The Girl in the Striped Dress: A completely heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story

by Ellie Midwood

  Dr. Hoffman swallowed. It wasn’t the first testimony he’d heard from an SS man. He was present during the trials in Nuremberg. He heard Otto Ohlendorf himself talk. However, suddenly, he wished for Dahler to stop, just to stop talking before the image would be forever branded into his mind. No wonder Dahler didn’t wish for Helena to hear all that. The psychiatrist himself wasn’t sure how he would be able to tolerate it any further.

  “Together with crematorium ovens, those nine pits made it theoretically possible to burn an unlimited amount of bodies, without stopping; every single day, double-shifts – day and night—”

  Intentionally loudly, Lieutenant Carter cleared his throat and groped for the glass of water almost spilling it in the process. What appeared on Dahler’s face in response to that was supposed to be a grin but it came out so grim and crooked, it could hardly pass for such.

  “Yes. That was precisely our reaction as well when we saw the pits with our own eyes.” Suddenly, he was looking at Novák – a long, sorrowful gaze full of remorse and agony. The Slovak held it and nodded slowly. Something passed between them that moment – something profound and meaningful, yet impossible to decipher for anyone who wasn’t bound together by that common horror they both lived through – the perpetrator and the victim.

  “When you say, ‘our reaction,’ who else are you talking about, Defendant?” the Chairman asked.

  “Rottenführer Gröning, the Kanada accountant. He didn’t believe me when I told him about the pits. He wished to see for himself. We went there, into the field, at night. There were only flowers everywhere; there was a meadow right behind the Kanada detail and the two bunkers. For some time, we waded through those flowers and I, myself, began doubting what I had told him for there was not a chance in the world that someone could transform such a beautiful, blooming meadow into a death factory in the course of a few days.” He went silent, then continued. “They had floodlights there though. We saw the pits all right. We both had been in Auschwitz much too long not to understand the meaning of all such preparations. The next day, Gröning asked for a transfer to the front.”

  “What about you?”

  “I wanted to. I almost did.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Dahler gave a small shrug, with a guilty smile in tow. “I couldn’t leave Helena there all by herself. Who knew what they were planning afterward, Höss and Moll? We were losing the war. The Reds had just liberated Majdanek. Who knew if Höss would order to liquidate all of the prisoners after he was done with the Hungarians?”

  “And what was your plan in the case of this happening?” the Chairman asked.

  Another shrug. “To try and run, I suppose. There were a few successful escapes before that… I don’t know. I didn’t have a plan if I’m entirely honest with you. I don’t know what I would have done if such an order came through. I wouldn’t have been able to protect her anyway. I just wanted to stay with her, I suppose.”

  Hoffman smiled. Dahler’s honesty was almost endearing.

  “When did the transports begin to arrive?” the Chairman asked.

  “The first one arrived on May 16.”

  “Did you serve on the ramp at that time?”

  “No. They would have made me but I got myself out of that duty.” Dahler was smiling slyly now.

  “I thought you said it was impossible not to obey direct orders under Höss.”

  “That is true. But I didn’t openly disobey orders. I simply stole enough things from the Kanada and ensured that I got caught red-handed, for the Political Department to put me into the bunker on disciplinary charges for an entire month. I have submitted the document confirming this to the court.”

  Hoffman caught himself grinning as well. The Chairman was reading the mentioned paper. He shook his head but a smile was playing on his lips, as well. “A crafty thing to do,” he commented under his breath but loudly enough for Dr. Hoffman to hear him. He chuckled softly.

  “You were released in late June?”

  “That is correct. But I was still ‘banned’ from the ramp for the entire month of July as well – they didn’t trust me with the Hungarians’ belongings, they said. Again, exactly what I was aiming for. I can’t confirm my not being involved with serving on the ramp though. I have no witnesses to give you any affidavits in this respect.”

  “You do.” Novák suddenly gave his voice. “I can confirm this, Your Honor. He didn’t serve on the ramp in July. I was there every day, escorting people to the gassing facilities. I didn’t see Herr Dahler there. Not once.”

  30

  Franz

  Auschwitz. Summer 1944

  The sky itself grew dark with smoke. Suffocated by the reddish clouds, the pale sun struggled to get through the columns of fire just to die before reaching the west. We hardly saw it nowadays. We became a nation of twilight.

  The pyres had been burning for two months now, daily and nightly. Moll had introduced two shifts to ensure continuous operation. An engineering genius, no less. Rumor had it, the old man Höss would promote him soon for his efficiency and inventiveness. Who else would think of using human fat as fuel?

  I took another swig from my flask, cringing at the taste of confiscated brandy. So, there was still brandy in the world if they kept bringing it with them. There must have been an outside world too, from which they came, where people took their breakfast that didn’t taste like charred human flesh and went to work along streets that weren’t surrounded by barbed wire and manned by watchtowers outfitted with machinegun posts. I regarded the sandwich which I took from the canteen this morning after pushing my breakfast around my plate, unable to swallow a single piece, brought it to my mouth but couldn’t eat it either and threw it to my Alsatian instead, who wolfed it down in two beastly gulps.

  The mutt was not mine per se. He belonged to one of the specially trained dog handlers. However, after the fellow had gotten himself into the infirmary a few days ago – officially, with the flu – but, unofficially, with a nervous breakdown, after he began seeing dead people standing in front of his cot at night and then, during the day also – and since I had the same kind of dog at home, this poor beast was assigned to me as I’d know how to handle him.

  The dog, Rolf, lolled his tongue out and regarded me with his amber eyes, no doubt grateful for the unexpected treat. I rubbed him behind the ear, pretending that it was my Prinz. Hopefully, I won’t end up like your previous handler, I thought to myself as I lowered to the ground next to the dog. I hadn’t seen any stiffs yet but my appetite was as good as gone and the SS doctors here muttered among themselves that it was one of the first signs. Also, unofficially. Officially, the SS men, the hardened Teutonic Knights, didn’t suffer from such things as weak nerves brought on by the ungodly view of mountains of human corpses. They suffered from shrapnel wounds and enemy bombs but never from any sentimental feelings. That was the official Party line. The unofficial… oh well. What good would it really do, to contemplate such philosophical questions?

  I gulped some more brandy. In the July heat and in the absence of any food in my stomach, it went straight to my head. I thought it to be a good thing. Much better than being sober nowadays.

  “Down,” I commanded.

  Rolf was lying down before I knew it. He was a good dog, well-trained and smart, with a strong back and muscular sides on which he allowed me to rest my head. With his hind legs framing my shoulder, with a sweet blade of grass in my mouth instead of a cigarette – they had reduced our rations again – I could close my eyes and pretend that within a fifteen-minute walk from here, the inferno wasn’t raging. Closer to the ground, the smell of the burnt flesh wasn’t as strong, sickly-sweet, and thoroughly nauseating. Our uniforms stunk of it. Our hair stunk of it, even after a good scrubbing. Our food reeked of it. The dog’s fur under me reeked of it. My eyes were red from all the smoke. Officially, Teutonic Knights didn’t shed tears for their enemies, nor did they feel pity for themselves.

  The trouble was, it took me muc
h too long to realize that I wasn’t one of them.

  “Dahler! I knew I’d find you asleep here, you miserable escapist!”

  I snorted softly at the insult and lifted myself on my elbows. To be sure, Gröning could afford to have that idiotic grin glued to his face these days, as his request for a transfer had just been granted. The lucky devil was heading to the Western Front within the next couple of weeks.

  “What else is there to do?” I sat up, lazy from the sun and brandy.

  “Your job.”

  “I am doing my job. I’m guarding the perimeter.”

  “Shouldn’t you be standing like a good soldier, with a rifle slung over your shoulder instead of snoring like a bastard?”

  “What for? I have Rolf for that. He’ll alert me, at once, if anyone approaches.”

  “He was snoring like a bastard, too, when I approached.”

  “He’s only trained on the inmates, not SS men.”

  Gröning only shook his blond head. He couldn’t really say anything to that. We all have always been a little envious of the dog-handling squad. They could lounge in the sun and nap all day or play with their mutts without a care in the world. Only when the transports came did they straighten their uniforms and put on serious faces, just like their dogs that strained on the leashes and snapped their teeth at the new arrivals. As soon as the ramp was empty, they would be back to their playing and napping. There were a few degenerates who amused themselves with setting their Alsatians on the prisoners just for the thrill of it but thankfully, they were the minority. The majority only wished to sleep and shirk duty.

  “So? Are you packing your suitcase yet?” I teased him and nodded in gratitude for the offered cigarette.

  We sat next to each other facing the camp. Behind our back, columns of black smoke were rising from the pits until the sky itself was charred with it. In front of us, smaller columns of smoke were shooting towards the blue dome. All four crematoria were gulping down their victims with the insatiable greed of ancient beasts. For some time, we smoked in silence, poisoning the air with our own smoke. It appeared as though the entire world was on fire these days.

  “I won’t miss this place,” Gröning spoke at last.

  It took him quite some time to admit it, to even utter it out loud, even though he knew it very well that I would be the last person in this camp to report him for it. He was of the same age as me, twenty-two. Our generation wasn’t quite sure as to what to make of itself as of recent times. It was easier for the idiots; they raised their arms in snappy salutes – Heil Hitler, little soldier! No defeatism among the German ranks! – and walked right under the Soviet tanks with four hand grenades tied together. It was also easier for the calloused bullies; they hanged the ones who began thinking for themselves, off the trees and lampposts and wrote, “I am a traitor of the Reich,” on the cardboard signs, with which they adorned their former comrades’ necks.

  It was the hardest for us, who grew up in a world that only had one master race; which drummed it into our heads since school how our lives belonged to the Führer and the Fatherland; how the orders must never be questioned, for our loyalty was our honor and our honor was our loyalty and some other utter bullshit to that effect… Until one day, when we looked around and saw what we did and were suddenly so very terrified of what we had become that no words would ever suffice to describe that cold horror that now resided in our hearts, which we weren’t supposed to have in the first place. Our hearts, just like our lives, belonged to the Fatherland. They only had the right to beat, for it – all else was treason.

  “You will miss this place as soon as you see the front with your own two eyes. Though, in your case…” Trying to joke, I even pulled the glasses, in their tortoiseshell frame, off his nose but the jest and the horseplay came out as pitiful as it gets and I returned his glasses, with a sigh, before he even asked for them.

  “You saw the front already,” he said, unoffended. “Would you rather see it again or stay here?”

  “I asked for a transfer in 1942. They didn’t grant it.”

  “Mine neither but that was two years ago.” He obliterated me with a wave of his hand. “We were winning the war then. Now, they can’t afford to be so selective. Ask for a transfer now and I guarantee you, the Old Man himself will sign it for you, even with your wounded knee. They take thirteen-year-old snotty-nosed kids from Hitlerjugend into the ranks now, or the grandfathers who must be old enough to have fought for the Kaiser in the 1870s. Surely, they’ll snatch you at once and particularly with your combat experience.”

  “One doesn’t need experience, to get a bullet in his stomach,” I replied evenly.

  He ignored the treasonous statement. “Even more so! Go to the Kommandantur; I’ll watch your post while you’re at it. Then, we’ll go to the front together!”

  I only stared ahead of myself without moving. I ought to go, I told myself, I really ought to… If I do, this all will be over within mere days. In mere days, I’ll be rocking on a train next to Gröning; he will be reading one book or the other and I shall be gazing out of the window and see people – living people and not walking skeletons whom we had starved to near death – and fields in which the fires weren’t burning.

  I regarded my nails, the grass matted around me – anything just to escape Gröning’s reproachful look.

  “You won’t go, will you?”

  Slowly, I shook my head.

  He didn’t ask me anything about Helena. He had never openly asked me about her – he silently disapproved of such a relationship – but only sighed and shook his head again, much like one would at a stubborn child.

  “What’s the plan then?” he asked, as if the logical question would bring some sense into my head. He was very logical, Gröning. I was the sentimentalist, according to him.

  “I’m staying here.”

  “To the bitter end?”

  “To the bitter end.”

  “I think you’re making a mistake.”

  I smiled, amused by such a suggestion. “You know, for the first time in my life, I’m actually certain that I’m not. For the first time, I feel like I’m doing the right thing.”

  “Your right things landed you into the bunker twice in the past few months.”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t mind. It was cool and quiet in there and didn’t smell like smoke.”

  “Just don’t end up being shot for something stupid, will you?” He was back on his feet again, brushing the weeds off his uniform. “We’re almost done with this rot. It would be stupid to die now. A really stupid, pointless death.”

  I waved my hand around. “What’s the meaning of all this then? Is this not stupid and pointless? Why are we murdering all these people, if the war is lost at any rate?”

  He walked away before I could say something even more treasonous that he would never report but equally didn’t wish to hear.

  He was the logical one, Gröning. He wasn’t a vicious anti-Semite like Moll and didn’t approve of the killings in a brutal manner but he thought of his own skin first and one couldn’t quite blame him for that. I watched him go, with infinite longing for the days when I only thought of my own skin too, when the world was black and white, when the Jews were the enemy, and when my uniform didn’t stink of smoke and death.

  31

  Franz

  The new fellow was barely eighteen, with cheeks hardly touched by the razor, gangly and patriotic. He was sent here straight from training, in Munich, he said and threw himself at his new duty with the true fervor of a freshly brainwashed idiot. By noon, already my head began aching due to all of his shouting and running around the warehouse with the efficiency of a chicken that’d just had its head chopped off. Growing more and more annoyed, I signed to him to come over.

  He even saluted me with that fresh-out-of-school salute. We, the old guard, hardly bothered bending our arms at the elbow as of late. Our Heil Hitler had also lost its enthusiasm quite some time ago. Unlike this new greenhorn, we uttered i
t indifferently. It tasted stale and moldy on our wind-bitten lips.

  “Just what are you doing with those poor wretches?” I motioned my head in the direction of the inmates. Confused and mildly alarmed, they kept throwing anxious glances in my and even Wolff’s direction, unsure of what to make of all this newly introduced shouting.

  “We have so many things to sort with all these transports, Herr Unterscharführer.” He gestured helplessly around. “I’m only urging them to work faster so we’d catch up with Herr Kommandant’s plan…”

  I snorted softly under my breath. I had the most profound conviction that Herr Kommandant’s only plan included organizing himself a passport with a new name in it and evacuating his villa with all the stolen goods before the Allies came. I considered breaking the news to the new fellow but noticed a Hitlerjugend Sieg Rune for special distinctions he proudly displayed on his breast pocket, an earnest Party loyalty look in his pale blue eyes and wisely decided against it.

  He was right about one thing, this earnest Pimpf. All around the different warehouses, mountains of belongings grew as high as the roofs; inside, there were only narrow trails left in between the tightly stacked suitcases and baby prams. One of the warehouses had been remodeled into a permanent storage facility; the trucks that used to transport all belongings with commendable efficiency to Germany were, for the most part, commandeered for the war effort; the diesel was in short supply and Germany itself was so relentlessly bombed that they needed medical supplies or coffins much more than all of these clothes.