Measure of a Man (7 page)

My luck was short-lived. “What are you doing?” a voice yelled.

I whipped my head around toward the door. A gorgeous, smartly dressed blond woman holding a baby stood silhouetted in the doorframe. It was the mayor of Weimar’s wife.

“I . . . I found your rabbits!” I stammered with a cheerful nervousness. “They’re alive and safe!”

“Why in the
hell
are you stealing my rabbits’ food?” barked the woman. “Animal!” I stood silent and stared at the floor.

“I’m reporting this immediately!” she said, stomping away. My heart pounded in my emaciated chest. A few minutes later, an SS soldier ordered me to come out of the cellar. I knew what was coming, and the knowing made it all the worse.

“Down on the ground, you dog! Fast!” yelled the German. He gripped his baton and bludgeoned my back. I do not know whether the mayor’s wife watched the beating. Given her cruelty, why would she want to miss it? On the hike back to Buchenwald, I replayed the scene over and over in my mind.

How could a woman carrying her own child find a walking skeleton saving her pets and have him beaten for nibbling on rotten animal food?
I thought.

In that moment my numbness to death melted. In its place rose an alien bloodlust, a hunger for vengeance unlike any I had ever known. The surge of adrenaline and rush of rage felt good inside my withered frame. Then and there I made a vow to myself: if I survived Buchenwald, I would return and kill the mayor’s wife.

Angular piles of bones wrapped in leathery skin cropped up around camp. The first time I saw a mound of corpses in Buchenwald, I stood and scanned the pile in search of my father. Rats scurried among the tangle of limbs while feasting on the rotting flesh. The Germans worried the rodents might infect the soldiers with diseases, so they dumped the bodies in mass graves near the Bismarck Tower.

In March and early April, the word spread among the prisoners that liberation was near. Respected block leaders confirmed the reports, but rumors about Hitler’s final plans for our extermination tempered our excitement. “The Germans are planning to drop bombs over Buchenwald. They will kill us off and destroy evidence of war crimes,” I heard an older inmate say. “They will never let us make it out alive. We’re all going to die if we don’t mount an uprising.”

“The camp is mined!” another warned. “They’re going to blow us up minutes before the Americans arrive to free us!”

“I heard they have prisoners digging mass graves to bury us in,” said another.

Everyone was frazzled and afraid. I didn’t know whom or what to believe. All I knew was that I hadn’t made it this far to be killed days or hours before regaining my freedom. I resolved to do whatever it took to stay alive.

In early April, prisoners swapped barracks, exchanged names with other prisoners, and wreaked all manner of havoc at night in an effort to confuse the soldiers at roll call. The idea was to run out the clock before the Nazis could march us off to mass graves. Then, on April 4, something happened that I never thought I’d see. We stiffened our spines. When the voice came over the loudspeakers ordering all Jews to report for roll call, not a single prisoner went. The underground resistance had determined that the Nazis planned to machine-gun Jews on the
Appelplatz
.

I expected the Nazis to inflict brutal punishment following the stand down. In a sense, they did. They stopped supplying our daily food rations and began evacuations two days later. But what I did not know—what only a handful of us knew—was that one of the underground prisoner organizations had forged a letter from the Americans and delivered it to the commandant of Buchenwald, Hermann Pister. The phony letter promised leniency for Pister if he delivered us to the Americans without inflicting further atrocities against us. Instead of gunning us down, Pister evacuated prisoners in waves.

I’d survived one death march. I refused to go on another. I learned there was a Czech barrack nearby. The Czechs let me mix in with them. On April 6, the Germans sent three thousand inmates marching out of Buchenwald. The next day seven thousand were
evacuated. On April 9, nearly five thousand prisoners were sent on a transport, and over nine thousand left the next day.

All the activity reminded me of an earlier conversation with an older prisoner, who had pulled me aside and whispered in my ear. “You’ve worked in the munitions factory, yes?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“The underground needs a special weapons part from that facility,” he said. “You are in that building. Perhaps you could get it.”

I told him I knew nothing about weapons parts and probably wasn’t the best person for the job, but I would look around and see what I could do. “I can’t promise anything,” I stressed.

“That’s fine. Just look for it, and let us know if you see anything or know anyone who could get their hands on it.”

I had heard about the underground prisoner resistance from older inmates but knew very few details. Word was that they had a cache of stolen German guns ready for a prisoner uprising.

April 11, 1945, was the day of my rebirth.

I awoke to the din of prisoners racing between barracks. “Get up! It’s happening! Today is the day!” someone said. I crawled out of my sleeping rack and bounded to the floor before pulling on my prisoner pants and wooden shoes. I huddled behind the other prisoners peering out our barrack doors.

Buchenwald was bedlam. Prisoners were running in every direction as the remaining German soldiers scrambled to prepare their retreat. Commandant Pister and many other SS had already
fled. Around ten o’clock a voice over the loudspeaker ordered, “All members of the SS leave the camp immediately!”

A roar rolled through the barracks. Members of the underground prisoner resistance frantically handed out the modest collection of smuggled machine guns and weapons to block elders, and the children were ordered to stay inside the barracks. We found out later that a Russian officer and fellow prisoner had organized the uprising that took the SS officers off the watchtower and helped free us.

Around eleven o’clock on the morning of the eleventh, we heard the sweet sounds of tanks from General George S. Patton’s Third Army pummeling the Nazis in the distance. The blasts grew louder and louder, our hearts fuller and fuller.

I walked to the barrack door and looked out at the frenetic blur. Nazis ran in search of a life-saving change of clothes—clothes that would camouflage their bestial depravity. A well-known and dedicated SS sadist sprinted past me wearing a Russian uniform he’d raided from a Russian POW. Other soldiers shot prisoners for the striped wardrobe of oppression they made us wear. They hoped the rags would spare them from the gallows as war criminals.

The shirt!
I said to myself. I ran back to my rack and took off the soldier’s shirt I’d worn religiously under my striped prisoner uniform. The shirt had now lost its power. Not even the Nazis would wear it.

I could hear the American tanks rumble as the concussions from the gun blasts echoed off the barrack walls. Nazi machine guns returned fire. I sat in my rack and prayed a simple prayer. “God, please let the Americans win. Please, God. Please,” I prayed.

God answered my prayer around 2:30 that afternoon. The American tanks from the Sixth Armored Division reached the SS military barracks. At precisely 3:15 p.m., the white flag of surrender flew over Buchenwald. Ours was the first camp the Americans liberated. But the euphoric cries ringing across Buchenwald were muted by the extreme hunger we were suffering after nearly six days without food.

Roughly twenty-one thousand prisoners remained on liberation day. Eight hundred fifty of them were children like Elie Wiesel and me. I remember seeing Elie at Buchenwald and thinking he was the skinniest kid I ever saw. I was a bag of bones, too. But at least we were teenagers. When the Americans arrived to take care of us children, to their utter shock, they found among the inmates a three-year-old boy.

Food came quickly. So did the sickness. Our emaciated bodies and withered organs couldn’t handle the shock of food. People became severely ill from eating too much too fast. The American doctors examined my symptoms, tended my wounds, and placed me on a special diet designed for my smaller frame. Whatever the Americans told me to eat, I ate. Whatever they said to avoid, I avoided. I trusted them completely. How could I not? They were Americans. They saved me.

Peace and gratitude came over me the minute I laid eyes on the American soldiers. The skeletons and stench mortified the GIs. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Their uniforms, their composure, their compassion—I loved them, wanted to be one of them.

The next day, April 12, my future client and hero forever, Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower,
rolled into Buchenwald at the nearby subcamp of Ohrdruf near Gotha. Eisenhower was ten feet tall in my mind. He is still. Ike brought General Omar Bradley and General George S. Patton along with him to see the nightmare firsthand. They saw the starved prisoners hobbling on pipe-stem legs. They saw the bodies charred on Ohrdruf’s pyre. They unlatched a door and surveyed a room stacked high with rotting corpses. Actually, that was one sight General Patton did not see. As Eisenhower wrote to General George Marshall a few days later:

         
The things I saw beggar description. . . . The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where [there] were piled up twenty to thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give
first hand
evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”

Ike toured the human ruins. He ordered every soldier in the area not on the front lines to do the same. “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for,” said Eisenhower. “Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting
against
.” During his walk through the camp, Eisenhower turned to a GI and said, “Still having trouble hating [the Nazis]?”

Later, Patton informed Ike that the mayor of Gotha and his wife hanged themselves after touring the Ohrdruf concentration camp. “Maybe there is hope after all,” quipped Eisenhower.

Wisely, the general displayed Buchenwald to the world. He designed an aggressive publicity offensive to prevent the Germans and others from averting their eyes in denial. Soon the Americans had German civilians touring the camps, smelling the bodies, walking through the death chambers, and digging mass graves to bury the Shoah dead.

The Germans touring Buchenwald looked at us like zoo animals. Some women bore pained faces and shed tears. Others held their hands over their mouths and noses to guard themselves from breathing in our stench and germs. Many Germans feigned shock and surprise at the mounds of corpses that piled up when the crematoria ran out of coal. And perhaps some genuinely were surprised by the
depths
of depravity to which the SS had descended. But I will go to my grave believing that the many who lived in and around the camps knew what Hitler and his henchmen were up to. How could they not? From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany created twenty thousand camps of all kinds, including transit camps, forced-labor camps, and extermination camps. Companies bought us as slave labor. We were hauled in trains across the countryside. We were beaten and killed on labor sites outside the camps. And it took tens of thousands of Nazis to run the death machine—tens of thousands of Nazis who were genocidal monsters by day, family men by night. By 1945, 6,297 members of the SS and 532 female guards worked at Buchenwald alone.