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Because of her position in Canada, Linda had witnessed the SS pilfering goods to enrich themselves and their homes. Like most of the Slovak girls, she also spoke German and knew what the SS were saying to each other. At one point they tried to trip her up by asking her if she saw him in the morning or at night.
“I can’t tell you if it was the morning or evening because the gas was always going, but I can tell you if it was summer or the winter by the dirty smell in the ground,” Linda told them.
Finally, the judge asked her if there was anything else she wanted to tell the court.
That was Linda’s moment. This tiny, white-haired old lady who was our Linda Reich stood up and looked at the gallery. “Yes, I have some words to say to all of you,” she said. “I have waited all my life for this. To stand here in front of you and point my finger.” She walked up to Weise and pointed at him so everyone could see. “And none of you can do a damn thing about it!”
And then she walked out of the courtroom. Her daughter chokes up at the memory. “The German high school kids followed my mother out of the courtroom and started hugging her and telling her, ‘Don’t worry, this is never going to happen again.’ ”
Weise was found guilty but fled to Switzerland after he was released on bond. He was arrested twelve weeks later and served his sentence until 1997, when he was set free for health reasons. He died in 2002.
SOON AFTER ARRIVING in Israel in the 1950s, Ria Hans Elias (#1980) was denounced by a survivor who said Ria had beaten her. Ria was arrested and had to defend herself against accusations that she had abused prisoners. Edith says this was truly unfair because if anyone helped others, Ria had. “Ria was one of the good ones.” The claim was serious, though. The complainant not only accused Ria of hitting a female prisoner but claimed, Ria explains, “It was impossible that I could be Jewish; only Germans got this number here.” She points to the number tattooed on her arm. In fact, there were at least a few other survivors from the first transport in Israel, including Helena. But in 1944, when most of the Slovak female survivors arrived in camp, the SS had begun adding letters before prisoners’ numbers, and the woman thought Ria’s four-digit number starting with the numeral one meant Ria was a kapo.
Auschwitz survivors’ numbers represent a strange kind of sorority or fraternity. Lower numbers command more status among survivors and garner others’ respect, but low numbers can also attract suspicion. The lingering question is, What did you do to survive?
After hiring a lawyer and defending herself against the allegations, Ria was acquitted, but not before spending time in an Israeli jail—a true irony considering she had also been jailed in Auschwitz.
Forty-seven years later when she gave her testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation, she confessed to a deep confusion around the circumstances. “A week or two ago,” she says, “I am certain I didn’t . . . I’d swear I didn’t beat her. Today, I don’t know anymore, [because] when I start to think about how it was [in Auschwitz], I was . . . inside, I was dead.”
Edith is stalwart in her defense of Ria Hans. “If she hit someone it was to protect them. New girls didn’t know how to behave or where the dangers were. Ria did. I bet Ria saved that woman’s life, and she didn’t even know it.”
PEGGY FRIEDMAN KULIK (#1019) remained friends with Linda Breder née Reich well into their golden years. Linda’s daughter, Dasha, remembers hearing her mother’s friends from Auschwitz and “Canada” laughing as they reminisced about sneaking things past the SS and not getting caught. Some people think survivors should never laugh. But after so many years of sorrow and horror, they deserve laughter. All of the survivors I know and have known have the most excellent senses of humor.
The photos of Peggy as a young woman reveal a girl who liked to make silly faces, despite the many hardships she suffered during and after the war. Like most of these young women, Peggy had trouble conceiving and carrying a pregnancy to term. Almost every survivor suffered miscarriages or had to have medical “interruptions”—the term for abortions at the time—to save their own lives. Peggy miscarried twins. Two boys. “I was kicked in the back by my SS man, and he damaged my uterus.” She finally had one son, who was born four weeks prematurely.
For girls who had grown up in mostly large families, having only one or two children was tough. For their children, there is a different sadness.
“We were a generation that grew up without grandparents,” says Sara Cohen, daughter of Danka Kornreich Brandel (#2779) and Rena’s niece. “We also had very few aunts, uncles, or cousins. It wasn’t until I joined my husband’s family and attended gatherings with more than a dozen aunts and uncles and countless first cousins that I saw what other families experienced. When I had my own children and witnessed the unconditional love and wisdom they received from their grandparents, I finally understood what I had missed during my own childhood.”
Bertha Berkowitz Lautman (#1048) immigrated to Cleveland, Ohio, where she had one son, Jeffrey Lautman, with whom she traveled to Auschwitz several times. During her lifetime, Bertha did everything she could to educate young people about the Holocaust. “It is very important to take kids back to camps with survivors to teach them the Holocaust is not a hoax. You should study and learn as much as you can. Carry on and be active in organizations. After I am gone, it’s all going to be all forgotten. Who will remember?” she asks.
You will, reader. You will.
Bertha remained friends with many of the girls she knew in Auschwitz and lived just a few blocks away from one of her best friends, Elena Grunwald Zuckermenn (#1735). Elena was the second woman I ever spoke to about the first transport and confirmed for me everything in Rena Kornreich Gelissen’s account of the transport from Poprad in our book, Rena’s Promise. At that point, I had no idea there were other survivors, as Rena’s best friends Erna and Dina had already passed away.
However, Elena preferred to stay anonymous in her lifetime, and I lost touch with her over the years. Just as I was wrapping up this book, I got an email from Elena’s daughter and photos of her mother with Bertha, holding schoolbooks and looking like the high schoolers they were.
“My brother and I believed that our mother was always critical of us, our choices, and our decisions,” Elena’s daughter says. “I occasionally referred to her as the ‘Iron Lady.’ Finally, I realized this was her way of shielding us and steering us to a better life and more opportunities. There is no doubt of the impact of traumatic events, which affected her practical nature, fearful world outlook, and the importance of family. At age seventeen, she was the first to be taken from her family, survived the horrors and deprivation experienced in the camps, and after liberation discovered she was the only survivor of her once-large extended family. My mother was an incessant worrier but managed to channel her anxiety into productive activity, regulating family life and maintaining a large network of friends, who were survivors and refugees. I always felt that we were different, perhaps even special, because of my parents’ traumatic experiences and the loss of family. I have read about shared trauma through the generations, but I believe that strength and determination to survive can also be shared through the generations.”
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) had not been defined or recognized in the 1940s and ’50s, but survivors still suffered from it. Joan Rosner Weintraub (#1188) offers a poignant reminder of how it afflicted the rest of her life. “I am afraid of the shadow. If I am driving a car and a policeman is in back of me, I am shaking. I’m afraid that he is after me. I see a uniform, I am scared to death.”
“We look normal, but we’re not,” Edith says. How could they be? “I lost my education, which was the biggest theft of my life. I lost my health. I came back with a broken body. Elsa came back healthy but was afraid of everything. The fear killed her in the end.”
The fear resides in Edith, as well. She just hides it better. Usually. It only takes a small incident to trigger panic. Edith’s family calls it “the mushroom story,” an illustration of the kind of ongoing trauma survivors suffered.
A few days before Edith, Ladislav, and their son left to visit Edith’s family in Israel, where the Friedmans emigrated in the 1950s, a newscast reported that a family had gone mushroom picking in Israel and unwittingly eaten poisonous mushrooms. The entire family had died. The names of the victims were not reported. After several days of travel from Prague, the Grosman family boarded the ferry to the Holy Land, but “when we arrived at the dock,” George recalls, “there was no one there to greet us. My mother panicked. She lost it.”
Edith was convinced that it was her family that had died of mushroom poisoning. Sobbing and hysterical, she could not be calmed down by George or his father. She was convinced that her entire family had died. “Then the whole Friedman clan showed up!” George says. They had gotten a flat tire on the highway. There was great rejoicing and laughter, but the moment is a refrain of the trauma Edith and all of the women suffered from, no matter how well they tried to hide it from their children and loved ones.
I AM IN TYLICZ, POLAND, with the sons of Erna and Fela Dranger (#1718 and #6030). They have flown from Israel to explore the region and are looking for any remnants of their family or Jews themselves in a village that is now dominated by ski resorts. American pop music from the 1980s blasts out of metal loudspeakers bolted onto telegraph poles that line the ski slopes.
“We are descended from very special survivors. Not anyone can survive in that place for that long.” Avi is a tall and gentle man with soft, deep eyes. “I know that when I was born, she [Fela, his mother] had a breakdown.” His eyes well up with tears. His older cousin reaches over and pats his leg. While they are first cousins, they are as close as brothers, because Avi spent the first two years of his life being raised by his Aunt Erna while his mother recovered her sanity. “When I was fourteen, she had a second breakdown.” His voice catches. “She used to run out of the house into the lobby and scream that people are coming to hit her and murder her.”
“My mother was stronger,” Erna’s son, Akiva, chimes in. “I have never seen her break or cry. Never.” She never told anyone in the family about her experience. Children are, indeed, secondhand survivors.
“We were all sick,” Edith confirms. “We came out of it, but the damage that was done on us, mentally, is a lot bigger than the illnesses we had physically. We will never ever, never ever get rid of the damage that they made in our hearts, changing how we look on the world and on people. This was the biggest damage that the war brought on us.”
Survival brings with it a complex array of emotions, psychological explanations, and guesswork. “I never felt guilty,” Rena Kornreich says. “Why should I? I didn’t do anything wrong. They did! They are guilty.” In contrast, Edith says, “The guilt of the survivors never goes away.” Of course, Edith lost her sister, Lea. Rena did not.
“Not a day goes by when I don’t think of Lea. Everything I do is for Lea. It has always been like that. You can’t see her. No one knows she is there, but she is. In my mind, in my heart, she is always here.” Edith taps her frail chest and shakes her head. In the light streaming in through the window, I swear I can see Lea’s spirit standing behind her sister.
Guilt may be the conundrum of the survivor. As a biologist, Edith brings logic and science to the question of survival, asking, “What if I survived because of some speck in my DNA that was different from my sister? What if those of us who survived had a gene for survival that others did not?”
Many survivors seem to have made an inner contract with themselves. Rena remembered everything that happened to her so that she could tell her mother someday. When she realized her mother had been murdered in the Holocaust, she clung to her memories in order to tell someone, someday what had happened. That someone eventually became me.
“How could I remember all the little incidents?” Joan Rosner Weintraub asks. “It is humanly impossible. How many beatings? We did something they didn’t like and they gave us twenty-five lashes. Can you survive twenty-five lashes? The only thing I live for now is for my daughter and my grandchildren.” For many of these women, it is their children who gave meaning to their lives.
Avi’s eyes fill up with tears again as he pays tribute to his mother, “It makes us really proud of our mums to see that they are survivors in a very difficult situation and to be proud of all those young women who survived and did not survive, that they did the best they could to lift up their heads. Their success is that they have lots of descendants, lots of grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.”
Ella Friedman Rutman (#1950) and her sister Edie Valo (#1949) returned to Slovakia to find five uncles who had survived, but no one else in the family. They lived in Slovakia for a time, then moved to Canada—the country—where Ella became the nanny for Edie’s children. “I never wanted to have children,” Ella says. “When I was in camp, I was always thinking I would be killed. In the end, I thought maybe I will be free, but I will never have children because I don’t want my children to ever go through what I did.” She was in her thirties when she got a surprise—a daughter. “The best surprise in my life. Without Rosette, it wouldn’t be a life.”
Ella and Edie’s cousin—another Magda (#1087)—was Donna Steinhorn’s mother. “I knew my parents were different from others at an early age,” Donna says. “It always made me want to protect them. To heal the deep wounds that they tried to hide from me. To do everything in my power to make them happy.” In the same way, mothers wanted to do everything in their power to make their children happy by never telling them what happened in the Holocaust. Although some survivors felt that way, one child I know was told everything too young and so often that she suffered from vicarious trauma. Genocide does not simply go away. Just as it can continue to haunt the survivors, it shapes the lives of those who live with and love those survivors.
Orna Tuckman’s mother, Marta F. Gregor (#1796,) never spoke about her experience, so in 2016 Orna began a journey of self-discovery that brought her to Slovakia and Auschwitz with me. In the towns where the girls were collected, we visited the old synagogues and town halls, looking for remnants of families before retracing the train route from Poprad to Auschwitz on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first transport. We were standing upstairs in the vast empty space of Block 10, where the girls were first held—and where, later, medical sterilization experiments were conducted on women—when Orna looked across the empty space and confided, “I think my mother was sterilized here. I was adopted.” Orna did not learn she was adopted until after her mother passed away. All of the women who had survived with Marta kept her secret.
Having children may have been the greatest act of survival and healing of all. A class of psychology students at Brown University once asked Rena what she did after the war to recover, mentally. “I had babies,” she said. After her first miscarriage, the birth of her daughter, Sylvia, was a miracle. Rena held her daughter and, filled with joy, looked at her husband and said, “I love you, John.” Then she looked at the doctor and nurses, “I love you, doctor. I love you, nurse. I love the whole world, even with the Germans in it.”
Childbirth. Creation. That was their power. Their legacy of survival.
No wonder Marta F. Gregor adopted Orna.
WHILE MARTA F.’S EXPERIENCE died with her and remains one of many stories that may never be fully uncovered, writing and art were other ways women found meaning. After emigrating to France, Dina Dranger Vajda (#1528) married a famous French resistance fighter, Emil Vajda. They raised their son in Provence. Dina kept copious notebooks, written mostly in Polish or rather poor French. Amid her musings are disturbing and macabre abstract watercolors.
Dina’s son Daniel Vajda is extremely close to his cousins in Israel, but he feels largely detached from his mother’s experience:
You know that all my family was deported, and there were very few survivors. After her deportation, I found myself totally isolated. I too was an immigrant on this earth. Even the Yad Vashem site didn’t bring me a lot. I have tried to rediscover names from the diverse notes I have made. It’s really very short. It needs to be seen in joined-up pieces. However, I did not have the courage to do the research in my youth, and at sixty-eight years of age, I do not have the energy to do it now.
Matilda Hrabovecká née Friedman (#1890) wrote the book Ruka s Vytetovanym Cislom (Arm with a Tattooed Number) and was the subject of the documentary film and play La Derniere femme du Premiere Train (The Last Woman of The First Transport) —which, of course, she was not. Matilda passed away in 2015. To date, she is survived by at least six women who were on the first transport. There may be others.
Magda Hellinger née Blau (Madge, #2318) who was on the second transport, immigrated to Australia, where she self-published her memoir. And, of course, Rena Kornreich and I wrote Rena’s Promise together, and now Edith and I have collaborated on this book and a documentary film. This book, Edith told me when I began the project, “should be about all of us, not just one person.” And so it is.
The Slovak survivors of the first and other early transports carry a heavy yoke that is difficult to comprehend now. Ariela Neuman, the daughter of Eta Zimmerspitz (#1756), explains that “in Israel, everybody accused the Slovak women because they survived.” So they tended to keep silent and not talk about it. “When they did,” Ariela continues, “we were like, ‘Oh no, not Auschwitz again.’ We feel guilty now that we didn’t want to hear about it. And they are almost all gone, and we can’t ask anymore.”
