Goran Rosenberg - A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

Historical coincidence determined how the event would be remembered. In the month following the end of the war, the armistice lines between the armies of the victorious powers were tidied up a little, and some of the troops were moved around. On July 1, 1945, American troops moved out of Uchtspringe and Soviet troops moved in, and sixty-six men in a mass grave were transformed from victims of the German Reich to victims of “fascism.”

I decide not to follow the train on its long detour from Uchtspringe via Wittenberge to Bergedorf in Hamburg, and drive directly to Ravensbrück.

Dr. Liedke gives me a copy of the Ravensbrück list. Well, not the whole list, but the page with your name on it. Of the documents from the slave camp archipelago, it’s the only one I have that bears your name. It’s a handwritten list compiled by the SS in Ravensbrück, and on it you appear as David Rosenberg and your brother Natek as Nathan Rosenberg, first Natek and then you. Rosenberg is spelled with an s , Natek appears as Nathan rather than Naftali, and your date of birth is 1926 rather than 1923, but it’s undoubtedly the two of you on the list. You’re entered as numbers 315 and 316. Prisoner category: Polish Jew. Birthplace: Widawa. Delivery: Auschwitz 26 VIII 1944. Dispatch: Wattenstedt ( sic ). Old prisoner numbers (from the SS registers at Neuengamme): 50648 and 50649. New prisoner numbers (for the SS registers in Ravensbrück): 18300 and 18301. Beside the prisoner numbers is a firmly penciled check mark, although not by the non-Jewish names. If I didn’t know what I know, I’d assume that the Jews thus marked were selected for a worse hell than the rest, but in Ravensbrück the unimaginable happens: the Jews are selected for a better one. I don’t know if the check marks on the list apply to that particular selection, but it may well be so. At any rate, the checks entitle the Jewish inmates to a food parcel from the Red Cross.

It’s April 14, 1945, and the front is approaching, and the stated aim of the increasingly deadly prisoner marches and transports through the German camp archipelago is to wipe out all traces of themselves; or as Himmler himself puts it on April 18, 1945, to ensure that no prisoner falls into enemy hands alive.

Kein Häftling darf lebend in die Hände des Feindes fallen .

Given another month, they might have done it. Of the 700,000 or so concentration camp inmates entered in the SS registers in January 1945, a third die in the final months of the war; dropping like flies, as we hear in testimony after testimony, not only yours. Toward the end, this is the sole remaining purpose of the evacuation transports: to make you disappear from the world.

And then, in Ravensbrück, after nine days on a train of open freight cars with a special car in the rear for the dead, your names are checked for a five-kilo food parcel from the Red Cross.

The Jews, specifically.

How is it possible? Ravensbrück is a concentration camp (mainly for women). In Ravensbrück, the SS is in absolute control. In Ravensbrück, prisoners are dying in vast numbers, 50,000 of them altogether, and from February 1945 onward in a newly installed gas chamber. In March and April 1945, 25,000 prisoners are evacuated from Ravensbrück in order to disappear. In Ravensbrück, too, no prisoner is to fall into enemy hands alive. SS men who check off Jews, especially, for life-saving food parcels are not only going against Himmler’s express orders, but they’re also sabotaging what to the very end remains the overriding mission of the SS empire: the annihilation of the Jews.

Who has the authority to order such a thing?

Himmler himself, it turns out. In the last months of the war, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler is playing a double game of life and death with a Swedish count named Folke Bernadotte. Himmler thinks he’s playing for his own life after the surrender, and Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross, thinks he’s playing, at least initially, for the lives of Norwegian and Danish citizens in Himmler’s concentration camps. With the war still raging, these people, in columns of white buses with Swedish flags and red crosses painted on them, are to be evacuated to life, not to death. More pressure is then brought to bear, widening the operation to include Danish and Norwegian Jews as well, and toward the end of April gravely ill women from Ravensbrück. At the same time, a Swedish representative of the World Jewish Congress, Gilel (Hillel) Storch, a Jewish businessman from Latvia who has managed to escape to Sweden, is simultaneously negotiating with Himmler, the Swedish government, and the International Red Cross about sending food parcels to surviving Jews in the German concentration camps. “In the Ravensbrück camp there are 35,000 Jewish women literally starving to death,” writes Gilel Storch on March 19, 1945, in a letter to legation counselor Hellstedt of the Royal Department for Foreign Affairs in Sweden.

As you no doubt realize, this is a story in itself, and it’s really not about you or any of the Polish Jewish men aboard the meandering train of freight cars from Aussenlager Watenstedt, but in Ravensbrück the food parcels and your road from Auschwitz just happen to cross paths. Those food parcels are a big thing, probably decisive to your survival, and the events associated with them remain vivid in your memory eleven months later, in that letter to Haluś:

Here [in Ravensbrück] they started talking about some parcels from the American Red Cross, and, believe it or not, the following day actually handed out parcels, each parcel to be shared by two. People went sort of crazy with happiness, and no wonder. A few weeks before the end of the war and here’s a dirty, hungry Häftling tucking into American chocolate, biscuits etc.

On the third day we were given another parcel, and news started to spread that the Jews were going to Sweden, but nobody believed it. I thought to myself that people had been so overwhelmed by the food parcels that they were starting rumors and gossip.

But people weren’t talking through their hats this time, either, because a few days later we hear somebody shouting: “ Alle Juden .” This was hardly music to my ears, for what could they possibly want with all the Jews, but we had no choice but to fall in. We were then 800 Jews among 6,000 [inmates] of other nationalities. An SS man gave us a speech: “At roll call tomorrow morning, the Jews are to stand to one side. You’re going to Sweden. The Swedish Red Cross will come and get you.”

Right away I thought of Biebow’s speech in the ghetto: “Now we’ll have some new guests arriving.” Actually I could have hidden and stayed behind, because I’d met a German Häftling I knew from the previous camp, and he was now a barrack guard. He said that if I didn’t want to go, I could stay. But he also said there was nothing to be afraid of, because the story about going to Sweden was true. I believed him because I knew he was a good friend, so why sit there in a camp if I could be free in a few days.

But still it was completely incomprehensible.

Could it be possible for a Jew to survive the war?

The next day we were taken from the camp [in freight cars], and for the journey we were each given three American parcels and could have had more if we’d wanted. So how could we not believe it?

On the parcels it said, American Red Cross durch Vermittlung Schwedischen Roten Kreuz — an den Ältesten der Juden in Ravensbrück . And in some of the parcels there were cans of meat labeled “kosher.” Now we were certain we’d been rescued.

At midnight, the train stopped. A civilian we recognized as a Kapo (this time a German Jew) came into our car. He wasn’t wearing his prison suit any longer, but normal civilian clothes, with a white armband. He spoke to us in German, and this all took place in the presence of the SS men who were escorting us: “I’ve heard there are various rumors circulating among you, that you’re dubious about all this (the journey to Sweden), that you’re afraid and talking of crematoriums, etc. Put all that out of your minds. The hours of this war are numbered. You see these SS men (and he pointed at them)? They still have their rifles, but you can be sure they’d like to throw them away now. They’re no longer our enemies. Let us not blame anyone, though it’s true that your children, mothers, fathers, and so on have been burned in the crematoriums. But they aren’t guilty of this. The whole of Europe is in ruins, don’t avenge yourselves on the Germans, they’re not the only ones guilty of this war, the whole world has gone mad, everyone is guilty. Englishmen, Americans, etc.”