999, page 27
Magduska was dead. Bela was devastated, Eugene, her little brother, completely bewildered. They did not tell Magduska’s mother. Everyone was racked with guilt. They had practically scolded the girls for not writing. What must Lenka think of them? Did she even know about Magduska? The card did not mention anything more, nor could it have. How long had the girls been dead? How did they die? No one knew. Their lives and their deaths are a permanent question mark that hangs over the family to this day, with no answers ever to arise from the charnel ground of Auschwitz.
Chapter Thirty-two
PHOTO COURTESY ARCHIVES DIVISION,YAD VASHEM WORLD HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE CENTER.
December 1, 1943
Dear Lenka!
I hope you received Willi’s letter and Milanko’s picture. We have put aside the jacket, salami, and medicines. Yesterday, we sent shoes and wurst—hopefully we will soon get detailed news from you whether you handed everything over to Kato [Katarina Danzinger (#1843)]. In November, we sent clothes and 500 kroner and you should have received them by now. Also, 3.5 and 2 kilos—we could hardly breathe—have you received them? Make enquiries with Kato. Willi hopes his sister-in-law has visited you. Bela is very ill, weeping for Magduska.
We are all thinking of you. Hang tough!
Kisses, Lilly
AFTER FIFTEEN MONTHS in the leichenkommando, Dr. Manci Schwalbova told Bertha and the others who worked with her that it was time to move to a different detail. Not all of them had made it through the fifteen months, but Peshy Steiner, Elena Zuckermenn, and Margie Becker were still there. Dr. Manci Schwalbova wielded what little power she had to arrange for the girls to work in Canada—they deserved an easier job after working so long moving corpses.
Canada was not the heaven everyone made it out to be, though. “We were able to eat during the day, but we had to go to selections,” Bertha says. “And the first day, I had twisted my ankle and was brought back on a stretcher. I thought I am for the crematorium.” Being one of Dr. Manci Schwalbova’s pets saved her, and Bertha was allowed to continue working. Sorting clothes did not require a lot of walking, and as long as she could stand and sort, she could stay alive. However, Bertha did not “have luck in Canada!” She had made friends with a girl from France and decided to sneak a gift out for her. She had seen other girls slipping clothes on and walking out without getting caught. How hard could it be? Bertha stuffed a blouse under her uniform, just before the end of work, and headed out to roll call.
—1048! one of the SS shouted.
Bertha has one of those clear, honest faces. Her cheeks flushed bright pink. That was all the SS needed to see, to know he had guessed right.
—Take off your uniform!
Slowly, she removed her jacket and her own blouse, and the crumpled item of clothing that she was trying to smuggle fell to the ground. She was lucky not to get twenty-five lashes, as Joan Rosner had gotten when she was caught organizing. But to Bertha, a teenager still clinging to her vanity, the punishment she got was even worse. The SS man ordered her head shaved.
Up to this point, she had had her head shaved only seven times. Once she had become a member of the leichenkommando, her hair had been safe. Having hair was a badge of honor. A status symbol. A sign that you were special. Now, Bertha had haphazard tufts of hair sticking out like brambles from her scalp. She felt ugly. Worse, she was ugly! But this shaving did something more serious to the teen—it crushed her spirit. She “couldn’t stop crying” and fell into complete despair. It was “the only time I really wanted to commit suicide.”
For deeply religious girls, the shaving of their heads should have occurred as part of their marriage. On her first day in Auschwitz, Bertha had been one of the girls brutally examined gynecologically and robbed of her maidenhood. For Bertha, a newly shaved head publicly announced her shame and rape. For fifteen months, her hair had been safe; now, the horror of that first day flooded back. The pain. The blood. The screaming girls around her. Her own screams.
She had lost everything. Her family. Her home. Her virginity. Her hair was the last straw—inconsolable, she wept and wept. She considered going to the wires and ending it all. Peshy Steiner came to her rescue. Peshy loved Bertha. Held her. Comforted her. Saved her friend from taking her own life.
In a documentary film from 1981, Bertha leans against the koya in Block 27, where she lived and slept next to Peshy. “This is where Peshy Steiner saved my life,” she says. It is a moment of deep regret, for Bertha was not able to save Peshy’s. “She was very, very ill.” She does not say more.
When Peshy became deathly ill, Dr. Manci Schwalbova would certainly have been called in to help, but miracles were few and far between in Auschwitz. Not everyone could be saved from the many dread diseases—including meningitis—that lurked in every filthy corner of their lives. Peshy and Bertha had been like sisters. Without her childhood friend, Bertha faced another dark night of the soul. Like Edith, she had to look to other girls to help pull her out of the abyss of grief. Elena Zuckermenn (#1735) was one of those girls.
While Bertha “didn’t have any luck” working in Canada, Margie Becker did. She was a natural contraband rustler, “an artist,” she says with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes. “Once, I smuggled a bed jacket in my shoe! I nearly died, it was so tight.” She began running her own little black market, trading smuggled clothing for food.
To friends, though, she gave things for free. Margie had gotten to know a girl who spoke a different kind of Yiddish, and the two became close friends while comparing the linguistic differences in their dialects. The girl asked Margie to help her get into a better work detail. Margie smuggled her a “pair of wool pants and a sweater,” and the next thing she heard, the girl had been taken in by one of the SS families and was working as their maid. All because she was well dressed. “You know, that’s what a difference it meant in anybody’s life if you were dressed. They always liked somebody dressed decent,” Margie says, shaking her head. “Those louses.”
Margie even found a gold ring, which she slipped onto her toe and hid in her shoe, then using it like a savings account, bartered the ring for margarine and bread, which she shared with friends. The trinkets and valuables the girls found in the kerchief details helped them survive, as long as they were not too brazen about what they filched and didn’t get caught. Joan Rosner (#1188) saw a girl get shot between the eyes after she was caught hiding some jewelry in her pocket.
DR. MANCI SCHWALBOVA heard about the difficulties Bertha was having in Canada and made her a messenger in the hospital ward, where she could keep an eye on the teen and protect her. Bertha carried documents and memos from one camp to another and spent her days at the back entrance of the ward, waiting for orders. She was also assigned to help deliver food to the bedbound prisoners and “got a little bit more food for doing” that service. Being a hospital messenger was the last job Bertha would work in Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was also the last time she would see her old friends now working in Canada.
At the start of the new year, the girls working in Canada were separated from the rest of the women’s camp. Canada had already been relocated to Birkenau to accommodate the expansion from a few sorting barracks to over twenty. Now in an attempt to prevent clothing and other valuables from being smuggled into the general prison population, the SS commandeered the girls and moved them into two blocks within Canada. There were no high-voltage wires around Canada, “only barbed wire. The first two barracks were our living quarters, and the other eighteen were the working places. On the other side, the men had only one barrack. We were separated completely from the rest of the inmates. We didn’t have any contact with them anymore,” Linda Reich (#1173) explains.
Chapter Thirty-three
Some people Say angels have wings. But my angels
had feet.
—EDITH FRIEDMAN
BY THE SECOND ANNIVERSARY OF the girls’ deportation from Slovakia, those assigned to Canada were working twelve-hour swing shifts, but after work they could walk around the camp road a bit. Ida Eigerman thought that since they were so close to the sauna, she might as well sneak in and have a shower. All by herself. In control of the spigots, she turned the hot water until it burned her skin. She scrubbed her flesh and inhaled the steam until her lungs felt clean of soot and oil and death. She let the water cascade over her forehead and through her hair, down her breasts and hips. She cleaned herself in places she would never have dared if the SS had been watching. She luxuriated in the quiet, the privacy, the peace of the water splashing on the cement beneath her tired feet.
The curfew bell clanged outside. There were no towels. No way to dry herself quickly. She pulled her uniform back on and ran outside.
“What are you doing?” one of the SS women yelled at her.
Ida’s hair was wet. Her clothes damp. Her face clean.
Two SS men walked over to where Ida was standing. “They had hands like this. I never saw such big hands.” One of the SS slapped her so hard, her teeth rattled in her mouth.
—1930 you are down for twenty-five! the SS woman ordered.
Twenty-five lashes.
Ida was terrified that the next day the commander would arrive and call her number for punishment. “Meanwhile, Ms. Schmidt, the kapo, needed some girls to go to Stabsgebäude.” Ida volunteered and escaped punishment. Arriving in the basement of the SS headaquarters, Ida would have found an old acquaintance, Rena Kornreich (#1716). It had been four years since they had slipped across the border of Poland and hidden in their uncles’ homes in Bardejov. Now their uncles and aunts were gone; their parents, gone; their cousins, mostly gone. How could they, who had come to Auschwitz in the beginning, still be alive?
THE TOWERING DEATH gate now loomed over the windswept expanse of Birkenau. Where two years prior there had been nothing but fields, train tracks now ran up to and under the death gate so that human cargo could be delivered directly into the mouth of hell.
The numbers being given to men were now 175,000; women were 76,000. There is no question that getting registered in camp and not going straight to the gas chamber was far less likely for women. That April, 21,000 women were recorded as being in Birkenau, while 46,000 men were being held in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complexes.
On April 7, there would be two fewer: Alfréd Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba were about to make their famous escape from Auschwitz. They would be among the few successful escapees, but they were the most important, because their escape would bring to the world the first concrete report on the death camp’s layout, the placement of gas chambers and crematoriums, and the approximate numbers of Jews who had been gassed. Their report would also be the first acknowledgment of the girls of the first transports, the horrors they had suffered in those early months and the fact that they “had dwindled to 5 percent5 of their original number” or about four hundred.
Tragically, history would not only refuse to recognize the girls, but the Allied forces would fail to act on Vrba and Wetzler’s information. Despite the report being sent to Switzerland, the United States, Britain, and the Vatican, the Allies did not think bombing the tracks or the crematoriums would “achieve the salvation of the victims to any appreciable extent.” They were wrong. Jews were collateral damage in a global war, and Auschwitz was now an über-killing machine capable of executing and cremating twenty thousand people per day.
As Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler fervently hoped that their report would save the Hungarian Jews from slaughter, the first Hungarian transport of “forty to fifty freight cars” with “approximately one hundred persons” per car arrived. The number of men, women, and children murdered from that transport was not recorded. It was, however, documented in a far more graphic way.
SS-Hauptscharführer Bernhard Walter, head of the Auschwitz photographic laboratory, and his assistant, SS-Unterscharführer Ernst Hofmann, took photographs as Hungarians Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia disembarked from the transport. The photos they snapped of masses of people walking along the railway tracks, children standing in the birch forest outside the gas chambers and crematoriums, girls laughing as they sorted goods in Canada were part of a photo essay designed to show the Red Cross that Jewish prisoners were being well taken care of and to dispel any rumors of extermination camps. It is a chilling album of mass murder, chronicled by the murderers themselves.
Leaning over a pile of pots and pans that had been collected from the new arrivals now heading to the gas, Linda Reich was dressed in a white blouse and dark trousers belted at her waist. She was horrified by the thousands of Hungarian Jews she had seen walking past the sorting piles in Canada all morning.
—Smile! SS Walter yelled at her as he focused his camera.
How did she manage to look as if she had just heard a joke, given that a gun was aimed at her head? Her teeth flash for the camera. The click preserves the image. The SS move on. Linda feels her spirit has been robbed. She is not emaciated by hunger. Her hair is pulled back. Her clothes look clean. She looks like a normal human being sorting some pots and pans, not a slave laborer going through thousands of items stolen from people being suffocated in the gas chambers just fifteen meters away, behind the photographer.
Numb, the girls of Canada watched the Hungarians walk to their deaths. Working in such close proximity to the gas chambers was devastating for them all. Some girls warned mothers with children to give their children to the older women. They did not explain why.
Many survivors who worked in Canada, like Erna and Fela Dranger from Tylicz, Poland, were never able to speak about their experience. Living and working just outside the gas chambers was just too much to speak about—ever.
“There were four crematoriums in a row, and about fifty feet away were forty sorting barracks,” Linda explains. That is where she, Helena, Irena, Marta F., Erna, Fela, Peggy, Mira Gold, and the many others worked. There were no walls around the gas chambers. “It was a brick building, red, nicely landscaped around, green grass.” The girls of Canada were unwitting decoys to the Jews going to their deaths. Highly visible, the well-dressed girls sorting items outside looked like “human beings,” not slave laborers.
In some ways, this was an early version of the curved loading chutes that Dr. Temple Grandin designed for slaughterhouses. The idea is that cattle see other cattle walking ahead of them and remain calm as they move into the chutes. Similarly, Jews coming off the transports and heading to their ultimate demise saw the young women working in Canada and thought, That will be us soon.
In reality, “95 percent went straight to the gas chamber.” The girls looked out “day and night, seeing the flames high in the skies . . . and the smell, and the clouds settled, and the ashes—black, greasy, fat on our faces.”
With the onslaught of the Hungarian transports, there were masses of new items to sort through, and an additional three hundred girls were added to the sorting details. Now six hundred girls were working in Canada on swing shifts. Men hauled the luggage from the transport ramps and piled it into virtual mountains. The girls were ordered to inspect everything, because “there was lots of food. They [the Jews] were hiding their valuables. So we had to take out everything and search.” The girls were not allowed to throw anything away, even broken glasses. “The good stuff, salami, cheeses, you know, durable foods, packages with sweets and so on, went on one side.” Broken things, like glass and pottery, were put to the other side. The rumor was that the broken glass was ground down, put into bread, and fed to the prisoners in Birkenau.
Linda watched the comings and goings of the SS, who filched the Hungarians’ riches for themselves. Canada was like a candy store for the SS. Multilingual and ever alert, Linda made mental notes of who was rummaging for furs and jewelry, and promised herself that if she survived, someday, she would make them pay.
IN JULY 1944, Eichmann’s plan to have four transports of Jews gassed each day was still unrealized, but the transports and executions had escalated. As summer temperatures rose, so did tempers. “The crowds and the heat and the lines, endless. Endless. You know, you couldn’t see the end,” Linda remembers. “People were tired. And they were screaming in Hungarian at the girls working in Canada, ‘Víz! Víz! Water! Water!’ ”
Water was one thing the girls in Canada had access to. “One of my coworkers couldn’t take it. She went and filled up a bottle of water from the pile we were sorting and threw it over the fence. A young child ran after it.”
At twenty-three, the attractive SS man, Gottfried Weise, didn’t look capable of cold-blooded murder, his close-set eyes and serious nose giving him an earnest and sincere visage. He ran after the child, tore the bottle out of the child’s hands, and threw it away. Then he tossed the child into the sky and thrust his bayonet into him as he fell, grabbed the boy’s arm and “smashed the child’s head against the wall.” A woman screamed. Then silence.
“Who did it?” he bellowed at the girls. “Who threw water to those dirty Jews?” He marched into the sorting depot, trained his gun on the girls, and ordered everyone to line up. “Who did it?!” he screamed.
Nobody said a word.
“If you are not going to step out, I will shoot one girl in every ten. Their deaths will be on your head!”
Nobody moved. He shot the first girl in line.
“Who did it?” He took ten paces. Shot the next girl.
“Who threw water to those dirty Jews?”
Silence.
Ten paces. Gunshot.
Sixty girls were executed for that bottle of water. The next day, there were sixty new girls in Canada. One of those new girls was very probably a teenager by the name of Julia Birnbaum, who had just watched her parents and siblings go to the gas. Tattooed A-5796, she arrived on May 24, 1944. Her father looked at her and said, “The Poles weren’t lying. This is it.” Her mother told her they would always be together, but then a suave and sophisticated man, with his finger hooked around one of the brass buttons of his uniform, asked her, “How old are you?”
