Trusting Calvin (9 page)

Are they joining up with others in the woods so they can gun us all down?

No. I think they're really gone.

Frozen in place, the men couldn't think of what to do next. After a time, they broke into small groups and headed back toward the highway, some looking over their shoulders for a surprise attack from the woods. Drawing closer to the road, they heard the roar of heavy vehicles, a great many, pushing their way along the highway.

“It's the Americans!” someone shouted from up ahead. “We are free! We must be free! That's what those pamphlets were; they were telling the Germans to surrender.”

It took some seconds for the men to believe what they were hearing. Some fell to their knees in the soggy field and laughed; some wept. Others, too numb to understand what was unfolding, stood motionless, eyes half-closed, still thinking about the Germans in the woods.

The Americans rolling by in trucks and tanks and Jeeps recoiled at the sight of the skeletal remains of what had once been men, skin sallow and eyes flat, closer to being corpses than humans. The prisoners closest to the highway could see that many of them were weeping as they tossed what food they had in their vehicles to the side of the road for them.

The hundreds of Jews—who had become, in sudden, surprising seconds no longer prisoners but survivors—continued forward. They should not go far, the Americans warned. The front lay just miles away, and danger was high.

Spotting a little farm with a cleared field on the outskirts of a village, which they later learned was Schwartzenfeld, the survivors stopped and collapsed into tired heaps, hundreds growing into thousands as wave after wave of men in tattered concentration camp uniforms stumbled wearily into their midst.

A group of American officers, some speaking perfect German, arrived to organize the mess of men. One noticed Moshe, doubled over on a bench, ashen, stricken, and helped him and several of the sickest men to the farmhouse, directing the woman there to serve them the tea and crackers that he gave her.

“Make them as comfortable as possible,” he ordered the woman, who was obviously unnerved by the sudden appearance of foreign soldiers and unhinged by the men who didn't seem like men at all.

Throughout the day, the officer returned to the farmhouse often, concern etched in each word he spoke. “I am trying to get you to a hospital,” he said to Moshe. “It's complicated because we are so close to the front, and there are no vehicles available to take you, but we're working hard on it.”

Zalmen and Yankel came to Moshe's side several times to tell him what they were seeing and hearing. Survivors were arriving by the hundreds, and food was being cooked on campfires. Tales circulated of thousands of men shot on the side of the road during the Flossenbürg march, prisoners who almost made it but had fallen a few hours or a few minutes too soon.

Historians eventually pieced together from scanty records, survivor testimonials, and body counts that about 22,000 prisoners marched out of Flossenbürg, and about 7,000 of them dropped dead or were shot along the way.

The Americans told them that theirs was not the only forced march through Germany. Reports were coming in of many others—death marches, they were calling them—from concentration camps scattered around the country, tens of thousands of men and women, all of them closer to death than life.

Early in the evening, Moshe sat by an open window listening to the men and machines milling about outside. His hunger satisfied for the first time in five years by a handful of crackers, he was beginning to recover, after hours of sipping tea and water, from his severe dehydration.

But he'd had to ask how to get to the washroom—just a few steps away, it turned out—that he could not see. He could hear the moaning of another survivor, but he couldn't see if there was any way he could help. When the woman of the farm had placed a cup of hot tea before him, he could smell it, even feel its heat, but he couldn't reach forward without fear of knocking it over.

I may be free, but I am blind,
he thought.

His whole family was no doubt dead, except for the two brothers who had formed a wall of protection around him that had not fallen. He had no home and few friends. He was now twenty-two years old, and he had no idea how he would ever be able to take care of himself. He could speak five languages—the Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish of his youth, and the German and Russian he had become fluent in as a survival tool in the camps—but he couldn't earn a living. He had withstood monstrous cruelty and deprivation but was utterly incapable of performing simple tasks. He began to weep.

The door to the farmhouse opened, and Zalmen announced in a cheerful voice, “You have company.”

A man swept Moshe into a bear hug. “We made it! We have survived. We are free,” Erich exclaimed. Pulling away, the German noticed Moshe's tears. “You're crying. Are you in pain?”

“No, not that kind of tears,” Moshe said between heaving sobs. “I have survived, yes. If not for you and my brothers, I would have gone up in smoke.”

That so many others had been hurled into the crematorium, dumped in ditches, or kicked to the roadside and shot when they could march no more—every one of them capable of making more of a life than he himself would ever manage now—made no sense. It wasn't right. It was unbearable.

“I don't know whether I should thank you or despise you.”

Five

Awakening on the floor of the farmhouse as a free man for the first time after 1,795 mornings as a captive in one camp or another, 140 more as a prisoner in the ghetto, Moshe felt disjointed. He should have felt relief and gratitude, he knew, but whatever layers of his being that might have contained those emotions had dissolved somewhere along the way.

In the camps he had gone from naive teenager to twenty-two-year-old man, propelled ahead like trash on a slow-moving creek, floating toward nothing known, barely conscious of the passage of time. Everything had been specified, scheduled, presented, or withheld according to some scheme he had never understood and couldn't question. What does that do to a man? He had no idea. He did know one thing for certain, though: He was blind. He could look forward to a life as a nuisance.

Yankel, Zalmen, and the three friends who had slept near Moshe in the farmhouse stirred. Their first words of the morning revealed that for all of them, the euphoria of the day before had given way to an uneasy understanding that they, too, were unprepared to assume their places in the world again as normal human beings.

“We have lived for five years like draft horses on a farm—fed by someone else, whipped into compliance, trained to perform so they would feed us,” Yankel said. “Now we don't even know how to find bread, how to pay for it. Our ability to care for ourselves has been stripped away.”

They were hundreds of miles from their hometown. Their family and friends in Poland, the means by which generations of Jews had glided into employment, had all died. If they possessed any useful skills, they had no idea what they were, and they believed the resentment toward Jews would be even greater in post-war Europe, dimming their prospects further.

Their best hope, they concluded that morning, was to get to a city where some opportunities might exist, a city where there were also doctors who could examine Moshe's eyes. They would leave immediately, in an effort to arrive ahead of the waves of survivors who would undoubtedly surge in once they had recuperated sufficiently in the displaced persons camp being established nearby by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

The six men gulped down a hasty breakfast of farina, the first cereal they had eaten in years, made with watered-down milk, and a slice of bread—real bread, made with rye instead of the mock bread of the camps.

Even though it was offered, they ate no butter. Zalmen was very firm about sticking to bland foods just now, as he had heard stories the night before while shouldering his way through the pandemonium of men and machines, soldiers and weapons. Some of the Flossenbürg survivors were dying in the fields after gorging on the candy bars and other food the soldiers had tossed in sympathy onto the roadside as they passed. Possibly their weakened systems couldn't digest that kind of food, and the vomiting, when they were already severely dehydrated, drained them of the final fluids needed for life. Maybe some were so close to dying that it was already too late to halt the trajectory. Possibly they fell victim to what later became known as refeeding syndrome, where severely malnourished people, upon eating a great deal of food, experience a burst of insulin that their bodies can't cope with, leading to cardiac failure—although that normally came days later, not hours.

Whatever the cause of the deaths, they had to be extremely careful, they decided.

The six men set off for Amberg, twenty miles away, where there was a convalescent hospital. Still exhausted from the previous days of marching, they tried to keep up one another's spirits, telling lies they all knew were lies, about the good things awaiting them. Sometimes they actually began to believe their own stories, and the mood grew almost giddy for a few minutes.

Not for Moshe, though. He had never known a blind man. He couldn't imagine how it would be possible to live on his own, earn money, find a woman willing to love him and have a family—if, after all the assaults on his body, he could even create children. He was young, better educated than most in that part of the world, multilingual, but he couldn't even tell day from night anymore. All he could do was cling to the desperate hope that doctors would be able to restore at least some sight in his right eye, the one that had offered a tiny strip of vision before the crack of light had closed.

Moshe said none of this. He simply walked, as they all did that day, until they could walk no more. They asked a farmer for bread and water as night fell, and sought permission to sleep not on his porch but in his barn. The farmer was a German, the enemy, and their regard for him was low. But decent people behave in a certain way, and now that they had had time to think about what probably had happened the night before in the farmhouse, they vowed never again to spread the lice and fleas that infested them in another stranger's home.

After days of walking past fields, farmhouses, and army equipment that had broken down or been abandoned at the side of the road, and nights spent sleeping in haylofts and scrounging for food, they finally reached Amberg, a city of about 40,000. It was April 29, not yet a full week since Allied forces had pushed through and staked their claim, and the town was in tortured disarray. Public transportation had stalled. Shopkeepers still hid their wares in case looters came through, or soldiers from one side or the other made declarations of ownership. A few survivors had arrived ahead of them and were roaming the streets and alleys with vacant expressions, sometimes erupting over small things.

The six presented themselves at city hall where record-keepers documented their survival. The brothers, like many survivors, decided to take different first names, less Polish-sounding. Yankel became Jack, Zalmen became Sigmund, and Moshe became Max. The new names signified new life, and also conferred separation from Poland, the country they despised now even more than they had in their younger years. The country of their ancestors and their youth had watched silently or participated as Jew after Jew was rounded up and taken away; as trains crammed with Jews lumbered past; as lines of ravaged, emaciated Jews in grimy uniforms marched past every morning to work; as crematoriums belched the ash of human bodies into the surrounding countryside. The Germans may have conceived the roundups and executions, but their Polish countrymen were complicit. They could never, even as old men, forgive that.

They received new clothes, a gift from the townspeople: underwear, socks, trousers, two shirts, shoes, and a jacket. Then they went to the public baths, where they submerged themselves in warm, glorious water. When they had scrubbed their bodies almost raw and wrapped themselves in crisp, new clothes, they set a match to their bug-infested uniforms and ruined shoes. They watched as the remnants of those years went up in flames—all but Max, who stood to the side and could only imagine how satisfying it would have been to see.

As Sigmund and Max entered the cool efficiency of the hospital, the odor of antiseptic hung sharp in the air, unexpected after all those years of living with the dull stench of filth and sickness. But it was not an unpleasant odor. It was the smell of promise.

In the exam room Max heard the horror in the nurses' voices as they pulled the hospital gown away from his bony chest and glanced at his thighs, no bigger than those of an eleven-year-old. He knew he looked awful, but he was impatient with their attentions.
The eye!
That's what they should be examining. Not the ruined eye, the hardened, calcified mass that seemed to interest them so much. The other one, he told the nurses, one after another. Examine that one. There had to be some process that would restore some of his sight.

He was not the first concentration camp survivor they had seen, but the numbers had not yet swelled to the level they eventually would, and they still marveled that men so malnourished, so frail, were still able to stand. They had no data about the long-term prospects and risks, but they knew Max's situation was dire. He weighed eighty-three pounds, they said. They feared his heart might suddenly fail or that other organs might, even now, shut down.

The first order of business, they said, was for him to gain forty or fifty pounds so he could build up his strength and reserves for the very real chance that he might get ill or require surgery.

“I don't care what I eat or if I eat at all,” he snapped in frustration as day after day they forced food on him. “Every passing day is a wasted day. I need to be able to see again. This eye to be taken care of is what I need.”

The nurses arranged an appointment with the one eye specialist in town, and Max awoke on that morning filled with apprehension. Maybe he would learn there was no hope of improvement. But the opposite was also possible, he reminded himself. He throbbed with anxiety, and when he reached the doctor's office he couldn't keep his breathing steady.

Dr. Hasselt silently examined and probed, first one eye and then the other. Max heard him push back his chair and place his instruments on the desk.

“Max, you will never see again.”

The rage was instant. “That's
it?
This
is what you tell me?”

He swung his head in the direction of the nurse who had brought him to the office. “What do you expect from a Nazi doctor?” Then again to the doctor: “And you—what are you a doctor for? You can fix nothing?”

The nurse walked him back to the hospital, and the director there, informed of the ophthalmologist's pronouncement, stopped by his room.

“Max,” she said, “maybe we cannot tell everything now. Once you have gained some more weight, gained some strength, I will see that you get to Munich, to the university eye clinic.”

He thanked her, but his mind was elsewhere, churning through thoughts unrelated to doctors and appointments. He had lived as a free man shackled by blindness long enough. He would kill himself. He might not be able to see, but he wasn't completely helpless. This he could do on his own. It required a great deal of thought, though.

How can I do it?
he wondered.
I would jump into the lake to drown myself, but where's the lake? I can't find it. I could throw myself in front of a bus, but where's a bus?

It wasn't easy for a blind man to kill himself. There was just one way, he decided.

Max told the nurse he was having trouble sleeping. She brought him a pill every evening, and he hoarded them, building a small pile in the bedside table, not sure how many he would need but assuming the task required a large handful. He didn't want to fail.

Maybe just three or four more days,
he thought one morning, after a couple of weeks of caching pills. That afternoon a nurse discovered his stash. She took it away and gave him no more sleeping pills.

Another avenue closed—for now.

At the end of June, Max and Sig set off for the appointment with a Munich eye specialist, a hundred miles away. There was still not much public transportation available, and certainly nothing reliable, so the brothers received priority permission to travel on an army truck.

Sig paced while Dr. Meisner, the head of the eye clinic, examined Max. The doctor, they learned, had been a high-ranking Nazi officer, and this bothered them, but he was said to be among the very best. Dr. Meisner tilted Max's head back and sideways, pressed his fingers against the ridge of bone that bordered each eye. Max could hear the click of what he assumed was a small light turned on and off.

“Here is the circumstance we have, Max. Nothing could have been done to save the left eye, and now it must be removed and the eye cavity cleaned out. We will fit you with an artificial eye. As for the right eye, I don't know. If you had received treatment immediately after the injury, all or most of the sight could have been saved.”

At this point, the doctor continued, it
might
be impossible to coax the right eye back to partial functionality.

Dr. Meisner performed surgery to remove the left eye and started Max on long-shot eye drops in an effort to revive the optic nerve. By late August, the surgery site had healed and the treatments on the other eye were complete.