Herschel stood and, in mock indignation, looked sternly at the others, “Not bankers, Mendel!” He shook a finger in Mendel’s face. “ That’s what got us into this mess in the beginning!”
We all laughed. I looked around, suddenly sober. I was one of them, yet I was not. As the discussion continued, I drew Herschel aside.
“What are we doing here, Herschel?”
He shrugged, “Living, Hans, just living. Why, what do you mean?”
“I mean, we walk about, we eat another’s food, we sleep in someone else’s tents and beds. I am used to doing work for my keep.” I was walking in tight circles now, giving voice to my innermost thoughts, thoughts that had been swirling in my head for several days. “This camp is just a way station, just a place for us to gather our wits, eat some proper food, heal and decide where we will go. I do not wish to be a refugee or a DP forever.”
Herschel stopped me, “Well, I understand. What do you wish to do?”
I had considered this. “Let us approach the Amis or the people who are in charge of this camp and see if we can do some work. Perhaps there is kitchen work or building or even digging we can do. I want to learn a trade. I thank you for teaching me about gold and gems, but I do not think that is of much use now, here.”
Herschel clapped a hand on my shoulder, “You are right, Hans. That working sounds like a good idea, my brother. Tomorrow we will go see Miss Maria.
“Miss Maria? I thought we wished to avoid her.”
Herschel shrugged, then smiled, “My father once said, ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer!’ I believe the saying came from a fellow named Machiavelli.”
I was astonished that he’d read The Prince. We had studied it in school. A Jew had heard of Machiavelli? “You think she is an enemy?”
“No, she’s just curious about us. So let us show her some brotherly love!” said Herschel, always the optimist.
Chapter 20 - Herschel’s Story
That evening, we discussed our plan with the Rabbi and Mendel. The Reb agreed it would be good for us to work, to feel that we were part of an organization doing good, for a change.
The next morning, as we ate breakfast in the mess tent, an American officer came in and addressed us. He strode to the front of the huge space and raised a hand. I will never forget his words,
“Gentlemen, today is May 8, 1945. General Eisenhower has accepted the unconditional surrender of all German forces fighting in Europe.” With a small smile on his clean-shaven face, he uttered the words I had been hoping to hear since I was a young boy. “The war is over.”
A great cry went up throughout the tent, and soon the whole camp, as the word spread. Men jumped up and hugged each other, shouting, screaming and dancing, some crying and others just smiling. We had survived. We had survived!
I sat and listened to the din, and remembered my parents, my brother, Isaac, and my sister, Miriam. I wondered what we were supposed to do now. Would we be evicted from the camp if we no longer needed the protection of the Americans? Our country was in shambles, our civilian population broken and demoralized. And the Jews? The Jews had been decimated. We had heard that millions had been killed. Millions! I hadn’t even been aware that we numbered in the millions. Were we expected to return to our former homes? Amongst those who’d turned us over to the Nazis? My neighbors, who’d injured, raped and killed folks like my parents and grandfather?
No, I decided. I would never return to that town. There was nothing but hate and anger for me there. The Rabbi was right. I must leave all that behind. But where was I to go? To Palestine with Mendel? I didn’t really want to be surrounded by other survivors, others who would talk endlessly about their time in the camps, the brutality, and the killings. No, I wanted to go someplace where I could disappear, start a new life and just be myself. I chuckled, be myself? I didn’t even know what that meant anymore.
Hans and Mendel looked at me curiously. “Are you all right, Herschel?” asked Hans.
“Yes, Hans, I am fine.”
He smiled, “The – War – Is - Over!” He threw his arms around Mendel’s shoulders and mine.
“Come, let us go see Miss Maria. I have a great urge to hug a woman!” He shouted.
Hans and I walked to the main receiving tent, arm in arm, nearly skipping.
The tent at the entrance was in chaos. Cars and trucks on the road honked their horns, men and women whirled arm in arm and even the soldiers grinned at us and raised their thumbs up. We elbowed our way into the packed tent. Miss Maria stood behind her table guarding her records from the crowd. When she saw us she gaily waved, and we pushed our way toward her.
“Good morning, Miss Maria,” I said holding out a hand.
She looked down. Then she laughed and drew me into a great hug and kissed me on the cheek. “It is a great day, no, Mr. Rothberg?” She held me out at arm’s length. Wisps of her auburn hair were plastered to her sweaty forehead but she never looked more beautiful. It was the first time I’d seen her smile. Her entire face lit up as if the sun shone. She looked over my shoulder and saw Hans standing there and smiled.
“And the other Mr. Rothberg. Hans, I believe?”
Hans smiled shyly and came closer. He was almost as tall as I but stronger, more filled out, more of a man. “ Indeed, it is a wonderful day, Miss Maria.” He too held out a hand and she took it shyly, and then drew him into a long embrace, kissing his cheek.
I raised an eyebrow. She winked at me over Hans’ shoulder and said, “I have heard what you boys are doing for Rabbi Horowitz.” Now she stepped back and folded her hands across her bosom. “I am proud of you two, Hans, Herschel. Please call me Maria.”
I frowned, “What do you mean, Miss, I mean Maria?”
She smiled slyly, “The lectures. The mess tent. You have given that old man new life. You, and you, young man,” she indicated Hans, “whether you realize it or not have inspired him. I have stood in the rear and watched him lecture and then answer all of your questions.” She smiled broadly, showing even, white teeth. “And for that, I am truly grateful to you.”
“Why are you grateful?” I asked. Her remark was perplexing. It seemed to me that there was more to Miss Maria than merely being a bookkeeper and check-in clerk.
“It is my job, Herschel.” She looked at me curiously. “Don’t you know what my full job is here?”
Hans and I looked at each other. “No. We assumed you did what we’ve seen you do. You know, check in the people as they come to the camp.”
She laughed a throaty laugh, covering her mouth. “I am all of that, but I also am trying to find homes for all of you. I oversee the hospital records. I help provide all of you with papers, passports, visas, and I order food and bedding supplies. Soon we will start building dormitories to replace the tents.” She paused and shook some papers from her table in my face, “And that is a lot of responsibility, my young friends.” She drew herself up and almost theatrically proclaimed, “I am one of the main representatives of the UNRRA.”
“What is the UNRRA?” I asked, having never heard of this organization.
“Why, Herschel, whose food are you eating? Whose beds do you fellows sleep in? Whose clothes do you wear?” She smiled and said, “The UNRRA’s, that’s whose. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.”
“We are classified as refugees, then?”
She nodded, “Yes, refugees and displaced persons.” She waved an arm, “This is a displaced persons camp.”
Hans nodded, “Herschel and I have something that we would like to discuss with you.”
“Discuss with me? Now? Why?” A frown creased her young face. “Is something wrong?”
“No, no,” I reassured her. “Hans and I would like some work, something to do all day long, a trade, perhaps.” I sought to calm her fears. “Now that the Rabbi is busy with his classes and Mendel, well, you know Mendel. He is always busy. Hans and I find ourselves restless.”
She appraised us, a finger to the
corner of her mouth. We were young and fit and, with the resilience of youth and the plentiful food supplied by the Americans, had regained some of our weight. “I’ll tell you what, I’ll see if I can find something for you to do.”
“That would be wonderful, Miss Maria,” agreed Hans. I just nodded and smiled.
This night we celebrated in the mess tent, which was crowded with boys and men. One fellow had a violin and another a balalaika and a third had a hand-carved flute. A Gypsy man turned over a tub from the kitchen and thumped it with his bare hands. We danced and sang until we grew tired, then stumbled back to our tents and fell asleep.
That night I dreamed about the camp, Kefferstadt. It was the first time since we had been liberated that I had dreamed of it.
In my dream, I watched a long procession of trucks enter the camp and stop by the stone building. The backs of the trucks were filled with naked people, hundreds in each truck, jammed together. All of them were moaning. Just moaning. The trucks backed up to the doors of the gas building and the backs tilted up and all the people just slid down and into the building. The doors slammed shut and then the gas trucks started up and poured their poison, Zyklon B, into the building through great flexible hoses. After a few minutes, several of us ran to the doors tugging our carts. As the doors swung open, the bodies came tumbling out. We worked as fast as we could to pile the bodies on our carts, the guards yelled at us to work faster, whipping us with great long whips I saw some Australian drovers use in a movie once.
I ran from cart to cart extracting gold teeth with a long pliers and stuffing them in a bag hanging over my shoulder. Beside me was Sergeant Granski, the cruelest of them all, hitting, punching, pulling hair. One boy hauled a cart with an impossibly high load of bodies. After a dozen feet, one corpse fell off, though he didn’t see it. Granski ran to him and screamed in his face, then pulled his pistol and shot him in the face, two, three, four times. The boy’s head exploded and bits of skull and brains flew everywhere. The last thing I remember just before he was shot was him looking at me and winking. It was my face that looked back at me.
I must have screamed because the next thing I knew, the Rabbi was sitting on the edge of my bed and holding my shoulders, “Shhh, shhhh, Herschel, it was just a bad dream.”
Mendel looked up from his bed, and Hans stood next to mine. “Easy, brother, easy.” His hand was brushing my hair back from my forehead, which was damp with sweat, though it was not yet warm outside.
“What were you dreaming about, my son?” asked the Rabbi.
I shook my head, “Nothing, nothing, the camp, the dead, Granski. It was all jumbled.” Was I going to experience dreams like that for the rest of my life? “It will be all right.” And I fell back into an uneasy sleep.
Morning came, bright, sunny and warmer. As it is written, ‘It was the first day of the rest of our lives.’
I rolled over and saw Mendel sitting up in his bunk. He was reading, his lips moving a bit. “Psst, Mendel, what are you reading?”
He held up the book so that I could read the spine. It was in English by a man named Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn. “What is this book, Mendel? You read English?”
“Yes, a little. I am teaching myself. Another man at the mess tent has been helping me. He says he used to teach English language at the university in Heidelberg.”
From the other side of the tent I heard Hans say, “My father went to school in Heidelberg.”
“No, Hans, our father went to school near Kassel. We: you, me and Isaac went to the yeshiva in our town. That is a school operated by the rabbis. Remember that, please.”
Hans mumbled something, and I strained to hear. He was saying yeshiva over and over.
I got up, stretched and slipped into my trousers and shirt. I went to Hans, “You must be careful, Hans. Jews were never allowed to go to the university at Heidelberg. You must only talk of this when we are sure we are alone.”
Hans nodded, but I knew he felt bad. “Will I ever be able to mourn my family?”
The Rabbi proposed, “Perhaps tonight, when the four of us are together, I will say the prayer for the dead for you, for all of us who have lost friends and family. Would you like that, Hans? And you boys?”
“Yes, that will be a good thing, Rabbi,” sighed Hans. “Will you teach me that prayer?”
“Yes, of course. It is called the Kaddish.”
“The Kaddish. I will learn it and say it every night to myself,” vowed Hans.
“We will say it with you, my brother,” I said.
Mendel agreed.
The Rabbi looked pleased. “We may soon have to start a yeshiva here,” he reasoned.
“You already have one, every day in the mess tent.” I answered, laughing.
Chapter 21 - Hans’ Story
Two days passed. Reb Horowitz continued with his private lessons for Herschel, Mendel and me in our tent for an hour in the mornings. Then he would gather his papers and go to the mess tent, where he would lecture for another hour. The discussion would continue until lunchtime. We usually accompanied him and thoroughly enjoyed his talks, as did the hundred or so men and boys, who were his students.
On this day his talk on morality continued. “My friends, how do you each see yourselves five and ten years from now?” He sat in a comfortable chair Miss Maria had provided for him. A large glass of water sat on a small table beside his elbow.
He raised his eyebrows, “You see, we have lived through a most terrible war which has taken our friends, family and yes, entire towns and cities. But you,” and here he pointed around at the assembly, “you have survive- to do what? Will you become revenge seekers, like my young friend Tevi here? Or will you attempt to put all this behind you?”
He stood on shaky legs and challenged us, “Or will you settle somewhere and find a wife, and even have children? Ask yourselves, if when those children grow up, do you want them to look at their father as a murderer or as a saintly man?” Here he grinned, “Of course, to find a saintly man amongst you will be like finding a kindly Gestapo agent, but,” and here everyone laughed, “wouldn’t you rather teach your children that you survived a terrible time, a time of mass killings, but perpetrated none yourself?”
A hand went up in the audience. An older man shuffled to his feet and said quietly, “I was in the Warsaw Ghetto, in Poland. I have killed Germans, killed to feed my wife and colleagues. Will I ever be able to face decent people again?” He was a gaunt man, with thinning hair and a beak of a nose.
“How do you feel now, my friend?” asked the Rabbi quietly.
He shrugged and said, “Hollow, empty, useless.”
The Rabbi came up to him and said, “You must fill all that hollowness with love: love for the Lord who saved you - for what, we do not know; love for your fellow men, and a love of life.” Here he took the man by the upper arms and gently smiled, “I, too, have lost everything, seen my fellows gassed and thrown into pits, my wife and child dead, but I go on and so must you.” He squeezed the man’s arms. “Perhaps you will go to Palestine with my young friend Mendel and become one of his dreaded bankers!”
The man, whom I later learned was named Dov Lemko, looked at the Rabbi respectfully, “Do you think I can be a whole man again?”
The Reb shrugged, “That is up to you. You are alive. You are standing here. Surely God has some purpose for you.” He turned to his audience. “You are all alive while others died. Surely there must be a reason. Would you waste that life God has allowed you to have? Would you dishonor those who died? Because if you throw that life away, that is what you do.”
The discussion continued, with many fellows contributing fantasies of where they wished to be in those long-off five or ten years. It was obvious to me that the Rabbi’s words had caused many men to look within themselves.
As the bell rang announcing lunch, Miss Maria entered the tent and caught Herschel’s eye, waving him over. She stood with a large American soldier.
“Boys, I’d like you to meet Chief Ha
wk. He’s with the 69th Seabees. That’s the construction battalion assigned to this camp.” Herschel and I shook the giant man’s hand.
“Pleased to meet you, men.” He appraised us, his eyes noting Herschel’s rather slight physique and my heavier one. “Maria here tells me you want to learn a trade. Is that right? Think you can do construction work?” He spoke to us in rather stilted German.
Herschel spoke up, “I speak much English, sir, and my brother Hans here, speaks some and is a fast learner.” He smiled a winning smile, “Your German is very good, sir. Where did you learn?”
He smirked at us and shook his head, “I lived in a mostly German town back in upstate New York, and I studied it in school. Never thought I’d have much use for it though.”
Miss Maria interrupted, “You fellows figure things out. I have to get back to work. I hear that there are several truckloads of refugees coming in today from the east, ahead of the Russians.” She waved and winked at Hans, “Bye now.”
The soldier turned to us, “Men, I am Chief Petty Officer Albert Hawk. My job here is to replace the main tents with buildings. I have only ten men in my command, so I am supposed to use men from the town. I…”
“Chief Hawk, Herschel and I would like to work with you to learn this trade. We can get more men from the camp here, many who are also trained as electrical men, plumbers and builders.” I had no idea if Jews were even trained in these trades but I did not wish to work with locals. They would be collaborators, former party members and most likely former soldiers hiding from the Americans.
“But I can just go into town and hire experienced men.” Was the Chief arguing or testing us?
“Hire?” Herschel blurted. “But Chief, the people here will work for nothing. We already get food and a place to sleep from the UNRRA. Many of these men would just like to have something to do during the day. Do you really want former Nazis working for you? Your enemies?”
Brothers Beyond Blood Page 10