It was an enormous risk, this ruse. There were few Jews in this barrack, which increased the likelihood of being reported to camp authorities. But week after week, Moshe lived silently on that top bunk without being detected, alone all day in his darkness, nothing to fill his mind or occupy his thoughts.
Sometimes Erich, who did not have off-site work assignments, leaned in and spoke softly and earnestly to Moshe. “The only currency you have in this place, the only currency any of us has, is hope. If we give it up, that is the end.”
A communist and a student of philosophy, Erich often shared thoughts that he believed could help a young man in a bad situation. He especially liked Friedrich Nietzsche and regularly quoted a favorite line: “That which seeks but fails to destroy you strengthens you.”
Moshe clung to those words. When the war was over, he would find an eye surgeon to repair his right eye, the one that had allowed that small wedge of vision for all those months. It must be salvageable, he told himself.
Every evening after his brothers and friends returned from work and had walked him to and from the kitchen for soup, they navigated him around the barracks to keep his muscles from atrophying. Then they gathered near his bunk to talk and share the latest rumors, trying to buoy his spirits.
Survival had for years relied on taking certain actions and avoiding certain others. Now it depended on being completely passive. This passivity was much harder than the previous approach. It lasted for two months, this hard, silent, isolated existence.
Early one April morning, barracks supervisors were ordered to escort anyone unable to work to the infirmary. Erich and Moshe both knew floor-to-ceiling inspections would now be conducted. There was no longer any way to prevent discovery of the blind Jew.
Before sending Moshe on, however, Erich spoke with the infirmary supervisor, a German named Hans, from whom he extracted a pledge to protect Moshe to the highest degree possible. Hans took his promise to Erich seriously, spending time with Moshe every day, trying, as Erich did, to keep up his spirits. This time in the infirmary wouldn’t be indefinite, however. Eventually the beds would be cleared of the valueless sick people, they knew. The infirmary was conveniently located near the crematorium.
On the evening of April 15, as Moshe was speaking with a French Catholic priest with whom he had become friendly, a guard flung open the door.
“All Jews are to report to roll-call square in fifteen minutes!” the man shouted.
This evening lineup could mean nothing but trouble.
“Moshe, pretend you are not Jewish,” the priest said.
A Ukrainian patient who had overheard the priest snarled, “Hey, Jew, you’ve got fifteen minutes to get the hell out of here.”
The Catholic and the Jew said nothing for a moment. Finally Moshe spoke. “As you see,” he said to the priest, “if I don’t go, he will give me away.”
“You are right, Moshe. Unfortunately, you are right. God be with you.”
Moshe shuffled to the door and grabbed the sleeve of a man walking past, assuming rightly that he was headed for the square, and soon Zalmen and Yankel hurried forward to collect him.
“We are leaving camp,” an official announced. “Everyone.”
With the Allied armies advancing—Americans from the west, British from the north, and Russians from the east—High Command had ordered the prisoners evacuated to Dachau, 140 miles away, though the prisoners learned none of this that night. Similar evacuations to push concentration camp prisoners deeper into the interior of Germany were taking place all over the country—partly to ensure they didn’t fall into enemy hands, and partly to ensure a sufficiently large labor force to maintain production of armaments for as long as battle supplies were needed. Flossenbürg’s more than 20,000 prisoners would be moved in a twenty-four-hour period, it was announced, in groups of 2,500. The Jews would go first, at sunrise.
Hustled to the railroad track at dawn the next day, the Jewish prisoners were loaded into several boxcars, crammed once again against one another.
Large red crosses had been painted across the roofs of the cars, a strategy that the Germans had been using for some time. This wasn’t to protect the prisoners they were hauling from place to place for war-related labor or to put them to death, but to protect the passenger cars at the rear, loaded with the wives and children of officers who had already been transferred. The trick worked for a while, but by the time this train was departing, the Allies assumed all trains were carrying weapons or soldiers to critical areas and did not refrain from firing on them.
Just a few minutes into the journey, the roar of low-flying aircraft rumbled above the train. Machine-gun fire ripped through the roofs. The men in Moshe’s car dived to the floor, a tangle of bodies atop one another, three or four deep. Zalmen flung himself over Moshe, and both landed on another man. When the shooting stopped and the two brothers stood, they realized that the man beneath them was dead, bleeding from the belly. A bullet had ricocheted from the metal rail beneath them, piercing the floor of the car and killing him.
The attack killed dozens of Jews and destroyed the locomotive. The guards who had survived forced the prisoners from the cars and herded them across the field to the road nearby, shouting orders and threatening to unleash the dogs. A few prisoners escaped into the woods, but most were too close to a gun or a snarling animal to make such a dash worthwhile.
Ordered into five-abreast formation, Moshe grasping the arm of Zalmen with his left hand and his friend Shlomo’s with his right, hundreds of Jews headed west, heads down, walking to an unknown destination an unknown number of miles away. An hour into the walk, the pop of a single gunshot came from the rear, then another. Soon, the shots were much more frequent. Men too sick or too exhausted to walk, falling down or not keeping pace, were being finished off on the side of the road.
A slow, steady rain began to fall, biting against their faces in the chill, turning the road slick. Moshe let go first of one arm and then the other to pull his thin jacket tighter against his throat, an ineffective shield against the cold. Every few minutes he turned his face upward like a creature of the desert, capturing the only water available to them. The gray skies and steady drizzle seemed to some of them nature’s way, maybe God’s, of giving them a chance to survive this ordeal.
The first day of the march was almost unbearable. The next day was worse. More marching, more gunshots. Day after day they walked, encountering almost no one, stopping only when the guards needed rest. The men knew, from overheard snatches of guards’ conversations, that the other thousands of prisoners from Flossenbürg were also marching along this road, cadaverous men with shaved heads, extending mile after mile.
They huddled under trees in the fields at night, submerged into instant, exhausted sleep. Each morning at first light, they got up and continued walking.
On the fifth day, Moshe could take no more. His feet were raw from poorly fitting wooden shoes, oozing pus and blood. Every step unleashed a whorl of pain.
“This is it for me. I can’t go on,” Moshe muttered.
“Do you know what day it is today?” Shlomo growled.
“No. I don’t care.”
“Today is April twentieth—Hitler’s birthday,” Shlomo said. “You are not going to give him your life as a birthday present.”
Moshe kept walking.
Zalmen offered his brother his shoes. When Moshe refused, Zalmen removed his own in mid-step, passed them to Shlomo, and approached a guard to ask if he could take shoes from a dead inmate. The guard agreed, and Zalmen returned with better shoes for his brother.
On the seventh night of the march, the guards, wanting to dry out from the merciless rain, directed the remaining men, possibly only 1,500 now, into an empty barn. Having a dry floor on which to rest was sheer luxury.
“Heraus schnell!” a guard shouted the next morning, April 23,
when the barn doors opened. Out quick.
They emerged into the warmth of sunshine, a gift, Moshe thought, that might make it possible to walk one day more, possibly two. They had almost nothing left, but if they were warm and dry they might be able to force a little more from their bodies. They could worry later about the absence of rain leaving them no water to drink.
Just then an airplane flew overhead and a shower of leaflets pirouetted down through the blue skies, landing by the hundreds in the unplowed fields. The prisoners were ordered to ignore them, but each of the guards stooped to grab one. Within seconds, the guards’ shoulders sagged. They kept the prisoners marching forward, but without the fervor of the previous days.
“What is this? What’s going on?” Shlomo whispered to Zalmen.
“I don’t know. Something about the papers has them worried.”
“What? What do you see?” Moshe asked, aware of a shift in the texture of the march. The guards would swarm together for a few seconds on the edges of the limping column, speaking in urgent voices that no one could quite hear, then resume their positions.
Soon, the guards directed the men onto a dirt road that seemed to go nowhere. As they moved closer to the woods, some of the prisoners concluded that this was where they would be gunned down, left in bloody piles, and they began whispering among themselves nervously. Suddenly, the guards hoisted their machine guns over their shoulders and ran toward the trees, away from the prisoners, hauling their dogs with them.
“They’ve left,” Zalmen said, amazement in his voice. “The guards have all run away.”
The prisoners stood motionless, stupefied. Moshe could hear snatches of the questions that they all asked of one another.
Is it real? Are they really gone?
It’s a cruel trick.
Are they joining up with others in the woods so they can gun us all down?
No. I think they’re really gone.
Frozen in place, the men couldn’t think of what to do next. After a time, they broke into small groups and headed back toward the highway, some looking over their shoulders for a surprise attack from the woods. Drawing closer to the road, they heard the roar of heavy vehicles, a great many, pushing their way along the highway.
“It’s the Americans!” someone shouted from up ahead. “We are free! We must be free! That’s what those pamphlets were; they were telling the Germans to surrender.”
It took some seconds for the men to believe what they were hearing. Some fell to their knees in the soggy field and laughed; some wept. Others, too numb to understand what was unfolding, stood motionless, eyes half-closed, still thinking about the Germans in the woods.
The Americans rolling by in trucks and tanks and Jeeps recoiled at the sight of the skeletal remains of what had once been men, skin sallow and eyes flat, closer to being corpses than humans. The prisoners closest to the highway could see that many of them were weeping as they tossed what food they had in their vehicles to the side of the road for them.
The hundreds of Jews—who had become, in sudden, surprising seconds no longer prisoners but survivors—continued forward. They should not go far, the Americans warned. The front lay just miles away, and danger was high.
Spotting a little farm with a cleared field on the outskirts of a village, which they later learned was Schwartzenfeld, the survivors stopped and collapsed into tired heaps, hundreds growing into thousands as wave after wave of men in tattered concentration camp uniforms stumbled wearily into their midst.
A group of American officers, some speaking perfect German, arrived to organize the mess of men. One noticed Moshe, doubled over on a bench, ashen, stricken, and helped him and several of the sickest men to the farmhouse, directing the woman there to serve them the tea and crackers that he gave her.
“Make them as comfortable as possible,” he ordered the woman, who was obviously unnerved by the sudden appearance of foreign soldiers and unhinged by the men who didn’t seem like men at all.
Throughout the day, the officer returned to the farmhouse often, concern etched in each word he spoke. “I am trying to get you to a hospital,” he said to Moshe. “It’s complicated because we are so close to the front, and there are no vehicles available to take you, but we’re working hard on it.”
Zalmen and Yankel came to Moshe’s side several times to tell him what they were seeing and hearing. Survivors were arriving by the hundreds, and food was being cooked on campfires. Tales circulated of thousands of men shot on the side of the road during the Flossenbürg march, prisoners who almost made it but had fallen a few hours or a few minutes too soon.
Historians eventually pieced together from scanty records, survivor testimonials, and body counts that about 22,000 prisoners marched out of Flossenbürg, and about 7,000 of them dropped dead or were shot along the way.
The Americans told them that theirs was not the only forced march through Germany. Reports were coming in of many others—death marches, they were calling them—from concentration camps scattered around the country, tens of thousands of men and women, all of them closer to death than life.
Early in the evening, Moshe sat by an open window listening to the men and machines milling about outside. His hunger satisfied for the first time in five years by a handful of crackers, he was beginning to recover, after hours of sipping tea and water, from his severe dehydration.
But he’d had to ask how to get to the washroom—just a few steps away, it turned out—that he could not see. He could hear the moaning of another survivor, but he couldn’t see if there was any way he could help. When the woman of the farm had placed a cup of hot tea before him, he could smell it, even feel its heat, but he couldn’t reach forward without fear of knocking it over.
I may be free, but I am blind, he thought.
His whole family was no doubt dead, except for the two brothers who had formed a wall of protection around him that had not fallen. He had no home and few friends. He was now twenty-two years old, and he had no idea how he would ever be able to take care of himself. He could speak five languages—the Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish of his youth, and the German and Russian he had become fluent in as a survival tool in the camps—but he couldn’t earn a living. He had withstood monstrous cruelty and deprivation but was utterly incapable of performing simple tasks. He began to weep.
The door to the farmhouse opened, and Zalmen announced in a cheerful voice, “You have company.”
A man swept Moshe into a bear hug. “We made it! We have survived. We are free,” Erich exclaimed. Pulling away, the German noticed Moshe’s tears. “You’re crying. Are you in pain?”
“No, not that kind of tears,” Moshe said between heaving sobs. “I have survived, yes. If not for you and my brothers, I would have gone up in smoke.”
That so many others had been hurled into the crematorium, dumped in ditches, or kicked to the roadside and shot when they could march no more—every one of them capable of making more of a life than he himself would ever manage now—made no sense. It wasn’t right. It was unbearable.
“I don’t know whether I should thank you or despise you.”
Five
Awakening on the floor of the farmhouse as a free man for the first time after 1,795 mornings as a captive in one camp or another, 140 more as a prisoner in the ghetto, Moshe felt disjointed. He should have felt relief and gratitude, he knew, but whatever layers of his being that might have contained those emotions had dissolved somewhere along the way.
In the camps he had gone from naive teenager to twenty-two-year-old man, propelled ahead like trash on a slow-moving creek, floating toward nothing known, barely conscious of the passage of time. Everything had been specified, scheduled, presented, or withheld according to some scheme he had never understood and couldn’t question. What does that do to a man? He had no idea. He did know one thing for certain, though: He
was blind. He could look forward to a life as a nuisance.
Yankel, Zalmen, and the three friends who had slept near Moshe in the farmhouse stirred. Their first words of the morning revealed that for all of them, the euphoria of the day before had given way to an uneasy understanding that they, too, were unprepared to assume their places in the world again as normal human beings.
“We have lived for five years like draft horses on a farm—fed by someone else, whipped into compliance, trained to perform so they would feed us,” Yankel said. “Now we don’t even know how to find bread, how to pay for it. Our ability to care for ourselves has been stripped away.”
They were hundreds of miles from their hometown. Their family and friends in Poland, the means by which generations of Jews had glided into employment, had all died. If they possessed any useful skills, they had no idea what they were, and they believed the resentment toward Jews would be even greater in post-war Europe, dimming their prospects further.
Their best hope, they concluded that morning, was to get to a city where some opportunities might exist, a city where there were also doctors who could examine Moshe’s eyes. They would leave immediately, in an effort to arrive ahead of the waves of survivors who would undoubtedly surge in once they had recuperated sufficiently in the displaced persons camp being established nearby by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
The six men gulped down a hasty breakfast of farina, the first cereal they had eaten in years, made with watered-down milk, and a slice of bread—real bread, made with rye instead of the mock bread of the camps.
Even though it was offered, they ate no butter. Zalmen was very firm about sticking to bland foods just now, as he had heard stories the night before while shouldering his way through the pandemonium of men and machines, soldiers and weapons. Some of the Flossenbürg survivors were dying in the fields after gorging on the candy bars and other food the soldiers had tossed in sympathy onto the roadside as they passed. Possibly their weakened systems couldn’t digest that kind of food, and the vomiting, when they were already severely dehydrated, drained them of the final fluids needed for life. Maybe some were so close to dying that it was already too late to halt the trajectory. Possibly they fell victim to what later became known as refeeding syndrome, where severely malnourished people, upon eating a great deal of food, experience a burst of insulin that their bodies can’t cope with, leading to cardiac failure—although that normally came days later, not hours.
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