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“What did I fast from?” Bertha Berkowitz (#1048) asks. “We fasted all the year, but I fasted.”
Fasting renewed their faith and spirit, gave them courage to resist the temptation of despair. Despite the daily injustices they were suffering, the SS could not take away their faith.
It was not unusual for the SS to use Jewish holidays as an opportunity to punish Jews and foul sacred traditions. A few weeks after Yom Kippur, the Jewish harvest holiday arrived. Sukkot is considered a happy celebration of harvest and plenty, so it was the perfect moment to make a harvest of Jews. Starting on the first of October and over the next three days, the women’s camp did no work at all. Instead, the girls were forced to stand at attention all day long—naked—waiting to march past the selection committee, which gave the thumb to life or the thumb to death—to the left or to the right. By the end of Sukkot, 5,812 women had been sent to the gas. The hospital ward was empty.
Chapter Twenty-four
The bonds between these women were unbreakable.
They were extraordinary. They all Saved each other.
—ORNA TUCKMAN, daughter
of Marta F. Gregor (#1796)
EMOTIONALLY AND PHYSICALLY, BEING IN the leichenkommando would be a tough assignment. Bertha’s friends asked her, “Why would you want to do something like this?”
“I am afraid for winter,” Bertha explained.
She was right to be afraid. At least in the leichenkommando she no longer had to march out and work from dawn to dusk. She got a double portion of food and was relieved of standing for hours every morning and night for roll call. Being housed in Block 27, which was next to the hospital wards, she became close with Dr. Manci Schwalbova and the other Jewish female doctors. All of them kept a close eye on the girls working in the leichenkommando because it was a high-risk job. Fortunately, one of the SS doctors was in love with one of the Jewish female doctors, and she got him to give the girls gloves to wear while they handled the corpses. She also convinced him that the girls needed to wash their hands with soap, so they were granted permission to go into the one washroom with potable water and wash up. After they had handled contaminated corpses all day, this was essential to maintain their health.
But those hygienic measures were not what Bertha remembers most. After handling the dead all day, feeling the greasy residue from the smoke and ash falling down from the crematorium chimneys and the dust kicked up by the trucks as they carted the dead to the crematoriums, what Bertha remembers was washing her face with clean water. “You have no idea what it means to wash your face.”
Somehow, Margie Becker (#1955) was able to organize a container and fill it with water. When she brought the water “home” to the block, she hid it, thinking she would use it every day to wash her hands and face—that was how important feeling clean was to her. “But I didn’t have the heart. People were dying of thirst. [I] couldn’t just go waste water on washing a face.” She gave the water to the less fortunate in her block.
The daily routine for those in the leichenkommando was vastly different than that of the rest of the details in camp. In the morning, the Stubenmädchen—or chambermaids—would pile the dead outside their blocks before roll call so that the numbers of dead were tallied. After the work details marched out, Bertha and the others in the leichenkommando began to collect the bodies and carried them to the leichenhalle, a storage shed behind Block 25 where the bodies were kept until the men arrived with trucks to take them to the crematoriums.
The protocol for recording women’s deaths had started in August, not long after the girls had been relocated to Birkenau. A scribe accompanied the leichenkommando on their daily rounds, recording the registration numbers of the dead so that they could be removed from the camp register. By the next roll call, the SS knew exactly how many prisoners were still living and working in the camp.
Collecting the bodies of those who had grabbed the wire in the night could only be done after the work details had marched out of camp for their day of work and the electricity could be turned off at the main switch. Once it was safe, Bertha and the others had to release the fingers, stiff with rigor mortis, from their death grasp and emancipate the charred bodies of friends and fellow prisoners from the wires.
The bodies of suicide victims were not limp—they were puppets dangling, grotesquely stiff. They did not fold neatly into wheelbarrows. Limbs stuck out at uncompromising angles. Though the Talmud states that taking one’s own life is against Jewish tradition, suicides were frequent. “I lost a lot of friends on the wires,” Linda Reich (#1173) says. It was hard to witness, but in the end the girls who chose that way out were not blamed by their friends. It was one of the few ways you could control your own life, by deciding your own death.
WHEN THE GAS chambers were backed up and couldn’t take any more bodies, the sick were taken to Block 25, which was heavily guarded by SS. It was usually full of ill girls and women who had not made it into the hospital or had tried to hide instead of going to work. Block 25—the sick block—was really a death block.
One of the hardest parts of working in the leichenkommando was finding your friends’ or family’s corpses, or worse, finding them dying in Block 25. Factory workers in an industry where death was a by-product, Bertha and the others did their best to respect their dead friends. “We would be very careful with their bodies. I asked for forgiveness of the dead person before we threw it on the truck to be taken to the crematorium,” Bertha says. In the beginning, she tried to remember the dates of friends who died, “just in case I survived, I should be able to tell [their families] what date it was, so they could honor the anniversary of death.”
Not everything the girls of the leichenkommando did was admirable. Margie confesses that she sometimes smuggled clothing from dead girls and sold their sweaters, socks and shoes for extra bread or margarine. One day, as she was clearing out the dead in Block 25, Margie heard Klary Atles’s voice among the dying.
“I don’t have a blanket,” Klary said as Margie walked by. She barely recognized the rabbi’s daughter who had tried to feed their spirits with her fervent faith in those first days in camp. Looking up at Margie with sweet compassion, Klary whispered, “I’m so sorry I didn’t know you at home.”
Although the community of Humenné was close, Klary and Margie came from different social classes and had not had much opportunity to become acquainted. Not only were their ages different, but Klary’s parents had sent her to a private school in Budapest. Margie had not even finished high school. “We had different worlds, you know, so I had nothing to do with her.” They were now equals in nothingness. Death has no class or status.
Helpless to save Klary, Margie could only give what little she had, not a blanket to fight the chills, but the assurance that she too wished they had spent more time together in freedom and been friends, and a last comfort of human connection.
AFTER THE MORNING shift of collecting the dead from the night before, the leichenkommando girls had their lunch break and an extra portion of bread with their soup. At two o’clock in the afternoon, the men arrived in a truck at the back of Block 25 to empty the leichenhalle. As the drivers waited, the girls lifted the corpses they had collected and carried them to the back of the truck. They worked quickly. The leichenhalle was not the sort of place one wanted to linger, but whenever they found one of their friends among the dead, all of the girls stopped to pray. “We asked for forgiveness and said the Kaddish in Yiddish before their bodies were taken to the crematoriums.”
Their final shift was at the end of the day, when the prisoners returned in columns from their work details. Those who had died, been injured, or murdered were left outside the gate so that their numbers could be recorded. The bodies were then moved either directly to the crematorium or stored in the leichenhalle. Selections were “all the time” now. “Marching in and marching out, they had selections for us. You didn’t have to be tall. You didn’t have to be nice. Whoever they wanted, they took.” The SS men often selected whole groups of healthy girls simply because they had the power to kill whomever they wished.
WORKING FOR THE leichenkommando may have given the girls extra food and allowed them to escape selections, but it did not protect them from typhus. Block 25 was rife with infectious disease, and though they had access to water for washing, the lice that carried the disease moved under the cover of sleep. One day, Margie walked past a glass window and caught sight of her reflection. “I looked like I was two hundred years old. I couldn’t have looked older. I just couldn’t believe it was me.”
As she fell into the fever and nausea of typhus, the girls in her block hid her. “I gave them my bread, of course, because I was unable to eat.” Fortunately, the work she did protected her so that she was able to recover. Later on, Margie reciprocated by helping those who had helped her.
Chapter Twenty-five
The barrack is nowadays overflowed with women of
various nationalities, full of hubbub, din and arguments.
There they are—Jewesses from Poland, Greece,
Slovakia; there are Poles, Swarthy Gypsies, and dark
little Croatians. They don’t understand one another.
They fight for Space, for blankets, for bowls, for a glass
of water. Foreign-language shouts and curses can be
heard constantly. One cannot fall asleep in here.
—SEWERYNA SZMAGLEWSKA (#22090)
IN 1942, THE SORTING DEPOT was in Auschwitz I, or the “mother camp,” which had grown from one barrack to four. It was “so full of clothing from the whole of Europe,” that the SS had to continually expand the area. Because the packages of clothing were shipped away from camp, the prisoners began to refer to the detail as Canada, a place far from the strife of war-torn Europe. A country still free.
After the men delivered the luggage from the transports, the girls in the white and red kerchiefs opened the bags and sorted the items inside. For the most part, the girls in the white kerchiefs sorted coats. The girls in the red kerchiefs sorted everything else.
Linda Reich (#1173) was responsible for sorting underwear and was known to smuggle up to five pairs at a time back to Birkenau so that girls wearing dresses could maintain some modesty and comfort. She doled out what she could to the girls in the block, but “you know how many things you can bring? Three—when you have thousands and thousands?” But she “gave it to whomever came.” By now bread was currency, and desperate girls would willingly give up their daily meal for undergarments. Linda was one of those rare girls who did not trade necessities for bread. Others were not so generous—unless, of course, they knew each other from the same town or village. Bread may have been coinage, but friendship was life. You needed both to survive.
THE MORTALITY RATE for girls and women had escalated once they were in Birkenau, not only because the conditions were dangerously unhygienic, but because every week one or two large selections took place. “Be ready tomorrow morning in the row of white kerchiefs because one is dying,” an old friend of Helena Citron’s said, slipping a white kerchief into her hands. “By the morning, they will put her outside.” It was the kind of news that in the normal world would bring sorrow; in Auschwitz it was good news, at least for Helena.
After roll call, Helena secured the white kerchief over her head and hurried over to where the sorting detail was lining up. A few of the girls in the white kerchiefs looked her way, but no one said anything. The girl she replaced was already a memory.
It was a three-kilometer march from Birkenau to Auschwitz I. And every morning, the girls with the white and red kerchiefs headed out the gate and marched back to the “mother camp,” where they sorted clothes and other items until dark, and then marched the three kilometers back to Birkenau. Male prisoners working in Canada observed that “every day, new girls replaced those who had disappeared.”
Marching out of the gate down the concrete road that led away from Birkenau, Helena stepped in time with the others. Head high, chest out, she looked just like the girls around her except for one detail—she was wearing clappers. Wearing clappers was a sure sign that she did not belong in the white kerchiefs, and the resounding clunk of wood against dirt attracted the kapo’s attention.
“Who are you?” Rita, the kapo, demanded.
Helena showed her the number on her arm
—1971.
—You don’t belong here! You will be reported.
Helena’s nerves shredded. Every clunk of her clappers sent a shock through her bones and brought a glare from the kapo. Upon arriving at the sorting shed in Auschwitz I, the girls were counted again, and Rita ordered Helena to follow her into the office where the overseer of the detail sat at his desk. Rita informed him that prisoner #1971 had sneaked into the detail.
SS-Unterscharführer Franz Wunsch’s temper flared. He blamed the kapo for not sending Helena back to Birkenau at once and accused her of not doing her job.
Listening to the two argue, “you’d think I was here in a life of pleasures,” Helena says.
“I discovered her on the way!” Rita justified.
“How did you find out?”
“She’s wearing flip-flops!” She pointed to Helena’s ill-shod feet. Helena’s stomach sank.
“Tomorrow! I want her tomorrow in the marsh!”
The marshes, where Edith and Lea were suffering, were fast becoming the punishment detail, because working in the grime and silt where bodies and ashes were being dumped made girls deathly ill.
Helena was sent back to the sorting table with Wunsch’s death sentence over her head. The others took pity on her and gently showed her what to do, whispering encouragement and hope so that she would not lose herself to tears. Standing in front of a pile of clothes, Helena felt despair descend but tried to focus on the seams and folds of the coats in front of her. How could something as meaningless as a kerchief cost her her life?
All she wanted was to work under a roof, out of the wind and rain and snow. All she wanted was a job that allowed her to fold clothes, not make bricks, or dig clay, or push wagons through the mud, or wade through the marshes, doomed to a slow but certain death. Around her, girls were sneaking tidbits of food found in pockets. Did she dare to steal anything? She was already going to die. What was death twice over for an extra morsel of food?
The morning passed slowly. Helena stared a hole into the clothes she folded. Head down. Deliberate. Not daring to look up at the girls around her. At noon, the kettles of soup arrived, and the girls lined up with their red bowls. And here the story divides into two different versions. In the first version, it was Wunsch’s birthday and Rita wanted someone to sing to him. However, Wunsch’s birthday was on March 21, and from Helena’s own testimony and that of other eyewitnesses, we know that she was in the white kerchiefs in the fall of 1942. So what really happened?
Here is a possible theory: Entertaining the SS was one of the ways kapos garnered favor, so as the girls were sipping their soup for lunch, it is possible that Rita announced she was looking for performing artists to entertain Wunsch—she needed to get back on his good side, after the verbal thrashing she had received that morning. So she announced that she needed girls who could sing and dance, and ordered them to eat quickly so that they could practice before surprising him in his office. Helena’s friends knew that she had a beautiful voice and wanted to help her stay within the white kerchiefs. They announced that Helena could sing.
Rita looked critically at #1971. “You can sing?”
Helena’s eyes stayed low on the ground. “No.”
“Sing,” the girls around her whispered encouragingly.
“You will sing!” Rita demanded. And that was that.
“Helena was very beautiful, and had a very, very nice voice. All of the Citrons did,” Edith remembers. Considering Edith’s own lovely voice, that is high praise indeed.
Helena had learned a romantic song from some German Jews, and that was the song she decided to sing. She waited off to one side while a few girls did their dance number, and then there was silence. Helena cleared her throat and softly began to sing the love song she had learned from the German prisoners. What was love in this place of death? What was life? Despite it all, she sang with her heart. The last note hung in the air. Blinking back a mist of tears, she tried not to quiver in front of the man who had ordered her death in the marshes.
“Wieder Singen, sing again,” Wunsch said, and then he did something unheard of. He said, “Bitte? Please.”
Lifting her eyes from the floor, she saw the rank on his uniform, the brass buttons that were so polished they reflected her face. She had no voice to respond.
“Please, sing the song again.”
She did.
At the end of the workday, Helena folded the last of the coats in her stack and sighed. That was that. Her life was over. A shadow loomed over her as the SS-Unterscharführer walked past. A note dropped at her fingertips.
It said Liebe. Love.
Then he ordered Rita to make sure that #1971 was at work in the sorting detail tomorrow.
The order clipped over Helena’s head like the crack of a whip. The kapo could do nothing against the order. Helena was in the white kerchiefs, whether she still wanted to be or not.
LIKE MOST SS, Wunsch was volatile and violent. Helena feared and hated him. But rejecting an SS officer could result in something far worse than accepting his advance; he could have her killed. Terrified, Helena left the work detail with another death sentence on her lovely head. And now began the real dilemma.
“I thought I would rather be dead than be involved with an SS man,” Helena says. “For a long time afterwards, there was just hatred. I couldn’t even look at him.”
