by Vic Shayne
About a year passed. I was barely animate. My legs moved one in front of the other as I walked, but I don’t know how. People ask me what I did in Mauthausen. Did I work? What is this word “work?” Real work has a purpose, a goal. The notion of labor in Mauthausen was meaningless. It was just another form of torture. It is a thing that the dead do in hell. We had bodies barely strong enough to move, always on the verge of giving up life for the release promised in death. People ask me what I used to think about. They may never understand. When your brain and body are starved for food, when you have no hope, when you are alone in the world—a world with endless suffering, death, and despair—then you do not think about things. Time passes and your brain just moves you until your body declines the invitation. A starving mind thinks of nothing. What can a mind wonder about in such conditions? Even dreams cannot move beyond the barbed wire fences and ovens and ruined bodies. Birds fly away from the camp but you do not comprehend what you are looking at. Soup is poured into your bowl but you put it in your mouth without thinking. A man falls dead in front of you and you are not fazed.
There was no longer a “me.” I did not think most of the time. I merely moved.
We were lined up in the cold, barely able to stand. In a foot of snow under an icy blue-black sky, as German soldiers shivered in long woolen coats, gloves, and leather boots, we wore pajama-thin clothing with holes and tears. The German soldiers slung their rifles over their shoulders and rubbed their hands together. They blew into their gloved hands and shifted back and forth on their feet, commenting to each other that it was cold. Our feet were bloody and wrapped in rags. We stood in the cold as a means of torture. Around me men swayed, trying to keep on their feet, trying to rob Death. One, two, or more fell to the earth. They would no longer arise. The horror was gone for these lucky few.
After hours went by and evening approached, the commandant had his German guards bring out their vicious dogs—Alsatians. Our bellies and throats screamed silently for food, for just a crumb. We cried for the thought of a morsel of food on our lips. I stuck out my tongue to catch a flake of snow. My eyes began to close and my back cramped and ached. The man beside me fell onto me then down to the ground. His eyes rolled up into his head and he died. The soldiers released their dogs on some unfortunate soul made to stand in front of us as the Germans laughed and pointed. The dogs tore into the living corpse, tearing him to shreds and gnawing at his body. God forgive us, for we were jealous of these dogs; we were jealous that they were feasting. Vicariously, our mouths moved and chewed at the air.
The things that make people human were not to be found in this vacuous world—charity, love, compassion, kindness. From time to time I would look out over the barbed wire fence and see blue-black crows take flight into the air. The birds teased us, effortlessly flying away, leaving Mauthausen and all our suffering behind. Spring was approaching, but I was long past hope. Eventually, there was no imagining that the war would end. There was no outside world. Death would come here. It would take me away over the fence with the crows. Hope had died for all of us. Our bodies and minds were sure to follow.
Spring
“The things I saw beggar description. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were overpowering. I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’”
—Memo from General Dwight D. Eisenhower to United States Army General George C. Marshall after visiting the Nazi Death Camps, 1945
In the outside world—a world that I could no longer fathom—the Americans were advancing. American soldiers. God bless these men. God bless them all. I cannot hold back my tears as I think of these words, these thoughts I still have for the American soldiers. God bless them.
Brave, strong, well trained, and determined, the Americans were on their way. The only ones in the world who could stand up to the German army. The only force more powerful than that which had destroyed my life was fighting its way toward a victory over Hitler’s forces. I had no way of knowing at the time, but the American Army 65th Infantry Division, part of General Patton’s Third Army, had fought from France to Germany and across Austria, cutting a path through the snowy forests, chasing the German Wehrmacht as it retreated until it finally began to lose its footing. Then, following the liberation of Paris, one more terrible battle had to be fought—the Battle of the Bulge; Hitler’s last stand.
The Americans were not to be defeated; they had come too far. But on the inside, in the lost world of Mauthausen, death continued to claim everyone around me. There was no news of the Americans. For our German tormentors, it was business as usual. More killings, more torture, more death. Bodies piled up faster than they could be burned. The crematoria operated day and night. The sky was raining ashes; rooftops were covered in thin, white, human flakes of dust.
By the spring of 1945, I had no more energy. My life was coming to an end. I could sense myself drifting away. Gradually, my ability to forge ahead was gone. All around me skeletons were slipping into the other world. A year before I had wondered: Where is the Moshiach? When is God going to reach out His hand and send His Messiah? I no longer asked such questions. Here in the hell of Mauthausen, in a barren world of stench and torment alongside a granite quarry near a dense, lush forest in Austria, I was crumbling into nothingness. My body and mind had failed me. Only fragments moved in and out of my thoughts. Food, bread, water, death. No more. Save me. Someone save me. Save us. God save us.
In the last days of Mauthausen, life came to a close. The floor beneath me rose up. It was dead, and on it, the dead. In the barracks, bunks held the weightless dead. Free. My feet, my hands, things. The ugly, bitter pill of German, guttural German, outside of my cloudy ears, gone. I could rest; I would rest. No more. There was no more to me. My eyes, against my will, were falling. Closing, closing, my life drawing to an end. My mind without thoughts or the ability to differentiate things or people. Not even thoughts of hunger. Beyond hunger. My eyes, so heavy. My self, falling closer to the edge. Slipping, slowly, slowly into nothingness. I had become a shadow. A shadow of what? A shadow of life; a shadow of myself; a poor, dull reflection. No, I was not myself, for I had disintegrated. My back—broken. My right arm—useless. So lost, the pain too had been erased; unkindly. Legs—sticks—buckling, not even able to hold up a skeleton of bones crying silently beneath paper flesh. Crying, but with no tears. God, Momma, Papa, Zayde, myself, water, a puddle, a crumb. Darkness shut out the sun over this no-place. An unknown spring with no more sky. My mouth open, empty. My eyes, my breath—no longer mine. And I no longer myself. Gone. At last, all of this no-world, poisoned sea returned to grains of dust, and I lost my will and fell. The lids of my eyes fell. Darkness. A dark, hollow loss.
On May 5, 1945, the Americans, traveling through Austria, happened upon Gusen, one of several subcamps of Mauthausen. I was unconscious and weighing less than seventy pounds, among the thousands and thousands of dead.
The American arrival has been referred to as a chance discovery. They weren’t looking for a concentration camp; they didn’t even know of its existence. What they found when they came to Mauthausen has most certainly haunted every soldier since that spring day. These were hardened soldiers. They had fought to the death across Europe, their friends and comrades dying and shattered in their arms. They had seen war; atrocious, hideous war, and all of its sights and sounds. They knew what blood and death smelled like. They understood the numbness and senselessness of tragic death. They had witnessed death and suffering as they marched across battlefield after battlefield. Yet they were unprepared for Mauthausen.
While the Americans roamed the camp looking for signs of life among the broken bodies, my own decaying body lay sunken, down by the foot of my bunk, on a razor’s edge between two worlds. Wholly unconscious. A powerful young soldier from the 65th Infantry Division took notice of m
e. He was scanning the floor for any sign of life—the flicker of an eyelid, a blink, a moan. He lifted me like a child in his arms and carried me to an army ambulance as an American soldier watched from the guard tower across from the barracks. My life, my future, and my past were in his hands as he stepped over the dead along his way to the truck. This man, whoever he was, had come across the world—had risked his own life—to be my Moshiach.
I was not aware of the day of liberation, but those around me who were still conscious and clinging to their own sanity grabbed hold of the Americans and sobbed at their feet. Unable to speak, they thanked our liberators and miraculously lived to see the end of the Nazi regime. I was robbed of the experience, unconscious, unable, in the least, to thank my personal Moshiach whose one last act of sacrifice and duty to humankind was to make his way among the dead to my bunk at the back of the barracks and lift my body from the floor and save my life. God bless the American soldiers. May history never forget them or what they went through. And when they die of old age, as they are as of this writing, may each one have erased from his memory what he saw, smelled, and heard the day he set foot in Mauthausen concentration camp, so he can rest in peace.
The Awakening
The Zohar, the great work of Jewish mysticism that is also called The Book of Radiance, in the Kabbalah, says all things visible will be born again invisible. And so my life in the Holocaust was over. My life was about to start anew.
For weeks, maybe a month even, I do not recall, I hovered between life and death in a hospital bed in the Austrian town of Linz. The city was now in the hands of both the American and Russian militaries.
When at last I opened my eyes, I was no longer a functioning human being. There were hundreds of others in the hospital in a similar condition. Many were dying. Others were laying on an army hospital cot as living corpses. Each day of life was a miracle unto itself. So close to death were we that it was unpredictable whether we would survive even with food and medical attention. We were in limbo.
With enough food and nourishment, eventually I came to my senses and was transported to another facility. This one was in Salzburg, Austria, where I was sent to learn how to be human again. At first I was completely unaware of who I was and what had happened to me since the liberation. Every day I was taught how to walk. I had lost nearly all my ability to speak and communicate.
The nurses and doctors would sit in front of me and ask, “How many fingers? Which is the thumb? Which finger is this? Remember who you are? What is your name? How are you today? Did you see out the window? Do you know who you are?”
They waited until I could see again. Every day I was spoken to as if I was a little child; slowly and patiently the nurses would prod me with simple questions. I drifted in and out of sleep. My attention span was short and sporadic. I was disoriented. Like an infant, the Austrian doctors and nurses would hold me. They wiped my mouth after they fed me; they held a cup to my lips so that I could drink. The nurses walked me with their arms tucked under mine, step by step, as my slippers shuffled painfully across clean, squeaky tiles down ten feet of a gleaming white corridor. Exhausted, I returned to bed and stared into space.
I knew a little German, and being able to speak Yiddish, I was able to understand a little more each day. I was just like a newborn. I came to the hospital 99 percent dead and was being introduced to the world again—the world of eating, sleeping in a bed, having a roof over my head, going to the bathroom, awakening to peace. Each day the staff members all seemed surprised that I was still alive. They constantly monitored me for signs that I might recover. The process was a long one, and it was a long time before I could try to piece together where I was and where I had come from. I was in a state of traumatic shock in the hands of German-speaking therapists. By the time I fully understood that I was alive, some of the first thoughts I had were: How did I survive? How did this happen? Who saved me? What kind of God could take away everything I had in such a horrible way, yet find a way to save me? Why me? I hoped that it had all been a terrible dream, that I still had my family.
Still in Salzburg, a thin young man approached me in the halls of the convalescent hospital. I was now walking on my own and exploring the wing of our hospital. This, the smallest of jaunts, exhausted me, and I turned around to return to my cot. I didn’t recognize the man, but he lit up when he looked at me. He approached me as if I was an apparition, holding out his thin hands, feeling for the air around my body.
When he was convinced that I was in the flesh, he smiled and said softly, “Is that really you?” He clasped his hands together in an inaudible clap and said, “I’m glad you are alive—so glad. You are alive. My God. Remember me?”
He was thin but with a round, kind, clean-shaven face and dark circles under his eyes. Teeth were missing from his mouth. He lifted his fingers to his lips, stared into my eyes, then rubbed his face.
“It’s me,” he said.
It was nice that he was glad to see me, I thought, but I honestly didn’t recognize the man. I searched my memory, but there was nothing. Maybe he was mistaking me for somebody else.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I smiled at him then turned to walk away.
He gently, but firmly, grabbed my arm and stared into my eyes. He held me with both hands on my shoulders and said, “I was with you in the same barrack—yours was the third bunk on the left from the back of the barracks. Remember? Ours was the one across from the guard tower. We left you to die among the dead. You were dead. You couldn’t walk; you couldn’t talk. I’m glad you are alive.”
“How do you know this was me?” I asked.
He answered, “I’ll tell you how I know you. We used to call you the rabbi. You said the prayers. And we saw a young American soldier carry you out. It was you. Sure, you were the rabbi.”
What could I say but “Thank you?” I was “the rabbi,” but I wished that I could give the man something in return. He was genuinely delighted that I had survived. We walked away from each other, but we both kept turning around, each of us a bit confused. He was surprised I was alive, and I was searching my mind for lost bits of memory. You see, those who know me well know that I remember people and faces. Here I am at age ninety-one and I remember children from Maitchet as well as the faces of their parents. But when that man stopped me in the corridor, he made me wonder what else I had forgotten.
There was a lot of time to think while convalescing in Salzburg. As I grew stronger and was finally able to walk and talk like a normal person, I spent more and more time just thinking. I thought about my family and all that I had lost. I would begin to cry at my returning memories. I thought about the insanity and the inhumanity that marked the last five years of my life. I wondered whether what happened to me was real and whether my family could really be gone. I couldn’t comprehend the immensity of all that had taken place from Maitchet to Mauthausen. And I thought about those who were brave enough to help the Jews even at the penalty of death.
I wondered whether I had a heart left after all that had happened. I wondered whether I would, like the Glatkis or Tamara Ulashik, have had the ability to save a family from death and victimization if the shoe were on the other foot. Could I overlook all the hate and prejudice and find any humanity within me to risk my own neck for a stranger? Would God give me the courage to save the life of a fellow human being trying to escape his hunter? What if someone in Maitchet had helped my mother and two little sisters, saving them from a horrible end? Who could answer such questions? I began to think more and more about the few people who risked their lives to try to save us—Tamara Ulashik, the Glatki family, and, of course, the American soldiers. It wasn’t long before I realized that sitting around thinking was the worst thing I could do to myself. All I could think about was Momma, Papa, Peshia, and Elka. My thoughts were driving me crazy, and I needed to occupy my mind and body if I was to keep my sanity.
In Salzburg there was very little to do but to rest, so I became restless. Each day, as I grew stronger in m
ind and body, I explored the city. I walked for miles to rebuild my legs and lungs. It was summertime and the sun’s heat baking on my back and shoulders was therapeutic. My wounded arm still ached, as did my back, but I walked for miles at a time throughout a city that just a year before would have swallowed me up. I looked at the windows. The Russians and Americans had ripped down all the Nazi flags and pried Nazi emblems, with their eagles and swastikas, off doorways and building facades. American jeeps were driving up and down the road. Russian and American soldiers whizzing by waved at me and I waved back.
At this time, Salzburg, like most other places in Western Europe, was in a state of turmoil. Thousands of people were homeless, including former concentration camp inmates. Now we were called “displaced persons,” or DPs. Civilians, too, hailing from every European nation wandered to and from their bombed-out cities and homes. Former Nazi SS officers, concentration camp kapos, and Nazi collaborators were trying to hide among the DPs to avoid prosecution and to collect benefits being handed out to survivors. Once in a while they were spotted in the street and then a small riot would break out. Russian soldiers would most often turn the other way.
Many of Hitler’s soldiers stood in line to receive rations amid noncombatants. Killers were intermixed with victims. American and Russian servicemen, with pistols in holsters and rifles over their shoulders, roamed the streets, depending on which district you were in. Military vehicles churned up the dust on the roads and roared on for miles at a stretch as MPs directed traffic at the busier intersections. Army officers controlled government offices. The families of German soldiers were looking for some place to go; they had lost either their homes or husbands or fathers. Their former providers were dead, lost, in hiding, still in Russian POW camps, or taken away by the Soviets to labor camps.
