I Shall Live (37 page)

On the Western front, the Allied armies crossed the Rhine at points along virtually its entire length, and were thrusting deep into Germany. The end of the war was very near now. Hitler, almost totally paranoid, was buying himself time measured in days,
and ruthlessly sacrificing the German people. Old men and children were drafted into the army and forced to fight in a hopeless cause.

In the first days of April the tension continued to rise among prisoners and guards alike. But through it all our professor continued his visits, regularly bringing new work for us. Word came that the Allies were approaching the Elbe River in the middle of Germany, and the final Russian drive to Berlin was expected any hour.

I was now sure that we were in the last days of the war, and tried to envision all the possible variations in the basic scenario of what would happen to us. My main concern was a possible order to separate the Jews from the other prisoners, which would have been a clear signal that they meant to kill us; I didn't think they would try to kill over forty thousand prisoners, of whom only a few thousand were Jewish. Anticipating this possibility, I went carefully through the entire camp looking for some place, any small hole, where Sam and I could hide out for the last few days of the war. I wasn't worried about food; we could last seven to ten days without it. The main problem was water, and I was able to get some containers that would hold enough water for that length of time. One evening after the Appel, I walked for several hours all over the camp looking for a pile of wood, a hole under a barracks where we could squeeze in, anything. But the whole camp was so standardized that I couldn't find a single place where we might hide.

The next day the loudspeakers began to blast a message, the same words over and over:
“Der Hund ist Tod.”
(The dog is dead.) This was their way of announcing President Roosevelt's death. In their frenzy and fear of the imminent defeat, Goebbels and his propaganda machine tried to exploit the President's death as somehow signaling a reversal of the inexorable Allied advance. These murderers of millions were so terrified of the day of judgment that they managed to persuade themselves that, with Roosevelt, their
archenemy, gone, perhaps they might be able to form an alliance with the West against Russia. What they couldn't accept was the fact that the entire civilized world was united against them. I was sorry that President Roosevelt would not be alive when victory came, but for the moment I was too preoccupied with our own survival to mourn him. What we needed was to find some way to avoid getting killed just as the war was ending.

One day, while we were working away at our numbers, a messenger came in with a note for our Stubenälteste. Told that he was out, the messenger went into the small room where the Stubenälteste worked and slept, and came out again empty-handed. I was so apprehensive of an order, which might come at any time, to kill all the Jewish prisoners that I decided to take a great risk and get a look at that note. I glanced out the door to make sure no one was approaching the barracks, then ran quickly into the Stubenälteste's room. The note was lying on top of his small table. I picked it up, read it, and felt faint. The top line read, in italics:
Re: Jewish Prisoners.
Underneath, in smaller type, was a list of instructions, and the first instruction was to compile a roster of all the Jewish prisoners in the barracks.

I was overwhelmed by a sinking feeling of fear, frustration, and desperation. I ran out and told the terrible news to Sam and the other mathematicians. Gloom fell upon us; no one could do any more work. Arno suggested that perhaps the directive had a different purpose, but we all knew that was unlikely. I was terribly depressed and couldn't sleep all night.

The next day, after the morning Appel, the SS announced that none of the outside commandos were to leave the camp that day; prisoners who were employed inside the camp were to continue on the job. When nothing was said about Jews I breathed again, but was fearful that at any moment I would hear the dreaded words, “All Jewish prisoners—step out.”

When we returned to our barracks after the Appel, to our surprise the professor came in. For the first time since he had appeared in Sachsenhausen the barracks was full of people who hadn't gone out that day, and some of them openly jeered at the professor and his “Kommando.” One made a crack about him and his Jews being Hitler's secret weapon. The professor ignored these remarks. He collected the completed sheets from Stark and gave him a new batch. Then he took some paper labels from his briefcase, gave them to Stark, and told him that “in view of the situation” (he didn't elaborate), he wanted to make sure the machines would be returned to their “rightful owners.” He asked Stark to attach the labels to our machines, said good-bye to us, and left. We looked at the labels. Each was typed “Property of the University of Kraków” (Poland). Despite our anxiety, we burst out laughing. Here was Germany collapsing, and the professor was worried about the rightful ownership of a bunch of obsolete old machines! He must have been making sure that after the war no one could accuse him of having stolen them.

The other prisoners were so noisy that it was impossible to work, but we continued to sit at our table the rest of the day. Now Jews and Gentiles alike were apprehensive and nervous. My German neighbor did nothing to relieve the tension; he kept repeating, “The dog [Hitler] is going to kill us all. He knows he will die, and he's going to take us all with him.” That night too I couldn't sleep.

We spent the next day again at our tables, even though we couldn't concentrate enough to do any work. The Stubenälteste came over to us and shook his head. “You're still going on with that crap!” Stark told him that we had to follow orders. He only laughed and walked away. I had to admit we were a ridiculous sight. No one else in the entire camp was working except the people in the kitchen and a few cleaners, the Russian artillery was booming within earshot, but there the eight of us were, still diligent at our tables. The atmosphere was
charged with electricity. The other prisoners were milling around aimlessly; arguments and fights were frequent. I began to feel a little better about the order I had seen in the Stubenälteste's office. If they were going to separate the Jews in order to kill them, it would have happened in the last two days.

That night I was so exhausted from lack of sleep that I conked out as soon as I hit the bunk. Very late I was awakened by the noise of another artillery barrage. It went on nonstop for hours, so intense and continuous that there was no mistaking it—this was the long-awaited final Russian assault on Berlin. Fatigue forgotten, I was seized with an enormous excitement. This was it!

Over the following four days nothing changed in the camp. There were no Appels. The barrage of artillery from the east continued on and off, and it was growing louder. The Russians had broken through and were coming closer. Ludicrous as it was under the circumstances, we kept plugging away at our numbers, afraid to take any chances that might give anyone an excuse to accuse us of disobeying orders. From time to time I went outside to see what was happening. The prisoners kept milling about in the yard, and rumors were running like wildfire. The Allies were approaching from the west. Hitler had ordered a “scorched earth” policy before the oncoming enemy. There was to be no retreat; the Germans had been ordered to fight to the last man.

There was no telling what was true and what wasn't. No one had any contact with the outside world, but some of the SS guards inside the camp were passing information to a few of the prisoners. Everyone was talking evacuation, which I found hard to believe. Where would they take us? The Russians were coming in from the east and south—they were probably only fifteen kilometers from Berlin by now—the Allies from the west, so the only possible direction to go would be north, but to what destination? It didn't make
sense. If they wanted to kill us all, the best place for that was right inside the camp, where we were surrounded by high walls and machine guns.

On the morning of April 20 an announcement came over the loudspeakers that was repeated incessantly: All prisoners were to line up at the gate by nationality in columns of five. There was going to be an evacuation. Poles, Russians, French, Norwegians, Dutch, Jews, and so forth were to form separate columns. As they began to assemble, chaos ensued, with prisoners running around like crazy trying to find the column for their nationality.

The decisive moment had arrived. When I heard that Jews were to form a separate column, I said to Sam that we were not going to join it, no matter what. He agreed, and we tore off the yellow triangles that branded us as Jews, making sure no telltale threads remained, leaving on the red triangles signifying political prisoners. We had no idea whether they would be verifying nationalities at the gate, but with over forty thousand prisoners running all over the place, I couldn't see how they would possibly have time to check. In any case, we were taking a lesser risk by not following these orders than by joining an all-Jewish column, which we were convinced would be the first to be killed.

Slowly the long columns were beginning to form. Since if there was any kind of check at the gate it would probably be by language, and since Polish was the only language Sam and I spoke perfectly, we went over to the Polish column. Several thousand Polish prisoners had already lined up. When we tried to join the column, a few rabid Polish anti-Semites recognized us as Jews and started to scream,
“Parszywi
Å»
ydzi, idzcie do swoich!”
(Rotten Jews, go to your own!) The last thing we needed was to attract any attention from the SS guards, so we quickly moved away and joined the column farther down, where the Poles didn't object to our mixing in with them.
We were as quiet and inconspicuous as possible, positioning ourselves in the middle of the column so as not to be too visible.

I was literally counting the seconds in my anxiety to get moving; once we were outside the camp, in a column of non-Jews, our chances to live would be greatly improved. The column on one side of us was Russian; on the other, German. In our column alone there were at least four thousand Polish prisoners. We were happy to finally see the prisoners up front starting to move out the gate. I could see that up ahead the guards were distributing food to the prisoners as they left the camp. All this activity was accompanied by the thunder of the Russian artillery; clearly the SS was in a great hurry.

It took more than an hour before Sam and I reached the gate, and we were careful not to catch anyone's eye, still fearful of being unmasked at the last minute as Jews. We each received a large piece of bread, about three or four times our daily ration, a small jar of marmalade, and a small package of margarine, which the guards warned us had to last us three days. When I actually walked through the gate, a feeling of enormous relief came over me, as if someone had lifted a great weight from my shoulders. As we marched off, for the first time since the start of the Nazi extermination of the Jews in 1941, I felt that we might have a fair chance to survive: As far as the SS guards marching alongside us were concerned, Sam and I were not Jews. I said to myself, “I shall not die. I shall live. I shall tell the story!”

We were on a road leading north, in a column of five prisoners to a row, half a mile long. The SS guards were walking on both sides of the column, fingers on the triggers of their machine guns. Two or three were marching ahead of the column and a few behind it. An officer on a motorcycle was riding up and down the road making sure everything was in order. Many military vehicles of all kinds were driving past. Some of the German formations seemed still intact, while others looked like the remains of a fighting force that had taken a bad beating. There were many stalled or abandoned vehicles lying on the shoulder of the road. Civilians were walking along carrying bundles; some had horse carts packed with their belongings. Allied planes and a few Russian ones flew continuously over our heads, but we didn't see a single German plane. From time to time, when one of the Allied planes spotted a group of German military vehicles, the pilot would dive down and strafe them. It did my heart good to see Germans jump and dive for cover. Somehow we weren't much concerned for our own safety; our column was very visible from the air, and our striped uniforms made it obvious that we were prisoners. Whenever the planes flew low over us, the guards stepped up to the column, feeling safer from air attack when closer to us.

Area of Germany between Berlin and the North Sea which shows the route of the Sachsenhausen death march.

After a while they led us onto a secondary road parallel to the main one, where things were much quieter. The peasants in the fields, almost all of them old men, women, and children, looked with curiosity but no surprise at the endless column of prisoners in their striped uniforms. I now weighed less than a hundred pounds, Sam, about eighty-five or ninety, and most of the others were in a similar state. But the guards kept us marching at a brisk pace.