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In the morning, before roll call, Edith risked her life again to sneak into Block 25. She had to go to work, but could not bear to leave her sister alone.
“Lea was on the lowest part of the shelves. Still on the floor. Lying in the dirt. Wasting away. It was so cold. She was in a coma now.” Edith did not know if Lea could hear her talking to her, praying to God to save her sister. Nearby in the shadows, also dying of typhus, was Giora Shpira’s dear childhood friend, Adolf Amster’s daughter Magda. Alone in the dark, Magda did not have even the comfort of a kiss.
WHILE EDITH AND the privileged few in the white and red kerchiefs marched out of camp to work in Auschwitz I, the rest of the women’s camp was still standing at roll call. No sooner had the sorting detail departed through the gate than the women left inside camp were ordered to remove their uniforms and stand naked in the snow. Across the frosted and forgotten world of Birkenau, the SS were about to undertake a mass typhus selection.
It was bitter cold.
“Those poor, bloody girls,” Moses Sonenschein, the son of a Polish rabbi, said to Rudolf Vrba. “They’ll freeze to death. They’ll die of exposure in this weather.”
Forty trucks waited to cart those selected away to the gas.
Among those forced to stand naked in the snow for the entire day were at least three girls from the first transport: Rena and Danka Kornreich and Dina Dranger. Despite Rena’s rigorous memory and attention to detail, she never mentions the cold or that they had to stand naked all day in the snow. Did she pass over that fact to protect us and herself from embarrassment, or was it simply too unbearable to recall? At some point, the mind shuts down to all the horror.
The weather was brutal, but they stood all day until dusk, when the last girl was selected to die. As the trucks—filled with thousands of girls and women—started for the gas chambers, “a banshee wail” rose up from the doomed, “a piercing protest that only death could stop.” Then one of the girls leapt off the back of a truck. And another. They were not going to go like sheep to the slaughter. They took one last stab at life and tried to escape. The SS chased after the fleeing girls, with dogs and whips.
“There is no God,” Moses Sonenschein cried. “And, if there is, I curse Him, curse Him!”
STARVATION DOES NOT induce clear or focused thinking, but Edith had spent the entire day praying for a miracle to save her sister. As she sorted the pockets and linings of the coats of dead Jews, she believed in the power on this day, of all days, because Chanukah was a reminder that “there were things worth fighting for; it marked the end of a war and freedom from tyranny,” while Shabbat celebrated a “world without fighting, cessation from work and redemption from slavery.”
Edith clung to the messages of Shabbat and Chanukah, but those ideals were practically impossible to believe in if her sister was dying. Lea had to survive. Edith had no candles to light in this darkest hour of her young life. All she had was a thin shred of hope in a miracle.
In the fading light of that winter afternoon, Linda, Helena, Edith, and the other clothes sorters marched back to Birkenau. At the gate the SS ordered the girls to stop and disrobe. “We had to go through the gate back to the camp nude.” Taking their clothes off in the bitter winter wind, barefoot in the snow, the girls marched one by one past the SS, who were dressed in long, dark, woolen coats, boots, hats, and leather gloves. Standing on both sides of the shivering girls, they looked for the telltale rash of spotted typhus on each girl’s flesh. The inspection was rigorous, and anyone with the slightest spot or blemish was directed toward the administration barracks on the right. There, their numbers were written down by one of the camp scribes before they were “loaded onto the trucks and taken to the gas chamber.”
To the left was the women’s camp and life. “If you can call slave labor life,” Linda says with a sigh. “Those who were marked or exhausted or didn’t look any more like human beings” went to the right. The girls who were still strong enough screamed and yelled, railing against the injustice of the inevitable.
“Chickens meant more than people,” Martha Mangel (#1741) says. Fortunately for Edith, her rash was gone, and the SS passed over her. Pulling her striped dress back on, Edith grabbed her shoes in her hands and ran barefoot down the rows of blocks to the front of camp and Block 25. In the gathering dark, something was strange. But what? She didn’t pause to ponder. She had to find Lea. At Block 25, she slipped easily through the gate. No SS was there. No Cilka. The courtyard was empty. The door creaked as she opened it and stepped into the block. Not a single girl lay on the shelves or floor. Edith wheeled around and ran back outside, turned the corner, and looked up the avenues of Birkenau. They should have been full of women. Her entire body began to quiver and shake. Her teeth chattered. Cold. Fear. Where had everybody gone?
Cilka appeared in the twilight.
“Where are they?” Edith demanded.
“Gone. Everyone is gone.”
As Linda entered her block, only a few faces shone in the dark, pale as ghosts. Of the one thousand girls who had been in her block that morning, just twenty were left. All over camp, girls returning from the sorting detail entered empty blocks. Linda had only nine friends left among the living. Edith had one.
Lea was gone.
Bertha Schachnerova, age twenty-seven, gone.
Lea Feldbrandova, age nineteen, gone.
Alice Weissova, age twenty-one, gone.
Our long-necked beauty, Magda Amster, age nineteen, gone.
Sara Shpira’s prayer lingered in the ash: It’S Simply beautiful to live. The world is so perfect. If only they all could have embraced Sara’s world instead.
DECEMBER 5, 1942, is one of the few recorded selections of women that year, but for all the meticulous detail the Nazis were known for, there is a discrepancy between the SS’s administrative numbers and the survivors’ reports. The historical record states that approximately “two thousand young, healthy and able-bodied women” were gassed. Survivors—men and women, independent of each other, and years after the fact—say that ten thousand girls and women died that day. Those witnesses include survivors Rudolf Vrba and his friend Moses Sonenschein, who watched the selection from the men’s camp; women who stood all day and survived the selection; Rena and Danka Kornreich; and about three hundred clothing sorters who returned to the empty camp.
“The camp was overcrowded. And the Nazis, the SS, expected fresh arrivals. So they had to get rid of us,” Linda says matter-of-factly. “The next morning, we woke up and the camp was almost empty. We heard that in the night they had burned ten thousand girls. We went out for the counting. We saw a few people we knew.” Only a few.
Since the data on women was most likely destroyed, we may never have precise numbers for the Shabbat Chanukah selection. But whom should we believe? The SS records on women, which were notoriously inaccurate, or the survivors and witnesses who were there?
Whatever the ultimate truth is, nearly twenty thousand women in the prison population died in the space of about eight months, and the majority of those deaths occurred between August 15 and December 5, 1942. According to Dr. Manci Schwalbova, seven thousand women and girls had been sent to the gas from the “hospital” alone.
“After this, most of the girls who were alive from the first transport survived,” Edith says, unless they died on the death march or from typhus. This was the last mass selection where girls from the first transport were sent to the gas. That is because in January 1943, the warden of the new SS overseer of the women’s camp, Maria Mandel, who had replaced Johanna Langefeld, ordered that girls with four-digit numbers, especially those beginning with the numeral 1, should be passed over during selections. Unless they were seriously ill, of course. It “was nice of her to say, because from one thousand, we were three hundred left,” Bertha Berkowitz states. It was probably the only nice thing Mandel ever did.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Gift of Eugene Hartmann in memory of Lenka Hertzka, MUSEUM OF JEWISH HERITAGE, NEW YORK.
December 12, 1942
Dear Lenka. Probably you only [just] received my cards, therefore I represent everybody, and write weekly. Everybody joins me in this letter. There is company here more often. We are with you in spirit, with all of you. [From] Magduska we await lines with impatience. Let her father know earliest. We are all healthy and quite busy.
Best Regards, M [Mama]
STABSGEBÄUDE STAFF HEADQUARTERS was a large three-story white brick building just outside of Auschwitz I. Behind the building were the kitchen and the noodle factory. Both of those forlorn and hollow edifices still stand today. Their shattered windows stare out at a flat expanse once called the trockenplatz, the drying place for the SS laundry. Today, the SS quarters serve as a high school, full of teenagers rambling up and down the stairs. Back then, our girls trod those same stairs under very different circumstances.
The basement of the building had a full laundry, sewing facility, and dormitory full of bunk beds, where the girls who worked in those details and the secretarial pool slept. It was here that Lenka Hertzka received cards from the Hartmann farm and read fondly about her nephew, sister, and mother. Eight-year-old Milan wrote to say that receiving her card was the best present of his birthday. He only wished that Magduska would write, too. Even at eight years old, he felt the absence of the somber, dark-eyed teen and her sunshine-faced cousin, Nusi. He had probably heard family members discussing the girls’ absence when they gathered at the end of a long day. A holiday card from Lenka’s mother mentions that the family had sent 250 kroner to the teenagers, as well as to Lenka. Who sends money to Auschwitz? They must have imagined that the girls could spend it in the camp commissary, like any other regular government worker.
It is clear the family had no idea what kind of place Lenka and their girls had gone to. The common misconception was that everyone was together, just as President Tiso had promised. They envisaged Lenka working closely with her cousins and seeing them in a cafeteria at mealtimes. Lenka’s cards home could not reveal the bleak truth, and Magduska and Nusi never wrote. Meanwhile, family and friends who had heard that Lenka was corresponding from Birkenau began writing to Lenka, as well.
“[Our mother] gave me news that you are there with many of our relatives, so be very friendly and please write to me whether you have already met up with Aliska, Renka, Markus B., and other relatives,” Lenka’s brother, Herman wrote.
“What are they doing? Are they healthy? Josef Erdie was there too but has probably already left, we learned this last piece of news yesterday from cousin Robert, who is working in the woodwork shop. He wrote to say that he is very well and would just like to know where his wife is . . .You should tell Magduska that Mark is already married. Lots of love and kisses.
Herman Hertzka
That cousin Robert had written to Herman to tell the family that Josef Erdie had “left already” was probably code for having gone to the gas. Though, if cousin Robert was very new in the camps and didn’t know the real situation, he might have actually believed that Josef Erdie had been transferred somewhere else. The fact that he was wondering about his wife may mean that he had no idea yet.
Herman’s note mentions news of Mark, a boy who Magduska must have been sweet on, and was now married. In Auschwitz, she did not even have the hope of a kiss, let alone a future love. The news might have broken her heart if Lenka had shared it, but it seems Lenka had not yet seen the girls. There is no mention of Magduska or Nusi in any of Lenka’s early cards. They were cetainly not in Stabsgebäude with her.
The Hartmann family was puzzled. Magduska and Nusi had been “working” in Auschwitz for months before their older cousin even arrived. Were they really so busy that they didn’t have time to write their family?
January 1, 1943
Dear Lenka,
I received your congratulations cards, thank you very much. Everything goes well. We also filled Milan’s boots [like a Christmas stocking]. This time I am also representing everybody. Meanwhile, you certainly received our card from Rožkovany. The girls [Magduska and Nusi] should follow your good example. Support them with it. We also sent money to Magduska. Best Regards and warm embrace to everyone.
Mama
Isolated on the family farm in the tiny village of Rožkovany, the Hartmann family seems to have settled into a safehouse of semi-naïveté, temporarily. They must have known that family transports were departing from Prešov, but deep in the countryside they were protected from the harsh scenes that those in the cities had witnessed. They must have heard about the roundups, though, especially as many of their own family members had left Prešov and were now living and helping on the farm. The Hartmanns were providing essential food for the Slovak people and army, but they still could not hire gentiles. They needed family help; in exchange, there was food on the table. Sharing their plenty, the Hartmann brothers sent packages of sheep’s cheese and other nonperishables to their daughters, as well as the girls’ friends, Ellie and Kornelia Mandel, who had been on the first transport with Magduska and Nusi.
IT WAS COMMON KNOWLEDGE that the only way out of Block 25 was to be carried out dead on a stretcher or in a wheelbarrow, and then tossed onto the truck heading for the gas chambers. The only prisoners allowed free access to Block 25 were the camp scribe and those in the leichenkommando. To make sure the block was secure, those who could go in and out wore special armbands.
Dr. Manci Schwalbova was working with others to exchange the tickets of ill girls who might recover “for the tickets of women who had already died in camp, because only the numbers had to agree.” Ella (#1950) never details her participation in this kind of activity, but as a scribe she was one of the few women that Dr. Schwalbova could have worked with to alter numbers. At ninety-five years old, she has a frail constitution, but she still has moments of clarity. When questioned, she admits, “I saved a few.” Irena Fein (#1564) was one of those few.
Irena had gotten frostbite in her toes and been sent to Block 25 because she was limping. Standing outside in the courtyard, to avoid the contagious ill and dying, she was trying to figure out a way to escape when Bertha, Margie, and the rest of the leichenkommando made their daily visit. Margie recognized Irena from Humenné and saw the plight she was in. Ella also recognized Irena because, according to Irena, Ella had been her block elder in Auschwitz I. Being on the first transport created a special bond between women. They could never have saved Irena if she had been seriously ill, but she was healthy. She just limped a bit. Since it was Ella’s job to write down the new arrivals into the Block 25 ledger, she was also in the position to not write down numbers.
Ella “had an [extra] dead body,” Irena says, “so they brought in the dead body and pulled me out.”
Manipulating the file cards, Ella replaced Irena’s number with the dead girl’s. Now they had to get Irena out. As they were about to remove a body, Irena took hold of the stretcher and walked out with them.
“No one said a thing, of course,” Bertha says. And the SS did not notice the extra girl removing the body on the stretcher.
Irena helped the others load the body onto the back of the flatbed, but now faced another predicament. She needed time to recover without being seen by the SS or reported. Ella sent her to her own block, where her sister, Edie (#1949), was the secretary. In charge of counting the girls in the block and reporting how many went out to work and how many stayed behind, Edie explains, “I had to give the report, but that was all.” Nothing was that simple in Auschwitz, but at least Edie could help girls, if she wanted to. Irena had a safe place to hide until she could walk again. There was yet one more problem. Her pinkie toes were black with gangrene.
Transmetatarsal amputation is not complicated surgery, but how did Irena know what to do? Was she instructed by one of the doctors? That is unlikely because she didn’t use surgical tools. Instead, under the cover of night, she slipped outside after curfew and scoured the grounds for a shard of glass. When she found one that was large enough to hold on to, she bit on a piece of cloth to prevent herself from crying out in pain, and proceeded to debride the necrosis from the gangrenous toes of her feet. She then packed the wounds with newspaper until they could heal.
A few weeks later, when Irena stepped out to work in her clappers, she still had her feet wrapped with newspaper. SS Anton Taube was a notorious brute and murderer who delighted in making prisoners do calisthenics in the mud and then killing them by stepping on their skulls. He stopped her almost immediately.
“Number 1564, what are you hiding?”
“I was itching and scratched myself, so I put a paper bandage on,” Irena lied.
“If it’s not healed by the next selection, you go to the chimney!” he said.
A few minutes later, SS Dreschler saw Irena with her bandage and took her stick to push Irena out of the roll call to go to the gas.
Irena held up her number, hoping the low digits would help her. “SS Taube told me that I will go next time, if I don’t heal. But not now!”
Dreschler’s hideous mouth curled in a snarl, but she let Irena stay in line.
One thing was sure: Irena needed one of the girls in the sorting detail to smuggle out shoes to protect her feet not just from the elements but from the prying eyes of the SS. Somehow, she was able to get a pair of boots. Even the littlest kindness could change someone’s life, or more than one life. Was this also, as Margie Becker believed, bashert? If so, Irena’s survival would help Edith to survive, too.
