In an assisted living facility in Ramat Gan lives an unassuming elderly couple, Michael and Ruthy Smuss. Everyone has a story, and every life is a story lived, but those who lived through the atrocities of the Nazi regime share stories that challenge our ideas of human capabilities.
Michael was born in April 1926 in the Free City of Danzig, Poland. His father, David, was the owner of an imported goods store, and the family was modern but traditional.
When Michael was six years old, the Nazi party, which had recently taken over the city, outlawed Jewish children from the school system. He was removed from school under the charge of being an “enemy of the people.”
From then on, his father home-schooled him, especially in languages, until they moved to Lodz when he was 12.
From Lodz to Warsaw
Lodz, a Polish city, had a gymnasia (school) where educator and dramatist Itzhak Katzenelson was the principal. In 1939, the Nazis took over Poland, and shortly after Michael’s bar mitzvah, they started rounding up Jews to be taken to the Warsaw Ghetto.
Michael’s mother, Margaret Ruth, had a passport from Danzig that read “Reisepass,” meaning “passport” in German. However, the Poles in Lodz didn’t understand German well, and the officials thought it was a “Reich pass,” which is how the Nazis referred to their regime; therefore, everyone assumed that she was a German citizen.
Through this passport, she and her daughter, Frida, were able to find work during the war, so they stayed in Lodz. Michael and his father were deported to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1939.
The ghetto had two types of Jews: the locals from Warsaw, many of whom were rich and had connections; and the Jews who came from other cities. Michael’s father, fortunately, had some connections and was able to open up a shop in the ghetto.
In the three years they spent in the ghetto, Michael connected himself to the Jewish underground, which believed in armed resistance. Many of the young members had been active in youth movements in Lodz and elsewhere, and Michael had been active in the Hashomer Hatza’ir youth movement and had friends from there in the ghetto.
The final liquidation was set to begin in April 1943. Months before the liquidation, acts of unrest and defiance arose in the ghetto. By this time, the original 460,000 Jews had dwindled to about 20,000, and the Jewish resistance decided it was time to fight back.
Various groups were given tasks toward this goal. Michael had been working at the Hermann Brauer factory that repaired military helmets damaged by bullets or shrapnel, and after restoration, the helmets were repainted. The resistance members stole some paint thinner each day to prepare Molotov cocktails.
In the months prior to the liquidation, Italian soldiers, allied with the Germans, were blamed for not taking an active role in general Erwin Rommel’s battle against British general Bernard Montgomery’s forces in North Africa. As punishment, they were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto.
Arriving in February in shorts, they were freezing, and somehow they were able to keep their Beretta guns on them. The resistance bought the guns in exchange for warm clothing. In addition to these guns, the British army dropped weapons into the forest next to Warsaw, which were collected by the resistance – Michael among them – and smuggled them into the ghetto.
On April 19, just after Michael’s 17th birthday, the order was given to liquidate the remaining ghetto Jews, and Ukrainian soldiers were sent to round them up. They called everyone from a megaphone to come out and line up, but as they marched into the ghetto, the soldiers were met by a surprise attack.
From every balcony and window, they heard gunshots, and from rooftops came burning Molotov cocktails. In shock, they ran out of the ghetto to save their lives. The resistance fighters were elated, not having planned to survive the attack. As Michael said, “Even if we had been killed on that day, we would have died happy.” They were the few who could actually execute some form of partial justice against the Nazis.
The first day started what was to be the most significant rebellion against the Nazis by their victims. On the second day, the Germans and Ukrainians entered with an armored personnel carrier along with the soldiers, but a resistance fighter placed a Molotov cocktail under it, which caused enough damage to stall it in its tracks. The second day seemed to be a small victory as well.
The Germans then decided to go all out. They appointed SS commander general Jürgen Stroop to liquidate the remaining Jews in the ghetto. He brought in 2,000 soldiers and destroyed every building, using bombs and fire to smoke out the resistance fighters.
There had been around 700 fighters under the command of Mordechai Anielewicz. They came out with their hands up, and they were all shot. Only on one occasion, when the Germans allowed the Red Cross to enter, did they take prisoners. That is the day on which the famous photo of the young boy with his hands in the air was taken. The next day, the massacre continued.
About seven years ago, I brought Michael to speak to Ulpan Etzion on Holocaust Remembrance Day in Jerusalem. On the ride back, he said: “Rafi, I might not be very observant, but I am a believing Jew. You see, for years after the uprising, even after the war, I would get these flashbacks before falling asleep of myself hiding in the basement of a house. As the Germans bombed house by house and smoked the survivors out, every 15 minutes I could hear someone scream ‘Shema Yisrael,’ followed by submachine gun fire and silence, Shema and gunfire, for days on end. It shook me to my core. You might say that is my Shema at night.”
The train to Treblinka
Michael and his father were part of the last group removed by General Stroop. The SS commander wanted to show off his success and invited foreign media to film the event. Therefore, he did not kill the group but instead marched them off to an umschlagplatz (meeting point) to be sent to Treblinka.
They knew that this was the end. Michael’s father refused to speak. He sat there in silence for hours. Finally, the cattle car train pulled up, and they were pushed into one of the cars. Each car needed to be filled with 100 people to justify the cost of the train, but not all the cars were filled.
So the train rode to the Warsaw airport, where the Nazis collected 350 Jews who were working with freight planes to fill the spaces, after which it headed for Treblinka. It was a hot day, and between waiting for two days without food and water and the heat of the ride, many people died from dehydration.
During the journey, there were two Ukrainian soldiers on the roof of every car, and the prisoners sought someone who understood Russian to listen to what they were saying.
After a few hours, the train came to a halt. The voices of German officers screaming at each other could be heard from outside. The prisoners asked for someone who understood German. Michael’s father knew German but was still unwilling to speak, so Michael offered to translate.
The cattle car was packed to the brim, so they had to push Michael across the car until the wall and up to the windows, which were actually two openings covered by barbed wire. He literally had to walk over dead bodies to reach that point. Listening, he was able to figure out the argument going on.
It seemed that two command cars with officers from the Luftwaffe demanded to stop the train. They complained that the train had stolen 350 of their workers, and the airport could not function. They demanded the to have workers back and threatened to take the issue up to the highest levels. After about half an hour of arguing, the train officers gave in. The train rolled back to the airport, the cars were opened, and 350 names were called out to descend.
Meanwhile, two more labor contractors approached the train, looking for 100 workers with experience in handling factory machinery. Michael offered himself, his father, and his resistance fighter friends for the job. Despite being covered with soot and smoke from their battle in the ghetto, they were taken on a truck to the Budzyń concentration camp in the Lublin District. From there, they went to Mielec every day to work in a plane factory.
Now, at the age of 98, looking back, Michael told me: “When we left on the train to Treblinka, I was sure that my life was over. We all did. But when the train came to a halt, I felt with all of my being that on this day I was not going to die. I felt that God was smiling at me. I had never felt anything like that before.”
The work camps
The head of the Budzyń camp was a sadistic murderer named Reinhold Feix.
“My father served as an interpreter. He was given a small room. I was taken out to another barrack to keep me away from Feix. One night, we heard two gunshots. Members of the underground told me that Feix had shot my father after he tried to escape through the electric fence.
“They also told me that Feix likes killing all family members so that there remain no witnesses. I was told that my life was in danger, and I asked what to do. They said I should request a meeting in the morning with Feix, and they told me what to say.”
Feix arrived on horseback. Michael was told to ask for his father’s coat, since it was very cold in the winter, and to make it appear as if his father’s death was unimportant to him. Feix took his horsewhip, placed it on Michael’s neck, and said: “Permission granted, but you must be in the first line every morning. If I see you without that coat even one day, [he pointed his pistol at me], I will shoot you.”
He was given the coat off his father’s dead body and returned to his barracks. The other prisoners took the coat, sewed up the bullet holes, and created two large pockets in the lining. Every day that they worked outside the camp, if they found potatoes or bread, they would stuff it into the pockets of Michael’s coat to bring to the other inmates. Many prisoners were saved from starvation by that coat.
In one conversation, Michael told me that he never understood what had happened that night. Why did his father try to run? Why through a fence that would surely be his end? Was it suicide?
“Years later, I met someone from Minsk who had been at Budzyń with us. My father was from Minsk, and his family lived there. This fellow told me how they were taken from Minsk to the Budzyń labor camp after the Nazis killed all the Jews in Minsk except the young who were sent to work.”
Michael’s father’s family was killed as well. Now Michael understood that his father must have heard about the death of his family and broke down.
Flossenbürg concentration camp
Michael’s friends from the underground knew he had to leave Budzyń. They were able to find him work in Mielec with Heinkel bomber planes, where he stayed until the assassination attempt against Hitler on July 20, 1944. Then the whole group was sent by train to work in a Messerschmitt aircraft factory in Bavaria.
The train went to Auschwitz in August 1944. It stayed there for just a few hours, “but I could hear people crying for water outside the window,” Michael recounted.
They then continued on to Flossenbürg. “We reached Floss after about two days without food or drink on the train, and by then we were not able to stand up. The prisoners there threw water at us and helped us drink.” As they entered the Flossenbürg camp, the stench of burning bodies from the crematorium reached them immediately.
“They told us to remove our clothes, and shaved off all our hair. We were sent downstairs to the showers. We were afraid it was gas, but actual water came out. I was given the number 60109. They wrote numbers on our foreheads. A ‘one’ meant strong enough to work in the quarry. I got a ‘two,’ which meant work in the factory. We were given striped pajama-like clothes and wooden shoes.”
Then they were taken to sign in for work. Michael said he had heard that the Germans had acquired IBM computers from the US and were probably entering all the names into a database. As they asked him his name, he suddenly thought of his mother and sister in Lodz. What if the Germans, through the database, could find out that they were his family? Would they now be arrested, too?
“Your name!” the officer asked him. Michael froze. “So he tze,” he heard himself say, meaning “What does he want?” in Polish. He said it again, so the officer figured that was his name. So, in his record, he was registered as Sohece Smuss. Michael went to work with a big smile, feeling that he had outsmarted the system.
The death march
Michael remained in Flossenbürg until April 1945. From a distance, the inmates could hear US general George S. Patton’s tanks. One day, an ambulance appeared with members of the Swedish Red Cross, who gave each of them a loaf of bread.
They were told that all Jews in the camp were being exchanged for German soldiers held by the Americans. They didn’t know that it was a trick by the Germans, though, as Hitler had ordered all Jews to be killed.
The Jewish inmates were put on a train to Dachau that was bombed by American bombers who mistook them for German soldiers, and 133 Jews were killed. They returned to Flossenbürg to bury the Jews, but they were cremated there instead. Michael was among those who carried the bodies to the crematorium.
Afterward, the death marches to Dachau began. For six days, they marched without food or water. Those who fell were shot by the Germans. On the second day, it rained, so they removed their caps to collect the water to drink as they marched. When they walked through a village, the villagers threw potatoes in front of them to make them move faster through the town.
As the American tanks drew near, the German soldiers fled. Michael and a friend approached a barn house in the village of Stamsried. A farmer came out, saw them, and brought them hot milk. Michael drank and passed out from starvation and fatigue, waking up in an American ambulance.
He was taken to the Idar-Oberstein hospital, where they washed him, gave him an intravenous drip, and took care of his wounds. One American soldier who took care of him noticed that Michael was circumcised and brought him a Jewish prayer book printed by the US Army. Michael has kept it to this day.
After being released from the hospital, he returned to Lodz to look for his mother and sister. He found them, but the Poles were very unwelcoming to returning Jews. Fearing something might happen, he took them to the American zone in Germany, where they were accepted into a displaced persons (DP) camp.
From the DP camps to the US
In the DP camp, Michael was active in Zionist activities with Hashomer Hatza’ir, which included creating a kibbutz there. Youth groups were devoted to spreading the idea of aliyah, and Michael was quite active.
However, he was disillusioned after the Battle of Latrun in 1948, in which Holocaust survivors were taken directly from the boats and given rifles to protect the Jewish state. Michael knew a few people who died in the battle whom he had convinced to make aliyah. He felt guilty about it, and in 1950 he decided to move to the US.
He arrived in New York City on a Liberty ship after 10 days at sea with his mother and sister. They all went to work and received rent-controlled apartments. Michael got married; his daughter was born when he was 30, and a son came along three years later.
In 1956, he went to an adult education school. He obtained his high school diploma and went to the City College of New York to study bookkeeping and taxation law, in which he worked. He told neither his children nor his wife what had happened to him during the war or what the tattoo “Laager” on his arm meant.
But then, years after the Holocaust, the post-trauma kicked in, and the nightmares began. What set it off? Michael thinks it was possibly the sound of the machinery at his workplace. Whatever the reason, the trauma came back with a vengeance. He kept dreaming about his Holocaust near-death experiences and hallucinated during the days.
He was brought to a clinic for survivors, where they gave him Prozac and other drugs. The more drugs he was given, the worse everything became. He felt he was losing control of his life and didn’t want to be a burden to his family, so he separated from his wife and children to allow them to live normal lives.
He continued to work and take medications, but the PTSD was unbearable. He was told that maybe he should go to Israel; there, they have a lot of Holocaust survivors as well. “They said, ‘In Israel, there are other crazy people just like you.’” So in 1979, Michael made aliyah alone.
Life in Israel
With his knowledge of languages, Michael found employment in a hotel. He lived in Tel Aviv, where he met people who had gone through the same hell he did. He didn’t go to doctors but worked on himself. That’s when he started to paint about his Holocaust experiences. He had no experience in painting but learned through trial and error.
He received social security from the US, which was more than his Israeli salary, so he only had to work in the evenings. He had a neighbor who played the cello, so he painted while listening to the music. “The music and the painting helped me regain control of my life,” he said.
At one point, he was invited to join a spa in Arad by a friend who founded it. There, he met a woman who would become the love of his life, Ruthy. They married and moved back to Tel Aviv. After regaining his life, Michael decided it was time to tell his story.
He volunteered to join March of the Living as a witness. Talking to young people about what happened gave him joy. He went on to speak with groups in Israel and abroad.
During one lecture, a student asked him how he was able to keep his faith after experiencing so much death and destruction.
Michael answered, “I totally understand survivors who lost their faith. I, too, know what pain and loss are. However, when I think of all the times that death came knocking on my door and I survived, I have no way to explain it aside from feeling that, according to some greater plan, I was supposed to survive. I also feel that due to this, I have an obligation to tell my story.”
Michael’s artwork has been on exhibit in numerous places, and a musical film called To Paint the Earth was made about him. Today, a talented writer in Texas is piecing together his biography. So, in the end, the six-year-old boy, who in Germany was called an “enemy of the people,” became an educator of his people upon finding his home in Israel.
The writer, a rabbi, is a senior lecturer in Jewish thought at Bar-Ilan University.
Credit: Source link
