999, page 30
Two yawning nooses awaited their victims. The prisoners’ heroes, two of the four girls who had smuggled the gunpowder to the Sonderkommando boys so that they could blow up the crematoriums were about to be executed. Edith does not recall which two of the girls from the ammunitions factory were forced up the steps of the scaffold, but it would have been Ella Gartner, Regina Safir, or Estera Wajsblum.
The SS yelled, “You have to watch because then you will know how you will be punished if you do something against us.”
Anyone who looked away was threatened with death.
As the sentence was read and the nooses were tossed over their heads, SS-Obersturmführer and Schutzhaftlagerführer Franz Hössler bellowed, “All traitors will be destroyed in this manner!”
“‘Long live Israel!’ the girls shouted and begin to recite in unison a Hebrew prayer,” Rena Kornreich (#1716) recalls. “Their voices were cut short as the chairs were pulled out from underneath them.”
A few hours later, Roza Robota, who had worked in Canada, and the fourth girl were executed in front of the girls of Canada. Linda, Peggy, Margie, Helena, Erna and Fela Dranger, and the others had worked next to Roza, eaten with her, spoken with her, slept near her, and now they wept for her. Perhaps she was the lucky one. To hang was better than to burn. To hang was better than to be gassed or beaten to death or starved. To hang meant you were an individual. That young women had defied the SS and helped organize the attack on the gas chambers struck more fear in the oppressors than the prisoners.
“We had those girls before our eyes all the time,” Edith says.
DEMOLITION TEAMS NOW began to disassemble the crematoriums and blow up some of the barracks in the women’s camps. Guarded by SS, the secretarial functionaries were ordered to load “prisoners’ documents, death certificates, and files into an auto.”
The long January night skies flickered with red and orange under the bellies of clouds. Sixty kilometers away, Krakow was burning. “The war was coming so close, and the shooting—you could hear it.” With the front so close, Linda and the girls still working in Canada feared they would be the last group taken over to the gas chambers and shot because they had seen too much. They were in better health than most of the other girls in camp, well fed and working under roofs. But beneath the silent sentries of the charcoal-stained chimneys, it was hard to believe in freedom. Still, the constant presence of Allied forces in the skies over the camp invigorated the prisoners’ courage “to see tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow will be better.”
Whisper campaigns came with the men hauling the kettles full of morning tea: “Prepare yourselves.” The grapevine was abuzz with rumors of an evacuation and the SS’s plans to incinerate the camp:
“Anyone left behind will be burned alive.”
“The SS are going to pour petrol around the perimeter, turn on the wires, lock the gates, and set it alight.”
As the SS made plans to use prisoners as human shields and march everyone on foot toward Germany, prisoners working in the Auschwitz underground smuggled out one last report:
Chaos, panic among the drunken SS. We are trying with all political means to make the departure as tolerable as possible and to protect from extermination the invalids allegedly remaining behind.
The direction of the death marches was being outlined by authorities, but with orders changing constantly, only one thing was certain. “This type of evacuation means the extermination of at least half of the prisoners.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
If the oceans were ink and the skies paper,
I couldn’t describe the horror of what I’m going
through.
—WRITTEN BY A POLISH BOY
IN THE KRAKOW GHETTO
THE SECRETARIAL FUNCTIONARIES stopped stuffing boxes of files into automobiles and started bringing “various camp documents” out of the SS offices to be destroyed in bonfires. Among those records were the photographs of hundreds of thousands of prisoners and much of the data on the women’s camp: population totals, death tallies, selection dates and totals, and execution records.
As rumors of the evacuation increased, Dr. Manci Schwalbova worked to help anyone well enough to walk. Helena was in the hospital when SS Wunsch warned her to evacuate. It was the kind of a warning the grapevine would have grabbed hold of and disseminated quickly—if Wunsch wanted Helena to leave, anyone who was capable should depart, too. A new whisper campaign began: If you can walk, save yourself. No one wanted to be locked inside when Auschwitz was locked and set alight to become a giant crematorium.
Prisoners who had access to the clothes in Canada began smuggling items out in empty soup kettles. Rena Kornreich and friends of hers from the laundry were given boots, gloves, warm coats, and sugar. SS Wunsch made sure that Helena and her sister had warm clothes and a pair of good shoes. It was the last “good” deed he would perform for the woman he loved. “I go back to the front, and you set out. If something turns around in the world and we lose the war, will you help me as I have helped you?” he asked.
Helena promised. Her sister did not.
FOR THOSE WHO WERE TOO ILL to leave the ward, Dr. Manci Schwalbova and the other medical staff did what they could for their patients, but as Jews, the medical staff were no longer important prisoners; they were cannon fodder for the Russians, just like all the rest.
Prisoners were frantic to organize what they could to survive the last push by the SS to destroy them. Anyone wearing rags on the death march would freeze to death. The men and women of Canada did everything they could to steal clothes and shoes for others. Those in the kitchens smuggled out sugar, bread, and other nonperishables to friends.
All the while, bonfires speckled the snow-laden landscape with ash as prisoner records were tossed onto the flames of oblivion.
EDITH KNEW SHE WOULD never survive the march. “How, with tuberculosis in the leg, can I go for a march of hundreds of kilometers in the snow? I cannot make it,” she told Elsa.
“If you’re not going, I’m not going.” Elsa was adamant.
“Please, Elsa. Go!” Edith would have fallen on her knees to beg her friend, but she couldn’t bend her left leg. “Save yourself. Go! You are okay! Go!”
“Without you, I’m not going!” And so Edith lined up in the columns with Elsa and determined she would try to leave.
At one o’clock in the morning on January 18, the final roll call was conducted. Leaving behind her patients in the hospital ward, Dr. Manci Schwalbova joined the evacuation columns as a nameless number, lining up beside Edith, Elsa and Irena Fein (#1564). Other girls who had traveled with Edith on the first transport were standing nearby as well, girls who were working in the New Blocks at the time of the death march and were probably in the same group as Edith: Ruzena Gräber Knieža, Rena and Danka Kornreich, Dina Dranger, Ida Eigerman, and most likely, Lenka Hertzka.
In a separate group preparing to evacuate were the girls from Canada: Linda, Peggy, Ida, Helena, Margie, Regina Schwartz and her sisters Celia and Mimi, Elena Zuckermenn, sisters Eta and Fanny Zimmerspitz and their cousin Martha Mangel, along with many others.
“We opened and closed Auschwitz,” Edith says.
THE ENSUING DEATH MARCH would be the final curtain for many, including the first girls. But for one in particular, it fell before the march even began. Ria Hans (#1980) worked in the hospital, where she often helped patients get out of the ward before the SS came and killed them. On January 18, one of those girls in the ward was Ria’s little sister, Maya. “She had tuberculosis and was so ill, she couldn’t walk a step.” How could Ria leave her little sister behind to be burned alive in camp? She would not be allowed to remain behind and die with her, either. Ria stole a vial of morphine and injected a painless death into her little sister’s vein. It was the kindest thing, the only thing, she could do.
Joining Manci and Edith in the column of girls and women, Ria could not look at them. The girls from Humenné looked around. Where was Maya? Ria could not speak.
They may still have been teenagers, but they were adults now. Women. And another one of them was gone forever. Maya had not even made it to twenty years old. The burden of her sister’s death weighed on Ria’s heart. How could she lift one leg after the other? How could she step over a single snowdrift given all she had lost? How could she live with what she had done?
“Everyone was mad at her,” Edith says, “but she was trying to save Maya from suffering. How was she to know that the SS would not burn the camp after we marched out? And who knows if the Russians would have come in time to save her?”
It had taken all day to organize the evacuation, and by the time the women were ordered to march out, they were already exhausted from standing and waiting. The snow fell heavy and hard. What had been ankle-deep was now knee-deep. Heavily guarded by SS under the spectral watchtowers, the columns of women departed with short intervals between them. Columns of men had already marched out a few hours earlier, clearing a path through the drifts of snow.
The mandate “For Jews, there is no weather” had never been more true. The first column of women marched out into the blizzard. As “they pulled us out from the lager,” Irena saw the SS bonfires as the threatened conflagration and thought that everyone left in camp was now burning alive. In truth, it would take several more days to empty the camp, and despite orders to “liquidate” the sick prisoners, SS Major Franz Xaver Kraus never lit the petrol-doused perimeter with a final match. A minefield had also been laid outside the fences, but the booby-trapped boundaries would not prevent the liberation of Auschwitz nine days later.
THEY COULD HEAR GUNSHOTS in the distance, but the women were moving in the opposite direction, away from the Russian advance and the hope of freedom.
The “snow was about over a meter or two meters high,” Linda says. She had shoes, but they were not a pair. “It didn’t matter. They were shoes,” and she had warm socks on her feet. Many prisoners had nothing. Prisoners “from the camp [Birkenau] had only those very thin, summery clothing, [and] wooden clogs.” There was no way those prisoners could survive the cold.
Divided into separate files, the prisoners were marched in several different directions toward the German border. As a result, the girls’ stories and how many days they trod through the snow vary.
“The first who marched, they paved the road for the rest. The SS was on the sides.” Some of the SS rode horses, pointing guns down at the prisoners. Whoever “was not able to walk was shot right away.” Linda, Peggy, and Mira Gold (#4535) walked as far behind their kommando as they could manage. “We walked over corpses.” Linda winces at the memory. Her voice quivers. “If the corpse still had something usable, a shoe or a sweater, we took it. But we didn’t have strength to pull them up to the side. So, you know, [we] stepped [on them] in the snow. The road was paved with corpses.” Linda’s column would take one of the longest routes, northward through Poland into the mountains, and they would march for a week. Most of the others headed due west.
“The snow was red, like it had been when we arrived in Auschwitz,” Edith remembers. “But then we were bleeding from our periods. Now we were bleeding from gunshots.” As the afternoon waned, the blizzard continued and the packed snow, greased with blood, turned to ice beneath their feet. Dr. Manci Schwalbova slipped and fell. Quickly, Edith and Elsa pulled her to her feet before an SS could shoot her. Some time later, they came upon Dr. Rose, one of Manci’s colleagues, who had also helped Edith. She had been shot dead. A doctor—murdered. It no longer mattered if you had once held a special position. “They had no respect for anyone.”
“I could hardly lift my feet out of the snow,” Ruzena Gräber Kneiža recalls. “My wet feet sank in the snow.” Ria Hans was “dead tired.” Every step weighed her down as she grieved for her little sister.
Marching over drifts of dead bodies, girls called out the names of those they had lost in the blizzard and the dark.
—Where are you? Can you hear me?
Their voices seemed like ghosts themselves—disembodied and invisible, howling names in the storm. “We heard about the rows of our friends . . .” Helena cannot finish her sentence.
“Exhaustion was also upon Ruzinka,” Helena remembers. “She had no children and no husband. She sat down twice. I lost my powers as well. She had nothing to live for. She did not want to get up.”
She looked up at Helena and said, “You’re young. Go! There’s no one to live for. Go!”
Given everything they had been through together and as deeply as she loved her sister, “at that moment I did not think. I had no thoughts. We had become something that has no explanation in our world. It was enough already.”
The SS were just one row away from where Ruzinka had sunk into the snow and now awaited the sweet comfort of a bullet to her head.
Despite having only a little strength of their own left, their friends picked Ruzinka up and dragged her. As with so many others on the death march, their help gave her the few minutes her spirit needed to recover strength—and as her spirit revived, her body did as well.
How did Edith survive the death march? She cannot believe it herself. “With my leg, limping all the way, how did I survive while others who were able-bodied did not? This is a miracle I cannot explain. I think it was God.”
God’s power must have worked through Irena Fein, too: “I was pulling with me a girl from Humenné. She was young. She couldn’t walk.”
“‘I can’t. I can’t. Don’t do this to me,’” the girl said.
“You are going! I had frozen feet!” Irena yelled, reminding her that she herself had lost two toes to frostbite, two years earlier. If Irena could march, anyone could march. She pulled the girl forward, forced her to keep walking. “Otherwise, she would have been shot,” Irena says.
That girl was Edith.
“THE ONLY THING we had to eat was snow. Frozen. Wet.” That first night and the second, columns of young women stopped at larger farms, where they were allowed to collapse in a barn and rest for a while. The straw warmed them, but they were soaked to the skin. Those who could not fit inside the barns slept in the snow outside. “You know, you get wet, you huddle. And then everything freezes on you. Many had freezing noses, frozen toes. I didn’t dare take off my wet shoes because I wouldn’t be able to put them back,” Linda says. “The stockings were wet. Everything was wet.”
Rena Kornreich (#1716) snuck to the back door of a farmhouse. “I have a sister and we’re both very hungry. We’re from Tylicz. If you can spare one potato, I’ll give her half. If you give me two, I’ll take one.” The wife of the farmer slipped Rena two warm potatoes and two hard-boiled eggs.
During the testimony of Regina Schwartz (#1064), the trauma of the death march is brutally evident. Wringing her hands, she becomes agitated and anxious. Panic rises in her eyes. Confusion descends. The interviewer keeps asking questions. But what is needed is silence. There are times, when listening to a survivor’s story, that the best thing to do is shut up, take her hand, and let your own tears be her witness. Some things are simply too hard to recall. Every survivor has moments they cannot speak of. They are not the same for everyone, though. That is why Linda’s and Edith’s memories of the death march are so important—they can tell us what others cannot bear to remember and should not be forced to recall.
As the snowstorm began to dissipate, Russian rockets lit up the sky, “like a rain of bullets overhead.” The front was closing in on them, but they were being herded away, farther and farther from freedom. No wonder so many just sat down in the snow and refused to take another step.
The columns of women marched for anywhere from two to seven days, depending on which route they had taken; thus the girls’ histories get quite complicated. On January 20, the first group of women arrived in Wodzisław lski, near the German border. They were forced to sleep outside near the train station. A number of Polish gentiles were part of this group. The next day, thousands more women arrived. “Trains of open freight cars [were] assembled from the morning until late into the night, into which half-dead, unconscious, and feverish female prisoners [were] loaded.”
Exhausted and starving, the girls collapsed into the black dust of open-air coal cars. The metal sucked away their body heat. When it began to snow again, Rena Kornreich scooped fresh snow off the iron lip of the car for moisture. Others were too weak to do anything. Everyone huddled together for warmth, but there was little, given that their clothing remained wet from snow. When the transports rolled, the weaker girls and those leaning against the metal froze to death.
In the chaos at the station, many of the girls had lost their friends and ended up on transports that took them away from one other, because the trains headed in four different directions, to four different camps: Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, and Buchenwald.
The transport to Gross-Rosen with two thousand women on it was turned away by the commandant due to overcrowding, then rejected from Sachsenhausen, as well. That transport arrived at Ravensbrück on January 27 after a total of five days. The transport heading for Buchenwald was also rejected due to overcrowding and redirected to Bergen-Belsen. Irena Fein was on this transport.
The last column of women to arrive in Wodzisław lski stumbled into town on January 22; Rose (#1371) was in that group of prisoners. When they arrived, they were told to find houses to rest in and to meet at the train station in the morning. This was an odd request. Why wouldn’t the prisoners just escape? No doubt many tried, but their uniforms were painted with crosses, and being captured and shot on the spot was more likely than freedom.
That night, Rose dreamt that the SS came and killed her, her friends, and the family who had given them shelter for the night. Terrified that with nothing but their camp uniforms to wear they would be caught, she persuaded some of her friends to go to the train station in the morning, just as the SS had ordered. Was the compulsion to obey orders stronger than their longing for freedom or was it the fear of death that kept her and her friends in bondage? Whatever the reason, they did not take the opportunity to escape; perhaps they were too tired and hungry, and simply did not know how to anymore.
