WALK IN MY SHOES

Collected Memories of the Holocaust

The pounding in my head made my whole body feel that it might split open and that my pulse was throbbing all the way down to my toes. My body was so hot I was still climbing onto the barracks roof at night. My legs were too weak to work, and my hand felt blistered when I checked my forehead for my temperature.

Next to the hospital was a shed which housed the hot water pumps which warmed the whole building. I climbed up onto the rooftop during the day, hiding behind a chimney which itself had been heated by the pumps. The  chimney blocked the view of the guards sweeping the camp every morning, and the side of the chimney where I hid was next to a fence, so nobody could see me.

Still, I couldn't work, and I had no place to go. My head was pounding so hard it felt ready to fall off. I hadn't much time.

I went to see Max Stein.

"Max, I can't go out on my assignment. I think I'm going to die. My head is thundering and I'm burning up. I've been sleeping on a roof during the day. I'm so hot, I can't work. I'll be dead in a few days."

If anything ever disturbed or distressed Max, he never let it show. This time, his eyes almost bulged out. He could see my eyes were closed nearly to slits. He put a hand on my forehead and immediately pulled back. He knew this was serious.

'I've been watching you, Joe. I know where you've been hiding, but I didn't know it was this bad. Let me go talk to Father," he said, worry clouding his eyes.

Later that day, Father came waddling over to me, his pudgy body almost hopping. When I saw him, I started crying. He examined my head and my eyes. Then worry furrowed his face.

"Take it easy. Take it easy. Let me see what I can do for you, Joe. I might be back later today. Tomorrow at the latest," he told me, his voice low and soothing.

I wasn't sure I would make it through the day. I just hid next to the chimney, hoping no guard would spot that I was sick. Later that same day, Father found me just as I was leaving my warm perch.

"You're going into the hospital. Report there at 7:30 in the morning," he said, eyes sparkling.

I was astonished. I just stood there with my mouth hanging open. Everybody knew Jews were never treated in the hospital.

"Just be there on time," Father said, then waddled away.

That night, a lot of thoughts went spinning through my head. Father must have talked to Mengele. Nobody but Mengele could have given permission for e to be treated. Mengele knew and liked how clean and neat I was and how well I did all his cleaning and polished his boots to almost a mirrorlike shine. But to be treated in the hospital? This was far more than I could ever have expected.

I know what happened, I thought. Father went to Mengele, and he didn't say I am a Jew, and he didn't say I am not a Jew.

Later, Father said he'd told Mengele that I was a guy Mengele knows, the guy who does the cleaning.

When I reported to the particular hospital barracks Father had directed me, I could smell an antiseptic. Then an orderly took me to a bed.

What's going to happen? Are the bastards going to beat me? Force me to watch while they torture one of us? I feverishly wondered.

My fear only increased when the orderly returned and walked toward me with razor in his hand. Would he slit my throat? Cut out my eye? What was he going to do? What he did was to shave my head completely bald, my blond hair falling like pieces of gold.

Soon I was wheeled into an operating room. I looked up, and my eyes almost fell out of my head. Underneath surgical masks were the faces of Josef Mengele and his three assistants. I could feel fear rise in my throat. I'd heard about Mengele's experiments.

"How could Father betray me like this?" I cried to myself.

Then a mask was put over my face and the sweet-smelling anesthetic was administered. I just didn't care anymore. I was in such pain the faces of my parents, my brothers, my sisters, all bobbed in front of my eyes and I just didn't care whether I died. From seemingly far away, I heard the pounding of a hammer, the scraping of a chisel, and the cracking of a bone. Then I blacked out.

When I woke up five hours later, my head was wrapped in white cloth. I could see out of one eye, but the other one was covered with some kind of bandage which went all the way around my head.

"What happened? Where am I?" I cried out.

As the anesthesia fumes wore off, I realized I was in a hospital bed. All I knew was that Josef Mengele had operated on me, and I was still alive. I still had pain in my head, but it wasn't the kind of feverish pounding I'd had before. It somehow was cleaner, brighter, more hopeful, though my head still felt as though somebody were banging the clapper on a large bell.
 

"What happened? What happened? No Jew I know has ever been put in here," I said to myself.

Then I remembered that Mengele and his doctors had operated on me. I could feel a chill of fear run the length of my body. I knew Mengele's reputation, so I ran my hands over my body to make sure I still had all my parts. I even grabbed my penis and my scrotum. I touched them all over. I wiggled them. They were all there. All in one piece. I was astonished.

It was Mengele doing the operation. I know it was. He never does anything for Jews, and surely he can see my circumcised penis. It must have been Father. Nobody else could arrange this, I thought in the blackness.

A few hours later, the guards brought in a prisoner and placed him in bed next to me. The rest of the ward's fifteen beds were filled, and some even had two people in them. It was my turn to have a bunkmate.

The man groaned.

"Who are you?" I asked in German.

"I'm a German Jew," he replied thickly, in German.

"Jew? How? There's no such thing as Jews in this hospital."

"I was hiding in Berlin. I was born there and I have friends. They were hiding me and I had to go out to see a friend of mine who also was in hiding. They caught me on the street. Somebody squealed, I guess, and I had an attack."

He groaned again. I didn't know whether his attack was stomach, gallbladder, or what. He went on to say that when they captured him they took him to Birkenau. They had told him they didn't know whether he was Jew or Aryan, and they had to check him out. In the meantime, they had put him next to me.

He looked at me with troubled eyes and trembling cheeks.

"What goes on here?"

"Me and you are not going to be here tonight," I told him. "You're in Birkenau, and here they gas five thousand to ten thousand people a day. Jews, Gypsies, Masons. Everybody."

"You're crazy," he said, hissing. "My people, the German people, would never do that."

"We'll see. Tonight me and you are going to be leaving here," I said in a nasty tone I later regretted. I knew what would happen to him; he didn't. Maybe his last hours should have been spent in comforting ignorance. Still, his protecting the Germans grated on me, so I stuck in my final dagger.

"You won't be coming back," I said.

About midnight, they came for him. But amazingly, not for me. "Where am I going?" he demanded of the guards, shouting.

Instead, I answered him: "You're going to die, as I'm going to die," I said, this time with real compassion. I could see by his wide eyes and flaring nostrils he now fully understood the truth of what I said. I never saw him again.

The next day Mengele and his three doctors visited me. I figured this was my time to die. Whatever they wanted to do to me, they would do. They saw my eyes were open very wide, and they all walked over, including Mengele. I badly wanted to urinate.

The three young doctors were cordial.

"Hello, how are you?" they said with big smiles. Doing surgery on a live body was a thrilling change of pace for them. Usually they only got to slice up corpses.

Mengele looked hard at the medical chart, then up at me. He talked to me in German, even though he thought I didn't understand. He was trying to demonstrate a warm bedside manner to the young doctors. "You've had a mastoid operation," he told me. I had no idea what that was. I just knew I had a yard of bandages wrapped around my head.

Then the three doctors unwrapped the bandages, which had globs of gray and yellow pus clinging to them. That pus was pouring out of my wounds like water from a leaking faucet.

"Ja, ja. Yes, it's good. It's good. Very good. Very good," Mengele said, looking at the results of his own surgery and nodding approvingly.

Then he called over a male orderly, someone I had seen on the job but had never talked to very much. He knew me because I moved around a lot. Mengele looked sharply at the orderly and said sternly, "Give him farina with milk. Give him margarine and white bread."

I'd not even seen, let alone eaten, such food since the war started. I would have had to bribe or kill somebody to get any of it. Now Josef Mengele himself was ordering me to be fed this delicious, life-giving nourishment. It was too ridiculous.

Either he thinks I'm a child or he's going to adopt me, I giggled inside my mind, half-giddy with fear and the realization that I might live.

I quickly pulled myself together. I understood Father was able to save me because Mengele knew me and I was as familiar a part of his routine as brushing his teeth. Mengele adored sticking to routines, not changing the way he walked, ate, or anything else. I had in an odd way become a part of him. Because I was an underground member, Father had been willing to save me.

I was still astonished that my life had been spared. I thought, I guess it's not what you know, it's who is looking out for you. I know Max, Max knows Father, Father knows Mengele, Mengele knows me. Simple as that.

I fell back asleep, but the orderly shook me awake. I opened my eyes in wonder. I saw a bowl of farina swimming in milk, white bread, real margarine. I almost threw the food down my throat.

A little while later, the orderly brought me white bread and hunks of cheese for lunch. I know my eyes were almost bulging out of their sockets. In four years of war, I had never had such a warm place to sleep or such nourishing food. Dinner that night was a thick vegetable soup.

I'm used to scraping the bottoms of garbage bins for food, and now look what's being brought to me in real dishes, I thought. I was overwhelmed. The food wasn't hard to digest, so even my shriveled stomach could handle it.

Most days, I was fighting to stay alive. Now, I could feel my body being flooded with vitamins and warmth and sleep, and I could feel myself tense up--I knew enough to mistrust good things that happened to me in a death camp. But nobody bothered me, I slept well, and I had good food. I was even given water in a small pan and a towel to wash myself.

There must be a God in heaven, I thought. A few days ago I was ready to die.

Now the Germans are treating me as a human being and the underground protects me. There must be a God in heaven.

Still, I was not treated the same as the Gentiles. I was put off in a corner, fifty feet away from everybody else. I was almost the only patient on my side. I figured Mengele knew I was Jewish but was doing a big favor for Father. He also was letting his young doctors do surgery on a live body. I think that was his idea of a good deed.

All around me were death and sickness. All day and night, when I wasn't sleeping, I heard the phlegmy hacking of people with infections deep in their lungs, groaning and even yelling from pain. Even though this was a ward for the healthiest of the sick people, a few died, and I saw them being carried out.

As for me, I had fine care. Nobody else in the barracks had a sheet or a pillow, and I had both. An orderly walked up to me and silently displayed his forearm: its blue tattooing contained the same series of numbers as mine.

"We have been through Majdanek together," he whispered. "I'm from Warsaw."

For several days after that he brought me a cup of water occasionally, asking, "How are you sleeping? How are you feeling?"
 

He knew that I was a celebrity of some kind, that there must be something special about this short little Jew.

"Thank God, thank God," was all I could say.

Max visited me a few times. He joked, "What are you doing here, Joe? I need you back there." Then he'd joke about my being placed so far away from every other patient. I'd smile, he'd smile, and we'd make small talk. We'd never talk about the underground.

About five days into my stay, Mengele and his entourage came again. One of the orderlies unwrapped the bandages to show off the surgery results. Mengele peered at the wound and said, softly, "Nice, nice, nice." Then he ordered my bandages changed and the four doctors went on their way.

I was in the hospital for nine days, gorging myself on farina, almost drowning milk, white bread, and margarine. Every day I was drenched with sweat, afraid being sick meant somebody was going to cart me off to be gassed at any moment.

I said to myself, "This has got to be a fantasy. This has got to be a dream," but I would always feel the lump behind my right ear and I would know the truth.

One day the orderly who had been through Majdanek approached me, looking a little sad.

"You're going to be discharged, Joe. You already have your clothing, but if you want a new set I'll get you some. And you get your old job back. Somebody's looking out after your rear end, and I'm glad," he said.

The next day I woke up, stretched, and looked over to the row of sick prisoners l beds along the opposite wall. I waited until breakfast was served. I slowly lapped up the milk and farina, letting every swallow take the longest time possible to dribble down my throat.

The sweet taste would have to stay with me for what I hoped would be a long, long time. So would the taste of white bread and margarine. I buttered the bread, then tore it into small pieces. I ate each little piece, chewing slowly and letting the rich taste wander down my gullet, savoring every last second of it.

The orderly took off my remaining bandages and put a little bandage over my scar. Then he gave me my clothing. I put it on, then left. I didn't have to check out; I didn't have a bill to pay. I waved good-bye to the orderly who had helped me.

The patients on the other side of the ward just looked at me with curiosity. They had no idea what strange disease I had that kept me isolated. I didn't bother explaining that it was just Jewishness, and that it wasn't contagious.

It's good to have friends, I thought, realizing that without the underground I should be dead by now. I also realized I was the link between the Birkenau underground and the outside world. I was the one who delivered the messages from each side. If not for me, nobody in the outside would know the horrors that were happening here. In my rectum, I carried hope for the underground inside the camp. I was the one who carried the news of how far the Allies had advanced, and how far the Germans were beaten back.

I'm a valuable instrument to them, I thought. They need me, and I'm thrilled to be needed.

The first day out, I was assigned to a Jewish foreman, a miserable man. He had been a foreman for the Czech for several months. As time went on, he was beating more and more people to death, until the Czech had renounced beatings. Then the foreman had to be careful.

Without a word, he walked over to me and started beating me. He especially enjoyed hitting me in the head. My hair had not grown back yet, and my surgical scars stood out like blood on a bandage. The partisans had trained me how to defend myself. I knew what to do, but my body was too weak to do it.

After he beat and kicked me for a while, he picked me up and threw me into the mud, which was partially icy because winter still gripped the camp. I saw male orderlies who had originally come with me to Auschwitz looking out the hospital window. I could see them frowning in anger as I picked myself out of the soggy mud.

I got my revenge. A couple of months later, when I was even more secure about how the underground could protect me, I walked over to the foreman. He was several inches taller than I, but I leaned up into his ear and hissed, "If you mess with me again, I'll cut your hands off and nobody will do a damned thing to me. And you know what the Germans will do to you if your arms are stumps and you can't even work."

The look he gave me, melding surprise and fear, made me feel almost as good as that first mouthful of farina in the hospital. It was nourishment for the soul.

I had taken heart. Every week I went out with the Leichenkommandos, and every week Max gave me the message and the condom. We always had very short conversations, as though we were total strangers. Generally we would meet in the hospital or between one barrack and another. Sometimes we would meet in the latrine after work, and he would just shake my hand, and say, "Hello, how are you?" Then I'd feel the neatly folded oily paper in my palm.

Nobody would bother Max wherever he went. He was a secretary, so he didn't work. He dressed fairly well and had such winter items as boots and jackets, all with no holes. He no doubt got enough to eat because his face still was plump.

When Max and I saw each other after a few days, we would go through the ritual used with all of the people we knew. We'd shake hands and say, "Thank God you're still alive."

That was how we behaved in Birkenau. Forming friendships was difficult, because we knew any of us could be caught up in the Nazi net at any time. But we couldn't survive without the sustenance of human companionship, no matter how temporary. Friendship in here meant almost as much as food. In a way, it was food for the spirit. Often, friendship was all that prevented us from going crazy or throwing ourselves onto the wires.

However, Max and I had something special. When Max and I saw each other and shook hands, either he was passing a note to me or I one to him. Our exuberance at seeing each other was not remarkable here, where just seeing someone you knew after a few days was a small miracle, a blessing, a light in an otherwise dark and menacing existence.