Trusting Calvin

by Sharon Peters

  The man with the ladle had enormous power, the power of life and death, really, over every person in the encampment. If a man received only broth without potatoes for too many meals, he weakened and died.

  “If it’s someone he knows or someone he’s decided he likes for one reason or another,” Moshe observed to Yankel after a few days of watching the soup distributor, “he dips deeply, to the bottom of the cauldron, and that person gets a few extra pieces of potato. We must figure out a way to befriend him. If we can’t do that, we must at least never upset him or offend him.”

  Moshe worried about his older brother. Yankel wasn’t as strong as some; never had been. He had been severely jaundiced at birth, his condition so dire that their parents had delayed his circumcision from the prescribed eight days after birth until he was four weeks old and more likely to survive the procedure. As he grew up he was more sickly than the other children, always had the hardest time when illness ripped through school. He also seemed to be on the receiving end of harm more often than most. One evening, when someone had hurled huge rocks through the windows of the synagogue, one had slammed into Yankel’s head, slicing a huge gash and knocking him unconscious. It took three weeks in the hospital for him to recover.

  Moshe believed the past was evidence enough that his brother was not suited to the demands of forced labor, and he regularly coached Yankel on survival skills that he developed as time went on. The first of several rules was this: When there is food, eat it; don’t save it. Soon after they arrived in Ruda, Moshe ate half of his daily bread ration one night and put the rest under his head for the next day, when with some extra nourishment he might work fast enough to escape at least some of the whip cracks. While he slept, someone stole the bread. Desperate men do desperate things, and all starving men are desperate, he now knew. Survival could hinge on an extra ounce of bread.

  Shoes, too, were a vital commodity. They meant the difference between manageable pain and sheer anguish that could bring a man to his knees. The prisoners quickly learned to sleep with their shoes on their feet, or shoved under their heads with the laces tied around their wrists so they wouldn’t disappear in the night.

  Many of the men at Ruda knew each other, but the building was oddly quiet in the evenings, the men too tired to waste energy on conversation, and too hungry. There was little to say, in any event. They had no idea how long they would have to shovel muck from the river bottom, and they had no idea what would become of them once someone decided the project was done. They knew only that to leave this place alive, if such a thing was even possible, they had to do exactly as they were told and conserve whatever strength they had to meet the demands placed on them.

  They worked at the river seven days a week. Every night they had two hours of free time, and during that time they washed their shirts and picked lice off their arms and chests—long, moving armies that multiplied with stunning speed. The men scratched endlessly at the bites and the sores that sometimes festered, oozing a putrid stench.

  At nine p.m., after the sun had slipped away, they moved toward the platforms to settle in for what passed as sleep in this place. If one man changed position in the night, they all had to, crammed so tightly together that the slightest motion required the clump of bodies to shift in unison like trees bending in the wind. Sometimes a man moaned in the night or screamed from a nightmare. Sometimes the July and August heat that had collected in the building, so heavy and oppressive, made sleep impossible. Sometimes the scratching at bites became so intense and noisy that it woke others, and they would growl for silence. Tempers erupted from time to time. But exhaustion and lethargy quickly dampened disagreements to fizzled-out impotence, like a sodden blanket tossed over a fluttering flame.

  As summer lost its grip and autumn advanced, a few of the men succumbed to starvation. Before they died they showed the telltale signs of near-death that became horridly familiar to prisoners in the months and years ahead: skeletal bodies, swollen faces and legs, vacant eyes.

  “He stopped wanting to live, that man,” Yankel said after yet another had died. There was nothing judgmental in his tone. It was obvious he understood how easy it would be to take the small step from an exhausted determination to live to a resigned gravitation toward a place of no pain and no hunger.

  “Possibly it’s true he gave up,” Moshe snapped, worried his brother might fall sway to dark thoughts that could pull him under. “But we must continue to do what we have to do in this place. We must believe that when it’s finally over, we will be alive. It serves no purpose to think about why that man died or anything else. Often we have seen it, Yankel. The people who think the most are beaten up the most.”

  One November morning, when the snow had begun to fly, the workers were ordered onto the trucks again, with no notice or warning. New location, different work, they all assumed. Their only concern was whether the work would be harder, the guards crueler, and the food scantier than what they had just endured.

  Several miles into the journey the brothers realized that they were heading toward Krasnik. Was it possible? Had the long, awful summer’s labor been all that was required of them? Would they be returned to their families in the ghetto?

  The vehicles stopped not at the ghetto but on the outskirts of Krasnik, at a sawmill. There they performed cold, dangerous work throughout the long winter and into the next spring. Cut the wood. Pile the wood. Load the wood into trucks. They were cutting, piling, and loading huge underpinning ties for thousands of miles of railroad that the Germans were either laying or repairing.

  The men didn’t see their families. They never left the worksite or the empty warehouse—midway between the sawmill and the railroad station—where they spent their nights. No sleeping platforms existed here; the floor was considered good enough. The men who had wrapped themselves in long coats when they had been rounded up or somehow had managed to acquire one along the way could spread their coats on the floor to cushion their bones from the concrete. The rest of them settled like dogs, shifting and rolling to find the least uncomfortable position.

  Their food rations were identical in quantity and type to those at the river worksite.

  “Our captors have developed or stumbled upon the perfect formula for what they want to accomplish,” Moshe said to his brother one night as they took tiny sips of thin soup, nursing it as long as possible, trying to trick their bellies into believing they were growing full. It was just enough food to keep the men working but little enough to inhibit outbursts, escape attempts, and, ultimately, most feelings or thoughts. Hunger, when it lasts long enough, displaces pride, neutralizes intent, and extinguishes most normal emotion. And that was evident in this group. The Nazis called their captives Untermenschen—subhumans. After so many months of severe food deprivation, that was almost how they felt.

  As the men became weaker, their diminished strength led to work accidents, injuries, and deaths. A poorly stacked pile of wood ties rolled onto Moshe one afternoon, and a claw of pain dug deep into the marrow of his foot. He could tell by the wavy way his toes moved when he tried to flex them inside his shoe—before the swelling locked everything into place—that some bones had been broken. He settled himself into a fixed position, all of the weight on his good foot, and kept working, trying to conceal the gnarling pain that coiled from toes to ankle. He couldn’t allow the injury to be detected by the guards; if they thought he was working more slowly, they would withhold food.

  The foot recovered in time, though it was crooked and bumpy and remained problematic for the rest of his life.

  After months in the sawmill, in July of 1941, Moshe and Yankel were reassigned to work at the nearby railroad station, loading scrap metal onto boxcars. Trucks filled with metal arrived in an endless line throughout the day, dumped their loads, and returned hours later to disgorge another twisted pile of ragged scrap. The men assumed it was being transported to a mill somewhere, but for what
precise purpose, they didn’t know.

  One afternoon, work halted to allow a train filled with people to pass. Pinched, frightened Jewish faces peered out as the train inched by. Car after car crammed with Jews of all ages.

  “Okay, that’s enough!” the foreman roared. “Stop looking at them and get back to work, or you’ll find yourself on the next train going exactly where they’re going.”

  By now the workers had heard enough bits of rumors about trainloads of people, mostly Jews, hauled away and never seen again, that they assumed places existed—maybe holding facilities of some sort—where Jews were being taken not to work but to be killed. Indeed, the Chelmno death camp, the first of six in Poland where Jews and other “undesirables” were sent to be killed, was mere weeks away from going into operation.

  The fact that the prisoners at the rail yard had no access to newspapers or radio reports or contact with villagers who could have provided detailed accounts of what was happening didn’t keep them from hearing certain things. Bits of news pulsed through unofficial lines, as if on the wind, from mouth to ear, a single fact traveling through dozens of people and arriving largely intact and truth-filled.

  Just as information dribbled in, it also dribbled out in sputtering spurts. While the Edelman brothers were loading railroad cars, Sarah learned of their presence there from a friend, a station worker who had spotted them. She removed her yellow badge and ducked through trees and back roads, a bundle pressed tight against her side, eventually reaching the station worker’s home.

  “Please,” she implored, “see that my sons get this.”

  The package contained clean shirts, underwear, and socks, and the ration of bread that she and Abraham had received that day. The man did as she asked, and in this way the brothers learned that their parents were still alive.

  After months of loading metal, late in the year, Moshe and Yankel were stuffed into trucks again and transported to a camp a few miles northwest of Krasnik. Compared to the makeshift labor outposts they had experienced so far, this one was an architectural gold standard of confinement and intimidation.

  Electrified barbed wire, twelve feet high, broken at each corner by a watchtower manned by guards with machine guns, surrounded the encampment: six barracks, a washroom, a kitchen building, and a bare-earth yard with a roll-call square, known as the appellplatz. A sign on the front gate announced, somewhat mysteriously: Jedem das Seine—“To each his own.”

  It was Budzyn, a Nazi concentration camp that—although comparatively small—had a proud devotion to rigid application of the rules.

  Each of the cement-floor barracks housed five hundred inmates assigned to one of the three-level-high bunks, no mattresses, no blankets or pillows, just wooden boards. During the first years of their internment there, the men wore civilian clothes, often filched from others who had died. Later, when absolute conformity became more important to the people in charge, the prisoners received grayish-blue-striped pajama-like jackets and pants, round hats, and wooden shoes, clothing that served them summer and winter. They learned to hoard any rag or piece of paper they found in order to stuff it into their shoes or line their jackets to provide a sliver of extra warmth during the three-mile march to and from work each day.

  The commandant always made sure to be on hand to introduce himself on the day new prisoners arrived. A ramrod-straight man in his early thirties named Reinhold Feix (pronounced Fikes), he was a former barber, with no great intellect, but great loyalty to the Nazi way.

  He had a wife and also a young son, and he taught marksmanship to the boy using live human targets. “Point at the nose or the belly, my son,” he would instruct the child when he had identified the man to be killed.

  Feix’s own preferred weapon was a bullwhip he always carried, outfitted with a special metal tip to better flay flesh.

  History would record him as one of the most brutal of all the camp commandants.

  But these were details Moshe and Yankel, and the 250 men deposited at Budzyn with them that day, wouldn’t discover for weeks to come. Feix had a number of other facts he wanted to share on this day.

  Smartly turned out, armed as if for battle, the Unterscharführer, as he was known in official circles, stood before them, flanked on the one side by his muscular German shepherd—tightly leashed but lunging and snapping—and on the other by Dimitry, a squat, scowling Ukrainian, who, the prisoners quickly learned, served as executioner when Feix was otherwise occupied.

  “Anyone who tries to escape will be hanged,” the commandant said in measured, detached tones. “If someone escapes and after twenty-four hours is not found, ten people will be shot and the foreman hanged. You will then have the deaths of eleven men on your conscience.” Prisoners were to move briskly, he said, show the utmost respect to their keepers, and march in formation when covering the miles to and from work every day.

  The men settled into an unvarying schedule. Awakened by shrill whistles at 5:00 a.m., every day but Sunday, they hurried to the latrine behind the barracks, an open trench crossed by boards—not nearly big enough to accommodate three thousand men in thirty minutes, particularly when dysentery or some other bowel-wrenching disorder was racing through camp.

  At 5:30 they received a cup of something bitter, brown, and lukewarm, possibly water boiled with acorns or chestnuts, they assumed, intended to mimic coffee. At 5:45 they lined up to be counted. If the number was off, departures were long delayed, and the men had to endure additional minutes of standing at attention, often while being slammed by fierce winds or lashed by pounding rain. After the count, the prisoners marched to work in straight lines, five abreast, through the camp gates and up the miles of road lined by Ukrainian guards and snarling dogs. Feix often rode his big motorcycle alongside the column of workers, angling in and out among them; some days, he rode his perfectly groomed white horse.

  The destination was a former munitions factory, a large concrete structure that the Germans had converted into an aircraft factory operated by the Heinkel Company. Moshe was assigned to a group that assembled and welded the wings of airplanes, and this struck him as a job ripe with possibility. When one is involved in the construction of such a vulnerable part of the aircraft, it might be possible, he thought, to do things that could cause a plane to fall helplessly out of the sky. He and the others in his work group discussed the possibilities sometimes at night, always in whispers, knowing that many among the prisoners would, if they overheard, pass the information on to the Nazis for a half a loaf of bread. In the end, they engaged in no sabotage. They had carefully observed the practices and procedures of the supervisors once the pieces left their workstation. Every part was inspected and then X-rayed. Had sabotage been detected, dozens of the workers, including many unconnected to the subversion, would have been killed.

  The work here was less physically grueling than the previous jobs, despite the eleven hours at their stations every day, plus the two hours spent marching to and from the plant. But it wasn’t without physical punishment. Some of the civilian supervisors and technicians were every bit as demeaning and whip-happy as the camp guards.

  At six p.m. the workers lined up for counting again, returned to camp, and at seven received supper—another quart of soup, usually the same as what they’d had for lunch: pallid water with a few pieces of sodden potato or beets. Occasionally, when a workhorse or one of the well-bred horses that the Nazi officers rode through the countryside broke a leg and was shot, the scraps and bones were tossed into the prisoners’ soup. The best cuts went to the guard dogs. The men also received a daily ration of seven ounces of bread, dry and hard to swallow, made from sawdust, crushed chestnuts, and a sprinkle of flour.

  Nearly every morning, one man—or several—simply didn’t wake up.

  Soon after Moshe arrived at Budzyn, he saw that the boy lying next to him didn’t stir when the morning signal shattered the silence.


  “Get up,” Moshe hissed, shaking him.

  The boy, stiff and cold, had died during the night. Possibly he had been sick for some time; no one knew. Prisoners in the camps always hid sickness, like animals in the wild. Any sign of weakness or even softness, the prisoners had learned, lessened the chance of survival. The guards could detect either from yards away, and once they did, it was only a matter of time.

  When someone died in the night, the corpse was left in the bunk, and the prisoners assigned to clean the barracks after the men left for work hauled it across the floor through the yard and to a ditch outside the fence.

  The ditch was very long and very deep. It had to be. Many men died there, and Budzyn had no crematorium. The bodies of the men who had died of starvation or illness, or had been shot, hanged, or beaten for some infraction or for sport were dumped tight against each other, like sausages in a butcher case, to keep the amount of space required as small as possible. Once the stretch of bodies was deemed sufficiently long, a thin layer of dirt was flung atop them so the next layer of corpses could be stacked in another row.

  One evening Moshe was watching a new group of prisoners file through the gate and realized that he was looking straight into the eyes of his older brother, Zalmen. Stunned, he could think of nothing to say but the obvious. “How did you get here? Why are you here?”

  Zalmen’s ghetto had been “cleared,” as the Nazis were calling the rounding up and shipping off of Jews, and Zalmen had been transported here, he said, his wife hauled off in a different direction. He hadn’t heard anything about Abraham or Sarah for months, or anything about their sisters and their families, still in the ghetto fifteen miles from his own. Each ghetto was kept strictly isolated from others, and information exchange had virtually ceased.

  As he spoke, Zalmen was scanning and assessing the place, a calculating expression on his face. He had learned a lot about the mentality and methods of people in power during all those months in the army and the stalag, and he immediately set about using that knowledge. He became friendly with the inmates who had been anointed camp supervisors, ensuring, among other things, that he and his two brothers shared the same barrack. He arranged for Yankel, who had been a master tailor in Krasnik, to be assigned to the camp’s tailor shop. It was a busy enterprise, making and repairing clothing for the officers and guards, and sometimes special demands required working late into the night. But it wasn’t hard labor, and Yankel didn’t have to make the daily journey to and from the plant in every kind of weather, which Moshe and Zalmen were convinced he wouldn’t be able to survive for long.