The Sisters of Auschwitz

by Roxane van Iperen

  ‘Next!’

  The fieldful of bony women moves steadily, like a conveyor belt with people. The front is inspected. Turn, the backside. Turn again and wait for his hand gesture. To the left means labour or experiment block, to the right means gas chamber. Mengele’s face is soft, not tight like the faces of most other SS officers; he steps around briskly, nods here and there, his angelic face is the very model of charm.

  A Russian prisoner said that Mengele once had trucks full of children under five dumped into an enormous fire pit because they were so hard to usher into the gas chambers at that age. About ten dumper trucks full of little ones drove backwards to the edge of the pit, after which SS officers, supervised by Mengele, tossed them into the flames by an arm or a leg. The burning children who tried to climb out of the pit were pushed back with long poles.

  ‘Next!’

  One step forwards. They are coming closer. It is almost Lien’s turn. They cannot help but stare at Mengele’s hands, giving directions like a traffic controller.

  Left.

  Right.

  He walks a bit between the lines, friendly, his posture straight like a horseback rider. Every few seconds another silent verdict.

  Left.

  Right.

  Everyone in the camp has lost weight, but one is worse than the other.

  Is that a bump under that navel there? To the right, we do not want any pregnant women.

  Is that a rash? Closer inspection, another doctor is called in and together they examine the naked girl. A nod; to the right.

  A woman is pinched in her upper arm; is there any fat so she can still work? To the left.

  Someone is hunchbacked. Mengele’s interest is piqued; he knocks on it, traces the woman’s spine with his fingers, feels her ribcage, sticking out like an open hull, and nods approvingly. To the experiment block.

  You, stick out your hands, turn around. You have scabies, Krätze: go left, to the Krätzeblock. The itch mite is rampant in the camp; the tiny creature burrows into the skin to lay its eggs. It causes hellish itches and rashes, but it does not kill you. Once they have patched you up, you can go back to work. This is exactly how Anne Frank was sent to the Krätzeblock, separated from the rest of the camp by a high wall. Margot had pretended she became unwell, so she could follow her sister. Janny has not seen them since.

  Left.

  Right.

  The group of women is gradually getting smaller, the crowd splits like the sea when Mengele passes through. Close up the line, Janny is a little behind Lien and keeps a sharp eye on her. The doctor walks between the women, gets closer, examines and nods, is in good spirits and enthusiastic as always.

  He stops in front of Lien and starts to laugh. Janny’s breath catches. Mengele has casually hooked his thumbs behind his belt. He is talking to her sister – Janny pricks her ears.

  ‘Was hast du gemacht?’ What have you been up to? Amused, his head tilted to one side, he looks at Lien; Janny can see the gap between his front teeth glisten. Lien does not respond. Janny sees her shoulders and neck tighten. Why is she not saying anything?

  Mengele moves closer towards her, points at her face with a smile.

  ‘Woher hast du denn das Veilchen?’

  Lien does not understand. She pulls up one shoulder, briefly shakes her head.

  A Veilchen – a violet? Does he mean the flower, what is he saying?

  ‘Ich habe keine Blumen.’ I do not have any flowers, she answers hesitantly.

  Then the penny drops. She pulls herself together – Janny can tell by looking at her sister’s back, which is relaxing. Lien’s chin goes up and she looks at the doctor fearlessly.

  ‘Ach so. Ja, ich hab mich mit einem Mädchen gestritten, und sie hat mich mit einem Holzschuh aufs Auge geschlagen.’ Oh, I see. Yes, I had a fight with a girl, and she hit me on the eye with a clog.

  Mengele bursts out laughing, gives her a smack on her naked bum and points to the left. Lien can go.

  Janny relaxes her fists, feels her nails very slowly pull out of her flesh.

  The woman after Lien is a nervous wreck by the time Mengele turns to her. The sisters know her, she is from a renowned family of frame-makers in a town near Amsterdam. She does not speak a word of German, so when he starts talking to her too, she is almost hyperventilating. Mengele’s mouth drops, he raises an eyebrow as he examines her.

  ‘Und du? Was hast du dann gemacht?’ And you? What have you been up to?

  Displeased, he looks at her belly, not yet as caved in as most, and waits for an answer. The woman looks around in despair, unable to grasp what is expected of her, until Mengele points at her abdomen.

  ‘Nein, nein . . .’ she stutters, wildly shaking her head. ‘I . . . ich . . . have . . . my little one is at home, two years.’ She gestures with her hand at knee height, nodding at the doctor with large eyes, hoping he understands. He does not.

  Right.

  ‘No!’ She screams, begs in Dutch, but Mengele is done with the conversation and wants to move on.

  The woman begins to cry, shouts that it is all a misunderstanding, the whites of her eyes bloodshot. Janny bites her lower lip, she almost cannot control herself. Mengele takes a step back and hits the woman hard on the head. Then he beckons the guards to take her away.

  A few seconds later, Mengele has passed Janny too and has given her the green light. The rows have almost dried up and there are barely any people left on the field; she should be relieved but is so furious about what just happened to the Dutch woman that she stomps around the site, fuming with anger. Then she sees a Dutch Aufseherin, an SS guard. Without thinking, she runs towards the woman and grabs her by the arm.

  ‘That woman is not pregnant and you know it! She is a political prisoner, not a Jew. If she is gassed, you are personally responsible.’

  Janny is small but fearlessly hisses at the woman in the face. Then she turns around and walks back to her barracks. As if by miracle, the Dutch woman is indeed dragged away from the gates of the gas chamber and they meet again later, both still alive.

  4

  La Marseillaise

  Janny and Lien fear the Kapos the most. These prisoners, men and women, delight in humiliating their fellow captives. They are appointed by the SS and seem to be recruited among criminals rather than teachers. In the first week, already the sisters wondered why their own Blockälteste, a healthy-looking Polish–Jewish girl named Rosa, would treat them so sadistically – but then they saw how Rosa was treated by the Kapos. If she could not compete with them, it would kill her. It will not be long before Lien incurs the wrath of one of those Kapos.

  Ruth Feldman is a sturdy Dutch woman from their block, former head nurse of the Central Israelite Hospital. She was in their carriage from Westerbork to Auschwitz and upon arrival passed the ‘sauna’ with them – the building where they were marked.

  One day, the sisters and Ruth are in the shithouse, as they call the latrines: a long stone building with a row of round holes from one side to the other, in which they must relieve themselves. It smells terrible and is filthier than a pigsty, but for that same reason it is one of the few places where the SS do not come and where you can briefly speak privately. Janny and Lien have finished, but Ruth has diarrhoea and cannot get up from her hole. Before long, a Kapo storms in to chase them away. When Ruth does not get up – sick as a dog and worrying she will soil herself – the woman gets furious. She pounces on Ruth and tries to shove her down the hole, into the shit pit.

  The women scream and shout as Ruth tries desperately to wriggle out of the hole. Without thinking, Lien takes off her wooden clog and flings it on the Kapo’s head with full force. The sound of a cork coming out of a bottle. The Kapo lets go of Ruth and the shouting fades. Lien quickly turns around and runs for her life, the Kapo chasing her, swearing. The woman soon loses her on the enormous site and by the time reinforcements arrive, Lien has been swallowed up by the crowd.

  When she returns to the barracks much later, Janny first rages a
t her sister before falling in her arms – they both know that if the Kapo had got hold of Lien, she would have beaten her to death. And still, the incident probably saves their lives, because when they see Ruth again, she says: ‘I’m signing up as a nurse and you are coming with me.’

  No matter how hard the Nazis try to completely strip prisoners of their personality, in the barracks their last ounce of humanity is persistently standing. They impersonate an SS officer, his lower jaw sticking out like a piranha’s, wobbling across the site on his short legs and jumping to attention the minute a superior walks past. They gossip about that Kapo with her fluffy angora jumper, short skirt, high boots and pinned-up hair. Janny fantasizes about burying that jumper in the Polish mud until the last bit of fluff is smothered.

  But most conversations in the barracks involve food. They talk about meatballs and mashed potatoes with a little hole for the gravy, pasta al dente with bolognese sauce and large chunks of Parmesan, about lamb cutlets, roasted with honey and thyme. About red wine from wooden barrels, coffee made of black burnt beans and about home-made lemonade with ice cubes tinkling in the glass. They talk until the gnawing hole in their belly is filled with imaginary food.

  When they seem to be enjoying themselves a little too much, the Kapo enters.

  ‘Jetzt wird nicht gefressen, jetzt wird gestorben!’ You are not here to eat, you are here to die!

  And as she storms out of the barracks, a skinny woman in frayed shirt walks after her, legs wide apart, the same arrogant pose and filthy look – and they still have a laugh, three stories up in their beds.

  Every day is a battle; they fight for food, for their lives; they fight for whatever has been stolen from them, for a good position at the little tap, where some women hit cups from other women’s hands to get just one drop of water; they fight for the torn blanket they find on their bed after work; strips of cloth can be tied into underpants against draught crawling underneath their chemises. But at the same time, they try to lift each other up with all the fighting spirit they have left. The fury of the Italian women makes Janny laugh and she loves the inventiveness of the French. With a piece of glass and a three-pinned comb, they model their bristly heads and furry eyebrows, and with some wet soil they draw an elegant arch above their eyes. They tie a cloth around their neck and put on a coquettish smile. It is no vanity but esprit, as Janny explains to her sister, clearly articulating her newly acquired French word.

  All the ugliness has not extinguished Lien’s voice, either. Sometimes she softly sings to Janny: the lullabies she sang to the children, Yiddish songs from her repertoire with Eberhard. It takes them back in time to The High Nest, when they were afraid but not dying – and, above all: still together. It sometimes seems a lifetime ago. But when Lien sings, Janny closes her eyes and sees herself walk to the house from the tram stop at Ericaweg after a long day, the kestrel hovering high above her in the bright blue sky. The forest appears, the shell path, the gate, the red shutters – in the front room someone at the dining table waves at her. Past the shed, say hello to Japie, bent over his workbench. Lien is at the back of the garden with the three children – they are standing outside the gazebo, singing. When she stretches her fingers, she can almost touch them.

  One day they are all chased out of the barracks.

  ‘Läusekontrolle! Alles ausziehen! Raus, raus!’ Louse check! Take off all your clothes! Get out, out!

  A few hundred women drop their rags in bundles on the floor and run naked into the cold October morning. It is no roll call; they are left to their own devices on the camp site and huddle together in groups. Their barren feet sink into the mud.

  ‘This is no louse check,’ a woman in the sisters’ group says. ‘Clothes off means gas chamber.’

  They shiver. Everyone knows the story of Mengele, who, when a typhoid fever epidemic occurred, chased 1,000 naked Gypsies out of their barracks and straight into the gas chambers. His effective approach when it came to epidemics had even earned him a medal, referred to as the ‘typhus medal’ by the prisoners when they were having a laugh. There is nothing to laugh about now.

  They stand in silence and wait on this wasteland beneath an autumnal Polish sky, looking like martians with their twiggy bodies and large wobbly heads. Suddenly, a French woman in their group, Michelle, begins to sing. With a soft soprano voice, she sings the first notes of ‘Chevaliers de la Table Ronde’, a popular French drinking song about the Knights of the Round Table, often accompanied by violin, tambourine and guitar. The song is about tasting wine, drinking with joy and the desire to be buried in a wine cellar with one’s mouth under the tap. The chorus, ‘Oui, oui, oui, non, non, non’, is usually sung along by bystanders while they link arms and whirl around. The others look up, bewildered.

  Michelle sings on, confidently, and with glistening eyes replaces the lyrics with a new satirical poem on Hitler and the cowardly collaborators of Vichy – referring to the non-occupied part of France where the government sympathizes with the Nazis. As soon as she gets the melody, Lien joins in and a few other women softly hum along too.

  When the last notes have evaporated, Lien starts to sing a Yiddish song. It is a cheerful tune with funny lyrics. More and more women gather around them and those who know the song softly sing along. Lien’s voice drifts above the cropped heads, encircles and unites them while the Kapos turn their barracks upside down. Next, Lien breaks into the Yiddish Partisan song, ‘Zog nit keyn mol, as du geyst dem letstn veg’ – Never say the final journey is at hand – and a few Polish women join in. They are surprised to hear the song, which only recently came up in the Polish Vilna ghetto and spread among Jews in the rest of Europe. Lien does not know all the words yet, but the Polish women help her. Before long, all the women from their barracks are standing around them, naked and shivering with cold, together in a large circle, their faces turned towards each other, singing along where they can.

  Before Lien has finished, she looks at Michelle, who taught her ‘Le chant de la libération’, anthem of the French resistance. Michelle nods and together they start singing the battle hymn. All the French women join in, but others, who have listened to Radio London, know it too; the BBC have started using it as their theme tune. Especially since the Nazis have banned the Marseillaise, ‘Le chant de la libération’ is embraced as alternative national anthem – except of course in Vichy.

  Ami, entends-tu le vol noir des corbeaux sur nos plaines?

  Ami, entends-tu les cris sourds du pays qu’on enchaîne?

  Ohé partisans, ouvriers et paysans, c’est l’alarme!

  Ce soir l’ennemi connaîtra le prix du sang et des larmes.

  Friend, do you hear the crows’ dark flight across our plains?

  Friend, do you hear the muffled cries of our country in chains?

  Partisans, workers and farmers, this warning is to say

  Tonight, both with blood and tears, our enemies shall pay.

  The song is usually accompanied by the beating of drums, perfect for marching on the spot – which they do. As they softly sing together, their knees rise in an even cadence, their feet in step with the words. For an instant they forget the chimney smoking behind them, the cold, the hunger, the number on their lower arm. Together, they are one voice and each naked foot splashing down in the mud makes their blood flow a little faster.

  That day, no one is sent to the gas chambers. Even Rosa, the head of their block, normally as cold as ice, is moved to tears by the Yiddish songs and gives Lien an extra piece of bread.

  A few days later, Michelle is beaten to death and a large group of French women is taken away, after all. But as the truck pulls up and drives towards the gas chambers, they can hear the banned Marseillaise, sung loudly behind the canvas of the tent.

  Allons enfants de la Patrie,

  le jour de gloire est arrivé!

  Contre nous de la tyrannie

  L’étendard sanglant est levé.

  L’étendard sanglant est levé:

  Entendez-v
ous dans les campagnes

  Mugir ces féroces soldats?

  Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras

  Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes!

  Come, children of the fatherland,

  The day of glory has arrived.

  Against us the bloody flag

  Of tyranny is raised;

  The bloody flag is raised.

  Do you hear in the countryside

  The roar of those savage soldiers?

  They come right into your arms

  To cut the throats of your sons, your men!

  Then Lien falls ill. They all feel miserable, all the time, but as long as they can get up in the morning and stay up during roll call and work, they can plough through the fog hanging over the wetland, day after day after day. A few people attempt to escape during roll call, but it is always in vain. They are hung and the others are made to watch. Then it is back to work. They fold plastic for aircraft, they pull shoes apart with their last bit of strength and drag stones from one place to wherever the Kapos tell them. The purpose of neither of these jobs is clear to them. Do not ask questions, just keep going – Janny keeps repeating it like a mantra, even when the pain in her smashed ankle pulls up to her teeth. One of the girls in their group ignores the advice: she opens her mouth, complains and has to pay for it. Knelt on a large stone, she has to hold a rock high above her head for a whole day; whenever she lowers her arms one inch, the whip cracks against her skinny body.

  One morning Lien is really giving up. It is still dark when they must report for roll call, four or five in the morning, and they cannot be late. But she no longer cares. Lifting up her eyes is too much to ask, let alone swaying her legs over the edge of the bed and holding that feeble body up. She would rather be dead. She is hot like a stove and the energy is flowing out of her body fast; Janny knows she has to act. A girl in their barracks has scarlet fever, a bacterial infection in the throat, easily transmitted by coughing. They only noticed when the girl was covered with a red rash – on her tongue, her face, her entire body – and had perhaps already infected half the barracks. Reluctantly, Janny takes her sister to the Krankenblock, the sick bay, and leaves her there with a heavy heart. It is the first time they are apart.