999, page 28
For some reason she lied. “Fifteen.”
Dr. Mengele signaled for her to step out of the line. Julia went directly from processing into the sorting details on the first day she arrived; the fourteen-year-old was now working in Canada with Linda, Helena, and the other old-timers.
Chapter Thirty-four
Some people end their lives long before they die, and
their extended lives are only an apparition. You took
the last step two days ago . . . and now you have found
your eternal harmony.
—DR. MANCI SCHWALBOVA, for Alma Rosé,
director of the Auschwitz women’s orchestra,
who died on April 5, 1944
HELENA CITRON’S FATHER APPEARED TO HER in a dream. He told her that her sister Ruzinka had been hiding as a gentile and had been caught. The next day at lunch, Irena and some of the other girls from Humenné were looking out the window of the sorting barracks when they saw Helena’s sister. This seemed odd as it was a Hungarian transport, but the girls must have seen the white-blond hair of Aviva, and then her mother, Ruzinka, carrying a newborn infant in her arms.
“Come! Come! Helena!” her friends shouted. “Ruzinka’s coming.”
The dream had been true.
Stricken with anguish and grief, Helena hid behind the mounds of clothes. She did not want to see her sister before she died. What was the point? An internal debate waged inside her mind and heart. How could she survive this, too? “I knew about all the people who had been exterminated, my whole family, my three brothers, my parents and my older sister with three lovely children, but this is my last sister.”
Then something clicked inside, and she revolted against her own timidity. What was she hiding for? Helena did not understand her own reaction. She ran to the window. There was Aviva’s white-blond head. Her elder sister, Ruzinka, was holding Aviva’s hand and holding an infant in her arms. Helena was an aunt again, and she didn’t even know it. A rush of emotions flooded through every cell of Helena’s body. She was not an animal. She was a human being! And it was the human part of her that ran to the door of the barrack and banged on it.
“What is this?” one of the SS yelled as he opened the door. To him, she was just prisoner #1971.
Standing in front of him in overalls, she begged, “Don’t shoot me. I just saw my sister, and after all these years, I want to die now with my sister.”
He looked shocked, but what did he care? He waved his gun for her to go. Helena ran toward the disrobing rooms. Standing just outside the doorway were the Lager Commandant Dr. Kremer and Dr. Mengele. As Ruzinka and Aviva disappeared inside, one of the SS bellowed at Helena, “What are you doing here?”
It was obvious from her number that she was not part of the transport, and no prisoner ever reached the gas chamber’s doorway and lived.
Helena stopped six steps away from them—that was mandatory. Always stay six steps away from the SS or they would shoot you. She was well trained. She was also not afraid of dying.
“I am already here many years,” she told Mengele and Kremer. “I have been through a lot, and now my last sister—” She choked. “We are all going to burn here. Let me die together with them.” What desire for life could she have without any family in the world?
“Are you good?” Mengele asked.
What did he mean by that? Helena had no idea and answered, “No.”
“So we do not need either her or you.” He and Kremer laughed at the joke, unholstered their pistols, and aimed.
Suddenly, Franz Wunsch appeared beside her and yelled at his superiors, “That’s my prisoner!” He grabbed her arm. “She’s been working for me for years, and we need her. There are not a lot left of these numbers, and she is a good worker.”
He threw her to the ground and berated her.
—What are you doing here, you Jew? You aren’t allowed in here! Get back to work!
Theatrically pummeling her, he dragged her away from her would-be executioners. Beneath the beating, he whispered, “Tell me quickly what your sister’s name is, before I’m too late.”
“You won’t be able to. She came with two little children.”
“Children, that’s different. Children can’t live here.”
The stark truth, stated so matter-of-factly, cut her heart. “Ruzinka Grauberova,” she whispered.
—Get back to work! he yelled.
Then he did what only an SS officer could do: He slipped behind Mengele and Kremer and disappeared into the disrobing area outside the gas chamber.
Had he ever witnessed this moment before? Seen the hundreds of naked women neatly folding their clothes, urging their children:
—Take off your own shoes. Hand Mama your coat. Watch the baby while I change.
“Ruzinka Grauberova!” he yelled over the heads of the women. “Ruzinka Grauberova, come forward!”
Her oval face and dark, almond-shaped eyes were the same as her sister’s. He would have recognized the family resemblance anywhere. She was already naked and helping Aviva undress. The delicate little girl looked in his direction. He signaled for Ruzinka to come through the maze of women and children to him.
Of course she recoiled. What did the enemy want with her and her children? She clasped her daughter and son tightly as the handsome SS man called her back from the “showers.” She stroked her daughter’s blond curls. The baby cried. Shifting the baby against her full breasts and holding onto Aviva’s hand, Ruzinka stepped hesitantly back through the tangled mass of women and children now heading for their shower. He spoke with dispassionate authority and told her that her sister was outside. Ruzinka looked frantic. Confused. Noise and chaos surrounded them. She was exhausted.
In a few moments, the room would be empty and the Sonderkommando would arrive. If he did not get Ruzinka out immediately, it would be too late to save her. And how could he ever face Helena without her sister?
—You have to come now if you wish to see your sister.
—Can’t I see her later?
—No.
—Mommy, go. I will watch the baby, Aviva offered.
Nestling the two-day-old infant into her seven-year-old daughter’s arms, Ruzinka assured herself that Aviva would be okay for a few moments. She asked one of the other women standing nearby to keep an eye on them. There was a perfunctory nod. Ruzinka kissed her daughter’s tears.
—Be a good girl.
Wunsch covered Ruzinka with his black cape and escorted her away from her children. Aviva carried her little brother into the showers. The door shut behind them.
AFTER EXTRICATING RUZINKA from the gas chamber, Wunsch led her past Mengele and Kremer by saying, “I need this one,” then delivered her to the sauna to be processed. It was an unheard-of allowance that even Helena admits “crossed a line.” But Wunsch would have done anything for her, and he did.
When Wunsch arrived in the sorting hut, everyone’s eyes were glued on Helena. What had begun as passionate physical attraction had now become something much more powerful—life and death hung on the curse of their love. Helena left the sorting table and moved slowly across the room. Camp noises—shuffling of cloth, stomping of feet, snuffling of noses—disappeared as they slipped behind a mound of still-to-be-sorted clothes. He pulled back a strand of Helena’s hair, let his lips brush the slight curve of her ear, and whispered that her sister was being processed.
Her tears were hot and hard, a mixture of relief and sorrow. Her sister was alive. Her niece and nephew were dying. Helena leaned against him and quaked in his arms. Theirs was not a match made in heaven but in hell. Their fates and the fate of her sister were sealed with a kiss.
IN THE SAUNA, a confused and anxious Ruzinka looked for her sister but saw only SS and a few other women standing in line to be processed, disinfected, and registered. Among the women registering and tattooing new prisoners would have been Ella Friedman (#1950).
Ruzinka fretted. Where was Helena? Had she been duped? The SS man had assured her she would see Helena after she was processed into the camp. Milk dripped from her heavy breasts.
—When will my children arrive? she asked the women around her.
No one answered.
Ruzinka started to panic and run wildly around the room. She had to breastfeed. Where was Aviva? Where was the baby? Naked, pacing like a trapped animal, she demanded answers to questions that would have brought a bullet between the eyes of any other Jew. But Ruzinka was under Wunsch’s personal protection now. No one could harm her.
It is not clear at what point Ruzinka was brought into Canada; normally, a new prisoner would have to undergo quarantine. When she was delivered to the block where Helena and the other girls slept at night, the others must have wondered at Helena’s power to bring her sister back from death’s door.
Dressed in new prison garb, bloody from her new tattoo, Ruzinka was frantic with worry and exhaustion. The minutes she had promised she would be gone had turned into hours and then into days. She had told her children she would be right back. How could she have lied to them? Like the parent bamboo dropping its flowers in mid-bloom, she must have felt it in her very being. Their DNA no longer answered hers. The connection between them had gone silent. But not knowing the truth of Auschwitz, how could she trust her instinct?
—Where is Aviva? Where’s the baby?
Her sister could not bear to tell her the truth. “It was very difficult because at first, she did not know that her children were murdered, and until they transferred her to me it took a while, and I kept promising her that her children were alive,” Helena admits.
Ruzinka kept talking about how big Aviva had gotten and so grown up. And wait until you meet your nephew! He’s so chubby and always hungry! He must be wailing by now. Look at my milk. At the mere mention of the baby wet spots formed on her uniform. Aviva must be terrified. She hadn’t eaten for days. Did Helena think she had eaten something by now? Who would nurse the baby? The other women in the block gawked at Helena. Waited for her to say something, anything.
Someone yelled, You have to tell her!
Ruzinka stared at the faces in the dark. The pale skin. Eyes glimmering in the shadows.
No woman could bear to speak the truth.
What Wunsch had done was “a great thing,” Helena says.
Ruzinka’s reality was far different from her little sister’s. Her heavy sobs tore everyone in the block apart. Most of the girls in Canada had never been married, never had children, but they felt the horror of this mother’s loss. The horror of Helena’s choice. Irena grieved for her sister, but at least her sister was not grieving for her children.
Ruzinka spent the next two weeks delirious and ill. She did not speak. Barely ate. Wept without ceasing. Her breasts ached as the milk in them dried up. Helena did what she could, bringing her sister bits of food from the pockets of the Jews who had gone to the gas. She cradled her sister’s head and tried to get her to eat. She prayed for her sister. She prayed for herself.
Was it selfish of Helena to save her sister? Could she have lived with herself if she had not tried? It is a dilemma no human being should ever have to face. Glassy-eyed with shock, Ruzinka stared at the bare beams of the ceiling above her head. Saw her daughter’s face in the darkness. Breathed her ashes in the air. Aviva’s ghost was everywhere.
Chapter Thirty-five
PHOTO COURTESY ARCHIVES DIVISION, YAD VASHEM WORLD HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE CENTER.
July 13, 1944
Dear Lenka—our daughter is now two months old. We are well. Now we are waiting for your visit, which we have been planning for a long time. We already have a house in Spa Vlasky, we just don’t know when [we are moving]. Everyone is working on the farm. Irma [Magduska’s mother] is at a hospital. Lisa often visits her there. Did you get our packages? Are you healthy? We would love to know. Write! We don’t know Ella’s address. Kisses . . . from Lilly
IT WAS THE LAST POSTCARD Lenka would receive from her sister, dated July 13, 1944. As the summer progressed, Jewish deportations out of Slovakia began again, and even families with exceptions were now in danger. The Hartmann family was tipped off by the local policeman and fled the farm. Lenka’s family—her sister, Lilly, her mother and niece and nephew—had already moved to a different town. There was no time to warn them that the Hartmanns were going into hiding. Bela and Dula split up to form two different groups. Nusi’s father, Dula, her mother, and little sister were caught. They did not survive. Nusi’s other two siblings, Bianca and Andrew Hartmann, were rescued by an aunt and uncle and taken into the forest, where they hid. “We lay like sardines” in an underground bunker with other members of the family, for the next three and a half months.
Bela’s wife, Irma, was now in a hospital, and of everyone in the family, she seemed to be the only one not in danger—the SS were not searching hospital wards for Jews. Bela and Eugene (Magduksa’s father and brother) fled into the mountains, where they hid. A village priest who “knew where everyone was hiding” preached to his congregation on Sundays that it was their duty to “ ‘feed the needy ones.’ He never said Jews, but everyone knew what he meant, and everybody in that village did help the Jews,” Eugene recalls.
In Humenné, Adela’s cousin Lou Gross, who was now six years old was woken up in the middle of the night and carried into a hayfield to hide. Having been “born into a privileged family” and “now being on the run and hunted by some invisible enemy” was discombobulating, especially for a young child. While his father joined the partisans to fight the Nazis, his mother ushered the family to safety time and again, always just one step ahead of disaster.
As the Russian front moved closer to Slovakia and crossed the eastern Polish border, Slovakian partisans—Jews and gentiles, communists and noncommunists—continued fighting a covert war against Tiso’s regime. On August 29, 1944, they revolted in what became known as the Slovak National Uprising. In response, thousands of Slovaks deserted Tiso’s army and joined the partisans.
Mayhem engulfed eastern Slovakia. Violence on the Eastern Front escalated as German troops pushed the partisans back into the Tatra and Carpathian Mountains, where Ivan Rauchwerger and his friends had spent almost two years preparing caves to serve as bunkers and hideouts. Young Slovak men, and even young women like Edith’s former classmate, Zuzana Sermer, were essential to the Russian invasion because they knew the mountain passes and could introduce Russian soldiers to sympathetic Slovaks who were ready to revolt.
German retribution for the Slovak Uprising immediately targeted Jews, and a law was passed stating that Jews could no longer live near the eastern border. It was a last-ditch effort on Tiso’s part to relocate Jews west of Poprad and “concentrate” them in preparation for his own Final Solution.
Still living under the relative protection of the Slovak government, Emmanuel Friedman had remained a vital worker while he continued to fix the windshields of bombers. But the relocation order included everyone, and Emmanuel was not going to risk letting any more of his children fall into the hands of the Germans. Who knew where Edith and Lea were now? The Slovak Uprising had secured a free area in the middle of the country. The last remaining Jews of Humenné now fled there. On September 5, 1944, the Friedmans boarded a train with Ladislav Grosman’s family and headed for Ružomberok, in the Liptov region of Slovakia.
Ladislav was still working in a military Jewish commando unit, “black uniform, no guns,” and was not in Humenné when his family was forced to leave. The two families and a number of other families from Humenné arrived in Ružomberok as refugees and with no idea what to do next. There was no welcoming committee. No Red Cross.
Standing under the awning of the train station, Edith’s little sister, Ruthie, tugged on her mother’s sleeve. “I’m thirsty,” she complained. The Friedmans headed to a café, where they could ask for advice from the locals. Minutes after the Friedman family walked away, the Germans bombed the station. Twenty-two members of Ladislav Grosman’s family lay dead under the rubble. The Friedmans were saved by Ruthie’s thirst.
The Friedmans spent the next few months hiding in the mountains with other Jewish families. Though barely a teenager, Edith’s brother Herman began fighting with the partisans. “At night, the kids [Hilda, Ruthie, and Ishtak] went down into the villages to ask for food from the villagers, who knew the children were Jewish and wanted to help them.”
AFTER GERMANY INVADED HUNGARY, Giora Shpira and his brother had returned to their family in Prešov. The Shpira family was poor and in desperate circumstances. Bereft of his daughter Magda, the aging Adolf Amster took the Shpira family under his wing. In return Giora and his brother did all they could to help the Amsters as everyone was forced to relocate into the western region of Slovakia. They would be able to avoid the last deportations that fall, but in the winter of 1945 both families—like the Hartmann and Gross families—were forced to go into hiding in a bunker in the woods.
The uprising was shortlived, and retribution by the SS and Hlinka Guard was brutal. “They went into villages accompanied by local Garda fascists looking for women who lived in their houses without husbands. Unless the wife could prove that her husband was fighting with Tiso’s army, or was working as a contract laborer for Germany, she was interrogated, tortured and often killed,” Ivan Rauchwerger recalls. Then he adds, caustically, “The Waffen-SS were somewhat less bloodthirsty. They usually just shot Jews, often whole families and, of course, partisans as well. I personally witnessed in June 1945 the exhumation of bodies, about twenty, all badly decomposed near a military airfield outside of my hometown, Spišská Nová Ves. There were about twenty women—all from the nearby villages, very distressed, and crying. I think that their husbands—the victims—had been caught either as partisans or as supporters of the uprising.
