My Will to Live: My Story of Surviving the Holocaust by Eve Gordon

Author:Eve Gordon [Gordon, Eve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Biography & Autobiography, Cultural Heritage, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
Publisher: FriesenPress
Published: 2014-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Surviving Against All Odds

A few days later I was sitting in the barracks, still thinking about how I could end it all and wishing to be dead. I got up at four in the morning and prayed. But my prayer didn’t help. It was like praying for the rain, and the rain wouldn’t come. There’s a song like that… I sat there and I just wanted to die.

Then I heard someone call my name, I heard, “Heinrich!” I sat on the bed, and these two guys came up and talked with me. I saw in their hands a pair of shoes, and I said to myself, “Oh, my God.” I saw these shoes that I needed so badly. I asked right away the real question: “How do you know my name?”

“Volanski said to find you. He said that you could do the job.” They had talked to some guys in the Sonderkommando who told them to come see me.

The Sonderkommando was a special unit where they were forced to work disposing of the dead bodies. They needed strong young male inmates like me. Just that day I had been selected to work there, but someone tipped me off. He said, “Get out from there, you will be killed!” Somehow I had managed to get in a different line for the work detail. They had better conditions over there, but it was gruesome work and all the workers were killed every few months because they saw things they shouldn’t have.

There were other boys I knew from the yeshiva, friends from my hometown who played soccer with me. In fact, one of them was one of the boys who had saved my life before, the one who had watched when the two Germans put me into that basement in Mlawa. Those friends had gotten to Auschwitz before me and were put into the Sonderkommando. They wanted to help me, and they sent these two Polish guys to find me. My friends told them, “He’s the guy; he is a leader.”

The men standing before me now were Polish civilians, not Jewish. They came into the camp and did work for the Nazis. They were maintenance men who made repairs on the nice apartments where the SS men lived. But they were also partisans, working with the resistance on the outside. They explained to me what they wanted me to do.

They wanted information about the transports: how many people came, what they did to them, how many were killed. They wanted to know details about what was done: did they shoot them, did they hang them? Those in the Sonderkommando knew information that the rest of us did not. Those who worked the night shift burned the people and things from each transport, and they wrote down what they saw, what they destroyed. I was to get this information from my friends in the Sonderkommando and give it to the partisans.

They told me that if I worked with them, they would help me survive, give me a little extra food and help where they could.

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