Samuel told him what those months were like, the worst of the war for him. Alone, lost, and starving, lacking all contact with the Resistance, he lived by night, eating worm-ridden earth and stolen food, until he was captured at the end of September. He spent the next four months in forced labor, first at Monowitz and then at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million two hundred thousand men, women, and children had already perished. In January 1945, faced with the Russians’ imminent advance, the Nazis received orders to destroy all evidence of what they had done in the camps. They evacuated their prisoners on a forced march through the snow, providing neither food nor shelter, back toward Germany. Those too weak to leave were left behind to be executed, but in the rush to flee the Russians, the SS did not manage to obliterate everything and left seven thousand prisoners still alive. Samuel was one of them.
“I don’t think the Russians came with the intention of liberating us,” Samuel explained. “The Ukrainian front was passing close by and opened the camp gates. Those of us still able to move dragged ourselves outside. Nobody stopped us. Nobody helped us. Nobody offered us even a crust of bread. We were turned away by everyone.”
“I know, mon frère. Here in France no one came to the aid of the Jews, and I say that with a great sense of shame. But remember those were terrible times, we were all hungry, and in those circumstances all sense of humanity gets lost.”
“Not even the Zionists in Palestine wanted to take in concentration camp survivors; we were the useless detritus of the war,” said Samuel.
He explained how the Zionists only wanted young, strong, healthy people—brave warriors to confront the Arabs, and stubborn laborers to work the arid land. But one of the few things he recalled from his earlier life was how to fly a plane, and this helped facilitate the immigration process. He became a soldier, pilot, and spy. He was David Ben-Gurion’s bodyguard during the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and a year later he became one of the first Mossad agents, working for Israel’s new intelligence agency.
Brother and sister spent the night in a village inn and the next day returned to Paris to fly to Warsaw. In Poland, they searched in vain for traces of their parents, but only found their names on a list of the victims of Treblinka they obtained from the Jewish Agency. Together they visited the remains of Auschwitz, where Samuel attempted to reconcile himself to the past, but it was a journey straight out of his worst nightmares that only served to confirm his certainty that human beings are the cruelest beasts on the planet.
“The Germans are not a race of psychopaths, Alma. They’re normal people like you and me, but with fanaticism, power, and impunity, anyone can turn into a monster, like the SS at Auschwitz,” he told his sister.
“Do you think that, given the opportunity, you’d also behave like a monster, Samuel?”
“I don’t think it, Alma, I know it. I’ve been a soldier all my life. I’ve been to war. I’ve interrogated prisoners, a large number of them. But I assume you don’t want details.”
NATHANIEL
The sly illness that was to end Nathaniel Belasco’s life was prowling around him for years without anybody, himself included, realizing it. The first symptoms were easily confused with flu, which that winter was affecting nearly half the population of San Francisco, and disappeared again within a fortnight. They did not return for some years, this time leaving him with a sensation of enormous fatigue; some days he would walk about dragging his feet, his shoulders hunched as if he were lugging a sack of sand on his back. He went on working the same number of hours every day, but the time spent in his office brought little reward; documents piled up on his desk, seeming only to expand and multiply overnight. He became confused, lost the thread of the cases he was pursuing conscientiously, ones he could once have resolved with his eyes shut, and all of a sudden couldn’t remember what he had just read. He had suffered from insomnia all his life, and this now grew worse, with bouts of fever and sweating.
“We’re both suffering from menopausal hot flashes,” he told Alma, laughing aloud, but she didn’t find it so amusing.