KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (113 page)

Before long, all of Dachau was in an uproar, with the news spreading fast across the compound. Even prisoners in the infirmary heard the revelry and began to celebrate. Among them was Edgar Kupfer, the intrepid chronicler of Dachau, who had become
weaker and weaker in recent months. Now he watched from his bed as other sick prisoners struggled to their feet and went outside, or looked through the windows at the tumultuous scenes.
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Soon Kupfer was joined by Moritz Choinowski, who had been treated in the Dachau infirmary a few weeks earlier for an ear infection. It was almost a miracle that the fifty-year-old Polish-born Jew was still
alive. His ordeal in the KL had begun years earlier, on September 28, 1939, when the Gestapo took him from his adopted hometown of Magdeburg to Buchenwald. That afternoon, Choinowski had handed over everything—his money, documents, suit, hat, shirt, socks, jumper, and trousers—and become a concentration camp inmate. “I stood there naked and received a convict uniform,” he later wrote. His red-yellow
triangle marked him out as a political prisoner (he had been an SPD supporter) and as a Jew. He survived the early war years in Buchenwald, despite several months in the lethal quarry and repeated corporal punishment (including three times “twenty-five blows”), and escaped the clutches of the murderous T-4 doctors. He survived his first mass selection in Auschwitz, soon after his arrival there
on October 19, 1942, on a freight car with some four hundred other men from Buchenwald. He survived more selections over the coming two years in Auschwitz-Monowitz, at the height of the Holocaust, and also withstood more illness, starvation, and beatings, despite serious injuries. He survived the death transport from Auschwitz via the hell of Gross-Rosen, during which an SS bullet only just missed
his head, hitting his ear instead, and arrived in Dachau on January 28, 1945. And he survived the final months of forced labor, even though he was now badly emaciated and sick, and contracted typhus, which claimed thousands of lives in Dachau in early 1945. Somehow Moritz Choinowski had survived all this, and on April 29, 1945, after more than two thousand days in the KL, he was free. “Is this possible?”
he sobbed, as he hugged and kissed Edgar Kupfer in the Dachau infirmary. “And he cries,” Kupfer continued in his diary, “and I think about how he has suffered, and I cannot hold back my tears.”
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Epilogue

Liberation was a cathartic moment. Many inmates felt grief and rage for all they had lost, but also relief and euphoria. They were alive and the camps were gone. One could end the story here, with the embrace of Moritz Choinowski and Edgar Kupfer in Dachau encapsulating the suffering of prisoners and the hopes of survivors. But these hopes were often dashed, and this legacy of the
camps is part of their history, too. In fact, some survivors never had any hope at all. Thousands of them were so sick they did not realize what had happened; as Choinowski and Kupfer hugged, prisoners nearby were dying and stared straight past the U.S. soldiers.
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Others observed the jubilation with incomprehension. One teenage survivor of Dachau, who had lost his father only weeks earlier, recalled
that he “watched the people sing and dance with joy, and they seemed to me as if they’d lost their minds. I looked at myself and couldn’t recognize who I was.”
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Among the more ecstatic survivors, meanwhile, the initial excitement quickly waned as they emerged from the depths of the KL.

Take Moritz Choinowski himself. Released from an American-run hospital in Dachau in June 1945, he moved to a
camp for displaced persons (DPs) and then, in early 1946, to a sparsely furnished room on the outskirts of Munich. For the next three years, he led a pitiful life. His body had been ruined by the camps; he could barely use his left arm and was in constant pain, not least from chronically infected scars left by SS whippings. Unable to work, he depended on welfare for his rent, food, heating, bedding,
and clothes. “I have not received any shoes since 1946,” he pleaded with an aid organization in April 1948. He was all alone, assuming wrongly that his daughter and his ex-wife (their marriage had been annulled by a Nazi court because she was an “Aryan”) had died in a devastating bombing raid on Magdeburg that destroyed their home. His last hope was to join his brother in the United States, which
appeared to many DPs like the promised land. Tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors headed for North America in the late 1940s, after the United States temporarily relaxed its immigration restrictions, and in June 1949 Choinowski boarded the navy ship
General Muir
to cross the Atlantic. After spending some time with his brother in Detroit, he moved to Toledo, Ohio, where he married another survivor
in 1952. But he could not remake his old life.

Before the Third Reich, Moritz Choinowski had been a vigorous self-made businessman, running a thriving tailor’s store and workshop. Now he was weak and ailing, with the SS tattoo on his pale arm a constant reminder of who had destroyed his existence. He could only work occasionally, and then only with painkillers. Employed mainly by a local dry
cleaner and tailor, he earned an average of $125 a month by the mid-1950s, barely enough to live. Meanwhile, his claims for reparations, submitted years earlier, had come to nothing, despite the efforts of his daughter in Germany, with whom he had finally reestablished contact in 1953 (she had last heard from him nine years earlier, in a postcard from Auschwitz). In April 1957, Choinowski appealed
directly to the president of the Bavarian Reparations Office, which had dragged out his case, to “save me from my hardship.” A few months later, he received a first payment, but he continued to live in humble circumstances. Despite his poor health he was grateful for having survived the camps, he told his daughter in one of his last letters, but he questioned what all the suffering had been for:
“Humanity has learned nothing from the wars, on the contrary, almost all nations are arming once more for warfare and that will probably be the end for humanity.” Choinowski died in Toledo Hospital on the evening of March 9, 1967, aged seventy-two.
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By that time, his former Dachau comrade Edgar Kupfer was living as a recluse on the Italian island of Sardinia. He had also struggled in the early
years after liberation. The bombing raid on Dachau had left him with a badly damaged foot and he suffered from a depression that pushed him to the edge of suicide. He felt like a stranger in his native Germany, and in 1953, after a spell in Switzerland and Italy, he gained entry to the United States, like Choinowski before him. But he never settled. He was plagued by pain and by nightmares about
the KL, and following a breakdown in 1960, the destitute fifty-six-year-old told an acquaintance: “My life here in America has not been blessed by fortune: bellboy in a hotel, security guard in a warehouse, dishwasher, professional Santa Claus, and finally here [in Hollywood] doorman in a large cinema.”

Edgar Kupfer returned to Europe soon after and spent more than two decades in Italy, increasingly
withdrawn and isolated. Bitter about the lack of interest in his chronicle of Dachau, he lived in abject poverty; again and again, he had to “tighten the belt, not to say starve,” as he put it. He had received some reparation payments in the 1950s, after a lengthy struggle in the courts. From the 1960s, he also drew a pension from the German authorities, though it was only small because unsympathetic
assessors had minimized his mental anguish. The indignity was compounded by the authorities’ failure to ensure timely payments. After yet another late transfer, the normally reserved and formal Kupfer lost his composure. All these years after liberation and he still had to beg for every scrap. “Trust me, this life makes me sick,” he wrote to the Stuttgart Office for Reparations in November
1979, adding: “It would probably be best if I took my life, then you would have one troublemaker less and the German state would only have to pay for my funeral, nothing more. But I am not sure if I want to give this satisfaction to those responsible.” Kupfer eventually returned to Germany and died in a nursing home on July 7, 1991, in complete obscurity.
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All survivors had their own stories,
some happier, some even more miserable than Kupfer and Choinowski. Whatever happened to them, they often faced similar hardships: the lasting pain of injury and illness, the search for a new home and job, the indifference of wider society, and the undignified struggle for compensation. And they were left with all the agonizing memories, the final cruelty of the camps. The memory of the crimes was
far more torturous for survivors than for perpetrators, who often settled into quiet lives and forgot about the KL, as long as they could escape justice.
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Survivors could not hope for such oblivion.

First Steps

A few hours after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen on the afternoon of April 15, 1945, Arthur Lehmann clambered across the demolished fence that had enclosed his prisoner sector and rushed
to the nearby compounds for women in search of his wife, Gertrude. The SS had ripped them apart in Vught more than a year ago, having already deported their two children to their deaths in Auschwitz. Since then, Lehmann, a middle-aged German Jewish lawyer who emigrated to the Netherlands before the war, had survived an odyssey through the KL complex that finally brought him, via Auschwitz, Mauthausen,
and Neuengamme, to Bergen-Belsen. In the days after liberation, he continued to search in vain for his wife. Later he learned that she had died just after the arrival of the British troops: “And so the day that brought me freedom brought her death.”
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Gertrude Lehmann was one of an estimated twenty-five to thirty thousand prisoners who were freed in concentration camps in spring 1945, only to
perish soon after; in all, at least ten percent of survivors had died by the end of May 1945.
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Mortality was highest in the largest camps, where misery had multiplied at the end of the war. And none of the liberated camps was bigger or deadlier than Bergen-Belsen. British troops found fifty-three thousand prisoners across two sites, with most inmates, including Lehmann and his wife, held on the
grounds of the main camp. Here typhus and other illnesses still raged, and the sick and starved had received no food or drink for days. “The dying just continued,” Arthur Lehmann noted later.
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Emergency relief in the liberated KL fell to the individual Allied forces. The soldiers on the ground were poorly prepared for the humanitarian disaster. Whatever information had trickled down during the
haphazard planning for the occupation—about the location of camps and conditions inside—was often outdated and inaccurate. Mostly, the troops did not even aim to liberate specific camps, they simply stumbled across them.
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Their initial reaction was shock. They were overwhelmed by the sight of skeletal survivors and decomposing bodies, and by the stench of waste and death.
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Meanwhile, a few predatory
soldiers, particularly from the Red Army, used the initial chaos to assault female inmates. “That was the worst, half-dead as I was,” testified Ilse Heinrich, who had survived as an “asocial” in Ravensbrück.
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With Allied commanders unable to provide immediate order and aid, as they scrambled for more staff and supplies, survivors took matters into their own hands. As soon as the Camp SS had
departed, they stormed storerooms and depots; in Bergen-Belsen, Arthur Lehmann saw the night sky light up with fires of inmates cooking their first meals in freedom. But as some survivors celebrated, a few drunk on SS champagne, others felt the dark side of inmate self-help. As in the past, inmates fought over the spoils. The weakest often went empty-handed, while some of the stronger ones ate until
they were sick. “Most [inmates] immediately gobbled down everything, and a new round of dying began,” Lehmann recalled.
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Survivors also looked beyond the camps in search of supplies, walking to nearby SS settlements, villages, and towns.

The need was greatest for all those prisoners liberated outside the KL, during death transports. Desperate for food, medication, and lodging, they could not
count on help from passing Allied troops, and initially had to fend for themselves. For the most part, this meant asking locals, or taking from them. After Renata Laqueur was freed from one of the Bergen-Belsen trains destined for Theresienstadt, she walked to the nearby town of Tröbitz, some ninety miles south of Berlin, which was teeming with Soviet tanks and soldiers. Laqueur entered a German
home and demanded food; she ate in silence, watched by the nervous occupants. Then she went to the local shops, which were being ransacked by other survivors of the death train (the Soviet military later gave them official permission to plunder). Packing as much as she could on a stolen bicycle, she slowly made her way back to the train and her gravely ill husband: “Paul’s face—as he saw the meat,
bread and bacon, jam and sugar—was more than enough reward for all the effort and agony,” she wrote a few months later.
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Many Germans dreaded encounters with freed prisoners. Some offered help and assistance, including the women of Tröbitz, who later carried Paul Laqueur and other invalids from the train to a makeshift hospital—though it is unclear whether they acted out of charity or calculation.
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Many more stood back, looking at the survivors as a threat. A farmer from the village of Bergen, a couple of miles from the camp, spoke for many when he claimed that robberies by freed prisoners and slave laborers had spread “the greatest horror since the Thirty Years’ War.”
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When it became clear that ordinary Germans had little to fear from feeble survivors, who were often just as scared, the
early panic gave way to disgust, with complaints about dirty foreigners defecating everywhere, and bitter resentment about their supposed privileges and profiteering. This hostility grew out of long-standing social and racial prejudices, as well as the more immediate impact of defeat and occupation. Wrapped up in their own sense of victimhood, most locals had little room for compassion.
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