"It took a year before I cried."

*

All Holocaust memoirs are not created equal. As one of the youngest survivors of Buchenwald, Romek Wajsman (known in North America as Robert "Robbie" Waisman), was rehabilitated alongside Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel. His unprecedented story of perseverance and survivalist acumen appears wondrous in retrospect.

Romek Wajsman was born in 1931 in Skarczsko, Poland, as the last child in a family of eight, six years younger than his nearest sibling. This detail matters. During a happy childhood within an Orthodox Jewish household he was catered to and treasured--and in this way he was inadvertently trained to be wise beyond his years. A childhood beating he received at the hands of some Gentile friends, only a few blocks from his home, first made him question the security of his existence. Then the Nazis were advancing. "My father used to say that there was nothing to worry about," he has recalled. "You can't just go and kill people on a wholescale level without some people in other nations sitting up and taking notice and saying 'Now wait a minute. What are you doing here?' That was my father's theory."

Soon Skarczko became a rail depot for advancing German troops. The Wehrmacht used chemical bombs. Black smoke was billowing. "We were all running. And what I recollect is my mother giving me a soaked towel, and (saying) 'Keep it on your face...' so this was the first brush with war and bombs and what was to come." The Wehrmacht arrived and literally asked for a cup of tea. His mother showed them hospitality. Discussion ensued when they left. 'You see, they're not monsters. They don't have horns.' It was still possible to rationalize a hopeful future. Some Poles told themselves that at least the cultured Germans could make sure that Communism wouldn't come.

All the Poles tried to adapt to defeat but tolerance was one-sided. Romek witnessed a Pole being shot to death in the street. The Nazis soon needed labourers. While a few able-bodied men disappeared into the woods; others who tried to run away were shot. Poles became afraid to go out. Particularly Jews. All of his four brothers acquired work permits. Everyone tried to retain optimism. "It was expected locally that either Russia or America or England would come to the rescue and defeat the Germans and restore Poland and every other country." But the entire family was forced to pack their belongings and move into a ghetto, rife with typhoid, in 1941. There were rumours that other ghettos were much, much worse. Deprivations and cruelties were rationalized until one evening a man who had escaped from Treblinka came into their ghetto residence, bringing them first-hand news about the Holocaust.

Romek was told by mother to go out and play. He disobeyed. He was curious. He hid behind curtains. He could hear the man from Treblinka shout, in frustration, "If you don't to believe me, don't believe me!" Panic ensued. It was true. All those people who were being forced to leave on trains, never to be heard from again, were not being re-settled. "As a child," Romek later recalled, "I remember thinking to myself, being Jewish was really not the most wonderful thing in the world and being Chosen, as sometimes we read in the Bible..."

The Waisman family secured work permits, except for Romek and his mother. Women and children were generally spared in wartime. It was unthinkable to believe otherwise. Romek's father hatched a plan to protect Robbie. He was the youngest, the precious one. They packed him a little suitcase. A couple with a horse and buggy arrived. Both parents rode with him to the farm. They reassured him that he would only have to remain at the farmhouse until it was safe. It was only for a short time. He was obliged not to make a fuss. But after three weeks he was extremely homesick. He was accustomed to his mother's arms and her kiss good night. He was special at home. Abandoned, he was nothing.

"I put my suitcase together and ran home. It took me about a day. I came home exhausted... The only spanking I ever received was that time. And while he was doing it, my father was screaming, 'You know it cost me all kinds of trinkets of jewelry' that he had given the farmer." This was the first time Romek risked his life to be re-united with his family.

The ghetto was not safe for children. They were next to useless as labourers. The Nazis were exporting them for execution. Romek's eldest brother woke him at three o'clock in the morning. He was put on a truck and covered with potato sacks. Without any permit, he was being smuggled out of the ghetto. At age eight, Romek Waisman would have to learn how to survive by his own wits. His brother put him in a hayloft. He was instructed to stay there for two days and two nights. He was self-disciplined. At night he would descend the ladder and forage for food in the garden. His brother returned as promised. Romek asked if they were going home. He was told there was no home. The ghetto had been liquidated. Of the approximately 1,500 children in Skarczysko, Romek and his sister would be among the precious few who would survive.

Romek asked his brother about his mother. Where was she? His brother said she had been re-settled. Lacking a work permit, she had been sent to Treblinka. He would learn she was gassed to death. Clearly, the way to survive was to work. His response to this tragedy was to go blank, to vow to live. Some fifty years later, while watching the movie Shoah, depicting a rail journey to Treblinka, he would be jolted into a flood of grief. Until then, he must win in the deadly chess game of survival. It was 1942. His father, sisters and brothers were working in a forced labor camp at Skarczysko. It was a munitions factory. He succeeded in persuading his brother, Abraham, who drove a transport truck, to smuggle him into the prison camp. This was the second time he would risk his life to be re-united with his family.

A German metalworking company, HASAG, was producing ammunition and equipment, including anti-aircraft shells. Romek excelled at painting 3,200 of these per day. His prodigious work rate earned his survival. "I was revered and looked up for being a wunderkind. That allowed me to live. That's the way you had to look at it. Anytime there was some higher-up from the Gestapo people, they would come to take a look." Romek was painting the S onto anti-aircraft shells much faster than adults. Nonetheless, children were routinely sent to the gas chambers. There was absolutely no certainty that he might not be selected for death while walking to and from the barracks. "I didn't consider myself a child. You grow up very fast when you have to. I very quickly learned to walk tall and look twice the size that I was."

The obligatory line-ups in the camp were harrowing. On a whim, he could be selected as a child bound for Treblinka. Sometimes he had to improvise. Once he was placed in the doomed line-up for older people and children. He did not panic. During the frenzy that ensued, he made an extraordinary gamble. He went up to the Nazi in charge and pleaded to put in the line-up for old people and children, the line he was already in. Sure enough, the Nazi supervisor refused to grant his request. The supervisor roughly pushed him into the line-up with his father and the other workers. This was the third time he risked his life to be re-united with his family.

At all costs, they must avoid the next selection process. His father devised a plan for Romek to escape and join the Polish partisans. "Don't worry," his father said. "I'll find you after this mess is over." A guard was bribed. A portion of the electrified fence was made safe. Romek was small. He could crawl underneath. He used a stick to lift up the wire. He made contact with the Partisans. He ran errands for them. One of them was going to teach him to handle a gun. But the Partisans were mean-spirited survivalists. "I was totally despised in that group because, again, I was a Jew." It was easy to distinguish a Jewish boy. He could be a liability. He stood out. "I realized very quickly that my chances of survival weren't very good and I looked for the same hole to get back into the camp. My chances for survival were better in the camp than they were outside." For the fourth time he risked his life to be re-united with his family.

It's conceivable that Romek Wajsman is the only person in the human history to sneak his way back into a concentration camp a second time. There, when an older co-worker noticed the holes in Romek's shoes, he gave Romek a scrap of leather from a refuse pile. A Nazi guard noticed this act of kindness and promptly accused the gift-giver of stealing from the Third Reich. The good Samaritan was promptly shot. Blood splattered onto Romek. The horror-stricken look on the face of the gift-giver would plague his dreams for the rest of his days. Romek blamed himself for the death of his would-be benefactor.

Kindness was dangerous. But kindness was also resistance. On Saturdays, the Gentiles didn't have to work and Romek did odd jobs around the munitions factory. A truck arrived on Saturdays to haul away the newly-manufactured anti-aircraft parts. The Germans, of course, required paperwork, a bill of lading. Everything must be recorded. Every anti-aircraft part, every corpse. One of Romek's jobs was to go to an office and exchange some paperwork he had been given for a bill of lading to certify that the munitions equipment could be taken away by the truck. There was a secretary he went to see. He had no idea whether she was German or Polish. He would never dare to speak to her. She was not allowed to speak to him. On one particular Saturday, he presented the paperwork as usual, and she gave him the bill of lading as usual. He felt something was different. It was bulkier. When he got outside the office, he realized she had hidden a little package of some sort. "I took a look and it was a sandwich! Two pieces of bread with butter and jam on it. I can still taste it," he recalled, more than fifty years later. "I mean it was something absolutely fantastic. I mean, you didn't see butter and marmalade."

His sister was in the women's barracks, far away. That night he risked his life to take her half of that sandwich. He was so proud to have it. "I knew how much she would appreciate it. Something like that could sustain you for a week... She [the secretary] risked her life in doing this. If one of the SS men would say, "What are you doing here?" and he saw a piece of bread and butter... she'd be shot. I looked forward to this treat on a weekly basis because she did for weeks on end. Gave me her lunch. I don't know her name. To me, she was one of the righteous ones."

Different camps served the business enterprises of different companies, some of which remain active. From 1943 to 1945, Romek was sent to various camps, where conditions varied. He and his father witnessed the brutal murder of his brother, Avram. The unpredictability of these years took a toll. Because his frame was slender, and he still just a young boy, and he we was known to be diligent worker, Romek was frequently valuable as someone who could crawl into cramped spaces, sometimes to fix faulty machinery. This joyless diligence was ultimately exhausting. He came down with typhoid. There were no medications. He was covered up with straw. He was hidden. His father could only visit him briefly, every twelve hours. He lay alone for eight days. If they found him, if the camp guards knew he was sick, he would have been murdered.

After eight days, as soon as he could stand, he forced himself to come back to work. It was the only possible way to survive. But he was noticeably weak. It was too soon. The guards pulled him out. "I was spotted you know [put on the truck for elimination]. I knew when I got on the truck that I'm finished, that same fate would be mine as my brother... We mounted the trucks and I was right on the edge and I remember seeing from the truck my father speaking to one of the guards." It was a mystery as to how his father saved him. He was too ill to be happy. In fact, he felt so exhausted that he was not entirely sure he appreciated being rescued. His father urged him to live. A few months later, they were separated by different shifts in a factory. They barely glimpsed one another, except on Sundays. His father's hair had turned completely white. "We just crossed one another. And, very simply, one day I looked for him and he wasn't there. He got moved to another part and that was the last I saw him."

Only his sister might be left alive. But he had lost track of her. To endure, Romek befriended Abram Czapnik, who was eleven months younger. They risked their lives to steal potatoes. They became inseparable. "Without his friendship, I would have lost my bearings and perished." In 1944, they were relocated to Buchenwald. Oddly, both were placed in Block 8, mostly reserved for political prisoners. He had no idea that the vast majority of teenage youths were kept in Block 66. They thought they were the only two children in all of Buchenwald. On April 11, 1945, he heard that his sister, Leah, might still be alive. He would not get to meet Elie Wiesel until 426 of the approximately one thousand children liberated from Buchenwald were relocated by Red Cross, en masse, as les enfants terribles, to France.

"It took a year before I cried."

Romek and Elie Wiesel arrived at the village of Ecouis, managed by a children's rescue society, as "a horde of suspicious, distrusting, rebellious and hostile children--as if from some other planet. They tried to give us salad to eat. Did we survive to be fed like rabbits? Then they gave us smelly Camembert cheese. Why were we given food that smelled foul to us, as if it should thrown away." The first time he was asked his name, he blurted out his concentration camp number. The refugee children were mostly cold and indifferent. The social workers and other experts assumed they would be irredeemable. They all questioned the existence of God. Gradually, they were divided between the socialists (who believed God was a empty fantasy) and the traditionalists (led by Elie Wiesel, who believed God worked in mysterious ways and there was meaning in the Holocaust).

The fascinating story of how these child survivors nearly all recovered to lead successful lives has been recounted in Robert Krell and Judith Hemmendinger’s The Children of Buchenwald (2000), the memoirs of Eli Wiesel, Miriam Rouveyre's Enfants de Buchenwald (1995) and Romek's own memoir, co-written with a Torontonian, Susan McClelland, Boy from Buchenwald (Bloomsbury 2021), published under his Anglicized name, Robbie Waisman.

Romek was one of the last to leave France, in December of 1949. He had learned his sister had survived, married a fellow survivor, and was living in Palestine. He tried to go to Palestine but did not succeed. France was too close to Germany. Canada and Australia were the best choices. In Montreal, he'd be able to speak French. But he was sent to western Canada, hoping to reach Vancouver but instead was billoted in the Calgary home of Harry and Rachel Goresht, where they were able to communicate in Yiddish. He befriended a young Edward Bronfman, learned English, became an accountant and moved to Saskatoon after ten years. There he married a girl from a prominent family, Gloria Lyons. "When I was dating Gloria, they looked into my personal history. My wife was warned she was marrying someone with a completely different background who had gone through the war. So there was discouragement. Not many of us were integrated to a degree where they were dating Canadian-born women. As far as I was concerned, I was simply looking for the right person."

In Saskatoon, as Robert Waisman, he opened a clothing store and served as President of the B'nai B'rith and Saskatoon Jewish Society. Few people other than his wife knew he was a survivor. They moved to Vancouver in 1978. He worked in the hotel industry and they raised two children, Howard and Arlaina. "I skied with them, I skated with them, I did everything possible with them. I took a lot of time with my children and I'm told that did me a lot of good. The childhood that I lost, and was robbed of, I recaptured with my children, and that was a wonderful feeling."

Following the trial of Holocaust-denialist Jim Keegstra in 1983, Waisman became treasurer of the Vancouver Holocaust Centre Society, then Vice-President, then President. In 2003, Waisman joined Willie Abrahams, a residential school survivor, to lecture B.C. students about their shared experiences in the face of violence and persecution. In 2014, he received the Governor General's Caring Canadian Award for his voluntary service to consciousness raising. In 2018, Robbie Waisman received an honorary Doctorate of Law from the University of Victoria. His wife Gloria died in February of 2021.

Near the turn of the century, he wrote, "I have lived a normal adult life, married and raised two children. In my mind, normality and surviving the Holocaust are two different things. When you really think about what survivors experienced, how can we be normal? It is true. Some of the thoughts and some of the ways we think cannot be normal. And yet, no one should feel sorry for me. I do not need sympathy. No one should say, "poor Robbie, what you must have been through." I don't want this. We have proven to ourselves that we're normal human beings, that we have raised families and become responsible members of our community. We have made many productive contributions and now, later in life, can look back and say, the Holocaust occurred, this is what happened, and these are the things we must do so that it does not happen again."

BOOKS:

Waisman, Robbie; McClelland, Susan: Boy from Buchenwald (Bloomsbury 2021). 978-1547606009

[BCBW 2021] Alan Twigg / HololcaustLit