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Eventually, some of the top SS figured out that one of the sisters was working with the underground. “There was a German woman from Ravensbrück, she was the brothel mistress, and Margit . . . said something to her,” Frances Mangel-Tack says. Evidently, the brothel mistress then informed the SS. “It was a very big thing what was going on.”
It was even bigger than the brothel mistress or the SS realized. Not only were the sisters helping the underground network, they were also planning their own escape. Before going to work on the night shift sorting clothes in Canada, Frida—the one with the “biggest mouth”—beckoned to her younger cousins, Martha, Eta, and Fanny to come into the sisters’ room. The four sisters sat their younger cousins down and told them to look out for each other and take care of themselves. It was an odd moment, almost an opening of hearts. Eta and Fanny were grateful to finally feel acknowledged by their elder cousins, who were normally dismissive and often outright rude. Eta, her sister, and their cousin Marta headed to work that night feeling more positive about their ability to survive the hardships in camp.
In the morning, Frida, Ruzena, Malvina, and Margit were gone. The girls in the block woke and looked around in confusion. Where were the sisters? They filed outside and got their tea. Lined up for roll call, but nothing was as it should be. The SS were stamping back and forth and yelling at everyone. Then one of the SS pointed at her and her sister and shouted their numbers.
—Prisoners 1755 and 1756! Get out of line!
They were ordered to report immediately to Auschwitz I.
“We thought someone in our family had come to release us,” Eta recalls.
With a kapo as escort, the girls were about to head out of the women’s camp when their cousin, the kapo, Frances Mangel-Tack rushed up to them.
“Do not admit you are related to our cousins,” she warned them in Slovak. “They are looking for anyone with that name Zimmerspitz.”
“Why? What happened?” Fanny asked.
“Just keep quiet.” Frances warned. “Don’t say a word!” Then she was gone.
It was an order that sank into Eta’s subconscious. Marching along the road from Birkenau to Auschwitz, the sisters had time to fret and worry. What did Frances mean, don’t admit they are related? In silence Eta and Fanny walked the distance to Auschwitz I, where they were delivered to Gestapo headquarters in Block 11, the Block of Death, for questioning. Generally reserved for political prisoners and Russian POWs, Block 11 now had four young women in it. All that stood between the execution wall and Eta and her own sister was Frances’s warning. Tortured screams came from within the belly of the prison. They sounded like a woman’s.
Dressed in his black uniform and polished brass buttons, the SS interrogator assessed the young women in front of him. He asked them if they knew the Zimmerspitz sisters.
Eta opened her mouth to answer the question but nothing came out. She had lost her ability to speak.
—We were in Block 18 with them, Fanny answered.
—And?
—And nothing. They were the block and room elders. They were horrible to everyone.
—Aren’t you related?
—No.
“How can you say that you are not related?” he demanded, pointing at Eta. “She looks exactly like Rosa.”
It all hung on Fanny. Eta had lost her ability to speak.
“We may share the same name, but there is no family connection!” Fanny said. “There are lots of Zimmerspitzes in Auschwitz-Birkenau!” Just look at all the Friedmans in camp.
—They never even gave us extra bread or privileges. Ask anyone. They were mean to us, Fanny argued.
Eta nodded. It was all true. Not even an extra portion of bread.
Their reputation must have been known, and the truth Fanny told bore up. It was clear that she and Eta did not know anything. The two sisters were allowed to return to Birkenau. Never had hell on earth looked so welcome.
SO HOW DID the Zimmerspitz sisters get caught?
Ruzena Gräber Knieža says a Polish prisoner found out about their plans and sold the story to the SS so she could get a lighter sentence. Frances says it was the brothel mistress. Eta says she met a Polish man in Israel, years after the war, who said he was their contact on the outside, who had tried to help them escape. That would have been a shrewd strategy, because the SS were notorious for taking payment and then betraying prisoners. It is an old story—to buy your freedom, you had to pay the SS or someone on the outside to help. But the reward for foiling an escape attempt or catching a prisoner trying to escape was usually a week’s vacation, sometimes a promotion.
Whatever happened, none of the other girls understood that the sisters’ cruelty had been a ruse to protect anyone who knew them in case they were caught. Anyone they showed kindness to would have been in danger after their escape, and a target for interrogation. So the sisters protected their cousins and everyone else in the block by being rude and nasty. The wealth the Zimmerspitz sisters accrued went to the underground. Their greed was for freedom.
We don’t know why there is no mention of their escape, capture, or execution in the historic record. All we have is family and prisoners’ testimonies. Did the SS decide it was too embarrassing to acknowledge? They had been tricked by four young Jewish women, after all. Very few people ever managed to escape from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Almost no Jewish women even attempted.
Men’s attempts at escape, their numbers, and their names, are consistently recorderd in the Auschwitz Chronicle, but there is no mention of the Zimmerspitz sisters’ escape attempt or execution. There is no record of them in Yad Vashem, except on a transfer list from Birkenau to New Berlin. Nothing in the Auschwitz “Death Books.” The Zimmerspitz sisters seem to have been expunged from the historic record.
Within earshot of each other in the hope of breaking the other three, the sisters were “badly tortured. They cut them to pieces. It was terrible,” Frances says. SS Taube evidently beat Frida and dragged her out in front of the roll call to make an example of her. But the Zimmerspitz sisters were tough. The SS got nothing out of them. Even bigmouthed Frida kept her silence. She was the last of the sisters to be executed.
Chapter Thirty-one
PHOTO COURTESY ARCHIVES DIVISION, YAD VASHEM WORLD HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE CENTER.
SEPTEMBER 16, 1943
AS ALWAYS, LILLY’S CARD WAS CHEERY and full of bits of gossip that make little sense now. Names of people getting married, health concerns, gossip. They reveal that the Jewish community in eastern Slovakia continued despite the dark fates of many friends and family members. The Hartmann farm was hanging on, but “we are completely without help,” Lenka’s mother writes. The post was also having trouble getting through. Two of Lenka’s letters, “the 15th of July and the 15th of August,” had arrived almost simultaneously. Censoring was now much more common, as well. Blocks cut out of the middle or sides of the postcards obscure the messages. But a naive phrase, “Your return is our hope,” frequently passed.
MORE THAN ONE GIRL would owe her life to Dr. Manci Schwalbova. But other Jewish doctors and nurses helped prisoners, too. The Polish prisoner Sara Bleich (#1966) had gotten relatively easy work in the red kerchiefs, though “sorting rags and clothes from the prisoners . . . was a nasty task since clothes were full of blood and dirt.” Like Ida before her, Sara contracted typhus. Treatment in 1943 was different from 1942, though. Sara was allowed to stay in the hospital ward and had been there for about three weeks when “the devil in person,” a new doctor who had arrived in Auschwitz at the end of May, walked through the ward, selecting women for the gas.
One of the doctors grabbed Sara from her cot and hid her in a barrel, then threw a blanket over the top. “And with that, she saved my life.” Sara was one of the first girls to escape Dr. Josef Mengele’s clutches. Without such spirited and courageous female doctors hiding them from the serial killers that stalked the hospital wards, very few girls or women would have survived at all.
“Mengele was so beautiful you would not believe that he did such bad things,” Eta Zimmerspitz (#1956) says. “There was a young kid, he forced him to have sex and he just watched them.”A modern-day Frankenstein who delighted in torturing and conducting experiments on innocent men, women, and twins, Mengele was someone everyone tried to avoid. But some functionaries, including Ella (#1950) and her sister Edie (#1949), had to deal with him directly and on a regular basis.
Ella’s secretarial skills and neat cursive handwriting brought her to the immediate attention of Mengele, who “promoted” her to become a scribe in the sauna, as the area was called where new arrivals were processed—strip searched, disinfected, and (from 1943 on) tattooed. Her job was to record new female prisoners’ names and numbers. As Dr. Mengele’s scribe, Ella would face constant reminders of the tenuousness of every woman’s life in Auschwitz; her neat, orderly lists documented the numbers of women selected to die or to be experimented upon. Eventually, she was promoted, becoming one of the tattooists. Ella always used “very small and neat” numbers and tried to ink only the inside of a woman’s arm.
Ella does not discuss how she coped with the stress of working under Mengele. Even her sister, Edie, who was rarely at a loss for words, stammers at the memory of him. “Everyone was shaking when Mengele came in [the office]. I can’t even describe [it]. If you looked at him, you could see this anger in him. You could see this dark . . . This dark nothing. Terrible.”
Ria Hans (#1980) was among the staff working in the hospital when Mengele arrived in camp. He cursed and accosted her verbally, while forcing her to insert needles into skeletal musSelmen, administering the phenol injections that would kill them. Edith says that Ria was caught trying to save a woman’s life. “Her punishment was to be placed in a standing cell in Block 11 for six months.”
Years later, when survivors had to apply for restitution from the German government, one survivor, who wished to remain anonymous, wrote about how Dr. Horst Schumann and Dr. Josef Mengele “performed test experiments on me by injecting viruses in me to see how my body was affected, which they observed by taking blood and watching me suffer. I did not get malaria, which they injected, but I contracted typhoid fever and other sicknesses of which I don’t know the names. This six-month period is a blur to me because I was sick so much of the time.”
AS 1943 PROGRESSED, other girls from the first transport who had been working outside also found better jobs. A special laundry detail now included Ruzena Gräber Knieža, Rena and Danka Kornreich, and Dina Dranger, who had been moved to the cellar under the SS staff quarters, where Lenka Hertzka and others in the secretarial pool lived. Separated from the rest of the camp population, the girls in the laundry and sewing rooms were removed from the dangerous epidemics that plagued the general prison population. A horizon of hope appeared in their bleak lives. Getting into the laundry or sewing details was the kind of promotion that should have encouraged qualities of grace and kindness. So Ruzena Gräber was shocked when, one Sunday afternoon, the mother of one of the girls, sneaked into the cellar where the girls were resting.
The poor woman fell on her knees and reached for her twenty-two-year-old daughter’s hands. “I am outside digging graves!” she wailed.
She was wretched. Worn rags hung off her body. She was covered in the festering filth of Birkenau. Revolted, the daughter, Theresa, cringed and backed away from the skeletal woman, who was not yet a musselman but nearing the point of no return.
She screamed at her mother.—Who am I to help you? Get out of here before you get caught and we both get killed!
And with that she threw her mother out of the block.
“I don’t know if she had the courage or power to help her,” Ruzena says, “but I saw how she treated her. That is a terrible picture in my mind. Under normal circumstances she was probably a perfectly nice person, so low can human beings go or be forced to go.”
HELPING OTHERS COULD CARRY CONSEQUENCES. Rose (#1371) had been working on the farm in Harme for over a year and a half. Raising pheasants and rabbits, tending the warrens, and keeping the grounds clean for the fowl, she took pride in her work and worked hard. Her kapo even left her in charge at one point when the kapo had to go away. One day Rose visited the hospital in Birkenau, and one of the nurses asked her to take an important letter back with her to Harme and deliver it to another prisoner. Rose slipped the letter into her shoe, not realizing that she was being watched by one of the SS spies—a Ukrainian woman who immediately turned her in. As Rose headed out of the gate, she heard the dreaded SS shout her number.
—1371, halt!
Rose froze.
—Take off your shoe!
The note was from one member of the underground to another. Rose was immediately arrested and thrown into Block Smierci, Block 11, where political prisoners, resistance fighters, and escapees—like the Zimmerspitz sisters—were interrogated, tortured, and usually executed. She would spend months in detention and was not released until October 1944.
IRENA FEIN (#1564) was now working with six other girls, going from one house to another, fixing things for the wives of the SS. Sometimes the girls did laundry, sometimes they were left to clear out a house that had been recently vacated by SS families. These were the best houses to work in because while their SS guards stood outside, Irena and the others would steal the leftover food in the pantries. When you are starving, everything revolves around food, and almost every prisoner characterizes the quality of a work detail by the amount of food they organized or were given as a reward.
Irena recalls entering a home where one of the wives “was cooking curly cabbage with potatoes.” While the other girls went off to do the laundry and clean the rooms, the mistress of the house asked Irena, “Could you help me hang up some curtains?”
“Ja, gnädige Frau. Yes, ma’am.”
Irena climbed up a stepladder as the woman passed her the drapes, then hooked them onto the brackets over her head.
“How is it in camp? Are you happy there?” the woman asked.
Irena hesitated. How could this woman actually believe she was happy in Auschwitz? “Please, don’t ask.”
“Why not? I am curious what it is like. We are not allowed to visit.”
“I can’t talk about it.”
“Why ever not?”
“Because you will tell your husband and I will get killed. I’m sorry.”
“Why, it’s so bad?”
Irena did not respond. She finished securing the last fold of the curtain and stepped down from the ladder. This was the sort of conversation that could land a girl in the gas chamber, and the German woman was too naive to know that. Their conversation was a bitter revelation. “Even the wives didn’t know what’s going on there.” Outside of the house, just a few meters away, women and children were being gassed and burned to death. Yet this woman was raising her children and living in a world where mass murder either did not exist or was justified in such a way that it was not considered a crime. How could anyone live under the clouds of smoke billowing overhead and have no idea of the atrocities being perpetrated by her husband, his colleagues, and the whole regime? Did they not know because they were innocent or because they did not want to believe the truth before their eyes?
The woman did not need to say thank you, but she did. Irena did not trust that the gesture was sincere, but nodded with a perfunctory “bitte.”
LENKA’S ADDRESS WAS CHANGING, and she had warned her family about the move. The new address on the cards indicated New Berlin. This may also have been an area the prisoners referred to as the New Blocks, which began to house the girls of the laundry in 1944. Lenka may have learned that her messages were being censored and somehow sent a telegram on October 15, 1943, to her aunt and uncle:
Many thanks for your loving lines, which gave me great joy. And I am very much looking forward to the package you mentioned. You could just throw it on the train. Send something that won’t break or get rotten, cheese, sausage, salami, kraut, or sardines in cans are good. Can you send sardines from Portugal through UZ post? If you write to my aunt, urge Papa to write because I have heard nothing from him. I am just sorry to say we don’t work in the same place but I know that she will write to you, too. I have heard that Nusi has not visited Herz tete.
Lenka was still trying to give them news of Nusi’s death, this time by referring to herself while using the word Herz, which also means heart in Slovak. Her message was clear.
Almost immediately, Lenka received a typed letter from Ernest Glattstein, who clearly was seeking information about his family and neighbors:
I would be very grateful if you can let me know whether my sister, Ilone Grunwald, brother-in-law Marcel Drody, Uncle Zeig Lefkovits and son Robert, with Dr. Kraus Bela—who lived opposite you—were with Regina, Dundy, and whether all the above named, arrived together with Nusi?
His queries about whether his family members are with Nusi are the only way he can find out the fates of his loved ones. A few lines later, he mentions several of the girls from the first transport: “Please say hello to all those I know. Wachs Seri, Wahrmann Margit, Ella Friedman [#1950], Edie Friedman [#1949].”
IT WAS DECEMBER when a postcard card from Ellie and Kornelia Mandel, the sisters who had traveled with Nusi and Magduska, arrived in Rožkovany at the Hartmanns’ farm. It is one of the few cards that there is no copy of, but Magduska’s brother, Eugene, remembers every word:
Dear Mr. Hartmann,
Thank you for your little package that I received from you. We are well off. I received mail from your daughter, Magduska, and niece, Nusi, in gan ‘edn.4 They are well off. They ask you to visit Uncle Kaddish often.
