Survivor
Continued from Page 1
The truck was dark green,
highlighted with the yellow specks -
and black stripes typical of camou
flage military gear. A handful of
others were waiting in the truck
when Boin boarded.
The truck slowly made its way
through Berlin, stopping at one
home, then another and another. At
every stop, the guards checked
another name off their list as each
terrified prisoner came aboard.
Within an hour, the truck was
crowded with about 50 prisoners.
Two guards rode in the front of
the truck; two watched the back.
The prisoners were packed in an
area seven feet wide and about 12
feet long.
The ride to the camp lasted 1 1/2
hours. The prisoners were silent,
fearing the guards would hit them
with their rifles if they spoke. But a
million questions raced through
their minds.
“It took us off guard,” says Boin.
His hair is now gray. He wears gold
rimmed glasses, and liver spots dot
his face. Tiny, red veins show
through on his nose, but his mus
tache is still there.
“We never expected it,” says the
old man.
Not even when he was thrown out
of high school in 1938 because he
was Jewish.
Not even when he was banned
from using public transportation.
Not even when he was forced to
wear a yellow star on his sleeve.
In 1936, Boin’s uncle warned his
father that something terrible was
about to happen.
“Arthur, now is the time to get out
of here,” his uncle had said.
“What do you want,” Boin’s father
replied. “I was in World War 1.1
have a legitimate business. I pay my
taxes. What can they do to me?”
As the truck carried Boin to the
camp, he tried to comfort himself
with his father’s words.
“My father always said, ‘Don’t
worry about a thing. There’s no
reason to be afraid.’
“But then you start thinking,
‘What’s going to happen? How am I
going to get out of here?”’
* * *
The frightened prisoners watched
the gates at Sachsenhausen close
behind them. Two fences topped
with barbed wire surrounded the
camp. One fence, Boin learned later,
was electric.
The truck stopped, and the
prisoners filed out. Soldiers began
calling off names.
The list included Jews, gypsies,
homosexuals, political enemies of
the state and priests.
They took turns emptying what
ever possessions they had in their
pockets onto a table. Then, after
stripping them of their possessions,
the Nazis stripped them of their
identities.
3709. The number, tattooed on
Boin’s left forearm, would become a
symbol of those nightmare years.
Later, he had his doctor remove the
four black numbers, leaving only an
inch-long, white scar as a reminder
of his past. He had it removed, he
says, because he was tired of being
pitied when someone spotted the
tattoo.
After giving him his number, the
soldiers shaved Boin’s head and
sprayed his naked body with DDT.
He was given new clothes to wear
— a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of
pants that looked like gray-and
white striped pajamas, only they
were thicker and itchier.
Then the soldiers took Boin to the
barracks, a large, wooden building
that housed about 95 prisoners.
Inside were rows of bunk beds
stacked three high. Boin shared a
bed with six or seven other prison
ers, though only three could fit
comfortably.
“Most of the time when you woke
up in the morning, the guy on the
right or the guy on the left was
dead,” he says.
* * *
Boin learned the silent rules of the
camp quickly.
The morning after he arrived,
Boin stood next to an old man who
was visibly undernourished. The
man fell to the ground, and Boin
instinctively bent down to help him
up.
Whoomph. A blow to Boin’s neck
knocked him to the ground.
“If you want to live, don’t look,
don’t listen, don’t hear and don’t
see,” fellow prisoners told him later.
“Because if you do, you’re going to
be in big trouble.”
The soldiers never let the prison
ers forget who was in control.
One cold night, for example, Boin
got permission to leave the barracks
to go to the bathroom. A guard
accompanied him to the outhouse.
Boin had wrapped a rag around his
body for warmth, covering the
yellow star on his sleeve. Outraged,
the guard took him to the camp’s
commandant.
“All I did was try to keep warm to
go to the bathroom,” Boin said
defensively.
The commandant smiled.
“Oh,” he said. Then he turned and
struck Boin several times.
“Okay, the next time you know,”
the commandant said. “I don’t want
to see this happen again because I
can do something more to you than
this.”
Like the silent rules, Boin quickly
learned the camp’s routine. The
days ran into each other.
At 5 a.m. the soldiers woke up the
prisoners for roll call by blowing a
trumpet or ringing a bell. Boin
usually awoke on his own. A
different soldier called the roll each
day. Sometimes the prisoners stood
in the cold for an hour while the roll
was called.
Breakfast, if there was time for it,
consisted of tasteless coffee and a
slice of bread. The prisoners each
received one loaf of bread a week,
and they learned to ration each slice.
At 7 a.m., the soldiers would
choose about 14 of the strongest
prisoners, Boin included, to work on
the roads outside the camp. They
would walk a few miles to the work
site. Two soldiers walked in front of
the prisoners, who were iined up in
rows of two and three. Two more
guards followed behind and another
two kept watch from the sides.
The guards in back would hit the
prisoners with instruments that
resembled police sticks if they
didn’t walk fast enough.
By 8 or 8:30 in the morning, Boin
and the other prisoners would arrive
at the work site. Often, their task
was to surface a new road. All day,
they would break up the old
concrete, shovel it out and load it
onto little carts. When the carts were
full, the prisoners pushed them onto
the side of the road or onto trucks.
“You dirty Jew,” the soldiers
would yell. “You never worked a
day in your life. It’s about time you
are taught to do some honest work.”
At noon, Boin and the other
prisoners took a 20-minute break to
eat bread and water for lunch. Boin
often used the time left after he was
done eating to take a short nap.
At 6 p.m., the road-workers would
return to camp.
Dinner was served in a kitchen
house, where large serving tables
were set up. Gray kettles filled with
potato-peel soup sat on the tables.
Sometimes a black kettle filled with
fried potato peels cut into small
pieces sat among the gray kettles.
Boin looked forward to seeing the
black kettle, where a small piece of
meat might be found among the
potatoes.
“I don’t know what kind of meat,
but I didn’t care,” Boin says.
It took about 20 minutes to reach
the front of the line, where a soldier
filled one compartment of an army
tray with soup.
“Hurry up, there are other people
waiting after you,” the guards would
order.
Some prisoners hurried so much
they spilled their soup. They
couldn’t go back for more.
“If you tried to do that,” Boin
says, “you would be taken out and
put in a place separate from every
one else or they’d beat you half to
death.”
The prisoners returned to the
barracks to eat.
“The soup tasted terrible, but you
ate it anyway,” Boin says. “It kept
us warm a little bit.”
Keeping warm was a constant
Travis Heying/DN
Joe Boin, 72, is president of the Society of Survivors of the Holocaust in Omaha. Fifty years ago,
he escaped from a concentration camp at Hindenburg when the Russians bombarded it.
battle. Some of the prisoners sewed
scraps of material together to use as
blankets. They scavengered the
scraps from the sewing room where
the commandant’s clothes were
made.
One prisoner wrapped old
newspapers around his worn-out
shoes to keep his feet warm.
The prisoners who had enough
strength talked in the barracks ...
always about the same thing.
What were they going to do? How
could they get out of here? What
was going to happen to them? What
happened to their families? How
could they get in contact with them?
There were never any answers.
“We were hoping that finally
England and France and all the
countries would come and bomb
these places and put us out of our
misery, but it never happened. It
never happened,” Boin says.
Once at Sachsenhausen, Boin
expressed his hatred for the Nazis.
“If God gives me the strength and
I stay alive,” he told fellow prison
ers, “I will kill every German I can
find when I come out.”
A Catholic priest, alarmed by
Boin’s statement, reprimanded him.
“Listen, if you do what you said
you’re going to do, you put yourself
in the same category as the Nazis.”
“So I started thinking, ‘My gosh,
this guy is right,”’ Boin recalls.
Most of the time, the prisoners
were silent in the barracks. Many
were too tired to talk, but they also
knew they must watch what was said
because the guards often tried to
find out what was going on inside
the barracks.
Sometimes bribes were offered in
return for information.
“Listen,” a guard would say, “I
will give you a piece of chocolate if
you tell me what is happening in the
barracks.”
And despite of everything, some
of the prisoners remained optimistic.
“Maybe they’re not as bad as we
think they are.” they would say.
“Maybe we can talk to them. Maybe
we can discuss things with them.”
“We hoped,” Boin says. “Inside
you have all this hope.”
But some would give up.
“I don’t want to live anymore
because I just don’t have the
strength,” some would say.
Others simply ran into the electric
fence.
“I was sometimes considering it's
better to be dead than alive,” Boin
says, “But somehow, some way, I
always came out of it.”
Boin usually went to bed at 8 or 9
p.m. But sometimes sleep eluded
him.
“So many things go through your
mind. If you start thinking about it
you almost go crazy trying to figure
out why you’re there and then what
will happen to you.”
* * *
When the soldiers at
Sachsenhausen announced one
spring morning that the camp at
Buchenwald needed airplane
mechanics, Boin stepped, forward.
“If I had a chance to get out of
there, I might have a better chance
to live,” Boin says. “Not knowing,
of course, whatever comes might be
worse than I had.”
He pauses for moment.
“But that’s really why I stayed
alive, I think.”
But it’s still a mystery to Boin
how he survived the brutal train ride
to Buchenwald.
About 1,000 prisoners were
crammed onto the train, packed like
sardines in a tin container. The train
was so full there was no room to sit,
no room to fall down, no room to
move.
“You couldn’t move to blow your
nose,” Boin says. “You had to hold
your hands above your head all the
time unless they were down and you
didn’t have any way to get them
up.” -
The train smelled of urine and
feces.
“People are people,” Boin says.
“If they have to go, they have to go.
But there’s no way to go. You have
to do it in your pants.”
Prisoners fainted from the smell
and the heat. Others died, but there
was no room for them to fall. For
two days and two nights, the
prisoners had no food or water.
Boin slept standing up.
“You just close your eyes and
whatever happens happens,” he
says.
The trained stopped three hours
short of Buchenwald just before
noon on the third day of the trip.
The prisoners would be transferred
by truck from there to Buchenwald.
“What a feeling when they opened
the door and we could get out,”
Boin says.
Prisoners poured out of the train.
Nazi soldiers waited outside the
doors. As Boin exited, he saw
thousands of other prisoners spilling
out of other trains, screaming for
relief.
When Boin finally arrived at
Buchenwald, he went to the bath
room, took off his clothes and
underwear and washed them. When
he was done, he put the wet clothes
back on and let them dry on his skin.
“I’ve heard people say, ‘If you re
ally wanted to get out, you could.’
That’s baloney. There was no way, no
way that you could escape.”
After Boin had washed, the guards
ordered him and some of the other
prisoners to move a huge pile of
stones to another location about a
mile away.
As the last stone was stacked, the
guards gave a new order.
“Okay, now you put them back in
the place where you got them,” the
guards said.
* * *
Six months passed.
Then in the fall of 1941, Boin was
transferred by freight train to
Auschwitz.
The scene at the Auschwitz depot
horrified Boin. Hundreds of Jewish
prisoners poured out of the trains,
screaming. Many of them were
beaten by guards for no reason.
Husbands were separated from their
wives. Mothers were separated from
their children.
“Women came with little babies in
their arms, 4 or 5 months old, and
they took them away and threw them
in a pile where they were used as
target practice,” Boin says.
During the 1 1/2 years he spent at
Auschwitz, Boin worked in the coal
mines. It was hard, back-breaking
work. But Boin faced a more
difficult job outside the coal mines.
For two weeks, he pushed wheel
barrows full of dead bodies to the
ovens, where the bodies were
destroyed.
“The smell from the dead bodies
you could smell for miles,” he says.
“I will never in my life forget the
burning flesh.”
* * *
A guard at Auschwitz had ar
ranged Boin’s move to Hindenburg,
Silesia.
“If you are able to work hard
again, not in the coal mines, but in
the stone quarries, I might be able to
get you out of here,” the guard had
told Boin.
“Do it,” Boin said.-“Just get me
out of here. I can’t stand it any
more.”
Soon after that conversation, Boin
found himself on a passenger train
with about 60 other prisoners.
At Hindenburg, prisoners who
couldn’t work faced certain death.
Boin watched as soldiers led about
80 men, woman and children five
miles into a field. The guards forced
them to dig a large hole and undress.
Then, the soldiers shot them as they
stood at the hole’s edge. Their
bodies felTinto the hole. A bull
dozer covered the hole with dirt.
Speaking in German, Mrs. Boin
adds to her husband’s story.
“Yes, some people were buried
alive. That’s true,” Boin says softly.
Boin’s freedom came as unexpect
edly as his imprisonment. On April
22,1945, Russia bombarded the
camp at Hindenburg. Boin and 10
other prisoners escaped into the
forest.
The frightened fugitives ate rats
and anything else they could find to
survive. But it was more than they
got in the concentration camps. By
this time, Boin weighed only 72
pounds.
As he thumbs through a history
book about the Holocaust, he stops
on one page and points to man so
thin his ribs bulged from his chest.
“That’s about how I looked when I
got out,” he says.
Russia finally liberated the other
Hindenburg prisoners in early May
1945. By that time, Boin had made
his way to Holland, where his family
had promised to meet after the war.
Fortunately, his mother, father and
sisters survived. Boin’s aunts,
uncles and cousins all perished.
For Boin, the questions remain.
Why? Why did he survive? Why
did his family survive and six
million others die?
He doesn’t have an answer. Not
then. Not now.