The Sisters of Auschwitz

by Roxane van Iperen

  She is still angry with Joseph for selling a bulk of fruit and vegetables to a German steel factory; they have had flaming rows about it. Partly because of this, and also because he thought her Red Aid work was too dangerous, she has left home and moved in with her sister in The Hague. Father shakes his head, thinks his daughter is grossly exaggerating, yet again, but does not want to ruin the atmosphere; they have had this argument too many times already. He does not want to know what Janny is up to in her ‘battle against evil’, as she consistently refers to it, and believes it will all work out. He has a business to run and that is hard enough these days.

  ‘And I’m going to be a star!’ In the midst of the conversation, Lien throws both hands in the air and breaks into song, stretching the letters of the last word into a festoon. They all burst out laughing, dissolving the tension at the table. Outside, the copper bell of the ice-cream van tinkles to the rhythm of ‘Do You Know the Mussel Man?’ – instantly, they look at their mother, three pairs of eyebrows raised enquiringly. The sound grows louder, he is approaching from the canal. Fietje looks stern for a moment but then her face lights up. She nods and they dash away like little children.

  Get up, get outside, quickly. They almost trip each other up in their haste, one behind the other, side by side, overtaking someone so as not to end up on the outside but in the middle of the crowd that is beginning to form. It has started raining. No glistening spring drops holding off but a heavy shower, a dump truck pouring out over their heads. Grey clouds gather above them, rapidly colouring the sky as dark as the soil.

  Janny takes her place in the line, looks quickly for Lien. Right behind her. Good. She looks ahead again, moves along. The water is already trickling down her face, drops falling from her eyelashes. Within minutes her clothes, still damp from the previous shower, are soaked. She shivers underneath the thin rags that have not dried for days. Her clogs sink into the mud and start to fill up. They were so pleased when they got them and they held up well for the first month, but nothing can withstand these circumstances. She has sunken into the sludge up to her ankles now and tries to pull the clogs out, one by one, very carefully, so nobody can see. Every move can be one too many. The Kapos shout, women still come running, too late, they are slapped, fall over in the mud. You must not be one of the last, you must not end up in the outer lines, you must not stand out, you must have nothing sticking out. She and Lien are lucky to be so small.

  Hours pass and the counting continues. One mistake, start again, all over, hundreds of heads lined up on a giant chessboard. Sometimes someone collapses, causing a hole in the pattern. Janny stares at the back of the woman in front of her, fighting her urge to resist the ongoing shouting of the Kapos and Aufseherinnen, the female guards, ignoring the rain, the hunger, the tingling pain in her shrinking body. Peeled off, they were, layer by layer like an onion, until nothing but the essence of their existence was left. First, they had taken their work, their schools, their homes and their city. Their neighbours and their friends. Then their families and their freedom. Ultimately their clothes, their hair, their reflection. But not the essence, that is what they need to focus on, they shall not have that.

  They can tell what happens otherwise, by looking at the living dead drifting across the grounds. The Müselmanner. They have given up on themselves and surrendered even before the Nazis pushed them over the edge. The comatose look of the Müselmanner is perhaps an even bigger triumph for the Fascists than the smoking chimneys on the site. They lie, hang, stumble across the grounds, men and women. Exhausted and emaciated, numbed and mute, jaws like iron clamps and eyes like marbles no longer registering anything. During the selection, the Müselmanner are the first ones sent to one side with a sweep of the hand, even before the sick, the pregnant, the children and the elderly; in their minds they have already made the journey to the gas chambers. They do not scream and do not cry, are no longer aware of their environment, or perhaps only too aware of its hopelessness. Which is precisely why the other prisoners avoid them.

  Rain pounds on Janny’s head, the drenched clothes have dissolved into her skin. She shivers in her chemise. No underpants, the wind blows straight through her. Her feet are so numb with cold that the wooden clogs seem to grow straight from her legs. But each time their essence threatens to slip away, they find what most others here lack – someone to turn to. The other helps them to remember who they are, because the other reminds them who they once were: two sisters from Amsterdam.

  3

  Lien’s Violet

  The sisters soon realize that the camp runs on a pyramid of humiliations that pits everyone against each other. Although at first sight Auschwitz-Birkenau seems like chaos submerged in mud, it is in fact a perfectly orchestrated killing machine, designed in great detail on SS drawing boards – gas chambers and crematoria included – and built on the marshes around the Polish village of Brzezinka. Constructing the camp already killed prisoners by the dozen. When the foundation was laid, the marshy soil swallowed the workers. With Hitler’s mandate, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler then organized his perfect extermination camp there.

  Himmler’s approach was not exactly experimental; he already had extensive experience. In 1933, he opened the first Nazi concentration camp for political prisoners in Dachau, near Munich. This neat man with his clerk-like oval head, tight lips and rimless glasses had more loyalty to Hitler than love for his own mother, and an obsession with creating a purely Nordic breed, picturing himself as the ultimate racial hygienist. Unsurprisingly, he focused mainly on women. Swift extermination of Jewish women was key, because they would produce the next generation of Jews, intent on avenging their fathers, and Aryan women had to reproduce as fast as possible. This concept, with Auschwitz-Birkenau as one of its final destinations, is where Janny and Lien have ended up.

  From the SS camp commander at the top, the ranks run all the way down into the barracks. Chosen prisoners exert the last bit of power there. Kicking down as hard as possible helps to maintain your position – and this position is of vital importance. A higher status means an extra piece of bread when others are starving, or exemption when others are sent to the gas chambers. Deploying prisoners for surveillance saves money and pitting victims against each other is an effective way to destroy the community, or whatever is left of it, from inside out.

  There is a Stübenälteste, head of the barracks, who has to obey a Blockälteste, head of the block, who has to bow for the Kapos, who account to the Aufseherinnen, who set the tone with their violent approach, each in their own way. One stoically smashes her whip on prisoners, another batters the skull of a girl until her brains are lying at her feet. Prisoners are not only crushed along vertical lines; divisiveness is encouraged everywhere. Poles are set up against Russians, Russians against Hungarians, Hungarians against Western Europeans. The sisters soon notice that most Kapos are Polish women with a specific dislike of French and Dutch girls.

  Janny and Lien are in a separate block with other political prisoners, women of all sorts of nationalities; they are from Greece, France, Italy, Russia and Denmark. They are all hungry and exhausted, they all miss their children and their families. Despite feverish attempts to get information on their relatives, the sisters have not yet been able to find Jaap, Father and Mother. Not a trace of Red Puck and the elderly couple, Loes and Bram Teixeira de Mattos, either, but that does not have to mean anything: Birkenau camp alone is larger than 350 football pitches with tens of thousands of prisoners in hundreds of barracks. Then there is the base camp, Auschwitz I, and, further away, Auschwitz III. There lies the industrial site with, among others, chemical company IG Farben, where slaves of the Third Reich help to produce synthetic rubber. When, as often, they cannot sleep at night, crammed between other restless women’s bodies on their wooden shelves, they try to picture Father, Mother and Jaap in the assembly line. Tired and filthy but with a beating heart. Or perhaps they have ended up in one of the forty smaller camps in the area and are now working on the land
. Optimistic scenarios present themselves in the long nocturnal hours, but during roll call in the dark morning, the first thing they see is again the chimney, triumphantly rising above the camp.

  On their first morning in Auschwitz, when a woman in striped clothes finally led them to a quarantine barracks, they had walked past one of those low buildings with a massive chimney.

  ‘What kind of factory is that?’ someone from their group had asked.

  The woman did not look up, she did not move a muscle.

  ‘Factory?’ she said, nodding towards the chimney with her chin. ‘That is your transport over there. Into the fireplace as we speak.’

  They want to believe the rest of the family have ended up well, but each day they have not been liberated, the ovens burn up a new load. Non-stop. They are constantly reminded by the stench covering the camp grounds like a blanket and by their voice, which, as they speak their first words in the morning, sounds hoarser every day.

  The days are filled with pointless work or endless roll calls. Six hours on end, sometimes twelve, sometimes around the clock, until the watery Polish sun reappears. In the first month the hairs on their arms still respond, reaching like sprouts towards the heat source, providing short-term relief as they stand there, famished, with 1,000, sometimes 2,000 people in blocks of twenty-five. But when September turns into October, a dark veil in the sky pours out one deluge after the other and soon, the rock-hard surface softens to a thick layer of stinking mud. Their clothes no longer dry and the barracks turn into damp stables in which funguses and vermin multiply at lightning speed.

  The triple beds in their barracks are merely shelving units for stacking people. Each layer is designed for two, but because the camp is overcrowded, five to six women are lying sideways on each shelf. This adds up to eighteen shivering bodies per bed. If they are lucky, there is some straw, but often it is just the dangerously creaking wood, a sliver of a blanket and their own hand to serve as a pillow.

  The tossing and turning at night is unbearable. The bony buttocks of a stranger against your belly, always a mouthful of sores and blisters breathing in your face, the constant coughing, the crying of those who have failed to keep the thought of their children at bay. Your nose in the flaky crown of your neighbour, a knee in your back, someone else’s festering wound brushing your skin. Someone is trying to pry open your hand and get hold of your valuables. A woman above you is sick and lets everything go, another one is delirious, a third one becomes aggressive.

  But all discomfort pales in comparison to the itching. The maddening itching, creeping underneath your skin, crawling up your bloodstream towards your brain. It never stops. Janny often thinks more people in the camp lose their mind as a result of the itch than because of all other hardships combined. The lice, fleas, bedbugs and other creatures are everywhere: in their clothes, on their head, on their eyelashes, between their toes, under their armpits and in their crotch. Dozens, hundreds of minuscule bites all over their body, every minute, every second, in the morning, the afternoon, the evening, at night. During roll call, in the shithouse, on their beds. The bugs are so small and they are so many that it seems an invisible army is eating them alive – it drives people mad. Entire strips of skin are ripped off with fingernails, teeth or sharp bits of metal. Skulls are scratched open and people walk around with sores on their head, which slowly work their way inside. Nothing will stop the itch and the biggest challenge is to surrender to it, without surrendering completely.

  Janny keeps telling her sister: we must survive this. If only they stay together, keep their wits and look after each other. Not think of the children. Stay clean. Eat what you can. Do not scratch open your skin. And above all: do not be selected by Josef Mengele and his team of SS doctors.

  The Selektion is a constant threat and the moment they all fear the most. Of course the main selection already took place on the Rampe, the platform, upon arrival. The frail, the infirm, the infants, children under fifteen: they could walk from the train into the gas chambers in one straight line. But that was not all. At random moments, SS Doctor Josef Mengele comes and selects; once a month, once a week, sometimes two blissful months go by without him appearing at all. He decides who can still work, who is interesting for his medical experiments and who has become entirely useless. He sends people to the gas chambers as if they are flies – dismissing them with a simple hand gesture. If you end up in either one of the other wretched categories, at least there is still hope.

  Selections often take place immediately after Zählappell, the head count. This is what happens today; after the endless wait they are not scattered around the site but instead, suddenly, there is noise everywhere. Guards, dogs, nervous Kapos, the shouting is even louder than usual.

  ‘Großer Appell! Antreten zur Selektion!’

  ‘Schnell!’

  Major roll call! Line up for selection!

  Fast!

  The crowd disperses, everyone rushes to their own block, gets undressed. Panic sweeps through the barracks. Naked women run around, stop each other, look for their family, children, camp friends. They do not have time but anxiously inspect their bodies, turn to neighbours and girlfriends for help.

  ‘Can you see a rash here?’

  ‘These spots, are those sores?’

  ‘Have I lost any more weight?’

  ‘Press your arm against your side, you do not want them to see that wound over there.’

  Someone rubs a lump of carefully kept margarine on her cheeks to put some shine on her dull skin. One woman slaps herself hard to redden her ashen-coloured face, another bites her lips and spreads out the blood. A piece of lipstick is worth a fortune, at least three daily rations of bread: a bit of colour can save you from Malach ha Mòwes, as they call doctor Mengele in Yiddish. The Angel of Death.

  Janny has already undressed and looks at Lien, sees how skinny she has become. Her gorgeous sister, followed around by all the boys when they were young, with her enviable figure and dark, full hair, now looks brittle and defeated, her spiked hair wrapped around her skull like barbed wire. Lien is looking at the chaos in the barracks in despair; her constant worrying takes up all of her energy. Janny has a thicker skin, is more collected, sometimes even stoic, like their mother; she is the more resilient one.

  A deep blue oil slick flows across Lien’s right eye, a testimony to her hot-headedness. The day before yesterday a girl in their barracks had stolen her clogs from under her head and when Lien came to demand them back the next morning, they got into a fight. They were both pulling at the same clog, shouting, and before Lien could snatch away the second one, the child hit her full in the face with it. Lien saw stars, but she did have her clogs back.

  ‘Lientje!’ Janny grabs her sister’s upper arms. ‘Pay attention now. We must get through this. Father, Mother and Japie are out there somewhere, waiting for us, we cannot be selected, do you hear me?’

  Lien nods resignedly but cannot find the strength to brace herself for the showdown with Mengele. They have been on roll call for hours, she is tired and hungry and would just like to lie down on her bed. Only for a little while. When Janny shakes her up, her head bobs along like a broken tulip on a stem.

  ‘I dreamt about Eberhard,’ Lien whispers, barely audible, her eyes lowered.

  Women around them begin to run outside and Janny observes her sister impatiently. Suddenly, Lien looks up.

  ‘When they find out Kathinka is Jewish, I will never see my baby again, Janny. And it’s all right for you to say Eberhard got away, but . . .’

  A sob escapes her mouth and her shoulders drop even further. Janny pushes them back up and brings her face so close to Lien that their noses are almost touching. Her dark eyes flash when she speaks.

  ‘Stop it! They are safe. And, Goddammit, we have other things to worry about!’

  She is shouting through the practically deserted barracks. Janny shakes her sister again until Lien gets annoyed, tries to wriggle free and begins to scold back. Janny does not l
et go until Lien is livid and they are opposite each other, fighting like when they were young, red cheeks and glistening eyes. Then she takes a step back and breathes out.

  ‘Right,’ says Janny. ‘Now, get outside and keep your chin up.’

  The dogs go wild, SS officers are barking at the women to move on. Quick, run, bare feet through ice-cold mud, wind scraping against their uncovered bodies. They are terrified of the Great Danes chattering at them with square jaws, their foam splashing against their skin as they walk past.

  Line up and go past the selection one by one. Mengele, accompanied by his medical staff, stands there waiting. He cheerfully inspects each body with his eyes. His uniform impeccable as always, his symmetrical face with shaven temples disappearing under a cap, his brown eyes filled with excitement to see what the selection will yield today. Twins in particular bring him into ecstasy, but those are a rare find in old cargos – he tends to pick them out on the platform. His zest for work is unprecedented; even on his days off he will pop up between the other doctors, hoping for a good catch.

  Here, in Birkenau, he can continue the scientific research on racial hygiene that he conducted at Frankfurt University, without restrictions – and much more. Less then ten years before, Mengele, then in his early twenties, obtained his doctorate with a thesis on ‘racial differences in the structure of the lower jaw’. But his Aryan fantasies have no limits and the supply of guinea pigs in Birkenau is endless. Mengele tries to make dark eyes blue and is working on an experiment to connect the bloodstreams of twins. The women have heard that he sews young twins together, veins and all, back to back, wrist to wrist. But there are also stories of him bringing the children milk and cookies. They do not know what to believe any more.