Eva's Story (14 page)

Rumours now began to circulate among the inmates that the Germans had tried to hide the evidence of the death camps by bulldozing the crematoriums. It was the most tremendous relief, although we hardly dared believe it was true. Anyway, we did not delude ourselves. We knew that we were still at the mercy of the Nazis and there were many other ways they could murder us.

Starvation was taking its daily toll. Women, exhausted in body and spirit, would work through their final day, go to sleep and never wake up. This was becoming the most common form of death.

We longed for liberation, but the end of the war seemed too far off for us. Every day could have been our end. Warmth was a forgotten comfort. There were no provisions for heat or extra clothes – except those you took from the dead – and there was no food to warm you up. Even the soup was tepid by the time it was distributed. We tried to hang on but we did not dare to hope. We feared that if the Russians came too close and the Germans had enough time before retreating, they would lock us up in the barracks and burn us alive.

In the meantime the Germans had started a slow evacuation of the camp. Every few days SS men and women would walk around the barracks with Kappos, picking out those to be evacuated to other camps. We didn't know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing to leave Birkenau. Some women tried to look strong and eager so that they would be picked. Others tried to appear small and insignificant to avoid being noticed. Now that I knew Mutti was waiting for me to join her in hospital, the last thing I wanted was to be picked out and moved on.

The depletion of our numbers began to show. Every other day another thirty or forty women were removed from our barrack to go on to transports back into the heart of Germany. Each time the choice became more limited. I kept my head down, plaiting and praying, whenever the SS came by.

Eventually they stopped behind me. ‘We'll have this one,' said an SS officer.

‘That one's a protected child,' warned the Kappo. ‘It might be wiser to leave her alone.'

‘Well, leave her then,' he snapped. ‘We'll take that one beside her instead,' and pointed to Franzi. She was roughly pulled up by the Kappo and told to go outside.

Franzi shrugged and bent down to kiss me goodbye. I hugged her hard. She had been a constant companion and a dear friend. I watched helplessly as she joined the consignment to an unknown destination. We had been thrown together by an evil fate and there was no knowing if we would ever see each other again. I felt so grateful to have known her. She had given me comfort and courage when I had been at my lowest and now she had to go instead of me. I needed to stay behind because of Mutti.

At that moment as I sat at the bench alone with the empty chair beside me, I knew Pappy's prayers had been answered again and I felt the hand of God truly protecting me.

16 December 1944 German counter-offensive, Battle of the Bulge
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At Appel in the third week of December several women were called by their numbers to stand on one side. No one knew what it was for. Each time we were separated from the main group we expected something dreadful to happen to us, to suffer some unbearable punishment for a minor wrong-doing. The last number called was mine.

I moved forward and stood in line with nine others, watching apprehensively as the rest went off to work. Then, to my joy, we were marched towards the hospital block.

I knew it was vital to contact Minni as soon as possible so that she could use her influence and reunite me with Mutti. When we arrived we stood in a corridor waiting for a place on any bed where the second sleepmate had died. We were not allowed to move from the spot and we waited for hours, sitting on the floor. The orderlies were walking around freely so I finally plucked up enough courage to ask one if she could find my cousin, Minni.

‘Minni?' she exclaimed. ‘What a wonderful woman! She was my friend in Prague and here too. I'll fetch her for you.'

Minni had been expecting me for days but she had been too busy to check that day's admittance list. Now she led me to my mother's section where she arranged for Mutti to be moved to an empty bunk and there I joined her. At last we were together again.

We lay cuddling each other for days. With the sound of intermittent gunfire and air-raid sirens as background noise, we talked in whispers day and night about everything that had happened to us in those months we had been apart which had seemed like years of torment. As we talked it became clear that Minni, with God's help, had saved both our lives.

Mutti and I lay in our hospital bunk and listened to the sound of the guns. Sometimes the cannon fire seemed very close, then it would drift away again and cease. Days darkened into nights without any change in our condition. Scraps of information no longer reached the hospital block because the working barracks had all been evacuated. Every ‘able-bodied' person had been force-marched out of the camp westwards. There were no new admittances or discharges, the only exits were those of the dead. Many people were dying every day of starvation, disease and hypothermia.

We sensed that the Russians were advancing. We waited for them, alternating between hope and despair. We prayed for them to arrive but we knew nothing of their progress. Nobody seemed to know what was happening. In any event, we were very scared that we would be eliminated before they arrived. We couldn't believe the Germans would actually leave us to be liberated by the Russians.

There were fewer Germans around now and we were left alone more often. Appels had ceased. It was Christmas time but we were hardly aware of that. Mutti and I lay together on the bunk, huddled under thin ragged blankets. No one really thought that there was a chance we would survive.

Minni's indomitable spirit was the one thing we were sure of. She was incredible. She held everyone together with great strength, showing undiminished cheerfulness as she organized the rations of bread and tea, and distributed the small amounts of medicine available. She spent the days constantly on the move, walking up and down the ward, directing the three other nurses in their duties of ministering to the dying and carrying out the dead. Every time she passed us she would give our bunk a determined slap and repeat, ‘We will get through.'

We were terrified of our fate but Minni's cheerful courage seemed to radiate hope and prevented us from giving up.

On our bunk, Mutti and I fantasized about what we would do when we were free again. We talked about warm baths with soap, sleeping between clean sheets, eating with a knife and fork – all the civilized delights that we had taken for granted and that had been denied us for what seemed like a lifetime.

Our thoughts always centred on food. We invented glorious menus containing all our favourite dishes. How we would gorge ourselves! We imagined eating boiled potatoes, spreading butter on fresh bread and crunching our teeth into firm apples. We would pretend we were in a restaurant in Amsterdam. First of all we would select our soup, then the main course (I always chose roast chicken with rice and cauliflower) and then we would lie there, dreaming of delicious desserts – pancakes filled with jam or cream, chocolate pudding, apple pie. I always wanted to end my meal with a glass of milk for which I had a terrible craving. And all the while our stomachs ached with starvation.

At the beginning of January the SS appeared at the door of the barrack and shouted, ‘Everybody who can get up and walk – come outside.'

Minni rushed over to us looking very agitated.

‘Get up,' she said sternly. ‘You have to come.'

‘But Mutti is too weak,' I said.

‘She will just have to make the effort,' said Minni firmly, and swept along the lines, insisting that anyone who could get out of their bunk and stand up had better do so and get outside.

Mutti's emaciated condition had left her in a desperately weak state but she was determined to stay with me from now on.

‘Of course I can get up,' she whispered. She feared we would be killed if we did not get outside. Only her willpower was giving her enough strength to stand up.

As soon as she managed to put her feet on the ground I wrapped her in a ragged blanket. I half-dragged, half-carried her out of the door. It was the first time she had been outside for months and she was almost fainting with the effort. She was very frail but totally determined that we should stay together. She leaned against me as we stood in the last row.

It was about eleven in the morning and bitterly cold. The temperature was far below zero. The icy air hit us, freezing the moisture on our bodies and making our face muscles so stiff that they stopped working. About half the women from the hospital block had managed to drag themselves outside.

The scene took my breath away. There was a clear, blue sky with no clouds at all. Snow lay still on the ground. It had transformed the entire compound, shrouding the huts and dirt tracks with a sheet of unblemished white. The land looked like Siberia. The bare ugliness of the camp had been smoothed over and turned, magically, into a winter fairyland.

We waited, assembled in neat rows, for further instructions but nothing happened. The SS had disappeared, leaving the Kappos standing around disconsolately, not knowing what was expected of them. We could all hear guns in the distance. We stood there for two hours, shivering inside our blankets.

Suddenly there was the wailing of an air-raid siren and agitated SS men reappeared, yelling at us to get back inside.

At dusk we were ordered out again. We stood there while the sun went down and it became darker and colder. Then there was another siren, so we all crept back into our cold bunks, frozen and shivering and very grateful to get our tiny portion of bread. Everyone was very nervous and frightened – including the Germans.

Although we remained inside throughout that night we just could not get warm again. The cold had seeped into our frail bodies and during those hours quite a few people died. In the morning I lay and watched as the dead were hauled off their bunks and dragged out into the snow by the nurses.

I saw Minni carry out several of her friends in her arms. Her face was haggard and blank. She came over to Mutti once or twice and touched her head pleading, ‘Hold on.'

This harassment went on for three days. Sometimes we were called out during the night to stand for hours in the bitter cold. Each time, when we were ordered outside again, more and more people stayed inside and did not attempt to obey the commands. By the evening of the third day I, too, decided that I had had enough. I wasn't going to see Mutti subjected to any more misery.

‘It will be another false alarm, anyway,' I assured her. So when the command came to get up and get outside we stayed on our bunk and fell into an exhausted sleep.

When we awoke next morning everything was still and quiet. There was no activity and the barrack seemed almost empty. I got up and went outside to investigate. It was a curious sensation; there was no one to be seen. Every SS guard and dog had disappeared. All the Kappos had vanished and most of the hospital patients had left too. Minni and the nursing staff had also gone.

It was another bitterly cold day but bright. Bodies of the dead lay at the side of the barrack slung one on top of the other. In the whole camp which had housed tens of thousands, there were now only one or two hundred souls left. Eighty per cent of these were too ill to move at all and lay waiting for death. The rest of us, a tiny contingent of living skin and bones, hung on with rising hope.

We knew we would have to try to survive alone until the Russians came and that might take several days or even weeks. And so we attempted to organize ourselves.

One Polish woman, Olga, who was not Jewish but had been a communist political prisoner, took command. She decided that she and I, with one or two other fitter inmates, should walk over to the kitchen block to see what food might be available. We also needed to find fresh water as all the pipes were frozen.

We wrapped ourselves in blankets and trudged across the snow to the kitchen barrack. We pushed against the doors, expecting them to be barred, but to our amazement they yielded immediately. What we saw when we entered made us cry out in delight. There, stacked up on the shelves which lined the walls, were hundreds of loaves of black bread – far more than we could ever eat in a year. It was like finding a treasure trove. We seized a loaf each and crammed chunks of bread into our mouths. We gorged ourselves on this limitless supply, then we filled our arms with as many loaves as we could carry and headed back to our barrack.

During the five minute walk I felt a wonderful elation. I was excited beyond belief and I could not wait to distribute the food – to be able to give strength back to everyone there. As I went round the bunks, tearing off huge hunks of bread and pressing them into the skeleton hands of the bedridden inmates I cried
Thank God
to myself over and over again. Some of them were too ill to eat much but they clasped the precious portions tightly against their bodies. We had barely taken enough but we were too weak to go back for more.

By now I was utterly exhausted and very confused. What if the Germans returned during the night and caught us? What if the Russians did not come in time to save us? I was extremely frightened because we were so alone. I began to realize that we might not survive after all, simply because we could not look after ourselves. There were so few able-bodied women who had enough strength even to walk about.

It was midday when Mutti and I ate some more bread. I lay down on my bunk to regain some strength, closed my eyes with relief and drifted into a fretful sleep. I was brought back to reality by Olga shaking me vigorously.

‘Get up and come down!' she ordered. ‘I need you.'

‘Not now,' I protested. ‘Please let me rest. I am worn out.'

‘I need you to carry out some dead bodies,' she said firmly.

It was as if an immense black cloud had descended on me.