“Alles raus! Alles raus!” the SS ordered. I peeked over the rim. We were stopped at the foot of a steep hill, and the guards were beginning to line what Häftlinge were left next to a trail leading up to barbed-wire and pine tree shrouded barracks. This I presumed was our new “Pitchi Poi.” The guards had their backs turned to the morgue cars so it was easy for Hubert and me to slip out and fall in with the others. We all threw ourselves on the ground and greedily ate the snow. Glancing back at the train, I saw that every car had practically become a morgue. It looked as if we had lost about 80 percent of our fellow “pajamas.”
We stumbled along the train track, which disappeared into a tunnel at the foot of the hill. The tunnel’s entrance was camouflaged with a canopy of netting woven with greenery and guarded by a fortified pillbox. Next to the tunnel was a pile of gigantic cylindrical aluminum sheets that looked like cigars sliced in half. They had been meticulously camouflaged. I couldn’t imagine what they could be used for, but my mind wasn’t altogether clear. I could barely hold up my head.
The guards ordered us onto a trail that veered away from the tunnel’s entrance, then zigzagged up to the camp. It took everything I had to keep Hubert on his feet as we went up those switchbacks.
This camp seemed newer, smaller, and better constructed than Monowitz. At least from the outside, it appeared that the Blocks were built for human beings, not animals. I wondered if the Germans had planned this to be a vacation resort after their victory.
We were immediately ushered to the showers. Once again, all our clothing was taken from us. Bye, bye, wool sweaters. Again, a shower that went from freezing to scalding. From the bitching of the Häftlinge from Majdanek and Gleiwitz, I realized that every single camp had the same design: to kill Untermenschen by inches.
When we came out of the showers they lined us up for a “selection.” I held my breath as Hubert threw out his chest and summoned his last reserves of strength, but they shoved him among the Muselmänner, or rather, the super-Muselmänner. There were tears in my eyes as I watched him totter away. My puny chest was filled with whimpers of protest, and somewhere in my numb brain I felt the urge to go after him. But I knew that opening my mouth or running after Hubert would just get me killed, too. So, I stood silent like a good Untermensch.
I had helped Hubert to the limit of my endurance, when I could barely stand myself, and it hadn’t been enough. The boches had pressed the last drop of blood and sweat from my friend, and now they were going to fertilize some cabbage field with his ashes. For the first time I grasped the hell of watching family, loved ones, trudge toward Birkenau’s belching chimneys. As we were being led into this new camp, I had seen a brick chimney. I knew the SS had shut down the Auschwitz crematoriums in November. Were they still burning here? I couldn’t assume they weren’t. That was hope, and the longer I treaded in striped “pajamas,” the more I believed hope was a cancer.
Dressed now in light summer “pajamas” and felt slippers, we were herded through the snow to a large frame building. The sign at the door read Kino, the German word for “cinema.” We sat down on rows of wooden benches. To keep myself from dwelling on Hubert, I studied the faces of the men around me. Oh, we were a sorry lot. Even the green triangles who had left Auschwitz in much better shape than the rest of us were now faint shadows. We had survived, but it was a hollow victory. We were still breathing as slaves behind the barbed wire that encircled a camp called Dora, and me without my vieille noix (“Old Nut”) to share my suffering with.
Barrels of soup were brought in. It was the first warm food we had received in two weeks. As we slurped up the soup, rumors circulated that there was an underground factory in the tunnel and that only those who were craftsmen in metalworking would be kept in the camp. The hell if I was going to go on another Nazi joy ride, so when the SS asked, I told them I was an electrician.
PART IV
DORA
CHAPTER 18
“Links, zwei, drei, vier; Vordermann und Seitenrichtung!” (Left, two, three, four; straighten up front and side!) the Kapo called off. After a week in quarantine, I tottered more than marched down the hill that I had climbed with Hubert. Near the camp’s gate, a potpourri of musicians from different camps struggled to play harmoniously.
The virtuosos in Monowitz had spoiled my ears. Unfortunately, most of them had arrived here as corpses. The kettledrum’s beating still echoed in my ears when I reached the bottom of the hill.
We followed the Kapo along the train tracks to the main tunnel.
About a hundred yards away was a sister tunnel that also had tracks coming out of it. A maze of “blast walls”—large blocks of concrete—were positioned in front of both entrances. They were designed to protect the factory inside the tunnel from the shrapnel and conflagration of Allied air raids. These heavy obstacles had to be removed every time a train brought in supplies.
A pleasant rush of warm air greeted us as we marched under the canopy of camouflaged netting and into the main tunnel. Boxcars with signs reading Achtung Sprengstoff! (Beware of Explosives!) blocked our path. “Zieht die Baüche ein!” (Pull in your stomachs!) joked the Kapo.
Hell, he was the only one who needed to suck in his belly. I hugged the tunnel wall and squeezed by the freight. In front of me were flat cars loaded with the aluminum hulls that had so intrigued me when I arrived. These sixty-five foot hulls were fully assembled, making them look like metal dirigibles. I felt as if I had stepped into a Jules Verne novel. Did the Nazis want to send us “undesirables” into space, using our ashes to turn the moon into one big cabbage patch? On racks near the flatcars sat the guts of these vessels, intricately contorted assemblages of pipes, hoses, sphere-shaped tanks, and valves. From my physics studies I knew that these were jet pro-pulsion engines. Whatever their purpose, I thought, these metal dirigibles must be drastically important to the Nazis for them to be built in such an elaborate underground factory.
A row of hanging lights stretched down the tunnel as far as I could see. The Kapo led us past a series of immense transverse tunnels set up as workshops. The bursting of explosive rivets that came from the workshop assembling the hulls sounded like Bastille Day fireworks. I was thankful the boches hadn’t drafted me as a riveter.
No amount of cotton could save one’s eardrums from sixteen hours of that racket. From other workshops came the shrieking of lathes, the hissing of paint guns, and the rattling of milling machines. We passed ten tunnels before we came to the relative calm of the electricians’ shop.
Unlike the Elektriker Kommando in Auschwitz, there was no barrage of questions from the Kapo, no impromptu test of my knowledge and skill. I was just assigned to a workbench and given a color-coded schematic. My job was to assemble and mount switches, gages, and instruments on panels of Winidur, a German PVC. It was all relatively new to me, but to my own astonishment and relief I managed well. I shouldn’t have been that surprised. As a kid I took toys apart to see what made them tick, and spent hours in my room with my Erector set. In high school, physics had been my favorite subject, while at home I happily did all the electrical repairs. In Buna I watched the electricians, asked the right questions, and became familiar with the German names for their tools and their symbols for volts, amps, and ohms. In the pipe shop, I had even helped solder circuit boards subcontracted by some unknown German company. Now, thankfully, it was all paying off.