Exodus - Leon Uris [81]
The main compound was set in an area that wallowed in mud. There was acre after acre of frame wooden barracks which were isolated from each other by high walls of electrified barbed wire.
These acres of barracks fed manpower into some thirty subsidiary slave-labor camps. Each inmate wore a black and white striped uniform and an identification color on his arm and left breast. A pink badge was worn by homosexuals, a black badge by field whores, a green badge by criminals, violet badges for clergymen, red for Russians and Poles, and the traditional Star of David for the Jews.
Dov received another badge at Auschwitz. It was a tattooed number on his left forearm. Dov Landau was now a black and white striped Jew number 359195.
LABOR LIBERATES. Dov Landau celebrated his fourteenth birthday in Auschwitz and his gift had been his life. He was quite fortunate for of all the tens of thousands of prisoners at Auschwitz, Dov’s small group of forgers were among the elite. His particular section was given the task of engraving and printing counterfeit United States one- and five-dollar bills for use by German agents in western countries.
After a short time at Auschwitz Dov wondered if it would not have been better to have died at Birkenau.
Here the inmates were underfed, worked into living skeletons, and stacked on shelves for their five hours’ sleep a night. Disease ran wild. Prisoners were tortured, driven insane, beaten, and degraded, and every known atrocity conceived by man was committed.
Here the penal colony lived in single black cells and were fed only oversalted vegetables to induce unquenchable thirst.
Here in Block X, Nazi doctors Wirthe, Schumann, and Clauberg kept the human raw material for their pseudo-scientific experiments. Polish prisoner Dr. Wladislaw Dering performed castrations and ovariectomies ordered by his German masters as part of their insane program to find a way to sterilize the entire Jewish race.
This was Auschwitz and this was Dov Landau’s gift of life. LABOR LIBERATES.
“One of the Landaus must live through this,” Mundek had said. What did Mundek look like? He could hardly remember. Or Ruth or Rebecca or his mother and father? He could not remember his father at all. The memories grew hazier and hazier until he could remember nothing but death and terror and he did not know that there was a life where death and terror did not exist.
A year passed. The trains came in and out of Birkenau. The deaths at the labor camps around Auschwitz from torture and disease and hunger were nearly as appalling as those at Birkenau. Somehow he managed to cling to his sanity and that animal instinct to survive.
Even in this blackest of pits there were some rays of hope. There was the prison orchestra. There was a flourishing underground and they had a radio receiver. Even here a man could find a way to get to a woman.
SUMMER 1944
There was a strange new stirring throughout Auschwitz. Dov could often look into the sky and see Russian bombers, and the secret radio began reporting German defeats. Hope, however dim, found its way through the muck and torture. Each new Allied victory sent the German guards into a murderous frenzy until the prisoners almost dreaded word of German defeats. At Birkenau activity speeded up until the gas chambers were in operation almost around the clock.
AUTUMN 1944
The feeling now was that Germany was going to lose the war. They were being beaten on all fronts. But as they lost on the battlefield the appetite for extermination grew. Colonel Eichmann threw every possible resource into finishing his mission of genocide.
OCTOBER 1944
The Sonderkommandos at Birkenau staged a wild uprising in which one of the crematoriums was blown up. Each day in new uprisings the Sonderkommandos snatched SS guards and their dogs and