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FOR THOSE WHO WERE ABLE to maintain a moral compass, that kind of fortitude fed their spirits in the face of horror. Girls like Bertha clung to a spiritual mandate that having a good position afforded them the grace to help other girls whenever they could. Sometimes that meant helping girls who needed salve for their wounds by giving them extra portions of bread to trade. Sometimes it meant giving extra bread to the men driving the trucks to the crematoriums because they were hungry. Sometimes it meant giving comfort and support. Sometimes it meant giving up something of yourself.
With so many desperate women in need, helping everyone was impossible. You had a nucleus of friends you focused on, but sometimes someone unknown came within your sphere unbeckoned. Then your hand became God’s hand. How many functionaries did something to help someone unexpected? One can hope all of them did, but with thousands now needing help, the small deeds of a few were swallowed up in the oblivion of the many.
WITHOUT HER SISTER, Edith floundered in a swamp of despair. The questions around her sister’s death haunted her and dragged her under the morass of a life without meaning. Why was she still alive but her sister not? “My sister had been able to save me, but I was not able to save her. So I lost her. I cannot describe this. It is too much to remember. I was the younger one. I was the weaker one. And yet, I am here.” It made no sense, but then nothing about Auschwitz made sense.
It was hard to get up in the morning, hard to stand obediently at roll call, hard to eat, hard to live. It was so easy to die in Auschwitz. Death was always within reach—in the electrical wires, in the guards, the dogs, the whips, the lice, the gas chambers. All she had to do was step out of line to get shot. But Edith did not have a death wish. “I tell you, I loved my sister, crazy, and I went to her and was with her as much as I could [be]. But was I sorry that I was alive? No. I was happy that I was still alive. That is the truth. Sometimes you say, what spirit was there in the survivors? I don’t believe that God was mixed in with the Holocaust. I don’t believe that God exists as a person. But I believe in the survivors.”
Some internal mechanism clicked inside and kept her going, but she needed more than willpower. She needed companionship. Elsa Rosenthal became Edith’s “lagerstrasse sister,” the term prisoners used to describe relationships that were as close and dear as blood ties—because no one survived Auschwitz on her own.
Margie Becker tells the story of one of her cousins getting selected by the SS and her cousin’s sister being left to live. The Benovicova sisters had been allowed to die together, but now the “sadism was so great” that SS quite often separated family members, forcing one to the gas and the other to life. Both of Margie’s cousins were healthy, but at the whim of the SS, the youngest was selected to die “for no obvious reason but cruelty.” On the other side of the fence, while her little sister was still waiting to be forced onto the flatbed trucks and carted away to the gas chambers, the older sister rushed over to Margie.
“Let’s be sisters,” she begged.
Losing a sister was like losing a limb or a vital organ. One’s sister or sisters offered not just physical support but a deep spiritual bond, a soul connection. Coming from the same root, sisters were flowers on the same stem. You could not survive the vortex of evil that was Auschwitz without someone providing a spiritual anchor.
Margie understood this. The moment her distant cousin begged her to be her lagerstrasse sister, she agreed. Elsa did the same for Edith. What was the purpose of surviving without Lea? Elsa needed Edith to survive. She made Edith continue going to work in the white kerchiefs. She slept beside her and prevented the cold drafts of despair from blowing Edith away. She wiped the tears that slipped onto Edith’s cheeks. She made Edith eat. Made her stand up straight at roll call. Reminded Edith that if she gave up, they would both die.
—I can’t survive without you, Elsa told her. The compassion and constant reassurance worked. From somewhere deep inside herself Edith found the courage to live. Then she found another reason.
THE GIRLS IN THE SORTING DETAILS wore a kind of apron or smock now. Every morning, they slipped into their aprons, which, like their camp uniforms, had the girls’ numbers and yellow stars on them. While sorting coats from a transport of Belgian Jews, Edith felt something in the hem of a black cashmere coat. She started to ignore it. Then she thought, What if it is something valuable that I can smuggle to the underground? She tore at the seam and wiggled a thin box from the lining of the coat. There were no SS nearby, so she quickly flipped up the lid and peeked inside. “Huge diamonds, already cut” gleamed up from the dark of the folds of the coat. Her heart raced. They were “worth millions, for sure.” If she was even caught looking at them she could be sent to the gas, but if she could smuggle them out to the underground, perhaps she could avenge Lea’s death. The box fit nicely into the pocket of her apron and did not make the slightest bulge.
It was a Saturday, the last day of the workweek. At the end of the day, Helena returned from behind the mounds of clothing where she now spent most of her days with SS Wunsch. “She did not have to work anymore,” Edith says, though she did need to stand at attention and get counted before returning to Birkenau. As they were standing there, the SS ordered them to hang their aprons on the hooks and leave them there for the weekend. The new protocol stunned the prisoners, many of whom had loot in their pockets that they planned to trade in camp for bread or other necessities.
—From now on, all aprons will remain here! one of the SS men announced.
It was a measure designed to prevent theft as well as contagion.
Edith tried to steady her hand as she hung up her apron, but she was unable to retrieve the box. The underground would have to wait until Monday. She left the diamonds behind.
The next day at noon, when the men arrived with soup kettles for lunch, one of the men carrying the kettles whispered to Edith, “The SS checked your jumper and found your diamonds. They are going to question you for sure.”
Edith quivered like a leaf in the wind. What was she going to do? To be caught stealing anything, even a potato, was punishable by twenty-five lashes. To be caught with diamonds? How could she have been so stupid? For all of her youthful naïveté, though, Edith had inherited her mother’s cleverness; she was shrewdly intelligent and logically minded. The man had warned her for a reason. All she needed now was a story the SS would believe.
Monday morning loomed. Marching to work, Edith’s left leg dragged with a heavy sense of dread. Outside of the sorting barracks, the women were forced to line up and wait for interrogation. Even Helena had to wait. The officer questioning them was not SS Wunsch but his superior, SS Ambros. One at a time, the girls’ numbers were called, and they had to step into the SS office for questioning behind a closed door. One at a time, they came out. Some went to work. Some went in the opposite direction. Edith was not the only girl who had left something in her pocket. It took all of her self-control not to let her knees knock together. By the end of the morning, she was the sole girl standing outside. Her opportunity to join Lea had arrived.
—1970!
Waved into the SS office, Edith stepped into the interrogation room and stood at attention before the stern-faced SS man.
“A box was found in your apron. Why didn’t you turn it in?”
“I didn’t trust the other guards to give it to.”
“Why is that?”
“Because it was quite large and I thought it might be important.” She paused for dramatic effect. “And if I gave it to you, I thought you might give me a little bit of sausage or something, so I saved it for you.”
“If you are lying, I will send you to the gas.”
She gave a perfunctory nod.
“Did you look inside?”
“I tell you the truth,” Edith lied to his face, “I saved it for you to look.”
“I can tell if you are lying.”
She nodded again.
His piercing gaze looked through her. Then he looked her up and down. Her waif-like appearance worked in her favor. How could anyone so tiny be a threat, even if she was a dirty Jew?
“I look at her and can tell she is telling the truth,” he concluded. “The little one is not guilty.”
“Everyone was so surprised that I didn’t go straight to the gas chamber, but I will never forget how that SS Ambros looked at me. Pure greed. He didn’t want the diamonds for Germany, but for himself. The next week he took leave and went home, where he opened a factory.” She never did get her piece of sausage.
THE RED AND WHITE KERCHIEF details in Canada had become so popular that everyone was organizing kerchiefs to get into them. Even Linda, who had been sorting since the beginning, got pushed out occasionally, despite her “good elbows.” Edith was so tiny she was easily dislodged from her spot, and she was too depressed to try to get it back. She didn’t have the energy to fight, so she returned to the frozen outdoors, clearing roads with her bare hands. Winter was dangerous. Frostbite was rampant, and the mandate that “there was no weather too bad for Jews” was adhered to.
Very few of the girls from the first transport were still working outside. Besides Edith and Elsa, those unfortunate few included Rena Kornreich and her sister Danka, their friend Dina Dranger, and Joan Rosner. “We had no socks, no coats or anything,” Joan (#1188) says. “If we found a rag, we would wrap it around our body to keep warm. There were one thousand girls in one block, and we were stealing each other’s blankets. [It is] humanly impossible to explain how bad it was. My legs were frozen; my toes were frozen. No head covering. We worked in the rain and went to sleep in the wet clothes.”
In order to keep typhus under control, the girls’ uniforms were collected for delousing on Sundays. The protocol included stripping out of their uniforms and delivering their clothes to the laundry to be boiled. Without any clothing to wear while their uniforms were washed, the girls huddled together under their thin blankets in the block, trying to stay warm. In the winter, drying the uniforms was a slow process and they usually came back frozen solid. On one of those Sundays in January, Edith woke up in excruciating pain. Her knee was as swollen as a balloon. “I couldn’t step on my leg.”
Because it was a Sunday, they had time to do something before any of the SS saw her. Elsa ran to the hospital block to get Dr. Manci Schwalbova.
Manci took one look at Edith’s swollen leg and shook her head. “Edith, I don’t know what to tell you, but it is tuberculosis.” Tuberculosis was a death sentence in even the best circumstances. “You are really, really, very sick. I don’t know if this can heal here with these conditions. But listen, yesterday was a selection. Now it is quiet in the hospital. I am taking you to a bed and operating. Then we’ll see how long I can keep you.”
In the quiet of Sunday afternoon, Manci punctured the flesh in order to relieve the pressure on the knee. With no anesthetic available, Elsa and a nurse had to pin Edith down to keep her from writhing with pain. Putrid pus drained out of Edith’s knee. With the infection lanced, Manci applied a poultice to the wound to keep it open and draining. Edith slept the sleep of a thousand nights and ate a little extra food organized through the underground.
She had been in bed for only three days when Manci woke her up in the middle of the night and said, “You have to go out quick, quick, quick because tomorrow they will come and take people.”
“How can I not limp with the pain? During the day I see stars.”
“You have to do everything to walk properly. Do not limp!” Manci warned. “You have to.”
Elsa came to the rescue. She supported Edith through the gates past the SS guards, whose eagle eyes were always seeking the sick and vulnerable, and somehow Edith worked without attracting any attention. Perhaps SS Mandel’s mandate protected the “little one” with such a low number, but it is more likely that Edith was simply so small she stayed below the radar of her superiors. She worked for three days until Dr. Schwalbova could give her a bed again.
It was a survival seesaw. Three or four days of rest, then escape back to her block before a hospital selection. This was where the secretarial functionaries played an essential role in the survival of prisoners in the hospital. News of selections made its way from the SS offices, where the functionaries who were part of the internal network of resistance worked. When the notices arrived, Manci and the other Jewish doctors “quickly hid the most endangered patients in the ward or ‘disguised’ them as ward workers.” More than once, Edith was hidden as a ward worker, herself.
Dr. Manci Schwalbova had her hands full. Not only did she face typhus and tuberculosis, but an outbreak of meningitis raged through the youngest of the female prisoners. As a doctor, she was in the difficult circumstance of trying to hide those she could save while being forced to leave those she could not to the clutches of Dr. Kremer, or the lesser-known Dr. Clau-berger who specialized in sterilization experiments.
Part of the Final Solution’s protocol included sterilization for Jews, and beginning in December 1942, Dr. Clauberg began trying out a variety of quick and inexpensive ways to sterilize young women. He was not interested in the health or recovery of his victims, and only a few would survive.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Gift of Eugene Hartmann in memory of Lenka Hertzka, MUSEUM OF JEWISH HERITAGE, NEW YORK.
THE TWO LETTERS CROSSED PATHS. In hers, Lenka’s mother expressed concern about mail delivery—not realizing that a prisoner receiving mail in Auschwitz was in and of itself extraordinary.
March 8, 1943
Dear Lenka!
We are writing you every 10 days by mail and also through the UZ [Jewish Council]. You only acknowledged two cards. We did not receive your January card, nor the letter from February 15th. We would be so happy to be able to send you something. We talk about you at meals and at every occasion . . .We also sent you money, also for Magduska. The parents of Magduska and Nusi are unhappy that they do not give any sign of life. If they could only add something to your letter . . . If it is permitted, please write always about our relatives and acquaintances. We are all healthy. We await your letters impatiently and kiss you warmly.
Kisses, Milan.
I kiss you, Opa.
From me too, Mama
Lenka’s letter also expressed concern about the post. Despite her position working for one of the top Gestapo and the privileges she received, she did not always get her mail.
April 2, 1943
My dears,
First I would like to wish you many happy returns dear Mama, even if it’s rather late. I wish you all health and luck and that we can celebrate the next birthday together. This time the usual present, I am afraid, will be missing, but I believe that you will probably forgive me that. I got Lilly’s card from 9th March. Since then I am impatiently waiting for more post, unfortunately in vain. Why don’t you write more often? One can also send little sausages and little packages of cheese. Besides that nothing is new. I work as before and thank God I’m healthy. I send all my love and hug you all.
Lenka
The first anniversary of the girls’ first day in the Poprad camp was also SS Franz Wunsch’s birthday. He was twenty-one years old. One year earlier, the girls had descended into tears as they were herded away from their parents and families. Now, they barely blinked when the latest transport from Greece arrived carrying 2,800 men, women, and children—2,191 of whom were gassed. The 192 women registered in camp were numbered 38,721–38,912; the 417 men’s numbers started at 109,371. While sorting the Greeks’ clothes and belongings, Rita—the white kerchiefs’ kapo—again announced to the girls that she needed performers. Glorious monkeys. Slaves of entertainment and labor.
No one could say no.
Of the prisoners chosen to perform, only one would be sincere as she sang a traditional birthday song and cheered, boisterously, “How nice that you were born, we’d have really missed you otherwise. How nice that we’re all together. We congratulate your birthday!”
Singing to Franz Wunsch out in the open with everyone else, did Helena feel the words held secret meaning? Was she really happy they were together and that he had been born? Could she imagine life without him? Stockholm syndrome was not a term yet, but the phenomenon certainly existed. To be fair, Helena had fallen in love with the young SS man, and he had fallen in love with her, too. He would carry the photo he had taken of her in his wallet to his dying day. But there is no denying that it was a relationship defined by power—his. She had no choice in the matter. Not if she wanted to survive.
Of course, his infatuation with Helena gave her status and power over the others. “If I had said, he [Franz] would have saved me by a second. All the women were disgruntled. There was a reason to be disgruntled there. I could just say the word and a quarter of them would disappear.3 But I did not do it.” That was extraordinary power to have, let alone to admit to having, yet in the same breath she denies ever having had a physical relationship with Wunsch. In earlier testimonies, she claims they shared only a word or two in passing. But a few years later, she admits “in the end I honestly loved him.”
When asked if she saw Helena at work, Edith laughs. “I didn’t see her a lot. I didn’t see him do a lot, either. They were up on the high shelves, above the mounds of clothes. She was very concentrated on herself and her love with this guy.”
Helena’s critics believed she “stayed alive” because of Wunsch, but he was not there to protect her all of the time. “I could have been killed twenty thousand times in other places,” she says. And if news of the affair had gotten out to his higher-ups, he would have been severely punished. Of course, she would have lost her life. Still, among prisoners, their relationship was not the best-kept secret of the war. Many survivors mention Wunsch and Helena in their testimonies. “It angered us all,” Eta Zimmerspitz (#1756) says.
