The Dentist Of Auschwitz (30 page)

These were the last days of the Reich. Hitler had clearly failed. But the Nazis still carried on the war against the Jews. We dragged ourselves on with our last ounce of strength. After marching for one hour we came to Neustadt and were ordered to turn left toward the Baltic Sea. There we found rafts and a dozen SS men standing by. Although the morning sun had begun to creep over the horizon, a heavy fog obscured our vision. We could see less than nine meters in front of us. Each dinghy took thirty people. We were puzzled. We did not know where we were being taken or what they planned to do with us. We feared the worst. About fifteen minutes later something emerged in the fog. As the dinghy drew closer, we saw the stern of a ship. Painted on its side was its name,
Cap Arcona
.

We soon heard someone shouting down through a bullhorn: “Are you bringing me more prisoners?”

“Yes,” the SS men replied.

“I can’t take them. I have over four thousand already on board. I have no more room.”

“We are overloaded,” another man yelled. “Why don’t you try the
Thielbek
or the
Deutschland
?”

“Our orders are to bring them to you,” the SS men yelled back.

The sailor refused. “I am the captain of this ship, and I will not take them. That is final,” he yelled down. The SS men, outranked and outmaneuvered, gave up and took us back to shore. Once there, the SS officer in charge, wearing a spiffy black uniform, stepped onto our dinghy and ordered it back to the ship. The other three dinghies followed. As if sensing the matter was not settled yet, the ship’s captain was waiting when we returned. The SS man, his voice threatening, ordered the captain to take us at once. The captain insisted as before that he had no room. The exchange was heated.

Finally the captain softened and asked, “How many have you got?”

“In all about five hundred,” the SS man yelled back. “Just take those sixty, and I will send the rest to the
Thielbek
.” This compromise worked.

By then the fog had lifted. We saw a rope ladder come down, and we were ordered to climb up. This was risky. Balancing was difficult. We did not have much strength, and we feared that we would slip off and fall into the sea. But how could we resist? So following on each other’s heels, with the rope ladder swaying and shaking, we climbed up, and somehow we made it. We followed a fair-haired, cruel-looking sailor below the deck. The stairs were covered with ornate Persian carpets, and heavy mahogany railings were anchored with shiny brass fittings. Elegant gold brocade tapestry covered the walls. One more level down, we passed a large and elegant Victorian dining room. The richness and the luxury of the
Cap Arcona
was ironic. We, the
Unmenschen,
the world’s rabble, on this luxurious liner?

We followed the sailor further down and came into a long narrow corridor. Finally he stopped and unlocked a heavy metal door and ordered us to pass through it. Then he slammed the door. We were in a new concentration camp, a room about twenty-one meters long and nine meters wide, normally used to store the ship’s provisions. It was barely lit and packed with prisoners from Neuengamme. We were below sea level, and the room had no portholes. A passive silence persisted there. The prisoners from Neuengamme had been there for more than a week. They were delivered to this ship by another boat, the
Athens
. In the last three days they had only had soup and water. They had no sense of time. Their isolation was so total that they didn’t know whether it was night or day when we came aboard.

The
Cap Arcona
was a luxury liner of the Hamburg-Südamerika Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft. At nearly 28,000 metric tons, it was the largest and most luxurious ship of the line and was nicknamed the Queen of the South Atlantic. Ironically, the Hamburg-Amerika line, the preceding company, had been founded by a Jewish immigrant to Germany. Now the ship was to make new history.

I had hunger pains, but I resisted eating my last piece of bread, which was stuffed in my coat pocket. I lay down, squeezed between my brother and a stranger, and immediately fell asleep. Suddenly I felt a tug and woke up, aware of someone standing over me snatching my last bit of bread. I grabbed his arm, and he jerked it away. “Let go of me,” he said in Russian, pushing my hand away. “You have just arrived, and I am here four days.” He didn’t have my sympathy. I am not sure that I then appreciated what he had gone through.

We were in the darkest gloom. Our morale was lower than at any other time I could remember. Some men were sighing, “This is our end. We won’t leave this ship alive.” But we were the tough and unyielding, having made it alive this far. This was the last straw for us, I thought. What will be will be. I fell asleep once more.

Suddenly we heard a loud bang, and the ship shook violently. Another and another bang followed in succession. We could hear crowds of people running by our door, shouting: “They torpedoed the ship! Just what we expected.” We knew that something dreadful had happened. We found that our door was locked, and no amount of pounding, yelling, and pleading for someone to open it helped. Then another bang resounded, and the floor began tilting under our feet. Soon smoke filled the room. Without fresh air, people coughed incessantly. Shouts rose in the room. “We cannot breathe! We are choking!”

We were close to asphyxiation, but no amount of screaming and pleading helped us. No one seemed to hear us. Even when we succeeded in prying a two-meter plank loose from a shelf and were hitting the door with it, no one answered. In the meantime, the sirens wailed, as we heard bang after bang. We were swaying back and forth like one body. The smoke grew heavier and so did the coughing. Suddenly the light bulb went out. The dark frightened us even more.

Finally, purely by chance, someone unlocked our door, and a wild stampede began. Everyone wanted to escape the smoky room. In this chaos I lost my brother, but we found each other while running wildly through the corridors. “Don’t go that way,” someone yelled, coming into our path. “You can’t get out this way. The stairs are on fire.” Others we encountered urged us to come with them. “There is another stairway at this end!” they shouted. We were running hard and getting nowhere. The corridor was quickly filling up with smoke, and men were coughing ceaselessly. “We want to get out of here alive,” delirious people shouted. We did not know whom to follow.

It was three floors up to the top deck. We frantically ran through the narrow, slanted corridor, bouncing off oncoming people. We passed the dining room and remembered the stairs from our march down. But they were in flames, and smoke was flowing down the stairway. Nevertheless, my brother and I tried to run up. We went a few steps, but the heavy smoke and flames were impenetrable. They pushed us back. I tried again, and so did others, but again we were pushed back, our hair singed. I retreated and then tried again, and each time I had to return. I made a final desperate attempt. I closed my eyes, and sheltering my head with my arms and hands, I ran as fast as I could up the stairs. That too failed. We were terrified, fearing for our lives. We ran back into the dining room. By then it also was filled with black smoke. We ran, holding on to one another, and saw another corridor leading in a different direction. We followed it and saw daylight coming from one of the men’s lavatories. The space was six meters long and three meters wide. An eight-meter shaft extended above this space, and men were lowering ropes. Some people were climbing up, but others were climbing on top of them and pushing them down. No one wanted to die, and panic reigned. Soon even more frightened men crowded the room. When one man managed to stand on another’s shoulders, someone else tried to stand on his, until they all fell down.

Finally I tried the rope. Standing on my brother’s shoulders, I tried to climb up, but I too was grabbed from behind and pulled down. I failed twice, and then my brother tried his luck. He was also knocked down. I can’t recall how many times we tried before I was able to hold on to the rope and climb up to the point where someone from above could grab my hand and pull me up. In this man’s grasp I lowered myself back down and helped my brother up. It was not a minute too soon, for the flames reached the lavatory, and others didn’t make it. Clouds of dark smoke shot up into the shaft, making further rescues impossible. We heard desperate cries from below.

I looked up into the sky and pondered the reason for our survival. The sun was draped in dark clouds. “Could it be, perhaps, that the prayers of our loved ones convinced you to have mercy on us? God, you often ask us to accept the crazy things around us,” I wanted to pray, but my thoughts were too painful, and I was in an emotional turmoil. In this profound chaos, I felt solace in simply being alive.

³
In his book
The Curtain Falls
, Count Bernadotte makes no mention of having been in Neu Glassau. Hence I am not certain that he was one of the three Swedes. See Count Folke Bernadotte,
The Curtain Falls
, trans. Eric Lewenhaupt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945).

W
e were three and a half kilometers from the closest shore.
Hundreds of prisoners filled the top deck. At the stern about fifty German civilians, including a few women, and at least that many German sailors also confronted with the same dilemma. Nearby were two smaller ships, the
Thielbek
and the
Deutschland
. The latter was tipped to one side and on fire. On one of its smokestacks, still visible, appeared a large red cross. A few hundred inmates were struggling in the sea, trying to swim to shore.

However fortunate we were to come out of the hell below, safety was still far away. The
Cap Arcona
was tilting, and we saw no one coming from shore to help. What’s more, not a single lifeboat or life vest was on the ship.

Death stared at us. Pandemonium had erupted, and the bay was full of swimmers. Many more were jumping into the frigid water. Those near the ship were getting nowhere. The downward pull of the sinking ship created a whirlpool, and the swimmers’ chances of survival were slim. Physically exhausted and no match for the elements, they struggled in vain, and one after another sank below the waves.

Suddenly from an empty sky planes appeared. We could clearly see their markings. “They’re British!” we shouted, and we waved and screamed up to them. “See, we are KZ-nicks! We are concentration camp inmates!” We waved our striped caps at them and pointed at our striped clothes, but there was no mercy. They dropped napalm, as the
Cap Arcona
shook and burned. On their next pass they came within fifteen meters of the deck. We could see one pilot’s face, and we thought we had nothing more to fear. But in that instant his plane’s belly flaps opened again, and more bombs flew down. We could track each one as it fell and on impact sent sections of the deck flying about. Other bombs missed us and fell into the sea, creating fountains of water splashing over us. Machine-gun bullets sprayed us and those trying to save themselves in the sea, and then the water turned red as bodies disappeared beneath the waves.

We were terrified as the ship tilted still more. The deck surface was smooth and wet, and we could no longer stand upright. We sat at the edge and held on to the railing. The sea around us was filled with people struggling and losing their battle to survive. Escaping the turbulence of the whirlpool was nearly impossible. The few that managed to get out of the whirlpool were so weakened that they soon vanished under the churning waters as well. It was three in the afternoon. The visibility was good, and we clearly saw the shore. We hoped that someone from shore would come, perhaps to rescue the
Cap Arcona
‘s crew, and we could get help. Surely they wouldn’t ignore their own people, we thought.

The
Cap Arcona
was tilted about thirty-five degrees into the water. Our hope of rescue was fast fading. In spite of what everyone saw happening around us, people were still jumping overboard, expecting a miracle. Then the explosives on board were ignited. My brother and I sat holding a railing post between our legs so as not to slide off the deck. Then flames shot up over our heads. Fragments of the deck were breaking off after each bang. The inferno was thorough. We could no longer hang on.

Josek and I stared at one another and looked toward the shore. I knew that he could not help me, nor could I help him. Josek could not swim. And he knew that he would never make it, trying to swim to shore. Each of us had to make his own decision. I looked at the clear, cold, and hostile sea, and every part of me shivered. We were rapidly sinking. Few people were left on deck. The sailors and some SS men were still there. Had they figured out a way to escape this nightmare? If they had, they did not share it with us. I looked to the heavens and asked why this was happening.

It was about four o’clock when I saw David Kot tie a rope to the ship’s railing and slide down into the water. When I looked down at him, he shouted up, “Come on down! The rope is strong. Down here we’ll have a better chance of being picked up.”

I was convinced. But before I decided I thought of my brother. We had survived so much together. I tried to get Josek to come with me. I told him that the planes and explosions on the boat would surely kill us. But Josek, afraid shrugged his shoulders. I understood his apprehension. “Berek, you go,” he said. “Perhaps you’ll get help for us out there. I will stay here and wait.” By then several people were hanging on to the rope, and more were eying it, believing it to be the miracle escape route. There was little I could do to persuade my brother. I took a last look at him, quickly turned my head, and followed Viky Engel down the rope.

I reached bottom. Seven of us were hanging on to the rope and bobbing in the water. The water temperature was cold—only about seven degrees Celsius. My jacket and shoes were soaked and heavy, and I had to take them off. Viky said that his brother, Willy, had left the ship some time ago and swum to shore. He thought that Willy was a good swimmer and that he would make it if anyone could. Desperate people seeking safety continued to slide down the rope. It was strong, but all ropes have their limits. We were nine, and more were coming. When the tenth person climbed on the rope, it stretched and crackled. “No more!” we shouted up. “The rope will tear.” But there was a stampede on deck, and people kept sliding down. I knew the rope would not last much longer. I was wearing trousers, a shirt, and a black short-sleeved sweater. I took off my trousers and let those go as well. With them went the kilo of dental gold. Now I had only my shirt, sweater, and underwear.