Ernie’s grandmother had been spared so far, though her sisters had already been sent away. Then, in January 1943, Ernie’s name appeared on one of the last lists of Jews to be deported from the city and he was told to prepare to be transported to the east. He expected it to be hard work, perhaps they would have to build roads or something like that, but no one knew exactly what lay ahead. He packed a rucksack, and what warm winter clothing he had and waited.
It was late in the afternoon when the men in leather coats came for him. They were Gestapo officers and they sounded civil at first, until his grandmother begged them to leave Ernie behind. ‘My grandmother was standing there and she looked so pitiful,’ he said, shaking his head wildly and biting his lip to fight back the tears. ‘She was so helpless without me and she knew she couldn’t cope. She begged and she begged them. “Can’t you leave him?” she said. “He is my sole support.” She didn’t understand. Then they got rough.
“Get ready now,” they said, and I knew I would never, never see her again. She was such a good woman.”’
It was hard to watch him going through it all again. Even sitting in the comfort of my own home I could put myself in his place as he relived that awful parting and I could feel it as he did. Now Susanne had gone his grandmother was the only family he had and good God what a terrible thing the old lady had to face. She was so frail.
I began to understand why Ernie was telling his story. He was committing it to record so that others in the future would know that he, Ernie Lobet, once had a grandmother named Rosa who lived and was loved by her family. He too was bearing witness. He discovered later that she died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
I don’t need to describe Ernie’s transport in the cattle trucks, his arrival at Auschwitz or the separation of those who were gassed immediately from those who could be worked to death more slowly. Once inside Auschwitz III-Monowitz, he described that moment of absolute devastation when the new arrivals who came with women and children realised that those they loved had probably been killed and burnt already. Ernie was alone so he was spared the pain of seeing others he cared for suffer.
Needless to say, he had many strokes of luck that helped him to survive Auschwitz. You had to find a niche or some way to supplement the meagre diet or you died, he explained. Ernie began work digging the foundations for a building; he could handle a spade, most of the others had barely seen one before, but he was as miserable as they were. Then he got a break. One of the guards ordered him to sweep the construction hut they used to shelter in. It had an oven inside and he was told to keep the fire going. Next they ordered him to keep a lookout for the sergeant so that most of the guards could stay inside and out of the cold. That meant that when Ernie came in to stoke the fire he could warm himself up a bit. It got him through the worst weeks of that winter.
I had always known he was a clever chap and he was lucky all right, I could see that. He explained how he’d managed to hold onto a hundred marks, which he had hidden behind his belt when he arrived. It must have been a gamble trying to decide what to do with it but he opted in the end to give it to the Block Senior in return for half a loaf of bread. It was an expensive meal but on the strength of it he was asked to become a camp runner carrying messages for the man. That meant he got a little extra soup and the chance to conserve energy. He could see from those around him that exhaustion was a killer.
The ones who worked outside began wasting away very quickly. Hundreds died in front of him and he knew it was impossible, absolutely impossible, to survive the camp if you didn’t find a little extra something to keep you alive. Where people worked also determined whether they lived or died. Ernie was lucky again and ended up working indoors with the German civilians which gave him a fighting chance, but no more than that.
As the story unfolded I heard his account of the cigarettes again and his meeting with me. It was a joy to be reminded of those few special moments but it was the rest I wanted to see.
Friendships among the prisoners weren’t necessarily an advantage. ‘Survival you had to do on your own,’ Ernie said. How true that was, I thought. It was also the reason I’d been such a solitary person during the years of my captivity.
One friend did stand out for Ernie and he was a man named Makki or Maggi, it was hard to hear exactly which. Ernie knew him from the hachshara, the kibbutz-style project he had attended years earlier where they had both learnt to till and sow the land. Ernie had given Makki – as I will call him – some of the cigarettes I had smuggled to him, so I felt a connection to this man.
What I really wanted to know was what happened after Auschwitz but when Ernie turned to the death march his mood altered. Everything he had built up to give him a chance to survive was swept away but he was less malnourished than most, he had
strong boots and cigarettes as currency. I had seen those frozen corpses myself, and tramped out of Auschwitz on that same icy road so I knew about those dreadful days. Ernie estimated that between forty and sixty thousand people had been marched out of the Auschwitz camps and that only about twenty thousand had arrived at the end of the march. That didn’t mean they would live to see the end of the war, only that they had survived that particular ordeal.
Ernie knew straight away that he had to get to the front of the marching column because wherever they were going would be overcrowded. He was right. He was amongst the first to arrive at Gleiwitz concentration camp where he managed to get out of the snow and got a bunk for the night. Those who came later had to sleep on the hard, icy floor.
Rob had warned me obliquely to prepare for a gruelling story to come and I could not imagine how Ernie had survived. I had been forced to march right across central Europe but I knew that would have been impossible for them. It had almost finished me off and I had started in far better shape.
Ernie was in Gleiwitz for three days but they knew the Soviets were advancing rapidly. Wild rumours were flying around about what the guards would do with them next. Some said they were going to go to Buchenwald or Mauthausen concentration camps, others that Switzerland or Sweden had agreed to accept them. ‘Anything would be believed,’ Ernie said. ‘Another favourite rumour said we were going to work in Germany in a jam factory. Jam had sugar in it and everybody was hungry.’ I could imagine how tantalising that idea was; there was constant talk of food in our camp but for really starving men like them it must have been torture. The lawyers amongst the prisoners suggested there would be an amnesty for them. ‘As if you could have an amnesty for people who had never been condemned,’ Ernie added.
Finally they were told to get ready for a transport and then loaded into cattle trucks with no roofs. ‘There must have been
about eighty in that car,’ he said, his eyes searching the floor. The snow was still falling when they set off and Ernie quickly lost track of time. ‘I was standing most of the way but then a lot started to die and we threw them out and that created room so that we could sit. I don’t know how many days we were in there. I had some bread left but we had no water.’
It was so frustrating hearing it all and not being able to help. I was muttering advice to him under my breath and it was as if he had heard me.
‘One guy had a canteen,’ he said ‘and somebody produced some string and we tied it on and dangled it down from the train and as we moved, it scooped up the snow. When it was full we pulled it up and we melted it in our mouths. That was how we survived.’
It took him four days to reach Mauthausen in Austria. The terrible reputation of that stone-quarrying camp had reached them even in Auschwitz. ‘We thought this would be our death but we were too tired, too weary to care,’ he said. ‘Some bread was thrown to us and we all made a beeline for it but I didn’t get any; nobody would share. Anyone who was lucky enough to get some devoured it before the others could.’
Soon the word spread that Mauthausen was totally full and they were going to be shunted off somewhere else. Ernie repositioned himself in his chair as he spoke. I could tell he was pacing himself, his face was drawn but his manner was still so matter of fact. The train had set off again and it was as if Ernie couldn’t bring himself to say what happened next. He took a deep breath, the corners of his eyes were red and he was shaking his head in disbelief. He tried to force a smile then he blurted it out. ‘I lost my eyesight,’ he said. ‘I had my eyes wide open and I was looking out and it was all black.’ His lip quivered as he spoke. ‘It was all black,’ he repeated. There he was in the back of an open cattle truck in the snow with all those dying people and he was blind and helpless.
He was struggling now as I had never seen him before, staring into the distance and shaking his head, his voice cracking as he spoke. ‘It was so terrible,’ he said, struggling to hold back the tears. ‘The train rolled on and stopped and then rolled on again and it didn’t seem to make any difference. The snow was still falling.’ He paused and blew his nose. It was as if Ernie was ageing before us. The smiling face from the photographs had gone. The creases that normally ran from the side of his nose to the corner of his mouth cut deeper into his face.
He must have been totally dependent on his friend Makki who told him that they’d left Austria behind and the places they were passing through now had Czech names. Ernie still couldn’t see anything.
As they rattled across the country, Makki told him that the news about them must have spread because, as they passed under bridges, local Czechs threw loaves of bread into the trucks to try and keep them alive. ‘If you were standing on an overpass the sight must have been something to behold,’ Ernie said. ‘I don’t know how many cattle cars there were but they were all open and inside you had these zebra-clad skeletons huddled together, listless like cows being led to the slaughterhouse.’ They had never received as much as a slice of bread when they passed through Austria and it was the same when they crossed back into Germany but the Czechs had done what they could. It reminded me of the loaf thrown to us as we marched wearily through that same country around that time.
Ernie was now in a permanent fog and past caring; without Makki he would be helpless and he must have felt his life ebbing away in the darkness. He must have known that a blind slave labourer was no use to anyone and he would be shot as soon as it was noticed. After at least seven days in those open cattle trucks they arrived at place near Nordhausen in central Germany where they were ordered out of the trucks and into another grim concentration camp. Its name was Dora-Mittelbau and Ernie would never forget it.
He got some soup to eat and his eyesight returned before his affliction was spotted. He learnt quickly that the camp supplied labour to a secret underground factory where they were building Hitler’s
Vergeltungswaffe –
the retaliation weapon we knew as the V2 rocket. It was the dictator’s last desperate card.
Ernie was given a new camp number, this time thankfully not tattooed on his skin. His clothes, including a sweater that had kept him alive, were taken away and he was assigned to a barracks, where they slept two to a bunk. He had to start again at the bottom of the ladder with no source of extra food and he had been in the camps long enough to know that without that he wouldn’t survive.
They were sent into the tunnels where the rockets were being built and Ernie was assigned to a work
Kommando
hauling bricks to Italian civilian bricklayers. He never saw a single rocket in his part of those caves and he couldn’t care less. By then the Americans were preparing to cross the Rhine and the Russians had surrounded Ernie’s home town, Breslau, but he was beginning to doubt whether the allies would arrive in time to save him. I recalled my own journey home and that moment when the treacherous river had seemed to lure me in to wash away my suffering and I wondered where Ernie had found the strength to hold on.
‘The work was brutal and the food consisted of one litre of soup,’ he said. He told his friend Makki they had to get out or they would certainly die. Nothing could be worse than where they were in those awful tunnels at Dora-Mittelbau. They heard that a party was being selected to go somewhere else to work. They both knew it was their only chance and they volunteered without knowing what it would involve.
Ernie realised that whatever lay ahead, they had a better chance if they said they had a specialism, real or imagined. He and Makki joined the long line of people wanting to get out and eventually they came face to face with an SS man who was deciding who stayed and who went.
Ernie stepped forward and the SS man demanded to know his profession. ‘Locksmith,’ Ernie said, though what he knew about that, he could write on his thumbnail. He was waved on to the transport. Makki was right behind him and he could hardly say locksmith as well, so when the SS man demanded his profession he answered, ‘Electrician.’
‘No, we need you here,’ the soldier barked and Makki wasn’t chosen. ‘I was heartbroken,’ Ernie said biting his lip and struggling with the weight of his own words. Then he gave up trying to contain himself, his face crumpled and he cried out loud covering his eyes with his hand. ‘I wanted him to come,’ he said his voice distorting, ‘I never saw him again and he died and only because he said “electrician”.’ Ernie’s chest jerked violently as he sobbed.
I felt uncomfortable watching his moment of private grief; it was like we had no right to be there. He was telling that story fifty years later and he was still heartbroken for his friend. They say around 20,000 prisoners died at that awful place and Makki was probably one of them. As he had done with his grandmother Ernie was testifying for his friend; that life, like all the others, mattered. They had pulled each other though Auschwitz and the death march and Ernie had helped him with the cigarettes I had smuggled to him but it was not enough.
Millions had died by then and there was little any of them could do to save themselves. Their reserves of courage and initiative had not delivered them. I knew from my own experience of war and captivity that the ones who came through owed their lives largely to chance. Ernie had used his breaks well but luck had played a large part in his survival.