A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy

by Thomas Buergenthal

  Those of us who were not sent to Treblinka when the ghetto was liquidated ended up in an Arbeitslager, or labor camp. It occupied a small area of the former ghetto. The two or three streets that composed this area abutted a field that at one time may have been a large playground or park. When we got there, it was just an empty, dusty plot of land. Our family, with Ucek and Zarenka now part of it, was housed in a large room, with a kitchen and bathroom that we had to share with another family. The bathroom had a big tub in which we three children got a chance to be bathed from time to time. Here I was very happy because I now had a brother and a sister, and, besides, I was the big brother and could lord it over them.

  We arrived at the labor camp in the late fall of 1942 — I was eight at the time — and remained there for about a year. My father still ran the Werkstatt, while my mother struggled to feed the five of us on the meager rations we got, which was not easy. Except for the fact that our family had grown and that Ucek and Zarenka were my constant companions, only two events from our life in the labor camp stand out in my mind.

  Once, my mother received an order from the commandant of either the Gestapo or the Schutzpolizei (I don’t recall which it was), summoning her to present herself to him the next day. She spent the remainder of the day in a terribly worried state, crying much of the time. When my father heard of the summons on his return that evening, he turned pale, and while he told her not to worry, I could see that he too was very concerned. They kept wondering all evening why the commandant would want to see my mother and what would happen to her. “Do you think that it has something to do with the children?” she asked. “That’s not it,” my father assured her. “They would simply have come and dragged the children away.” More speculation followed, and then my father said that he had figured it out and that they would talk about it later. At that point, I started to cry because I thought that the Germans planned to kill my mother.

  At night, I heard my father and mother continue to whisper about the order she had received. My father explained that he was sure that the Germans wanted her to become an informer. There could be no other reason for this strange summons, he claimed. If they had wanted to punish her for something, they would simply have come for her, and that would have been the end of it. No, he was sure that they wanted to use her as an informer because, among other things, she spoke German, and they could communicate directly with her. The problem was, my father explained, that if they told her what they wanted her to do and she refused, they would kill her or send her to Auschwitz or some other concentration camp. And if she did as they asked, she would eventually suffer the same fate. What to do? My father saw only one way out: “Don’t let them tell you what they want you to do. Just keep changing the subject. Talk about Göttingen, about anything, but for heaven’s sake, don’t let them tell you that they want you to work for them.”

  The next day, my mother was picked up and taken to the office of the commandant. I thought I would never see her again, and when Ucek and Zarenka saw me crying, they also cried and kept asking when Mutti was coming back. She did return and seemed no longer worried. When my father arrived that evening, she greeted him with a big smile and a kiss. “You were right,” she said, “but I never let him get to the point. He must think that I am a babbling idiot and that I was too dumb to be of any use to them.”

  The other event that has stayed with me to this day was the liquidation of the labor camp. It began early one morning. The Germans drove into the camp, ordered everybody out into the street, and herded us toward the big field in the middle of the camp. There we had to line up in two long columns, a dozen people abreast. The two columns were separated by a passageway some five meters wide. When we had been properly lined up, the soldiers (I believe both the Schutzpolizei and Gestapo participated in this operation) began to walk up and down between the two columns looking for children. The entire operation was overseen by the German city commandant. He stood in front, at a distance of about ten meters, facing the two columns. From time to time, he would bark out some order to his subordinates or flick his riding boots with a short horsewhip.

  All around us, children were being torn from the arms of their parents. When the soldiers saw Zarenka and Ucek, they tried to wrest them away from my mother. The two children began to scream, and my mother tried to hold on to them, but one of the soldiers began to beat her and she had to let go. Then one of the soldiers saw me and tried to drag me out as well. Holding on to me, my father stepped into the passageway. As the soldier was getting ready to beat him as well, my father bellowed something, and the man stopped. Still holding me by the hand, my father walked up to the city commandant. Before my father could say anything, I looked up at the commandant and said (I don’t know why or whether it was at my father’s prompting), “Herr Hauptmann, ich kann arbeiten” — “Captain, I can work.” He looked at me for a brief moment and said, “Na, das werden wir bald sehen” — “Well, that we’ll soon get to see.” Then he motioned my father and me back toward the column where we had been standing.

  We learned later that Ucek and Zarenka, with about thirty other children, were first locked up in a nearby house. From there, in the late afternoon, they were taken to the Jewish cemetery, where they were killed. We heard afterward that the soldiers used hand grenades to murder them. In that cemetery in Kielce there stands a monument today, erected in memory of the children who were killed on that terrible day in 1943, among them my little brother and sister. That is what they had become and that is what they will always be as long as I live. Over the years, I have managed to erase from my memory many a horrendous thing I experienced in the camps, but never for a moment have I been able to forget the day when Ucek and Zarenka were taken from us.

  What prompted the city commandant to spare my life on that morning has remained a mystery to me. Was it that I was blond and spoke fluent German and possibly reminded him of his own children? I shall never know.

  After the liquidation of the labor camp, we were divided into two groups of a few hundred people each and sent to two different factory complexes on the outskirts of Kielce. One group went to Ludwików, a large foundry. My parents and I ended up with the other group in Henryków, a large sawmill that manufactured wooden wagons for the German war effort. The iron rims for the wheels of the wagons made in Henryków were produced in Ludwików. In Henryków, we lived in a big barrack with all the other workers. My mother, father, and I slept in bunks toward the back end of the barrack, separated from our neighbors by a thin curtain. I do not remember whether the Werkstatt was still in existence and whether my father still ran it, but I think it more likely that he now worked full-time at some machine in the factory. My mother served as a nurse in the small infirmary presided over by Dr. Leon Reitter, the only doctor not executed when all the Jewish doctors who survived the liquidation of the ghetto were killed in the labor camp a few months before the children were murdered.

  Soon I too had a job. My parents were afraid that the German officer who had let me live because I told him I could work might one day come to Henryków on an inspection tour and ask about me. Since I had not been assigned a job in the factory, my parents decided that I should try to get the German head of Henryków, a civilian manager by the name of Fuss, to hire me as his errand boy. In order to speak to Fuss, I waited for him one day outside the small house where he had his office, and I approached him as he came out. When I told him what I wanted and that I also spoke Polish, he looked me up and down, and just when I was sure that he was not going to hire me, he said that he could use me. That’s how I became his errand boy.

  My job consisted mainly of taking the mail to a special mailbox, running various errands for Fuss on the factory grounds, and parking the bicycles of the Germans who visited him. It did not take me long to figure out that these Germans were noncommissioned officers who did not qualify for the cars the higher Gestapo and Schutzpolizei officers came in. I feared the latter and tried to avoid them as much as possible. The ones on bikes seeme
d less threatening, although I knew from experience that any German in uniform was to be avoided. Whenever these men would arrive at the building that housed Fuss’s office, I had to take their bicycles and place them in the bike rack some twenty to thirty meters away. At first, I pushed the bikes obediently to the bike rack. Gradually, I began to ride them like a scooter, with one foot on a pedal. As time went on and I became surer of myself, I would try to ride the bikes. I was much too short to sit on the saddle and could barely reach the pedals. Besides, never having learned to ride a bike before, I fell off a few times. While I did not mind a few scratches here and there on my hands and knees, I was afraid that I might damage the bikes and get into serious trouble. These were sturdy military bikes and could withstand considerable rough treatment, but had their owners or Fuss caught me trying to ride them, I would certainly have been severely punished. That never happened, and I eventually learned to ride a bicycle. Later, when teaching my sons to ride a bike, I often wondered whether they realized that there were more perilous ways of learning the art than to have a father hold on to the saddle until he thought that it was safe to let go.

  Fuss was in the habit of walking through the factory halls and yards with a whip. When he saw prisoners who were not working, he would beat them severely with his whip. He administered these beatings indiscriminately to men and women alike, frequently hurting his victims quite badly. After seeing one such beating, I decided to try to alert the workers that Fuss was on his way. As soon as I saw that Fuss was getting ready to make one of his rounds, and if I did not have other chores to perform for him, I would run ahead of him through the factory halls. Since Fuss usually wore a Bavarian hat with a feather, I would signal his imminent arrival by wiggling my finger at the top of my head. I got a big kick out of performing this service and probably saved many a prisoner from a beating.

  In the evenings, I would tell my mother and father what I had been doing that day as Fuss’s errand boy. On one occasion, I mentioned that I could hear the radio broadcasts Fuss listened to in his office. He usually had the radio on quite loud, and when I sat in the corridor near his door, I had no trouble hearing everything being said. Once I even heard Hitler speak; I was sure that it was Hitler because the person sounded just like my father when he put on a Hitler imitation for our closest friends. That was a very dangerous thing to do, and my mother always warned him that someone might denounce him to the Gestapo, but my father seemed to relish doing it. My report about the radio broadcasts prompted my father to suggest that I listen very carefully, try to memorize as much as possible what I heard, and report to him in the evening all I could remember. That became my regular assignment. Thereafter, whenever I had a chance, I would listen to Fuss’s radio and sometimes also to what he and his visitors were talking about. One day, I thought I heard that Mussolini had been captured by partisans. Since I knew that Mussolini was Hitler’s friend, I could barely wait to tell my father all about it. For a while, no one wanted to believe me, but then the news was confirmed by some Polish workers who were regular employees at Henryków. From then on, my reports on what was being broadcast on German radio were eagerly awaited. But our joy over Mussolini’s capture was short-lived, for we soon learned that he had been rescued by the Germans.

  The perimeter of the Henryków factory was guarded by soldiers who were, we were told, Tatars. They must have gone over from the Soviet side to the Germans when taken prisoner and were serving in German auxiliary units. They were not heavily armed, which apparently prompted some young men in our barrack to believe that it would be easier to escape when the Tatars were on duty. One night, some of these prisoners cut through the barbed wire fence. The Tatars, who always struck us as less committed to guard duty than their German counterparts, nevertheless spotted the attempted breakout. They shot and killed one of the escaping prisoners on the spot and captured the others. We were, of course, awakened by all the shooting and screaming. The next morning, the Tatars turned the prisoners over to the Gestapo, who drove away with them. Some days later, after gallows had been erected in front of our barrack, the prisoners, badly beaten and barely able to walk, were brought out. We had to line up and watch the hangings. The prisoners were ordered to stand on chairs under the gallows while the Germans forced an equal number of inmates, standing on ladders, to pull the nooses over the hoodless heads of the condemned prisoners. I could see that the hands of one of the inmates were shaking violently as he struggled to put the rope over the prisoner’s head. The prisoner turned and kissed the man’s hand, said something to him, and slid his head through the noose. The Gestapo officer in charge of the execution saw what had happened and furiously kicked the chair out from under the prisoner. It was obvious to us that the valor of the condemned man had robbed the German officer of much of the pleasure he must have expected to derive from his death. As I watched this horribly tragic scene, I was gripped by a curiously perverse sense of Schadenfreude, for it was only on very rare occasions that we could claim to spoil the pleasure the Gestapo appeared to derive from tormenting us, and this was one such occasion.

  The bodies of the prisoners were left hanging for a few days near the entrance to the barrack as a warning against further escape attempts. There were to be other executions in Henryków. As time went on, they became routine; but I remember only the first. The dignity and humanity the young prisoner demonstrated moments before his death — and the disdainful refusal of the other condemned men to plead for their lives — no doubt served over time to reinforce my conviction that moral resistance in the face of evil is no less courageous than physical resistance, a point that has unfortunately been frequently lost in the debate over the lack of greater Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

  Our life at Henryków came to an end abruptly one morning in July 1944, almost a year after we got there. A large contingent of German soldiers entered Henryków and ordered all of us to line up in front of the barrack. Then we were marched under heavy guard to what I believe was the freight railroad station of Kielce. When we got there, we found that the prisoners who had ended up in Ludwików when the labor camp was liquidated were already at the station. Here a freight train was waiting for us, and we were all ordered to get in. The doors were then locked from the outside. There was little light in the cars, although we could look out between the slats on either side. I saw that the last car of the train was an open cattle car bristling with heavy machine guns pointing in all directions. Soldiers with submachine guns sat in little cabs above each car.

  As we were boarding the train, we heard various announcements over the loudspeaker. One informed us that our next destination would be a factory in Germany where we were needed. This announcement was greeted with considerable relief and for a while seemed to silence the whispered rumors that we were on our way to Auschwitz. While I could not quite imagine what Auschwitz was really like, I had heard terrible stories about it, and I could sense that the mere mention of the name sent shivers down the backs of my parents and the other grown-ups.

  Many hours passed as the train moved through the Polish countryside. Asked where he thought we were being taken, my father assured everybody in our car that the train appeared to be moving toward Germany, not Auschwitz. Having studied at the university in Kraków, not far from Auschwitz, my father knew that part of the country well. Sometime later, I heard my father whisper to my mother that the train had veered off the route to Germany and was moving in the direction of Auschwitz. Others soon realized what was happening. People began to cry and pray; others huddled together in whispered conversations. I remember my father taking a big gulp from a small bottle of vodka before passing it to my mother. My mother kept squeezing my hand and hugging me from time to time.

  Two men in our car started to pry open some floorboards in the middle of the car. Similar escape plans were apparently being hatched in other cars. As it got dark and while the train was traveling near a forested area, machine-gun fire, coming from the last car, exploded all around us. Our guards mu
st have spotted those who were trying to escape by sliding through the holes in the floor of the cars and lying very flat between the rails. We never found out whether any of these prisoners made it. The train did not stop, and the shooting continued for some time. There appeared to be some additional escape attempts, followed by more gunfire, but the rest of us resigned ourselves to the fact that we would soon be arriving in Auschwitz.

  CHAPTER 4

  Auschwitz

  I WAS TEN YEARS OLD on that sunny morning in the first days of August 1944 when our train approached the outskirts of the concentration camp of Auschwitz. Actually, as we were to find out later, we were on our way to Birkenau, located some three or four kilometers down the road from Auschwitz proper. It was in Birkenau that the gas chambers and crematoriums had been erected, and it was here that millions of human beings died. Auschwitz proper was merely the public front for the Birkenau extermination camp. Auschwitz was shown to visiting dignitaries, whereas Birkenau was the last place on earth many of the prisoners sent there were destined to see.

  As the train moved closer and closer to Birkenau, we could see hundreds of people in striped prison uniforms digging ditches, carrying bricks, pushing heavy carts, or marching in formation in different directions. “Menschen!” (“Human beings!”), I heard someone mutter, and I sensed a collective sigh of relief in our car. “After all, they do not kill everybody on arrival,” must have been the thought that flashed through our minds. The mood in the car lightened somewhat, and people began to talk again. “Maybe Auschwitz is not as bad as it has been made out to be,” somebody said. I thought that it looked just like Henryków, only bigger, and that it would not be all that bad.