers. Household money was scarce, but Mom made it clear that whatever money I earned was mine to keep. Talk about incentive!

  One year, I had my eye on a new bicycle. I longed for that bike; I needed that bike, with the fancy chrome, the leather seat, and the shiny spokes. I decided to save up for it, stockpiling all my earnings for over a year to buy it. Finally, I had enough cash to buy my dream-on-wheels. But before I could go to downtown to make the purchase, I overheard something that gave me pause. Mother was telling a neighbor that she needed to put a new roof on the house, and that she might be forced to take out a loan to do it. She didn’t want to take a loan: how in the world would she pay it back?

  I decided to give all my hard-earned cash to Mother. She stared incredulously at my hand, extended toward her with my earnings.

  “Ivan, where did you get all this money?”

  “From my work in the summer and after school.”

  “But it’s so much money.”

  “I’ve been saving it for a long time.”

  “And you’re sure you want to give it to me—you’re sure now?” She gave me a look that was at once poignant and skeptical.

  “Yes!” I looked earnestly into her eyes. Mother never would have asked me for the money, but she was accepting gratefully. I knew I had done the right thing. As she gazed back at me, her face shone more than all the chrome bikes in Denver.

  Looking back on it, I believe that the strength of character built throughout my childhood contributed to my maturity and ability to endure the hardships of prison life. I learned that there are times you just have to tough it out. With Mother’s example, I learned never to feel sorry for myself.

  Survival at Gerolstein was influenced by another factor, too: the power of memories. How desperately I wanted just to turn the clock back And in my mind, I could do just that. Blessed with a strong imagination, I would revisit my boyhood and marvel at how good it had been.

  As though pulled by a magnet, my thoughts would take me home to 815 Garfield Street, where I had lived my entire life. Though surrounded by the squalor of prison, in my mind I was taking the streetcar down Madison Avenue, getting off at the end of the line, and sprinting the few blocks to our little brick house. Bounding past the big old willow tree, up the stairs to the front porch, I’d open the door to our living room and then make my way to the kitchen at the back of the house.

  The kitchen was where the real family action always took place. It didn’t take much for me to envision Mother busily making jelly from the grapes she’d gotten from Uncle Harvey’s grapevine across the picket fence next door. Or she’d be baking apple pies and strudel with apples from his tree. Even in Gerolstein, I could smell those pies.

  I could picture our backyard, where I first heard Mother scream on that “date which will live in infamy.” It wasn’t a big yard, but it had everything in it we ever would need. Mother grew her vegetables back there, and her beloved plants and flowers. Her favorite was lilacs, and in the spring, the delicate fragrance of Mom’s flowers would suffuse our house. There was enough grass back there to play on, and room to kick a football—almost enough room. I could easily remember the time that I was practicing kicking field goals in the back yard. Mother’s room faced the backyard, and she had put Max, who was an infant, in his bassinet there. My heart pounded as the ball crashed through the bedroom window. I raced inside, and there was Max, blissfully asleep, with broken glass all around him in the bassinet but not a scratch on him. I think it was then that I began to believe in miracles.

  It would certainly take a miracle to get out of this disgusting, filthy, freezing prison camp, I reflected. I wondered what Max was doing now, at the age of fourteen. Was he practicing football kicks in the backyard? Was he thinking of his big brother, his soldier brother, who had disappeared?

  Maybe he was practicing the jump shots I taught him at the basketball hoop behind the garage. Funny thing about the garage: We never had a car. When Mom and Dad bought the house back in 1922 (for the grand price of $2,500), the house came with that little garage in the corner of the yard. Maybe they dreamed that they’d own a car someday.

  But Mother had made good use of the garage during the Great Depression, in her resourceful way. Our local barber, Mr. Young, had a car, and he asked Mom if he could rent the garage from her.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she countered, “we can make a deal that’s easier for you and better for me.” He eyed her suspiciously. “You see those boys playing there, my boys?” She said, pointing. “Their hair grows faster than weeds. Suppose you give us free haircuts, and I’ll let you use the garage.” It was a deal. Throughout the Depression, we were best-groomed kids on the block.

  And my mind inevitably zoomed back behind the garage to the alley, the gateway to all kinds of delights. Vegetable sellers, fruit peddlers, and the iceman would come down that alley. If you needed ice for your icebox, you put a card in the kitchen window, and he would stop in and deliver a block of ice. As he would go by, carefully carrying the block on his back, we kids would scramble for the ice chips, scooping them up, throwing them at each other, sucking them to get a refreshing cool drink on a hot summer’s day. People who bought and sold rags, bottles, and all sorts of trinkets would come through the alley too. And then there was the popcorn truck. Each of these peddlers played his own special music: we’d hear them coming and run into the house to get a nickel, if Mom had one handy.

  Dreaming of my boyhood while at Gerolstein was not always easy. Surrounded by disease and misery, with death hovering in the air as an ever-present phantom, Denver receded further and further from my conscious thoughts. With the stinking latrine and the hopeless expressions on my friends’ faces, it was tough to remember a time and place when life was safe and normal.

  Even the scarcest reminder of home was encouraging. Late one night, as we lay in the pitch-dark barrack, we were reminiscing about our favorite topic—food. A guy some distance from me said he used to work in a candy store next door to the Aladdin Theater. I perked up and shouted, “You said Aladdin Theater? Which one? Where are you from?”

  “Denver!”

  “Me too! My father used to take us to the Aladdin Theater on the streetcar. I used to go every week.”

  “I worked in the sweet shop next door.”

  “Wow! I don’t believe it.” I was smiling for the first time in weeks. I wanted so much to meet him, and I looked for him the next day. I never found him, but that voice in the night meant the world to me.

  So I knew
I had to at least try to counter depression, to keep in mind that that distant, comforting place called home not only existed, but still waited for my return. So I would tell Andy everything I could think of about my home and about my childhood, which now seemed remarkably quaint and lighthearted. My mind would meander through my memory, weaving one story into the next. Of all the places in that house, the most magical, I told him, was the front porch.

  We used to play Monopoly there, and penny ball too. Jerry, Max, and I would put on shows on the porch as well, hanging up curtains around its perimeter, erecting a stage curtain, and setting up seats. The neighbors would pay five cents to watch the Goldstein Brothers perform skits and sing.

  Music was a love we all shared. Mother would take us to summer band concerts in the park, and she infused our home with her own passion for music of all kinds. While she couldn’t afford to buy musical instruments, one way or another, she saw to it that they made their way to us: we got a saxophone from my cousins and an upright piano from Mom’s great-aunt. And somehow, she scraped up money or bartered for lessons. You’d walk into the house and hear Jerry practicing his scales on the sax and Max improvising on the piano. The most musical of all of us, Max also learned to play the sax, clarinet, and vibraphone (similar to a xylophone).

  Probably the single most treasured item in our home was the phonograph player. I loved records, and those 78s yielded hours of inspiration, from the soaring notes of famous opera singers to the catchy ditties of Broadway musicals and popular songs of the 1920s and ’30s. The powerful operatic voice of Enrico Caruso, that famous pioneer of recorded music, as well as Al Jolson, Fannie Brice, and Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt, could be heard playing, night and day.

  I loved them all. I knew just about all of the songs by the Gershwin brothers, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern—composers who shared my Jewish heritage and had evolved musically from the liturgy of Eastern European synagogues to the pop songs and swing of New York’s Tin Pan Alley.

  Opera and the classics were my favorites. As a teen, I shared this joy with my friend Eddie Bronstein, who loved opera too. Through him, I got a job as an usher at the Great Artist Series at the Denver Auditorium. The best musicians and singers played there. Ushers weren’t paid, but I got to watch all the performances, and the best part of it was that I could go backstage to meet top performers. I got to see Gilbert & Sullivan musicals, watch incredible concerts, and meet the legendary violinists Yehudi Menuhin and Jascha Heifitz; opera greats Richard Tucker, Jan Peerce, Paul Robeson, Judith Anderson, and Roberta Peters; and pianists Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz. After seeing these greats of the musical stage, their recordings sounded even better to my ear.

  The record player fed my humorous streak too. I would listen to old recorded comedy routines over and over, mouthing them along with the comic till I got them down pat. So our porch performances rolled together all of these influences—the humor and music we all knew from the radio and from our beloved record player.

  I struggled to remember all the details of these times, to bask momentarily in the comfort of hometown warmth, even in the Hellhole of Germany. Huddled with Andy on the icy floor, I would tell him about warm summer nights when the neighborhood kids—Jewish, Italian, and Irish—would gather on our porch. The porch swing would sway back and forth. We’d sit on the steps or lean against the house wall and gab well into the night.

  It didn’t matter that we were of different ethnic origins. Our strong sense of neighborhood overcame such divisions. Mother always said that the greatest blessing is to have good neighbors. And she was the epitome of a good neighbor herself, caring deeply about everyone and respecting each one’s religious beliefs and observances, just as she received the same respect in return.

  Next door to us was the Irish-Catholic Murphy family. A jovial, hard-working man, Mr. Murphy proudly worked for the Union Pacific Railroad. Perhaps recognizing that the fatherless boys next door may be lacking common things, he became like an uncle to us, giving us firecrackers in the summer and even taking us swimming with his family.

  I liked Mr. Murphy, and I genuinely cared about him. Once, on my way home, I found him sprawled out on his porch. Was he dead? With tears in my eyes, I ran to the phone and called the police. They came and examined him, then smirked as they told me that he wasn’t dead—only dead drunk. Did I catch it from Mrs. Murphy later that night! She bawled me out so much for calling the police that I never forgot it. So I learned to ignore Murphy’s drinking binges. No matter how bad off he seemed, I would walk away, never again risking Mrs. Murphy’s sharp tongue.

  One of the fascinating things about Mr. Murphy was that he had fought heroically in World War I, and was one of the few survivors of the “Fighting 69th.” Though not old, his hair was white. He swore it turned white overnight during a battle. We would sit on his porch and listen to his endless war stories. Most of the combat he had seen was hand-to-hand, fought in the trenches, and he described these in lurid detail. His favorite story was about the time he fought in a trench with a German soldier. He was out of ammunition, but he had a bayonet. The German was wearing a thick leather belt, but Murphy ran toward him at full speed and tore through the belt. “And that was the end of him,” Murphy would conclude, slapping his thigh.

  I would tell Andy Mr. Murphy’s old war stories, but for the first time in my life, I realized that they might have been exaggerated. Were any of them actually true? It didn’t really matter, we decided. What mattered is that he had survived to tell his tales. I would describe what a thrill it always was to see old Murphy strut in Denver’s annual Memorial Day parade, holding his banner of the 69th high, and I’d imitate the old soldier’s slow, prideful gait. It was good for our morale, good for a laugh. But when we stopped laughing, I wondered bitterly if I would ever march in that parade.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Cattle Car

  PNEUMONIA, MALNUTRITION, and frigid weather relentlessly stalked Gerolstein’s inmates, and the death rate was accelerating. We all worried about catching some disease, for if a soldier came down with a fever, there was little chance of survival. But my greatest concern in the three weeks since I arrived there was about my feet. After the German soldier took my boots the day after I was captured, I had plodded for miles through snow and frozen mud, fighting sub-zero winds in only my socks and makeshift rag “shoes.” My feet were wet most of the time, and now frostbite had numbed even the intense pain. Every night, I would remove the wet rags from my feet and replace the rags with dry ones. I noticed that my feet were turning dark in color, a sure sign of gangrene. For at least thirty to forty minutes every night, I would massage my feet, apprehensively trying to revive the blood circulation.

  Though wave after wave of new prisoners assured us that the war was nearly over, incredibly, many more POWs were now coming to Gerolstein. Could our cramped, foul conditions be any worse?

  Yes. There was now less space, less food, and more disease. “I can’t survive this. I’ve got to get out of here,” I reflected miserably. “Andy and I won’t make it, it’s impossible—unless something changes, and soon.”

  Then one day in mid-January, I heard an announcement that seemed to offer a chance of escape. “Achtung! If you are severely ill or wounded, report immediately to the doctor. If he determines that you are in serious danger, he will give you a ticket to be shipped out on tomorrow’s train. Report now to the doctor.”

  I looked down at my swollen, blackened feet. Could they be my ticket out of the Hellhole? What about our pledge: could I get Andy out with me? And what about the rest of our foursome?

  A plan began to percolate through my brain. But first, I needed a ticket. I limped to the doctor’s office and showed him my feet. Holding my breath while he poked and prodded, I prayed that he would agree that I was one of the walking wounded ready to leave Gerolstein. Quickly, quietly, he handed me a ticket with “290” scrawled on it—my exit ticket. “You will give this to the guard at the train tomorrow night,” he instructed sum
marily. “The lineup will be outside the barracks, next to the track.”

  That night, I showed the precious ticket to Urda, Kessler, and Lozano. They looked at it morosely and then quietly congratulated me on my good fortune.

  “You don’t get it, guys!” I cried. “We’re all getting out of here with this!”

  “But there’s only one ticket,” they retorted, practically in unison.

  “I have a plan.”

  “Nothing can get us all out of here.”

  “We have to try, and we have to stay together. I’m willing to risk my ticket.” They just shook their heads with negative resignation.

  “Just listen to my plan.” As they crowded around me, I whispered my idea. “The Germans move their trains only at night so they won’t be spotted by the Allied air force. So it’ll be dark. The four of us get on line—”

  “Yeah, with one ticket. What’s the use?”

  “Hey, didn’t you ever pass a basketball behind your back? When you were a kid, didn’t you ever learn a sleight-of-hand magic trick?”

  They stared at me in disbelief.

  “Look,” I continued, “we have to stand right next to each other, practically touching, with our hands behind our backs, like this.” I passed the ticket quickly behind my back to Andy. “It’ll just take a little coordination and practice,” I urged. “I show the ticket and pass it to Urda, and Urda to Kessler, and Kessler to Lozano. With perfect timing and handwork, we all get on that train.”

  It was worth a try. The plan would work. It had to work. If it failed, we were all doomed to remain in Gerolstein and probably die there soon. We practiced over and over nearly all night, swiftly moving that piece of paper down the line till we had our technique down pat.

  “What if the guard takes the ticket away from you, Ivan?” whispered Andy.