I Shall Live (29 page)

People from our transport were exhausted from the long trip in the cattle cars, and the next day a few of them developed a high fever. Fred's fears of a typhus epidemic spread by the lice in Majdanek had materialized. He went to the doctor in charge of the hospital—a Jew, a Dr. Gross—and informed him of this dangerous development, suggesting that he order an immediate quarantine to prevent the spread of the typhus to the rest of the camp. Dr. Gross agreed, and we were placed in separate barracks and isolated from the rest of the camp. Fred was the only person permitted to leave the quarantine area.

Płaszów

1 Offices

2 SS Barracks

3 The Gray House

4 The Red House

5 Goethe's Villa

6 Barrack for the dogs

7 Cesspool

8 Warehouse

9 Warehouse

10 Quarry

11 Kitchen

12 Stable

13 Garage

14 House for the Germans

15 Hospital

16 Bathhouse

17 Construction square

18 Camp hospital

J. Bau (in:
Proces ludobójcy Amona Goetha
, Cracow, 1947, p. 375)

Over the next few days more and more people came down with the fever, among them Felek. At first we hoped that it was just a cold, but his temperature quickly shot up like the rest. He soon reached the crisis, his fever hovering around 104–105 degrees, and for a day or two it was touch and go, but then the fever started to drop. He was one of the last to fall ill; the spread of the disease seemed to have been arrested, and no new cases were reported. Miraculously not one of the thirty or forty who came down with typhus died, but those who recovered were very weak for a long time.

One day Dr. Gross came to visit our barracks. He ordered the convalescents to line up and started making notes in a book he was carrying. Fred saw that he was listing the prisoners' numbers of the people who were the weakest; these included some who had never recovered from the journey in the cattle cars. He became suspicious and asked Gross about it. Gross replied that he needed the information to obtain extra rations for them, but it made Fred very uneasy; he didn't trust Gross. However, after it was clear that the epidemic was over, our quarantine was lifted and we were moved to a regular barracks.

The first Appel in Płaszów was quite an experience. The entire camp, more than twenty thousand, lined up on the Appelplatz to be counted. The Jewish Kapos were running around helping the SS do the count, and often beating up the prisoners. The Appel took an hour and a half, and I was told that it sometimes went on for as long as three hours.

After the Appel we were marched out to work. Part of our group was taken to a construction site, a hospital for Wehrmacht officers.
Bencio Fink, myself, and about thirty others were assigned to a work detail that was excavating the foundation of the hospital. The earth was heavy with clay, which made the work difficult. Other prisoners loaded the earth we had dug into trucks, and it moved along fast.

In the middle of the day they gave us about fifteen minutes to rest. My job in the Budzy
ń
factory had made me soft, and I developed a large blister on my right hand.

When the workday was over, we formed a column and marched back to camp. At the gate they counted us twice before we were permitted to pass through. Supper consisted of a
menashka
of soup, which I forced myself to eat just to have something warm in my stomach. After supper was our first opportunity to learn about conditions in Płaszów. It was run internally by Chilowicz, a Jewish Lagerälteste, with the help of an aide, Finkelstein, and a number of Jewish Blockälteste and Kapos. All of them were brutal and corrupt, living well at the expense of their fellow Jews.

The camp commandant, Amon Goeth, was a demented sadist who hanged or shot people utterly at whim. From his house on the other side of the barbed wire he would observe prisoners inside the camp through a pair of binoculars, and if he didn't like the look of a man, the way he walked, for instance, he would shoot him with his telescopic-sighted rifle. Goeth went around the camp accompanied by a dog, Rolf, who was trained to attack when Goeth cried, “Jude!” After Rolf had done his job, Goeth would finish the prisoner off by beating him to death with his large knout, or simply shooting him.

Whenever there had been an escape attempt, Goeth would select ten prisoners at random and either shoot them himself or have them shot on a nearby hill, called Hujowa Górka. Goeth was completely unpredictable. He ignored the strict Gestapo rules and kept a Jewish woman in his apartment as his mistress. He was brazen in his demands for constant payoffs from Chilowicz and his underlings.

Under Goeth's leadership, frequent selections were conducted in the camp hospital, and those too sick or weak to work were taken to Hujowa Górka and shot. The mere mention of the name Hujowa Górka was enough to send a shiver through the ranks of prisoners. Many thousands of Jews had been killed there and buried in mass graves.

None of this information made us feel any better, but despite the hazards of life in a camp in which there were continual selections and shooting, it still seemed preferable to Majdanek, with its eerie emptiness and with no apparent reason for existing.

For the first time since we had left Budzy
ń
, we heard reliable news from the front. The Russians were indeed continuing their offensive and had invaded the prewar Polish territories. The Allies were making progress in Italy. To our disappointment, though, there was still no word about the expected second front in the West. Again I felt that familiar mixture of exhilaration at the German defeats and despair over our infinitesimal chance of living to see the final Allied victory. Hitler and the SS had marked us down for death, we were in their hands, and nothing less than a miracle would save us.

We soon discovered that Płaszów was a much more commercialized place than the other camps. Here one could buy many things, not only food but other commodities as well. The Jews at the top of the hierarchy lived luxuriously, with the best food and even many conveniences and services. They exercised their power through a hundred or so Jewish policemen, Kapos, and Stubenälteste, who were also relatively comfortable. Apart from them, there were two classes of prisoners: those who had some money, and those who didn't. The first group readily obtained extra bread and other food; the second group were starving to death on the camp rations—which were much smaller even than they were supposed to be. Trade with the outside world was brisk, and corruption rampant and highly
organized: the prisoners' rations were cut so that those in positions of power could divide the remainder among themselves and sell it.

In our barracks, in addition to a Jewish Stubenälteste, was a Kapo, a German prisoner named Fehringer. He wore a green triangle, signifying that he was a criminal. He had been sent to Płaszów for the murder of his parents, and was sarcastically referred to as “the orphan.” Fehringer was of medium height, with smooth blond, almost white hair and gray-blue eyes. He was wiry and very alert, and spoke with great precision. He was cruel, always looking for the slightest pretext to attack the prisoners, and when he did, he was very methodical, like someone performing a mechanical task. He would hit his victim like a trained fighter, his fists so quick that it was impossible to protect oneself. Almost every day Fehringer would pick someone out for this treatment, and when he was finished with him, the man was ready for the hospital.

I tried hard to avoid Fehringer as far as possible, making sure not to break any rules. Fred had been given permission by Dr. Gross to send the prisoners who were too weak to work to the hospital, but he was warned that if he did this too freely, he would be punished. Fehringer's victims pleaded with Fred to give them an admission pass to the hospital. They knew that it was a dangerous place, but many preferred to run the risk of the frequent selections so that they could stay in bed for a few days and recover. Fred found it difficult to refuse them.

After a few days Fehringer began to notice the absence of the people he had recently beaten up, and found out that it was Fred who was sending them to the hospital. One day he approached Fred and said in his cutting voice, “I hear, Dr. Orenstein, that you are a very good-hearted man. You better watch out. This is a concentration camp, not a resort.” When Fred told me of this, my heart sank and I begged him to be very careful. Fehringer was an extremely
dangerous man to have as an enemy. Fred lifted his hands helplessly. “What can I do? When people come to me in such terrible shape, how can I refuse to help them?” It was an impossible dilemma.

One of the prisoners who knew Fehringer well told us that there was another reason besides sadistic pleasure for his systematic attacks on the prisoners: he was deliberately terrorizing them so that nobody dared complain about the smaller rations of bread. Fehringer was in charge of cutting up the bread for the four hundred or so inmates of our barracks, and every day he kept for himself four or five of the forty to fifty loaves he received. He was doing the same thing with the margarine and marmalade; what he withheld from us he sold on the black market for diamonds and gold. Fehringer, it was said, was sharing his loot with the Stubenälteste and some of the SS guards as well. He was very self-confident and cocky, and apparently believed that Fred's passes to the hospital were undermining his reign of terror. I lived in constant fear of Fehringer and of what he might do to us, particularly to Fred.

We decided to sell one of our two remaining twenty-dollar bills for bread. Fearful that Fehringer would find out about it if we were to do it in our barracks, we went to another barracks to make the deal. Fehringer shrewdly suspected us, because on one occasion he told Fred that if he had any money he had better hand it over. Fred denied having any, but Fehringer seemed unconvinced. We now had only one twenty-dollar bill left, and we doled out these last additional portions of bread to stretch them as far as possible. For the first time in the camps, I was constantly hungry.

In Budzy
ń
I had sometimes urinated in my sleep. Here I had a bunk on the bottom tier—luckily, because the same thing happened again. But this time I didn't have to worry that a prisoner would scream and curse me, as one had done in Budzy
ń
, which would have been dangerous with Fehringer nearby. Sleep was our only release
from the dark reality of our waking lives. Sometimes I dreamed of happy times with my family, and of having plenty of food and love and hope. Every morning, upon waking and realizing with a jolt where I was, I experienced a strange sensation, as if a stone were slowly moving down from my heart to the pit of my stomach.

One day, late in April, Fred's suspicions of Dr. Gross were confirmed. The prisoners whose numbers he had written down in the hospital were summoned out of the ranks at the morning Appel, and together with Musulmen from other barracks were taken to Hujowa Górka for execution. It was disheartening to see a Jewish doctor selecting the SS's victims for them. Fred, who had recovered from the depression he had suffered at Majdanek, said, “I hope we survive the war just so I can testify against Gross at his trial.”

Work on the construction site continued for a couple of weeks, and the excavation was almost finished. The pit, at the bottom of a tree-lined hill, was about eight feet deep, two hundred feet long, and forty feet wide. One day while we were working I spotted on the ground a torn piece of German army newspaper, perhaps a quarter of a page. I noticed the bold type that was always used for the German military communiqués. I was always intensely curious about what was happening on the war fronts, but usually had to rely on secondhand reports from other prisoners. Here was a chance to read it for myself. I looked around to make sure no one saw me, then quickly picked up the piece of newspaper and stuck it in my pocket.

Suddenly I heard a voice behind me:
“Jude, zeige mir was du hast in deine Tasche.”
(Jew, show me what you have in your pocket.) I felt as if I had been struck by a bolt of lightning. I turned around, and there was an SS man, his hand stretched out toward me. I took the piece of newspaper out of my pocket and handed it over. He glanced at it and said, “You can't wait for us to lose the war, can you, Jew?” I was
so scared I couldn't think. He took out his revolver and pointed it toward the excavation pit. This was the end, then.

I didn't understand that he wanted me to jump into the pit, and I just stood there at the edge of it. He kicked me in the stomach, and I fell in. He then pointed the gun at me, and I waited to be struck by a bullet. I had no last thoughts that I can remember, only terror. Then I heard the SS man say, “
Jude, raus
.” (Jew, get out.) The pit was very deep, and I had to jump up to catch hold of the edge with my fingertips. He stomped on my fingers with his boots, and I fell back into the pit. “
Jude, raus
,” he said again. Again I jumped up and again he stomped on my fingers. Now the skin was coming off. I couldn't hold on any longer, and fell back into the pit. The third time he waited until I had lifted myself chest high, and then he kicked me. I fell back in again.