Recovering himself at last, Moll grasped her arms and threw her off the gallows, to the ground. Jumping down, he began kicking at her body with his steel-lined boots, sweating and panting with effort. And she was still laughing, laughing at him in front of the entire camp, laughing at ghostly pale Mandl who stared at the unraveling scene of sheer brutality with her mouth agape and the official document with Mala’s sentence hanging limply from her shaking hand. And Mala didn’t feel pain any longer, only some gleeful, lightheaded joy, and the harder Moll kicked, the louder her howling laughter echoed around the compound, eerie and sending chills down everyone’s spine.
At last, Moll couldn’t take it any longer.
“Get that witch out of here!” he bellowed at his underlings. “Take her to the crematorium and burn her alive!”
An audible gasp traveled through the ranks. Even the wardens exchanged bewildered glances; surely, it was too much.
Through a bloody film in her eyes, Mala stared at the painfully blue sky above, as if her fate was of no concern for her any longer. She had done her part. She had given the people hope. Now, it was up to them to use it against the men who had sentenced her and Edek to death.
For whatever odd reason, Zippy’s words about Joan of Arc resurfaced in her memory and Mala smiled blissfully through overwhelming pain. If she were to die in the flames like the French warrior and saint, so be it. At that instant, Mala found such an end inexplicably befitting.
Some Slovak girls gently lifted her body off the ground so that the SS wouldn’t defile her with their touch. They put her on the death cart and pulled it in the direction of the crematorium, thousands of eyes following their grim funeral procession. As soon as the cart was out of their sight, all those eyes turned to the SS and, for the first time, the SS felt unnerved by those hateful stares.
A girl had slapped the most feared SS commander in front of the entire camp.
Suddenly, the SS didn’t seem so invincible anymore.
Inside the crematorium, Kostek and his friends gently took Mala’s body off the cart and laid it onto the table, where Edek’s body was already lying. She had died of blood loss and her injuries on the way there, robbing Moll of his final death wish. Kostek was cleaning her face with a handkerchief, just like she had cleaned his in some other lifetime, as it now seemed.
“Shall we cremate them together?” Filip asked.
Kostek nodded. “Yes. Only together.” He looked at the man. “Could you go outside and cut all the flowers from the flowerbeds? The Hungarians are all dead. No one needs to be deceived anymore.”
“What of the SS—”
“Screw the SS,” Kostek declared dangerously loudly.
The entire room stared at him in stunned amazement; then, someone else repeated, “That’s right. Screw the SS.”
“Kill them all.”
“Burn them in these very furnaces like they’ve been burning us for years.”
“Burn it all down!”
The soft grumble turned to shouts. Surrounding two dead heroes, the Sonderkommando were planning the revolt.
Thirty-Seven
October 7, 1944
The day dawned pale-blue and pleasantly warm, and yet, some vague, invisible threat seeped into the air, poisoning it and shielding the disk of the rising sun like a dark cloud. In the yard in front of Crematorium IV, the Sonderkommando exchanged subdued whispers as they eyed the SS with suspicion. Two days ago, Moll had demanded a list with three hundred names on it—supposedly, for a rubble clearance team somewhere in Upper Silesia, where the food would be plentiful and the barracks warm and clean. Only, the Sonderkommando had burned enough men whose names had also been put on similar “rubble-clearing teams” to put two and two together.
For the past forty-eight hours, they’d been stuffing rags soaked with oil under their bunks, in between the crematorium roof rafters, and in the coke store as well.
For the past forty-eight hours, they’d been carrying their hidden contraband from Jurek’s admissions block into their own, pulling the planks of the floor open and distributing whatever makeshift bombs and weapons they had managed to gather among themselves.
For the past forty-eight hours, they solemnly shook hands and thanked one another for being a good comrade and swore to give their lives in the name of freedom and take as many Nazis with them as they could.
Now, as they stood assembled in the yard, Kostek felt the cool metal of Edek’s gun tucked in the back of his trousers and felt a dark grin twisting his features into a grimace of pure, cold hatred.
Unsuspecting and sure of himself, Moll began to call out the names. Seeing that no one had budged, he raised his voice, his brows knitting together. In another minute, he was outright screaming, his good eye rolling wildly in rage, just to be met with the defiant, deafening silence from the Sonderkommando ranks.
“Do you not understand German all of a sudden, you ugly stinkers?!” Moll bellowed, sweat breaking under his collar. Nervous sweat, for—for the first time in his glorious SS career—he had realized that they didn’t fear him any longer; him, the man who used to instill mortal terror into anyone who wore an Auschwitz prison uniform.
A young woman had slapped him in front of the Auschwitz crowd and now, they saw him for what he was—the pitiful, short, one-eyed coward. If he couldn’t frighten Mala, how could grown men possibly be terrified of him?
Laughter broke from the back of the ranks, as though they found him, the SS commander, incredibly amusing just then with his red, sweaty face and all of his senseless shouting.
“Piss off, German swine!” someone cried from the back.
Moll swayed when a stone, hurled by one of the prisoners, struck him in the head. Slowly passing his hand over his forehead, he regarded the blood on his hand in great astonishment, as though he couldn’t quite comprehend the fact that he, the invincible Aryan warrior, could bleed like the Jews he had personally shot.
It wasn’t Mala’s blood that marked his face this time; it was his own and they smelled it, the former prey turning predators at the tantalizing metallic scent of it. Wild fire ignited in their eyes. A savage cry for revenge broke through, slashed the air like a whip, and from all sides, a hail of stones flew like projectiles at the few defenseless guards.
The SS drew weapons, began shooting in the general direction of the Sonderkommando crowd that had already scattered, occupying strategic positions behind the crematorium walls—their former prison turned into a fortified bastion in mere minutes.
“Kill the oppressors! Burn it all down! Raze this blasted camp to the ground!” a hoarse cry broke from Kostek’s throat. He didn’t recognize his own voice, his own hands that were pulling the gun out; the sheer power coursing through his veins to finally defend himself and his fellow sufferers against evil.
The acrid, black smoke poured from the roof of the crematorium, the alcohol-soaked piece of felt igniting within moments from someone hurling a Molotov cocktail atop it. The air grew thick with the victorious screams of the inmates and the petrified cries of the retreating SS. From the darkening sky, the camp siren’s wails came crushing down, but even they couldn’t suppress the calls for an uprising.
Fascinated and mortified, from behind the barbed wire, the rest of the camp inmates watched the Sonderkommando successfully fend off the SS, arriving in great numbers, in steel helmets and with machine guns at the ready, for a few glorious minutes.
To be sure, it could never last long, this unfathomable revolt, this awe-inspiring revolution of the free men against their enslavers. But even though the fearless heroes were being mowed down by the hail of machine-gun fire and steel, they didn’t fall in vain. For on the blood-soaked ground, the dead SS men lay next to their former victims. Just two months ago, two martyrs died simply to prove that the SS were mortal. Now, the camp resistance died following their suit, just to show their fellow inmates that the SS also bled, that they could be overpowered and killed, that the crematorium could be burned down—one just had to
find courage in themselves to fight.
“Raze this blasted camp… to the ground…” His stomach riddled with bullets, Kostek raised himself on his elbow, gathered all of his powers, aimed Edek’s gun at the nearest SS man and shot him, with his last bullet, clean in the forehead.
Epilogue
State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau. January 29, 1968
The man looked about fifty, with a mane of dark hair streaked with gray and anxious dark eyes under the knitted brows and a somewhat haunted look about his lined, yet still-handsome face. He was dressed formally in a navy suit and a tie under his unbuttoned camel-wool coat, as though for an official reception. The staff kept regarding him quizzically as he paced the grounds of the former concentration camp in visible agitation, shoulders stooped, eyes scanning the empty guard towers as if he expected to see dark specters of the SS men materialize out of thin air.
Two days had passed since the twenty-third anniversary of the camp liberation. Most of the invited speakers and survivors were gone. In the distance, the voice of a tour guide explaining the structure of the camp compound to a group of schoolchildren echoed around the red-brick walls.
The man squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his fingers against tightly closed eyelids in a futile effort to make the nightmare fade away. But when he opened them, the past was still there, unavoidable and frighteningly real. Seeing that there was no escape from it, he took the deepest of breaths and forced himself to ascend the stairs, each step heavy with dread.
Pale as death, beads of sweat above his lip, he approached one of the museum workers and muttered something indistinctly as he fumbled with the contents of his pocket.
“Is there anything I can help you with?” the young woman asked. It was her third week working here. An idealistic historian, she wished to be as helpful as she possibly could. “Would you like a private tour perhaps?”
“No.” The man released an odd, ghostly chuckle and shook his head without meeting her eye. “No, I’d rather not. I’ve had enough of those back in my day.”
He stopped abruptly and, driven by some inward impulse, looked at the young woman sharply before yanking the layers of his overcoat, jacket, and shirt up to his elbow. On his forearm, the number 290 was stamped in fading blue ink.
The museum worker’s breath caught in her throat. It was rare that they saw such low numbers here. It was rare, because most of the low prisoner numbers—the veterans of the camp—didn’t survive all five years of Auschwitz hell.
“Could you wait here just a few moments, please?” she whispered hoarsely, her hand hovering with reverence over his arm, not quite daring to touch his sleeve. “I shall fetch the person in charge—”
“No, no!” the man cried, his gaze turning pleading. “I’m not here for myself. I don’t want any attention. I’m here because… it’s time. I gave my oath to him and I haven’t kept my word. It was too painful, all too fresh in my memory. I couldn’t bring myself to… He was always braver than me, you see. He was a true hero. Just like she was…” His voice trailed off, thick with memories and tears.
He wiped them discreetly with the back of his hand and extracted an envelope out of his breast pocket. With tremendous effort, he opened it and produced a small piece of paper, which he held out to the museum worker in his open palm. With a trembling finger, he pulled its ends open to reveal two locks of hair—one very short and brown, and the other, longish and golden—interwoven together.
The young historian’s hand flew to her mouth when she recognized the names scribbled with pencil on the edges of what appeared to be an old German newspaper.
Mally Zimetbaum 19880, Edward Galiński 531.
“I would like to donate these two locks of hair to the museum. It is an inscription made by Galiński. It’s his hair and that of Mala Zimetbaum. The camp Kapo Jupp, who was forced to hang Edek, gave me the hair and the note an hour after his death, stating that it was the last request of the condemned that I should give it to his father or Mala’s. But, as I later discovered, Mala’s father perished in Auschwitz without her knowing and Edek’s father was shot in reprisal for some Nazi big shot being killed by the partisans. And so, this tragic memento went with me through all the camps through which we were moved at the end of the war as the Allies drew near—Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen, Neuengamme, Schandelach, and I kept it to this day.” After releasing a ragged breath, the man added in a voice that was barely a whisper, “Edek was my best friend. He and Mala, they became Auschwitz legends after their deaths. In part, it was their heroic last words and refusal to submit that inspired the Sonderkommando rebellion in October 1944. They died, but they became the symbol of the resistance. The Sonderkommando men picked up arms inspired by their example. I should have told their story a long time ago, but…”
“You’re Wiesław Kielar, aren’t you?” the young woman asked, recognition flickering in her eyes.
“Yes,” he confirmed softly. “I am. I promised Edek I’d write a book about Auschwitz, to tell the truth of how we lived and died. I’ve been avoiding my memories for far too long. It took me years to force myself to face the past again. I had to come here and see it all once again to realize that the memories, they aren’t just mine to guard. I owe it to the dead to release them.” When he looked at the historian, his eyes were clear once more, filled with steely determination. “I think it’s time I finally pick up my pen. So that the world learns, and never forgets.”
If The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz moved you to tears, and left you in awe, then don’t miss out on the incredible The Violinist of Auschwitz. Based on the unforgettable true story of Alma Rosé, Ellie’s beautiful page-turner brings to life one of history’s most fearless, inspiring and courageous heroines.
Get it here!
The Violinist of Auschwitz
Based on the unforgettable true story of Alma Rosé, The Violinist of Auschwitz brings to life one of history’s most fearless, inspiring and courageous heroines. Alma’s bravery saved countless lives, bringing hope to those who had forgotten its meaning…
In Auschwitz, every day is a fight for survival. Alma is inmate 50381, the number tattooed on her skin in pale blue ink. She is cooped up with thousands of others, torn from loved ones, trapped in a maze of barbed wire. Every day people disappear, never to be seen again.
This tragic reality couldn’t be further from Alma’s previous life. An esteemed violinist, her performances left her audiences spellbound. But when the Nazis descend on Europe, none of that can save her…
When the head of the women’s camp appoints Alma as the conductor of the orchestra, performing for prisoners trudging to work as well as the highest-ranking Nazis, Alma refuses: “they can kill me but they won’t make me play”. Yet she soon realizes the power this position offers: she can provide starving girls with extra rations and save many from the clutches of death.
This is how Alma meets Miklos, a talented pianist. Surrounded by despair, they find happiness in joint rehearsals, secret notes, and concerts they give side by side––all the while praying that this will one day end. But in Auschwitz, the very air is tainted with loss, and tragedy is the only certainty… In such a hopeless place, can their love survive?
This devastatingly heartbreaking yet beautifully hopeful tale proves that even in the darkest of days, love can prevail––and give you something to live for. Fans of The Choice, The Tattooist of Auschwitz and The Orphan Train will lose their hearts to this magnificent tale.
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Books by Ellie Midwood
The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz
The Violinist of Auschwitz
Available in Audio
The Violinist of Auschwitz (available in the UK and the US)
A Letter f
rom Ellie
Dear Reader,
I want to say a huge thank you for choosing to read The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz. If you did enjoy it, and want to keep up to date with all my latest releases, just sign up at the following link. Your email address will never be shared and you can unsubscribe at any time.
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Thank you for reading the story of this truly remarkable woman. I hope you loved The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz and, if you did, I would be very grateful if you could write a review. I’d love to hear what you think, and it makes such a difference helping new readers to discover one of my books for the first time.
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A Note on the History
Thank you so much for reading The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz. Even though it’s a work of fiction, it’s based on a true story and, while writing it, I tried to keep as close to historical fact as possible, only taking creative license to enhance the reading experience. The circumstances of Mala’s and Edek’s arrival at the camp, their pasts, the development of their relationship, their eventual escape, capture and execution are all true to fact.
The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz: A totally gripping and absolutely heartbreaking World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story Page 31