Holocaust (40 page)

That day, Zalman had been ordered to the train. My Uncle Moses boldly plucked him out of the crowd, explained to a kapo that the man was terribly ill, and walked him into the clinic.

“Go to the sink,” my father ordered. “Vomit. Jam your finger down your throat.”

Zalman looked worried. “They were eyeing us. Hoefle’s out there.”

“I’ll handle them,” my father said.

Moses, standing watch at the window, now saw Hoefle and a man named Karp, the ghetto police chief, approaching.

“They’re coming,” Moses said.

“Berta, leave by the rear door,” Papa said. “Go to
the school. Better hide with someone. Zalman, go with her.”

The two left. Almost the instant my mother and Zalman had departed, Hoefle and Karp entered. The latter was a tool of the Nazis, a converted Jew who had earned the hatred of everyone in the ghetto.

Karp barked, “Everyone on their feet!”

Papa protested. “These people are ill.”

“Shut up, Weiss. On your feet in front of Major Hoefle.”

The half-dozen people in the small room got to their feet.

“What in hell is going on here?” asked Hoefle. He and his officers rarely set foot in the ghetto. They governed through underlings—noncoms, Ukrainian militia, ghetto cops.

“A branch clinic of the hospital, sir,” my father said.

“They don’t look sick to me,” Karp said. “Where’s the written authorization for all this?”

“It exists,” my father said. He struggled to control himself. “I can’t help it if your office is inefficient.”

The ghetto police chief and the SS officer wandered around the clinic—picking up the bottles on Uncle Moses’ tiny dispensary table, inspecting under beds.

“What kind of racket are you running here, Weiss?” Karp asked.

“I am
Dr
. Weiss, Karp.”

Hoefle smiled at this: Jew against Jew.

Karp stopped at a cot on which a young woman reclined. She was a cousin of Eva Lubin, a woman who had said she would fight in the resistance.

“What’s wrong with you?” Hoefle asked her.

“Fever.”

Hoefle—he was a vicious killer, formerly an Einsatzgruppe officer—gently put a hand to her forehead. He looked at Karp, said nothing, and the two of them left.

My father and Uncle Moses watched them depart. They knew now they could expect the worst. But they were determined to keep up the pretense; perhaps some
miracle would result in their being bypassed. My father again tried to convince Karp that it would be a mistake to let diseased people ride the trains. But Karp would not let my father into his office.

Hoefle lost no time in striking.

It was learned later—through an informant in Karp’s police force—that the clinic was to be burned, and everyone in any way connected with it sent out on the next transport.

The first blow fell on my mother.

She was rehearsing the children in Jewish folk songs, village airs that she had gotten them to sing for her (quite a change for that grand lady, so proud of her Mozart and Beethoven), when Karp and an aide entered the classroom.

Her presence was so dignified, so calm, that he was subdued, apologetic. “Excuse me, Mrs. Weiss,” he said. “You must come with me.”

“May we rehearse the song once more? It’s for the children’s musicale.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“May I see Dr. Weiss?”

“Your husband will be at the station.”

At once she understood what was about to happen. Calmly (so one of her students told me) she got her coat, her pocketbook, and said goodbye to the children.

“You coming back, teacher?” asked Aaron Feldman.

“Of course. In my absence, Sarah, will you take the class?”

The oldest girl nodded, and went to the front of the room.

“If I am gone for some time,” my mother said, “you are not to neglect your lessons. You will be better people for being educated, for knowing Shakespeare, and the Pythagorean theorem. Goodbye, children.”

They bid her goodbye. They had seen people leave for the rail station a thousand times; they knew about the transports.

At the station, the usual mob of seven thousand were being assembled, registered, grouped. My mother looked at the small clinic and saw that it had been destroyed. She glared at Karp.

“I’m under orders, Mrs. Weiss.”

Lowy and his wife were also on the transport. My father had rescued them once. But now, the printer had been swept up in the newest roundup of victims. Mrs. Lowy was bawling uncontrollably.

“Cut it out,” Lowy said. “How bad can it be? Be glad to get out of this hole.”

Soon, my father, carrying two valises, appeared. He was allowed to take some of his medical supplies. He wore the dusty, battered Homburg he had worn making calls in Berlin, the same dark topcoat.

He and my mother embraced.

Lowy and his wife greeted him. “Sorry, doc. You tried. I guess we’re just destined to get shipped out together all the time.”

“Yes,” my father said. “Fellow passengers again, Lowy.”

The people on the shipment were a cross-section of the ghetto—the poor, the starving, middle-class Jews, and even relative aristocrats like my parents.

My father tried to joke. “You know, Berta, I almost feel as if Lowy is an old classmate.”

The Umschlagplatz was a dreary, depressing place—a yard about thirty by fifty meters. Around it ran a high brick wall and the rear of an abandoned building. Those scheduled for transport were herded through a wire fence. Inside, they sat on bags and valises, bartering for food, trying to cook, making last-ditch efforts to be released.

My parents remained there twelve hours with the Lowys and hundreds of others before the trains arrived. It was a terrifying time. At one point, two young men tried to escape. They sneaked into the abandoned building and tried to cross from its roof to the adjoining house. The SS guards shot them down. Older people
began to moan; children wept. There were no toilets. People relieved themselves in corners of the vast yard.

“I wish they’d get on with it,” Lowy said. “The family camp has got to be better than this.”

“Yes,” my mother said. “I believe we were ready for a change. Isn’t that so, Josef?”

And yet all had been told the truth of the transports by my Uncle Moses:
they were going to their death
. Still, they tried to joke, to make light of the fate that awaited them. The guards were soon doubled—ghetto cops, Latvians, SS. This meant the train was due any moment.

My father asked Lowy, “So the resistance is losing the master printer. How will they manage?”

“I’ve trained Eva. If she keeps at it, she’ll make a good pressman.”

My father nodded. The resistance. He would no longer be part of it. “What about my brother?” he asked Lowy.

“Hiding with Zalman. It won’t be easy. The Germans are sweeping out whole blocks. Anyone hiding—shot on the spot.”

At about five in the afternoon the train appeared. Again, the loudspeaker blared its orders—people were to proceed in orderly fashion into the cars, fill them, observe sanitary rules. There was a single bucket in each car for that purpose.

So they moved to the train. My mother and father went arm in arm. A young mother, holding a child, pleaded with my father for medicine. He said he would help her once they were aboard.

Karp, one of the most hated of all people in Warsaw, came abreast of my parents. “I’m sorry, Dr. Weiss.”

My father made a last appeal. “Karp, get my wife off the transport,” he said. “She’s a teacher, an interpreter. She speaks better German than your masters. Make an appeal for her.”

“No chance, doctor.”

At the edge of the surging crowd, a young man had
lost his mind, was straggling to escape through the wire gate. He was being methodically clubbed to the ground.

“Josef,” Mama said. “You cannot get rid of me that easily.”

He smiled. “Oh, I was just saying goodbye to our friend Chief Karp.”

“Don’t blame me,” Karp said. “They’ll get around to me one of these days.”

“If we don’t first,” Lowy said.

They moved up the planks into the cattle cars. People ran for places near the openings in the slats. Breathing, moving, would be difficult. Lowy’s wife became hysterical.

“Stop bawling,” Lowy said. “What did you expect? The Paris Express?”

“I can’t help it. I’m frightened.”

“So are we all, Mrs. Lowy,” my father said. “But we must look at things bravely.”

More shots rang out in the Umschlagplatz. They had killed the crazed young man.

My parents entered the cattle car. My father found a place, set his valise down as a seat for the two of them. “There,” he said. “First-class reservations. I must talk to the conductor about the deplorable condition of these cars.”

She took his arm. “Josef, as long as we have each other, they cannot destroy us.”

“Of course, my darling.”

They were not aware of it, but their train was to be routed to Auschwitz, rather than Treblinka. The latter camp, more primitive, with smaller facilities, was jammed to capacity.

By January 1943, our partisan band, under Uncle Sasha’s leadership, had raided the Ukrainian collaborators three times. We had guns and ammunition, and had killed several dozen of them. The time had come to attack the Germans.

On a snowy New Year’s Eve, we gathered in a woods outside the town of Bechak, where an SS garrison had
newly arrived. Samuel, the rabbi who had married us, conducted a brief service, as the soft, silent snow fell, covering our fur hats and heavy coats. Most of us wore boots stolen from the Ukrainians. We were all thin and hungry. Food was hard to come by in the winter, and we were forced to be on the move all the time.

“Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” Samuel intoned softly.

I had forgotten how to pray. Bar-mitzvah, high holidays, those had been the extent of my religious training. We attended (when we did) a reformed synagogue, with much of the service in German. I noticed that Uncle Sasha did not join in the prayers.

He and I stood to one side, protecting our rifles, waiting.

“What about you, Weiss? A prayer or two?”

“I don’t know how.”

“I know how, but I won’t. Not after my family was murdered.” He looked up at the wintry sky. The snow came down in powdery clouds, almost caressing us. “Give us a quote, rabbi, something that will help Jews going into battle.”

Samuel finished his praying, smiled at Uncle Sasha and said:

“‘And David said unto his men—gird ye on every man his sword.’ Amen.”

There were seven of us in the party—all men. Sometimes the women went on raids. But against a German garrison, Uncle Sasha had decided that only men should fight. The rabbi left us to return to our camp.

Soon we saw the lights of the village of Bechak. It seemed far away, on a different planet. The party came to a halt. I suddenly became the center of attention. They removed my fur hat and put a German helmet on my head. I took off the loose tunic I wore. Under it was a German army overcoat, belts, ammunition case. I carried a Mauser rifle.

Sasha stared at me. “You’d fool me.”

“I almost fool myself.”

“Ready? Start walking. We’ll be a hundred meters behind
you, one group on your right, one on your left.”

“I’ll remember.”

“Remember something else,” Sasha said. “Kill fast.”

I walked alone, keeping to the countryside, plodding through the snow. Cold, frightened, I thought of my brother—doomed to rot in prison forever, it seemed. Of Anna, dead under circumstances that filled me with suspicion. Of my parents, living in the hell of Warsaw. (I was unaware that they had been sent to Auschwitz, or what their fate was.) And of my grandparents, dead by their own hands, unable to face the horror.

Soon I was in the town. It looked beautiful, like a painting, in the snow. A dog howled at me. The streets were empty. In all occupied towns, curfew was strictly observed.

We had scouted the town earlier. Yuri, disguised as a tinker, had wandered through the village a week earlier. The Germans had set up their headquarters in the town hall. They were an SS unit, probably sent to round up any remaining Jews. Their appetite for killing us was insatiable. We were not sure how many were there—perhaps a company, perhaps only a platoon. In any case, the enlisted men’s barracks were at the edge of the town, in an old mill. But the officers were quartered in the town hall.

I entered by a side street. My boots crunched in the snow. There were two sentries on duty outside the hall. It was brightly lit. I could hear singing from inside. Of course. A New Year’s celebration. The Germans had Russian and Ukrainian whores and girl friends.

The sentries passed one another in front of the hall. Then one moved on, vanished from view. I hurried out of the side street and walked briskly up to the remaining soldier.

“Hell of a way to make a man spend New Year’s,” I said.

“Hey … who are you?” he asked.

“Battalion messenger. The goddam phone is out again. I have a message for the captain.”

I’d come upon him so brazenly that he did not even
ask me for the password. He was very young and small. And I sounded like, and looked like, an ordinary German soldier.

“What captain?” he asked.

“How the hell do I know? Wait, here it is.”

I dug a paper from my coat pocket and gave it to him. The sentry walked toward the reflected light from the town hall and squinted at the paper. I got behind him.

“Looks like Captain Van Kalt. Isn’t that what it says?”

“There ain’t no such captain. What the hell—”

I whipped a leather cord around his neck, dug my knee into his back and wrestled him to the ground. All the anger that had boiled inside me these years found itself in my arms, my hands. He struggled awhile, then stopped. I yanked the leather thong a few more times to make sure. Then I took his rifle. I dragged the body to the side of the stone steps and pressed myself against the building.

In seconds, the other sentry turned the corner. I played no games with him. Instead I leaped from the brick wall and smashed at his neck with the rifle butt. His helmet flew off, and before he could shout, I’d batted him again. His head exploded.