He got down from his chair and smiled, as if saying that now he had finished as a spokesman and was prepared to answer questions. Bejski and some of the others began to speak to him, and he pointed to himself and said in creaky Belorussian Yiddish—the sort you pick up from your grandparents rather than your parents —that he was Jewish.
Now the conversation took on a new intimacy.
“Have you been in Poland?” Bejski asked him. “Yes,” the officer admitted. “I’ve come from Poland now.”
“Are there any Jews left up there?”
“I saw none.”
Prisoners were crowding around, translating and relaying the conversation to one another. “Where are you from?” the officer asked Bejski.
“Cracow.”
“I was in Cracow two weeks ago.”
“Auschwitz? What about Auschwitz?”
“I heard that at Auschwitz there are still a few Jews.”
The prisoners grew thoughtful. The Russian made Poland sound like a vacuum now, and if they returned to Cracow they’d rattle around in it bleakly like dried peas in a jar.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” the officer asked.
There were cries for food. He thought he could get them a cartload of bread, and perhaps some horsemeat. It should arrive before dusk. “But you should see what they have in town here,” the officer suggested.
It was a radical idea—that they ought to just go out the gate and begin shopping in Brinnlitz. For some of them it was still an unimaginable option. Young men like Pemper and Bejski pursued the officer as he left. If there were no Jews in Poland, there was nowhere to go. They didn’t want him to give them instructions, but felt he ought to discuss their quandary with them. The Russian paused in untying the reins of his pony from a railing.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking them in the face. “I don’t know where you ought to go. Don’t go east—that much I can tell you. But don’t go west either.” His fingers returned to untying the knot. “They don’t like us anywhere.”
As the Russian officer had urged them, the Brinnlitz prisoners moved out the gate at last to make their first tentative contact with the outer world. The young were the first to try it. Danka Schindel went out the day after the liberation and climbed the wooded hill behind the camp. Lilies and anemones were beginning to bud, and migratory birds were arriving from Africa. Danka sat on the hill for a while, savoring the day, then rolled down it and lay in the grass at the bottom, inhaling the fragrances and looking at the sky. She was there for so long that her parents presumed she had come to grief in the village, with either the townspeople or the Russians.
Goldberg left early too, was perhaps the first to go, on his way to pick up his riches in Cracow. He would emigrate, as quickly as he could arrange it, to Brazil.
Most of the older prisoners stayed in camp.
The Russians had now moved into Brinnlitz, occupying as an officers’ quarters a villa on a hill above the village. They brought to the camp a butchered horse, which the prisoners ate ravenously, some of them finding it too rich after their diet of bread and vegetables and Emilie Schindler’s porridge.
Lutek Feigenbaum, Janek Dresner, and young Sternberg went foraging in town. The village was patrolled by the Czech underground, and Brinnlitz folk of German descent were therefore wary of the liberated prisoners. A grocer indicated to the boys that they were welcome to a bag of sugar he’d been keeping in his storeroom. Young Sternberg found the sugar irresistible, lowering his face to it and swallowing it by the handful. It made him cruelly ill. He discovered what the Schindler group were finding in Nuremberg and Ravensburg—that liberty and the day of plenty had to be approached gradually.
The main purpose of this expedition to town had been to get bread. Feigenbaum was armed, as a member of the Brinnlitz commandos, with a pistol and a rifle, and when the baker insisted there was no bread, one of the others said to him, “Threaten him with the rifle.” The man, after all, was Sudetendeutsch and in theory an approver of all their misery. Feigenbaum pointed the weapon at the baker and moved through the shop into the residence beyond, looking for hidden flour. In the parlor, he found the baker’s wife and two daughters huddled in shock. They looked so frightened, indistinguishable from any Cracow family during an Aktion, that a great shame overwhelmed him. He nodded to the women as if he were on a social visit, and left.
The same shame overtook Mila Pfefferberg on her first visit to the village. As she entered the square, a Czech partisan stopped two Sudeten girls and made them take off their shoes so that Mila, who had only clogs, could select the pair that fitted her better. This sort of dominance made her flush, and she sat on the pavement making her embarrassed choice. The partisan gave the clogs to the Sudeten girl and passed on. Mila then turned in her tracks, ran up behind the girl, and gave the shoes back. The Sudetendeutscherin, Mila remembers, was not even gracious.
In the evenings, the Russians came to the camp looking for women. Pfefferberg had to put a pistol to the head of a soldier who penetrated the women’s quarters and grabbed Mrs. Krumholz. (Mrs. Krumholz would for years later chide Pfefferberg, pointing at him and accusing him. “Whatever chance I had of running off with a younger man, that scoundrel prevented it!”) Three girls were taken away—more or less voluntarily—to a Russian party, and came back after three days and, they claimed, a good time.
The hold of Brinnlitz was a negative one, and within a week the prisoners began to move out. Some whose families had been consumed went directly to the West, never wishing to see Poland again. The Bejski boys, using their cloth and vodka to pay their way, traveled to Italy and boarded a Zionist ship to Palestine. The Dresners walked across Moravia and Bohemia and into Germany, where Janek was among the first ten students to enroll in the Bavarian University of Erlangen when it opened later in the year. Manci Rosner returned to Podgorze, where Henry had agreed to meet her. Henry Rosner himself, liberated from Dachau with Olek, was in a pissoir in Munich one day and saw another client of the place wearing prison-camp stripes. He asked the man where he had been imprisoned. “Brinnlitz,” said the man.
Everyone except an old lady, the man told him (inaccurately, as it turned out), had survived Brinnlitz. Manci herself would hear of Henry’s survival through a cousin who came to the room in Podgorze where Manci was waiting and waved the Polish paper in which were listed the names of Poles liberated from Dachau. “Manci,” said the cousin, “give me a kiss. Henry’s alive, and so is Olek.”
Regina Horowitz had a similar rendezvous. It took her three weeks to travel from Brinnlitz to Cracow with her daughter Niusia. She rented a room—the handout from the Navy store made that possible—and waited for Dolek. When he arrived, they sought to make inquiries of Richard, but there was no news. One day that summer Regina saw the film of Auschwitz which the Russians had made and were showing free of charge to the Polish population. She saw the famous frames involving the camp children, who looked out from behind the wire or were escorted by nuns past the electrified fence of Auschwitz I. Being so small and so engaging, Richard figured in most of the frames. Regina got up screaming and left the theater. The manager and a number of passing citizens tried to soothe her in the street. “It’s my son, it’s my son!” she kept screaming. Now that she knew he was alive, she was able to discover that Richard had been released by the Russians into the hands of one of the Jewish rescue organizations. Thinking both his parents dead, the rescue body had had him adopted by some old acquaintances of the Horowitzes’, people named Liebling. Regina was given the address, and when she arrived at the Lieblings’ apartment could hear Richard inside, banging on a saucepan and calling, “Today there’ll be soup for everyone!” When she knocked on the door, he called to Mrs. Liebling to answer it.
So he was returned to her. But after what he had seen of the scaffolds of Plaszow and Auschwitz, she could never take him to a children’s playground without his growing hysterical at the sight of the swing frames.
At Linz, Oskar’s group reported to the American authorities, were relieved of their unreliable ambulance, and were taken by truck north to Nuremberg, to a large holding center for wandering concentration-camp prisoners. They were discovering that, as they had suspected, liberation wasn’t a straightforward business.
Richard Rechen had an aunt in Constanz, by the lake on the Swiss border. When the Americans asked the group if there was anywhere they could go, they nominated this aunt. The intent of the eight young prisoners from Brinnlitz was to deliver the Schindlers, if possible, across the Swiss border, in case vengeance against Germany erupted suddenly and, even in the American zone, the Schindlers were unjustly punished. Additionally, all eight of them were potential emigrants and believed that these matters would be easier to arrange from Switzerland.
Reubinski remembers that their relationship with the American commandant in Nuremberg was cordial, but the man would not spare them any transport to take them south to Constanz. They made the journey through the
