“So we remained, the pair of us. Every day I prayed for myself, for him, and for Israel. I dared to bring Feiga’s name to my lips, pleading. He brought to me from his takings, and saved me twice from prisoners who wanted to slaughter me for my portion of soup. So small, he was, and so bold. A savage. At the end of every day he checked, making sure I hadn’t forgotten to pray for him. I did not know what sort of a trap I had fallen into, and did not give it much thought because my body was surviving thanks to another radish, another bit of soup, another potato. Many times, when the food was in my stomach, I grew terrified of this partner, a thief and a robber — how had I joined up with this burglar? But hunger came and pierced through my thoughts, and when Rothschild passed me a potato I did not ask where it came from, whether from the prisoners’ kitchen or the jailors’ kitchen or the hoard of another miserable prisoner. I grabbed it and ate.
“One day there was a special roll-call. There were shouts, and a group of us was sent to work in the woods. There, we knew, death was waiting. You did not come back from working in the woods with those villains. I was to be annexed to the group, separated from fortunate Rothschild. I had already began marching with the rows of people, extremely frightened, when suddenly Rothschild slid into our group and squeezed in next to me. ‘Right behind you, Rabbi!’ I no longer knew who this Rothschild was — a villain or a righteous man. For he had sentenced himself to death.
“After many hours of walking, we were hurried into a wooded area and ordered to chop down the trees. Our hands grasped dull axes and broken saws, and the supervisors made sure the work was done according to certain rules and with the requisite energy. Every so often, one of the supervisors lost his patience, burst into the group, chose himself a victim, and that victim had no recourse. Why did they not shoot us and be done with it? Who can tell. For days, they worked us from morning to night. They themselves were bored. The woods made them irritable and we paid the price. We bowed our heads and continued to work. There was no Adler to come to my help here. Rothschild, in the woods, was also waning. We were both losing our strength. Around us people collapsed, unresponsive to thrashes, beatings. Anything was better than another hour of work. Each one who gave up his life, we regretted, because we would have to carry his body back to the camp. The Germans could not tolerate inaccurate numbers or a discrepancy between the number that set off and the number that returned.
“Rothschild, it turns out, was not idling. Every night when we were brought back to the camp, shattered, he did not lie down on his bed as I did, one foot in the grave. He ran around stirring things up, investigating, lobbying. A few days later he found himself a job in the kitchen and was also able to get me out of the woods group and back to the boot-marchers. One night he woke me up and dragged me out of the hut, unafraid of the supervisor and the SS outside. He stealthily gave me a piece of meat, a real piece of meat, which if not for the freezing cold would have probably sent a stench throughout the entire camp. I swallowed it. My stomach ached for two days, having forgotten the taste of meat. And the pain, well. Nu, like a new baby that keeps you from sleeping. Like Yariv, your Yariv, when he was born. He wouldn’t let you sleep, but the joy, the joy!”
(Suddenly, my Yariv, in the middle of the camps.)
“And of course, he said, ‘Don’t forget to pray for me, Rabbi.’ He took me back to the hut but did not go in. For Rothschild, night was the time for doing business. He was always busy with intrigues and commerce. As if he meant to get rich in this place. For one whole month he tormented himself with a major secret transaction. He twitched on his cot at night, hitting and kicking the planks. He hit me too, thrashing this way and that. He was seeking reprieve from the calculations he labored over all day, skipping among his confidants, hiding, helping, bribing, slipping away. I was not let in on the secret and had no idea what kind of transaction could be so worthy of these torments. Apart from life, what asset could he gain here? Perhaps that was his business. Life. Saving his own life in some way. Escaping was not his intention. Not a simple escape. He was derisive of escape plans, and often mocked some poor garrulous rookie boasting of his idea. He would tell him dismissively, ‘Nu, so you escape. What then? What afterwards?’ Perhaps Rothschild was plotting a large-scale plan. What he was scheming, I do not know. But one day it was all over. His strength suddenly ran out. He went back to the little transactions, a stub of salami here, a potato there, cigarettes. At night his sleep was restful again.
“More than anything, Rothschild looked to Cell Block 18, where the Germans had built a sophisticated printing house to print counterfeit bills in other currencies. The printing house ignited a flame in Rothschild’s eyes. All his instincts fired up for the chance to get himself a job there. He talked with this one, debated with the other. Walked alongside the fence at night, returned excitedly from hasty meetings. He waited expectantly for a conversation, just a few words, a partner to arrive. Truly like a suitor and a lover. Yes, even in a creature such as Rothschild there was a manifestation of love.
“But before he managed to establish a role for himself in Cell Block 18, he had already jumped on another opportunity. A rumor was going around that soon a group of prisoners would be evacuated from Sachsenhausen. Where to? That was unclear. Perhaps, like other times, to the nearby woods to be shot in the head. But perhaps elsewhere. Rothschild considered the opportunity from all points of view, and decided to get himself into the transport. He informed me that he had put my name down for this corrupt business too. As if he could not imagine leaving for a new place without the man who prayed for him.
“I was terrified. What was I doing with a murderous character like this? How had I gotten mixed up with him? But when the rumor turned into an actual transport, and the list was real, and both of our names were on it, I joined him without a word — what life did I have without Rothschild? And that was how we arrived at Dora-Mittelbau camp.
“We were in that hell for only a few weeks. Rothschild soon realized he had struck a foul bargain. After our welcome, which included roll-call, lashings and punishments, we were thrown into rock caves. That was the camp. Entirely made of dark, stifling tunnels. There we had to dig tunnels for the Germans to store their secret missiles. Not that we knew that. We only knew that we were digging from morning till evening, no food, horrendous conditions, without any light. They did not let us see the light of day. We worked and slept and ate in the tunnels. For our intestinal needs, the Germans built for us, in their mercy, a wonderful kind of facility. Fuel barrels cut in half, which we were invited to fill up to our hearts’ content. Apparently there was no shortage of empty barrels throughout the German Reich, but we were given only a few, so as not to spoil us. As if they were saying, you’re not getting fed anyway — how could you have any excrement? There were very few barrels and they were always overflowing. We stepped in human waste. People gave up all remnants of human dignity and left their waste wherever they happened to crouch. The aqueducts filled with the smell of excrement and a strong odor of grease and dust.
“You know, there are almost no accounts of Dora-Mittelbau camp. Why is that? Because there are so few survivors fortunate enough to be able to tell what happened there. Every day people dropped dead by the dozens and the hundreds. You cannot imagine how murderous and terrible that place was. Rothschild realized immediately that he had made a bad move, and, incredibly, he discovered that in a nearby camp they needed metal workers. Right there and then he became a metal artisan, pushing himself under the kapo’s nose just in time so some other prisoner wouldn’t be taken instead. They took ten prisoners, including the metal artisan Yosef Ingberg of Bochnia. There is no way of knowing what Rothschild did to get me onto that list, but he did not forget me, he did not leave me in that awful cemetery Dora-Mittelbau. Cursed is the world in which camps such as Dora-Mittelbau are created to kill human beings.