The Hands of War

by Marione Ingram

  After dinner one evening in late August, while Sonia was reading to other students a mystery novel I had already read, Uri and I sat on the rocks beside the Elbe, facing each other so that we could see both the river and the mansion. After a little prodding, Uri talked some more about his experiences at Auschwitz. He told me that until they were too sick or weak to care, most of the slave laborers at the camp had tried to track the progress of the warring armies, each person praying for liberation or an armistice that would set him or her free. Although he had never stopped thinking and dreaming of release, Uri had given up on prayer. If praying could have helped, he said, the camp would have been empty.

  He had also stopped paying attention to the rumors that passed for war news. Instead, he had focused his energy on “finding” things that he could trade for food or favors, such as being allowed to visit his sister, Judith, who worked in an arms factory in another part of the camp. The things he “found” he actually took off the dead people he had to remove from the barracks and cart to a crematorium while the living were at work. No one living or dead had much of anything but occasionally Uri had found something, such as an amulet or coin that could be used to bribe a guard. But nothing could have bought him a ticket out of Auschwitz, so he was as fearful as he was surprised when he was told in August 1944 to board a train that had just brought hundreds of prisoners into Auschwitz and was being refueled to take hundreds away.

  * * *

  Heading west toward the sunset Uri listened to several of his fellow prisoners debate where they were going and why. One of these boxcar lawyers pointed out that they weren’t the first to leave Auschwitz at a time when new trainloads were still arriving from the far corners of Europe. Weeks earlier, when the Red Army had begun to approach Poland’s western gates, the Krupp Company’s automatic weapons plant and many of its workers had been transferred to a “safer” location in Silesia. Since no one knew the destination of the present train or why almost all its boxcars had been filled with women, every conceivable possibility was examined with care. The only point on which all agreed was that release from captivity was not a likelihood. Eventually a consensus developed that they were being transferred to new work sites within Germany, where, with enough slaves and hostages at its disposal, the Third Reich would be able to hold off the Allies indefinitely. In time England and America would agree to terms to keep the Red Army from taking Germany’s industrial heartland and pitching its tents on the shores of the Atlantic.

  Although everyone knew the Nazis were insane, no one in the boxcar believed that the German army would continue to fight on German soil until every last man and boy had been killed or captured. So several of the prisoners were lamenting that this new deportation might diminish their chances of being liberated. Others insisted it was better to be leaving Auschwitz since the Germans would never allow their slaves to be taken alive. Uri didn’t pay much attention to the arguments. He thought that he had seen his sister, Judith, among the hundreds of women being loaded onto the train and nothing else mattered nearly as much as contriving to see her face-to-face at the first opportunity.

  When the train finally arrived at a slave depot in the Ruhr area of Germany, however, Uri was too disoriented to attempt an immediate reunion with his sister. After several days in a cramped space with little food or water, every muscle and bone felt like it had been hit with a hammer, and he seemed to have lost the ability to tell whether he was awake or asleep. At first, the depot seemed to be a figment of one of his waking dreams. The smell of burning flesh emanating from Auschwitz crematoriums, which had remained in his nostrils throughout the long journey, was suddenly replaced by the astringent odor of burning coal. And instead of being wedged into a wooden bunk in fetid barracks infested with vermin, he was consigned to a cot in a large canvas tent that literally breathed the night air. Even the soup served up by the local slaves was infinitely superior to the bilge on which inmates had steadily declined at Auschwitz. But these improvements, as welcome as they were, did not fully account for the almost dream-like atmosphere of the slave depot.

  One of the Essen munitions factories of “Cannon King” Alfried Krupp. (Source: The New York Times Current History of the European War)

  The simultaneous unloading of several hundred Jewish women in their late teens or early twenties created that illusion. As they flexed sinewy arms and legs and turned stiffened backs and necks, their pale, shaved heads became incandescent in the slanting lateafternoon light and seemed almost to float above their gray prison frocks. Despite the sunlight and the baleful stares of guards with whips and truncheons, their eyes widened as they took in the huge pavilion tents in which they were to sleep. Watching one of them finger a tattooed number on her forearm, and another the pale yellow star on her sleeve, and seeing their faces cautiously accept the possibility that their lives had taken a dramatic turn for the better, Uri felt tears begin to trickle down his grimy cheeks.

  When he and his sister were finally able to embrace a few days later, however, they were both too thrilled for tears. Judith had thought that he was still at Auschwitz and was overjoyed to find that they had both been transferred to the Ruhr depot, which seemed almost like summer camp by comparison. He was delighted to discover that, although she looked thin, the heavy physical work she had performed at Auschwitz had made her almost as strong as he was. When he commented on how wiry she was, Judith challenged him to arm wrestle, which enabled them to laugh together for the first time since they had been deported from Hungary. When she suggested that they pray together for their parents and sisters, he didn’t object, but he couldn’t make his lips repeat the words with her.

  About ten days later Uri and the other men who had been on the train were ushered into a large open-sided tent for inspection by slave selectors, whom a depot official identified as representatives of the Reich’s foremost armaments manufacturer, Alfried Krupp. Almost two weeks of pleasant weather and light duties in a camp with hundreds of young women, including one named Erika who initiated him into the transcendent pleasure of sex, had caused Uri to relax his defenses somewhat. So he was not mentally prepared when he suddenly confronted a gray-bearded man with a clipboard, a large fountain pen, and the skeptical look of a horse trader eyeing a Gypsy pony. As the slave selector pursed his lips and peered at him through small, silver-rimmed glasses, Uri realized that he was the youngest person anywhere around and that the selector might therefore consign him to the nearest extermination camp. To indicate that he was fit for hard work, Uri began to run in place and pummel his skinny torso with his fists. The selector stepped back with a disapproving sneer. A half-second later a guard struck Uri across his back and shoulder with a leather-covered truncheon.

  Uri fell to his hands and knees and fought to hold back tears. Very quickly he stood up again, hoping to demonstrate that he was strong enough to take such a blow and keep going. Apparently this worked; the selector smiled slightly as he examined Uri’s meager muscles. Muttering his misgivings, the selector pointed with a gloved finger to a group of men forming deeper within the tent.

  Seeing that the group included the more able-bodied of the men who had been in his boxcar, Uri shuddered with relief then reached back reflexively to touch the area between neck and shoulder where the truncheon had landed. Feeling a stab of pain, Uri cried out and then scurried toward the group of men. But the Krupp selector shouted for him to halt and Uri instantly froze.

  “We must teach this young man German discipline,” the selector declared. “See to it that he goes to Dechenschule!”

  The guard, who was wearing a blue uniform instead of the usual brown, gray, or black, promised to take care of it personally. He didn’t hit Uri again but pushed and poked him with the square-sided truncheon to a position nearer the center of the tent. Told not to move a muscle until the guard returned for him, Uri waited and watched as the Krupp officials processed the remaining few men with brisk efficiency, accepting all but two or three. The gray-bearded selector pointed his pen
at the rejected men and shouted to an SS official, “Send them to Buchenwald and bring in the Jewesses!”

  Minutes later scores of frightened young women in prison garb were herded into the tent. They stumbled about frantically in their galoshes and dilapidated shoes, repeatedly bumping into one another and sometimes screaming as a leather bullwhip split their flesh with a lightning crack. The wielder of the whip, a stout SS captain with a truncheon in his other hand, sauntered behind them, scowling and somehow smiling at the same time. Although his legs were short and his shoulders broad, the captain skipped about with a dancer’s agility until his shiny black boots deftly positioned him to strike whatever precise point on a woman’s anatomy his reptilian mind had selected. Male and female SS guards helped him corral the women in front of the Krupp selectors, who acted as if they were watching an animal tamer in a circus tent. “Ja! Ja!” they shouted in unison each time he struck a woman with his whip, and they broke into spontaneous applause when he knocked one woman’s eye from its socket and onto the tarmac. As the stricken woman and those close to her fell to their knees and screamed, a young woman quickly retrieved the bloody eye, receiving as punishment a painful lash that struck the Red Cross on the back of her prison frock.

  Recognizing the retriever of the eye as the girl who had relieved him of his virginity, Uri felt as if he had been castrated right where he stood. His legs trembled and the hot pain in his neck shot through his lower body. Although months of handling and disposing of the dead and dying had hardened his responses to suffering, the adroit cruelty of the SS captain and his applauding colleagues was more than Uri could stand. Tears coursed down his cheeks as he fought for control by telling himself that his sister was not among this group of women and by suppressing the thought that she might well be in the next. Fortunately the German work ethic soon overtook Baron Krupp’s representatives, who temporarily sidelined the SS captain so that they could get about the business of selecting the fittest of the young women for their master.

  The inspection of the women was much more thorough than the cursory examination given the men. The selectors complained loudly about the condition of the women but appeared to enjoy thumping the Red Cross on the back of every dress, lifting the skirts of many, and looking under the yellow star on each left sleeve to check for vaccination. Uri observed that every bulging tummy or swelling breast received special attention, and that the selectors seemed to be rejecting any woman who looked as if she might be pregnant. Such women were made to join a larger group at which the selector pointed and shouted, “Buchenwald!” Uri was convinced that these women were being condemned, so when Judith took her place on the slave block, Uri held his breath until his sister was thankfully consigned to the smaller group.

  Long before the selection of female slaves was completed all of the other men who had been selected, but not Uri, were loaded onto trucks and dispatched to one of the fifty or more slave compounds in and around the city of Essen. Groups of thirty or forty of the selected women were allowed to return to their sleep tents for personal belongings and then were also loaded onto trucks. As she left the selection tent Judith surreptitiously waved to Uri. He wanted to respond but didn’t dare because she was passing within the range of the SS officer with the long whip. After she had moved beyond the reach of the lash Uri waved back, but he didn’t think Judith had seen him. His back hurt and he felt utterly alone.

  A half hour later, when the captain started toward the entrance to the tent, Uri was somewhat cheered by the thought that he and Judith might never see that fiend again. On his way out, however, the captain was stopped by the slave selector who had chosen Uri. Uri couldn’t hear what was said, but as the selector spoke, the captain’s eyes methodically searched the shed until they found Uri. The captain smiled with tight lips and the corners of his mouth turned down, then he touched the leather visor of his hat with his whip and marched out of the tent.

  Accompanied by the blue uniformed guard who had struck him with the truncheon, Uri climbed into the rear of the last truck leaving the depot. They joined a group of agitated young women who didn’t know where they were being sent. Some feared that they were the ones who had been selected for extermination while others lamented that the friends left behind would soon be murdered. Listening to their conversations in Czech and Hungarian and Romanian, Uri concluded that even those who were confident that they had been chosen as slaves were unaware that their new master was the head of Europe’s most powerful and fabled family. Thinking they would want to know, Uri pointed to the name on the guard’s hat. Although the guard had seemed absorbed in loading and lighting his steeply curved pipe, he noticed Uri’s gesture and was aware that several of the women had curtailed their conversations and were looking at him. After a few quick puffs that made the pipe bowl glow like a miniature volcano, the guard exhaled a cloud of smoke and then pointed with the stem of his pipe to the name emblazoned in block capital letters on his hat, on his sleeve, and above the breast pocket of his shirt. The dark eyes of the young women shifted as he proudly made his point, “KRUPP. KRUPP. KRUPP.”

  He took another puff and pointed the pipe stem toward the countryside beyond the truck. “Krupp is master here,” he said, rotating the stem to take in the entire landscape. He warned them to work very hard to keep from being sent to Buchenwald.

  Like most Europeans the women were aware that the Krupps were the famous “cannon kings” whose weapons had killed more people than the plagues. They associated the name with those of monarchs and earlier, more chivalrous wars, as well as with Hitler and the Third Reich’s triumphs. After a respectful pause, the women returned to their conversations in Romanian, Czech, and Hungarian as the truck rolled through a landscape cluttered with factories, refineries, power plants, forges, mines, smelters, laboratories, foundries, rolling mills, cement plants, firing ranges, kilns, air strips, and launch pads.

  “Big Bertha,” one of the women said suddenly, referring to the Krupp matriarch after whom the firm’s most famous cannon was named, “I’ll bet she lives around here somewhere.”

  The guard nodded his head and relit his pipe.

  The expressions on the women’s faces grew even brighter as the truck bullied its way through the bustling streets of Essen, where trolleys, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians noisily competed for the right of way. The presence of so many people suggested to Uri and all the women that conditions might not be so bad with so many witnesses about. The guard, however, continued to look glum and hardened his demeanor even more when the truck braked to a halt on Humbolt Strasse at the entrance to Alfried Krupp’s concentration camp for Jewish women. Uri could see through curtains of barbed wire that other women who had been at the depot had preceded them. They were standing in military formation in front of the dormitories, which looked more or less like the ones at Auschwitz. Each woman had a thin blanket folded over her left arm. Mindful of the armed guards in the watchtower that loomed above him, Uri tried without success to spot his sister among the large group of women.

  Immediately after the women on Uri’s truck entered the camp they were issued blankets and wooden clogs and made to line up with the others. Martial music suddenly blared from loudspeakers attached to the guard towers and after only three or four minutes stopped just as abruptly. In the silence that followed Uri could hear the braking and clanging of trolleys at a station adjacent to the camp. Then he noticed the black uniformed figure striding toward the women from a smaller building across the field from the dormitories.

  “No! No! No!” Uri groaned to himself as the stocky SS officer who had terrorized the women at the slave depot came to a halt in front of them and began to bark out instructions. The guard who had ridden on the truck with Uri tapped him on his sore shoulder and pointed toward the SS officer, who was underscoring his harangue by cracking his whip.

  “The Camp Commander,” the guard said, eliciting more muffled groans from Uri. The guard then turned Uri around and shoved him until he began to walk on hi
s own down the street leading away from the camp. Then the guard got on a bicycle he had obtained from a small round shed near the trolley station and pedaled beside Uri, compelling him to run at a dogtrot. Uri was too upset to care that his ill-fitting Auschwitz shoes were rubbing huge blisters on his feet. All he could think about was how his sister and the other women must have felt to find themselves at the mercy of the fiend they thought they had left behind at the depot.

  Dechenschule concentration camp was less than two miles from the Jewish women’s camp but seemed a lot longer to Uri because, for one thing, his feet were painfully raw and, for another, he hated every step that separated him from his sister. His feet would have been even worse if he hadn’t taken off his shoes and run barefoot over the smooth cobblestones that paved Essen’s streets. The two barracks at Dechenschule were made of stone and looked like school buildings, which is what they had been before the windows were fitted with iron bars, the classrooms were crammed with three-tiered bunks, and the whole compound was wrapped in barbed wire. After he was registered and given a new number—his Krupp number—Uri was issued a blanket and an ill-fitting prison uniform whose stripes were yellow and robin’s-egg blue. Both the blanket and the uniform were embossed with the overlapping three rings representing cannon muzzles that formed the emblem or logo of Krupp enterprises. He was instructed that the Krupp firm had converted Dechenschule from a school into a penal camp for slaves they wanted to isolate and punish. As punishment, inmates were compelled to perform the most difficult and dangerous tasks in Krupp’s vast complex of mining, smelting, and manufacturing enterprises in and around Essen. The camp was under the auspices of the Gestapo but was staffed by SS-trained Krupp guards who, he was told, would shoot to kill anyone who made any move to escape.