A Chosen Few (14 page)

With a list of family possessions that had been hidden in various non-Jewish homes in town, they went from door to door asking for
their belongings. And at each doorway they heard the same claim: Their possessions had been stolen by the Russians. In the end, all they managed to collect was the one item of no monetary value—a portrait of Karol’s father.

Karol went to see a woman he had known before the war to tell her that he had been with her husband in Sachsenhausen. So many people were missing, and if you knew someone’s story, you had to tell the family. Wassermann had seen the husband “go to the other side.” Everyone was learning this phrase. When a train had arrived at the camp, some of the passengers had been sent off to work and others had been pointed in a different direction—“to the other side,” for extermination. The woman explained to Karol that he was mistaken, that she had been to a clairvoyant who had seen him in Siberia. “He will be coming back from Siberia,” she kept insisting.

“He is not coming back,” Wassermann repeated. “I was there. He is not coming back.”

“I saw him in Siberia. You’ll see.”

Wassermann shook his head. He had no patience for this nonsense. But she also had news for him. She had found her brother on a train of survivors from Poland. He was weak and had died within days, but he had spent those last days telling her about things he had seen, including the death of Wassermann’s brother Tybor. His death had been so horrible that Wassermann was never able to retell that story.

It took one more stop for Karol Wassermann to decide that he was through with the Slovaks. He went to the Jewish cemetery to visit the graves of his mother and father, who had died before the war. The cemetery was now just an empty field, littered with fragments of stone. Slovak fascists had destroyed it. Standing over the shattered stones where his parents’ graves used to be, Wassermann asked himself, “How can I live in this town ever again? Whenever I shake someone’s hand, I will wonder if these are the hands that knocked over my parents’ gravestones.”

T
HE
C
ZECH LIBERATION ARMY
of Ludvik Svoboda was still in Prague. With it was a newspaper correspondent, František Kraus. Before the war, Kraus had been a well-known Prague journalist living with his wife Alice on Kozi Street in the old Jewish ghetto that dated back to the Middle Ages. After 1848, Jews had been
allowed to live outside the ghetto, and as they became prosperous citizens, they moved out of the cramped old neighborhood. Whoever was poorest took their place, and the Jewish town eventually became the rat-infested Prague slum. In 1893 slum clearance began, and when it was over, the ancient Jewish neighborhood had been converted into a fashionable art nouveau neighborhood. Only six synagogues, the cemetery, and the Jewish town hall were preserved. By 1938, Prague Jews had become indistinguishable from gentiles. Prague remained, as it had been for centuries, one of the important Jewish centers in the world, but it was more famous for its writers and composers than for its Torah and Talmud scholars. The Kraus family was typical of sophisticated, well-educated modern Prague Jewry. František, a fourth-generation Praguer, would go to synagogue for Sabbath, but instead of walking there as required by religious law, he would take a streetcar.

When the Germans came, they did not seem to have many problems finding the Jews, even the most assimilated. Shortly after the Nazi invasion on March 15, 1939, twenty-six thousand Jews emigrated to Palestine. Of the ninety thousand who remained in the Czech lands, only twelve thousand survived the war.

František and Alice were sent to Theresienstadt and from there, because they were young and strong, to labor camps. While František’s forced labor detail was repairing rail lines in Germany, he escaped and resumed his profession: He traveled with Svoboda as a war correspondent. After the war, when he got back to Prague, he discovered that the apartment on Kozi Street was taken. During the war Germans had lived there, and once they fled, a Czech family had found it abandoned and moved in. They told Kraus that it was now their apartment and that they intended to stay.

Not only did he have no home, but he found no trace of Alice, who had been sent to a women’s labor camp. The Allied military operated an office for camp survivors who were looking for their relatives, but he could learn nothing from them. But unknown to him, the war had not yet ended for Alice.

She was in southern Poland, just across the Bohemian border in Kudowa, where the Germans had used almost three hundred women prisoners for a small airplane parts factory. Almost every night during the last three months of the war, she had seen zips of light, followed by the deep booms of Katyushas, Soviet rockets. On the evening of May 7, 1945, with Hitler already dead for a week, the Germans signed an unconditional surrender. On the same day,
a man from Nachod, a Bohemian town a mile and a half away from Kudowa, walked across the Czech-Polish border to Kudowa to negotiate with the woman SS commandant. His offer was simple: Let these women go, and we will give you civilian clothes. On the morning of May 8 there were no more uniformed SS in the camp. The people of Nachod took the freed prisoners into their homes, fed them, and looked after them. But on May 11, only a few days after the end of World War II, a large SS division came through Nachod, desperately fleeing the Red Army and trying to reach the nearby U.S. Third Army. The townspeople tried to stop the division, holding it up just long enough for the Red Army to arrive. Once there the army forced a final stand in the Nachod town square as the locals and work camp refugees hid in the nearby woods listening to more Katyushas.

Alice got back to Prague and found František, and they resolved to start life again the way it had been. They would go on being Prague Jews as they had always been—not very religious, but active and clear in their Jewish identity. She would try to forget everything that had just happened.

But not all survivors felt that way. One woman who had been with Alice in Kudowa and Theresienstadt left for America, vowing never again to even tell anyone she was Jewish. She settled in California, and there she discovered something strange about America: Everybody was something. They were Jewish, or they were Italian, or they were Mexican. They all talked about it. You apparently had to be something, and so she and her family called themselves Jewish. It was a distant and safer world, where Jews always talked about Jewishness. One day years later, she saw a book in a shopping mall bookstore about Rudolf Höss, the Auschwitz commander. In one of the pictures inside she saw an emaciated girl who she recognized as herself in that far away nightmare.

B
y the time Marian Turski was 18 years old, he had survived the Łódź ghetto, two winter forced marches across Central Europe, and three concentration camps. Finally, on May 8, 1945, the last day of the war, the Germans ran out of places to move their prisoners. Turski, exhausted from the marches and already cheated out of two camp liberations, was able to stay in Theresienstadt until the Soviet Third Guard Tank Army rolled up to the fortress town. But his struggle to survive was not yet over. Suffering from typhoid, he lay in a Soviet field hospital too weak to move until the following September.

The first sealed-off ghetto had been in his native Łódź. In 1941, ten years after Icchok Finkelsztajn fled the depression, the Germans had walled off a section of the city in which they trapped 163,177 Jews from all over Europe, forcing them to operate more than a hundred factories for the Nazi war effort. Those who survived the squalor had been shipped to death camps.

Turski’s mother, father, and younger brother and most of the people he knew were among the missing 160,000. It seemed certain that his father and brother had been gassed at Auschwitz. A woman he had worked with in the ghetto’s Communist underground told him she had seen his mother in Bergen-Belsen. That was something he could try to hold onto—the fact that the last time his mother had been seen, she was still alive. But he was still
too weak to look for her. He had to rest and try to put on some weight and get some strength or, after all he had lived through, he would not survive.

After a few weeks, Turski went to the Silesian town of Waldenberg, a displaced persons center. There he befriended a man in his midthirties who was eager to meet a ghetto and camp survivor like Turski. The man was full of questions. He was not sure what he wanted to do, he told Turski, but he was certain that he wanted to leave Poland. They talked and pondered the future together. Turski also did not know what he would do once he got back his strength. His friend—this stranger who was his only friend at the moment—decided to search Jewish clubs and organizations for other DPs and to find a way to get to Palestine. Before he left, he asked Turski for a photo by which to remember him.

After the man left, he drifted to camps and clubs, talking to as many other refugees as he could. One night, he ran into a group of DPs who had not seen Poland since they were deported to camps. How is Warsaw? How is Łódź? They wanted to know everything he had seen while wandering Poland. The man had pictures to show them—photos of the piles of rubble that had been Warsaw, of Łódź, of his friend Marian Turski who had survived the Łódź ghetto.

One of the DPs, a woman, suddenly grabbed the photo of Turski. She was his mother. Marian Turski was not alone.

B
EFORE THE WAR
had even ended, Jakub Gutenbaum, only a teenager, already knew that he had lost almost everything. He had last heard from his father in the summer of 1940, when he was 11 years old. The father had escaped into the Soviet Union, and the family could only guess about how he had vanished.

Gutenbaum, his mother, and his younger brother were among the almost 400,000 Jews who had been forced into the Warsaw ghetto. The 80,000 non-Jewish residents of that neighborhood had been ordered to leave, and Jews had been packed into the three-and-a-half-mile area. Walls were built to close it off, and the Jewish third of Warsaw’s population was left inside to starve.

Impatient with the death rate from hunger and disease, the Germans rounded up six thousand Jews each day and took them to an area by one of the gates, the Umschlagplatz. From there they would be shipped to camps for extermination. In 1943, when there
were only about 40,000 Jews left in the ghetto, a thousand young people decided to fight to the death with smuggled arms. The Gutenbaums went to their hiding place in the ghetto, a basement, with about forty other people. The hatchway was concealed by a pile of coal. As they hid, they could hear the Germans enter the house overhead, could hear them fire off their weapons. But the Germans didn’t seem to find the hatchway under the coal. Then smoke started to snake its way through cracks in the ceiling. The Germans were burning down the house. The hidden Jews rushed to stuff rags in all the cracks. As the basement grew hot and then hotter, the forty, naked on the floor with their mouths open, gasped for air, and it still got hotter.

At night the Germans retreated and the basement cooled off. The Jews could go upstairs into the burned-out shell of the house to breathe. But the next day they went back into the basement, and the Germans burned again. They existed like this from April 19 until May 3. Then they heard a banging on the hatchway. Germans armed with machine guns ordered them all out. As they were marched through the ghetto with their hands behind their heads, they could see that the ghetto was now a charcoal-colored world in which nothing was alive, as though swept by a storm of fire.

The Gutenbaums and the other Jews spent three days in the Umschlagplatz, during which more and more groups with hands behind their heads were brought in. Finally, they were all stuffed into freight trains and taken to Maidanek. When they got out of the train, Germans with clubs in their hands, leading growling dogs that strained at their leashes, inspected them. Jakub was pushed away from his mother and younger brother. Soon they were in two different groups. Now 14, Jakub was taken to room number four with the men. His mother and brother were taken to room number five with the women and children.

While he was in the ghetto Jakub had heard from the Resistance that all the Jews were being taken to camps and killed. He wasn’t sure if this was true, or if it was, how they were going to be killed. The first thing he had to do was get to his mother and brother. The next day, he managed to get to room five, but he found no sign that they had ever been there. He had no illusions now. He was certain that the Resistance had been right and that his mother and brother were already dead.

Two years and several camps later, Gutenbaum, like Marian Turski, was a teenage orphan liberated at Theresienstadt. When he
returned to the crumbled black remains of what had been Warsaw, he found an orphanage where he could stay. And then, unexpectedly, he discovered that he was not alone. An uncle came to the orphanage looking for relatives and Jakub moved into his uncle’s one-room apartment.

B
Y THE TIME
the war ended, thirteen-year-old Barbara Góra, her mother, her father, and her sister had all gone by a variety of names. When she was ten in 1942, she had been Barbara Englisz. A German who checked her papers on a Warsaw street thought Englisz was a droll name in wartime Warsaw, and he laughed. He would not have laughed if he had known that her real name was Irene Hochberg and that she had been smuggled out of the ghetto.