Long Way Home(81)

Before we left, Art gave me a letter to give to Jimmy. “If I can get away after the baby is born,” he said, “I’ll try to drive down to visit him.”

I thanked Art for his willingness to open some very painful wounds for his friend and took his photograph for Jimmy’s scrapbook. Art walked with us to the street and paused a moment to admire Joe’s motorcycle. Then he turned to Joe.

“I couldn’t help noticing your leg,” he said. “Were you wounded in combat?”

“Yeah, in France. Jim was one of the medics who saved my life.”

Art rested his hand on Joe’s shoulder. “You paid a huge price, my friend. But when you get back home again, make sure you look at some of the photographs and news footage from the concentration camps. I won’t lie—they’re hard to stomach. But if you ever start to wonder if your sacrifice was worth it, the record of what went on in those camps will help you remember why we fought. Your sacrifice meant the difference between life and death for those survivors. You rescued a multitude of people—along with the generations of children who will be born to them someday. You are their hero.”





20


Gisela





JANUARY 1945

It was hard to keep track of what day or month it was in Buchenwald. The only way we knew that the year was now 1945 was because we heard a few of the guards toasting the New Year one bitterly cold winter night. We had nothing to celebrate. Everyone was dying. The little bit of food that we ate went straight through us.

“Still hanging on to hope?” Ada would ask me from time to time. The vaccine experiments had been halted, and there were rumors that all the female prisoners, including the nurses, would be moved to a satellite camp soon.

“Yes, I still have hope,” I replied. And my hope sometimes came through very strange means. When thousands of exhausted, dying prisoners arrived in Buchenwald after the New Year, we learned through camp gossip that these prisoners had been forced to march here from a concentration camp in Poland called Auschwitz. The Nazis had evacuated them because the Soviet Army was approaching, closing in on Berlin from the east.

The Nazis quickly set up what they called the “little camp” inside Buchenwald, housing these newcomers in tents and a windowless horse stable. There was only one latrine for thousands of men, no water, no heat, and little food. We were glad that the Allies were inching closer, but it didn’t change the fact that we were all starving to death. Corpses littered the ground, piling up faster than they could be taken away. Gritty ash fell on us every day, turning the snow gray, but the crematorium still couldn’t keep up with the demand. Prisoners continued to be used as slave labor in the nearby stone quarry or were forced to work twelve-hour shifts in the munitions plant. It was our job in the infirmary to keep as many of them alive as we could so they could continue to be worked to death.

Spring arrived, but the only difference was that fewer of us froze to death. We were still starving. When we learned that thousands of prisoners were now going to be evacuated from Buchenwald, we knew it could mean only one thing—Allied troops must be approaching from the west. The Nazis were being squeezed from both directions. I had learned of an underground Resistance group operating inside Buchenwald, and those brave souls did whatever they could to hinder the Nazis’ plans and delay our evacuation. Weak as we were from hunger and illness, most of us wouldn’t have survived a forced march.

But even as the Allied armies marched closer, so did the angel of death. I wondered which of the two would reach me first. Ada, Lotti, and I, along with most of the women in our barracks, fell ill with fevers and dysentery. Our bodies were too weak to fight off illness, too weak to stand in line for our meager food rations, too weak to move the bodies of the women who had died during the night out of our overcrowded bunks. Hope came in the form of artillery fire, which we could hear in the distance. It meant help was coming closer. When the sun set each day, I would remember what Sam and I used to say to each other, and I would whisper, “We’re another day closer.” I could only hope that help didn’t arrive too late.

My fever soared. One minute I was shivering; the next I was burning up. My fitful sleep was haunted by nightmares of torture and death, yet each time I awoke, I discovered that the nightmares were real. I was still a prisoner. I was still in Buchenwald. I still wanted to survive, but I was slowly forgetting the reason why. At least death would bring relief.

I wasn’t sure how many days I lay on my bunk, delirious and dying, before I became aware of shouting outside. I thought I heard the word Americans. Someone was shouting that the Americans were here. I didn’t know whether to rejoice or not. Were these the same Americans who had called out to us from the Coast Guard cutter off the coast of Florida, telling us to go away, saying we weren’t wanted? Or the same Americans who had clumsily dropped tons of bombs on innocent civilians in Mortsel? I wanted to ask these Americans if they were really going to help us this time or turn their backs on us again.

I summoned my strength and managed to roll over and drop from my bunk to the floor. I could see blue sky beyond the open door, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to walk. I crawled instead, pulling my way forward, holding on to whatever I could grasp, until I was outside. The commotion was louder now—voices and shouts and the sound of motor vehicles. I had managed to drag myself only a few feet forward in the dirt before I collapsed, facedown. I heard footsteps approaching, then a man’s voice above me saying, “Looks like we got here just in time.” The man crouched in the dust and gently rolled me over. I opened my eyes and looked up.