Holocaust (48 page)

An alarm had been sounded somewhere.

The Klaxon drew guards from their quarters—we could see the Germans and their Ukrainian auxiliaries
running out, armed, confused, shouting commands.

We took cover behind the barracks.

Barski assigned me to command a group of about twelve men, some armed, some willing to fight and die with shovels and rakes in their hands.

A squad of SS enlisted men came charging down the main street in the barracks area, and I gave the command to fire. We killed them all—seven or eight. The other units held back, not so ready to take us on.

It was Barski’s plan to assault the camp arsenal before we fled, arming our entire party, and truning us into what amounted to a small army.

Several units raced forward, holding close to the sides of buildings, trying to reach the arsenal. But as we approached, a machine gun on top of the camp water tower opened up, and scores of us were cut down.

Barski stopped the squad leaders behind the camp mess hall.

“Useless,” he said. “We’ve got to forget about the arsenal. To the gate.”

By now we had been joined by a mob—almost six hundred Jews, eager for freedom, willing to face the German guns, to race for the gates unarmed rather than submit to Sobibor’s gas chambers.

I followed Barski. Vanya led another group. From behind the cover of water barrels and sheds, we opened fire on the guards at the central gate and killed them all.

A mad rush followed. All six hundred Jews raced for the exit. Some threw stones at the guards, tried to blind them with sand.

I could hear Barski screaming at them not to run to their left—the land there was laced with mines, and there was a double strand of barbed wire to cut through. It was a dreadful sight. The land mines began to explode; dozens were blown apart.

Barski led us to a passageway behind the officers’ barracks, where we knew the earth had not been mined. Shots began to crack around us from the barracks. But Barski was right. The field was not only
free of mines, but the barbed wire was thin, and we climbed over it.

Bullets kept cracking around us. Men fell. Women stumbled. I thought of Helena dying in the forest. And I kept running. A hundred meters … two hundred meters …

In the evening, we stopped beside a stream.

There was just a handful of us in our party. But we hoped others had made it safely out of the death camp.

A girl named Luba, a Red Army auxiliary, staggered into our midst at dusk. She was covered with blood, wounded in the arm and hand. She sat down and wept for a long time before she could tell her story.

Yes, six hundred Jews had fled to the gates. Four hundred, most of them without guns, actually made it to the woods and meadows outside the camp. But more than half of these were killed by landmines, pursuing SS and police, aircraft. Several thousand Fascists were sent in pursuit of the escapees from Sobibor. And, we learned later, Polish Fascist groups in the forest finished off those who escaped the SS. An old story to me.

There were about sixty of us with Barski. We were better armed, trained, tougher. We would try to reach a Soviet partisan brigade.

Years later I learned that we had killed ten SS men and thirty-eight Ukrainians. Another forty Ukrainian guards fled rather than be called to account by the Germans. And two days after our breakout, Himmler ordered Sobibor destroyed. We had made the bastard uneasy, thrown a scare into the great murderer.

Barski said that he and his comrades would head east and try to find a Red Army unit. There was a report that the Russians were about to recapture Kiev. Barski wanted to be part of the action.

Kiev
. I thought of Helena and how we had stolen bread, hidden from the Germans. How Hans Helms had betrayed us and then been killed. And how we
had run away from the procession of doomed Jews, and from afar seen the massacre at Babi Yar.

The hole in my insides began to eat at me, like an acid, a slow fire. I wanted her to be with me again, sharing crude meals, sleeping with me in haylofts, barns. But I would never see her again. I doubted now that I could love again, ever give myself to a woman.

Barski invited me to join them, but I said I wanted to travel alone. He warned me that I’d be in danger of capture, that by heading west I was moving toward German lines. I said I didn’t care. If I died, I died, and besides they hadn’t gotten me yet.

“Good luck, kid,” he said. And he embraced me.

“Can I keep a gun?” I asked.

“Sure. You’ve earned it.”

I walked off, following the stream, seeing Helena’s face in every tree, every leaf.

My brother Karl did not survive another winter. He had been transported to Auschwitz with a trainload of other Theresienstadt prisoners, marked for gassing.

Somehow—perhaps the word had gotten out that he was a gifted artist, and might be used—he was spared immediate death.

That he lived as long as he did was probably due to the kindness of a man named Hirsch Weinberg, who told me of Karl’s last days. This was the same Weinberg who had been a tailor with Karl at Buchenwald, five years earlier, after the arrests that followed
Kristallnacht
.

One day Weinberg noticed this tall, gaunt man, hiding his hands under his tunic. He studied the face and recognized him.

“I know you,” Weinburg said. “Weiss … the artist …”

They were in the same barracks, and Weinberg looked after him, tried to find work for him, sneaked bits of bread to him.

“Weiss, don’t you remember anything?” Weinberg asked. “The day we had the fight over the bread? When they hung us on the trees?”

Karl nodded. He even smiled.

“Sure, you remember,” the tailor went on. “You had a Christian wife. Used to smuggle letters in to you.”

Karl nodded.

Weinberg brought him up to date. A lot of news had seeped into the camp. The Red Army had entered White Russia. Although Jews from all over Europe were still being sent to Auschwitz, something was in the wind. There had been a lull in extermination selections. Hoess was said to be in trouble with his bosses.

Oh, there was all kinds of good news. Italy had declared war on the Germans; Smolensk was in Russian hands; the Allied invasion was imminent …

Karl’s voice was lost, weak. “My father … here … mother …”

It fell to Weinberg to have to tell him that both my parents had been gassed a year before. They were among the two million victims who had fed the furnaces. Weinberg had met my father once; he had liked him, as had everyone.

Karl could not cry. He listened, nodded, asked for water.

(How strange. I, too, had difficulty crying for a long time after Helena died. What happened to us? Did the evil of our persecutors, their lack of humanity, infect us?)

Then Weinberg saw Karl’s hands. “My God. What they did to them!”

He studied the gnarled, broken claws, stroked them.

“Punished,” Karl said. “For drawings.”

“Listen, Weiss, we’ve come this far. Hang on. We’ll be free someday.”

“Paper,” Karl said. “Pencil … charcoal …”

Weinberg went looking through the barracks and found a large piece of gray cardboard, and a chunk of charcoal from the stove. He propped Karl up in bed and gave them to him.

Karl’s ruined hand could barely clutch the charcoal. He smiled when he succeeded, asked Weinberg to hold the cardboard steady.

Then he proceeded to draw, in great sweeping lines.:

I have seen the picture. Inga has it. I’m not sure what it means. A swamp, darkening sky, clouds, and from the murky waters, a hand rising, reaching toward the sky.

He kept drawing, thanked Weinberg, and asked him to save his last picture.

Karl died some weeks later—typhus, cholera, no one knows. Perhaps he starved to death. Or simply lost the will to live.

His body was hauled away and burned, and his ashes mingled with those of our parents, and millions of others.

Auschwitz
November 1944

I have become a wandering emissary of the Third Reich—reporting endlessly on the final solution, keeping statistics, checking with Eichmann, Hoess, all the others involved in this staggering labor.

Last July, the Russians overran the Lublin concentration camp. The secret was out—as if it could ever have been kept. The horror pictures—so-called—have been shown to the world. We, of course, deny them, and claim that they are actually
Russian
atrocities perpetrated on the Poles.

But the fact that the world is slowly learning of our vast “resettlement” plans has not deterred Eichmann. He is arranging—even now, as the death-camp details are being revealed—for the mass deportation of Romania’s Jews. All through this fall of 1944, Eichmann, with my support, has kept the transports rolling, from Holland, Belgium, France. Survivors of the Krakow ghetto were dispatched to Auschwitz. Only last month, Eichmann sent 35,000 Jews from Budapest to various camps, all of these people marked for “resettlement.”

In Lublin, the Russians are hanging our staff men
at the Maidanek camp. Yet Eichmann, Hoess, and many others, myself included, persist.

Himmler has sent orders out that the Auschwitz crematoria be
destroyed
. Gassings are all but stopped at Auschwitz. Instead we are desperately moving the inmates west, shifting them from camp to camp, a step ahead of the Russians.

All sorts of lunatic, irrational things are happening, as if no one is in charge, or knows precisely how to act in the face of our imminent defeat. Today orders came to ship only “Hungarian Jews” from Bergen-Belsen to Switzerland—orders from who? why?—and tomorrow I may receive a cable ordering that everyone in Auschwitz be marched west, to places like Gross-Rosen and Sachsenhausen.

Does Himmler really think he can hide our work?

Does he (and Kaltenbrunner and my other superiors) honestly think they can change the nature of our efforts by shifting several thousand starving ghosts?

Yet we keep them wandering all over Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, tens of thousands of these Jews, in rags, dying by the roadside, collapsing of starvation and disease. Would it not make more sense to take them out of their misery by the simple expedient of Zyklon B? Could we not then say that our measures were of a humane nature? That human endurance, the will to live, having been terminated in these Jews—and others—it is only decent to let them die as quickly and painlessly as possible? But no. My chiefs keep up this pretense that the camps never existed, that no deaths occurred there, that there were no such things as gas chambers and ovens. I sometimes feel I almost believe it myself.

Of course my personal life has suffered. I see Marta rarely, and we do not converse much, let alone share a bed. Peter is in uniform now, training with the so-called “wolf packs” who are supposed to fight to the death to save Berlin. He is a tall, handsome lad; yet, when I saw him last, I had little to say to him. Laura wept a great deal. She was hungry most of the time,
and in the selfish way children have, blamed Marta and me for everything. The Bechstein is still in our apartment—damaged but playable. Marta thought of giving Laura lessons; nothing came of it.

So today I am at Auschwitz again, trying to carry out Himmler’s orders—dismantle, destroy, burn, obliterate the evidence. What a farce! But I am going through the motions.

And yet, there are times when I wonder if these efforts are as futile as they seem. For so many years, despite rumors and even direct reports, the world refused to believe that we were doing what we were. We were good at deception. And we found willing believers. Our Aesopian language worked well. Of course. The Jews. Problems. Have to be resettled, you understand.

How astonishing, the way the world turned away, took our word, trusted us!

As early as 1942, the Swedish government had word of the killing centers. Through a report from one of their diplomats, via a talkative SS officer. But the Stockholm government
did not let this information out
. And even the BBC, and other voices of our enemies, were cautious about uttering a word about the fate of the Jews. So perhaps I am being unduly harsh in my judgment of our SS leaders; properly handled we might well convince a vast area of public opinion that we never harmed a hair on a Jew’s head, executed only criminals, permitted the Jews to live peaceful lives in little cities of their own. Perhaps.

Not long ago, as Russian guns boomed at the I. G. Farben calcium mines outside the camp, and Soviet planes bombed us, I was on the phone with some flunky in Berlin, who kept screaming at me that the camp must be destroyed, all records burned, every last inmate evacuated, or killed, or whatever. It is all of a senselessness that defies belief.

But I have obeyed orders a long time, and I keep shouting at Josef Kramer, who has replaced Hoess, to keep at the job of blowing up the crematoria, dismantling the gas chambers.

Today Kramer laughed. He was stuffing papers into
a briefcase, packing a valise—like a salesman off on a hurried trip.

“They’re all out of their fucking minds,” Kramer said. “Hide this place? Shit, it’s all on paper, all recorded. Eichmann’s already told Himmler we’ve killed six million—four million in the camps, and the rest by the Einsatzgruppen. It’s in writing, in memos, all over the place. What the hell will it mean to blow up a few buildings?”

“No more gassing!” I shouted. There was a plan to get rid of the last of the Sonderkommandos. “No more—”

“So Berlin can say
we
did it, they didn’t know a thing that was going on. Like that” asshole Hans Frank. When the Russians captured him, he said he never had a thing to do with it, never killed a Jew. It was us, the SS, the RSHA.”

I began—I don’t know why—to pull open the Auschwitz files and throw folders into the blazing fireplace. I ripped papers apart, heaped them high in the flames, while Kramer mocked me.

“You’d be better off burning more Jews, Dorf.”

“No. No. Berlin says move everyone west. Himmler is convinced the allies will understand. Britain and America will be sympathetic to us. It’s the Russians we have to avoid. Himmler wants to negotiate with the Americans. He—”