I Shall Live (36 page)

The bombing stopped abruptly, but we spent the rest of the night at the station nevertheless. The train didn't start rolling again until early morning, and it was only minutes before we reached our destination. The voices of the guards could be heard, and the door of our car was opened. We jumped out and saw a sign: “Oranienburg.” So they were taking us to the infamous Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg concentration camp. I had heard that this was the largest one of all. It was not a good omen. Why would they be taking us to a camp even closer than Ravensbrück was to the Oder River and the Russians?

The guards ordered us to form a column, and we marched out of the station. All about us was devastation from the bombing. To our surprise, the guards marched us right through the town of Oranienburg, not around it; windows opened as we passed through the streets, and people peered out at us. We marched for close to an hour, until a huge camp appeared in the distance. Soon we were standing at the gate, which bore the familiar sign over it:
Arbeit Macht Frei.

The gigantic Sachsenhausen concentration camp was built in an enormous semicircle, each of its numerous sections surrounded by high stone walls with guard towers, searchlights, and machine guns. We were led by the guards to the reception area, made to take hot showers, and given new striped uniforms, shoes, and prisoner numbers. Again we had to attach red and yellow triangles to our jackets. Our transport was divided among only a few barracks, and the seven of us in the mathematicians Kommando managed to stay together. Since all the work commandos had already gone out before we arrived, we spent the rest of the day in our new barracks. Our Stubenälteste was a German criminal, like Karl, but he wasn't as pleasant as Karl. We told him about our Kommando in the hope that he might know something about it, but he just brushed us off.

At the end of the day, after the work commandos had returned to the camp, we went out with the rest of the prisoners to be counted on
the Appelplatz. It was so vast that it seemed to swallow up even the more than forty thousand prisoners who lined up on it by blocks to be counted. The Appel took only a little over an hour, an amazingly short time for such a large count. Afterward we walked around the camp to get the lay of the land. The guards didn't seem to object to prisoners milling about, and we mingled freely with people from all over the camp. I had never seen such a variety of nationalities, from every part of Europe, by the thousands: Poles, Russians, Jews, Gypsies, Belgians, French, Dutch, Danes, Czechs, Bulgarians, Spaniards, Yugoslavs—each speaking his own language, a true Tower of Babel. There was also a large contingent of Norwegian students, who, we were told, had been sent to Sachsenhausen after they had demonstrated against the traitor Quisling. The German prisoners wore triangles of different colors, each representing a code for the type of “crime” they had committed against the Third Reich.

Sachsenhausen contained close to a hundred barracks, many housing up to five hundred men. There was a large kitchen and a bathhouse. A large barracks was marked “Pathology,” and here medical experiments were performed, frequently on German homosexuals. There was even a running track offering a variety of different surfaces, so that the many local shoe manufacturers could use the prisoners to test the effectiveness of various materials. Some prisoners had to walk forty kilometers a day on this track, checking wear and tear of different shoes. Sometimes, just for fun, the guards would give the prisoners who had been selected for the tests shoes several sizes too big, so they could enjoy the spectacle of their stumbling and tripping as they tried to run. There was a station Z, where the SS exterminated “undesirable” prisoners. There was even a permanent gallows. Everywhere were big signs exhorting us to diligence, obedience, cleanliness, and order. Our heads were spinning. This place was incredible. It was as if a talented writer
had written a weird, crazy, futuristic, nightmarish movie script, and then the producer actually built a huge set for it.

How was our professor ever going to find us here? He would never be able to cut through this superstructure to reach us. We went back to our barracks in a profound depression, too despondent even to talk. I went directly to my bunk and tried to fall asleep, but the images of Sachsenhausen kept crowding my mind. Every hour or two I would wake up, as though in shock at finding myself there.

Next morning it was bitterly cold. I shivered for almost two hours on the Appelplatz in my thin uniform. In Ravensbrück I hadn't much minded the Appel, knowing that soon after it was over I would be back in our nice warm barracks. Not here. Things looked bad for us; we knew no one, had no connections, no money, no way of getting extra food. It was obvious that many prisoners didn't live on camp rations alone. The young Norwegians, for instance, all looked healthy and well fed—strapping specimens of the Nordic type Hitler so admired—and in fact we learned that they and some of the others regularly received food parcels from their families. No wonder they looked so good! We, on the other hand, were the starving pariahs, reduced to skin and bones, on the way to becoming Musulmen.

We were assigned to an outdoor commando and spent the day loading and unloading trucks in subzero temperatures. The SS guards were especially rough, beating us for no reason at all. If something didn't happen soon, we would die. What kept us alive for the moment was the knowledge that the Russian army was on the Oder River, only thirty-five kilometers away. It was only a matter of weeks now, maybe no more than days, before they began their final assault on Germany.

The days dragged slowly. We always worked outdoors, at a different place almost every day, but wherever we were it was bitterly
cold. We no longer had the strength to do the jobs we were given, and the guards were always beating us up. Hunger was constant. Only the certainty that both the Western Allies and the Russians would soon be launching their final offensives, that the war would be over and the matter of our survival decided one way or the other, kept us from total despair. We had little hope that our special commando would ever resume its activities; its existence could no longer be justified by any stretch of imagination. There was a strong feeling in the air that time was running out for Hitler.

Some of the other prisoners told us stories about Sachsenhausen. One, a Russian prisoner of war, had worked for over a year as a cleaner in a barracks where a group of more than a hundred Jewish printers were busy producing high-quality counterfeit British pound notes. They had recently succeeded in breaking the code for producing the special paper used by the United States Treasury, but were not quite ready yet to do the actual printing. The Jews in this printers' commando were treated well, he told us. The whole group had been shipped out of Sachsenhausen only two or three days after we arrived. Here was another special commando, except that they were the real thing; what they were doing was genuinely useful to the German war effort—a fact that dampened our spirits still further. If the SS had found it necessary to evacuate the forgers' commando, it was highly unlikely that they would let the Chemiker Kommando resume its “work” so close to the front.

A number of well-known political prisoners were incarcerated in Sachsenhausen, among them the former Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, and Hans Luther, the former head of the German Foreign Office. They were kept in an isolated barracks and we never saw them. A neighbor of mine, a German political prisoner who had been in Sachsenhausen for more than five years, told me that Jews and homosexuals were treated with particular cruelty. He estimated
that ten thousand or more German homosexuals had been killed by the SS in Sachsenhausen since he had arrived in the camp. He told us too that sometime in 1942 the SS had locked a group of Jews in a barracks before shipping them to Auschwitz. Learning of this, a few German Jewish prisoners formed a clandestine resistance group, which broke ranks during an evening Appel and actually started to push and shove the SS guards, demanding that they free the Jews in the barracks. The other prisoners looked on in astonishment at this collective act of desperate—and futile—courage. To everyone's amazement, these rebels were not executed immediately, but a few weeks later they were shipped to Auschwitz with the others.

My German neighbor was outspoken in his criticism of the Nazis, and of Hitler in particular. He never referred to him by name, always as
Der Hund
(the dog). “The time is coming soon, the dog will pay,” he used to say to me. Sam warned me against becoming too friendly with this man, lest one of the other prisoners denounce him to the SS, which might endanger my life too, by association.

One great help in this difficult time was a contact I had established with a prisoner who was well informed on what was happening on the war fronts. He worked outside the camp in a shoe factory, where he had become friendly with the owner, who had a shortwave radio and listened regularly to the BBC. In the West, I learned, the Allies had begun their offensive and were advancing inside Germany. A massive new Russian offensive was expected any day. The BBC was predicting that the war would end in a matter of weeks, which increased our tension to an almost unbearable pitch. The moment of decision was at hand. Hold on! Hold on!

One day late in February we were at the morning Appel, which seemed to go on forever in the bitter cold. As it ended, I heard an announcement which I couldn't quite make out. My German neighbor, who was standing next to me, said, “You're a mathematician, aren't
you? They're looking for you.” Sam was standing on my other side, and he too thought he had heard them say “mathematicians.” My heart leapt. Could it possibly be true? Had our professor actually managed to find us again? We ran like mad to our Stubenälteste, who grudgingly admitted that the SS were trying to locate a special group of mathematicians, and told us to go to the main office of the camp. We ran there, and the clerk confirmed that a professor from Berlin had been given special permission to set up our Kommando again. He told us to wait. After about an hour we saw the professor coming toward us. Stark was speechless from excitement; I couldn't believe my eyes. Once again, just when we needed him the most, our professor had appeared out of the blue to come to our rescue, like some mythical magician. It was really too good to be true. The mere thought of not having to work outdoors, half frozen, day after day, filled my heart with happiness. The professor greeted us, arranged with the camp officials for a table and benches to be set up in our barracks, gave Stark an envelope with new sheets, said goodbye, and went away.

We spent the rest of the day taking it easy, chatting and speculating about how long this new stage of our Kommando would last. With the Russians almost upon us and Germany so near collapse, how was our professor able to keep his “sting” going? Stark was full of admiration. “You've got to hand it to him. He must have powerful connections.” For the first time since our arrival in Sachsenhausen, I enjoyed a good night's sleep.

In the morning even the cold didn't bother me, since I knew that as soon as the Appel was over we would be back in our barracks. Even if the war went on for several more weeks, our chances of surviving had vastly improved.

When we returned to the barracks we found that our Stubenälteste didn't at all relish the thought of eight Jews hanging around
his barracks all day, and was loudly giving vent to his doubts about us and our Kommando. He attacked men like our professor, who shirked their duty to fight when Germany's very life was threatened and fifteen-year-old boys and old men were being sent to the front. We were careful not to say anything that might anger him further, and waited patiently until he was finished with his tirade. He then ordered his assistant to set up the table and benches, and left the barracks in disgust.

In no time there I was, back at my machine, banging away at the keys. This was just what the doctor ordered—rest. Our spirits rose. Our only worry was our conspicuousness, even in a camp as large as Sachsenhausen. There were too many SS officers roaming around, and any one of them might take it into his head to question the need for our Kommando at a time when Germany was so near to collapse.

In the days that followed, work in the math Kommando was a respite, a balm to our nerves, which had been frayed by physical abuse and hard labor—too hard for our starving bodies. Yet the tension was becoming harder to bear every day. The clock of our destiny was ticking away relentlessly; we knew that we were at five minutes to noon, when, after all we had endured, all the incredible luck that had brought us through this far, our fate would be decided in one brief moment—either a life of freedom, with all its joys, or brutal death. Every fiber of my body ached to survive, if only to know the excruciating pleasure of witnessing the downfall of Hitler and the SS, cornered like rats, fleeing the sword of justice but ferreted out one by one and made to pay for the bestialities they had inflicted on their fellow human beings. I wanted to be free to go where I pleased, not to be denied life just because I was a Jew. I wanted to meet and embrace those brave men who were fighting to liberate us and restore sanity to a world gone mad. I
wanted to find my brothers and sister, hug and kiss them, and together shed tears of sorrow for our parents, who had been forced to lie down naked, to be killed in cold blood. I wanted to shed tears of happiness for them, that their children had survived and would continue the family line. The thought of the decisive days at hand dominated my every waking moment, to the exclusion of everything else.

Meanwhile, we went on with our work. The professor visited us once a week, bringing with him new sheets of meaningless numbers, but his visits were becoming shorter. We could sense his discomfort; he became especially uneasy whenever the Stubenälteste was watching us from a distance.

It was the end of March when we began hearing the first sporadic exchanges of artillery. Although we knew that we were within reach of the Russian long-range cannon, the fact that we could hear them actually in action caused wild excitement in the camp. Our Kommando was confined to our barracks, which meant we had no direct contact with the outside world and were dependent on our neighbors to bring news in to us. But even without them, we would have sensed that something was afoot, for things were changing within the camp. Some of the guards who were known for their cruelty began treating the prisoners a little less harshly; the German civilians in the factories where some of the prisoners were working suddenly became much more friendly, even sympathetic, and openly criticized Hitler and the Nazis. Clearly they were trying to accumulate witnesses who would testify to their “humanity” on the rapidly approaching day of judgment.