by John Hersey
With a frightened and yet hopeful expression, Erlanger sat up in bed. He took his right leg, just above the knee, in his hands, and began to lift it to the right, over the edge of the bed.
The colonel said, “You don’t have to carry your leg any more. Use it. Take your hands off it.”
In spite of the colonel’s adjuration, Erlanger followed through and lifted his right leg with his hands all the way. He moved his left leg after it and gradually slipped forward, until his feet touched the floor.
The colonel said, “Stand up.”
Erlanger looked at the colonel. The patient’s face seemed to be appealing to the doctor not to force him to try to walk. It was not easy to abandon his comforting incapacity. The colonel repeated his command to stand up. Erlanger pushed himself upright, but put all his weight on his left leg and kept a hand on the edge of the cot. He put the other hand to his forehead, because the drug had made him dizzy.
“Now walk.”
Erlanger let go of the cot. He said, “I’m not sure I know how. I don’t know if I can….” He stood still for a long time, studying his feet.
Slowly he shifted his balance. He swung his weight to the right until his legs were bearing him equally, then he eased back on the left leg. With great concentration he turned his body, pushing his right shoulder and hip forward. He dragged his right foot six inches across the floor.
He had begun to tremble and perspire. Again he shifted his weight until he was balanced on both feet. Then, with a look of fear on his face, he continued slowly to move his weight onto his right leg. He took a step with his left foot that was really a quick hop, so that minimum responsibility fell to his pitied leg. He took another, similar eccentric step. Then he took another and looked up at the doctor. He took two more steps. Suddenly, as if a switch had been tripped, confidence seemed to flood through him, and he said, “I can walk.”
The doctor said, “Go out in the hall and try it out.”
Erlanger stepped forward now with an almost natural pace. He walked along the hallway, and those in the room could hear him say, “I can walk, God, I can walk. Look at me, I can walk. I can walk, look, I can walk, I can walk.” Because of the drug he sounded drunk.
He came back down the hall and entered the room. He was weeping; maudlin. “They didn’t make me into a cripple or a no-good,” he said with a thick tongue.
“Of course not,” the doctor said. “Now lie down.”
Erlanger sprawled on the bed. He squeezed his forehead with one hand; dizziness had apparently hit him again. Then he raised his head and looked down at his leg, and he lifted his leg off the bed, apparently to show himself that he could do it. His face had a sheepish, bewildered expression.
The doctor said, “In a few minutes, you’ll go to sleep, and you’ll have a good long sleep. After you wake up, I’m going to have another talk with you, and I want you to remember everything you’ve told me, and some other things, too.” The colonel knew that no more than a beginning had been made in this session, and a precarious one, at that; Erlanger might, in days to come, fight as if for his life against the interpretations that the doctor had put upon his ailment. But a beginning had been made—for if Erlanger remembered nothing else of this morning’s ordeal, he would remember one essential fact: that he was not a cripple. He could walk. The colonel now was gentle. He put his hand on Erlanger’s shoulder and he said, “You feel better, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir, I feel pretty good now. Just I’m shaky. I feel kind of foggy.” Erlanger yawned. He put a hand over his mouth and let the yawn have full play, and when it had spent itself, he said, with inappropriate casualness, “Excuse me.”
The colonel said, “Go to sleep, son.”
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
Prisoner 339, Klooga
*
Not to Go with the Others
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
I
WHEN the Nazis found themselves face to face with defeat, not long before the close of the Second World War, they became panicky, confused, vengeful, exterminatory, and Wagnerian in a gruesome vein—they visualized a vast heroic funeral pyre on which all mid-Europe would be immolated; they were determined that others than themselves would be the first to meet the flames.
The two stories that follow come from that bad time toward the end of the drama, when the grandiose scenery collapsed and the lights flickered. This pair of stories offers, as it happens, examples of survivals that depended upon almost opposite talents—one, boldness; the other, caution.
Benjamin Weintraub, the central figure of the first of these accounts, was a natural leader, an easy athlete, one who could not resist probing, an improviser, an irrepressible escapist—not always brilliant in his solutions but always one to try. I met him, still in the enclosure of the Klooga Camp, near Tallin, Estonia, about a week after the culminating events of this story, and he and a couple of his friends laboriously told me about them with the help of a Polish-English dictionary. They could still hardly believe in their having been roused from the nightmare they had endured. I saw all too vivid evidence of the veracity of their wild words, for rains had, in the end, prevented the Nazi flames from doing but a moiety of the intended work of disposal.
Prisoner 339, Klooga
ON THE DARK DAY when the Jews of Wilno were gathered into a ghetto, a tall, athletic, twenty-three-year-old man named Benjamin Weintraub sat down in his room in the presence of his wife and split the heel off his leather knee boot, cut a neat round hole in the inside of the heel, took his wedding ring off his fourth finger, put it in the hollow place in the heel, and nailed the heel back on his boot. The ring was gold and heavy. Inside it were engraved the date of his wedding, 5 IV 41, and the name of his wife, LIBA.
Later the same day the young couple were taken to the ghetto, which consisted of two miserable streets and was divided into two parts—one for “specialists,” who could claim various skills, the other for “nonspecialists,” who had no trade. Weintraub and his wife were put in the “specialists’ ” ghetto, and, although he was trained as a chemist, he was classified by the Germans, quite arbitrarily, as an electromechanic. There were twenty-three thousand people in the “specialists’ ” ghetto, and about twelve thousand in the other. The two streets were so crowded that the Weintraubs had to live like sticks of cordwood in a room thirty feet long by twenty wide, with nearly forty people. The ghetto was surrounded by a high wall and was heavily guarded by German and Lithuanian SS and SD men. Every day Weintraub was taken out into the city with a party to do heavy labor—usually having nothing to do with electromechanics. The work was hard, but he found he was lucky to be doing it: five weeks after the ghetto was formed, all twelve thousand of the “nonspecialists” were taken out to a place called Ponary, twelve kilometers from Wilno, and were killed by machine-gun fire. From time to time there were small “clean-outs” of specialists who were considered by the guards unfit or unruly. They would be taken out in small groups and would simply not return. Weintraub’s mother, father, and two brothers were killed in these clean-outs.
Weintraub had recently come from a hopeful life, and that made the new squalor even worse. He and his wife reminisced: about the night they had first met at Jack’s Sport Club and got on so well because she danced like a professional and he was immodestly willing to admit that he was the best dancer in their students’ circle; of the times they went skiing together in the hills and woods near Wilno; their swims together at the swimming club, tennis on the public courts, volleyball at the university—a healthy, noisy life. He recalled the things he had done well: the day he won the eighteen-kilometer race at Neuwilno in 1938, his having graduated second in his class at the secondary school, his skill in basketball at Wilno University. They talked of the futility of all the ambition he had had—his youthful desire to be a great concert pianist and his hard studies at the Wilno Conservatory of Music, then his more sensible decision to ma
ke a decent living as a chemical engineer and the years of preparation at the university. He teased her about how hard he had tried to teach her to sing, sitting at the piano in his own bedroom and struggling with her tone deafness, always finally giving up and playing Beethoven sonatas for her. He told her again and again of the wonderful trip to Finland he had taken as a boy of thirteen alone with his father, and of the incredible waterfall there called Immatra. They remembered their wedding party, only five months before they had been taken into the ghetto. She chided him for his stubbornness, for when she had moved into his family’s five-room apartment at 2 Teatralna Street, he had not let her change a single thing in his room; he had a “sports corner” there crowded with pictures of athletes, and a “nature corner,” with pictures of the Polish countryside in all the seasons.
There had been a time, Weintraub also recalled, when death had been an entertainment, in murder mysteries, his favorite form of reading….
* * *
—
All that life soon faded. Memories of it gave way to a new and absorbing study: how to get away? News had filtered into the ghetto of Jewish partisan groups in the woods near the city, and all in the ghetto dreamed of escaping to them. Weintraub was rather slow to work out a plan, and then it was not a shrewd one.
There were Jewish police in the ghetto, and he thought that if he could obtain a ghetto policeman’s uniform, he might somehow bluff his way past the swarm of SS and SD guards at the main gate. He finally managed to steal a uniform, and on September 6, 1943, two years to the day after being taken into the ghetto, Weintraub, disguised as a ghetto policeman, walked with his wife to the gate. They stopped a few minutes, trying to decide what to do, and as they waited, the car of the ghetto’s ranking SD man, Unterscharführer Kietel, approached the gate to go out. The car stopped for a moment for a guard check and for the gate to open. Weintraub whispered to his wife to jump on the spare tire in the rear. He said he couldn’t go out in uniform because he would be spotted outside too easily. Liba jumped on and clung to the spare. The car started up. Weintraub turned quickly away. About fifty yards beyond the gate, the street curved to the right. Looking back, Weintraub saw his wife drop off just before the curve and dart into a side street. That was the last he saw of her.
Weintraub learned two lessons from Liba’s escape. Thinking it over, he remembered that the Unterscharführer Kietel drove out every day at precisely the same hour, almost to the same minute. The first lesson this taught him was that these Germans were so methodical, so precise, that he might be able to use their precision against them. The other lesson was that an escape had always to be planned from beginning to end. He had not even thought what he would do beyond the gate.
There were at this time less than two thousand Jews left in the ghetto. On September 23, 1943, they were taken to a camp in a pine forest near a town called Klooga in Estonia. Klooga was a labor camp. When the prisoners arrived, there were signs denoting various professions stuck in the sandy soil in front of a barracks. The Jews were told to group themselves around the signs according to their skills. Weintraub had learned from the experience of the “nonspecialists” the importance of declaring a profession. Seeing the pine woods all around the camp, he went to the sign for carpenters.
To inhibit escape a barber ran clippers in a straight, naked line from the middle of each man’s forehead to the nape of the neck. The prisoners were given unmistakable striped blue canvas shirts and jackets or coveralls. And they were given numbers. From this time forward Benjamin Weintraub was No. 339, Klooga. A cloth label on his shirt declared his number. On the label, too, was a Star of David.
No. 339 at Klooga and all the other unlucky numbers got up at five a.m., had a single cup of burnt chestnut ersatz coffee, started work at six and had a half-hour rest at noon, during which they were given an unvarying bowl of soup, worked on until dark, and then were given a few slices of bread and twenty-five grams of a margarine which stank so that many were unable to eat it.
The work varied. The prisoners were set to building wooden sheds and shops. Later they made concrete blocks and tank obstacles. Some made wooden shoes for shipment to Germany. Some cut wood. Some loaded the camp’s products into freight cars on a siding about half a mile from the camp.
There was always too much work, there was never enough sleep, and the craving for food was constant and sickening. But the worst thing of all was the mental depression the prisoners felt. Their guards were trained in impersonality and seemed to take pleasure in hurting flesh and bone. The prisoners gradually lost all hope. The urge to survive drove some of them to degradation—they informed against their fellows, some even curried favor with their tormentors.
No. 339 was outstanding among the prisoners. The superiority at skiing, swimming, and basketball of which he had once boasted so immodestly had trained him well for the camp. He kept initiative and even a kind of hope long after the others lost it. Since he was strong and apparently so cheerful, the Germans began to trust him and put him in command of work parties.
He rewarded their trust by planning day and night to escape, not alone but with many others. First he simply observed the daily habits of the Germans—where they walked, their punctual hours of changing guards, of eating, and even of going to the bathroom. Then he began small reconnaissances. He would sneak out of his barracks at night and walk around a while, feeling out the vigilance of the guards. Gradually he began widening his movements.
He began going out through the wire at night at a place where sentries left a gap in their patrol, and he would make his way to the town of Keila, twelve kilometers from the camp. Then he began to have luck. He met some Estonians who were willing to risk their lives by giving him bread, butter, and cheese.
Others, on his instructions, began sneaking out, too. Several were caught and soon disappeared. The Germans said they had “gone to Riga.” A terrible whisper went around the camp that there was a gas chamber and crematorium at Riga. “Going to Riga” became the synonym, among the prisoners, for death.
Many lost the will to live and virtually starved themselves to death; when they became too weak to do any kind of work two German doctors, named Bottmann and Krebsbach, put them permanently to sleep with a drug called evipan. Bottmann was not a very good doctor and probably knew it, and very likely it was an inferiority complex which made him, one day, flog a Jewish surgeon named Ovseizalkinson within an inch of what was left of his life. The Germans devised an ingenious whipping cradle whose straps and buckles placed victims in the best possible position to have one man sit on the head while the other whipped the buttocks. For the slightest offenses prisoners were given twenty-five lashes. The number twenty-five, like the word “Riga,” came to have an awful significance among the prisoners.
There were a few cases of wanton cruelty. One winter night, when a number of Jews built a bonfire outdoors to warm themselves without having asked permission, the Unterscharführer Gendt went berserk with an ax. He killed, among others, a man named Dr. Fingerhur, who had been one of Wilno’s outstanding gynecologists. One of the guards had a vicious dog which he occasionally sicked on prisoners. One day some dreadful-looking shadows of people limped into the camp and said they were survivors of a typhus epidemic at another camp near Narva, hundreds of kilometers away, and that the Germans had made them walk all the way along the coast to Klooga. They described how SS guards had disposed of habitual stragglers by drowning them in the sea.
Practically the only thing that kept the prisoners alive now was a sense of common fate and a lingering defiant sense of humanity. They exchanged occasional messages that symbolized these senses. For instance, on his wife Liba’s birthday that year Weintraub was handed a note by a guard. It read, “To Prisoner 339 from 359, 329, 563, and 350: We, your comrades, greet you on this day and hope that you may see your wife as soon as possible and that you may then live at her side until her blonde hair turns to gray.”
Th
e hopes that 339 had for an escape were jarred one freezing day early that year. He was walking through the camp with a long board on his shoulder when his right foot slipped on a patch of ice and brought him down. His weight fell on the right leg and broke it badly just above the ankle. He was in bed for two and a half months.
When his leg mended, No. 339 was afraid he might have lost his contacts in the village of Keila, but he found that he was able to pick them up again quickly. He was lucky particularly in gaining the trust of a man named Karl Koppel who lived at 58 Hapsal. Koppel was a great help to 339. He managed to get some pistols and some ammunition. He gave the pistols, one by one, to 339. Koppel provided fifty rounds of ammunition per weapon. When he got each pistol back in the camp, 339 went in the dark to the woodpile, only a few feet from the barracks, hauled a log out from low in the pile, took it into the barracks to his bunk, scooped out a hollow with a chisel stolen from the carpentry shop, put the pistol in it, and then took the log back out and returned it to its place in the pile.
Koppel had given 339 only seven revolvers when a miscalculation upset the whole plan. The miscalculation 339 made was not of his adversaries but, ironically enough, of his fellow Jews. He told too many. The word spread. With the help of the whipping cradle the Germans found out a few names. Then, apparently at random, they made a list of almost five hundred Jews. Perhaps they were uncertain who the real leaders were; perhaps the Germans needed manpower too much. At any rate none was executed. Instead all five hundred were taken to another camp at Lagedi, about fifteen kilometers from Tallin.
Here 339 had to start the whole process from scratch. This time he told only his most trusted friends. Ironically, the camp that was intended to punish the escapists turned out to be less severe than Klooga. The SS man in charge was no less harsh personally than the SS man at Klooga. The difference was that he had just been recalled from the Russian front. He knew how the war was going. He had heard about the Moscow declaration on war criminals.
