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The well-intentioned Swedes led the girls away from the bonfire to showers and another eruption of terror. How could the Swedes have known that every little thing in normal life would mean death to girls who had survived three years in Auschwitz? Finally, someone explained in German that the showers had only water in them, and the steam was from the heat off the water, not gas. Still terrified and trembling, the first girls bathed. They were disinfected to kill any lice. Given fresh, clean clothes without any prison stripes on them. One of the doctors explained in German that because their stomachs had shrunk so much, if they ate too much, too fast, they could die. The lesson of Bergen-Belsen had been learned, and liberators were now cautious about what foods starving prisoners were fed and how much. The girls were given vitamins and served cereal. Hot porridge. Cream of Wheat. It was “divine.”
BUT ACROSS EUROPE, freedom still hung in the balance for many others from the first transport. When the airfield in Retzow was closed and the camp disbanded, Linda was part of a group that was marched toward Berlin. Edith and Elsa were forced to march in a different direction. This time, civilians were fleeing the Russian advance, as well. Allied bombers were dropping packages of food. Of course, prisoners were not allowed to retrieve them. The SS took everything. All Linda got “was a big piece of Ivory soap. No food, no nothing.”
After a long day of walking, Edith and Elsa lagged behind their column. The SS were far ahead, and the shadows lengthened as night descended. There was a little hut standing all on its own. Edith, Elsa, and nine other girls looked at the tiny refuge and quickly made a decision—they’d had enough.
It was a simple decision: “This is the last place that we are coming like prisoners. Here we will be free.” They fell on the floor of the little house and slept the sleep of the dead.
Edith woke to a gentle buzzing by her ear. The breath of wings across her cheek. Tiny angels buzzed through the golden light of morning, streaming in through the windows. They had fallen asleep in an apiary.
Footsteps crunched up the path outside. The latch lifted. A broad-faced, bearded German man stepped inside, unaware that there were interlopers sleeping on the floor. Edith sat up and rubbed her eyes.
“What are you doing here?” the man asked.
“We were sleeping,” she said.
“Your people are gone already,” he said. “I will tell you where, so you can catch up to them!”
The girls rose slowly to their feet, so as not to upset the bees, and slipped outside. The beekeeper pointed down the road, and they headed unhurriedly in the general direction he had indicated. No sooner were they out of his sight than they slipped into a ditch to hide. All around them, gunshots fragmented the morning quiet. Were the SS shooting prisoners, or were the Russians shooting SS? The girls crouched in the ditch until the gunshots receded. Two girls, one from the first transport and one from the second, decided to scout the area while the others hid. They returned with good news.
“We found an empty horse barn, with straw.” It was the perfect place to hide for the day, while they tried to scratch the red paint off their uniforms. The red crosses were so thick and bright they could be seen from far away, easy targets for SS looking for escapees. Picking the paint off the backs of their shirts and sides of their trousers took most of the day.
That night, they sneaked back to the beekeeper’s house and stole a chicken. All of the houses and the farm animals had been abandoned by the German farmers fleeing the Russian advance, so the girls milked the dairy cows, foraged for eggs in the chicken coops, and had their first meager meal in freedom.
The next day, their SS officer rode past on his bicycle. He didn’t stop to look inside the barn where they were hiding. He just continued on his way. In a neighboring house, two Polish men who had been working on one of the farms saw the girls pulling water from the pump and called out, “Are you hungry?”
Edith had thought she would never know a full stomach again, but the Poles brought the girls so much food they couldn’t eat it all. Fortunately, because they had been able to eat porridge and other foodstuffs when they were in Retzow, their stomachs could manage the feast. Afterwards, all they could do was enjoy the luxury of a stuffed stomach.
As sunbeams filtered through the open windows, reflecting off the dust and pollen in the air, they heard a woman’s voice shouting outside: “Der Krieg ist vorbei! The war is over!”
Running to the window, Edith saw a German woman riding a bicycle and waving the white flag of surrender.
“We are free! Free! Kostenlos! Zadarmo! Fray!” they shouted in three different languages, and hugged each other. Wept for joy. Then wept with sorrow.
Chapter Thirty-nine
A NOVEL WOULD END HERE. It would wrap up with everyone safe and happy and traveling home to be reunited with loved ones. Fiction can do that. Nonfiction cannot. And that is not how wars end.
These were vulnerable young women, alone in a world of male soldiers who had fought long and hard and wanted a reward. No woman was truly safe.
To hear the Russian soldiers tell the tale, sex with female prisoners was an act of brotherly love—a celebration of life. Sex with German women was revenge. But prisoner or kapo, German or Jew, Polish or Slovak, French, Dutch, or Italian—it was all rape. After Orli Reichert (#502), the “Angel of Auschwitz,” fled Malchow, the entire group of women she was with was raped by the liberating Red Army.
“So now we were free, but we were not,” Edith explains. “There were no trains, no cars, no bridges. Everything had been bombed and destroyed. They were soldiers with guns, and we were without anything. We were so afraid. We only had a number on our arms to show them, but they were interested in the lower parts of our body, not the upper parts.”
Edith’s group of girls found a flag with a swastika lying on the ground and tore it apart with their bare hands. Pulling away the swastika, they made themselves red scarves so that the Russians would respect them as communists. That evening, eleven Russian soldiers arrived, carrying buckets of food, eggs and milk that they had cooked for the girls. It was all very jovial and kind, and then it became awkward. The men sat and watched the girls eat. “When we finished eating, we did not know what to do and we were tired, so we said, ‘we want to go to bed.’ ”
“Us too,” one of the soldiers said with a chuckle, as he made what he thought was a good-natured grab at one of the girls.
She slapped him away. “No!”
“But we fed you.”
“We never had a man with us. We are girls.”
“But we fed you.”
Such was their male logic. The soldiers tried to manipulate the girls into agreeing to sleep with them, but the girls held a unanimous front.
Finally, the officer of the men stood up. “Get out!” he ordered. “Leave them alone!”
The girls breathed a sigh a relief as the soldiers disappeared into the night. Then the officer turned, looked at them, and smiled. “So who wants to be with me?”
“You just threw the others out.”
“Yes, but I have more rights because I am an officer,” he explained.
“We are still girls, even if you are an officer,” the eldest argued. “You have to leave, too!”
Grudgingly, he departed into the night. The girls secured the barn door and curled up as close as puppies in the straw. In the morning, they told the Polish workers what had happened.
“They will come back. If they didn’t succeed last night, they will come back until they succeed on the second or third,” the Poles warned them. “You can’t stay here any longer.” They decided to take the girls to a train depot on the border with Poland.
The Polish men brought two draft horses down from the pasture, hitched them up to a wagon, and helped the girls to get in. Sitting in the back of the wagon, Edith gazed up at blue skies emptied of bombers. Spring had erupted around them. All the colors of the world were more vibrant, more intense. Green was greener. Pink, pinker. Flowers were sweeter for the smelling of them. The earth was a miracle. Every aroma, every hue, every breath of air was an extraordinary experience. After not having had a single pleasure for three years, Edith felt every sensation until the very cells in her body woke up and sang.
In a cherry orchard, the Poles unhitched and watered the horses. The girls climbed up into the trees. Edith wedged her bottom on a branch, reached above her head, and gathered the first fruit of freedom. Her fingers and lips and teeth were stained burgundy. Juice ran down her chin. She spit the pits at the others in jest. There was laughter. They laughed. Paused. Looked at each other and then laughed all the more. Like fistfuls of life, Edith gathered cherries into her arms and pockets and mouth, until she could hold no more.
A Russian officer trotted by on his horse and looked at the girls sitting in the back of the wagon. “Jews?” he asked.
They nodded.
“Hide them at night to avoid their being raped or killed,” he cautioned the Polish men.
So that is what they did. Every night, they found a barn along the road where the girls could hide in the straw and sleep until they made it to the train depot. But now there was another problem. Without any papers or money, how could they get home?
It was a question being asked by thousands of refugees all over the continent. Another question was: Should we go home? For many Jewish survivors, that answer would be no.
“I have no family,” Joan sobs, years later. “Just a second cousin. You just don’t get used to it.” She did have an aunt, her mother’s sister, and an address in the Bronx. Joan wrote to her aunt from Sweden and was one of the first of the first girls to emigrate to the United States.
The Polish girls unilaterally decided not to return home. They knew there was no one left. Rena Kornreich and her sister Danka went to Holland; their friends Erna and Fela stayed in Sweden; Dina Dranger went to France. Sara Bleich eventually emmigrated to Argentina. Margie Becker had an aunt in America, who wired one hundred dollars as soon as she heard from her niece. Margie bought a decent dress and headed east for Slovakia. On a train home she met Solomon Rosenberg, her future husband, also returning from the camps.
FOR THOSE RETURNING HOME, journeys took on the epic proportions of Ulysses’ voyages as they faced one hurdle after another. They hitchhiked or caught trains, begged rides in wagons, and walked for miles. Edith had to cross a footbridge swaying over a torrent of dark floodwaters in the River Váh—spring melt from the mountains.
Some girls, like Kato (#1843), one of Lenka Hertzka’s friends from Prešov, had a card from the Red Cross that gave her free passage on the trains. Others, like Edith, received nothing.
Linda sobs remembering the moment when the international commission arrived at the displaced persons camp where she and her friends were quarantined and announced that they were considered “citizens of the world.” They were given papers that allowed them to go wherever they wanted. All they really wanted to do was go back to Slovakia. “I knew already that my twin brother, my sister, my other brothers, everybody was wiped out. But I wanted to go home.”
Once a week, there was a train from Prague to Bratislava. To catch it, Linda and her friends walked from Berlin to Prague on foot, a 318-kilometer journey. When they arrived in Prague, the train was so full of refugees there was no room inside, so Linda, Peggy and a few other friends clambered up the side of the train and sat on the roof.
“Why not on the top of the train? I was young.” And alive.
From the top of the train, the world unfurled. Freedom was a horizon of distant green mountains, a chalk-blue sky. The desolate gray-beige bands of Auschwitz faded in the brightness of a horizon washed clean by storms. Not a single barbed-wire fence or watchtower hemmed in the distance. Freedom was the wind in their hair, the sweet spring air, and the flowering trees. The sun baked their weary bones, warmed muscles hardened by work, starvation, and fear. Tension melted into the metal top of the train. As they passed towns and villages, the refugees waved from the windows and the roof of the train. Villagers cheered and waved back. Just as they had more than three years earlier, the girls broke into song. This time, they did not sing the Slovak national anthem.
Homecomings
RIA HANS (#1980) WALKED the one thousand kilometers from Germany home to Humenné. When she arrived, in August 1945, she weighed thirty-nine kilograms, about eighty-five pounds. She had gained weight since liberation. “I was very sick. My skin, you couldn’t even give me an injection. My body was completely dry, until my mom gave me oil of coconut baths.” Ria was one of the lucky few whose parents had survived. Her father had a farm outside of town, and “when it started to ‘stink’ ” in town, the family moved out to the farm. They had dressed like Slovak farmers and had taken the children to church, where the priest was a good friend. Like Lou Gross, Ria’s siblings had learned how to say the “Our Father” and pretend they were Catholics. That was how the Hans family survived. Ivan Rauchwerger’s sister weighed just 38 kg when Bergen-Belsen was liberated. After two months of recuperation in a British military hospital, “she came back to me still weighing only 40 kg. She had no hair and no teeth.” Ivan didn’t even recognize her. She suffered from ill health most of her life and “had many operations, skin grafts, and nonworking kidneys.”
Very few of the girls returned to anything, though. Peggy knew that her brothers and sister had died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, but she had hoped to find something left. She walked the two hours from Stropkov to her tiny village only to find complete desolation and her family’s farm burnt to the ground. The walk back to Stropkov was even longer, weighed down by loss and memories. The last time she had walked that road, she had said good-bye to her family without knowing she would never see them again; she had been with Anna Judova (#1093) and Ruzena Kleinman (#1033). They too had survived, but where were they now? She sat on a curb in the now-empty Jewish quarter of Stropkov and wept. Peggy was penniless, homeless, and with no family—alone in the world. A young Jewish widow, whose husband had hidden her in a bunker with her twin daughters, stopped and asked Peggy what was wrong.
“I don’t know what to do with my life!” Peggy sobbed.
“I have one bed and one sofa,” the young widow told her. “You will sleep with one girl on the sofa, and I sleep with one girl in the bed.” Adopted into this makeshift family, Peggy became the girls’ nanny and slowly reentered the world of the living.
When Linda returned to her parents’ house that summer, everything looked the same as it had when she left. She prayed that someone in her family was still alive and knocked on the big wooden gate. A steel-faced Ukrainian man opened it and glared at her. “What do you want?” How could anyone be so rude to a petite young woman, as frail and kind-faced as Linda?
“Well, this is our home,” she stammered, unsure what else to say. “I want to come back to my house.”
“It is mine. I bought it for a dollar,” the Ukrainian said. “Go back where you came from!” He slammed the door in her face. “This was my welcome home. . . . I felt like a ghost returning from my grave.”
Despite all the outrages Linda had experienced in Auschwitz, the cruelty, deaths, and murders, she felt more stunned by the fact that the Hlinka Guardists had taken all of her family’s furniture, all the mementos from her childhood, all her mother’s heirlooms and even stolen her home. She had no family left. No inheritance. Nothing but the scraps of memory that had not been sanded away during her years in slavery.
She returned to Bratislava, where she had left some of her friends, and then discovered that her sister had survived by hiding under false papers as a Catholic. The she met Fred Breder in a bread line, and they were married in 1946. She was no longer alone in the world. It would take them twenty years to get their family home back, but Linda would fight for that house the way she had fought to survive. Of course, by the time it reverted to her family, she had emigrated to America.
ALICE ICOVIC (#1221) arrived in Slovakia on a wagon with several other girls. As they approached a farm, Alice greeted the gentile farmer with a traditional Slovak greeting: “Dobrý de k požehna-nému Ježišovi Kristovi. A good day to be blessed by Jesus Christ.”
“Navždy!” he answered. “Forever.”
It felt good to be in her home country, speaking her native language, and she smiled at his wife, who had come down to the road to see who was passing by.
“Please, could you give us a bit of a milk?” Alice asked. “We are coming from a concentration camp and are very thirsty.”
Realizing that Alice and her friends must be Jews, the couple looked horrified. “Oh my God!” they said. “You were gassed and set on fire. How many of you are coming?”
“I forgot I was in Slovakia,” Alice says, shaking her head. “You can’t say we could be proud of those moments.” She and her friends turned heel and, “shaking the dust from their feet,” left.
Edith faced a similar reception in the market a few days after she arrived home when a woman recognized her and said, “There are more who came back than left.”
THERE WERE SOFTER landings for some. Ida Eigerman (#1930) had ended up in a displaced persons camp in Pocking, Germany, where she was picked up by the Czechs, who had sent buses to move Czech and Slovak refugees. “I can say this was the happiest day in my life. You—you ran away from death. And the Czechs were so nice. On the way, they had kettles with milk and cakes and bread and salamis and anything you want. Who could eat so much? When you have been so hungry, you cannot eat anymore.”
Eta and Fanny Zimmerspitz (#1756 and #1755) and their cousin, Martha Mangel, also made it to Prague eventually, but on foot. By then, the trains were so full that it was almost impossible to get on them, but they discovered that a group of Polish and Slovak men had decided to organize and escort female survivors home to Slovakia. It was a 300-kilometer journey and would take over a week to walk home, but the girls were safe, protected, and well cared for on the road.
