William & Rosalie: A Holocaust Testimony

nine: A human being

113 Semi-comatose in the hole William hears a German voice: “Now I’m going to show you what happens when you try to escape.” Fiery noon sunshine shocks his retinas as the guards toss the boards aside. The blinding flash of sky is interrupted by dark figures in helmets who reach down, grab him and jerk him back up into the world. Blinking, raw from bug bites, and covered with soil, he is too weak to stand. The soldiers hold him up for display in front of thousands of prisoners. When the officer tires of mocking him he is thrown on a bunk to die. A French Jew saves his life. “He brought me soup for a few days until I got my strength back. I think he saw my escape as an act of resistance and assumed I was some sort of brave macho guy. He invited me to come to France after the war to start a new life. He said he would help me find a girl. I was touched because the French prisoners tended to stick to themselves.” Four days after William is unearthed the camp commandant announces that Gross Rosen will be evacuated. The Russian winter offensive refuses to slow down. With rockets and chapter nine A human being WRStxt.indd฀฀฀113 5/9/07฀฀฀10:18:22฀AM 114 William & Rosalie shells and wave after wave of punishment troops, the Soviet armies shatter anything that gets in their way. The SS keeps retreating and shipping prisoners west. The news catches William off-guard. He knows he should start to hustle up food. Years in the camps have taught him that nimble anticipation is a big part of staying alive. As Gross Rosen evacuates he can’t even walk without leaning on his new friend. Forty thousand men march out of the granite quarry in early February. Most will trudge through the snow until they stumble and get shot. William’s luck holds as once again he is among the few who get to ride a train. His French buddy boosts him up into another open gondola car. William has a piece of bread for the journey, a chunk as big as his palm. This last-minute windfall comes from a prisoner he helped with food months earlier at Auschwitz. William remembers that when the man pulled the bread out of his waistband and pressed it into William’s palm, he warned him to watch out for the Hungarians. I don’t want to say anything bad about the Hungarians . They suffered as much as the rest of us. But at this point prisoners were preying on each other. The strong stole from the weak. The Hungarians were the last Jews to be rounded up and they were healthier than people who went into the camps early. Some of them took advantage of this. I was sitting on the floor of the train car holding onto my piece of bread. When I wasn’t paying attention a little Hungarian boy jumped out of a corner and snatched it. A wild-looking kid with a dirty face, maybe WRStxt.indd฀฀฀114 5/9/07฀฀฀10:18:22฀AM Chapter Nine 115 ten years old. He stuffed the whole thing in his mouth and jumped back into his daddy’s arms. His dad was a great big guy. He didn’t say a word but he gave me a look that said, sorry, that’s life. Disinclined to retaliate and too weak to even stand up, William packs five years of outrage and frustration into ten minutes of shrieking, sobbing, and cursing. “The French guy who thought I was such a hero could not believe the tantrum I threw. At one point I was just yelling Rose’s name over and over. He seemed ashamed to sit next to me on a train where other people were eating the dead.” As the locomotive moves further into Germany, three Hungarians at the other end of the wagon start to butcher a Greek. The man they hunker over was dead fifteen minutes before they rolled him on his belly. They pull down his pajama bottoms and gouge into a gluteus muscle with a dull knife. From William’s vantage point a lot of sawing and yanking seems to be required to get the stringy strips off the bone. The wind has turned every face purple. Under...