Jakub's World: A Boy's Story of Loss and Survival in the Holocaust

Heat

1 Heat Winter and early spring of 1945, are busy in Flossenbürg. By January the camp is so over-crowded that twelve hundred men, the sick, the muzulmen, are rounded up in front of Block 18 and those who can still walk are deported to BergenBelsen (the prisoners referred to such a transport as an “Ascension” because those who leave are never heard of again) those who cannot walk are taken into the laundry and dispensed with. On February 8, members of the July 1944 plot on Hitler’s life—Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Oster, Judge Sack, Dr. Hajlmar Schlacht, Dr. Theordor Strünck, General Thomas, Major General Halder are transferred from jail in the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin to the Special Prison together with Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, his wife, and little daughter. Auschwitz, Lublin, and GrossRosen drain their prisoners to Flossenbürg. On February 13, 14, 15, and 16 three to four thousand prisoners arrive from Gross-Rosen. On March 8, 1,157 more of Flossenbürg’s dying are conveyed to Bergen-Belsen. On March 10, Prince Albrecht of Bavaria, his wife, eight children, and their governess are brought in and confined under guard and on concentration camp rations in two rooms of the Alte Forsthaus in the center of the village where the adjutant’s lover, the DEST’s secretary, lives. On March 17, an additional 870 people are transported to Bergen-Belsen. On April 1, U.S. forces cross the Werra. On April 3, the chief justice of Bavaria, Josef Müller is transferred from the Special Prison in Buchenwald with Captain Ludwig Gehre. On April 14, 75 76 Jakub’s World Heinrich Himmler sends a telegram to the Flossenbürg command that in the event of evacuation, “No inmate must fall into the hands of the enemy alive.” On April 5, U.S. forces reach Nuremberg. On April 8, Prince Albrecht and his family are moved to Dachau. On that day, too, several hundred prisoners are brought in from Brieg in Upper Silesia, all in bad condition, some have died on the journey. An hour or so later yet more concentration camp prisoners arrive. Josef Müller, who witnesses their arrival, hears an SS man scream, “Uns interessieren keine Namen mehr, uns interessieren nur noch Zahlen!” (Names don’t interest us any more, only numbers!). That night, Dietrich von Bonhöffer and von Rabenau are hastily fetched in from Schönberg. That night Canaris, Oster, Sack, Strünck, Gehre, Rabenau, and Bonhöffer are tried. Between five and six o’clock the following morning, they are executed in the Special Prison yard. At dawn that day, the Schuschnigg family is driven away. In the same period, one thousand four hundred Czechs are brought from Brünn. On April 10, Peter Churchill and a group of British officers is brought from Sachsenhausen. The Special Prison is full so they are kept in a ward of the hospital until cells open up. On April 11, the arrivals of the first of thousands of men from Buchenwald begin. The outcamps of Flossenbürg empty back to the mother camp. Inside the Special Prison, doors open, doors close. German voices sound out German words. Naked feet slap against the floor. Crevices and cracks in doors give glimpses of naked people, the execution yard. Groans. Screams. Shots. Stretchers. Inside the Special Prison, slits in the boards covering narrow windows yield a hillside, processions of laden stretchers, emaciated corpses spilling out onto ice. Inside the main camp, the prisoners are ever more pressed in their barracks. Seventeen thousand men are held in a camp built for five thousand; their sparse ration grows sparser; ever more dead are carried out of the barracks in the darkness of morning; the beatings continue; the killings continue, increase. Ever more burning pyres assist the cre- 77 Heat matorium, ever more clouds of sickly smoke rain ever more human particles onto the ground. Fifteen inmate clerks in the Labor Allocation Department work throughout the day and two throughout the night picking out of the files of the living the cards of the dead. The world of the concentration camp victims—gray depression encircled by electrified wires and granite hills—is ever more desperate, and the habitual Oberpfalz winds maintain their determined course. In the Kommandatur, in the Political Department, in the Labor Allocation Office, in the Clerk’s room...