Survivor

by Sam Pivnik

  Over the months and years that followed I began to piece together what happened to us during the time of the camps. Much of it remains unknown – and will always remain unknown; especially the unanswerable question of how a supremely civilised people like the Germans could become so seduced by a madman that they allowed the seemingly unthinkable to happen. In the 1950s no one wanted to know about the Jews. Back in 1939 there were a lot of people in Britain who thought that going to war over Poland was a wrong decision. I expect many more in France felt the same. British men and women had died to honour a treaty obligation with a distant country – that was how many of them saw it. And the last thing those who were left wanted was a bunch of Jews stirring things up.

  Across Germany there was a rapid de-Nazification programme after the war. This was already happening when I was in Konstanz. People lost their uniforms, slipped off their swastika armbands and walked quietly away. Some of the most notorious were smuggled out of Europe to the anonymous mountains and jungles of South and Central America. The more ordinary just shrugged, denying any knowledge of the camps or of Nazi atrocities. Those who couldn’t deny it, who were caught bang to rights, came out with the old nonsense that they were only obeying orders and had no choice. A brilliant study by the American historian Daniel Goldhagen – Hitler’s Willing Executioners – which appeared in 1996 has conclusively proved that this is a lie.

  But if most people in 1950s Britain didn’t want to know, we, the survivors, had to know. Whether we’d gone to America or Israel or whether we’d tried to resurrect, however impossibly, our old lives, we had to find out. For years one of the problems in researching wartime Poland was the existence of the Iron Curtain. While I was still at Konstanz, learning to drive and surviving by my wits, Winston Churchill had made a speech at Fulton, Missouri in which he warned, ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent.’ He went on to prophesy, in that over-the-top way of his, ‘The Dark Ages may return on the gleaming wings of science. Beware, I say. Time may be short.’ He was talking about the Cold War, the Communist threat which was then advancing west, and the ever-increasing risk of atomic warfare. The practical side of it from my point of view was that the Russians, enigmatic and humourless as ever, weren’t giving out any information about what lay behind that Curtain, and the situation got worse rather than better as time went on.

  I have tried to make it clear in this book that the men responsible for the Holocaust as I saw it were the ordinary, everyday members of the SS and the Kapos who all too often enjoyed carrying out their bidding. But for the record, the men at the top who engineered the whole thing met their ends in ways that could never atone for the millions of deaths they had caused – but they met them nonetheless. Adolf Hitler, consistently voted today as the most evil man in history, shot himself and/or took poison in the private apartments of his bunker under Berlin as the Red Army were battering the capital at street level. That was on 30 April 1945 while I was in Neuglasau waiting to be marched to the Cap Arcona. Thousands of books have been written by cleverer men than me in an attempt to unravel his twisted mind. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS that still haunt my nights, put on an eye patch and posed as a Gestapo agent, apparently blissfully unaware that anyone with Gestapo papers was to be arrested on sight. He was stopped by the British at Bremervörde and, during a routine examination by an army doctor, swallowed a cyanide capsule he had hidden in the lining of his coat and died almost instantly. Hans Frank, who had governed Poland from 1939 and promised to make us all slaves, was rounded up and faced judgement at the international court at Nuremberg. He pretended to be shaken by the testimony he had heard in court, confessed his guilt and told everybody he had found God via the Catholic Church. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and was hanged on 16 October 1946.

  What happened to the people I knew – to those at the bottom, who were the victims of those monsters and to those who so willingly helped them achieve their insane goals? Liquidation came to Wodzislaw, my beloved Garden of Eden, at about the same time it came to us in the Kamionka. My aunt Lima Novarsky’s landlady, whose name, sadly, I don’t remember, was one of those rare Christian Poles who risked everything for us Jews. Lima’s son – my cousin, Shlomo – was in his twenties by then and the landlady hid him in her house. Unfortunately, she got a little drunk in a pub one night and let slip the fact. It wasn’t only in wartime Britain that ‘careless talk cost lives’ and someone informed the SS. The next day both of them, the old Christian Pole and the young Jewish man, were dragged into the town square and shot.

  The last time I had seen my grandmother, Ruchla-Lea, the half-blind old lady had been standing, terrified, with the other old people of Bedzin that August day, the day of the Aktion at the Hakoah stadium, when day turned to night. She was herded onto a train and taken those fatal kilometres to Auschwitz. We heard that she lost her sight completely in her last hours; whether this was hysterical blindness caused by her fear, I don’t know. I don’t know either whether it was better or worse not to see what was happening on the Rampe, where months later I’d be working. Someone, I hope, helped her off the train and onto the platform. Someone, I hope, helped her onto a truck. Someone, I hope, helped her undress. And above all, I hope someone held her hand as she died.

  ‘Already in Heaven’, ‘up the chimney’ – this, I had known for a long time, was the fate of my immediate family: Lejbus Pivnik, the tailor who took his God and his traditions so seriously; Fajgla Pivnik, the mother who bore me, who gave me life and saved it; Hendla Pivnik, with her dreams of Eretz Yisrael and the Holy Land; the children, Majer, fourteen; Chana, thirteen; Wolf, eight; and little Josek, six. They were people – my people – but they became statistics and their names weren’t even written down. We learned that Hendla had not in fact been selected for the gas chambers immediately as I had assumed. Long afterwards I met Gutscha Diamond, the Kapo at the women’s camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau who told me to get out any way I could because they were going to kill us all. She told us that Hendla had lasted about ten days. She would have gone through a quarantine-style initiation which I can only hope was less brutal than mine. Her head would have been shaved, so would her armpits and between her legs. She would have been given a shapeless ‘shift’ dress and a pair of badly fitting clogs. She would have realised, as I came to realise, that her family had gone. And perhaps she gave up. Or perhaps she didn’t. After all, she was a fighter was Hendla, a member of Gordonia and a big sister to me. Nathan never forgave Gutscha. To the end he believed that she could have done more for her, as a relative, however distant. But Gutscha’s own children died in the camp. How could she have saved someone else’s child and not have saved her own? After Hendla’s ten days, somebody’s hand flicked to the left and she walked to the gas chamber.

  What about the people back home in Bedzin, those who we had known during the Occupation? Kornfeld, who had kept the pub where my father drank, was one of the first to go when the deportations started. Machtinger, the shoemaker who was his brother-in-law, went too. A little later, Piekowski the horse dealer, his wife and the daughters I had seen being abused by Machtinger and the policeman Mitschker disappeared as well. Where did they go? Not Blechhammer certainly, because Blechhammer was a relatively small camp and it’s likely that Nathan would have seen them there. But there were many labour camps in Poland and elsewhere – Auschwitz alone had forty-seven sub-camps – so God knows where they ended up or what their ultimate fate might have been.

  I don’t know either what happened to the Haübers, the kindly factory manager at Killov’s factory and his wife, whose little girl I used to walk to school sometimes. She is still alive, I know, but her parents must be long gone, having walked that difficult tightrope of the war years when for a German to help a Jew meant death. One man who found that out was Alfred Rossner, who ran the factory where my father and Hendla worked. Although I don’t remember it from the time, when the first depor
tations began in Bedzin in May 1942, he went around the streets of the town in his pony and trap, calling out in Yiddish – how many Christian Germans spoke that? – to ignore the orders of the Judenrat and refuse to be rounded up. My memory of 6 August 1943 as we waited, terrified, on the platform for a train that would take us to Auschwitz, doesn’t include the removal of some people from the crowd. These were Rossner’s key workers, all Jews, who were quietly taken back to his workshops, no doubt in exchange for huge backhanders to the officiating SS. Four months later, with a handful of Jews still working and by this time living in his factory, Rossner was arrested by the Gestapo. On charges that were never made clear, they hanged him in January 1944. Fifty-one years later, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem recognised Alfred Rossner as one of the Righteous Among Nations.

  Old Dombek, the delivery man whose horses Nathan and I loved, ended his days in Auschwitz-Birkenau. I remember seeing him turning before my eyes into a Müsselmann; after they’d worked him half to death, the SS took him to the gas chamber. Like all of them, he deserved better.

  He didn’t live in Bedzin, but, indirectly, my uncle Moyshe had played such a vital part in my life and he never knew it. If, as I believe, Kapo Manfred put in a good word for me as I lay delirious with typhus in Auschwitz-Birkenau, it was because he knew Uncle Moyshe. Others who didn’t know him however, sent him to Buchenwald, where he slept in a crowded bunk above Nathan. At some point and for some reason, a faceless SS bureaucrat moved Moyshe on. There were no gassings in Buchenwald; I can only presume that he died in another camp.

  You have followed me from Bedzin in that grim train that sweltering August, with frightened men singing the psalms of David. You have followed me to Auschwitz. I left there in what must have been January 1944.

  By the summer of that year, as I took my chances in the mine at Fürstengrube, the murder of prisoners was speeded up at Auschwitz-Birkenau. There were no selections any more; everybody who arrived on the Rampe was sent straight to the gas. You can read the statistics for yourself, but they only tell a small part of the story. As the Red Army got ever nearer from the East, a rising sense of panic set in amongst the German high command and the SS. Mass extermination officially stopped in November on direct orders from Himmler, although many survivors know from their own experiences how seriously those orders were taken.

  In the last months of 1944 the old barracks we’d called home were dismantled and shipped elsewhere in the Reich. So were the contents of Kanada, the clothes, glasses and false limbs of the dead that still might have a use in the Nazi economy even now. From September the burial pits that contained bodies and the ashes of my family were cleared and filled in with soil, despite the best efforts of the slave labourers doing the work, to keep at least some evidence of mass murder for the liberation they prayed was on its way. The Sonderkommando, those poor bastards who dragged corpses from the gas chambers to the ovens, staged a revolt on 7 October. They were told they were being sent to the ‘rubber factories’ among Auschwitz’s sub-camps but they knew perfectly well this was a death sentence. Using pickaxe handles and rocks they attacked the SS guards and set fire to the crematoria. One of the SS men was thrown alive into an oven at Crematorium II. The attempt had been brave but it underlined the hopelessness of open revolt, even as the camp was dying and the SS had their backs to the wall. An estimated 450 prisoners died as a result of the uprising as opposed to only three of the SS.

  The last roll-call at Auschwitz was held on 17 January 1945, two days before we marched out of Fürstengrube into the freezing night. A total of 31,894 men and women stood on the Appellplatz that day, Birkenau itself having been contracted in size so that effectively the two camps became one. In the death marches that followed an estimated half of these people died, in exactly the same conditions we faced after Fürstengrube.

  Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front on 27 January. It was Saturday – Shabbat. There was some fierce resistance at Birkenau from the retreating SS but by three o’clock a makeshift Red Cross flag could be seen waving from the women’s camp. One of the women shouted, in Russian, ‘Welcome, victors and liberators.’ And a soldier shouted back words that very few of them could ever have expected to hear – ‘You are free.’

  On that day there were 7,000 surviving prisoners at Auschwitz. By the most conservative of estimates, one and a half million died there.

  What happened to the men who had run the camp, who had conspired in those years to make our lives Hell? The Kommandant there in my time, who I never remember seeing, was Rudolf Höss. I have read somewhere that his father wanted him to be a priest, but the boy had a calling of an altogether different kind. Caught by the Allies, he was put on trial at Nuremberg and his testimony there, along with private papers, has since been published in book form. It remains one of the most important pieces of evidence for the existence of the Holocaust ever produced. Holocaust deniers today can rubbish the memories of people like me as so much distortion and exaggeration, especially after so many years. But Höss actually ran the extermination process and his evidence was collected only months after it had finished. Holocaust deniers cannot dismiss him so easily. What is most chilling is Höss’ calm description of genocide as if it’s the most normal thing in the world, and the fact that he was more concerned to make a good impression on his superiors than worry about the inhumanity of it all. When his wife asked him if people were really being gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, he wrote, ‘In the Spring of 1942 many blossoming people walked under the blossoming trees of the farmstead and most of them went with no premonition of their deaths.’ How pleasant to note that one of the most efficient mass murderers in history was also – almost – a poet. They hanged Rudolf Höss outside Block 11 in Auschwitz I – the death block where so many had died under his orders. He had a last cup of coffee – the good stuff, not the ersatz rubbish we had – and died on a gallows that still stands today. His body hung for only thirteen minutes before a doctor pronounced him dead. It was the last public execution in Poland.

  Hauptscharführer Otto Moll was captured by the Americans and tried by them. The transcript of his interrogation is available for anybody to read today. He insisted that Höss be present throughout so that he could check any errors Höss had already made in his lengthy statement. Even at this stage, when his guilt was evident, Moll tried to wriggle out of things. Yes, he admitted he was in charge of the crematoria, but it was the doctors who had shaken the Zyklon B capsules into the gas chambers and the doctors who selected those who died. As for the numbers involved, he was sure that was overplayed – the kind of nonsense the Holocaust deniers seize on today. Moll complained also about being shackled to a guard when Höss was not. His interrogator, Lt Colonel Smith W Brookhart, was unmoved – ‘We are not interested whatsoever in your feelings in this matter.’ Found guilty of war crimes at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Fürstengrube and against death marchers, Moll was hanged on 28 May 1946. He was thirty-one.

  Today, among several others buried in the grounds of the old Landsberg prison where Hitler once did time, Moll’s grave is tended by the State of Bavaria, as though this man should be shown any respect at all.

  Unterscharführer Karel Kurpanik, the man whose face still haunts me in the darkness, led a death march in January 1945 and was wounded in an air raid in those chaotic months as the Reich collapsed. He was arrested in his home town of Neu Beuthen, now a suburb of Bytom, on 19 July and tried by a special court in Katowice, close to where so many of his crimes had been committed. They hanged him in February 1946.

  I would like to think that all the monsters of Auschwitz received justice but that didn’t happen. Dr Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death who had consigned my family to the gas chambers and who had done his best to do the same thing to me, was transferred to KL Gross-Rosen after the liquidation of Auschwitz at the end of January 1945. He served as a doctor with the Wehrmacht briefly before disappearing into civilian life. Despite plenty of evidence by survivors, there was littl
e definitive proof which put Mengele at Auschwitz at all until 2007, when a photograph album was presented to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The extraordinary photos show the SS at play, officers partying and having picnics in their leisure time when they weren’t killing people. Mengele is there, smiling his gappy grin, enjoying the company of Cain.

  He was smuggled out of Germany where he’d been working as a farmhand with stolen papers in Rosenheim, Bavaria and got to Argentina. In Buenos Aires he practised as a doctor, carrying out illegal abortions until the authorities rumbled him. Here he met Adolf Eichmann, more than any other Nazi, perhaps, the architect of genocide. But Eichmann’s days were numbered by 1960 because he was being watched by Mossad, the Israeli Intelligence Service. When they smuggled Eichmann back to trial in Israel, Mengele ran again, this time to Paraguay, using his real name on his passport. By the late 1960s, the world’s mood had changed. On the one hand, the Holocaust was an accepted field of study for historians and the stories of survivors like me were already being collected. On the other – even as early as 1950 – the Americans and even the Russians, who had suffered an appalling loss of 20 million of their people to the Germans, seemed less inclined to hunt Nazis. Even so, it was pretty unbelievable that the Israeli ambassador to Paraguay should say, ‘I must confess I was not so eager to find Mengele … he was, after all, a German citizen who had committed his crimes in the name of the Third Reich. None of his victims were Israeli – Israel came into existence only several years later.’ If even an Israeli is prepared to accept the ‘I was only obeying orders’ defence, what hope is there for justice?