The Dentist Of Auschwitz (26 page)

“Is it true that the Unterscharführer cleans his fingernails with your sterilized instruments?”

“Yes, Herr Hauptscharführer,” I answered clearly and continued with the details.

Moll listened intently to everything that I said. He was getting angry. Punishing inmates was his own privilege. Then he turned to Hinze and in a stern voice said, “Is it true what the dentist says? What do you have to say, Unterscharführer?”

Hinze was dumbfounded and stood there silent. He did not seem to grasp the situation or believe what was actually happening. He, a Nazi officer, was being questioned about what he did to a Jewish prisoner? Finally he mumbled that he was not going to answer. That did not sit well with the authoritative Moll. “Ich sehe zu, daß Sie versetzt werden” (I’ll see to it that you are transferred), Moll said and dismissed us all.

I still could not trust that Hinze’s tyranny had come to an end. “You won’t have to fear him much longer,” Breiten said. It was more surprising when Hinze came to see me a few hours later. Calmly he said good-bye to me as if we had once been friends. Had it not been for Lagerältester Otto Breiten’s courage and, of course, Moll’s inflated ego, I would have never been freed of Hinze’s misuse. This day was special, one I would not ever forget.

Another time it was announced that German political inmates could volunteer for the German army. Not all were eligible, nor had all the eligible signed up. Otto Breiten did, and Josef Hermann became Fürstengrube’s new Lagerältester. Josef Hermann was the son of a Jewish architect. His given name was Hermann Josef, and he came from Ansbach, Bavaria. His mother had converted to Christianity. He was married to a Christian, he said. His father had designed the first low-income housing project in Germany; it was built outside Núremberg and called Gartenstadt. He came to Auschwitz as a Jew in 1942. When he was sick with typhus, he lay in the main camp’s KB, and a doctor friend reversed his first and last names to make him sound Gentile. He was sent with us to Fürstengrube after his recovery. That is how the Jew, Hermann Josef, became the non-Jew, Josef Hermann. As camp elder, his position was precarious. He feared that the Kapos who came with us might know his real name and eventually give him away.

Nearly every week new Jews were delivered from such faraway places as Libya, Morocco, and Algeria. The Germans had arrested them in Vichy France. They were replacing the dwindling number of original inmates. Of the Jews from Dobra who had come with me here, only a few remained alive.

One day Kurt Goldberg came into the dental station. With coal dust baked into his face and his striped jacket hanging on his skeletal body, he was a bare image of the Goldberg I remembered. He was despised by his fellow inmates, who could not forget what he had done at Gutenbrunn. He now showed sensitivity that I thought he never possessed. “I am not here as your patient,” he said. What he did in Gutenbrunn still haunted him, but he asked me for no pity. He just came in to unburden his soul. He regretted abandoning his Jewish heritage. Before he left me, he spoke in almost perfect Yiddish. Shunning those he once abused, he was completely resigned to the inevitable. In a sense, I thought, he didn’t want to prolong his life. “I know that I deserve what I am getting. I am not going to last here much longer.” I offered him some food, but he refused to take it. I had to persuade him to accept. This was the first time that I saw him at peace. He was completely resigned to death. A couple of days later I saw his shift returning. Someone was carried on a stretcher. I knew instantly that it was Goldberg. He was nearly unrecognizable. He was, at the end, a scant image of the man we had once feared.

I saw Boot, the heavyweight boxing champion, in the infirmary with a badly infected leg wound. With his large body and thick muscles, he looked every bit the boxer. The Norwegians were a small group, only five in all at Fürstengrube. They were proud of their country and spoke well of the courageous Norwegians that staved off their deportation for so long. But Boot’s name ended up on a weekly selection list, and he was transferred to Birkenau. The irony of his life was that though he had been a winner in the ring, he could not win this bigger bout, and he died from undernourishment and overwork.

Hauptscharführer Moll eventually left Fürstengrube, and Max Schmidt, who had been in officer training school for three months, returned with the rank of Hauptscharführer. He was now the Kommandant. We heard that Moll went to assist in liquidations at camps in the east. Schmidt often came to have his teeth cleaned. He was easy to speak with and, unlike Moll, predictable. At times he had functioned as Lagerführer when Moll was absent.

One morning my brother slept beyond his usual time. When I shook him to wake him up, he pried his eyes open and then fell back to sleep. The next day he was well enough to open his eyes and drink water, but immediately thereafter he fell asleep again. By the third day, unsteady on his feet, he went back to work. I never learned which medication he took that made him so sick, or why he took it.

Within two weeks of Hinze’s departure, a new
SDG
, Karol Baga, came to Fürstengrube. Baga was a Volksdeutscher and completely opposite from Hinze. He did not have Hinze’s abysmal vocabulary and or his malevolence. Baga himself had once worked nearby as a coal miner. It seemed that he felt more comfortable with pick and ax than with his duty as a medic. He showed no interest in what anyone was doing. When he came to the dental station, he remained only long enough for me to say, “All is OK here,” and then he left.

Finally, early in June 1944 we heard that the Americans had landed in Europe. The
BBC
reported their successes. This was the one step we felt would surely bring Hitler and his evil empire to an end. In July the heat of change was bearing down on the Germans. The Allies were pushing through France. The Soviets were chasing the Nazi army back through Poland and into Germany. They must have known that the end was near. We were trembling with hope. But all the SS men at the camp seemed to believe that Germany was still unconquerable.

Later in July we heard about an attempt to assassinate Hitler. It was unbelievable to hear that Hitler survived. We too thought then, as the Germans had, that he was indestructible. Dr. Lubicz expressed it best when he said, “If he is not defeated from within, this may still last a long time.” He added, “The leaders of the free world met with Hitler several times before 1939, only to bargain away land piece by piece for his false promises. They knew of the widespread persecution of Jews then and failed to do anything for us.”

By the end of July Greek Jews from Salonika were delivered to Fürstengrube. None of them understood German, but they proved themselves to be tougher than any of us.

One day, there were unusual lights in the sky, and columns of smoke drifted our way. We knew what the foul odor was. “The Nazis are gassing thousands of Hungarian Jews,” we heard. “The crematories can not dispose of all those bodies, so they’re being burned in pits in the forest.” Soon everyone in our camp knew the cause of the amber-red skies and the stench that flooded the camp. Hungary, too, was soon to be Judenfrei. I went to the morgue, and the dead bodies lay in bizarre positions. I had not been there in days, and some of the corpses were badly decomposed. They smelled so foul that I could not bear it. I decided to leave and not return. Should I be asked about it, I would say that I forgot. But no one asked, and that was the last that I saw of the morgue.

The newest transport brought Jews from the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Among them was a dentist, Dr. Grosch. When he learned that Fürstengrube had a dental station, he came to see me. A few weeks before he had still been free in Prague with his wife and daughter, he said. “We were first taken to Theresienstadt, where they still are, I hope.” He crossed two of his fingers. “And I was transported here.” Dr. Grosch had taught oral surgery in a dental school in Czechoslovakia. He also wrote two textbooks on the subject. I reckoned him to be fifty years of age. He was tall and slender, and his face, only slightly lined, displayed a lot of wisdom and also sadness. But most of all it expressed unusual intelligence. The prison jacket he wore seemed three sizes too small for him. The red triangle, yellow star, and number, along with a
T
for Tschechoslowakei, were at his collarbone.

For me, the concentration camp was by now a way of life, but to Grosch, new to the situation, Fürstengrube seemed very frightening. I had compassion for him. When he asked if he could help me in the dental station, I decided to ask Hermann, the Lagerältester. Dr. Grosch was allowed to work with me. Fürstengrube now had its largest number of inmates, over fifteen hundred, with more than a hundred SS men.

I now had gained a great deal of practical dental experience, perhaps enough for a full dental degree. I knew “It hurts!” in at least ten different languages. I had also learned to devise surrogate methods for helping my patients, and in spite of their novelty some cures really worked. Some of the cases I treated were rarely seen at normal times. I set mandibular fractures and cared for extreme gingiva diseases and periodontal and root infections. Because of the lack of proper medication, the newly arrived Dr. Grosch was often unsure of what to do. His professionalism meant a lot to me. He often talked about life in Prague. The welfare of his wife and daughter was his major concern. He was fond of me. Once, with a twinkle in his eye, he said, “After this is over, I want you to be my son-in-law.”

Hitler kept dangling miracle weapons before the German people. It was amazing that they still believed him. “The war is not lost,” his disciples said. The guards, of course, must have feared they would someday be held accountable for their actions. However discouraged we were, our hope for freedom kept us alive. Perhaps it was a perpetually inherited trait of ours, passed on through the experience of prior persecuted generations. No one wanted to die, not after we had suffered for so long. But freedom was not yet ours.

On a rainy day early in September 1944, Moniek, a Stubendienst from the barracks where my father worked, came running to tell me that my father was unconscious on the washroom floor. When I arrived, Papa was lying on the cement floor, his face cold and sweaty. His eyes were closed, and he was barely breathing. Moniek helped me carry him to the KB, and Josek and I put him on a bunk. Seeing how distraught we were, Moniek called me aside. “I’ll tell you what happened,” he said, “but don’t tell Nathan. Your father wasn’t well this morning, and after the inmates left, he went to lie down on his bunk. But Kapo Nathan ordered him get up and sweep the floor. I took the broom, because I wanted to finish sweeping for him. When Nathan saw this, he called him lazy and ordered him to go on, hitting him until he fell down, unconscious. Then Nathan ordered us to take him to the washroom and pour water on him.”

I was in shock. As I listened, my stomach knotted, and I gritted my teeth. “Why didn’t you call me?” I demanded to know.

“It all happened so fast,” Moniek responded.

When Dr. Seidel examined Papa, he shook his head. Neither he nor Lubicz made any prediction. When Josek and I insisted on being told what was wrong, Seidel said that when Papa’s fever subsided he could tell us more. Dr. Lubicz injected Papa with a stimulant but couldn’t revive him. We knew that our father’s condition was very serious. It seemed that he opened his eyes once, but the pupils were fixed and glassy. They were not the eyes we knew. The thought of Kapo Nathan made me shake in anger.

Josek and I took turns watching Papa day and night. “Papa, do you recognize me?” I asked him many times. If he ever knew that we were with him, he did not give us any sign. He was burning up with fever. His forehead was hot and sweaty. We knew that he had little chance of living, but we couldn’t admit it to ourselves. We sat hoping for a miracle. The next day Moll came and said he knew Papa was very ill. He allowed me to stay with him. The next evening Papa stretched out his arms as if to embrace us. We thought we saw his lips move, but there was only silence. Then his hands fell to his side. Dr. Lubicz looked at him but saw no promising signs.

The third night was Erev Rosh Hashanah, the night before our New Year. Suddenly Papa’s face turned gray. He sank deeper into the coma and soon died. Though we knew all along that his death was inevitable, seeing it happen and seeing his lifeless body was extremely painful to us. My father was my hero, perhaps even more so because of the anguishing years in camp. I missed him enormously. Josek and I knew that his children could not bestow the last tribute, to give him a decent burial.

But the morning after Papa died, Moll said, “When I saw your father I knew he wouldn’t make it. An ambulance will be here to pick him up. I know you say some prayers at burial for the dead.”

“Yes, Herr Hauptscharführer. Kaddish is what we say.”

“Jawohl, tell the driver to wait and to allow you both the time to say what you want.” Moll could even be that generous and understanding. I thought of an old well-known Jewish proverb: “The worst anti-Semite has one Jew that he likes.”

The next day, the first day of Rosh Hashanah, Papa’s body was taken to Birkenau. Before that, however, Josek and I recited Kaddish, as best as we recalled it. “Eternal One! Father of our father. Have mercy on him, as he has passed to his eternal rest. He raised us to know that salvation is achieved by believing in thee. He lived for thee and led us in thy way. He never forsook thee and thy teaching.”

We were sure that Papa’s death was due to Nathan’s beating. I went to see him. Nathan avoided me for a time, but I found him and asked: “Nathan, what did you do to my father? You killed him! Didn’t you know that he was sick and not unwilling, but unable, to work? When Moll said that my father could help in a block, I sent Papa to work in your barracks because I knew you. I thought you would have some regard for his age. But I see how wrong I was. You are a Jew, but you are no less brutal than the SS are. Have no doubt, you will pay for this someday. People like you get what they deserve.”

His face afire, he glared at me. But I knew that he would not dare hit me. “I didn’t know that he was sick, I swear,” he said. I looked him in the eye. I had nothing to add, so I left in disgust. A few months later Nathan Green tried to escape. He was caught and hanged.