Born Survivors (29 page)

Priska froze, her heart pounding.

‘Is it true?’ one of the female SS guards asked incredulously, staring at Priska who was dangerously undernourished and weighed around seventy pounds. ‘Are you pregnant?’

‘Yes,’ Priska admitted finally in a whisper, expecting to be shot on the spot.

The guards looked at each other and shook their heads in disbelief. There was a long pause as Priska held her breath. Then one of the guards asked, ‘When are you due?’

‘Soon. Very soon.’

The guards went away to confer as Priska slumped back on her bunk. News of her condition quickly spread among her fellow shift workers, who tried to reassure her that nothing terrible would happen. Days passed without incident and everyone went back to their own routines, such as they were. Then one day a guard approached Priska quietly and asked her, ‘What do you need?’

By that stage Priska’s feet had become her worst torment. They were swollen, caked in blood and oozing pus. She barely faltered. ‘I would love a warm bath for my feet.’ To her amazement, a bowl of hot water was brought to her. As other prisoners looked on in shock and envy, she sat in her grubby clothes, full of lice and other
creatures, soaking her toes in the improvised foot spa ‘like a queen’. The water was, she said, ‘very hot’ and such a luxury – ‘Bliss!’

She added, ‘People were nice to me because they were sorry for me and no one believed that I would have a living child or that it would be normal.’ She knew that the sudden change of heart among the guards was almost certainly self-serving but still she welcomed it. ‘My husband and I had a very good relationship and I desperately wanted to have his child.’

Anka’s pregnancy too had been exposed by then, not by the Czech paediatrician she’d confided in but by others who spotted her distended belly in profile. ‘I was getting thinner and thinner but my stomach was getting bigger and bigger,’ she said. ‘Some of the guards knew it. If they’d found out before 18 January, I would have been sent back to Auschwitz, but Auschwitz didn’t exist any more … so they couldn’t send me anywhere. I didn’t know that, though. I couldn’t have … I had to admit my pregnancy after they asked me. I couldn’t not admit it, but they couldn’t send me away.’

Although she was painfully thin, Anka’s breasts had become still larger and heavier as they filled with milk and caused her much discomfort under her rough clothes, especially during the hurried marches to and from work. Her friend Mitzka borrowed needle and thread and fashioned a bra for Anka from a piece of cloth. It was an amateur attempt with unusually pointed cups but Anka was so grateful for the support that she wore it for the remainder of the war.

Rachel, who’d hidden her condition from her sisters for nine months, was also exposed around this time by some of the prisoners, one of whom found her sisters and asked them, ‘Do you know Rachel is pregnant?’

‘No! Are you crazy?’ Bala was incredulous. ‘I sleep with her in the same place!’

‘She can’t be!’ Ester and Sala cried in unison. Although they were on separate shifts and the pair worked somewhere else, they still saw Rachel whenever she returned to the barracks and hadn’t noticed a thing. Once the sisters realised it was true they were
shocked and afraid, especially because Rachel had grown so weak that she could hardly walk and had been largely confined to the sickbay. Sala said, ‘We couldn’t believe it and were very, very sad for her if it was true. I mean, how awful to be pregnant in that place!’

Rachel said, ‘There was no extra food for me and they couldn’t help me.’ She tried not to think about what might happen to her and her unborn child.

A few days later one of the Germans who worked with Sala secretly gave her an orange. ‘They were scared to help us but still he gave me that beautiful, vibrant piece of fruit. I hadn’t seen or smelled anything so lovely for as long as I could remember. I longed to keep it for myself, but I hid it in my dress and was able to get it to Rachel for her and the baby. They needed it more than me.’

By then the women hardly worked at all and were mostly confined to barracks, torpid with the kind of chronic hunger that few ever know. They could hear shelling and knew that the Allies must be near, but still they didn’t know if this meant that the SS might panic and kill them all. Some no longer cared.

One day after her footbath, on the morning of Thursday, 12 April 1945 – the very day she had estimated that her baby was due – Priska Löwenbeinová went into labour. Crying out as the first contraction doubled her in two, she was taken to the sickbay in a small room at the factory and helped onto a wooden plank laid across a table. As she struggled with the waves of pain bringing on the first baby she’d carried to full term, she was assisted by Dr Mautnerová, who did what she could without drugs or any remotely sterile equipment.

Every time Priska sat up red-faced to brave the next spasm, she came face to face with some thirty or so onlookers who had crowded around the doorway to watch. They included SS guards, factory foremen and the
Lagerälteste
(camp elder). Some of the spectators placed bets on whether the baby would be a boy or a girl. ‘They said that if it was a girl the war would be over, and if it was a boy then it would go on for even longer.’

While they bickered over the gender of her baby, Priska was experiencing pain the like of which she had never felt before. After several hours of labour and with a final excruciating push, at exactly 3.50 p.m. (according to a guard’s watch), Priska was delivered of a daughter. Anaemic and dangerously malnourished as she was, the amount of blood that the mother lost in the process almost finished her off.

‘It’s a girl! It’s a girl!’ the Germans cried happily. ‘The war will soon be over!’ As the baby emerged fully, though, one of the guards yelled, ‘It’s a devil!’

The child that by all odds should never have survived nine months in Priska’s impoverished womb came out with her little blood-smeared hands screwed up into fists held up around her ears. For a moment, even to Priska, they looked like horns. Some of the onlookers became hysterical and Priska, too, was overcome. Although incredibly relieved to have given birth to a live child after so many dead babies, she’d secretly feared that it might be abnormal or deformed. The baby did seem to have a disproportionately large head but that was mainly because – at three-and-a-half pounds – her body was so very small. Once Priska realised that the child had no defects after all, she was overwhelmed that Tibor wasn’t able to share her joy, and then petrified of what might happen to her.

Up until that moment her baby had been hidden away, relatively safe inside her belly. Now suddenly she was out – a needy, naked, vulnerable child – in a world run by Nazis. Her little girl was too weak to cry and could barely move her puny limbs. Once the doctor tied off the umbilical cord and wiped her down as best she could with a cloth, Priska was able to hold her daughter in her arms for the first time. The scraggy little infant had hardly any fat or muscle on her body and excess skin rolled down her legs like stockings. Her wizened face was so shrivelled that it was, she said, ‘ugly as sin’, but she had her father’s big blue eyes.

‘
Moja
my Hanka,’ Priska said, damp-eyed, recalling her whispered
conversation with Tibor in the cattle truck on their nightmarish journey to Auschwitz –
Hanka for a girl, Miško for a boy
. She looked down at the child with a ‘nicely shaped’ round head and smallish nose and felt her mouth crease into a smile.

‘Think only of beautiful things,’ Tibor had told her just before they were separated on the ramp in Auschwitz II-Birkenau. His message was engraved on her heart. In Freiberg, Priska had secretly decided that if she looked only at pretty children on the way to and from the factory then her baby would not only live, but be beautiful too. While the other prisoners clutched each other, heads down, her eyes had deliberately sought out the face of every blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryan child she could find. Praying that she would give birth to a similar-looking son or daughter with a ‘turned-up nose’, she didn’t want her baby to look as Jewish as she did and hoped it would more closely resemble her father with his pale Polish colouring.

It had worked. Hanka had arrived, and to her mother she seemed almost perfect. Conceived with love in an apartment in Bratislava by an adoring couple who’d lost so much, the tiny little thing in her arms had survived Nazi occupation, the rigours of Auschwitz, the bitterest of winters, and six months’ noise, violence, starvation and hard labour to push her way into war-torn Europe. With her birth, she’d dared those on both sides of the conflict to hope for something better. ‘It was the most beautiful child I had ever seen,’ Priska said of the little bag of bones covered with skin. ‘We had been through so much and yet here we were, alive!’ She knew that they would never have survived without the kindness of the stranger Edita who had helped her through the whole ordeal, so she decided to call her baby Hana Edith Löwenbein, known as ‘Hana’ or ‘Hanka’.

The pain of her labour and the loss of blood took what little strength Priska had left, however, and she sank back onto the table barely conscious. Her baby was so underweight and lacking in insulating layers of body fat that she was dangerously susceptible to
hypothermia. Unable to offer either much sustenance or any kind of medical after-care, Dr Mautnerová couldn’t be certain that either mother or child would survive. Priska was hardly aware of the next twenty-four hours, other than that she and her child slept deeply. Whenever she woke she cradled her baby contentedly, but she couldn’t help but lift the tip of Hana’s nose with a finger to try to encourage even more of a
retroussé
profile.

As the end of the war seemed closer than ever and with the apparent relaxation of the previous rules, a few of her friends were allowed to visit her, including Edita, who wept at the news that the baby had been part named after her. The women had pooled their precious supply of marmalade and mixed it with a little water to make syrup for the baby, which they gave to Priska in the cleanest mug they could find. They’d also found some of the soft white cotton with
KZ Freiberg
stamped on it and stitched Hana a smock with an embroidered Peter Pan collar, as well as a bonnet complete with blue chain-stitch edging and tiny red flowers. These were items Priska would always treasure.

Hana’s baby outfit made from KZ Freiberg cloth

Her visitors told her the news that Franklin D. Roosevelt had died of a massive cerebral haemorrhage on the day she’d given birth. The American president, who’d come to power the same year as Hitler, had been sixty-three years old. A prisoner overheard an SS officer shouting the ‘good news’ to his colleagues. The women prayed his death wouldn’t prolong the war still further.

On her second day of life, malnourished Hana ‘jumped’ onto her mother’s breast. ‘She sucked out all the milk, which was really only water,’ Priska said. ‘She was a very good child. She drank and she went to sleep crying.’ Whatever nutrition Priska had to offer she gladly gave her child, but the giving of it depleted her still further, and even after feeding Hana remained pale and floppy, whimpering piteously.

Priska was aware of little more until 14 April, thirty-six hours after she’d given birth, when the second-in-command to the
Unterscharführer
shook her awake just after midnight and told that the camp was being evacuated. ‘
In einer Stunde muss alles marsch bereit sein!
’ he cried. (All must be ready to march within one hour!) That included her and her baby, and she hoped that not being shot in her bed or left to die in the sickbay might mean that she and baby Hana still had a chance. ‘The Soviets were coming to town so they were running away and they were taking us with them,’ she said.

Since December 1944, the Nazis had evacuated camp after camp all across occupied Europe in a race against time. Realising that they were almost certain to lose the military offensive, many were determined not to lose their war against the Jews and continued to annihilate them. Thousands were gassed or shot before the camps were evacuated, but some were allotted a different fate. The Nazi high command clung to the belief that, whatever happened, they would still need slave labour to rebuild the Reich. Hitler and Himmler planned an
Alpenfestung
, or ‘alpine fortress’, to which the German high command and its elite forces could retreat. It was an area intended to stretch from southern Bavaria across western Austria to northern Italy.

As prisoners would be needed to help defend the region, the decision was made to move any
Häftlinge
who’d survived incarceration in the south deeper into Reich territory. For speed and efficiency, those chosen to survive until the Nazis were done with them were transported by train, but where no rolling stock was available, or where the tracks and stations had been bombed, they were forced to evacuate on foot. These ‘death marches’ during one of the harshest winters in living memory were a fresh form of torture and killed off the weakest while leaving only the strongest alive.

In the final six months of the war, an estimated 300,000 of the 700,000 concentration camp and death camp prisoners who’d so far defied the odds to survive were to perish. At Auschwitz that January 60,000 surviving inmates were marched forty kilometres to a railway station where they were herded onto trains and sent deeper into Germany. Approximately 15,000 died en route of exhaustion, exposure or starvation as their cattle cars became abattoirs. Many more died elsewhere and the SS guards had orders to shoot any too feeble to continue.