Alex's Wake (46 page)

The new facilities featured special double-paned glass peepholes through which the guards could watch their victims' death agonies and high-powered ventilators that sucked out the lethal remnants of the Zyklon-B from the chamber before the
Sonderkommandos
ventured in to clean up. The new crematoria also included built-in incineration rooms to enable more convenient access for the disposal of the corpses. Bodies could now be hoisted via elevator to one of the five ovens that were kept busy night and day.

During the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, correspondence from the corporations vying for concentration camp building contracts was introduced as evidence. One such business, the firm of C. H. Kori, made its case by pointing out that it had already furnished the Reich with four furnaces for the Dachau camp. Its letter continued: “Following our verbal discussion regarding the delivery of equipment of simple construction for the burning of bodies, we are submitting plans for our perfected ovens which operate with coal and which have hitherto given full satisfaction. We suggest two crematoria furnaces for the building planned, but we advise you to make further inquiries to make sure that two ovens will be sufficient for your requirements. We guarantee the effectiveness of the cremation ovens as well as their durability, the use of the best material, and our faultless workmanship.”

The skill and workmanship of the Kori company, as well as the efforts of such businesses as I. A. Topf and Sons of Erfurt, Huta Structural and Foundation Engineering from nearby Katowice, the Silesian
construction firm Lenz & Company, and the chemical giant I. G. Farben, which held the patent for Zyklon-B, proved to be as effective as promised. Engineers and designers who a few years earlier had conceived of medical innovations and advancements in the technology of highway construction now set their minds to the task of ever more potent and efficient engines of death.

Their handiwork, though planned to be carried out in secrecy, was not and could not be hidden. Also testifying at Nuremberg was Commandant Rudolf Höss, who declared, “Of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.”

In July 1944, Soviet troops began what would become their victorious advance to the west, pushing back German lines of defense as they went. They liberated the Majdanek death camp in eastern Poland and then crossed the Vistula River about two hundred kilometers from Auschwitz. The Nazis used the next six months attempting to erase from history all record of their crimes at Auschwitz. In July, about 155,000 prisoners were held there; by the beginning of 1945, about half that number had been transported to concentration camps in the West, among them Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Bergen-Belsen.

During the month of October, about forty thousand people were murdered in the gas chambers of Birkenau. In November, Himmler ordered the executions to stop. In the fields of Birkenau where bodies had been burned, the trenches and other low-lying areas that had been filled with bones and ashes were cleared, leveled, and covered over with turf. The crematorium at Auschwitz was redesigned and changed into an air-raid bunker. And in January 1945, the gas chambers of Birkenau were dynamited.

On January 17, 1945, the SS issued orders calling for the immediate execution of all remaining prisoners in the Auschwitz camps, but in the chaos of the Nazi retreat, those orders were ignored. Instead, Auschwitz and Birkenau were evacuated and nearly sixty thousand prisoners were forced to accompany the Nazi army as it fled to the west. Many thousands perished in the cold and bitter conditions; anyone who couldn't
keep up, fell, or tried to rest or run away was shot. A little more than forty thousand prisoners survived the death march and were then interned in other camps to await their eventual liberation.

Back at Auschwitz, the final ten days of the camp's existence saw a frenzied attempt to destroy the carefully tended records of the murderers. Files, dossiers, death certificates, and other papers were burned. The x-ray machine that had been used for Horst Schumann's experiments was removed and sent west. On January 21, the last of the sentries were ordered down from the camp's watchtowers. Before they fled, the retreating Nazi soldiers set fire to the main facility; six days later, only six of the thirty barracks remained.

On Saturday afternoon, January 27, 1945, soldiers from the 60th Army of the Soviet Union's First Ukrainian Front came upon the smoking remains of Auschwitz and Birkenau. They discovered around six hundred corpses and more than seven thousand emaciated survivors, prisoners who had been deemed too weak to accompany the death march. The fleeing Nazis also left behind clothing stolen from their murdered victims, including nearly 350,000 men's suits and more than 830,000 women's dresses and other apparel. In a warehouse near the main camp, the Soviet soldiers discovered more than seven and a half tons of human hair. Researchers estimated that it came from the shaved heads of about 140,000 women.

Since the Nazis destroyed so many records and files as they prepared their hasty evacuation from Auschwitz, arriving at an exact number of human beings murdered there has proven to be a difficult task. Based on testimony from survivors and perpetrators and the work of latter-day scholars, the figure of 1.1 million to 1.5 million people seems accurate. About 90 percent of those gassed, at least 950,000, were Jews. It has been estimated that about 75,000 non-Jewish Poles and 20,000 Roma, or Gypsies, were also gassed. About 200,000 people died of starvation, disease, or overwork.

In June 1942, Polish teacher Antoni Dobrowolski, who was working for the Polish underground, was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz. On October 21, 2012, Dobrowolski died. He was 108, the oldest known survivor of Auschwitz.

O
N OR ABOUT
M
ONDAY
, A
UGUST
17, 1942, Convoy Nineteen, the train from Drancy bearing my grandfather, my uncle, and 989 other Jewish prisoners rolled slowly beneath the guard tower at Birkenau and came to a halt, its piston-applied brakes moaning on the iron wheels. The boxcars' doors slid open and the 991 inhabitants, after three days packed together in darkness, emerged blinking into the unfamiliar sunshine. They were ordered onto the well-trampled grass and dirt of the siding and marched before the row of doctors and soldiers who had gathered under the open summer sky to render judgment. In the next few minutes, 875 of the 991 were pronounced too old or weak for work on behalf of the Reich. These 875 souls were sent down the path to the left, toward the guards who ushered them into one or the other of the little brick houses under the pretense of a shower and, afterward, a nourishing bowl of soup. Each of the 875 had led lives of happiness, sorrow, adventure, wonder, frustration, boredom, generosity, peevishness, hope. One of those 875 had been born into a well-to-do family of horse dealers, had fought for his country in the Great War, had run a successful women's clothing store where he'd acquired a reputation for kindness and honesty, had been arrested for the crime of his religious heritage, and had spent the last forty months engaged in a futile attempt to escape his pursuers and achieve a life of freedom for his family. His name was Alex Goldschmidt, he was my grandfather, and on that day he was murdered in one of the gas chambers of Birkenau. He was sixty-three years old.

Of the 991 passengers in Convoy Nineteen, 116 survived the selection process conducted on the dusty siding by the railway terminus and were sent off to the right to be stripped, shaved, tattooed, and assigned a barracks at Auschwitz. Of those 116, only one would still be alive at the time of the camp's liberation in 1945. Another of the 116 was a young man born to a wealthy merchant, a young man whose school years had been marked by no particular academic achievement but who had risen to his feet in an impulsive act of bravado and defiance that would be remembered and admired many decades hence, a young man who had spent the last 15 percent of his life as a refugee and a prisoner but who had utilized part of that time tending the sick,
learning the skills of animal husbandry and bookbinding, and reading the plays of William Shakespeare, and nearly all of that time being his father's constant companion and close friend. His name was Klaus Helmut Goldschmidt, he was my uncle, and on that day he was tattooed with the number 59305 and assigned to Barracks 7 in Auschwitz.

Barracks 7 was the site of what was called the
Mauerschule
, or bricklayers' school, where relatively healthy young men were taught the craft of fashioning and laying bricks. All the main buildings of Auschwitz were made of bricks, so the camp authorities deemed it necessary to have a constant supply of skilled workers. The students of the bricklayers' school had a remotely easier existence than the other inmates of Auschwitz in that their food rations were of slightly better quality and their place of work—the school—was on the second floor of Barracks 7. While other prisoners had to work outdoors in all weather, often marching hundreds of yards to get to their construction sites, all the bricklayers had to do was climb a flight of stairs.

But if Helmut had drawn a relatively plum assignment, he did not have long to enjoy it. On October 7, fifty-one days after he had entered the iron gates of Auschwitz under the archway proclaiming that work would make him free, he was sent to Barracks 20, one of the camp's hospitals. According to a plaque affixed in a room of the barracks by the curators of the Auschwitz memorial, “Prisoners who suffered from infectious diseases, mainly typhus, stayed in Block 20. In this room, in the years 1941 to 1943, prisoners were killed by lethal injections of phenol into the heart. Prisoners selected from the camp hospital or prisoners sentenced to death by the camp Gestapo were killed here. In one such special procedure, 121 Polish and Jewish boys were killed in this room. Corpses were put in the opposite room, from where they were transported to Crematorium 1. Almost every day a few dozen prisoners were killed by lethal injections in the camp.”

Two days after he entered Barracks 20, on October 9, 1942, Helmut died. The official cause of death was listed as typhus, but there is every chance that he was one of the prisoners who was murdered by lethal injection. Helmut Goldschmidt was twenty-one years old.

W
EDNESDAY
, J
UNE
15, 2011.
“My God, it's a theme park!”

After all the miles and all the anticipation and all my fears of the past two days, these are the words I growl to Amy as we enter the crowded parking lot of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum in Oswiecim. There are at least a half-dozen tour buses and milling crowds of tourists, among them a group of older Japanese men and women, many of them with multiple cameras hanging from their necks, and high school classes from Tel Aviv and Far Rockaway, Long Island, some of the kids solemn and attentive and some of them hanging back, sneaking a smoke.

“Welcome to Holocaust World 3-D!” I continue, as we squeeze into a parking space. “It's the emotional roller-coaster of a lifetime! Thrills! Chills! You'll never forget to Never Forget! (Tattoos sold separately . . . striped pajamas not included . . . Zyklon-B no longer in stock.)” Amy smiles at me indulgently, then kisses me to shut me up. I can't explain to her the source of my confused feelings. On the one hand, I think it's very much a Good Thing that so many people have traveled so far to tour this memorial and to learn the details of the horrors that were perpetrated here. On the other hand, I'm put off by all the eagerness to gawk. It's as if we're rubbernecking at the smoldering wreckage of a colossal accident along the highway of Western civilization. I want everyone to just move along.

There is no admission fee to enter the Auschwitz camp, but there is a charge to join any of the several tours that depart regularly from the museum's entranceway, tours conducted in English, French, German, Italian, Polish, and Japanese. Even though we are not joining a tour group, we find ourselves caught in the swirl of humanity packed into a hallway. Three or four security guards size us up and then one of them waves us through turnstiles onto a gravel path. After perhaps fifty yards, we turn right and walk beneath the notorious iron gate bearing the words
Arbeit Macht Frei
. Somehow, I think, it shouldn't be so easy.

We ring the bell at Barracks 24, which today houses the archivists who work in the Office for Information On Former Prisoners. We are buzzed in and meet Piotr Supinski, a helpful young man who confirms the date of Helmut's death and tells me the details of his time in Barracks 7 and 20. Piotr speaks slowly and softly in perfect English;
it comes to me that he regards me, respectfully, as grieving next of kin. His kindness moves me deeply, and suddenly all my parking lot cynicism dries up and blows harmlessly away.

Amy and I leave the archives and, hand in hand, join the quiet throngs strolling along the well-kept gravel paths from barracks to barracks. We seek out Barracks 7, where Helmut lived for a few weeks with his fellow bricklayers, and then make our way with unwilling steps to Barracks 20. Here is where my uncle died, and here is where I have determined to tell him goodbye. But I realize that I have forgotten his picture in the car.

I am in no mood to face the crowds back in the entrance hall, but there is nothing to do but walk back to the parking lot and detach the photos of Alex and Helmut from their position above the Meriva's rearview mirror, where they have kept us company during our long journey. I anticipate an uncomfortable wait standing in line to get back into the camp, but something remarkable happens. The people in the halls, tourists and security personnel alike, take one look at the photos I am carrying and, without a word, shrink back and give us room to pass. Everyone seems to know why I am carrying pictures of these people and their relationship both to me and to this hideous place. My path back into Auschwitz is made free and clear.