The Hands of War

by Marione Ingram

  Within a few days Uri learned that there were only a few real criminals or offenders at Dechenschule. Most of the inmates were there because they had been community leaders—public officials, doctors, teachers, judges, lawyers and even clergymen—who had been taken hostage in occupied countries to keep the populace in line. Once in custody they became subject to a Nazi regulation that mandated the deportation of anyone held for more than eight days without being charged or cleared. The Nazis carried out the deportations with utmost secrecy—they called the program “Night and Fog,” thereby heightening the impact on families and communities by making leading citizens disappear without a trace.

  Waiting to profit from their disappearance was the current cannon king, Alfried Krupp, the Third Reich’s avid exploiter of slave labor. As the Third Reich’s Fuehrer over all industry and the sole proprietor of its largest industrial complex, he demanded and obtained more than a hundred thousand slaves to help him produce the arms that enabled Germany to wage global war. Although he had slave colonies at many plants scattered about occupied Europe, most of his slaves were held in concentration camps in and around Essen. The Night-and-Fog victims in Uri’s barracks came mainly from France, Belgium or Holland. Some thought that Krupp had placed them in his penalty compound because he feared they would be more motivated than others to escape. Others said he was simply going along with the policy of intensifying the pain of the prisoners and their families by enforcing secrecy. A French priest who supported Hitler as a bulwark against communism said their incarceration was a mistake that would surely be corrected by Baron Krupp when he became aware of it. He remained convinced even when told by another imprisoned priest, who cleaned Krupp’s office every morning, that the slave chief was fully aware of the means by which his slaves were acquired. But whatever Krupp’s reasons for treating them so vilely, most of his Night-and-Fog slaves resented being kept incommunicado as much as they hated the harsh conditions and back-breaking labor. Having become accustomed to hard labor at Auschwitz, Uri was not as disturbed by his treatment at Dechenschule as he was by his sister’s nightmare ordeal on Humbolt Street.

  Among Krupp’s Essen slave colonies, Uri learned over time, the most wretched conditions appeared to be reserved for the Jewish women. He was unaware that Krupp had given his personal attention to the procurement and exploitation of this group, regarding it as something of an experiment to test whether women slaves could be used for heavy work that normally was assigned only to men. But like everyone else, Uri understood that Jews were considered the lowest form of slave life, to be treated worse than non-Jews from Eastern Europe, who were more abused than those from the West. With much greater anguish than others, Uri heard about or even witnessed the special mistreatment given his sister and her companions.

  When the weather in northern Germany turned bitterly cold, all of the men and women in Krupp’s fifty or so concentration camps in the area, including Uri’s penal camp, had or were issued a second blanket, as SS rules required. All except the five hundred Jewish women on Humbolt Strasse; they were forced to get by with only one. Frequently they were forced to work with hot coals or metals that burned, cut, or froze their hands, but no protective clothing or gloves were permitted. Their only garment was the thin burlap prison dress they had been issued at Auschwitz, their shoes the crude open wooden clogs issued by Krupp. Although their work was as heavy and dangerous as any imposed on men, their rations, a bowl of soup and a slice of bread a day, were the skimpiest in Essen and the most frequently withheld.

  Lack of protection from air raids needlessly killed thousands of Krupp slaves and everyone had priority over the Jewish women to any refuge that was available. When a raid occurred while they were at work, they were the only ones expressly forbidden to seek some kind of shelter. Jewish girls who in one instance took refuge in a partially destroyed cellar inside their camp’s barbed wire were forced to yield this space to Polish men from another camp. In contrast to his sister, Uri could bury himself in a slag heap if he was working near one when an alarm sounded or could crouch in a ravine Dechenschule prisoners had dug at their camp to gain a measure of protection from bomb splinters. This was not enough protection to prevent scores of deaths at Dechenschule during one raid, but the Jewish women, whose barracks were destroyed in the same raid, had been forbidden to dig or lie in slit trenches, the narrow shallow trenches or ditches that others were allowed to use for a modicum of protection during raids. Women locked in one of the huts that was set on fire during that raid were burned alive because no guard would release them. After that raid the survivors at Dechenschule, including Uri, were transferred to another camp, but his sister and her companions were made to live partly exposed to the elements in the cold, wet and darkened ruins of the camp’s kitchen.

  During that last terrible winter of the war, after their wooden clogs had broken apart and their feet were bloody and oozing pus, the battered, starved, severely frostbitten women were marched barefoot for nine miles twice a day through the main streets of Essen, letting everyone see how the cannon king and his country dealt with Jewish women. To heighten their humiliation, the guards shaved grotesque patterns on the women’s heads, the most derisive design being a Christian Cross to mock the Jew’s “heathen” status. Alone among Krupp’s hundred thousand slaves, the Jewish women were not allowed to use the toilets in the plants or foundries where they worked but were forced to go out in the open. From time to time the screams of one or more women being punished or tortured near Krupp headquarters reached the ears of the firm’s top executives and directors. The response, if any, was simply to have a secretary close the windows.

  When the Jewish women returned to their barracks at day’s end, they were confronted by SS guards recruited by Krupp who beat them with metal truncheons at the slightest provocation or simply for sport. As the Allied armies drew closer, brutality grew more frequent and the guards taunted the women, saying that there would always be time to kill them before they could be liberated. But the most terrifying event of every evening was the arrival in the women’s quarters of the short-legged SS Camp Commander. As every Krupp official and most of Essen knew, his specialty was putting out eyes with his whip. He also delighted in lashing other parts of the body and sometimes flayed women to death.

  Accounts of such horrors circulated by word of mouth throughout the cannon king’s domain, being told and retold countless times by both slaves and masters and driving Uri wild with fear for his sister. Lying on his wooden bunk at night, it was impossible for him to put images of the sadistic SS captain out of his mind whether he was awake or asleep. When he tried to replace such images with those of Erika, the spirited girl who had been his first lover, he compounded his suffering.

  Despite their own dire condition, the members of Uri’s working group from the disciplinary camp were moved to anger and pity by the brutalized state of the Jewish women who marched past them at an Essen intersection as both groups were on their way to work. Frequently when he saw his sister among the marching women, Uri wanted to dash across the street, pull her out of the ranks, and attempt to escape with her. But he knew that he would surely fail and she as well as he would be severely punished or probably killed. One day as Judith passed from sight unaware that he was nearby, Uri resolved to do whatever it took to see her.

  Drawing on his Auschwitz experience, Uri volunteered that same day to help recover and remove the bodies of those who had died in Krupp’s service. In addition to those killed in air raids, which sometimes numbered several hundred, disease, malnutrition and other mistreatment were taking an increasingly heavy daily toll on the slave population. Tuberculosis and other contagious diseases were so prevalent that no one wanted to touch the dead. Because of this Uri got his wish.

  With the help of bribes to civilian security personnel, Uri was soon able to arrange to see his sister at her worksite. She was so tired and emaciated that she seemed to look through him for a full minute before she recognized him. Her skin, which had remain
ed supple and relatively smooth at Auschwitz, now looked like stiff butcher paper that had been reused several times. It was wrinkled, stained, torn, and spotted with dried blood and bites that might have come from rats as well as insects. Despite her appearance, however, Judith still had a strong will to live. Brother and sister quickly agreed that they should attempt to escape rather than wait to be freed, since they both believed that the guards meant it when they said they would kill all the Jewish women before the Allies arrived.

  “The best time to escape,” Judith said, “would be during a heavy raid, when the guards retired to their bunkers.” Uri agreed and told her that when the next big raid occurred he would come to her compound and slip through a damaged part of the barbed wire that surrounded her camp. Uri had spotted the damage when his burial detail had gone to the cemetery that bordered the camp to dig a grave. He assured Judith that he would be able to get out of the camp to which he had been transferred after Dechenschule had been bombed. He also said he would try to identify a place to hide in Essen. Judith confided that she could probably get them a place by appealing to one of the older Krupp workers who occasionally slipped her a bit of food in return for being allowed to fondle her.

  Judith soon persuaded one of her molesters to secure a place for her to hide. Uri confirmed that the damaged barbed wire at her camp had not been repaired and located a place where he could get through the wire at his camp using a metal stake that was meant to hold it down. He also got his hands on the coveralls of a Krupp employee who had died in a raid. But when Allied bombers failed to return to Essen for several weeks, Judith and Uri had to put their plans on hold.

  During that time Uri’s work took him to just about all the facilities for treating sick and injured Krupp slaves. He discovered that there were in fact few facilities, no medicine and very little treatment unless, as at Uri’s own barracks, a slave with some medical competence was allowed to minister to the other inmates. That had been permitted because his camp’s dispensary and sick bay, which were much too small for the numbers of ill inmates, were so stinking and filthy with human excrement that no Krupp employee wanted to go near them. In Krupp’s Essen camps hundreds of injured and seriously ill slaves died every week without any medicine or antiseptics to discourage wounds from festering and becoming gangrenous. There was even a Krupp concentration camp for the hundreds of children who against all odds were born to slaves. The mothers were forced to return to work before the babies were weaned and many of the infants soon died. Identified only by their slave numbers, scores were buried in Essen by Uri’s crew.

  Overwhelmed by the enormity of their workload and the inhumanity that caused it, Uri asked a veteran gravedigger, a tall, skeletal, slightly stooped man with a French accent, if conditions for slaves had been better when the Germans were winning the war. They were digging a grave in a field that was partially covered with snow and Uri was shivering with cold even though he was wearing a dead man’s sweater beneath his blue-and-yellow-striped prison garb. The veteran first glanced at the guard, an old Krupp hand who was making a small fire for himself from brush they had cut, and then put a finger to the side of his long nose.

  He told Uri that the Krupps were in charge of all German industry and could always get anything they wanted, but that even when Germany ruled almost all of Europe and was stripping it of food, Krupp slaves were as underfed then as now. In good times as well as bad, conditions had always been harsh for Krupp slaves. When another digger suggested that Krupp might “fatten us up” a bit before the Allies arrived, the veteran said there was not a chance. “Germans still believe that Krupp and Hitler will come up with something to defeat their enemies,” he explained, “and Krupp won’t put doubts into cabbage heads by suddenly treating slaves like human beings.”

  A few days later Uri’s anxiety for his sister’s welfare spiked sharply when word spread in the camps that Krupp was arranging to ship the Jewish women to Buchenwald where they would be fed to the ovens to keep the Allies from seeing what he had done to them. Although the railways had been severely damaged by bombing, the veteran gravedigger warned that almighty Alfried could arrange to have the women disposed of by one means or another. He said that Krupp had always been Hitler’s indispensable man. Without the Krupps Hitler would have been a comic opera figure. The Krupps had helped to make him Chancellor, but Alfried’s mother wouldn’t let Hitler, an “upstart corporal” spend the night in their castle when he came to thank them.

  “How come you know so much about this?” Uri asked, drawn to this Frenchman who talked to him more than anyone else did.

  The Frenchman said that he had been one of the lawyers for the owner of a tractor factory that Alfried Krupp had decided to take for himself. After learning everything he could about Krupp, the Frenchman had advised his client to sign over the factory. But the rightful owner refused. He came from such a powerful family himself that he thought he could say no to Krupp. This was a fatal miscalculation.

  Uri asked if Krupp had caused the man to be arrested.

  The Frenchman nodded his head. He said that his client was a Jew and had been sent to Auschwitz where he was promptly killed. At that point the Frenchman also had been arrested and had been made to “disappear” in Essen. Asked why his client had thought he could stand up to Krupp, the French lawyer explained, “He was a Rothschild, a member of the famous Jewish banking family headed by Baron de Rothschild.”

  After Krupp arranged for a special train to dispatch into oblivion all of the nameless inmates in his camp for children born to Krupp slaves, Uri bribed a guard to let him see his sister again. Outside the mill where Judith worked, he passed a woman who was bent over with her hands on her knees urinating on the ground. She looked almost more animal than human. The top of her head was bald but matted tufts of hair rose above her ears. Her tattered burlap dress was streaked and plastered to her body and her exposed legs and cheeks showed bloody welts. Shuddering at the thought that his sister might be in similar shape, Uri looked away and hurriedly shouldered through the heavy doors of the mill.

  When he saw Judith there, he told her that Krupp had disposed of the slave children to keep the Allies from discovering them. He said that she should get ready to leave, since guards and prisoners were predicting that Krupp would soon send the Jewish women to the Buchenwald death camp for the same reason. Judith told him that she was aware of the situation but that they would have to wait for an air raid which would make the guards take to the shelters, since escaping together would be impossible while the guards remained at their posts. She drew a smile on his worried face by telling him she had secured a hiding place for them in Essen.

  Before leaving her, Uri reassured Judith he would be able to get away when the planes came. He also asked her if it would be possible for them to take Erika with them. Judith told him that Erika had been given a terrible lashing by the Camp Commander and was in no condition to attempt an escape. Judith also expressed surprise that Uri hadn’t seen Erika outside, since she had gone out to do her business just before he arrived. Realizing that the wretched woman he had passed outside was Erika, and that she had suffered so much he didn’t recognize her, Uri pressed his hands over his eyes to hold back tears.

  That night Uri’s contraband coveralls were discovered inside his straw mattress by a guard who obviously had been tipped off about them. Although he insisted that he had taken the coveralls only for their warmth, Uri was accused of plotting an escape and the camp beater was immediately summoned. There had been no official beater at Dechenschule, and the survivors of the air raid that destroyed that camp experienced collective shock when they discovered to their horror that Neerfeld, the camp to which they had been transferred, employed a specialist to inflict pain.

  The fearsome beater, a middle-aged man with dark hair and skin that looked like he had spent years shoveling coal into a Krupp furnace, was accompanied by a lanky SS lieutenant. The lieutenant’s jackboots thundered on the floorboards as he walked through the barracks w
rinkling his nose at the foul smell and demanding to see the prisoners who had tried to escape. Beneath his leather-billed hat, his pink face went scarlet when a Krupp guard pointed to Uri as the lone offender.

  “A Jew boy!” the lieutenant bellowed, slapping his heavy leather overcoat with a swagger stick. He railed at the Krupp guards for interrupting his dinner for a Jew, telling them that the only way to deal with Jews was to shoot them. He asked for one of the guards to give him a gun since he hadn’t brought his.

  “First we need to find out who put him up to this,” the beater advised, holding up Uri’s coveralls with one hand while squeezing the back of Uri’s neck with the other. He said that once Uri revealed who was plotting to escape with him, they could shoot the lot of them.

  The lieutenant agreed. He called for a length of rope and removed his hat and overcoat, promising to discover Uri’s confederates in short order. After the rope arrived, he quickly made a loop at one end and slipped it over Uri’s head. He then threw the other end over a ceiling beam and jerked it sharply several times, tightening the noose until Uri was forced to stand on tiptoes, choking and gasping for breath. Whenever Uri grabbed at the noose to try to let in more air, the lieutenant would pull harder, almost lifting Uri off the ground, turning his face purple and causing his eyes to bulge and run with tears.

  The beater meanwhile removed his own heavy coat and made one of the assembled prisoners pull Uri’s blue-and-yellow-striped trousers down around his ankles.

  “Oh this is a real Jew, alright,” the lieutenant exclaimed, glancing at Uri’s genitalia. He nodded at the beater who struck the back of Uri’s pale thighs with his truncheon.

  “Stop sniveling, Jewboy!” the lieutenant yelled. Easing up on the rope he ordered Uri to point out the men who were going to attempt an escape.

  When Uri refused to oblige him, the lieutenant jerked on the rope and nodded at the beater, who struck with his truncheon again and again. After several blows Uri flailed the air with his arms as if to implicate everyone in the room, and the guards had to restrain the other prisoners from attacking him. Streaming mucus and tears, Uri released the contents of his bladder onto the floor. The lieutenant jerked hard on the rope as if to shut off the flow of water by cutting off the flow of air into Uri’s lungs. Held aloft, Uri danced on air until he passed out. The lieutenant dropped him on the wet floor and told the beater to revive him. The beater tried for several minutes but was not successful.