The ladder leading to the roof began to quiver faintly under someone’s weight. Before long, a carpenter’s boots appeared in Mala’s view, then the dark blue overalls, followed by the carpenter himself—a tall, sly-faced fellow from Slovakia with the red triangle of a political prisoner sewn over his heart. Pavol got himself into Auschwitz for trading in fake passports, though he, himself, took great offense whenever anyone dared to doubt the legitimacy of his merchandise. According to him, the passports were very much real, purchased with his hard-earned money from the deceased person’s family members who had no use for them at any rate, just like the deceased themselves.
“Just whom was I harming with my innocent actions?” Pavol would inquire with a look of the frankest self-pity. “Mr. Jew needs a passport to flee the country; the family that had just lost their father needs money; it’s a simple matter of demand and supply, with myself acting as a mediator between the two parties. The Gestapo agent accused me of falsifying the documents! Pfft! I never falsified anything in my entire life. All I did was put a new photo in the passport. Wouldn’t even alter the name. Well, just the part of the stamp that goes over the photograph, a very tiny bit of it. But the passport itself, just like the name in it, was real!”
It appeared that Auschwitz’s re-educational program had failed in his particular case, as Pavol had not only refused to abandon his old “mediator’s” ways but turned the local trading into quite a profitable business. The slight paunch he had managed to develop in a place where people dropped from starvation like flies attested to that.
At once, he opened his arms in a welcoming gesture. “Mala! You’re a sight for sore eyes!”
Her gaze never leaving the compound, Mala pressed herself against the man’s chest and coiled her arm around his neck. To any curious eyes, they presented an innocent enough picture—a pair of lovers, both from privileged details, stealing a hug and a swift kiss in between their errands. The punishment for that, in the severest of cases, would be a whip against one’s buttocks, but Mala had already established herself as Mandl’s protégé. No Kapo was stupid enough to report her. That was a useful position, indeed.
“Right pocket of my jacket,” she whispered into his ear by way of greeting. “Sulfa drugs, like you asked.”
It was Mala’s suspicion that the Slovak was not only a forger but a former pickpocket; she hardly ever felt his touch whenever he extracted the goods. A pickpocket with a moral code—he never took anything besides what she had indicated.
“Most obliged, Mally,” Pavol spoke just as quietly into her ear, the stubble on his cheek scratching at her skin, tender in the frost. “The scabies fellow sends his best regards.”
She felt her pocket sag significantly when he lowered his portion of merchandise into it.
“And these are from me, personally,” he added, demonstrating a few long nails before dropping them quickly into her pocket. “Pinched them just this very morning.” With the wryest of smiles, he tossed his head at the roof he was supposed to be fixing.
Mala grinned, genuine gratitude shining in her eyes. The nails were in great demand with the Sonderkommando, whatever they were stowing them away for. Just like empty sardine tins that the Slovak luckily had access to.
“Thank you. And this is for you. For your trouble,” Mala repeated Stasia’s words, dipped into her pocket and produced two pieces of bread and a few loose cigarettes. They instantly disappeared into the pocket of Pavol’s overalls.
After another quick hug—purely fictitious, for the Slovak had a moral code concerning that too and never took advantage of the situation—the two conspirators went on their respective ways. The carpenter, up the ladder; Mala, toward the crematorium, her steps heavy with dread.
It was these trips that she loathed the worst. Not even the suffering of the sickbay could compare to the morbid atmosphere of these death factories. And yet, she trooped forward, her hand clutching the nails inside her pocket. She had seen far too many people vanish into their maws to remain a silent bystander and wait for her turn to ascend those steps into the purgatory quietly and decently, like the SS hoped they all would do.
In front of the imposing rectangular building, Oberscharführer Voss was smoking, elegant and tall in his form-fitting gray overcoat.
“Mala.” He coughed into his gloved fist. “What brings you to our forsaken parts?”
She was a Birkenau runner, an inmate in charge of filling women’s working details; the Sonderkommando was an all-male one. Perfectly aware that she had no business there, Mala grinned amiably at the crematorium’s Kommandoführer. “The laundry detail Kapo sent me. She wanted me to ask the Sonderkommando’s Kapo when he wanted their bedsheets to be disinfected.”
“Didn’t they just disinfect them?” Taking another deep pull on his cigarette, Voss narrowed his eyes in suspicion. He was lenient enough, and particularly when drunk, which was more often than not, but he was no idiot.
“New Kommandant’s orders, Herr Oberscharführer. The bedsheets ought to be disinfected every week due to the typhus outbreak. Another guard has just caught it. Herr Kommandant says he doesn’t wish to lose any more of his men to that blasted plague.” Mala made a suitably regretful grimace.
At those words, Voss saw reason at once. Even though he had his own separate quarters in the crematorium, he slept under one roof with his Sonderkommando men. Judging by his expression, he had no desire to become yet another statistic. He was already motioning Mala inside.
“Put that headscarf of yours over your face,” he advised when she was almost through the doors. “They’re still sorting those stiffs. It stinks to high heaven in there.”
Voss’s reluctance to directly supervise his men’s macabre duties explained the Sonderkommando’s privileged position better than any words would. The SS preferred to accommodate their forced conscripts the best they could just so they, themselves, wouldn’t have to do the dirty work. They wanted the Jews and other undesirables dead without their direct involvement.
Quietly, Mala snorted with chill disdain as soon as her back was to Voss and made the first resolute step into the Auschwitz inferno.
Inside the vast antechamber, the Kanada Kommando inmates were pulling the clothes off their hooks and hurling them into big industrial sacks. Mala’s eyes slid along the walls adorned with signs in nearly all European languages—Bath and Disinfection, Proceed Straight Ahead, Leave Your Valuables Here for Disinfection. She averted her gaze in disgust.
The faint trace of chemicals in the air scratched at her throat as she advanced further along the corridor and toward the opened, airtight door. A Sonderkommando man in a respirator stomped out in his rubber boots, pulling two corpses by their ankles. By the elevator, two of his comrades were waiting for him with a small gurney that was already piled with bodies.
Even the headscarf covering her nose didn’t mask the stench of death that made Mala’s eyes water. The bodies were still soft, pliable; their arms moved when the man in rubber boots stacked two last bodies atop the sizeable mound. Their eyes hadn’t glazed over yet; the tears were still visible on their unnaturally ruddy cheeks with a net of burst blood vessels around their noses and mouths. From their lips, pinkish-white froth still dropped, mixing with blood that had run from their noses.
The inmate in a respirator pulled it off his face, wiped his wet forehead with the back of his hand and then, to Mala’s amazement, produced a handkerchief and began to clean the corpses’ faces. The other two men waited patiently for him to finish and only after he stepped away, satisfied with the result, did they push their heavy load inside the industrial elevator. Its doors closed with a loud clang that reverberated through the entire building, it seemed. Mala felt a shiver run through her at that sound, full of desolate finality.
“Are you looking for someone?” the Sonderkommando man asked her, regarding the bloody handkerchief in his hands with eyes full of torment.
“Konstantinos. Your Polish friends call him Kostek.”
“The Greek fellow?”
“Yes.”
“He’s upstairs, manning the ovens.”
“Could you fetch him, please? It’s important.”
“It must be.” The man’s grin resembled a painful grimace. “Else, why would anyone willingly come here?”
He called the elevator and remained in the same position—eyes downcast, shoulders slumped—until the doors opened to swallow him, much like they swallowed everything in that hell. The Krema, as the crematorium was called among the local population, was the SS’s Moloch, the god of death they had created and worshipped with due diligence.
Left alone in an overpowering silence, Mala advanced, step by tentative step, into the chamber where a thousand voices had screamed not even an hour ago. Inside, the soft humming of air ventilators was audible. Through the small vents in the roof, pale sunlight seeped into the ghastly dungeon. Several hollow columns wrapped in metallic mesh protruded from the ground and disappeared into the torn squares of blue sky just visible through the hatches. Mala approached one of them, searched for electric wires and, not finding any, carefully touched the mesh. Here, the chemical smell was even stronger.
“Are you mad, lingering around those things?” A hand grasped her shoulder and pulled her away, back toward the heavy metal door.
Mala recognized Kostek, wearing the Sonderkommando “uniform” of civilian clothes and rubber boots. In his hand, he held a hose from which water was dripping. Incredibly tall, he towered not only over his fellow Kommando mates, but most of the SS men as well. His olive skin invariably displayed a permanent five o’clock shadow no matter how closely he shaved. Across one of his green eyes, a long scar stretched, cutting his right brow in two—a present from the Greek Gestapo in reward for his resistance activities, according to Kostek himself. Whenever he spoke of those “glorious days,” his face always creased into a dark sneer. Caught, tortured, assigned to the detail that broke men stronger than him, he not only hadn’t relented but swore revenge, even if it came at the cost of his own life. A perfect fighter in Auschwitz’s underground army.
“The SS lower gas pellets inside through those columns,” he explained, hosing down the floor. “It’s mostly dispersed by now, but it can still do damage to your lungs.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I though the gas was just that—gas.”
“No. Pellets. Light blue and very deadly.”
There was a long pause. Mala looked down at the gray concrete emerging from under the layer of blood and grime, at the water shimmering in the pallid light seeping from the hatches, at Kostek’s face that hadn’t betrayed a single emotion aside from the haunted glaze in his eyes that made it difficult to look into them without flinching. She wondered if he had nightmares.
“Do you dream much?” Mala probed carefully.
The solitary ray of sun broke through the nearest hatch and, all at once, the mist from Kostek’s hose burst into a myriad of lights. Offensive and grotesque, a rainbow hung over the death chamber like a demented decoration. His face twisting into a grimace of utter distaste, Kostek threw the hose down, staring through the hatch at the torn piece of blue sky with accusation.
“No,” he spoke at length. “I don’t dream at all. Too tired to dream.”
“I sometimes do,” Mala confessed, watching the water colored faintly with pink pool around her boots. “But I never remember my dreams in the morning.”
“Perhaps it’s for the best.”
Mala didn’t argue. Perhaps it was.
Then, as though remembering herself, she reached into her pocket. “Your tins, as promised. And even some nails today.”
“Nails!” Kostek brightened at once and reached for the items the way most inmates reached for bread. The Sonderkommando men were well fed by the SS—they had other priorities. “Thank you. You have no idea how helpful these are.”
“I don’t, that much is true.” Mala paused before giving Kostek a curious look. “Whatever do you need these for? I can still see how the nails may be used as a sort of weapon, but sardine tins? Are you planning to cut your supervisors’ throats with them or something of the sort?”
“Something of the sort.” He was laughing. It was strange to hear laughter in that chamber, strange but oddly hopeful at the same time. Kostek leaned very close to her. “We’re making bombs out of them.”
“Bombs?” Mala regarded him with great skepticism.
He moved his shoulder slightly. It was a you-don’t-have-to-believe-me-if-you-don’t-want-to shrug.
“A Soviet prisoner of war taught us how. Two weeks before camp leader Hössler shot him.”
Mala mentally calculated the number of tins she had passed to Kostek and his comrades by now and looked at him with alarm this time. “Just how many do you have?”
“Enough to make things hot for the SS,” he gave a vague reply in tow with a conspirator’s wink. “We just have to wait for the Allies to come close enough. As it is, Africa is already lost to the Nazis; Italy has switched sides and is fighting against them now; the Red Army has been chasing them west ever since Germany lost Stalingrad and is fighting already in Ukraine from what we last heard—take my word for it, it’s only a matter of time till the reinforcements are here. Then, we’ll stage such a revolt, they shall remember us for a long time.”
It was a local fantasy, just like inmates’ dreaming of the things they would do once they were liberated, the food they would eat, the torture they would inflict on their former tormentors. Everyone indulged in it now and then and no one really took it seriously. But, that day, Mala looked into Kostek’s eyes and, for some reason, believed him.
Five
Auschwitz
Edek and Wiesław were insulating a guard’s booth. It stood near the very gates with their infamous slogan—Arbeit macht frei—work makes you free; a small black and white doghouse with its SS chain-hound inside guarding its morbid kingdom. Not a single person would slip by that watching SS without proper authorization. The gates of Auschwitz Hades were sealed good and fast under his watch. Though, presently, the chain-hound was smoking as he wound circles in front of the gate to keep warm. Apparently, having to be stuck with two inmates inside such a small booth was beyond his desire.
“Have you ever seen a sunset like this one?” Edek spoke in an undertone, his gaze riveted to the sky. The whipped butter of golden clouds was slowly melting around the glowing disk, reddening the tops of the trees tucked in snow. “As though someone spilled pure honey atop the reddest apple one can find.”
“You’re hungry then?” Wiesław chortled softly, throwing a quick glance at the pacing guard.
Edek, too, saw that the German was growing impatient.
“You’re just a damned romantic, aren’t you?” Edek snapped in sudden, senseless anger.
Wiesław shrugged, not offended in the slightest by his friend’s outburst. They were all prone to those now and then. He had long grown used to ignoring them. “Is that why you pleaded with Lubusch to let us come here? So you can ogle clouds or some such?”
This time, Edek ignored the jab. “No, you miserable muttonhead,” he explained amiably, lowering his voice to a whisper. “I pleaded with Lubusch to let us come here so we could find out how one walks out of here without raising any suspicion.”
For an instant, Wiesław froze with a hammer in his hand, blinking at his friend in stunned wonder. An uncertain smile twitched on his face for a fleeting moment, while he waited for a punchline to the joke. When it didn’t follow, he grew serious at once and gave Edek a warning shove with his hammer. “Why would you talk such rot? Have you forgotten what they do to the others when someone goes under the wire? Mass executions in reprisal, to prevent more adventure-seekers from following suit. Is that what you want? Innocent men’s lives on your conscience?”
Edek shook his head impatiently. “That was before.”
“Before what?”
“Before the new Kommandant arrived. Remember what happened to the man who had escape
d because he missed his mother? Herr Kommandant not only didn’t execute him but returned him to the block perfectly unharmed and prohibited the Kapos to punish him in any way.”
Wiesław remembered. The entire affair was so inconceivable, it had become the talk of the camp for the next two weeks. The old Kommandant, Höss, would have shot the bastard himself. The new one, Obersturmführer Liebehenschel, forgave the man out of pure sympathy. In Liebehenschel’s eyes, running away simply to hug his mother was a selfless act of love, not a crime for which one ought to have been shot.
“Kommandant Liebehenschel is a sentimentalist,” Wiesław conceded. “I wonder how he ended up here, in Auschwitz.”
“Lubusch says in punishment.”
“For what?”
“Lubusch doesn’t know himself. He heard the new Kommandant was under house arrest prior to his arrival here. Supposedly for hurling a glass of champagne at Hitler’s portrait during one of their SS soirees.”
“Is that a fact?” Wiesław’s expression betrayed his mistrust.
“How would I know? I lost my invitation that day and didn’t make it to the party,” Edek hissed back with great sarcasm.
From the direction where the swamps lay, the wind had picked up and brought with it the stench of rotten water. Dark clouds crowded overhead, bulging with heavy, wet snow. With the sun almost gone, the forest loomed ahead, full of shadows and something vague and threatening.
Partisans and freedom, Edek realized just then. Freedom, which he could almost taste if he licked his wind-bitten lips; which he could almost see if he just looked closely and long enough—
The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz: A totally gripping and absolutely heartbreaking World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story Page 4