Trusting Calvin (7 page)

As each new crop of prisoners arrived, additional details about the outside world flowed in, and they learned that the extermination of the Krasnik Jews was merely part of a much bigger program to rid Poland of all Jews for all time. Every ghetto had been or would be liquidated.

Many of the prisoners came to believe that once all the Jews in the ghettos were killed, the Jews in the labor camps—the last of the Jews in Poland not trenched so deeply underground that they couldn't be discovered—would be executed as well. Thus, the arrival of dozens of SS late one afternoon in August 1943 caused alarm. The prisoners were ordered into their barracks without supper, and the doors were barred from the outside.

Moshe stood at a window and watched as SS milled about the fence, inside and outside, clustering, heavily armed, a group here, a group there, some smoking, some talking.

“This is the end,” one of the prisoners said softly.

A few men began praying, and several more drifted toward them, a corner of prayer that grew larger and louder. Others sat apart from the praying, as Moshe, Yankel, and Zalmen did, and spoke of their families and of dreams unrealized. A few cried quietly.

The inevitable had finally arrived. Tomorrow they would all be in the ditch.

“This part, the waiting, is worse than the dying,” someone said. Moshe agreed.

The hours ground on, the Nazis still massed and huddled outside, the sluggish passage of time almost unbearable.

At five a.m. the next morning, the sound of the bar being lifted from the other side of the door shook the prisoners into full alert. They rose, some reaching out to give a final pat on the shoulder to a friend, moving forward to face what they knew they had to face. When they emerged into the early-morning gray, expecting a spray of gunfire, the yard was empty. The SS had gone.

A shout rang out from a tower. “Go to the washroom, go to the outhouse, and get ready to go to work.”

The prisoners learned later that day that the Nazi high command had ordered the Budzyn prisoners killed. But the executives of the Heinkel plant, informed that their workforce was about to vanish, begged officials to reconsider, arguing that these particular Jews were crucial to Germany's war efforts. Sometime in the wee hours, the elimination order was canceled.

That episode, along with all the other episodes of survival, strengthened the faith of some, made them even more devout. For others, however, the level of cruelty they had witnessed was sufficient evidence that there was no God, and they shed their faith, layer by layer, until nothing at all remained. The extremes of opinion sometimes led to heated words. On the eve of Yom Kippur in the year that Feix had randomly chosen more than one hundred men to shoot, the same year of the near extermination of the whole camp, some of the prisoners in Moshe's barracks ate supper quickly and gathered in a corner to recite the Kol Nidre prayers.

Several agnostics, disgusted, formed their own knot. “Look at them, praying to God who has forsaken us. Commandant Feix decides who shall live and who shall die. They are fools.”

Moshe's own feelings were conflicted. On the one hand, his religious upbringing had taught him to love God under any circumstance. Even though he had been less than devout once he reached his teen years, some shards of these teachings continued to prick at him. On the other hand, there was the reality of the last three years. He was too hungry and exhausted to arrive at any meaningful position, but it troubled him, this unsettled business of his faith, worsened, he supposed, by the specter of being killed at any moment.

Even Yankel, the most devout of the brothers, struggled.

“Will it be me next?” Yankel asked Moshe one day. “I don't want to know. But I will not blame those who lose hope or those who lose faith. Who will it be tomorrow? I don't know. Maybe me, maybe not. Can I do anything about it? I cannot. What is the use of believing? There is no use of even talking about it.”

Commandant Feix was reassigned, and the prisoners entertained a weak hope that perhaps the next commandant would be less vicious. But there was no perceptible shift in the level of cruelty.

On April 8, 1944, as Moshe was walking across the yard after evening soup, one man among many in the yard, two guards jumped him. They had no reason to pay him any special notice. Moshe was following the rules, as he always did, blending in, as he always did. Possibly they were bored, the usual motivation for a random beating.

Again and again they brought down their whip butts across Moshe's head. Long after he had fallen to his knees they kept at it. Moshe felt flesh disconnect from bone. He could smell his blood as it filled his eyes. The last clear vision he had was of the two blond guards sneering as they kicked him.

Once the guards had clomped off and it was safe to approach, Zalmen ran into the yard. Moshe was incoherent, his eyes pouring blood, his face already swelling so much that he could barely make his lips move. His ears were raw, almost purple, and his nose was gushing. Zalmen hauled Moshe to his feet and dragged him to his bunk, elevating his head onto a pile of jackets and rags so the torrents of blood flowing from so many places wouldn't pool in his eyes or flood his throat. Friends gathered around, careful not to say too much about how he looked, offering small words of encouragement.

“They are worse than animals,” Moshe heard one of them say.

Dr. Forster, who had been a physician in Austria before being imprisoned— always respectfully called
Herr Doktor
by the prisoners—raced to the bunk to stanch the bleeding and assess the damage.

“He will live,” the doctor finally said to Zalmen. “He's young, and he will mend. I am, however, very worried about his eyes. The left one has been completely destroyed. With nothing but my bare hands, there is practically nothing I can do for him. God only knows how much he will see with his remaining eye.”

Moshe remained on the platform bunk for two days. On the third he pushed himself off to go to work. He had no sight at all in his left eye, and just a small blurry wedge of vision in his right.

If he allowed himself, even for a second, to consider that he was all but completely blind, his stomach clenched into itself, and he knew full-blown panic was near. So he forced his energy into experimenting with positioning his head in various ways so he would know what angle permitted the maximum vision from his one semi-functioning eye. Once he had established that precise position, he practiced, swiveling his head back and forth again and again, assuming it so often that he knew exactly what to do to find it instantly, when a split second might matter.

Having mastered this skill, he decided to hope that as the healing process advanced, his sight would improve.

But the sliver of vision deteriorated day by day. He could recognize some items and some people if he turned his head just the right way and if there was sufficient light. That was the best he could coax from the one eye that still worked.

His friends took to sandwiching him between them when they walked or worked. No one dared wonder how long the charade would work. Moshe would be shot if his blindness was discovered.

Two months after the attack, in June 1944, as the Red Army advanced across Poland, Budzyn was summarily shut down.

The Edelman brothers and most of the other prisoners were taken to the train station, loaded into boxcars, and transported hundreds of miles to Wieliczka in western Poland. Here the Germans' legendary skill for perfect planning failed. The High Command had developed an idea, never fully explained to the prisoners, about placing machines in the salt mines there, presumably to extract minerals. Once the men had been unloaded, however, functionaries discovered that the mines were impossibly wet. No work could be done.

The prisoners remained there for four weeks awaiting further assignment. Officials somewhere, unhappy about the idleness of so many men, decided to make use of the time by formally imprinting their status upon them. Each man was given a tattoo, a hastily needled primitive-looking KL, standing for
Konzentrationslager—
concentration camp in German.

On August 1, they were loaded into boxcars again. As always, they had no idea where they were going. This time, though, they knew that it was as likely to be a death camp as a labor camp.

Four

The men were crammed eighty to a boxcar in the late afternoon, shoulder to shoulder, so tight against each other that no one could move or change position. It was broiling hot, and the boxcars became steamy and fetid, reeking of sweat and bodies too long unwashed. The engine was hauling so many cars that it never picked up much speed; the train just ground into a slow, numbing rocking motion. It was nauseating, this combination of heat and stench and swaying, and many of the men vomited, sliming the floor. They couldn't last long like this, and they prayed the journey would be short.

It was not.

As the sun rose high in the sky late the next morning, heat radiated from the roof and sides of the car. No food, no water. Not even a bucket in a corner where a man could relieve himself. By afternoon, almost a full day after they'd started, bladders and bowels could no longer be denied. A man with a makeshift knife spent hours scratching and digging a hole they could use as a toilet, but it was almost impossible to maneuver their way to the hole, and some passed out making the effort.

The train stopped to take on water and coal for the engine a few times, and during those brief pauses the doors opened, allowing a slice of fresh air to drift in. One bucket of water was thrust forward for the eighty men to share. It wasn't enough—just one sip per man.

On each side of the car, just below the roof, two narrow, grated windows served as a peep crack to the outside. The men who stood near them described the scenery for the men close enough to hear. The summer colors were beautiful: verdant green fields, lush trees, flowers abloom in yellows, lavenders, and reds. When the train passed through towns, the watchers reported, they could see people staring back at the human faces peering out at them. Those people probably knew or suspected where the train was heading—if not the precise destination, then the sort of place it was. And they didn't stare for very long.

Moshe stopped sweating. His body had no fluid left to release. He could almost sense his organs shutting down, one at a time, even though such a thing was impossible to feel, he knew. He was certain he was on the brink of becoming delirious. Maybe he had already reached that point, he thought, but was too close to death to recognize it.

Several men died standing up. Their bodies simply stopped working after months or years of deprivation, this final assault of prolonged dehydration, heat, and hunger one they could not fend off. Each time the train stopped and the men shifted a little, the corpses lost the support from the live men stuffed up against them, and they dropped to the floor.

After three nights and two days on the train, having crossed the border into Germany along the way, though the men didn't know this, the train slowed and then halted again.

There was something different about this stop, they realized as soon as the doors screeched open. A long column of guards stood at attention, watching them, and a camp, much larger than Budzyn, loomed in the distance, nestled among towering evergreen trees and jagged rock faces.

As they seeped out of the cars, blinking hard in the late-morning sunlight, they noticed a queer, heavy odor they had never smelled, but which they identified instantly. It was the stench they had heard of in recent months, the stink of recently burned human flesh, and it glued itself to their skin and nostrils, so leaden and cloying they could almost taste it. This, they realized, almost as one, was one of the storied camps where people died or were killed in such numbers that a burial ditch wasn't sufficient, so the Nazis had built a crematorium to turn humans to powdery ash.

The thought, once registered, slid off, their brains unable to process anything more complicated than the raw, aching hunger gripping their guts and the billowy depletion from standing and swaying for the last three days. Weak and flaccid as fish washed ashore, they moved with as much speed as they could manage toward a makeshift corral, some of them collapsing along the way. There on the baked earth they were stripped of their clothes, no shade or shelter from the fiery sun, left to consider the evidence that pointed to only one outcome: They were destined for the crematorium.

When night fell and the mountain temperatures plummeted, they huddled together for warmth under the eerie silver moon, piles of pale naked bones, shivering, barely human. At daybreak, they were rousted to their feet and ordered to march forward, headed for, they all supposed, whatever instrument of death would be used. Moshe could see almost nothing, just a little shaft of light and vague forms, but he could feel the resignation in the men who surrounded him, and it matched his own.

When they were brought to a halt it was in front of a line of men wearing not military or guard uniforms but prisoner uniforms.

“They have no guns,” Zalmen whispered to Moshe.

“My God, they have razors. They intend to shave us. We are not to be killed.”

Barbers—“inmate specialists”—shaved every hair from their bodies, head, chest, and groin. Disinfectant to combat the lice that remained was smeared on their armpits and groins. The Nazis wouldn't go to all this trouble, they knew, merely to push them into the ovens.

They were laborers again.

They were finally allowed to dress—in pajama-like uniforms, striped, blue and black. A white strip on the chest indicated the prisoner's number. Moshe Edelman was 14426.

“Memorize it, remember it,” Zalmen told him. “It's important.”

Next to the number, a yellow triangle indicated that he was a Jew.

Formalities completed, they were assigned to barracks, Moshe, Zalmen, and Yankel to Barrack No. 4, one of sixteen identical structures rising up in determined rows.

They were in Flossenbürg, they eventually learned, built by the SS in 1938 for political prisoners. It had a kitchen, laundry building, and the requisite watchtowers and lights perched high to prevent after-dark escapes. The Nazi enchantment with slogans, so often bizarrely incongruous, was in evidence here, emblazoned on the gatepost:
Arbeit macht frei.
Work shall set you free.

The facility had been designed to hold eight thousand inmates. By 1944–45 it held more than twenty thousand, most of them political prisoners from the nations of Europe that the Nazis had occupied, as well as German criminals, prisoners of war, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Gypsies, and, finally, Jews, who made up only about 12 percent of the population. The overcrowding meant they had to sleep four to a bunk and stand in line much longer than in the past for soup and bread. The Jewish minority in the population meant there was a great deal of anti-Semitic behavior from fellow prisoners.

The food was minimal, the barracks broiling in the summer, frigid in winter, and the guards skilled in acts of cruelty, just as in the other camps. But some aspects of this camp were very different from their earlier experiences.

A torture chamber, which the prisoners called the torment bunker, sat behind a brick fence. The prisoners couldn't see what went on there, but the people in the bunker—political prisoners and prisoners of war—were given food during the days or weeks they were kept alive for interrogation, and the men who carried it to them shared with others what they heard inside.

Flossenbürg housed some of the most important prisoners of World War II: seven spies who had dropped into Germany and were captured, German Resistance leader Wilhelm Franz Canaris, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a revered anti-Nazi Lutheran minister who had helped many Jews escape. Also sent to Flossenbürg for special SS treatment were the six men thought to have been involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler, and famed French Resistance worker Simone Michel-Lévy. Moshe and his brothers were ordered to attend many public hangings in Flossenbürg, events presented with great bluster and milked for dramatic impact.

The crematorium was also an unnerving presence the Edelman brothers had never before had to contend with. A smallish brick oven in a nondescript concrete building with a chimney taller than the building itself, it lay a few hundred yards downhill from the camp's perimeter. Some of the people cremated there had died of starvation or disease, some had been shot or hanged, many had been gassed.

The gas chamber at Flossenbürg wasn't specially designed or attentively constructed like those at the sites that served as extermination camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The Flossenbürg “gas chamber” consisted of a big military truck retrofitted to do the job. When it was time to gas several people, the guards herded them into the back of the truck, turned on the engine, and the exhaust slid through hoses to the back where the people stood. They died more slowly in the truck than in the custom-built gas chambers at other camps, but eventually they stopped screaming and breathing.

The prisoners hoisted into the truck, at least in the first few weeks after the Edelmans arrived, generally came from the barrack that housed the sick and ailing, men who didn't recover quickly enough from illness or injury. Later, infractions that previously resulted in being shot—breaking camp rules or not working fast enough—led to gassing. The Germans were trying to preserve as much ammunition as possible for fighting the war.

As time went on, the death rate at Flossenbürg escalated, and the crematorium operated around the clock. Sometimes even that wasn't sufficient, and corpses were piled up like cords of wood, doused with gasoline, and set afire.

The work days were, as always, long and grueling. Some of the prisoners worked at the recently opened Messerschmitt factory, about an hour's walk from the camp, where they built parts for German fighter planes. Others worked at a stone quarry near the camp, an assignment that amounted to most as a slightly delayed death sentence. Hundreds were crushed by falling slabs, plummeted to their deaths after an exhausted misstep, or were ground to lifelessness by the punishing process. As in Budzyn, whenever too many deaths or killings caused a shortage of manpower, another trainload of men from another camp resolved the problem in a day or two.

The aircraft manufacturing factory had been established here in 1943 after the main plant was bombed, and that was why so many of the Budzyn prisoners had been sent here. They knew how to assemble airplane parts and how to work in an assembly team. Here they did the same—producing parts for the Me-109, the backbone of the Luftwaffe, used as fighter-bombers, bomber escorts, and reconnaissance aircraft.

Zalmen and Yankel made sure they were on the same team as Moshe so they could cover for his slowness and mistakes. Moshe positioned himself at his six-person station, felt out the parts, and kept his hands moving. When a guard approached, his friends would whisper a warning, alerting Moshe to lower his head and look especially busy. When he made an assembly error, someone quickly reached over and corrected it.

Moshe had learned to listen for every signal and movement, to walk with a determined step even though he could see almost nothing. He had become so adept at sensing his surroundings and adapting to the slightest pressure from a brother or friend who steered him almost imperceptibly, that the guards suspected nothing. It was nerve-racking, nonetheless, these around-the-clock maneuvers to avoid detection.

After five months in Flossenbürg, Moshe's sliver of vision diminished to almost nothing. He knew the charade couldn't continue much longer. If the guards learned of it, he would be killed, and his friends as well. If a mistake left their station because he couldn't recognize objects, their overseers would assume sabotage, and they all would be hanged. He couldn't allow that to happen. He was not ready to die, but he knew he couldn't avoid it much longer.

It was time.

Moshe sat with Zalmen and spoke fast and earnestly, leaving no room for debate. “If you have your sight, if you have your legs, you can walk, you can see where you walk. You can postpone death—it's possible. I can't see where to walk. Death is coming to me. I don't have to look for it, it's coming, and I refuse to have others die as well, with me, because of me. That would be unconscionable.”

“We have managed this long,” Zalmen snapped. “We will continue. Live this minute and the next minute and the rest of the day. Work, sleep, and get up the next morning and start over again.”

For a few more days Moshe did as his brother asked.

But one morning in early February 1945, when he awoke, the narrow sliver of blurry vision had vanished. He was completely blind.

He had to stop working.

“I can't see any tools,” he told Zalmen and Yankel. “You must understand: I cannot risk the safety of the others. My life isn't worth anything anyway. Whatever will be, will be, but I can't go to work anymore. We must report this.”

He felt his brothers staring at him, mute, trying to find the right words to say.

Finally Zalmen arose from the bunk and crossed the room to speak with the barrack supervisor, a German gentile named Erich, a political prisoner wise in the ways of survival, who had demonstrated that, although strict, he was fair.

“Moshe can see nothing,” Zalmen said to Erich. “He is completely blind. He cannot work any longer.”

Zalmen didn't look into the German's eyes as he spoke the words, nor did he ask for leniency. Neither was permitted. Erich looked at Zalmen and then across the room at Moshe. “Go back to your bunk,” he said, nothing more.

Zalmen and Yankel didn't sleep at all that long, awful night, knowing their brother would be shot or gassed soon after daybreak.

Moshe spent the hours trying to remember every moment of happiness and peace in his past. He had done what was necessary to remove the others from the jeopardy created by his blindness, and whenever a gust of panic about the coming morning blew through him, he reminded himself of that. Even if by some miracle he somehow managed to survive this hell, he thought, as he lay there in the dark, this life wouldn't be worth living. Completely blind, unable to work or care for himself.