A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [42]
Karol Wassermann, a pharmacist who knew something about medicine, was not going to eat himself to death. The first few days, he barely allowed himself to eat at all. He tried to warn the others as well. But Wassermann was a difficult man; he always went against the grain and was not well liked. When he had first been admitted to the hospital in a fever-driven delirium, he had repeatedly talked about death and—worse—the smell of death. By then, a small c rematorium had been built on the edge of the camp, and the smell from it drifted throughout the triangular-shaped Sach-senhausen compound and into the little town of Oranienburg. But in the camp, as in the town, you didn't talk about the smell. The inmates did not like people who talked about these things. After the Liberation, when Wassermann tried to tell people that they would die from eating, it was just Wassermann talking about death again. For now, there was food. They should try to get a few pounds back on their bodies before the Germans returned.
They spent their first week completely on their own. Then the Soviets, not the Germans, came back and tried to help them. By then, half of them were dead or dying from overeating.
Two days after the war ended, Wassermann was able to get a bus to Prague. When he arrived, he saw that the city's stone bridges, spires, and dark passageways were still undamaged. Moritz Mebel remembered the Prague Liberation very differently from the one in Budapest. “Oh, Prague! It was a huge party. I have never again seen anything like that. We were hosted by people. You felt that Liberation was really celebrated with their hearts!”
Once Wassermann was in Prague, he looked for his aunt, who he hoped would not have been deported because she was married to a Christian. He recognized a few other survivors wandering the cobblestone streets. They looked like him, like most people he had known in recent years. The stare, the body that looked as if it were held together by strings. They too were looking for a relative or friend who was still alive. After days, Wassermann did find his aunt alive. She had a place where he could stay and begin to reorganize his life.
He was a Slovak and did not plan to stay in Prague. Czechoslovakia, which had been put together at the end of World War I, had been separated by Hitler. He had kept the western part—Bohemia and Moravia, including Prague—because he considered it to be German. The eastern Slovak region had been handed over to the pro-Nazi Slovak nationalist Father fozef Tiso. Now that the Slovak nationalists had been defeated and disgraced, Czechoslovakia was a single country again. For a few weeks, Wassermann and his aunt waited in Prague in the hope that his brother Tybor would turn up on one of the trains of returning survivors, just as he had. But after some weeks of vainly checking the arriving trains, Karol and his aunt returned to their native central Slovak mining town of Banska Stiavrica.
With a list of family possessions that had been hidden in various non-Jewish homes in town, they went from door to door asking for their belongings. And at each doorway they heard the same claim: Their possessions had been stolen by the Russians. In the end, all they managed to collect was the one item of no monetary value—a portrait of Karol's father.
Karol went to see a woman he had known before the war to tell her that he had been with her husband in Sachsenhausen. So many people were missing, and if you knew someone's story, you had to tell the family. Wassermann had seen the husband “go to the other side.” Everyone was learning this phrase. When a train had arrived at the camp, some of the passengers had been sent off to work and others had been pointed in a different direction —“to the other side,” for extermination. The woman explained to Karol that he was mistaken, that she had been to a clairvoyant who had seen him in Siberia. “He will be coming back from Siberia,” she kept insisting.
“He is not coming back,” Wassermann repeated. “I was there. He is not