Measure of a Man (10 page)
My traveling companion was scared to death. We skivvied off the soldier’s jacket. I put it on. Instantly, I became a Russian soldier. My friend was beside himself. We slid the Russian down on the ground and shoved him under the seat bench inside the compartment. I sat in his vacant seat and pretended to be him. When someone saluted me, I saluted back. The uniform’s power amazed me.
“We have to jump off this train,” Willie pleaded. “They’re going to find out what we did.” We slid the Russian out from under the bench. My friend re-dressed him while I put my clothes back on. Every time the soldier stirred, I knocked him out again.
Back at our makeshift home base, we met four Jewish girls. They, like us, were survivors and parentless. They gave me hope that, however improbably, some young girls—girls like my sisters—had survived the Shoah. By now I knew that going to the left at Auschwitz meant being gassed and burned in the ovens. Still, the girls’ presence lifted my hopes.
We bragged to the girls about our booming import-export business and said they should travel with us so we could keep them safe. That wasn’t just a pick-up line. Russian soldiers were notorious for raping girls traveling alone on trains. We had heard it happen several times even in broad daylight. The Russians didn’t care. The screaming, the struggling—it was horrible. We would not let our girls be traumatized yet again.
Protecting our girls felt good. They were fun and sweet. We would flirt, kiss, and distract one another from our grim reality. To us, life was an adventure. We weren’t afraid to take risks. What did we have to lose that we hadn’t lost already? We were poor but proud. When something good happened for one of us, we shared the spoils. Like the time one of the boys in our group secured a calf from a farm. That night we made a family feast. I knew how to skin and butcher a calf from my days in Pavlovo, and the girls knew how to cook it. We dined like kings and queens and thought it the best veal money could buy.
One of the girls in our group was named Magda. She and I shared a birthday and a hometown, and I felt a certain kinship with her. On one train ride, I saw a Russian soldier take a liking to Magda. Another boy from our group nudged me and snapped his head over in their direction. We stared intently and watched them talk. The Russian seemed sincere. We walked over to assess the situation.
Magda’s eyes let me know she felt uncomfortable, that the Russian was coming on too strong and that she needed help. We engaged in small talk for a while. The Russian proceeded to declare his undying love for Magda, a total stranger he had only met a couple of hours before.
“That’s wonderful,” I said. “When we arrive you can meet Magda’s father and mother and ask for her hand in marriage,” I joked. The Russian didn’t get the joke.
“That would be lovely,” he said. “I’d like that very much.” Magda shot me dagger eyes. I knew the train system extremely well. When the train stopped, we ditched the Russian Romeo and never saw him again.
Business was humming. Even though selling cigarettes out of suitcases was not my long-term goal, I was young and free again. I was also in my home country of Czechoslovakia, based in a camp at Teplice-Sanov. The connection to my roots felt good, kept me grounded, and drew my focus away from news of my father’s death.
That is, until the Russian Communists began making their moves on Czechoslovakia. You must remember that during this
time Czechoslovakia was the last democratic country in Eastern Europe. We even had good relations with the Russians because they had liberated us. But things were changing—and fast. Communists had infiltrated top government posts and were making rapid gains. I had seen the slow creep of evil once before. I wasn’t about to stick around to see my freedom and property die a second death. Sharing with one’s neighbors out of free choice was one’s right. But government seizure of one’s wages and property for the purposes of redistribution of wealth at the barrel of a gun was tyranny. I wanted none of it.
As much as it pained me to do so, I made plans in the fall of 1946 to leave my homeland to escape the looming Soviet takeover. As it turned out, I planned my exodus at just the right time. In the May 1946 elections, the Communists won 38 percent of the vote. In 1948, Czechoslovakia fell into forty years of deadly Communist rule.
My plan was simple: pack the few things I owned and run away. Specifically, I would try to sneak across the Czech-German border and get to the large Gabersee DP camp near Wasserberg, Germany, located in the American occupation zone. I felt safe with the Americans. The trouble was sneaking back into the country responsible for murdering my family. The first time I tried to enter Germany, the German border guards stopped me. I got testy with the officer. When he grabbed my arm to escort me away, I became unhinged and caused a spectacle.
“You cannot touch me! Never again!” I hollered at the top of my lungs. “Shoot me, but do not touch me. Never again can you touch me! No German will ever arrest me again!” The German officer was stunned.
That night I slept in Czechoslovakia near the border. The next evening I successfully snuck into Germany by running through the forest. I headed straight to the relatively new Gabersee DP camp. I made the camp my home. Speaking with the older Jewish men about religion and Israel reinvigorated my faith. I realized God must have a plan for my life, a reason for saving me from the ovens. I contemplated traveling to Israel to find my extended relatives, and joining the
Aliyah Bet
, the clandestine operation to smuggle persecuted Jews into Palestine. I even joined a
kibbutz
, a Jewish agrarian commune. It didn’t go so well. When they told me we had to share everything with each other, including our clothes, I protested. “No, I don’t share my clothes with anybody!” I told them. They made a special exception and allowed me to keep and wear my own clothes. Still, the fit wasn’t right. I was too stubborn and independent to make a good
kibbutznik
.
I was seeking God, yearning for an answer to the questions I had asked Rabbi Schacter at Buchenwald: Where was God? How could He love me and let me go through such pain and loss?
Throughout my life I had heard that everything happens for a reason, that God’s ways were mysterious but purposeful. I believed that. But something I read decades after my showdown at the mayor of Weimar’s house proved to me that in the end, in this life or the one after, God ultimately achieves justice. A friend shared with me an article from a 1945 issue of
Life
magazine about Nazi suicides following the war. Here is a portion of what it said: “In the last days of the war the overwhelming realization of utter defeat was too much for many Germans. Stripped of the bayonets and bombast which had given them power, they could not face a reckoning with either their conquerors or their consciences. These
found the quickest and surest escape in what Germans call
Selbstmord
, self-murder. . . . In Hitler’s Reich, Germans stopped killing others and began killing themselves. In Weimar the mayor and his wife, after seeing Buchenwald atrocities, slashed their wrists.”
That day at the mayor’s home, God pricked my conscience. In so doing He spared me the guilt and shame of killing the mayor of Weimar’s wife. I didn’t need to kill her. She did it for me.
E
nvisioning a future was an indulgence I had not allowed myself since my family’s capture. Despite all odds, I had made friends and survived by running cigarettes. But the weight of my father’s death prompted me to take a break from traveling and trading. The Gabersee DP camp in Wasserburg, Germany, became my home for six months. We played cards and soccer, met girls, and spent time getting to know new camp visitors. There were no work requirements. If you wanted to work, you worked. If you wanted to do nothing, you did nothing. I liked to work. My modestly successful business and expanding wardrobe boosted my self-confidence. At Auschwitz and Buchenwald, I’d worked thirteen-hour days without pay in deplorable conditions, interrupted only by the occasional beating. Now I worked
because I wanted to. Better still, the government did not confiscate my possessions and the fruits of my labors. Earning and keeping my own money empowered me to help myself and others.
During my time off from black-market trading, I worked as a mechanic with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) area team’s motor pool, maintaining engines and vehicles as needed. I always enjoyed the challenge of working with my hands and making things better than I found them.
Still, somewhere along the way I decided that military service to one’s country was the surest pathway to manhood. That belief intensified after I learned of my father’s murder. I wanted the discipline and camaraderie that came through service to something bigger than oneself. With my short run in the Czech army completed, I searched for another way to give back. Others had died on the battlefields and in the gas chambers. My conscience would not permit me to sit on the sidelines of history.
One day at Gabersee, an older Jewish man told me about the
Aliyah Bet
. The Hebrew word “Aliyah” means “immigration.” “Bet” is the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The man explained to me that Jews were engaged in a covert “second immigration.” The British, who controlled Palestine, had allied themselves with the Arabs to stop Holocaust survivors from going to the Jewish homeland. He said Jewish volunteers had launched a secret mission to smuggle Jewish refugees and survivors into Palestine. An underground network called the
Brihah
(“flight” in Hebrew) helped move Jews from DP camps in Germany, Austria, Italy, and elsewhere to port cities in places like Italy, France, and Greece. There, the refugees boarded boats bound for the homeland.
The Americans supported the effort and devoted 10 ships manned with 250 American veterans who had volunteered to help transport Jewish Holocaust survivors from Europe across the Mediterranean Sea. Holocaust survivors attempting to enter Palestine and intercepted by the British went to internment camps.
That was all I needed to hear. “How can I help?” I asked. The man smiled.
“Well,” he said gently, “you’re probably a little too young to help with something like this.”
“I’m eighteen right now and will be nineteen in August. I served in the Czechoslovakian army. I survived the Nazis and the concentration camps. I can help,” I said.
“What skills do you have?” he asked, only slightly less skeptical.
“I am an auto mechanic for the UNRRA motor pool,” I said.
“Do you know how to drive?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said. “I’ve driven all kinds of vehicles.”
“What about a large truck?”