The Runaway Family

by Diney Costeloe

  “Out! Out! All out!” The guards prodded them with rifles, jabbing ribs with the barrels, or smashing the butts across heads if anyone moved too slowly.

  “My God! What a stink!” cried one of the guards as he climbed up on the tailgate. “You can tell this lot are Jews! The truck stinks to high heaven!”

  Kurt heaved himself awkwardly off the lorry, and at the prod of a rifle followed Martin and Rudy into the line of men that had formed up outside. Manfred was soon beside them, and they stood and waited as the last of the men were unloaded. Some were unable to stand, their cramped legs giving way under them, but kicks from the SS guards and the lash of a whip soon had them crawling over to the column of men and hauling themselves upright.

  An SS man barked an order, and the column shuffled through a set of heavy gates, above which were inscribed the words “Work Makes You Free”.

  “We’ve been brought to a work camp,” Kurt thought, and an icy-cold fear crept through him. There had been rumours of such camps, but they were for Communists, criminals, enemies of the state. Why had he and the others been arrested? He knew, of course, knew that it was because they were Jews. Jews with businesses. Jews who had no business to make money out of honest Germans. Jews who recently had come together to form a local committee to try and protect themselves from the ever-increasing persecution. Jews who were making a nuisance of themselves. Jews.

  Someone further up the line fell over, and was almost trampled as the column continued past him, stepping over him, before coming to a halt in front of a squat, square building. With Rudy Stein on one side of him and Manfred Schmied on the other, Kurt waited. The sun came up behind the building, and out of the corner of his eye he could see other buildings away in the distance, surrounded by barbed wire.

  And so they waited, and waited, as the sun rose higher, its heat pounding their unprotected heads. Some, unable to withstand the heat, keeled over, collapsing in a heap on the ground. No one made a move to help them, no one dared move as the SS guards stalked the lines, whips in hand, pistols in their belts, looking for signs of rebellion. The sun rose to its zenith, and still they stood there until at last an SS officer appeared from inside the building. He strode out in front of the drooping column of men, and raising his voice began to harangue them.

  “I am Oberführer Hans Loritz, commandant of this camp,” he announced, adding ominously, “and you will get to know me.” He pointed his finger, drawing it along the line of men. “You are the dregs of humanity. You are enemies of the Reich, and now you have been brought here you will work for the good of the German people. You will stay here until you have, through hard work and re-education, understood the error of your ways and can be returned to society in safety. You will stay here for as long as is takes.” His voice had risen as he spoke and now it was almost a screech. “In the meantime you will work. You will be obedient to the guards. No disobedience or weakness will be tolerated. My guards have been well trained and they will be watching you. If you fail to obey an order, you will be punished. If you are slow to obey an order, you will be punished. If you break camp regulations, you will be punished. If you incite other prisoners to rebel, you will be punished. If you don’t work hard, you will be punished. If you show lack of respect to your guards, you will be punished. You are here because you are not fit to live among decent Germans. You will stay here until you are fit to return… however long that takes.” He walked over to one of the men who had collapsed in the heat, and kicked him in the ribs. “While you are on parade you will remain at attention at all times… or you will be punished.” His eyes roved the phalanx of men standing before him, as if searching out resistance, recalcitrance. The prisoners remained rigid, unmoving, as the guards continued to stalk between the lines.

  “Registration will now begin!” With this order Hans Loritz turned on his heel and strode back to the building.

  When he had disappeared the guards marched the first rank of prisoners to the door, where again they waited in line. The rest continued to stand in the sun. No one spoke. No one moved. The commandant’s words echoed in their heads and the roving SS guards ensured that there was no break in the ranks.

  At last their turn came and their line moved forward. Kurt stood in front of a desk and gave his name, address and date of birth. The SS sergeant wrote it down meticulously in his ledger. He then looked up at Kurt.

  “Why have you been arrested?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Kurt replied. As the words left his mouth he was struck a powerful blow in the back. He staggered forward, only just maintaining his feet.

  “Stand to attention, scum!” screamed a voice behind him, and Kurt caught himself from turning and managed to draw himself upright again.

  “You are here because you are an agitator, a dirty Jew stirring up other Jews,” said the sergeant, continuing in a bored drawl, without looking up. “Based on article one of the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State of 28th February 1933, you are taken into protective custody in the interest of public security and order. Reason: suspicion of activities inimical to the state… or as I said,” and now he did look up again, his eyes narrowing, “you’re a dirty Jew stirring up other Jews, and until you’ve learnt better, you’ll stay here… and work!”

  Work Kurt did. Work they all did, from first light, throughout the day, until they dragged themselves back to their huts to sleep. The prisoners’ compound was surrounded by coils of barbed wire, overlooked by five watchtowers, where ever-vigilant sentries manned machine guns. The sleeping quarters were housed in bare concrete buildings that had once been an explosives factory. Within a wall and surrounded by a high electric fence, they stood in ranks on either side of a track that led to the parade ground. Kurt, Rudy, Martin and Manfred were assigned to the same hut.

  Once their details had been taken, they were photographed, had their heads shaved, were stripped of their clothes and given prison garb, little more than ill-fitting white overalls. Any personal possessions they had, including money, had been logged in another ledger and taken from them.

  “There is a canteen where you can buy what you need,” said the corporal who listed their effects. “The cost will be deducted from your money.”

  “What happens when it runs out?” Manfred had dared to ask.

  “Then you can buy nothing more,” snapped the man. “What do you think this is? A charity home?” He gave a harsh laugh. “Your family can send you more money. That is how it works.”

  “But they don’t know where I am!” Manfred had not yet learned to keep his mouth shut. A sudden lash from behind made him stagger, crying out and clasping his neck where a dark red weal sprang to life.

  Kurt, Rudy and Martin, waiting in line, kept their eyes rigidly ahead. The guard with the whip had turned his attention to them. He walked along the waiting line, flicking his whip at the unmoving prisoners, enjoying the fear in their staring eyes. The SS, indeed well trained for such work, had begun their work of dehumanising their prisoners.

  Once their “registration” was completed, their group was lined up again, and clutching the few possessions they had been given, a few items of clothing, a bowl, mug, knife, fork and spoon, they were marched into the prisoners’ compound to the huts they’d been assigned.

  As new prisoners they had to find bunk space among the already occupied bunks. Shuffling into the hut, they were confronted by a tall prisoner with an aggressive face, and few teeth.

  “I’m Horst Kleiber,” he told them. “I’m the sergeant of this hut. I’m in charge of everything in here. You do what I tell you, at the double, and we’ll rub along. You don’t, you’ll be in dead trouble because then we’re all in the shit. Got it?” They got it, but it was almost impossible to comply with all the regulations. The first morning, Kurt was struggling to make his bed. His was a top bunk, and as he wrestled with the bed sheet his feet disturbed the bed of the man below him.

  “Watch your sodding feet!” roared the man. “They’l
l be here in two minutes!”

  In less than that time, two SS guards came into the hut and checked the beds and the cupboards. Manfred’s cupboard was deemed to be untidy, though he had only the socks and the mess tins handed out to him the previous day. One of the guards upended the cupboard onto the floor and then beat him with steady blows of his whip until the contents were replaced. Everyone else in the hut stood to attention in silence as this punishment was inflicted, each praying that his bed, his cupboard, would pass muster.

  Life in the camp was sheer hell. Every morning they got up at first light, and once the hut had been passed as tidy by the guards, which seldom happened at first inspection, Kleiber led the section out to parade as a platoon for roll call. Then it was labour. Hard labour. The camp was to be rebuilt, extended, to accommodate more prisoners, with improved quarters for the SS guards and their families. All the old buildings had to be torn down and replaced. Everything was done at the double, and any man seen flagging was kicked or beaten.

  Kurt and Manfred were on the same work detail and spent much of their day as human draft horses, pulling huge wagons laden with stone from place to place. Always at the double, always at the mercy of the whips and rifle butts. Rudy, who was older and smaller, was on a similar work detail, but he struggled to keep up. He needed glasses, but even though it meant he had difficulty in seeing where he was going, he seldom wore them.

  “Take ’em off, mate,” advised Horst Kleiber. “They always pick on blokes with specs, think you’re intellectuals!”

  He was right. After two such encounters with the SS guards, Rudy took his glasses off.

  Horst had been arrested several years before because he was a Communist. As an old hand, he knew how best to work the system to make life fractionally easier. He was a fierce hut sergeant, roaring at anyone who risked getting the whole hut punished, but he was also scrupulously fair when it came to division of food, his Communist principles allowing every man equal shares. Kurt, Manfred, Martin and Rudy were the only Jews in the hut, but though Horst would probably have had no truck with them outside, here he ensured that they received their fair share. He was responsible for discipline in the hut, and that affected everyone alike. As the four friends settled in, other inmates taught them tricks that helped them escape the attentions of the guards. No one in the hut wanted to draw the attention of the SS.

  As the weeks progressed there was an awful inevitability about their lives. They had each been allowed to send one postcard to their family at home, to say where they were, and to ask for money.

  “They make a nice little profit on their canteen,” Horst pointed out when Kurt expressed surprise that they were allowed to communicate with the outside world. “They need you to have money to spend so that they can insist on your spending it!”

  The canteen provided some of the necessities of camp life. It was possible to buy, at a price, a little extra food, and although this was often almost inedible, they ate it anyway; anything to stave off the ever-present gnawing hunger. Clothes had to be repaired, and precious funds had to be used to buy needles and thread. Clothes in disrepair were the excuse for further beatings at the hands of the guards.

  Rudy grew steadily weaker. The others helped him whenever they could, but on work detail it was every man for himself. Helping a struggling comrade almost certainly earned you the lash of a whip or the kick of a jackboot and did the comrade no good at all.

  “I’m going to die in this place,” Rudy said dismally one evening when they had collapsed on their bunks after an extended evening roll call. “I can’t go on like this.”

  “You can and you must!” insisted Kurt. “Don’t give them the satisfaction.” He looked across at his old friend, and took in his emaciated state. They had all lost weight, the meagre diet and hard physical work had ensured that, but he saw now that Rudy was in a worse state than the rest of them. The flesh had fallen away from his face, so that his skull seemed to strain through the parchment of his skin. His arms and legs, poking from under his camp overalls, looked skeletal in the harsh light of the lamp. But it was his eyes that told Kurt that Rudy was right. There was nothing in his eyes, sunk into the hollows of his face, but a blank stare; the life had gone out of his eyes.

  “It’s all right for you,” Rudy said. “Most of the time I can’t even see where I’m going. They shout ‘Tempo! Tempo! Los! Los!’ and I don’t know which way to run.”

  The next day he was detailed to break up the concrete blocks from one of the demolished buildings. Swinging the heavy hammer was beyond him, and one of the guards, a sadistic bully called Schuller, grabbed the sledgehammer from Rudy’s grasp and swung it himself, smashing it down onto Rudy’s legs. With an agonised scream, Rudy collapsed, his legs useless beneath him. Blood streamed, soaking through his grubby white overalls, as he writhed on the ground with pain.

  Schuller looked down at him dispassionately and said, “That is how you swing a sledgehammer.” He looked round the rest of the crew. “Why aren’t you working?” he bawled. “Does anyone else want a demonstration?” The rest of the detail turned away from Rudy, trying to close their ears to his agonised cries. Schuller looked down at him with contempt and then pointed to the man nearest to him. “You! You take him back to his hut. On the double! You’ve five minutes to be back here!”

  It was Kleiber whom he’d chosen. Kleiber dropped his hammer and bent to Rudy. There was no way he could carry him without subjecting him to further agony, so he simply picked him up and hoisted him over his shoulder, his smashed legs dangling behind, his blood pouring onto the gravel. Kleiber took him back towards the ranks of huts with Schuller’s bellow of “Tempo! Tempo!” echoing in his ears. When he reached the hut he laid Rudy on his bunk. He was no longer screaming, he had passed out with the pain. Kleiber tried to straighten the damaged legs, but he could see that Rudy would never walk again.

  “Poor bugger! Better off unconscious,” Kleiber muttered as he looked down at the motionless body. “Better off dead, now.”

  When they returned to the hut at the end of the day, they found Rudy was indeed dead. His bed was soaked in blood, his pale face a mask of agony.

  Kleiber told them what had happened. “Nothing we could have done for him, poor bugger,” he said. “He was a goner as soon as that bastard Schuller raised the sledge.”

  Kurt looked down at the man whom he’d known all his life. Rudy, the teacher that all the children had loved, lying in a pool of blood with his legs smashed.

  “What happens to him now?” he asked Kleiber.

  “We take him out to roll call,” replied Kleiber. “Now!”

  “We what?” Kurt was incredulous.

  “He’s not reported dead yet, is he?” Kleiber sounded weary. “If he’s not on parade the numbers won’t tally and we’ll all be out there all night. Remember last week?”

  How could they forget it? For some reason the numbers at evening roll call had been out and the entire camp had stood there for six hours under the glare of the searchlights before being allowed to crawl back to their huts for a couple of hours’ sleep before reveille.

  “He’s your mate, you can carry him,” ordered Kleiber, and Kurt and Martin lifted the now stiffening body of Rudy Stein and solemnly carried him out onto the parade ground to be counted. By the next evening Rudy’s body had been disposed of, and his bunk, scrubbed for an hour by Manfred to remove the blood, had been taken by a new prisoner.

  That night Kurt lay on his bunk and thought of home, aching for his beloved Ruth and his children. It was at night that he was at his most wretched. Despite the need for sleep, he found that he lay awake, in dread of what the following day would bring. Would he even survive it, or would he, like Rudy, be murdered by one of the guards? How long would he be in this hellish place? He had been called to the administration office, and a list of his “crimes” had been read out to him. Joining his local Jewish committee made him a troublemaker. Until it was clear that he had atoned for this, had renounced such action aga
in, he would not be set free. He was sent back to his work detail with the SS officer’s words ringing in his ears.

  “We’re watching you, Friedman. You’re an agitator. We’re watching you!”

  It was a week later that Martin Rosen disappeared. In the morning he was at roll call, at the end of the day he was not. As the men paraded ready for roll, Kleiber was shouting at them. “Where the fuck is he? Someone must know!” But no one did, and as they lined up for roll, they knew that it would be their hut’s fault that the numbers didn’t tally. The wrath of the SS would come down on them. Pale-faced and rigid with fear, Kleiber’s platoon took their place on the parade ground.

  Then a miracle happened. Roll was called but Martin Rosen’s name wasn’t. Incredulous, they were dismissed, and within minutes of returning to the hut, a new prisoner came through the door. Kleiber allotted him Martin Rosen’s bed.

  “Where can he be?” Kurt muttered to Manfred as they ate their meagre evening meal. “What’s happened to him?”

  “Daren’t even think about it, after what happened to poor Rudy,” Manfred said, scraping his bowl with his fingers to scoop up the last drop of the slop that had been in it.

  Klaus Herman, another in their hut, looked across from where he sat. “He was in our work party this morning,” he said. “He was called to Nero’s office. Haven’t seen him since.”

  Kurt gave an involuntary shudder. Nero was the prisoners’ name for the commandant. A call to his office usually meant some great punishment was about to be administered, usually in front of the full complement of prisoners. It was Oberführer Loritz’s way of reminding them all that they were at his mercy… and that he never showed any. What could Martin have done, he wondered? Was he even now being tortured in the punishment block?