999, page 12
AS THE YOUNG WOMEN MARCHED down the camp road and into a separate compound from the men, secured with a locked gate, brick wall, and barbed wire, they wondered why there were so many safety precautions. Was the wire there to protect them from the insane asylum residents on the other side of the wall? It never occurred to them that it was to prevent their own escape. They were just coming to work here for a few months, after all.
On the other side of the gate, the girls were told to put their luggage in a pile. The protocol in Ravensbrück was to confiscate prisoners’ possessions, search them, and then return the items to the prisoners. So even the new Ravensbrück guards were confused. How would the Jewish girls find their things in the huge pile being amassed? Some of the Jewish girls asked the same question, only to have their lives threatened. Those who still had any food were forced to set their food aside, as well. This was especially cruel, as they had not been fed since the previous day and there was little concern about feeding them now. But these were law-abiding girls, good girls, and they obediently did as they were told, putting their food with their luggage.
In a normal world, after a long and dirty train journey, you would hope for a bathroom, a change of clothes, a warm bowl of soup, a shower. Instead, our girls were forced to stand outside in the cold and snow for hours, while the new commandant of the women’s camp, SS Johanna Langefeld, and her SS women tried to make sense of the situation. No one seemed to know what they were doing, and their inefficacy was probably enhanced by the fact that the list that had accompanied the girls from Poprad was misnumbered. Over and over the girls were counted, and the result was always the same: 997. Not 999. They could not account for the missing numbers. Had a girl escaped? At some point, someone must have noticed the errors on the pages and scribbled across the cover of the list from Poprad in red pencil: “wäre zu nummerieren und alph. zuordnen.” (Translation: “number and assign alphabetically.”) That list was typed on March 28, and confirms that the exact number of women who boarded the train in Poprad, arrived in Auschwitz the next day. There were 997 Jewish women now in camp, not 999.
When the girls were finally released, the kapos, which is what the new Ravensbrück guards were now called, opened the doors to Block 5, and the SS ordered the girls inside. Frozen and desperate, the girls ran for the doors, forcing themselves between the frames and getting jammed against each other as the kapos beat them back.
“Everybody pushed. Everybody screamed. It was bitter cold,” Linda recalls. Pushing and shoving friends and strangers, they stepped on each other’s toes as they crowded into the building. “We were thirsty. We had to go to the bathroom.” Everyone wanted to get inside where it was warm, but inside there were no lights, no cots, no heat. Filthy straw was strewn on the floor. There were ten toilets for more than nine hundred girls. The only available water was discovered dripping from a water pipe in the basement, so the girls had to lick the drops from dirty pipes. Dehydrated and exhausted, they were at their wits’ end.
As Irena Fein and her friend Gizzy Grummer went to sit on one of the few benches, other girls went to sit on the tables. They were all tired and wanted to rest, but “the kapos made us lie on the dirty straw floor.” No sooner were the girls forced to lie down in the blood-strewn straw than “millions of fleas covered us from our feet to our head. And that alone could have made us crazy. We were tired, and all we wanted to do was to rest.”
Bedbugs climbed their legs. The girls who had collapsed to the floor leapt back up, screaming and slapping themselves as biting, bloodsucking bugs covered their legs and faces. It was as if the all the plagues that God sent down upon the heads of the pharaoh in Egypt had been perpetrated upon them—“ten plagues in one day,” Helena Citron says.
One girl became so hysterical she ran up to an SS man, who was standing dispassionately at the door watching the bedlam. “I don’t want to live even another minute more,” she yelled in his face. “I can already see what will happen to us!” As the SS man looked down at the young woman, the terrorized cries of the others subsided. Even the most hysterical girls backed away from the girl yelling at the SS. He motioned for her to follow him. She backed away.
He pointed to the now-open door.
“Anyone who had a brain knew where they took her,” Helena Citron says, “a better place, definitely not. She was the first to be taken.” She could have been Jolana Grünwald or Marta Korn, the only female prisoners recorded in the Death Books in March 1942. Whoever she was, they never saw her again.
They were too terrified to sleep. “We were afraid that the kapos and the men would come and kill us,” Edith says. “Nobody would say what was going to happen to us.” Not knowing pushed everyone to the edge of sanity.
The only thing Edith clearly remembers is that she hid her menstrual napkins up on a brick above the stove to retrieve later. Other than that, her young mind skipped over that night as one might skip over a muddy puddle to avoid staining one’s clothes or, in Edith’s case, her mind. When they finally fell asleep, it was in spite of crying.
Chapter Twelve
We Should never Say everybody is the Same. No, I
think there is always an exception. In every misery,
there is some kindness. There has to be. From every
hell, Somebody has to come back.
—MARTHA MANGEL (#1741)
AT FOUR IN THE MORNING, a hollow thumping drummed any dreams away as the kapos burst into the block and began beating anyone still asleep on the floor. “Zählappell! Zählappell! Roll call! Roll call! Raus! Raus!” It was a haphazard race outside to the lagerstrasse. There they were ordered to form rows of five, in a ritual that was about to define their sole means of existence—being counted. It would take hours. Standing in the predawn haze, Edith felt her teeth chatter with fear, her body shiver with exhaustion. Finally at daybreak, fifty of the girls in the front rows were told to march into a building. The rest formed a line outside and waited.
Inside, their processing began. First, they were told to take off their clothes. All of their clothes. Even their underwear and their bras were placed in a pile. Then came a table, where their jewelry was collected.
One of the guards came by and said, “Take off your earrings, watches, pendants, and rings. You will not need those anymore.”
The girls put them on the table. “We still thought that it’s fun,” Laura Ritterova recalls. “So what. We will earn some money, and we will buy new jewelry. The world belonged to us. We told each other, ‘So what? I can work.’”
The fun soon stopped when some of the girls whose ears had been pierced as young children couldn’t get their earrings out. Edith was one of those girls who was unable to wriggle them free. One of the kapos reached over, grabbed Edith’s earlobes, and yanked the earrings out, tearing the flesh. Blood streamed down Edith’s neck. Lea lunged to protect her sister, but what power does a naked teenage girl have against armed adults? There was barely time to comfort her little sister before they heard a girl screaming.
“And so the nightmare began,” Edith says.
For young virgins mostly raised in Conservative or Orthodox Jewish homes, being nude in front of other women was shocking in and of itself. In front of men, many for the second time that week? Unheard of. It was about to get even worse. Typical processing for Ravensbrück prisoners included more than being strip-searched. The first two hundred girls were now forced to undergo rough gynecological examinations, conducted with the sensitivity of a butcher disemboweling a chicken. Sixteen-year-old Bertha Berkowitz was number forty-eight. When she speaks of that moment it is with a sad shrug—nothing more is said. Others among the early numbers avoid ever mentioning the assault.
“I never told it because I was too embarrassed,” Joan Rosner (#1188) confides more than fifty years later. “When we were examined internally and the SS put their hand into our private parts and they raped us like,” she pauses. “We were bleeding, and they did it to the hundred that morning and the hundred before, and after that they stopped because they were looking for jewelry. And they didn’t find any jewelry so they stopped doing it.” Like most women, Joan kept the experience a secret. “I was too embarrassed. Now I’m an old lady, I am realizing, why should I be embarrassed? That’s what they did. We were bleeding and ripped from the rings they had on their fingers.”
Reports vary as to whether it was one male doctor or several of the Ravensbrück female guards thrusting their hands into the girls’ vaginas to see if they had hidden valuables inside. Perhaps it was both. Blood streamed down the insides of the violated girls’ thighs. The gynecological examinations stopped after the so-called doctor chortled, “Why bother? They’re all virgins!”
Raucous laughter erupted among the Ravensbrück guards. The deflowered girls limped forward in line to the next phase of processing.
They were all crying. “We wept with them,” Irena Fein says.
As if being manhandled by female guards were not horror enough, the girls were now forced to stand naked in front of male prisoners who were assigned to act as barbers. The Polish men were also horrified but, familiar with being beaten into submission, they did what they were told: clip heads first, then underarm hair, pubic hair, and leg hair. Forced to step up on stools so the men could shave them more easily, the girls were easy targets for vile ogling by SS guards, who laughed lecherously at the vulnerable girls. Meanwhile, the male prisoners were eye to eye with each girl’s pubis.
As Adela Gross stepped into the room, heads turned. Her gorgeous red hair with its thick curls spiraled down her cheeks. Margie Becker remembers, “A friend of mine, a sister of mine really, she had red hair, beautiful hair, too, and they were searching in her hair for blades or for knives or for things like that.” As the SS stuck a pick into Adela’s tresses, she kept her chin up despite the humiliation. When he finished, he directed a brutal gaze at her red pubic hair.
He ordered her to stand up on a stool, so that her crotch was now eye level with the man who had to shave her. Within moments, Adela was shorn of her power and unique beauty. Bald, she looked just like all the other teenagers around her. There was not a shred of her hallmark red hair left. Only freckles remained.
The girls were now pushed outside of the processing building and forced to stand naked in knee-deep snow to await disinfection. Shivering in the March winds, they wrapped their arms around their bare breasts. Their shorn skin dimpled into gooseflesh. Without any underwear or hygienic pads, there was no hiding menstrual flows. “All the girls seemed to have their periods,” Edith says. “There was blood in the snow under our feet.” Those in front trampled down the pink snow with their bare feet as the line moved slowly forward to a huge vat of disinfectant.
Why did they need to be disinfected? the girls mumbled.
“You Jews brought lice into the camp,” an SS man retorted.
“We never had lice!” Irena Fein exclaims. “How could we? We had only just arrived.” Trying to argue that point was useless. The term “dirty” Jew was the only stereotype the SS believed.
How long did they stand in the snow? Too long. The warmth of their bare feet turned the snow they stood on to slush, which froze into ice. When they were ordered to climb into the vat of frigid water, they went fifty at a time, bleeding or not. Disinfectant burned their newly shaved flesh. By the time the first hundred had been doused for lice, the water was filthy. It was never refreshed.
Climbing out of the vat, the girls ran across the snow to the final building, where Russian uniforms had been left in piles for them to wear. The wool was stiff with dried blood and feces, and riddled with bullet holes. There were no undergarments to protect the girls’ delicate skin. The Russian insignias of the dead soldiers were still visible on some of the clothes. Linda was given a man’s blouse that “was so big, it dragged on the ground” and a pair of riding jodhpurs that went up to her head. There was “nothing to tie them up.” Only the last thirty girls got a different uniform. Edith, Lea, Helena, and Adela got striped dresses. The dresses were not warm and there were no leggings or woolen stockings to cover their legs and no underwear.
A pile of footwear awaited them now. Some prisoners would refer to these as clogs, but that is a polite term for the “clappers,” flat slabs of wood with leather straps over the top that were nailed onto the sides. Think Dr. Scholl’s with no arch support or buckle to adjust for tightness, and no matching pairs. They had been made by male prisoners who most likely had no idea they would be used for young women, so not much thought had been given to accommodating smaller, more delicate feet. In this only were the girls at the beginning of the line lucky. They fumbled through the pile trying to find a fit. Those at the end of the line were left with what had not been taken.
Finally, white rectangles of cloth with numbers on them and yellow stars were handed to each girl, to be sewn onto their uniforms later. The first strip of white cloth handed out had the numbers 1-0-0-0 printed on it. The next girl was given 1-0-0-1, 1-0-0-2, and so on. A scribe wrote down the registration numbers next to the girls’ names. Witnesses believe that the sisters Frida and Helena Benovicova from Modra nad Cirochou, not far from Humenné, were among those first few girls. Peggy, who had walked two hours to get to the bus stop in Stropkov, was number 1-0-1-9, and sixteen-year-old Bertha Berkowitz was 1-0-4-8. Their first job would be to sew their numbers on the front of their uniforms so their photographs could be taken.
Finally registered and dressed for “work,” each girl was equipped with a red bowl and soupspoon, then released back into the cold, where they were told to stand in line and wait. Rows of five. Five in rows. Wrenched from the unordered routine of civilian life, the girls were quickly becoming regimented mannequins.
#1474, name unknown. Only known photo of a girl from the first transport, taken immediately after processing, circa March 28, 1942.
PHOTO COURTESY AUSCHWITZ MUSEUM ARCHIVE.
Exiting the last building, the girls at the front of the line could now see their friends still standing outside the processing buildings, dressed in their best clothes, sensible boots, coats, gloves, hats. They shouted warnings.
“Throw away your jewelry!”
Those who had not yet been shaved did not recognize the poor bald wretches standing in the snow in dead soldiers’ uniforms and shod in open-toed sandals shouting at them. No one recognized each other. Names dropped from the air until the girls still waiting to be processed understood—they were soon to be bald wretches themselves.
Rena Kornreich tore off her watch and stepped it into the mud, promising herself not to let the Nazis get anything else she owned.
Hanging back toward the end of the line were most of the girls from Humenné: Sara Bleich, 1-9-6-6, was just three girls away from Lea and Edith: 1-9-6-9 and 1-9-7-0. Helena Citron was 1-9-7-1. When the last thirty girls came out onto the lagerstrasse, it was dusk. And they still had to stand and be counted. It was the only time they would ever be in numerical order again. It was also the last time that they would all be alive.
As night descended, they were directed to Block 10 at the far end of the women’s camp. The girls stumbled over one another to get into the relative warmth of the block and out of the cold. As they pushed and shoved each other in desperation to get inside, common human decency was already dissolving. Politeness was a thing of the past, or reserved only for friends and family. “I have good elbows,” Linda Reich (#1173) says again and again in her testimony.
Inside the block, away from the guards and the dogs, the girls looked for each other and shouted their friends’ names:
—Adela! Magda! Lea! Edith! Gizzy!
Shaved heads. Men’s uniforms. Nobody looked as they should have. “We didn’t recognize each other,” Helena Citron says. “And then, instead of crying, we started to laugh. We laughed hysterically because there was nothing else we could do. We laughed because tears were not enough.”
HOURS LATER, AFTER the degradation of processing, Edith sneaked back into Block 5 to retrieve the menstrual pads she had hidden in the brick door of the big oven in the center of the block. Someone had taken her pads. “Not that I needed them. I never got my period again until after the war.”
This was common for all of the girls. It takes a certain amount of body fat for a woman to menstruate, and on a diet of less than 1,000 calories per day, there is no fat left to support a female body. Add to the equation a healthy dose of sedative-laced tea every morning to make the girls more pliable and confused. “You feel like a zombie. They were giving us bromide, so our brains wouldn’t work. We didn’t have to think,” Edie (#1949) says. Bromide also helped stem sexual desire and inhibit menstruation.
A smattering of women in their early twenties continued to menstruate for a few months, but the only way to get a napkin was to go to the hospital and show the doctor you were bleeding. Rena Kornreich avoided that humiliation by using scraps of newspaper she found in camp. They weren’t hygienic, but they enabled her to keep her secret. Robbed of that rite of passage into womanhood—menstruation—some younger women began to question their own identities. What were they if they were not women anymore? Not even human beings? “It was good not to have [our periods] hygienically,” Edith admits. “There was no hygiene in Auschwitz, and without the possibility of keeping clean and of washing every day, you didn’t want to have your period. But we felt like we weren’t women without it.” Of course, the last thing the SS wanted was for them to feel like women. It was probably why they dressed them in dead Russian POWs’ uniforms.
THE BRICK TWO-STORY building of Block 10 butted up against a courtyard with a brick wall at one end. Across the courtyard was Block 11, referred to by the male prisoners as Block Smierci—the Block of Death. This was where political prisoners, POWs, resistance fighters, and spies were held in solitary confinement and tortured; they were then taken outside to be shot in the courtyard. It was not easy to witness these executions. Rena (#1716) slept beside the boarded-up windows along that side of the block. Peering through the slats at night, she watched Russian POWs being executed. One of the male prisoners later informed her that the girls were wearing the dead POWs’ uniforms.
