Born Survivors (22 page)

Hope flared in them briefly as jets of icy water flushed away their fear. Water signified life. Life equalled
Arbeit
. Work could mean survival. Still wet, and sprayed with disinfectant that stung their nostrils, they were marshalled out of the showers, thrown their prison garb, handed a little bread and soap and marched smartly to the railway tracks that had brought them through the gates a little over twenty-four hours earlier. Stunned into silent obedience once again, the sisters managed to remain close enough in the confusion to be pushed up a wooden ramp into the same freight wagon before the doors were slammed shut and bolted from the outside with a horrible clang.

Inside that nauseating atmosphere, stacked together in the half-light, the sisters almost suffocated on the sweat, fear and urine of the previous wretches who’d recently arrived from the world beyond the fences, no doubt to be sent straight up the smokestack. Their eyes growing accustomed to the darkness, the eighty or so women had no idea where they were going or what would happen to them when they reached their destination. They would likely not see the sky for
days or be able to move their limbs as they were pressed against one another with no room to sit, rest or breathe.

None of them would sleep. All would suffer. Some might die.

But all they cared about was that they had somehow been saved from the hell of swallowing human remains. Although they’d wondered about the possibility of an ‘afterwards’ which had seemed beyond all imagining, they’d hardly dared hope there really might be a time
after
Auschwitz; the place they’d expected to inhale their loved ones in a final, fatal gasp.

With a shudder and a jolt that sent them crashing into each other with a cry, their train pulled away from the labyrinth of barbed wire as they held their collective breath. Sala elbowed her way to the small window of the wagon as they were slowly dragged back across the threshold of that cruellest of places.

As the train gathered pace, she peered out at the land beyond the camp in the grey morning light. Having passed through a portal into another world, she saw orchards full of apples and vast fields with
people toiling in them or tending to pumpkins and cabbages as if it was just another day. The countryside that unfurled before her eyes comprised thousands of acres of farmland worked by prisoners and German settlers who’d been imported as part of an agricultural experiment. While those within Auschwitz-Birkenau starved to death, these fertile pastures just beyond the high-tension fences swelled with fresh produce.

Railway tracks to Auschwitz II

All of a sudden, Sala spotted something that made her heart leap with hope. There was a woman working in the fields who looked exactly like their mother, Fajga. Her relief that their blessed Mama might still be alive sent her into hysterics. ‘I started screaming “Mother! Mother!” She looked up at me like I was crazy but I will never forget her face – she looked just like my mother.’

Rachel, standing close by, grabbed her younger sister by the shoulders and slapped her hard across the face. The two women fell against each other as the engine gathered speed and pulled them away from the wraiths of all those they’d ever loved.

Anka

When Anka and her friend Mitzka arrived in Auschwitz II-Birkenau in the third-class passenger carriages from Terezín, they were in very poor condition, physically and mentally. For the two days it had taken them to get there they’d been crammed together with insufficient air and no chance to move. The space they were forced to share with so many others reeked of unwashed bodies, or worse, and they were forbidden to lift the blinds or open the windows. With no food or water to drink, Anka said, ‘The worst experience of all was the thirst.’

Long before the snaking train began to slow, those who defied the orders to peer under the blinds spotted the chimneys spouting fire. ‘We did not know then what it meant but the impression was gruesome … The smell was of things I had never smelled before and which you couldn’t place … I will never forget that smell
but … the look of the chimneys was so frightening that even without knowing what was going on, you drew back.’

As soon as the train stopped and the doors were thrown ajar they half-jumped, half-fell from the carriages as if drunk. There was immediate pandemonium, and shouts of ‘
Raus! Schnell! Laufen!
’ (Out! Hurry! Run!) Panic-stricken, they were surrounded by what looked like ‘demented’ men in striped pyjamas who told them to drop the luggage carefully painted with their names, assuring them they’d be reunited with it later. They never were.

‘There were dogs barking and people screaming. It was bedlam. No one knowing where to go … millions of people milling about … at least a thousand people. I don’t remember if it was night or day,’ Anka said. ‘The SS were shouting and hitting everybody who came their way. It was like the apocalypse. You felt something eerie but you didn’t know.’ The
Kapos
quickly separated men from women but the prisoners who’d been used to being segregated in Terezín didn’t fear that so much at first. ‘I was in the same wagon with a male friend who was about my age. We’d known each other all our lives and he said, “Well, we had better say goodbye because I must go with the men and you with the girls, so see you after the war.” I never saw him again.’

Men and women then had to line up in front of a high-ranking officer – the infamous Dr Mengele – who directed some to one side and some to the other. ‘I was young and healthy and so I went right. And all the women with children and people older than forty … went left … It seemed quite senseless at the time. It wasn’t, though.’

Anka and the other
Häftlinge
, including her Terezín girlfriends, were then jostled into rows of five and marched away without a moment to catch their breath. ‘We had to run in that mud … with that smell and those flames. It was frightful. No one could imagine … how terrible that place was. It’s indescribable.’ Driven like geese to the remote
Sauna
building and into what they were told was an ‘undressing chamber’ they found women in various states of nudity. They too were commanded to take off all their clothes and underwear and leave them in a heap. The order was accompanied by the warning that if
they resisted they would be shot. Like all those before them, they had their jewellery torn from their hands, necks and wrists.

In all her years at Terezín, Anka had somehow managed to hold on to her plain wedding band and the amethyst and silver engagement ring Bernd had given her, secreting it under her tongue or holding it in her fist. Somehow, in spite of the beady eyes of the Birkenau
Kapos
and guards, she managed to hang onto it again.

Pushed into the next room, the women were forced to sit naked while men and women wielding razors that snagged the skin roughly shaved their heads. Anka tried not to cry as she watched her once-silken tresses drop to her knees and then onto the floor. These locks were then swept by a birch broom into a kaleidoscopic cloud of hair – much of it still adorned with pins, ribbons or combs. Like shaven animals, the young women felt utterly barbarised and no longer human. Anka described it as one of the worst things that happened. ‘You feel more than naked; you feel degraded … like a cockroach you can step on. It didn’t hurt but … the humiliation … if you don’t do it of your own free will … you can’t imagine what you look and feel like without hair.’

Hair clipped from women’s heads in Auschwitz

When they were ordered back into line, Mitzka, who’d been separated from her friend for only a few minutes, shouted frantically, ‘Anka! Anka, where are you?’

Anka replied, ‘If you are Mitzka, then I am standing right next to you.’

She recalled, ‘We were running around naked with the men looking at us and it was so awful. We were frightened but we still didn’t know of what.’

Pushed outside into the wind and rain for another
Appell
and her next ‘Mengele test’, Anka passed muster once again as she covered her breasts and prayed for some dignity. On seeing that everyone was being searched for any last valuables, she retrieved her rings and allowed them to slip from her fingers. Tears pricking her eyes, she ground the rings deep into the soft clay with her bare foot. ‘I took my two rings and I threw them in the mud and said, “No Germans will have them.” It broke my heart but it was my choice, not theirs … Perhaps somebody found them but that was the most precious thing I had at that moment.’ She knew that she’d lost her love tokens from Bernd for ever, but it felt like an important act of defiance. It was a path she was set to continue.

Shuffled inside from the parade ground, they were told that they would have to take a shower – an experience they welcomed because they had no idea what ‘going to the showers’ might otherwise have meant. The water that hissed out instead of gas was cold, intermittent and foul, and there was nothing with which to lather away their sweat. Still wet, they were thrown odd, shapeless clothes in rough material that immediately irritated their skin. ‘We were given some dreadful rags to wear and somebody was lucky enough to get shoes or not so lucky. I got wooden clogs.’ Then they were driven towards the serried rows of huts that constituted the prison blocks. As they ran, their nostrils became clogged with the strange sickly smell that lingered constantly and appeared to emanate from the belching chimneys.

One of the women turned to Anka and asked, ‘Why are they
roasting meat here?’ She looked at the strange wreaths of black smoke but couldn’t answer. ‘By then we were so frightened and confused and everything became a ghastly nightmare, which unfortunately was true.’

Their block was like an enormous chicken coop, with a dirt floor and no windows but narrow openings in the roof. Inside were wooden partitions each filled with three-tiered shelves that had no mattresses or coverings. The building was already perilously overcrowded. There must have been a thousand women in it with up to twelve in each bunk. The new arrivals were met with groans and the warm, malodorous stink of the unwashed. The women didn’t know where they were supposed to sit or sleep or what they were meant to do.

One of Anka’s friends who’d been transported from Terezín with her family desperately looked around for a familiar face but could find none. Eventually she asked one of the other women, ‘What happens here? When will I see my parents again?’ The rest of the
Häftlinge
laughed so hysterically that Anka thought they must have lost their minds. Was this where they’d been sent – to a lunatic asylum? Would they too go mad in this pit of despair? An older woman howled, ‘You will see, and
what
you will see!’ Another, with a crazy grin, cackled, ‘You stupid cow! They are in the chimney by now. We will all go up in smoke, and then you’ll see them!’

Anka was convinced then that the women were indeed insane. ‘But we quickly came to realise that they were right and we were wrong … In that moment we knew what was happening there … they were burning people in the chimneys.’

The women from Terezín squeezed into bunks wherever they could, trying to stay together as a group. Anka and Mitzka pushed their way between two stinking bodies in a space that would scarcely fit a child. As they lay on the unyielding planks they gradually tried to take in all that had happened since they’d left what they now appreciated was the luxury of their ghetto. Some began to weep but most remained silent, overcome with exhaustion, or paralysed with fear as prisoner-guards patrolled the block.

‘The
Kapos
were internees like us, only they had been there for some time and got this better job. Some of them were all right but some were worse than the Germans. They dropped a word here and a word there. We put two and two together and suddenly we knew. The people who were sent to the other side had been gassed within minutes of our arrival. My parents, sisters, Peter, and everybody who preceded us here ended in the gas chamber.’

As she was trying to take in the impossible, a woman named Hannelore who’d travelled with them broke into a popular German song. Before the rise of Hitler, she’d been a professional singer and she sang that night to try to lift their spirits. Anka said it did quite the opposite, however, and the women went crazy telling her to stop. ‘That was apocalyptic,’ she said, ‘because you felt like listening to a song like you felt like going to the gas chamber.’