Those next few hours might prove our last, but I was determined we would confront our destiny with dignity and, if we were soon to die, we would do so as human beings, not animals.
At the dawn’s early light I gathered the children to my breast, kissed each one and said quietly, “Come with me, little ones, and be brave. I cannot promise you a future, but we will surely die here before another night passes. Whatever happens, remember always I love you both.”
I kissed them both. “But now, we are going to try find our Mama.”
67.
We emerged from our dark hiding place into the cold light of winter’s day, our bodies tremulous in the sub-zero temperature. I clutched Nicolae and Elone to me, determined that, if our lives were soon to end we would at least die in one another’s arms.
But we were greeted only by silence. An eerie, indifferent silence that neither gave hope, nor inspired fear.
There was no guard at the gate to the next compound and we walked cautiously towards it, expecting at any minute to feel the muzzle of a gun, the salivating teeth of a guard’s vicious hound, or a bullet in the back.
But nothing happened.
We stopped at the gate, peering through, ready to throw ourselves at the mercy of the guard, but there was no-one, no-one at all, to greet us. I hesitated.
Frightened.
Bewildered.
This was not the scenario I had prepared myself for.
I felt Nicolae tug weakly at my hand, reminding me we must find food soon or perish regardless, and I knew we had to risk going on.
I pushed the gate open slowly, psyching myself for the inevitable confrontation, but none came. No guard rushed to threaten us, nor a spray of bullets to ward us off. Instinctively I looked to the watchtower, but could see no-one. I dismissed the observation, thinking it too distant to offer clarity.
Even so we became emboldened by our progress and proceeded cautiously across the concourse, towards the factory. Too weak to fend for ourselves any longer I knew we must present ourselves, beg for mercy and hope to be dealt with painlessly.
The factory was silent, and we were aware of a tangible aura of dereliction.
It was a relief then, but no surprise, to push open the doors and find nothing but abandoned machinery. I called out, daring there to be someone, but only the echo of my voice responded.
“Anca, where is everyone? What has happened?”
I turned to my sister, holding her close. “I do not know, Elone. We must investigate further.”
We departed the factory, walking brazenly across the concourse, willing someone to challenge us, but still there was silence.
A lonely, palpable silence that haunted our every step.
For perhaps an hour or more we wandered between empty barracks, opening doors to deserted buildings, confronting non-existent guards, before we finally saw a figure, sitting propped against a wall in the distance.
I called out, but there was no response and we rushed across to him, hoping for explanation. But as we arrived at his side I recoiled in horror, shielding the children from the scene. For all the destruction I had witnessed recently, still I was not indifferent to death, and the sight of this skeletal corpse sickened me. But I could not help but study it.
A crystallised frosting disguised his features but there was no obvious sign of wounding and I could not help but wonder if it were cold or hunger that had smote his last breath where he sat.
I drew the children away and we began to hurry across the empty grounds, searching for the living in this desolate place of death.
We stumbled by accident upon a canteen and began searching among the abandoned pots and pans for any scrap of food that might be there. We were lucky to unearth a few cans of tinned meat from which we fed ourselves ravenously, without regard to etiquette or future needs, until all was gone.
Thus nourished and fortified, we continued our search.
As we accosted further bodies I began to despair that we were the very last people alive in this evil place, but as we rounded a corner and entered a new compound we were elated to see a hundred or more people before us.
We shouted out, all of us, but barely a head turned, only indifference greeting us, and as we closed in on these people, adults and children, male and female alike, these skeletal frames burdened with despondency, my elation became fear. For these were people moribund, for whom the very will to live had been driven from their souls.
As we entered among them it became apparent many had already succumbed, some dead, other dying, literally before our eyes, where they lay on the frost-smitten ground.
I rushed among them, asking questions, trying to find answers, but was met by glazed indifference. Perhaps they did not understand me. More likely they were simply beyond caring. We began to move among them, looking for any fit enough to respond, but met only apathy, perhaps even resentment that we should intrude upon their last hours in this way.
I scanned the hopelessly attenuated bodies as we meandered between them, daring still to hope I might see Mama among these survivors.
We eventually came to the perimeter fence and I could confirm now that the watchtowers had been long abandoned, but still the forbidding barbed wire fences presented an impenetrable barrier to the outside world.
We turned back, once again stepping among the barely living, over the dead, the three of us hand in hand, snakelike across the yard, when I heard a feeble voice cry out.
“Anca? Anca? Tell me it is really you!”
My heart leapt, hoping this pitiful voice was my mother’s, but as I descried the skeletal frame that addressed me, struggling to raise her head above a weakened body, I saw it was but a child of about my own age.
“Anca! It is you!”
I looked again, peering into those withdrawn eyes, trying to put a name to the frost-smitten features beneath shorn hair.
Then, emotion choking my voice, “Raisa!”
68.
I was beside Raisa in an instant, cradling her head against my side, pouring out incomprehensible questions amid a mixture of tears and sorrow, for if to meet again my best friend was a delight, to see her like this, moribund, resigned to die where she lay, was a pitiful sight I shall never strike from my mind.
Nicolae belatedly recognized Raisa and knelt beside us, taking her hand. Elone joined us, cognisant of the bond though she knew not the person.
If weak of body and spirit, our chance encounter seemed to invigorate Raisa and we managed to talk a while, sat on the cold ground, until she again began to show fatigue.
Weak as she was, Raisa managed to offer some explanation of events. The Red Army was advancing and the Nazis had abandoned the camp as I had surmised, destroying what they could, taking many thousands of able workers with them, heading west, on a long, tortuous journey by foot to camps nearer the German border. Those too weak or ill to travel, too old or too young, were simply left here at Auschwitz.
Left to die.
She asked of her father, Maxim. I was able to tell her I had seen him alive not long ago and how he had assisted us, and her features brightened. Knowing that her own mother had perished here in Auschwitz I could not bring myself to ask if Raisa knew Mama’s fate.
I remembered the canteen we had encountered earlier and, promising we would return with sustenance, we rose to search for any remnant of food we might have first missed. Raisa’s hand lingered in mine, unwilling to relinquish her grip, sunken eyes imploring me to stay, but I knew without food she would not survive the night.
Tearfully we made our way back, ambulate amid the dead and dying, to where we had earlier found our meal.
All around me people were starving, but I thought only of Raisa.
We found a single tin of beef, undoubtedly the last. There would be no more.
I held the tin in my hand, looking first at Nicolae, then at Elone, then thinking of Raisa, so close to death.
Elone took my hand. “Raisa must have it, Anca. Something will turn up for us
, you will see.”
I said, “You three will have it. You, Nicolae and Raisa.”
Elone did not reply, but took Nicolae by the hand and began leading him back the way we had come. I quickly opened the tin and followed them, hiding the food in my pocket for fear of taunting the many starving people we would have to pass by to get to my friend.
By the time we returned to her darkness was once again encroaching, the temperature falling rapidly. I divided the contents of the can and gave a third each to Nicolae, Elone and Raisa. Elone immediately divided her share in half and gave a portion each to Nicolae and Raisa.
I could not find the words to express myself, simply hugging Elona to me as my brother and my friend gratefully ate.
Too weak to move of her own accord, it would have been impossible for us to carry Raisa between the dead and dying all around us, and I knew we must stay the night with her, out in the open, to shield her with our own bodies, for she would not survive another night unprotected.
We huddled together around her, Raisa’s head on my lap, shivering as darkness closed in on us. At some stage I abandoned principle and took clothes from the dead around us to provide us with warmth, but still the cold penetrated deep.
Somehow Nicolae managed to find sleep, and later Raisa too. Elone stayed awake with me through the night, her indomitable spirit all that prevented me succumbing to the cold.
We talked of times past and times future, avoiding always the subject of the fate of our families. We spoke of what we would do when the war ended, where we might live, who we might marry. If the talk was aimless and futile still it kept us awake, the better to shield our slumbering partners.
But eventually I surrendered to sleep myself, waking again as dawn broke.
As the spring of day began again to illuminate our wretched surroundings desolation loomed large. Still more bodies littered the concourse, still fewer managed to stand or even sit up.
Elone held my hand tight, and as I studied her face in the crepuscular light I could see tears in her eyes. I became alarmed, unsure of her concern.
“Elone, what is it?”
She did not look up, but said quietly, “I am sorry, Anca. Your friend has gone.”
It took a few seconds for the meaning of her words to penetrate my mind before I fell upon Raisa’s body and wept. Elone comforted Nicolae while I clutched Raisa’s lifeless form to my breast until emotion finally succumbed to reality and I conceded defeat.
She had been my best friend, but now she was no more.
Still I had Nicolae and Elone, of course, but for now I could only think of Raisa.
Elone retrieved the amulet from around her neck and passed it to me, no words necessary.
I took it gratefully and placed it over Raisa’s still head, before pulling her coat over her.
I began to cry again.
69.
Just hours later the first soldiers arrived, the advance guard of the Russian Red Army, to announce our liberation.
It was January twenty-seventh, nineteen forty-five, and for us the war was over.
But for my dear friend Raisa, and for countless hundreds of thousands of innocents like her, they arrived too late.
70.
“Mrs. Jones, are you okay?”
I felt a comforting hand on my shoulder as Mr. Wilkinson’s concerned voice intruded on my thoughts.
I looked around me and the distraught faces of Nicolae and Elone, the children of Auschwitz-Birkenau, became the distraught faces of Class 9B.
Through my tears the pediculous garments of that dread necropolis faded, to be replaced by pristine school skirt and trousers, shirt and blouse.
I struggled for words, but none would come.
In all these decades since that day I had never had cause or desire to tell my story, at first unable, later believing no-one would wish to hear it.
Now, as I looked around me to see these school students in tears with me, children made oblivious to the reality of man’s inhumanity to man by the fantasy of television and film, I felt pangs of guilt that I had ripped apart their innocence, burdening them with knowledge of events past that many would argue were best left forgotten.
A child from the front row came forward with a tissue and I took it gratefully. I felt her hand slip into mine and as I looked at her I could see Raisa’s face staring back at me.
I dabbed my eyes and Raisa was gone, replaced by this caring schoolgirl, gripping my rugose fingers, comforting me.
She asked, “What of your mother, Anca? Tell us, did you find her?”
Mr. Wilkinson stepped forward. “No more questions, Jennifer.”
He turned to me. “Mrs. Jones, there’s no need to continue. If you wish to leave now we quite understand.”
I gestured for him to let me respond “Thank you, but they have a right to know.”
I turned to the class, dabbing my eyes, struggling to control my voice.
“Would that this were just a story, a fairy-tale, for then perhaps I could offer you a happy ending.” I looked about them, every pair of eyes upon me. “But the Holocaust was no fairy-tale. There was no happy ending.”
I paused, myriad emotions straining to be unleashed, but somehow I kept control.
“No, Jennifer, I never saw my mother again. Almost certainly she was taken to Auschwitz. No less certainly she died there, though I will never know for sure, and in truth it is the not knowing that hurts the most.”
I sensed they wished to hear more.
“Elone’s parents, Chaim and Golda, both perished. We later learned that Golda had died on the train journey to Auschwitz, even before the derailment that liberated the children and I. Chaim, on a different train, probably the same one that carried my mother, arrived at Auschwitz expecting to be reunited with his wife and daughter.”
I struggled with the words. “He was a Jew with no special skills and in poor health. He was sent directly to the showers on arrival.”
Ben, the boy who had been so indifferent to my story when I had begun, put up a hand tentatively. He asked, “What of Maxim, Raisa’s father?”
I tried to smile at Ben, to acknowledge the thoughtfulness of his question. “He was taken away on the Long March, for his lapidary skills were valued. Given his parlous health it is unlikely he completed the journey.”
I saw Ben choke back tears.
“Maxim’s daughter, my dear friend Raisa, was buried by the Russians in a communal grave close to Auschwitz. One anonymous body among tens of thousands. But at least she was given the dignity of a grave. Most of the millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust were denied even that.”
The room was silent, glazed eyes imploring me to continue.
“Of course, there were survivors, myself among them. Nicolae, Elone and I are still alive today to challenge those who say the Holocaust never happened, although Nicolae was thankfully too young to remember much of it.”
Ben asked, “Do you still see one another?”
I smiled. “Elone, even now, I still think of as my sister. She was a remarkable child who grew up to be a remarkable woman. For all her suffering she was able to distinguish the Nazi from the German, and later married a German man. She lives to this day in Berlin. We keep in contact still, but there are some things we never talk about. Some things are too painful... Even now, after all this time...”
I began to cry again and Mr. Wilkinson attended me, helping me to my feet. “Mrs. Jones, I think you have told us enough. Perhaps you’d like a cup of tea. I’ll escort you to the staff-room.”
As he walked me past the seated children sombre, glistening eyes stared up at me, gentle hands reaching out to offer comfort. I knew I could never go through this again, to relive those terrible memories a further time.
Perhaps I should never have come here today.
But as I felt Ben’s hand in mine, clutching tightly at my fingers, I realised that, if even one child there went from that class believing, determined, that those tragic events we call the Hol
ocaust should never be allowed to happen again, then the innocent victims of the Nazis had not died wholly in vain.
71.
I sat in the staff room, refreshed by a cup of sweet tea.
Mr. Wilkinson, having assured me that my talk had had a profound impact on his pupils, had gone to his next class, leaving me alone with my thoughts.
A television was on low in the background, a twenty-four hour rolling news channel, and suddenly I was crying again. This time not over events seven decades past, but over tragedies taking place even now.
As I watched reports of ethnic cleansing, of terrorism and genocide, still taking place around the globe today, I could not help but wonder if we had learned anything at all.
END
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Anca's Story--a novel of the Holocaust Page 19