By Chance Alone Read online

  In the two years preceding the Hungarian deportations to Auschwitz, Prime Minister Miklós Kállay and Regent Miklós Horthy had successfully resisted Hitler’s Final Solution and eased off on the anti-Semitic laws, which were no longer strictly enforced.* They also prosecuted a number of Hungarian military officers for the massacres of Jews and Serbs in the Novi Sad raid of January 1942.** By early 1944, the Allies were making significant military advances against the Axis, and Allied victory appeared inevitable. Knowing that the end of the war was imminent, Kállay and Horthy began a series of “secret” armistice negotiations with the Allies, a development of which Nazi officials were well aware. In response, the Nazis occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944, and made immediate plans to deport the Hungarian Jews to the extermination camps in occupied Poland. They forced Horthy to enact a regime change, and on March 22, Döme Sztójay was appointed prime minister with the Nazis’ approval.

  With Sztójay in command, the mass murder of the Hungarian Jews advanced very swiftly. From March to August, the government “introduced over one hundred anti-Jewish decrees depriving Jews of the rights, assets and freedoms,”* all under the watchful eye of SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, who had come to Hungary to oversee the deportations. By March 31, all Jews were forced to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothes. This was followed by preparations for the physical isolation of the Jews in ghettos and collection camps. Like many rural Hungarian Jews, Max and his family were not ghettoized but were transferred directly to a collection camp—the brickyard—where they stayed for only three weeks. The brickyard was one of many “camp-like accommodations outside residential areas: in factories, industrial or agricultural buildings, or other areas (mines, forests).”**

  Meanwhile, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the SS also began to plan for the influx of Hungarian Jews, which would mark the extermination camp’s most lethal period. Filip Müller, a member of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando (Jewish prisoners who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria), described hearing the disturbing news that trains would soon begin to arrive from Hungary: “Towards the end of April 1944 there were increasing rumours of the imminent extermination of the Jews of Hungary. To us, the prisoners of the Sonderkommando, this terrible news came as a devastating blow. Were we once more to stand by and watch while more hundreds upon thousands were done away with?”*** SS-Hauptscharführer Otto Moll, who managed the Auschwitz II–Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria, forced inmates to dig two additional pits behind Crematorium 5 in preparation for a greater-than-usual volume of corpses.* The Nazis also extended the train lines inside the camp and built a new unloading ramp to accommodate the large numbers of Hungarian Jews they expected.**

  When Max stepped onto that unloading ramp at the age of fifteen, he was on the cusp of the minimum age for slave labour—a possibility for survival not afforded to his younger brothers and baby sister. As he describes the final separation of his family, the reader yearns for some parting exchange between Max and his mother, but the chaos of arrival engulfed them both, and Max—and the reader—was denied this moment. As he was ushered toward the Sauna to be processed into the camp, he unknowingly had a glimpse of his family’s fate when he thought he saw people jumping into the crematory pyres that Otto Moll had prepared weeks earlier. Other Hungarian survivors, including Alexander Ehrmann, describe a similar state of confusion: “Beyond the barbed-wire fences there were piles of rubble and branches, pine tree branches and rubble burning, slowly burning. We were walking by, and the sentries kept on screaming, ‘Lauf! Lauf!’ and I heard a baby crying. The baby was crying somewhere in the distance and I couldn’t stop and look. We moved, and it smelled, a horrible stench. I knew that things in the fire were moving, there were babies in the fire.”***

  Auschwitz was not a single place but a network of camps in the Nazi-occupied Polish town of Oświęcim. It included the extermination camp at Auschwitz II–Birkenau; the labour camps at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz III–Monowitz; and other satellite worksites and factories. Today, Auschwitz is the most iconic symbol of the Holocaust, in part because it had the largest number of victims (1.1 million, mostly Jews), and in part because a relatively large number of survivors (tens of thousands) were left to transmit the stories of suffering there. At Treblinka, by comparison, nearly as many Jews and Romani were murdered (as many as 900,000), and less than eighty survived. Bełżec and Chełmno had only two known survivors each. Countless oral and written testimonies have inscribed Auschwitz into our collective consciousness, including Elie Wiesel’s Night, Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, as well as numerous films.

  While Max joins a chorus of Auschwitz survivors and some of his references may be familiar to the reader (the selection process at Birkenau, standing for hours at roll call, the prisoner orchestra in Auschwitz I, and the daily hunger, humiliation, and exhaustion), his account of daily life in the hospital of barrack 21 offers a wholly unique perspective on the procedures and processes of the camp. His description of the medical operations (both official and illicit) performed in the surgery ward gives us a glimpse into the complex role that prisoner doctors played in healing and resistance.

  Many readers will be familiar with Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor who performed the selections on the unloading ramp and engaged in medical experimentation on prisoners, sometimes for pseudo-scientific “research,” and sometimes for clinical trials for chemical and pharmaceutical products.* Indeed, the death in Auschwitz of each member of Max’s immediate family was tied in some way to a Nazi doctor: his mother, siblings, and grandparents were selected for gassing by a Nazi doctor on the unloading ramp in Birkenau, and his father and uncle were later selected for medical experimentation by Nazi doctors at Auschwitz I. Fewer readers will know about the prisoner doctors who worked in official and unofficial capacities through the camp. In The Nazi Doctors, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton details the difficult position of these men and women: “For prisoner doctors to remain healers was profoundly heroic and equally paradoxical: heroic in their combating the overwhelming Auschwitz current of murder; paradoxical in having to depend upon those who had abandoned healing for killing—the Nazi doctors.”**

  Through Max’s account, we come to know one of these heroic prisoner doctors: Dr. Tadeusz Orzeszko, the Polish political prisoner who mysteriously saved Max from certain death in the gas chamber and assisted the resistance movement at great personal risk. Dr. Orzeszko was born in Tashkent (now in Uzbekistan but then part of Turkestan) in 1907. He attended medical school in Warsaw, worked as a general practitioner and OB-GYN assistant in Radom (also in Poland), and began to study surgery in 1937. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, triggering the Second World War, Orzeszko aided members of the Polish underground and eventually joined the Union of Armed Struggle in 1940.* In addition to providing illicit medical assistance to partisans, he engaged in intelligence gathering and distributed resistance media. The Gestapo arrested Orzeszko in April 1943, tortured him for months, and eventually deported him to Auschwitz. Like Max, he first entered barrack 21 as a patient and was eventually employed there.**

  Max was separated from Orzeszko during the death march and knew nothing of his fate, but the doctor also made it to Mauthausen alive. Although Max was quickly transferred to Melk and Ebensee, Orzeszko remained at Mauthausen, where he also worked as a camp physician, until his liberation. Max did not see the doctor again before his death, but he did meet his family members in Warsaw in March 2010 at a reception organized by the Toronto-based Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center. He has since maintained a close friendship with Orzeszko’s son, Jan, and he recently learned that Dr. Orzeszko’s granddaughter, Julia, named her baby son Max in his honour.

  In addition to the details of the surgery ward in barrack 21, Max’s memoir also provides a unique perspective on “liberation” as both an acute moment of freedom and a long, arduous process of recovery marred by illness, overwhelming grief, and years of displacement and unce
rtainty. It is striking that Max was liberated by the 761st Tank Battalion, a segregated unit of African American soldiers who had themselves experienced violent racist oppression at home. Some were only a couple of generations removed from slavery. (Twenty years ago, Max was reunited with one of his liberators, Sergeant Johnnie Stevens, at a documentary screening in Toronto. Stevens was the grandson of slaves and the first African American bus driver in Middlesex County, New Jersey.* He remained in close contact with Max until his death in 2007.) Yet liberation was only one step in Max’s long journey to a new life of stability in Canada—a journey that included a difficult recovery from pleurisy, the loss of his family home, and a six-month period of imprisonment in Communist Prague for forging false identification documents.

  After decades of working as a committed and inspiring Holocaust speaker, Max wrote this memoir as a gift to his readers and a guarantee that his memories will endure for future generations. Despite several false starts and the nightmares that invaded his sleep when deep memories resurfaced, Max was determined to commit his story to paper—an act that speaks to his persistence and fortitude. Like many Holocaust survivors, he lived in part because of luck and circumstance, in part because of his relationships with people who afforded him lifesaving advice or a kind gesture, and in part because of his own personal strength, which allowed him to get through one impossible day after another. Working so closely with Max in the editing of this memoir is one of the highlights of my scholarly career, and I cherish the friendship we have developed over the last five years. His story is now yours.

  —Amanda Grzyb, PhD

  Acknowledgments

  Of approximately sixty members of my extended family, only three of us survived: me; my maternal first cousin, Lily Friedman Kalish; and my paternal first cousin, Chaim (Tibor) Lazarovits. After the war, Lily immigrated to the United States and married an American veteran. She was the spitting image of my mother, and once I settled in Canada, we spoke on the phone biweekly. Chaim immigrated to Israel in 1947 and married an Israeli woman; I saw him annually in the last fifteen years of his life. Lily passed away on July 23, 2014, at the age of eighty-nine, and Chaim passed away on July 31, 2015, at the age of eighty-five. They were the only remnant of my first family, and the only people with whom I could reminisce about our previous life and our beloved family members—I am grateful for the bond that we shared after the Holocaust. Their deaths hit me hard and I feel the loss every day.

  I would like to acknowledge all the people who assisted me in my recovery period after my initial return to Czechoslovakia as a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. Ily Klinka, our family friend and neighbour, saw my distress and provided swift motherly actions, which led me to the St. Elizabeth Hospital in KoŠice. The dedicated nuns at St. Elizabeth pulled me through several difficult weeks of treatment for pleurisy. Joseph and Malvinka Gottlieb took me into their home without hesitation and gave me sustenance, and they, together with six others—their three daughters, Ilonka, Clari, and Shari; their son, Itzhak; their cousin Ruty; and their friend Magda—all contributed to a welcoming atmosphere and created a “home” for me. Malvinka’s wonderful meals reminded me of my mother’s and grandmother’s preparations, and enabled me to put on weight and regain vitality.

  As I continued along in my journey to health, I was assisted by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which supported a school for Jewish studies and vocational services in Marienbad, Czechoslovakia. The three years I spent there renewed my spirit, both physically and mentally. As the three years were coming to an end, Rabbi Abraham Price of Toronto was instrumental in securing my visa to come to Canada.

  I want to acknowledge the support of the Holocaust Education Centre (under the auspices of the Jewish Federation of Toronto), which gave me the opportunity to speak to students from public schools, high schools, and universities, as well as adult groups. Likewise, I want to recognize the March of the Living Canada, under the direction of Eli Rubenstein and Michael Soberman. They demonstrate exceptional leadership and dedication, and provide an important service to the community. I acknowledge, too, all the friends, professors, students, and teachers who have provided a constant platform for me to expound on the lessons of the Shoah. I am hopeful the information I have offered will make a difference for them in the future, for the betterment of humankind.

  My granddaughter Tziporah Sarah with my great-grandchildren: Yehudit (right), Elisheva (left), and Michael Aharon.

  I am very thankful to the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, under the direction of Avi Benlolo and his support staff, for giving me the opportunity to speak as a survivor educator in many of their educational programs. The Wiesenthal Center does important outreach work in the public sphere to educate and inform about the Holocaust and genocide. It was on one of their annual “Compassion to Action” missions to Poland that I met Jim Gifford, the editorial director for non-fiction at HarperCollins, who has been so supportive of my memoir project. I am grateful for Jim’s editorial advice, his kindness, and his friendship. I am also indebted to my talented copyeditor, Janice Weaver, who went over the manuscript with such care and professionalism, and to my wonderful production editor, Maria Golikova, who helped keep the project on track. Professor Robert Jan van Pelt was kind enough to meet with me in Oświęcim in Summer 2015, and he helped me obtain releases for historical photographs of Auschwitz.

  It seems to me that the stars were aligned in March 2010 when I first met Professor Amanda Grzyb, from the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario, on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s inaugural mission to Poland. Through our common interest in Holocaust education, the seeds of our relationship were sown, and she played a vital role in the writing of this book. When I met Amanda, I had been speaking as a survivor educator for many years, but it was difficult for me to put my experiences down on paper. Amanda understood my frustrations and graciously offered her editorial assistance to help me overcome the obstacles that were preventing me from writing. With her help, I found my voice and my method of self-expression, and everything seemed to flow naturally from that point. Her research assistants, Amaal Mohamed Bhaloo, Kaitlyn Bida, and Jennifer Schmidt, assisted us both by transcribing our interviews. Amanda is a generous, thoughtful, and caring person, who has dedicated herself to educating others about the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and other social injustices. I am proud to have her as a friend. I’m very grateful that she invested her valuable time in reading and editing my manuscript. She gave me the confidence to continue in an organized fashion, with a clear goal in mind. With her encouragement, I delved deep into the past and was able to bring long-forgotten, terrifying experiences to the forefront of my memory.

  Our granddaughter Julie.

  Finally, I want to express my deepest appreciation to my family. My in-laws, Rose and Sam Cosman, listened to my story and helped me along my journey. They became my second set of parents, and all their family members—their sons, Malcolm and Alvin, and their uncles, aunts, cousins, and sisters-in-law—accepted me in every respect. I owe an eternal gratitude to my beloved wife, Ivy, and my sons, Ed (who was a sounding board throughout this entire process) and Larry (who designed the maps in this book), for their love, support, and encouragement. They make my ship sail smoothly and are the stabilizers in my life. They are always there for me, and I can always count on their steadfastness. I’m fortunate to have two granddaughters, Amy Tzipporah Sarah and Julie Mina Leah, who have brought me great joy. And now a fourth generation is coming along, with three great-grandchildren so far: Yehudit, Elisheva, and Michael Aharon.

  I send this book to publication with a feeling of great accomplishment. It was difficult to complete, but I’m relieved that my story can be shared with my family and others, who I hope will gain insight from it. Thank you for reading my words.

  Appendix

  ADDITIONAL DOCUMENTS

  In 1995 I discovered that my father and uncle were victims of Nazi medical exp
eriments. Dr. Carson Phillips of the Neuberger Holocaust Centre in Toronto found documents showing their names on a July 1944 selection list in the Auschwitz archives.

  This and the following letter demostrate the dispassionate and mechanical approach of the engineers and SS officials involved in the logistics of mass murder.

  Translation:

  [Top left: Rubber stamp of the Topf management secretariat, dated 6th December 1941, with the initials of the directors: LT for Ludwig Topf and ET for Ernst-Wolfgang Topf, and the inscription for reply and replied on]

  Erfurt, 6th December 1941

  To Messrs

  Ludwig and Ernst Wolfgang Topf

  Inside the house

  Dear Messrs Topf,

  As you know, I designed both the 3 muffle and 8 muffle cremation furnaces, and this using mainly my free time—at home.

  These furnace constructions pioneer the way for the future and I venture to hope that you will grant me a bonus for the work involved.

  Heil Hitler!

  Kurt Prüfer

  On the order of LT/ET,

  150 RM paid 24/12/41

  [Initials]