By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — I had recently the privilege of bringing two elderly men together with common narratives: both were born in villages along the Carpathian Mountains, both suffered through four Nazi concentration camps, and both were liberated from the notorious Ebensee work-to-death camp by US forces on May 6, 1945.
They never met till last month—sharing bittersweet reflections over lunch in Southern California. Lou Dunst was born in Jasina, Czechoslovakia and Edward “Boomie” Hoffman in nearby Nagyszőlős. The Nazis found them both as young teenagers and systemically killed their parents and their ways of life.
When they encountered each other, Boomie, the heavier and cheekier one of the two, embraced the more formal Lou. I stood by and choked back tears.
Their own emotions were somewhat forcefully restrained as they distilled them in a series of greetings, blessings, and knowing intuitions via a medley of Ukrainian, Hungarian, Russian, and Yiddish expressions. Warmth, pain, and insight filled the space between them, which narrowed quickly along the path of raw memories. They shook hands first, then partially embraced—two men who in some ways reluctant to rub their wounds against each other.
“What barrack were you in at Ebensee?” Lou asked Boomie.
“I was in Barrack 27,” said Boomie.
“I was in 6 and in 18,” Lou informed him.
It was almost as if two nice old Jewish men were having a reunion of some disowned Boy Scout troop from a murky time and place too unbearable to explain to any outsider.
They both remembered that as soon as one walked into Ebensee, one encountered the decidedly plusher, canine-protected SS barracks. Then the “housing” for inmates unfolded, row after row of infernal buildings racked and ridden by suffering, lice, howling, and savagery.
“I had a kapo [an inmate-guard],” said Boomie, “who was a professional killer. He built a hanging tree outside the building, just where you walked into the barrack. And he had a big bucket of water there. If he didn’t like you, he pulled you out and pushed your head into the water until you are dead. I got to Ebensee in March [1945]. A lot of people died…”
I remarked to Lou: “You saw these kinds of things all the time, I’m sure?”
“Some of it,” Lou responded politely. Then, falling back into his good nature, he teased Boomie about being a “greenhorn” at Ebensee, since the latter arrived within two months of the May 6 liberation. Lou endured the place considerably longer although, Boomie, dumped there from Dachau, was no greenhorn in the category of suffering. The two men treated each other with respect and insight and they shared the kindred spirits of interminably scarred psyches.
Then Boomie commented: “The last two months before liberation, I had to—they put me to take some of the bodies from the crematorium. I’m looking and I see: some of the bodies had the tuchases [buttocks] cut out.” Lou nodded vigorously and knowingly. He knew where Boomie was going with this account.
“They used to cook those parts to eat,” reported Boomie.
The men talked again of the days before the Nazis came down the Tzisa River, like diabolical locusts in search of Jews.
The two men, once little boys with quiet dreams in the Czech fields, sat and sipped coffee in a Panini restaurant in California. People chatted, studied menus, and checked their email on Smartphones.
The survivors smiled at each other in warm anguish. In the end, Boomie was #42117 and Lou was #68122. In both their cases, their numbers were grafted onto bracelets made from the discarded Zyklon B cans—the pesticide thrown into the gas chambers in order to kill screaming, naked Jews.
But the numbers remain tattooed into the souls of two nice Jewish men who are trying to live normal lives after surviving the most abnormal times in human history.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in Encinitas, California. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com