The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  As he was shunted along with the other men, someone whispered in his ear, ‘Tell them you’re older.’ Fred had no idea what he was talking about. He’d been brought up to believe that lying was abhorrent and dishonorable, but a moment later when a high-ranking Nazi officer impatiently asked his age, without thinking he blurted out, ‘Fifteen and a half,’ instead of fourteen.

  ‘How many bricks can you carry?’ the officer asked. Fred didn’t know what made him say five, but it was obviously the right answer because after giving him a vicious kick, the officer ordered him to join the men on the right.

  Along with hundreds of others, he was pushed into a hut and told to strip and shower. Everything in Fred recoiled. Never in his life had he been naked in front of strangers, but the stinging whips of the guards and the ferocious snapping of the dogs made refusal unthinkable. After an icy shower they were given no towels, but coarse striped uniforms with no underpants or shoes. Their hair was shaved by rough hands and questions were answered by beatings and curses. Hell had no room for the word ‘why’.

  Dazed by the surreal scenes and inexplicable behaviour all around him, Fred heard someone yelling at him to hold out his left arm. While guards stood around ready to quell any trouble, a man behind a table pricked tiny dots into his skin with what looked like a long Waterman pen. Numb with shock, Fred saw that it was a number: 106792.

  ‘You’re not a name any more,’ the man jeered. ‘From now on you’re just a number.’

  It didn’t take Fred long to realise that he had arrived at an efficient death factory where he didn’t count even as a number. Half an hour’s walk away was the industrial site called Buna where he became a slave in IG Farben’s synthetic rubber factory. Every day the guards, who had the power of life or death over their prisoners, played their favourite game. They would snatch a prisoner’s cap and toss it away. When the unfortunate man ran to retrieve the cap, because he knew he’d be flogged if he returned to camp without it, they would shoot him on the pretext that he’d tried to escape.

  Because of the guards’ sadistic activities, there were always dead bodies to be carried back to camp at the end of the day. Exhausted after the long day’s hard labour, starved and aching after the strain of lugging the corpses, the prisoners were often ordered to stand motionless for several hours while the guards counted them. Any movement was savagely punished.

  Only after the counting was completed were they allowed to return to their barracks for food, often to find that there was very little, if anything, left.

  When he finally lay in the hard, narrow bunk he shared with another prisoner, his body wracked with hunger and exhaustion, Fred felt a faint flicker of satisfaction. He had managed to cross the minefield and survive one more day.

  It was no wonder that some of the young boys accepted the protection of the Kapos, who, in return for sexual favours, allocated lighter work or handed out an extra piece of bread. Although Fred never considered this option himself, homosexuality was rife in the camps. Sex was the only commodity that prisoners had left in a world where everything else had been stripped away.

  On Saturday afternoons, Dr Mengele would arrive with his doctor cronies at the Buna camp which was known as Auschwitz III and order all the prisoners to strip naked. Everyone trembled when Mengele appeared. He was a handsome man with a disdainful expression who had perfected a way of looking through them as though they were transparent, which in their emaciated state was not far from the truth.

  During selections he would stand on a box to appear taller and more powerful while he and his acolytes scrutinised the bodies to decide who would live and who would die. No matter how ill they were, they tried to stand up straight and look strong because if you were sick and couldn’t work, you were no longer any use and went up the chimney. Sometimes Mengele would ask for volunteers for some special task, but it was whispered that they were used for medical experiments. One of the older prisoners took Fred aside one day. ‘Never ever volunteer for anything, no matter what they promise,’ he warned.

  On Sundays, Mengele carried out another type of inspection. Although the Nazis professed a horror of germs, in fact it was the overcrowded, unsanitary conditions of the camp, where no soap was issued and thousands of bodies were crowded in together, that caused infections to flourish. When an epidemic of pustular dermatitis broke out, the prisoners who sorted the clothes of the new arrivals were the first to get infected. Fred’s ship-mate André Wayne was one of the clothes sorters who had to line up every week and show their hands to Mengele, while he peered for signs of the tell-tale pustules. If he spotted blisters on their hands, they were doomed.

  They might get away with it one day by swiftly turning their hands over but the following Sunday there would be no way to hide the infection because it invariably spread. The unfortunate men being dragged away tried to feign indifference to their fate and appear strong, but a nervous tic on their cheek or a throbbing vein at their temple would betray their emotions. An hour later, smoke would billow from the crematorium.

  Fred survived the selections until the day hunger made him reckless. When he heard that a hundred men were needed to volunteer for kitchen work, the idea of being closer to food and the possibility of getting an extra ladle of soup from the bottom of the pot where the precious vegetable peelings usually settled, made him forget the older prisoner’s admonition. He was already lining up with the other volunteers when his mentor yanked him away from the group.

  ‘Remember what I told you? Never trust their promises!’ Fred was angry that this interference had deprived him of extra food, but the following morning the camp was buzzing with news. ‘Those hundred guys went up the chimney last night,’ someone told him.

  Fred dragged himself from one endless day to the next. There was no hope, no faith and no God, and yet in the depths of his being he discovered the stubbornness to endure the dismal existence and deprive his tormentors of victory. But his grip on life was about to be severely tested. One Saturday in the summer of 1944, Dr Mengele pointed his well-manicured finger at Fred and before he had time to realise what was happening, the Kapos had hauled him off to the most dreaded barracks of all: Block 24, where the medical experiments were conducted.

  They pumped fluid into his stomach, rubbed him all over with some foul-smelling liquid and poured kerosene down his gagging throat. Six men held him down while the surgeon started to slice open his groin without anaesthetic of any kind. Unable to move or make a sound as they cut him up in the name of medical science, Fred was in agony, remaining completely conscious throughout the torture. When the butchers of Auschwitz had completed their surgery, they rubbed some chemical into the raw wound and left. Three days later, when the incision had begun to heal, they returned, ripped his flesh open and injected him with a different chemical.

  The experiment was devised ostensibly to find a swift method of healing wounds. Ever since the disastrous German campaign in Russia the previous year, when the Wehrmacht lost over 600,000 men, it was obvious to everyone except Hitler that Germany had lost the war, but he continued to send young soldiers on their hopeless mission. As the German losses increased, it became essential to discover some way of making soldiers recover from their wounds so that they could return to the front quickly. The inexhaustible supply of expendable Jewish prisoners made them ideal subjects for sadistic experiments which, it was later revealed, had served no purpose whatsoever as the doctors usually fudged the results.

  As Fred’s gehenna continued, he lost track of time. Lying nearby, other victims were yelling, screaming or moaning. All around them hung the indefinable scent of terror which was more palpable than the metallic smell of blood or the putrid stink of pus. Pain that no one would alleviate seared Fred’s body day and night and he wished he could die. On a freezing November day, when the guard wasn’t looking, he stole a sharp knife, concealed it in the bunk and sliced his wrists. As dizziness overtook him and consciousness slipped away, he waited for death to bring him peace at last. But
when he opened his eyes and looked around, he realised with a shock that he was still alive. In that moment of epiphany, Fred knew that he was meant to survive and with that knowledge came a surge of strength.

  Even though it was already January 1945, Fred still needed a great deal of strength to survive the last few months of the war. With the Russians advancing, the Germans were determined to erase all evidence of their crimes. After killing off those who were too ill to walk, they proceeded to herd the rest across Poland and into Germany, five abreast. Fred had typhus and infected wounds and some of his fellow inmates, who themselves were dying, placed him on a makeshift trolley which they pulled along the frozen road in the snow. When they reached Gleiwitz in Silesia, they were pushed into open cattle cars. By the time they arrived at Nordhausen in Germany, Fred’s hearing had been irreparably damaged by the frost. The bodies of those who had frozen to the sides of the waggon or had starved to death were flung over the side.

  As they were taken through the town to a small camp near the Luftwaffe airport, German civilians hurled stones and clods of dirt at them, called them dirty Jews and blamed them for the war. It soon became clear that they had been sent to this camp to die. Fred’s job was to pick up all the dead bodies in the morning. He would load them onto trucks bound for the crematorium at the nearby Dora concentration camp, where the Germans made V1 and V2 rockets beneath the mountain.

  Although these missiles were meant to attack England, few of them ever reached their target because the prisoners sabotaged them. Whenever the rockets failed in their mission, the Germans would hang 200 or 250 prisoners in reprisal. It was already March, they were given very little food, and hangings and floggings continued unabated. Those who became ill were dragged into a green-painted truck that was a mobile gas chamber.

  Just when Fred thought he had seen and experienced every type of abuse and degradation, in the last weeks of the war at Nordhausen he witnessed cannibalism. Maddened with hunger, some prisoners cut up the bodies of those who had starved to death, but occasionally they administered the coup de grâce to the dying themselves, with a blow to the head. Fred watched as they lit a fire, put the pieces of stringy flesh on a stick and cooked them. He wondered if the following day they would be cutting him up, because he was too weak to defend himself. But no matter how ravenous he was, he never took part in these ghoulish meals. It offended his sense of human dignity.

  By early April, the American army was coming closer and the sky was black with planes flying to Magdeburg or Dresden. During the bombing of Nordhausen, Allied planes hit the concentration camp by mistake and killed about 2500 prisoners who had survived the Nazi atrocities. When the bombardment ceased twenty-four hours later, Fred lay seriously wounded under the rubble of a collapsed building. Crawling out on his hands and knees, he was caught by a German, beaten up and left to die.

  Two days later, he managed to escape. Staggering like a zombie, frozen to the marrow, injured and starving, he kept moving towards the town until he saw a green helmet and a rifle in front of him. Panic-stricken, he raised his arms and waited. When he realised that it was an American soldier, he collapsed. In the bushes behind them, about thirty Nazi soldiers were tearing off their uniforms and feverishly pulling on stolen civilian clothing.

  When he woke up in a German hospital he did not believe that the Nazis had lost the war and did not trust the young German doctor who wore black jackboots under his long white coat. Several months later, when he was discharged from the hospital, he ran into an inmate who had also escaped from Nordhausen. The man looked at him as though he’d seen a ghost. ‘Fred, you’re alive!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘I may not look it but I am,’ Fred replied.

  ‘We held a funeral for you!’ his friend said. ‘After the camp was bombed, we assumed that you’d been killed with the others. Forty people came to your funeral!’

  When General Eisenhower entered the camp, he ordered the townspeople to clean it up and bury the bodies in a mass grave before they were issued with ration cards. Fred stayed in Nordhausen for three months but after it was turned over to the Russians, he moved back to Berlin to search for his family. Not knowing that his parents had been killed, he kept waiting for them to find him.

  In Berlin he joined the American Military Police and searched for former concentration camp guards. Some of them had obtained false papers from Jews they had killed and tried to get into the DP camps. One guard he picked up said, ‘You know what Germany needs? Ten thousand Jews to come back and build the country up again!’

  Another told him, ‘Next time we’ll be smarter, we won’t leave so much evidence behind!’ Some guards were bashed or killed by survivors, but Fred could not get over his horror of them and refused to touch them. Besides, he had faith in the democratic process of the Nuremburg trials, which he was invited to attend. It was a triumphant moment, to know that he had outlived his tormentors and was able to help convict the war criminals. Only the top twenty Nazis were on trial, but Fred had a profound sense of satisfaction at seeing Goering and Hess marched into court. And it gave him particular pleasure to note that some of the American soldiers escorting them were black.

  Although he was disappointed that Goering eluded justice by committing suicide, and that thousands of perpetrators were still at large, he felt that the trial vindicated democracy.

  Now, as he twirled his sweetheart Magda around the deck in a tango, Fred recalled a very different dance he had attended shortly before leaving Berlin to board the Derna. He was chatting with some friends in a nightclub run by the Americans, when an attractive young woman came over, addressed him by name and asked him to dance. With a shock he recognised her as Irmgard Hauser, who had lived next door to him before the war. Like other German youngsters, she had joined the Hitler Youth and relished using her power to torment and humiliate Fred. When he declined her offer to dance, she looked brazenly at him and said, ‘Maybe you can help me find an American so I can migrate to the United States?’ Fred slapped her across the face and walked out, feeling better than he had felt for a long time.

  His dancing partner on the Derna did not know what nightmares his smiling face and witty comments concealed. But Magda had nightmares of her own, as the blue number tattooed on her forearm revealed. Esther Fiszman was taking a rare stroll around the deck with Sam. Attracted by the happy sound of young voices singing to the accompaniment of a guitar, she drew closer, then stopped and stared. Sitting there was a young woman she recognised. Recalling their reunion many years later, Esther said: ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was Magda, who had looked after me in Auschwitz when I was ill. If she hadn’t hidden me in the camp laundry when I caught typhus, I would have been killed. I was very grateful to her, but after we were liberated, I never expected to see her again. Seeing her on board was incredible.’

  But like most concenration camp survivors, Magda was determined to put the past behind her. The tattooed number that was the legacy of the camps belonged to a world that they had left behind, along with the ashes of their parents and the humiliation, terror and pain they had locked away and marked ‘never to be opened’.

  There were no words, when it was all over, to describe what they had seen and suffered. No language could express what you felt when you saw your mother and little sister led away, to emerge as sweetish smoke from a tall black chimney. No words to explain how it felt to be forced to watch young boys having a noose slipped over their thin necks, or to see young women tortured and humiliated in public. To survive, you were forced to sort the clothes of the dead or cart people from the gas chambers to the crematoria, even when you could detect a faint pulse threading beneath the bluish skin. The shame you felt because you hadn’t been able to stand the gnawing pain of hunger and became a Kapo’s favourite for an extra piece of bread.

  And if they were willing to talk, who would want to know the hideous way the Nazis had redefined human nature, the depths to which human beings could sink, and how easily apparently normal people could become mo
nsters of cruelty? They were the messengers who had returned from hell, and their message was that those in charge were not devils with horns, but people whose ordinariness was their most chilling characteristic. If they’d been willing to examine the meaning of their own survival, they would have realised that it also illustrated the strength of the human spirit to endure and triumph over evil, but to find the strength to face the future they had to refrain from looking back.

  Yvonne Engel had a softness and vulnerability that everyone responded to. Plump and affectionate, she was a girl everyone felt comfortable with. Which words could she use to describe what it had been like for her, when, at the age of twelve in Auschwitz, she had been pushed into the gas chamber? Naked, trembling, her thick hair shaved off, she was squeezed among screaming, terrified women and children, waiting for the gas to be piped through the ceiling and knowing that this would be the last place she would ever see.

  Suddenly the door had opened and she was pushed from death into life because the usually efficient killing system had broken down. For once, Zyklon B had failed to blow through the vents.

  No one guessed that Bob Grunschlag, who appeared so strong and confident, fought with the demons of the past every night and woke up covered in sweat and terrified of losing control of his bladder. In the nightmares, he was back inside the forest bunker in Poland, maddened by hundreds of lice, or staring at the faces of his dead companions crawling with fat white maggots. Sometimes he was running across the rooftops again to get away from village boys chasing him with pitchforks.

  If André Wayne were to study philology all his life, where could he find the words to convey the anguish he felt when he saw his seventeen-year-old sister sent to the left? She had offered to hold a child for the tired woman next to her, not knowing that women with small children were automatically consigned to the gas chamber.