Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (29 page)

“Rudi was a sort of ‘golden youth’,” said Richard. “You know what I mean? His had been the world of sports-cars, tennis, country-house weekends, summers on the Riviera. He was a half-Jew; there really was no reason for him to be there.
*
Except that in 1938, after the Austrian Anschluss, he had fallen in love with a girl from Vienna who was Jewish. He married her the day before the regulation came into effect that Jews had to wear Stars of David on their clothes. Of course, he didn’t have to wear it, but the day after his wedding he had the Star sewn on all his suits and coats. When she (though not he) was ordered to Theresienstadt, he went with her. And when she (not he) was ordered to Treblinka, he came with her there too. She was killed immediately. Rudi was an officer, a lieutenant in the Czech army, and he was later of decisive importance in the planning and execution of the revolt. But after his wife was killed it was three weeks before he would speak to anyone; he had been assigned to work in the tailor shop under Suchomel, who, by comparison to some, was relatively decent,” Richard shrugged his shoulders. “That doesn’t mean Suchomel didn’t beat us; all of them beat us.

“The last arrival of our particular group, ten days or so later, was Zhelo Bloch – a photographer in ordinary life. He too was a Czech officer, also good-looking, with brown hair, a strong square sort of face and a muscular body. He was the military brain behind the planning for the uprising – for a long time. Both he and Rudi – and Robert too in other ways – were immensely important to us and to the camp as a whole. Zhelo and Robert became inseparable; and Rudi Masarek and Hans Freund. All of us had great respect for Galewski, the Polish camp-elder; he was an engineer of note, in his forties I think, tall, slim, with dark hair. He looked and behaved like a Polish aristocrat, a very remarkable man.

“Our daily life? It was in a way very directed, very specific. There were various things which were absolutely essential to survival: it was essential to fill oneself completely with a determination to survive; it was essential to create in oneself a capacity for dissociating oneself to some extent from Treblinka; it was important
not
to adapt completely to it. Complete adaptation, you see, meant acceptance. And the moment one accepted, one was morally and physically lost.

“There were, of course, many who did succumb: I have read more or less everything that has been written about this subject. But somehow no one appears to have understood: it wasn’t
ruthlessness
that enabled an individual to survive – it was an intangible quality, not peculiar to educated or sophisticated individuals. Anyone might have it. It is perhaps best described as an overriding thirst – perhaps, too, a
talent
for life, and a faith in life.…”

I understood what Richard had meant when I met Berek Rojzman who came to Treblinka with me when I visited the camp.

*
Limiting the number of Jews.

*
For anti-German activities.

*
Western European half-Jews were often able to escape the rigorous laws applied far more relentlessly to half-Jews in the East.

5

L
IKE HIS
father and his grandfather before him, Berek Rojzman was brought up to be a butcher. Nowadays he works in a factory in a Warsaw suburb; a solidly built man, six foot two, married to a widow – a gentile – with two children.

His family, in which there were six children, lived in Ejrodzisk Maz, a medium-sized town in Eastern Poland. He was the second eldest and went to a Jewish school. “But they taught us Polish,” he said. Yes, he was aware of anti-Semitism. “The Polish children called us ‘Jew-Jew’,” he said. (The present government in Poland is – rightly – determined to obliterate this use of “Polish” for “Christian”; it is arguable that this use of language may have originated quite as much with the Jews themselves as with the Christians in Poland, where Jews, particularly in Eastern Poland, always felt themselves to be – and appeared to wish, or had to remain – a separate ethnic entity within the country.)

“Nationalists came and stood in front of our shop and said, ‘Don’t buy. Jews, go to Palestine.’ There were often fights between Jewish and non-Jewish boys. Our parents said, ‘Pretend not to see, pretend not to hear.’ ” And if the same situation arose now, he says, he would do the same. “The best way with hooligans is to ignore them.”

Berek Rojzman finished school at fifteen and started working in his father’s shop. He met his first wife when he was seventeen, and married her when he was twenty-eight. People in Poland, perhaps unused to this kind of journalism in connection with these events, were usually puzzled if I asked about anything other than the horrors they had lived through, and when I asked Berek Rojzman what their relationship had been all those years, he smiled shyly and answered with a joke. But he finally gave me to understand that it was near-platonic. The engagement was so long because “my mother died, and I had to help my father with my smaller brothers and sisters.”

When I remarked at one point during our conversations that his family sounded very strong, he agreed. “My grandmother,” he said, “lived fifteen kilometres away from us, on her own. When she was 115 years old, she came to see us, on foot, for a drink. And when she’d had her drink she refused to be driven home in the cart – she said she’d walk, just as she had come. We had suggested repeatedly that she should come and live with us. But Babka said, no, she wouldn’t, she might disturb us. She was about 120 or 121 when she died, still living fifteen kilometres away, still on her own.”

When Berek finally married in 1938, he continued working for his father for a year and then bought his own shop in a Warsaw suburb. In pre-war Poland it was rare for any but upper-class, artistic or academic Jews to make friends with non-Jews, but the young Rojzmans made friends with – as he put it again – a “Polish” couple.

“This couple,” said Berek Rojzman, “were enlightened people. They felt, as we did, that they believed in God and that God is God however one happens to pray to him. My wife,” he said, “was killed by the Germans in Treblinka. The husband of this friend was killed by the Germans in Warsaw. After the war she and I met again and we married.”

Berek had joined the army on August 24, 1939, and for the short time he was a soldier, before he was captured by the Germans, he worked as a medical orderly. Clearly he was one of those soldiers who are never at a loss, a born fixer, using his enormous physical strength and his cunning to improve the lot of his comrades, his officers and obviously – his own. He likes to crack jokes. “When they sent me on patrol,” he said, “I always took food and vodka along with me, and I always managed to find some treat to take back to the officers. I was giving them the strength to fight!”

When he got home after escaping from a pow camp, the Germans wouldn’t let him reopen his shop. “I butchered secretly,” he said.

At the end of 1939, when the Germans decreed that all the Jews of Warsaw were to move into the ghetto, the Rojzman family decided that there would be safety in numbers; that in this city within a city life could be made reasonably normal, with homes, work, clinics, help for the old and, above all, schools for the children. They bought a flat in the ghetto and the whole family moved into it. Berek and his father opened shop again as butchers.

There was an interlude of a few months when they were given a cottage on his estate by a Polish landowner, Janusz Rogulski (“I had a lot of connections in the countryside, of course,” said Berek, “but he was good; he wanted to help us. We just lived there. We didn’t even have to work.”) By the spring of 1942, back again in Warsaw, they had decided that they would be safer in a smaller place. They got away by train (which Jews were not entitled to use) and on foot to Biota Rawska, where again they bought a place to live in the ghetto. Other Jews in Poland at that time – hundreds of thousands of them – were creeping into the nearest hole to hide: the Rojzmans bought houses and flats. Others accepted whatever work they were given and starved on ghetto rations: the Rojzmans practised their trade, fought, bartered, sold this and that, and none of them lacked food, clothes or shelter. Others who escaped from the Warsaw ghetto lived rough in the forests or were sheltered by heroic Christians: the Rojzmans took a scheduled train to the town of their choice.

But for all the vitality and ingenuity, in November 1942 they were shipped to Treblinka. Berek was selected for work, all the others died within the hour.

“My older son had died as a baby; but they killed all the rest of my family, including my wife, of course, and my two-year-old boy.

“I got selected for work because one of the men in the ‘Red Command’ [who worked in the undressing barracks] was a former friend. When he saw me – and two other young men he knew – he told us to stay in the undressing barrack and if necessary hide under clothes – there were mountains of them on the floor – and he ran to see the Jewish camp chief, Galewski, and told him that he knew us, that we were strong young men and could work. First Galewski said only I could stay – but finally he said all right for all three of us. I worked in the Red Command all that winter. After that I was assigned to agricultural work – gardening and the planting of vegetables.”

It emerged very clearly that Berek Rojzman continued in Treblinka the same survival techniques which had already proved themselves outside. “I traded,” he said, with a smile. “Mostly with the Ukrainians. They were
in business
: they wanted gold, clothes, objects and food. On the other hand, when we were short, they could get food from the peasants for gold and money and bring it to us. It worked,” he said. “It worked well. They were just like anybody; they traded.”

“If I speak of a thirst, a talent for life as the qualities most needed for survival,” said Richard Glazar, “I don’t mean to say that these were deliberate acts, or even feelings. They were, in fact, largely unconscious qualities. Another talent one needed was a gift for relationships. Of course, there
were
people who survived who were loners. They will tell you now they survived
because
they relied on no one but themselves. But the truth is probably – and they may either not know it, or not be willing to admit it to themselves or others – that they survived because they were carried by
someone
, someone who cared for them as much, or almost as much as for themselves. They are now the ones who feel the guiltiest. Not for anything they did – but for what they didn’t do – for what … and this cannot be any reflection on them … for what simply wasn’t in them to be.”

It was quite clear that Richard did not mean to say that people died because they didn’t have these qualities. To be chosen to live even for an extra day was nothing but luck, one chance in a thousand: it was only that if they had this incredible luck, then these qualities, he thought, gave them a chance to survive longer.

Joe Siedlecki, who is now a
maître d’hôtel
at Grossinger’s Hotel in Upper New York state, is a strikingly good-looking man of six foot three, who looks eminently capable of taking care of himself, and others. He was a soldier in the Polish army at the start of the war – “in some of the worst battles,” he said – and then a prisoner of war. His wife is a lovely thirty-two-year-old German, Erika, who converted to the Jewish faith in order to marry him. She comes from Kiel where her family still lives. “My father and mother said I must take his religion,” she said. “A wife must be the same religion as her husband, they said. And I wanted to anyway. My family, they love Joe. No, they were never religious; my father left the Church forty-six years ago to become a
Gottgläubiger
– no, I don’t know why, but,” she laughed, “perhaps the fact that in Germany we have to pay a church tax had something to do with it.”

The Siedleckis have an enchantingly pretty daughter, five when I met them – an almost classic example of a much-loved child growing up in freedom and security – and live in a particularly nice modern flat in a Grossinger staff-house; a sunny, golden place, flower-filled and beautifully equipped, almost like something out of an American ad-man’s dream. Its atmosphere is Erika’s creation and represents very vividly her personality. “Some people ask Joe how he could marry a German,” she said when Joe had gone off on an errand. “After all he’s been through – they just can’t understand. He gets very angry sometimes. It happened at the hotel just the other night, when one of the guests had the temerity to ask him. He told him it was none of his business. But on the other hand, he himself often used to tell people I was Italian or something, and he doesn’t want me to speak German to the little one. But in that I think he is wrong. I think I owe it to her to teach her. Later, when she goes to college, she’ll get credits for it; it’ll help her get on. And anyway, I can’t help it, I
am
German you see; if something nice happens like Willie Brandt getting the Nobel Prize or something – I feel proud. I do speak German to her – I sing German songs and read German fairy tales to her. First in German and then I translate them for her. I do that every evening for an hour, from 7 to 8 … when Joe is not here.”

“The Germans?” said Joe. “What shall I tell you? When I was over there to testify, they treated me like a king; a king I tell you. And my wife’s family, they respect me. In Treblinka, some of them were animals, but some of them were good too. I tell you, the Poles were worse, much worse than the Germans, and so were the Ukrainians. There was one
SS
, if I saw him today, if there was anything he needed, I’d give it to him; Karl Ludwig. He was a good good man. The number of times he brought me things, the number of times he helped me, the number of people he probably saved, I can hardly tell you. I don’t know where he is now, but I wish I did.