999, page 18
There was “one loud scream that nearly opened the heavens. My parents and younger siblings were on the way to the crematorium,” Helena says. But at least “in another hour or two they would no longer be suffering. Sometimes, in these situations, death is the best thing.” All she had left now were her sister Ruzinka and her niece Aviva, hiding somewhere in Slovakia.
ON JULY 17, 1942, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler arrived at his killing fields in order to inspect the facilities and hear reports on the plans for expansion. At forty-two years old, he had chipmunk cheeks, and his chin was beginning to soften and sag. Round pince-nez balanced on his nose above a trim moustache; he looked more like an egotistical schoolboy, the type used to getting straight As and being pummeled by after-school bullies, than a mass murderer. Now he was the bully, goosestepping his way around Germany’s newly acquired countries and concentration camps—of which there were already many. Auschwitz and Birkenau were the largest.
Just prior to his arrival, Johanna Langefeld told five of her favorite Ravensbrück prisoners that she was going to ask Himmler to commute their sentences. There was a reason for this request. Langefeld was planning to ask Himmler to reassign her to Ravensbrück. Without her there to promote and protect them, she knew their status would fall, especially with a new overseer, who would have her own favorites. It was an action that would later save her life. Emmy Thoma, Tilly Lehmann, Luise Mauer, and Bertel Teege would come to Langefeld’s defense during the Ravensbrück tribunals in 1947.
On the same day that Himmler visited the camp, two transports from Holland, carrying 1,303 men and boys and 697 women and girls arrived. In a meeting with four other officials, Höss gave an overview of the current complex, then turned over the presentation to SS Major General Hans Kammler, who used both models and blueprints to illustrate the new plans for buildings, waste facilities, and gas chambers. Then they took Himmler on a tour of the farming zones, kitchens, and infirmaries, where victims of the typhus epidemic were supposedly cared for, and the train depot, where the Jews from Holland had already disembarked and were standing in long chaotic lines with their belongings.
Himmler and his cronies monitored the selection process resulting in 1,251 men and 300 women being accepted into camp. The rest of the transport—399 women and girls and 50 men and boys—were then gassed in Bunker 2. Since the crematoriums were not yet functional, Himmler was especially interested in seeing how the bodies were cleared out of the gas chamber and hauled to mass graves to be buried. It was a very full day.
In the evening, a reception was held in Himmler’s honor so that SS officers could meet their Reichsführer and toast his health. Next came a formal dinner held at SS Brigadier General Gauleiter Bracht’s house in Katowice, thirty-six kilometers north of Owicim. There they dined with their wives. As was customary, the time came for the women to be excused, so the men could discuss the day’s events and the next day’s agenda over cigars and whiskey. The women’s camp was top of the program.
Under the heat-hardened sky, the girls were standing at roll call the next morning when the gates to the women’s camp opened and Himmler himself marched inside. At this point, the women’s section was so overcrowded that “you had to step over people who were sitting outside,” Linda Reich recalls. Hundreds of new female prisoners were sleeping on the ground. Typhus raged.
SS Langefeld was not the kind of woman to spend time curling her hair with an iron. Her hair was in a bun under a hat, but her boots were polished onyx black, glinting below her skirt. It may have been hot already, but Langefeld did not sweat. It was not her fault that Commandant Höss was allowing so many women into the cramped camp space that should have held only five thousand. Now Himmler would see for himself the problems she was facing.
The Jewish girls watched as the kapos they normally feared nervously lined up in neat rows of five. Shoulders back, chins high, eyes straight forward, the kapos stood at attention, aware that while they were superior to the Jews, they were inferior in the eyes of everyone else—criminals who could be disposed of as quickly and easily as their Jewish female counterparts. As Himmler walked along the ranks of the Ravensbrück prisoners, inspecting them, Langefeld explained their prisoner categories, pointing out the prostitutes, murderers, communists. Then they stopped at the front row of kapos, where Langefeld’s favorites stood.
As they passed Bertel Teege, Luise Mauer, and the three others, Langefeld paused and addressed her Reichsführer.
—Herr Himmler, I have a request to make.
The other men may have been taken aback by her boldness. But the two SS were the same age, and Himmler had long approved of Langefeld’s organizational abilities.
Pointing to her five assistants, she said, “These women are the most senior prisoners here. They have worked hard, and I believe they have served their prison terms with honor and dignity. I depend on them and have never had any issues with them. I beg you to recognize their prison terms completed.”
Luise Mauer could not believe Langefeld was making good on her promise. Having been in prison since 1935, she had never allowed herself to imagine freedom under the Third Reich. She was considered a traitor to her country because she was a communist. Himmler turned his owl eyes toward Mauer and addressed her directly. “Why are you in prison?”
Mauer thrust out her chest and spoke directly and honestly. “I was first arrested in 1933. My husband was a council member of the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands—The Communist Party of Germany) in Hessen. In 1935, I was arrested again and sentenced to four years for treason. At the end of the trial, I was taken to Ravensbrück, then in spring this year came to Auschwitz.”
“You were a communist,” Himmler said, looking disgusted. “Are you still one?”
Despite the possible repercussions of her response, Mauer bravely answered, “Yes!”
Nearby, SS Maximilian Grabner was stunned by her answer, but Himmler continued his interrogation. “And what is your view now of the National Socialist state?”
“Since 1933 I have only known prison and concentration camp, so I can only feel negatively toward the National Socialist state.”
“I will therefore give you the opportunity to get to know our new state. I release you!” Mauer looked doubtfully at Langefeld and the SS superiors around her.
“But Herr Himmler!” SS Grabner blurted. “She is irredeemable and politically untrustworthy!”
Himmler squinted through the pince-nez on his nose and cleaned the lenses. “Despite that, I am releasing her. But before I do, she will have to work in the house of the Waffen-SS.” He turned to Langefeld and asked her a few additional questions about Mauer, then turned back to the prisoner. “The supervisor says you are a cook. You can serve there as a cook.” It was a probationary position. In fact, four of the five kapos would not be released for another year or two. Only Bertel Teege was freed immediately.
As Teege left under the iron gates inscribed with the motto Arbeit Macht Frei, she could not have helped but be aware that she was one of the lucky few to actually work her way to freedom.
THE INSPECTION OF the women’s camp was paramount for Himmler’s visit, but this was no normal roll call. Released from their own inspection, the kapos joined the SS women in shouting at the girls to strip naked before the Reichsführer of the SchutzStaffel (SS). Hesitation was addressed with whips. Pulling off their filthy Russian uniforms, the girls were ordered to “Move out! March!” past Himmler, Höss, and the other male inspectors.
—Hold out your left arm! Straight in front of you!
They were too scared to be embarrassed. Eyes forward, teeth clenched, the girls held their left arms straight out in front of them, palms facing Himmler. “If they had made us hold out our right hand, I would have been selected to die,” Joan (#1188) says. She “had a big sore” on her right hand.
In the end, the only female prisoners who did die that day were twenty Jehovah’s Witnesses who were used in a flogging technique demonstration. After they had been beaten to death, Himmler approved the flogging of women in camp.
Having succeeded in her request to have her favorite kapos released, Langefeld took an opportunity to ask Himmler to reassign her to Ravensbrück, citing not only differences of opinion between Höss and herself, but also the lack of respect she was being shown by the male SS guards. In his own diaries, Höss repeatedly complained about Langefeld, and it is likely he had already voiced his displeasure with her to Himmler. Himmler denied her petition and further undermined her position as supervisor by instructing Höss that the female kapos should be allowed to “vent their evil on prisoners.”
A number of these kapos were already in prison for murder, and Himmler now gave them license to kill—Jews. What little control Langefeld had had over those malevolent kapos was now lost, but it was the Jewish women who truly would suffer.
AT THE END of the day, the SS-Reichsführer concluded his business with Höss in a private meeting where he told the commandant that under no circumstances should Sipo (Security Police) operations be stopped, least of all because of lack of accommodations. He ordered Höss to complete the construction of the Birkenau camp and to kill all Jewish prisoners unfit for work. Finally, in recognition of his work and performance, Höss was promoted to SS Lt. Colonel.
The 999 girls Bertel Teege had seen arriving on March 26—or those who were left—would not be so lucky as to leave Auschwitz. With the Russian POWs almost entirely extinguished and the construction on the brick blocks nearly finished, Lt. Colonel Rudolph Höss made good on his promotion. Three weeks after Himmler’s visit, Höss determined that Birkenau was ready to receive female prisoners.
Chapter Twenty
August 1, 1942: At morning roll call, the occupancy
level of Auschwitz-Birkenau is 21,421 male prisoners,
including 153 Russian POWS. The occupancy of the
women’s camp is not known; Since the relevant doc-
uments are missing, it cannot be established.
—DANUTA CZECH, Auschwitz
Chronicle, 1939–1945
WHEN THE SUN ROSE over the women’s bald heads on August 8, it was already hot. Flies buzzed amid the filthy prisoners’ bodies packed against one another at morning roll call. There was nothing unusual about the day. Somnambulists in Russian uniforms, the girls broke into their work details as usual, but on the other side of the guard gate, an entire section of girls was diverted. With trepidation, the girls in the remaining work details turned to watch their friends and family march away down a long dirt road. They had no idea if they would see each other again.
Those marching away from the regular routine were suddenly on high alert. Trudging past fields of potatoes and over train tracks, they walked for almost thirty minutes before the shadows of fencing appeared in the distance, and their destination became clear. Ravens croaked and flapped overhead.
TODAY, THE WALK between Auschwitz and Birkenau has a highway overpass that looks down on a switchback of functioning train tracks, part of the Owicim station, not far from what is now the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Buses and taxis transport crowds of visitors in a few minutes between the two camps so that visitors do not have to endure the forty-minute walk. To cross Birkenau itself takes almost as long. For many prisoners, this was a trek they had to make twice a day, to and from work after upwards often to twelve hours of heavy labor. They had no water bottles, no energy bars. They were sustained by nothing but a crust of bread, putrid tea, and mostly rotten vegetable and horsemeat soup.
From the highway overpass, it is hard to imagine the emptiness of the countryside back in 1942. Today, the fields of potatoes and other crops, which probably existed then, too, still surround the complex, but there are also housing developments. Commuter traffic whizzes by the ominous death gate, which looms like a historic shadow across the flat, monochromatic landscape. In 1942, when the girls marched across the fields to Birkenau, that brick structure, so commonly identified with Auschwitz-Birkenau did not even exist yet. As they entered through the wire fenced gate, a wind swept across the steppe. There was no Arbeit Macht Frei sign. Only a few wooden watchtowers had recently been built. This vast space contained hardly anything but fifteen brick buildings in three rows and kilometers of barbed-wire fences. A few single-story office buildings had been built to serve the SS and their functionaries, but mostly there were low rectangular brick and wood buildings for housing and a few offices.
Over the next two years Birkenau would expand to become the largest death camp of all time. The equivalent of 319 football fields, the size of Birkenau is unfathomable, even today. From a bird’s-eye view, Birkenau looks more like a giant Monopoly game board of brown plastic houses in orderly rows than a death camp. Walking from one end of it to the other is exhausting, yet Edith and the other girls had to cross their section of it many times a day—to go to the toilet, to scrounge for food, eventually to sneak over to the still-to-be-created hospital ward.
The women’s section, which Himmler had urged Höss to complete in a timely fashion, was on the left of the main entrance. The section on the right of the main camp road were green wooden barracks that would house the overflow from the men’s camp, now to be referred to as Auschwitz I.
BACK IN AUSCHWITZ I, the girls who had been left behind worried about those who had disappeared. Where had the others been taken? Were they ever going to return? A whisper campaign by the few humane kapos assured them that the missing female prisoners had been transferred to a new camp. The next morning, when another large group of work details headed in the same direction, those still heading to work stayed calm, albeit wary. It took four days for the entire women’s camp to be moved from Auschwitz I to Birkenau. Linda remembers that girls who were too ill to walk to the new location were offered transportation in the back of trucks. “Those were the first girls who were [formally] gassed in August 1942.” Their deaths were not recorded.
During the transfer, a problem arose with the numbering system. Women arriving on the Slovak transports were being immediately processed and registered in Birkenau. However, there were still women from the July transports being numbered and registered in Auschwitz I, and the numbers of the female prisoners had been mistakenly duplicated. It took a few days to bring the numbers back into a consecutive sequence and to fix the replicated numbers—how is not clear. Perhaps the old number was crossed out and a new number tattooed below, but there is no record of that happening. It is more likely that the duplicate number bearers were simply removed from the prison system—meaning they were killed.
BIRKENAU WAS TRUE nothingness. “It was bare,” Linda says. “No roads—lots of dust. You didn’t see a green leaf—nothing.” The Russian POWs who had been there had eaten the grass. Not long after they arrived, the girls began eating the grass, as well.
The soil in Birkenau was clay, and under the hot sun it hardened like cement. When it rained, the clay softened and sucked the feet of prisoners into it, twisting muscles, rotting flesh, and worse. In their wooden clappers, the Dutch girls would go scrounging for food near the kitchen, but the mud was treacherous. Margie Becker says, “They drowned in the mud. Nobody lifted a finger. They just drowned in the mud there. They were too delicate, too beautiful” to survive Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Block 13 stabled many of the girls from Humenné, including Edith, her sister Lea, Helena Citron (#1971) and Irena Fein (#1564). A few blocks away, Bertha Berkowitz (#1048) would end up in Block 27 with her best friend from home, Peshy Steiner. She probably did not yet know Margie Becker (#1955) from Humenné, or Elena Zuckermenn (#1735) from Poprad, but they were about to become good friends and coworkers.
Inside their new “homes,” Edith found dirt floors and “boards with a little straw on them. In the summer, we would take off a little bit of our clothes and use them as pillows.” Who would have thought they would miss the thin and uncomfortable straw mattresses of Auschwitz? Or the threadbare blankets? Now, Edith and the others had nothing but rags, probably left over from the Russian soldiers who had died building these brick tombs.
A brick dividing wall ran down the center of the block. Three tiers of wooden shelves, or koyas, were fitted into each horse stall–size section, lining the brick walls on both sides of dirt-floor aisles. The blocks had the same layout as the stables that had once served the Polish cavalry, where the Russian POWs had been held. Originally, each stable was supposed to accommodate eighteen horses. At the entrance were two larger rooms: one for tack and one for grooming and mucking-out equipment. This layout would now accomodate human beings. The front rooms housed block and room elders, who were in charge of doling out food in the morning and evening and assigning petty jobs, like cleaning the blocks. They were also responsible for keeping accurate records of the girls living—and dying—in the block. Initially, each block housed about five hundred girls, but it was only a matter of time before overcrowding would alter the sleeping arrangements from six girls per koya to ten, and the blocks would hold one thousand women or more. Sleeping near one of the cast-iron stoves was essential in the cold, dank blocks, where temperatures in the winter months regularly fell to minus thirty degrees Celsius.
As bad as Auschwitz I had been, it had felt more communal and even looked like a small town. Birkenau felt like, and was, a wasteland. The only thing growing nearby was the birch forest at the far end of the lagerstrasse from which the camp took its name. There were other things to miss about Auschwitz I, too. There had been water dripping in the basements and a few sinks and toilets inside the building. Now the girls had to cross the camp to reach the so-called lavatory, which was made of wooden slabs with fifty-eight holes placed over an open sewer. “Can you imagine thousands of girls going to the latrine and [being given] only five minutes, not even [to go]? Everybody wanted to go!”
