The last survivor, p.1
The Last Survivor, page 1
The Last Survivor
The Last Survivor
The Incredible Story of the Man Who Survived Three Concentration Camps and a Major Maritime Disaster Near the End of World War II
Frank Krake
Translated by Haico Kaashoek
Guilford, Connecticut
An imprint of Globe Pequot, the trade division of
The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Blvd., Ste. 200
Lanham, MD 20706
www.rowman.com
Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK
Copyright © 2022 by Frank Krake
First Lyons Press edition published 2022
Map on page ix by Paul Scheurink
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
ISBN 978-1-4930-6371-0 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4930-6372-7 (electronic)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
For Jo
Contents
Prologue
1 A child in hiding
2 Life on Kattenburg Island
3 An open casket
4 Hard at work
5 The war
6 Arbeitseinsatz
7 On the run
8 Buried alive
9 The wrong decision
10 Transit camp Amersfoort
11 Concentration camp Neuengamme
12 Satellite camp Husum-Schwesing
13 First day at work
14 Broken shovels
15 New arrivals
16 The Revier
17 No food, no doctor
18 Back in Neuengamme
19 A close shave
20 Cakes from an SS guard
21 Rabbits in a concentration camp
22 Oil lamps and pink triangles
23 Covering your tracks
24 Prisoners at sea
25 The Cap Arcona
26 Liberators on the horizon
27 Answered prayers
28 Free but still captive
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Sources
Prologue
Bay of Lübeck, Germany, 3 May 1945
The fighter planes appeared from the south, equipped with phosphorous bombs and rockets that they fired in bursts at the Cap Arcona. The majestic ocean liner, packed with five thousand concentration camp prisoners, was instantly transformed into a burning hell. The German flak guns were unable to fend off the wave of attacks, the rattling of machine guns and the uninterrupted explosions only completing the pandemonium. Emaciated inmates tried in vain to take cover.
Wim had to act quickly. He looked around. The luxurious ballroom was strewn with severed limbs. Dripping blood spattered the once so pristine white panelling and ornate ceilings. Everywhere soldiers, dead drunk and in blind panic, shot at anything that moved.
He crouched down and forced himself to keep thinking clearly.
After a few minutes, the Typhoons had disappeared as quickly as they’d come and an other-worldly silence fell over the battered though still floating ship. It gradually gave way to the screams of the bleeding wounded and the orders shouted by the German Volkssturm soldiers, who had stayed behind to guard the camp prisoners. Most of the SS members had weaselled their way out the previous night.
He must get away from here. Get off the ship as quickly as possible. That much was clear to Wim. He’d spent months in the worst German concentration camps, under inhuman conditions, where everyone around him had died of hunger, disease or maltreatment. The ‘hell of Husum’ they’d called it there. And then been worked to death in camp Neuengamme by sadistic SS officers, under the motto ‘Vernichtung durch Arbeit.’ ‘Extermination through labour.’ They’d been murdered by exhaustion, despair and utter insanity. Don’t ask how, but he’d survived it all. And was it now going to end like this, with freedom in sight?
He pulled himself together. Never.
Behind a pair of German prisoners, Wim fought his way upwards, to the deck and open air – though he wasn’t the only one to do so. Hundreds of people trampled one another just to get away. That is, if you could still call such carcasses in rags people. On deck, they fought to the death for anything that might float. They dashed themselves against the ship’s iron hull as it began to lean and steadily heat up. They were drilled by bullets from German soldiers, who shot at every prisoner they managed to get between their cross hairs.
Then the planes returned. They failed to notice the white flag the captain had raised, impossible to see through the smoke, and tore into the crippled ship. Shells exploded, machine gun bullets flew past Wim’s ears. He fled to a small ladder, descending two steps at a time, and hid underneath a metal platform.
Trembling, he peered with one eye past the iron handrail above. On deck, it was still the same sheer panic, the cursing and shooting soldiers. After this new wave of attacks had passed, he cautiously crept back out and looked around.
The sea was full of corpses. It reeked of death, a smell he’d come to know only too well since the Germans had first picked him up in a razzia – one of the Nazis’ round-ups – and dragged him, by way of the torture chambers of Amsterdam, from camp to camp. Concentration camps in Nazi Germany without gas chambers: they existed. And they were no less effective. Inhumane places, encircled with barbed wire, where the chimney was your only escape. Tens of thousands of imprisoned civilians had been murdered there and had coloured the air around Neuengamme an ash grey for years, a constant sickly stench the legacy of their suffering. They came from Russia, the Netherlands, Poland and Denmark. From Germany, Italy, Belgium and France. Mostly young men in the prime of their lives.
Wim had narrowly survived. He weighed less than forty kilos but had an iron will to keep going. The advancing liberators had been within striking distance when the last survivors in the camp were herded together and put on a transport north – on foot or in cattle wagons – to the last remaining part of Nazi Germany, where the SS could continue their reign of terror. It was a journey that would cost many more innocent lives.
Wim felt the deck sinking underneath his feet while the ship shook from several explosions that seemed to come from the hold below. He looked at the grey-blue waves where, among the corpses, the fight for a single lifebuoy or simply a splintered plank just carried on.
The soldiers had now set their sights on the floating survivors, who were picked off one by one. The command from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had been clear:
‘No prisoners shall be allowed to fall into enemy hands alive.’
An order was still an order, so they shot. The exhausted prisoners who by some stroke of luck had managed to evade the bullets now succumbed to the temperature of the sea-water, which froze their muscles and made them sink slowly to the bottom of the Bay of Lübeck.
‘They were British. British!’ pounded through Wim’s head. He’d recognised the Typhoo ns’ contours. It had been the liberators, so long awaited by everyone, who had sown murder and mayhem among the tattered, exhausted and under nourished crowd.
For the Royal Air Force, Operation Big Shipping Strike was a tremendous success. They believed they’d taken out the SS members and Nazi party leaders fleeing to Scandinavia. Johnny Baldwin, the famous and decorated leader of RAF No. 198 Squadron, which had carried out the attack, was now sitting 300 kilometres away with his co-pilots and a cold bottle of beer.
On the deck of the burning, glowing Cap Arcona, Wim was still fighting for his life. In a flash, his thoughts went out to his mother and sister in Amsterdam. He needed to see them again, tell them his story. He felt the hot air singeing his lungs.
Wim took another deep breath, closed his eyes – and jumped.
1
A child in hiding
Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 1932
‘You little piece of shit! I know you’re in here, you runt.’
Wim heard the footsteps coming closer. He pushed his face even further between his knees and pinched his nose shut, as he was scared of having to sneeze from all the dust. He was sitting safely behind the washstand, a plank five millimetres thick shielding him from discovery and a thrashing. For nothing. His stepfather was, as so often, completely wasted and in his evil drunkenness wanted yet again to vent all of his misery onto his nine-year-old stepson.
‘Come on out, you runt, and then you’ll see how we do things here.’
He listened to his torturer’s heavy breathing and through a minuscule gap between the backboard and a plank, he could now see him standing there too. Hendrik Aloserij had to support himself with both hands so as not to fall over. He leaned against the washstand with his left hand and still held the door handle in his right.
That Saturday afternoon, Wim had been playing in the small kitchen when he heard the front door open. From the stumbling footfall on the stairs, he immediately knew it was time to pack up. ‘Quick, get out of here,’ his mother whispered.
He’d flown up the stairs to the attic. Under the rafters, he carefully stepped sideways over a thin beam along the ledge
‘Little piece of shit!’
Aloserij’s favourite curse penetrated every fibre of Wim’s slender body. He shuddered, only for a moment. The days when he’d have shaken like a leaf were far behind him. Never theless, he occasionally still woke up in the middle of the night, soaked in sweat, because of some bad dream in which he’d caught yet another beating.
He watched Aloserij’s thin lips tremble with rage. His face was elongated, his head was bald and browned, his light eyes bulged. He had two oblong ears, so large that even in this precarious situation, Wim still had to smile. He was so happy that this wasn’t his real father and that he could go through life with the modestly sized ears of another man. Add to that those beautiful waves in his hair, those finely shaped eyebrows and that always roguish look, which, despite him being so young, made him popular with the girls in his neighbourhood.
Aloserij moved his search to the bedroom across from the bathroom. Wim’s older sister, Jo, had her own bed there, next to the one that Wim had to share with his half-brother Henk. When he couldn’t find his stepson in that room either, Aloserij, his words now approaching gibberish, headed for his own bed to sleep off the alcohol. Wim heard him shuffle towards the staircase and slowly descend. At least he wasn’t as drunk as a few days before, when he’d bounced down the steep stairs on his rear end.
It wasn’t spacious or luxurious inside their upstairs apartment at 78 Kleine Kattenburgerstraat, though compared to most of the other children on their small island on Amsterdam’s east side, they couldn’t complain. Three doors down, his friend Piet Klaver had to share a bedroom with four brothers. Their father had died in a work accident in the port and they needed to get by on welfare. Between all kinds of quick fixes and help from the neighbours, the family could just manage to survive. They only paid a guilder seventy-five each week for rent, which was why they, too, had come to live on the island.
In Wim’s small house, the children heard everything. The interior walls were even thinner than the exterior bricks and those were just seven centimetres thick. In winter, heavy frost formed on the inside of the windows. When there was an easterly wind, you could feel the cold coming in through all the façade’s pores. On days when the temperature outside dropped far below freezing, the difference inside their bedroom was marginal.
Wim’s stepfather collected his pay on Saturdays. As a construction worker, he earned seventeen guilders a week. For that he spent ten hours a day, six days a week, scurrying up and down ladders, bags of cement and construction materials balanced on his neck. When, on Saturday afternoon, the week was over, he went straight to Café De Nieuwe Aanleg, an old bar on the corner of the Kleinestraat and Mariniersplein. He wouldn’t come home until hours later.
That didn’t always end well. A few months earlier, the children had been sitting with their mother around the paraffin stove in the kitchen, when they heard the front door open and then a hard, muffled bang. Wim’s mother rushed downstairs and found Aloserij in a weird position, lying against the nearly vertical staircase, dead drunk. With a tenacity verging on primal force, she pushed him up the stairs, all the while yelling loudly into his ear to keep him awake. Upstairs, she dragged him into their bedroom, where she emptied his pockets and gathered together the last few guilders that were left of his pay, barely enough for the rent. She was beside herself and burst into tears. The children were silent, not knowing what to do.
After ten minutes, their mother had regained her composure somewhat and sent Jo to the milkman to borrow some money. She came back with six guilders in her hand and a despondent look: six guilders that their mother would have to pay back over the following weeks as best she could. If Aloserij didn’t drink away his pay, anyway.
For Wim, it was much worse if his stepfather came home not hammered but just heavily intoxicated. Drunk enough to be aggressive but not plastered enough to immediately fall asleep. It was at those moments that his hiding place offered the only salvation. Or he made sure he was out – far from home, wandering over the islands, together with Piet; playing marbles with the boys from Wittenburg, the next island over, or playfully ringing the doorbell of the crippled greengrocer on the Oostenburgergracht further down the canal.
Before moving to the island, they’d rented a beautiful new house in the Van Spilbergenstraat, all the way across town. Wim had never understood why his mother had insisted on going after Henk Aloserij, a man from Kattenburg.
‘I’m your father,’ he said, the first time they’d met, in an attempt to win over Wim.
‘You’re not my father,’ Wim snapped.
The strange man looked at the boy with a friendly expression. He pulled out a dime from his pocket and tried to press it into his little fist. Wim’s eyes flared fiercely.
‘I don’t want your money – and you’re not my father.’
He turned around and ran outside, where he sat on a kerb. He’d never known his real father, who had died from one lung disease or another shortly before his birth. Jo had already told him that their mother was involved with another man. He’d already suspected as much. Usually, their family barely went to church, but for the last six months they’d gone almost every week. To the Sint Annakerk on the Wittenburgergracht, with those beautiful stained-glass windows, nearly as high as the trees that stood beside it. After Mass was over, the same bald man with a bronzed head and pale eyes would appear at his mother’s side, the same man who had just introduced himself as his father.
Wim was so lost in thought he hadn’t noticed that his sister had been sitting next to him for some time. Jo was more than a year older than him, but they were inseparable. Their mother made sure that Jo always dressed neatly, preferably in white dresses and with a matching ribbon in her dark hair. How she did it was a mystery, but with the few cents she had, she always managed to make her daughter shine. Wim was especially fond of Jo and enormously proud to be her younger brother; and from the same father at that. After school, they would always hang out together and there were no secrets between them – aside from his hiding spot upstairs.
2
Life on Kattenburg Island
Amsterdam 1935
During the latter half of the seventeenth century, three islands had been built on Amsterdam’s east side, along the IJ river. Kattenburg was the most westerly; Wittenburg and Oostenburg lay right beside it. To the east, the Czaar Peterstraat separated them from the port. The residents of the small, often ramshackle workers’ houses were proud of their neigh-bourhood: they called themselves ‘Islanders’, a nickname they’d made their own.
The entire area was dedicated to the shipping industry. At the time, its large shipyards were building hundreds of vessels for the Dutch East India Company. From Kattenburg it was only a short walk to the naval storehouse, the Marine Etablissement, once an important fortification for the city of Amsterdam. Café Het Gouden Hoofd, which was nearby, in turn bordered on the Mariniersplein. That was where the directors and managers of the many shipping companies lived, in houses that stood in sharp contrast to the humble workers’ abodes throughout the rest of the neighbourhood. Nevertheless, the poorer Kattenburgers were prouder than they were jealous of this section of their island. The sense of belonging won out easily over the wealth divide.
Wim didn’t have neighbours in this close-knit community but a great many aunts and uncles. In times of need, they helped one another out. Wim and his siblings witnessed this fact when their mother, who almost never got sick, found herself in bed with a high fever in the winter of 1935. As was usual, the neighbourhood jumped to her aid. Mr Adolfs, the butcher from across the street, walked in one Sunday afternoon with a pan-fried steak – real beef, which they never usually ate. Now and then they had enough money for a small cut of meat, but their mother would buy horse, which was much cheaper.
It was always bustling on Kattenburg. Vendors selling merchandise on cargo bikes would come along and loudly praise their wares. Mothers leaned from their windows to put their laundry out to dry and keep an eye on their brood. Sailors on shore leave and idle dock workers with little money and even less to do filled the streets of the island, which was connected to the rest of Amsterdam by a number of bridges. Wim scrounged together little bits and pieces everywhere he went: an apple from the greengrocer, a slice of ham from Adolfs the butcher – whom he loved to visit – or a roll of sweets for a few cents at the grocer’s on the corner of the Tweede Kattenburgerdwarsstraat, just a stone’s throw away. He usually saved the roll for his Sunday excursions with Jo. After going to church, they would first eat a couple of sandwiches at home before setting off, for everywhere and nowhere. Anywhere to get out of the house.
