Sapphire Skies (27 page)

A soldier standing by the door tugged it open and a foul stench rolled out. A mix of urine, sweat and fear. In the flash of the soldier’s torchlight I glimpsed terrified faces: women, children, old people. I was shoved inside the crowded car and the door was slammed shut. A few moments later the train moved again. I could no longer see the people around me but I could sense their wretchedness. Who were they and where were we going?

The journey took four days, which we endured without food or water. I learned that the people in the carriage were Ukrainian Jews on their way to a work camp. On the third day a child died. The guards had to prise the child’s corpse from the mother’s hands. Her wails pierced my heart. The only way I could cope was to rest my head on my knees and think of nothing.

The day after, we passed through a station. My heart sank when I saw the sign:
Kraków
. My worst fears were realised: we were in Poland. A while later, the train came to a halt with a long, low whistle. The doors were slid open and German soldiers ordered everyone out. I waited for the others to leave before lowering myself from the wagon to the ground. I searched the sea of faces for any of the Red Army soldiers I had been with before our escape, but there was no one. I was the only survivor.

‘Poor Filipp,’ I muttered. An SS officer in a neatly fitting uniform and polished boots glared at me. Something seemed to irritate him and he indicated that I should stand to the side while the other passengers were divided according to their sex. As I was the only prisoner of war in the group, I wondered if that was what had annoyed him. Perhaps I was supposed to have been taken to a transit camp in Germany instead of here.

I spotted men and women in striped uniforms working in a field beyond the barbed-wire fence. There were watchtowers at regular intervals manned by guards with machine guns. Other guards patrolled the fence line with dogs. They must be determined to keep these people imprisoned, I thought. An odour that made my stomach heave reached my nostrils: the stench of burning flesh and hair. I’d smelled it many times over the battlefield but it was much stronger here. I glanced around for the source of the smell and noticed a redbrick building behind some trees. Smoke was drifting from its chimney. A sense of foreboding washed over me.

One of the guards indicated that I should join the women who didn’t have small children. Women with young children and those who were pregnant were ordered to the left, along with the elderly. The rest of us were told to line up in single file.

Arbeit macht frei
: work makes you free. I had no idea what those German words meant when I entered Auschwitz-Birkenau that day, nor that I had passed into a living hell run by monsters. I was selected to work in the storage area, sorting the goods that had been stolen from the Jews and other prisoners when they were brought to the camp. Every day I picked through muslin-wrapped cheeses, jars of preserved vegetables, canned fruit and sweets. The depot was nicknamed ‘Canada’ because of all the riches that were stored there — jewellery, clothes, shoes, household goods, as well as food; it was considered one of the preferable jobs in the camp. The women who worked there were permitted to grow their hair, unlike women in other areas of the camp who were shorn from head to foot. Our uniforms were better and so were our barracks.

‘You can eat some of the food,’ said the kapo who supervised me and the other women in the section. ‘The guards will turn a blind eye. Just don’t take anything back to the barracks. That will earn you a beating.’

‘Why do we get treated better here?’ I asked Dora, who worked with me and was teaching me basic German.

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. The mental torment might be enough.’

I didn’t understand what she meant until one day a train arrived from Czechoslovakia. When the passengers had disembarked, I saw that the pregnant women, young children and old people were being herded towards the redbrick building that I had glimpsed on my arrival. I carried on with my work but kept returning to the window to see what was happening. Then I heard screams and cries. I felt sick to my stomach. Were the people being beaten?

Sometime later I heard motors start up, like those on ventilators in factories. Smoke rose from the chimney. When the kapo saw the smoke he ordered us to shut the windows, even though it was hot inside the storehouse. I obeyed his order but as I did so I saw through the glass two prisoners pushing a cart with naked corpses on it. One of the dead was a woman. An umbilical cord dangled from between her legs with a fully developed baby attached to it. I dropped to my knees.

‘You’ll learn not to look next time,’ Dora said when she found me vomiting into a piece of cloth.

Even the horrors I had seen in Stalingrad did not compare to what was going on in Auschwitz. Innocent people were being gassed to death. I thought incessantly of escape after that, but soon realised it was futile for someone who worked inside the camp. The Forbidden Zone was wide and vigilantly patrolled and I’d be shot before I could reach the wire.

‘Listen,’ Dora told me one day, ‘stay strong and don’t risk your good fortune in being allocated this work. Most of us ended up here because we have relatives in the work-assignment office who arranged it for us. It’s awful, but the guards here don’t starve us and they don’t send us to the gas chamber if we do what we’re told. According to you, the Russians are pushing the Germans back. Well, hold on until they get here.’

I saw that Dora was right. It was a Soviet pilot’s duty to try to escape if captured, but I also had a duty to my mother — I was all she had now — and a duty to Valentin because he loved me and would be waiting for me. Working in the storehouse section was the reason I survived two winters at Auschwitz while other prisoners, reduced to living skeletons by a lack of food and from overwork, died in their thousands.

‘Are you noticing the changes?’ Dora whispered to me one day.

I was. The number of trains arriving each week was decreasing and the selections had stopped. Food rations began to improve in quality and quantity. Fewer people were being killed randomly or for minor offences.

‘They’re getting desperate,’ Dora said. ‘They
need
our labour now.’

I dared to allow myself the hope that the changes meant the front was drawing closer.

In late autumn, some of the crematoriums were dismantled; and then one night in early January, when I lay in my bunk shivering from the cold, I heard a sound that made me sit bolt upright. Planes! I knew from the pitch of the engines that they were Ilyushins: Russian bombers. Had I imagined it? I looked around. Other women were sitting up; they’d heard them too. After the planes came the boom of artillery and the crackle of rifle fire.

‘The Russians are close,’ one woman whispered.

The following day, dozens of German armoured vehicles rumbled past the camp. The Nazis were fleeing.

Dora and I were transferred from sorting food to packing clothes, suitcases, shoes, spectacles and other stolen goods for dispatch to Berlin. The guards ordered us to hurry but the snow hampered the speed at which we could push the wheelbarrows and carts from the bunkers to the trucks. My feet were wet and frozen, and the last thing I wanted, now that the Red Army was approaching, was to die of pneumonia.

An explosion ripped through the air as another crematorium was blown up. On one of my runs a prisoner stopped me and whispered that she’d seen SS officers throwing hundreds of documents and registration books onto bonfires.

‘They’re destroying the evidence,’ she said. ‘They know what they’ve been doing is abhorrent.’

‘But what about us?’ I asked her. ‘We’re eyewitnesses to their crimes. What do they intend to do with us?’

Anticipating that there would be some desperate act by the Nazis before the Red Army arrived, Dora and I stowed away food and prepared a hideout in one of the storage bunkers.

A few days later, Russian bombers destroyed several bunkers, including the food depot. Fortunately Dora and I had been loading a truck at the time and weren’t inside the depot. We rushed to inspect the damage and were relieved to see our hideout bunker still standing.

The SS soldiers ordered prisoners out of their barracks, even though the temperature had fallen seventeen degrees below zero. Those who didn’t move quickly enough were beaten. In the confusion Dora and I, along with another woman from our bunker, slipped away to our hideout. From the commotion we heard outside it was clear something terrible was happening.

‘They’re going to make all able-bodied prisoners march west, to Germany,’ the woman claimed.

I stared at her in horror. The idea was madness. Even the strongest prisoners weren’t up to that in the extreme cold. They were inadequately clothed and many of them didn’t have shoes.

We remained hidden in the storage bunker, huddling together for warmth. I heard Soviet planes engaging with the Germans near the camp and imagined Valentin up there in his Yak fighter coming to rescue me.

Early the following morning the lights outside the bunker went out and darkness fell over the camp. I crawled to a window but I could only see the flames of dozens of bonfires. We ventured out, hiding behind abandoned barrows and crates in case the Germans were still about. All around us lay the frozen bodies of women who hadn’t been well enough to march. The SS had shot them. They’ve made a bad job of hiding the evidence of their atrocities, I thought.

There seemed to be no guards around and parts of the barbed wire around the camp had been cut. Was it a trick? I squinted at the guard towers, trying to see if any soldiers remained there. But they appeared to be abandoned. Were we truly free at last? I wanted to believe it but was anxious that this was only a lull before another storm hit.

‘I’m going to the men’s camp,’ said the woman who had hidden with us in the bunker. ‘I want to find out what happened to my husband and son.’

We couldn’t stop her. In her shoes I would have done the same thing. But Dora and I thought it was wiser to go back to our hiding spot. We were right. At first light SS soldiers arrived in trucks. They spread throughout the camp, dragging sick patients out of bunkers and forcing them to stand in the snow. Dora and I clung to each other when we heard soldiers breaking into the storage bunker where we were hiding. We covered ourselves with piles of blankets but the soldiers had brought dogs and we were sniffed out.

‘Out! Out!’ the soldiers screamed, beating us with the butts of their rifles.

We were forced to line up with the other women from the camp in rows of five. Jewish women were placed in the front rows, the rest of us behind them. The blood drained from my face. They were going to execute us, row by row. I glanced up, willing the Soviet Air Force to arrive. But the sky remained empty.

The soldiers formed into their murder squads. The woman next to me, a Polish resistance fighter, started to pray. From the rhythm of her speech I knew that she was reciting the Lord’s Prayer. I crossed myself.

From behind the soldiers came a rumbling sound: vehicle engines. A convoy of German armoured cars pulled up. An officer leaped out and rushed towards the commander of the firing squad. A heated discussion took place, and a few moments later the commander gave an order and the soldiers turned on their heels and boarded the trucks that had brought them here. Then they drove off towards the road to join the convoy.

We prisoners looked at each other. We were still alive despite such a close encounter with death. Several women fainted.

‘We’d better find some food and drinking water,’ Dora said.

We hurried as fast as our thin bodies could carry us to the main camp, checking over our shoulders for guards, but no one appeared. Some of the prisoners had already raided the SS storage cellars and were astounded to find piles of warm clothing and food left behind in the Nazis’ haste to depart.

Dora grabbed a coat, a pair of boots and some bread. ‘I’m not taking any chances,’ she told me. ‘I’m leaving now!’

For me, the best decision seemed to be to stay in the camp and wait for the Red Army. I embraced my companion of the eighteen months, knowing that I would never see her again.

Red Army soldiers arrived at the camp the following day. We gathered around the fences and watched them.

They were horrified when they saw the state we were in. Several of them tugged open the gates. ‘You are free!’ they shouted. ‘You are free! You can go home!’

We staggered towards them, embracing and kissing them. I stumbled towards one soldier and fell at his feet. ‘Thank you!’ I cried, hugging his legs. ‘Thank you for coming for us!’

The soldier’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Comrade, you are Russian?’ he asked, bending down to help me up. ‘Of all the horrors I have seen … Comrade, what have those monsters done to you?’

The Red Army brought with them doctors, nurses and volunteers, and the stone buildings of the main camp were turned into hospital wards. The nurses tended to the sick, while the volunteers, many of them Polish people from the surrounding countryside, handed out clothes from the storage rooms. I had borne the cold so long that the coats, boots, underwear and dress I was given felt luxurious.

Now that we were free, I wanted to return to my regiment — which was my first duty — and then make contact with my mother. It was raining and the snow was turning to mud but I was determined to leave Auschwitz as soon as possible. The soldiers said that the government was setting up repatriation points for Soviet men and women who had ended up in Poland or Germany as prisoners or forced labourers. They told me there was one in Katowice, thirty-three kilometres northwest of Auschwitz. The food volunteers gave me a package of cheese, bread and dried fruit for the journey.

I headed towards the gate, shoving my hands in my pockets to keep them warm. My fingers touched something inside. I took the object out: it was a ticket for a cinema in Budapest. The discovery drove home to me that I was wearing another woman’s coat; a woman who had met her end in the gas chambers. Something in my mind jumped. I heard screaming and lifted my hands to my temples. I saw the dead woman in the cart and her miscarried child. My feet felt as if they were sinking into the ground. The buildings around me no longer seemed solid but vibrated before my eyes.