I Have Lived a Thousand Years

by Livia Bitton-Jackson

  “We have no luggage, Herr Offizier,” the interpreter says softly. “We have nothing.”

  “Tell him, our valets are bringing our luggage on another train.” The wisecrack in Hungarian is greeted by a general cackle. Hungarian is the language of all five hundred of us.

  Wisecracks begin to fly.

  “My luggage is being sent special delivery.”

  “Oh, I forgot my golf clubs in Auschwitz!”

  Laughter is breaking up the lines.

  “You have no luggage at all? No personal belongings? How can that be?” The officer is incredulous.

  “No,” the interpreter says, then, her tone lowered, she repeats, “We have nothing.”

  We march through clean provincial streets. Houses, neat little gardens, cobblestoned sidewalks. People are gawking at us from windows. The few passersby on the street turn to look at us in astonishment.

  Houses. People. Streetcars. My God, life still goes on. Despite Auschwitz. Despite gas chambers.

  Mommy drags her feet. She is unable to keep up with the pace of the march. A short, blonde woman officer approaches her. “What is your name?” she asks timidly.

  “My name?” Mommy begins to stammer. “A-17361.”

  “But that’s a number. What is your name?”

  “You want my name?”

  “Yes. What’s your name?”

  “Laura Friedmann.”

  “Frau Friedmann, can you walk a little faster?” Mrs. Friedmann? She actually called Mommy by her name, and with a title—Frau? Mrs.? Am I dreaming?

  “No. I’m unable to walk faster. Even this is great effort. I received an injury in Auschwitz. I’m partially paralyzed.”

  I hope it’s safe to say all this to a German officer, even though she is obviously not an SS. Neither are the others. They wear the uniform of the Wehrmacht, the official German army.

  “Do not worry,” the German officer replies. “Here you will get better. We will take good care of you.”

  I am surely dreaming.

  At the terminal we are loaded on streetcars that are reserved for us and driven through busy city traffic to the industrial section. Here we disembark at the gate of a factory complex with large black lettering: MICHELWERKE.

  Michelwerke is a factory complex manufacturing parts for the Luftwaffe, the German air force. In order to boost production, the plant had requested five hundred female prison workers from a concentration camp. And here we are.

  Our living quarters are in one of the factory buildings. First we are led to the showers in the basement. There are real metal showerheads here, not just holes in the ceiling. There are wooden mats on the floor, and taps marked “warm” and “cold.” We are handed a clean towel each! And soap. One piece of soap to every one of us! Towels and soap!

  “Girls, my soap is perfumed!”

  “Mine, too!”

  “Girls, this is a dream!”

  “We’ve landed in paradise.”

  “This cannot be true. We are making it all up …”

  You yourself turn on the water. Warm water comes from the tap marked “warm.” And you turn it off when you’re through. At your leisure. It does not start and stop by an unseen arbitrary hand. In this shower you are your own master. And the towel. It’s clean and soft.

  As we get out of the showers, a secret spark of self-esteem is nurtured deep within. It’s a divine message. A promise of redemption. A message of faith. Of hope.

  We sit around long tables in the yard and are served warm soup. The soup is golden yellow with long, yellow noodles in white, clean porcelain bowls. Real food in real dishes.

  Several girls begin to weep. They weep silently, and their tears trickle into the bowls of steaming soup. They weep and the warm liquid soothes their parched, eager lips. Their aching souls.

  After soup, there is more. A second course. It’s dumplings with sauerkraut. Their flavor surpasses anything I’ve ever eaten.

  But it does not satiate my appetite. My craving for more and more food is intensified. When the meal is over, my stomach still smarts with hunger. But my soul soars to heaven.

  Mommy shares my yearning for a quantity of food. But she also shares my joy in the quality of the food.

  After dinner, our new masters escort us to our living quarters on the sixth floor. We receive three large rooms, airy and light, with individual, double-tiered bunk beds. On each bed there is a straw sack covered with a sheet. A clean, white sheet!

  This must be heaven.

  What will tomorrow bring?

  HERR ZERKÜBEL

  AUGSBURG, SEPTEMBER 1944

  Here we are, a singular workforce—five hundred young women, most in their twenties, new arrivals from Auschwitz. We are concentration-camp inmates—starved, bruised, brutalized.

  The reception in Augsburg left us breathless with its hints of humanity, with its promise of hope.

  We are lined up in the factory yard, to be sorted out for our work assignments. A white-coated, heavyset man with short-cropped, flaming red hair approaches us. His eyes are as blue as ice and just as cold; his face is a frozen mask of unsmiling gravity. He is Herr Zerkübel, the director of the factory division, the lord and master of our new world. In a tone barely audible yet unerring in its force, he commands us to step out of line, one by one, and proceeds to inspect us. He subjects each one individually to a most curious scrutiny, peering deep into eyes, measuring the distance between eyes, eyebrows and cheekbones, and the height and width of foreheads with a small pocket ruler. I can barely control my shivering.

  Tall, blonde, fair-skinned girls with blue or green eyes are commanded to step aside. There are eight of us.

  Now Herr Zerkübel adds somewhat shorter girls with blonde hair, blue or green eyes, and fair skin. He needs thirty-five in this group, he says. Finally, he adds redheads, and even girls with light brown hair. But all have light eyes and fair skin.

  This is a select group for Montage. Work in Montage requires superior intelligence, he explains. Herr Zerkübel determines superior intellect by the colors of hair, skin, and eyes. The colors of the Aryan race.

  The next category consists of girls with brown hair and eyes, but fair skin. They are assigned less-complex, more-routine metalwork, in the Dreherei. The black-haired, dark-eyed women, among them a noted physicist, a doctor, and a college professor, are assigned the most primitive task of polishing metal parts in the Lackiererei.

  Herr Zerkübel departs with a barely perceptible nod of his head in the direction of our military masters, and they escort us to our living quarters. Now the rooms are reassigned, according to rank. The Montage girls receive the brightest of the three rooms. With beds quite far apart, our room has an air of spaciousness, while the other two are somewhat crowded, and somewhat darker. Although she is assigned to the Putzkommando, Mommy is allowed to join me in the Montage quarters. We occupy two adjacent bunks on the lowest tier.

  The next day we are roused at dawn for Zählappell and breakfast—black coffee and a piece of brown bread. The lineup for work takes place in three groups, Montage, Dreherei, and Lackiererei.

  Just as the lady officer had promised, in Augsburg Mother is recuperating. Her task of cleaning floors and windows is designed to help her recover. As no one supervises her, she gets a chance to rest. Rest is her only cure. Although she receives no other medical treatment, her condition begins to improve. Gradually she starts to regain the use of her right hand. Her left hand, however, remains partially paralyzed. Her walk also begins to improve. Little by little she recovers her sense of balance and begins to locomote unaided. Slowly, very slowly, she starts to actually carry out her tasks in the Putzkommando, to clean windows and wash floors.

  Her posture remains permanently altered. Her head is bent forward almost as sharply as when the accident occurred. And her walk is slow, deliberate, and uneven. But we are free of the imminent threat of the gas chamber.

  Herr Zerkübel is the supreme lord of Montage. At ten o’clock every morning, like c
lockwork, he emerges from his glass enclosure in the center of Montage. Like Zeus’ descent from Mount Olympus, Herr Zerkübel’s approach with measured steps and erect posture, his silent scrutiny of our every move, inspires awe. Not a muscle moves in his face, not a flicker of an eye betrays any human sentiment. Never does he give any indication that he even notices our presence.

  When he was displeased, Herr Zerkübel would, after he again ensconced himself in the glass office, summon our guard and have him escort the culprit into his exalted and terrible presence for a reprimand. The reprimand was always delivered to a point above the unfortunate creature’s head, in scathing negation of her existence.

  Work in the Montage is interesting. Here we produce a compact, intricate gadget, the ultimate result of having assembled many little parts. These small parts are cut out in the Dreherei, finished, polished, and painted in the Lackiererei, and then brought to us in the Montage to be assembled into a precision instrument that is supposed to control the distance and direction of the bomb ejected by a fighter plane.

  I work on three small machines, combining minute parts into a fascinating unit. The completed instrument is like a medium-sized camera studded with colorful wires and screws in an intricate pattern.

  We work in an assembly line, all thirty-five of us, each affixing one or two small components to the growing gadget.

  Only four or five German civilians work in the Montage. Their job is to test the more complex sections before the gadget progresses too far. Mr. Scheidel’s machine, for instance, checks the accuracy of my work. He inserts the unit I produce into his machine, and it indicates whether I made a mistake. If I did, the entire unit has to be discarded—an inexcusable waste. Mistakes are chalked up as deliberate acts of negligence. Or worse; sabotage.

  The completed gadget reaches the glass office. But first it is checked and rechecked by two German civilian experts. Herr Zerkübel is not to be troubled by mistakes. But we are aware that he sees everything from his glass dominion; he knows of every mishap, no matter how minor. We are aware, and we live in a constant state of dread.

  The final product reaches Herr Zerkübel’s glass office with an assumption of perfection. He receives each instrument with ceremonial formality, and inserts it into his sophisticated checking apparatus. All the minute parts of the gadget are then set in motion and begin to move in harmonious complexity, sending a fine set of whirring and ticking sounds like discreet bells through the entire expanse of the Montage. It is a proud sound, a happy sound. The instrument is working perfectly, and we made it. We have created something intricate, and complex, and difficult.

  It is also a tragic sound. The success of our work contributes to the success of the German war effort. We are toiling against ourselves.

  LEAH KOHN, FORGIVE ME …

  AUGSBURG, WINTER 1944/1945

  I shudder at the sight of the familiar SS uniform.

  After the arrival of the new SS officer from Dachau, a concentration camp nearby, our little haven of hope is gone. A radical transformation has taken place in Augsburg. Five days of fragile bliss are over.

  The white sheets have been removed from our bunk beds and now we sleep on bare straw sacks. The food has turned into a nondescript, tasteless mush. The table and the benches have been taken away, and now we eat our food crouching on beds or sitting on the floor in the corridor. And there is Zählappell twice a day.

  The most painful transformation is in the attitude of our German staff. Their friendliness has turned to curtness, and in some, to animosity. Two days after the arrival of the SS man, one of our guards called us blöde Hunde, idiotic bitches, and we quivered with the familiarity of the epithet. Instead of looking at us, our guards started to avert their eyes. They started to shout orders. And some started to carry whips.

  The commandant of the camp, the Oberscharführer, has remained fair. One evening while shoveling snow in the yard, we discover mounds in which potatoes are stored for the winter. We quickly dig them up and, hiding them under our dresses, smuggle enough potatoes into the camp to allow each inmate at least one potato. We wash them in the toilet and eagerly await our bedtime. Only after lights-out do we dare consume our concealed delicacies. Noiselessly, with utmost care, so as not to attract the attention of the guard on patrol we bite into the hard, delightful skin of the raw potato. But Mommy saves her potato. “For Sabbath lights,” she says. Friday at sunset Mommy kindles her Sabbath lights in the carved-out potato halves using oil smuggled from the factory and threads from our blanket for wicks. But moments after she whispers the Sabbath benediction over the faintly flickering lights, the Oberscharführer enters. The room is dark; only the light from the potato on the windowsill illuminates the tall bunk beds and the frightened faces of the young girls who have gathered to hear Mommy’s blessing for the holy day.

  “What’s this?” His tone is exceptionally gruff. He approaches the window and turns to face the cluster of young women frozen in fright. “Whose is this?” No one speaks. Mother calls out in a low voice, “They’re mine, Herr Oberscharführer. I lit those lights. For Sabbath.” The Oberscharführer’s eyes, as they scan our faces, are torches of rage. His voice cuts like steel. “Lights in the window! Do you know what you’ve committed? You!” he shouts at Mother. “Take these away at once!”

  Mother slowly picks up the burning potato halves and follows the Oberscharführer out the door. At the exit, the Oberscharführer turns and issues a stern warning: “This should never happen again!” He orders Mother to put out the lights in the toilet and dump the potatoes into the garbage can. Thank God. He does not ask where the oil and potatoes came from. And he does not punish us. We are lucky.

  The holiday of Hanukkah is in ten days. The incident inspires us to save potatoes for a Hanukkah celebration with lights. But we have learned our lesson. Before lighting the Hanukkah oil lamps in carved-out potato halves, we post lookouts at each entrance and develop a system of warning signals. A miracle comes to pass. For eight days we delight in kindling lights and singing Hanukkah songs without being caught.

  Soon after our arrival the Oberscharführer said our uniforms were unsuitable for winter and put in an order for clothes for us. We had arrived in the regulation gray prison dresses with two large red letters, K and L, painted on our backs. The letters stand for the word Konzentrations Lager—Concentration Camp.

  The dresses, coats, and sweaters have arrived. They are lovely, colorful clothes—not sacklike prison uniforms meant for camp inmates, but garments to be worn by young women.

  Our happiness knows no bounds. The new clothes have transformed us from nonentities into people. From sexless, ageless, shapeless digits into—girls! The clothes have given us dimensions.

  Some of the girls brush their budding hair with wet fingers into provocative styles, pinch their cheeks to achieve surprisingly becoming complexions, and assume graceful postures. The effect is quite startling.

  I have received a pink dress made of soft wool and an elegant warm tweed coat with a sumptuous deep brown fur collar. As I wrap it about me, I feel luxuriously pampered. It has a rich texture and a beautiful cut, and it makes me look like a young woman. It hugs and comforts my thin, long, bony body, and makes it feel and look better nourished. In the coat I look lanky rather than gaunt.

  The excitement keeps me from falling asleep. As the coat lies at the foot of my bed, I keep reaching over and stroking the soft fabric with my fingers and brushing the soft fur against my cheeks.

  In the morning I stand for Zählappell in my new pink dress, then go off to work in the Montage wearing it. Mr. Scheidel, the old German civilian who works next to me, stops in his tracks as he approaches. He does not recognize me at first. The smile of recognition in his face, the surprised look in his eyes, reveals the extent of change in my appearance. And I feel like a human being.

  I feel like a person in my pink dress. My outlook on life has changed. Old Mr. Scheidel’s reaction, the reaction of a free individual, a German civilian from the r
eal world, is of paramount importance. His look of approval validates my new self-image. It re-creates my world.

  All the other girls also sit self-consciously at their workbenches and giggle in secret anticipation of Herr Zerkübel’s reaction. At ten, Herr Zerkübel, the supreme master of Montage, makes his customary, silent, impassive appearance. As he passes among the rows of young girls fidgeting in suppressed excitement, his demeanor remains aloof. His stony face and posture continue to hold immutable disregard of our very being. Our new clothes do not render us visible to Herr Zerkübel.

  Herr Zerkübel’s manner does not dampen my enthusiasm. I sense a change in my old partner, Mr. Scheidel, and that’s enough.

  In the evening, back at our living quarters, I try on my coat again. It’s beautiful!

  All at once, I notice white stitching at the hem of the lining. I look closer, and see that the stitches form letters. LEAH KOHN—DÉS. It’s a name, and a place. A town in Hungary. And the name of a girl. A Jewish girl.

  These clothes belonged to Jewish women. They were taken away from them, and given to us! This coat … this coat belonged to Leah Kohn from Dés. She was tall and slim, just like me. And she loved this coat, that’s why she stitched her name into the hem of the lining.

  Is she alive? Is she now shivering on bitter cold winter days and nights in a thin prison sack, while I delight in her warm coat?

  Or was she taken to the gas chamber to suffocate in agony after having been stripped of this beautiful coat?

  Leah Kohn’s coat is no longer a source of delight for me. It has become an agonizing burden. And so has the pretty pink dress of a nameless owner.

  I have become an accomplice to SS brutality and plunder by wearing these clothes. I have become a participant in Nazi crimes by benefiting from pillage and perhaps even murder. How dare I wear this coat? How dare I wear this dress?

  Leah Kohn, forgive me.

  THE BOWL OF SOUP