The Testimony    (6 page)

FRIEDA

The first cracks in the rigid routine of extermination in Auschwitz-Birkenau appeared towards the end of 1944. While large transports of newcomers continued to arrive at this obviously final destination, groups of inmates were now being sent out as well. The numbering and rollcalls were abandoned, and among the inmates there were rumours of Russian and Allied armies marching towards Germany.

One evening, on return from my work in the crematoria, I saw a group of women being marched out of our section of the camp. My barrack was empty so, assuming that Mother was in the group being herded out, I joined it when the guard got busy counting and yelling at those selected to leave. We were ordered onto a cattle train and there, to my relief, I found Mother. Another long, cross-country journey followed, with many dying on the way. We received a bucket of water per wagon, and a slice of bread for those who lined up at a stop in a middle of a field somewhere.

On arrival at this new camp there were showers, and our soiled uniforms were exchanged for a variety of civilian clothing. Each carried a number preceded by the letters ‘PV’ that was printed on the front and back, below shoulder level. Very small dresses were issued to tall people and large ones to petite figures. The overseers were helpless with laughter as we were made to march round and round in a circle.

‘Old’ inmates told us that this was Stutthof, a concentration camp in East Prussia on the coast of the Baltic Sea. The letters ‘PV’ stood for
Politische Verbrecher
, meaning political criminals. Inmates in other sections were German communists, Russian POWs, saboteurs, among others. In a distant section we could see a group of women with long, blonde hair. They looked healthy and dignified, in complete contrast to us. We learned they were Estonian freedom fighters. What were we doing here?

Next to us, in the male section, was a raised platform with gallows for public hangings. At the corner of each section was a tower with an armed guard. From dusk to dawn the barbed-wire fences carried a high-voltage current.

Stutthof differed from Birkenau in other aspects. It was smaller and surrounded by a forest, and our barracks had no bunks, only some straw on the floors. The filth was horrible. The occasional fumigation and hosing down of the barrack helped only briefly.

The latrine was an open hole in the ground outside with slippery edges, making its use fraught with the danger of falling in. The overseers were mostly female, pathologically sadistic and highly inventive in ways of punishing and humiliating us. Earlier arrivals to Stutthof called it ‘the bottom of hell’.

Apart from early morning rollcall and the removal of dead bodies piled outside the barrack, there was nothing to do all day officially. There was a group selected to go to work on nearby farms, some on a daily basis. Others stayed on the farms for a period. They were well fed there, and on return would smuggle in a few carrots or small pieces of other food.

I was not selected and was glad to stay with my mother, again at a safe distance. She was now very weary and emaciated.

It was in this nether world that I met and befriended the remarkable Frieda. I don’t know her surname—we all left those outside the prisons—but I still remember her number: PV 83356. (I was PV 84065.) She was sent to Stutthof some months earlier from Budapest, where till then Jews were allowed relative freedom. She was a university professor and I think that her subject was sociology—not something I could well comprehend then.

I think Frieda was in her fifties, her re-growing hair a silvery brown. She was a gentle, wise and knowledgeable lady. I spent most days with her and the nights with my mother at the other end of the barrack, because here too they were separating families. Mother’s friend and neighbour was a lady from Warsaw, still very beautiful, whose golden hair re-grew upwards on her shaven head so that it looked like a halo. Goldie was her name now. She was a physician, and a warm and caring person.

Frieda and I talked in German. Her intellect impressed me, and I grew very fond of her. We were an odd pair: she a mentor and a teacher to me, I a self-appointed bodyguard to her. Towards the end of the war I was becoming an accomplished prisoner, skilled in the tricks of the trade, with a variety of survival mechanisms and a sharpened sense of approaching danger. Frieda was a novice who didn’t—perhaps couldn’t—focus entirely on each moment. She made many comments that were global in nature and therefore a bit abstract for me, whose education comprised all of three years of primary school.

Frieda wondered how humanity would regard these events, whether this war would change the social order the way the French Revolution had; perhaps it would serve to eliminate barbarians and racism. Such concepts were rather too grand for me, and spoken in a language of which I had only a colloquial command. But whenever I looked puzzled, Frieda explained patiently. She wondered how Dante would have written his
Inferno
had he spent time in Stutthof. I asked who was Dante and what was his Inferno, and Frieda told me about this thirteenth-century Florentine poet at length.

With no work of any sort to be done, nor the energy to carry it out, there were endless empty hours between the daily count of prisoners at dawn and the distribution of ‘bread’, ‘soup’ and ‘coffee’ late in the day. Frieda and I talked while we performed the main activity of the day, which was delousing by a popular and effective method: clothes were folded and stacked into a narrow parcel, then pressure was applied from above. Within minutes most lice were in the top layer, where they could be massacred wholesale. It then remained to squash their eggs, which were usually found along the seams of garments and were also pressed, between one’s thumbnails. Hair that grew between successive head shaves also required delousing, and this was done—on a reciprocal basis—by your neighbour. The extra clothes one needed to wear during this operation were obtained by stripping them from the dead on the pile outside.

Occasionally we talked about a possible future. What on earth maintained this flicker of hope in us? A few months into the war, the phrase ‘If we survive’ started to precede thoughts and statements about the future. Hope had to be qualified. Inmates were making resolutions: ‘If I survive I’ll never ever be fussy about food, nor waste any.’ ‘If I survive I’ll value every free day and never complain about any trivial thing,’ and so on. My mother hoped that, if I survived, I would be normal in mind and body or, as she put it, sane and not maimed. I hoped desperately that my parents would survive. Goldie hoped that these hellish events would somehow create a better world—as if evil would burn itself out here. Frieda kept repeating that if we survived we should have to testify and bear witness for the rest of our lives.

For me, to encounter a great intellect is like standing before a magnificent mountain or panorama. Though it makes me feel small and insignificant, I would not want to miss such an enrichment of life. But I now think that behind the barbed wire a highly developed intellect hindered the chances of survival. For those with little education—the young or the dull—it was a short step back on the ladder of development to the primitive condition of self-preservation instincts, not distracted by reflections or despair. To reflect was to be off guard. The effects of malnutrition, constant harassment, fear and beating concentrated my wits on the immediate problems of survival.

One’s wits
had
to be concentrated on immediate survival: to watch and listen, to interpret sounds and silences in terms of approaching danger, the better to hide if possible. I was rather like a primitive creature living in the undergrowth of the jungle, surrounded by predators. From down there, given the practicalities of survival, one can see only the bit of the canvas that is in front of one’s face.

But from the height of a well-developed intellect it was difficult to regress that far. From that height the whole panorama of the Holocaust could be seen and contemplated: its horror could overwhelm.

On reflection, only much later did I realise how overwhelmed Frieda must have been by the ‘big picture’ she was able to view. At times I was exasperated by her lack of attention to the immediate; that in spite of my warnings of a particularly murderous guard on duty that day, or other approaching dangers, she focused on it only briefly. But she would go and give those warnings to Mother at the other end of the barrack. Frieda, Mother and Goldie often shared their thoughts.

Along with regression came the slow process of brutalisation: a dulling of compassion and sensibilities, where the need to find a pebble to suck to fill our stomachs with saliva to relieve the hunger pains became stronger than the will to listen to a distressed inmate; where watching another hanging no longer had a lasting effect; and where devising ways of torturing our torturers became a creative pastime.

After some particularly humiliating episodes, I would be consumed by hatred and devise instruments of torture to use on the Nazis ‘if we survive’. I told Mother about one: I would put our camp commanders in a wire cage, the two opposite walls of which are pushed by tanks, so as to slowly crush them to death while we watched and heard the cracking of their bones. I could not see why Mother got so upset. Later I heard her say, to a woman who kept talking about the damage to her property, that the greatest damage was being done to the minds of children—would they ever be normal if they survived? I must have been on the verge of insanity then. But in Frieda, as in Mother and Goldie, neither regression nor brutalisation was evident.

The conditions were changing, and were so unpredictable, that one had to play it by ear when it came to what was the best survival technique: in some situations, it was safer to be a helpful and accepted member of a ‘pack’; in others, being left to one’s own devices was probably better. The most common way for inmates to help each other survive was to divert the overseer’s attention during a prolonged beating or if some illegal activity was going on. We would usually stage a fight between several inmates. The overseers often found these fights entertaining, but there was also a risk of punishment for it.

Spying on other inmates was rewarded with extra food. In Stutthof, we suspected one older woman was informing the overseers about messages being sent to other sections, and about people who changed uniforms with dead or dying persons. She was seen speaking with the overseer and, on several occasions, seemed to have a larger than usual portion of bread. We gave her a beating one night, and a warning. She was not maimed; it was just another beating. And a measure of the degree to which we had been brutalised.

I think, to survive, one needed a combination of the following: good physical and mental stamina at the outset; adaptability, in the sense of quickly learning a whole new set of reflexes and coping mechanisms and shedding those that had become a handicap; improvising and quick thinking was a help, while rigid attitudes were a drawback; the ability to retain hope against all odds; a strong will to live; and a strong sense of human dignity. Perhaps a black—and often sick—sense of humour helped. Wisdom or experience was of little use as there was no precedent, only total unpredictability. Sheer chance and luck were still decisive as life depended on the whim or mood of those in power at the moment. No quality obviates a hail of bullets.

Our arrival at the barracks had caused such overcrowding that there was not enough room to stretch our legs at night, but this was soon relieved in the usual way: carrying out the dead in the morning was one of the few tasks of each day before the endless empty hours unfolded. We fought the lice, sucked pebbles and amused ourselves by watching the deranged in their bizarre activities. One of them recited incoherently and theatrically, another went through a series of movements as if she were at home. We would guess whether she was arranging flowers, polishing silver or setting the table. She even combed her non-existent long hair and managed to deny reality so completely that we had to drag her out to the queue for food.

One of the tricks for survival was pretending to be dead. A convincing performance took some guile. It wouldn’t do to just lie there relaxed with closed eyes, because most real corpses were twisted in agony. I devised a useful position with head thrown back, arm covering the face and legs drawn up in a foetal mode. In winter, when breath steamed in the icy air, I breathed shallowly and rapidly under my arm so that any steam was re-inhaled before it became visible.

This accomplishment saved me from bullets or beatings on several occasions. I tried to pass this useful trick on to Mother, Frieda and Goldie but they did not use it.

At that time in Stutthof there were bodies everywhere: on the fences or the ground below them—those who suicided by electrocution; on the gallows—bodies from recent hangings; yesterday’s dead waiting to be taken away, today’s dead not yet removed from the barracks. As cold weather approached we stole their clothes. There were frequent suicides by climbing the high barbed-wire fence after it was electrified at dusk. Sometimes the clothing got so firmly caught on the barbs that the body remained there, hanging like a twisted scarecrow.

Unpredictability was the order of the days and nights of the war, all five years and nine months of it. In the various prisons, we were entirely at the mercy of the whims of prison guards and commandants. Their personalities, moods and sadistic inventiveness brought ever-changing and unexpected events into our existence. Some of the unpredictability was planned and deliberate, as in the frequent, random relocations of prisoners from one barrack to another. Yet such is the force of habit that we got used to it.

Physical and verbal abuse lost its humiliating effect on us through its frequency, and because it only incriminated the Germans. But their spitting in our faces was hard to get used to: to me, it was very depressing.

The gross overcrowding we were periodically subjected to was an insidious and effective form of torture. While having others ‘in the same boat’ was a blessing, it turned into a curse when we were packed like sardines. It had a rapidly dehumanising effect. Not much respect for one’s fellow human beings survives inside a mass of tightly packed humans who are pushing and shoving and gasping to breathe and trying to move their numbed limbs. It devastates the morale and crushes even the blackest sense of humour. (The sight of a truck tightly packed with animals still makes me shudder.)