Soon, the partisans came, emerged right out of nowhere, from the invisible forest behind. Willy smiled at them and, in his halting Russian provided by Otto’s dictionary, said, “Zdravstvyite, tovarishy.”
Hello, comrades.
We are finally home.
Epilogue
Byelorussian forest. Autumn 1943
On Commander Zorin’s orders, the entire brigade gathered for a meeting. I had a feeling it had something to do with Boris’s return from Minsk; however, this time instead of bringing people with him as was his habit, he returned alone, his face grim and forbidding and positively refused to answer any questions before he could talk to his comrade Brigadier.
The wind caressed bare treetops above our heads. The forest had long become home for many of us. Where I perceived alien and threatening wilderness before, fir trees now promised shelter and freedom. The mist had invaded our parts once again and now its cold, glittering drops that had accumulated on the trees overnight, were falling on our anxious faces – premature tears we didn’t bother to wipe.
Boris and Zorin emerged from Zorin’s dugout, at last, hats with red ribbons – partisans’ insignia – in their hands, gazes riveted to the ground, words failing them for a few interminable moments. We waited patiently; the old, the children, the men, and the women, most coats still bearing faint outlines of the hateful yellow patches; faces were drawn and lined with memories of wasted lives and far too many deaths. Zorin was about to say something but then signed to Boris instead – you brought the news, you announce it. I have not the heart…
The wind was growing stronger, chasing torn clouds along the leaden sky. I turned my collar up. Boris released a tremendous breath and stepped forward.
“Comrades. More than two years ago, in August 1941, we appealed from our underground to the Jews in the Minsk ghetto with the warning, ‘ghetto means death! By every means possible, break down the fence around the ghetto!’ By the end of the first year of occupation, we had opened a way to the partisan forest. Now we must bring you the dreadful news – the ghetto no longer exists.”
A collective groan rolled around the campsite. We had all sensed that it was what he was about to say; we had awaited the dreadful news long enough but were still unprepared to hear the truth.
“There are no more Jews in that city where entire generations of Jews shaped its Jewish look, its Jewish character, and molded its way of life with their blood and their sweat,” Boris continued meanwhile. “They no longer exist, the Jews of Minsk, who contributed so much to our national and cultural advancement. In the streets of Minsk, you can no longer hear the sound of our Yiddish speech. It no longer exists, the city which witnessed the flowering of Yiddish art and literature. And there is no longer any hope of saving it. We are all orphans, we, the last Jews of the ghetto…”
Boris’s voice broke after those last words. He couldn’t speak any longer. All around, the weeping grew louder. And then, in the middle of collective mourning, came a sudden, “If there are no more Jews, then we shall be the Jewish people.”
I looked up at Willy. A soft grin playing on his face, he circled my waist with his arm. As though sensing his touch, our child stirred inside – a future partisan, as Zorin himself announced with a wink one day in summer, when it became impossible to hide my pregnancy from the rest of the brigade any longer. In Willy’s uniform cap, on top of torn German insignia, the same red ribbon of a partisan now gleamed with pride.
“We shall be the Jewish people,” I whispered after him.
“We shall be the Jewish people,” next to me, Liza asserted.
“We shall be the Jewish people,” my sisters repeated in German.
“We shall be the Jewish people,” came the stubborn oath of the partisans.
The desperate, tear-stained faces around us brightened; the eyes now shone with fearless determination; hands linked, chained us one to another – forest brother to forest sister, forest mother to forest child, a German to Byelorussian, a Russian to a Pole and our voices rose in a unanimous kaddish which soon transcended into something fearsome and awe-inspiring – we sang the partisan song.
If the spellbinding tale of The Girl Who Survived took your breath away and left you with tears in your eyes, then you need to read Ellie’s unmissable bestseller The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz. This powerful, heartbreaking novel tells the inspiring and breathtaking true story of Mala Zimetbaum, whose heroism will never be forgotten, and whose fate altered the course of history…
Get it here!
The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz
Millions of people walked through Auschwitz’s gates, but she was the first woman who escaped. This powerful novel tells the inspiring true story of Mala Zimetbaum, whose heroism will never be forgotten, and whose fate altered the course of history…
Nobody leaves Auschwitz alive.
Mala, inmate 19880, understood that the moment she stepped off the cattle train into the depths of hell. As an interpreter for the SS, she uses her position to save as many lives as she can, smuggling scraps of bread to those desperate with hunger.
Edward, inmate 531, is a camp veteran and a political prisoner. Though he looks like everyone else, with a shaved head and striped uniform, he’s a fighter in the underground Resistance. And he has an escape plan.
They are locked up for no other sin than simply existing. But when they meet, the dark shadow of Auschwitz is lit by a glimmer of hope. Edward makes Mala believe in the impossible. That despite being surrounded by electric wire, machine guns topping endless watchtowers and searchlights roaming the ground, they will leave this death camp.
A promise is made––they will escape together or they will die together. What follows is one of the greatest love stories in history…
Fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Choice, and The Orphan Train will love this breathtakingly beautiful tale, of courage in the face of tragedy and bravery in the face of fear. Based on a true story, The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz shows that, in darkness, love can be your light…
Get it here!
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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)
A Letter from Ellie
Dear Reader,
I want to say a huge thank you for choosing to read The Girl Who Survived. If you did enjoy it, and want to keep up to date with all my latest releases, just sign up at the following link. Your email address will never be shared and you can unsubscribe at any time.
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Thank you for reading the story of this truly wonderful couple. I hope you loved The Girl Who Survived and, if you did, I would be very grateful if you could write a review. I’d love to hear what you think, and it makes such a difference helping new readers to discover one of my books for the first time.
I love hearing from my readers—you can get in touch on my Facebook page, through Goodreads or my website.
Thanks,
Ellie
elliemidwood.com
The Girl Who Survived
Germany, 1941: “We live together, or we die together.” A novel that will stay with you forever, The Girl Who Survived tells the inspiring true story of Ilse Stein, a German Jew who was imprisoned in a ghetto––and who fell in love with the man she was supposed to loathe.
For eighteen-year-old Ilse life is u
nrecognizable. A year ago, she wasn’t forced to wear a star on her clothes. A year ago, her parents were alive, not yet killed by their own countrymen. A year ago, she had her freedom.
Now, at the break of dawn, she steps off the cattle train into a Minsk ghetto. This is Ilse’s new home: trapped by barbed wire, surrounded by SS guards she is forbidden to look in the eye, with no choice but to trade the last of her belongings for scraps of food. Sentenced for the crime of simply existing, she doesn’t expect to live past the summer.
Yet the prisoners in the ghetto refuse to give up––the underground resistance is plotting their escape. Ilse’s first act of defiance is smuggling from the munitions factory, slipping bullets into the lining of her pockets.
But this is just the beginning… When Ilse meets Wilhem, a local SS administrative officer, she never dreams that her greatest rebellion will be falling for him. Wilhem promises that she will survive, even if the cost is his life. But in a world of such danger, daring to love is the most dangerous risk of all…
Fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Choice, and Orphan Train will be completely gripped by this heartbreaking tale. Based on a true story, this powerful novel shows that love is stronger than terror, and that when life takes everything from you, death is not to be feared…
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The Girl in the Striped Dress
Auschwitz, 1942: This unforgettable novel, based on a true story, brings to life history’s most powerful tale of forbidden love. Set within the barbed wire of Auschwitz, a man and a woman fall in love against unimaginable odds. What happens next will restore your faith in humanity, and make you believe in hope even where hope should not exist.
“I won’t let anything happen to you,” he whispered, pressing a note into her hand. Her entire body trembled when she read it: I am in love with you.
Helena steps off the cattle train onto the frozen grounds of Auschwitz. She has twenty-four hours to live. Scheduled to be killed tomorrow, she is not even tattooed with a prison number. As the snow falls around her, she shivers, knowing that she has been sentenced to death for a crime she didn’t commit.
When a gray-clad officer marches towards Helena and pulls her away, she fears the worst. Instead, he tells her that it’s one of the guard’s birthdays and orders her to serenade him.
Inside the SS barracks the air is warm, thick with cigarette smoke and boisterous conversation. After she sings to the guard, Franz, he presses a piece of cake into her hands––the first thing she has eaten in days. On the spot, he orders her life to be saved, forever changing the course of her fate.
What follows is a love story that was forbidden, that should have been impossible, and yet saved both of their lives––and hundreds of others––in more ways than one.
Fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Choice, and The Orphan Train will be utterly entranced by this unputdownable page-turner. This completely heartbreaking yet beautifully hopeful novel shows that love can survive anything and grow anywhere.
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The Violinist of Auschwitz
Based on the unforgettable true story of Alma Rosé, The Violinist of Auschwitz brings to life one of history’s most fearless, inspiring and courageous heroines. Alma’s bravery saved countless lives, bringing hope to those who had forgotten its meaning…
In Auschwitz, every day is a fight for survival. Alma is inmate 50381, the number tattooed on her skin in pale blue ink. She is cooped up with thousands of others, torn from loved ones, trapped in a maze of barbed wire. Every day people disappear, never to be seen again.
This tragic reality couldn’t be further from Alma’s previous life. An esteemed violinist, her performances left her audiences spellbound. But when the Nazis descend on Europe, none of that can save her…
When the head of the women’s camp appoints Alma as the conductor of the orchestra, performing for prisoners trudging to work as well as the highest-ranking Nazis, Alma refuses: “they can kill me but they won’t make me play”. Yet she soon realizes the power this position offers: she can provide starving girls with extra rations and save many from the clutches of death.
This is how Alma meets Miklos, a talented pianist. Surrounded by despair, they find happiness in joint rehearsals, secret notes, and concerts they give side by side––all the while praying that this will one day end. But in Auschwitz, the very air is tainted with loss, and tragedy is the only certainty… In such a hopeless place, can their love survive?
This devastatingly heartbreaking yet beautifully hopeful tale proves that even in the darkest of days, love can prevail––and give you something to live for. Fans of The Choice, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, and The Orphan Train will lose their hearts to this magnificent tale.
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A Note on History
Thank you so much for reading The Girl Who Survived. Even though it’s a work of fiction, most of it is based on a true story. Ilse Stein and Willy Schultz (the names weren’t changed) indeed met in Minsk in 1942 after Schultz’s brigade was killed by the SS during the Purim massacre the day before that. Their meeting itself and the following development of their relationship are also true to fact. I tried to stick to reality as much as I could while working on this novel and used any information available concerning Ilse or Willy to paint as accurate of a portrait of both as I could. Ilse’s family history, including their move from Nidda to Frankfurt and her further employment at the parachute factory and eventual deportation, are all based on fact, same as Willy’s family history and the history of his employment and war service.
The history of the organization of the ghetto, its structure, etc., I also tried to keep as close to reality as possible. I preserved all the names of the streets, including “exits” used by different resistance members (unlike many other ghettos, the Minsk one wasn’t surrounded by a brick wall but only by a fence of barbed wire which wasn’t electrified and therefore, due to this fact and lax patrolling of the perimeter, the members of the ghetto underground and also children who begged for food on the “Russian side” almost daily, could more or less freely crawl through it when the occasion presented itself). The Labor Exchange, the Orphanage, the Hospital, the Jewish Cemetery, the Market set up on Krymskaya Street, Jubilee Square – everything was transferred into the narration as described by the ghetto survivors.
Most of the characters, including secondary ones, are also based on real people, such as Oberscharführer Scheidel, who “welcomed” Ilse and her family upon their arrival to Minsk; his boasting about “freeing the space” for the German Jews by killing thirty-five thousand Soviet ones is also based on truth; his words I tried to change as little as possible while preserving the message. General-Kommissar Kube was also a real senior official in Nazi-Occupied Byelorussia, who was later assassinated by the Byelorussian partisans in 1943. Known to be a vicious anti-Semite, he nevertheless treated German Jews (called “Hamburgs” by the locals since the first transport from Germany arrived from Hamburg) differently from their Soviet counterparts; the occasion where he protested against the treatment of former decorated war veterans is real (at the end of the note I’ll provide an actual letter to the Reich Commissioner of Ostland, H. Lohse), just like his idea to provide them with “skilled worker’s” cards to protect them from selections by installing a wagon workshop in their Sonderghetto.
Police Superintendent Richter, his brutal treatment of the ghetto inhabitants, including setting his dog on them and his infamous “Sunday concerts” are also based on the facts provided by the survivors of the ghetto (you can read in more detail about him in H. Smolar’s memoir The Minsk Ghetto or a collection of memoirs of the ghetto survivors, “We Remember Lest the World Forget”).
Ghetto Elders Dr. Frank (the Sonderghetto) and Ilya Mushkin (the Ostjuden ghetto) are also based on real people. Mushkin was indeed captured by the Gestapo and executed for aiding a German officer who wished to defect; what happened to the officer himself is not known but most likely he was court-martialed
as well.
The Girl Who Survived: Based on a true story, an utterly unputdownable and heart-wrenching World War 2 page-turner Page 25