'THREE
HAVE ESCAPED !"
Slowly
and cautiously, taking great care to emit no sound, we removed the iron sheet
from the pit where we were huddled.
With bated breath, we belly-crawled out and began advancing towards open
terrain. We managed to slip past the
watch towers, but when we were some way beyond, the sentries, possibly hearing
something, opened fire. We froze in
place. In the darkness, we watched the
trails of the tracer bullets - and realized they were far away. We had apparently not been spotted. We did not presume to utter the thought out
loud, not even in a whisper, but as one man we resumed our crawling. The guards maintained their fire, but they
did not hit us.
When
we judged ourselves to be out of range, we clambered to our feet and began
running. After running about 11 miles
under the cover of darkness, we reached a bridge over the river Vistula.
"Careful,"
muttered the Russian, his soldier's eyes reading the terrain well. He pointed and our glances followed his
extended finger: on the bridge, we spotted a soldier. A sentry, apparently.
"We'll
have to skirt that point," said the Russian.
We
withdrew to a tangle of bushes on the river bank, deciding to swim across. We undressed, tying our clothes to our backs
to keep them dry. The Russian was the
first to make it across. I was next to set out. As I swam, the boots tied to the back of my neck turned over and
filled with water, dragging me down. I have never excelled as a swimmer; now,
having gotten myself caught up in a branch, I returned to the bank from which I
had set out. I encountered the Pole, who had yet to enter the water.
"You're
as wet as a sewer rat," he remarked,
"And where's your cap'?"
Only
then did I realize that I had lost my cap in the river.
We
decided to spend the day drying out in the bushes, before making another
attempt to cross the river the following night. When dawn broke, we heard voices not far from our place of
concealment. Peeping through the
bushes, we spotted a group of women in prisoners' clothing. They had come to work in the fields, reaping
hay and piling it into heaps. Silent,
we lay in the sun amidst the bushes, hoping the women and their guards would
not come our way.
In the
afternoon, it began raining. The women
hastily took cover between the piles of hay.
When the rain stopped, the Germans held a count. We heard yells in German, from which we
learned that two women were missing.
The Germans began searching for them.
Combing the terrain, they drew ever closer to us.
"Damnation,
they're likely to stumble on us!" I hissed through my teeth in dismay.
"Rather
than let them catch us here, let's start walking," the Pole proposed,
"they may take us for local farmers.
"
I
forgot momentarily that, having lost my cap in the river, my shaven prisoner's pate was liable to give me
away. After traversing a short
distance, we suddenly heard the voice of an S.S. man: "Halt!" Left
with no other choice, we complied. We
approached the German who had hailed us, crying out piteously: "What luck
we met you! We've been roaming the
fields since yesterday, looking for the way back to our camp!"
The German soldier called his officer, who evidently
realized that we had absconded from Auschwitz.
He entrusted us to two of his men with guard dogs, and they marched us
back to camp, beating us and setting the hounds at us.
I learned subsequently that, upon discovering our
escape, the camp's security officials had promptly sent a telegram to the
security services in Berlin. 1 found a duplicate of the original in the
Auschwitz archives. Dated
"Auschwltz, 30.6.44," it offered particulars about our trio:
1.
Paluch Mieczyslaw, born 14.1.1910 ... Most
recent address ... Height 1.65 meters ... brown hair presently cropped, speaks
Polish, brown eyes.
2.
FRYDBERG ABRAM
ISRAEL, Jewish. Born 4.2.24. Brought
from Pruzhany on 2.2.43. Height 1.65 meters, hair brown, cropped. Speaks Polish. Eyes brown. Number 99288.
3.
Russian POW,
Tarasow Nikolai. Born 17.1.10 at
Saratov. Transferred from Stalag 336 G
on 24.2.44. Height 1.71 meters, brown hair, cropped, speaks Russían, grey
eyes...
The above escaped on 29.6.44. Paluch and Frydberg from
the potato Kommando, Tarasow from the Gleissanschluss Kommando.
Back at the camp, we were confined to a cell in the
political department, and our interrogation commenced.
In particular, our interrogators demanded to know the
whereabouts of the last of our trio.
"Where is the third one?" the two of us.
We feigned innocence.
"There were only two of us. We got drunk and lost our way ..."
The interrogators of the political department, under
the notorious killer Boger, gave us no peace for weeks on end. Our interrogator's secretary, a Slovakian
Jewess by the name of Katia, was of great help to us; indeed, she may have
saved our lives. When the interrogator
left the interrogation room briefly, she hastened to whisper: "Whatever
happens, you must stick to your story.
Let's hope they don't catch the Russian, and that he doesn't tell a
different version."
The Russian was not captured, and we did indeed stick
to our story; accordingly, we were spared the death sentence, being condemned
instead to lifelong labor with the punitive squad. At evening roll call, we were seated in a special rack, in full
view of all the camp inmates; our sentence was read out - "for the offense
of attempting to escape" - and our bare buttocks were subjected to 25
lashes from a fearsome leather whip.
After that lashing, several weeks passed before I was able to sit down.
1 found myself once again in the punitive block
Birkenau's Block 11 - this time as a dangerous criminal with a round red
patch. But I now had more experience
and better connections. Friends
smuggled food to me and I did not experience hunger. And above all, I was helped by past connections: the head of
Block 11 was the Polish prisoner Bednarek, who, mindful of the special favor
with which I was regarded by camp registrar Stibitz, treated me accordingly.
Near punitive block 11 was the Sonderkommando's Block
13, where I often visited to receive food. There, 1 got to know Phillp Miller, another prisoner who would manage
to survive-, he later settled in Germany, where he published a book about the
Holocaust years.
While 1 served my sentence in the punitive block,
events at the battlefront picked up tempo, with a marked impact on matters in
the camps.