ALSO BY RICHARD RASHKE
The Killing of Karen Silkwood
Capitol Hill in Black and White/with Robert Parker
Dear Esther
Pius
Useful Enemies (January 2013)
Introduction
Sobibor, Poland
The Prisoners
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
The Escape
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
The Forest
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
The Remnant: A Personal Epilogue
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Image Gallery
Afterword
Acknowledgments, Sources, Notes
for
the more than two hundred and fifty thousand who did not escape from Sobibor
to
Guy
ALMOST EVERYONE KNOWS OF Auschwitz and Dachau. But few people have ever heard about Sobibor, although the biggest prisoner escape of World War II took place there, on October 14, 1943. Why history has been so silent is no mystery.
In 1945, the Allies captured a mountain of German documents, bequeathing to historians an incomparable war library. Among those millions of pages, however, were only three short documents about Sobibor, part of Heinrich Himmler’s Operation Reinhard, the code name for three top secret death camps in eastern Poland.
The death camps — Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka — were quite different from Dachau, a prison, and Auschwitz, a concentration camp with gas chambers for those too weak to work. They were giant death machines. Every Jew sent there was to be gassed within twenty-four hours, with the exception of between a hundred and six hundred Jews chosen to maintain the camp. They, too, were destined to be killed when Operation Reinhard was completed, if they lasted that long.
The Polish Central Commission for German War Crimes estimated that the Nazis gassed a minimum of 1.65 million Jews — about one quarter of all those killed in the Holocaust — in these three death camps. Sobibor, where more than two hundred and fifty thousand died, was the smallest, and Himmler’s best-kept secret.
If the Germans did not leave enough documents about Sobibor to satisfy historians, they did leave living records — some thirty survivors scattered around the world. I interviewed eighteen of them in the United States, the Soviet Union, Brazil, Poland, and Israel. On one level, most were reluctant to talk about Sobibor because of the pain that comes from reliving a personal hell. But on another, most were eager to have a professional writer tell their story "for their grandchildren." I was somewhat surprised, for I am not Jewish, and I thought that fact might create an atmosphere of distrust, discouraging openness and honesty. On the contrary, I got the distinct impression that I was welcomed as a writer precisely because I was not a Jew.
Most of the survivors I interviewed vividly remembered aspects of the Sobibor story, almost as if they could still see, hear, and feel it. Although they all contributed something to this book, three emerged as extremely important. Alexander (Sasha) Pechersky was co-leader of the escape from Sobibor. He wrote a short account of the revolt soon after the war. I found and interviewed him in the Soviet Union. Stanislaw (Shlomo) Szmajzner, a key planner in the escape, lived in Sobibor almost from the day it opened to the day of the escape. He wrote a book in Portuguese about his experiences in the camp. I found and interviewed him in Goiania, Brazil. Thomas (Toivi) Blatt, who spent six months in Sobibor, made it a point to know everything he could about the camp while he was a prisoner and after he escaped. He wrote a diary, parts of which have been published as articles. I found and interviewed him in Santa Barbara.
The research and writing of Escape from Sobibor presented two predictable problems. As everyone knows, eyewitness accounts of almost anything vary. Some are even contradictory. Sobibor was no exception. The basic story of the camp, the uprising, and the escape emerged with a great deal of freshness. But there were some contradictions because survivors either embellished details over the years, and then accepted the exaggerations as facts, or confused rumors with reality. As a researcher, I sifted through the stories, discarding what I felt were embellishments, and I analyzed the differing versions of an incident, deciding for myself which was more or most accurate. I explain my important choices in the notes at the end of the book.
Dialogue posed the second problem. The reader will note that some portions of the book are rich in dialogue and others are not. The reason for the unevenness is that for some sections I was able to draw on books, articles, diaries, and interviews with people who had excellent memories; for others, either I was unable to find eyewitnesses to the events I was describing, or those I found had poor recall. The end notes list my sources by chapter.
It stands to reason that much of this book and its dialogue is a memoir — a compilation of recollections of incidents and conversations as people remembered them happening almost forty years before. The dialogue, therefore, is as accurate as their memories. Furthermore, all of the dialogue came to me through the filter of translation. Eyewitnesses heard or spoke the original in one language and gave it to me in another, often through an interpreter. Most of the time, the oral translations were rough and grammatically incorrect, as interpreters arbitrarily switched from direct to indirect quotations. I handled these problems as best I could, using my judgment and rendering the dialogue into colloquial English.
In sum, I am certain that the dialogue in this book accurately describes who said what to whom, and that it is reasonably faithful to the words that were spoken.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Thomas Blatt, the first survivor I contacted when I began to work on Escape from Sobibor. He did more than break the ice for me. During the sixteen months I researched and wrote the book, I interviewed him for more than ten days. He shared his diary with me, served as my Yiddish interpreter in Brazil, Russian interpreter in the Soviet Union, and Polish interpreter in Poland. He guided me through the Sobibor campsite, and reviewed for accuracy the first draft of this book. I can only imagine the emotional pain and fatigue he suffered as I dug and picked and probed, not always with gentleness and sensitivity.
Mr. Blatt is one of a handful of Jewish survivors from Izbica, Poland, which once had a thriving Jewish shtetl of four thousand. He dedicates his work on Escape from Sobibor to his mother, father, and brother, who were murdered there, and to the Jews of Izbica who, unlike him, did not escape.
Washington, D.C.
March 1982
SS SERGEANT KARL FRENZEL waited until most of the shooting was over, then tried to call Security Police headquarters in Lublin, twenty-five miles away. But the phones were dead, and the officer in charge of Sobibor was missing.
Frenzel walked through the main gate, crossed the tracks to the small public railway station, and handed a message to the Polish telegraph operator: JEWS REVOLTED … SOME ESCAPED … SOME SS OFFICERS, NONCOMS, FOREIGN GUARDS DEAD … SOME JEWS STILL INSIDE THE CAMP … SEND HELP.
The Security Police dispatched SS and police task forces to Sobibor to round up the Jews still trapped behind the fences; they also ordered the army to chase those who had escaped and the Luftwaffe to buzz the pine forests. The next day, October 15, the Security Police sent the following report to Berlin:
On October 14, 1943, at about 5:00 P.M., a revolt of Jews in the SS camp Sobibor, twenty-five miles north of Chelm. They overpowered the guards, seized the armory, and, after an exchange of shots with the camp garrison, fled in unknown directions. Nine SS men murdered, one SS man missing, two foreign guards shot to death.
Approximately 300 Jews escaped. The remainder were shot to death or are now in camp. Military police and armed forces were notified immediately and took over security of the camp at about 1:00 A.M. The area south and southwest of Sobibor is now being searched by police and armed forces.
The SS ferreted out the 159 Jews still inside Sobibor. A few had pistols and fought back; the others hid wherever they could. When the Jews were executed in the woods and buried, the SS dismantled the gas chambers, razed the buildings they didn’t want to move, and planted pine saplings where the barracks had once stood.
The Nazis left Sobibor — the forest of the owls — as they had found it. In the center of what had been the camp stood the foresters’ tower, reaching a hundred feet above the pines. And across the tracks from the public train station sat the old post office, where the Sobibor Kommandant had lived.
On October 19 — five days after the Jews of Sobibor had escaped — SS chief Heinrich Himmler halted Operation Reinhard. The Red Army was less than three hundred miles from Sobibor, and the evidence had to be destroyed before they found it. Besides, Operation Reinhard had been a complete success. In twenty months, it alone had killed almost two million Jews. (Not even the Nazis knew the exact number; they did not keep records.) And there were no more Jews left to murder in the ghettos of eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, White Russia, and the Ukraine.
But Himmler couldn’t destroy all the evidence. When the Russians crossed the Bug River into Poland and pushed past Sobibor, a few miles away, the evidence, hidden in the barns and fields, or fighting with the partisans, was among the first to hug them.
STRETCHING TO LOOK TALLER than he was, the boy stood next to the men in the open field surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, seven feet high. It was a sunny May afternoon, and after the ride in a boxcar smelling from urine and death, the air was a perfume of spring and pine. Painted over the gate in foot-high black letters was SS SONDERKOMMANDO, and the sign perched on white stilts in front of the railway shack across the tracks said SOBIBOR. The boy had never heard of Sobibor, nor had he any idea of what kind of special SS camp it was. He looked around.
Carved out of the thick pine forest along the main railway line, Sobibor looked peaceful and quiet. Although the German and Ukrainian guards were carrying leather whips, pistols, and rifles, the boy tried to convince himself that Sobibor was just another work camp for Jews. In the middle of the camp, a foresters’ watchtower rose a hundred feet into the clear spring sky, and across the tracks, behind the wooden station, sat a half-dozen woodcutters’ cottages.
The boy was only fifteen years old, barely five feet tall, thin as an alley cat, and just as wary. Afraid to turn his head, he looked as far to the left as he could and saw the women and children scramble into a column, four abreast, and march through a huge gate, braided with pine branches so that no one could see in or out. The sign next to the gate read SHOWERS. He tried to catch a glimpse of his mother and older sister, but they were lost among the shuffling thousands. The gate swung closed, and the Nazis turned to the men and the boys who tried to pass as men. “Line up,” shouted a tall SS officer with lanky arms that hung almost to his knees. “Four across.”
The boy gave a last furtive look around for his father, from whom he had been separated after the Ukrainians drove them out of the boxcar with whips, but he couldn’t see him as the men pushed and shoved into the semblance of a formation. He grabbed the hands of his brother, nephew, and cousin, lest he lose them, too, and have to face alone the thatched gate and whatever was behind it. Hand in hand, the boy and his family formed a row in the long column.
“Stay together, no matter what,” he whispered to them. “Promise.” They nodded in fright.
The tall Nazi walked down the line, peering at faces as if he were searching for someone he knew. To the boy, he looked like a black giant, dressed as he was in a black uniform perfectly pressed, a black cap with a silver skull — the Death’s Head, the SS called it — shiny, knee-high black leather boots, and a black whip curled in his hand like a snake.
“Tailors, shoemakers, painters,” the tall Nazi called. “Forward.”
The boy began to panic. What should he do? Who would get better treatment? Those who stepped forward or those who stayed in line? What would happen if he lied and said he was a tailor? As the Nazi approached him, the boy fought his fear, as he had done so often during the past three years, and heeded the feeling churning inside him, making him say and do things for reasons he didn’t understand.
“I’m a goldsmith,” he shouted above the other voices. “Do you need a goldsmith?”
Before the SS officer could say a word, the boy reached into the knapsack at his feet, and whipped out a wallet with a monogram of gold on it. "See?"
He offered the Nazi the wallet. “I made this.”
The boy’s initials gleamed in the late afternoon sun, finely crafted and smooth as ice on the lake.
“You? This?”
“Yes,” the boy snapped back, afraid to allow a second to slip between the question and his answer. “These are my tools.” He dipped back into his sack and fished out a kerosene burner, charcoal, pliers, and chisels.
“Out, then,” the Nazi said. “Over there. We’ll see.”
“I have three brothers who are goldsmiths, too,” the boy lied. He was surprised at his own boldness, for his brother, cousin, and nephew hardly knew the difference between gold and brass. The Nazi quickly looked over the three youngsters and nodded to them to join the boy.
“My father,” the boy asked. “What about my father?”
“Don’t worry.” There was a note of kindness in the Nazi’s voice. “Tomorrow … Sit. I’ll be back.”
The boy hugged his tools. They had saved his life before, and if he had made the right decision today, they would help him again. He had learned to spot the glimmer of greed in a Nazi’s eye; the tall SS man had that glint.
The huge gate swung open, and the column of men and boys marched through, as the women and children had done. Then it slammed closed. A Ukrainian in a drab gray-green uniform and black soldier’s cap stood guard, rifle pinned across his chest. The boy wasn’t sure whether the “Blackie,” as the Jews called every Ukrainian auxiliary, was there to keep people in or out.
While the “goldsmiths” waited for the tall Nazi, another lad sat down beside them, and the boy became nervous. It was important to obey the Nazis exactly, or they could turn on you like German shepherds.
“Beat it,” he told the newcomer. “We were told to sit here. Alone!”
“No,” the newcomer said. “I paint signs, and the big Nazi told me to sit here, too.”
The boy accepted the sign painter reluctantly; he would be just one more risk, one more person to say a wrong word, to do something to anger the tall SS man. But the boy had no choice, so he sat as straight as he could and waited. Within an hour, some Ukrainian guards came back to the field and marched a group of shoemakers and tailors to another part of the camp, but the tall Nazi did not return. The boy waited, his fear pushing his imagination to see behind that huge gate. Finally, as darkness began to paint the forest black, the big gate swung open and the tall Nazi walked through. He was alone. Before he closed the gate, the boy caught a glimpse of a long corridor that seemed to go nowhere, a tube lined with barbed-wire fences thatched with pine branches.
“Come,” the tall SS man said. He led them to a pine barracks with a tarpaper roof, slanted slightly for the heavy winter snow, and pushed the door open with his boot. “Inside. Stay! No one else in.” He slammed the wooden door behind him and left.
Except for a patch of dusk streaming through the narrow, high window, it was as dark as a tunnel. A shadow moved in the corner of the long building.
“Who is it?” The boy tried to scream, but only a hoarse whisper came from deep inside his dry throat. “Who’s there?”
The shadow moved again. “I’m a Jew, too,” said a timid voice that quivered like tin. “I’m a sign painter. Who are you?”
They sat in the dark on the bare wooden floor — the two young sign painters, the boy, and his brother, cousin, and nephew. They were tired, thirsty, and hungry, but their tension and fear drove away the fatigue, hunger, and thirst. They told one another where they had come from, what had happened to them on the way to Sobibor, how they had been chosen from the long line of men. But no matter where they began their whisperings, huddled in the corner as far from the door as they could crawl, they always came back to the gate with the sign SHOWERS and the corridor behind it leading nowhere.
The sign painter with the timid voice said he had been sitting in the barracks for a whole day. He described how a crew of Jews had come back through that gate with brooms, rakes, and carts, and how they had cleaned from the field the toys, caps, and scraps of paper that littered it, even raking up the footprints in the sandy soil. It must be some kind of trick, he said. The Nazis must want each trainload to think it is the first. But why? The question hung over them, and they dared not speak an answer.
The tall Nazi with long arms kicked open the door. “Goldsmith,” he ordered. “Take a bucket. Follow me.”
The boy crossed the yard with the Nazi, half-running like a child at its father’s heels to keep up with his huge strides. They entered a storeroom piled almost to the ceiling with cheeses, salamis, canned sardines, and tins of milk.
“Whatever you want,” the Nazi said.
The boy had never seen so much food before in all of his fifteen years. The musty smell of cheddar and garlic was enough to drive him mad, but he fought the urge to dive into the pile and tear at a piece of soft cheese. He suspected that the Nazi, who barked out words, rather than sentences, with a thick Austrian accent, was trying to trick him.
“No, thank you,” the boy said. “I’m not hungry.”
“Better eat.” The Nazi laughed. “A lot of work tomorrow.”
Sensing a veiled threat in the Nazi’s voice that tomorrow he would be on trial and that he had better be a good goldsmith, the boy picked the longest salami he could see. The Nazi took him into the kitchen next to the storeroom, where a cook filled his bucket with coffee and gave him a loaf of fresh bread.
As best they could in the dark, the boy and his friends divided the bread and salami. If they had had a scale, they would have weighed the portions to make sure each got equal shares. The bread, they devoured; the salami, they chewed very slowly, as if they were eating a bony fish. But no one could drink the coffee. Someone had used the bucket to clean paintbrushes, and the coffee tasted of turpentine.
They talked late into the night, and when the others finally had drifted into a restless sleep filled with dreams of boxcars, train rides, and tall Nazis, the boy lay on the wooden floor and stared into the patch of moonlit darkness framed by the window. Next to him the second sign painter, who had arrived the day before, lay shaking.
Questions rolled in the boy’s mind like marbles, and the faces of his mother, sister, and father flashed before his eyes.
What was behind that gate?
What did “showers” mean?
Where were they — his family?
Would the tall Nazi march him through the gate in the morning? When dawn filtered through the window, the boy had no answers.
THE BARRACKS WAS SEVENTY feet long and forty feet wide, with beams running along the ceiling like the ribs of a wooden whale. It was empty. The boy, Shlomo Szmajzner, crept to the door and looked through the cracks, then cautiously peeked out the window. The soft spring morning was fenced in by barbed wire and ringed with watchtowers — tiny pine huts on stilts twenty feet from the ground, with Ukrainian guards inside holding Mausers. With their ladders gently sloping to the yard below and their slanted tarpapered roofs, the watchtowers looked like clubhouses where little boys puffed cigarettes and talked about little girls. The fence, guarded by Ukrainians, was seven feet high, and its pine posts were so perfectly spaced, they looked as if an architect had placed them.
Two hundred yards straight ahead from the barracks where Shlomo watched, the railway tracks cut a ribbon through the pine forest. A switching track broke from the main line, and from the switching track a spur, long enough to hold ten boxcars, jutted into the camp. Inside Sobibor, next to the spur and the main gate, stood a pretty two-story woodcutter’s cottage, surrounded by May flowers and neatly trimmed shrubs. Shlomo could see some Germans with Finnish submachine guns entering and leaving the house.
Standing alone in what looked like the center of the camp were several sheds, a camouflaged fence, and the gate through which his mother, sister, and father had walked. The boy strained, half-expecting to hear his mother’s call, “Shlomo, Shlomo,” or his sister’s laugh drift across the yard on the thin spring air. But there wasn’t a sound, and if the yard had not been covered with litter, no one would ever know that two thousand Jews had passed through the gate just the day before. How could so many Jews be so quiet, Shlomo wondered.
Three pine-boarded barracks identical with his stood close by, like new barns waiting for the cows. Other than Ukrainians tramping across the yards and an occasional German with a guard dog, the camp seemed empty and still.
The reality of Sobibor grabbed Shlomo with pincers of steel. He had ridden into a barbed-wire trap, and with the fences, the Mausers, the dogs, and submachine guns, there was no way out for a fifteen-year-old goldsmith with a kerosene lamp and charcoal, pliers and chisels. Despair glued him to the windows.
As he watched, without a whistle or a warning the huge camouflaged gate creaked open, and fifty to sixty men and boys shuffled out and began to clean the yard. Shlomo’s heart pounded when he recognized a tall, thin boy. Shlomo stared at his friend, Avi, hoping his intensity would draw the boy’s eyes up to the window. Avi bent over his rake like a robot, but when his Ukrainian guard wasn’t looking, he stole a glance at the barracks as if he knew Shlomo would be there. Avi nodded almost imperceptibly, then went back to raking litter. When the yard was clean and the footprints smoothed away with brooms of pine branches, Avi disappeared into the tube leading nowhere.
Taking turns spying through the window, the boys waited for the tall Nazi. The sight of the Jews cleaning the yard had given them a sense of hope, because if there were fifty or sixty, there must be more. But where were they all working? Why was it so quiet? Why didn’t more Jews cross the yard?
At noon, the Nazi with the long arms kicked open the door of the hut. The boys leaped to their feet like German soldiers.
“What do you need to work?” the Nazi asked the goldsmith.
“Just tables and chairs,” Shlomo said. The painters nodded, too frightened to open their mouths. The six boys followed the Nazi into one of the sheds packed with tables and chairs, clothes, linens, and blankets tossed into careless piles. Shlomo struggled to make one decision at a time, to focus all his energy on this one situation, for he hadn’t yet figured out how he would hide from the SS the fact that his brother, Moses, his nephew, Jankus, and his cousin, Nojeth, were not goldsmiths. He selected a table and chair for himself and one for each of them.
“Our clothes are filthy,” Shlomo told the SS man. “And we don’t have beds.”
“All the blankets and clothes you need,” the Nazi said. “No beds. Not even for us.”
They carried their loot back to the barracks. “Stay inside,” the tall Nazi warned them. “If a Ukrainian calls, don’t go. Understand? Stay away from the fences. Understand?” He left them without an explanation.
In the clean pants and shirts and new high leather boots, the boys felt better than they had for a long time. Perhaps the Sobibor Nazis were different. Maybe they weren’t so bad after all.
Within an hour, the Nazi returned with another German in a white jacket. “The Kommandant,” the tall Nazi said. He eased the door closed behind him.
His name was Captain Franz Stangl, he said. He pulled up a chair and ordered Shlomo to sit across the table from him.
Captain Stangl was impeccably dressed. His white coat was buttoned from top to bottom, his gray slacks pressed and creased, and above a film of yard dust, the top of his boots gleamed. He was thirty years old, thin and wiry. From under the silver skull on his SS cap, light brown hair brushed the tops of his ears and there was the hint of a dimple under his lower lip. In his right hand, he carried a pair of cloud-white gloves. He spoke in soft, passionless tones and smiled easily. To Shlomo, he had the polished elegance of a university professor torn from his classroom by the war and planted in the sandy soil of eastern Poland.
Captain Stangl explained that, as Kommandant, he had unquestioned authority and that in his hand he held the power of life and death. He asked the boy how he could possibly make jewelry without a workshop, and how someone so young could already be an artisan. His questions were friendly, even courteous, and Shlomo forgot for a moment that Captain Stangl was a Nazi.
Shlomo spread his tools on the table. To melt the gold, he explained, he used a small kerosene burner and a piece of charcoal. The burner looked like Aladdin’s lamp, with a wick poking out its long nose. Holding the kerosene lamp in one hand, the charcoal in the other, and a glass tube in his mouth, he blew the top of the charcoal into a glowing ember. Then, Shlomo explained, he put the gold in a hole in the center of the charcoal. When it melted, he poured it into the mold he had made. Sometimes, he said, if he was not in a hurry and he had some lime, he would cover his hand with it so that he could work more comfortably. But it wasn’t necessary, since his hand was used to the heat of the charcoal and molten gold.
Shlomo showed Captain Stangl how he made the mold out of wire, and how he placed it on one piece of waxed sheet metal, and then covered it with another. After screwing the two pieces tightly together, he poured the gold into the mold. Once the basic design had set, he carved the jewelry with chisels.
“It’s very simple,” he told the Kommandant with pride, “but it works.”
Captain Stangl was fascinated; he questioned Shlomo about each tool, almost as if he were giving the boy an exam. But the little goldsmith answered every question with great detail and authority, all the while hoping the Nazi would not toss a question at his “brothers.” When he seemed satisfied, Captain Stangl told Shlomo he wanted a gold monogram. And using the tabletop as a blackboard, he traced with his delicate finger the design he wanted.
Shlomo had hidden some gold in his knapsack, but hardly enough to make the large monogram Captain Stangl wanted. He had been saving the gold for an emergency, perhaps even to buy his life. He sensed that this was an emergency.
“I have some gold,” he said. “But not —”
“I’ll send over whatever you need,” Captain Stangl said.
The German seemed so friendly and gentle that Shlomo decided to press his luck. Ever since he had seen the women and children walk through the huge gate, he had been thinking of little else but his mother, father, and sister. He felt a vague stab of pain as he tried to convince himself that they were well. But now, in the presence of the kind German, he had a foreboding that seemed out of place, a doubt that nagged with the stubbornness of a deer fly.
“My parents and sister came here with me,” he told the captain. “I miss them. Can I see them?”
The Kommandant listened to Shlomo with his head down, as if he didn’t want to look the boy in the eye. “Don’t worry.” The Nazi’s voice was fatherly. “They’re fine. Don’t be afraid or upset. They just went to take a shower. They got new clothes and are working in the fields, happy and well. But they do have to work harder than you do …” He paused. “You boys will have everything you need. Tools, material, plenty of good food, beds. And I promise on my word as an officer, soon you’ll join your parents.”
Captain Stangl so tranquilized the boy that a sense of relief washed over him. Maybe Sobibor wasn’t such a bad place, he tried to convince himself. The Nazis were humane, and he had clothes and food. He would work in relative comfort. There were promises. Soon he’d be with his father and mother and Ryka. Hadn’t Captain Stangl promised that on his word as an officer? Shlomo didn’t doubt him, for the Kommandant was sincere and compassionate, and the boy wanted to believe him.
Captain Stangl sent Shlomo a handful of scarred gold rings, some so precious they looked like heirlooms, and the tall Nazi brought him a slightly used, but more complete, set of goldsmith tools. Shlomo didn’t dare ask himself where the gold and chisels came from. He concentrated on embossing F. S. on an intricate gold setting.
Shlomo stationed Moses, Jankus, and Nojeth at their tables, gave them the tools he wasn’t using, and told them to pretend to be busy. It will be a life or death performance, he warned. There’s no telling what the tall Nazi would do if he knew they weren’t smiths.
Shlomo worked on the Kommandant’s monogram with more zeal than on any piece of jewelry he had ever crafted. He sensed that to survive here, as in the ghetto, he’d have to make himself indispensable — such a valuable little Jew that the Germans would not be tempted to trade him in for an older, more experienced artist. He hammered until dark that second day at Sobibor, numb from the work, the pressure, and the emotion.
After a huge meal — as much bread, cheese, salami, milk, coffee, and sardines as he could eat — Shlomo slipped into a heavy sleep, clutching Stangl’s promise. By dawn, he was back at work in the other end of the barracks. Like a musician, he performed all day long for a stream of Nazis who dropped in to watch the little Jewish goldsmith. And whenever there was an audience, Shlomo slowed down to make his work look more demanding than it actually was, so that the Nazis would forget the other boys, scraping and banging at their tables.
Late the next morning, his third day in Sobibor, Shlomo sent word to Captain Stangl that the monogram was finished. The Kommandant rushed to the barracks, and when he saw the gold F. S. carved on the intricate setting, just as he had ordered it, he acted like a greedy child. “Magnificent! Magnificent!” he said as he turned the piece in his hand. “Just beautiful.”
Shlomo beamed. Not only was he proud of his work and pleased that he had executed the Kommandant’s design to perfection, but he had passed the test. No Nazi at Sobibor would ever doubt again that he, Shlomo Szmajzner, was a master goldsmith.
The tall Nazi was the next SS man to order a gold monogram — G. W., for Gustav Wagner. And the other Germans who had watched Shlomo work dropped in to congratulate him and to ask for rings and bracelets for wives and sweethearts, for monograms and good luck charms.
The boys savored their first performance. They were now working for Sobibor’s top brass. All they had to do was please every Nazi as they had Captain Stangl, and their lives would get even better. There would be a steady flow of work, for when it came to gold, they knew, there would be no end to greed, no end to wives and sweethearts, brothers and sisters, no end to children and friends, each of whom would be delighted with a piece of jewelry made by a little Jew with a kerosene burner and charcoal.
Maybe he would even see his father, mother, and sister soon, Shlomo thought. Maybe some Sabbath, Captain Stangl would allow him to go for a walk in the village. Maybe soon he’d be free. Maybe …
But first, there was a delicate problem. Whose jewelry should he make next? It was obvious that he’d have to satisfy Sobibor’s most powerful Nazi after the Kommandant, but who was that? And what would happen if he made a wrong choice?
Deep down, Shlomo knew that he’d make the right choice. He was a survivor. And he had lived this long while others died precisely because he had made the right choice over and over again.
SHLOMO WAS BORN IN Pulawy-on-the-Vistula, fifty miles west of Sobibor. The story of his family was not unique.
Shlomo’s shtetl was isolated from the Polish Catholic community that surrounded it. The Jews spoke Yiddish better than they did Polish. The men wore beards and caftans; the women kept their heads covered. Jews married Jews, sold their bread and meat mostly to other Jews; their children played with Jewish children, attended schools run by the Jewish community or went to both the town school and Hebrew school.
But lessons bored Shlomo; it was goldsmithing that fired his imagination. Whenever he could sneak away from his father, he sat in the shop of Herzl, the master goldsmith of Pulawy, watching for hours the artist at his bench. At ten, Shlomo made a deal. If his father would permit him to serve as an apprentice to Herzl, he’d work extra hard in school. By the time he was twelve, Shlomo was a qualified goldsmith.
When the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939 and occupied Pulawy, Shlomo begged his parents to flee to Russia, where, he had heard, the Jews suffered less. But his parents refused to go. What about the house? Who would watch it for them? And the family business — how could they just give it up?
Over the pleading of his parents, Shlomo stuffed his clothes and tools into a knapsack and boarded a train east. He was thirteen years old. Shlomo tried to pass as an Aryan, because in 1939 the Germans had forbidden Jews to travel without a special permit. But the Poles on the train denounced him, and the Germans forced him off. After weeks of hitchhiking and riding trains, Shlomo reached the Bug River — the border between Poland and Russia — and sneaked across. A Jewish jeweler gave him a job, and the boy had plenty to eat. He was free.
Before the winter was out, Shlomo was homesick for his mother and father, brother and sister. The Russians caught him trying to cross the Bug into Poland. After questioning him for hours, they let him go home. If the crazy little Jew wanted to live under the Germans, they said, that was his problem. Once across the river, he hitched a wagon ride to the nearest train station, trying to look as Polish as he could. But no sooner had the train lurched to a start, than a Pole pointed at him. “A Jew!” he shouted. “A Jew!”
The Germans dragged him off to the nearest Gestapo station. “Are you?” the agent asked.
“Yes,” Shlomo said. He couldn’t deny his heritage, and he didn’t know that while he was in Russia, the Germans had issued a decree requiring all Jews to wear a Star of David.
“Take off your boots.” The German pushed Shlomo out the door. “Stand here until I come back.” Then, checking his watch, the Nazi went inside.
Shlomo knew he’d get frostbite, possibly lose his legs, if he just stood in the snow and the freezing wind, so he began to run in place, as if he were warming up for a soccer game. Soon the sweat was dripping into his eyes. The Gestapo agent came back in a half-hour, blew his whistle, and let him go, with a stiff warning to wear the Star of David in the future.
A Jewish tailor carried Shlomo to his home, bathed his feet in cold water, rubbed them with alcohol, and fed him. Shlomo stayed a week, until he was rested and could walk again. He had heard that the Nazis had driven the Jews of Pulawy from their homes — “resettlement,” they called it — and that his family was living in Wolwonice.
As he approached the edge of the Jewish ghetto the Germans had carved in Wolwonice, Shlomo saw his mother, hanging out the wash in front of an old shack. Almost as if she could hear his footsteps in the snow, she turned. She seemed puzzled as she stared at the boy, then shocked. “My son!” she screamed. The tears streamed down her face. “My son.”
Shlomo was so happy to be home that he couldn’t stop touching everyone, hugging and kissing his mother and sister. They had thought they would never see him again, and as the times got worse, they used to say, “At least Shlomo is free.” Now, they couldn’t believe that he would give up his freedom for a ten-by-ten hovel with paper stuffed in cracks, a leaky roof, no water, and a clay oven to warm the family if they managed to scrounge wood or sawdust.
Shlomo told them that he had thought of nothing but them in Russia, that his love had driven him back, and that he would never desert them again, never. Not even if it meant death.
Before the winter of 1940–1941 was out, food had become so scarce in Wolwonice that Shlomo and his father cut off their Stars of David and crept out of the ghetto to beg for food from relatives nearby. But a Pole turned them in for a kilo of sugar, and the Gestapo tossed them into jail. Shlomo and his father argued most of the night away. Shlomo had heard stories about the Nazis killing Jews who traveled without papers or the Star of David. He told his father that if they didn’t escape, they’d be murdered. “Maybe not tomorrow. But the next day or the next,” he said.
At first, his father couldn’t believe the Nazis would be so brutal. “They’ll just keep us for a few days to scare us,” he argued. “Then they’ll let us go.
“I’ve seen more of the Germans than you have, Father,” Shlomo said. “We can’t take the chance. We have the family to think about.”
In the end, his father agreed to make a break. The next day, after lunch, as the prisoners lined up for work and the Germans changed the guard, Shlomo and his father edged to the rear of the column. When the German guarding them turned his back, they ran.
Back in Wolwonice, Shlomo helped feed his family by silver- and goldsmithing for German soldiers — rings out of forks, bracelets from gold rings. Somehow, Shlomo and his family survived, feeding on the hope that things would get better.
Then, without warning, the Germans cut the ghetto in half, squeezing the four hundred Jewish families of Wolwonice into a tiny closed ghetto around the synagogue. Within weeks, the ghetto was a shanty town without water, crawling with lice, and smelling like a sewer. At night or early in the morning, the Germans raided workers from the ghetto, marching them to nearby farms or factories or building projects. Every day, a few more failed to return.
Shlomo’s family, living in the synagogue, were so desperate for food that Shlomo slipped away one day from his work detail and went to beg for food and money from relatives in western Poland. (By the fall of 1941, the Germans decreed that any Jew traveling without a Star of David and a permit could be executed.) An aunt fattened him up and pleaded with him to stay with her, where, for the time being, it was safer, but Shlomo told her he had promised never to desert his family again. One cold autumn night, he crept back into the ghetto with a few gold coins in his pocket and some bread under his shirt.
When the money and the food ran out, Shlomo’s father cut off his Star of David, slung a bag over his shoulder, and walked from village to village, door to door, begging food from Catholics in the name of Jesus. Posing as a Christian made the proud Jew feel so ashamed and guilty that he used to sit in the corner of the synagogue at night and cry, unable to eat the cabbage leaves and stale bread he brought home on the best of days.
One day the Judenrat — the Jewish Council set up by the Nazis to carry out its decrees in the ghetto — assigned Shlomo and nineteen others to pick the last of the fall beets and potatoes on a farm nearby. Shlomo sniffed an opportunity. The old German sergeant who walked with a cane seemed like a fair man. At least, he never beat anyone, let the Jews rest from time to time, and made certain they ate reasonably well. Shlomo told him that he was a goldsmith and that he would be pleased to make something for him — a ring, maybe, or a bracelet for his wife — but that he’d have to go back home to get his tools. The old soldier didn’t believe that a fourteen-year-old boy could be a goldsmith; he assumed that Shlomo was lying in order to escape. But Shlomo kept pestering, and eventually the old German sent him home, under guard, to get his tools.
The German, who wanted a ring with his unit insignia, set Shlomo up in a cozy room in the farmhouse. As the sergeant watched Shlomo for hours on end, he began to call the boy by his first name. Shlomo sensed that the old soldier didn’t understand what the Nazis were doing to the Polish Jews, so he told him about his home in Pulawy, his parents, the filth and lice, the hunger. “While potatoes and beets are rotting in the fields,” Shlomo complained, “we are starving in ghettos.”
The old German listened in silence. One day, he said, “I’m going to give you a wagonload of potatoes.”
Shlomo couldn’t believe the German. A kilo, yes. But a ton?
“You get the wagon,” the German said. “You can have all it carries.”
It wasn’t easy to smuggle a wagon of potatoes into Wolwonice without creating a stampede, but Shlomo managed to do it under the cloak of night. He and his family hid enough potatoes to tide them over for two weeks. Then, taking turns guarding the wagon outside the synagogue, they distributed the rest among the other Jews, according to need.
Shlomo continued to make jewelry for the old German until the first winter snow, when, because there was no more work in the fields, the Judenrat called him back to the ghetto.
Given the lice, fleas, and lack of sanitation, it was inevitable that typhus would strike Wolwonice. When it did, the Nazis stuffed all the Jews into the synagogue in an attempt to control the epidemic. Two Jewish doctors worked around the clock while the fever spread from family to family and while the Judenrat collected money to buy black-market medicine from the Germans and the Poles. Old Jews were the first to succumb to the diarrhea and fever. Most died. Shlomo, his sister, Ryka, Moses, and Jankus all caught it, and for twelve to fourteen days, they tossed on their mats in delirium. But, young and resilient, and driven by a determination to live, they got well.
Hardly had the tiny ghetto recovered from typhus, in the spring of 1942, when the Nazis swooped. The German officer in charge of selecting non-Jewish Poles to work in factories in the west had been assassinated, and the Nazis blamed the Jews. In retaliation, they shot the whole Judenrat in the town square and ordered the rest of the Jews to assemble for “resettlement.” It was the first time most Wolwonice Jews, Shlomo included, had seen the Nazis murder people in cold blood; the shock sent a shiver of fear through the four hundred families. There was no logic to the action: it was unlikely that a Jew would assassinate a Nazi who rounded up Aryans for German factories, so why had the Germans killed the Judenrat? And what did “resettlement” mean?
To a person, the Jews of Wolwonice refused to go to the square, but with no guns, little strength, and no place to hide, they were no match for the Nazis, who routed them from the synagogue and the few houses left in the ghetto, herded them into the square, and marched them all night to Opole, thirty miles away.
Compared to Opole, Wolwonice was a kindergarten. The ghetto was a sealed tomb of four thousand Jews. They huddled in parks, schools, and synagogues — anyplace they could find a spot to sit or lie. And shocking to Shlomo, who thought he had seen all of life in his fourteen years, was the moral degradation into which the war and poverty, fear and hatred had driven some Jews. Besides the Judenrat in Opole, the Nazis had created a Jewish Ghetto Police. Both groups had become corrupt, trading gold and girls for food and work papers. The corrupted Jews were few in number, but they had the Opole ghetto by the throat.
With few exceptions, it was now everyone for himself or herself, as Jews fought to stay alive for just one more day, telling themselves that Opole was the bottom, that nothing could be worse, that if they could survive Opole, they could take anything. Like dogs, hundreds died of hunger in the streets. Their corpses were stripped, piled on carts, and buried in mass graves outside the ghetto.
It didn’t take Shlomo long to learn how to save himself and his family. After a few days in Opole, he was making badges for the Ghetto Police and rings for them to trade with the SS for food and privileges. He even threatened a Jewish dentist into allowing him to use his laboratory so that he could melt gold faster, make more rings, gain more friends, more favors, more food.
One month after Shlomo was resettled in Opole, the Nazis raided the ghetto. During the first week of May 1942, they rounded up half the Jews. Rumors spread like typhus, for no one knew what the sly Germans were up to. Some Jews argued that resettlement anywhere was better than living in Opole; others, like Shlomo, smelled a trick. Hadn’t each move the Nazis forced him to make been for the worse? Shlomo persuaded his family to hide. When an SS officer dug them out, Shlomo bribed him with a gold ring to pass them by.
The Nazis marched the first two thousand Jews out of Opole. For days, Shlomo waited in the sealed ghetto for news. There was nothing, not even a rumor. Then, on May 10, the Nazis pounced again, this time trapping the rest of the Jews, including Shlomo and his family. The Germans herded everyone into the town square, piled the old, the sick, and the children into carts, and ordered the others into a column of four abreast. As the half-starved Jews began to march northeast, they heard the shots of the Nazis executing the Judenrat and the Jewish Ghetto Police.
Shlomo walked close to the front of the column with Moses, Jankus, and Nojeth. The Nazis, in cars, on horseback, or on motorbikes, kept the column moving — a silent cortege marching to the rhythm of hoofbeats and motors, the shrill cries of whistles, and orders shouted in Polish and German. Occasionally, as the column passed farm after farm tinted green with promise, a gunshot would shatter the peace of the spring morning. Whispers floated up and down the line: “They’re shooting stragglers. Keep moving.”
An older Jew a few rows ahead of Shlomo began to slow, first swaying slightly in the sun, then missing a step here and there, at last faltering. A Nazi on a motorbike raced up and jerked the man to the ground. Pulling his pistol, he shot the Jew in the neck and remounted his bike as if he had just killed a lame horse. Instinctively, Shlomo straightened up and put more bounce into his step.
At noon, a German blew his whistle and shouted, “Halt!” The Nazis lunched while the Jews stood in the sun. After a rest, the Germans began to play games. They took into the woods several wagons filled with children and the old and sick. There were screams and shots. Then silence. Terror gripped the column of Jews. What was going on? Where were they going? Why the shooting? Those in the remaining wagons sobbed or looked into space, eyes glazed with fear or madness. But the Nazis weren’t finished. They walked up and down the column, yanking out the best-dressed men and women. At the side of the road, they shot them and auctioned off their clothes to the Poles. The highest bidders stripped the Jews, leaving their corpses to rot in the sun.
After lunch, another whistle, and the cortege continued northeast. Along the way, Shlomo saw hundreds of Poles in wagons or resting on hoes in the fields, watching with curiosity, some even smiling. By nightfall, the exhausted column from Opole had marched into a barbed-wire pen next to the train station in Naleczow.
People frantically searched for members of their families, hugging, kissing, or crying as they found a father and a mother, or learned that a son and a sister had been murdered on the way. Shlomo was lucky; his entire family had survived the day. The Poles of Naleczow came to the pen to sell bottles of water for gold and jewelry, and the barbed wires vibrated like cello strings with the rumble of Jews reciting Kaddish, the prayer for the dead.
It was the worst day Shlomo had ever had. It must get better, he argued with himself. He would probably ride the rest of the way to wherever he was going. A work camp, probably. That was why the old, the sick, the children, and those who couldn’t keep up were shot. It made terrible sense. The Germans wanted only those who could work. He and his family were still strong. They would survive. He was sure of it. He huddled near them on the ground, for the comfort of closeness, and waited for morning.