Katrina Allick and Bill Lowenberg met once as a part of the Next Chapter Project before Bill’s passing in April 2011. Mr. Lowenberg survived seven concentration and extermination camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau. Viktor Frankl recounts in his memoir, Man’s Search for Meaning, several stories that illustrate experiences similar to Mr. Lowenberg’s. This essay incorporates Frankl’s testimony to enhance Mr. Lowenberg’s oral history.

May 10, 1940, remains a vivid date in Bill Lowenberg’s memory. It was the day Germany occupied Holland. It was a time of fear, stress, and degradation as the Nazi Party and their collaborators began to kill any sense of Jewish community and leadership. Bill grew up in Ochtrup, Germany, until 1936, when, at the age of 10, he, along with his family, fled Ochtrup and its anti-Semitic community. The Nazi Party increasingly placed limits on Jews, creating greater social isolation for them. Bill’s family, no longer able to afford the taxes that the Nazis had imposed on Jews, left for Borculo, Holland.

Trouble in Holland

After May 10, 1940, the social isolation that Jews had experienced in Germany became institutionalized in Holland. After nine months of German occupation in Holland, Bill and his Jewish peers had to sew the Star of David on their outerwear. Otherwise, they risked arrest. Bill and his family relied on rumors as their source for information. They had no real knowledge of what the future held. In 1942, they faced deportation.

One factor began to control Bill’s fate: luck. Bill was 16 when he went to his first camp—Westerbork—along with his father, Julius; his mother, Emmy; and his younger sister, Erika. He and his family did what they were told, following every instruction meticulously. And yet, Bill asks himself, “If I could have just a half an hour in my life to sit with myself and my family to think why we thought the way we did, why we were sheep … 6 million people ….” Death became the central fear in every Jew’s heart, including Bill’s. As a child, Bill had asthma. Yet, after that first night in the camp, he never had asthma again. Westerbork was a transit camp, not a death camp, but terrible loneliness and fear became inscribed in each prisoner’s heart.

At Westerbork, Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays became dreaded days, full of chaos and screaming. Every Sunday, a list of names of Jews who had to report for transport was prepared. Every Monday night, empty trains arrived at Westerbork. Every Tuesday, those same trains left full of people from the camp headed for an unknown future. “When the train doors closed and the engine whistled,” Bill says, “a calm set over the camp: a calm of tragedy, sadness, and loneliness …. Between 1942 and 1945, more than 120,000 people went through Westerbork …. Each week, a train left and the following week another came.” After nine months at Westerbork, Bill was told to report for a transport to Poland, without his family.

Cattle cars and trains had become machines that decided the fate of the millions of Jews transported from camp to camp. Bill was put into a very crowded cattle car bound for Auschwitz on August 31, 1943. The trip of panic and fear lasted for four or five days. Only sounds of bombs and aircrafts or holes of light through the dark cattle cars gave Bill a sense of time and place. He was given no food or water. Little did he know that he was about to enter an evil place where people lost all sense of humanity. Bill was the only Jew from that transport who survived the war.

Just a Number at Auschwitz

145382. No longer was Bill Lowenberg referred to by his name, but by a number. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, luck played its part in his first selection process. He came face to face with Dr. Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” and his riding crop. He lied when asked his age, saying he was 18 rather than 17. “None of us had the slightest idea of the sinister meaning behind that little movement of a man’s finger, pointing now to the right and now to the left, but far more frequently to the left.” (Frankl). Bill was pointed to the right. At first, Bill was mad at himself for lying because he was directed to walk rather than take trucks as transportation. “Only later,” Bill recalls, “did I learn that the ones who went on the trucks went right to the gas chambers.”

At Auschwitz-Birkenau, everything was taken from Bill and the other prisoners. Treated like animals, they were stripped of their clothing. Their heads were shaven by other prisoners in striped suits, and numbers were tattooed on their arms. That same day, Bill experienced luck again. He was reunited with a man named Hans Elsberg, “a man I had known vaguely as a child, more by name than by face.” Hans, who was originally from Germany as well, came in the first transport from Westerbork to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942, and had survived nearly a year, something very rare for Jewish transports. What made Hans special to the Nazi officers was that he was especially talented. He knew how to fix anything mechanical, he was a very good musician, and, most particularly, he was a magician, a talent that had helped save his life when he first arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of his 1,800-person transport, he was one of the few to have survived. Bill writes, “He told me some of the rules of survival, warning me not to drink the water, things like that. More importantly, I had someone to talk to, like an older brother. Psychologically, his friendship, more than any of the specific survival tips he gave me, had an enormous effect on me.”

Living a Nightmare

Auschwitz-Birkenau was especially detailed and orderly, just like Hitler. “Everything was orchestrated to produce panic, fear, and intimidation, with no time to weed at the different feeling,” Bill says. Prisoners were forced to march to composers such as Mozart, Strauss, and Wagner. Stress had become a never-ending thread weaving through Bill’s life. Throughout the camp, starvation played the leading part in every decision made by an inmate. Prisoners volunteered as sonderkommandos, prisoners who helped load and burn bodies, for extra rations of food, not caring “about what they were doing or about being killed, only about being hungry.”

Here’s what Bill remembers: bunks made of wooden planks, constant hunger and thirst, polluted water, no pillows, no privacy, fear, stress, inhumanity, and beatings from morning until night. Bill says, “I will always remember the Gypsy violins” from the neighboring camp and how “the Gypsies truly made their violins cry” in the nighttime. “It is not the physical pain which hurts the most … it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.” (Frankl)

Having been separated from his mother, father, and younger sister for about a year, Bill was indirectly reunited with his family. One day, while working on a road gang, he was motioned to look up by a friend of his father’s. “I saw a column of people marching that included my parents and my sister. I knew where they were going. They didn’t.” After taking a minute to look in shock, he was beaten with a heavy stick by a German guard because he had stopped working. All he could do was stand there and watch his parents, both 46, and sister, 14, walk toward their death. “My family—mother, father, and sister—had been taken to the gas chamber and were gone forever.”

Each moment at Auschwitz-Birkenau was such a moment of enormous shock that Bill just stopped feeling anymore. Everything was so surreal that it became impossible to comprehend or react to it. Although the past was gone and there seemed to be no future, Bill’s will to live was strong. He used his survival skills and wanted to be able to live and tell his story. Life at the end of the war did not feel intelligible. If Bill managed to lose his spiritual hold, he would be doomed and would become subject to mental and physical decay.

Surviving the Work Crew

In 1943, Hans told Bill to come with him on an “unknown” transport to escape the starvation, stress, and fatigue of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The destination of the two- or three-day transport was eventually Warsaw. They reached the Umschagplatzin in the Warsaw Ghetto just after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Bill and Hans, together with about 300 Jews from Auschwitz-Birkenau, made up a work crew that joined prisoners in a work camp in Warsaw. After 11 months of cleaning the Warsaw Ghetto, only approximately 20% of the prisoners survived. One of the main jobs assigned to the prisoners was the burning of dead Polish bodies from inside the ghetto. Hans, who had become a clerk in the camp office, was able to help Bill by assigning him easier jobs. At first, Bill burned bodies found in the streets of the ghetto. Subsequently, he was assigned to laundry. After that, he was assigned to look for scraps of metal and electric transformers that would be sent to Germany. Finally, he was sent with six other people to the east to work in a German SS army camp. At the camp, food had become more valuable than money or diamonds. “The person who had the diamonds, but no bread, died,” Bill says. “He couldn’t eat the diamonds. There might be a fortune in this man’s hand, but it had no value.”

One day about a year later, German soldiers began to dig large trench holes with bulldozers. All of the Warsaw prisoners were herded like sheep. Several hundred Jews at a time were taken out of line and shot around the trenches that became mass graves. Heinrich Himmler, the organizer of the mass murder of Jews, “had ordered the camp commander to kill the remaining people left in the camp.” The Polish Underground threatened that “no Germans would leave Warsaw alive if they killed the remaining Jews.” Therefore, Himmler’s order was not carried out and the Warsaw prisoners were forced to march west.

Marching to Death

The Death March lasted about eight to 10 days. Each day was a struggle to survive without any water or food. Bill recalls eating any grass or tree leaves he could find along the way to avoid starvation. The line of prisoners was shadowed by a truck with machine guns prepared to shoot anyone found too weak to march. “The thirst was worse than the hunger,” Bill says. “One day it rained, and everyone tried to catch the rain in their soup bowls.” Eventually, they reached boxcars that transported the prisoners—first to Dachau, then to Landsberg outside of Munich. Out of the original group of prisoners that started the march, only a few hundred remained. Humanity had reached its lowest point. The prisoners’ sleeping barracks were trenches dug in the ground. Starvation had forced the prisoners into cannibalism. Bill and Hans remained in the camp for 10 months until April 1945.

With promises of freedom, German soldiers lured the remaining prisoners on a second Death March to “Switzerland”—to what was actually Allach, another concentration camp. A week later, on April 30, 1945, Bill, Hans, and the other prisoners were liberated by American troops. This was the first time Bill remembers crying in the three years of imprisonment. That night, the camp was bombed, but, with incredible luck, Bill survived. “When the bombing started, I was in a very crowded bunker,” Bill says. “I felt claustrophobic and left, not caring what happened. A minute or two after I left, a rocket hit the bunker, killing several hundred people.”

Honoring Memories

Although Bill’s story does not end there, his moment of liberation is one that changed his life. His life before liberation was not a life at all, and his life after the war turned into a lifelong cause devoted to honoring America for liberating and saving him and to telling his story to young people. Bill (or Mr. Lowenberg, as I know him) expresses his selflessness through the story of his childhood and his autobiography. He notes in his Foreward, “As I get older, I think much more about my dear parents, my sister, and other family members.” He devoted his life to telling his story mainly to his family in a way that would not hurt them but rather would teach them tenacity and appreciation for the life they have. Although he had pushed the past away at first, he eventually used his memories to honor his parents and sister and his overwhelmingly courageous survival.

Works Cited