Auschwitz #34207: The Joe Rubinstein Story

by Nancy Sprowell Geise

(Author Note: In March 1942, trains began arriving daily at Auschwitz. Sometimes several trains would arrive on the same day, each carrying one thousand or more victims coming from the ghettos of Eastern Europe, as well as from Western and Southern European countries. During 1942, transports arrived from Poland, Slovakia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Yugoslavia, and Theresienstadt.

I remember Grandfather telling me that among Jews, permanent markings on the skin were strictly forbidden because they were a sin against God. The Nazis had obviously known this about us and how degrading such a brand would be.

Author Note: Only those prisoners selected for work were issued serial numbers; those prisoners sent directly to the gas chambers were not registered and received no tattoos. At Auschwitz II (Birkenau), the SS staff introduced the practice of tattooing in March 1942. Some Jewish prisoners (but not all) had a triangle tattooed beneath their serial number.

(Author Note: “The first selection among weak and sick prisoners took place on May 4, 1942: 1,200 prisoners who had arrived in the previous month were declared ‘unfit for work.’ On May 12, 1942, for the first time, a transport of 1,500 people was brought from the nearby town ... directly into the gas chambers.”)

(Author Note: Bodies that had been buried in mass graves eventually began to putrefy in the hot Polish summers. By the end of summer, 1942, the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, ordered Jewish prisoners to dig up the mass graves, layer the bodies with wood and other combustibles, and then burn them in large open pits over a metal grate. This method was soon replaced with burning bodies in crematoriums.) (See Chapter Endnotes for additional information.)

It came to me in the dark one night on a crowded berth. The one thing they had no control over, the counter to their hatred and my fear was prayer.

Though none of us had been spared from the consequences of the evil choices of others, we had never been alone. Did God permit Hitler and the Nazis to survive as long as they did as a lesson for the world? So the world could witness, on the grandest and most terrible of scales, what happens when a whole society chooses evil? So that once and for all, we could see that at its core evil breeds only one thing: death? And that the only conqueror of both evil and death are God and His love?

Long ago they were pulled into the same gentle arms of the One who stayed with me while I was in the pit of death, weeping with me, healing me; the same arms that heard the prayers of a broken boy crying out for the dead he pushed in his cart; the same arms that were there, carrying each of them home. Our unfathomable grief is His, too.