Measure of a Man (5 page)
The Americans pounded Buna with another massive payload eight days later. This time when the sirens sounded, I noticed something I had missed during the last bombing raid: the sight of the SS scurrying and hiding like cockroaches exposed to the light.
How beautiful to see them fear for their own lives for once
, I thought.
How wonderful that they must finally confront a force superior to their own
.
When the all clear sounded, the soldiers crawled out from their crevices and resumed their stations. But for that brief moment when the bombs rained down on Buna, they, too, were reminded of their own mortality, submissive to the might of the bombs, made to cower in fear. Seeing that felt good. Damn good.
1
945. Winter battered Buna.
Having grown up in the Carpathian Mountains, I thought I was adjusted to blistering winds and icy nights. I wasn’t. At night my hands and feet went numb clutching the thin blanket the Germans gave us. It was not uncommon to wake up to find prisoners frozen to death in the sleeping racks.
The bombing raids before the new year raised our spirits. But rumors of Russian and American forces tightening the noose on Hitler were common. Prior bombings had failed to bring liberation, but this time seemed different. This time, I’d felt the ground shake beneath my feet.
The blocks buzzed with chatter about a possible evacuation. By the middle of January the Russian cannons closed in on the
camp. With over ten thousand prisoners still in Buna, where we would go or how we would get there no one knew. My hand injury had put me back working in the hospital. One thing I knew for certain was that the hundreds of infirmed prisoners could barely move, let alone survive relocation.
A few days later, our block leader assembled us to confirm the rumors: we would evacuate the next night. The Germans’ plan was to empty dozens of subcamps and march tens of thousands of prisoners to the central meeting point of Gleiwitz. The walking wake became known as the Death March.
What one wore could determine whether one lived. Prisoners scrambled to gather extra garments and to double-wrap wounds. Others stuffed straw from sleeping-rack mattresses or empty cement sacks into their uniform to insulate themselves against the brutal cold. I raced to the hospital and grabbed a coveted pair of socks, a shirt, and a jacket. Foot care was a major ordeal in the concentration camps. Prisoners were not issued socks. The only “shoes” we had were wooden, Dutch-style clogs with weak linen straps. After hours of walking or running, feet blistered and skin sloughed off on the wooden soles. I’d seen enough pus-filled foot infections and frostbite cases in the hospital to know foot care would be essential for surviving the roughly twenty-five snow-covered miles between Buna and Gleiwitz.
The Germans gave us extra bread and thin blankets. At sundown the SS organized the blocks into thousand-man columns. Fathers huddled with sons in the hopes of being put in the same group to Gleiwitz. How I yearned to be one of those father-son pairs.
I fell in with the hospital unit. Only the well and walking were allowed to make the march. We left roughly 850 ill prisoners behind in Buna. When the Russians arrived days later to liberate Buna, 250 of those prisoners had already died; others were too far gone to ever recover.
A doctor in our column ordered me to help push the medicine supply wagon. I tried to stay positive.
Maybe being close to life-saving medicines and having a cart to lean on will help steady my stride
, I told myself.
A stillness fell over the column. Searchlights lit up the camp. I looked straight ahead toward the gate. Puffs of breath hovered in the icy air above rows of cap-covered heads standing and waiting in our column. I shook my arms and pumped my legs to keep my blood flowing in the bitter cold while we waited.
“Forward! March!”
I leaned hard into the wagon to turn the wheels just a few inches, lowering my head as we passed through the gate to let the bracing wind roll over my back. “Faster!” the SS yelled. I steadied my breathing and emptied my mind, just as I’d learned to do during so many bricklaying missions.
Gear inside the wagon clattered and clanked as I sloshed through the snow. I angled my body into the rolling pharmacy to shift my weight off my feet and onto the wagon. The wind whipped our faces as the snow fell hard against the blackness. The march would be the ultimate endurance test, one in which the mind must master the body. I paid no attention to the rumblings from my stomach and imagined warmth instead.
“Faster! Faster! Faster!”
The wagon rattled as I ran. Wheezing prisoners sucked cold air deep into their lungs. Huffing, hissing, tubercular coughing filled the night sky as we crunched through the unrelenting snow.
Slowing down or resting brought instant death. Anyone who faltered or fell was executed on the spot. The first couple miles brought intermittent pistol pops, but the farther we marched the more gunshots I heard. I had long since stopped flinching at the sound of gunfire. Slayings had become a common feature of our cursed existence. Our column had become a moving shooting gallery.
The medicine wagon’s wheels, slick with sludge, became easier to roll. Still, the cart’s weight and resistance wore on my arms, back, and atrophied leg muscles. The farther we went, the thicker the snow mounds grew until the wheels of the wagon stopped turning. Why we’d taken the medicine wagon in the first place was a mystery to me. The Nazis would have never permitted prisoners to use the rolling pharmacy; our health was hardly their concern. What’s more, most of the soldiers’ packs were loaded with vital emergency medicine kits and food rations, rendering the wagon’s contents useless to the SS as well.
Blasts of wind sent the snow slamming diagonally across our column, and I knew I would never make it to Gleiwitz pushing the medicine wagon. We pressed on. A doctor saw me grinding like a mule against the cart. “The wagon is of no use. Leave it,” he said. I lifted my hands off the cart and quickly stepped around it to avoid breaking stride or catching a soldier’s eye. My body lunged forward without the wagon’s weight, sending me bumping into the prisoner in front of me. “Watch it!” snapped the prisoner. The rest of the
column veered around the sides of the cart like fish swimming around a rock.
About an hour after I ditched the wagon, I noticed that some German soldiers had begun ordering prisoners to haul their heavy rucksacks. A few minutes later a German trotted up alongside me. “Put this on and carry it,” he said without breaking stride. He slipped the pack on my shoulders. Its weight—at least thirty pounds, a significant burden given my small frame and condition—threw me off balance and nearly toppled me to the ground.
What is this bastard lugging? A dead body?
The twisted thought made me chuckle under my breath.
Gunshots now rang with regularity. My hunger was too intense to ignore. I slipped a piece of black bread from inside my jacket and ate it. I ran with my mouth agape in the hopes of catching a few snowflakes to wet my tongue.
While I was chewing the bread and licking the icy air, a gust of wind smacked the side of our column and temporarily bent our formation. The sting of the wind and force of the blast jolted me out of my tunnel vision, reminding me that there was a world surrounding the hallway of horror down which we clomped. I looked to my sides at the ghastly scenes on our flanks as bullet-riddled bodies lay strewn across the snow.
We trudged on. The soldier’s pack on my back was about to cause a crisis. I had to do something. Fast. The soldier it belonged to was nowhere in sight. I peered over my shoulder and spotted two boys I knew from the camp. I caught their eyes and motioned for them to catch up to me. “What is it?” the boy to my right asked softly.
“You hungry?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Starving!” said the other boy in a hushed voice.
“I think I can help,” I said. “I think this bag has food rations.”
“Are you crazy?!” the voice over my right shoulder said.
“He’ll kill you if he finds food missing!” said the other.
“Yeah, but at least I won’t die hungry!” I joked.
They were not amused.
“Fine,” I said. “Just unbuckle the sack and tell me what’s inside.”
“What if they see us?” the boy on the left said.
“They won’t. Besides, like you said, he’ll shoot me. Not you.”
Several paces later I felt a gentle tug against my back as one of the boys loosed the strap and unlatched the closure. Under the cover of darkness, he lifted the flap and rummaged through the bag with his hand. “There’s bread in there, wurst, a heavy metal ammunition box, and a medicine pack,” he said.
“No human head?” I quipped. My exhaustion was making me silly. “Grab the heavy box and toss it,” I said.
“You’ve gone mad,” one of them said.
“Fine, I’ll throw it away,” I said. “Just hand me the box low on my right.”
The boy on my right pressed the box against my hip and passed it to me. I marched ten paces or so before dropping the heavy object into a deep snowdrift and watching it disappear. My load felt much lighter.
The blasts of the Russian cannon pounding the German lines, like a military cadence, kept me motivated and moving. But the
hunger—that damn hunger—wouldn’t relent. My feet were now frozen blocks. It felt as if I were jogging on stilts.
I needed energy. “Hand me the bread,” I said over my shoulder. “I will share.” The boy on my right wasted no time. His hand stabbed into the bag like a spear, poached the loaf, and handed it to me.
“Here,” I said, “share this.” I ripped off a chunk and passed the bread like a relay baton behind me. Both boys’ hands clawed for the German’s bread—far fresher than our own fare. I slipped a piece of the soft loaf into my mouth and closed my eyes briefly to savor it. It was the best bread I ever tasted—even better than my mother’s and grandmother’s homemade loaves. I swirled my tongue over and around the fluffy morsel to soak up the taste.
I paused for a moment before requesting the wurst. My family kept kosher, but given the circumstances, I figured God would understand. “Hand me the wurst,” I said. I bit off a mouthful of salty meat. It tasted funny. I gnawed off two more pieces and handed them to the boys.
Our evening meal and reverie were short-lived. The front of our column was marching into walls of wind and snow. “March! March! March!” the SS officer barked. Bodies dropped fast in the worsening weather and were left behind. To quench their punishing thirst, prisoners ate the snow that piled up on themselves and the men marching in front of them.
“I have to rest,” I heard an unfamiliar voice say behind me. “Just a minute. It’s not in me to keep. . . .” The man fell forward, and I felt his fingertips brush my backpack, as if he was trying to break his fall. I kept marching. A few paces later I looked over my
shoulder and saw a flash from an SS gun and the man’s body twitching in the snow.
Prisoners tumbled and were trampled in a crescendo of gun blasts. We passed corpse after corpse as drifts of snow covered the dead. We kept going. The more bodies I saw, the more paranoid I became that the soldier would reclaim his pilfered pack and shoot me in the head. The burn in my thighs and the sting of the cold in my eyes made me lightheaded.
If he shoots you, he shoots you
, I thought.
There’s nothing you can do about it. Might as well take the medicines too
.
Where this idea came from I have no idea. It was risky. Despite working in the hospital and pushing the medicine wagon, I had no training in pharmacology. The pills could have been vitamins or poison. I wouldn’t have known the difference. Either way, the pills couldn’t worsen my condition. If they killed me, I was out of my misery. If they boosted my system, I had a better chance of survival. I decided I’d swallow them if and when we ever stopped.
We’d marched for miles without ceasing. I’d pissed myself twice, the urine warming my legs as it trickled down. The SS must have been getting tired as well because a German finally ordered us to halt. Prisoners collapsed as if their spines had been yanked out by a string.
I stretched out my arms and let my body fall backward like a spruce into a pillow of snow. My head spun as I stared up at the sky. Stars winked against the blackness. I’d never felt so alone. I wondered where God was, where He’d been these last nine months. Many of the older religious men in the camps had remained faithful, had prayed nightly. I admired their deep faith, their commitment to never letting go of God. I wasn’t having a crisis of faith. I
was a child. I didn’t think grand, deep thoughts. All I knew was that I wanted to feel close to God, to know He hadn’t forgotten me and still loved me.