The Dentist Of Auschwitz (17 page)

I wanted to know about my friends from Dobra. “Sadly,” he said, “most are in camps or dead.”

When Josek had been drafted into the Polish cavalry and I had seen him dressed in his elegant uniform, I had wished I was him. When he clicked the spurs on his shiny high boots, he seemed to me the bravest man in our village. But I most liked his high-domed hat. Though it was three sizes too large for me, when I tried it on I felt like a grown-up hero. But now our six-year age difference vanished. Before we returned to the work detail, Josek asked me if I could bring Papa along with me to visit. As I left Josek and his fellow inmates, I felt embarrassed that, although we shared the same fate, I was free to go around and visit while all the others were confined to the rigorous life of hard labor.

When the inmates in Gutenbrunn heard about the women’s camp, they swamped me with questions, and soon I found myself carrying notes back and forth between the camps.

One Thursday morning six inmates were brought to the camp in a now familiar scene. The SS and Gestapo henchmen had lots of experience, and the hangings seemed almost a joke to them. As the inmates returned from work, they were told to line up around the gallows. Out came the condemned, their wrists tied behind them, their flesh bulging, and their skin a grisly blue. They blinked at the bright daylight. They were led onto chairs, and their legs were tied together. After the Gestapo read their sentence, one of the condemned men raised his voice and yelled, “You will pay for this! Someday the world will take revenge for these crimes, you wretched murderers!”

A Jew’s making such a threat stunned them. They probably had never heard anything like it before. “Keep your mouth shut!” a Gestapo man yelled. But the condemned man, having nothing to lose, continued to shout: “Murderers! Murderers!” We looked at one another, startled. We could see how embarrassed the Nazis were, and after a few more unsuccessful attempts to shut the man up, one scar-faced member of the Gestapo gave a signal to the hangman, and the ropes tightened. A demonic silence hung in the air. There were no more speeches, not even the reminder that this was to serve as a lesson. The six men were dead, and the hangman quickly left. Though this incident had been of no help to the condemned, their defiance was a brave act that burned itself deeply into my mind. After Dr. Seidel pronounced the men dead, the infirmary workers had the dreadful job of removing the corpses. As we carried their bodies, the echo of “Damn you, you wretched murderers!” hung in the air. Carrying our brothers’ dead bodies was not easy. We didn’t believe in martyrdom and looked upon every life lost as a penalty for being Jewish. That evening the turnip soup was difficult to swallow.

The following Wednesday, when Tadek and I again left the camp, I asked him if he knew of any other camps. “Yes,” he said. “But they are too far away for us to go to.” When we came to the women’s camp, their Kommandant was away. We were told that he was only there in the afternoon. My cousin Balcia also wasn’t there. One girl that needed my help, though, was glad that she had waited for me. She was in pain. I extracted one of her diseased molars. Her gums bled badly, so I brushed tincture of iodine on them and injected her with an ampoule of two cc’s of vitamin C. We again passed my brother’s work detail and stopped. This time I had letters from Gutenbrunn for inmates in Josek’s camp. Our time quickly passed, as we spent it remembering the past.

Whereas the executioners usually came late in the afternoon, one Thursday an ambulance, followed by Gestapo and SS men, came early. Before the drama began around the gallows, our Kommandant led the visitors on an inspection. They marched through our rows, looking at us and making snide remarks. As they came slowly toward me, I saw that one, a man carrying a briefcase, was of high rank. He was a colonel, an SS Sturmbannführer. When he passed us, I was struck by his Semitic features. I turned to my right and unwisely remarked to some other inmates that he looked Jewish. The man following the colonel heard my comment, and he hit me in the face with his gloves, shouting, “Shut your mouth! You swine! Don’t you know who this is? He is Sturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann!”

I wished I hadn’t said it, but it was too late. Then the slim, tall Colonel Eichmann turned back, paused, looked at me, and grinned. Then, as if in an afterthought, he snapped open a thick oversized briefcase that he carried. “Look,” he said. “Do you know what those are?”

That scared me. I saw rope tied neatly in four nooses. I couldn’t say “nooses,” for fear that the word would not pass through my lips. I didn’t know what to do. Finally I said, “Herr Sturmbannführer, those are ropes.”

“No, no. Those are zizith,” he said gleefully, whereupon the whole entourage burst into laughter.

Though I had heard Eichmann’s name mentioned, at that time I knew only that he was a Nazi bigwig. But that he knew what zizith were puzzled me. Soon afterward I heard that he also spoke some Hebrew. From then on, whenever I heard Eichmann’s name, I was reminded of this bizarre encounter. In the end eight more Jews lost their lives that day in Gutenbrunn.

Hunger and hard labor were chipping away at our numbers bit by bit. Even the strong were now calling on their last reserves of energy. The monster had been devouring its prey with a ferocious appetite. “Organizing” had become more dangerous. Never a science, it now required connections and keen judgment. The squallor of our living conditions is hard to describe. Some claimed to have seen inmates inflicting wounds on themselves just to stay away from the unendurable work. In the infirmary I saw wounds and cuts on inmates that couldn’t possibly have been accidental.

Mendele was our best source of news in those days. When he came one day to tell me what he had heard, he looked broken. “They are liquidating all the ghettos,” he said. “They are gassing, burning, or machine gunning all the Jews.” It was so startling, so unbelievable, that I had to stop listening to him. But when he swore by God, I believed him. I realized that we could be next. Zosia had visited only rarely, and when she came we hardly moved from the gate.

One Saturday an inmate told me that Zosia was waiting at the kitchen gate. As in times past, with no sentry near, we walked slowly toward our rendezvous place. This was unmistakably the nicest day that spring. Robins, swallows, and sparrows crisscrossed our path, chirping away. Their song was the only sound we heard. Fallen branches and trees toppled by the winter lay on the ground. Where sunshine hadn’t reached, the young ferns seemed very pale. After a while we came to a clearing, and the bright sunshine invited us to sit down. We hadn’t made love for some time, and sitting close to her I knew what I wanted. As I drew close, I saw that she felt the same, and soon we succumbed.

As we lay on the sun-warmed moss, she said, “We heard about the dreadful things the Germans are doing now to Jewish people. My family thought that you ought to come and stay at our house until the war is over. You’ll be safe there.” Then she added that the Allies had successfully landed on the Greek island of Crete, and that many Italians had turned to fight the Germans, and that the Russians were chasing the Nazis out of their land. “We have enough room for you and your father in the cellar. You’ll both be comfortable there,” she said.

She caught me speechless. I was overwhelmed. I realized that her family must have planned this for some time. Surely they must understand the danger to them. “Do you know what it might cost you if we were found staying in your house?” I answered. “You may not know, but harboring Jews is punished by death now.”

“We live on a small street, and Germans rarely come there. You will be safe with us,” she assured me.

The idea that they were ready to risk their lives for us was remarkable by itself. I thanked her and promised to discuss it with my father. She gave me bread and some more antacids for my ulcer. “Bronek,” she said, “the war can’t last much longer. Please think seriously about escaping from here.”

Then we parted, leaving in different directions. When I came out of the forest, I saw two peasants crossing a field. I waited until they were out of sight, and then I returned to the camp. Rachmiel knew of Zosia, and when I passed him, he grinned. Inmates were waiting for the kitchen window to open so they could quickly grab some soup to still their hunger. Seeing this, I thought of Zosia’s prediction. “The war won’t last much longer.” But for many, I thought, the end might come too late. I was bothered by guilt over my relationship with Zosia, but not because we had sex. It wasn’t lust, I had rationalized. I really loved Zosia very much. I was not sure how long I would survive the camp. Still, comparing my life with those of my fellow inmates, I was the lucky one.

I walked to our block. A lone unburned log lay beside the stove. Bright rays of sunlight covered the wood floor. I began to mull over Zosia’s proposal. I was in a terrible predicament. I felt that living in a cellar wasn’t a good trade-off for what our life was like now. My father was still the coffee man in the Herdecke Kommando, and being the dentist made my day-to-day life bearable. Survival at this camp wasn’t our foremost concern. Yet the offer Zosia put forward was simply too good not to deserve serious attention. When Papa heard about it, he was stunned. It was also the first time I mentioned Zosia’s name to him. Reaching the right decision was not easy. I had my misgivings, and I was sure Papa had his. We carefully weighed everything we could think of, and in the end, Papa said it was up to me to decide. I knew that our roles had reversed. “Whatever you decide,” he said, “will be all right with me.” Still I was torn with uncertainties, and our dilemma remained unresolved.

The next time I went to see my brother, his work group was no longer working on the road. Though Tadek tried to find out where he was, I did not see him again there. At the same time it seemed that a plot around us had been thickening. The Nazi monster, now wounded and in convulsions, hastened his game, devouring his prey as never before. Many disturbing rumors circulated about the Jews who were still in the ghettos. New names like Majdanek and Sobibór were mentioned. Newly arrived inmates told us about the heroic uprising in the Warsaw ghetto and the battle that had followed. The few Jews who never doubted their end fought thousands of heavily armed Germans, they said, and inflicted heavy casualties on the Nazis. At first it was hard to believe, but as more Jews arrived, more stories detailed the ghetto’s brave and fearless battles. They spoke of it with a pride I had never heard expressed before. We wanted to hear those stories over and over. We thought that the Jews had finally broken the long-standing myth of their being incapable of fighting back.

“The bastards are going to kill us all,” Mendele angrily said. “If I had a gun, I would kill a hundred of them before they got me.” A lot of us agreed. If we didn’t rise up to fight here, it was for many reasons. Barely alive, we had nothing to rise up with. Killing one German would have meant retaliation on hundreds of us.

It was the end of May 1943, and though I had been to the women’s camp several times, I had yet to see my cousin. Once again I asked Tadek if he could take me there on a weekend, but he again said no. When I suggested that we go there one evening, I saw him waver. He was close to saying yes. “If someone catches me,” he said, “I’ll end in Gutenbrunn, with you.” Finally, when I insisted, he agreed, and we made plans for a Monday night visit, at half past ten. “This time we have to go on foot,” he cautioned. He also warned me that no one was to know, not even my father. But first I had to find a way out of camp. I knew that Rachmiel could leave the back door of the kitchen unlocked. As I had often carried notes for him, it wasn’t difficult for me to persuade him. In the evening when I left, I told my father not to worry if I came back late. It was warm that night, though clouds blocked the moon. Yet I was shivering, perhaps from fear and excitement. When I came to the kitchen, the door was unlocked, and a small package and a note were nearby. “Come on,” Tadek said. “We have to get through this forest first.”

Past the woods we heard the sound of a rushing river. We followed the stream, and when it narrowed, we jumped across. Then we crossed a stone fence. “We have to be careful now. We are coming to a road,” he warned me. I followed him with Rachmiel’s bundle under my arm. We were suddenly startled by automobile headlights. As they got closer, they suddenly swerved and sped away from us. This crisis over, we walked to the camp.

The perimeter guard must have heard us, because he came out of his guardhouse and looked around. Tadek walked slowly to him, and I remained out of sight. My heart raced with fear and anticipation. It seemed to me that I had lost all safety in being there. In any case, it was too late to go back now. When Tadek returned, he whispered that at first the guard wouldn’t permit me to go in. Only after he had told him that I would slip into the camp while Tadek and he walked around the fence, so that he would not see me, had the guard agreed. “That way, if someone catches you, we will say that we didn’t know.” This was their condition, and I had to accept it.

As soon as they both disappeared into the dark, I sneaked inside. Except for the lights flooding some areas, which I carefully avoided, the camp was dark. As I raced to the first barracks, I felt my heart and my head pounding. How would I find my cousin at night in this mysterious place? I wished I had not come. At the barracks I slowly tested the steps, so that I would not make an unexpected noise and wake someone. I opened the door and tiptoed inside. It was dark in the room, and the air hung heavy with human sweat. The women were breathing out of rhythm. Soon my eyes got accustomed to the darkness, and I could make out a woman on a bunk. I tugged her blanket gently. She raised her head and gave me a startled look. I told her to be quiet. “Don’t be afraid,” I whispered. “I am the Jewish dentist who comes here weekly. I am looking for my cousin Balcia. I know she is here.”

The girl was still scared. She pulled her blanket up to her chin and didn’t answer me. By now I had awakened others. They moved slowly, like zombies, on their bunks. “Who is there?” I heard them ask. When they learned that I was the dentist and that I was looking for Balcia Jakubowicz, one said she knew her. “She is in Block 5,” she added.