by Denis Avey
Soon the word spread that Mauthausen was totally full and they were going to be shunted off somewhere else. Ernie repositioned himself in his chair as he spoke. I could tell he was pacing himself, his face was drawn but his manner was still so matter of fact. The train had set off again and it was as if Ernie couldn’t bring himself to say what happened next. He took a deep breath, the corners of his eyes were red and he was shaking his head in disbelief. He tried to force a smile then he blurted it out. ‘I lost my eyesight,’ he said. ‘I had my eyes wide open and I was looking out and it was all black.’ His lip quivered as he spoke. ‘It was all black,’ he repeated. There he was in the back of an open cattle truck in the snow with all those dying people and he was blind and helpless.
He was struggling now as I had never seen him before, staring into the distance and shaking his head, his voice cracking as he spoke. ‘It was so terrible,’ he said, struggling to hold back the tears. ‘The train rolled on and stopped and then rolled on again and it didn’t seem to make any difference. The snow was still falling.’ He paused and blew his nose. It was as if Ernie was ageing before us. The smiling face from the photographs had gone. The creases that normally ran from the side of his nose to the corner of his mouth cut deeper into his face.
He must have been totally dependent on his friend Makki who told him that they’d left Austria behind and the places they were passing through now had Czech names. Ernie still couldn’t see anything.
As they rattled across the country, Makki told him that the news about them must have spread because, as they passed under bridges, local Czechs threw loaves of bread into the trucks to try and keep them alive. ‘If you were standing on an overpass the sight must have been something to behold,’ Ernie said. ‘I don’t know how many cattle cars there were but they were all open and inside you had these zebra-clad skeletons huddled together, listless like cows being led to the slaughterhouse.’ They had never received as much as a slice of bread when they passed through Austria and it was the same when they crossed back into Germany but the Czechs had done what they could. It reminded me of the loaf thrown to us as we marched wearily through that same country around that time.
Ernie was now in a permanent fog and past caring; without Makki he would be helpless and he must have felt his life ebbing away in the darkness. He must have known that a blind slave labourer was no use to anyone and he would be shot as soon as it was noticed. After at least seven days in those open cattle trucks they arrived at place near Nordhausen in central Germany where they were ordered out of the trucks and into another grim concentration camp. Its name was Dora-Mittelbau and Ernie would never forget it.
He got some soup to eat and his eyesight returned before his affliction was spotted. He learnt quickly that the camp supplied labour to a secret underground factory where they were building Hitler’s Vergeltungswaffe – the retaliation weapon we knew as the V2 rocket. It was the dictator’s last desperate card.
Ernie was given a new camp number, this time thankfully not tattooed on his skin. His clothes, including a sweater that had kept him alive, were taken away and he was assigned to a barracks, where they slept two to a bunk. He had to start again at the bottom of the ladder with no source of extra food and he had been in the camps long enough to know that without that he wouldn’t survive.
They were sent into the tunnels where the rockets were being built and Ernie was assigned to a work Kommando hauling bricks to Italian civilian bricklayers. He never saw a single rocket in his part of those caves and he couldn’t care less. By then the Americans were preparing to cross the Rhine and the Russians had surrounded Ernie’s home town, Breslau, but he was beginning to doubt whether the allies would arrive in time to save him. I recalled my own journey home and that moment when the treacherous river had seemed to lure me in to wash away my suffering and I wondered where Ernie had found the strength to hold on.
‘The work was brutal and the food consisted of one litre of soup,’ he said. He told his friend Makki they had to get out or they would certainly die. Nothing could be worse than where they were in those awful tunnels at Dora-Mittelbau. They heard that a party was being selected to go somewhere else to work. They both knew it was their only chance and they volunteered without knowing what it would involve.
Ernie realised that whatever lay ahead, they had a better chance if they said they had a specialism, real or imagined. He and Makki joined the long line of people wanting to get out and eventually they came face to face with an SS man who was deciding who stayed and who went.
Ernie stepped forward and the SS man demanded to know his profession. ‘Locksmith,’ Ernie said, though what he knew about that, he could write on his thumbnail. He was waved on to the transport. Makki was right behind him and he could hardly say locksmith as well, so when the SS man demanded his profession he answered, ‘Electrician.’
‘No, we need you here,’ the soldier barked and Makki wasn’t chosen. ‘I was heartbroken,’ Ernie said biting his lip and struggling with the weight of his own words. Then he gave up trying to contain himself, his face crumpled and he cried out loud covering his eyes with his hand. ‘I wanted him to come,’ he said his voice distorting, ‘I never saw him again and he died and only because he said “electrician”.’ Ernie’s chest jerked violently as he sobbed.
I felt uncomfortable watching his moment of private grief; it was like we had no right to be there. He was telling that story fifty years later and he was still heartbroken for his friend. They say around 20,000 prisoners died at that awful place and Makki was probably one of them. As he had done with his grandmother Ernie was testifying for his friend; that life, like all the others, mattered. They had pulled each other though Auschwitz and the death march and Ernie had helped him with the cigarettes I had smuggled to him but it was not enough.
Millions had died by then and there was little any of them could do to save themselves. Their reserves of courage and initiative had not delivered them. I knew from my own experience of war and captivity that the ones who came through owed their lives largely to chance. Ernie had used his breaks well but luck had played a large part in his survival.
I could tell from Ernie’s delivery that some of his spirit had gone now; he had crossed a threshold. It was as if losing his friend tarnished his own remarkable endurance story; his speech became slower, like he was ticking off the details to get to the end.
The transport left with Ernie on it but the skeletal volunteers were only taken as far as Nordhausen, a camp at the other end of the same miserable tunnel complex, and he wasn’t much better off. They slept on rows of bunks crammed inside a series of army garages. He guessed there were about 6,000 inmates held in that camp at the time, all trapped within yet another electric fence. The food was just as awful as in the other camps.
It was March, the days were melting into each other and he was losing track of time. He knew by then that the war was going to end but he was wasting away. The prisoners around him were dying rapidly and he feared he wouldn’t live to see his liberation. Of the 6,000 in that camp when he arrived only 1,500 were still alive a few weeks later.
Each day Ernie was ferried into the tunnel in a small train to shift stones, but the work was heavy and slow, they were all weak and even the guards didn’t really care any more. The 1,500 prisoners left towards the end could barely do the work of a hundred healthy men, he said. Then at the end of March the work stopped altogether; it no longer made sense.
The days passed as they waited for the Americans but they never came. The allied bombers were always high up above but heading for targets further a field. Then one day in early April Ernie heard air-raid sirens, though it made little difference to him now, there was nowhere to hide anyway. He heard bombs falling on to the camp, hitting some of the barracks buildings which burst into flames. He heard screaming and saw prisoners running around on fire and he realised they were dropping incendiaries; the burning gel from the bombs was sticking to them. Then he noticed that some of the blasts h
ad damaged the fence around the camp and although the SS were in shelters it looked like quite a lot of them had been killed too. It was still too dangerous to escape.
Ernie’s barracks was one of those still standing, so prisoners from the other blocks came in to shelter and they all huddled together for a night without food, expecting the worst. The next morning they heard sirens again and the prisoners began to panic; people were racing in all directions. As soon as he got out of the barracks Ernie saw the electrified fence was hanging loose and there was a gaping hole in it. All the SS men he could see were running away as quickly as they could. He saw some of the inmates climbing over the barbed wire and he followed them and once on the other side he began to run.
Then he heard the low drone of planes overhead and bombs being released and still he kept running across the fields as they exploded around him. He turned to see that the camp had been hit. The pilots far above can have had no idea that these military buildings had been turned into a concentration camp not long before. He kept on going until he felt like he had been running forever and then he dropped into a deep furrow near the edge of a forest to catch his breath.
Looking around, he spotted the body of a dead civilian and he guessed from his clothes that he was an Italian who had been killed the night before. The body was dressed in an old army jacket, nondescript trousers and a ‘grotesque hat’ with a visor. Ernie was looking down at it when he realised for the first time that he was free at last.
He rolled the dead man over and struggled to get the clothes off him. ‘There is nothing worse than undressing a dead body,’ he said. Rigor mortis had already set in but he managed to tear off the large trousers and jacket from the corpse and swapped them for his own zebra uniform. He was a civilian again.
As Ernie spoke those words, a smile broke out across his face for the first time in ages. I couldn’t help it, I felt myself smiling with him; I knew what that moment must have felt like.
Now, wearing the stranger’s clothes, he looked around and saw people in the distance but no one was taking any notice of him. The wind was blowing papers around from bundles lying in the field. He thought they would make good toilet paper and picking one up, he saw that it was a leaflet dropped from a plane. He stood in the open and read the words, ‘Germans, throw away your weapons, the war is over. Surrender. Your Fuhrer has deserted you.’ It was, he said, the most wonderful message he had ever received.
I too had crossed Europe around that time on foot. I knew he was still far from safe and I suspected there would be a couple more twists before Ernie’s story was done and I was right. He walked on through the forest until he came to a country road crammed with German civilians pushing their belongings on prams and anything else with wheels. He guessed they had been bombed out of their homes and he noticed straightaway there were no youthful people amongst them, just old men and women plus mothers with children.
Then he spotted a robust peasant woman pushing her belongings on a wagon of some sort. When she saw his clothes she called him across, thinking he was an Italian. He realised the danger instantly, he couldn’t speak the language but guessed she probably couldn’t either. He had heard Italian spoken in the camps and spluttered something like, ‘Nonparlo.’ She looked at him suspiciously then gestured to him to push the cart and as he took her place, he noticed an enormous loaf of bread sitting on top of her belongings.
Ernie was smiling again describing the size of the bread, holding his hands wide apart like a crazy angler telling of the fish of his dreams. I glanced around the room and saw that Audrey and Rob were grinning with him as they watched him tell this story; we could all guess what was coming. He didn’t keep us waiting. He told how he pushed the cart on for a few minutes until the forest thickened and then he made a dive for the bread, ran for the trees and was gone before she knew what had happened.
He heard her shouting ‘Dieb! Dieb!’– ‘Thief! Thief! Get him!’ No one was prepared to chase him through the woods for a loaf of bread, so when he was sure it was safe enough to stop, he sat down and ate the whole lot in one go.
It began to feel like his amazing story was coming to an end now, he was smiling a lot more and his head was tilted to the side as he remembered with some relief the closing days of the war after all he’d been through. Along the way he met Peter, a man he knew from the camps, who had also escaped, acquired civilian clothing and was making his way along the same country road.
Ernie was still wearing the cap he had taken from the dead Italian and he knew if anyone told him to remove it he was done for, his shaven head would give him away. Peter and he decided to head west to meet the Americans but without any visible sun, neither was sure which direction that was. Eventually they decided the civilians were probably heading in the right direction so they followed the line of the road whilst remaining under the cover of the forest.
‘Halt!’ They stopped dead in their tracks. The order had come from a German soldier who stepped out of the trees. He demanded to know who they were and where they were going and he said they couldn’t go much further as the Americans were coming. They knew they looked emaciated, they were wearing ridiculous outfits and they had no hair. The only advantage they had was that they both spoke fluent German.
They told him they were civilian workers from Nordhausen where they had lost all their clothes in the bombing; what they were wearing was all they had. They had been sent to repair military vehicles at a town up ahead. It was in Ernie’s words a ‘cockamamie story’. Whether he believed them or not, the soldier said he would take them to his senior officer so they had no choice but to go with him. As they marched along he turned to them and asked if they could shoot. ‘Of course,’ Ernie replied, no doubt wondering where it would lead.
They knew the soldier didn’t quite trust them; they spoke German but they were so thin by then they didn’t look like Germans at all. As they got closer to the base, Ernie decided they would have to kill the soldier to save themselves but he couldn’t speak to his friend as the armed man was marching behind them. Nothing came of it. At least the soldier was Wehrmacht and not SS so that was something but the game would be up as soon as they were ordered to remove their hats.
They arrived at a command post where they were presented to a lieutenant with one arm. The soldier repeated their cover story for them but the officer interrupted before he could finish. ‘Two more men, wonderful,’ he said. ‘I can use two more men.’ He ordered the soldier to get uniforms and guns.
It dawned on Ernie that after years in concentration camps he was going to end the war in a German army uniform, with orders to shoot at his liberators and friends. Before the clothes and weapons arrived the officer asked if they had eaten, they said no and he sent them off to get some soup. They were tucking into their food half an hour later, wondering what to do next, when a soldier ran in shouting, ‘Feind-alarm, Feind-alarm’ – enemy alarm. It meant the Americans were almost on top of them.
There was chaos; soldiers were running everywhere, revving up motorcycles and cars outside in the courtyard as the unit prepared to make its escape. Ten minutes later Ernie and Peter were still sitting there huddled over their soup without a single German soldier in sight. He was a master storyteller and not for the first time I was laughing with him as described the scene.
They stepped outside not knowing where to go and then they saw the first tanks coming towards them, each with a white star on its side. Ernie’s face was animated again as he spoke and he was making large sweeping gestures with his hands as he described the enormous column and seeing those soldiers in strange uniforms everywhere. He heard someone blow a whistle, the column came to a halt and a soldier opened the hatch on the tank’s turret, looked down at him and said, ‘Polski?’ It was the first black man he had ever seen and he was asking if Ernie was Polish.
‘No,’ he replied, ‘Konzentrationslager’ [Concentration camp]. The American’s face showed he had no idea what he meant. This was the moment of liberation Ernie had
dreamt of endlessly but the soldier was looking for a different sort of release. ‘Do you have any Cognac?’ he asked. The soldier must have been disappointed with their reply and the column moved off, leaving them standing there.
Ernie’s face relaxed into a broad smile as he recalled the encounter. I felt, watching him, like I’d lived through it with him and now I was smiling too.
The rest of Ernie’s story was delivered in a different gear; he was on the home straight. He got to Paris and lived by selling cigarettes on the streets, learnt French at the Alliance Française and eventually got to America on board the SS Marine Flasher, an immigrant ship. He cried when he sailed past the Statue of Liberty and set foot in New York on Labour Day 1947. After all that, poor Ernie was drafted into the US army not long after arriving in America and sent to fight in the Korean War, where he took part in the Incheon landing. In the years that followed he sold vacuum cleaners in Harlem and studied hard. Like me, he became an engineer and years later, he retrained as a lawyer. I could see it had been a struggle but it was his version of the American dream and though Korea must have been a shock, he took it in his stride. I couldn’t believe it. It was an incredible turnaround for the lad I had known in Auschwitz.
I was astounded when I was told how similar our post-war lives had been, engineering was just the start. He liked to drive fast and developed a love of British sports cars, starting with his Austin-Healey and moving on to a Jaguar like mine. He refused to dwell on the past or burden anyone with his own suffering and I am told he never really talked about Auschwitz until very late in his life.
He was a man of good cheer, I am told, and I am sure we would have had a lot to talk about without ever mentioning those terrible years. Ernie’s lifelong friend Henry Kamm said of him, that he came to America with nothing except the clothes on his back and out of his own intelligence, energy, willpower and ambition he created a life for himself and a very enviable life it was. Henry said Ernie left behind a great number of friends when he died.
