At precisely 6:30 that Monday evening, the sirens began to sound. Jacob was completely baffled now and more terrified than ever. He thought he heard gunshots, though in the commotion and confusion he couldn’t be sure.
Not knowing what was done at a moment like this, he followed the crowd back to their barracks and soon spotted Gerhard shouting for everyone to line up to be counted. Evening roll call was not for another half hour, so clearly something out of the ordinary was happening. Jacob just hoped it was the thing for which he had been so nervously waiting for the past twenty-four hours. He hoped against hope that his friend Leszek Poczciwinski was now on the move. For the life of him, he couldn’t understand why Leszek hadn’t left the day before, but if he was on the run now, Jacob wished him all the best.
A buzz moved through the camp as people began to realize that someone was missing and began speculating that perhaps that person had actually tried to escape.
As Jacob stood at attention with the rest of his block, he watched with great interest to see how the camp reacted to an escape attempt. He watched as hundreds upon hundreds of heavily armed troops rushed from their barracks to take up predetermined positions around the camp while hundreds of other elite troops flooded out of the gates to search for the escapee. He could hear the barking of the German shepherds being loosed for the hunt. He watched as searchlights warmed up to full strength in all of the guard towers and scanned the camp perimeter.
Jacob’s stomach was in knots. He had prepared himself for standing out in the chilly evening air for a few extra hours. He was stronger and healthier than most of the men in Block 18. What he had not anticipated was the word that Commandant Hoess was refusing to allow the prisoners to go back to their barracks or even sit down, much less lie down, or move at all until the escapees were captured or confirmed dead.
Again a buzz rippled through the camp. Had Hoess just used the word escapees? Plural? Jacob’s pulse quickened. That meant it wasn’t just a lone renegade. There were at least two men on the run, possibly more. Every prisoner was now not only wondering who they were and how they’d done it but was also rooting them on. Their escape was an escape for all of them. Their victory would give desperately needed encouragement to all the rest. Jacob wondered whether the men on the move with Leszek were Otto Steinberger and Abe Frenkel.
It seemed unlikely that Leszek would introduce him and Max to two men who might soon be gone for good—or dead. What would be the point? Still, whomever Leszek had taken with him, they had not been shot yet, nor electrocuted on the fence. They had clearly made it past the electric fences and outside the camp. That’s why all the troops were being deployed beyond the fences.
Another thought hit Jacob. Could Max be one of the escapees? Could Max’s sister, Abby?
Two hours passed—then three and four and five. In a way, this was good news. The manhunt was still on. No bodies had been dragged back to the camp. This meant Leszek Poczciwinski and whomever he’d chosen to go with him were still free. But the toll on the rest of them was rising fast. The prisoners around Jacob were increasingly cold and exhausted and growing faint. Those suffering diarrhea had no choice but to defecate where they were standing. Yet those who fell down were beaten. Fellow prisoners did their best to hold each other up. They quietly pleaded with their comrades to be strong and not buckle under the pressure or the fatigue factor. Many simply couldn’t make it, however, and the beatings were as savage as anything Jacob had seen since arriving. The guards seemed to be taking out their seething anger against the prisoners who had escaped on the prisoners who had grown too weak to remain standing and were too exhausted to get back on their feet.
By one in the morning, Jacob found himself swaying, barely able to keep his knees locked. He was drifting in and out of consciousness. At one point, he drifted to sleep long enough to have a dream. In it, Leszek was sipping tea in London with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, explaining what he had seen and heard and bravely endured and mapping out a plan to send in a rescue force to set the captives free. Then Jacob snapped awake and found himself wobbling to and fro, on the brink of collapse. He was about to drift away again when suddenly a pistol went off right next to him, nearly deafening him. Jacob’s eyes shot wide open just in time to see an older man collapse to the ground with a gaping hole in his head. It was the man who slept on the bunk below Jacob and Josef, the man with the abdominal cramps. Blood and brain matter flew everywhere. Jacob was paralyzed with fear but fully awake again and standing erect. The guard who had pulled the trigger ordered Gerhard and another block senior to drag away the body, and as they did, word spread through the camp that Von Strassen had given the guards permission to shoot any prisoner deemed too weak to remain on his feet. Gunshots began echoing up and down the street.
Finally, as the sun began to rise, Von Strassen ordered all the men back to their barracks until a special morning roll call in an hour and a half. By now, Jacob was too delirious with fatigue to worry about only having ninety minutes to sleep before having to stand at attention once again. Following Josef, he limped back into the barracks and climbed up into the top bunk.
Just before he slipped into unconsciousness, he thought again of Poczciwinski. Had he made it? Was he really out? Had he really slipped through the gates of hell?
He must have, Jacob thought. There was no other reason to let the men go back to bed. And for the first time since arriving at Auschwitz, he fell asleep with the trace of a smile on his face.
50
Everything changed that week in April, yet nothing changed at all.
For three days and three nights, Colonel Von Strassen and several thousand troops and dozens of dogs conducted the most intensive manhunt in the history of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps. Yet in the end, Leszek Poczciwinski was neither captured nor killed in the daring escape. Neither were his two comrades—both of whom turned out to be Polish friends of his. For this, Jacob was overjoyed.
To his terror, Jacob was dragged in for questioning by Von Strassen and his men, but to his surprise, the interrogation lasted only for a few hours. Jacob played dumb, and it seemed to work. He kept saying he didn’t know anything about Leszek Poczciwinski’s activities. He repeated over and over again that he had just arrived. He kept pointing out that he spent most of his time working, not hanging out with the kapo of the Canada command. He and Leszek Poczciwinski had only had a few brief conversations, he insisted.
In the end, Von Strassen let him go. The whole episode left Jacob deeply rattled, but he was also proud of himself for keeping his cool and sticking to his story and not letting Von Strassen’s threats wear him down. It was, he felt, sort of a rite of passage, a test of manhood, and somehow he had passed. Uncle Avi, he felt sure, would be proud. He hoped his father and mother would be too.
Maximilian Cohen, however, disappeared. Jacob looked desperately for his friend every day in the Canada command and throughout the camp, but he did not find him. Eventually, he heard a rumor that Von Strassen had turned Max over to Dr. Mengele to be interrogated. The very thought made Jacob shudder. Since Max’s warning to stay away from the medical clinic, Jacob had heard stories of the sadistic experiments Mengele performed on living human beings, all of them without anesthesia, and he feared greatly for his friend.
Finally, at 6:30 on Monday evening—precisely one week after the sirens had sounded—every man in the camp was lined up in the courtyard in front of the gallows. As every prisoner stood at attention to watch, Max, shackled and led by two armed guards, emerged from the basement of the building where Von Strassen had his office.
Jacob gasped. He watched as the guards led Max up onto the wooden platform and put the noose around his neck. His friend’s face was white as a sheet. His lips were trembling. But when he briefly caught sight of Jacob in the crowd, no more than ten meters away, Max stiffened and lifted his chin. Then, before the guard could pull the lever, Max shouted at the top of his lungs, “Long live the Jews of Romania!” Then his body suddenly dropped. The
rope tightened. His feet kicked wildly. His eyes bulged. Then he stopped struggling and grew still, and it was all over.
Jacob watched in horror. He did not cry. He did not make a sound. He just stared at his friend, swaying in the cool spring breeze.
As the life drained out of Max, the will to escape drained out of Jacob. He was not just watching the death of his only friend in the world. He was watching the death of the only person who knew how Leszek Poczciwinski had gotten out.
But that was not all. On Tuesday morning, the situation went from bad to worse. Von Strassen ordered Jacob removed from the Canada command and assigned him to a construction detail. Now Jacob was to help build a factory at one of Auschwitz’s subcamps known formally as Monowitz-Buna, but known to the prisoners simply as Buna. No longer did Jacob have a protector. No longer did he have a friend. No longer was he working indoors. No longer did he have access to fruits and vegetables and half-decent cups of coffee.
Every day after roll call, a slew of kapos rounded up Jacob and several hundred other men, and they headed off, surrounded by armed guards. Buna was located quite some distance outside the double electrified fences of the main camp, and Jacob could have looked for any possible flaws in the security, but frankly he didn’t see the point. He no longer had the stomach for trying to escape or helping anyone else get free. His only hope, he decided, was for Leszek Poczciwinski to mount a rescue operation.
If he could merely survive for another few weeks, he might actually be able to walk out of this death camp alive. Otherwise he was doomed. It was a painful, bitter truth, but to Jacob it was truth nonetheless.
The only question now was how to survive another month in the out-of-doors, with minimal rations, working far harder than he ever had in his life.
51
Jacob lost six pounds in just the first week.
After a month, he had lost nearly twenty, none of which he could spare. He hadn’t had much body fat to begin with. Now he was a walking skeleton. His rib cage stuck out. He could see the bones in his arms. He had dark circles under his eyes, and his skin was a sickly gray. He had also developed a hacking cough, undoubtedly due to all the dust generated at the work site.
Jacob and his work detail were mixing and pouring concrete and laying a foundation at one end of an enormous complex of buildings being erected by the slaves of Auschwitz. For Jacob, it was as if he had been transported back to ancient Egypt. Even he, who had never cared much for the Bible or for the history of Judaism, knew how the Jews had been forced in ancient times to engage in huge construction projects for the pharaoh. But where was Moses this time? More importantly, where was God? Who was going to lead them out of Egypt and on to the Promised Land? They weren’t going to be able to hold up too much longer.
One day, during a rare break, another man on Jacob’s work detail told him he’d heard they were building a factory for a privately owned German industrial conglomerate known as I. G. Farben. Rumor had it that the Buna Works, once completed, would produce synthetic rubber for the Nazi war effort. Jacob didn’t know if it was true. Nor did he care. The only thing that kept him going was the hope that he would see Leszek soon.
But a month passed, and then a second month and a third, and nothing changed, except that now Jacob had lost even more weight. No Leszek came to get him. No Allied troops came. There was no liberation. Just more grueling work and more dead and dying as far as the eye could see.
By the middle of July, Jacob’s cough was worsening. He had not only lost all hope of escaping; he had lost all hope of surviving, too. Every day men dropped dead of exhaustion or starvation. Every day he and his comrades picked up the corpses, put them on wooden carts, walked them back to camp, and delivered them to the crematorium, where the ovens never stopped working and the chimney never stopped belching out its black, putrid smoke along with the ashes of human bodies that fell from the sky like snowflakes morning, noon, and night.
Over time, through short, furtive conversations with other prisoners, Jacob slowly pieced together a bit of the story of Leszek Poczciwinski. Occasionally Jacob ran across people who had known Leszek, and he kept his ears tuned to the camp gossip. After Von Strassen and his men had given up looking for the escapee, rumors swept through camp about who Leszek really was and who was working with him. Jacob dismissed most of what he heard as fantastic myths spooled up by people who had never met the man. He had become a superhero in their eyes, and the stories just became more and more far-fetched with each telling. But every now and then, Jacob heard a tidbit that sounded credible, and he tucked it away in his memory banks, though for what he could not say.
One day, for example, Jacob was working alongside a prisoner who had only recently been captured and delivered to Auschwitz. He told Jacob that he was a Polish army officer and that he knew Leszek Poczciwinski well. He also said that Leszek Poczciwinski wasn’t Jacob’s friend’s real name. His real name was Piotr Kubiak. The man said he had been to boot camp with Kubiak years before and they had briefly served together after the Nazi invasion. He confirmed that Kubiak was a captain in Polish intelligence and a dedicated member of the Resistance. What’s more, he confirmed what Max had told Jacob—that Kubiak had actually volunteered to be sent to Auschwitz. Once his plan had been approved, he had simply walked down a street in Warsaw when he knew there would be Nazi roundups that day and gotten himself arrested.
Jacob still struggled to believe this was true. “Why would anyone volunteer to come to a death camp?” he asked.
“Piotr didn’t know what was really happening here,” the man replied. “None of us did. Who could have imagined such monstrosities? I mean, if Piotr had known this was really a death factory and what that really meant and the scale it was really operating on, I don’t think he would have come. His wife never would have let him do it. Nor would his commanders. He thought what we all thought: that this was just a labor camp. We thought they were building things and making things for the Nazi war effort, like this factory. That’s why he wanted to come here. To figure out what was happening and get the facts back to his comrades. It was supposed to be a brief operation. In the end, it was more than he bargained for. I just hope to God that he’s safe now and back with his family.”
Jacob hoped so too. And he desperately hoped that Leszek Poczciwinski—aka Piotr Kubiak—hadn’t forgotten all of them.
In time, Jacob also learned a few details about the two men who had escaped with Captain Kubiak. One of the men was James Mihilov. He was prisoner number 5340. The other, he learned, was Jahn Letski. He was prisoner number 12969.
One night after hearing these details, Jacob found himself curious. Were these things true? Could such information be verified? He asked his bunkmate, Josef, to look up the names in the records office. Two days later Josef got back to him. He confirmed the names Mihilov and Letski and their numbers. And there was more. Josef had come across information about the escape in the records as well.
These two men had worked in the camp bakery. Apparently Kubiak had met them there, and together they had broken through a back door when the guards weren’t looking. They had cut the phone lines coming in and out of the bakery so that when the guards did find the men missing, they were delayed in relaying the news to Von Strassen’s office.
These were interesting tidbits but hardly useful, actionable intelligence. None of it gave Jacob any kind of road map to follow to help him escape.
As the weeks passed, Jacob increasingly resigned himself to dying in Auschwitz. Probably soon.
52
AUGUST 1943
August was a brutal month.
For several weeks in a row the temperatures around Auschwitz consistently topped 40 degrees Celsius, or 104 Fahrenheit—far above normal, Josef said. There was no wind. Not even a light breeze. The mosquitoes were out in full force, as were the flies.
The stifling, suffocating nights in Block 18 were almost as unbearable as working in the blazing sun twelve hours a day. Jacob never had enough water to
drink or food to eat. Slowly dehydrating and starving to death, he was getting intense headaches and rarely had to urinate. When he did, it hurt and what little was produced had an odd amber color.
Jacob was finding it increasingly difficult to get out of bed in the morning, despite Gerhard’s incessant shouting and cursing. Josef said he was looking for openings in the records office that he could recommend Jacob for, but so far nothing had come up. And try as Josef might, he couldn’t find any kapos willing to pull Jacob off the Buna detail and put him back in an indoor job.
It got so bad that Josef began giving Jacob his own cup of tea at breakfast every morning and half of his already-meager ration of soup at dinner each night. Jacob strenuously protested at first, but as he grew weaker, he reluctantly accepted both, though he was embarrassed that he could think of no way to return the favor.
Then, one evening, Jacob spotted a vaguely familiar face in the dining hall.
For the life of him, however, he couldn’t remember the name of the man ladling the ever-so-small portions of soup out of a huge metal pot to the prisoners waiting in line. As the line inched forward, Jacob stared at the man and tried to place his name and where he knew him from. Was he from Siegen? Jacob didn’t think so. He felt fairly certain he would remember anyone he had known well in Siegen. Was it one of the men who had worked in Uncle Avi’s factories? Or someone from Brussels? From the Resistance? Or from one of the towns they had passed through? Did he live in one of the homes Jacob and his friends had stayed at?
When Jacob reached the front of the line, the man nodded politely but didn’t say hello or give any other indication that they knew each other.
He did, however, ladle far too much soup into Jacob’s bowl. Rather than filling it halfway, as he was supposed to, the man filled Jacob’s bowl nearly to the brim. Jacob stopped in his tracks and stared at the overly generous portion and then back at the man. But now the man refused to make eye contact and seemed anxious for Jacob to move along. So he did.