Outrage bkamc-23

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Butch had joined her at the door by the time the elevator across the hall opened to reveal the Sobelmans. They were a cute couple. Neither was much over five feet tall, though the man had a couple of inches on his wife. He had gray eyes and a full head of kinky gray hair that looked like steel wool with two large ears protruding from it; her curly hair was ginger colored and framed an elfin face with merry blue eyes. Although they were both in their eighties, they were still spry and stepped lightly out of the elevator to hug their hosts.

  Moishe was holding a bag from their bakery on the corner of Third Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street, Il Buon Pane. “You need me to take that for you,” Butch said, reaching for the bag. But Moishe pulled it away from his reach.

  “Not so fast, my friend,” he said. “I want to make sure this arrives in the kitchen safe and unmolested.”

  “Then come in, come in,” Marlene said, laughing as her husband chuckled and beamed at their guests.

  The Sobelmans entered the living room, where they met Lucy and were soon joined by the twins. As they all greeted one another, Moishe surrendered his jacket to Butch, but Goldie kept hers on. The women were going to a new impressionist exhibit at the Frick Museum on Fifth Avenue while “the men” talked.

  As the women prepared to leave, Moishe’s hands made the sign language symbols for “I love you” to his wife. Also a concentration camp survivor who had been “experimented on” by Nazi doctors, Goldie had not spoken for more than sixty years, although there was nothing physically wrong with her. She had said her first words in that time only recently, as the assassin Nadya Malovo prepared to shoot Moishe-part of her plan to exact revenge on Butch Karp. “Please, child,” she’d begged Malovo, her voice hardly more than a whisper from the self-imposed silence. “If you must shoot, then I beg you, me first. I cannot stand to see him hurt.”

  Although Butch later told Marlene that the last thing he would have expected from Malovo was mercy, the assassin had not shot. In hot pursuit, U.S. Marshal Jen Capers entered the bakery at that moment with her nine-millimeter pointed at Malovo’s head. Although Malovo considered taking out Capers and the Sobelmans in what might have resulted in death to all, she instead gave herself up. Capers, who had lost a partner to Malovo’s treachery, then escorted Malovo to a federal lockup to await trial.

  They had all wondered if having spoken once, Goldie would now continue. But she reverted back to silence and communicated through sign language, which was part of the reason Lucy was going on the excursion. A polyglot who spoke more than sixty languages fluently and parts of a couple dozen more, she was also a master of sign language.

  I love you, too, Goldie signed back to Moishe. Try to be good.

  I’ll do my best, Moishe signed back with a smile as Lucy translated for the others.

  When the door closed behind the women, Karp turned to Moishe. “Why don’t we set up around the kitchen table if that’s okay with you? I think the boys want to record this.”

  Moishe nodded and held up the bag. “But first we celebrate life’s pleasures.”

  The little old man winked at Karp, who laughed. He’d already caught the scent of Sobelman’s specialty, cherry cheese coffee cake, which he deemed to be the best in the five boroughs, and that probably meant the rest of the civilized world, too. “I’ll fetch the plates; boys, you get the forks,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “And make it snappy, my stomach is doing handsprings.”

  It was a half hour later when the four pushed back from the table with contented sighs and full bellies. With reluctance all around, they turned to the darker issue at hand.

  “So, I understand you want me to talk to you about the Sonderkommandos,” Moishe said, looking from one twin to the other. The boys nodded. “I will warn you that this will not be an easy story to tell or to listen to; it may even give you nightmares. But I will tell you the truth because I believe every young Jew should hear it before his bar mitzvah.”

  The old man paused. “Tell me first, what is the significance of the bar mitzvah?”

  “Isn’t it the rite of passage for Jewish males from childhood?” Giancarlo said.

  “And from that point on, we’ll be considered men,” Zak added.

  Moishe smiled. “No ceremony creates a man from a boy,” he said. “A man is defined by his actions. But that is the definition most people would give. However, as your rabbi will undoubtedly tell you out at some point, a bar mitzvah marks the time when a Jewish male is morally responsible for his actions. And in a sense, perhaps, your definition is apt, as to be a man, one must be morally responsible.”

  Moishe took a sip of coffee. “Myself and my family and friends had just celebrated my bar mitzvah in our little town outside of Amsterdam, where my father was a baker, when our world changed forever. For many generations, we Jews were welcome in the Netherlands; indeed, Christian Dutch welcomed twenty-five thousand German Jews who fled their native land ahead of the coming storm in the late 1930s. We thought we were safe.

  “Even when stories began circulating that Jews in Germany were being rounded up and shipped off to ‘relocation camps,’ as the Nazis so euphemistically called them, we still felt safe.”

  Moishe paused and pulled out his wallet, from which he took a small old black-and-white photograph. “This is me with my father, Abraham, my mother, Sarah, and my little sister, Rebecca. It was taken in 1943, shortly before the German occupiers announced that all Dutch Jews were to be relocated.”

  The photograph was passed around until it came back to Moishe, who looked at it longingly for a moment and then replaced it in his wallet. “And you know what the strangest part of all is? We didn’t resist; we went along like so many sheep to the slaughter. People acted as if we were all going on vacation together. Families packed suitcases and dressed in their best traveling clothes. The vacation would last until the war was over, our parents told each other, and then we would all go home.

  “We were sent to a camp near the Polish village and rail station for which it would be named. A quiet place in the country called Sobibor. It was isolated, surrounded by forests and swamps, lightly populated but strategically placed near the large Jewish populations in the Chelm and Lublin districts.

  “Construction of the Sobibor camp had begun in March 1942, and it was a model of German efficiency. It existed on a large rectangle of land, four hundred by six hundred meters in size, that was cleared and surrounded by triple lines of barbed wire fence, three meters high and under the watchful shadows of strategically placed guard towers. Tree branches were intertwined in the fences so that the casual passerby wouldn’t know what he or she was looking at.

  “The camp itself was divided into three areas, each also surrounded by barbed wire fencing and more guard towers. The first was the administrative area closest to the railroad station, with a platform that could accommodate twenty freight cars at a time. It could have been a train station like any other in Europe,” Sobelman recalled. “We were told it was merely a transit point and that we would be moving on shortly. Only they would not say where we were going.

  “This area also included the living quarters for the guards, SS soldiers, and Ukrainians who were forced to work in concentration camps, though in truth, many of them enjoyed their work; after all, their people had a long history of murdering Jews.

  “The first area was also where prisoners used as the camp’s labor force were housed, including the Sonderkommandos, whom I’ll return to in a moment,” Moishe said before continuing. “The second area, called Camp Two, was where the new arrivals were marched to be separated from their belongings and each other. The young children went with the women.”

  Sobelman spoke quietly as he struggled to form the words. “That was the last time I saw my mother and sister. They and the others were taken to a building where they were forced to undress before going into a special hut to have their heads shaved so that the Germans could make use of their hair.

  “Most of those who arrived on the train soon passed
from Camp Two to Camp Three through a walkway two or three meters wide and surrounded on both sides by barbed wire. It, too, was covered with branches so that the prisoners could not see out or be seen by those outside. The Tube, as it was called, ran for 150 meters-that would be more than one and a half of your American football fields-toward a group of trees,” the old man recalled.

  “Behind the trees was a large, ugly brick building containing three rooms, each about twelve feet by twelve feet. Into these rooms naked, frightened Jews were driven-as many as a hundred and sixty people, sometimes more, at a time, all crammed together and unable to move as they listened to the sound of diesel engines starting outside and then smelled the exhaust being pumped into the rooms.”

  Sobelman looked at the boys. “I want you to close your eyes and imagine what I tell you,” he said. “Now, imagine that you are in one of those rooms. You cannot sit down or hide. You cannot smell the carbon monoxide in the fumes, but you know it is there. So you and the others begin to panic. You fight and claw and climb over one another’s naked bodies, looking for an escape. But there is none and you know that you are going to die, and all you can do is scream and pray.”

  Moishe closed his eyes. “Ach, I still can hear the voices of the Hasidic women shouting the Shema Yisrael as they were stripped and forced into the killing rooms. Shema Yisrael adonai eloheinu adonai echad! ”

  “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One,” Giancarlo translated softly.

  “Yes, the Lord is our God,” Moishe said with a slight smile. “But for reasons known only to Him, He did not stop the evil done to His people in those years.”

  Moishe was quiet again. His eyes remained closed as his voice wavered. “The women did not shout very long… not long at all. In fact, from the time most of us arrived at the rail station to those final moments in the gas chambers, it was only two or three hours. That’s all it took to process and murder four or five hundred people at a time… Men, women, children, they spared no one.”

  Moishe let the image linger before he went on. “For the Jews the guards had kept alive to work, there were many jobs around the camp. In general, these workers were treated better-even allowed to keep and use medicine they found on the poor souls chosen to die-and given more food. After all, they had to maintain their strength.”

  The old man cleared his throat. “But the very worst of the jobs was as a Sonderkommando, which means ‘special unit’ in German. And their primary responsibility was to dispose of the corpses from the gas chambers.” The old man paused as he looked at the boys. “For a time, I was a Sonderkommando.”

  “How did you become a Sonderkommando?” Zak asked.

  “I was with my father when we were forced to strip and then herded toward those gas chambers past the smirking SS guards and Ukrainians who laughed and hit us with sticks to make us keep moving,” Moishe answered. “We had just about reached the building when a German officer, Hans Schultz, reached out and grabbed me by the arm… I wanted to stay with my father and held on to his hand, but he pulled away and said, ‘Do not forget.’ And then he was gone into the building, and I never saw him again.”

  Moishe paused and dipped his head in sorrow as tears filled his eyes and began to stream down his cheeks. They sat in silence. “I apologize for the emotion,” he said finally, “but it happens sometimes and leaves me unable to speak.”

  “Do you want to continue some other time?” Karp suggested.

  “No, no, for heaven’s sake, I’m okay now,” the old man replied. “As I said, I never saw my father again. But I was spared not through some kindness, but because the Germans and their Ukrainian dogs did not want to do the dirty work. We worked in teams. Some cleaned out the killing rooms, the bodies so tightly packed that even when they were dead, there was no room to fall down. Rail tracks ran up to the back of the building; bodies were hauled out the rear doors and loaded on trolleys to be taken to pits, where other Sonderkommandos stacked them like cordwood for efficiency, then burned and buried them.”

  Sobelman sighed and it took a moment before he could continue. “But there were many jobs for the Sonderkommandos. Some gathered the hair in the shaving hut and sorted it by color and quality-most going to stuff mattresses, though the best was used for wigs. My job was to remove gold fillings from the teeth of the corpses before they were placed on the trolleys for the burial pits.”

  Zak scowled. “Why did the Sonderkommandos go along with this?”

  “Zak!” Giancarlo snapped. “That’s rude.”

  “No, no, it’s a legitimate question,” Moishe responded. He turned to Zak. “The simple answer is that we had no choice. It was do as we were told or be killed, or commit suicide-and there were those who chose either of those last two options as well. However, the urge to survive is very powerful. Some because they fear death. But for others, such as myself, it was with the hope that someday I might exact revenge on my family’s murderers, as well as carry out my father’s wish that I not forget, which is why I think it is important to tell you boys my story. So that you never forget, either.”

  Even being a slave laborer was no guarantee of staying alive, Moishe said. “Because of our intimate knowledge of their mass murders the Nazis and their minions considered us Geheimnistrager — the ‘bearers of secrets.’ The Sonderkommandos were kept apart from the others in the camp so that we could not tell them what we’d seen and experienced. They did not want some escapee or survivor to tell the world about their evil deeds. In fact, they were so worried that the Sonderkommandos were regularly gassed as well-their deaths being particularly cruel because they knew what was going to happen even sooner than the others.”

  “Why weren’t you gassed?” Zak asked, shooting a quick glance at his brother.

  Moishe shook his head sadly. “Ironically, I was spared because of my father’s occupation. One day, a German officer named Johann Klier, who had owned his own bakery before the war and ran the camp’s, sought me out. Other prisoners who had known my father had told Herr Klier that I was an experienced baker. So I went from pulling the teeth of corpses to baking bread.”

  As he passed a hand over his eyes, it took the others a moment to realize that he was weeping. But when Karp offered another cup of coffee “and a chance to catch your breath,” he waved him off. “Forgive an old man his tears. No matter how many times I have told this story, the pain and grief are just as raw.”

  He turned back to the boys. “By the fall of 1943, more than two hundred and fifty thousand people had been murdered at Sobibor and the Germans were starting to worry that the war wasn’t going so well and that word of their crimes would get out. They planned to wipe out all traces of the camp and every inmate in it. When word filtered to the Sonderkommandos that they were to be gassed in October, we rose up.

  “On the morning of October 14, led by a man named Leon Feldhendler and a Red Army lieutenant named Alexander ‘Sasha’ Perchorsky, the Sonderkommandos and some of the other prisoners who joined in lured the SS guards in the camp to their deaths. We cut the electricity and telephone lines and broke into the camp armory. Then we began to fight the Ukrainian guards before escaping, though many of us died in the minefields surrounding the camp.

  “There were six hundred of us in the camp that day,” Moishe recalled. “About a hundred and fifty were killed by guards or the mines. Three hundred of us escaped. Within a week, one hundred of us had been recaptured or killed. Everyone who’d been left behind at the camp was murdered and buried. The Germans then bulldozed the camp and turned it into farmland, as if it had never existed.”

  Moishe’s eyes glittered now with anger. “But those of us who escaped and survived did not forget. I eventually met and joined up with Jewish partisans who were fighting the Germans. The ember of revenge burned deep in my chest, and I killed my enemies with great pleasure.”

  The old man continued. “One day I was leading a small company of men when they captured three German SS officers whose car had broken down. I recog
nized them from Sobibor, including the officer who had pulled me away from my father, Hans Schultz. When I forced them to their knees on the road, Schultz started crying and begging for his life. ‘I was only doing as I was told,’ he cried. ‘You cannot imagine the nightmares I endure. The sound of people screaming and begging for their lives. The little children crying. And that horrible wailing and the sound of them crawling over each other to try to escape when the gas began to enter the room.’ That bastard looked at me like I would understand. ‘You were there, Moishe,’ he said. ‘You remember how sometimes when you opened the doors to remove them, some of them would be missing fingernails and have just bloody stumps because they had been clawing at the walls and each other.’ Terrible. Terrible.”

  “What did you do?” Zak asked.

  The old man sighed. “I played the part of judge, jury, and, may God forgive me, lord high executioner. With my anger raging inside, I decided that the punishment must fit the crime. I remembered how these men had laughed as all those innocent people had cried out and struggled to stay alive. So I had my men strangle them with cords, starting with Schultz’s subordinates. And while they kicked and dug at the cords with their fingernails, their faces turning purple and the blood vessels bursting in their eyes, I demanded that Schultz laugh.”

  “Did he?” Giancarlo asked quietly.

  “Remember what I said about the will to survive?” Moishe said. “Yes, he laughed as though at a great joke. And then I threw the cord around his neck myself and cried-which I still do at the memory-as I choked the life out of him.”

  8

  Felix sat at a bare table in a stark room of white washed walls and linoleum wondering when the police were going to let him go home. He was by himself and there were no sounds other than the nervous tapping of his foot.