Survivor

by Sam Pivnik

  But as things turned out, we were only passing through. From the barges we were marched north through flat, prosperous-looking farmland. Away from the shelled town you could again believe there was no war on. We were halted outside a large barn beside a road in a hamlet called Neuglasau. We stood in our rows of five, exhausted, confused. Some of the older men knew roughly where we were. This was Schleswig-Holstein, specifically Ostholstein, on Germany’s northern coast and we had marched with the Bay of Lübeck on our right. This was the scene of the last of the murders of the death marchers. As we shambled past a line of ancient oaks along the road that led into Neuglasau, a prisoner went down to a pistol bullet.

  We spent three or four days in this barn or in the yard outside, all 200 of us, exhausted and scared. Schmidt was absent most of the time and we didn’t know why. He may have been scouting ahead as he’d done throughout the death march or he may have been visiting SS headquarters which, it was rumoured, had moved into the area away from the firestorm that was Berlin. In his absence, four men were brought to this barn by the local police. They were probably partisans or escapees from another death march. I saw Schmidt’s number two, a red-headed sergeant whose name I never knew, take these men one by one at hourly intervals behind the barn and I saw him draw his pistol. The crack of the gun, drifting smoke and bodies flopping to the grass.

  The next day, the Oberscharführer returned and played God again and carried out another selection. About twenty of us were chosen and we were on the road again. We came to yet another barn, smaller than the last. It was Oberkapo Hermann Josef who made things clear to us now. This was Max Schmidt’s home, the farm owned by his parents. And we were going to work on it.

  To this day I have no idea what was in Schmidt’s mind. Was he ordered by somebody higher in the SS to bring us here? We couldn’t know at the time that the SS, which had decided whether we lived or died for the past six years, was on the point of collapse, everybody frantically shifting for himself. Did Schmidt have some fantastical idea about keeping us Jews prisoner to the bitter end, to continue to do his bit, as his Führer had once said, to bring about the end of Jewry in Europe? Did he hope to trade us as hostages to save his own skin?

  One thing we were all sure of: this was not a humanitarian gesture. There was nothing remotely humanitarian about Oberscharführer Max Schmidt.

  10

  Cold Comfort Farm

  We had been rousted out of the barn by shouting SS men, but you couldn’t equate it with Fürstengrube or Auschwitz. And we got fresh bread and real coffee rather than the ersatz rubbish we’d had since, in my case, 7 August 1943, my first full day in the Quarantine Block. I can’t describe the taste of that bread. People living around this farm had had this every day and I could barely remember what it tasted like. But if my mind wandered back to Wodzislaw and the Garden of Eden and all the comforts of my childhood, it was soon shaken back to reality. All around me in that damp-smelling barn sat exhausted, half-starved prisoners of the Nazi state, our heads still badly shaved, our striped uniforms hanging in tatters and our clogs caked with blood. And around us the SS were still in charge, if only because they still had guns.

  It was now that Schmidt made another selection. Were they going to divide us into small, manageable units to shoot us on the edge of burial pits they would make us dig first? In the end, this was the most benign selection I’d ever faced. We were broken up into small groups and one by one they marched off across the flat fields of Ostholstein. My group stayed put, the boys of the Maurerschule, and if I didn’t exactly feel a burst of pride about that, at least I was among friends.

  The Schmidt farm became a sort of home to us over the next few days. We lived in a hay loft over a pigsty which said it all in terms of how the Schmidts regarded us. And they made us work. For two weeks we broke our backs building walls and mending roads, lashed at first by the stinging rain or chilled to the marrow by the winds howling in over the flatlands. But by comparison with what we’d all known, this was a sort of paradise. There were no more selections on the Schmidt farm. We worked hard because we could. I didn’t get much more food than at Fürstengrube or on the Rampe, but it was quality that counted; it was real and it was fresh. Our morning bread was made with flour and had butter on it. Our soup had actual vegetables and sometimes pieces of meat. If this sounds childish, it’s not meant to; it’s just that none of us had had such luxuries for so long.

  Occasionally in that fortnight we’d be marched out to other farms and here the fare was even better. One of the men we worked for was Herr Miller. He was ill and couldn’t do the jobs himself. His wife was so grateful to us that she cooked potatoes in schmaltz for us and we all had extra helpings. On the Schmidt farm were two Ukrainian girls, forced labourers who did odd jobs cleaning the farmhouse and cooking. Their fried potatoes were to die for; I hadn’t seen food like this since before we moved to the Kamionka.

  The situation in the Schmidt household was surreal. After my years in the camps with rough male company and the daily terrors of selection and the Appellplatz, the atmosphere here was very different. I remembered I had seen Schmidt’s wife, Gerda, at Fürstengrube. She wasn’t much older than me, very pretty, with golden hair she usually wore in the braids so beloved of German womanhood – every inch a Valkyrie. Her father was there too, the civilian engineer Herr Bergman from Fürstengrube. When we were at the camp the Bergmans lived in Myslowice nearby but I guessed that part of Poland had now been overrun by the Red Army and the Bergmans had fled to one of the tiny ‘islands’ where the Thousand Year Reich still prevailed. Schmidt’s parents were in their early fifties, I supposed. My time in the camps made it difficult to guess ages and the whole experience was tinged with that deadly, hopeless mantra from the Rampe – ‘tell them you’re eighteen’. The senior Schmidts were prosperous-looking ‘good Germans’, both well-built. He had the short cropped hair popular among middle-aged men with a Prussian background. She was very much the North German Hausfrau. I wondered if they knew exactly what their son did for a living and whether they were proud of him. There were local men too, labouring with us in the fields but they didn’t talk to us and we in turn left them alone.

  It was nearly the end of April now and the weather had turned to spring with greenery on the trees and blue between the clouds. From time to time we heard the drone of aircraft and saw the black outlines of bombers high above. We couldn’t be sure but they were either British aircraft – Wellingtons, Halifaxes and Lancasters – or American B-52s and the sky belonged to them. There was no sign of the Luftwaffe. Every night we saw the sky glowing red over Hamburg to the south. We heard artillery fire too on the ground and it was coming not from the east, where the Red Army was forging ahead across a shattered land. It was coming from the west and I remembered that day, the day I turned thirteen; how we all stood on the pavements in Bedzin waiting to welcome what we thought would be British or French tanks. And soon, very soon now perhaps, as we worked in those German fields, they’d be here. Six years too late, General Miles Dempsey and the Second British Army were on their way.

  One evening we were sitting in our pigsty eating our soup when Schmidt and his father wandered past, deep in conversation. For days now his men had been getting increasingly nervous, fingers on triggers, tempers frayed, watching the skies and watching the roads. There was the steady thud of distant shells as dusk fell, a deadly barrage which we know now was costing the British £2 million a day to maintain and which was sounding the death knell for the Third Reich. I heard Schmidt say to his father, ‘It’s getting bad.’ He crossed to the pigsty and rested on a metal barrier looking at us. Was this it, I wondered? Would he pull out his revolver as he had at Fürstengrube when the boilers wouldn’t work? Had he decided to get rid of his troublesome burden once and for all? He said nothing. His face gave nothing away. He turned on his heel and walked into the house.

  Why didn’t we run? That night, after soup in the pigsty? The next day under the Ostholstein sun, in the fields of spri
ngtime – why didn’t we run? Yes, Schmidt was there. So were his men and their guns. But we weren’t supervised all the time, other than by unarmed, harmless-looking farmers. We could have run, could have made it, could have reached the welcoming arms of the British, who surely wouldn’t fire on scarecrows wearing the stripes of a concentration camp? But we didn’t. None of us. And it’s something I’ve read about since in the memoirs of other survivors. The years of terror, of barbed wire, of electric fences, they never leave you. You turn in on yourself, hiding in the only Hell you know. Why? Because out there, in those fields and woodlands, across the ploughed farmland of North Germany was a world I didn’t know at all. I was just thirteen when the Wehrmacht invaded my homeland and in a way my life had been put on hold ever since. In a word, I was too scared to run away.

  But all that changed one day. It was 1 May. To the southwest of us, Hamburg radio announced that Hitler was dead. The madman who wanted to build his own Garden of Eden in my country had gone. His successor was Admiral Dönitz, a man I’d never heard of, and he told his distraught listeners, ‘It is my duty to save the German people from destruction by the Bolshevists.’ As the Red Army got to the Reich Chancellery, they found the charred remains of Hitler and his wife in the little garden there. There was a kind of poetry in that, although it would be years before the world knew the full details.

  We had our breakfast as usual that day but now we were ordered into column again. There would be no more work on the farm. We marched back through Ahrensbök, the little village with its Christian church and its weekly market where the locals tried to pretend everything was normal, even when shaven-headed men in stripes walked among them. The other prisoners from the outlying farms joined us and once again we were going north, heading for the sea.

  I don’t remember who heard it first, us prisoners or the trigger-happy SS walking alongside, behind and ahead. There was the unmistakeable whine of an aircraft banking high to our left ahead of us and straightening as it roared towards us almost at tree-top level. It must have been a British fighter but nobody was taking time to look for markings. Even before we heard the SS order to scatter, the column had broken up and we all dived for cover. I must have run for thirty or forty metres before I threw myself into a ditch at the roadside and waited. Heads were popping up everywhere, but the danger hadn’t passed. The plane banked again and was coming back for another look. Columns on the road could have been troops or they could have been civilian refugees. The last thing the RAF would have been expecting would have been the remnants of a death march. Again the plane roared above us and I saw the red, white and blue roundels this time. There was no gunfire though. The Luftwaffe would have recognised our stripes at once and riddled us just for the hell of it.

  This time I stayed put, crouching in my part of the ditch, feeling wet and uncomfortable in the earthy hole. I suppose the fighter made three or four passes and then became a speck in the blue before disappearing altogether. When I put my head up again, there was no one there. I can’t explain to this day how that happened. Why didn’t I hear the SS orders to form up again and the clatter of clogs on the metalled road? The point is I didn’t and I suddenly felt the most terrifying panic. I couldn’t remember when I had last been entirely on my own, but it must have been before my thirteenth birthday. Even when I was living at 77 Modzejowska Street and going to school, there must have been times when I was just by myself. After the German invasion, that never happened.

  The fields and trees of a beautiful early May stretched away in the Ostholstein countryside and everything seemed so normal. Why had the column marched without me? My experiences of the Appellplatz had taught me that the living – and the dead – were counted again and again. But this wasn’t the old SS, the lethal institution that had so many ways to torture people. Our guards were as scared as we were, perhaps more so because they knew retribution was waiting for them. No one was coming back for me and I had no one to go to. My father, my mother and all my siblings were dead in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Nathan had been taken from us as we moved into the Kamionka; my grandmother left behind at the Hakoah months before that. I had to assume they were dead too.

  I didn’t know exactly where I was. As I write it now, it’s obvious. You can Google Ahrensbök on a computer and fly over a digital version of the road I crouched beside on that day in early May. All I knew was that I was inside the heartlands of the Third Reich and the people there hated Jews. How long would I last in the open, on my own? So I decided to go back, back to the Schmidt farm with its cold comforts, to the most recent place I could call a sort of home. I waited in the ditch until dusk was falling, then made my way back.

  I was careful in the twilight to avoid the main road through Ahrensbök. There were SS installations nearby and every house, I supposed, was the home of a rabid Nazi. I kept to the fields, crouching low and running along hedges, from barn to barn and outbuilding to outbuilding. In one of them I found some raw sugar beet and ate it, the first food I’d had since breakfast. Then I recognised the pigsty and its loft and crawled in there, tapping the grunting inhabitants aside and stretching out on the straw.

  It was probably dawn the next day when I heard a commotion below me. I must have stirred waking up because a floorboard creaked and I found myself looking straight into the tanned, weatherbeaten face of Max Schmidt’s father. He swore in German, more surprised than angry, and demanded to know what I was doing there. I told him I got lost. It wasn’t very convincing but when I added I felt I ought to come back, he seemed satisfied. I wasn’t going to give him any trouble. He told me to stay put and that’s exactly what I did, resting back on the straw again.

  It was a while later – I can’t be sure how long – that Max Schmidt appeared. I heard his motorbike growl into the yard and snatches of conversation between him and his father. The next thing I knew was that Oberscharführer Schmidt was standing outside the pigsty looking at me. He wanted to know why I wasn’t with the others and I told him I had got lost when a plane flew overhead. He shook his head, more in sorrow than in anger, and for a moment I felt like a naughty schoolboy again, throwing snowballs at the lady with the funny hat in Bedzin. The difference now was that rather than my father’s belt or a stern word from Mr Rapaport, my old headmaster, this man could put a bullet in my brain.

  ‘Come with me,’ was all he said and I followed him to his motorbike. He straddled it, revved the throttle and told me to get on the back. The last person I’d seen in this position had been Oberkapo Hermann Josef on the death march and I felt terrified. I’d never ridden on one of these things before and it took me a while to realise I had to lean with Schmidt and the bike. I didn’t know where to put my hands. Hugging an SS man, the Kommandant of Fürstengrube, a Jew-hater and a murderer, was something I couldn’t bring myself to do. So I held on to the bar behind the pillion seat and hoped for the best.

  None of this made any sense. Even a few weeks ago, Schmidt would have beaten me half to death for ‘getting lost’. He’d have shot me rather than let a Jew so close to him. But now … now, though I didn’t yet know it, his Führer was dead and the Third Reich had only four days of life left in it. Oberscharführer Schmidt was hurriedly re-inventing himself, to present an altogether more human face to the world. And the first part of this was to make sure no concentration camp survivors were found at his parents’ farm.

  We roared out of Ahrensbök and after about a kilometre or so saw another marching column ahead. They wore the stripes and the clogs I knew so well but these weren’t my boys of the Maurerschule or even from Fürstengrube. Schmidt spoke to the NCO in charge of the SS escort and signalled for me to join the rest. I watched Schmidt climb back on to his bike and ride south and I hoped I’d never have to see him again.

  * * *

  We marched north again as the sun climbed, but by mid-morning a thick, grey sea mist had enveloped us and you could barely see the men in the row ahead. Out of the gloom I could make out the buildings of the outskirts
of a town. This was Neustadt and we were back at the Baltic again.

  There are twenty-two Neustadts in Germany. This one was a naval base and we could just make out the ghosts of what appeared to be warships riding at anchor in the bay. The whole place was full of prisoners like us, sitting around in their striped uniforms with the SS prowling the perimeter. What was different was the presence of the motor buses with well-dressed civilians standing near them. On the sides of the buses were huge red crosses.

  I was still staring at these when a voice I knew made me turn. ‘Szlamek, where the hell have you been? Get your arse over here!’ It was Oberkapo Hermann Josef and he beckoned me over to the huddle on the ground. One by one the faces flashed before me. This was the Fürstengrube contingent I’d last seen scattering into ditches near Ahrensbök. Herzko Bawnik, Peter Abramovitch, Hersh Goldberg; I was back with the boys of the Maurerschule.

  Everybody was whispering excitedly. The Red Cross had a reputation that cut across national barriers. They had even, although I never saw this, muscled their way into Auschwitz. The war was over, everyone said. The Red Cross were going to take us all to Sweden. After the hysteria of these early moments on the dockside, cold reality began to dawn. If the war was over, why were the SS still there, with guns and vehicles? And why were we going to Sweden, a neutral country, when we should have been allowed to go home to Poland? And there was an even colder reality. How could the thousand or so prisoners crowded on that concrete all get on three buses?