Eva's Story (9 page)

I cried continuously with sickness and fear but the other prisoners were relentless with their insistence and in some ways they were right.

‘You can get medicine there,' they argued, ‘that may save your life – not end it!'

They kept up the persuasion because I looked and felt so ill.

‘Do it for us, if not for yourself,' said Franzi, to add extra weight to their argument.

So in the end I gave in and agreed to go to the surgery. We all suspected that I had typhus.

Mutti applied to the Kappo, giving her my number and her own number so that she could accompany me. It was the system that if anyone needed to go to the surgery, they would put their number forward in the morning and wait to be called to attend, in turn, block by block. I was still shaking and sweating by the time they came for me but managed the ten minute walk to the surgery block hanging onto Mutti's arm. I thought I was going to pass out, but I remained conscious enough to stand in line with other women who had turned up for ‘treatment'. We were a sad-looking group of bedraggled and dirty human beings.

Although this ‘hospital' was simply another barrack building, it looked much cleaner than the others. It had an air of professional efficiency about it. Nurses in white aprons bustled around and there were Jewish doctors in white coats. Medical orderlies wore striped blue and grey prison dress and appeared clean and well-fed. The atmosphere was reassuring.

A nurse finally appeared to take the next patient into the surgery. She was fairly tall, with a sturdy pear-shaped body and a full head of hair. I thought she had the face of an angel. She cut an unlikely figure in that place and among the emaciated forms around her she seemed like an Amazon. She moved with a sense of purpose and was obviously the one in charge.

When Mutti saw her she suddenly let out a scream. Even in my sickened state I could sense her thrill of excitement.

‘Minni!' she shrieked at the top of her voice.

The solid figure of the nurse turned to stare at my mother. ‘Fritzi!' she yelled in turn as she rushed over to us and threw herself into my mother's arms. They hugged each other tightly, laughing and crying with joy. This was Minni, our beloved cousin from Prague. It was wonderful luck for us that she was there of all places.

Mutti and Minni were like sisters, they had spent many childhood holidays together. Minni had married a famous skin specialist and, although she had been in Birkenau for several months, she had been able to gain considerable protection because of her husband's reputation in treating the Germans for skin disorders – and she had often assisted him in his work.

Minni took me in herself to see the doctor, staying to make sure I got the correct drugs. She agreed with him it was probably an attack of typhus. I was extremely ill but even so Minni did not want to see me go into the hospital.

Mutti helped me back to our barrack. That evening as we stood for Appel there were thunderstorms with torrential rain. Mutti later confessed that she had been convinced I would not survive the night. I was burning with fever and delirium. Franzi helped drag and pull me to my place on the bunk where I lay in a drugged sleep with all the humiliations and torture of the past weeks obliterated from my mind.

And then, quite amazingly, when I awoke at dawn for the next Appel my fever had completely gone. I still felt very weak and wobbly but I knew I was going to pull through.

Everyone was pleased. Mutti was overjoyed. I told myself that if Pappy knew about my recovery he would be proud of me. He was fanatical about good health. He had no patience for anyone who made a fuss over minor illness. He had always taught me to be brave.

My illness made me appreciate my father's wisdom in the way he had brought me up to be tough and fearless because after that episode I realized my body was capable of recovery, even in the most adverse conditions. From that time on I tried not to make a fuss over unimportant things.

My recovery gave me a new view of life and helped make the unbearable bearable. I told myself that it was now up to me. I was determined to survive the war no matter what they did to me.

By now we were all beginning to grasp the truth about the extermination programme and to realize that death lay at the end of the line for us. We came face to face with the reality of elimination during the early days of our three-weeks quarantine, at Appel. One evening a German woman SS guard had appeared holding the hand of an angelic little girl whose long golden curls hung half-way down her back. Her young mother, head shaven and in prison stripes, followed behind as they walked along the lines of standing women. The guard was thoroughly enjoying herself encouraging the child to count along the rows.

‘One, two, three, four and five in a row.' The guard repeated in a sing-song voice.

The child skipped happily alongside trying her best to keep up with the numbering while we all stood still, heads to the front, hardly daring to move for fear of being beaten.

During the next few days these two made regular appearances at Appel. We speculated amongst ourselves that the mother was probably the girlfriend of an SS officer which was why she was getting preferential treatment. We never found out exactly what happened but, one morning, she and her daughter were no longer there. Nor were they ever seen again in the barrack and the rumour quickly spread that they had been ‘selected' – that chilling euphemism for ‘put to death'. We started then to realize how vulnerable we all were.

Now that Mutti had made contact with Minni, I felt a bit more secure. From time to time while we were in quarantine she would visit us with a little extra food – a piece of black bread, a bowl of watery soup, sometimes even a portion of cheese. When she came to see us we were always so hungry that we ate anything she gave us on the spot, occasionally saving a morsel to give to Franzi. We had discovered that saving food for later was useless because it was invariably stolen while you were sleeping or off guard. Everyone was always hungry. Neither the black coffee substitute nor the watery soup had much nutritional value, especially when shared between five. Mutti and I agreed that we would exchange some of the food Minni gave us for our own mugs.

Several inmates had noticed Minni giving us extra food and hung around hoping for a share. In fact, there was a good deal of extra food around but not for Jews. Polish prisoners were allowed food parcels from home or the Red Cross. Sometimes they would get some bacon or cheese or a bag of sugar. I was desperate for something sweet to eat.

One morning on my way back from the latrines I saw something white and glittering on the ground.

It's sugar
, I thought, bending down and pushing my finger into the tiny white particles. I wetted my finger so that I could pick up every tiny little grain. It was the first sweet thing I had tasted for weeks.

Towards the end of our quarantine the Kappos told us the SS would be coming to sort us out for different work units. Everyone became very nervous as we realized that our fate was about to be decided.

During the next early Appel a group of five, smartly uniformed officers arrived at the camp. They were quite polite to us as they walked up and down the rows of standing women, calling out the names of different work units to a Kappo who took note of each prisoner's tattoo number and the work unit to which she had been allocated. It was very efficiently organized. Unfortunately, we had no idea what the code names represented or to what kind of work we were being sent. We only knew that some units were more desirable than others.

I stood facing straight ahead, looking as bright as I could, feeling the SS coming nearer until they were in front looking me over. Quite suddenly, I did not feel afraid. I looked them squarely in the eyes as the senior officer called out ‘Canada'.

I knew this was an elite work unit because everyone in our compound said they wanted to work there. Completely innocent of the ways of camp protocol I blurted out, ‘Can my mother come too?'

The Kappo stared at me in disbelief, but the German officer seemed amused.

‘Which is your mother?' he asked in a very reasonable tone.

I turned and pointed Mutti out to him. I watched him stroll up to her and, just as a buyer of a horse would look over the animal, turn her around, move her head from side to side and examine her from all angles. Then he nodded and said, ‘Yes! Why not?'

Mutti and I exchanged relieved glances. We felt that we were beginning to get the hang of manipulating our fate rather better than we had thought possible.

At that point there was a commotion outside the camp. We could hear dogs barking wildly and sounds of shooting. Someone had attempted to escape. We could hear SS running backwards and forwards shouting instructions to each other. Kappos were summoned and we were left standing in our rows. Within the hour, gallows were erected and all of the inmates were summoned to witness the hanging. It was to be an example to us. The escapee, who was a slightly built woman with a shaven head, was dragged forward. She was dishevelled and her feet were bare. Her hands were bound behind her back and there were bloodstains on her dress. Mutti tried to stand in front of me so that I should not see what was going on. But although it was happening before me and although I was forced to look I did not really see it. None of us saw the hanging. We were forced to look – but we did not see.

Even after this, there was always someone trying to run away. Each morning after Appel when prisoners were taken outside the camp to various places of work, the desire to escape was very strong. Armed guards patrolled with their dogs ready to chase and pull down anyone moving out of line. I really believed that no one could ever get away.

I was afraid most of the time, but occasionally hope rose inside me despite our awful situation. After being allocated to work units, six of us were taken to one side and given the privilege of wearing a striped prison dress. Then we were lined up with 400 or so workers allocated to ‘Canada'. As we walked through the gates I was uplifted by the sense of freedom.

‘This is quite an adventure!' I whispered to Mutti.

We left the camp preceded by a little band playing marching music. We were all dressed alike, but presentably, so that farmers in their fields would not think we were badly treated. However, they must have been aware of the armed guards and dogs that accompanied us, seen our shaven heads and the gaunt, strained faces of the older inmates. Too many of us appeared half-starved for them not to be aware that something horrible was happening to us. But, as most people do when confronted by things they don't want to know about, they turned the other way.

The sun beat down on our bald heads as we marched along towards the sorting camp that was known as ‘Canada' – a slang name given because this was the land of plenty. It was a huge, open compound, encompassing many sheds and covered areas erected to house the spoils brought in from the trains that shunted prisoners to their deaths. Each morning lorries collected all the remaining personal possessions of the condemned from the railway platform and dumped them here to be sorted by work parties like ours.

We could see huge piles of clothing, great mounds of shoes waiting to be sorted and one heap, taller than my head, of metal and glass. As I drew nearer I saw it was made up of thousands of pairs of spectacles. It still did not dawn on me why they were no longer needed by their owners.

Mutti and I, with dozens of others, were put into a massive shed where we were each given a pair of scissors. We had to undo the linings of fur coats – hundreds of them – to look for any hidden jewellery, gold, money or anything else that might be there. We found so many things hidden away that, at first, it was a bit like opening a pile of presents.

We would exclaim loudly over items we discovered especially if we came across biscuits or sweets. We grabbed and ate more or less what we wanted and no one stopped us.

We worked in a relaxed atmosphere, because everyone was eagerly searching for and finding many items of value. Some older inmates kept back small pieces of jewellery, like diamond rings, which they dug into the ground under their feet, hoping they would be able to retrieve them later. It all seemed very enjoyable until I suddenly thought of the people who had kept such precious things in their fur coats, and particularly when I came across photos of babies and their smiling parents. Sometimes these were the only ‘precious' items hidden away and it made me very sad.

As I gazed at a photo of a Barmitzvah boy surrounded by his smiling, loving family the shed seemed to spin around me and I was hit by the enormity of what I was doing. Suddenly I knew that none of these people would ever see each other again, only in heaven. I was paralysed by the horror of it and at the same time angry that I had allowed myself to enjoy something so hideous and ghastly.

Every evening the workers returned to the barracks to stand for hours at Appel to make sure no one had succeeded in escaping during the day. Inevitably, separation from loved ones, starvation and dehumanization were completely unbearable for some women. I am sure they realized in their hearts that escape was futile but they made one last-ditch effort to be free before sacrificing their lives. Sometimes they would run out of the marching line outside the camp and be shot in the back or brought down by the dogs and torn to pieces. Or, when they were back inside the camp, they would throw themselves against the barbed wire which was highly electrified. They would scream horribly as they burnt to death on the wire.

Imprisonment was something one had to bear for oneself. If we had been given a chance to survive the conditions I should have looked on it as an exciting challenge but I realized that, just like a bull in a bullfight, we did not have a fair chance. The system was designed to kill us all. But my will to live was strong and I had made a pact with myself that I would try to overcome every challenge.

On returning to camp from ‘Canada' we suffered the indignity of being physically searched in case we tried to smuggle anything back. We had to open our mouths, take off our shoes and occasionally we had to strip completely. Despite this, people at the camp begged us to smuggle food back for them. Mutti and I often risked discovery and somehow managed to secrete a biscuit or sweet for Franzi and one or two of our friends.