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Here is another of my stamp articles, which Bryan
requested.
The Philatelic Tourist
By Stephen G. Esrati
To the tunnel of death
I have been a stamp collector since I was a six-year-old in Tel Aviv and have been a philatelic journalist since 1955. Through stamps, I have seen the world, and through stamps I have experienced and written about the defeat of Italy's Fourth Army in the 1917 Battle of the Isonzo, the French breakout at Bir Hakim in North Africa, the treachery of King Hussein ibn Talal of Jordan, and of life and death-mostly death-in Buchenwald.
I have invented FM radio with Edwin Howard Armstrong, made death rays with Nikola Tesla, fought a secret war between Peru and Ecuador in the jungles of the upper Amazon during the making of "Fitzcarraldo," and watched British Petroleum overthrow the Shah.
I told the story of the overthrow of Salvador Allende Gossens in Chile according to Fidel Castro, and, later, according to the American physician who did the autopsy.
In other words, I have traveled and have read with an eye toward developing a stamp article. If something was on a stamp it was a potential stamp column.
In 1979 I urged my family to take a sentimental journey with me to northeastern Italy, where I had served in the U.S. Army. Much that I remembered was no longer there, but I found the material for my novel, Comrades, Avenge Us. And it wasn't even on a stamp.
Before leaving Cleveland, I had read tourist pamphlets sent out by the Yugoslav National Tourist Office. My attention was caught by a description of a tunnel between Austria and Yugoslavia that, the brochure said, "was built by German prisoners."
So we flew to Slovenia, rented a car, and crossed over into Italy. After a few days, we went north into Austria and headed for the tunnel through the Karawanken, (also called the Carnic Alps). I was eager to see something good that the Germans had accomplished.
On the Austrian side, there was no marker, no sign that the tunnel had not been built in the ordinary way. But when we came out on the other side, we found the remains of one of the deadliest German concentration camps, the so-called South Camp at Loibl (German for Ljubelj). Many of the former hutments bore inscriptions in many of the languages of Europe. There was even a small crematorium to get rid of the remains of those who worked here and froze to death.
Across the road, Yugoslavia had built a powerful memorial. One part was made up of five steles arranged like a five-pointed star. Each bore a chiseled inscription in a different language that had been made visible with red paint inside each letter. The red paint had been scratched out of the German inscription, making it nearly impossible to read.
"Here stood, from 1941 to 1945, the annex to the Nazi death camp Mauthausen-Ljubelj. Here suffered and died political deportees from France, Poland, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy and Yugoslavia."
When I got home, I tried to find information about the Ljubelj Tunnel. There was hardly any until André Lacaze's Der Tunnel appeared. It was translated into English as The Tunnel at Loibl Pass (Doubleday, 1981) and was listed by libraries as fiction. But the only fiction in this most revolting of books about Nazi cruelty was the name of the author.
In 1983 I went to Paris for a stamp show and visited the secretive headquarters of the survivors of Mauthausen at 31 Boulevard Saint-Germain, where I obtained a small brochure but was unable to learn who Lacaze was.
The Ljubelj Tunnel was not on a stamp. I could write no stamp column about it. So I used it in my novel, Comrades, Avenge Us, and dedicated the book to the memory of the Allied POWs (not political deportees) who slaved and died in its construction. One of my fictitious characters escaped from Ljubelj.
In 1995, Josef Zausnig wrote another book, Der Loibl-Tunnel: Das vergessene KZ an der Südgrenze Österreichs, (Drava Verlag, Celovec-Klagenfurt, Austria), about the tunnel, complete with pictures taken during its tortured construction under the aegis of the huge Austrian construction conglomerate Universale.
By Stephen G. Esrati
To the tunnel of death
I have been a stamp collector since I was a six-year-old in Tel Aviv and have been a philatelic journalist since 1955. Through stamps, I have seen the world, and through stamps I have experienced and written about the defeat of Italy's Fourth Army in the 1917 Battle of the Isonzo, the French breakout at Bir Hakim in North Africa, the treachery of King Hussein ibn Talal of Jordan, and of life and death-mostly death-in Buchenwald.
I have invented FM radio with Edwin Howard Armstrong, made death rays with Nikola Tesla, fought a secret war between Peru and Ecuador in the jungles of the upper Amazon during the making of "Fitzcarraldo," and watched British Petroleum overthrow the Shah.
I told the story of the overthrow of Salvador Allende Gossens in Chile according to Fidel Castro, and, later, according to the American physician who did the autopsy.
In other words, I have traveled and have read with an eye toward developing a stamp article. If something was on a stamp it was a potential stamp column.
In 1979 I urged my family to take a sentimental journey with me to northeastern Italy, where I had served in the U.S. Army. Much that I remembered was no longer there, but I found the material for my novel, Comrades, Avenge Us. And it wasn't even on a stamp.
Before leaving Cleveland, I had read tourist pamphlets sent out by the Yugoslav National Tourist Office. My attention was caught by a description of a tunnel between Austria and Yugoslavia that, the brochure said, "was built by German prisoners."
So we flew to Slovenia, rented a car, and crossed over into Italy. After a few days, we went north into Austria and headed for the tunnel through the Karawanken, (also called the Carnic Alps). I was eager to see something good that the Germans had accomplished.
On the Austrian side, there was no marker, no sign that the tunnel had not been built in the ordinary way. But when we came out on the other side, we found the remains of one of the deadliest German concentration camps, the so-called South Camp at Loibl (German for Ljubelj). Many of the former hutments bore inscriptions in many of the languages of Europe. There was even a small crematorium to get rid of the remains of those who worked here and froze to death.
Across the road, Yugoslavia had built a powerful memorial. One part was made up of five steles arranged like a five-pointed star. Each bore a chiseled inscription in a different language that had been made visible with red paint inside each letter. The red paint had been scratched out of the German inscription, making it nearly impossible to read.
"Here stood, from 1941 to 1945, the annex to the Nazi death camp Mauthausen-Ljubelj. Here suffered and died political deportees from France, Poland, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy and Yugoslavia."
When I got home, I tried to find information about the Ljubelj Tunnel. There was hardly any until André Lacaze's Der Tunnel appeared. It was translated into English as The Tunnel at Loibl Pass (Doubleday, 1981) and was listed by libraries as fiction. But the only fiction in this most revolting of books about Nazi cruelty was the name of the author.
In 1983 I went to Paris for a stamp show and visited the secretive headquarters of the survivors of Mauthausen at 31 Boulevard Saint-Germain, where I obtained a small brochure but was unable to learn who Lacaze was.
The Ljubelj Tunnel was not on a stamp. I could write no stamp column about it. So I used it in my novel, Comrades, Avenge Us, and dedicated the book to the memory of the Allied POWs (not political deportees) who slaved and died in its construction. One of my fictitious characters escaped from Ljubelj.
In 1995, Josef Zausnig wrote another book, Der Loibl-Tunnel: Das vergessene KZ an der Südgrenze Österreichs, (Drava Verlag, Celovec-Klagenfurt, Austria), about the tunnel, complete with pictures taken during its tortured construction under the aegis of the huge Austrian construction conglomerate Universale.
Here is how I told the story in my
novel:
The Loibl Pass, which links Austria to Yugoslavia, is at an altitude of 5,400 feet, making it im-passable much of the year as snow piles up in the Alps. The idea of building a tunnel had first been proposed in 1679, and again in 1725. An all-weather tunnel was started and abandoned in 1843.
In 1942, Hitler ordered Dr. Friedrich Rainer, the Nazi Gauleiter of Carinthia, to start con-struction. Hitler saw it as a vital link between two parts of his Reich [Slovenia had been annexed to Germany as Oberkrain].
The work began with civilian Slovenian and Serbian workers who had been collected at Begunje and other collection points and sent to a transit camp at Sentvid.
The Loibl Pass, which links Austria to Yugoslavia, is at an altitude of 5,400 feet, making it im-passable much of the year as snow piles up in the Alps. The idea of building a tunnel had first been proposed in 1679, and again in 1725. An all-weather tunnel was started and abandoned in 1843.
In 1942, Hitler ordered Dr. Friedrich Rainer, the Nazi Gauleiter of Carinthia, to start con-struction. Hitler saw it as a vital link between two parts of his Reich [Slovenia had been annexed to Germany as Oberkrain].
The work began with civilian Slovenian and Serbian workers who had been collected at Begunje and other collection points and sent to a transit camp at Sentvid.
A camp was built on the Yugoslav side of
the mountains, but Partisans led by Stane Zagar destroyed it. Then the
camp was rebuilt and the first prisoners were transferred there from
Mauthausen. These consisted almost entirely of Soviet prisoners of war
and French political internees, including Marcel [a fictitious
character in my book]. There was also a large group of Spanish
Loyalists, who had been rounded up by the Germans after the Spaniards
had found refuge from Francisco Franco in France.
Among those who died at the tunnel were
thirty-four Americans. [34 Americans are known to have been murdered
in Mauthausen. Ljubel was part of Mauthausen. I changed things
around.] It has never been deter-mined who they were, but Marcel
believed most of them to have been airmen.
Zagar's Partisans attacked the camp for the second time in 1943. That time, the attack failed.
Running the tunnel project, with full knowledge of the slave-labor conditions in the icy camp, was Hoch- und Tiefbau Gesellschaft Universale, a Vienna construction company, the prime contractor.
Marcel called Universale an exploiter of slave labor. Marcel wanted Universale put in the dock. [This scene takes place at the Nuremberg trials.] It never was, and is still one of Austria's leading construction companies.
"Universale grew rich by killing us. It was paid so much per inmate for upkeep. It did not spend it on us. 'Let them die of starvation,' Universale thought. 'We can always get more slaves from Mauthausen.' So we were not just subject to the horrors of the long hours of work, twelve and sometimes fifteen hours a day, but also to starvation and to the cold. You cannot imagine the cold. The wind made it worse. It was enough to freeze a man dressed warmly against the cold. We were not even allowed that.
"The only successful escape from Loibl before mine was by a Parisian criminal [the hero of Lacaze's "fiction"] who could not bear facing another winter in that hell carved in ice."
To the dungeons of Napoleon
From Ljubelj, we headed south to Lake Bohinj. Next to the Stane Zagar inn was a Yugoslav National Tourist Office. All the posters but one were in German, the clerks spoke German, the pamphlets were in German. A Dutch friend commented that the Deutschmark had triumphed by capturing Yugoslavia where the Wehrmacht had failed.
The one poster not in German said: "The Museum of Hostages is now open." I asked the clerk how to get there (I had to speak Italian because I will not speak German to non-Germans) and was given instructions. We took the road to Bled and turned off into a pretty little town, with a tall church tower overlooking a large chateau on the other side of the one street.
The chateau had been built during the Napoleonic conquest. Before the was, it had been a hospital. During the war it was the Gestapo headquarters for Oberkrain.
In front was a large statue of a kneeling man in chains. Someone had put flowers in his hands.
We found the museum in the basement and were greeted in German by a uniformed guard and ticket-taker.
We were now in the Gestapo dungeons. Hostages were held here so that if the Partisans killed one German, ten hostages were killed. Near the front desk, under glass, was a hand-written list of every hostage. Those who had been killed or deported to concentration camps were crossed out in red.
The cells were tiny, but once held a mass of humanity that was forced to remain standing all day behind a line drawn across the floor. Each cell, about eight feet wide and about fifteen feet long, had an iron door, into which hostages had scratched inscriptions.
Zagar's Partisans attacked the camp for the second time in 1943. That time, the attack failed.
Running the tunnel project, with full knowledge of the slave-labor conditions in the icy camp, was Hoch- und Tiefbau Gesellschaft Universale, a Vienna construction company, the prime contractor.
Marcel called Universale an exploiter of slave labor. Marcel wanted Universale put in the dock. [This scene takes place at the Nuremberg trials.] It never was, and is still one of Austria's leading construction companies.
"Universale grew rich by killing us. It was paid so much per inmate for upkeep. It did not spend it on us. 'Let them die of starvation,' Universale thought. 'We can always get more slaves from Mauthausen.' So we were not just subject to the horrors of the long hours of work, twelve and sometimes fifteen hours a day, but also to starvation and to the cold. You cannot imagine the cold. The wind made it worse. It was enough to freeze a man dressed warmly against the cold. We were not even allowed that.
"The only successful escape from Loibl before mine was by a Parisian criminal [the hero of Lacaze's "fiction"] who could not bear facing another winter in that hell carved in ice."
To the dungeons of Napoleon
From Ljubelj, we headed south to Lake Bohinj. Next to the Stane Zagar inn was a Yugoslav National Tourist Office. All the posters but one were in German, the clerks spoke German, the pamphlets were in German. A Dutch friend commented that the Deutschmark had triumphed by capturing Yugoslavia where the Wehrmacht had failed.
The one poster not in German said: "The Museum of Hostages is now open." I asked the clerk how to get there (I had to speak Italian because I will not speak German to non-Germans) and was given instructions. We took the road to Bled and turned off into a pretty little town, with a tall church tower overlooking a large chateau on the other side of the one street.
The chateau had been built during the Napoleonic conquest. Before the was, it had been a hospital. During the war it was the Gestapo headquarters for Oberkrain.
In front was a large statue of a kneeling man in chains. Someone had put flowers in his hands.
We found the museum in the basement and were greeted in German by a uniformed guard and ticket-taker.
We were now in the Gestapo dungeons. Hostages were held here so that if the Partisans killed one German, ten hostages were killed. Near the front desk, under glass, was a hand-written list of every hostage. Those who had been killed or deported to concentration camps were crossed out in red.
The cells were tiny, but once held a mass of humanity that was forced to remain standing all day behind a line drawn across the floor. Each cell, about eight feet wide and about fifteen feet long, had an iron door, into which hostages had scratched inscriptions.
On one cell door, we found inscriptions in
English.
My mother
Mrs. A.E. Watt
11, Thornham Rd.
Sale, Manchester, England
Nearby was his name: D.M. Watt
I wanted to write a book about Watt and about the Ljubelj Tunnel, but could learn little about Watt, despite strenuous efforts.
So I ended up writing historical fiction.
To the Buchenwald Uprising
Meanwhile, the stamp writing continued with instructions from my managing editor at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland not to write about subjects of interest only to stamp collectors. "Make it stamps in the news or the news in stamps," John Murphy said.
So I wrote about the history of Poland during the Solidarnosc uprisings, about the Falkland Islands after the Argentine invasion, and about Tesla's death ray when President Ronald Reagan proposed the "Star Wars" anti-missile defense system.
And while I was at that stamp show in Paris, I sought to establish who Carlo Schönhaar was. The East Germans put him on a stamp as a martyr of the French resistance, but there was not so much as a word about him anywhere. I had even tried two years earlier in East Berlin, going into dozens of bookstores and a library. I struck out.
But in Paris I hit pay dirt at the Museum of the Order of Liberation. The doorman found Schönhaar in his index to members of the order, and was sure he had to have been an Alsatian. But Schönhaar was neither an Alsatian nor a war hero. He was simply the child of a Nazi official who sent his kid to a French school. When the pupils staged a nonpolitical demonstration one day, the Germans broke it up and arrested all of them. All were shot at Mont Valerien, the place of execution near the American war cemetery outside Paris.
The stamp, like many East German propaganda stamps, was a lie. The stamp that really stuck in my craw was the one showing the monument to the armed inmates of Buchenwald who, the Communists said, had liberated the camp.
The statue is still there, but the West Germans have rerouted tourists so that most never get to this piece of braggadocio.
When I finally got to Buchenwald, I headed first for the statue. The parking lot had been chained shut. I parked in the road. And there it was, next to the closed-down East German tower that had replaced the Bismarck tower at the same spot. The statue, by Prof. Fritz Cremer, had been allowed to deteriorate by the West Germans, but is still a powerful lie.
Here is what I wrote about Buchenwald as a stamp column. Stars indicate subjects of stamps:
For Americans, Buchenwald presents yet another horror. American prisoners of war were held and mistreated there. (It was to check on this that I went there because my novel, Comrades, Avenge Us, deals with Nazi mistreatment of Allied POWs.) Some were eventually transferred to POW camps, but two remained among the British and Canadian POWs up to the moment when a U.S. Army reconnaissance jeep found the camp on April 11, 1945.
The jeep turned back to report. When an American column drove up the hill later, it was met by a column of armed prisoners heading for Weimar, off in pursuit of their tormentors.
Buchenwald was where French Premier Leon Blum* was held. The camp also housed other notables, the Italian Princess Mafalda of Hesse; Maria Ruhnar, a Jehovah's Witness; Fritz Thyssen, the pro-Nazi industrialist who turned against Hitler; the entire family of Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg* and the wife of Fritz Goerdeler*. Her husband was a leader in the attempt to kill Hitler.
An East German set shows three notables who were killed there: the perennial Communist presidential candidate, Ernst Thälmann*; Rudolf Breitscheid*, who proclaimed the German Republic on Nov. 9, 1918, from the balcony of Berlin's Reichstag*, and Pastor Paul Schneider*, a member of Pastor Martin Niemöller's* Confessional Church, who was tortured for 18 months until his death.
Recently, I contributed the followiing to an on-line discussion of the Holcaust:
My cousin, who has written a book about her own survival from the Holocaust (see Irene Hofstein at http://members.tripod.com/~ShibaHill ) called me last night with the greatest surprise because she had just read The Invisible Wall by W. Michael Blumenthal, President Carter's secretary of the Treasury.
My mother
Mrs. A.E. Watt
11, Thornham Rd.
Sale, Manchester, England
Nearby was his name: D.M. Watt
I wanted to write a book about Watt and about the Ljubelj Tunnel, but could learn little about Watt, despite strenuous efforts.
So I ended up writing historical fiction.
To the Buchenwald Uprising
Meanwhile, the stamp writing continued with instructions from my managing editor at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland not to write about subjects of interest only to stamp collectors. "Make it stamps in the news or the news in stamps," John Murphy said.
So I wrote about the history of Poland during the Solidarnosc uprisings, about the Falkland Islands after the Argentine invasion, and about Tesla's death ray when President Ronald Reagan proposed the "Star Wars" anti-missile defense system.
And while I was at that stamp show in Paris, I sought to establish who Carlo Schönhaar was. The East Germans put him on a stamp as a martyr of the French resistance, but there was not so much as a word about him anywhere. I had even tried two years earlier in East Berlin, going into dozens of bookstores and a library. I struck out.
But in Paris I hit pay dirt at the Museum of the Order of Liberation. The doorman found Schönhaar in his index to members of the order, and was sure he had to have been an Alsatian. But Schönhaar was neither an Alsatian nor a war hero. He was simply the child of a Nazi official who sent his kid to a French school. When the pupils staged a nonpolitical demonstration one day, the Germans broke it up and arrested all of them. All were shot at Mont Valerien, the place of execution near the American war cemetery outside Paris.
The stamp, like many East German propaganda stamps, was a lie. The stamp that really stuck in my craw was the one showing the monument to the armed inmates of Buchenwald who, the Communists said, had liberated the camp.
The statue is still there, but the West Germans have rerouted tourists so that most never get to this piece of braggadocio.
When I finally got to Buchenwald, I headed first for the statue. The parking lot had been chained shut. I parked in the road. And there it was, next to the closed-down East German tower that had replaced the Bismarck tower at the same spot. The statue, by Prof. Fritz Cremer, had been allowed to deteriorate by the West Germans, but is still a powerful lie.
Here is what I wrote about Buchenwald as a stamp column. Stars indicate subjects of stamps:
For Americans, Buchenwald presents yet another horror. American prisoners of war were held and mistreated there. (It was to check on this that I went there because my novel, Comrades, Avenge Us, deals with Nazi mistreatment of Allied POWs.) Some were eventually transferred to POW camps, but two remained among the British and Canadian POWs up to the moment when a U.S. Army reconnaissance jeep found the camp on April 11, 1945.
The jeep turned back to report. When an American column drove up the hill later, it was met by a column of armed prisoners heading for Weimar, off in pursuit of their tormentors.
Buchenwald was where French Premier Leon Blum* was held. The camp also housed other notables, the Italian Princess Mafalda of Hesse; Maria Ruhnar, a Jehovah's Witness; Fritz Thyssen, the pro-Nazi industrialist who turned against Hitler; the entire family of Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg* and the wife of Fritz Goerdeler*. Her husband was a leader in the attempt to kill Hitler.
An East German set shows three notables who were killed there: the perennial Communist presidential candidate, Ernst Thälmann*; Rudolf Breitscheid*, who proclaimed the German Republic on Nov. 9, 1918, from the balcony of Berlin's Reichstag*, and Pastor Paul Schneider*, a member of Pastor Martin Niemöller's* Confessional Church, who was tortured for 18 months until his death.
Recently, I contributed the followiing to an on-line discussion of the Holcaust:
My cousin, who has written a book about her own survival from the Holocaust (see Irene Hofstein at http://members.tripod.com/~ShibaHill ) called me last night with the greatest surprise because she had just read The Invisible Wall by W. Michael Blumenthal, President Carter's secretary of the Treasury.
From Blumenthal she learned that German
anti-semitism (of which she was barely aware even though she lived
through Nov. 9, 1938, in Berlin) went way, way back and that Jews were
mistreated in the Kaiser's army. But her greatest shock was from
Blumenthal's description of what happened to his father in
Buchenwald.
My cousin's late first husband was a graduate of that school of terror. "He never talked about it," she told me, "and I did not know."
That was one of the reasons I went to Buchenwald last year. I knew a little, but I cried in Buchenwald.
Just to the left of the pretty entry, inscribed with "To Each His Own," was the prison, where the heat was turned on in summer and off in winter; where the sadistic Sergeant Sommer tortured and beat his prisoners at will; where people had piled flowers in the cell of the Rev. Paul Schneider.
A friend of mine in Germany once sent me the day-by-day account of Pastor Schneider's family, ending with the SS summons to Mrs. Schneider to travel to Weimar to come and get her husband because he was about to be released. She came; she was handed some ashes, certainly not his, and given some "explanation" of his sudden demise. He had been beaten to death by Sommer.
As I came through the art nouveau gate, I faced the Appelplatz. Because of my own agenda, I turned left to see the monument to the POWs who were murdered here. I found the inscription "Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika," proving once again one of the main points of my novel-that the murder machine was also directed at Americans.
When I turned around to walk toward the crematorium, a small group of children stayed behind at the side of the wind-swept place where thousands of freezing men were lined up daily to "be counted," wearing nothing more than the equivalent of a pair of pajamas. I rushed over. Two teen-aged boys were trying to light a red candle in a glass, a red Yahrzeit light. I inquired.
The boys, both German, stood up and explained. This was the spot where the Germans had herded together the Polish officer corps, enclosed them in wire fencing, and left them without food or drink to freeze to death. I do not recall the number, but it was in the thousands.
I asked, "Why are you doing this?"
With tears running down their cheeks, the boys, who could not light the candle in the wind, said, "Wir sind doch Deutsche. Wir konnten doch nicht hier einfach vorbei gehen."
"We are, after all, Germans. We couldn't just walk by."
They left their unlit candle for someone else to light.
But there were many places where they could have left the candle. Near the crematorium where a plaque recalled the death of Ernst Thaelman, the Communist leader; or the plaque recalling Rudolf Breitscheid, the man who proclaimed the republic from the balcony of the Reichstag; or the site of the barracks of the "Canadian" POWs, who had hidden fellow prisoners marked for death, including Franz Werfel, and, finally, the marker for the workers in the clothing warehouse who hid the baby Franz Werfel, whom they found in his father's suitcase. Two of those workers were also beaten to death by Sommer, if I recall correctly.
These were the fleshings out of the image of Buchenwald I had carried since I was a child in Tel Aviv, where my mother once sent me to a Russian movie and I hid under the seat through most of it. It was about Buchenwald. I think I was 7 or 8 years old.
The recalled images from the movie are worse than what I found in the sanitized camp on the Ettersberg. But the camp still proved worse in that the most striking movie image that I remember, decapitations with a broad ax, was false. Soviet propaganda! The SS did it with piano wire and meat hooks. How could the Russians have dreamed of that?
What amazes me in all this is that the cruelty, the inhumanity, the terror somehow never got through to my cousin. Yet I knew it all along.
Perhaps that is why both my cousin and I are driven-possibly along with Charlotte Opfermann-to write about all this because, in our own way, we bear witness.
To my "homecoming" in Berlin
In 1981, I was invited to spend a week in West Berlin by the mayor. It's something Berlin does for all its scattered children. After an orientation in drab city offices on the Hardenbergstrasse, we were given our program. We were to have a guided tour; a special tour to match our interests; free tickets to two cultural events, and a goodbye dinner.
My cousin's late first husband was a graduate of that school of terror. "He never talked about it," she told me, "and I did not know."
That was one of the reasons I went to Buchenwald last year. I knew a little, but I cried in Buchenwald.
Just to the left of the pretty entry, inscribed with "To Each His Own," was the prison, where the heat was turned on in summer and off in winter; where the sadistic Sergeant Sommer tortured and beat his prisoners at will; where people had piled flowers in the cell of the Rev. Paul Schneider.
A friend of mine in Germany once sent me the day-by-day account of Pastor Schneider's family, ending with the SS summons to Mrs. Schneider to travel to Weimar to come and get her husband because he was about to be released. She came; she was handed some ashes, certainly not his, and given some "explanation" of his sudden demise. He had been beaten to death by Sommer.
As I came through the art nouveau gate, I faced the Appelplatz. Because of my own agenda, I turned left to see the monument to the POWs who were murdered here. I found the inscription "Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika," proving once again one of the main points of my novel-that the murder machine was also directed at Americans.
When I turned around to walk toward the crematorium, a small group of children stayed behind at the side of the wind-swept place where thousands of freezing men were lined up daily to "be counted," wearing nothing more than the equivalent of a pair of pajamas. I rushed over. Two teen-aged boys were trying to light a red candle in a glass, a red Yahrzeit light. I inquired.
The boys, both German, stood up and explained. This was the spot where the Germans had herded together the Polish officer corps, enclosed them in wire fencing, and left them without food or drink to freeze to death. I do not recall the number, but it was in the thousands.
I asked, "Why are you doing this?"
With tears running down their cheeks, the boys, who could not light the candle in the wind, said, "Wir sind doch Deutsche. Wir konnten doch nicht hier einfach vorbei gehen."
"We are, after all, Germans. We couldn't just walk by."
They left their unlit candle for someone else to light.
But there were many places where they could have left the candle. Near the crematorium where a plaque recalled the death of Ernst Thaelman, the Communist leader; or the plaque recalling Rudolf Breitscheid, the man who proclaimed the republic from the balcony of the Reichstag; or the site of the barracks of the "Canadian" POWs, who had hidden fellow prisoners marked for death, including Franz Werfel, and, finally, the marker for the workers in the clothing warehouse who hid the baby Franz Werfel, whom they found in his father's suitcase. Two of those workers were also beaten to death by Sommer, if I recall correctly.
These were the fleshings out of the image of Buchenwald I had carried since I was a child in Tel Aviv, where my mother once sent me to a Russian movie and I hid under the seat through most of it. It was about Buchenwald. I think I was 7 or 8 years old.
The recalled images from the movie are worse than what I found in the sanitized camp on the Ettersberg. But the camp still proved worse in that the most striking movie image that I remember, decapitations with a broad ax, was false. Soviet propaganda! The SS did it with piano wire and meat hooks. How could the Russians have dreamed of that?
What amazes me in all this is that the cruelty, the inhumanity, the terror somehow never got through to my cousin. Yet I knew it all along.
Perhaps that is why both my cousin and I are driven-possibly along with Charlotte Opfermann-to write about all this because, in our own way, we bear witness.
To my "homecoming" in Berlin
In 1981, I was invited to spend a week in West Berlin by the mayor. It's something Berlin does for all its scattered children. After an orientation in drab city offices on the Hardenbergstrasse, we were given our program. We were to have a guided tour; a special tour to match our interests; free tickets to two cultural events, and a goodbye dinner.
It was the guided tour that drove me wild.
There were about eight of us, from Great Britain, from Israel, and my
wife and I from Cleveland. An elderly woman, who introduced herself as
a professor at the Free University and a "certified"
anti-Nazi because some of her family were killed by the Hitler
diktatur, was to be our tour guide.
At one point on this hot day, I dared to open the window in the Volkswagen bus. The driver shouted, and ordered me to close it. In Germany, I thought, one must ask permission from authority. In that bus, he was the Führer.
We drove past a building called the Kammergericht and the Frau Professor explained that it had survived the war, "but the Americans had so many bombs left they did not know what to do with, so they bombed it after the capitulation."
She also fumed about how "the Russians" had blown up the Kaiser's palace out of "sheer spite." Well, actually, it was the East Germans, but no matter. The "certified" anti-Nazi was an anti-everybody.
But she really showed herself as an anti-Nazi at the Ploetzensee Prison, site of the execution of the leaders of the 1944 attempt to kill Hitler. That's where I learned about "Sippenhaft," the arrest of distant relatives of persons suspected of being opponents. She, herself, had been arrested because of a relative. And so, it turns out, the "certified" anti-Nazi had sort of fallen into that category and had successfully passed through denazification because some relative of hers had really been the anti-Nazi.
Frau Professor Doktor urged all of us to travel into East Berlin to compare life in slavery to life in freedom. We took the subway to Friedrichstrasse and were immediately coerced into exchanging 25 marks into worthless Ostmarks. We could hardly spend them because there was little to buy. But we finally faced terror on the way "home" to West Berlin. We entered the subway station and were forced into long queues. Finally, we reached the crossing point into the subway.
A policeman, in a uniform that looked just like that of the Wehrmacht, including the high military cap, took my passport and held it in front of me as he glanced suspiciously back and forth from the picture to my face. Then he handed the passport through a window and said: "Wait!"
My wife was next. Same thing.
Finally, the passports came back through the slot.
It was a brief encounter, a fleeting moment. But in that cap and in those jackboots, he made me cringe.
At one point on this hot day, I dared to open the window in the Volkswagen bus. The driver shouted, and ordered me to close it. In Germany, I thought, one must ask permission from authority. In that bus, he was the Führer.
We drove past a building called the Kammergericht and the Frau Professor explained that it had survived the war, "but the Americans had so many bombs left they did not know what to do with, so they bombed it after the capitulation."
She also fumed about how "the Russians" had blown up the Kaiser's palace out of "sheer spite." Well, actually, it was the East Germans, but no matter. The "certified" anti-Nazi was an anti-everybody.
But she really showed herself as an anti-Nazi at the Ploetzensee Prison, site of the execution of the leaders of the 1944 attempt to kill Hitler. That's where I learned about "Sippenhaft," the arrest of distant relatives of persons suspected of being opponents. She, herself, had been arrested because of a relative. And so, it turns out, the "certified" anti-Nazi had sort of fallen into that category and had successfully passed through denazification because some relative of hers had really been the anti-Nazi.
Frau Professor Doktor urged all of us to travel into East Berlin to compare life in slavery to life in freedom. We took the subway to Friedrichstrasse and were immediately coerced into exchanging 25 marks into worthless Ostmarks. We could hardly spend them because there was little to buy. But we finally faced terror on the way "home" to West Berlin. We entered the subway station and were forced into long queues. Finally, we reached the crossing point into the subway.
A policeman, in a uniform that looked just like that of the Wehrmacht, including the high military cap, took my passport and held it in front of me as he glanced suspiciously back and forth from the picture to my face. Then he handed the passport through a window and said: "Wait!"
My wife was next. Same thing.
Finally, the passports came back through the slot.
It was a brief encounter, a fleeting moment. But in that cap and in those jackboots, he made me cringe.
--
Stephen G. Esrati
Stephen G. Esrati
Author of THE
TENTH PRAYER, A NOVEL OF ISRAEL ($22.99 from amazon.com, or $19.54
plus shipping from Xlibris)
http://www1.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=1279
and of COMRADES,
AVENGE US, a tale of war crimes against Allied prisoners of war
and a hunt for the
perpetrators. ($7.50, postpaid, from me, or $21.25 plus shipping from
Xlibris)
http://www1.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=1280
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