Born Survivors (47 page)

Rachel (seated right) in 2002 with (L–R) her grandson David, daughter-in-law Mary, son Mark, grandson Charlie and granddaughter Margaret

When she watched the film of
Gone with the Wind
with her grandson Charlie, particularly the scenes depicting how the characters suffered during the American Civil War, she told him, ‘They think that’s bad?’ Later in life, she also took Charlie and some of her other grandchildren to the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem, where she answered more of their questions than she had ever answered of her son’s.

Towards the end of her life, Rachel suffered from a series of medical problems including diabetes, high blood pressure and heart issues. She also had nerve damage in her legs, became deaf, and her bones softened with osteoporosis, causing multiple spinal fractures. She would say of her lack of mobility, ‘I tell my legs where to go and they don’t listen!’ Mark said that, in her eighties, his mother was ‘weak and tired after years of being strong and healthy … She found it hard to enjoy life and hoped for the end.’ Still, she celebrated her eighty-fourth birthday with family on New Year’s Eve 2002, having only just given up being a volunteer at a local hospital. Two months later, she had routine surgery on her bladder, insisting that the operation be timed for when her sisters Ester and Sala were on a trip to Hawaii so that they ‘wouldn’t fuss’.

Mark flew to Nashville from his home in Wisconsin to be with his mother and was at her side when she suffered catastrophic heart failure immediately after the operation. ‘She opened her eyes briefly and looked my way,’ said her baby who was born in a coal wagon. Rachel Olsky died on 19 February 2003.

At fifty-seven years of age, and after a lifetime of trying to live up to the legacy of his extraordinary birth, Mark had become an orphan. His indomitable mother, who had so very nearly died sixty years earlier and had endured so much in her lifetime – including the death of two husbands – always played down what she and
Mark had gone through. ‘You’re making a big story out of such a simple thing!’ she would have told her son.

Rachel is buried in a peaceful corner of a Jewish cemetery in Nashville, Tennessee, surrounded by beautiful dogwood trees.

Rachel’s grave in Nashville, Tennessee, USA

Anka

After three weeks of rest and recuperation in the infirmary at Mauthausen, Anka and Eva were finally ready to go home. As she braced herself to be repatriated to Prague, she and her daughter were inundated with baby clothes and gifts from soldiers and well-wishers until Eva was ‘very well-equipped’.

With Eva’s all-important birth certificate and Anka’s brand-new identity papers no longer stamped with a ‘J’, mother and child
boarded buses to České Budějovice and eventually the flower-decked Czechoslovakia-bound train on or about 20 May 1945, and bade a fond farewell to those who’d saved them.

Like those of the other mothers, Anka’s journey was tortuous and peppered with long delays. Most railway stations were devoid of staff but crowded with people desperate to get home and who tried to climb aboard, even riding on the roof. The sorry-looking Czech prisoners from Mauthausen eventually reached their destination late one dismal night at Prague’s Wilson Station. It was a place Anka knew only too well from the days when she would travel from Třebechovice to visit her aunt and from where she’d alighted after moving to the city to study law. That all seemed like such a long time ago.

Arriving in a post-war, post-revolution Prague, though, was one of the most depressing moments of Anka’s war. ‘All those years you had to keep going and keep fighting and try not to worry or to think,’ she said. ‘It never occurred to me until then that there would be no one left to meet me … my parents and my sisters … there was nobody there and nothing to come home to.’ It was, she added, a ‘dreadful realisation … the worst moment of the entire war for me’.

Aside from the damage done during the revolution, parts of the city had accidentally been carpet-bombed by American pilots who’d mistaken it for Dresden in the February raids, leaving its power and transport systems in chaos. Huge areas of it were still blacked out. Emotionally and physically fragile, Anka had no money and her only plan was that at daybreak she would make her way to her cousin Olga’s apartment. Contrary to all logic, she felt sure that Olga would have survived because she was married to a Gentile. In the meantime, Anka and her friends had to wait in the dark until officials from the Red Cross arrived and arranged to put them up in the Hotel Graaf near the station.

The following morning, she slipped away with Eva and found her way to the tram station. As one of the first survivors to return to
Prague after the war, her appearance made her something of a curiosity. Even though horrific images of the liberated camps and their survivors had appeared in cinema newsreels and newspapers around the globe, people were still shocked to see the stick-thin mother with uneven hair wearing the shabby second-hand clothes she’d been given in Mauthausen. Many felt sorry for her and offered her far too many Czech crowns.

‘I just need the tram fare,’ she insisted, and took only what she required. In daylight the city was surprisingly unaltered, but to a disorientated Anka it seemed changed beyond all recognition. Making her way to the second-floor apartment at Schnirchova Street, near the city’s Art Nouveau Exhibition Grounds, she climbed the stairs and was stunned to find bread and salt – the basics of life – waiting outside the door in traditional Czech welcome. Knocking on the door just after 10 a.m., she came face to face with her cousin Olga Šroňková, her husband Ivan, and two children, who’d heard she was alive and had been waiting for her to return. ‘We haven’t got lice!’ Anka said, before falling into familiar arms and crying for the first time in years. In fact she and Eva were riddled with lice, but nobody cared, so relieved were they to see them.

‘Please can we stay a few days to recover?’ Anka asked. They would stay for three and a half years as Olga and her family welcomed them warmly and gave them a new start in life. ‘They were angelic. In that small apartment with teenagers they still took us in – and for all that time.’

In the first few days after her arrival, Anka mainly slept and ate. She couldn’t get over the idea of having enough to eat and would secretly get up in the night to help herself to as much water as she liked, or raid the store cupboard. She seemed unable to stop eating bread, and would even bake fresh supplies with Olga in the middle of the night if the power was on.

When it became apparent that she and Eva had brought lice home with them, and that both were also suffering from scabies –
caused by parasitic mites – they were admitted to hospital for several days to be treated with insecticide lotions and antibiotics. Olga, who was twenty years older than Anka, visited her often and was extremely patient with her. Gently, she began to answer her questions and recount what had happened in Prague in her absence. Olga and her sister Hana – who’d also married a Gentile – had escaped arrest until the last six months of the war, when they’d been imprisoned in Terezín. Their husbands were sent to a separate camp in Czechoslovakia for non-Jews. All had survived.

She was also able to tell Anka that no other members of their family had yet made contact. There was no word of Anka’s proud parents Stanislav and Ida, of sorrowful Ruzena and her pretty blond son Peter, or of her fun sister Zdena and her husband Herbert. Olga showed Anka the postcard that Zdena had been forced to write from Birkenau, containing the codeword
lechem
for bread – her last valiant attempt to let them know they were starving. Zdena, the vibrant, beautiful woman who had so loved her husband and her life, had been snuffed out like a candle.

Olga had heard nothing about her parents, whom Anka had last seen leaving Terezín. Nor was there any word of Bernd. The family had registered all the names of their missing relatives with the relevant authorities. As the days turned to weeks without further news, it seemed increasingly likely that they were the sole survivors from their large extended family.

To add to her woes, Anka’s plentiful supply of breast milk dried up virtually the moment they arrived in Prague. ‘It was as if her body said, “Enough!” once it decided she could get formula milk or other food for me,’ Eva said. ‘The irony was that Peter’s father sent a whole load of Ostermilk powder from England but when my mother took me to a paediatrician to check me over he told her it was rubbish and she should throw it away, so she did.’

Thereafter, every attempt Anka made to feed baby Eva ended with her weeping in pain and frustration. She had no more milk to offer and her breasts were extremely tender. When a child specialist told
her that Eva needed to ‘eat and eat and eat’, Anka felt she had no choice but to force-feed her. Eva, poorly and unable to do anything but suckle, was tipped upside down on the sofa and fed soup with a spoon until she either choked or swallowed. It was a traumatic experience for everyone.

Anka and Eva, Prague 1945

Anka had other worries too. Stripped of Czech citizenship by virtue of her marriage to a German and her country’s expulsion of all Germans, she was worried that she might be in danger, even though she was Jewish. Every day she took Eva in a pram to the various government offices to fill in forms and speak to officials in an effort to recover her citizenship.

Still there was no news of Bernd or her relatives, despite enquiries with everyone Anka met who might have been with them. Refusing even then to relinquish hope, she told herself that he was on his way home to her. Then, gradually, through people
who knew her family, she learned the fate of her immediate relatives. Her parents and sisters, as well as Peter and her brother-in-law, had all been placed in the Czech family camp in Birkenau designed to appease the Red Cross. Anka’s once proud father Stanislav – whose glasses and spirit had been broken in Terezín – had died of pneumonia within weeks. Smiling Zdena and her handsome husband Herbert were gassed along with Ruzena once the family camp was emptied. Anka’s nephew Peter, just eight years old, had been sexually abused by the guards before he too was gassed. Anka’s mother Ida, the jovial, buxom matriarch who’d manned the till at the leather factory and entertained the female customers, had lost her mind when her family had all gone and was almost certainly sent to the gas chamber. ‘The man who told me about my mother [losing her mind] may have been sorry for me and I don’t know if it was true but it would have been a blessing if it were.’

Just as she was trying to take all that information in, Anka bumped into someone in the street. ‘I met him by chance in a very smart road which is called Na Přikopech … I can’t even remember what I was doing there. And there he was. I knew him from before the war and I never realised that he was in the same camp as Bernd … And he saw me and he was very pleased to see me and he asked, “Did you know? – Don’t wait for your husband. He was killed just before liberation. I was there when he was shot.” I will be eternally grateful that he didn’t make a song and dance and that he told me straight. He didn’t make me wait.’

Anka found out eventually that soon after Bernd had arrived in Auschwitz II-Birkenau in September 1944, he’d been selected to work in the mill and munitions factory of a satellite camp named Bismarckhütte, in Chorzów Batory in Silesia. Located near the Bismarck steel mill run by the Berghütte company, the camp held approximately two hundred Jewish prisoners who were forced to do manual labour or make parts for weapons. He survived the severe winter but on 18 January 1945, all the prisoners were evacuated thirty kilometres to Gliwice on a ‘death march’ through deep
snow. Bernd may even have joined the column of hapless souls among whom was Priska’s husband Tibor, but it will never be known if the men ever met.

Anyone on that march who lagged behind or fell to the ground was shot in the back of the head and abandoned by the roadside to freeze solid. Such had been Tibor’s fate. Those who remained – they could barely be called ‘living’ – were then loaded into cattle trucks to be sent by rail to the Nordhausen-Dora or Buchenwald camps. It was on that final leg of the journey that Bernd was shot in front of the train by an SS guard. Months later, nobody could tell his grieving widow what had happened to his body, which was presumably lying abandoned somewhere in the middle of the frozen landscape. She had no idea if he was later buried, and there was nowhere she could ever go to pay her respects.