Born Survivors (21 page)

The miracle of seeing Tibor that day and knowing that he was still breathing was enough to lift Priska’s spirits. The thought that she might see him again became a tremendous solace to her. His words of encouragement echoed in her ears and, as she lay sandwiched between Edita and the other women on her bunk that night, she began to feel even more passionate about saving her child. Surely the war would be over by the time little Hanka or Miško was born?

Shortly before she and Tibor had been deported, the news bulletins
they’d been secretly following on a friend’s wireless had assured them the tide was turning against the Germans. France was free and the joint Soviet and American forces were closing in. It could only be a matter of weeks before they were liberated and then she, Tiborko and their unborn son or daughter could return to their home and pick up their cruelly interrupted lives. Pressing her palms flat against her belly she silently worked out when her baby would be born. ‘I got pregnant on 13 June 1944, so I knew exactly when nine months would be up,’ she said.

Her due date was 12 April 1945. Setting that day firmly in her mind, Priska decided there and then that – no matter what – she would protect the baby she carried and keep herself alive at least until he or she was born. Having been able to remain relatively unscathed in Bratislava for the first five years of the war, she was healthy and strong. She had a husband who was alive and who loved her and was counting on their survival.

She had promised him that they would make it – and so they would.

It was a dream Priska clung to until the grey dawn on or about 10 October 1944, approximately two weeks after her arrival in Auschwitz II-Birkenau, when she and the other prisoners were rounded up once more and roughly paraded in front of Dr Mengele, with his fickle power over her fate. Smiling as always, and this time tapping a riding crop against his polished boots, he casually flicked it
links oder rechts
as he selected the healthiest of them for hard labour. Priska was still bright-eyed and blooming compared with those who’d spent years in ghettos or camps. She was of prime stock. Before she even understood what was happening, she’d been directed to one side by the flick of Mengele’s crop before being pushed into a group of other women deemed suitable for
Arbeit
.

After being given a morsel of bread and a ladleful of slop doled out from a kettle, the women were unexpectedly loaded back into the closed goods wagons of a huge train, which squatted broodingly on the tracks.

As she inwardly cried out her husband’s name, the doors were slammed shut with a dreadful finality on Priska’s dreams of seeing Tibor again. With a hiss of steam, the big black locomotive hauled her away from the hellfires of Auschwitz to a new and unknown destination.

Rachel

With little variation in the day-to-day mechanics of the murderous Nazi machine, Rachel and her sisters were treated similarly to the rest of the women transported to the end of the line at Auschwitz during the late summer and autumn of 1944.

After the train from Łódź pulled to a halt on the dedicated rail spur in Birkenau with a screech of metal against metal, the doors were flung open and the light dazzled their eyes. Their limbs stiff after their enforced immobility, they were pulled from their wagon to find themselves frightened out of their senses in a desperate crush of screaming, weeping people. Before they knew what was happening, they’d been hived off to one side and jostled to the
Sauna
where they were ordered to take off their clothes. Spurred on by whips and curses, they were forced to leave all vestiges of their old life behind.

‘They shaved our heads, they washed us with some disinfectant, and then we went out the other side of this big room,’ Rachel said. ‘They were walking around looking at women – and
how
they looked – as they selected healthy younger ones. There were no babies. No mothers. Only healthy women who could work.’

As they stood with their arms in the air, earrings were ripped from their earlobes with pliers and rings prised from fingers by greased hands. ‘You won’t need watches where you’re going,’ the prisoner-functionaries sneered, so those were taken too. Then their ears, mouths and private parts were poked and explored before they were shorn. Naked, hairless and utterly humiliated, the young women looked almost identical as they were assessed for
their suitability to be worked to death. They were of a similar age, height and build, without any obvious disabilities or blemishes.

Sala said, ‘We were scared little sheep. I didn’t even recognise my own sister after a female SS guard shaved us. I told her we don’t even look like people any more … I was wearing a little necklace that my friend made for me and, stupidly, I didn’t even try to hide it so one of the guards grabbed it from my neck. They didn’t even talk to us. It was all so cruel. Then we were paraded outside, for all to see our shame.’

Waiting in line for her turn to be judged, Rachel watched as the good-looking SS doctor she’d first seen on the
Rampe
squeezed every other woman’s breast. Any who were visibly pregnant were dragged from the line. She suspected that she might be carrying her husband Monik’s child, but she couldn’t be sure. Either way, she sensed instinctively that to admit her condition would be a fatal error of judgement. Trembling with cold and fear, the comely wife who wasn’t even sure she wanted a baby of her own yet must have felt some shame in denying the existence of her unborn child.

As Mengele passed by without challenging her, Rachel realised with a wrench that she’d never even had the chance to share her news with her husband or her lovely mother Fajga. And now she didn’t dare tell her sisters for fear that it might have repercussions for them too. Somewhere in the rows and rows of shivering mannequins, Sala, Bala and Ester went through the same clinical process of selection as more of the weak and undernourished were weeded out and marched away. Even after their years in the Łódź ghetto, the women were safeguarded by their youth, looking far more vital than those whose bones could be mapped beneath their skin.

Earmarked by an ever-cheerful Dr Mengele, all four sisters were directed to a group destined for immediate transportation to a slave labour camp. Hastened back inside the building with whips, they were thrown bizarre items of mismatched clothing from a loose pile that appeared to be all that remained of the last human cargo – as if they had just stepped out of their garments. As with everyone else who passed through the
Sauna
, the choice was wildly random and
size or shape never a consideration. These tangible vestiges of broken lives included teenagers’ dresses, workmen’s overalls, feathered hats, even baby clothes. Some prisoners were given backless cocktail dresses to wear accompanied by huge men’s boots. Others were tossed nightwear or summer blouses. A few were fortunate enough to be flung some underwear or cloths that could be used as such, but the majority had no undergarments at all – an experience that was completely alien to them. Their feet slopped around in oversized shoes, black ‘Holland’ clogs, or were squeezed into heels that would soon become instruments of torture.

‘I was very lucky,’ Rachel said. ‘They threw me a big black dress that must have come from a cripple. It had a detachable yoke and was as big as a tent. I knew straight away that I could hide my pregnancy in that. Nobody would know what was going on under that dress. Then they threw me a pair of shoes that I couldn’t bear, but I still wore.’

Once again, the sisters managed to stay together, only this time they were marched outside and beaten into a semblance of order. Commanded to stand five deep in the roll-call area to await the next phase of their nightmare, they stood stiffly to attention in their ridiculous attire, and watched as the rest were herded off to another block or somewhere worse. As the Polish winds began to bite, heralding the start of one of the harshest winters in European history, the women wondered what was to become of them and whether they would ever be able to escape from this bitter purgatory.

Fortunately for them, there was no time to lose. The Germans knew that they were losing the war and, with most of their men enlisted, the scarcity of labour for armaments and industry was a major problem. As in the ghettos, the Nazis realised that the healthiest prisoners – even Jews – could be economically useful before they were killed. The factory the women were destined for was vital to the continuation of air attacks on the Allies – a field of combat in which the Germans had been very successful. Advances in technology had made aircraft on both sides of the war capable of unparallelled devastation, but the Luftwaffe had initially gained air supremacy over western Europe
using its Messerschmitt, Junkers, Heinkel, Stuka and Focke-Wulf planes. Hitler considered his bombers to be the ‘flying artillery’ that supported his ground forces, but once the Allies achieved supremacy thanks to the Battle of Britain, the German air force suffered a series of catastrophic losses. During the defeat at Stalingrad especially, the Nazis lost nine hundred planes, so more needed to be built – and fast. Anyone deemed physically capable of doing work was appraised and those who didn’t make the grade were simply thrown away.

Unaware of the fate that had been decided for them, the bewildered women in Birkenau in late 1944 waited with parching thirst as the light faded and the temperature dropped still further. In the distance they could hear dogs barking, the cries of the desperate, and sporadic bursts of machine-gun fire. Filled with incredulity and terror, they were commanded not to move and the
Kapos
and female SS guards struck or slapped anyone who became unsteady on her feet, pleaded for water or asked to use the toilet.

Eventually, they were allowed to sit down in the cold mud and each given a small portion of some watery substance. It quickly became apparent that the bowls they shared had been used as chamber pots. The salty liquid slopped into these vessels was evil-smelling and inedible but the women pinched their noses and forced it down in a futile attempt to quench their thirst. ‘We got some soup but without spoons, so we ate it with our hands,’ Rachel said, her mind raging against the profanity while her body cried out for food.

They then sat for hours in the dark watching the strange crimson glow in the sky from the camp’s chimneys whilst trying not to breathe in what smelled like burning meat that left a caustic taste in their throats. One by one, veteran prisoners approached them to whisper sadistically, ‘See those chimneys? They gas people here and then they burn them. If your mother went to the left, that’s where she is now.’

To begin with, their battered minds simply refused to process the information. The words being spoken seemed too fantastically evil to be true. But then came the chilling suspicion that these withered creatures with mad eyes and shuffling feet were speaking the truth.
Choking on the realisation that almost their entire family had been marched to the charnel house to be gassed and incinerated, the acrid smoke made them gag. Rachel, numbed, suddenly thought that if the Nazis could do that to innocent men, women and children, then what on earth would they do to a newborn baby? Fear stabbing at her womb, she could barely breathe.

Her foreboding of what might happen if her pregnancy was detected was fully justified. With so many women being transported to Auschwitz daily from the occupied territories, the SS realised that a percentage would be pregnant. Those who couldn’t hide their condition were routinely sent to the gas chambers, but as the war dragged on and healthy young women were needed for work, there was the problem of those who didn’t show yet. So the Nazis set up a primitive abortion clinic in Birkenau run by prisoner-doctors. Many of the women forced to have abortions in such hostile and unhygienic conditions lost their lives anyway. The few who were able to hide their pregnancies and even conceal their births usually lost their babies due to malnutrition. Those allowed to go to full term were often denied access to their infants, who either starved to death or were given to Dr Mengele for experimentation. In his special block, referred to as ‘The Zoo’, the SS captain and his team of medical staff carried out unspeakable operations on twins, babies, dwarves and adults that ranged from sterilisation and castration to electric shock treatment and amputation – sometimes without anaesthetic. Some mothers were encouraged by the prisoner-doctors to murder their infants in order to save their own lives.

Then, in an apparent change of policy, the SS announced that all abortions would be stopped and extra rations issued to pregnant women, who would be exempt from the innumerable
Appelle
. The order was revoked soon afterwards and any Aryan child of non-Jewish were taken away for ‘Germanisation’ before being passed off as the offspring of childless Germans. Almost three hundred pregnant women in the special birthing block were sent to the gas chambers. Those babies not sent away died of hunger, thirst or disease. Others
were gassed or fed to the ovens. Some were administered injections to the heart. An untold number were drowned in a bucket.

Rachel could have known none of this, but she did know that the business of Auschwitz was death. Still shattered by the news of her family’s annihilation, she and her sisters then had to take in the additional information from their fellow
Häftlinge
that the gas chambers in the camp were disguised as showers. ‘Sooner or later, we will all join our loved ones in the chimney,’ they were told coldly. So, a few hours later, when the prisoners were nudged awake in the dawn and commanded by the SS to shower, they broke down. Sobs racking their bodies, they followed each other blindly to the slaughterhouse, one hand on the other’s shoulder, no longer caring about their nakedness. Many of the prisoners prayed out loud, making deals with God that if they survived they would be better Jews and devote their lives to helping others. ‘They took us in a room and I saw the showers,’ Sala said. ‘I thought, “Well, this is the end of us. I will smell gas,” but – no – water was coming out and again we were safe.’