Life's a Scream

by Ingrid Pitt

  Two guards Rachel and I had been singing for came along and watched us playing for a while. One was quite good-looking, tall and neat. He smiled. The other one was fat and ugly, pink like a pig. He kept whispering in his companion’s ear. He had to stand on his toes to reach it. Suddenly the tall one grabbed Rachel, held her tight by her shoulder and smiled at her. He said something I couldn’t hear and opened his trousers. He slammed Rachel against the wall of the Kinderschuppen, which vibrated. All the kids disappeared in a flash. Me too. I crawled under the hut and listened to the thuds her body made against the Kinderschuppen as the SS man pushed into her body again and again. His hat fell down, rolled under the hut and stopped in front of me. The silver death’s-head insignia grinned at me. I crept further to the back of the hut, into the darkness. Rachel dropped to the ground. Eager hands grabbed her and pulled her up again. The other guard had a go. The same thudding noises . . . He let Rachel drop to the floor. A face appeared under the floorboards of the Kinderschuppen. A hand reached for the hat. The shiny boots walked away, crunching on the gravel.

  Rachel’s body lay on the ground. Slowly I crept closer. I pulled her under the hut. It was hard – she was four years older than me. Blood ran down her legs. For a moment she opened her eyes and looked at me, then she stopped breathing. I held her, but the rats came back and I crawled away.

  Four

  We had a great trade going with new arrivals. It was easier for the children to organise this than the grown-up prisoners. We could rush around without being accosted, hide behind the huts and slip into them unnoticed when everyone was away on work detail. Some of the older children, about eight or nine years old, had organised us into gangs. One particular boy, probably the oldest in the Kinderschuppen, had even got some sort of black market going. He was a regular little Fagin. Before long, we were all part of his empire. His main line of business was spoons. At that time, the top currency was the simple tablespoon. It was what kept you alive. Without it you were reduced to lapping up what little food was available like a dog. With it you were in at the cooking pot, shoulder to shoulder with the best of them. Unfortunately, spoons were a fast disappearing commodity. When the camp had first opened everybody had been issued with pyjamas, wooden clogs, a threadbare blanket, a canteen and a spoon. By the time I got there you grabbed what you could and hung on to it for grim life. In the children’s compound there were spoons which were handed out each mealtime. Our budding Fagin made us filch them. If we didn’t perform he would beat us up. I became one of his ace suppliers.

  Before long, the spoons’ disappearance was noted and typically the Lager – camp – officials over-reacted. There we were, twenty or so little ones, asleep in our bunks, when the door crashed open and two dog handlers burst in, barely able to control the huge Alsatians, shouting at us to get out while they searched the hut. Standing outside in our draughty shifts, we clung to each other, petrified. We had been there long enough to know that we could be in deep trouble very soon. The guards crashed about inside and then stormed out, triumphantly bearing a cardboard box full of spoons. They called the ‘Fagin’ boy out from the cold and wet line-up and took him away. We never saw him again.

  They also took one of the boys whom I didn’t like, a bossy eight-year-old. I didn’t mind that he’d gone. Life went on as usual after that. I discovered years later that the children the Germans had no use for were sent to Mauthausen and Ravensbrück and were gassed. Why they didn’t just kill everyone at Stutthof no one knows. But who knows why the Nazis did anything . . .

  It’s surprising how easy it is to fall into a routine. At least when you are very young and have no recollectable experience to compare with your present life. The nightmare of mass murder is all around you every moment of every day and even at night, too. Gone were the times of waking up in the morning, all three of us together, warm and safe, holding a mug of tea or cocoa, nattering about moles and ditches and butterflies. All I knew now was that it was bad to cry, you were always cold, food was something you bolted down as quickly and as often as possible and you kept out of the way of the men and women in hats with silver badges on the front.

  Long lines of people arrived every day, but the number of prisoners in the camp never rose. Some kids joined the Kinderschuppen and lots of people queued up outside a small brick building which was the gas chamber. The chimney smoked all the time. I had got used to the constant stench, the shouting, the snarling dogs which never barked, the armies of scurrying filthy rats which spread disease and the constant hunger. The vicious beatings and ghostlike prisoners, running around, pushing carts with clothes or cases piled high. When something fell off, guards would be on hand at once and beat the prisoner trying to pick up the fallen bits and pieces and avoid the club blows at the same time.

  Instead of cows and horses, uniformed prisoners of war began to appear in the barbed-wire enclosure behind the Kinderschuppen. At first there were only a few dozen or so. Gradually more were driven in and before long the enclosure was full to bursting point. Fräulein Gloge told us not to be seen speaking to them. They were Russian POWs and were being held there until they could be taken to a more permanent camp. I watched them from my little window over my bunk. They milled around, trying to keep warm in the open, without any cover, not even a blanket, and with very little food. As winter drew in many were carried away dead.

  I thought I knew about the Russians. I kept waiting for them to rise up and shout ‘Hurrah!’ like my papa had told me the great General Kutuzov’s army had done, crushing the wicked Napoleon. I fervently believed my Russians would rush the fence, trample it down and liberate the camp. But they never did.

  We were taught German by a professional teacher who was hellbent on teaching me to write with my right hand. I didn’t take to it and he made me lay my hands on the desk in front of me so that he could hit them with a thin yellow stick. It hurt like hell. When he did it his face turned red; so did my hands. I still kept on writing with the left. God only knows why I didn’t even try to do what he wanted.

  One day, in the middle of the German lesson, a couple of soldiers stormed in, grabbed our teacher by the neck and dragged him outside. He pleaded with them, appealed to us kids to do something and hung on to the door frame screaming. One of the guards smashed his rifle butt on to our teacher’s fingers and he let go quickly enough. We were all in our usual state of terror. Adults were always warning us to keep our heads down when violence was being meted out. The wrong look, the wrong word could soon put you on the receiving end. Nevertheless we crept to the window and watched as our poor teacher, still begging for mercy, was made to stand at the centre of our play area. Without any preamble they shot him in the head and left the compound.

  Terrified, Fräulein Gloge urged us to return to our seats but we waited to see a couple of prisoners come into the yard and take the body away before doing as she asked. It was the last day of school for a long time. The teacher was never replaced. Fräulein Gloge tried to fill the role but she was too soft-hearted. There was one unexpected outcome from the brutal scene – I never wrote with my left hand again.

  Another selection parade was held and the more acceptable children were loaded on to lorries. I had again failed the audition. As I watched them disappear I felt rejected and a little envious.

  The half-dozen rejects were playing quietly in the compound when the gate opened and four or five soldiers barged in with rifles and dogs. The woman in the white coat watched, expressionless as usual, as, stunned by fear into silence, we were rounded up. Instead of being marched up the road to the brick-built compound with the gas chamber and the black smoking chimney that we had learned to fear, we were led in the opposite direction into the main compound. Outside the building with the tall windows we were brought to a halt and one of the men went inside. It was starting to rain. We huddled together on the packed earth and watched it become a mire of mud. The man returned and we were marched off again, this time towards the huts. Again we were herded together and made
to wait . . . and wait . . . and wait. Too wet and confused even to cry, we tried to guess what the next move would be. Around us, activity in the camp was picking up. Marching groups of women shuffled past us. Some looked at us curiously, others were too exhausted to care. Then I saw my mama in another group. They were heading in our direction. I had never been so pleased to see her. The group consisted of mothers of some of the children. There was a lot of crying. The soldiers left us for a while to enjoy our reunion, then got bored and drove us away. I soon found out that a new regime was in place. The size of the Russian compound was being extended, taking in part of the children’s area. In future, the youngsters would spend the day in the Kinderschuppen with the white-coated Kapo and the nights in the main camp with their mothers.

  Being back with Matka was wonderful. She spoiled me rotten. The conditions in the hut were awful compared with what I was used to but being reunited made it worthwhile.

  My mother had made a new friend, a young Lithuanian woman called Annie Jadkowska. Annie and she shared a bunk, and worked together in the laundry. Sometimes Annie was forced to work in the brothel. That impressed me, although I had only the vaguest idea of what it meant. Sex wasn’t a prime subject of conversation in the barracks. Food and death were.

  I loved Annie. She was big and warm, and had a way of giggling that was infectious. She would clutch me in her arms and hug me and hug me, and not let me go. I have a passion for big breasts because of Annie. Hers were big and soft and warm, whereas my mother was just skin and bones, and it hurt when she cuddled me. Annie would tell me about her little boy in Vilna and how she would soon see him again. In the meanwhile I would have to fill her ‘empty arms’ . . .

  Annie had worked in Berlin for some time as a spy for the Russians. She used me to take notes and throw them towards the Russian compound as I passed on the way to the Kinderschuppen. I never saw anyone pick them up and nobody ever tried to get a note back to her but I guess the sense of doing something helped her to get through each dreadful day. The trouble with Annie was that she never learned to keep quiet. How she ever managed to be a spy I’ll never know. Obviously she wasn’t a good one or she wouldn’t have been in the camp in the first place. The Nazis let her shoot her mouth off for a long time without doing anything about it – probably because they appreciated her activities in the brothel – but one day, inevitably, they decided they’d had enough. It was the middle of the night when the guards crashed into the hut. They came straight to our bunk and ordered Annie to get down. There was no place to hide. When I saw them coming I crept under my blanket and shut my eyes tight. I didn’t want to see them march Annie away. She didn’t say anything. She knew it was the end, that she was done for. Everyone in the hut knew.

  The next morning all the prisoners were lined up to watch the hanging. Even the children were forced to look on. I couldn’t breathe. I tried to keep from weeping. They brought her out and marched her to the gallows. A square frame of timber with five ropes tied off and boxes strategically placed beneath the nooses. Annie could hardly walk. She looked terrible. Her pyjama frock was torn, there was blood all over her face and they must have broken one of her arms, for it dangled at the side of her body at an awkward angle. She crouched forward and walked with enormous effort. The prioners had to lift her on to the box under the scaffold. They put the noose around her neck and kicked away the box. Her body shook and went limp. I wanted to scream and shout but not a sound came out.

  Annie’s body hung there for days as a warning. Eventually prisoners wheeled her away to where the smoke climbed into the sky.

  A few days later they came and took my mother while I was in the Kinderschuppen. The security officer, SS Captain Hoppe, had found out she was a friend of Annie and assumed she was tarred with the same revolutionary brush. After all, she was Jewish and had a Lithuanian background. When I arrived back at Block 5 that evening the other women looked after me. They tried to make light of the fact that my mother had been taken to the dreaded punishment block but I was an old lag by now and knew the score. What would become of me if Mama didn’t come back? Without her I would die.

  I spent the night in the bunk of two other women. By the morning I was like a furnace. Too weak to get up, I didn’t join the other children when they were taken off to the Kinderschuppen. I lay in the bunk all day, drifting in and out of consciousness. I woke up once to find that I had been sick and messed myself. I was worried about what my mother would say – but not for long. When the women at last arrived back from work I was unconscious – and I had a swelling on my neck the size of a carpenter’s fist. I’d had problems with my glands for a long time but I guess the added torture of having to watch the hanging of my dear Annie and losing my mother had brought on a crisis. I couldn’t eat or talk. But most awful of all, I couldn’t breathe. And my condition was getting worse. It was a miracle that neither Mama nor I had fallen really sick before. The marshes bordering the camp bred sickness and the vermin scurrying around the huts spread it to the prisoners.

  Suddenly Matka was back. I didn’t question the fact that she was there. It was natural. She was always there when I was really in trouble. She made a fuss of me and never let on about the pain she had suffered, although it was clear that she had been badly beaten. I was sure that everything would be all right now. The next thing I knew I was stretched out on a table with my mother standing over me holding my head while prisoners held me down and a man, who I later learned was called Steiner, looked at my neck. I tried to twist my head round to see what he was going to do but my mother’s grip and the vice-like hold of the prisoners kept me in place. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a candle burning. The blade of a knife passed through the flame. I felt a sharp cut. My body convulsed as pain seemed to explode in my head. I passed out and dreamed of ferns and trees. When I woke up I could feel the man’s hands on my throat. Now the suffering was different. The wild searing pain was gone, leaving just an ache that wasn’t being helped by the man’s determination to get any residual puss out of the wound. I tried to struggle but there were too many hands holding me down.

  They couldn’t sew up the wound. Catgut was not an easy commodity to find in the camp. Steiner poured some burning liquid over the hole in my neck and wrapped me up with a bandage. The prisoners carried me to my mother’s bunk and I fell asleep in her arms.

  As a result of her connection to Annie, my mother lost her job in the laundry and was put on a torturous work detail, unloading rocks from lorries on the main road outside the camp and cutting them up into smaller pieces. The camp was being extended again and building materials were needed. The place was constantly growing and evolving. Even the Kinderschuppen had undergone a radical change. The Kapo in the white coat had been joined by a couple of other women. These were prisoners. But often the prisoners were worse than the Nazis, wanting to ingratiate themselves with the camp hierarchy in return for life-supporting extra rations. The Kapo in the white coat seemed indifferent to our fate, which was fine with me, but the new women were determined to turn us into perfect little German schoolchildren. I, for one, didn’t like that and it was back to the old routine of dumb insolence followed by a slap, crying and more dumb insolence. I tried to tell my mother what a trial my life had become but she was so exhausted from a sixteen-hour day humping rocks that I didn’t get a lot of sympathy for my whining.

  My mother’s new job was horrendous and the women dropped like flies. She knew she wouldn’t last the week. Part of the agony was wearing wooden clogs. They made the feet bleed, which then became infected and if you couldn’t march properly in your work detail you’d get picked out for the gas chamber. I recognised that Matka was in a bad state and wondered what would happen to us.

  The Kapo of my mother’s work detail, Peter Steiner, was the ‘surgeon’ who had saved my life. Before the camps he’d been a shoemaker and now earned a little preferment by making boots for the Nazi officers and guards. He expiated his guilt by helping out some of the less fortunate pris
oners and soon he began to take an interest in my mother and her scrawny, sickly kid. Mama always told me after the war that without me she would have given up straight away. She wouldn’t have endured the hell it took to survive. Protecting me gave her superhuman strength and a purpose to live. Steiner found such a purpose by helping us. He organised food for us and alcohol to disinfect my poorly healing wound. Somehow he got a new bandage and some antiseptic cream and, after repeating the treatment with the alcohol – which was terribly painful – the incision started to close up and heal.

  Steiner was a whittler. With the same knife he used to operate on me, he carved little ornaments. He knew that if it was found on him he would be a candidate for the ‘road to heaven’, as the Nazis called the gas chamber, but the knife was his symbol of resistance. He carved Mama a small wooden Star of David. She kept it hidden under her straw mattress, then gave it to me to keep safe. I lost it and my mother was heart-broken. Years later, in Buenos Aires, I found a carved wooden Star of David, an exact replica, at an antiques market. When I gave it to my mother, to my surprise, she thanked me matter-of-factly and took it to her room. I didn’t see it again until after her death. She kept it in a little box with my father’s medals. I still have it, and wear it and pretend it’s Steiner’s star.

  One day Steiner brought me a little Cossack doll, no bigger than a child’s hand. I took it with me everywhere.

  My mother never found out how Steiner managed to get her transferred to the kitchens. It saved our lives. She cooked exclusively for the Nazis, having learned from my father what kind of food Germans like and how to prepare it. She had to make out a shopping list once a week. She soon became quite a dab hand at sorting away little titbits and bringing them back to the hut. It was dangerous and if she had been caught there would have been no reprieve. But she didn’t seem to care. I think at this point she was seriously doubting that we would survive the camp. There were too many knives pointing our way.