As background information, well before his interment in Dachau, my parents had applied for all the necessary papers to both leave Germany and to enter America. They arrived while he was there. My mother bravely took them to Dachau, found my father, and handed them to him through the fence.
There was no place for him to hide the papers; the pajamas worn by the prisoners had no pockets and while he might have been able to dig a hole and place the papers there, he chose to take a chance that could have cost him his life. He brought the papers to the Kommandant’s office. Being the way the Germans were…retentive, shall I say (are, in fact; believe me, I know), the Kommandant looked at the papers and said, “Alles in ordnung (Everything is in order)” and told him he could walk out. As he was leaving, he heard the Kommandant say, “Grumbacher, with a physique like yours you would have made a wonderful Nazi. Too bad you are a Jew!” He never looked back.
Ok, so I decided to do my best to replicate the steps. First of all, you know that I traveled around the country in 2003 and on subsequent trips telling my father’s story to a variety of groups. One question that came up a lot was, “How did your mother know where to find your father?” She didn’t. She walked around the perimeter of Dachau and happened to see him. Understand that the camp was at least the size of two football fields with buildings as well as the open space where inmates “hung out.” It was miraculous that she found him, maybe more miraculous that she had the stamina to walk that much.
Another question has been, “Was the fence electrified?” While I gave the talk numerous times, I never knew the answer until I went back. I had a good idea though. Yes, it was electrified, and since the holes between the links weren’t spaced far apart how she slipped him the papers unharmed is yet another miracle.
But there was more. What I hadn’t paid attention to the first time was the trench between the inmates’ field and the fence. It was deep. My father had to drop into the trench and climb out again, itself a feat but on top of that there were guard towers all along the way. How he managed to avoid getting shot, I’ll never know.
I went to the Kommandant’s office and just imagined the scene. My father had guts, to be sure, and just standing there made me realize that he and the others who survived were beyond lucky…and so was I.
By the way, something else I didn’t know at my first visit to Dachau: only men were interred from Kristalnacht till the early 1940s; and because the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Problem” (i.e. extermination) hadn’t been put in place until then, everyone interred in Dachau was ultimately released by April of ’39. They might have escaped with their lives then, but who knows how many of those men and their families were as fortunate when the Jews were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, Dachau and the other camps.
(The will of the deceased was being read: “And to my wife, Sarah, I leave half of all my assets. To my son Bernie, I leave a third of the remainder. To my daughter, Rachel, the same. To my son, Sam, the same. And to my brother-in-law, whom I promised to mention in the will – “Hello there, Hymie!”)