All God's Children (36 page)

Again one of the others ran immediately to the window and watched. Finally she nodded, and the others all visibly relaxed even as they continued to work.

“You are…you have agreed to…” Beth did not know how to express the shock she was feeling that Anja would ever willingly be party to doing work for the Nazis.

“What choice did she have?” An older woman looked at Beth over the tops of a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. “What choice do you have now that you are here?”

Several other women murmured their agreement.

“I volunteered,” Anja explained. “At least that way I can perhaps help the others.”

“She brings us extra rations,” a woman with ruddy cheeks and a kind face said.

“And sometimes lets us choose a special piece of clothing,” a girl of no more than fifteen added with a shy smile.

“I know it must be difficult for you to accept….”

“No. I expect that before this is over I will find myself doing things I could never have imagined.” Beth walked to the window and stared out into the gathering dusk. She felt her hands tighten into clenched fists, and a moment later she was pressing her flattened palms against the window. “We have to get out of here.”

“Impossible,” Anja said flatly. She explained about the intense security—a system of so-called lagers that she described as jails inside of other jails. “You saw the central watchtower and the others? Those guards have orders to shoot without asking questions first,” she explained. “Come on. They have one thing right, and that is that the work will make the time pass. The work will keep you safe.”

The other women continued with their assignments while Anja showed Beth the system for sorting, cataloguing, and storing the clothing.

As she digested the strict procedures for sorting and cataloguing the clothing and other items, Beth could not stop thinking of all she had witnessed that day. She thought of all those people marched off to be disinfected while she—and indeed anyone who had been selected as a volunteer—still wore the clothing they’d arrived in. No one had mentioned shaving her head as a precaution against disease.

“Why was I not taken for a shower?” she asked Anja.

Everyone stopped working and looked first at her, then at Anja. Her friend took hold of her hand as if she were a child who needed to receive some upsetting news. “Where do you think all of this comes from, Beth?” She nodded toward the piles of clothing. “The so-called showers are gas chambers. The stench that permeates the very air we all breathe is from the burning of the bodies,” she said, her tone matter-of-fact.

“But that is…it is beyond comprehension.”

Anja shrugged. “It is horrid, and there is not one thing we can do about it without suffering the same fate.”

Once again a worker signaled the approach of someone. Anja motioned for Beth to sit at the typewriter. She stood close by as Beth rolled a clean sheet of paper into place and began typing the list that Anja placed in front of her. She was grateful that she had excelled in her typing class during high school and had gained plenty of experience typing out her uncle’s notes and lectures.

The same SS officer entered the storeroom and watched Beth for a long moment before nodding approvingly. “Perhaps the Americans are good for something after all, eh?” Again he touched Anja’s face before he left.

“He takes too many liberties with you,” Beth grumbled.

Anja’s eyes widened. “Do you not yet understand, Beth? We are all of us their possessions—their slaves. For now you are safe. The guards are mostly occupied elsewhere throughout the day, and at night they have other avenues for their entertainment. But you need to prepare yourself. You are quite beautiful and…”

If Beth thought she had felt the kind of soul-wrenching fear that she hoped never to endure again before now, she had been mistaken. The unspoken but vivid reality that Anja was painting for her was beyond anything she could ever have imagined. She felt the bile of fear rising in her throat. “I need to…”

“You need to work,” Anja said firmly. “We have quotas that we must achieve or risk being replaced, and we must finish before the next roll call.” She turned to the others. “Ladies, let’s get to work, or we’ll get no rest at all.”

    CHAPTER 20    

J
osef was ashamed to find himself grateful for the relatively easy assignment. Certain that his father’s influence was the cause, he was determined to form a bond with his fellow inmates. But it did not take him long to realize that because he was German and definitely not Jewish, no one in camp was willing to trust him. Clearly they suspected him to be a spy—another trick of their captors to learn whatever they could about the prisoners.

Every afternoon promptly at five, a whistle signaled the end of the workday. All the prisoners except those assigned to Lager III—the so called area for showers—ran to line up outside the prisoners’ kitchen to receive their meager ration of a hunk of stale bread and a cup of ersatz coffee. They then stood in silence in all kinds of weather to be counted for perhaps the second, perhaps the fifth time that day depending on the whims of the commandant. After that they returned to the barracks for the night.

The barracks were crammed with wooden bunks stacked three high with little space between them. The first night he spent there, Josef was surprised at the way the men joked, played games, sang songs, or talked quietly in small groups. It was no different than the nights he’d spent with his fellow soldiers. But he was never included in any of these interactions—until his second week in camp.

That night the old man he worked with in the dispensary sat down next to Josef on his bunk and offered him a tin cup filled with a green watery liquid.

“Dandelion tea,” the man said. “One of the men found a patch today. Try it.”

Josef took a sip as he warily watched several of the others move closer so that they had closed off any possible avenue of escape should he need one.

“I am Rabbi Moshe Weiss.”

“Josef Buch.” Josef nodded to the rabbi and then in general to the men around him. “I see you teaching the younger boys at night,” he added, hoping to gain trust.

“Hebrew lessons—every Jewish boy takes such lessons.”

Josef took another sip of the tea. It wasn’t half-bad. “Thank you for this,” he said.

“Tell us your story, Josef Buch,” the rabbi urged, and then with a wry smile added, “You are our first non-Jewish roommate. We are naturally curious.”

So Josef told them everything—that he was the son of a fairly powerful member of the Gestapo, that he had studied medicine and served on the western front and returned to Munich to complete his medical training, that he had met Beth….

“Ah, the American woman who works with Anja Steinberg in the sorting rooms. You are a fortunate man, my friend. Your wife is not only beautiful, but also kind. Several of the woman and girls have mentioned that.”

“She’s a Quaker—a member of the Religious Society of Friends,” Josef said as if somehow that explained everything there was to know about Beth.

“How did the two of you end up here?” the man occupying the bunk above Josef’s demanded. These were the first words he and Josef had exchanged.

Josef told them about the White Rose. He named no names, but it hardly mattered now. With Hans, Sophie, and Christoph dead and the others arrested or on the run, he saw no reason not to sing the praises of his courageous friends. He told them about the leaflets that he and Beth had distributed, told them about the arrests and how Beth had been led to believe that he had betrayed her and her family. “Not unlike many of you who no doubt also believe that I am not to be trusted, I suspect,” he added, fixing his gaze on each man in turn before continuing.

He told them of his arrest, of the reunion with Beth, of the trial and sentencing and how incredibly brave Beth had been through it all. “And I will not deny that, were it not for my father’s position, certainly I would have been sentenced to death and perhaps Beth as well.”

He fell silent then, drinking the last of the tea, gone tepid now, while the men watched him in the silence of their own thoughts. Finally the rabbi covered Josef’s hand with his. Josef saw that the old man’s fingers were knotted with arthritis. “Thank you, Josef Buch.”

Then he and the others moved back to their own bunks as promptly at ten o’clock the lights went out.

The following day as they performed the morning ritual of making up their bunks, cleaning the barracks, and assembling for the first roll call of the day, it was as if overnight there had been a referendum regarding Josef. Whatever had transpired, there was little doubt that nearly all of the suspicion had been wiped away. Men spoke to him— some calling him Josef, others Buch, and a few calling him Doc. He was one of them now, and the simple pleasure he felt in that was like a gift.

Each evening before lights went out, Beth did her best to make herself presentable and then waited just outside the women’s barracks for Josef. Their time together would be in minutes rather than the hours she longed to spend with him, but she would take what God offered and count her blessings.

They sat side by side on a rough wooden bench under an eave of the barracks in all weather—rain, snow, or mild moonlit nights. He wrapped his arms around her, and she nestled next to him, memorizing the way they fit together like puzzle pieces. They kissed and then talked of the day—what they had seen and heard, who they had encountered, and which of their fellow prisoners were in need of special comfort or attention. Before lights went out and they each had to return to their respective barracks, Beth had persuaded Josef to sit in silence with her, their hands joined, their eyes closed, their breathing steady.

All around them others might also be in the yard outside the barracks—often this included other couples seeking a dark corner where they could consummate their love or simply find solace in the body of another. But Beth had asked only one thing of Josef—not here in this place. And he had agreed.

One night about a month after they had first arrived in Sobibor, Rabbi Weiss asked if he could sit with them for a bit. They made room for him on the narrow bench. In a few days, by Josef’s best calculations, March would turn to April. Already the evenings held the promise of spring—even in this place.

The rabbi stared at the orange glow that rose above the treetops in the area they knew was Lager III. “Elizabeth, I am curious. In your faith there is as I understand it no place for war or violence of any kind.”

“That’s right.”

“Yet how do you reconcile your faith with that?” He motioned toward the orange sky where they all knew the fires of the recently completed crematorium were now running round the clock. A train arrived nearly every day, and each one carried more and more men, women, and children—all of them except a precious few walking down the lane that the guards called
Himmelstrasse
or Road to Heaven.

“It is not my place to explain such things,” Beth replied. “In our faith we believe that God’s spirit dwells in everyone regardless of age, gender, nationality…or faith. We are born with God’s spirit already inside us.”

“Beth often has to remind me that we are all God’s children,” Josef added.