A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy Read online

  Our next stop was Warsaw. Here my father had some relatives, and since my mother had never met any of them, we were greeted by them with much rejoicing and kissing, lots of laughter, and enormous amounts of food. I hated these visits because all the women kept kissing me and stuffing me with food. Fortunately, there were always some children around with whom I could escape from the grown-ups and play.

  These visits came to an end when I caught a severe case of whooping cough from one of my playmates. The doctor told my parents that inhaling river air would do wonders for me. To my delight, my parents acted almost immediately on the doctor’s recommendation and hired a horse-drawn carriage to drive me back and forth across a bridge over the Vistula River that connected Warsaw with Praga, its eastern suburb. I loved these daily excursions and was very sad when my cough gradually subsided and my parents decided that we could leave Warsaw and travel to Katowice.

  By 1939, Katowice, a city in the southern part of Poland, had become a gathering point for German Jewish refugees. Here they registered with the British consulate in the hope of obtaining the necessary documents allowing them to travel to England. My parents had been told in Warsaw that the British consulate in Katowice would handle our visa applications, and that the sooner we got there the sooner we would be able to leave for England. My whooping cough had delayed our arrival in Katowice.

  In Katowice we moved into a small apartment. I’ll never forget our first night in that apartment. My parents had barely turned off the lights when the room we shared seemed to come alive. My mother screamed that she was being bitten to death. When my father jumped out of bed and switched on the light, we found the walls of the room and our beds covered with bedbugs. They were crawling all over us. It was quite a sight to behold: there seemed to be hundreds of ugly orange yellow bugs, and their vicious bites itched intolerably.

  My mother wanted to leave right away, but my father calmed her down and explained to her that we were lucky to have this place. Once they had convinced themselves that we had no choice but to stay, my parents mounted a veritable bedbug extermination campaign. They found some candles and began to burn the bugs off the walls; they shook them out of the sheets and stepped on them on the floor. There was a sink in the room, and my mother started shaking the bedbugs from the sheets into the sink in the hope of drowning them. These desperate efforts to rid us of bedbugs must have gone on all night. I fell asleep after a while without realizing that bedbugs would be the least of our problems in the years ahead.

  I had a lot of fun in Katowice. There the refugees formed their own little community. My parents became part of it and soon made many friends in this group. As was customary in Germany, these friends immediately became my “uncles” and “aunts.” I played with their children, and they kept an eye on me when my parents had to be away on an errand. They usually gathered in some café or park. Here they played cards, read newspapers, whispered a lot about the war that was coming, and worried. Everybody was waiting for their “lucky day.” And every so often, there would be a celebration, much kissing, and many tears: somebody’s lucky day had arrived in the form of a long-awaited visa from the British consulate, allowing the recipient to travel to England. Soon those who had been granted visas would leave Katowice, usually in small groups or transports put together by the British consulate.

  Our lucky day was not to come for some time. In the meantime, I remember playing in a lovely park in Katowice and swimming in a nearby lake. The Jewish community in the city apparently provided some help for needy refugees, as did various individuals associated with it. I remember being taken shopping by a very nice man who had befriended my parents and returning home with toys and wearing a completely new outfit: new pants, shirt, and jacket. He had thought I looked too German in the clothes my mother liked me to wear. From time to time, we would also be invited to dinner in Jewish homes, although this did not happen all that often, and certainly not as often as I would have liked; I would have been happy to escape our ugly room and meager meals.

  One day my mother came home in a very excited state. She told my father that she and a girlfriend had gone to a famous fortune-teller. Before going in, Mutti had taken off her wedding ring, and, because she looked much younger than her age — she was twenty-seven years old at the time — she was very surprised when the fortune-teller, after studying her cards, proclaimed that my mother was married and had one child. In addition to knowing a great deal about our family background, the fortune-teller told my mother that her son was “ein Glückskind” — a lucky child — and that he would emerge unscathed from the future that awaited us.

  My father scolded my mother for believing this nonsense and for spending money on it when we had barely any left. But my mother claimed that her girlfriend had paid for the visit because she wanted someone to accompany her. “Besides, maybe the fortune-teller knows something we don’t know, for how else could she have known so much about me?” she retorted. “The only thing the fortune-teller knows that we don’t know is how to make money in these bad times,” barked my father. The argument between them continued for a while.

  None of us knew at the time, and I only found out much later, that the fortune-teller’s prediction about me would sustain my mother’s hopes in the years ahead, when we were separated. Even after the war, when friends tried to convince her to give up searching for me and not to continue torturing herself, for “Tommy could not possibly have survived,” she would reply that she knew I was alive. To me, she insisted years later that everything the fortune-teller had told her had come true. “Of course, I don’t believe in this hocus-pocus,” she would add in all earnestness, only to contradict herself immediately by asking, “but how do you explain that she was right about you and me?”

  Our lucky day came a few weeks after my mother’s visit to the fortune-teller. We received the prized visas for travel to England and were scheduled to leave Katowice on September 1, 1939. There was the usual excitement among our friends, with everybody wishing us well and expressing the hope that we would all soon be reunited in England. I was told that we would be in England in a few weeks and that once there we would no longer have to be afraid of the Nazis.

  But it was not to be. On our “lucky day,” Hitler decided to invade Poland. When we arrived at the Katowice railroad station, where our transport was to be put together, the people from the British consulate told us that it was no longer possible to leave from a Polish port. Arrangements had therefore been made to get us to England via the Balkans. Despite the onrush of people who were trying to leave Katowice that morning, probably because it was not far from the German border, we eventually got to board the railroad car that had been reserved for us and for some other refugees who had also received their visas. Finally, after a long delay, the train moved out of the station. We seemed to have made it.

  I don’t know how long we traveled on that train. For the most part, though, the train was stopped more than it moved, waiting for other trains loaded with soldiers to pass. The roads along the railroad lines were crowded with people walking or riding in horse-drawn carriages and wagons. Everywhere there were long columns of soldiers, marching and on horseback and in trucks, pulling artillery pieces and supplies. The soldiers were moving toward the front in the direction opposite that of the civilians, who had to make room for them to pass, not always an easy task on the narrow roads.

  For me, all this commotion was very exciting. I spent much time waving to the passing soldiers and admiring their uniforms and three-cornered hats. And then, suddenly, the fun stopped. Our train had again halted, this time next to a Polish military train. That train was filled with soldiers and military equipment. On each side of the tracks were open fields. We had probably not been there for more than a few minutes when we began to hear the far-off sounds of approaching airplanes. Then they were above us — two or three planes. People began to scream, “Niemcy! Niemcy!” (“Germans! Germans!”), and the air resounded with the rattle of machine-gun fire and the thump
of exploding bombs. The train began to shake. The noise was terrible.

  My father grabbed my mother and me and pushed us out of the train. “They are attacking the military train!” he screamed above the noise. “We must get out, we must get out.” Some people had already jumped from the train and were scrambling across the tracks into the fields. We followed them, pushed on by others. The Polish soldiers began to shoot at the German planes with rifles held out of their train’s windows. They did not have much luck. The planes kept swooping down on the trains and the railroad tracks, blowing up some of the carriages. They kept repeating this maneuver for what seemed like a very long time.

  Once we managed to get to the nearby field, my mother threw herself on top of me while my father shielded both of us with his body. People were screaming as the planes flew over us with their machine guns blazing. They could easily have killed all of us, but it seemed we were not their targets. Then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, the planes were gone. We waited for a while for them to return, and when they did not, we got up and started to look around. No one on our side of the field seemed to have been hit, but people were wailing, and a few children were crying. Some railroad cars were on fire; there was smoke everywhere. Many injured and dead soldiers were lying on the other side of the tracks and near their train. The tracks had been destroyed as far as the eye could see.

  After a while, my father went to look for our belongings. He found some bags and dragged them back to the field. Here we were soon joined by others from our group. “What now?” was the question being asked, and “Where are we?” Nobody seemed to have any answers, and except for my father, no one in the group spoke Polish. He soon learned from some passing farmers that we were not far from Sandomierz, a town some two hundred kilometers east of Katowice.

  We stayed overnight in a barn, and then our little group began the trek east to the Russian border, sometimes in hired horse-drawn wagons and other times on foot. The roads were teeming with civilians and soldiers. Like us, most of the civilians were trying to get away from the invading Germans. Every day there were more people on the road. We slept in open fields or in barns and made little progress in our move east. The farmers would charge us for the use of their barns and sell us food. Often, the barns would already be rented out by the time we got there, and then we would have to sleep outside. Some farmers were kind to us; others were not. The latter frequently called us bad names. Here I first learned that we were “Parzywe Zydzi” — Scabby Jews.

  There were rumors that German spies were everywhere. My father heard that the public was being warned by the Polish government to be on the lookout for German spies. Our little group was suspect because, except for my father, its members spoke only German. With increasing frequency, my father would have to explain who we were and show our English travel documents to suspicious Polish officials. After a while, only he would go out to the villages to buy food for our group and to get the latest news. I would sometimes accompany him. There we would listen to a radio or talk to the farmers. The information we would bring back seemed always to be the same: “Things don’t look too good. The Germans are advancing; the Polish army is retreating.”

  Every so often, my father would speak with somebody who had recently come back from Russia or had news from there. Here too, the story was usually the same. “Terrible things are happening in that country. Not a good place for foreigners; many of them are being sent to Siberia.” Nobody in our group wanted to believe these reports since we had hoped to escape to Russia. Finally, my father decided to see for himself; we were not very far from the Polish-Russian border. He was back a few days later and announced that it would be better to take our chances in Poland. I don’t know whether he had actually crossed into Russia or whether he had spoken to people at the border, but he was convinced that it would be a mistake for us to try to get into Russia. “Conditions are terrible,” he reported, “particularly for foreigners. A lot of people are getting arrested or deported. The lucky ones are turned back at the border.”

  “If not Russia, then what?” somebody asked, prompting a long and often heated discussion about the fate that awaited us in a Poland under German occupation. It continued into the night. When I woke up the next morning, the decision had been made. Instead of seeking to enter Russia, we would try to reach Kielce, a city west of Sandomierz with a large Jewish community that might take us in.

  Little had changed on the roads. They were even more congested. We were being stopped often and asked to produce our papers. At times, there were tense moments as my father tried to convince Polish military officers that we were not German spies. The news from the front was not very good, my father told us. It was getting worse every day. The Poles were blaming German spies for their military setbacks and the rapid German advances.

  My father tried to cheer everybody up by telling us that we would soon be in Kielce and sleeping in real beds again. That was great news for me, but it had little effect on the grim mood that had gripped our little group. I heard someone say that we did not have much to look forward to. “We will either be shot by the Poles as spies or by the Nazis because we are Jews. What is better?” one of my adopted uncles asked with a grin, and everybody laughed. After a while, though, nothing seemed to be funny anymore.

  A few days after our decision to walk to Kielce, we began to hear what sounded like a distant thunderstorm. “Artillery fire,” my father told me, “but it is far away from here. Listen.” And he showed me how, by lying down and pressing my ear to the ground, I would be able to hear it much better. I had a lot of fun playing this game. More and more Polish soldiers and their equipment could be seen on the road and in nearby fields. After a while, the entire road was taken up by retreating troops, at which point all civilians were ordered off the road. We waited and rested in a ditch nearby. It seemed to take hours before the last of the Polish soldiers had passed. Then suddenly, we heard the roar of approaching engines and saw walls of dust in the distance. “Tanks! German tanks!” I could almost touch the fear that swept over our little group. But then I heard my father’s reassuring voice, “Stay calm! Don’t anybody run! Don’t say anything unless spoken to.”

  As the tanks approached — they advanced toward us on the road and across the fields — we were enveloped in dust and smoke. One of the tanks stopped near our group, and a young soldier, his body protruding from the open turret, his face covered in soot, yelled over to us in German, wanting to know who we were. After some hesitation, somebody answered that we were Jews, and another added, “German Jews.” “Nothing to worry about,” he yelled back. “The war will be over soon, and we’ll all be able to go home again.” He waved at us and the tank moved forward. These very reassuring words brought us temporary relief. People began to joke and laugh again. But as fate would have it, they turned out to be the kindest words any German would address to us for a long time to come.

  Notwithstanding what the young soldier had said, for us the war had really only just begun. We continued toward Kielce. Near Opatów, some thirty kilometers west of Sandomierz, a wealthy Polish farmer allowed us to stay in one of his barns. He and my father would go off to talk for hours at a time. My mother would always worry until my father returned, and then the two of them would whisper a lot. I later learned that the farmer and some of his friends were in the process of forming a Polish resistance group to fight the Germans. They wanted my father to join them; they needed people who spoke German and Polish and had military experience. We would not have to worry about food or a place to stay, and a way would be found to get us false identification papers. My father and mother talked about this offer for days. Eventually, my father turned it down. They were both very sad that they had to make this decision. The problem was that my father and I, because of our features and light hair color, could have passed for Poles. But my mother spoke no Polish, and her wavy dark hair and brown eyes would have given her away as a Jew. “Poles can smell a Jew a mile away,” my father said, “and sooner or l
ater somebody will denounce us to the Germans.” As a family, we could not pass ourselves off as Poles and expect to get away with it for long, and breaking up the family was out of the question. We continued our trek west to Kielce.

  It seemed that we were condemned to be who we were, which was not a particularly good prospect. We could do little more than hope that things would get better. That hope never left us, and it sustained us in the years to come, despite the fact that we had no good reason to expect our situation to improve. But what else could we do but hope? That, after all, is human nature.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Ghetto of Kielce

  WE LIVED IN KIELCE for about four years until we were transported to Auschwitz in early August of 1944. Lived is probably not the right word to describe our incarceration in that bleary Polish industrial city, its ghetto, and two different work camps. Had our train not been bombed in an area where Kielce was the nearest Polish city with a large Jewish population — it numbered about twenty-five thousand at the time — we would not have gone there; although, in retrospect, it made little difference that we did not reach another Polish city. The fate of Jews was basically the same in all of them, and life in Kielce during those years was no worse or better than it would have been elsewhere in Poland.

  My first recollection of Kielce is our one-room apartment (kitchen included) on the third floor of an old, somewhat run-down apartment house on Silniczna Street. The building was part of a four-building complex that surrounded a dirty courtyard. To reach our house, one had to go through a big gate, which opened onto a noisy street. We were assigned the apartment by the Jewish community council of the city shortly before the ghetto was established in early 1940. At that time, the German police (the Schutzpolizei) and the Gestapo ordered all Jews to move into the area of the city containing the largest concentration of its Jewish population, which was also among the most run-down parts of the town. We did not have to move because we already lived there.