999, page 11
“Maybe from Poland we go to Germany to work?” Linda suggested.
What she did not know was that the Slovaks had just handed the entire transport over to the Germans. The border crossing gate rose, and the train rolled forward. With the lowering of the barrier behind them, the fate of the girls was sealed.
THE TRAIN LUMBERED through the endless night, grinding away at what was left of their morale. There was no direct route to where they were going. Even today, a regular passenger train from Poprad to Owicim can take upwards of six hours. As the girls slept fitfully, the train lurched past a changing landscape. Mountains diminished into windswept steppes flattened by war and poverty. It was a foreign wind that now chilled the girls’ already shivering bodies. Nestled up against their friends, sisters, cousins, seeking warmth and comfort, they stared into the black ink of the car. The train slowed when it passed through small towns they had never heard of—Zwardo, ywiec, Bielsko-Biała, Czechowice-Dziedzice—moving ever more slowly as it passed forests of silver birch, spruce, and thigh-high snow. When dawn came, its watery light barely touched the girls’ pale faces.
Like Africans packed into the bellies of slave ships headed for the Americas, our girls were part of a new burgeoning slave trade. All of the major countries of Europe and Britain had outlawed the ownership of human beings and eradicated the transatlantic slave trade in the early 1800s. Now, more than one hundred years later, Germany was flouting its own antislavery laws and violating the human rights of these girls. Of course, like Africans, Jews were considered less than human—humanitarian concerns could be ignored. By the end of the war, this diabolical slave trade would generate about 60 million Reichsmark (the equivalent of $125 million today) for the German economy from Auschwitz alone. Yet they had no intrinsic value, so no one bothered buying or selling Jewish prisoners.
IT WAS AROUND eleven in the morning when the engine ground to a halt at another town only a few of the girls would have ever heard of, the Polish town of Owicim. Located on the meandering Soła River, beneath a picturesque medieval castle, Owicim was a pretty little town that had allowed its Great Synagogue and the Sanctuary of the Blessed Virgin Mary Cathedral to be built overlooking the river’s banks together. Surrounded by white buildings, the town square had no defining sculpture or fountain in the center, but there was a second cathedral and at least one other synagogue—worship was not in short supply. Gentile and Jewish inhabitants of the town worked together in the community, and acts of resistance were common. Residents were already being held in the local prison camp, while others had been forced to work there by the occupying German force.
A few miles outside of town were hectares of flat land for crops and grazing. This was not a poor community. It had industry and barracks for the Polish Army. After the German invasion, political prisoners and POWs needed to be imprisoned, and the Germans decided that Owicim’s former army barracks, a few miles outside of town, would make the perfect prison camp. In 1942, to make room for an expansion of the prison camp, residents in neighboring villages were forced to relocate. Their homes were about to be demolished.
THE TRAIN HAD STOPPED in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere. There was no famous death gate. That infamous symbol had not even been designed yet, let alone erected. Birkenau was nothing but stables and swampland.
When the doors of the cattle cars opened, it was to a panorama of gray sky and flat, beige earth. A strip of snow stretched across the horizon. Bands of dark gray. Light gray. Brown gray. Black gray. Vistas as abstract as Mark Rothko’s art, Edith and the girls looked out at a real version of his paintings and were swallowed up by the landscape. A nothingness beyond imagination.
The pupils of the girls’ eyes contracted. Pain and light. Light and pain.
“There was nothing,” Edith says. “Nothing!”
There is a semiprecious Polish flint that is created through such extreme pressure that it hardens the limestone crystals common in that country until they become invisible to the human eye. Under this forceful compression, the stones form tiny abstract landscapes—bands of gray and off-white—that, once polished into cabochons, look like minuscule works of abstract expressionist art. Spiritualists say these stones heal those haunted by the past, but Edith and the other girls had to survive first. They were about to be compressed and hardened by forced labor that was designed to pulverize them into stone.
The SS ordered male prisoners to get the girls out of the cattle cars. Men yelled. Dogs barked. Whips cracked.
“RauS! RauS!”
Hollow-eyed men in striped pajama-like uniforms peered into the cars. These were Polish prisoners arrested for crimes as petty as handing out leaflets or as serious as sabotage. None of them had seen a woman since their incarceration, almost two years for some. Now, hundreds of girls peered out at them, well-dressed, their hair less coiffed but still presentable. The girls stood blinking from inside of the cattle cars. Fumbling with their luggage, uncertain what to do next, they stood in the doorway, unmoving.
The initial response of the shocked male inmates was to hold out their hands and help the girls, but the SS beat men who moved too slowly or acted too kindly. The train was high up off the ground, and a ditch ran under the tracks. Dressed in tight fitting skirts or dresses, the girls did not know whether to clamber down or jump. They froze on the lip edge of the cars. SS shouts increased. Finally, one girl, then another, tossed her suitcase and reluctantly jumped a meter to the ground. Like lambs, the rest followed. Standing unsteadily on the ground, they smoothed the seams of their dresses and skirts. Older town girls checked their stockings for ladders. Soon, the field was filled with girls speaking Slovakian to the men, who whispered urgent warnings in Polish. The few Polish girls had the immediate advantage of language.
German orders fell on their collective heads.
INTO THIS CHAOS, Dr. Izak Kaufmann jumped off the train and demanded answers of the SS in charge. Where were they? Why hadn’t there been any blankets on the train for the girls? Or food? Or water? Questions one would expect any physician to ask.
As the SS laughed at him, he became more irate.
Linda Reich watched as the distraught doctor ran back and forth trying to stop the SS from hitting the girls, and bellowing at the guards that the conditions were horrible. He wanted to know who was responsible and how President Tiso could have approved of such a travesty.
The SS taunted him, then cracked a whip against his back, his leg, his face. He tried to defend himself. It was no contest. Crippled by a blow, the doctor slumped to the ground, where the SS kicked him to death. Dr. Kaufmann was never registered in camp. His name does not appear in the historical death records of Auschwitz, but he appears to have been the first victim of the first Jewish transport. Or was he the second?
“WE KNOW THAT one of the women died on the transport,” says the foremost historian on the first transport, Professor Pavol Mešan. We are sitting in his office at the Museum of Jewish Culture in Bratislava after spending the weekend at anniversary events honoring the young women of the first transport. Since 2001, Dr. Mešan has dedicated much of his time to preserving their history. It is due to his efforts that the Slovak government hung plaques at the railway station in Poprad recognizing the young women of the first transport and at the former barracks (now a school) where the girls were first held. On the table in front of us are rare documents that he has found over the years: the food protocol, the bill from the SS that the Slovak government paid for deporting its Jews . . . documents he has unearthed in musty old file boxes in the Slovak National Archives. Through his assistant and my interpreter, Dr. Stanislava Šikulová, I ask if we know the name of the girl who died.
He shakes his head.
There were rumors that a girl jumped off the train when it passed through Hungary (which at that point was possible because the borders were quite different then). She could not have escaped after Poprad on the way to Auschwitz, though. Edith is certain of that, as am I. The same girls who left Poprad on March 25 arrived in Auschwitz on March 26—there are two lists that confirm that, a Slovak list and a German list.
In the archives at Yad Vashem, there is a Slovak document that mentions a woman dying on the transport, but no name is given. There is a comment at the bottom of a list of just ninety-nine girls from a dis¬parate assortment of towns. Three girls are from Poland (one from Krakow!) and two from Budapest, though on the original list they are recorded as being from Slovakia. All of the girls in this obscure document were on the first transport, their names on the original list of March 24, 1942. This shorter list appears to be dated March 25, 1942, but it turns out to have been compiled later by “an amateur historian, who helped to organize the first memorial events in Poprad” in 2003. Jozef Šebesta “worked for the Czech Society in Slovakia and spent a huge amount of time in archives and talking to survivors” to gather information about the transport, Dr. Šikulová and Prof. Mešan explain. So is this a list of survivors that Šebesta collected after the war, or was Šebesta trying to create a list of girls deported before the original list was discovered in the German archives? They assure me that “there is no reason to doubt that one woman died during the transport, because it was mentioned so many times by survivors, and Šebesta, as well, had to have [heard] it from somebody.”
While so many of the women’s death records seem to have vanished, there is one name in the Sterbebücher—the Auschwitz “Death Books”—that stands out. Jolana Sara Grünwald was born on 14 June 1917, and there is a death certificate for Jolana dated 27 March 1942, the day after the girls arrived in camp. She was twenty-five years old.
At the bottom of the six-page list that Jozef Šebesta compiled he writes:
A thousand women were deported from Poprad. But only 999 arrived to Auschwitz. One died on the way. In the camp, women were given numbers from 1000 to 1998. Under the number 1000, the only doctor was deported, Dr. Izak Kaufmann, born February 4 1892 in Beloveza . . .
Signed, Jozef Šebesta
There is another disparity—997 girls left the station in Poprad. A second list, typed by the Germans on March 28, 1942, that puts the girls’ names into alphabetical order, has the same 997 girls on it. Would they have typed a girl’s name on the receiving list in Auschwitz if she were dead?
Chapter Eleven
When danger is at its greatest, God is at his closest.
—ETA ZIMMERSPITZ (#1756)’S FATHER
ACROSS THIS EMPTY EXPANSE OF Polish steppe, the girls were forcibly marched through the fog and heavy weather toward what Linda Reich described as “flickering lights and boxes.” As they got closer, they could see two-story brick barracks surrounded by barbed-wire fences. It was bitter cold. Gale-force winds whipped the plain, creating sharply carved snowdrifts. The temperature was near zero degrees Celsius. Edith shivered and stayed close to her sister. If their parents knew . . . if only their parents knew.
Along a dirt road, the girls shuffled uncertainly into this apocalypse. Detached in body and mind, they trudged across the frozen ground of a foreign country. Above their frail forms, a red-and-white striped border crossing gate rose and they trundled under the cast-iron lie that arched over every prisoner entering Auschwitz: Arbeit Macht Frei, “Work Will Make You Free.” None of the girls at the time noticed the upside-down B that Polish prisoners had welded into the sign in 1940—one of the first acts of resistance in the place that would soon swallow their lives.
At the sight of a large brick building with a huge chimney, Linda whispered to a friend, “That must be the factory where we are going to work.” In actuality it was a gas chamber that was not yet functioning.
The four Zimmerspitz sisters and three of their cousins walked uncertainly into the compound. Frida, the eldest of the sisters, mumbled to the rest, “We aren’t staying.”
NOT ALL OF THE 997 GIRLS were foreigners. Ironically, the girls who had fled Poland for the safety in Slovakia were now back home as unwitting prisoners. As the Polish girls passed their fellow Poles, they thought the men staring at them looked like madmen from an asylum. In fact, these men were part of the first line of resistance fighters captured after the fall of Poland in 1939. Many of them would do anything they could to help the new female prisoners, especially the Polish ones. There were no Slovak men in camp yet.
Marching up the lagerstrasse, or camp road, between rows of two-story brick barracks, the girls reached another gate—this one, attached to a brick wall with barbed-wire coils on top. As the gate swung open and the girls passed through this smaller guard post, they saw other women. For Regina Schwartz and her sisters, who had been told they were being sent to the front to be defiled by German soldiers, seeing women must have brought some sense of relief. At least they weren’t at the front working as sex slaves.
These women would not provide much comfort, though. They themselves had arrived just a couple of hours before the Jewish girls. They were Himmler’s first 999, commandeered from the most notorious women’s prison in Germany, Ravensbrück, they were an eclectic mix of murderesses, con women, political prisoners (communists or anti-Nazis), “Bible thumpers” (many were Jehovah’s Witnesses), prostitutes, and “asocials” (lesbians, actually referred to as “Poof Mamas” by prisoners). While some of these crimes may sound ludicrous today, under German law such “misdeeds” were rigorously prosecuted and those who committed them were found guilty. Our Jewish girls were guilty merely of being born.
One of the political prisoners transferred from Ravensbrück to Auschwitz, Bertel Teege, had hoped that serving her prison sentence in Auschwitz would be easier with better conditions than in Ravensbrück. She would be sorely disappointed. With a somber asymmetry to her face, her eyes, and even her mouth were slightly askew. But it was a righteous face—austere, and at the same time lost, a face that could not hide the things it had seen and was about to see, things most people could never comprehend.
Her closest confidante and friend was fellow communist Luise Mauer. Thirty-six years old, Mauer had a thin-lipped smile and a truth-seeking gaze. Little frightened her, even after five years in Ravensbrück.
Upon arriving in Auschwitz, Teege had felt hopeful at the sight of “six stone houses, with a capacity of one thousand persons per house.” There would be plenty of room for prisoners with so much space available to them. A few hours later, she was shocked to see hundreds of young Jewish women, “all well dressed, with suitcases full of expensive clothes, money and jewelry, diamonds and food. They had been told they would be here for three months and therefore had to bring with them everything they needed for survival. They were thus equipped, having believed the Nazis’ lies.”
Looking at these well-brought-up, previously well-fed young women, healthy despite their tearstained cheeks, filled some of the new guards from Ravensbrück with pity and others with sadistic hatred. Flint-eyed convicts watched the girls like foxes stalking lambs. Ignorant of their plight, our girls had no idea what was in store for them. The Ravensbrück prisoners did. Only now, they would be able to dish out the cruelty rather than being the victims of it. Defiling innocence carries a certain delight for the perverse personality, which was not uncommon among the Ravensbrück crew, and they were about to be given carte blanche to punish, work, hit, and kill the young Jewish girls and women. They had certainly not been brought to Auschwitz to do office work.
Of the new recruits, Commandant Rudolph Höss wrote, “I believe that Ravensbrück was combed through to find the ‘best’ for Auschwitz. They far surpassed their male equivalents in toughness, squalor, vindictiveness, and depravity. Most were prostitutes with many convictions, and some were truly repulsive creatures. Needless to say, these dreadful women gave full vent to their evil desires on the prisoners under them . . .They were soulless and had no feelings whatsoever.” Of course, Höss never wrote about his own soullessness, nor that of his SS.
PRIOR TO THE 1990s, the transport of the 999 Jewish women was referred to by former prisoners and Slovaks as the “first transport” to Auschwitz. Then, in an ironic twist, historians recalculated that classification and removed the girls from their category, replacing them with a single train car of forty Jewish men who had been arrested for petty crimes by the Gestapo and were experimentally “killed with Zyklon B” on February 15, 1942. The girls were also denied historical recognition as being on the “first women’s transport to Auschwitz” because that nomenclature was given to the train carrying the 999 female reichsdeutsche, ethnic German prisoners from Ravensbrück. Why were German guards, who were also often the murderers of our girls, given the status of the “first women’s transport to Auschwitz”?
While the standard definition of the noun “transport” does imply the movement of goods or people via a transit system, in Nazi Germany it meant something much more. It meant the Final Solution. And it was on this date, March 26, 1942, that the term “transport” should have taken on a new definition. “Goods” now meant Jews; “transport” meant death. However, few Holocaust history books, and even fewer websites, include the girls or the first transport in their Holocaust time lines; rarely do our 999 girls even make a footnote.
In Slovakia, the girls maintain their place in history, where they are acknowledged and revered for their place on the first transport to Auschwitz. Auschwitz historians themselves refer to the girls’ arrival as the First Mass Registered Jewish Transport. In 1942, the IVB4—the Department of Jewish Evacuation Affairs—identified the girls as being on the first “official” Jewish transport of Eichmann’s Final Solution. Without debate, that is how the girls should be remembered.
