Survivor

by Sam Pivnik

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  Glossary of Terms

  Prologue: Facing the Angel

  1. The Garden of Eden

  2. The World Turned Upside Down

  3. Occupation

  4. Day Turned to Night

  5. Descent into Hell

  6. The Razor’s Edge

  7. The Rampe

  8. The Prince’s Mine

  9. Death March

  10. Cold Comfort Farm

  11. The Cap Arcona

  12. Liberation

  13. The Land of Milk and Honey

  14. A Kind of Justice? A Kind of Peace?

  15. Return to Eden

  Photographs

  Notes on Sources

  Further Reading

  Appendix

  Index

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  ‘There is a straight line from “You have no right to live among us as Jews” to “You have no right to live among us” to “You have no right to live”.’

  Raul Hilberg

  Acknowledgements

  There are so many people I would like to thank for bringing my story to publication that it is really impossible to name them all, but some stand out and so to them I would like to give my special thanks: Philip Appleby, for his patience and unfailing support – this book would have been impossible without him; Andrew Lownie, my agent, for believing in this project; Rupert Lancaster, Kate Miles and all the team at Hodder and Stoughton; all of the researchers and writers who have worked with me over the years, in particular Danielle Fox and Adrian Weale; my friends and supporters Ray Appleby, David Breuer-Weil and Alan James; Judith Hassan and all the staff at the Hendon Holocaust Centre; Chris Brassett; Jill Pivnik, my sister-in-law and Mei Trow, my able ghost writer who has brought my memories to life. But most especially I should thank all who have not been with me since I was a boy; my mother and father, my brothers and sisters and all my friends from Bedzin. They gave me the strength to carry on.

  Sam Pivnik

  I would like to thank four people in particular for their help on this book. First and foremost – as always – my wife Carol, who has spent many hours typing the manuscript, even with a dislocated elbow; my son, Taliesin, who – again, as always – was an indefatigable researcher, gentle critic and, on this occasion, back-up typist; Greta Hofmann, for her indispensable translation work from various German texts; and Bryan Jackson, for the use of his extensive Holocaust library.

  M.J.T.

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Author’s collection: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33. Aish UK: 35, 37, 38. akg-images: 10, 12, 20. Getty Images: 9, 11, 16 (photo David Clapp). Courtesy of Bernd Janssen: 34. ©Estate of Mieczysław Kościelniak: 17. Adrian Weale: 14, 15, 36, 39. Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority: 6, 8, 13. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC: 18.

  Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if there are any errors or omissions, Hodder & Stoughton will be pleased to insert the appropriate acknowledgement in any subsequent printings or editions.

  Glossary of Terms

  Aktions – The removal of Jews, Gypsies and other ‘enemies’ of the Third Reich to the concentration camps.

  Aliyah Bet – The codename given to the illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine in the 1930s and 40s.

  Appell – Roll-call at the camps.

  Appellplatz – The square where prisoners would assemble for roll-call.

  Arschlöcher – German insult; arsehole.

  Asos – Short for ‘antisocial ones’ – a category of prisoners including the homeless, long-term unemployed, sex offenders etc.

  Baumeisters – Civilian engineers (see also Steigers).

  Bedzin – Author’s home town.

  Berchtesgaden – Hitler’s Bavarian retreat.

  Berufsverbrecher – Professional criminals who worked in the camps.

  Blockältester – Block senior.

  Blockschreiber – Roll-call clerk.

  Blocksperre – Lock-down.

  Byelorussia – Belarus.

  Dreckjuden! – German insult; ‘Dirt Jew!’

  Edelweiss Piraten – Anti-Nazi movement in Germany.

  Einsatzgruppe – German taskforce, execution squad.

  Eretz Yisrael – The Biblical Land of Israel; Greater Israel.

  Fall Weiss – The Nazi’s strategic plan for invading Poland.

  Familienlager – Family camp.

  Gau – German district.

  Gauleiter – District leader.

  Gordonia – A Zionist youth movement.

  Hachshara – Preparation for emigration to Palestine/Israel.

  Häftlingskrankenbau – Prisoners’ hospital.

  Haganah – Jewish Defence Force; paramilitary organisation.

  Hausfrau – Housewife.

  Heder – Religious primary school.

  Hefker – Jewish term for being free of responsibilities; from the legal term to denote an ownerless property.

  Hitlerjugend – Hitler Youth.

  Jedem das Seine – ‘To each, his own’ – motto on gates of Mauthausen camp.

  Judenfieber – Typhus; lit. ‘Jew fever’.

  Judenrat – Jewish council.

  Judenrein – Cleansed of Jews.

  Kaddish – Jewish prayer for the dead.

  Kapos – Camp foremen, recruited from the ranks of the prisoners.

  Kappellmeister – Bandmaster.

  Kindertransporte – The transport of children – either to safety, or to the death camps.

  Knochenmühle – ‘The bone-grinder’ – nickname for Mauthausen camp.

  Kojen – Three-tiered bunk.

  Kommando – German term for unit.

  Kriegsmarine – German Navy.

  Lagerälteste – Camp seniors.

  Lagerführer – Camp commandant.

  Lagerschreiber – Camp clerk.

  Lausbub – German insult; rascal.

  Lebensraum – Literally, living space, Hitler’s foreign policy for expanding the Reich.

  Machal – The Hebrew acronym for ‘Overseas Volunteers’; soldiers who fought for the new state of Israel.

  Maurerschule – Builders’ school.

  Muselmänner – Muslims (col. for starving camp inmates).

  Oberkapo – Chief Kapo.

  Operation Barbarossa – Codename for German invasion of Russia.

  Organisation – Slang for black market operations in the camps.

  Piepels – Boys used for sex by camp guards and Kapos.

  Premiumschein – Ticket for canteen.

  Rampe Kommando – Platform detachment.

  Rapportführer – Sergeant Major, commander of Block.

  Raus! – Out!

  Reichsfeldmarschall – German rank of Field Marshal.

  Rottenführer – Nazi Party section leader.

  Scheissjude – Racial insult (lit. ‘shit-Jew’).

  Schiffchen – Soft side-cap.

  Schnell! – Quickly!

  Schutzhäftlinge – Political prisoners (lit. protective prisoners).

  Shabbat – Jewish Sabbath.

  Sheitel – Traditional black wig worn by Jewish women.

  Shem Yisborach – Hebrew name for God.

  Sicherheitsdienst – German
security service.

  Smetana – Sour cream.

  Sonderausweis – Passes that stated you were essential to the war effort.

  Sonderbehandlung – Special treatment.

  Sonderkommando – Special units; inmates who were forced to operate the gas chambers and crematoria.

  Stahlhelmes – Steel helmets.

  Stalags – Prisoner-of-war camp.

  Steigers – Civilian engineers (see also Baumeisters).

  Stiebel – Jewish prayer room.

  Stube – Side room.

  Stubendienst – Camp orderlies.

  Sturmabteilung – Brown Shirts.

  Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger – Notorious SS military unit composed of German prisoners.

  Totenkopf – Death’s Head units of SS.

  Treif – Non-kosher food.

  Treuhänder – A trusty; trusted helper.

  Umgeseidelt im Osten – Resettlement in the East.

  Untermenschen – Literally, subhuman. A Nazi term for Jews.

  Unteroffizier/Unterscharführer – Corporal (Army/SS).

  Volksdeutsche – Poles of German origin.

  Vorarbeiter – Foreman.

  Wehrmacht – Germany’s armed forces.

  Winterhilfe – Contributions to help soldiers on the Eastern Front.

  Yad Vashem – Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem.

  Yiddishkeit – Jewishness.

  Zyklon B – Chemical compound used in the gas chambers.

  PROLOGUE

  Facing the Angel

  There was no calendar in Auschwitz. No dates, no anniversaries, nothing to mark the passing of time. For the lucky ones, those of us who survived, night followed day and days became weeks. Not many of us outlived the passage of months. So I don’t know exactly when I fell ill. It was probably December 1943, freezing as only the Polish winter can freeze. In my thin striped tunic and trousers I should have felt bitterly cold, but that particular morning I felt hot and sweaty.

  We slept five to a kojen, a three-tiered bunk, crammed together on the hard, damp wooden boards and it took me a while to take stock – to realise that all that shared body heat should have faded now I was standing alone. My head throbbed and the glands in my neck were painful and inflamed. In the days before the war if you felt ill you went to the doctor. If you couldn’t afford a doctor, you stayed in bed, wrapped up warm and took an aspirin. In Auschwitz there were no doctors like that. And the only hospital was a place of death – it was the HKB, the Häftlingskrankenbau, the prisoners’ hospital, known to us as all as the waiting-room for the gas chamber. I buttoned up my jacket and tried not to shiver as the raging fever gave way to chills.

  I barely remember my work on the Rampe that day. Presumably the trains rolled in as they always did, with the rattling of trucks and snort of the engines, the hissing escape of steam; then the sliding of bolts and the poor, damned souls emerging, blinking into the sky’s brightness. I’d seen them so often before, I barely noticed them now. Toddlers clinging to their mothers, crying; women clutching their children; Orthodox elders trying to talk to the Kommando, asking for an explanation of the inexplicable; old people, wild-eyed and shaking, limping along the Rampe at the prods of the SS men.

  I knew which of those to avoid, whose eyes not to meet, which snarling, snapping dog to be wary of. And I went about my business as I always did, dragging the stiff, shit-caked bodies out of the trucks, trying not to breathe in the stench. We laid them down on the concrete, far behind the lines of the living, who were already being marched away. To the right, life. To the left, the gas. No rhyme. No reason. Just the random flick of an immaculately gloved finger. Right. Left. Left. Right. Left. Left.

  I remember staring along the Rampe that day. It looked like a battlefield, as it always did. The bodies were being carted away, making way for the piles of coats and bags, a girl’s doll, somebody’s glasses. Everybody had been told to leave their belongings where they were. They’d all be returned to them later, after the showers. After the de-lousing. After the Zyklon B.

  It was starting to whirl in my brain, the shouts of the SS and the Kapos echoing and re-echoing. Everything suddenly seemed far, far away – the snorting train and the disappearing columns of new arrivals. Work sets you free. ‘Raus, raus!’ ‘Schnell!’ ‘You fucking Jew scum.’ Work sets you free …

  * * *

  When I woke up, with a start, I didn’t know where I was. There was a greyness everywhere, smudged by barely moving patches of black. As I focused and my head cleared, I knew exactly where I was. This was the hospital block, the whitewashed walls an attempt at sterility. The black patches were patients, like me, still in the striped uniform of the prison inmates.

  How many hours or days I was there, I don’t know. I was just grateful for the bed, which felt soft and yielding after the weeks on the hard boards. The mattresses were paper filled with wood shavings, but not as rough at least as the usual sacking and straw. We still slept three to a bunk, all of us infection cases in together. The soup was just a little thicker and there was an extra crust of bread. Little things like that give you a renewed longing for life; for little things like that, some men would kill each other in the main camp. The fever came and went, with a throbbing head, a chronic aching in my arms and legs, a sense of crippling weakness. I was seventeen and I felt like an old man.

  I had typhus, what they used to call all over Europe ‘gaol fever’ because it broke out so frequently in prisons. Entirely apt, then, that I should get it in Auschwitz-Birkenau – the ultimate prison. Except that here they called it Judenfieber, Jew Fever. If you look up the symptoms today, you’ll find the type of the disease I had was Rickettsia typhi, most common where hygiene is poor and temperatures low. Temperatures ran to 106° Fahrenheit and give you a hacking cough – a cough I still have today. Without proper treatment, the death rate can be as high as 60%.

  Back then, I didn’t know any of this. Neither did I know that the raw onion they gave me to eat in place of medicine did me no good at all. All I knew was that I was desperately ill but the will to survive drove me on, made it possible for me to get out of my bunk bed and stand to attention with the other patients the day that Mengele came. I had seen him often of course on the Rampe, the polite, handsome, immaculately uniformed SS officer, glancing at the prisoners as they tumbled out of the trucks. A pointed finger. That was all it was, in those expensive grey doeskin gloves. A finger to the right was life; to the left was death. That was the way my family had gone, losers in the ghastly lottery the Nazis had set up.

  He was wearing his white coat today, open over his tunic. There was a stethoscope around his neck. Around him clucked a number of orderlies, SS men with clipboards and lists: the ward round from Hell. By the time he reached my bed I was literally shaking with terror. We all knew that anyone unable to stand by their beds went straight to the gas. But this was a man who had spent the previous months making selections at a glance, deciding life or death with just a look. What was I? Five foot three, five foot four? I weighed less than I should have after the experiences of the ghetto and this camp; but the food I’d scrounged from the Rampe gave me more strength than most. I was trembling uncontrollably from head to foot, unable to stop shaking.

  It took him seconds. The finger pointed to the left. The gas chamber. The crematorium. Oblivion. Did I think, in those terrible seconds, that I would see my family again? That all this misery would soon be over? Perhaps. But the overriding urge was to live; to see another dawn; eat one more crust of bread. I burst into tears, throwing myself at his feet, blurting out something about wanting to be shot, not gassed. I think I even kissed Mengele’s boots, polished like mirrors as they always were.

  The boots moved away. And to this day I don’t know why. All the accounts of Mengele that I have ever read agree that he couldn’t bear to be touched by a Jew. As a doctor he examined plenty of them, but that was on his own terms, for his own purposes. I had thrown myself on him and I could have faced an instant bullet for tha
t. I never looked into his face, so to this day I don’t know why he changed his mind. Did he recognise me from the Rampe? Did he relent because he realised in my gabbling that I spoke German? Was it actually Mengele himself or an underling who had motives I cannot guess at? All I know is that the ward round moved on, the boots clicking on the floor and the finger pointing elsewhere, at some other poor bastard. The Angel of Death had gone.

  The orderlies started moving out the immobile, to prepare them to become immobile for ever. One of them, a rare kindly face among so much hostility, leaned over as he picked me up and said, ‘Don’t worry, Szlamek, you can stay here.’ I collapsed into bed, crying all over again.

  In the three or four days I spent in the hospital, I had time to think. I had come as close to death as anyone is ever likely to and moments – seconds – like that make you concentrate. I was seventeen. My family were gone. I was alone. But it hadn’t always been like that. Once – and it was actually only four years ago – there had been a magic time when no one thought or spoke of death. It was a time of life. It was my childhood.

  1

  The Garden of Eden

  It’s the little things I remember – the singing of the birds in the high woods; the taste of the blackberries, wild and sweet by the roadside; and over it all, under a sky that seemed forever blue, the heady scent of the pine trees. I remember the rutted roads and the smell and rattle of the bus that took us there – eighty kilometres through a magic land; the furthest I had travelled in my life.

  It was summer, of course, when we went there – just a holiday like any other. But not like any other. Summers like that would not come again, except in my fondest dreams. Summers that should have faded from my memory but refused to fade. Memories that may just have kept me sane in the years that followed. And I can hear them now, the friends and family crowding round, laughing, nodding, the old men tugging their beards, the women hugging us and clucking round, preparing the food. ‘Here are the relatives,’ was the first shout we’d hear, ‘from Bedzin!’ And for those few weeks, Bedzin could have been on the far side of the moon.

  I can see the tables now, groaning with the food of the countryside. Butter, rich and yellow; the smetana cream, sharp and pure and richer than anything you can buy today. Cheese that melted in the mouth but bit back; the cheese with holes (Emmenthal or Jarlsberg), the schweitzer cake. Bread that smelled of Heaven dipped in smetana; pastries you’d give your right arm for. We ran through the woods, my brothers and I, running off a meal like that – Nathan, nearly a man in that last summer; Majer and Wolf, trying to keep up. Josek was too little to join us; just a babe in arms and never far from my mother’s side. We kicked a rag ball around in the long grass, rode the tough little ponies of the Polish plain, splashed each other and swam in the cool, brown water of the river, dappled with trailing willows.