table if that’s okay with you? I think the boys want to record this.”
Moishe nodded and held up the bag. “But first we celebrate life’s pleasures.”
The little old man winked at Karp, who laughed. He’d already caught the scent of Sobelman’s specialty, cherry cheese coffee cake, which he deemed to be the best in the five boroughs, and that probably meant the rest of the civilized world, too. “I’ll fetch the plates; boys, you get the forks,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “And make it snappy, my stomach is doing handsprings.”
It was a half hour later when the four pushed back from the table with contented sighs and full bellies. With reluctance all around, they turned to the darker issue at hand.
“So, I understand you want me to talk to you about the Sonderkommandos,” Moishe said, looking from one twin to the other. The boys nodded. “I will warn you that this will not be an easy story to tell or to listen to; it may even give you nightmares. But I will tell you the truth because I believe every young Jew should hear it before his bar mitzvah.”
The old man paused. “Tell me first, what is the significance of the bar mitzvah?”
“Isn’t it the rite of passage for Jewish males from childhood?” Giancarlo said.
“And from that point on, we’ll be considered men,” Zak added.
Moishe smiled. “No ceremony creates a man from a boy,” he said. “A man is defined by his actions. But that is the definition most people would give. However, as your rabbi will undoubtedly tell you out at some point, a bar mitzvah marks the time when a Jewish male is morally responsible for his actions. And in a sense, perhaps, your definition is apt, as to be a man, one must be morally responsible.”
Moishe took a sip of coffee. “Myself and my family and friends had just celebrated my bar mitzvah in our little town outside of Amsterdam, where my father was a baker, when our world changed forever. For many generations, we Jews were welcome in the Netherlands; indeed, Christian Dutch welcomed twenty-five thousand German Jews who fled their native land ahead of the coming storm in the late 1930s. We thought we were safe.
“Even when stories began circulating that Jews in Germany were being rounded up and shipped off to ‘relocation camps,’ as the Nazis so euphemistically called them, we still felt safe.”
Moishe paused and pulled out his wallet, from which he took a small old black-and-white photograph. “This is me with my father, Abraham, my mother, Sarah, and my little sister, Rebecca. It was taken in 1943, shortly before the German occupiers announced that all Dutch Jews were to be relocated.”
The photograph was passed around until it came back to Moishe, who looked at it longingly for a moment and then replaced it in his wallet. “And you know what the strangest part of all is? We didn’t resist; we went along like so many sheep to the slaughter. People acted as if we were all going on vacation together. Families packed suitcases and dressed in their best traveling clothes. The vacation would last until the war was over, our parents told each other, and then we would all go home.
“We were sent to a camp near the Polish village and rail station for which it would be named. A quiet place in the country called Sobibor. It was isolated, surrounded by forests and swamps, lightly populated but strategically placed near the large Jewish populations in the Chelm and Lublin districts.
“Construction of the Sobibor camp had begun in March 1942, and it was a model of German efficiency. It existed on a large rectangle of land, four hundred by six hundred meters in size, that was cleared and surrounded by triple lines of barbed wire fence, three meters high and under the watchful shadows of strategically placed guard towers. Tree branches were intertwined in the fences so that the casual passerby wouldn’t know what he or she was looking at.
“The camp itself was divided into three areas, each also surrounded by barbed wire fencing and more guard towers. The first was the administrative area closest to the railroad station, with a platform that could accommodate twenty freight cars at a time. It could have been a train station like any other in Europe,” Sobelman recalled. “We were told it was merely a transit point and that we would be moving on shortly. Only they would not say where we were going.
“This area also included the living quarters for the guards, SS soldiers, and Ukrainians who were forced to work in concentration camps, though in truth, many of them enjoyed their work; after all, their people had a long history of murdering Jews.
“The first area was also where prisoners used as the camp’s labor force were housed, including the Sonderkommandos, whom I’ll return to in a moment,” Moishe said before continuing. “The second area, called Camp Two, was where the new arrivals were marched to be separated from their belongings and each other. The young children went with the women.”
Sobelman spoke quietly as he struggled to form the words. “That was the last time I saw my mother and sister. They and the others were taken to a building where they were forced to undress before going into a special hut to have their heads shaved so that the Germans could make use of their hair.
“Most of those who arrived on the train soon passed from Camp Two to Camp Three through a walkway two or three meters wide and surrounded on both sides by barbed wire. It, too, was covered with branches so that the prisoners could not see out or be seen by those outside. The Tube, as it was called, ran for 150 meters-that would be more than one and a half of your American football fields-toward a group of trees,” the old man recalled.
“Behind the trees was a large, ugly brick building containing three rooms, each about twelve feet by twelve feet. Into these rooms naked, frightened Jews were driven-as many as a hundred and sixty people, sometimes more, at a time, all crammed together and unable to move as they listened to the sound of diesel engines starting outside and then smelled the exhaust being pumped into the rooms.”
Sobelman looked at the boys. “I want you to close your eyes and imagine what I tell you,” he said. “Now, imagine that you are in one of those rooms. You cannot sit down or hide. You cannot smell the carbon monoxide in the fumes, but you know it is there. So you and the others begin to panic. You fight and claw and climb over one another’s naked bodies, looking for an escape. But there is none and you know that you are going to die, and all you can do is scream and pray.”
Moishe closed his eyes. “Ach, I still can hear the voices of the Hasidic women shouting the Shema Yisrael as they were stripped and forced into the killing rooms. Shema Yisrael adonai eloheinu adonai echad! ”
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One,” Giancarlo translated softly.
“Yes, the Lord is our God,” Moishe said with a slight smile. “But for reasons known only to Him, He did not stop the evil done to His people in those years.”
Moishe was quiet again. His eyes remained closed as his voice wavered. “The women did not shout very long… not long at all. In fact, from the time most of us arrived at the rail station to those final moments in the gas chambers, it was only two or three hours. That’s all it took to process and murder four or five hundred people at a time… Men, women, children, they spared no one.”
Moishe let the image linger before he went on. “For the Jews the guards had kept alive to work, there were many jobs around the camp. In general, these workers were treated better-even allowed to keep and use medicine they found on the poor souls chosen to die-and given more food. After all, they had to maintain their strength.”
The old man cleared his throat. “But the very worst of the jobs was as a Sonderkommando, which means ‘special unit’ in German. And their primary responsibility was to dispose of the corpses from the gas chambers.” The old man paused as he looked at the boys. “For a time, I was a Sonderkommando.”
“How did you become a Sonderkommando?” Zak asked.
“I was with my father when we were forced to strip and then herded toward those gas chambers past the smirking SS guards and Ukrainians who laughed and hit us with sticks to make us keep moving,” Moishe answered. “We had just about reached the building when a German officer, Hans Schultz, reached out and grabbed me by the arm… I wanted to stay with my father and held on to his hand, but he pulled away and said, ‘Do not forget.’ And then he was gone into the building, and I never saw him again.”
Moishe paused and dipped his head in sorrow as tears filled his eyes and began to stream down his cheeks. They sat in silence. “I apologize for the emotion,” he said finally, “but it happens sometimes and leaves me unable to speak.”
“Do you want to continue some other time?” Karp suggested.
“No, no, for heaven’s sake, I’m okay now,” the old man replied. “As I said, I never saw my father again. But I was spared not through some kindness, but because the Germans and their Ukrainian dogs did not want to do the dirty work. We worked in teams. Some cleaned out the killing rooms, the bodies so tightly packed that even when they were dead, there was no room to fall down. Rail tracks ran up to the back of the building; bodies were hauled out the rear doors and loaded on trolleys to be taken to pits, where other Sonderkommandos stacked them like
