Carrion Comfort (27 page)

“They walked within five meters of me. Bent over my task, I glanced up once to see the Oberst looking directly at me. I do not think he recognized me. It had been only eight months since Chelmno and the estate, but to the Oberst I must have been just another Jew prisoner sorting through the luggage of the dead. I hesitated then. It was my chance and I hesitated and all was lost. I believe I could have reached the Oberst then. I could have had my hands on his throat before the shots rang out. I might even have been able to seize a pistol from one of the officers near Himmler and fire before the Oberst knew there was a threat.

“I have wondered since if something besides surprise and indecision stayed my hand. Certainly I knew no fear at that time. My fear had died with other parts of my spirit weeks before in the sealed shower room. What ever the reason, I hesitated for several seconds, perhaps a minute, and the time was lost forever. Himmler’s party moved on and passed through gates to the Kommandant’s Headquarters, an area known as the Merry Flea. As I stared at the gate where they disappeared, Sergeant Wagner began screaming at me to get to work or go to the ‘hospital.’ No one ever returned from the hospital. I bowed my head and went back to work.

“I watched all the rest of that day, lay awake that night, and waited for a glimpse all the next day, but I did not see the Oberst again. Himmler’s group had left during the night.

“On fourteen October, the Jews of Sobibor revolted. I had heard rumors of an uprising, but they had seemed so farfetched that I had taken no interest in them. In the end, their carefully orchestrated plans came down to the murder of a few guards and a mad rush by a thousand or so Jews for the main gate. Most were cut down by machine gun fire in the first minute. Others made it through the wire at the back of the compound during the confusion. My work detail was returning from the depot when the madness erupted. The corporal guarding us was clubbed down by the vanguard of the mob and I had no choice but to run with the others. I was sure that my blue coveralls would draw the fire of the Ukrainians in the tower. But I made the cover of the trees just as two women running with me were cut down by rifle fire. Once there, I changed into the prison-gray tunic of an old man who had reached the safety of the forest only to be struck down by a stray bullet.

“I believe that about two hundred of us made it away from the camp that day. We were alone or in small groups, leaderless for the most part. The group who had planned the escape made no provision for surviving once they were free. Most of the Jews and Russian prisoners were subsequently hunted down by the Germans or discovered and killed by Polish partisans. Many sought shelter at nearby farms and were quickly turned in. A few survived in the forest and a few more made their way across the Bug River to the advancing Red Army. I was lucky. On my third day in the forest I was discovered by members of a Jewish partisan group called
Chil
. They were under the command of a brave and utterly fearless man named Yechiel Greenshpan who accepted me into the band and ordered their surgeon to bring me back to weight and health. For the first time since the previous winter, my foot was properly treated. For five months I traveled with
Chil
in the Forest of the Owls. I was an aide to the surgeon, Dr. Yaczyk, saving lives when possible, even the lives of Germans when I could.

“The Nazis closed down the camp at Sobibor shortly after the escape. They destroyed the barracks, removed the ovens, and planted potatoes in the fields where the Pits had held the thousands not cremated. By the time the partisan band celebrated Hanukkah, most of Poland was in chaos as the Wehrmacht retreated west and south. In March, the Red Army liberated the area in which we were operating and the war was over for me.

“For several months I was detained and interrogated by the Soviets. Some members of
Chil
were sent to Russian camps, but I was released in May and returned to Lodz. There was nothing there for me. The Jewish ghetto had been more than decimated; it had been eliminated. Our old home on the west side of town had been destroyed in the fighting.

“In August of 1945 I traveled to Cracow and then cycled to Uncle Moshe’s farm. Another family— a Christian family— occupied it. They had bought it from civil authorities during the war. They said they knew nothing of the whereabouts of the previous owners.

“It was during that same trip that I returned to Chelmno. The Soviets had declared the area off-limits and I was not allowed near the camp. For five days I camped nearby and cycled down every dirt road and path. Eventually I found the remains of the Great Hall. It had been destroyed, either by shelling or by the retreating Germans, and little was left except for tumbled stones, burnt timbers, and the scorched monolith of the central chimney. There was no sign of the tiled floor of the Main Hall.

“In the clearing where the shallow death pit had been, there were signs of recent excavations. The butts of numerous Russian cigarettes littered the area. When I asked at the local inn, the villagers insisted that they knew nothing of mass graves being exhumed. They also insisted— angrily this time— that no one in the area had suspected Chelmno of being anything but what the Germans had said it was: a temporary detention camp for criminals and po liti cal prisoners. I was tired of camping and would have stayed the night at the inn before cycling south again, but it was not to be. They did not allow Jews at the inn. The next day I took the train to Cracow to find work.

“The winter of 1945–46 was almost as hard as the winter of 1941–

42.

The new government was forming, but the more pressing reality was one of food shortages, lack of fuel, black marketeering, refugees returning by the thousands to pick up the torn strands of their lives, and the Soviet occupation. Especially the occupation. For centuries we had fought the Russians, dominated them, resisted their invasions in return, lived under their threat, and then welcomed them as liberators. Now we awoke from the nightmare of German occupation to the chill morning of Russian liberation. Like Poland, I was exhausted, numbed and somewhat surprised at my own survival, and dedicated only to making it through another winter.

“It was in the spring of 1946 that the letter came from my cousin Rebecca. She and her American husband were living in Tel Aviv. She had spent months corresponding, contacting officials, sending cables to agencies and institutions, all in an effort to find any remaining vestige of her family. She had traced me through friends in the International Red Cross.

“I sent her a letter in response and soon there was a cable arriving which urged me to join her in Palestine. She and David offered to cable the money for the voyage.

“I had never been a Zionist— indeed, our family had never acknowledged the existence of Palestine as a possible Jewish state— but when I stepped off that overcrowded Turkish freighter in June of 1946 and set foot on what would someday be Israel, a heavy yoke seemed to be lifted from my shoulders and for the first time since eight September, 1939, I was able to breathe freely. I confess that I fell to my knees and shed tears that day.

“Perhaps my sense of freedom was premature. A few days after I arrived in Palestine there was an explosion at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem where the British command was housed. As it turned out, both Rebecca and her husband David were active in the Haganah.

“A year and a half later I joined them in the War of Independence, but in spite of my partisan training and experience, I went to war only as a medic. It was not the Arabs that I hated.

“Rebecca insisted that I continue my schooling. David was then the Israeli manager of a very respectable American company and money was not a problem. This was how an indifferent schoolboy from Lodz— a boy whose basic education had been interrupted for five years— returned to the classroom as a man, scarred and cynical, ancient at the age of twenty-three.

“Incredibly, I did well. I entered the university in 1950 and went on to medical school three years later. I studied for two years in Tel Aviv, fifteen months in London, a year in Rome, and one very rainy spring in Zu rich. Whenever I could I would return to Israel, work in the kibbutz near the farm where David and Rebecca spent their summers, and renew old friendships. My indebtedness to my cousin and her husband grew beyond repayment, but Rebecca insisted that the only surviving member of the Laski wing of the Eshkol family must amount to something.

“I chose psychiatry. My medical studies never seemed more to me than a necessary prerequisite of studying the body in order to learn about the mind. I soon became obsessed with theories of violence and dominance in human affairs. I was amazed to learn that there was very little actual research in this area. There was ample data to explain the precise mechanisms of dominance hierarchy in a lion pride, there was voluminous research relating to the pecking order in most avian species, more and more information was coming in from primatologists on the role of dominance and aggression in the social groups of our nearest cousins, but almost nothing was known about the mechanism of human violence as it relates to dominance and social order. I soon began developing my own theories and speculations.

“During those years of study I made numerous inquiries after the Oberst. I had a description of him, I knew that he was an officer in
Einsatzgruppe
3, I had seen him with Himmler, and I remember that
Der Alte’s
last words had been ‘Willi, my friend.’ I contacted the Allies War Crimes Commissions in their various zones of occupation, the Red Cross, the Soviet People’s Standing Tribunal on Fascist War Crimes, the Jewish Committee, and countless ministries and bureaucracies. There was nothing. After five years I went to the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. They, at least, were most interested in my story, but in those days the Mossad was not the efficient organization it is reputed to be today. Also, they had more famous names such as Eichmann, Murer, and Mengele which were higher on their list of investigations than an unknown Oberst reported by only one survivor of the Holocaust. It was in 1955 that I went to Austria to confer with the Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal.

“Wiesenthal’s ‘Documentation Center’ was one floor of a shabby building in a poor part of Vienna. The building looked as if it had been thrown up as temporary housing during the war. He had three rooms there, two of them crammed with overflowing filing cabinets, and his office had only bare concrete for a floor. Wiesenthal himself was a nervous, intense person with disturbing eyes. There was something familiar about those eyes. At first I thought that he had the eyes of a fanatic, but then I realized where I had seen them before. Simon Wiesenthal’s eyes reminded me of the ones I stared into each morning as I shaved.

“I told Wiesenthal an abbreviated version of my story, suggesting only that the Oberst had committed atrocities on Chelmno inmates for the amusement of his soldiers. Wiesenthal became very attentive when I said that I had again seen the Oberst at Sobibor in the company of Heinrich Himmler. ‘You are sure?’ he asked. ‘Positive,’ I replied.

“Busy as he was, Wiesenthal spent two days helping me attempt to trace the Oberst. In his cluttered tomb of an office complex, Wiesenthal had hundreds of files, dozens of indexes and cross-indexes, and the names of more than twenty-two thousand SS men. We studied photographs of
Einsatzgruppen
personnel, military academy graduation pictures, newspaper clippings, and photos from the official SS magazine,
The Black Corps
. At the end of the first day, I could no longer focus my eyes. That night I dreamed of photographs of Wehrmacht officers receiving medals from smirking Nazi leaders. There was no sign of the Oberst.

“It was late in the second afternoon when I found it. The news photograph was dated twenty-three November, 1942. The picture was of a Baron von Büler, a Prussian aristocrat and World War One hero, who had returned to active duty as a general. According to the caption under the photograph General von Büler had died in action while leading an heroic counterattack against a Russian armored division on the Eastern Front. I stared a long moment at the lined and craggy face in the fading clipping. It was the Old Man.
Der Alte
. I set it back in the file and went on.

“ ‘If only we had a last name,’ said Wiesenthal that evening as we ate in a small restaurant near St. Stephen’s Cathedral. ‘I feel certain we could track him down if we had his last name. The SS and Gestapo kept complete directories of their officers. If only we had his name.’

“I shrugged and said that I would return to Tel Aviv in the morning. We had all but exhausted Wiesenthal’s clippings relating to
Einsatzguppe
and the Eastern Front and my studies would soon be demanding all of my time.

“ ‘But surely no!’ Wiesenthal exclaimed. ‘You are a survivor of Lodz Ghetto, Chelmno, and Sobibor. You must have much information about the officers, other war criminals. You must spend at least the next week here. I will interview you and have the interviews transcribed for my files. There is not telling what valuable facts you may possess.’

“ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I am not interested in the others. I am interested only in finding the Oberst.’

“Wiesenthal stared at his coffee and then looked at me again. There was a strange light in his eyes. ‘So, you are interested only in revenge.’

“ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just as you are.’ “Wiesenthal shook his head sadly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we are both obsessed, my friend. But what I seek is justice, not revenge.’

“ ‘Surely in this case they are the same thing,’ I said. “Wiesenthal again shook his head. ‘Justice is required,’ he said so softly that I could hardly hear him. ‘It is demanded by the millions of voices from unmarked graves, from rusting ovens, from empty houses in a thousand cities. But not revenge. Revenge is not worthy.’

“ ‘Worthy of what?’ I snapped back, more sharply than I intended. “ ‘Of us,’ said Wiesenthal. ‘Of them. Of their death. Of our continued existence.’

“I shook my head in dismissal then, but I have often thought of that conversation.