Last Stop Auschwitz

by Eddy de Wind

  After much discussion Hans was allowed to go along. He had to do exactly what Alfonso said. He wasn’t to split off from the others and if they bumped into any strangers on the way, he mustn’t talk to them. He laughed, but wryly. They didn’t have much faith left in his abilities as a partisan, but at least they were still taking him along. They knew how important it was to him.

  The day had just dawned when they set out. Alfonso led the way. After a long discussion of the pros and cons, he’d left the submachine gun at home. They passed the women’s barracks and came out in open fields. The snow was a foot deep, but that wasn’t a problem for them in their boots and woolen socks.

  After an hour they reached the railway line and could see the Birkenau barracks. When they came up to the camp gate, they saw a woman sitting in the snow against a post. The woman made a slow hand gesture. Hans squatted down next to her.

  “Is it dinnertime yet?” she asked, almost under her breath. Then she dozed off again. She must have been sitting there in the snow for a long time.

  Jacques urged Hans to keep walking: “Or maybe you want to help all the thousands lying in the snow?”

  Jacques was right. They walked along the railway line that ran straight through this city of barracks, with the endless rows on either side of the line, everything white and deathly. Beside the railway line ran the road, the central Lagerstrasse, and there, along the road, lay the women, one every ten yards or so.

  They were almost all old women, the weaker ones, who hadn’t been able to keep up with the others right from the beginning of the death march, perhaps collapsing before it even began, during the hours of roll call. They were lying in bizarre poses. Hans had seen many dead bodies, but never such strange ones. Some had their arms wrapped around their legs, others were lying with one arm in the air, as if still trying to get up. But all of their heads were bloody. Their humane escorts had shot them all in the back of the head to put them out of their misery or, more accurately, to prevent any possibility of their being liberated by the Russians after all.

  Many of the women were almost naked, the clothes pulled off their bodies by those who were closest. Not one was wearing shoes.

  After they had walked about a third of a mile along the main road, they saw tracks in the snow curving off between two rows of barracks. They followed the tracks.

  A few hundred yards farther, they saw the first sign of life in the camp. A woman, a child still. When she saw the men, she fled into a barracks. They walked up to it and Alfonso pushed the door open. Their breath stopped short and their legs refused to take another step. The disgust that overcame them was like that of an invalid who feels the breath of death in the sickly sweet smell of chloroform. Hans held tight to the doorpost because this inferno with hundreds of pitiable beings, this warehouse with so many individuals, all dangling between life and death, made his head spin.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off the catastrophic living and the fortunate dead, lying jumbled together on the bunks. Accompanying all of this was quiet wailing and, when the men showed themselves, cries of fear and pleas for help. They braced themselves and went deeper into the barracks.

  They spoke to the strongest of the women, who all told the same story. Six days ago the entire camp had been ordered to turn out. All the nurses and all of the sick who could make any kind of progress at all had been forced to go with them. The rest stayed in bed. Nobody gave them anything to eat, nobody nursed them, nobody took away the bodies. None of them had the strength for any of that. There were only a few of them who were able to go outside to relieve themselves. The others just did it in bed. The stench of feces mixed with the smell of the corpses and the gasses developing in black, frozen arms and legs…

  They spoke to a Czech girl. All these women were from Birkenau. No, she didn’t know anything about transports that might have turned back. She herself had come here from Theresienstadt with her parents and sister. As they were twins, the whole family was initially spared, because doing blood tests on twins was one of the Lagerarzt’s hobbies. But then they’d lost track of their father, and their mother had died of dysentery two months ago. Now she was lying here with her sister in one bunk. Her sister had died last night. Before her death, she had asked her to turn her over so that she could look into her eyes one last time. With the two of them working together, they’d managed it. Today she would die too. She too was finished.

  Hans swore. He thought of that family: the father, the mother, the two young girls… He saw them at home in Prague. It was summer and they’d gone for a walk. Then they’d sat down at an outdoor café for a refreshing drink. The father was talking about his business and the mother was praising him for having done his best and, after years of work, having fulfilled his dreams. And the sisters joked with each other when a boy from school passed and gave them a shy wave.

  “So,” the father said, “which of you two is the lucky one?”

  They blushed and the whole family laughed.

  And now the whole family had been destroyed. The last one was lying here with frozen feet waiting to die, weeping with her head pressed against her beautiful sister’s body.

  They went to the next barracks. Standing in the doorway was a man, a Hungarian.

  “How did you get here?” Jacques asked.

  The man was nervous. He turned around as if someone was threatening him from behind. Then he grabbed Jacques by the arm, let go of him, ran a hand over his head, and looked back again. He gave an impression of total confusion. Then, in broken German: “Last week we went on transport. Our troop was twelve hundred men. Terrible journey, walking day and night. I can walk, I was in a good Kommando, but so many exhausted. The first day at least one hundred dropped out. If they fell in snow, the SS counted to three, then fired. After one day we had walked twenty-five miles. Then farther again. Sixty miles in three days. There were only seven hundred of us left. All the roads of Upper Silesia are full of dead bodies. The night of the third day something was wrong. We were standing still and the SS were having a big discussion. It seemed our route was blocked by the Russians. We carried on along a forest road. It was a sunken road and the SS were walking on the sides, about ten feet higher. Suddenly they started shooting. I dropped down next to a tree trunk. That saved me. After the SS left, I got up. Various others weren’t dead. They were groaning softly but couldn’t go on. They had been shot in the stomach or legs. With three of us we started on the way back. We hid in the daytime and walked at night. Sometimes the farmers gave us something to eat.”

  “Was it like that with all the transports?” Hans asked.

  “I don’t know, but we won’t see many of them again.”

  No, he wasn’t being left much hope. The vision was reality. It was strange that life still went on, that the Earth kept turning. We feel like we and our loved ones are the center of the universe. But the universe doesn’t care whether we’re happy or die like dogs in the snow.

  They went inside the second barracks. There Hans discovered a Dutch girl. She was called Adelheid and begged Hans to help her. He gave her a piece of bread he had in his pocket. She grabbed it like a starved animal and the women next to her raised themselves up on their elbows to get something too.

  Hans promised this and promised that. What else could he do? But he knew he wouldn’t keep his promises. He knew he couldn’t help them. Even if he dragged everything he could find to these barracks, it wouldn’t help; it would only cause fights and new misery. Because there were five more barracks like this one. Two thousand women lying on bunks between hundreds of dead bodies. Who could help here? The Russians? What was keeping them? Why wasn’t the sound of artillery coming closer?

  Of course, these two thousand unfortunates were just a fraction of the millions Berlin had on its conscience. But they were what was left of the greatest of all this war’s calamities. They were the last coincidental letters written at the bottom of history’s blackest page…“Birkenau.”

  It was evening by the time they
got back to No Pasarán. They sat down by the stove, which was glowing red. Van den Heuvel was just making coffee when Alfonso, who was keeping watch, called out: “A woman with a bandaged head.”

  The lads crowded around the attic window and discussed what to do. The girl was a couple hundred yards away and walking slowly—feeling her way, as it were—between the houses. In the gathering dusk they couldn’t make out what kind of person she was, but the white bandage wrapped around her head stood out clearly.

  “Let Jacques and Rudi go out to her,” Alfonso suggested. “Be careful.”

  “Fine, we’ll go to the lookout tower first, then double back. That way our paths will cross.”

  They set out. A few minutes later they were standing before her. The girl was shocked and asked in German who they were.

  “Workers. From this area. Can we help you?”

  For a moment she looked hesitantly at the men and then, leaning on a doorpost, she was unable to control herself any longer and burst out crying. Jacques put an arm around her and led her back to No Pasarán. When she saw the lads sitting around the stove with their shaven heads, she smiled through her tears. They gave her a place to sit near the stove and Van den Heuvel poured her a coffee. Max let fly at her right away.

  “Where’ve you come from? How’d you get wounded like that?”

  She flinched.

  “Damn it, man, give her a bit of breathing space,” Hans snarled.

  The girl looked at him.

  “Are you from Holland?” she asked in Dutch.

  Hans was very surprised and introduced himself.

  “I remember you from Westerbork,” she replied. “I’m Roosje… I was in the registration office.”

  He laid a hand on her shoulder and told her to rest a little now.

  “What happened to your head?”

  “A blow with a gun butt. A farmer put a rough bandage on it for me.”

  The bandage was no more than a strip torn from a bedsheet. Hans pulled out his tin box while Rudi unwrapped the old bandage. Roosje’s hair was all clotted together with blood.

  “How am I going to get this clean without hydrogen peroxide?”

  “Just cut it off,” she said. “It’s full of lice anyway.”

  Hans admired her pragmatism and reluctantly cut off her hair. Although the wound wasn’t large, her scalp was split all the way through. She was in a lot of pain, but bore up bravely. After he’d dressed her wound, she lay down on the pile of mattresses. Everyone remained silent and drank their coffee.

  Suddenly she began talking: “I was in a labor camp near Neu Berun. I was there for four months with my mother and my little sister. My mother died last month.”

  “When did you arrive from Westerbork?”

  “We went to Theresienstadt six months ago. After that we were in Birkenau for a week and then we were sent on to the labor camp. There were a thousand of us: women aged between fourteen and sixty. Officially the limits were sixteen to fifty, but a lot of older women were scared and gave their ages as under fifty. First we lived in tents, but then, in November, the first snow fell and we got wooden huts. They were made for forty people, but they crammed a hundred of us into each one. That’s how we got infected with lice and scabies.”

  “How did they treat you?”

  “It was hard labor. We were guarded by twenty men in black uniforms from the SS Sonderdienst. They had a political officer and an Oberscharführer, the Oscha. We were given ten ounces of bread and a liter of soup a day. There was never anything extra and never anything we could organize. Two hundred died in four months. My mother too.”

  “Wasn’t there an infirmary?”

  “Yes, there was a hospital tent. The Hungarian girls called it the ‘waiting room.’ You only went there when you were completely finished, to wait for death. Ah, we were all waiting for death. It was so awful.”

  “Was there a doctor too?” Hans asked.

  “Stop interrupting her,” Max snapped.

  “When my mother died, we had to dig her grave ourselves. Never in my whole life have I felt so miserable. For Mother, death was a deliverance. She suffered dreadfully. She was always an intelligent woman, interested in all kinds of things, but toward the end she couldn’t talk about anything but food. She had terrible diarrhea and swollen legs. She worked until four days before she died. I don’t understand how I can live on. My father dead, my mother too, and my sister gone.” She sighed and stopped telling her story for a moment.

  “Where’s your sister, then?” Alfonso asked.

  “I don’t know. We got separated. This is what happened: last week we saw the prisoners from Auschwitz marching on the roads. There were endless columns of them.”

  “Were there many women among them?” Hans asked.

  “Yes, but we weren’t able to speak to anyone. Our guards kept us at a distance. We thought we would be leaving soon too, but we had to work until the day before yesterday. I think they kept us at it for so long because we were digging tank traps. Early yesterday morning it was suddenly: ‘All fall in.’ Only the sick and the women who didn’t have any shoes had to stay behind. Altogether that was more than two hundred because a lot of women had worn out their shoes so badly they’d had to work in the snow in their bare feet. Five hundred women marched off. I don’t know what happened to them. Those of us who stayed behind were expecting death.” She fell silent and bit her lip.

  “Why can’t you tell us any more?” Hans asked.

  “You won’t believe me.”

  “Why not? We know all too well that the SS is capable of anything. Back in Holland, I didn’t want to believe what they were saying on the BBC about Polish Jews being gassed. Now, unfortunately, we know better.”

  She shrugged: “In Holland, they won’t believe us either when we go back and tell them everything.”

  “So we’ll make ourselves believable and official reports that prove the truth of our stories will be published. And if somebody still refuses to believe it, I’ll just ask them where my mother and father are. Where are my brothers and all the tens of thousands of others…”

  “Maybe you’re right, Doctor… After the big group had marched off, we were left with two hundred women, the Oscha and two guards. Then the Oscha went into two blocks to give all of the women an injection. The injection was supposedly for typhoid fever and had to be given intravenously. But we understood all too well what those injections were for. The Oscha didn’t give the injections properly in the veins and because of that it only killed two girls. They couldn’t speak anymore and died in a confused state a couple of hours later. The Oscha mustn’t have had enough of the liquid because he only injected about fifty women. In the afternoon he came into the blocks with the two Sturmmänner and had all those who could still move line up outside. It was a miserable troop of a hundred half-dressed women, barefoot in the snow. Most of them had blankets wrapped around them. They only had one wish: to suffer as little as possible. No traces of fear were visible in their hollow faces. They all knew what it was about. They had all seen it coming, for four long months. Enough of hunger, enough of cold, wounds, lice, and scabies.”

  “But didn’t you realize how close the Russians were? Didn’t you have any possibility of saving yourselves, of resisting? There were only three SS men, after all.” It was Alfonso, the fiery Spaniard, the fighter from the Civil War who had fought hard for life. He threw the words at her feet as a protest against what seemed to him unthinkable cowardice.

  She smiled at his outburst. “Oh, several walked off, but most of them could hardly put one foot in front of the other, they were so emaciated. No, death didn’t come as an enemy, but as the savior. A Hungarian girl—Judith was her name—was crying. The Oscha shoved her in the chest: ‘Don’t cry, you silly goose.’

  “‘What are you going to do with us, Oscha?’

  “‘I’m going to kill you all.’

  “‘But I want to see my parents again so much.’

  “‘You’ll see them—in the
next world.’

  “Then the troop set off. Slowly, step by step, leaning on each other and shuffling along. We were going to the tank trap we ourselves had dug. It was 325 yards away. That took us almost half an hour. There was always someone trying to run off, but mostly the Oscha caught up to her easily. Still, some managed to get away.

  “Halfway I nudged my sister. ‘We have to try,’ I said. She didn’t want to. She didn’t feel capable of making another effort. But when the Oscha was chasing an old woman who had got some 150 feet away, and the guards were on the other side of the row watching, I pulled my sister along behind me and we ran as best we could.

  “But our torturer came back too soon and set out after us. We had a head start of a hundred yards at most. Anja could hardly take another step. There was only one chance. I called out to Anja to let herself drop. She rolled into a ditch and I ran on as fast as I could. The Oscha didn’t bother about Anja and came after me. It was the hardest moment of my life. I was completely exhausted.”

  She was silent for a moment. Tears welled up in her eyes. “Then I surrendered and walked back with the Oscha. We came to the pits and everyone had to lie down on their stomachs. The SS men fired three volleys from their machine guns. I was still alive, but driven half mad and only wanting one thing: ‘Oh God, let me die.’ I couldn’t take it anymore. And then the three men were there, finishing off the job, bringing the butts of their guns down on their victims’ heads. I can still see the blood splattering around and the women, the three men, and the white snow, all turning red. Then they hit me too and it was all over.”

  The girl sighed deeply.

  Jacques gently stroked her arm. She smiled for a moment, as if relieved, as if happy that she had now been able to unburden her heart to trusted comrades.

  “They’d done their work badly. After a short time, maybe an hour, I regained consciousness. I was lying in the pit among the murdered women, but I was still alive. Then I felt that something had changed inside of me. I had to stay alive. I wanted to live to tell all of this, to tell everyone about it, to convince people that it was true… to take revenge for my mother, revenge for my fiancé and for all the millions who have been murdered. There are variations on the theme—gassing, hanging, drowning, starving, and more—but I had survived one of those. I had seen death and lived to tell the tale. I have to tell it, and I will tell it.”