999, page 19
Sinks consisted of a metal trough with ninety spigots, but the water was contaminated and anyone drinking it got dysentery. Eventually, there would be ten toilet and sink barracks, but in the first few months, those were still under construction. The overcrowding at Auschwitz I had been temporarily solved—the poor hygiene had not. Girls were not allowed to go to the latrines at night, so in emergencies they had to use their red bowls and then try to scrub them clean with dirt the next morning before they were served tea. To make it to the latrine before roll call, you had to get up before dawn ahead of thousands of others. “It was just horrible, no facilities, no toilet paper, no nothing. Sometimes we tore off from the shirt a piece of cloth. It was just unreal.”
New arrivals suffering the same stomach problems from the rancid soup were wearing dresses now, and without toilets readily at hand and no underwear, they “had diarrhea running down their legs.” Fouling yourself was reason to be killed, but there was no hiding accidents. When a transport arrived and a few hundred new girls were taken into camp, it meant a few hundred more girls all running to the toilets at the same time. In the rush, girls sometimes fell through the holes in the latrine and drowned in the sewage below. Of all the possible ways to die in Auschwitz, falling into the latrine was the death Bertha feared the most.
For many of the girls, Birkenau was the final blow. As bad as Auschwitz had been, a gossamer film of hope had covered their experience, supported by religious faith. Now hope was gone. In Auschwitz I, girls had jumped to their deaths from the second-floor windows to commit suicide. With that option taken from them, there was only one way out. Edith says, “Many committed suicide going to the high voltage [fences]. In the morning, it was like a Christmas tree. People, you know, charred, dark” hanging on the wires.
Auschwitz I was purgatory to Birkenau’s hell.
Chapter Twenty-one
Do men learn from women? Often. Do they admit it
publicly? Rarely, even today.
—ELENA FERRANTE
THE TOWN OF HOLÍ IS the site of the easternmost continental European excavation of Neolithic menhirs to date—a Slovak Stonehenge. In the 1940s, it had a small Jewish community of 360 people who must all have been “rehomed” by the time the harvest festival celebrations were getting underway on August 15, 1942. Why else would President Tiso have decided to commemorate the occasion in this midsize border town, eighty kilometers from Bratislava?
With his thick bulldog neck and priest’s collar tucked beneath a double chin wattle, Tiso was both ferocious and charismatic. Outside a church, farmers carried maize and sheaves of wheat. Girls in white lace smocks and embroidered skirts, with long braids and floral headbands, lined up along the road to welcome their president with Heil Hitler salutes. Even the men were dressed in traditional costumes. It had been a good year. Prosperity was increasing, and President Tiso wanted to make sure the Christians of his country knew why things were going so well. Stepping up to the podium, he looked down upon his adoring citizens with stern, fatherly kindness.
“People ask if what is happening now is Christian. Is it humane?” he bellowed to the gentiles of Holí, newly freed of their Jewish neighbors. “Is it not just looting?” His microphone crackled. “But I ask: Is it not Christian when the Slovak nation wants to defeat an eternal enemy, the Jew? Is that not Christian? Loving thyself is a commandment of God, and that love commands me to remove everything that harms me, that threatens my life. And I believe nobody needs much convincing that the Slovak Jewish element has always been such a threat to our life, and I don’t think I need to convince anyone of that fact!” The townsfolk cheered and waved sheaves of wheat.
“Would it not look worse if we had not cleansed ourselves of them? And we did it according to God’s commandment. Slovaks, go and get rid of your worst canker! . . .What did the British promise the Jews before World War I, just to extract money from them? They promised them a state and got nothing in return. And you see, Hitler asked nothing from them and even so is now giving them a state!”
That “state” was Poland’s death camps.
Fake news was no longer just on the rise—it was the only news available, disseminated through the Hlinka Guard’s propagandist newspaper, Gardista. One article published in November 1942 was titled “Ako ziju zidia v novom domove na vychode?” or “How are Jews living in their new homes on the outskirts?” The center photo shows young Jewish women wearing crisp white pinafores and kerchiefs, smiling into the camera. “They don’t look embarrassed to death,” the caption reads. In the next column, “a Jewish policeman is proud to have his photograph taken.” The rhetoric was so manipulative that even the less gullible seemed to swallow it, perhaps because they could not bear to believe their own good fortune was due to the misfortunes of Jewish former friends and neighbors. One gentile pensioner so believed the Gardista newspaper about the successful rehoming of Jews that he sent a postcard to the Minister of the Interior, Alexander Mach, complaining that elderly Jews were receiving better treatment than he, an aging Slovak citizen, was. He asked to be given the same treatment as they were.
The ability people have to believe that government policies targeting minorities are not racist or unfair was not unique to the 1940s. Modern regimes have been equally guilty of repackaging genocide under the guise of immigration policies, religious convictions, ethnic purity, or economics. The common factor is always that the first victims are the most vulnerable, and least “valuable,” in the targeted culture. By August 15, 1945, thousands of women and children had been killed in the new gas chambers. Only the fittest and “luckiest” women were still alive.
On the same day that President Tiso was congratulating himself on his Christian values, 2,505 men, women, and children from Poland and Holland arrived in Auschwitz—yet only 124 men and 153 women would be registered in camp. Within ten days of being relocated to Birkenau, the women’s camp population expanded by almost two thousand. A fresh new slave workforce was ready to replace the “old-timers,” worn-out girls who had been there for almost five months.
THERE IS NO CONCRETE DATE in the Auschwitz Chronicle confirming the first selection of registered female prisoners to be gassed, but we know from survivors that it happened shortly after they arrived in Birkenau. We also know from the Auschwitz “Death Books” that at least twenty-two women from the first transport died on 15 August. It is the first time that so many registered women were documented as dying in one particular day. And that is evidence that the first selection of female prisoners happened on August 15, immediately after morning roll call.
Whispers passed through the lines. Why weren’t they being sent out to work? What was going on? Was it good or bad? No one knew what the word “selection” meant. Selected for what? Forced to stand under the hot sun, feeling more blisters erupt on their bare heads and necks, unable to seek shade as the hours passed, the girls shifted their feet and looked around.
Many of the girls who had been in camp since March “couldn’t stand straight. Or had marks. Bruises,” Linda recalls. And then they “had to undress.” This is a fact that many survivors—even memoirists, like Rena Kornreich—gloss over or avoid mentioning in their testimonies. Selections were made in the nude. That way the girls could not hide open sores or wounds, skeletal figures, or rashes. Frida Benovicova had gone to school with Edith when they were girls. Now the eighteen-year-old and her twenty-three-year-old sister, Helen, moved to the front of the line. Rena Kornreich (#1716) was standing just a few rows away and saw one of the sisters being told by the SS to go to the right. The other was told to go to the left.
“Please don’t separate me from my sister!” One of the sisters fell to her knees and begged for mercy. No one knew for sure what the directions meant. Whatever the circumstance, the sisters wanted to stay together. The SS man looked down at the begging girl and flicked his hand. Frida scrambled after Helena and hugged her close.
Naked, the two walked hand in hand toward flatbed trucks, where they were herded roughly aboard. Rena had no idea who the girls were, but she recognized the sisters from the first transport and believed that their numbers were 1000 and 1001. Wherever they were going, she knew “it couldn’t be good.”
It would take seventy-five years for me to find their family and learn their names.
Chapter Twenty-two
You hear me Speak, but do you hear me feel?
—GERTRUD KOLMAR, “The Woman Poet”
ARRIVING IN BIRKENAU cemented the first girls’ fears. Things were not going to get better. The only way to save themselves, and one another, was to get decent work. Of course, “decent work” could also be dangerous and unpleasant to perform.
Margie Becker had heard that they were looking for a detail of volunteers to carry corpses as part of a detail called the leichenkommando, and sought the advice of her friend, Hinda Kahan, the seventeen-year-old daughter of one of the Hasidic rabbis in Humenné. When Margie asked Hinda if she should take a job handling dead bodies, Hinda looked at her incredulously. “What’s the matter with you? Just pretend that it’s a brick. What do you care?”
Just as Margie was about to volunteer, Hinda came up with a better plan. Edita Engleman, from the first transport and also from Humenné, was working with Dr. Manci Schwalbova in the hospital and had heard the administration was about to add workers to the sewing detail. She knew Hinda’s family from home and wanted to help her get a decent job. To get work as a seamstress was lifesaving. Best of all, it meant working inside and not having to face selections anymore.
—Stay home today. I’m going to try and get you into the sewing detail, Engleman told Hinda.
When there is good fortune for one, you share it with your friends, so Hinda told Margie, “Why don’t you stay home with me? We can hide in the block, and we’ll get into the sewing detail together.” Margie told another friend of theirs.
It was a little bit like playing hooky from school, with far more disastrous consequences if they were caught, but the opportunity to get into the sewing detail seemed worth the risk.
They hid in the block, but when the count was over the kapos came looking for them. Margie and her friend got caught; Hinda did not. The two girls were forced into the very last work detail, which was overseen by one of the criminal “murderess” kapos who beat and killed girls for fun. It was “the worst detail.” And because they were the last to be collected for work, they were in the end row of girls, so the SS let the guard dogs tear at their heels and their coats, and whipped them from behind as punishment for trying to hide. Throughout the twelve-hour shift, the girls were beaten and threatened by the SS and their dogs. “We were crying all day,” says Margie.
After evening roll call, Margie and her friend returned to the block to find that there had been a selection. Anyone who had stayed “home” from work had been taken to the gas chambers. Hinda Kahan was gone.
“Edita Engelman tried to do her a favor because of the rabbi [Hilda’s father], and she knew her from home. She wanted to be helpful, and that’s what happened.”
Now Hinda was dead.
“It was bashert,” Margie says. Meant to be.
Was anything really meant to be in Auschwitz? Margie had to believe that it was; how else could she survive? Faith plays an important role in Margie’s survival narrative—she was meant to survive, so she could tell the story of Hinda Kahan. It was a fatally hard lesson to learn.
The next day, Margie pinched her cheeks so that she looked healthy when she volunteered for the “privilege of carrying corpses.” Among the other volunteers was another friend of Margie’s, who had tied a kerchief over her head so that she looked better, “but she had swollen eyes and was a candidate already, so she didn’t make it.” Survivors use phrases like “candidate” (for the gas) and “didn’t make it,” again and again, as if they were in a competition seeking the finish line. In fact, that is not far from the truth—the competition for survival was won only by the fittest and the luckiest. Reaching the finish line meant life.
ONE OF THE other girls volunteering for “decent work” in the leichenkommando was Bertha Berkowitz (#1048). Even when she had been free, Bertha had suffered from feeling cold all the time. There was no way she would survive the winter if she did not get work that was inside most of the time. At the tender age of sixteen, she was adult enough and smart enough to scheme for her survival. She weighed the pros and cons of being on the leichenkommando. Was she strong enough to lift dead bodies? Could she bear to handle the flesh of girls she knew after they had died? Was doing such work worth an extra portion of bread? Was she emotionally and psychologically strong enough to handle the task?
The key to her decision to volunteer was witnessing the first mass selection of prisoners and learning that members of the leichenkommando would be exempt from selections. This was a job that could help her survive. “It was horrible,” though. Among those volunteering with Bertha were Margie Becker (#1955), Elena Zuckermenn (#1735), and probably, Bertha’s childhood friend Peshy Steiner.
The leichenkommando was the worst of the “decent work” details requiring manual labor. If the girls could have gotten into the laundry or sewing details, the package or mail room detail, or the farming detail, they would have tried. Caring for farm animals might have been psychologically and physically easier, but the test to get into the farming detail was brutal and potentially deadly.
With delicate feaures and a complexion as fresh as the flowers she was named for, Rose (#1371) had dark blond hair that she had often worn in long braids, when she had hair. She didn’t look hardy, but she had been raised on a farm and knew how to work. Since her arrival, she had primarily worked in the farm construction detail in Harme, a few kilometers from both camps. This was a particularly brutal detail, overseen by an SS man who liked to wear a white suit instead of his uniform. They were all terrified of him, as his special form of entertainment was to throw an object outside of the boundary and order a girl to fetch it. It was a no-win situation: if the girl disobeyed the order he shot her for disobeying; if she obeyed the order he shot her for crossing the boundary and trying to escape. He wasn’t the only SS who enjoyed this ruse—Juana Bormann “the woman with the dog,” enjoyed doing the same thing, only she used her German shepherd instead of her gun to kill girls.
After the barns in Harme were finished, the SS created a physical test to discern which workers were fittest and deserved to work on the farm. Rose describes being forced to stand all day outside without moving. It was a particularly cold day, and periodically additional physical tests were given to the girls. At one point, they were forced to hold their arms out straight in front of them for an indeterminate amount of time; if their arms shook or they dropped them, they were taken away to be gassed. At the end of the day, they had to leap over a ditch. Those who completed all the tasks were then rewarded: they were moved into the newly built barrack and assigned farming tasks. Rose became responsible for raising rabbits and pheasants. She knew she was lucky to be there; she even worked under a kapo who was kind. Best of all, working in Harme meant living in a smaller, warmer barracks on-site. The food they were fed was also better. Rose describes a bright green näs-selsoppa, nettle soup, rich in vitamins.
FOR GENERAL “FACTORY” WORKERS and girls with no special skill sets, the real life-saving work was in the sorting details, now referred to by prisoners as the red or white kerchiefs. As transports arrived from all over Europe, more and more items had to be sorted, and more and more girls were needed to do the work. The trick was getting into the detail. The “uniform” was a head scarf—either red or white. There was only one way to get one of those: steal one or trade your bread.
The best jobs in camp required a higher skill set than those of the “factory” laborers. “Functionaries” could type, take shorthand, were multilingual, or had neat cursive handwriting—skills that farm girls and most teenagers lacked. Having been in camp longer than any other Jewish women, many of the more experienced Slovak girls were savvy to positions in the SS secretarial pool and had early on claimed many of those jobs. Being older and having finished high school had its advantages, but teens like Edith, Adela, Magda Amster, and Nusi and Magduska Hartmann had been robbed of a high school education. If they didn’t get into the sewing, farming, or sorting detail, their only other option was hard labor.
WE KNOW VERY LITTLE about Magduska and Nusi Hartmann’s cousin, Lenka Hertzka, and her experience working for one of the top members of the Gestapo. However, because of her position, Lenka was able to write regular postcards and letters to family and friends; she received correspondence, as well. Her cards, letters, and occasional telegrams reveal often mundane facts and requests for food, amid coded messages about family and friends. Lenka’s cards were not the by-rote lies that the other prisoners were forced to write; sometimes, her cards were not even censored. Her family’s correspondence back to her reveal confusion about her circumstances and constant questions that she could not answer.
Gift of Eugene Hartmann in memory of Lenka Hertzka, MUSEUM OF JEWISH HERITAGE, NEW YORK.
The Hertzka and Hartmann correspondence continued for the next two years. One of the first people to write was Lenka’s eight-year-old nephew, Milan:
Dear Lenke: Since everybody wrote to you already, I try my luck. We are healthy. If only our aunt [Lenka herself] were with us. We are always talking about you and Magduska.
