Prisoner B-3087 (21 page)

as soon as they could, the amerIcans took
us away from Dachau. We had walked and been
trucked and been taken by train so many times to so
many new horrible places that some of the prisoners
were reluctant to go. But the Americans assured us
that all that was over, and gave us blankets and food
for the short truck ride into Munich. The Allies occupied the city, and there they would house us until they
figured out what to do with us.

I was put in a building that had once, I was told,
been a barracks for SS officers. An American soldier
led me upstairs to a big room filled with bunk beds
and told me which one was mine.

He looked surprised. “Nobody,” he said. “It’s
yours.”
A bed all to myself! Then— wonder upon wonders— the soldier gave me a blanket, a pillow, and
sheets for the bed. Sheets! My fellow prisoners and I
looked around at one another like we were on some
alien planet. I hadn’t slept on a sheet, nor had a pillow
or a blanket, for five years. Perhaps six.
With shaking hands, I began to make the bed. I
didn’t even know how, didn’t remember the feeling of
linens and soft things. The soldier helped me, and I
climbed carefully into my new bed. A real mattress,
with springs! My body sank into it, and my head fell
into the pillow. What luxury!
Beside my bed there was a little table, and on the
table the Americans had given me more gifts: a washcloth, a cup, and a toothbrush. I picked up the
toothbrush reverently and cried as I held it in my
hands. I remembered that day, standing at the pump in
the camp — which camp had it been? — when I wondered when I had ever been so fortunate as to have
something so simple as a toothbrush. Piece by piece,
bit by bit, the Americans were giving me back my life.
That night in the dining hall, we sat in chairs. At a
table. I hadn’t seen a chair in six years, nor a table. The
tables were long, with places set for ten people at each.
The American soldiers stationed with us came in and
sat down with us. We were to eat the same food the
soldiers ate. There were plates at the table, and silverware. I picked up a fork and looked at it the way I had
my toothbrush, like it was some artifact from another
world. There were napkins too. I watched the
Americans tuck their napkins into their collars and
after a minute, I did the same.
And then they brought the food. Big platters of roast
beef. Mashed potatoes. Gravy. And baskets of rolls —
more bread than any of us had seen in years. The man
across from me started to cry, and the American soldiers didn’t know what to do.
“Would you pass the salt?” I asked him.
The man looked up at me through his tears, and he
started to laugh. He was laughing and crying at the
same time. “Pass the salt,” he said. “Yes,” he said,
laughing. “Yes, let me pass you the salt.”
And so we began to pass the food around, this feast
the Americans had laid out for us. They couldn’t
understand our tears, couldn’t know how amazing
such a simple meal was to us. Would they ever understand? Would anyone who hadn’t survived what we
had survived understand? We could tell them all about
it. Describe in every detail the horrors of the camps
and the way we were treated. But no one who had not
been there would ever truly understand.
As the food filled my plate and the soldiers and former
prisoners around me began to eat, I remembered that
day in Kraków so long ago, the day the war had begun.
I remembered the food on the table in my old apartment in Podgórze, and all my family sitting around me.
Mother and Father. Uncle Moshe and Aunt Gizela, and
little cousin Zytka. Uncle Abraham and Aunt Fela. My
cousins Sala, Dawid, and their two boys. They were all
dead and gone now. I thought too of my friend Fred, and
the boy who had been hanged for trying to escape,
and the man who had fought back, and all the other
people I had watched die. They filled my table and the
tables all around me, taking the places of all the real
people in the room. The dead would always be with me,
I knew, even when I was surrounded by life again, even
if the Americans gave me back all the objects I had lost.
It would be the same for all the other prisoners too,
I knew. They smiled as they ate, but there was sadness
in their eyes. Sadness for the people we had lost and
would never get back.

But I was wrong about losing everyone. A few days
later I was out for a walk in my Munich neighborhood. I walked the streets whenever I could. I still
wasn’t used to the fact that I could walk as I pleased,
that I wasn’t gripped by thirst and hunger every second. I was thinking about what the rest of my life
would hold when I saw a familiar face. She passed by
on the other side of the street, and for a moment I
thought I had to be mistaken.

“Mrs. Immerglick?” I called. I dashed across the
street to get a closer look. “Mrs. Immerglick?”
The woman turned. It was! It was Mrs. Immerglick,
the mean old lady who’d lived across the hall from me
in Kraków! She burst into tears when I told her who I
was, and she hugged me so hard I couldn’t breathe.
“Oh, Yanek! Yanek, it is so good to see you!” she
said at last. “The last time I saw you, you were just a
boy! Now look at you. You’re a grown man!”
I
had
grown, even in the camps. When I looked in
the mirror these days, I didn’t recognize the person
staring back at me.
“The last time I saw you,” I told her, “you yelled at
me for bouncing a ball in the hall!”
“Yes! Yes! You and that ball!” She gripped my
shoulders tight, as though if she let go I would disappear. “Oh, my dear boy, how I wish we could go back
there now, how I wish we could start again. I wouldn’t
have yelled at you, I promise.”
I laughed, a sound as strange to me as my own face.
I hadn’t laughed enough in the last six years to recognize the sound of it. “It’s all right, Mrs. Immerglick.
What about your boys? The rest of your family?”
“Fred,” she said. Her son’s name was Fred, like my
friend who had died. She had tears in her eyes. “Fred
survived. Like you. My Fred made it. But no one else.”
I nodded, reaching out to squeeze her arm. “Is Fred
here in Munich?” I asked. “I’d love to see him.”
“Yes, yes. And you know about your cousin Youzek,
of course.”
My heart gave a small leap. “No.” I was almost
afraid to hope. . . .
“Oh! My dear boy! Your cousin Youzek and his
wife are alive! And they’re here, in Munich!”
Youzek! I hadn’t seen him in years. Mrs. Immerglick
brought me back to her apartment to write their address
down for me on a piece of paper. I walked back out
holding the paper in both hands and staring at it.
I had family still. A cousin. Family. I wasn’t alone.
I went to see them as soon as I could. Cousin Youzek
met me at the door, hugging me even harder than Mrs.
Immerglick had. He pulled me inside and introduced
me again to his wife, Hela. We cried, and laughed, and
cried some more.
“How did you survive? How did you make it?” we
asked each other again and again, telling our stories
long into the night. Youzek and his wife had survived
by hiding with friends, and they had taken in another
family, the Gamzers, who had survived the same way.
There were three of them: Isaac, Barbara, and little
Luncia, a twelve-year-old girl who sat in the corner
reading a book the whole time.
“What are your plans now, Yanek? What will you
do?” Isaac Gamzer asked me as we sat around their
table.
I shrugged. It was true; life had to go on. “I like
movies. There’s a theater near where I live now. I
thought I would try to get a job as a projectionist.”
“No, no, Yanek! You need to go to America!”
Youzek told me. “That’s where the opportunities are.
That’s where you can build a new life for yourself.”
“America?” It felt so out of my reach now. “I don’t
have any papers, any money,” I replied. “How would
I ever get to America?”
“There is a special program,” he told me. “For
Jewish orphans of the war. They will help you get
your visa and pay your way.”
I was instantly excited by the idea of going to
America. I remembered the movies I’d watched as a
boy in Kraków. Did everyone ride around on horses
and wear cowboy hats? Did gangsters have shootouts
in the streets? Could I really find a home there? I had
to find out.
I registered for the program. I talked to lawyers. I
filled out forms. I changed my name to Jacob Gruener
and took to calling myself Jack, like the American soldiers called me. The process took months. Years. All
the while I came back to visit Youzek and Hela almost
every day, and soon I became good friends with the
Gamzers too. Little Luncia and I still didn’t have
much to say to each other, but Isaac and Barbara
became like second parents to me, even more so than
Youzek and Hela. They became family.
It was hard to leave my new family when the papers
finally came through in March of 1948. But I had spent
years trying to get to America, and I was determined
to go. Youzek, Hela, the Gamzers, and I had an emotional farewell before I boarded the train that would
take me to the coast, where I would catch a ship to the
United States. The Gamzers planned to come to
America too, when they could, and I promised to stay
in touch.
It had been almost ten years since the Nazis had
rolled into Kraków. And almost that long since I’d
last seen my mother and father, my uncles and other
cousins. But they were gone now. I would always
yearn for them and remember them, but there was
nothing left for me in Europe but ghosts. I had said
good-bye to all of them long, long ago.
I stepped on board the train and didn’t look back.
For nine years I had done everything I could to survive. Now it was time to live.