“What part of Slovakia are you from?” I asked her in my native language.
As though woken up from a trance by my question, she looked up and offered me a wavering smile before shaking her head.
“Czech?” I tried again, this time in German – the camp’s official language.
“Polish, from here,” she replied, her features twisting into a tearful grimace. It was a common disease of the new arrivals, this extreme, overwhelming homesickness. The mere mention of one’s hometown’s name was enough to send one howling in tears.
I nodded solemnly. So, they’d begun transporting Polish women here as well now. The tapestry of nations was enriching the multinational KZ each month, it appeared. If I paid more attention to the text of the newspapers that I was shoving into my half-boots when the Kapo wasn’t watching, I would have put two and two together sooner than that. But the camp has long taught us new priorities. Warmth came before information and besides, reading was strictly prohibited by the camp rules. I didn’t fancy twenty days in the bunker for trying to figure out how the war was going for the Germans. The question of who was winning was clear enough from the sheer number of transports that kept pulling up to the ramp and the growing mountains of personal belongings that would take us years to sort out.
Around me, women began to mutter. They were looking forward to sweeping, eagerness written all over their pinched, blue-lipped faces. I blew onto my cupped hands as well and saw a cloud of vapor forming around them. We all wished for Irma to hurry up with those brooms. Brooms meant sweeping, sweeping meant warmth and we had already grown cold after an offering of coffee that did nothing to provide nourishment or energy but only made one’s stomach churn with hunger.
However, they changed their routine this time, it seemed. Irma arrived with stacks of cards and a fistful of pencils, which she set to distribute in the same business-like manner ordinarily reserved for the Sunday brooms. Mystified, we regarded them for some time, turning them this way and that in our hands. One side was lined and there was a place for a stamp. Another one depicted a beautiful landscape with cheerful farmers working the land. Waldsee, the gothic letters announced, not Auschwitz.
“Write to your families,” Irma instructed us as she stalked across the barracks in her new, tall boots.
Rumor had it that she’d finally wormed her way into one of the SS men’s graces despite her doubtful racial status and was now enjoying the full privileges of such a position. Her entire countenance now reflected it; she carried herself almost like one of the new SS female wardens who had begun to arrive from Ravensbrück recently. We had only seen them from afar; the sharp-dressed, stone-faced creatures that strutted around with an air of utter disdain surrounding them. Strangely enough, we were spared from falling under their jurisdiction. Rottenführer Wolff, who wouldn’t stop leering at them, was even generous enough to explain it to us that they were here to oversee the outside working details, the women’s camp that was being constructed in Birkenau. The Kanada women were his, he added with a dirty wink in our direction. It still puzzled me, how exactly he benefitted from having such a female harem under his charge – it’s not like he would have ever touched us, the dirty Jewesses, but apparently, it somehow made him feel better about himself. Not that we complained; our SS supervisors were at least a familiar evil. The SS wardens, we heard, whipped just about anyone who looked at them the wrong way. We only got beaten for a good reason, in the SS men’s eyes, that is.
“Write the following,” Irma continued. “Dear such and such, we’re all well and doing fine here at Waldsee. The work is not hard and the food is plentiful. Come see us soon. Yours – your name here.”
A few heads shot up as if to ensure that we hadn’t misheard her. Suddenly, we couldn’t get our breath. Cold horror crept over us and it was even worse than the April chill that hung over the barracks like a permanent mist. Anxious and ashen with fear, we exchanged uncomprehending glances. To write something of this sort to our own flesh and blood! Our senses may have been dulled by hunger and exhaustion but we still had our wits about us to see through the charade well enough. To lure them into this hell pretending to be one of the tanned, smiling women waving from the golden field, in which we were supposedly working. They even drew a German soldier next to this travesty, his face almost swimming in kindness. Sure enough, he lacked the whip attached to his hip. Nor did the artist draw a gun on the German’s belt. Postcard Germans didn’t shoot anyone. They were there merely to supervise. We were all friends here, after all. You really ought to come to see it for yourselves.
The same frantic fear that was painted on mine was reflected on my fellow inmates’ gaunt faces. Cautiously, one of the women raised her hand with a stub of a pencil in it.
“Blockälteste Irma, allow me to report, please. I have not anyone left at home.”
“Write to your friends then. To your neighbors, to your rabbi, for all I care!” Irma waved away her objection with an incredible nonchalance about her. “Everyone must submit their postcards.”
How fast she had forgotten her Jewish half, firmly concentrating on the Volksdeutsche one! I quickly bit my lip, averting my eyes from her beautifully styled hair. Who was I to judge her? After all, wasn’t she only trying to survive, like most of us? Surely, there were other ways to go about it, ways that didn’t involve turning on her own fellow inmates, for one, but that’s what the slightest hint of power did to people in this place and Irma was, so far, the least corrupted by it from what I saw. At least, she wasn’t openly bullying anyone and neither did she try to set the inmates against each other – a pastime, with which some Kapos and block elders entertained themselves. The truth was, Auschwitz was a nightmare but at least Irma didn’t make this nightmare worse for us.
She regarded us, the pitiful lot, and suddenly a fleeting ghost of sympathy softened her features.
“If you arrived here with someone and they—” She wetted her lips with a nervous glance toward the door. “You can write to your friends or family who aren’t here anymore.”
She said the words without saying anything openly. Hope once again ignited in our frozen hearts. Smiling and overwhelmed with gratitude, we set to writing, the diligent little pupils. I arrived alone, without my family but I did have a friend with me on that train and so, I would write to her – the woman who wasn’t here anymore.
“Dear Cylka.” My hand was not steady and the words came out unsure, wavering. We weren’t used to writing anymore, only to working and dying.
I summoned her spirit out of the depths of my memory. Here she is, laughing with her beautiful voice as we head home from school. We are fifteen and two boys follow us, precisely five steps behind. They had just begun doing it a few days ago and the situation still amuses Cylka immensely. They never talk to us, only among themselves, quietly and shyly and the only communication that we get from them is “Goodbye now! Till tomorrow,” before we disappear into our tenement apartment house. A year later, one of them will get enough courage to kiss me on the cheek and I would lie without sleep countless nights, imagining that I’m in love with him.
“… we are all well and doing fine here at Waldsee.”
Here she is, in her wedding dress, hugging me tightly as her beautiful eyes are brimming with tears. “Next year, I’ll be dancing at your wedding,” she says and kisses me on both cheeks. But the next year the war starts and my family sends me to live with our gentile friends. It’s easier for me to pass as one of their daughters; unlike Cylka or my older sister Róžínka, I’m still unmarried and have no children. They hide my passport and procure false documents for me, for which my father pays unthinkable money to some crook. This buys me a couple of years of freedom.
“The work is not hard and the food is plentiful.”
Here she is, rocking her youngest child at the train station as we wait for the transport, guarded by the German soldiers. The cattle car arrives. Inside, there’s a single bucket with water. We are told to use it to relieve ourselves
after we drink all the water. We haven’t seen Auschwitz yet and its communal latrines; we haven’t been stripped naked and forced to stand with our legs wide open while an unfamiliar man’s hands shave off our pubic hair. We still have our dignity and modesty; we’re shy and are trying to hold on for as long as it’s possible. Only when one can’t stand this torture any longer does she work her way into the “bucket corner” and mutters her “excuse me, please,” while another woman is holding a coat in front of her to allow her at least some privacy. The bucket soon begins to overflow and the refuse splashes all around it emanating the most revolting stench but the guards, who travel with us, wouldn’t let us empty it, despite all the screams and pleas that it’s impossible to breathe inside.
“Come see us soon.”
Here she is, still rocking her child, who has died from hypothermia on the train, as she stands on the camp’s ramp. An officer walks on it flanked by two oddly-dressed men and we can’t help but gawk at him as though hypnotized. His uniform is regal and immaculate and tailored to fit him to stunning perfection. His hand in a leather glove grabs my chin and not hers and he turns to lead me away after himself, leaving Cylka and her dead child along with the rest of the women. Rottenführer Wolff.
“Forever yours, Helena.”
I wrote the address. My hand was firm now. They didn’t assign the numbers to the ones who were sent to the gas upon arrival and therefore, they would never know that my Cylka was dead. Over my shoulder, Irma grunted her approval before taking my card.
Dinner time. I looked at my palm with a miserable smear of margarine on it, at a piece of bread in my other hand and began licking the margarine absentmindedly as I chewed the bread as slowly as possible. Dinner was the most nourishing meal of the day. In the morning, we only got a splash of ersatz coffee and for lunch – the so-called turnip soup. I had learned by now to stand in the middle of the line when they distributed it from two tremendous cauldrons. If one lined up for it too soon, they only got water from the top, into their mess tin. If one was at the end of the line, there was a chance that nothing would be left at all and they’d go hungry till the evening. But the lucky ones in the middle could count on getting a piece of a carrot or an onion, in addition to the vegetable broth – a veritable feast! However, all of these miserable meals only teased our appetite. They never satisfied it.
My stomach was still rumbling when I clambered onto the bunk to lie next to two sisters, Anna and Katarina. They were also from the former Czechoslovakia, only the Czech part of it, the new arrivals. Anna’s nails were still painted. I kept staring at them with greedy fascination the entire time during the dinner – a piece of a long-lost life. Katarina was constantly crying; an SS doctor defiled her during the mandatory “search for valuables” upon arrival and now Jozef surely wouldn’t marry her. Who would want an impure bride? How would she explain herself?
The same SS doctor also shoved his fingers, in a rubber glove, inside me on my first day, only unlike her I knew better than to hope for making it out of here alive. Who cares if I’m technically speaking not a virgin any longer? Certainly not I. But I didn’t tell her that, just turned to her for a fleeting instant and enclosed a biscuit, which I had found among someone’s belongings in the Kanada today, into her hand. She hiccupped in surprise and broke into more tears, thanking me profusely. I felt sorry for her. She was being transferred to the outdoors detail from what I’d heard. I was saving the biscuit for myself for later but she needed it more than I did. Everyone around knew what an outdoors Kommando meant for an inmate’s life expectancy – two months, if one was lucky not to catch malaria or typhus or get on one of the supervisors’ wrong sides.
They talked to each other softly, the usual sister talk. Róžínka and I used to chat the same way, lying next to each other in our bed. I missed my sister dearly after she’d gotten married and moved away and now, I missed her even more so because from time to time and on Sundays in particular, it got so unbearably lonely here in the evenings that one wanted to howl, like a wolf, at the moon. How was it possible to suffer from solitude in such an overcrowded place? Very simple – when one had nobody at all, not a soul to talk to, not a familiar face to look at, not a friendly smile to see one through the day. People died much too fast here and therefore, making friends was a dangerous affair.
Rottenführer Dahler’s face suddenly appeared before my eyes. He was one of the few people who smiled at me here. I shut my eyes tightly and willed myself to sleep. I’d rather see grim faces around me than his smile. I’d rather die than smile back at him.
5
Helena
Another week passed by. Auschwitz Alps were threatening to overflow. The trucks, often as many as twenty, arrived daily from the ramp, to which new transports crept up carrying their human cargo. The transport Kommando only shrugged apologetically when we began moaning at the sight of yet another truck, belching its contents at our feet. If it continued in the same manner, we’d soon drown in all these clothes.
A day ago, Camp Kommandant Höss arrived in his staff car to inspect our work detail. Waded around, as though through a great sea, poking and prodding at the mountains of clothes, with his whip; shook his head disapprovingly at the SS men and particularly at Rottenführer Dahler – Kanada Kommandoführer – who followed him close on his heels and demanded for the additional warehouses to be built and for a night Kommando to be added, at once, to a day one. It had rained the day before and all of the clothes that had been left outside, for there was not a chance to fit them all into the warehouse, now lay around its walls in pitiful, wet heaps, emanating the faint smell of sweat and damp cotton. Such wastefulness, as the clothes were meant for the Aryan folk, after all, must have caused Kommandant Höss even greater frustration.
After throwing his last, “sort out this mess! All leaves are canceled until you do,” at the officers, he stalked off along with Schutzhaftlagerführer Aumeier. Not too far from me, a Kapo pulled his head into his shoulders. A tense silence hung over the warehouse, along with a forming fog. Rottenführer Wolff’s hard breathing could be heard even by us, who cowered in our neat lines of five behind the male part of the Kommando. The Kommandant took his dissatisfaction out on the SS men, reprimanding them for the mess; they, in their turn, would take it out on the Kapos using their whips this time. After that, our turn would come and the Kapos didn’t have a habit of sparing the ones who got them into trouble with the SS. In the end, it was always our fault. We failed to produce the quota. We were lazy and didn’t work hard enough. The very impossibility of such a task to be completed, even if we worked night and day without breaks, didn’t seem to cross anyone’s mind in this chain of command.
I clenched my fists and mentally prepared myself for a rubber truncheon beating.
As it was expected, it was Wolff who exploded first as soon as Kommandant Höss’s car was out of the gates.
“You brainless swine!” He whipped around, already brandishing his horsewhip. “I ought to knock your fucking heads off, right about now!” The first blow landed on the nearest Kapo’s shoulder. The Kapo fell down at once, covering his head with his hands, as Wolff pummeled him mercilessly. “Lazy scum! You think you’re here on a vacation of some sort?! I’ll show you how to work, you filthy lot!”
Just as Dahler turned around to face our Kapo, Maria, she quickly put two and two together and began working her rubber truncheon on us before he would put his horsewhip to work on her. Better skin off our backs than hers, she reasoned. Not that it wasn’t understandable.
For the next fifteen minutes, the SS were taking their frustration, for the canceled leave, on the Kapos and the Kapos showered us with blows in return. In this competition for the best disciplinarian, Dahler’s eyes caught mine as I, after receiving my prescribed beating from Maria, was inspecting my aching ribs gingerly in the hope that she hadn’t cracked any of them in her zeal. His hand, with the horsewhip in it, froze midair above the back of some unfortunate man – I couldn’t quite make out who
it was, for Maria whacked me on my temple and quite hard at that – before he lowered it slowly. I turned away. By all means, don’t stop on my account, Herr Rottenführer. I know you’re annoyed with your canceled leave and we, the Jews, deserved it, the lazy scum that we are.
Moving slowly, I staggered toward my working station and began sorting the clothes without waiting for the Kapo’s order. My ears were still ringing from Maria’s truncheon. From the corner of my eye, I saw Dahler making a hesitant step in my direction. I turned my back completely on him. I never thought I could hate someone so much in my entire life. I didn’t even hate Maria for the thrashing she had just administered to us. At least, she was honest about it. Him, I couldn’t even look at. My entire body was trembling with that hatred. It was coursing through my veins, turning blood into acid. If I had a gun in my hands at that moment, I would have shot him without a second thought.
Canceled leaves must have been some powerful incentive for our supervisors. After a month only, new additional warehouses had been erected for our Kanada work detail. Inside, new offices for the SS had been installed – Kommandant Höss’s special order:
“Whenever I or any of my deputies come here, I want to see you either supervising your workers or doing the administrative job in your own office. Whoever is found missing from his post without a superior officer’s permission will be transferred someplace where they will put you to work, if you don’t appreciate your current employment. The Eastern Front, for one example.”
The Girl in the Striped Dress: A completely heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story Page 5