by Karla M Jay
Otto tugged at his sleeve, and Herbert leaned over. “This is where, we must part. You need to be home, with family. I am fine, to do zis alone.”
“No. I’m not leaving you.”
“What did he say?” Weber asked.
Herbert relayed his father’s request.
“It’s too late for that.” Weber’s eyes narrowed. “You’re both internees. And to answer your question, you’ll have an appeal opportunity in camp.” He folded the document he carried. “The transport leaves immediately.”
“I need to make a phone call.” Herbert hated how his hands trembled. He stuffed them in his pockets. He needed to hear Jutta’s calming voice, to tell her the disheartening news. People said sometimes you have to go through your worst, to arrive at your best. He didn’t agree. He’d been at his absolute best when he was home taking care of his family and didn’t need to experience a worst-case scenario.
“Once you get to Ellis Island, you will be afforded the same privileges as other prisoners.” Weber and the police escorts left, their leather soles slapping on the polished floor in time with the word echoing through Herbert’s head—prisoners, prisoners, prisoners.
Wilhelm Falk
Sparks, New Hampshire - February 1944
After one week in camp, Falk continued to work on an escape plan. Security was tighter than he imagined, and his broken ribs hindered him from going into the forests. Like every morning, Falk now lined up on the open parade ground waiting to be counted. He stomped in place in the winter dawn. As the count crawled up and down the lines, he called out his number, his breath a visible puff that shot straight out and hung for seconds before dissipating. He cupped his hands around his mouth to hoard a piece of warm air.
The roll call continued.
The day seemed bleak and it didn’t help that his feet ached. He scowled at his boots as if they were traitors, his feet almost frozen inside them in such a short time. The snow on the parade ground was trampled into brown slush, a swath of ugliness in the otherwise pristine view. From the eaves of the barracks to the mountains in the distance, the land was bleached white as far as he could see. He looked across the meadow, once again studying the village of Sparks. The tall church steeple and random columns of chimneys, spewing smoke, pointed the way to daily town life. The church bells rang each day at noon, and on Sunday’s call to worship, the uplifting chimes mingled with the laughter of children. Those were the signs of normalcy that hurt Falk the most. A tranquil village with a covered bridge only five hundred meters away, its townspeople enjoying everyday activities so reminiscent of his days with Ilse and their sons before the war. He rarely looked toward the village. It was too painful of a reminder of what he’d lost.
When the captain’s voice boomed for them to move out, it seemed to crack open the morning cold like fragile ice breaking on a pond, a sharp sound rippling across the camp.
The mess hall was stocked with plenty of food and strong coffee. Falk piled his plate with fried eggs, sausage, potatoes, and sweet bread. He avoided the Nazis from his barracks and ate breakfast with Jerry Schroeder, the guy with the broken nose. He and Jerry were assigned to the camp maintenance group, at least until their injuries healed. With Falk’s company management skills, he could have offered an easy overhaul and new design for organizing the workings of the camp. But he was Klaus Stern, a sanitation engineer, relegated to fixing outdated plumbing and painting the interiors of the buildings.
He and Schroeder reported to the camp doctor, Birk Lauterbach, every few days to check on their health. Lauterbach reported Falk’s medical assessment to the camp commanders and suggested how soon he could head out into the forests to start contributing to his share of pulpwood quotas. Lauterbach, in his mid-fifties but fit from playing tennis, spoke satisfactory German. He even shared that his grandparents, who emigrated from Munich, raised him. He seemed to hold no bitterness toward the POWs. Sometimes he’d offer a cigarette, or thick, brown bread with butter from the kitchen.
Dr. Lauterbach deemed Falk to be ready for work in the forest in two more days. In the meantime, he needed to continue modifying his plan to escape since he couldn’t simply walk out of camp. With two belts of barbed wire ringing the compound, even if he got through the first one, the space between offered no place to hide. The lookouts in the four towers kept their guns tightly aimed on that inner ring. Of course, guards also patrolled the perimeter of the cutting areas, but the forest was a sizable place to watch.
Before setting off to the barracks to meet the plumbing crew, Falk stopped by the canteen for two Hershey’s chocolate bars. He handed over the resin tokens used as currency. Then he pocketed the chocolate for now, as they would go in his secret food stash under his bed for the day he escaped.
The eight-man crew to which he was assigned was almost finished fitting pipes under a new shower building. The next job entailed fixing the shingles on the north-facing roofs that took the brunt of Canadian windstorms. By midday, his crew would be out from under the showers and up on the rooftops, grabbing not only fresh air but also a view of how the camp fit into its surroundings.
The morning passed, and they gathered in the mess hall for lunch. Each worker grabbed a paper sack from the food line and found a seat. Today, lunch consisted of a ham sandwich, a cookie, and a beer. The beer was a nice touch and surely came about when the camp kitchen assigned POWs to help cook. The Germans sold the kitchen commander on the idea the POWs required beer in their daily diet to remain docile.
Falk was halfway through his sandwich when a POW across the table, a dour man who rarely spoke, threw his arms in the air as if begging for mercy. The guards called him Adolf, a name they used for all Nazi supporters, a guy Falk steered clear of in conversation.
The man muttered loudly an incoherent stream of consonants, interspersed with intelligible phrases, such as “line up” and “everyone out.”
The guards’ attention turned to him when he jumped to his feet and shouted, “I’m done and going home.” He ran for the doors, but in an instant, was restrained by three guards who wrestled him outside. Dr. Lauterbach’s lunch was about to be interrupted.
The room fell quiet as the POWs resumed eating. Falk could relate to the guy. Several times in the past year, he wanted to end it all to scrub his mind free of the guilt and misgivings. The need to tell someone the whole truth about the extermination camps kept him from suicide. That and his longing to see his family again.
A man at his table broke the silence. “Anybody know what that was about?”
Another with a hawkish face spoke, a guy who never participated in the Nazi songs and chants in the mess hall. When he moved, he walked like a man being dragged down by invisible forces, bent and struggling to move his youthful body from place to place. “Einsatzgruppen.”
They all nodded, agreeing with his one-word response. Although there were rumors of what Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen killing squads were involved in during the early years of the war, Falk doubted the other POWs knew the magnitude of what these roving slaughter teams did. He couldn’t imagine what went through the soldiers’ minds when they discovered the extra pay, drugs, and superior rations didn’t always make up for machine-gunning hundreds of thousands of desperate men, women, and children because they were deemed racially inferior. Their screams and cries sounded no different than those of pure-blooded Germans.
Falk set his utensils on his plate. “Hard to come off the drugs.”
The hawkish soldier said, “He was swallowing Pervitin like candy.”
Falk worked hard to protect the one pill he smuggled in. How had the POW kept a large supply of pills from being undetected? He finished his lunch, took his sack to the trash, and waited near the door for the rest of the work crew. He watched a POW hand a letter to a guard to mail. He needed to write to Ilse. She should be in the Netherlands with their sons by now. Any information reaching Düsseldorf from Wehrmacht headqu
arters, notifying her Wilhelm was killed in Italy, hopefully would not have found its way to her. But just in case it had, his letter to her from Klaus Stern needed to be carefully worded to let her know he was still alive. In his last letter to her before he switched uniforms with Stern’s corpse, he wrote, “Don’t believe everything you hear.” He prayed she remembered that in the coming months.
If he were lucky enough to be successful and not shipped back to Germany to be hanged, would he ever tell Ilse all he had done? She’d be shocked that his one and only killing was a German doctor, not the enemy.
He recalled his visit to Hadamar as a new SS officer in late ‘42. He’d arrived there with the pretense of needing to review the T-4 Program. Outside on the patio, recently cleared of snow, he talked with Dr. Heinrich Unger. Dr. Unger and others reviewed patient files in institutions across Germany, with the objective to determine which handicapped or mentally ill individuals should be flagged for elimination.
“I’ve supervised fourteen thousand ‘undesirables’ so far,” Unger bragged.
“Are you feeling all right?” Unger asked Falk that day.
The sheer number of dead made him stumble in a moment of wooziness. Of course, he hadn’t seen Auschwitz yet.
“I apologize. It might be the stench of the fog hanging over the facility.”
Unger pointed to the gently falling ash. “They’re prettier in death as ashes than they ever were in life, don’t you think?”
Ashes? Falk clamped his lungs shut and avoided breathing in the remains of the condemned. His blood boiled, but he straightened his back.
“I’m fine.” Steadying his beating heart and roiling stomach contents, he added, “I may have eaten a bad piece of fish in my travels.” He cleared his throat. “Was everyone who lived here marked for extermination? Surely some had skills to offer the Reich.”
“If a resident lived here, it was because they were flawed. We read all the files, and within a week, labeled each person with different-colored labels for one of three categories . . . kill, kill and remove their brain for research, kill and extract gold teeth.”
This time, Falk turned to a snow-covered lawn and vomited the contents of his stomach. He retched long after, forcing the damning words from his head as if that were even possible. He hadn’t seen the full horror of Hitler’s plans until now. What had the generals talked him into? He couldn’t take part in this immoral scheme, but he was trapped.
“Fucking British blockades,” Unger said, his voice full of kindness. “Nothing but rotten food, making it nearly impossible to get a decent meal.” He pointed to the medical offices and became more animated. “Come join us for a celebration. We have fine beer and wine.”
“Celebration?” Falk asked, the word raw in his throat.
“Patient number fourteen thousand five reached the ovens last night. We think. We can’t always keep an exact count.”
Falk begged off. His body trembled to control his anger, but he simply said he needed to settle his digestive system. On the return drive to Limburg, the nearest town, his rage was nearly uncontrollable as he hurled his car along narrow roads, planning a dozen ways to kill Dr. Unger—all slow and painful.
Of course, he did none of what he first imagined, but when he returned a few weeks later, he brought Dutch Resistance letters he found in an abandoned house in Lititz. After forging Unger’s name, he planted them in the doctor’s briefcase. He waited at the edge of the woods until finally the doctor was dragged to the lawn. There, the SS shot him for harboring Jews, cutting short his protests of innocence.
Setting up Unger gave him a moment of satisfaction. But it would not stop the atrocities. After Hadamar, Falk set his sights on gathering information he could share with the world. He believed the world would listen and deal the death knell to Hitler’s cleansing plans. So far, they hadn’t. His trusted colleagues deemed his stories as exaggerated. Had his friends concluded he was merely another drugged SS officer?
Creating an army of evil had taken a few years to accomplish. His sons were coming close to recruitment age, and he needed them to be left out of the fight. Hitler’s indoctrination into his hate club started early with the Hitler Youth, but the club did nothing but destroy innocent young minds. Hans and Dietrich looked up to him with his dark uniform, the brass and medals, the privilege. They would leap at the chance to follow in his footsteps, not knowing the emotional hell he’d traipsed through these last years to put a stop to it all. He prayed the war ended before the fisted power closed in around them. Before they were made to trade their play guns for the real thing.
Izaak Tauber
Płaszów, Poland - February 1944
“Nothing but farms out there, Mama!” Izaak pointed from one of the train’s windows.
“I see that,” she said.
The train ride proved to be the opposite of their last trip. No one died, but like Mama, the forty passengers looked nervous. Izaak’s only experience with a work camp was the bad side of Westerbork, where he and Zev were caught peeking inside the long buildings. He didn’t want to dress in grey clothes and break apart batteries. Maybe they’d get a job working outside.
He tried not to doze because, along the way, they passed some amazing sights. They crossed a deep wide valley on a skinny bridge. And when the ground dropped away on the sides of the train, Izaak’s stomach fell, too, as he imagined they were flying across to the other side. They chugged past a slow parade of hundreds of people, mostly families pushing carts and carrying big bundles along a road. Everyone in the world was moving to new places.
And now, out the window, a circus train sat on the tracks next to them. The cars were painted in bright colors with animals drawn on the side. “A circus, Mama!” Horses poked their heads out of one car. “Do you think they will come to our new town?”
“From what I’ve heard, the work camps are away from towns and cities.” Mama wrapped her arm around him. “But one day again . . . we’ll all go see a circus.”
When Mama made plans like this, the sick feeling in his stomach calmed down. He leaned into her embrace.
Farther on, the wheels under his feet slowed. The farms turned into open land then factories and warehouse buildings, and back to less pretty fields and rotting houses. When the train stopped, the pretty countryside was replaced by muddy fields and more barbed-wire fences.
The doors rolled open, and Mama grabbed his hand as the guards yelled for them to get out. They hurried down the steps with their suitcases as he tried to spot a friendly guard, like Abraham, someone who could help them. Instead, these guards had faces like stone.
“Is this Papa’s camp, Mama?” It was hard not to turn an ankle on the road leading to the huge gate. Izaak watched his feet, careful to place each step in a solid indentation made in the frozen mud. Was Izaak following in one of Papa’s footsteps? His pulse quickened as he stumbled, but he didn’t fall. A man who fell moments ago was beaten by a guard with a rifle butt.
“It’s a camp, Izaak, named Płaszów.” She lowered her voice and it became kind of rough, like the old lady who used to live two houses down from them and liked to smoke smelly cigars that always made his eyes water. “But I don’t know anything else.”
Izaak lifted his eyes. The barracks sprawled forever inside tall rows of barbed fencing, making Westerbork seem tiny by comparison. Once through the gate, a terrible smell reached him, and he placed a gloved hand over his nose. The place smelled like a hundred open-pit toilets. A whispered message moved along the line in many languages. It hurried over Izaak’s head, but Mama heard it because she was tall.
“Oh, dear,” she said in a soft tone.
“What is it?” Izaak asked as he tugged Mama’s arm.
When she didn’t answer, Izaak squeezed her hand and asked again.
“This camp is very full,” she said. “Over twenty thousand people. And, Izaak . . . we must follow the r
ules exactly as we are told.”
“We always do that.”
“But this time, love, we may not like what they ask us to do.”
Izaak studied the guards’ perches along the fences. The guns sticking out were huge with wide belts of bullets hanging off each. A spotlight swept back and forth, probably because the clouds were too thick to let in the sun.
“Women’s side,” a female guard yelled, pointing Izaak and his mama to the right.
They passed many long buildings until his group entered the one they were directed to. Just inside, a pinched-faced woman dressed in a dark dress, resembling the German guards’ uniforms, yelled orders and pointed to a pile of striped rags in a corner.
“We need to change into other clothes, Izaak,” Mama said. “This is one of the rules we won’t like, but we have to do.”
A woman with a shaved head handed out the ragged shirts, pants, and dresses. She leaned close. “The camp commandant is cruel. Stay away from him, especially if he is dressed in his white sweater and hat.”
“What happens then?” Mama asked, accepting the garments handed her way.
“He stands on his balcony and shoots people for no reason . . . or he does worse.”
Before Izaak could decide what was worse than getting shot, another woman guard grabbed at Izaak’s suitcase. He held on tight. “My windmill drawing and Papa’s pipe!” He couldn’t lose the few things he owned that reminded him of Papa.
Mama pulled his fingers from the handle. “Please, Izaak.” Her voice trembled. “We cannot argue with them.”
The woman guard was bigger than most men. She smiled, but her eyes looked like a snake’s. And as quick as a snake, she picked up Izaak and tossed him and the suitcase onto the pile of luggage.
He flew in slow motion, bracing for the pain he’d feel when he landed on the hard edges of the cases. His hearing had all but stopped, but in the background, he heard his mama’s cry.
