When reminiscing about his familial home became too painful, Edek turned his thoughts to the future. In it, there was always a dense forest, his partisan squad and the Nazis he and his new comrades would ambush, eventually freeing their land from the Reich’s yoke once and for all. Edek dreamt of heroics, but each time, his thoughts veered off course and it was always Mala’s face that ended up before his eyes. That hauntingly beautiful face and those mocking lips of hers: What else then? Do you need a Mercedes too, with a personal driver?
Invariably, Edek ended up chuckling at the memory of that single encounter and was astounded at the fact that he still could laugh in the first place; buried alive in that frost-covered coffin, it was Mala’s words that kept him sane and counting the days till their next meeting. It would come, he was sure of it, just as he was sure that she would go through with her promise and get the Ausweis for him—and then, with Lubusch’s aid… For some reason, Edek would always lose his train of thought at that precise point.
On the sixth day, at breakfast—it was just a mug of bromide-infused water the SS had the nerve to call coffee—Edek realized that he could no longer see his imaginary comrades’ faces from the partisan squad. Mala’s image replaced them once and for all and there was suddenly no going back for Edek. The realization of it both excited and terrified him. All at once, the Strafblock had lost its power over him.
I’ll be waiting, she had told him without quite meaning what he wanted it to mean; yet never before had Edek been so determined to come out of there alive.
When the guard opened the door on the ninth day, Edek realized that he couldn’t walk. Only crawl, on all fours, like an animal, for his muscles had grown much too weak after his solitary confinement in a cell that didn’t permit any movement. That was precisely how the SS wanted them—humiliated, beaten into submission, reduced to an animalistic state—but Edek refused to give the guard the pleasure of seeing him on his knees longer than needed. Using the wall for support and trying not to cry out in pain at his muscles strained to the utmost, he pulled himself up and squared his shoulders in defiance. His legs were trembling something frightful; his eyes, no longer accustomed to the bright light, were brimming with tears, but he stood all the same.
In the room reserved for interrogations and dealing out punishment, a small delegation stood. Through the film of tears, Edek recognized Lubusch and, next to him, the new Kommandant, Arthur Liebehenschel, surrounded by a few of his adjutants. Edek’s hand flew to his head instinctually and lowered slowly, as soon as he remembered that he no longer possessed an inmate’s striped hat to take off as a sign of respect before the SS.
An officer from the Political Department addressed Edek, reading out a sentence about sabotaging the detail’s production: “…a grave offense against war effort and German Reich… a crime that must not go unpunished… requested by Unterscharführer Lubusch and approved by camp Kommandant Obersturmbannführer Liebehenschel…”
His words scarcely registered with Edek; his eyes were trained on Lubusch and Lubusch only, expectant and pleading. To his great relief, his Kommandoführer gave him a brief encouraging nod in tow with a smile. It touched his mouth for an instant only and was gone before anyone could notice, but suddenly, the panic slipped away from Edek. He began to breathe again.
From what Edek had grasped, he was to be lashed again, in the presence of the camp Kommandant—on Unterscharführer Lubusch’s request.
Kommandant Liebehenschel, a handsome man in his early forties, cleared his throat for the umpteenth time. Edek saw him clasp and unclasp his hands and look around as though desperately searching for an exit, as if it was him who was about to get his buttocks skinned by the executioner’s lash.
In the meantime, the executioner, a brawny man with a red, pockmarked face resembling a bulldog’s, was instructing Edek on how to stand correctly to receive his punishment.
“Take your pants off,” he growled, indicating where Edek was to place his forearms. Suddenly, his face was right next to Edek’s, who could smell chewing tobacco on the executioner’s breath. “I won’t hit you hard,” the man whispered through his barely moving lips, “but you scream as loudly as you can manage, if you know what’s good for you. It’ll be over before you know it.”
It was an odd request, but Edek had spent enough time in Auschwitz to follow such advice.
The executioner fussed some more over his victim, then turned to his distinguished guests waiting for permission to start. It was the political officer who gave it.
From his place, Edek saw how pale the Kommandant had grown as he stared in great alarm at the whip, with several beaded ends, in the executioner’s hands. To his credit, the latter made a big show of rising it slowly and dramatically over his shoulder.
The blow stung, not half as badly as Vasek’s, but Edek screamed so wildly that Kommandant Liebehenschel shouted for the executioner to stop it at once.
“His legs,” Liebehenschel muttered, white as chalk. “He’s already been lashed. And that affair counts for ten lashes at once.” He pointed at the executioner’s whip and Edek saw his hand trembling. “That’s enough. You’ll maim him for life. He won’t be committing any more such sabotage. Will you?” This time Liebehenschel stared directly at Edek. In his tragic, black eyes was a wild appeal for confirmation.
In a shaking voice, Edek promised that he wouldn’t.
The Kommandant breathed out in relief. “It’s all settled then. Release him back to his barracks. No! Wait. Send him to the sickbay. He needs to have his wounds tended to before he can return to his duties.”
After the Kommandant and his escort were gone, it was Lubusch who volunteered to take Edek to the camp hospital barrack.
“I hope you won’t hold it against me,” Lubusch said, dealing him a friendly clap on his back as the two were making their way out of the punishment block’s dungeon. “The Political Department wanted to keep you there for a month. But I suggested an alternative they couldn’t refuse—a demonstrative punishment before the Kommandant’s eyes. Liebehenschel is a sentimentalist,” Lubusch explained with a confidential grin. “He can’t bear the sight of inmates suffering. The gas chamber, he won’t even go near. He nearly worked himself up into a nervous breakdown after he saw women and children heading into Hössler’s domain in Birkenau. I knew that if I got him to watch over your execution, he would stop it at once.”
“Thank you, Herr Unterscharführer.” Edek actually meant it.
For a time, they walked silently side by side, Lubusch matching his strides to Edek’s much slower ones.
“Is it true that he hurled a glass of champagne at Hitler’s portrait?” Edek finally asked.
Lubusch moved his shoulder. “That’s one version of events.”
“May I ask what’s the other?”
“He left his wife for a young woman of an unreliable political status,” Lubusch replied vaguely. “And refused to break it off with her when his superiors demanded he did so.” He paused for a while and then added in a voice that was full of romantic finality, “She followed him, to Auschwitz, after they shipped him off here as a punishment.”
It occurred to Edek that Lubusch was thinking of his own wife who had followed him to Germany despite her racial status. Edek desperately tried to stop his train of thought, but he couldn’t help himself: all of a sudden, he was wondering too. He was wondering if Mala would follow him if he offered her the chance to run.
Eleven
Birkenau
Mala was passing her most recent haul to Kostek, her Sonderkommando connection, when the siren began to blare over the crematorium. Instinctively, their eyes darted to the ceiling. Could it be? They exchanged hopeful looks. An air attack? The civilian Polish workers, who did odd jobs around the camp, never missed a chance to impart “the war news” to the local population, to raise their spirits. The Auschwitzers were aware that the Allies had bombed German cities, but not once had they seen an allied plane flying over their forsaken parts. It was eve
ryone’s conviction that the Soviets would reach them sooner than the Western Allies, but even the Red Army was still too far away, fighting somewhere in Western Ukraine, from what they had last heard.
As the sirens wailed, they were hoping for a miracle; but then familiar German shouts filled the crisp winter air outside, along with frenzied dog barking, and their hope died, much like everything did in Auschwitz.
Sensing danger, Kostek grasped Mala’s hand and pulled her toward the elevator, but it appeared to have been locked. Issuing a curse in his native language—only the SS had the keys to the blasted thing, he explained as they ran—he made toward the exit with Mala in tow, but a frightened crowd of the Sonderkommando men were already pushing toward them, sweeping them back toward the gas chamber.
“Everyone inside, now! Schnell, schnell, schnell! Quick, quick!” the SS man bellowed, accompanying his words with the cracking of his horsewhip.
Mala only caught a glimpse of the guard’s face, but she instantly recognized him. It was Hauptscharführer Moll, one of the officers in charge of the Sonderkommando and their ghastly detail. His brutal face was red with fury; his strawberry-blond hair was in disarray, which was highly unusual for him; the veins in his neck bulged as he shouted his commands at the stupefied men; his good eye rolled like mad, while his glass one remained unblinking and dead. The contrast was truly petrifying.
“Inside the chamber and stay there, you bloody oafs!”
A few SS men advanced toward the crowd, their submachine guns leaving the Kommando no chance for a revolt. In the general commotion, Mala lost Kostek.
“Damn this rat trap!” someone said beside Mala, his voice cracking with bitter tragedy. “They cheated us again.”
Her back pressed against the column with its metal mesh, Mala was frantically twisting her head around, trying to make sense of the situation. Inside her chest, her heart was beating wildly.
“What’s happening?” she asked no one in particular.
A few faces turned to her, regarding her with genuine sympathy.
“Every six months or so, they liquidate the entire Sonderkommando,” a man near her explained. “After they liquidated our predecessors, we swore that we wouldn’t go down without a fight. That we would foresee it happening—”
“Our time is not up yet!” someone shouted wildly. “It hasn’t been six months yet. We have four more weeks to live!”
“It’s almost Christmas, you SS swine!” another man cried. “Have you not the heart at all? Killing us all before the holy day?”
Painfully aware of a sense of dread creeping over her, Mala felt her entire body trembling. The SS were already herding more men into the chamber; these new ones brought with them the stench of singed hair and burnt flesh from minding the ovens upstairs. Their cries and curses mixed with the wails of the air-raid siren, deafening and terrifying.
By some miracle, Kostek found her again; and for an instant, his face reflected immense relief. In another moment, he was elbowing his way toward the airtight door in which the SS men were brandishing their whips and submachine guns.
“Herr Hauptscharführer!” There was desperation in Kostek’s voice as he called for Moll’s attention. His fingers clutching Mala’s wrist were like iron. “There is an outsider among us. Mala Zimetbaum, the runner from the camp office.” He was gasping by the time they reached the group of the guards.
At once, two muzzles of submachine guns were aimed directly at their stomachs.
“Back!” Moll shouted, his face twisting with rage.
“But she doesn’t belong—” Eyeing the weapons in alarm, Kostek was groping for the right words. “Lagerführerin Mandl and Obersturmführer Hössler would never approve—”
Moll struck out at him with the speed of a venomous snake. His fist caught Kostek square in his jaw and made him stumble back a step despite his solid build. Moll was already upon him, pummeling him with his fists, until Kostek surrendered and fell to the floor, only covering his head with both arms to protect it from further assault. After dealing him a few swift kicks in the stomach and legs, only then, breathing heavily and sweating bullets, did Moll step back. The entire chamber heard the clang as the airtight door locked after him with an ominous sound.
Enveloped in semi-darkness, all eyes were directed at the hatches in the ceiling. The siren kept blaring, but so far, the hatches remained closed.
Mala crouched by Kostek. He was still dazed but was already working his way up, holding onto one of his comrades’ elbows for support. Using her headscarf, Mala set to cleaning his face.
“Why bother?” He managed a bloodied smile. One of his eyes was already swelling. “We shall all be dead in a few minutes.”
Mala considered saying that she was a human and that’s what humans did, but then found fault in that logic. No; humans could no longer claim that their humanism was what separated them from the animals. Even animals helped each other; Mala herself had witnessed a hen warming orphaned ducks under her wings on an old farm in Poland. Humans were the biggest hypocrites among all species, for they banned abortions for Aryan women and yet they had no qualms about throwing Jewish children into gas chambers. They talked about helping fellow men and yet turned entire ships full of refugees away from their shores, condemning them to death. They spoke at length of their Christian values, but when it came to offering shelter to the persecuted, they shut their doors and chased the invaders off their property with guns and curses.
“Because your face is bloody and the right thing to do is to clean it,” Mala said instead.
Kostek grinned with his broken lips. “How much better the world would have been if everyone did the right thing.”
“Hopefully, future generations will learn from our mistakes.”
“You think so?” He arched a skeptical brow. “You know, after thousands of years filled with bloodshed and conflicts, I have long lost all faith in humankind.”
“So did I. But I still have faith in a fellow human. Now, I have faith in you.” Mala looked at him. “You knew they were about to kill you all and yet you risked your life to save mine.”
“And you risked your life coming here in the first place.” He averted his gaze, suddenly unable to meet her eyes. “Forgive me, please, Mala.”
“I have nothing to forgive you for.” She smiled gently. “It was the right thing to do.”
His shoulders quivered in the twilight of the chamber and Mala couldn’t tell whether it was from tears or mirthless laughter.
The sun was descending, but the siren was still roaring its demented song above the camp compound. Now the searchlights had joined it, blinding the inmates lined next to their work details and barracks. They’d been standing to attention for hours now; scarcely feeling their own extremities, which felt as though they were frozen solid to the ground. At first, they had shivered violently; next, they had grown apathetic and sleepy and had to be nudged by their barrack mates to reply their Jawohl—present—whenever the SS man called out their number. Now, a good number of them were lying on the snow—it was their comrades who shouted their numbers for them and propped them up for the guards to see their ash-gray, dead faces.
The patients of the sickbay, whoever could walk that is, had also been chased outside by the SS doctors, while their inmate orderlies were checking the numbers of the bedridden ones inside the hospital barracks.
He could no longer feel his lips and yet Edek was certain he was smiling as he stood for the interminable roll call in the glacial cold. For he knew what the incessant wailing of the siren meant.
Someone had attempted the impossible and succeeded.
Someone had escaped from Auschwitz.
“Whatever are you grinning at?” Roman’s purple lips barely moved. He was Edek’s bunkmate, also sent to the sickbay to recover from a Kapo’s beating that had left him with painful welts on his buttocks that required surgery. “They can get him, still.”
“They won’t get him.” Edek’s feverish eyes stared wildly in
to the night, ignited by hope. “He’s gone far, far away by now.”
“They have the dogs.”
“There are marshes all around here. He’ll lose them there in no time.”
“He’s probably drowned in one of those swamps, the hot-headed idiot.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.” Edek tried to shrug but wasn’t sure if he actually managed to do so. He had long lost all feeling in his extremities. “He has to be alive. If he’s dead, I may as well go to the wire right now.”
This time, Roman didn’t argue. He understood.
Mala had never thought she would be so relieved to hear camp leader Hössler’s voice. He spoke to them through the airtight door and yet, the crowd inside was so anxiously breathless, they heard each one of his words perfectly.
“Listen up, men. There has been an escape. So far, only one inmate is presumed missing, but we can’t exclude that he had an accomplice or accomplices.”
Mala’s breath caught in her throat. Edek? But it couldn’t be. Wiesław said he was locked in the Strafblock. The Kapo had confirmed it too, when she bribed him to supply Edek with a straw pallet and a warm blanket.
She listened closer.
“We’re going to open this door to conduct a roll call among you lot,” Hössler continued in his well-regulated voice. “There are machine guns mounted in the corridor; if you try to run or do anything idiotic, we won’t have much choice but to shoot you all. Now, we don’t want that and, surely, you don’t want that.” A pause, to drive his point home. “May I, as your leader, count on your good reason and behavior?”
Hössler wasn’t called a sweet-talker by the Sonderkommando for nothing, it occurred to Mala. Where Moll bellowed and raged, Hössler spoke in measured tones and appealed to their logic. Mala understood only too well how he could persuade Auschwitz’s new arrivals to walk straight into the gas chamber without suspecting a damned thing. It was difficult not to fall for his lies; it was even harder to separate them from the truth.
The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz: A totally gripping and absolutely heartbreaking World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story Page 9