by Daniel Silva
“Juden, raus, raus!” An SS man cracks a whip across my thigh. “Get out of the car, Juden.” I jump onto the snow-covered platform. My legs, weak from many days of standing, buckle beneath me. The SS man cracks his whip again, this time across my shoulders. The pain is like nothing I have ever felt before. I get to my feet. Somehow, I manage not to cry out. I try to help my mother down from the car. The SS man pushes me away. My father jumps onto the platform and collapses. My mother too. Like me, they are whipped to their feet.
Men in striped pajamas clamber onto the train and start tossing out our luggage. I think, Who are these crazy people trying to steal the meager possessions they had permitted us to bring? They look like men from an insane asylum, shaved heads, sunken faces, rotten teeth. My father turns to an SS officer and says, “Look there, those people are taking our things. Stop them!” The SS officer calmly replies that our luggage is not being stolen, just removed for sorting. It would be sent along, once we’d been assigned housing. My father thanks the SS man.
With clubs and whips they separate us, men from women, and instruct us to form neat rows of five. I did not know it then, but I will spend much of the next two years standing or marching in neat rows of five. I am able to maneuver myself next to my mother. I try to hold her hand. An SS man brings his club down on my arm, severing my grasp. I hear music. Somewhere, a chamber orchestra is playing Schubert.
At the head of the line is a table and a few SS officers. One in particular stands out. He has black hair and skin the color of alabaster. He wears a pleasant smile on his handsome face. His uniform is neatly pressed, his riding boots shine in the bright lights of the rail platform. Kid gloves cover his hands, spotless and white. He is whistling “The Blue Danube Waltz.” To this day, I cannot bear to hear it. Later, I will learn his name. His name is Mengele, the chief doctor of Auschwitz. It is Mengele who decides who is capable of work and who will go immediately to the gas. Right and left, life and death.
My father steps forward. Mengele, whistling, glances at him, then says pleasantly, “To the left, please.”
“I was assured I would be going to a family camp,” my father says. “Will my wife be coming with me?”
“Is that what you wish?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Which one is your wife?”
My father points to my mother. Mengele says, “You there, get out of line and join your husband on the left. Hurry, please, we haven’t got all night.”
I watch my parents walk away to the left, following the others. Old people and small children, that’s who goes to the left. Young and healthy are being sent to the right. I step forward to face the beautiful man in his spotless uniform. He looks me up and down, seems pleased, and wordlessly points to the right.
“But my parents went to the left.”
The Devil smiles. There is a gap between his two front teeth. “You’ll be with them soon enough, but trust me, for now, it’s better you go to the right.”
He seems so kind, so pleasant. I believe him. I go to the right. I look over my shoulder for my parents, but they have been swallowed by the mass of filthy, exhausted humanity trudging quietly toward the gas in neat rows of five.
I cannot possibly tell you everything that took place during the next two years. Some of it I cannot remember. Some of it I have chosen to forget. There was a merciless rhythm to Birkenau, a monotonous cruelty that ran on a tight and efficient schedule. Death was constant, yet even death became monotonous.
We are shorn, not just our heads, but every where, our arms, our legs, even our pubic hair. They don’t seem to care that the shears are cutting our skin. They don’t seem to hear our screams. We are assigned a number and tattooed on our left arm, just below the elbow. I cease to be Irene Frankel. Now I am a tool of the Reich known as 29395. They spray us with disinfectant, they give us prison clothing made from heavy rough wool. Mine smells of sweat and blood. I try not to breathe too deeply. Our “shoes” are wooden blocks with leather straps. We cannot walk in them. Who could? We are given a metal bowl and are ordered to carry it at all times. Should we misplace our bowl, we are told we will be shot immediately. We believe them.
We are taken to a barracks not fit for animals. The women who await us are something less than human. They are starving, their stares are vacant, their movements slow and listless. I wonder how long it will be before I look like them. One of these half-humans points me toward an empty bunk. Five girls crowd onto a wooden shelf with only a bit of bug-infested straw for bedding. We introduce ourselves. Two are sisters, Roza and Regina. The others are called Lene and Rachel. We are all German. We have all lost our parents on the selection ramp. We form a new family that night. We hold each other and pray. None of us sleeps.
We are awakened at four o’clock the next morning. I will wake at four o’clock every morning for the next two years, except on those nights when they order a special nighttime roll call and make us stand at attention in the freezing yard for hours on end. We are divided into kommandos and sent out to work. Most days, we march out into the surrounding countryside to shovel and sift sand for construction or to work in the camp agricultural projects. Some days we build roads or move stone from place to place. Not a single day passes that I am not beaten: a blow with a club, a whip across my back, a kick in the ribs. The offense can be dropping a stone or resting too long on the handle of my shovel. The two winters are bitterly cold. They give us no extra clothing to protect us from the weather, even when we are working outside. The summers are miserably hot. We all contract malaria. The mosquitoes do not discriminate between German masters and Jewish slaves. Even Mengele comes down with malaria.
They do not give us enough food to survive, only enough so that we would starve slowly and still be of service to the Reich. I lose my period, then I lose my breasts. Before long, I too look like one of the half-humans I’d seen that first day in Birkenau. For breakfast, it’s gray water they call “tea.” For lunch, rancid soup, which we eat in the place where we are working. Sometimes, there might be a small morsel of meat. Some of the girls refuse to eat it because it is not kosher. I do not abide by the dietary laws while I am at Auschwitz-Birkenau. There is no God in the death camps, and I hate God for abandoning us to our fate. If there is meat in my bowl, I eat it. For supper, we are given bread. It is mostly sawdust. We learn to eat half the bread at night and save the rest for the morning so that we have something in our stomachs before we march to the fields to work. If you collapse at work, they beat you. If you cannot get up, they toss you onto the back of a flatbed and carry you to the gas.
This is our life in the women’s camp of Birkenau. We wake. We remove the dead from their bunks, the lucky ones who perish peacefully in their sleep. We drink our gray tea. We go to roll call. We march out to work in neat rows of five. We eat our lunch. We are beaten. We come back to camp. We go to roll call. We eat our bread, we sleep and wait for it all to begin again. They make us work on Shabbat. On Sundays, their holy day, there is no work. Every third Sunday, they shave us. Everything runs on a schedule. Everything except the selections.
We learn to anticipate them. Like animals, our survival senses are highly tuned. The camp population is the most reliable warning sign. When the camp is too full, there will be a selection. There is never a warning. After roll call, we are ordered to line up on the Lagerstrasse to await our turn before Mengele and his selection team, to await our chance to prove we are still capable of work, still worthy of life.
The selections take an entire day. They give us no food and nothing to drink. Some never make it to the table where Mengele plays god. They are “selected” by the SS sadists long before. A brute named Taube enjoys making us do “exercises” while we wait so we will be strong for the selectors. He forces us to do pushups, then orders us to put our faces in the mud and stay there. Taube has a special punishment for any girl who moves. He steps on her head with all his weight and crushes her skull.
Finally, we stand before our judge. He l
ooks us up and down, takes note of our number. Open your mouth, Jew. Lift your arms. We try to look after our health in this cesspool, but it is impossible. A sore throat can mean a trip to the gas. Salves and ointments are too precious to waste on Jews, so a cut on the hand can mean the gas the next time Mengele is culling the population.
If we pass visual inspection, our judge has one final test. He points toward a ditch and says, “Jump, Jew.” I stand before the ditch and gather my last reserves of strength. Land on the other side and I will live, at least until the next selection. Fall in, and I will be tossed onto the back of a flatbed and driven to the gas. The first time I go through this madness, I think: I am a German-Jewish girl from Berlin from a good family. My father was a renowned painter. Why am I jumping this trench? After that, I think of nothing but reaching the other side and landing on my feet.
Roza is the first of our new family to be selected. She has the misfortune of being very sick with malaria at the time of a big selection, and there is no way to conceal it from Mengele’s expert eyes. Regina begs the Devil to take her too, so that her sister will not have to die alone in the gas. Mengele smiles, revealing his gapped teeth. “You’ll go soon enough, but you can work a little longer first. Go to the right.” For the only time in my life, I am glad not to have a sister.
Regina stops eating. She doesn’t seem to notice when they beat her at work. She has crossed over the line. She is already dead. At the next big selection, she waits patiently on the endless line. She endures Taube’s “exercises” and keeps her face in the mud so he will not crush her skull. When finally she reaches the selection table, she flies at Mengele and tries to stab him through the eye with the handle of her spoon. An SS man shoots her in the stomach.
Mengele is clearly frightened. “Don’t waste any gas on her! Throw her into the fire alive! Up the chimney with her!”
They toss Regina into a wheelbarrow. We watch her go and pray she dies before she reaches the crematorium.
In the autumn of 1944, we begin hearing the Russian guns. In September, the camp’s air raid sirens sound for the first time. Three weeks later they sound again, and the camp’s antiaircraft guns fire their first shots. That same day, the Sonderkommando at Crematorium IV revolt. They attack their SS guards with pickaxes and hammers and manage to set fire to their barracks and the crematoria before being machine-gunned. A week later, bombs fall into the camp itself. Our masters show signs of stress. They no longer look so invincible. Sometimes they even look a little frightened. This gives us a certain pleasure and a modicum of hope. The gassings stop. They still kill us, but they have to do it themselves. Selected prisoners are shot in the gas chambers or near Crematorium V. Soon they begin dismantling the crematoria. Our hope of survival increases.
The situation deteriorates throughout that autumn and winter. Food is in short supply. Each day, many women collapse and die of starvation and exhaustion. Typhus takes a terrible toll. In December, Allied bombs fall on the I.G. Farben synthetic fuel and rubber plant. A few days later, the Allies strike again, but this time several bombs fall on an SS sickbay barracks inside Birkenau. Five SS are killed. The guards grow more irritable, more unpredictable. I avoid them. I try to make myself invisible.
The New Year comes, 1944 turns to 1945. We can sense Auschwitz is dying. We pray it will be soon. We debate what to do. Should we wait for the Russians to free us? Should we try to escape? And if we manage to get across the wire? Where will we go? The Polish peasants hate us just as much as the Germans. We wait. What else can we do?
In mid-January, I smell smoke. I look out the barracks door. Bonfires are raging all over the camps. The smell is different. For the first time, they’re not burning people. They’re burning paper. They’re burning the evidence of their crimes. The ash drifts over Birkenau like snowfall. I smile for the first time in two years.
On January 17, Mengele leaves. The end is near. Shortly after midnight, there is a roll call. We are told the entire Auschwitz camp is being evacuated. The Reich still requires our bodies. The healthy will evacuate on foot. The sick will stay behind to meet their fate. We fall into rank and march out in neat rows of five.
At one o’clock in the morning, I pass through the gates of hell for the last time, two years to the day after my arrival, almost two years to the hour. I am not free yet. I have one more test to endure.
The snowfall is heavy and relentless. In the distance we can hear the thunder of an artillery duel. We walk, a seemingly endless chain of half-humans, dressed in our striped rags and our clogs. The shooting is as relentless as the snow. We try to count the shots. One hundred…two hundred…three…four…five…. We stop counting after that. Each shot represents one more life extinguished, one more murder. We number several thousand when we set out. I fear we will all be dead before we reach our destination.
Lene walks on my left, Rachel on my right. We dare not stumble. Those who stumble are shot on the spot and thrown into a ditch. We dare not fall out of formation and lag behind. Those who do are shot, too. The road is littered with the dead. We step over them and pray we do not falter. We eat snow to quench our thirst. There is nothing we can do about the horrible cold. A woman takes pity on us and throws boiled potatoes. Those foolish enough to pick them up are shot dead.
We sleep in barns or in abandoned barracks. Those who cannot rise quickly enough when awakened are shot dead. My hunger seems to be eating a hole in my stomach. It is much worse than the hunger of Birkenau. Somehow, I summon the strength to keep placing one foot in front of the other. Yes, I want to survive, but it is also a matter of defiance. They want me to fall so they can shoot me. I want to witness the destruction of their thousand-year Reich. I want to rejoice in its death, just as the Germans rejoiced in ours. I think of Regina, flying at Mengele during the selection, trying to kill him with her spoon. Regina’s courage gives me strength. Each step is rebellion.
On the third day, at nightfall, he comes for me. He is on horseback. We are sitting in the snow at the side of the road, resting. Lene is leaning on me. Her eyes are closed. I fear she is finished. Rachel presses snow to her lips to revive her. Rachel is the strongest. She had practically carried Lene all that afternoon.
He looks at me. He is a Sturmbannführer in the SS. After twelve years of living under the Nazis, I have learned to recognize their insignia. I try to make myself invisible. I turn my head and tend to Lene. He yanks on the reins of his horse and maneuvers himself into position so he can look at me some more. I wonder what he sees in me. Yes, I was a pretty girl once, but I am hideous now, exhausted, filthy, sick, a walking skeleton. I cannot bear my own smell. I know that if I interact with him, it will end badly. I put my head on my knees and feign sleep. He is too smart for that.
“You there,” he calls.
I look up. The man on horseback is pointing directly at me.
“Yes, you. Get on your feet. Come with me.”
I stand up. I am dead. I know it. Rachel knows it, too. I can see it in her eyes. She has no more tears to cry.
“Remember me,” I whisper as I follow the man on horseback into the trees.
Thankfully, he does not ask me to walk far, just to a spot a few meters from the side of the road, where a large tree had fallen. He dismounts and tethers his horse. He sits down on the fallen tree and orders me to sit next to him. I hesitate. No SS man has ever asked such a thing. He pats the tree with the palm of his hand. I sit, but several inches farther away than he had commanded. I am afraid, but I am also humiliated by my smell. He slides closer. He stinks of alcohol. I’m done for. It’s only a question of time.
I look straight ahead. He removes his gloves, then touches my face. In two years at Birkenau, no SS man had ever touched me. Why is this man, a Sturmbannführer, touching me now? I have endured many torments, but this is by far the worst. I look straight ahead. My flesh is ablaze.
“Such a shame,” he says. “Were you very beautiful once?”
I can think of nothing to say. Two years at Birke
nau has taught me that in situations like these, there is never a right answer. If I answer yes, he’ll accuse me of Jewish arrogance and kill me. If I answer no, he’ll kill me for lying.
“I’ll share a secret with you. I’ve always been attracted to Jewesses. If you ask me, we should have killed the men and utilized the women for our own enjoyment. Did you have a child?”
I think of all the children I saw going to the gas at Birkenau. He demands a response by squeezing my face between his thumb and fingers. I close my eyes and try not to cry out. He repeats the question. I shake my head, and he releases his grip.
“If you’re able to survive the next few hours, you might someday have a child. Will you tell this child about what happened to you during the war? Or will you be too ashamed?”
A child? How could a girl in my position ever contemplate giving birth to a child? I have spent the last two years simply trying to survive. A child is beyond my comprehension.
“Answer me, Jew!”
His voice is suddenly harsh. I feel the situation is about to spin out of control. He takes hold of my face again and turns it toward him. I try to look away, but he shakes me, compelling me to look into his eyes. I have no strength to resist. His face is instantly chiseled into my memory. So is the sound of his voice and his Austrian-accented German. I hear it still.
“What will you tell your child about the war?”
What does he want to hear? What does he want me to say?
He squeezes my face. “Speak, Jew! What will you tell your child about the war?”
“The truth, Herr Sturmbannführer. I’ll tell my child the truth.”
Where these words come from, I do not know. I only know that if I am to die, I will die with a modicum of dignity. I think again of Regina, flying at Mengele armed with a spoon.