Here to Stay

by John Hersey

  * * *

  —

  A transport came in from Birkenau, and among its passengers Stirner found a man who had worked in the vicinity of the gas chambers at that camp. He asked the new arrival, “What do they do with the women who have children?”

  “What do you expect?” the man said.

  “We’ve had no details, only rumors,” Stirner said. “Tell me.”

  “You are wondering about your own wife and children?”

  “Yes. One son only.”

  “How did they leave the transport? In a truck, at once, with the old and sick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I have to tell you that I can’t give you any hope.”

  Stirner asked, “Even healthy women?”

  The man from Birkenau grew angry. “I’ve been near the gas chambers day and night,” he said. “I tell you women with children simply don’t exist.”

  * * *

  —

  Early in the spring of 1944, Stirner found a new friend, a young Czech Jew named Edouard Kohn, who had a gentile wife at home in Prague. He had gone to Poland early in the war, in an effort to make his way to Sweden, but he had been caught, extradited, and put into a concentration camp; he had escaped, been found, escaped again, been found again, and at last had been sent to Auschwitz. He had a buoyant spirit, and he and Stirner became Pauker—buddies. Edouard’s wife sent him parcels, which he shared with Stirner. So many Germans were being withdrawn from the camp that Jews were moving, by default, into many of the administrative posts, and Kohn was given charge of a storehouse for chemical instruments in the plant, which by this time was in partial operation. He was able to smuggle pots, thermometers, water glasses, and even, sometimes, pure grain alcohol into camp, and when the news was good, he and Stirner had a few surreptitious drinks together. That was something new indeed for Auschwitz.

  * * *

  —

  The three British P.W.’s in Smuda’s welding shack had grown friendly with Stirner. One was George Watson, who had grown up in India and had never seen England; Stirner enjoyed telling him about his own country. The second was Dennis Deerfield, a Yorkshire boy, and tough. The third was James Simpkins, who had been in France in 1939 and 1940 and had gone through Dunkirk, only to be captured later in North Africa. These three shared with their Jewish friends chocolates, which Stirner had not seen for years, and soap and other treasures from their Red Cross parcels. Stirner told them everything he had seen in the camp; they found it hard to believe his stories. “How is it possible,” Walton asked once, “that there are ordinary Jerries living outside here, and that these frightful things could have been happening only a few hundred yards away?” Somehow the British had acquired a radio, and they relayed the BBC news each day; Stirner translated the German communiqués from Smuda’s paper; and then they discussed operations and strategy. All through the spring, they wondered when the second front would come.

  Just for fun, Stirner also wrote love letters for them, to German, Czech, and Polish girls who lived near the camp, whom they had of course never met, but whose addresses they wheedled from Smuda. “I’ll marry you,” one of them dictated one day. “I give you the word of a British soldier that I’ll marry you.”

  In order to improve his English, Stirner asked the men for reading matter, and when Simpkins gave him a pamphlet from an evangelical society in Boston, Stirner asked if he had connections in America, and he said he had. Stirner asked Simpkins to write his American friends, requesting them to forward a message to some friends of his own in Decatur, Illinois. At once they drew up a letter: “I have been in touch with Alfred Stirner. He is in good health. He knows nothing about any of his relatives in Europe. He says he would like to hear from you, and if you have time….”

  * * *

  —

  That spring the Häftlinge were permitted to form a marching band, under the leadership of a Polish Jew who had played in orchestras on the French liner Normandie and on several ships on the Mediterranean; the bandsmen used instruments that had been brought to the camp by musicians, been taken away from them, and been stored in the camp warehouses. At first this was pleasant. The band played every morning and evening, as the Kommandos marched to and from the plant. There were concerts on Sunday afternoons.

  Then one day a Pole who had escaped was caught and brought back into camp. He was marched around the camp wearing a placard that said, “I am glad to be back.” The next morning at roll call he was given twenty-five lashes, and while he was being whipped the band was ordered to play patriotic German music. After that it played for all whippings, and from then on band music gave no joy.

  * * *

  —

  Stirner wagered Dr. Bernhardt two loaves of bread one day, a tremendous stake that might have meant life or death for some inmates, that the Allies would land in France before April twentieth. He lost. Late in May—by that time there were only a handful of men alive from the two hundred forty who had been in Stirner’s transport—everyone was aroused by a rumor that the second front had begun. This was the false D-day rumor started by an Associated Press girl in London practicing on the office transmitter, and somehow it made its way to Auschwitz.

  * * *

  —

  The wealthy men and the riches of European Jewry were finding their way to camps like Auschwitz. Some men had managed to keep a few gems as they entered camp, and a lively trade grew up between the camp and the civilian populace living around it. In this trade the prominents, who had longstanding contacts with civilians, acted as middlemen. Of course the jewels were bartered for a tiny fraction of their true value, but nevertheless they often saved lives. Prominents could use their influence in other ways. Stirner tried to do what he could for a rich man named Emil Buenos, who had been born in Egypt and had been an art dealer in France and America, and who really tried to adjust himself to conditions in camp. Stirner managed to have him transferred from Kommando Number Four, the hard-labor gang, to lighter work; but the life was too hard, and Buenos died. Some men could not accept the camp’s ruthless levelling. The Frenchman Jules Mossé, who had served as a high official in the French government, never could understand that to be a Häftling really meant being a non-person; he tried to keep his dignity and his sense of position, and no matter how much Stirner and other prominents attempted to ease his fall into the anonymous mass, it crushed him, and he, too, died.

  * * *

  —

  At four o’clock in the afternoon of June 7, Stirner looked out of a window in his welding shack and saw one of the foremen, a young Jew, running wildly across the factory enclosure toward the shack. Stirner hurried outside and met the foreman.

  The youth said breathlessly, “They’ve landed! They’ve landed!”

  “It’s another rumor,” Stirner said.

  “I tell you it’s true, since yesterday morning.”

  Stirner ran in to Watson, Deerfield, and Simpkins, and asked them if the news was true. They said they didn’t know; they would have to wait for that night’s BBC.

  When the Kommandos marched back to the barracks that evening, all had heard—and by this time believed—the report. It was as if all the inmates were drunk. There was dancing in the barracks. The older men wept. Each person sought out his friends and congratulated them. Stirner hurried to see Dr. Bernhardt, who had not heard the news and said flatly, “It’s a lie.”

  Stirner was convinced that the invasion had begun, and he tried to persuade the dentist. Dr. Bernhardt’s hands started to tremble, and he said, “If we knew this were true, and if we knew our women and children were alive, we would be like newborn children—we could begin our lives all over again.”

  At the plant, first thing next morning, Stirner hurried in to Smuda’s shack to see his British friends. They were raucous and jubilant, and Stirner knew at once that the news was irreversibly true.

  That afternoon t
he German communiqué said that most of the Allied forces attempting to land in Normandy had been thrown into the sea. The Germans in the camp, who had been visibly nervous for twenty-four hours, seemed more confident. For the Häftlinge there were several days of anxious waiting. Then it was certain that a permanent bridgehead had been established, and they knew that it could only be a matter of time till they re-entered the world.

  * * *

  —

  During the next days a strange figure entered Auschwitz. He was a Czech Jew, a gynecologist who before the war had gone from Czechoslovakia to Poland to Sweden to England. There he had enlisted as a naval doctor, and he had been put aboard a former Blue Funnel liner that had been converted to a transport. On the ship’s second voyage to Singapore, the vessel had been waylaid in the Straits of Malacca by a German raider, the Atlantis, and during the gunfight the captain of the British ship had been killed, and the Atlantis had taken the vessel into its convoy as a prize. The raider and its half-dozen victims had then crossed the Indian Ocean, had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and had put in at last at Bordeaux, then in German hands. On the British transport’s manifest, in the ship’s safe, the doctor was found to have been registered as a Czech, not a Briton, and after the ship’s crew had been lodged in a P.W. camp at Bremen, the Gestapo had made inquiries in Czechoslovakia and had discovered that the doctor was Jewish. A few days later the doctor had been honored with a warrant of arrest personally signed by Heydrich, the SS chief, and had been taken to Auschwitz. He made a sensational stir among the inmates of the camp, trembling with hope over the Allied landings in the west, when he arrived there in a British naval officer’s uniform.

  Stirner befriended this hero and tried to get messages about him to Czech authorities in London, through his British friends, but no answer ever came.

  * * *

  —

  There was nothing to do but wait. Caen. Bayeux. Papers, maps, more waiting. June, July, August—then, suddenly, Avranches, Paris, and the French border; the Russians near Krakow.

  The atmosphere in camp grew tense. Some kind of decision was approaching, and no one could tell what the Germans would do in the last death struggle.

  Then the Allies were stopped. The Russians paused at the Vistula; the Americans stalled at Aachen.

  * * *

  —

  Early in August inmates of Auschwitz saw their first Flying Fortresses by day, when the Americans raided an oil refinery at Trzebinia, near Oswiecim. The German and Polish civilians who worked in the Auschwitz plant had concrete bunkers for shelters; the Häftlinge had only ditches—but this meant that they could watch the planes, and cheer. Bombs hit the refinery, and for days Trzebinia’s black smoke gave the inmates a grim pleasure.

  On August 20, at eleven o’clock in the morning, Fortresses attacked Auschwitz itself. It was a Sunday, and when the attack came, Stirner was fortunately doing some paper work inside the camp. The plant was the target. The barracks shook. A bomb that landed in the British P.W. camp killed forty; nearly eighty Jews were killed in the factory. The bombing was over in a few seconds. The plant, so painfully built, was a shambles: buildings had fallen, railroad tracks were overturned, big craters had been formed. The Germans set the Häftlinge to work cleaning up.

  From that day morale broke. There was an alarm nearly every morning for a few days, and a second attack came soon, and the inmates panicked and ran in every direction. There were a couple of attacks early in September, and the plant was again damaged, and again the Germans gave the inmates the task of making repairs.

  * * *

  —

  After the rebellion in Budapest that summer, when the dictator Admiral Horthy was pushed out by Szálazi, a whole string of transports began arriving at Auschwitz from Hungary, full of Jewish prisoners destined for the gas chambers. Upon their execution, the crematories were so overloaded that many bodies had to be burned in the open fields. The prevailing winds blew across the camp. At the plant there were already foul smells from the manufacture of metanol and buna—a nauseous odor above all of sulphur. When the new smell came, Stirner made a business of going around among the German civilians holding his nose.

  One German shook his head and said, “It’s bad.”

  Another shrugged his shoulders and said, “These things happen.”

  * * *

  —

  One morning in October, Stirner noticed that all the German civilians showed up at work in their Alarmkompanie uniforms, and he asked some of them what the reason was, and they said they were mobilized to assist the SS in case of riots. Later Stirner found out the real reason. A few days before, when a number of transports had come from Theresienstadt, the Auschwitz authorities had decided to exterminate the Kommando that had been working in the crematories and to set up a new one. Somehow the intended victims heard about the plan, organized a contact with another Kommando working in a munitions plant, obtained some dynamite, shoved their green-triangle Kapo into the crematories, and blew them and him up If Stirner and the others in the men’s camp had heard the explosion, they had not paid much attention to it.

  The Kommando had done a good job on the crematories. There were no more gassings at Auschwitz.

  * * *

  —

  Winter came on, and the inmates’ mood was bitter. The Allies seemed to be mired. The air raids were frightening. Winter itself was unbearable. Death was a daily collector at the roll calls on the parade ground. The British P.W.’s no longer received parcels, and the Jews, remembering the generosity of their British friends, began sharing their own meager food with them.

  * * *

  —

  Lena’s birthday had been in December. On the day after her birthday, a snowy day, Simpkins took Stirner aside and handed him a miraculous piece of paper. It was a note from Stirner’s friends in Decatur, Illinois. He hurried to one of the plant lavatories, where the guard was a Häftling. “Close the door,” Stirner whispered. “I have to read a letter.” Inside he unfolded the sheet and read the wonderful words:

  “As soon as the war is over, come to see us. We are still the same friends, Alfred, no matter what you have been through….”

  Stirner took great courage from that scrap of paper. He recklessly carried it into camp and showed it to all his friends.

  * * *

  —

  Just after Christmas there was a severe air raid in which the plant was almost totally destroyed, and after that the Germans made only halfhearted efforts to clean up the area.

  On January 13, the Russians broke through on the Vistula. Two days later there was a long night air raid. In the morning it was freezing cold. The guards were tired, and the authorities announced that there would be no work that day. A rumor went around during the day that the whole camp would be evacuated. Five days later, in the evening, the order was given to prepare for evacuation. Stirner put on some long woolen underwear that his prominent friends had procured for him, and he wrapped up some reserve bread and margarine that he had been hoarding since the first evacuation rumor.

  One last roll call was held, and then, escorted by the entire SS force, the inmates of Auschwitz, and even the women from the “brothel,” marched out to the west. The temperature was eighteen degrees below zero, Centigrade. The march lasted for thirty-six hours. Any who lagged were shot. All the way the SS men were in terror of being cut off by the Russians.

  Those who could make it reached the town of Gleiwitz, where all were embarked on a freight train. In Stirner’s transport from Berlin, he had had sixty people in his car; now he had nearly two hundred. There were five thousand five hundred on the train altogether.

  First the train went to the concentration camp at Mauthausen, in Austria, where the authorities declared they would not accept the Auschwitz inmates; their place was already overcrowded. So the train moved by slow stages toward Berlin. The inmates were inside the freight cars se
ven days and nights. Those who lived, lived on snow. More than a thousand died along the way. Many jumped out. Stirner’s Czech friend Edouard Kohn jumped out and ran away, and Stirner kept thinking that after all that he had survived he could not die on the way to freedom.

  The survivors were taken to an airplane factory in Berlin, where, at last, they were fed bread and soup. For a week they slept on a cement floor, and then they were moved into barracks and were put to work in the plant. They labored there for three months, through many air raids. Stirner maneuvered himself into a clerical job in the Schreibstube, and he obtained civilian clothes by barter.

  By April 21, the Russians had approached very near to Berlin so the authorities decided to march the Auschwitz Häftlinge westward again. The inmates walked day and night through Mecklenburg. Near Schwerin, one night early in May, Stirner and a few friends, having heard rumors that they had walked into a pocket between the Americans and the Russians, decided to make a break. They slipped off into the night, and though they were challenged once, they got away.

  On May 3, 1945, Alfred Stirner and six companions walked out of some woods into a clearing at one side of which an American flag was draped across a bush. For several minutes the seven men stood at the edge of the clearing and wept. When Stirner felt able to speak, he walked out and approached an officer.

  “We are political prisoners who have escaped,” he said. “We are Jews.”

  Stirner was to remember for a long time the exact words the American spoke. “You’re welcome here,” he said. He turned to an enlisted man with him and said, “Break out some C rations for these people.”