They must have gone straight from the trains to the little grove of trees, where they sat and waited, with the worried faces you see in the pictures, but some hope that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all. The people who first saw those photos after the war knew them as archetypes—the tall woman, the boy in the sailor suit, the girl with the braids—but then someone who survived filled in the names. This somehow made it worse.
THE NEXT DAY, she scanned her list again—“Escape References, Auschwitz”—and saw there was another testimony probably worth the drive, a man who’d landed there about the same time as Hermann. It was easier this time—the traffic meant nothing, and the computer remembered her. She too was in jeans, no longer hoping for a civilized word from an assistant curator.
The testimony she’d come for was from a Greek, named Morris Venezia, whose family had been in Thessalonika, he said, for five hundred years before they were seized and sent to Auschwitz. They had come from Venice in the Middle Ages, hence the name. He and his brothers were put to work in the gas chambers—“You know why they chose the Greeks?” he asked the interviewer.
Why? she said aloud in her little cubicle. She had wondered, often, listening and reading.
But the interviewer stopped him with one of those “Wait, before we get to that,” and then never did get back “to that.”
So why the Greeks were chosen she would probably never know, although there was a reason, and Venezia would have been the one to tell it. He was not an intellectual, but a man who saw clearly nonetheless. Almost poetically—he got the blood-red poetry of the whole thing. He said when they first got there, they still didn’t know. They were taken to the building with the huge chimneys, and still didn’t know. But then they were given huge scissors, “like sheep-shearers,” and taken to the door of a big room, and when the door was opened, they knew.
There were hundreds of women lying there, “like sardines, like alabaster, all beautiful, all dead.” He and his cousin were still terrified of dead bodies that morning. They handled them gently at first, laid them carefully on the floor, holding their heads so that they didn’t hit the cement, till a guard came and struck them with his cane, so hard they saw stars. “Like this!” the guard screamed, and threw the women on the floor, “like junk.”
“Faster!” screamed the guard. Another blow. They were assigned to cut the long hair off the dead women with the shears, as an introduction. Later they would graduate to throwing the bodies into the ovens. Three at a time, two men with one woman in the middle, to speed things along. “Since fat burns,” said Morris Venezia.
She knew that by now, didn’t have to hear it again. But the reason she knew that truly incriminating piece of testimony, that undeniable detail of the death camps, is that men like this one had lived to testify. He had been in there with his brother and his cousin, which is probably how he survived, and he was clever—he learned the ropes. Learned to shield himself from the horror just enough to stay sane. He was supposed to wait just outside the door, but from there you could hear the people inside “praying,” said Morris Venezia, “calling on God.” He soon learned that he could run and hide himself away during that part, so as not to have to hear it. As long as he was back when they opened the doors.
Once, he said, after they had pulled some men from the gas and had them stacked up, waiting for the lift to take them up to the ovens, one of the dead men suddenly sat up and started to sing.
Everyone stopped, transfixed, and stared, even the guards, even the SS, froze for a moment, silenced. The man’s eyes were shining, and his face was lit by a beatific smile. A man who’d just been through the gas and hadn’t quite died. “He was singing like this”—Venezia hummed a few bars of “Eine kleine Nachtmusik.” Mozart. “He looked around, not really there. Happy.
“But then an SS drew his gun and shot him in the neck.”
Not that it mattered perhaps, because here was a man who must have been beyond bullets. He had breathed poison gas and woken up singing. Was it possible that that’s what they all did, just before they died? Went to that place, wherever Mozart’s music takes one? A lovely meadow, with their own mothers and fathers, their own children, happy at home?
Could that be? Since it happened this once? Since there is this one, detailed firsthand account? An unknown man who stopped between life and death, in that inferno, that nightmare of crime, with a smile on his face and Mozart on his lips. Morris Venezia and his cousin Dario were there. They saw it and heard it and lived to tell. Took the trouble to tell.
A GREAT GIFT, THAT. One of the few, along with the documented escapes. And she felt lucky that she’d gone back and played that tape that day, lucky she’d heard that story, for the sake of everyone the Nazis had killed, not just Hermann—who could have been that man, actually. The timing was right, late May or early June 1944, during the Hungarian transports.
It occurred to her that maybe that was the best she could do for Hermann, because as far as that quest went, she had to admit that she was coming to the end of the line. True, there was her uncle’s letter—the nieces who had seen Hermann “at Auswetz Concentration Camp.” Strengthened that claim with the assertion that “he was very strong and healthy,” further evidence that they might in fact have seen him. And all this back in 1945, unaffected by a future in which he never came back.
“They do know that he escaped from the Concentration Camp”—but not formally, she was forced to conclude. The histories seem to have those names.
Unless the girls meant later, in the chaos that swept over the place in the fall, as the Russians closed in. The problem with that was that Hermann’s nieces hadn’t said when they left Auschwitz themselves—or rather, they probably had, but Consie’s uncle hadn’t written it down. “They told me the same stories I had heard the night before from the other refugees,” was what he wrote instead.
Which left her crying over an old letter. But history, real history, is like that. Everything there but the one thing you want.
Although on the other hand, that left open the possibility that they were still there, in Auschwitz, those two girls, Klara and Alice, in October of 1944. Because if that’s the escape they were talking about, there was still a chance.
20
IT WAS NEAR THE END, with a little hope in the air, even in Auschwitz, which is what people needed to find the strength to act. “You must be strong to wish to escape,” wrote the French Resistance prisoner Charlotte Delbo. In 1942, when she was taken in, “no one dreamt of escaping.”
But by the fall of 1944, the Nazi Reich was no longer infinite. On a good day, you could hear the Russian tanks from Auschwitz. Allied bombers flew over regularly, though always on their way to somewhere else.
Still, they were the future, and everyone knew it, including the SS, who were suddenly facing a very big problem. The trains were no longer arriving day and night with a prodigious number of new victims to be processed, which left eight hundred strong, tough SK prisoners standing around with nothing to do. The strongest and toughest of the prisoners, the gas and crematorium workers, the men the Nazis had forced to do the worst work since the beginning of time.
No one was going to trick these guys into the gas. There wouldn’t be any “Tie your shoes together” or “We’ve got a nice white coffee waiting for you afterwards” for them. On the other hand, they couldn’t be allowed to live, they were never allowed to live. The system had been honed over the years: the groups worked for two or three months, meanwhile always training a new group to replace them, so that on the day they were suddenly surrounded with no warning by the SS in force with machine guns and dogs, and shot down, there were new men standing by to throw them into the ovens that they’d taught how to operate by then.
A neat trick, the SS congratulated themselves. They even showed these prisoners their lighter side on the subject. “Your path to Paradise is assured,” they liked to tease them.
The prisoners got the joke, but might have questioned the concept of “
Paradise.” “Inferno,” they knew —as Zalmen Gradowski, the SK worker who managed to leave a written record buried in the ash, put it, “The dark night is my friend, tears and screams are my songs, fire my light . . . Hell is my home.”
These men were kept completely segregated from the other prisoners. Once in that door, there was no way out. In compensation, though, while they were working, they were permitted to eat some of the food the dead left beside their neatly tied shoes, and even to wear their sweaters under their own stripes. In the few pictures, there are boots on their feet, instead of the deadly wooden clogs.
All of which made them even more of a problem for the SS by late summer of 1944—men who knew, men accustomed to looking death in the face, straight on, but who were neither starving nor hobbled nor confused. It had always required some skill to kill them, but the momentum of the whole death apparatus had kept things moving forward, and the numbers had always been kept under control. Before that summer, there were only about two to three hundred active crematorium workers at any given time in Auschwitz-Birkenau, half of whom were always slated for slaughter themselves.
But the Hungarian transports had required more workers. The ovens had to be kept fired round the clock, and the gas chambers running as well. There were always people outside, waiting for their “showers.” Standing quietly and waiting, hand in hand with their own children, still oblivious to the fact that they were queueing for their death.
The summer of ’44 had been a sort of apotheosis for the SS, who had risen with flying colors to the epic demands placed upon them. They were, after all, the incarnation of the Third Reich here. Their führer in Berlin was the one who uttered the stirring words—“Send the Hungarians”—but it was the SS who had to make them flesh. And Eichmann in Budapest, in an organizational exaltation of his own, was rounding up and shipping out more people faster than ever before and without stop. This meant trains pulling up to the platform at Auschwitz day and night, with too many people for the gas, too many for the ovens, which broke down continually all that summer from overuse, and it was left to the SS on the ground there to find the way.
And they had. They had dug pits for outdoor burning when the ovens were on the blink, and shot people one by one when there was no room for them in the gas chamber. They even managed to keep the thing tidy. Having discovered that a man shot in the neck tended to fall backwards and splash blood on shiny SS boots, they trained prisoners to hold them by the ear and then thrust them forward as they fell, into the pit that had been dug precisely first to catch and then to burn them.
Fine. The SS did all that and whatever else Berlin required of them without complaint, and they got through the 450,000 sent to them by June. But to do it, they’d had to more than double the number of prisoners working the gas and the ovens, to eight hundred, and bring in the Greeks with their strength and the linguistic divide, the fact that they didn’t speak or understand Hungarian. Clever, that, but once the transports started tapering off, these men became redundant. There was no further work for most of them, nor did the SS see the sense of allowing eight hundred eyewitnesses to the logistics of the Final Solution to survive the camps, particularly with the Russians already outside of Krakow.
They considered lining them up and shooting them, but feared that sort of action could engender an uprising, or a hand-to-hand scuffle that the SS, though armed, weren’t sure they would win. Creative solutions were called for, and the first thing the SS came up with was to retrofit a legitimate delousing station into a gas chamber, bricking up the windows and then covering them with sandbags. In this way, they managed to trick the first three hundred prisoners inside, on the twenty-ninth of September 1944. The gassing went smoothly, and the SS were pleased. There were five hundred left now, a more manageable number. These the SS thought they could handle with the more routine method of selecting them out, group by group.
BUT THERE WAS an underground in the camp by then, several undergrounds in fact. There were the Polish partisans, who had the weapons and the connections; the Russian POWs, who had the guts and the skills; and these crematorium prisoners, who had the least to lose. Since they had always been killed off like clockwork after only a few months, they’d never been able to organize anything among the different crematoria before. But these men had already lived longer, and the SS too were slipping. There was a new overseer of the gas chambers, SS Staff Sergeant Busch, brought in to replace the staunch Otto Moll.
But Moll proved irreplaceable. He’d been one with the place, had flinched at nothing, even went beyond, occasionally selecting pretty girls to shoot himself, and leading the way when it came to throwing live children into burning pits. But poor Busch had to get drunk to effectuate these duties. This meant the crematorium subversives could work around him more easily.
And an uprising was finally in the works, a serious plan, coordinated throughout the camps. For months, some young women prisoners, working in an ammunition plant just outside the gates, had been risking their lives to smuggle little bits of gunpowder to the prisoners, who’d been fashioning hand grenades out of shoe polish tins. Another of them, a welder working for the SS, managed to make four bombs in oxygen cans with acetylene. One girl stole diamonds from the dead women’s corsets she was sorting, and traded them to corrupt guards for keys to the sheds with rakes and hoes, axes, tools that could be turned, French Revolution–style, into weapons. Still others filched wire cutters to cut through the triple rows of barbed wire, along with the tools needed to slash the SS tires. Some even managed to hide a few guns taken from wrecked planes hauled back from Stalingrad for dismantling. Something akin to hope was in the air.
The plan was that on a given day, at a given signal, the prisoners throughout the various subcamps in Auschwitz would fall upon their guards in unison, seize their machine guns and kill them, set off their home-made bombs, cut the wires, and liberate the camp. Even the half-dead among them thought the plan was good.
BUT THE PROBLEM WAS WHEN? The Greeks claim they were pushing for action, with the Poles stalling for more weapons. The crematorium prisoners were complaining that the partisans wouldn’t arm them. But when they got word through the underground that another selection for the gas was imminent, they resolved to act on their own, without the Polish partisans if they had to. And on the seventh of October, they did.
Some say it started when a guard overheard the prisoners plotting and threatened to reveal their plan to the SS. In this version, one of the men seized him on the spot and threw him alive into the burning oven, and the action commenced.
Another prisoner, Filip Müller, says it started with a selection that day, at Crematorium IV. “Towards mid-day,” he says, the SS staff sergeant, Busch, “along with several other SS men and guards, arrived in the yard in front of the crematorium. All prisoners were ordered to line up. Then Busch began calling out the first few numbers on the list, starting with the highest and working his way down to the lowest. Those selected for transfer were made to stand on the opposite side of the yard.”
Everyone knew what that meant. Those with the least to lose now had nothing to lose. One of those selected, Chaim Neuhof, a Pole who’d been at Auschwitz since 1942, approached SS Staff Sergeant Busch, said something low, and then shouted out the password, “Hurrah!” and struck him with a hammer.
Or shovel, some say. The rest of the prisoners then “set up a loud shout, hurled themselves upon the guards with hammers and axes, wounded some of them, the rest they beat with what they could get at, they pelted them with stones without further ado,” according to Salmen Lewental. The prisoners dug up the hidden munitions, tied up the SS men who were nearby, and grabbed their weapons.
Jukel Worona, a glazier from Czeconau with “a thick black beard,” led a group back into Crematorium IV with bottle bombs and handmade grenades, and blew it up. The crematorium burst into flames.
At the sound of explosions and fighting, the prisoners at Crematorium II joined the revolt. The Reichsdeutsche Oberkapo and
one SS man were thrown into the burning furnace alive, and another SS man was beaten to death. The rest of them ran for help, blowing their whistles, while the prisoners cut the barbed-wire fence, at the women’s camp as well, and escaped into the woods.
AND HERE’S WHERE IT should have ended, where it could end, if someone makes the movie. The crematorium in flames, men in stripes, and some women, with hair grown in just enough to look like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. And all of them running into the woods and then stopping, at least one pair of them, to embrace. The Russians, anyway, are coming. The worst was behind them. Last shot perhaps of Allied planes, overhead.
Which actually did happen. There was an Allied air raid that night that prevented the SS from further pursuit, and that was good, for a while.
But this was Auschwitz and what happened next was what happened there. There were about two hundred and fifty unarmed prisoners on the run, and three thousand SS men with two machine guns each against them. Even so, if the prisoners had turned northeast, toward the Vistula River, then maybe. But they turned southwest, and thus hit an Auschwitz subcamp and were trapped. Some of them took refuge in a barn, which the SS set on fire. The ones who ran out were shot. Most of the organizers of the revolt were dead by then.
Twelve others who did get across the river were hunted down with dogs and shot. Their bodies were dragged back to the camp. All in all, two hundred and fifty rebels were killed, along with another two hundred prisoners.
But this was not the worst of it. The worst of it was what happened to the four girls, the ones who’d smuggled out the powder, some of which the SS found and traced. There were only the four who worked in the small room in that particular munitions factory. They were arrested at once.
They were held for a few months and tortured beyond reason. They were young, in their teens and twenties, Estujsia Wajcblum, Regina Saperstein, Alla Gaertner, and Roza Robota. Despite the torture, none of them said a word.
The Plum Trees Page 20
