No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

Arthur Finds a Friend

There were women working in camp also that came from the outside. I met this woman and she told me she worked in a restaurant. She was from the same city as I was. She was a pretty girl. Simple but crazy. She said to me, why don’t you say to your boss over there I am a good cook.

So I said to my boss, maybe you want a good cook here. Maybe somebody want to cook a good meal for you.

He said, do you know her?

I said, ya, ya, she’s a good cook.

So she cooked him a meal. It was good and he hired her as an official cook for him. She came every day and the next thing I know, she sleeps with him. She wants to stay in the camp and there’s a house adjacent. Nobody lives there. We used it mostly for storage. I tell the boss, why don’t we fix the house up, you could have a nice house there. So he gave me a couple of men. I paint and fix and put electric wiring in. A bathroom I make.

She moved in with him. He made her chief of providing all the supplies from there to us. The woman, she’s not a friend of mine anymore. She orders me around like a big shot. She is the lady with her slave. She goes sometimes to the other camp where my wife is. I said to her, do me a favor and give my wife my bread. She tells me, ya, I leave it. I said, how’s my wife? She said, fine. I found out after the war she’s playing games with me, she doesn’t do this. I thought that my wife got the food. She didn’t. My wife never got anything. It was the only time I was happy, and it was not real.

My friend the woman, she orders me around all over the place. She’s in the bathtub. She orders me, wash my back. Wash my feet. I prepare coffee for her in the morning. I did everything for her. She constantly tells me to come in the morning, and if I don’t come in the morning, I’ll be a dead Jew in the afternoon.

I don’t want to make her angry because she gets drunk and is totally irresponsible. I tried to appease her. I’ve never been as nice to anybody as I was to that girl. My boss knows that I go there. I have a feeling that he knows something is all wrong, because every time she calls the office, he calls me on a loudspeaker. Go up to my house and fix something. I think one day he gonna come in. Because if she tells me to wash her back, I’m gonna wash her back and he gonna come in and shoot me right there.

He abused her a lot. He used to get drunk and beat her up. She had cigarette burns on her body. I would find her in bad condition, bloody and semi-conscious. I put her in the bathtub, put some warm water in it, and she just sat there crying a lot. She would get herself together again and do what he told her to do.

I felt very bad because I blamed myself that she wound up in this position. She wasn’t too old, maybe a couple years older than me. And she always said that she was gonna kill him. She said before the war is ended and her parents gonna find out about her living with the German, she gonna burn that place down. After the war, I met a friend of mine and he said this place was burned down.

She suffered a lot and I have a bad feeling that if I would be dead, maybe she would not wind up like that.