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Secretarial functionaries—like the Hartmanns’ cousin, Lenka Hertzka—lived outside the barbed-wire fences of Auschwitz I and Birkenau, in the basement of Stabsgebäude, the SS staff quarters. Here were real bunk beds, blankets, and even a shower. Because the secretarial girls lived and worked in close proximity to the SS, they had to be clean, well dressed, and attractive. That meant they were allowed to grow their hair. “Some even wore stockings.” Although the work they performed was physically easier, they were provided with extra portions of bread. Some went so far as to become plump.
For those working hard labor, it was difficult to see some of the same girls they had arrived with in March parading around camp with an air of superiority, with their nicely coiffed hair and civilian clothing that had been taken from Jews. “We saw that there were people who were a little bit better off than we were,” Edith says. “There were people who were repairing shoes or clothing, sitting and working in offices.” They were the lucky ones, if any prisoner in Auschwitz can be considered lucky.
Some functionaries also worked within the barbed-wire fences—block elders, room elders, scribes. When “we went out to do hard work, we had to sing. We had to go to work even if we had a fever, but they stayed inside,” Edith says. “All of the block elders survived. All of them.”
Faced with the difficult position of pleasing the SS, the kapos and their peers, block elders were forced to discipline the girls in their blocks, many of whom they had grown up with. Edith received a “few spanks” from her block elder, who was on the first transport with her. The block elder and her sister had a terrible reputation but seventy-five years later, Edith is still hesitant to reveal their last names because she does not want to bring shame on the women’s children and surviving family. The fact is, “if you survived the first transport, you most likely did something special, and that was not always nice.”
Among the functionaries, “the most important thing was to obtain a position which would lift them out of the mass and give them special privileges, a job that would protect them to a certain extent from accidental and mortal hazards, and improve the physical conditions in which they lived,” Höss confided in his diary. Auschwitz was already a cutthroat business, and among functionaries, it could be equally ruthless. It only took one misdeed to get reported and be instantly demoted back to Birkenau, or worse. According to Höss, the women “flinched from nothing, no matter how desperate, in their efforts to make such safe jobs fall vacant and then to acquire them for themselves. Victory usually went to the most unscrupulous man or woman. ‘Necessity is the mother of invention, ’ and here it was an actual question of sheer survival.”
Being granted a functionary position might save your life, but being powerless to save others—especially those you loved—created a complicated psychology for those in these coveted positions. And not everyone wanted these positions of importance. When Rena (#1716) turned down the chance to become a room elder, it was because she could not face the moral ambiguity of being in a position of power. “I can’t take bread from others who are as hungry as me; I can’t hit people suffering just like I am.” No matter what position you held in Auschwitz, whether you worked hard labor, as a block or room elder, or as a secretary to the SS, a “ ‘hard and indifferent armor’ was required to survive.”
“It frequently happened that persons who had acquired these safe positions would suddenly lose their grip, or would gradually fade away, when they learnt of the death of their closest relations. This would happen without any physical cause such as illness or bad living conditions.” Höss specifically identified this as a Jewish weakness: “The Jews have always had very strong family feelings. The death of a near relative makes them feel that their own lives are no longer worth living, and are therefore not worth fighting for.” What is surprising is that more functionaries did not give up.
Taking a functionary position meant girls might be able to help others, but it also meant they might not be well liked by the other prisoners. How could they be? They got more food, worked fewer hours, and did not have to endure selections. They also faced a moral conundrum—they were working for the very system that was liquidating their families, their culture, and their communities. Although many functionaries used their positions to help where they could, the sad truth is that a number of them did not act ethically or morally. For good reason they were ridiculed and despised by those in the general population. Survival and morality were often at cross-purposes in Auschwitz.
Of the girls from the early transports who got higher functioning positions, Dr. Manci Schwalbova writes, “they were often young girls whose whole family had been murdered, and some of them became reckless, having been infatuated by the experience in the most difficult period of camp. Some of them actually took delight in the exercise of the power which had been [given] to them. Luckily, they were few in number.” She immediately adds that “in all departments you could have found women who did not hesitate to risk their own life to save other’s lives.”
Dr. Manci Schwalbova was one of those risk takers. It was essential that the Jewish doctors have access to medicines and extra food or they couldn’t help prisoners survive. Malaria was rampant in the summer months, and quinine was needed. Typhus required rest and hydration; lemon water was the best prisoners could scrounge. An underground network was set up, which included many functionaries willing to risk their lives to help others by smuggling food and medicine into the hospital. In this respect, one of the most important of the work details was the “package room, where parcels were arriving for already dead women.” From there, workers smuggled “unclaimed” food and medicines into the hospital to help the ill recover.
Block elders were also able to smuggle medicine to the girls in their blocks. Of course, they required payment, and that meant many girls went hungry to get something as simple as salve for a cut to prevent infection. Nothing was free anymore.
Those who suffered most were the girls who did not move up the ladder to better jobs and continued to do hard labor outside, demolishing buildings, making roads, digging clay to make bricks, making bricks. Standing knee deep in water, Lea and Edith continued to clean out swamps and drainage ditches, one of the worst details. As fall descended and it got colder, Edith began to feel an ache in her knee that would not go away.
Chapter Twenty-three
Birkenau really began the death camp.
—EDITH GROSMAN
ON SEPTEMBER 2, DR. JOHANN PAUL KREMER—a seriously unattractive, wild-eyed, balding monster of a man—arrived to replace one of the camp doctors who had fallen ill from typhus. On his first day of orientation, the geneticist and professor of anatomy from the University of Münster observed the disinfection of prisoners, the delousing of a block with Zyklon B gas, phenol injections that killed sick prisoners, and the gassing of 545 French men and boys and 455 women and girls. A meticulous diarist, Kremer entered on a pristine page of paper that night: “Present for the first time at a special operation, outside at three o’clock in the morning. In comparison with this, Dante’s Inferno seems almost like a comedy. Not for nothing is Auschwitz called the camp of extermination!” It did not seem to disturb him in the least.
At noon a few days later, Dr. Kremer accompanied the Troop Doctor Master Sergeant Thilo to Block 25, where skeletal women and girls were “sitting on the ground” in the courtyard outside. Hanging off their bodies were the filthy, threadbare uniforms of Russian soldiers. Horrified by the hollow-eyed, living ghosts, Dr. Thilo turned to his colleague and said, “We are here at the anus mundi [anus of the world].” It was women he was referring to.
The “stumbling corpses” in the courtyard of Block 25 were known as musselmen (racist slang meaning Muslims), which meant a prisoner beyond hope. These ill and starved men and women were more feared than pitied. No one wanted to come close to these physical reminders of what every prisoner was in danger of becoming: a modern-day zombie, a golem, a human being becoming inhuman. Infatuated with their power to dehumanize and destroy, the SS called them a “terrible sight,” “the most ghastly of the ghastly.” Prisoners, equally terrified by the sight of these frail skeletons, tried to be kinder, saying the women were “not quite alive, yet not quite dead.” There was a deep-seated fear among prisoners of becoming so physically frail and spiritually obliterated, becoming one of those for whom “the spirit God breathed into their souls has been utterly sucked out.” They feared it was contagious. In fact, disease was largely responsible for these prisoners’ deterioration.
Dr. Kremer witnessed these undead being forced onto flatbed trucks and transported outside the women’s section toward the gas chambers. Here, they were not even allowed the dignity of entering the changing room, where Jews disrobed before entering the “showers.” Instead, they were forced to take their clothes off outside so that their uniforms could be burned instead of disinfected. Bared to the elements, some spirit arose from within and they pleaded for their lives.
—Have pity, they cried and begged the SS men. “They were all driven into the gas chamber and gassed.”
“GIRLS WERE DYING daily, by the tens and hundreds,” Edith says. Even if a girl couldn’t walk, she had to come out to roll call and get counted before being carted off to the gas. “I knew a girl from Humenné who was brought to the count in a wheelbarrow, the same wheelbarrow that was being used to bring bricks from buildings.” She does not remember the girl’s name.
When girls didn’t have the strength to get up and go to roll call, they were beaten by the block and room elders. One girl had been beaten for not getting up to work and was left sitting against the wall on her koya. They counted her without realizing that she had died. Margie Becker says, “She was sitting with her eyes open” for a few days. Nobody noticed.
The battering-ram winds of fall swept off the stark steppe and into the barracks of Birkenau, which were less airtight than those in Auschwitz. It cut through the cracks in the mortar, bit the tender flesh of the poorly dressed girls. With no natural windbreak, howling winds haunted their exhausted sleep. Threadbare blankets—one per three girls—barely covered their frail bodies. As they huddled closely together for warmth, it only took one cough on the blanket to pass bacteria. Lice crawled from one sleeping girl to another, spreading disease without prejudice—it killed SS and prisoners alike.
Typhus is a disease that thrives on war, famine, and disaster, and Auschwitz was a perfect storm for an epidemic: it had overcrowding, a lack of hygiene, and body lice. “The battle against pests was central, and [they] became a deadly enemy,” kapo Luise Mauer remembers. With no way to shower, bathe, or launder their filthy uniforms, prisoners were at their mercy. Despite monthly delousings, typhus spread undeterred, moving from rat to prisoner, from prisoner to prisoner, from prisoner to captor. “In Auschwitz, whole streets are struck down with typhus,” Dr. Kremer wrote in his diary. “First Lieutenant Schwartz is sick with it.”
“The girls’ camp suffered the most. The poor wretches were covered with lice and fleas,” Rudolf Vrba would write with Alfréd Israel Wetzler in “The Auschwitz Report” a year and a half later. The camp was ill-fitted with sanitary installations for the number of women using the facilities. The only potable water was in “one small lavatory, to which a common prisoner did not have access.”
The ill and dying were so plentiful that they were discarded outside, behind the hospital blocks. Left lying there, these unfortunate girls and women were gathered up like so much wood to stoke the crematorium. One day not long after they had arrived in Birkenau, Margie Becker heard her name being called from among the dying on the ground in the hot sun.
“Water, please . . .”
In their 1938–1939 class photo taken in Humenné, Zena Haber stood in the center of the back row, towering over the other girls. Slouching forward, she looks uncomfortable with her height and her body. It must not have been popular to smile in photos in those days, as almost no one did. Hands are clasped in laps or behind backs. Only Edith, standing in the back row near Zena, is open armed; her hands touch the girl sitting below her, a friend whose name she no longer remembers. Zena’s light hair curls back off her face. Chin down, she appears to be glaring at the camera, but there is just enough of an upturn to her mouth to imagine a budding smile, had the camera clicked just a second later.
“She was a beautiful tall girl,” Margie says. Now her friend since girlhood, a fellow teenager, was dying.
It was a hot day. The sun beat down on their bodies. Zena Haber had sores on her body and a canker on her lips. There was no water. No mercy. Just a beautiful young woman dying of thirst and disease, neglected by the world. Margie felt forlorn and guilt-ridden—she had nothing to give her friend, had no way to help. And she was afraid to touch her. What if she caught Zena’s disease? Torn between her own sense of self-preservation and her desire to aid her friend, Margie apologized to Zena and scurried away.
TYPHUS CAME ON ABRUPTLY, often while girls were at work. Joan Rosner’s joints ached so badly that she had to stop digging in order to catch her breath. Leaning on her shovel, she felt pain sear through her limbs.
“Straighten up!” one of her friends whispered.
Joan (#1188) tried to right herself, but she was too weak.
“Attack!” the SS woman ordered. They heard a scrambling of paws against dirt. Its hot, stinking breath slapped her face as the dog clamped down on her arm, which had risen spontaneously to protect her throat. The dog’s teeth sank into her bicep as she tried to defend herself. For some reason, the SS woman called the dog off, and he did not kill her. Bleeding from the neck and arm, Joan resumed shoveling like mad. Head down. Digging. Digging. Nonstop. Through the pain. Blood throbbed in her temples. Feverish. Digging. At the end of the day, Joan made it through the gate without being called to one side, then collapsed onto the koya, where she slept without getting any bread. In the middle of the night she sat up in her bunk.
“I am going home.” She crawled off the shelf.
“Joan! Where are you going?” one of her friends called after her.
“My mother is waiting for me in the carriage,” she said matter-of-factly and walked out of the block.
Going outside after curfew was dangerous, but her shelf-mate woke a few other girls, and they ran after Joan, who was walking purposefully toward the electric fence and what she thought was her mother’s carriage.
They grabbed her and struggled to keep her from reaching the wire. Feverish and delusional, she fought them.
—Where’s my mother? she asked.
—What are you doing here?
She looked around at the camp. The watchtowers. The searchlights.
—Where am I?
Under cover of night, they sneaked Joan to the camp hospital. She needed salve and medicine for the dog bites and cool compresses to bring down the fever tormenting her mind. Selections were still a relatively new occurrence, so the girls probably did not know that Joan could be killed for convalescing. All they knew was that she would be killed if she tried to go to work in the morning.
Enter Dr. Manci Schwalbova. Manci had a soft spot in her heart for the Slovak girls and tried to do whatever she could to help them. But at that point, the only medication available for Jewish prisoners was charcoal. We “got charcoal for everything,” Joan says. She was lucky to get that; by October, Jews would not be allowed any medical intervention at all.
The hospital might not have been able to offer much in the way of medicine, but at least Joan was able to rest in an actual bed and get hydrated. Her fever abated, and the puncture wounds from the dog’s teeth closed up. But life was never a sure thing in Auschwitz. Just as she was beginning to recover, one of the doctors came through the ward and chose ten girls to come to his office, where he was beginning to conduct experiments. Joan was one of those girls. Fortunately, when they arrived at his office, the electricity had gone out. The doctor sent the girls back to the hospital and said, “Come back tomorrow.”
Joan wasn’t that sick! She knew her life depended on not returning to the hospital and went straight back to her block, to disappear into the anonymity of the thousands of women around her. The respite had helped her recover, but for weeks afterward, Joan’s girlfriends had to help her past the SS, who hovered like vultures at the gate, eager to feed ill prisoners to the gas. She had five friends she depended on. They were always together—always helping each other. She does not report their names in her testimony.
“To have someone who watched over you was very important,” Martha Mangel (#1741) says. “Everybody watched out for somebody.” For Martha, that somebody would be her eldest cousin, Frances Mangel-Tack, who had arrived on the fourth transport and gotten a position early on as a block elder, like her cousin, Frida Zimmerspitz. Both block elders were attractive, smart, and devious. Eta Zimmerspitz (#1756) says that soon after they arrived in camp, Frida complained to one of the SS men that the kapos had stolen their food and the man sneaked her some ham. “We wept,” Eta recalls, but “we ate it.”
Frida became block elder for Block 18 and gave all three of her sisters positions as room elders or block scribes. Their cousin, Frances, would not remain a block elder. Instead she would become one of the few Jewish kapos in Auschwitz, a position that would make her infamous among prisoners.
ROSH HASHANAH, THE Jewish New Year and High Holy days, arrived with the first blush of fall. Golden birch leaves flickered to the ground, covering the mass burial pits with blankets of yellow. Murmurations of starlings swooped above a sea of suffering humanity. With new arrivals coming into the camp, the first girls were able to learn when Yom Kippur started. As the sun went down behind the watchtowers, many girls, despite their gnawing hunger, began to fast.
