by John Hersey
The seven went outside. Dusk. All quiet. They thought the Germans had left, and they wanted to climb the wall and escape. The first three climbed up and dropped away in apparent safety, but then the lights flashed on in the turrets and bursts of firing broke out. Three of the remaining four decided to take their chances at climbing out after total darkness; they did not know whether the first three had been killed or had escaped. Only Zaremski decided to stay.
The three climbed, but this time the lights came sooner, and the guards killed all three while they were still scaling the wall.
Zaremski crept into the camp’s storehouse in a separate building. Finding some damp blankets, he wrapped them around himself and climbed into a big box, where he stayed all night. Once during the night he heard steps outside the building, and in the early morning he heard walking again. This time the footsteps approached the storeroom door. The door opened. The steps entered. Through the cracks of the box Zaremski sensed that the beam of a flashlight was probing the room. Zaremski could hear box tops opening and slamming and a foot kicking barrels. He held the lid of his box from the inside. Steps came near, a hand tried the lid, but Zaremski held tight, and the searcher must have decided the box was locked or nailed down. The footsteps went away.
Later two others came at different times and inspected the room but neither tried Zaremski’s box; the third hunter locked the door from the outside.
Much later Zaremski heard a car start and drive away.
Much later still—some time on the nineteenth of January in the year of victory—Zaremski heard the Polish language being spoken, even by the voices of women and children. He jumped out of the box and broke the window of the storehouse and climbed out to his countrymen.
CONSERVATION
Tattoo Number 107,907
CONSERVATION
THIS IS the story of a man who was able to survive a slow hell invented by the Nazis of Adolf Hitler’s Germany. The means of his survival was a hoarding of units of energy. Stirner—his name and others have been changed at his request—realized at the outset of his ordeal that in order to survive he must try to bring into balance the strength, on the one hand, that he was obliged to spend in labor, in terror, in exposure to weathers, and in daily contemplation of the Nazis’ appalling barbarities, and the strength, on the other hand, that he could derive from food, from pauses at work, from sleep, and from the society of fellow victims. This he managed for more than two years to do.
Stirner told me the story later in my home in the United States.
Tattoo Number 107,907
ALFRED STIRNER was a young Berlin intellectual, a former student of the law, a would-be social worker, who spent the autumn days of 1941 wearing the mask of a welder; it shielded him from sparks and also warded off, for the time being, by muffling his identity, a fate that was surely in store for him in Hitler’s Germany. Twenty-seven years old, he lived with his wife and a small son in a single room in the Halensee section in the western quarter of the city, in a small building crammed with one hundred and twenty working people. The Stirners’ little room on the third floor boxed their entire sense of life, for outside the room they had to move on byways, staying clear of Leipzigerstrasse, Unter den Linden, and all main streets, and were barred from bookstores and barber shops, and were not allowed to buy clothes, and had been to no concerts for three years, to no motion pictures, to no plays, and could shop for food only in designated stores, and were not permitted on buses or trams or trains. To reach the factory for work at six-thirty each morning, Stirner had to arise at a quarter to five, for he was obliged to walk more than an hour to the plant. The Stirners wore the Star of David.
The room itself lacked a telephone. A radio was forbidden. The Stirners ate cabbage, black bread, potatoes, scraps of suet, over and over. Since the start of the war, the single window of the room had always been blacked out; Jacob, the child, had never seen a window thrown open to a night of stars and city lights, and one of the first words he had learned to speak was the question that had to be asked when a person entered an unlit room: “Darkened?” Nevertheless the room was home; they were a family in it. There was a couch against one wall, and at night the three Stirners slept on it, together. The spectacle of Jacob growing, with a child’s optimism, having no cause to think the world had ever been otherwise, was a source of pleasure and strength to the parents. They had a small gramophone, and some evenings they asked friends in the same building to come in for “home concerts” of Stirner’s favorite recordings, the Second Brandenburg Concerto, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, the “Eroica.” And whenever they had the energy the Stirners read books: Max Weber’s political science, Sombart’s economic history, Heinrich Heine, Hermann Hesse, Dubnow’s Jewish history, Buber’s Jewish philosophy, Franz Werfel, Stefan Zweig, Jakob Wassermann, and Thomas Mann, and translations such as Pearl Buck’s Die Gute Erde, and Margaret Mitchell’s Wom Winde Verweht. Besides, the Stirners had many close friends, and conversations in the little room were frequent, large, witty; often peals of laughter came from within.
This was the condition of the Stirner family’s life when mass deportations of Jews from the city began.
* * *
—
Alfred had been a nineteen-year-old student when Hitler had come to power in 1933. Among the Jews there had been two groups at that time—those who had decided to emigrate at once and those who, long afloat on German culture, had decided to stay and make fast their anchor lines. Stirner’s parents had been among the latter group. As Hitler had consolidated his power, those who held on had felt more and more that they were losing a weird battle, in which they had never been clearly engaged, but even as late as the Munich agreement the Jews in Stirner’s circle had felt that all that would be necessary to outlive the nightmare of Hitler would be acquiescence in the loss of certain civil rights. Only in November, 1938, when they learned of the subsequences of the killing of a minor German diplomat in Paris, named Von Rath, had they begun to realize that much worse might be expected, for soon after Von Rath’s death, which was advertised as having been brought about by a fanatical Jew, German crowds, displaying an obedient spontaneity, had burned synagogues, looted Jewish shops and apartments, desecrated Jewish cemeteries, and otherwise given notice that henceforth Jews could expect not merely time-honored humiliation and deprivation but also brutality.
At once the Jewish community had organized mass emigration of children to England, Sweden, Belgium, Holland, and France. Stirner, having almost finished his course of law at Berlin University but having come to realize that under Hitler the pursuit of law would be a madman’s chase, had quit his studies and joined the welfare office that was setting up the children’s “transports”; and soon he had been signalled, by a speech Hitler made in the Reichstag to celebrate the anniversary of his own coming to power, that the work was urgent indeed. “If war comes,” Hitler cried, “this war will end not with the extermination of the Aryan race but with the extermination of the Jewish race.” Stirner had made several trips to England and Sweden. During Stirner’s stays in Berlin, in his spare time, having in the back of his head an idea that he might try to get himself and his own family out of Germany, he had taken training as a welder, so as to have some means of earning a living if his improbable dream of emigration came true. By August, 1939, Stirner’s welfare group had shipped out from Germany seven thousand children.
After the outbreak of war, Stirner and his friends had expected to be herded at once into concentration camps like the notorious one for political prisoners at Buchenwald, about which they knew; but at first nothing had happened. Within a couple of months, news had trickled into Berlin of the harsh treatment of Jews in Poland during and after the German campaign there—synagogues burned, ghettos established, non-combatants shot. Early in 1940, the Germans had begun to call more and more Jews for hard labor in their own communities—at street-cleaning, masonry, portage, ditch digging, shelter construction, road layin
g—but through that year Stirner had managed to continue his welfare work. Emigration no longer being feasible, he had begun supervising a number of small handicraft training schools for Jews, which the authorities had allowed in view of the demand for skilled workers of all kinds. After Hitler had started the Russian campaign, the pressure for manpower had become so great that the schools had been shut down and the pupils put to work. Stirner had resorted to his welder’s mask.
* * *
—
October, 1941, was a bad month for the Jews in Berlin. It was then that the first mass deportations to concentration camps began.
On the Day of Atonement that autumn, the heads of the various Jewish centers in the city were called together at Gestapo headquarters and were commanded to deliver to the Gestapo enough apartments to house one thousand people, and those Jews who were to surrender their rooms were peremptorily named on a list. They were not allowed to move in with families or friends but were ordered to gather at a synagogue in Levetzowstrasse. All their property was declared confiscated. They disappeared.
Later those who stayed behind learned through post cards that the evacuees had been shipped by train to the ghetto of Lodz, Poland. This first deportation was especially vivid to Stirner because his father’s sister and her family were among those who were taken away.
Stirner was demoted from his welding job and placed in a heavy-labor gang in a munitions plant. There, in a party of forty-five men of all ages, he had to carry blocks of pig iron and sheets of steel, and occasionally he helped dig new foundations. The strain of this work was complicated not only by his worry about the deportations but also by the fact that R.A.F. raids were then becoming frequent, and his spending entire nights in the Jewish corner of their apartment basement—a shelter consisting merely of the cellar itself, shored with some extra timbers—and then doing this heavy work by day, all on an inadequate diet, drained his strength and untuned his nerves.
Through 1942 one transport of deportees after another left Berlin—to Riga, Lublin, Minsk, Warsaw, Kovno. Stirner and others who were not taken heard only rumors about the fates of the evacuees. They heard that some transports never arrived at their destinations. One camp they did hear about was Theresienstadt, where the Nazis assembled older Jews in a much publicized exhibition camp that was supposed to demonstrate good will and a policy of keeping Jews together. Many Berlin Jews tried to obtain non-Jewish identity papers, but these could only be procured through German friends and at great expense. Even suicide could be dear; Veronal, with which many Jews killed themselves, cost up to two thousand marks a box on the black market.
Six times during the year the Gestapo called on Stirner and questioned him. Each time the papers that marked him a welder made them move on. One evening, when they asked him about his trips to Sweden and England before the war, he felt the edge of the sword at his neck—but once more his welder’s certificate saved him.
* * *
—
On December 8, 1942, on his way home from work, Stirner went by his parents’ apartment, near his own, to chat with them awhile. When he knocked on their door, a Christian woman, who was a neighbor, opened her door, in great agitation, and said that SS troops had come and taken the elder Stirners away on ten minutes’ notice. Stirner hurried out and questioned other Jews. He learned at length that his parents were among those quartered in a provisional transit camp in a Jewish elder’s house in Grosse Hamburgerstrasse. He arranged to have a little food, some clothing, and some prayer books smuggled in to them. Seven days later he learned that the house was empty. Much later he learned that his parents, whom he never saw again, had been in the first transport to go to a new camp at Oswiecim, Poland. The German name of this camp was Auschwitz.
* * *
—
Every day in the New Year season that winter seemed as if it would be the last. Stirner’s sister Rose, who had been ticketed for deportation along with their parents but had been kept in Berlin because she was an experienced stenographer, moved into the Stirners’ room. Lena Stirner prepared knapsacks containing work clothing, underclothes, sewing things, a couple of books for the boy Jacob, a chess set, an Old Testament, shoes, handkerchiefs, towels, and toilet articles. Stirner maintained a self-deluding optimism. He had a friend in his factory gang who was married to a Christian and was allowed a radio; at two-thirty every morning this man arose and listened to the BBC and next day whispered the news to Alfred, and the reports of Eisenhower’s progress in North Africa and of the Russians’ success at Stalingrad gave him heart. “It is a race,” he used to say to Lena in those weeks, “between our fate and Hitler’s.” A speech Goebbels made on February 25, 1943, in the Berlin Sportspalast, however, depressed him. Goebbels was trying to buck up the Germans and at one point he said, “We have prepared everything to liquidate the enemy in our midst. We declare total war against him.”
The very next day Rose Stirner came home from her work with a report that something serious—she had been unable to learn just what—would take place the following day, February 27. Stirner had observed from previous roundups that husbands had been taken from factories and wives from apartments, and often families had been unable to reunite. He determined to stay at home on the twenty-seventh. Rose could not; she had to go to work.
At noon on the twenty-seventh a friend came in and told the Stirners that SS Leibstandarte troops had entered all factories in which Jewish gangs worked and had taken them off; other troops seemed to be making the rounds of Jewish apartments and were arresting Jews wholesale. There was nothing to do but wait. Stirner tried to write an objective letter to a friend in Sweden. He gave up and tried to read a novel by Zweig. Soon he gave that up too and just sat with Lena and Jacob.
* * *
—
At four o’clock, two Gestapo men arrived. They told the Stirners to be ready to leave in ten minutes. Jacob—then three years and three months old—was sleeping, and Lena Stirner, who appeared not to be afraid, persuaded the men to give her forty-five minutes to waken the boy, get him dressed, and make arrangements to leave.
During part of the wait Stirner talked with the Germans, and he asked, among other things, how they thought their actions would rest on their consciences.
One of the men said, “What would happen if the Russian Jews came in here? They wouldn’t give us ten minutes’ notice. They would give us a bullet in the neck.”
When for the last time the Stirners walked out of their little room, one of the Gestapo men fixed on the door, alongside the six-cornered star already there, a seal forbidding entrance in the name of the Gestapo. The Germans first, then the Stirners, trooped downstairs. Outside, Stirner saw an SS truck and six soldiers with rifles. He had a moment of panic, thinking he and his fellows were going to be killed on the spot, but Lena, with the boy in her arms, walked straight up to one of the soldiers, who ordered them into the truck. They got in with a number of other Jews. Soon a soldier closed the door, and they drove about the city, stopping three or four times to take in other Jews, and finally, when the truck was full, they drove some distance. Unable to see out, they did not know where they were going. It was cold. The truck seemed to drive aimlessly, and sometimes it stood still, until altogether some six hours had passed. The boy slept most of the time. Alfred sat holding Lena’s hand, and they whispered about their life before the war. They felt consoled in being together, because most of the people on the truck were separated from their families.
Once they heard one of the guards mention Lichterfelde; that meant to Stirner—because of executions there of which he had read—shooting. Later he heard the same man talking about Oranienburg; that meant shooting, too.
At last the truck stopped for good, and the Stirners got out at a place they could not recognize; it was dark. People from several trucks were herded with their luggage into a cavernous shed, where they heard the voices of a crowd. Stirner figured out, eventually, that they were
in an immense stable, or armory. Guards’ voices barked occasionally. It seemed all the people were to spend the night there. They had no water, no lavatory, no light, no food, and barely room to lie on the ground.
In the morning rumors darted through the frightened crowd. At about noon Rose Stirner, who, as a transit-camp functionary, was permitted to move around Berlin freely, arrived wearing a red brassard—authorized transit-camp organizer. She talked the guards into allowing her to take her brother and his family to her own transit camp, which was more comfortable than the big shed, and later she arranged to have Zinfred and Lena appointed organizers, too, and for nine days, while carrying out duties assigned them, they were able to hunt for friends, provide them with food, carry messages, and reunite a few families. All this time, transport after transport was leaving Berlin for the east.
On the night of March 2–3, the first large-scale night raid of Flying Fortresses took place. After the all-clear, relieved from their terror, the Stirners took vindictive pleasure in looking out and seeing Berlin afire.
“Nero’s Rome,” Lena said.
Zinfred said, “I hope the railways are destroyed.”
But they were not, and five days later, on March 8, the Stirner family was listed for a transport eastward.
* * *
—
The Stirners had three more days in camp before their transport left. On the morning of the ninth, they were handed official decrees which announced to them that in view of their hostile attitude toward the German Reich they were now being deprived of their property and being deported. The three-year-old child, Jacob, was favored with one of these documents. On the eleventh, the passengers of their transport were assembled in a yard with their hand luggage and loaded into trucks, which took them to the Quitzowstrasse freight station, and there SS Leibstandarte troops embarked them in cattle cars, sixty people to a car.
