After the German philosopher Eric Gutkind sent Albert Einstein a copy of his tome Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt on salvation, Einstein offered some comments in German that he mailed off to the author. (The cost of mailing a letter was 3¢.) Both Einstein and Gutkind had German-Jewish origins, had the good fortune of averting disaster in Europe by being among the limited few allowed to immigrate to American. At war’s end (and until life’s end), both remained in America. A few days ago – December 2018 – Einstein’s two-page, hand-written note known as ‘the God letter’ – the contents of which I have always felt kinship – was auctioned at Christie’s for $2,892,500. Following, the text of the letter in translation:

Sir: If a miracle is an event without a physical cause then miracles occur in abundance. Whenever an electron passes through a diffraction grating (which displays the nature of wave) it can then be detected as moving along one of several exit channels provided for it by the grating.

Despite intense efforts, no physical cause has ever been found for the choice of channel, or for similar choices made in many other physical processes. Modern physicists have concluded that no such cause exists. Or, in other words, that the cause is nonphysical. It is usually attributed to “chance,” but that of course is simply an evasion.

Yours truly,

Alan Cottrell

Cambridge, England 

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Sir: With respect to both those seeking the canonization of the late Mother Teresa and those discussing the claimed miraculous powers if a silver medallion touched by her body after her death … life itself is the miracle. Try making something as “simple” as a mosquito if you don’t believe me …

Yours faithfully,

Richard N. Strange

London, England

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Sir: The great difficulty with miracles is not whether God performs such things, but whether any Being capable of being regarded as God could wish to behave in such an arbitrary and callous way. If miracles actually happen, then God stands condemned.

Yours faithfully,

Michael Tatham

Buckinghamshire, England

These three comments on spirituality or God – Letters to the Editor – had been published in The Times (of London) on September 1, 2001. Repeat: 9/10/2001. Strange, no? So: Has anyone or anything been minding the store?

I was browsing the internet for a reference re ‘human kindness’ for a new work project, and the following came up:

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The Human Kindness Foundation website is currently undergoing maintenance. We will be back very soon.

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This explains a lot. Happily though, the ache left by the moment’s void, got filled this morning as I hurried down Ninth Avenue. It was not quite eight. Children of many different roots were off to school, folks carrying coffee in cardboard headed toward work or the subway like arrows shot from bows. A few stragglers ardently walked dogs; one old sniffy hound seemed to be leading it’s human who winced as he took careful steps on (perhaps) untreated chilblains caused by a too cold winter. The tale that soothed my void is from my book Fiet’s Vase and Other Stories of Survival, Europe 1939-1945. It’s the story of a once captured English soldier who later became an author and a traveler who lived a long, rich life and died in 2006 at age eighty-six. I invite you to come with me to the rugged Apennine Mountains in Italy, the year is 1943. Witness how the gold dust of kindness flew in the face of cruelty at a moment of great need. Take heart at what’s possible:

[a swatch taken from Italian wallpaper]

Excerpt:

He was in the British army and had been smuggled into Italy to blow up an airport. The plan had failed and he’d been captured by the Italian army. The soldier’s name was Eric Newby. and he returned to the mountains and forests of the Apennines twelve years after war’s end with his wife and two children, to find, visit and somehow thank the various men, women and children who’d sheltered, fed and protected him for more than a year after his escape in 1943 from a prisoner-of-war camp outside the village of Pianura Pada, not far from the city of Parma. All who had helped him, and those who had helped Jews and other ‘out- laws,’ had done so at the risk of their own lives.

Over the course of that year, separately and together, a human lifeline had been spontaneously created that sustained Newby’s body and kept his spirit alive. As he later wrote in his memoir Love and Death in the Apennines, all help ‘was given freely at the time, out of kindness of heart.’ The first link in his human lifeline was a tall Italian farmer with a florid face, Signor Merli, who allowed Newby to spend the first night after his escape hidden in his hayloft. He was impressed by the farmer’s large Roman nose. Although he’d managed to acquire an Italian phrase book before escaping from the camp into the countryside, Newby and Merli couldn’t speak to each other. Because Newby had a broken leg and because it was daylight and dangerous, Merli hurriedly helped him up a steep, rickety ladder into the hayloft. He gave him a bottle filled with fresh water and left him. Suffering severe pain in the broken leg, Newby listened to the sound of explosions in the foothills of the Apennines that – he correctly assumed – were being made by the advancing Germans.

When dark, accompanied by a heavy mist, had entirely fallen, Newby was helped into the farmer’s house and the farmer’s small, dark wife fed him pasta and salty cheese, which he washed down with frothing purple wine. As he wolfed down the food, the farmer’s two children studied his unusual uniform and boots. Then he was put to bed on feed sacks in the cowshed. In the morning, an Italian doctor came to look at his leg and arranged to have him taken to hospital. When Newby gestured goodbye to Signor Merli and his family, Signora Merli began to cry He was taken by the dissident doctor to the Ospedale Peracchi near Fontanellato and hidden in a bed in the maternity ward. His helpers had agreed that if he didn’t get his leg set – couldn’t walk, couldn’t run – he didn’t stand a chance of escaping. Cheese, fruit, eggs, cigarettes and civilian clothes were brought to him by women and young girls who arrived out of nowhere on bicycles. Immediately he was visited in the hospital by a slim, blue-eyed young woman named Wanda, a Slovene from a place close to Ljubljana, who had lived in Italy with her father for a long time and obviously was connected to the dissidents who were helping him. She insisted that he learn Italian, which she would teach him. Neither could have imagined at that moment of meeting that they would be reunited after the war and would marry each other. The doctor set his leg in a plaster cast, and while the bone mended, Wanda’s Italian lessons began.

When the Germans discovered Newby at the hospital, he was put under armed guards. After several days a note was left under his lunch plate: ‘Tonight, 22:00, if not, Germany tomorrow, 06:00. Go east 500 metri across fields until you reach a bigger street. Wait there! Don’t worry about clothes and shoes.’ That night, feigning diarrhea, he went back and forth to the bathroom. When the hallway was clear, he climbed down a drainpipe outside the toilet window and hobbled away per the instructions. Waiting at the crossroads was an old car that had the Red Cross symbol painted on its door. Inside sat the doctor who had already helped him, along with a schoolteacher, referred to as ‘Maestro,’ who happened to be Wanda’s father. They drove Newby toward the large outlines of the Apennines, and after a night in the woods near the Po River, he was taken in hand by a large limping man with a scar along his nose. This was Signor Giovanni, who left him in an underground hole with a promise to return. The hole had recently been dug by the gnarled hands of Giovanni and his very old father. It was fortified with sacks and a few provisions that included a blanket, water, cheese, wine and a can into which he could evacuate. All night, rain fell on the makeshift roof and dripped through the air hole until late the next day – the coast was clear and Giovanni and his father came to retrieve him.

His next shelter was two villages farther up, on a mountain- side. It was a stone hut the size of a cowshed that he first saw illuminated by fierce lightning. It belonged to the Zanoni family. Fearing expulsion when Signor Zanoni told him he couldn’t sleep in the hay, his heart sank. But then Zanoni announced that he could sleep in the house in a bed after he finished milking his cow. With relief. Newby was shortly brought there. Zanoni’s house seemed more a cave than a house. The stones glowed red from hanging oil lamps. Zanoni, his wife, their three children and a small and wrinkled aunt who watched him constantly through thick glasses – six people in all – lived in this cavelike residence. Newby was fed potato gnocchi and given red wine to drink, then he was put into the warmest, softest bed in which he’d ever slept – before or since. The knitted vest they gave him smelled strongly of sheep. He fell asleep to the sound of crashing rain and woke to sounds of cows and hens in the yard below. It was September 1943, and the reward for denouncing a fugitive like himself or a Jew or a partisan had just risen to eighteen hundred lire, at a time when a thousand lire meant a comfortable life for a month. The sentence for aiding or abetting anyone of these outlaws was execution.

Newby’s next shelter was several hours by foot through the woods, higher in the mountains. His shelterers were a thin, erect farmer, Signor Luigi, who always wore a hat; his wife, Agata, who had a booming voice and was missing a tooth; their daughters, Rita, thin and dour, and Dolores, Amazonian and lusty; a plowboy, Armando; and a ferocious dog named Nero. These mountain people spoke a mountain dialect. Despite the risk, the arrangement was that Newby would be fed and sheltered at Pian del Sotto – as the place was called – in exchange for field work. Since he would be working outside most of the day, a story would be circulated that he was deaf and dumb, a bombed-out fisherman originally from Genoa.

The next link in Newby’s chain of helpers – albeit an accidental protector – was encountered after Newby had spent a sun- drenched autumn Sunday gathering mushrooms near a cliff that was about five or six thousand feet above the valley. He was lying on a spot of soft underbrush soaking up the afternoon heat and had let the lazy sounds of bees, insects, sheep bells and even a tolling church bell in the valley lull him to sleep. When he opened his eyes, a German officer – armed, in uniform – was towering above him. His name was Oberleutnant Frick. Flat on his back, Newby was frozen to the spot on which he lay. He was shirtless, bootless, sockiess, weaponless. He thought about the choices available at that instant – murder, combat. One quick shove might send the German tumbling off the high cliff behind him. Or? Or? Or he could act the part of the Italian deaf-mute. However, he couldn’t will himself into action, he simply lay where he was, frozen. He realized that the German was also frozen. After a decisive moment, rather than fight to the death, the two soldiers continued doing nothing, continued staring at each other. Then Newby noticed the butterfly net that Frick was toting and the moment of jeopardy dissolved and they began to converse.

This German was a professor of entomology from Gottingen who was in Italy lecturing on Renaissance painting and architecture to soldiers who were engaged in destroying these very things. Newby and Frick drank a beer from Munich together. They discussed the war, the impending German defeat. Before leaving Frick told him, ‘Do not be afraid. I will not tell anyone that I have met you. I am anxious to collect specimens … specimens with wings.’ Strange as it felt, Newby shook the hand that was offered and – still seated, agape – watched Frick, the sworn enemy, take off across a field, his net lunging at a butterfly unseen to him.

Forced by the tightening German noose to move again, Newby next met Abramo, a huge man with mottled skin and a viselike handshake, a shepherd who lived even higher in the mountains to the west of Pian del Sotto, among gray cloudbanks, with flocks of black and dun-colored sheep and dogs in an area peppered with dwarf beech trees. Abramo’s hut smelled of sheep, was less than ten feet square. Abramo gave Newby grappa to drink, polenta, hare stew flavored with mushrooms, herbs and giblet gravy to eat. The stay here lasted only a few days. Next – because it was becoming too dangerous for him to be sheltered in anyone’s house at all, six male members of the community built a secret house for him. A lean man with a sharp nose named Francesco was in charge. A very old man named Bartolomeo and four others, including Francesco’s boy Pierino, and a mule climbed very high into the mountains together and worked all day When the outside of the makeshift house/cave was finished, the helpers stacked wood inside and created a chimney in the cliff wall. Late in the day, the wives of the men appeared at the building site loaded down with backpacks filled with cheese and rice, bread, salt and acorn coffee purchased at exorbitant prices – which none could afford – on the black market. And of course they’d brought wine. A password – ‘Brindisi’ – was agreed upon. Gathering their tools, the Italians wished him luck and led the donkey down the mountainside, disappearing quickly.

Entirely alone, Newby undraped the sacking that covered the entrance. He climbed behind the tangled beech tree roots and stepped inside his cave home. Once inside he let the sacking fall back behind the roots, rendering the door to his refuge entirely in- visible. While inside he could hear the hoot of forest owls through the long, lonely winter months he spent based at this refuge in solitude except for visits from the children or grandmothers of his shelterers, bringing him food – eggs, sausage, but more often bread, milk and soup. ‘Almost always they came when it was just growing light; but I was always awake … Then they would hand me the pot – and after I had handed back the pot, I would receive words of encouragement, and usually, in answer to my question, they would say that there was niente di nuovo – no news. This meant in the comune rather than the world, although they sometimes would add – dabbing their eyes – that there was still no news of the boys in Russia, whose grandmothers some of them were, and then they would go back down the hill, very black and respectable, with the pot concealed in a black bag made of American cloth.’

So he remained when fierce rain, then blizzards, came to the mountains, when bombs began to fall on Genoa. One day the son of one of the protectors arrived in an anxious state. He told Newby that he must leave in less than an hour, that the milìzia was coming for him that very night. He took rice and other supplies and was guided to a rendezvous with a boy – Alfredo, slim, shy, whose lips were blue from cold – who led him safely around frozen waterfalls, iced gorges, through a night of wailing winds, to the hut of a family of charcoal burners whose faces were dusted black from charcoal. There he was given bracing grappa and the warmth of a hot fire. From this refuge he was led by a boy to a barn where an almost blind man, Amadeo, awaited them, as well as a small girl carrying a crock of hot soup. While Newby ate, Amadeo told him, ‘I, too, will give you food and shelter for as long as you wish to stay here.’

The chain of human kindness held firm during his time in the mountains.

*

Is it better to remember or better to forget?  As I grow old, nature-enduced forgetfulness will make that decision for me. In small ways it’s already doing so and I really don’t mind. Though I’ve published many Holocaust-related books, I no longer read everything new that appears on the Shoah, WWII, Anne Frank, and no longer have my finger on that pulse from the past. (I don’t have the stomach for so much suffering and cruelty anymore.) Nonetheless, I can’t let Holocaust Remembrance Day (27 January) pass without lighting a candle and bowing my head. Following, an extract from my book Fiet’s Vase and Other Stories of Survival, Europe 1939-1945 from the section titled –

The Survival of Memory:

Once it was believed in Europe that there existed in the exotic and magical South Seas sponges from under the sea that had very special attributes. Information, sound, stories, music, life experience that was spoken in the presence of the sponge was somehow stored within it and would remain there. Later – it didn’t matter how much later – days or centuries later – when the sponge was squeezed, the stored memory could be released. Regardless of distortions of time, distance or space, the human memory would be preserved

Her husband, Stefan, had been deported to Auschwitz, her mother, Stefania, had been deported to Treblinka, Adina Blady Szwajger, a twenty-six-year-old pediatrician working in the children’s hospital in the Warsaw Ghetto with starving, disease-ridden children, was exhausted and soul-sick. She wrote in 1943:

TO OUR FRIENDS ACROSS THE SEA

We know, brother –

A storm rends the night, trees rustle –

            You bury your face in your hands,

Ghosts beat at your windows and doors,

All your beloved ones have perished-

You alone survive.

Finally, Warsaw was liberated by the Red Army on January 17, 1945. Adina put this and other poems she’d written away She began to work with the Main Committee of Polish Jews to find the few children who had been hidden with Aryan families during the war and who had survived.

After completing this work – in May of 1945 – she moved from Warsaw to the town of Lagiewniki, close to Lodz. She’d been offered a job and took it. The job was at a TB sanatorium, where she worked with Dr. Anna Margolis, who had known her when she had been head of the TB ward in the Bersohn and Bauman Hospital in the Warsaw Ghetto during the war. Adina immersed herself in her specialization, diseases of the chest, and eventually married Wladyslaw Swidowski, who, as Wik Slawski, a member of the Resistance, had become her lover late in the war. He had helped people from the Warsaw Ghetto – and Adina – escape through the sewers of the Old Town to the center of Warsaw during the infamous uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto. In those first years after the war, she studied, secured the medical diploma she’d never officially received because of the war and decided to specialize in TB in children. She would work exclusively with children, as she’d done during the war, from then on.

Having already put her wartime poems and all memory of war years away, Adina decided never to write or speak about those times. And she never did. She explains her thinking: “If I remained silent, I’d manage to forget at least some of it and be able to live like everybody else. Years were passing. I didn’t manage to forget but I still believed that I had the right to remain silent.” She stuck to her vow. Slowly the bombed-out ruins of Poland were cleared and rebuilding began, the sound of hammering could be heard, the smell of fresh paint permeated the air. Trolleys again ran through the streets, damaged historic buildings under- went the long process of restoration or were completely brought down; rubble was cleared. Street lamps were replaced and the streets were lit at night after years of darkness. Eventually, one could find toothbrushes and even sour cream in the shops. To be able to add a dollop of sour cream to beet soup or to the top of a potato pancake was an exquisite joy. Life – days, then years, then decades – took on a peaceful cadence.

Her work as a doctor continued. “Being a doctor sets you apart from normal life. It means that you always have to think of other people’s pain as though it is something more

important than your own.” Work, the hospital, quiet home life, became a kind of parapet set apart from the world. Forty-three years – a lifetime – passed. At age seventy-one, Adina became very ill. She was taken to the hospital and put into a ward where she hovered between life and death. She was tired of life and had no fear of death. Although her body was wracked by illness, the thread of physical life continued to hold her to the world.

For a long time, lying in the ward, she was neither dead nor alive. During this nether time, the memories she’d tried to kill hovered. Suddenly she felt that she was “in the presence of the past.” Against her will, recollection and memory stirred. The image on a yellowed board that she’d painted in childhood came back to her. It was of her child’s room, of a potted amaryllis standing on a windowsill. She remembered the view of rooftops that could be seen through that window. The painting was one of the only remnants she’d been able to preserve from her past. She called the painting “A Fragment of a Dead World.” She remembered how she stood in a throng of people watching the conquering German army march along Krakowskie Przedmiescie Street, seeing the eyes of the conquerors that seemed to be made of ice. She remembers the taste of the half-pound of Pluto’s chocolate she and her mother frivolously bought that day with the last of their money. She recalled the presence of fear that had to be hidden. “But it was there, coiled up tight, like a spring in your stomach. It would sometimes awake and send a piercing, icy shiver through your whole body.” Images, fragments, scenes, gruesome memories of that time past returned. Unstoppable.

Weak as she was, lying in the hospital ward, dying in fact and not fighting against the abyss of death, Adina resisted the onslaught of memories but couldn’t any longer stop them. They first seeped into her mind, steeped themselves in the waking/sleeping, conscious/unconscious atmosphere. Finally, the poisonous snake of memory bit through her strong will, releasing its venom. “Another fear came over me. That I wouldn’t make it in time. That I wouldn’t repay the debt l owed to those times.” Suddenly, Adina feared that she would die without bearing witness to what she had seen; that her knowledge of the past would die with her. She called for a pen, for paper. “And I started to hurry. There, on a hospital bed, I started to write. Quick1y. To win the race against time.” Using the venomous memory as ink, though very late in life, she wrote a memoir that she titled I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children’s Hospital and the Jewish Resistance, which she was able to complete and see published in 1988. Although infirm, aged and not long for the world, Adina built a monument to memory using words as mortar. She wrote in part:

There’s no trace, in this great, modern city, of what happened here. Yes, there is a monument. But not even a single fragment remains of the wall which separated one third of the residents from the rest: not a vestige of the stone desert which they made of the place where people lived, fought and died – people who had been there for a thousand years. Not a single burnt-down house from whose windows mothers had thrown their children and jumped after them.

Sometimes I walk through that new, modern neighborhood, along pavements which cover the bones of those who were burnt there. I look up at the sky, there where my house and all the other houses once stood. When I close my eyes, the streets become familiar again. A crowd of people – shadows – wander among the shadows of houses and, clearly, as if they were real, I hear the voices of children, crying in that other language: Hob rachmunes! Have mercy! … Sometimes I come to Sienna or Sliska Street. I look at the hospital gate, peer through the railings and see that the Paradise apple trees that used to blossom there have gone. The hospital does not bear the name it should … But I close my eyes. And the gate opens – the one on Sliska Street where once a homeless child had stripped naked – and all the people who have disappeared pass through it … There is the Head Doctor, in her white gown, doing her last rounds, and behind her the doctors, nurses and orderlies, then the administrator and Dr. Kroszczor, who carefully closes the gate behind him … I know that they’ve left everything as it should be and that Dola Keilson has swept all the floors …

[Photo portraits: Adina Blady Szwajger l. young, r. old]

... Their younger brother, Iziu, age ten, was sometimes able to bring them a pot of their mother’s hot soup. But sometimes he couldn’t make it, and Joseph and Marcel had nothing to eat.

One very dark night, Joseph and Marcel were making their way back to their rented couch in time for the curfew. As they approached the bridge, someone warned them that an SS officer was blocking that bridge and shooting at any Jew who tried to cross. Joseph and Marcel ran in another direction into a strange neighborhood. Just then, all the lights in the town went out due to a power outage. Disoriented, they wandered through dark streets. They kept walking and realized they had drifted away from the town and were walking in mud through a field. They could hear the sound of a flowing river; it was so dark that they could see nothing before them but looming shapes. They groped their way in another direction and found themselves in an unfamiliar neighborhood, had no idea where they were. They were freezing now, lost and exhausted. Seeing candles burning in the window of a house, they remembered that it was the first night of Hanukkah. Something made them walk toward this flickering candlelight. When they got almost to the door of the house, they realized that they’d walked right to the door of the chimney sweep. They entered and the chimney sweep explained the power failure and told them he’d lit candles in the front room for them.

In Joseph’s words: “To this day, I’m unable to explain how we managed to reach that house in the gloomy night, how we crossed the river and the air base without being aware of it.” Even when he examined the town after the war, he could not unravel the route taken. He concludes: “The mystery can only be explained as our private Hanukkah miracle.”

Eventually Marcel and Joseph went to the Krakow ghetto with their family, but then were sent to the Plaszow work camp. At Plaszow, night and day, the white smoke of those who had died that day rose from the crematorium and the stink of burning human remains filled the air. Joseph describes that grim sight: “The departed in the form of white smoke, rose easily upward, waved their hands in parting and viewed with pity all those who remained behind. Then they danced gaily in celebration of their new freedom, before disintegrating in the air.”

Because of his drawing skills, Joseph was given the job of drawing plans and signs or anything else that needed to be designed or painted. His mother worked outside the camp every day. Marcel was sent to the Jewish cemetery, where he was ordered to smash headstones with a sledgehammer. The pieces of this sacred stone would be used for paving roads, One morning Marcel confided to Joseph that he’d found a priceless gold cup in the cemetery and had hidden it. “It’s worth a fortune!” Marcel told him. Joseph looked at the tarnished but obviously pure gold cup and was alarmed. He urged his brother to get rid of it. And quickly.

That night, he and Marcel were planning to visit their mother, hoping, since she worked on the outside of the camp and could often scrounge up extra food to bring home for her sons, that she’d bring some with her. After Joseph had begun his day’s work of painting, writing slogans, he heard in the distance the sound of sledgehammers. Among them would be his brother Marcel. Late that afternoon Joseph heard that a hanging was going to occur that night. When he inquired as to who would be hanged and why, he was told that someone had been caught with stolen gold. The rumor was that the person who would be hanged had a short name that began with the letter B. Joseph didn’t need to hear any more – he wept, knowing that they’d caught Marcel.

As he walked toward his mother’s barrack, he could almost hear the sound of Kaddish in the sound of the blowing wind. He found his mother back in the barrack. She told him she had a great surprise. To go with their ration of bread and margarine, she had a boiled egg and a slice of onion to share among the three of them. Ashamed, unable to tell his mother the truth, he pretended to have a headache and left the barrack. Joseph was walking aimlessly when Marcel appeared from nowhere and announced that he’d sold the gold on the black market. “I watched him with wonder and joy,” was how Joseph described the emotion he felt. Eventually, he discovered that the hanged boy was named Beim. The Germans had found a gold watch in Beim’s pocket.

Second miracle: Joseph first met the woman who would be come his wife – who …

Fiet’s Vase

and

Other Stories of Survival,

Europe 1939-1945

available on Amazon as a paperback and kindle

Because an earlier posting (on 3/1/2016) by my guest blogger Jo Schulze — Thanking the Hippies, a German writing on postwar Germany — garnered so much interest, it seemed a good idea for another German to tell another story. From an interview done with Benno Meyer-Wehlack for Fiet’s Vase and Other Stories of Survival, 1939-1945. Sadly Benno is no longer alive.

THE SURVIVAL OF THEATER

Theater did withstand the conflagration: When Benno Meyer-Wehlack was sixteen, he was called to Arbeitsdienst – the duty to work. This was not exactly forced labor, assigned to prisoners and foreigners; it was something for German youth before they could enter the military. Here they could learn discipline and how to work-duty and work. It was the end of 1944. The red glow of fires from Allied bombings of Berlin could be seen on the horizon at night. Sulfur-colored dust was always in the air that smelled of smoke. Benno could hear bombs exploding even while he was below ground in shelters or in cellars and bombed-out, skeletal remains of buildings that pocked his neighborhood.

Benno had been living with his parents in Berlin. The schools were shut. There were lines in front of shops because food, even though rationed, was becoming scarce. In 1940, he had been evacuated to the city of Zokapane in Poland on a mobbed train filled with his entire school and other people. His parents wanted him back and he’d come back to Berlin in 1943- His father was a Nazi, wrote for a Nazi newspaper. By the time he returned, all schools were closed. He spent much time on his own except to help man flak guns with other boys his age. It was at that time that he got called up for Arbeitsdienst, received an induction letter into the military Earlier in the war, before the Jews in the neighborhood had all disappeared, Benno remembers a Jewish boy blasphemously telling him that the war was going to be lost and that democracy would one day come to Germany He didn’t know what democracy was, so couldn’t think about it one way or another. And- since all he really remembered was Hitler’s times and the radio promising victory- he didn’t imagine any other way When times got harder and harder in Berlin, he wasn’t concerned about winning or losing the war; he became concerned only about enduring.

Benno bid his parents goodbye and went as instructed to the induction center with a small pack on his back. He and other boys were sent on a very slow train to Sylt, an island in the North Sea. He was put into a barracks there. Because of the deteriorating condition of the war, Arbeitsdienst was no longer just for work but was suddenly for premilitary training. The idea was to get all young boys fit to fight. They trained with wooden guns. They were ordered to crawl across floors and to climb up and over difficult ob- stacles. Times were bad, he was hungry all the time. Some of the boys got packages from their parents filled with things purchased on the black market. But Benno’s parents couldn’t send him much. One of the boys had a copy of Thomas Mann’s Budenbrooks, which had been censored and was forbidden. One boy would read it aloud and the others would gather to listen. It was exciting because he’d never before encountered anything that was blacklisted. His father’s newspaper had once been sent to Sweden, and a forbidden newspaper had been sent back with an article about a book by Klaus Mann, Thomas’s son, who was also blacklisted. Clearly, there was a large world that had been shut off to Benno. The Thomas Mann reading seemed like news from another planet.

There were no uniforms available, so the boys wore ordinary clothes. Benno and the other boys had signed a pledge to defend the Führer to the last drop of blood. After signing, each of them was given a waistband decorated with Nazi insignia. A group of thirty or forty boys his age were then taken to a military base where there was a small military airport. It was next to the harbor at Rostock near Warnemünde. Here Benno was given a pair of pants by a mechanic at the airport. These pants were like knickerbockers, with the legs drawn tight at the bottom. They were mechanic’s trousers, gray At this base, although there was some discipline, no one took care of him. Benno felt inadequate to all that was expected of him. One day he came down with a terrible sore throat and could no longer swallow. He was hungry but he couldn’t eat and began to get very thin. He felt completely shut off from the world and didn’t have any idea what was happening in the war. One day he noticed that some of the military officers were moving out. He didn’t know where or why. Large antitank guns were left behind. An officer gave these powerful weapons to the boys before he left and told them that they were theirs for their defense. Then he left too. At this point Benno realized that everyone had gone, that he was alone on the air base with a few other teenaged boys.

Benno saw two Russian tanks moving in a meadow, so he went into the woods and took off his military boots and put on civilian shoes that he’d kept, in their place. He got rid of his waist- band and everything else that seemed military and then walked to Warnemünde. He crossed a river and came upon a forced labor camp, fenced in with barbed wire, just at the moment when the guards had disappeared. Benno met one of the laborers there who was dressed in white, a Hungarian. Benno thought he must be a baker, The man was undernourished and weak, hadn’t eaten a thing in days, Benno decided to continue on and walked away from the camp, As he walked, he saw people coming in the other direction, trying to escape the Russians, He came to a market square in Warnemünde where a Russian soldier stood prohibiting people from entering, Benno told him, “I want to go home,” As he stood facing the Russian soldier, trying to communicate, German Stuka airplanes began strafing the area, On the ground were Russians, in the air, Germans, Benno didn’t know if the Russians would put him into a camp. They didn’t interfere with him at all and let him pass the market square and go toward the ferry that crossed the River Warne.

Near the square he saw a small shop. He entered but no one was inside, Going farther inside, into the apartment attached to the shop in back, he saw food on the table, ready to eat, It appeared as if the people had just left, He didn’t know where they’d gone. They’d even left their small dog, who nipped at him, There were edibles on the shelves of the shop, things he hadn’t seen in ten years, like cherries. He was so hungry but – because of his throat – couldn’t swallow. Instinctively he knew that he should take food with him. He found a shirt and a jacket and took them also. From a bookshelf he took a volume of poems.

He knew that he had to cross the River Warne near Warnemünde to be on his way to Berlin, He reached the ferry and saw that it was still operated by Germans but was now under Russian control It was filled with Russians who had swords. They had small horses – ponies with long hair, Shetland ponies – that were pulling carts. The Russians looked impoverished, not like a conquering army to him, but like he imagined Cossacks might

look. He saw three cows coming on the ferry that approached his side of the river. He thought, Maybe these Russians will kill me! But he had to cross the river to get home, so he stood and waited for the ferry to arrive. When it did, he courageously got on and rode across. At the other side he asked the direction to Berlin. Someone pointed the way. A Russian soldier offered him a stolen bicycle. The Russians were cruising around him, having fun; one took away his coat, another his wristwatch. Today, a mature man in his seventies, Benno Meyer-Wehlack, respected German writer, doesn’t remember anymore whether the wristwatch was his or whether he’d stolen it from the small shop. He recalls that the Russians offered him schnapps and vodka to drink, which he refused because of his throat.

He described to me how, farther along in his journey, he met a young German soldier in uniform who joined him. They walked together, speaking in German. That first night, they encountered more Russians, who took the German officer away, so the next morning Benno continued on alone. Because the Russians had given the foreign forced laborers permission to take whatever food they wanted, Benno sometimes at night joined the groups that gathered together in farmhouses, sleeping in hay. These former forced laborers shared whatever stolen food they had. For the first time he saw and tasted corn. He tried to avoid the main roads because these were clogged with traffic. Most of the traffic was going away from Berlin- west, toward the Americans- because people were afraid of the wrath of the Russians. Once Benno went to a house owned by an elderly couple and they offered him a bed for the night. To this day the memory of the ecstatic feel of a real bed elicits a look of deep pleasure on Benno’s face. Benno remembers that the Germans he encountered along the way were anxious and terrified of what would become of them, People shared whatever they had with each other and with him, It was springtime, May 1945.

Along the way he saw that the Nazis of a particular village were being used as forced labor to remove barricades, After passing through that village he made a new friend who walked with him, The man was shabby, a German, He pulled a wooden cart, He was a sergeant, Around his neck, on a string, hung an alarm clock It was his joke directed at the Russians, who were so fond of wristwatches. When Benno and the man would meet Russians, the man would laugh. The Russians would laugh back. The man was going to Leipzig. He told Benno that in his cart was his capital, he was going to start a factory. Benno saw that in the cart were uniforms. The man embarrassed Benno. They walked together for many days.

When they entered Berlin – at Wedding – Benno felt that he should invite the man home and offer him a night’s lodging, But he didn’t. At a street corner he told him, “I have to go this way,” and abruptly left the man with the cart on the street. “For the next ten years,” he confessed to me, “I felt guilty for not offering hospitality to this man.” He saw that though hedges of forsythia blossomed in the parks, the city of Berlin was completely destroyed. It was a shock. Most of the shops and buildings were smashed into rubble, trams had been turned on their sides and were filled with stones. Sandbags were piled along the wide avenues. Everything smelled of gas. Some buildings still standing seemed to be on the verge of collapse, and whole streets had been cordoned off with signs: ACHTUNG! MINEN! Attention! Mines! Benno thought, This will never be a city again. He passed cooking stations run by the Russians in which they cooked goulash. Goulash was a kind of stew that was new to him. The Russians were distributing it to the hungry people waiting with outstretched hands and empty stomachs. They were wearing shabby clothes, the looks on their faces were like that of people in a fog.

Because his parents had been bombed out during the war, Benno went to look for them in the place where they’d told him in their letters that they’d been assigned. But they were not there. He learned that they were alive but had been evacuated to Bavaria by bus near the end of the war. He wasn’t unhappy that they were absent because he’d gotten used to being on his own and was looking forward to continuing his independence. It was an adventure now. He was invited to stay one night but no more in their former rooms among things that he recognized as theirs.

In the morning he went back to his old neighborhood – Charlottenburg – because he had to get a ration card, without which he wouldn’t be able to get food. His throat was starting to heal and he longed for a potato. At the end of his street was a theater in which he’d attended plays with his parents. It was damaged but wasn’t in ruins. Someone with a piece of cardboard was trying to clean some of the rubbish strewn at the front of the theater. He recognized this man as an actor from the theater. Benno offered to help clean up the rubbish and, side-by-side, they swept and scooped, lugged and cleared up debris. After the big debris was collected into a pile, Benno found two pieces of cardboard and began cleaning the smaller bits. He hoped the actor would see how useful he could be and would need him. He worked very hard, or, as he described it, “like a dog.” Finally the actor laughed and told him, “You can be a part of the theater.” From that day Benno lived in the semi-ruin and helped to make repairs. He was happy to be under the roof – or part roof – of a real theater, because he’d always wanted to be an actor. Other actors began to turn up and joined in cleaning and repairing. As a reward for supporting the Resistance, the conquering Russians gave this theater to Viktor de Kowa. He was to be its director. They also told him that he could open it.

Sitting in the living room, we drank strong coffee and stuffed ourselves on chocolate and cookies in the sprawling painting-and-book-lined apartment in Charlottenburg. This was the same building where Benno and his parents lived before the war, and where his parents would commit suicide together shortly after they returned to Berlin because his father couldn’t find work and his mother had broken down. The apartment is on Mommsenstrasse. He described how, a few months after the German surrender, in the first raw winter of peace, his father had asked him to come up for a talk. He had gone, and his father had told him not to visit for a few days, that he’d decided to commit suicide with his wife, and didn’t want Benno to be the one to find them. Benno said that he bade his parents goodbye that day and – as instructed – didn’t return to the apartment. Benno speaks rapidly, always with thrusts of words and with wit. He shares this apartment with his wife of thirty years, Irena Vrkljan, an eminent Croatian poet and writer. Irena and Benno work together doing translations, writing radio and television plays. Benno insists that even if official history always says that the Tribune Theater was the first to open after the end of the war, it was really his theater that opened first and gave the first performance.

He proudly recalls his recitation of a poem by Erich Kästner during the first performance. The first line was:

We were seventeen and we were scared.

Benno describes opening night: “The theater was dark. There was a piano playing. I came on stage. As soon as I began to declaim, I thought I heard the audience coughing but they were really crying. In the audience were women who’d lost their husbands and sons who were my age, who sobbed as I recited. When I realized this, I made them cry more, manipulated them with my recitation because I enjoyed the fact that I was acting. I hoped then that I could act and maybe write too, and live as an artist from then on, that it was the route to moving others and being moved.” Benno was the only serious note in this performance. All were tired of war and misery, they wanted to forget the past years, so the show was mainly cabaret. After the performance, one of the more seasoned actors took him aside and said, “You made it into a soap opera, an overdone thing. Please refrain from melodrama.”

Benno lived in the theater for two years and took care of it as well as he could.

****Page 1 – Fiet’s Vase and Other Stories of Survival, Europe 1939-1945****

After the Germans attacked the Netherlands at 3:55 in the morning on May 10 in the year 1940, the Dutch fought back. On May 14, in order to force the country to surrender, the German Luftwaffe bombed the historic Dutch city of Rotterdam, which was then the largest port of Western Europe. The word usually used to describe the effect that this bombing had on Rotterdam is “obliterated.” One usually reads or hears this attack described like this: “The Luftwaffe obliterated Rotterdam.” Which it had. Quite shortly afterward, when Adolf Hitler, the German leader, threatened to attack Utrecht next and other parts of the Netherlands in a like manner if the Dutch continued to fight back, the Dutch surrendered to the Germans and Queen Wilhelmina escaped to England. Quickly the German army occupied this flat, wet, atmospheric landscape that has contributed Rembrandt, Vermeer, van Gogh, Anne Frank and much more to the culture of the world.

As a consequence of the destruction in Rotterdam, a newly married young woman, whose husband had already come to Amsterdam, who eventually became a poet and translator and would one day more than forty years later become a friend- then a vital young woman of twenty-nine-came to Amsterdam to join her husband. Although not easy to find, they eventually found and rented rooms in the house of a Jewish doctor and his large extended family of sons, daughters and grandparents in the neighborhood known as the Transvaal area in East Amsterdam. She and her husband lived in these rooms for two years until they were able to find other lodging in an eighteenth-century house on the outskirts of Amsterdam, in which, it would turn out, she would live out her life, and happens to be still living there, well into the twenty-first century. Also renting a room in the doctor’s house was a young Dutch girl whom my friend knew as Fiet. My friend would see Fiet coming and going on the stairway and they would cordially greet each other in passing. But the acquaintance went no further.

As the Germans tightened the noose around the entire country, they cast a separate chokehold around the collective neck of the Jewish people, many of whom were quite assimilated among the general Dutch population. One day the doctor and his family disappeared. My friend would later learn that they’d gone into hiding in a house on one of the canals. The fortunate doctor and his family would all survive, except for one of the children who never came back after the war. It was around the time that roundups of Jews had begun in 1942 that my friend heard a timid knock at her door one dark, evil night, as Grone Polizei and German soldiers and trucks had begun to fill the neighborhood, signaling that a roundup was about to commence. Because the entire neighborhood was on edge, my friend cautiously asked who might be knocking. A voice answered, “Sophie.” My friend realized immediately that it must be the young girl Fiet, since Fiet was the nickname for Sophie. She opened her door and saw Fiet standing in the hallway clutching a small suitcase.

My friend invited her to come inside. My friend no longer remembers exactly how she felt or what emotion Fiet showed and takes great pain to not dramatize or overstate the corresponding emotions. It seemed that the Germans had begun knocking on all Jewish doors and giving people twenty minutes to pack a rucksack. She explained that hers had been packed for months in the event that they came to her door. The whispered word was that Jews were being deported to the East. Fiet held out the small suitcase and asked, “Would you keep these things for safekeeping for me until I return?” The unsaid fact that Fiet was asking my friend to commit a crime had entered the uncomplicated equation of being merely neighbors, since the entire Dutch population had been informed in no uncertain words that a Christian helping or abetting a Jew or Jewish property was a crime and would be punished harshly (The adverb “harshly” needn’t have been included, since everything the occupying German military did, they did with harshness’) Fiet had added, ”And if I don’t return, please keep these things.” My friend doesn’t recall what – if anything – else was said, or if she simply reached out her hands, took the suitcase and hid it somewhere in her small room. My friend gave her word to keep the suitcase until the young girl returned to retrieve it. Her thoughts at that moment? She doesn’t remember them anymore, or didn’t by the time I met her. But, knowing her kind character, she probably asked the young girl if she needed anything to take with her. Food? Clothing? Could she do anything else to help? As there was a crime against the Nazis now between them, there was also a promise now between them, and Fiet was already hurrying away to her appointment with fate.

Years later, one of the several young children of my friend discovered that the suitcase contained a tin of tea, a folded kimono, a small silver vase engraved with scenes of bucolic life. But before the contents of the suitcase were known to anyone but Fiet, almost the entire Jewish population of their quarter of Amsterdam was deported to parts unknown. Three more years later, when the war was finally over, and the few surviving Jews and others who had been sent to parts unknown – now gruesomely known – returned, the young woman named Fiet, who would have been twenty-six by then, was not among them. As survivors straggled back in the months after the Liberation, my friend waited for a knock at her door, searched on her own, hoping to return the suitcase directly into Fiet’s hands. Even after a year or more, as occasional survivors trickled back to Amsterdam, my friend still hoped. Years and then decades passed, but Fiet never was seen or heard from again and no one ever came to claim the belongings she’d left for safekeeping.

Sixty years later, the suitcase, kimono and tin of tea are long gone. My friend has no memory any longer of how they disappeared. A few years ago, as she approached her ninetieth year, because of my interest in this dark time of Dutch history now fading from collective memory, she gave the remaining silver vase to me for safekeeping and I promised that I would pass it to someone else to transmit it from generation to generation – before I died. She told me the few things she knew about Fiet: She was a Dutch girl of twenty-three. A Jew. She was probably a student. Fiet was short for Sophie. I wrote this information down on a slip of yellow paper and put it inside the vase. The harrowing statistics of what was lost and how it was lost in this war are well known. This small silver vase as the sum total of what remains of one young woman at the prime of her life is one immutable remnant that has survived from one unrepeatable life whose traces have otherwise been erased.

Fiet’s small vase stands on my east-facing bookcase. Its darkened silver presence is like a stone in my shoe. To keep my promise, this vase will accompany me to the end of my life, as will the heavy memory of the human survivors of World War II – Jewish or other – I’ve encountered. Not one survivor I’ve engaged understands why he or she survived and another didn’t. In my inter- views with the subjects, in their memoirs or biographies, in the documentaries or other memorabilia on which this book is based, they all describe walking through the eye of the needle of fate at its cruelest and somehow – as bodies of loved ones as well as strangers fell around them – coming out alive on the other side. Each vivifies some configuration of factors that they speculate might have intervened to spare them from almost certain death, factors like unusual resolve, family bonds, human kindness, un- canny luck, even instances that can be viewed as supernatural. Though grave damage had been done to every part of their beings including their souls, each survivor’s indelible voice extols the strength of the human spirit and the victory of a life wrested from extinction.

Although there have been two hundred forty wars – large and small – since 1945 and ominous conflagrations rage at this moment, World War II continues to stick in history’s throat. Neither do we seem to be able to swallow this epoch nor spit it out. It is known in such accuracy and picked over in such detail because – among mountains more – four hundred eight-five tons of filed German records buried deep in mines and hidden in castles in the Harz Mountains were unearthed to provide information. Moreover, a multitude of partially burned files were found at Berchtesgaden and elsewhere at the end of the war, including stenographers’ notes of top-secret meetings and conferences. Vast libraries of documentation of this time including diaries, documents, testimonies, transcriptions of conversations, lists, accountings, interrogations and the like remain intact as well.

World War II officially began on August 31, 1939, when, using their own man dressed in a Polish military uniform, the Nazis faked an act of aggression on a German radio station. In reprisal, early the next morning, on September I – with surprise and unprecedented speed – the German military attacked Poland by air and by land at once. Within twenty-four hours, one hundred thirty Poles had died, another one hundred eleven by September 2. On September 3, in the small village of Truskolasy, fifty-five Polish peasants were shot. In the village of Wieruszow, also in Poland – setting the stage for what has since become known as the Holocaust – twenty citizens were forced into the market square because they were Jewish. A young woman – Liebe Lewi – saw her father being herded with the group. She ran toward him. Seeing this “impudence,” as the German officer referred to the daughter’s emotional response, at gunpoint, he ordered Liebe to open her mouth. When she did as he’d ordered, he aimed his pistol at her tongue and fired.

On September 3, the British and French declared war on Germany. That night, ten airplanes flew from Britain across Western Europe into German airspace dropping thirteen tons – 6 million pieces – of paper from the air onto German soil. On these leaflets was written: Your rulers have condemned you to the massacres, miseries and privations of a war they cannot ever hope to win. The warning went unheeded. Quick1y the war spread. A little less than six years later – in August 1945 as atomic weapons arrived on the world stage – came the final surrender that ended World War II.

By the shores of a bay there is a green oak-tree; there is a golden chain on that oak; and day and night a learned cat ceaselessly walks round on the chain; as it moves to the right, it strikes up a song, as it moves to the lift, it tells a story.

There are marvels there: the wood-sprite roams, a mermaid sits in the branches; there are tracks of strange animals on mysterious paths; a hut on hen’s legs stands there, without windows or doors; forest and vale are full of visions…. And I was there. I drank mead, I saw the green oak-tree by the sea and sat under it, while the learned cat told me its stories. I remember one – and this story I will now reveal to the world.

PROLOGUE TO RUSLAN AND LUDMILA – Alexander Pushkin (Dimitri Obolensky, translator)

[Photo: Drawing by Joseph Bau, one of the subjects interviewed in Fiet’s Vase]

[[Fiet’s Vase available as a paperback and as a kindle on Amazon]]

If it’s the end of January, then International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day that recognizes hatred, must be here. Having been marinated in this subject matter for 20 plus years, you’d think it would get easier to think about. It doesn’t. The opposite is true. This year my thoughts turn to one of the subjects featured in my recently reissued nonfiction Fiet’s Vase and Other Stories of Survival, Europe 1939-1945, Joseph Bau, a brilliant, satirical graphic artist, also a poet, who, along with his wife Rebecca (whom he married secretly while they were prisoners in a concentration camp) walked through the eye of the needle of death and survived against all odds. After the war, Joseph and Rebecca emigrated to Israel where they procreated two daughters – Haddasa and Tslila – who are keeping the memory of their parents and their father’s artwork alive around the world. Following, the piece that resulted from my interview with Joseph:

Joseph Bau’s mother, Tzilah Bau, originally from Krakow, Poland, died – “was murdered” is how Joseph refers to her death – in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. His father, Abraham, was murdered in Plaszow concentration camp, and his brother Iziu (Ignacy) was murdered in the Krakow ghetto. Joseph’s own survival, the mysterious coincidences that kept him and his brother Marcel alive in Plaszow, Joseph’s clandestine marriage while a prisoner at Plaszow and the reunion with his wife after their separation defied all the odds. Or, as Bau himself explains so much good fortune, “defied the laws of nature.” The word he uses liberally to describe these events is one that’s usually used as a sign of divine intervention in human affairs, the repeated word he chooses – “miracle.”

In 1971, Joseph Bau and his wife, Rebecca, reluctantly returned to Europe – to Austria – from Israel, where they’d lived since war’s end. In Israel, Bau had become a renowned artist, an animator, and also an author. After I contacted him, we conducted our interview by e-mail. He was eager to discuss his life. But one day his children e-mailed me to say their father was ill and in the hospital. Fortunately; whatever else I needed to know could be found in his book of writing and sardonic drawings, Dear God, Have You Ever Gone Hungry?

Because Joseph had been a witness to many brutal murders committed by an SS officer named Franz Gruen – including the murder of his own father – at Plaszow, he was invited to act as a witness by the Austrian government at Gruen’s trial. Gruen was eventually sentenced to nine years in prison, and, as Joseph later explained, the effect of seeing Gruen, of returning to a German-speaking country in Europe, of recounting the bitter facts of his father’s murder, caused his eyesight to blur, his mind to hallucinate scenes from the gruesome past, his blood pressure to shoot up so high he ended up in a Viennese hospital for an entire month. Except for several visits by his old friend and benefactor Oskar Schindler, it seemed to Bau from the Austrian hospital bed that he had fallen into – in his words – “a pit full of scorpions and snakes.” He didn’t feel safe until he returned to Israel.

But even in Israel, regardless of the many decades that passed after the war, images of persecution, privation, brutality remained vividly alive in his memory. For instance, one Saturday evening, as Joseph and his wife and children sat at the dinner table after a fine meal, these images came to haunt him. The table had been set with a good tablecloth. The room was lit by candles. Rebecca had just cut and distributed slices of cake, topped with icing and powdered sugar that she herself had baked. Music was playing on the radio in the background. Joseph remembers watching his wife. He remembers the mouthful of delicious cake sticking in his throat. “Suddenly; I saw her in the striped dress, with a white kerchief on her shaven head, looking at me with sad, hollow eyes. The light dimmed, and emaciated shadows dressed in prison uniforms surrounded me again. The chill wind brought the sound of shooting in the distance, and my nostrils breathed in the smell of burning flesh.” Bau spit out the cake, which to him tasted like stone. Although part of him returned to reality – he could hear the music on the radio, see his children eating the delicious cake – another part of him remained, and will forever remain, in the concentration camp that dwells inside.

First miracle: In the second winter of the war, in Krakow, the streets were frozen with sleet, and a nasty Siberian wind blew snow and ice against buildings, trees and lamp poles. At the time, Joseph and his brother Marcel had badly forged papers; they’d been denied the yellow identity cards, Kennkarten, that the police had issued certain Jews but not others. Thus they were constantly in danger of deportation and so slept in the home of a Christian, a chimney sweep, at night. They could not go to their own bed in daytime, and were forced to stay outdoors. This was excruciating because the weather was terribly cold. Their younger brother, Iziu, age ten, was sometimes able to bring them a pot of their mother’s hot soup. But sometimes he couldn’t make it, and Joseph and Marcel had nothing to eat.

One very dark night, Joseph and Marcel were making their way back to their rented couch in time for the curfew. As they approached the bridge, someone warned them that an SS officer was blocking that bridge and shooting at any Jew who tried to cross. Joseph and Marcel ran in another direction into a strange neighborhood. Just then, all the lights in the town went out due to a power outage. Disoriented, they wandered through dark streets. They kept walking and realized they had drifted away from the town and were walking in mud through a field. They could hear the sound of a flowing river; it was so dark that they could see nothing before them but looming shapes. They groped their way in another direction and found themselves in an unfamiliar neighborhood, had no idea where they were. They were freezing now, lost and exhausted. Seeing candles burning in the window of a house, they remembered that it was the first night of Hanukkah. Something made them walk toward this flickering candlelight. When they got almost to the door of the house, they realized that they’d walked right to the door of the chimney sweep. They entered and the chimney sweep explained the power failure and told them he’d lit candles in the front room for them.

In Joseph’s words: “To this day, I’m unable to explain how we managed to reach that house in the gloomy night, how we crossed the river and the air base without being aware of it.” Even when he examined the town after the war, he could not unravel the route taken. He concludes: “The mystery can only be explained as our private Hanukkah miracle.”

Eventually Marcel and Joseph went to the Krakow ghetto with their family, but then were sent to the Plaszow work camp. At Plaszow, night and day, the white smoke of those who had died that day rose from the crematorium and the stink of burning human remains filled the air. Joseph describes that grim sight: “The departed in the form of white smoke, rose easily upward, waved their hands in parting and viewed with pity all those who remained behind. Then they danced gaily in celebration of their new freedom, before disintegrating in the air.”

Because of his drawing skills, Joseph was given the job of drawing plans and signs or anything else that needed to be designed or painted. His mother worked outside the camp every day. Marcel was sent to the Jewish cemetery, where he was ordered to smash headstones with a sledgehammer. The pieces of this sacred stone would be used for paving roads, One morning Marcel confided to Joseph that he’d found a priceless gold cup in the cemetery and had hidden it. “It’s worth a fortune!” Marcel told him. Joseph looked at the tarnished but obviously pure gold cup and was alarmed. He urged his brother to get rid of it. And quickly

That night, he and Marcel were planning to visit their mother, hoping, since she worked on the outside of the camp and could often scrounge up extra food to bring home for her sons, that she’d bring some with her, After Joseph had begun his day’s work of painting, writing slogans, he heard in the distance the sound of sledgehammers. Among them would be his brother Marcel. Late that afternoon Joseph heard that a hanging was going to occur that night. When he inquired as to who would be hanged and why, he was told that someone had been caught with stolen gold. The rumor was that the person who would be hanged had a short name that began with the letter B. Joseph didn’t need to hear any more – he wept, knowing that they’d caught Marcel.

As he walked toward his mother’s barrack, he could almost hear the sound of Kaddish in the sound of the blowing wind. He found his mother back in the barrack. She told him she had a great surprise. To go with their ration of bread and margarine, she had a boiled egg and a slice of onion to share among the three of them. Ashamed, unable to tell his mother the truth, he pretended to have a headache and left the barrack. Joseph was walking aimlessly when Marcel appeared from nowhere and announced that he’d sold the gold on the black market. “I watched him with wonder and joy,” was how Joseph described the emotion he felt. Eventually, he discovered that the hanged boy was named Beim. The Germans had found a gold watch in Beim’s pocket.

Second miracle: Joseph first met the woman who would be come his wife – who wore the usual striped uniform of a prisoner, her shaved head covered by a white kerchief – while he stood outside an office in Plaszow. He was drafting a map. He of course had no way of knowing then that they’d live together for fifty-three years until her death in 1997. or that he would outlive her. Although men and women had been executed if they were caught making love or even holding hands, Joseph found a few wildflowers and hid them in his cap. He went to look for the woman he’d seen whose name he had been told was Rebecca. He met her in the soup line and began a courtship. To locate each other, they whistled a short tune that became their trademark. Joseph acquired a white kerchief and-as did women prisoners-wore it over his shaved head in order to pass as a woman. Joseph and Rebecca kissed for the first time behind the latrine as the moon shone down. They decided that they wanted to marry each other. But how could this be done in such a place?

It took four black-market loaves of bread made with brown flour and sawdust to buy one spoon that was made of good silver. And it took four more loaves of this same bread as a bribe to a prisoner who had been a jeweler to make two wedding rings out of the acquired silver spoon. On a chosen evening, Joseph and Rebecca met beside his mother’s three-tier bunk. Despite the fact that they couldn’t find a rabbi to do the service, they crafted a makeshift wedding. “HarI at …” concluded Joseph. Joseph’s mother gave her blessings. In their eyes, and – they hoped – in the eyes of God, they were man and wife. They decided to share her bed that night, which was a dangerous act indeed but worth the risk.

But just as they’d climbed up to the top bunk and were becoming acquainted with each other at close, intimate quarters, news that the Germans were going to conduct a search of the women’s barracks was broadcast over the loudspeaker. The several women who slept next to Rebecca spread Joseph with filthy rags and laid their heads on him as though he were a pillow. He wasn’t detected during the search, but almost immediately after it was concluded, the siren signaled an unscheduled count of male prisoners. This meant that all men were to go quickly to the assembly grounds to be counted. Absence or lateness meant death. Adjusting the white kerchief back onto his head, Joseph jumped down from the three-tier bunk and ran toward the men’s camp as the floodlights swept pools of light back and forth across the grounds. He reached the fence that divided the men’s and women’s sections only to discover that the usually open gate of the high fence had been closed and electrified. If he touched it, he would die from bolts of electricity If he didn’t quickly reach the assembly point, he’d die in some other way He decided to try to make an impossible leap. Still amazed more than fifty years later, Joseph says of his leap, “I rose, unwittingly, so high that only my fingers and toes grazed the strands with the lethal current. To this day, I cannot understand how I managed to cheat that mad trap, the dragon that spit fire and swallowed even the bravest heroes. By rights, I should have found my death then and there!”

But soon Joseph was marked for death again. Plans were afoot to transfer Joseph and many other prisoners from Plaszow, which was in the process of being shut down, to an even more lethal concentration camp named Gross-Rosen. At the time, Rebecca had become manicurist for an infamously sadistic Nazi, Amon Goeth, who kept a loaded gun beside the manicure table. If Rebecca’s manicure scissors slipped and cut him, she was told, he would shoot her. During her visits to Goeth’s house, she became acquainted with his secretary, who was a Jewish prisoner named Mietek Pemper who had come to Plaszow with his mother. Because Rebecca had successfully intervened when Pemper’s mother was about to be shot – and saved her life – to return the favor, Pemper offered to add Rebecca’s name to the list he was presently assembling of Jews who would be sent to work in a factory in Czechoslovakia, The owner of the factory was named Oskar Schindler. When the moment came to add her name to the list that would one day become known as “Schindler’s List,” Rebecca wrote down Joseph Bau’s name and not her own. So when the bitter day of parting came, Joseph was transferred and went to work in Schindler’s factory in Czechoslovakia, where he was protected and fed by Oskar and Emilie Schindler at Brinnlitz. Rebecca remained at Plaszow but was soon sent to Auschwitz, where she survived three selections to the gas chamber. She was later taken to Lichtwerden in Czechoslovakia. Her substitution of his name for hers was never mentioned after the war to anyone, not even to her husband. Forty years later, Joseph finally learned the truth when Rebecca revealed it in the making of the film Schindler’s List.

Neither could have imagined ever seeing the other again, on the terrible day of their separation. Joseph had left his “dear and sacred love” a poem that includes the lines

Though our life together was so short,

I must leave now,

sad and forlorn, I am going

To a fate ordained by these desperate times,

By a road unmarked by any signs,

To a mocking destiny

All set to welcome me.

Despite the protection he was given by the Schindlers, Joseph weighed sixty-six pounds when the Russian army liberated Brinnlitz. Almost immediately, along with a small group of survivors, he began the arduous task of trying to get back home. He hoped that if his wife or any of his family had survived, they’d go home too. He jumped freight trains, crossed borders on foot, he somehow made his way to the street in Krakow to the house where his family had lived. Though he found their apartment occupied by a knife-wielding man, he was elated to be home. He found lodging elsewhere and began visiting the Jewish Committee office, which daily posted lists of living and dead. Here Joseph discovered that his mother, once a respected couturier who had owned her own boutique specializing in hats, had died in Germany in Bergen-Belsen. He learned that though she had managed to hang on to life, she had died shortly after the camp was liberated by the British. Eventually, he discovered that Marcel had survived in Germany and so had Rebecca. Although Rebecca had finished the war in Lichtwerden, she had been in an accident in the small city of Freudenthal. She and several women were in a wagon being taken somewhere when the wagon overturned. All the women were injured and had been put in a hospital there. But how to get to Freudenthal? First he had to find a way to be issued a travel permit.

Miracle upon miracle: Joseph wrangled a travel permit. Desperate to get to Rebecca, he began jumping freight trains again. At the juncture of Morawska Ostrowa, he was instructed by the trainmaster to get on the train to Szwinow and jump off while the train was still moving, and there transfer to Freudenthal. Joseph found his crowded train and squeezed on board. Wanting to be ready to jump, he sat in an open door frame, legs hanging down dangerously outside the moving train. He tried to stay awake but sleep overcame him, and when he woke he discovered he’d missed the spot where he was to leap. He got off the train at the next station to find out that not only had he missed his disembarkation spot, but he’d also missed the connecting train. Amidst great confusion at the train station, Joseph found a train going back in the direction he’d come. He climbed onto the flat roof of the train, and it began its journey. Shortly, however, dark clouds gathered and a storm broke open, pouring hail and heavy rain down on the roof of the train. Soaked, bones aching, he managed to stay alert and got off the train at the transfer point, Szwinow. In a sorry state, shivering, hungry, Joseph waited for a connecting train and climbed aboard. It happened to be a passenger train. He found a normal seat and fell asleep.

Abruptly his deep sleep was interrupted when the train stopped and all the passengers were ordered off the train. Again confusion reigned. His clothing – the prisoner’s striped shirt and trousers from the camp that he still wore – was still wet. He made inquiries and learned, to his amazement, that the reason for the abrupt interruption of his journey was that there had been a recent accident with a train, It seemed that a train packed with passengers had been crossing the river on a bridge when the bridge – damaged in the war – gave way. The train had plunged into the river here in Opava where they were. People were crushed in the fall; others had drowned in the river. Further questioning revealed to Joseph that the train that had been in the accident was none other than the train he’d been trying desperately to catch. Had he not fallen asleep, had he made his connection, he would have been on that train and would most likely have died in the river.

Joseph marveled at this most recent reprieve from death as he waited beside the river through the night, watching as the clouds indifferently scuttled across the face of the moon. Out of the blue, an enraged woman singled him out, accused him – despite his vocal denials and the striped prisoner shirt he still wore – of being a German, a Nazi, a criminal. The police were called in and he was taken to the police station. The situation calmed when Joseph showed his papers to the police. One policeman felt badly when he realized that Joseph was a Jewish survivor. He asked if he could help in any way. Joseph explained about his wife’s injury on the overturned wagon, about his journey in search of his wife, about the trains, the bridge. “You know,” said the policeman, “here in Opava we had a similar accident with a wagon. In fact, there are still several girls in the hospital.”

It seemed an odd coincidence. Although Joseph believed that Rebecca was in Freudenthal, he went to the hospital in Opava with the policeman anyway. All the while, he kept protesting that his wife was in Freudenthal, not Opava. Nonetheless, in the corridor of the hospital he whistled the special notes known only to Rebecca and himself In his own words: “I entered the hospital with the policeman and whistled the tune we’d used to locate each other at the Plaszow camp. No, I cannot find the words to describe that wonderful reunion which defied all the laws of nature. I’ll leave it to you … to imagine what happened on that fateful evening of June 7, 1945.”