Auschwitz Lullaby

by Mario Escobar

  Auschwitz Lullaby

  © 2018 by Mario Escobar

  Mario Escobar, Canción de cuna de Auschwitz © 2015 by HarperCollins Español, Nashville, Tennessee.

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.

  Translated by Gretchen Abernathy.

  The English translation for the lullaby at the end of chapter 1: Good evening, good night, covered with roses and carnations all round, slip under the covers. / Tomorrow morning, if God wills, you will wake once again. / Tomorrow morning, if God wills, you will wake once again. / Good evening, good night, watched by angels who show you in your dreams the Christ-child’s tree. / Sleep now blissfully and sweetly, see paradise in your dreams. / Sleep now blissfully and sweetly, see paradise in your dreams.

  The epigraphs are from (1) Elie Wiesel, Romanian-born Jewish writer, survivor of Nazi concentration camps (in US News & World Report, October 27, 1986; quoted in Christian Volz, Six Ethics: A Rights-Based Approach to Establishing an Objective Common Morality [eBookIt.com, 2014], ebook, section “Essay 3: Social Justice”); (2) Miklós Nyiszli, Hungarian Jewish doctor; assistant to Dr. Mengele (in Fui asistente del Doctor Mengele: Recuerdos de un médico internado en Auschwitz [Osweicim: Frap-Books, 2011]; quotation in translation); and (3) Olga Lengyel, Hungarian doctor and Auschwitz survivor (in Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz [Chicago: Ziff-Davis, 1947], 212).

  Thomas Nelson titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

  Epub Edition May 2018 9780785219941

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Escobar, Mario, 1971- author.

  Title: Auschwitz lullaby / Mario Escobar.

  Other titles: Cancion de cuna de Auschwitz. English

  Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Thomas Nelson, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018008673 | ISBN 9780785219958 (trade paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Auschwitz (Concentration camp)--Fiction. | Romanies--Nazi

  persecution--Fiction. | Concentration camp inmates--Fiction. | World War,

  1939-1945--Prisoners and prisons--Fiction. | GSAFD: War stories |

  Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PQ6705.S618 C3613 2018 | DDC 863/.7--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008673

  Printed in the United States of America

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  To my beloved wife, Elisabeth, who visited

  Auschwitz with me and fell in love with this story.

  I want to spend the rest of my life with you.

  —

  To the more than twenty thousand ethnic Gypsies

  who were imprisoned and exterminated in Auschwitz

  and to the quarter million murdered in the forests

  and ditches of northern Europe and Russia.

  —

  To the Asociación de la Memoria del Genocidio

  Gitano (Association for Remembering the Gypsy

  Genocide), for their fight for truth and justice.

  The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death.

  —ELIE WIESEL

  An hour after leaving Kraków our convoy stopped at a large station. The sign gave the name of the place: Auschwitz. That doesn’t mean anything to us. We’d never heard of the place.

  —MIKLÓS NYISZLI

  One required an extraordinary moral force to teeter on the brink of the Nazi infamy and not plunge into the pit. Yet I saw many internees cling to their human dignity to the very end. The Nazis succeeded in degrading them physically, but they could not debase them morally.

  —OLGA LENGYEL

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Auschwitz Lullaby has been the hardest book of my entire professional career to write—but not because of any formal difficulties with the writing or quandaries about where the story was headed. What worried me was not being able to capture the greatness of Helene Hannemann’s soul within the lines of these pages.

  Human beings are momentary breaths in the midst of the hurricane of our circumstances, but the story of Helene reminds us that we can be the masters of our own destiny, even though the entire world is literally against us. I cannot say if this book has taught me to be a better person, but certainly to offer fewer excuses for my errors and weaknesses.

  When Larry Downs, my friend and publisher, heard Helene’s story, he said the world needed to know it. But that does not depend on us . . . It’s up to you, dear reader, and your love for truth and justice. Help me to tell the world the story of Helene Hannemann and her five children.

  Madrid, March 7, 2015

  (just over seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz)

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Epilogue

  Historical Clarifications

  Chronology of the Gypsy Camp at Auschwitz

  Glossary

  Discussion Questions

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  PROLOGUE

  MARCH 1956

  BUENOS AIRES

  I held my breath during the airplane’s steep ascent. I’d hardly even stepped outside the capital city the entire six years I’ve spent in Argentina. The thought of being cooped up in such a small space for so many hours made my chest hurt, but as the plane’s nose evened out, so did my breathing, and I calmed down.

  When the attractive blonde came up and asked if I wanted anything to drink, I told her tea would be fine. For a second I thought about having something stronger, for my nerves, but since my stay in Auschwitz, I had snubbed alcoholic beverages. It was a disgrace to see my colleagues drunk day in and day out, and Commandant Rudolf Höss barely batting an eye. It was true that in those final months of the war, desperation had overtaken many men. Some had lost their wives and children in the barbaric Allied air raids. Still, a German soldier—and even more so a member of the SS—should remain collected regardless of the circumstances.

  The stewardess carefully placed my hot tea on the tray table, and I flashed her a smile. She had perfect features. Her lips were just wide enough, her eyes a bright, intense blue, her cheeks small and rosy—the ideal Aryan face. Then I turned my eyes to my old black leather case. I had packed a couple of biology and genetics texts to make the trip go faster. I cannot explain why, but at the last minute I also decided to grab a couple of the old notebooks from the Zigeunerlager kindergarten in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Years before I had put them with my reports on genetic studies carried out in Auschwitz, but I had never gone back to read through them. The notebooks were the diaries of a German woman I met in Auschwitz, Helene Hannemann. Frau Hannemann and her family, and the war, were now part o
f a distant past I preferred not to dwell in, the years when I was a young SS officer and everyone knew me as Herr Doktor Mengele.

  I reached over and picked up the first notebook. The cover was completely faded, the corners were stained with dried splotches, and the paper had taken on that faded yellow color of old stories no one cares about anymore. Swallowing my first sip of tea, I slowly opened to the first page. The long, slanting hand of Helene Hannemann, the director of the Gypsy nursery school at Auschwitz, took me back to Birkenau, to section BIIe, where the Roma were housed. Mud, electric fences, and the sweet smell of death—that was Auschwitz for us, what it remained in our memories.

  ONE

  MAY 1943

  BERLIN

  It was still dark when I stumbled half-asleep out of bed. Though it was starting to get warm during the day, the mornings continued to be chilly enough to give me goose bumps. I slipped into my light satin robe and, without waking Johann, headed for the bathroom. Fortunately, our apartment still had hot water, and I could take a quick shower before going to wake the children. All of them but little Adalia had school that morning. I wiped the steam off the mirror with my hand and looked at myself for a few seconds, noting how the encroaching wrinkles seemed to make my blue eyes look smaller. I had bags under my eyes, but that was not surprising for a mother with five children under the age of twelve and who worked double shifts nursing to keep the family afloat. I toweled off my hair ’til it recovered its straw-blonde color, but I stopped to examine the gray streaks that were spreading upward from my temples. I got to work curling my hair, but that only lasted until I heard the twins, Emily and Ernest, calling me. I threw my clothes on and, still barefoot, hurried to the other bedroom.

  They were sitting up in bed chatting quietly when I entered the room. Their two older brothers remained curled up, grasping at the last few seconds of sleep. Adalia still slept with us, as the kids’ bed was too small for all five of them to squeeze in.

  “Less noise, sweeties. The others are still sleeping. I have to get breakfast ready,” I whispered. They beamed at me as if the simple sight of my face were enough to make their day.

  I pulled their clothes off the chair and placed them on the bed. The twins were already six years old and did not need my help getting dressed. The more people there are in a family, the more streamlined the systems have to be to help everyone get the simple tasks done as quickly and easily as possible.

  I went into our tiny kitchen and started heating things up. A few minutes later, the bitter scent of cheap coffee filled the room. That weak substitute of brown-tinted water was the only way to cover the tastelessness of our watered-down milk, though by now the older kids knew they were not drinking real milk. Every now and then with a bit of luck, we could get our hands on a few cans of powdered milk, but since the beginning of the year, rations had grown even scarcer as things got worse on the front.

  The children came racing to the kitchen, elbowing their way through the narrow hallway. They knew the bit of bread with butter and sugar that they were offered every morning would not linger long on the table.

  “Less noise, please, loves. Your father and Adalia are still in bed,” I scolded as they took their seats. Despite their hunger, they did not tear into the bread until I had handed around the mugs and we had prayed a short prayer of thanks for our food.

  Three seconds later the bread had disappeared and the children were downing their coffee before heading to the bathroom to brush their teeth. I took that moment to go to our room, get my shoes and coat, and put on my nurse’s hat. I knew that Johann was awake, but he always played possum until he heard the front door close. He was ashamed that I was the family’s breadwinner now, but everything had changed in Germany since the war began.

  Johann was a violin virtuoso. He had played for years in the Berlin Philharmonic, but since 1936, the restrictions against everyone who did not fit into the Nazi Party’s racial laws had grown much harsher. My husband was Romani, though most Germans used words like Gypsy or tzigane to describe people of his race. In April and May of 1940, practically his entire family had been deported to Poland. We had not heard anything from them in nearly three years. Fortunately, in the Nazis’ eyes I was a purebred; because of that, they had not bothered us since then. Even so, every time someone knocked on our door or the phone rang at night, my heart jumped involuntarily.

  When I got to the front door, the four older children were waiting with their coats buttoned, their school caps on, and their brown leather satchels at their feet. I looked them over, tied on their scarves, and dawdled at the part of the routine when I kissed their cheeks. Blaz, the oldest, sometimes pushed my effusive affection away, but Otis and the twins ate up those precious moments before we crossed the threshold to walk to school.

  “Come on, I don’t want you to be late. I’ve only got twenty minutes ’til my shift starts,” I said, opening the door.

  We had hardly made it onto the landing and flipped on the light when we heard the clop of boots noisily ascending the wooden stairs. A chill ran up my spine. I swallowed hard and tried to smile at the children, who had turned to look at me, sensing my unease. I gave a nonchalant wave of the hand to reassure them, and we started to go down. The children dared not leave my side. Typically I had to keep them from dashing headlong down the stairs, but the approaching footsteps quelled their energy. They crept along behind me, as if my lightweight green jacket might conceal and protect them.

  By the time we got to the second-floor landing, the sound of the boots filled up the entire stairwell. Blaz leaned over the rail to get a look and one second later turned back to give me the look that only an older brother can give to communicate what he knows without upsetting the younger ones.

  My heart starting racing then. I could not breathe, but I kept going down the stairs hoping that once again misfortune would simply pass me by. I did not want to believe that suffering had chosen me that time.

  The policemen ran into us right in the middle of the second flight of stairs. The agents were young, dressed in dark-green uniforms with leather belts and gold buttons. They stopped directly in front of us. For a silent moment my children looked in awe at their pointed helmets with the golden eagle, but then they dropped their eyes to the level of their shiny boots. A sergeant stepped forward, panting a bit, looked us over, and then began to speak. His long Prussian-style mustache shook with his politely threatening words.

  “Frau Hannemann, I’m afraid you’ll need to return to your apartment with us.”

  I looked straight into his eyes before answering. The cold reply of his green pupils pierced me with fear, but I tried to remain calm and smile.

  “Sergeant, I’m afraid I don’t understand what’s going on. I need to take my children to school and then get to work. Is anything the matter?”

  “Frau Hannemann, I would prefer that we speak in your apartment,” he answered, forcefully taking my arm.

  His movement startled the children, though he had intended to be subtle. For years we had witnessed the violence and aggression of the Nazis, but this was the first time I felt actually threatened personally. I had hoped for so long they would simply fail to notice us. The best way to survive in the new Germany was to be invisible.

  The door of some neighbors, the Wegeners, opened ever so slightly, and through the crack I glimpsed a pale, wrinkle-creased face. She gave me an anguished look, then opened the door all the way.

  “Herr Polizei, my neighbor Frau Hannemann is a wonderful wife and mother. She and her family are the model of politeness and goodness. I hope no ill-intentioned person has defamed them,” Frau Wegener said.

  That act of bravery brought tears to my eyes. No one risked public exposure in front of the authorities in the middle of the war. I looked into my neighbor’s cataract-clouded eyes and squeezed her shoulder gratefully.

  “We are only following orders. We simply want to speak with your neighbor. Please, go inside and let us do our job in peace,” the sergeant said, gra
bbing the doorknob and slamming the door shut.

  The children jumped, and Emily began to cry. I seized the moment to pick her up and press her against my chest. The only words that managed to cut through the grief and solidify in my brain were, “I won’t let anyone hurt you, children.”

  A few seconds later, we were standing in front of our apartment. I fished for the key in my purse stuffed with crackers, tissues, papers, and makeup, but one of the policemen pushed me aside and rapped hard on the door with his fist.

  The sound echoed down the stairs. It was still quite early, and the city had not yet emerged from the silence of the night. People were just beginning their morning routines, trying to hide in a normalcy that had ceased to exist a long time ago.

  We heard hurried steps, and then the door opened, casting light onto the landing. Johann’s mess of dark, curly hair partly covered his eyes, giving him a distinctly disheveled appearance. He looked first at the police, then at us. Our eyes silently pleaded with him to somehow protect us, but all he could do was push the door open all the way and let us in.

  “Johann Hanstein?” the sergeant asked.

  “Yes, Herr Polizei,” my husband answered with a trembling voice.

  “By order of the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, all Sinti and Roma of the Reich must be interned in special camps,” the sergeant recited. Surely he had repeated this speech dozens of times in recent days.

  “But . . . ,” my husband started. His big black eyes seemed to devour the eternal instant before the policeman made a sign and his colleagues surrounded my husband and held his arms.

  I placed my hand on the sergeant’s shoulder. “No, please. You’ll terrify the children.”

  I could sense a slight heaviness in his gaze for a few seconds. Ideas never manage to completely suffocate feeling. A German woman who might be his sister or cousin was talking to him, not a dangerous criminal intent on deceiving him.

  “Please allow my husband to get dressed. I’ll take the children into another room,” I pleaded with him softly, trying to alleviate the violent situation.