He stopped for a moment. A shadow of something subtly aggressive stole over his face; the hardly veiled accusation was audible in his voice that was trembling with indignation. It was only Dahler he bore his unblinking gaze at as he spoke. Listen to what you made us do. Remember every crime that stained your hands with blood.
“There were two gassing facilities at that time in Birkenau, Bunker 1 and Bunker 2, called The Little Red House and The Little White House, respectively. They were completely unsuspicious, simple whitewashed farmhouses with thatched roofs – not a soul expected that something horrible could happen to them inside such harmless facilities. Those two structures were the only ones that remained from Brzezinka village that had been demolished prior to Birkenau’s construction. The camp administration converted them into gas chambers for the time being, until the construction of the new crematoria would be finished.”
The courtroom’s air had grown tenser, stuffier, as though thick with a vague threat. For some time, Novák stared moodily ahead.
“It was all very smartly organized. People were starved, thirsty, and dog-tired after the train and the SS promised them warm soup and coffee after the showers. They also told them that their clothes would be disinfected and that they would be placed in quarantine for a couple of weeks before they would be assigned to their respective work details. Some of the SS, particularly inventive ones, even went as far as asking people for their professions. ‘Oh, you’re a carpenter? That’s wonderful. That’s precisely what we’re looking for. And you’re a seamstress? It seems we are in luck today! Those are just the professions we need. Report to me after the showers and I’ll ensure that you’re assigned to a work detail that suits your profession.’ It was sickening to listen to.” He pursed his lips into a thin bloodless line. “Needless to say, all of those people would be gassed within the next twenty minutes, skilled workers and unskilled ones alike. Their bodies would then be buried in the ravines behind those two bunkers. In summer 1942, a new problem manifested itself though. Those bodies began to swell and the earth began to open under the scorching sun. The smell coming out of that opened ground was atrocious. But when some black liquid began rising and polluting the groundwater in the vicinity, the SS ordered us to take chlorinated lime there and pour it on top of the mass graves. When that didn’t produce any results, we were ordered to unearth and burn them all. However, that was already in the autumn of the same year.”
The Chairman cleared his throat. Next to him, Lieutenant Carter took a sip from his glass. Even Dr. Hoffman himself felt something catch in his chest at such a dispassionate, yet hauntingly vivid description of the extermination process. He wondered how Novák himself coped with what he had seen daily, in what he had participated, unwillingly, yet participated nevertheless. To be sure, at least some of the Sonderkommando men sometimes escorted their own newly arrived relatives and even families into the gas chambers. No wonder the Slovak was so agitated when it came to the hearing of Dahler’s case. Dr. Hoffman could very well understand his sentiments on the former SS guard’s account.
“You said you saw the defendant beating Frau Dahler, is that not so?” the Chairman continued, forcing his emotions under control.
“Yes. I was walking with a column of men towards Bunker 1. Helena, I beg your pardon, Frau Dahler,” Novák bared his teeth in a snarl as he pronounced Dahler’s last name, “ran along the women’s column that followed in front, in the direction of Bunker 2. Half of the women had already entered the structure. She was trying to get inside when Herr Dahler caught her by the scruff of her neck and pulled her to the side. What followed was some sort of altercation between them. I didn’t hear the words, only saw that she was crying and begging him for something. Then he threw her down on the ground and began beating her with his horsewhip, calling her all sorts of names. Stupid fucking Jew; one more time you disobey me; I’ve had it up to here with you; I ought to shoot you, you stupid bitch – that sort of thing. I heard him because by then, he was screaming. One of the superior officers, Hauptscharführer Moll, intervened at this point and told Herr Dahler to take her away and continue with his beating someplace away from the new arrivals’ eyes. Moll himself was a first-class sadist but he didn’t want to create any sort of panic among those people who were still unfamiliar with the camp. Herr Dahler agitated a great deal of them with that beating.”
Dr. Hoffman was watching Dahler closely the entire time that Novák was speaking. Not a muscle moved in the Austrian’s face. He remained fascinatingly calm.
At the mention of violence, a failure to display any sort of emotion was characteristic of those suffering from psychopathy, the psychiatrist wrote down in his notepad but then put a big question mark next to it. With the best will in the world, Dahler, for some reason, didn’t appear to be a textbook psychopath to him. And the more he observed the couple in front of him, the more confusing the entire affair was getting.
“Defendant, is that true, what Herr Novák just described?” The Chairman regarded the former SS man over the rim of his glasses.
Dahler appeared to be hesitating for a few moments.
“Yes, it is,” he finally replied in a mild voice.
Suddenly, his wife pulled forward in her seat. “Your Honor, may I clarify something?”
“Yes, Frau Dahler, you may.”
“It wasn’t what Herr Novák described. That is… he misunderstood what he saw.”
“With all due respect, Frau Dahler, I don’t quite see how it is possible to misunderstand an assault. The defendant either beat you that day, or he didn’t. There’s no way around the fact itself.”
“He had to. Otherwise…” She stumbled upon her own words, confused. Her eyes were flashing about in distress, dark, suddenly alarmed. “Otherwise, Hauptscharführer Moll would have put me into that gas chamber, along with my sister, Róžínka. My husband saved us both by his action.”
For some time, the room was immersed in such silence, Dr. Hoffman could hear himself breathing.
“Care to elaborate, Frau Dahler?”
“Yes, please, Your Honor. I wouldn’t want you to assume something of my husband’s actions that were beyond his control. You’ll see it for yourselves that it was the only possible solution in that situation. Herr Novák is right, Moll was a first-rate sadist. Franz had to whip me in front of him so that he wouldn’t do something worse to me.”
“Very well, Frau Dahler. We’re listening.”
Helena
Birkenau. Summer 1942
Despite the early hour, the scorching sun was beating down unmercifully. Escorted by the SS and Kapos, we marched in between passages of electrified barbed wire towards our new living quarters. Well, a part of our Kommando, that is – young women only. The men were all left in Auschwitz.
On the border of the two camps, we were stopped on some senior SS man’s orders. Near the gates, through which outside work detail groups left every morning, some sort of selection was being held. Accompanied by the orchestra music blaring its usual morning march, two SS officers, with medical corps insignia gleaming on their shoulders, were pulling men out of a work detail group and lining them up aside from the others.
“Strip completely!” The order was given.
As slowly as possible, the pitiful gray skeletons began pulling off their filthy, torn rags on which the blue stripes could hardly be recognized under all the layers of grime covering them.
“Faster, faster! Get on with it!” Another impatient shout from the SS medic.
Instantly alarmed, we began shooting anxious, pleading glances in our SS supervisors’ direction. For some time, they observed the unraveling scene with politely bored expressions and only when our nervous shuffling and murmurs had grown too loud to go unnoticed, did they take pity on us.
“No need to worry,” Rottenführer Dahler commented quietly. “Those are all Muselmänner. They can hardly walk, let alone work.”
No one could say anything to that. The severe emaciation of the inmates stunned u
s into helpless, petrified silence. Under their wrinkled, scaly skin with a cadaverous tint to it, bones protruded to such an extreme that their very ability to stand on their own two feet was a miracle beyond any comprehension. Their shaved heads had lost all semblance to those of actual human beings’ – a pitiful parade of skulls with their eyes still glimmering with hope to cheat fate, at the last moment. At the end of the line, one of them snatched his prison garb from the ground and began pulling it on all the while staring at the SS doctors, both of whom were busy taking the selected men’s numbers down. A sorry attempt to cheat the Grim Reaper but he still had the fight left in him. The stubborn human will to survive shone in his hooded eyes, rolled in between tightly pressed jaws. A Kapo, the Green triangle, saw him and pounced on him at once, pummeling the poor creature with his club until the latter could no longer raise his skeletal arms in a futile effort to protect himself. After ensuring that the man was dead, the Kapo ran up to his SS bosses and tore his cap off to report “the incident.” Without any emotion or even a single look in the murdered man’s direction, the SS doctor put his number down along with the others. The rest of the unfortunates were loaded onto a truck that sped up in the direction of Auschwitz, at once. Outside work detail Kommandos were waved off to proceed. The entire affair was over in under ten minutes.
We resumed our marching in silence. Having seen off outside work detail gangs, the camp orchestra were packing their instruments, ridiculous and mocking in their white uniforms and red cords. Behind my back, a few women were sniffling quietly.
“Stop feeling sorry for them,” Rottenführer Wolff snarled, annoyed with such an unseemly, in his eyes, display of sympathy towards our fellow inmates. “If we keep wasting food on sustaining their miserable existence, it’ll mean that good, able-bodied workers will go hungry, such as yourselves. Is that what you want, you feeble-minded cows?”
Rottenführer Dahler marched on my side of the column. Soon, he leveled with our row of five – the standard marching formation here – and kept walking, looking straight ahead, next to me. I kept touching my kerchief – a nervous gesture, which I couldn’t control for the life of me after seeing that scene. How sheltered we’d been in our Kanada! How positively blind to the misery of the rest of the camp, in our little paradise. Now, we were suddenly terrified to be taken away from it; terrified, that we should end up like those men in striped garb, starved and worked to death until not only our bodies but our souls were wasted away, withered and covered with countless sores – walking corpses for whom death was a welcoming notion.
I suddenly couldn’t get my breath. Cold sweat poured down my back, my very body was oozing with fear. I clasped my mouth to stifle a sob – crying after an SS man explicitly prohibited us to do so was a sure way to get oneself a one-way ticket to the gas.
For a moment, I didn’t feel the ground on which I was walking. I only saw the gray sleeve of Rottenführer Dahler’s uniform, swinging rhythmically back and forth. He never uttered a word or betrayed a single emotion. Only once did he brush my hand with his, accidentally, no doubt. I risked stealing a quick glance at him. A few heads turned after mine, as well – a veritable herd instinct. He was gazing vacantly ahead and his relaxed, almost serene features instilled some certainty into our anguished souls. We felt ourselves growing calmer. It must have been some sort of a mind trick the camp played with one’s brain. We had learned to put trust into them much like sheep put their faith into their sheepdogs. To be sure, they were still the enemy, the alien species and could still kill us at will and yet, they wouldn’t give us away to the wolves with the SS medical corps insignia on their shoulders… at least, so we thought.
It was better to think so.
It was better to trust them rather than not have anyone to trust at all.
We had to march for quite some time, for our new barracks sat on the very outskirts of Birkenau, surrounded by pine trees and overlooking vast green fields as far as one’s eye could see. The road was well trampled on and dusty. On both sides of it, an insufferable number of barracks lay. In the distance, the railroad work Kommando were hammering away at the still unfinished tracks. The air was thick with tar and oil and stale sweat.
Staff cars sped by; trucks with Red Crosses on them; motorcycle patrols with uniformed SS in them, Lagerpolizei signs gleaming on their necks and we still marched, marched past endless barracks and work details, past emaciated inmates with hollow eyes and sunken cheeks, past misery and death itself. Some of them still rose to their feet at the sight of the SS men but some had long lost the strength to even lift their heads. With our faces white as chalk, we saw that these new Muselmänner wore striped dresses – like us.
“Must be the women’s camp,” someone commented incredulously under their breath.
We looked closer but with the best will in the world, we couldn’t recognize women in those pitiful figures. Same hollow eyes, same shaved heads, same grayish skin and bony fingers stretching out in our direction from behind the barbed wire like an apparitions’ transparent limbs – only by those dresses could we tell them apart from the men that we’d seen. More heads began turning, in alarm, toward the SS men. You aren’t taking us there, are you?
“Take a good look!” Wolff shouted as though on cue, pointing with the tip of his whip in the women’s direction. “This is where you will end up if you keep being lazy scum. Take a good look and get it once and for all into your thick skulls how nice you have it with us!”
Instead of looking, we swiftly averted our eyes, shuddering at the thought that this could very well be us, had it not been for some lucky chance that landed us with the Kanada Kommando. Wolff wasn’t wrong. We did have it nice, compared to these walking skeletons. To be sure, we looked thin but still human. We were allowed to keep our hair and wear regular shoes and not wooden clogs supported only by leather straps or go barefoot like half of these women. We were able to steal some food found in suitcases and pockets. Women from the women’s camp followed our procession with dead eyes. In our turn, we were ashamed to look at them. For whatever inexplicable reason, we felt guilty before them, as though we had betrayed them in some way.
“There will be showers as well.” I looked up at Dahler. He announced it to no one in particular but I knew the words were meant for me. “Behind the warehouse, for now.”
In spite of myself, I broke into a beaming smile. There will be showers! I wished so much to ask him whether we should be allowed to take them daily or if there was going to be a schedule of some sort but speaking to an SS officer without being addressed first, wasn’t allowed. Irma, with the red armband reading “Senior – Block 1” on her sleeve, marched right in front of me and she certainly wouldn’t hesitate to administer her punishment with her club for my opening my mouth without permission.
Dahler, however, seemed to guess my thoughts for he clarified, after a pause, “you can take them as often as you like. As a matter of fact, it would be preferable for us, if you took them daily. We don’t need any lice in our work detail.”
“Ja, shower daily, ladies.” Of course, ‘ladies’ was spoken with a scornful smirk from Wolff. “If you don’t want to end up with your heads shorn off like those cows over there.” Another nod in the women’s camp direction. “There will be no ugly shaved-head scum in our Kommando. You get lice, I’ll see to it personally that you burn, along with them.”
As we had reached our destination, at last, the Kapos assembled us once again for the last roll call before sending us straight to work. Inside and in between partially constructed warehouses, mountains of personal belongings were piled up. In front of the sorting stations, men attired in made-to-measure jackets were working – all “old numbers,” judging by the insignia on their breast. They must have bought their way into the kosher detail by bribing the SS. Their well-nourished faces, skin gleaming with health, their wristwatches, hair styled with pomade, and shined shoes indicated their belonging to the camp elite who knew how to “organize” things here. In stunned si
lence, we observed them before the Kapos began assigning us to our stations.
The differences between the two Kanadas soon manifested themselves. The process of “organizing” here had been put on an almost industrial level.
“Anyone need French soap?” One of the men kept repeating his offer as he was making his round from one end of the warehouse to the other, on some suitable pretext.
“I can give you shoe polish for it,” a muffled voice replied near my station.
“What kind?”
“Good kind. From Holland. It smells like perfume.”
“French perfume… French perfume,” a different inmate murmured, following the same route as his counterpart some ten minutes ago.
A hushed offer from the sorting table in the corner. “I’ll take your perfume for five dollars.”
“Ten and not a penny less.”
“You’ll sell it to an SS warden for twenty, you crook! Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“Suit yourself.”
“I’ll give you eight dollars and some stockings to go with it.”
“Silk?”
“Nylon! He wants silk! Fathead!”
“One yourself.” A derisive grin. “Fine. Have it your way but it’s highway-robbery if you ask me.”
Like wide-eyed deer, we dug aimlessly at the clothes in front of us as they traded with each other like some Wall Street big shots. The most astonishing part was the fact that the Kapos almost entirely ignored such blatant black-market dealings, yawning, and almost purposely averting their eyes when the goods exchanged hands. At last, after quickly glancing around, one of the girls pulled a pair of underwear from the pile and stuffed it inside her dress. Another one snatched a women’s wristwatch while two others were busy stuffing their pockets with food. The old numbers, who had at first ignored us entirely, soon broke into grins.
The Girl in the Striped Dress: A completely heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story Page 8