My Father Was A Nazi Slave

My father was a child slave laborer for the Nazis. He was taken into custody when he was about 11 when my grandfather and great uncle were arrested for being part of the Polish Underground where, as lawyers, they had been getting fake paperwork for Jews to get out of Nazi occupied Poland. In the 1970s when I was about 10 years old I remember being with my grandfather when he received a phone call essentially from Israel. It was a strange conversation, and at the end I asked him what it was. He said that something like 92 people had identified him specifically as the lawyer that had gotten them their paperwork to get out of Poland, and they were now living in Israel or New York, and had been interviewed to figure out who had helped people escape the Holocaust. I think they were trying to offer him some status called, “Righteous Among the Nations,” or something that came with Israeli citizenship and free healthcare, and they mostly wanted to give him the acknowledgement. He politely turned them down, saying that he only did what anybody else would have done.

My grandfather had a serial number tattooed on the inside of his left forearm from being processed into Auschwitz where he was not separated from his brother-in-law, and due to their ability to speak German and Polish, they were often used by the Nazis to do paperwork translations, though they were also dumped into a snowy field in the middle of winter with materials and told to build another camp for Auschwitz. He said something like 10% of the people survived, and then after that camp was full they took some more people including the 10% that had built the first camp, along with a bunch of new slave laborers and dumped them into another snowy field, and had them build another camp for Auschwitz, and that this was typical, in every way the Nazis made sure that whatever they had prisoners do was incredibly lethal.

At that point my grandfather and great uncle had become emaciated due to lack of food and being worked as slave laborers, because from the start, even with sufficient food supplies the Nazis fed the prisoners barely enough to survive, and the common term for the emaciated prisoners that survived the low calories was Muselmann which meant Muslim. It had absolutely nothing to do with religion, it just had to do with their heads being always down, they appeared pious, but they really just didn't have enough energy to even lift their heads. Whatever manual labor was given to prisoners required more calories than the food they gave them provided, leading to constant weight loss to the point of emaciation. Despite this they would help each other out, like my grandfather and great uncle kept each other motivated, which he said was the only reason he survived. Almost all of the new slave laborers died in that second snowy field, their bodies unable to adapt to the low calories and the work. When I knew my grandfather in the 1970s long after the war had ended he was still very gaunt and had a skeletal figure, just with a pot belly.

My grandfather and great uncle were captured when they had driven over to visit somebody in the Polish Underground, my great uncle waited in the car while my grandfather went upstairs. The door to the apartment was ajar. He knocked on the door and said, “Hello?” Pushing the door open he stepped inside. The phone rang. Now every instinct in his being told him to turn and run, but instead he calmly and slowly walked over and picked up the phone. He heard a voice speaking in Polish but with a German accent, the man asked for his friend and he said that he wasn't home. He was too polite to just hang up, and as he was talking he heard a car pull up outside, stop abruptly, and then he heard troopers get out, then Jack Boots stomping up the stairs, and then the Nazis entered the apartment. They had already taken his brother-in-law into custody at the car, and now he was going too, and they were both being sent to Auschwitz.

In total 2.77 million non-Jewish Poles died during Nazi occupation. Most were rounded up and sent to the camps like my grandfather, and almost all of the non-Jewish Poles were males from the nobility of Poland known as Szlachta like my grandfather. By the end of the war between 40% and 55% of all Polish doctors, lawyers, judges and professors had died in the camps, either by being worked to death, dying of famine, or by being sent to the gas chambers. Hitler’s Final Solution killed 6 million Jews across Europe both in the cities and in the camps like Auschwitz, including up to 3 million that lived in Poland before the war, but a little known part of Hitler’s grand plan was to kill all of the Polish nobility and turn the remaining Polish people into slaves that would grow crops for the Germans.

When my grandfather was taken into custody the story told by my father was that he had to decide whether he was going to wear long pants or short pants when he went to the train to see his father leave, he wore long pants and the Nazis decided that he was too adult and so they took him when I think he was 11 years old. The Nazis forced him to work in a factory pressing gun barrels for tanks, and he was on a pressing machine that was rolling sheet metal in between two rollers when the fingers on his right hand got caught in the rolling machine. As it crushed his fingers he was able to turn and flip off the power for most of the factory, and they were able to open up the machine and get his hand out but it was mangled.

His mother was also there at the factory, my grandmother, but I didn't know her at all because after surviving the war and making it to the United States she died of a brain aneurysm before I was born. But she was there when my father got hurt, and it happened to be the one day each week or month that the German factory owner’s wife used to bring him lunch. So she and my grandmother bonded because my grandmother spoke High German, and she decided to bring in a German doctor to work on the little Polish boy, otherwise they were planning on cutting his hand off at the wrist. The doctor did reconstructive surgery and was able to save the pinkie and thumb, and reset the pinkie opposed to the thumb for a pincer grip, but couldn't save the middle three fingers. My father wrapped his hand with an Ace bandage for the rest of his life as an extra layer of protection because the skin was fairly thin over where his three knuckles in the center were.

After my father recovered from the surgery they transferred him to a different job which was to work with a couple of other kids that were also maimed, and their job was to take food in a push cart up to the top of a hill where the German soldiers were recovering in a hospital, and along the way they would just reach in and eat as much as they wanted. So instantly they got more food than anybody else, and in addition as they passed through the town they would pick up cigarette butts, and this was before filtered cigarettes so the cigarette butts were all tobacco. And then, not only did he get hooked on smoking cigarettes when he was 12, but they would take the cigarette butts and reroll them, and be able to trade them back at the camp where they stayed, which was an all cripples camp.

Now in the all cripples camp they would make a communal soup in the evenings like a stone soup, where everyone would bring and contribute something. Somebody would bring an egg, somebody would bring an onion, somebody would bring a potato, somebody would bring some cabbage, somebody would bring a carrot, and eventually it would turn into soup. And if you brought something then you could participate and get a bowl of the soup, so not only did they get to eat their fill when they were pushing the cart up to the German soldiers but they also traded cigarettes for something like an onion or a carrot and contributed to the communal soup, so they got to eat soup at night as well, giving my father 2 meals a day and enough calories for the rest of the war.

There was one other person who could participate in the communal soup in a very unique way. There was a person that had a single plate and the bottom of it was unglazed ceramic, and this person had a skill where they could sharpen anything on the bottom of this plate, he was so skilled that no one else could compete with him or do as well. He could sharpen any razor blade, any knife, whatever you needed sharpened he could sharpen it, and so he just sat there in a corner of the yard in the shade and people would trade him things in exchange for getting their blades sharpened, and so he too participated in the communal soup, otherwise you had to come up with some way to earn some piece of food to contribute to the soup.

My father was particularly against artificial flavors because he had experienced some of the sawdust soup, where the Germans invented artificial chicken soup flavor like if you get a Ramen and it says made with artificial flavor, yeah that artificial flavor was invented by the Nazis. This wasn't cruel, they had run out of calories due to the Allies blockading all of Germany, millions of German civilians were starving outside of the fences of Auschwitz, just like people were starving to death in Auschwitz and in the other camps where they eventually served sawdust soup. Again, that's not cruelty by the Germans, because the German civilians were also starving due to the US and Allies destroying all rail lines and bridges which caused famine. When things got bad enough the Germans would just take water and boil sawdust because there were a few calories that could be extracted from it, and then they would flavor it with artificial chicken soup flavor and that is the infamous sawdust soup that both civilians and slave laborers alike had to try to survive on.

And if you didn't have access to community soup like stone soup in the evening made with a variety of things, you would slowly waste away on sawdust soup like my grandfather and great uncle did for years, though they did get occasional calories from the few packages sent by their families that the guards didn't steal. At the end of the war my grandfather and great uncle were released and were not force-marched out of Auschwitz like the rest of the slave laborers, possibly because they had done translations for the Germans.

In the United States the deaths of the 2.77 million mostly Szlachta Polish civilians are largely ignored, along with any potential Soviet, US or Western Allies being responsible for the German famines. Famine occured on both sides of the Eastern Front, with the Nazis causing over 19 million Soviet civilians to die during the war mostly by intentionally engineering famines, and calculations range up to 9 million Germans dying of famine during the war and in the following few years, though the West disputes that any German famines were intentional. In America sawdust soup is misrepresented as being caused by the intentional cruelty of the Nazis towards the Jews, and nothing to do with famine, when in reality over half of the 60 million deaths during World War II were caused by famine, and German and Soviet civilians were emaciated like my grandfather and dying of starvation by the end of the war, and both civilians and prisoners alike were resorting to sawdust soup as a last ditch effort to avoid starvation.

So that was what I grew up with, my father was missing three fingers on his right hand and had a pincer grip because of the Nazis, and my grandfather was still emaciated with a pot belly due to intentional starvation by the Nazis and famine, and he had a serial number tattooed on the inside of his left forearm because of the Nazis, and so did my great uncle who I also knew. And I now know that they all had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD, though my father appeared to have it far worse than my grandfather or great uncle, maybe because he was so young when he was a Nazi slave laborer, and because of his hand.