999, page 13
In the front of the top floor of Block 10 were windows that the girls would use to speak with the Polish male prisoners on the second floor of the men’s block on the other side of the wall. Calling out to the new arrivals, anxious for news of the outside world and the softer voices of women, the Polish gentiles eagerly helped their countrywomen. Longing for shared language and human connection, the Polish men—some of whom had been in camp since 1940—tossed the Polish girls spare portions of bread, ropes to tie up baggy pants, and love notes. The Slovak girls did not receive the same kind of admiration.
AT 4:00 A.M. on the second day, the girls were served tea. It is also referred to as coffee by some survivors. It tasted so bad no one could be sure. This liquid “breakfast” was all the girls were served in the morning. Not long after arriving, Edith and Lea figured out that they could use the tea to brush their teeth. There was no spitting out the “very, very valuable” liquid, despite its horrid taste. “Hunger hurts very much, very, very much [but] lack of water is even worse. The thirst was unbearable,” Edith says. Despite that, she and Lea “used a little bit to wash our hands and faces.” After a few minutes of tea and toilet, the girls lined up in rows of five. Standing. Standing. Never moving. The ritual was becoming embedded into their brains.
Dawn broke across the rooftops, barbed-wire fences, and watchtowers surrounding them as the SS and kapos counted. After roll call, 996 girls were instructed to clean their barrack, and a few of the older women were chosen for positions overseeing the blocks. As Jews they were still underlings, but the women who had those first positions of power immediately sprang up the ranks, from the dregs to something a bit more important. Given the task of maintaining order, they woke up the block in the morning, served the food, and decided who got to stay inside and clean, who went outside to work, who got more bread. The first Jewish block elder in Block 10 was a young woman called Elza. No one seems to recall her last name. She was strict, and within a few days she became known for hitting the girls who were late to roll call or in her way. When she was told to pick an assistant, she gave her sister a position beside her. Can we blame her? Whom else would she choose?
TODAY, BLOCK 10 IS NOT OPEN to the public, but special permission is granted to survivors, children of survivors, and researchers who enter the side door with reverent footsteps. The first floor is cement and has a hallway with rooms on either side where girls originally slept on bunks. At the front of the block are a few broken and filthy toilets on one side of the hallway across from a room with a long trough for washing, though there was no soap for prisoners. In the center of the building sits a chimney, which would have served wood-burning stoves on both floors.
Wending its way up to a large landing is a wide staircase. At the top of the stairs are two small rooms, where the room elders and her assistants slept. The rest of the space is open, with only one wall dividing the open space. In 1942 it was filled with bunk beds that had thin, straw-filled mattresses and even thinner wool blankets.
The girls chose to sleep close to their friends and formed small supportive cliques. Almost everyone knew or recognized girls from their province. At night, from their bunk beds, some girls talked about food, home, and their parents. Others spoke of nothing. Most simply cried themselves to sleep.
The newly married Ruzena Gräber Knieža (#1649) was crying bitterly on her bunk when Annie Binder, one of the kapos, approached her and said in Czech, “Don’t cry. My child, you mustn’t cry. You must be strong. You must try and survive.” Historically, the Ravensbrück prisoners have a terrible reputation, but Ruzena says, “Among them were wonderful women.” Annie Binder was one; two other kapos, one a prostitute, Emma, and the other a communist by the name of Orli Reichert, who would be called “the Angel of Auschwitz,” appear in multiple testimonies and are credited with saving many, many lives.
Since the new kapos were themselves prisoners, they understood prison life under the Nazi regime, and some tried to forewarn the girls. “Many of the German kapos helped us through an indirect whispering campaign [and warning] if you don’t work, they won’t keep you.” No one understood what was at stake or what it meant to not be “kept.” Some thought it meant they would get to go home sooner if they didn’t work. At this point, they did not understand that the real purpose of Auschwitz was to destroy them. Despite the foul conditions and treatment, they still believed they would be sent home in a few months’ time.
Edith’s face is solemn. “And then the girls began to die.”
Part Two
Map of Birkenau (Auschwitz II). Much of the camp was yet to be built when the women were relocated in August 1942. There was no death gate entrance until mid 1943, and there was no train track leading into or unloading ramp in camp until 1944. Birkenau was still under construction in 1945.
© HEATHER DUNE MACADAM; DRAWN BY VARVARA VEDUKHINA.
Chapter Thirteen
March 28, 1942
The headquarter; Dr Konka, Bratislava Liptovský svätý Mikuláš
I am asking to cancel temporarily the order for the chief accountant of the liqueur factory in Liptovský svätý Mikuláš, Alzbeta Sternova. She has permission to work for our company due to the fact that there is no Aryan workforce to replace her.
AS HAD HAPPENED WITH THE telegram to release Magdalena Braunova, the telegram to release Alzbeta Sternova arrived too late to save her. Already in Auschwitz, Magdalena Braunova should have been celebrating her sixteenth birthday with her family; instead she was watching Alzbeta and 768 more teenage girls and young women arriving in Auschwitz on the second transport.
Like the girls of the first transport, these young women had been placed in a holding station, where they, too, had been systematically starved on the food regime devised by the government. When this transport stopped in Žilina, two additional cattle cars carrying one hundred additional young women from the eastern region were added to the convoy. Among them were Manci Schwalbova (#2675) and Madge Hellinger (#2318).
Manci Schwalbova was a kindhearted, no-nonsense sort of woman. She was also engaged to be married and hoped to be exempt. Fortunately for Edith and many others, she was not. Manci was the young woman who had not been allowed to finish the last medical exam to make her a licensed doctor, but Auschwitz didn’t require a degree to be a working physician. She was almost immediately allowed to practice and became known by everyone as Dr. Manci Schwalbova.
Madge Hellinger had been a kindergarten teacher and was also supposed to have been exempt. When she turned down a sexual pass made by one of the local policemen, he sold her exception to another Jew, pocketed the money, and sent her to Auschwitz. A stalwart young woman, Madge would eventually be promoted to a block elder and do her moral best to treat everyone fairly from that position of power.
Rena Kornreich’s sister Danka (#2779) was also on this transport, as were many other cousins and sisters of the first girls. It was not a family reunion that anyone wanted to celebrate. Girls like Rena waited in dread as they kept watch for their siblings and cousins to arrive. However, when the new arrivals entered the camp, they thought the young women with bald heads and crazed looks were part of an insane asylum. No one immediately recognized anyone else. “We thought, ‘Maybe our jobs are to care for these patients,’” Madge Hellinger says.
After standing for their welcoming roll call, the girls and young women of the second transport were thrown into Block 5 with its bloodstained straw in what appears to have been part of “orientation” to the women’s camp. The girls panicked and cried hysterically, swatting at the fleas, bedbugs, and lice biting their tender flesh. As if that weren’t bad enough, the Ravensbrück kapos decided to have some “fun” at the expense of the new prisoners, taunting the girls by telling them the soup and tea they were fed “will kill you if you drink it.”
Perhaps because she had been a teacher and was older than most of the young women around her, Madge Hellinger took it upon herself to taste the food. “It was vile, but I recommended that everyone have some, warning the younger ones among us that they were dehydrated and needed liquid to survive.” Unfortunately, the only liquid other than bromide-laced tea was a soup made out of “rotten vegetables” harvested from fields that were still deep under the snow and the meat of dead horses shipped from the Russian front.
“The soup was so bad, nobody could eat it,” Edith confirms.
Many of the Orthodox girls refused to eat the unkosher soup. Margie Becker (#1955) “couldn’t swallow it.” Girls tried to help her by holding her nose so she wouldn’t retch as she forced the tepid, foul-smelling “broth” down her gullet, to no avail. “I was so envious that they could [drink the soup] and I couldn’t.” She was just too sensitive to the smell, and during those first weeks, no matter how hungry she was, she ended up giving her soup away.
There was another reason to avoid the soup, though. Everyone got sour stomachs and diarrhea from it. The only thing that helped settle their stomachs was bread, but there was not enough of it to go around. After almost five days of virtual starvation in Poprad, girls were wasting away.
When the new girls looked through the windows of Block 5 they saw insane girls waving at them and shouting, “If you have some scarves or socks, hide them for us!”
“They said they would find our things when they came to clean the barracks.” Scarves? Socks? “We thought they were crazy.” Why did they need to hide their own clothing? It was a ridiculous thought—until the next day, when the girls of the second transport had all of their belongings confiscated and they, too, were longing for socks to keep their feet warm and scarves to protect their newly shorn heads from the cold.
Only after the girls of the second transport had been stripped, shaved, and deloused were they allowed to join the prison population. Only then did they discover their sisters and cousins among those they had thought were mad and enter what Dr. Manci Schwalbova called the “drat-maimed world” of Auschwitz.
IS THERE A SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE between the first and second transports? Edith is adamant that there was, “because we didn’t know what would happen. The girls from the other transports had us. We could speak to them. But we didn’t have anything. We came to nothing. The girls who came in after us had us to speak to. We showed them what we had learned so they didn’t have to be as afraid as we were. So it was scary for them, but not as scary as it had been for us. We knew nothing. Just the horror of one thing after another. And now just a few days on, we were the old-timers.” But, she adds, “help is a funny word because there wasn’t much help for it. What could we do but tell the new girls be careful, keep your head down, don’t do this or that? It wasn’t like we were sitting around having meetings and sharing advice. We weren’t chatting. That never happened. We were working, working. Tired, tired. We didn’t talk about music or literature or our school studies. We spoke about, What do we think will happen to us? How do we think this can help us? How can we steal some bread? How can we steal a blanket? We were nice girls from good families trying to learn how to steal from other nice girls from good families. This was not human. They dehumanized us. Made us turn against our own people for survival.”
BEING CREATED b’tzelem Elokim (in the image of God), Jews traditionally avoid any permanent mark on the body, because the body is not owned by a person—it belongs to God. In Auschwitz, that last dignity of belonging to the Almighty and to your parents who named you was stolen without ceremony.
Auschwitz was the only camp to ink its prisoners. This unique, permanent numbering system was the equivalent of being registered, which is one of the reasons modern historians began referring to the first official Jewish transport as the “first mass registered Jewish transport.” The tattooing did not happen on the first day the girls arrived, but reports vary as to when it did. Some girls say it happened the day after they were processed, some say it was after the second transport arrived. Rose (#1371) remembers a Slovak friend of her father tattooing her, which would have meant they were tattooed weeks later. What we do know is that once they sewed their numbers onto their uniforms, that number became their name, and they were tattooed with the same number. If the uniform number did not match the tattoo on their arm, they would be shot.
Entering a room full of tables, the girls were shoved into chairs and had their left arms yanked forward and held down by strong men. SS shouted at them, “Hurry!” There was no time for vanity. Rough and tumble, these were not attractive numbers with artistic flourishes. Ones looked like sevens. Mistakes were crossed out with a line and re-inked below. The numbers were placed just below the elbow’s bend on the forearm. The pain of the tattooist’s needle piercing the delicate skin repeatedly caused tears in the eyes of even the bravest. Each prick of ink burned as the word of God was defiled.
While being tattooed was a truly dehumanizing experience, being tattooed carried more meaning than any incoming prisoner could fathom—it meant a life sentence. Life might be fleeting but it was still life.
If you can call slave labor life.
ONE MORNING, NOT long after the second transport arrived, a young woman jumped out in front of the labor squads and shouted, “Don’t work for the Nazis. We shall be killed anyway. Let them rather shoot us!”
A gunshot cracked through the ranks of the women. The girl fell to the ground.
Carried to the makeshift hospital ward, where Dr. Manci Schwalbova was already working, the girl was laid on a table. “The bullet passed through her lungs and abdomen,” Manci writes. The SS doctor refused the girl any palliative care. Manci was forced to watch her bleed to death. She never knew her name.
Early attempts at resistance came in many forms, but were never effective. A girl from the second transport by the name of Lia decided to go on a hunger strike to protest the conditions and lack of food. In normal circumstances, this act might have been noticed, but in Auschwitz it was simple convenience. The girls were already on a starvation diet. Besides, Jews were supposed to die anyway; it was of little matter to their captors how they perished. Protests rarely received notice in the historic record, but they remained in the consciousness of witnesses who saw the “personal protest of girls who, being on the border of hopelessness, did not care at all for such a life and had ceased to believe in a new one.” There was little else to believe in.
Neither Lia’s death nor the deaths of Jolana Grünwald and Marta Korn are formally noted in the Auschwitz Chronicle, which records the day-to-day deaths, murders, gassings and goings-on in Auschwitz, from its opening to the day it closed. In fact, not a single woman’s death was logged by the SS into any surviving historic record until May 12, 1942, when a female prisoner was found hanging on the electric fences—a suicide. One month later, on June 17, another woman was reported found on the wires. If either of these women had been male prisoners, a number and name would have been logged. As women, they remained anonymous.
We know almost nothing about women’s deaths before August 1942, except for what has been reported by witnesses and survivors. And while men’s deaths were calculated every day and totaled at the end of the month, women’s deaths were neither noted nor tallied—at least not in any documentation that survived the war. From March to August 1942, we know exactly what the male inmate population was and how many men died each month. For women, we have only the number of those registered in camp and the assurance from survivors that, whether or not their deaths were recorded, girls were definitely dying.
Marta Korn’s death is remarkable, not only because she was the first woman recorded as dying in Auschwitz, but because she was also the only young woman from those first months whose death is recorded. Was she the girl who Helena Citron claims got hysterical and was removed by the SS that first night? Or did she die in some other manner? We may never know for sure.
Researchers believe that the death records for women were destroyed in the conflagration of documents in January 1945, as the Russian front closed in on the death camp. However, since the women’s camp in Auschwitz was under the jurisdiction of Ravensbrück, the number of deaths should have been filed in its administrative offices. The fact is that complete records regarding women in Auschwitz (early 1942) have never been found in Ravensbrück either. All we have are Jolana Grünwald’s and Marta Korn’s names listed in the Sterbebücher—the “Death Books” database. They are the only deaths on record linked to the first transport in those first few weeks of the girls’ arrival; no cause of their deaths are documented. In the vast archives of genocide, Jolana Grünwald, 25, and Marta Korn, 21, may be mere statistics, but they were also the first female victims of Auschwitz.
THE DESTRUCTION OF the women’s camp documents speaks volumes, because there is no doubt that women died. At the end of February 1942, prior to the arrival of any women prisoners, 11,472 men were listed as occupying the camp; that month, 1,515 men had died. In March, 2,740 men were added to the prison population, along with 1,767 women. But although a total of 4,507 prisoners had been added, the occupancy level of the men’s camp decreased to 10,629; 2,977 prisoners died in March. Prior to the arrival of the 999, the average monthly death toll in Auschwitz for men ranged between 1,500 to almost 1,800. Now in March, the number almost doubled. Could that spike be attributed to deaths among our girls?
By April, the total camp population had increased to 14,642 prisoners—5,640 of whom were women—yet the death toll dropped back to its average rate. In the chaos around women arriving into camp, had women’s deaths been included with men’s, then removed from the monthly death tallies in April and thereafter?
