The war was still not over for about a week. My company, together with other units, was ordered to move out in pursuit of German troops that had retreated from Berlin. That day or a day later, we reached the edge of a forest. A whole German division was apparently dug in at that forest. Although they outnumbered us, their commanders were willing to negotiate an orderly surrender. The negotiations continued through much of the night. By morning, what had been expected to be a major surrender resulted in the capture of only the German officers who had taken part in the negotiations. The rest of the German division had simply vanished into thin air. After leaving the area around Berlin, we would from time to time run into groups of German soldiers who would surrender to us without putting up any resistance. It was quite an exhilarating experience for me to see German officers tremble in fear in front of us, when only months earlier they had inspired fear in all who had to appear before them.
A few days later, we learned that Germany had surrendered. The celebrations were even wilder than those that took place when we heard that Berlin had capitulated. The shooting and drinking continued for hours, into the night and even on the next day. The soldiers in my company were singing the Polish national anthem and all kinds of other Polish songs I had never heard before. Every so often, someone would raise his glass or bottle and drink to Poland and to the victorious Allied armies. Some soldiers stood around in small groups and spoke of home and of their families in Poland; others, with tears in their eyes, kept saying that they never thought they would live to see the end of the war and the defeat of Germany.
I was not sure whether to be happy or sad. Of course, I was happy that the war was over and that we had been liberated. But when the soldiers spoke of their families and of home, I was reminded that I did not know where my home was. I had no home without my parents, and I did not know where they were. I was sure that if I had survived, they must have survived too and that they would find me! In the meantime, my company was my home. But what would happen to me when all the soldiers went home? I decided that there would be time enough to answer that question, and for all I knew, it might never present itself since I was sure my parents would find me before the army was disbanded.
I had a wonderful time as we moved through Germany after its capitulation. Along the way, some soldiers from my company had come upon what remained of a German circus. There they found a beautiful pony and a miniature cart. They brought both to me, and one of the soldiers told me, “We liberated it for you. It needed a good Polish home.” Now I spent many hours combing and feeding my new companion. I would ride the pony for fun, but when the company had to move, I would sit behind my pony in my little cart and follow the horse-drawn wagons that were carrying our supplies. Along the way, soldiers from other companies would wave and shout to me as we passed. Before I got the pony, I had also acquired a small pistol of the type that women would carry in their handbags. I think it was my shoemaker friend who gave it to me. Since he had warned me that the five bullets in the magazine were the only ammunition he had been able to find for the gun, I shot it only once in order to find out whether the gun really worked. It did. From then on, I carried the pistol very proudly in a holster the shoemaker had made for me and polished it often.
We moved at a much slower pace through Germany after its capitulation than before, and we stayed for days in different towns. Many of the houses were empty, since their owners had fled in advance of the arrival of Soviet troops. We basically had the run of these towns. Some of the soldiers from my company amused themselves by breaking windows in the houses and causing all kinds of other damage. Encouraging me to follow their example, the soldiers would tell me that the Germans deserved that and more for all the suffering they had caused in Poland.
I did not see much excitement in breaking windows and preferred to play or to ride my pony whenever we stopped in a town for a few days. But one day a young soldier invited me to come along with him for some good fun. With his pepeshka submachine gun slung over his shoulder — this was a gun with a round magazine that almost all the Soviet and Polish soldiers used at the time — he guided me to a narrow street and pointed to the telephone poles lining the road. “See those white porcelain cups with the electric wires wound around them?” he asked. “We are going to try to shoot them down,” he said, as he clicked a lever on the gun so that it would shoot only one bullet at a time. He had many misses but also some hits. When hit, the porcelain would shatter on the sidewalk, adding to the noise the pepeshka made. After a while, he handed me the gun. First, he had me aim it at a nearby fence “to give me a feel for the gun.” It was not very heavy, and the round magazine seemed to help steady it. I had no trouble hitting the fence, but it took me a while to hit the targets on the telephone poles. I got the hang of it after a while. From then on, my friend and I would go hunting for these porcelain cups whenever we came to a new town. To this day, whenever I see telephone poles with porcelain cups, I recall, not without some shame, my acts of vandalism of long ago and feel a suppressed yearning to try it at least one more time.
Our meandering through Germany came to an end when my company, with all its equipment, was ordered to embark a train to Poland. The train stopped many times as we traveled, frequently alongside trains crowded with Soviet troops. We would then all get off our train and engage in friendly banter with the Russians. Poles and Russians would trade in all types of “liberated” items. The Russians would display their “czassy” (watches) — they would proudly show off four or five watches on each arm — and offer to trade some of them for other watches or jewelry. They seemed fascinated by what made watches tick. I remember one of them putting a watch under the wheel of a railroad car, while the train was being shunted about, to see what would happen to the watch when the car had gone over it. Everybody cheered when he retrieved the flattened watch and ceremoniously displayed the shattered pieces to us.
There were more cheers and much rejoicing when the train crossed into Poland. Our destination was a military garrison in the Polish city of Siedlce. There I shared quarters with a group of men from my company. The soldiers played a lot of soccer and cards as they waited to be demobilized and allowed to return to private life. There was also a lot of goofing around. A frequent pastime consisted of waiting until some unsuspecting soldier entered one of the outdoor privies near one of the barracks. A few soldiers then materialized out of nowhere, lifted the privy off its hole, and tipped the wooden structure on its side with the poor victim screaming and swearing.
At the garrison in Siedlce, I started to spend more and more time with a young soldier in my company who was Jewish. Over the years, I have forgotten the names of many people, but the name I most regret not remembering is that of this young soldier, although I still have the photograph he gave me of the two of us in our uniforms. While I imagine that many of the soldiers in my company guessed that I was Jewish, I kept that information to myself for fear, probably unjustified, that they would no longer treat me as one of their own. I did, however, tell my friend but asked him not to let the other soldiers know. Whenever we talked, he kept asking me what I planned to do in the future. Of course, I had no idea. I had not really thought about it, probably because I expected my parents to find me any day soon. He kept shaking his head, very delicately, trying to make me realize that it would take them a long time to find me, assuming that they were still alive.
Thomas Buergenthal (left) in a tailormade Polish Army uniform,with the soldier who took him to the orphanage, 1945
One day he let me know that he had to go away for a few days. He returned from his trip very excited and told me that he had found a wonderful Jewish orphanage in Otwock, near Warsaw. He had told the director about me, and she indicated that I would be most welcome to stay there until I found my parents. I would love it there, my friend assured me; I would meet many children my age who had also survived the war. Besides, our company commander had told him that a military garrison was not really the right place for an eleven-year-old
boy.
A few days later my friend and I were on a train bound for Otwock.
CHAPTER 8
Waiting to Be Found
THE JEWISH ORPHANAGE OF OTWOCK WAS HOUSED in a white, longish, rectangular, two-story building, with a big front yard and a garden in the back. Surrounding it all was a thick pine forest where mushrooms, blueberries, and wild strawberries grew in abundance. A narrow paved road led to the orphanage from the town of Otwock. The orphanage could also be reached by walking through the forest along some well-trodden paths. Before the Second World War, Otwock was a well-known resort with many sanitariums where people suffering from tuberculosis could stay. Some of these facilities, converted to other uses during the war, lined one side of the road leading to the orphanage.
For me, the Jewish orphanage served as a halfway point from one life to another. It was here that I underwent a gradual transformation from being a perennially frightened and hungry camp inmate struggling to survive to an eleven-year-old child with a relatively normal life. I enjoyed almost every minute of my stay at the orphanage, although there were moments when I looked back with nostalgia on the adventure-filled life I had in the Polish army and wished I still had my pony with me.
The orphanage housed teenage boys and girls, as well as some younger children, separated into different groups. I was placed with the oldest group of boys. Here I was the youngest among some fifteen to twenty boys, which made me feel very important. Not all the children in the orphanage were real orphans. Some still had one or both parents. These children had been temporarily placed in the orphanage while their parents sought to reestablish their lives or were still abroad. I was among those whose parents, as far as we knew, had been killed during the war. We were the real orphans and saw ourselves as the orphanage’s tough guys, lording it over the other kids. In some perverse way, our attitude resembled that of hardened criminals or “lifers” in a prison who take pride in their status. At the same time, of course, I continued to believe, without telling anyone, that my parents were alive and would find me one day soon.
The vast majority of children in the orphanage had been hidden during the war by Polish families or in convents. During that period, some of them lived under terribly difficult conditions. One girl, Tamara, who was my age, spent more than two years hiding in the low attic of a house. There was no room in that attic for her to walk or even to stand up. By the time she was liberated, her legs had become seriously deformed. Other children and their parents had managed to obtain false identification papers. This enabled them to pass themselves off as Poles in various towns and villages around the country, though they lived in constant fear of being denounced to the Germans. Some of these children were left to fend for themselves when their parents were caught in SS raids. Among the older kids, there were also some survivors of different German work camps. Each of us had a story to tell that was more horrendous than the next, but we rarely, if ever, talked about our past, although my friends loved to hear me regale them with tales of my life in the Polish army.
Since I was the only one in the orphanage who had survived Auschwitz, our administrators publicized this fact. As a result, I was frequently interviewed by journalists and trotted out to meet important visitors. I even appeared occasionally in the newsreels that were shown in Polish movie houses in those pretelevision days. From time to time, we were also visited by representatives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the “Joint,” as it was known), the organization that, I believe, was the orphanage’s main benefactor.
We were treated very well in the orphanage. When I first arrived, I was examined by a doctor who decided that I was too thin for my age and needed to be put on a special dietary regimen to gain weight. For quite some time thereafter, my breakfast, in addition to the standard bread and boiled eggs, consisted of a bowl of light cream into which I usually stirred strawberry jam or orange marmalade. Some kids who were on this special diet did not like the cream we were served. Since I loved it, I frequently traded my eggs for their cream. Never before had I eaten so well! There were moments when, on seeing all that wonderful food in front of me, I felt sure that it was all a dream and that, instead of the white cream I thought I saw, I would wake up and look down on the snow we ate on the Auschwitz Death Transport. In the late summer or fall, when the mushrooms in our forest were bursting out of the ground, our cook would send us out to gather them for her. For the next few days, we could count on wonderful mushroom soup or some special mushroom dishes. I thought I was in heaven.
When I arrived at the orphanage, I did not know how to read or write, apart from what my parents had tried to teach me surreptitiously in Kielce. I am quite sure, though, that I must have received some individual instruction from one of our counselors before I was sent to the nearby Polish grade school attended by the other kids from the orphanage. Curiously enough, I remember almost nothing about that school, how long I was there, what grade I was in, or what I learned. It may well be that I was there for only a brief period of time. But a couple of things stand out in my mind from my time at that school: the big crucifix that hung above the blackboard, and the daily prayer our Polish classmates intoned every morning while crossing themselves. Even though I did not participate in this exercise and was quite uncomfortable just standing there, I soon learned the words by heart and can to this day still recite them in Polish.
I also still remember the day I dunked one of Tamara’s braids — she sat in front of me — into the ink pot on my desk. She gave me a terribly nasty look but said nothing to our Polish teacher. Instead, she reported me to the head counselor when we returned to the orphanage. A few days later, I was made to appear before an honors tribunal composed of some older kids. As punishment, the tribunal sentenced me to carry Tamara’s books to and from school for a period of two weeks and to perform any other chores she cared to assign to me. That led to our becoming inseparable friends and, after a while, she even volunteered to mend my socks.
Much of our free time in the orphanage was spent on sports. It soon became apparent that, despite the amputation of my two toes, I could run very fast, and I gradually developed into a good soccer player. Since I could kick equally well with my left or right foot, I was able to play a number of different positions. As a result, I was always among the first kids chosen when the two best players of the orphanage selected their teams. In the orphanage I also learned to play table tennis, which was a big sport there, and after a while I could beat many of those who had taught me the game. At some point during my stay there, the orphanage created a boy scout team. Although we were still waiting for proper uniforms by the time I left, I very much enjoyed the activities we performed as scouts.
In the evenings, particularly on weekdays and after the Sabbath services, Polish and Jewish books would be read aloud. At times too, some of the kids would put on musical recitals. I remember that one of the older boys played the piano very well, while others sang or performed some other musical instrument. I soon learned, to my great regret, that I lacked all musical talent and could not even carry a tune.
From time to time, some of us older kids would be taken on excursions outside of Otwock or be allowed to travel as a group by ourselves. Once we were given permission to take the train to Warsaw, a mere twenty kilometers from Otwock. The occasion for our trip was the reopening of the main bridge over the Vistula River connecting Warsaw and its Praga suburb, which had been destroyed during the war. We had been given money for our tickets, and when we reached the station, somebody suggested that I buy the tickets, since I was the youngest and could claim that we were all under either ten or twelve, whichever the cutoff age was. When I got to the ticket window, I made myself shorter than I was and got the reduced-price tickets. We spent the extra money on candy and felt really proud of ourselves.
We grew vegetables in the garden behind the orphanage, and if we wished, we were assigned a small plot for individual cultivation. We grew cucumbers, carrots, beans, cabbages, and tomatoes. I love
d working in my little garden, particularly after one of the kids showed me how to change the shape of a cucumber by putting the still-small plant into a bottle. After following his instructions, I would faithfully inspect my bottled cucumber every morning to see what was happening to it. My experiment did not turn out the way I had hoped because when I tried to get the ripe but deformed cucumber out of the bottle, I mutilated it.
To one side of our building, near the garden, the beekeeper kept a row of beehives. Fascinated by what he was doing, I volunteered to help him one day. He instructed me on what to do, and, after donning the protective net he handed me, I tried to operate the bellows used to smoke out the bees so the beekeeper could remove the honey. As I struggled unsuccessfully to make the bellows work, I began to get stung on my gloveless hands and decided to run despite the beekeeper’s warnings to stand still. The beehives must have been located some twenty meters from the orphanage building, and as I tried to outrun the bees, whole swarms began to follow me. With my protective net no longer in place, I was being stung all over my face and neck. I made it to the building and slammed the door shut, leaving most but not all of the bees behind. The nurse I went to see later said that I was very lucky, because had I been allergic to bee stings, I might well have died. As it was, I was in considerable pain for a number of days with my swollen hands, face, and neck. I never again went near the beehives.
One day two of my friends found a handgun in the forest, and they told me about it because, as they put it, I knew “how to handle guns.” They had buried the gun near a tree and wanted me to look at it in order to see whether it worked. The three of us went into the forest, and my friends dug out the gun. I inspected it with all the apparent expertise I could muster for their benefit. It was quite dirty and even rusty in places, and I wondered whether it would work. What to do? Here we faced a real dilemma, for there was only one bullet in the magazine: if we tested the gun to see whether it worked, we would end up with a gun but no ammunition; if we decided to save our only bullet, however, we would always wonder whether the gun worked. Eventually, our curiosity got the better of us, and we convinced ourselves that at some future time we would be able to acquire the needed ammunition. Since I had bragged to all willing to listen that I had lots of experience shooting guns, my friends decided that I should be the one to try it out. I was not happy about this decision because I had been told by those who gave me my little gun in the Polish army that a dirty, rusty gun might explode when used. When it appeared that I had no choice but to demonstrate my expertise with guns, I asked my friends to stand some distance behind me as I proceeded to aim the gun at a big tree a few meters away. I pulled the trigger, and the gun went off with a big bang, emitting a great deal of smoke. But I was still standing, gun in hand and uninjured. We decided to rebury the gun after wrapping it in some cloth. We had planned to come back a few days later with bicycle oil or butter to clean the gun. In the meantime, though, Polish government placards appeared all over town, some of them nailed to trees near the orphanage, calling on the population to turn in all weapons. My two friends and I debated what to do with our buried gun and decided to leave it where it was. It is probably still there.
A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy Page 11
