The Auschwitz Escape

  During this time, the d’Astiers took Jacob into their home, and for this he was deeply grateful. He lived with them and took meals with them. He went shopping for them and cooked for them. He answered their many questions about Luc and about the camps and about his time in Belgium and his childhood in Germany. They answered his many questions too—about Luc’s family and what he was like as a boy and about Luc’s deep faith. Jacob appreciated their hospitality and their gentle manner. They respected him as a Jew. They did not pressure him or ever make him feel uncomfortable. To the contrary, they cared for him as if he were their own grandson.

  Often he lay in bed at night on a comfortable mattress, in a sturdy bed, with clean sheets, in his own room, staring up at a freshly painted ceiling with a fan that kept him cool on these hot summer nights. He lay there and wondered how the world had become such an evil place. How could so many good people turn such a blind eye to the atrocities being done all around them? It was one thing if they didn’t know that millions of lives were being extinguished. But now that people knew, how could they do nothing? How could they see such evil and take no action?

  And why was the world so cold toward the Jews? Why did so many hate them? What had he and his people done to make the world so casually turn a blind eye to the extermination of the Jewish race?

  Before long Jacob could no longer bear living a safe and peaceful life in Washington, D.C., while his friends were suffering and dying in Poland. So when he heard through the grapevine one day that Otto Steinberger had actually returned to Czechoslovakia to join the Resistance and fight the Nazis on the front lines, Jacob decided to do the same.

  Despite the Allied reluctance to take specific actions to liberate or even bomb the camps, Jacob could see that the tide of the war had shifted. The Allies were gaining ground. Hitler and the Nazi war machine were being systematically pushed back. Jacob believed the war was winnable. Indeed, he was beginning to believe he would live to see the day that Hitler was captured, tried, and hanged for crimes against humanity. But Jacob could not bear to think of Abby—if she was still alive—hearing that he had done nothing to save her, that he had sat around in a brownstone walk-up in Georgetown while she had suffered in Auschwitz.

  So early one morning he packed his suitcase, thanked the d’Astiers for their kindness, and walked out the door to catch a cab to the airport.

  – – –

  Ninety-six hours later, he was back in Žilina, not far from the Polish border, meeting with the leaders of the Resistance, having a Mauser rifle placed in his hands.

  He had escaped Auschwitz and told the world of its atrocities. But that was not enough for Jacob Weisz. The people he’d worked and suffered with in Auschwitz were still working and suffering there, if they still lived at all.

  He would fight his way back to them or perish in the fight.

  103

  And then it happened.

  As 1945 began, the Allied forces, under the leadership of General Eisenhower, won victory after victory over the Nazis and pushed deeper and deeper into enemy territory from the west. Meanwhile, the Soviet Red Army pressed Hitler from the east. Town after town, city after city, region after region was liberated. The Hitler war machine was on its heels, and the Allied noose was tightening.

  Then one day Jacob and his friends in the Resistance came back from a mission and huddled around an old wireless set and heard the stunning news. The date was January 27, 1945.

  “The Red Army has liberated the Nazis’ biggest concentration camp at Auschwitz in southwestern Poland,” the announcer said. “According to reports, hundreds of thousands of Polish people, as well as Jews from a number of other European countries, have been held prisoner there in appalling conditions, and many have been killed in the gas chambers. Few details have emerged of the capture of Auschwitz, which has gained a reputation as the most notorious of the Nazi death camps. Some reports say the German guards were given orders several days ago to destroy the crematoriums and gas chambers. Tens of thousands of prisoners—those who were able to walk—have been moved out of the prison and forced to march to other camps in Germany.”

  Jacob could not believe what he was hearing. This was the day he had longed for, fought for, and now it had come. It seemed unreal.

  “Details of what went on at the camp have been released previously by the Polish government in exile in London and from prisoners who have escaped,” the announcer continued. “Since its establishment in 1940, only a handful of prisoners have escaped to tell of the full horror of the camp. . . . When the Red Army arrived at the camp, they found only a few thousand prisoners remaining. They had been too sick to leave.”

  Jacob wanted to be elated. But he was horrified. Only a few thousand prisoners had been found alive out of the sixty thousand who were normally held at Auschwitz? It couldn’t be. There had to be more.

  But as the details kept coming and the reality of what had happened began to sink in, Jacob wept as he had never wept before.

  He had no idea who, if any, of his friends had survived. But now he had a new mission: he would get to them. He would find them. Whatever it took.

  EPILOGUE

  JUNE 5, 2014

  AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU CONCENTRATION CAMP

  Four months after his ninety-third birthday, Jacob Weisz returned to Auschwitz.

  He had long ago vowed never to return. He had no desire to revisit the places or the memories they invoked. He had a quiet, peaceful life now. He had a little four-bedroom house on Long Island, and it was all paid for. It was in the country—plenty of green grass and farms and sunshine. Yet it was still close to the city and the heart of the Jewish community there. Why would he ever want to return to the place of his nightmares?

  Yet on the seventieth anniversary of his escape, he finally agreed to make the trip.

  Nearly all the friends he had made in the camp were gone now. Leszek Poczciwinski had long since died. So had Otto Steinberger and Abe Frenkel. Judah Fischer had passed just a few years earlier, and Milos Kopecký had died six months before.

  But Abby was still alive, and it was she who persuaded him to make the voyage, as hard as it was. She was, after all, his wife, and it was there, in Auschwitz, in the depths of hell, that they had met. And to his astonishment, she had been one of the 2,819 prisoners the Red Army had found still alive when they had liberated the camp in January 1945.

  As guests of the Polish government, Jacob and Abby flew first class, something they had never done before, on Lufthansa flight 7636, departing New York City at 6:25 in the evening. After a brief layover the following day in Frankfurt, they proceeded on to Kraków, touching down just before ten o’clock in the morning. There, before a bank of television cameras and a gaggle of journalists from around the world, the elderly couple were helped down from the plane, set carefully in wheelchairs, and greeted by the prime minister of Poland, flanked by thousands of people cheering them—many of them Jews, but also many Christians—all of them with tears streaming down their faces.

  Jacob had never seen anything like it. He squeezed Abby’s hand.

  This was her idea, not his. She had taken the calls from the Polish, Israeli, and American authorities asking them to come and offering to take care of all the arrangements. It was she who asked that their entire family be invited too—their six children and eighteen grandchildren and thirteen great-grandchildren. Abby had pored over the itineraries and the flight plans and all the logistics.

  “Welcome back, Mr. and Mrs. Weisz,” the Polish premier said as the cameras rolled and the world watched. “You are the heroes of the Polish people, and we welcome you here as two of our own.”

  Jacob was so overcome with emotion he could barely speak. “I never imagined,” he said, his voice quavering.

  “I suppose not,” said the premier, the son of a famed leader of the Resistance. “But I hope you will believe me when I tell you that this is not the place you both left. You are welcome here today. Indeed, you are living testimonies to God’
s grace and mercy. One of you escaped. One of you was liberated. Yet both of you endured and have lived full and fruitful and wonderful lives. You have your family here today to bear witness that, in the end, evil did not triumph. It tried, but it did not succeed. Evil was defeated because good people rose to the challenge and refused to surrender. We endeavor with you today to live up to your example, and today we honor you and the memory of all who were lost in this country and on this continent.”

  The assembled crowd erupted in thunderous applause.

  “Thank you, sir,” Abby replied. “Thank you very much.”

  Jacob, however, could not speak. His eyes were filled with tears, and his hands were trembling.

  Abby handed him a fresh handkerchief.

  He took it and stared into her eyes, red and moist as well. “I love you,” he whispered.

  “I love you too,” she whispered back.

  Pulling himself together, Jacob wiped his eyes and cleared his throat. Then he turned to the prime minister. “Sir, you are most kind. May I introduce to you my Abigail?”

  The premier, accompanied by his own wife, smiled warmly, and they both shook Abby’s hand.

  “I have wanted to meet you for quite some time, Mrs. Weisz,” the first lady of Poland said softly. “I have heard and read a great deal about you. It is such an honor to finally meet you in person.”

  “The honor is all mine,” Abby said graciously.

  “We have a present for you, Mrs. Weisz,” the prime minister said. “For both of you, really.” He then handed Abby a small package wrapped up in brown paper and string.

  Jacob’s heart raced as he watched his wife’s frail hands begin to unwrap it. Could it be? It wasn’t possible.

  But sure enough, when Abby got the paper off, there it was—the leather journal he had given her so long ago, filled with the poems he had written in Auschwitz.

  It was now Abby’s turn to be overcome with emotion. Tears streamed down her face as she opened the journal and touched its yellowed pages.

  The first lady explained how the journal had been found by archivists and brought to her attention while they were preparing for this trip.

  “It is beautiful,” Abby said through her tears, clasping the journal to her chest. “Thank you so very much. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you.”

  After a moment, Jacob spoke again.

  “Your Excellency, I would like to introduce you to one of my sons—our firstborn.”

  “It is an honor to meet you, sir,” the prime minister said, shaking hands with the distinguished, gray-haired sixty-eight-year-old gentleman at Jacob and Abby’s side.

  “Likewise, Your Excellency.”

  “What’s your name?” the premier asked when Jacob forgot to offer it.

  “It’s Luc, sir,” the son replied. “Jean-Luc Weisz. I want to thank you for all you’ve done to welcome my parents back to Poland and to bring all of us here as well. I didn’t think I’d ever come here. For years, my father forbade it. But here we are, and we’re all deeply grateful.”

  They exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes and had no small number of pictures taken. Then Jacob and Abby and their wheelchairs and their family were loaded onto buses and given a police escort on the hour-long drive to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.

  Abby chatted nervously with Luc and their other children on the sixty-five-kilometer journey. But Jacob said nothing. He just held Abby’s hand and squeezed it tightly. He was doing this for her and for their family, but there was nothing in him that wanted to be back in that place again, and the closer he got, the more he dreaded it.

  When they arrived, they were greeted by a larger delegation of Polish, Israeli, German, British, and American officials, including ambassadors from each of the countries, various Jewish scholars, prominent rabbis, pastors, priests, and journalists from across the globe. Jacob was, after all, the last living person ever to have successfully escaped from the world’s most notorious death camp, and his return on the seventieth anniversary of his flight to freedom was making headlines all over the world.

  Throughout the long day, Jacob endured the speeches and the photo opportunities. He accepted an award, though he had informed them before coming that he would not speak, and he did not. But Abby spoke, and she was quite eloquent, he thought. To the world he imagined she looked gray and wrinkled and frail. But to him she was still as beautiful as the day he had met her, and she always would be.

  Then, as a family, they toured the Auschwitz camp. They toured the barracks and the dining hall and the Canada command and the medical clinic where Abby had worked. They visited the home of Rudolf Hoess and saw the gallows where Max was hanged. At Abby’s insistence, there was no guide or foreign officials or any media for this portion of the day. This was just for them as a family, and wherever they went, Abby told them stories of what had happened there.

  Finally their children wheeled Jacob and Abby into the gas chamber. There they did not speak. They just sat quietly.

  Then they were wheeled next door to the crematorium, where the ovens were still visible. They did not speak there either. What was there to say?

  Eventually they toured the Birkenau camp as well. They saw the train tracks and even a cattle car that was still there. They visited some of the dilapidated barracks and the ruins of the large gas chambers and crematoriums, blown up by the Germans in the last weeks before liberation when they heard that the Soviets were rapidly approaching from the east. Most of what had once been there was gone. The bakery was gone, and so, of course, was the woodpile from which Jacob and Luc had made their escape. But the memories came flooding back, and Jacob continually fought back tears.

  It was June, and though it was warm, Jacob and Abby were both developing a nagging cough, and their son Jean-Luc was becoming concerned for their health. So as the sun began to set, they all decided they had seen enough. They met again briefly with the prime minister and the various officials. They said their thank-yous and their good-byes. Then they were bundled back up and put back on the buses to return to Kraków.

  On the bus ride, no one said a word. Certainly not Jacob. He just sipped a cup of hot tea Luc had given him and held Abby’s hand as he stared out at the beautiful countryside passing by.

  Soon Abby fell asleep. It had been a big day, and she had done nearly all of the talking. But as she slept so peacefully, Jacob kept finding himself staring at her. He still couldn’t believe his good fortune—how he had found her in a Red Cross refugee camp soon after her liberation, how he had sat at her bedside night and day for months, feeding her and reading to her and telling her the news of Hitler’s suicide and VE-day.

  But in the end, it had not been he who rescued her. It had been she who rescued him. For it was Abby, more than anyone else, who had helped Jacob Weisz survive the traumas of the Holocaust. And not just in the camp, but over the last seven decades of their life together. It was she who had helped him regain his faith in humanity and eventually his faith in God.

  Abigail Cohen Weisz loved to say she had never lost faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—not even in Auschwitz. To the contrary, she loved him more than ever. Indeed, she loved to remind her husband and their children that the Jews had suffered for thousands of years—under Pharaoh, under the Babylonians and the Persians and the Greeks and the Romans. That didn’t prove there was no God. Rather, she argued, the survival of the Jews throughout the ages—through all the attempts to exterminate them—proved there most certainly was—and is—a God, and not just any God but the God of Israel, who loved them, as the prophet Jeremiah once wrote, with an “everlasting love” and continued to draw his people to him with everlasting kindness.

  It was she who reminded Jacob of the many ways God had rescued them. It was she who reminded him of Max and Josef and Jean-Luc Leclerc, all of whom had in one way or another given their lives that they might live. Not every survivor shared her sense of optimism and hope for the future. Jacob certainly hadn’t. But by her simple fai
th and constant love, she wooed him.

  It had taken Jacob quite some time, but after the birth of their first son, Luc, he had begun to reconsider his skepticism. Over the decades, he had read from the book of Psalms Abby had given him. Every morning when he woke up and every night before he went to sleep, he had searched the Psalms and the prophets and the rest of the Scriptures long and hard. From time to time, he would even pick up the Bible Abby had given to Luc. And eventually he had come to believe that Abby was right. God was not only real but had, in fact, shown himself to Jacob in countless ways, large and small, in the camp and beyond.

  In fact, the more Jacob had read the Scriptures, the more his hunger for God’s Word had grown. And the more Jacob realized that the Lord had rescued him—and rescued him for a purpose—the more he realized that Abby’s great faith had become his own.

  The God of the Bible was no longer simply the God of Abraham and Isaac.

  Now he was the God of Jacob as well.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In many ways, this is the most difficult book I’ve ever written. It is the first work of historical fiction I have ever attempted, and it has been a deeply personal project.

  To write about the events of the Holocaust is to step onto sacred ground. To create a work of fiction in hopes of helping people understand the truth of what really happened—and to try to inspire people to begin their own journey to learn the facts, the truth, the testimonies of those who were there—is a sensitive endeavor. Of this I am keenly aware.

  So far as I know, none of my relatives were murdered at Auschwitz or in the other Nazi death camps. As the descendant of Orthodox Jews who escaped the pogroms of czarist Russia in the early years of the twentieth century, I realize that I have been very fortunate. By God’s grace, my paternal grandparents and great-grandparents, after fleeing Russia, did not settle in Poland or Germany or Austria. Instead, they made it to America, where they found safety and freedom several decades before Adolf Hitler rose to power. Other relatives of mine, including those on my Gentile mother’s side of the family, are originally from Germany. But they, too, immigrated to America before the events of World War II unfolded. Had they stayed in Europe, their story likely would have turned out very differently. Indeed, often I have wondered what would have happened to our family if they had made different choices.