Trusting Calvin (8 page)

It was done, and it was right that it was done. He had no regrets.

At morning roll call—his last, he knew—his brothers pressed closer than usual.

There was a shuffling sound. Someone had sidled in next to him.

“Go back and get in the top bunk,” the voice of Erich said.

Erich had made a decision. He didn't explain it, then or ever. He barely knew this young man named Moshe, but he had decided to protect him, knowing full well the consequences of hiding a blind Jewish prisoner.

When the building emptied for the day, Erich moved close to Moshe's bunk and instructed him on the fine points of continuing to stay alive.

“Flatten yourself on this top platform when the other men go off to work,” he said. “The guards will have no idea you're here, and if anyone thinks about you at all, they'll think you're in another unit.”

Because Erich was German, and therefore thought trustworthy, his fabrications about Moshe's whereabouts during head counts were never doubted. Whenever officers inspected the barrack, Moshe lay on his back, still as a corpse, not breathing, and just as Erich had predicted, they never climbed up to investigate the highest bunks, careful to keep as much distance as possible between the bedbugs and themselves.

It was an enormous risk, this ruse. There were few Jews in this barrack, which increased the likelihood of being reported to camp authorities. But week after week, Moshe lived silently on that top bunk without being detected, alone all day in his darkness, nothing to fill his mind or occupy his thoughts.

Sometimes Erich, who did not have off-site work assignments, leaned in and spoke softly and earnestly to Moshe. “The only currency you have in this place, the only currency any of us has, is hope. If we give it up, that is the end.”

A communist and a student of philosophy, Erich often shared thoughts that he believed could help a young man in a bad situation. He especially liked Friedrich Nietzsche and regularly quoted a favorite line: “That which seeks but fails to destroy you strengthens you.”

Moshe clung to those words. When the war was over, he would find an eye surgeon to repair his right eye, the one that had allowed that small wedge of vision for all those months. It must be salvageable, he told himself.

Every evening after his brothers and friends returned from work and had walked him to and from the kitchen for soup, they navigated him around the barracks to keep his muscles from atrophying. Then they gathered near his bunk to talk and share the latest rumors, trying to buoy his spirits.

Survival had for years relied on taking certain actions and avoiding certain others. Now it depended on being completely passive. This passivity was much harder than the previous approach. It lasted for two months, this hard, silent, isolated existence.

Early one April morning, barracks supervisors were ordered to escort anyone unable to work to the infirmary. Erich and Moshe both knew floor-to-ceiling inspections would now be conducted. There was no longer any way to prevent discovery of the blind Jew.

Before sending Moshe on, however, Erich spoke with the infirmary supervisor, a German named Hans, from whom he extracted a pledge to protect Moshe to the highest degree possible. Hans took his promise to Erich seriously, spending time with Moshe every day, trying, as Erich did, to keep up his spirits. This time in the infirmary wouldn't be indefinite, however. Eventually the beds would be cleared of the valueless sick people, they knew. The infirmary was conveniently located near the crematorium.

On the evening of April 15, as Moshe was speaking with a French Catholic priest with whom he had become friendly, a guard flung open the door.

“All Jews are to report to roll-call square in fifteen minutes!” the man shouted.

This evening lineup could mean nothing but trouble.

“Moshe, pretend you are not Jewish,” the priest said.

A Ukrainian patient who had overheard the priest snarled, “Hey, Jew, you've got fifteen minutes to get the hell out of here.”

The Catholic and the Jew said nothing for a moment. Finally Moshe spoke. “As you see,” he said to the priest, “if I don't go, he will give me away.”

“You are right, Moshe. Unfortunately, you are right. God be with you.”

Moshe shuffled to the door and grabbed the sleeve of a man walking past, assuming rightly that he was headed for the square, and soon Zalmen and Yankel hurried forward to collect him.

“We are leaving camp,” an official announced. “Everyone.”

With the Allied armies advancing—Americans from the west, British from the north, and Russians from the east—High Command had ordered the prisoners evacuated to Dachau, 140 miles away, though the prisoners learned none of this that night. Similar evacuations to push concentration camp prisoners deeper into the interior of Germany were taking place all over the country—partly to ensure they didn't fall into enemy hands, and partly to ensure a sufficiently large labor force to maintain production of armaments for as long as battle supplies were needed. Flossenbürg's more than 20,000 prisoners would be moved in a twenty-four-hour period, it was announced, in groups of 2,500. The Jews would go first, at sunrise.

Hustled to the railroad track at dawn the next day, the Jewish prisoners were loaded into several boxcars, crammed once again against one another.

Large red crosses had been painted across the roofs of the cars, a strategy that the Germans had been using for some time. This wasn't to protect the prisoners they were hauling from place to place for war-related labor or to put them to death, but to protect the passenger cars at the rear, loaded with the wives and children of officers who had already been transferred. The trick worked for a while, but by the time this train was departing, the Allies assumed all trains were carrying weapons or soldiers to critical areas and did not refrain from firing on them.

Just a few minutes into the journey, the roar of low-flying aircraft rumbled above the train. Machine-gun fire ripped through the roofs. The men in Moshe's car dived to the floor, a tangle of bodies atop one another, three or four deep. Zalmen flung himself over Moshe, and both landed on another man. When the shooting stopped and the two brothers stood, they realized that the man beneath them was dead, bleeding from the belly. A bullet had ricocheted from the metal rail beneath them, piercing the floor of the car and killing him.

The attack killed dozens of Jews and destroyed the locomotive. The guards who had survived forced the prisoners from the cars and herded them across the field to the road nearby, shouting orders and threatening to unleash the dogs. A few prisoners escaped into the woods, but most were too close to a gun or a snarling animal to make such a dash worthwhile.

Ordered into five-abreast formation, Moshe grasping the arm of Zalmen with his left hand and his friend Shlomo's with his right, hundreds of Jews headed west, heads down, walking to an unknown destination an unknown number of miles away. An hour into the walk, the pop of a single gunshot came from the rear, then another. Soon, the shots were much more frequent. Men too sick or too exhausted to walk, falling down or not keeping pace, were being finished off on the side of the road.

A slow, steady rain began to fall, biting against their faces in the chill, turning the road slick. Moshe let go first of one arm and then the other to pull his thin jacket tighter against his throat, an ineffective shield against the cold. Every few minutes he turned his face upward like a creature of the desert, capturing the only water available to them. The gray skies and steady drizzle seemed to some of them nature's way, maybe God's, of giving them a chance to survive this ordeal.

The first day of the march was almost unbearable. The next day was worse. More marching, more gunshots. Day after day they walked, encountering almost no one, stopping only when the guards needed rest. The men knew, from overheard snatches of guards' conversations, that the other thousands of prisoners from Flossenbürg were also marching along this road, cadaverous men with shaved heads, extending mile after mile.

They huddled under trees in the fields at night, submerged into instant, exhausted sleep. Each morning at first light, they got up and continued walking.

On the fifth day, Moshe could take no more. His feet were raw from poorly fitting wooden shoes, oozing pus and blood. Every step unleashed a whorl of pain.

“This is it for me. I can't go on,” Moshe muttered.

“Do you know what day it is today?” Shlomo growled.

“No. I don't care.”

“Today is April twentieth—Hitler's birthday,” Shlomo said. “You are
not
going to give him your life as a birthday present.”

Moshe kept walking.

Zalmen offered his brother his shoes. When Moshe refused, Zalmen removed his own in mid-step, passed them to Shlomo, and approached a guard to ask if he could take shoes from a dead inmate. The guard agreed, and Zalmen returned with better shoes for his brother.

On the seventh night of the march, the guards, wanting to dry out from the merciless rain, directed the remaining men, possibly only 1,500 now, into an empty barn. Having a dry floor on which to rest was sheer luxury.

“Heraus schnell!”
a guard shouted the next morning, April 23, when the barn doors opened. Out quick.

They emerged into the warmth of sunshine, a gift, Moshe thought, that might make it possible to walk one day more, possibly two. They had almost nothing left, but if they were warm and dry they might be able to force a little more from their bodies. They could worry later about the absence of rain leaving them no water to drink.

Just then an airplane flew overhead and a shower of leaflets pirouetted down through the blue skies, landing by the hundreds in the unplowed fields. The prisoners were ordered to ignore them, but each of the guards stooped to grab one. Within seconds, the guards' shoulders sagged. They kept the prisoners marching forward, but without the fervor of the previous days.

“What is this? What's going on?” Shlomo whispered to Zalmen.

“I don't know. Something about the papers has them worried.”

“What? What do you see?” Moshe asked, aware of a shift in the texture of the march. The guards would swarm together for a few seconds on the edges of the limping column, speaking in urgent voices that no one could quite hear, then resume their positions.

Soon, the guards directed the men onto a dirt road that seemed to go nowhere. As they moved closer to the woods, some of the prisoners concluded that this was where they would be gunned down, left in bloody piles, and they began whispering among themselves nervously. Suddenly, the guards hoisted their machine guns over their shoulders and ran toward the trees, away from the prisoners, hauling their dogs with them.

“They've left,” Zalmen said, amazement in his voice. “The guards have all run away.”

The prisoners stood motionless, stupefied. Moshe could hear snatches of the questions that they all asked of one another.

Is it real? Are they really gone?

It's a cruel trick.