Rena's Promise (48 page)

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Authors: Rena Kornreich Gelissen,Heather Dune Macadam

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Historical, #test

BOOK: Rena's Promise
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begins to fall again and after a little while I am able to scrape a tiny layer of fresh clean snow off the ridge of the car before it turns black. This we melt in our mouths, trying to quench our thirst.
Finally the train starts. Wind whips our faces with bitter, sub-zero breath. I do not know what time it is. Every time I look at my watch I forget what the hands say and I don't want to raise my cuff and give any reason for the cold air to touch my skin directly. For how long the train races through the night I do not know. We get in and stay there until we are told to get out; it is dark and light somewhere in between.
"
Raus! Raus!
" We are ordered off the train. Our legs are cramped from sitting still and our joints don't bend easily as we leap into the snowdrifts below us. Four feet down.
We march again for a very long time through the dark. It is below zero. The snow is at our knees. No one has come before us to break the trail. There are no footprints to indicate that others have traveled this path; the bodies that strew the landscape are still warm. They are all girl-women. Where are they taking us?
Gunshots rip through the air like swatting flies on a hot summer day; still we march. I look at my watch but the numbers have no meaning. There are lights ahead. We march toward the lights, through the snow toward the gate of another camp, Ravensbrück. The words cackle across the dawn
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
. My heart collapses. We are not free.
11
There is nothing here, no blankets, no bunks; there are lots of girl-women and all the beds are occupied. We are so tired we curl up on cold dirt floors. I am so hungry that I sneak outside to find us food. There was a pile of potatoes we passed on our way through camp. Edging along the blocks, I scour the complex for the shadow I think will fill our bellies. There are no potatoes, only piles of bodies in the dark.
11. "January 24 [1945] . . . a transport with female prisoners from Auschwitz, including 166 Poles, arrives in Ravensbröck" (Czech, 800).

 

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Four
A.M
.
"
Raus! Raus!
"
They wake us with watery tea and a crust of bread. I cannot remember when we ate last, then I recall it was the Polish woman.
Is this for life or is it for death?
 
Page 255
Neüstadt Glewe
 
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We are in Ravensbrück for a few days, but there are so many of us and such little food that they decide to divide the camp up. The thumbs choose Danka, Dina, and me; I look around for Janka, Mania, and Lentzi, but they're not in our group. I don't know where they are. Danka, Dina, and I are piled into a flatbed truck, clinging to each other. Are they taking us to the gas? The flatbeds cross out under the gates of Ravensbrück and turn west; they are moving us again. We lean against the wood sides of the truck, jostling into one another. The road is full of potholes and bumps. Danka and I avoid looking at the girl-women riding with us. We are too tired to care where they're taking us or why; we just want to rest and eat.
We arrive at Neüstadt Glewe, get counted, and are handed pieces of bread.
1
At least we don't have to sleep on the floor here. In the morning we stand at roll call and quickly notice that there is no crematorium in this camp. There is a mound of bodies, though, about six feet high. The smell in camp is of decaying rather than burning flesh.
We are marched through the middle of town to work. The townspeople come out of their shops and homes to spit at us as we pass. The hatred in their eyes is dismaying; we are not human beings to them, we are lower than dogs. At the edge of town we are
1. Neüstadt Glewe is approximately 132 kilometers northwest of Ravensbrück.

 

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forced to dig trenches in an effort to stop the Allied forces. One would think the townspeople would be grateful for the work we do to protect them, but they spit at us that evening as well. We get another crust of bread and half a bowl of tea that night; that is all the food we are given. Rations are shrinking before our eyes. The Germans are losing the war.
For a month we are chased out of dreamless sleep and marched through town, and every morning, every night we are spit at as we pass. We wake. We get counted. We march. We dig. We eat. We starve. We wonder if it will ever end.
Four
A.M
.
"
Raus! Raus!
" We stand at attention for roll call and are then dismissed.
"It isn't Sunday, is it?"
"I don't think so." Part of the camp continues to work at an airplane factory; the rest of us have nothing to do. Rumors circulate that we won't be working anymore.
"The Allies must be close," our whispers speculate. "Maybe the war is almost over." We hope this is true, but after the death march, we know better than to put any hope in this desire. They could move us again to another prison if they wanted to. They could march us to Madagascar.
The lull of not working and spending all day behind the fences is enough to drive me crazy. I notice that the pile of bodies lying behind the barracks in camp is getting larger and I learn from the other prisoners that many of these women were arrested after the Warsaw Uprising. They are Jews and Poles, left to rot together outside without even a ditch to be buried in.
I go to the camp elder and say, "With no other work in camp to do, I was wondering if you might give us permission to bury the bodies of these few hundred women?"
"
Jawohl
," she says. "I'll give you a hand wagon. Choose nine

 

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others to help you. You start tomorrow morning. I'll assign two SS men to escort you.'' I make a note: she has a green triangle on her uniform, she is a murderer.
I ask for volunteers for this leichenkommando. Danka and Dina volunteer, as well as seven other girls. Covering our noses, we take the cart out to the mound of bodies. "We don't have gloves, so we must be careful," I warn the girls. "Only touch the arms and legs, and be very careful of any open wounds. We can't wash our hands before we eat, so we must be very careful so that we don't get sick." I take the arms while another girl takes the legs, and we swing a corpse onto the cart. It sighs as the last air is expelled from its lungs.
We falter. "Come on,
schnell!
" The guards yell. We load the cart as quickly as possible, about fifteen bodies. Then we begin our march to the burial place. Across the road is a men's camp of Italian political prisoners.
"Not much longer! Not much longer!" they shout as we walk by. We do not have a radio in camp; the news of the world has been cut off from us. We stare at these wild-eyed men; they do not look crazy, just desperate for freedom. "Not much longer! Not much longer!" Can they be right? How far away is not much longer?
The SS take us up a hill. The cart is heavy and we strain our muscles to keep it moving. It figures they would choose a burial site that is difficult to reach.
"You will bury them here." The guards stop, pointing to the area where we should dig, then they move away to rest on their rifles.
I thrust my shovel into the soil. It's rock-hard. We try to dig deep, as we're supposed to, but it is impossible. I get in the hole to dig out the bottom. The soil is so unforgiving that it takes hours to dig the graves, though. Thoughts run through my head while I'm in the hole trying to dig a little deeper; the SS could just shoot us and we'd fall in having dug our own graves.

 

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"Help me out," I call to the girls above. A hand reaches over the side; it's my sister pulling me up out of the pit.
"I don't like seeing you in there," she murmurs.
"I don't like being in there." I mean it, too. This is so difficult and we are so weak. But finally we get all the holes dug and the bodies are put to rest in unmarked graves. We stand on the hill, the sun slowly sinking toward the horizon.
"Let's say a prayer for the women we've buried," I whisper. There is a unanimous nod. Over the mounds of fresh dirt we say a prayer. The guards do not notice our stillness, our silence. It is very important to me to give these women who have died some sacred ground in recognition of their lives. The prayer make us feel good, and there is not much that does that. We walk wearily down the hill back toward camp. We have worked hard today and buried only fifteen women, and the mound of bodies still in camp looks no smaller for all our effort. I am sorry that I volunteered us for this job.
"Do you think I could sneak some potatoes from the pile and get something to eat?" I ask Dina one Sunday afternoon. The portions are getting smaller and we can no longer count on getting both soup and bread every day.
"I heard that the camp elder killed a girl for stealing a potato when she went out to get coal; she made the girl empty the bucket and there it was. She kicked the girl until she fell on the ground, threw a board on top of her, and jumped on the board until she was dead," someone tells me.
"Oh my God."
"Don't do anything to make this camp elder mad," another girl-woman adds. "She killed her husband and her in-laws. She's insane."
I shudder but am still enamored by the thought of trying to get two potatoes without getting caught. I am more capable than the girl who is now dead. I know I can do it.

 

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