The Gus Schonfeld survivor story as documented by Jeannette COOPERMAN of the St. Louis Magazine, June 2008.
Before finding his way to St. Louis in the mid-1940s, before medical school, before marrying and raising a family, and before a long and decorated career at Washington University, Gus Schonfeld was a young boy, a prisoner, at Auschwitz. Then another camp. Then yet another camp.
Gus Schonfeld woke up and went to his bedroom window, looking out at the snow-capped mountains of the Carpathian range and toward the left bank of the Latorca River that ran past town. It was 1941, and he was finally 7, and he was going to Hebrew day school with his big brother, Frédi. Maybe today on their way home his mother would stop at the kosher patisserie for his favorite, Indianers, chocolate-covered cake shells filled with chocolate whipped cream.
It'd be a good day - if the Christian kids didn't ruin it all by throwing stones and yelling, "Stinking Jews!" When there were just a few of them, Gus and his friends threw stones back, but when the Christian kids outnumbered them, they ran away. He was also careful to make himself invisible when the colorful, smoky, chanting Eastern Orthodox parades went by, because sometimes there were riots, and if Jewish kids were standing around, they'd get beaten up for killing Jesus.
Still, about half the people in Munkács were Jewish, even if they didn't keep kosher the way his family did. His grandfather had fought for the kaiser of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War I, and Gus listened breathless to his stories. Now Munkács was Czech, and the streets were filled with every language he'd ever heard of. Sometimes he wasn't even sure who was speaking what: Czech, Hungarian, Slovakian, Ruthenian, Polish, Yiddish, German ... But they all strolled the Corzo together, and everybody stared and smiled when they saw Gus' mother - she was beautiful, and she got pedicures at the shoe store, and she'd dress up and take his father's arm, her hand pale against the fine dark wool of his custom suits.
During the day, while Gus and Frédi were at school, their father would put on a white wraparound clinical jacket and see patients in a downstairs office of their big house. On Shabbat the Schonfelds went together to the Orthodox synagogue, and Gus and Frédi sat with their father on the men's side, in a special place up front near the Torah scrolls. His dad didn't own land or anything - he wasn't like the landowners Gus had seen standing stiffly while tenant farmers bowed and kissed their fingers. But his patients loved him, and a stream of people came in and out of his offices: large-bellied young women, snot-nosed babies, bent old people. There were all sorts of smells and mess, but Dr. Schonfeld kept himself immaculate. Gus used to watch him shave, lathering up the brush with suds, and he'd lecture Gus about how important it was to always shine your shoes.
Life was interesting and happy - until later that year, when Frédi got sick. Something was wrong with his kidneys, and their father couldn't cure him, and he begged Frédi's forgiveness in the ritual way at the funeral, draping himself over Frédi's coffin and asking him to forgive any hurt they had ever caused him, ending in a keening wail unlike any sound Gus had ever heard his controlled, refined father make.
By then the war had started. Gus remembered how scared he and Frédi had been two years earlier, when they'd heard a huge boom - and that fast, their big house was filled with dust. Coughing, they'd run upstairs right behind their parents. Everything was white with plaster dust, and a whole wall was gone! His dad said an artillery shell had hit them, probably by accident, fired by the Czech Army as they withdrew from Munkács. They weren't happy about leaving, his dad said.
The boys weren't sure what to make of it; they just nodded, and helped clean up, and the next day, things were back to normal.
But now the grown-ups' voices were tense, talking about how some of his cousins had to go off to labor battalions, because Jews couldn't be real soldiers, and the Hungarians were friends with somebody called Hitler. Everybody Gus knew hated Hitler.
Next the police came banging on the door and took Gus' father away, saying he'd made a pro-peace speech on the soccer field. They locked him up in the Kohner castle, and Gus' mother, who was 10 years younger and until then had always just deferred to his father, gathered her nerve, went to Budapest and bribed an official to release him. Gus had gone to visit him first, pressing hard against the metal fence and staring, mesmerized, at the filthy, scraggly beard that had turned his father into somebody else.
When his father came home, he bathed and was himself again - but now the Hungarian Army was using him to take care of soldiers as they were being shipped to the eastern front. One day Gus saw him put some weird medicine on one of the Jewish soldiers' legs and asked why, and his father told him a grown-up secret: He was using the medicine to make ulcers in the men's legs so he could certify them as unfit to serve - and save their lives.
Gus thought about that for a long time.
Another day, his father came home from Csontos, one of the villages where he was treating soldiers, and gave Gus a shot. It pinched, but Gus just pressed his lips shut, didn't say ouch or anything. Two weeks later, his dad came home again, flushed and sweating. His fever soared so high it nearly killed him, and Gus' mother nursed him around the clock. Instead of inoculating himself against typhus, he'd brought the serum home to keep Gus safe.
By now, the whole world had changed. Gus had a new baby brother, and his mother's face was alive again - but worried, always. Their friends were losing their homes and businesses, and every Thursday was beggars' day, when people came to the Schonfelds' front door for coins and food and drink, and left blessing them in Yiddish. One man, gray and grizzled, was allowed to come into the house, and he went to the kitchen, poured slivovitz and added two drops of water from the kitchen sink. Gus decided he must be a relative.
Gus started listening closely to the grown-ups talk and to BBC news of the war on his father's illegal shortwave radio. His dad taped a big map, 3 feet wide, on the wall above the radio, and every night they plotted the progress of the front as it moved westward.
But the Russians didn't get to Munkács fast enough.
In March 1944 the Germans marched into town. Gus watched, wide-eyed, for the half hour it took them to pass his house. There were tanks, troop carriers, mechanized infantry, horses, SS in long, belted black leather coats with whips and tall boots. He peered closer, saw the death's-head symbol pinned to their hats and lapels, the swastika on their armbands.
Now the Schonfelds had to wear armbands, too - but theirs were bright yellow, and there were stars that had to be pinned on every day. Some people sewed theirs on. All the Jews had to live in one small part of town, which meant nine families living in his house, and the toilets overflowed, and people were pacing and crying and praying and reassuring each other that the Hungarians had promised to take them to work camps, which was not so bad, compared to what they'd heard about Polish Jews being killed. He heard grown-ups asking almost hysterically how the people who had produced Beethoven and Goethe could be doing all this.
Six weeks later, Gus' father was drafted to serve in Barkaszo, a nearby village, and the family was permitted to go with him, driven an hour outside town by wagon. One night Gus overheard - his ears had grown very sharp - his parents talking about the Steinbergers killing themselves.
Brown-haired, brown-eyed Gita Steinberger had been his first love in grammar school, and he'd thought she was beautiful. Now his parents were saying that her father had injected poison into his wife and Gita and then himself. As Gus, heart racing, tried to comprehend, he heard his parents asking each other whether they should do the same, and all the fear and dread and confusion exploded inside him. He ran into their bedroom screaming, "No! No! I want to live!"
His parents never mentioned suicide again. Soon the Hungarian gendarmes - with shiny, dark blue-green feathers, like roosters', in their helmets - came to Barkaszo and took the Schonfelds to a brick factory. It had railroad lines running into it, and every day Jews would get loaded into railroad cars and the doors would slide shut and the cars would glide away.
One other thing happened at the brick factory that Gus will never forget: He ate nonkosher food. His mother had managed to bring some ham, and there was nothing else to eat. He took a tentative bite, then another, waiting for something very bad to happen to him - and when it didn't, he wasn't sure whether the rabbi had lied, God had forgiven him or God had stopped caring about him altogether.
In late May it was the Schonfelds' turn to be shoved onto a cattle car. There were so many bodies Gus had to either stand or sit on the floor - and there was one bucket for maybe 100 people, and its contents sloshed onto the floor, so when he tried to sit down, he got moist and dirty. He could feel people's panic thick in the air, hear their voices shake as they talked bravely about how they were going to a Hungarian work camp in the middle of the country.
Three days later, the doors slid open and they saw not Hungarian soldiers, but German guards with German shepherds and automatic guns. "Mach schnell! Mach schnell!" they yelled. Gus saw double rows of barbed-wire fencing and, craning his neck, watchtowers.
They were at Auschwitz.
The order came through the crowd: "Give up all your valuables, because if we find any on you, you will be killed." His mother had stuffed a couple of diamonds into a tube of toothpaste; she threw it down on the ground. Gus hesitated, then threw down his stamp collection.
"If you can walk 10 kilometers, go to the left; if you can't, go to the right" the guards said. Gus' father, who had managed to run up ahead to see what was happening, came back breathless and told his wife to give their new baby to her mother and then say she was a nurse. Gus, now 10, was to say he was 16. His grandmother and baby brother went to the right; they went to the left, and then men and women were separated, so he went with his father and uncles and cousins. They stripped and put on blue-striped gray jackets with numbers above the breast - his was 90138. He was given his first pair of long pants - the traditional European sign of a young man's coming of age.
That night they climbed into three-tiered bunks, 10 men to each tier, and slept on straw, huddled under mangy, gray blankets. Lice climbed from the blankets onto their bodies and burrowed in. Over the next two weeks, Gus became an expert at finding the lice and killing them in a flash, crushing them between his thumbnails with a little snapping sound and a squirt of blood onto his nail. Meals weren't much more appetizing than the lice: square dark bread rolled in sawdust, thin dark soup that had bits of grass floating in it and, less often, tiny pieces of blutwurst. For every few barracks, there was a public toilet, where he would sit on a board laid over a hole in the ground, and while he sat, he looked across to a boarded-up area. Seeing gaps between the boards, he quickly finished, walked over and looked inside. He saw naked male bodies, stacked like cordwood. They were people who had died during the night, he realized. Some people got sick or starved, some were beaten to death and some, he'd heard, ran to the electric fence and died on purpose, electrocuted or shot by the guards. Every day they'd collect the bodies and dump them into narrow-gauge railroad cars, triangular like the ones used to carry coal out of mines, on a track that ran in front of the barracks.
The building where the cars stopped had smoke coming out of its chimneys day and night, and ash dropped everywhere, and the smell was more vile than anything he'd ever imagined. One day he almost got hit by one of the kapos (inmates chosen for their sadism). They used rubber hoses filled with metal, and when the man swung one at him, Gus ducked and ran.
Another day he saw a kapo kill a man with a shovel - he just swung, and the man dropped, and that was the end of him. Gus guessed they'd pick the dead man up in the little railroad car.
He and his father had been at Auschwitz two weeks when they were shipped on to a bombed-out camp, mainly just rubble, in Warsaw. Gus heard whispers about the uprising, how this place had been the Warsaw ghetto and the Jews had decided that if they were going to die anyway, they were going to take as many German guys with them as they could. Gus approved of this wholeheartedly.
Their job at the new camp was to salvage building materials from the rubble, and his special job was to clean bricks with a trowel and make nice little piles of them. The bricks and metal would be shipped into Germany, which by that time had been bombed. Gus chipped and scraped and piled, thinking of his mother and wondering where she was. He missed her gentle arms; his father was not the type to soothe or cuddle.
Instead, his father would say, "Here, take this bread, I've already had something to eat." Or "Here, eat this little piece of sausage, I'm not hungry." Or "They are looking for people to ship back to Auschwitz; go and hide." Or "When you see those guys, run; they prey on young boys."
Nearly always, Gus was scared and cold and dirty - and numb. He listened without feeling anything when the grown-ups told stories of home, told jokes, sang Yiddish songs. He went through the days' routine and tried not to think at all.
Then word went out that they would be vacating the camp, and those who could walk should line up on one side and those who wanted to ride in the truck - well, they knew already what riding in the truck meant. They walked the 120 kilometers from Warsaw to Kutno. It was August, searingly hot, and there were a couple of thousand people marching, with German guards on either side of the line, driving them on. Those who slowed were whipped; those who fell behind were shot. Mouths dry, they moved faster when they saw a river in the distance - but at the river's edge, German soldiers filled their canteens and walked back, stood in front of the Jews and drank, then spilled the water out in front of them. Gus heard his father beg a guard to let Gus go and drink - and saw the guard hit his father in the chest in reply.
When they stopped that night, people dug in a field with metal soup bowls and found some muddy water about a foot down. Soon the entire field was dotted with holes. Those precious sips of water staved off the worst of the dehydration - and infuriated the guards, who started beating people to stop them from digging.
At Kutno, it rained, which helped. They were loaded onto a hot, airless train, with no water, and after a day or so he saw people drinking their own urine. And he fought it, but then he, too, drank his urine, and it tasted just a little salty, not horrible after all, but like seawater, and it didn't make him any less thirsty.
One more day and the doors opened to Dachau. Of the 2,000 men who had made the trek from Warsaw, 1,000 remained. The guards told them to march, that they were going to the showers - and people already knew about showers, of gas instead of water - so a ripple of panic went through the crowd as they debated whether they were really being taken to be killed. The argument against it was "Why would the Germans waste all this manpower?" Gus wasn't sure either way - and he didn't even care. So many people had died already that death was a familiar idea, and his own seemed no different than anyone else's.
They really were showers, though - hot, blessed showers, followed by delousing and fresh uniforms, the first real act of kindness. People said the end of the war must be near, and the Germans must want to be remembered as being nice to them.
But the war did not end. They rested at Dachau, then went on cattle cars to Waldlager Mühldorf, a camp in the forest where they were to build a hidden airplane factory that couldn't be bombed. Gus' father worked as a doctor again, and he and a Jewish surgeon were able to hand out crepe-paper bandages and some aspirin. They cleaned ulcerated sores, and they gave charcoal to people with dysentery.
In fall the prisoners slept 10 men to a circular cardboard hut, on straw on the ground, feet in the center and heads out to the periphery in a circle. When the temperature dropped, they dug oblong holes in the ground, with central walkways, shelves on either side where people slept, and roofs of logs and earth.
One night a 16-year-old Jewish boy from Holland needed surgery, and it was Gus' job to hold a light and wipe the sweat off his father's and the surgeon's brows. Another night he heard a Nazi guard who was crazy running around the camp with his Luger drawn, terrorizing the inmates. And then, for several nights running, he started to hear bombers passing overhead, explosions in the distance. Rumors flooded the camp: The Germans were losing, that's why there were fewer guards all of a sudden, and the Americans were bombing.
On May 2, 1945 - a clear, sunny spring day - Gus and his cousin saw a soldier walking toward the camp with a tommy gun, scanning, and more soldiers and tanks behind him. The gates opened. Gus' cousin, who spoke English, took a step forward and started talking to the soldiers, and yes, they were Americans!
They rounded up a few guards, so prisoners started running around trying to catch the guards, too. Gus saw other prisoners catch one and start beating him, and then the American soldiers intervened and put the guard up on a tank to protect him. They don't feel what we feel, Gus realized, suddenly sick to his stomach. They'd come to the rescue, and they'd treated him kindly and thrown him a C-ration (he'd thought it was a chocolate bar and started eating it unwrapped) - but they didn't understand. How could they?
The prisoners were taken to a German convent to recuperate. Gus didn't trust the nuns - they were German, and they were Catholic - so he made sure he always had an American soldier in sight. Then he went with his father to Prague, where his father began work in a tuberculosis sanitarium and started trying to find Gus' mother. At the YMCA where Jews gathered every evening, Gus and his father met people who told them she'd survived - but Gus wouldn't let himself believe it. Then a man went to Munkács, found Gus' mother and told her they'd survived. She didn't believe him, either - until he showed her a note from Gus' father with their new address and she recognized the handwriting.
She came instantly to Prague, accompanied by a female cousin who had also survived, and Gus and his father learned about all the camps Gus' mother had been shuffled through. And about how she'd waited at Auschwitz, breasts heavy with milk, for her mother to bring the baby, asking more and more hysterically, "Where is my baby?"
Finally another Jewish woman had pointed across to the ever-burning chimneys and said, voice harsh, "You see that smoke coming up from the chimney? That's your son. Get used to it, because otherwise you will go crazy, and you will not survive."
Years later, Gus' cousin told him how his mother's face had lit as they traveled to Prague, and how she had murmured over and over, "I'm a mother again."
But both her mother and her baby son had been killed, and for the rest of her life there was a deep sadness about her, wondering whether, if she hadn't handed her mother the baby, her mother would have survived. Gus' father had offers in Czechoslovakia, but she refused to stay in Europe, in what she called "the graveyard," surrounded by "murderers."
Instead they came to the United States, where Gus' uncle had emigrated long before the start of the war. Gus' father had not wanted to follow; life had been too good in Munkács.
Now he interned, at 43, at Jewish Hospital in St. Louis. "I can break iron," he would tell Gus, so determined was he to get his life back, regain some social status, build up his family again, help their relatives. He went into private practice in East St. Louis.
For Gus, the nightmares had started: a German soldier running toward him every night, pointing a bayonet straight at his heart. Then he began seeing a new sequence: Hundreds of tiny Jews are on a chopping block. God slams his fist down into the crowd, killing some, injuring some, sending the rest flying to all parts of the world. The survivors pick themselves up, wounded and dazed, and kneel in grateful prayer to God for having kept them alive.
He could make no sense of it. Theodicy, he decided, was idiocy; there was no way to reconcile a loving God with human suffering. He'd been right when he ate the ham; God wasn't even paying attention.
He went to Washington University Medical School, loving not so much the clinical side his father had adored, but the research, the ability to discover and make a difference and heal. He interned at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York, met a lovely young Jewish audiologist and married her. They moved back to St. Louis, where he joined the faculty of Washington University, and they had three children. One son would grow up to be a lawyer, the other a musician, the daughter a social worker.
Gus was now armed with every kind of security life could offer - a solid, loving marriage, successful children, good friends, money, a beautiful house, investments, a brilliant research record, 36 years of uninterrupted funding from the National Institutes of Health, the titles of physician in chief, chair of internal medicine, Busch Professor and Samuel E. Schechter Professor of Medicine, and a slew of awards and publications - yet he lived in constant vigilance, aware of everything around him and of anything significant or dangerous happening anywhere in the world. He knew how quickly cruelty could surface, how easily order and joy could be reduced to chaos.
One day he pulled out an old sepia photograph his parents had managed to save: Hebrew preschool (cheder) in Munkács, Class of '39, with Gus in the middle, right in front of the rabbi, and 33 boys around him. He started checking, one by one.
He was the only child in the photograph who had survived. (image below)