4
Nathan Shapow was a big bear of man, two hundred pounds of solid muscle. To his family and friends, he was more like an oversized teddy bear than a wild ferocious animal. For Nazis and enemies of his family and friends, Shapow was no teddy bear: he could be as threatening and deadly as a grizzly bear in the wild. He was a complex man who wanted nothing more than to be a loving family man, a successful businessman, a patriot, and a boxer. History would throw so many combinations of punches at him that a man with less stamina and heart would have gone down for a full count and never gotten up. For Shapow, the will to survive, thrive, and fight on were the fuels that kept him going through bruising bouts with enemies who wanted to rob him and other Jews of their future. His Holocaust experiences were Job-like tests; and much to his own amazement, he passed each test, bloodied but alive.
He was born in Riga, the capital city of Latvia, on November 6, 1921, to Mordechai and Chaye Shapow. He was the firstborn; two brothers followed, Boris and Ephraim. The family lived modestly, but comfortably, in a largely Christian country where Jews were periodic victims of vicious anti-Semitic acts and at other times were merely tolerated. In families of multiple children, psychologists have theorized that either the youngest or the oldest will be the most successful. In the Shapow family that would turn out to be Nathan. In fact, from his late teenage years onward, he was known as Nathan the Strong.
But even before his teenage years, he proved to have the agility, endurance, and flexibility of a natural-born athlete. As he grew he developed large biceps and fists and thick forearms; friends told him he had the makings of a boxer, and he was drawn to the sport, which had been gaining popularity in his neighborhood. It was a sport that appealed to young Jews as a means of self-defense against anti-Semites, who might attempt to bully them. Shapow proved to be a natural. He quickly learned to jab, duck, feint, and slip punches as easily and as quickly as a duck learns to swim. When he sparred with other young boxers at the local Maccabi club, he demonstrated a flashing left hook and a rocketing knock-out right. The Maccabi was not only the site where he honed his boxing skills, it was also the place where Shapow thirstily imbibed talk of Zionism and its dreams of liberation and freedom. His trainers, who were ardent Zionists, were impressed not only by Shapow’s appreciation of Zionism but also by his seemingly natural aptitude for boxing. They taught him how to hold that left hook in reserve, to feint with his right, then quickly deliver the left hook before an opponent could see it coming. It was rapidly followed by a right to the opponent’s jaw. It was a perfect knockout punch. Years later, one of his opponents commented that the combination of those punches made him feel as if his head was about to be separated from his neck.
Shapow’s training, toughness, skills, and even his ability to take a punch and bullishly keep coming at an opponent would be the ingredients for his survival during the bitterly oppressive days of the Soviet and Nazi occupations of Riga. Throughout his life, Shapow would never be a Jew who would obediently let himself be led to his own murder. He was neither sheep nor goat. He saw himself as an ancient Judean lion, a defender of himself as well as of his people. He knew that if faced with probable execution, he would go down with a fight, taking as many enemies with him as possible. “Better to die a brave man than be killed as a coward” would become his motto during World War II.
And it was in 1940 that Shapow began to call upon his strength as a fighter. The Soviet army occupied Riga and treated the populace, especially the Jews, as subhumans to be brutalized for the slightest infractions. In 1941, conditions worsened when the Nazis overran Latvia. The Nazis policy of exterminating Jews made the Soviets look almost beneficent by comparison. For the Nazis, the Jews were not merely subhuman, they were disease-carrying vermin who would sooner or later have to be exterminated to save the Aryan race from contamination. Under the Nazi occupation, the Shapow family considered itself lucky to eat and breathe; but they knew that each day could be their last for they lived under the implicit daily threat of being arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and sent to a concentration camp. Their future, if it existed at all, was bleak at best.
The Nazis justified their occupation because they were strong, pureblood Aryans who had the right to dominate and, if necessary, destroy lesser breeds. The Soviets had not been quite so brazen: they had pretended that their occupation was democratically approved. Their iron fist was concealed in a thick Moscow mitten, whereas the Nazis held up a starkly naked iron fist as a warning to all those who might disrespect them. Prior to the Nazi occupation, the Soviet government had ordered an election from July 14 to July 15. To ensure that the outcome reflected government goals, the Soviets informed the populace that “only the list of the Latvian Working People’s Bloc must be deposited in the ballot box. The ballot must be deposited without any changes.”
Of course, everyone knew the meaning of one-party rule: it was standard practice for dictatorships. However, the Soviets had such contempt for the people they governed that twelve hours before the last ballot was cast, the Soviet government in Moscow published the outcome of the election. It reported that more than 96 percent of the populace had voted and they had over welcomingly voted in favor of a Soviet government. With the rigged election serving as its justification for control of all of Latvia, the Soviets set up the apparatus necessary to govern by fear and stealth. They opened a police headquarters in Riga from which the officers could monitor the population and stamp out dissent, and which the officers did with such swift and unremitting levels of brutality that the populace lived in fear of being beaten, imprisoned, and tortured. Many friends and relatives of the Shapows were arrested, some never to be seen again. Those who were released from prison told stories of being beaten and tortured, forced to confess not only to crimes they hadn’t committed but also to crimes that were never revealed to them. On one occasion nearly sixteen thousand people were rounded up and deported. The civilian population did not know what provoked the roundup.
Before the Soviets left Riga to the Nazis, Shapow had honed his survival skills. He became as slick, sly, and secretive as a cunning coyote on urban streets. He stole food for his family; he stole clothes; he bargained on the black market. His cleverness and resourcefulness made it easy for him to deal with corruptible officials. Even so, he was fortunate never to have been caught. If he had, he would have been imprisoned or, at best, sent to Russia and forced to join the Soviet army.
When the Soviets were replaced by victorious Nazi troops in 1941, more than 131,000 Jews from all the Baltic states had been deported. Some, though forced to fight for the Soviet army, were glad to turn their rifles and machine guns on the hated Wehrmacht and SS. Those who were not conscripted into the army were enslaved to work in factories that manufactured munitions. Very few imprisoned Latvians survived the war.
Survival became more difficult for the Shapow family under Nazi occupation. For Nathan, who stole food to feed his family, stealth and wiliness required nerves of steel, for whereas the Soviets would beat and imprison a thief, the Nazis would execute such a criminal. In Shapow’s estimation, the Soviets were indeed barbaric, but the Nazis were even worse: for them, killing a Jew was as casual as blowing one’s nose. To survive, Shapow became an alley cat of the night.
The SS turned the Riga Ghetto into an oversized cage in which Jewish residents were regularly terrorized by daily acts of unprovoked beatings, and arrests that led to torture, public hangings, or a gunshot to the head. Malnourished, inadequately clothed against the cold, rain, and snow, the Jews simply tried to survive. They were treated like diseased feral dogs. Nathan Shapow was determined not to succumb, not to be crushed under the Nazi jackboot.
To those SS officers in Riga who took notice of Shapow he was an affront for he did not fit the image that the Nazis promulgated of a cringing, cowardly, sniveling Jew. He was obviously strong and athletic. He had a reputation as a tough guy, a guy who could box an opponent into bloody defeat. Though he conducted himself with pride and self-confidence, he was careful not to provoke an impulsive attack by some hot-headed SS man. Yet he became the obsessional target of one officer, Obersturmführer Hoffman, an arrogant and sadistic man whose pleasure derived from humiliating and beating Jews. To beat up defenseless Jews was a form of daily exercise for Hoffman. As a warning to others and as means of making others fear him, he would often leave his victims prostrate, bloody, and unconscious in the street. To Hoffman, Shapow’s physical attributes and pride were a challenge, one to be defeated with utter ruthlessness. Shapow’s very being was worse than an impertinence. Shapow must be humiliated, brought to his knees, begging for his life. Shapow commented, “Perhaps he could not stand my attitude, for I neither looked nor felt like the Nazi’s stereotype of the ‘racially inferior degenerate Jew.’ I was young, strong as an ox from years of football, swimming and boxing, and carried myself like an athlete. Though imprisoned in the ghetto, a slave laborer, I was not cowed.”1
Shapow believed that years of boxing at the local Maccabi Club and on behalf of the Zionist Youth Movement, Beitar, had made him strong enough to endure whatever slave labor work the Nazis wanted him to perform. Nevertheless, Hoffman was determined not only to make Shapow’s life miserable but to kill him as evidence of his own superiority and to prove to the Jews of Riga that even one of their strongest was no match for an Aryan SS man. One day, Hoffman ordered Shapow back to his small room in the ghetto. Hoffman walked behind Shapow and shouted orders at him: “Macht schnell, macht schnell [Faster, faster].” Once inside the small room, Hoffman pushed Shapow against a wall and called him an insect, a rodent, a dirty Jew. Just as Shapow turned around to face Hoffman, he saw that Hoffman had begun to unbutton the holster that held his Lugar. Shapow was dealt a fatal choice. He wrote that he could
die like a coward or die as a warrior. I took a step towards him, moving slowly, almost imperceptibly, and as his hand closed around the handle of his pistol, I let my training take hold. With all my strength and skill, I threw a fast, round-arm left hook, the punch that made a legend of Joe Frazier… . [Hoffman] was certainly no boxer, and my left hook was enough to stun him. I followed with a classic straight right, connecting with his chin, which had veered to the side from the force of my first punch, his mouth hanging open in shock and pain. I heard the crack of bone as Hoffman’s Aryan jaw broke.2
Not taking a chance of attracting other SS men by the sound of shooting Hoffman with the Lugar, Shapow grabbed a wooden stool and slammed it down against Hoffman’s skull. He brought the stool down repeatedly, crashing it down again and again until he heard the cracking of caved-in cranium bones. Blood spattered like shrapnel onto the walls, onto Shapow’s clothing; his hands were gloved in its sticky redness as Hoffman lay in a bed of his own Aryan blood. Shapow was breathing hard, his heart was pounding. He wondered how to dispose of Hoffman’s body. He decided to wait until darkness descended on the ghetto, then in the quiet deadness of a moonless night, he dragged Hoffman’s corpse several streets away from his room. He dumped the body in a darkened doorway, then furtively brushing against the sides of buildings like a feral cat, he made it safely back to his room. There he mopped the floor, washed the walls. Not seeing any evidence of blood, he dropped onto his bed and fell into a deep sleep.
About the same time that he awoke the next morning, Hoffman’s body was discovered by outraged SS officers. They furiously declared that some Jewish scum was responsible for this cowardly act. They intended to find the Jew and make an example of him. No Jew can get away with killing an Aryan, especially a member of the SS. Jewish men were lined up and questioned. They were told to stand at attention and keep their eyes focused on the ground. They were told that if the murderer of Hoffman didn’t confess, then others would have to pay with their lives for the crime. Since no one confessed and the SS didn’t have a suspect, the SS commander chose two Jews at random. They were young and strong, and if given the chance, they looked as if they could have over-powered the SS commander. But with guns pointed at them, they had no chance of fighting back or escaping. The two frightened yet stoical martyrs were marched to the town square where all the Jews of the ghetto had been instructed to congregate. The two Jews had their hands tied behind their backs; each of them was instructed to stand on a low stool, then each had a noose placed around his head. The SS commander shouted an order, and the stools were kicked out beneath the feet of the two men. For a few moments their bodies jiggled like marionettes, then they went limp. They were left hanging there for all to see until their decomposing bodies were food for insects and birds. Though consumed by guilt, Shapow was relieved not to have endured the kind of retribution that he had witnessed. He had acted in self-defense. He had followed his training as a boxer: never be a victim. He knew he would carry guilt about what had happened for the rest of his life.
He wrote in his autobiography that
a good boxer never gets caught on his heels. He ducks, he bobs, he weaves, he stays out of his opponent’s reach. Those were the rules I lived by, out of the ring as well. My secret was to keep fit and strong, so that I was always looked upon as “useful” by our oppressors, while ignoring as many of the rules and regulations, especially over food and clothing, as I could without being executed. I kept out of the way of the Kapos and the SS as much as possible.3
Shapow proved not only to be as elusive as a jaguar in a nighttime tropical jungle, he was also a fearless and adventurous thief who not only stole food and drink for himself but also for friends and family. He concealed his treasures in a small cellar beneath his room. He was fortunate that a member of the ghetto police, Herr Rudy Harr, a former boxer, overlooked Shapow’s thefts in exchange for half of what was stolen. Paying off cops has long been a tradition with unindicted thieves.
As bad as the Riga Ghetto was, it was just a way station for the Nazis. Not satisfied with dehumanizing and destroying lives in the ghetto, the Nazis constructed a concentration camp for them in Kaiserwald. There thousands of Jews were forced to be slave laborers and fed just enough to keep them constantly hungry and barely alive. Many died of disease and exhaustion. Jews had heard of mass shootings, and being a slave laborer was certainly better than being a corpse. Nevertheless, many Jews could not escape from the Nazi plan of extermination. One of the worst massacres took place in late 1941 when more than 25,000 Jews from the Riga Ghetto were transported to the Rumbula Forest not far from Riga. Over a two-day period all were murdered by the SS. It was the second-most-extensive murder of a large number of Jews. The largest massacre had occurred at Babi Yar in the Ukraine, where 33,371 Jews had been slaughtered. Once again, Shapow’s luck held out: he was one of the fortunate ones for he was not rounded up for the Rumbula transport but was sent to the Kaiserwald concentration camp.
The Rumbula massacre was carried out by Einsatzgruppe A with the assistance of local Latvian collaborators such as the Arajs Kommandos of Viktors Arajs. The massacre was led by Friedrich Jeckeln, an SS–Polizeiführer. The other leaders of the massacre were Eduard Strauch, Hinrich Lohse, and Herberts Cukurs. Throughout the war, these men continued to carry out their murderous activities. However, after the liberation of the camps, they were tried for crimes against humanity at what was known as the Einsatzgruppen Trial, where all were found guilty. Friedrich Jeckeln was hanged. Herbert Cukurs escaped to South America, where he was tracked down and assassinated by the Mossad. Eduard Strauch was sentenced to death but died in prison before his execution could take place. Lohse was sentenced to a mere ten-year prison term. Arajs escaped and remained in hiding in West Germany, until he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison in 1979; he died in prison in 1988.
With a survivor’s skill for deception, Shapow earned a place for himself in the Kaiserwald concentration camp. Prior to selecting slave laborers for the camp an SS officer had asked if any of the Riga Ghetto inhabitants had been engineers before the war. Shapow, fearing that non-engineers would be sent to extermination camps, stepped forward and said that he had performed many engineering jobs as a civilian and could do anything that required his skills. He also mentioned that, if necessary, he could perform hard labor for he was as strong as an ox. He was not surprised that rather than perform the tasks of an engineer he was put to work at hard labor. He had saved himself from likely extermination.
Though he considered himself fortunate to be sent to Kaiserwald, he quickly came to hate the camp, for it was an arena for extreme brutality and inhuman deprivations. The prisoners were forced to work 12 to 14 hours a day, every day, on a diet that was designed to ultimately lead to death. They were daily given a bowl of watery soup and a sliver of raw potato or a piece of potato skin. The prisoners were also given a few scraps of bread that were 50 percent sawdust. On such a meager diet, it is no wonder that so many of the prisoners died of starvation while others succumbed to opportunistic diseases.
However, work was not all that Shapow was required to do. Word had gotten around that Shapow had been a boxer before the war. It was decided that there should be a boxing match between Shapow and a German named Werner Samuel, who had been a professional middleweight champion. Samuel, as a former professional, was the odds-on favorite to beat Shapow. Training was minimal for Shapow, but his hard work in the ghetto and the camp had kept him strong and as fit as one could be on a near starvation diet. The bout began like a sudden storm.
Two left jabs stopped me in my tracks and a right hook put me down on one knee. I could feel the blood gathering in my nasal passages and the roar of the crowd echoed painfully in my ears.
The old cracked canvas beneath my knees felt rough and hard, the punches had hurt and I knew I was in danger of being outclassed… . His left was a tattoo on my face, followed up by stinging rights. I took the blows, and then put my chin in the way of a right hook and hit the canvas with a sickening thump.
I shook my head to clear my fogged brain, thumbed the trickle of blood from my nose and climbed back to my feet on the count of eight.4
Shapow realized that if he had a chance to beat his opponent he would have to use every weapon in his arsenal. Failure could result in his death. So he resorted to the techniques of a street fighter. When one grapples in a dark alley there are no rules: winning is all that matters. Like a wild bull, Shapow head-butted his opponent, knocking him off his feet. When Samuel got up, he was met with a hard elbow to his right eye. Shapow then delivered a powerful blow to the back of Samuel’s head, another to his kidneys, and a third to his already swollen ears. Shapow did everything but knee Samuel’s groin. In this street fighter’s brawl nothing was disallowed. With his opponent on the verge of defeat, Shapow delivered a powerful left uppercut that sent Samuel sprawling to the hard canvas. Samuel managed to raise himself, just in time for Shapow to deliver a devastating straight right to Samuel’s chin. The man went down and stayed there for a full count of ten. Shapow felt he had won the bout for the Latvian Jews. His destiny would soon change again.
By August 1944, the Soviet Army was advancing toward Latvia, and so as not to interrupt plans for the continued work of Jewish slave laborers and not to hinder the goal of massive exterminations, the SS began an evacuation of Kaiserwald, transporting inmates to the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland. The camp was established in 1939 and was the first concentration camp set up outside Germany. Before the evacuation could begin, nearly all Jews under the age of eighteen and over the age of thirty were summarily executed, for the older ones were not considered capable of slave labor and the younger ones were not yet fully developed as laborers. They were useless to the Reich. Those who were regarded as too weak or too sick to survive the trip to Stutthof were also killed. The twenty-three-year-old Shapow, strong and capable of hard work for long hours, was spared and shipped off to Stutthof. Though he survived the camp, others were not so fortunate: between 63,000 and 65,000 of the 110,000 inmates died there.
The camp was notorious for having a large number of sadistic guards who enjoyed nothing so much as beating the inmates. For the guards, it was a form of recreation. And the beatings were not just administered by male guards but also a large number of female guards. There were 295 female guards at Stutthof, all of whom were infamous for their gratuitous cruelty that frequently resulted in murder. After the war, 34 of them were tried and convicted of crimes against humanity, including one who had previously been a Red Cross nurse. Several of those convicted were given death sentences and publicly hanged. Others were given moderate prison sentences. That all the guards were not tried as criminals disappointed and angered the surviving prisoners. After all, the guards were, with few exceptions, murderers.
Noted historian Martin Gilbert quotes an inmate of Stutthof:
All the Jews were assembled in the courtyard; they were ordered to run, to drop down and to stand up again. Anybody who was slow in obeying the order was beaten to death by the overseer with the butt of his rifle.
Afterwards Jews were ordered to jump right into the cesspit of the latrines, which were being built; this was full of urine. The taller Jews got out again since the level reached their chins, but the shorter ones went down. The young ones tried to help the old folk, and as a punishment the overseers ordered the latter to beat the young. When they refused to obey they were cruelly beaten themselves. Two or three died on the spot and the survivors were ordered to bury them.5
The SS expressed their sadism not only in deeds but also in spirited singing that cynically welcomed the Jews as they arrived in the concentration camp: “Jews, go through the Red Sea / The waves close in, / And the world is happy. / Jews are drowned.”
The singing was followed by much laughter, which was followed by shouted orders to stand at attention. Though obedient to the SS commands, Shapow was filled with hatred for the guards who were as incapable of pity and empathy as serial killers. In such a threatening environment, Shapow’s skills for self-preservation remained on high alert; his luck did not fail him, though to look at him one would have thought he was not long for this world. In boxing terms, he had gone from being a light heavyweight to being a straw-weight. No longer 200 pounds of muscle, he was now 105 pounds of skin and bone. He looked as if a stiff blow from the butt of Nazi rifle would kill him. Yet he maintained his usual vigilance. He was tough minded and determined not to be a casualty of the Nazis. He would hold out until the Nazis were defeated. All the prisoners had learned that the Soviets and the Americans were winning the war. It was just a matter of time until they were liberated.
They heard the SS talking about the advancing Soviet army. Though the guards spoke guardedly about it, their words were whispered among inmates. The SS also discussed among themselves stories about the Soviets not taking prisoners, of seeking revenge for Stalin-grad and other atrocities. Indeed, wherever the Soviets encountered Nazi soldiers, they slaughtered them. Knowing what would happen to them if captured by the Soviets, the SS made plans to evacuate Stutthof. But the normally efficient SS took too long in planning their escape. By April 1945, the camp was nearly encircled by Soviet troops; the only means of escape was by boat. However, there was not sufficient room aboard the boats to transfer all the prisoners, regardless of how tightly they were packed onboard. Not wanting to leave witnesses behind who could testify to their atrocities, the SS marched hundreds of prisoners knee-deep into the sea and mowed them down with machine gun fire. The screams of victims could be heard throughout the day. When the slaughter was over, more than 25,000 of the 50,000 prisoners had been slaughtered. By time the Soviets arrived on May 9, 1945, the camp was nearly empty, yet a few prisoners had managed to hide from the evacuation organizers. Emerging from numerous hideouts in the camp came one hundred emaciated prisoners who greeted their liberators with tears and hugs. Some got down on their knees and kissed the hands of their liberators; others begged for a few morsels of food. The Soviet soldiers were shocked at the condition of the prisoners and several of the soldiers said they wished there had been SS available to be killed.
While those responsible for running the camp escaped from immediate execution by Soviet troops, they were not able to escape the hammer of postwar justice. There were six Stutthof trials, beginning on April 25, 1946. The first one was conducted in Gdansk (Danzig) at a Soviet-Polish court. The trial lasted until May 31. In the dock were 17 guards and kapos, including the camp commandant Johann Pauls, who stood on trial for crimes against humanity that included the murder of 85,000 prisoners. He plus 5 female guards and 5 kapos were all hanged. Only 2 kapos were found not guilty; the rest received prison terms of varying length.
One of the most notorious women to be tried for her role as overseer at Stutthof was Herta Bothe, a 6'3" guard who was known as the Sadist of Stutthof. She reportedly beat a Hungarian Jewish woman to death with a wooden block and shot two other inmates for no apparent reason. At trial, she claimed that she never killed anyone. She avoided being sentenced to death and instead was sentenced to ten years in prison. She did not serve her full sentence and was released on December 22, 1951, in an act of leniency. She died in 2000 at the age of seventy-nine, never having accepted responsibility for her acts. She merely claimed she had made a mistake by becoming a concentration camp guard rather than a hospital nurse.
A second trial was held from October 8 to October 31, 1947. There, 24 guards were found guilty of crimes against humanity. Of those, 10 were sentenced to death, and the remainder received prison terms ranging from three years to life. Five days later on November 5, a third trial commenced and after five days of hearings, an additional 19 former camp guards and officials were found guilty and sentenced to varying prison terms. One SS officer was acquitted and released. A fourth trial began on November 19, 1947, and after ten days of testimony, 26 guards and officials were found guilty and sentenced to prison for terms lasting from three months to life; 1 kapo was acquitted. At the fifth trial in 1949, Hans Jacobi, another Stutthof commandant, was found guilty and sentenced to three months in prison. SS–Rottenführer Emil Strehlau was found guilty and sentenced to death. The last trial took place in 1953, which concluded with a guilty verdict for Paul Bielawa, a prison guard from Third Company in Stutthof; he was sentenced to twelve years in prison.
The last trial of anyone who participated in the atrocities of Stutthof was conducted in 2019 when Bruno Dey from Hamburg was accused of contributing to the killings of 5,230 prisoners. However, he was tried in a juvenile court because he was seventeen years old at that time.
Though life for inmates at Stutthof was harrowing, Shapow emerged as one of the lucky ones. Having claimed to have been an engineer, he was transported to the Magdeburg camp, where he was told he would be assigned work that utilized his alleged engineering skills. A guard instructed him to clean oil from a pit beneath anti-aircraft guns. Shapow wondered why he would have needed engineering experience to do a janitorial job. But he performed the work reliably and never gave the SS reason to punish him. His diligence paid off, for he was soon sent to work in a munitions factory. There he worked six days a week for eighteen hours each day. On Sundays, he along with other Jewish prisoners had to clean latrines, toilets, and Nazi barracks. In addition, having cleared away dishes and utensils from the Nazi dining area, they then had to wash everything and mop the floors. On Mondays, work would resume at the munitions factory. It was a tedious routine but at least Shapow was alive, and when no one was around he stole scraps of food for himself and his fellow inmates. A clever and resourceful thief, he was never the subject of an investigation into the small quantities of missing food.
On April 16, 1945, as American artillery pounded the Magdeburg camp and as B-17 and B-24 bombers dropped their bombs in response to the commandant’s refusal to surrender, Shapow wondered if his luck might be ending. Thus far, he had survived the Nazis. Would he now be blasted to smithereens by Allied bombs and artillery fire? The prisoners prayed that they would be spared.
After twenty-four hours of unremitting bombardment, it seemed as if their prayers had been answered, for the Nazis finally agreed to surrender. Before doing so however, the SS wanted to kill off all the Jews before the surrender became official. Fearing that he would be killed, Shapow climbed over a barbed-wire fence, dropped to the ground, and hid in a sewer pipe with other escapees. After twelve hours in concealment, the escapees left their hideout and came face to face with a surprised SS officer. Before the officer could react, he was quickly overcome by several men, and Shapow delivered a powerful combination of punches that left the officer bloody and unconscious. The men removed the officer’s uniform, shirt, and boots. Shapow put on the officer’s boots and jacket. Another man took the officer’s pants, Another, the man’s hat and shirt. They then scrambled to a nearby abandoned factory where they hid in the basement. While bombs rained down from British and American bombers, the men commented on the irony of hiding in a factory where they had prepared anti-aircraft shells to shoot down Allied bombers. Again, they prayed that they would not be victims of friendly fire.
The bombardment soon ended, and the escapees breathed sighs of relief. Not long afterward, American troops arrived. As they passed by each structure, they yelled for Germans to emerge with their hands in the air. If they appeared with their weapons they would be shot. No questions asked. In addition to a few German laggards, the Jewish escapees came out of the basement into the sunlight. Because Shapow was partly dressed in an SS uniform, he was taken aside and accused of being a member of the SS. An American soldier demanded to see if he had an SS tattoo. He then wanted to know how long Shapow had been a guard at the camp. Shapow insisted he was not a Nazi, but a Jew, who stole the uniform. Americans had heard many such stories from captured SS and did not believe Shapow. Nevertheless, Shapow kept telling the Americans that he was Jewish. Over and over again, he repeated himself. “I’m Jewish, and this is part of a stolen uniform.” Frustrated by Shapow’s insistence on being identified as a Jew, an American soldier brought over one of his Jewish infantry buddies to ascertain Shapow’s genuine identity. The American Jew pulled a small prayer book from his knapsack and handed it to Shapow. “Read the first prayer in Hebrew.” Shapow did so, but before he could finish it, he was instructed to recite the balance of the prayer from memory. He did so in fluent Hebrew. The American soldier retrieved his prayer book and embraced Shapow. Shapow breathed the air as a free man for the first time in six years. He and the men with him were given new clothes and small quantities of food to fill their shrunken stomachs. Those who ate too much or too quickly experienced spasms of pain and vomited. Yet they were excited finally to have nourishing food that their bodies had craved.
Karl Rahm and Siegfried Seidle, the commandants who brutally controlled the Magdeburg camp, were eventually captured and tried for crimes against humanity. They were found guilty and executed. The men who had escaped the commandants’ wrath and sadism would have preferred the opportunity deliver their own personal justice but were appreciative that the two SS men were executed.
Following his release from Magdeburg, Shapow, a committed Zionist since his youth, made his way to what was then Palestine. There he was reunited with his father, who had left Riga before the war. One day while walking on the streets of Tel Aviv, Shapow collided with the man who had robbed him, his brother, and their mother of the money they had needed to escape from Riga prior to the Nazi invasion. This man had promised to deliver exit papers as well as train and boat tickets that would guarantee the Shapows’ safe escape from Riga. He had asked for a large sum of cash, all the money that Shapow’s mother had. She paid it. However, when she arrived at the point of departure, she was told that all of her documents were forgeries. Bereft, anxious, and fearful, she returned to her home and lived with debilitating stress. It was too much for her, and she died of a heart attack. Shapow immediately recognized the con man, grabbed him by his shirt collar, and slammed him against a wall. He then beat him into unconsciousness. It was an act of unsatisfactory revenge, for he could not bring his brothers and mother back to life. Shapow had wanted to kill the man but refrained from doing so. What good would it do? The man suffered a terrible beating for what he had done and that would have to be sufficient justice.
Shapow found a more satisfying outlet for his need to settle scores and win a more important battle for the Jews than beating up one con artist. Shapow wanted to destroy those who proposed driving the Jews into the sea; it would be his means of spitting in the face of the Nazis. He joined the Irgun and fought for Israeli independence. He was a brave soldier who killed a number of Arab soldiers and later was honored for his heroism and commitment to Jewish independence. One day, on leave from the army, Shapow met a beautiful petite woman named Hela. Shapow and Hela soon fell in love and married. Following Israel’s declaration of independence and recognition by President Truman, Shapow and Hela moved to the United States, first living in Chicago, then in Los Angeles. Shapow began a successful trucking business, and he and Hela raised their two children, Michael and Adina.
I asked Mike his impressions of his father (and he said his sister, Adina, agrees). He told me that his father’s
WW II experiences were life altering horrid events full of suffering and constantly looking death in the eye. Losing his family and friends in Riga ghetto affected him terribly and changed his whole life. Often having terrible nightmares and crying out in his sleep it was definitely PTSD. He was able to manage it so very well by having a zest for life and family. Boxing gave him an edge for survival in the camps and allowed him to steal food; the SS would look the other way because he was a great athlete and a great boxer; he became so popular in the camps that he was called “Nachman der Stärkere” (Nate the strong one). He always shared his loot with his mates which made it somewhat easier for them to survive. When dad walked into a room he had presence and when he spoke everyone would listen with admiration and respect. He was my hero, a humble gentle giant; adversity never scared him, for he always overcame it. He was our family’s security and an example to humanity. After all he went through and not allowing it to affect his day to day management of life is beyond me.6