The Dentist Of Auschwitz (32 page)

I almost gave up hope of seeing him again, but he returned wearing a black tuxedo with tails that was four sizes too big for him. He didn’t settle for ordinary clothes. He brought me a German naval officer’s uniform with all the insignias, a pair of high laced navy boots, and an officer’s hat, belt, and tie. “Where did you find this?” I asked him, surprised.

“Don’t ask any questions. Just get dressed. Wait ‘til you see what else I have,” he said with twinkling eyes. Then he went out and came back pushing a shiny bicycle by its handlebars. “I took it away from a Nazi,” he said. I was not surprised. I also felt uncharitable toward the Nazis. The law of survival in the Lodz ghetto and in concentration camps had taught him new rules, which he now followed. It was the law of the jungle.

Many of the released prisoners also wanted to leave, and those who were able walked out with us. I am closing a chapter of my life, I thought. Mendele walked with his head high, proud of this shiny bike, something he probably wanted all his life but never got. Happiness was written on his face. Then, as if in an afterthought, he exclaimed in a sudden burst, “You know what? I saw your brother, Josek.”

It was as if he had hit me in the face. Josek alive? How could that be? I took him by his silk tuxedo lapels and shook him. “You saw Josek,” I said slowly, looking into his eyes. He looked back at me very seriously. I knew Mendele wouldn’t tell me a lie about my brother.

“Honest to God, I saw him,” he insisted.

“When did you see him?”

“Just now. I forgot to tell you.”

“Are you sure that it was Josek you saw?” I said, not wanting to risk raising a false hope. “What was he wearing?”

“He still had on his camp clothes. I don’t know how they survived, but there were about seventy of them. Honestly, I swear by my mother and father that I saw him.” I knew it had to be true.

“Mendele! I believe you. Come with me and help me find him.” We walked to the center of town, and two more survivors told me that they had also seen my brother. There could be no mistake. I was sure he was alive. I walked up the same hill we had come down two days before with Mendele circling around me on his bike. We saw a group of fifteen of our fellows still wearing their infamous concentration camp outfits. I took a few steps forward, but Mendele was already among them. He found my brother, who was coming toward me estaunded and happy. Under his arm was a Swiss cheese the size of a bicycle wheel.

“Josek! How did you survive?” I demanded to know, as we embraced. It had been a long time since we had cried. All the tears, long held back, came pouring out. We wept like children.

“I followed you with my eyes. When you passed the stern I saw you struggle, and then I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I saw you being pulled up into the boat. Seventy of us were still on the ship, holding on to the railing. It was dark, and I thought that was it and no one would help us then. But at daybreak, I guess about six o’clock this morning, a boat with English soldiers came alongside and took us off,” Josek said, happily exuberant.

One question was always the first thing that a survivor asked another: How did you survive? No two stories were alike. Unfortunately there were few of us to ask those questions. Most of the tenacious, tough, death-defying comrades who miraculously survived years of ghettos and concentration camps, had been devoured by the Baltic Sea. Only a small part of the
Cap Arcona
was above the water. “No one could possibly be alive out there,” I thought.

The Allied soldiers who liberated the area, British and Belgian troops, could not understand how it all had happened. What we told them about the camps seemed so preposterous that they shook their heads in disbelief. It seemed as if they didn’t know anything about concentration camps. We were the first inmates that they had stumbled on.

As we were saying our sorrowful good-byes to our dead comrades, those with whom we had endured the worst, a young British lieutenant asked if some of us would come with him and tell his superiors what had happened. Not many of us spoke English. I did a little, though not well. My brother and two others went with the lieutenant and me in an odd-looking car, a jeep. We drove west on the main road, passing hundreds of abandoned cars, trucks, and tanks until we came to a brick building, a former post office. The lieutenant told us that when the German armies pushed to the sea, they had tried to elude capture by leaving their army vehicles behind and switching to civilian vehicles.

We were taken to a major. We still felt apprehensive around authorities, especially the military. That fear continued long after the war. The major was about fifty years old, with a short haircut and a neatly trimmed mustache. He opened a package of cigarettes and offered each of us one. Then he leaned back in his chair and asked in English which one of us spoke his language. I nodded and told him that I spoke a little English. He prepared to take notes. He asked my name and where I was from.

We were concerned about being forced to repatriate to Poland. A rumor that this might happen was circulating at that time. I remembered Max Schmidt’s suggestion. “We’re from France,” I said.

He asked how we got on the
Cap Arcona
and how it sank. When I told him in my limited English that we saw
RAF
planes bombing the ship, his chin dropped, and his eyebrows rose in disbelief. Intrigued, he asked more, and then it became apparent that my English was insufficient to fully describe the event. The major called an interpreter. A pretty German girl of about twenty came in and translated his questions into German for me and my answers into English for him. She was visibly moved by the account of our experiences.

The major and lieutenant listened politely. At the end of our interview, the major suggested that we leave the area because of the ongoing fighting. Of course we didn’t have transportation. Having seen many abandoned vehicles on the way here, we hoped he would permit us to take one of the cars now littering the roads. He understood the connection. “I can’t give you permission,” he said, friendly but firm. “There are so many are out there, though. Just take any vehicle you can use. No one will stop you.” As for our personal identification, he said, “Your tattoos will sufficiently identify you.”

We were excited, and ten of us went to look for the right vehicle. We explored all the cars around, but one car couldn’t take us all, so we decided to look for a truck. We searched until we were almost out of town. Then we saw a bus with camouflage war paint. It was a Peugeot, still in good condition. My father had once owned a Peugeot truck. I looked around inside, but the keys were nowhere to be found. It was the perfect vehicle for us, and we wondered what to do. We decided to go into the house and ask the farmer if he had the keys. He claimed that the bus wasn’t his, but we thought that he had the keys nonetheless. We were determined to take that bus. When we insisted and threatened him, he went to the bedroom and returned, trembling, with the keys in his hand. He claimed he forgot his wife had put them there.

I started it up and began backing it out onto the narrow street. I had had only limited experience driving a large vehicle, and I soon got into a situation in which I could go neither forward nor backward. The engine stalled. I tried to get it going, but it kept stalling, and I finally gave up. Disappointed, we left that bus standing and went to look for another one.

We must have looked at fifty vehicles without finding a bus like the one we had just left. It was late in the afternoon. We were dulling our hunger with slices of my brother’s wheel of Swiss cheese. We searched until we came upon two Italian-made Fiats that looked as if they had just come off the assembly line. The keys were in them, and we decided to take them.

My brother started one, and I the other. We were driving west, as the major had suggested, deeper into the occupied territories. We greeted the soldiers on every Allied vehicle we passed with waves. They looked at us with misgivings, wondering who the bony-faced people in striped suits and shabby German naval uniforms were. The landscape was now free of swastikas. In their place lay the reminders of war: burned-out cars, trucks, and tanks. Among the people walking on the road was a tall, slightly hunched man carrying a bundle on a stick. He was swaying from side to side and lurching forward as if he had been on the road a long time. As we passed him. someone said, “It’s Ohlschläger, the SS guard from Fürstengrube.” We stopped, and he continued walking calmly toward us. When he came close we asked him if he knew who we were. He acted evasive and answered no.

“Are you not Ohlschläger, the guard from Fürstengrube?”

This convinced him that it would make no sense for him to deny it. “Yes,” he said, stuttering, “but I had nothing to do with the camp.” We soon became accustomed to hearing this denial. “I just did my duty. I was just a tower guard.” This was another excuse we would hear repeatedly. Now Ohlschläger was no longer the brazen SS trooper. He feared us as we had once feared him.

He embodied all evil to us. Our bitterness and anger were difficult to contain. Some said we should kill him. We all wished him death, but no one wanted to be the executioner. He was repeating his defense. “I was just a plain man doing my duty,” he said over and over. Our positions had suddenly reversed, and he was helpless. We were unsure what we should do with him. We were intoxicated with our new freedom and found it easy to forgive. But he did not walk away scot-free. We gave him a few well-deserved kicks and slaps, and then we left him. His real punishment, we believed, was the defeat of his Führer’s Nazi theory. That should bring him enough disgrace. Later we agonized over why we had not dealt more harshly with him.

As we continued driving, we came to Neu Glassau. By then the sun had set. We had nowhere to go, so we decided to drive by the Schmidts’ barn, take the cutoff, and go to their house. In front of their mansion was a circular driveway lined with trees. A few of our former fellow inmates who were still there were astonished to see us. They still wore striped suits, as did most of our party. They told us that they had survived by hiding in and around the barn. Unfortunately some others were not so lucky; they had been discovered and shot. Josef Hermann was also there. He preferred to be called Hermann Josef now. Schmidt, our former Kommandant, was gone.

The elder Schmidts, whom we had not seen before, came out of the house and greeted us. He was a well-to-do farmer, a dapper suntanned man of about fifty. She was a plump, well-mannered lady. Max was their only child, they said. They had one of their pigs slaughtered for dinner that night and asked us politely to stay. Whereas just days ago we were
Unmenschen
and, like cattle, had slept in and around their barn, now we were suddenly honored guests having dinner in the house of our Kommandant’s parents. Had our lives taken this big a turn? No German had treated us like this before. Before dinner they served wine and schnapps. For many of us, this was our first drinking experience in years. By the time the pig was cooked and brought to the table, some of us were half drunk, or at least lightheaded. The table was festive, as if set for a joyous celebration, covered with fine china and crystal.

In this gaiety and frolicking, the time was apparently right for a surprise to be sprung on us. In walked Max Schmidt with a bright, friendly smile on his face, his hair cropped. He came up to each of us sitting around the table to shake hands. To me he stretched out his arms as if I were his closest pal. “Dentist, how nice that you survived. Too bad that Bernadotte wouldn’t take you to Sweden.”

Although I regarded his advice about Sweden as the best deed of his that I could remember, I asked him how he knew I was not in Sweden. “You were not around when we were returned,” I said to him. He let it go by, and I did not pursue it any further.

Here we were, pampered guests in Schmidt’s house eating a special meal prepared for us. The former Lagerführer sat at the same table as we did, and we all ate and drank merrily together. “Let’s not talk about the past. Forget what has happened. It was a terrible time for all of us,” Schmidt said. Then he rolled up the left sleeve of his shirt and showed us a number on his arm, just like the ones that all of us had. I couldn’t see whether it was tattooed or painted. That seemed not to upset us. We let everything pass with laughter. The prevailing attitude was one of forgiveness.

Around midnight we all were asleep. When I woke up in the morning I saw sparkling sunshine filtering into a few small windows of the feed storage room where I had slept. Next to me were my brother and Srulek Lipshitz. My head was heavy. Something wasn’t right, I knew. Weighing what had happened last night, I became troubled. I thought about Max. In the past five months, having sole command of us, he could have let us go free. Showing us a prisoner’s number, to make himself seem like us, was particularly distasteful to me. This number, and the fact that his hair was cut short, convinced me that he was strenuously trying to conceal who he really was and wanted to masquerade as a camp survivor. “We cannot allow this,” I thought. I could not stay there another minute.

Ten of us decided to leave immediately. Hermann Josef wanted to come with us. “We ought to turn Max over to the Allies and tell them what role he played in the camps,” I said. Hermann agreed that he was not entirely innocent. Max was nowhere to be found, but his parents were there, and so, suddenly, was Gerta. It was obvious to the Schmidts that something had changed since last night. They knew that we were leaving. It was difficult to part from our brethren with whom we had shared life for several years. We had little gasoline left and thought we would stop and ask soldiers for “petrol,” as the British called it. As we left we were still talking about how we were manipulated by the Schmidts and how Max’s insensitive act was particularly appalling.

Five kilometers to the west we saw an British army depot. We drove in and were immediately stopped at the barrier. We explained in halting English to the two soldiers why we had stopped, but they wouldn’t let us see anybody. They claimed that no one there had authority in such matters and suggested that we see British Army Intelligence. Nonetheless, we succeeded in getting a canister of gasoline for each car, twenty liters’ worth, and also a box of rations. We stopped at two more depots and were told the same thing. None of the British soldiers seemed to take us seriously—as if they did not care. We were baffled and disappointed by them. Since we were not far from Westphalia, Hermann Josef suggested we stop in Lüdenscheid, where a friend of his still lived, he believed. We changed direction.