Carrion Comfort

  “Eggs and bacon and toast all right?” she asked. The air smelled of fresh-roasted coffee.

  “It sounds wonderful,” said Saul, “except I’ll pass on the bacon.” Natalie made a fist and pretended to bop herself on the head. “Of course,” she said. “Religious reasons?”

  “Cholesterol reasons,” said Saul.

  They talked about trivial things over breakfast— what it was like to live in New York, to go to school in St. Louis, to have grown up in the South.

  “It’s hard to explain,” said Natalie, “but somehow it’s easier being black here than in a northern city. The racism still exists here, but it’s . . . I’m not sure how to explain it . . . it’s changing. Maybe the fact that people here have dealt with the roles for so long and have to change them lets everyone be a little more honest. Up north, things seem raw and mean.”

  “I don’t think of St. Louis as a northern city,” said Saul with a smile. He finished the last of his toast and sipped his coffee.

  Natalie laughed. “No, and it’s not a southern city either,” she said. “I guess it’s just a Midwestern city. I was thinking more of Chicago.”

  “You’ve lived in Chicago?”

  “Spent time there in the summer,” said Natalie. “Dad arranged a photography job for me with an old friend on the Tribune.” She paused and fell silent, staring at her coffee cup.

  Saul said quietly, “It’s hard, isn’t it? One forgets for a while and then mentions the person’s name without thinking and it all comes back . . .”

  Natalie nodded.

  Saul looked out the kitchen window at the fronds of a palmetto. The window was open a bit and a warm breeze came through the screen. He could barely believe that it was the middle of December.

  “You’re training to be a teacher,” Saul said, “but your first love seems to be photography.”

  Natalie nodded again and rose to refill both of their coffee cups. “It was an agreement Dad and I had,” she said and this time she smiled. “He’d continue helping me with the photography if I agreed to be trained in what he called ‘honest work.’ ”

  “Will you teach?”

  “Perhaps,” said Natalie.

  She smiled at him again and Saul noticed how perfect her teeth were. The smile was both warm and shy, a benediction.

  Saul helped her wash and dry the few breakfast dishes and they poured fresh cups of coffee and went out onto the small front porch. There was little traffic and the sound of children’s laughter was gone. Saul realized that it was a Wednesday; the children would be in school now. They sat on white wicker chairs, facing each other, Natalie with a light sweater over her shoulders and Saul comfortable in the wrinkled corduroy sports coat he had worn the day before.

  “You promised the second part of the story,” Natalie said quietly.

  Saul nodded. “You did not find the first part too fantastic?” he asked. “The ravings of a lunatic?”

  “You’re a psychiatrist,” said Natalie. “You can’t be crazy.”

  Saul laughed loudly. “Ah, there are stories I could tell . . .”

  Natalie smiled. “Yes, but first the second part of this story.”

  Saul fell silent and looked at the black circle of coffee. “You had escaped from the Oberst,” prompted Natalie.

  Saul closed his eyes for a minute, opened them, and cleared his throat. When he spoke there was little emotion in his voice— at most a faint hint of sadness.

  Natalie closed her own eyes after several minutes as if to picture the scenes that Saul was describing in his soft, strangely pleasant, slightly sad voice.

  “There could be no real escape for a Jew in Poland that winter of 1942. For weeks I wandered through the forest to the north and west of Lodz. My foot eventually quit bleeding, but infection seemed inevitable. I swathed it with moss, ban daged it with rags, and staggered on. The long slashes on my side and right thigh throbbed for days but soon were covered with scabs. I stole food from farm houses, kept away from roads, and avoided the few bands of Polish partisans operating in those forests. The partisans would have shot a Jew as quickly as the Germans would have.

  “I do not know how I survived that winter. I remember two farm families— Christians—who allowed me to hide in the straw heaps in their barns and who brought me food when they had almost none themselves.

  “In the spring I went south, attempting to reach Uncle Moshe’s farm near Cracow. I had no papers, but I was able to join up with a group of workers who were returning from building defenses for the Germans in the east. By the spring of 1943, there was no doubt that the Red Army would soon be on Polish soil.

  “I was eight kilometers from Uncle Moshe’s farm when one of the workers turned me in. I was arrested by the Polish Blue Police who interrogated me for three days, although I do not think they wanted answers, only an excuse for the beatings. Then they turned me over to the Germans.

  “The Gestapo was not interested in me, thinking, perhaps, that I was just one of the many Jews who had run from the cities or escaped from a transport. The German net for Jews had many holes in it. As in so many of the occupied countries, only the willing cooperation of the Poles themselves made it next to impossible for Jews to escape their fate in the camps.

  “For some reason I was shipped east. I was not sent to Auschwitz or Chelmno or Belzec or Treblinka, all of which would have been closer, but was sent across the width of Poland. After four days in a sealed boxcar— four days in which a third of the people in the car perished— the doors were slammed back and we staggered out, blinking tears against the unaccustomed light, to find ourselves at Sobibor.

  “It was at Sobibor that I again saw the Oberst. “Sobibor was a death camp. There were no factories there as in Auschwitz or Belsen, no attempt at deception as at Theresenstadt or Chelmno, no ironic slogan of Arbeit Macht Frei over the gates as at so many of the Nazi portals to hell. In 1942 and 1943, the Germans were maintaining sixteen huge concentration camps such as Auschwitz, more than fifty smaller ones, hundreds of work camps, but only three Vernichtungslager death camps designed only for extermination: Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor. In the brief twenty months of their existence, over two million Jews died there.

  “Sobibor was a small camp— smaller than Chelmno— and it was situated on the River Bug. This river had been the eastern border of Poland before the war and in the summer of 1943 the Red Army was pushing the Wehrmacht back to it once again. To the west of Sobibor was the wilderness of the Parczew Forest, the Forest of the Owls.

  “The entire complex at Sobibor could fit into three or four American football fields. But it was very efficient at its task, which was simply to expedite Himmler’s Final Solution.

  “I fully expected to die there. We disembarked from the transports and were herded behind a tall hedge down a corridor of wire. They had put thatch in the wire so we could see nothing except one tall guard tower, the tops of trees, and two brick smokestacks directly ahead. There were three signs to the depot pointing the way: CANTEEN → SHOWERS → ROAD TO HEAVEN →. Someone at Sobibor had expressed the SS sense of humor. We were sent to the showers.

  “Jews from the French and Dutch transports walked docilely enough that day, but I remember that the Polish Jews had to be driven on with rifle butts and curses. An old man near me shouted obscenities at every German and shook his fist at the SS men who made us disrobe.

  “I cannot tell you exactly what I felt when I entered the shower room. I felt no anger and very little fear. Perhaps the dominant feeling was one of relief. For almost four years I had been driven by a single imperative—I will live— and to satisfy that imperative I had watched while my countrymen, my fellow Jews, and my family had been fed into the maw of this obscene German slaughter machine. I had watched. In some ways, I had helped. Now I could rest. I had done the best I could to survive and now it was over. My single regret was that I had not been allowed to kill the Oberst rather than the Old Man. At that moment the Oberst had come to represent everything evil w
hich had brought me to this place. It was the Oberst’s face which I had in my mind as they closed the heavy doors to that shower room in June of 1943.

  “We were packed in tightly. Men shoved and shouted and moaned. For a minute nothing happened and then the pipes vibrated and rattled. The showers came on and men pushed away from them. I did not. I was standing directly under a showerhead and I raised my face to it. I thought of my family. I wished I had said goodbye to my mother and sisters. It was at that second that the hatred finally came. I concentrated on the Oberst’s face as the anger burned in me like an open flame and men cried out and the pipes shook and rattled and spit their contents out at us.

  “It was water. Water. The showers— those same showers that claimed so many thousands each day— were also used as showers for a few groups a month. The room was unsealed. We were led outside and deloused. Our heads were shaved. I was given prisoner coveralls. A number was tatooed on my arm. I do not remember any pain.

  “At Sobibor, where they were so efficient at processing so many thousands a day, they chose a few prisoners each month to retain for camp maintenance and other work. Our transport had been chosen.

  “It was at this moment— still numb, still not believing that I had emerged again into the painful light— that I realized that I had been chosen to fulfill some task. I still refused to believe in God . . . any God who betrayed His People so did not deserve my belief . . . but from that moment on I believed that there was a reason for my continued existence. That reason could be expressed by the single image of the Oberst’s face which I had been prepared to die with. The immensity of the evil which had swallowed my people was too great for anyone— let alone a seventeen-year-old boy— to understand. But the obscenity of the Oberst’s existence was well within my comprehension. I would live. I would live even though I no longer responded to any such imperative toward survival. I would live to fulfill what ever destiny awaited me. I would suffer myself to live and to endure anything in order to one day erase that obscenity.

  “For the next three months I lived in Camp I at Sobibor. Camp II was a way station and no one returned from Camp III. I ate what they gave me, slept when they allowed me to, defecated when they ordered me to do so, and carried out my duties as a Bahnhofkommando. I wore a blue cap and blue coveralls with a yellow BK emblazoned on them. Several times a day we met the incoming transports. To this day, on nights I cannot sleep, I see the places of origin scrawled in railroad chalk on those sealed cars: Turobin, Gorzkow, Wlodawa, Siedlce, Izbica, Markugzow, Kamorow, Zamosc. We would take the luggage of the dazed Jews and give them baggage checks. Because of the resistance of the Polish Jews— it slowed down the processing— it again became the custom to tell the survivors of the transports that Sobibor was a layover, a rest station before the trip to relocation centers. For a while there were even signs at the depot giving the distances in kilometers to these mythical centers. The Polish Jews rarely believed this, but in the end they shuffled off to the showers with the others. And the trains continued to arrive: Baranow, Ryki, Dubienka, BialaPolaska, Uchanie, Demblin, Rejowiec. At least once a day we distributed postcards to those on transports from selected ghettos. The messages were pre-written—WE HAVE ARRIVED AT THE RELOCATION CENTERS. THE FARMWORK HERE IS HARD BUT THE SUNLIGHT IS PLEASANT AND THERE IS MUCH GOOD FOOD. WE LOOK FORWARD TO SEEING YOU SOON. The Jews would address and sign these before they were led off to be gassed. Toward the end of the summer, as the ghettos were emptying, this ruse was no longer needed. Konskowola, Jozefow, Michow, Grabowic, Lublin, Lodz. Some transports arrived with no living cargo. Then we Bahnhofkommando put aside our baggage check forms and wrestled the naked corpses from the stinking interiors. It was like the gas vans at Chelmno only here the bodies had been locked in their death embrace for days or weeks as the cars sat baking in the summer heat on some rural siding. Once, while tugging at a young woman’s corpse which was locked in a final embrace with a child and older woman, I pulled and her arm came off in my hands.

  “I cursed God and envisioned the pale, sneering face of the Oberst. I would live.

  “In July, Heinrich Himmler visited Sobibor. There were special transports of Western Jews that day so he could see the processing. It took less than two hours from the arrival of the train to the last bit of smoke rising from the six ovens. During that time, every worldly belonging of the Jews was confiscated, sorted, itemized, and stored. Even the women’s hair was cut in Camp II and made into felt or woven into slipper linings for U-boat crews.

  “I was sorting through luggage at the arrival area when the Kommandant’s party led Himmler and his entourage through. I remember little of Himmler— he was a little man with a bureaucrat’s mustache and glasses— but behind him walked a young blond officer whom I noticed immediately. It was the Oberst. Twice the Oberst bent to speak softly in Himmler’s ear and once the SS Reichsführer threw back his head in a curiously feminine laugh.

  “They walked within five meters of me. Bent over my task, I glanced up once to see the Oberst looking directly at me. I do not think he recognized me. It had been only eight months since Chelmno and the estate, but to the Oberst I must have been just another Jew prisoner sorting through the luggage of the dead. I hesitated then. It was my chance and I hesitated and all was lost. I believe I could have reached the Oberst then. I could have had my hands on his throat before the shots rang out. I might even have been able to seize a pistol from one of the officers near Himmler and fire before the Oberst knew there was a threat.

  “I have wondered since if something besides surprise and indecision stayed my hand. Certainly I knew no fear at that time. My fear had died with other parts of my spirit weeks before in the sealed shower room. What ever the reason, I hesitated for several seconds, perhaps a minute, and the time was lost forever. Himmler’s party moved on and passed through gates to the Kommandant’s Headquarters, an area known as the Merry Flea. As I stared at the gate where they disappeared, Sergeant Wagner began screaming at me to get to work or go to the ‘hospital.’ No one ever returned from the hospital. I bowed my head and went back to work.

  “I watched all the rest of that day, lay awake that night, and waited for a glimpse all the next day, but I did not see the Oberst again. Himmler’s group had left during the night.

  “On fourteen October, the Jews of Sobibor revolted. I had heard rumors of an uprising, but they had seemed so farfetched that I had taken no interest in them. In the end, their carefully orchestrated plans came down to the murder of a few guards and a mad rush by a thousand or so Jews for the main gate. Most were cut down by machine gun fire in the first minute. Others made it through the wire at the back of the compound during the confusion. My work detail was returning from the depot when the madness erupted. The corporal guarding us was clubbed down by the vanguard of the mob and I had no choice but to run with the others. I was sure that my blue coveralls would draw the fire of the Ukrainians in the tower. But I made the cover of the trees just as two women running with me were cut down by rifle fire. Once there, I changed into the prison-gray tunic of an old man who had reached the safety of the forest only to be struck down by a stray bullet.

  “I believe that about two hundred of us made it away from the camp that day. We were alone or in small groups, leaderless for the most part. The group who had planned the escape made no provision for surviving once they were free. Most of the Jews and Russian prisoners were subsequently hunted down by the Germans or discovered and killed by Polish partisans. Many sought shelter at nearby farms and were quickly turned in. A few survived in the forest and a few more made their way across the Bug River to the advancing Red Army. I was lucky. On my third day in the forest I was discovered by members of a Jewish partisan group called Chil. They were under the command of a brave and utterly fearless man named Yechiel Greenshpan who accepted me into the band and ordered their surgeon to bring me back to weight and health. For the first time since the previous winter, my foot was properly treated. For five months I traveled with Chil
in the Forest of the Owls. I was an aide to the surgeon, Dr. Yaczyk, saving lives when possible, even the lives of Germans when I could.

  “The Nazis closed down the camp at Sobibor shortly after the escape. They destroyed the barracks, removed the ovens, and planted potatoes in the fields where the Pits had held the thousands not cremated. By the time the partisan band celebrated Hanukkah, most of Poland was in chaos as the Wehrmacht retreated west and south. In March, the Red Army liberated the area in which we were operating and the war was over for me.

  “For several months I was detained and interrogated by the Soviets. Some members of Chil were sent to Russian camps, but I was released in May and returned to Lodz. There was nothing there for me. The Jewish ghetto had been more than decimated; it had been eliminated. Our old home on the west side of town had been destroyed in the fighting.

  “In August of 1945 I traveled to Cracow and then cycled to Uncle Moshe’s farm. Another family— a Christian family— occupied it. They had bought it from civil authorities during the war. They said they knew nothing of the whereabouts of the previous owners.

  “It was during that same trip that I returned to Chelmno. The Soviets had declared the area off-limits and I was not allowed near the camp. For five days I camped nearby and cycled down every dirt road and path. Eventually I found the remains of the Great Hall. It had been destroyed, either by shelling or by the retreating Germans, and little was left except for tumbled stones, burnt timbers, and the scorched monolith of the central chimney. There was no sign of the tiled floor of the Main Hall.

  “In the clearing where the shallow death pit had been, there were signs of recent excavations. The butts of numerous Russian cigarettes littered the area. When I asked at the local inn, the villagers insisted that they knew nothing of mass graves being exhumed. They also insisted— angrily this time— that no one in the area had suspected Chelmno of being anything but what the Germans had said it was: a temporary detention camp for criminals and po liti cal prisoners. I was tired of camping and would have stayed the night at the inn before cycling south again, but it was not to be. They did not allow Jews at the inn. The next day I took the train to Cracow to find work.