I could tell from Ernie’s delivery that some of his spirit had gone now; he had crossed a threshold. It was as if losing his friend tarnished his own remarkable endurance story; his speech became slower, like he was ticking off the details to get to the end.
The transport left with Ernie on it but the skeletal volunteers were only taken as far as Nordhausen, a camp at the other end of
the same miserable tunnel complex, and he wasn’t much better off. They slept on rows of bunks crammed inside a series of army garages. He guessed there were about 6,000 inmates held in that camp at the time, all trapped within yet another electric fence. The food was just as awful as in the other camps.
It was March, the days were melting into each other and he was losing track of time. He knew by then that the war was going to end but he was wasting away. The prisoners around him were dying rapidly and he feared he wouldn’t live to see his liberation. Of the 6,000 in that camp when he arrived only 1,500 were still alive a few weeks later.
Each day Ernie was ferried into the tunnel in a small train to shift stones, but the work was heavy and slow, they were all weak and even the guards didn’t really care any more. The 1,500 prisoners left towards the end could barely do the work of a hundred healthy men, he said. Then at the end of March the work stopped altogether; it no longer made sense.
The days passed as they waited for the Americans but they never came. The allied bombers were always high up above but heading for targets further a field. Then one day in early April Ernie heard air-raid sirens, though it made little difference to him now, there was nowhere to hide anyway. He heard bombs falling on to the camp, hitting some of the barracks buildings which burst into flames. He heard screaming and saw prisoners running around on fire and he realised they were dropping incendiaries; the burning gel from the bombs was sticking to them. Then he noticed that some of the blasts had damaged the fence around the camp and although the SS were in shelters it looked like quite a lot of them had been killed too. It was still too dangerous to escape.
Ernie’s barracks was one of those still standing, so prisoners from the other blocks came in to shelter and they all huddled together for a night without food, expecting the worst. The next morning they heard sirens again and the prisoners began to panic;
people were racing in all directions. As soon as he got out of the barracks Ernie saw the electrified fence was hanging loose and there was a gaping hole in it. All the SS men he could see were running away as quickly as they could. He saw some of the inmates climbing over the barbed wire and he followed them and once on the other side he began to run.
Then he heard the low drone of planes overhead and bombs being released and still he kept running across the fields as they exploded around him. He turned to see that the camp had been hit. The pilots far above can have had no idea that these military buildings had been turned into a concentration camp not long before. He kept on going until he felt like he had been running forever and then he dropped into a deep furrow near the edge of a forest to catch his breath.
Looking around, he spotted the body of a dead civilian and he guessed from his clothes that he was an Italian who had been killed the night before. The body was dressed in an old army jacket, nondescript trousers and a ‘grotesque hat’ with a visor. Ernie was looking down at it when he realised for the first time that he was free at last.
He rolled the dead man over and struggled to get the clothes off him. ‘There is nothing worse than undressing a dead body,’ he said. Rigor mortis had already set in but he managed to tear off the large trousers and jacket from the corpse and swapped them for his own zebra uniform. He was a civilian again.
As Ernie spoke those words, a smile broke out across his face for the first time in ages. I couldn’t help it, I felt myself smiling with him; I knew what that moment must have felt like.
Now, wearing the stranger’s clothes, he looked around and saw people in the distance but no one was taking any notice of him. The wind was blowing papers around from bundles lying in the field. He thought they would make good toilet paper and picking one up, he saw that it was a leaflet dropped from a plane. He stood in the open and read the words, ‘Germans, throw away your
weapons, the war is over. Surrender. Your Fuhrer has deserted you.’ It was, he said, the most wonderful message he had ever received.
I too had crossed Europe around that time on foot. I knew he was still far from safe and I suspected there would be a couple more twists before Ernie’s story was done and I was right. He walked on through the forest until he came to a country road crammed with German civilians pushing their belongings on prams and anything else with wheels. He guessed they had been bombed out of their homes and he noticed straightaway there were no youthful people amongst them, just old men and women plus mothers with children.
Then he spotted a robust peasant woman pushing her belongings on a wagon of some sort. When she saw his clothes she called him across, thinking he was an Italian. He realised the danger instantly, he couldn’t speak the language but guessed she probably couldn’t either. He had heard Italian spoken in the camps and spluttered something like, ‘Nonparlo.’ She looked at him suspiciously then gestured to him to push the cart and as he took her place, he noticed an enormous loaf of bread sitting on top of her belongings.
Ernie was smiling again describing the size of the bread, holding his hands wide apart like a crazy angler telling of the fish of his dreams. I glanced around the room and saw that Audrey and Rob were grinning with him as they watched him tell this story; we could all guess what was coming. He didn’t keep us waiting. He told how he pushed the cart on for a few minutes until the forest thickened and then he made a dive for the bread, ran for the trees and was gone before she knew what had happened.
He heard her shouting ‘
Dieb! Dieb!
’– ‘Thief! Thief! Get him!’ No one was prepared to chase him through the woods for a loaf of bread, so when he was sure it was safe enough to stop, he sat down and ate the whole lot in one go.
It began to feel like his amazing story was coming to an end
now, he was smiling a lot more and his head was tilted to the side as he remembered with some relief the closing days of the war after all he’d been through. Along the way he met Peter, a man he knew from the camps, who had also escaped, acquired civilian clothing and was making his way along the same country road.
Ernie was still wearing the cap he had taken from the dead Italian and he knew if anyone told him to remove it he was done for, his shaven head would give him away. Peter and he decided to head west to meet the Americans but without any visible sun, neither was sure which direction that was. Eventually they decided the civilians were probably heading in the right direction so they followed the line of the road whilst remaining under the cover of the forest.
‘Halt!’ They stopped dead in their tracks. The order had come from a German soldier who stepped out of the trees. He demanded to know who they were and where they were going and he said they couldn’t go much further as the Americans were coming. They knew they looked emaciated, they were wearing ridiculous outfits and they had no hair. The only advantage they had was that they both spoke fluent German.
They told him they were civilian workers from Nordhausen where they had lost all their clothes in the bombing; what they were wearing was all they had. They had been sent to repair military vehicles at a town up ahead. It was in Ernie’s words a ‘cockamamie story’. Whether he believed them or not, the soldier said he would take them to his senior officer so they had no choice but to go with him. As they marched along he turned to them and asked if they could shoot. ‘Of course,’ Ernie replied, no doubt wondering where it would lead.
They knew the soldier didn’t quite trust them; they spoke German but they were so thin by then they didn’t look like Germans at all. As they got closer to the base, Ernie decided they would have to kill the soldier to save themselves but he couldn’t speak to his friend as the armed man was marching behind them.
Nothing came of it. At least the soldier was Wehrmacht and not SS so that was something but the game would be up as soon as they were ordered to remove their hats.
They arrived at a command post where they were presented to a lieutenant with one arm. The soldier repeated their cover story for them but the officer interrupted before he could finish. ‘Two more men, wonderful,’ he said. ‘I can use two more men.’ He ordered the soldier to get uniforms and guns.
It dawned on Ernie that after years in concentration camps he was going to end the war in a German army uniform, with orders to shoot at his liberators and friends. Before the clothes and weapons arrived the officer asked if they had eaten, they said no and he sent them off to get some soup. They were tucking into their food half an hour later, wondering what to do next, when a soldier ran in shouting, ‘
Feind-alarm, Feind-alarm
’ – enemy alarm. It meant the Americans were almost on top of them.
There was chaos; soldiers were running everywhere, revving up motorcycles and cars outside in the courtyard as the unit prepared to make its escape. Ten minutes later Ernie and Peter were still sitting there huddled over their soup without a single German soldier in sight. He was a master storyteller and not for the first time I was laughing with him as described the scene.
They stepped outside not knowing where to go and then they saw the first tanks coming towards them, each with a white star on its side. Ernie’s face was animated again as he spoke and he was making large sweeping gestures with his hands as he described the enormous column and seeing those soldiers in strange uniforms everywhere. He heard someone blow a whistle, the column came to a halt and a soldier opened the hatch on the tank’s turret, looked down at him and said, ‘Polski?’ It was the first black man he had ever seen and he was asking if Ernie was Polish.
‘No,’ he replied, ‘
Konzentrationslager
’ [Concentration camp]. The American’s face showed he had no idea what he meant. This was the moment of liberation Ernie had dreamt of endlessly but
the soldier was looking for a different sort of release. ‘Do you have any Cognac?’ he asked. The soldier must have been disappointed with their reply and the column moved off, leaving them standing there.
Ernie’s face relaxed into a broad smile as he recalled the encounter. I felt, watching him, like I’d lived through it with him and now I was smiling too.
The rest of Ernie’s story was delivered in a different gear; he was on the home straight. He got to Paris and lived by selling cigarettes on the streets, learnt French at the Alliance Française and eventually got to America on board the SS
Marine Flasher
, an immigrant ship. He cried when he sailed past the Statue of Liberty and set foot in New York on Labour Day 1947. After all that, poor Ernie was drafted into the US army not long after arriving in America and sent to fight in the Korean War, where he took part in the Incheon landing. In the years that followed he sold vacuum cleaners in Harlem and studied hard. Like me, he became an engineer and years later, he retrained as a lawyer. I could see it had been a struggle but it was his version of the American dream and though Korea must have been a shock, he took it in his stride. I couldn’t believe it. It was an incredible turnaround for the lad I had known in Auschwitz.
I was astounded when I was told how similar our post-war lives had been, engineering was just the start. He liked to drive fast and developed a love of British sports cars, starting with his Austin-Healey and moving on to a Jaguar like mine. He refused to dwell on the past or burden anyone with his own suffering and I am told he never really talked about Auschwitz until very late in his life.
He was a man of good cheer, I am told, and I am sure we would have had a lot to talk about without ever mentioning those terrible years. Ernie’s lifelong friend Henry Kamm said of him, that he came to America with nothing except the clothes on his back and out of his own intelligence, energy, willpower and ambition he
created a life for himself and a very enviable life it was. Henry said Ernie left behind a great number of friends when he died.
When Ernie was asked at the end of his story what advice he would give future generations he said: ‘For evil to succeed all that was needed was for the righteous to do nothing.’ I was thrilled to hear his words. From the moment we began working on the book I had repeated the same maxim endlessly to Rob like only a man in his nineties can and now there it was, the same sentiment on Ernie’s lips. I was struggling to contain myself as he went on. It was too good to be true. ‘You cannot let things go,’ he said. ‘You have to fight for what you believe and you can’t be passive, you cannot let somebody else do it for you. If you have to be aggressive to reach your goal and take a stand, then do it.’ With that Ernie – the friend I helped but had never really known – shrugged his shoulders, smiled and thanked his interviewer. His story was over and so was mine.
Behind the house the winter sun was dropping in the sky, casting long shadows and turning Win Hill the colour of rust.
‘Ernie got it,’ I said afterwards. ‘His experience taught him that you’ve got to fight for what’s right. It gets you into a lot of trouble but he came to the same conclusion as me.’ People think it could never happen again and particularly that it could never happen here. Don’t you believe it; it doesn’t take much.
I will always regret not tracking Ernst down when he was alive and if I had known he was in America I would have gone and found him without doubt.
The Great Architect had turned his back on Auschwitz, I am convinced of that, but I knew when I talked to Ernie the day was a little brighter and that’s something you never forget. Now as an old man there is at least one face in that crowd that I can reflect on and say to myself: I did what I could.
I had always remained positive even as a POW and in a strange way I had convinced myself, rightly or not, that I was still the master of my own fate, that I was taking the initiative. Ernie and
Makki had used their intelligence and made the very best of their chances and still, on the flip of a coin – the choice of a word, ‘electrician’ or ‘locksmith’ – Ernie survived and his friend had died.