by Sam Pivnik
For those seven days we rattled through the Czech countryside, the trucks bouncing and swaying with no predictability at all, so we were thrown against the walls and each other. There was no food, no water except for the icicles we could crack from the rims of the trucks and the snow that fell, which we collected in a tin can, and there was no shelter. We hurtled through stations, never stopping, never slowing. Police, Wehrmacht officials in uniform, stared at us from platforms. Just another trainload of Jews. We’d started the war in the first place, hadn’t we? The Führer had said so. Nobody had cared what happened to us from the first day and now everybody was too concerned with what would happen to them.
And on that train, men ate each other. The criminologist Brian Marriner has written ‘… in life threatening situations human beings lose all their inhibitions … We become what we were designed to be: animals. And there is no shame in that.’ They say cannibalism was a feature of life for the Russian peasants when I was a boy at home in Bedzin and that it happened in KL Bergen-Belsen a few weeks after our particular train journey. The army doctors who examined the corpses there found that one in ten had bite marks on their legs. One of them saw an ex-prisoner, even after liberation in the relative comfort and safety of an American field hospital, use a knife to cut off a portion of flesh from the leg of a corpse in the mortuary and slip it surreptitiously into his mouth. ‘No shame in that’? I am not so sure. Desperate, freezing men from Eastern Europe – and I’m not sure where – used whatever sharp-edged objects they could find to rip open the frozen corpses and cut out the liver, eating it raw as it warmed their frostbitten fingers.
Food – it was all that mattered. Czechoslovakian civilians clustered at various bridges under which our train whistled, throwing bread to us. The SS guards, in wagons between the open trucks, swivelled their machine-guns upwards and scattered these Good Samaritans with their bullets; killing people who were just trying to feed us. They also turned their guns on us, peppering anybody who caught the bread. That was overkill. We were already killing each other in those trucks. The law of the jungle that ruled in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Fürstengrube had now spread to this train. We fought and jostled, punching, gouging, kicking with the desperate energy of the starving. It was literally survival of the fittest. The biggest, the strongest, the most vicious, got the bread. The weakest, the smallest, sank to the truck floor in their hopelessness.
It was on the seventh or eighth day that we rolled into Mauthausen. Nearby, although we didn’t know it, was the city of Linz where Hitler in his madness was still trapped in his bunker below the streets of Berlin, planning to rebuild as Germania, the most colossal city in the world. Mauthausen stood on the north bank of the Danube, a beautiful part of Europe whose beauty was lost on us, the starving; we had come deep into Austria. It was not actually an extermination camp, which you might find odd if you look at the camp’s Totenbuch, the ledger of the dead. It records the fact that 36,318 executions took place there in the six and a half years of its existence – a drop in the ocean, of course, compared with Auschwitz-Birkenau.
We’d heard there were gas chambers and crematoria at Mauthausen and we could see from the trucks the huge gates and the giant eagle and swastika above them. We’d heard too about the stairs of death, one hundred and eighty-six stone steps of different depths up which Muselmänner were forced to carry stone as I’d been forced to carry it in the Quarantine Block in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Men died in their dozens each day, the collapse of the front row on the highest steps crashing backwards in a deadly domino effect on those behind. Most of the prisoners here were originally Polish intelligentsia who had been worked to death through slave labour.
The previous year large numbers of Dutch and Hungarian Jews had been bought into Mauthausen, many of them thrown to their deaths at the so-called Parachutists’ Wall, their bodies bouncing off the rocks on the quarry floor. One of the survivors of Mauthausen, Dr Antoni Goscinski, recorded years later in his memoirs that he counted sixty ways in which the SS murdered their prisoners. At Nazi headquarters in Berlin, Mauthausen was known as Knochenmühle, the bone grinder.
Still no food. Still no shelter or warmth. Whatever negotiations took place between our SS and Mauthausen’s commandant, the place was full and there was no room for us. We were shunted on to Buchenwald. This was one of the earliest and largest of the concentration camps, set up to house political prisoners before the war. It was built on a wooded hill a few miles from the town of Weimar, associated in German culture with the names of the poets Goethe and Schiller. I doubt if either of them would have understood Buchenwald. The factory here operated twenty-four hours a day making machine-guns and shells for the Wehrmacht, now retreating – we heard in snippets of railside gossip – on all fronts. Buchenwald was also a place where, like Auschwitz-Birkenau, they killed people in their thousands, to realise a madman’s dream.
There was a sign over the main gate, although I never saw it, which read, in wrought iron, Jedem das Seine – to each his own. The inmates apparently had their own reading of that – everyone gets what he deserves. Many of them got far worse than they deserved in the ‘singing forest’, the macabre name given to the woods beyond the camp where men were hanged upside down from the trees. Testimony of the survivors would record that Walter Sonner, the ‘hangman of Buchenwald’, once followed the biblical end of Jesus’ disciple Peter and crucified two priests upside down.
I can’t describe the pain in my stomach and the cramps in my legs as Buchenwald turned us away too. The train was split now, half the trucks taken in one direction, half in the other. I suppose you could say it was symbolic. The more we thought about it, the more obvious it became that the Reich had fallen apart. There were no decisions coming from the top now; there was no cohesion, no plan. Everybody was operating on tittle-tattle, rumours of troop movements and the word ‘liberation’ was on everybody’s lips. Why were the SS keeping us? As hostages, pawns in some desperate deal to save their skins? Or could this, even now, be an ongoing part of the Jewish policy that the Nazi state had been carrying out for the last six years?
We rattled into Dora-Mittelbau near Nordhausen in the Harz mountains. The haunting beauty of this range was lost to me, crouching, frozen and starving, in a coal truck with corpses for company. At last we left the train. It had been nine days and I could barely walk. Dora-Mittelbau was a large complex built in natural caves in the mountains and tunnels linked with workshops that made Germany’s top-secret V-2 rockets which were still raining down on Britain, bringing death and destruction of a kind I never saw in Bedzin. Everywhere was high-security, electrified fences, painted skulls and crossbones and signs to ‘Keep Out!’ We slept in a disused hall and we got food for the first time in a week. It was the usual thin soup with two cabbage leaves chasing each other around the bowl, but it was food. The place had no heating and there were no beds, but it was indoors, under a roof and after so long in the trucks, a little touch of paradise.
We spent two days there and Oberscharführer Schmidt turned up. We hadn’t seen him for the whole of the march and the train journey, but then we hadn’t actually seen much at all apart from what was happening in our own truck. It had been a surreal experience being penned in that rectangular box of wood and metal, like a little world of its own where men died of hunger and cold and there was nothing but the snow beyond it and the rhythm of the rails.
Schmidt collected several hundred of us, the living debris of the camp, and we were marched off to a sub-camp called Tormalin. It was only much later I discovered that the camp’s actual name was Regenstein, that it was near the little town of Blankenburg and was named after a ruined medieval castle nearby. For whatever reason – and it was probably to cause the maximum confusion to the Allies trying to find them – a number of camps were given the names of minerals. Regenstein became Tormalin. This was another Fürstengrube, as though the whole journey between these places had been pointless – just a new means for the SS to kill us. There was an Appellplatz, r
ows of huts, blocks, electrified wire and four guard towers. The sleeping quarters were new and looked temporary, as if the SS were just making us squat here before the Russian artillery moved us on. There was no permanent kitchen and only a makeshift water supply. The food was the same monotonous round – hard black bread, watery soup, ‘coffee’ – and on it we were expected to work on a new tunnel that led to the underground rocket factory. Technically, although no one told us this at the time, our employers were the Hitzbleck company from Duisberg, Brandt from Magdeburg and the Scheffer Organisation from Blankenburg. Behind them were the industrial giants in the whole Dora-Mittelbau complex like Junkers, Heinkel, Siemens and BMW. We made the joists that held up the roof – the same sort of work we’d been trained for at the Maurerschule in Auschwitz-Birkenau – and the pace was murderous. The chemical stench in the tunnels was awful, the kind of sulphur you associate with Hell. There’d been trouble at Tormalin before we arrived and camp gossip told us that Russian prisoners of war had attempted various acts of sabotage. Everybody involved had been shot.
Here was one of the most ghastly sights I had seen in the camps. Would-be escapees were hanging from the walls in the tunnels of Tormalin, meat hooks wedged into their flesh. There they stayed, putrefying to blackness, as a warning to the rest of us.
And here I began to turn into a Müsselmann. On the Rampe and at Fürstengrube I’d been able to organise, to scavenge some extra food here and there to stay alive. At Tormalin there was no chance of that. Here, we were all equals, all, whatever our individual skills, doing the same job. They were working us to death and on that dreadful diet, a lot of us made it easy for them.
There were civilians here too, of course, because of the technical nature of the work. And there was the same kind of sporadic, unpredictable brutality that there had been at Fürstengrube. Most of the time we got along tolerably well but there was the occasional outburst when the SS complained about sloppy workmanship and the whips snaked out, whistling through the air to thump on backs where shoulder blades were already painfully obvious.
It was here that Kapo Hans and Shlomo Barran were executed, along with four or five others on the orders of Oberscharführer Schmidt. I no longer remember what crime they were supposed to have committed, but since Hans was a Christian, it couldn’t have been simply a case of anti-Semitism.
* * *
It all changed again early in April. On 6 April, although we didn’t have any accurate news at the time, the Red Army was at the gates of Vienna. Far to the East, Poland was once again in Russian hands and what ought to have been liberation was anything but. Before dawn we were up as usual, shouted orders, short patience. We downed our breakfast, such as it was, and I tucked the usual grey crust into my jacket for later. But the Appell that morning was different. The Kapos and Vorarbeiters from Tormalin weren’t there, just the SS. And under the death’s heads caps and stahlhelmes were faces I recognised; these were the old guard from Fürstengrube, with Oberscharführer Max Schmidt at their head. Did I imagine it or was the roll-call, that interminable torture that could last hours, quicker this morning? Schmidt had something to say and once the headcount was over, he told us we would be leaving and must be ready by 0700 hours. That wasn’t difficult. I had the clothes I stood up in, a metal bowl and a tin cup I’d scrounged from somewhere. There was a real buzz as we mustered. For days now we’d been aware of Allied aircraft high overhead, sometimes swooping lower to investigate, looking for the Wehrmacht who must be hiding out or offering token resistance here and there. We never, in the snatched moments we looked up at the sky, saw any sign of the Luftwaffe. The Reich was bleeding to death.
But dying animals still have it in them to kill, and snatches of whispered conversations all around me, on the Appellplatz, in the barracks that morning, said it all. Schmidt had warned us that any stragglers would be shot. Were they taking us to yet another camp? Could there still be any left? If we were to go on the road again, would we meet a Russian platoon or a British tank unit? Above all, the fear that gripped us most was what the SS would do to us. Once they’d been so proud of their meticulous paperwork, their quick, efficient removal of an entire race. Now, not only were we an encumbrance as they retreated, we were walking evidence of their inhumanity. Could they possibly keep us alive?
Once we’d got our flimsy gear together there was another roll-call on the Appellplatz and they counted us again. We were about 200 strong and they marched us out in fives, escorted by the Waffen-SS, armed to the teeth. There was no mention of a train now. The man who had spoken of one back at Fürstengrube had been Oberkapo Hermann and he vanished into the distance ahead of us on the back of Max Schmidt’s Zundapp motorbike.
Another death march. Another trek along rutted roads where the sudden arrival of spring meant nothing. The ruts weren’t frozen solid any more and the snow wasn’t falling; but the mud was clinging and made walking difficult. How long my Fürstengrube boots would hold out I didn’t know. They weren’t much better in this situation than the clogs of the Quarantine Block and they chafed my feet, raising blisters that burst and rubbed with every step. Men staggered and dropped by the roadside and no one turned back to look as we heard the dull crack of the pistol shot as the SS killed them.
The only time we stopped all day, trudging through the foothills of the Harz mountains, was to let the SS have a drink or a cigarette. We got no water, no food, no idea of where we were going. In fact, we were going to Magdeburg and we got there as dark fell. This medieval city was only about ten kilometres from Berlin, the capital of Hitler’s Reich that now had the fury of the Red Army unleashed against it. I had never actually seen a bombed city before. The planes that had hit Bedzin on my thirteenth birthday had targeted industrial areas only and I realised now what little damage they had done. This place was a shambles. The Elbe slid a sludge-brown in the gathering gloom. There were no lights anywhere and the huge towers of the cathedral loomed black and broken against the night sky.
The streets we trudged along were littered with rubble and broken glass. This city had been destroyed before, burned to the ground in the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century, and now it had taken another pummelling. There was a fortress here, but it was also a key communications centre with a tangle of railway junctions, and the real reason for Allied bombing was the huge Krupp armaments factory just out of town. The people we saw here were shabby and dirty and looked just as hungry as we were. In Czechoslovakia, people had thrown bread to us on our open trucks. In Magdeburg they had no bread to give and they ignored us completely.
By nightfall, the SS had assembled us at one of the quays along the waterfront. We were corralled into an open-sided shelter and told to rest. My feet and back were in agony and I just huddled the night away in the darkness, listening to the gurgle of the river and praying for food. There wasn’t even any water, even though the mighty Elbe was just feet away. We noticed the SS ranks had thinned during the night, but whether they’d be back at dawn we didn’t know. Those who remained watched us carefully, rifles at the ready, eyes alert. Just in case we doubted that they were still in charge.
At first light we were ordered to our feet again and I wasn’t sure how I could walk on through the pain. Max Schmidt roared up on his motorbike; he’d found a drum of water for us. There was still no food but we queued patiently, as most of us had queued for five years now, to dip our tin mugs into the water and gulp it down. Then, another roll-call. And we marched to the water’s edge.
Riding at anchor in front of us were two river barges. They were filthy and rotten-looking, flat boats with an open cargo hold and a small wheel house at the stern. The SS divided us into two groups and we were loaded into the holds, gritty and dusty with coal. I was used to this, both from Fürstengrube and from the open coal trucks into Mauthausen. It’s funny how you can take comfort from such little things, familiarity breeding a kind of hope. There was no shelter of course and nothing by way of a toilet but at least we weren’t walking and I was gratefu
l for that. I noticed Schmidt lolling against his motorbike chatting to the harbour commander, but I couldn’t hear the conversation. The Elbe ran north to the sea, I assumed, but at the time I didn’t even know which river this was, still less exactly where it went.
North. We were definitely going north, chugging downstream, belching black smoke into the April sky. There wasn’t much conversation in those holds. We were crouched or sitting as best we could, a hundred men watching the world go by. We saw villages along the riverbanks, smoke rising lazily from chimneys. We saw children playing in back gardens. Now and then, we even caught the smells of cooking. This was a different world. A world where there was no war, no camps; a world of peace we could see, smell and almost touch. Of course, had I thought about it, this was also a world without Jews. I wonder what those laughing, happy children made of us, with our shaven heads and our filthy, lice-infested uniforms, staring back at them: a floating concentration camp.
For three whole days we steamed on, speculating on where we were going. If Kapo Wilhelm, on the barge with us, or Hersh Goldberg had any idea of our destination, they weren’t telling us. At one point, watching the bank sliding by, I saw refugees streaming along the road, carrying the kitchen sink on their shoulders, in their carts and prams. A people on the move. But not the Exodus this time. These people were Gentiles, Aryans beaten out of their homes and fleeing – though whether from the Russians or the Americans and British, we didn’t know. From time to time we saw Max Schmidt, with Hermann Josef behind him, weaving his motorbike through this trickle of the dispossessed.
Each evening we moored somewhere along the river and on the second morning, a van drove up. Out of it got four civilians who bought us bread and ersatz coffee, the first food we’d tasted since leaving Tormalin, and it was relative heaven. The final morning of the journey came on the third day and we tied up in a canal on the outskirts of a port. This was Lübeck, we heard hours after we arrived. Its name, apparently, means lovely one, but it wasn’t very lovely when we arrived. The medieval church was a ruined shell and the place was in chaos, with trucks, ambulances and people everywhere. The port installations and U-boat building yards had been the target of the British RAF for the past three years and it showed.
