Measure of a Man (4 page)

During morning roll call, an SS soldier barked my number.
This is it
, I thought.
You’re about to become one of the disappeared
. The soldier pulled me from the line and ordered me off to the side, away from the others. I stood there for over an hour. Sometimes the lineup took hours, as the Germans counted over and over and over to make sure every last miserable one of us was accounted for. It mattered little whether we were alive or had died the night before in the sleeping racks. Every skeleton must be catalogued and counted.

The Nazis then yanked another boy off the line and ordered him to stand alongside me. The boy and I had never spoken. From the looks of him, he appeared to be a few years older; he was at least six inches taller.

The rest of the prisoners were dispersed to begin their daily slave labor. The boy and I were marched to a room inside a building
I had never been in before. When we entered, the walls echoed with the cracks of whips and the cries of men.

Scattered throughout the space were small clusters of prisoners, each with one or two SS soldiers interrogating them. The Nazi walked my fellow inmate and me to a clear patch in the room and poked his baton into my sternum.

“Is your father a partisan?” he asked.

“No, my father is not a partisan,” I said.

“I’ll ask again. Is your father a partisan?” he said louder.

“No. No, he is not,” I replied.

“Where is your father now?” said the soldier.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Somewhere in the concentration camps.”

“Tell me his number.”

“I do not know his number.”

“Tell me his number right now!”

“I do not know it,” I said, lying in the hope of protecting my father.

“Down! On the ground!” he barked.

I crouched down on all fours. The soldier turned to my fellow inmate.

“You! Whip him hard! Now!” the soldier commanded.

I looked back over my shoulder and saw the German hand the boy what appeared to be a stick. “Whip him! Now!” ordered the German. The boy knew what we all knew: any attempt to be merciful and strike with anything less than full force would mean instant punishment. I stared straight ahead, my muscles tightening in anticipation of the first lash. The boy cocked back
his arm and let the whip crack right between my shoulder blades. My elbows buckled. The sting undulated across my back.

“Again!” yelled the soldier. The second lash tore across the small of my back. I screamed. “Another!” yelled the Nazi. My arms quavered as my body grew heavier. The third strike of the stick hit square against my spine, sending me falling face-first to the floor. Tears streaked my dirty face. The soldier ordered me to stand.

“Is your father a partisan?” the soldier asked again, this time with a smile.

“I cannot lie. My father is
not
a partisan. He is
not
,” I said.

“We’ll see about that,” he said. The soldier turned and glared at the other boy.

“What about your father? A partisan?” asked the soldier.

“No. He is not,” answered the boy. The soldier stabbed the air with his baton in a downward motion. “Down!”

The boy assumed the position. The German handed me the whipping stick I’d just been beaten with. “Whip him! Hard!” the Nazi commanded. I looked down at the bludgeon and saw that it was smeared pink with my blood.

“Whip him!”

I reared back my arm and drove the whip into the middle of the boy’s back.

“Another!”

It was at this moment that I realized the boy had intentionally spaced out my lashes as a favor to me. I tried to return the compassion, this time aiming lower. The boy howled and his knees gave
way. I’d missed and struck his tailbone. Everything in me wanted to apologize to him for the misplaced hit. But I knew any hint of tenderness or decency would be met with swift SS intervention against us both.

“Again!”

This time I focused hard on the top of his back and aimed squarely for his shoulder blades, the largest unstruck portion of his back. The stick landed right on target.

“Up! Up! Up!”

The boy sprung off the ground and stood at attention.

“Is your father a partisan?” the soldier asked him.

“No, he is not a partisan. I do not know where he is. But he is not a partisan at all.”

My eyes darted across the room. The same sordid scene, prisoner flogging prisoner, was unfolding all around us, as Nazis played conductor in their sadistic symphony.

What had my people done to deserve this? How could they hate us this much when they didn’t even know our names?
There were no answers to my youthfully naïve questions.

“Back to your block!” snapped the soldier.

The rest of the day, my mind whirred.
Was Father being tortured? Did he say something that tipped them off? Did Father give them my prisoner number?
The psychological torment was almost as painful as the welts stinging my back.

The next morning’s roll call played out like the last. The same boy and I were ordered off the line, hauled to the interrogation room, and forced to trade blows while attempting to shield our fathers from danger. With each denial we gave—“No, my father is not a partisan”—I felt a strange pang of pride, a small celebration
of victory that neither of us had sold out his own blood, even as we were forced to spill each other’s.

Five days straight. That’s how long they made us beat each other. Not once did either of us give up his father.

I’d endured nearly a week of beatings. My back was crisscrossed with deep trenches of torn skin. I couldn’t see the wounds, but I could feel the blood pool inside the ripped grooves before spilling over and oozing down my back. I tried to make a game of standing and sitting in such a way so as to keep my shirt from brushing against my lacerated skin.

The day after my final beating, I walked into my barrack, only to be accosted by a German I had never seen before. He was a doctor, the kind whose job it was to play God in a medical ritual known as
Muselmann
inspection.
Muselmann
was the word we used in the camps to describe a walking, emaciated corpse. Doctors determined whether a sick or malnourished prisoner was salvageable or whether he should be gassed and burned. My heart jumped when I saw the
Muselmann
doctor.

The doctor spun me around, lifted my striped uniform and Nazi shirt, and fingered the loose meaty flap of flesh barely covering exposed muscle. “Tomorrow there is a transport going to Buna,” he said flatly. “Your number is on it. You will be on the transport.” He asked no questions and offered no explanations. But for whatever reason, that German doctor decided to save my life. I never saw him again.

Five miles from Auschwitz in Poland lay the subcamp of Monowitz, or “Buna.” The name Buna was derived from the
butadiene synthetic rubber factory there that was owned by the IG Farben chemical conglomerate. The SS sold prisoners to IG Farben to work as slave laborers in their massive industrial factories where, among other things, the company manufactured the Zyklon B gas used to exterminate my people.

From factory work to excavation to bricklaying to bookkeeping, IG Farben demanded slave laborers with all manner of trades and skills. The work conditions were as grueling as at Auschwitz, complete with eleven-hour workdays most of the year and thirteen-hour shifts in the summer. But since IG Farben paid for the prisoners, the Nazis were less inclined to kill off inmates for fun. Instead, soldiers administered punishments by singling prisoners out for life-threatening labor assignments such as working in the mines. Nevertheless, in the little over two years of the Buna concentration camp’s existence, the Germans sent an estimated twenty-three thousand prisoners to their deaths.

When I arrived in Buna, I said nothing and complained to no one about my back. Buna had a hospital, but I reasoned that asking for medical assistance might be a one-way ticket to death. Suffering in silence was foolish; infection felled prisoners regularly. But the alternative—seeking medical attention—was a far swifter death sentence than the most virulent disease.

If I die I die
, I thought.

The Buna barracks were overcrowded and shoddily constructed. During my first week there, I woke up drenched in sweat and trembling with the chills. With no way to hide my condition, I gambled and quietly asked a
kapo
for help. He said he would try to get me into the hospital to see a doctor without raising any alarms about my condition to the soldiers.

The doctor I saw was himself a prisoner. To my amazement, he said he knew my dad. The connection to my father—no matter how tenuous—lifted my spirits.

“Your assignments are reinjuring your back,” the doctor explained. “The weight, the bending, the lifting—your wounds can’t heal properly. They’ll never heal, so long as you’re doing hard manual labor.” He said he would have me reassigned to work inside the hospital. I was overjoyed.

Even though I’ll be around sick and dying people
, I thought,
at least there will be no more slayings inside the hospital
.

I was wrong. Instead of gunshots, the Nazis in the hospital administered death sentences with a lethal dose of phenol injected into the heart.

Doctors often conducted morning roll call for hospital patients. There was a silent code of support among some of the prisoner doctors and inmates. When a doctor saw a prisoner with a dire condition or in distress, he would try to get the patient better medicines or extra food rations. I joined the discreet team effort in any little way I could. When a feeble patient was in danger of being singled out, I volunteered to stand in for him.

The doctors weren’t stupid; they knew what I was doing. Tragically, a lot of the sick ended up dying anyway because they were so weak. Only a few of the truly sick patients got well and returned to work in the camps. Still, even though my efforts weren’t much—I was just a kid—patients’ eyes glowed with gratitude every time I told them I would take their place in line. I guess it made them feel worth something and restored a sliver of their human dignity. It did the same for me, too.

One of my jobs in the Buna hospital was preparing and delivering rations of “soup.” With my Nazi shirt under my uniform, no one questioned my coming and going. Operating somewhat invisibly allowed me to get more food to more people. On one occasion I brought a person from my town extra portions several days in a row until he finally regained his strength. God helped him survive, not me. But it made my heart happy to have God use me in a small way to bring someone I knew back to health.

Working in the hospital, I saw every type of malady imaginable. Bloated bodies, corpses covered with disfiguring rashes, skeletons with skin stretched tight like a drum, bodies with limbs blown apart by bombs—I saw it all and helped haul carcasses out of the hospital.

Buna’s barrack conditions were no less bestial than those in Auschwitz. We were so tightly packed into our sleeping racks that everyone had to learn to turn or readjust in unison. Despite the Germans’ desire to prevent outbreaks of typhus or malaria, hygiene was horrific. One shower a week was a luxury. It was not uncommon while sleeping to be urinated or defecated on by fellow prisoners. Nighttime thefts were also a problem. Sometimes a prisoner might save and hide a scrap of black bread, only to have another prisoner pilfer and eat it.

After my back healed, I was taken off hospital detail and reassigned to work in the Buna Works factory and to do brick repairs on bombed-out buildings. Once, while working in the factory, I was assigned to feed wooden planks into a cutting machine. I got distracted and took my eyes off the boards. The machine severed one of my fingers and nearly took off my hand.

The industrial importance of Buna’s rubber factory made it an Allied bombing target. I recall at least twice being bombed at Buna. The first time was December 18, 1944. The warning sirens blared as the rumble of American B-17 and B-24 bomber planes thundered overhead. I scrambled to hide under something and prayed the bombs would miss us and kill our captors.

The shockwave and blast of bombs excited me. With every bomb the Americans dropped, I knew we were that much closer to liberation. Instead of manna, God dropped munitions. The aftermath was glorious. Fires raged, and black columns of smoke rose not from crematoria chimneys but from the rubble of the German factory.