Four Perfect Pebbles

by Lila Perl

  “Now one of my main occupations was to pick the lice from my clothing one by one and destroy them with my fingernails. Our bodies, our hair, our blankets all were infested, for the barracks themselves were crawling with lice because of the overcrowded and unclean conditions. Hair lice laid their eggs, called nits, in our hair. Clothing lice preferred the seams of our garments and our bedding.

  “I remember one garment I loved and tried to preserve. It was an off-white hand-knitted wool cardigan with short sleeves that someone had made for me in Westerbork. Somehow it stretched to fit me as I grew. I still wore it in Bergen-Belsen, for there my body weight was actually decreasing because of the growing hunger.”

  By the early months of 1945 the food at Bergen-Belsen consisted mainly of cabbage-flavored water and moldy bread. This ration was far less than the six hundred calories a day per inmate that the camp had formerly provided. The prisoners found themselves longing for the turnip soup with bits of gristly horsemeat and the pats of yellow grease called butter that they had received in “better” days.

  Despite the total breakdown in the food supply and in sanitary conditions, the SS continued to concentrate on preventing escape. Daily roll call went on for hours in the numbing cold. The police dogs—so dangerous that their handlers had to wear thick armguards and carry dog whips and pistols—continued to terrify the shivering inmates standing at Appell.

  The death toll was now mounting rapidly as the result of exposure, hunger, severe diarrhea, and fevers. In addition, as the winter drew to an end, the lice-borne disease known as typhus began to spread throughout the camp. Its symptoms were high fever, a red rash, headache, and delirium, often resulting in death. By March 1945, 35,000 out of 60,000 prisoners at Bergen-Belsen had died, mainly of typhus.

  “Yes,” Marion said, “death had become a moment-to-moment occurrence. In our dark, crowded quarters we often tripped and fell over the newly dead. Their bodies could not be taken away quickly enough.

  “Yet even with these terrible sights all around us, even with the stench of the overflowing latrines in our nostrils, those of us who could still function yearned above all for food. Bread came first among our longings, which we called the three B’s: bread, bed, and bath. For food was survival.

  “One evening in early April 1945 Mama, who still worked in the kitchen, was able to smuggle some potatoes, turnips, and salt into our barrack. She also brought an empty can, and with some splintered wood from our bed slats she managed to build a small fire over which to cook a soup. We had carefully chosen a place on the uppermost ‘bed’ of a triple-decker bunk where we and some others could shield our illegal and dangerous activity.

  “The soup took a long time to cook. It was still bubbling away and was almost done when Mama and I heard the sound of the guards approaching for a surprise visit. I was sitting on the bed near the pot of soup with my right leg bent at the knee. In our haste to cover up what we were doing, we tipped over the pot and the boiling soup spilled across my leg, scalding the lower part from the knee down.

  “I was just a few months past my tenth birthday, but I did not utter a sound. I knew better than to cry out. In our fourteen months in Bergen-Belsen the Nazis had tried to break us physically, spiritually, and emotionally. This forced us to learn self-discipline the hard way. Perhaps it was good that I had always been stubborn and strong-willed. Mama and I lost the soup that evening but not our lives.”

  Medical treatment of any kind had long ceased to be available at the camp, which was now in a state of almost complete turmoil. The war, it was rumored, would be over soon. Allied bombers roared overhead even during daylight hours, while at night the rumbling of Allied artillery could be heard shelling western front German cities. Would the camp commandant, Josef Kramer, the notorious “Beast of Belsen,” surrender the camp peacefully or would he order his SS to attempt a last stand, resulting in mass murder?

  For some 8,000 prisoners, the Blumenthals among them, the outcome would remain in question. Within days of the boiling-soup accident that had severely burned Marion’s leg, the members of the her family learned that they were to be evacuated “to the East.”

  “On April ninth, 1945,” Marion said, “we were marched to the station and put aboard a long train of cattle cars. My leg was now infected and oozing a thick yellow pus. The pain was very great, and I could not walk. We did not know that Auschwitz had been liberated by the Russians in January 1945, and we were sure that was where the Germans were sending us. It made no sense for them to ship us east when other prisoners were being evacuated to the West. But that was how it appeared, and we were given no explanation of anything.

  “Once more, this time so close to the war’s end, it seemed that our chances for survival were being snatched away from us and that death loomed closer than ever.”

  Six days later, on April 15, 1945, British troops reached Bergen-Belsen and liberated the camp. The commandant, Josef Kramer, gave it up without a struggle. He was later tried by a British military court and hanged. The thousands of prisoners who were still alive were freed and cared for. But the Blumenthals were not among them.

  CHAPTER 6

  “On the Death Train”

  “I don’t remember,” Marion said, “how we covered the distance of three to four miles to the railroad loading platform at the town of Belsen. I am sure that, weak as he was, Papa must have carried me.

  “Albert, of course, would have shouldered as many of our belongings as he could, as well as the knapsack in which he always managed to have at least a crust of bread or a raw turnip to share with the rest of us. Mama, too, carried a knapsack with personal belongings and precious documents, receipts, letters, and mementos, including our old family photographs. One good thing about the evacuation from Bergen-Belsen, frightening as it was, was that we were allowed to be reunited as a family and to remain that way.”

  The train that awaited the Blumenthals and their fellow prisoners had recently emptied itself of other prisoners who had been transported to Bergen-Belsen from the East. In fact, the ragged, hollow-eyed groups actually passed each other on foot, moving in opposite directions. Later the 2,500 Belsen evacuees learned that they were the last of the three groups to leave the camp. The balance of the 8,000 evacuees had departed earlier, starting on April 6.

  The first group had been taken to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, or Terezin, in Czechoslovakia, which was liberated by Soviet Army units on May 8, 1945. The second group had been shunted back and forth across north-central Germany until it was liberated by American troops near Magdeburg, a short distance to the east of Bergen-Belsen. The occupants of the third train were not so fortunate.

  “As bad as Bergen-Belsen was,” Ruth recalled, “we were terrified to be going on transport to what seemed like almost certain death. Why would the Germans want to empty the Sternlager so near to the end of the war? Was it because they had so many exchange Jews in the camp who had never been sent to Palestine? We were the evidence of their broken promises to the International Red Cross. Was that why they wanted to have us destroyed before the Allies arrived and learned the truth?”

  As ordered, the prisoners climbed into the boxcars. At first, with only about fifty people to a car, there was room to spread out and arrange themselves in their new quarters. It was agreed that the pail of drinking water and the toilet bucket would be kept as far apart as possible, at diagonally opposite ends of the cars.

  The prisoners now waited for the doors to be slid shut and bolted from the outside and for the train to start rolling. But oddly, nothing happened. The day was warm and sunny, and soon some of the bolder evacuees ventured down from the cars. A pile of rotting rutabagas, the turniplike vegetables that made up much of the camp fare, lay near the end of the platform. People began to sort through them for those that were the least odorous. Some even wandered into a nearby stream and began to bathe. Surprisingly the SS guards who were posted around the loading area made no attempt to drive the prisoners back into the cars.


  “They didn’t even shout a warning,” Ruth said. “So why didn’t any of us make a run for it? We couldn’t because we had a child with a serious leg wound. But some of the others might have made it into the dark pine forest beyond the loading ramp.

  “The answer, surely, was that no matter where we hid we would still be surrounded by Nazi Germany. So close to defeat, the country would be more dangerous than ever for an escaped Jewish prisoner. No, there was still no place to run.”

  All that day the train remained at the siding, its doors wide open. By early evening the prisoners had begun to build fires of dried twigs alongside the railroad track and to cook soups with the half-rotted rutabagas and any other roots or herbs they’d managed to dig up. Then, as darkness fell, they were herded back into the cars. The doors were bolted, and they awaited the start of the journey to an unknown destination.

  After a fitful night the prisoners awoke to find themselves still standing at the Bergen railroad siding. The train had not moved. It was now April 10, another pleasant spring day. The routine was much like that of the day before, except that additional prisoners from Bergen-Belsen straggled toward the train and entered the boxcars. Instead of fifty people, each car now held seventy to eighty. Also, bread was distributed to the prisoners, a large chunk that they were told must last them for eight days. Late that night, its doors again shut and bolted, the train at last began to move.

  The next morning, with the train having traveled only about fifteen miles north of Bergen, it halted, and the doors were unbolted. As the SS guards slid them open, they called into each car, “Toten raus!” (“Out with the dead!”)

  Already several cases of typhus had developed on the train, for many of the prisoners had been incubating the disease while still in Bergen-Belsen. The two-week incubation period began with the bite of a louse that carried the typhus germ. No symptoms showed until the deep pink, pea-size spots appeared around the midriff. This rash had given the disease the common name of spotted fever. Its onset was accompanied by a severe headache and a high fever that often resulted in delirious ravings and hallucinations. Death usually followed within one to two days. If, however, the patient survived past the twelfth day, it was believed that there was a good chance for recovery.

  “This cry of ‘Toten raus!’,” Mama said, “was repeated throughout the trip, as more and more people fell victim to the disease. We prisoners had to bring out our dead. Then the SS would give us pickaxes and shovels to dig a shallow pit alongside the railroad track, while they stood guard over us. We buried our loved ones, covered over their mass grave, and there we left them.

  “One especially pitiful burial was that of a little boy, only seven or eight years old, who was the son of a heavyset Greek Jew named Albala. Albala had been our head Kapo in Bergen-Belsen, and he was hated by all of us. He never failed to give us that extra measure of cruelty when the German command was around to observe him in action. For these cruelties to us, he received special favors and privileges from the Germans.

  “But that day, as I watched him place his child’s lifeless body alongside the track, I thought, No, not even he, the hated Albala, deserves such a sorrow.”

  The mounting deaths from typhus gave the death train its name. But the killer disease was only one of its scourges. Almost everyone suffered from dysentery, and many were unable to wait for one of the train’s frequent stops to relieve themselves. Others were too weak to crawl down from the cars. So the latrine buckets overflowed, and the cars became open sewers.

  The passengers were ill, too, with pleurisy and tuberculosis, diseases that spread easily when people coughed or spit. And many had wounds that, like Marion’s, failed to heal.

  “It was impossible,” Marion said, “to keep the large burned area of my leg clean. It continued to ooze pus and was attacked by lice that I removed one by one and destroyed. Many people shaved their heads to be rid of the lice that we had carried with us from the camp, and that were surely on the train as well when we boarded it. But I begged Mama not to shave mine. So she carefully combed out the head lice several times a day, as she had done in Bergen-Belsen.”

  By April 15 the slow-moving train had traveled only as far as Lüneburg, about fifty miles northeast of Bergen. Often it stopped during the day in wooded areas to hide from the Allied aircraft that flew overhead.

  Although the Germans attached a white flag to the train, the Allies had no idea of the innocent cargo it carried. Dive-bombings and strafings with machine guns continued, and sometimes the train was even caught in artillery crossfire. If the attacks came by day, the train stopped, and if the doors were opened, those who could run sought cover in nearby ditches. During night attacks the cars remained sealed, and the prisoners could only huddle in their places and hope for the best.

  A few days later the train crossed the Elbe River, heading in an easterly and then a southeasterly direction. Soon after it had reached the far side of the river, the bridge on which it had traveled was blown up by Allied bombers. The train was now in the zone between the Western Allies and the Russians. It was, in fact, headed toward Berlin, the German capital, where Hitler still held out.

  “By this time,” Ruth reported, “so many had died of typhus that we were once again able to find a little room for ourselves in the cars. Our bread and water were long since gone. But the great number of stops made it possible for us to dig some potatoes, beets, and other root vegetables from the edges of fields. Water for drinking was our main problem. Some people drank from the creeks and streams along the tracks. But this was dangerous, for it could lead to severe diarrhea. So once, when the train stopped, I went up front to the locomotive and begged water from the German engineer. He did me a great kindness in letting me have as much water as I had vessels for. The water came from the steam locomotive itself and was hot and rusty. But at least it was safe for us to drink.”

  After one week on the train the prisoners came in sight of the bombed-out capital of Berlin. Because of the extensive damage to the railway lines, it took two days to cross the city. The train had to stop frequently to be backed up and rerouted wherever there were broken tracks, derailed cars, disabled locomotives, or heaps of rubble. The buildings that still stood appeared as weird silhouettes against the sky.

  “These sights,” Marion said, “all told us that the war must be coming to an end. Yet the Germans insisted on moving us onward along what was left of their railway system. It was senseless for them to do this, and it was terrifying to us. We could only conclude that they were determined to kill us, even in the midst of their own death throes.”

  After Berlin the train continued in a southerly direction, traveling almost parallel with the Polish border. The area had once been a rich farming belt. Although it now suffered from wartime shortages, the prisoners found it possible to obtain occasional handouts of bread and potatoes. An almost friendly SS man would accompany the groups of food seekers to a farmhouse door and wait there while they tried their luck.

  Gradually the prisoners noticed that another favorable development was taking place. Some of the farmhouses had been recently abandoned. The German farm population was fleeing the area, a sure sign that the Russians, approaching from the East, must be close at hand.

  “We were so ill and weak,” Ruth said, “skeletons all of us, that we hardly realized what was happening. The train had become our ‘home.’ We crouched there like sick animals, sleeping, eating whatever we had, delousing ourselves and our clothing.

  “Then one morning, very early, the doors were slid open. Men in uniforms sprang aboard, but they were not the SS. They spoke roughly in a strange accent, saying over and over again a word that sounded like the German for ‘watch,’ ‘Uhr, Uhr!’

  “Some already had their arms full of wristwatches. Only a few of us had anything to give them, for we had long since bartered away everything we had for food. But they were good-natured about it. And when we looked out through the doors of the train, we saw that there were other Russian sol
diers like them, marching alongside the track. They were leading away as prisoners our SS guards, or at least those SS who had not managed to escape during the night.

  “We knew then that after six and a half years this was the day of our liberation from the Nazis. It was exactly two weeks since we had boarded the death train in Bergen-Belsen. The date was April twenty-third, 1945.”

  Photo Insert

  A Bergen-Belsen prisoner suffering from typhus, the disease that had killed tens of thousands at the camp by March 1945

  April 1945, immediately after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen: women peeling potatoes while the unburied bodies of the dead lie in the background

  The grave of Walter Blumenthal in Tröbitz, Germany, as it appeared at the time of his burial in June 1945

  The marked burial site of Holocaust victim Walter Blumenthal, as a result of the work of caring and conscientious non-Jewish residents of Tröbitz

  Entrance to the Honorary Jewish Cemetery that exists today in Tröbitz

  Albert in Amsterdam, to which he commuted daily from Bussum while attending secondary school

  Marion in Holland in December 1945, her shorn hair not yet fully grown back

  At the Youth Aliyah home in Bussum, 1946: Albert in center and Marion, wearing glasses, at far right

  In Peoria, Illinois, summer 1948: Albert with Marion, age thirteen and a half

  Spring 1951: Marion, Ruth, and Albert in a park in Peoria

  Marion’s graduation from high school, June 1953

  Marion and Nathaniel’s wedding, August 2, 1953