Scary Stories, Rituals, and Urban Legends

I've Never Told Anyone Of The Nightmare Which Saved Me From The Holocaust

My name is Abner Schulman and I am a ninety-four year old Holocaust Survivor. I was a teenager in western Belarus when the Germans arrived in my village. That was the day my entire world ended, it was Armageddon, in the very sense of the word. The non-Jewish villagers helped the invading Nazis to round us up, they had hated us long before they had even heard of Adolf Hitler. Anyone deemed fit to work was thrown into a cramped, freezing railcar and taken to Maly Trostinets concentration camp, which is where my story takes place.

What I believe happened in June of 1944 may have been a figment of my imagination, a grand hallucination, the desperate attempts of a broken man to piece together some kind of meaning amidst pure, unbridled horror and tragedy. I was starving, sleep deprived and overcome with grief at the loss of my family and friends, so I am not about to claim that I maintained a stable mind. Many of my fellow prisoners suffered madness during that time, claiming to have seen and heard all kinds of things during their imprisonment. But as I sit here, in the twilight of my life, I feel I must relate things that felt as real to me then, as writing this does now.

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The summer of 1944 was a scorching one. My labor-gang was given the back breaking task of digging a canal from the nearby river to the camp itself, all in the sweltering midday heat. We were barely fed, rarely watered, with the SS guards only passing out canteens of lukewarm, unfiltered water when men had begun to vomit and pass out from heat stroke. I remember the hunger like it was yesterday, the wrenching, twisting pain that lived with you on a daily basis. All you could ever think of was to get something to eat. At night, we would dream of feasts, surrounded by family and friends that we would never see again.

One afternoon, as the sun was perched high in a cloudless, blue sky, one of our fellow prisoners suddenly stopped working. He stared off into the distance, silently staring into shimmering haze. An SS guard cursed at him, racking a bullet into the chamber of his rifle. The prisoner snapped. His pupils dilated, froth forming at the corners of his mouth as he commenced to rant and rave. We tried to calm him down, but it proved impossible. The man was rabid, wild eyed; he had completely lost his mind. At first the black uniformed SS guards just laughed, mimicking him in pidgin Russian. This only infuriated the madman as he turned and glared at his detractors, trembling with frenzied rage.

"Rache", he growled, drool spilling from his lips as it leaked around his swollen tongue, "Rache, Rache, Rache ist nah, NAH!".

Revenge, he screamed, revenge is near, over and over at the guards, laughing as he did so, the maniacal, haunting laugh of a doomed man who had nothing left to give. The guards stopped laughing as they began to comprehend his broken German. They looked at each other nervously as their mockery ceased, but as he continued his tirade, they started to look downright frightened. It didn't take long before one of the guards took out his side arm, aimed it squarely at the madman's face, and fired a shot. The man collapsed into the canal, blood squirting from the small, rough hole torn through his forehead. We were ordered to dig his grave.

"Jüdische Ratten", the guard hissed, spitting on the body of the dead lunatic, the lunatic whose face was still etched with a feverish smile, even in death.

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It began the next day.

Something was wrong with the river, something terribly wrong. Much to our relief, all work on the canal was suspended until the situation could be resolved. Information was like a currency in those days; when you having nothing, something as simple as news becomes as valuable as gold. Scrambling for what little we could glean, we finally securing an audience with a member of a working party that had seen the condition of the nearby watercourse.