Once We Were Brothers (16 page)

“I hide behind the garbage cans until later that night when I see Otto drive up and stop his car. I dash out and slide into the passenger’s seat. ‘You’ve got to go to Grandpa Yaakov’s and get her rings. Dr. Weissbaum will say he found them in the house.’

“Otto shakes his head. ‘That won’t work. Dr. Frank will know he’s lying – that the rings were never lost. He’ll take the rings and then he’ll imprison the Weissbaums.’

“‘What can we do? We have to rescue her.’

“Again Otto shakes his head. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’

“‘I don’t believe what I’m hearing! This is Hannah’s mother! You’re a big shot. You can go anywhere you want. You can release her.’

“Otto won’t look at me. He stares straight ahead, through the windshield onto the darkened street. He is dressed in his spotless Nazi uniform and his cap with its gold braiding. ‘And what would I say to Dr. Frank? How do you propose I persuade him to release a Jew, especially one that he’s arrested for dishonesty?’

“‘You have to try. You have to find a reason.’

“‘No. If she’s still alive, I’ll try to get her assigned to a work detail. Maybe afterward she can return home.’ He turns his head to me. ‘It’s always dangerous to lie to these people, Ben. They’re very sharp.’

“‘What are you talking about?’ I shout. ‘You’re the one who told us to hide our most valuable possessions. It was
you
that suggested it.’

“‘I didn’t tell her to hide her wedding rings; that was stupid.’

“That’s all I can take. I bolt from the car. It’s well after curfew, but I don’t care. I slam the door and walk all the way home in plain sight. As I approach the house, I see Hannah and her father waiting in the window. Hannah bursts out the door, jumps down the steps and grabs me by the shoulders. ‘What did Otto say?’

“‘I don’t know if Otto will help us. He doesn’t know where she is and he’s afraid to confront Dr. Frank.’

“‘Why? Why is he afraid, he’s one of them.’

“I nod. ‘That’s why.’

“‘What can we do? We have to help my mother.’

“‘Otto said he’d look into where they took her, try to get her on a work detail and bring her home.’

“We wait for two days without any word. My father tries to locate her through the Judenrat, asking for a conference with Dr. Frank or any of his officers, but he doesn’t get anywhere. Hannah’s father reaches out to his former patients, many of whom are not Jewish and have greater mobility, but he is equally unsuccessful. Hannah stays with us. We try to comfort her and give her hope.

“Finally, we receive a message to meet Otto at the park. Hannah, Beka and I meet him early the next morning.

“‘I’m afraid I’ve had no luck,’ Otto says. ‘Dr. Frank has returned to Berlin and no one seems to know what happened to Mrs. Weissbaum. You understand, I can’t appear to be too concerned or they’ll suspect me of befriending Jews.’

“‘Won’t you please contact Dr. Frank in Berlin?’ Hannah begs. ‘Can’t you tell him that you need to talk to my mother about something important – that she has vital secret information or something?’

“‘Are you serious? Dr. Frank is the Governor-General of all of Poland. Are you suggesting that I contact him in Berlin and bother him about some Jewish woman he arrested for concealing valuable property belonging to the Reich? And what kind of vital information, Hannah? What sense does that make? Why, right now Dr. Frank could be meeting with the Fuhrer. What would they think of me?’

“‘Otto, who cares what the Nazis think? We’re talking about Hannah’s mother,’ I say. ‘Have you forgotten who you are?’

“‘I can’t risk it, Ben. I’ve done what I could. She’s not in Zamość.’

“‘Where could she be?’ cries Hannah.

“Otto just shakes his head. ‘I gotta go. I’ll keep my eyes open. If I find out anything I’ll contact you.’”

“Was Mrs. Weissbaum ever found, Ben?” Catherine said.

“Nope. Never found.” He took a sip of tea.

“From then on we saw less and less of Otto. He was becoming quite the partygoer. We’d hear reports of him boozed up with other young Nazis, sometimes with his arm wrapped around some blonde groupie. Ilse made sure he was promoted up the ladder and that he got all the benefits.”

“What about your early morning meetings at the park?” Catherine said. “Did he stop meeting with you?”

“He joked that it was hard for him to get up so early, that it was important for his career to socialize with the other officers late into the evening and he had to sleep off his hangovers and clear his head for the next evening’s revelries. Even so, every now and again he’d meet us at the park and give us a bag of food. ‘How’s everybody holding up?’ he’d say.

“‘We’re making it,’ we’d tell him, but to be truthful, the situation was deteriorating badly throughout the summer and fall of 1940. There were no jobs, no money, restrictions on every movement and constant German brutality in the streets.

“In June, the Judenrat was ordered to conduct a public registration of all males between the ages of 14 to 60 for special work details. The registration took place in the town square and as usual, Otto and his superiors were there to supervise. There were over two thousand men selected and we were marched to the town of Janowice, several miles away. Upon arrival, five hundred were chosen and sent directly to Wysokie, ten miles further. Those five hundred men and boys were never seen again. The rest of us were sent back to town.

“Almost daily, Otto requisitioned workers through the Judenrat to be sent to labor camps the Germans were building, some near Lublin, some to the east. Most of the time, the workers returned in the evening. Sometimes they didn’t. Everyone feared assignment to labor details, but if you didn’t show up, the Nazis would take two, sometimes three members of your family and send them in your place or publicly execute them.”

“Were you or your father assigned to these details?”

“Because he was on the Judenrat, Father was spared from the work details and remained in the town. Otto avoided sending me on assignments to distant labor camps, but there came a time in late summer when he met me in the park and told me that I would have to go. Some of his Nazi cohorts were pressuring him.

“‘There’s talk about my favoring the Solomons,’ he said. ‘In order to maintain credibility and protect the rest of the family, I’ve got to send you out.’

“‘I understand,’ I said.

“‘The detail is temporary and scheduled to return to Zamość in a couple of weeks. You’ll be chosen tomorrow.’

“The next morning I was sent with one hundred fifty men to a construction site near Janowice, in a clearing on the edge of the forest. Long wooden buildings that resembled horse stables had recently been built and we were housed forty to a building. We slept on the floor. They didn’t even provide the hay. Our daily rations were a piece of meat, a loaf of bread, a cup of tasteless water soup and one cup of something brown they called coffee. The Judenrat tried to send shipments of food to the work details but their requests were repeatedly denied.”

“What work were you sent to do?” Catherine said.

“We built stables and riding paths for the SS. We cleared trails through the forest. We constructed fences and outdoor corrals. We worked on jumping and show rings. All those structures essential to the German war effort.

“We had been there about two weeks, when we were rousted out of our sleep in the middle of the night and told to line up in the field. The SS commandant, a brutal man named Dolf, walked up and down the line, pulling men out to send to work at Belzec.”

“Why do I know the name Belzec?” Catherine said.

“It was to become one of the most ghastly of the death camps. Located in the forest between Zamość and Lublin, along the railroad line, Belzec’s sole purpose would be extermination. It was not intended to be a prison camp, so there were very few barracks constructed to house inmates. There was housing for the SS officers and there was housing for the Kapos.”

“Kapos. They were guards, right?”

Ben nodded. “They were prisoners – some Ukrainian, some Polish, even some Jewish – often brutal men, who were used by the Nazis to police the other prisoners, process the murders and clean out the gas chambers.”

Catherine shivered and took a sip of her coffee.

“Belzec wasn’t operational until 1942, but workers were conscripted to clear the area and construct the site. The night we were rousted out of bed – it must have been three in the morning – Dolf took fifty men. They were loaded onto trucks and immediately driven out. The rest of us returned to our huts and slept. Our work detail lasted three weeks and we were marched back to Zamość. Eighty-two of us returned. The fifty taken by Dolf were never seen again. Eighteen never left Janowice. They died there or were kept by the SS to work the stables.

“I returned to my home, filthy from the work and weak from malnutrition. I hadn’t had a bath since I left. Nor a decent meal. My mother declared a holiday and broke out a bottle of wine she’d hidden in the back of the cupboard. There were tears and hugs from my family. It was so good to see Hannah again. And Beka.

“Grandpa Yaakov was there, too. While I was gone, he was ordered to leave his farm, as were other Jewish farmers, and move into the city. My father had found a Catholic family to live at the farm with the understanding that Grandpa Yaakov would return once the war was over, but Grandpa Yaakov was distraught and couldn’t come to terms with leaving his farm.

“‘I’m not hurting anybody,’ he said to me. ‘Why do they care if I live on my farm? I already give them most of the milk and cheese and they take all the grain.’ I, of course, had no answer.

“Having been freed from the ordeal in Janowice, I was glad to return to the warmth of my home and Mother’s good cooking, although the addition of Grandpa Yaakov to our already crowded home presented quite a dilemma for my mother. Grandpa was not just another mouth to feed when we were short of food, or a sleeping area to provide when we were short of beds, but we were running out of breathing room. People need privacy and dignity. These days we’d say they need their space. Overcrowding, even in a spacious home, breeds irritability, and that ran double where Grandpa Yaakov was concerned. He was not a city dweller; he’d lived on a farm all his life with his dogs and his cats and his horses. They were his family.

“Nevertheless, we tried to stay upbeat. We told ourselves that the conditions were temporary, that good would always triumph over evil, that God wouldn’t let this madness go on much longer. We continued to wait for the Allies, listening to the rumors. Soon, we said, Poland will be liberated, the invaders will be repulsed and pre-war life will be restored.

“But truthfully, our hopes were dwindling. Hitler had already rolled into Paris, and he had conquered Denmark, Holland, Sweden and Belgium. Come autumn, we started to talk seriously about escape.

“‘I want you to find Otto,’ Father said one night. ‘Arrange a meeting here at the house.’

“‘I don’t think he’ll come,’ I said.

“‘Tell him that I am insisting upon it, Ben. He’ll respect my wishes.’

“I met Otto in the park early the next morning. He handed me a bag of food and part of last night’s dinner.

“‘Father wants you to come to the house and meet with him,’ I said.

“‘It’s too great a risk, someone might report me. They already accuse me of playing favorites, of being soft on the Jews. Tell him to meet me in the park.’

“‘I think he wants you to meet with the whole family. He said you wouldn’t refuse him if he asked you.’

“Otto took a deep breath. ‘Very well. There’s a rally Wednesday evening and I’m sure everyone will go to the nightclubs afterward. I’ll duck out and stop by the house. I can be there about ten.’

“We gathered all the members of the family and also Hannah and her father. Otto didn’t arrive until eleven and he was nervous when he came in. His black leather coat was pulled up at the collar, covering most of his face. What a difference there was in his expression once he walked into the house. Gone was the smirk of the arrogant Nazi. It was like he felt he didn’t belong anymore, but this was his family, all eight of us, and he hung his head.

“‘We need to talk about getting the family out of Poland,’ Father said.

“Otto shook his head. ‘It’s impossible. First of all, you can’t ride the trains or the busses. They’ll check your papers. Second, I can’t get you a car, and even if I could, there are roadblocks at the entrance to every town. If you don’t have the right papers, they’ll arrest you or worse. Third, where would you go? Russia? Austria? Germany? There are no friendly neighbors. It would only end up getting you and me killed.’

“‘What about getting us forged papers? We’ll take our chances on the train, make our way to Turkey. Ziggy’s in New York now and he’ll sponsor us.’

“Otto pondered the request. ‘I’ll do what I can. I’ll see if it’s possible to doctor travel papers. It might take a while. But I better go now. The crowd will be looking for me.’ He put his black billed cap on his blond hair and pulled his collar up. ‘I’ll get back to you.’”

Catherine interrupted. “It’s late, Ben. Are you getting tired or hungry?”

“Hungry for sure, but I’ve got another hour in me, if you feel like listening.”

“One more hour and we’ll call it a day.”

“Since my father had decided that we were all to leave Poland, we were in a continuous state of readiness. We waited throughout the fall and into the winter for Otto to get our papers and make arrangements for us to leave but there always seemed to be a snag, some reason for another delay. Travel restrictions were changed, or escape routes were being closed.