Measure of a Man

by Martin Greenfield

  The instant my father saw the unfamiliar handwriting, he knew something was wrong. He hopped on a train and tracked me down at the hospital. The worst part was that he had already gone to the brothel using the return address from my letters. Someone there told him I had gotten my hand caught in a motor and was at the hospital.

  Standing there, silent and stern, my father did not speak to me. He did not need to. His gaze cast more shame upon me than his words ever could. I wanted him to know the girls were like our sisters, loving and kind and helping us so much. But we never spoke of it. Instead, he took me home.

  When we got back to Pavlovo, my five-year-old baby brother was hanging on me as if I were a hero. I’d been away for over half his life and hardly knew him. I had lost touch with home.

  The next morning, my father explained that Jewish boys and men in nearby towns were being rounded up and taken. He and my godfather decided we should run and hide deep in the woods. I had just spent years in Budapest living a carefree life without restrictions, without fears. Now, just hours after coming home, my father was packing me up, arming me with a handgun, and taking me out in the field to practice shooting.

  “I’m not going!” I said.

  “Yes, you must!” Father yelled.

  “I will never do that! Whatever happens to you, I want it to happen to me. You separated me from you in Budapest. I’m not going!”

  “Hush! You don’t understand the danger. You will obey me!”

  “I will not! Not unless you go with me,” I said.

  I loved my father. I had missed him terribly while I was away. What was the point of being back in Pavlovo if I had to hide in the forest like some wounded animal?

  The Nazis made the decision for us. The next day, the Germans and Hungarians surrounded our home and took us away.

  But even if all that had not happened, even if I had not learned mechanical skills in Budapest, sitting there inside Auschwitz, my father would have probably made something up and told the Germans I possessed a trade. It was all part of his plan. Above the gates at Auschwitz was a sign. It read Arbeit macht frei (“Work makes you free”). By volunteering my skills as a mechanic, my father protected me. It was his way of marking me for the Germans as a Jew whose skills they could exploit, as one not to be burned.

  As soon as my father offered up my skills, two Germans walked toward us to take me away. I then did something I should not have done, something stupid.

  I ran.

  Why, I do not know. Fences and soldiers were everywhere. Where did I think I was going? I cannot say. But for whatever reason, I ran.

  A few paces into my sprint, I heard a barking German shepherd barreling down on me. My arms pumped hard as I stretched my stride and ran faster than I’d ever run before. The barks got louder. I snapped my head back over my shoulder and saw the dog closing in. He leapt and latched his teeth onto my leg. I looked down. The dog hung from my calf. I shoved his head with both hands. He snarled and gnashed violently as I struggled to pry him loose. The dog’s jaw unlocked, taking a meaty chunk with him. Blood spurted on my prisoner uniform, the dog’s mouth—everywhere. I tried not to cry. Not in front of my father, not in front of the other men and boys.

  The two soldiers tromped over to retrieve the dog and make sure he was uninjured. They then snatched me up off the ground and hauled me away from the group. I thought maybe that night I would join my father again, but that did not happen.

  That day, my second inside Auschwitz, was the last time I ever saw my father.

  The Germans dragged me to the laundry. Whether they wanted me first to perform a simpler task than mechanical work, or whether this was a punishment for trying to flee, I do not know. But after my sprinting stunt, I was eager to show the Germans I was a hard worker who could be of use.

  My first job in the camps was washing Nazi uniforms. I knew nothing of the task. In Pavlovo we had a maid who washed all my clothes. Still, I grabbed a brush and an SS soldier’s shirt and scrubbed hard and fast. After working my way about halfway through the pile, it happened. I scrubbed so hard the bristles ripped the collar. The face of the pacing soldier at my station flushed red. I do not remember his words, but I remember his baton. He beat me until I bled. He needed to make an example out of me for the other prisoners. When he was finished with my flogging, he balled up the torn shirt and threw it in my face before huffing off.

  The shirt was trash to the soldier but not to me. I kept it. Working in the laundry was a nice man who knew how to sew. He gave me a needle and thread and taught me how to sew a simple stitch. I mended the shirt. To this day I still don’t know why, but when I got up the courage, I slipped the soldier’s shirt on and wore it under my striped prisoner uniform. It was a crazy thing to do, because none of the other prisoners had a shirt. But I did it anyhow. From that day on, the soldiers treated me a little bit better. They thought I was somebody—someone who mattered, someone not to be killed. The prisoners treated me a little bit better as well. You must remember that some of the kapos (supervisors) were Jewish prisoners, but they could be brutal. They wanted to please the Germans, so some of them would be hard on us so the Germans would not punish them. Sometimes the kapos were harsher than some of the Germans. When I had my soldier shirt on, however, that did not happen. When I wore the shirt, the kapos didn’t mess with me.

  The shirt means something, I thought. And so, I wore the shirt. In fact, I ripped another one on purpose so I could have two.

  The day I first wore that shirt was the day I learned clothes possess power. Clothes don’t just “make the man,” they can save the man. They did for me.

  Of course, receiving your first tailoring lesson inside a Nazi concentration camp was hardly the ideal apprenticeship. I would have much preferred to hone my craft on Savile Row or in the mills of Milan. Looking back, though, that moment in the camps marked the beginning of the rest of my life. Strangely enough, two ripped Nazi shirts helped this Jew build America’s most famous and successful custom-suit company.

  God has a wonderful sense of humor.

  CHAPTER TWO

  INSIDE AUSCHWITZ

  Many days inside Auschwitz I was afraid I would die—and then afraid I wouldn’t.

  We were surrounded by death and darkness, madness and murder. And the vicious precision and regimented order of the place made the moral insanity all the more bizarre and cruel.

  Each morning around 4:30 we were stirred from our sleep, lined up, and counted in a ritual known as roll call. My heart would start jumping in my chest. A Nazi soldier would whirl his baton and scan the line with his eyes while another called out the list of prisoner numbers. Any sign of illness or fatigue was cause for being pulled from the line and sent to the crematorium.

  Day and night the ovens burned. The smoke spewed up from the soaring brick chimney and belched the vaporous remnants of corpses into the air. At night you could see the flames spitting against the blackened sky. Still, no one in the camps talked to me about the crematoria. Whether that was because I was just a boy or because I no longer had a father by my side to speak piercing truths to me, I do not know. But I could smell that something was horribly wrong.

  After morning roll call, we were given something approximating black coffee. To be sick or weak was dangerous, so no matter how rancid the gruel or vile the smell, I forced myself to eat. The afternoon slop was usually some sort of soup that frequently had human hair, trash, or dead insects floating in it. Sundown brought black bread mixed with sawdust. Soup made you skinny. Bread made strength. So I ate as much bread as I could scavenge and always tried to cover my wounds with my clothes.

  My labor assignment in the laundry lasted several days before I was moved to the sorting room, which housed the confiscated wares of newly arrived prisoners. The space was filled with fifty or so prisoners combing and sifting mountains of clothes, shoes, and other possessions. Sometimes a prisoner stumbled upon a hidden morsel of food folded inside a bag or tucked inside a coat pocket. Prisoners caught try
ing to sneak a bite were promptly whipped by a kapo, who often smuggled the food or ate it himself.

  Between the rummaging and sorting, I peeked over and around piles every chance I got in the hopes of spotting a family member. That’s all I wanted: one glimpse, a single fleeting confirmation they were still alive. But it never came. Looking back now I realize that false, cruel wish, like an invisible ladder whose rungs materialized based on hope, compelled me to reach for survival.

  The weeks passed and the piles got smaller and smaller until transports of new prisoners slowed to a trickle. The Nazis reassigned me to the bricklaying teams. Allied bombs were busting up brick buildings everywhere, so our services were in high demand. I knew nothing about masonry. A prisoner who served as a team leader stuck a trowel in my one hand and a mortar bucket in the other before walking me to a block of bricks. There I learned the finer points of bricklaying before being put to work.

  The work was hard and the days were long, and my wire-thin teenage frame did its best to keep up with the older, stronger men. For some reason, slathering and smoothing the mortar across the faces of the bricks made my thoughts float to Pavlovo and brought back scenes of Grandma Geitel icing freshly baked cakes. Before long I had perfected my ability to detach my mind from my physical form, and my body sped up as my thoughts slowed down.

  Even so, no matter how hard we worked, our captors would slay prisoners without provocation.

  Killings were frequent and random. One day a boy from my block and I were tasked with building a brick wall. We started just after morning lineup. By late afternoon we had completed a good stretch of the wall and felt a certain pride in our accomplishment. We stacked the bricks higher and higher until the wall stood some five or six feet tall. We talked while working to unclench our minds. A single gunshot rang out, but I didn’t think much of it. The crack of rifle fire and the spraying of machine guns were common, so I kept stacking and talking. I asked the boy a question and got no reply.

  I asked again.

  Silence.

  I swiveled my head in his direction. Several yards away, the boy lay motionless, facedown in the dirt inside an expanding pool of blood. I later learned a Nazi had used the boy for target practice.

  At home in Pavlovo—and in most civilizations—a clear moral order structured our daily lives. Hard work, justice, fairness, integrity—these virtues produced predictable fruits. But not in the concentration camps. The Germans killed for any reason or none at all. It was futile to try to discern their logic, because there was none. If a Nazi was angry, he might kill you. If a Nazi was happy, he might kill you. It made no difference.

  The dehumanizing randomness of the murders suffocated my sense of hope, just as Hitler and his henchmen had intended. What appeared random was, in fact, not random at all. It was a systematic psychological lynching, a strangling of the human heart’s need to believe in the rewards of goodness, a snapping of the moral hinge on which humanity swings. Soon, and much to my shame, I became anesthetized to death, numb to depravity. Some primal survival switch inside me had been temporarily flicked on that allowed me to submerge the emotions generated by the evil scorching my eyes.

  I witnessed dozens of shootings and helped carry scores of corpses. Sometimes a dead body would be intact and appear to be sleeping. Other times a bullet would rip through a prisoner, spilling out organs. Or shatter a skull, exposing chunks of brain. But as the days passed, no matter its condition, a body soon became just a body, a sallow, bloodless, gangling object that must be lugged, heaved atop a pile, or dropped in a hole. At fifteen, I had become an undertaker.

  But children even younger than I were plunged into the same abyss. What’s more, I had already learned to survive on my own during my years living in Budapest at the brothel and working as a mechanic. Sometimes I think God used those years as a sort of training ground, a kind of boot camp, to prepare me for my orphaned existence.

  Some days inside Auschwitz seemed to evaporate one into another, mornings ebbing into evenings with mind-numbing monotony. Other days brought jarring events that, decades later, still visit me in vivid nightmares. Like the first time another prisoner beat me.

  During morning roll call, an SS soldier barked my number. This is it, I thought. You’re about to become one of the disappeared. The soldier pulled me from the line and ordered me off to the side, away from the others. I stood there for over an hour. Sometimes the lineup took hours, as the Germans counted over and over and over to make sure every last miserable one of us was accounted for. It mattered little whether we were alive or had died the night before in the sleeping racks. Every skeleton must be catalogued and counted.

  The Nazis then yanked another boy off the line and ordered him to stand alongside me. The boy and I had never spoken. From the looks of him, he appeared to be a few years older; he was at least six inches taller.

  The rest of the prisoners were dispersed to begin their daily slave labor. The boy and I were marched to a room inside a building I had never been in before. When we entered, the walls echoed with the cracks of whips and the cries of men.

  Scattered throughout the space were small clusters of prisoners, each with one or two SS soldiers interrogating them. The Nazi walked my fellow inmate and me to a clear patch in the room and poked his baton into my sternum.

  “Is your father a partisan?” he asked.

  “No, my father is not a partisan,” I said.

  “I’ll ask again. Is your father a partisan?” he said louder.

  “No. No, he is not,” I replied.

  “Where is your father now?” said the soldier.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Somewhere in the concentration camps.”

  “Tell me his number.”

  “I do not know his number.”

  “Tell me his number right now!”

  “I do not know it,” I said, lying in the hope of protecting my father.

  “Down! On the ground!” he barked.

  I crouched down on all fours. The soldier turned to my fellow inmate.

  “You! Whip him hard! Now!” the soldier commanded.

  I looked back over my shoulder and saw the German hand the boy what appeared to be a stick. “Whip him! Now!” ordered the German. The boy knew what we all knew: any attempt to be merciful and strike with anything less than full force would mean instant punishment. I stared straight ahead, my muscles tightening in anticipation of the first lash. The boy cocked back his arm and let the whip crack right between my shoulder blades. My elbows buckled. The sting undulated across my back.

  “Again!” yelled the soldier. The second lash tore across the small of my back. I screamed. “Another!” yelled the Nazi. My arms quavered as my body grew heavier. The third strike of the stick hit square against my spine, sending me falling face-first to the floor. Tears streaked my dirty face. The soldier ordered me to stand.

  “Is your father a partisan?” the soldier asked again, this time with a smile.

  “I cannot lie. My father is not a partisan. He is not,” I said.

  “We’ll see about that,” he said. The soldier turned and glared at the other boy.

  “What about your father? A partisan?” asked the soldier.

  “No. He is not,” answered the boy. The soldier stabbed the air with his baton in a downward motion. “Down!”

  The boy assumed the position. The German handed me the whipping stick I’d just been beaten with. “Whip him! Hard!” the Nazi commanded. I looked down at the bludgeon and saw that it was smeared pink with my blood.

  “Whip him!”

  I reared back my arm and drove the whip into the middle of the boy’s back.

  “Another!”

  It was at this moment that I realized the boy had intentionally spaced out my lashes as a favor to me. I tried to return the compassion, this time aiming lower. The boy howled and his knees gave way. I’d missed and struck his tailbone. Everything in me wanted to apologize to him for the misplaced hit. But I knew any hint of tenderness or dec
ency would be met with swift SS intervention against us both.

  “Again!”

  This time I focused hard on the top of his back and aimed squarely for his shoulder blades, the largest unstruck portion of his back. The stick landed right on target.

  “Up! Up! Up!”

  The boy sprung off the ground and stood at attention.

  “Is your father a partisan?” the soldier asked him.

  “No, he is not a partisan. I do not know where he is. But he is not a partisan at all.”

  My eyes darted across the room. The same sordid scene, prisoner flogging prisoner, was unfolding all around us, as Nazis played conductor in their sadistic symphony.

  What had my people done to deserve this? How could they hate us this much when they didn’t even know our names? There were no answers to my youthfully naïve questions.

  “Back to your block!” snapped the soldier.

  The rest of the day, my mind whirred. Was Father being tortured? Did he say something that tipped them off? Did Father give them my prisoner number? The psychological torment was almost as painful as the welts stinging my back.

  The next morning’s roll call played out like the last. The same boy and I were ordered off the line, hauled to the interrogation room, and forced to trade blows while attempting to shield our fathers from danger. With each denial we gave—“No, my father is not a partisan”—I felt a strange pang of pride, a small celebration of victory that neither of us had sold out his own blood, even as we were forced to spill each other’s.

  Five days straight. That’s how long they made us beat each other. Not once did either of us give up his father.

  I’d endured nearly a week of beatings. My back was crisscrossed with deep trenches of torn skin. I couldn’t see the wounds, but I could feel the blood pool inside the ripped grooves before spilling over and oozing down my back. I tried to make a game of standing and sitting in such a way so as to keep my shirt from brushing against my lacerated skin.