Born Survivors (40 page)

‘No, no! She’s alive! She’s healthy!’ the nurse reassured her as Priska took baby Hana in her arms and vowed never to let her daughter out of her sight again.

Pete Petersohn continued to closely monitor Hana’s progress and saw mother and baby regularly. His major explained that all those weeks in the coal wagon had almost killed the baby. ‘He said she’d picked up an infection that had travelled throughout her body.’ Both men tried to persuade Priska to evacuate to the US once she
and the baby were strong enough to be moved. ‘My officer tried to talk her into bringing the baby to America,’ said Pete. ‘He was going to make arrangements for the two of them to come … because he felt she needed further treatment than what we could give her, but she wouldn’t have it. She wanted to go back to Czechoslovakia because [of] her husband … she had hoped that he would show up.’ Resisting their kind offer, Priska carefully folded away all that she had left of her child – the little white smock and bonnet the women of Freiberg had made for her baby – and prayed she would make a speedy recovery so that she could soon take her home.

A few barracks further along, Anka’s baby remained wrapped in the paper into which it was first folded for the next three weeks. There were no nappies and nothing soft to wrap it in – just more newspaper. Still no word had reached her of Priska and Hana, or of Rachel and Mark, so each mother still believed that hers was the only ‘miracle baby’. The reaction of their liberators didn’t disabuse them. ‘When the Americans arrived, they came and started to look at us like we were one of the Seven Wonders of the World,’ Anka said. ‘I was filmed for newsreels. They couldn’t get over it. A seventy-pound woman with a three-pound baby alive and kicking. They had never seen anything like it in such a place!’

Aside from all the attention, she said the best thing of all was the chocolate the American soldiers gave her. ‘That was lovely, except that they said we could have it, but then we couldn’t have it all. What torture was that?’ In the end, they were allowed one tiny cube at a time. After a few days, Anka called one of the American nurses to her bedside. ‘I asked if she could please give my little boy a bath as he had never been washed. She looked at me as if I had gone mad and said, “What do you mean? You have a little girl!” … I got hysterics – my first hysterics after all this – how can it be a “she” when they said it was a “he”? … I didn’t know what to think. I had never heard anything like that.’

Anka created such a scene that several doctors rushed to her bedside. At her request, each of them examined the child she’d called
Martin and confirmed that she’d given birth to a little girl and not a boy at all. One doctor eventually explained that it was a common mistake in sexing small or premature babies, as the genitals are often enlarged and swollen. ‘I was delighted!’ Anka said. ‘I had always wanted a little girl! … She was like an angel. I kept warming her little feet with my hands.’

Cradling her daughter still closer after her first bath, Anka chose the name Eva because it couldn’t be shortened or changed in any language. That felt important to her, having lived through a period when people’s names and the language they spoke had taken on such sinister significance. And although she had been born on 29 April in the back of a cart below the gates of the camp, Anka decided that her child would always celebrate a second birthday – 5 May, the date when she was liberated and ‘born again’ as Eva Nathanová – a free citizen. It was a decision shared by the other mothers individually.

Rachel’s sister Sala had been the first of the Abramczyk sisters to realise that the Americans had officially liberated Mauthausen when she heard artillery on 6 May, the day after Sgt Kosiek’s acceptance of the German surrender. Then she saw walking, talking GIs in the camp. ‘US Jeeps carrying soldiers came in and I started crying and everyone started screaming and people were lying on their carts clapping that the Americans were here. That is how they died – clapping and thanking them for coming. At least they knew they came but, gosh, so many people passed away then! They were too sick and too tired and they gave up.’

Sala was so excited to share the news with her oldest sister that she hurried to her barracks to see her. ‘I told her, “Rachel! Rachel! The war is over!” and she gave me a slap across the face because she thought that I’d gone crazy! … but that was the day we were all born again, especially baby Mark. The US soldiers were so good to us. God bless America!’

Rachel eventually accepted that her younger sister was telling the truth but she was too weak to get out of bed and see the liberators
for herself. In any event, by then there was bedlam in the camp. Relief at being free and the sight of a white flag hoisted over the gates brought indescribable joy to the prisoners but also incredible outrage at what had been done to them. Grown men were crying and behaving wildly. The huge wooden
Reichsadler
(imperial eagle) that had presided over the SS garage block was torn down and smashed to pieces by vengeful inmates. Any remaining guards were beaten or killed, while bands of prisoners in tattered uniforms played out-of-tune instruments or sang rousing renditions of their most patriotic songs.

One of the US soldiers at the camp that week was Captain Alexander Gotz, MD, present with the medical detachment of the 41st Armored Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron. He described that day as the witnessing of a ‘macabre and grotesque opera with the performers barely resembling human beings’. Even when things calmed down and the Americans had regained control, the surviving prisoners weren’t yet out of danger. They faced a new and unexpected enemy – compassion.

The US soldiers had strict instructions not to feed survivors until medical staff could properly assess their condition. After the liberation of previous concentration camps, the Allied command had learned the hard way that feeding the starving could be fatal. But the young Americans of the 11th Armored Division hadn’t any such experience before Mauthausen and they found it impossible to refuse the hungry multitudes, with tragic results. Gladly, they handed over their rations – including sweets and cartons of cigarettes – not realising the consequences. Men and women who’d been living on liquid, supplemented by bark peeled from trees or blades of grass, gobbled up the cigarettes rather than smoking them. Those who’d never seen chewing gum before swallowed it whole. Others used sharp stones to feverishly hammer their way into tins of beans and then gorged the lot, along with unhealthy quantities of bacon, cheese and Hershey bars, unable to stop themselves.

After years of extreme privation, and contaminated by decay, their bodies had broken down to the point where they could no longer digest solid food. An estimated 1,300 weakened and dehydrated prisoners died of sickness and diarrhoea due to their intolerance to the rations they were given in the days following liberation. A further 2,000 died from disease – mostly typhus and dysentery.

The three mothers and their babies were equally at risk. Rescued from their vermin-infested barracks, they were moved to better quarters where they were each given something to eat and drink. Then women started dying around them in droves. ‘The Americans didn’t know how to handle this,’ said Rachel. ‘They had never seen starving people before. They gave them everything.’

One GI offered Rachel his military ration of chocolate wrapped in brown paper. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen chocolate and so, for several moments, she just sat and stared at it, speechless. After a while she held it to her nose, closed her eyes and inhaled. The soldier, thinking that she didn’t know what it was, spoke slowly as he told her, ‘You chew it and swallow it.’ He even made hand gestures to show her, which only made Rachel weep. ‘He asked me, “Why are you crying?” I couldn’t tell him so he went away.’ When he returned he asked her again.

‘Because you were telling me what chocolate is,’ she replied.

Mortified, he apologised, but added, ‘When did you last look in the mirror?’

Rachel thought it must have been about a year before, May 1944, when she was still in the Łódź ghetto with dear Monik and her lovely family.

‘When we came here we all thought you were wild people,’ the soldier explained apologetically. ‘We didn’t realise you were normal.’

Those desolate shadows of the people they’d once been had forgotten what ‘normal’ was. Some of their fellow fragments of humanity were too exhausted to appreciate that they were free, even when the Nazis disappeared. One survivor said that at first
their minds couldn’t grasp what that could mean, even though they’d been waiting so long to be saved. They were, she said, ‘too weak and too empty to feel happiness’.

Many, desperate to get away in case the Nazis came back, staggered like drunks out of the camp gates, which were suddenly swinging open. The exertion proved too much for many who dropped dead just beyond the walls. Others made it as far as the town or onto neighbouring farms where they begged for food and clothing – and were almost always given something. Some of the most disorientated prisoners simply slumped to the ground, unable to grasp the concept of freedom or the miracle of Nature.

Their struggles were far from over and the next few weeks and months would see only the fittest of them survive. Few were even aware of the Germans’ unconditional surrender on 7 May 1945, in a little red schoolhouse in Reims, France. Or that VE Day was celebrated wildly around the world the following day, with millions taking to the streets. With their minds and bodies broken and their loved ones almost certainly gone, in the overcrowded bunks and barracks of Mauthausen there seemed less cause for celebration.

Within weeks of the Nazi surrender, the Allies were carving up the former German empire between them. Word flew around the camp that although the US Army had liberated Mauthausen it would be the Communist Soviets who took control of that part of Austria. The deadline for the takeover was 28 July 1945, when the Americans would withdraw south of the Danube and the Red Army would be in charge of the camp and any remaining inmates. For many Jews who feared the Russians almost as much as they’d feared the Nazis, that suddenly became their own personal deadline to escape to American-held territory.

Keen to stem the tide of infectious survivors wobbling pitifully out of the camp, the Americans closed the gates once more and assured them that they would be able to leave once they’d been declared disease-free. ‘We just wanted to go home,’ said Sala, who
was in better shape than most, ‘but they said we couldn’t yet because there were still some SS in the area. Many people didn’t understand or accept that, so then they explained that we were in quarantine.’ Determined to do what she could to help, Sala volunteered as a nurse in the temporary infirmary set up by the Americans for some six hundred-plus patients, as well as the tented field hospital they established for more than a thousand. She helped give vitamin and other shots and took care of the sick and dying for ten days. ‘I had to do something, even if it was only feeding people their last meal.’

Then she contracted typhus. ‘I don’t remember much about it because I was delirious and in quarantine. I remember an Italian doctor saying that I wouldn’t make it. From that day on, my sister Ester kept me alive. She opened the window and she climbed in to give me food. She didn’t even care if she got typhus too. I was almost dead for one week but she remained at my side because I couldn’t walk or see. Once I asked her to get me some strawberries and somehow – I don’t know how – she found me some, but I was feverish and I told her, “I don’t want strawberries!” Poor Ester. She saved my life.’

Rachel, too, did what she could. With the help of the Red Cross and other aid workers, the Americans had set up a mess squad to cook food, check on its nutritional content, and carefully monitor portion sizes. They were soon overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people they had to feed, and had to post armed soldiers to protect supplies. After a while, they decided it would be better to provide stoves for each hut and allocate food to be served three or four times a day. Rachel quickly took charge of her barracks and, clucking over her fellow survivors, began to prepare soup. ‘I had a baby to nurse and my sisters were sick, so I found a small pot and I cooked,’ she said, falling back into the maternal role she’d adopted to care for her younger siblings since their childhood in Pabianice.

Sala continued to deteriorate as typhus rampaged through her
body. It was weeks before she was out of danger. ‘I was so ill,’ she said. ‘I was running to the bathroom but everything was filled and it looked like hell … All you saw was dead people. There were corpses everywhere.’ One day a doctor came into her room and announced that June had arrived. ‘He said, “Let’s open the windows. Summer is here and we are all getting well.” And I did get well. I made it.’

In the following weeks, as the three new mothers and their babies gradually regained their strength and even began to gain a little weight, they were kept in separate sections of the camp, which was then under official quarantine. With tens of thousands of survivors to deal with, what the Americans called ‘organised chaos’ reigned, only ameliorated by the fact that most were too weak to leave their beds.

Apart from Rachel, who’d heard rumours that there were other babies in the camp but had never seen any with her own eyes, each mother remained completely oblivious of the others. Where they could have supported each other and shared their experiences in Auschwitz, throughout their time in Freiberg, and on the train, each continued to believe her situation to be unique. How could another woman and her baby have possibly lived through what they had each withstood? Besides, they had too many other things to think about – chiefly regaining their stamina and trying to make themselves presentable for the day when they might be released and, hopefully, reunited with Tibor, Monik and Bernd.

‘They still wouldn’t let us leave the camp because they were worried we would infect the Germans, so we were there for another four weeks,’ Rachel said. ‘But after a few days some of the girls went down into the town and people gave them some clothes and dresses and we washed our faces and began to look like normal people again.’ The seamstresses among them tore up blankets to make wraparound skirts and they adapted men’s underwear and shirts, some of which had been taken from the guards’ quarters or pulled from the bodies of those who’d perished. Others ripped
down the brightly coloured curtains or grabbed the gingham bedcovers from the barracks of the SS guards and
Kapos
, and made skirts and blouses from them. The luckiest ones raided the homes of the senior SS women and took their pick of clothes. Survivor Esther Bauer said, ‘I was given a dark green woollen suit with a fur collar. I was so happy!’