Free Outrage by Robert K. Tanenbaum Page B

story. So that you never forget, either.”
    Even being a slave laborer was no guarantee of staying alive, Moishe said. “Because of our intimate knowledge of their mass murders the Nazis and their minions considered us
Geheimnistrager
—the ‘bearers of secrets.’ The
Sonderkommandos
were kept apart from the others in the camp so that we could not tell them what we’d seen and experienced. They did not want some escapee or survivor to tell the world about their evil deeds. In fact, they were so worried that the
Sonderkommandos
were regularly gassed as well—their deaths being particularly cruel because they knew what was going to happen even sooner than the others.”
    “Why weren’t you gassed?” Zak asked, shooting a quick glance at his brother.
    Moishe shook his head sadly. “Ironically, I was spared because of my father’s occupation. One day, a German officer named Johann Klier, who had owned his own bakery before the war and ran the camp’s, sought me out. Other prisoners who had known my father had told Herr Klier that I was an experienced baker. So I went from pulling the teeth of corpses to baking bread.”
    As he passed a hand over his eyes, it took the others a moment to realize that he was weeping. But when Karp offered another cup of coffee “and a chance to catch your breath,” he waved him off. “Forgive an old man his tears. No matter how many times I have told this story, the pain and grief are just as raw.”
    He turned back to the boys. “By the fall of 1943, more than two hundred and fifty thousand people had been murdered at Sobibor and the Germans were starting to worry that the war wasn’t going so well and that word of their crimes would get out. They planned to wipe out all traces of the camp and every inmate in it. When word filtered to the
Sonderkommandos
that they were to be gassed in October, we rose up.
    “On the morning of October 14, led by a man named Leon Feldhendler and a Red Army lieutenant named Alexander ‘Sasha’ Perchorsky, the
Sonderkommandos
and some of the other prisoners who joined in lured the SS guards in the camp to their deaths. We cut the electricity and telephone lines and broke into the camp armory. Then we began to fight the Ukrainian guards before escaping, though many of us died in the minefields surrounding the camp.
    “There were six hundred of us in the camp that day,” Moishe recalled. “About a hundred and fifty were killed by guards or the mines. Three hundred of us escaped. Within a week, one hundred of us had been recaptured or killed. Everyone who’d been left behind at the camp was murdered and buried. The Germans then bulldozed the camp and turned it into farmland, as if it had never existed.”
    Moishe’s eyes glittered now with anger. “But those of us who escaped and survived did not forget. I eventually met and joined up with Jewish partisans who were fighting the Germans. The ember of revenge burned deep in my chest, and I killed my enemies with great pleasure.”
    The old man continued. “One day I was leading a small company of men when they captured three German SS officers whose car had broken down. I recognized them from Sobibor, including the officer who had pulled me away from my father, Hans Schultz. When I forced them to their knees on the road, Schultz started crying and begging for his life. ‘I was only doing as I was told,’ he cried. ‘You cannot imagine the nightmares I endure. The sound of people screaming and begging for their lives. The little children crying. And that horrible wailing and the sound of them crawling over each other to try to escape when the gas began to enter the room.’ That bastard looked at me like I would understand. ‘You were there, Moishe,’ he said. ‘You remember how sometimes when you opened the doors to remove them, some of them would be missing fingernails and have just bloody stumps because they had been clawing at the walls and each other.’ Terrible. Terrible.”
    “What