Born Survivors (17 page)

Threatened with death unless they complied, the prisoners rehearsed what to do, where to be and how to behave. They were instructed to wear their best clothes and make sure they were well groomed. Deliveries of fresh vegetables and newly baked bread were carefully orchestrated and timed. The Red Cross visit took place on 23 June 1944.

The Ministry of Propaganda of the Third Reich, under the direction of Joseph Goebbels, had the six-hour visit filmed and added to other stage-managed images intended to be broadcast around the world in a film titled
Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt
(The Führer Gives the Jews a City). The carefully edited clips, set to upbeat music such as Offenbach’s ‘Infernal Galop’, the most popular music for the Parisian can-can, captured images of healthy-looking young men and women working outside the ghetto in forges, potteries or art studios. They were shown making handbags, sewing or doing woodwork, before walking arm in arm back to the ghetto to enjoy leisure activities such as reading, knitting, playing cards, or attending recitals and lectures. There were shots of an energetic football match, scenes of old couples chatting on park benches, and sun-tanned children eating bread thickly smeared with butter – the first they’d seen in years.

Facetiously, communal showers were shown with naked men soaping themselves down. Men, women and children were seen watering the commandant’s vegetables in the walled garden. Anka and Bernd were two of many Jews filmed sitting in a Viennese-style
Kaffeehaus
drinking ‘coffee’. As the ciné cameras whirred, they did as they were told, smiling into the lens and sipping from mugs filled with oily water served by smiling waitresses in white aprons. In what proved to be the recording of a remarkable moment in history, Red Cross officials were also filmed sitting alongside senior SS officers from Berlin enjoying Verdi’s
Requiem –
performed by a greatly reduced choir.

Everyone in the ghetto prayed that their visitors would see beyond the charade, ask probing questions or demand to divert from their designated route. It wasn’t to be. The event was a triumph for the Nazis. Dr Maurice Rossel, the head of the International Red Cross delegation, stated in his report, ‘In general, nobody who has arrived here will be deported any further.’ Effectively giving the Nazis an alibi against all charges of mass murder, he and his colleagues announced that the Jewish quarters were ‘relatively good’
and ‘comfortable’ with rugs and carpets. They said that there was nourishment, clothing, a postal service and culture, and that the youth homes were of a ‘remarkable educational value’. He concluded: ‘We were extraordinarily amazed to find in the ghetto a town which lives almost a normal life. We had expected to find worse.’ He stated that his report would be ‘a relief to many’.

The inmates knew nothing of the Red Cross report and hoped that the outside world would finally come to know of their existence. No matter how much the ghetto had been embellished, surely the delegates could see that this was still a prison occupying a square kilometre that had been cruelly severed from the rest of the world?

After the visit everything attractive or pleasurable that had been placed in the ghetto was destroyed, dismantled or taken away. Terezín and its inmates were returned to their former dilapidated state and even had their rations cut for two weeks because of the ‘extra’ food and luxuries they’d been allowed. Smiling children who’d been filmed on rocking horses or in theatrical productions were among 5,000 deported to Auschwitz in the days after the filming ended. They included Verdi maestro Rafael Schächter, along with the Jewish producer of the propaganda movie, and Anka’s friend the conductor Karel Ančerl and his family. Schächter – who’d brought hope to thousands and played the last music many of them would ever hear – was eventually killed after surviving three camps. Ančerl survived but his wife and child didn’t.

The Czech police who guarded Terezín continued to smuggle in reports from outside whenever they could, and informed the delighted prisoners that the Allies had landed at Normandy and were moving across France. ‘The news spread like the wind and we thought then that we had won!’ Anka said. ‘And we told each other that we’d be home in a month.’ Quite deliberately, she and Bernd decided to try for another baby – ‘mad as we were’. She added, ‘That first pregnancy wasn’t planned, but it happened. My second pregnancy was planned because we thought, “Now we have been
here three years … how long can it still take?”’ Her reasoning was that if they arrived back in Prague with a baby they’d manage somehow, but if they didn’t then they would have to wait until they had money and jobs, and that would take so much time they might never do it.

With numerous transports still taking people East, some of the attics in the barracks suddenly became empty, so Bernd build a secret compartment in what he called the ‘hay loft’ of one of the buildings where he and his wife could meet. These became known in the ghetto as
kumbalek
or cubbyholes. Later, Bernd extended the space to a private one-room apartment in which they could live. ‘We adapted it for our use very prettily,’ Anka said.

There was always the risk that the Germans would make one of their periodic raids and find them, but Bernd and Anka took their chances. France had been all but liberated, including Paris, and the Allies were embarking on an airborne assault on the Netherlands. The summer of 1944 was long and hot, and while many of those around them – especially the old – died from poor sanitation, disease and starvation, Anka and Bernd were happy in their stolen moments of togetherness.

It was difficult for Anka to know if she was pregnant or not, because her previous pregnancy, coupled with her illness and general lack of nutrition, had interfered with her menstrual cycle. The women called it ‘prison syndrome’ and it affected many in captivity. She still had no idea if she was expecting a baby when in the autumn of 1944 – as the Allies drew ever closer and entire German divisions were forced to surrender – the Nazis decided to deport most of the inhabitants of Terezín.

Fearing a rebellion, and in an act of calculated planning, the Germans first demanded the transportation of the most able-bodied men to a new camp ‘somewhere near Dresden’ in Germany. They declared that for the next four weeks another thousand people would be sent every other day. All the promises to the pioneers that they would be saved proved worthless as Bernd received one of the
dreaded pink slips ordering him to report for a new
Aufbaukommando
. When the elders complained to the Germans that the pioneers had been promised immunity, they were told that all such exemptions had been ‘abolished’.

Under the regulations of the ghetto, Bernd had to surrender his ration card so that his food supply would be cut off and he was expected to report for deportation within twenty-four hours. ‘There was no warning that he was going away,’ Anka said. ‘Suddenly an order came for all men to leave for a different ghetto. We thought it would be similar to Terezín, somewhere in Germany. It might be worse but it would still be a sort of ghetto … One didn’t associate it with any catastrophe or horror.’

Nevertheless Anka fought to control her emotions once more as she helped Bernd pack a few belongings for his unknown destination. The men were assembled in one of the courtyards in the barracks and their loved ones allowed to take bitter leave of each other. After she hugged and kissed him goodbye, they promised to see each other again soon. Without knowing that his wife was pregnant, Bernd was then marched to the rail spur on the fringes of the camp and loaded onto a crowded passenger train. It was 28 September 1944, just short of three years since he’d been sent to Terezín.

Without his comforting presence, the days melded into one for Anka. Despondent, she lived in a world of sorrow, hunger and dread. With so many prisoners deported and the demands of the Nazi war machine ever more persistent, she was transferred to a factory within the ghetto where she was put to work cutting strips of processed mica laminate for aircraft spark plugs. ‘They called it
Glimmer
and it came in small transparent platelets. We used very sharp knives to split it into thin layers.’ This
Glimmer spalten
was considered a vital product for the Luftwaffe and safeguarded many from the transports, including Anka.

Desperately lonely and miserable in her new job, in which she could no longer acquire extra rations for herself and her one remaining relative, her blind father-in-law, Anka wondered how she
would manage. Then the Nazis announced that they needed a thousand more people to work in the new German labour camp. Her friend Mitzka’s name appeared on the list, along with many other friends from Prague who’d also been pioneers. Anka was exempted because of the war work to which she’d been assigned. To quell the pervasive unrest, the German high command made a further announcement that anyone could volunteer to follow their friends and family to the new camp near Dresden if they wanted to. They encouraged the hope that to be sent for useful employment would give them a guarantee that they’d be saved.

Anka’s heart leapt at the news and her decision to follow Bernd was sealed. ‘By then I knew I was pregnant, but my husband didn’t know it … Totally mad.’ She said that, rightly or wrongly, she thought that as she had survived with Bernd in Terezín, so then could she exist in some other place, even if it was worse. She still had no idea where he was or what the conditions might be like, but she was determined to be with him regardless. ‘Germany was, at least, a civilised country where one could live,’ she thought, describing her decision to volunteer as ‘the biggest foolishness of my life’. She and Bernd had survived three years together; they had lost their son and most of their family. She didn’t believe that anything worse could happen. She prayed that they’d be reunited straight away and then put to work somewhere she might even see her parents and sisters, and that they could all remain together until the war was over.

She also feared that if she waited, she might be transported somewhere else and never find them again. She packed up her few belongings – this time with a far more practical mind than when she’d arrived in Terezín three years earlier carrying a box of doughnuts – helped by a friend who was staying behind. ‘I hadn’t told anyone I was pregnant,’ Anka said, ‘but when I packed a dress someone had made for my first pregnancy she said, “Why do you take this with you?” and I didn’t answer. She said, “Oh God, you are pregnant!” and she practically fainted. She said, “Are you mad? Why would you go of your own free will?”’

A few days later, on Sunday, 1 October 1944 – not long after American troops had reached the Siegfried Line in western Germany – Anka left Terezín for good. Climbing up into crowded third-class passenger carriages, she, Mitzka and her friends were packed in ‘like sardines’. As the doors were locked behind them and the blinds pulled down, the train gave a piercing whistle before moving off. Anka tried not to panic and hoped that the journey taking her to her husband would not be too long.

Her prayers were answered in as much as she did follow Bernd, just as she’d hoped. Cruelly, their train even pulled into Dresden station, which they thought meant that they’d arrived. Relieved, she and the others expected to be let out there to join the new camp and looked forward to being reunited with their loved ones. Exhausted, hungry and dehydrated, they waited and waited in the locked train until it suddenly moved off again. To their horror, the next station they stopped at was Bautzen, sixty kilometres east of Dresden. And that was when they knew that they’d been lied to. ‘Slowly but surely it dawned on us where we were heading,’ she said, describing seeing Polish station names as ‘a bad moment’ as their train clanked morosely on.

‘Going East really meant only one place, which we knew nothing about but its name – Auschwitz. It was a camp: a dreadful camp. But we didn’t know anything more about it.’

Anka couldn’t possibly have known, but had baby Dan lived, and had she arrived with him in her arms on the infamous
Rampe
of Auschwitz II-Birkenau on that Sunday in October, she and he would almost certainly have been sent straight to the gas chambers. Instead, she was carrying a new life in her belly, its tiny heart beating against all the odds.

No stranger to hiding a pregnancy, none but Anka knew she was with child again as – after two days – the train doors were unlocked and she came face to face not with the smiling face of Bernd but with what appeared to her to be hell on earth.

4

Auschwitz II-Birkenau

Priska

In the unearthly chaos that followed Priska’s arrival at the second of the three vast camps of mass extermination known collectively as Auschwitz, the latest consignment from Slovakia were snapped at by hounds and yelled at by striped prisoner functionaries known as
Kapos
as they were pulled violently from the wagons. A grim phalanx of SS sentries stood a little to one side, their weapons raised. ‘We didn’t even know what Auschwitz was,’ she said, ‘but we knew what it was the minute we jumped down off that train.’

Stunned into silence by a surreal world of high-voltage barbed wire fences, watchtowers manned by soldiers armed with machine guns, and the sweeping beams of searchlights, she and Tibor found themselves immediately assailed on all sides by aggression and cruelty as whips cracked and commands were barked at them – ‘
Alle heraus!
[Everyone out!] Hurry! Leave your luggage!
Schnell!
’

Young and old, equally defenceless, poured from the train and were shoved into closely patrolled lines. Swiftly separated from each other while they were still reeling from the confusion, their precious suitcases lay abandoned in muddy puddles. Some of the
women became hysterical as they tried to cling to their loved ones or shield their children from the hostile hands of strangers.

Priska was wrenched from Tibor’s arms and almost thrown to the ground, but Edita managed to catch her before she fell. Crying out and looking around for him desperately, she could no longer see her young husband as he was swallowed up in the swarm of people crowding all around her. Stumbling forward, she suddenly came face to face with the senior SS captain she would later learn was called Mengele. To her, though, he was just another Nazi officer with cold, impersonal eyes.