999, page 22
A year younger than Helena, the dashing, baby-faced Wunsch with his soulful eyes would have turned any German girl’s eye. After getting shot on the Russian front, he had been reassigned to Auschwitz and was easily recognized by the girls because “he had one leg shorter than the other” and limped.
Over the next few weeks, only a word or two passed between them. He might “see me with swollen eyes because they beat me badly or told me a word in my ear that was worse than a knife in the brain, and ask ‘What happened to you?’ ”
Afraid that if she told him who had beaten or abused her she would be blamed and sent to the gas, Helena never answered him. He was certainly not going to reprimand an SS or kapo for doing what he himself was expected to do—for what he himself did do to other prisoners.
One must wonder about the price girls paid if they rejected sexual advances by the SS men—and women. Those who somehow maintained their allure, despite having no hair and being painfully thin, must have been rare, but the remnants of their beauty may have brought them unwanted attention and inappropriate intentions.
The mystery is what happened to the beautiful redhead, Adela Gross. That fall, when Adela stepped in front of the SS self-proclaimed gods during one of the mass selections, one of the men’s thumbs went against her. This was not a democracy—one thumb against you robbed you of life. But why did he choose Adela for the gas? She was young, still had flesh on her beautiful bones. She was healthy. “According to their mood they selected whole groups of healthy girls.” Could it have been that random? Some SS did delight in selecting beautiful and healthy girls for the gas. Or is it possible that she had rebuffed an SS’s advances and paid the ultimate price for taking the moral high ground?
Rena Kornreich (#1716) never forgot watching Adela walk proudly away from the side of the living to the flatbed trucks already full of girls condemned to death. She comforted some. She helped girls weak with fear and incapable of crawling onto the flatbeds to their feet. Her dignity lodged in Rena’s heart and memory forever.
We do not know what Adela’s number was. We do not know what day she died. “It was early” in Birkenau, Edith says, but Edith did not see Adela get selected. There were thousands of girls in camp and no way to witness everything. Survival was an all-consuming struggle. One day you noticed that you hadn’t seen one of your friends in a while, and that was when you knew. She was there then she was gone. How was unbearable to ponder. Where was undeniable. It would take seventy years for Lou Gross to discover what happened to his cousin Adela.
ALTHOUGH BY THIS point many of the first girls had been lucky enough to get “decent jobs,” Edith and Lea had not; they continued to work outside, clearing roads and ponds. Their feet were cold and their skin had cracked. Then Edith’s clappers wore out on the bottom. “The sole was gone and I was walking on stone and having not to say, ‘Ouch!’ in front of the SS.” Desperate for help, she asked Helena to smuggle a new pair of shoes out of the sorting detail.
“I don’t know how to do it,” Helena told her. “I’m too scared.”
Edith suggested that Helena ask one of the men to grab some for her.
“If I do that, after the war he will ask me to marry him because of your shoes!”
“That was Helena for you,” Edith says, shaking her head with mild disgust. “She was so focused on herself.” She went to Margie Becker instead.
Margie not only smuggled shoes to Edith and Lea, she got them socks as well. In the real world, shoes may seem a small comfort, but in Auschwitz they could save your life. Working outside immediately became more bearable and safer. Their feet were protected from debris and cuts, and with the threat of winter around the corner, they would be protected from the snow and the frostbite sure to strike those who were still shod in clappers.
More and more, girls were being selected by the SS as they returned from work at night. Standing by the entrance of Birkenau, SS officers watched them march past and picked out girls for the slightest blemish. The increasing randomness of selections was terrifying. If SS Lagerführer Maria Mandel caught a girl even looking at her, she was dead. None of the old-timers ever looked up. No newcomer survived if she did.
Even if you made it through the gate, you weren’t safe. One night, a girl from the first transport was simply walking to her block when an SS man shouted, “You!”
“She was healthy, but they didn’t care,” Edith remembers. “They would grab them as they were walking by so they could make their quota.”
There was a quota? There was indeed.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Postcard image taken from Eugene Hartmann interview, 1996. USC SHOAH FOUNDATION—THE INSTITUTE FOR VISUAL HISTORY AND EDUCATION; sfi.usc.edu.
WITHIN EIGHT WEEKS of his Christian values speech in August, President Tiso decided to slow the deportation of Jews. Of course, over two-thirds of Slovakia’s Jewish population was already either dead or working as slave laborers in any number of Slovak or Polish camps, and the Slovak government owed the Third Reich millions for having “rehomed” them. It was a cost the Slovak Assembly realized “deeply interfere[d] with state finances” and future economic development.
The end of the deportations brought relief for those who had not been removed from their homes, and who were under the conviction that the Presidential exemptions would protect them. Safe on the family farm, the Hartmann family continued to correspond with Lenka Hertzka. One of her earliest postcards is written in pencil and has a purple German postage stamp of the Führer. It is postmarked in red ink: Auschwitz Oberschlesien (Upper Silesia), the region in Poland where Auschwitz is located.
November 28, 1942
My Dears,
First of all I want to send you birthday wishes, even if they are a bit too early but good wishes get even better with time. I also wish you good health and joy and that the good Lord gives you strength to continue working. Here, the winter is upon us and I think it will soon be the same at home with you. In the evening I travel in my thoughts to the town and remember the old familiar places.
Lenka
The writing is so faded the salutation is almost indecipherable, but the postcard is addressed to Ivan Rauschwerger’s uncle, Adolf. Ivan does not know how Lenka Hertzka knew his uncle.
WORKING IN CANADa did not make a prisoner exempt from illness or death, but it did offer ways to hide sick friends. Sometimes a short respite was all one needed to recover. Ida Eigerman (#1930) was working in one of the kerchief details when she came down with typhus.
The trick to getting past the guards when you were very ill was to be sandwiched between two other prisoners who helped you walk upright. In this way, prisoners were able to slip past the eyes of the SS seeking to make their gassing quotas by removing the ill and infirm from the ranks of laborers and replacing them with new slave laborers from Jewish ghettos in France, Belgium, Greece, Holland . . . .
Once in the sorting barrack, Ida was hidden under piles of clothing so that she could sleep through the day and recover her strength. Throughout the day, the girls would check on her and slip her some water or a bit of food they had found in a pocket before going back to work. At the end of the day, when the SS weren’t looking, they helped her out of the clothing pile and through the selection process as they entered Birkenau. If they didn’t protect each other, who would? It was the only way to survive. This is what women did for each other. This is what women did for men, too.
In the fall of 1942, Rudolf Vrba was carrying luggage from the transports to the sorting barracks, where he got to know many of the young women in the white and red kerchiefs. As the typhus epidemic ripped through the men’s and the women’s camps, Rudi became one of its victims. It struck aggressively while he was carrying suitcases to the sorting detail. For three mornings in a row, his friends propped him up between them as they marched past the SS guards to work. Once past the SS, they snuck him over to where the Slovak girls were sorting. The girls hid him, just as they had hidden Ida, in enormous piles of clothes.
Feverish and dehydrated, he was unaware of much, but throughout the day, the girls took turns sneaking him a little lemon and sugar water. They even administered some sort of pills. Surviving typhus was a bit like Russian roulette since it took whom it wanted with little rhyme or reason. A few days later, he was placed in the sick-bay and actual medicine was administered to reduce his fever. But it was the spiritual sustenance the Slovak girls gave him that raised “what little remained of my morale.”
IT BEGAN WITH A HEADACHE and muscles so stiff and aching that Edith could barely move. She was nauseated and felt chills one moment, and a burning fever the next. If the SS had made her stick her tongue out, they would have seen the telltale spots and sent her to the gas. She could not eat and fell into a stupor. Everything hurt, even her eyes. “The memory is so alive, so vivid. I feel it when I speak about it. I see myself. I see Lea pulling me to work, telling me, ‘Stand straight.’ ” Edith could not stomach anything but liquids, so Lea gave Edith her tea and soup and ate Edith’s bread in return. “I must have had a fever of forty-one degrees Celsius, and I was going to work lifting bricks for buildings.”
Edith’s body struggled against the infection for several weeks; then she woke up one morning and felt alive again. The fog of fever had broken. And she was ravenously hungry for solid food. Staring up at the bare wooden beams above their bunk, she wondered what month it was and felt a faint smile of relief. Turning to her sister, she whispered the good news, “Lea, I am hungry!”
Glassy-eyed and pale, Lea looked at her little sister. “But I am not.”
NOW THE ROLES REVERSED. It was Edith making sure that Lea got extra portions of tea and soup, while Edith ate Lea’s bread.
Typhus is not passed from one person to another; it is passed through lice. There are several strains, though. And in a place like Birkenau, it would have been easy to contract all three, because the carriers for all three infections were present: lice, rats, and mites.
For the first two weeks after Lea fell ill, Edith propped up her sister as they headed out to work. Still weak and recovering from her own illness, Edith had to pull Lea up off the wood shelves that served as their bed, help her stand through roll call, and then steer her past the SS to the marsh cleaning detail. The detail Helena had been threatened with was regular fare for Edith and Lea, and it had taken a heavy toll on the Friedman girls. As they scooped paper and bottles out of the cold water, their hands and feet cramped in the damp. When it rained and the temperature dropped, they pulled their hems up above their knees, but the water was so deep that their dresses still got wet. When they came out of the water icicles formed on their clothes. And winter was closing in.
Occasionally, it was possible to hide from work by slipping onto the top shelves and hiding under the thin blankets for the day. If you were lucky, your block and room elders allowed you to stay there unhampered. If you were unlucky, and the SS searched the blocks, you could get caught and sent to Block 25 or directly to the gas, as Hinda Kahan had been.
Lea had been ill for two weeks, but instead of recovering her strength, she was becoming weaker and less responsive to Edith’s pleas to get up and go to work. Finally, one morning, she could not even lift her head. The fight had gone out of her. Anyone who has been that ill knows the feeling. Unable to move, your body as heavy as stone, you need to do nothing. You can do nothing. But rest was a luxury not available to Jews.
Frightened by her sister’s refusal to rise, Edith begged, “Lea, you have to get up. Come on.”
Lea could barely sway her head from side to side in refusal.
“Maybe I could have done more,” Edith still frets, but she was a teenager, alone in a hostile world that was not designed for survival. She had no idea what else she could do beyond give Lea her tea. Her soup. Her prayers. In her teenage mind, Lea had to recover. Lea was the strong one. Edith was the wisp of a girl that their mother worried about.
Helena and a few other girls from the white kerchiefs were living in Block 13 with Edith and Lea. One of them must have seen how hard it was for Edith and got a white kerchief for her to wear so she could get into the sorting detail. Since Edith already had good shoes, she did not have to worry about clappers drawing the unwanted attention of the kapo, Rita.
Edith needed this lighter work to recover her own strength. She also needed to get extra food for her sister, and maybe an extra white kerchief. If she could just get Lea into the sorting detail, maybe Lea would recover her health. Time was running out. It would only take one SS guard to find Lea hiding in the block. Full of plans to rescue her sister, Edith marched out with Helena the next morning and headed back to Auschwitz I, where they sorted coats together. At least, one of them sorted coats.
Edith had heard rumors that one of the girls was having an affair with an SS man. Now, standing at a long table, emptying pockets of food and other possessions, she saw Helena making eyes at the handsome young SS officer who oversaw their detail. The looks that passed between the two were electric. When Helena disappeared from the sorting table and slipped up into the mountains of clothes around them, everyone focused on their work and pretended not to notice. A little while later, SS Wunsch made his way to a high shelf to join her. Edith was shocked, because the Citron family was strictly Orthodox. But who was she to judge? “She loved this guy,” Edith says. “They were both in love.”
There is a photograph of Helena in her striped prison dress, smiling broadly into the camera. Her thick dark hair falls just past her shoulders. Her face is full, unpinched, unstarved. Behind her is the backdrop of Auschwitz. It must be the only picture of a prisoner truly smiling in Auschwitz-Birkenau. She looks not only happy but in love.
AT THE END of the day, Edith had hidden a few bits of food in her pockets, but Lea needed more than food. She needed medicine. But even Dr. Manci Schwalbova was having problems getting medicine for ill Jewish prisoners.
Edith returned to the block full of ideas to help Lea. Maybe she could trade the food for a lemon or clean water to drink. Maybe she could get Lea to raise her head and eat some bread. But the bunk where Lea should have been was empty. In a panic, she rushed to the block elder, Gizzy, and her sister.
“Where is my sister? Where is Lea?”
They had taken her to Block 25.
“How could they do that? Why didn’t you stop them?” she yelled.
It is the conundrum of Auschwitz. The block elders and room elders could allow girls to hide from work, but if any kapos or SS checked the blocks, they were forced to send the hiding girls to Block 25—a one-way ticket to death. Once a girl’s number was registered in Block 25, she could not escape. And the only way in or out of that block was past the SS security guard and then the block elder. So how did Edith get into Block 25 to see her sister and walk back out, not just once but twice?
“We had our ways,” Edith says. “But Cilka sure didn’t help me!”
Cilka was the block elder for Block 25. She was only fifteen or sixteen years old and ruthless. She was one of those that Dr. Manci Schwalbova mentions, who let her power go to her head. Cilka was not the sort of person who would do a favor for anyone.
“Maybe somebody from the leichenkommando gave me an armband,” Edith muses. If so, that person was probably Margie Becker, but all these years later it is hard to remember all the little favors girls did for each other. “Maybe because I was wearing a striped dress and had a white kerchief, I looked important enough to be let in.” The truth is she does not remember.
Block 13 was just one block away from Block 25; Edith did not have far to walk to get to the courtyard entrance. Under cover of night, she slipped into Block 25. The block was a refrigerator of death, dark and claustrophobic. Bodies were everywhere and girls moaned in the dark. Edith called her sister’s name and listened for a response. She found Lea lying on the dirt floor. “I held her hand. Kissed her cheek. I know she could hear me.” Lea’s eyes were moist with tears as Edith wiped her brow. “I was sitting with her, looking at her beautiful face, and I felt I should be there instead of her. I had been sick and gotten well. Why couldn’t she?” Inside the blackness of the unlit block rats scurried by. The air smelled of death and diarrhea. It was freezing cold. Edith tried to give Lea a little bit of food, but Lea could not eat. Curling up beside her sister, Edith tried to warm her with her body. She stayed for as long as she dared then slipped back through the shadows to her block. It was a night of hollow dreams and fitful sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The fact is that when the heart is bleeding, Somewhere
it doesn’t realize it’s bleeding.
—TSIPORAH TEHORI, NÉE
HELENA CITRON (#1971)
ON DECEMBER 1, 1942, “the occupancy level of the women’s camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau is 8,232.” But on that same day women were being tattooed with the numbers 26,273 to 26,286. Where had all the others gone? More than six thousand women and girls had been selected over three days in October, but with no solid population tallies at month’s end, we have no idea how many women were actually in Birkenau prior to December. If the occupancy level reported in the Auschwitz Chronicle is correct, then what was about to happen would have been impossible.
December 5, 1942, was Shabbat Chanukah in the Jewish calendar—St. Nicholas Day in Christian observances, a day of gift giving and celebrating children who have been good in the past year. Shabbat Chanukah carries special meaning and has a “deep Kabbalistic significance that reflects the spiritual energies of the participants.” The ritual starts with the lighting of the Chanukah candles, because once the Sabbath begins, you can’t “light” more candles or work—the Sabbath celebrates “humanity through the act of rest.” Chanukah, in turn, celebrates the miracle of light, the retaking of the Temple, and God’s deliverance of his chosen people from destruction. It was from destruction that Edith and Lea now needed a Chanukah miracle.
