As the doors were opened and the passengers began to tumble out we were relieved to see them mostly fit and able, if exhausted from their journey, which I surmised must have been of much shorter duration than our own terrifying ride to have allowed them to keep so well.
The first wagons carried women and children, the latter men, though none wore the distinguishing brassard pronouncing them to be Jews.
As we watched, families join together on the concourse after their journey, children and wives hurrying to their fathers and husbands. I was filled with envy, the fear instilled by Henryk’s and Maxim’s words evaporating as the sound of joyous families reunited raised even above the loud music.
It was obvious enough to me now that Maxim was mistaken, misled somehow by rumour and innuendo, his mind weakened by poor health, mistaking the fatalities caused by typhus for the work of the Nazis, and I felt my spirits rise.
The music stopped and Nazi guards stepped forward, addressing hundreds of people in broken Polish, confirming my suspicion that these were local people, having been brought from within Poland to work.
Someone asked, “Where is our luggage?” and for a brief few seconds my worst fears danced across my mind as I realised not a single valise accompanied them, bringing back vivid memories of the scene I had witnessed in Warsaw. A guard assured them their trunks were in the end wagon and would be unloaded shortly, and somehow I allowed myself to believe it, for in doing so I gained hope we would soon find our mother.
The guards began to move among the new arrivals, asking them their trades and skills, directing those with valued abilities to a separate area, requesting the others remain where they were. My pulse quickened as I heard a woman respond she was a seamstress and watched with keen interest as she was directed to stand with the select few. This was Mama’s trade and evidently a valued one. Most surely had she arrived safely at Auschwitz she would have been selected for her skills and might even now be employed somewhere close by.
As I watched the segregation of skilled and unskilled workers continue my hopes rose still further and I found myself clutching the hands of Elone and Nicolae, a faint smile playing on my lips.
Quite soon the separation was complete and the skilled workers were led away, assured they would meet their families again later, once they had been fully assessed.
Then the Nazi guard turned on the several hundred Poles still standing on the concourse and warned them that the camp was rife with typhus, a fatal disease transmitted by lice, and that for this reason all new arrivals had to be disinfected before entry into the camp could be permitted. Why the selected skilled workers should have been taken through without this precaution was not explained.
I watched the crowd directed to some windowless barracks just a short way distant, following a path which ran by our hideaway.
My mind raced. This was our chance to join them, to sneak in amongst them as they passed, to go on to the cleansing showers, and to emerge refreshed and lice-free.
A smile played on my lips and I reached out to Nicolae’s shoulder. From the showers we would surely be taken directly to the women’s quarters, perhaps to find Mama that very day. It was all I could do not to rush out and announce ourselves.
As I edged forward, whispering to the children to make ready, I felt Elone touch my arm and looking to her could see alarm in her eyes.
As if reading my mind she whispered, “No, Anca, I do not like it. There is something wrong here.”
Be it intuition or childlike fear, her prescience concerned me, for I could not banish entirely from my mind the words of Maxim. If his crazed denunciation of the showers was just too incredible to be believed, still his tortured features haunted my mind, warning me all was not as it seemed.
I took a deep breath, closing my eyes, searching for the correct response. The right decision. At last I said quietly, “You are right, Elone. Now is not the time.”
62.
We watched in silent fascination as the hundreds of people were led to the windowless barracks, there to be made to strip naked on the concourse, men, women and children alike, old and young together, evidently indifferent to their nudity, perhaps accepting it was the price they paid for their future security. I thought fleetingly of the scene on the hill I had witnessed from Henryk’s truck. But this was different, I told myself. The showers were right alongside.
A patina of frost still clung to the hard ground and a cold wind blew through the camp, making the would-be bathers shiver and hold their arms about themselves to keep warm.
Guided by Kapos, labourers began to gather their clothes, throwing the garments onto carts. To be disinfected, the curious were told.
More men appeared, carrying large sheets which they lay on the ground then, as we watched, these naked people were made to stand astride and their body hair, from their heads, beneath their arms, everywhere, was shaven clean. To prevent the typhus lice breeding I heard the Kapos explain.
Only when every person, adult and child alike, had been so treated, were they led to the showers. How many were crammed into each room I could not tell, but somehow every person there was found a place in one or other of the buildings and the doors closed around them.
The sheets of hair were carefully gathered and carted away, to what end I could not begin to guess.
Now the concourse was all but empty, only a few guards remaining, indifferent to the Poles awaiting their fumigation within.
Nothing more to see, we eased our way back to our secure hiding place beneath the hut and huddled together for warmth. I stroked Elone’s hair, thankful we had not presented ourselves as I had considered, a smile playing on my lips to imagine her head shaven.
But my smile was short lived as the first screams began.
Bewildered, we stared about us, perplexed as to where the sound emanated, but in seconds it was obvious. Maxim’s words came flooding back to me, of the fate met by his wife Catherine, taken to the shower rooms on her first day.
As the screams became louder I hugged Nicolae to me, futilely covering his ears with my hands.
Elone was clutching me, her eyes wide with fear, streaming tears, looking to me for salvation, but I could offer none.
For perhaps twenty minutes the screams continued unabated, tortured screams of men, women and children, enduring a fate I could not begin to imagine.
And then the screams began to subside and minutes later there was only silence, broken by the incessant, uncontrollable sobbing of three terrified children, alone and afraid in the very heart of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
63.
Nicolae was in shock, a low whine barely audible, that I could no nothing to quell, and I feared Elone would soon join him.
We clung together, lost innocents in this place of darkness and maleficence. Yet somehow, for all I had seen and heard, my mind could not embrace the truth.
For all I had witnessed... My father’s execution; the brutal murder on the platform in Bucharest; the mowing down of lines of Jews outside Plaszow; the screams that still echoed loudly in my mind... For all Henryk and Maxim had warned me, still I could not conceive of the enormity... Of the sheer scale of the extermination taking place here.
It was so unreal that I began telling myself it had not happened. That hunger and fatigue had produced some horrific collective hallucination between us. That I would shortly wake up in a warm bed at home and find the whole thing had been no more than an obscene nightmare.
I wanted to comfort the children, to deny what they had heard, to give them hope, but my brain had all but ceased to control my body. I found myself being drawn back to the edge of the hut despite myself, not wanting, but needing, to see. To assure myself it had not taken place, that I was somehow mistaken.
For a moment, perhaps minutes, perhaps an hour, it was as if nothing had happened. The concourse was deserted, the shower rooms silent. A cool autumn sun was breaking through the smog of ash that drifted incessantly from the furnace chimneys now just a short way distant. From
afar I could hear the sounds of industry as the factories churned out their deadly munitions.
Closer still I heard voices, human voices, from within the shower barracks and I was craning myself forward, desperate to believe, willing those hundreds of naked Poles to walk back out into the cold day, cleansed and disinfected, ready to don clean clothes and take up their duties.
As the doors opened from within it was all I could do to contain my joy and rush out to greet them. To embrace them. To celebrate their very existence.
But the dream turned to macabre reality as the first labourer appeared in his striped prison uniform, dragging a cart behind him. If I knew what was on the cart even before it emerged into view, still I looked, unable to tear my eyes from this grisly scene.
I watched, unwillingly, unable to turn away, as cartloads of tangled bodies were drawn across the concourse before me, quietly borne to the furnaces in the distance.
And as I watched the true nature of these ovens became apparent. These four huge chimneys rising above the birch trees represented no industrial process but one. They were crematoria, designed and built for the sole purpose to dispose of the bodies of the innocent victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
64.
Even to this day I do not quite know how we survived the months that followed.
We were without food, our thirst quenched only by the rain that shortly began to fall, turning the hard ground of autumn into a quagmire of mud and slime. Only when the mud became so deep that it penetrated beneath the hut to our hiding place could I muster the will to go on, to move elsewhere.
If I had not yet abandoned all hope of finding Mama, buoyed by the possibility that her skills as a seamstress may have proved her salvation, still my first concern was to protect Nicolae and Elone from this dread necropolis.
We moved by night, like mindless automatons, gaining advantage from the inclement weather that saw the guards sheltering from the cold rain. If the electrified perimeter fences with their barbed wire and watchtowers were carefully avoided, still we managed to wander about the site with relative impunity.
Eventually we were driven from our hiding places by the flood of mud and filth accumulating, and were forced to seek shelter in unlocked buildings.
One such place we found ourselves in proved our salvation, yet ironically was the very centre of the death industry that was the purpose of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
We were there for many weeks, perhaps months, I cannot be sure, hiding behind hundreds of cans marked with the legend Zyklon B. If I had realised then these canisters contained hydrogen cyanide, the very gas used to exterminate tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent people, surely we would have moved on. But it was warm and dry, and in truth perhaps we would have sheltered there regardless, for our very survival depended on it.
From the security of this improbable refuge I foraged by night for food, collecting discarded crusts of bread or half-eaten tins of salted beef thrown down by the Nazi guards, scavenging like a wild animal. This combination of meagre rations and the dry warmth that permitted us to rest peacefully bar our dreams, meant that slowly, so very slowly, we began to regain our strength and Nicolae and Elone to emerge from their cocoon of shock.
If at first our only thoughts were to stay alive, as the days passed and we remained undisturbed we became increasingly confident. Our lassitude was lifting with each small meal, and each day we remained undiscovered I foraged further afield, sometimes brazenly approaching Nazi barracks, listening at windows in the hope I would hear a language I understood, or find food or information that would assist our campaign of survival.
I even managed to clothe us, when I stumbled upon a row of huts each laden with garments of all purpose and size.
At first I thought I had found the warehouses for the clothes manufactured on site, but I was quickly disabused of this idea when I dragged a coat to the light and saw the Jewish brassard upon the sleeve. Yet by now I was beyond shock.
As I rifled through coats, dresses and underwear selecting items that might fit us, as I clambered over a huge pile of thousands, literally thousands, of children’s shoes looking for a pair to fit my little brother’s feet, I knew well their origins. But by now I was indifferent, perhaps even beyond caring, that these were all that remained of innocent children brought here with their parents to work, only to be slaughtered like so many cattle.
All that now mattered was our own survival: Nicolae’s, Elone’s and mine.
I drew hope from the increasing laxity of the guards within the compounds, where they seemed to wander aimlessly about, indifferent to their duties. Occasionally I would hear snippets of information in Polish and with it began to gather hope. Rumour told of the Red Army’s approach and I was aware the atmosphere of the camp had changed.
65.
Perhaps the first tangible evidence was when the ashen smog of cremated bodies began to dissipate and fresh, winter air began to penetrate our lungs.
Slowly the skies cleared and we could see the clouds once more.
Then the demolition began, at first orderly, later with more urgency, with less attention to detail. I watched the crematoria chimneys slowly pulled down, each night when I ventured out witnessing some advance in their destruction, and for the first time began to hope again.
I had by now lost all track of time, only the seasonal changes providing an amorphous calendar within my confused mind, but I knew autumn had passed and winter was well advanced. Snow was particularly unwelcome, not so much for the cold, for that we had come to accept, but because I feared tell-tale footprints left behind might announce our presence.
So long had we been here in this makeshift domicile, resident among these pernicious canisters, ensconced amid oddments of clothing for comfort and warmth, subsisting on the dregs raided from Nazi rubbish bins, that we began to feel at home, daring to believe we could survive the winter here, perhaps even the duration of the war.
But such complacency proved misjudged.
It was early morning, a cold sun’s watery rays illuminating another freezing day. We were huddled together for warmth, the three of us, beneath a pile of coats and camisoles, when we heard their arrival. I was upright in an instant, fear dictating my actions, a hand each over Nicolae’s and Elone’s mouths to prevent them making a sound. Wide eyed they sat up, terror etched in their faces as we heard the Zyklon B canisters being loaded onto carts.
A small window to the rear of us provided the store’s only light and surreptitiously prising it open I eased first Nicolae, then Elone, through the tiny gap. Even their small, emaciated bodies struggled to squeeze through and I feared for my own chances.
Both children were by now safely outside but as I clambered onto the ledge and began to prise myself through the tiny orifice my worst fears were realised. I became suspended halfway, my coat entangled with the window hook, leaving me hanging from the wall a half metre from the ground.
“Anca! Anca!” It was too much for my little brother and he cried out for me to join them, all caution forgotten at the sight of his sister struggling to free herself.
Too late, Elone grabbed him, urging him to be silent.
I heard angry shouts in guttural German and the sound of canisters being thrown to one side as a Nazi guard advanced on me from behind.
A heavy hand clasped my shoulders and I screamed out, “Nicolae! Elone! Run! Run!” I struggled violently as a thickset arm came around my neck and began dragging me back into the store. Limbs flailing, I lashed out as best I could, but to no avail, only the very size of the window’s aperture preventing me being pulled back the way I had tried to leave. I could see my brother below me, watching helplessly, terrified, and was reminded it was not just my own fate that would be sealed were I to lose this battle.
Suddenly my tormentor’s arm slipped over my chin and across my face and I seized my chance, biting deep into his wrist with an animal-like ferocity born of desperation.
With a scream of pain his arm was gone and I
fell back to my halfway position, hung pendent by my coat. Angry voices shouted at the window even as Elone pushed her tiny body beneath mine, taking my weight, allowing me the leverage I needed to slip my arms from the coat sleeves. I fell to the cold ground, free, leaving the garment dangling from the window.
I grabbed the children, one under each arm, and with a celerity that surprised us all managed to carry both my charges across the concourse to the shelter of another building. Even as we cornered the hut, a spray of gunfire spattered the ground behind us.
We stopped for breath, to get our bearings, fearing the worst, but from our tormentor all we heard was a cold laugh, as if somehow he found amusement at our determination. He shouted out across the concourse, though I recognized only the word Kinder, children, and hoped our escapade had been dismissed as a harmless child’s prank.
66.
A punishing hoarfrost had descended overnight, rendering the ground gelid, our return to hiding beneath barracks buildings all the more difficult after our relative comfort in the store-room. I knew we would not survive many nights so exposed, and I was slowly realising that, for better or worse, we must soon present ourselves and accept our fate.
If the showers of death had been abandoned and destroyed, as I knew they had, and the crematoria dismantled, then it was just possible a more tolerant regime now ruled Auschwitz, that would permit us the singular luxury of continued life.
We huddled together and shivered the day away, and when night came Nicolae clung to Elone and I both, unwilling to let me leave them even to scavenge for food.
A second day passed.
A third.
Temperatures plummeted each night, barely rising to freezing point during the day. I studied the emaciated faces of Nicolae and Elone as night fell for the fourth time and knew that, when day next broke, I would have no alternative but to present all three of us to the mercy of the Nazi’s cruel administration.
Anca's Story--a novel of the Holocaust Page 18