German officers are proud of the fine Swiss watches they wear on their wrists and insist they be kept in excellent repair. Your claim that you are a watchmaker gets you assigned to a small workshop where three other people work at repairing timepieces. You don't really know what you are doing, but the others help you out, and you learn quickly — fortunately for you because false claims to special skills are punished by a slow and painful death by hanging. Perhaps it is the skill with instruments that you learned in medical school that saves your life.
In November 1944, as the Russian army approaches Auschwitz from the east, the guards destroy the crematoria, shred the records which tell about the 1,500,000 people killed in the camp, and then try to flee the advancing enemy. As discipline in the camp breaks down, you escape.
You are afraid of ending up in Russian hands, so you travel west to the German city of Mannheim. An American army chaplain tells you he knows nothing about watchmaking, but he offers you another possibility.
When I arrived in Mannheim,
he tells you, I found the holy
books from the Old Age Home buried safely in the garden behind
the building. There's no place for them in Germany anymore; I am
sending them to the library of the Hebrew Union College. If you
would like to accompany them, you might find work. I could
recommend you.
You accept the chaplain's offer and soon find yourself in Cincinnati, Ohio, sorting and cataloguing books. The people are kind and helpful, and you are happy to be alive. You decide that this is where you will spend the rest of your life.
END