The Last Jews in Berlin by Gross Leonard

Author:Gross, Leonard
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781497689381
Publisher: Open Road Media

21

THERE WERE TWO ironic compensations for his capture and incarceration in the deportation center on the Grosse Hamburger Strasse for Willy Glaser. The first was that he had been permitted to take a bath, the first he had had since going into hiding ten months before. He had been so dirty that a crust had formed on his skin. The second compensation was warm food. The food, prepared by a Jewish woman, Frau Harpruder, wasn’t good by normal standards, but Willy savored every bite.

The compensations, however, were of little comfort. Willy knew why he was there. It would be only a matter of time before he was on his way to Auschwitz.

Several days passed without incident. Willy spent hours looking out the barred window of his room, watching the guards play soccer. The building backed onto the oldest Jewish cemetery in Berlin. It was overgrown now, with many of the gravestones lying on their sides, but it had once been the burial place of the most important Jews in Berlin. It was said that Moses Mendelssohn, the great scholar and philosopher who lived in the time of Frederick the Great, was buried in the cemetery. Mendelssohn had translated the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, into German. He had also been—yet another irony—a leading proponent of German-Jewish assimilation.

The guards were playing in a clearing and laughing very loudly. It wasn’t the kind of laughter you normally associated with soccer. Then the play moved Willy’s way, and suddenly he understood why they were laughing, and he had to bite hard on his lip to keep from crying out. It was not a ball the guards were kicking; it was a human skull.

Six days after his capture Willy got his transportation number to Auschwitz. “I’m not giving up yet,” he told one of the other prisoners. “If I get a chance I’ll try something. I’d rather have a bullet in me than be shipped to Auschwitz.”

The other prisoner, a reed of a man, also in his forties, eyed Willy critically. “I’d like to come along,” he said at last. “I have money outside. If we make it we can live well.”

“That’s great,” Willy said. “I have no money at all.”

The day before the transport was scheduled to depart, the guards took the prisoners outside to exercise in the cemetery.

“Now’s our chance,”. Willy whispered to the reedy man.

But the man shook his head. “I can’t,” he whispered back.

Willy nodded. “I’ve got a coat and a briefcase back in the basement. Take them with you,” he said.

The guards made them line up and count off and then sent them marching around the cemetery. Once, twice, three times they went around. By now the guards were off in a small group, talking, laughing, kicking the skulls, not watching the prisoners any longer. As they passed some shrubs Willy darted through them and toward the cemetery wall. He saw a headstone next to the wall. His senses were so clear he even noted that the inscription was in memory of a couple.

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