Dr. John Mann's journey of remembrance brought him at last to the Wall of Death at Auschwitz, a forbidding place, pocked and weathered, a dead-end between two grim barracks, a place where thousands died.

He put on his yarmulke, walked alone to the wall and said the prayer for the dead, El Male Rahamim, "God full of compassion." He prayed for his father.

Prisoners who had escaped, or broken the Kafkaesque regulations of the Auschwitz death camp, or just displeased the guards, were brought naked to this killing place for summary execution.

Mann's father, Aron Mankowski, was shot before this wall sometime in the night hours of June 18 and 19, 1942.

Mann arrived at this haunted place June 11, just about a week before the 56th anniversary of his father's death. He wept as he recited the prayer that has been offered for the Jewish dead after pogroms and massacres in Eastern Europe since the time of the Crusades. He wept again as he wrote in the diary he kept of this voyage of the heart. He relates what he was told at Auschwitz.

"[The prisoner] was undressed completely and walked through the iron gate, down three steps into the death courtyard. The courtyard is a rectangular area between the women's Barracks and Barracks 11. The windows of the women's Barracks were covered so that the women could not watch the execution.

"At the end of the courtyard there is a stark black wall where a prisoner stood before being shot in the back of the neck at point blank range by a German officer."

"I think that's exactly what happened to my father," Mann says, discussing his trip during a conversation at his handsome home on Springlake Way. He's an associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University and practices internal medicine at the Hopkins Green Spring Station campus.

At the start of his journey, Mann had written in his diary: "I do not know what to expect. The exact purpose is unclear to me."

He hoped at least to bring back some understanding of their heritage to his daughters, Gilda and Stacie. The idea of making sense of the past had grown stronger over the last few years.

Two years ago, Mann and his wife, Risa, a pathologist who is a professor of oncology at Hopkins, had returned to the small French village where he and his brother, Oscar, their mother, Hindel, and an uncle, aunt and cousins survived the German occupation of France -- aided by peasant farmers and protected by the underground resistance movement.

This summer, he walked the streets in the town of Dombrowitz, where his mother had lived until she was 22, the town from which a host of his uncles and aunts and cousins were transported to their deaths. They are pictured in a Holocaust memorial book about Dombrowitz, a somber and doomed family of East European Jews.

He continued his pilgrimage to the cul de sac where his father was killed. Memorial flowers now bloom at the foot of the shooting wall; beyond the wall, trees grow green in June.

"I need to rediscover my father," Mann's diary reads. "I think that my only memory of my father is seeing him getting dressed on the day he was arrested."

Earliest memories

He would have been about 5 years old that day. He was born in November 1936 in Paris. His father and mother had left Poland in the early 1930s and were married in Paris. His older brother Oscar was born there in 1934.

"I don't think I had ever seen my father in his underwear before," he says. "I remember seeing a very pale man getting dressed."

The family lived then in an apartment in Paris. His father was a businessman who sold clothes in the markets of suburban villages. Their world came apart when the Germans invaded France in May 1940. Paris fell in June.

"My earliest recollection," Mann says, "is that my father had a truck and that we all left Paris and went somewhere trying to get away from the Germans. But unfortunately we kept getting news from Paris that everything was great. So we went back.

"My mother says we kept getting letters: 'The Germans are fine. Business is good. Life is normal.' "

Back in Paris, the Germans made everyone register, he recalls. "We wore the yellow star. In late 1941, they were arresting men, presumably to go to labor camps. My father must have been suspicious because he, and the man we were subletting from, went to hide on the roof.

"Unfortunately the concierge told the French police that they were there. My father was arrested."

He never saw his father again.

To Auschwitz

Aron Mankowski was taken to Drancy, the infamous deportation center for most of the Jews of Paris. Mann learned from the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross that his father arrived in Auschwitz on March 27, 1942. He was shot less than three months later.

Mann believes he knows the name of the judge who condemned his father: Rudolf Milner. Milner was arrested after the war. He was judged not guilty of war crimes, Mann learned, because he was a "legal judge" following the laws of the time.

After his father's arrest, Mann, his brother and their mother fled south from Occupied France along with his mother's brother and his family. From 1942 to 1945, they lived in a village called Le Bosc, near the town of Saint-Antonin, on the southwest edge of )) the rugged plateaus of the Massif Central.

"As opposed to what happened to us in Paris," Mann says, "it was a very positive experience, because I'm sure everybody in the village knew there were seven Jewish people living there. They knew and yet no one said a thing. And yet no one turned us in.

"And it was a considerable danger to them. French people were being shot for hiding Jews. The priest was terrific. The mayor of Saint-Antonin was a physician and a leader of the underground. After the war, they named a street after him, Paul Benet."

His family lived in a typical French peasant home. Mann and his wife found it virtually unchanged when they returned there two ++ years ago. He remembered the pungent smell of sheep from when he first arrived in the village as a boy of 5. And he found a member of the family that sheltered them who remembered playing with Oscar and "Jojo," his nickname then.

He and his brother had attended a one-room French school. He remembers that a grocery store next to the church had the only phone in town.

"When the Germans would leave the city to go looking around," he says, "they would call the grocery store and warn us to get out."

His mother, who is now 90, told him that once a German patrol came through unannounced and a young German officer picked up the blond, curly-haired Jojo Mann.

"My mother must have been dying," he says.

"The people in the village were fantastic and life was good there," Mann remembers. "This is a part of France that is very fruitful. And I remember the gathering of the grapes, the vendange, and there was an extraordinary feast.

"I remember this as a very happy time," he says. "I don't think I knew enough to be afraid."

After the war

The family learned of his father's death only when they returned to Paris after the liberation. In another of those strange ironies of World War II, they got their old apartment back; even the furniture was intact. His mother, then 38, resumed his father's business. They even recovered his truck, which had been

requisitioned by the French army and perhaps driven as far as Poland.

From the age of 11 or 12 on he and his brother helped out with the business. Today Mann may be the only prominent Baltimore physician who spent his teen-age years selling clothing in the Paris suburbs.

pTC "We sold shirts, pants, suits, overcoats, but primarily blue work coats," he says. "We didn't sell ties, socks, underwear. They were considered a different kind of business."

In 1953, his brother Oscar came to America leaving the 16-year-old John in charge of the marketplace stalls. Two years later, Mann followed his brother to America. During the Korean War, Oscar joined the U.S. Army, earned his U.S. citizenship and was able to bring their mother over, too.

Mann got a job selling souvenirs at National Airport, soon becoming a sales manager. And he enrolled at George Washington University. Both brothers applied at Georgetown University Medical School. A cousin was a good friend of the priest who was dean at Georgetown, and arranged an interview.

"He asked a few questions and he said, 'You're in,' " Mann says, still marveling. "They were different days."

His brother went first; Mann took another year at George Washington. They both worked full-time and both did well at Georgetown. His brother now has a big practice in Washington. Mann came here to Johns Hopkins.

"I'm very proud of the fact I worked full-time and finished number one in my class," Mann says.

Ancestral home

In June, the successful doctor and fatherless son searched for a past that is all but lost in the town where his mother was born.

He found little trace of the Jewish life that had flourished there for generations. Before the Nazis arrived, 7,000 people lived in Polish Dombrowitz, half of them Jews. Now Dombrowitz is in Ukraine, the population is 11,000, and Mann thinks there are perhaps 10 Jews living there. Two remnants of the five pre-war synagogues survive. One is an empty building; the other houses a beauty parlor.

He went to the cemetery where his grandfather was buried. All but a handful of the gravestones were gone. He found a single simple stone monument marking two mass graves of at least 1,800 Jews shot by the Germans in 1941. Many were his relatives.

He said kaddish, the congregational prayer of mourning, with the small entourage that accompanied him.

And he wrote in his diary words he recalled from a forgotten author about Jewish life in Eastern Europe:

"It did not die, but it did not survive."

Pub Date: 8/06/98