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

by Ellie Midwood

  Amid the mechanical noise of the death factory, my fingers coiled around a clip with five long, hard-nosed bullets for the Mauser Karabiner 98K rifle, caliber 57mm, on their own accord. For a few interminable moments, two possibilities struggled for power inside of my frantic mind. Into the box or into the pocket?

  Soviet Judenrat’s Elder, Ilya Mushkin, had just been arrested, tortured, and executed for aiding a German officer who had wished to abandon the whole SS business and join the partisans. Certainly, Mushkin was no hard-boiled agent-provocateur from a spy novel and yet he risked his life to stand up for what he felt was right, to aid not just a fellow Jew but a former enemy who had had enough of that senseless killing as well, who was sickened by what his own fellow SS men did daily, to the point where the prospect of shooting at his own former comrades was easier to conceive than going along with their atrocities for one more day. Rivka said the Gestapo treated him no better than Mushkin.

  The pocket.

  The hard noses of the bullets were stubbornly digging into the seam of its lining guided by my cold, now resolute fingers. If Mushkin martyred himself for a German, what was one stolen clip? Yes, they’ll shoot me if they find it. Surely, Mushkin considered them shooting him for that German as well.

  “I stole one Karabiner clip,” my lips hardly moved as I whispered my confession to Rivka later that day.

  Trembling from cold and shifting from one foot to another, we stood in a column in front of the gates of the ghetto, waiting to be readmitted inside. I half-expected her to burst out laughing.

  “That’s good,” she whispered back instead, looking straight ahead of her. Hirsh was performing the search today – a good thing. The cunning fellow from the Soviet Ordnungsdienst always went out of his way to make a good impression of a most thorough search, before his German supervisors; in fact, he hardly ever “found” anything despite feeling the items rolling through the cloth under his fingers. “That’s five bullets to kill five Germans. Now, we just need a gun to go with it.”

  “They go with the rifle. I can’t steal a rifle.”

  “The armaments factory produces handguns as well. You can risk stealing one of those, can’t you?”

  Slowly, I nodded. The line moved unhurriedly forward, an endless parade of shuffling feet and rags – a sorry sight good only for rested nerves. The routine was familiar by now. Hirsh would undoubtedly whack a couple of the strongest, sturdiest men from the column – a prearranged business, no doubt – and demonstratively wave confiscated items in the air. But so many ignored, “non-kosher” goods went back into the ghetto that the “whacked” men marched back inside with smiles on their faces. Their comrades would smuggle enough to trade on the small market set up on the Krymskaya Street and feed their families for a few days. The ever-present chief of the German police Gattenbach would raid and shoot up a makeshift market with monotonous regularity but mere hours after his departure, people would trickle back quietly to proceed with their barter, obstinate and resolved to survive just to spite him and his troops. Hirsh positively refused to take his “share,” Rivka also noted, with unconcealed pride in her voice, on her compatriot’s accord, no doubt. “Bring whatever you may to the hospital,” he would say. “Or to the orphanage. They need it more than I do.” They did practice what they preached, those communists, I thought to myself for the millionth time. We only lied to our own people and pretended that we were better than them.

  In the course of the next few days, I managed to smuggle enough parts out of the munitions factory to assemble an entire handgun out of them. I snatched them from different assembly lines on my way to the canteen or bathroom right under my unsuspecting fellow Germans’ eyes. The biggest parts I dropped into my boots; the bullets went into the double bottom of my mess tin; the smaller pieces – under the lining of my pockets. The meeting with Rivka and her friends was set for Sunday, not due to it being our day off but more due to it being the SS’s day off and therefore they wouldn’t bother with searches, the disciplined, punctual compatriots of mine. I could have brought them the parts but what could beat the official, solid look of an assembled weapon?

  I emptied my pockets before the man who I hoped would help me put it all together. With reluctance, he agreed to admit me to his small apartment when I insisted that I had something of utmost importance to discuss with him. Some unofficial Judenrat business, if he could spare ten minutes of his time; I know it’s dinner time and you have already changed into your proper evening attire to have your potato-peel soup, but I had seen the Cross for War Merits on your lapel before the SS took it and I know that you’ve been to the war…

  “I won’t be joining you for dinner, don’t worry,” I called out to his wife, who was setting the table in a tiny kitchenette and thoroughly pretending to be unbothered by an unwelcome guest. I completely pretended not to notice her relieved look. Her husband, Herr Weiss, rearranged the parts I laid out before him with a guarded look. I sniffled quietly. My nose kept running as the damn cold wouldn’t leave me alone. “Can you put it together?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not for me. It’s for someone—”

  “Who wants to go to the forest and join the partisans,” he finished calmly. He didn’t have the face of a soldier but rather, of an intellectual, whose eyes had been dulled by far too many books he’d read and forehead creased by far too many thoughts those books brought up. He didn’t belong here. He belonged in a study wainscoted in mahogany, making notes on the theory of something. He didn’t belong to the first war either, but it claimed him just like the ghetto did now. He seemed to know what was going on. “I can’t assemble it because you’re missing two parts. There should be two return springs on either side of the frame.”

  Catching a blank stare from me, he sighed, walked over to the window, hunted for something in the semi-darkness of the corner, behind the heating element which didn’t produce any heat; fished out something, wrapped in a rag, at last.

  “Just take this. I’ll arrange more parts for myself tomorrow.” Shielding himself from his wife’s eyes with his back, he quickly pressed a pistol into my hands and only stepped back into the light once it disappeared into my pocket. I didn’t ask any questions. I knew he worked at the same munitions factory, just had no idea that he was stealing parts as well and had even assembled them into something that could actually shoot and then concealed it carefully, prepared for a fight like the soldier that he was. Perhaps, I was mistaken about him. Perhaps, I was mistaken about the rest of my proud, truth-rejecting Hamburgs.

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  I hesitated. His wife cleared her throat in the kitchenette. Herr Weiss told her to begin without him but her wifely duty triumphed and she remained rigid and stiff-backed, with her spoon clenched in her hand as she pretended that the aroma of the potato-peel soup didn’t have any power over her whatsoever.

  “I’m leaving,” I announced to no one in particular and started for the door. Then, already in the threshold, I took hold of his sleeve again. “Would you be interested in the meeting—”

  “No,” he stopped me abruptly. “No meetings. This,” his eyes fell on my pocket in which his gun sat, warm and snug, “is for personal use. For when they come… surely, you understand. And if I were you, I wouldn’t go there either. The Gestapo have just executed the head of their Judenrat. What do you think they will do when they catch the rest of their underground?”

  With a solemn nod, I turned on my heel to leave him to his dinner. I was mistaken, after all, it turned out. It wasn’t for resistance, it was for his stubborn German pride. He simply didn’t want to go their way; he wanted to go on his own terms.

  “As though the SS would care,” I muttered under my breath, running out in the street. To them, a dead Jew was a dead Jew, whether they shot him or he shot himself. They’d strike his name from the list and go on about their business.

  I had less than fifteen minutes to make it home before the 7 p.m. curf
ew. The streets were already deserted, wiped out by fear and darkness. Anyone caught outside after the curfew would be shot and all that business. Tonight, I wasn’t afraid, for the first time. Tonight, I had the means to defend myself. I suddenly understood the ghetto underground and the risks they took. It wasn’t just out of righteousness and principles and everything that had long lost its value on the black market. It was out of a craving to feel strong again, powerful; not some defenseless sheep that are led to the slaughter but a force to be reckoned with. A tiny drop that will eventually crack the stone in two.

  I gave them the gun that Sunday. To part with it was more difficult than I imagined it would be, but Leib, a young man with bright expressive eyes, was thanking me so profusely as the weapon traded hands, that I felt that he’d have much better use for it than I. He bowed his head and promised, in his accented Yiddish, to kill as many Germans as he could, as soon as he joined the partisans; suddenly realized that he was speaking to a German, confused himself even more, apologized, reddened to the roots of his hair when I assured him that I didn’t take any offense and only regained his composure once I offered him my hand to shake and wished him the best of luck with the partisans.

  “First soap, then bullets and guns.” Rivka was in the best mood as she saw me off at the barbed wire, which separated our two ghettos and in which an exit had been made by the already familiar Boris. She held it up for me and carefully rearranged the line as soon as I was safely on the other side. “Soon, we’ll be smuggling people every week.”

  I smiled and waved at the figure, obscured by the darkness, before setting off on my way home. Perhaps, I was mistaken about myself also. Perhaps, I could do it after all.

  Chapter Seven

  March 2, 1942

  The day of Purim started out as usual – Jubilee Square, filing into work brigades, the march with an escort. Some civilians still stared as we were led outside the ghetto and along the streets; most had long ceased to bother. They had their own affairs to attend to, their own working quotas to worry about. Only children still waited in ambush along the streets and never missed a chance to throw a few “rocks” into the column. We smiled and waved in gratitude when the SS got distracted; the rocks were, in fact, potatoes. Children waved back and smiled, also behind the SS men’s backs.

  Yes, the day started out without any change. It was the evening that met us with charged silence, forbidding faces in front of the closed gates and muzzles of the submachine guns staring ominously at our peaceful columns.

  The SS didn’t say a word yet, except for their usual “Halt,” but people had already sensed something, felt something deep in the pits of their hungry stomachs, now so well-trained on both food and danger. We started emptying our pockets, discreetly, in silence; burying scraps of whatever we could steal that day, in the snow, with the tips of our boots. No one inquired as to why they weren’t readmitting us back, only listened to the evening air, pricking our ears like the animals we had become, cagy and alert. No gunshots so far. No cries of children torn out of their mothers’ arms. No pleas from the elderly. Silence.

  Glances were exchanged, the very first ones, anguished and hopeful at the same time. Perhaps, a Purim’s miracle? Perhaps, just a check-up of some sort? Perhaps, General-Kommissar Kube is visiting? Perhaps, we won’t have to die today?

  A Judenrat member stepped cautiously forward, began inquiring something in his correct, polite German and got shot by an enraged squad commander before anyone could comprehend what had happened.

  “Were you not told to wait, you brainless swine?!”

  The crowd swayed and shied to the side as his muzzle turned on us.

  “Back into line!” Another wrathful shout followed; immediately after, to emphasize the point, a short warning burst of submachine gun fire that strafed the ground to our right, herding us back into our place. “Face down! If you can’t wait like normal people, while standing, you’ll be waiting like the rats that you are, with your noses to the ground!” We instantly dropped to the snow, covering our heads with our hands – sheer survival instinct. “The ones who move will be shot on the spot if shooting is the only language that you understand!”

  All illusion was lost, shot along with the Judenrat man and left for dead in the middle of the holy day. No God was stronger than the SS. The SS killed God in front of our eyes. Soon, we would follow; everyone was sure of it.

  The dusk hid in the west, replaced by the night, as black as our killers’ boots. They lurked among us, the predators; buried in the snow, we froze from paralyzing fear and waited for the merciful death. Anything was better than this agonizing terror, the anguished uncertainty, the SS-imposed wait.

  The snow slowly melted around and under me; it would quickly turn into ice as soon as the temperatures plummeted, as they always did in this God-forsaken place at night. It stung my bare cheek and made my teeth ache on the side on which I lay. I dared not move. Shots were fired from time to time at those unfortunates who couldn’t stand the torture with the snow any longer and shifted their position to alleviate the pain.

  A lone searchlight brushed our heads leisurely and, as far as my eye could see, traveling after its morbid path, lay one big mass grave with bodies scattered about like torn dolls. Numbness replaced the intolerable ache in my legs, covered only by thin woolen stockings. As another pair of black boots stopped near me, I wondered if that was how people lost their limbs to frostbite. One of the boots now stood on my back; after a few minutes, the soldier changed the position and put his other foot in between my shoulder blades – not hard and heavy, just to keep it off the snow. The SS man was cold too. At the last moment, I prohibited myself from stirring and making him shoot me for it. My sisters were in the column also. I couldn’t die because I hadn’t taught them how to steal yet.

  A well-dressed man came running by, the director of something – I didn’t quite catch the title with which he began threatening the SS commander. Apparently, his factory workers were among the half-frozen almost-corpses in the snow and he demanded their immediate release. The SS commander mentioned some high orders, got thrown off track by the man’s authoritative bearing and his fur-lined coat, muttered something about fetching his commanding officer and disappeared for the next fifteen minutes.

  “Sarin?” Another voice soon joined the factory director’s in his indignation. “Is Sarin here?”

  “Minsk prison warden,” someone to my left recognized the voice, announcing the title with a hushed measure of respect.

  The SS men, left without their commander and his high orders, reluctantly allowed Sarin to identify himself and get up. It seemed that the prison warden had managed to obtain some sort of release form for Brigadier Sarin, but Sarin, whose face I couldn’t see, positively refused to go anywhere unless the entire brigade was released. That the SS, without their commander, could not authorize.

  The commander reappeared with two other men in tow; I recognized the first one at once. So, General-Kommissar Kube was here after all. His face was waxy and stone-like, a posthumous mask, in the ghastly shade of the searchlight. The other one I had never seen before. Round spectacles on the hooked nose, unimpressive stature, a typical bureaucrat, a far cry from a virile SS soldier – it seemed for a moment as though someone thought it to be an excellent joke to dress one of our kin in the SS uniform.

  “Obersturmbannführer Eichmann,” he introduced himself to the factory director.

  “Are you in charge here?”

  “Jawohl.”

  “I demand an immediate release of the men who, as you can see according to this list, all fall under the category of skilled workers. Without them, the production of the factory under my management will virtually stop. You can’t even begin to comprehend the consequences this will have on the Wehrmacht and—”

  “We have already filled our quota for today,” the officer, who called himself Eichmann, interrupted him calmly. “All of these people are free to go.”

  Only the following morning
we learned that the SS under his command had executed over five thousand people.

  In the morning, the sun reluctantly spilled its light over the ghetto. A collective moan reverberated through the crowd as the Labor Exchange officials started filing us, the Hamburgs, into a separate column judged solely on the body count and not our “skilled worker” life ticket. We began shouting and waving our skilled worker cards even more frantically when we noticed that it was only women they wanted, just like the SS the day before. The SS demanded five thousand people; the Labor Exchange officials, only a handful.

  “It’s for work,” they tried to calm us. “No one will shoot you!”

  Wasn’t that what the SS was telling the ones, who were left inside the ghetto, the day before? No one will shoot you; we only need to fill our quota. They sounded so official, so reassuring, too. The only mistake they made was to say in reply to the Housing Department official’s Dolsky’s question as to what kind of Jews the SS wanted to report for work, “Ganz egal” – it’s all the same. Women, and children, and the infirm ones – just give us five thousand. He instantly knew what they were up to; how helpless he must have felt with no time even to warn anyone.

  They marched us toward the Government Building, the grandest surviving structure in all of Minsk. Past the statue of Lenin, torn off his pedestal yet still lying, forgotten and no longer threatening, half-buried in the snow. They lined us up in the square, facing the entrance, with staff cars and trucks parked in front of it. In most windows of the Government Building the glass, shattered during the battle of Minsk, had been replaced and glinted brand-new and clear in the rays of the rising sun. Only a few windows were still boarded with plywood sheets, shards of glass still baring their teeth around it. Much like the occupants didn’t bother with Lenin, they spared themselves the pains of prying off the wreath, with hammer and sickle, mounted at the very top; merely covering it with a black banner with two SS letters on it – a suitable, mourning color for the occasion. Women around me glimpsed the banner too and quickly averted their eyes.