Surviving the Holocaust: Aryan Papers and Bergen-Belsen

This is the second extract from the book Our Mob: A Family Chronicle by Sever and Alice Sternhell (Sydney, 2005), Part I of which can be found here. It is also taken from Chapter Four of that book and continues the story of Sever’s experiences during the Holocaust. In the previous extract in the December issue we wrongly listed the Auschwitz extermination camp as one of the horrors he lived through. As this extract records in detail, it was rather the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen where he was imprisoned in 1944 before escaping to Switzerland.

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Disguised by Aryan papers, 1942–1944

The ordinary story of Jews in German-occupied Europe during the Second World War was simple (death), but the stories of survival are all extraordinary, full of coincidences and unlikely happenings. I think that my survival story was unlikely even by these standards. It was just one bloody unlikely and/or lucky thing after another. It was like tossing a coin and getting “heads” every time. Given that out of the 3,500,000 Jews in pre-war Poland at most 5 to 10 per cent survived and that most of them survived because the Russians deported them to Siberia or Kazakhstan between 1939 and 1941, it really did take extraordinary luck to survive. For my father, my mother and me to survive partly on independent trajectories (at one stage the three of us were in three different countries!) was totally improbable. If I were a believer, direct divine intervention via archangel Gabriel would offer the most obvious explanation.

This memoir appears in the latest Quadrant.
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The first key accident was my aunt (Sylvia, a cousin of my father’s) running into one of her Polish friends on the street in Lwow. There was Sylvia, having just been through the great August 1942 action and having lost her husband under horrific circumstances. (Henio was a gynaecologist and was recruited from his hospital to perform a late abortion on an SS officer’s girlfriend. The woman died and Henio was tortured to death at the Gestapo prison on Lackiego 29—the building still stands.) Walking on the street, she was hailed by Ula whom she knew from art school during the Soviet era. Ula, then about thirty-two years old and a very attractive and impetuous woman, instantly told Sylvia that she was going to “save you and your family!”, totally ignoring the fact that the penalty for any such action was death. Ula was brought to our place to meet my parents and me and was instantly taken by me, or perhaps by my “Aryan” looks—I was very blond, blue eyed and straight-nosed. She kept repeating that, no matter what, I was not going to die. We already had some Aryan papers in the form of forged birth certificates, some of which are still in my possession. My father became Kazimierz Korytowski and had an authentic birth certificate, which had belonged to a deceased Pole of that name. My mother had a forged birth certificate and a forged marriage certificate and I became a totally fictitious Severyn Korytowski, there being no need to change my given name, which was not at all Jewish.

Part One: The Beginnings of the Holocaust

It would take a very long book to describe our odyssey on Aryan papers. At first my mother and I travelled to Krakow by train (train journeys were specially dangerous as the SS haunted trains inspecting papers—and penises) with Kazik (Kazimierz) Schultz, the boyfriend of Ula’s sister and the man who really saved my life, as Ula decamped after making the initial contact. In late 1942 Krakow was horrifically dangerous but I survived and already showed signs of the cheek and courage which were to serve me well: thus I always travelled in the “Nur fur Deutsche” (Germans only) tram carriages on the theory that document checks would be less likely. It worked, helped no doubt by my Nordic appearance.

My mother got a job as a housemaid with a German family and eventually changed jobs to serve the family of an SS officer who was transferred to Vienna. She was treated abominably as a sub-human Pole, but survived the war and finished up testifying in a British court in Vienna in 1945 when her ex-employer was charged and jailed for something a lot more horrendous than belting a Polish maid! Sylvia went off on Aryan papers to Warsaw, where she survived the great Polish uprising in 1944 and was reunited with my mother when the latter returned to Poland from Vienna. My father stayed on in the Ghetto and survived two more actions before going on Aryan papers in Krakow. As his only significant asset, he was carrying with him my mother’s engagement ring concealed in a bar of soap. It stayed there throughout the rest of the war and was duly returned to my mother in Paris in 1946. After a succession of close shaves in Krakow he walked over the Carpathians to Hungary, still on false papers. As I remained in German-occupied Poland, we were during all of 1943 and a bit of 1944 in three different countries—something of a survival record, I am sure. Normal postal service existed in German-occupied Europe and we remained in touch by means of guardedly written letters.

My position in Krakow was clearly not tenable and I returned with Kazik Schultz to Lwow, where I stayed in his flat till Easter 1944. Let me digress for a moment to describe the almost comic circumstances of my return journey to Lwow and the family relations of Ula, her sisters and Schultz. First the train journey, which took only about eight hours although it seemed a lot longer. Kazik Schultz was a Volksdeutcshe (ethnic German) although he spoke no German at all and was a fierce Polish patriot. However, declaring yourself a Volksdeutsche brought better food rations and some safety from being caught for forced labour in Germany—a fate that befell perhaps 2,000,000 Poles. Volksdeutsche could also travel in Germans-only train carriages.

On the principle that such carriages were less likely to be inspected by the SS, we travelled in one from Krakow to Lwow. Unfortunately, the remaining occupants were soldiers on their way to the Eastern front and opposite me sat a middle-aged Feldvebel (sergeant), Iron Cross and all, who took an instant liking to the blond boy across the aisle—perhaps I reminded him of a son or nephew. The trouble was that while I might have looked German, my command of the German language was rather limited. I was thus on my very best behaviour and kept saying “Ja, Herr Feldvebel” and “Nein, Herr Feldvebel” while fed chocolate and patted on the head. Kazik Schultz, whose German was precisely nil, just sat there and prayed. However, we eventually got to Lwow unharmed and the kindly Feldvebel went on his way to the Eastern front and most probably death.

In Lwow, I joined Kazik’s household, which was somewhat complicated. Ula (Eleonora Bereznicka) had two sisters, both older than her. The oldest was a divorced woman, Mrs Leszczynski, who had a grown-up son, Roman, then twenty-two and an aspiring poet—bits of his efforts remain embedded in my memory. The middle sister, named Kazika (by a long arm of coincidence there was Kazik and Kazika while my father’s Aryan name was also Kazik!) was a very sexy woman then about thirty-six, married to an extremely nice railway employee Kazik (again) Zurek, but living with Kazik Schultz. The Schultz household consisted of Kazik, Roman, Mrs Leszczynski, the very elderly father of the three sisters who acted as cook, and me, who was a ticking bomb—the Germans would have killed all of them, together with me, for (unknowingly, except for Kazik and Kazika) harbouring a Jew on Aryan papers.

Kazika lived with us most of the time, and Ula, as well as Kazik’s nineteen-year-old daughter (he was divorced) made occasional appearances, while the whole family (including Kazika’s husband) and some close friends gathered in Kazik’s flat for Christmas and Easter. A novel waiting to be written, but I will only relate some highlights of my life there between November 1942 and March 1944. Kazik was a great bloke, even though he looked like a thug (he had been a heavyweight amateur wrestler in pre-war Poland) and I really liked him as well as being grateful. He also saved our family photographs and memorabilia. Being caught in possession of these might have meant death, but what the hell: he was harbouring a Jewish boy! Photographs of Kazik and Kazika are in my possession. My parents helped them financially, but they showed no desire to emigrate to Australia, we lost touch after my father died and they must both be dead by now of old age. Ula was brought over to Australia in 1948 and immediately became the object of my mother’s and Sylvia’s plots to marry her off. In the event, all by herself she met an American major in the Marines who was in Sydney on a goodwill visit and he married her and carried her off to California! Unfortunately, it was not a happy ending: Ula remained in touch with us for some years, but then the major informed us that she had died suddenly, presumably of some sort of heart problem. She could not have been more than forty-five years old and if there is a Catholic heaven after all, I am sure she has a place there.

I rarely left the flat, the biggest danger being recognition by my numerous Polish and Ukrainian contemporaries from my Soviet school days, who would have very likely denounced me just for the hell of it. It is quite true that many of the Holocaust survivors, including of course myself, owe their lives to courageous Poles and that the number of Poles who denounced Jews was small. However, the great bulk of the population was not just (understandably, in view of the consequences) unwilling to help, but quite happy about what was happening to us. They did not just sit on their hands—they applauded, and I have lost count of the number of times I heard Kazik’s acquaintances say that “the one good thing that Hitler has done, is to rid us of our Jews”. Others who survived on Aryan papers tell the same story. In fact, the only person who both did not know that I was a Jew and who was genuinely outraged by what the Germans did to us was Kazika’s husband Kazik Zurek—a really decent man.

Kazik was not only in touch by mail with both my father and mother but also directly with Milek who was on Aryan papers in Lwow. Unusually he, a circumcised man, survived while the women of the family, Genia, Rela and Tania, were caught on their way to Germany as (Aryan) slave-labourers, after being denounced by one of Tania’s school friends at the railway station in Stanislawow.

The hunt for Jews hiding out on Aryan papers went on relentlessly: one day early in 1943 I was startled to hear machine-pistol fire just outside. Peeking through a chink in the curtains I saw a number of corpses in the gutter just across the road from us, a veritable river of blood flowing down the gutter and SS men milling about. It transpired that the family in the ground-floor flat across the road, no more than fifty metres from us, was discovered hiding Jews and all of them were executed. The total killed was nine and the corpses were left lying in the gutter all day, presumably as an example. I was more scared then than ever before or after and my knees were actually knocking.

In June 1943, the Germans finally “liquidated” the Lwow Ghetto. From a rise behind our block of flats I saw a column of smoke as the very last of the Jews put up a fight and the Germans were burning them out. As a Volksdeutsche, Kazik had a right to own a radio and Roman and I listened to the Polish-language BBC broadcasts and Moscow long-wave radio, becoming quite expert at picking up the broadcasts through the German interference. Naturally, there was a death sentence for listening to these, but it never worried us.

The tide of war was turning dramatically after the Stalingrad debacle at Christmas 1942. The 9 a.m. BBC broadcast, always starting with the Morse-code “V” for victory (dot-dot-dot-dash), announced dramatically practically every morning that “last night, the planes of the RAF Bomber Command were over Germany”. By 11 a.m. we learned if it had been Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin, Munich, Essen or Bochum and we gloated. By daytime, the Flying Fortresses of the Eighth US Air Force took over. At midnight, Radio Moscow brought the cannons firing victory salvos on the Red Square in Moscow, followed by enumeration of villages and towns liberated and Germans killed or taken prisoner. We followed the North African campaign blow by blow, from the moving barrage from a thousand guns at El Alamein to the surrender of Von Armin’s army in Tunisia and eventually to the invasion of Italy and Badoglio’s change of sides. Only the Pacific war was awaiting a turning point, but even there the Japanese advance had stalled completely. We knew it was only a matter of time before we won—the problem was to survive till then.

Late in 1943, I formed a scheme of doing something towards the victory myself. The insane plan, formed entirely in my adolescent head, was to derail a German arms or troop train and to join the partisans in the woods. One morning, I wrote a suitable letter to Kazik, apologising for any inconvenience and thanking him for all he had done, stole some tools and went off. Finding (without a map) an appropriate railway line took some time and when I started to undo the nuts holding the rails, it was quite dark. It is a lot harder to undo rails than one might think, although at least I was on target: trains loaded with tanks, trucks and artillery going east were passing every twenty minutes or so. I gave up on the mechanical approach and started to dig out the ballast from under the rails. After about an hour, my fingers were bleeding but I was making no progress, and decided to give up and let others win the war.

I started walking back towards Lwow along the railway. Suddenly, walking in the opposite direction and just visible in the pre-dawn gloom, was a German soldier, rifle and all. Oddly enough, I was not afraid and reasoned quickly that if I dived from the railway line, he would hunt me down and kill me, so I continued walking. He walked off the line and I passed without incident, not even panicked, presumably with archangel Gabriel in close attendance. Eventually, I got back home where Kazik and Kazika were awaiting the arrival of the SS, having reasoned that I would have taken identification with me and been inevitably caught. I had forgotten to write that I carried no papers whatsoever and relied on a kitchen knife with which I planned to kill myself (by cutting my wrist—it was all thought out) if captured. There have always been some doubts about my sanity!

Hungary and Bergen-Belsen, 1944

In February 1944, my father wrote to us in the usual oblique way, that he had arranged a guide to take me over the Carpathians to Hungary. It was no simple matter to get to the frontier and it was decided that Roman should come with me as well. We boarded a train for Stanislawow, changed to a train going to Worochta (passing Nadworna of the Einsatzgruppe C memory) and met the guide without any incident. The last bit of the journey to the frontier was a bit trickier, as only local residents could go to the last little station (Woronienka) and it was decided that the guide, with two Jewish girls on Aryan papers, would take the front compartment and try to detain the German policeman (local Schupo, not SS) whom he knew, to prevent him from getting to the rear compartment occupied by Roman and me. If that did not work, given that we had no convincing (or even unconvincing) excuse for being on the train, Roman was to grab the Schupo in a bear hug, while I stuck a knife (the same as used for the railway expedition) in his back and we were to toss the body out of the window into the snow. I am confident that we would have carried this out, but fortunately female company and a bottle of vodka kept the Schupo busy till Woronienka and we reached the guide’s house without incident.

After a twenty-four-hour rest and accompanied by the guide, the two girls and another Jew, we set out in pitch darkness and in knee-deep snow over the Carpathians for Hungary. The trip took about twelve hours and towards the end I was hallucinating from exhaustion, but the highlight happened quite early: we were crossing a culvert under a railway line, the thin ice crackling loudly under our boots, when suddenly the guide motioned us to stop. There were two German soldiers right above us, chatting and smoking. We froze still, and had they had a dog it would have been curtains for us, but they tired of the spot and walked off while we walked on, archangel Gabriel in attendance.

There was a nasty surprise when we finally staggered to a small railway station on the Hungarian side: the roads were jammed with German trucks, artillery and tanks, this (March 18, 1944) being the day when Hitler decided that Hungary was an unreliable ally and had to be occupied. There were no immediate consequences for us as the German army was frying bigger fish, but eventually this meant that the last sanctuary for Jews in Europe was gone and the Hungarian Jews largely disappeared in an orgy of murder in Auschwitz. Roman and I got to Budapest without incident and met my father. Roman joined a displaced persons’ camp south of Budapest and survived the war unscathed, to return to Poland after the war and die of natural causes in his early fifties.

My father placed me with a peasant family in a village, Tarnok Ligelt, about twenty kilometres south of Budapest. Mr and Mrs Kovacs (smith) were lovely people (with a lovely twenty-year-old daughter, Lilly, my first real sex interest). Other than her, the entertainment was watching the USAF bomb Budapest in daytime, the RAF taking over at night. Even though some planes came down in the vicinity and we inspected the wreckage and the mutilated bodies of our airmen, there was no question that we were winning the war in a big way, and this was confirmed on June 6, 1944: D-Day!

Meanwhile, I lived a normal boyish life, learned Hungarian quickly, made friends and helped in the fields by digging potatoes. However, my position was highly precarious: I had no real papers and was obviously not a Hungarian. My lovely hosts, who knew me to be Polish, but of course not Jewish, got the idea of presenting me as a German. One day, a real German woman (there were German settlers all over Eastern Europe) searched me out and embraced me in the middle of the village street, babbling in German. Even my very brief answers showed my poor command of German and she said suspiciously, “Du bist doch nicht Deutsche!” (you are not German). Quick as a flash I answered “Volksdeutsche!”, which fobbed her off—another close shave notched up.

Towards the end of June, my father visited and told me about a scheme, which later became known as the Rozse Kasztner project, for the Germans to exchange a transport of Hungarian Jews for (variously reported) wounded German prisoners, trucks or money, and my father’s Zionist connections got us two places on the initial (and, as it turned out only) transport. I vividly remember my father saying to me: “There is a fifty-fifty chance that we will go straight to Auschwitz and be killed, but it might work. Shall we go?” I also remember replying: “Fifty-fifty!! Great, let us go!”, the odds being much better than our chances of survival otherwise, even at this late stage. I bade tearful farewell to the Kovacses and my lovely Lilly, and off I went.

We boarded the transport together with 1680 Hungarian Jews from a Budapest transit camp on Columbus Street and set off, the standard seventy persons to a cattle truck, hoping to finish up in Tangiers. The trucks were open and we knew where we were. As we passed Bratislava there were a very tense couple of hours: if we went north at that stage it meant Auschwitz, and my father and I were going to jump. However, the train turned west, past Vienna (my father identified St Stephen’s Kirche and we knew my mother was somewhere there) to a brief stop at Linz, where we learned that Lwow had been liberated by the Red Army. The train then turned inexplicably north and eventually went past Hannover and Celle to what we later learned was the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, generally abbreviated to “Belsen”.

It has been estimated that some 50,000 people perished in Belsen. When British and Canadian troops liberated the camp in April 1945, they saw Dantean scenes of mounds of emaciated corpses and clusters of equally emaciated survivors. All this, particularly bulldozers shoving piles of corpses into mass graves, was faithfully recorded on film and turns up every now and again on television documentaries, thus giving the impression that Belsen was hell on earth. However, by comparison with the extermination camps in Poland, where millions died, and even with many other Konzentration Lagern, such as Matthausen, Buchenwald and Dachau, Belsen was a mere first circle of hell.

First, while the food (half a litre of soup and 600 grams of heavy bread daily being the principal diet) was reliably delivered to us, it literally amounted to starvation rations: we arrived at the end of June 1944 and by the time we left over five months later we were reduced to walking skeletons. Second, there really was no escape: the camp was divided into various sub-camps by barbed-wire fences and we were in Barracke 11 and in half of Barracke 10 and were known as the “Hungarian Camp”. Much more serious obstacles surrounded the camp as a whole. Our sub-camp was on the edge and part of our border was in fact the camp’s outer perimeter consisting of a single barbed-wire fence, a carefully brushed sand strip on which any footstep would show, a triple barbed-wire fence with coiled and overhanging sections and an electrified fence. Every hundred metres or so stood a well-constructed watch tower, much more elaborate than the ones I saw in Auschwitz on a visit in 1993, with an SS man, a searchlight and a machine gun.

Just to make sure, SS with dogs patrolled the woods outside the camp perimeter. There was no doubt about it: they had us, but the psychological effect was oddly calming. There was no need to worry about being caught—we already were, and all we had to do was try not to starve or otherwise die. We were not subject to any serious brutality, beyond kicks and blows at the daily “appel”, the counting ritual unfailingly performed by a bored and infuriated SS man or woman, one of whom was the notorious Irma Grese, later convicted by the British for multiple murders and hanged. We were made to stand in rows five deep in front of our barracke—my father and I, together with 120 others, were in room 10C, which was approximately twice the size of our present lounge room. It rained a lot and the strain of standing for usually an hour or so was too much for an increasing number who were counted separately in the barracke. The SS were continually losing count and their tempers and obviously did not see anything odd about counting prisoners who could not possibly escape. The “appel” ritual was maintained in all camps—labour, concentration and even extermination—where the population was rapidly disappearing. Just another part of the German obsession with order!

The guards were a mixed lot, ranging from sadistic psychopaths to criminal elements glad not to be at the front. I particularly remember a relatively harmless elderly SS man nicknamed by us Popeye the Sailor for his remarkable similarity to the cartoon character. One day, one of our young men on the soup-detail—the group bringing the fifty-litre soup containers from the camp’s kitchens into our compound—yielded to temptation and picked up a raw potato from the floor of the kitchen. He was caught and not shot, presumably only because the camp commandant was responsible for keeping all of us on ice. Instead, the lad was sentenced to two weeks in solitary confinement in a freezing cell of about two metres square. Popeye was detailed to escort him to the lock-up and told him: “Don’t worry lad, I served fourteen years for murder and it did me no harm!”

Other groups in Belsen fared much worse. The remaining part of Barracke 10 was occupied by 300 “Poles”, who were Polish Jews with various South American papers, with whom we could communicate by walking in pairs a couple of metres from the dividing fence and talking loudly, apparently within our respective camps. It transpired that there were originally 2000 such “Poles” occupying the rest of Barracke 10 and Barracke 11, but shortly before our arrival their papers were re-examined and the 1700 whose identity papers were more dodgy were transported to Auschwitz and killed. My father knew some of the people in the remnant “Polish” camp and many more people in the vanished group, which included the Lisowoder family from Lwow with their two boys, the older one, Roman, being my best friend back in the pre-Holocaust world.

On a more cheerful note, many of the remaining 300 “Poles” lived through Belsen. I met a young man slightly older than me in Palestine in 1946 who told me how their group survived. In March 1945, the camp commandant (the notorious Joseph Kramer, later executed by the British), decided that this group of 300 should be killed and as the “facilities” of Auschwitz were no longer available (they fell to the Red Army in January 1945) and as he apparently did not want to murder them inside his camp, they were put on a train with the idea of executing them somewhere in the countryside. Fortunately, an American armoured column intercepted the train and upon learning what was going on, promptly executed the would-be executioners!

Besides the “Poles” we had two other neigh­bouring sub-camps. One of them housed some hundreds of Soviet prisoners, who had been political commissars. There were such “Politruks” attached to all units of the Red Army and normally, they were executed by the Germans as soon as they fell into their hands. Our neighbours somehow escaped this fate and were used to do all sorts of heavy labour inside the camp. They were horribly treated—I saw on two occasions an SS man beating a prisoner to death with an iron bar. I doubt if many of them survived. Our other neighbours were 4000 Dutch Jews and their families, who were kept on ice just like us, but for a different and bizarre reason: they were diamond cutters and the Germans must have concluded that after they conquered the world and all its diamond mines, they would need such people, who are very difficult to train. I don’t know about their fate and I suspect that Anne Frank’s  father, who survived Belsen, might have been one of them as there were no other “Dutch” sub-camps.

We had no contact with the external world, but a torn piece of a German newspaper blew in with the story of the “Attentat”—the attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944. There was little doubt that we were going to win the war shortly. Belsen was on the direct line from southern England to Berlin, and we observed on many occasions armadas of American bombers flying serenely in their hundreds above our heads, the sun reflecting from their polished aluminium wings and fuselages.

In August 1944, the SS officer whom we knew to be responsible for the Kasztner project, Obersturmbannfuhrer (colonel) Hermann Krumey (later tried and convicted as one of Eichmann’s closest accomplices by a German court in 1969) turned up and selected about 300 of us as a trial batch to be sent to Switzerland. In the months after their departure, we had no idea what was going on and simply got thinner and weaker waiting for something to happen. On December 6, 1944, Krumey turned up again and we were informed that we were indeed “exchanged” for something unspecified (it turned out to be simply cash supplied by American Jews and going into Krumey’s pocket) and were going to Switzerland. We were cautiously jubilant but my father and I, who had had much more gruesome experiences with the Germans than our Hungarian fellow prisoners, still thought in terms of rescue or Auschwitz. We were marched five kilometres to the station (a great effort in our emaciated condition) guarded by the usual machine-pistol-toting SS and their guard dogs, and put on a normal passenger train. A good sign!

The distance from Belsen to the Swiss frontier is only about 600 kilometres, but the train took three days to cover it, most of the time being spent hiding in tunnels to escape American fighter-bombers—Hitler’s “Festung Europa” (fortress Europe) had no roof. We repeatedly passed through burning cities, like scenes from some Wagnerian Gotterdammerung, confirming that no matter what happened to us, Germany was definitely going kaput. Meanwhile, having eaten all the food we kept for emergencies (after all, it would not be needed whether we were going to Switzerland or to Auschwitz!) we developed diarrhoea and spent a lot of our time queueing up at the toilets. Eventually, as dusk fell on December 9, 1944, the terrain became hilly and forested and we hoped that we were somewhere near Switzerland—in fact we were very close to Constantz on the Bodensee. At this stage the train stopped for several hours and nothing happened. We were later told that Krumey had demanded a large additional sum of money, threatening to divert us to Auschwitz.

This might have been a bluff, given that Auschwitz was about to fall to the Red Army, but the Swiss advanced the sum required (which was later repaid by American Jews) and we were saved. Meanwhile, we had no idea of the drama and when the train finally crept forward, well after midnight, we were literally and figuratively in the dark. I was sitting next to the window and I saw in the faint light that the grey helmet of a soldier being passed by the train appeared to be of a subtly different shape. It was indeed—he was Swiss! Minutes later, the lights in the carriage went on and a Swiss officer entered saying: “We gehts, mine Damen und Herren?” (How are you, ladies and gentlemen?). It is impossible to describe the feeling of elation and relief. We had survived. The nightmare was over.