The Books: Dear God, Have You Ever Gone Hungry?, by Joseph Bau

Daily Book Excerpt: Memoirs:

Next book on the Memoir/Letters/Journals shelf is Dear God, Have You Ever Gone Hungry?, by Joseph Bau.

Joseph Bau was interned at the Plaszow concentration camp in Krakow when he met his future wife, Rebecca, another prisoner. The Plaszow concentration camp was built on the Krakow Jewish cemetery, and was part of the Final Solution of “dealing with” the Krakow Jews. Joseph Bau, during a time of unimaginable violence and deprivation, fell in love with Rebecca, courted her, and then married her, all while imprisoned at Plaszow. It was his brand new wife who managed to put her new husband’s name on “Oskar Schindler’s List”, thereby saving his life. She had been “hired” as the manicurist for Amon Goeth, the brute who ran the Plaszow camp, and it was through her time working in his house that she came to know some of the higher-up Germans who frequented the camp. This is how she heard about the mythical “list” that could save Jews. Desperate, and thinking only of her husband, not of herself, she maneuvered and manipulated and blackmailed those who owed her favors to get Joseph on the list.

Joseph then became one of “Oskar Schindler’s Jews”, while Rebecca was sent to Auschwitz. (It was only after the war that he found out that it was because of Rebecca that he was on that list.) She was marked for the gas chambers three times, by Joseph Mengele himself, and, showing her character and bravery, one of those times she slipped out of the line that was marching towards the gas chamber and got back into the line of naked women being examined. Mengele recognized her as having come through the line twice, and was furious. There was a pimple on her breast and he saw it as a sign of sickness, but she was defiant towards him and told him that no, the pimple was because she was menstruating. He had a nurse come over to “check” her, and yes, indeed, Rebecca did have her period. Mengele spared her. For some reason, that story haunts me. Rebecca Bau was always fighting for her life. She was wily, smart, defiant, and was always looking for a way out. But still. It’s chilling.

Rebecca and Joseph were reunited after the war (in an absolutely incredible story: they met by a series of coincidences – if he hadn’t gotten off THAT train, if he hadn’t spoken to THAT Czech woman, if this and that hadn’t happened, he never would have found his wife on that day), and the two eventually moved to Israel. Joseph Bau was an artist and (according to his biography) became Israel’s first animator. He died in 2002.

Dear God, Have You Ever Gone Hungry is the harrowing story of the Nazi’s regime in Poland, seen through the eyes of a young artistic man who managed to maintain his humanity to such a degree that he could look at another starving prisoner, in her striped uniform, and think, “That girl. I like that girl. Let me find some wildflowers to give to that girl.” In Steven Spielberg’s movie, there’s a brief scene of a couple of prisoners getting married at Plaszow and that is obviously meant to be Joseph and Rebecca Bau. Under unthinkable circumstances, the prisoners allowed themselves to celebrate the union, and the Baus allowed themselves to invest in the future, which is what marriage is. Amazing.

The story is illustrated with Bau’s absolutely arresting artwork.

Some of the images (like the book cover) are burned into my brain forever. Abstract, powerful, the images insist that you Look, Deal With This, Remember. Joseph Bau gives us floor plans and maps of the various camps and factories, guiding us through virtual tours. The book brought me to tears many times.

It is not a pleasant read. It is infuriating. It is important. I read it in translation, of course, but the translation gives Joseph Bau’s voice an impassioned infuriated tone: he maintains his composure, and his anger is titanic. But the love that keens through the book is enough to rip your skin off. He admits when he does not have the words. He cannot describe his reunion with his wife, for example. He trails off. Some things are beyond words.

Here is an excerpt from the exhaustive chapter on the layout of Plaszow.

Excerpt from Dear God, Have You Ever Gone Hungry?

The death camps were an integral part of the Nazi regime, from its very conception to its inglorious downfall. Electrified barbed-wire fences, watchtowers sniffing for human prey, dense clouds of smoke, which reeked with the smell of burning flesh and adhered to the striped uniforms of the inmates – nothing will erase these images from the memories of the survivors among those who were caught up in the diabolically conceived, perfectly executed Holocaust machine created by Adolf Hitler and Associates.

For six million Jews, those years of total madness became their terminal years; for the small number who lived through it, who managed by some miracle to smuggle their souls through the various “actions” and selections, this devastating period of life left scars they have carried and will carry for the rest of their lives. No amount of German reparations and subsidized holidays at health resorts can make them forget.

The years of my youth were a ransom paid to history for the dubious privilege of witnessing and participating in this, the most macabre epoch in Jewish annals. The story of the concentration camps is like the scenario of a horror movie directed by someone devoid of human emotions, whose purpose is to scare the audience and to set its nerves on edge. How can I now convince those without understanding that these shocking events really took place, when I myself find them beyond human comprehension? When the Germans started the last stage of their Final Solution in the summer of 1942, the Jews were already sealed hermetically in the ghettos, stripped of all rights and property, and thoroughly brainwashed against any thought of resistance. Then the Reich extorted from them the final payment – their lives.

The Nazis chose an appropriate place for implementing the genocide of the Krakow Jews, their new cemetery in Plaszow, on the outskirts of the city. As a start, by means of forced labor, they desecrated the fresh graves by erecting upon them the first of many huts or barracks and placed there a misleading sign, WORK CAMP. After herding the Jews from all the ghettos in the area into the cemetery, they unveiled the true purpose of the place with the sign CONCENTRATION CAMP.

The camp didn’t arouse misgivings at first; a few residential huts, a kitchen, a bakery, latrines, and workshops were not cause for panic. But soon it became obvious that this was the prototype of a death camp, with all the facilities required for mass murder. The facility was expanded well beyond the cemetery, to encompass surrounding lands and houses within a radius of four kilometers.

After their defeat, as they retreated in confusion, the Germans found time to obliterate the camp entirely; they burned the tens of thousands of scattered bodies and dismantled the incriminating huts before carrying them away. Later, the Poles placed a memorial on this historic site, but except for the cemetery, the annexed lands were returned to their original owners.

Lest its existence fade into oblivion, I shall try to reconstruct Plaszow from the shards embedded in my consciousness, to construct a model of this veritable hell on earth. I owe it to the countless camp inmates, those who died there and those who will carry its imprint on their souls to the end of their existence.

I will now take you on a guided tour of my model. We’ll start with the main gate, which today has been obstructed with a barricade. To the right, you see the train tracks and two station buildings. The hapless victims were shipped from here to the furnaces of Auschwitz or to other camps, to work in factories producing the implements that would enable the master race to conquer the world.

When the Kapos – the Jewish supervisors appointed by the Germans – ordered the locksmiths to install barbed-wire grilles in the doorways of the railroad cars stationed on the tracks, we knew that an “action” was imminent. Rumors started flying from hut to hut, and the dread of new agonies joined the fears that were our daily fare. All hopes of even a partial redemption were long gone, but the thought of being transferred to a strange, uncertain destination made matters worse.

Since there were no clocks or calendars in the camp, time dragged on slowly toward infinity. At indefinite intervals, the freight trains laden with human cargo departed. No one expected to hear from the unfortunates again. The barbed-wire fences shut out effectively any communication with the outside. When it became known that the locksmiths had commenced their work, the inmates started planning how to survive the anticipated selection. All means to this end were justified. Young, prematurely gray men blackened their hair with pieces of burned cork and reddened their sunken cheeks with the dye from paper wrappers of chicory. Those who had money bribed the servants and clerks of the Germans and concealed their remaining valuables within the intimate recesses of their bodies. An open market existed for helpful information or to provide protection from the evil. Thus the privileged whispered about there being some well-guarded secrets to survival, but no two versions were alike. It was pathetic to see how members of families who were forced to separate did so without any display of emotion, as their tear ducts had dried up long before. The air of uncertainty gave an added resonance to the horrors that were the order of the day.

Through this gate, countless thousands arrayed in rows of three shuffled their wooden clogs to the monotonous “Left, left, left” rasped hoarsely by the Kapo. The barrier lifted above the shaven heads of the marchers, their only crime indicated by the word Jude stamped on their identity cards. A bitter slogan was born in the camp: “You enter through the gate – you exit through the chimney.” How near the truth!

We are at the start of the twentieth-century version of the Via Dolorosa, four kilometers long and lined on both sides by a three-meter-high electrical fence, powered by high-tension wires strung between porcelain terminals. Along the outer rim of this wall of death lies a complex arrangement of barbed-wire coils five meters wide. Thirteen watchtowers perch over the whole system, each of them heavily fortified and equipped with machine-guns, telephones, and constantly revolving searchlights. The towers are manned by SS guards day and night, while unleashed dogs, trained to attack people in striped suits, roam the area. This formidable complex, designed to preclude any attempt at escape, was constructed by the forced labor of the inmates under the supervision of the Germans, according to plans that had been pretested for efficiency in other camps.

Today the gate is unguarded. Nobody searches us for concealed bread or sugar. There is no Kapo to announce in a loud bellow, “Twenty-two prisoners from the building detail.” Our next stop is the domain of the Angel of Death and his faithful helpers, the armed SS battalion and the police chief. Even the sun feared to enter this forbidden area. Some say it failed to get a pass from the authorities.

Today the law of the jungle no longer applies. We can walk in respectful silence, as befits a sacred place. While our shoes tread over the gravel, listen, please, to the language of the stones: They are weeping, and when you lift one, you feel the texture of marble. These are not ordinary stones; they bear Hebrew inscriptions. Yes, the Plaszow roads were paved with the fragments of elegant monuments, which the prisoners were forced to crush and scatter over their surfaces. Under these stones, squeezed down into the earth by heavy rollers, is buried the cemetery itself.

Now we are passing two important buildings. On the left is a two-story house built before the war, which served as the headquarters of the duty officer and contained the telephone exchange and a radio transmitter linked to a series of loudspeakers. During the “actions”, they broadcast dance music to the entire camp. On May 14 (one of the special dates impressed on the prisoners), for example, the Nazi operators amused themselves by playing a German lullaby, “Good night, Mommy,” while a transport of children and sick people were being dispatched to the Auschwitz crematoriums.

On the opposite side of the road stands the headquarters of the camp commandant. His name was Amon Goeth, and he was a hideous, fat monster weighing more than one hundred fifty kilos (three hundred thirty pounds) and standing more than six feet six inches in height. His reputation for depravity terrified the population, causing them to shiver in fear and their teeth to chatter. His cruelty defied human comprehension. Using tortures surpassing anything known to the Inquisition and with terrifying capriciousness, he dispatched his victims to their eternity. For the slightest infraction of his rules, he would pummel a hapless prisoner’s face and watch with sadistic pleasure as it spit broken teeth and became swollen and blue, the eyes forced from their sockets. When administering a whipping, he compelled the victim to count the lashes and, if in his agony he made a mistake, to start counting again from the beginning. During so-called interrogations, the accused was hung by the feet from a hook in the ceiling of Goeth’s office and a dog was sicced on him. When someone escaped from the camp, his group was lined up in a row and told to count off by tens. Then Goeth would personally execute every tenth man.

At one morning Appell, he decided to have some fun. Accusing a Jew of being too tall, he shot him and proceeded to urinate on his still stirring body. Turning to the man’s shocked friend, he yelled, “You don’t like this, eh?” Then he killed him as well and urinated on him. There was the case of a hungry man who stole a potato from the storeroom. Goeth had him hanged near the gate to the prisoners’ quarters with a potato stuck in his mouth and a sign proclaiming, “I am a potato thief.” Once, he caught a boy was was suffering from diarrhea and was unable to contain himself. He forced the boy to eat all of the excrement before killing him. Every morning, after a meal of raw meat mixed with fresh blood, the mad commandant would tour the barracks in the company of two fierce bulldogs that had been trained to tear people apart. After such visits, the hut inmates tallied the result: fifteen to zero, twenty to zero, thirty to zero. The zero was always on our side. We could have killed the monster, but we knew the score then would be twenty-four thousand to one.