A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy (8 page)

The bodies of the prisoners were left hanging for a few days near the entrance to the barrack as a warning against further
escape attempts. There were to be other executions in Henryków. As time went on, they became routine; but I remember only
the first. The dignity and humanity the young prisoner demonstrated moments before his death — and the disdainful refusal
of the other condemned men to plead for their lives — no doubt served over time to reinforce my conviction that moral resistance
in the face of evil is no less courageous than physical resistance, a point that has unfortunately been frequently lost in
the debate over the lack of greater Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

Our life at Henryków came to an end abruptly one morning in July 1944, almost a year after we got there. A large contingent
of German soldiers entered Henryków and ordered all of us to line up in front of the barrack. Then we were marched under heavy
guard to what I believe was the freight railroad station of Kielce. When we got there, we found that the prisoners who had
ended up in Ludwików when the labor camp was liquidated were already at the station. Here a freight train was waiting for
us, and we were all ordered to get in. The doors were then locked from the outside. There was little light in the cars, although
we could look out between the slats on either side. I saw that the last car of the train was an open cattle car bristling
with heavy machine guns pointing in all directions. Soldiers with submachine guns sat in little cabs above each car.

As we were boarding the train, we heard various announcements over the loudspeaker. One informed us that our next destination
would be a factory in Germany where we were needed. This announcement was greeted with considerable relief and for a while
seemed to silence the whispered rumors that we were on our way to Auschwitz. While I could not quite imagine what Auschwitz
was really like, I had heard terrible stories about it, and I could sense that the mere mention of the name sent shivers down
the backs of my parents and the other grown-ups.

Many hours passed as the train moved through the Polish countryside. Asked where he thought we were being taken, my father
assured everybody in our car that the train appeared to be moving toward Germany, not Auschwitz. Having studied at the university
in Kraków, not far from Auschwitz, my father knew that part of the country well. Sometime later, I heard my father whisper
to my mother that the train had veered off the route to Germany and was moving in the direction of Auschwitz. Others soon
realized what was happening. People began to cry and pray; others huddled together in whispered conversations. I remember
my father taking a big gulp from a small bottle of vodka before passing it to my mother. My mother kept squeezing my hand
and hugging me from time to time.

Two men in our car started to pry open some floorboards in the middle of the car. Similar escape plans were apparently being
hatched in other cars. As it got dark and while the train was traveling near a forested area, machine-gun fire, coming from
the last car, exploded all around us. Our guards must have spotted those who were trying to escape by sliding through the
holes in the floor of the cars and lying very flat between the rails. We never found out whether any of these prisoners made
it. The train did not stop, and the shooting continued for some time. There appeared to be some additional escape attempts,
followed by more gunfire, but the rest of us resigned ourselves to the fact that we would soon be arriving in Auschwitz.

I WAS TEN YEARS OLD
on that sunny morning in the first days of August 1944 when our train approached the outskirts of the concentration camp
of Auschwitz. Actually, as we were to find out later, we were on our way to Birkenau, located some three or four kilometers
down the road from Auschwitz proper. It was in Birkenau that the gas chambers and crematoriums had been erected, and it was
here that millions of human beings died. Auschwitz proper was merely the public front for the Birkenau extermination camp.
Auschwitz was shown to visiting dignitaries, whereas Birkenau was the last place on earth many of the prisoners sent there
were destined to see.

As the train moved closer and closer to Birkenau, we could see hundreds of people in striped prison uniforms digging ditches,
carrying bricks, pushing heavy carts, or marching in formation in different directions. “
Menschen!
” (“Human beings!”), I heard someone mutter, and I sensed a collective sigh of relief in our car. “After all, they do not
kill everybody on arrival,” must have been the thought that flashed through our minds. The mood in the car lightened somewhat,
and people began to talk again. “Maybe Auschwitz is not as bad as it has been made out to be,” somebody said. I thought that
it looked just like Henryków, only bigger, and that it would not be all that bad.

Years later, when asked about Auschwitz and what it was like, I would reply that I was lucky to get into Auschwitz. This response
would invariably produce a shocked look on the face of the person who had asked the question. But I really meant what I said.
Most people who arrived at the Birkenau rail platform had to undergo a so-called selection. Here the children, the elderly,
and the invalids were separated from the rest of the people in their transport and taken directly to the gas chambers. Our
group was spared the selection process. The SS officers in charge must not have ordered it because they probably assumed,
since our transport came from a labor camp, that children and others not able to work had already been eliminated in those
camps. Had there been a selection, I would have been killed before ever making it into the camp. That is what I meant with
my flippant remark about being lucky to get into Auschwitz.

Of course, when we arrived in Birkenau, I did not know what to expect, nor did I know that I had escaped the deadly selection
process. As soon as we stepped out of our freight cars onto the station platform, all men were ordered to line up on one side
and all women on the other. But for one brief moment a few months later, this was the last time I was to see my mother until
we were reunited on December 29, 1946, almost two and half years after our separation. We could not really say good-bye, because
the SS guards were constantly yelling for us to move, hitting and kicking anyone who did not immediately do what they were
ordered to do. I was too scared to cry or even to wave to her and stayed close to my father.

My father held on to me as we were marched away from the station toward a big building. Here we were ordered to take off our
clothes and made to run through some showers and a disinfecting foot pool. Along the way, our hair was shorn off, and we were
thrown the same blue and white striped prison uniforms we had seen on entering Auschwitz. It was at this point that my father
whispered to me that we had made it, for it was only when we had received the uniforms that he could be sure that we were
not being taken to the gas chambers.

With that process behind us, we were again ordered to line up and march. We must have walked for quite some time before we
came upon rows and rows of barracks as far as the eye could see. Streets — actually unpaved roads — cut through the long rows
of barracks. High barbed wire fences on either side of the rows of barracks divided what looked like a large town into sizable
individual camps, each with its own gate and guard towers. Later I was to learn that these individual camps were identified
by letters of the alphabet. For example, women were housed in camps B and C, men in camp D, and so on. Our destination was
camp E, better known as the Gypsy camp. That camp had housed many thousands of Gypsy families. All of them — men, women, and
children — were murdered shortly before we arrived. Only the name remained to remind us of yet another horrendous crime committed
in the name of the master race.

The entrance to the Gypsy camp, consisting of a movable barbed wire gate, was guarded by the SS with their dogs. Once inside
the camp, we were ordered to line up in single file behind a group of barracks and made to roll up our left sleeves. At one
end of the line, two inmates sat at a wooden table. Each of us had to move up to the table, state our name, and stretch out
our left arm. I was walking ahead of my father in the line and did not quite know what was happening. Then I saw that each
inmate at the table was holding something that looked like a pen with a thin needle at the end, and that they were writing
something on the outstretched arms after dunking the pens into an ink pot: we were being tattooed. When my turn came, I was
afraid that it would hurt, but it went so fast that I could hardly feel it. Now I had a new name: B-2930, and it was the only
“name” that mattered here. The number, now somewhat faded, is still there on my left arm. It remains a part of me and serves
as a reminder, not so much of my past, but of the obligation I deem incumbent on me, as a witness and survivor of Auschwitz,
to fight the ideologies of hate and of racial and religious superiority that have for centuries caused so much suffering to
mankind.

My father, who was right behind me in the tattoo line, became B-2931. Our numbers were also printed on a strip of cloth with
a yellow triangle, the color identifying us as Jews. (There were different colors to distinguish between different types of
inmates. Political prisoners, for example, were given red triangles. Other colors were assigned to homosexuals, criminals,
and so on.) Some forty-five years later, when I returned to Auschwitz and gave the person in charge of the archives my name
in order to find out when precisely I had arrived there in 1944, she asked for my number. I looked surprised since I had always
heard that the Germans kept very precise records in their camps. “By the time you arrived,” she explained, “there was such
a large influx of new arrivals that the SS no longer bothered to record the names of inmates, only their numbers.” Sure enough,
once she had my number, she was able to provide the date I needed. The card with my number even disclosed how many people
had come with me to Auschwitz from Kielce. It occurred to me then that unlike those of us who survived Auschwitz and can document
our existence in that camp by reference to our numbers, those prisoners who died in its crematoriums after the SS had stopped
recording their names have left behind no trace of their presence in that terrible place. No bodies, no names; only ashes
and numbers. It is hard to imagine a greater affront to human dignity.

After we had been tattooed, we were assigned to our barracks. Ours was a wooden structure like all the others in the Gypsy
camp, with a mud floor that divided two long rows of wide, triple-level, wooden bunks. Once in the barrack, we were greeted
by a burly prisoner with a cane. This, I was to learn right away, was the
Blockältester,
or barrack boss. He kept pointing to the bunks and yelling in Polish and Yiddish, “Ten men to each level!” Whoever did not
move fast enough for him was hit or kicked. My father and I found a bunk, picked the middle level, and were soon joined by
eight other inmates. Then we were ordered to lie on our stomachs with our heads pointing toward the middle of the barrack.
I can’t recall whether we were given blankets, but I am sure that we had no mattresses.

Although we were not given anything to eat that evening, the very thought of food was forced out of my mind by what happened
that night. Into the barrack strutted two or three well-fed inmates with canes and clubs. They wore armbands that identified
them as
Kapo
. Kapos were inmates who, together with the barrack bosses, ran the camp for the SS and terrorized their fellow inmates, day
in and day out. Right after the Kapos had greeted our barrack boss, one of them yelled in German, “Spiegel, you son of a bitch.
Get down. We want to talk to you!” As soon as Spiegel stood before them, the men surrounded him and started to hit him with
their fists and clubs: on his face, his head, his legs, his arms. The more Spiegel begged for mercy and screamed, the more
the Kapos beat him. From what I could make out as the Kapos yelled while beating him, Spiegel had apparently denounced one
of them to the Gestapo in Kielce, with the result that the denounced man had been sent to Auschwitz some two years earlier.

Spiegel was soon on his knees and then flat on the ground, begging to be allowed to die. He was covered with blood and no
longer really trying to protect himself against the blows that continued to rain down on him. The Kapos then picked up Spiegel
and began to push and pull him out of the barrack. We did not see what happened next. Later we heard that the Kapos had dragged
Spiegel to the fence and that he died on the fence. Our camp, like the others in Birkenau, was enclosed by a highly electrified
fence that emitted a perennial buzz. The fence separated those of us in the Gypsy camp from camp D on one side and camp F
on the other. A single wire strung about a meter high and a meter from the fence on either side warned inmates not to get
any closer lest they be electrocuted. Spiegel must have died by being thrown against the fence or by crawling into it. Gradually,
I came to realize that it was not uncommon for inmates to commit suicide by what was known as “walking into the fence.”

It is difficult not to wonder whether it ever occurred to these Kapos that they were no different from Spiegel. He denounced
fellow Jews to the Gestapo because he believed that he was thereby prolonging his own life, whereas the Kapos allowed themselves
to become the surrogates of the SS by beating their fellow inmates, forcing them to work to total exhaustion, and depriving
them of their rations, knowing full well that by these actions they hastened the deaths of the prisoners. All that in order
to improve the Kapos’ own chances of survival. Thus, besides testing the morality of those who became neither informers nor
Kapos, the concentration camps were laboratories for the survival of the brutish. Both Spiegel and the Kapo he had denounced
had been friends of my parents. Both had been with us in Katowice. At that time they had been my “uncles.” I seem to recall
that the Kapo whom Spiegel had denounced had been a dental technician or a dentist in his prior life; I never knew what Spiegel’s
profession had been. Had they not ended up in the camps, they probably would have remained decent human beings. What is it
in the human character that gives some individuals the moral strength not to sacrifice their decency and dignity, regardless
of the costs to themselves, whereas others become murderously ruthless in the hope of ensuring their own survival?