The secretary stopped a few yards away from me. She shook her head and did not come up the barrack stairs. She started crying and covered her mouth with her dark hand, trying to hold back the sob that ruptured the afternoon’s calm.
“How long do we have left?” I asked serenely, as if the only thing that mattered at that moment was the schedule.
“They’ll be here in two hours.”
“Thank you. Thank you for everything,” I said.
She turned and slowly walked back up the road. I went into the room and played with the children for the next two hours. We were waiting for the SS to burst in at any minute but, to my surprise, heaven granted us a little longer.
I wrote in my journal for a while and then left it on the table. I cleared my throat to tell the children what was about to happen, but then there was a knock at the door.
Dr. Mengele entered, dressed in a long black leather coat. He greeted us politely and asked if he could see me alone. I sent the children to our room at the back, and he and I sat at one of the tables as two old friends might do, yet this was not friendship.
He was quiet for a long moment and then put a piece of paper on the table.
“What is this document?” I asked, curious.
“It’s a letter of safe passage. You yourself are not a prisoner of the Third Reich. With this letter, you can return to your home,” he said seriously, his face darkened.
“We can go home?” I asked. I was more confused than happy.
“No, you yourself may go home. Your children must stay.” He stated the facts tersely.
“My family is here. I can’t leave without them. I’m a mother, Herr Doktor. You all wage your wars for grand ideals, you defend your fanatical beliefs about liberty, country, and race, but mothers have only one homeland, one ideal, one race: our family. I will go with my children wherever fate takes them.”
Mengele stood and nervously smoothed down his hair. My words had unsettled him somehow. I was not the model of the Aryan woman he had in his mind.
“They will all be killed tonight in the gas chambers. They’ll become part of a mangled mass of bodies; their corpses will be devoured by the flames and turned into ash. But you can go on with your life. You’ll have other children and be able to give them what you couldn’t give these. You’ve thrown your life away. Look at yourself; you’re a ghost of who you were. You’re nothing but skin and bones.”
I smiled. At that moment I realized I had always been superior to him and all the assassins who ruled that inferno. They were capable of snuffing out the lives of tens of thousands of people within seconds, but they could not create life. One good mother was worth more than the entire murderous machine of the Nazi regime.
I took my hand off the paper. For a moment I thought about throwing myself at his feet to beg for the lives of my children, but I stayed quiet with an inexplicable internal peace. Mengele retrieved the paper from the table and tucked it into his jacket pocket, and something that was no longer disdain yet not quite respect flashed in his eyes.
“Frau Hannemann, I do not understand what you are doing. This act of individualism is deplorable. You are putting personal sentiment above the good of your people. The National Socialist Party has attempted to do exactly the opposite. We are a national body in which the individual himself is unimportant. I hope you are sure of your decision. There is no going back.”
The officer turned to leave. The children crept out once they heard I was alone again. They all hugged me at once. We were one united mass with six hearts beating in unison.
“They’re going to take us somewhere better,” I told them with a knot in my throat. Perhaps it was a lie, but I did actually believe my words.
The thought of death that day sounded sweetly of eternity. Within a few hours, we would be free forever.
The little ones soon went back to their games, but Blaz stayed beside me.
“Honey, I think you should make a run for it. We’ve got maybe fifteen minutes left. I’ve packed you the food I was saving for an emergency, and a bit of money. Don’t ask me how I got it. I’ve heard people say that outside the camp, the Polish resistance helps prisoners who manage to escape.”
“But I can’t leave you,” Blaz said, bewildered.
“Go give your brothers and sisters a kiss. They’ll live through you. Your eyes will be their eyes, your hands their hands. Our family won’t be wiped off the face of the earth completely.”
Blaz started to cry. He hugged me, and I soaked in the warmth of his body for the last time. He said good-bye to his siblings, who hugged him indifferently and returned to their games, unaware of what that hug meant. His eyes drank them in, memorizing their skinny faces. With its voracious appetite, time always devours the memories and faces of those we love. Memory fights to hold on to them through the strength of tears and the painful sigh of love.
I put his hat firmly on him and walked him to the door. I cinched his bundle and wiped his face with a handkerchief. Then I gave him one last kiss before he headed toward the sauna. When he disappeared between the barracks, I heard a siren. My stomach tightened, and I held my breath. There was an eerie silence all over the camp, then the sound of motors and barking dogs broke in. I went back inside our barrack. My children were still playing. I sat down with them and started cutting out papers as the world disappeared at our feet, shrouded in fire and ash. I remembered Johann’s smiling face and wanted to believe he would survive the destruction, that one day he would find Blaz and together they would rebuild the ruined edifice of our existence.
In those final moments, I thought of the smell of real coffee in our apartment and the minutes before breakfast when everyone was asleep under the shadow of my wings. “Blessed daily life, may nothing break you, nothing wound you, nothing deny your beauty and the sweet strokes you paint in our souls,” I wrote in my journal before closing its covers for good.
EPILOGUE
I did not want to remember. It is true that the camaraderie of those years and the broken dreams of our ideals were always flashing up before me, but I wanted that past to stay in a hazy cloud that covered over everything.
I tossed the school notebook onto the seat beside me and closed my eyes, trying to steady my breathing. The reading had taken a toll on me, like hiking too quickly up a steep mountain. I had spent the entire transatlantic flight reading, and I was tired but also overwhelmed by the distinct memories of Helene Hannemann. Images assaulted my eyes like a raging, vindictive whip. I can still see her being led away by the soldiers that night, August 2, 1944. The Gypsy camp was a madhouse of shouting and pleas, but she remained calm, like she was simply taking her children out for an afternoon at the park. My men had to offer bread and sausages to the Gypsies to convince them we were taking them to another camp, but Helene simply took the food and, after helping her children climb into the trucks, told them to eat slowly the final morsels of their lives.
I did not want to get too close. I could not explain it, but her courage had an effect on me. It filled me with doubts, made me question my creed. I watched her from afar. She was in the back of the truck. When the vehicle started to move, Helene hugged the youngest ones to her. The other prisoners wailed and carried on, beating their breasts in terror of the gas chambers, but she started singing a lullaby. Her voice wrapped around those wretched creatures and rocked them calmly. By the time the truck reached the gates and turned toward the crematorium, the shouting had quieted down, and the wailing ceded to the profound silence of death.
I stayed with the soldiers to search the barracks. We routed out a few Gypsies trying to hide from their fate, but the voice of Helene Hannemann kept humming the old lullaby in my head. Her words fluttered up with the ashes of her existence when I left the Gypsy camp that night, never to return. So much courage, so much love in the midst of the most absolute darkness: it blinded me for a moment. But I understood then that the fate of men is a mystery in the mind of the gods, and we ourselves were gods, though our twilight
was drawing to an end.
HISTORICAL CLARIFICATIONS
The story of Helene Hannemann and her five children is completely true. Helene was a German woman married to a Gypsy man. In May 1943, she and her family were sent to Auschwitz and held in the Gypsy camp at Birkenau. After Dr. Josef Mengele’s arrival to Auschwitz, Helene was chosen to open and direct the camp’s Kindergarten, a children’s nursery school. She was a nurse, and Mengele chose her because he thought a German would do a better job than anyone else. Helene had several female Gypsy helpers, two female Polish nurses, and a Czech nurse named Vera Luke.
The nursery and school were housed in two barracks, which were stocked with school materials, a film projector, and even a swing set. Mengele employed the nursery school as a holding pen for the children he would later use as guinea pigs for his experiments.
From the evening of August 2 until the morning of August 3, 1944, the Gypsy camp was exterminated. Despite Mengele’s promises, Helene Hannemann and her five children were murdered in the gas chambers. She was given the option to leave alone, but she refused to abandon her children. In the novel, Blaz has a chance of surviving so that the reader is left with at least a speck of hope, but the reality is that all five children died that night.
I have changed the names of the children and of Helene’s husband, but I have kept the true names of the majority of the real-life characters who lived and suffered in the Gypsy camp at Auschwitz.
Ludwika Wierzbicka, Helene’s nurse friend, was a real prisoner who worked in the Gypsy hospital. The entire medical team mentioned in this book was real.
Elisabeth Guttenberger, the camp secretary, was a real person who managed to survive both the Gypsy massacre and World War II.
In the profiles of the female Nazi guards Irma Grese and Maria Mandel, I have attempted to stay as close to historical reality as possible. It was rumored that Irma Grese, a very beautiful and very cruel young woman, was Dr. Mengele’s lover who miscarried a child of his while at the camp. Maria Mandel, one of the cruelest guards, took a liking to a Gypsy child, as narrated in this book, but had to hand him over to die. Both Grese and Mandel were executed by hanging after being found guilty of war crimes.
Dinah Gottliebova (later, Dinah Babbitt) was also a real person. Mengele had the young Jewish Czech artist paint portraits of Gypsy prisoners.
The Gypsy camp nursery school at Auschwitz really did exist and was open from May 1943 through August 1944.
According to the official register, 20,943 ethnic Gypsies were imprisoned at Auschwitz, though many thousands more were murdered upon arrival to the camp, with no count or trace of their presence; and an estimated 371 Gypsy children were born at the camp. However, Auschwitz investigator Michael Zimmermann claims that there were really 22,600 prisoners at the camp, 3,300 of whom survived when they were transferred to other camps around the middle of 1944. The Gypsies came mainly from Germany, the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and Poland, though there were some from other locations as well.
The two attempts to exterminate the camp were real events, as was the Gypsy resistance in May 1944, which delayed the camp’s elimination until August of that year.
Himmler did not visit Auschwitz in the spring of 1943. The last time he was at the extermination camp was in the summer of 1942.
Josef Mengele was transferred to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp on January 17, 1945. He took with him two boxes of documents, while the rest of his research was destroyed by the SS before the imminent arrival of the Russians to the camp. Mengele escaped on February 18, slipping among the thousands of soldiers captured by the Allies. Under the false identity of Fritz Hollman, he escaped through Genoa to Argentina. Despite the high price placed on his head, Mengele was never captured, and he drowned, presumably while swimming, in Brazil on February 7, 1979.
In February 2010, a grandchild of a Holocaust victim purchased Mengele’s diary. In 2011, thirty-one more volumes of his diaries were sold, acquired by an anonymous collector.
We do not know if Helene Hannemann wrote a diary, but we believe it would have been something like the first-person testimony of the protagonist telling her story in this book.
In 1956, Dr. Mengele traveled to Switzerland to see his son. It is believed to be the last time he set foot on European soil.
CHRONOLOGY OF THE GYPSY CAMP AT AUSCHWITZ
1942
December 16. Heinrich Himmler, Reich Leader of the SS, signs the decree to incarcerate the Gypsies in Nazi-occupied territory and to create a Gypsy camp at Auschwitz.
1943
February 1. The Gypsy camp at Auschwitz officially opens, though there were Gypsies already incarcerated for common crimes.
February 26. The first Gypsies arrive at the extermination camp.
March. Twenty-three transports with 11,339 ethnic Gypsies arrive.
March 23. Some 1,700 men, women, and children are exterminated after arriving at Auschwitz to control the spread of typhus.
April. Another 2,677 ethnic Gypsies arrive.
May. Dr. Josef Mengele arrives at Auschwitz as the medical attendant to the Gypsy camp.
May. Another 2,014 prisoners arrive to the Gypsy camp. The Gypsy camp nursery school is established.
May 25. Mengele orders the assassination of 507 men and 528 women to avoid a new typhus epidemic.
1944
April 15. Some 884 men and 437 women are transferred to Buchenwald and Ravensbrück.
May 16. The Gypsy camp prisoners resist their extermination so strongly that the attempt to eliminate them is halted.
May 23. Another 1,500 prisoners are transferred to other camps.
July 21. The last Gypsies arrive at the Gypsy camp.
August 2. Some 1,408 prisoners are sent to other camps. The rest, 1,897 men, women, and children, are murdered in the Birkenau gas chamber.
November 9. A hundred new Gypsy prisoners are transferred to the concentration camp in Natzweiler for typhus-related experiments.
1945
January 27. The Soviets liberate the remaining 7,600 prisoners held at Auschwitz.
1947
The first Auschwitz trial, in Kraków, Poland. Around forty former SS officers and soldiers are condemned and some are hanged.
1963
The second Auschwitz trial, in Frankfurt. Twenty-two Nazis are tried and seventeen are condemned.
GLOSSARY
Arbeit macht frei: Work sets you free.
baxt: luck
Beng: devil
Blockführer: block supervisor
Gadje: non-Roma, non-Gypsy
Guten Morgen: Good morning.
Kindergarten: nursery, school, and childcare center
Knirps: little boy
Obersturmführer: senior assault leader
Sonderkommandos: groups of Jewish male prisoners who were forced to dispose of corpses from gas chambers or crematoriums
Zigeunerlager: name by which the Gypsy family camp was known
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1.Helene faces many difficult decisions, beginning with the choice to accompany her family as they’re being led away by the police. What, if any, different choices would you have made?
2.When she agrees to go with the police, do you think that Helene has any inkling of what lies before her and her family?
3.The conditions at Auschwitz were almost too terrible to comprehend. As you reflect upon the horrors experienced by the prisoners, discuss the ways in which the physical torments of the camp impacted the inmates’ minds as well.
4.Why do you think Dr. Mengele wants to establish the nursery school? What is its purpose for him?
5.Why do you think Helene agrees to manage the kindergarten? What are her reservations, and are they valid?
6.Describe some of Helene’s bravest moments. Would you have been able to muster the courage and strength to do some of the things she does?
7.Name a moment or a scene that is either heartbreaking or heartwarming. Why is that moment significan
t to you?
8.How does one maintain dignity in the face of inhumane oppression? What is the value of struggling against those forces, even when all seems lost?
9.In a place like Auschwitz, what is the value of hope?
10.What would you say is Helene’s legacy? Was her battle worth fighting? Why or why not?
11.What does this story tell you about the power of love? The power of sacrifice?
12.The author based this novel upon a real woman who lived and died at Auschwitz. How does the truth of this story change the way you read and experience it?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The memory of Helene Hannemann and her family will remain forever in the pages of this book but even more so in the minds and hearts of those who read it. When none of those mentioned below remain, still many will know the immense value of this great woman and mother.
I want to express my gratitude to the Museum of Auschwitz, which allowed us a guided tour to visit and discover both Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
My gratitude also goes to the following: to the written testimony of Miklós Nyiszli, assistant to Mengele. To the work of Sławomir Kapralski, Maria Martyniak, and Joanna Talewicz-Kwiatkowska about the Gypsies in Auschwitz, Roma in Auschwitz (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2011). To the testimony of the executioner and commandant at Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, who wrote a disgraceful book to clear his conscience, which nonetheless provides us with valuable details. To Mengele’s biographers, Gerald L. Posner and John Ware. To the testimony of the Gypsy survivor Otto Rosenberg. To the heartbreaking account of Dr. Olga Lengyel, and to the journalist Laurence Rees for his book Auschwitz: The Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’ (London: BBC Books, 2005).
To Miguel Palacios Carbonell, distinguished member of the Spanish Gypsy community, who told me the beautiful story of Helene Hannemann and her family.
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