Hitler, Stalin and I

by Heda Margolius Kovály

  Next I managed to join a workshop where they made small woven mats. They told us they were destined for the Wehrmacht, to be used in armored cars and tanks to keep soldiers’ feet warm. It was quite unpleasant because the materials were dirty. The mats were woven on wooden frames stretched with very strong strings, and the strips of cloth woven through them had to be torn from the supplied materials – textiles collected from the homes of people who had been transported to various concentration camps. Once on the frame the strips were packed tight, resulting in a small carpet. This technique is still in use all over the world.

  Women at work in one of the spinning workshops of Łódź Ghetto, Poland, circa 1940s. Photo: Mendel Grosman. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Moshe Zilbar.

  Heda Blochová and Jiří Bloch, Prague, 1922; Marta Blochová and Jiří Bloch, Prague, circa late 1930s.

  Courtesy Margolius Family Archive.

  Even at the beginning my mother wasn’t in good health. I didn’t want her to go to work, so I brought the material to her. Mother tore it into the strips, and I took them back to the workshop. I knew that I had to make Mother’s work official. One day while at work I noticed an empty manager’s office. I climbed in through the window, found the workshop’s rubber stamp and impressed it onto Mother’s identity card; now Mother was safely employed.

  Possibly around Łódź there were villages from which more and more people were being transported. There were terrible scenes. Often they came bloodied and wounded, but even worse was that the village women wore large warm folded headscarves under which they hid their babies because they knew the Germans would take them and kill them. It happened often that the babies suffocated.

  There were so many dreadful events happening all around that just thinking about what we were doing, about the material we were handling was very unpleasant. We sat there, always two – two at one frame. I befriended one girl who had been born in Dresden. With her parents she moved to Prague, and from there she was transported to Łódź Ghetto. During one of those raids when we had to come out onto the street or yard and they were selecting people to be taken away, the Germans took her mother. At that moment her father collapsed dead. He had a heart attack and died on the spot, and she remained on her own. When I first saw her, she sat by the frame heartbreakingly crying. I sat next to her, and we became very good friends. We had much to share. We helped each other, and it was really beautiful. But in the end they took her too.

  What happened to your brother?

  By 1942 my older brother Jiří had been transported, first to Theresienstadt Ghetto and then to Maly Trostenets near Minsk, Belarus, where he was shot. I have no idea why they took people so far away to kill them. Perhaps it was a remote place where there were no problems dealing with so many dead. It took me a long time to find out. Immediately after the war I had no idea what had happened to him.

  Now we know what happened to all of them. They were getting rid of the less productive people. They began to send notes to older people for them to come to such and such place, so that they would be sent to work: to Auschwitz. At one time my father got such a note. It was really terrible, and I had no idea what to do. I remember running out of our house to a building where normally our guardsmen were gathered; they looked after the perimeter fencing. I had no idea why I went there; I had hoped to find somebody who could help me. Even so, there was no hope.

  The building was empty, but I stayed there and waited. Suddenly the ghetto leader appeared; our Jewish leader Rumkowski, he looked at me and said in Yiddish so we could understand each other: “What are you doing here?” I began to tell him that my father got the note and that I had to save him somehow. He looked at me, took the note and wrote over it: Zwolnić; meaning he was freed from the transport. My father was probably the only one who escaped transport. We kept saying that if this was so successful perhaps what would follow would also end well. That it must finish in our favor. However, that happened shortly before the final evacuation.

  Because of the nearness of the Eastern Front, the order came for the ghetto to be liquidated. They began to get ready in the summer of 1944. An enormous, tall German came, a uniformed officer with all the military insignia and a cap. He stood on a small pedestal and spoke to us in German, giving us his word of honor as a German officer that nothing bad would become of us. He told us not to oppose the coming change and that we would be well looked after. This happened just after the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, which had been partly open, allowing people to go to work outside the ghetto boundaries. This enabled them to communicate with the Polish underground, and even get some weapons and the support of the Poles from the other side.

  However, we, in Łódź, never got out of our ghetto even for a moment. Even so, I know that there was a large group of people there who continuously plotted various schemes, which in our situation were totally unrealizable, and the majority of them were Communists. I have to say that the Communists behaved very bravely in the ghettos and concentration camps. They did everywhere. Ask anyone who was in a concentration camp, and every one will confirm that the Communists were idealists then. They were people who really wanted to live to change society, to provide people with a better life, and they behaved very well. They supported each other, and their ideology gave them great strength. However, I haven’t been in touch with any of the Communists I encountered in the camps.

  My father, my very clever father said then: “Well I think that it must be true because a German officer wouldn’t give his word of honor if it weren’t true. That isn’t possible. Perhaps it’ll all end well.” He was a great optimist. They loaded us onto the cargo train, and we sat there pressed together for about two days. They didn’t let us out, and many people died along the way. It was a terrible journey.

  Entry gate and electrified fence at Auschwitz, circa 1945.

  Courtesy Česká televize.

  VI

  COLUMNS OF FIVE INTO THE GAS CHAMBERS

  AUSCHWITZ

  In Auschwitz they chased us out of the train with terrible shouts and screams as we were getting off. Immediately we were separated, men on one side, women on the other. I was jumping off the train and saw my father shouting at me: “Take care of your mother!” And I glimpsed Rudolf being beaten by someone. I grabbed my mother by her hand. We held firmly, and they gathered us into a column of five. In the concentration camps, the formation of columns of five was most important. This I learned later. We moved slowly, along the sides soldiers prodded us to move on, and the now infamous Doctor Mengele stood on a high podium. I saw how he waved his arm this way or that way. And when in front of him there was an older or ill person, or someone who had glasses, or was covered in a rash, or had the slightest disability, or was a mother with a child, he always waved them to one side.

  I thought: “Something terrible will happen,” and I held my mother’s hand tightly until we came in front of Mengele. He pointed at my mother. I kept holding on to her and wanted to follow her. But a soldier who stood there with his rifle took me by the shoulders and pushed me to the ground, which was covered in sand. Before I managed to get to my feet my mother was already further up the road in the group of older people. And she kept stretching her arms toward me. I turned around to ask the soldier: “What will happen to them? Where are you taking them? What will you do with them?” And he said: “Don’t you worry.” At that moment my mind went blank.

  Bales of the hair of female prisoners found in the warehouses of Auschwitz at the liberation, circa 1945. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park.

  From that time on I ceased to comprehend the events around me clearly until I left Auschwitz. I retained certain distinct moments. I remember very vividly particular scenes that I lived through as if in a painted picture, but I didn’t know how long I had been there. Later, when we managed to get out of Auschwitz and I started to recover, my girlfriends told me that they had already written me of
f. They said that I stood there all the time with my head down and refused to eat anything. They gave us various thin soups or water, always in one bowl for five people, and mostly I refused to have it. I was like the dead walking, especially in the first few days there.

  Then they took us to some baths, and we were all shaved, all that could be taken off. For some girls that was the last straw. Nowadays anything is possible, and people are accustomed to seeing anything. But in those days we used to have comparatively long hair, and those women who were shaved had the feeling of final degradation: “They took my beauty away; I am not even a woman.” However, I wasn’t affected by it; somehow I let it all slip by me.

  In Auschwitz it was very hot. That is what I remember most, the terrible thirst we had to endure there. We stood in the most dreadfully hot sun while the female SS guards walked around us and looked on as we lay there nearly unconscious from thirst. They carried buckets of water and poured them into the sand in front of us. I remember that well, how girls kept fainting.

  Our barracks were former stables for horses with compacted sandy ground. In the middle was a raised platform for a stove and chimney, and on it kapos ran around with whips lashing girls here and there while shouting and making a terrible commotion. We were all pressed hard together; there were always groups of fifty of us in that small space, where we could hardly fit. Some women fainted, others cried; it was dreadful – it was terribly insane.

  The leader of our barrack, our kapo, announced that we had to have some fun. They mustered a group of women who could sing, and they sang various songs. The majority of them were Poles because there weren’t many from Prague. But there was Mrs. Steinová, who was a trained singer. I was friends with her daughter – we attended the same school. And now that poor woman, with shaven head, stood on that platform and sang Hair, Golden Hair Have I. She always sang arias from Rusalka. It was even more horrendous – that beautiful music and the memories I had of seeing it in opera houses, and how I loved music, and now what was happening in that hellhole.

  When the night came, awful screams began: “Lie down!” We couldn’t all fit in there standing up, let alone lying down, so we had to lay one on top of the other. Obviously one wasn’t allowed to get up or go out; one couldn’t make a step without permission. One night everyone was lying down and there was silence, and I sneaked out. I couldn’t have cared less if they had shot me. I didn’t give it a thought. Outside there was a glorious night, with many stars as if we were in the mountains. There was a little breeze, and the electric wires stretched around the camp were singing.

  I recalled how I went skiing near Prague with Rudolf and my cousin, and on our return we noticed fence wires beautifully resonating similarly. It felt like I had been taken out of the present time. I lay there, the scar on my face bleeding as I reflected: “The world is so beautiful, those stars, that music, and I lie here in the dirt like a worm.” This was really the lowest point, I think, that I lived through there.

  Now and then some managed to escape, but they caught them almost immediately. The whole camp, the whole of Auschwitz had to kneel down. We knelt for at least 12 hours on the ground, in sand and grit. We all had bloody knees, and still we had to kneel until that person was caught. Then there was a roll call where we had to stand at attention. We were chased out of the barracks onto an open ground outside where they brought the escapee, and in front of us broke her arms and legs and took her to be gassed.

  Every evening an armed SS-man came and carried out an inspection to check if all detainees were present. We had to be counted in the units of five. At one time when he walked through our barrack, a Polish woman, who must have gone insane at that moment, ran out and shouted: “Run away, a black bird flying above will kill us all!” And he shot at her, and she fell there. I remember how she shouted and that movement of falling. Events like that, I recall.

  All the films that try to reproduce Auschwitz, all that is totally impossible. Auschwitz was so awful because all the inmates had gone mad. We had gone utterly crazy. The detainees were mad from fear, what had happened, terrible longing for their parents, the terror that you might suddenly lose both your parents and what kind of terrible end they might have endured. Those who haven’t lived through the experience could never imagine the enormous physical pain caused by such sadness and such mental horror. All those girls were beside themselves. And the ones who guarded over us were crazy too; because, you couldn’t carry on like that without being affected by it. And the worst characters must have become even more deranged. That’s why it can’t be truly described.

  We didn’t work at Auschwitz; that is why I don’t have the usual tattooed number. We should have all been gassed, but the Germans couldn’t manage to murder us because daily transports continued to arrive, bringing detainees from concentration camps all over Poland. The war front was getting nearer, so they were evacuating all concentration camps to Auschwitz and Treblinka where there were gas chambers. The Russians advanced into Poland, and the Germans were presumably anxious to keep the Russians from seeing the camps and spreading the news of what was happening there.

  Suddenly our kapo came, our leader, and told us that the next day when a train arrived we would be taken to another concentration camp. And if it didn’t arrive, we would be taken to the gas chambers. Nobody worried about it because we had all already lost enough reasoning to worry or had no feelings left. We didn’t get out of the barracks; we had no idea where we were. They took us toward the tracks where there were heaps of ballast. At night I climbed one and saw how those people in columns of five were being taken to be gassed. Endless processions, really slowly edging toward the gas chambers; by day and night black smoke rose from the chimneys as they tried to liquidate as many people as they could.

  Every day so many people arrived that they couldn’t cope with it, and that’s the reason I am alive. That can never be re-enacted – that amazing cold-blooded efficiency, that organization of slaughter. Just imagine how those people kept going, slowly, in order, five abreast, toward death, toward terrible carnage. It didn’t occur to them to defend themselves because they didn’t know where they were going. They were told to go to the showers, to wash after their journey, and there, instead of water, gas came out. That was the worst; a healthy mind can’t ever comprehend those events.

  I remember lying on that heap. It was getting dark, and suddenly a large seed ball from a dandelion floated by. I extended my hand and the seed ball settled on it. And I thought: “Perhaps now my mother is dying.” I, mad as a hatter, presumed it to be a sign that in that confinement there was something that wanted to communicate with me. I was still beside myself; I didn’t talk to anybody or make any friends. When somebody told me: go, I went; when somebody told me: stop, I stopped. I had no connection with reality.

  Some of the barracks in Auschwitz, photographed from the air, date unknown.

  Bodies prepared for a mass grave in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, photographed upon liberation, 1945.

  Courtesy Česká televize.

  The next day the train arrived. Again they arranged us into those rows of five – it was extremely important because otherwise they would take the sixth person to the end of the procession, and those girls at the end we never saw again. That, I already knew. So they put us in the column of five; we slowly shuffled toward the train, and they counted us in. They said Stücke. How many Stücke had they already loaded?

  Suddenly I saw that we were six in our row. What had happened? One of the girls up front had possibly lost her head, or she had a friend or a sister in our row and went back to be with her. And because I was at the end of the row and was so apathetic, somebody pushed me, and I started to run forward. And I ran until someone took my hand to join their row. Presumably that was the row from which the girl had deserted. They were only four, and they panicked – where to find another person to fill the gap?

  We continued to advance, and exactly in front of me an SS-man by the train shouted: “That’s
it; that’s enough!” And they started to scream at us to turn around, and at that moment somewhere by the train a woman fainted. And from there, the SS-man shouted: “One Stück more!” So the soldier standing next to me pushed me forward, and I went. That’s how I got out of Auschwitz – a miracle. My whole life is one miracle after another.

  VII

  KUDLA

  THE LABOR CAMP

  How long were you in Auschwitz?

  We arrived in Auschwitz on August 15th, 1944, but when we left we had no idea what day it was – no way of knowing there – we knew nothing. We kept standing in the barracks without being able to move and without speaking to each other properly. Then we left to be taken to another concentration camp. And when we went out to work there was frost on the ground, so it must have been October. I wasn’t in Auschwitz too long, but it was enough.

  After that, anything would have been better. They sent me, along with a couple of young women who had arrived with me from Łódź, further west, toward Germany because the next camp, in the region of Lower Silesia, was already in what was formerly the German countryside. Then we were evacuated from there too. We heard continuous artillery shelling as the front grew nearer. And always when it was quite close they sent us further on. Toward the end our guardsmen were anxious to get as far west as possible to save themselves from the Russians.