The Girl Who Survived
Based on a true story, an utterly unputdownable and heart-wrenching World War 2 page-turner
Ellie Midwood
Books by Ellie Midwood
The Girl Who Survived
The Girl on the Platform
The Girl in the Striped Dress
The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz
The Violinist of Auschwitz
Available in Audio
The Girl in the Striped Dress (Available in the UK and the US)
The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz (Available in the UK and the US)
The Violinist of Auschwitz (Available in the UK and the US)
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Epilogue
The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz
Hear More from Ellie
Books by Ellie Midwood
A Letter from Ellie
The Girl Who Survived
The Girl in the Striped Dress
The Violinist of Auschwitz
A Note on History
Acknowledgments
To my two muses, Pupper and Joannie
Prologue
Minsk, Soviet Union. February 1943
“We live together, or we die together.”
How simple he made it sound. It was all the same to him now; he had confessed to me not two days ago when he had typed his own name into the stolen blank of an official permit – our ticket to a free life, or a communal death sentence; one could never tell these days which one it would be.
I nodded out of habit – in a place like this, you learn to accept, without any reservation, anything that a man in a uniform tells you, if you know what’s good for you – and smiled, in spite of myself, as he held my face in his warm palms.
“I will get us out of here,” he repeated once again, with a sidelong glance toward the window. He didn’t see the city which lay right in front of his eyes any longer; he peered much further, into the vague dream of a forest and the partisan brigades. “I will get us both to freedom. You believe me, don’t you?”
I nodded again, feeling miserable and powerless yet smiling brightly, just like my mother was as she was being led to the gas van. While being marched to her certain death, she was smiling at me, courageous and reassuring, just so I would stay strong, just so I wouldn’t succumb to the mass hysteria.
“Why the tears?” He tilted his head to one side, as though pitying me with those kind eyes of his.
How desperately he had tried to dig out of me that habit of instinctive submission to any word spoken by a Herr Offizier whoever that Herr Offizier might be. But, someone before him had driven the point across far too many times, accentuating it with rubber baton blows, riding crop whips, and a few backhanded slaps for good measure. So, forgive me, Herr Hauptmann, but habits instilled by blunt, savage force will never be so easily eradicated by your soft voice and promises in which I don’t fully believe.
You’ll change your mind. Surely, you will. There’s nothing in it for you except for court-martial and death if your own people seize, or capture you and death if the Soviet partisans do. And all for what? A couple of dozen or so Jews who still cling to life despite all, and a girl, whose face you’re holding in your hands now? You will change your mind at the last moment, Herr Hauptmann. You’ll see how fast you will. You’ll remember your recent promotion, your wife waiting for you at home, your comrades, and your country and you’ll invent some suitable excuse for us to swallow before you send us to our deaths. But I’ll still nod and pretend that I believe you just not to disappoint you with my truth.
“Happy tears,” I lied for his sake, determined to keep my reservations to myself. But then something caught in my chest. Another barricade, which I’d so thoroughly erected, crumbled and fell, and together with it, the tears began falling, glistening between his warm fingers that always wiped them away with infinite tenderness. Stupid, stupid girl, reaching for him and clawing at his stiff uniform, scratching at the eagle on his chest into which I wished to turn, on so many occasions, to fly away from all this misery and death and the land of the hope lost. Gullible fool, pressing your head into his shoulder and weeping in his embrace as he’s promising something to you, which was denied to your kin by his masters, to which he still bows – your miserable, silly life. And yet, my fingers coiled around his belt, my eyes found his again and I whispered his own words back to him before he’d take them back, “We live together, or we die together. You promised. Do not forget that.”
Chapter One
Frankfurt am Main, Germany. May 1940
Somewhere in the west, the war was in progress, yet Frankfurt appeared to be entirely oblivious to it. Apart from a few subtle changes – our factory moving its production from civilian textile to the Luftwaffe parachutes, women donning the uniforms of the tram conductors and post personnel, official Wehrmacht vehicles honking impatiently at the civilians, and more crimson banners cascading down the buildings than usual, the city remained stubbornly un-military.
May was exceptionally warm that year. The sweet smell of the trees in bloom made one drunk with spring as soon as one stepped out of the buzzing beehive of the factory. The days grew longer; the sun now lingered in the reddening vastness of the sky for a while after the end of the shift and welcomed us back onto the street with a gentle kiss on our pale cheeks, before rolling reluctantly westward. As was my habit, I paused near the gate to soak in the last rays of the setting sun. Next to me, a group of women lit up their cigarettes in peace, away from the stern shift superintendent. Some of them had already removed their factory-issued uniforms and the navy-clad mass that had poured onto the street just minutes ago, transformed into women again, in their fancy, though somewhat wrinkled, Friday dresses.
Lily, my sister, who was only two years older than me and yet had the most profound conviction that she had all the right to act as, if not my mother then my legal guardian, to be sure, was already tugging my sleeve urging me away from the crowd. I remained rooted to the spot, stubborn and deaf to all her pleas and threats, my nostrils twitching when slight remnants of the tobacco hit them. The women were chatting about the new motion picture. I wanted to stay and listen at least; fat chance I’d be able to see it with my own eyes.
It promised to be good, judging by the dramatic posters that lined the newsstands, right next to the war bulletins and local news. The Eternal Spring – an undying historical romance set in the era of Ireland’s fight for independence attracted more ogling bystanders than the Frankfurter Zeitung’s headline, France’s Fall is Imminent, to its right. Apparently, France’s fight for independence didn’t inspire much interest or sympathy in the crowd as of yet; maybe later, some years later, when they make a motion picture about it and make the French speak German much as they
did with their fictional Irish, then it would.
“Ilse, we have to hurry. The curfew.” Lily pinched her lips into a stern line and took a resolute step forward, most definitely expecting me to follow her.
With a faraway look in my eyes, I barely heard her. I was more interested in the fictional Gloria’s story, which was being re-told by one of my fellow seamstresses.
“And then what?”
It wasn’t just me who held her breath as the plot developed.
“She leaves her British husband – that big shot in the magistrate – for that Irish freedom fighter,” the lucky girl, who saw it together with her date, replied, her eyes flashing with excitement.
“Does she really?”
“Yes. It was so romantic!” the girl confirmed, rolling her eyes with enthusiasm.
“They say, Eugen Klöpfer was amazing!”
“He did a marvelous job! Lina Carstens was an absolute delight too!”
“Ilse, let’s go!” Lily’s hushed voice, the voice of reality, broke into the faraway world of my girlish dreams. “The curfew, mind you!”
The curfew. Amid that lively, chattering crowd I had almost forgotten that I didn’t belong to it. A sudden wave of rebellion and some inexplicable longing for an act of revolt, no matter how small and insignificant, filled me that instant, overpowering and demanding belief that I act upon it.
“You go without me.” I decided something for myself that evening. My hand, with my passport in it, dipped into Lily’s handbag and, before she could break into her panicked protesting, I looked her square in the eye. “I’m going to see that motion picture.”
“Are you quite mad?!”
I ignored her hissing above my ear, only hastened my steps away from her, from that factory, from my own passport that she was trying, in vain, to slip back into my hands.
A criminal case, if caught, but sometimes we all need to feel alive, or we’ll go insane from the lack of air; that’s why prisoners risk further sentencing and break out of prisons and that’s why Jewish girls leave their passports in their sisters’ hands – to gulp freedom just once more, before another wave would come and drown them all for good.
We still could get away with such mischief, the German Jews, that is. The Frankfurter Zeitung, for one, reported that the Polish Jews had to wear armbands with a blue Star of David on them, the failure to display which was punishable by severe measures, according to the newspaper. We were still indistinguishable, unmarked, forbidden from entering public places and parks, but spared at least this final humiliation. There was a talk about it right after the Kristallnacht, during which Papa’s grocery store in our native Nidda was raided and destroyed but for some reason, it remained just that, talk. Frankfurt offered much more anonymity than our native town; no one knew us here and we could still blend in with the locals as long as we smiled at the police and didn’t betray ourselves with that frightened look that instantly gave away the bearers of the cursed red “J” in their passports.
Even the spring in Frankfurt was different than in Nidda – dustier and louder. Nidda was more of a big village with the only difference that we had cobbled streets and street lamps but even with all these features, characteristic of a small town, the river encased in stone (which had given the name to our town) resembled a murky, weed-ridden stream much more than an actual river and the town’s main attraction was a fountain built in the market square sometime in the seventeenth century. The life in Nidda, as I remember it, used to be lethargically peaceful. It moved slowly and stagnantly, much like the opaque waters of the Nidda river, into which my classmates used to jump in summer for a good splash, risking just as good of a hiding from their parents – but children don’t think about such things when fun is in sight.
Our school used to be a long, narrow two-story building – a co-ed; the town was far too small for separate schools for girls and boys. The first time I realized that we – my sisters and I – were different from the rest of the children was when the new headmaster arrived from Frankfurt and, during his very first “roll call,” pointed at me with his wooden rod.
“Stein, collect your books and go sit over there, in the back. Rosenblatt.” The rod of doom was now aiming at another classmate of mine, Hanne. “You, too.” The new headmaster regarded the teacher, Fräulein Jung, wrathfully with his watery, bloodshot eyes. The collar of his shirt was so stiff with starch, it must have caused him great discomfort but his desire to impress transcended such trifles as personal convenience. “Have you received the new directives from the Ministry of Education?”
Fräulein Jung acknowledged him with a shameful nod.
“Why aren’t you implementing those directives then? Jewish students must sit at the back.”
I was already at my new desk by the back wall and so, I didn’t hear what she replied to him; apparently, something to do with Hanne’s short stature and bad eyes. I saw that Hanne was already squinting at the blackboard in her seat next to me. Thankfully, I was a full head taller than the tallest boy in my class and had perfect vision. Tough luck for Hanne though – the new headmaster didn’t deem her eye problems and lack of height worthy of his attention.
What started with a crack, soon grew into a rupture which was impossible to ignore. The class was now divided into boys in new brown uniforms, girls in white blouses and navy skirts, and the rest, looked down upon by the uniformed crowd with the arrogant disdain of superiors. It was strange, really, what one headmaster could do to a class that used to be so united. Apart from that though, our life didn’t change a bit, remaining positively boring and monotone for the next few years. Then, in November, the SA came with torches and trashed our shop along with a few others. While we were hard at work cleaning up the street early the following morning, they were busy gluing posters to our walls: Deutsche! Wehrt Euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden! – Germans! Defend yourselves! Do not buy from Jews! It was then that our parents decided it was time to leave Nidda. Not because of the posters, or the SA – or indeed the familiar faces of my schoolmates in their new uniforms – but solely because they didn’t have enough money to start it all anew, the shop, that is.
Ever since the Kristallnacht had happened, Papa ceaselessly grumbled that those Germans from Nidda who had taken the Russian Empress Katherine the Great up on her promise of free land and left for farmlands in Russia some two hundred years ago were the smart fellows. Just his misfortune, his forefathers weren’t among them. Lily and I couldn’t quite tell if he was saying this in grim jest or not but we sometimes caught ourselves wondering the same. At least, no one had returned back to Nidda so far.
Consumed by my musings, I hadn’t noticed I had reached the booth of the ticket seller. I slowed my steps down a bit, glimpsed the usual announcement near the entrance of the cinema – Juden sind nicht erwünscht – and wondered if I should just walk past it and head home as I should have. That’s what Lily would have done. But I was not Lily.
“One, please,” I demanded boldly, handing the seller the money and acting as though I belonged there, the Aryan girl.
The bored-looking man assessed me with his glance.
He’ll ask me for my identification now and I’ll have to tell him that I’ve forgotten it at home, he’ll whistle for a policeman – there he is standing on the corner – and it’ll be over for you, Ilse.
I smiled brightly at him. Sometimes I could easily pass for an Aryan. I was very tall, had fair skin, an oval face, blue eyes; only the hair was dark and lay around my shoulders in natural waves. However, half of the population of Germany was dark-haired. Sometimes, they asked for my papers when I would worm my way into a store in which I had no business being. No one arrested or even fined me so far. Some chased me off, grumbling something under their breath; some shook their heads with a knowing grin and pretended they didn’t see a red J in my passport, so that I could buy goods meant only for the Aryans. It was the Frankfurt policemen’s leniency that spoiled me, emboldened me to the point where I found myself where I was n
ow, in front of the cinema, with its Jews not wanted sign.
“Just one?” The bored-looking ticket seller appeared suspicious.
“My date is running late,” I lied, without batting an eye.
“Aren’t you too young for dates?” He gave me one more critical once-over. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen,” I lied once again.
I was sixteen. Schools in Frankfurt didn’t welcome Jews, but a textile factory producing the parachutes for the Luftwaffe wasn’t as picky. It was better this way, working, that is. At least I could bring some money to the family table instead of moping about our tiny apartment, with its scarce, mismatched furniture, all day long, like our youngest sister, Lore.
“Let me see your passport.”
After a moment’s hesitation, I fumbled with my handbag, thoroughly pretending to be deep in search of the needed item. After my search failed to produce any results and I had already braced myself for the sound of his whistle, he suddenly swept the money that I’d laid out for him before and presented a ticket, accompanied with a disapproving shake of the head.
“Take care one of your BDM leaders on duty doesn’t catch you watching what you’re not supposed to be watching. All of you want romance nowadays,” I heard him grumble after I’d promptly snatched the ticket from him. “My daughter got in trouble with hers just two days ago. For the same thing, mind you. They check the theaters, your leaders. And you won’t con them with not wearing your uniform, either.”
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