A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (17 page)
Read A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz Online
Authors: Goran Rosenberg
I’m touched by the exact figure. From a train carrying some 1,600 prisoners, of which a large but forever inexact number will die before journey’s end, the exact number of the bodies unloaded at the Uchtspringe station has been preserved by history and carved into stone by the good citizens of Uchtspringe, at a time when the town was part of the German Democratic Republic (DDR). Even if you didn’t know that Uchtspringe was once part of East Germany, and might perhaps be surprised to learn it, since it was American troops who liberated Uchtspringe and tried to clarify the identities of the 66 bodies in the mass grave, the text on the grave monument leaves no room for doubt. For the good citizens of the DDR, National Socialism was the history of another Germany. Theirs was an unbroken struggle against “fascism,” which was the shameless lie that for four decades undermined the memory of what actually happened. In
DDR history, it was another Germany’s train that made a longer stop at Uchtspringe, and another Germany’s doctors who prescribed death to more than a thousand of their patients in Uchtspringe.
Historical coincidence determined how the event would be remembered. In the month following the end of the war, the armistice lines between the armies of the victorious powers were tidied up a little, and some of the troops were moved around. On July 1, 1945, American troops moved out of Uchtspringe and Soviet troops moved in, and sixty-six men in a mass grave were transformed from victims of the German Reich to victims of “fascism.”
I decide not to follow the train on its long detour from Uchtspringe via Wittenberge to Bergedorf in Hamburg, and drive directly to Ravensbrück.
Dr. Liedke gives me a copy of the Ravensbrück list. Well, not the whole list, but the page with your name on it. Of the documents from the slave camp archipelago, it’s the only one I have that bears your name. It’s a handwritten list compiled by the SS in Ravensbrück, and on it you appear as David Rosenberg and your brother Natek as Nathan Rosenberg, first Natek and then you. Rosenberg is spelled with an
s
, Natek appears as Nathan rather than Naftali, and your date of birth is 1926 rather than 1923, but it’s undoubtedly the two of you on the list. You’re entered as numbers 315 and 316. Prisoner category: Polish Jew. Birthplace: Widawa. Delivery: Auschwitz 26 VIII 1944. Dispatch: Wattenstedt (
sic
). Old prisoner numbers (from the SS registers at Neuengamme): 50648 and 50649. New prisoner numbers (for the SS registers in Ravensbrück): 18300 and 18301. Beside the prisoner
numbers is a firmly penciled check mark, although not by the non-Jewish names. If I didn’t know what I know, I’d assume that the Jews thus marked were selected for a worse hell than the rest, but in Ravensbrück the unimaginable happens: the Jews are selected for a better one. I don’t know if the check marks on the list apply to that particular selection, but it may well be so. At any rate, the checks entitle the Jewish inmates to a food parcel from the Red Cross.
It’s April 14, 1945, and the front is approaching, and the stated aim of the increasingly deadly prisoner marches and transports through the German camp archipelago is to wipe out all traces of themselves; or as Himmler himself puts it on April 18, 1945, to ensure that no prisoner falls into enemy hands alive.
Kein Häftling darf lebend in die Hände des Feindes fallen
.
Given another month, they might have done it. Of the 700,000 or so concentration camp inmates entered in the SS registers in January 1945, a third die in the final months of the war; dropping like flies, as we hear in testimony after testimony, not only yours. Toward the end, this is the sole remaining purpose of the evacuation transports: to make you disappear from the world.
And then, in Ravensbrück, after nine days on a train of open freight cars with a special car in the rear for the dead, your names are checked for a five-kilo food parcel from the Red Cross.
The Jews, specifically.
How is it possible? Ravensbrück is a concentration camp (mainly for women). In Ravensbrück, the SS is in absolute control. In Ravensbrück, prisoners are dying in vast numbers, 50,000 of them altogether, and from February 1945 onward in a newly installed gas chamber. In March and April 1945, 25,000 prisoners are evacuated from Ravensbrück in order to disappear. In
Ravensbrück, too, no prisoner is to fall into enemy hands alive. SS men who check off Jews, especially, for life-saving food parcels are not only going against Himmler’s express orders, but they’re also sabotaging what to the very end remains the overriding mission of the SS empire: the annihilation of the Jews.
Who has the authority to order such a thing?
Himmler himself, it turns out. In the last months of the war, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler is playing a double game of life and death with a Swedish count named Folke Bernadotte. Himmler thinks he’s playing for his own life after the surrender, and Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross, thinks he’s playing, at least initially, for the lives of Norwegian and Danish citizens in Himmler’s concentration camps. With the war still raging, these people, in columns of white buses with Swedish flags and red crosses painted on them, are to be evacuated to life, not to death. More pressure is then brought to bear, widening the operation to include Danish and Norwegian Jews as well, and toward the end of April gravely ill women from Ravensbrück. At the same time, a Swedish representative of the World Jewish Congress, Gilel (Hillel) Storch, a Jewish businessman from Latvia who has managed to escape to Sweden, is simultaneously negotiating with Himmler, the Swedish government, and the International Red Cross about sending food parcels to surviving Jews in the German concentration camps. “In the Ravensbrück camp there are 35,000 Jewish women literally starving to death,” writes Gilel Storch on March 19, 1945, in a letter to legation counselor Hellstedt of the Royal Department for Foreign Affairs in Sweden.
As you no doubt realize, this is a story in itself, and it’s really not about you or any of the Polish Jewish men aboard the meandering train of freight cars from
Aussenlager
Watenstedt, but in
Ravensbrück the food parcels and your road from Auschwitz just happen to cross paths. Those food parcels are a big thing, probably decisive to your survival, and the events associated with them remain vivid in your memory eleven months later, in that letter to Haluś:
Here [in Ravensbrück] they started talking about some parcels from the American Red Cross, and, believe it or not, the following day actually handed out parcels, each parcel to be shared by two. People went sort of crazy with happiness, and no wonder. A few weeks before the end of the war and here’s a dirty, hungry Häftling tucking into American chocolate, biscuits etc.
On the third day we were given another parcel, and news started to spread that the Jews were going to Sweden, but nobody believed it. I thought to myself that people had been so overwhelmed by the food parcels that they were starting rumors and gossip.
But people weren’t talking through their hats this time, either, because a few days later we hear somebody shouting: “
Alle Juden
.” This was hardly music to my ears, for what could they possibly want with all the Jews, but we had no choice but to fall in. We were then 800 Jews among 6,000 [inmates] of other nationalities. An SS man gave us a speech: “At roll call tomorrow morning, the Jews are to stand to one side. You’re going to Sweden. The Swedish Red Cross will come and get you.”
Right away I thought of Biebow’s speech in the ghetto: “Now we’ll have some new guests arriving.” Actually I could have hidden and stayed behind, because I’d met a German Häftling I knew from the previous camp, and he was now a barrack guard. He said that if I didn’t want to go, I could stay. But he also said there was nothing to be afraid of, because the story about going to Sweden was true. I believed him because I knew he was a good friend, so why sit there in a camp if I could be free in a few days.
But still it was completely incomprehensible.
Could it be possible for a Jew to survive the war?
The next day we were taken from the camp [in freight cars], and for the journey we were each given three American parcels and could have had more if we’d wanted. So how could we not believe it?
On the parcels it said, American Red Cross
durch Vermittlung Schwedischen Roten Kreuz—an den Ältesten der Juden in Ravensbrück
. And in some of the parcels there were cans of meat labeled “kosher.” Now we were certain we’d been rescued.
At midnight, the train stopped. A civilian we recognized as a Kapo (this time a German Jew) came into our car. He wasn’t wearing his prison suit any longer, but normal civilian clothes, with a white armband. He spoke to us in German, and this all took place in the presence of the SS men who were escorting us: “I’ve heard there are various rumors circulating among you, that you’re dubious about all this (the journey to Sweden), that you’re afraid and talking of crematoriums, etc. Put all that out of your minds. The hours of this war are numbered. You see these SS men (and he pointed at them)? They still have their rifles, but you can be sure they’d like to throw them away now. They’re no longer our enemies. Let us not blame anyone, though it’s true that your children, mothers, fathers, and so on have been burned in the crematoriums. But they aren’t guilty of this. The whole of Europe is in ruins, don’t avenge yourselves on the Germans, they’re not the only ones guilty of this war, the whole world has gone mad, everyone is guilty. Englishmen, Americans, etc.”
During this speech the SS men stood with heads lowered. Kapo Meyer (that was the name of the German Jew) told us all to stand up and sing “Hatikvah”[the anthem of the Zionist movement]. Just imagine, three weeks before the end of the war, 800 Jews on German
soil singing “Hatikvah” and SS men presenting arms (that’s what it looked like in our car). People were moved to tears.
I must hurry up with my story, I’m afraid I’m already boring you.
Allow me here, before you resume boring the woman who will become my mother, to insert one detail about the food parcels. Though it’s true they’re labeled
RED CROSS
, my guess is that the labels do not say
AMERICAN RED CROSS
but
INTERNATIONAL RED CROSS
, as anything else would hardly be possible; this is Nazi Germany, after all, still at total war with America, and it’s hard enough to understand how even this much is possible. Again, a story apart. Not that it matters, not now and not then, but just so your account jibes with my documents. You’re quite right about the Americans’ being behind the food parcels, but they’re operating primarily through a body called the War Refugee Board, set up by President Roosevelt on January 22, 1944, and tasked with taking immediate steps “to forestall the plan of the Nazis to exterminate all the Jews and other persecuted minorities in Europe.”
One such step is to finance the 40,000 parcels of kosher food that in February 1945 are warehoused at the port of Gothenburg and which, through the mediation of Gilel Storch and others, are handed over to the International Red Cross to be transported by rail, primarily to the Theresienstadt, Bergen-Belsen, and Ravensbrück concentration camps, and expressly for distribution to Jewish inmates. Some 7,500 of the parcels from Gothenburg reach Ravensbrück sometime in April. I assume that toward the end of your journey, one or two of these parcels save your life. Each parcel contains twenty Camel cigarettes, vitamin tablets, a bar of soap, half a kilo of dried milk, chocolate, biscuits,
half a kilo of margarine, a can of corned beef (marked kosher), a can of cheese, and a can of tuna fish.
The food parcels not only save lives, they also kill. Starving bodies cannot suffer the shock of solid food. Hunger must be controlled to be vanquished. Not everyone is capable of such control, and a can of corned beef, however kosher it may be, is no child’s plaything. “There are evidently different methods for killing people; by gas chamber or by Red Cross parcels,” notes Dr. Georges Salan, counting 58 Jewish prisoners dying from the food parcels in Ravensbrück.
The train carrying the singing Kapo and the SS men presenting arms never completes the announced journey to Sweden, but you don’t explain why. This is where you hurry up with your story a bit so as not to bore the woman who is to be my mother. Dr. Liedke’s investigations reveal that the trainload of Polish Jews from Łódź sets off from Ravensbrück in the direction of Hamburg on April 24 but comes under attack from Allied bombers and is forced to turn back. The German railroad lines are common bombing targets in the last weeks of the war. I find it hard to fathom how you can gloss over something like that, but I’m starting to realize that on your road from Auschwitz, the cancellation of a train ride to freedom is just another wrong turn in the growing chaos of war, where no one knows what’s real or unreal anymore: food parcels, death transports, liberation, annihilation, the Red Cross, the SS, truth, lies. I imagine the only things that really exist for you on that train are the food parcels in your hands, but I’m not sure everyone’s convinced that even those are real. Nor am I at all sure whether you and the others on the train realize what’s happening, or why the train is turning back, or even that it’s doing so. Trains have a tendency to shunt to and fro, to move from one track to another, without
necessarily changing their destination. Maybe your two stays in Ravensbrück blur into one, with the food parcels being the all-suppressing link between the two. Maybe all days, dates, and events are blurred together. The last white buses leave Ravensbrück on April 25 under the command of the Swedish lieutenant Åke Svenson. That same day, a “Swedish” train leaves Ravensbrück for Hamburg with 4,000 women loaded on fifty freight cars, but the train disappears in the fog of war and is found four days later outside Lübeck, where its engine has broken down. When the trucks are unbolted, four women are found dead while others are in a very bad state and have to be taken to a hospital, but this “ghost train” is nonetheless able to continue its journey to the Danish border with 3,989 surviving Ravensbrück women. The train carrying the singing Kapo and the arms-presenting SS men apparently left a couple of days earlier, yet it does not, as far as I’ve been able to establish, feature in the narrative of those who were saved from Ravensbrück. The ghost train of Lübeck is there, but not the train with the singing Kapo. If you were on the way to Sweden, as you were expressly told, why is there no record of it other than your story and Dr. Liedke’s story and, I assume, the stories of all the others who share the experience, on a train from Ravensbrück, of a Jewish Kapo intoning the new Jewish national anthem in front of SS men presenting arms?