The Girl Who Survived: Based on a true story, an utterly unputdownable and heart-wrenching World War 2 page-turner

by Ellie Midwood

  So, today was a pass-for-an-Aryan day. I beamed my acknowledgment at him and dived into the safety of the dimmed lights and plush chairs. Sinking into the luxurious, eternal softness of my seat, I wept along with Lina Carstens, whose acting was indeed, a delight. One thing the ticket seller was wrong about, I didn’t want romance. I didn’t cry because they had what I didn’t; I cried because the film had ended and it was anyone’s guess if I’d ever get a chance to sneak into a theater again. I didn’t want romance. I only wanted a normal life.

  Chapter Two

  Frankfurt. November 1941

  Mutti sat near the window, nearly touching the windowpane with her temple to make out careful stitches in the last rays of the dying sun. Electricity was a luxury once again. We had long grown used to burning candles instead of using electric light but sewing by candlelight, with Mutti’s bad eyes, was entirely out of the question. As I was polishing our mismatched, chipped furniture – a generous donation of the very first family in Frankfurt that Lily and I worked for as maids – I watched Mutti’s creased forehead, her bloodless, pinched lips that used to smile ceaselessly at her three daughters and husband and almost choked with the most profound pity for her. I knew precisely which things she was desperately trying to work out in her mind. Where else to get more orders, when dealing with a Jew had just been proclaimed to be a criminal case? Will Lore be able to deliver Frau Kästner’s order without anyone noticing? Should Lore go after the curfew? She’s a blonde little girl, took after her mother; perhaps, they won’t stop her? What to do with Ilse and Lily? Ilse has grown even more and suddenly decided to develop a chest as though overnight! That’s also my genes, curse them! Where to get the cloth to expand her dresses? Or should I give her mine? I can make do with two blouses and a skirt; she can have the rest. Take it all, my darling girls – my clothes, my food, my needlework, the blood from my fingers, my soul – just live, girls, just… survive.

  I missed the textile factory. I missed “pass-for-an-Aryan” days. On the left breast of my painfully tight dress, a yellow star with a single word Jude was now sitting. We had to purchase it from an office in the center of Frankfurt. I still couldn’t comprehend how they could handle it with such ease, as though it was a simple merchandise transaction. Here’s your new Star, Fräulein Stein. Here are your instructions on how to put it on your dress or coat so it would be visible for everyone. Thank you for your purchase. We hope to see you again soon! It was such a cruel mockery of human dignity, such an insolent display of inhumanity wrapped in typical bureaucracy. I was still puzzling over it long after, while still holding the sign of humiliation for which I actually had to pay, in my hands. The line of people was moving slowly past me – they, too, came to the wonderful German store today. Thank you for doing business with us. Please, come again!

  The last of our rights had been taken away just two months ago, the last shreds of our dignity swept away by the wind of the war – this time in the East. Our kin was now hardly seen in the streets, in those few hours during which we were still allowed to buy our food while carefully maneuvering through the dark backstreets in order not to get anywhere near “Aryan” parts of the city. The first ones who’d caught a whiff of smoke and death – still invisible yet hovering imperceptibly with its scythe above our heads – disappeared among the waves of German intelligentsia and freethinkers some three years ago, after dutifully paying off the Nazis for the damage caused by the same Nazis during the Kristallnacht. The others, who still held onto some chimeric hope of things returning to normal, picked up and left in September, as soon as the Yellow Star Law officially went into effect. Now, it was only us left, the ones who could barely afford an electricity bill, let alone paying off the government tax and a foreign visa. Marked, shunned, forbidden to work, to walk, to breathe – I was almost certain they’d pass some sort of law concerning those last two notions I mentioned.

  Upon hearing the loud knocking on the door, mother and I exchanged uncomprehending glances. After the Weinstein family, who used to live above us, had left in September, we had no visitors and didn’t expect any. The fall swept through the city and along with it, the Gestapo, combing, raking through what remained of the Jewish community, sweeping the last of us, along with the fallen leaves. The Frankfurters were oblivious to it all. They went about their business, while we hid behind the curtained windows and bolted doors. Nothing was certain anymore. Each day became a gamble. Life itself grew unsettled; the air around us was charged with constant tension and the feeling of imminent danger from which there was no escape. We were trapped and already sentenced; sentenced for the crime we hadn’t the faintest idea we’d committed.

  Vati, pale and still clutching a newspaper in his hand, emerged from the bedroom. His gaze passed over us, almost not seeing and fastened itself, with an awed expression, on the dark hallway, from which the persistent knocking echoed, shuddering, reverberating with fear, through our very bones. The visitors didn’t announce themselves yet but we all knew, on some instinctual level, who stood on the other side of the door. Lore’s little palm, sweaty and cold, found mine, in the dusk of our unlit apartment; I gave it a reassuring press.

  Vati stepped forward, hesitated for a moment and then suddenly gave a harsh, high-pitched laugh. “I suppose I should get that. Unlikely they’ll go away if I don’t.”

  Mutti slowly rose from her chair, oblivious to her sewing that slid off her lap and landed softly on the floor.

  Lily never left the sanctuary of the bedroom. Without seeing her, I knew that she was staring obstinately at the book she was pretending to read, just to ignore the reality around her. She had given up on it by now. She wished nothing to do with it any longer.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Vati unlocked the door. Bright light coming from the staircase flooded the shadowy world of our cobwebbed apartment; basking in it, two plain-clothed men stood. I didn’t catch the names, only the organization they worked for. They strode in, silently counted all of us including Lily in the bedroom and her book, behind which she was hiding her pale, terrified face, no doubt; handed Vati some papers and headed to the exit without any further explanations.

  “Do we all have to appear in the Office?” Vati mumbled, trailing after them.

  “Yes, everyone without exception,” one of them replied without turning around.

  The sun was almost set but we could still make out the words on the printed three-page summons bearing the stamp of the Reichzentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung – Reich Central Office for Jewish Resettlement. With meticulous German pedantry, it announced the precise day and hour we were all to report to a train station for a medical examination, supervised by official physicians of the Office. We were allowed to take a suitcase and food for five days – a travel ration.

  “One pair of boots; for women – one pair of stockings,” Vati was reading out from the summons, his voice betraying his anguished state with a slight tremor, “two pieces of underwear, one work outfit, one sweater, two blankets, two sheets, one plate, one drinking cup, one spoon.” He dabbed his forehead with the handkerchief. “One towel and some soap.”

  “Is that all?” my mother asked, her voice eerily extinguished.

  “We are also to hand over whatever ration coupons we have left. Pets are not allowed.”

  “We don’t have any.”

  “Yes, that’s good, I suppose… It says here, they will all be destroyed.”

  For whatever inexplicable reason, that last remark of his stuck with me and stunned me into astonishment with its cruelty. I could understand their hatred for us but I could never comprehend their desire to destroy animals, whose only fault was that they used to belong to the Jews. What madness was it now? Admittedly, animals could have been spared at least.

  The train would be provided by the Reich Bahn; no need to pay for the tickets. It didn’t say where exactly we’d be heading, though.

  “To Minsk,” a bespectacled official from the Office for the Resettlement announced to us the
following day before handing us more instructions and already shouting, “Next!”

  Each of us, even Lore, had just signed the declaration, which the same official had put before us. I reread mine before he pulled it out of my hands impatiently. Its words would forever be emblazoned into my memory as something unbearably heartbreaking and unnecessarily cruel. “I, the undersigned Jew, Ilse Stein, confirm that I am an enemy of the German government and therefore I have no right to the property I leave behind – furniture, valuables, money. My German nationality lapses and from November 8, 1941, I’ll be a stateless person.”

  Three years ago, almost to the date we’d had to leave our native Nidda. Now, to celebrate the anniversary of the Kristallnacht, they decided to rid themselves of the last Jews. Frankfurt lay just behind the tall, arched window of the Office but was already obscured from my view, already dissolving into a thick mist of the past, already some past-life destination, a mere memory.

  “Where is Minsk?” Lore whispered, pulling on my sleeve.

  “In Byelorussia. The Byelorussian SSR, to be exact.”

  “What’s SSR?”

  “Soviet Socialistic Republic.”

  “We’re going to live with the Bolsheviks?” She sounded almost horrified.

  My poor little sister, I thought with an ironic smirk. You’ve been listening too much to the German radio and its constant propaganda.

  “Should be a welcome change. Can’t possibly be worse than this,” I responded instead through gritted teeth and immediately received a harsh, reproachful look from my mother.

  “They’ll provide us with lodgings in Minsk,” Vati said to no one in particular as we headed to the exit, lost particles of sand amid the cruel sea.

  The following morning each of us packed a suitcase, marked each with our names, dates of birth, and one single word, Frankfurt. Then, we packed a separate bag as we had been instructed. Papa’s was thick with papers: his scholarship papers, bank accounts, and bankbooks – now nulled and voided yet required for some incomprehensible reason; stocks and bonds which he had purchased a few years ago and to which he hadn’t any rights any longer. In Mutti’s, was her life insurance and funeral funds with the location of the plots. In mine, I only had my birth certificate, a passport, and a small savings account book which Vati had opened in my name when I had just turned twelve. It, too, was now useless. The list went on, demanding to pack the keys and provide the numbers of safe deposit boxes; inheritances, rights of patents or real estate, art of any kind, collector’s items, jewelry, diamonds, gold and silver objects, medals, gifts, compensations from insurance companies, mortgages, accurate descriptions of partnerships with names, addresses and telephone numbers of the partners…

  “We’re not coming back,” Papa suddenly uttered, his voice thick with emotion. “We’re never coming back here…”

  Now that he stood in front of the window, I have just noticed how stooped his frame had become, how he had suddenly aged, shrunk into himself, how his face had taken on a waxy, cadaverous tint. Abruptly, he turned on his heel and appeared almost cross, defiant as his fingers clutched the star on his chest.

  “I’m not ashamed of it. I’ll wear it with pride, here or there – it’s all the same to me! They won’t break me. I’m stronger than…” He stumbled upon the right word, moved his lips as though searching for it, receded and lowered himself slowly into a chair, from the seat of which the stuffing had been bursting through like poisonous mushrooms through the roots of a tree.

  Vati died two days later, on the train, after clutching his star for the last time. His body traveled with us for eight hours, his stiffening head perched on my shoulder, until the stop somewhere in Poland. Only then the SS hurled his corpse away, together with four other people from our car. Through an opened door, I could see the side of the tracks littered with bodies. Somewhere in the distance, strange men in striped uniforms were digging into the frozen ground.

  “Who are they?” Lore’s hand found mine again.

  “Gravediggers. They will bury our Vati.”

  The young blonde girl was studying them with mistrust, working things out in her child’s mind. “What is it they’re wearing? Aren’t they cold?”

  I stared at my father’s corpse – Leopold Stein, the Jew – until the door to our car was slammed with force and the lock turned by the gloved hand of the SS man. My eyes were full of tears, which, unlike Mutti’s, never spilled over. A shudder of anguish ran through me without reflecting on my face. I could feel it turning into a mask, hard as granite, cold and unmoving. My heart barely turned inside my chest, heavy as a stone.

  Mutti, with her tear-stained face, would not cease smiling at me with such painful tenderness about her. As soon as her husband died, she knew it was all over for her as well. If her Leo couldn’t endure this, if his strong, steady heart shattered inside his chest, she wouldn’t survive this either. But what of her daughters, her darling, beloved daughters? The smile jerked, wavered, almost contorted her face back into a painful grimace but with some inhuman willpower, Mutti forced it back into place, peering into my eyes and mine only. I know why; there’s steadiness in them which she couldn’t find in Lily’s or little Lore’s. There’s a promise to survive. She wanted to believe that even when she has perished, at least one of her children would make it. I smiled back at her and nodded my silent reassurance. I’ll survive, Mutti. Whatever it takes, I’ll survive.

  “Gravediggers,” I repeated out loud, like an accusation. A woman, who had a place by the small caged window, turned to face me, startled from some sudden revelation.

  “That, they are,” someone remarked next to me, a bespectacled man with an ironic grin on his face. He, too, was looking at the SS man’s hand, still clutching the iron bars of the window.

  Chapter Three

  Minsk. November 17, 1941

  We arrived at the break of dawn. It was a particularly dreary, dismal morning caught between the autumn and winter when the weather itself can’t decide between the mist and wet snow and when the ground smells of rotting leaves, mud, and despair. The sun was lost somewhere between torn shreds of clouds, gray and heavy like everything in this alien, Eastern land. The city of Minsk was crumbling under their weight, or what was left of it, that is. Through a small, barred window, I watched the wet flag with a swastika on it slap against the flagpole of the train station.

  The door to our cattle car opened with a groan, as though it, too, was dreadfully tired from our interminable journey. Rushed by the familiar “Raus, raus, raus” and the occasional blow of the whip, we spilled into the fog-shrouded outside, the coveted outside, of which we’d been dreaming for days with no end, crammed tightly together until a quarter of our cattle car had died and we breathed out in relief, for now, we could take turns to sit and even sleep.

  Wisps of fog, sticky and foul-smelling, obscured everything from sight apart from the SS and their wolfhounds, looking ready to pounce. I clutched Lore’s hand tighter. Minsk smelled of rotten earth and swamps, of something vaguely hostile and sinister. The stench, drifting from the field on the other side of the tracks was clinging to me, penetrating my nose and mouth, slipping down my throat. I saw Lily pick up a handful of dirty water from the puddle to satisfy her thirst; she managed to slurp it from her palm before I slapped her wrist in helpless fury. Her lips quivered in an apologetic smile. She didn’t care any longer if she got sick and died.

  The SS filed us with the help of their truncheons, poking and prodding us in our aching backs until they had us standing in the usual orderly and thorough manner. We were waiting for something or someone. In the icy mist of the Minsk morning, that someone rose above us, the dirty horde, from his podium and introduced himself as Oberscharführer Scheidel. He was the kind of a man I’d seen countless times in Frankfurt and never in Nidda; immaculate overcoat, clean-shaven cheeks, hands in leather gloves, and a look of utter contempt for anyone who stood below him. A perfect product of the Party.

  “Welcome to Minsk, Frauen
und Herren.” His entire manner betrayed the narcissistic attitude of someone who takes pleasure in the sound of his own voice. “You may thank me now; I made room for you by getting rid of thirty-five thousand Russian Jews just ten days ago.”

  Malicious triumph stole over his face as, one by one, our heads instinctively turned in the direction of the field across the train station. The wind had picked up; the wind, blowing above the remnants of the recently unearthed soil and raising the shadows that now stood looming before us, invisible yet brutally real. We suddenly realized what the foul smell was. Next to me, a young woman began crying softly. Lore looked at her, confused and suddenly indifferent.

  “Why is she crying?” she muttered, as though annoyed by such an unseemly display of emotion. “Surely she should know by now that the Nazis kill people.”

  I pressed my finger to my lips, giving a sign to her to be silent. I should mind myself and my tongue when I’m around her from now on. She’s picking up too many of my poisonous remarks.

  Scheidel’s short speech was soon over; some sort of selection began instead. Rough, gloved hands were pulling us apart, separating families into mortified, shrieking entities, wide-eyed and trembling with a new sort of animalistic fear. The fog rolled in waves now, hiding us from each other. I lost the frail hand of my Mutti in the ashen air and was feeling around with my hand searching for her coat, in vain. I called for her in anguish but my voice drowned in the ocean of others. In a rare moment of clarity, as the wind tore at the mist and succeeded at parting it for a few merciful seconds, I glimpsed a row of vans waiting in the distance – metal beasts swallowing people one after another. I charged toward them, to where my mother was being led along with the others but someone gripped me by the collar of my coat much as one would do with a dog. The clean-shaven face of a very young soldier stared right into mine. He couldn’t have been older than me. He said quietly, “If you want to live, go with the others,” and he pushed me right into Lily’s trembling, awaiting arms. Lore clutched at my coat with the desperation of a drowning person clutching at a lifesaver.