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The trauma of their circumstances carried with it an ethical disassociation as well. Girls who had been deeply religious found their morals weakening as the stakes for survival rose. Auschwitz was a kind of cruel game played for the amusement of the SS and kapos, many of whom delighted in pitting prisoner against prisoner. The girls tried to help one another, but as cliques based on family and friendship formed, some were excluded. This was survival not just of the fittest but of the luckiest, with fierce competition for the most limited resource—food. All of the girls in camp came with a strict religious code of ethics, but within a few weeks, they were stealing from each other: food, blankets, “anything that wasn’t tied to your body.”
“They made us turn against each other. It was so horrible,” Edith says. “You were always in danger not just of losing your life but of losing your soul. And the longer we were there, the closer the shave to the soul. Morals are something that if they are embedded in you, they cannot be gotten rid of, no matter how depraved the life you are forced to live. I think some girls chose to die, rather than act mean to others.” Others were just mean.
Edie (#1949)—who had arrived with her sister, Ella—admits freely, “I stole everything.” In fact, when the Red Cross delivered food packages to prisoners in camp, Edie (who had the same first and last name as our Edith) was given the responsibility of handing the packages out and decided that since there were two with her name on them, she should get both. Our Edith got none.
“You have no idea what you will do to survive until you are forced to choose between starving or eating, freezing or being warm, praying or stealing. You can pray before you steal. ‘God forgive me for taking this girl’s blanket because someone took mine. God forgive the girl who stole my Red Cross package, so she could eat and I couldn’t.’ ” At ninety-four years of age, Edith offers a rare perspective on this incident: “All these years later, I still hold a grudge against that girl. She ate. I did not. We were both seventeen. We both survived. You know, when you get old you don’t forget the wrongs done you, but I am glad to say I am old enough now not to care anymore . . . . You don’t know a girl until you live with her or, like we were, are imprisoned with her. That is when you discover not only who she is, but who you are. This is the thing, though. We were teenagers. We weren’t adults. We were still young enough to want to throw temper tantrums, to be lazy, to shirk a duty or sleep late. Only a month ago, we were giggling and gossiping about the latest bit of news in our community, and now we were seeing girls dying, girls our age who should live to become old ladies like I am now, already dead before their time. And then there is the question, will that be me too? Will I be dead soon, too?”
There is another thing Edith does not forgive. When the block elders began their jobs, they probably served bread and soup equally to their fellow prisoners. But as the days wore on and their own bellies hollowed with hunger, many began to steal food for themselves and their friends or families. “Block-ältesters [block elders] were supposed to cut the bread in four pieces,” Edith explains. “But they started cutting out the middle of the bread. So if there were a hundred pieces for us, the block elders got an extra hundred middle slices. This they ate themselves or gave to their sisters or cousins while the rest of us starved for a little bit more.”
Can we really blame them? Would we be any better? If you have cousins who are starving, how can you care about strangers? Even with the extra portions, everyone was still hungry. “No Jew ever had a full belly in Auschwitz,” Edith says. “Until you have actually experienced starvation, you don’t know what you are capable of doing to another human being.”
THE MORE STRENUOUS the work detail, the more quickly girls became weakened from the lack of food. Cold also burns fat and calories, and those first few weeks working outside led to critical weight loss. Survival depended on getting inside work, or less rigorous outside work, but the only inside work was cleaning the barracks, and that task fell to the block and room elders. For the rest of the girls, there were only demolition teams, spreading manure, cleaning streets. “In a very short time, we looked like noodles. I probably weighed about sixty-five pounds,” Edith says.
Since food was the key to survival, getting in the line of a server who stirred the soup so the vegetables and horsemeat came up to the top—even if both were rotten—was a godsend. One survivor remembers girls shouting, “I have meat in my soup!” whenever they were lucky enough to get something to chew. Linda Reich (#1173) prided herself on stirring the soup whenever she served it, but many servers skimmed the top and served only broth, saving the bottom “best” for themselves. Sometimes it helped to stand in the back of the line, but if the soup kettle was emptied too soon and you were too far back in the line, you could end up with no soup at all.
Linda recalls racing to get soup at the so-called “lunch” break because the SS would shoot anyone falling into line too slowly. Death had no rhyme or reason—it came in an instant, often without warning. This was not a dystopian society created by some novelist. Auschwitz was a real-life Hunger Games.
At dusk, when they were finally done working, the girls were forced to line up before marching back to camp. “The last in the row had to drag the corpses back to the camp because they had to be counted, too.” No one ever wanted to be last in the row, especially in the demolition details, which always had a number of dead girls. Add to that the sheer exhaustion of working all day, and the girls forced to carry corpses barely had any strength left. Often a dead girl was dragged along the ground until she “didn’t have skin on her back anymore,” Linda says, sadly. “There was always blood on the road.”
After evening roll call, Linda and others began to notice that some of the injured girls never returned to the blocks. Ever. “It was very strange,” Edith says. “If someone was sick, if they had a small wound on their leg, they were separated, collected, and we didn’t see them anymore.” Where did they go? In the beginning, it did not occur to them that the missing girls were being killed.
In her testimony at the Ravensbrück trials in 1945, the political prisoner and kapo Luise Mauer reported that “the murder machine now ran on full steam. Anyone deemed not fit for work or discovered hiding in the blocks by the supervisor [Johanna Langefeld] was killed.” Mauer and Bertel Teege were ordered to select anyone not capable of working anymore and send her to the “sanatorium.” The sanatorium, of course, was now a fully functional gas chamber. The two kapos decided they “would rather die ourselves than help these fascist murderers” and went to their boss, SS Langefeld. A strict Lutheran, Langefeld was often torn between her religious values and the violent demands of her job, and she respected Teege and Mauer for their own moral judgment. In a rare moment of compassion, Langefeld did not report them for insubordination, which probably saved their lives.
With the job of selecting women for the “sanatorium” assigned to someone else, Mauer and Teege began a “whisper campaign” to quietly warn and encourage block elders to send everyone out to work or give ill girls work duties inside. They did not dare explain why the block elders should send ill girls to work. They could not confide in anyone that being sent to the “sanatorium” meant being killed, or they themselves would have been killed. The result was that many ill prisoners thought the block elders were being cruel by not allowing them to go to the sanatorium and insisted they be allowed to go. Those girls were taken away while the details were outside working and never seen again.
BY THE END OF APRIL, over 6,277 young, mostly Jewish women had been registered in Auschwitz—197 were Czech, a small number were Poles who had been hiding in Slovakia, and the rest were Slovakian. The total was more than the entire prisoner population of Ravensbrück. Yet how many women were still alive and part of the prison population at Auschwitz is unknown.
About the time a new work detail was created, Erna Dranger’s sister, Fela, arrived on April 23 on the eighth Slovak transport. Her number was 6030. Erna and Fela were among the first group of girls, made up mostly of “old-timers,” who were chosen to work in the new detail sorting clothes. Among those sorters was evidently Magda Amster, whose father had driven through the night in an attempt to rescue her.
Ever since Linda Reich had lost her shoe, she had been hiding in the back of the lines at roll call, trying to avoid being sent out to work. Given the opportunity to move into the clothes-sorting detail, she promptly stole a pair of shoes to put on her feet. Few of the girls in the new sorting detail would forget their friends and quickly figured out how to pilfer items and smuggle them back in to the general population. They called it “organizing.”
Shoes were the most essential items girls needed. Like Linda, others had lost their clappers in the mud, and being barefoot was a sure route to an early grave. Other items, like underwear, bras, scarves, and socks, also made their way into the blocks and began to improve the women’s lives by helping them feel like women again. For the girls sorting the clothes, smuggling these things out was a quiet rebellion against the authorities. It was also a way to honor their cultural identity—keeping Jewish clothing to clothe Jews instead of watching it be sent off to clothe Germans. No one charged for these gifts, not in the beginning. Everyone just wanted to help each other anyway they could.
“There was a girl from our transport who would bring us something from the kitchen, something cooked, like a potato,” Edith remembers. “She knew how to bring it through so the guards would not find it because they checked everyone, especially the girls working with food or with clothing.” Every single survivor tells a similar story of having vitally important clothing items or food smuggled to them by their friends. Like the Polish flint hidden in the earth beneath their feet, aiding one another hardened their resolve to survive and compressed the girls into semiprecious gems of mutual support.
The sorting detail was a fairly small operation at this point, but it would help save many lives in those early days. Going to work under a roof to sort clothing became one of the most desired work details. Not only was the job relatively easy, but the girls were out of the cold, and if no guards were looking they could eat bits of food found in pockets. Of course, getting caught meant twenty lashes with a whip and being sent back to hard labor outside. Organizing was worth those risks, though.
The clothing was kept in one block, where Linda and others folded blouses, skirts, coats, and trousers, ten to a package. Then those packages were moved to another block, where they were stacked, ready to be put into empty cattle cars and shipped back to Germany. Rather than return empty, the cars that brought in Jews were filled with Jews’ belongings. Stamped on the outside of the freight cars was the message, “For the Families Who Have Their Sons on the Front.”
Still naive about their circumstances, some of the girls wrote messages on scraps of paper, in the hopes that the German families who received the clothes would alert the authorities and help the girls: “Achtung! Jewish clothing from concentration camp.” They did not realize the authorities already knew.
WITH THE ADVANCE OF SPRING, the fields where the girls had spread manure were now being hoed for crops and planted with potato eyes. Edith and Lea were assigned to a new detail: cleaning the streams and ponds around the perimeter of Auschwitz, which were filthy with refuse and sometimes human bones buried deep in the muck. Forced to wade into the water, they pulled out the garbage and set it on the banks to be collected. “In the summer, this was not such a bad detail, but in the early spring and late fall, we froze. We went to bed wet and woke up wet. We never dried out.”
By now, some of the girls had been moved into different blocks. Irena Fein was in Block 8, where it seems Edie’s sister, Ella (#1950), may have been the block or room elder. Ella never states that she served in either position, but her sister worked as the block’s scribe, a position that would have given the sisters more power and helped their position in camp. By this point, their youngest sister, Lila, had also arrived in camp on the third transport. If Ella had been promoted to block or room elder, it was an important promotion. At twenty-one years of age, Ella was not only more mature than many of the other girls, but she had gone to secretarial school and learned skills that would eventually single her out for a much more important position in camp. Functionaries like block and room elders no longer had to have their heads shaved.
Delousing and shaving took place every four weeks on a Sunday. Some girls now faced their own fathers or brothers naked. Forced to hurry, the men couldn’t help but nick the girls’ flesh with the unwieldy electric shears, especially as they tried to hurry past private parts. The disinfectant “bath” always came after the shaving. The girls stood naked in long lines waiting to jump into the vat for a few minutes—the only access to water they had during the month, but the disinfectant didn’t clean their flesh. It just burned.
Chapter Seventeen
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived,
but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
—MAYA ANGELOU
BACK IN SLOVAKIA, BOTH GENTILES and Jews were increasingly disturbed by the deportations. On April 26, 1942, a crowd of Slovak gentiles organized outside the Žilina transit camp, where young Jewish men and women were being held for the next transport. They “began to curse the fact that the Jews were being concentrated [there] and deported. It almost came to a real demonstration. The [Hlinka] Guards, who were to have guarded the Jews, did not know what to do with the mob.” It was one of the few acts of public resistance by gentiles on behalf of Jews. Other actions were smaller, more personal, and less likely to capture the attention of the Hlinka Guard or the police.
Ivan Rauchwerger’s father had found his son work in a leather factory that had been owned by an old friend from school and then Aryanized by a Lutheran who was friendly to Jews. With a job that was important to the war effort, Ivan was not at risk of being deported, but “we were systematically being dehumanized by both the state and the Catholic Church.” There was an emotional cost to receiving an exception. At sixteen, Ivan had already seen his girlfriend board the train for “work.” Now he was watching his childhood chums leave town in cattle cars. “We who remained behind carried on with our joyless lives as virtual nobodies.”
His friend Suzie Hegy berated the Hlinka Guards when she was forced onto one of the April transports. “I have not done anything wrong!” she screamed. “I have not yet lived, and you are going to kill me?” Ivan never saw Suzie again.
By April 29, 1942, ten Slovak transports had illegally removed 3,749 young Jewish men and 6,051 young women to Auschwitz. No families had been deported yet.
For Polish Jews, things were quite different.
During morning roll call early in May, Edith and Lea noticed that a huge canvas tent had been set up in the center of the lagerstrasse. They were standing at the edge of the lines when one of the male kapos walked past. “I remember he had the green triangle of a criminal, and he said, ‘You know what this tent is? There are children’s shoes. And you know where the children are? You see the smoke? Those are the children.’ ”
“Why would he say something so crazy?” Edith whispered to her sister. “There weren’t any children in camp. It was such a strange thing to say. A normal brain doesn’t catch on.” They simply could not believe him.
The shutters on the windows of Block 10 had been nailed closed to prevent the girls from looking into the courtyard of Block 11 and the execution wall. However, the knots in the wood of the shutters had been pushed out, so they could see what was happening down below. One day, when the girls were at work, the kapo Luise Mauer was approached by Elza, the block elder from Block 10, who had seen something she wanted to show Luise. On the other side of the shutters, on the bloodied ground between Blocks 10 and 11, SS were shooting “without mercy on women and children who were already dead, and those that were still alive.”
This was not the only incident that Luise Mauer and her colleague Bertha Teege witnessed. One day, after emptying the lagerstrasse of prisoners as they had been ordered to do, the two women returned to Johanna Langefeld’s office and peeked through the blinds of the window. “About three hundred women, children and men, young, old, healthy, and sick, some on crutches, walked along the camp road. Then they were driven into an underground passageway, which looked like a giant potato peeler with air ducts. Then we saw two SS men wearing gas masks empty canisters of what we later came to realize was the notorious Zyklon B, which was responsible for the deaths of millions, into the air ducts. Horrific screams filled the air—the children screamed longest—then all we could hear was whimpering. That, too, dissipated after fifteen minutes. And thus we knew that three hundred people had been murdered.” In fact, there were many more.
Between May 5 and 12, Polish transports carrying 6,700 Jewish men, women, and children were sent directly to the newly functioning gas chambers in the first mass executions in Auschwitz. There were no crematoriums yet, so the bodies had to be buried in large pits.
When Langefeld returned to her office “looking pale and disturbed,” Mauer and Teege confided that they had seen what had happened. Langefeld told them that “she had no idea that people would be killed here. And that we should on no account tell anyone what we had seen, on pain of death.” The irony of that statement alone speaks to the double paradox that murder in Auschwitz required.
MEANWHILE, IN SLOVAKIA, outrage had arisen not only because unmarried young women were being removed from the protection of their parents’ homes but because families were being separated. The April protests in Žilina had slowed the deportations long enough for President Tiso to reassure the country that he would act as a “good and humane person and stop the deportations of single girls.” He reiterated his assurances on every radio broadcast, in every newspaper, and at every public event, “It is the basic principle of the Christian faith that families should not be separated. That principle will be observed when the Jews are sent to their new settlements.” Everyone, even the Vatican, believed (or perhaps just wanted to believe) his lies. In reality, Tiso was just waiting for the Slovak Assembly to pass the legislation that would make “rehoming” Jews legal. That decision was made on May 15, 1942, when the Slovak Assembly debated the question of whether deporting Jews should be legal.
