Felix Opatowski's Holocaust Memoir PDF

Prologue In 1950, five years after the concentration camps were liberated, it felt as if I were coming out of some sort of altered state; I re-entered the world in a daze and everything seemed covered in fog. It felt like there was no place to go and nowhere to turn. How can anyone imagine the ment...

Prologue In 1950, five years after the concentration camps were liberated, it felt as if I were coming out of some sort of altered state; I re-entered the world in a daze and everything seemed covered in fog. It felt like there was no place to go and nowhere to turn. How can anyone imagine the mental state of a survivor? The line of sanity had been stretched to its limit. By then, the world was again in turmoil. Stalin’s Communist regime and its threatening antisemitic policies had already caused a new exodus of Jews from Eastern Europe. Among them were the Gnats, a Jewish family from Poland who had spent the war years in Siberia. They had a daughter named Regina. When I met her and fell in love in 1946, she was seventeen years old and I was twenty-two. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen and today, as I write down my memories after fifty years of marriage, four children and five grandchildren, I still cannot believe how fortunate I was to have met her. My wife and I and our eighteen-month-old baby arrived in Canada in April 1949 with no money, no profession and no job. Although I was fluent in Polish, Yiddish and German, I now found myself unable to communicate. Moreover, I was given the impres- sion from everyone I met, including Jews, that it was unfashionable to be a survivor. Most people were simply not interested in learning  2 gatehou se to h ell about the concentration camps and the atrocities that occurred in them. In my opinion, it was only when Adolf Eichmann was caught in Argentina and taken to Jerusalem for his televised trial in 1961 – and particularly when Elie Wiesel’s writings were published – that the world took another look at the survivors.1 As I started to think about telling my own story, I was driven by a personal quest – the need to find a British prisoner of war whom I had only known in Auschwitz by his code name, the Count of Auschwitz. I have always felt that without him I would not be here to tell this story. I want to honour what he did to help the Jewish prisoners in the camp and do justice to his memory. I also want to tell my story in the hope that future generations will never forget the horrors of the Holocaust, of which I am a survivor. I know that I owe something to the people who didn’t make it. These people did not commit any crimes. These people did not kill anybody. Young, old, pregnant women, babies – what could their crimes possibly be? They died solely because they were Jewish. The world must remember what happened to them so that they didn’t die in vain. Most of what I will tell you here I experienced personally or saw with my own eyes. I will also tell you some things that other people told me, and rumours that I heard. Yet, having finished this memoir, I reflect on the fact that long after the survivors, including myself, are gone, historians will continue to write about the Holocaust, especially about Auschwitz. But they will never really know everything about the camp because nobody ever really knew everything about Auschwitz. Felix Opatowski, Prisoner No. 143425 Toronto, 2008 1 For information on Adolf Eichmann and Elie Wiesel, as well as on other major organizations; significant historical events and people; geographical locations; re- ligious and cultural terms; and foreign-language words and expressions contained in the text, please see the glossary. My Childhood in Lodz I was born in Lodz, Poland on June 15, 1924. When I was growing up, the population of Lodz was approximately half a million and about one-third of that was Jewish. Of these, I would say that 50 per cent had something to do with textiles, one way or another. My parents’ names were Esther and Nathan. I had one brother, five years younger than me, named Romek. He was a good-looking kid with lots of blond curls. When I still had some, my hair was a red- dish colour. Like many of the Jews in Lodz, my father worked in the textile trade. He was born on a farm not far from Łask, a town about fifty kilometres from Lodz. My mother, Esther, was born exactly at the turn of the century, in 1900, and she was about five years younger than my father. Back then we didn’t always know people’s exact dates of birth and, unlike in Canada, celebrating birthdays was not com- mon. I don’t remember the dates when my parents were born – only the years. When my father was about fifteen years old, his father told him, “Son, if you’re not going to do something with your life while you’re still young, the Russians are going to take you into the army.” Even though Poland was self-governing, it was still under Russian military occupation and young men were drafted into the army at the age of twenty and forced to serve for six years. Naturally, my father didn’t want to be drafted, so he left Poland and went to Germany. Poland 4 gatehou se to h ell had open borders with Germany and Austria and their relations were relatively good. While moving around from one place to another trying to find work, my father met a young German, who wasn’t Jewish, named Max. Max had left home for the same reason as my father – in his case, to avoid being drafted into the German army. Of course, no one knew yet that there would soon be a war; they simply didn’t want to be in the army. Max and my father became very close friends. They spent time travelling through Europe from one country to another, eventually going as far as Spain and Portugal. My father learned how to speak German fluently. When World War i broke out my father and Max stayed in Spain and Portugal to avoid the draft – Spain remained neutral and Portugal only entered the war in 1916. While they were in Portugal, they supported themselves by peddling cheap goods on the road and at a kiosk in the marketplace. When the war ended, they each returned to their parents. Nevertheless, they made a pact that whatever happened, they would remain friends. The post-war period in Poland, and perhaps in all of Europe, was a struggle. Germany had lost the war and communism was gaining power there. My father came back to his father’s farm near Łask, but after travelling all over Europe, he didn’t want to become a farmer. Besides, the farm didn’t even belong to the family. Polish landowners leased out their land to Jewish farmers and they had to pay a percent- age of the produce to the landowner as well. My father had quite a number of brothers and sisters but not one of them wanted to work on the farm; each wanted to be independent. When I was young my father’s brothers and sisters would come around to visit and exchange information. I could always hear them talking because our place was small and there wasn’t much privacy. Wherever we lived, if we had two rooms, it was a lot. One conversa- tion I remember vividly was when my father’s sister, Sarah, came to ask for advice. She had married a German Jew by the name of Nathan Krull. Because the economic situation in Poland was difficult – es-  f el i x opatowsk i 5 pecially for Jews – they were looking for a better life. When my aunt asked my father what he thought of Germany or other countries as a place to live, he suggested that they go to Spain or Portugal because he knew people there. They took his advice and settled in Portugal, where they lived for many years. Poland had become independent in 1918 but the economic situa- tion for both Jews and Poles was even worse than before. There was terrible inflation and taxes were high. The government taxed people according to how much they thought a person should pay instead of verifying what they earned. Whenever I overheard my parents talk- ing about problems, this seemed to be their biggest hardship – how to meet their taxation quota. They had very little money to begin with and it wasn’t easy for them. At a certain point my father’s friend Max visited our family and decided to remain in Poland. My father was a smart man but he didn’t have a profession so Max suggested that they form a business part- nership. Max knew about machinery since his father was a machin- ist in a large German textile factory. Max’s father helped them get two or three used textile machines and used the parts to put together one good knitting machine; with that, they started a small business manufacturing clothing in Lodz. They had a little shop and that’s how they made a living. At around that same time, my father met my mother, most likely at a dance hall where young people congregated. They fell in love and got married in either 1921 or 1922. My mother’s parents had a little dairy stand in the market in Lodz where they sold milk and cheese. My mother and her sister would help their parents on market days. Later on they began selling dairy products from their home. When my parents got married, they lived in her parents’ apartment and that’s where I was born. My grandfather was Orthodox and I remember his grey beard and traditional black hat. I don’t think I was more than three or four years old when he died, so I only remember him vaguely. My grandmother spent most of her time in bed. In those days, when people got old and a little bit 6 gatehou se to h ell sick, they just stayed in bed. My grandmother was always either in bed or in the kitchen and I remember very little about her as well. My father’s parents, on the other hand, I remember vividly. I visited my paternal grandfather’s farm once or twice each year. On the high holidays – Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement – we would always get together. It wasn’t easy to travel there because we had to take a train and then a wagon. Sometimes my grandfather came to visit us by horse. He had red hair, like I did, and a thick, bushy beard. He was as strong as a bull. One time, when I was about ten, he took me to the barn and said, “There’s a sack of potatoes. Can you take it into the kitchen? Your grandmother is going to need it to cook.” I grabbed the sack of potatoes, but I couldn’t lift it. He said, “What kind of a man are you?” He took the sack of potatoes on one shoulder, took me on the other shoulder and walked to the kitchen like that. He was big and stocky, and I remember him as a very kind man. On my grandfather’s farm there were many fruit trees and lots of bees. Whenever we went to visit there was always plenty of food and we would often bring home fruit and a pail of honey. As a child I was terribly afraid of the bees and when they chased me I would scream. My grandfather would tell me not to be afraid. He could put his hand right into the beehives and the bees didn’t do anything to him. I was always amazed by this. I still don’t know how he did it. There was also a stream running by the farm with lots of carp in it and my grandfather used to fish out the carp with his bare hands. Once, at dinnertime, my father asked my grandfather how he and my grandmother made a living. My grandfather said, “It’s not too bad. I have a bonus. The landlord doesn’t know about all the fish in the stream so I don’t have to pay a percentage to him when I sell them. I make more money from the carp that I take to the city than from the fruit.” When I was a child and my brother was a baby, my grandfather gave me a little German Shepherd puppy. I was thrilled. I took the  f el i x opatowsk i 7 puppy home and named him Rex. This dog was my childhood com- panion and my whole family loved him. Wherever I went, Rex fol- lowed. He went to school with me and would wait outside until I left at the end of the day. He was so smart that he understood everything that I told him, in both Yiddish and Polish. Sometimes when my friends and I played soccer and we didn’t have anything to use for a goalpost, we would use the dog instead. I would tell Rex, “Stay.” And he always did. Some of the other kids were afraid to come close to the goal with Rex there and refused to play with us. It’s possible that he barked at them, but Rex was never a vicious dog. Thinking back, it was really quite funny to have a dog as a goalpost. Other good memories from my childhood are the kind that chil- dren recall when they have a happy childhood and loving parents. I remember my mother’s kindness and caring. I remember how on my first day of school my mother stayed with me because I was crying and didn’t want to be there without her. The teacher told her not to sit with me. “But he’s crying,” my mother exclaimed. What did that teacher know? I remember another mother was sitting with her child, too. The next day I didn’t cry and my mother told me that I would be okay. “Don’t worry, I’ll be waiting outside,” she said. My mother had a sister and a brother-in-law who lived nearby and they had four children, two boys and two girls. Their younger daughter was a year or two older than me and we often played to- gether. She was a beautiful young woman with long, red curls, but she had one problem that made her unhappy. She had freckles. I don’t know who came up with the idea that girls with freckles couldn’t find a husband; all I know is that everyone made fun of freckled girls and it was very disturbing for them. My cousin always felt bad that her friends had boyfriends already and she didn’t. Much of my childhood revolved around my father’s little shop. It was far from where we lived and I very rarely saw my father during the week. He didn’t have a car and by the time he came home from work I was already asleep. Mostly I spent time with him on Sundays 8 gatehou se to h ell when the shops were closed and I would go with him to help him clean it. As a child I liked sports and was an avid soccer player. Soccer was very popular in Europe. At the end of our street was a huge field where most of the kids played. I was better than average and became a much sought-after soccer player. I even played on the Junior Polish League, which was a Christian team. Ultimately this saved me a lot of grief. I was once harassed by Polish hoodlums who threw stones at me and called me “dirty Jew” and “Christ-killer,” and my teammates came to my defence. “Unh uh,” they called out to them, “You find yourself another Jew to pick on, not him.” But even my teammates weren’t always so kind to Jewish players. Jews were treated as inferior and often limited in what they could do on the team. We lived with antisemitism on a daily basis. I remember once running to my father and crying, asking him why I had been called a “dirty Jew” in the street. He replied that I was going to have to live with this problem all of my life. I couldn’t understand because I was too young then, but little by little, as I became more exposed to prejudice, I began to realize what he meant. It was in the playground. It was in the school. It came from the teachers, from the principal, from everybody. I just had to resign myself to it. School was mandatory and I went to a public school, not a sepa- rate Jewish school. Most of our teachers were Polish, but there were also some Jewish teachers. I wasn’t a bad student because I was very curious and read a lot of books. I also always wanted to know a little bit more than the Polish child sitting next to me. When I was twelve, I told my father that some of my friends were going to the Jewish high school, or Gymnasium, and I wanted to go too. Instead, my father advised me to go to the Catholic Gymnasium, where he felt I would get a better education. I registered there, but the antisemitism soon became too rough for me to handle. There were only three or four Jewish students in my class and we were treated badly. Some of the kinder Christian teachers told me that I should  f el i x opatowsk i 9 go to the principal to complain if I was treated unfairly. But when I went to the principal he told me not to complain and said, “You Jews shouldn’t even be here.” I went home upset, blaming my father for sending me to the Catholic school. After the Christmas break, I didn’t go back. Instead, I applied to another Gymnasium in the city. Unfortunately, though, I couldn’t pass the exams to go to the next level at the new school because I hadn’t yet been there a full year. What helped me get ahead was that one of the Christian teachers had seen me playing chess, which I was very good at. This teacher got to know me and helped me advance to the next grade because he knew I was bright from the way I played chess. Although I wasn’t brought up Orthodox, we had a traditional Jewish home. My family celebrated the Jewish holidays, which at that time was very rare for people who were not religious. My father, hav- ing left home early in his life, was not observant, but he knew a lot about tradition and the Bible. When I was thirteen I had a bar mitz- vah. It was in what we call a shtiebl in Yiddish, a small synagogue. This shtiebl was bigger than a room; I think it had been converted from a small warehouse. I went to cheder – religious school – for a few weeks before my bar mitzvah and learned a few verses from the Torah portion that I was supposed to recite. I actually didn’t learn that much because I kept sneaking out to play soccer. When the time came and I was called up to read the Torah, I said the few words that I had learned and then my mother came in with a tray of herring, a challah and a bottle of vodka. Everybody said “L’chaim!” (To life!) and that was my bar mitzvah. Around that time I also joined a Zionist youth organization called Betar, founded by a man named Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Many Jewish chil- dren were active in youth groups. We didn’t have anywhere else to go at night because we were afraid to be out in the streets. We got uniforms, played games, sang songs, and learned about Zionism and pre-state Israel – then called British Mandate Palestine. These lessons stayed with me. The Betar clubhouse was a little bit far from where I 10 gatehou se to h ell lived, but I had a friend who belonged named Jolinarsky. He was the captain of the soccer team on which I played and we all looked up to him. When he suggested I join Betar, I did. At first they wouldn’t ac- cept me because I was only thirteen, which was too young. But I kept going there and sat around and watched them until they let me stay. Before joining Betar, I knew a little bit about Zionism from my parents. They had friends who belonged to Zionist organizations and many of these organizations arranged for guest speakers to come from British Mandate Palestine and other countries. Some of these speakers warned us that we should leave Europe. In 1938, about a year after I was with Betar, Ze’ev Jabotinsky came to Lodz on a European tour to warn the Jews that a catastrophe was approaching. At this point, not too many people spoke out so openly about their concerns. His arrival was a significant event for us since he was the founder of the Zionist Revisionist movement and played an important role in Jewish politics. When he spoke in a Jewish theatre in Lodz, it was packed with people. When he left, the crowd asked him to make another speech so he stood on top of a car and spoke some more. Members of Betar had to stand around guarding him because a rival Zionist organization tried to cause trouble and break up the meeting. After Jabotinsky’s visit I asked my father why this famous man was telling us to save our lives by going to British Mandate Palestine, or anywhere out of Europe, in fact. My father didn’t answer. By that time Adolf Hitler had already written Mein Kampf, in which he ex- pressed his open opposition to Jews and their “Jewish ideas” that he claimed were destroying Germany. A lot of people thought Hitler was a crackpot; but in 1935, not long after Hitler became the leader of the German people, he began implementing some of his crazy ideas through the first Nuremberg Laws. Then, after Kristallnacht – pogroms directed against German and Austrian Jews in November 1938 – Jewish leaders again warned us that we should leave Europe because war was imminent. Of course, no one could have predicted what it was really going to be like.  f e l i x opatowsk i 11 On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Everyone in the apartment building came down to our place to listen to the news. Most Jews in Poland didn’t have radios, but my father had purchased one just a few months before the war started – I even remember the name of the radio manufacturer, Telefunken, a German make. We did have some newspapers but not everybody could afford to buy one. I knew about what was going on mostly from what I heard other people say. I knew about Adolf Hitler from my parents, from what I heard at the Zionist youth group meetings, and occasionally I read the newspaper. I was only fifteen years old when the war broke out so I didn’t really think that much about it at all. I had to do well in school, I was trying to stay out of trouble and was busy playing soccer. I didn’t realize that when war broke out it would mean the end of my schooling. I had been dreaming of going into medicine. I was fas- cinated by the subject. I always liked history books, too, and I enjoyed reading about the American, French and Russian revolutions. I read books by Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. I read them all before the war. When I couldn’t find novels to read, I pored over medical books and technical and scientific texts. I wanted to be a doctor more than anything else. Early on in the German occupation many of my Jewish friends mentioned that their parents were planning to pack up and move to the Soviet Union. I asked my father why we weren’t doing the same. Naive as I was at fifteen, perhaps I thought this would be some kind of big adventure. My father answered, “I’m not going to run away now. I ran away once in my life and came back with nothing. I worked very hard for what I have accumulated here and I’m not going to pack up and run away again.” He figured that life wasn’t easy in the Soviet Union either and we would need visas and money to leave. Besides, the Germans were going to need textiles just like everyone else and since his partner, Max, was German my father thought we would be safe. 12 gate hou se to h ell But even Max advised my father to take his family out of Poland and go to the Soviet Union. In the beginning, it was still easy to cross the border, especially at the city of Bialystok. Many Polish Jews crossed into the Soviet Union there and many of them survived. My wife’s parents, for example, left with her and her two brothers and as a result they all escaped certain death. Max reassured my father that he would take care of the business and help him escape, but my father still refused. I was very proud of my father for saying that he was not afraid to stay. I felt like he was a hero. But this was one of the first mistakes he made. My father was about forty-five years old and my mother was almost forty then. It wasn’t easy for them to decide to leave ev- erything they knew and the life they had built up for themselves. Nobody could imagine what was coming. Who in his right mind, in 1939, could think of what the future was going to be for the Jews of Europe? By the time my parents did decide to leave, it was already too late. The War Begins The Germans occupied Lodz on September 8, 1939, a week after the war broke out. They came through the city like a big parade, wav- ing German flags. Everybody was standing in the streets watching the German army march through. I wasn’t sure exactly what was go- ing to happen but I knew it wasn’t going to be good because I had heard how my parents and their friends were talking about the situ- ation. Some people left for Warsaw, which was a mistake because the German air force was strafing the highways and Warsaw was getting hit worse than all the other cities. Most people had to turn back and those who made it to Warsaw probably lost their lives in the fighting that went on there. In Lodz there was no fighting, just occupation. My very first encounter with the German occupation was when a couple Volksdeutsche boys came around while I was playing soccer with my friends. These Volksdeutsche were Poles of German ances- try whose parents had either married Poles or had come to Poland years before, when Poland belonged to Germany. We recognized the boys because they were wearing Swastika armbands and since the Volksdeutsche lived among us they recognized us as Jews. They told the Polish boys I was playing with, “You’d better tell these Jewish guys to get out of here. They’re not supposed to play with you.” My teammates answered, “What’s this got to do with anything, Jews and non-Jews playing together. These are our friends. We’ve 14 gatehou se to h ell been playing together all our lives.” My Jewish friends and I didn’t say anything. We left and never went back. They were threatening us and we were afraid. That was my first experience with Nazism. By the first week of November, the Nazis ordered all Jews to wear a yellow armband. Two weeks later, that law was amended so that we had to wear a Star of David on every piece of clothing and were not supposed to go out without it. There were notices in the streets saying we could be fined or sent to prison; later, we heard that we might even be executed for not wearing one. Wearing the badge didn’t bother me much; my mother sewed the star on my outer clothing and I went out. For my parents, however, wearing the Star of David had a terrible impact. They were ashamed to be seen in the street with a badge. I embarrassed my mother by reminding her to put on the Star of David before she went out. They just didn’t want to do it. A few times, I went out to shop for groceries with my father. We had to get food somehow, but we weren’t allowed to go into a store wearing the Star of David. Besides, even if a Pole wanted to sell bread to us, he could get into trouble. So a few times, I went out without the badge. There was no choice. My parents warned me that I could get beaten up or shot, but I insisted on going. On one occasion when I tried to stand in a lineup for bread, a Volksdeutsche recognized me as a Jew. “There is no bread for you Jews,” he said and I was kicked out of line. No one cared if Jews didn’t eat. I returned home empty-handed and wept. We really felt the bit- terness and the hatred then. We had been exposed to antisemitism before, but not that kind of antisemitism. When they needed workers, the Nazis would line people up on the street with the help of the Volksdeutsche. A few times they caught me and my father and made us unload their trucks and clean out their quarters. They held us for a day and sent us home at night. There was no violence or beatings yet. We just worked for the day while some- one kept an eye on us. At one point while we were working, I looked at my father’s face and he appeared to be angry – more at himself than  f e l i x opatowsk i 15 at what they were making us do. On that particular day the Nazis had taken a truckload of us to work far away and then left us there. It took us two or three hours to walk home in the cold and it was starting to snow. My father mumbled to himself that he should have listened to people and taken their advice to leave when we could. I didn’t know what to think. I just felt sort of claustrophobic every time we got rounded up. We were under the gun but no one had started firing yet. By the end of 1939, although we didn’t know it at the time, the Germans had started making plans for a ghetto. In February, they announced where the Jews would be relocated. In Lodz there was a section called Baluty where the conditions were much worse than ours. My family didn’t live extravagantly, but at least we were in the centre of the city and managed not too badly. Baluty was a slum and the people who lived there were very poor. I would say 75 per cent of the population there was Jewish. This is where the Germans placed the ghetto. In the early spring of 1940, we were evacuated from our apart- ment building. First, a big sign was posted in the hallway and the superintendent told everybody that the Jewish people had to move out. Then, one evening, a German came in with a Volksdeutsche to help him and they gave us verbal notice to leave the premises. I think they gave us two or three days to move out, which was a lot because I heard from other friends that they had only been given a few hours. We could only take with us what we could carry and fit in a handcart and then we were sent off to Baluty. On the day we had to evacuate, a German officer came to our apartment to check it out and see if it was a good place to live. The of- ficers were housed in the nicest apartments evacuated by Jews while the ordinary soldiers got the inferior ones. The officer saw Rex and patted him on the head. “Oh, what a beautiful dog,” he said in German. Rex had grown to be quite handsome. His ears stood straight up like a purebred and although he wasn’t that big, he was very muscular. The German noticed that whenever we spoke to Rex, he understood. 16 gate hou se to h ell He asked his name and I told him. By that time we had to leave. My father had managed to get a handcart and was afraid they were going to take it away from us if we didn’t hurry. My father put everything together on the cart and tied it down. I was carrying something and my little brother and my mother also had a few things as we were gathered together to leave. Rex, of course, started to follow us but the German officer called out to Rex to stay with him. Rex didn’t move. I tried to take him along but the officer wanted to keep him. He held Rex back until Rex started growling at him. “You’d better keep Rex quiet,” my father whispered to me. I was too young to understand the danger of refusal. The German asked my father for a leash but we had never had a leash for Rex. Instead he tied a rope around his neck. There was a little bit of a struggle, but Rex wasn’t fierce. He never bit people. As we left, my brother, Romek, was crying and I was crying too as the German held Rex back from us. “Just quiet down,” my father told us. “Whatever he wants, he can take.” We had already had plenty of opportunities to see what hap- pened if someone talked back to a German soldier. We started walking toward Baluty. My mother had some relatives there but I didn’t know them well. Baluty was not really in walking distance and when I was a child we hardly ever used the streetcar to visit people – it was expensive and it didn’t go many places. Now we had no choice but to walk. It probably took about two hours to get to my mother’s cousins, especially since we were carrying so much with us. It wasn’t so easy for my mother to remember exactly where her cousins lived either because she hadn’t been there in so long. We only stayed with our relatives for a little while. It was very cramped and we weren’t particularly welcome there since we hadn’t had much to do with them before. Nevertheless, the Jews living in Baluty had been given orders to share accommodations with any friends or relatives. Most people would rather share with family than with strangers. It’s possible that our relatives took us in because they  f el i x opatowsk i 17 felt sorry for us, but I think it was also for more materialistic reasons. I’m sure my father gave them some money. Our cousins lived in a small apartment. I seem to remember them having only two rooms and a kitchen. They had two or three children, there were four of us, and soon another family moved in as well. The mother of the new family was my mother’s cousin and closest friend. They had two boys. There must have been at least twelve people living in those two small rooms. Later, even more people arrived. Somehow we all lived together, but we could hardly get into the kitchen. We slept on the floor and I had to sleep on the landing outside the apart- ment. Sometimes, if I wasn’t careful, I fell down the stairs, but luckily there were only five or six steps so the fall wasn’t too far. After about a month or so my father found us another place to live close by. My parents didn’t tell me why we were moving. Maybe it was too cramped and uncomfortable, or possibly my cousins were charging too much and my father didn’t have enough money to pay them. Who knows? Our new place, however, was much more com- fortable. It had belonged to Poles who were evacuated from Baluty to make room for the Jews. I’m sure they didn’t want to leave, but all of the Christians had been forced out of the ghetto area. All of a sudden we had a whole house to live in and the former residents had even left some potatoes in the cellar. What a picnic for us! In the very beginning, life in the ghetto wasn’t so bad because people were still bringing in provisions. The ghetto wasn’t blocked off until the end of April 1940, so until then we could still leave the ghetto in the daytime if we had a permit. Taking a chance – because Jews weren’t allowed to use public transportation – my father some- times went by streetcar to see his partner, Max, and he never came home empty-handed. Max was kind to him and said he would help him any way he could. Although the Nazis decreed that Jews couldn’t own property or run businesses, Max made sure that my father still got his share of the profits. A few times he even came to the ghetto on bicycle to bring us food. One night I overheard my father telling my 18 gate hou se to h ell mother, “I’m not going to see Max any more. I think he gives me his own bread. I can’t go to him and take away his bread because I don’t know if he has enough for himself.” They were that close. The situation in the ghetto deteriorated rapidly and soon became so terrible that we didn’t dwell on these things. More than 150,000 people were forced to live in Baluty, and people continued arriving from the towns and little villages surrounding Lodz. As more people were transferred to the ghetto, living there became increasingly cha- otic. Although it was so overcrowded, at least some people had mon- ey and there were provisions. The overcrowding got even worse in the fall of 1941, when wealthy Jews from outside Poland arrived in the ghetto and the ghetto population grew to more than 200,000. Jews from Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria were all being sent to Lodz. Many of them were better off than the Polish Jews and brought valuables with them. Some of them had gold, diamonds and fine clothes. Before long they had to sell everything they owned because they had nothing to eat, but there wasn’t enough food to go around. Bread became even scarcer than money. Although we always had trouble getting food, it was still manage- able until the Germans closed the ghetto. Then the problems really started. They took away our Polish money and printed special ghetto money that we got if we did special work. But where were we going to get work when there were so many people in one place? The only work we had was organized by Chaim Rumkowski, head of the Jewish Council, also called the Judenrat. Before the war, Rumkowski had been the head of an orphanage. When the Germans appointed the Lodz Judenrat they put Rumkowski in charge, whether he wanted the job or not. The Judenrat had the responsibility of providing services like health and housing for the ghetto population and organizing dis- tribution of food, work details, the Jewish police and the fire depart- ment. Rumkowsi didn’t have any idea what to do at first, but he ended up organizing labour in the ghetto very well. He organized work for the war effort so well that the ghetto lasted until August 1944.  f el i x opatowsk i 19 The German authorities started establishing forced labour fac- tories. When they needed people to work in them, they came to Rumkowski. He was happy to give them workers because he expected that they would be fed in exchange for their work and there would be fewer people to feed in the ghetto. Rumkowski also thought that if he could get enough contracts for the German war effort, Germany would keep the Jews in the ghetto alive. Unfortunately, the Germans had a different idea – they didn’t want any Jews alive, even if they needed them. That was the goal of the Nazis. One night when I was sleeping, I felt something lick my face. I opened my eyes and a dog jumped on top of me. Rex had run away from the German officer and had sniffed out where we lived! I couldn’t believe it. We had moved twice in the ghetto and he still managed to find us. After being with that dog so many years, I still hadn’t re- alized how really clever he was. Rex sniffed around and found my mother and father sleeping in another corner. Everybody got up and we made such a hoorah. Then my mother said, “How are we going to feed him? We don’t even have any table scraps.” We were eating scraps ourselves. So I said, “I’m going to give him mine,” and my brother said, “I’m going to give him mine too.” We were so happy. A couple of weeks later, the German who stole Rex drove into the ghetto on a motorcycle. Not every German soldier could enter the ghetto and finding out where we lived was not easy. But he found us and came around. When he saw Rex, he took out his pistol and shot the dog right in front of us. That was my first real taste of Nazi brutal- ity. I started to cry but my mother told me to stop. She was scared that the German was going to shoot me too. My brother and I took Rex and buried him in a nearby field. Now I really realized that we were in for trouble. The Polish Jews we knew who had lived in Germany and were deported back to Poland after the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938 had told us stories about the Nazis. Some we believed and some we didn’t, but little by little we began to suspect what the Germans wanted to do with us. When that 20 gate hou se to h ell German officer shot my dog, I knew we were in for a tough time. I realized that all those stories we heard about the Nazis were true. German officers came to the ghetto every few days to round up people for work. In the beginning, the people they took went to work in areas close to Lodz and then returned to the ghetto at night. But by the end of 1940, they started deporting people to forced labour camps. In the ghetto, there were houses that had been destroyed and needed repairs, which was hard work. I didn’t do that work myself, but when houses were demolished, I was fast enough to steal a piece of wood to trade for bread. That was the beginning of my activities in the trade business. Once in a while I would also find something to bring home from the area of the ghetto that had been evacuated by the Poles since there was often something to steal there. That was all I did. I was still active in playing soccer, but little by little, when we had less food and sometimes no food, I had to stop playing soccer because I didn’t have the energy anymore. When the winter of 1940 set in, we needed fuel for warmth and cooking. Almost immediately, wood became just as scarce as bread. We couldn’t find coal or wood and if we could find any, we had to pay good money for it. We demolished furniture just to cook a meal. Finally, in the dead of winter, we had nothing left at all. My father looked for work, but it wasn’t easy to find. My mother cried because she couldn’t feed us. My brother cried from hunger. Then one day my father came home with a loaf of bread. A loaf of bread! It felt like a holiday. Then I found out that he had joined a work detail, or Kommando, called the Scheisskommando. They would remove hu- man waste from the toilets and sewers because in Lodz, the apart- ments, especially in the poor district, had only outdoor plumbing. When they emptied the outhouses and the public washrooms they had to move the excrement out of the ghetto to dispose of it. When I saw my father doing this work, he pretended not to see me. He was ashamed for his family to know what he was doing, but that was the  f e l i x opatowsk i 21 only work he could find. By now we were starving, so it was bet- ter than nothing. Later on, the people who had shied away from this kind of work couldn’t even get that. It was considered a “prominent” job because workers got extra pay and special rations for it. Jolinarsky, the soccer captain who had taken me to the Betar Zionist organization, was also in the ghetto. When I was still playing soccer in the ghetto, before I got too weak, Jolinarsky took me aside one day and gave me a piece of stale bread. Oh, I tell you, this piece of stale bread sure tasted good. I probably hadn’t eaten for two or three days, which was common – to eat every day was practically im- possible. I started gobbling it down quickly until at the last second I remembered my little brother. Romek was just as hungry as me. I left one piece in my pocket, went home and gave it to Romek. He looked at me incredulously, wondering how I got it. I told him, “Just eat it up and don’t ask questions.” The next time I saw Jolinarsky I asked him where he had gotten the bread. He told me that the lack of food in the ghetto had forced people to start smuggling, with some ghetto residents selling bread or potatoes to others in exchange for whatever valuables they still had. Then they’d sneak out of the ghetto into the area where the Poles were still living and exchange these valuables for more food. Jolinarsky was one of these smugglers. “There are a few guys I know who can get out of the ghetto,” Jolinarsky told me. “If you come with me this evening, I’ll show you what to do.” I knew this was dangerous and I could get shot for sneaking out of the ghetto. Jolinarksy told me that he was almost shot himself. On the other hand, I had seen my father doing the Scheisskommando work and felt I’d rather take a chance at being shot than let my father keep doing it for a little extra soup or bread. And so I started smuggling. The first time I brought food home my mother wanted to know where I got it. “Did you steal it?” she asked. “Mother, don’t ask ques- tions,” I answered. “I have some food. Eat something first.” I thought with a little extra food, she’d be happy. When my father came home, 22 gatehou se to h ell she showed him what I had brought. Potatoes, bread, even a piece of butter. They asked where I got the food, but they weren’t dummies. They knew there was smuggling going on. At first my father protested – he was afraid I would get killed. Then he stopped asking about it. The ghetto was fenced in with plain ordinary barbed wire or with wooden fences and a bit of wire. Police guarded the fence, but the area was so large that there were always places left unguarded. To carry out our smuggling we had to wait until it was dark and find places where we could sneak under or over the wire to the other side where the Poles who lived nearby knew us and knew that we wanted to trade goods for food. Mostly we got bread, potatoes, butter and cheese, which we paid for with jewellery, gold or other valuables. I had no clue what these items were worth, but Jolinarsky was teaching me what to do. When my father saw I wasn’t going to stop smuggling, he began to help out. He went to some friends and told them that he could get them food if they gave him valuables. I didn’t want my father to be involved in case something went wrong, but I didn’t have a choice. He was the only man I could trust and I had to trust somebody. Some of the other parents helped out too, so at least we managed to organize a way to get food into the ghetto. Then, one day, me and a few other boys got caught. As we were nearing the fence outside the ghetto a German guard started yelling. He shone lights on us and began shooting. We ran and one of my friends was hit. I don’t remember if he was killed, but he fell down. Two of us managed to get over the fence. I jumped over the wire and started running. The Jewish police inside the ghetto were also on guard and they caught us, which was lucky. If they hadn’t, the Germans would have killed us. This way, when they saw the Jewish police capture me and the other boys, the German guards stopped chasing us and stayed on the other side of the wire fence. Since we gave them extra food, the Jewish police often looked the other way when it came to smuggling. It didn’t matter who they were, they  f e l i x opatowsk i 23 didn’t get very much to eat either. This time, however, they arrested me, Jolinarsky and the other guys and took us to the jail. The commander of the jail, who was Jewish, appeared to be a se- nior officer. He walked around with a hat and a special uniform. The jailers wore ordinary police uniforms but the commander looked like a big shot. Such stupid things like this are what I remember. Living conditions in the jail were awful. I was thrown in with murderers and thieves. It was crowded and there weren’t any beds, so we slept on the floor. The only thing that wasn’t so bad was that we got a daily ration of food. If there were enough turnips, they gave us turnips. If there were enough potatoes, they gave us potatoes. It was never really consistent but I had more food in the jail than outside of it. My par- ents came to visit me several times. One time my mother brought me some carrots because, in the summer, they could still grow vegetables. I was in the ghetto jail for almost six months. I remember, while I was in there, hearing about the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which was in June 1941. In early December, the Nazis started trans- porting people from the ghetto jail to labour camps in the Poznań area, about two hundred kilometres northwest of Lodz. The com- mander of the jail gave a speech about how we were going to be trans- ported to a camp that was better than the ghetto, where we’d be fed, and that we should take postcards to send home to our family. The Jewish police came around to threaten that some of us were going to be interrogated by the Germans. Then German officers did come and take some of the inmates. Maybe they shot them. I never found out. For some reason, my mother learned about the transports before I did. Someone had let her know that I would be going to a labour camp and before we all left my mother and my brother came to say goodbye. She brought me a jacket and some personal items like a shirt and undershirt and an extra pair of shoes. The most important thing she brought me was a blanket and a pillow – these items be- came very useful in the labour camp. That was the last time I saw my mother and my brother. 24 gate hou se to h ell On that very last day in jail my father didn’t come to visit. I never saw my family again and I never heard from them again. It was only after the war that I found out why my father hadn’t visited me that day. Weisser Adler Early on the morning of the transport, the Germans assembled us in a big field outside of Lodz. There must have been more than three thousand people gathered there. The Germans were selecting the younger men for the labour camps. I saw lots of women on the other side of the field waiting to be transported, too. They sent the women away from the field, but I don’t know where they went. Before we set out, they gave us each half a loaf of bread, which we were very happy to get. They told us this bread had to last until we reached the camp, but half a loaf of bread doesn’t last very long. We went to the first labour camp in a civilian train. Poznań was the head office for several of the camps in the area and our first stop was at Poznań Stadium. I saw very little of it, but I remember that there were trucks waiting there with workers in uniforms. They took our names and they put us on the trucks to be sent to different destinations. Some people remained in Poznań. My group was taken to a camp in the town of Rawicz, about one hundred kilometres from Poznań, known to us as Weisser Adler (White Eagle), the name of the school it was housed in. It was an awful camp with terrible conditions. I spent almost two years there. Weisser Adler had been converted from a school. It was large enough to accommodate two thousand people or so, all squeezed together. The sleeping quarters were made up of long bunks in three 26 gateh ou se to h ell tiers. They put straw on the bare boards and we slept on the straw with whatever belongings we had. My blanket and pillow came in very handy because they didn’t give us any blankets. There was also one big washroom and one huge room where we ate. Whenever we needed help, more workers were sent from Poznań. These people were sent out from the ghetto, and the labour camp and ghetto administration were paid for all our work. The only pay we received was a bit of lousy food. The commander of the camp was an ethnic German, a Volksdeutsche, who had been an officer in the Polish army. His name was Charnetski and we called him Captain Charnetski. He was a de- cent fellow, but very strict. He might have beaten us a few times, but he didn’t hit too hard and he was not a murderer. He wasn’t out to kill anybody. One good thing about him was that he tried to run the camp in a military fashion. He disapproved of the starvation con- ditions and complained to the German officials who came once a month to do an inspection that we didn’t have enough food. He didn’t like the fact that a lot of us were dying. As long as we were alive, those who ran the camp got paid. Then again, they didn’t give us enough food to keep us alive. It was a no-win situation. One thing that Captain Charnetski was very strict about was forc- ing us to wash, even in the winter. When we got up to go to work, each one of us had to get undressed to the waist and wash in cold water at the pump. Charnetski would often watch us and noticed if somebody was just splashing himself or actually washing. He would give over the names to the foremen and when we came back from work, anyone who didn’t wash wouldn’t get supper. So we learned the proper routine very quickly. It only took one time of being denied food and, believe me, we didn’t refuse to wash anymore. We thought he just wanted to torture us, but I’m sure that this saved some lives; when we washed ourselves with cold water, we got toughened up. We developed a kind of armour from the experience. It wasn’t pleasant at five o’clock in the morning, but it was good for hygiene since there  f e l i x opatowsk i 27 was nowhere else to shower or bathe. I got so used to the cold water in the morning that later I missed it. At the labour camp I met two Czech brothers, very fine, intel- ligent men, who were a little older than me. One of them had been a professor. They talked to me as if I understood the things they knew. There were times I’d have to ask them to slow down because I didn’t know what they were talking about. For instance, one time they were discussing Sigmund Freud. “You don’t know who Sigmund Freud is?” they asked in astonishment. They were stunned that I didn’t know who he was. I mean, how would I know about Freud? He was obviously a very famous man, but I was only a teenager and I didn’t have much education. Yet, I always asked questions, wherever I was. There were quite a few intelligent people in the camp – teachers, professors, doctors and surgeons – and because they had nothing better to do when I asked them questions, they answered me. We were all suffering from beatings and hunger and lice and it was dif- ficult to fall asleep, so we talked. I always had a thirst for knowledge and I was especially interested in religion. I found out more about the topic in the labour camps than I had known in all the years previously because of these people. At night, we had to talk very low to avoid disturbing others. Some people got killed for that. The labour camp wasn’t a good experience, but it was an experi- ence. The work was incredibly hard. The hours were very long and we worked far away from the camp. It didn’t matter how much time it took us to get to work, we still had to put in the same amount of hours at the job. We got a piece of bread in the morning and a little soup in the evening. Mostly the Germans took us to repair highways. Polish roads were lousy. I don’t think the Nazis had enough manpower or money to build new highways so we were widening the existing ones. They made new lanes on both sides because they needed transporta- tion for the military supplies they were taking from Germany to the Soviet Union. It was very strenuous work. 28 gate hou se to h ell Every morning we had to wake up early to make it to work by seven. Yet, every time we finished a kilometre or two of road, we were further and further away from the camp. One time we were so far away that it took us hours just to get back. By the time we arrived at the camp we were so exhausted that we could hardly even eat the soup for which we had starved the whole day. The next morning we were up again by five o’clock but couldn’t make it there for seven be- cause it was too far, so the next day we had to get up even earlier. The tools that we had were primitive. If they had fed us decently, hadn’t beaten us and given us decent tools, we could have finished the work in half the time. But the Germans didn’t care. People were collapsing on the way to work or in the middle of the job. Either they got a bullet in the head or they just lay where they fell. They couldn’t move anymore. When the highway was finished they drove us to our next job because it was too far away to walk. We were assigned to work on the Vistula River, the main river for transportation. In some places the river wasn’t wide enough for supply boats to pass through. They took us to those spots where the river was narrow and muddy and we waded through the river the whole day, digging out slime, rocks and bushes, and then reinforcing the banks. We never tried to resist. We weren’t organized and we were too weak. We hardly had the strength to crawl up the banks that we were reinforcing. Some of us were assigned to move the dirt and rocks away from the river with wheelbarrows and that was even harder work. The guards switched us around every few hours but because I was one of the youngest ones, I had to push the wheelbarrows most of the time. If the wheelbarrow tipped over in the muck, I was in real trouble since the overseers, who were mostly Volksdeutsche, thought it was sabotage. We tried to help each other out because if one of us fell down with a wheelbarrow we could be beaten to death. Whenever work was interrupted, they beat us. Even worse, if we were hit over the head with a shovel or whatever, we didn’t have any way to recover.  f el i x opatowsk i 29 We had to go on working when we were in pain. If we couldn’t do our work properly we didn’t get supper. It was like a domino effect. When we didn’t get food, the next day we could barely work; a lot of us died. I saw some people before they died from hunger. Other men called this type of person a Muselmann. It took me a long time to understand what a Muselmann was. I don’t know where the term re- ally came from, but somebody explained it to me like this: a Muslim man (Muselmann in German) wears a white turban on his head; if the people who were dying had a towel or a shirt, they wadded it up and put it on their heads like a turban because they were feverish. Most of the time they would wander around in a daze, not knowing what was happening to them. These people stumbled around, starving, while still holding pieces of bread in their hands. That was the kind of shape they were in. I remember, when I got out of bed one morning, I said to one of these fellows, “Are you coming out?” There was no answer. A piece of bread was lying beside him. He had just given up. He was still moving, but he was finished. I thought to myself, “No way. I’m not going to end up like this.” One time I saw a man who was so weak from starvation that he got dizzy and fell down, so they beat him to death. We were beaten all the time. It wasn’t necessary, but the guards enjoyed doing it. They also hung a few men. That was just how it was. In the beginning, we didn’t know about the Nazis’ plans to mur- der the Jews. We just knew we were in a labour camp. We thought we were going to work and that at least they were going to feed us decent food so we could work. But as it turned out, even at the camps where the labourers worked on building rockets for the Germans, the Germans starved them all to death when they no longer needed them. We asked ourselves, “Why?” It was a big “why.” We soon realized that it was going to be impossible to live and work on the pitiful rations we received, so we started a smuggling op- eration like the one I was involved in at the ghetto. At night, Weisser Adler had only two guards and the commander. It wasn’t barricaded 30 gate hou se to h ell with electric wire because there was no place for us to go. There were some Polish farms around there, but a Pole wasn’t likely to take us in because it was too dangerous. He might give us some food, though. Since there was only one German guard at the front entrance we could jump out the back windows of the school to leave the camp. We knocked at various farmers’ doors and some of them took pity on us and gave us some food, mostly vegetables, carrots and potatoes. We were happy with a potato even if it was raw. Some farmers didn’t have anything to give us. A few times, people got caught, and several men were beaten up and put into solitary confinement for a few days without food. There were a few months when we were contracted out to a big farm to harvest sugar beets. We ate the sugar beets even though they didn’t taste very good. It helped our hunger a little bit. The beets were dark on the outside but when we peeled off the skins they were white on the inside. At first when we bit into them they were sweet, just like sugar, but in a matter of seconds they became bitter. Sometimes they were so bitter that we couldn’t even swallow them. At that time, we still had our belongings, so many of us had knives to cut off the skin on the beets. I didn’t have a knife, but I borrowed one when I needed it. The Germans weren’t afraid that we would attack them; they weren’t afraid that we would retaliate. Once in a while, the guards told us we could write postcards and they would mail them for us. We wrote postcards to our families in the ghetto, but when we didn’t get any replies, we asked the guards what happened. They said that the situation in the ghetto was so bad that they didn’t allow people there to send any packages or mail. Once, they told us that we didn’t get any replies because we didn’t deserve such privileges. I think the only reason they told us to write postcards was because they wanted to tease us. Some of the guards were Poles who were probably nobodies before the war and all of a sudden they had a stick or a gun and they could do whatever they wanted. They were arrogant and cruel.  f e l i x opatowsk i 31 Hundreds of us disappeared very, very quickly. People were dying daily. Before the camp, I had never known what hemorrhoids were. But while there, I learned that some people died just from hemor- rhoids that started to bleed and wouldn’t stop. There were no medical facilities at all. If we got injured, the only medication was cold water. There was one Jewish fellow who had attended medical school and kind of served as a nurse. He was the only one who could examine us to say if we were well enough to go to work or not. He got strict orders from the camp commander that someone had to be really sick to be excused. Our sleeping conditions were so terrible that it wasn’t long before the straw became infested with lice. They were eating us alive. When the commander found this out he immediately sent us for delousing. The guards took us in trucks to a convent where the nuns, who were also nurses, were paid for delousing. They took us in, stripped us of our clothes and led us to a machine where they sprayed us with a special kind of green liquid solution. It burned so terribly that we yelled out in pain. It wouldn’t have hurt so much if we hadn’t already scratched up our bodies to relieve the itching from the lice bites. Once our clothes were disinfected we got dressed, but as we were putting on our clothes, the nuns saw how awful we looked and be- came concerned. When they found a chance, they gathered together what they could and gave us some bread. They were so kind to us – I don’t think those nuns even had enough food for themselves. They probably gave away their own portions. The delousing took three full days. While we were gone they changed the straw in the bunks and washed everything. When we returned, another group was sent to the convent. While the hygienic conditions became a little bit better, it didn’t take long until the lice were back. On the other hand, by then only half of us were left alive so the sleeping quarters weren’t quite so congested. Eventually there weren’t enough of us to do the required work and the Germans dis- solved the Weisser Adler labour camp. They transferred us to another 32 gatehou se to h ell labour camp – where many people had also died – and combined both to form a satellite camp, which was nearby and was also sur- rounded by farms. On the way to this camp, several men tried to run away, but the guards caught them and put them in jail. They hung five or six of them and the whole camp was ordered to watch. That took care of any more escape attempts. That was the first hanging I ever wit- nessed. I was very disturbed and had nightmares because of it. Before they were hanged, the men yelled out, “Let Poles live! Down with the Germans!” The Poles thought this was a very patriotic thing to do and later they put up a monument for them. It’s too bad I don’t remember where it is because when I went back to Poland later, I wanted to visit it. After the hanging, the entire camp was punished. The command- er didn’t feed us for three days, yet we had to work just the same. We got coffee but no food. The punishment didn’t stop some of us from sneaking out to the farms to look for something to eat. Mind you, there were men who resented us for going since we weren’t only put- ting ourselves in danger, but all of them as well. Nevertheless, when we came back we always shared whatever we had with them. The inmates from the camp we joined were also from Lodz. I think they must have been sick even before we arrived. None of them looked very healthy to us – we thought we didn’t look too bad in comparison. After about four weeks, a typhus epidemic broke out and half of the camp died. I think only a few hundred remained alive by the end of our time there. Typhus was not a sickness that a person could identify right away. Generally, people start getting weak and dizzy and fall asleep. Some of the inmates didn’t even have time to crawl into their bunks because the sickness hit them so quickly and severely. I was lying in my bunk when it hit me. I must have been unconscious for at least a week. The only thing the ones who weren’t so sick could do for us was to give  f e l i x opatowsk i 33 us water. Even while we were unconscious, they tried to give us water to drink. Both the sick and the healthy slept in the same place. Some of the sick got up; some of them didn’t. A few inmates, when they got better, started moving out the dead bodies. Even some of the Germans who were guarding the camp were exposed and got sick too. I mean, ty- phus doesn’t discriminate. I heard that two Germans died, but I don’t know if they died or if they went to the hospital. When I regained consciousness, I was very thirsty because the fe- ver had been so high. Somebody had brought me water, but it wasn’t enough. When I first tried to get out of my bunk, I collapsed. Finally I managed to crawl over to the water pump. While I was there I saw a man coming down the stairs from the floor above. He was eating a handful of grain. I asked him where he got it. “Go upstairs and get some of it yourself,” he said. I hadn’t known that on the second floor was a warehouse, or as we called it in German, a Magazine. I won- dered how I would get up there. I could hardly move and had trouble enough dragging myself to the pump. “Maybe when I get a little bit better,” I thought to myself. For dinner that night we were given some decent soup. At least we found a few potatoes in it. I felt as if my blood was beginning to flow again, and I started feeling a little bit warmer. The tips of my fingers had been cold and numb. That night, I tried to crawl up the stairs, but I just couldn’t. The next morning, I made it up one flight. On the landing there was raw rice and barley, which I ate. It was filling but gave me a stomachache. The following day we got more soup and I felt a little bit better. I thought, “If there’s grain on the first level, I’m going to climb up another flight and see what’s there.” And guess what? I found sugar. I couldn’t believe it. Sugar! I started eating it – then my heart really started pumping. I scooped it up and filled every pocket I had. I was afraid I would be caught. The Germans knew that some of us had 34 gatehou se to h ell found the barley and the rice but they really didn’t make a big effort to take it away. Maybe they felt a little bit sorry for us after all. Needless to say, one of the cooks complained, “If you guys eat the grain raw, I’ll have nothing to cook with.” But nobody knew about the sugar. I mentioned what I had found to a few other fellows and they went to get some sugar, too. That sugar was such a boost for us. About a week later many of us were well enough to start working again. Somehow, the conditions weren’t so bad anymore. Nobody was shooting us. Nobody was coming in and beating us just because we were Jews. We were only punished if the commander thought we re- ally deserved it. Once in a while we got a little bit of news about the war from the Polish people we met when we were sent to work on farms. The Polish farms were not as industrialized as Western farms and their irrigation methods were not as advanced. They had to depend on rain to fill their irrigation ditches and when there were floods, they constantly needed to repair the ditches. They probably paid the commander for a few hundred labourers from the camp to help them. That was the only time we hoped they would take us out to work because the farm- ers gave us food and information. In 1942, the news on the front was good for the Germans – which was not such good news for us. Rumours started spreading that the labour camps were going to be shut down. Nobody knew what was going to happen to us. After the war, I learned that in January 1942, high-ranking Nazis such as Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann had assembled to discuss a new plan for a “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” All of the ghettos and labour camps were to be dis- solved. A year and a half later, in the summer of 1943, the Germans closed our camp. When I had first left the ghetto in the transport from Lodz, there were approximately 2,500 to 3,000 of us. When I left Weisser Adler for the next camp, only about three to five hundred people were left. The rest had died of starvation, beatings, overwork and typhus. The  f e l i x opatowsk i 35 labour camps were bad enough. We didn’t think anything could be worse, but unfortunately we were wrong. They put us in cattle cars on trains and sent us to Auschwitz. We didn’t know where we were going, of course, but a few Polish labourers who had worked with us for pay told us, “If you have a chance to escape before they take you to Auschwitz, you’d better do it, because there’s no escape from Auschwitz.” That was the first time I’d heard of Auschwitz. It was what the Germans called the small Polish town of Oświęcim, but I didn’t know anything else about it. I was in a cattle car full of people and nobody knew where we were going. In August 1943, I was part of a transport of about two thousand people, maybe more. We got a portion of bread and a little water when we got on the train. The trip took a few days because they picked up a few hundred of us, then they went to other camps and picked up more. At these stops, they wouldn’t let us out, but I could see that they were packing more wagons with Poles and Roma, called Gypsies at the time, but mostly with Jews. There were so many camps; by the last stop I couldn’t believe there were so many of us crammed into each wagon. We had to make the best of the sleeping arrangements. We didn’t get any water on the way. Before we left for Auschwitz, I’d had dysentery for a couple of weeks. Dysentery was very common and there was nothing we could do for it. Having dysentery was no picnic. Toilet paper was out of the question. And we were on the train for a few days with no place to relieve ourselves. There was only one bucket. The people who knew about dysentery told us not to drink and to eat as little as we could, but once we were on the train we didn’t get anything to eat or drink for a couple of days anyway. Auschwitz We arrived at the Auschwitz station at night. I don’t know what time it was but it was dark. A very curious thing happened when I arrived and I never heard of this happening again. When the doors of the cattle cars opened, lights shone on us and we heard a voice shouting in German over a loudspeaker. Then – I’ll never forget this – this voice announced that there were trucks standing by and whoever couldn’t get to a truck would be shot. We all jumped down from the train, running, pushing each other. Everybody wanted to get to those trucks. I couldn’t even see the trucks. All of a sudden, some of our people started yelling, “Here they are! Here they are!” The trucks had headlights on and the motors were running. Then the trucks started moving. Although I was very weak from the two or three days on the train, the typhus and the dysentery, I tried hard. I ran to one truck, but it drove away. I probably could have made it because it wasn’t that far away. There was still some room on the truck, but I think it left on purpose. I made my way toward another truck, but I couldn’t run anymore; I could only walk. That truck left, too. Again, I think the driver did it on purpose. I didn’t make it to any of the trucks and there must have been forty or fifty of them. All the trucks drove away. I thought to myself, “After all the misery I went through in the past two years in the labour camp, this is my end.” That was going to be it because I knew by then that the Germans didn’t make idle threats. 38 gatehou se to h ell At that moment I heard dogs barking and saw a lot of bright lights turned on us. The Germans began yelling, “Line up in fives. Line up in fives.” With the Germans, it was always five, five, five. Now I saw men with striped uniforms. I tried to ask them questions but the only thing they said was, “Line up, line up. Be quiet, don’t say anything. When they ask your age, if one of you is too young, don’t tell the truth. If one of you is too old, don’t tell the truth.” They seemed to be afraid and didn’t say anything more. I couldn’t understand what they were talking about. I figured that if they were going to line us up and ask our ages, they weren’t planning on shooting us; I started feeling safer. But I was with a few others from the labour camp who began to worry. Maybe they’ll shoot us later, I thought. Maybe they’re lining us up to shoot us. We had no clue. This was our first “selection.” Although the notorious Josef Mengele was known for doing many of the selections, he didn’t do ours that time. Another SS officer did the selection. On command we walked by him and didn’t know what he was selecting us for because we didn’t know what a selection was. He asked a few people their ages and according to the answer sent them to the right or to the left. We soon learned that one way led to the gas chambers; the other to work. There weren’t too many of us who were selected for death in the gas chamber that time because we were all arriving from a labour camp. The old and the weak had already died. We were the strongest ones and that’s what they were looking for. Instead of shooting us, when it got a little bit lighter out they marched us about a kilometre or so right into Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz ii. They took us to a big assembly place and told us to take off our clothes. They said we couldn’t keep these clothes any- more, but we should make sure to keep our shoes because those were the only shoes we would have. I don’t know what happened to my shoes; someone must have taken them. They were bad shoes anyway, already worn out. But somehow I got other shoes. I think I got two of  f e l i x opatowsk i 39 the same foot, but they fit and were better than nothing. Some people had no shoes at all. They then took us for delousing. They shaved all the hair off of our bodies. They disinfected us and then took us to the showers. They gave us striped uniforms. This was the same routine that everyone else went through when they arrived in Auschwitz. Then they lined us up again. One of the SS officers who was in charge came up to one of the men who was standing in the line and asked him his name. When the fellow answered him, the SS officer clubbed him over the head with his rifle. The man fell down and the officer said, “This is a lesson for you. You don’t have a name any more. From now on, you have a number.” I saw the person in front of me put out his arm and a German tattooed a number on his arm. Then it was my turn. I stuck out my arm. I got the number 1 – 4 – 3 – 4 – 2 – 5. From then on, I knew that this was my name. Although I had come from a ghetto and then a labour camp, neither of which were pretty, I had never expected to be branded with a number. Now I really felt that I was a slave. Slavery had begun affecting me from the time I had to put on the Star of David and grew when they closed the ghetto. But a number! It had a terrible impact on me. The way that Auschwitz-Birkenau functioned had everything to do with the numbers. When we got our striped uniform, we had to write our numbers on a piece of linen. The Germans supplied the ink. We attached these pieces of linen onto a coloured triangle, which they gave us to wear on our uniforms. A red triangle was for po- litical prisoners. According to the Germans, all the Poles who came to Auschwitz were political opponents. A red triangle with a yellow stripe was for Jewish political prisoners – the rest of the Jews wore the two yellow triangles that formed the Jewish star. Then there were dark green triangles worn by criminals – many of them were the ka- pos, our supervisors. Brown or black triangles were for the Gypsies. According to these triangles, the Germans and the kapos recognized 40 gateh ou se to h ell who we were. Anyone wearing the red inverted triangle over the yel- low triangle was considered the dregs of the camp. Then the Germans put us in what was called “quarantine.” I didn’t understand what the name quarantine meant. I asked one fellow, but he didn’t know either. I think it meant separation. The quarantine area consisted of a whole camp of barracks. It was the gatehouse to hell. That’s the only way I can describe it. A few days after our arrival at Auschwitz, I began to wonder about the incident with the trucks. We had all thought they were going to shoot us for not getting on those trucks. I wondered, then, what hap- pened to the ones who had made it to the trucks? I had spent almost two years with some of those men in the labour camps and many were my friends. Finally I found out what happened to them. Apparently the Germans had played a trick on us, reversing the outcome of what they had announced on the loudspeaker. They took the guys who made it to the trucks right to the gas chambers and they put the rest of us in quarantine in Birkenau. I never heard of that kind of selection occurring again. Clearly, it was just not my time to die. When I came into the barracks on the first day, I already had enough experience from the labour camp to know how to deal with the living conditions. There were three tiers of bunks. I knew I didn’t want to be on the lower bunk because all the dirt and lice fell down from above. If somebody peed in the middle of the night, it went right down onto the person below. I was trying to get either a top or middle bunk, but since the top ones were already taken I went for a middle. Just as I got to the only one that was left, another fellow pushed me away and tried to take it from me. One of the men who was there saw what had happened and spoke up for me, calling out, “Hey, don’t push him away. He was there first.” The one who pushed me started telling the guy off, but he wouldn’t have it. “Don’t mouth off to me if you don’t want trouble,” my new friend warned. His name was Jakob Artman and he became one of my closest friends. He saved  f e l i x opatowsk i 41 my life twice in the next three years and we were devoted to each other until the day he died. When I settled into the bunk, I thanked my new friend and we started talking. I asked him how long he had been there. He said six or eight weeks and then offered to give me a few tips. For instance, as we were talking I was rubbing my arm where they had tattooed the number. “Don’t rub it,” he warned me. “It might get infected.” When I asked him what Auschwitz was all about, Jakob was straightforward. “It’s a very terrible place,” he said. “Nobody gets out of here alive.” He took me outside the barracks, pointed to a chimney and said, “The only way we’re going to get out of this camp is through that chimney.” I could see a huge red brick building but I didn’t understand what he meant. When we had arrived in Auschwitz we walked to Birkenau from the railway station and we could smell something burning. Of course, we didn’t know there were crematoria in Birkenau. How could any normal human think that in the middle of the twentieth century they were burning human bodies? Those things were too farfetched for us to even think about. But when we came into the quarantine camp, we started wondering what kind of place this was. The kapos would point to the chimney and say, “That’s your destination.” The ghetto, the labour camps in Poznań... these were all terrible places. Still, there we didn’t talk about chimneys, we didn’t talk about crema- toria, we didn’t talk about gas chambers. Jakob was quick to advise me that I had to be extremely careful in the quarantine camp. He told me that the Germans would try to work me to death there. If I survived, they would just take me to an- other camp. I told him that I had just come from a labour camp and that Auschwitz couldn’t be harder than that. “Oh, yeah?” he replied. Unfortunately, he was right. Many of us were indeed worked to death in that quarantine camp, with hardly any food. The guards took us out early in the morning and we worked at making roads and digging ditches for the sewers. We 42 gateh ou se to h ell were doing all of this because the camp was expanding. There were lots of prisoners, so we didn’t have to work fifteen hours a day, but we were doing very hard manual labour. It would have gone much faster if there had been wheelbarrows to take the rocks and move them to where they were supposed to go. But, no, we had to carry them in our hands. The whole thing was designed, I would say, as a test to see if we were able to do this type of work. If we survived three months of the harshness of quarantine, then we qualified to go to the D camp in Birkenau, which was the men’s labour camp. The atrocities that happened in quarantine were horrible. Dr. Mengele was a frequent visitor, although in the beginning we didn’t know who he was. He and the officers went through each of the bar- racks to choose people for all kinds of experiments. We saw men taken away and they never came back. We heard screaming. Then there was the selection. After I’d been working in the quar- antine camp for about two weeks, a kapo came into the barracks and announced that there was going to be a selection, that no Jews would be going to work the next day. The other inmates left and the Jews stayed behind in the barracks. At first I was happy to have a day off work. I was so naive that I didn’t know what the selection was for. I thought that maybe the Germans were going to pick the ones who were healthy for special work. To me, we were having a holiday. Jakob was wiser. He told me that he had heard that people had to be very careful during the selection, advising me to make sure that I knew where my clothes were when I was ordered to undress, to stand up straight, to not ask any questions. An hour or so later, I saw Dr. Mengele. He came in with his en- tourage, about half a dozen SS men, and one man in civilian clothes who was taking notes. We had to strip naked. Dr. Mengele sat down and we walked in front of him. He indicated which person should go to the left or to the right. When a person went in one direction, the civilian wrote his number down.  f el i x opatowsk i 43 When it was my turn, I saw that the man didn’t write down my number. I thought when he took down a number it meant they were going to take that person to another labour camp. Jakob had told me that sometimes, if a person was lucky, the Germans would need him for other work. I thought that I had missed an opportunity. So I went back and I tried to tell him that he had forgotten to write down my number. One of the guards pushed me away. I was almost crying. I was stubborn. I didn’t want to stay in Auschwitz. I didn’t want to go to the gas chambers. I didn’t want to be cremated. I didn’t want to die there and I kept pushing back. Finally the guard gave me a good push and I fell over to the other side. I was with the men who didn’t have their numbers written down. Mengele didn’t send me to the gas chamber that day. It turned out that it was the inmates whose numbers the civilian wrote down who were doomed. The Germans put them in a special barracks under guard. They didn’t get any food or water and they were held there for a couple of days. Then they were put into the gas chamber. That is what I had been begging for. That was how naive we all were when we arrived in Auschwitz. We didn’t know anything. The conditions in quarantine were so terrible that I was just desperate to get away from there. At least I was lucky that in the barracks where I was, there were only ordinary selections. Mengele wasn’t picking anyone for experi- ments from our group. Afterward, I learned more about Josef Mengele. I thought he looked like a movie star, good-looking. He was tall and wore a black SS uniform with shiny boots and I remember the way he walked. I also remember the saying, “You’re better off if he doesn’t see you.” He was one of the doctors in Auschwitz who met the transports coming in, selecting people for work or the gas chambers – sending them right or left. Mengele always selected some people for his experiments; if there were twins among the new arrivals, they were in trouble. I only found out these things about Mengele much later. Thank God I wasn’t involved with him very much. 44 gateh ou se to h ell Jakob continued to teach me what to do and what not to do in quarantine. Every piece of advice helped. There were about sixty bar- racks in the quarantine area. Each barracks consisted of a room that held up to a thousand people, depending on how many inmates the Nazis wanted to squeeze in. There were three tiers of bunks and each bunk could hold six men, but usually it was four or five. When we were sleeping on one side, if one guy rolled over, everybody had to move. It was very cramped. The bunks were plain planks of wood with no blankets whatsoever. In the centre of the barracks there was a furnace for heat. Firewood went in from one side and a chimney came out the other side, run- ning to the end of the barracks. That was where we sat and ate and socialized. That’s where we shared our misery. We sat there until we had to go to bed because when we lay down it was so congested that it was a relief just to fall asleep. We were not supposed to talk after the lights were turned off. Everything was very strictly supervised by a kapo whose help- ers were called foremen. There was talk about Jewish kapos. I was in Auschwitz for two years and I only met two Jewish kapos and a few Jewish foremen. Most of the kapos were ex-prisoners. They had the right to kill us whenever they felt like it. It was lawless. We couldn’t complain to anybody and nobody could protect us. I saw people who were killed for nothing – sometimes just talking at night or going to the buckets if they needed to urinate could get someone killed. At night we couldn’t go to the washroom after nine-thirty. If we had to urinate at night, we had to do it in our soup bowl or cup. Lots of people, including me, had to pee in their soup bowls because if we did it where we slept, the kapos could kill us right there. Or, if the kapos didn’t kill someone, they often crippled him. Jakob warned me not to talk back to the foreman and to do exactly what I was told because the kapos might kill me for no reason at all. That’s just the way it was in the barracks. In each camp in Birkenau, the washrooms were just as big as the  f e l i x opatowsk i 45 barracks and constructed the same, except the washroom had holes to sit on and in the corner, by the door, there were water pipes that ran to the sink. The water ran all the time because it was constantly needed. It wasn’t the best water in the world. We drank it, but it was probably contaminated. Sometimes it was blue, sometimes it was brown and sometimes it was yellow. That was the water we washed in. That was the only water we had. We had no choice. In quarantine, I saw what happened to the people who were se- lected for the gas chamber. It was a terrifying sight. When we went to work, we couldn’t help walking by the barracks where the guards were holding them since it was right at the entrance to the quaran- tine camp. Even if we walked out of the barracks to go to the wash- room, they could see us. If they recognized us, they might call out our names. They knew they were going to die and all they were asking for was water. One of two brothers that I knew was taken in a selection. The other was in my barracks. I heard him crying at night. When we walked to work the next morning he wanted to see his brother. I don’t remember if it was to give him water or not; I think he just wanted to touch his brother or be close to him. The kapos beat him up. I don’t know if he died. I never saw him again. One of the first prime ministers of Poland after the war, Józef Cyrankiewicz, wrote in his memoirs that nobody could really know about Auschwitz completely. It was impossible to figure it out. It was a chaotic situation. By the time we grasped what was going on, what could we do to survive? I was already a veteran of camps and misery, but this was something entirely different. This was as if I was on an- other planet. Out of necessity, I soon began to figure out my way around. For example, one thing to know was how to hang on to our belongings. We got a bowl for soup and they told us not to lose it. The bowl had a 46 gateh ou se to h ell hole in the side with a wire through it and we tied it onto our pants. If we lost our bowl, we had nothing to eat with. We had to sleep with that bowl. We also didn’t get utensils. If we already had a spoon but wanted to cut a piece of bread (although the bread we got was so small we didn’t need to cut it) we sharpened the edge of the spoon with a stone and that was our spoon and our knife. We even had to sleep with our shoes on so no one could steal them. If we needed something, we had to trade our bread for it and the only place to do this was in the washroom. That was the one lo- cation where we could talk to people privately, and that was where we did business. If we needed a spoon, a sock, a shoe, we could ex- change for something else we had. The washroom was the market in Auschwitz. Birkenau consisted of several camps with roads between them wide enough for a truck or even a tank to pass through. Each camp consisted of fifty or sixty barracks. Quarantine was the first camp. The women’s camp was next and then the D camp, which was the main la- bour camp for all of Auschwitz. There was also a Czech Family Camp and a Gypsy camp. It was some time in September 1943 when they made the special camp for Czech people from the Theresienstadt camp. The Nazis wanted to get rid of all the inmates from Theresienstadt, but they couldn’t do it so freely because it was a well-known camp. It held the intelligentsia of Czech Jews – doctors, scientists and so on – who sent out letters before it was restricted. The world knew about it. So the Germans figured they were going to get rid of them little by little. They sent 15,000 or 25,000 of them at a time to Auschwitz, where they weren’t killed right away. Whole families were put in this camp together, which was a novelty. They were given better treatment, de- cent food and they didn’t have to work much, except to clean up the camp. They were allowed to write postcards to send to Theresienstadt and maybe all over the world for propaganda purposes, to show how humane Auschwitz-Birkenau was. In March 1944, about six months  f el i x opatowsk i 47 after the first arrivals, almost the whole camp was murdered in the gas chambers. The rest were murdered about three months later. The Gypsy camp contained between 20,000 and 25,000 prisoners. The entire camp was murdered a little bit later than the Czech camp, in the beginning of August 1944, except that what happened with the Gypsy camp was more dramatic. The Czech people hadn’t been aware that they were going to be gassed. They went very quietly. They didn’t scream and fight for life the way the Gypsies did, because the Gypsies knew what was going to happen to them. There was yelling and shouting the whole day. Later, as more women arrived, they added another two women’s camps. There was also a medical camp and a camp for agriculture. Not far away was another camp called Buna, also known as Auschwitz iii. In addition there was a Magazine, or warehouse, where the kitchen and the cooks were. The cooks were mostly Soviets who had survived from the time Birkenau was being built in early 1942. The Germans held more than 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war (p ow s) in Auschwitz and either worked them to death or killed them in the gas chambers. By the end of the war, less than a hundred had survived. Then there was a block where the kapos lived. Every camp had a Lagerkapo, the main kapo, who was in charge of all the work and the other kapos. The kapos were supervisors of the work details. Each kapo had foremen and so on. It went according to rank. There was a man in my barracks, five or six bunks away from where my quarters were, who had a bunk to himself. Nobody was above him; nobody was below. At first, I thought maybe I was mistak- en. Maybe his bunk-mates were out working or something. This man never went to work. He was never beaten up. He just sat around and was treated a little more humanely than the rest of us. I saw that he had a big knife with a point and a piece of wood that he was whittling. I was always curious. Wherever I was, it was good to know what was going on. That became second nature to me. I asked Jakob if he knew anything about him. How did he get a knife? He clearly had privileges 48 gate hou se to h ell that nobody knew anything about and he didn’t talk to anyone. Jakob didn’t know much about him but he had heard that he was a German Jew. He had a red triangle over the yellow one and a yellow stripe on top of that on his uniform. One day I saw him sitting by the furnace carving some pieces of wood. I went to take a closer look and recognized what he was mak- ing – they looked like crude chessmen. Remember, I played chess at school. I was a decent chess player for my age, too, so I was intrigued and asked him if he was a chess player. He just grunted at me, as much as telling me not to bother him. The next day I approached him again and introduced myself. He still didn’t tell me his name but did ask if I played chess. Most chess players don’t like to brag in case they lose. Decent players don’t let on how good they are. I told him that I knew a little bit about the game. We soon got a little friendlier. He told me that he only needed to make two more pieces and offered to play a game with me sometime. I readily agreed, especially since there was lots of time to kill before the guards shut the lights off at night. He had his own bulb in his bunk, so he could whittle or read. I couldn’t understand what this was all about. About a week later, he called me over. He had a first-rate chess- board. The chess pieces didn’t look that good, but at least he had painted them black and white so I could recognize them. We set it up and we played a game. I didn’t play very well and after about five minutes he told me that I was a lousy player. I replied that I was do- ing my best and asked him if he would give me a few tips. “I’m not a teacher,” he said, very roughly. We played another game and he gave up, saying, “Nah, you’re a lousy player.” But he didn’t have anyone else to play with, so he called me over again a couple of days later. I went back and he set the board up and we started playing again. He grudg- ingly admitted that I was playing a little bit better. After we finished the game, he went to his bunk and took out a piece of cake and offered it to me. Cake, I want you to know, not  f el i x opatowsk i 49 bread. A piece of bread was like a diamond to me. Can you imagine what cake was? It was a bit stale, but that was the best cake I had ever had in my life. I started to ask him where he got it but he just walked away. I returned to my bunk with the cake. I was in shock. I told Jakob the story and I insisted on giving him some of it. It was the first thing I was able to share with him. I thought we were in heaven. Jakob sug- gested we eat it somewhere else – he was worried that someone might try to kill me for it. The days passed by. I went to work on the roads. When I came back to the barracks, the man called me over. We played chess again and he gave me a piece of chocolate, enough to share between two people. When I took it to Jakob, he proposed that instead of eating it, we sell it. We took it to the washroom, where some of the other inmates were, and got a decent piece of bread for it. Only a newcom- er who didn’t know about hunger would trade bread for chocolate. Another time, the man gave me a cigarette. We were able to get a little trade business going with the things he gave me. I finally got comfortable enough with my mysterious friend to ask him what his name was and he told me that it was Sigmund. I started to tell him where I came from but he stopped me, saying, “I don’t want to know where you come from. I don’t want to know about your family. You want to play chess with me, let’s leave it at that.” We played more and although he was a decent player, I was actually better than he was and it started to show. He was impressed with my playing so we became better friends. Playing chess with him earned me the respect of the entire barracks. Nobody yelled at me anymore. Once, while we were playing, I lost my queen and Sigmund said, “Make sure you don’t lose the queen. That’s the most important thing – not only in the game, but in life, too. Don’t ever trust a woman. They’re smarter than we men are.” At that moment I felt that I could ask him more about himself. I asked him why he didn’t talk to anyone else and why he was willing to talk to me. He told me that the Gestapo wanted information from him and he was sure that if he talked to 50 gate hou se to h ell someone, they would have no reason to keep him alive. I wasn’t going to push him so I left it at that. About a week after this conversation, there was a strange event that seems hard to believe, but I tell you that I witnessed it with my own eyes. I arrived back at the barracks from work as usual and saw to my surprise that a German soldier was standing at the door and a couple of kapos were blocking the entrance so that nobody could go in. A big black limousine stood right in front of the barracks with a chauffeur at the wheel and a good-looking young officer standing beside the car, smoking a cigarette. I don’t know what his rank was, but I could tell that he was a high-ranking officer. By this time, most of the prisoners from my barracks had arrived from various work details. None of us were allowed in; we all just stood outside, waiting to see what would happen. About half an hour later, the door to the barracks opened and, to our astonishment, a woman walked out. To me, in the middle of Auschwitz, this woman, with her perfume, high-heeled shoes and beautiful clothes, looked like the most beautiful woman in the world. She walked out the door of the barracks, went straight to the car and got in the back with the officer. We all just stood there with our mouths ope