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

by Ellie Midwood

  “Not so fast, my little chickens!” Moll was in his element now, the fire dancing in both of his eyes. “Go get them, boy! Atta boy!”

  His Alsatian caught up with the women before they could reach the fence, his teeth snapping at their heels and tearing into their bare flesh. The dog rounded them up, much like a sheepdog would his herd and began pushing them back toward his master. Rolf made a high-pitched noise, shifting from one foot to another next to me, clearly agitated.

  “Set him free!” Moll urged, laughing like a Satan. “Let him have his fun, too!”

  My hand coiled around the leash even tighter, before I knew what I was doing. In fact, I didn’t feel my body any longer. It had suddenly grown so light that the wind could have picked it up and carried it away. The ringing in my ears grew so loud, the women’s screaming barely registered in them. They huddled together, bleeding from their torn wounds and trembling viciously, with their entire bodies, despite the overpowering heat around us.

  Moll licked his lips as his only eye stared at their tear-stained, petrified faces. Slowly, he reached for his gun and tugged onto his uniform trousers to hide the bulge straining them. His breath was heavy with excitement. “Just look at it! Look at it well! In a moment, you’ll burn exactly like them!” He shouted, spraying the air with saliva.

  At last, accompanied by the laughter of his SS men, he took mercy on them and shot them one by one, shoving them into the pit with his boot right after. I turned away and vomited all over the ground and my boots before dropping to my knees. Agitated, Rolf kept licking my face and hands, whining and pacing around me. Apart from that whining and the crackling of the fire, not a sound could be heard around. Suddenly, the whole world grew mute. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and slowly roved my gaze around. Hostile, disdainful faces stared back at me from above.

  “You’re a disgrace to your uniform,” Moll commented calmly, as though stating a fact. “I thought you’d have a better stomach for it, after the front.”

  For what? For death? For murder? I wished to ask him but my voice was suddenly gone as well.

  Moll called somebody over. “Get him away from here and take care not to bring him back. Pathetic weakling.”

  A pair of hands pulled me upward surprisingly gently. It was an inmate, a Slovak doctor. I recognized him even through the haze still blurring my vision. In silence, he escorted me out of that hellish scene, supporting me all the way to the crematorium for I staggered unmercifully, like a veritable drunk. Rolf trailed next to me, his leash dragging on the ground. From time to time, he nudged my hand with his wet nose. I kept wiping the sweat off my face angrily. The sweat and the tears…

  In the crematorium, the Slovak doctor had his own entrance on the side of the building. Apparently, his dissecting room, newly set up by Dr. Mengele, was there. He sat me down onto the corpse slab and asked me politely to wait there. I was lying down when he returned with the syringe.

  “What is it? Phenol?” I jested grimly.

  “Would you like it to be phenol?” he retorted, without much emotion and rolled up my sleeve.

  Rolf sat up next to the slab, eyeing him with suspicion. I reached down and rubbed his ear with the other hand until he relaxed again.

  “Would you?” I tried to sound mocking but it came out rather pitiful. The pathologist looked at me with reproach and rubbed the injection site before folding my arm at its elbow.

  “Hold it tight for some time.”

  “You didn’t reply to me.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” he sighed eventually. There was something pacifying about this room, something oddly calming in the sound of the instruments clinking on the metal surface, in the clean, sterile smell of the disinfectant. I closed my eyes once again. My limbs were growing heavy with sleep, along with my eyelids. “I gave an oath to Hippocrates. I would never do harm to anyone living.”

  “What were you doing in the field?” I muttered.

  “I look for certain deformities that may interest Herr Doktor.” It was clear who Herr Doktor was. “He likes autopsies performed on those and sometimes ships particularly interesting cases to Germany, to one scientific institute or the other.”

  “For what?”

  “For what? To prove how degenerate and racially inferior the Jewish race is compared to the Aryan.”

  “Is it really? You’re a scientist…”

  “Of course not. Those are common deformities that occur in every race.”

  “That’s what I thought. The science is rigged. Just like the press, the history… We have nothing to trust anymore. Everything is a lie…”

  “Don’t speak, please,” he pleaded with me, placing a warm palm onto my shoulder. I was saying all sorts of wrong things and his suddenly protective attitude would have amused me if I weren’t so apathetic, with a growing numbness in my body. He must have felt it too, the fact that I was almost fully under the effect of whatever sedative he gave me. His fingers pressed into my shoulder slightly. “That young woman who you brought here two years ago and who got sick with typhus later… Is she still alive?”

  I smiled softly. “Yes. Of course, she is. I’d never let anything happen to her…”

  “There’s still hope for you then, young man.”

  I wasn’t quite sure whether he really said it or if I only dreamed his words.

  January 1945

  The columns were ready to set off on their last journey. The roar of the approaching Soviet artillery had grown quiet for the night. It was wiser to abandon the camp under cover of darkness.

  Kommandant Höss was the first one to go and he took care to make off as early as the end of July. He evacuated his entire villa, where his family used to live so lavishly. It took two whole train cars to bring all that plunder to Germany.

  All three crematoria had been demolished with explosives in November. The Sonderkommando took care of the fourth one, burning it down after their standoff with the SS earlier that month. Most of them were shot, in retaliation but the remainder were still alive and firmly set on staying that way. None of them had identified himself as a former Sonderkommando member during the last roll call that took place not two hours ago. The men were not stupid. They knew what fate awaited them had they done so. What was left of the camp administration were quite clear on the question of “evidence.” Everything must be burned and buried. First, the paperwork and then – the witnesses.

  With two pairs of warm, fur-lined boots carefully concealed under my overcoat, I kept searching the column for Helena and her sister. It was ready to depart, in fact, the beginning of it had marched out already. At last, I found them, or to be exact, Helena found me, clutching at my overcoat at once and positively refusing to let go. I doubt she heard me instructing her to put on the boots before they would start marching and it would be too late. There were clear instructions to the SS escorting them to shoot everyone who fell behind, indiscriminately.

  “I’m staying here with you.”

  That was all that she was repeating with the obstinacy of a madwoman, while her sister Róžínka was changing her footwear as one would do with a helpless child.

  “Leni, I am not staying in the camp.” I tried prying her frozen fingers off my coat but to no avail. She kept clawing at me with more desperation. At least, the inmates next to us took care to look the other way, thoroughly pretending not to see the unraveling scene. “I’m going to the front along with the newly formed division. No SS man is staying in the camp.”

  “Take me with you then.”

  “To the front?” My smile resembled a wretched grimace if anything.

  “I can help. I can bandage wounds…”

  There will be no wounded where I am heading, only dead bodies. I wanted to tell her but that would only make everything worse.

  “Helena, here’s my mother’s address in Vienna.” I shoved the note into Róžínka’s hands instead of hers. Róžínka was in a much better state of mind than Leni. “As soon as you walk out of here, Untersch
arführer Gorges shall take you to a village – we have already agreed on everything. He’ll leave you there to wait for the Soviets. When they come – it shall only be a day or two, maybe less even – show them your tattoos and tell them you’re escaped inmates. They shall take you to the Red Cross, or their nurses will sort you out… In any case, you shall be taken care of. And when this whole affair is over with, go find my mother. She will take you both in. She’s expecting you. And when the war is over, I shall come and join you. You won’t even notice how fast the time will pass.”

  I cupped her cold cheek for the last time. It was time for me to go but she still clung to my overcoat and cried and cried and begged me to take her along as though she had not heard a word of what I had just said. It was a good thing that Gorges appeared in time and tore her off of me a bit too forcefully and nodded with a solemn look to my question, “You shall keep your word, won’t you?”

  I knew he would. It wasn’t even the heavy bribe with which I had lined his pocket. The war was as good as lost and helping two Jewish women “escape to safety” would look mighty good on his new POW’s resume.

  The column marched on. Helena kept twisting in Gorges’ forceful grip and looking at me until the darkness swallowed them all, leaving only the flattened snow and an occasional corpse here and there. But I still stood and stared after them until the whistle blew, gathering us, the remaining defendants of the Reich, into a new “regiment.” An entire twenty men, against the advancing Russian army.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Germany, 1947

  The court hearing was over. Dr. Hoffman, Dr. Hutson, and Andrej Novák stood outside the Magistrate’s building and smoked. The setting sun cast its golden shadow onto the ruins that lay in front of them. Among them, gilded shadows of the dead stood.

  “May I ask you a question?” Dr. Hoffman turned to the Slovak.

  “I imagine you have quite a few.” Novák smiled. It suddenly occurred to Dr. Hoffman that it was the first time that he’d seen the Nazi-hunter smile.

  “Why did you withdraw your charges as a co-plaintiff?”

  For some time, Novák just smoked in silence, squinting at the sunset. “I changed my mind,” he finally replied, with an almost astounding nonchalance about him.

  “About charges?”

  “About Dahler.” He looked at the psychiatrist. “He saw me in that column when we were about to be marched out of Auschwitz. He saw me and yet he didn’t point me out to his fellow SS men, even though there was a special order on our account. He didn’t mention it during the hearing and I still wonder why.”

  “Didn’t want to sound like another Gorges?” Dr. Hutson proposed.

  The Slovak gave a small shrug. “Perhaps.” He looked ahead of himself, his expression pensive. “I never knew him as a person. Only as a uniform, an SS man and they were all the same to us, more or less. Killers. Torturers. Heartless bastards, in general.” He paused. “That day, in July 1944, when he made such a mess out of himself in front of Moll, I thought he was simply stinking drunk. Pissed to the point where he couldn’t even stand. The SS drank a lot, you see. It was one of their favorite pastimes. I thought that this was the reason behind his behavior.”

  “You don’t think he was lying to the court, describing that day?” Dr. Hutson narrowed his eyes slightly, his face pulling to a wry grin.

  Novák waved him off. “I remember very well what I was saying in the beginning. That he was a liar through and through and he’d say anything to save his skin. I said it because I wanted you to jail him for as long as it was possible. I didn’t know if he was actually a liar. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to get to know him as a person.” He shook his head. “No, I don’t think he was lying. You don’t lie convincingly about such things that turn your stomach when you just think of them. One can’t lie about something of this sort and get away with it.”

  “Are you satisfied with the verdict?”

  “I am. I knew he’d most likely be acquitted due to the low rank, the birth-date amnesty, and the absence of personal participation in the crimes and I only persisted with the charges because… I just wanted him in jail. Doesn’t make me an exemplary citizen, I suppose?”

  “You have every reason to want to see an SS man in jail,” Dr. Hoffman said.

  “Yes, but… see, that’s the point of it. How does my seeing him only as a uniform make me different from him, who only saw all of us like vermin before someone finally came along and opened his eyes? I suppose I needed someone to open my eyes too. Someone has to stop this cycle of hatred. We all need to become better men. He made his first step when he saved Helena and didn’t report me to the SS. I may as well make the second and let him be. He’s punished already, punished for the rest of his life with his wife’s state. It’s him who’ll have to look at her daily and realize that it’s his kin that did this to her.”

  “He’ll take good care of her,” Dr. Hoffman said softly. “He won’t abandon her.”

  “I know that,” the Slovak agreed surprisingly easily. “I saw him with her. Another reason why I changed my mind about him. Though, I must admit, changing one’s mind is never easy.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  The door to the Magistrate’s Office opened and Franz Dahler stepped outside, holding onto his wife. Still a bit pale but beaming nevertheless, she moved past him, hugging the folders, with papers, to her chest.

  “Did you get your Denazification Clearance stamped?” Dr. Hoffman asked, smiling at the couple, in spite of himself.

  The Austrian nodded and hesitated before offering his hand to the psychiatrists. After both shook it, he lowered it hesitantly, as though in respect to the Slovak. It was Novák who smirked slightly and offered him his palm first. Dahler grasped it at once and shook it thoroughly.

  “I don’t know how to thank you, Herr Novák.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Please, allow me at least to ask for your forgiveness for everything. I didn’t get a chance to say it properly in the courtroom… I really, truly am sorry for everything that I’ve done to you personally and to every single person I’ve wronged. I know that it’s all just words and it’s much too late and surely won’t bring anyone back—”

  “It’s all I wanted to hear,” Novák interrupted him with a soft smile. “Trust me, it does mean a lot. Doesn’t change anything for the past but means a lot for the future.”

  “Is there anything I can do, perhaps? Anything…” In vain, Dahler searched for the right word.

  “Yes, you can. If, in the future, you see a teenager shout a racial slur at someone, stop him, pull him to one side and explain to him where you served and how such slurs led to the slaughter of millions. If you see a newspaper article denying the Nazi crimes, write one countering it and tell the people exactly what you’ve witnessed. The hatred, the racism, the xenophobia didn’t miraculously disappear with Hitler. They’re all still very much alive and kicking and it’s up to us to do something to fight them. If you want to do something for the victims, don’t stay quiet about the past, please. Talk to people – young people most of all – tell them the truth as you saw it. Talk as often and as loudly as you can. Many people will deny our, victims’, experiences. They shall say we invented it all to suit our agenda or some such. They will deny the existence of the gas chambers and the crematoria. They will deny our own memories. But they will surely listen to an SS man.”

  Dahler smiled sadly. “I doubt the ones who you have in mind shall listen to an SS man who betrayed his own kind, in their eyes that is.”

  “Still, Mr. Dahler. Talk. Whether they will listen to you or not, just don’t be silent. None of us should ever be silent in the face of injustice. The victims need people to talk for them, otherwise, it’s much too easy to pretend that they never existed.”

  Dahler nodded slowly, solemnly. “I will. I will talk, Herr Novák. I want to apply to the University to get my education at last. If they accept me, I shall talk to the students, if t
he administration allows it. And I shall write to the newspapers. You will hear my name again, I promise. I will be talking until you get sick of me.”

  Novák broke into chuckles, looked at Dahler’s sleeve, and then clapped him a bit awkwardly on his shoulder. There was a veil of mist in the SS man’s eyes. Dr. Hutson gave his colleague a dig in the ribs.

  “Thank you for everything, Andrej.” Helena stepped in front of her husband and, after promptly depositing all of the papers into his arms, enclosed her fellow countryman in an unexpected embrace.

  “I’m sorry for dragging out the court session for so long.” Novák reddened in spite of himself. “I was honestly trying to help.”

  “I know you were. And you did. Just not like you thought you would.” She beamed at him.

  “Will you be all right?”

  “I will be very much all right, yes. We are applying to the same University. I will be writing a lot, too.”

  “You? You will be attending the University?” The Slovak looked her over incredulously.

  “Well, as long as Franz and I go there together, it shall be all right. The University will do us both good.” She hesitated before asking, “May I have your address if that’s all right with you? I should so love to stay in touch and write to each other.”

  Novák glanced at Dahler expectantly.

  “Don’t look at me.” Franz grinned. “I’m not the one to grant any permissions here. The more things Leni does independently, even such insignificant ones as writing letters to her friends, the better for her.”

  Dr. Hoffman couldn’t agree more. “You should apply for the psychiatry faculty,” he called to Dahler. “You’d make an excellent therapist.”