Читать книгу The Ritchie Boys: The Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned to Fight Hitler - Bruce Henderson - Страница 8

Loud banging at the front door jolted Martin Selling out of a sound sleep. It was shortly before sunrise, November 10, 1938.

Martin lived in Lehrberg, in southeast Germany; he and his relatives were the only Jews living among the thousand other residents of this tranquil agricultural village. Over the course of the previous day, the Nazis had carried out a series of brutal, coordinated attacks against Jews across Germany. But Martin wasn’t aware of that yet.

This widespread campaign of malevolence would forever become known as Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” so called because of the mounds of glass shards from broken windows that littered the streets after thousands of synagogues and Jewish-owned homes, businesses, and hospitals were looted and destroyed. The violence began after a teenage boy in Paris fatally shot a German embassy official—an act of retaliation, as his parents had been expelled from Germany, along with thousands of other Polish Jewish immigrants. Using the shooting in Paris as a pretext for a long-planned roundup of Jews, Nazi storm troopers took to the streets on the night of November 9.

Twenty-year-old Martin had recently returned to Lehrberg, his childhood home, from Munich, where he had been working as a tailor. Munich was the city in which Hitler rose to power and the national headquarters of the Nazi Party. Martin had seen Hitler numerous times; when his motorcade sped through the streets, everyone on the sidewalks was expected to stand at attention and snap a stiff right arm in a “Heil Hitler” salute. If Martin heard the Führer’s motorcade approaching, or even saw groups of marchers waving Nazi flags, he tried to be as inconspicuous as possible, slipping away or ducking into a side alley.

Earlier that year, Hitler had become aware that his motorcade regularly passed a large synagogue on its way to party headquarters. On the Führer’s orders, the congregation was given less than a day to remove its books and valuables; a few days later, the site was a newly paved parking lot. Martin’s boss, an older Jew, had finally seen enough. He fled to Italy, leaving Martin jobless and with no choice but to return home to Lehrberg.

The pounding on the front door did not stop but became louder and more menacing. By the time Martin reached the door it was in danger of being kicked in. He opened it to four storm troopers of the Sturmabteilung (SA), in matching brown shirts with red and black swastika armbands, who pushed him aside and rushed in, though at six foot two Martin towered over them.

Without giving a reason, the SA men searched the house—helping themselves to an expensive camera—then took Martin into custody along with his uncle, Julius Laub, who had been managing the family’s textile store next door since his sister, Ida—Martin’s widowed mother—passed away two years before. She had run the store following the death of Martin’s father from a heart attack fifteen years earlier. The SA men also arrested the housekeeper, the only other resident in the house. At the same time, other SA men were picking up Martin’s aunt Gitta and her three children, who lived nearby.

They were all driven five miles to an outdoor sports arena in the town of Ansbach, where they joined sixty other Jewish men, women, and children. The terrified group huddled in the bleachers for the rest of the icy night, shivering from fear and the chill of the blustery winds. Conversing softly with the others, Martin learned that the synagogue in Ansbach had been set ablaze, local Jewish homes vandalized, and Jewish men beaten. When Martin and some others asked the SA men what was going to happen next, they didn’t seem to know. They had only been ordered to arrest all the local Jews.

The following afternoon, at about 3 P.M., the women and children, as well as men over the age of fifty-five, were released without explanation. Martin, his uncle, and about fifteen other men remained in custody. They were marched to the local prison, an old, primitive structure, and locked up in a single cell. There was no running water or toilet—only a metal “honey bucket”—and the food was primitive and scarce. After two days in these cramped quarters, they were sent to Nuremberg, thirty miles away.

The Nuremberg district prison was filled nearly to capacity. Several hundred Sudeten Germans, ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, had also been arrested after raising opposition to Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland, where three million ethnic Germans lived, two months earlier. The local Jews picked up during Kristallnacht—about a hundred in total from Nuremberg—were locked inside the prison gym, which had been furnished only with bare mattresses on the floor. Martin’s group joined them.

Most of the guards were older men accustomed to dealing with hardened criminals, not political prisoners, and they seemed overwhelmed by the crowded conditions. They did their duty and nothing more, which meant the prisoners were largely left alone. An inmate crew brought food from the kitchen to distribute among the prisoners, and at one point everyone was allowed to take a shower in a communal washroom, which had a row of multiple showerheads. The prisoners were let out of the locked gym in small groups for an hour a day; they could pace circles in the prison yard only after it had been cleared of Aryan prisoners so they would avoid contact with the Jews.

Within a week, some of the Jewish prisoners were released, Martin’s uncle among them. The decisions about who got out and who did not were utterly mysterious to Martin and everyone else. While some of the guards revealed that they had received the release orders from the local Gestapo, none of the feared secret police had shown up at the prison, and no prisoners had been questioned. By December 22—six weeks after Martin’s arrest—nine of his original group remained. On that day, guards thundered down the corridor, announcing that they were being moved to the Dachau concentration camp.

Martin, who was now in his own cell, felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach. He knew about the existence of Dachau, as did most Germans, but it was spoken about only in ominous whispers. Opened in an old World War I munitions factory near Munich in March 1933, Dachau was the first concentration camp established by the Nazis after they came to power. Schutzstaffel (SS) leader Heinrich Himmler had announced in the newspapers that Dachau would be utilized to incarcerate those who “threaten the security of the state.” During its first year, the camp held nearly five thousand prisoners, primarily German communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and other political opponents of the Nazis.

But Martin had a very personal history with Dachau, too. In April 1933, his cousin, a lawyer in Munich, had been arrested and sent there. He died in Dachau three months later. Based on the grim stories he had heard, Martin considered the move to Dachau to be his own death sentence.

The locks on the cells of the Dachau-bound prisoners were rapidly keyed open and the doors swung ajar by guards. Frantic to write a farewell note to his twin brother, Leopold, who lived with an aunt elsewhere in Germany, and to his uncle Julius, Martin scribbled on a scrap of paper. When he stepped into the corridor and passed the cell of a prisoner he had gotten to know, Martin pushed his folded-up note through the bars.

At the Nuremberg train station, Martin and the eight other men brought in from Ansbach were loaded into a modern passenger train car, where they remained under guard for the hundred-mile ride to the Dachau depot. Upon arrival, their car alone was shunted to a sidetrack. The first thing Martin saw was SS troops in black uniforms with red swastikas, carrying rifles with fixed bayonets, surrounding them on all sides.

The SS pushed the prisoners off the train and down the platform, then herded them past some administrative buildings, the guards’ barracks, and an outside shooting range, where the SS practiced their marksmanship. Martin would soon learn that it doubled as an execution site. A heavy iron gate opened onto the prisoners’ fenced compound, above which was a metal sign that read, ARBEIT MACHT FREI, “Work will make you free.”

Electrified barbed wire enclosed the rectangular compound—about three hundred by six hundred yards—on all sides. Tall gun towers rose up at strategic locations. Inside the compound was an infirmary, a laundry, workshops in which inmates produced goods ranging from bread to furniture, and a main yard for roll calls and other assemblies.

The inmates lived in ten single-story barracks made of brick and concrete; each had been built to house 270 prisoners and was subdivided into five rooms designed to hold fifty-four men apiece. The men in each room were referred to, in military fashion, as a platoon. Every room had thin wooden bunks covered with straw and an attached washroom with a few sinks and flush toilets.

When Martin and his group arrived, the guards pushed them into a large room and made them strip off their clothing. After their heads were completely shorn, they were ordered into a cold shower and herded naked into another room, where a camp doctor did a quick examination. They were then given lightweight, blue-and-white-striped uniforms to put on. Some of the men had arrived clutching the small bags they had been allowed to take from home when they were arrested. Now they had to leave the bags, and the only personal items they could take with them were whatever toiletries they could carry.

In prison in Nuremberg, Martin had become friendly with a man named Ernst Dingfelder, who was deeply religious. Now Ernst whispered to Martin that he wanted to keep his Tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl. Martin couldn’t believe his ears; it struck him as crazy to try to sneak a Jewish prayer shawl into a Nazi concentration camp. He argued back and forth with Ernst, telling him that if the guards found the shawl, they would likely wrap him in it before shooting him. At last, Martin convinced Ernst to leave it behind.

Each prison uniform at Dachau had a number above the right breast. Martin’s was 31889. He soon realized that, according to Dachau’s numbering system, he was the 31,889th inmate since the camp’s opening. What he did not know was that he was also one of more than ten thousand Jews who had entered the concentration camp in the weeks since Kristallnacht.

It was midnight when Martin’s group reached block 8, room 4. Crammed into the unheated space were two hundred prisoners, four times more than the space was built to hold. To make room, the built-in bunks had been replaced with two levels of six-foot-deep wooden shelving, one at ground level, the other about four feet off the floor. A thin layer of straw crawling with lice and fleas covered each one. Without room to turn over, the men slept body to body, their heads against the wall. Despite the freezing temperature, many spent the night uncovered, as there weren’t enough blankets to go around.

Exhausted after little sleep, at five o’clock the next morning Martin stood for his first roll call. When this was complete, he and the others were led back inside and given watery ersatz coffee and bug-infested porridge. Dachau was a labor camp, but with the rapid influx of so many new prisoners, the officers in charge had not yet been able to schedule them all for forced-labor duties, which consisted of digging in gravel pits, repairing roads, and draining marshes, all under the watchful eyes of the guards. Instead, Martin and the rest of his group spent the day milling around in the main yard, clapping their hands and stamping their feet to keep them from freezing.

That night, dinner was a stew that resembled swill fed to pigs. Whatever meat was in it looked to Martin like chitterlings and other unidentified organs. Every third day, pairs of men shared a small loaf of bread; unfortunately, this wasn’t that day. Ernst, Martin’s friend, recoiled at the sight of the nonkosher meat and refused to touch the mysterious stew. Thereafter, Martin tried to help him stay kosher by trading his bread for Ernst’s stew. In the face of the indignities and deprivation of the Nazi concentration camp, Martin was determined to persevere, and in the process stay true to his principles and commitments. Helping a friend in need was one of them.

Martin saw right away that the prisoners who had been in Dachau longer—months, even years before he arrived—were dulled mentally and weakened physically by the daily grind and the brutal treatment they received at the hands of the guards. Beatings were commonplace, and many prisoners had lingering injuries and bad bruises. Others were feverish and sick. Most were afraid to seek treatment at the infirmary; not only was the medical care deplorable, but anyone reported as being sick was labeled a malingerer and could be subjected to punishment—most commonly solitary confinement for long periods of time or twenty-five strokes across the back with a whip that cut into the flesh. But the list of offenses for which prisoners received savage penalties at Dachau was long. An escape attempt meant death, warned a notice posted in the courtyard, as did “sabotage, mutiny or agitation.” Anyone who attacked a guard, “refused obedience,” or declined to work at assigned labor was to be “shot dead on the spot as a mutineer or subsequently hanged.”

Prisoners particularly dreaded Saturday afternoon inspections. Beforehand, the stubble on the men’s heads was trimmed to the skin. Room 4 had two dull hair clippers for two hundred men; with their dull blades, the clippers pulled out clumps of hair. Aluminum food bowls were inspected. The bowls had to be spotless, even though there was no soap and the men were prohibited from scrubbing with anything abrasive. Beatings were given out when guards found specks of food or scratches on the bowls.

When Martin failed one inspection, he had to stand at attention, motionless, while a leather-gloved guard repeatedly slapped his face. Martin had seen others similarly punished. The more they flinched, the longer the beatings lasted. With incredible determination not to show fear, he kept his reflexes under control and did not recoil from the blows. The guard gave up and moved on. It was a test of grit and resolve that Martin did not forget.

The cruelty of the SS was unlike anything Martin had imagined men could be capable of inflicting. He suspected that guard duty at Dachau was not a choice assignment, and that many of them were ordered there to be trained in brutality for duties in other camps and newly conquered territories. Dachau’s was a hierarchy of violence: the young soldiers were subject to such harsh treatment by their leaders that they were quick to vent their pent-up anger on the inmates. The process reminded Martin of training attack dogs.

One evening at roll call, the camp commandant announced that a prisoner had escaped. As punishment, all inmates would be held at attention in the main yard until the escapee was caught and returned. The long hours of the night crawled by, and it was bitterly cold under the bright spotlights. When the guard shifts changed, the men standing in the assembly area heard the clicking of machine guns in the gun towers—the loaded weapons were being checked.

Martin stood at the end of one row of prisoners. After midnight, exhausted and nearly frozen, he began to drift off to sleep on his feet. He must have swayed, though he was still standing when a rifle butt struck him in midback with painful force. He struggled to keep his balance and not fall.

In the morning, the assembly area was littered with men who had collapsed during the night—as far as Martin could tell, all were dead. The other prisoners were taken away briefly for food and water, then returned to the parade ground. The bodies had been removed.

Everyone remained standing until four that afternoon, when the escapee was returned to camp. Whisked out of sight, he was never seen again.

The man’s death would not have been easy, Martin knew. A favorite torture technique at Dachau had its roots in the medieval Inquisition: a victim was placed underneath a gallowslike structure, hands shackled behind his back, and pulled into the air by ropes attached to his wrists. Weights were added to the victim as he swung to inflict more intense pain on his arms and shoulders. Martin knew of men who had dangled helplessly for up to an hour as punishment for some real or imagined infraction. Most ended up with dislocated or broken bones and joints; some were permanently crippled.

Despite the horror of the consequences, there continued to be escape attempts by desperate men, but they seldom resulted in freedom. Some inmates chose another type of escape. A man would run toward the fence, attracting a hail of bullets from the gun towers. If he made it all the way, he would throw himself against the wire to be electrocuted. The SS guards usually made the quick kill, but not always. One prisoner, shot before reaching the fence, was left on the ground to writhe. His cries lasted all night.

On nights like that, with moans and shrieks sounding in the air and the constant cold biting at his body, Martin did more thinking than sleeping.

The big question was always: Why? As an avid reader with an interest in history—he had hoped to go to college, but when he turned sixteen in 1934, he was told he had received all the schooling to which a Jew was entitled in Germany—he knew about medieval Europe and the Inquisition. What difference was there between the suffering of men four centuries ago—ad majorem Dei gloriam (for the greater glory of God)—and what the Nazis were doing now? Suffering was still suffering. And if there was supposedly only one God, whose was it?

Some inmates at Dachau, like Ernst Dingfelder, were devoutly religious when they arrived. Others became more religious the longer they stayed. And then there were those who found they could no longer believe in God—any God—because of what was taking place. Martin identified with this group. He would, he decided, observe and participate in the traditions and ceremonies he had grown up with, out of a desire to acknowledge his Jewish heritage. But for the rest of his life, he knew, he would just be going through the motions. The horrors of Dachau had destroyed his belief in God.

Prisoners were allowed to write one letter a week, though with Nazi censors reading all outgoing mail, there was little they could say. Martin could not describe the effects of the starvation diet and all the weight he had lost, or the painful, open frostbite sores on his feet that made walking a torment. If the inmates failed to say everything was fine, their letters would not be mailed. Since his letters were the only documentation his family had that he was still alive, Martin wrote dutifully each week. Under the sender’s name was the line: “Concentration Camp Dachau.” The return address included the words Schutzhaft-Jude, or “Jew in Protective Custody.”

On January 1, 1939, Martin turned twenty-one. As he was now of legal age, Uncle Julius was no longer his guardian or trustee of the home his mother had left Martin. How camp officials discovered these facts he never knew, but shortly after his birthday, Martin was summoned to an administrative office and shown a document mostly covered by a blotter. He was told not to attempt to read the paper—only to sign it.

“Was ist das?” he dared to ask.

“Sie haben drei Sekunden.” He had three seconds to sign. “Sonst.” Or else.

He signed, and the paper was taken away. Only then was he told that he had signed a power of attorney allowing his mother’s house to be sold.

Martin Selling knew then that he would not be going home.