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Jacob's Courage
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Amsterdam Publishers
ISBN-10: 9493276929
Pages: 476
Copyright: June 13, 2023
ISBN-13: 9789493276925
Price: $4.95 (eBook)
This book brings the Holocaust to life and evokes emotions not found in many history books.
Jacob's Courage: Romance and Survival amidst the Horrors of War, is a poignant and powerful tale of love, faith, and bravery set against the harrowing backdrop of Nazi-occupied Austria. A moving coming-of-age love story, it examines the resilience of the human spirit in the face of unspeakable brutality and genocide.
https://studio.youtube.com/video/zly3n1GirfA/edit
Excerpt
"In his bedroom, 17-year-old Jacob Silverman tossed and turned in his bed. A fierce winter storm had dumped new snow on the city overnight. In the forest below, evergreen trees were bending under the weight. They creaked and moaned with each gust of wind. Smoke drifted up from chimneys in the city above, which was surrounded by a sentinel of towering gray mountains. Sweating profusely, Jacob was disturbed in his sleep by a horrible vision. Under closed lids, his eyes darted in every direction. It was the worst nightmare of his life, as real as waking life, if not more so. In this horrific dream, Jacob was older by several years. He was emaciated. And he wore a strange costume, gray pajamas with vertical red stripes. A Star of David was emblazoned upon the front. On his head was a cap of the same coarse fabric. He looked around a huge red brick room, filled with acrid smoke and ash; a furnace room of some description. The heat was unbearable, and there was a disgusting odor, not unlike burned meat. An underlying stench was sickly sweet.
He stood in front of an enormous oven. Men dressed like Jacob were continuously pushing large objects into the fire on mechanical trays. With every movement, ash fell off the men working there, floating slowly to the floor, where it covered the bricks. Some ash got into Jacob’s eyes, and he could not see well. Other men scrambled to bring more of the large things into the room for the fire. They resembled ghosts. The fire itself was so large and intense that it produced a deep thundering sound. It shook the foundations of the building. Jacob thought that it sounded like a speeding locomotive. He was sweating profusely and feeling lightheaded. He was overwhelmed with exhaustion and his muscles ached. How could he feel such pain when it was only a dream?
The pervasive ash was in his nose, his throat and upon his clothes. He found it difficult to breathe. The heat coming from the gargantuan fire was oppressive. Jacob had never been in a place like this in his life. He found himself holding onto a large gray iron platform, built like a tray with rollers to slide the large objects into the blazing inferno. He could barely see at all.
Through cracks in the wooden ceiling, Jacob could make out a towering chimney, belching out thick clouds of ash and black smoke. Like a monstrous flame atop a gigantic brick candle, the chimney pushed out smoke so thick that he could not tell if it was night or day.
He stared at the men next to him. These men never looked up, continuously feeding the fires. Jacob felt completely alive. His heart was pounding. This deafening theater of the macabre was far too real to be a dream. He held onto his own tray, trying to catch his breath. Glancing at his left arm, he noticed numbers tattooed in dark blue. All the while, the men in stripes pushed and pulled upon the huge bins, continuously delivering the large items into the fire. The things they pushed reminded Jacob of naked, life-size dolls. His vision remained blurry, no matter how many times he wiped his eyes. He could taste the unpleasant ash in his mouth and felt certain that he was about to pass out.
Fierce-looking uniformed men with black helmets and machine guns were shouting at the workers in German. They had the letters SS upon their collars, in the shape of lightning bolts. Doors were opening and closing in a cacophony of precision. Carts were crashing together. A large open elevator screeched as it moved up and down, and workers carried carts with squealing wheels. But the deep roar of the furnace remained deafening. Such was the symphony of death in a place too horrid to imagine.
Jacob wondered why people in dark uniforms were yelling at him in German. Everyone he knew spoke Yiddish. Why would German soldiers be screaming at him? One soldier was irate with Jacob and walking in his direction, his heels clicking loudly upon the concrete floor. Jacob could not imagine why he was in this hellish place or why the German soldier looked so angry with him. He had never been so confused or frightened in his life. He began to realize that he was in immense trouble. Jacob’s eyes darted around the room. He tried to focus on the things that were being carried. The “items” being burned were white and gray lumps of something. He rubbed his eyes again and again. As his vision finally cleared, he was able to gaze into the furnace directly in front of him. Inside the blazing inferno, Jacob saw human bodies.
The reality burst upon his fragile mind. The fire was filled with burning people! The Germans were burning people! Jacob suddenly felt nauseous and began to retch. He doubled over as his stomach cramped. But there was no food to come up. He somehow knew that he had been starved for a long time. A thin, silver stream of mucous dripped from his mouth, falling lazily to the dusty floor. As he focused on the bodies in the fire, Jacob saw that the victims were females of every age. Girls and women – all consumed in flames! Two workers dumped a cart filled with more dead women and girls next to Jacob’s tray. He watched in awe as two men began loading the victims onto a platform. All of them were naked. Their heads had been shaved. Some had a number tattooed on their left arm. With no hair, they looked like large, swollen dolls. Their bodies bounced and wiggled as they were picked up and placed on the trays. Some were soiled with feces and urine. Many had froth or blood coming from their mouths and nostrils. But none of them had bullet holes. Something else had killed them. Jacob’s mind was bending under the weight of this unbelievable terror. The faces of the dead appeared expressionless; their eyes sunken and distant. They stared at him as though waiting for an explanation. Some bodies were purple at the bottom and white on top. Others had tanned faces below white skulls. Jacob’s mind stretched to comprehend this inconceivable panorama. It was far too real to be a dream. And yet, it was too frightening to be reality.
Jacob closed his eyes tightly and shook his head, fully expecting the nightmare to be over when he opened his eyes again. All the while, that screaming German soldier was walking his way. Jacob blinked hard and opened his eyes, but with the same dreadful result. The vile furnace room remained. And the German soldier was getting closer.
The other men in striped pajamas carried the bodies over their shoulders, on their backs – as though they were carrying huge sacks of grain. The children and babies were carried by an arm or a leg. Jacob was repulsed as he watched those tiny bodies being thrown into stacks or upon the trays. He understood that the babies were dead. Yet, it seemed unnatural and disrespectful to throw bodies around so carelessly. What was happening in this room was unthinkable. Most of the workers were strong men, although there were a few men in the same striped uniform who seemed fragile. He watched their faces as they scurried about the room performing their various duties. Their faces were like stone, bereft of expression, their eyes cold and distant. They worked furiously, as though their masters’ whips were at their backs. He imagined that each of them had shut out the mindless horror of the task to which they were assigned.
On top of the pile, he saw an old woman, a middle-aged woman, and a girl. The woman and child appeared malnourished. The old woman had deep circles under her eyes and bruises around her body, as if she had been beaten. The girl appeared to be seven or eight years old. Perhaps it was a woman with her daughter and grandchild; their facial features were similar. Their eyes seemed to plead for help. But it was too late for help.
Who were these people? What did they do to deserve this? What right did these Germans have to arbitrarily kill innocent people, particularly women and children? In an instant, Jacob began to wonder if these victims were Jewish. He knew that his fellow workers were Jewish. Each had a Star of David on the front of their “pajamas.”
In his dream, Jacob felt as though he had been there for many months, perhaps for years. In an obscene way, he had become an instrument of human destruction for the Germans. The feeling of guilt was ghastly – beyond description. The pain was unbearable. He had physical pain too. His left knee ached terribly, as though it had been heavily damaged. His life had been reduced to the most pathetic existence possible, in which he fed the fires of evil, destroying the bodies of his own people. He was only allowed to stay alive if there were more Jews to cremate. He could feel his mind splitting, cracking down the middle. His emotional anguish was insurmountable. Finally, he screamed at the ceiling. “Why me, God?”
The man next to Jacob was loading bodies onto his tray and pushing them into the fire as fast as he could. As he was doing this, he was softly saying Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, in Hebrew. Jacob’s heart pounded so hard that he was afraid it would burst through his chest at any moment. Thoughts bounced swiftly through his mind. How could anyone mastermind something as horrifying as this? And even if Hitler was mad, how could he convince his soldiers to do something so utterly evil? Could a sane person do something this hideous, even with all the German propaganda about Jews? Yet, Nazi soldiers with lightning bolts upon their black collars were supervising this repugnant task forced upon Jews. It had become the price of remaining alive for a few more days. Underneath his vast torment, Jacob understood that his own death would soon arrive. Somehow, he knew that the Germans changed the crematoria crew every month or two. Members of the old crew would be killed and burned by the new. And that is how the system worked, month after month, year after year, until there were no more Jews left to burn. Jacob knew that when the next train arrived with men physically able to do the task, his group would be killed and someone just like him would burn their bodies.
He saw in his mind the words that were on the gate above the entrance to this ignominious death camp. The wrought iron letters spelled out “Arbeit Macht Frei.” How ironic, thought Jacob. The “freedom” promised to them was their own death. Just the thought of touching a corpse was sickening. Besides, he was a member of the Kohanim, the priests of Judaism. Just like his father and grandfather, he was forbidden from being in the same room as a dead person, much less touch one.
A terrible thought passed through his mind. What if I must burn the body of Rachael or my parents? His mind was now spinning out of control. Trembling, he was overcome by another wave of nausea. Suddenly, he was pushed very hard from behind. As he fell toward the open furnace, his face was singed. His head came dangerously close to the flames. He could hear the hissing sound of burning hair, followed by that awful smell. The entire right side of his face was scorched. He stretched out his right arm and just barely grasped the tray before falling into the furnace. A wave of pain passed through his body. He fell on the ground, hitting the hot brick floor. This sent a cloud of ash up around him and a stinging pain into his hip. He began coughing as his nostrils filled with ashes.
He crouched on the brick floor and watched as the ash displaced from his fall made slow circles, floating around the room. Bits of ash landed everywhere, on the uniforms of the soldiers, on the faces of workers, on the tray next to him, even on the bodies as they were carried into the room. It reminded Jacob of snowflakes falling gently on a windless winter day.
With astonishment, he realized that he was inhaling all that remained from hundreds of Jews, perhaps thousands! Those tiny bits of ash were the last molecules of all those innocent people, burned by these Kapos. The realization was like a punch in his stomach. He began to retch again. Nothing came. His hands and legs trembled. The other workers looked like frightened ghosts in some lurid story. They moved like panicky machines from place to place, turning other Jews into tiny bits of grayish ash. Like his biblical predecessor, he came to understand that God had a plan for him; its significance not yet fully understood.
The German soldier that had been screaming at Jacob finally arrived. He looked like any other young German soldier. In his late twenties, he was tall, with blond hair tucked neatly into his helmet. His blue eyes glared at Jacob, burning into him. The soldier looked quite formidable, with his black helmet, black uniform, flashing SS collar, machine gun and neatly holstered Luger pistol. Jacob could not hear the words of the German soldier. In fact, he could hear nothing except the fire. He had been temporarily made deaf from his encounter with the furnace door. The soldier stopped screaming and slowly removed his Luger from its holster.
The German drew his gun and moved toward Jacob, staring at him with indignant admonition. The look on the Nazi’s face suggested he was ready to act. He screamed at him in German.
Jacob noticed in an offhand manner that his accent had a touch of Bavarian.
“What is it with you filthy Jews?” scowled the tall young man with piercing blue eyes. “Do you think you’re here for a vacation?” With that, the soldier pointed the shiny black pistol at Jacob’s head.
Jacob realized with sudden dread that this would be his last moment alive. His heart was pounding out of his chest. Blood was rushing through his ears and he had tinnitus. Perspiration formed tiny droplets on the back of his hands. He looked around at the other men, who continued working while staring at him in solemn, heartrending silence. Behind him, the immense red brick furnace continued to roar. The SS soldier aimed the gun at Jacob’s temple. Everything seemed to slow down. Even the Kapos moved more slowly. Jacob’s eyes traveled around the smoky room.
With the steady movement of someone who had done this many times, the German backed away as far as possible to avoid getting Jew blood on his handsome black uniform. Jacob watched in terror as the soldier’s finger slowly squeezed the trigger. The gun fired. Jacob was deafened by the sound, despite the din of the furnace. A swath of flame and smoke left the gun’s barrel. Jacob felt a huge jolt of pain in his head. Velvety darkness gradually encased him in a vacuum from which nothing could emerge. He became nothing within impenetrable darkness."
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