Leon Uris (24 page)

Often a last-minute panic broke out but the Germans were ready now with storm troopers who clubbed and whipped the reluctant into the “shower rooms.”

The iron doors were bolted shut.

A can or two of Cyklon B was dropped into each “shower room” and it was all over in ten or fifteen minutes.

Then came the
Sonderkommandos
. These were clean-up squads of inmates from Auschwitz. They emptied the gas chambers and removed the corpses to the crematoriums. Gold teeth were pulled and rings taken before the burnings. These would be melted down and sent to Berlin. Often a well-shaped skull would be taken for sale to the German guards as paperweights.

Little attention was given to pictures of families or love letters that were found in the clothing. The troopers were most interested in searching through the linings where jewelry was often hidden. Often an infant was found hidden in the clothes and designated for the next “shower.”

Hoess was good to his troops. They worked hard when a large trainload came to Birkenau and were rewarded with extra rations and schnapps. His system worked with great efficiency and he never seemed fazed. He did not even get upset when Colonel Eichmann unloaded a quarter of a million Hungarian Jews on him practically without warning.

Hoess pressed his scientists and engineers for greater efficiency and lower costs. His architects had blueprinted elaborate expansion plans. One was for a gas chamber with a floor that could be lifted hydraulically like an elevator to another level where the crematorium was situated. Other plans were designed to increase the Birkenau capacity to forty thousand executions a day.

The greatest bottleneck at Birkenau was the disposal of corpses. At first they were taken directly from the gas chambers to open fields and buried in pits and covered with lime. The stench became unbearable. The SS troops forced the Jewish
Sonderkommandos
to dig up all the pits and burn the bodies, then crush the bones. Again, open field burning proved too foul-smelling, so inside crematoriums had to be constructed.

The train bearing Dov Landau passed through Auschwitz and came to a halt at the siding at Birkenau.

D
OV WAS HALF DEAD
with hunger and blue with cold, but his years of constant contact with danger and death had sharpened his instincts so that even in this state he was alert to survive. Dov knew that the next hour would spell life or death.

The doors of the cattle and freight cars were opened and those like him in open cars were ordered over the top with harsh guttural commands. The miserable victims dragged themselves onto a long platform and faced a line of storm troopers who stood in readiness with clubs, whips, pistols, and vicious dogs straining at their leashes. The whips cracked out in the cold air and brought screams of pain. The truncheons thudded against skulls, and pistols shot into the bodies of those too weak to walk.

A line was formed, four abreast down the length of the platform, and directed toward a huge station room. The line pressed to the room at a slow but steady pace.

Dov looked around him. To his left were the trains. Beyond the trains on the road outside the station room he could observe a line of waiting trucks. The trucks were not enclosed so they could not be gas vans, Dov assumed. To his right, past the line of guards, Dov could see the neatly groomed lawns and trees around the brick gas chambers of Birkenau. He studied the shapes of the buildings and their conelike chimneys and he knew the area to his right held extermination chambers.

The line pressed on. A nausea born of fear racked him. A man staggered and fell, unable to arise. Two snarling dogs were turned loose and ripped the man to pieces. His shrieks set Dov to trembling. He fought to gain control; he knew that he must show no fear.

His line moved into the station room. The large line was split into four single lines, and each line moved toward a desk set up at the far end of the room. A German doctor sat behind each desk, and around each doctor stood a dozen guards and assistants. Dov fixed his attention on the desk ahead of him to try to find out what was happening.

The doctor quickly looked over every person as he or she stepped to the desk. The doctor would then order the person to go off in one of three directions.

The first way was out an exit on the right side of the room. Dov began counting; seven out of ten people were sent out that way. These people were old or children or appeared in bad condition. Since he assumed the buildings on the right were gas chambers, he came to the conclusion that those being sent out the right exit were going to be put to death immediately.

The second way was out an exit on the left side of the room. This exit led to the outside where the line of trucks was waiting. About two out of ten went that way and all of them appeared fit and well. Dov assumed they were being sent to the labor camp.

The right door meant death and the left door meant life!

There was also a third group. These people, one in ten or even more, were mostly young women, some quite beautiful. A few teen-age boys were ordered to join this group. Dov Was certain the girls would be used as German field whores and the boys for homosexual activities with the German officers.

He drew in a dozen deep breaths as his line inched forward. He was a pack of bones and he knew he didn’t stand much of a chance of being sent through the left exit to the labor camp.

In the next line a woman screamed and half a dozen guards converged on her and flung her to the ground and ripped away her skirts. The woman had been trying to hide an infant.

“Right ... right ... right ... right ...” the doctor kept ordering the victims.

Dov Landau stopped before the desk.

The doctor looked up and glanced at him. “Go to that exit on the right,” he said.

Dov smiled softly. “You are making a mistake, Doctor,” Dov said with infinite calm. “I am an expert forger and counterfeiter. Write your name down on that piece of paper and I’ll show you.”

The doctor sat back, stunned. Dov’s coolness impressed him, for he obviously knew what awaited him. The youngster had put a sudden halt to the monotonous death march. The doctor caught his bearings and a smirk crossed his lips. Two guards grabbed Dov and began to drag him away.

“Wait!” the doctor commanded. He looked at Dov again and ordered him to turn around. For a second he became tired of the foolishness. The boy was making a clever bluff. He was about to order him out of the right exit, but his curiosity got the better of him. The doctor scribbled his name on a pad.

Dov wrote out six duplications of the signature and returned the pad ... “Which one of those did you write?” Dov asked.

Half a dozen guards peeked over the doctor’s shoulder and stared in amazement. The doctor looked at Dov again and then whispered to a guard who walked off.

“Stand over here to one side,” the doctor snapped.

Dov stood by the desk and watched the line of people move toward him. He looked at them being condemned at the rate of four a minute.

Dov looked into the eyes of the guards and he looked at their truncheons and at the snarling dogs. He glanced at the right-hand exit and whistled a shaky tune half beneath his breath.

Five minutes passed. Ten minutes passed. The line coming in from the platform seemed never to end.

The guard returned with another man who was obviously a high-ranking officer, Dov thought, for his chest was filled with medals. The doctor handed the pad of signatures to the officer, who studied it for a full minute.

“Where did you learn this?” the officer snapped.

“In the ghetto at Warsaw.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“Passports, travel cards, any kind of paper. I can duplicate anything.”

“Follow me.”

Dov passed through the left-hand door. As he got into the car and drove off toward Auschwitz a Main he seemed to remember Mundek’s words: “One of the Landaus must live through this.” In a few moments the car passed through the main gate of Auschwitz. The sign over the entrance of the camp read:
LABOR LIBERATES
.

The main compound was set in an area that wallowed in mud. There was acre after acre of frame wooden barracks which were isolated from each other by high walls of electrified barbed wire.

These acres of barracks fed manpower into some thirty subsidiary slave-labor camps. Each inmate wore a black and white striped uniform and an identification color on his arm and left breast. A pink badge was worn by homosexuals, a black badge by field whores, a green badge by criminals, violet badges for clergymen, red for Russians and Poles, and the traditional Star of David for the Jews.

Dov received another badge at Auschwitz. It was a tattooed number on his left forearm. Dov Landau was now a black and white striped Jew number 359195.

LABOR LIBERATES
. Dov Landau celebrated his fourteenth birthday in Auschwitz and his gift had been his life. He was quite fortunate for of all the tens of thousands of prisoners at Auschwitz, Dov’s small group of forgers were among the elite. His particular section was given the task of engraving and printing counterfeit United States one- and five-dollar bills for use by German agents in western countries.

After a short time at Auschwitz Dov wondered if it would not have been better to have died at Birkenau.

Here the inmates were underfed, worked into living skeletons, and stacked on shelves for their five hours’ sleep a night. Disease ran wild. Prisoners were tortured, driven insane, beaten, and degraded, and every known atrocity conceived by man was committed.

Here the penal colony lived in single black cells and were fed only oversalted vegetables to induce unquenchable thirst.

Here in Block X, Nazi doctors Wirthe, Schumann, and Clauberg kept the human raw material for their pseudo-scientific experiments. Polish prisoner Dr. Wladislaw Dering performed castrations and ovariectomies ordered by his German masters as part of their insane program to find a way to sterilize the entire Jewish race.

This was Auschwitz and this was Dov Landau’s gift of life.
LABOR LIBERATES
.

“One of the Landaus must live through this,” Mundek had said. What did Mundek look like? He could hardly remember. Or Ruth or Rebecca or his mother and father? He could not remember his father at all. The memories grew hazier and hazier until he could remember nothing but death and terror and he did not know that there was a life where death and terror did not exist.

A year passed. The trains came in and out of Birkenau. The deaths at the labor camps around Auschwitz from torture and disease and hunger were nearly as appalling as those at Birkenau. Somehow he managed to cling to his sanity and that animal instinct to survive.

Even in this blackest of pits there were some rays of hope. There was the prison orchestra. There was a flourishing underground and they had a radio receiver. Even here a man could find a way to get to a woman.

SUMMER 1944

There was a strange new stirring throughout Auschwitz. Dov could often look into the sky and see Russian bombers, and the secret radio began reporting German defeats. Hope, however dim, found its way through the muck and torture. Each new Allied victory sent the German guards into a murderous frenzy until the prisoners almost dreaded word of German defeats. At Birkenau activity speeded up until the gas chambers were in operation almost around the clock.

AUTUMN 1944

The feeling now was that Germany was going to lose the war. They were being beaten on all fronts. But as they lost on the battlefield the appetite for extermination grew. Colonel Eichmann threw every possible resource into finishing his mission of genocide.

OCTOBER 1944

The
Sonderkommandos
at Birkenau staged a wild uprising in which one of the crematoriums was blown up. Each day in new uprisings the
Sonderkommandos
snatched SS guards and their dogs and threw them into the crematoriums. At last every
Sonderkommando
was executed and a call went out for a new group from Auschwitz.

His back to the wall, Eichmann made a final gesture. Twenty thousand Jews, the cream of Jewry, who had been under guaranteed protection at the Czech camp of Theresienstadt, were ordered transferred to Birkenau for extermination.

The Jewish death toll at Birkenau mounted and mounted until the count reached nearly a million Poles, fifty thousand Germans, a hundred thousand Dutch, a hundred and fifty thousand French, fifty thousand Austrians and Czechs, fifty thousand Greeks, two hundred and fifty thousand Bulgarians, Italians, Yugoslavs, and Rumanians, and another quarter of a million Hungarians.

Each day during the macabre race for total annihilation came a call for more and more
Sonderkommandos
.

NOVEMBER 1944

The counterfeit shop was abruptly closed down in Auschwitz and everyone was sent to Birkenau to work as
Sonderkommandos
.

It was Dov’s new job to wait in the corridor of the gas chambers until a gassing was over. He and other
Sonderkommandos
stood by until the shrieks of agony and the frantic pounding on the iron doors stopped. They waited another fifteen minutes for the gas to clear. Then the doors of the gas chambers would be opened. Dov had to go to work with ropes and hooks to untangle the hideous tangle of arms and legs and drag them out for reshipment to the crematorium. After the bodies were removed he had to enter the chamber and hose it down and get the room ready for the next batch of victims who were already in the dressing rooms, being prepared.

For three days Dov worked at this gory task. Every ounce of his strength was sapped, and now that stubborn, defiant will to live that had carried him through seemed to fade. He dreaded that instant when the iron chamber door opened and he was face to face with the tangle of corpses. He dreaded it worse than the thought of the ghetto or the sewers. He knew he would not be able to stand to see that horrible sight much more often.

Then a startling thing happened!

The Germans ordered the crematorium ovens dismantled and the gas chambers blown up! The Allies were advancing from the west and the Russians were coming from the east. Now the Nazis made frantic efforts to cover up their crimes. Pits of bodies were exhumed all over Poland and the bones crushed and scattered. Desperately needed transportation was used to get the Jews inside Germany.