999, page 10
dept. 14 [sic]
Levoa
Magdalena Braunova born March 28 1926 was taken to Poprad to fulfill her work duty after turning 16 years
Hermina Jakubovicova born August 14 1921 was during female presentation on February 26 1942 recognized as unable to work; in spite of it, she was taken to Poprad camp on 23. 3. 1942
Lenka Szenesova (born Singerova) as a married person was also taken to Poprad and the mentioned three persons were by mistake taken to fulfill their work duty and therefore we ask you to make an edit and send them home.
District branch of the Jewish Center Levoa
Then, a flurry of telegrams from desperate Jews began arriving at the ministry.
In Poprad some very different preparations were being made. For supper that Thursday, the girls from Levoa (fifteen-year-old Magdalena, disabled Hermina, and already-married Lenka) were standing in line for something that was called “goulash” although it looked more like garbage. It contained, per dietary instructions, their allotment of 100 grams of meat for the week—less than a can of cat food. It would be the last real meal they would eat for the next three years. If they survived the next three years.
In the afternoon, the guards shouted for everyone to gather their things and line up outside. There was an odd sense of relief. After the constant stress of the unknown, the impending sense of doom, and days waiting in the barracks, the girls were going somewhere. Impatient to get moving and do something different, they packed up their few things and chatted among themselves, guessing, always guessing: Were they going to the factory now? Were they going to start work soon? Would someone feed them more at the factory?
Organizing one thousand people to do anything rarely runs smoothly. There was shouting among the girls. Sisters and cousins hurried each other. Chaos.
No one had brought all that much. Most of the young women were still wearing what they had worn the day they left home. Woolen dress suits, sensible shoes, woolen leggings, maybe stockings on the town girls. Village girls wore longer skirts and hand-knit sweaters. Everything from fashionable hats to babushka-length scarves covered their heads.
EARLIER IN THE DAY, at least two Jewish physicians had reported for duty in Poprad after being ordered to accompany a trainload of girls. There were supposed to be seven Jewish doctors in all on the transport. When Dr. Weiszlovitz arrived, he was told his services were no longer needed and he was excused. The reason the authorities gave him was that there were more than enough doctors for the transport. In fact, there was only one—Dr. Izak Kaufmann. Evidently, one medical practitioner was enough for 999 young women.
There is some confusion about Dr. Kaufmann’s presence on the transport. Some believe that Dr. Kaufmann took the place of the last girl on the list, twenty-five-year-old Giza Neuwirth, but this does not concur with Yad Vashem records. His presence could not have been covert in the barracks; no one would have forgotten a man’s presence among the girls, let alone a doctor’s, yet not one survivor ever mentions a doctor in the barracks. Certainly, Edith never saw him. And when our young witness, Ivan Rauchwerger, drove to Poprad to check on his girlfriend, he was asked to bring some of the girls’ medications back with him. If a doctor had been available in the barracks, why would girls have asked for their medications?
Dr. Kaufmann was conscripted as part of the authorities’ ruse, and like Dr. Weiszlovits he must have arrived on the day of departure. His name is not to be found anywhere on the list of 999 girl’s names, typed on March 24, 1942. It is found only at the bottom of a separate list of ninety-nine of the girls’ names. Next to his name, it states that he was the only doctor for one thousand “people.”
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE to load almost one thousand women onto a train of cattle cars? Was it still daylight when the last of them stepped outside to breathe the brisk mountain air and send a prayer up to God, thankful that they were free of the horrible barracks?
That moment of respite faded as the guards shouted at them to march to the railway tracks outside of the barracks.
It was the longest line of cars Edith had ever seen. Even cattle market trains were shorter. The size filled the girls with trepidation. “We didn’t think that these were for us,” Linda Reich says. Then the Hlinka Guard opened the doors to the cattle cars and ordered the girls to get inside.
Who in their right mind would willingly board a freight train like this? There were no ramps. Ramps were used for cattle, but not for human beings. How could they get inside? The cars were too high off the ground to be boarded by girls in skirts, girls with luggage. Not one girl could figure out how to clamber aboard, and not one girl wanted to. They balked at the idea.
The guards began cursing and screaming. “You Jewish whores, you!”
The youngest of three sisters, Regina Schwartz, naively asked the guards, “Where are you taking us?”
“To the front, so the German soldiers can have a good time with you!” the Hlinka Guards said as they laughed.
These were cold men who didn’t care when the girls began crying. Whips were on order for tears.
“Like an animal,” Margie Becker says an SS man glared at her. “I still remember his blue eyes, piercing blue eyes. He pulled out his tongue,” and panting at her said in German. “‘Now your tongues are going to be hanging out, too.’” It was a curse and a threat; soon they were going to be hungry and thirsty. “It was very horrible.”
Although the first transport slipped secretly away into the night, one week later, by the time the third transport was leaving Poprad, a number of parents had hired cars, “to be with their daughters, desperate at having to part with their children. The girls were loaded into cattle wagons—each with a sign reading ‘eight horses’ or ‘forty persons.’ That was the last their desperate parents saw of them,” Ivan Rauchwerger recalls. “The girls were confused and distraught, many in tears.” It is unlikely that the girls of the third transport were beaten and forced into the cattle cars, as the others had been on the first transport, because by that point there were witnesses: Many people, gentiles and Jews, were coming to Poprad to see the girls taken away.
“We were trying to be ladylike, but there was no way to get into the train in our skirts and dresses,” Edith says. To avoid a stick across their back, they had to help each other into the cattle cars and hoist their own luggage with no assistance from the men. More mature young women struggled to maintain their composure and self-respect. Teenagers wept hysterically. They were good girls. Girls whose fathers paid taxes and obeyed the law. Girls who had obediently registered to work because their government told them they must, even though many had never been away from home for even one day in their young lives. What were nice girls doing in wagons used to haul livestock to slaughter, wagons that still smelled of manure, urine, and fear?
Edith and her sister clung to each other, but Edith remembers little of the train ride. The brain can only cope so much, and after so many indignities, her young mind simply stopped processing the horror. Reality had become a nightmare from which she could not wake.
DESPITE BEING RELIEVED OF DUTY, Dr. Weiszlovits did not leave the Poprad station immediately. Instead, he watched in horror as the columns of young women carrying their luggage were pushed and shoved into cattle cars. Afterward, he raced home and told his wife that Slovakia was “not for a child.” They had to get their twelve-year-old son, Yehuda, out before it was too late. Yehuda was smuggled into Hungary, where he hid for the rest of the war. Yehuda survived the Holocaust. His father and mother did not.
AS EVENING DESCENDED and the last of the girls were boarded, the guards walked down the line, checking that the metal bars on the doors were securely latched. From inside came wails and pleading, high-pitched voices. The guards thumped the doors and walked on, waving as each car was cleared to go. The conductor blew the whistle. The signal light shifted from red to green. The engine revved. The stationmaster threw the switch, and the transport creaked forward onto the main track. As cars swayed left, then right, the weight of their cargo too insubstantial to keep the transport balanced and sturdy, the stationmaster wrote Departure time: 20:20 in the station register.
Chapter Ten
They had come—almost as children—from the arms
of their mothers, in a State of naïveté and ignorance
of their future destiny.
—DR. MANCI SCHWALBOVA
ALONG WITH KONKA’S TELEGRAM, a few of the promised exceptions arrived in Prešov on the afternoon of March 25, 1942. The moment Adolf Amster heard the news, he called his driver to bring the car to the house and rushed to the governor’s office to pick up the document that would free his beloved daughter. They left for Poprad at once. If everything went according to plan, Magda would be safely home in a few hours.
Today, the distance between Prešov and Poprad can be driven in an hour on smoothly paved, four-lane toll roads. Even the old, narrow, two-lane route is paved, though one can still see donkeys and sometimes people pulling carts along the median. In 1942, the road still only had one lane, and parts of it would have been gravel or tarmacadam. The harshest winter on record had also taken a toll, creating miles of washboard surface and dangerous ditches.
Adolf Amster was not the only father racing fate. The Hartmann cousins had also received their family’s exception and borrowed a friend’s truck to drive to Poprad and rescue Madg-duska and Nusi. There were probably other men of industry and commerce, responsible for everything from lumber mills to banks to farms, who had received exceptions, trying to rescue their daughters, as well.
Other families did not get the necessary paperwork for another few weeks. Such was the case for the Friedman and Gross families. The mayor of Humenné himself had assured Edith’s father that the exceptions were on their way, but they did not arrive in time. This was government at its most inefficient.
The sun was setting over the High Tatras as the Amster car hastened toward Poprad. Adolf Amster’s impatient hands worried the official paper with its government seal. Not seeing his daughter’s sweet face at the breakfast table for the past few days or hearing her witty chatter with her mother, not feeling her endearing kiss on his cheek, had sent him into turmoil. Her mother had paced the house, fretting by the window curtains, peering out at a world gone mad. When the day turned to rain, she had cried because she longed to wash Magda’s hair with the rainwater. All she wanted to do was brush her daughter’s hair in front of the fire until it was smooth.
A confident and successful businessman, Adolf Amster had no doubt that he could secure Magda’s release. When he did, he would make it up to her and allow her to go to Palestine to join her elder sister and brother and her best friend, Sara Shpira.
The sky was a twist of scarlet and orange above the icy peaks of the mountain range that defined Slovakia’s northern border as Amster urged his driver to push the accelerator to the floor. In minutes, the landscape sobered into a gray dusk. The car lurched between grassy verges. A dog-fox stalked a hare in the fallow fields.
IN THE FETID cattle car, girls sought each other in the dark. Through the wooden slats, they could see the light shift from pale yellow to soft pink, lavender to gray to black. The train lurched. Its cargo was so much lighter than the cattle it normally carried to the slaughterhouse that the cars swayed from side to side. Motion-sick girls retched into buckets until there was nothing left in their stomachs but bile. After being starved for five days, there wasn’t much to begin with. As the train increased its speed, the cold night air whistled through the cracks. They shivered in the dark. Teeth chattered. Weeping was as communal as terror.
“And we still didn’t know where we are going.” Edith’s voice is still shrill and indignant, seventy-five years later.
IT WAS DARK by the time Adolf Amster arrived at the Poprad barracks, only to find the building empty. The guards left behind, probably local boys, had seen the chaos around the girls’ departure and told him the girls had been taken to Žilina. Amster hurried back to his driver, and together they headed west to that last major transfer station between the Slovak, Czech, and Polish borders.
The eastern railway track skirted a vast plateau before it splintered off in different directions. There were no railroad crossing gates on the plateau. The rail line did not even have warning signs where it crossed the roadways. The green glow of eyes floated in the dark night, as deer raised their heads from grazing. The car’s lights bored holes in the blackness as it left behind farm fields and began a long slow ascent through pine forests, snow snakes and black ice. The highway to Žilina crisscrossed the tracks so that sometimes the train was on the driver’s side and sometimes it was on the passenger’s, sometimes it was below the car and sometimes it was higher. If he had been close enough in the murky night, Adolf Amster might have spotted the caboose light hugging the rocky banks of the Váh River.
Fog rose up from the gorge below. Wending its way through foothills and virgin forests, the train decelerated at sharp bends and slowly ascended and descended the mountain passes, until, just past the town of Vrútky, the tracks and road rose together into the treacherous passes of the Malá Fatra mountains. Then the train cheated the distance by ducking into the mountain, its caboose light swallowed by the tunnel. As they navigated the hairpin turns, time ticked against Adolf Amster and the other drivers. The tunnel cut at least half an hour off the journey and brought the train within twenty minutes of the main railway junction of Žilina—well ahead of the desperate fathers.
A normal passenger train would have taken less time than driving, but the cattle car’s speed was markedly slower, giving the fathers a fighting chance of rescue. However, the train did not have to stop and pick up passengers. It simply slowed as it reached the depots of Štrba, Liptovský svätý Mikuláš, and Vrútky and lumbered over railway crossings, until it reached Žilina. And stopped.
A VAST JUNCTION station, Žilina was then, and still is, the intersection of lines going east to Poprad and beyond, west to the Czech Republic and Germany, south to Bratislava and Budapest, and north to Poland. Here cargo and passenger trains can have their cars connected or separated and trains can be switched back and forth from local branches to main lines.
As the Final Solution got underway, Žilina would become very busy—the central transit hub for all Slovak deportations (and later Hungarian). This was where the transports would arrive and the switch would be thrown to send the trains northward.
Switching tracks is not a quick process, especially for long, cumbersome freight hauls. The train performs a sidestep dance between tracks, moving slowly backward off one line, then waiting for the switch to be thrown before wobbling forward onto a new line, heading in a different direction. Depending on how many tracks it must shift across to reach its intended line, it repeats this zigzag dance.
From inside the train the girls peered between the slats and watched as the train clanked and swayed along the turnouts across the diamond-shaped crossing switches—destination unknown.
WITHOUT THE GERMAN and Polish railways, the Holocaust could never have been so lethal. It required the use of only two thousand trains to liquidate two-thirds of the Jews in Europe. In 1944, just 147 trains would transport 450,000 Hungarian Jews. The railway station for the town of Owicim and the Auschwitz death camp would become one of the busiest of the railways, with 619 trains working the deportation routes across Europe. Not one bureaucrat in the German railway system refused to authorize a single transport. In fact, the SS was required to pay the Deutsche Reichsbahn (the German Railway) for each Jew deported, and extra charges were levied against them for cleaning the cars once they were emptied. The cost for adults and children over ten years old was four pfennig (pennies) per kilometer; children under the age of four went free. It is roughly 106 kilometers from the border of Slovakia at adca to Owicim, Poland, costing roughly $4.24 per person after the border crossing.
In a few weeks, when more transports from Slovakia and the transports from France began filling the tracks, Jews would be considered the absolute lowest priority in terms of travel. They came after troop trains, supply trains, medical trains, and paying customers; even empty trains would have priority over Jewish “freight.” That is most probably why the train carrying Edith and the others did not leave Poprad until 20:20. Night was the best time to move freight, and darkness provided a clandestine cloak of secrecy.
The girls were already suffering significant trauma from being uprooted, treated like criminals, and starved. Living in the barracks in Poprad had been the first step in a psychological process of “deculturation.” But being locked into the cattle cars and treated as cargo was about more than cultural identity. It was about their place in humanity. No one knew what to believe anymore. All of their expectations were being crushed under the wheels of the transport.
RACING DOWN THE STATION PLATFORM at Žilina, Adolf Amster yelled at God. The transport had already pulled out of the station. Filled with anger and anguish, he stood on the empty platform unable to be the father he was meant to be—a man who protected his daughter and could rescue her. What would he do without his little Magda?
FORTY MINUTES AFTER THE TRAIN DEPARTED from Žilina, it creaked to a halt again. Woken abruptly by harsh German voices outside the train, Linda Reich peered through the cracks in the car and saw the lights of the border crossing. She weighed a little more than one hundred pounds, so she suggested the taller girls lift her up to the ventilation window so she could look out. Outside, she saw the Hlinka Guards hand paperwork to the SS. She read the signs in Polish to the girls below as everyone tried to make sense of the direction of the train. Rena Kornreich was doing the same thing for the girls in her cattle car.
