Trusting Calvin

by Sharon Peters

  In Budzyn, the lice problem was far worse than it had been at the other labor camps Moshe and Yankel had experienced, and the prisoners developed pocks and craters on their torsos, arms, and legs from relentless scratching and digging. The men didn’t realize it, but the danger was far greater than infected sores. Lice carry the typhus bacterium, and sickness soon bludgeoned the camp. The disease that during World War I had killed as many as 40 percent of those infected—more than three million in Russia alone—invaded the already-weak bodies of the Budzyn population with chills, coughing, cramps, diarrhea, fevers, and intense joint and muscle pain.

  Zalmen was among the first felled. Fever flamed through him. Moshe and his friends forced water down his throat, wrapped cool rags around his head, and when he became delirious, they held him down so the fits of flailing didn’t fling him from his bunk. They had no medicine for any illness, and a few had already died of this terrifying sickness.

  When the fever finally broke and it appeared that Zalmen might live, the inmate in charge, who had watched the ministrations from a distance, approached. “Tomorrow you do not go to work. You stay here to clean the barracks.”

  Unsteady, barely able to speak, Zalmen hauled himself off the bunk the next morning when the others left and began scrubbing floors, his head muzzy, his body only vaguely responsive to what he was demanding of it. Feix appeared as part of his daily routine of inspecting every building to demonstrate that he knew all, that secrets could never take root under his command. He saw Zalmen moving slowly and, enraged at this insolence, drew back his whip again and again.

  When the prisoners returned from the plant that evening, Zelman was still working, his shirt and his back shredded, his trousers splattered with dried blood. Again his friends turned to the only form of treatment available, cold compresses.

  The next morning, Zalmen joined everyone else on the march to work. Prisoners who didn’t recover quickly, being of no value, were shot.

  Typhus lingered over the barracks for weeks like a malevolent mist. Moshe fell ill with a case less severe than Zalmen’s, though bad enough to leave him partially deaf in one ear.

  In two months, hundreds of men had died, their bodies hauled off to the ditch. This unanticipated burst of additional deaths did not create a manpower issue, however. Feix merely had to send word that he needed a hundred more Jews, and a hundred more Jews would arrive in short order. Still, having sick men around was an annoyance. The commandant grew weary of men dropping dead on the job, tired of the stench of dying.

  One morning he ordered the barracks where the sick were recovering emptied. Dozens hobbled, as ordered, to the edge of the ditch, and were shot, one by one. This was much more efficient than having to haul corpses across the yard when men died in their beds, and Feix seemed pleased with his solution.

  The determined typhus rampage finally slowed.

  One early evening as he made his way across the yard toward the barracks, Moshe was deep in thought. Somehow, against all odds, he and his brothers had survived a winter in Budzyn. He and Zalmen had marched through blinding blizzards driven by winds so harsh that ice had formed on their faces, through snow so deep that their feet and legs felt numb all day. Now spring was teasing the camp with the promise, if nothing else, of an easier march to work once the ankle-deep mud from the almost-daily rains, straight, heavy, and sullen, had dried. They were still alive, and he wouldn’t have predicted that when winter had begun.

  Suddenly a guard pointed his whip at Moshe and motioned for him to approach.

  “And you, too,” the guard shouted to another man, “and you, you, and you.” When he had collected five, he ordered them into formation and marched them out the gate toward the commandant’s house. The sentries at the gate smirked and hooted as they passed.

  Darkness hadn’t fallen yet, though the sun was dropping low in the sky, soft against their backs as they walked toward something they knew would be awful. Feix had been entertaining special guests, they knew, in the same way—through the rumor network—that they knew about much of what transpired in the primly landscaped world the commandant inhabited, far from the stench of latrines and sickness and desperation.

  When he entertained, the commandant took pride in providing unusual diversions. That would be the function they would serve, the men knew. There had been stories. This wasn’t the first time that randomly selected men had made an early-evening journey to Feix’s place. Only four of them, if that, would return to the camp. The only question was by what means one or all of them would die. It wouldn’t be a quick death—that much was certain—as a quick death has insufficient entertainment value.

  The walk seemed to last forever, yet when they arrived at the spot where they were ordered to form a line it seemed to Moshe that they had arrived too fast. He hadn’t had the time or ability to recall all the important memories he had always imagined he would want to relive if given a few minutes warning before his death. He could no longer call up the planes and the shadows of Hadassah’s face, and this saddened him. He had recalled too few of the special moments with his mother in her kitchen, the scent of baking apples filling the air between them as she spoke of her plans for him. He had thought about his sisters’ babies, their downy heads under his hand and the warm, sleepy weight of his tiny niece as she curled against his chest, but there was so much more about them he knew he should remember.

  Time had run out.

  Under a soldier-straight line of chestnut trees, the tender leaves not yet mature, whispering against each other in the breeze, the men stopped, their gazes fixed to the ground. They were not permitted to make eye contact with the men and women, a dozen or so, assembled a few feet away making cheerful cocktail talk.

  The voice of the commandant rose above the rest, silencing the chatter. He expressed his profound pleasure at the presence of these important guests, promising a spectacle of impressive novelty.

  And then he pointed at the prisoner in the center position, next to Moshe, and ordered him to step forward.

  “Kill!” Feix barked.

  The German shepherd at his side leapt forward, grabbing the man by the throat.

  The killing of a man by a dog, even by a large, expertly trained dog, is a noisy process, and a long one. The snarling and the shrieking rose into the darkening sky, meeting what sounded to the prisoners like a couple of women giggling nervously.

  After some time, the entertainment was dead.

  The dog sensed this and released what was left of the man’s neck.

  “Good dog,” the commandant said. The animal was still, but hot, alert, quivering with what seemed to Moshe anticipation of more.

  The night grew deadly silent, each prisoner certain he would be the next to die, hoping, actually, to be next, not third or fourth after this.

  “Go. Take them back,” the commandant finally growled at the guard.

  The remaining prisoners turned sharply and began the walk back to the camp at the brisk pace expected, leaving one of their number behind. Moshe hadn’t known the man who had died just inches away from him. But he remembered every detail, every second of what had happened. Had he prayed for that man’s soul as he died? He couldn’t recall. He hoped he had.

  He did know one thing. Standing an arm’s length away from a long and tortured death changes a person—even here, surrounded by death and dying.

  Near the end of 1942, the Edelman brothers received the first piece of information about Krasnik that had crossed the camp walls in many months: All three thousand of Krasnik’s remaining Jews had been loaded into railcars and transported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

  The news came the way all such news did. Sympathetic Poles brought their lunches wrapped in newspaper pages which they purposefully discarded near, but not into, trash cans, so a watchful prisoner could pluck them up. The reports that the prisoners received in this w
ay always circulated quickly, but on this day the information spread with ferocious speed. Almost everyone at Budzyn had relatives in Krasnik—all of them now dead, the prisoners assumed.

  “Do not show emotion. You must control yourself,” they reminded one another throughout the long afternoon.

  That night, the three brothers sat next to each other, silent, all that remained of the Edelman family of Krasnik, Poland. Everyone else was gone, they were sure: their parents, their sisters, and the men whom their sisters had married, the nieces and nephew, so small, so young. Sarah was fifty-five years old and Abraham sixty-four.

  Moshe had expected all that long day to feel a wave of grief once he had left the demands of work and the prying eyes of the guards, when he could sit privately and allow his heart to follow its will. But there was nothing. How awful it now seemed to him that he had eaten his evening soup as always, so soon after learning that his entire family, Hadassah, everyone he had ever known, had no doubt perished. Was it possible that his experiences, the horrible things he had seen during these twenty-nine months in the camps, had so fully displaced everything else in his brain that he could no longer feel emotion about something he had not actually witnessed? It would not surprise him if that were the case. He felt little emotion anymore about anything, to be honest, even the things he did see.

  He glanced at his brothers, hoping for some sign or spark that would carry him to a reaction that he knew he should be having, but they remained silent, too. Even Zalmen, who always had something of importance to say when circumstances required it, had nothing this night.

  The brothers had shared the belief during all the long months at the camp that the misery they were enduring was enough for one family, that it would spare their parents, sisters, and other loved ones. Now they knew no such scorecard was being kept.

  Moshe and his brothers contemplated escape from time to time, even discussed it occasionally. Such thoughts, however, had to take into account the prospects of post-escape survivability as well as the consequences of success. The results of the few efforts that had been launched had dampened everyone’s enthusiasm for such ventures.

  In November 1942, three men scaled the fence at the plant and dashed into the woods. Residents of a nearby village found the escapees and turned them in. All of the prisoners were ordered into the yard to watch as Dimitry hanged the three captured fugitives, not in the conventional way, but upside down, to increase their agony. As they dangled by their ankles in the bitter cold, Dimitry slashed at them with his whip. Hours later they finally died, stripes of blood frozen in place on their backs.

  “If anyone dares to embarrass me again, this is what will happen to you!” shouted Feix, his face red with fury. “Or worse!”

  Still, escape attempts were set in motion from time to time. It wasn’t easy for a man to keep within the narrow ground between desperate flights for life and becoming a Muselmann, the camp term for someone who had given up. The ditch filled with men who had veered to one side or the other.

  A few months after the hanging of the three escapees, another man escaped, and this one was not apprehended. Feix made good on his arrival-day speeches. He picked ten men and ordered them to strip as the entire camp stood at attention. The naked men were marched to the ditch where Dimitry ordered them to their knees and shot them, slowly, one by one. The foreman who had oversight responsibility for the escapees went to the gallows.

  Sometimes death came predictably—a rule broken, or a badly timed glance at a guard; sometimes it was random bad luck. One spring morning in 1943, Feix arrived as the march to work was about to begin. He gestured with his whip at first one man, then another, according to no method or reason that seemed apparent, and those men were told to step aside. Soon 105 had been grouped and stripped, Moshe’s friend Laibel and his father among them. All were ordered to run toward the ditch. Laibel and his father, in motion, reached toward each other and joined hands. When the bullets mowed them down, they were still grasping each other.

  As each new crop of prisoners arrived, additional details about the outside world flowed in, and they learned that the extermination of the Krasnik Jews was merely part of a much bigger program to rid Poland of all Jews for all time. Every ghetto had been or would be liquidated.

  Many of the prisoners came to believe that once all the Jews in the ghettos were killed, the Jews in the labor camps—the last of the Jews in Poland not trenched so deeply underground that they couldn’t be discovered—would be executed as well. Thus, the arrival of dozens of SS late one afternoon in August 1943 caused alarm. The prisoners were ordered into their barracks without supper, and the doors were barred from the outside.

  Moshe stood at a window and watched as SS milled about the fence, inside and outside, clustering, heavily armed, a group here, a group there, some smoking, some talking.

  “This is the end,” one of the prisoners said softly.

  A few men began praying, and several more drifted toward them, a corner of prayer that grew larger and louder. Others sat apart from the praying, as Moshe, Yankel, and Zalmen did, and spoke of their families and of dreams unrealized. A few cried quietly.

  The inevitable had finally arrived. Tomorrow they would all be in the ditch.

  “This part, the waiting, is worse than the dying,” someone said. Moshe agreed.

  The hours ground on, the Nazis still massed and huddled outside, the sluggish passage of time almost unbearable.

  At five a.m. the next morning, the sound of the bar being lifted from the other side of the door shook the prisoners into full alert. They rose, some reaching out to give a final pat on the shoulder to a friend, moving forward to face what they knew they had to face. When they emerged into the early-morning gray, expecting a spray of gunfire, the yard was empty. The SS had gone.

  A shout rang out from a tower. “Go to the washroom, go to the outhouse, and get ready to go to work.”

  The prisoners learned later that day that the Nazi high command had ordered the Budzyn prisoners killed. But the executives of the Heinkel plant, informed that their workforce was about to vanish, begged officials to reconsider, arguing that these particular Jews were crucial to Germany’s war efforts. Sometime in the wee hours, the elimination order was canceled.

  That episode, along with all the other episodes of survival, strengthened the faith of some, made them even more devout. For others, however, the level of cruelty they had witnessed was sufficient evidence that there was no God, and they shed their faith, layer by layer, until nothing at all remained. The extremes of opinion sometimes led to heated words. On the eve of Yom Kippur in the year that Feix had randomly chosen more than one hundred men to shoot, the same year of the near extermination of the whole camp, some of the prisoners in Moshe’s barracks ate supper quickly and gathered in a corner to recite the Kol Nidre prayers.

  Several agnostics, disgusted, formed their own knot. “Look at them, praying to God who has forsaken us. Commandant Feix decides who shall live and who shall die. They are fools.”

  Moshe’s own feelings were conflicted. On the one hand, his religious upbringing had taught him to love God under any circumstance. Even though he had been less than devout once he reached his teen years, some shards of these teachings continued to prick at him. On the other hand, there was the reality of the last three years. He was too hungry and exhausted to arrive at any meaningful position, but it troubled him, this unsettled business of his faith, worsened, he supposed, by the specter of being killed at any moment.

  Even Yankel, the most devout of the brothers, struggled.

  “Will it be me next?” Yankel asked Moshe one day. “I don’t want to know. But I will not blame those who lose hope or those who lose faith. Who will it be tomorrow? I don’t know. Maybe me, maybe not. Can I do anything about it? I cannot. What is the use of believing? There is no use of even talking about it.”

  Comma
ndant Feix was reassigned, and the prisoners entertained a weak hope that perhaps the next commandant would be less vicious. But there was no perceptible shift in the level of cruelty.

  On April 8, 1944, as Moshe was walking across the yard after evening soup, one man among many in the yard, two guards jumped him. They had no reason to pay him any special notice. Moshe was following the rules, as he always did, blending in, as he always did. Possibly they were bored, the usual motivation for a random beating.

  Again and again they brought down their whip butts across Moshe’s head. Long after he had fallen to his knees they kept at it. Moshe felt flesh disconnect from bone. He could smell his blood as it filled his eyes. The last clear vision he had was of the two blond guards sneering as they kicked him.

  Once the guards had clomped off and it was safe to approach, Zalmen ran into the yard. Moshe was incoherent, his eyes pouring blood, his face already swelling so much that he could barely make his lips move. His ears were raw, almost purple, and his nose was gushing. Zalmen hauled Moshe to his feet and dragged him to his bunk, elevating his head onto a pile of jackets and rags so the torrents of blood flowing from so many places wouldn’t pool in his eyes or flood his throat. Friends gathered around, careful not to say too much about how he looked, offering small words of encouragement.