The Dentist Of Auschwitz (13 page)

We stopped at the entrance facing two armed sentries. Unlike the flimsy wire gate in Steineck, this one was of solid oak and joined two twenty-meter-long concrete buildings. Each building contained several small windows with iron bars strung across them. A rusty sign above the gate read “Gutenbrunn.”

The SS men led us inside. Surrounded by the four massive buildings, the yard was dark. We had come to a farm. These buildings were once stables. At the far end of the yard I saw a gallows. It looked much like the one I had been lucky enough to escape. Here we seemed to be cut off from the rest of the world. In the center of the yard were two SS men surrounded by camp police. They were obviously expecting us.

One man dwarfed them all. He was very tall and had stern, catlike eyes. He looked at us with disgust. “What have we got here?” he asked. “A bunch of Mussulmen?” Because he wore civilian clothes without an inmate’s patch, we did not know who or what he was. We were convinced he was a German. He was over two meters tall, had a square jaw, rosy cheeks, and large protruding lips. He wore black riding britches that were tucked into an officer’s shiny boots. He wore a brown shirt and a beige sweater, and a woolen scarf was wrapped around his neck. His strange-looking hat could have been from the French Foreign Legion. As he strode about, surveying us with contempt, he slapped his billy club against his boots. The loud boom echoed off the concrete buildings. As he called for the camp police, he kept taunting us as a disorganized bunch. Intimidated by the cruel giant, we stared at him and then at one another. He was a real mystery to us. “This is Gutenbrunn, you lazy Ost-Juden.” This was his name for Jews who were born east of Germany. “You mother-fucking bastards. You will have to earn your keep here.”

The SS men just stood by. They didn’t need to intimidate us, since this giant was doing their job for them. Then our new boss divided us into three groups and ordered his policemen to lead us into three different blocks. As we left, he handed out a slap here and a curse there. When he saw the box I carried, he slapped it with his club and asked me what I had inside.

I looked at his glowering face. “Those are my dental tools.”

“What!” he said, as if he didn’t understand what I had said. “Dental tools?” he repeated. “Who allowed you to bring them here?”

“I brought them here because they were helpful in Steineck,” I countered. He looked at me sharply but said nothing further. A young policeman, Menashe, took charge of my group. At a safe distance, I asked him who the man was.

“He is an inmate from Hamburg, the Lagerältester here,” he said. Then, realizing he had omitted the most pertinent point, he added, “He’s a Jew like all of us.”

This was mystifying. I had never heard the term
Lagerältester,
and I had certainly never heard of a Jew who was so powerful in a labor camp. It was hard to understand how he could have gotten all this authority. And even more important, how could he treat his fellow Jews in such a cold and callous manner? “What’s his name?” I asked.

“Kurt Goldberg,” Menashe answered.

Each camp building seemed thirty meters long and about twelve meters wide. Inside each were eight rows of four-tier bunks, capable of housing eight hundred inmates. On the thick cement walls were rings that once held cattle in place as they were milked. Our new home was a stable, now housing human beasts of burden. The floors were hard clay, the kind that kept the cold inside. “Even on warm days,” we were told, “the temperature never goes above thirteen degrees Celsius.”

What light entered the room came through windows of iron bars, augmented by an occasional light bulb that hung listlessly from the high ceiling. There was just enough light so that we could see the bunks. This time Papa and I were determined to find bunks higher up from the floor. Someone helped us to find two spaces at the very top. The inmates were already back from work. Most were from Lodz, now called Litzmannstadt by the Germans. There were Jews from Germany, Holland, and Austria here. While most of us from Steineck were craftsmen and merchants from small villages, the other inmates here were more worldly. I met intellectuals, authors, and lawyers. But like the world outside, there were also a number of common thugs. It was a multilingual camp, and if one of us spoke in Yiddish, we could expect a reply in a dialect of German.

Kurt Goldberg was twenty-four. He was the product of a mixed marriage and felt more German than Jewish. In 1933 he had joined the Hitler Youth, but later the Nürnberg laws reclassified him as a Jew, and he was expelled from the “Aryan” organization. Nevertheless, he was convinced that he deserved better, and he took out the anger and frustration of his misfortune by intimidating his fellow Jews. His boldness and his command of the German language made him a perfect tool for the malevolent Nazi system. He once admitted that if his mother had claimed that he was fathered by an Aryan, he would be free of this Jewish stigma. His special contempt, however, was reserved for Polish Jews. He thought that the “Ost-Juden” were responsible for his dilemma. Among the many diabolical characters anointed in that era, he will always remain the most enigmatic to me. Ultimately he fell from Nazi favor and died.

Gutenbrunn had begun to operate as a camp four months before we arrived. In quick succession other camps had cropped up all around Poznan: Eichenwalde, Lenzingen, Antoninek, Fort Radziwill. By the time we got to Gutenbrunn, eighteen hundred inmates, all Jews, were already inside the walls. The guards were Poles, just as they were at Steineck. Our food rations were identical: a “pica” of bread, morning and night, and soup twice a day. Yet Gutenbrunn was in many ways different. It had better facilities, including showers and an infirmary. The camp doctor was Seidel, an Austrian. He supervised a hospital with twelve beds. The bunks were roomier, with fresh straw on each with a pillow and pallet. But not even this brought an end to the bugs, although taking periodic showers and delousing our clothes brought some relief.

While on the surface it would seem that life was better here, it wasn’t. In our block, a boy barely twelve years old drew my attention. He was the youngest person I had seen so far in camp. His name was Mendel, but everyone called him by the diminutive, Mendele. He had been arrested in Lodz for smuggling food into the ghetto. He had claimed to be sixteen and was believed. This landed him in Gutenbrunn. With a round face and bright smiling eyes, he was pleasant to look at. He had a typical Lodz Yiddish accent and was a compulsive talker. He knew how to stay alive in Gutenbrunn by doing whatever was required to survive. Neither a hard worker nor lazy, Mendele was camp smart. Even though he was a malingerer and a goldbricker, the foremen generally liked him. He knew how to make them believe he worked hard, by wiping his forehead when they watched him. He stopped his work as soon as they walked away. Gifted with the knowledge of how to con everyone, he knew how to organize and outsmart inmates twice his age. While others got punished for an offense, Mendele, who committed the same offense, got away with only a warning. He was no stranger to anyone he thought he could profit from. The ghetto life had equipped him with a strong survival instinct. He was a product of the new order. Yet one could not help but like him.

We could not see outside the camp grounds, for Gutenbrunn’s four tall buildings and enclosing walls blocked out the world. Sometimes it seemed as if this was all that was left of the universe.

We had been in the block less than an hour when we were called to the
Appellplatz
(mustering ground) again. The SS men were gone, leaving us to Goldberg and his policemen. Goldberg barked out orders in a cruel tone as he continued to demean us with insults. The police obediently assisted him with their own abuse. We were told that on Monday all of us were going to work in the Herdecke Kommando, a newly formed group. Even though we knew that everyone’s usual work was constructing railroad tracks, we didn’t have the foggiest idea what the Herdecke Kommando was. Our experience with rail construction nonetheless must be valuable to Gutenbrunn, we thought. Unlike the prisoners already here, the one hundred from Steineck had by now worked nearly a year on this railroad. Perhaps that was the reason we were brought here.

The monotony of the food continued. Our meals consisted of a square of margarine and a spoonful of marmalade, and at noon and in the evening we also got a ladleful of turnip soup. The staple crop here was turnips. Getting food here took us twice the time it did in Steineck. They needed kitchen help badly. As in Steineck, the policemen here were not short of food, German cigarettes, or alcohol. When we returned to our bunks, I learned that Goldberg had been asking where the dentist was. Soon I could hear him yelling from the far end of the building. When he saw me, he came over and asked me which bunk was mine. I didn’t know what to say. But this time he acted more rational, and his voice was much calmer. Soon I learned why. He was to take the bunk next to mine. I was surprised that a powerful man like him didn’t have a better place to sleep. I was perplexed and puzzled at why he picked a bunk next to mine. Was he targeting me for mischief? Though there was no homosexuality in Steineck that I knew of, this was Gutenbrunn, a different camp. Now that I knew Goldberg was a prisoner, I decided to disregard his authority and treat him like anyone else. I knew the situation required me to be careful, though. I could not object to his bringing his personal things and leaving them on the bunk next to mine. He came late that evening, long after curfew. Neither my father nor I were yet asleep. He noticed our uneasiness, then uttered a few words to me, turned, and fell asleep. Though I was never at ease with him next to me, I didn’t fear him any longer. A couple of weeks later he decided to move to another bunk. In time we developed a smoother relationship, and he even went out of his way to help me.

Monday at six in the morning policemen came into the block and began hitting the bunks with their billy clubs and shouting, “Aufstehen!” The usual rush began. Standing in the food line, I began the silent debate. Shall I eat my pica all at once or save part for later? In the confusion of the first morning, a young inmate’s bowl of soup spilled to the ground. Tears ran down his cheeks, for he knew he would go hungry that day.

“Eintreten! Step in line!” the policemen yelled, herding us into rows of five. Soon we learned how the Herdecke Kommando got its name. Herdecke was then the engineer in charge of building this section of the railroad. He was German, like all the foremen here. My father and I were assigned to haul split stones in wheelbarrows up to the rail beds. Pushing them on the sandy soil was hard enough, but doing it uphill was definitely beyond my father’s strength. Yet he couldn’t let on, for that would brand him a work shirker, and that was a dangerous image to have in camp. In a few days our arms and shoulders had become so sore that we could hardly lift them. Fortunately, Herdecke noticed it on one of his inspections, and Papa was moved to raking, where he could take short breaks. We were able to return to the camp at noon for soup. Since we no longer had Zosia’s food packages or Stasia’s scraps, we relied solely on what we got in camp.

Although I was unable to contact Zosia, one day she came. I was told that she was at the kitchen gate asking for me. This gate was open all day for the trucks that delivered food. I wondered how she had found me. “I heard where you were from the people in Brodzice. I had no trouble finding the camp,” she said. By now nearly all the inmates knew that I had a relationship with a shiksa. The attention we got made us both uncomfortable. When the sentries at the gate were gone, we casually walked outside. I discovered that we could have a certain amount of privacy here. I embraced her, and we kissed. I was delighted to see her again.

First she was concerned about the quantity of medication I still had. Then we talked a while about Gutenbrunn and our work. As usual, she had brought some food for us. After we said good-bye I watched as she disappeared into the distance. I wondered if we would ever have the freedom we had at Steineck. I returned with Zosia’s package, and for the first time Papa and I had real bread in Gutenbrunn. My father must have known about Zosia, although he had never met her and I never spoke with him about her.

The inmates in Gutenbrunn did not have any dental care. Since Goldberg knew about my instruments and my dental work in Steineck, I decided to ask him if I could help when needed here. He listened, and then he sent me to speak with Dr. Seidel, whom I had not yet met. I went after work. The first aid room was full of inmates suffering from a variety of ailments. A large number of them had swollen legs, with huge ankles, and I wondered why. Dr. Seidel said it was edema. He told me that to still hunger, some inmates drank more water than their systems could handle, and the excess settled in their legs. “The slightest scratch or abrasion will not heal. The wound becomes infected, and that has disastrous consequences for them,” he said. “The cure is rest and proper nourishment.” Those luxuries were not available to us. Some of the sick begged the doctor for a day or two off, hoping to recuperate, but he could not grant their wishes.

Dr. Seidel was in his early forties, small of stature with narrow shoulders and a slightly sunken chest. He was a quiet, well-mannered man. He spoke with a squeaky voice. When he looked at me, his eyes seemed to pierce right through me. He was direct and quite sure of what he said. He seemed constantly to chew on something. His standard advice was “Let those wounds dry, and they’ll heal by themselves.” At first I thought his remedies were the result of having few medical supplies. Later I learned he actually believed this to be good therapy, and it was often so.

Because a lot of inmates were waiting, I wanted to leave and return another time. But when he heard that Kurt Goldberg had sent me to see him, he waved me into the next room. I explained who I was and why I had come. He listened carefully. I told him that I could come after work and help if a dentist was needed. He promptly agreed. “You could keep your things in one of these two hatches,” he said, pointing at them.