by Sam Pivnik
The wind and tide by early evening were driving us towards the shore and the fishing boats, loaded with Kriegsmarine, police and SS, were still prowling the waters, looking for survivors. We all knew perfectly well that anyone in a striped jacket was likely to receive a bullet. It must have been about six o’clock and we’d been in the water for over two hours. I was exhausted and couldn’t feel my legs for the cold. Even so, about a hundred metres from the shore we decided to swim for it.
Gunfire from the beach stopped us. I could see two policemen as we bobbed nearer, firing their pistols into the breakers. We couldn’t see their targets but we knew they were half-dead men, like us. We decided to wait until dark and by now my feet were touching the bottom. But time and tide wait for no man and before night fell we were buffeted onto the sand and were too weak to do anything about it. If the SS had found us then, it would all have been over. I couldn’t walk, so I crawled up the beach, flapping like a seal in the sand. There were corpses lying in the surf, battered and rolled around by each incoming wave. Too exhausted to move and unable to stand, I may have fallen asleep.
I heard voices from far away: perhaps people further along the beach or else the ghosts of the Cap Arcona. They grew louder and I realised that someone was shaking me by the shoulder.
‘Wake up!’ the voice said. ‘If you lie here you’ll freeze to death.’
I tried to make my eyes focus, my mind concentrate. It was the Rampe all over again as Jew fever swept over me, but now a kindly man in a striped concentration camp jacket was helping me sit up.
There were other men around, dark shapes in the evening who helped me hobble up what felt like a shingle slope. My clothes were saturated, clinging to my body, and I’d lost my boots. I remember the glow of a fire in some trees and two men half carrying me to lie next to it. As my circulation came back, I started shivering. Part of it was the cold of my body and my wet clothes. Part of it was shock. There was no food, no water and no blankets but I drifted in and out of sleep until dawn.
The first thing I remember the next day was birdsong. And I realised after a while that this was the first morning since I’d got to Auschwitz-Birkenau that there was no morning roll-call. No barked orders, no clubs, fists, boots. In fact, and this was so odd, there were no other sounds at all. There were five men sitting around the ashes of last night’s fire. One of them had been floating with me on the debris from the Arcona that had saved both our lives. The others, who must have found us both on the beach, were strangers. No one spoke. We were all too shocked and too exhausted.
Perhaps my ears were sharper than the rest, because I was the youngest there; I heard the throaty rattle of an engine. I expected a truck or perhaps a motorcycle with SS plates but as I saw it coming along the road that ran beside the grove of trees I could see it was a battered flatbed, an old Ford, and it was driven by an old civilian. The brakes screeched as he pulled up and leaned out of his window. He asked in his heavy North-German accent if we were from the ship. Somebody told him we were.
‘Get in the truck,’ the old man said, jerking his thumb to the flatbed, ‘I’ll take you to Neustadt. They’ll give you some food.’
So we drove into Neustadt, each one of us still silent, jolted around in the truck. There wasn’t a swastika in sight, just grim-faced men in khaki uniforms who stared at us. That day, if you read the history books, you’ll find that Admiral Dönitz, Hitler’s successor, sent his officers to Luneburg Heath, to the headquarters of the British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, to talk surrender.
It should have been flowers and laughter and homecomings and relief. Instead six Jews sat on a flatbed truck in an alien town, soaked to the skin, thirsty and hungry and cold.
For some of us the war would never be over.
12
Liberation
There is a photograph of me taken a few weeks after the war ended. I am eighteen. It’s the only photo I have that even vaguely reflects my childhood. All the others – and there probably weren’t that many anyway – were thrown away and destroyed by the Nazis in their attempt to obliterate my life and a whole way of life. In the photo my hair is growing back and I had enough to comb a parting into my curls.
‘He looks pretty good on it,’ the Holocaust deniers will say, ‘considering all he’s supposed to have been through.’ Yes, I do. By the time this photo was taken I’d been getting decent food for several weeks. My prison stripes have gone and I’ve scrounged a military shirt from somewhere. It doesn’t fit me, any more than the stripes did, but it’s warm and soft and comfortable and that means a lot. I don’t think I look eighteen and in an odd sort of way, this photo is more than just a snapshot. It is a memento of my teenage years. I didn’t look so very different from that day in Bedzin when I was thirteen and the planes came. Six years. Six years during which time stopped and a nightmare took its place.
The kindly old German had dropped us off outside the huge, brick-built naval barracks. The place was in darkness and we couldn’t find the light switches. We knew the war must be over but there was no sign of the British Tommies. There was a sense that no one wanted to become a casualty with a ceasefire so close, so perhaps everyone was just keeping their heads down, avoiding any more confrontation. Over the coming weeks we heard horror stories of the fierce resistance some of the Waffen-SS units were putting up as the Reich surrendered.
Our first priority, as it had always been, was food. However well I look in that photo, back then I was seriously underweight and the fact that the British had taken Neustadt didn’t guarantee us a meal ticket. We were allowed into the naval barracks and could help ourselves to any surplus clothing lying around. For the first time in nearly three years I stripped off my striped rags and put on ‘real’ clothes. The irony was that these were the Nazi uniforms of the Kriegsmarine, the German navy. We ripped off the Nazi insignia with delight, partly because we were tearing up the remnants of the most appalling regime in history and partly because the last thing we wanted was to be interned by the British as German prisoners of war.
The barracks was crawling with refugees, camp survivors like us and people from God-knows-where who had long ago lost their homes and lost their way. It was like the Tower of Babel, with everybody gabbling excitedly in a bewildering range of languages. What there wasn’t was any food. Hours passed and locals turned up with bread and cheese, the first we’d had since we’d left the quayside for the Cap Arcona.
Most of the talk was about the sinking, the garbled stories of who saw what, of who died and who was still alive; people we didn’t know who had so nearly survived the nightmare only to die just before the dawn came. In these hours I realised that most of the Maurerschule had gone – Peter Abramovitch’s brother and cousin; the Engel brothers, Willi and Viky; Max Schmidt’s camp barber; the list was endless. Some would have been machine-gunned in the water, others mangled by the torpedo boat’s propeller blades. Many would have drowned or been shot as they reached the shore. Most, perhaps, were burnt to death in the inferno of the Cap Arcona’s hull. I remember particularly listening to survivors from the Athens. She was a small freighter and her captain, too, had tried to refuse the SS’s demand to take prisoners on board. Like the Cap Arcona’s captain, they had threatened to kill him and the ship had been used to ferry prisoners out to the Arcona moored further out in the Bay.
When the Typhoons came over, the captain ordered the white flags to be hoisted and the planes passed overhead. The Athens came under her own steam into port and unloaded the passengers she carried. We wondered how many SS men had managed to slip away from the quay before the British ground troops arrived.
We got confirmation the next day that the war was finally over. People were running in all directions in the barracks square, shouting and laughing hysterically, hugging each other and slapping each other on the back. ‘We’re liberated, we’re free!’ rang out in a dozen languages. The words sounded good in all of them. I didn’t have much to do with our liberators. We began to see the occas
ional armoured car and heard the Tommies’ boots crunching in the streets as they took full occupation of the town. There was no fighting, no pockets of resistance. Now and again there’d be a commotion as somebody caught a German soldier trying to escape and gave him a good smacking or a kick up the arse.
In those days of course I couldn’t speak a word of English and had only the vaguest notion of those times back in Bedzin when my father would entertain us with the snatches of the language he’d picked up when he lived in Stamford Hill. Food came from these liberators in their typically reserved way. We heard as time went on that further south the Americans who had liberated Buchenwald were giving out chunks of chocolate they called candy and allowing ex-prisoners like us to help themselves from shops and warehouses. That didn’t happen in Neustadt. Instead, the British let various refugee agencies try to tackle the problem.
It must have been chaos everywhere in the days and weeks after the German surrender. There were people all over the place, desperate, confused, hungry and broke. I know – I was one of them. A British soldier gave me a khaki tunic to wear in place of Kriegsmarine blue. It was so different from the grey-green of the Waffen-SS I had seen every day for the last six years. It was what the British called a battledress, itchy and short, but after the stripes of Auschwitz-Birkenau I felt like a millionaire. Food came from one of the refugee agencies; papers were supplied by the Jewish Refugee Committee, an American organisation. The roof over my head was by courtesy of the German Navy, requisitioned by the British Second Army.
It’s odd, but I don’t remember any real restrictions in the days after the war. There ought to have been a curfew, no-go areas, everything you’d expect from martial law imposed by a conquering army in enemy territory. In fact we were allowed to go where we liked and I remember feeling very bored, especially in the evenings. This sounds ungrateful but it’s not meant to. My days had been filled for so long with backbreaking physical work and constant terror, to find myself at a loose end now was a very strange sensation. The British laid on films for us in the naval barracks and through the cigarette smoke (currency wafting into the thick atmosphere) I watched again those black-and-white Westerns I had loved as a kid back in Bedzin. I didn’t understand a word of the dialogue of course, but I knew who the good guy was from the colour of his hat, and how difficult can it be to follow a plot where a fist fight breaks out in a saloon? And there was another oddity about liberation. I slept in my own bed on my own for the first time in my life. And the bed had sheets and a pillow.
Of all the emotions that whirled in our heads in those first days of freedom, the strongest was of revenge. This was a time before Simon Wiesenthal’s Nazi hunters, before what had happened was given the name the Holocaust, before all that developed into an industry of its own. All we knew was that the murderous face of Fürstengrube and the death march looked very like that of a farm boy from Neuglasau, hangman and killer of Jews – Oberscharführer Max Schmidt. Three or four days after the liberation, a group of half a dozen of us found a horse and cart from somewhere and piled on board. We’d hired the vehicle and its driver in exchange for cigarettes and our direction was the farm at Neuglasau.
It had been less than a week since we’d left there, marching on the road towards our rendezvous with death on the Cap Arcona and I remember passing the spot where I’d thrown myself into the ditch as the British plane flew overhead. The farm of course looked the same – the house, the barns and outbuildings, the paving stones we’d laid in the yard, the pigsty loft where we’d slept. But everything else was different. We’d left that place Untermenschen, life unworthy of life. And now we were back, if not exactly as conquerors, at least with the tables very definitely turned.
Herr and Frau Schmidt were painfully polite and almost apologised for the fact that their son was not there. It was as if we had come along with our football to see if Max could come out to play and his mummy had to tell us he couldn’t. There were eight of us, all Jews, all survivors, but it turned out that not all of us had a common motive at this stage. Herzko had survived the bombing of the Cap Arcona and I had been so happy to find him still alive in Neustadt, his flat feet pounding the pavements of a town that had never known a ghetto. The dentist, Bronek Jakobowicz was there with his brother Josek and the electrician brothers, the Lipshitzes. So too was Kapo Janek, a huge man with dark hair, Peter Abramovitch, who had helped me onto the Arcona’s deck and the Mischling architect Oberkapo Hermann Josef who I had last seen on the quayside when he gave me a clip around the ear for trying to get taken away by the Red Cross. The one who wasn’t there when we arrived was the shoemaker Mendeler Davidovitch. He had been hiding out on the Miller farm, almost certainly with the connivance of Max Schmidt, and so he’d escaped the horrors of the Cap Arcona.
The Schmidts insisted we stay for a meal and it turned out to be roast pork. They said we could select a pig and kill it ourselves. I knew this would be beyond me as I’d never killed an animal in my life and didn’t know where to start. It turned out that none of the others had a clue either and we spent several fruitless minutes hurtling around the pigsty, trying to catch the squealing beast. In the end, Herr Schmidt put both it and us out of our misery, slinging a rope over a beam, deftly looping it round the pig’s back legs, hauling it up and cutting its throat. With a final squeal and shudder, the animal was dead. After the horrors of our collective diets for the last three years, we weren’t going to stand on any sort of Jewish dignity over the fact that this was forbidden meat, and we ate heartily. I wondered what my father would make of it all. In that bizarre dinner party we all spoke German, drank schnapps and made small talk. Did I imagine it or was Herzko making eyes at Gerda Schmidt? And most of all, did she seem to be enjoying his attention?
Perhaps it was because I was the youngest there that Gerda’s sister seemed to take a liking to me. She was pretty and sixteen but after all this time I can’t remember her name. Despite what I’d seen of the Theresienstadt women, I had no clue about sex. Like everything else which a boy would normally have been getting up to during his teens, I had no direct experience of anything like that. I was probably blushing when she spoke to me, laughing and smiling, and I tried to copy the much more worldly Herzko without making it obvious.
When it came to evening and darkness closed in, it was decided that we would stay. Most of us squeezed into the attic rooms at the top of the huge farmhouse, so different from the pigsty loft that had once been our home. Herzko, I noticed, slipped off to a room rather closer to Gerda Schmidt’s.
Over the next few days, as Mendeler came out of hiding and we all strolled in the spring sunshine of Neuglasau, I became ever friendlier with Gerda’s sister. Now, in the contemplation of my old age, I may have all sorts of issues about sleeping with a Nazi, the sister-in-law of an SS Oberscharführer. Then, we all had an air about us of what Jews call hefker; we’d abandoned any sense of responsibility and we just enjoyed our freedom. I don’t think anyone could have blamed us, and certainly the sixteen-year-old girl who wandered with me in the sprouting corn of Ostholstein seemed to feel the same crackle in the air. Perhaps, if things had turned out differently, I could have faced my future with the pretty blonde girl whose name I can’t now recall.
I don’t remember either how long we stayed on the farm or what the Schmidts made of our presence, but I do remember the evening their son turned up. It is one of the most bizarre transformations I’ve ever seen. So bizarre that each of us there has a different memory of it. Gone was the SS uniform and the tall, elegant stride. The Oberscharführer was no more and plain old Max Schmidt, the farmer’s son, stood in his place. His head was shaved, rather more neatly than ours had been in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Fürstengrube and he joined us at the dining table and made small talk as if we were all old buddies having a post-war reunion. I didn’t know it at the time, but he may well have had in his pocket the papers of Kapo Hans the Miner, whose body he had left at Tormalin. We had one plan; ex-Oberscharführer Schmidt had another. It made
my blood run cold to see the way he behaved. Had there been a war? Was there such a place as Auschwitz? Had anybody died over the last few years? It was incredible.
After dinner, out of earshot of the Schmidts, a full-blown row broke out among us. Hermann Josef was arguing that Schmidt had done his best to help us in recent weeks; he’d brought us to his parents’ home and saw that we got decent food. He’d let Mendeler hide in the Miller’s farm – though none of us understood that – and had let him (Hermann) ride everywhere on his motorbike. Jakobowicz talked of forgiveness, of the need for us all to move on and reclaim what we could of our lives. Schmidt had helped him, he said, on no less than three occasions. On the death march when Jakobowicz was on the point of collapse, the Oberscharführer had turned up on his bike and ordered vodka to revive him. Schmidt had given permission for Jakobowicz to set up as a dentist in Ahrensbök, allowing him to visit various friends in the process. Just before we were marched to Neustadt, Schmidt had taken Jakobowicz aside and told him of the impending visit of the Red Cross, implying he should pretend to be from Western Europe, so he would be taken to Sweden. As for Schmidt, the best way to repay his kindness was to give him the best alibi possible. If any British soldier stopped Herr Schmidt, all he had to do was to roll up his sleeve and show a tattooed number, the mark of shame that was Auschwitz.
