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Orna Tuckman’s future mother, Marta F., had a large family that stood waving to her. Next to her in the same compartment were her good friends: Minka, Margita, and another Marta. In their early twenties, these young women felt differently than the teenagers, who were being separated from their mothers and fathers for the first time. Many of these young women had jobs and lives outside their immediate families. Leaving home to work for three months of government service was going to make their families’ lives more difficult because they were working girls and brought in needed income. Postponing their own young lives, they worried about their futures. How could a young woman fall in love and get married if she was doing government service for three months? What young man would wait for a young woman who was no longer available for long walks and sweet murmurings? Were there many nice Jewish men working at the shoe factory?
Chapter Eight
Sexism is like racism. It’s very dehumanizing.
—WILMA MANKILLER, Chief of the
Cherokee Nation, Western Band
IN THE POPRAD BARRACKS, EDITH and Lea woke to a world transformed. There was no breakfast, no singing, no mother. Edith’s eyelids were stuck together from tumult, tears, and sleeplessness. To make matters worse, she had gotten her period. As she and Lea wandered down the hallways, they could hear girls’ voices in hollow rooms and footsteps echoing inside the vast empty barrack.
Shock has prevented many survivors from remembering details about their time in the Poprad barracks. Margie Becker recalls working in the kitchen peeling potatoes and slipping food to one of her friends, but “felt so sorry that I gave her the unkosher food.” Commandeered to cook stewed cabbage for the afternoon meal, the girls in the kitchen were also instructed to cut precisely 150 grams of bread—the size of a clenched fist—for each girl.
Others were ordered to clean the barracks. Edith and Lea held back tears as they worked on their hands and knees scrubbing floors and walls. “No one told us what we were doing there,” Edith says. “They gave us rags and mops and told us to clean the barracks. So we cleaned. We wondered, is this it? Was this the work we were supposed to do? That’s not so bad, but it seemed strange to bring a couple hundred girls to clean some barracks. Why so many? We knew nothing.”
And then 224 girls from Prešov arrived at the barracks. Seventy-four of them were teenagers, including Magda Amster.
“You know,” Edith says, “the feelings are very hard to explain, because a seventeen-year-old girl, if she’s not completely stupid, is a lot more optimistic of the future than an older person. With all the fear and all the insecurity, our optimism was there.” She and the other girls looked at what they were being told to do and figured, “Maybe it is only really for work. Maybe it is only for something special. Maybe it is for work that is not so hard or horrible. We didn’t know. How could we? No one knew about Auschwitz then. It didn’t exist yet!”
Among the group of young women from Prešov were two middle-aged women. Fanny Grossmann and Etela Wildfeur were both forty-five, and while we can’t be sure, it seems possible that they joined eighteen-year-old Ruzena Grossmann and nineteen-year-old Marta Wildfeur, who may have been their teenage daughters.
The government had been clear in its stipulation that only young, unmarried women were expected to register for work. So what were Fanny and Etela and, by the end of the week, twenty-seven other middle-aged women doing on the first transport? They did not come from one single community. Seven of these women came from Prešov, four were from Edith’s hometown of Humenné, three came from Levoa, and one arrived on the bus from Stropkov.
Perhaps some of these women had planned to go together, but there is no way to know if they organized themselves ahead of time as an act of resistance—going in place of their daughters or niece—or of solidarity, refusing to let the girls go alone and unprotected. Perhaps the middle-aged women were unmarried and unrelated to the younger women and girls. We simply do not know. What is striking about these older women is that they are there. They are listed and accounted for, and they may represent a small act of rebellion that could have been perpetrated only by women. Men could not volunteer to replace their daughters or sisters. Only women. And when these women showed up at the trains and bus stations with their suitcases, they were not turned away.
The question has to be asked: If they were not on the original roundup list, did they register under the names of the daughters or family members they wanted to replace? Or did they give their own names and simply volunteer to go in place of the younger women? Whatever the case, by the time the list was typed and the quota had been made, no one was turned away.
So these God-fearing, religious women stood before the Hlinka Guard members . . . and stated their names and ages for the record: Eta Galatin, age forty; Margita Gluck, age forty-five; Lenka Neumann, age forty-two; Fanny, Paula, Ilona, Rezi . . . At fifty-eight years of age, Etela Jager was the oldest, and truly alone—she was the only woman on the transport bearing her family name and she came from a village that no longer even appears on a map. What was she doing there? Perhaps she was going in place of her granddaughter.
Whether they were resisting the government orders or going in solidarity with their daughters, we cannot know. Their silent courage speaks to the spirit of women, and it is a feat that has never been recognized. None of these women survived.
The first transport incited another, much better documented, act of resistance. In the border town of Bardejov, three hundred girls were supposed to report on March 20 and stay overnight in the town’s Jewish school. However, on March 19, Rabbi Levi went to Dr. Grosswirth and Dr. Moshe Atlas with a risky idea. He asked the doctors to inject some of the girls with a double dose of the vaccine against typhus so that by morning they would be feverish. The doctors did so, and in the morning they declared that there was a typhus epidemic. The local authorities placed the entire Jewish section of Bardejov under quarantine, and every girl living inside the town perimeter was immediately excluded from reporting for “work.” They were not even allowed to enter the school.
On Saturday morning, after spending the night in the school, about two hundred girls from the surrounding region were taken by passenger train to Poprad. But not a single girl was from Bardejov itself.
Konka still had a quota of girls to deliver and a target of five thousand in the space of a week, which may explain why town criers were suddenly making announcements in smaller towns. “Town criers were not always prompt,” Edith says. “They went around to villages and banged on their drums, but there were lots of villages to go to, so it could often take days for news to arrive.” Two weeks had passed since the first announcement though. With Bardejov coming up short, Konka and his cronies would have to look elsewhere for deportable young, unmarried women.
SUNDAY, MARCH 22, 1942
While families in the larger towns like Humenné and Prešov had had time to prepare or perhaps escape, girls in smaller towns had almost zero warning, a method that would prove to be highly effective. Over half of the population in the town of Stropkov was Jewish. They had a synagogue and yeshiva, and while poverty was rife in rural communities, Stropkov had an active marketplace and its own rabbi. In the surrounding valleys tiny villages were often made up of only one or two Jewish families.
Peggy knew literally everyone in Kolbovce, the village where she had grown up—she was related to them, after all. Her protective elder brothers returned unhappily from work that Sunday afternoon to inform the family that the town crier had been banging on his drum, and Peggy was supposed to report for government service the next day. The good news was that the work she did would benefit the family, her brothers assured their parents. If the family could receive a stipend from her service, it would be appreciated. Times were rough, and even rougher for Jewish families, who needed every little bit of help they could get.
That evening, after Peggy packed her things, did she pause to study her face in the mirror and think how grown-up she suddenly looked? Did she try smoothing her thick black hair by rolling it with socks, so she would look more sophisticated? She had never gone away on her own before, but the idea of supporting her family felt very adult and responsible. Like most teenagers, she thought growing up was exciting and something to be rushed into. Sighing with anticipation, Peggy figured she was going to have an adventure of her own. She couldn’t wait.
THAT SAME SUNDAY, in another small village outside of Stropkov, the Berkowitz daughters were already hiding when a local policeman came by with a list in his hands. Bertha’s mother claimed the girls had gone to visit relatives, but he had heard that excuse enough already and threatened to take Mr. Berkowitz if at least one of the girls didn’t come with him.
Bertha’s mother and father asked where the girls were going. They wanted to know what they would be doing—what parent wouldn’t?
When the policeman said, “a shoe factory,” they decided that didn’t sound so bad.
Mrs. Berkowitz called her sixteen-year-old daughter, Bertha, to come out from her hiding place. Her younger daughter, Fany, remained in hiding.
“Don’t worry,” her mother assured Bertha, “I’ll go with you to the registration.”
Together they packed a few of Bertha’s things into a satchel while the policemen waited. As Bertha stepped into the center of their home, her father motioned for her to sit on a stool. Tears streamed down his face as he placed his hands on her head and prayed: “God is going to help you. You will be home soon.” It was the first time she had ever seen her father cry. They were the last words he ever spoke to her.
As they were leaving, Bertha’s mother called back to her sons. “Don’t forget to take down the laundry!” Frozen on the line, the shirts and socks jerked in the wind, waving an awkward good-bye.
Mrs. Berkowitz and the policeman escorted Bertha and her best friend, Peshy Steiner, to the larger town of Kapišová, where they were told to sleep for the night. A bus would pick the girls up in the morning. Bertha and Peshy spent the night in a friend’s home with other girls who had come from the surrounding villages with their mothers or fathers. While the teenagers slept on the floor, tense voices full of dread worried their dreams. “I did not sleep very well,” Bertha says. “My mother didn’t sleep at all. She aged ten years in one night.”
ON MONDAY MORNING, a policeman showed up at Peggy’s house. Her mother packed sandwiches and some sweets for the two-hour walk to town, and Peggy hugged her brothers and parents good-bye. Wrapped warmly, a scarf around her neck and shoulders, she waved and headed off on her adventure.
The only way out of the valley was along a dirt road between the mountains. Snow clung to the hills, and the ground was hard and frozen. A lemony sun crested the mountains as the morning shadows receded toward the forests.
At the next village, Brusnica, twenty-one-year-old Anna Judova joined Peggy. The girls had grown up in the farmlands of Slovakia among gentile neighbors with very little thought or care about the wider world. Peggy’s eager face wore a broad smile as they headed down the road, her mass of dark hair pinned back under a hat to keep her ears warm. An hour later, their police escort stopped to pick up Ruzena Kleinman. The three girls swung their bags and chatted buoyantly in the brisk morning air.
Forty other young women were standing at the bus stop in Stropkov when Peggy, Ruzena, and Anna arrived. Amid a din of young voices, the girls chitchatted about the mystery of their government jobs. Like Bertha, some of them had been told they would be working in a shoe factory; others had been told they would be working on farms. The bus driver was affable and smiled at the girls, but all he knew was that they were going to Poprad. With Passover just a week away, the girls immediately began to wonder if maybe they would be allowed to come home for Seder. Poprad was only a few hours away, after all.
Peshy Steiner was like a daughter to Mrs. Berkowitz, and as the others were boarding the bus, Bertha’s mother looked at Peshy’s beautiful face and took her hand. The other girls they had walked with stood by her. “Promise me you will look after each other,” she told them. “And remember Bertha is the baby of you. Take care of her, like you would your little sisters.”
In an instant, they were bound by their vow and formed a sorority among themselves. As Bertha kissed her mother good-bye, she felt something change deep inside her. At that moment, she says, “I became very grown up.”
The engine on the bus coughed, then sputtered. The smell of petrol stung their noses as black smoke puffed out of a rusty exhaust. There was a great deal of chatter and excitement; most of the girls were anything but sad. “Nobody thought it was the last time they would see their parents. We were going away for a little while and would be back soon,” Bertha recalls.
“We were laughing and singing,” Peggy says. “It was an adventure. The bus driver was very nice, and we had sandwiches that our mothers had packed for us. It was like a picnic!” Even the bus driver joked with them.
About two hours into their journey, the scenery outside began to change as the High Tatra Mountains came into view with their dragon-toothed peaks bedecked in winter white, majestic against an ice blue sky. Like the girls from Humenné before them, these young women were filled with such a sense of patriotic pride at the sight of the High Tatras that as the bus rounded the bend in the road and revealed what they thought was their final destination, they burst into song.
Pulling up at the barracks in Poprad, the driver opened the door to the bus and the enthusiastic girls tumbled out. Looking quizzically around the compound, they smiled at the men in black uniforms stepping toward them, whips in hand.
“The moment we got off the bus, everything changed,” Peggy recalls. “There were guards yelling at us. Whipping us.” Being pushed and shoved around by men, who were rude and gruff, the girls stopped short and looked at the bus driver for help. What was this? What was happening?
The driver looked as shocked as his passengers.
The girls’ confusion was compounded by the incongruity of their situation. Their lighthearted mood of hope and eager compliance collapsed.
Outside the windows of the barracks, the day shifted to night. The sandwiches they had eaten on the bus were gone. Their mothers hadn’t packed more than lunch, thinking that their daughters would be fed supper. Inside the barracks, there was no meal prepared for the new arrivals. Edith and the others had already eaten their Monday allotments, 150 grams of potatoes each. The robust country girls from Stropkov met the hollow-eyed girls who had been in the barracks for two days, whose faces were distorted by shock and hunger. Since the girls from Humenné had arrived on Friday, they had been fed no more than 150 grams of millet, cabbage, legumes or kasha each day, along with their allotment of one piece of bread. It was hard to believe that a few days earlier, those same girls had also been singing patriotic songs on their way to Poprad. No one was singing now.
SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD Ivan Rauchwerger arrived with two of his friends to check on the girls from his town of Spišská Nová Ves, about twenty-four kilometers from Poprad. Ivan had been staggered by the announcement that the girl he was in love with, and so many of the girls he had gone to school with, were being rounded up for government service. Why not call young Jewish men, who were stronger and more fit for work? Why not call him?
Like everyone in the Jewish community, Ivan’s family was dismayed by the abrupt government requisition. “The country had not turned a complete blind eye to what was happening,” he remembers. “Many gentile business owners contacted bishops in Bratislava and asked them to intercede with President Tiso on behalf of their Jewish friends, as this deportation of single, young girls was in contrast to everything the Christian religion teaches, especially ‘Love your neighbor.’”
Ivan Rauchwerger as a young man.
PHOTO COURTESY IVAN JARNY.
That Monday, Ivan’s mother, Eugenie, insisted he go check on their neighbors who had been taken. One of Ivan’s friends borrowed his uncle’s car and, together with Ivan and a couple of other friends, drove to the barracks in Poprad. Less than half a block away from the railway tracks, the two-story building would have been easy to spot from the main road. Despite a fence around the grounds and guards at the entrance, Ivan and his friends were able to talk their way inside. Immediately, they were surrounded by panicked and frightened girls. “Their cheeks were streaked with mascara, and they begged my friends and me to bring food and medicine. It was horrible to see them so distraught. They were desperate.”
“We were crying the whole time,” Edith says. “What will happen to us? What are we doing here? The guards didn’t tell us anything.”
By the next day, when more men arrived to check on their sisters and cousins, the guards stopped allowing anyone inside the compound. Joan Rosner’s brother Luddy tried and tried to see his sister, to no avail. Emil Knieža was able to borrow an army uniform from a gentile friend and was allowed to visit his young wife, Ruzena Gräber, whom Edith knew from school. Ruzena had argued for her freedom, and as a married woman she should have been exempt, but officials did not concern themselves with specifics. Winding their fingers through the chain-link fence, Ruzena and Emil had a desperate conversation.
—They are taking you to Poland, he warned.
Neither of them knew what that meant.
The girls in the barracks seethed with unrest and impatience. It seemed like they were waiting for something. But what? Meanwhile, buses from other far-flung towns kept arriving.
THE HARTMANN FARM was run by two cousins who were as close as brothers. Renting the spacious farmhouse and the attached farmland from an aristocratic Hungarian woman, Bela and Dula Hartmann shared everything. The house had two wings, so each family had its own kitchen and bedrooms, conjoined by a communal family room, where the children would gather at night to sing songs, play games, or read quietly by candlelight. There was no electricity or indoor plumbing, but that was neither unusual nor considered a hardship.
