3. LOVE OF FREEDOM

In 1944, first all the able-bodied Jewish men were taken away to forced-labor and there seemed to be no avenues of escape left. The Nazi camp was well guarded and though conditions were tough, they were bearable. My father Martin was one of the lucky ones: he wasn’t a smoker yet and could thus trade his cigarette rations to the others for more food. (It was only after the war that he taught himself to smoke two packs a day, to fill his empty days in the empty house he found after returning.)

Martin had never shirked hard work and was not religious like some of the other prisoners, for whom working on the Sabbath was a sin to be avoided at all costs. In the camp, he could fill in for them and thus earn extra food again. The religious ones didn’t seem to realize that it was a worse sin to lead a fellowman to perdition, especially a lapsed Jew. Just like back home, where they normally got around the law against lighting fires during the holiday by paying the “Sabbath Goyim” to come around and light the stove for them!

Months, even years passed and nothing changed – they were shifted to other camps where conditions were always worse, the food consisting of rotten potatoes with the occasional worm for much-needed protein. Rumors abounded of the war’s end, hope spread about finally going home. Then the orders arrived: they were to be moved right into Germany, probably never to see their homeland again.

Martin decided to escape on the road, where the guardians were less acute and carelessly left him hiding in the bushes during one of the truck stops. Then he walked back alone to his home town, hundreds and hundreds of miles away. Hiding and getting some sleep during the daytime, by night he crossed the shifting front lines of fighting that was still going on all around him. Once he was awakened by nearby gunshots, only to find that a Russian woman soldier was shooting a rifle from right on top of the haystack in which he had buried himself for cover. He saluted her and went happily back to sleep, thinking to be finally safe. By evening though she was dead and he knew he was back in danger, again behind the enemy lines.

Yet he survived and persevered, as always, and made it back home, to find an empty house with his family gone. Neighbors confirmed that his wife and daughter Vera Photo4 had been taken away with all the others, his parents, brothers and sisters, never to return. No more avenues of escape for him, if not in cigarettes and drink, for which he had always had a good head and thus had never abused before. Little did he know or care that these forcibly acquired bad habits would cause cancer, starting the downward spiral towards death finally catching up with him after all his escapes. But that was to be over forty years later, after a second lifetime in which I was to play an important part.