By Chance Alone (20 page)

We realize that the mark of Cain stands upon our foreheads. Across the centuries our brother Abel has lain in blood which we drew, or shed tears which we caused by forgetting Thy love.

Forgive us for the curse we have falsely attached to their name as Jew.

Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For, O Lord, we know not what we did.

T
ibor “Max” Eisen and his family were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the spring of
1944
, during the Holocaust's final phase, which targeted approximately eight hundred thousand Jews living within the wartime borders of Hungary. They were the last major Jewish community still alive in occupied Europe.
*
Although Hungary was allied with Nazi Germany and had introduced its own anti-Semitic laws in
1938
,
**
the country's leaders had resisted Nazi injunctions to
deport their Jewish population to the extermination camps in Poland. In March
1942
,
75
to
80
percent of the eventual victims of the Holocaust were still alive, but “a mere eleven months later, in mid-February
1943
, the percentages were exactly the reverse.”
*
Among the victims of this “short, intense wave of mass murder”
**
were three million Polish Jews, many of whom perished in the three Operation Reinhard extermination camps (Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec) between October
1941
and November
1943
.
***
The Nazis and their collaborators also deported Jews from France, Holland, Belgium, Norway, the German Reich, Luxembourg, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Slovakia, Croatia, Italy, Greece, and Serbia. Prior to their arrival at one of the six extermination camps, many European Jews endured horrific conditions in ghettos, labour camps, and transit camps, where death by starvation and disease was an everyday occurrence. On the Eastern Front, the Einsatzgruppen (Nazi mobile killing units) massacred more than one million Jews, primarily through mass shooting operations in the Nazi-occupied cities and villages of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and other Soviet territories.

Jews had lived in Hungary for over nineteen hundred years, with some evidence of a Jewish presence dating back to the Roman Empire. Like all other European countries, Hungary had
a long history of anti-Semitism, including instances of exile and violent pogroms, accusations of “blood libel,” and orders to wear identifying badges.
*
There were also periods of relative tolerance: the Hungarian parliament emancipated Jews as individuals in
1867
and officially recognized the religion in
1895
, granting Jews full civil rights.
**
At the same time, however, “a new form of political anti-Semitism emerged, integrating anticapitalist frustrations, xenophobic hatred, and religious anti-Judaism rooted in ancient superstitions.”
***
In May
1938
, the Hungarian government began to enact anti-Semitic laws (similar to Nazi Germany's
1935
Nuremberg Laws) that severely restricted Jewish participation in Hungarian public life. Max's family fell under the jurisdiction of these laws in the spring of
1939
, after the Munich Agreement (dated September
29
,
1938
) initiated the partition of Czechoslovakia, beginning with the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland. Max's village of Moldava nad Bodvou in southern Czechoslovakia was annexed to Hungary, which, as Max laments, separated him from his maternal relatives, whose farm remained in Slovak territory. Although anti-Semitism was prominent in both Slovakia and Hungary, living on the Hungarian side of these new borders likely contributed to Max's survival. With the signing of the Tripartite Pact (between Germany, Italy, and Japan) in November
1940
, Slovakia joined the Axis and began to par
ticipate in the Final Solution. As early as March
1942
, Slovak gendarmes, soldiers, and members of the Hlinka Guard delivered Jews to the Nazis with much enthusiasm. Max's maternal family members were among those sent to Majdanek, which functioned as a concentration camp, a death camp, and a sorting centre for the belongings confiscated from victims at Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec. All of them perished there.

In the two years preceding the Hungarian deportations to Auschwitz, Prime Minister Miklós Kállay and Regent Miklós Horthy had successfully resisted Hitler's Final Solution and eased off on the anti-Semitic laws, which were no longer strictly enforced.
*
They also prosecuted a number of Hungarian military officers for the massacres of Jews and Serbs in the Novi Sad raid of January
1942
.
**
By early
1944
, the Allies were making significant military advances against the Axis, and Allied victory appeared inevitable. Knowing that the end of the war was imminent, Kállay and Horthy began a series of “secret” armistice negotiations with the Allies, a development of which Nazi officials were well aware. In response, the Nazis occupied Hungary on March
19
,
1944
, and made immediate plans to deport the Hungarian Jews to the extermination camps in occupied Poland. They forced Horthy to enact a regime change, and on March
22
, Döme Sztójay was appointed prime minister with the Nazis' approval.

With Sztójay in command, the mass murder of the Hungarian Jews advanced very swiftly. From March to August, the government “introduced over one hundred anti-Jewish decrees
depriving Jews of the rights, assets and freedoms,”
*
all under the watchful eye of SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, who had come to Hungary to oversee the deportations. By March
31
, all Jews were forced to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothes. This was followed by preparations for the physical isolation of the Jews in ghettos and collection camps. Like many rural Hungarian Jews, Max and his family were not ghettoized but were transferred directly to a collection camp—the brickyard—where they stayed for only three weeks. The brickyard was one of many “camp-like accommodations outside residential areas: in factories, industrial or agricultural buildings, or other areas (mines, forests).”
**

Meanwhile, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the SS also began to plan for the influx of Hungarian Jews, which would mark the extermination camp's most lethal period. Filip Müller, a member of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando (Jewish prisoners who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria), described hearing the disturbing news that trains would soon begin to arrive from Hungary: “Towards the end of April
1944
there were increasing rumours of the imminent extermination of the Jews of Hungary. To us, the prisoners of the Sonderkommando, this terrible news came as a devastating blow. Were we once more to stand by and watch while more hundreds upon thousands were done away with?”
***
SS-Hauptscharführer Otto Moll, who
managed the Auschwitz II–Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria, forced inmates to dig two additional pits behind Crematorium 5 in preparation for a greater-than-usual volume of corpses.
*
The Nazis also extended the train lines inside the camp and built a new unloading ramp to accommodate the large numbers of Hungarian Jews they expected.
**

When Max stepped onto that unloading ramp at the age of fifteen, he was on the cusp of the minimum age for slave labour—a possibility for survival not afforded to his younger brothers and baby sister. As he describes the final separation of his family, the reader yearns for some parting exchange between Max and his mother, but the chaos of arrival engulfed them both, and Max—and the reader—was denied this moment. As he was ushered toward the Sauna to be processed into the camp, he unknowingly had a glimpse of his family's fate when he thought he saw people jumping into the crematory pyres that Otto Moll had prepared weeks earlier. Other Hungarian survivors, including Alexander Ehrmann, describe a similar state of confusion: “Beyond the barbed-wire fences there were piles of rubble and branches, pine tree branches and rubble burning, slowly burning. We were walking by, and the sentries kept on screaming, ‘
Lau
f
!
Lau
f
!
' and I heard a baby crying. The baby was crying somewhere in the distance and I couldn't stop and look. We moved, and it smelled, a horrible stench. I knew that things in the fire were moving, there were babies in the fire.”
***

Auschwitz was not a single place but a network of camps in the Nazi-occupied Polish town of Oświęcim. It included the extermination camp at Auschwitz II–Birkenau; the labour camps at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz III–Monowitz; and other satellite worksites and factories. Today, Auschwitz is the most iconic symbol of the Holocaust, in part because it had the largest number of victims (
1
.
1
million, mostly Jews), and in part because a relatively large number of survivors (tens of thousands) were left to transmit the stories of suffering there. At Treblinka, by comparison, nearly as many Jews and Romani were murdered (as many as
900
,
000
), and less than eighty survived. Bełżec and Chełmno had only two known survivors each. Countless oral and written testimonies have inscribed Auschwitz into our collective consciousness, including Elie Wiesel's
Night
, Primo Levi's
Survival in Auschwitz
, and Art Spiegelman's
Maus
, as well as numerous films.

While Max joins a chorus of Auschwitz survivors and some of his references may be familiar to the reader (the selection process at Birkenau, standing for hours at roll call, the prisoner orchestra in Auschwitz I, and the daily hunger, humiliation, and exhaustion), his account of daily life in the hospital of barrack
21
offers a wholly unique perspective on the procedures and processes of the camp. His description of the medical operations (both official and illicit) performed in the surgery ward gives us a glimpse into the complex role that prisoner doctors played in healing and resistance.

Many readers will be familiar with Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor who performed the selections on the unloading ramp and engaged in medical experimentation on prisoners, sometimes for pseudo-scientific “research,” and sometimes for
clinical trials for chemical and pharmaceutical products.
*
Indeed, the death in Auschwitz of each member of Max's immediate family was tied in some way to a Nazi doctor: his mother, siblings, and grandparents were selected for gassing by a Nazi doctor on the unloading ramp in Birkenau, and his father and uncle were later selected for medical experimentation by Nazi doctors at Auschwitz I. Fewer readers will know about the prisoner doctors who worked in official and unofficial capacities through the camp. In
The Nazi Doctors
, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton details the difficult position of these men and women: “For prisoner doctors to remain healers was profoundly heroic and equally paradoxical: heroic in their combating the overwhelming Auschwitz current of murder; paradoxical in having to depend upon those who had abandoned healing for killing—the Nazi doctors.”
**

Through Max's account, we come to know one of these heroic prisoner doctors: Dr. Tadeusz Orzeszko, the Polish political prisoner who mysteriously saved Max from certain death in the gas chamber and assisted the resistance movement at great personal risk. Dr. Orzeszko was born in Tashkent (now in Uzbekistan but then part of Turkestan) in
1907
. He attended medical school in Warsaw, worked as a general practitioner and OB-GYN assistant in Radom (also in Poland), and began to study surgery in
1937
. When Germany invaded Poland on September
1
,
1939
, triggering the Second World War, Orzeszko aided members of the Polish underground and eventually joined the Union of
Armed Struggle in
1940
.
*
In addition to providing illicit medical assistance to partisans, he engaged in intelligence gathering and distributed resistance media. The Gestapo arrested Orzeszko in April
1943
, tortured him for months, and eventually deported him to Auschwitz. Like Max, he first entered barrack
21
as a patient and was eventually employed there.
**

Max was separated from Orzeszko during the death march and knew nothing of his fate, but the doctor also made it to Mauthausen alive. Although Max was quickly transferred to Melk and Ebensee, Orzeszko remained at Mauthausen, where he also worked as a camp physician, until his liberation. Max did not see the doctor again before his death, but he did meet his family members in Warsaw in March
2010
at a reception organized by the Toronto-based Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center. He has since maintained a close friendship with Orzeszko's son, Jan, and he recently learned that Dr. Orzeszko's granddaughter, Julia, named her baby son Max in his honour.

In addition to the details of the surgery ward in barrack
21
, Max's memoir also provides a unique perspective on “liberation” as both an acute moment of freedom and a long, arduous process of recovery marred by illness, overwhelming grief, and years of displacement and uncertainty. It is striking that Max was liberated by the
761
st Tank Battalion, a segregated unit of African American soldiers who had themselves experienced violent racist oppression at home. Some were only a couple of generations removed from slavery. (Twenty years ago, Max was reunited with
one of his liberators, Sergeant Johnnie Stevens, at a documentary screening in Toronto. Stevens was the grandson of slaves and the first African American bus driver in Middlesex County, New Jersey.
*
He remained in close contact with Max until his death in
2007
.) Yet liberation was only one step in Max's long journey to a new life of stability in Canada—a journey that included a difficult recovery from pleurisy, the loss of his family home, and a six-month period of imprisonment in Communist Prague for forging false identification documents.