Born Survivors (18 page)

Dr Josef Mengele

Wearing the smile that seemed permanently fixed to his pale face, Mengele asked her, ‘What’s the matter, pretty one?’

Straightening up, Priska lifted her chin and replied defiantly, ‘Nothing in this world.’

‘Show me your teeth,’ Mengele instructed.

She hesitated for an instant but then dropped her jaw.

‘
Arbeiten!
’ (Work!) he commanded sharply.

Rough hands pushed her towards a line on the right. Amid the vast sea of suffering she found herself drowning in, no one was allowed to stop or look back. Tibor had vanished in the waves of bewildered humans that stretched for hundreds of metres, and she wasn’t even certain if Edita had been able to follow her.

Wielding batons and yelling ‘
Schneller!
’ (Faster!), the
Kapos
and the uniformed SS guards marched the women five abreast through a corridor of sticky mud lined with deep ditches and ringed with high barbed-wire fences. Taken to a remote brick building on the periphery of the camp, they were squeezed into a long room with windows and immediately ordered to strip naked in order to be ‘disinfected’.

Stunned, many of these women who’d never been seen undressed even by their husbands, faltered. If any were slow to disrobe or begged for something to cover their nakedness they were felled with blows until they complied. Their discarded clothes, watches, money and jewellery were quickly piled into mounds to be sorted in the commercial heart of Auschwitz – a warehouse named
Kanada
after the country rich in natural resources. There, the
Kanadakommando
of approximately a thousand mostly female Jewish prisoners were closely supervised as they waded through a gigantic jumble of clothing up to three storeys high.

It was their task to put aside any warm or good-quality clothing to be steamed, disinfected and sent to the Reich. They had to search seams and linings for gold, banknotes, precious stones or jewellery. Sifting through the pockets of the doomed, they came across lovingly preserved photographs of family celebrations and loved ones, which were thrown into a pile to be burned (although some were bravely saved).

Once the new arrivals were completely naked, they were hurried along a corridor to a small room where skilled fingers examined mouths and other orifices for hidden gold or gems. Those who’d
feared the loss of everything they owned had their dentists hide diamonds in their fillings. Others secreted jewels in their vaginas. Most were found. Once thoroughly checked, the women were then fed like sheep to the shearers who wielded scissors and electric clippers to hurriedly shave off all their hair.

The women hung their heads and sobbed as their precious locks – once so carefully tended and curled – were swept away to be collected in large sacks. Their hair had been their crowning glory and an integral symbol of their femininity, so when their fingertips gingerly explored their unaccustomed baldness they felt truly degraded and enslaved. Then they were pushed on to the next guard to stand on little stools and have their underarm and pubic hair removed, although in the rush to process them not all of the women, including Priska, had everything shaved off.

Designed as a measure to identify them immediately as prisoners should they escape, and to reduce the risk of lice, this shaving with semi-blunt razors was the most shocking element of the process of dehumanisation that the women from Slovakia were now locked into. Stripped of their clothes, their hair, their identities and their dignity, they were often left with painful nicks, and with scalps that hadn’t been completely shaved and sprouted irregular strands. Friends and relatives huddled together and gripped each other in tight embraces, afraid to lose physical contact because they suddenly all looked the same and ‘no longer human’.

Since there were too many of them to be further examined inside the building, the women were bullied outside onto a large open parade ground for their first
Appell
and another inspection by Mengele, the chief physician of the women’s camp at Birkenau. The shock of the cool air on their naked heads and bodies made them gasp. Unable to look each other in the eye, they were lined up in rows of five to be scrutinised, their degradation complete. Cringing in the mud, the women felt that the world had tilted on its axis as the life they’d once known had been snatched from them for ever.

Where were their loved ones, gobbled up by the night? What had
happened to their once carefree existence? In the madness and mayhem of Auschwitz, and with that infernal smell ever lingering in her nostrils, Priska wasn’t the only one who felt on the brink of lunacy.

As Dr Mengele approached, she watched as he pulled women from their rows if they looked unwell or had any obvious scars or injuries. Sometimes he seemed to select them just because he didn’t like their faces. Having overheard him addressing several prisoners before her, she knew that he would ask if she was pregnant. Trying to appear outwardly dignified, inwardly she had never felt more humiliated or afraid.

Then suddenly he stood before her smiling, so close that she could smell his aftershave. She lifted her head. Incongruously handsome in his uniform, Mengele looked her up and down appreciatively, seemingly impressed at how healthy she was compared with the scores of scrawny women around her, many of whom were all bones and boils.

Yet Priska knew she couldn’t trust him. She and Tibor had been conveyed to the camp like animals. They’d been denied water and food, screamed at, beaten. Having been sundered from the only man she’d ever loved, she had then been deprived of all dignity and shown nothing but contempt. If Hitler truly intended to keep his promise to make Europe
Judenrein
– pure of all Jews – then that would surely mean that the unborn child of a Jew wouldn’t be spared either.

As Mengele studied her with unblinking eyes, there was just a fraction of a second to decide. But in the small space after he’d asked her in German if she was pregnant, Priska looked back at him directly.

‘
Nein
,’ she replied, unwilling to admit to any further mastery of the language that he and his cohorts arrogantly assumed they all understood. Her heart beat wildly beneath her ribcage. She knew that if she was later exposed – as she undoubtedly would be if she remained a prisoner – then the consequences could be severe. After
a pause, though, the physician with a PhD in anthropology who harboured deep-rooted ambitions to become a great scientist, passed nonchalantly to the woman next in line.

Once that first
Appell
was over, Priska and the rest of the women were herded back into the brand-new
Sauna
with its many windows and efficient T-shaped layout, specially designed to process the small percentage of prisoners earmarked for labour. Still naked, they were taken to a concrete shower room where the
Kapos
, who gestured violently and spoke roughly in order to curry favour with their watching masters, harassed them into standing under a complex grid of copper piping and large metal showerheads. There was an agonising delay while they waited, clustered barefoot on the slippery floor.

The showers at the Sauna, Birkenau

All of a sudden steaming hot water gushed onto them from above as they cried out in shock and disbelief. They threw back their heads and opened their mouths to try to slake their thirst, but the
water in Birkenau wasn’t fit to drink and they quickly spat out the salty, contaminated liquid. There was no soap or towels but the
Kapos
sprayed their heads and underarms with a stinging disinfectant that found its way into every sore and nick. The water was cold and then hot and came in spurts, but the women did what they could to wash the stink of fear from their skin.

Sopping wet, they were hurried by the continually yelling guards into another room where they were given a few moments to dry off. Marched along a parallel corridor to the one they’d entered by, they were pushed into a space almost as large as the undressing hall, and then into a small latrine without a door located off to one side.

Commanded to squat over holes in the floor five at a time, the women recoiled at the stench of ammonia that rose from the gulley below. Prodded with batons and without any paper, few were able to perform before they were hurried out again. Frightened and confused, they were pointed to the door of another small room off the main hall in which there was a huge pile of discarded clothes. As each woman entered, some inmates threw her an item or two of leftover clothing.

Making no eye contact and sifting through the absurdly mismatched garments with grubby fingers, those whose choices could mean the difference between life and death tossed Priska some footwear from a random pile of shoes and a baggy coat dress of sturdy black material, for which she was eternally grateful. Many of her less fortunate companions were handed incongruous items such as dresses that were far too small, items of male underwear, or even full-length satin gowns. The sartorial effect might have been amusing if they’d been anywhere else. Instead, they pulled their ridiculous prison garb over damp skin and stared at each other with a growing sense of foreboding.

The women from Sered’ were then frog-marched – five abreast – through an exit door across another parade ground and then pushed along a corridor of barbed wire that led to another building. Still on
the fringes of the female camp, it was known as the
Durchs
(transit) block or as ‘Lager C’, where row upon row of wooden huts or barracks, each thirty metres by ten, housed thousands of frightened women.

The geography of death at whose centre Priska found herself was an immense network of three camps and the deadly hub of more than forty satellite camps. Not far from Oświęcim, the remote southern Polish town that the Nazis renamed Auschwitz, this place was to become the most potent symbol of the Third Reich’s decision to commit assembly-line genocide. Originally an Austro-Hungarian cavalry garrison which was later taken over by the Polish army, Auschwitz I was initially intended to be a ‘Class 1’ prison camp for mostly Polish Jewish and non-Jewish criminal and political inmates. In May 1940 it was officially designated a concentration and
Vernichtungslager
(destruction or extermination camp) under the authority of the commandant, SS captain Rudolf Höss, who had previously served at Sachsenhausen and Dachau.

The wooden accommodation blocks at Auschwitz II-Birkenau

Auschwitz II-Birkenau, built early in 1941 by Soviet prisoners-of-war, of whom it was to hold 100,000 (most of that number later died), was three and a half kilometres away on the site of a former village named Brzezinka, renamed by the Germans Birkenau, which means ‘birch trees’. On a marshy plain at the confluence of two rivers, the spot was chosen for its central location within the Reich and its proximity to a major rail network.

As soon as the Nazis decided to expand their operations in Poland, the 1,200 hapless villagers of Brzezinka were ordered to abandon their homes, which were then razed to the ground. Thousands more were evacuated to create a no-man’s-land of twenty square kilometres where the camp could remain hidden away from the rest of the world. Bricks from the houses were used to build the camp’s arched gatehouse, guards’ quarters, and a few early prisoner blocks. As more blocks were needed, so they were made of local wood. Birkenau was reclassified as a concentration camp in March 1942.