by John Hersey
Early in September of that year the Russians launched an attack against the Baltic States. No. 339 and the others were given no war news at all and they did not know what was happening when, on September 18, thirty trucks driven by SD men came to camp. That day most of the men were out constructing anitank bunkers for Tallin. No. 339 was doing some work in the camp with eighteen other men.
The nineteen prisoners in the camp were gathered together near the front gate. The SD men began to argue. No. 339 knew enough German to understand that they were arguing whether to take the nineteen right away or wait for all the prisoners to come back in. He heard the word Riga and the word Klooga. He saw that the guards were taking part in the discussion and that all the Germans were ill at ease and confused.
He was standing near the gate. At a peak in the argument he bolted. He ran straight across the road, where the trucks were waiting, into some woods. Then, banking on the thorough Germans to comb the woods, he doubled back and went into the back door of an Estonian house that stood only a few yards from the camp gate. He persuaded the Estonian who was there to lend him a coat and cap. He took up a piece of material, a needle, and some thread, and told the Estonians to say that he was a tailor who worked there. He thought that if the house were searched the job might be done by one of the visiting SD men, who would not recognize him.
In a few minutes he looked out of the window and saw his eighteen comrades being bundled into a truck. The truck drove off.
The others came back from their work after about two hours. They were not marched into the camp at all but were lined up in groups of about thirty beside the trucks on the road. This time the thorough Germans took no chances. The drivers and guards formed a huge ring around the trucks, the prisoners, the road—and the house in which 339 was trying to hide. Eventually some of the camp guards came in the house, recognized 339, and took him out.
Something made 339 edge his way to the last truck. That instinct saved his life. The last truck left at about nine o’clock in the evening. Along the way it broke down. After it was repaired the driver and guard were at a loss what to do. They inquired of some officers they met along the road. The officers suggested that they take the truckload to Tallin jail.
The truckload of prisoners arrived at the Tallin jail early in the morning and slept there a few hours. In the morning they were bundled back in the truck and driven to Klooga.
When they reached the camp they saw that all of the camp’s three thousand prisoners had been gathered in the barbed-wire-enclosed yard behind one of the barracks. The truckload including 339 was put in a group consisting entirely of men brought from Lagedi. No. 339 asked a guard what was going on. The guard said they were being taken to Riga and to Germany. So they were “going to Riga” at last. A few minutes after his truckload arrived, 339 saw, off in the underbrush some distance away, a line of about three hundred men carrying logs. He asked one of his friends who had arrived from Lagedi with the earlier trucks the night before what the logs were being carried for. The friend said he did not know, that early that morning the Germans had picked out the three hundred strongest men in the camp, had given them a huge breakfast, and had taken them out to work.
The breakdown and late arrival of his truck kept 339 out of that working party. That is how the instinct that had made him get in the last truck saved his life, for not one of the strong men carrying wood survived that day.
No. 339 asked the guard where the men were carrying the wood, and why. The guard said that the wood was needed in Germany. It was going along with the prisoners to Riga and Germany. The prisoners, he said, were loading the wood for Riga.
The prisoners were loading the wood for Riga only in the symbolical sense of the word. They were taking it to a clearing in the woods about half a mile from the rear gate of the camp. There they were ordered to construct curious platforms. First they laid four heavy logs in a square. Then they filled in the square with pine boughs. Then they scattered small kindling wood among the pine boughs. Next they put long crosspieces across the square, and across these they laid shorter logs until there was a kind of floor. In the center they put up four poles to form an area about a foot square and kept the space inside that little area free of sticks and boughs. The platforms, of which there were four, were about thirty feet square.
This work took quite a while. In the enclosure, 339 grew suspicious. At noon promptly the methodical Germans fed the prisoners in the enclosure. But the others did not come back for lunch. No. 339 asked the guard what was holding them up. The guard said, “Perhaps they have decided to take them straight to Riga without coming back here.”
The men at the platforms must have been terrified at what was happening then. They were being divided into groups of thirty. The first three groups were ordered onto three of the platforms and were told to lie prone. When they were all down, SS men with revolvers stepped onto the platforms and shot those who were lying there, one by one, in the back of the head. Those who tried to run away or tried to resist were shot in the face or stomach.
As soon as all the men on the platforms were shot and before some of them were dead, the others were ordered to build another layer to the platform right on top of the bodies of their companions. Still no boughs or sticks were put in the little square in the center. The Germans had thought of everything: that was to serve as a chimney, to give the fire some draft.
As soon as he heard the first shot in the enclosure, 339 knew that the Germans were determined to kill every Jew, Russian, and Estonian in the camp. He was terrified, but he tried to think clearly. One thing he knew: this would be his last chance to try an escape.
While the men out at the platforms were building the second layer, 339 began to plan. There were just two permanent guards in the enclosure. Others came and went. The two in the enclosure had tommy guns and walked back and forth in front of the two large groups. The guard in front of the women looked across at the smaller Lagedi group really carefully only when he was walking toward it. It took him about twenty seconds to make each lap. The nearest door of the U-shaped barrack was about sixty feet away. It would take perhaps ten seconds to run to the door and disappear to the left up the stairs.
Fortunately he had explored every inch of the barrack many times. He would run upstairs all the way to the double ceiling of the attic. He would go completely around the three sides of the U above the ceiling. At the other end of the building, he would drop down to the top tier of bunks, run around a pile of window frames lying up there, pull them into a crude barricade, crawl through in the dark to the hollow chute down to the next floor. This was large enough for one person to hide in, but it was dark. Beyond that, 339 could not imagine anything.
* * *
—
Out at the platforms the second layer was ready, and three more groups were ordered to climb up. The SS men followed and began putting their pistols to the backs of victims’ skulls.
When the noise of the second group of shots was heard in the enclosure, panic broke out. Women began shrieking. There was a commotion among the men. No. 339’s friends looked at him to see what he would do. In the excitement over the shooting, he ran.
He made the door all right. As he ran up the stairs he heard the sounds of footsteps behind him, and he tried to run faster. Then he realized that there were many footsteps, and that he was afraid of being followed by only one guard, or at most two. He looked back. Something he had not foreseen had happened. Many other prisoners were following his lead.
* * *
—
Quite correctly the guards out in the yard held their positions with their tommy guns aimed at the bulk of the crowd. But before they could get it under control well over a hundred people had run into both doors of the building. More than forty followed 339 over the course he had planned. By the time they all got behind the barricade of window frames and in and near the chute, the place was a mass of terrified flesh.
All those who had run into the other door of the barracks, on the ground floor three flights down from 339 and his followers, tried to hide on that first floor. They threw themselves under bunks, cringed in corners, and climbed onto upper bunks.
The guards called out for reinforcements. These entered the door on the ground floor under 339’s hiding place. One of 339’s companions had cut an electric-light wire and caused a short circuit, so the barracks were all dark. Apparently the SS reinforcements were conscious of death themselves that afternoon, because 339 heard two German voices say, in tones that seemed to express fear of the dark, “Are there any guards in there? Come out, you people.”
There was a silence. A friend of 339 named Dondes Faiwusz, who had run through the kitchen shed inside the U of the barracks and into a window on the ground floor, saw what happened next. Two SS men entered the main room on the ground floor, where all the runaways were trying so pathetically to hide in exposed places, and they sprayed the room, one to each side, with tommy-gun bullets. Up on the third floor the forty men heard a great deal of firing—enough, they later learned, to have killed eighty-seven of their fellow prisoners. It was hard for 339 and his packed-in companions to restrain themselves from crying out in their panicky conviction that the Germans would come up and find them and spray them with bullets, too.
But after the firing downstairs, and the screaming and groaning that followed it, subsided, 339 and his friends could hear only distant sounds—shouts in the courtyard, more shooting far away.
The shooting came in periodic flurries—as new layers were finished on the platforms. In midafternoon there was an increase in the firing. Apparently the SS men thought they would never get finished, using only the platforms, so they herded seven hundred people into a barracks, shot them there one by one, and set the building afire. No. 339 and his fellows were lucky that the Germans did not choose their barracks. The smell of burning wood and flesh raised their hair on end. They thought their building might be burned.
The shooting and the smell of burning went on until two or three in the morning. Then there were sounds of German voices and trucks and cars driving off. Then there was silence.
No. 339 and the others could not be sure that all the Germans had gone. Nor could they be sure that they would not come back the next morning and hunt them out. The stench of burning flesh and the sound of screaming people were so fresh in their minds that they crouched absolutely still all night without whispering.
The group of forty stayed in their dark hole for five days and nights. On the second night some of them sneaked out, as they often had, and stole bread from the camp commissary. But they did not dare look around much. They went back up to the attic.
On the fifth day one of the men ventured out. The camp was deserted. He saw a Russian airplane overhead. He ran trembling upstairs to tell the others of their deliverance. A few hours later the first Russian soldier came into the camp.
No. 339 thought first about the new life he could now begin. He took a scrap of paper and he wrote a letter he intended to give to a Russian officer:
To the Consul of the American States in Moskau.
Dear Consul!
I stayed from thousands. I have lost my parents and brothers. My wife remained in Wilno and I have no news from her. The only one who remained is my father-in-law, an American citizen who is now living in New York and [with] whom I want to communicate about myself. I had no other chance and I am forced to ask you and I am sure that you will not refuse me. Please send this telegram: Samuel Amdurski, Federal Food Corporation, New York. During a year no news from Liba and Bertha. I am in Estonia. I will do all to find them out.
Benjamin
Then 339 thought about the life he had had. He sat down, pried the heel off his boot, and found his wedding ring there. He tried to put it on his fourth finger. Three years of manual labor for the master race had thickened the fingers that had once played Beethoven and measured chemicals into test tubes. He could not get it on. He put it on his little finger. It just fit.
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
II
IN THIS TALE the survivor, Frantizek Zaremski, lived because of his tentative nature. Far from being a leader, he even refused to follow, and in the outcome it was this need to hold back that saved him.
I met Zaremski and heard his story from him in a dark room in a farmhouse at Rodogoszcz, near Lodz, Poland, a few days after his escape. I had just been shown the detritus of the factory where his ordeal had taken place; many pierced or charred bodies were still strewn about. Zaremski was obviously suffering from shock. As he talked he kept his left hand, which was bandaged, in his trouser pocket; he wore a blue windbreaker with a zippered fly. The skin of his face was drawn tight over the bones and cartilege, and the hair on his head, which had been shaved by the Nazis, was just beginning to grow back in. More than once, as he told his story, he covered his eyes with his free hand, and I thought he might faint.
Not to Go with the Others
IN THE third year of the war, Frantizek Zaremski was arrested by the invaders on a charge of spreading underground literature—specifically, for carrying about his person a poem a friend from Gdynia had given him, which began:
Sleep, beloved Hitler, planes will come by night…
After he had spent six weeks of a three-year sentence for this crime in the Gestapo prison at Inowroczon, Zaremski was sent to Kalice to do carpentry. By bad luck, at the time when his term expired, the Russians had broken through at the Vistula, and his captors, instead of releasing him, took him, in their general panic, to the transfer camp for Polish political prisoners at Rodogoszcz, where he was placed in Hall Number Four with nine hundred men. Altogether there were between two and three thousand men and women—no Jews, only “Aryan” Poles suspected or convicted of political activity—in the prison.
Late in the evening of Wednesday, January 17, 1945, three days before Lodz was to fall to the Russians, all the prisoners were gathered on the third and fourth floors of the main building, even those who were sick, and there they all lay down on wooden bunks and floors to try to sleep. At about two in the morning guards came and ordered the inmates to get up for roll call.
They divided the prisoners into groups of about twenty each and lined up the groups in pairs. Zaremski was in the second group. SS men led it down concrete stairs in a brick-walled stairwell at one end of the building and halted it on a landing of the stairway, near a door opening into a large loft on the second floor. The first group had apparently been led down to the ground floor.
Someone gave an order that the prisoners should run in pairs into the loft as fast as they could. When the first pairs of Zaremski’s group ran in, SS men with their backs to the wall inside the room began to shoot at them from behind. Zaremski’s turn came. He ran in terror. A bullet burned through his trouser leg. Another grazed his thigh. He fell down and feigned death.
Others, from Zaremski’s and later groups, ran into the hall and were shot and fell dead or wounded on top of Zaremski and those who had gone first. At one time Zaremski heard the Polish national anthem being sung somewhere.
Finally the running and shooting ended, and there ensued some shooting on the upper floors, perhaps of people who had refused to run downstairs.
SS men with flashlights waded among the bodies, shining lights in the faces of the prostrate victims. Any wounded who moaned or moved, or any whose eyes reacted when the shafts of light hit their faces, were dispatched with pistol shots. Somehow Zaremski passed the test of pretense.
As dawn began to break, Zaremski heard the iron doors of the main building being locked, and he heard some sort of grenades or bombs being thrown into the lowest hall and exploding there; they seemed to him to make only smoke, but they may have been incendiaries. Later, in any case, the ground floor began to burn. Perhaps benzine or petrol had been poured around. Zaremski was still lying among the bodies
of others.
There were several who were still alive, and they began jumping out of the burning building, some from windows on the upper stories. A few broke through a skylight to the roof, tied blankets from the prisoners’ bunks into long ropes and let themselves down outside. Zaremski, now scurrying about the building, held back to see what would happen. Those who jumped or climbed down were shot at leisure in the camp enclosure by SS men in the turrets on the walls, and Zaremski decided to try to stay inside.
On the fourth floor, at the top of the reinforced concrete staircase, in the bricked stairwell at the end of the building, Zaremski found the plant’s water tank, and for a time he and others poured water over the wounded lying on the wooden floors in the main rooms. Later Zaremski took all his clothes off, soaked them in the tank, and put them back on. He lay down and kept pouring water over himself. He put a soaked blanket around his head.
The tank was a tall one, separated from the main room by the stairwell’s brick wall, and when the fire began to eat through the wooden floor of the fourth story and the heat in the stairwell grew unbearable, Zaremski climbed up and got right into the water in the tank. He stayed immersed there all day long. Every few minutes he could hear shots from the wall turrets. He heard floors of the main halls fall and heard the side walls collapse. The staircase shell and the concrete stairs remained standing.
It was evening before the shooting and the fire died down. When he felt sure both had ended, Zaremski pulled himself out of the tank and lay awhile on the cement floor beside it. Then, his strength somewhat restored, he made his way down the stairs, and on the way he found six others who were wounded but could walk.
