The Seven Year Dress: A Novel

by Paulette Mahurin

  I wanted to scream, “Stop this madness!” Instead, I held my breath and stood still. I might have looked passive, but inside, I was defiant. I swore I would not succumb to their heinous corruption of all that is sacred and humane. They would not have the pleasure of laughing over my dead body.

  As my hatred of Nazis intensified, my compassion for the prisoners blossomed. Virtuous deeds abounded, and I took notice: the man willing to give up his shoes, Ester’s sharing her food at great risk to her well-being, others assisting the fallen despite a risk of being shot, and those offering solace to others in emotional turmoil while sacrificing much-needed sleep. These kind, selfless men and women captured my heart and infused my soul with hope that goodness would prevail. Perhaps it was the trauma of being abused in every way possible and surviving it that had changed me. I was no longer the innocent Helen, fantasizing about a joyful marriage with children and a dog. That child, that young woman, was gone, and a new gentle woman was resurrected in her place. I loved the new Helen.

  Still, my life was in constant danger, and I remained vigilant. For the past two years in Auschwitz, I stayed alert to strange noises, slept uneasily, and constantly tried to suppress disparaging images and emotions. When I look back on what had happened, I can’t explain how I stayed alive. I like to believe that my fortitude came from my parents. That the best of them lived on in me. I saw their altruism shine through me when, like Ester, I shared my food with someone near death from malnourishment. I gave up my blanket to a woman who had a nasty cough so she wouldn’t get pneumonia. By helping others when it was safe to do so, I found serenity in the midst of the madness.

  Surprised and grateful, I remained in the sewing room, repairing uniforms and articles of clothing that a new guard brought to me. I didn’t expect that I would stay on there after Schüler died since the room was a private facade for his sexual exploits. Oddly, and in death, the irony turned on him. Schüler selected me to do the sewing so he could have a sex slave. While he was alive, I wasn’t considered a very productive seamstress. Now that he was dead, I was a valued worker, and the quality of my sewing kept the SS from harassing me.

  My new guard, Karl Schmidt, was younger than Schüler by probably fifteen years. Perhaps in his late twenties, he reminded me of Max with his strikingly handsome face, straight blond hair, and tall, thin stature. His blue eyes were soft when he spoke to me, and, although he tried to hide his gentle disposition, my heart felt his innate kindness. He was a good person in a bad circumstance. Although he appeared randomly with more uniforms for me to mend, he left me alone for most of the day.

  Schüler’s death, the welcomed change in Schmidt’s disposition, and the innumerable transformations that my life had made in the past three years reinforced something Ester had cryptically said to me the first year I arrived, “Nothing lasts.” When I asked her to explain, she only nodded her head. Now I understood.

  Despite the difference in the personalities of my former and current guards, when Schmidt entered the room I still flinched into a bundle of twisted muscles. For all of the prisoners, existing in the concentration camp meant the possibility imminent death. I never knew what or who would come through that door. I had been conditioned like one of Pavlov’s dogs. I had learned about Pavlov and his Nobel Prize in Physiology before I was banned from school. His work was never clearer to me than when I encountered the bad fortune of negative conditioning at Auschwitz. My new hair-trigger reflexes, my body’s involuntary reactions to stress and pain, were etched into my core. An opening door, a loud footstep, a strange noise in the night, a tap on my back, and even laughter like the kind I heard when my brother Ben was executed sent me into a panic. Operating on an abnormal anxiety level day in and day out, I was never far from losing my mind. Perhaps understanding some of the suppressed and subconscious mechanisms at play helped me cope. My responses were normal given the conditions. This knowledge was such a relief.

  “I brought you these.” Schmidt handed me three uniforms and a dress.

  Feeling slightly safer with him, I spoke. “A dress?”

  “It seems you have made an impression on the Commandant’s wife.” Stories had gotten around that I was a gifted seamstress.

  “But it’s a child’s dress,” I queried as I held the beautiful beige satin and lace material in my hands.

  “It’s Brigitte Höss’ birthday dress. It was ripped playing with her brother. I’ll wait while you repair it. One mistake could be very bad for you.”

  “Very bad” was an understatement. Commandant Rudolf Höss made an art of treachery. He blithely ordered the torture and deaths of thousands of prisoners—including children—while doting on his own children in his off-camp mansion. Prisoners overheard stories that the SS told about the Commandant as a loving father and husband. I knew about him from Ester. While Höss lived in luxury, we lived in squalor and rodent-infested dwellings. While he ate the best food available, prisoners ate Salmonella-contaminated meat. Höss resided in a villa with his wife and five children while our families were slaughtered at his command. For a brief time, Commandant Arthur Leibehenschel replaced him, but in May 1944, Höss returned to Auschwitz. His return brought the darkest time to the camp when over 400,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in 56 days. Unable to handle the plethora of corpses, Höss ordered his officers to burn the bodies in open pits within eyesight of horrified prisoners.

  My stomach knotted into a painful mass at the mention of the Höss name; I felt as if I had just listened to my death sentence. “Yes, sir,” I replied as I looked at the damage. On the back of the dress, above the hem, I examined a rip about six inches long. Her brother must have grabbed it from behind while the girl tried to get away. Yes, I know the feeling of wanting to flee. I had thread that matched and felt the best solution was to raise the bottom. I prayed I’d do a good job, and that my hands wouldn’t sweat and damage the material. Didn’t these rich Nazis have a personal seamstress? Why trust such an important job to a prisoner? I can’t have survived all this time only to be killed for a botched sewing job! With these thoughts racing through my head, I worked as quickly as I dared while being as precise and careful with the delicate material as possible. When finished, I gently folded the dress to avoid creases and handed it back to my guard.

  Alone again, my nervous gut didn’t calm until I saw Schmidt hours later when he marched me to roll call formation. He made no mention of the dress. Since I continued to be used for sewing, the repair must have met with the Commandant’s wife’s approval. To my relief, I never received another garment from the Höss family.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  As the weeks in 1944 advanced, rumors ran rampant among the prisoners that Germany was losing the war. Ester told me about three of the prisoners who worked in a munitions factory who had overheard a radio listened to by an SS guard. A British station! In hindsight, I wondered if that guard was not a true believer of Hitler’s propaganda. Or perhaps he was like my Max—a decent man with his own secrets. Ester also listened as guards, drunk with schnapps, boasted about forty-six people at the camp who had been sentenced to death for listening to foreign radio against Hitler. It was a crime for anyone to listen to a foreign radio station that condemned Hitler’s government; their murders for simply listening to the radio, however, were not criminal. Everything about the camp life seemed upside down.

  “Could it be true? About Germany losing the war?” I whispered to Ester, trying to tamp down the spark of hope igniting in me.

  She shrugged. “The guards said the radio reports were all lies. But the way they said it…I don’t know. With the guards, you never know.” Ester’s words were buoyed up with optimism when she whispered in my ear, “It was as if that guard in the munitions factory wanted the prisoners to overhear…Why? I don’t know. If word got out, he would have been killed for it. Perhaps it’s the nature of the news and just an attempt for the guard to appear neutral? Who can know another’s motives? But,” she patted my back and moved her mouth closer to my ear,
“I have a good feeling about it.”

  In a low, hushed tone, I asked, “Do you know what they overhead?”

  “Something about an earlier Casablanca Conference that was attended by the United States, the British, and someone from France…”

  Years later, when I was reading about the events surrounding World War II, I learned more about the conference that had taken place in January 1943. Attended by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and, representing the Free France Force Generals, Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud, it produced a statement of the Allied tactical will: unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers, which included Germany.

  But there, in my bunk, I heard Ester tell me, “I think the Allies are advancing. We are going to be freed, Helen!”

  Fearful someone would overhear us, I gritted my teeth and squeezed her hand. In the softest tone I could muster, I breathed, “I pray to God you’re right.”

  “Yes.” Ester kissed my forehead and went to her bunk.

  I went about my work in Auschwitz with that conversation repeating in my head like a Mozart symphony.

  As the hearsay about our liberation lingered, the atrocities continued. Each day was a pins-and-needles paradox: more rumors of Germany’s defeat combined with an unmistakable escalation of brutality and murder. At a meal, I overheard whispering men huddled together out of earshot of the guards. They mentioned the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that had happened last year. Ester had heard more than I was able to comprehend fully. That night, once again, I entreated her to tell me what she knew. She whispered to me, “A man named Jacob Gottlieb arrived yesterday. He escaped the uprising and had been in hiding…”

  A cough a few beds over startled me. I put my hand over Ester’s mouth and waited. The cough continued a few more times and then quieted down into deep-sleep breathing. “Come closer,” I told Ester.

  “Apparently the Nazis made the poor Jews living in that ghetto an example of what they do to resisters. That’s all you need to hear.” She motioned to give me a good night hug and kiss.

  “Ester, please, tell me.” I held my breath.

  Ester sorrowfully shook her head.

  “Please.” I squeezed hold of her hand.

  She let out a deep sigh and put her lips back to my ear. “Jacob and a few others somehow managed to escape, go into hiding, and join up with the another resistance movement. But, by then, it was too late. Many died. Too many perished,” she sniffed.

  Much later, I learned that the Warsaw uprising was the final effort of an organized Jewish resistance taking place. The single largest revolt by Jews during World War II resulted in 13,000 Jewish deaths—many burnt alive or suffocated.

  People in my life had always wanted to protect me from ugly truths: Papa, Max, and now Ester. For me, not knowing was worse than knowing. I didn’t need to be protected as much as I needed to be informed. I wanted to know what was happening in and out of the camp. In some small way, knowing made me feel as if I still belonged to the world that existed outside of Auschwitz.

  The rumor mills were buzzing with contradictory stories. “Germany is stronger than ever!” “Germany is about to be crushed!” Without seeing any variation in my daily life, I began to doubt the news of our imminent freedom. Hope is a dangerous emotion when life is nothing but ambiguity. To avoid becoming depressed, I focused on my sewing.

  As new families arrived, I continued to witness the deception. From the sign on the gate promising salvation to those who worked hard, to the enticement of a “shower” for hygiene, on went the lethal lies. As the year progressed, the gas “shower” chambers were operating day and night. The relentless smoke spewing sacred ashes of the dead descending on the camp like a fog that never lifted. It sickened me to feel like I was breathing in dead people. And with every breath I prayed for their souls. I prayed for mine. For Ester’s. For Shana’s. And I prayed that the cruelty would end.

  But the cruelty didn’t end. New arrivals, exhausted from days of travel, quickly learned that to sit down meant to be shot. To not obey an order was a death sentence. And so they arrived at the barracks shaken and shocked. I, along with Ester and the other kindhearted prisoners, tried to offer whatever support we could: a listening ear, a warm hand, a gentle hug, or perhaps encouragement like, “You may find your family and be reunited. Don’t give up hope.”

  In that cataclysmic camp of doom, surrounded by many layers of barbed-wire fence, we continued to march to morning roll call, to march to eat, to march to work, to march to evening roll call. We marched by the fallen and dead, and we marched back to the barracks. The nighttime continued to bring respite and signs of life: the gentle comforts of lullabies and old folk songs, the light tiptoe dancing, whispered jokes and storytelling, sweet conversations, and risky lovemaking. Each night before I went to sleep, Ester hugged me and kissed me on the forehead, and then I prayed I’d live to find my sister. The benediction of those moments kept me going another day. And the determination to survive that I saw in the eyes of other prisoners inspired me. I resolved not to give up hope, no matter what.

  It was that resolve that had helped me when the vilest of men arrived at the camp, Dr. Joseph Mengele. The minute I saw that cold, calculating, evil face, my heart constricted. When he smiled, no, sneered, a gap between his two front teeth made him look simultaneously diabolical and idiotic. And he constantly smiled when working with his favorite test subjects: children. How could a human being who conducted agonizing clinical experiments on live children smile all the time? To this day, I have nightmares about the research he did on infants and children. I had seen children playing in the “nice play-yard” Mengele constructed for them. Ester told me that these children were his experimental subjects. “Out he’d come with sweets for them. They would be so happy! The next minute, a lethal injection, beating, shooting, or selection for deadly research.” Ester didn’t cry often, but she sobbed when she said, “What he did to those poor youngsters…His evil, uncaring eyes made me shiver.” That was the only night that our conversation ended with my dry heaving. I moved even that conversation into the archives of my mind, where I locked up all of my painful memories—neither gone or forgotten, just apparitions that haunt me still when I allow myself to be vulnerable to them.

  So life continued as 1944 moved into autumn. I sewed and worked hard at remaining alive and sane. I was lucky that I hadn’t made any mistakes to compromise my life. As the rumors intensified that the Allies’ breath moved closer and closer to Auschwitz’s gate, the prisoners’ routines continued. In hopeful moments, I envisioned the victors at our door. What would they think when they came upon living skeletons, some who were despondent and some who were unhinged? Would they understand that the Nazis treated us like animals, not humans? Would they comprehend the atrocities that occurred at Auschwitz, that the entire purpose of the camp was for extermination?

  Would the world find out that we labored twelve hours a day, took brief periods for small meals of rotten food, and spent the rest of the time in roll call lines and in our barracks surrounded by filth, vermin, insects, and lice? We bore the scars of their unthinkable acts of indecency and immorality on human rights. We were brought to our knees as they humiliated us for their entertainment. Would the world learn of the Nazi machine’s barbarity?

  Some like to believe there were lessons to be learned from this moment in history; I disagree. I came to realize that life is a game of chance that you enter. It is up to you to determine how you react to the events that chance presents to you. It is up to you to proceed at your own risk. Is there a God guiding any part of the journey? I don’t know. I made it out alive, but what of the millions of innocent souls who didn’t? Where was God for those unfortunate victims?

  Soon, I wouldn’t have to wonder about what the world would think of Auschwitz and the people—dead, alive, and in between—that they found there.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  In mid-January 1945, a huge commotion broke out in
the camp. Thousands of detainees were rounded up by the SS and forced to proceed west from Auschwitz on foot. Before the marches, thousands of others were liquidated. Countless rows of prisoners were lined up, shot, and left in open graves. A few, pretending to be dead, hid among the fallen bodies. The sickening bang of each bullet riveted my body. I stood beside Ester in abject terror, biting my lower lip and barely breathing until the SS passed us by. I had no idea why we had been spared. Letting out a breath and still scared to death, I mumbled to Ester, “Do you know what’s happening?”

  With a trembling hand, she wiped the sweat beading on her forehead. “I think it may have something to do with the gas chambers not working. But I’m not sure.”

  “The gas chambers aren’t working? Why not?” I couldn’t believe I was asking that question.

  Ester ran her hand over her head. “Last year. Remember? The crematoriums were dismantled. Don’t bother asking why. I don’t know.” She took my hand and squeezed it.

  Remembering when they demolished the buildings where they incinerated bodies, a chill ran down my spine. Instead of gassing and burning the poor victims, the SS was now shooting them by graves. What’s going on? I wondered about the reason for the extensive exodus and why so many able-bodied workers were being killed. But all I could do was watch and wait because Ester’s information only went so far.

  That Ester and I were not among those to be escorted out the gate of hell proved to be fortuitous. I later heard about those who were decamped. If anyone lagged behind in the line or could not continue, they were shot. Prisoners suffered in the cold winter weather without any protection from the elements, many dying from exposure and starvation. It’s estimated that more than 15,000 perished on those marches.

  When the last of the groups marching out were gone, the camp quieted. There were still several thousand prisoners and some guards left behind, but thousands upon thousands had exited. Just when we thought the chaos was ebbing, complete disorder and confusion erupted. Flammable liquid was poured over the bodies in the graves and over buildings: the gas chambers, officer quarters, medical buildings, and the research buildings. Lit torches set the bodies and buildings on fire. I heard a loud explosion. I assumed that a gas leak caused the explosion. The SS scampered around frantically, either shooting anyone in sight or throwing papers onto the burning pyres in the death pits.