Born Survivors (11 page)

They didn’t realise it, but that was to be the last time Rachel and her sisters ever saw their parents and younger siblings.

3

Anka

Anka’s identity card

‘Are you with child, lady?’ the infamous doctor of Auschwitz II-Birkenau asked Anka Nathanová in German when it was her turn to stand naked in front of him at
Appell
that October night in 1944
.

A well-endowed twenty-seven-year-old Czech who’d long been embarrassed by her breasts, she attempted to cover them with one arm while the other tried to shield her private parts. Looking around, stupefied, Anka could hardly believe she’d been foolish enough to volunteer to follow her husband Bernd to this place. After surviving three years in the Terezín ghetto one hour north of Prague, she’d naively imagined they would be settled somewhere similar. With the rest of her family already sent East, she thought it would be best to stay together
.

From the moment her train came to an agonisingly slow stop on its dedicated rail spur through Birkenau’s arched ‘Gate of Death’, she realised her mistake. Terezín was a paradise compared to this
.

As soon as the iron latches of the goods wagons were unlocked, the heavy wooden doors crashed open with an ominous clang. Bewildered men, women and children plunged out into the night, tripping and lurching over each other as if intoxicated
.

‘We came to hell, and we didn’t know why,’ Anka said. ‘We were disembarking but we didn’t know where … We were frightened but we didn’t know what of.’

Pulled down into that hungry mouth that devoured transport after transport into the most efficient of the Nazis’ industrialised killing centres, Anka was in shock from the outset. In the stark lights from the watchtowers all she could hear was the clamour of dogs barking, all she could see was men wielding cudgels shrieking ‘
Raus! Raus!’

Impeccably dressed German officers stood around like marble statues as their prisoner minions beat, pushed or frightened the pitiful crowd into submission. All were cruel and hostile and a cacophony of languages could be heard as guards bellowed orders, women and children wailed, and men protested in vain
.

With no time to comprehend what was happening, everyone who lurched off that train experienced the sudden horrible sensation of being in a place of acute danger as they were expertly separated into two long lines. With women and children on one side and men and older boys on another, the Jews of Terezín were pressed into a seething mass of humanity towards the SS officer whom Anka was to meet again later
.

The smirking doctor, in whose hands their fate lay, stood with his legs apart watching them approach. He was the only one who didn’t look straight through them as if they didn’t exist. Interrogating each rapidly and asking if there were any ‘
Zwillinge
’ or twins, he waved a riding crop indicating to which side they should go. ‘
Links
’ meant left and ‘
rechts
’ meant right; he sent at least two-thirds of the new arrivals, including men, women and children, left, but indicated that Anka should keep right
.

As she passed close by him she felt an almost palpable air of excitement in his bearing, as if selecting the choicest specimens from his latest delivery was the best part of his day. Beyond him, flames as high as houses blazed from the tops of two enormous chimneys. A double ring of barbed wire and electrified fencing precluded any possibility of escape. Hanging heavy in the air was a strange, sweet smell that no matter how hard she tried to breathe through her mouth, Anka was never quite able to expunge from her nostrils – or from her memory
.

Less than an hour after entering what she called this ‘Dante’s Inferno’, the ever diligent Mengele was standing in front of her again, this time on a sodden parade ground expecting her to admit that she was carrying a child
.

Avoiding eye contact and staring down at his knee-length boots, she noticed that they were so highly polished that she could see her own naked reflection in them. Pressing her eyes shut against her humiliation she, too, shook her head and told him, ‘
Nein,
’ before he sighed in apparent exasperation and moved on
.

Some of the happiest days of Anka Nathanová’s life were when she was a carefree young law student at the medieval Charles University in Prague just before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Strikingly beautiful and fluent in German, French and English with a smattering of Spanish, Italian and Russian, Anka revelled in
the rich life of one of Europe’s most vibrant, multi-cultural cities. Prague was prosperous and progressive with cafés, theatres and concert halls, and it attracted some of the world’s finest minds and greatest artistic talents.

Anka loved classical music, especially the works of the composer Dvořák, and concerts featuring Beethoven and Brahms. She especially liked the Czech opera
The Bartered Bride
. Popular with the boys, her greatest joy however was to be taken to the cinema where she lost herself in the stories of other lives and enjoyed films such as
The Good Earth
,
The 39 Steps
and
The Lady Vanishes
.

Anka was born Anna Kauderová on Friday, 20 April 1917, in the small fourteenth-century town of Třebechovice pod Orebem, some thirteen kilometres from the city of Hradec Králové in what was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Hradec Králové, whose name translates as ‘Castle of the Queen’, is one of the oldest settlements in the Czech Republic and lies at the fertile confluence of the Elbe and Orlice rivers. It is a city also known for its grand pianos, manufactured by Antonin Petrof.

Cheerful and – by her own admission – a little spoiled, Anka was the baby of the Kauder family by several years and utterly adored by her parents, Stanislav and Ida, her older sisters Zdena and Ruzena, and her brother Antonin, known as ‘Tonda’. Another brother, Jan, aged three, had died of meningitis two years before Anka’s birth and her mother never quite recovered from the loss.

The family owned Kauder & Frankl, a successful tannery and leather factory in Třebechovice pod Orebem. It was co-owned with a relative of Ida’s named Gustav Frankl. Anka was three years old when her family relocated from a flat in Hradec to a large apartment at one end of the factory.

Kauder & Frankel was a sprawling C-shaped construction on a large plot of land. A new building, its tannery had a tall brick chimney that Anka, as a little girl, was always afraid was going to topple over and kill them. Their apartment had a garden and a patio with a gazebo and an outdoor oven for summer dining. They grew
vegetables and tomatoes and plucked fruit from their own trees. The grounds were so big, in fact, that after her sister Ruzena married, she and her husband Tom Mautner hired renowned Prague architect Kurt Spielmann to design and build them a Bauhaus-style villa on the plot, where they lived happily for many years with their infant son Peter.

An avid reader, Anka would slip away into the family garden to devour her favourite Latin books and the classics, which she read in various languages. She shared her passion for reading with her brother Tonda, who was kind to his little sister and took her everywhere with him, especially to the football matches he was such a fan of and always returned from hoarse. ‘We had a marvellous relationship,’ she said. ‘He had a car and he took me on outings. Whenever we went dancing and my mother didn’t feel like going, he came with me and was always in the background and never intruded. I was taken care of because I had my brother with me.’

Anka’s mother Ida was unusual for her generation in that she worked behind the till in the family factory. A warm, chatty woman, she thrived on gossip shared with her largely female customers, who enjoyed confiding in her. With the matriarch at work every day, the family employed several staff including a maid, a cook, a gardener and a washerwoman. Ida made sure that they kept a clean house and took good care of the children.

‘My mother would have done anything for me,’ Anka said. ‘We had a beautiful relationship. Only the best was just good enough for us at home.’

Athletic, healthy and a strong swimmer, Anka became the schools junior backstroke champion for Czechoslovakia and swam in the local river – occasionally nude. Naturally bright, she was raised to think for herself and do as she pleased. At eleven years of age she left her idyllic childhood home to become one of the few Jews to attend the Girls Lyceum in Hradec Králové. She went on to do well at the Gymnasium where she took extra classes in Latin, German and English. ‘I lived in a
pension
in Hradec and went to the
Gymnasium and I was as happy as a lark. I had a lot of boyfriends and went dancing and to parties and everything went smoothly.’ Anka also learned to play the piano and to dance, as well as taking part in sports such as tennis and rowing.

Her father’s factory manufactured handbags and other goods for the mass market, and although Anka and her sisters often spurned his offers of free bags because they thought them too old-fashioned, she was proud of the new leather satchel she was given every few years – which was big enough for her school atlas.

Stanislav Kauder, who was forty-seven when Anka was born, was ‘an unbeliever’ and a committed Czech. He did not agree with the concept of Zionism and was intensely patriotic. Jewish by birth, the family was not at all observant and considered themselves freethinkers. ‘I was brought up without any religion whatsoever,’ Anka said. ‘I went to school in a very small place where there were Jewish children and a Jewish teacher came sporadically to teach us about history, but I never learned how to read Hebrew and in my parents’ house kosher wasn’t kept.’ In defiance of tradition, the family frequently enjoyed the Czech national dish – roast pork with sauerkraut and dumplings – even on the Sabbath. And Anka’s brother Tonda once ruined his chances of marrying an eligible young Jewess by lighting his cigarette from the family menorah as her parents looked on, appalled.

Stanislav loved his children but was a self-contained man who rarely spoke to them. As was the custom, he let his wife take charge of the children’s upbringing. He adored his wife, whom Anka described as ‘an angel’. Ida Kauderová was slightly more observant than her husband and was driven ten miles to the synagogue in Hradec Králové on the highest Jewish holidays. It was, however, more out of ‘piety for her parents’ and to please her large family – she was one of twelve children. The best part, she always said, was to go to the local Grand Hotel afterwards with one of her sisters for coffee and cake. And she never forced her religion on her children.

‘We happened to be Jewish and that was that,’ said Anka. ‘It didn’t hinder me in any respect.’

There were only a handful of Jewish families in Třebechovice but she experienced no anti-Semitism amongst her friends and could do pretty much as she pleased.

As the political situation in Europe began to worsen, those around Anka became increasingly nervous. When her German-speaking mother heard Adolf Hitler’s inflammatory speeches on the radio, the normally optimistic woman became overwhelmed with fear and insisted to any who’d listen that no good would come of him.

Like so many of her friends, though, Anka was blasé almost to the point of ignorance and felt that they lived too far away to be directly affected by Nazi ideology. ‘We never thought anything would happen to us. We felt invincible,’ she said. She was the first of her family to go to university, something that made her parents very proud, especially her mother Ida, who was bilingual and a frustrated academic especially fascinated by history.

Anka couldn’t wait to move to Prague, which was two hours away by train. It was a city she knew well, as she would stay there as often as possible with her aunt Frieda, a milliner who had an apartment on Wenceslas Square. Whilst studying at Charles University, Anka lived there too.

Even after she moved to the city in 1936, she continued to remain largely immune to growing concerns about Hitler. Funded by an allowance from her father, she was on holiday skiing in the Austrian Tyrol with friends in March 1938 when the
Anschluss
happened. Overnight, Austria was in the hands of the Nazis and Czechoslovakia was surrounded. Red flags bearing
Hakenkreuze
or swastikas appeared on the streets of Salzburg, and Anka watched in amazement as Austrians greeted Hitler as a hero while the country’s Jews became outcasts. This first direct contact with the Nazis was ‘something that we couldn’t grasp’. She added that although she personally didn’t see any attacks on Jews, ‘it was in the air somehow’.

Still, she didn’t think that the German Chancellor with the funny moustache (whose birthday she happened to share) would directly affect her gilded life. Only when her first serious boyfriend, Leo Wildman, announced that he’d decided to move to England to join the British Army did she begin to reconsider. Leo’s father had already been arrested and imprisoned as a subversive and his family feared for the future. She was sad to see Leo go and waved him off at the railway station. Just as the train departed, his father – who’d just been released from prison – ran up the platform to say goodbye to his son, but he was too late.