Born Survivors (23 page)

A few hours after they had arrived, the
Kapos
brought them some oily water they called soup, ladled from a dirty metal kettle. They were given an unwashed plate to share between four people and no spoons. ‘We were so stunned by all these goings on – so frightened and so half-mad – that nobody was hungry, for the time being anyway.’ Not yet comprehending how little they would be offered to eat, the new inmates spurned their only meal for days. The Polish women rushed forward to eagerly snatch their share, lapping it from their bowls like animals.

Lisa Miková, a Czech prisoner who’d arrived on the same transport as Anka, explained, ‘The Polish women couldn’t believe it and said, “You don’t want to eat?” We told them, “No, it’s horrible, and the bowls aren’t washed.” How they laughed. “Can we have it?” they asked. We saw how hungry they were then and how they licked even the smell from the plate. The next day the same soup came again and we hesitated again. The Poles told us, “We are also used to eating with forks and knives and spoons – that was normal. This place is not normal. If you don’t eat then you will lose weight and then you will lose interest and then you will die.” We could well imagine it, looking around us. And so we started to eat, even though it was so disgusting.’

Few slept those first nights and if they did manage to drift off they were rudely awoken for the dawn
Appell
, where they were chased out of their block by guards brandishing sticks. Then they were ordered to strip and stand in line for hours in the cold and the dark to be checked and double-checked, for no apparent reason other than to torment them. Some were beaten and called ‘
Saujud!
’ (dirty Jew!) Others were slapped or spat at. Many were pulled out and marched away. ‘Before you got there you had to wade through acres of mud and all the time above you the towering chimneys spilling flames. A real inferno … Slowly, we started to understand what was going on.’

While Anka awaited her turn to live or die, she appreciated the importance of having shoes, however painful or ill-fitting they might have been. Those without footwear were shivering and desperate. Nobody could possibly survive without something to keep their feet from the cold, wet mud that lay thick and deadly on the ground. Her own life-support systems almost frozen, she vowed to keep her clogs with her at all times. She also learned other tricks of survival – chiefly the art of becoming invisible, keeping her head down, blending in without attracting unwanted attention. There were distinct factions among the prisoners that generally equated to East versus West, with Germans, Austrians and Czechs on one side, and Poles, Romanians and Hungarians on the other. Shoes, food and clothes were often stolen while people slept. With nerves strained to breaking point, fights broke out and it was easy to get caught in the middle.

‘The more you were in the camp, the more you knew how to cope and how to survive,’ Anka said. ‘Everybody was trying to do their utmost not to offend the Germans … to be like an ant crawling somewhere, [something] that doesn’t matter. To get through the day somehow without being attacked.’ It was helpful that she understood the German commands and could respond faster than those who didn’t, and that she had a sixth sense about keeping away from those who might be duplicitous or dangerous. Whip-smart, she was able to close her mind to what the next hour might bring and focus only on getting through this one.

‘The fear was overpowering but you had to cope with whatever came,’ she said. ‘I thought again of Scarlett O’Hara in
Gone with the Wind
saying, “I’ll think about it tomorrow,” so that’s what I did.’

Anka spent the next ten days in what she called ‘that living hell’ in which she daily breathed in the dead. In a place where all concept of time was lost, it felt to her like a hundred years. She lived from hour to hour, never knowing what would happen to her. ‘You were afraid all the time, twenty-four hours a day,’ she said. There was nothing to fill their bellies but stale dry bread plus the insipid coffee-flavoured concoction in the morning or salt-flavoured water at night. There wasn’t even a blade of grass to eat. Untold thousands in Auschwitz died of starvation or disease. What they were given brought on stomach spasms and diarrhoea, yet for the first time in their lives they couldn’t just go to the toilet when they wanted to. She said that practically everybody had dysentery. ‘I leave it to your imagination what it looked like and how it smelled … you were in a dreadful state with no possibility of washing or anything. I got through that with difficulty. Being pregnant kept me going.’

With only limited access to the communal concrete holes, they were beaten or prodded with long poles or hay forks by SS officers shouting, ‘
Schneller! Scheisse!
’ Anka said she would never forget the humiliating ‘sport’ the Nazis made of it, in the mud and the suffocating stench, poking women in the backside as they defecated. ‘Just for fun, not even letting you do your business in peace … a group of them said we will make fun of the Jews when they do whatever they do … it was so degrading.’

Appell
, announced by a bell, was at dawn and dusk with fresh
Selektionen
in between. In the complex arithmetic of death, there were so many to be counted and then entered into ledgers that the naked roll calls often lasted for up to three hours. Paraded in front of a team of medical staff smoking cigarettes, the women were mortified. ‘It was just dreadful – clothes on or no clothes … hungry and frightened and going through there and then left or right – by then
we knew what it meant … at four o’clock in the morning … you stood in the rain and the wind … You were always frightened [that] next time it will be my turn and if they had known that I was pregnant, there was no other way.’

Anka went through at least twelve of these selections. ‘I don’t think they looked at us as human beings. The only criterion was, “Is she healthy enough to work?”’ In her constant inner dialogue she asked, ‘Will I make it? Will I get through this time?’ She added, ‘It becomes all about me, me, me … but if it’s life or death you choose life … you don’t do anything for or against it but you are relieved that you go this way and everybody else goes that way. It has nothing to do with the other people, but you have been chosen to live.’

If someone was unaccounted for – through sickness or death – the prisoners were forced to stand for hours, swaying with tiredness, until the numbers tallied. Exhausted and weak from subsisting on a few hundred calories per day, the pregnant, naked Anka tried not to faint as so many did during those interminable twice-daily
Appelle
. ‘If someone fainted or became ill they were sent straight to the gas chamber. I fainted because I was pregnant and frightened and cold and hungry but my friends picked me up and stood me up and held me up and I was saved … everybody was very kind to me … because you mustn’t be ill in Auschwitz – you either go to a hospital, are shot, or you walked to the gas chambers.’

And so she lived to see another day.

Just as Priska had longed to see Tibor, so Anka ached to be back in the arms of Bernd. Hope was all she had left. Hope that tomorrow would be better. Hope that she wouldn’t get sick or lose her baby. Hope that she would make it out of there alive. Had Bernd, too, gone through this shocking phase of acclimatisation when he’d arrived in Auschwitz a week earlier? Was he in a bunk somewhere on the other side of the camp, his mind in equal turmoil, worrying about her the same way she was worrying about him?

Like Priska, however, Anka quickly learned that the women were kept far from the men and separated by cement posts three metres high and kilometre upon kilometre of coiled barbed wire. Nor could she find any information about the other members of her family – her parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles. Even if it was true about the gas chambers and the chimneys, surely the younger, healthier ones like her might have been saved?

What Anka didn’t know was that she was in the minority. Of the approximately 1.3 million people deported to Auschwitz, 1.1 million were to perish, including most of her family, some of whom – she discovered later – had first been tricked into believing that they would stay together in a
Familienlager
(family camp). This was a section set up by the SS at Birkenau in the summer of 1943 when they expected the International Red Cross to demand a formal inspection of Auschwitz after they’d been allowed to visit Terezín. As part of the Nazis’ global propaganda
campaign, from then on all new arrivals from Terezín were put in the family camp where they were allowed to keep their belongings, their hair and their clothes.

Postcard from Anka’s sister Zdena from Birkenau with Lechem for bread

The new Czech inmates were then forced to write postcards to relatives at home and in Terezín to allay the growing fears that none of those transported ever contacted their loved ones again. In one such postcard received by their cousin Olga at her apartment in Schnirchova Street, Prague, dated October 1943, Anka’s sister Zdena wrote – in German, as prescribed:
My dear ones, I am here with my husband and sister and my nephew. All are well and in good health … Greetings and kisses, Yours Zdena Isidor
. At the risk of death, she slipped the Hebrew word
lechem
(bread) instead of ‘Olga’ into the first line of the address in the hope that her cousin would realise they were starving. Olga understood and immediately sent a food parcel, but Zdena and her family were unlikely ever to have received it.

Dr Rossel of the International Red Cross did pay an unannounced visit to Auschwitz that year but he was prevented from seeing any of the barracks or the infirmary. Instead, he chatted about winter sports with a young SS officer and promised to send medicines and cigarettes before he left. When his organisation didn’t make the expected demand to see more, the SS liquidated the
Familienlager
. Having been protected for so long in what was called a ‘harbour in an ocean of horror’, the trusting parents, grandparents and children of Terezín were once again cast adrift. On the night of 8 March, in its largest mass murder of Czech citizens at the camp, some 3,700 Jews were among almost 5,000 who met their fate in the gas chambers, including most of Anka’s family. Many were heard singing the Czech national anthem as they were marched to their deaths.

After more than a week in Birkenau, Anka lost all sense of time. She no longer had the strength to ponder the fate of her relatives; she couldn’t even bring herself to think about the baby growing inside her, whose presence only placed her in the gravest danger. All she could think of was how to survive the next selection, all the
while trying to avoid breathing in the flakes of ash that drifted ominously around the camp. On the morning of 10 October 1944, Anka overheard Dr Mengele tell his subordinates, ‘
Diesmal sehr gutes Material
’ (This time, very good material), as he continued to make his personal choices, spinning women around to examine them front and back. Once again, her pregnancy went undetected and she was selected to live. ‘We felt like cattle being sent to the slaughterhouse.’

That morning, still naked and holding onto her clothes, she and a group of women were not returned to their squalid barracks but were marched instead towards a large, low, sinister-looking building. Any who faltered in fear had blows rained on them by the
Kapos
. Anka thought, ‘Is this it? Is this the gas chamber they’ve told us about? I thought we’d been selected for
Arbeit
.’ Although she knew that all that really meant was that they would be worked to death instead of being murdered immediately.

Inside the unfamiliar building, they were ordered to take a shower. Praying, hoping, they were swept into the shower room en masse, sharing each other’s sense of helplessness. They could hardly believe it when freezing cold water – not gas – sputtered through the showerheads. ‘Water! Life!’ some cried. Cleaner than they’d been in days, they were flung some more second-hand clothing before being given a little bread and salami, and then they were pushed to the railway ramp at a gruelling pace. Loaded into goods wagons, some five hundred of them were locked inside before their train pulled them away from the fire and brimstone, sour stink and cloying taste of Auschwitz.

Peering through a crack in the wall of her cattle car at those fat-fuelled flames blazing orange-red, Anka had no idea where she was being sent, but for the first time in weeks she dared herself to breathe normally again. ‘We were sent away and we were thrilled because we knew it couldn’t be worse … The feeling that we were leaving Auschwitz alive – you just can’t imagine! It was heaven.’

Losing sight of the hell of Birkenau was, she always said, one of the greatest moments of her life – just as it had been for Rachel and Priska. What none of them appreciated was that they had yet to face the greatest threats to themselves and their unborn babies – hunger, exhaustion and cold.

5

Freiberg