“Anyway, Leszek recruited Luc to be part of our team.”
“Is he also a Pole?” Jacob asked.
“No. He’s French,” Abby replied. “Interesting guy. Turns out he’s a pastor.”
“A pastor?” Jacob whispered. “You mean a priest?”
“No, he’s not Catholic. He’s Protestant.”
“Then what in the world is he doing here? Shouldn’t he be goose-stepping through Berlin or leading the Easter services for Fat Louie and his friends?”
“No, no, he’s different. You’ll like him.”
“Different? You mean he got caught stealing money from his church?”
“No, of course not—he’s not like that,” Abby said. “He’s different different. Good different. Leszek told me Luc was arrested by the Gestapo for helping rescue Jews out of Nazi-controlled areas. Something like five thousand Jews, or close to that, if I’m not mistaken.”
Jacob was incredulous. “Five thousand?”
“Well, not all by himself. Apparently the other pastors in his church and most of the people in their town were helping.”
Jacob shook his head in disbelief. “What town?”
“I don’t remember exactly. Somewhere in the south of France.”
“You’re saying that guy, Jean-Claude . . .”
“Jean-Luc,” Abby corrected. “But everyone just calls him Luc.”
“Whatever. You’re saying this Luc guy and his town helped rescue five thousand Jews escaping from Germany or wherever else when the Nazis rose to power?”
Abby nodded.
“I don’t understand,” Jacob said. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would he do such a thing?”
“I told you; he’s different.” Abby smiled. “Anyway, I don’t have time to tell you the whole story. I don’t even know the whole story. You should ask him yourself. He’s being transferred to Birkenau in the next few days. Somehow he and Otto and Abe will link up with you. They’ll brief you on the plan and then tell you what they need you to do. Now, as for why you? I really can’t say. You’ll have to ask Otto. If I had to guess, I’d say you must have proven yourself a faithful assistant to Piotr, and now they need someone they can trust. Max is gone, so they’re reaching out to you. Regardless, you’re being transferred to Birkenau tomorrow. They’ll make sure you get the food and drink you need to get your health back. But they will need you to take enormous risks on their behalf. Are you willing?”
“Are they going to take me with them?”
“When they escape?”
“Of course.”
“I have no idea. You’d have to discuss that with them.”
“And what about you?” Jacob asked. “Are you going to transfer too?”
“They need me here,” she replied. She put the stethoscope in her ears, unfastened the top few buttons of his zebra-striped uniform, and listened to his heart.
When Jacob realized his heart rate had shot up and that she could hear it happening, he was mortified.
She just laughed.
55
The next day Jacob was put on a bus and transferred to Birkenau.
He had no idea what to expect, and he had tossed and turned much of the night worrying about the million different things that could go wrong.
For all his fears, however, Jacob was fixated on one central truth: he was about to meet Otto and Abe again, two men who, according to Abby, had a solid, realistic escape plan. They were specifically and personally requesting his help. Maybe they were going to invite him to escape with them. But even if not, he hoped to learn invaluable lessons he could use to escape soon himself.
Jacob’s first impression on arriving at Birkenau was amazement at the sheer size of the sprawling complex. There were enormous sections for men, other sections for women, and one section exclusively for Gypsies. Abby had told him that Birkenau was one of the original Auschwitz expansion camps. It was built in 1941 to ease overcrowding since the gas chambers and crematorium at Auschwitz simply could not handle the volume of people being shipped in by train day after day. That might have been true, but Hoess and the other Nazis clearly weren’t satisfied with how big Birkenau currently was. They were feverishly expanding the camp to accommodate more trains, more people. They were building more and larger gas chambers capable of killing far more Jews in a single moment, in a single fake shower room. There were also enormous crematorium facilities being built by the very prisoners who would eventually be burned in them.
Already four crematoriums were operational and working around the clock. Thus, in addition to the single crematorium and its infamous chimney operating in Auschwitz-I, there now were a total of five such facilities between Auschwitz-I and Auschwitz-II. Jacob did the math, and it was staggering. With ten furnaces per building, that meant that there were fifty or more furnaces in operation, each of which could completely burn a human body into mere ashes in a matter of only twenty minutes, and all of which could hold many bodies at a time.
“Hoess is obsessed with German precision engineering,” Abby had told him before he left the clinic. “He doesn’t want to just kill people with beatings and firing squads and starvation. That’s not good enough for him. He’s supposed to move faster. He’s supposed to kill more people more efficiently. I hear he’s getting pressure from the top, from Hitler and Himmler. They want him to create a ‘death factory’—an assembly line that literally kills Jews by the hundreds of thousands and then disposes of the evidence of the crime into the sky. This is why we must not give up.”
She had implored Jacob to help Otto and Abe get out and spread the message of what was happening here among the Jewish communities who hadn’t arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau yet.
“Please, Jacob,” she had pleaded. “We need to stop Hoess. We cannot let him win.”
As Jacob arrived and was processed, Abby’s words echoed in his heart. She was right. As terrible as Hoess’s orgy of murder had been to date, it might pale in comparison to what was coming. The evidence suggested Hoess and his minions were gearing up for something much larger and much worse. They were creating a capacity that suggested a surge of prisoners would be coming through here, and soon. That was bad enough, but as Jacob thought about it, he realized the situation was much worse even than it looked at first glance. After all, no one seemed to be building more or bigger kitchens to feed this surge of prisoners. No one seemed to be building more or bigger dining halls. No one was building enough barracks for all these new people to sleep in. An awful lot of construction was going on, but none of it was designed to let people live here. All of it was designed to bring people here to die, and no longer by the thousands but by the hundreds of thousands.
Jacob felt sickened by the new reality that was dawning on him. At the same time, though, he felt energized by the prospect of helping the two men who had arranged for him to come. Yes, it was dangerous. But as Leszek had once said to him, if he was going to get caught and killed, he wanted it to be for doing something useful. He was honored to help these men escape, and whether they asked him to join them or not, Jacob decided there and then that as soon as possible after they were gone, he would make his own escape as well.
56
Over the next few days, Jacob tried to adjust to a new routine.
He saw no evidence of Otto or Abe. But he did find new people, new rules, less food, and new guards with different idiosyncrasies who could erupt without notice. The most immediate problem, however, wasn’t the guards. It was the lice.
Almost from the moment he arrived, Jacob found himself battling an outbreak of lice in the barracks that was driving him and the other men crazy. The tiny creatures were everywhere. They had infested the blankets and the mattresses and now their clothing. Every night, Jacob would take off his boots, put them on his hands, and use them to crush hundreds of the beady little insects. But to no avail. He woke repeatedly in the night feeling them crawling in his ears and on his arms and hands and face, biting and leaving little red spots all over him.
/> Abby had warned him that the conditions at Birkenau would be bad, but he hadn’t been able to imagine how things could be worse than what he was already enduring. Now he knew.
If the lice were unbearable, the rats made things even worse. They were everywhere. It seemed not a night would go by without Jacob waking up in the wee hours to the screaming of some man in his barracks who had just been bitten by one of the verminous creatures. It seemed hard to fathom, but Jacob actually found himself wishing he were back in Block 18.
Making things even more awful, if that were possible, was the fact that the barracks to which Jacob was assigned did not have a lavatory or wash facility connected. When he and the other prisoners in his barracks wanted to bathe, they were required to strip naked first and then walk several hundred yards to a public facility, regardless of the weather. Jacob was humiliated. But he reminded himself that at least it was only September. The air was dry and not too cold, except in the evenings. What would he do when winter came?
Jacob was eager to link up with Steinberger and Frenkel, but they never showed. He had met them only that one time, so though he constantly kept an eye out for them, he had to strain to remember what they looked like. He wondered whether he could have forgotten any of Abby’s instructions. Was he supposed to have met them, even one of them, at a certain place at a certain time on a specific day? He didn’t think so, but now he was worried. He didn’t dare ask anyone about them. Abby had warned him to trust no one. There were informants everywhere.
Soon after his arrival, Jacob was assigned to another grueling work detail. As September wore on, he was occupied building wooden huts for guards to sit in out in the vegetable fields while they were overseeing all their forced labor. They were not large huts. They could only fit four or five men at a time. But it kept them cooler on the sunny days and drier on the rainy days, and Jacob could often hear the Nazis laughing and drinking and playing cards inside.
Jacob resented every moment. It was dusty, dirty, exhausting work. He and his mates labored for twelve interminable hours a day in the sun. And it wasn’t as if he were doing something for his fellow prisoners. All he was doing was making life easier for the enemy. Once again Jacob began to lose weight—and with it, his hope.
Where were Steinberger and Frenkel? They were supposed to take care of him, weren’t they? They had promised to feed him and get him inside work, hadn’t they? But September passed, and they never showed.
As October began, Jacob was transferred to yet another work detail. He had no idea why. Maybe he had angered someone. Maybe too many people had dropped dead and they needed new slaves to replace the others. Whatever the reason, he spent that month harvesting and washing potatoes and carrots out in the fields. During that time, he developed a sinking feeling that the plan Steinberger and Frenkel had concocted had already been smoked out by Von Strassen. He had to assume that the two men had either abandoned their plan or been arrested.
There was another possibility, Jacob realized. The two men might already be dead. Perhaps he needed to stop waiting and start coming up with an escape plan of his own.
The only shred of good news was that being on this new agricultural detail allowed Jacob to steal and eat a few carrots and even a few potatoes here and there. He had to be careful, of course. He could never let one of the kapos see him eating, much less the guards. He was even careful not to let any of the comrades he was working with see him. Instead he kept his head down, worked his fingers to the bone, and impressed his supervisor with his daily quota of vegetables. Otherwise he tried not to attract any attention whatsoever.
When the harvest ended, Jacob received a different assignment. He and three of the men on his detail who were still reasonably healthy—or at least not dead yet—learned that they had just been transferred to work in the bakery. Upon hearing the news, Jacob breathed a sigh of relief. Finally he would be working indoors. The change came not a moment too soon, for in November and December the leaves would have fallen, and the temperatures would follow. Soon the rains would come and then the snow.
When Jacob showed up at the bakery for his first day of work, he wondered for the first time in a month whether perhaps all hope was not lost after all.
The kapo who greeted him was none other than Jean-Luc Leclerc.
57
Jacob didn’t know whether to be elated or concerned.
After all, this was the man he had first met at the medical clinic, the man who later had provided him additional soup and bread in the cafeteria. This was the man of whom Abby spoke so highly. Was he for real, or was he fooling them all?
Luc made no attempt to personally connect with Jacob that day. Indeed, for the first few days, Jacob’s new kapo rarely even made eye contact with him. He did not say anything particularly friendly or personal or act like they had even met before. He simply showed Jacob and the new men assigned to him what their jobs were and put them to work.
One of the men was responsible for mixing enormous batches of dough. Two more helped Luc roll the dough and shape it into hundreds upon hundreds of loaves of bread. Jacob was assigned to the gigantic, industrial-size ovens. He was responsible for cleaning them at night and doing basic maintenance on them to keep them in working order. Throughout the day, Jacob’s task was to put the large baking sheets of bread into the ovens and ensure the temperatures and timers were set properly. When the timers went off and the loaves were fully baked, he removed the sheets from the ovens and put them on cooling racks. In the meantime, he was supposed to wipe down counters, mop floors, and keep the entire bakery clean and orderly.
Luc was by no means rude or impolite during this time. He simply seemed indifferent, and this surprised and disappointed Jacob. Wasn’t it Luc who had directed him to meet with Abby? Wasn’t it Abby who’d directed him to meet with Steinberger and Frenkel? For Jean-Luc Leclerc to show up in Jacob’s life now and say nothing about Steinberger or Frenkel nor bring him any message from Abby—nor say anything personal at all—seemed odd, to say the least. Indeed, there were times in those first few days when Jacob felt angry, even betrayed. And he wasn’t exactly free to initiate a conversation with Luc on his own. Every day there was an enormous amount of work to be done. The conditions were hot, sweaty, and noisy. Armed soldiers came in often to demand bread for themselves and their friends. There was rarely a moment of privacy or solace.
Luc was not without some sense of compassion, however. Every few days he would let a large piece of bread drop to the floor near Jacob, and when the coast was clear, Jacob would reach down, scoop it up, and eat it as quickly as possible. Sometimes it was a chunk of warm, soft bread fresh out of the oven. Sometimes it was a piece of dry crust that otherwise might be thrown away. Either way, each morsel was a godsend. Eventually Jacob noticed that Luc was doing this for the other men, too, as well as making sure all of them had buckets of fresh, clean water that they could partake of whenever they wanted. The combination did wonders for the morale of their little team, and in time their estimation of their kapo grew steadily.
After a few weeks in the bakery, Jacob got up the nerve to ask his fellow workers their names and where they were from, something he had never done before in any of his other jobs.
It was already clear to Jacob that his fellow workers were not Jewish. They didn’t wear yellow triangles on their uniforms. Rather they wore red ones, indicating they were political prisoners, just like Luc. Unlike Luc, however, who was—according to Abby—a Protestant minister, these three men were Catholics. Jacob learned that they all hailed from a little town in Czechoslovakia called Žilina. Stefan, it turned out, was twenty-five, a mathematics teacher and the son of a medical doctor. Andrej was twenty-six, a mechanic whose father had also been a mechanic before he was killed in the war. Janko was almost twenty-seven, a farmer. He was married and had three little girls. Remarkably, Jacob learned, they had all been arrested and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau separately. That they had wound up together in the same camp, and working in the same pl
ace, they considered a miracle from God, and even Jacob had a hard time discounting the possibility that they were right.
It took some time, but eventually it dawned on Jacob that Luc had orchestrated all this. Yes, it had taken longer than Jacob had wanted. Perhaps longer than Luc wanted too. But even though Jacob and Luc had not had a serious conversation of any length yet, it was increasingly obvious to Jacob that it was Luc who had rescued him from the fields and brought him inside the bakery. It had to have been. Likewise, it was Luc who had rescued the Czechs and Luc who was making sure they were all being fed as well as possible under the circumstances.
The man wasn’t moving precipitously. He wasn’t doing anything that would attract the attention of the camp guards or the other kapos. But he seemed to have a plan. He seemed to know what he was doing. And it seemed to be working.
58
JANUARY 1, 1944
AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU CONCENTRATION CAMP
It was snowing furiously as the year 1944 began.
But Jacob refused to be disheartened. On the Saturday morning of New Year’s Day, he made a resolution but told no one of it. This was the year he was going to escape from Auschwitz. Or die trying.
Defying his instincts toward introversion and reclusion, Jacob was slowly and haltingly but definitely reaching out to the three Czechs. He talked to them, engaged them with questions, tried to build friendships. Meanwhile, he had been waiting for Jean-Luc Leclerc to approach him. Thus far it had not happened. But again, Jacob refused to let the apparent lack of progress discourage him. He felt sure Luc would make contact in due time. When he did, Jacob hoped the conversation would lead him to Otto and Abe and out of this factory of death.
After roll call and breakfast, Jacob arrived at work before the bakery got busy for the day and was told by Luc to take two dozen stacks of empty wooden crates to the loading dock behind the main kitchen facility. Jacob grumbled at the assignment. Everyone he knew was envious of his job working in the warmth of the bakery during such a miserable storm. Now, however, he was having to trudge back and forth, back and forth, hauling crates through the drifting snow and bitter winds.