Prisoner B-3087 (20 page)

we marched another three days before
we crossed back into Germany. The Czech people
continued to help us as much as they could along the
way, but once we were back in Germany the doors in
the villages were closed to us again, and the window
shades pulled down tight. If the Germans didn’t see
us, they didn’t have to think about us. But we left
enough dead bodies in the ditches that they would
know we’d been through.

I made my bread last as long as I could, but there
was no way I could march for another three days.
Neither could any of the other prisoners, from the
looks of our ragged ranks. How close was Dachau?
How much longer would it take us to get there? Would
any of us be alive to see it?

The Nazis must have been thinking the same thing.
On the afternoon of the sixth day, we came to a tiny
depot, where a train waited for us. The
kapo
s split us
up — Jews in one train car, Poles in another — and we
were loaded on. In a third car, the Nazis loaded in
wooden crates.

“Our documents,” one of the other prisoners told
me. “They send them along with us wherever we go,
the monsters. They like to keep track of who they kill
and how they do it.”

It seemed like an awful lot of trouble to go through
for “traitors to the Fatherland.”
The cattle car was crowded and unsanitary like all
the rest, and there was no food or water but what we
brought with us. At least we weren’t walking anymore, which was a small mercy.
A day and a night passed in the train. I drifted in
and out of sleep, swaying on my aching feet, but was
awakened by the sound of an explosion.
Ka-boom.
It
was close enough to rattle the car. Planes droned overhead. Russian? American? British? I had no idea. But
they were dropping bombs all around us.
Boom.
Boom. Ka-boom!
The last of them hit so close we were
all thrown forward. The train’s brakes screeched as it
slammed to a halt, and we all struggled to look out
through the slats and see what had happened. Soon
word came to us from the Polish car behind us: The
last car on the train had been hit with a bomb. No one
had been hurt, but the car that held all our documents
was destroyed.
“Ha,” someone laughed humorlessly. “How will the
Hitlerites know who they’re killing now?”
“Easy,” someone else said. “They’ll know because
they put all the Jews in this car, and all the Poles in
that car. When we get to Dachau, they’ll just gas us
and put the others to work.”
He was probably right. They didn’t know our names
anymore, but we still had our Jewish stars on our uniforms, ragged and torn though they were, and we were
all in the Jewish car. As long as they kept us together,
they could herd us all right into the gas chambers.
Which gave me an idea.
I found the Jewish star on my jacket. It was dirty
and falling apart. Remembering my work sewing uniforms, I bit at the seams that still held it on my jacket
until I could rip it off.
“They’ll kill you for that,” a man next to me said,
watching me.
“They’ll kill him for wearing it too,” another
man said.
I didn’t listen. I had a plan. The place where the star
had been sewn on was cleaner and newer-looking than
anywhere else on the jacket, and you could still see the
outline of the star. That would give me away for sure!
I slipped my jacket off and put it on the floor, rubbing
it around with my foot. When I picked it back up it
was filthy all over, including the place where the star
had been. Good. Now, at least, I would look the part.
When the train finally stopped outside Dachau, we
were taken out of the cattle cars. As the Jews and Poles
got off beside one another, I slipped from one group to
the other. If the Nazis had lost our records, they
wouldn’t know I was a Jew unless I was standing with
the Jews!
One of the Poles saw me change sides, and he
frowned at me. I worked my way farther into the
group and waited, my heart thumping. If I was caught,
I’d be killed. I remembered how my dark blond hair
had sometimes made people mistake me for a gentile
back home in Kraków, and I hoped the Nazis would
be fooled.
The SS officers made us line up and tell them our
names and numbers.
“Prisoner B-3087,” I told them. “My name is Yan
Zielony.”
Zielony
meant “green” in Polish. My real last
name,
Gruener
, meant “greener” in German.
Zielony
made me sound more Polish, and it was easy to
remember.
The Nazi wrote down my name and number and
nodded me on. I had done it! I was no longer a Jew to
the Nazis! I was going to live!
“That boy’s a Jew,” someone said. It was the man
who’d seen me cross over! He pointed at me. “He
came over from the other car when we got here.”
The blood drained from my face. A
kapo
grabbed
me and raised his club to hit me.
“Wait!” I cried. “I was born Jewish, but I never
practiced!” I lied. “I never went to synagogue! All my
friends were Poles! Christian Poles! I went to church
with them! I’m not a Jew!”
“If you were born a Jew, you’re a Jew,” the SS officer
said. He marked through my name on his sheet. “Put
him with the others, where he belongs.”
The
kapo
shoved me along to the group of watching
Jews. None of them had said a word, not even the men
who’d seen me take off my Star of David. When the
kapo
had pushed me back among my people I turned
to look at the Pole who had ratted me out. He kept his
eyes on the ground and wouldn’t look at me. Why had
he done it? What difference did it make? It’s not like I
would have eaten food he could have eaten or slept on
a bed he could have slept on. I was nothing to him, nor
him to me. And yet he had told on me when there was
nothing to be gained by it. He had told on me for no
other reason than that I was a Jew.
The Nazis took our names and numbers and made
new documents for us to replace the ones that had
been destroyed before they marched us into Dachau.
They would need them so they could keep track of
how they killed us all.

the day after I Got to dachau, the man next
to me in my bunk got the camp fever. “Camp fever”
was what everyone called the typhus that spread like
fire throughout the ranks of prisoners. It started with
a headache and a fever, then became a cough. My
bunkmate got a spotty rash on his chest, and soon he
was so delirious he couldn’t speak or understand a
word I said to him. The Nazis did nothing to treat
him, or any of the other prisoners who got the camp
fever. The man from my bunk died three days later,
coughing up blood. Prisoners died by the hundreds
everyday.

I always tried finding somewhere else to sleep, away
from the sick, but it was almost impossible. More than
1,500 prisoners were crammed into barracks built to
house 250 prisoners. It was a wonder we didn’t all have
typhus within a week, the way we had to sleep on top
of one another. Each day I woke up expecting to be
sick, and it seemed like a miracle when I went to bed
that night, spared.

At least the Nazis didn’t expect the sick to work
too. They didn’t make any of us work at Dachau.
Prisoners had once worked here, like all the other
camps, but not now. Dachau was in chaos. Some days
we didn’t even have roll call. The war was coming to
an end, and we all knew it, even the Like we had
guessed, the Germans had been moving us around to
avoid the approaching Allied attack. Even so, the
chimneys still burned day and night, day and night.

One night, early in the spring, we woke in the barracks to the sound of explosions nearby. They were so
close they were deafening. A building in the compound exploded, shaking our barrack, and I covered
my head with my hands, just like all the prisoners
around me. There was no place to go, no place to hide.
The war had come to Dachau, and any moment a shell
or a bomb might fall on our building and kill us all. So
many times I had wished for a bomb to fall on me, to
end my suffering, but now I prayed that no bomb
would hit me. Not now, not when I was so close to the
end! If I could only survive a little longer, I thought,
just a little longer —

Planes roared overhead for hours. Bullets fired—
pop pop pop pop pop pop pop
— from inside or outside
the camp, I didn’t know. The heavy
poom poom poom
of artillery shook our wooden beds, and the dust and
dirt of seven years rained down on us from the roof. I
heard Nazis shouting to one another in German, more
gunshots, more bombs exploding, but I kept my head
down like the rest of the prisoners, whispering to
death, pleading for it to pass me by yet again.

Then, close to dawn, the shooting and explosions
stopped. I felt a rush of relief at the silence. The bullets
and bombs might come again another day, but for now
we were alive. Used to the sounds of war coming and
going, we went back to sleep. There might be a roll call
in the morning, and we would need all the rest we
could
get.

But come morning, something was different. For
one thing, no
kapo
had come around to wake us up. I
woke only because my body told me it was the time.
As everyone stirred in their sleeping shelves, we looked
around at one another, wondering where our jailers
were. One of the prisoners crept to the door and
peeked outside.

“There— there aren’t any guards!” he told us. “I
don’t see any guards!”
What trick was this? I didn’t believe it. Slowly we all
climbed down from our shelves and looked out the
windows and doors. The man was right— there
wasn’t
a
kapo
or an SS officer to be seen. Prisoners
staggered out of each of the barracks, looking this way
and that, waiting for the Nazis to jump out and start
shooting us. But the camp was empty. The Nazis had
fled in the night!
I staggered into the yard, but there I stood. I didn’t
know what to do. None of us did. For so many years,
we had only done what we were told. That was the
only way to survive. Now I was on my own. I could
walk right up to the front gates of the camp and walk
away. But where would I go? What would I do? My
home was in Kraków, hundreds of kilometers away.
And what was home anymore? I had no family to go
back to. No apartment that still belonged to me. I had
no possessions or belongings. And even if I tried to go
back, who would help me get there? Who would give
me real clothes? Who would feed me? Who would be
a friend to me, a Jew, when no one had stood up for me
to begin with?
The grim reality set in. We were free, but we were
still Jews in a land that hated us, that had stolen everything we owned and had taken our families and put us
in camps and gassed us and cremated our bodies.
“Soldiers!” someone at the front gates cried.
“Soldiers are coming!”
I steeled myself. So this was it then. The Nazi army
would kill us all, gun us down and leave us for dead
before the war ended. The extermination of the Jews
was unfinished business.
Some people ran for the barracks, as if to hide, but
most of them, like me, stood in the yard and waited
for what was to come.
The gates opened, and soldiers marched into the
yard. But the soldiers weren’t wearing gray and brown.
They were wearing green. Their helmets looked different from the SS helmets too. And the tank that followed
them . . . the tank had an American flag on it.
“It’s the Americans!” I cried, feeling something
close to joy for the first time since I could remember.
“The Americans are coming! The Americans!”
The Allies had reached us at last! Some prisoners
hurried up to the American soldiers to shake their
hands. Some hugged one another. Some gave prayers
of thanks. I fell to my knees and wept. Had I really
made it? Had I actually survived the Kraków ghetto
and
ten
different concentration camps? I had been ten
when the war started. Now I was sixteen. For more
than six years I had been a prisoner of the Nazis.
Prisoner B-3087. Now it was all over.
An American soldier hurried to help me up, and
asked me something in English I didn’t understand.
He tried again in German. “What’s your name?” he
asked me.
“Yanek,” I told him. “My name is Yanek.”
“Everything’s going to be all right now, Yanek,” he
told me, and for the first time in six years, I believed
he was right.