A Train Near Magdeburg

by Matthew Rozell

  We were all sent into a large room and together—children, adolescent boys and girls, mothers, grandmothers and grandfathers—had to disrobe and march naked to a shower between two lines of laughing, pointing, machine-gun-toting SS guards with dogs. Walking to that shower was the very first real dehumanization I experienced. It drove into our minds the fact that we were not who we used to be, not individuals who had our own dignity, respected within our communities, but, rather, people who the SS guards considered to be subhuman. I was stunned, as were my mother and grandmother. All those laws that had existed in Hungary for a number of years and prevented Jews from living a free and normal life, even the German occupation and being forced to wear the yellow star—none of it was as psychologically damaging as this was. It wasn’t just a physically and mentally unpleasant experience—this was the ultimate shock from which I don’t think I recovered.

  Peter Lantos

  My parents found out after a while where we were, but they did not know how long we would be staying here or what we would be required to do. I did not understand the language the soldiers were speaking, and my mother explained that it was German, a language both my parents spoke. The soldiers were either German or Austrian, she said, and we were no longer in Hungary. This was a confusing discovery, since I could not understand why the enemy was kinder than our own people. Here we were treated better than at home; we were given food and drink, and they did not beat us. At least, not until we encountered our first Ukrainian guards. They were not prisoners like us—they had voluntarily joined the Germans in their retreat from Russia—but their privileged status did nothing to diminish their appetite for cruelty. They carried thick, long sticks, and these they wielded to devastating effect. Their savagery was unprovoked and indiscriminate: it was not necessary to commit what they could have perceived as a crime, or even a minor trespass against regulations; our very existence was enough to trigger their brutality. Incomprehensible as it was, they apparently enjoyed beating us; they found sadistic delight in crushed bones and bloody faces. Although I did not realize this until much later, it was in Strasshof that, for the first time, I witnessed the practical implications of the concept of punishment without crime or cause: you are guilty simply because you exist. It was also here that I made my first anthropological observation, to be confirmed later elsewhere—that the women guards were the more vicious of the species; in their brutality, they easily outperformed the men. It was a shock to see women beating up defenseless prisoners who could have been their mothers or their children.

  Irene Bleier Muskal

  We woke up Friday morning in Austria to the sound of the boxcar doors opening, our clothes crumpled from being on our bodies for two weeks now. Spiritually anguished, we dragged ourselves out and discovered that we had arrived in Austria. Many dead bodies were soon spread out in front of the open boxcars. The Austrian policemen took over this ‘human cargo.’ To their credit, they acted much more humanely than the Hungarian policemen did. No bawling or beating us.

  I looked around and discovered a nearby road where civilians—free people—occasionally rode through. Together with my thirteen-year-old sister Jolan, I walked to the roadside, where Jolan begged passersby for bread. We hardly got there when a young bicycling girl stopped and gave us her own sandwich roll with butter and yellow cheese, which we divided among the five of us. This anonymous Austrian girl's kind gesture satisfied our starved stomach and made our souls feel good.

  Armed gendarmes instructed us to line up in rows of five. We put down our backpacks in the bare field that was our ‘home’ for now and breathed some fresh air. We walked around the area, turning over every little bit of garbage we found in the hope of finding some food. I found some moldy, greenish bread, broke it up into five pieces, and shared with my family. Each of us received less than one bite, so we just swallowed it bitterly.

  We laid down our starved and tired bodies on the bare earth as dark clouds threatened above us. The clouds soon poured heavy rain upon us. I took this as a sign that God is crying for us. If the whole world keeps quiet and does nothing to help us, at least the faithful Almighty feels for us. The rain poured mercilessly on our bodies as the Sabbath entered on our second deeply sad Friday night.

  At daybreak Saturday, the beautiful sun shone brightly in the sky. But we could relate neither to the sun nor to the rain. Our feelings deserted us; nothing penetrated our consciousness.

  As we walked about, we discovered some barracks surrounded by barbed-wire fences. In the compound, we see fellow Hungarian Jews, including some friends and relatives from Püspökladány. Their transport left Hungary after ours, going straight to the Strasshof concentration camp in Austria. Our transport was on its way to Auschwitz, but by some miracle was turned back from Poland and arrived here in the Strasshof concentration camp.

  In turn, residents of each barrack took their belongings with them to take a shower and undergo a ‘procedure.’ This meant taking all clothes, including the last bit of clothing which covered our bodies, and presenting them by hand to a Ukrainian man. This man took care of disinfecting the clothes while the people strolled around naked inside a special building for a couple of hours. I could not believe that this unheard of, degrading description was true, but when I went to look, I saw with my own eyes that it was really happening. Naked women lined up and handed their packs to the hands of Ukrainian men.

  At once, I felt the pain of the dreadful shame. Oh, such torment, such a miserable spectacle. I just stood there scared stiff, and like a living dead walked to my place. Then a deafening scream woke me up from my lethargy. I looked in the direction of the hysterical bawling and saw a young woman trying to escape this degradation by choosing death. She was about to hang herself on the outer wall of the barrack building, both her parents lamenting and begging her not to punish them.

  Sheer desperation encompassed me. As I stepped inside our barrack, the multitude already had their packs on their backs and were starting on their way to the shower for disinfecting. My mother begged me to come with them. ‘No,’ I answered her, ‘I am just unable to go.’

  The place soon emptied completely, save for me. Still scared stiff in my dark desperation, I leaned against the wall. A young Ukrainian beast shortly appeared, yelling at me to come. ‘No, I am not going anywhere,’ I daringly answered. His expression grew angry as he lifted his hand and beat my back with his whip. My mind darkened, my soul deeply injured.

  Unable to think, my two legs dragged me to the shower place, where I joined my mother. All of us women stood in line, naked, and handed over all our belongings to a Ukrainian man. Then the real torture began. We were herded from room to room and questioned about many different things, then underwent medical examinations. Then a young male shaved all our body hairs. Oh, how can the earth tolerate so many cruel deeds? Our senses were totally numbed by so many different shocking events. I could not comprehend anything and was paralyzed.

  Agnes Fleischer Baker

  I can only tell you that probably the worst thing, when we were in a shower, and it wasn't gas, obviously I'm alive, but they used the Ukrainians, and we were naked in the shower, my mother and my sister and I, and I'm ten years old, and one of the Ukrainians came and pinched my naked butt. That was terrible.

  Peter Lantos

  One day my grandmother died. I cannot recall how; my mother later said she had suffered a heart attack. I do not remember any burial ceremony—my parents said a prayer, and that was all. My mother cried, but I was standing by her side without shedding a tear, numb and motionless, paralyzed by fear. But death did not become my grandmother—it was strange to see her, the commanding matriarch suddenly diminished to a small, silent corpse, lying motionless under a foreign sky. Her silence was anomalous and ominous; there was no longer anyone to order around or quarrel with. She timed her death well, the last act of a resourceful woman with a long and full life—by dying suddenly in Strasshof, she avoided the later, harder stages of the journey, and saved herself furt
her suffering and humiliation.

  Irene Bleier Muskal

  We were divided into two groups. Ours became the forced slave laborers of the 20th century. The other group consisted of people unfit to work, either because of age or poor health, but mainly young mothers who had more than two babies with them. Empty boxcars stood ready to ship these miserable saints without delay to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. There, the innocent, defenseless human cargo perished within minutes—their tormented souls returned to the Creator, their remains herded to the crematorium and burned to ashes. The pure souls parted from the bodies through the crematorium chimney in the form of dark gray smoke, on their way to the heavenly tribunal.

  Our group boarded boxcars at the same time as the less fortunate group. With deep pain, I can still recall seeing a former neighbor of ours, Mrs. Stern—along with her four young children—board the Auschwitz-bound boxcars. She saw no one except for her young ones. Her eyes reflected the oncoming death. After the war, she and her children never came back, like so many others from our hometown, and from so many other cities and countries.

  Leslie Meisels

  Our group consisted of twenty-one people from four family remnants—‘remnants’ because almost all of our fathers had been taken away to the forced labor service. We were with the Bleiers, a widow with four children from my hometown, Mrs. Bleier’s sister-in-law with her three children[*] from the nearby town of Püspökladány, and the Leib family of seven from Kaba. As we waited, we saw some of the people who had come with us on the train being led back to the cattle wagons, and we all wondered where they were going. When we saw that our respected rabbi, Yisrael Jungreis, and his wife, the rebbetzin[*], who were both in their late seventies, were being forced into one of these cattle wagons, my mother gave me a half-full pot of roasted flour and goose fat we had been saving and told me to take it to them because they might need it. I went right over to the wagon where the rebbetzin and rabbi were and, finding the door slightly open, gave them the pot from my mother. After thanking me, the rabbi put his hands on top of my head and recited the priestly blessing, ‘May God keep you… bless you and be gracious to you….’ It was very moving, and I felt touched. He had barely finished the blessing when an SS guard came over and slammed the door shut, pushing me away. This has always stayed with me.[*]

  *

  Irene Bleier Muskal

  Our transport got moving, stopping after a while at a small Austrian town. Here, each of us received a hot meal consisting of mashed potatoes and spinach, compliments of the local mayor. It was a very nice gesture.

  Later we arrived in Vienna, where we left the boxcars and walked through some of the city's long streets, our packs on our backs and in our hands. As usual, armed guards escorted us. I recall being taken over by a terrible sense of humiliation when masses of civilians peered at our column. Looking back, it was they who should have felt the shame, and not me.

  Our first day of work turned out to be our holy Sabbath day. The farm owner paid the Nazi authorities some amount in order to use us, but we received no payment, only a meager food supply. We performed strenuous farm work from sunrise to sunset for the duration of our stay, all summer and fall. Sunday became our day of rest. Our captors treated us inhumanely, hitting us on any special occasion they found. We kept track of our holy days, the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur. The landowner permitted us to celebrate them. We prayed to the Almighty even more fervently than ever, hoping to be rescued soon—to be free human beings with all our loved ones.

  In the late fall, the clock ran out on the Hungarian families in Austria. The decision was made to send them to Bergen–Belsen, part of a complicated holding pattern as exchange negotiations went on.

  Towards the end of October, we were served a one-day notice to prepare ourselves for a journey; the destination was again unknown. The first station for us was back to Strasshof, where several thousand of our fellow Jewish slave laborers gathered. After a few days, we were again herded into boxcars, ready for shipment.

  The boxcar with its human cargo was advancing from Austria through Czechoslovakia in the direction of Berlin, Germany. The human cargo consisted of the Jewish slave-laborers of the twentieth century, stripped of all their human rights, banished from their country of birth by the government, mercilessly thrown to the clutches of Nazi Germany in order to be annihilated. We sat crammed on the naked floor, asking no questions as to our pending destruction. It was pitch dark at night. Under the influence of months of agony, we lost our own free will and just accepted the treacherous instructions and followed the perilous hands wherever they took us. Our minds were in a state of terror, with the effects lingering long after.

  Bergen–Belsen

  Thus our journey continued, coming to a stop after an unknown amount of time. We dragged ourselves out of the boxcars as the doors were unlatched, the Nazi guard roaring out orders. We had to line up at our destination, the Bergen–Celle train station, a slow and steady rainfall welcoming us.

  Since we were chased out of our former homes, dark skies and steady rain greeted us at each new location. Such a marvelous sensation this phenomenon gave me. I was overcome with a special feeling that somehow even managed to uplift my darkened spirit. It came to me as a message from the heavens, which were venting their anger. The Almighty shares in our tragedy and is pouring tears of sorrow; He is crying on our behalf. These thoughts planted seeds of hope and faith into my soul against the backdrop of the great catastrophe.

  Lined up in rows of five, we set out on our sad march. Army trucks delivered our backpacks. Swab-German SS Nazi soldiers escorted us. The group I was in consisted mainly of women and children, some old people and a few young ones; men aged 18 to 48 were taken to forced army labor several years before, where most had perished from starvation, from inhuman beatings, or from freezing to death in sub-zero weather.

  Our group marched in the middle of the road, with a few stone houses to our left, curious eyes staring at us from the windows. I felt deep humiliation, but the people who should have felt the shame were those staring at us from the houses. We were innocent, defenseless people; they were partners in the annihilation of millions of innocent souls.

  BOOK TWO

  THE AMERICANS

  During the night I realized that I was going to die. When I accepted this, I felt peaceful; there was nothing that I could do.

  –Carrol ‘Red’ Walsh, age 24

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Coming Home

  1987/Hudson Falls, NY

  I fire up the Beast on this cold December morning, and retreat to my sanctuary to wait for her to warm. Exhaust fumes drift my way, but I pay them no mind. Sitting on the edge of my bed in a former recreation room attached to my parents’ garage, I also fire up the first of four cigarettes, a bad habit I picked up in a previous life in the restaurant business to deal with stress. I am chain-smoking before climbing into the Beast, a hand-me-down gas-guzzling Oldsmobile Delta 88 convertible, to make the short drive to the public high school where I now teach, the school that I left eight years ago as a high school graduate, in the town I told my father I would not return to. In that conversation as a senior in high school, I also responded to his parental ‘what are your plans for the future’ entreaties with the timeless wisdom and wit of the eighteen-year old—‘I’m leaving this town, I don’t know what I want to do, but I do know I am NOT going to become a teacher, like you’—a passing shot before I head off to college a few hundred miles away. Take that, old man.

  But, touché. He has the last laugh, because at 26, I am now paying him a token in rent, and driving his old Beast around town. And I am a teacher, a high school teacher like him, and wait—oh, yes—teaching the exact same subject that he has been teaching for thirty years, world history. Even the young can’t outrun the karmic wheel, it seems.

  Now on the other side of the desk, in my first year in the public school system, my stress levels have me thinking of investing in tobacco stocks. I’m the third history te
acher that the students have had this year, and it is not even Thanksgiving. My own high school teachers are now my colleagues—let’s talk about weird—and I’m pushing what feels like a shopping cart through the crowded hallways, with lesson props, books, and marked-up papers to hand back, all asunder. I’m shuffling from classroom to classroom, like an itinerant peddler of obscure vials of ‘wisdom’ and ‘knowledge’ that nobody seems to want. I don’t dare turn my back to the chalkboard for I have discovered that a new teacher is also a magician, and can, with this act, make pencils and pens, paper wads and notebooks all demonstrate Newton’s Laws of Motion of their own accord. When I walk into the classroom, my young charges seem to rub their hands together in hormonal homicidal glee. For many of them, I am next on the hit parade, hopefully out by Christmas. This is my life and the tunnel I have entered. How did I wind up here? What have I done?

  *

  Well, for starters, I have to admit to myself that I always liked history. It was easy to annoy my younger siblings by lingering at the museum exhibits and devouring every last word of the descriptions and interpretations, and I supposed I relished that as well. Before the household would wake up on sunny summer mornings, I would ditch them all and head down to the river by myself to wander the banks in search of old bottle dumps and remnants of the fighting from the wars of the colonial period and the American Revolution that raged right through here, the confluence of warpaths along the falls of the Hudson River in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. In my solitary pursuits I trespassed and looted with abandon, bringing home unbroken glass treasures to my appreciative mother, who would wash them and set them with love on her kitchen windowsill. This went on even after a well-intentioned neighbor spotted me crossing the bridge at the river, and placed a call to Mother, who, with characteristic shrugs, made no real effort at interdiction. I also hung out for hours on summer days in the local graveyards, and I was fascinated by the stories and legends of the heroes and villains who played parts in the forging of the United States. My dad taught summer school, and when I came home from my explorations, he would be setting up the slide projector to preview his course materials and here exposed me to other history, particularly the art and architecture of Renaissance Europe. He really loved that, and he was a minor expert because of it. My mother and he were big readers as well, and enjoyed their travel. I suppose it rubbed off.