Born Survivors (38 page)

In a surreal sequence of events, Priska was ordered to wait outside the guards’ barracks while the stranger took Hana inside. Rushing to the window with its pretty gingham curtains, the new mother watched anxiously as the stranger undressed the baby and laid her on a table. Then she stood over her smiling and cooing, seemingly oblivious to Hana’s appalling condition. The
Kapo
went to a cupboard and pulled out a length of string and a bar of chocolate – a luxury Priska had almost forgotten existed. The guard broke off a cube of chocolate, tied some string around it, and dangled it tantalisingly over the baby’s mouth. Enjoying her first-ever game, Hana’s sore-covered legs jerked in evident delight and her little tongue hungrily shot in and out as, standing outside in the cold, Priska’s breath steamed up the glass.

After almost an hour, the guard wrapped Hana in her grimy smock and bonnet once more and carried her back outside. ‘Here,’ she said brusquely, returning the baby to a shivering Priska. She then instructed another
Kapo
to escort mother and child to the gypsy barracks to join the others. She turned on her heel as if what was about to happen to them was none of her concern.

To reach her new quarters, a building where parts had formerly been made for Messerschmitt fighter planes (and therefore also known as the ‘Messerschmitt camp’), Priska had to descend the Stairway of Death to the quarry, which had thankfully fallen silent for the night. The route down was treacherous enough in the daytime, the steps dangerously uneven – but at night, holding a small baby, her legs quivering with fatigue, she almost slipped and fell several times. When she finally made it to the bottom and stumbled past the cliff at the foot of which so many had died, she and Hana were led to the farthest of Mauthausen’s thirty or so blocks, which was little more than a damp structure on the edge of the quarry. Inside a group of women who looked like prostitutes were quarrelling noisily in a corner; they didn’t even look up. A few handfuls of straw and some broken pallets had been thrown on the floor of urine-soaked clay. The bodies of the exhausted women from the train lay folded where they’d collapsed.

This wasn’t a place to see beauty. This was a place where people were left to rot.

Others from the Freiberg train had taken the exact same route as Priska earlier that evening while the
Kapo
was playing with Hana. They could hardly walk another step and many fell down the steps and had to be carried to the bottom. By the time they reached the barracks they simply found a place and sank down, ‘too exhausted to live’. Some of the luckier women, like Lisa Miková, had been assigned slightly better quarters in the main camp at the top of the hill, where – even though they were put into bunks four at a time – they were cared for by male prisoners who risked their lives to give them their own food and water in the
hope of keeping them alive. But none of those women had newborn babies to feed.

With Anka and her infant in the less than hygienic
Sanitätslager
, Rachel collapsed with Mark in the lice-infested barracks nearby, and Priska and Hana curled in exhaustion on the floor of a filthy hut, the women’s interminable ‘death march’ had finally come to an end. They were still at the mercy of a murderous regime, however, and their war was far from over. There were countless ways to die in KZ Mauthausen, the most frequent of which were starvation, exhaustion and disease – all of which they and their infants were already suffering from. In such conditions, all three babies were dangerously prone to hypothermia, hypoglycaemia and jaundice.

None of their mothers knew what the next day might bring and all were too exhausted to think about it. As dawn crept over the Alps on Monday, 30 April 1945, the three mothers and their babies remained oblivious to the arrival of a new day, or to its significance.

For, later that afternoon – as Soviet forces closed in on the subterranean
Führerbunker
in Berlin – Adolf Hitler and his new bride Eva Braun sat sit side by side on the couch in the study of his bunker and took leave of each other. As they bit down on glass vials of cyanide, Hitler also shot himself in the right temple with his pistol. Their bodies were carried outside, soaked in petrol, and burned. In his last will and testament, written on the day Anka’s baby was born, Hitler said that he had ‘chosen death rather than suffer the disgrace of dismissal or capitulation’. He ordered his followers to uphold the race laws ‘to the limit’ and to ‘resist mercilessly the poisoner of all nations, international Jewry’.

News of Hitler’s suicide would have spread very quickly through the dwindling Nazi command, but it didn’t reach the dying men and women under their control in those last desperate days of the war. If the prisoners were aware of anything, it was that there was shooting and shouting all day long, which only served to remind
them that they were still trapped in the heart of one of the last operational camps implementing Hitler’s plans to exterminate the enemies of the Reich.

‘The Germans were hysterical and yelling at everyone,’ said Lisa Miková, who lay in the hub of the camp up on the hill. ‘Everyone was afraid to go outside in case they were shot.’ She had slumped onto a stinking mattress on the floor of her barracks and when a Czech prisoner brought her some bread she thought to herself, ‘Now I must live.’ The bread, made from sawdust and chestnut flour, looked and smelt deeply unappetising, but it wasn’t that which prevented her from eating it. ‘I was so tired I couldn’t eat. I was feverish and everything was like in a dream world. Then a woman came and prised open my hand to release the bread from my fingers. I watched her impassively. I was too weak to move or fight.’

Only Anka and her new baby in the infirmary camp were shown any kind of care. With few medical facilities, it was mostly a place in which inmates waited to die. Compared with the way she’d been treated on the train, though, Anka thought the Germans ‘couldn’t do enough’ for her – although her infant stayed unwashed and wrapped in newspaper and she remained filthy and weak, surrounded by others dying untreated of typhus or worse. She said, ‘By the time we arrived the Germans were already frightened out of their wits and they started feeding us.’ She described their change of attitude as ‘cloying and horrible’, adding, ‘I knew the day before they would have killed us and now everything was fine and we were the “chosen” people.’

She remembered from Dan’s birth that she was advised a newborn shouldn’t be fed for the first twelve hours of its life, so she rested and allowed baby Martin to sleep before she tried to feed him. To her surprise, when she did she had so much milk that she could have ‘fed five babies’. She added, ‘I don’t know where it came from. If I had faith I would say it was a miracle.’ Her baby, whose arms were the width of her little finger, guzzled greedily.

After weeks in which she had eaten not much more than a few mouthfuls of stale bread, Anka was given a bowl of macaroni swimming in fat. ‘I was so hungry I ate it. I can’t tell you how hungry I was! … but it could have killed me on the spot. My intestines couldn’t take it.’ Almost immediately, she became incapacitated with diarrhoea and was extremely sick. ‘I didn’t have much left to give and could have contaminated the milk for the baby. But how can you resist food when you are starving?’

Somehow she managed to survive that setback, but still she didn’t know if she had lived another day only to be murdered by the Nazis the next. The other prisoners tried to assure Anka from their adjacent bunks that she didn’t have to worry about the gas chamber any more because it had been ‘blown up’, but she was afraid to trust anyone. She had no idea if what they said was true, but she certainly hoped so.

In the barracks beyond her
Sanitätslager
there was little hope for the rest of the women from the Freiberg transport. Their new quarters were alive with vermin and full of diseases. Tormented by lice, they were now even dirtier than they’d become accustomed to. It was difficult to breathe because of the smell of excrement and decomposing human flesh. The corpses of some prisoners had been dragged into the woods to form piles of flesh-covered bones. Gerty Taussig, who’d staggered from her hut to relieve herself, slumped onto a log, shocked. A male inmate sat next to her and said conspiratorially, ‘I will share something with you – the best pieces of meat are from the thigh.’

For the first time in almost as long as they could remember, no one arrived to make them get up the next morning. Nor was there any coffee-water to drink. Up on the hill they could hear shooting and the mounting sounds of violence as the Germans panicked. The noise of an explosion in the distance was music to their ears. There were also the sounds of work continuing in the quarry beyond their compound, but then an eerie silence fell and the women wondered if they’d been left there to die.

In the days immediately after Hitler’s suicide, the longer-term inmates of Mauthausen, who’d formed their own prisoner committees and resistance groups, noticed a distinct change in the atmosphere of the camp. There were still
Appelle
but work in the quarry virtually ceased (although the strongest were still instructed to break up and carry rocks). Then they realised that there were fewer and fewer Germans around. The ‘old-timers’ were suddenly able to move freely, taking food and water to the weakest, encouraging them to hang on. There was an almost constant roar of diesel engines as vehicles left the camp and the Red Cross ambulances were finally allowed through the gates to remove their agreed French and Benelux evacuees. Not that the
Häftlinge
down the hill were aware that potential rescue was so close at hand, while most of the food parcels the Red Cross brought in were taken by the fleeing Nazis.

As Anka slept soundly for the first time in months, Rachel and Priska also tried to rest and regain a little strength as their babies squeezed the last drop of milk from them. All were completely unaware of the moment when in the early hours of Thursday, 3 May, thirty-nine-year-old Frank Ziereis, the SS commandant of the camp for the previous six years, gave the order for his men to leave. The Zyklon B box that fed the gas chamber had been dismantled, and the camp was handed over to a unit of
Feuerschutzpolizei
(fire police) drafted in from Vienna, assisted by some older German soldiers.
Standartenführer
Ziereis then fled to his hunting lodge with his wife, but was later captured and killed. His SS officers scattered to the winds.

That day, a French officer released the previous week by the Red Cross managed to get a message to the Allied authorities warning them that tens of thousands of prisoners in Mauthausen and its satellite camps were likely to be killed following a letter received from Himmler ordering the destruction of anything that could be used as evidence against the Nazis.
[The officer] stated that the Germans are planning to exterminate these completely
, the secret
message read.
Gas, dynamite and barges for mass drowning have been called forward and received. Massacres had started when the officer left the camp
.

Two days later, on the morning of Saturday, 5 May 1945, a reconnaissance squad from the ‘Thunderbolts’, the 11th Armored Division, Third US Army, was on patrol in the area checking on the safety of bridges when it was persuaded by an agitated Red Cross delegate to accompany him to Gusen and then into Mauthausen. The troops were led by platoon leader Sergeant Albert J. Kosiek, a Polish-speaking non-commissioned officer whose lieutenant had recently been killed but who turned down a promotion to remain with his men. The son of Polish immigrants to America, Sgt Kosiek was in charge of twenty-three soldiers with just six vehicles including a tank and his scout car when he first saw the fortress on the hill at Mauthausen, mistaking it for a huge factory.

Mauthausen liberator, US Sgt Albert J. Kosiek

When he began to smell the ‘foul odours’ emanating from the camp he discovered, to his horror, that it was a factory of sorts – a place of murder on a previously unimagined scale. Like so many of the Allied soldiers who stumbled across the Nazi killing centres in the final months of the Second World War, it was an experience that would never leave Kosiek and his men. Beyond the high stone walls and double electrified fences they came across thousands of saucer-eyed prisoners, many of them catatonic and on the verge of collapse. A huge number were unashamedly naked after years of being forced to stand in
Appell
after
Appell
without any clothes. In the final stages of the war, their rags had either fallen off or been torn from them by their stronger fellows. Exposed to the weather, their skin was covered in sores or had been eaten away by disease.

‘It’s a sight I’ll never forget,’ Sgt Kosiek said. ‘Some had just blankets covering them and others were completely nude, men and women combined, making the most emaciated-looking mob I have ever had the displeasure to look upon … They hardly resembled human beings. Some couldn’t have weighed over forty pounds … it made me wonder what kept them alive.’ In spite of their appalling physical and psychological condition, some of the prisoners were rioting and even more went ‘wild with joy’ – screaming, yelling and crying in a discord of languages as soon as the Americans drove in through the gates.