Born Survivors (28 page)

There was a full shift of women in the factory, including all three mothers, when British planes from Bomber Command attacked Dresden, forty kilometres from Freiberg. Air Marshal Arthur Harris ordered a series of raids between 13 and 15 February 1945. Most Dresdeners believed that their city would never be targeted because of its historic and cultural status. Many were unaware that in the sixth winter of the war, the Nazis had chosen it as a key location in a planned ‘Elbe Line’ of defence running from Prague to Hamburg, which placed it squarely in the Allies’ crosshairs.

It had been six years since Hitler ordered the strategic bombing of Polish cities such as Wieluń and Warsaw, followed by devastating raids on Holland, and four years since his
Blitzkrieg
of London claimed 20,000 lives between September 1940 and May 1941. The ‘Blitz’ on the British capital lasted for seventy-six consecutive nights and damaged more than a million homes. Almost simultaneously, the port of Liverpool and its surrounding areas were attacked in a series of bombing raids between August 1940 and May 1941, killing almost 4,000 people. The city of Coventry was targeted in the eighteen raids of
Operation Mondscheinsonate
(Moonlight Sonata), the most damaging of which occurred on 14 November 1940.
Some five hundred German bombers attacked the city that night with five hundred tonnes of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices, intent on destroying its factories. More than 4,000 homes were lost and two-thirds of the city destroyed. Hundreds of people lost their lives and over a thousand were injured, adding to those from previous raids. In the coming years, fresh raids on the city would result in further losses, bringing the death toll there to 1,236.

These attacks and others were matched by numerous Allied raids on Germany and occupied Poland, including Hamburg and Berlin as well as cities such as Pforzheim, Swinoujscie and Darmstadt, many with equally devastating results. Dresden, however – known as the ‘Jewel Box’ for the ornate rococo and baroque style of its architecture – was to become one of their most controversial targets. As the first waves of British Lancaster bombers homed in on the city after a five-hour flight from Lincolnshire at around 10 p.m. on 13 February 1945, sirens began to wail to warn the citizens of Freiberg of a possible air raid. The SS locked most of the prisoners – including Priska, Rachel and Anka – into the top floor of the factory, which could well have been an RAF target. They then fled to their basement shelters with the foremen and civilian staff.

The women were instructed to turn off the lights and draw blackout curtains so as not to attract attention but they immediately disobeyed, eager to see the seven hundred or so heavy bombers swooping in low above them. On several occasions they watched as aircraft slowly circled their factory as if on a dummy run and wondered if the next bomb-load might be for them. Anka said, ‘We willed the RAF to drop a bomb on us … so that the factory wouldn’t work on this war project … but they didn’t.’

Rachel too recalled that on the nights Dresden was bombed they shouted at the sky: ‘Come here! Come and bomb us! We’re going to die anyway!’ She added, ‘We were absolutely certain that none of us would survive. It was just a question of living as long as we could. It was only when Dresden was bombed that the realisation finally dawned on us that we might be saved.’

A handful of German guards who’d been posted outside their door in case the women tried to escape complained bitterly about having to put themselves at risk. ‘They told us not to look out of the windows and not to make any signals to the pilots with lights,’ said Lisa Miková. ‘We were cheering and they were furious that we were so happy.’

Although the capital of Saxony was some distance away, the night sky was lit up by the incendiary devices and high explosives that decimated it. An estimated 25,000 inhabitants of Dresden were killed and the subsequent firestorm painted the sky red, destroying more than six square kilometres of the city. ‘That was the most magnificent theatre I ever saw in my life because we watched all those firebombs and their colour in the sky and we wished them all the worst things in the world. It was … fabulous … there was such satisfaction,’ said Anka. ‘After the war everyone spoke badly of “Bomber” Harris but he was a saint to me.’

The bombing of Dresden

One of the foremen came back from the devastated city the next day and reported that ‘not a stone was left’ in the old part, nor a family untouched. Gerty Taussig said they didn’t care about anyone who’d voted for Hitler, only the wonderful artworks that must have been burned. Rachel said, ‘One of the women guards told us how upset they all were. She said, “This is our town! Our people!” She said that if anyone showed any joy about the firebombing or even looked in the direction of the window, she’d be shot.’ Rachel quickly spread the word in order to try to restrain the prisoners’ exuberance.

The first raid on Dresden had taken place during the night shift. The next day the planes came again – dropping seven hundred tonnes of bombs during daylight. On the third day, they attacked the suburbs and a nearby oil refinery. ‘You could read from the light of the fire. It burned terribly,’ said Lisa Miková. ‘I must say that we had no pity. We said, “What about our parents and our husbands? Who started this?” We were cool about it even though we knew there must be women and children and thousands dead. The next day the guards were furious and they did their worst, giving slaps to everyone and not letting anyone use the toilet.’

The sudden appearance in Freiberg of melancholy lines of refugees fleeing Dresden with their belongings allowed hope to flare once again in the factory. With so many hundreds of Allied planes overhead, the prisoners dared to believe that salvation might be close at hand. They didn’t even mind when they were sent out onto the streets to help clear the rubble from associated raids. It was a pleasure to see what the Allies had done. Rachel’s only disappointment was that the British didn’t target the railway. ‘Why didn’t they bomb the tracks or the trains?’ she asked. ‘Then no one could ever be sent to a concentration camp again!’

By 31 March 1945, further Allied raids had severed the Freiberg factory’s supply lines and raw materials had run out. There was no more fuel to run the machines and the electricity supply was patchy. All production was stopped. Eager not to lose their jobs, the
guards told the prisoners to ‘keep busy’, so they fashioned things from discarded scraps of metal, including little knives with which to cut and eat what they called ‘the finest meal in the world’ – grass. Now that the snow was melting they could surreptitiously reach down and grab clumps of it on their way to and from the factory. Other prisoners made themselves little aluminium combs. Even though some had been shaved again since Auschwitz, bristly tufts of hair were growing back on most of the women’s heads and these precious styling accessories reminded them of a time when they’d been more civilised.

A comb made from aircraft metal at Freiberg

Gerty Taussig had a friend who was thrilled to have such a comb and kept it tightly gripped in her hand for fear someone might steal it. During an
Appell
, an SS guard spotted it and grabbed it from her. ‘What do you need this for?’ he snapped.

‘To comb my beautiful hair,’ the woman replied, running her hands across the fuzz that barely covered her scalp. Even the guard joined in the laughter, but still he didn’t give the comb back.

At one of the usual early morning
Appelle
that were always carried out with a needless sense of urgency, Priska – nine months pregnant and terribly weak – was late to appear in line. Able to move only slowly, with swollen ankles and throbbing feet, she was confronted by one of the guards who rounded on her and demanded, ‘Why are you late?’

Priska smiled thinly. ‘My being late is hardly going to destroy the Reich.’

The guard raised his fist and beat her so badly for her insolence that she fell to the ground and curled into a ball to protect her belly. The beating could easily have killed her and her baby. When he finally stopped, she was helped up by the women either side of her. Tasting blood in her mouth, she told them, ‘It’s OK. I’m OK.’ Attempting a laugh, she said, ‘It’s better than being shot!’ Drawing once again on her faith, she silently told the child inside her, ‘I knew you would survive.’

Spring gradually warmed the winter air and through the windows the women could hear birds singing and see the treetops budding into leaf. As a new season began, heralding their sixth year of life under the Nazi boot, the prisoners pondered what the coming weeks and months might bring. Many of their
Meisters
had been sent to the front, and when they were instructed to start dismantling the aircraft machinery to take to another factory, they didn’t know whether to be relieved or afraid. Wild rumours began to fly around the place. Would they be ‘liquidated’? Shot in their barracks before the SS fled? Or would they be taken away along with the machinery of war? Their greatest fear was that they might be transported back to Auschwitz. They were completely unaware that the Soviets had liberated the camp in January, along with some of the worst extermination camps such as Treblinka, Bełżec and Sobibór.

With the order to put down their tools and with nothing else to do but wait, the inmates were largely confined to their bunks. A few were instructed to do pointless groundwork such as moving rocks
from one place to another just to look busy. As they were no longer working productively for the Reich, their rations were reduced. They were given less than 200 grams of bread a day each and half-portions of the rank, saltless soup they gulped down. ‘They said if you don’t work you don’t need to eat so much,’ said Lisa Miková. ‘After that we got bread every day but soup only every second day. That was very cruel. We felt sure we would be killed.’

Aside from the weight they’d already shed, the women began to lose whatever muscle they had left, and with it almost all their energy. Their grey skin, which was scaly and stretched tightly across the contours of their bones, peeled and blistered. They panted shallowly, with foul breath; their legs and feet swelled so that many found it difficult to walk. Their body temperature dropped, leaving them shivering and highly vulnerable to infection. As they had throughout their time as prisoners, though, the women stuck together and tried to keep each other going. Priska had Edita and friends including Magda Gregorová, who was married to the famous Slovak actor Martin Gregor. Rachel had her sisters, and Anka had Mitzka and friends from Prague, including Klara Löffová and Lisa Miková. ‘When we’d worked and stood together for hours and hours we’d talked much more and remembered poems and other things until the SS screamed, “Don’t talk!” We tried that in the barracks then, telling stories and remembering films and books,’ said Lisa Miková. ‘Sometimes it helped and sometimes it didn’t, so people would cry, “Please shut up because it reminds us of home.” It was terrible, to be reminded of home then.’

And so they waited, as the Germans spent the next few days ‘running around’ trying to decide what to do. The women still had no contact with the outside world and were unaware that the all-important battle for the Ruhr region was about to be won by the Allies, or that Cologne and Danzig had recently fallen. They were also completely ignorant of the propaganda spread by the Allies in radio broadcasts and leaflet drops over Germany and Austria that Hitler was about to lose the war. All the women knew was that they
were desperately hungry and frightened. And as they anxiously awaited their fate, squabbles broke out and tensions in the barracks ran high.

During one morning’s cold-water wash in early April 1945, a Czech prisoner spotted that Priska was pregnant under her voluminous coat dress, and became hysterical. The woman had kept her family’s diamonds hidden throughout the war and was terrified that they would all be searched – or worse – if the guards found out. ‘You’ll get us all killed!!’ she screamed. ‘Our deaths will be on your conscience!’ She became so overwrought that the guards came running and demanded to know what the commotion was about. ‘She’s pregnant! She’s pregnant!’ the woman shrieked, pointing and groaning.