Authors: Henry Orenstein
This was repeated seven or eight times. My fingers were hurting badly. With great courage and at grave risk to himself, Bencio, who had been working next to me, whispered in Polish, “Ask him for forgiveness.” That seemed like a very good idea, and I tried to say something apologetic to the SS man, but somehow no sound came out of my throat. To this day, I don't know why. After a couple more rounds of my jumping and his stomping, the SS man turned and walked away. When I realized he wasn't going to kill me after all, a wild joy surged through me. My fingers were a bloody pulp and I needed Bencio's help to climb out of the pit. “I thought you were a goner,” he said. I was so happy to be alive I wasn't even bothered by the pain. I even joked about it: “At least he should have let me keep the newspaper.” One of the other prisoners had a piece of cloth and bandaged my fingers with it.
When Bencio and I got back to the barracks and told my brothers about my close call, they couldn't believe my carelessness. “There aren't enough dangersâyou have to create your own?” Fred
brought some fresh bandages from the hospital, cut off the pieces of skin that were hanging loose, and cleaned the wounds. This was painful, but within a couple of days the torn flesh had dried out and started to heal.
It was the beginning of May, but unseasonably chilly. One especially cold morning we were standing on the Appelplatz when I saw a tall German in a white fur coat standing in the center of the square. The whispered words “Dr. Blanke” and “selection” ran through the ranks of prisoners. We were ordered to strip completely, all of us, and from barracks after barracks the prisoners were made to run in single file a few steps apart past a small raised platform on which Dr. Blanke was standing to get a better view. He held a thin stick in his hand, and as each prisoner ran past him, he would make a tiny movement of the stick to one side or the other.
Those he directed to the left had to stop at a table where a clerk was sitting and give him their prisoner and barracks numbers. They were then kept in a group apart. Those who ran to the right rejoined the others from their barracks who had already passed the selection. The SS and the Jewish Kapos made sure everybody went according to Dr. Blanke's direction. We all knew that the group on the left had been selected to die; those who looked sick or were too weak to run fast were sent there. Some of them, knowing what it meant, made believe they had misunderstood Dr. Blanke and tried to sneak over to the “healthy” group on the right, but the SS and the Kapos drove them back.
I stood and watched this scene with a grim fascination, thinking, “What an unbelievable spectacle: Dr. Blanke in his big white fur coat, standing there like an impresario conducting an audition, and twenty thousand naked prisoners running past him so he can choose in the blink of an eye who will live and who will die.” I was very conscious of the fact that I was eyewitness to a unique event. Here we were in the twentieth century, and a supposedly civilized
nation was doing this. I thought, “This makes Nero, the Roman Colosseum, the Christians, and the wild beasts look like a dull show.” It's hard to convey the visual impact of twenty thousand naked men, and a single person the master of all these lives.
When they saw me naked, my brothers were afraid I wouldn't pass the selection. At the best of times my legs are long and thin; now I weighed only about a hundred ten pounds, and my legs looked alarmingly skinny. My brothers urged me to keep an upright posture, run fast, and try to impress Dr. Blanke with my physical condition. In spite of their fears I wasn't scared, because I felt physically well. When my turn came, I ran fast, like a sprinter, my chest out, and I passed the life-and-death test. It was a huge relief, though, because one could never be sure. The spectacle went on for hours. About fifteen hundred prisoners were selected to die. A few among the “survivors” had family who were sent to the left, and some of the survivors asked to join them, a request the SS generously granted. Those selected to die sometimes tried to dissuade their loved ones from sacrificing their lives, but usually failed.
After the selection, the rest of us were ordered to get dressed and form our work commandos; the selected group stayed behind. At the end of the day we learned that they had been shipped in cattle cars to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
A few days later we finished work at the hospital construction site, and I was assigned to a work detail that was planting vegetables on a nearby SS farm. To my distress Fehringer was the Kapo of our group, but except for an occasional outburst he wasn't as bad as when he was in the barracks. From time to time he would disappear with his girlfriend, an SS woman who was one of our supervisors, and perhaps this put him in a better mood. It was early June now, and the weather was pleasant. Even though we were forced to work nonstop, I preferred the field work to the construction job.
During the lunch break on June 6, I noticed our SS supervisors talking excitedly. In the afternoon one of the truck drivers making deliveries to the farm told one of the prisoners that the Allies had landed in France. The word spread quickly, and I could scarcely contain my joy. We talked of nothing else through the rest of the day, and all evening after the Appel. At last, after so many years of suffering, Western civilization was coming to our rescue.
Now Hitler and his armies were doomed, trapped between the jaws of a gigantic nutcracker, the victorious Russians driving from the east, the fresh Allied armies pushing through from the west. We tried to estimate how long it would take them to crush the Nazis. I was the optimist, and thought perhaps it would be only a matter of weeks, but even the most pessimistic among us expected the war to be over before the end of 1944. We also debated the possibility that the Wehrmacht itself might get rid of Hitler and sue for peace. About that the pessimists were dubious: “The stupid Germans will follow Hitler right down to the bitter end. And anyway, how would that help us? Do you think they'd just hand us over to the Allies to be witnesses against them?” It was hard to dispute their logic, but somehow they couldn't shake my faith. There was always room for the unpredictable, a stroke of luck; hadn't my brothers and I already defied the most incredible odds against us? I felt that there was a chance that somehow, under the pressure of events, things might get out of control to create the kind of conditions that would enable us to survive.
I was so excited I couldn't get to sleep for hours that night. I tried to remember the map of France and visualize where the landings were taking place. Dunkirk would be ideal, perfect poetic justice! But probably the coastline so close to England would be too heavily fortified for the Allies to effect a landing. Yet perhaps, with the bulk of Hitler's armies occupied in trying to stem the Russian advance,
they wouldn't offer much resistance anywhere in the west. And once the Allies landed, their overwhelming superiority in the air would protect them. Thus happily engaged in playing commander in chief of the Allied armies, I finally fell asleep.
The very next morning, June 7, we were standing on the Appelplatz when there was an announcement that all prisoners who belonged to the “chemist and scientist group” were to report immediately to the main office of the camp. This of course aroused both excitement and dread among us. By then we had become convinced that even if the Germans had indeed at one time been planning to make some use of a special scientific commando, they had been forced to abandon the plan, whatever it was, in the face of the onrushing Russians and the new threat from the west. What other explanation could there be for their actions, first singling us out as a special group in Budzy
Å
, then sending us to Majdanek for no discernible purpose, mingling with us hundreds of Jews from Radom, then shipping us by cattle car to PÅaszów, where for almost two months they had used us in a variety of unimportant labor commandos?
As we assembled outside the camp office, we tried to prepare ourselves for what they might ask, and rehearsed the information we had originally given the SS concerning our “education” and “experience.” I was eager to get the impending interrogation behind us so that the commando could start functioning. I was weary of physical labor, for I was steadily losing weight and growing weaker. If we were assigned to something less physical, our chances for survival would improve.
Soon they started summoning people from the head of the line into the office. A few really were specialists, and obviously they were the least apprehensive about the interview. For the rest of us, the moment of truth was near. There were fifteen or twenty new people among us in addition to the original Budzy
Å
group,
I noticed; apparently the SS had recruited “specialists” from other camps as well. I stood almost at the end of the line, hoping to gather clues as to what was going on from the people ahead of me after they had finished their interviews. To my enormous relief, most of them were coming out of the office smiling. Fred was ahead of me in the line, and when he came back he told me that after reviewing his “education in chemistry,” they asked him only one question: “How many legs does a fly have?” Fortunately he knew the answer: six. I had always thought it was eight, but then I had never claimed to be a chemist; I was a mathematician. Felek and Sam returned to say they had had only to repeat the details of their “educational background,” and were asked no other questions.
When my turn came, I went in and saw three civilians seated behind a table. They were very polite. One of them asked me whether I was familiar with calculators. “Oh yes, I used them a lot at school,” I lied. “I'm sure I would have no trouble handling them.” I had conditioned myself beforehand to speak confidently, no matter what they asked me. The interviewer smiled at me and made a note of my reply. “Is that all?” I asked. He nodded and I left. I felt tremendously relieved: I had passed!
After they had questioned us all, we compared notes. They had told some of us that soon they would have a place ready for us to work in. We didn't go out to work that morning, and spent the rest of the day in endless discussions about the significance of it all. The critical thing was that we seemed to have passed the screeningâif indeed one could call it that. Had the Germans questioned us in any depth, they would have immediately discovered that virtually all of us were frauds. Talking among themselves, they had referred to each other as “Herr Professor,” so apparently they were genuinely educated men with degrees in the fields in which we claimed to be expert. Had they wanted to find out what we did or did not know,
they could easily have done so; it was clear that they didn't want to know. They wanted the “Chemiker” group (as we began to call it) to start functioning regardless of what our qualifications were.
Now, why were they so interested in creating this commando, and how would it affect our future? They had offered few clues as to what kind of work we would be doing, or where. But it was now obvious that this Chemiker Kommando would indeed play a decisive role in our struggle to survive. It was beginning to look as if my rash act of registering my family for it might turn out to have been the right decision after allâwhich was a load off my mind.
The next couple of days were filled with anxious anticipation, with one distracting event. About that time a transport of thousands of young Hungarian Jewish women arrived in Budzy
Å
. Some were kept in a barracks next to ours, separated by a single row of barbed wire. After the Appel people on our side of the fence were talking to the women, who were all young, with shaven heads. They wore weird, shapeless garments made of what looked like flour sacks, with slits for the head and arms. But even without hair and in that getup, many of them still looked comely. They were very frightened, and anxious for any information as to what they could expect.
This was the first time I had ever heard Hungarian spoken. Since I knew several languages, I thought I might be able to understand a little of what they were saying, but I soon found that Hungarian bore no resemblance whatsoever to any other language I was familiar with. One of the girls spoke a few words of French, so I tried to communicate with her. Even bald, she was stunningly beautiful, with large dark eyes, perfect skin the color of a peach, and the loveliest facial features I had ever seen. I asked her about her family, and she told me her younger sister was with her, indicating the girl standing next to her. I then inquired about her parents. She said something I couldn't understand, but she looked sad and two large tears rolled
down her cheeks. It was very frustrating not to be able to understand each other, but I tried to sound as encouraging as possible. Then suddenly an SS woman carrying a whip appeared and started hitting the girls, and the two sisters ran away with the others.
Seeing these women made me very sad. They all looked so young and healthy, and many of them were extraordinarily pretty; now I could appreciate how well deserved was the reputation of Hungarian women for beauty. But it was heartbreaking to see these innocent young girls so frightened, lost in a strange country, humiliated, beaten, and completely at the mercy of the brutal SS. For many days and nights I was haunted by the image of that girl with the tears rolling down her cheeks and animal terror in her eyes. Over the next few days I kept looking for her through the barbed wire, but I never saw her again. A week or so later they were gone. We were told they had all been shipped to Auschwitz.
About June 10 the Chemiker Kommando finally became a reality. After the Appel that morning we were ordered to form a separate group and were marched out through the gate, full of curiosity and anticipation. Our curiosity was soon satisfied. We were taken to a barracks very near the camp. Inside waiting for us were the German civilians who had interviewed us. They separated us into three groups. Sam, myself, and six others were “mathematicians”; Felek, Fred, Bencio, Richie, and perhaps twenty or so others were in the “chemist” group, and the rest were the “engineers and inventors.”