You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (13 page)

“Where were you?” I asked early on, when we were only source and reporter. Or pretending to be only that.

You rambled the names, quickly at first, then slowly so I could try to spell them correctly. That wasn’t easy. When you said
Tisticle
to identify one camp, and I wrote it out phonetically, I knew I’d never find that in a book.

Part of the problem was that each place went by different names in different languages at the same time. Auschwitz was also Oswiecim. Was
Tisticle
German, Polish, or Yiddish? If it was Yiddish, it could have been spelled ten different ways, so who knows which version got recorded. I tried all the possible spellings (testicle, tstacle, gonad, ball), but still haven’t found it listed.

Another problem in mapping your journey was that you could have named the correct town where you slaved, but the reference books named the business that benefited from your labor instead of its
location. That’s what happened with “Doytch Air,” as you pronounced it. The official, incomplete record of your whereabouts, typed up by a different kind of note-taker in 1945, called it “Deutsch Eve.” I searched for fourteen years, on and off, for a labor camp with that name and found nothing. I looked in books at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. I contacted researchers from Yad Vashem. I Googled and Googled and Googled. Finally, after starting all over and visiting the Holocaust Museum’s library a second time, I found, in tiny letters in the back of a massive book, these words:
Deutsche Erd
. After flipping around between glossaries and listings, I learned that those words translate to “German Earth and Stonework,” and that Jewish slaves worked for such a firm at the time you told me you were at “Doytch Air.” Mystery solved.

I haven’t been as lucky with most of the others, and it doesn’t help that there is no definitive list of all the forced labor camps. There were about 437 in Poland alone.

So we’ll go with Hardt as your first location. Your job was to lay tracks. You weren’t hauling rails fast enough, so a guard hit you over the head with a stick. It split open the place where your ear attaches to your head. I can still see the ragged white scar when I sit next to you in the nursing home chairs. It bled hard, and that could have been the end of you. The guard could have been inspired by the sight of you holding your bloody head, red running through your hair and your fingers, to hit harder the next time, or just use a gun. But you had a friend who must have been some kind of wilderness expert. He opened his pants and peed on your wound. The bleeding stopped. You couldn’t feel your ear for a week or two.

“Good thing I’m not deaf.”

So true. Half blind is quite enough.

Every morning they gave you a square of pumpernickel bread. You were supposed to divide it in thirds and make it last the day. But you were so hungry that you ate the whole thing right away. At lunchtime, when you had nothing to eat, the guard who whacked you would plant his fat self in front of you and eat juicy sandwiches.

Hardt must have been where you received the package from home. Bill remembers another Hardt prisoner getting a package from his Christian girlfriend. He was hanged for it, and the rest of you had to watch him swing until he was dead.

And Hardt was also most likely the place where Mendel stole raw potatoes so you could eat, an act of thievery he paid for with a severe beating. Another time, he and Bill crawled under the fence and managed to bring back some bread from a local farm. They didn’t get caught that time, but you remembered some other guys who did. They, too, were hanged. So many hangings. They must get tangled in your memories like necklaces locked in a box.

Then you built roads for Deutsche Erd. You may have slept at a forced labor camp called Falenfeld, or one called Weisengrund. Or maybe you were still at Hardt. I hate being imprecise like this, but this is your story so I’m going with your memories. Your job was to clear the woods and mountains so a highway could go through. For about six months, you pushed heavy wheelbarrows until their weight dragged you to the ground. Then you stood and pushed farther.

“It was real rough,” you said. “But it was nothing.”

I think the farm came next. It was on an estate in a Polish city that the Germans had taken over. For nine months you lived like the king of the slaves. There were a hundred horses, a couple hundred cows, “plenty fields.” They actually fed you meat. Whenever a cow or calf died, they let the Jews cook and eat its rotting flesh.

Then they sent you to another labor camp in another Polish town. And when they finished with you there—after two years of being worn down, but proving you were still strong—you hit the big time. Auschwitz.

People talk about concentration camps, but they weren’t all the same. Forced labor camps weren’t necessarily a death sentence. The Nazis needed you alive to keep the war machine and the businesses that fed it thriving. Death camps, such as Chelmno, had only one purpose. And the others, like Auschwitz-Birkenau, did both—working people to death in Auschwitz and killing them outright the moment they arrived
two miles down the road, in Birkenau—though people were also gassed in Auschwitz and worked in Birkenau, so it gets confusing.

On August 27, 1943, they transferred you and 1,025 other men to Auschwitz. They lined you up for selection. Only 10 went to the gas chambers. They led the rest of you to a slower death. Until then, you’d worn filthy civilian clothes. Your skin showed no dark blue. At Auschwitz you got the striped uniform and the tattoo.

They started that day with number 140,721. You stood in line while they branded 603 men before it was your turn. That must have taken hours, depending on how many prisoners wielded tattoo pens. I can tell from the look of your numbers that whoever plunged them into you had been in a great hurry.

You were scared of the hot needle. You pushed Bill, who was always more brave, in front of you. He’s still pissed about that, by the way, though when you tell the story you laugh like older brothers have always laughed at their own pranks.

“I knew if he could survive it, I could too,” you said with that big smile.

You survived. Those numbers, 141324, have stretched and faded with age. But they will outlive you.

You didn’t stay in Auschwitz for long. They loaded you onto a bus and drove you to a new auxiliary camp that had been set up near a coal mine about ten miles away from Auschwitz-Birkenau. The town was called Libiaz. The mine, Janina.

Three hundred of you became coal miners. Crews of ten or twelve would step into a cage and go down into the earth. Poles blasted the coal off the walls and you shoveled it into wagons. You worried that the mine would explode with you in it. You had good reason to be concerned. Exactly six months before you arrived in Auschwitz, a mine explosion killed seventy-four coal miners in Montana. They’d been working longer hours under riskier conditions than usual to support the US war effort, when methane gas and coal dust, which are present in all coal mines, mingled and combusted. The Montanans belonged to a labor union that was trying to keep them safe. I’m certain you didn’t.

You didn’t have vacations, either. Even the day they chopped an infected boil from your groin they made you join the work crew.

“They cut it open and put a couple of Band-Aids on it,” you remembered.

When the Polish coal blaster asked why you were late, you pulled down your pants and showed him. The bandages had fallen off. He crossed himself and told you to sit down and rest. Then he found you another bandage.

Every night after you left the mine, they made you shower. Sometimes you were too tired to wash your hair, but if they found out you’d neglected it, they took you out in the middle of the night and scrubbed you down with powerful hoses.

“If you’re smart, you put your head down. When you look straight at it, you can’t catch your breath.”

You hated it, but you didn’t care anymore.

“I didn’t think about nothing. I felt tired. When I went down to the coal mine I could hardly walk. I come up and I was just too tired.”

It was time to stop.

“I couldn’t lift my hands to wipe my face,” he said. “I felt like an old man.”

You were twenty-three years old.

“I felt like I was a hundred.”

You told Bill you had to get out of there.

“I don’t care what they do to me,” you said.

You asked him to leave with you.

“Where we gonna go?” he asked. “They gonna kill us.”

You both knew there was only one possible destination.

“Whenever they were burning people, we smelled it,” Bill said. “On Thursdays.”

Who asks to be shipped to the gas chambers? People who still had prayers left in them were praying to stay away.

Bill tried to talk you out of it. He remembers it as vividly as you do. He tried to get you to hold on and you tried to get him to quit.

“I’m gonna stay here ’til I can’t work no more,” he said.

He was eighteen and you were all he had. One day he came back from the mine and you were gone. No wonder he can’t completely forgive you.

They didn’t take you immediately. A potato shipment got in the way. Every week a truck came to the mine from Auschwitz-Birkenau to drop off food and clothes and to pick up prisoners. That week, the truck was a day late. They couldn’t send you to the gas until the potatoes arrived.

When you got off the truck, a prisoner spoke to you.

“You’re a lucky man,” he said.

One day earlier, the day you were supposed to arrive, there’d been a selection. The prisoner had seen the strong sent to work and the weak—like you—sent to the ovens.

“You missed it by one day,” he told you.

They sent you to the camp hospital, but you saw how sick the other patients were and you suddenly weren’t so tired anymore.

“I’m fine,” you said, selecting yourself for the work side.

That explains your potato worship. The potatoes were magic. Their tardiness saved your life. Did you vow on that day to thank them by eating as many as possible if you ever returned to a proper dinner table?

We’d known each other for more than a year when you and Vera agreed to have Thanksgiving with us. It’s not as if you had other options. I don’t think Vera’s Odessan family celebrated Thanksgiving, at least not in a traditional, all-the-fixin’s way, and none of your people had invited you. After your wife died—or possibly before—you’d lost touch with all of her relatives except The Millionaire with the hat. He was a stray, too, not a host, due to the unsettling lack of children on that side of the family. Bill had plenty of offspring, so he probably had a festive get-together. But even if you’d been included, he was too many states away. All you had as a source for turkey was us.

But you didn’t want turkey. You called me the day before Thanksgiving as I was chopping, baking, setting, sautéing, whipping, vacuuming, and generally kitchen-maiding myself into exhaustion. You wanted to put in a special order.

“Can you make me a baked potato?” you asked.

I told you I was making mashed, that baked weren’t part of the custom, and that there’d be plenty for you to eat.

“I only like the potato,” you said. “My stomach.”

“What about turkey? That’s gentle.”

“It’s too greasy. Just a plain potato is good.”

You’re lucky I’m such a sucker for you. I squeezed one potato into the oven beside the turkey roasting pan the next day. And sure enough, except for one dry piece of white meat, that baked potato was all you ate.

Maybe you didn’t eat much because you were too busy observing. If each of us has a special talent—mine is parallel parking—yours is accurately assessing a person’s character in less than an hour. Later you asked questions about specific relatives: Why is this one so depressed? What makes that one so fidgety? I was amazed that you could pin down quirks and insecurities that had taken me years to identify. And while everyone had been on company behavior, no less.

My children, as children do, accepted you as just one of the other grown-ups. What Carrie thinks of first when I mention you isn’t your sad biography, but the night you watched her and her cousins perform a Passover skit in my living room. Somehow, a plastic “plague” frog hit you in the head, a casualty that barely rattled you. It took a few years of regular visits before Carrie noticed that you didn’t blend with anyone else in our lives.

“Why are you friends with Aron?” she asked.

I was drying a crystal water glass after you and Vera had gone home after a holiday meal.

Carrie, who was probably eight, sat at the table while I cleaned.

“Because I like him,” I told her. “Friends don’t have to be the same age as you, you know.”

“Why didn’t he go to his family’s today?”

“He doesn’t have a family. He never had any children, and his wife died.”

“Oh,” she said. “Can I have a piece of bread?”

I was so grateful for her short attention span. I wasn’t ready to explain more. I didn’t want to tell her all you’d lost, and how, because that would have meant opening that ugly world to her. I dreaded the day she’d add the terms
Kristallnacht
and
Nuremberg
to her vocabulary. She still believed that she was just as valued on Earth as anyone else. How would she stay innocent after learning that civilized people hated Jews enough to burn the old ladies and shoot the mommies and smash the babies’ heads against walls?

“How’s the book?” you ask every once in a while.

Early in our friendship, you agreed to let me write about you. You know I filled steno notebooks and tiny cassette tapes with your stories; even now, you see me scribbling your greatest hits onto the backs of payment envelopes mailed from Germany. But you can’t understand why it’s taking so long for me to settle you between covers. One reason is that you’re radically more than the source of a story to me. The other is that I’m stymied.

“I don’t know what to say about you,” I answer. It’s the truth. I can’t write anything conclusive until I figure out why we’re together. Some writers say they find the answers by writing their way toward them. But I need to know the last line before I type the first word. We’ve agreed that no one wants to read a book that’s just another Holocaust tale. They’ve read it before, or seen it in a movie theater. They’re tired of it, inured, past being moved. What’s another gas chamber, or one more skinny man in stripes? As they say in publishing, it’s not fresh.