Auschwitz (47 page)

The most devastating example of how anti-Semitic beliefs and values still live on, however, occurred when Toivi visited his old family home in Izbica. He knocked on the front door and asked the man who now lived there if he would be happy to let him enter and look around the house in which he had been raised, the house in which he had hidden from the German “actions,” and the house in which his beloved mother and father had spent their last days before being taken to Sobibór. Initially the new owner was reluctant, but when Toivi pressed three American dollars into his hand he was allowed to enter. Immediately Toivi noticed a chair in the living room and remarked that it had once belonged to his father. “Oh, no,” the man replied. “That's impossible.” So Tovi took the chair, turned it over, and there written on the base of it was his family name. At this the man said, “Mr. Blatt, why the whole comedy with the chair? I know why you are here.” Toivi looked at him, bemused. “You have come for the hidden money,” the man continued. “We could divide it—50 percent for you and 50 percent for me.” Furious, Toivi Blatt left the house without a backward glance.

There is a fitting postscript to this story—one that deserves a place in a morality tale. When he next returned to Izbica, Toivi passed by his old house and saw the place in ruins. He went to his neighbors and asked them what had happened. “Oh, Mr. Blatt,” they said, “when you left we were unable to sleep because day and night he was looking for the treasure you were supposed to have hidden. He took the floor apart, the walls apart, everything. And later he found himself in the situation that he couldn't fix it—it would cost too much money. And so now it's a ruin.”

But if the post-war experiences of Toivi Blatt, Linda Breder, and Walter Fried illustrate a dark and depressing side of the human condition, then a more comforting story comes from another part of Europe. When the Danish Jews returned home—the majority from exile in Sweden, a few from the Nazi ghetto-camp of Thereisenstadt—they enjoyed a heartening
reception. “It was not like places where people had taken over the property of the Jews and made themselves at home,” says Bent Melchior.
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“Here nothing was touched.” As soon as the Melchior family returned, the landlord gave notice to the new tenants of the family's apartment, and within three months the family members were back living exactly as they had been before the deportation. Their landlord had even carefully packed up and stored their furniture ready for them.

Rudy Bier
¹⁹
and his family also came back home to Denmark to discover their apartment “spotless.” The rent had been paid by their friends during the years they had been away. “It was a wonderful feeling,” he says, “that we were expected to come back.” The worst experience he can remember concerns his wife's family. An uncooked duck had been left in their flat, and eighteen months later his in-laws returned to find the duck still there, but in an advanced state of decomposition. From that moment his mother-in-law never ate duck again.

As a general rule, the Danish Jews fared much better upon their return than the Polish or Slovak Jews, and the reasons behind this are almost certainly situational. Jews attempting to rebuild their lives in countries now occupied by the Soviet Union faced the near impossible task of trying to recover their property in a new political system that preached total nationalization and that prevented individuals from owning houses or factories as they had before the war. The non-Jews who had moved into houses or flats left when the Jews had been forcibly deported could now simply say that the state owned the property and they were merely renting it (as was the case when the Frieds tried to recover their restaurant in Slovakia).

Nor was it, of course, in the interests of many non-Jews in these countries to open up a discussion of just how they had behaved during the Nazi occupation and the persecution of the Jews; and, in any case, as a result of the scale of the murders, few Jews actually managed to return to initiate the debate. The Soviet desire to portray the Nazi campaign of genocide as directed merely against those who opposed “fascism” also played directly into the desire felt by many non-Jews in the East to airbrush the traumatic events of the Nazis' “Final Solution” out of their history. There were simply too many awkward questions to answer.

Example after example in this history shows how hard it is for the majority
of people to go against prevailing cultural mores. Walter Fried's old friend Josho turned against him not because he made that decision in isolation, but because the culture surrounding him had changed as a result of both the arrival of the Soviet forces and the presence after the war of the few Jews who did manage to return home and remind everyone of a past many wished to forget. Choice is always possible, but it is always much easier to go with the flow—and if that flow happens to lead to anti-Semitism and persecution, then so be it.

The Danes, on the other hand, faced no such difficulties. Because they felt they had behaved admirably in the autumn of 1943 in the face of the Nazis' attempted deportations, the return of the Danish Jews after the war was an event to be celebrated, not ignored. Economically, politically, perhaps even morally, it was easier to be a Dane immediately after the war than a Pole or a Slovak. This is not to say that life for the Jews who returned to their former homes in the countries of Western Europe was always easy—it wasn't. Despite the work of the Joint Distribution Committee and the restitution money paid by the Federal Republic of Germany to Israel via the Luxembourg Agreement during the 1950s, many Jews never received their due. The struggle for proper restitution and compensation continues, of course, even to this day.

While those who had endured Nazi persecution faced distinctly mixed fortunes after the conflict ended, their SS perpetrators knew with certainty from the moment of the German surrender that they were at risk of arrest and prosecution. Just as Rudolf Höss sought to conceal his past, a much more minor cog in the Auschwitz machine, Oskar Groening,
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also tried to do the same. In 1944, Groening's application for a trans fer to a front-line unit had finally been granted and he had joined an SS unit that was fighting in the Ardennes. After being wounded and sent to a field hospital, he rejoined his unit before it eventually surrendered to the British on June 1945, 10.

Once the SS members were in captivity, the British handed questionnaires to all of them. Groening then realized that, as he puts it, “involvement in the concentration camp of Auschwitz would have a negative response” and so he “tried not to draw attention to it.” He wrote on the form that he had worked for the SS Economic and Administration office in Berlin. He did this not because he was suddenly overcome with a sense of
shame about what had happened at Auschwitz, but because “the victor's always right and we knew that the things that happened there [in Auschwitz] did not always comply with human rights.” Groening still feels that “my time as a prisoner of war was the consequence of my membership in the Waffen SS, which retrospectively was made into a criminal organization—so I found out that I had been in a criminal organization without having known I'd joined it.”

Along with the rest of his SS comrades, Groening was imprisoned in an old Nazi concentration camp, which was “not very pleasant—that was revenge against the guilty.” But life improved when he was shipped to England in 1946. Here, as a forced laborer, he had “a very comfortable life.” He ate good food and earned money to spend. He became a member of the YMCA choir and for four months traveled through the Midlands and Scotland giving concerts. He sang German hymns and traditional English folk songs such as “A lover and his lass” to appreciative British audiences who competed to have one of the Germans stay with them overnight and give him a good night's sleep and breakfast.

When he was finally released and returned to Germany in 1947, he found that he could not regain his old job at the bank because he had been a member of the SS, so he got a job in a glass factory and began the long climb up the management ladder. He continued his policy of trying not to draw “undue attention” to his time in Auschwitz, so much so that he insisted that his close family erase their memories as well.

Once, shortly after his return to Germany, he was sitting at the dinner table with his father and his parents-in-law and “they made a silly remark about Auschwitz,” implying that he was a “potential or real murderer.” “I exploded!” says Groening. “I banged my fist on the table and said, ‘This word and this connection are never, ever, to be mentioned again in my presence, otherwise I'll move out!' I was quite loud, and this was respected and it was never mentioned again.” Thus did the Groening family settle back and begin to make a future for itself in post-war Germany, enjoying the fruits of the German “economic miracle.”

The post-war years would also see the formation of the state of Israel and, as a consequence, a concerted attempt by a well-funded and well-organized security force to track down Nazi perpetrators. The most famous
success was the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and his subsequent secret transfer to Israel and to trial in Tel Aviv in 1961. Moshe Tavor
²¹
was one of the members of the Israeli security team that captured Eichmann. Proud though he is of that action, which was publicized around the world, it is, however, the secret “revenge” he took in the days and months immediately after the war that he believes accomplished more.

When he was twenty years old, in 1941, Moshe Tavor joined the British army and subsequently served in the Jewish Brigade, a unit of 5,000 Jewish soldiers under the command of a Canadian-born Jew, Brigadier Ernest Benjamin. Their emblem was the Star of David—now the flag of the state of Israel. Jews from Palestine had first been incorporated into the British army in 1940 and a Palestine Regiment had subsequently fought in North Africa in 1942, but there had been opposition for many years within the British government—notably from Neville Chamberlain—to the formation of a separate and distinct Jewish unit. Winston Churchill was much more open to the idea, and the Jewish Brigade was finally formed in 1944.

As the unit fought its way up through northern Italy, and in the immediate aftermath of the end of the war, Moshe Tavor and his comrades learned more and more about how their fellow Jews had been treated by the Nazis. “We got angry,” he says simply. “And many of us felt it wasn't enough that we participated in the war.” So Moshe Tavor and his comrades discussed ways that they could take “revenge” on the Germans. Tavor says that they first used whatever contacts they had in the intelligence section of the army and through Jewish organizations to obtain a list of names of Germans who were believed to have been involved in the killing of Jews. Then they disguised their vehicles, covering up the Star of David and replacing it with identification marks from non-Jewish units, and put British military police armbands on their sleeves. Once all this preparation was complete, they would drive up to the house of the suspected perpetrator and take him away for an “interrogation.” “They weren't too suspicious,” says Tavor, “because they didn't know we were Jewish Brigade—they thought we were British soldiers. We would take this guy and he wouldn't resist. And from that moment on he no longer saw anything. He never saw his house again.”

Moshe Tavor and other members of the Jewish Brigade drove with their German captive to an isolated spot and there they “gave him a trial.” They
put to him all the allegations against him they had themselves been given and “maybe we gave him a chance to say a few words.” And then—in every case—they “finished him off.” They were anxious not to leave behind any traces of the killing—no blood and no body. “The method was that one of us would strangle him.” And he confesses that he himself personally strangled one suspected perpetrator

After killing the suspected perpetrator they disposed of the body. “Then we would drive to an area we had chosen in advance. We would tie something heavy—like a part of an engine—to his feet and then we would drag him into a river.”

Moshe Tavor has no regrets that he personally killed Germans in this way:

Moshe Tavor accepts that his version of “justice” was far from that of a proper trial with judge and jury, and confesses that “in my life until then I had done quite a few things which were not exactly straight.” And, of course, the “evidence” that he and his comrades would have received could on occasion have been little more than suspicions—accusations that were never to be properly tested in a court of law. The possibility—indeed, the probability—therefore is that he was involved in the killing of some innocent people. Such was the anger felt by him and his colleagues, however, that this was a risk they were prepared to take. Indeed, he even witnessed
members of the Jewish Brigade killing Germans against whom they had no evidence whatsoever: “There were guys who did things spontaneously. One had a brother or a mother who'd been killed [by the Nazis]. So when we were in Germany or Austria and they'd see a German on a bicycle then the driver would simply run him over.”