Unlikely Warrior (26 page)

My strength ebbed daily. It cost me the greatest effort to get up to walk in the circle or to stand in line for our mush. It occurred to me that soon they could be carrying me out with the rest, and someone would earn an extra cup of kasha on my account. I thought of my mother. Had she survived the bombardment of Vienna? Was there still a human receiving station, one able to pick up the emergency signals?

Dear Mutti, Once again I’ve reached a low point in my life, a low that I wouldn’t have believed possible. What a wretched thing it is when human beings go off to fight and kill their fellow men. Soldiers are sitting around me on the rain-softened ground, bent double from pain, sobbing. Young men are withering and fading away like cut flowers.

I already know how it feels to be coming close to the other side, how it is to be forced finally into a corner from which there no longer seems to be any exit. The countercurrent has become too strong. My brain no longer has any options at its disposal. Those three guardian angels you always said I had don’t seem able to find me this time. That little bit extra, which gave me the advantage when everyone else was dying all around me, seems to have disappeared.

My hips are bloody from lying on the ground, my eyes have sunken deep in their sockets, and my cheeks are cavernous. My hair is encrusted with filth. When I go to the latrine, I check my excrement for blood, seeking the sign that I also finally have caught dysentery. Soon they will be carrying me out with the rest.

The soldiers who fell in battle were clean, with an insignificant little hole in the skull, a large spot of fresh blood on the jacket, but otherwise healthy, strong bodies. Sometimes they were even freshly shaven. Here we are stinking skeletons, covered with filth and excrement.

What a way to die. No women will run wailing through the village streets, no priest, not even a mournful dog. We don’t know each other’s names or the name of the closest town. If it gets to that point, if I never get out of here alive, you can imagine that I died from a shiny bullet flashing cleanly through my body. No one will be able to tell you any differently, because no one here knows or wants to know. If you are still there, live your life to the fullest, the way you promised when we said goodbye. I send you all my love and gratitude.

I lost all feeling for time. I became more and more immune to any kind of sensation. Thousands more were to die before the trucks finally came to take those of us who were left to the train station.

KIEV—PUSHKIN’S REQUEST

After what we had been through in the previous weeks, the experience of simply sitting in a moving train was an almost overwhelming novelty. Even though the cattle cars were stuffed with prisoners and locked from the outside, we were suspended in a kind of euphoria. It had required the strongest nerves and physical stamina to survive in that open camp at Balti, without even the most primitive human requirements, watching as every day hundreds more died. With each passing day it had seemed more and more likely that the Russians had decided this was the simplest way of eliminating us. No one believed any longer that our situation could or would change.

But now to be in a train, one that was actually moving, reawakened a hope that there might still be a chance for our survival after all. A moving train had to have a destination, however far that might be. Even if we were heading for Siberia, it would still be better than turning up our toes in an open field in the cold rain.

We sat close together on the dry plank floor of the cattle car. Some of us stood up to stretch for a while. Conversations began, and we started introducing ourselves to those seated nearby. Somehow we made room for the seriously ill so that they could lie a little more comfortably.

A piece of tin was nailed below one of the two sliding doors in such a way that it could be used as a primitive toilet, draining outside the car. For a few hours all went fairly well, and then it began to get dark.

When night finally fell, each man, overcome by exhaustion and weakness, started trying to stretch out. But there simply wasn’t enough room. Sooner or later we toppled over and fell asleep wherever we were. Within a relatively brief time, bodies were layered on top of each other. Since no one wanted to be on the bottom, smothered by crisscrossing stinking bodies, we began rolling and tossing, and this activity didn’t stop until dawn, when the first rays of light poked through the cracks between the boards in the walls and a few men began to rouse themselves.

At one of the many halts, the guards opened the doors and handed out loaves of bread, one loaf to twenty men. The already familiar distribution took place under the watchful eyes of the recipients. Nobody wanted to receive even a crumb less than his due. The same twenty men shared a bucket of water and a small bag of coarse salt.

We spent the third day stopped on the outskirts of a station and could hear the rain pelting the wooden roof. The next day the train was still standing in the same spot, but the sun was shining. The sky must have been cloudless, and it began to get hotter and hotter inside the cars. Each was crammed full with fifty men, and the ventilation was minimal. By noon we were all bathed in perspiration and having trouble breathing. We began to drum on the walls, and when this produced no reaction from the guards, we banged even louder. A rhythm began to build, and I suddenly heard wood splintering.

A burst from a submachine gun brought our protest to an abrupt halt. Voices of Russian soldiers rang out, and then, with a loud clatter, the sliding doors on one side of the train were opened. A battalion of soldiers was lined up parallel to the train, pointing weapons in our direction.

This is the end,
I thought, expecting a salvo from the guns any second.

A loudly bellowing Russian officer appeared, and an interpreter called out the translation, “The doors will be shoved back again, but left open a handsbreadth. If anyone tries to open them wider or makes any noise at all, the soldiers have orders to shoot three men from each car!”

He had barely finished speaking when something completely unexpected occurred. The train made a sudden jerk, and all who were standing fell to the floor. After a second, lighter jolt, the train began to move. Away we chugged with wide-open doors, past the astonished soldiers with their guns still leveled, past the openmouthed officer who didn’t seem to know how he should react.

Thanks to this lack of coordination between the officer and the locomotive engineers, we sat for an entire afternoon dangling our legs out the open doors and admiring the passing scene. Five more days transpired before our arrival in Kiev, during which time a few in my car died. We kept this fact from the guards so that our bread ration wouldn’t be cut. During the night we squeezed the bodies through a narrow window below the roof.

We didn’t get to see much of Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine. After leaving the train we dragged ourselves for two hours along the outskirts of the city until we reached an abandoned brick factory that was being used as a quarantine camp for prisoners.

Although many more died there during the following two weeks, it seemed like a paradise to those of us who survived. We had a roof over our heads, dry straw for a bed, and regular meals.

On the twelfth of November 1944, I left the quarantine camp in a column of six hundred. We marched all morning until we reached the bunker camp, which by now had been described to us many times.

This enormous camp was capable of sheltering several thousand prisoners of war. Except for some smaller administration buildings, the compound consisted primarily of numerous parallel, half-underground bunkers, with roofs of dirt hills overgrown with grass.

Inside each bunker stood two long rows of double-deck wooden bunks, separated down the middle by tables and benches nailed together from rough planks. A couple of heavily smoking petroleum lamps provided the only evening light.

Each of us received two threadbare military blankets and a bag stuffed with lumpy cotton for a pillow. As I lay down on the straw sack to which I had been assigned, I thought I was in heaven.

At 2:00 p.m. a camp policeman came into the bunker and yelled out in German, heavily accented with Polish, “Everybody fall in. On the double!”

We ran out to the large open area in front of the bunkers.

“Line up in columns of a hundred men each, four to a row, but fast!”

We stood shivering in our bare feet on muddy ground while we waited for the officers to appear.

“At ease. Dress ranks.”

A small group of Russian officers strolled out of the building across from where we stood.

“Count off,” yelled the camp policeman.

The man at the front right-hand corner of each column called out one, and we quickly continued through the rows until the last.

“Five hundred eighty men reporting for roll call,” announced the policeman.

Thirty soldiers with submachine guns came marching up and positioned themselves just behind us. I waited, with sinking heart, to see what this new development could mean. The next command rang out.

“Remove all articles of clothing above the waist and raise your arms.”

The soldiers went through the rows, inspecting our upper arms. When they were finished, they had ordered about twenty-five of the prisoners to step out of line. These were members of the Waffen-SS, troops who all had their blood types tattooed on their upper arms so that they could be given speedy transfusions on the battlefield. It had been one of their many special privileges. The twenty-five were executed that same day at dusk.

One of the well-dressed Russian officers said to the rest of us, in quite good German, “You will be taken next in small groups to the sauna, where you will receive clean clothing. Tomorrow we will begin taking down your personal data, and after that you will be assigned to various work groups.

“As long as you are here in camp, you will receive three warm meals a day, five hundred grams of bread, and coffee. You will give absolute obedience to every officer and camp guard. Any lack of discipline will be immediately and severely punished. Dismissed!”

When we were enrolled the following day, I stated my Austrian nationality, my training in mechanical drawing, and the fact of my Jewish blood. I was surprised to see so many non-Germans in the camp. The prisoner ranks included Hungarians, Czechs, Romanians, Poles, and even a Dutchman. One way or another, they all had fought for Germany, whether voluntarily or under coercion.

Although I had heavy diarrhea and was generally very run-down, I began to regain hope regarding my chances for survival. Everything seemed to be falling into an organized pattern. I was thankful for the roof over my head, for the warm soup, and for the chance to keep clean once again.

The biweekly bath in the sauna was one of our most welcome routines, though it also included certain drawbacks. During the all-too-brief minutes that we were allotted for washing off two weeks of grime, our uniforms were heated to just under burning temperature in order to kill any lice. The clothing was often returned to us in a slightly scorched condition, and once in a while it was so badly burned that we had to wait naked for hours until replacements could be obtained.

After leaving the sauna, we entered a small room where the barbers were at work. Using a white liquid of unknown composition as a soap substitute, they shaved off all the hair on our heads and bodies.

I recall, in particular, the shaving of our pubic hair. The barber worked roughly and with great enthusiasm. This procedure was always fairly painful, but it was carried out in order to prevent an outbreak of yellow fever, an epidemic spread by lice nesting in the hair.

All of the camp police were German prisoners of war from the Polish-German border areas. Of course they all claimed Polish allegiance at this point. Because of their ability to understand Russian, a Slavic language similar to their own, and to speak it to some degree, they were relegated to the administrative jobs. That included the kitchen, food transport, and in-camp police. They also took over the role of officers in the work details and inside the bunkers.

As Poles, many of them had built up a certain amount of hatred for the Germans as the losers and gave vent to these feelings through general brutality. No Russian ever mishandled me, but once, when my diarrhea forced me to relieve myself in a place not designated as an official latrine, two of the Polish camp police kicked out two of my front teeth with their boots.

About mid-November a soldier came into our bunker and called out my name. When I stood up, he said, “You are expected in Captain Pushkin’s office.”

We walked to one of the administration buildings, where the officer in question awaited me with a friendly expression and offered me a chair. Captain Pushkin was about fifty years old, with a round Slavic face and gray hair starting to thin.

He said, in fluent German, “Prisoners here in camp who have worked in important German war industries have been called upon to provide as much exact information as possible about the factories: their locations, number of buildings, type of production, etc. The sketches they give us are usually poor and hastily drawn. With your background you should be able to work those rough sketches into more professional-looking drawings. As for all special tasks here in camp, you will receive double rations.”

I began that same day. After I had completed my drawings, another prisoner in the office translated the German descriptions into Russian. The work was easy, the atmosphere in the office relaxed and pleasant. Captain Pushkin often brought potatoes from home that we sliced and fried over the little iron stove.

Two weeks later I arrived one day at work with bad stomach pains and feeling generally ill. The captain laid his hand on my forehead and said, “Come with me. I’m taking you to the infirmary.”

At the rickety barracks that served as a hospital, the captain talked for a while with the Russian head doctor. Before he left he said, “I hope you will be well again soon. I’ll visit you tomorrow and bring you something to read.”