Pursuit (12 page)

“You didn't see it?”

“No. I went to Palestine before the war, to a kibbutz. Then, later, I joined the Mossad. It's an illegal group to bring Jews to Palestine. I was just back in Poland—in Kielce, actually, on my way to Lublin—when I was picked up. He shrugged and smiled. “Don't worry. I've been in the camps for five years. We'll survive.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Look at him.”

“Who's he?”

“His name is Wolf, Morris Wolf. He's from outside of Munich. He's been in the camps since 1936—eight years—and he's still alive. We'll survive, don't worry.”

“I wonder …”

“Don't wonder.” It almost sounded like an order. “We have to survive.”

“Why?” His very asking was an indication of his misery.

“Because Palestine needs us, for one thing—”

“Palestine?”

Brodsky looked at him in the growing light. “Palestine! Someday we'll have our own nation there, our own country, and you and me and Wolf and all the rest have a lot of work to make that dream come true.”

Palestine! Grossman thought. You, possibly, but certainly not me! If either one of us survives this hellhole, that is. He became aware that Brodsky was speaking again.

“And there's another reason we have to survive.”

“Why?”

“To make sure people never forget,” Brodsky said flatly, and started to climb down as the shrill camp whistle blew to rouse them for the day.

Chapter 6

An Esthonian named Soli Yaganzys was the Kapo—the prisoner overseer—of Barracks Thirty-eight in Area Three of Camp One at Bergen-Belsen. The Germans had saved him from a terrible death at the hands of the Russians, for whom he had helped betray Esthonia. He might still have been working for them had he not been caught also working for the Germans.

With the Nazis in the early days of his tenure there, Yaganzys had done quite well, until his habit of killing the women he raped forced his employers to recommend a concentration camp for a correctional interlude. Dachau saw him as a prisoner, as did Sachsenhausen, but by the time he had experienced Gross-Rosen and Ohrdruf he had graduated to becoming a Kapo. And as a Kapo he was too valuable to be released.

Yaganzys hated Jews as much if not more than the SS. No one ever did know exactly why, unless it was because his ability to handle Jews in his early days as a Kapo—in the days when there were still more than a handful of Jews alive in the camps—had earned him his continued existence as a prisoner himself. But of all the Jews Yaganzys had encountered in all the camps he had frequented, he hated Morris Wolf the most. Wolf, Yaganzys learned, had been in the camps since 1936, and for a Jew to survive more than a year at the most struck Yaganzys as being criminal. Yet Wolf had survived almost eight years and continued to survive, and every day the little Jew lived was a personal affront to Soli Yaganzys.

The amazing thing about Morris Wolf was that he did not appear to be a survivor. He had never been particularly strong even before his experience in the camps; yet Morris Wolf continued to survive. True, he had wasted almost to a skeleton, but he continued to survive. Yaganzys made sure the worst tasks were assigned to Wolf, as well as those best calculated to sap the little strength the small man had; yet Wolf continued to survive. He survived because he had learned early in his camp experience that in order to survive one had to accept, and Wolf accepted. Or, rather, Wolf had always accepted, but even acceptance has its limits.

In November, when they had been in Barracks Thirty-eight under the control of Yaganzys approximately two months, Wolf revolted. He pretended not to hear an order from Yaganzys. He knew his refusal was suicidal, but after eight years Morris Wolf had decided he had been wasting his time in surviving. Death, after all, could scarcely be worse than survival under Yaganzys. And so he refused an order by pretending not to hear it.

It was, of course, the excuse the Kapo needed and he did not hesitate to use it. Making sure everyone in the barracks was paying close attention, he dragged Wolf from his bunk and stood him in the middle of the room. His whip was curled in his hand. The other prisoners stood back, watching fearfully. Yaganzys smiled at Wolf.

“Jew turd! I told you to bring the soup tonight. If you had done it when I first told you to, you would have had help. Now you will do it alone.” He looked around. “You will eat when this Jew shit brings your soup, not before.” He looked back at Wolf, his hand stroking the leather of the curled strap sensuously. “You will do it now!”

Wolf looked back at him, looked through him, did not hear or see him.

“Possibly this will help you to pay attention,” Yaganzys said, and stepped back, allowing the whip to uncurl itself on the floor behind him like an obedient snake. Then, with all his force and with the skill that had come from much practice, he brought the lash over his head and sent it flying at Wolf. The knout wrapped itself around Wolf's head; blood spurted as the lash curled across the cheek, cutting the flesh to the bone, crushing the nose, the final tip of the strap flicking out one of Wolf's eyes as one might flip a seed from a grape. Yaganzys made a practice motion with his thick wrist; the whip obediently unwrapped itself. Wolf still stood, the blood pouring from his face, his cheek flapping down, the blood choking him as it ran past his rigid lips into his throat; but he did not fall. Yaganzys brought the whip back for a second strike, determined to kill the little Jew, now and once and for all. And then Brodsky was upon him, tearing the whip from his hand, wrapping the thin rawhide about Yaganzys' throat, pulling it taut with all his strength.

The prisoners stood and stared. Yaganzys bellowed and brought his hands up to free himself. Brodsky panted in his effort to maintain his grip, to strangle this monster, but Soli Yaganzys was far stronger. And then Ben Grossman came to Brodsky's aid, fed by his hatred for the Kapo; and then the other prisoners came in a pack and that was the end of Soli Yaganzys. In moments he lay stretched on the floor, his tongue protruding blackly from his mouth, the whip strap buried deep in his throat like the coils of an attacking snake, his dead eyes staring up at them in profound surprise.

The prisoners fell back, appalled by the action they had taken, staring wildly at Grossman and Brodsky, their eyes demanding the two get them out of the terrible dilemma in which the two had thrust them. In the excitement they had forgotten Wolf, but he still stood, his one eye staring down at the corpse of his enemy. Then he fell.

There was a man named Pincus in the barrack, a Jew from Posnan who had been a pharmacist in life before the war. He knelt beside Wolf, tearing off his shirt, pushing the torn cheek into an approximation of its proper position and wrapping it as tightly and as best he could with the shirt. He looked up.

“He has to go to the hospital,” Brodsky said briefly, taking command. “Tell them he fell from his bunk. His head hit the water bucket.” He looked down at the corpse on the floor as Pincus and another man lifted the unconscious Wolf and carried him out. “Under the floor boards with this one.”

Under the floor boards was the locker room of the inmates. It was here they hid things they stole and often lost sleep worrying that the things would be re-stolen. It was here that prisoners fortunate enough to have friends were hidden when it was known their next assignment was the gas chamber. It was here dead rats killed during the night were flung by those too lazy to carry them outside. They lifted the floor boards and dug a grave for Yaganzys, scattering the dirt made excess by his bulk as far as they could fling it under the floor; and they buried his whip beside him.

That night, after midnight, Brodsky was wakened by a sound. Someone had lifted the floor boards again, and in the darkness he could see a ring of bodies around the opening. And then came the other sounds and he knew they had regretted their wastefulness and had dug Yaganzys up again and were sharing his flesh. He shuddered and put his head down again, hoping at least they would bury the remains and put the floor boards properly back in place.

The following day they were told their Kapo had apparently escaped, which did not seem to bother the officials of the camp. A new man was assigned who was little different than Yaganzys.

At Bergen-Belsen the sick died quickly; those who were well enough to do a day's work at the Herman Goering Werke factory in Braunsweig, or to work in Celle, died more slowly. To Benjamin Grossman the camp was all the hell he had known it would be. Each day seemed to bring him closer and closer to the end of his endurance.

He lay on his straw mat as winter came, clutching his thin blanket to him, and tried not to think of the next day. But the routine of each squalid ghastly day had burned itself into his mind too deeply not to repeat itself endlessly in his thoughts. Up at six. A half-hour to straighten the mat, fold the blanket, help carry those who died in the night outside. The burial
Sonderkommandos
would take them to the pits later. Then time to relieve himself at the ditch, shivering uncontrollably as he crouched with the others. Clean oneself as best one could, using snow rather than stand in line at the one faucet. Dry oneself on a jacket sleeve. Then eat a breakfast of one slice of bread and a half-pint of so-called coffee. Then march off to roll call. If the guards were in a playful mood, push-ups in the freezing mud and filth. Then the dash to the labor-assignment area to be crammed with others into the trucks. And off to the steel mill in Braunsweig for a hard day's work.

The mill, at least, was warm, but not the freezing cold of the roll-call area at night. Standing for hours, bumping one foot against the other to keep the circulation going while the names were droned out. And more hours if someone had been so inconsiderate as to die somewhere without advising the authorities. It was almost beyond endurance! Maintaining life on one slice of bread and another cup of thin soup at night. Fortunately, Max Brodsky, with his wits and experience, sometimes managed to scrounge extra rations. He did sewing work for some of the SS guards, or fashioned souvenirs for them from odds and ends in exchange for food. Brodsky always shared with his friends, but principally with Ben. Otherwise he would never have made it.

On those nights when he could pry his mind from the horror of his daily existence, Ben Grossman would feel his ribs, knowing they were getting more prominent. He would run his finger along the curve of his nose, sure it was becoming more and more hooked as the flesh fell away from the bone. He thought of all the food he had wasted in his life. Juicy steaks and rare, half-eaten. Bread broken and even buttered before being abandoned. Thick puddings left untouched, salads overlooked, rich desserts barely tasted. Cigarettes no longer interested him; he wondered at his previous addiction. Anything that could not be chewed, savored, and swallowed was beyond the range of his imagination. He seldom thought of women, or if he did he pictured them only as serving wenches, bringing piles of steaming potatoes to the table, flushed with gravy, or fragrant schnitzels with glistening eggs on top. At times like this he was certain he would not live long. A person could starve just so long and then he had to die. It made no difference how determined a person was to survive. It was ridiculous to suppose otherwise.

Spring came suddenly to Celle and the
Belsenlager
. The snow simply disappeared one day, swept away by the chill rain that came to take its place. The camp was a mire; the rain came in sheets, flooding the ditches, floating the winter's collection of excrement in odorous layers deposited throughout the camp. Men walked barefoot, tucking their thin sandals into their blouses, catching the rain water in cans for drinking; and often coughing their lungs away as they lay in their soaked clothes in their tiers at night. The bread turned moldy; the morning coffee and the nightly soup tasted of the dirty water from which they were brewed.

Rumors flooded the camp, tinged with enough truth to be devastatingly frightening: the Allies had suffered a major defeat the November past at a place called the Bulge and were withdrawing from France as quickly as possible without suffering a total rout; the Russians had been stalled along the Vistula and outside the gates of Warsaw, and now that winter had finally passed, the Panzer divisions were regrouped and prepared to drive the Asiatic hordes to Stalingrad again and beyond. It was a period when Max Brodsky, a bean pole of a man now, needed all his faith not to lose hope. For Ben Grossman it was the depths of despair.

He looked little more than a skeleton now. Even his small ears, once so neatly laid against his head, now seemed to stand away from his tiny skull, almost useless appendages, since he seldom heard or paid attention to what was said to him. He no longer walked erect, but stooped like an old man, and his teeth hurt when he bit into his morning slice of bread, so that he would mouth it, soaking it in saliva, and painfully swallow the mush that resulted. For weeks he had been without a labor assignment. He was totally useless at the mill. His hands shook constantly, and at times he would pause in his shuffle through the accumulated filth of the yard and stop to talk to the corpses laid out awaiting the burial detail. He would mumble to them of his precious plan and how it would have worked had he not been cursed somewhere in life; and then he would listen for an answer from his lifeless audience.

One day Max Brodsky was reassigned from the labor pool, this time to a small factory in Celle that manufactured kitchenware—pots and pans—from unused shell casings. He worked there a week, sawing the bases off the shells and feeding them into presses, before he suddenly realized the opportunity that had presented itself to him. In earlier days Max Brodsky would have seen that opportunity at once.

He had guessed early on that the factory was probably owned in large part by the top SS in the camp, if not by most of the SS there on shares, but it was only after a week that he realized how illegal the use of needed shell casings must be. For several days he pondered his information, wondering exactly how best to take advantage of it; then, knowing no other means and also aware of the risk he was taking, he approached a guard for whom he had done sewing.