I Shall Live (42 page)

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In his memoirs Churchill speaks of the later German defeats at Stalingrad and El Alamein, toward the end of 1942, as the turning point of the war. With all due respect to the great man, I disagree. I think the real turning point was the cruel Russian winter of 1941–1942. Until then the German soldiers, buoyed by their victories, had expected the war against the Soviets to be quick and easy. “The Russians are dumb animals,” they said. “They run from us like rabbits. Their planes are being shot down by our Messerschmitts. Their tanks and artillery are pretty good, but no match for ours. The German soldier is invincible. Hitler is right; we should have won World War I. We lost only because we were betrayed.”

Suddenly all this had changed. The Russians were fighting back, and fighting well. They were tougher than the Germans, and more tenacious; they could take the cold. The Germans were not such a superior race after all. This shift in the Germans soldiers' view of their Russian foe was, I believe, decisive. In the great battles that followed—Orel, Kharkov, Stalingrad, Kursk—the Germans became frightened, even demoralized. They began to realize the enormity of what they had gotten into. The huge Russian landmass confronting them looked overwhelming. They were oppressed by a sense of futility, which put them at a critically important psychological disadvantage in the battles to come.

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Churchill wrote in his memoirs that on December 7, 1941, for the first time since the beginning of the war, he had a really good night's sleep. He was certain now of victory.

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For years after the liberation, I felt guilty at not having gone with my parents. But as time passed, I came to see that it would have been a great mistake for us to remain with them. They suffered a terrible death, but they died knowing that we had gotten out and been given another chance at life. Mother's last cry to Fred, “Save the children!” showed she thought there was some hope for us. Father too, especially in the last few months of his life, had worried only about us and not at all about himself. It would have been unbearable for them to watch the murder of their five children.

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I have to admit that I got hold of the document not as a result of laborious research but by sheer accident. Recently Dr. Gotz Aly, a fellow historian, came from West Germany to see me at YIVO and asked me to read his study on Helmut Meinhold, a former Nazi staff worker of the
Institut fur Deutsche Ostarbeit
in Cracow and author of many anti-Jewish and anti-Polish pamphlets, and who, after the war, became the main scholarly adviser both to the government and parliament of the German Federal Republic. In his study, Dr. Aly quoted a few documents, one of which immediately caught my eye. I read it and it turned out to be Koppe's letter to Himmler.

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I was not particularly religious before the war, still less so during the Holocaust. But many years later I came to believe in God. Nevertheless, although my Jewish identity is very strong, I still don't go to a synagogue or observe the religious holidays. However, I believe that the Creator of this Universe—so perfect in its complexity and harmony, compared with which even the greatest achievements of man seem child's play—could not be fundamentally cruel. The answer then must be that whatever happens to us on earth, however harsh our individual fate, our existence here is part of a great mystery, which we, in this lifetime at least, shall never understand. Since logic is useless here, we must take it on faith that God, who had the power to create the universe and its awe-inspiring phenomena, is also wise and just. The perfection of His Great Design is inconsistent with cruelty and murder. The answer is only to be found in the mystery that lies beyond our reach and which we shall never understand in our lifetime. All we can do is try to follow what we believe to be His will, and that is to be just to one another, and try to help our fellow man.

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My memory of this woman is hazy, and I don't remember the circumstances under which she joined our commando.

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Amon Goeth had used Chilowicz and his underlings to accumulate enormous amounts of diamonds, gold, and other valuables. Chilowicz was using these valuables, which he obtained by searches of the new prisoner arrivals and other means, to secure his position as the Lagerälteste. Goeth was anxious to get rid of Chilowicz before Płaszów was liquidated, by setting him up, as well as his wife and Finkelstein, in a phony “escape plan,” and then making sure that the group was caught and killed. Goeth himself was captured by the Polish authorities, sentenced to death on September 5, 1946, and hanged on September 13, 1946.

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Not until after the war did I learn that in fact sometime late in the summer of 1944 all the concentration camps had been notified that the execution of any prisoner had to be approved by Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. The reason for this we never learned; the most likely explanation is that the Gestapo and SS camp personnel, in order to avoid being sent to the front themselves, needed to keep the camps filled with prisoners.

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Speaking of real scientists, had Hitler's attitude toward Jews been different, it's conceivable that the course and outcome of World War II might have been affected. Jewish scientists in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and other European countries that had fallen into Hitler's hands happened to be in the forefront of nuclear research, which eventually led to the development of the atom bomb. People like Leó Szilárd, Enrico Fermi, Lise Meitner, Edward Teller, and Albert Einstein fled to escape the Nazis' racial policies, and later were very instrumental in the United States becoming the world's first power to make atomic weapons. It's entirely possible that had these very same scientists been working on behalf of Germany, it and not the United States could have been the first nation to have atomic weapons at its disposal. This in turn could have changed history. It's hard to imagine England not seeking some accommodation with Hitler had London and other English cities been destroyed by atomic bombs during the 1941–1945 period.

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I'm sorry to say that when I tried it after liberation, the old magic just wasn't there.

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As I found out after the liberation, it was the Swedish Red Cross that delivered the food packages to us. The Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, who organized the delivery, and a few others, were able to get approval for this mission of mercy from Himmler, who was trying to ingratiate himself to the Western powers, hoping that his cooperation would somehow save his life. Himmler was captured at the end of the war and, realizing that nothing would save him, committed suicide by crushing a cyanide pill in his mouth.

A note of interest: there are several eyewitness stories about Himmler personally observing, through a small window, the suffocation of hundreds of Jews in a gas chamber during his visit to the Auschwitz extermination camp.