I Have Lived a Thousand Years (8 page)

“Goldene Haar!”
he exclaims and takes one of my long braids into his hand. I am not certain I heard right. Did he say “golden hair” about my braids?

“Bist du J
ü
din?”
Are you Jewish?

The question startles me. “Yes, I am Jewish.”

“Wie alt but du?”
How old are you?

“I am thirteen.”

“You are tall for your age. Is this your mother?” He touches Mommy lightly on the shoulder. “You go with your mother.” With his riding stick he parts Aunt Serena from Mommy’s embrace and gently shoves Mommy and me to the group moving to the right.

“Go. And remember, from now on you’re sixteen.”

Aunt Serena’s eyes fill with terror. She runs to Mommy and grabs her arm.

“Don’t leave me, Laura. Don’t leave me!”

Mother hugs her fragile older sister and turns to the SS officer, her voice a shrieking plea, “This is my sister,
Herr Offizier,
let me go with her! She is not feeling well. She needs me.”

“You go with your daughter. She needs you more. March on!
Los!”
With an impatient move of his right hand he shoves Mother toward me. Then he glares angrily at Aunt Serena.

“Move on!
Los!
You go that way!”

His stick points menacingly to the left.

Aunt Serena, a forlorn, slight figure against the marching multitude, the huge German shepherd dogs, the husky SS men. A savage certainty slashes my bruised insides. I give an insane shriek, “Aunt Serena! Aunt Serena! I will never see you again!”

Wild fear floods her hazel eyes. She stretches out her arms to reach me. An SS soldier gives her a brutal thrust, hurling her into the line marching to the left. She turns again, mute dread lending her added fragility. She moves on.

I never saw Aunt Serena again.

A
RBEIT
M
ACHT
F
REI

AUSCHWITZ, MAY 31, 1944

The huge metal letters loom high and dark above the gothic gate like a sinister crown. WORK SETS YOU FREE. What does that mean? Could Mommy have been right? Could it be that we would work and be treated like human beings? Given food and proper lodgings? But free? What do they mean by that? Would they give us even freedom if we worked?

The immense portals of the gate open and we march through into an enclosure with tall wire fences. Very tall plain wire fences flanked on both sides by a lower fence of barbed wire.

It is rapidly growing lighter. And colder. Much colder. The eerie light of the watchtowers is growing dimmer. When would we get our things? I need my coat. We keep my marching. On and on. Past rows of barracks, long flat buildings on both sides of the pebble-strewn road lined with barbed wire. It is a road without an end. It stretches far into the fog. And we keep my marching.

Motorcycles roar past. SS officers. Dogs. Incessant barking.
“Marschieren. Marschieren! Los. Los!”

We keep marching. On and on. It is bitter cold.

Clusters of people linger on both sides of the road, beyond the fence. Are they men or women? Shorn heads. Gray dresses. They run to the fence and stare. Blank stares.
The blank stares of the insane. They have the appearance of the mentally ill. Impersonal. This is probably an asylum for the mentally ill. Poor souls.

The road ends. Our silent, rapid, haunted march ends at the entrance of a gray, flat building. By fives we are ordered to file through the entrance. Inside, a long narrow room, very low ceiling. Inside, shocking noise. Shouts, screams. Loud unintelligible screams.

“Ruhe!!”
Quiet!

A tall husky blonde in SS uniform shouts,
“Ruuheee! Wer versteht Deutsch? Deutsch! Wer versteht Deutsch, austreten!”
Who understands German? Step forward!

I step forward. I understand German. A few other girls also step forward. They probably also understand German.

“Tell them,” the big SS woman roars. She tosses a chair toward me. “Stand on this and tell them to keep quiet at once. I want quiet this minute. Next minute they will be shot!”

I attempt to shout above the din. And other interpreters, they too shout as loudly as they can. The low ceiling compresses the sounds. The noise is like a roaring tidal wave hurling back and forth. Stunning us senseless.

“RUHE!”
The buxom SS woman leans forward and cracks her whip into the crowd. As if on cue, the row of SS soldiers lining the walls step forward and begin cracking their whips, snapping into faces. A sharp pain slashes my left cheekbone. I feel a firm welt rise across my face. Why? I am the interpreter. Quickly, I step down and melt into the crowd. Perhaps it is safer there.

Within seconds it becomes quiet.

“Sich auskleiden! Alles herunter!” Everyone
undress! Everything off!
“Los!”

The room is swarming with SS men. Get undressed? Right here? In front of the men? No one moves.

“Didn’t you hear? Take off your clothes. All your clothes!”

I feel the slap of the whip on my shoulders and meet a young SS soldier’s glaring eyes. “Hurry! Strip fast. You’ll be shot. In five minutes anyone with clothes on will be shot!”

I look at Mommy. She nods. “Let’s get undressed.” I stare directly ahead as I take off my clothes. I am afraid. By not looking at anyone I hope no one will see me. I have never seen my mother in the nude. How awful it must be for her. I hesitate before removing my bra. My breasts are two growing buds, taut and sensitive. I can’t have anyone see them. I decide to leave my bra on.

Just then a shot rings out. The charge is ear shattering. Several women begin to scream. Others weep. I quickly take my bra off.

It is chilly and frightening. Clothes lie in mounds on the cement floor. We are herded, over a thousand shivering, humiliated, nude bodies, into the next hall, even chillier, darker. Even barer and more foreboding.

“Los! Schneller, blöde Lumpen!”
Move. Faster, idiotic whores.

We are lined up, and several young women in gray dresses start shaving our hair—on our heads, under our arms, and in the pubic area. My long, thick braids remain attached while the shaving machine shears my scalp. The pain of the heavy braid tugging mercilessly at the yet unshaven roots brings tears to my eyes. I whisper a silent prayer for the shaving to be done quickly. For this unexpected torture to be over soon.

As my blonde tresses lie on the ground, the husky,
indifferent hair butcher remarks, “A heap of gold.” With a shudder I remember the scene at the selection—the SS officer admiring my
“goldene Haar,”
the separation from Aunt Serena. Where was she now? Was her hair shorn off as well? Did she also have to strip naked? Was she very frightened? Poor darling Aunt Serena. Where was she now? Had my hair been shorn off before the selection we would be together with her now. We would not have been separated. It was because of my blonde braids that Mommy and I were sent to the other side. Poor darling. If only we could have stayed together!

The shaving of hair has a startling effect. The absence of hair transforms individual women into like bodies. Indistinguishable. Age melts away. Other personal differences melt away. Facial expressions disappear. In their place, a blank, senseless stare emerges on the thousand faces of one naked, unappealing body. In a matter of minutes even the physical aspect of our numbers seem reduced—there is less of a substance to our dimensions. We become a monolithic mass. Inconsequential.

The shaving of hair has another curious effect. A burden is lifted. The burden of individuality. The burden of associations. Of identity. The burden of the recent past. Girls who had continually wept since the separation from parents, sisters, and brothers, now keep giggling at their friends’ strange appearances—shorn heads, nude bodies, faceless faces. Some shriek with laughter. Others begin calling out names of friends to see if they can recognize them now. When response comes from completely transformed bodies, recognition is loud, hysterical. Embraces are wild, noisy. Disbelief is shrieked, screamed, gesticulated. Some girls
bury their faces in their palms and roll on the ground, howling.

“Was ist los?”
What’s the matter? A few cracks of the SS whip, and order is restored.

I look for Mommy. I find her easily. The hair cropping has not changed her for me. I have been used to seeing her in her kerchiefs, every bit of hair carefully tucked away. Avoiding a glance at her body, I marvel at the beauty of her face. With all accessories gone, her perfect features are even more striking. Her high forehead, large blue eyes, classic nose, shapely lips, and elegant cheekbones are more evident than ever.

She does not recognize me as I stand before her. Then, a sudden smile of recognition: “Elli! It’s you! You look just like Bubi. Strange, I’ve never seen the resemblance before. What a boyish face! They cut off your beautiful braids ...”

“It’s nothing. Hair can grow.”

“With God’s help.”

We are herded en masse into the next hall. I shriek with sudden shock as a cold torrent of water gushes unexpectedly from openings in the ceiling. The mass of wet, nude bodies crushes about me in a mad, splattering wave. In a few minutes it is over and I am carried along in the midst of the wet mass to another hall. Gray, sacklike dresses are shoved at us and we are ordered with shouts of
“Los, blöde Schweine”
to pull them over wet, shivering bodies. The epithet
“blöde Lumpen,
” idiotic whores, is now downgraded to
“blöde Schweine,”
idiotic swine. More despicable. And it is upgraded only occasionally to
“blöde Hunde,
” idiotic dogs. Easier to handle. Everyone has to pick a pair of shoes from an enormous shoe pile.
“Los! Los!”
Take a pair. Size makes no difference.

As we emerge from the other end of the building and line
up quickly in rows of five, shivering wet in shapeless gray sacks, with heads clean shaven, the idea strikes me. The strange creatures we saw as we entered the camp, the shaven, gray-cloaked bunch who ran to the barbed-wire fence to stare at us, we are them! We look exactly like them. Same bodies, same dresses, same blank stares. They, too, must have arrived from home recently. They too were ripe women and young girls, bewildered and bruised. They too longed for dignity and compassion. And they too were transformed into figures of contempt instead.

The
Zählappell
lasts almost three hours. This word, meaning roll call, becomes the dread and the lifestyle of Auschwitz. Twice daily we are lined up by fives in order to be counted. At 3
A.M.
we would line up with lightning speed, and then stand stiffly and silently for three or four hours until the official SS staff shows up to count our heads. The SS officer taps the heads of the first line and counts in multiples of five. The actual count is accomplished in a few minutes. The stiff, silent wait on the evening
Zählappell
lasts from five to nine. The lineup has to be mastered in seconds in order to stand for hours, waiting.

It is inconceivable to me that the mad rush inside would culminate in an interminable wait outside. Why are our wet, traumatized bodies, wearing only a single cotton cloak, hurled out into the cold for an endless, senseless wait?

Finally, a smartly stepping, brisk, German military staff member appears. With the tip of an authoritarian stick on the shaven head of the first girl in every row of five, we are initiated into the camp. We have become members of an exclusive club. Inmates of Auschwitz.

B
ORN IN THE
S
HOWERS

AUSCHWITZ, MAY 31, 1944

Newborn creatures, we marched out of the showers. Shorn and stripped, showered and uniformed, we marched. Women and girls from sixteen to forty-five, rent from mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, and husbands—transformed into a mass of bodies, we marched toward the barracks of Auschwitz.

An abyss separated us from the past. The rapid succession of events this morning was an evolution of aeons. Our parents and families belonged to the prehistoric past. Our clothes, our shoes, our hair—had they been real? The homes we left only recently were in distant lands, perhaps of make-believe.

We were new creatures. Marching expertly in fives at a rapid, deliberate rhythm, we were an army of robots animated by the hysterics of survival.

We survived the entry into Auschwitz. Unknowingly, we survived the selection of the diabolical Doctor Mengele, the handsome psychotic monster who had tenderly stroked my “golden hair” and in a kindly voice advised me to double-cross his SS machinery and lie about my age so as to save my life.

As we march in a deliberate, rhythmic, robodike manner toward our future in Auschwitz, a heavy cloud of smoke rises from the stacks of a low, gray building on our left. It was
only much làter that we found out about the smoke. By then we knew all the faces of death. By then we had lived long enough in the realm of death to believe what we found out about the smoke.

But now, as we march from the showers toward the camps, we know only of survival. We sense its sinister significance. Survival is programmed in every fiber of our muscles, and with those muscles we march, not understanding, not even wishing. We march on, driven by instinct. We march, steadfastly avoiding German whips, growling German shepherds, and poised German guns. With inexorable drive we march silently on and on. That quality, born in the showers, that new, mystical compromise with death, bids us to move on. Our secret pact with death animates our march toward the camps.

When we reach C-Lager, the sun is high. It scorches my freshly shaven scalp. It parches my lips and throat. My shoes, two sizes too small, are pressing on skinned toes and ankles. My own mystic march against death is turning into a graceless limp. Relentless heat, suffocating dust, and the monotonous drone of marching feet. Thirst. Unbearable. God, let me faint.