Survivor

by Sam Pivnik

  As we argued this way and that, I realised that I was, in the end, a lone voice for the arrest of Schmidt. Herzko wasn’t there at the time. Neither was Mendeler Davidovitch. Hermann Josef wasn’t an Oberkapo any more but he was a powerful persuader with a towering personality and it ended up with Kapo Janek slapping me across the face and telling me to shut up. My head was buzzing, but as I remember it, Bronek Jakobowicz had the job of rolling up Schmidt’s sleeve and tattooing a false number on his forearm. This was all the more peculiar because, as I would learn afterwards, Schmidt took the identity of Hans the Miner who, as a Christian prisoner, was not tattooed. The rest of it would be up to Schmidt’s imagination. If anyone challenged him in the days, weeks, months ahead, he had enough inside knowledge of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Fürstengrube and even the death march to give a convincing account of himself from a prisoner’s point of view. The tattoo would be the final ‘proof’.

  Why didn’t I do something about this appalling situation? Why didn’t I go into Herr Schmidt’s living room, take his shotgun from its rack and blast the Oberscharführer to death? Perhaps I’d seen too much killing. Perhaps I am not a murderer. It turned out I couldn’t even kill a pig. I wanted Max Schmidt to face legal retribution, not a kangaroo court and certainly not a random execution. And I missed my chance. My face was still stinging from the slap I’d received as Max Schmidt, Hermann Josef, the Jakobowicz brothers, the Lipshitzes and Schmidt’s father-in-law, Bergman, the I.G. Farben engineer from Fürstengrube, all left. To this day I can’t understand why the Lipshitz boys went. Jakobowicz had been kissing SS arse for a long time and naturally his brother went with him. Hermann Josef had been hand-in-glove with Schmidt, virtually since the man had taken over Fürstengrube from Moll. But the actions of the Lipshitzes didn’t make sense to me then and still don’t make sense today. Schmidt had just lost a war – what possible future could there be with him?

  It might have been the next day or the day after that the British came. A khaki-painted lorry arrived and a handful of Tommies tumbled out. There had been complaints, apparently, from the local Lutheran pastor that there were ex-prisoners on the Schmidt farm who were disrupting the tranquillity of village life. The irony of this amazed me then as it does still. Men like that Lutheran pastor had knuckled under when Hitler came to power in Germany and his church had become by and large a Nazi organisation. Here he was still banging on about the unacceptability of the Jews. He didn’t want us in his backyard and extraordinarily, the British were on his side. As we climbed into the truck I realised that Herzko was missing. He hadn’t been there during the row over Schmidt’s future; he wasn’t there when the British took us away. That man could vanish for Poland! I heard later that he was hiding in a toilet and I suspect this was with the connivance of Gerda Schmidt who had taken more than a liking to Henry Herzko Bawnik! He was probably disrupting the tranquillity of village life all by himself.

  I stayed in the Kriegsmarine barracks for perhaps two months. There was a formality about the British that we found awkward, especially as rumours were reaching us from further south how the Americans treated refugees like us. Near Buchenwald, as the GIs liberated the camps around there, General Eisenhower had given specific orders. ‘Open the stores,’ he had said. ‘Let the prisoners take whatever they like. Give them whatever they need, from town, from the bakeries, from the butchers, give it to them.’ That didn’t happen in Neustadt. It was an occupied town at the end of the bloodiest war in history and everybody had their own agenda. For Joe Zoller and me it was still about survival, as it had been for years.

  I hadn’t known Joe very well before Neustadt. He had been on a different shift from me at Fürstengrube, sleeping in a different block. But we both had a basic ability to organise and we went into business together. Neither of us smoked back then, but we scrounged cigarettes and traded them on the black market. In the back streets of Neustadt we traded anything – watches, cameras, anything the SS and the Wehrmacht had left behind in their hurry to get out. Looking back, Joe and I weren’t very good black-marketeers and we ended up with a lot of stuff we couldn’t shift.

  I got hold of a German motorbike in the course of this wheeling and dealing and Joe and I roared off to Bergen-Belsen to sell herring we’d acquired from local fishermen in the Bay of Lübeck. The Cap Arcona still lay there, a black carcass washed by the grey sea; corpses floated out of her charred hull for weeks. We took pictures with the cameras we got and what an historic record they would have made today if I’d ever got the film developed or bothered to keep it.

  What we were really on the lookout for were girls. My fling with Gerda’s sister had whetted my appetite I suppose, and what else were two nineteen-year-olds with cigarettes and a motorbike going to do with themselves? There were professional black-marketeers in Neustadt who could run rings around us – let them get on with it. We just wanted a good time – hefker, a lack of responsibility which we both found exhilarating.

  That was not how the British saw it. We were not confined to the naval barracks but it was clear that they saw their job as building bridges, literally and metaphorically, with the locals. Black-marketeering was a crime in Britain and the Tommies had a habit of searching young men on the streets, confiscating their contraband and locking them up for the night. When I tried to get petrol for my motorbike, a British soldier wearing sergeant’s stripes refused to sell me any.

  There was one day, though, when I had enough petrol to go back to the Schmidt farm. A lone visitor on a motorbike, wearing a British Army jacket, didn’t cause much of a stir. Ostensibly I went to the dairy to get fresh butter and cheese but in fact I’d really gone to see Gerda’s sister. We didn’t tumble in the hay that day. Did we exchange promises? Vow to stay in touch? If we did, I don’t remember and there were more pressing needs, and I left with the produce of the dairy stuffed into my saddlebags. Back in the barracks that night, we all ate well.

  At the back of my mind, in that early summer of 1945, was what I would do with the rest of my life. I’d used up far more than my nine lives and I wasn’t yet twenty. Neustadt was a surreal adventure after the hell of the camps, but it was hardly a way of life and I had to move on. For many camp survivors at the end of the war, moving on meant moving back. Home. Family. The life we’d known. Some went back. Joe Zoller did. He had a sister he believed was still living, somehow, in Poland and he went off to find her. As for me, I knew my family had all gone. Grandmother Ruchla-Lea couldn’t possibly have survived. My mother, my father, Hendla, Chana, Majer, Wolf and Josek had been in Heaven for two years, by way of the chimney at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The last I’d seen of Bedzin was Christian Poles, on a sweltering August day, carrying away our furniture from the Kamionka. For months before that, somebody else was already living in my house along Modzejowska Street. The only possibility – and it was a slight one – was that Nathan was still alive. I had last heard of him nearly three years earlier when he was in the labour camp at Blechhammer. But Nathan had a hernia and had to wear a special belt. How long could he have survived in that condition in a world where the Nazis were bent on creating a perfect Aryan state and imperfections weren’t tolerated?

  In those weeks in Neustadt there were rumours everywhere. People were moving in all directions, on the road, hitching rides on trains and trucks, looking for people who were probably long dead. The Jews in particular were looking for more than that – we were looking for our past, our history, our way of life. And it didn’t seem to be anywhere. It was on this rumour mill that I heard of a cousin of my father’s who had ended up in Bergen-Belsen and at some time in June I hitched a ride there and started searching.

  KL Bergen-Belsen had been liberated by the same British Army division that were billeted in Neustadt. It was one of the first to be liberated by the Allies and the appalling conditions there shocked the world. Captured SS men at the camp had no accurate idea how many inmates there were; they guessed perhaps 40,000. The dead lay in heaps in the barracks or on the Appellplatz. Men too w
eak to move lay in their own filth on their bunks and their shit trickled down to the tier below. There had been no water for a week when the British got there because bomb damage had destroyed the pumping system. Red Cross boxes in the camp’s stores contained tinned soup, milk and meat sent by various Jewish societies. Much of this had been stolen by the SS and nothing had been distributed. On one day after liberation, the official Second Army History will tell you 548 prisoners died. They died free men.

  There was nothing for me at Bergen-Belsen, just another camp to be bulldozed, another German town made to confront its recent past. Still homeless, still wandering, I made my way back to Neustadt. And as I reached the Kriegsmarine barracks, there, on the tarmac outside, stood Nathan.

  * * *

  He didn’t look any different, my big brother. And yet in so many ways he was. We both were. We fell into each other’s arms and cried. We were both hugging our mother and father, old Ruchla-Lea, Hendla, Chana and the boys, Majer, Wolf and Josek. We were hugging ourselves for all we’d seen and been through. We were hugging a way of life that was gone forever.

  Nathan never asked me what happened to our family. He didn’t have to. He knew already. Heaven via the chimney – it was as simple and as stark as that. Eight people we both loved more than anything in the world wiped out to realise the dreams of a madman. That madman had not gone up the chimney, although as the years went by we learned that Hitler’s body had indeed burned, on his own final orders, in the garden of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Was there any comfort in that for Nathan and me? None at all.

  My brother’s story would take another book to recount in full and over the next few days in Neustadt we swapped our experiences. In a way it was easier then than it is now. We were still both boys and although the memories were still new and raw, there hadn’t yet been time for the nightmares and sadness to sink in and become a way of life for us. Nathan had been transferred to camp after camp until he was sent to Blechhammer, and by the time he got there, it was under the auspices of the huge Auschwitz complex. I remember thinking, as he talked, that had he gone to Auschwitz-Birkenau with us on that terrible day in August 1943, he would have gone with the rest of the family to the gas chamber, because of his hernia. That kind of physical problem would not have been tolerated by Mengele’s welcoming committee and the doctor’s elegant gloved hand would have flicked to the left. And if Nathan had gone to the flames, I would have gone with him as I saw too many people do on the Rampe; people who chose to stay with their families, no matter what. I remembered two brothers in particular. One had had his arm broken in a beating by a Kapo and his brother had walked with him towards the terrible gates, supporting the lad and cradling his arm.

  In the camps where Nathan worked, there was no brutal stripping, no selection and no gas chambers. Once under the Auschwitz umbrella, of course, that changed. Nathan had to give up his civilian clothes and wear the blue and white stripes that marked us all in Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was also tattooed; his number was something like 176000. As we chatted in the safety of the Kriegsmarine barracks, with our hair growing back and our mixed bag of clothes on, Nathan mentioned the name of our old friend Vladek Lipanski. He had been working at Blechhammer at the time that Nathan was there and he often visited us before the Kamionka move made that impossible. We’d both played football with him; he bought Nathan’s bike from us in exchange for potatoes. And he had never once mentioned Nathan. To Nathan he had said, ‘I knew you’d end up here. And here, you’re going to die like a dog.’ That was our friend. That was a Gentile Pole.

  In one of those bizarre coincidences which can happen in wartime, Nathan and I almost met. The Blechhammer camp had been every bit as brutal as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Hours on the Appellplatz in freezing conditions, standing in rows of five. Beatings and killings by the Kapos and the SS. Muselmänner being worked to death. What was different about Blechhammer was that, unlike Auschwitz-Birkenau, Nathan’s camp was bombed by the Allies. Ten times between July and November 1944 bombs hit Blechhammer. I had probably seen those bombers droning overhead from Fürstengrube, not realising they were targeting my brother.

  Nathan had left his camp on foot in the bitter January of 1945, one of the last groups to leave, three days after we left Fürstengrube. His experiences on the road were every bit as ghastly as mine with the desperately starving breaking formation to grab cabbage stalks in the snow-covered fields, only to be shot dead by the SS, red staining the green and white. He too rode the open coal trucks and at Buchenwald, we actually rode the same train. There, as the SS desperately looked for some kind of plan as their world was collapsing, Nathan’s trucks rattled into Buchenwald itself and ours went on to Nordhausen and Dora-Mittelbau. The coincidences of war.

  When we met again in the naval barracks, Nathan was living in Konstanz am Bodensee, on the pretty lake there, in the French zone. If it wasn’t apparent already, it quickly became clear that the Allies of 1941–5 were Allies no more. Before 1941, the Russians had carved up my country with the Germans. Before 1941 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Americans had shown little inclination to get involved in another European war. During the war most of France had collapsed against the Blitzkrieg of the Wehrmacht and the area that hadn’t, Vichy, were straightforward Nazi collaborators. There was no love lost between East and West, Stalin’s Communism against Churchill’s democracy, and the British and French had fought each other for a thousand years, recent experience notwithstanding. Each of the Allies controlled their captured bit of Germany jealously and with a careful eye on each other.

  This was how Nathan had found me. He caught a train from Konstanz with a friend who was looking for his family. At a camp called Feldafing near Munich, he met somebody from Bedzin who had seen me in Neustadt. By the time Nathan got there, I was already in Bergen-Belsen, looking for him.

  * * *

  There was nothing to keep me in Neustadt and I went with Nathan on those brilliant, scruffy, unplanned, free trains to Konstanz in the late summer of 1945. I had never been this far west before and we were suddenly in Baden with a tranquil lake crowded with brightly painted steamers and the mountains of Switzerland reminding us that some countries at least had been spared the horrors of war. We both knew that no Swiss Jews had been sent via the cattle-trucks to the chimneys. The French First Army, with its borrowed American armour, had taken the town without opposition at the end of April and Konstanz was now the centre of the French zone.

  Nathan lived in a palace! I had never seen anything like it. Gailingen had been a Jewish settlement for centuries but the Nazis had destroyed it, burning the great synagogue there shortly before the war. The house I now moved into belonged to the Rothschild family, those wealthy Jews from the international banking community that Hitler had been gunning for most of his life. In fact, the Nazis had only just vacated the house because it had been a hospital during the war and a Jewish Committee had recently taken it over. I slept in a bed more comfortable than the Kriegsmarine barracks and ate decent food provided by the Joint Refugee Committee.

  We played football; we learned Hebrew. We looked to our future and we looked to our past. The future was Palestine – the biblical Canaan, a land flowing with milk and honey and almost every day lorries came through Konstanz carrying Jewish refugees who had decided to get there. We put them up for a day or two and sent them on their way. Like us, they were the flotsam and jetsam of the camps, men and women young and strong enough to take everything the Nazis had thrown at them. They had lost their prison stripes and put flesh on their bones before taking off into the unknown.

  From us, rested and refreshed, they went on over the border into France or Italy, with forged papers and cash to bribe frontier guards. From there, the Holy Land of Palestine beckoned them.

  It didn’t beckon us – not yet. Our past lay in Poland, in Bedzin or with our mother’s relatives in the Garden of Eden. Yet we each of us had memories that were too bitter to contemplate a return. We knew that the synagogue in Bedzi
n was a burnt out shell. The Kamionka, I assumed, had collapsed into decay and in any case, it was too primitive to make a home there. The place was Judenrein, Jew free, and the Poles who had taken our home and our furniture and watched us board a train for Auschwitz weren’t likely to want us back.

  The only other home we could contemplate was England. My father had lived with relatives in Stamford Hill shortly before the First World War and there was at least one of his sisters living in London’s East End. We wrote to our distant cousin in Bergen-Belsen who remembered the London address and, via the Joint Refugee Committee, we were sponsored to emigrate to London.

  We rode the trains again, this time in an overcrowded passenger carriage. The last time I had done this I had been on my way to Hell with my family. Now it was just the two of us, the last of the Pivniks, and we crossed the Channel on a grey, rain-lashed day in the autumn of 1947.

  I was twenty-one, officially a man in the eyes of most of the world’s countries, and after the summer on Lake Constance, London was an impossibly miserable sight. Everything was grey and drab and the city that had withstood two Blitzes was still scarred and hurt. There were bomb craters everywhere, holes in the ground where houses, hotels and shops had stood. Rationing was still the norm and Britain was going through its Age of Austerity. Foreign holidays had been banned the previous month and the weekly meat ration had been cut by 2d. As Nathan and I gradually learned English and tried to cope with the contents of newspapers, we read that the government of Clement Atlee had just passed the Supplies and Services Act which was to force workers into certain industries. It caught my eye because the Tory Opposition called it the SS Act. If only they knew!

  Thick fog enveloped the city that November – what Cockneys called a ‘pea-souper’. I’d never seen anything like it. We were living in our aunt and uncle’s house in the East End and it could only be temporary as there wasn’t really the space. One of the songs I heard on the radio was ‘Maybe it’s Because I’m a Londoner’ and I was struck by the fact that I wasn’t. Nathan and I worked in our relatives’ tailor’s shop, both of us, as chance would have it, following in our father’s footsteps. But no one wanted to know about the Jews, about what we’d been through. Everybody had their own problems – rationing, the loss of loved ones, the bombs, those ‘doodlebugs’ that I’d seen being made in the sulphurous tunnels of Dora-Mittelbau. The camps, Auschwitz, the Holocaust – all that was far away and somebody else’s problem.