The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz: A totally gripping and absolutely heartbreaking World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story

by Ellie Midwood

  In search of at least some clue, Edek stole a sideways glance at the letter and regretted it almost instantly.

  “…if you only knew how deeply it hurts, being looked upon like a second-class citizen at all times. Just yesterday, a grocer—grocer!—had the insolence to question me solely because of my accent. While I was arguing with him, someone whistled a policeman; the policeman fetched a Gestapo official. Had I not had your photograph and all of my identification on me, including our marriage certificate, God only knows where they would have taken me. The grocer apologized afterward; explained that he was only doing his civic duty. Thought I was an escaped foreign worker. And that was just one of my recent adventures. And you say it’s safer for me to be in Germany. I should never have left Poland! I’m hated here, hated solely for—”

  Edek averted his eyes. He needn’t read any further, everything was clear as day.

  “What’s your first name, Galiński?”

  Edek glanced up, startled. Not at the term of address—Lubusch only called the men in his workshop by their last names, never by their numbers—but at the unexpected intimacy of the question.

  “Edek—Edward,” he quickly corrected himself.

  A small smile appeared on Lubusch’s face. “Really?”

  Edek nodded his affirmation, somewhat surprised.

  “So is mine. How do you spell it? With a W?”

  “Yes, with a W.” Edek discovered that he was smiling as well.

  “My wife is Polish.” His namesake confessed what Edek had deduced himself by now.

  Edek nodded, unsure of what he ought to say. Neither “that’s wonderful” nor “I’m sorry” appeared to be a suitable reply and so he blurted out the only thing that came to his mind: “I didn’t know you were allowed to marry Polish women.”

  “Officially, we aren’t.”

  “But you still did.”

  Lubusch shrugged his shoulders evasively. It was evidently a painful subject he wasn’t particularly fond of discussing. “Frankly speaking, I always thought all the racial laws were ridiculous.”

  Edek blinked in astonishment. That was something new entirely, coming from an SS man, no matter how lenient.

  “Are you married, Edek?—Do you mind if I call you Edek? Or do you reserve this right for your friends only?”

  “Not at all, Herr Rottenführer. Edek is much better than Häftling 531.”

  “That much is true, I suppose.”

  “And no, I’m not married.”

  “Have a girl waiting for you at home?”

  Who would wait for so long? Edek wanted to say.

  “No, Herr Rottenführer,” he replied instead.

  For some time, Lubusch stared pensively ahead.

  “Who is considered inferior in your country?” he said eventually.

  “Jews, I suppose. A lot of people don’t like them.”

  “What about you?” Lubusch asked.

  “I like and dislike people based on their character, not race or religion.”

  “So, if you fell in love with a Jewish girl, would you have married her?”

  “I would have.”

  “All right. So, say, you did marry her. But now your compatriots are treating her horribly because—as you said it yourself—many people don’t like them in your country and she grew terribly unhappy…” He paused, as though tasting the words before uttering them, “What would you do?”

  “I would have taken her someplace where she would be happy,” Edek replied without hesitation.

  “And say, if you were in the army?”

  “I would have run away.” He didn’t even blink.

  Lubusch looked at him closely. “You would have deserted then?”

  “For the woman I love—yes.”

  “They would have shot you if they caught you.”

  From Edek, a shrug. “It would have been worth it. At least my beloved would have remembered me as a hero who risked everything for her and not a coward who—” He bit his tongue, stopping himself mid-word, but it was much too late.

  Too terrified to even think, Edek risked a glance at Lubusch and saw, to his relief, that the SS man was chuckling. That was the last thing he had expected.

  “Don’t fret, I won’t take you to the wall and shoot you for speaking the truth. I needed to hear that, I suppose.”

  “I wasn’t talking about you.” Edek desperately tried to save the situation. “I was talking hypothetically…”

  “Naturally, hypothetically.” Lubusch looked as though he found Edek positively amusing just then. “I said, don’t fret. I’m not mad. Have you ever seen me mad?”

  “No, Herr Rottenführer.”

  “You truly would have run then?” Lubusch narrowed his eyes slightly, turning serious again.

  “Yes, Herr Rottenführer.”

  “And to where?”

  For a few moments, Edek considered. “Holland, I suppose,” he ventured eventually. “I heard they treat all immigrants the best.”

  “And what if Holland was occupied?”

  “Then England, I guess.”

  “And how would you get there?”

  “There must be someone who would have smuggled us for a certain sum. Isn’t that why some French Resistance fellows are serving their terms here?”

  Lubusch nodded. His eyes had grown brighter; the haunted look was gone out of them. A faint blush colored his usually pale cheeks. Edek could tell that something profoundly important was at war within him, some ideological battle in which his uniform and his duty was slowly losing to a Polish girl who crocheted doilies for him and signed her letters, with infinite love, always yours, A.

  “You go ahead and fetch lunch for your Kommando,” Lubusch said at last, as though just now remembering himself. “And give everyone double rations. The numbers are exceedingly good today.”

  Picking up the key, Edek hid a smile at the thought that Lubusch had not once looked at the production list. He was already on his way when he heard a soft “thank you” behind his back.

  “Thank you, Herr Rottenführer,” Edek replied.

  Thank you for keeping your humanity in a world that prides itself in ruthlessness.

  Four

  Birkenau

  Mala’s hand, with a stub of a pencil in it, hesitated over the official form. Despite the small iron stove in the nurses’ cubicle, on particularly cold days, Mala could see her own breath coming out in translucent clouds. The Revier—the complex of sickbay barracks for the inmates—was a far cry from the comfort offered by the camp office where Mala ordinarily worked, but she never complained. The thought of helping her fellow inmates warmed her better than any central heating system would.

  Maria Mandl, the head of the women’s camp and Mala’s immediate superior, had regarded Mala in amazement when the latter had asked to be appointed to that particular duty in addition to the ones she was already carrying out.

  “You wish to be put in charge of assigning discharged inmates to different details? Whatever for? You’ll have to spend hours in an unheated barracks crawling with lice and disease.”

  “It’s quite all right, Lagerführerin. I know the camp better than anyone and I know the inmates. I believe I shall do a much better job of matching them to different roles according to their qualifications and abilities than some Kapo who simply puts their names next to details without bothering to ensure that they’re up for a job.”

  “They have to be up for any job,” Mandl had countered, unimpressed. “That’s the sole reason they are allowed to live, so they can work and contribute to the final victory. If they don’t wish to work—or claim that they can’t—we have a special place for such duty shirkers.”

  The gas chamber. Mala’s face had grown very still.

  “You are correct as always, Lagerführerin,” Mala had replied, “but what I meant to say was that it would be wiser to assign seamstresses to sewing details rather than sending them to gravel raking. Former construction workers would do a much better job producin
g rubber at the Buna factories at the Monowitz subcamp than French salesgirls. And, naturally, doctors and nurses would apply their talents with much greater use taking care of the sick rather than emptying latrines with the Scheisskommando. Do you not agree with me?”

  The question was rhetorical, of course, but Mala had long grown used to the fact that even the most irrefutable logic had no place in the dark shadow of Auschwitz. The camp wasn’t organized with the purpose of putting enemies of the state to work; it was designed as a death factory, where such “enemies” would be exterminated through work, starvation, or disease. That was why the Kapos in charge of such assignments took great pleasure in competing with one another in matching the most unsuitable candidates to work that was simply beyond their victims’ intellectual or physical powers. Cosmopolitan girls who used to work for fashion magazines found themselves peeling potatoes in the kitchen; jewelers’ apprentices, with their fine hands, were sent to the laundry detail; musicians were appointed as truck drivers and former truck drivers discovered themselves assisting SS physicians without having the faintest idea of what they were doing.

  It had been idiotic to hope that Mandl would see reason, but much to Mala’s surprise, the women’s camp leader had approved of the idea.

  On her first day as an appointed official, Mala had marched into the sickbay with a radiant smile full of hope; now, she sat examining the list in front of her with her eyes dark with anguish and cursed for burdening herself with the responsibility of choosing who was to live—and who to die. There were only two available positions in the Kanada work detail, where clothes were in abundance, where food could be found in countless suitcases, where gold and precious gemstones could be concealed in one’s mouth to be exchanged for something edible later. The rest of the positions were all in the outside work gangs. To be assigned to an Aussenarbeit was essentially a death sentence to an inmate, and particularly in the harsh Polish winter.

  Mala shuddered each time, when delivering messages to the wardens, she saw skeletal women in their threadbare robes lifting stones that must have weighed as much as the women themselves, carrying them across the field, where another outside work detail was breaking them up for road building. If they didn’t trot fast enough for the Kapo’s liking, they were lashed and cursed at. If they dropped their load or collapsed under its weight, they were shot or mauled by the SS wardens’ dogs. Even the strongest prisoners lasted mere weeks doing back-breaking work for the Reich; the weaker ones dropped like flies within days, and sometimes even hours. Their Kommando mates carried them back into the camp each evening—a grotesque parade of the dead and soon-to-be dead, marching through the gates to the cheerful sounds of the camp orchestra.

  Mala threw a gaze full of agony at the small window behind which the wind was howling viciously and almost thought of putting her own name onto the list instead of one of the condemned women. Only, it would be of no use; Mandl had grown much too dependent on Mala’s services. Even the camp leader Hössler, Mandl’s superior, held her in high esteem, sneaking French cigars into her pockets whenever she brought documents into his office—“Trade them for some cheese and butter; in winter, those are two items of the most paramount importance to keep warm.” They would never let her go. She was chained to them good and fast.

  Stasia, an inmate physician, stuck her head through the door, pulling Mala out of her dark musings. “Still working, Mally?”

  Mala’s glare was eloquent; compiling these death lists was the last thing she wished she were doing.

  Sliding into the room, Stasia pulled the door after herself noiselessly. A Polish doctor, she wore the red triangle of a political prisoner on her chest with visible pride and was notorious among the camp population for getting into arguments with SS physicians. Oddly enough, her outspoken manner and sharp, analytical mind had earned her the respect of her German “colleagues.” More often than not, they authorized her demands for proper medical supplies, which undoubtedly had saved many lives. She had a severe face that seemed to be permanently set into a grimace and thin, bloodless lips that rarely smiled; however, it was her eyes that betrayed her true nature. Warm-brown and brilliant, they radiated compassion and a desire to help that went beyond one’s official obligations. Her job was never done once she shed her off-white coat. Stasia was constantly on duty, ready to trade her own last ration in exchange for a life-saving roll of pills, never complaining about doing double shifts whenever an influx of patients overwhelmed the sickbay doctors.

  “Listen, Mally,” she began in an urgent whisper. “Rita, the Soviet girl who I asked you to smuggle some Cardiazol for, has to go to the Kanada. I just learned she has a boyfriend in the Sonderkommando.”

  “Ah, the corpse carrier detail.”

  It was both tragic and strange, the fact that the Sonderkommando was considered the camp elite due to their privileged position, and yet, no one willingly volunteered to join their ghoulish detail. And who could blame them in all good conscience? Just one look at the haunted faces of those hulky inmates, who trooped around the crematoriums in their tall rubber boots, was enough to frighten away even the most desperate types. It was a damnable business, escorting entire families to the gas chambers every single day, listening to the screams and frantic banging on the airtight door that grew weaker, gradually dying out completely, and then dragging those bodies out by sticks with long hooks on them—for some couples clung to each other with such force, it was impossible to separate them otherwise. Piling them up onto the industrial elevator; laying them out on the floor for the dentists to extract their golden crowns and search their orifices for hidden treasures; stacking them onto the gurney in a certain fashion and shoving them into the raging inferno; hosing the foam, blood, excrement and urine off the floor of the gas chamber and waiting for it to dry before admitting another batch inside. Zyklon-B, a cyanide-based poisonous gas used by the SS for mass murder, didn’t dissolve well in the humid conditions.

  The Sonderkommando smoked while they waited, mostly in silence. Such work inspired the desire to throw oneself onto the electric wire, not to partake in small talk. In exchange for their grisly services, the SS kept them warm and snug in their two-bunk beds inside the crematorium itself; kept them well-supplied with food and, most importantly, alcohol; and rewarded them with visits to the Auschwitz brothel. Though that last privilege was reserved for the non-Jewish inmates only. Not that it mattered; according to the working girls themselves, the Sonderkommando men mostly wanted to lay their heads on a warm woman’s lap and cry softly while the girl gently stroked their shaved heads. The corpse carrier detail. It had the highest rate of suicides among the entire camp complex.

  “The very same.” Stasia perched on the edge of the flimsy desk, which didn’t even squeak in protest. How thin they all had grown, Mala mused, focusing on the physician’s sharp eyes in which thoughts were constantly at work. She had befriended Mala before anyone else did; only later did Mala discover the reason for such friendliness: Stasia belonged to what was called “an organization” in the camp’s terms. The local resistance that refused to submit to the SS-imposed order. “At any rate,” she continued, “now that Rita’s almost recovered, you ought to assign her to the Kanada. She’ll be able to get certain things out, to exchange them later for whatever’s needed. And don’t fret, she’s as reliable as they come. I spoke with her countless times while I was treating her; she’s a Red Army girl, very ideological, so you can imagine how much she loathes the Nazis after they captured her and her comrades. First-rate resistance material.”

  Half-glancing at her, Mala couldn’t help but grin. Speaking in riddles and undertones had long become Stasia’s second nature due to her clandestine activities.

  “You’ll be getting your cut for it; it’s all already arranged,” the inmate doctor continued. Only her lips moved with great urgency, the rest of her face remaining perfectly still. She hadn’t blinked once, her eyes delivering the message that she didn’t wish to put into words: We need this, Mal
a. This is a question of life and death for all of us, not just one inmate.

  Mala understood everything. Though not a member of “the organization” herself, she assisted them with whatever she could.

  Stasia’s face positively transformed when she saw Mala write Rita’s name on the official form. At once, she extracted sulfa drugs, five pieces of bread, a few loose cigarettes and a golden ring out of her pocket. “For your troubles. I know it will be difficult to explain why a Soviet Jew got the most kosher position in the entire camp and not a Volksdeutsche.”

  “Lagerführerin Mandl doesn’t question me all that much. I don’t think she wants to be bothered.” Mala pocketed the goods, already mentally distributing them among the inmates she would see later.

  Stasia’s fellow underground members were also on Mala’s to-visit list. The people who were still plotting, against all good reason, simply because they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves otherwise. Neither would Mala. They all said she fit right in with them and, to Mala, that was the highest praise there was.

  In front of one of the barracks in the men’s camp, Mala slowed down her steps and came to a gradual halt. Leaning against the splintered wall, she lit a cigarette, her eyes never leaving the wide, open space in front of her. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, one could never be too vigilant. Danger was virtually everywhere; the air stank of it just like it stank of burnt flesh and singed hair.

  In moments like these, she was grateful for the militaristic training she had received in Hanoar Hatzioni—one of the Antwerp Jewish youth organizations. The local Zionists saw the writing on the wall when Hitler was still promising peace to the world. While the rest of the world ate those promises up, Hanoar Hatzioni members were marching in formation and crawling in trenches on their bellies, boys and girls indistinguishable from each other in their jodhpurs and heavy boots—children preparing for the war which the adults blindly denied. During the day, Mala studied hard to be smart; during the evenings and weekends, she trained even harder to be strong, so that when the Nazis came, she would face them as a soldier, not a trembling lamb heading for slaughter. It was Mala’s profound conviction that it was that training that had ultimately helped her survive a death camp so far; that had taught her how to draw strength from one’s hatred, how to identify goals and follow through with the most audacious plans. How to outwit the SS in their own lair, as she was presently doing.