Naturally, the scars of war weren’t as apparent as they were in Europe, but now and then I’d see a man with an empty suit jacket sleeve or a young man with crutches instead of legs.
Work was tough to get then. There was a depression on. Most jobs created by the war had vanished with the victory. Many GI’s stepped back into their old jobs while many more pounded the pavement alongside me. There were times, as I stood at bus stops, that I kicked myself for leaving such a plum job back in France.
Finally, I got hired at the BB Pen Company in Hollywood as a maintenance man, which meant I did a little of everything.
Every so often someone would notice the tattoo on my left arm and ask what it meant. A few would ask me more questions, but most didn’t care. It was painfully obvious that a majority of Americans knew very little about the 11 million men, women, and children who passed through the concentration camps. They were more concerned about the boys who died on Okinawa and other Pacific Islands that no one had ever heard of before and their country’s devastating new weapon.
On the swing shift one night at BB, this riveter—a tall blonde who was in her forties—asked me if it was rough in the Nazi camps.
“You have no idea,” I told her.
“Did you get enough to eat?” she asked.
When I told her I was half my body weight at the end of the war, she paused for a moment then said, “Yes, it was rough here, too. All we had to eat was chicken.”
I nodded, thinking that if in Monowitz somebody had given me the choice between a night with Miss America or a chicken leg, I’d… Well, by now you know the answer to that one.
Riding the bus back to Santa Monica that night I decided to put to paper what I’d gone through, a belated diary if you may, so I wouldn’t forget. That was the fall of 1947. I’d write whenever I got the chance—on the bus to and from work, on my lunch breaks, and on a bench overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I wrote it in French. I could speak English pretty well, but the written language gave me fits. I wrote on notepads that my mother would then type. I titled it An Odyssey of a Pajama.
In 1952, I paid a UCLA French-language student, a friend of a friend of my mother, two hundred dollars, and five months later my Odyssey was translated, but I was disheartened that somewhere, somehow, my manuscript had lost its meaning. So along with working two jobs and the seeming disinterest in the Nazis’ atrocities, I put the manuscript in a drawer. Living life just seemed more important than retracing the past.
In 1954, I allowed a girlfriend, a librarian, to read my manuscript, and she convinced me to submit it to the Saturday Evening Post and Harper’s. Their rejection letters sent my Odyssey back in the drawer. And there it sat through the 1950s and the birth of the cold war, and the start of my career as a cine-technician, repairing and rebuilding film projectors, cameras, and developers. There it sat through the 1960s and the civil rights marches, the Vietnam War, and Suharto, the 1970s and Pol Pot and Pinochet, and the 1980s and Central American death squads, and countless massacres of innocent life in Africa.
The Holocaust was now a household word, and many brave survivors had already done much to ensure that the world would never forget. I still wanted to weigh in, but to be blunt, I didn’t think anyone cared to hear the story of an atheist red triangle. I loathed the skinheads and neo-Nazis I saw on TV who proclaimed that the Holocaust never happened. Those morons couldn’t tell you what continent Germany is on, and they exalt a coward who committed suicide after ordering brainwashed youths to their slaughter on the barricaded streets of Berlin. More than anyone else, those bigots made me want to get my manuscript out of the drawer and into the hands of someone who would help me shape it so it could sit on a library shelf.
By the fall of 2001 I was retired but working part-time as an usher at the Cannon Theatre in Beverly Hills. I discovered that the brooding young man behind the concession stand was a writer. I hadn’t spoken to Brian—he just didn’t seem the type to bother with idle chitchat—but when I told him I’d written about my time in the camps, he stopped setting up the cookies and candies. He said he’d really like to read it, and the next night I brought him my only copy.
The next time I saw Brian he told me he’d read my manuscript in one night and wanted to help me develop and expand the manuscript so it could grab a publisher’s attention. He convinced me that this wouldn’t be an insurmountable task, but it was a tough road for both of us. The manuscript needed more description and explanation. I struggled with memories and feelings that I had long buried as Brian, a perfectionist, agonized over the choice of words and sentences. Having done his research, Brian asked the right questions and I filled in the gaps. Three years later my Odyssey became Scheisshaus Luck.
We have never learned from history, so I hate to admit that I’m not optimistic that the genocide and enslavement on the scope orches-trated by the Nazis will never be repeated. “The god with a moustache” didn’t invent concentration camps and genocide. I have read that he used the U.S. government’s handling of Native Americans as one of his blueprints. The Jewish people will never let it happen to them again. Yet we all know that the extermination of innocent human beings designated as “the other”—whether because of their skin, their religion or lack thereof, their politics, their ancestral tribe, or just because they’re the most convenient scapegoat—continues unabated and unchecked. That doesn’t mean the voices of reason and the victims of atrocities should ever stuff their thoughts and recollections in a drawer. We’ll never find utopia, but that doesn’t mean we should stop seeking it. Just maybe, some day, the human race will conquer its learning disability.
AFTERWORD
Joseph Robert White,
University of Maryland University College, Adelphi, Maryland
Although there are many French gentile accounts of Dora, the same cannot be said of Auschwitz-Monowitz. Two Jewish testimonies, by Georges Wellers and Paul Steinberg, have been published, but only Steinberg’s is available in English. For this camp, reliable gentile accounts of any nationality are rare. Most were contributed by Poles, in a few instances by prisoners allegedly complicit in the elimination of Jews. Pierre Berg’s account, therefore, makes a welcome addition to the Monowitz testimonies.{1}
Mr. Berg attributes his arrest and survival to “Scheisshaus luck.”
If not eloquently expressed, it undoubtedly captures the feelings of many surviving victims. Too often, the general public and even historians insult survivors with the impossible question, “Why did you survive?” Mr. Berg’s emphasis upon the terrible misfortune leading to his arrest and to the rare moments of good fortune give a sense of the contingencies that always lurked beyond a prisoner’s control under the Nazi regime. As his account shows, confusion over a prisoner’s number or the mix-up over a brand-new shirt made the difference between life and death.{2}
Mr. Berg’s privileges derived mainly from his facility with languages. Unlike Primo Levi, who passed a life-or-death interview in academic German at the I.G. Auschwitz Buna Polymerization Detachment, Mr. Berg spoke the language fluently, after frequent childhood vacations in Germany. His multilingual experience underscored Levi’s memorable description of the I.G. Carbide Tower as a modern-day “Tower of Babel.” Besides French and German, Mr. Berg spoke Italian, English, and Spanish on the I.G. building site. His technical skills and problem-solving abilities likewise were fortuitous, although he endured months of backbreaking work in labor crews.{3}