Holocaust

by Gerald Green

  The Jews working for Kurt Dorf were ordered into a column of twos. They were told they were being taken for delousing, fumigation. A new outbreak of typhus was feared.

  There was a pause. Then the men assembled. Some began to weep. One man fell to his knees and embraced the SS sergeant’s boots.

  “He should not,” my father said. “Let’s at least go with pride.”

  Lowy gulped. “I guess it’s over, doc.”

  “Yes, you and I have had a long journey.”

  “Not exactly a vacation, doc.”

  They were marched off, toward the concrete buildings, the distant chimneys.

  “You’ve been a good friend, Lowy,” my father said. “And I might add, an excellent patient. You always paid your bills on time, and you did little complaining.”

  Lowy blinked back tears. He looked at the guards. “Doc … why don’t we just jump on them? We’ll die anyway. Take a few with us. What’s wrong with us?”

  “We were trained all our lives not to.”

  They walked across the hot, dusty compound, on the road they had helped build. They turned once. The engineer was standing alone, arms folded, watching them.

  “Give me your hand, Lowy,” Papa said.

  “I feel like a kid. First day off to school.”

  My father tried to joke to ease the terror. “Lowy, did you ever have your gall bladder looked after? I’ve been warning you about it for years, ever since you first came to my office on Groningstrasse.”

  “I may have it done this fall.”

  They kept marching. Men stumbled. They knew.

  “A hell of a way for a man to die,” Lowy said.

  Someone behind them called out, “Maybe it’s what they say—just a delousing.”

  Lowy nodded. “Yeah. Delousing.” He looked at his gnarled hands, a printer’s hands. “Dammit. There’s black ink under my nails, doc. Well, maybe the pamphlets helped.”

  “I’m sure they did,” Papa said.

  They were gassed several hours later, with two thousand others.

  In September, Uncle Sasha had gotten word of a trainload of Luftwaffe pilots that was due to pass over a railroad not far from our newest camp. He decided to attempt to blow up the lines and ambush them.

  We had conducted a dozen raids by now, against the Ukrainian militia and the Germans, and we felt this would be our best haul so far. We had lost men, but the family camp had remained intact under his firm leadership. We had more guns than ever, more food. It was amazing how the local farmers, seeing us armed and defiant, learned to respect us.

  Helena insisted on going along. She had been on several raids—against my will—but I was especially worried about her on this one. It was too dangerous. The trains were always heavily armed with machine guns mounted fore and aft.

  Sasha sent me out to tie the dynamite to the railroad ties. It was a terribly hot day. I was soaked through my khaki shirt. In the trees and bushes at the side of the railroad, a dozen partisans, including Helena, Yuri and Nadya, waited.

  I had learned a great deal about explosives. None of these things are hard to learn. What is difficult is getting up the courage to put them into practice. (In Israel, Tamar says, Jews became soldiers overnight. Armed and trained, they made the world forget that they had been frightened ghetto dwellers.)

  Distantly we heard a train whistle.

  “Hurry,” Sasha said.

  “There’s time,” I shouted back. I made sure the dynamite sticks were secure, that the caps were in position. The pounding of the heavy wheels would set them off. As soon as the explosion took place, we would rake the rail cars with automatic fire and grenades. It would be our biggest action to date.

  I made my last knots, then walked into the cover of the foliage, unlimbering my machine pistol.

  Helena stood next to me. She looked small, unprotected. But she too carried a machine pistol, and had grenades draped around her neck.

  “Some necklace,” I said.

  “I’m proud of it.”

  I kissed her cheek. She was frightened. We all were. But we had learned not to show it. We would never plead for mercy. We would die before giving in.

  Uncle Sasha had an ear cocked in the direction from which the train was due. He looked concerned.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I think they’re stopping.”

  We all listened. Beyond a curve in the tracks, there came a sound of chug-chug-chug—an engine locomotive slowing down. Then the sound ended, and the engine seemed to sigh.

  We waited. Seldom had I seen Sasha so upset. He nodded at me. “Rudi, sneak out to the edge and see what’s happening.”

  I crawled on my belly, holding the machine pistol in my cradled arms, and reached the shoulder of the rail line. A few more yards and I could see the locomotive. It had stopped.

  On the roof of the first car was a machine gun with a crew. They were standing, looking about. The train was a good fifty yards from the explosive charges I had set. Something had aroused their suspicions. Maybe it was just a security measure—they knew there were partisans in the area.

  Then I saw a half-dozen soldiers come out of the train, all in combat gear. They began to walk slowly down the track, while the train remained stationary.

  I crawled back to Sasha and the others.

  “They’re sending men out,” I whispered.

  Sasha frowned. “They’ve been tipped. Let’s clear out, as fast as we can.”

  “We can take them,” I said. “Ambush them. Let them come.”

  “No. Only when we have an advantage. They’ll kill us with those heavy machine guns. Everyone move off.”

  We started through the woods.

  Evidently the Germans suspected something, for we could hear orders being barked out, men running along the gravel shoulder. The train also edged up, but did not reach the explosives.

  Then, without warning, the machine gun opened fire.

  Twigs and branches split and cracked around us.

  “Scatter!” Uncle Sasha shouted.

  I grabbed Helena’s arm and we raced through the forest. Branches cracked at our face, clutched at our clothing. I wanted to turn and fire, to try to stop them, for I could hear them behind us—boots pounding, shouts in German, cracks of their rifles, louder bursts from the mounted gun.

  And suddenly Helena was hit. She fell without a word, still holding my hand.

  I stopped and kneeled oyer her. Her face was calm, pale. There was no agony on it. The bullets had entered-her back and killed her instantly. She lay there, looking tinier than ever, more beautiful, and I buried my face on her breast.

  Why they did not shoot me down also, I do not know. A rifle butt smashed against my head and I was unconscious.

  Some of our band had escaped. Four, including Yuri and Helena, were killed. Two other young men and I—again for reasons that elude me—were marched to a collecting point for Red Army prisoners.

  The usual rule on partisans was to shoot them on sight. But perhaps they planned to torture us and get information on the entire partisan movement.

  We were not fed, given just enough water to keep us from dying of thirst, and then, unexpectedly, with a great rush of action and orders, we were herded aboard a cattle car.

  I huddled in a corner, and I felt I was being transported to my death. Perhaps I had cheated death long enough. I thought of Helena dying silently under the fusillade of bullets. She had wanted to come on a raid so that we could die together. Now she was gone; I lived. I felt guilty, miserable, unworthy. I should have argued her out of her foolish desire. I wept for a long time as I squatted in the rattling, noisy wagon. The trip was interminable. One of the men said we were going to Poland. He had seen road signs.

  That made me certain that we were to be killed. Perhaps worked as slave laborers for a while.

  Finally the train was unloaded at a town called Sobibor. We were walked for a mile or so to a concentration camp—barbed wire hung on concrete pillars, floodl
ights, a high fence, dogs, sentries. A bleak, dreadful place. Chimneys smoked in the distance. A death camp.

  Eventually, I was assigned to a barracks, where I climbed into a bunk and fell into a long, nightmarish sleep. I dreamed of my boyhood in Berlin, the games I’d played—and it was a time of terror and defeat in my mind. When I awakened, I expected Helena to be at my side, as she had been for years. I may have even called her name. But I cried no more. A great hole had grown inside me, eaten at my emotions, my heart. She was dead. Our cause was a lost one. I would never see Sasha or my partisan friends again.

  The barracks was crowded, hot, malodorous. Surprisingly, it was very quiet. Some men were speaking softly in Russian, and I caught a word here and there. I pretended to be sleeping, turned, and saw five or six rugged-looking men in tattered army uniforms sitting on a bunk. They were looking at a drawing on top of a box.

  One man stood between them and me, evidently appointed to keep an eye on me.

  “Mine field,” I heard him say. “Here. Here.”

  I had learned a good deal of Russian in my days with the partisans and from Helena. Again, I listened.

  “Barbed wire, double strands,” the man was saying. “We might need wire cutters.”

  Another man asked, “What about the SS barracks? The guns on the water tower?”

  “We’ll have to knock them out,” the other man said.

  I soon gathered that the man in charge was a Red Army captain. His name was Barski. The man who spoke to him, his lieutenant, was named Vanya.

  This Vanya suddenly said, “Captain Barski, we don’t have a single gun.”

  “We will get them.”

  I raised myself on one elbow. The bunk creaked. The man watching me said something to the others.

  Vanya said, “The bastard, he’s awake and he’s been listening.”

  He came over to the bunk and pulled me down. I struggled. We almost came to blows. Others separated us.

  “Keep your hands off me,” I said in bad Russian.

  Vanya tried to punch me in the stomach. I parried the blow and went for him again. He and some others shoved me to a lower berth.

  “What did you just hear?” Captain Barski asked.

  “I didn’t understand it. I’m a German Jew. My Russian isn’t that good.”

  Barski switched to Yiddish—close enough to German so that we could talk. “Go on, what do you think we were talking about?”

  “It sounds like you’re going to break out.”

  Vanya shook his head. “He’s a goddam spy, Barski,” he said. “The SS planted him here. German Jew, hell.”

  Barski tapped my shoulder. “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Weiss. Rudi Weiss.”

  “What the hell are you doing here in Sobibor?”

  “Sobibor? I don’t know. I was on a train with a bunch of other prisoners. I was a partisan in the Ukraine.”

  They looked at one another. Barski sat down opposite me. “Listen to me, Weiss, if that’s your name. If you’re a spy, we’ll have to kill you. This is a death camp. There’s a gas chamber here, furnaces. We’re getting out. If the Germans put you here to spy on us, I’ll strangle you myself.”

  So I told them my story—running away from Berlin years ago, wandering across Europe, Czechoslovakia, the Ukraine. When I got to the part about joining Uncle Sasha, Barski’s eyes brightened.

  “What did he do before he became a partisan?” the Red Army captain asked.

  “He was a doctor. In a village called Koretz.”

  He asked me more questions—who were some other members of the band, was there a rabbi with them. My answers appeared to satisfy him. I told him of some of the actions I had fought in—the attack on the SS headquarters, other assaults.

  When I’d finished, he looked at the others. “I believe him,” Barski said. “It sounds crazy, a guy from Berlin, a German Jew fighting down here, but crazier things have happened.”

  “I say kill him,” Vanya said.

  But Barski was convinced. He shook his head. “Listen, Weiss, you know what happens in this camp? They gas two thousand a day. The SS men sleep on pillows stuffed with the hair from the Jewish women they murder. They have their fun knocking out the brains of Jewish children. There’s a field outside, three feet deep—ashes of the Jews.”

  I nodded. “I believe it. I believe anything about them. Just get me a gun. I’ll fight with you.”

  Erik Dorf’s Diary

  Posen, Poland

  October 1943

  The Reichsführer called a meeting of about a hundred officers involved in the final solution.

  We met in the lobby of a hotel, here in Posen. A lot of my old colleagues were present—friends and enemies. Among the group, Blobel, Ohlendorf, Eichmann, Hoess.

  In the old days I would be right at Heydrich’s side, notebook in hand. Alas, Kaltenbrunner didn’t want me that close to him. The ogre sat to one side of Himmler, listening. I sat somewhat at the rear of the room. More and more, I find a need for large doses of cognac to get through the day. I also find my mind less able to concentrate on important matters. Long noted for my detail work, I know I am becoming forgetful, sloppy.

  Blobel was bragging about his work at Babi Yar. All the bodies (so he claimed) had been dug up and burned. Vast pyres of railroad ties soaked with gasoline had been used to, as someone put it, “burn the evidence.”

  But why? I wonder to myself. Why bother?

  Blobel reported that over 100,000 corpses had been disposed of. Then Eichman did some boasting about his trains. Hoess talked, modestly and quietly, about the functioning of Auschwitz.

  Himmler kept asking if these things were being done “secretly.” He seemed more concerned than ever that the outside world not know of our work of the past few years. And yet, when one officer suggested we halt the exterminations so that Jewish labor could be used, he was silenced at once—by Reichsführer Himmler himself.

  It was stuffy and hot in the hotel lobby. Most of us were weary. We wondered why Himmler had called us together.

  Someone else—possibly Globocnik—requested a dozen Iron Crosses for his men, for their heroic work in ridding eastern Europe of Jews, Himmler liked the notion. He had already given out numerous decorations for officers involved in the crushing of the Warsaw rebellion.

  More business was discussed. Blobel, sitting with Ohlendorf not far from me, nudged the latter in the ribs and said, loud enough for me to hear, “Silence from the Great Dorf.”

  “Maybe he’s turned yellow,” Ohlendorf said. But he nodded at me. A very polite, educated fellow. He freely speaks about his killing of ninety thousand Jews in the Odessa area.

  Suddenly—out of the blue—Himmler asked, “May I ask that all of you submit suggestions on the eventual dismantling of the camps?”

  “Dismantling?” asked Blobel.

  “Yes,” the Reichsführer said. “Our job is all but done. I … I am not suggesting Germany will be defeated, of course. But the evidence, the remains will lead to misunderstandings.”

  “I don’t think so, sir,” I said. My voice was emboldened by the half-bottle of brandy I’d consumed.

  “Dorf? Ah, our resident semanticist.” Himmler smiled at me.

  “Perhaps we should let the camps and the furnaces stand,” I said, “as a fitting memorial to our great work.” The alcohol loosened my tongue. “Perhaps we should tell the world how we achieved—”

  Blobel grabbed my arm. “Shut up, Dorf.”

  They all looked away from me. It was odd. I noticed that a small recording machine was on the table and was operating.

  Himmler ignored my interruption, and began to speak again. “I must talk to you frankly about a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly and yet we will never talk of it publicly. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race.”

  Obviously it had been on his mind a long time.

  “It is one of the things it is easy to talk about,” Himm
ler rambled on. His tiny eyes seemed to vanish behind the pince-nez. “The Jewish race is being exterminated, and it is quite clear it is in our program, elimination of the Jews. And we are doing it, exterminating them.”

  In a way, it was refreshing. After all the wordplay, the euphemisms, the code words (many of which I created), it was almost exhilarating, cleansing, to hear our leader come out with it. And still the recording apparatus spun.

  He went on to be critical of those Germans who knew “a good Jew” or who would ask that a Jew be spared. “Not one of those who talk this way has witnessed it,” he said, “not one of them has been through it. Most of you know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time to have remained decent men, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.”

  What his speech meant to him personally, or to us, I am not sure. I am certain that the annihilation process will be speeded up. But his insistence on secrecy, on the possibility of a plan for dismantling the death camps, bothers me.

  I stumbled to my feet and asked to be heard. There was such total silence in the room, from these officers who had murdered—four million souls? five?—that I was able to command their attention.

  “Permit me to say, Reichsführer,” I said, “that if our work is truly that noble, we should advertise it to the world.”

  “Quiet, you damn fool,” Blobel growled.

  “I believe the major misunderstands me,” Himmler said.

  “If I may, sir,” I went on. “The Führer has pointed out many times that we are performing a service for western civilization, for Christianity. We are defending the west against Bolshevism. As for Jews, even our great religious figure Luther saw them as menaces.”

  “Oh, I quite agree, Major,” the Reichsführer said. “But others will not see our aims as clearly. And the Jews will lie about us.”

  “Let them,” I said. “Let them. Those who are left. But I say we should flood the world with film, photographs, affidavits, lists of the dead, testimony. Let us build working models of Hoess’ Auschwitz, let us tell the world every last detail about our heroic deeds. And let us insist to all that what we did to the Jews was a moral and racial necessity! Surely the western Allies will appreciate that.”