When We Were Brave

by Karla M Jay

  Three female SS officers stood next to the gate. They’d be tough to fight. These were muscular women with fierce expressions who could knock a person back a step or two. They carried their large weapons as easily as Ilse carried a purse. “Not allowed. You cannot go in,” one said. “We bring the selected guests to you.”

  Guests. Falk flinched at the cruelty behind the term. Apparently, evil knows no gender.

  His group moved away from the gate and stood with their backs against the brick wall to stay warm, rubbing their arms and legs in the morning light. His heart thudded. The chance of bumping into a fellow SS officer here was slim but considering the SS guards were exchanged throughout the camp network, it wasn’t an impossibility.

  Herman Ott moved beside Falk. Ott was a dedicated medic, and he found him to be bright-eyed, sweaty, and talkative. The medic offered cigarettes. “Warm yourself while we wait.”

  Falk accepted and lit up.

  Jonathan Bauer joined them and also accepted a light. He was the youngest member of the group and spoke five languages, shifting between them with little effort.

  Ott exhaled, and the smoke hung in the frigid air before dissipating. “Must be hell in that place. According to our connection, many workers committed suicide here. Perhaps a few hundred.”

  “Seems extreme,” Bauer said. “Why not pick up and leave when it is dark?”

  Nilsson smiled. “The Red Army is coming closer and closer, and before they attack, there are rumors. The Russians torture or kill citizens in the cities and towns in each camp. Their logic is that the local population knew what was happening, so they are just as guilty.”

  A lump formed in Falk’s throat. That described him.

  Iron grated against iron as the gates slowly swung open. The female guards flanked a long line of prisoners, hobbling along, four abreast, all with the smell of neglect trailing off them.

  The Red Cross team moved into action. Falk reached for a man so emaciated it was hard to discern his age. He could’ve been thirty or eighty. The man shuffled along, muttering what must have been a prayer. He nearly carried the man up the few steps into the white bus where a nurse took over. Then he turned back for another ragged skeleton. The sight made Falk sick to his stomach. These survivors were a testament to man’s will to persevere against all odds, a fight to the end against unimaginable evil. To each person Falk helped up the two steps, he said, “You are safe.”

  The prisoners’ eyes were wary. Recognizing danger and double meanings was probably the only reason they survived this long. They were given water, tea, and packets of soft-cooked potatoes. The workers were warned not to overfeed the famished prisoners because it would make them vomit.

  Many survivors immediately fell asleep. One man, with a wasted arthritic claw, tugged on Falk’s coat while he covered him with a blanket. He asked a question Falk couldn’t understand, so he motioned Bauer to his side and the man asked again. Bauer translated. “He wants to know where they are going.”

  Bauer told the man they were going to Switzerland after two more stops.

  The man turned to the window, and after a few moments, released Falk’s coat. He asked another question. Bauer said, “He wants to know if we are coming back for those left behind?”

  Bauer answered the stricken man, and then explained to Falk. “I told him we hope so.”

  Falk knew there was no such hope for this camp. Today would be the only rescue mission.

  The answer appeared to brighten the man’s spirits, and his smile revealed missing teeth.

  “His sons are still there,” Bauer said.

  Falk’s head thumped and he swallowed hard. What horror to leave children behind in this pit of hell. In this man’s case, the children must be dead, or they would be in this rescued group. This small glimmer of hope might be the only thing keeping the man alive, and Falk refused to take it away.

  When everyone had settled in, Falk took a seat in the rear of the bus and rested his head against the windowpane. Freeing prisoners was one small step on his road to healing and making amends. It felt good. He wasn’t sure he’d share the horror stories of these camps with Ilse whenever he was home again. It was a sight he’d never forget and visions she never should have to comprehend.

  Outside, the snow-dusted cornfields slid past. Then a stone barn. And a field with a huddle of sheep whizzed by, all under a winter-blue sky. The rhythm of the wheels on the road finally felt like he moved closer to his personal goal. It was not a plan he shared with the Red Cross but was, nevertheless, urgent.

  Izaak Tauber

  Auschwitz, Poland - December 1944

  For two weeks, Izaak had been handing out strings at the Auschwitz train platform. He slowly stepped on his raised wooden box as the second train arrived today. His legs were wobbly from hunger, and he shivered under his coat. He was tired of being hungry, cold, and feeling sick.

  “Here it comes,” George Brady said. He was a teenage saxophonist in the camp orchestra. He nodded in the direction of the hissing train that grew larger and larger under the bare-limbed trees. George sat on a wobbly chair with the other orchestra members, freezing in their thin suits borrowed from a stack of clothing in the sorting building.

  George’s sister, Hana, was in Friedl Dicker-Brandeis’s art class with Izaak in Terezín. Izaak asked where their art teacher and the children now lived because in the two weeks since he and Papa arrived, none of them were around. George said they all went to the showers, but Izaak couldn’t believe that because showers didn’t take that long. He assumed George didn’t have any better information than he did until he learned, soon after, what the showers meant. He cried that night squeezed in the long bed with Papa and eight other men. His friends and favorite teacher were all dead. How could someone like his teacher, who knew about beauty and the magic of using art to take a person to another place, be gone?

  Moments ago, he asked George if Hana brought any of the drawings and paintings from their art studio with them. George said Mevr. Dicker Brandeis locked hundreds of them in two suitcases and hid them at Terezín. That was good. Auschwitz had no nice buildings to hang anything.

  The train came to a complete stop in a whistling cloud of steam. Then the orchestra broke into Dąbrowski Mazurka, the national anthem of Poland. Smoke rolled from the huge engine’s stack as if it couldn’t leave fast enough. The guards pulled the doors to the side. Jewish workers took off the dead people first. They wore rags tied around their mouths and noses, so they wouldn’t catch the Typhus germs going around. The dead were piled onto a cart and hauled away.

  Then the other passengers climbed down, and although Izaak stood on the box there, the guards warned him to never talk to them. The passengers’ faces were full of surprise when the music played. The guards spoke in kind voices and told them which lines they wanted them to join.

  Acting as if he had zipped his mouth shut, he handed out the strings. Passengers could tie their shoes together and be able to find them later in the building called Canada. For the next half hour, he offered strings and pointed to where people should leave their shoes. When the last person was out of sight, the music stopped.

  Then he threw as many pairs of shoes over his shoulders as he could carry. His record was sixty-five, but today forty-three pairs seemed extra heavy, banging against his front and back as he slogged along the snow-covered ground. He hoped to make only twenty trips from the platform to the storage building called Canada and then he’d be finished. The only good news was these back-and-forth trips gave him a chance to check out the women’s side of the camp and try to find Mama. For days, he and his papa asked about her, but the workers who went to the women’s side never came back with any news. Papa knew about camp Bergen-Belsen nearby. He was there a short time before transferring to Terezín and said Mama might be there.

  Bad thoughts slithered around in Izaak’s brain like wet snakes. His mother said
if they got separated it wouldn’t be forever, but after six months he feared he’d never see her again.

  At night, when he was almost asleep, he could hear her voice, low and soothing in his head like a soft piece of cloth he could touch if scared. It was so hard not knowing how long the war would last, and if they’d have to live in more bad places before they went home.

  An inmate and a man in a grey-green uniform with silver skulls on the collar were waiting for him on the platform when he returned for the last load of shoes. The man in uniform was handsome and smelled clean like soap. The inmate smelled dirty like everyone in Izaak’s room.

  The clean man leaned down and pulled out a drawing from behind his back. It was Izaak’s long-ago drawing of Papa. He spoke, and then the dirty man translated. “He wants to know if you are the one who drew this picture.”

  Izaak nodded, not understanding where he dropped it, or how the man found it. Was he in trouble?

  “I’m sorry,” Izaak said, his tongue barely working. “I left it some place.” He made sure not to look in the soldier’s eyes. Looking right at a guard made them angry and sometimes they hurt the person who dared look at them.

  The men talked again. The dirty prisoner asked Izaak if he could draw like that all the time.

  Izaak bobbed his head. “I’m better now. I took art classes from a famous person.”

  The clean soldier stood tall and put his hand on Izaak’s shoulder and spoke. The prisoner changed the words around for Izaak to understand. “How would you like to live in a nice house and draw all day?”

  He couldn’t believe his ears. The soldier smiled and raised his eyebrows as if to say, “It’s true.”

  A house? Drawing?

  Abraham from Camp Westerbork told him over a year ago that his drawing of Papa might help him somehow. Now it was happening.

  “Can Papa live there, too?” Izaak watched him nervously. This offer was unexpected and maybe couldn’t be trusted. What if this was a cruel joke? The guards played bad jokes all the time and people got hurt.

  Another flurry of words. “What is your Papa’s name? We’ll find him and let him know where you are. He can come visit.”

  Izaak’s heart beat fast. This man might be the one who could get his family all together again.

  “Saul Tauber. And my mama is Rachel Tauber. I think she’s here some place, too.”

  The clean soldier motioned to the prisoner to carry the last of the shoes and follow them. He handed Izaak his drawing. The sun lowered letting nighttime come, and the wind blew extra cold. Izaak tucked his free hand into his armpit and hugged the drawing to his chest as he followed alongside the men. He found new energy in his legs with this turn of fortune.

  The soldier spoke again through the prisoner. “And what is your name?”

  “Izaak. And I’m nine.” He wanted the man to know he was not a baby. That he was old enough to learn new things.

  They walked by a group of men pulling a loaded cart of wood. The men looked up as they passed, but Izaak didn’t spot his papa there to tell him the good news. He wished he could see Papa’s face when he heard he was chosen to practice art.

  The clean soldier smiled and then said through the translator, “But you are so young to be this talented. We must see about this gift you have.” His smile was friendly, much different than the other soldiers who worked there. “My name is Uncle Josef. I’m a doctor.”

  Suddenly, the man’s smile made Izaak nervous. It was too wide as if he were trying hard to make him believe something that wasn’t true. Or maybe it was the look in the man’s eyes? Something was off, but he couldn’t say what. He hugged the drawing closer. The big question he asked himself was what interest did a doctor have in art students anyway?

  Herbert Müller

  On the road near Heidelberg, Germany - January 1945

  The first night in the forest, Herbert and the family found a camp alongside a logging trail. They watched from the trees in case someone lived there, but on closer inspection, it was abandoned.

  “Paratroopers were here.” Herbert walked closer to read the lettering on an open chute. “Look. It was our guys.” Old parachutes with serial stamp numbers and Made in Manchester, Conn. were put up to create five tents.

  “This is cool.” Alfred wandered around the camp. “They were hiding from the Germans.”

  Inside each tent lay a straw mattress, kept semi-dry from the elements, with one rudimentary wooden table and chair. In one direction, a trail led thirty feet to an outhouse, and in the other, was a natural spring with tin cups hanging in a tree. Knowing the U.S. military had been here made it feel safer, although he knew that hope carried no weight. The paratroopers may have been snuck out, but his family was still in a war zone and no rescue operation was on its way to save them.

  They dragged four mattresses into one tent and slept until dawn. The morning sun dropped warm golden beams to the forest floor through openings in the trees and an earthy scent—damp and rich—surrounded them.

  As much as they wanted to stay in the camp, they had no food and needed to push north. He rolled up a parachute, so they’d have a ready-made tent at their next stop. They followed tractor ruts through a yellowed vineyard on the side of a long slope and eventually entered the edge of a small town.

  “Oh, dear Lord,” Jutta said, pointing to the dead bodies stacked like cordwood outside the church. Perhaps a dozen adults and a child.

  A sudden gust carried the stench of rotting bodies and they covered their noses.

  “Don’t look, children.” He kept them moving away from the dead, searching for a store or market. On the main road in the center of town, they passed families bundled in rags, pushing handcarts, one with a gaunt elderly person riding on top. Panic crept into his chest. If this is how German citizens fared, what could he expect for his family?

  Smoke pushed out of the chimney at a dismal store at the edge of town, just as snow began to fall. The inside of the town market was dim, its floor covered with warped and cracked linoleum. His family gravitated to the woodstove in the corner as he greeted the owner, a lean man with wire spectacles and full black beard. He wore a bloodied apron over a threadbare, once-white dress shirt. The man’s face was set in a frown.

  A young woman clomped in through a curtained-off doorway behind the counter. She wore blocky, heavy shoes and kept her eyes on his family. The man slipped one hand under the counter and left it there. If a gun, he didn’t blame the storekeeper. Waves of hungry refugees passed through the town and desperation outweighed societal rules.

  Herbert filled a basket with bread, a small piece of dried ham, a bag of black walnuts, matches, and a lighter. He paid for the supplies from the forty Reichsmarks, their relocation allowance Stutz handed him before the trip began. He had yet to open Graf’s envelope, hoping to hand it back to the pastor one day, a plan that kept his worry at bay concerning his friend.

  Back outside, they huddled under the roof on the side of the store and made haphazard sandwiches with the bread and ham.

  “Chewy,” Alfred said, over-emphasizing how hard it was to grind through the meat. “Are we sure it’s not old shoe leather?”

  Frieda looked like a chipmunk with her bite of sandwich pocketed in one cheek. “Better than garbage.” She laughed less and was more direct and focused on facts ever since the train blew up.

  “Garbage is way down my list.” Jutta ate the bread separately from the meat. Her cold was nearly gone, and her strength returned. “But we won’t have to root through cans just yet.”

  “I hope you’re joking, Mother.” Frieda’s nose and cheeks were pink from the frigid weather.

  “She’s joking, love,” Herbert said, “but this shoe-leather sandwich might be dinner and breakfast, as well.”

  The snowflakes thickened and softened the town’s drabness. A burg drained of all its hustle and bustle by depriva
tion and death. As they headed back into the woods, Herbert felt trapped inside a snow globe, shaken by some unseen hand, keeping him off balance as he guided them to safety.

  They walked all day, sticking to trails along creeks and paths through farmers’ fields, sometimes walking back roads. They’d become more brave when it appeared no one paid attention to them. What was another four refugees in a country with thousands wandering around? When Herbert saw Jutta stagger, he said, “Let’s find a place to sleep.”

  Hours earlier, the snow stopped, but a clear cold night awaited them. They approached a farmhouse with a barn and silo, a small affair.

  “I’m going to ask about the barn,” Herbert said. “We need to be inside tonight.”

  “Tell him we’ll milk his cows,” Alfred said and chuckled.

  “Warm milk sounds good.” Frieda rubbed her hands and stuck them in her armpits.

  Jutta and Herbert waited on the stoop after he knocked. His heart raced when beyond the gauzy curtains he made out the outline of a figure carrying a rifle. “Let’s leave. We’ll ask at another place.”

  A man yanked open the door. He wore layers of clothing and a surprised look stamped on his face. With the rifle clenched in one hand, he held open the door with the stump of his other arm. “What do you need?” His voice was like phlegm over gravel.

  “One night in your barn, away from the cold,” Herbert said in German. “We have children with us.”

  He leaned to the side to see Frieda and Alfred who were just a few steps behind. “Yes. Like so many. Can you pay?”

  “How much?” Herbert and his family were dressed in layers, but not like in the rags other people on the road wore. The farmer may have guessed they had some money with them.

  “Fifteen Reichsmarks.” He used his shoulder to hold the door and pointed his stump to the barn. “The upper loft on the right, if you want it.”