“Frau, you can’t be here,” a kapo reprimanded me, pushing me away with a nightstick.
“Please, I have a letter of safe passage. My husband is here, Johann the Gypsy.” My words came out with rapid-fire anxiety.
Then all the prisoners started yelling Johann’s name, the choruses running the length of the rows of workers. A second later, a man stepped away from the ranks. He looked to be at least fifty years old. He was wearing a plain violet-colored shirt and dark pants that hung loosely off his extremely thin frame.
“Helene!” the man yelled in an unmistakable voice. My knees buckled as I heard my name from his lips, and I began to weep.
We ran and caught each other in a long embrace. We hardly said a word. Two halves have no need for speech to become a whole again. There in front of them all we kissed unabashedly, the guards and kapos looking on in shock. We represented everyone’s life right then, the days when each of those men walked free in the world before becoming executioners, victims, ghosts.
“It’s the twins’ birthday today,” he said, our tearstained faces pressed against each other.
“Yes, yes, they’re all fine and miss you so much.”
“Good God, I thought I had lost you all forever,” he said between heaving sobs.
I held him tightly, feeling his pronounced ribs and sweaty skin. I could smell his essence. I took his face in my hands and concentrated all my energy on burning his image into my retinas. He was still beautiful to me despite being battered by life. His sunken cheeks, his face scraggly with intermittent shaving, the dimple in his chin, his bushy eyebrows, his gray-streaked dark hair brushed back—it was the beautiful face of the man I loved. In that moment I would have thrown it all away for him, even my own children. It was incomprehensible to any but a woman in love who had just found her long-lost beloved. When you find the one you love, everything inside is on fire. The half of you that was destroyed and abandoned fits together again, and pain and suffering become ghosts from the long-distant past. I wanted to touch his face, kiss his lips, be soothed by his long musician’s fingers: to be his wife, one flesh and one blood.
Those were the only minutes in Auschwitz that flew by. Inside the fence, time crept by with unnatural slowness, but the hands of the watch raced against one another there with Johann, compelled by Cronus’s eternal fear of Aphrodite.
The sun was setting. The shadows were growing longer. Our hands fought to stay entwined as I began to lean away, back toward the crematoriums.
“Will I see you again?” His question was that of a dreaming man to a vision. His eyes pulsed with pain, and I rushed to kiss him again. It was fleeing, like a breath of fresh wind in the desert, but it was enough to carry me back to the heavy burden destiny had assigned me: guarding the labyrinth and preparing the Minotaur his daily offerings of death and pain.
I did not want to lie. I let the silence answer his doubts. Our fingers brushed against each other one last time, and an electric shock jolted me from the tips of each digit. I walked backward as long as I could. The work group began to stumble toward Kanada, everyone hypnotized by what they had just witnessed. Love did not exist in Auschwitz, and if it ever managed to grow up among the putrid waste of the streets, it quickly withered under the camp’s scorching hatred.
As I walked blindly toward the second checkpoint, I felt like I had left my soul behind. I could not fight off the sensation of emptiness, dry and hollow inside. I tried to cheer myself up with fake hope, but I did not believe my own lies. I walked as briskly as I could down the road. I no longer feared the guards. Maternal instinct drove me, the need to get back to my pups and nestle them beside me. When I got to the Gypsy camp, I felt like I was once again entering the mouth of hell. I wanted to give up, throw in the towel. But I had to be strong. There were nearly a hundred children depending on me, not to mention my own sons and daughters and the women in my charge. One little error could destroy everything we had painstakingly built. Yet in that moment all I felt was a gaping emptiness.
The road through camp was empty since it was forbidden to go outside the barracks after sundown. The guards verified my pass, and ten minutes later I was at the nursery school. The three youngest were already in bed. My friend Ludwika interrogated me with her eyes but said nothing. I forced the pain away, got Blaz and Otis in bed, left the door cracked, and went to sit beside her.
“Did you see him?”
“Yes,” I answered, trying to swallow back my tears through the lump in my throat. “I was about to give up when he came back with his work group. It was just a few minutes, but I could touch him and kiss him.”
“I am so, so glad,” she said very seriously.
In a way, I was being selfish. All the prisoners here in Auschwitz had a sad story to tell and someone they loved, lost forever in the sky over Poland. Ludwika had her share of pain as well. Suddenly, she flinched and seemed to come out of some flash of memory. She grabbed my hand.
“Don’t give up. You’re doing something truly beautiful with these children. Ever since you came, a ray of hope has penetrated the camp. You may not realize it, but you’re an inspiration and a hope for all of us. Look what you’ve accomplished in just a few months”—she waved her hand around the nursery—“but this is only the beginning. The storm is still to come. The war isn’t going well for the Germans, and I don’t know how they’ll react when they realize they’re about to lose. I fear the worst, which is why it’s important to have people like you to lead the way.”
“I’m nobody, Ludwika. I’m just a poor mother trying to take care of her children,” I answered.
“No, Helene. God sent you here to guide us. We needed a breath of hope, and you showed up with your beautiful family. I’ve never known anyone as brave and determined as you.” She gave me a hug.
Sometimes we have to lose everything to find what is most important. When life robs us of what we thought we could not live without and leaves us standing naked before reality, the essential things that had always been invisible take on their true value.
“You make me feel proud again to belong to the human race, Helene Hannemann.”
Those words filled my lungs with the air I had lost in Kanada when I had to walk away from Johann.
“As long as I’m alive and have the strength, I will do everything possible to get them to treat us like human beings. It won’t be easy, but we’ll do our best not to ever lose our dignity,” I said.
My friend stood up with her chin raised. She had recovered some of the pride she had lost when she arrived at Auschwitz. I could see the fear receding from her eyes. That was the Nazis’ true weapon, domination by inflicting terror.
Months later, I remembered the words of that conversation. My friend had been right. The storm was approaching at the end of the summer, though for a while we thought it would pass and that our ship would not sink to the depths of the Nazi extermination camps.
THIRTEEN
OCTOBER 1943
AUSCHWITZ
As we had thought, things got slowly but steadily worse over the summer. It was now widely known that the Nazis were starting to lose the war. News of big losses on the Russian front trickled in slowly, as did news of Allied advances in Italy and the destruction of the greater part of the German air fleet. Since summer had begun to fade, German cities had been bombed regularly, and every day we heard bomber planes flying overhead. Things were not getting any better in Auschwitz. The guards were on edge because of the downturn in the war; and a new inspector, Konrad Morgen, had been sent from Berlin. After his arrival, even Dr. Mengele was more jittery.
We did not see Mengele around the Gypsy camp as much. He spent most of his time on the train platforms and in the hospital barracks, where he had taken most of the twins for his experiments. No one knew what he wanted with the poor creatures, though some people said his goal was to make German mothers more fertile so they could fill the earth with their offspring. For the Nazis, women were baby factories. The only thing they cared about w
as our fertility. We were supposed to produce strong, healthy children for the Reich, which would then take and throw them into the conflagration of the war. How many good boys had died for their leader on the Russian steppes or in the African deserts?
Mengele dreamed of supplying the machine of Nazi destruction with an endless supply of innocent creatures with clear blue eyes and straw-blonde hair. He had also seemed to lose interest in the nursery and school. Despite my repeated requests for the materials we needed for the children, he would only send a formal letter to the camp commandant, or he would just ignore me. We had become the broken toy, no longer holding any appeal for him.
I tried to face the problems with a positive attitude and not think much about the future.
Despite the widespread problems and general deterioration at the camp, a few weeks earlier, an older gentleman named Antonin Strnad had, with the guards’ permission, started a school for older boys. Blaz attended, balancing the classes with afternoon rehearsals for the Gypsy orchestra. The rest of the time he helped me in the nursery and with the younger children in the evening.
One Sunday my son was on edge. Some of the camp officers were coming that day to listen to our orchestra, and the players were keenly aware of how dangerous it could be if the Nazis were displeased with the performance. I intended to take advantage of the visit of the officers to beg them to provide the supplies we needed to take care of the children.
The camp commandant arrived with the other officers just before noon. We had had a week with no rain, but other prisoners told me that as soon as November began, the weather in Auschwitz would be brutal: relentless rain, snow, and cold that seeped into your bones.
The visiting party sat on chairs we had set up beside one of the first barracks at the camp. All the prisoners were edgy because of the visit, but after threats and blows from the kapos, they settled down. The younger prisoners sat while the older ones stood to listen to the concert.
When the music started to flow that chilly Sunday morning, for a few moments we all forgot about the difficult conditions of the last few weeks and allowed the ethereal notes to transport us far away. I closed my eyes for a few moments and disassociated from where I was. Light gently penetrated my closed eyelids, and I felt a momentary peace. The beautiful sounds seemed to have the same effect on both executioners and victims. Their evil did not negate the fact that they were also tormented souls. They had gone belly-up in the ocean of disdain and little by little drowned in their own cruelty.
When I opened my eyes again, it was to behold the beautiful picture of my son playing the violin with impressive skill. He was Johann from years ago: the same simple elegance and relaxed posture as if his feet did not rest on earthly ground. The violin sang sadly in his hands and dexterously drew out all the feelings we had been repressing for months.
Mengele was not far from me. The prisoners had brought seats for the medical staff as well, and each time I turned my head, I could see his enraptured face. In the few months I had known him, he had undergone a drastic change. It reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The protagonist sells his soul to the devil in exchange for retaining his youth and beauty, but though he remains externally attractive, over time he deteriorates internally, which is apparent in a picture he keeps locked up in his room. Eventually the picture shows the portrait of a monster.
I had never realized this before about Mengele, or had not been able to verbalize it. I was terrified of him. I recalled the morning not long ago when Zosia, one of Mengele’s assistants with his experiments, came to the school to pick up a set of twins. I walked her to the door, and as soon as we were outside she told the two girls to go up the road a bit. Then she put her hands to her face and broke down crying.
“I can’t do it anymore. If I had known what that madman does with the poor little things . . . Every day I wake up telling myself this will be the last time I have to assist him,” she cried. “The first thing I think about when I get up is throwing myself against the electric fence and ending it all, but I don’t have the courage.”
“It won’t be much longer, Zosia. The Allies will come soon and get us out of here,” I said, trying to comfort her.
“But until they get here, he’s still a monster; he’ll torture hundreds every week . . .”
Her words were perplexing, and they chilled me to the bone. There were plenty of rumors about what went on in the sauna and in barrack 14 of the hospital, which some called the Zoo, but hearing it firsthand from one of the doctor’s assistants made my heart skip a beat.
“Every day we carry out experiments on children of all ages. First we research and then do trials to try to change their eye color. So many have died from infections or have been left blind. Now we’re infecting the children with all sorts of diseases to kill them later and do autopsies. It’s horrible! I can’t do it anymore!”
I hugged her while the twins waited a short distance away. I looked at them. Elena and Josephine were two beautiful little Jewish girls who had been selected by the doctor shortly after their arrival. They usually slept in the orphans’ barrack, but I already knew that once children were officially requested by the doctor, they never returned to the nursery school or to the Gypsy camp at all. They stayed in the hospital barrack 14. At first Mengele only sent for twins sporadically, but since August, a steady stream of one or two pairs of twins per week had left our camp and never returned. The supply of new pairs of twins had dwindled since September, and every day I was terrified that the doctor would ask for my own children for his experiments.
My chest was hurting. I took a deep breath and hugged Zosia again, who recommenced her tears. I held her as she wept for a few minutes. Then she pulled herself together, dried her tears, and said she was much better. She went off holding each girl by the hand and swinging her arms with theirs, and I hated Mengele from the bottom of my heart. I hated him and all the Nazis there at the camp. They murdered our bodies but also corrupted our souls, stealing the most precious part of us, our very humanity.
When the concert was over, I approached the doctor. He was talking with other officers and pretended not to notice me. I stayed patiently by his side, determined to ask him to improve our situation in the nursery school. Yet I grew more nervous as the minutes passed. Finally, he turned, looked me up and down with his freezing eyes, and smiled softly.
“It seems you have something important to say, prisoner?”
“Yes, Herr Doktor,” I stuttered.
“I have received your reports and requests. I am doing what I can, but things have changed notably in the past few months. The bombings from the Marxists and Jews are getting worse.” He frowned. “Thousands of German children are homeless and practically starving. You don’t want us to stop feeding German mouths in order to fill the bellies of Jewish rats and lowly races?”
I knew it would be imprudent to answer that question, but rage was building from my stomach to my mouth. I took a deep breath, forced a calm into my voice, and said, “I understand. But we have no more milk, the rations are extremely scarce, and most of the children are getting sick. Half of them won’t make it through the winter.”
“Well, then that’s fewer mouths to feed. Don’t forget it: the strongest survive. It’s simply natural selection.” He was indifferent.
“They are locked up and have no chance of survival. This is not natural selection; it’s letting them die of starvation, exposure to the elements, and misery.” I had not controlled my growing fury.
“Watch your tone! Until now I’ve tolerated your impertinence because you’re a German woman of the Aryan race, but my patience has its limits. Remember that you have five mouths to feed. Worry about them, not all the Gypsies. What do you care what happens to the rest of them? What I receive from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute is barely enough for me to feed the children in barrack 14 at the hospital. I can’t maintain all the Gypsies at Birkenau; I’m not their father.”
He was losing his temper. As Mengele
spoke, he drew closer and closer to me, spluttering with rage. I pulled back, shaking with fear and anger. I had never seen him so upset. The rest of the officers turned to see what was going on. Mengele realized and calmed down immediately.
“This is not the place to discuss such a sensitive issue. I’ll see you in my office at five o’clock. Do be on time. I want to close this subject for good.” His tone was soft and his demeanor calm, but rage boiled underneath. Then he turned from me and flashed his smile at the rest of the officers, a completely different person again: the enchanting Josef, the quintessential conversation partner and bamboozler of women.
I took my children by the hand and started back toward the nursery barrack. I wanted to get as far away as possible from him. Zelma followed and caught up with me before we got to the barrack. She put her hand on my shoulder and, with a sad face, asked, “What did the doctor tell you?”
“He wants to see me later,” I answered shortly, not wanting to go into details.
“Five more children have died this week. At this pace we’ll lose half of them before January.” She winced at the thought.
“I know. I think about it every minute of every day. It tortures me. Like I said, I’ll do what I can to try to help the situation, but it won’t be easy.” Inside, though, I was working hard to convince myself to keep trying, to hold nothing back in attempting to convince Mengele that we were still worth keeping alive.
“I will pray for you. It’s not easy to make deals with the devil,” Zelma answered. Then she turned and walked away, her head down low.
While the orchestra dispersed, the prisoners returned to their daily routines of death and horror. In the last few months, nearly all the Gypsy families had lost at least one or two of their loved ones. The first victims had been the babies. Since we had been at the camp, over two hundred had been born, but only 20 percent survived past the first week. Then the young children started dying because of malnutrition and chronic diarrhea, which left most of them so weak that a light cold snuffed out their frail lives in a heartbeat. The adults had also started to disappear little by little. For the Nazis the increased deaths were a relief: fewer mouths to feed.
Auschwitz Lullaby Page 13