Dov wrote out six duplications of the signature and returned the pad. “Which one of those did you write?” Dov asked.
Half a dozen guards peeked over the doctor’s shoulder and stared in amazement. The doctor looked at Dov again and then whispered to a guard who walked off.
“Stand over here to one side,” the doctor snapped.
Dov stood by the desk and watched the line of people move toward him. He looked at them being condemned at the rate of four a minute.
Dov looked into the eyes of the guards and he looked at their truncheons and at the snarling dogs. He glanced at the right-hand exit and whistled a shaky tune half beneath his breath.
Five minutes passed. Ten minutes passed. The line coming in from the platform seemed never to end.
The guard returned with another man who was obviously a high-ranking officer, Dov thought, for his chest was filled with medals. The doctor handed the pad of signatures to the officer, who studied it for a full minute.
“Where did you learn this?” the officer snapped.
“In the ghetto at Warsaw.”
“What kind of work do you do?”
“Passports, travel cards, any kind of paper. I can duplicate anything.”
“Follow me.”
Dov passed through the left-hand door. As he got into the car and drove off toward Auschwitz a Main he seemed to remember Mundek’s words: “One of the Landaus must live through this.” In a few moments the car passed through the
main gate of Auschwitz. The sign over the entrance of the camp read: labor liberates.
The main compound was set in an area that wallowed in mud. There was acre after acre of frame wooden barracks which were isolated from each other by high walls of electrified barbed wire.
These acres of barracks fed manpower into some thirty subsidiary slave-labor camps. Each inmate wore a black and white striped uniform and an identification color on his arm and left breast. A pink badge was worn by homosexuals, a black badge by field whores, a green badge by criminals, violet badges for clergymen, red for Russians and Poles, and the traditional Star of David for the Jews.
Dov received another badge at Auschwitz. It was a tattooed number on his left forearm. Dov Landau was now a black and white striped Jew number 359195.
labor liberates. Dov Landau celebrated his fourteenth birthday in Auschwitz and his gift had been his life. He was quite fortunate for of all the tens of thousands of prisoners at Auschwitz, Dov’s small group of forgers were among the elite. His particular section was given the task of engraving and printing counterfeit United States one-and five-dollar bills for use by German agents in western countries.
After a short time at Auschwitz Dov wondered if it would not have been better to have died at Birkenau.
Here the inmates were underfed, worked into living skeletons, and stacked on shelves for their five hours’ sleep a night. Disease ran wild. Prisoners were tortured, driven insane, beaten, and degraded, and every known atrocity conceived by man was committed.
Here each morning found dozens of inmates who had hanged themselves by their own belts or thrown themselves on the quick mercy of the electric wire. The flogging blocks were in constant use and naked buttocks were lashed in public at roll calls.
Here the penal colony lived in single black cells and were fed only oversalted vegetables to induce unquenchable thirst.
Here in Block X, Nazi doctors Wirthe, Schumann and Clau-berg kept the human raw material for their pseudo-scientific experiments. Polish prisoner Dr. Wladislaw Dering performed castrations and ovarectomies ordered by his German masters as part of their insane program to find a way to sterilize the entire Jewish race.
This was Auschwitz and this was Dov Landau’s gift of life.
LABOR LIBERATES.
“One of the Landaus must live through this,” Mundek had said. What did Mundek look like? He could hardly remember. Or Ruth or Rebecca or his mother and father? He could not
remember his father at all. The memories grew hazier and hazier until he could remember nothing but death and terror and he did not know that there was a life where death and terror did not exist.
A year passed. The trains came in and out of Birkenau. The deaths at the labor camps around Auschwitz from torture and disease and hunger were nearly as appalling as those at Birkenau. Somehow he managed to cling to his sanity and that animal instinct to survive.
Even in this blackest of pits there were some rays of hope. There was the prison orchestra. There was a flourishing underground and they had a radio receiver. Even here a man could find a way to get to a woman. SUMMER 1944
There was a strange new stirring throughout Auschwitz. Dov could often look into the sky and see Russian bombers, and the secret radio began reporting German defeats. Hope, however dim, found its way through the muck and torture. Each new Allied victory sent the German guards into a murderous frenzy until the prisoners almost dreaded word of German defeats. At Birkenau activity speeded up until the gas chambers were in operation almost around the elock. AUTUMN 1944
The feeling now was that Germany was going to lose the war. They were being beaten on all fronts. But as they lost on the battlefield the appetite for extermination grew. Colonel Eichmann threw every possible resource into finishing his mission of genocide. OCTOBER 1944
The Sonderkommandos at Birkenau staged a wild uprising in which one of the crematoriums was blown up. Each day in new uprisings the Sonderkommandos snatched SS guards and their dogs and threw them into the crematoriums. At last every Sonderkommando was executed and a call went out for a new group from Auschwitz.
His back to the wall, Eichmann made a final gesture. Twenty thousand Jews, the cream of Jewry, who had been under guaranteed protection at the Czech camp of Theresienstadt, were ordered transferred to Birkenau for extermination.
The Jewish death toll at Birkenau mounted and mounted until the count reached nearly a million Poles, fifty thousand Germans, a hundred thousand Dutch, a hundred and fifty thousand French, fifty thousand Austrians and Czechs, fifty thousand Greeks, two hundred and fifty thousand Bulgarians, Italians, Yugoslavs, and Rumanians, and another quarter of a million Hungarians.
Each day during the macabre race for total annihilation came a call for more and more Sonderkommandos.
NOVEMBER 1944
The counterfeit shop was abruptly closed down in Auschwitz and everyone was sent to Birkenau to work as Sonderkommandos.
It was Dov’s new job to wait in the corridor of the gas chambers until a gassing was over. He and other Sonderkommandos stood by until the shrieks of agony and the frantic pounding on the iron doors stopped. They waited another fifteen minutes for the gas to clear. Then the doors of the gas chambers would be opened. Dov had to go to work with ropes and hooks to untangle the hideous tangle of arms and legs and drag them out for reshipment to the crematorium. After the bodies were removed he had to enter the chamber and hose it down and get the room ready for the next batch of victims who were already in the dressing rooms, being prepared.
For three days Dov worked at this gory task. Every ounce of his strength was sapped, and now that stubborn, defiant will to live that had carried him through seemed to fade. He dreaded that instant when the iron chamber door opened and he was face to face with the tangle of corpses. He dreaded it worse than the thought of the ghetto or the sewers. He knew he would not be able to stand to see that horrible sight much more often.
Then a startling thing happened!
The Germans ordered the crematorium ovens dismantled and the gas chambers blown up! The Allies were advancing from the west and the Russians were coining from the east. Now the Nazis made frantic efforts to cover up their crimes. Pits of bodies were exhumed all over Poland and the bones crushed and scattered. Desperately needed transportation was used to get the Jews inside Germany.