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

by Ellie Midwood

  “How old is the girl?” A hand appeared out of the mist, threatening to take my youngest sister as well. Oberscharführer Scheidel himself.

  “Fifteen, Herr Oberscharführer!” Lore shouted back courageously, despite the fact that her entire body was trembling.

  “You don’t look older than twelve to me.” He regarded her with suspicion.

  My back was wet with sweat. I tore a knitted hat off her head, revealing her blonde locks like some sort of magical protection from an evil omen. “She’s our half-sister, Herr Oberscharführer! A mischling. Her father is Aryan.”

  He gave her a half-hearted, passing look; appeared satisfied with his inspection and shoved her back to us.

  They kept herding us like sheep towards the trucks covered with tarpaulin but I kept looking back and screaming for my mother until I could see her no longer. I wished for her so desperately to turn around and wave goodbye. I knew it was the last time I would see her.

  “Other people are with her. She’s not alone,” Lily said, as though this was supposed to appease me.

  I tore my hand out of hers. I kept peering greedily at the vans, which soldiers were now locking. Suddenly, I couldn’t get my breath. I smelled death in the air and one thought only beat its brutish tattoo in my mind. What a damnable business it was, not to be able to say goodbye to one’s own mother. Mutti, Mama, Ma, Mutter, my dear, dear mother! I wished to scream but not a sound tore from my tightly sealed lips. In little Lore’s face, I saw a reflection of my own – expressionless, gray, tearless. My shoulders suddenly felt as heavy as lead as though the weight of the entire world lay on them.

  “They must be taking them to a different place,” I spoke as though through a dream.

  “I know, Ilse.” Lore smiled bravely at me and gave my hand a reassuring press. She knew, but she would go along with my version just so we wouldn’t fall apart, the sudden orphans.

  Next to us, a couple was congratulating each other with “making it through”. Someone shouted at them to shut up.

  “The SA beat our parents to death back in ’38,” the young man explained with a guilty, quivering smile, as though apologizing for the fact that they didn’t have to mourn anyone, again, the second time around.

  It was a blessing of some sort, I suppose. After life takes everything from you, there’s nothing else to fear, not even death.

  The setting sun was sinking behind Kolektornaya Street, burying itself on the Jewish Cemetery. We were still building the wall. The SS hardly allowed us any time to put our belongings in our new lodgings and forced us out into the street at once. Soon, rolls of barbed wire found their way into our hesitant hands. Rushed by the shouts, several men were hurriedly digging pits for wooden rods, also provided by the SS. From the other side of the ghetto, guarded faces observed our actions with suspicion. From time to time, they exchanged knowing glances and murmurs until one of the SS men shot in their general direction without bothering to aim and thus dispersed the gathering crowd which, in his eyes, had no business watching us work.

  “Your new neighbors,” the same SS man remarked with a disdainful smirk. “You should be thanking us for allowing you to separate yourselves from them as quickly as possible. Soviet vermin.” He spat on the ground as though the words tasted vile in his mouth.

  So, that’s why the wire in the middle of the ghetto, in addition to the one around it. In the course of a few days, we had become a ghetto within the ghetto, the German section, the Hamburgs, as the Soviet Jews mockingly addressed us. Their resentment, whenever we came into contact with them, was almost palpable; they had mistakenly assumed that the wall was our idea. They thought us to be the same as the SS who’d brought us all there – after all, we did speak the same language. We also had the audacity to try and organize the miserable semblance of vegetable gardens outside our houses in the ground which wasn’t yet frozen solid – such a German, bourgeois thing to do.

  The first couple of weeks were the most confusing. The Soviet Jews regarded us with infinite suspicion and positively refused to have anything to do with us; Gentile Byelorussians, who worked for the Germans, weren’t quite sure what to make of us and what kind of a tone to adopt with us. Even Germans themselves, including the SS, suddenly stumbled upon their own superiority and issued orders that contradicted each other, confusing everyone even more. And so it happened that when Obersturmbannführer Strauch, the local SS authority, would line us up outside, to perform street cleaning duty, General-Kommissar Kube – the civil authority – who happened to be inspecting the ghetto that morning, would cancel it in horror and chase us off to clean the German Cinema House instead, for “cleaning the streets was surely for the Soviet vermin and not the people of noble German blood.” Someone from Strauch’s entourage duly reminded him that we weren’t of noble German blood but of the Jewish type. Kube screamed, “Eastern Front!” at the unlucky SS perpetrator who’d actually listened during his racial purity classes – the threat, which promptly ended the discussion.

  The matters complicated themselves even more after our Juden-Altester – the Judenrat Elder – Dr. Frank reported to Herr General-Kommissar that among the Jews, deported from Germany to Minsk, were people whose brothers currently fought for Germany at the front and that the Ordnungsdienst – ghetto’s police service – consisted of men who had served in the German Army during the Great War, some of them of quite a high rank and some still having their medals of distinction on them. General-Kommissar Kube was thoroughly mortified and promised to bring the matter to the attention of the Führer himself. Obersturmbannführer Strauch rolled his eyes behind his back and in the same manner – behind his back – shot a few of those very such people, of noble German blood, that very evening. Kube was incensed, departed in a huff and soon returned from Hitler’s headquarters with an order that no skilled worker was to be harmed, as they were essential for the war effort. Strauch sardonically remarked that most of the German Jews wouldn’t fall under this definition for they were ordinary middle-class people and hardly knew any useful trade at all. Kube responded by setting up a special factory for the production of wagons since the German Army needed horse-drawn carriages more than cars. For the time, Kube’s civil authority had won out, over the SS one.

  And so, we lived, between heaven and earth, between “good Germans” and “Soviet vermin Jews,” suspended in a sort of purgatory, for no one could decide what we were anymore.

  The ghetto was an odd sort of place if a purgatory could be called “odd.” At our squat little hut, there was a number on the door, twenty-three. When our newly appointed Elder, Dr. Frank, had just directed us to it, we’d mistakenly assumed that it was the hut’s number, like in some Bavarian Inn, the civilized people that we were. The Soviet Jews burst out laughing as we marched next to them to work as someone mentioned that they lived in the hut number twenty-three.

  “Try to make it hut number twenty-two one morning during the roll call and the SS will see to it that it’ll be hut number zero by midday,” one of the women guffawed, speaking to us in Yiddish. We understood most of it, just like they, the Yiddish-speaking ones, understood us, the Hamburgs.

  That particular morning, we failed to comprehend the meaning of her words, were too proud to ask for clarification and therefore dismissed it as a pitiful attempt at jesting. A week later, when, in the hut across the street, the local ghetto police discovered a runaway, the coin dropped at last. It dropped, when every single inhabitant of the unfortunate hut was taken outside and shot, including teenaged children.

  Before, I had only seen death on the screen. It was always either noble and beautiful in a hero’s case, or well-deserved and approved by the audience in the villain’s. Who were the executed men and women that day? I suddenly didn’t know. It dawned on me that I’d never seen anyone getting shot in real life. I realized that I’d never seen so many people getting shot one by one, in front of my eyes, to such an extent where I lost count of them marching toward the pockmarked wall and adding their body co
unt to the ever-growing heap. We were forced to line-up outside our huts and watch the execution. The entire dreadful affair was beyond any comprehension.

  I remember very well that it was Monday. I remember how violently my body trembled – from the cold, not the terror (I convinced myself of that to stay strong, just not to faint) as my own countrymen slaughtered my own countrymen in cold blood, in this madness of a morning, in this foreign, broken skeleton of a city, ravaged by the bombs in the war of annihilation. Against them, against us; I couldn’t tell anymore. A film of tears washed everything away before my eyes, mixing together the snow, the blood, the corpses we had to drag away as soon as the SS finally had their correct body count for the hut with the number twenty-seven. Twenty-six corpses lay in front of it, minus one – the runaway, their unwitting executor. I remember clutching an SS man’s sleeve – I still don’t know how I dared to do it; perhaps, I still believed that they were my fellow Germans, who spoke my language – to take pity on my little sister and at least spare her this grisly task. I’d take all of them to the cemetery myself. I’d drag them all with my own hands, just don’t let my Lore touch them. She’s far too young. She’s still a child. You took her childhood from her already; don’t make her into a corpse-carrier, to top it off.

  He did take pity on the little girl. He allowed her to carry the dead teenagers.

  The Soviet Jews looked at us with sympathy that day, for the first time. We had ceased to be the same, as the SS, to them. We became fellow sufferers, the victims who had the misfortune to speak the language of the enemy and therefore, it was all right to barter with us through the barbed-wire wall.

  Chapter Four

  January 1942

  A pair of black, shining boots tracked muddy, melted snow across the freshly mopped hardwood floor. Heaving a sigh (but only after the owner of the boots was out of hearing range), I dunked the rag back into the aluminum bucket, with “Dom Kino” – Cinema House – written on one side in red letters and threw the rag onto the floor in helpless anger.

  “One way to put it, they do it on purpose,” Rivka sniggered from her corner where she was polishing the legs of the chairs with something smelling strongly of citrus. “Another way to put it, they don’t give a brass tack. They don’t even notice that we’re here. It’s all the same to them, as long as the floors and the furniture remains clean. Who cleans them, who starches their shirts, who washes their dirty undergarments, it’s of no interest to them. It is as if we have already ceased to exist. As if they have already succeeded in killing us all.”

  She was a chatty one, Rivka. And beautiful, too, with wide, bottomless eyes and fine, sharp features. She spoke to me in Yiddish; I replied in German. It would have amused the SS, such an unorthodox form of new communication now widely adopted in both ghettos, had they paid any heed to us.

  The muddy tracks were slowly fading before my eyes. After a moment of wrathful impotence, I began scrubbing the floor angrily, imagining that I was erasing those black-boot footsteps from this earth, forever. I’ve never been so obsessed with such a fierce, all-consuming hatred directed at a uniform – any sort of uniform – as I was now. It had a million faces and yet no face at all. All of them – blond, dark-haired, blue-eyed, dark-eyed, handsome, ugly, cruel, smiling, German, Austrian, Lithuanian, conscripted, volunteers, SS, Wehrmacht – they all morphed into a vague faceless bearer of death and torment and I refused to see them for anything else.

  “Those are beautiful hair clips you have. The SS didn’t take them, did they?” Her voice betrayed an emotion which I couldn’t quite decipher. Surprise? Envy? “They took everything from us as soon as they admitted us here, last summer. And then after that, every other week, they conducted raids until there was nothing else for them to take from us except for the skin off our backs. So, they began shooting us when we ‘failed to produce the required quota.’ That’s all that Herr Kommandant knows, the quotas. This much silver by tomorrow. This much gold in two days. For the failure to comply – you know what. Familiar business.”

  “They didn’t take anything from us yet. Only our mother, as soon as we arrived.” I stared at my hands that were red and raw from the cold, dirty water and that ceaseless, useless scrubbing.

  “Are you here with your husband?”

  “No. My two sisters. I have no husband. None of us are married. The youngest one is only twelve.”

  “How old are you?”

  “It feels like seventy.”

  “My father made it out of the city just before the Germans surrounded it. I couldn’t go. My son was in kindergarten and there was bombing, so I couldn’t get to him. No, no; he survived, my little Yasha. But it was too late to run afterward. Mama stayed with us too but then there was the Oktyabrskaya Revolution parade. You must have heard by now what they invented, the SS. Such creative minds, you Germans are! So very cultured, true playwrights and directors, I tell you!” Her voice was suddenly harsh, snappy. “I was taken to the woods early that morning, to chop wood with the rest of our brigade, so I learned about what happened from a friend who watched the whole spectacle unravel from her window. The SS surrounded a certain area with police and the dogs, lined people up as if for roll call, and handed the ones in the front row a huge banner with Long Live the 24th Anniversary of the Great Socialist October Revolution! Long Live Comrade Stalin! Long Live the USSR on it. Then, they gave the rest of the people small red flags as well and ordered them to march along Komsomolskaya Street and out of the gates, all the while filming and photographing the entire procession. I don’t know how far they told them to march but I do know in which ravine they threw the bodies later. You must have seen it from the train when you arrived. I was assigned to the burying brigade. I buried my own mother – at least that I got out of it. She’d like that, the fact that it was her daughter who was throwing soil on top of her grave, even though she lay there along with thousands of the others.” She paused and then added softly, “That was right before you arrived, the first transport from Hamburg. Then from Frankfurt. Then from Vienna. There was so many of you and no place to put you. But they’re inventive, your compatriots. They figured this little mathematical problem out.”

  “What are you telling me this for?” I was suddenly furious. “My mother is also dead! I didn’t kill yours!”

  Rivka regarded me in surprise. “I wasn’t accusing you of anything. Just making conversation.”

  “Well, make it about something else or don’t make it at all!”

  I almost expected her to call me a German bitch or some such. I sounded like one but I’d rather her despise me and not talk to me at all than talk to me about that. An inexplicable sense of guilt burned my cheeks in spite of the absurdity of it.

  She was quiet for some time. Then, she spoke again, as though nothing had happened. “Those really are very nice hair clips.”

  “A whole lot of good they do when one has almost nothing to eat.”

  “You could trade them for food,” Rivka remarked nonchalantly.

  I stopped my scrubbing for a moment to look at her. She was looking at my head instead, assessing the value, it appeared.

  “Yes, those are worthy of at least ten potatoes and some canned preserves. Perhaps, even some speck, if you’re lucky.”

  “They’re my father’s gift.” I touched my hair self-consciously. “I can’t trade them for a piece of smoked fat.”

  They’re all I have left of him.

  Rivka shrugged and resumed her polishing. The grand piano, on which she was working, stood by the window. Absentmindedly I wondered why my compatriots didn’t bother removing the tape from the glass; did they expect the Soviet planes to come back with a vengeance? Hardly. Our troops stood near Moscow from what I last heard. No one was coming back to reclaim the city. We were all stuck here for the time being.

  I chewed on my bloodless, chopped lip, working things out in my mind.

  “Where would I get speck anyway? Or potatoes, for that matter? Surely not from your side?”
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  Yes, we were stuck here, utterly and irreversibly at the uniforms’ mercy. Curiosity, or hunger, got the better of me. I surrendered. I began considering, calculating; ten potatoes equaled a whole month of potato soup. Canned preserves meant some meat that Lore could put on her bones. A piece of smoked fat – my mouth began to water at the mere thought of it. I could almost smell its heavenly aroma. That was the stuff; it would see us through January at any rate. How cold it was outside! All outhouses had been long chopped for wood. Whoever was caught doing their business in the open, was shot, just where they squatted, in the pile of their own excrement. The SS thought it befitting.

  “Not from my side, but through my side,” Rivka supplied with a grin. “We live worse than dogs, worse than you, the Hamburgs, even, but don’t forget, we’re from around here. We were born here, we grew up here, and we still have friends on the other side – in the city, in the forest where half of the Soviet troops disappeared last summer. You have only your SS. You choose who you want to deal with.”

  I pondered her words for a few infinitely long moments. At last, my red, stiff fingers found their way under my clothes and pulled a golden chain from under the layers of two sweaters, a blouse, and two undershirts.

  “What about gold? Would they take gold?” Our very first Frankfurt employer, Frau Novak, gave it to me ‘for good luck,’ together with furniture for our new, bare apartment. It was a little easier to part with it than with Vati’s hair clips.