Guta had become part of the Tod Kommando—the Death Task Force. In time, she learned to suppress her horror and dissociate herself from the job that kept her and her mother alive. Only by plunging her hands into the bowels of death day after day was she able to earn that clay-like muddy bread that she shared with her mother. As her mother had not been assigned any work, Guta would rush back to their barracks every evening, terrified in case she had been carted away with those who were no use to the Nazis. Like an animal, Guta learned to depend on her instincts and to sense danger in distant sounds and sudden silences.
A few months later, when the icy wind slashed her emaciated body in its thin striped jacket, she and her mother were loaded onto another train. A three-day journey brought them to a smaller camp surrounded by a pine forest. This was Stutthof, near Danzig on the Baltic coast. There were no bunks, only lice-infested straw scatttered on the floor, a raised platform for public hangings, electrified fences and hardly any food.
Stutthof was the realm of the dead and dying. It surpassed the horrors of all written and visual images of hell. Bodies swung from gallows like scarecrows, sprawled against electrified fences like bats, and lay in piles in the yard and the barracks each morning, dead from typhus or starvation. Inside the barracks, they lived among stench and filth. One day one of the sadistic female guards was showing an army officer around the camp. ‘Da haben wir unsere Untermenschen,’ Guta heard her say with a delicate shudder of distaste. ‘Here we have our subhumans.’
The only hope of surviving this last rung of hell was to absorb its lessons. Yelled at, cursed and abused every day, they spoke mostly in grunts and curses. Whenever new prisoners were brought in, Guta only had to hear them speak to know whether they would survive. When a group of Hungarian women arrived at Stutthof, they still spoke in complete sentences and used polite expressions. She knew they didn’t stand a chance.
What use were fine words when the tracery of her mother’s spine was visible from the front and pus oozed from the sores on her body? The sore on her mother’s elbow had eaten away all the flesh and exposed the bone. Too weak to fetch snow to clean up the arm for her, Guta sucked the putrid flesh out of her mother’s sores so that it wouldn’t spread and rot her entire body.
Near her on the deck, a pregnant woman in a navy pleated skirt and bare feet walked past on swollen legs. That brought back another incident. One of the women in her barracks doubled up in pain and gasped that she was about to miscarry. They all knew that if the guards found out she was pregnant, they’d kill her. One prisoner tore a strip off her ragged skirt to tie around the woman’s mouth to stifle her screams while she laboured in agony to expel the tiny body, a bud wilted before it had time to blossom. They had no knife or scissors and, desperate for something to cut the umbilical cord before she bled to death, someone smashed the window and used a shard of glass. A moment later she ran towards the latrine with an unusual bulge under her skirt. She returned without it. When the whistle blew next day at roll-call, their blood froze. Someone must have found the foetus. But the announcement was about a broken window. As punishment for damaging property belonging to the Reich, they were ordered to stand outside in the snow for several hours. Some dropped to the frozen ground and never got up again.
Without realising it, Guta ran her finger along the flattened bridge of her nose. To vary the monotony of camp life, the guards would beat prisoners with rubber hose, plaited wire, clubs and long leather whips studded with metal balls that crushed flesh and broke bones.
The camp commandant had a special talent. He’d perfected a karate-like blow to the jaw that never failed to make the victim topple over and fall backwards, exposing the soft and vulnerable places he enjoyed kicking with his lovingly-polished boot. During one of those beatings, Guta heard the crunch of bone as he smashed her nose, the base of her skull and her ribs. It was two days before she regained consciousness. Bruised and broken all over as she was, she had to stand still at the interminable daily roll-calls.
‘If only you didn’t glare at the Germans so much,’ her mother used to lament over Guta’s mangled body. ‘I’m sure they beat you so often because you make it so obvious that you hate them. Why attract attention to yourself?’
But Guta mumbled, ‘I can’t help it. I’m not looking for trouble, but they disgust me so much that I can’t hide my feelings.’ But the fury that fuelled her defiance also strengthened her resolve not to give up.
Hoping to hear some news of her father, whom she hadn’t seen since the day they arrived in Auschwitz, Guta became proficient at throwing secret messages over the fence to the men on the other side. To send one of these missives required overcoming two almost insurmountable obstacles: finding a scrap of paper and a pencil. If she was determined enough to give away some of the precious watery soup, a prisoner would let her use his pencil stump. She would wrap the precious message around a pebble and tie the small parcel with a thread pulled out of her dress.
Usually her messages landed without being spotted, but on one occasion she was caught by the camp guard. A whistle shrilled through the camp to announce a public flogging. The camp fell silent as all the prisoners, including her mother, were forced to watch while Guta was made to stand on a box and flogged forty times with a leather strap. And yet, throughout all the suffering, pain and humiliation, one thing they could never crush was her sense of her own strength and dignity, or the hope that one day this would end and life would be beautiful once more.
Despite her agonised pleas for her mother to hold on just a little longer, Guta heard her mother’s last fluttering heartbeat two days before the Russians arrived to liberate the camp. Two days later, when one of the soldiers picked Guta up and carried her tenderly to the field hospital truck, she looked up into his face and saw tears flowing down his cheeks. He saw an emaciated girl, ill with typhus, a smashed face and a frostbitten leg rotting with gangrene. She was fifteen.
The road to recovery was slow and spiked with pain. She endured one operation after another as surgeons tried to rebuild her nose and graft flesh onto her mutilated leg. When she was strong enough, she worked in a medical laboratory by day and studied at night.
Guta had never intended to leave her native land. She wanted to help rebuild her ravaged country and play her part in creating the new egalitarian society that was supposedly taking shape. While enrolled in a crash matriculation course, she befriended a fellow-student whose courage she admired. Barbara had fought with the partisans and had scars and medals to show for her heroic deeds during the war. The two became close friends and often sat up late, cramming science and algebra and discussing the just society they were going to create in Poland.
One evening Barbara looked up from an equation they were trying to solve. ‘You know those matzos Jews eat at Passover? How come they’re white?’ she asked. Guta didn’t understand the question. ‘Well, you’d think that the blood from Christian babies would make them dark,’ Barbara explained. Guta stared at her friend, too stunned to reply. Barbara’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. Please don’t be offended,’ she cried, ‘It was just a question of chemistry, that’s all. After all, blood turns dark when it’s heated.’
Guta finally found her tongue. ‘I can’t believe that an intelligent person could believe such vicious nonsense. You’re repeating superstitions from the Dark Ages!’ she exclaimed.
Barbara flushed. ‘When I was a little girl, my mother always said that if I was naughty the Jews would take me away, so I believed they were capable of anything, even using the blood of Christian babies,’ she said. Flinging her arms around her friend, she sobbed, ‘Guta, I don’t know what to say, I feel terrible. Please forgive me. I’ll never repeat such stupid things again.’
Although they remained friends, the incident had left a profound mark on Guta. She was shocked to realise that she was living in a country where even basically decent people were still being brainwashed to believe that Jews were the Devil incarnate. How many more ce
nturies would it take for this deeply ingrained prejudice to disappear? Six years of persecution by the Nazis and the blood of ninety percent of Polish Jews hadn’t washed away this age-old hatred. She was depressed to think that she had survived the Nazi camps only to return to medieval prejudice in her own country.
Several months later at the Jewish welfare office in Lodz, while scanning lists of survivors in the hope of finding a relative, Guta met a pleasant young man who was doing the same. Dick was twenty-five, dependable and caring. Like so many young people who found themselves alone after the war, the two clung to each other in an effort to replace the love and warmth they had lost and create a family again. They married soon after they met, and not long afterwards boarded the Derna for Australia.
The other passengers saw a tall young woman in a cotton print skirt, socks and laced-up shoes, but what stayed with them was her air of vulnerability. Like someone who has just emerged from a coma, she seemed dazed by everything around her. In the camps she had learned the skills she needed to survive, but in peacetime they were no use. She wondered whether she would ever make up the time and social skills she had lost.
But with Stelios and Charlie she conversed without any problems. They hated the Italians because they had sided with Hitler, betrayed the Greeks and marched in at the bidding of their opportunistic Duce. The two seamen often talked about the fights that erupted below decks between the Greek and Italian crew who lay in wait and lashed out at each other in the galley, the dining room or in their cramped quarters.
Tensions simmered and exploded. It took only an angry glance, an accidental shove, a curse or a comment casting doubt on someone’s paternity or impugning their nation’s courage, for flick-knives to click open and white-faced antagonists to confront each other, fists clenched and weapons raised. Supporters would rush into the fray and soon there was a free-for-all, as seamen shouted, punched, lunged, kicked and slashed their despised opponents. Occasionally alarmed passengers ran out of the way of seamen chasing each other around the decks and shouting curses as knife blades gleamed in the moonlight. Late one night, Heniek Lipschutz was out strolling when he witnessed a tense stand-off that lasted until Kosmos, the captain’s portly son, advanced to disarm three Italian crewmen wielding chains.
Late at night, after these encounters, Stelios and Charlie would creep towards Guta with some of the injured Greek combatants. They knew that she had completed a first aid course and had brought iodine and gauze with her, and, more importantly, that she was on their side. Pushing forward his companions with their slashed arms or bloodied noses, Stelios would whisper, ‘Can you bandage this one?’ After she had dabbed the wounds with iodine and bandaged them, they would murmur their thanks and disappear below. Secrecy was paramount because they didn’t want the captain to find out they’d been fighting again, but they trusted Guta whom they regarded as an honorary Greek. In gratitude for her help, they often brought meals out on deck so that Guta and Dick didn’t have to go down to the stifling dining room, adding some extra treat that wasn’t available for the other passengers.
Guta and Dick’s relationship puzzled the seamen because they seemed more like friends than lovers. They were not physically demonstrative and never even held hands. Stelios couldn’t understand it. ‘Are you sure you’re really married?’ he would ask in his ingenuous way that always made her smile. Thinking that it was lack of privacy that kept the couple apart, the sailors suggested various places where they could be alone, but the idea of making love with so many people around appalled Guta.
Although Dick tended to be serious and withdrawn, he had an aura of mystery that women found attractive. He didn’t indulge in small talk but when he said something it was usually witty and memorable, and Guta liked the way he looked deep into her eyes and listened closely to every word she said. She supposed that their depressed, introverted state would wear off once their life became more settled and the traumas of the past had receded.
Occasionally on the other side of the deck she would watch the Estonians rehearsing their national songs. Something about them and their dark-shirted conductor disturbed her. Perhaps it was their rigid, regimented demeanour, or the unsmiling faces that gave no indication of what they thought or felt and reminded her of some Baltic camp guards whose cold brutality she had experienced. And now one of their group, the middle-aged man who sometimes played the accordion, was giving her a long, cold stare that made her shiver even though the sun was blazing.
15
Landfall was imminent. As seagulls screeched around us, the ship buzzed with excitement. For the first time in four weeks we were going to step on land. The day before we docked, men brushed suits and polished shoes, women ironed dresses and pinned their hair up, while the proud mothers of Anna Sznur and Haneczka Poczebucka twisted their daughters’ hair in strips of cloth to make Shirley Temple sausage curls in honour of the occasion. My hair stayed plaited as usual.
The Derna dropped anchor in Colombo Harbour in the noon-day heat on 27 September, as the city shimmered in a misty haze. Determined not to waste a moment, everyone rushed to the purser’s office to have their passports stamped so they could disembark as soon as the first tenders arrived to ferry them ashore. My mother couldn’t wait to taste normal food again and feel the ground firm beneath her feet.
‘I don’t know how I’m going to stand another two weeks of this voyage,’ she sighed as we stepped into the tender which sped towards the city and left a widening wake of foam behind us.
After the monotony of the ship, Colombo burst onto our dulled senses with the joyous impact of a fireworks display. The vegetation, exuberant and moist, looked as though it had been lacquered with paint of a startling green that seemed to drip off the wide leaves. There were fairytale croton bushes, their leaves speckled with yellow, scarlet and tangerine, and perfumed plants with flowers like crimson saucers. Agile boys, whose white loin cloths dazzled against their chocolate skin, monkeyed up the tall smooth trunks of coconut palms with astonishing speed, machetes in their mouths. They slashed the tops of the rough shells, but I didn’t like the thin musty liquid that spurted out or the rubbery flesh that they cut into strips for us to taste.
Running along the street, skinny men with sharp cheekbones and legs as thin as chicken bones weaved in and out of the traffic, pulling rickshaws. On the tattered seats reclined Singhalese women with gold bangles clanking on their plump wrists. Beggars whose eyes blazed in deep sockets held their birdlike hands together in supplication, while Europeans drove past in the back of opulent cars with expressions indicating that all was right with their world. The gulf between the affluent and the destitute was distressingly deep. It troubled my father, who pointed out the contrasts as we wandered along avenues lined with palm trees that we had only ever seen in picture books.
The women with smooth jet-black hair and vermilion dots on their foreheads were like exotic blooms, the brown flesh of their midriffs exposed between their fitted short-sleeved tops and the shimmering saris so cleverly pleated that they didn’t need buttons or zippers. Little Pauline Seitz tugged at her mother’s arm as a bejewelled woman walked past. ‘That lady had a red stone in her nose!’ she shouted, twisting her head round for another look. ‘Look, they’re eating in the street!’ Crouched on the pavement stirring a pot on a primus, a woman in a wraparound cotton skirt doled out dollops of rice onto large banana leaves for men who scooped the food up with deft movements of the right hand and didn’t spill a grain.
Men squatted on the pavement selling figurines. ‘Memsahib,’ they called out to Vala, holding up their handiwork. ‘Please look. Nice elli-phant.’ Pauline wouldn’t let her mother rest until she had bought a matching pair with neatly curved ivory tusks. When my parents stopped to admire some statues carved by a white-haired vendor whose own face resembled an ebony carving, he kept nodding and pointing at me. It took my startled parents several minutes to realise that he wanted to buy me. For the rest of the day my mother kept a tight grip on my hand.
The smells of Colombo were intoxicating. I breathed in the overpowering scent of sandalwood and camphorwood, unable to decide whether I liked it or not. From colourful shrines and temples, the sweet smoky smell of incense teased my nose, while the strange odours of cummin, coriander, cinnamon and garam masala wafted out of shops and market stalls, along with purple, saffron and crimson powders and fabled plants like frankincense, tamarind and myrrh.
All Colombo was buzzing with the news that the ship which had just docked in the harbour was carrying over 500 migrants to Australia. When a Czechoslovakian Jew who had settled in Colombo heard about the Jewish orphans, he hired a bus and rushed to the port to take the children to the zoo. Although he was taken aback to discover that most of the orphans were in their late teens, he bought them all ice creams, showed them around and then invited them out for a lunch they would never forget.
On top of a hill looking out over the city and the ocean, the orphans came to a gleaming white palace set in a tropical park. This was the Galle Face Hotel, whose colonial opulence took their breath away. Although Ceylon had gained its independence from British rule in February that year, within that colonnaded façade the traditions of the Raj were firmly entrenched. In a dining room, slow-moving wooden punkahs creaked above their heads while teak floorboards creaked under their feet. Reclining in rattan armchairs, fair-complexioned women in linen dresses, broad-brimmed hats and superior expressions nibbled at dainty cucumber triangles and sipped tea served by brown-skinned waiters, while an orchestra played music from the Palm Court.
The Voyage of Their Life Page 18