The Keeper of Secrets (12 page)

Chapter 22

Dachau

November 1939

T
he locomotive pulled into the platform, rolled to a stop, and let out a long sigh of steam and a piercing keen of whistle. Soldiers stepped up to the wooden boxcars, unhooked the metal bolts, and slid the sides open. Clusters of men of all ages stumbled out onto the frozen ground. They’d traveled south for days, squeezed so tightly together they couldn’t turn around, and now their lack of balance was sending them reeling from side to side. Large dogs, held on chains, barked and lunged at them. Snow swirled in the cold wind, stinging exposed skin.

Simon, his hand bound in a bloodstained handkerchief, followed the man in front of him. David was at his heels. Both of them were drinking in deep gulps of the icy, but fresh, air. All around them men in greatcoats seemed to be yelling abuse and screaming instructions.

“Out! Out! Come on, move faster! Move, you dirty Jew.” Eventually they came to the end of a stationary line of men.

“Where are we, Simon?”

Simon turned back to his brother.

“I don’t know.”

A middle-aged man, standing in the line next to theirs, scowled at them. “Dachau, someone said we’re waiting to go into Dachau.”

“What’s that?” David sounded confused.

“It’s a work camp, a slave labor camp.”

“Why did they take us away from Berlin?”

“Because we’re Jewish, boy. When they ask you what you can do, boy, tell them you’re good at making things. That you like building things.”

He looked at Simon. “And you—tell them you’re a cook or a baker; they’re always looking for cooks.”

A
fter waiting for three hours, the boys got to the head of their line. An elderly man sat at a small wooden table, with a sheet of paper and a pot of ink, a pen, and a blotter in front of him.

“Name?”

“Simon Horowitz, and this is my younger brother, David.” Their names were written down, and they were marched into the camp through gates in the barbed-wire fence. The buildings were wooden, rectangular, and low-slung. They were herded across a large square of open ground and into a long room where a man with foul breath cursed in their faces and told them to strip naked. Then he gave each of them a set of striped fatigues, with a red-and-yellow-colored Star of David on the jacket, and no underwear.

In front of them more lines had formed, leading to a row of chairs. The air was full of the metallic clicking of scissors. Simon reached a chair and was pushed down onto it. First a man wielding scissors cut his hair, and then his head was shaved. It felt very strange; the man’s hands were rough, and he pressed hard with a blunt razor. When it dug into Simon’s scalp, it hurt, but the ache from his hand was so intense he hardly noticed. David’s eyes were very round and full of unshed tears. Although Simon tried to send the boy a reassuring smile, he feared it looked more like a grimace.

As soon as the shaving was done they were sent in yet another direction and had to sit in front of a man at a table. This one looked weary and old and wore fatigues, with a Star of David on the jacket.

“What happened to your left hand?”

“It . . . I got hit. By a truncheon.”

“Let me see.”

He unwrapped the hand and tentatively held it out. The man lifted it into his hands, turned it over, and gently prodded the swelling. Pain shot up Simon’s arm, and he yelped and pulled back.

“You’re lucky. It’s the metacarpals, the bones in the hand behind the knuckles. A clean break and not through all of them. It’ll heal in a few weeks. Put some snow on it when you can to stop it swelling any more, and flex the hand to stop it getting stiff.” He looked up at Simon, and his dull gray eyes were kind. “Try not to show the pain. If they ask you if you can work, say yes. If you’re no use to them, they’ll shoot you.”

After that they were marched off to their barracks, bald, barefoot, freezing, and dressed in fatigues that looked like pajamas. The building was a single story with one entrance. Inside it was lined with long wooden bunks, four levels high and six feet wide, full of men, lying with their feet toward the wall and their heads pointing out to the center of the room. Each man had a horsehair blanket and a small metal bowl and lay on a thin sack. Simon stared openmouthed into the room. The guard gave them each a bowl, a blanket, and a sack and pushed them toward one of the bunks.

“In there.”

They clambered up and lay down on their stomachs. Putting any pressure on his hand hurt, but he swallowed the pain and didn’t flinch. He could feel David’s small body shivering beside him, and he patted his arm.

“What must we look like, eh! Don’t worry, we won’t be here long, and what a story we’ll have to tell. Papa will find us and sort it all out, you’ll see.”

David nodded vigorously.

“I know he will, and it’s good to be lying down. I wonder where Mama and Rachel are. God, it’s cold!”

S
imon’s overriding memory of his first night was the unrelenting noise. He wasn’t yet in a position to realize that sleep deprivation was second only to starvation on the list of nightmares to come. All around him echoed a cacophony of coughs, groans, cries, farts, screams, and snores. After a while he created an orchestra in his head and allocated different instruments to the most defined sounds. He couldn’t stop wondering what they’d do if he just got up, walked to the gate, and told them he’d had enough and wanted to go home now. He’d done nothing wrong; what gave them the right to hold him here? Or had he? It was easy to forget that surreal moment when he’d punched a captain in the army of the Third Reich. And who else was here? Franz Reinhardt, who’d simply disappeared during the Kristallnacht, was he here somewhere?

Just as Simon had finally fallen into a black oblivion, harsh voices were screaming at him and jerking him awake. It was still dark, but he could feel bodies moving around him.

“What is it?” he mumbled sleepily.

“Roll call. Three times a day, and for God’s sake, don’t be late.”

The voice sounded frightened. He felt David moving next to him.

“Come on, Si. We’d better follow them.”

The mass of men moved as quickly as it could, out the door and into the freezing night. Large spotlights lit the bare parade ground with a fierce white light. There were more men in greatcoats and more large dogs on chains, snarling and barking. Simon and David stood in line toward the back of the ever-increasing square of men. Simon glanced around him—old men, young men, very thin men, very fat men, and all with shaven heads or a little regrowth, shapes disappearing into the darkness beyond the scope of the light.

After an hour, his legs started to ache but still they stood there, nothing to see but the back of the man in front of you. After two hours, he began to play violin pieces in his head, his fingers twitching as they hung by his sides. After three hours, dawn was breaking, and they were yelled at again until they all ran back to the barracks.

O
ver the coming days Simon and David learned the routines of the camp. There were endless hours wasted in roll calls and standing still in one place. The men had hats that they wore outside of the barracks, and when an officer addressed a man, he tore it off his head and stood with his arms by his sides and his eyes downcast. Prisoners were identified by numbers and had to recite them from memory when addressed by anyone in uniform. They were fed once a day, stale bread and a thin, watery version of
kartoffelsuppe,
a soup with chunks of potato in it, sometimes a piece of sausage. After the first few hours, the hunger pangs abated into a dull gnawing sensation, an awareness that they were never full. Simon remembered his last meal at home with vivid clarity. For lunch that day he’d had a piece of
roggenbrot
bread, some cheese and spicy sausage, and a big portion of his favorite cabbage salad, with raisins, apple, and carrot and a lovely vinegar and sour cream dressing. In fact, he and David could recite all their favorite meals: sauerbraten, apple pancakes, baked veal cutlets, lebkuchen, and their mother’s wonderful
neujahrspretzel
on New Year’s Eve—anything, as long as it had no potato in it. All around him, Simon was conscious of men coping with the sudden withdrawal of substances they were used to ingesting frequently, smokers, heavy drinkers, those on medication, and those used to ample food. Some suffered in silence and some didn’t. Fights over food were common.

He was astonished how quickly he and David seemed to adapt to their surroundings. They slept on the thin mattress, a sack full of wood wool, with a long-haired, scratchy blanket to keep out the biting cold, in close proximity to numerous other bodies. In fact, body heat was a godsend in the dead of night. The other prisoners taught them to hold their mattresses over a fire so the fleas, lice, and bedbugs would fall out into the flames. The latrines were trenches in the ground with a wooden plank laid over them. The planks had round holes cut in them, and a thin canvas sheet separated each hole. Showers and baths were distant memories, but they did “wash” themselves with snow when they got the chance. Their feet were always cold to the point of numbness and started to turn black after days of standing barefoot on frozen ground.

Fear was the most restricting aspect of their daily lives. The guards had complete control over every prisoner and made arbitrary decisions, seemingly on a sadistic whim. Simon saw men shot and hanged and beaten with truncheons every day. He worried about the effect this must be having on his thirteen-year-old brother and tried his best to convince David that their situation was only temporary and would be remedied as soon as their papa discovered where they were. Then, on their twentieth day, something happened that changed everything completely, forever.

Y
ou and you and you and you, come, now. Come on, move!”

Simon was so used to the general din of shouting voices that it took him a moment to realize that the man was yelling at him. And at David. Almost subconsciously they followed the men in front of them, out the door, and across the open space. But this time there was no roll call and they kept on running, the dog at their heels. Eventually they came to another building. An officer with a clipboard stood outside watching them.

“Numbers!” he ordered.

They recited their numbers in turn and stood, eyes down, arms at their sides, caps in hand.

“You have been picked to do munitions work. In here, move!”

They found themselves inside a metal working room full of machines and tables manned by prisoners in fatigues. Simon was shown how to press metal shells, and David, with his smaller hands, was given the job of polishing them. The room was warm, and just the simple act of having something productive to do quickly lifted their spirits. His hand hurt at first, but he found a way to press down with his right and just adjust with his left. Sneaking sideways glances as he worked, Simon could see that the other men were equally absorbed in their activities and the guards seemed to leave them alone. After about five hours, a sharp, high-pitched whistle blew, and some of the men laid down their tools and stood beside their machines. The man with the clipboard reappeared and examined each man’s work, then wrote something on his board. The men filed out the door, and another line came in. Simon returned to his machine, keen to get back to his work.

“David!”

Even before he looked up, he recognized the voice. His heart soared and then crashed, all in a split second.

“Papa!”

“Simon.”

A terrible understanding crept through his numbed consciousness and seemed to freeze him to the spot. With a growing sense of finality he realized there would be no escape, no rescue from without.

Although Benjamin wore fatigues that barely covered his body, Simon could see that his father had already lost weight. His face was ashen, and his skin had a sheen of sweat. He was bald, and for the first time in his life Simon saw his father’s face without the large mustache; his long upper lip looked naked. What was worse, he knew that his father’s reaction to seeing his sons would be as mixed as theirs at seeing him. The joy of their reunion would be tinged with crushing despair at their plight and an overwhelming feeling of shame at his inability to protect his family. They were prevented from talking further until they were marched back to the barracks.

Without consulting the guard on duty, Benjamin collected his meager belongings and moved from his building to be with his sons. There were some initial complaints from the men next to them, but when the family relationship was explained, they welcomed the new arrival with enthusiasm. David took great comfort in his father’s physical presence, and Simon couldn’t help but feel the load of responsibility had lifted. Even if Papa wasn’t going to charge into the camp and rescue them, they had a much better chance of surviving if they were psychologically stronger.

Benjamin explained that he and Mordecai had been driven straight to the railway station and processed, then put on board a train to Dachau with no opportunity to protest or communicate with their families. After comparing departure times, they decided that both men and boys were probably on the same train but in different boxcars, and the chaos at arrival, plus the sheer numbers in the camp, had prevented them meeting until now. Their initial experience was similar to the boys’. They’d stayed together for the first twenty-four hours until Mordecai suddenly developed a high temperature and started vomiting. The guards dragged him away and Benjamin hadn’t seen him since. The other prisoners said he’d been taken to the hospital. No one ever came back from the hospital.

Simon told him about the house, the captain, and the looting. Benjamin was delighted by the punch in the nose, but his joy turned to despair on learning of the fate of Elizabeth and Rachel.

“They’ll be all right, Papa. I told them to go to Maria Weiss. Rachel came with me when we took that first big box of supplies to her, and she’s picked up books for me and had tea with Maria. Mama knows that Maria will help her.”

Benjamin nodded slowly.