Brothers Beyond Blood (3 page)

Before Mama and Miriam could get to Papa and Grandpapa, the crowd grabbed them and tore their clothes from their bodies. I turned my face into Isaac’s chest and cried. I was ten years old, and I cried like a little baby. Later Isaac, who was thirteen, told me that the men, our former friends and neighbors, had raped them repeatedly. Then they rushed into the shop. Isaac and I were dragged out and punched and kicked until we lost consciousness.

When we awoke, it was dawn. The street was clear of men, and the sun glinted on a carpet of shards of glass. I read later that this was called “Krystall Nacht” because of all the glass. We never saw Mama or Miriam again. We heard that they had been sent to a work camp called Ravensbrueck, but it turned out to be an extermination camp for women. I only knew of my Mama’s and sister’s fate from a ledger that was recovered by the Russians from the partially demolished camp. Years later they gave a copy to the British, who published the list. Until then, I never knew, and it haunted me.

Isaac and I hid in our apartment behind the shop and survived, often scuttling through the streets and alleys late at night and searching through garbage cans for food, like the rats they called us.

One night Isaac spotted Mr. Bruger, and we followed him. He had been one of the men who had cheered when my papa and grandpapa had been shot. He’d been one of the men who had torn the clothes from my mother and sister and held them while the men had raped and raped them. He had once been a friend, we thought. Isaac was crazed that night. When Mr. Bruger was opposite an alley entryway, Isaac grabbed him and pulled him in. After a brief struggle, Isaac hit Mr. Bruger on the head with a cobblestone. He hit him and hit him until there was nothing left of his pinched face.

After that we were hunted and finally we were caught. Isaac tried to stay with me, but he was sent to a camp called Gross-Rosen, in the east of Germany. I was sent to a small camp named Kefferstadt near the Swiss border. It was a sub-camp of the much larger one at Dachau, though I was never there, thanks be to God. You could smell the stench from Dachau all the way to our camp in the woods some days. There were never more than four or five hundred of us in Kefferstadt. I was now thirteen and almost two meters tall, though very thin.

The Nazis usually sent boys younger than fifteen off to be gassed but I lied and was tall so they let me live. Can you call what I did living?

Sonderkommando is what we were called. I, and a few others, would go into the gas buildings after everyone was dead and the gas had dissipated, pull the bodies out, and transport them to the trenches dug between the back fence and the wood. The clothing, valuables, shoes and even the underclothes were all taken to the counting shed. We separated the valuables and once a week a courier from Berlin would come and retrieve the best items. They weren’t interested in the clothing, so the counting house , began to fill up though mice and moths enjoyed the feasts there.

I think Kefferstadt was originally designed as a work camp. One of the older prisoners told me that early in the war there were sewing machines and they made uniform blouses for SS officers. All that was now forgotten, and that building sat unused.

We were merely a disposal camp. I’m sure that the Commandant at Dachau, who was the OberKommandant of the main camp and the dozens of sub-camps, had forgotten us. Our Major Boettcher supposedly reported to him.

I came to Kefferstadt on a cold, overcast day. I got off the train in the nearby town of Keffer, but there was no one at the station to meet me. I waited for more than an hour but still no one came. Finally I asked the stationmaster how I could get to Kefferstadt. He told me that it was down a road to the east. It was early autumn, and the weather was still warm. When the wind let up a bit, I started walking, my bag perched on my shoulder. As I walked, the fields gave way to a small forest. It was beautiful, with the leaves turning color, all golden and red. One would not know there was a war on.

After a while, a farm cart pulled by a skinny nag came along and the driver let me ride with him. He was thin and bent, wisps of gray hair peeking out from under a battered straw hat. When I told him my destination, he shook his head and muttered something I didn’t quite understand, something about an abattoir and hell.

At last we came to a fork in the road and he pointed to the left. About one-half kilometer, he said, and threw my bag down. By the time I alighted and had retrieved my bag, all I saw was the back of the cart. Then he was gone around a sharp bend.

I came to the gate in the late afternoon. There was one guard. When I showed him my papers, he let me in and directed me to the Commandant’s office. My first impression of the camp was gray. Everything was gray, nothing painted. A row of ramshackle barracks obviously for the prisoners, weathered wood with rusty corrugated metal roofing. Rows of barbed wire surrounded the camp. As I entered through the gate, to my left was the Commandant’s Office. Like the rest, it was a wooden framed building with corrugated iron roofing, similar to the prisoners’ barracks, though somewhat better constructed. At one time it may have been painted but that was long ago and only a few flakes remained. There was a narrow porch but no chairs or tables on it. It was merely meant to provide a place to stand in inclement weather while waiting for the commandant’s secretary to allow admittance.

A Major Boettcher was Commandant and took my papers. My first impression of him was that he was a professional soldier, in his fifties with a square jaw, close-cropped graying hair and a short fleshy nose. What I most remembered was his eyebrows. Thick and dark, almost obscuring his pale gray eyes. He snorted, “Kinder, all I get is kinder.” He turned to me with a sigh, “Go to your barracks and draw a uniform and weapon. It is the second building on the left as you exit. If you can’t find it, Schwartz or one of the other guards will show you.” I left him looking down at a newspaper, head in hands.

I found the barracks and a sergeant named Granski. I introduced myself and offered him my hand. He snorted and slapped it away, “So you are here to help exterminate the rats, eh?” He was squat with greasy black hair and bristly black whiskers.

I was confused. Rats? Were we overrun with rats? I looked around at the dingy barracks room. It was dark, and the place was long overdue for paint. Three dim light bulbs glowed trying to seep into the gloom between bunk beds and lockers. The windows were coated with grime and the floor with dirt and dust. So this was my new home.

I frowned at Sgt. Granski. “Rats?”

He chuckled, “Rats. Jews. Queers. They are all the same. We keep them here until the Reich tells us to grind up another batch.” He grinned through widely gapped teeth. Then he turned on his heel and led me to a bunk with a half folded mattress. It was thin and smelled of mold.

I looked at the rows of bunk beds. “How many guards are there, Sergeant? There must be a large contingent to fill this room.”

“Only ten now, young Hans. But now we only have about one-hundred and fifty rats to guard.” He laughed again and snorted, “Guard! As if any of the rats are going anywhere. They couldn’t even if they wanted to.”

I frowned, “Why is that, Sergeant?”

He grinned. “Too weak. Too sick. Too scared.”

And so that was my introduction to the camp at Kefferstadt and one of my fellow guards. We kept the gate closed and sat in the towers or fed the guard dogs. The camp kept several large Alsatians. I was told that at one time, this camp bred the guard dogs.

Sometimes a truck would bring a couple of new prisoners but even that finally ceased. Once I saw a guard shoot a prisoner for no apparent reason, out of boredom I expect. I was not much given to abusing the rats, as the prisoners were called, though if one were slow, I was ordered to give him a rough shove.

Food was our biggest problem. The nearby farmers had stopped coming around and after our petrol got low, we were unable to go get food in the town. We grew a small garden and some of us hunted the surrounding wood. One day a farmer came with a cart with cabbages in it. We offered him Reichmarks but he refused, preferring gold or gems.

That was just about the time I met your father personally. One day I was told to help out in the storage warehouse. There was a rat there that knew gold and gems.

“What do you know of these valuables, Jew?” I asked, shoving him but not too roughly. The boy was thin as a rail, though tall, with brown hair and a small, bent nose, unlike the Jews shown on the posters pasted up in my hometown. The more I looked at the boy, the more curious I became. Take away the striped uniform and he looked like one of the boys I’d been with in school or the Hitler Youth. “Where are you from, boy?”

Herschel looked up and frowned, then dropped his eyes, “I am from a town in Eastern Germany near Dresden, Teplice. My family are, or,” he mumbled, “were jewelers.”

“Jewelers, huh? So what do you know about this stuff, Jew? Or should I call you Jew-eler?” I said in jest. I picked up some of the pins, necklaces, rings and bracelets, then let them slide through my fingers into a wooden tray.

He slid down onto the floor and held the tray in his lap. “Come, sir, sit down here and I will teach you about gold and what I know of gems.” He looked at me appraisingly, “My name is Herschel. What is yours, sir?”

I sat down beside him after leaning my heavy rifle against the wall. “I am Hans, Herschel,” and shook his thin hand. And from that day on I was the student of a rat - or the first Jew I had ever known.

Later we became friends. Ironic, no? He would help me select some semiprecious gem or gold trinket to trade for food. We eventually made a small cache of the better items and buried them in a jar I’d taken from the kitchen.

It seemed like each day we would have to bury a prisoner or two. By the time I had arrived, very few prisoners were shipped to us. The ones we had were sick and weak. After only one month, our population had dwindled to little more than one hundred prisoners and only seven guards. With the lack of food and petrol, we guards were in no better physical condition as the prisoners. So why did we stay? Why did we not leave as two guards did one day, just laying down their rifles and walking out the gate? I suppose that some of us felt it was our duty to stay and yet, with the war all but over, we knew that we would be punished as harshly as any of the prisoners, maybe even worse. I stayed because I had no one to go home to. No home, in fact. My school friends were scattered, father and sister dead. One day I realized that my only friend was Herschel. I treated him as an equal and brought him scraps of food. I tried to protect him from the abuses of the other guards. Granski was the worst. He said he enjoyed killing the rats, that he was doing the world a favor. I grew up quickly in this camp. Many times the farmer’s words came back to me: abattoir, hell.

I wore shoes taken from the storehouse, a baggy pair of trousers, which barely reached to my calves and my uniform coat and hat. I had neither undergarment nor socks, for these had all fallen apart many weeks ago, and there were none to be had in the storehouse. Herschel gave what clothes he could to the other prisoners, and I assisted him. Our storehouse seemed to be the dispensary, clothing store, cooking utensil supply and shroud source.

Oh, yes, we had lots of shrouds. In the beginning we received many hundreds of burial shrouds. Now we were tearing them up for rags and dressings for the many weeping sores. Yes, I lived with my friend in hell.

Chapter 4 - Herschel’s Story

Hans became my pupil. Most days we prisoners were roused from our pallets with a kick and were shoved ahead of guards to tables and benches for some food, though food was a polite term. These days every meal was a thin, watery gruel. Sometimes there were maize granules, pig feed; or small pieces of root vegetables, rarely meat. Two of the guards trekked into town and traded gold teeth or small pins for whatever they could find. Sometimes they would commandeer a cart and horse from a farmer to bring them back.

A guard named Jurgen was the cook for both the guards and the prisoners. The war was nearing the end, and we were all starving, guards and prisoners alike. The prisoners wore striped uniforms, though rags were more like it, while the guard’s uniforms had deteriorated to a like state. There were few clothes remaining in the counting house and what was there were mainly children’s and women’s. The moths and rats had made Swiss cheese of most of them.

One day, as we crouched in the sorting house, we were discussing the

carat weight of gold. For some reason, Hans asked me what my family name was. Now he had rarely talked about family, his or mine. “Why do you ask, Hans?” I warily questioned. Was he trying to get some information from me?

He shrugged, “Just want to know who I am working with.” I was taken aback. Working with? Not ‘had under me’ or ‘who my prisoner is’, but
working with
. I was almost loath to reply, but something compelled me to answer honestly. Hans had never abused me, never hit me. In fact he frequently gave me a crust of bread or an apple piece from his own larder.

I drew in a breath and said, “My full name is Herschel David Rothberg.”

He jumped up, dropping the gold chain he’d been fingering, “You’ve gone too far, Jew. You make jest of me.”

I frowned, frightened, “Why? What do you mean, Hans, I mean, sir?” I covered my head with my hands and leaned against the wall, drawing up my feet in expectation of a rain of blows.

He leaned forward, face almost touching mine. “My family name is also Rothberg, Herschel. How did you know? I never told you.” He was angry and perplexed. He drew away and walked in close circles, muttering to himself.

I gaped, at him. “This is true? Rothberg? You are a Rothberg?” I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing. What a cruel joke. I, a Jewish prisoner in a concentration camp, a death camp, shared the same family name with my guard, a good German boy, a Hitler Youth. I laughed. Lord, how I laughed, holding my sides, tears running down my face.

Hans understood the irony of it, and then he smiled. In a moment he started laughing too. Harder and harder. Oh, the paradox, that fate should give us this moment. Guard and prisoner shook with laughter, looking at each other and shaking with fresh gales. I gasped, “Maybe we are long-lost brothers?” I shouted and collapsed again in mirth. I had not laughed in many years, and it felt so incredibly good. If I were to die at that moment, I would still have my laughter to transport me to who knows where.

After we had subsided, we two sat side by side against the wall. I was a bit taller than Hans. He was shorter but not quite as thin. His uniform trousers, worn through at the knees, were barely long enough to cover his ankles. I wore a pair of raggedy striped pants and a shirt that had once been a guard’s waistcoat; shoes for both of us came from gassed and dead prisoners.

After a minute Hans asked me, “Where are your people from? Before coming to Germany, I mean.”

I shrugged, “Someplace in Russia, my Grandpapa told us. I don’t remember where. And yours?”

Now he shrugged, “Here. I mean Germany, as far as I know. Our family name many generations ago was Rothenberg, but somehow it got shortened to Rothberg.” We both mulled that over.

Then, in a note of seriousness, he told me that the Commandant had left in the middle of the night in his auto, using the last of the petrol. Hans called the Commandant a coward and said, “There are only seven guards left to guard the prisoners.” He buried his face in a crooked elbow “I don’t know what will become of us.”

“Why, what do you mean?” I asked.

“Granski, the Polish guard, now fancies himself Commandant. He wants us to kill all of the prisoners and run away so no one can tell what we did here.” He sniffled and said, “But I have nowhere to go. My family was killed in an air raid. There are barely one-hundred of you prisoners left but I cannot let him kill all of you.” He turned a haggard face to me, “What am I to do, Herschel? I have never killed anyone.” His agony was plain to see.

I gasped, “You can’t let him do that, Hans. These men are walking dead now.” Most of the prisoners had been in the camp for years. The ones who are left had rheumatism, severe arthritis, tuberculosis, scurvy or a myriad of other ailments and diseases. I weighed just fifty kilos. We discussed ways to protect the other prisoners. Finally I demanded, “Who of the other guards are left?”

In an strained voice Hans replied, “Just me; Jurgen the cook; Helmut; Karl, the boy who came just last week from Hamburg; Riger; and, of course, Granski.”

I thought for a moment, “Listen, Hans, this is what you must do.” I grabbed him by a sleeve and thrust my face close. “Go into town tonight.” I whispered. “ Then when you get back, tell Granski that the British or Americans have parachuted into the forest near town and will be here by morning. That may make him leave during the night.”