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Rose and four of her friends arrived at the train station and boarded an open-air coal car that was full of male prisoners. The girls were terrified, but the men were kind to them and advised them to say they had been ordered to get on the transport when it stopped. Rose could tell by the direction the train was taking that it was heading south and hoped that meant they were going to Slovakia. The transport did indeed pass through the farthest western notch of Slovakia, but it continued chugging past the border and into Austria, where it delivered the girls to Mauthausen concentration camp. Rose was devastated. Would they never be free?
Meanwhile, Linda and two to three thousand other women were still marching. “We walked for about a week” before they too ended up in Wodzisław lski and were loaded into open-air coal cars. Desperately dehydrated, some of the girls crawled up to where the engine was hitched to the train, where there was not only warmth but hot water dripping from a spigot. “Otherwise, there was nothing.” Linda and a few others sipped the hot water greedily.
A week of trudging through the cold and snow with barely any food had left most of the girls weak and vulnerable. A hundred girls were forced into one coal car. Standing room only. “Many of the inmates died.” The living couldn’t care for the dead and survive. Linda and the others had no choice, but to throw them out.
It may sound coldhearted now, but the dead girls robbed the others of heat. “Naturally, [we] took everything which was usable away from them,” to help keep warm. They believed the girls who had died would have wanted them to take what they could and live. “I don’t know how long we traveled. I can’t tell you. But the hunger—you don’t know . . . how hunger hurts.” Linda’s voice cracks. Tears fill her eyes. “It’s worse than a disease. Hunger hurts very much . . . .” It takes Linda time to gather herself. Staring off to one side, swallowing hard, weeping, she says haltingly, “This . . . this journey on the train from Wodzisław to Ravensbrück, that was the worst experience that I ever had, freezing to death, throwing over my dead comrades, who survived three years in Auschwitz.” Only to arrive in Ravensbrück—where there was no room for them. No food. Nothing.
ON JANUARY 27, the same day that Linda’s transport arrived in Ravensbrück, the Russians marched into Auschwitz and Birkenau camps. A few days earlier, the “30 storeroom barracks” in Canada had been set on fire. The barracks were still smoldering, and when the Russians arrive, over a million “pieces of women’s and men’s outerwear . . . are found in the six remaining partially burned barracks.” There they also found “over 600 corpses of male and female prisoners who were shot to death or died otherwise in the last few days.” Of the 5,800 prisoners still alive in Birkenau, four thousand were women. It is not clear if any of those women had been on the first transport.
WHAT CAMP YOU ENDED UP IN after the death march was critical to survival, and of all of the death camps at this point, Bergen-Belsen was the most deadly. It was “a very bad lager,” Irena says. “Everybody was sick, everybody was sleeping on the floor. Everything was on the floor. They gave us water and they gave us a piece of bread, nothing else.”
Fortunately for Irena, an old friend from home who had also been on the first transport, and had probably been transferred with Bertha in October, recognized Irena and snuck her into her room. The kindness of Ruzena Borocowice, who had been nineteen years old when they were deported to Auschwitz in 1942, very likely saved Irena’s life.
IVAN RAUCHWERGER’S SISTER, Erika, was death marched from Ravensbrück to Bergen-Belsen and describes eating frozen grass, which prisoners dug out from under the snow. In camp, she was rescued by two women from her hometown. One worked in the kitchen and brought her three cooked potatoes to eat. “The second, the wife of Erika’s primary school teacher, managed to get Erika admitted to the children’s barrack.” This protected Erika from standing at early morning roll call, where SS often attacked and killed prisoners; more important, there was less disease in the children’s block. Both these women died of typhus “within a week of helping Erika.” Among the children in camp with Erika was Milan, Lenka Herzka’s nephew.
BY THE END OF JANUARY, nine thousand women had arrived in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp. One of those groups—very likely Linda’s—marched for two weeks and about 300 kilometers before boarding the open coal cars bound for Ravensbrück, where they were left outside for twenty-four hours “because there [was] no room for them there.” Linda and the few friends she had left could not even get inside a tent. “We thought that was the last minutes of our lives. No food, no nothing. And still, other inmates were pouring in.” When they were finally able to squeeze into a tent, it was “full of mud,” and there was no room to lie down.
Edith opens her legs in a V to show how everyone sat, like dominoes “between each other’s legs on the cold ground and leaning against each other.”
“In Ravensbrück, it was physically impossible to live. We were really like herrings in a barrel. We couldn’t lie down. There wasn’t space for us because so many people had come there from other camps in Poland that were being evacuated. There were thousands of people, more than the capacity of the camp. It was very hard. There were so many people, not washed, not kempt. I don’t know if we even had food.” Edith pauses. “I don’t have a picture before my eyes of going for food.” To survive the death march was an insurmountable task. Now, there was another to face: starvation.
The situation became increasingly desperate. When hungry death marchers rushed the kettles of soup, the kapos lost control of the crowd and the kettles toppled over, spilling the soup across the frozen camp road. Linda weeps as she describes falling on the ground to lick “the food from the ice.”
There were a few brief reunions and tender moments. Among the hordes. Etelka Gelb found Ruzena Gräber Knieža’s mother-in-law, “a broken, old woman.” Ruzena’s heart filled at the sight of the woman, whom she had thought she would never see again. “The joy was great. The grief was terribly great.” She stroked and caressed Ruzena and murmured blessings. “If you survive, be happy.” She was taken to the gas chamber the next day. But that moment had strengthened Ruzena’s resolve. “Somehow, she blessed us.”
“Listen, Elsa,” Edith told her camp sister. “If they ask for volunteers, we will go. We didn’t survive the death march to die a slow death of starvation.”
Elsa grabbed hold of Edith in terror. “What if volunteering for work is a trip to the gas chamber?”
“Come, Elsa. I think even the gas chamber is better than this.”
Trucks arrived in the camp and one thousand girls were loaded onto them. Was it for the gas? Even Elsa did not care anymore. As it turned out, several of Ravensbrück’s satellite camps were able to accommodate the new prisoners. Among those camps were Retzow (where Edith and Elsa went), Malchow and Neustadt-Glewe.
Ruzena Gräber Knieža (#1649), Alice Icovic (#1221), and Ida Eigerman (#1930) ended up in Malchow, which was set up to hold one thousand women in just ten small barracks. It now had to house five thousand. Perhaps the best thing about Malchow was that the senior kapo from the women’s hospital ward, Orli Reichert (#502) was also there. Having arrived in Auschwitz on the same day as the first girls, on March 26, 1942, Orli had been incarcerated since she was twenty-two years old for being a communist. Long dark lashes around deep brown eyes and pale skin made Orli a striking young woman, and she had done everything in her power to help Jewish prisoners survive. The moment the Auschwitz survivors saw the woman many referred to as the “Angel of Auschwitz,” they clapped and cheered, “Our Orli is back with us!”
A number of other girls from the first transport were transferred to Neustadt-Glewe, about 120 kilometers deeper into the interior of Germany. The collection of girls onto a truck for Neustadt-Glewe happened so fast that many friends were separated from each other. Linda Reich and Dina Dranger were among those left behind. Meanwhile, riding in the back of the open trucks were Margie Becker, Peggy, Helena and Ruzinka, Eta and Fanny Zimmerspitz, their cousin Martha Mangel, Regina Schwarz and her sisters Celia and Mimi, Julia Birnbaum (#A-5796), Magda Moskovic (#1297), and the Polish girls Sara Bleich, Rena Kornreich and her sister, Danka.
These girls did not cheer when they arrived. Not only was there no Angel of Auschwitz in camp, there was one of the devils herself. Wardress Dreschler and her buckteeth were waiting for them.
Although these satellite camps were not death camps, girls still died. Prisoners were at the bottom of the list for receiving rations, and food was limited. Violence was the other cause. One of the chief kapos at Neustadt-Glewe was a murderess who delighted in stomping girls to death if they tried to steal food. But with barely any food in camp, stealing it was worth the risk. When Rena Kornreich attempted to steal three potatoes, the murderess came after her with a board to crush her. Rena escaped into one of the blocks where probably one of the girls from the first transport hid her in her koya and saved her life.
WHEN LINDA WAS TRANSFERRED from Ravensbrück, she and a group of girls were taken to an unfurnished, open barrack, and locked inside. There was nothing to sit on, and the moment the door shut, the girls panicked. “We were sure it was a gas chamber.” They smashed the windows and climbed out, heading for the woods.
One of the SS women from Auschwitz raced after them, shouting.
—Come back! We aren’t going to kill you! You’ll get shot if they find you!
They didn’t know what to believe, but for some reason they trusted the SS woman and slowly returned. For once, an SS was telling the truth. The girls were not murdered. We can’t be sure of the date Linda and the others revolted, but Himmler had started negotiations with the Swedish government to hand over “hostages” and had released an order, in March, “not to kill any more Jewish prisoners and to take all measures to reduce mortality among them.” That order may have saved Linda and the others. They were transferred to Retzow, where Edith and Elsa had already been working for a month.
South of Ravensbrück, Retzow had an airfield not far from Berlin. As a target, the airfield was regularly bombed so that German planes could not land and refuel. The women prisoners’ job was to go out onto the airfields, fill in the craters, and clear the runway of bombs. It was dangerous work, but to die by American bombs was better than to die at the hands of the SS. Besides, as soon as the SS retreated to their bunkers, the girls had free run of the camp and the kitchen. It was the first time in three years that Edith and the others got to eat something other than soup and bread. Whenever Allied bombers flew overhead and the air raid sirens wailed, the SS ran to the safety of their bunkers. The prisoners ran to the kitchen. “So we had a better life. We got food. Sometimes we even got semolina and milk, and we had clean water to wash ourselves,” says Edith.
LIBERATION WOULD COME soonest to the Bergen-Belsen death camp. Typhus had become a raging epidemic and already claimed thousands of lives. On April 15, fifteen days after Anne Frank died from the disease, Bergen-Belsen was handed over to British and American troops. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when the news came over the loudspeaker: “We’re here. We’re here. We’ve come to liberate you.” The prisoners could barely believe their ears. “By seven o’clock that evening the camp was full of food.” The starvation and disease were so severe, however, that many prisoners died from gorging themselves on army rations. Bertha was lucky; she couldn’t keep any food down.
Twenty-eight thousand prisoners had died since February, and the liberating armies designed special punishments for the SS and kapos, forcing them to carry bodies into mass pits for burial. They forced Dr. Fritz Klein and the commandant of the camp, SS Josef Kramer, to crawl across the mounds of dead bodies that had never been cremated or buried. They marched the German townspeople through the gates, past the emaciated corpses of thousands of human beings.
Whole blocks were incinerated to kill the disease-carrying lice. Showers were set up for women to bathe in, and they were doused with pesticidal powders. BBC reporter Richard Dimbleby described the camp: “Over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which . . . This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.”
For Bertha and Irena, it was the most wonderful.
Tears fill Bertha’s appreciative eyes as she recalls the soldiers who liberated her. “They were so great to us. So much compassion, so much understanding.” There is BBC footage of Bertha wearing a skirt and a clean white blouse while leading two well-groomed British soldiers from the crematoriums. As she walks with the soldiers, they pass the Lagerführer. “He was the prisoner now. I was a free woman.” She is a classic beauty with piercing eyes. These are not the eyes of a victim. They are the eyes of a young woman who has witnessed the worst of humanity, has survived, and now carries the power of that truth in her soul.
HIMMLER HAD STARTED NEGOTIATING the sale of Jewish prisoners with the Swedish government as early as March 1945. Brokering this deal was Count Bernadotte Folke, vice-chairman of the Swedish Red Cross, who was also working to free thousands of Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish prisoners. Folke’s intervention was repeatedly thwarted by Himmler’s narcissism and self-delusion, but he needed the money to save his own skin. To persuade the Swedes to negotiate with him, he offered to release one thousand female hostages—he threatened to kill them if the deal fell through. Ella (#1950), Edie (#1949), Lila (#3866), Joan (#1188), and probably Erna (#1715) and Fela (#6030) Dranger and, possibly Matilda Friedman (#1890) were among those prisoners for whom freedom was being negotiated.
Joan had been working in the hollow mountain of Porta Westfalica, where she was lowered in elevators deep into a mountain to do wiring for bombs and ammunition. It was the “scariest” job she ever worked. “We thought we are never getting out of here.” But Joan’s biggest fear was that they could be locked inside the mountain forever, and no one would ever know where they were or what happened to them.
While Joan was working in that undeground factory, Ella, Edie, and Lila were digging ditches outside of Porta Westfalica when the chipmunk-faced mass murderer himself showed up. One thousand of the female prisoners in Porta Westfalica were loaded into cattle cars and sent northward. Then the train stopped and reversed. The girls inside had no idea what was happening. No one knew where they were going, or that they were part of the extensive hostage negotiations between Himmler and the Swedish Red Cross. The constant back-and-forth on the tracks frayed their nerves. “They didn’t know what to do with us,” Joan says. It was a tug-of-war, with women as the rope.
Count Folke could not grant Himmler all of his demands, and Himmler kept changing his mind about what he wanted, making agreement almost impossible. When negotiations completely collapsed, the SS opened the doors to the cattle cars and began waving their machine guns and shouting, “Raus! Raus! Get out! Get out!”
It was 1942 all over again. The young women tumbled out of the cattle cars. They thought they were in the middle of nowhere. In fact, they were not far from Ludwiglust castle grounds.
Forced to bunch up against the train, the girls faced an impenetrable wall of SS alternately aiming their machine guns at them or returning the guns to their sides. They stood like that—the young women staring at their executioners, and the SS staring at their frightened victims—all day long. Hours passed.
“We thought this was it,” Joan sobs.
In the afternoon, as the SS prepared to mow down over one thousand women in cold blood, a German soldier drove across the field honking, waving a white flag and shouting, “Halt! Don’t shoot them!”
Himmler had acquiesced. Count Folke and the Swedish government had bought the young women’s freedom.
Wehrmacht soldiers—also known as brownshirts—were regular army, not SS, and they now took over the transport. Holding out their hands, they helped the girls back onto the train. These were Germen men who smiled kindly at the girls, touched their hands, gave them bread, and assured them that the next time the doors opened, they would be out of Germany. Free.
It was hard to believe anyone in a uniform.
As the train paused at Hamburg station, Joan heard a newspaper hawker shouting, “Hitler ist tot! Hitler is dead!”
Peering through the cracks of the car, she saw a black border around the front page of the newspaper. It was true. “We couldn’t believe it.”
A few hours later, just as the German soldiers had promised, the train doors opened and the girls were in Denmark. “There were nuns, the Red Cross, people threw bread from the windows.”
“You are free!” they shouted. “You are free!”
It took a few minutes for their eyes to adjust to the light of liberation. It took their minds much longer. Moving along the crowds on the street, they were handed “chocolate, cigars, and white bread. We were so sick from it!” Tents had been set up to receive the newly released hostages. Doctors and nurses attended to them immediately. Most important was removing any lice-infested clothing. It was the kind of protocol the young women were familiar with by now. They removed their clothing and waited for inspection.
The Red Cross workers did not mean to be callous when they poured petrol over the clothing and lit a match. But when flames leapt up the mound of clothing, the girls panicked and tried to flee. Screaming. Sobbing. They clung to each other in fear. “We were naked and thought we would be next on the fire. We didn’t speak any Swedish, either, so we couldn’t understand what the Swedes tried to tell us . . . We couldn’t believe that [the fire] wasn’t for us.”
