I, myself, couldn’t resist the pair of undergarments that I found among some unfortunate woman’s belongings. The old number, who had bartered his French soap for a tin of sardines, snorted with amusement next to me. Blushing copiously at being found out, I thoroughly pretended to ignore him. “You can take pretty much everything from here,” he said. “Just don’t forget the golden rule of the Kanada; the Kapos and the guards need to get their share. If you don’t bribe them, they’ll do you in for stealing before you know it.”
I made sure to instruct the rest of the girls on this matter. In the evening, our Kapo Maria left the detail with a smile on her face for the first time. Everyone could see her bulging pockets as she walked away from our neat columns, leaving us in Irma’s charge.
The SS appeared before us. Under the collar of Rottenführer Wolff’s uniform, a new silk necktie was gleaming softly. Rottenführer Dahler was chewing gum like some American actor who’d just jumped off the screen. Both seemed mighty pleased with their new working arrangements away from Kommandant Höss’s watchful eye and constant harassment. Here, they were masters and Gods and, so far, things were looking up for us, as well, in view of such lax policing.
“We have another surprise for you,” Rottenführer Wolff announced cheerfully. I had a suspicion he had discovered a bottle of some top-shelf spirits among the dead people’s belongings. Now that the alcohol had taken its effect, his goodwill knew no restraint. “Block by block, you will now go inside the main warehouse and find suitable clothes for you to wear. No more of this prison garb. Get yourselves some shirts and slacks preferably and comfortable shoes as well. But keep your kerchiefs. We don’t need any of your hair falling into the sorted clothes. You’re welcome now, tramps. Now, off you go! Make yourselves look pretty.”
If it weren’t for Irma already prodding us in the backs with her truncheon as she shouted her “Los, los, los!” at our small column, we would have thought it was some sort of drunken joke.
“Take off all of your clothes and drop them in that corner over there.” Irma indicated where we were to discard our striped dresses.
Naked, we were quickly herded into the showers. The showers were a small affair, dark and dingy, with metal stalls on both sides with pipes running along the walls and showerheads protruding from them and a concrete floor. The water was blisteringly cold but we were just delighted at being able to wash, no matter this minor inconvenience. At least, we could remove all the grime off our skin! It was a paradise, no less.
Only a few minutes were allotted to each block. After a quick but vigorous scrubbing, Irma chased us back into the warehouse where we, naked and still glistening with droplets of water running down our backs from our wet hair, were allowed to select suitable shirts, trousers, and even underwear from the piles of the already sorted and disinfected clothes. One of the inmates carefully marked down the exact number of everything we took – the clothes were already prepared to be shipped to Germany.
“Get dressed! Be quick about it!” Irma shouted again. Two minutes later, but not before we could extract whatever we had “organized” during the day from our abandoned dresses’ pockets, she was chasing us toward the exit. Women from Block 2 were already waiting at the doors for their turn.
Only when we were inside our new barrack, inspecting our new attire and boasting who had brought the biggest haul from the new Kanada, did scowls replace the smiles. Brooding silence now shrouded the barrack instead of the cheerful remarks. All this had come off our murdered kin. How could anyone celebrate that?
10
Helena
I heard Maria call out my number as she pointed in the direction of a building that was still missing part of its roof. Carpenters were hammering away overhead as I proceeded to my designated area along with a few other women.
“You’re on disinfection duty today,” Maria barked out, all business as always. “Sonderkommando will tell you what to do.”
Anxiously, we looked around. There were no clothes there, only endless clotheslines stretched like spiderwebs from one wall to another. Sonderkommando men, indeed, soon appeared along with their Kapo, who was to be our supervisor that day. We had long grown used to these men, even though we weren’t allowed to communicate with them openly. They stomped inside in their usual black rubber boots; no one spoke about it but we all knew that they had to hose off the gassed people’s bodies inside the bunkers before bringing them outside for burial or cremation. After that, they would clean the gas chamber itself so it would be pristine and spotless for its new victims but no one talked about that either. Death and food were two prohibited subjects for discussion in the camp and for a good reason.
With their usual efficiency, the Sonderkommando began organizing the working station.
The Kapo, a burly black-haired man with a red triangle of a political prisoner on his chest, began instructing us in his thick, low voice. “So, ladies, here are rubber gloves for you. Now, you each take a basket for yourself. Yes, those ones that the lads just brought in. You take the hair and wash it first in this solution, it’ll strip it of all the oils and bugs if there are any. Then, you rinse it with regular water and hang it to dry on these clotheslines. If the hair is too short, lay it out on these newspapers.”
The Kapo spoke in German with a thick Polish accent and since most of us girls were Slovakian, we exchanged uncomprehending looks. We must have misheard him, or he must have used the word “hair” instead of something else. Or maybe it was their Sonderkommando slang for something? They did call corpses, “stiffs,” after all and the contraband they called, “non-kosher goods,” so, perhaps, that was one of those things?
Only when he prompted us to move – well, go on, grab a basket, those braids won’t wash themselves – did we realize that he was talking quite literally. Piles and piles of women’s hair came into view as we looked into the baskets. Blond, gray, curly, braided, long, permed, red, dyed – shorn-off womanhood itself that made us shudder with horror. We were used to sorting and disinfecting the clothes but this was an entirely different matter altogether.
“Well, get on with it!” The Sonderkommando Kapo nudged us in the backs softly. “Don’t be so squeamish. At least it’s not teeth,” he added in a mild voice, as though in an apology.
Two of the inmates under his charge quickly demonstrated to us what was expected of us. Their motions were quick and professional, almost mechanical and utterly devoid of any emotion.
“You must forgive us,” one of them whispered softly when Maria was busy talking about something with the Polish Kapo. “Ordinarily, it’s our duty to do all the head-shaving and hair disinfection after the gassing but there have been so many of them in these past few days, we don’t have enough men left. Half of us are sent daily to the burial pits; all of those stiffs are coming out and the SS said we need to—”
“No jawing!” The Kapo’s shout quickly put an end to the conversation.
With shaking hands encased in rubber gloves, we handled dead women’s hair all morning. When the time for lunch came and along with it, block orderlies with cauldrons of soup, our group suddenly couldn’t even look at it. Not too far from us, the men from the Sonderkommando calmly munched on their rations. We regarded them almost with envy. They had long grown used to it. Death simply didn’t touch them any longer. They had invented names for it and mocked it daily, just to get through the day, just to keep their minds, just to desensitize themselves to the point where their bodies functioned like automatons but their thoughts were somewhere very far away, away from the mountains of corpses which they washed, shaved, burned, and buried daily. It was the only sensible solution. No one could blame them for still being able to eat their soup.
The man was sun-tanned, well built and with the sly face of a typical profiteer; attired in a white undershirt, black slacks, and the already familiar black rubber boots. His hair was not shaved but parted on one side and neatly brushed back. He whistled to me softly as I was piling the baskets into a separate heap outside the ba
rracks. For some time, I stood undecided. The area adjacent to the warehouse lay deserted; most of the inmates worked inside, away from the heat. But to me, the midday heat meant not the damnedest thing. Here, I could be left alone, in my own company, at least for a couple of hours. When one is constantly surrounded by people, one grows to loathe their company. Women took the risk and disappeared in the latrines’ direction at night for that very reason. Just to be alone, just not to hear the others’ voices, just to be alone with one’s own thoughts. Such luxury was nearly unobtainable in the camp but I had a willing ally in Rottenführer Dahler.
“But of course,” he had granted me his permission at once as soon as I had offered to sort the mounting piles of luggage outside. “Only watch it so that you don’t get heatstroke out there. If you feel warm, come back at once.”
After an incessant torrent of Jawohl and thank-you, I nearly ran into the blinding early-afternoon sun, grinning like a cat.
Another whistle from the Sonderkommando fellow. I turned sharply round, brought my hand to my brow to shield myself from the sun and cast a suspicious glance at him. He signed to me to come closer. However, I refused to leave my position for some doubtful business affair he had come to conduct here, no doubt.
He threw his muscular, tanned arms up in the air in the universal gesture of exasperation and disappeared behind the barracks. Not a minute later, he reappeared with a rolled mattress under one arm and a pillow under another.
“Interested?” he shouted to me, annoyed with my skittish ways.
My eyes widened in amazement. Surely, such lavishness as a personal mattress couldn’t have been “organized” here! Yet, I regarded it greedily as he dropped it down onto the ground that had been swept clean just this morning.
“Well?” he pressed, playing with the pillow in his great paws. “Stuffed with the down; first-rate quality.”
I made a step in his direction. “And the mattress?”
“Cotton, my guess. Lots of it. Soft as a feather! Come and feel for yourself.”
Before I knew it, I was squatting on my haunches in front of the rolled, striped mattress and digging into its softness, giggling like a schoolgirl. The Sonderkommando inmate dropped the pillow into my lap as well, fluffing it up and arranging it with great care.
“See? Soft as a cloud. You’ll sleep like a child, take my word for it. Nothing like a good night’s sleep for people in our profession, eh? We all have such mattresses in our barracks. They do make a difference; trust me when I tell you.”
The man could sell, that much was obvious. And I was already clutching the pillow to my chest, refusing to part with it. No more miserable straw pallets, so thin that each board of the bunk was prodding and poking at our bony forms at night. I pressed my cheek to the pillow, burrowing my entire face into it and imagining how positively delightful it would be to sleep on such a cloud of long-forgotten softness each night.
I was sold. Sold, through and through and not even ashamed of it.
“What do you want for it?”
“I need top-shelf liquor, as many bottles as you can get your hands on. By tonight.”
“By tonight?”
“Well, ja. It’s an SS man’s birthday and one of his comrades wants to make it memorable for him. Stash them all in one of those baskets you were just sorting and bring them to the back of the disinfection facility after your shift.” He motioned his head in the direction of the warehouse, from which the clean, folded clothes were taken to Germany every morning.
“How am I going to smuggle so many bottles out of the warehouse?”
He narrowed his eyes slightly. The sly grin was back on his face. “That’s for you to worry about. Rumor has it you have your own SS man in the Kanada. Why don’t you ask him for permission?”
“Are you mad? He’ll never agree to that! One bottle, perhaps, but an entire basket full of them – he’ll personally shoot me for it!”
“Stiff luck for you then. It’s a good mattress, and these are hard to come by.” He patted the striped roll with affection.
I screwed up my face and glanced from the warehouse to the mattress and back. He moved closer. I clutched the pillow tighter to my chest.
“He won’t refuse you. Ask nicely. Smile at him. You can risk smiling at an SS man for a mattress; no?”
“How am I going to smuggle it into my barrack?”
“Leave it up to me. Delivery is free; just tell me which barrack and which bunk is yours and I’ll even throw in some sheets and a blanket for you, on top of the deal.”
I regarded him in amazement. He certainly knew which hands to grease up, if he could make such promises.
“I’ll try.”
After lunch – even the soup was different here, made of potatoes and not rotten turnips – I knocked on Rottenführer Dahler’s office door.
“Oh.” I paused at the door, noticing the steaming plate on his desk. “Forgive me, please. I didn’t know you were still eating, Herr Rottenführer. I shall come back after—”
“No, no, don’t be silly!” He was already on his feet, ushering me in. “Come in. Sit down. What is it?”
For a second, a thought occurred to me that he might have been offended by the idea that I only came to him whenever I needed something. However, judging by his question and the attentive manner in which he’d inclined his head slightly to one side, it dawned on me that he had long put up with such a state of affairs between us. It seemed as though it had been his plan all along, to wear me out with this suddenly kind attitude. He did say that it would be him who would prove me wrong in the end and it appeared that he was stubbornly keeping to his promise. You want the showers? I’ll get you the showers. You want new clothes? I’ll get you the clothes. You want food? Take all you like – I will see to it that the Kapos won’t say a word to you. You want to work by yourself? Stay out there by yourself until you bore yourself into consumption. I’ll let you do anything you want, anything that’s in my powers, just for you to keep coming here and asking me for more, it read in his blue eyes that shone with such bright, fiery passion today, it was suddenly impossible to look into them.
I lowered my eyes and decided to look at his plate instead. It was also soup but different from ours, with pieces of meat in it and even some green onions mixing with yellow circles of fat on its surface. Misinterpreting my gaze, he pushed it slightly towards me. “Are you hungry?”
I shook my head and surprised even myself thinking that I really wasn’t. Well, not as hungry as we used to be before, in Auschwitz, where this plate would turn me blind with hunger and never let me concentrate on a single coherent thought as long as it stood, teasing and excruciatingly unattainable, before me. Here, in Birkenau’s Kanada, where the stealing was so widespread that we left the work detail every evening with pockets full of foodstuffs, we began worrying about other affairs. We were well dressed and showered daily now. We were turning from animals back into people again.
“A man from the Sonderkommando offered me a mattress.” I cast a probing glance in Dahler’s direction.
“In exchange for…?”
“Liquor. A basket full of it, to be exact. By tonight.” I bit my lip, expecting the worst. He was feared for his temper after all and one could never predict how he would react to such an insolent proposition.
Curiously enough, Dahler’s face drew into a wry smile instead.
Seeing my confusion, he shook his head good-humoredly. “That weasel Voss. It’s one of their crematoria SS men’s birthdays. He could have asked me for it but he knew that he’d have to pay me for it. So, he went about it the only way an arch-crook like him would do, asked an inmate to arrange it for him for free. What do you say to that?”
Smiles were chasing one another across his tanned face. I thought it to be wise to smile as well, even though I had not the faintest idea who this SS man Voss was.
“I say he is a veritable crook, Herr Rottenführer.”
“It’s good for you, though,” he continued. “
You’ll get yourself a new mattress out of the deal. Where did he tell you to meet him, that Sonderkommando fellow?”
“Behind the disinfecting facility.”
“Gut. Don’t go there by yourself. I’ll send an inmate instead.”
I regarded him in confusion. Was I not an inmate?
“A man,” he clarified. “A basket full of liquor is much too heavy for you to carry.”
I thanked him quietly and, after a moment’s hesitation, extracted a wristwatch with a golden face, out of my pocket. I had procured it beforehand and thought it to be a suitable thing to offer him. “Thank you again, Herr Rottenführer.” I slid it quickly across the desk toward him.
He tensed at once, pulled himself up and folded his hands on his lap, offended.
“Do you think I do this to profit somehow?” He pushed it back toward me in indignation. “Take it back. I don’t want it.”
“It’s not a bribe, Herr Rottenführer.”
“It looks oddly like one.” There was ice in his voice.
“It’s a present. For you,” I tried to explain.
For a few moments, he was staring blankly at me, utterly confused. “A present?”
“Yes. A present. You always give me something. Now I can finally give you something in return. It’s not… a payment, it’s a… gesture. Forgive me, please. It was never my intention to offend you.” I passed my hand over my forehead, nervously searching for the right words. “I can’t explain it all to you in my bad German but I’ll just say that if you take it, it’ll make me feel better. Make me feel like I can give something. It makes people feel better when they can give something to others.”
He looked at me for a very long time.
“Yes, you’re right,” he finally spoke, after a pause, his voice faltering and turning strangely melancholic as if I had just reminded him of some long-forgotten, universal truth the sight of which he’d lost a long time ago. “It does. Giving is better than taking.”
The Girl in the Striped Dress: A completely heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story Page 9