Chapter Thirty-Three: A Tank with the Star of David PDF

# Chapter Thirty-Three ## A Tank with the Star of David A day or two after I last spoke to Georg, I was lying on my bunk next to Ivar, trying not to starve to death. I was so weak I couldn't move, and there was no reason to move anyway. We hadn't seen food for over ten days. We had been told, thr...

# Chapter Thirty-Three ## A Tank with the Star of David A day or two after I last spoke to Georg, I was lying on my bunk next to Ivar, trying not to starve to death. I was so weak I couldn't move, and there was no reason to move anyway. We hadn't seen food for over ten days. We had been told, through the camp grapevine-messages whispered in passing on the Appelplatz, or in the latrine—that the Germans had been rounding up Jewish prisoners and sending them away on trains or on death marches, or taking them out into the woods to be shot, in a last-minute effort to silence the witnesses. We were weak, helpless and terrified. We didn't have the strength to move, let alone run or fight. So all we could do was hide in our barracks, try not to be noticed, and keep on breathing. It was about three o'clock on the afternoon of April 11. We heard something outside the barracks that we had not heard before: a roaring, rattling sound that seemed to be getting closer. One of the guys in my barracks, one of the few who could still stand up for a few minutes at a time, got up to look out of one of the shoulder-high windows. Then he said, in a small, broken voice: "I think we're being liberated." We didn't believe him. I had seen so many people go over the edge, over all the years of my imprisonment, that it was hard for me to take him seriously. You never knew what to believe, and what not to believe. Prisoners lost it and went insane all the time. This was probably just one more inmate cracking up. Tomorrow, it might be me. Why should I get my hopes up? He kept on rasping. "If you don't believe me, come and take a look." What the hell, I thought. Along with some of the other guys, I moved slowly to the dirty, broken panes. I could see a tank coming, a big olive-colored monster roaring up the road between the barracks. We had heard that the Germans had orders to obliterate the camp if there was any chance of its being captured. We believed that they would never let us out into the world, never let us tell our stories. So when I first saw the tanks I was sure that the Germans were there to blow us all up. But where I expected to see a white-and-black German cross, as on every tank I'd ever seen, there was the Jewish star of David, scrawled in chalk on the side of this tall, frightful machine. Why would the Germans pull a prank like this? I asked myself. We had no idea, even in April of 1945, that Europe had been invaded by the Allies, that the American Third Army was roaring through western Germany, or that Germany was on the edge of defeat. Except for those few words from my friend Georg, which really told me nothing, I had no clue about what had been going on in the outside world. I did know that I was weak and dizzy. If it wasn't for the windowsill I was leaning against, I would fall down in a heap. I'm hallucinating too, I thought. The officer on top of the tank turret was wearing a greenish-brown uniform, which did not look familiar to me-German Wehrmacht or SS uniforms were almost always gray or black. Then I realized that he was yelling in Yiddish, which no German officer would ever do. "Ihr seit fray!" he cried, again and again. "You are free!"