“What about me?”
Edek heard Zippy clear her throat and, having turned his head, had just caught sight of her steering Wiesław toward the locked door. Turning the key, she nearly pushed him into the corridor.
“We’ll mind the hallway,” Zippy threw over her shoulder, barely concealing her grin before silently shutting the door after the couple.
Now, there was just two of them in this semi-twilight and all the right words had suddenly escaped Edek’s mind.
“Won’t they… question you?” he asked, wetting his lips.
“I’ll worry about that when it happens,” Mala replied, much too carelessly for his liking. “It’s an old camp rule. Don’t waste your nerves on something that hasn’t happened yet.”
Edek grasped her wrist before he realized what he was doing. “Run with us.”
Mala pulled back, amused, but didn’t bother to release her hand from his grip. “Are you mad?”
“Not in the slightest. It’s too dangerous for you to stay here after helping us. Come with us. Please.”
“You are mad,” she announced her verdict with a wistful half-smile and gently pulled herself free. “Stick to your original plan. Run with Wiesław, join the partisans and fight. I promise, I’ll be here when you come to liberate us all. I’ll even meet you personally at the gate.”
In the silence that followed, her purposely carefree, playful grin nearly broke Edek’s heart.
From the top desk drawer, Mala retrieved a stamp and rolled it carefully in the inked sponge. In another instant, she held the very official-looking Ausweis before Edek, triumphant and impossibly beautiful just then. “Here. Your ticket to freedom. Merry Christmas.”
He stood before her, infinitely grateful and touched to the marrow, but suddenly—despite everything—he couldn’t bring himself to take it. Only after Mala physically closed his fingers around it did Edek whisper his thanks, in a voice that shook slightly for reasons he couldn’t quite explain.
Eighteen
Mala turned the corner of the crematorium and set off in the direction of the sickbay. It was a short walk, which, in itself, was somewhat symbolic. Birkenau inmates avoided the camp hospital barracks like the plague; for most, the crematorium was the next stop if the SS doctors didn’t finish them off with a lethal shot of phenol in the heart first. People didn’t go to the sickbay to recover. They went there to die.
In her pocket, medical contraband was concealed behind the double lining. Not carefully hidden enough for a thorough search by any means, but it did the trick when someone new and itching to impress their superiors demanded that Mala empty her pockets in front of them. The old hands re-educated such new recruits quickly enough; Mala was not only Mandl’s favorite, but camp leader Hössler’s too. A pet Jew, and upsetting her wouldn’t be beneficial for one’s promotion.
Feeling the roll of aspirin and sulfa drugs through the cloth, Mala stifled a grin of satisfaction. In exchange for her nails and bolts, Kostek stuffed her pockets with a veritable haul that would make any Birkenau physician delighted. Mala was well aware of the reasons for such generosity—at any given moment, an inmate, or an inmate’s friend or relative, could find themselves in the camp hospital. It was important to have comrades among the doctors, who had good memories for bribes and who would make sure that the valued patient would be kept off the SS doctors’ dreaded death lists, leaving the sickbay on their own two feet instead of being transported straight to the crematorium. But, that day, there was another reason for his visit.
“That’s from Rita,” Kostek had informed Mala, producing vials, pills, and injections from the hidden compartment inside his overalls. “The Soviet girl whose transfer to the Kanada Kommando you made possible.”
“She stole all that?” Mala couldn’t believe her eyes.
“Well, not at once.” Kostek had chuckled softly. As always, he stank of burnt flesh and some atrocious pine-scented cologne which nearly everyone in the Sonderkommando used in an attempt to conceal the stench. “We’ve been collecting it for you for a week now. Rita says if you need anything, just say the word. Her boyfriend also sends his regards. He offered to get you some dental gold—he works as a dentist in the crematorium, pulls the fillings out of poor devils’ mouths—but I told him, most likely you wouldn’t take it.”
Mala had grimaced at first—naturally, she wouldn’t—but then something shifted in her expression as she thought of Edek. In the past few weeks, she had thought of him more often than she cared to admit. She found herself pretending that it was solely because of her desire to do her utmost to help him, rejecting any sentimental undertones. She did her utmost to help Kostek as well, but she never dreamt of him kissing her, never awoke, her back wet with sweat, her breath hitching in her throat, still feeling his arms roaming over her body.
Edek had asked her to run with him. Naturally, she wouldn’t consider it seriously—she had far too many lives dependent on her here, in Auschwitz, to simply up and leave them all to their fate. If it weren’t for her, her newly adopted Papa would have certainly perished under the muddy waters of Moll’s mass grave, the very thought of which turned her stomach with dread. Who knew how many more people she would be able to pull from the clutches of death in the future, if she only stayed inside the barbed wire? But she still fantasized about it, guiltily, invariably under the cover of the night. Her cheeks hot with a mixture of shame and the most decadent pleasure, she dreamt of being free—with Edek by her side.
“In fact, I could use some gold,” she had said at length, chasing unwelcome and highly untimely thoughts from her mind. “And as for Rita, ask her if she can get me a man’s wristwatch. Preferably expensive, but not overly. Something with a golden face and a leather strap. Preferably German or Austrian-made.”
To her great relief, Kostek didn’t ask a single question, only nodded and trotted back to his grisly work detail. Walking briskly toward the sickbay, Mala was thinking of him and his comrades and the nails she’d been smuggling for them, wondering if she would ever witness the uprising they’d been dreaming about for months now.
The hospital barrack where her friend Stasia worked was more crowded than usual. Birkenau was in the middle of a typhus epidemic and, unlike the previous Kommandant Höss, the current one, Liebehenschel, refused to send all sick patients to the gas and so they lay, five people per bunk, moaning from high fever and stomach pains that the hospital recruits had no means to alleviate.
“What are you doing here?”
Mala swung round toward the voice. An inmate doctor was staring at her as though Mala was mad.
“I thought Mandl strictly prohibited any camp office personnel from coming here during the epidemic.”
Lagerführerin Mandl indeed did and was more than explicit in her orders. After a few SS men had caught the disease, Mandl outright banned Mala and Zippy from setting foot anywhere near the camp sickbay.
Offering the doctor a tentative smile, Mala stepped closer to her. “I brought medicine.”
The inmate doctor’s expression changed at once. Her gaze was now riveted to Mala’s pockets.
“I need to see Stasia first though.”
“She’s in the back, behind the partition.”
As Mala moved to pass by her, the doctor swiftly stepped away, pressed herself against the nearest bunk so that Mala could pass.
“Lice,” she explained apologetically. “I don’t want you to catch it. And please, don’t touch anything, and after you leave here, run a match along the seams of your clothes.”
Mala promised that she would.
Finding Stasia where the doctor said she would be, the inmate physician sat on a little stool with her back to Mala. In front of her, on a makeshift operating table, lay a woman with a chalk-white face and her legs wide open. The hem of her striped dress was pulled over her stomach; it was barely swollen, and yet, Mala instantly understood what procedure Stasia was performing on her patient.
The physician straightened in her seat, lo
oking over her shoulder in obvious alarm, but relaxed at once when she saw Mala.
“Didn’t anyone tell you that it’s bad taste, creeping up on people like that, and particularly here? You scared today’s breakfast out of me!”
Mala grinned, in spite of herself. Stasia had quite a way with words. “I’m sorry. Bad timing?”
“Would have been, if you were SS. Just give me a few moments. I’m almost done.”
Relief reflected on Stasia’s patient’s face at those words. She lowered her head back on the table and closed her eyes. Stasia patted her gently on her thigh.
“Don’t fret, Mama. I did everything as carefully as possible, given the circumstances. You’ll have plenty of babies in the future, after you come out of here.”
The young woman nodded bravely. Tears were rolling down her cheeks, but she wiped them with the back of her hand.
“Your husband will understand,” Stasia continued. “There was no way around it; not here, in Birkenau, at any rate. You know what SS doctors do to pregnant women here. If someone reported your pregnancy, you’d be on the first truck to the gas.”
Stasia’s patient nodded again. She knew. Everyone did. The Nazis only cared about their own racial stock. Everyone else’s offspring could go to the devil.
“Thank you,” she spoke softly. “For helping me. The doctor in the other barrack refused.”
“Is it that self-righteous Hungarian bitch you’re talking about?” Stasia snorted with disdain.
“Yes. She said I’d go to hell if I went through with it.”
Stasia laughed cuttingly. “We’re already in hell. There is nothing worse than this. Even the devil himself doesn’t have an imagination like our SS friends,” she scoffed, half-turning to Mala on her stool. “You know what amazes me the most about some people? They value their idiotic ideals over actual human lives. Esty—” her hand, holding a cloth on which she had just generously poured antiseptic, gestured toward her patient, “would have died, and that self-important Hungarian broad, who calls herself a physician, wouldn’t give a brass tack. All she cares about is the idea of the unborn child. The mother, who is a living and breathing human being and whose life is at stake, is irrelevant to her. She would refuse to abort a child that didn’t have the slightest chance in the first place and kill the mother with her inaction as long as her religious principles aren’t compromised. Isn’t that something amazing?”
“I’m Jewish.” Mala shrugged. “In my religion, we value a mother’s life over an unborn child’s. Even when it’s a difficult birth and there’s a choice between a mother’s life and the child’s, we always save the mother. She’s already here on earth. She has her life, family, friends, her work and her interests. She’ll go on and have more children. The child hasn’t begun its life yet, so the choice is obvious. That’s the logic behind all this, at least.”
“Precisely,” Stasia agreed. “I worked as a gynecologist, back home, in Poland. I was performing abortions—illegally, of course—for all those poor souls who had been turned away from state hospitals. I had thirteen-year-old girls who were raped by their uncles and who sat there with empty eyes and explained to me very calmly that it was the choice between me helping them or them drowning themselves in the river. I had wives who wore veils over their faces to cover up their bruises, begging me to help them so that another poor soul wouldn’t be born into a household where the husband did two things: got drunk, and beat up her and the children on a daily basis. My private clinic was a safe refuge for them. But in the eyes of the self-righteous public, I was this vicious child-murderer with no morals or ethics. And you know what? If helping a woman in crisis is immoral and unethical, I think I’ll remain immoral and unethical rather than condemning her to a life of abuse, poverty, or literal death as in Esty’s case.”
“You’re neither immoral nor unethical,” Esty said with a soft smile. “You saved my life.”
Rising from her stool, Stasia planted an unexpected kiss on the young woman’s forehead.
Mala watched them, misty-eyed, and suddenly realized that was all that mattered to Stasia. Her patients’ words. No one else’s.
“I never asked you why you got arrested,” Mala asked the Polish woman later, as the two of them were exchanging the goods in the nurses’ room.
“Most of the medical personnel got arrested in my town. We were very close to the German border, you see. They replaced us all with their German doctors and nurses.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“You’re not a communist or anything?”
Stasia snorted. “Have you ever heard me quoting Marx?”
“Do you have a family?”
“A husband and two wonderful children.” Stasia patted her chest, where Mala suspected the inmate doctor carried a smuggled photograph. “What about you, Mally? Are you married?”
Mala didn’t answer at once. Too much time had passed. She scarcely remembered the life before Auschwitz. With each passing day, it appeared more dreamlike, almost something she had imagined. At first, just after her arrival, Mala took refuge in memories but soon realized that memories only sucked the life out of her, leaving a black, gaping hole in the place where her heart ought to have been. And so, she began padding it out, stuffing her empty, torturous life with whatever—and whoever—she could: Hanoar Hatzioni youth group with the camp resistance; Antwerp dances with Birkenau orchestra concerts; her cheerful best friend from the fashion house with sly and infinitely brave Zippy; her former boss with camp leader Hössler and Lagerführerin Mandl; her father with a French Jew she had pulled out of the corpse-filled trench with her own two hands.
Only Edek hadn’t been a mere replacement for her last beau, for a date for which her Papa had bought Mala new patent shoes. Edek was something new entirely, a force that had swept into Mala’s life and transformed her from a revenge-obsessed automaton running errands for the resistance into a woman who began to thaw out, to allow herself to feel once again.
To dream.
To love.
“I had a boyfriend back in Belgium,” she admitted at last with great reluctance.
“Does Mandl allow you to write to him?”
“She does. But I never did.”
“Why not?”
Mala shrugged. She considered explaining it all to Stasia, the fact that she had left Belgium as one person and had transformed into a completely different one, and that the new Mala no longer had anything in common with the young handsome man whose features were growing more and more blurred in her memory. The old Mala was idealistic and just a tiny bit naive; she believed in the Zionist cause and dreamt of fighting for it and could have never imagined, in her darkest nightmares, that her fight for the cause would take place in the death camp in which survival was the biggest form of resistance. A former intellectual, who had loved debating with her comrades and had never been afraid to speak her mind was now forced to bite her tongue in front of her superiors if she didn’t want to end up getting shot for her unwanted opinions. A girl who had never been afraid to love, fiercely and with an open heart, had to close it to the outside world as soon as she had realized where she had been incarcerated. Forming attachments, let alone falling in love, was a dangerous affair in Auschwitz. One could never know when a new friend or a loved one would be rounded up at the latest selection or shot by a bored SS guard using inmates as target practice.
Auschwitz had changed her to such an extent that she wouldn’t be able to shrink bank to that previous Mala, who her old boyfriend had fallen in love with. How would she even explain her experience to someone who wouldn’t be able to conceive it at all—the crematoriums, the SS, the death carts, the torture chambers, the gallows on the Appellplatz and the sickbays where medical personnel had to rely on her contraband, for the SS thought it was a waste to supply the camp hospitals with medicaments. He would never understand what she had gone through.
She considered saying it all, but only ended up saying, “I
t’s better this way.”
Oddly enough, Stasia understood. She was an Auschwitzer too. They would forever share that bond, just like they’d share the memories of this place—the nightmarish quality of it all.
Later that afternoon, Mala sat on the Sauna’s floor, her hair still wet and smelling strongly of disinfectant. Better safe than sorry, she’d reasoned, bribing the Sauna’s madam, Mutti, with a bar of milk chocolate in exchange for a thorough hot shower and whatever green disinfectant they dunked the new arrivals into. The chocolate must have been good indeed—Mutti even arranged for Mala’s clothes to be disinfected while Mala waited, wrapped in a rug the Sauna’s block elder passed for a towel.
“Where’s your boyfriend today?” the Bavarian demanded in her booming voice, giving Mala a sly look up and down.
“Which one?” Mala threw her a purposely seductive smile.
The former madam rolled her eyes. “The one who looks at you with the gaze of a dying sheepdog. That handsome Pole of yours from the fitters’ Kommando who comes here almost every day asking if we have any pipes to fix.” She snorted good-naturedly, giving Mala another meaningful look.
As though on cue, Mala heard a familiar voice cursing crudely in Polish and smiled. Edek must have just witnessed something outside that had caused an outburst of abuse directed at “the blasted SS” and their mothers described in the most derogatory terms, and all of their enablers and some “bloody sod” whom Mala couldn’t see from where she was sitting.
Edek’s choice of words must have offended someone’s feelings for next came the almost indignant reproach: “Mind your language, young man. There are women present here.”
“…And men, who were raised better than this,” someone else added.
The new arrivals, Mala scoffed, shaking her head. It’s all right. The local staff shall teach them the local ways soon enough.
She rose to her feet and approached the small group of people. Before them, Edek stood, thoroughly incensed.
“Mind my language?!” he shouted. “You ought to be outraged by what is happening in the Appellplatz presently and not by my choice of words. You ought to be outraged at the SS for herding the entire barracks outside on Sunday, their only day off, and making them do gymnastics ‘to strengthen their health.’ You ought to be outraged at the fact that the Kapos and block elders beat the ones who can’t keep up with the ridiculous pace, to death,” he roared. “Those people are being brutalized as we speak, but you’re offended by my description of it? I suggest you go and sod yourself then. Go tell the SS to mind their language. See what they do to you.”
The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz: A totally gripping and absolutely heartbreaking World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story Page 15