Authors: Gerald Green
“They got to love him. Or the Nazis scared everyone. Jail, murder, torture. They showed the world how. Listen, I was in the printers’ union with lots of Christian guys, friends, Socialists. Where are they? They joined the parade.”
My father all but fell. He walked away from the roadbed, rested on one knee. The fumes were affecting him.
Kurt Dorf saw him and walked down from the construction shack in which he had his office. “Are you ill?” he asked my father. “No, no, just a bit tired. I’ll get back to work.” Kurt Dorf halted him. “What is your name?” “Weiss. Josef Weiss.”
Lowy piped up, from the road:
“Dr
. Weiss.”
“Medical doctor?” the engineer asked.
“Yes. I used to be in general practice in Berlin. I had my own clinic.”
Kurt Dorf looked at my father for a moment. A small supply truck had driven up. Supplies were being unloaded. “Why don’t you work on the truck the rest of the day?” he said. “It’s not as arduous.”
My father nodded, started to walk away. Then he turned. “We are grateful to you. We know what you are doing.”
Dorf was embarrassed by this. A party of SS, led by an officer, had appeared and were waiting for him at the construction shack. Blueprints rolled under his arm, he turned and walked toward them.
Auschwitz
February 1943
Pleasant surprise at Auschwitz today, on my weekly visit. Well, pleasant up to a point.
I found my Uncle Kurt at work on a new road-building project. This place is so vast and complex, so much work is being accomplished here for the war effort, that it is possible not to know about a relative or a friend who may be employed here. Kurt was at the Buna artificial rubber plant for some time, redesigning
buildings, and now he is working on the road to I. G. Farben.
We shook hands, a bit coolly at first, then embraced with a good deal more warmth. I wanted to enjoy the privacy of the reunion, so I dismissed my aides.
“So,” he said. “Uncle and nephew reunited. How are you, Erik?”
“Well enough. Let’s see. When did we last see each other? Christmas two years ago in Berlin, correct?”
“With Marta and the children.
Silent Night
around that beautiful piano.” He smiled. “Good to see you, Erik.”
“And I’m delighted to see you. Reminder that I have a family.”
Kurt then invited me inside his tiny office in the wooden shack. He said he had some real coffee—not ersatz—and we would celebrate our meeting with a cup.
We were silent awhile, sipping the hot coffee, looking out of the large glass window (the shack was on a height) at the city that had grown out of Auschwitz. Distantly, the four high chimneys smoked.
“Your roads have been a great help to us,” I said. “Not only for the transport of war goods, but for prevention of contagion, simplifying disposal procedures.”
He looked at me strangely. “I understand there is a great deal of disease in this camp.”
“Oh, yes. The Jews are a filthy people.”
“I imagine there is also infection among those who run it?”
“Some.”
“Not of the body so much as of the spirit. Of the soul, perhaps.”
I sensed where the discussion was moving. Kurt had always had a bit of the moralist in him. Never a party member, he could not understand our goals, our long-range policies.
“You’ve gotten even more righteously indignant, Uncle. What we do, we do out of necessity.”
He got up. “You need not lie to me. I am of your blood. Save your lies and deceits for those thousands
and thousands of innocent Jews you are murdering in this place. Yes, and Russians and Poles, and anyone else you deem an enemy.”
I said nothing, crossed my legs.
He walked away, suddenly spun about. “Why in God’s name must you strip them naked before they die? In the name of all that is decent, can’t you leave them with a shred of dignity before you murder them? I’ve seen your SS louts grinning at Jewish women, those poor souls trying to cover themselves. I never really believed in Satan, or that there was pure evil in the world, until I came here.”
“It took you a long time,” I said quietly. “You were at Babi Yar.”
“Maybe I wanted to believe your lies. Like so many of our countrymen.”
“Uncle, you are defending criminals, spies, saboteurs. These Jews are spreaders of contagion, both physical and political. We are sanitizing Europe, eventually the world. More people agree with us than you imagine.” I spoke calmly, rationally, trying to make clear to him my commitment to my duties.
Kurt looked at me with icy blue eyes; the harsh eyes of my father when he had caught me in a lie. “I heard a remarkable story the other day,” he said. “In January, the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto revolted. They actually killed German soldiers, forced the SS to retreat. Think of it, Erik, those unarmed, despised, terrorized people, fighting back against the lords of the earth. It almost restores one’s confidence in Divine Providence.”
“Almost. But not altogether.”
I had heard about the rebellion in Warsaw in January. It is rumored that the Jews are still arming, preparing to resist our efforts to dislodge the last fifty thousand remaining there. It is of no consequence. In the end we will prevail. But I felt I owed my father’s brother something. Engineer though he was, road builder, he could find himself in deep trouble expressing such sentiments.
I looked out the window at his road gang. “I am told
you have been using several hundred Jews as laborers. Extra rations, privileges. There are Poles available.”
“What of it?”
“Jews are marked for special handling. They are to be worked until they are useless and then marked for special handling.”
“Say what you mean, Erik, say the word. Murder.”
I ignored him. “I shall find you some Red Army prisoners. Strong backs and dull minds. They can replace your Jews. If we let the Jews survive, they will destroy Germany someday.”
“I want you to leave my workers alone.”
“You curry favor with enemies of the Reich, is that it? The children of these Jews … the children we send …”
To my astonishment, he ran at me and grabbed my collar, almost tearing the insignia off. I am not a physical man, I never have been. I detest violence, fighting. My Uncle Kurt is tall and well muscled. Years of outdoor work have made him powerful. I felt the strength in his hands. He shook me as if I were a puppy.
“I should strangle you with my own hands, you bloody murdering bastard. As a favor to my dead brother. How many dead will satisfy you, Major Dorf? A million? Two million? How many bodies will you burn over there before you are secure? Dammit, Erik, show me some sign of humanity before this ends, show me that there is something decent left in you!”
“Take your hands off me.”
He hurled me against the wooden wall. I did not resist him. I was armed, of course, but it was unthinkable to draw my weapon. Besides, his anger had subsided into a kind of sick disgust.
Straightening my uniform, trying to ascertain whether any of my men had witnessed the embarrassing scene, I tried to tell my uncle precisely what Marta, with her womanly intuition, had said to me recently. Persuasively, I told him that if we were to stop killing Jews now it would be an admission of guilt. When one is convinced of one’s rightness, one cannot halt a
course of action simply because it is distasteful, or because others misinterpret it. Therein lies real courage: doing what is often sickening and apparently brutal, but is necessitated by a great goal, a far-reaching plan.
“What we do is a moral act,” I said, “a historical imperative.”
He came at me again, and I thought this time he would surely kill me.
But he stopped short, and whispered, “I understand too well. I understand all of you too well. Get out.”
His anger, his irrationality, concerned me. But as long as he does the job for Hoess, builds roads, modernizes factories, he is useful. Besides, he apparently keeps his traitorous views to himself—except for me.
The day after my mother was gassed to death, my father learned of it. In the evening, after he and Lowy had finished their work at the road-building site, they had, with forged passes, made their way to the women’s sector.
There they found an empty barracks. A woman kapo, one of those who had marched my mother off to her death, told him that all the women in that block had gone to the gas chambers.
The men broke down and wept. There was little they could say to each other, no words of comfort.
Someone told me that my father went in and sat on my mother’s bunk for a long time. He went through her valise, touched her meager belongings, and took from it a folder of piano music—her old, yellowed, fraying music, from our home on Groningstrasse. Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Vivaldi.
“Goddam them,” Lowy wept. “Why doesn’t anyone ever say no to them? Why don’t the Allies bomb the railroads here, the ovens, the gas rooms?”
My father had neither answer nor solace for him.
On Sunday, April 18, 1943, the Jewish Fighting Organization, in which my Uncle Moses, once a timid druggist, was now a key member, learned that the Germans were preparing a mass attack on the remaining Jews. It was to start at two in the morning of the following day.
Anelevitz called his subcommanders together. Weapons were given out. Key points in the ghetto were manned. It would be a fight to the death. Of actual armed combatants, of which my Uncle Moses was one, there were about five hundred.
What they did not know was that Von Stroop, the SS general in charge of the operation, had
seven thousand
men ready to destroy them—Waffen SS, regular army including artillery, tanks and planes, two battalions of German police, Polish police, key members of the SD, and a battalion of Ukrainian, Latvian and Lithuanian auxiliaries.
The armed Jews were sent out in small groups to three main areas of the ghetto—the central area near Nalewki and Zemenhof Streets, and the factory area near Leszno Street.
Inside an apartment on a high floor, Uncle Moses and Zalman sat at a window, waiting. The room was dark, but the family who owned the apartment, incredibly, were preparing for Passover. A woman was setting the table with candelabra, matzohs, the haggadah.
In Uncle Moses’ detachment, besides Zalman, who sat with him at the window, were Eva Lubin and Aaron. Aaron slept at the rear of the room, atop an ammunition case. In the areas I have mentioned, similar small parties of armed Jews waited. The streets were deserted.
Zalman yawned. “Passover, Weiss. April 19, 1943.”
“I’m afraid you and I shall have no seder,” Uncle Moses said.
“We could have attended one last night. The SS invited us. Didn’t you hear the sound truck they sent through?”
“Oh, indeed,” Moses said. “Did anyone go?”
“Not even Elijah the Prophet.”
“A pity. I might have gone if I didn’t have this job. You know, Zalman, when I was a kid, I never got to ask the four questions. Maybe last night General von Stroop would have given me the honor.”
“Perhaps. Before shooting you.”
Eva recalls my uncle suddenly reminiscing about his brother and sister-in-law, my parents. A bachelor, he had no family left. He missed them, wanted them.
“Yes,” Zalman said. “We could use a doctor now.”
“To treat the wounded?”
Zalman nodded.
“My inclination will be to shoot them if they cannot be rescued. We know what kind of people we are fighting.”
They talked about new rumors—a platoon of Jewish police, who were supposed to take part in the attack, had been executed by firing squad; Himmler had come to Warsaw to witness the end of the ghetto.
“I wish there were more than a handful of us,” Moses said.
“These people,” Zalman said, not without sympathy, “these people, our people, they were not trained to shoot guns.”
“Was I?”
Both men peered into the dark street. Zionist banners hung from many buildings—the blue-and-white star, the blue bars. There were also Polish flags and appeals to the Poles to join the fight. To the end, there was hope that they would.
Moses spoke. “Tomorrow is Hitler’s birthday. The SS has promised us as his birthday present. Warsaw will be cleaned out to celebrate the Führer’s anniversary.”
“Candles on his cake,” Eva said.
Moses sighed. “I never thought I would be resigned to dying. But I am. That fellow Anelevitz taught me a lot. The world will know we did not all march off, docile, dumb, accepting.”
A light went on in the rear room.
“Put it out,” Eva ordered the woman.
“I’m cleaning up for Passover.”
“Clean up in the dark,” Eva said.
“Passover,” Zalman said. “Still they observe. I’m not critical of them, Weiss, just speechless. Maybe we needed less tradition, fewer prayers—and more guns.”
An old man in the rear of the room was praying—shawl, skull cap, opened prayer book. He bent and swayed in holy ecstasy.
“Be tolerant, Zalman. This was their life. They knew nothing else, and it kept them together for a long time. Maybe it will keep us together when this hell ends.”
From the street below, there were drum beats, martial music. The gate to the ghetto had swung open and a detachment of ghetto police, unarmed, walked into the empty streets. Behind them were the foreign auxiliaries. They carried rifles, machine pistols.
A sound truck now appeared and stopped in the midst of the square. From its speaker, a friendly voice issued forth:
“A happy Passover to our Jewish friends! Put down your guns! Come out in peace! We shall arrange a seder for you! Forget this foolish battle, for you are being led by traitors who only seek your death, while they escape!”
Uncle Moses, who had practiced shooting in the basements, raised his rifle and blew the loudspeaker apart with one shot. It dangled on broken wires.
The truck went into reverse. On orders barked from SS noncoms, the ghetto police and the auxiliaries formed battle lines. They were not leaving.
The drums began to beat again. They marched farther into the street. It had been agreed upon earlier by Anelevitz and the other commanders to save ammunition for the Germans.