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were arrested and jailed in the headquarters. Sometimes an extremely fat and good-natured colonel, who drove a Mercedes too big and shiny for the town, would personally kick a soldier down stairs into a cellar, which made a good impression on the townspeople. Soldiers bought things in the Konrads’ hardware store and became acquainted with the family. Sometimes they would come over to the Konrads’ house. On those occasions Gyorgy's parents would always get his sister out of sight—these Russians could be unpredictable. They drank vodka and ate raw onions, taking crunching bites off them as though they were apples, and slurped tremendous amounts of raw eggs, sucking them noisily out of the top of the shells. Gyorgy thought these Russians were a funny people.

5

Liberated

Prague

JUST NORTH OF BERLIN, IN THE TOWN OF ORANIENBURG, not hidden in the woods but in the town, was the Sach-senhausen concentration camp. For twelve years, people living in gray Prussian houses with high-pitched roofs, neat little gardens, and painted metal gates watched emaciated prisoners march by. Then in 1945 the Germans marched forty thousand prisoners away to nowhere. They did not have the capacity to kill them all and they did not want them to fall into Allied hands, so they marched them. Hundreds dropped dead. Hundreds more were shot. But three hundred were left behind in the hospital, a long, one-story barrack on the edge of the camp.

When the Germans gave the order for the march out of the camp, there was disagreement among the prisoners in the hospital. Should they drag themselves out, or should they claim to be too weak to stand up? Their survival had turned on such decisions for years. Some of the hospital inmates expected that the people who went on the march would be shot. Then, too, they might really be too weak to survive it. How far would they be marched? Others thought that anyone who said he was too weak to march would be shot. Some thought the hospital had been wired and that the Germans would blow it up with them in it.

The three hundred hospital inmates watched the SS march the last survivors off. Some waited for the explosion. There was none. They waited longer—nothing happened. There was no point in leaving, nowhere to go, and no use in turning to the people who lived in the neat gray houses along the road from the main gate. The hospital had shelter and a little food, and so they stayed there. The Sachsenhausen concentration camp was liberated one week later by three heavily armed Red Army soldiers who burst into the hospital. They had mongolian features and said something quickly in Russian. Then they left, and the group was alone again. Karol Wassermann, a Slovak Jew, understood enough Russian to know that what they had said was, ‘You are free.”

ONCE THE THREE HUNDRED Sachsenhausen inmates were pronounced free, they were alone—free at last, free to eat and die. And that was what they did. First they looked around the camp for food. Then they slipped out, nervously avoiding the town, going out to the woods, where they caught rabbits and birds and found plants and fruits. Returning to the camp, they cooked rich stews arid roasted meats. And they died. These people had been living-some of them for years—on a slice of bread and thin soup that was little more than flour and water. You could never get enough. “I could have eaten—or rather drunk—ten liters of that soup. There was nothing in it,” said Karol Wassermann.

Now they had real food, and they died from it. In all the liberated camps of Europe in the spring of 1945, some survivors dropped over from exhaustion, some succumbed to epidemics— tuberculosis and typhoid—and thousands died from overeating. Survivors hoarded sausages, meat, bread, clothing, blankets—the things that had made the difference between life and death in the camps. Who knew how long this liberation” phase would last? When the Holocaust started again, they would be ready. Or they would be ready for the next one. Even in the early 1950s orphanages for camp survivors found that some of the children