Exodus - Leon Uris [46]
Dachau was the biggest of the “scientific” centers. She learned that Dr. Heisskeyer injected children with t.b. germs and observed their death. Dr. Schutz was interested in blood poisoning. Dr. Rascher wanted to save the lives of German air crews and in his experiments high-altitude conditions were simulated and human guinea pigs frozen to death while they were carefully observed through special windows. There were other experiments in what the Germans referred to as “truth in science” which reached a peak, perhaps, in the attempted implantation of animal sperm in human females.
Karen heard of Wilhaus, the commander of the camp at Janowska, who commissioned the composer Mund to write the “Death Tango.” The notes of this song were the last sounds heard by two hundred thousand Jews who were liquidated at Janowska. She heard other things about Wilhaus at Janowska. She heard his hobby was throwing infants into the air and seeing how many bullets he could fire into the body before it reached the ground. His wife, Otilie, was also an excellent shot.
Karen heard about the Lithuanian guards of the Germans who merely clubbed and kicked people to death and of the Croatian Ustashis and their violent killings of hundreds of thousands of prisoners too.
Karen wept and she was dazed and she was haunted. Her nights were sleepless and the names of the land tore through her brain. Had her father and mother and brothers been sent to Buchenwald or had they met death in the horror of Dachau? Maybe it was Chelmno with a million dead or Maidanek with seven hundred and fifty thousand. Or Belzec or Treblinka with its lines of vans or Sobibor or Trawniki or Poniatow or Krivoj Rog. Had they been shot in the pits of Krasnik or burned at the stake at Klooga or torn apart by dogs at Diedzyn or tortured to death at Stutthof?
The lash! The ice bath! The electric shock! The soldering iron! Genocide!
Was it the camp at Choisel or Dora or Neuengamme or was it at Gross-Rosen or did they hear Wilhaus’ “Death Tango” at Janowska?
Was her family among the bodies which were melted to fat in the manufacture of soap at Danzig?
Death lingered on and on at the displaced persons’ camp at La Ciotat near Marseilles, France
... and Karen heard more names of the land. Danagien, Eivari, Goldpilz, Vievara, Portkunde.
She could not eat and she could not sleep—Kivioli, Varva, Magdeburg, Plaszow, Szebnie, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Oranienburg, Landsberg, Bergen-Belsen, Reinsdorf, Bliziny.
Genocide!
Fossenberg! Ravensbrück! Natzweiler!
But all these names were small beside the greatest of them all—Auschwitz!
Auschwitz with its three million dead!
Auschwitz with its warehouses crammed with eyeglasses.
Auschwitz with its warehouses crammed with boots and clothing and pitiful rag dolls.
Auschwitz with its warehouse of human hair for the manufacture of mattresses!
Auschwitz, where the gold teeth of the dead were methodically pulled and melted down for shipment to Himmler’s Science Institute. Auschwitz, where an especially finely shaped skull would be preserved as a paperweight!
Auschwitz, where the bones of the cremated were broken up with sledge hammers and pulverized so that there would never be a trace of death.
Auschwitz which had the sign over the main entrance: LABOR LIBERATES.
Karen Hansen Clement sank deep in melancholy. She heard till she could hear no more. She saw until she could see no more. She was exhausted and confused, and the will to go on was being drained from her blood. Then, as so often happens when one reaches the end of the line, there was a turning upward and she emerged into the light.
It began when she smiled and patted the head of an orphan and the child sensed great compassion in her. Karen was able to give children what they craved the most, tenderness. They flocked to her. She seemed to know instinctively how to dry a runny nose, kiss a wounded finger, or soothe a tear, and she could tell stories and sing at the piano in many languages.
She