My Mother's Ring: A Holocaust Historical Novel

by Dana Fitzwater Cornell

  When we arrived back to camp the next morning we went through the usual course of events—standing at attention for roll call and then standing in line for our measly rations. A few mouthfuls of pitiful broth consumed, I retreated to my barracks, searched for the closest available bunk, and drifted to sleep for a few hours until the growling from my stomach stirred me awake. Before I opened my eyes I became aware that a man next to me was sitting up with his feet dangling over the side of the bed; his back was curled so that he wouldn’t hit his head on the bunk above us. Skipping past introductions, I probed him for information.

  What I found out from this man, a pockmarked and disfigured Jew who had arrived from the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany three months prior, was that any prisoner who survived for longer than four months was considered an exception to the rule and presumably blessed with assistance from the leadership. Almost all of the people from his transport had already perished. He couldn’t tell me why he thought he was still alive since he had not been offered any incentives thus far. What he could tell me was that the camp’s central purpose was to manufacture armaments and to assemble the fuselages of Messerschmitt II fighter planes, or Me 262 planes, for the German Luftwaffe. In response to my questions regarding the evolution of the camp, he said that in the early years of the camp’s existence prisoners had carved out the sides of mountains and constructed underground tunnels; these tunnels were turned into factories to produce the armaments. Prior to 1940, prisoners were marched daily to and from Mauthausen to the Gusen camps since living quarters had not yet been constructed. There was nothing more he could tell me and so he staggered out of bed and as he left me he lifted his arms and said, “To the next life.”

  That was the last I ever saw of him.

  Dismounting from my bunk after my conversation partner left, I walked for roughly ten minutes before finding a latrine. When I came upon a wooden hut with a long line extending from it, I took my place behind the others. For the men with dysentery this line was too long for them to wait. After about ten minutes, I was able to enter. I found just a few planks with large oblong holes drilled in them. The holes were overflowing with human waste and smelled dreadful, but I didn’t care. A filthy bathroom was the least of my worries.

  On my way back from the latrine, I heard a bell signaling for us to gather for roll call. Roll call in Gusen II was just as dreaded as in the other camps except it was conducted at varying intervals because of our shift work. The aforementioned process, however, does not warrant repeating. Following this, we were served a sad excuse for a combination of breakfast and lunch. That day we received the same meal we had eaten for dinner. Our caloric intake seemed to be equivalent to what a mouse might eat.

  Day after day we worked through the night in the tunnels, coming back to camp a little weaker and a little more battered. Surviving on broth and tiny pieces of bread—on the days when we were fortunate enough to be fed—we gradually wasted away. The typical concentration camp related diseases ran rampant through the barracks, taking all of us hostage.

  The guards showed their savage tendencies often, grabbing axes and shovels away from prisoners who were assigned to carve tunnels into the mountains and then pummeling us with them when they felt exceptionally macho, and making us stand in thigh-deep excrement in the latrines when they felt overly crazed. Sometimes they dragged us by our feet over rough stone pathways until our faces were cut so badly that we couldn’t open our eyes or our mouths for days. Other times, they filled barrels full of freezing water and tossed inmates inside, holding their heads underneath the surface until they drowned. The guards were crueler than they seemed to be at the other camps I had lived in, or maybe I was just so weak by that point that their nastiness seemed magnified. They were under intense pressure from their superiors, and from the leadership back in Germany, to make sure we met strict production deadlines and seemingly unachievable quotas. They worked us into the ground.

  Weak or ill prisoners were pulled from their bunks and taken to an unknown location on a regular basis. Some said these men were taken to another barracks to be injected with poison while others supposed they were taken to Hartheim Castle to be gassed. Rumors were always floating in the air and at the time I didn’t know what to believe. What I did know, however, was that people didn’t last for long in the camp. Many of my fellow prisoners simply stopped breathing when their frail bodies could no longer fight off illnesses or feed off their decaying muscles. As a result, stacks of corpses piled up around the camp.

  The ovens couldn’t cook the bodies fast enough; they simply weren’t able to keep up with the death toll.

  CHAPTER 42

  You didn’t worry about your aching muscles, you worried about not feeling the aches. When you became numb to your body’s senses, that’s when you knew you had given up. People with frostbitten toes who swore off their shoes because they could no longer shove them inside: those were the people you worried about. Delirious men who sat down in the snow as though it was a warm down comforter, oblivious to the cold, who neither responded to nor understood your pleas to stand: those were the people you worried about. Unmindful of their whitish-yellow faces and hard, darkened skin and blood-filled blisters, they passively allowed the final stages of hypothermia to ravage them.

  I’ll never know why disease or severe hypothermia did not touch me while in Gusen II. Perhaps I was somehow immune to the usual diseases and accustomed to the harsh climate and poor nutrition by then. In any case, I am forever grateful.

  While I somehow escaped illness, I was unable to avoid injury. About a month into my stay, I was hurt during work. Having nearly completed the assembly of a fuselage after an onerous night full of complications, with the painting of a swastika on the tail of the plane complete, my team was preparing to make the final modifications to the aircraft. Just before the announcement was made to switch shifts, a member of my unit tripped on an oily spot on the dirt floor, causing him to fall onto the equipment table I was standing beside. With a heavy metal sheet in my hand, I had no time to react as one of the tabletop machines crashed into my left knee. Whimpering in agony, my other knee buckled and I faltered. My busted kneecap felt fractured. A few men gathered around me to see if I was okay, but a kapo instantly called them back to work. I stood up, leaning on the table for support, testing the strength of my left leg. Overcome with excruciating lightning bolts of pain, I winced. The kapo came up to me, not to see if I was alright, but just to know if I could still work. Even though I felt my body going into shock and turning cold, I shivered while telling him “yes.” The last thing I wanted was for him to think that I was unable to work. To this day, my knee still irritates me, causing me to rely on a cane to balance out my limp. For the duration of my camp life, I disregarded the pain in order to stride as normally as possible to avoid repercussion. The inability to walk rendered prisoners useless to the Nazi war machine; when an inmate became crippled he knew that the end was near.

  CHAPTER 43

  Everything about the scenery in Gusen II was lackluster and completely devoid of color, lacking both flowers and other foliage, which was especially noticeable on the warm days when the snow melted and the landscape was exposed. Thousands of wooden soles milling about over the years had stomped away the vegetation until growth was all but stunted. Even the grass didn’t thrive in the springtime. There were no trees in the confines of the fences to shield us from the tempestuous winds. The underbrush in the adjoining areas was also absent, not from the weather it seemed, but from decomposition. All of the greenery had been choked away due to the poor air quality attributed to the repugnant smokestacks. It was hard to tell if we or the plants were declining at a faster rate.

  Insects were our enemies but, in a warped sense, in times of sorrowful loneliness they were also our companions. A louse climbing on our arm could dig into our flesh and infect us with lethal bacteria, bringing about our ultimate demise, but in the same token, a louse on our arm could be something to talk to, someth
ing to coexist with us. I often found myself swearing at the lice as they irritated my skin, but there were a few exceptions when I looked upon them as things that were merely trying to live another day, just like me.

  On one occasion, I untied the string around my neck, which I had repaired so many times with pieces of straw that it was full of knots, and let my ring fall into my palm. Picking a louse from my elbow, I placed it onto the inside of the little halo, smiling as the tan-colored parasite rounded the circumference like a circus animal. This activity brought me a few minutes of joyful pleasure. The louse and I: two beings that needed each other. The louse needed to feed off my blood and I needed it to entertain me. I would never resort to such activity now, but all of those years ago I found any means I could to placate my lonesomeness.

  By the time April rolled around, I was more isolated than I had ever been. Nearly all of the men I had been transported from Mauthausen with had gradually disappeared for one grim reason or another. Their places in our labor group were immediately filled without so much as an acknowledgment. The flow of human traffic into and out of the camp reminded me of an out of control carousel except no one was able to choose when the rotating platform stopped or when or if they could live through the experience.

  While I had already acquired an abundance of physical, mental, and psychological scars, in April I witnessed something so unthinkable that it left a blemish on my heart. As I made my way back to my block one morning, the sound of what I thought must have been sticks being thrown around outside behind my building caught my attention. Fearful, I stayed where I was until the sound stopped. Soon after it did, three Nazis dressed in blood stained long white coats and black rubber gloves up to their elbows rounded the corner, smirking, carrying glass jars with unknown objects and liquids inside them. The pungent smell of formaldehyde lingered in the air after they walked by me, causing my eyes to water. Rubbing my eyes with my hands, I walked around the side of the building until I reached the back. Two skinless, eyeless skeletons were on the ground. Most of the organs had been ripped out of the carcasses. Blinking my eyes, I leaned my back up against the building and slid down onto my knees.

  I felt scared and vulnerable. So very vulnerable.

  CHAPTER 44

  Some nights I felt just like a capsized sailor in the middle of a vast, tumultuous sea even though I was surrounded by other people. There were many times I just stayed awake with my limbs crumpled beneath my core, my bony shoulders digging into the base of my bunk, my back pressed up against another prisoner staring at the space in front of me, searching for hope in the darkness. The routine gusts of warm air from my neighbors tickled my cheeks as their chests rose and fell, making me feel as though I was adrift in the ocean with the breeze blowing around me as I bobbed up and down in the rippling, pitch-black current. Just like the stranded sailor, distressed and disoriented, I also felt as though I was drifting into an endless, dark abyss. Maybe someone was forming a search party to look for the sailor, but I thought that there was no one in the world who would be able to rescue me.

  However, the nights were not the only time I felt alone and lost. My situation seemed no better in the morning. I awoke once to a man staring directly at me. I stared back at him, wondering why he wouldn’t stop looking at me. He just kept staring. It took me a few moments to realize that I had slept next to a cold, lifeless body all night.

  While I feared death, I was even more fearful of being the last one left alive, of being stuck in this twisted world all by myself.

  The dull sounds of bombs bursting apart in the distance became louder each day, jostling our beds as we slept. These noises let us know that the front was moving towards us. We hoped that the Allied Powers were battling through the Axis Powers, but we didn’t know if we would be bombarded, too, whether accidentally or intentionally.

  Living with the threat of attack from the land and from the air, a part of each of us craved social contact. While many of the men in the camp formed strong bonds with one another, my depression isolated me from the others. I yearned for Mendel. Although I hadn’t seen him for almost a year, I pictured him standing at the front of a classroom holding a piece of chalk between his fingers and teaching a roomful of young pupils. I wanted so badly for him to have the opportunity to achieve his dream. I wanted to share in his excitement when he reached his goal.

  What I wanted to happen in life and what ended up happening had been polar opposites up until that point. I assumed that the trend of letdowns would continue indefinitely much like the drawn out war. We were not endowed with foresight. We didn’t know what day the combat would draw to a close. Today, we know the dates each camp was liberated leading up to the Allies’ victory, but in those days, without an end in sight, we had no date to look forward to.

  You can imagine my delight then, when I was reunited with my own flesh and blood. But the encounter I had fantasized about for so long was far different than how the reunion played out.

  CHAPTER 45

  During breakfast one day following my shift it finally happened. I found Mendel. Or maybe I should say that he found me. While standing in line with my bowl and spoon on that particular day I noticed that someone new was doling out the soup. With his oversized striped cap drooping over the bridge of his nose, he looked just like the rest of us—fatigued and defeated. After this initial glance, I thought nothing more of the new cook. When I found myself at the front of the line, I automatically extended my bowl towards him, watching it fill with warm, putrid stock. My demeanor changed when a piece of potato and a cube of meat dumped into it. I had been gifted two coveted items.

  Breaking away from the table with an inward grin, I suddenly stopped, looking backwards after sensing the unmistakable pull of eyes staring at me. Adjusting my focus back to the table, I saw that the cook was looking at me with recognition, ladling out spoonfuls to the hungry line without paying attention to his work. Finding his behavior uncharacteristic of the usually detail-oriented servers I was used to, I stared back at him.

  Repositioning his cap with his free hand, his movements seemed memorable. Why did he look so familiar to me? I studied the contours of his face, but his skin looked vacuum sealed just like the rest of us. Who was he? Why was he watching me?

  And then it all made sense. Spotting a clover-shaped birthmark on his cheek, I knew that it was Mendel. To say that I was shocked would be far undercutting my emotion; I was surprised beyond all words this planet has ever conceived. It took every bit of restraint I had not to scream. Our eyes locked, communicating with one another as our souls leapt from our bodies to intertwine. I wanted to run towards him so that I could embrace him, but our inconspicuous, nonverbal interaction had already roused suspicion from the guards. Fearing for the security of my brother’s advantageous work assignment, I reluctantly walked away, suspecting that we might have to be satisfied with the visual exchange we had shared. Risking each other’s safety was out of the question. And so I headed on my way, already looking forward to the next meal, hoping I would see Mendel again.

  But there were to be no more meals at Gusen II for me or for the thousands of other prisoners.

  Later that morning, as the dull sound of bombs exploding in the distance grew more explosive, we were rounded up and thrust into groups without warning. Small amounts of food were thrown to us, including cans of sardines, loafs of bread, and chunks of cheese and potatoes. Only those of us who were mighty enough to reach for these products could catch them. I shoved a wedge of moldy cheese and a can of sardines into my pocket before anyone could rip them away from me.

  It was a chaotic scene as the guards ran amok, scrambling orders as they shouted to one another, bulldozing prisoners with each step. The situation went into a tailspin as no one seemed to know what was happening. Those who were too weak to peel themselves from their bunks were commanded to stand, but after repeated orders to do so were ignored, they were considered useless and left right where they were. I later learned that some of these prisoners
were injected with deadly phenol solutions. Intentionally set fires erupted from the SS buildings as the guards filled shallow, burning pits with camp related paperwork. In the midst of the confusion, I saw one of the guards with a piece of paper in his hand hustling a couple of men, most of them criminal prisoners, through the front gate. I read the guard’s lips as he spoke to the prisoners, telling them to “get out” and to “run away.” The prisoners complied, stepping outside the gate as a number of other guards looked on with acceptance. It was clear to me that the guards had alerted these favorable prisoners in advance about their release from the camp. For some reason unbeknownst to me the leadership felt obliged to free these men. The rest of us were not so lucky.

  Several prisoners attempted to squeeze by the guards, hoping to ride on the coattails of the one guard’s kind gesture so that they could also be freed, but these men were struck down by bullets while trying to escape. Even though there was a general sense of turmoil in the camp, it remained clear that the guards were not confused about their cruelty towards us. What was in store for the rest of us?

  My first thought was to split apart from my group in search of Mendel. Now that I knew he was there, I had to find him again. I wanted to hug him, speak to him, and keep him safe from danger.

  I headed for the kitchen, ignoring the deranged swearing from the guards as I made my way there. On any other day I wouldn’t have had stood a chance of surviving if I disobeyed protocol, but that day was unusual. A majority of the guards were standing together near the main gate, involved in a seemingly heated discussion, by the time I broke away to look for Mendel. They had been thrown for a loop, having just received orders from high ranking Nazi officials to evacuate the camp. It was the first time I saw the SS looking unsure of their roles as they attempted to decipher mixed messages amongst each other. Usually confident and organized, they became confused, self-doubting men that day. Even so, they were still intimidating because of their hatred of us and their weaponry.