‘Will it be me?’ wondered Henryk Mandelbrot with soil in his mouth. One, then two, then a shot. The footsteps grew louder and then so did the shots. One, then two, then a shot. Another man was dead. One, then two, then a shot. Another witness was silenced.
Chaim Neuhof was killed along with Dorebus, Panusz and Handelsmann. Kalniak, one of the Sonderkommando Kapos who had been responsible for making the list of names, had also been killed. Kalniak, though not himself on the list, had helped secrete the explosives in Crematorium IV the night before. He had known what was going to happen and that he would die.
Crematorium IV, its gas chamber and its ovens, had been so severely damaged it was never used again. When finally the shooting stopped, Henryk Mandelbrot was allowed to stand up. Before the uprising there had been 663 Sonderkommando men.
Afterwards there were 212. When Henryk Mandelbrot took his face out of the dirt and stood up he saw the two Zalmans, Lewental and Gradowski. They were both dead.
*
‘Don’t I need to know the end of the story?’ Lamont Williams asked the old man in Manhattan’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
‘You are here for the end of the story.’
Lamont smiled but gently persisted. ‘What did you do when the fighting started?’
‘There was chaos in the yard. Prisoners –’
‘Sonderkommando men?’
‘Yes, Sonderkommando men were running in every direction as the SS fired at them. The ones what ran to the fence where the wire was cut –’
‘The ones who ran to the barn at Rajsko?’
‘Yes. When they ran and the SS chased them I saw there was a chance to do something but I didn’t know what. There were men, men what I knew being shot and dying, their bodies hitting the ground all around me.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘You will think this is crazy, and it was, but it was what saved my life. I ran towards Crematorium IV and –’
‘But that was the one that was on fire.’
‘Yes, exactly, it was. But I thought that if I could get there without being shot, it might be the safest place.’
‘But what about the fire?’
‘At that time there were bullets flying everywhere and I was more afraid of the SS bullets than of the fire. They were shooting at me and twice I hit the ground and just lay there so they would think I was dead. Once I had hit the ground they stopped shooting at me. I waited a little bit and then I got up and ran. I did this twice and I made it to Crematorium IV.’
‘But why did you want to go there? It was on fire.’
‘Because it looked like they were going to shoot everybody they could see. Who knew what they would do even though they still needed Sonderkommando men and they knew it? They were so angry, so enraged, maybe even frightened, that they were just going to kill anyone they saw, so I had to try to not be seen. I had to hide. That was my instinct, to hide. Where should I hide? Where were they least likely to look? Crematorium IV.’
‘Because it was on fire?’
‘Yes, because it was on fire.’
‘But how did you know you could survive the fire?’
‘I didn’t know anything, Mr Lamont. I could try now to pretend to be a hero. I was not a hero. There were plenty of heroes. I was not one of them. The heroes died. Look, when a building is on fire sometimes not all of it is on fire.’
‘But how did you know that you’d even make it through the door?’
‘I didn’t know anything. All around you is shooting and you are in a panic and afraid. Where is the least shooting? Near where the building is on fire.’
‘So you got to the door?’
‘Yes, I got to the door. I had run and I was completely out of breath. The doorway was on fire but if I got through it … no more bullets. So I jumped through the flames and I got in. We knew the building better than most of the guards and I knew there was a place inside what the bullets couldn’t reach and that was what I was looking for.’
‘If it wasn’t on fire.’
‘Exactly, yes, if it wasn’t on fire.’
‘Where was it?’
‘It was the flue. You understand? The flue, it was cast iron. It led from the ovens to the chimney.’
‘That’s where you went?’
‘Yes, I hid there … while others fought and some tried to escape.’
‘But how did you know the building wouldn’t collapse on top of you and kill you?’
‘I didn’t know. I took a chance. Look, Mr Lamont, there was no logic to the place but death. We were all meant to die. The men who escaped from the camp and ran to Rajsko, they all died, all of them killed, and they were the heroes. The coward who ran into a burning building and hid, he lived until now.’
‘And the two Zalmans, Gradowski and Lewental?’
‘I told you.’
‘Yeah, but you said you hid, so how did you – ?’
‘I crept out of there. When the shooting had stopped I crept out.’
‘The shooting had stopped?’
‘Yes, because they were lining up everyone what had not yet been killed and they made them all lie face-down on the ground.’
‘You too?’
‘Yes, of course. I chose the wrong time to get out of the building but then maybe the fire would have got me, or the falling shingles, if I had stayed. They lined all of us up face-down in the dirt and they shot every third one. When I got up Gradowski and Lewental … I saw them on the ground. I survived but they didn’t.’
This was the last time Lamont Williams would learn about the Sonderkommando from Mr Mandelbrot. Lamont hadn’t known it but Mr Mandelbrot, it seemed, had. It was at the end of this visit that Mr Mandelbrot smiled as he saw Lamont take the silver menorah. That night when Lamont’s grandmother saw it in their Co-op City apartment and asked him about it, Lamont told her a little of the story of the Sonderkommando uprising.
‘If he’d followed the others out through the hole in the fence to Rajsko they would have shot him.’
‘So he only survived by running into a burning building?’
‘That’s about right. He hid in the cast-iron flue in Crematorium IV.’
‘What a story!’ Lamont’s grandmother said, getting up to clear the kitchen table. That night before going to bed she picked up the silver menorah and examined it.
‘He must have really liked you … give you this. What do you think it’s worth?’
Lamont didn’t hear her and when she leaned in to kiss him goodnight she didn’t repeat it.
‘I’ll try to come see you tomorrow,’ Lamont had said to Mr Mandelbrot that night as he left him.
‘Yes? Good,’ the old man said. That was the last thing he ever said to Lamont. Lamont wasn’t able to get back to him the very next night or the night after that. Three nights after their last conversation he was startled to see another patient when he walked into what had been the old man’s room. Lamont realised what had happened but he found himself unprepared for it, and for all that it was really no surprise, still, he had to hear the end of the story from someone who really knew. The next day when he chanced upon the old man’s treating oncologist in the hallway, he took the unusual step of approaching her.
‘Excuse me, Dr Washington,’ he said nervously. ‘That patient, Mr Mandelbrot, was he moved to another – ?’
‘He died,’ she said, looking at her watch, and kept walking. Lamont Williams stood alone in the hallway for a moment with his mop in his hand and a bucket of grey soapy water at his feet and thought of the old man. Who else knew his story? Who else knew all of it? Anyone? The man from Building Services had to finish mopping the floor.
*
Adam still had not discovered anything that remotely connected black troops to the liberation of Dachau and, for all the intrinsic value of his discovery of Henry Border’s transcripts and 1946 wire recordings of DPs, he felt himself getting pulled away from the topic that had initially led him to them. But he did find something in one tr
anscript that offered him at least a glimmer of hope with respect to the role of African American troops in the liberation of another concentration camp. Border had interviewed a DP, a Holocaust survivor, named Taussig. It seemed that Mr Taussig had for a time been a prisoner at one of the satellite camps of a concentration camp named Natzweiler-Struthof. In the course of describing his liberation he mentioned to Border that among the first Allied troops he saw were black soldiers. Mr Taussig told Border that when he saw these armed black men, black soldiers, he knew that these had to be the Americans. There could be no doubt as to who these men were and he knew he was finally free.
Discovering this immediately sent Adam off to find out what he could about Natzweiler-Struthoff. He quickly learned that Natzweiler-Struthof was situated near Strasbourg just west of the Rhine. It was the only concentration camp the Germans ever established in France. The main Natzweiler-Struthof camp was abandoned some months before the Allied armies got to it but many of its satellite camps on the east side of the Rhine, some very close to it, were used by the Germans till only weeks before they surrendered. Adam discovered that in the last months of the war these satellite camps contained prisoners transported from camps in the east, which included Auschwitz, that were in the path of the advancing Red Army, and prisoners from Dachau and other camps in order to relieve the pressure on those camps too.
The abandoned Natzweiler-Struthof main camp was first entered by units of the French 1st Army which, together with the US 7th Army, constituted the combined Allied 6th Army Group commanded by the American Lieutenant General Jacob Devers. Adam was soon able to ascertain that the 6th Army Group reached the western bank of the Rhine around 24 November 1944. The 6th Army Group was the first Allied army to reach the Rhine and it was Devers’ plan to cross it and advance north along the Rhine valley.
There were two aspects of this that particularly piqued Adam’s interest. First, one of the divisions of the US 7th Army was the 79th Division and one of the battalions in that division was the African American 761st Tank Battalion. Adam had already come across reports, albeit not reports officially verified by the US military, to the effect that the 761st Tank Battalion had been involved in the liberation of a concentration camp. Second, in determining the viability of an assault across the Rhine in the Strasbourg region, Devers, Adam found, had sent scouting parties across the river to probe the German defences there. They reported back that the defences were quite surprisingly weak.
What excited Adam about all this was the possibility that members of the 761st were in the probing parties that crossed the Rhine in late November and that they were involved in skirmishes in the vicinity of a Natzweiler-Struthof satellite camp not far from the river. If he were able to confirm this then he would have established that black troops were among the first Allied troops on the Western Front to have encountered, or even perhaps to have entered, a functioning Nazi concentration camp, a very signal accomplishment.
Whatever the improbability of this speculation, Adam was for a time obsessed with looking into it further to see whether there could be anything to it.
What records might there be of the combat experiences of the 761st, official or otherwise? Who were the men of the 761st? There had been six white officers, thirty black officers, and 676 black enlisted men. Activated in 1942 in Louisiana, the 761st Tank Battalion had received intensive training in Texas. To his delight he found that they had landed at Omaha Beach, Normandy, on 10 October 1944. They would have been in Europe at the relevant time with more than a month to get to Natzweiler-Struthof. From a group of over 700 men surely someone had recorded his war experiences? Were there written accounts that had not been uncovered, that were known only to family members? Perhaps there were veterans of the battalion Adam could interview. There was so much to discover. Adam finally had something positive to offer his friend, William McCray.
*
The orders came all the way from Berlin. The war had turned increasingly against the Nazis with the American, British and Free French armies reaching the Rhine in the west and the Russians entering Poland in the east but still they had to know. The Reich looked about to collapse but still they had to know. Find out how they did it. How did these half-dead Jews, isolated prisoners in a death camp, get hold of weapons? How did they get hold of gunpowder? A delegation was sent from Berlin to Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was inconceivable to the SS that the gunpowder could have come from the women of the Weichsel Union Metallwerke factory. Just as they didn’t consider and then dismiss the possibility that Churchill, Stalin or perhaps Roosevelt had personally delivered gunpowder to the men of the Sonderkommando, neither did they bother to consider that it could have come from these starved young Jewish women. Then during an examination of the destroyed building that had housed the gas chamber and ovens of Crematorium IV a little tin was found. It was round and metal and had once contained shoe polish. Now it contained braided strands of cotton, a wick of some kind and gunpowder. It was a homemade grenade that the Sonderkommando never got to use and the gunpowder it contained was recognised as that coming from the Weichsel Union Metallwerke factory.
It was around this time that a woman, a prisoner who had once been housed in the same block as Estusia and Hannah Weiss, was caught with a whole loaf of bread. Beaten but unwilling to betray the origins of the bread, she offered other information that might be of value, information about the prisoner Estusia Weiss who used to receive visits from the prisoner Rosa Rabinowicz of the Kanada Kommando. The smuggling of the bread was forgotten about.
Block 11, the camp’s ‘prison within a prison’, was in Auschwitz I, the part of Auschwitz-Birkenau with the gate adorned by ‘Arbeit macht frei’. The Kapo of Block 11 was a Jew, an unusually tall and strong man known by many more prisoners than had ever seen him as Kapo Jakub. It was on the basis of his strength and size that the SS had chosen him to be the Kapo of Block 11. Some said he was simple; others made allegations of cruelty about Jakub. Still others who had got out of Block 11 swore that only his timely acts of kindness had saved them. When prisoners locked in the cells of Block 11 heard Jakub approaching their cell they recognised that it was him by his walk and if, from the sound of the footsteps, they believed he was alone, they would call out to him from the dark of the punishment cells.
‘Help me, Kapo Jakub. Please help me.’
The call of the prisoners would follow the sound of his footsteps down the blackened concrete corridor. ‘Help me, Kapo Jakub. Please help me.’
The year 1944 was coming to an end when Estusia Weiss and her friend Ala, two of the Pulverraum workers from the Weichsel Union Metallwerke factory were taken to Block 11 for interrogation. Their foreman, Regina, was taken there too, and soon after so was Rosa Rabinowicz. All four of them were beaten viciously, repeatedly. News of their incarceration in Block 11 reached Noah Lewental and others of the resistance movement. So certain were they that under interrogation they would be betrayed that many of them considered suicide.
Rosa Rabinowicz, her face, torso and legs lacerated and bleeding, lay on her back alone in her cell fresh from a beating. Struggling to breathe through broken ribs, she heard the prisoners in the distance announce the movement along the corridor of Kapo Jakub.
‘Help me, Kapo Jakub. Please help me,’ she heard them call. Without getting up or even trying to get up, she crawled along the floor to the cell door and waited for his step to come closer to her door. Then she started to call out, ‘Help me, Kapo Jakub. Please help me.’
Jakub could not go past the cells alone without hearing this cry from inside the cell of every prisoner. ‘Help me, Kapo Jakub. Please help me.’ Even prisoners who had never been helped by him at all, who had never spoken to him and who had no reason to expect that he should suddenly risk his life to help them, even these prisoners called out to him from their cells, almost as though in prayer. They called out to him as though to fail to call when he went past would be to limit one’s chance of survival. Those who didn’t call out to him were no longer
conscious.
Jakub heard the cries as he made his way along the basement corridor of Block 11 and when he got to the door of Rosa Rabinowicz he heard the broken woman’s feeble cry and he stopped. Far from the loudest cry for his attention, he could have been forgiven for not hearing it, but he was walking slightly more slowly as he approached this particular cell. He knew exactly who it was that lay bleeding there. He had brought bread and water to this cell when its inmate had been unconscious. Jakub knew that this cell contained the woman Rosa, the woman who had smuggled gunpowder to the Sonderkommando, gunpowder used in the uprising, the only uprising in the history of the camp. Whatever privilege his position brought him he would try to share with this woman, Rosa Rabinowicz.
When she stopped hearing his steps she wondered if he was still there. Then she heard the keys in the door of her cell and within seconds there stood towering above her the hulking frame of Kapo Jakub. The man took a step over her and into the tiny cell. He crouched down and brought to her the bowl of water in the cell. Cradling her head in his lap, he told her that when he counted to three she should swallow and she did. He placed her head gently back on the ground and, still on his knees, he reached over to the bread he had left for her earlier and broke off a piece to feed her but she was unable to take it in her mouth. Her mouth, swollen and bloodied, could not accept anything solid. The blood from her mouth, fresh from her latest beating, dripped onto his leg. He took some of the bread, softened it in the water and began to feed her.
‘Look at you,’ he said quietly to himself, not expecting any response. But the broken woman with her head in his lap spoke to him between intakes of breath.
‘Bring me Noah, Noah Lewental. Bring me Noah, Jakub, will you?’
‘Who is he?’
‘He’s an electrician … from Ciechanow. Ask around … someone will know him … They will know him,’ she whispered. ‘Can you get him here before I die?’