A Train Near Magdeburg

by Matthew Rozell

  Stunned, I looked into Mother’s face, grown so old these days, yet still full of boundless love and the willingness for self-sacrifice. ‘Surely you understand,’ she continued. ‘We’ll go together with Mirka. Why should you sacrifice yourself in vain…?’ I look into Father’s face, it expresses determination… I fall into my mother’s arms.

  ‘No! Don’t say that! I won’t go on my own!’

  It was a great relief to be together again. We stopped talking about it. Now my mind started to work, to search for other solutions. I felt that my parents accepted the idea of death; they were quiet. I did not. I had come to my senses and began to think logically. I wondered why did the German during the selection send my sister and I back with my father into the crowd and not order us to the left, as they did with all those without a worker’s permit? Does that mean that there will be another selection tomorrow, but this time not according to the work permit or any other document, but according to some other criteria? It was already evening then, and after us the selection was over for that day.

  I try to explain to my parents that we can attempt to get past tomorrow as well, we must not despair. One of us suggests that we empty a backpack, put Mirka inside, and Father will carry her on his back. I’ll hold the only worker’s permit we have, as I am still in danger, and my parents will try to get past, declaring they work for Töbens and were late yesterday. We calmed down a little and looked for a place for the night. We entered an apartment, already full of people lying on the floor. The atmosphere was full of tension and the people were nervous, but we sensed wonderful, friendly warmth; they even made room for each other and for us too. Last minute charity, fellowship of the condemned to death, I pondered.

  At five o’clock in the morning, after a sleepless night, we again stood in rows in the street, waiting for the selection. The people of the Schultz workshop passed by, holding out green numbers, attesting to their status. Many children were among them, going to their death. Suddenly, in one row, we saw Uncle Leon, Father’s brother, his wife, and two sons, without their six-year-old daughter. Father asked: ‘Where is Hanale?’

  ‘We’ve hidden her in a hiding place with grandmother,’ Uncle answered.

  ‘Where is it? Tell us and we’ll take Mirka there. Do you know that they are taking all the children?’ said Father, agitated.

  Aunt Irena answered: ‘That’s impossible, there isn’t any more room there for anyone.’ They strode on in wide rows in the direction of the wooden gate. We stood there, stunned.[*]

  We had another significant meeting during that march to the selection in Mila Street. Fate again brought together two brothers—my father and his older brother David and his family. Fate had wished him to meet his other brother as well, before their final parting.

  Uncle David was unshaven, emanating despair. Beside him walked Aunt Guta and their two daughters, ten-year-old Helenka and nine-year-old Milka. The two brothers embraced. Uncle David said: ‘There’s nothing we can do, Shimek. That’s the end for us.’ They had no work identity card; they went along with their little daughters; they went with them to the end. There was nothing to say to each other. We were also going into the unknown. I looked at the little girls. My uncle’s daughters had blue eyes, so light blue. Did they understand what awaited them?

  Father’s backpack was heavy for him. He made a hole so Mirka could breathe, and through it he occasionally gave her water to drink from a bottle. I supported the precious backpack from below. How can the poor child sit there, with her legs folded under her, her back bent tightly, without air? Will she be able to remain like that? And what if they beat Father with a whip, as they often do, and Mirka is hit and cries out? And anyway, how much chance do we have?

  We agreed that I’d go first and Father would follow me. If he sees that they order me to go to the left, to those condemned to death, he’ll go there too, and Mother will follow him. But what will happen if I get through and they don’t?

  My head is throbbing; it’s hot. I must remain calm. Mother comes close to me and whispers in my ear. I feel her hot breath. She kisses me, she gives me strength.

  Now it is the turn of the rest of the people belonging to the Töbens workshops, left over from yesterday. Suddenly, the people in front of us draw back, and we are facing the gate. Father pushes me to go first; I hold the worker’s permit firmly in front of me and go straight to the right, pushing aside the rubber truncheon in my way. I turn around. Father follows me with the heavy backpack. Mother, where is she? And then I see her, head held high. Walking erect in a dignified way, she follows Father. We’ve made it!

  A miracle! The people in front of us drew back because they began to take everyone to the left, and yet we passed. We stood in a long row with the other fortunate people and watched what was going on: There were no more workshop people. The Germans let us go to the right for no particular reason. They took others to the left according to some blind game, according to rules known only to them!

  At noon, exhausted, we begin to move in a long procession back to the ghetto. It is hot, terribly hot; we are covered with sweat and very thirsty. Mirka peeps out of the backpack; people are surprised that a whole family was able to pass. Most of them have remained alone.

  We are escorted by Jewish policemen. They are also tired and worn out. In the streets, corpses are lying about, of people who were discovered in hiding places and did not go to the ‘cauldron.’ The roads are strewn with household utensils, clothes, cutlery, undone quilts—the ghetto streets, brimming with life only a few days ago, are deserted. A deathly silence permeates everything. Only the open windows bang in the wind, and belongings bereft of their owners lie around; the blood of the unfortunate people, lying on the sidewalks—only the stillness is calling for revenge. Everything cries out for vengeance! We drag our feet in silence, not as though we had been set free, but like slaves granted a respite. A thought reverberates in my head: why not me? We returned to our street, to the houses allotted to the Töbens workers.

  *

  In the course of time, I found out the extent of the catastrophe. The selection and the search for people hiding in the ghetto lasted four days. The first stage of the extermination of the Warsaw Jews was over. During those days they took more than a hundred thousand people, among them almost all the children in the ghetto. The ghetto was now kinderrein—‘unpolluted by children.’ At the end of the great ‘aktion,’ on September 12, 1942, only about 50,000 Jews out of a population of over 300,000 remained alive.[26]

  As 1943 dawned, the SS returned to the ghetto for another major deportation. They encountered the first armed resistance from the ghetto fighters and beat a hasty retreat, leaving behind wounded and weapons, and calling off the operation. For the next three months, the ghetto fighters organized and prepared for the final struggle. On the eve of Passover, April 19, the Germans returned again, this time with the aim of liquidating the ghetto once and for all, in time for Hitler’s birthday on the 20th. By then, there were between 300-350 active fighters; the young were now the real leaders of the ghetto, having decided not between life and death, but rather, how to die.[*] Aliza recorded her observations of the preparations for the final battle they all knew was coming.

  Spring, 1943

  As spring approached, the atmosphere in the reduced ghetto changed. We waited for the final ‘aktion,’ for the final extermination of the Jews of Warsaw. People began to build bunkers. Experts turned up, engineers who built bunkers with electric light, in wells and toilets. Most of the bunkers were dug in cellars. There were various ways to enter the bunkers from the ground floor: by raising a cover in the kitchen stove or through an opening in the large stove attached to the wall, or in many other strange ways, according to the fertile imagination of the builders. The ghetto was preparing for a struggle.

  *

  March passed, and April came. Talk about the approaching final liquidation of the ghetto intensified. The ghetto was fully aware of it and prepared. It was the calm before the storm, s
uffused with energy and tension. Frequent shots near the ghetto and sudden evening searches by the SS command cars heralded what was to come. Sending off the people working for Töbens and Schultz factory workshops to Poniatow and Travniki[*] caused apprehension, even though they had gone of their own free will. If they are sending out the workers, what will happen to all the rest? The companies of the SS General Globocnik[*], in charge of extermination, again arrived in Warsaw.

  *

  The only possibility left is to escape to the Aryan side, to dress up as a Pole and look for acquaintances or people willing to hide Jews in exchange for money. For a few thousand zloty, one could get a Polish birth certificate and a ration card. People handed over their children to Christian clerics, to monasteries, and to peasants in the villages. Sacks were thrown over the walls daily and openly, at least on our side. People paid bribes to the foremen of the work crews to be able to join them going out to work on the Aryan side. Some of them did not look Jewish and were lucky enough to find ‘good’ Poles. Women dyed and oxidized their hair, and created curls by rolling their hair in pieces of paper, to look like blonde gentile girls. But they could not change the color of their eyes, or their dejected and pallid look. A Jew could also be picked out by his hesitant walk, his bent back, and his eyes constantly darting around him. We were so preoccupied by our aspiration to look like ‘goyim’ that we examined ourselves and others: Does that man look like a Jew? Will they recognize him in the street?

  Of course, a new profession cropped up among the simple Polish people, with many demanding a bribe, or being paid to be an informer, a blackmailer. We were deeply disappointed; we thought that as witnesses of our tragedy, our compatriots, sharing the same language and culture, they would hold out a hand to save us. But it did not happen. A few of them hid Jews for large sums of money; these were mostly people connected to socialist activities and the left-wing parties. Many devout Christians and religious scholars did so without taking money, out of true nobility of spirit. Many others, from among the simple folk, made a living by informing on Jews to the Gestapo, and collaborated willingly out of pure antisemitism. They walked around in the streets close to the ghetto, spied by the gates and the places where Jews worked on the Aryan side, and looked for victims. Thousands made a living in this way.

  *

  The state of our family grew worse. We began to suffer from hunger. There were no clothes left to sell, we lived on the food we had received in the workshop, distributed by the Germans.

  *

  Aliza’s family decided to split up to increase chances of survival. Her more ‘Aryan-looking’ mother and younger sister, with a great deal of bribery, subterfuge, and nerves of steel, went into hiding on the Aryan side. Her father decided to take the chance and volunteer to go to the work camp near Lublin. Aliza herself wanted to stay and fight in the ghetto, but now only fourteen, she was deemed too young and was directed by the leadership of the resistance to make her way to the Aryan side as well, to live to tell the story.

  Leaving the Warsaw Ghetto

  We stood at the entrance of the house. Father was to leave me there and go off. He was pale and had a tormented look. He could not move. He hugged me, kissed me, and went off. He came back a moment later, and we embraced again. I did not cry. I clung to him. Again he left. No, I saw him come back to me once more. I felt I wanted him to leave; I couldn’t bear it any longer.

  ‘Daddy, goodbye, see you again. You’d better go!’

  One more hug, and he left.

  Left altogether.

  A long time has passed since I saw him disappearing into the distance, turning again and again to look at me. I was naïve enough to believe we would see each other in a week’s time. I did not know, nor did Father, that at that very moment the order to surround the ghetto before the final liquidation was already in the works.

  *

  July 15, 2013/Majdanek

  At each new authentic site, where these unspeakable horrors were perpetrated, some kind of invisible hand pushes me just a little bit harder. It’s tough to explain. But this evening, as I write into the early hours on the laptop from my bed in the splendid Grand Hotel, perhaps Lublin’s most celebrated and storied, I am troubled. We teachers are being handled with the finest accommodations, something which teachers are rarely afforded. My roommate Tim and I appreciate this, and talk about it when the lights go down, lying in the dark. We bounce theories and ideas off each other about what we have witnessed during the day, trying to process what we have experienced. Yet I fall asleep fitfully, for outside of our room not so long ago, Nazi jackboots echoed on the staircases.

  Lublin, for centuries an important center of Jewish life and culture in Europe, became the seat of SS power in this part of the Generalgouvernement, that large area in Poland that had not been annexed directly to Germany, German East Prussia, or after 1941, the German-occupied USSR. The month after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Himmler ordered the construction of a new concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin. The original purpose of the camp, to be known as Majdanek (pronounced ‘My-don-ek’), was to provide forced labor for the construction of SS and administrative centers in the planned eastern territories.

  Majdanek holds a central role in the administration of Operation Reinhard, the code name for the plan for the physical annihilation of the two million Jews still residing in the Generalgouvernement. Named for Reinhard Heydrich, who was assassinated six months after presiding over the Wannsee Conference, it took planning and it took deliberation. Within this framework, Majdanek primarily served to concentrate Jews whom the Germans spared temporarily for forced labor. It occasionally functioned as a killing site to murder victims who could not be killed at the Operation Reinhard killing centers: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka II. It also contained a storage depot for property and valuables taken from the Jewish victims at the killing centers. And like other concentration camps in the Reich, Majdanek also served as a killing site for targeted groups of individuals, including members of the Polish resistance, hostages taken from the Security Police prison in Lublin, and prisoners in the camp itself who were deemed no longer capable of work. [27]

  To witness Majdanek is to see the first concentration camp to be captured when it was overrun relatively intact by the Red Army in July of 1944. All of the evidence is here; buildings intact, stuffed with original artifacts that were left here. Himmler must have been pissed. The barracks here are the original intact wooden shacks. Do you know how a sound, or a smell, can instantaneously trigger a memory long buried? These buildings reek; I know that heavy gasoline-like smell. My late father is before my teenage eyes on a hot July day like today, in his white T-shirt, layering on this thick petroleum-based wood preservative with his paintbrush at our hunting shack in the Adirondacks, before the version he favored was banned for public use. The authentic guard towers menace like outer space creatures from The War of the Worlds. On top of that, the bizarre science fiction ‘unreality’ of the place is enhanced by the Soviet memorial in the far-off distance, which resembles a flying saucer hovering over an unknown object.

  Did you know that an undestroyed gas chamber as well as crematorium ovens still exist at this site? So why not see it? Go in it? The intact gas chamber building is still labeled outside as ‘Bath and Disinfection I.’ I enter. Low ceiling. Dark. Concrete floors with gutter channels. Sinks.

  Pushing a bit deeper into this claustrophobic ‘assembly line,’ I feel a deepening pressure in my chest—I don’t like it here. Another doorway beckons, summoning me forth into a small room with showerheads above—all connected, all so orderly.

  I’m trailing behind the group now. To continue moving forward with the group will bring me to the gas chamber; I turn around and my feet carry me back through the entrance, and I exit this wooden building. I’m just not going there; I wait outside. I am conscious of a pull to witness, but today I am just not going to go in.

  The next building is the storehouse for clothing and other personal ite
ms taken from the Jews of the combined killing centers.

  Walking in here you are overpowered again by the nauseating smell of the creosote, and then your eyes try to take it all in—row upon row of piles of shoes, all behind chicken-wire cages holding them back from spilling at your feet. Leather, different colors, different materials and designs; men’s, and women’s, and children’s shoes of all sizes and shapes, and all now taking on the brownish hue that channels the temporal spectrum of the passage of time. Mountains of shoes, voiceless yet vociferous messengers from the past that scream out to reclaim lost dignity—Remember Us.

  We exit the building. Two young Polish women with a stroller casually pass us, chatting—they are cutting through Majdanek to take a shortcut to the Catholic cemetery on the outside of the camp memorial complex. The irony is not lost on the group.

  And it is going to get a hell of a lot more ironic in the next 20 minutes. In the barracks area, we have a stop and a discussion; we move on to the Soviet memorial, that futuristic hovercraft, and the crematorium. The crematorium is intact, too. Again I hang back. Instead, I go over and check out a memorial stone with a plaque near the steps to the Soviet memorial. I note the trench-like undulating terrain behind the memorial stone. I read what happened at this spot, and I think I need to sit down.

  Nervous about the recent uprisings at Treblinka, Sobibor, the Warsaw and Vilna ghettos, and elsewhere, the SS chief Himmler ordered the murder of the Jewish slave laborers in and around the camp, including the camp at Poniatow.

  Code named ‘Aktion Erntefest’ (Operation Harvest Festival), the SS and police auxiliaries shot them in the ditches I am standing before; they played loud music through loudspeakers to drown out the noise, to disguise the gunshots for the folks back in the town. The shootings went on all day, the largest single-day and single-location massacre known to have occurred in the Holocaust.[28] Over 33,000 were murdered on that chilly Wednesday in November, 18,500 right here, right before me.[29]