Holocaust (47 page)

The barracks was crowded, hot, malodorous. Surprisingly, it was very quiet. Some men were speaking softly in Russian, and I caught a word here and there. I pretended to be sleeping, turned, and saw five or six rugged-looking men in tattered army uniforms sitting on a bunk. They were looking at a drawing on top of a box.

One man stood between them and me, evidently appointed to keep an eye on me.

“Mine field,” I heard him say. “Here. Here.”

I had learned a good deal of Russian in my days with the partisans and from Helena. Again, I listened.

“Barbed wire, double strands,” the man was saying. “We might need wire cutters.”

Another man asked, “What about the SS barracks? The guns on the water tower?”

“We’ll have to knock them out,” the other man said.

I soon gathered that the man in charge was a Red Army captain. His name was Barski. The man who spoke to him, his lieutenant, was named Vanya.

This Vanya suddenly said, “Captain Barski, we don’t have a single gun.”

“We will get them.”

I raised myself on one elbow. The bunk creaked. The man watching me said something to the others.

Vanya said, “The bastard, he’s awake and he’s been listening.”

He came over to the bunk and pulled me down. I struggled. We almost came to blows. Others separated us.

“Keep your hands off me,” I said in bad Russian.

Vanya tried to punch me in the stomach. I parried the blow and went for him again. He and some others shoved me to a lower berth.

“What did you just hear?” Captain Barski asked.

“I didn’t understand it. I’m a German Jew. My Russian isn’t that good.”

Barski switched to Yiddish—close enough to German so that we could talk. “Go on, what do you think we were talking about?”

“It sounds like you’re going to break out.”

Vanya shook his head. “He’s a goddam spy, Barski,” he said. “The SS planted him here. German Jew, hell.”

Barski tapped my shoulder. “What’s your name, kid?”

“Weiss. Rudi Weiss.”

“What the hell are you doing here in Sobibor?”

“Sobibor? I don’t know. I was on a train with a bunch of other prisoners. I was a partisan in the Ukraine.”

They looked at one another. Barski sat down opposite me. “Listen to me, Weiss, if that’s your name. If you’re a spy, we’ll have to kill you. This is a death camp. There’s a gas chamber here, furnaces. We’re getting out. If the Germans put you here to spy on us, I’ll strangle you myself.”

So I told them my story—running away from Berlin years ago, wandering across Europe, Czechoslovakia, the Ukraine. When I got to the part about joining Uncle Sasha, Barski’s eyes brightened.

“What did he do before he became a partisan?” the Red Army captain asked.

“He was a doctor. In a village called Koretz.”

He asked me more questions—who were some other members of the band, was there a rabbi with them. My answers appeared to satisfy him. I told him of some of the actions I had fought in—the attack on the SS headquarters, other assaults.

When I’d finished, he looked at the others. “I believe him,” Barski said. “It sounds crazy, a guy from Berlin, a German Jew fighting down here, but crazier things have happened.”

“I say kill him,” Vanya said.

But Barski was convinced. He shook his head. “Listen, Weiss, you know what happens in this camp? They gas two thousand a day. The SS men sleep on pillows stuffed with the hair from the Jewish women they murder. They have their fun knocking out the brains of Jewish children. There’s a field outside, three feet deep—ashes of the Jews.”

I nodded. “I believe it. I believe anything about them. Just get me a gun. I’ll fight with you.”

Posen, Poland
October 1943

The Reichsführer called a meeting of about a hundred officers involved in the final solution.

We met in the lobby of a hotel, here in Posen. A lot of my old colleagues were present—friends and enemies. Among the group, Blobel, Ohlendorf, Eichmann, Hoess.

In the old days I would be right at Heydrich’s side, notebook in hand. Alas, Kaltenbrunner didn’t want me that close to him. The ogre sat to one side of Himmler, listening. I sat somewhat at the rear of the room. More and more, I find a need for large doses of cognac to get through the day. I also find my mind less able to concentrate on important matters. Long noted for my detail work, I know I am becoming forgetful, sloppy.

Blobel was bragging about his work at Babi Yar. All the bodies (so he claimed) had been dug up and burned. Vast pyres of railroad ties soaked with gasoline had been used to, as someone put it, “burn the evidence.”

But why? I wonder to myself. Why bother?

Blobel reported that over 100,000 corpses had been disposed of. Then Eichman did some boasting about his trains. Hoess talked, modestly and quietly, about the functioning of Auschwitz.

Himmler kept asking if these things were being done “secretly.” He seemed more concerned than ever that the outside world not know of our work of the past few years. And yet, when one officer suggested we halt the exterminations so that Jewish labor could be used, he was silenced at once—by Reichsführer Himmler himself.

It was stuffy and hot in the hotel lobby. Most of us
were weary. We wondered why Himmler had called us together.

Someone else—possibly Globocnik—requested a dozen Iron Crosses for his men, for their heroic work in ridding eastern Europe of Jews, Himmler liked the notion. He had already given out numerous decorations for officers involved in the crushing of the Warsaw rebellion.

More business was discussed. Blobel, sitting with Ohlendorf not far from me, nudged the latter in the ribs and said, loud enough for me to hear, “Silence from the Great Dorf.”

“Maybe he’s turned yellow,” Ohlendorf said. But he nodded at me. A very polite, educated fellow. He freely speaks about his killing of ninety thousand Jews in the Odessa area.

Suddenly—out of the blue—Himmler asked, “May I ask that all of you submit suggestions on the eventual dismantling of the camps?”

“Dismantling?” asked Blobel.

“Yes,” the Reichsführer said. “Our job is all but done. I … I am not suggesting Germany will be defeated, of course. But the evidence, the remains will lead to misunderstandings.”

“I don’t think so, sir,” I said. My voice was emboldened by the half-bottle of brandy I’d consumed.

“Dorf? Ah, our resident semanticist.” Himmler smiled at me.

“Perhaps we should let the camps and the furnaces stand,” I said, “as a fitting memorial to our great work.” The alcohol loosened my tongue. “Perhaps we should tell the world how we achieved—”

Blobel grabbed my arm. “Shut up, Dorf.”

They all looked away from me. It was odd. I noticed that a small recording machine was on the table and was operating.

Himmler ignored my interruption, and began to speak again. “I must talk to you frankly about a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly and yet we will never talk of it publicly.
I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race.”

Obviously it had been on his mind a long time.

“It is one of the things it is easy to talk about,” Himmler rambled on. His tiny eyes seemed to vanish behind the pince-nez. “The Jewish race is being exterminated, and it is quite clear it is in our program, elimination of the Jews. And we are doing it, exterminating them.”

In a way, it was refreshing. After all the wordplay, the euphemisms, the code words (many of which I created), it was almost exhilarating, cleansing, to hear our leader come out with it. And still the recording apparatus spun.

He went on to be critical of those Germans who knew “a good Jew” or who would ask that a Jew be spared. “Not one of those who talk this way has witnessed it,” he said, “not one of them has been through it. Most of you know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time to have remained decent men, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.”

What his speech meant to him personally, or to us, I am not sure. I am certain that the annihilation process will be speeded up. But his insistence on secrecy, on the possibility of a plan for dismantling the death camps, bothers me.

I stumbled to my feet and asked to be heard. There was such total silence in the room, from these officers who had murdered—four million souls? five?—that I was able to command their attention.

“Permit me to say, Reichsführer,” I said, “that if our work is truly that noble, we should advertise it to the world.”

“Quiet, you damn fool,” Blobel growled.

“I believe the major misunderstands me,” Himmler said.

“If I may, sir,” I went on. “The Führer has pointed out many times that we are performing a service for western civilization, for Christianity. We are defending
the west against Bolshevism. As for Jews, even our great religious figure Luther saw them as menaces.”

“Oh, I quite agree, Major,” the Reichsführer said. “But others will not see our aims as clearly. And the Jews will lie about us.”

“Let them,” I said. “Let them. Those who are left. But I say we should flood the world with film, photographs, affidavits, lists of the dead, testimony. Let us build working models of Hoess’ Auschwitz, let us tell the world every last detail about our heroic deeds. And let us insist to all that what we did to the Jews was a moral and racial necessity! Surely the western Allies will appreciate that.”

I seemed to have transfixed them. I could see the sweaty, hot faces staring at me in that dismal hotel lobby.

“Yes,” I went on, “let us maintain that we have committed no crime, but have merely followed the imperatives of European history. Eminent philosophers and churchmen can be called upon to support our case. I’m a lawyer, you know. I understand these things.

“No shame, gentlemen, no deceptions, no apologies for dead Jews, or excuses about spies, or disease or sabotage. We must make clear to the world that we stand between civilization and the Jewish plot to destroy our world, to pollute the race, to dominate us. We,
we alone
, have been men enough to accept their challenge. Why hide it? Why keep it a secret? Why invent excuses?”

I noticed their cold stares. Himmler was frozen.

“We have to convince the world—friend and foe alike—that the Jews forced this war on themselves … that we, we alone … we stood … we stand between the survival of … of …”

My voice dwindled into silence. They sat, all of them, looking at me as if I were a diseased dog.

Finally Himmler broke the silence. “Major Dorf has a point, I suspect. The details of our future attitudes toward our work can be the subject of another meeting. What is important is that we feel in our hearts that we have fulfilled this task with love for our own people,
and that we have not in the process been damaged in our inner souls.”

I got up to speak again, but Blobel and Ohlendorf this time grabbed me, each by an arm, and led me to the corridor, thence up the stairs of the dingy hotel to my room. There were Polish whores, some of them quite beautiful, available for all of us, but I wanted only my cognac bottle.

“You fucking idiot,” Blobel said.

I could hear Himmler’s prim, small voice, still addressing his men. “We have remained decent, loving men, and for that we may be proud …”

Vanya, the prisoner who had not trusted me, soon became my friend. He managed to get me work in the cobbler’s shop, where, it was agreed, the revolt would begin. As yet we had not a single gun.

Before we were marched off to work that morning, I remember Barski telling us, in the dark barracks, “Do it in such a way that they don’t make a sound.”

A half-dozen of us carried small hatchets jammed into our belts.

We opened the shoemaker’s workshop. Vanya began to replace heels.

I kneeled in a corner and began to polish the black boots of the SS officers.

About an hour after we had opened, a young SS lieutenant came in. He carried a Luger in a holster in his belt.

“My boots ready?” he asked Vanya.

“Yes sir. You can try them on, if you wish.”

The officer sat on one of those low stools one finds in boot shops and waited. He saw me, kneeling, polishing. “Who’s that?”

“New prisoner, sir.”

There was a fleeting moment of suspicion on his
face. Then he decided he had nothing to fear. I was gaunt, bruised, dressed in prison rags.

Vanya yanked at the officer’s boots, as he sat on the lower part of the stool. He got the new boot on. I got up with the pair I had been polishing and carried them to the shelf behind the stool.

I placed them on the shelf over the name of their owner. Something must have warned the lieutenant.

He spun around, and as he did, I smashed his skull with the hatchet. It was odd. He did not have time to reach for his gun, or make a sound. I hit him so hard that his brains spattered Vanya, who was several feet away.

Vanya yanked the Luger from his belt. We dragged the body into a closet, cleaned up the blood and brains.

About ten minutes later an SS captain entered. He, too, was looking for a new pair of boots. I did not even give him a chance to say good morning. From behind the door, I leaped at him and killed him with one blow of the hatchet. He wavered, staggered, seemed reluctant to die. I hit him a second time.

This time I took his pistol. We dragged him into the closet also.

Coinciding with these actions, other men in Barski’s unit killed Germans in the tailoring shop, the cabinetmaker’s, and the barber shop. We were very lucky. The soldiers had dribbled in, alone or in pairs, and were cut down before they could sound a warning.

Finally, Barski and a small party, armed now with handguns, raced into the weapons room, killed a half-dozen guards, and unlocked the gun rack. We met them there and loaded up with guns and ammunition.

By now almost a hundred prisoners had gathered in the barracks area.

Barski distributed guns to the men. For the women, there were hatchets, broom-handles, shovels. We would kill any way we could.