A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy (13 page)

When we had reached the infirmary, the doctor told me to go to my ward and get a good night’s sleep. As I opened the door
of my ward, I could sense fear gripping the patients who had stayed behind. They must have expected the SS with their dogs
and guns. There was a general sigh of relief when they recognized me. I was swamped with questions and reported what I had
heard: that the Russians were coming closer, that there would be another transport tomorrow, and that there was nothing to
worry about tonight. Then I went to sleep with my clothes and shoes on in order to be ready the next morning.

The sun was shining through the small windows of our ward when I woke up. I jumped out of bed as fast as I could and hurried
over to the ward where the doctor had his quarters. The door was open but nobody was inside. Everything pointed to a sudden
departure. There were empty cans, paper, and rags on the floor and on the straw mattresses of the beds. As I hobbled through
the room, I called out the name of the doctor. There was no answer. Fear choked my throat as I realized what had happened.
“The doctor left me behind!” I cried. I limped out of the room into the hospital yard and through the gate. The
Appellplatz
was totally deserted! But I remembered the machine guns on the balcony of the administration building and on the guardhouses.
Without looking up at them, I limped back to the barrack as fast as I could, trying to stay close to the wall in order not
to be seen by the SS guards behind those guns.

“He left me behind!” I cried, throwing myself on the floor next to the bed of Marek, my Polish neighbor whose legs were in
a cast. Marek must have been in his midtwenties. Except for me, he was the youngest person in the ward. We had become friends
as soon as he had arrived at my ward. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you wake me up? I don’t want to die with you. I
don’t want to die!” He pulled me up to his bed and, with tears in his eyes, told me that the last group had left either late
at night or early in the morning. I don’t know how long I had been sitting on his bed when I heard him whisper, as if talking
to himself, “They were going to take my casts off next week. Now they’ll bury me with them.” I limped over to my bed. My feet
hurt. Moans and muffled cries filled the room.
This is it,
I thought.

A little while later, I heard Marek say, “You can walk. Why don’t you leave the hospital and hide someplace in an empty barrack?”
This possibility had not occurred to me, not even when I realized that the doctor and his friends had deserted me. Had I thought
of it, I probably would have tried to hide. Now, as I lay in my bed with my clothes on and the cane by my side, I did not
want to hide anymore. I had lost the desire to live and the fear of dying. It was a wonderful feeling, complete emptiness.
My feet seemed no longer to hurt; I was not hungry anymore.
I hope they come soon,
I thought, as I remembered having had a similar sensation in Auschwitz when, with no hope of escape, I waited for the truck
that was to take me to the gas chamber.

Hours passed, and I realized that I was still alive. The pounding of heavy artillery made our barrack tremble. Some people
were sitting up in their beds looking at their neighbors, as if to reassure themselves that they were still alive. In between
the heavy bombardment, we could hear machine-gun fire. “They must be fighting in Oranienburg already. Somebody should go and
see what is happening.” Marek turned to me. “You can walk,” he said. I slid down from the bed, limped out of the ward, and
began to crawl along the outer wall of the barracks through the hospital yard to the gate. The
Appellplatz
was deserted. Not far away from me something fell to the ground. It looked like a piece of metal. Heavy machine-gun fire
could be heard coming from different places outside the camp’s wall. I looked up at the balcony of the administration building.
There was nobody behind the big gun. I walked a few steps further until I could see another watchtower along the wall of the
camp. It too was empty. I limped back to the ward as fast as I could, stormed through the door, and screamed, “They are gone,
they are gone! The SS has run away! The machine-gun towers are empty!”

Very excited, I reported what I had seen. Nobody seemed to believe me because Marek called me over to his bed and asked whether
I might have been mistaken. Once more, I recounted what I had seen. “Those metal pieces are probably shrapnel,” he said. “When
you go out again, try to stay under the roof of the barrack.” He suggested that I rest my feet for a while before going out
to report back.

A little later, I again took up my position near the fence of the hospital and stayed there for quite some time. The shooting
came closer and closer. Then, all of a sudden, I heard a squeaking noise and realized that the big gate under the camp’s administration
building was being opened. I hid behind a fence post, afraid that the SS were returning. When I looked up again, I saw some
soldiers get off a military vehicle and walk toward the center of the
Appellplatz
in the direction of the big gong. They did not look like the SS and wore uniforms I had never seen before. But I was still
afraid to move. Then I heard the sound of the camp’s gong. One of the soldiers was striking it as hard as he could, while
another was yelling: “Hitler
kaputt!
Hitler
kaputt!
” They threw their caps in the air and performed what looked like a wild dance.

First one and then two inmates ventured out very carefully from the barracks where they must have been hiding. Others followed.
Fearing that the SS had tricked them into believing that the soldiers were Russians, I waited to see when they would lower
their guns and start shooting the prisoners. That did not happen. Instead, the soldiers embraced the first few men who reached
them and seemed to be giving them cigarettes. By the time I got to the gong, a small group of inmates had surrounded the soldiers,
who kept repeating that Hitler was “
kaputt
” and that we had been liberated. More people came out of their hiding places in various barracks. Again I looked all around,
hoping to spot Janek and Michael, but they were nowhere to be seen. In fact, I never saw them again and never learned what
had happened to them.

The Soviet soldiers who first entered Sachsenhausen had told us that we were free, that we had been liberated. I could not
quite grasp what that meant. I had never really thought of liberation as such. My sole concern had been to survive from one
day to the next. True, sometimes when lying in my bunk in the infirmary, listening to the sound of British and American bombers
flying toward Berlin, I would fantasize that one of these large planes would swoop down, lower a big hook, pick up the entire
barrack, and take it, with me in it, to England or America. That is something I could imagine, not liberation.

After the Russians had left, all of us who had greeted them around the camp gong started for the SS kitchen. I followed very
slowly, some fifteen or twenty yards behind, always ready to take cover. I still could not believe that this supposed liberation
was real and not some sort of trick concocted by the SS.
They probably staged this liberation in order to draw us out of our hiding places,
I thought to myself. That is why I did not walk into the kitchen with the rest of the men but kept my distance. When nothing
happened, I slowly entered the building and on my way to the kitchen noticed an open door to what looked like an office. After
making sure that no one was inside, I stepped in and looked around. Above the desk hung a photograph of Hitler; the walls
were lined with filing cabinets; a telephone rested on the desk. I looked out of the window and saw a number of men going
out of the kitchen carrying bread and some tin cans.

Maybe we really have been liberated,
I thought as I climbed on the desk and pulled down Hitler’s picture. I threw it on the floor, shattering the glass and the
frame. I spat on it and stepped on his face so hard that my feet began to hurt, but still I went on until the picture was
torn to pieces. Then I pulled out all the drawers from the filing cabinets and let the files fall to the floor. My work completed,
I sat down behind the desk in the soft leather chair and picked up the telephone receiver. The line was dead, but I spoke
into it anyway, telling my imagined listeners that Hitler and all Germans were dead. Then I pulled the cord out of the wall
and limped over to the kitchen.

There the men were eating everything they could find. Some of them were hanging over big kettles, slurping what looked like
soup the SS had left behind. The door to the storeroom was open, and a number of men came out carrying armloads of bread and
sausages. Everybody was chewing on something. I found two loaves of bread, some onions, and a pickle. I began to eat the pickle,
which was the only food I had an urge to eat at that moment and which tasted delicious, and limped out of the kitchen to share
my “liberated” food with Marek in the infirmary. People were running back and forth out of the camp and into the kitchen —
eating all the time while carrying more food. On my way out, a man pushed me and snatched one of my loaves of bread, but I
was too excited to worry about it.

The news of our liberation had already reached the infirmary by the time I got there. Somebody had brought pails of soup and
other food. Marek tried to tell everybody not to eat too much all at once because, being undernourished, they might die from
overeating. But no one paid attention. Marek and I split the bread and onions and a remaining piece of the pickle.

In the late afternoon, a Russian officer came into our barrack. He told us that all sick people would be cared for by Russian
doctors and nurses who were to arrive in a few days. Those who could walk were free to leave the next day. Marek called me
over to his bed after the Russian had left. “We had better try to get out of here on our own,” he said. “Who knows when the
Russians will come and take us to a hospital. Besides, the Germans might reconquer the camp, and we don’t want to be here
when that happens. You’ll have to help me get out of my casts.” He produced a knife, and I started to cut. “Let’s leave tomorrow
morning, all right?” I agreed, although I would have loved to have been taken to a Russian hospital on a Red Cross truck as
the officer had promised.

When I woke up early in the morning, Marek was already practicing walking. “What a day!” he said, pointing to the window.
“The sun is shining, celebrating our liberation. I had already given up all hope of ever again seeing my folks in Poland.
What a surprise it will be!” And he performed an awkward jig. “Get ready,” he said to me, “you are coming to Poland with me,
and then we’ll start looking for your parents.” Yes, my parents. How I wanted to be together with them again! I did not know
where my parents were, nor where or how we would be reunited. But even though I had seen many people die in the camps, it
never occurred to me that my parents might not be alive. I was sure that they would find me as soon as they were liberated.

THE BIG SACHSENHAUSEN GATE WAS OPEN
. Marek and I walked through it, under the administration building with its tower and the now-empty machine-gun nest near
the area where some of the SS guards had been housed, and left the camp. We did not look back, either because we were afraid
that some SS guards would suddenly give chase or because we did not want to be reminded of what lay behind us or both.

It took us a while to reach what looked like a major road or highway. It was teeming with tanks, military trucks, and horse-drawn
wagons, carrying men and supplies. The men were waving to us and shouting. “Polish soldiers,” Marek said, and we waved back,
calling out to them in Polish. They threw us loaves of bread as they drove past, chanting anti-Nazi slogans and singing “Long
live Poland!”

We had been told to travel away from the front, which was moving closer and closer to Berlin. That meant that we had to go
in the direction from which the soldiers were coming. Along the way we met inmates from other camps. There was much waving
and cheering, with everybody wanting to know what camp we came from. For a while the road resembled a street carnival. A Polish
military truck offered us a ride to a nearby German town. “Most of the houses here are empty,” the driver told us. “The Germans
ran away because they are afraid of the Russians.” Then, acting as though he owned the town, he added, “Move into any of these
houses, and take anything you find there, compliments of the Polish Kosciuszko Division.” The soldier laughed and drove away.
As we walked down one of the streets, we met three Jewish girls from Hungary and two young men who had also just been liberated.
They asked Marek and me to join them in the search for a house.

It did not take us long to come upon a large two-story brick house with a garden in front and a large backyard. It must have
been abandoned on very short notice because the kitchen table was set, and there was even some food still on the plates. “Let’s
continue the dinner,” one of the girls suggested. The cellar was stocked with canned fruit, vegetables, and even canned meat.
We carried some of it up, and the girls started a fire and began to cook. What a wonderful dinner it was! My first real meal
in years. The trouble was that while it all looked marvelous to me, I could barely swallow more than a few bites. Marek claimed
that my stomach must have shrunk during all those years of near starvation. I did not know whether he was right; all I knew
was that I could eat very, very little. Rather than stay at the table, I remembered the chickens and rabbits in the backyard;
it had taken some persuasion on my part to save the rabbits from our eager cooks. I went out of the house to feed and play
with the rabbits.

Wealthy people must have lived in the house, I thought. It had many rooms with fine furniture and paintings on the walls.
It was hard for me to imagine, after Kielce, Auschwitz, and Sachsenhausen, that such homes existed and that families lived
in them. The closets were filled with clothing. There were sheets and towels in drawers, as well as blankets and pillows.
What would I not have given to have my parents with me in this house!