The Dentist Of Auschwitz (31 page)

People still kept coming and sliding down the rope. With about fifteen holding on, the rope began to untwist. Then it snapped and tore. We all plunged down deep into the dark cold sea. It tumbled and churned, as if we were in a giant washing machine. I had no air. I struggled, my lungs bursting. Finally I surfaced and was able to stay up. David Kot was battling the sea. He couldn’t stay on top. He went down, came up thrashing, and went down again with a gurgling sound. This time he vanished for good. Four others who had held the rope with me managed to stay afloat only a few minutes before they too drowned. I knew I would not get very far if I tried to swim to shore. Flinging my arms and kicking hard with my feet, I swam back to the ship. There I could escape the downward pull of the current. Then I moved along, holding onto the ship’s hull, until I managed to reach the stern. There I held on and watched.

Hundreds of people were fighting death in the heartless cold waters of the sea. Then suddenly, I saw an object bobbing thirty meters from the ship. It was a small bit of wood. That gave me a new determination. I pulled off my sweater, shirt, and underwear. Naked, mustering all my strength and resolution, I began to swim for it. Every stroke was a major effort. Once I was outside the drag of the whirlpool, swimming was easier. When I came close to the wood, I could see that it was a piece of the ship that had blown free in an explosion. I grabbed it and held it tightly under my chest. “We’ll both have to make it to shore, or both go down,” I mumbled. “I will not let go of you until you save me.”

I alternately kicked with my feet and threw my arms forward. Hard as I tried, the meter-high waves seemed to pull me up and down and keep me in the same place. I realized that I lacked the strength to make it to shore. Then I saw a small boat slicing slowly through the sea. I thought of changing direction and swimming into its path to intercept it. I redoubled my efforts. I stretched and kicked, but in spite of this I fell short. It was a four-meter boat filled with naked men. I knew it would pass before I could reach it. I wasn’t the only one struggling in the water. Some were closer to the boat’s path. I feared this was the end. I heard people begging to be picked up. As a man was pulled up, I waved and yelled to get their attention. “We can’t take anyone. We have no more room! We are full!” they shouted back to me. But that did not deter me. In a final effort, I lurched, throwing my arms forward to get a bit closer to them. Then I saw how low their boat was in the water, just barely above the waterline. I begged and pleaded with them until I could shout no more. “It’s Bronek, the dentist. Let’s try to take him,” someone yelled. The motor slowed, and the boat turned and pushed in my direction. A minute later a few hands pulled me into the boat. I slumped down, barely conscious. The naked comrades and the sunburned fisherman were my archangels. As the little boat slowly plowed the waters toward the shore, many people were begging to be picked up. “If we take one more, we’ll all go down,” the fisherman cautioned.

The small engine pushed the heavily loaded boat, as the waves rolled it up and down. The fisherman skillfully manuevered the boat to avoid capsizing. I sat still, with my head between my pulled-up knees, and thought of my brother. I had cheated death once more, but he could not. All hope that the
Cap Arcona
would stay afloat was fading.

The fisherman’s skillful hands brought the boat slowly into the shallow waters. “OK,” he said and stopped. “You can make it from here.” We struggled to get out. The sun was sinking into the sea. The
Cap Arcona
was barely visible. We were naked, cold, and hungry and feared capture. Was there another camp or, even worse, another
Cap Arcona
awaiting us?

Later we learned the results of the gruesome tragedy. Although the precise number of the drowned will never be known, the first estimates were that 13,000 people died in the Baltic Sea that day. Only 1,450, 10 percent of the inmates from Fürstengrube, Neuengamme, Gross-Rosen, and Stutthof camps, survived. Although no one can say how many Americans were captives on the ships, none survived. According to eyewitness reports, the captain of the
Cap Arcona
was the first to leave the ship. Declassified records released by the British Royal Air Force in 1975 conclusively proved that the ships were indeed sunk by the
RAF
. Why is still a mystery.

On January 31, 1947, the captain of the
Cap Arcona
filed the following statement:

Captain Heinrich Bertram’s Report to the Hamburg-Südamerika Dampfschiffahrts-Gesellschaft, Hamburg, Holzbrücke.

On February 27, 1945, I took over the command of the 28,000-metric-ton passenger ship
Cap Arcona,
by the order of the Hamburg-South America Line, in agreement with the Navy Department.

From the captain of the
Athen
I learned that the transportation of about twelve thousand prisoners from Lübeck had begun. Most of them were destined to be loaded on the
Cap Arcona
.

For me it was a matter of course to refuse to accept the prisoners, since any responsible seaman knows that the risk at sea of taking on human beings without absolute necessity during wartime is dangerous enough, especially such masses.

On Thursday, April 26, the SS officer, Sturmbannführer Gehrig, who was in charge of transport, appeared, accompanied by an advisory merchant marine captain and an executive Kommando, consisting of soldiers armed with machine guns. Gehrig had brought a written order to my attention that called for me to be shot at once if I further refused to take the prisoners on board.

At this point it became clear to me that even my death would not prevent the boarding of the prisoners, and so I informed the SS officer that I categorically renounced any responsibility for my ship.

Gehrig proceeded to order the transfer of the prisoners from the
Athen
to the
Cap Arcona
. Additional transports arrived from Lübeck, so that on April 28, 1945, I had a total of about 6,500 prisoners on board in spite of the statement of the merchant marine officer that the ship was capable of holding a limit of 2,500.

On Sunday, the twenty-ninth of April, I drove to Hamburg to request release from the order to scuttle the ship in case the enemy approached. In Hamburg I was told that Count Bernadotte had just declared that he would take all prisoners except German nationals. Swedish ships were already on their way, and I should speedily return to Neustadt.

It is worth mentioning that on Monday, April 30, 1945, the
Athen
took 2,000 German prisoners on board that were not supposed to go to Sweden, so that at the time of the sinking of the
Cap Arcona,
only about 4,500 prisoners were on board.

Signed: Heinrich Bertram, former captain of the
Cap Arcona
[4]

Martin Gilbert, the eminent British historian, in his book
The Holocaust
describes what happened to those prisoners who were turned back from the ships:

On May 2, in Lübeck harbor, several hundred Jews who had been evacuated from Stutthof were taken out in small boats to be put on board two large ships in the harbor, the
Cap Arcona
and the
Thielbek
. The captains of these ships refused to take them, however; they already had 7,500 Jews on board. The small boats were ordered back to the shore. But, as they neared land in the early hours of May 3, and the starving Jews tried to clamber ashore, SS men, Hitler Youth and German Marines opened fire on them with machine guns. More than five hundred were killed. Only 351 survived.

That same day, May 3, the
Cap Arcona
was attacked by British aircraft in Lübeck bay. Only a few of the prisoners managed to save their lives by jumping overboard. [5]

⁴
Joachim Völfer,
Cap Arcona: Biographie eines Schiffes
(Herford, Germany: Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, 1977), 120-21.

⁵
Martin Gilbert,
The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War
(New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1986), 806.

W
e asked the fisherman
where we could go to find shelter. He thought a while, scratched his head, and mumbled, “Hmm.” Then he directed us to a bakery. “Follow the shore until you come to a house on a hill just off the beach. That’s the bakery. No one may be there, but you may find the oven still warm and even some bread.” We thanked him and asked him to help those still in the sea. He did not need to be motivated. He had his boat ready to leave. A veil of darkness covered what was left of the
Cap Arcona
. A ghostlike quiet, broken only by the sound of the surf, hovered about the place where the tragedy of the last twenty-four hours had unfolded. On the shoreline the sea approached and then receded, as if nothing had happened.

As we left the boat I raised my eyes to heaven. “Dear God, my mother and my father and my sister are all dead. Please, God! Let me not mourn my brother too,” I pleaded. We moved like shadows along the eerily quiet shore, trying not to be seen. Suddenly we came upon the bodies of two comrades from Fürstengrube. As we continued on, an elderly man came toward us. What if he gave us away?

The man was frightened as well. His eyes widened with each step we took toward him. The sight of ten naked men walking the beach surprised him. “What happened to you?” he asked, and we told him about our ordeal. He hadn’t heard a thing, he said. We beseeched him to go and recruit people with boats to save the drowning. But he told us that most people had left the area because of the heavy fighting. “Continue moving along the shore, and you’ll come to the bakery,” he said, rolling his esses in the North German dialect. Then he walked off, still shaking his head. We hobbled in the deep sand, half frozen, our teeth chattering, and we discovered five more survivors. Finally we saw a faint light. It was the bakery.

Inside twenty more survivors were wrapped in scraps of burlap and rags, sitting piteously around two burning candles. They were talking about who had drowned and who had survived. The conversation was unemotional, as if they were talking about lost objects. I listened, fearing I would hear my brother’s name among the dead. I still had some hope, however faint.

The ovens were ice cold. Our biggest concern was being found there and herded into another camp. We had water, and at last we could slake our thirst, but there was not a morsel of food. A few more survivors arrived. Each spoke of the miracle that had saved him. “Your friend Willy must have made it to the shore, but then he died. I saw him lying on the beach,” said one. Despite the gnawing hunger, fear of another concentration camp didn’t let us rest. A few more survivors trickled in throughout the night. Nearly all who were saved seemed to come to the bakery. Mendele, among the late arrivals, claimed he had seen my brother still on deck when he jumped into the water. Like most of us, he too was rescued by a fisherman.

As daylight began to filter in, a civilian came and ordered us to board two trucks. At first he did not to tell us who he was or why he was here. We feared the worst. When we asked him where he was taking us, he startled us. “We are taking you to a hospital. The British are here.” Outside were two open trucks and another German civilian. There was nothing to indicate the previous day’s disaster except some debris on the beach. We boarded the trucks, still stark naked. We carried those who were unable to walk. Some still refused to believe that we were free. They suspected another German trick. But there was none of the mustering of the past.

It was six in the morning when we left the bakery. The
Cap Arcona
lay on one side at a forty-five-degree angle, with part of its hull above the waterline. As the trucks followed along a shore road, we occasionally saw bodies on the beach. Then the two vehicles turned onto a paved highway. Within minutes we saw tanks roll by us painted with white stars. We thought that it was the Soviet star and that the soldiers were Russians. The uniforms and berets of the soldiers, though, convinced us that they were British. We yelled and waved, and they must have thought that we naked men were crazy.

More British tanks passed, and there was more friendly waving. We were swept away by the soldiers’ warm-heartedness. Few of us spoke English. We quickly learned the victory sign. They acknowledged us, raising their fingers in a
V
, which said more than any words could convey. As we came to the center of Neustadt, where two-and three-story houses stood, we strained to cover our private parts.

Finally the two trucks stopped at a red brick building, a German navy hospital. We were led to a large room and shown clean bunk beds with white bedding and real linen sheets. Each of us got a blue nightshirt with a navy insignia on it. The contradiction was inescapable. Yesterday we were still useless parasites. Now we were in such an elite hospital. It was a monumental change for us.

The room was dimly lit. I lay with my eyes glued to the ceiling. So much had happened in the last forty-eight hours that I found it hard to think. If only my brother had survived. My head felt heavy. Resting on the soft, puffy pillow, I fell asleep.

It was noon when I heard voices. I opened my eyes and saw a woman, who was speaking in the distinctive German of the region. The familiar voice of Mendele answered from the bed below. The middle-aged woman had volunteered to care for us. “The doctor ordered special food for you,” she said. “It will be ready very soon.” Then a nurse came, raised the window shades, and began taking everyone’s temperature. I did not feel feverish, but she insisted. She also spoke German. Her orders were to check everyone. Bright sunshine began to flow through the windows, washing the room with light.

At twelve thirty two women carried in a large kettle of real soup, along with bread and butter. “A doctor will be here soon. Until then you should remain in your beds,” they said, sounding kind. I had freedom on my mind. Not feeling sick, I didn’t need the peace and quiet of the hospital. I itched to see the world. I just wanted to leave. But how could I, without clothes? I looked at Mendele. He was only a boy, much more fit to be seen naked than I was. I did not need to insist. He offered to look for clothes. “I’ll scrounge something for you,” he said as he left.