Auschwitz (42 page)

Else was put on board a freight train with the other gypsies and transported to Auschwitz. She remembers being taken to the “sauna” at Birkenau and told to undress and take a shower. Afterwards she tried to find her clothes among the pile in front of her, but she could not see them. And, being a well brought up little girl, she did not want to take anything that was not hers. So she stood, naked and alone, while the gypsy families around her
dressed themselves as best they could. Eventually, when only half a dozen pieces of clothing lay on the cement floor in front of her, one of the women next to her said, “You have to just grab anything.” So, having arrived in her Sunday best, with layers of clothing to protect her from the cold, she left with one pair of underwear and wearing a thin summer dress.

In the gloom of a crowded barracks, and surrounded by gypsy families, this eight-year-old girl gradually became immobile with shock. Not saying anything, not crying out—for there was no one to heed her cries—just standing in the middle of this morass of people who were all, as she saw it, looking out “for number one.” Then she was the beneficiary of a piece of luck that almost certainly saved her life. One of the block Kapos, named Wanda, took pity on her and led her to a nearby barracks. Here, Wanda allowed Else to share her own small room and sleep next to her on a table covered with a rug, where “it was about a hundred times better than being in the barrack.”

Most of the time Else's life in the camp was one of enforced idleness. Every day she would walk up to the top end of the gypsy camp, where the wires abutted the railway, and watch the new transports arrive. She saw columns of people “most of them nicely dressed” walking in the direction of what she later learned was the crematorium. These were the Hungarian Jews selected to die—although Else did not know that at the time. When there was no incoming transport to watch through the wire she would “play” with the one toy she had—a lens from a pair of glasses, which she had found on the ground. She would pile up dry grass and then focus the sun's rays through the lens until the grass started to burn.

After several weeks, Wanda said to Else, “You cannot stay with me any more,” and disappeared. “I was so shocked,” says Else, “being completely on my own again that not many things penetrated my shocked mind ... things started to go really topsy-turvy, haywire—you name it.” Else remembers being placed back in one of the main barrack blocks again, but this one was not so crowded as before. There had been a selection, and many of the gypsies were now held elsewhere in the camp. That night, there was a “massive noise—loud screams. I'd never heard screams of that nature.”

It is impossible to establish what atrocities were being committed outside; the “massive noise” could have been occasioned by any number of actions within the camp—possibly the SS preparations for the liquidation of
the gypsy camp that was to occur shortly. Else was one of the 1,400 gypsies selected to be spared that particular horror and transferred to another concentration camp. Auschwitz records confirm that Else, registered as gypsy number 10,540, left Auschwitz on August 1, 1944.

Else's experience could scarcely have been dreamt up by the most creative writer of fiction. Think of it: An eight-year-old girl raised as a German is snatched from her loving parents, learns she was adopted and is part gypsy, and is transferred to Auschwitz where she is left to fend for herself until being adopted by a Kapo. She is abandoned once more, and then finds herself in dark barracks surrounded by strangers while terrible atrocities are taking place outside, only to be shipped off to another concentration camp the very next day. No wonder Else feels that this cumulative experience “buggers up your mind for the rest of your life. I can say that with total authority. It does.”

On the night of August 2, 1944—only a day after Else left Auschwitz—the gypsy camp was liquidated. Many people attest to the terrible scenes as the Nazis tried to clear the camp. Władysław Szmyt
⁴⁰
was one of those who witnessed it. A gypsy himself, he had been mis-classified by the Nazis as a Polish political prisoner and imprisoned in a section of Birkenau next to the gypsy camp, where many of his own relatives were incarcerated. On the night of August 2, he watched as gypsy children were smashed against the side of trucks and heard automatic machine gun fire and pistol shots. He saw the gypsies fight back with whatever makeshift weapons they could find—often spoons or knives—but soon they were overwhelmed. “I started yelling,” he says, “I knew they were taken to be destroyed. That's the end. Must be the worst feeling in the world.” That night, 2,897 gypsies were taken to crematorium 4 and gassed. Their bodies were burned in open pits nearby.

In the meantime, Else had been taken to Ravensbrück concentration camp north of Berlin. Here she stayed for several weeks, suffered more appalling privation, and fell into a near-comatose state. Salvation came one morning, in September 1944, when her block Kapo, a Polish woman, called out her name. Else was escorted to the administration block and suddenly told, “You're going to be released.” She was ordered to take a shower—the first since the day she arrived in Auschwitz—and then led naked into a room piled high with clothes. She stood there “too frightened or shocked
to do anything—naked, wet and looking around, probably expecting punishment for being there even in the first place, because I'd been beaten before for doing nothing wrong whatsoever.”

Only after she failed to emerge from the room for some time did a woman come in and help her dress. Then Else waited in an office of the administration block until her adopted father was brought in. On seeing him, Else felt “numb.” “Too numb to feel anything. If they had said, ‘God Almighty is coming to see you' it wouldn't have had any effect then.” Before Else was released she was made to sign a document—standard practice for prisoners leaving concentration camps—agreeing that she would not divulge where she had been or what she had experienced. “I didn't have to make crosses because I could write,” she says. “And I think that was the first signature I ever gave in my life.”

Else then boarded a train with her stepfather to take her back to Hamburg. In their carriage was a German army officer, and Else remembers how her father told him about his adopted daughter's arrest and imprisonment, all because her grandmother was a gypsy: “And he lifted my skirt and exposed my legs which were covered in big sores and he said, ‘This is what you're fighting for at the front.'” She has no recollection of the officer's response. She does remember, though, that on her return home her eldest sister made her a cake out of mashed potatoes—since sugar was rationed—and boiled some carrots to stick in it like candles. And then, after a six-month absence, Else returned to school; pretending to be a normal eight-year-old German girl once more.

No one knows for sure why Else was released. Any records that might reveal the truth were destroyed by the Gestapo at the end of the war. Perhaps her adopted father's protests that Else had been completely assimilated into German society finally registered with the local Nazi authorities—he even joined the Nazi party himself that year, to show his own loyalty, and it is possible that action tipped the balance. What is known for certain is the legacy—a human being hugely damaged by living a nightmare for six months. “The level of human depravity is unfathomable,” says Else Baker. “And it will always be like that. It's a very cynical view that has been formed in my mind out of my experiences, I'm sorry to say.”

Else Baker's horrific personal story illustrates many of the worst aspects
of life at Auschwitz—the sudden brutality, the arbitrariness of human behavior, the casual cruelty. But, perhaps above all, it shows how important personal relationships were in order to enhance the chances of survival—indeed, to even try to make life worth living. In Else's case, it is difficult to see how she could have lived through Auschwitz without Wanda's help. This was something that Alice Lok Cahana, who was in Auschwitz–Birkenau at the same time as Else, also realized all too well.

Alice's love for her sister Edith had already driven her to take huge risks within the camp so that they could be together but, that summer, there was a problem. Edith became sick with typhoid and was taken to one of the hospital barracks. This was a potentially deadly turn of events for Edith—not just because of the lack of adequate medical care, but because regular selections were made for the sick to be taken directly from there to the gas chambers. Alice was determined that Edith would survive, however, and visited her regularly. To gain entrance to the hospital Alice had to bribe the Kapo with her bread ration, and also agree to help her take out the bodies of prisoners who had died during the night. Alice remembers:

As a visitor in the infirmary, Alice was in great demand—all the sick prisoners wanted news of the outside. They would pull at Alice's clothes as she walked along the barracks to visit her sister and demand, “What's happening?” Amidst the dark, disease-ridden atmosphere of the hospital, with the smell of bodily waste and decomposition, listening to the moans of the dying, Alice tried to offer some comfort, “I learnt to make up stories—that soon the war is over. ‘Hold on, because soon we will go home.'” But Alice knew that all this was a lie, because she witnessed firsthand the alarming rate at which people “disappeared” from the infirmary—either dying in their bunks or selected for the gas chamber. So she decided that, sick as Edith was, she had to get her out. She told Edith: “If you can just bear it, I will take you out as a dead person and then we'll go back to our barrack.” The next day,
Edith pretended to be dead and Alice carried her out of the hospital along with those who had truly expired during the night. Once outside, she helped her stagger across Birkenau and they both returned to their original barracks.

Protecting her sick sister outside of the infirmary, in an environment that was supposed to be full of “healthy” women, however, was much harder. “Every day there were selections,” says Alice, “and [they] were so severe and so scary.” The women often had to stand for selection in front of the immaculately turned out Dr. Josef Mengele. “By then we were infested with lice,” says Alice, “and it felt so horrible—horrible. Nothing can be so humiliating as when you feel your whole body is infested. Your head, your clothes—everywhere you look on your body there's an animal crawling. And you cannot wash it off. There's no water.”

One day, Alice and her sister were selected—but only to go to another barrack at Birkenau. It was here that Alice made the most unlikely of escapes. By now it was October 1944 and, because the days were getting colder, the block Kapo announced that any teenagers should stand apart to receive additional clothes. Alice decided to join this “children's” group and go and get warm clothes for Edith to protect her from the forthcoming bitter Polish winter. “So we went. And we came to a nice building with flowers at the windows. And we went in and an SS woman said, ‘Everyone put their shoes nicely together, your clothes on the floor.' And we were taken into a room—naked.”

Alice and the others sat in the room and waited, thinking they were to be given a shower before receiving the promised new clothes: “It was a large room and gray in color. And very sober because when they closed the door it was almost dark in there. And we sat there waiting and shivering. Waiting and waiting and waiting.” Then suddenly the door flung open and the SS woman screamed, “Hurry, get out from here! Get out fast!” and she started to throw clothes back at the teenagers. “Go!” she shouted. “Run as fast as you can!” Alice could not find her own clothes again but, dressed in whatever she could, made her way back to the barracks. There she complained to the others that, “They'd told us we'd get warm clothes and I didn't even get my clothes back!” It was only then, when she was told by other prisoners, “Stupid child! Don't you know where you were?” that she finally realized she had been waiting inside the gas chamber of crematorium 5.

What is perhaps the strangest aspect of all in Alice's story is that, even after many months in Birkenau, she did not realize where she was being sent. Of course she had been told about the existence of the gas chambers—anyone who lived in Birkenau more than a few days knew about them—but her way of trying to cope with camp life had been to block out this knowledge, and she certainly had no idea of the exact mechanics of the killing process. Says Alice,

This is an important insight—the knowledge that even those who lived in the shadow of the crematoria chimneys could erase the existence of such places from their minds. They were able to do so, not just because the practical function of the killing factories was simply too horrendous to contemplate, but because the daily humiliations of life in the camp—the lice-ridden clothes, the battle to use the latrine, the struggle to find enough to eat, the filth and dirt that pervaded everything—pushed any thoughts away other than the fight to live for the immediate moment.