Holocaust

by Gerald Green

  Karp stopped at a cot on which a young woman reclined. She was a cousin of Eva Lubin, a woman who had said she would fight in the resistance.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Hoefle asked her.

  “Fever.”

  Hoefle—he was a vicious killer, formerly an Einsatzgruppe officer—gently put a hand to her forehead. He looked at Karp, said nothing, and the two of them left.

  My father and Uncle Moses watched them depart. They knew now they could expect the worst. But they were determined to keep up the pretense; perhaps some miracle would result in their being bypassed. My father again tried to convince Karp that it would be a mistake to let diseased people ride the trains. But Karp would not let my father into his office.

  Hoefle lost no time in striking.

  It was learned later—through an informant in Karp’s police force—that the clinic was to be burned, and everyone in any way connected with it sent out on the next transport.

  The first blow fell on my mother.

  She was rehearsing the children in Jewish folk songs, village airs that she had gotten them to sing for her (quite a change for that grand lady, so proud of her Mozart and Beethoven), when Karp and an aide entered the classroom.

  Her presence was so dignified, so calm, that he was subdued, apologetic. “Excuse me, Mrs. Weiss,” he said. “You must come with me.”

  “May we rehearse the song once more? It’s for the children’s musicale.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “May I see Dr. Weiss?”

  “Your husband will be at the station.”

  At once she understood what was about to happen. Calmly (so one of her students told me) she got her coat, her pocketbook, and said goodbye to the children.

  “You coming back, teacher?” asked Aaron Feldman.

  “Of course. In my absence, Sarah, will you take the class?”

  The oldest girl nodded, and went to the front of the room.

  “If I am gone for some time,” my mother said, “you are not to neglect your lessons. You will be better people for being educated, for knowing Shakespeare, and the Pythagorean theorem. Goodbye, children.”

  They bid her goodbye. They had seen people leave for the rail station a thousand times; they knew about the transports.

  At the station, the usual mob of seven thousand were being assembled, registered, grouped. My mother looked at the small clinic and saw that it had been destroyed. She glared at Karp.

  “I’m under orders, Mrs. Weiss.”

  Lowy and his wife were also on the transport. My father had rescued them once. But now, the printer had been swept up in the newest roundup of victims. Mrs. Lowy was bawling uncontrollably.

  “Cut it out,” Lowy said. “How bad can it be? Be glad to get out of this hole.”

  Soon, my father, carrying two valises, appeared. He was allowed to take some of his medical supplies. He wore the dusty, battered Homburg he had worn making calls in Berlin, the same dark topcoat.

  He and my mother embraced.

  Lowy and his wife greeted him. “Sorry, doc. You tried. I guess we’re just destined to get shipped out together all the time.”

  “Yes,” my father said. “Fellow passengers again, Lowy.”

  The people on the shipment were a cross-section of the ghetto—the poor, the starving, middle-class Jews, and even relative aristocrats like my parents.

  My father tried to joke. “You know, Berta, I almost feel as if Lowy is an old classmate.”

  The Umschlagplatz was a dreary, depressing place—a yard about thirty by fifty meters. Around it ran a high brick wall and the rear of an abandoned building. Those scheduled for transport were herded through a wire fence. Inside, they sat on bags and valises, bartering for food, trying to cook, making last-ditch efforts to be released.

  My parents remained there twelve hours with the Lowys and hundreds of others before the trains arrived. It was a terrifying time. At one point, two young men tried to escape. They sneaked into the abandoned building and tried to cross from its roof to the adjoining house. The SS guards shot them down. Older people began to moan; children wept. There were no toilets. People relieved themselves in corners of the vast yard.

  “I wish they’d get on with it,” Lowy said. “The family camp has got to be better than this.”

  “Yes,” my mother said. “I believe we were ready for a change. Isn’t that so, Josef?”

  And yet all had been told the truth of the transports by my Uncle Moses: they were going to their death. Still, they tried to joke, to make light of the fate that awaited them. The guards were soon doubled—ghetto cops, Latvians, SS. This meant the train was due any moment.

  My father asked Lowy, “So the resistance is losing the master printer. How will they manage?”

  “I’ve trained Eva. If she keeps at it, she’ll make a good pressman.”

  My father nodded. The resistance. He would no longer be part of it. “What about my brother?” he asked Lowy.

  “Hiding with Zalman. It won’t be easy. The Germans are sweeping out whole blocks. Anyone hiding—shot on the spot.”

  At about five in the afternoon the train appeared. Again, the loudspeaker blared its orders—people were to proceed in orderly fashion into the cars, fill them, observe sanitary rules. There was a single bucket in each car for that purpose.

  So they moved to the train. My mother and father went arm in arm. A young mother, holding a child, pleaded with my father for medicine. He said he would help her once they were aboard.

  Karp, one of the most hated of all people in Warsaw, came abreast of my parents. “I’m sorry, Dr. Weiss.”

  My father made a last appeal. “Karp, get my wife off the transport,” he said. “She’s a teacher, an interpreter. She speaks better German than your masters. Make an appeal for her.”

  “No chance, doctor.”

  At the edge of the surging crowd, a young man had lost his mind, was straggling to escape through the wire gate. He was being methodically clubbed to the ground.

  “Josef,” Mama said. “You cannot get rid of me that easily.”

  He smiled. “Oh, I was just saying goodbye to our friend Chief Karp.”

  “Don’t blame me,” Karp said. “They’ll get around to me one of these days.”

  “If we don’t first,” Lowy said.

  They moved up the planks into the cattle cars. People ran for places near the openings in the slats. Breathing, moving, would be difficult. Lowy’s wife became hysterical.

  “Stop bawling,” Lowy said. “What did you expect? The Paris Express?”

  “I can’t help it. I’m frightened.”

  “So are we all, Mrs. Lowy,” my father said. “But we must look at things bravely.”

  More shots rang out in the Umschlagplatz. They had killed the crazed young man.

  My parents entered the cattle car. My father found a place, set his valise down as a seat for the two of them. “There,” he said. “First-class reservations. I must talk to the conductor about the deplorable condition of these cars.”

  She took his arm. “Josef, as long as we have each other, they cannot destroy us.”

  “Of course, my darling.”

  They were not aware of it, but their train was to be routed to Auschwitz, rather than Treblinka. The latter camp, more primitive, with smaller facilities, was jammed to capacity.

  By January 1943, our partisan band, under Uncle Sasha’s leadership, had raided the Ukrainian collaborators three times. We had guns and ammunition, and had killed several dozen of them. The time had come to attack the Germans.

  On a snowy New Year’s Eve, we gathered in a woods outside the town of Bechak, where an SS garrison had newly arrived. Samuel, the rabbi who had married us, conducted a brief service, as the soft, silent snow fell, covering our fur hats and heavy coats. Most of us wore boots stolen from the Ukrainians. We were all thin and hungry. Food was hard to come by in the winter, and we were forced to be on the move all the time.

  “Hear, oh Isr
ael, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” Samuel intoned softly.

  I had forgotten how to pray. Bar-mitzvah, high holidays, those had been the extent of my religious training. We attended (when we did) a reformed synagogue, with much of the service in German. I noticed that Uncle Sasha did not join in the prayers.

  He and I stood to one side, protecting our rifles, waiting.

  “What about you, Weiss? A prayer or two?”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “I know how, but I won’t. Not after my family was murdered.” He looked up at the wintry sky. The snow came down in powdery clouds, almost caressing us. “Give us a quote, rabbi, something that will help Jews going into battle.”

  Samuel finished his praying, smiled at Uncle Sasha and said:

  “‘And David said unto his men—gird ye on every man his sword.’ Amen.”

  There were seven of us in the party—all men. Sometimes the women went on raids. But against a German garrison, Uncle Sasha had decided that only men should fight. The rabbi left us to return to our camp.

  Soon we saw the lights of the village of Bechak. It seemed far away, on a different planet. The party came to a halt. I suddenly became the center of attention. They removed my fur hat and put a German helmet on my head. I took off the loose tunic I wore. Under it was a German army overcoat, belts, ammunition case. I carried a Mauser rifle.

  Sasha stared at me. “You’d fool me.”

  “I almost fool myself.”

  “Ready? Start walking. We’ll be a hundred meters behind you, one group on your right, one on your left.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  “Remember something else,” Sasha said. “Kill fast.”

  I walked alone, keeping to the countryside, plodding through the snow. Cold, frightened, I thought of my brother—doomed to rot in prison forever, it seemed. Of Anna, dead under circumstances that filled me with suspicion. Of my parents, living in the hell of Warsaw. (I was unaware that they had been sent to Auschwitz, or what their fate was.) And of my grandparents, dead by their own hands, unable to face the horror.

  Soon I was in the town. It looked beautiful, like a painting, in the snow. A dog howled at me. The streets were empty. In all occupied towns, curfew was strictly observed.

  We had scouted the town earlier. Yuri, disguised as a tinker, had wandered through the village a week earlier. The Germans had set up their headquarters in the town hall. They were an SS unit, probably sent to round up any remaining Jews. Their appetite for killing us was insatiable. We were not sure how many were there—perhaps a company, perhaps only a platoon. In any case, the enlisted men’s barracks were at the edge of the town, in an old mill. But the officers were quartered in the town hall.

  I entered by a side street. My boots crunched in the snow. There were two sentries on duty outside the hall. It was brightly lit. I could hear singing from inside. Of course. A New Year’s celebration. The Germans had Russian and Ukrainian whores and girl friends.

  The sentries passed one another in front of the hall. Then one moved on, vanished from view. I hurried out of the side street and walked briskly up to the remaining soldier.

  “Hell of a way to make a man spend New Year’s,” I said.

  “Hey … who are you?” he asked.

  “Battalion messenger. The goddam phone is out again. I have a message for the captain.”

  I’d come upon him so brazenly that he did not even ask me for the password. He was very young and small. And I sounded like, and looked like, an ordinary German soldier.

  “What captain?” he asked.

  “How the hell do I know? Wait, here it is.”

  I dug a paper from my coat pocket and gave it to him. The sentry walked toward the reflected light from the town hall and squinted at the paper. I got behind him.

  “Looks like Captain Van Kalt. Isn’t that what it says?”

  “There ain’t no such captain. What the hell—”

  I whipped a leather cord around his neck, dug my knee into his back and wrestled him to the ground. All the anger that had boiled inside me these years found itself in my arms, my hands. He struggled awhile, then stopped. I yanked the leather thong a few more times to make sure. Then I took his rifle. I dragged the body to the side of the stone steps and pressed myself against the building.

  In seconds, the other sentry turned the corner. I played no games with him. Instead I leaped from the brick wall and smashed at his neck with the rifle butt. His helmet flew off, and before he could shout, I’d batted him again. His head exploded.

  Uncle Sasha and the others came racing out of the shadows.

  “Yuri and your men, the back door,” Sasha said. “The rest of us, in the front. Go in firing, but for God’s sake don’t hit one another.”

  We plunged into the main room of the hall, without warning, without a word.

  There were a dozen German officers in the room, and perhaps an equal number of women. A young lieutenant was playing the piano.

  They all seemed weary, sated. It was not a very happy New Year’s party; and we did not make it any happier.

  Uncle Sasha fired the first bursts and killed three men near the door. Yuri shot the man at the piano, and he fell noisily on the keyboard. The women shrieked. Some—men and women—fell to the floor. A captain rose, holding his hands high.

  Uncle Sasha grabbed him by the collar. “The gun room.”

  “All right. Don’t kill us.”

  “Fast. Yuri, guard the others. Everyone else with me.”

  The captain—he had been slightly wounded in the arm—unlocked the gun rack. We festooned ourselves with machine pistols, rifles, handguns. Each of us took as much ammunition as we could carry. There was a medicine chest, and we took that also.

  “Can you manage that, Weiss?” Sasha asked me. He was pointing to a light machine gun.

  “I’ll try.” I picked it up, balanced it on my shoulders and followed them into the main room.

  Inside, Yuri had started to bind the hands of the remaining Germans. But Sasha was in a hurry. “There’s a faster way,” he said.

  He led us through the door. Then he ordered us to hurl grenades into the headquarters. We did. The explosions lit up the whole village; we knew that the soldiers at the main barracks would be on our tail any minute.

  We began to run.

  I felt the bullet slam into my shoulder. My back turned wet, warm. I got to my feet, but had to drop the machine gun. Yuri and another man helped me. When we got back to the camp, I was in a dead faint.

  I next remember Uncle Sasha cutting my clothing away. I was on my side. The disinfectant clogged my nose, burned my back.

  Then I heard a snipping, and the pain in my shoulder became unbearable. I howled. And on top of my howling, I could hear Helena screaming.

  “Stop! Stop! You’re hurting him!”

  She ran to the opposite side of the cot and began to kiss me, but she kept shrieking.

  Uncle Sasha’s voice boomed over her screams. “Quiet! Get away from him, or I’ll throw you out, wife or no!”

  “You’ll kill him with your damned stupid raids!” Helena yelled.

  “How is it, Weiss?” he asked.

  “It hurts like hell.”

  “I’ve almost got the bullet out. We can’t spare the morphine for this kind of thing. Hang on, you’ll be all right.”

  The snipping and clicking of Sasha’s medical instruments bothered me almost as much as the pain. Until he began to probe deeply, stabbing at nerves. The disinfectant, some kind of potent Red Army concoction, helped. My mind was so distracted by its harsh odor that I gritted my teeth and grunted, determined I would not scream.

  My father, examining my bruises once after a rough game played in the mud, decided I had a high threshold for pain; I could take a great deal. “It’s common among athletes,” Papa said, smiling. And almost added—“and those who are less intelligent and sensitive.” But I’m sure he didn’t mean that. It was simply that I was expected to be the family
roughneck, and I obliged. Just as now, with a bit of male bravado, in front of my wife, I would not yell, howl, or complain.

  Helena wept, sat down on the edge of the cot and kissed the back of my neck.

  “Worse pain once,” I chattered. “Worse … broke my ankle … didn’t play a whole year.”

  Sasha growled at her. “Get out of my way, dammit.”

  “No.”

  “Then it’ll take longer and he’ll suffer more.”

  Yuri, standing to one side, staring at my blood staining the blankets, tried to calm everyone. “It was worth it. One man wounded. And what a haul—rifles, machine guns, ammo. We must have killed eight of them.”

  Helena jumped from the cot. “I don’t give a damn about your haul!”

  “Ah, hell, it’s still bleeding,” Sasha said. “Hand me one of those bandage packs.”

  He worked on me for another fifteen minutes. Helena refused to leave the cot, stroking my head, kissing me. Finally, Sasha held up the misshapen slug. He had swathed my back in bandages.

  “There it is, Weiss,” he said. “From a Mauser. Something to show your grandchildren.”

  Yuri laughed. “Have it gold-plated.”

  Helena grabbed it from Uncle Sasha’s hand and hurled it against the wall. “Stop! Stop! I hate all of you! I can’t stand this damned joking, as if it were some kind of game! Sure it’s a game—but one we can never win! He’s almost bleeding to death and you make jokes about the bullet that almost killed him! I’m sick of this camp, and this useless war and the way you think you’re accomplishing something. So you kill a German here, a Ukrainian there—what of it? One day we’ll all be dead … one winter more will kill us all…

  Her voice became a choked, heaving sob. She fell on her knees and began beating the icy logs of the hut, screaming all the time that we were all doomed, that we might as well give ourselves up to the Germans.

  “I don’t want any more … I don’t want any more …” she kept sobbing. “No more … no more …”

  Uncle Sasha assembled his medical kit and nodded at Yuri, as if to say, “This is between man and wife.” They started for the door. I turned painfully on my elbow.

  “You did that almost as good as my father,” I said. “Nobody could tape the way he could.”