5
Liberated
Prague
JUST NORTH OF BERLIN, IN THE TOWN OF ORANIENBURG, not hidden in the woods but in the town, was the Sach-senhausen concentration camp. For twelve years, people living in gray Prussian houses with high-pitched roofs, neat little gardens, and painted metal gates watched emaciated prisoners march by. Then in 1945 the Germans marched forty thousand prisoners away to nowhere. They did not have the capacity to kill them all and they did not want them to fall into Allied hands, so they marched them. Hundreds dropped dead. Hundreds more were shot. But three hundred were left behind in the hospital, a long, one-story barrack on the edge of the camp.
When the Germans gave the order for the march out of the camp, there was disagreement among the prisoners in the hospital. Should they drag themselves out, or should they claim to be too weak to stand up? Their survival had turned on such decisions for years. Some of the hospital inmates expected that the people who went on the march would be shot. Then, too, they might really be too weak to survive it. How far would they be marched? Others thought that anyone who said he was too weak to march would be shot. Some thought the hospital had been wired and that the Germans would blow it up with them in it.
The three hundred hospital inmates watched the SS march the last survivors off. Some waited for the explosion. There was none. They waited longer—nothing happened. There was no point in leaving, nowhere to go, and no use in turning to the people who lived in the neat gray houses along the road from the main gate. The hospital had shelter and a little food, and so they stayed there. The Sachsenhausen concentration camp was liberated one week later by three heavily armed Red Army soldiers who burst into the hospital. They had mongolian features and said something quickly in Russian. Then they left, and the group was alone again. Karol Wassermann, a Slovak Jew, understood enough Russian to know that what they had said was, ‘You are free.”
ONCE THE THREE HUNDRED Sachsenhausen inmates were pronounced free, they were alone—free at last, free to eat and die. And that was what they did. First they looked around the camp for food. Then they slipped out, nervously avoiding the town, going out to the woods, where they caught rabbits and birds and found plants and fruits. Returning to the camp, they cooked rich stews arid roasted meats. And they died. These people had been living-some of them for years—on a slice of bread and thin soup that was little more than flour and water. You could never get enough. “I could have eaten—or rather drunk—ten liters of that soup. There was nothing in it,” said Karol Wassermann.
Now they had real food, and they died from it. In all the liberated camps of Europe in the spring of 1945, some survivors dropped over from exhaustion, some succumbed to epidemics— tuberculosis and typhoid—and thousands died from overeating. Survivors hoarded sausages, meat, bread, clothing, blankets—the things that had made the difference between life and death in the camps. Who knew how long this liberation” phase would last? When the Holocaust started again, they would be ready. Or they would be ready for the next one. Even in the early 1950s orphanages for camp survivors found that some of the children were still hoarding food from the dining hall.
Karol Wassermann, a pharmacist who knew something about medicine, was not going to eat himself to death. The first few days, he barely allowed himself to eat at all. He tried to warn the others as well. But Wassermann was a difficult man; he always went against the grain and was not well liked. When he had first been admitted to the hospital in a fever-driven delirium, he had repeatedly talked about death and—worse—the smell of death. By then, a small c rematorium had been built on the edge of the camp, and the smell from it drifted throughout the triangular-shaped Sach-senhausen compound and into the little town of Oranienburg. But in the camp, as in the town, you didn't talk about the smell. The inmates did not like people who talked about these things. After the Liberation, when Wassermann tried to tell people that they would die from eating, it was just Wassermann talking about death again. For now, there was food. They should try to get a few pounds back on their bodies before the Germans returned.
They spent their first week completely on their own. Then the Soviets, not the Germans, came back and tried to help them. By then, half of them were dead or dying from overeating.
Two days after the war ended, Wassermann was able to get a bus to Prague. When he arrived, he saw that the city's stone bridges, spires, and dark passageways were still undamaged. Moritz Mebel remembered the Prague Liberation very differently from the one in Budapest. “Oh, Prague! It was a huge party. I have never again seen anything like that. We were hosted by people. You felt that Liberation was really celebrated with their hearts!”
Once Wassermann was in Prague, he looked for his aunt, who he hoped would not have been deported because she was married to a Christian. He recognized a few other survivors wandering the cobblestone streets. They looked like him, like most people he had known in recent years. The stare, the body that looked as if it were held together by strings. They too were looking for a relative or friend who was still alive. After days, Wassermann did find his aunt alive. She had a place where he could stay and begin to reorganize his life.
He was a Slovak and did not plan to stay in Prague. Czechoslovakia, which had been put together at the end of World War I, had been separated by Hitler. He had kept the western part—Bohemia and Moravia, including Prague—because he considered it to be German. The eastern Slovak region had been handed over to the pro-Nazi Slovak nationalist Father fozef Tiso. Now that the Slovak nationalists had been defeated and disgraced, Czechoslovakia was a single country again. For a few weeks, Wassermann and his aunt waited in Prague in the hope that his brother Tybor would turn up on one of the trains of returning survivors, just as he had. But after some weeks of vainly checking the arriving trains, Karol and his aunt returned to their native central Slovak mining town of Banska Stiavrica.
With a list of family possessions that had been hidden in various non-Jewish homes in town, they went from door to door asking for their belongings. And at each doorway they heard the same claim: Their possessions had been stolen by the Russians. In the end, all they managed to collect was the one item of no monetary value—a portrait of Karol's father.
Karol went to see a woman he had known before the war to tell her that he had been with her husband in Sachsenhausen. So many people were missing, and if you knew someone's story, you had to tell the family. Wassermann had seen the husband “go to the other side.” Everyone was learning this phrase. When a train had arrived at the camp, some of the passengers had been sent off to work and others had been pointed in a different direction —“to the other side,” for extermination. The woman explained to Karol that he was mistaken, that she had been to a clairvoyant who had seen him in Siberia. “He will be coming back from Siberia,” she kept insisting.
“He is not coming back,” Wassermann repeated. “I was there. He is not coming back.”
“I saw him in Siberia. You'll see.”
Wassermann shook his head. He had no patience for this nonsense. But she also had news for him. She had found her brother on a train of survivors from Poland. He was weak and had died within days, but he had spent those last days telling her about things he had seen, including the death of Wassermann's brother Tybor. His death had been so horrible that Wassermann was never able to retell that story.
It took one more stop for Karol Wassermann to decide that he was through with the Slovaks. He went to the Jewish cemetery to visit the graves of his mother and father, who had died before the war. The cemetery was now just an empty field, littered with fragments of stone. Slovak fascists had destroyed it. Standing over the shattered stones where his parents’ graves used to be, Wassermann asked himself, “How can I live in this town ever again? Whenever I shake someone's hand, I will wonder if these are the hands that knocked over my parents’ gravestones.”
THE CZECH LIBERATION ARMY of Ludvik Svoboda was still in Prague. With it was a newspaper correspondent, Frantisek Kraus. Befo
re the war, Kraus had been a well-known Prague journalist living with his wife Alice on Kozi Street in the old Jewish ghetto that dated back to the Middle Ages. After 1848, Jews had been allowed to live outside the ghetto, and as they became prosperous citizens, they moved out of the cramped old neighborhood. Whoever was poorest took their place, and the Jewish town eventually became the rat-infested Prague slum. In 1893 slum clearance began, and when it was over, the ancient Jewish neighborhood had been converted into a fashionable art nouveau neighborhood. Only six synagogues, the cemetery, and the Jewish town hall were preserved. By 1938, Prague Jews had become indistinguishable from gentiles. Prague remained, as it had been for centuries, one of the important Jewish centers in the world, but it was more famous for its writers and composers than for its Torah and Talmud scholars. The Kraus family was typical of sophisticated, well-educated modern Prague Jewry. Frantisek, a fourth-generation Praguer, would go to synagogue for Sabbath, but instead of walking there as required by religious law, he would take a streetcar.
When the Germans came, they did not seem to have many problems finding the Jews, even the most assimilated. Shortly after the Nazi invasion on March 15, 1939, twenty-six thousand Jews emigrated to Palestine. Of the ninety thousand who remained in the Czech lands, only twelve thousand survived the war.
Frantisek and Alice were sent to Theresienstadt and from there, because they were young and strong, to labor camps. While Fran-tisek's forced labor detail was repairing rail lines in Germany, he escaped and resumed his profession: He traveled with Svoboda as a war correspondent. After the war, when he got back to Prague, he discovered that the apartment on Kozi Street was taken. During the war Germans had lived there, and once they fled, a Czech family had found it abandoned and moved in. They told Kraus that it was now their apartment and that they intended to stay.
Not only did he have no home, but he found no trace of Alice, who had been sent to a women's labor camp. The Allied military operated an office for camp survivors who were looking for their relatives, but he could learn nothing from them. But unknown to him, the war had not yet ended for Alice.
She was in southern Poland, just across the Bohemian border in Kudowa, where the Germans had used almost three hundred women prisoners for a small airplane parts factory. Almost every night during the last three months of the war, she had seen zips of light, followed by the deep booms of Katyushas, Soviet rockets. On the evening of May 7, 1945, with Hitler already dead for a week, the Germans signed an unconditional surrender. On the same day, a man from Nachod, a Bohemian town a mile and a half away from Kudowa, walked across the Czech-Polish border to Kudowa to negotiate with the woman SS commandant. His offer was simple: Let these women go, and we will give you civilian clothes. On the morning of May 8 there were no more uniformed SS in the camp. The people of Nachod took the freed prisoners into their homes, fed them, and looked after them. But on May 11, only a few days after the end of World War II, a large SS division came through Nachod, desperately fleeing the Red Army and trying to reach the nearby U.S. Third Army. The townspeople tried to stop the division, holding it up just long enough for the Red Army to arrive. Once there the army forced a final stand in the Nachod town square as the locals and work camp refugees hid in the nearby woods listening to more Katyushas.
Alice got back to Prague and found FrantiSek, and they resolved to start life again the way it had been. They would go on being Prague Jews as they had always been—not very religious, but active and clear in their Jewish identity. She would try to forget everything that had just happened.
But not all survivors felt that way. One woman who had been with Alice in Kudowa and Theresienstadt left for America, vowing never again to even tell anyone she was Jewish. She settled in California, and there she discovered something strange about America: Everybody was something. They were Jewish, or they were Italian, or they were Mexican. They all talked about it. You apparently had to be something, and so she and her family called themselves Jewish. It was a distant and safer world, where Jews always talked about Jewishness. One day years later, she saw a book in a shopping mall bookstore about Rudolf Hoss, the Auschwitz commander. In one of the pictures inside she saw an emaciated girl who she recognized as herself in that far away nightmare.
6
Liberated
Poland
BY THE TIME MARIAN TURSKI WAS 18 YEARS OLD, HE HAD survived the Lodz ghetto, two winter forced marches across Central Europe, and three concentration camps. Finally, on May 8, 1945, the last day of the war, the Germans ran out of places to move their prisoners. Turski, exhausted from the marches and already cheated out of two camp liberations, was able to stay in Theresienstadt until the Soviet Third Guard Tank Army rolled up to the fortress town. But his struggle to survive was not yet over. Suffering from typhoid, he lay in a Soviet field hospital too weak to move until the following September.
The first sealed-off ghetto had been in his native Lodz. In 1941, ten years after Icchok Finkelsztajn fled the depression, the Germans had walled off a section of the city in which they trapped 163,177 Jews from all over Europe, forcing them to operate more than a hundred factories for the Nazi war effort. Those who survived the squalor had been shipped to death camps.
Turski's mother, father, and younger brother and most of the people he knew were among the missing 160,000. It seemed certain that his father and brother had been gassed at Auschwitz. A woman he had worked with in the ghetto's Communist underground told him she had seen his mother in Bergen-Belsen. That was something he could try to hold onto—the fact that the last time his mother had been seen, she was still alive. But he was still too weak to look for her. He had to rest and try to put on some weight and get some strength or, after all he had lived through, he would not survive.
After a few weeks, Turski went to the Silesian town of Waldenberg, a displaced persons center. There he befriended a man in his midthirties who was eager to meet a ghetto and camp survivor like Turski. The man was full of questions. He was not sure what he wanted to do, he told Turski, but he was certain that he wanted to leave Poland. They talked and pondered the future together. Turski also did not know what he would do once he got back his strength. His friend—this slranger who was his only friend at the moment—decided to search Jewish clubs and organizations for other DPs and to find a way to get to Palestine. Before he left, he asked Turski for a photo by which to remember him.
After the man left, he drifted to camps and clubs, talking to as many other refugees as he could. One night, he ran into a group of DPs who had not seen Poland since they were deported to camps. How is Warsaw? How is Lodz? They wanted to know everything he had seen while wandering Poland. The man had pictures to show them—photos of the piles of rubble that had been Warsaw, of Lodz, of his friend Marian Turski who had survived the Lodz ghetto.
One of the DPs, a woman, suddenly grabbed the photo of Turski. She was his mother. Marian Turski was not alone.
BEFORE THE WAR had even ended, Jakub Gutenbaum, only a teenager, already knew that he had lost almost everything. He had last heard from his father in the summer of 1940, when he was 11 years old. The father had escaped into the Soviet Union, and the family could only guess about how he had vanished.
Gutenbaum, his mother, and his younger brother were among the almost 400,000 Jews who had been forced into the Warsaw ghetto. The 80,000 non-Jewish residents of that neighborhood had been ordered to leave, and Jews had been packed into the three-and-a-half-mile area. Walls were built to close it off, and the Jewish third of Warsaw's population was left inside to starve.
Impatient with the death rate from hunger and disease, the Germans rounded up six thousand Jews each day and took them to an area by one of the gates, the Umschlagplatz. From there they would be shipped to camps for extermination. In 1943, when there were only about 40,000 Jews left in the ghetto, a thousand young people decided to fight to the death with smuggled arms. The Gutenbaums went to their hiding place in the ghetto, a basement, with about forty other people. The
hatchway was concealed by a pile of coal. As they hid, they could hear the Germans enter the house overhead, could hear them fire off their weapons. But the Germans didn't seem to find the hatchway under the coal. Then smoke started to snake its way through cracks in the ceiling. The Germans were burning down the house. The hidden Jews rushed to stuff rags in all the cracks. As the basement grew hot and then hotter, the forty, naked on the floor with their mouths open, gasped for air, and it still got hotter.
At night the Germans retreated and the basement cooled off. The Jews could go upstairs into the burned-out shell of the house to breathe. But the next day they went back into the basement, and the Germans burned again. They existed like this from April 19 until May 3. Then they heard a banging on the hatchway. Germans armed with machine guns ordered them all out. As they were marched through the ghetto with their hands behind their heads, they could see that the ghetto was now a charcoal-colored world in which nothing was alive, as though swept by a storm of fire.
The Gutenbaums and the other Jews spent three days in the Umschlagplatz, during which more and more groups with hands behind their heads were brought in. Finally, they were all stuffed into freight trains and taken to Maidanek. When they got out of the train, Germans with clubs in their hands, leading growling dogs that strained at their leashes, inspected them. Jakub was pushed away from his mother and younger brother. Soon they were in two different groups. Now 14, Jakub was taken to room number four with the men. His mother and brother were taken to room number five with the women and children.
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