The Auschwitz Escape

  Jacob gave Luc a hug but resisted the temptation, as strong as it was, to cheer at the top of his lungs. And then they just stood there for a moment, drinking in the fresh air and staring up at the night sky. It was a beautiful sight to behold.

  But Jacob’s attention was drawn back to the towering chimney in the distance with its hissing blue flames and belching black smoke, and a sadness settled right back down on him. All the elation he had felt just moments before was gone. He couldn’t believe how fast it was replaced by a heaviness he knew he would never be able to adequately describe to those who had not been to Auschwitz. Jacob remembered what Gerhard Gruder had said when he had first arrived: the only way out of this hell was through the chimney. Jacob had believed him at the time. But now here he and Luc were. They were out. Maybe they would make it all the way to true freedom. Maybe not. But already they had accomplished what he had once been sure was utterly impossible.

  Yet Jacob knew that Gruder wasn’t really wrong. How many Jews and Poles and Gypsies and others had departed this place only through the chimney? More than he could bear.

  Jacob looked back over the camp that had been his home. With its twinkling lights, it seemed so still, almost peaceful. A stranger, he thought, might pass by at this hour and not think twice about the place. It didn’t seem so dark and menacing in the night.

  But Jacob knew he could never make such a mistake. He had seen too much. He knew all too painfully well what was happening behind those walls. He knew those flames were being fueled by the bodies of his fellow prisoners.

  Jacob was reminded afresh that he and Luc were not escaping to save themselves. They were, they hoped, witnesses rising as if from the grave to tell the world and make the atrocities stop.

  And then Jacob realized that what Leszek Poczciwinski once told him had been right. The reason for all the security measures Hoess and Von Strassen had put into place was not simply to keep the prisoners in. It was to keep the story in. It was to make sure no one ever learned of the Nazi killing machine.

  81

  JUNE 6, 1944

  They put the planks back where they had been.

  Though they thought it unlikely, there was a slim chance the barracks would not be built this week after all, and they wanted Josef to have an escape option of his own if he opted for it.

  The temptation then was to run for their lives. But they could not. Not yet. Rather, they got on their bellies and began to crawl.

  Jacob led as inch by inch they made their way across several hundred yards of no-man’s-land, heading toward a forest of birch trees. Jacob feared he might set off a land mine at any moment, blowing himself to bits, but he was following the precise plan Steinberger and Frenkel had given them. They hadn’t been killed by mines. Neither, apparently, had Fischer and Kopecký. So maybe his heart was palpitating for no reason. Then again, maybe Von Strassen had made changes Jacob knew nothing about.

  Jacob realized such thoughts were dangerous. They ramped up his anxieties, slowed down his movements, and distracted him when he needed to concentrate. He tried to stay focused on the task at hand. He wanted to believe God was with him, as the man who was crawling behind him did. He would have given anything to have Luc’s preternatural calm. Even in sickness, Luc had a peace about him.

  Finally they reached the forest. Jacob was now on his hands and knees. As much as he wanted to run, he didn’t think it was safe yet, but at least they were no longer out in the open. They were in the shadows now. They were making progress.

  But then something happened Jacob had not counted on. He felt sand in his hands. Looking ahead and to the right and the left, he could see a river of sand several meters wide stretching out in both directions. Is this where the mines are? he wondered. Maybe so, but he couldn’t jump it. They would have to walk straight through.

  He got to his feet and scanned the forest around him in every direction, fearing the random patrol, fearing a couple of policemen hiding in the dark. Yet he put one foot in front of the other. He had no other choice.

  He didn’t die. He and Luc crossed the sand river in two separate places, making sure to smooth out the sand behind them to cover their tracks. And then they had had it.

  It was time to run, they agreed, and they bolted. They were a good kilometer away from the main perimeter of the camp now, not completely free and clear but far enough away—and deep enough in the forest—that they couldn’t be spotted by anyone in the towers.

  At one point they came to a clearing and stopped to catch their breath. There they found a wooden signpost. The sign read, Attention! This is the Auschwitz concentration camp. Any unauthorized persons will be shot without warning! It was hardly news to either of them, but it was jarring. They looked around, watched and listened to see if anyone was near them, decided they were okay, and started running again.

  To Jacob’s relief, his legs were thawing out. The combination of the adrenaline coursing through his system, the thrill of being out, and the dread terror of getting caught had helped his muscles adjust. His lungs, however, were another matter. He was impressed by how well Luc was doing. The man seemed built like a runner. Jacob was not. He hadn’t had this much exercise since his days in the Resistance in Belgium, and his chest burned. But as much as he wanted to stop and rest, he wouldn’t let himself. If his lungs exploded and he died as a result, he would gladly accept his fate. On the other hand, if he stopped and lounged around for a while and got caught doing it—and was returned to the camp to be hanged—he would never forgive himself.

  Using the fading North Star as their guide, they continued in a steady run for another half hour or so until Jacob came to a stop.

  “Why did you stop?” Luc asked, winded but doing better than his comrade. “We need to keep moving.”

  “No, look at the sky,” Jacob said. “It’s getting light. We need to find a place to hide to ride out the day.”

  They could see that they were approaching the outskirts of a village. Though they had no idea which one it was, they had to assume that everyone in it was hostile. Jacob spotted a small farm about a kilometer to their right. There were no lights on in the main house or smoke coming from their chimney. There was, however, a large barn in the back.

  “How about that?” he asked, and Luc readily agreed.

  They made their way across a field of corn, disappointed it was too early in the season to find any ears they could actually eat, and reached the barn just as reddish-orange streaks of daylight began to break forth in the east. Slowly, carefully, they entered the barn from the far side, away from the house, and learned—first by the odor, and then by all the cows—that this was a dairy farm.

  That was a risk. It likely meant a farmer would be coming out at any moment to milk these cows. Then again, given the time, they might have already been milked. But neither Jacob nor Luc wanted to find out the hard way. So, spotting a loft with a wooden ladder leaning against it, they stealthily moved inside and climbed to the top.

  Just then someone entered the barn from the other side. The fugitives froze dead in their tracks as they heard not just one but two people whistling. Looking down through two slats, they soon saw a pair of teenage girls emerge. The girls, probably sisters, each grabbed a wooden stool and set about milking their father’s cows.

  Step by cautious step, Jacob and Luc moved to the back of the loft. Easing into the shadows, they covered themselves with hay and tried to remember to actually breathe in and out every few moments. They didn’t dare cough or sneeze or make any sound at all. But Jacob, for one, found his mouth watering. He hadn’t tasted milk since the glass Abby had given him in the clinic. It seemed like ages ago. Dare he try to get some today?

  – – –

  “Hit him again,” Von Strassen said.

  Fat Louie didn’t have to be told twice. He hit Josef Starwolski in the stomach so hard, blood spurted out of his mouth.

  The twenty-one-year-old Polish Jew, his hands and feet locked in chains attached to a cement wall, was
already a mess. His face and eyes and nose were so bruised and swollen and bloody he would have been unrecognizable even to his own mother. But despite hours of brutal interrogation by Von Strassen, Starwolski had not yet broken.

  “Do you really think I’m going to kill you?” Von Strassen asked him now. “You don’t know me at all, do you, Josef? You would love that. You would actually love it if I would simply put you out of your misery, wouldn’t you? But what would be the fun in that? No, no, I’m not going to kill you, Josef. I’m just going to keep asking you questions until you tell us what we need to know. And if you don’t answer me, I’ll have my friend here begin cutting off your fingers, one by one. Does that sound better? Now, tell me what I want to hear. Where are your friends Jacob and Luc heading?”

  – – –

  The answer was no.

  The girls were very efficient at their work. They filled their pails, poured the milk into a larger vessel of some kind, then filled them up again and again, and when they were all done, they struggled mightily to carry the vessel back into the house. When they were gone, there was no more milk to be had. What’s more, it turned out they had little brothers and sisters who soon were up and awake and running about, darting in and out of the barn all day. They were leaping and laughing and carrying on as though they had not a care in the world. Jacob had forgotten that there were children in the world who felt like that.

  The father also came in and out of the barn at various times during the day. One time he came for a pitchfork. Another time he came for an ax. Soon Jacob could hear him chopping wood in the backyard of the house amid the squeals of delight coming from the children. It made him think of Ruthie. In two weeks, she would have turned fifteen. It had been five and a half long years since he had looked into his sister’s eyes.

  The gnawing hunger and constant fear that they would be discovered made it hard to keep to the plan their mentors had laid out for them: sleep all day, run all night. It was not until around three in the afternoon that Luc finally fell asleep, and Jacob didn’t succumb for probably another hour.

  Just a few hours later, they woke to the smell of smoke from a brick fireplace wafting through the air and detected something wonderful cooking in the kitchen. Jacob’s mouth was watering, and it was all he could do not to sneak down from the loft and steal the first thing he saw that was edible.

  Soon a bell rang. The children came running from everywhere, and then all was quiet.

  Jacob imagined all the different things that might be on the dinner table, trying to match the aromas to the foods, but often just salivating over what he wanted to be eating. An hour later, the girls were back, milking again, and laughing and complaining about the terrible roast their mother had made for dinner, oblivious to the fact that two starving fugitives were listening to their every word just a few meters above their heads.

  – – –

  Von Strassen was livid.

  Josef Starwolski still wasn’t talking. So Von Strassen nodded, and Fat Louie raised his ax and chopped off Josef’s right thumb.

  Josef did not start talking, however. He screamed and then slipped into unconsciousness.

  This infuriated Auschwitz’s chief of security all the more.

  This wasn’t working. Either Starwolski really didn’t know anything, or he was exceedingly loyal to these two men. Either way, the effect was the same. Hour after hour was going by, and Von Strassen was no closer to catching these escapees, much less to forestalling his own increasingly imminent execution. Worse, the three Czechs who had worked in the bakery with both Jacob Weisz and Jean-Luc Leclerc weren’t talking either. They, too, had been tortured to the limits of any normal human being’s capacity to endure. But they knew nothing.

  It was time for Von Strassen to shift his attention to Abigail Cohen.

  82

  “Did you know Jacob before arriving at Auschwitz?” Von Strassen asked.

  “Who?”

  “Do not take me for a fool, Miss Cohen,” the colonel shot back as he paced around the room, circling the wooden chair she was chained to in the dank and cold, foul-smelling basement known among most prisoners as the pit. “Did you know Jacob Weisz before you came here?”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Abby replied.

  “Jacob Weisz,” Von Strassen said again. “Are you actually going to sit here and lie to my face that you don’t know who I’m talking about?”

  “I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard that name before.”

  “Liar!” Von Strassen shouted, leaning down inches from her face. “You are a liar, Miss Cohen, and if you don’t start giving me the answers I want to hear, I will have no choice but to turn you over to savagery you cannot imagine.”

  Behind him, Fat Louie stood in the shadows, fiddling with a bloodstained wooden club and staring at Abigail with a half-crazed look in his eyes. Von Strassen watched as she glanced to the corner and then back at him. She had a steely resolve in her own eyes, but he perceived it was beginning to falter. Von Strassen had not given permission to lay a hand on this girl—not yet—but he had no doubt the man was itching to be unleashed, and his time would come soon enough.

  “Really, I’ve never heard that name before,” Abby insisted.

  “Rubbish! We know you met repeatedly with Mr. Weisz. We know your brother, Max, was his best friend in the camp. We know the two of them were caught sneaking into the medical clinic, where you work. And we know more. We know that you introduced Mr. Weisz to Jean-Luc Leclerc. And that Mr. Weisz gave you a gift before he escaped. And that you gave Mr. Weisz a gift before he escaped. And that you and Josef Starwolski were the last Jews to speak to Mr. Weisz before he escaped. So I’m thinking it’s likely that you gave him instructions on how to escape and instructions on where to go and instructions on whom to meet on the outside and what to tell them. Are you really going to deny all this when we have proof, when we have eyewitnesses, when we even have the journal Mr. Weisz gave you, which my men are analyzing right now for hidden codes and messages?”

  “Wait a minute, wait, wait—are you talking about Leonard?” Abigail asked, looking as perplexed as she was frightened. “Leonard Eliezer? Yes, I know Leonard. And yes, we were friends. But I’ve never heard this name, Jacob . . . What did you call him?”

  “Weisz, Miss Cohen,” Von Strassen said. “Yes, Jacob Weisz, aka Leonard Eliezer. Jacob is his real name. That was his given name when he was born in Berlin on February 2, 1921, to Dr. Reuben Weisz and Sarah Schmidt Weisz. He was never really Leonard Eliezer. That was a fiction, an alias. That was the name he lifted from a dead man on the train ride from Brussels. But his real name was Jacob Weisz, and I’m asking if you ever met before you got to Auschwitz.”

  “Herr Colonel, please, I have never heard the name Jacob Weisz before today,” Abigail said. “If you say that was Leonard’s real name, then maybe it was, but I never heard it. He never said it to me. Nor did Max.”

  “What about Poczciwinski?”

  “No.”

  “Leszek Poczciwinski never used the name Jacob Weisz?”

  “No, never—not that I ever heard.”

  “But he talked to you about Leonard Eliezer?”

  “Once, I think—but really I met Leonard through Max.”

  Von Strassen circled the chair several more times, trying to decide whether he believed her.

  “I will ask the question one final time. Did you meet Leonard Eliezer before you arrived here in Auschwitz?”

  “No, Herr Colonel. I had never met Leonard before we got here. I wish I had. I think of him as my friend. I wish I’d had more time to get to know him.”

  “Where is he going?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I think you do.”

  “But I do not.”

  “Then what did you give him just before he escaped?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do not test me, Miss Cohen. We have eyewitnesses. We know Mr. Weisz left the hospital carrying a smal
l package. Now, what was in it? What exactly did you give him?”

  83

  Luc still had a fever.

  So did Jacob, but Luc looked far worse. His temperature seemed higher. His face and hands were cold and clammy, and he could not stop shivering. For the moment, however, he was actually sound asleep under the hay and under Jacob’s own coat, which he had put over him when Luc first began shivering uncontrollably. For now Jacob decided to let him keep sleeping. The sun was just beginning to sink in the west, but he could hear some of the children still playing in the fields. It would still be several hours until they were all in bed and he would feel safe enough to get moving again.

  Without anything else to do, Jacob considered that perhaps it was finally time to open Abby’s gift. He had wanted to open it the moment she had given it to him, and he had thought about it constantly ever since. Indeed, its very presence in his backpack was one of the things that had kept him moving forward through so many trials in the past few days. And now, at last, he could see what she had given him.

  As quietly as he could, he reached into the backpack, down to the bottom.

  First he came across the padlocked steel box containing all the precious documents, photographs, ledgers, and other materials he and his colleagues had stolen from the Nazis. This was the elixir, the prize they had smuggled out of the camp—the materials that bore irrefutable proof of the specific nature and magnitude of the Nazi atrocities taking place inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps. It was this, even more than their own testimonies, Jacob was certain, that would convince the Hungarian Jews and the Allied leaders of what der Führer was really doing behind closed doors. It was this that would move them to take decisive action to save the Jewish people and forever alter the destiny of Europe.