Measure of a Man (3 page)
But even if all that had not happened, even if I had not learned mechanical skills in Budapest, sitting there inside Auschwitz, my father would have probably made something up and told the Germans I possessed a trade. It was all part of his plan. Above the gates at Auschwitz was a sign. It read
Arbeit macht frei
(“Work makes you free”). By volunteering my skills as a mechanic, my father protected me. It was his way of marking me for the Germans as a Jew whose skills they could exploit, as one not to be burned.
As soon as my father offered up my skills, two Germans walked toward us to take me away. I then did something I should not have done, something stupid.
I ran.
Why, I do not know. Fences and soldiers were everywhere. Where did I think I was going? I cannot say. But for whatever reason, I ran.
A few paces into my sprint, I heard a barking German shepherd barreling down on me. My arms pumped hard as I stretched my stride and ran faster than I’d ever run before. The barks got louder. I snapped my head back over my shoulder and saw the dog closing in. He leapt and latched his teeth onto my leg. I looked down. The dog hung from my calf. I shoved his head with both hands. He snarled and gnashed violently as I struggled to pry him loose. The dog’s jaw unlocked, taking a meaty chunk with him. Blood spurted on my prisoner uniform, the dog’s mouth—everywhere. I tried not
to cry. Not in front of my father, not in front of the other men and boys.
The two soldiers tromped over to retrieve the dog and make sure he was uninjured. They then snatched me up off the ground and hauled me away from the group. I thought maybe that night I would join my father again, but that did not happen.
That day, my second inside Auschwitz, was the last time I ever saw my father.
The Germans dragged me to the laundry. Whether they wanted me first to perform a simpler task than mechanical work, or whether this was a punishment for trying to flee, I do not know. But after my sprinting stunt, I was eager to show the Germans I was a hard worker who could be of use.
My first job in the camps was washing Nazi uniforms. I knew nothing of the task. In Pavlovo we had a maid who washed all my clothes. Still, I grabbed a brush and an SS soldier’s shirt and scrubbed hard and fast. After working my way about halfway through the pile, it happened. I scrubbed so hard the bristles ripped the collar. The face of the pacing soldier at my station flushed red. I do not remember his words, but I remember his baton. He beat me until I bled. He needed to make an example out of me for the other prisoners. When he was finished with my flogging, he balled up the torn shirt and threw it in my face before huffing off.
The shirt was trash to the soldier but not to me. I kept it. Working in the laundry was a nice man who knew how to sew. He gave me a needle and thread and taught me how to sew a simple stitch.
I mended the shirt. To this day I still don’t know why, but when I got up the courage, I slipped the soldier’s shirt on and wore it under my striped prisoner uniform. It was a crazy thing to do, because none of the other prisoners had a shirt. But I did it anyhow. From that day on, the soldiers treated me a little bit better. They thought I was somebody—someone who mattered, someone not to be killed. The prisoners treated me a little bit better as well. You must remember that some of the
kapos
(supervisors) were Jewish prisoners, but they could be brutal. They wanted to please the Germans, so some of them would be hard on us so the Germans would not punish them. Sometimes the
kapos
were harsher than some of the Germans. When I had my soldier shirt on, however, that did not happen. When I wore the shirt, the
kapos
didn’t mess with me.
The shirt means something
, I thought. And so, I wore the shirt. In fact, I ripped another one on purpose so I could have two.
The day I first wore that shirt was the day I learned clothes possess power. Clothes don’t just “make the man,” they can save the man. They did for me.
Of course, receiving your first tailoring lesson inside a Nazi concentration camp was hardly the ideal apprenticeship. I would have much preferred to hone my craft on Savile Row or in the mills of Milan. Looking back, though, that moment in the camps marked the beginning of the rest of my life. Strangely enough, two ripped Nazi shirts helped this
Jew
build America’s most famous and successful custom-suit company.
God has a wonderful sense of humor.
M
any days inside Auschwitz I was afraid I would die—and then afraid I wouldn’t.
We were surrounded by death and darkness, madness and murder. And the vicious precision and regimented order of the place made the moral insanity all the more bizarre and cruel.
Each morning around 4:30 we were stirred from our sleep, lined up, and counted in a ritual known as roll call. My heart would start jumping in my chest. A Nazi soldier would whirl his baton and scan the line with his eyes while another called out the list of prisoner numbers. Any sign of illness or fatigue was cause for being pulled from the line and sent to the crematorium.
Day and night the ovens burned. The smoke spewed up from the soaring brick chimney and belched the vaporous remnants of
corpses into the air. At night you could see the flames spitting against the blackened sky. Still, no one in the camps talked to me about the crematoria. Whether that was because I was just a boy or because I no longer had a father by my side to speak piercing truths to me, I do not know. But I could smell that something was horribly wrong.
After morning roll call, we were given something approximating black coffee. To be sick or weak was dangerous, so no matter how rancid the gruel or vile the smell, I forced myself to eat. The afternoon slop was usually some sort of soup that frequently had human hair, trash, or dead insects floating in it. Sundown brought black bread mixed with sawdust. Soup made you skinny. Bread made strength. So I ate as much bread as I could scavenge and always tried to cover my wounds with my clothes.
My labor assignment in the laundry lasted several days before I was moved to the sorting room, which housed the confiscated wares of newly arrived prisoners. The space was filled with fifty or so prisoners combing and sifting mountains of clothes, shoes, and other possessions. Sometimes a prisoner stumbled upon a hidden morsel of food folded inside a bag or tucked inside a coat pocket. Prisoners caught trying to sneak a bite were promptly whipped by a
kapo
, who often smuggled the food or ate it himself.
Between the rummaging and sorting, I peeked over and around piles every chance I got in the hopes of spotting a family member. That’s all I wanted: one glimpse, a single fleeting confirmation they were still alive. But it never came. Looking back now I realize that false, cruel wish, like an invisible ladder whose rungs materialized based on hope, compelled me to reach for survival.
The weeks passed and the piles got smaller and smaller until transports of new prisoners slowed to a trickle. The Nazis reassigned me to the bricklaying teams. Allied bombs were busting up brick buildings everywhere, so our services were in high demand. I knew nothing about masonry. A prisoner who served as a team leader stuck a trowel in my one hand and a mortar bucket in the other before walking me to a block of bricks. There I learned the finer points of bricklaying before being put to work.
The work was hard and the days were long, and my wire-thin teenage frame did its best to keep up with the older, stronger men. For some reason, slathering and smoothing the mortar across the faces of the bricks made my thoughts float to Pavlovo and brought back scenes of Grandma Geitel icing freshly baked cakes. Before long I had perfected my ability to detach my mind from my physical form, and my body sped up as my thoughts slowed down.
Even so, no matter how hard we worked, our captors would slay prisoners without provocation.
Killings were frequent and random. One day a boy from my block and I were tasked with building a brick wall. We started just after morning lineup. By late afternoon we had completed a good stretch of the wall and felt a certain pride in our accomplishment. We stacked the bricks higher and higher until the wall stood some five or six feet tall. We talked while working to unclench our minds. A single gunshot rang out, but I didn’t think much of it. The crack of rifle fire and the spraying of machine guns were common, so I kept stacking and talking. I asked the boy a question and got no reply.
I asked again.
Silence.
I swiveled my head in his direction. Several yards away, the boy lay motionless, facedown in the dirt inside an expanding pool of blood. I later learned a Nazi had used the boy for target practice.
At home in Pavlovo—and in most civilizations—a clear moral order structured our daily lives. Hard work, justice, fairness, integrity—these virtues produced predictable fruits. But not in the concentration camps. The Germans killed for any reason or none at all. It was futile to try to discern their logic, because there was none. If a Nazi was angry, he might kill you. If a Nazi was happy, he might kill you. It made no difference.
The dehumanizing randomness of the murders suffocated my sense of hope, just as Hitler and his henchmen had intended. What appeared random was, in fact, not random at all. It was a systematic psychological lynching, a strangling of the human heart’s need to believe in the rewards of goodness, a snapping of the moral hinge on which humanity swings. Soon, and much to my shame, I became anesthetized to death, numb to depravity. Some primal survival switch inside me had been temporarily flicked on that allowed me to submerge the emotions generated by the evil scorching my eyes.
I witnessed dozens of shootings and helped carry scores of corpses. Sometimes a dead body would be intact and appear to be sleeping. Other times a bullet would rip through a prisoner, spilling out organs. Or shatter a skull, exposing chunks of brain. But as the days passed, no matter its condition, a body soon became just a body, a sallow, bloodless, gangling object that must be lugged, heaved atop a pile, or dropped in a hole. At fifteen, I had become an undertaker.
But children even younger than I were plunged into the same abyss. What’s more, I had already learned to survive on my own during my years living in Budapest at the brothel and working as a mechanic. Sometimes I think God used those years as a sort of training ground, a kind of boot camp, to prepare me for my orphaned existence.
Some days inside Auschwitz seemed to evaporate one into another, mornings ebbing into evenings with mind-numbing monotony. Other days brought jarring events that, decades later, still visit me in vivid nightmares. Like the first time another prisoner beat me.