Born Survivors (30 page)

The women of KZ Freiberg had no choice but to obey the orders to evacuate – even Priska, who should never have been moved so soon and had no support for a baby that would normally have been placed in an incubator.

Rachel, in a similarly poor state, still rose from her bed to warn her sisters as soon as she learned that the camp was being evacuated. ‘I was too weak. I couldn’t do anything or even give birth. But then that night I heard they were taking us away. I knew I had to do something so I went to my sisters and said, “Make yourselves ready. We are leaving tonight.”’ The Germans were, she said, ‘organised and disciplined to the last minute’ as they ordered the prisoners to destroy any evidence and clean everything up. Then they marched them through the town for the last time, five abreast and at a punishing pace. ‘They didn’t know where they were sending us to. They were just told to get us away as the Russians were close.’

Lisa Miková was surprised at the speed of the evacuation as the barracks were cleared one by one. ‘There was a sudden departure in the night – always in the night,’ she said. ‘They came and said take everything – your bowl and spoon and your coverlet … We had no warning before we were marched to the station in the dark and sent away. We didn’t know that Auschwitz no longer existed and we were so afraid to go back there – that would be the worst.’ Even though it was the dead of night, it felt as if the whole town of Freiberg had been mobilised as Allied aircraft manoeuvred menacingly overhead. As well as the increasing numbers of refugees fleeing south, entire families packed up their most precious things and took to the roads or hurried to the station. The imminent arrival of the soldiers of the Red Army frightened them far more than the planes of the RAF.

Priska with her baby and thirty-five other sick women were among the last to leave KZ Freiberg. Initially they were ordered to march in the rain with the others, but they only made it a few hundred metres before it became clear that they couldn’t go any further. The guards conferred and then told the rest of the women to move on, leaving those who’d fallen by the side of the road. ‘The other women were convinced that they were going to execute us then,’ Priska said. ‘They were saying goodbye and crying with us.’

But instead of being gunned down in the middle of the town for all to see, the women were loaded into a sealed military truck. Once they were inside, the doors slammed shut behind them and they were driven off by the SS. Baby Hana was so lethargic she hardly cried or moved, even though her skin had started to blister. Trying to keep her warm, Priska pressed her daughter against her heart under her baggy dress. The women in the van had no idea where they were going and as they bumped along, many feared they would be driven to a remote location and shot. Others, having heard rumours of Chełmno and elsewhere, felt sure that they were to be gassed by exhaust fumes. Priska kissed Hana’s head and
prayed. ‘I am a believer so I told myself it is all in the hands of God and his power. He knew where I gave birth, so that’s why he helped me.’

With the Red Army approaching Freiberg from one side and the Americans from the other, there was little time to spare, so – whatever the initial intention – the van stopped for an agonising period for no apparent reason before starting up again. When it eventually pulled to a halt and Priska and the others were helped off at the station, their arrival was cheered by the women who never thought they’d see them again.

Virtually every train across occupied Europe had been deployed to ferry troops or munitions to and from the advancing fronts, and any remaining passenger carriages were reserved for fleeing citizens of the Reich. The only wagons available to the Nazi-run rail network for the transport of the 990 Jewish women and some male prisoners from the adjacent barracks were fifteen open-topped or ‘semi-wagons’ and a handful of closed cattle cars. Some of the wagons had been utilised for transporting anthracite and were ankle-deep in soot. Others had been used to ferry animals or human cargo, while the rest had carried dry goods including slaked lime that would burn feet already in a pitiful condition.

The spring weather had turned wet and cold and as the women were herded into the open cars, sixty to eighty at a time, the rain turned to sleet. With nothing but their thin blankets to protect them from the elements, they were pressed against each other once more as the bolts were slid shut behind them. If they stood on tiptoe or lifted one another up they could just see out. Much to their mutual dismay, a German
Aufseher
(overseer) was placed in most of the wagons to stop the prisoners looking out or trying to escape. Panic-stricken, they began to speculate where they were being sent. One claimed to have heard that they would be taken to an underground munitions factory and buried alive. Others feared they would be transported to the main Flossenbürg concentration camp in Bavaria (the destination of many death marches) to be
exterminated like vermin. What possible use would the SS have for so many half-starved women incapable of doing hard labour in a granite quarry?

Priska simply focused on trying to get through the next few hours. Squashed into one of the open wagons, she struggled to protect her newborn from the crush and slid to the blackened floor, pulling her baby’s little bonnet over her eyes.

Somewhere a few wagons further along was Rachel – almost to full term and so fragile that she’d been placed with the dying. The only consolation was that the car wasn’t quite so packed as the others and she could at least find a small space in which to lie alongside the rest, ‘like herrings in a tin’. None but her sisters and a handful of other women, loaded onto separate open wagons further along the train, knew that Rachel was with child. Neither were any of them aware of Hana’s birth. Struggling to stay alive, they had more pressing concerns.

Anka, nine months pregnant and a ‘walking skeleton in rags’, was squeezed into an open-topped coal truck with Mitzka, but she was in no better condition than her fellow mother-to-be. As frightened as the rest of them and praying fervently that they weren’t on their way back to Auschwitz, Anka gripped the side of the wagon with both hands to keep her balance as it shunted forwards with a lurch just after daybreak.

Belching black smoke, the hulking locomotive began to drag its wretched cargo away from a beleaguered Germany to they knew not where.

6

The Train

Prisoners transported in open wagons, winter 1944

Anyone standing on the platform of Freiberg station that damp morning in April 1945 probably wouldn’t have taken much notice of the freight train slowly pulling out on a westerly track. As with
any departure, a signalman would have swung a lantern in the half-light, the stationmaster would have blown a whistle or waved his flag to indicate that the ‘special’ was about to pull out, and the driver would have opened up the steam regulator as his crew fed coal to the firebox.

The only indication that this wasn’t just another war-time locomotive delivering supplies or munitions to the front would have been the scruffy heads of the tallest prisoners, just visible over the top of the sturdy goods wagons. Even then, few of the frightened Germans swarming around the station looking for an escape route would have suspected that somewhere in amongst those broken, decrepit creatures was a two-day-old baby, with two more babies about to be born. Nor were they likely to have much cared.

Under the direction of the
Deutsche Reichsbahn
(DR), assisted by various government ministries and their associated railway companies, the Third Reich’s vast 100,000-kilometre cross-Europe rail network had some 12,000 locomotives at its disposal, carrying both freight and passenger wagons. Aside from their primary function of mobilising troops and supplying the fuel and machinery necessary to maintain a war, the captured trains of occupied Europe became a fundamental instrument in Hitler’s ultimate goal or
Endlösung
. Between them, they transported a sizeable percentage of the millions destined for death by extermination or labour.

Crammed to capacity to maintain quotas for the rapacious gas chambers, the large wooden boxcars accessed via a heavy sliding door became the favoured method of transportation for the ‘freight extras’ – one of many terms the Nazis used for the deportees as part of their elaborate web of deceit. The beauty of the sealed ‘sardine tins’ was that they kept the prisoners out of sight and there was no escaping from them, unless as a corpse. The standard wagons, ten metres long, had also proved themselves to be the most efficient in terms of maximising revenue in what became an entirely self-financing operation. Coupled together these trains could easily carry
the minimum 1,000
Stücke
(‘pieces’) to qualify for the bulk travel discount offered for freight transportation.

The German railway operators charged the SS only a third-class fare if transporting more than four hundred passengers, which worked out at one
Pfennig
per kilometre for every person their trains hurried to the camps. In a chillingly calculated system, these fares were sometimes charged directly to the prisoners, who were forced to pay in cash or valuables or have the amount deducted from their ‘wages’. Children under four were transported to their deaths without charge, and those under ten went half-price. Each ‘piece’ was only ever issued with a one-way ticket.

Transported in conditions designed to inflict the maximum suffering, millions of
Häftlinge
were sent on journeys that could take a few hours or many days. The longest known shipment was from
Corfu in Greece in June 1944 and took eighteen days. When the doors were slid open in Auschwitz, hundreds of the train’s 2,000 occupants had expired. The rest, most of them dying, were immediately gassed.

Continental boxcar with elevated compartment used for transporting prisoners

The DR also charged the guards who escorted the prisoners, although they were issued with return tickets. Once each transport had been loaded, these men and women often climbed into the special elevated compartments built for the brakemen, an addition common on continental trains, or travelled in adjacent cars with comfortable seating. Sometimes they rode in passenger carriages coupled to the end of the trains. Only rarely did they remain with their charges inside the stinking boxcars.

Even so, not all the guards or rail staff were happy to accompany such transports. After one twelve-hour journey from Terezín to Auschwitz, some soldiers were reported to have broken down and declared that they’d ‘rather go to the front’.

A Czech train chief named Adolf Filipik who was ordered to shepherd a transport of
Häftlinge
is reported to have had a nervous breakdown and was unable to continue working after handing over his cargo. In Kolín, fifty kilometres from Prague, train drivers and their chief collapsed under similar strain and were no longer able to take up their ‘unusual service’. Their replacements only made it as far as the town of Český Brod, before they too had to be hospitalised. In such cases, SS officers were then brought in as engine drivers.

In spite of these few unwelcome interruptions to what was a highly efficient service run with bloodless proficiency, the freight wagons were used again and again; cleaned out after each delivery before being sent back for their next consignment. Some of the cattle cars were fitted with ropes and metal rings for tethering animals, apparatus that was put to deadly use by those prisoners who chose suicide over uncertainty. Had livestock been transported in the same wagons then they would have been treated far more compassionately, with straw spread across the boards, and basic
humanitarian measures would have been adhered to in order to minimise the animals’ suffering. No such allowances were made for the enemies of the Reich.

The powerful Class 52
Kriegslocomotiven
, the so-called ‘war trains’, that became a symbol of Nazi domination were those that made the most frequent journeys to and from the camps. In effect, they made Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ possible. The workers from each occupied nation who – under Nazi supervision – drove, fuelled, fumigated or waved the trains through also played their part. These employees, who were repeatedly warned that if they helped any of those on the transports they would be shot, not only contributed to the efficiency of the planned annihilation (often profiting from it) but became often unwitting accomplices to industrialised murder.