Mengele Saves a Life

The pounding in my head made my whole body feel that it might split open and that my pulse was throbbing all the way down to my toes. My body was so hot I was still climbing onto the barracks roof at night. My legs were too weak to work, and my hand felt blistered when I checked my forehead for my temperature.

Next to the hospital was a shed which housed the hot water pumps which warmed the whole building. I climbed up onto the rooftop during the day, hiding behind a chimney which itself had been heated by the pumps. The chimney blocked the view of the guards sweeping the camp every morning, and the side of the chimney where I hid was next to a fence, so nobody could see me.

Still, I couldn't work, and I had no place to go. My head was pounding so hard it felt ready to fall off. I hadn't much time.

I went to see Max Stein.

"Max, I can't go out on my assignment. I think I'm going to die. My head is thundering and I'm burning up. I've been sleeping on a roof during the day. I'm so hot, I can't work. I'll be dead in a few days."

If anything ever disturbed or distressed Max, he never let it show. This time, his eyes almost bulged out. He could see my eyes were closed nearly to slits. He put a hand on my forehead and immediately pulled back. He knew this was serious.

'I've been watching you, Joe. I know where you've been hiding, but I didn't know it was this bad. Let me go talk to Father," he said, worry clouding his eyes.

Later that day, Father came waddling over to me, his pudgy body almost hopping. When I saw him, I started crying. He examined my head and my eyes. Then worry furrowed his face.

"Take it easy. Take it easy. Let me see what I can do for you, Joe. I might be back later today. Tomorrow at the latest," he told me, his voice low and soothing.

I wasn't sure I would make it through the day. I just hid next to the chimney, hoping no guard would spot that I was sick. Later that same day, Father found me just as I was leaving my warm perch.

"You're going into the hospital. Report there at 7:30 in the morning," he said, eyes sparkling.

I was astonished. I just stood there with my mouth hanging open. Everybody knew Jews were never treated in the hospital.

"Just be there on time," Father said, then waddled away.

That night, a lot of thoughts went spinning through my head. Father must have talked to Mengele. Nobody but Mengele could have given permission for e to be treated. Mengele knew and liked how clean and neat I was and how well I did all his cleaning and polished his boots to almost a mirrorlike shine. But to be treated in the hospital? This was far more than I could ever have expected.

I know what happened, I thought. Father went to Mengele, and he didn't say I am a Jew, and he didn't say I am not a Jew.

Later, Father said he'd told Mengele that I was a guy Mengele knows, the guy who does the cleaning.

When I reported to the particular hospital barracks Father had directed me, I could smell an antiseptic. Then an orderly took me to a bed.

What's going to happen? Are the bastards going to beat me? Force me to watch while they torture one of us? I feverishly wondered.

My fear only increased when the orderly returned and walked toward me with razor in his hand. Would he slit my throat? Cut out my eye? What was he going to do? What he did was to shave my head completely bald, my blond hair falling like pieces of gold.

Soon I was wheeled into an operating room. I looked up, and my eyes almost fell out of my head. Underneath surgical masks were the faces of Josef Mengele and his three assistants. I could feel fear rise in my throat. I'd heard about Mengele's experiments.

"How could Father betray me like this?" I cried to myself.

Then a mask was put over my face and the sweet-smelling anesthetic was administered. I just didn't care anymore. I was in such pain the faces of my parents, my brothers, my sisters, all bobbed in front of my eyes and I just didn't care whether I died. From seemingly far away, I heard the pounding of a hammer, the scraping of a chisel, and the cracking of a bone. Then I blacked out.

When I woke up five hours later, my head was wrapped in white cloth. I could see out of one eye, but the other one was covered with some kind of bandage which went all the way around my head.

"What happened? Where am I?" I cried out.

As the anesthesia fumes wore off, I realized I was in a hospital bed. All I knew was that Josef Mengele had operated on me, and I was still alive. I still had pain in my head, but it wasn't the kind of feverish pounding I'd had before. It somehow was cleaner, brighter, more hopeful, though my head still felt as though somebody were banging the clapper on a large bell.

"What happened? What happened? No Jew I know has ever been put in here," I said to myself.

Then I remembered that Mengele and his doctors had operated on me. I could feel a chill of fear run the length of my body. I knew Mengele's reputation, so I ran my hands over my body to make sure I still had all my parts. I even grabbed my penis and my scrotum. I touched them all over. I wiggled them. They were all there. All in one piece. I was astonished.

It was Mengele doing the operation. I know it was. He never does anything for Jews, and surely he can see my circumcised penis. It must have been Father. Nobody else could arrange this, I thought in the blackness.

A few hours later, the guards brought in a prisoner and placed him in bed next to me. The rest of the ward's fifteen beds were filled, and some even had two people in them. It was my turn to have a bunkmate.

The man groaned.

"Who are you?" I asked in German.

"I'm a German Jew," he replied thickly, in German.

"Jew? How? There's no such thing as Jews in this hospital."

"I was hiding in Berlin. I was born there and I have friends. They were hiding me and I had to go out to see a friend of mine who also was in hiding. They caught me on the street. Somebody squealed, I guess, and I had an attack."

He groaned again. I didn't know whether his attack was stomach, gallbladder, or what. He went on to say that when they captured him they took him to Birkenau. They had told him they didn't know whether he was Jew or Aryan, and they had to check him out. In the meantime, they had put him next to me.

He looked at me with troubled eyes and trembling cheeks.

"What goes on here?"

"Me and you are not going to be here tonight," I told him. "You're in Birkenau, and here they gas five thousand to ten thousand people a day. Jews, Gypsies, Masons. Everybody."

"You're crazy," he said, hissing. "My people, the German people, would never do that."

"We'll see. Tonight me and you are going to be leaving here," I said in a nasty tone I later regretted. I knew what would happen to him; he didn't. Maybe his last hours should have been spent in comforting ignorance. Still, his protecting the Germans grated on me, so I stuck in my final dagger.

"You won't be coming back," I said.

About midnight, they came for him. But amazingly, not for me. "Where am I going?" he demanded of the guards, shouting.

Instead, I answered him: "You're going to die, as I'm going to die," I said, this time with real compassion. I could see by his wide eyes and flaring nostrils he now fully understood the truth of what I said. I never saw him again.

The next day Mengele and his three doctors visited me. I figured this was my time to die. Whatever they wanted to do to me, they would do. They saw my eyes were open very wide, and they all walked over, including Mengele. I badly wanted to urinate.

The three young doctors were cordial.

"Hello, how are you?" they said with big smiles. Doing surgery on a live body was a thrilling change of pace for them. Usually they only got to slice up corpses.

Mengele looked hard at the medical chart, then up at me. He talked to me in German, even though he thought I didn't understand. He was trying to demonstrate a warm bedside manner to the young doctors. "You've had a mastoid operation," he told me. I had no idea what that was. I just knew I had a yard of bandages wrapped around my head.

Then the three doctors unwrapped the bandages, which had globs of gray and yellow pus clinging to them. That pus was pouring out of my wounds like water from a leaking faucet.

"Ja, ja. Yes, it's good. It's good. Very good. Very good," Mengele said, looking at the results of his own surgery and nodding approvingly.

Then he called over a male orderly, someone I had seen on the job but had never talked to very much. He knew me because I moved around a lot. Mengele looked sharply at the orderly and said sternly, "Give him farina with milk. Give him margarine and white bread."

I'd not even seen, let alone eaten, such food since the war started. I would have had to bribe or kill somebody to get any of it. Now Josef Mengele himself was ordering me to be fed this delicious, life-giving nourishment. It was too ridiculous.

Either he thinks I'm a child or he's going to adopt me, I giggled inside my mind, half-giddy with fear and the realization that I might live.

I quickly pulled myself together. I understood Father was able to save me because Mengele knew me and I was as familiar a part of his routine as brushing his teeth. Mengele adored sticking to routines, not changing the way he walked, ate, or anything else. I had in an odd way become a part of him. Because I was an underground member, Father had been willing to save me.

I was still astonished that my life had been spared. I thought, I guess it's not what you know, it's who is looking out for you. I know Max, Max knows Father, Father knows Mengele, Mengele knows me. Simple as that.

I fell back asleep, but the orderly shook me awake. I opened my eyes in wonder. I saw a bowl of farina swimming in milk, white bread, real margarine. I almost threw the food down my throat.

A little while later, the orderly brought me white bread and hunks of cheese for lunch. I know my eyes were almost bulging out of their sockets. In four years of war, I had never had such a warm place to sleep or such nourishing food. Dinner that night was a thick vegetable soup.

I'm used to scraping the bottoms of garbage bins for food, and now look what's being brought to me in real dishes, I thought. I was overwhelmed. The food wasn't hard to digest, so even my shriveled stomach could handle it.

Most days, I was fighting to stay alive. Now, I could feel my body being flooded with vitamins and warmth and sleep, and I could feel myself tense up--I knew enough to mistrust good things that happened to me in a death camp. But nobody bothered me, I slept well, and I had good food. I was even given water in a small pan and a towel to wash myself.

There must be a God in heaven, I thought. A few days ago I was ready to die.

Now the Germans are treating me as a human being and the underground protects me. There must be a God in heaven.

Still, I was not treated the same as the Gentiles. I was put off in a corner, fifty feet away from everybody else. I was almost the only patient on my side. I figured Mengele knew I was Jewish but was doing a big favor for Father. He also was letting his young doctors do surgery on a live body. I think that was his idea of a good deed.

All around me were death and sickness. All day and night, when I wasn't sleeping, I heard the phlegmy hacking of people with infections deep in their lungs, groaning and even yelling from pain. Even though this was a ward for the healthiest of the sick people, a few died, and I saw them being carried out.

As for me, I had fine care. Nobody else in the barracks had a sheet or a pillow, and I had both. An orderly walked up to me and silently displayed his forearm: its blue tattooing contained the same series of numbers as mine.

"We have been through Majdanek together," he whispered. "I'm from Warsaw."

For several days after that he brought me a cup of water occasionally, asking, "How are you sleeping? How are you feeling?"

He knew that I was a celebrity of some kind, that there must be something special about this short little Jew.

"Thank God, thank God," was all I could say.

Max visited me a few times. He joked, "What are you doing here, Joe? I need you back there." Then he'd joke about my being placed so far away from every other patient. I'd smile, he'd smile, and we'd make small talk. We'd never talk about the underground.

About five days into my stay, Mengele and his entourage came again. One of the orderlies unwrapped the bandages to show off the surgery results. Mengele peered at the wound and said, softly, "Nice, nice, nice." Then he ordered my bandages changed and the four doctors went on their way.

I was in the hospital for nine days, gorging myself on farina, almost drowning milk, white bread, and margarine. Every day I was drenched with sweat, afraid being sick meant somebody was going to cart me off to be gassed at any moment.

I said to myself, "This has got to be a fantasy. This has got to be a dream," but I would always feel the lump behind my right ear and I would know the truth.

One day the orderly who had been through Majdanek approached me, looking a little sad.

"You're going to be discharged, Joe. You already have your clothing, but if you want a new set I'll get you some. And you get your old job back. Somebody's looking out after your rear end, and I'm glad," he said.

The next day I woke up, stretched, and looked over to the row of sick prisoners l beds along the opposite wall. I waited until breakfast was served. I slowly lapped up the milk and farina, letting every swallow take the longest time possible to dribble down my throat.

The sweet taste would have to stay with me for what I hoped would be a long, long time. So would the taste of white bread and margarine. I buttered the bread, then tore it into small pieces. I ate each little piece, chewing slowly and letting the rich taste wander down my gullet, savoring every last second of it.

The orderly took off my remaining bandages and put a little bandage over my scar. Then he gave me my clothing. I put it on, then left. I didn't have to check out; I didn't have a bill to pay. I waved good-bye to the orderly who had helped me.

The patients on the other side of the ward just looked at me with curiosity. They had no idea what strange disease I had that kept me isolated. I didn't bother explaining that it was just Jewishness, and that it wasn't contagious.

It's good to have friends, I thought, realizing that without the underground I should be dead by now. I also realized I was the link between the Birkenau underground and the outside world. I was the one who delivered the messages from each side. If not for me, nobody in the outside would know the horrors that were happening here. In my rectum, I carried hope for the underground inside the camp. I was the one who carried the news of how far the Allies had advanced, and how far the Germans were beaten back.

I'm a valuable instrument to them, I thought. They need me, and I'm thrilled to be needed.

The first day out, I was assigned to a Jewish foreman, a miserable man. He had been a foreman for the Czech for several months. As time went on, he was beating more and more people to death, until the Czech had renounced beatings. Then the foreman had to be careful.

Without a word, he walked over to me and started beating me. He especially enjoyed hitting me in the head. My hair had not grown back yet, and my surgical scars stood out like blood on a bandage. The partisans had trained me how to defend myself. I knew what to do, but my body was too weak to do it.

After he beat and kicked me for a while, he picked me up and threw me into the mud, which was partially icy because winter still gripped the camp. I saw male orderlies who had originally come with me to Auschwitz looking out the hospital window. I could see them frowning in anger as I picked myself out of the soggy mud.

I got my revenge. A couple of months later, when I was even more secure about how the underground could protect me, I walked over to the foreman. He was several inches taller than I, but I leaned up into his ear and hissed, "If you mess with me again, I'll cut your hands off and nobody will do a damned thing to me. And you know what the Germans will do to you if your arms are stumps and you can't even work."

The look he gave me, melding surprise and fear, made me feel almost as good as that first mouthful of farina in the hospital. It was nourishment for the soul.

I had taken heart. Every week I went out with the Leichenkommandos, and every week Max gave me the message and the condom. We always had very short conversations, as though we were total strangers. Generally we would meet in the hospital or between one barrack and another. Sometimes we would meet in the latrine after work, and he would just shake my hand, and say, "Hello, how are you?" Then I'd feel the neatly folded oily paper in my palm.

Nobody would bother Max wherever he went. He was a secretary, so he didn't work. He dressed fairly well and had such winter items as boots and jackets, all with no holes. He no doubt got enough to eat because his face still was plump.

When Max and I saw each other after a few days, we would go through the ritual used with all of the people we knew. We'd shake hands and say, "Thank God you're still alive."

That was how we behaved in Birkenau. Forming friendships was difficult, because we knew any of us could be caught up in the Nazi net at any time. But we couldn't survive without the sustenance of human companionship, no matter how temporary. Friendship in here meant almost as much as food. In a way, it was food for the spirit. Often, friendship was all that prevented us from going crazy or throwing ourselves onto the wires.

However, Max and I had something special. When Max and I saw each other and shook hands, either he was passing a note to me or I one to him. Our exuberance at seeing each other was not remarkable here, where just seeing someone you knew after a few days was a small miracle, a blessing, a light in an otherwise dark and menacing existence.





Death and a Job Switch

The messages between the underground and the outside were a bright beam of light in my life. I always read them before I put them into the condom, then into my rectum. I wanted to know what was happening in the camp. The news was always depressing, but it always made me feel good that the deaths of these people--many of them my people--would be noted by the world, no matter how slightly, through the numbers on this small slip of paper.

What really gave me heart were the messages I picked up detailing the battering the Germans were taking. One day I was face-to-face with proof that the war was souring for the Germans. I was passing by a work camp near Birkenau during my corpse-fetching duties. I had been there so long nobody bothered me much. Some of the work camps had been turned into prisoner-of-war facilities, and I wandered near the fence and asked the POW's where they were from. It was amazing: they were Jewish pilots from all over the United States and England. Some spoke Yiddish. One said he was from New York. Earlier in the war they might have been beaten to death. Now, the Germans left them in peace because the Swedish Red Cross was watching very closely.

"Damned Krauts are running for their lives now," said the guy from New York in a nasal twang. "We're bombing hell out of them."

He assured me that if we could just hang on, we'd be free.

Just then the Leichenkommando leader called out and I had to go back to my duties, but the news thrilled me.

By this time, in the winter of early 1944, I knew the Soviets were pushing the Germans across the Polish border. I also knew the Allies were winning important battles. I dreamed my Poland would one day soon be free of these vermin. My personal dream continued, too.

"One day, I will be free. I will have a wife and children, and I will have my own business. I can do this. Miracles do happen. And they are happening," I would almost chant to myself.

I was a mass of conflicted feelings. Often I would picture my dream in my mind, usually when I was cold, wet, and hungry and it was raining or snowing. Then I would grasp reality. I would lie quietly and press my flesh between my thumb and forefinger realizing I had so little meat that my skin felt like a piece of paper lying on top of my bones. I would despair, then think over the messages about the war I had read and dare to think the war might be over sometime soon, and that I would survive.

I will get an education. I'm just as good as the Germans, and even a lot better.

There's plenty of land to buy yet. I will build. I will create factories, homes, I thought.

Sometimes I would let my fantasy become even richer. I would see myself with two or three of my friends, maybe Hymie, Nuftul, and Frank, and we had all formed a company and were living nicely, with nice houses, wives, children, and cars. I pictured my house as palacelike, shrubs and flowers blooming in a profusion of colors.

While my soul was being filled with hope, the spirits of many of my landsmen were being drained. Day after day I would wake up to find someone's bed was empty. Maybe two or three beds.

I knew right away who was missing just by looking up and down the seemingly endless rows. Also, I'd go near the barracks back door, where the barrel was. That door was always open a little, looking out on the electrified fences, which sat like silent snakes in the dawn.

From that vantage point, I could see limp bodies, the head hanging down on one side, the toes of the shoes touching the ground, draped over the wires. Generally there were one to four corpses. Many of us regularly went to the barrel in the morning to see who had committed suicide the night before. Over the next several months, I would see the corpses of perhaps three hundred men from my barracks alone swaying lightly on the wires. So thin had they become that their corpses bent the wires only a little.

After work, when we were wet, tired, hungry, and had endured countless beatings during a twelve-hour shift, the men often would talk about killing themselves. They'd had only the most meager food and their ragged clothing was scant protection against the freezing nights. They'd look at me and say, "Joe, life is intolerable here. Why wait? Why be tortured? Nobody can withstand such misery, such agony. We'll all be dead very shortly anyway. What is the point?"

Of course, all the people who talked that way were Jews. The barracks had some Gentiles, but they didn't endure selections. They got packages of clothes and food. I despaired. The Allies may have been winning battles, but the world had forgotten about us.

We are Jews. We have no home, no food, no friends, no relatives, nothing to help us. People gave up on us. Some were too busy making millions and some don't care. President Roosevelt doesn't seem to care much, I would often think to myself. If he cared, a lot of things could have been done to stop the atrocities. I hope and pray the world will have peace, and all I see around me are atrocities. Where are our fellow Jews? Where are the Americans?

Sometimes I'd say this to my close friends. Mostly I tried to keep up people's spirits for another day. I wanted what I knew to leap out of my mouth, to soothe the hurts, the pain, the agony, the despair, of those I saw around me. But it would mean my death.

All I could do was talk to them. In my seven years in the yeshiva, I learned that in both the Jewish and Christian religions, people who commit suicide are murdering themselves. If you kill yourself, you will lie next to the wall of the cemetery, not with your family.

"You have no right to destroy the life God gave to you. I know we all could face the gas chamber," I would tell the prisoners, pleadingly. "In a short while, all of us could be gone. There's always a chance a miracle can happen again. Stay alive another hour. We can live to see these bastards buried in their own blood."

"You're crazy, Joe," they would say to me. "You're a sweet man. Nobody ever tried harder to make things good for us. But this is a death camp. What people do here is die. It's only a question of whether it's going to be sooner or later."

I was nearly dead myself. I was almost a skeleton. I weighed maybe 80 pounds, down from 150.

Will I survive this war? Will I make it? I keep dreaming I will be somebody. But maybe instead of being somebody important, I'll just be somebody who is dead, I thought to myself. Then I shivered.

In the spring of 1944, our food situation began to improve a little. The Nazis had occupied Hungary to prevent the Hungarian government from making peace with the Allies. A few months later, the government there started deporting Jews to Birkenau. The Germans had told the Jews they were being sent to Auschwitz to work, so the Hungarian Jewish committees sent along huge piles of sacked peas and beans to feed their people.

Although many of the Hungarians were not kept at Birkenau, the Germans in some small measure had told the truth. At that point, they were allowing healthy men up to age forty and women up to age thirty or thirty-five to be sent to Germany or to work camps.

However, the peas and beans that the Hungarians had with them stayed in Birkenau, so we ate slightly better for a little while. Then international pressure from the Red Cross, the Vatican, and the Allies made the Hungarian government stop the deportations only weeks after they began. I knew what had happened, of course, because I was reading the underground's messages.

In the spring of 1944, a Jewish boy from Hungary arrived in Birkenau. He was in good shape. Somehow the Hungarian government had allowed him to be fed decently. He was medium-sized, seventeen years old, with auburn hair and some meat on his bones. He came over to me, because he'd figured out I could help him.

"Joe, the Hungarians lost the war on our front and the Germans started deporting us right away. Jews were being taken to the front, but I'm too young. What goes on here?"

Because he had given me some news, I gave him some news and told him what happened there. He hung on to me, but he was smart enough to land a job on the ramp without my help. I had helped several people to get jobs: Frank, Noah--the prisoner who always was asking my advice--and two other guys.

Ultimately, I had more than a dozen men transferred to my area. There were some people I could not help, but who could take very good care of themselves. In the middle of 1944, a transport of Jews was shipped in from northern Italy, where the Germans still held on against the Allies. Among them was Checo, a champion boxer. Checo could speak only Italian. I didn't know that language very well, but he had a friend with him who also spoke Serbo-Croatian. I knew enough of that language to get by, and the boxer and I communicated through his friend.

Already there was a gang of seven Ukrainians in the camp. They were anti-Semites. They also had an amateur boxer in their midst. They told Checo's interpreter that if Checo didn't fight, they'd kill him. Checo refused, but after several death threats from the Ukrainians, he gave in. Though I never could catch him at it, I suspected the Stubendienst kept urging on the Ukrainians.

About three weeks after Checo arrived, the two boxers fought. The fight was held on a Sunday between Barracks 8 and 9. There was almost a carnival atmosphere. There must have been twelve hundred people, packed in very tightly. Everybody was craning his neck or pushing toward the front row.

It was a pitiful festivity. The smell of unwashed bodies clogged the air and ragged clothes hung in strips on most of us. Many of us had lost our teeth, and most were covered with scars and caked blood. Finally, a space about eighty by one hundred feet was cleared in the middle of this pathetic and ragged group. The two boxers, stripped to the waist, stepped forward. A Stubendienst with a whistle and watch was referee.

"We're going to have a fight," he announced in German. "We don't know who's going to win, but it's all for free. There will be ten rounds, and each round will be five minutes," he bellowed.

The crowd, already in a circle around the men, was probably the most religion--and nationality--diverse group I had ever seen at the camp. It was first come, first served, so Jews and Gentiles were randomly mixed together.

The whistle blew for the first round, and Checo came bobbing and bouncing out of his corner. He was squat, with rippling muscles and a ballet dancer's ability to move on his feet. He was about five feet, seven inches, and weighed perhaps 190. The Ukrainian was about an inch taller but skinnier by 25 pounds.

From the beginning, the Ukrainian clearly was overmatched. Checo bounced, bobbed, and weaved around him, while the Ukrainian just stood there and moved a little. He had no footwork. Checo would jab and run, and the sound of Checo's fist smacking the Ukrainian's face popped into the air several times a minute. The Ukrainian's face kept getting lumpier and lumpier. By the end of the second round there was no doubt how this fight would turn out.

The Ukrainian was tired, his movements more leaden. By this time, Checo was pumping his fist into the Ukrainian's face harder and harder, smothering him with flurries while the Ukrainian kept covering his face and stomach. After smashing the Ukrainian five or six times, Checo would dance away from the man's lunges, which became increasingly awkward and ungainly as fatigue and the pounding of Checo's punches sapped his strength.

The Ukrainian kept shaking his head to clear his mind. After each flurry, he shook his head harder and harder. Occasionally, he would land a solid blow to Checo's head or stomach. We could hear the flesh smack, but Checo didn't budge. By the third round, the Ukrainian was being hit more, getting weaker, and shaking his head harder after each attack. Checo was almost dancing in and out at will, smacking the Ukrainian around, then dancing away from his opponent's flailing.

Checo was obviously toying with his opponent. In the middle of the fourth round, Checo stopped his mosquitolike tactics and started banging away hard at the Ukrainian. Checo's fists were hitting their mark almost unopposed. The Ukrainian's knees started to crumple, his body became wobbly, his eyes started to glaze over, and he seemed to become disoriented, moving disjointedly in several different directions. The yelling and screaming from the Ukrainians grew louder as they shrieked in disbelief that a Jew could beat one of them.

Finally, Checo decided to end it. He slammed the Ukrainian with a rain of blows to his head, breaking the nose so hard blood started spurting. We saw plenty of blood in this place, but this was the first time we had seen it when rules actually applied. With one deep uppercut, Checo nailed the Ukrainian, who flew upward, then landed spread-eagled on the ground. Two glum Ukrainians carried the unconscious boxer away.

The Jews applauded the outcome, but not aggressively. We had to play down our true feelings. If we had screamed and yelled and slapped each other on the back, we would have instigated a riot. There were lots of Kapos there. There was an abundance of murderers there, too, and they had knives and brass knuckles. If we'd been too exuberant, we would have suffered mightily.

The Ukrainian boys were clearly angry about the outcome. They'd point at the Italian boxer and make muttering noises, their eyes flashing a bigot's anger. One day, all seven of them sneaked up behind Checo and dragged him outside. Even such a splendid physical specimen as Checo couldn't fight back while being assaulted by several two-by-fours and brass knuckles.

We heard the crunch and slap of the weapons hitting their target, and the Ukrainians screaming, "We're going to kill you, Jew. We're going to fucking kill you."

Checo didn't understand a word they were saying, but he was screaming out, "Help, help, they're murdering me," in Italian, punctuated by loud shrieks and wailing. The only reason I knew what he was saying was that his interpreter was standing near me.

We couldn't help him. No matter what we did, we'd be losing. If we helped him, then our lives would be in jeopardy from the murderers. If we laid a finger on a Gentile, that would be the end of us. We felt terrible that we couldn't help.

The assault lasted about ten minutes. When Checo staggered back in, we couldn't recognize him. His face was swollen. Blood was gushing out of his eyes and through his mouth, which spilled red spittle. There was hardly an inch of his face undamaged in some way. His eyes could barely see out of their sockets they were so bloody and his face was so swollen.

The Jews were upset and angry with the Ukrainians, but we felt we couldn't do anything in revenge. Many of the Ukrainians were murderers and Kapos. They could get their own kind of revenge on us, and we couldn't stand up to them nearly as well as Checo could.

I went over to his bunk and put a hand on his shoulder. "God, Checo, we all feel bad about what they did to you. But if we do something to them, they'll kill us," I said, with real sadness.

"Don't worry, Joe," he said through broken teeth and swollen lips through his interpreter. I could hear his breath rasping because something inside his nose had been broken. I'll take care of this myself. I'm not done with them. I'm going to die, but they're going to be dead before I get through with them."

About three weeks later, Checo caught four of the Ukrainians outside the barracks. Two Jewish doctors who worked in the ambulance later said two Ukrainians died, and the others were half-dead.

I asked Checo why he did it.

"I'm going to die anyway. Now I feel good about it. The whole thing is this: They messed up my face, but I broke their arms and legs and I let them know they can't get away with this. They're going to survive because they're Gentile. I'm Jewish. I'm dead. But until they go to their graves, they will know a Jew was a better man than they were."

A few days later, I saw Checo's interpreter. I hadn't seen Checo in at least thirty-six hours.

"Where's Checo?" I asked, trying to mask my fears.

"I don't know where he went. I haven't seen him. I think they took him to the crematorium because he looked so pitiful," the interpreter said, looking sad.

Brutality here still was everyday fare. On rare occasions, however, it even had a humorous side. Once my friends and I were working all night unloading at the ramp. I and 120 other guys were marching back into camp. We were the cream, the elite, of the prisoners. Many of us had survived in Birkenau for four years, whereas most people didn't last more than four hours. We marched as well as any of the Germans, and we were proud.

That night an SS man was stinking drunk. And he had a whip, one of those with metal wires inside. We were returning a little early, and I guess he thought we were slacking off.

He was staggering, and his legs were buckling. He couldn't hit all of us, but he came after us with a shovel. He staggered around. We were right by the gate on an empty lot, running for our lives.

We couldn't run very far or we would be shot. We had to stay there. He probably didn't know what he was doing. He made us run in a circle. The gate was locked and the guards wouldn't let us in, and we would have been shot for going back to the ramp. So we had to stay there, running around in a circle.

He was howling, "You bastards, you dumb motherfuckers." He was loaded, but he wasn't too drunk to beat us. His lash swung out time and time again in the night.

"Jews. Filthy fucking Jew bastards," he yelled. "Crawl, you slime, crawl on your hands and knees!"

For two hours, the blood ran. The snap of his whip and the yells and groans of pain were almost more frightening than the gas chambers. At least there your death was certain. His whip would lash out, then he would flick it so it ripped off a piece of a man's ear, or pulled out an eye.

Being a small man was a real advantage at a time like this. We were all on our hands and knees, but my size let me hide behind the bigger men. The tongue of his whip barely licked my back once or twice. Mostly I was next to the people who got hit, and I heard their cries.

Suddenly I heard the Nazi shriek, and I looked up. There was a huge welt across both eyes, his left cheek, and his forehead. He was so drunk he had hit himself in the face with his own whip. His eyes had swollen shut, and the rest of his face was starting to puff up.

"I'll get you, you bastards. Think you can fight back? Think you can strike one of the Fuehrer's men? Think you can beat an Aryan, you fucking Jew bastards?" he roared. The pain he was feeling and the revenge he was bent on taking made me sweat and shudder, and I hid closely behind a big man in front of me.

The Nazi snapped his whip again and again, but now he was both drunk and blind. We easily dodged his lash. Every time he lashed out, the whip would snap back and he would hit himself. He would roar in pain and anger, then draw his hip back and lash out again, hitting himself with a snap, followed by a shriek.

By now we all had stood up and were standing in a ragged semicircle in front of him. We were watching a glorious show, and we only longed to have our hand on the whip instead of his. But watching an SS man whip himself while his face turned bloody and the foam poured out of his mouth was a treat we'd never had.

Finally, the SS reared back and let loose with a muscular force that would have felled any man in our group, then whipped his arm back to strike again. The whip curled under itself, hitting him in the head. He fell into a bloody heap in his uniform, now drenched with his own blood and coated with dust. He was a disgusting parody of the military might and racial superiority Hitler claimed for himself and his Germans.

"God paid this man back," I said to Hymie, as we walked away.

Not long after this incident, I got up in the morning and started walking toward the hospital. I passed by the Gypsy camp. The quiet was suddenly shroudlike. There were no children running near the fences, and nobody was trying to sell me cigarettes. I could smell charred flesh.

Something's wrong, very, very wrong, I thought, troubled.

I spent most of the day trying to imagine what the Germans might have done. I was working in the hospital, and we all kept asking each other what had happened to the Gypsies. Back in my barracks, a guy I was sure had Sonderkommando connections walked up.

"Guys, guess what? No more Gypsies. They gassed them all last night," he said.

The Allies were rolling closer. Every time I picked up the underground's notes now, I could feel the earth shake from bombing which was no more than forty or fifty miles away. I knew the Allies were gaining ground.

I figured the Germans were getting panicky about the possibility they might lose the war, so they were exterminating as many undesirable people as they possibly could. This was May 1944, and about fifteen Gestapo started taking over some of the selections. The Allies had overrun Majdanek and Treblinka by then. Mengele still did most of the selections. He especially liked the night shift. He seemed to soak up the darkness.

"We're next," I told Frank. "We are having our finger put in the lion's mouth, and we have to wait to see when the lion is going to bite it off."

Frank just nodded sadly. We were all depressed. So many people were being transported in and gassed.

A day after the Gypsies were executed, I met with Max to pick up my next message. By that time, we could see the number of trains was increasing, and the Germans were grabbing everybody they wanted from wherever they could. The healthy prisoners were shipped to Germany as slave labor. The rest went up the Birkenau chimney.

"What's going to happen to us, Max? The Gypsies have been liquidated." "They're shipping people out of here to Germany like crazy," Max said out of the side of his mouth. "They'll either kill us here or send us to Germany, where they will kill us or starve us to death. Getting out alive is not a choice."

"What about the hospital?"

"They'll probably shut down everything. If they're shipping people to Germany by the trainload, they won't have time to give anybody medical attention. If people can't work, they're dead. Things are so bad even the Gentile patients may be in the ovens."

Soon after, one of Mengele's young doctors pulled me aside while Mengele and the others weren't looking.

"Listen, Joe, you're in danger. With the Gypsy camp closed, the hospital probably is next. They'll evacuate every able person to Germany," he whispered, then nodded at me and left the room.

In the next few days, I could see more and more hospital beds yawning empty as the patients died even faster than usual--probably for lack of medicine--and no more patients were being sent in.

The hospital workers, about 120 of us, were panicking. We all tried to find something to do, some way to justify our continuing to be kept there. At night, we could hear bombs exploding.

I knew the Russians had taken Warsaw. They had stopped for a while to regroup, and now they were on the move again.

"What are they going to do with us in Germany?" I asked Hymie and Nuftul.

"They're going to kill us one by one by working us to death while we starve. We know the end of the war is coming fast, but it's still too damned slow."

The next night after dinner the Stubendienst shouted, "Listen, I have an announcement to make." He called out a lot of numbers, including Hymie and Nuftul's.

"These numbers are to gather in front of the barracks tomorrow and march to the Sonderkommando barracks."

They weren't even trying to hide where they were sending us. Then he called out my number, Frank's, and a few others. "Tomorrow, you report to Canada," he said.

Everybody's face went ashen. Hymie and Nuftul looked at me. "How come we end up in hell and you get Canada?" Hymie asked.

I knew the answer, but even God I couldn't tell.

"I don't know," I said, shaking my head. "They just called out my number and here I am."

Inside, my mind was thinking faster than I could run. I knew nobody had been sent from Canada to the ovens, so I was safe for the time being. I also knew Hymie and Nuftul soon would be in the crematoriums.

The next morning, as soon as the numbers were called out, the Sonderkommandos had to go. Hymie and Nuftul's heads bowed. They knew they had about twelve weeks. The pace of the executions had stepped up dramatically, as had the pace of Sonderkommando executions. I guessed that the Germans, knowing that the war was lost, wanted to kill as many Jews and other people they considered undesirable as possible.

It was a sure bet that all my friends would die very shortly. I hugged them, then kissed them on the cheek. We were all crying. Then they had to walk twenty-five yards across the street to be swallowed up by the barbed wire fence. The six-foot wooden door of the Sonderkommando barrack swung open and they walked in. The gate slammed behind them.

Later, I found out that this same night all the patients were cleared out of the hospital. Most were gassed.

The hospital workers now were in a bind. They'd had the best jobs, but now they had nothing to do. The Jews were sent to the Sonderkommando squads; the Gentiles were sent to work on construction. Even in the face of imminent defeat, the Germans just couldn't stop building.

"What's going to happen to me? What's going to happen to the rest of us?"

I asked Frank. "I'm scared."

I even thought of killing myself. Fear was the constant undercurrent, and I knew my religion required me to battle it.

"No, I won't give in," I told myself. ''I'm going to fight the bastards to the end. It's been almost six years now. I know the end is coming. Maybe I'll be here for it."