999, page 17
The atmosphere in the assembly’s gallery was described as “oppressive” as Hlinka Guards positioned themselves opposite the “voting deputies” in order to intimidate those concerned about the moral and religious implications of the bill. By the time the vote was called, most of the assembly had left, having chosen not to cast their vote. The bill passed. Instantly, it was legal for Jews to be deported and, once deported, stripped of their citizenship and their property. Slovak Jews no longer needed to be referred to as “donating servants.” Only those with exceptions would be safe now. A new surge of requests flooded the Ministry of the Interior.
With the deportations now legal, Adolf Eichmann himself arrived in Bratislava to assure the government that “Slovak Jews worked happily in their new homes.” Over the next few months, twenty thousand Slovak Jews would be sent to Auschwitz. Just as Tiso had promised, families would be deported together. It was only when they got to Auschwitz or Lublin that they were separated—by death.
As the three-month mark of their supposed government service “contract” passed, the girls watched transports arriving from Slovakia with a sickening sense of despair. Something very different from what anyone had supposed was now happening. Young women were no longer the sole targets. Some of the girls were stunned to find themselves no longer bereft of their mothers, but doomed to watch their mothers suffer with them. “We were overpowered by hopelessness,” writes Dr. Manci Schwalbova. “Daughters supporting their mothers had to witness how they were beaten and how they went down under the burden of heavy labor and inhuman conditions.”
IN HUMENNÉ, LOU GROSS rushed out to help his friend’s grandmother with her suitcase, only to be dragged away by his nanny, crying. In the few short months since Adela had left home, he had grown up beyond his four years of age.
Giora Shpira was lucky enough to have a government exception through his father’s work at the lumberyard, but at fourteen, he witnessed not only entire streets in Prešov being deported, but families who had remained behind being herded into a square and gunned down. “That was the fate of most of the residents on K. Street,” Giora writes. Even with their exemptions, his father worried that the boys would soon be targets, so he smuggled them to Hungary. Giora’s brother hid in an orphanage, while Giora worked as an electrician’s apprentice.
In Rožkovany, the Hartmann family worked their dairy and agricultural fields, trying to continue life as usual. Eugene worked double duty, caring for his invalid mother and helping his father. They had still heard no word from Magduska. Her father fretted that his promise to send her a care package remained unfulfilled, but he had no idea where to send one.
Since the Hartmanns had exceptions for running a farm vital to the country’s food supply, other members of their extended family came to live on the farm with them. Their cousin Lenka Hertzka had stayed in Prešov, however, and was abruptly deported in June. Fortunately, Lenka’s sister, Lilly, her nephew, and mother (Magduska’s aunt) were already safe on the farm.
No one in Auschwitz was safe, but Lenka had secured work as an assistant to one of the top members of the Gestapo. One of her privileges was mail. That July, a postcard arrived from Lenka, in Auschwitz. The Hartmanns finally had an address to send things to Magduska and Nusi, and immediately sent a postcard back to Lenka asking the questions that nagged the family.
Why could Lenka write, but not Magduska and Nusi? Clearly, Lenka was older and more mature, but Magduska had always acted responsibly. Was she so busy that she couldn’t write to her family? What was wrong with her? Postcards were also arriving from other girls who had been deported with Magduska and Nusi. Why was it that everyone but their daugthers had found time to write?
The Hartmanns were a microcosm of innocence, suggesting what many other families also must have believed: that their daughters were living in some a kind of dormitory, saw each other regularly, had meals together, and could receive packages of food, money, clothes, bedding, and of course, news from home. They had no idea that almost everything they sent to Auschwitz was confiscated by the SS.
IN THE ENCLOSED space of a locked cattle car on in its way to Lublin, RudolfVrba, who would eventually become famous for escaping from Auschwitz, was listening to his neighbors talk about the postcards they had received from the girls in Auschwitz. Zachar, who ran a small vegetable stand, was sitting next to his teenage daughter, who was busily buffing her nails. Looking up from her manicure, Zachar’s daughter said, “My cousin went on the first transport and she wrote to me the other day, saying everything was fine. The food was good and they weren’t working too hard.” A shadow crossed her freckled face. “There was only one thing I couldn’t understand. She said her mother sent me her love. And her mother died three years ago.”
A woman nursing her infant looked up. “There was something funny in the letter I got from my sister, too,” she said. “She told me old Jakob Rakow was in fine form. But Jakob was killed in a car crash ages ago.”
“A gossamer web of doubt descended on the conversation,” writes Vrba.
The passengers began to open their bags and shuffle through cards that had been sent from girls performing work service in some camp in Poland. Sure enough, there were other odd comments, “references to people who were dead or to events which could not possibly have happened.” Why would their daughters, sisters, or cousins write such nonsense? To a single family, the postscripts were simple oddities, but now that other families were producing cards with similar comments, a sense of foreboding descended. As the postcards were read out loud, people began to reconsider the coded messages. Then, just as quickly, they assured themselves that there was nothing to be alarmed about.
The families who had been warned were doomed to fall prey to the covert warnings the girls couldn’t give clearly. It was easier to believe President Tiso’s assurances and trust that they were being resettled than to believe that they were going to die, like Jakob Rakow in his crashed car. Tiso was keeping his promise, after all, to deport the Slovak Jews as entire families—instead of separating them from their daughters, as he had done in March.
As the family transports began in earnest, the young Ivan Rauchwerger drove to Poprad again to help the families newly incarcerated in the military barracks. “I saw heart-wrenching misery and desperation in a large mass of dehumanized beings. The ladies’ makeup had melted, there were only a couple of taps dispensing water, a lot of the toilets were out of order, the men were unshaved, nervous, the children crying; there were not enough bunks to sleep on. I was besieged with women begging me: ‘Please go into my study, I left my university degree on the desk, I am a doctor and they may need me.’
“Another said, ‘I need my glasses. I am half blind and left my glasses on my bedside table, please bring them.’
“ ‘I am a diabetic and left my insulin behind—I am not able exist without it’
“ ‘I left sanitary pads in the bathroom. Please, I must have them now.’
“ ‘I ran back, but their homes were locked up. All we could do was bring them some food, toilet paper, and sanitary napkins. ’ ”
The Hlinka Guard had taken over possession of the homes and everything inside. “We observed how the guardists happily entered the homes and flats of our friends and came out with arms full of bed linens, tablecloths, clothing, and other items. Later they came out with paintings, artworks, and rugs, and toward the evening they came with horse carts for the furniture. A month later, they received titles to those properties.”
When a postcard from Auschwitz arrived in Ivan’s town, it appeared to report facts identical to the others: “the Germans treat us fairly. Yes we work, but not too hard. We get enough food and sleep in hygienic barracks. Our family is almost complete, only Uncle Malach Hamowet is missing. We hope he will join us soon.” In Hebrew, Malach ha-Mawet is the Angel of Death. Susie Hegy had been right.
On May 28, 1942, Ivan watched as one of his school friends, Budi Stein, and his father were marched through town, carrying what worldly belongings they were allowed. Budi’s father was a German-Jewish architect who had fled Germany in 1934 as the Third Reich and the Nazi party were rising to power. The Steins had built a beautiful home in Spišská Nová Ves near Ivan’s family home. Now black-garbed Hlinka Guardists pointed guns at Budi and his father. The community gathered to watch people traipsing down the gravel streets carrying suitcases for the new “homes.” President Tiso had promised.
“I will never forget the way Budi looked at me: ‘How come I am being deported and you are free?’ His face still haunts me,” ninety-three-year-old Ivan Rauchwerger says solemnly. Budi was seventeen years old, the same age as Ivan at that time. None of the Stein family survived. Their large transport left Slovakia for Lublin, Poland. The next stop after Lublin was Auschwitz.
Chapter Eighteen
To lift Such a heavy weight,
Sisyphus, you will need all your courage.
I do not lack the courage to complete the task
But the end is far and time is Short.
—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, Les Fleurs du mal,
quoted in Suite Française by Irene
Nemirovsky
ON THE FOURTH OF JULY—America’s Independence Day—the first selection of Jews was carried out “on the unloading platform while the SS Standby Squad surrounds the train.” The total number of Slovak Jews on this transport is not recorded, but only 108 women and 264 men were chosen to be registered for “work.” Separated by gender, the new deportees were forced to walk past an SS doctor and other camp administrators, whose job it was to decide which prisoners were able-bodied and young enough to work. “Old people, children, mothers with children, and pregnant women are told that they are to be driven to the camp.” Thus separated from their families, they clambered into trucks and waved to those chosen for work. They were then driven “to the bunker in Birkenau and killed in the gas chambers.” The rest were processed: shaved, deloused, and tattooed.
Selections at the train platform universally showed a preference for male prisoners over female. The reason was obvious. Not only were women more likely to want to stay with their children, but the SS were looking for physical strength. Women were not ideal slave laborers. However, there was another factor in the decision-making process: overcrowding in the women’s camp.
Despite the fact that there were no formal calculations to reveal the exact number of women in camp—nor the exact number who had died—as of May 12, 1942, more than eight thousand women (Jews and gentiles) had been registered in Auschwitz, and another five thousand were about to arrive. But there were only five barracks, with bunks for one thousand prisoners in each building. To handle the additional population, domed Nissen huts of corrugated metal were erected in between the two-story brick blocks. No additional toilet facilities were added to the camp, and hygiene, which had always been a difficulty, now became a major problem.
The girls were battling not only to get the best jobs and extra food, but against an invisible enemy that could strike quicker than an SS whip—typhus. Except for monthly disinfections, there was no protection against the lice and fleas carrying the deadly disease. It spread rampantly through the men’s and women’s camps, killing indiscriminately, even striking down the camp doctor, SS Captain Dr. Siegfried Schwela, and at least two Ravensbrück kapos, Gertrude Franke and Helene Ott. Records indicate that approximately 77 percent of the Jewish men died of typhus in these first months. We have no record of how many women succumbed to the disease; we only know that typhus raged through the women’s camp.
“Once the Jewish transports from Slovakia began to arrive, [the women’s camp] was crammed to the roof within a matter of days,” Commandant Höss wrote in his diary. “Conditions in the women’s camp were atrocious and far worse than the men’s camp.” The prisoners were “piled high to the ceiling. Everything was black with lice.”
“Women,” he wrote, “deteriorated far more rapidly then the men. Everything was much more difficult, harsher and more depressing for the women, since general living conditions in the women’s camp were incomparably worse. They were far more tightly packed in, and the sanitary and hygienic conditions were notably inferior. The women’s camp, tightly crammed from the very beginning, meant psychological destruction for the mass of female prisoners, and this led sooner or later to their physical collapse.
“The disastrous overcrowding and its consequences, which existed from the very beginning, prevented any proper order being established in the women’s camp.”
Of course, for the lack of “proper” order, Höss blamed the Chief Supervisor of the women’s camp, SS Johanna Langefeld, not himself. There was a clear patriarchy in the camp administration, which Langefeld complained about to both her superiors and her staff. Höss may have admitted that “the general congestion was far greater than in the men’s camp,” but he refused to take any responsibility for the overcrowding and inhumane conditions that the girls suffered. In fact, he blamed the women prisoners themselves: “When the women had reached the bottom, they would let themselves go completely.”
What irony that the man responsible for the conditions women suffered should blame the women themselves for not looking better before they succumbed to death. Holding female prisoners responsible for their own misery speaks volumes about the camp’s misogynistic system and its overall contempt for women. But then Jews were not even considered human; being a Jewish woman was the lowest of the low.
Nazi Germany’s patriarchal ideology worked against women in particular, as Höss delighted in finding fault with the female SS and kapos in charge of the women’s camp as well as the female prisoners. His criticism does reveal one possible explanation for the inadequate death-toll records for women: “Hardly a day passed without discrepancies appearing in the numbers of inmates shown on the strength-returns. The supervisors ran hither and thither in all this confusion like a lot of flustered hens, and had no idea what to do.”
Chapter Nineteen
A new Soldier came into the barracks and was very
Sad and very afraid; Sitting and Shivering, he Saw that
the other soldiers were Singing and in a good mood. He
looked at them and asked them, “Aren’t you afraid?”
“Of course we are afraid.”
“So how can you be in a good mood and Singing?”
“Because we are already used to being afraid.”
—ILYA EHRENBURG, as told by Edith
NOW FAMILIAR WITH LIVING IN these “crazy conditions,” the prisoners began to feel like being at the camp was some kind of life. They even referred to their blocks as “home.” “We knew when to go to the bathroom when no one was there, and when the bathroom was being cleaned. We knew not to do more than we could, not more than we had to; we knew to show them that we were working but how to save our energy,” Edith says. “We were used to being afraid, and we knew how to live being afraid.” Newcomers did not.
It was so hot that summer that the women’s shaved heads had blisters from sunburn. Their feet were swollen and full of blisters and cuts from wearing the open-toed clappers. Dust was amplified by the lack of rain. Sweat created brown rivulets in the crevices of their skin as they shoveled dirt, tore down buildings, and picked the ever-present lice from their bodies.
As the family transports began to arrive, there could no longer be any doubt that something was happening, because no children ever appeared in camp. Women and children vanished shortly after they arrived.
The prisoner news network was quick and efficient, and through that grapevine, Helena Citron (#1971) heard that her brother was in camp. “Wait by the window of your block after work, and he will come to the window on the other side of the fence,” one of the male prisoners told her as he passed by. After evening roll call, Helena waited by the window until she saw her brother appear in the upstairs window of the block on the other side of the wall. Even from a distance, she could tell he was shocked by her appearance. Had she really aged so quickly in such a short amount of time?
“Why didn’t you stay in hiding?” she asked him.
—I thought I might be able to come here and rescue you.
He told her that he and their parents had been deported to Lublin. Their older sister, Ruzinka, was living under Aryan papers with her husband, who was an engineer in Bratislava. The snippets of news hung in the air above the barbed wire.
On the morning of July 25, Edith and Lea stepped outside for roll call and saw Aron, Helena’s brother, hanging on the electrical wires that surrounded the camp. He had been shot for trying to escape. The sisters looked nervously around, worried about what Helena would do if she saw her poor brother’s body. As the gray dawn faded into daylight, his forlorn form glowed in a tangle of black wire. “They left his body on the wire until roll call was done,” Edith recalls. It was a message no Jew could ignore.
Afraid that the news would make Helena suicidal, the Friedman sisters decided to keep the secret to themselves. However, when the girls marched out to work, Slovaks from the men’s camp yelled to Helena, “Your brother is no longer alive!”
Transports filled with families deported to Lublin were now beginning to to arrive. Helena and the other girls listened desperately to the reports from male prisoners hauling luggage and belongings to the sorting depot. The men warned the girls that some of their parents were coming into camp. What about those who didn’t? Dread electrified the girls.
