Four Perfect Pebbles
Page 1
Child’s identification card bearing the Nazi coat of arms, issued to Marion Blumenthal, age three and a half, in Hoya, Germany, on June 10, 1938
DEDICATION
To Joan Newman, to whom I am deeply grateful for the privilege of having met Marion Blumenthal Lazan.
—L. P.
To my mother, Ruth Blumenthal Meyberg, who carried the full burden and whose love and perseverance saw us through, and to my husband, Nathaniel, whose deep devotion has made the perpetuation of our heritage possible. And in memory of my father, Walter Blumenthal, who would have derived great joy and fulfillment from his three grandchildren—David, Susan, and Michael—and nine great-grandchildren—Arielle, Joshua, Gavriel, Dahlia, Yoav, Jordan Erica, Hunter, Ian, and Kasey Rose.
To all those who have known adversity and despair, I offer my belief that out of darkness can come light.
—M. B. L.
CONTENTS
Dedication
Prologue
1. “Four Perfect Pebbles”
2. “A Small Town in Germany”
3. “Get Dressed and Come with Us”
Photo Insert
4. “Escape to Holland”
5. “The Greatest Disappointment”
6. “On the Death Train”
Photo Insert
7. “Freedom and Sorrow”
8. “Holland Again”
9. “America, at Last”
Epilogue
Bibliography
Map: Germany and Surrounding Nations, 2016
Afterword to Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Photo Insert
Praise
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
This is the story of a family—a mother and father and their two young children—who became trapped in Hitler’s Germany. They managed eventually to leave that country for Holland, where they were soon again caught in the Nazis’ web, and their situation grew even more serious. For in the final years of World War II, when the Holocaust reached its most feverish pitch, the four members of the Blumenthal family were returned to Germany.
During their ordeal, lasting six and a half years, the Blumenthals lived in refugee, transit, and prison camps that included Westerbork in Holland and the notorious concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in Germany.
Bergen-Belsen was the camp to which Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were transported in October 1944. The two girls, aged fifteen and nineteen, died there of typhus in March 1945. It was in the very same section of Bergen-Belsen that the Blumenthal family remained imprisoned from February 1944 to April 1945. Marion Blumenthal, the younger of the two children, was nine years old when she arrived there. Her brother, Albert, was eleven.
The British troops who liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, wrote of its “indescribable” horrors. “Piles of corpses” lay unburied everywhere, while those who still breathed were “little more than living skeletons.” The entire camp population was infested with lice. Those prisoners who had not already succumbed were the dying victims of typhus and other epidemic diseases, starvation, exposure, and neglect.
The Blumenthals, however, were not among the deeply suffering prisoners who might have benefited from the British capture of Bergen-Belsen on April 15. Six days earlier they had been marched to the camp’s loading platform and placed aboard a train of cattle cars headed east in the direction of the dreaded Auschwitz extermination camp. For two weeks the “death train,” so named for the many passengers who died of typhus, made its tortuous way across Nazi Germany. When liberation came at last, it was at the hands of Russian troops who had little to offer those who staggered weakly from the train.
As a grown woman Marion Blumenthal Lazan recalls the events that shaped her youth. She tells of the four years she spent with her family in Holland’s Westerbork, of her terrified arrival in Bergen-Belsen and what it was like to live through the long chain of days behind its barbed-wire fences, and of the struggles of her teenage years of postwar Europe and America.
Invaluable details and documentation have also been supplied by her mother, Ruth Blumenthal Meyberg, and her brother, Albert Blumenthal. The inner strength and enduring spirit of the members of this family make it possible for all of us to become witnesses to an evil that, sadly, must remain forever in human memory.
CHAPTER 1
“Four Perfect Pebbles”
Long before dawn crept through the windows of the wooden barrack, Marion stirred in Mama’s arms. She had slept this way, wrapped in her mother’s warmth, for many weeks now, ever since her family had arrived at the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in northwestern Germany.
All around her were the sounds of the other women and children, lying in the three-decker bunks that ran the length of the barrack. As Marion came awake, the muffled noises sharpened. There were gasps and moans, rattling coughs, and short, piercing cries. And there was the ever-present stench of unwashed bodies, disease, and death.
Hardly a morning passed without some of the prisoners no longer able to rise from their thin straw mattresses. When the guards came to round up the women and children for roll call, they stopped briefly to examine the unmoving forms. Later those who had died in the night would be tumbled from their bunks onto crude stretchers, and their bodies taken away to be burned or buried in mass graves. Soon new prisoners would arrive to take their places. As many as six hundred would be crowded into barracks meant to hold a hundred.
Mama nudged Marion. “Get up, Liebling. It’s time.”
As soon as Mama withdrew her arms, thin as they had become, the warmth vanished, and the chill of the unheated room gripped Marion’s nine-year-old body. Cold and hunger. In her first weeks at Bergen-Belsen, Marion had been unable to decide which was worse. Soon, however, the constant gnawing sensation in her belly began to vanish. Her stomach accustomed itself to the daily ration of a chunk of black bread and a cup of watery turnip soup, and its capacity shrank. But the bitter chill of the long German winter went on and on.
On one of her earliest days in the camp Marion had actually believed that she saw a wagonload of firewood approaching. Perhaps it would stop in front of the barrack and some logs would be fed into the empty stove that was supposed to heat the entire room, for a few hours of glorious warmth. But she had been horribly mistaken. The wagon trundled past, and a closer look told her that it was filled not with firewood but with the naked, sticklike bodies of dead prisoners.
As on all winter mornings, getting dressed in the predawn grayness took no time at all. Marion had slept in just about everything she owned. All she had to do was to put her arms through the sleeves of the tattered coat that she had used as an extra covering under the coarse, thin blanket the camp provided.
Soon the cries of the Kapos (Kameradshaftspolizei, or police aides)—privileged prisoners who served as guards—were heard as they moved from barrack to barrack.
“Zum Appell! Appell! Raus, Juden!”
Marion and Mama must now find a way to relieve themselves before hurrying to the large square, with its watchtower and armed guards, where the daily Appell, or roll call, took place. There was not always time to visit the communal outhouse, about a block away from the barrack. The toilets in the outhouse were simply a long wooden bench with holes in it, suspended over a trench. There was no water to flush away the waste, no toilet paper, and, of course, no privacy.
Some mornings, Marion and Mama and the other prisoners had to use whatever receptacles they owned as night buckets—even the very mugs or bowls in which they received their daily rations. Before leaving the barrack for Appell, the prisoners had to make sure the room was clean, the floor swept, and their beds made. Each inmate stood in f
ront of her bunk for inspection. If the blankets were not tucked neatly enough around the sagging straw mattresses, punishments were meted out. The slightest infraction could mean losing one’s bread ration for the day.
Roll call was held twice a day, at six in the morning and again after the prisoners had returned from their work assignments. It was held in winter and summer, in ice and snow, in rain and mud. If a single person was missing because of sickness, death, or an attempted escape, all the prisoners were made to stand at attention, in rows of five, for hours—even for a whole day—without food or water or any way to relieve themselves.
Some prisoners did try to escape, but very few succeeded. Each section of the camp was surrounded by a high fence of barbed wire. The fence was charged with electricity and had pictures of death’s-heads posted on it as a warning. Prisoners who attempted to scale the fence were electrocuted. Others who tried to escape while on a work detail, outside the fenced areas, were almost always caught by the watchful eyes of the armed guards, by keen-nosed police dogs, or at night by sweeping searchlights.
Marion hoped, as she did every morning, that the roll call in the square would be over as quickly as possible. Then, after dismissal, there might be a few moments to see Papa and her eleven-year-old brother, Albert, who were imprisoned in separate barracks in the men’s section.
In Westerbork, the Dutch camp where the family had lived before, all four of them had been housed in a crude but private quarters. However, no such arrangement existed for any of the prisoners in Bergen-Belsen. Actually they were told they should consider themselves “lucky” to be in the section of the camp known as the Sternlager, or Star Camp. Here male and female prisoners were allowed to meet briefly during the day. Also, they could dress in their own clothes instead of striped prison uniforms. But of course, they must wear the yellow Star of David high up on the left side of the chest, as they had been forced to do for many years now. In the center of the six-pointed star the word Jude (German for “Jew”) was inscribed in black.
Today, possibly because of the icy temperature, the barracks guards had begun reporting their head counts quickly. There were two prisoners missing. But they had already been found. They had “run into the wires” sometime during the night. This was the term the Kapos used to describe the act of committing suicide when prisoners died by hurling themselves against the electrified barbed-wire fences.
In just under one hour the roll call had been completed. Already Marion and Mama had spotted Albert and Papa across the frozen ground of the square. Now the entire family came together in a hasty, wordless embrace, for there was never much time.
At once Papa began to push into Mama’s hands the extra rations he had managed to trade for cigarettes. In the weeks since the family had come to Bergen-Belsen, the male prisoners in the Sternlager had been receiving a small number of cigarettes once every few days. Papa, who did not smoke, immediately went about exchanging his cigarettes with other prisoners for bits of food, such as a small chunk of bread, a turnip, or even a potato. Mama, after making sure that Papa had kept enough for himself and Albert, squirreled these items away for herself and Marion.
Albert, too, usually had a small horde of secret treasure. He carefully collected the tobacco from partially smoked cigarette butts and made his own trades to get extra rations.
Marion had brought along her own secret treasure this morning, but hers was not anything to eat. She felt in her coat pocket to make sure the three pebbles were still there. There she carefully drew them out and opened her palm for Albert to see.
Albert, who seemed to be growing taller and more skeletal every day, looked down at Marion’s hand. “Yes, I see,” he said with a wan smile. “That again.”
“That again.” Marion mimicked him. Her deep-set eyes grew fiery. “Look closely. I have these three pebbles, exactly matching. Today I will find the fourth. I suppose you think I’m silly.”
“No, no.” Albert calmed her. He had always been the soothing, protective child. Marion was the excitable one.
“Four perfect pebbles,” Marion said proudly, watching her own breath form a mist in the frosty air. “One for each one of us. You’ll see. I’ll show you the fourth one tomorrow.”
Albert placed a hand on her shoulder. “Yes, of course.”
Marion flashed him a look, part love, part impatience. Big brothers were all the same. Time and again Albert told her that there could be no such thing as even two perfectly matching pebbles. Pebbles were like snowflakes. Every single one was different from every other one.
But Marion ignored such scientific reasoning. She had a fixed idea, one that was important for her to hold on to. If she could find four pebbles of almost exactly the same size and shape, it meant that her family could remain whole. Mama and Papa and she and Albert would survive Bergen-Belsen. The four of them might even survive the Nazis’ attempt to destroy every last Jew in Europe.
Over and over Marion had collected such pebbles in groups of four, terrifying herself when she could find only two or three and not a fourth that matched. A foolish pastime? A superstition? Perhaps. But the sets of pebbles were her lucky charms, and they gave her a purpose.
Searching for a complete set was a way to fill the succession of empty days. Every day of Bergen-Belsen was the same, with nothing to do but stand at roll call and worry about when Mama would reappear from her work detail. In Westerbork, where they had lived for the past four years, some of the camp inmates taught informal classes. But here there was no schooling or even any work for a child of nine.
There was only Marion’s self-invented game. It was her way of keeping her family together. It was also a way of linking a past she could vaguely remember with a future that she could hardly imagine.
How had Marion’s family become caught in the Nazis’ trap? Why had Papa’s carefully thought-out plans to escape from Germany failed? When, in fact, had all their troubles started?
Marion was too young to remember having lived the beginning of the story. But Mama remembered. She knew it all, and she would tell it to Marion as they lay whispering in their bunk at night.
As Mama told it, their family story sounded like a fairy tale that grew more and more frightening as it went on. Its ending had not been written yet. But it did have a fairly happy beginning. “Of course, you don’t remember”—Mama would sigh as she drew the covers more tightly around them—“when you were just a baby in that small town in Germany. . . .”
CHAPTER 2
“A Small Town in Germany”
Hoya. That was the name of the town where Marion had lived for the first four years of her life. It lies on the Weser River in northwestern Germany, about halfway between the cities of Hanover and Bremen. Like many of the old towns along the river, its streets were lined with pointy-roofed merchants’ houses, for the Weser was an outlet to the North Sea.
Mama often recalled how as a young woman of twenty she’d taken a very long train ride across northern Germany to “seek her future” and ended up in, of all places, Hoya.
Mama, who was born Ruth Moses, was the eldest of five daughters of a German-Jewish family living near the city of Tilsit, in far-off East Prussia. Today Tilsit, renamed Sovetsk, is part of Russia. “I wanted to get out of that small place,” she told her children. “So I answered an ad in the newspaper for a job as a bookkeeper. The first work I got was in Brakel, a place in Westphalia, to the south of here. But after a time I saw an ad for a better job, in a shoe store in Hoya. Hoya was even smaller than Brakel. And much, much smaller than Tilsit. It had only three thousand people and exactly forty-four Jews. But I liked it, so I stayed.”
There was more to Mama’s story than that. After working just two weeks in the Blumenthals’ family business in Hoya, she received a proposal of marriage from their son, Walter. And in December 1931, when Ruth was twenty-three and Walter was thirty-five, the couple married. Their first child, Albert, was born on October 11, 1932. Marion was born two years later, on December 20, 1934.
Oma cared for Albert and Marion and cooked the evening meal, for which the entire family gathered. While Marion, the baby of the family, was being rocked to sleep, the grown-ups sat around the table and talked. “We talked,” Mama remembered, “about the store, about the events of the day, and mostly about that man Hitler.”
“That man Hitler.” He had been around for ten years or more by the early 1930s, when Albert and Marion were born. As the leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ party—the Nazi party, for short (from Nazional, the German word for National)—he ranted against Communists, Jews, and gypsies, and against Slavic peoples, such as Poles and Russians, all of whom he considered inferior. He also denounced any Germans who were crippled, deformed, or mentally ill as being unworthy of existence.
Such nonsense, most people thought at first. The man was nothing more than a political crackpot with a small band of followers. In 1923 he had served nine months in jail after a crazed attempt to overthrow the government. His Nazi party was only one of many political parties that were represented by popular vote in the Reichstag, the lower house of the German parliament.
Yet by 1930 the Nazi party had gained an alarming number of deputies in the Reichstag. In a little more than a year its representatives had increased from 12 to 107. And two years later, in 1932, the Nazi party, with 37 percent of the vote, was the largest in Germany. Too splintered politically to form a united front against the Nazis, the other parties had become small and helpless.