He then heard the captain laughing at his own joke and heard his jackboots crunch the ice underfoot as he turned and started climbing back up the path.
He must have fallen asleep, because when he awoke, he could not move, his joints were so stiffened from the cold. He realized he had been crying in his sleep and the tears had frozen on his face. He stirred in the pit. With great effort, he pushed himself upright and extended his hands, feeling for the pit wall as he shuffled his feet across the frozen sand.
After several steps he felt the wall and realized he was in over his head and did not know how to crawl out. He was totally nude, literally freezing to death, and didn't know what to do to save his own life. At that exact moment, the cloud layer overhead parted, as if slate were sliding off of slate and leaving an opening where, blessing of all blessings, the moonlight shone through. Two moons, true enough, but it didn't matter. For several minutes, the pit was fully illuminated, and he was able to find foot- and handholds and pull himself back up onto the bank. He quickly ran to his clothes, pulled on his shoes, and forced his feet down inside his pants and buttoned his fly. Ordinarily the wool shirt would have scratched and torn at the open sores on his back and shoulders left by the whips. But just then, in those freezing temperatures, the wool actually felt comforting, and he knew it was the closest he had ever been to feeling true joy for it meant he was actually still alive.
With a wracking sob, he ran for the barracks. When he found the door in the dark, it was chained shut again, so he sat down on the frozen stoop and wrapped his arms around himself. He shook and cried out from the cold. This went on for hours. Then the frostbite came into his feet and hands and he felt the feeling drain away. Then his lips froze and the tears in his eyes froze. He blinked over and over, keeping the film in liquid state. Had he not, his eyes would have frozen and he would have been unable to blink at all. In this manner he passed the remainder of the night.
At long last the sun thinned the eastern sky to the faintest glow along the tree line. The guards came and unlocked the barracks door and rousted out the men. Shaking and stamping his numb feet, Lodzi stood off to the side while the men were turned out. The Jews acted as if nothing had happened when Lodzi fell in among them and hurried around the buildings to the kitchen window. He began weeping when he saw the window propped open and knew he would have a warm cup in his hands in just a matter of minutes. At the last second, the wave of men parted and allowed Lodzi to move to the head of the line. He received his coffee and lump of bread and moved off.
Andrus found him a few minutes later. "Here," he said. "Take my coffee too." Lodi didn't argue or protest. He gladly accepted and drank it right down. Both men stood and watched as the sun fully bloomed up through the trees and filled the morning sky with delicious light. He huddled against Andrus as they watched the sky. Finally the smaller man's warmth was transferred into him and he stopped shaking. "It is good," Andrus whispered.
When the sun was up, he joined the captain's work detail. Not another word was said about the night before. The wound on Lodzi's face where he had smeared mud was now cleaned off with several dabs of coffee. Miraculously, it was scabbed over. He was still seeing double but that didn't hinder his work.
They were ordered to run to the showers. Bodies were up and waiting!
He ran with the bodies that day and didn't spill even one off his ladder. He knew Heiss would be pleased with him.
Whichever way it was, Heiss seemed not to know him that day and never whipped or cursed him even once.
Lodzi accepted the evening soup and pressed the tin cup to his face. He moved it over his eye and the throbbing relented. Not totally, but just enough that he could take a deep breath without pain from the movement of his jaw.
Warm. That's all he had desire for anymore in his life. Warm.
Chapter Four
After twenty days of dragging corpses from chamber to ditch, Lodzi found an opening that would help extend his life expectancy beyond the next several minutes. Or so he hoped.
There were nineteen dentists. The twentieth had flung himself into the ditch and begged to be shot, ending it all. The Nazi guards were only too happy to oblige his last wish, and suddenly the Scharführer Nassil ascertained at roll call there were nineteen men in the group of dentists. He ordered the Kapo of the dentists, Dr. Hansell, to raise the number of dentists to twenty. This occurred on February 3, 1942, when—after a period of weakening ice storms and lesser snowstorms—by early February 1942, the trains were increasing. More dentists were needed. When Dr. Hansell announced he was looking for a dentist, Lodzi stepped forward and claimed to be a dentist. Dr. Hansell looked no further and neither did he ask any questions. Only a fool would claim to be a dentist if he weren't. In a short time the truth would be known about the newest member of the dental team.
They were taken to a large shed lined with worktables along the walls. In the center stood a small stove, which emitted what was felt to be a huge globe of warmth that found its way around the room to the worktables. At last, thought Lodzi, I will feel warmth. For the first time in over a month he would be able to stop shaking!
Lodzi took his place at one of the worktables, as directed. He peered out one of two small windows. He could see the ten big gas chambers. While he watched, a transport was brought in and the outer doors of the gas chambers were opened. He watched the new arrivals run down the path, tearing clothes from bodies, and disappearing into the gas chambers, the first into station one, the second into station two, and on and on until they were all absorbed into the efficient killing apparatus. The larger killing hall had ten chambers, into each of which as many as six hundred people could enter. Each chamber was seven meters long by seven meters wide. People were stuffed into them like herrings. Small transports were brought to the smaller structure, which had three gas chambers, each of which could hold four hundred persons. In that structure the gassing would last about twenty minutes, while in the larger, newer structure it would last about three quarters of an hour.
Lodzi busied himself at his workstation, watching out of the corner of his good eye to see what the real dentists were inclined to with eye and hand. He determined they were doing something with the bowls of teeth and jaw fragments placed beside each dentist at the worktables by the Ukrainian guards. The SS storm troopers would never touch such a thing as the bowls. God forbid they should come into contact with Jewish body parts!
The next thing he knew, the Germans operating the gas chambers were banging on the windows where he worked. They were shouting, "Dentisten raus!" (Dentists out!).
The guards watching over them inside the warm room swiftly thumped six men. Lodzi was among those selected, so he fell in line behind the others. They were each carrying pliers so he took his newly acquired pliers along as well.
Once outside, with pliers in their hands, they positioned themselves along the path on which the corpses were carried from the chambers to the mass graves. Jewish workers brought bowls to them from the carpentry building. As a way of saying “Thank you,” those workers were shot in the head and left splayed and bloody in the snow along the path.
Lodzi could look back north, directly into the loading platform of the gas chambers. He watched the ladder crews strain to load their ladders with the dead. The corpses, all standing, were so tightly pressed together and had their hands and feet so intertwined the ramp workers were being shot for being slow. Frantically, the survivors pulled out the first few dozen corpses. The bodies then become looser and the corpses started to fall out by themselves. From his days of working there, Lodzi knew the tight compression resulted from the fact people were terrorized and crammed in as they were driven into the gas chambers. Little did they realize there was no exit at the far end, so jammed up they remained.
The bodies began arriving on the ladders and stretcher.
Lodzi's new job, searching for gold embedded in the corpses' teeth, was made incredibly more difficult by the corpses from the larger gas chambers, where d
eath took longer. These corpses were horribly deformed, their faces all black as if burned, the bodies swollen and blue, the teeth so tightly clenched that Lodzi found it literally impossible to open them to get to the gold crowns. Sometimes they had to pull out even the front teeth to get to the back teeth where the gold was most likely mined.
He watched his fellow dentists struggle as he shot a look back along the path, and several times he felt the bite of the whip when he was adjudged to be working slower than the others. But soon he got the hang of it, coming to understand along the path his job required him to pull the teeth containing gold, place his finds inside the bowls, return with his bowls to the dentists' shed, and there dislodge the gold from the teeth. Once that was done the teeth were buried on top of their owners, randomly, of course. The gold: where it disappeared he had no idea. But he was wise enough to know the gold in some parts of Poland would be as good as zlotys, so he began hiding what he could on his body. Some of it flew from tabletop to anus when no one was watching. Such a proposition made standing and working much harder, but it underscored his determination to do whatever was necessary to survive his sentence to hell.
As the new trains arrived and as he painfully ran to the path and bent about his new task, inside he was chanting, Sh'ma Yisrael, Sh'ma Yisrael (Hear, O Israel). He was an uneducated man, knew no poems, remembered no songs, so he tricked his mind into believing it was somewhere besides caught up in the Nazi death machine by chanting the common Jewish prayer, Sh'ma Yisrael, Sh'ma Yisrael. In this way, he imagined he was in synagogue listening to prayer and making his plans for a peaceful Sabbath. In this way, he escaped the reality of what his hands and eyes were actually doing.
Working so intimately with the corpses sucked away whatever spirit remained in Lodzi. After several days, he began to understand the thinking of the previous dentist number twenty who had thrown himself into the pit and begged to be shot. He understood and wondered whether he might take that same road out of hell.
"First thing, we kill Vernich. We cannot afford his deceit."
"Agree," said Lodzi. "When will we do this?"
"Tonight. We will have a trial tonight and hang him from the rafters."
"What is our evidence?"
"You caught him with coffee. I would say that's enough."
"There are many among us who will disagree. We need more than just coffee."
"What about the disappearance of Shemel Lieberman? and what about his middle of the night disappearances outside?"
"That might be enough," said Lodzi. "Besides, what does it matter, one more Jew dead? Even the wrong one?"
"Tonight it is, then. After they put out the lights, I shall call a trial."
"You should call me as witness. I am the one who saw him with the coffee, and I am the one who knows he leaves the barracks at night."
* * *
By midnight, the trial had been held, and Vernich found guilty, but as luck would have it, the Nazis paid them an unannounced visit that night, and Vernich screamed to them the Jews were about to hang him. He was taken away by the Nazis and never seen again in Barracks One.
Chapter Five
He could remember the first time he hated a Jew.
Fourth grade, Munich, Germany and the first day of school. At recess the gymnasium teacher gathered the boys together and, with a great air of solemnity, told them it was time to see who was the fastest, the strongest, the toughest of all.
Janich Heiss survived the footraces and won them all. Until race five, when he was pitted against Myron Unterberg. Myron was a smaller, frail boy who wore round eyeglasses and read books checked out of the eighth grade section of the library. Myron rarely spoke and was always chosen last for kickball, wickets, and swimming teams.
But that day in September, Myron, much to everyone's astonishment, had won all four of the progressive footraces.
Now, for fastest boy, the field had been narrowed to two: Janich Heiss and Myron Unterberg.
Both boys had removed their shoes and socks at the start of the period outside of the classroom. Cuffs were rolled up and outer shirts removed. Myron even had Andy Merrill hold his eyeglasses as he pawed the clipped autumn grass in his bare feet, flexing his arms and gulping air. All was ready.
Janich Heiss eyed his competition and couldn't help but laugh. It was as good as won, his smirk said. Now, it was just a matter of running fifty meters and writing it in the books. Like Myron, Janich had also kicked off his shoes and peeled off his socks as soon as they had escaped the classroom. On Janich's side of the four-lane track were eleven chanting German boys. On Myron's side were three Jewish youths and one displaced Russian whose presence at the school was never clear. Nor was his German.
A chant arose from the German side. Fearful looks and shrugs were exchanged on the other.
Then the teacher cried out, "Eins, zwei, drei—verlaufen!"
Both charged headlong down the cinder track. Their lengthening footprints were left behind under settling clouds of dust as they churned and stretched for every advantage. At the twenty-meter mark, Janich had him by a good step and he almost threw his head back and laughed because he could only see it getting better with every step to come. Myron, for his part, kept his eye on the string stretched across the posts thirty meters away. Suddenly his gait lengthened as his extraordinarily long, skinny legs found their rhythm. Slowly at first, then increasing with each of the next ten steps he caught up to the German boy, now drawing abreast, now moving a full step ahead and his stride lengthening by another two inches. With an audible cry the German lurched forward, nearly lost his footing, and stumbled the final five steps. The Jew was already bent over, catching his breath and spitting, when Janich ran over the string lying across the track. At the finish plus one step he caught himself and kept running down the track, never stopping, never mind that the race was concluded, unwilling to face the reality of what had just happened, unwilling to face the jeers and call-downs of his German classmates. As he ran, ears burning, labored breathing, balled fists, he felt it there, deep inside his chest, like a heavy log, catching fire and expanding up through his chest, spitting and hot, blinding out his vision of all things good and wonderful in the world, taking his soul in its grasp and wringing empathy away, torturing fair play until it fled. He was left with what his German literature reading later that year would call: hate. He hated Myron Unterberg. Everything about him: his soft eyes, his long nose, his quiet manner of speech, his frail physique—all of it. Hated and wanted it pushed off the world.
At the age of twenty-five he was serving his Führer at Treblinka in 1942. That old fire still leapt and burned in his chest, that old hatred was there—mistaken for meaningful thought—propelling him out of bed in the morning and empowering his day.
He had a goal for the day: he was going to personally count out five thousand Jews and personally murder each one. The notion of such power being his and his alone made him feel proud that he was a member of Hitler's top corps. It wouldn't be hard to do. Two thousand Jews had arrived during the night on two different trains, and even now were milling around and mewling inside the barbed wire. It was sun-up. Another three thousand Jews would arrive on the trains before noon. He considered the nose count to be his inventory, his personal pantry of product for the showers.
He sat on the edge of his bed and pulled on the light wool socks and heavy slacks issued for winter wear. His jackboots, neatly placed side-by-side on the floor as if at attention, were slipped over the socks and partially up the leg followed by the loud sound made by the brass zipper in the early morning quiet of his bedroom. Across the bed lay Marta, his wife of three years, asleep with her mouth open and a puzzled look wrinkling her brow. Clearly she was dreaming, because when she was conscious, she never suffered a puzzled look. Always there was a look of certitude on her face and manifest in her actions. Never puzzled, she was certain she was a Nazi and was proud of it.
He was happy for Marta. She had adjusted quickly to life at Treblinka and had
made friends of the other officers' wives. The couple seldom spoke of his work. He knew there was no doubt in her mind about the magnitude of the death camp's operation. He also knew she despised Jews almost as much as he did. Her father was a second cousin of the Kaiser and she had been raised among German nobility and taught early on she was a member of the superior race. She looked down her nose at Jews, of course, and anyone else who was not one hundred percent German descent for five generations.
Her father had been a merchant, a man who dealt in import–export, and she had a habit of walking into his retail store and reminding the clerks and salesmen that she was the daughter of the owner and they were mere employees. Even at the age of ten, she would go into her father's office when he was away, commandeer his chair, and insist that Mrs. Annesbrau bring her tea and cookies upon request and without delay. The employees hated her, of course, and that was the second lesson of her youth: it was good to be hated, it little mattered what others thought of her and it was her job to ignore everyone else. Except when it came to her husband. To her husband she was devoted, attentive, and highly sexual, as she knew he could have his way with any of a thousand Jewish women at any time day or night. So far that had never happened. When she prayed, more than anything she prayed for his sexual celibacy beyond their bedroom.
Mr. and Mrs. Heiss—Janich and Marta—when they first heard the parables of Adolf Hitler, were swept away on the tide that buoyed Hitler and would eventually place him in power. Here was a man whose hatred of the Jews surpassed even their own, and who understood the superiority of Aryan breeding. Here was a man they could believe in and commit to as if he were a prophet. In fact, among the SS, he was actually viewed as a prophet and not as a mere man. When he seized power in Germany and began imprisoning and murdering his political adversaries, Janich was anxious to become a member of the Gestapo and help the cause. Instead, the Roman Catholic priest in his parish commended him to a disciple of Himmler and he was selected into Schutzstaffel or SS as it was commonly known.
Unspeakable Prayers: WW II to Present Day (Thaddeus Murfee Series of Legal Thrillers) Page 4