The Journey of Anna Eichenwald

by Donald Hunt

  That afternoon, Anna saw him. Josef was walking in a meadow that bordered the farm. He climbed the fence that contained the sheep. She noticed that he was rather tall, about six feet and very thin. She only saw him briefly and never saw his face. Anna had heard of the death camps in Poland. She suspected the trauma had overwhelmed him.

  Anna looked forward to the evening meal. She wanted to become better acquainted with Johann and Greta, and Josef if possible. It might be another month or so before they could be liberated. She was anxious to be able to return to Buchenwald to look for Eric. She had tried not to think about him too much but prayed daily for his safety.

  Anna soon learned that the evening meal was a reward for a hard days work. Greta and Johann were sturdy 50-year olds who put in long days. Their living was meager but rewarding. They were sitting with Anna by the fire when Josef entered. Anna stood up to greet the man.

  “Hello, I’m Anna,” she said, extending her hand.

  “Anna,” Josef said politely as he shook her hand. He sat down on the sofa and stared into the fire. Anna stared at him. She was surprised at his youthful appearance. He had sharp angular features and a crop of dark hair, windblown and unkempt. His face was kind. She thought he might be handsome with another month of good food.

  The evening was pleasant although Josef said nothing during the meal. When they finished eating he stood to leave, thanked Greta, then excused himself.

  Over the next week the process with Josef repeated itself. Each day he walked, exchanged polite greetings, and disappeared after dinner. He remained withdrawn and unresponsive.

  One evening after dinner Anna decided to attempt dialogue. She felt even the most grievous experience could be overcome if it could be shared.

  “Josef,” she said softly. “Can you tell us about Auschwitz?”

  He gave no sign of surprise. “What do you want to know?”

  Josef looked at the floor. His eyes filled with tears. He did not respond for several minutes.

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Auschwitz…it was a place for killing. My wife and I were deported there along with our three-year-old son. We were taken in December of 1943. We had been living in a ghetto in Krakow where I was a school teacher. We were the last of the Jewish people to go. When we arrived I was separated from my family. I didn’t see them again. I was given a job…the task of collecting the clothing of those who went to the gas chambers. Then I was made to move the dead to the crematoriums. I was one of the sondercommandos…the crematorium warriors. Every day thousands of innocent people…men, women, children…were thrown into the ovens. They literally disappeared up the chimney.

  During my second week there, I was collecting clothes of the people killed that day. I found my wife’s dress and her shoes. They were in a pile with my son’s playsuit. The gas chambers…they were disguised as showers. There were holding pens where several hundred people would stand…and signs that read ‘to the baths and disinfecting rooms.’ Most of the time symphony music was played on loud speakers…Mozart, Bach. SS officers would stand on wooden towers above the pens. They shouted for everyone to remove their clothes. Of course, the men and women were reluctant to do this. If they were too slow the officers would come down and beat them. Children clung to their parents and those without parents to each other. They were told to place their clothes in neat piles so they could find them after the showers.

  The people tried to comfort each other. They spoke in Polish or Yiddish. Before the gas chamber door opened, most were already dazed with fear. They knew something dreadful was going to happen. They could feel it…my god, they were standing there naked with guards ready to beat them. Of course, they were scared…how could they not know was about to happen?

  I remember a young mother undressing her daughter. The child looked about two years old. Then the mother took her own clothes off. She held the child in her arms and rocked her from side to side. They were a picture of my wife and son. They were going to their deaths….naked and afraid.

  The chamber doors…they were plated steel on rollers. Inside the concrete structure there were pillars, some to support the ceiling, some to hold the Zyklon-B cyanide pellets. There were shower heads in the ceiling to deceive the victims. As the doors rolled open the SS officers would scream for the people to get in. After the doors were shut, some of the officers liked to look through glass in the doors to watch them dying. Then two men with gas masks would get on top of the roof and pour the cyanide pellets into open cylinders that went into the chamber. These cylinders had perforations to allow the poison gas to escape into the chamber.

  I saw this. I heard the coughing and the screaming. The people would bang on the doors. And then the screaming would stop…usually within 10 minutes or so…and then everything would be quiet. The exhaust fans would clear the chamber. Then when the doors were opened the bodies would tumble out, usually the stronger men first because they were able to claw their way to the door. Pregnant women sometimes in late term, had partially delivered their babies…the head would be expelled out of the birth canal.

  Sondercommandos would pull the bodies out amid excrement and vomit. Each adult was checked by German orderlies for jewelry and gold fillings and these would be removed. Then the bodies were transported to the crematoria. This was done in large dumpsters on rails.

  Most of the clothing I collected had a yellow Star of David sewn on the front of the garment. The clothes, shoes and eye glasses were all saved, obviously of more value than human lives. My job was to collect the clothing and then load the bodies into the ovens. In the last few months, to save time and expenses, many of the younger children were thrown alive into the ovens. I witnessed all of this. Auschwitz was a place for killing!”

  Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945. The Germans tried to destroy the gas chambers and crematoria with dynamite. Auschwitz, however, was only one of many death camps. Most, if not all of them, kept Totenbuch or death books. But all were incomplete and many of them destroyed. The final number of deaths has been estimated by most scholars to be between five and six million souls.

  * * *

  In the spring of 1945, the end came quickly. The 1,000-year reign predicted by Hitler for the Third Reich ended after a laconic 12 years. The fall of the Ruhr industrial area in west central Germany was key. The area was bordered by three rivers; the Rhine to the west, the Ruhr to the south, and the Lippe to the north. About 80 percent of German coal and steel production was centered in the Ruhr. Allied forces mounted a successful campaign to encircle and capture this area. In doing so, they captured several hundred thousand Wehrmacht troops. Coal was the dominant energy source for all of Germany and after the loss of the Rumanian and Hungarian oil fields, there was a critical shortage of aviation fuel for fighters and petrol for tanks.

  The hope for ‘miracle weapons’ was a sophistry. Launching sites for the V-2 were lost with the occupation of the French and Belgian coasts. It was true that Germany had developed a jet fighter, and that the conventional Allied prop planes were no match for the jets. But they required a special type of fuel and the few refineries for this fuel production had been taken out with precision bombing. These planes also needed longer runways which were easy to spot and destroy.

  The effort to develop a successful fission bomb never materialized. After the defection of Hanz Eichenwald, Werner Heisenberg became head of the project. Heisenberg was an outstanding physicist and was made director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics. He may have opposed the development of an atomic bomb on moral grounds but he may also have realized that Germany would need large amounts of Uranium 235 which had to be separated from U-238, a process that was both extremely difficult and expensive. For whatever the reason, during a meeting with Albert Speer, minister of munitions, Heisenberg did not pursue development of the bomb. This, despite the fact that nuclear fission had first b
een achieved in Germany just four years earlier in 1938 by Otto Hahn. As it turned out, Hitler had little understanding of fission and even less interest.

  By mid-March the Germans had lost another 350,000 men who were killed, wounded or captured. Hitler was desperate. In a prolonged meeting with his generals and in a fit of rage, he contemplated completely denouncing the Geneva Convention and executing all POW’s. Most of his staff objected to this policy on legal grounds and as a result, it was never established. Still, hundreds of POWs perished when forced on long marches without adequate food or water.

  Thousands of German troops gave themselves up as quickly as possible to the advancing British-American forces. Nazi generals and military leaders were fanatical in their reprisals. On one occasion early on the afternoon of March seventh, units of the 9th U.S. Armored Division approached a railroad bridge over the Rhine at Ludendorff. They expected the bridge to be destroyed. When it was not, their tanks poured across and drove back a weak German defense force. By the end of the day the Americans had a strong bridgehead on the east bank. Soon after, the eight officers in charge of defending the bridge were executed by a special ‘Flying Tribunal’ that had been set up by the Fuehrer. There were no second chances with Hitler.

  Over the next few weeks, the Nazi Supreme Commander was becoming a physical wreck. His vengeance turned from the advancing enemy to his own troops and the German people. His railing against his commanders grew to a fever pitch. In meeting after meeting, he stood before them flushed with rage and trembling. He would complete his tirades with truculent outbursts at individual staff members. It was during one of these outbursts that he made one of the last momentous decisions of his life. On March 19th he issued a general order to make Germany a vast wasteland. All military, industrial, communication and transportation facilities were to be destroyed. Nothing would be left to help the German people endure their defeat.

  Fortunately, before the ‘scorched earth’ policy was handed down, it had been anticipated by Albert Speer, Minister for Armament and War Production. On March fifteenth, he drew up a memorandum in which he strongly opposed the policy. He presented his views to Hitler on March eighteenth. It said in part:

  “In four to eight weeks the final collapse of the German economy must be expected with certainty. . .After that collapse the war cannot be continued even militarily . . . We must do everything to maintain, even if only in a most primitive manner, a basis for the existence of the nation to the last. . .We have no right at this stage of the war, to carry out demolitions which might affect the life of the people.”

  Hitler was unmoved. The next day the egregious policy was handed down. It was more comprehensive than could be imagined and called for the destruction of all industrial plants, water works, gas works, electrical facilities, food and clothing stores, railway and communication installations, canals, ships, bridges, railcars, and locomotives – all of them. But the country was spared this catastrophe, in part by the rapid Allied advances and also by the adroit, almost superhuman efforts of Speer. He mobilized military personnel who, in direct opposition to Hitler’s orders, raced about the country to make certain the plan was not carried out.

  Once the German forces in the Ruhr were trapped, some 21 divisions, the Nazi defense front was split leaving a 200-mile gap open to the Elbe River and the heart of Germany. On April eleventh, a spearhead reached the Elbe near Magburg. The U.S. Ninth Army was now only 60 miles from Berlin.

  Another significant event was occurring about 100 miles south at Buchenwald. While the Germans were preparing to evacuate the camp, they discovered block-66 and the 600 Jewish boys. On April tenth, Julian Richburg was ordered to have all children in the camp on the parade ground at 10:00 a.m. to evacuate the camp. Now that the SS had been made aware that children were being hidden, he had no choice. So there they were, hundreds of Jewish boys standing before the gate waiting for it to be opened. More than 60,000 prisoners, including all the women, had already left the camp. As the guards were preparing to open the gates, two U.S. P-51 Mustang fighter planes suddenly made a low-level pass over the camp. History records the planes as coming ‘out of nowhere’ with roaring engines soaring at about 500 ft. As sirens sounded throughout the camp, all of the guards scattered, and the boys ran back to their barracks. That was the last time Julian Richburg and Beryl Yenzer saw uniformed German soldiers. The following day, advance elements of the American Third Army, commanded by General George Patton, arrived and drove the remaining Nazis from the camp. The American soldiers found some 21,000 starving prisoners still holding on to life in the hell of Buchenwald.

  Master Sergeant Paten Johnson from Provo, Utah, was astonished when he opened the door to block-66. He stared at the faces of more than 600 Jewish boys who had been saved by two Jewish underground operatives. Within days, the international Red Cross set up a relief station to care for the Buchenwald survivors…among them a large burly man named Beryl Yenzer. He was holding a small and very frail four-year old boy named Eric.

  Nuremberg was the city of the great Nazi rallies of the ’30s, rallies in which Hitler would address up to 50,000 party faithful at a time, with his orotund speeches. By April 16, 1945, Nuremberg was occupied by American forces - on the same day Russian troops broke loose from their bridgeheads over the Oder River and marched to the outskirts of Berlin. On the afternoon of April twenty-fifth, patrols of the U.S. 69th Infantry Division met elements of the Russian 58th Guard Division at a village called Torgue, on the Elbe River. North and South Germany were severed, and Hitler was trapped in Berlin. The last days of the Third Reich were at hand.

  In Berlin, the thunder of Russian heavy artillery could be heard. Hitler had returned for the final time on January sixteenth. His plan was to eventually make it to his mountain Villa, the Berghof, at Berchtesgaden in the mountains of Barbarossa. On April tenth, he sent his house staff but he himself was cut-off and could not join them.

  Since the attempt on his life the previous July, he had grown distrustful of everyone. He was living in his bunker 50 feet below the bombed out Chancellery. He fumed to one of his secretaries.

  “I can rely on no one. They all betray me. The whole business makes me sick….If anything happens to me, Germany will be left without a leader. I have no successor. Hess is mad, Goering has lost the sympathy of the people, and Himmler would be rejected by the party – besides, he is so completely inartistic….Rack your brain and tell me who my successor is to be!”

  Strange, with the disastrous end staring him in the face, this physical wreck of a man was obsessed with who would be his successor, as if there would be anything to succeed to. In a bizarre paradigm, a few of his most fanatical followers clung to the hope they would be saved by a last-minute miracle. Goebbels above all embraced this hope.

  One evening in the bunker, Goebbels was reading to Hitler from the History of Frederich the Great, the King of Prussia from 1740 to1786. This war hero frequently led his forces into battle personally and reportedly had several horses shot out from under him. He was admired as a tactical genius. Hitler identified with this man who had established Prussia as one of the five European powers of the day. Like Frederich, who took no pleasure from his popularity with the Volk and instead, preferred the company of his pet greyhounds, Hitler also had strained relationships with those around him - but he loved his pets.

  The last portion read by Goebbels went as follows:

  “Brave King! Wait yet a little while, and the days of your suffering will be over. Already the sun of your good fortune stands behind the clouds and will soon rise on you.”

  Hitler’s eyes filled with tears. He wanted to search for the ‘good fortune’ that he believed would be bestowed on him.

  The following day Goebbels acquired two horoscopes. One for the Fuehrer, drawn up the day he became Chancellor; the other of the Weimar Republic, composed by an obscure astrologer at the birth of the Republic in 1918. Both horoscopes had made similar predictio
ns. Amazingly, both predicted the outbreak of the war in 1939, the early victories of 1941, and the reversals for the German forces leading up to 1945. In April they predicted temporary successes. Just as in the Seven Years’ War, when the death of Czarina brought about a ‘miracle’ to the House of Brandenburg, Goebbels was expecting a death that could change the fortunes of this war.

  Goebbels returned to Berlin the next night after yet another RAF bombing. The remains of the Chancellery and the Adlon Hotel were burning. As he ascended the steps to the Propaganda Ministry, he was approached by an aid with ‘urgent news’. The aid shouted, “Roosevelt has died!”

  * * *

  Anna had spent an amazing four weeks with Greta and Johann. She had not only gained her weight back but had experienced a great deal of emotional and spiritual healing. She saw Josef at meals. She had worked to befriend him but had little success. She understood he might never recover from the trauma of Auschwitz. She was not certain she could recover given the same experience. And she knew she didn’t have the skills or the knowledge to help him.

  In long conversations with Greta, Anna told her own short history and the stories about how she had become a surgeon, fallen in love, fled the Nazis and lost Christian. With the story of Josef in Auschwitz and her own experiences at Buchenwald, she felt blessed to be alive. She did not yet know that approximately 6,000,000 Jewish men, women and children had perished at the hands of the Nazi Reich. But she knew she had designed a new goal for her life. She would find Eric and raise him as her own. She had first considered this when she placed his feeding tube in the hope of saving his life. When the boy survived, she began to love him. Was he a gift from God? Was he the child she would never have with Christian?