By Chance Alone (11 page)

Sometime in September, there was a heavy bombing raid while we were in the middle of an operation. We had to stop our work, and I opened the windows in the surgery and the prep room so that the glass would not shatter from the exploding bombs. Outside, shrapnel and shards of glass were landing all over the camp. When the bombers left, the all-clear sirens sounded. I closed the windows and the operation resumed.

While I was preparing for the next patient, the door to the prep room opened and an unfamiliar SS officer began speaking to Dr. Orzeszko. He ordered him to clear the operating room for several injured SS personnel who were en route by ambulance. This officer announced that he would perform the operations, and that Dr. Orzeszko was to assist him. He was Dr. Fischer, the camp doctor, and he was responsible for ensuring that no contagious diseases developed in the camp and endangered SS personnel.

Several stretchers were brought into barrack
21
and lined up in the hallway. Dr. Fischer and Dr. Orzeszko checked the condition of the injured SS men to assess who would be attended
to first. Most of them had shrapnel wounds in their legs, chests, and arms. I was instructed to cut off their uniforms and prepare them for surgery. These SS men were bleeding and moaning from pain, and I could see that the colour of their blood was the same as mine. These killers were not so brave when they were laid out flat on their backs. I suddenly felt elated at the thought that a fifteen-year-old Jewish teenager was in charge while they lay there, totally helpless.

Dr. Fischer unbuckled his belt with his sidearm and handed it to me along with his jacket. He then sat on a stool to wash up for the operation, while I controlled the water temperature. He asked me to cover his riding pants with towels so they would not get wet, and then he asked me for my name, my place of origin, and my date of arrival in Auschwitz. He also asked me where my family was, but I didn't dare tell him what had happened to them. I told him I didn't know. I'm not sure why he asked me about my family when he must have known what happened to the Hungarian transports.

When Dr. Fischer had finished washing up, I held up the sterilized gown so he could put his hands inside. He was over six feet tall, so I had to get up on a stool to tie the gown around his waist and neck. I also tied on his mask and held out the latex gloves while he put them on. I placed the instruments in the sterilizer but made an instantaneous decision to disinfect them for only five minutes rather than the required twenty. I had no desire to use safe methods on SS criminals, and I justified my actions by telling myself that I was in a war and this was the only tool I had to fight the enemy. We operated on the SS soldiers for two days in our surgery until the bombed-out SS hospital near Birkenau was back in action.

***

In late November
1944
, a teenager slipped out of his barracks after the camp was locked down for the night and tried to break into the kitchen facilities. He was intercepted by Sergeant Kaduk, who took great pleasure in torturing and beating people he found outside of their barracks after lockdown. From my bed, I heard Kaduk's dog barking, and shortly after that I heard machine-gun fire from the guard tower. The teenager was shot in the head. He was brought to the surgery right away for an emergency operation. I was summoned to the operating room and the surgeons arrived soon after.

We placed the boy on the operating table, and I could see a severe bullet wound on the left side of his temple with an exit wound at the back of his head. A large part of his skull was shattered, and he was in a coma. The surgeons cleaned the wound, removed bone chips, stopped the bleeding, and stitched him up. There was nothing more they could do for him.

The orderlies took him to the upstairs ward, where Dr. Gordon took charge of him. He was the only critical patient in the ward, and all the doctors took a particular interest in his survival. Many days later, he emerged from his coma and opened his eyes. Dr. Gordon spoke to him, but there was no response. He was paralyzed and we could not give him any sustenance and had no intravenous fluids to sustain him. He was trapped in his body, eyes open, with no way to respond. He appeared to have massive brain damage. Dr. Gordon periodically tested the boy's nerve responses by pricking his hands and feet with a needle, and after a week, he showed some response to the needle on one side of his body. When Dr. Gordon spoke to him, the boy
moved his eyes as if he understood. Dr. Gordon worked closely with him, teaching him to speak again. He was kept alive only because it was near the end of the war and the gas chambers had been destroyed by order of the camp Kommandant.

Around the same time, another teenager was brought into the operating room with severe pain in his belly. When the surgeon opened him up, he realized it was a ruptured appendix and the teenager died on the operating table. We all felt sadness at the death of such a young person. His body was taken to the experimental barracks next door for disposal.

Of all my experiences in the prep room, the most shocking task came when the SS men removed patients from the upstairs ward to the Birkenau gas chambers and returned about two hours later with their pockets full of teeth wrapped in bloody rags. I was ordered to remove the gold crowns and fillings from these teeth because I had access to medical instruments. As I worked, I couldn't help thinking that just a short time before, the owners of these teeth had been alive. And now they were just a pile of ash. Removing the gold crowns and fillings traumatized me, and I felt that in some small way, I was participating in the desecration of their remains. I wondered how many SS men enriched themselves by scavenging the remains of their hundreds of thousands of victims.

I
t was a well-known fact among the prisoners that unless a door opened for you, it was impossible to get out of Auschwitz alive. My head wound was, ironically, exactly the door that I needed. It had saved me from the rigorous work on the Landwirtschaft Kommando. But even that opportunity would not have been possible without the immediate first aid I received from Under-Kapo Stasek, who stopped the bleeding and arranged for my delivery to the surgery in barrack
21
. Without his initiative, my story would have ended in that scrubby field of tree stumps. I also owed my life to Dr. Orzeszko, who not only operated on my wound but also took me off the stretcher before I was sent to the gas chamber in Birkenau.

I worked in the operating room for six months, and my structured daily routines allowed me to survive away from the severe hard labour and the threat of the SS guards and the Kapos. Dr. Orzeszko was a dedicated and skilful surgeon who was respected by his peers and the Polish political prisoners of Auschwitz I. I suspected that he also played an integral role in
the Polish underground in the camp, a fact that was later confirmed by his family.

A short while after I started working in the operating room, Dr. Orzeszko opened a pantry door and showed me shelves loaded with food supplies, including loaves of bread, salami, onions, potatoes, carrots, salt and pepper, and a large cooking pot. I was astounded at this bonanza—more food than I'd seen since I left my home in April
1944
. He told me how to prepare a stew with all the provisions, and how to use the autoclave as a pressure cooker. I salivated at the scent of the cooking food. Of course, there was always the worry that the aroma would give us away, so this activity was done after all the operations were finished and the SS officer in charge of the barracks had left for the night. The meal was ready in less than an hour, and in no time I felt that my stomach was so full it might burst. I couldn't believe that I'd just had a bowl of goulash in Auschwitz! The leftovers were locked in the pantry and consumed the next day. The ingredients for our stews were sent by the chief cook, and I knew that I was one of the privileged few who had access to such provisions. The extra calories made a huge difference in my overall health and stamina, and this nourishment was key to my survival.

Dr. Orzeszko, like other Polish political prisoners, was allowed to receive small monthly care packages containing food and other supplies. He was also allowed to receive and write one letter per month. When the doctor's package was delivered to the operating room, he would open it with tremendous care, as if wanting to feel the love from his family members back home. I was happy for him, but it only reinforced the fact that Jewish inmates didn't have this same privilege. There was no one left to send us these precious gifts.

T
he Sonderkommandos were Jewish inmates forced to work twelve-hour shifts disposing of the victims of the gas chambers. After each gassing procedure, they removed the bodies from the chambers, cut off the victims' hair, extracted gold crowns from their mouths, and cut open body orifices in search of treasure that might have been ingested or hidden. (Even the hair had economic value, because the Nazis could make it into fabric.) This was the most gruesome and soul-destroying job that any human could endure. And if the work itself wasn't bad enough, the Nazis gassed the Sonderkommandos every sixty days to ensure that there were no witnesses to their crimes, so the men knew their own deaths were imminent.

On October
7
,
1944
, Crematorium
4
was blown up by the Sonderkommandos. They had fashioned rudimentary explosives from gunpowder, which they'd obtained from women inmates who worked in the Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke factory. They'd also prepared Molotov cocktails. When a unit of SS men came in to oversee their execution, the inmates threw the Molotov
cocktails at them, killing several of them, and then blew up the crematorium. In the chaos that followed, the Sonderkommandos broke out through the gate and ran toward the perimeter of the camp. Guards began shooting at them, and large reinforcements of SS units were immediately organized and sent in pursuit. They shot down most of the men. Of the approximately six hundred Sonderkommando inmates involved in the rebellion, only six managed to escape through the three cordons around the camp into the nearby forest.

As a result of this uprising, the inmates of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II were made to stand at
appel
all night as a form of collective punishment. Many simply dropped and died from exhaustion. As I stood, I was not only exhausted but also extremely fearful of other consequences, and when we were finally dismissed, I was relieved to go back to the operating room to continue my daily duties.

The Nazi officials immediately launched an investigation to determine how the Sonderkommandos had managed to get a hold of the explosive powder. The makeup of the powder was specific to each factory, and the evidence led them to Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke, where hundreds of women from Birkenau were working as slave labourers. Eventually, the Gestapo were able to identify four young women, and these women were brought to barrack
11
at Auschwitz I for interrogation. We heard nothing more until January
5
,
1945
, when the entire camp was assembled in front of the gallows in Auschwitz l. There were many SS guard units lined up to form a barrier between the inmates and the gallows, and the Lagerkommandant soon arrived with his own personal SS guards to oversee the executions. As I looked at the nooses hanging from the gallows, I had no idea who the
victims would be. Finally, guards brought out the women. Their hands were tied behind their backs, and their faces were black and blue. But they held their heads high as they walked to the gallows platform, where the nooses were then placed around their necks. To prolong the agony, they were hanged one at a time. But before they died, each one of them spoke, in a clear and loud voice, two Hebrew words: “
Chazak V'Amatz
” (Be strong and courageous). These women were Ester Wajcblum, Regina Safirsztain, Ala Gertner, and Roza Robota.

They stood tall and unafraid on the gallows and died bravely. The thousands of assembled inmates were outraged and the emotion was palpable; I felt that just one outburst from someone could have transformed us into action. But we, who were already so beaten down, could only react to this indignity with a collective deep groan. I felt ashamed that we could not respond more appropriately to the heroic actions of the four women.

As soon as the hangings were complete, the Lagerkomman-dant was hastily escorted out of the camp and the SS units waded into the mass of prisoners, yelling and beating us in an attempt to move us all back into the barracks. The Nazis, with this action, were sending us the message that they were still in control. We of course were at their mercy, with no physical stamina or weapons with which to fight.

But there was a new feeling of urgency in the air. Our daily activities had slowed considerably. Many factories had closed down, and the machinery had been transported back to Germany. Military trucks were busy loading clothing, blankets, and other items from the barracks where these things were stored. The SS piled medical documents and registration cards in front of the barracks, then poured gasoline on them and burned the
evidence. These fires continued burning for many days and nights. We heard rumours that the SS had blown up the three remaining gas chambers and crematoria, a development that I greeted with relief because I knew that as long as these engines of death were operational, I was at risk. The entire Auschwitz system was unravelling. Our workload in the operating room was down by almost
50
percent, and I had lots of spare time. But still I worried that I might have outlived my usefulness as a slave labourer, and I wondered what the Nazis would do to us as the Red Army drew near.

***

Christmas and New Year's
1944
–
45
were celebrated in Auschwitz I by prominent inmates and some SS soldiers in a barracks that was decorated with pine boughs, streamers, and posters that said “
Fröliche Weihnachten
” and “
Fröliche Neues Jahr
.” I joined the surgeons and doctors of barrack
21
at the celebration. Tables had been stocked with food, including salami, bloodwurst and liverwurst, cheese, bread, schnapps, and cigarettes. The guests at this party were Polish political prisoners, barracks elders, room elders, doctors, and Polish tradespeople, such as electricians and carpenters. The other participants included German and Austrian Kapos and under-Kapos. These men were criminals and asocials in their lives outside of Auschwitz, and they wore black and dark green triangles to distinguish them from other prisoners. The final group of guests were the SS Kommandants of the different work units. These were sergeants and lower ranks; there were no officers in this group. I estimated there were approximately one hundred people assembled in the room. The food was fast
disappearing, and the mood was festive and the atmosphere convivial. Although I did not feel part of the celebration, the food was absolutely sustaining for me.

In the spirit of the holidays, the guests sang “O Tannenbaum” (everyone seemed to know the German version), and afterward, the Austrians sang a song called “
Wien, der Stadt meine Tr
äume
” (Vienna, the city of my dreams). After the songs, the room became melancholy. I observed the reactions of the three main groups. The Polish political prisoners were hopeful because they realized the war was coming to an end and they believed they would soon be reunited with their families; the SS soldiers were aware of the advancing Red Army, and they knew their futures were very uncertain; and the men in the third group, the criminals and killers who were our Kapos, were sad because they had nothing to look forward to and would no longer be in positions of power. I was the odd man out in this gathering. I felt neither hopeful nor sad, but I was preoccupied with the fear that the Nazis would kill us all before they left the camp. Unless I was liberated, there would be no happy ending for me. The war was near its end, but freedom seemed so far away.