The Daughter of Auschwitz. My Story of Resilience, Survival and Hope

Chapter Eight. The Yellow Death Camp

The rap on the door — a rifle butt, accompanied by a string of instructions in German — demanded our full attention.

“You’re moving out. You can take one suitcase each. Be at the Appellplatz in five minutes. Hurry up”.

The soldiers had come for us again. We’d been expecting them. But the moment still delivered an electric shock. We all twitched, as if we’d been Tasered. After four years of occupation, we had precious few possessions. Still, my parents hurled clothes and other key belongings into the cases as fast as they could.

We walked out of the door without a backward glance and headed toward the assembly point. The other remaining survivors from Tomaszów Mazowiecki stumbled into the street looking apprehensive. Was this it? Was this the end?

Farther along, I could see a German army flatbed truck with a canvas cover, belching out black exhaust fumes as the engine idled. The tailgate was down. As we walked briskly along the cobbles, I peered up at my father, who exchanged anxious glances with my mother.

I had never been on a truck, but I had seen them from the window. I glanced back at my mother. Her face gave her away. They’d seen this scenario unfold many times since the ghetto was formed, and only rarely had deportees reached the destination mentioned by the Germans. The Nazis were mendacious. Even when they were sending people to their deaths, they always made it appear that the Jews were going to a better place. By offering a thimbleful of hope, the Germans were able to proceed with their industrial slaughter with comparably little fuss. Hope was an accomplice to murder.

My mother climbed into the back of the truck first. My father handed up the suitcases. And then he lifted me into my mother’s arms. There wasn’t a lot of space beneath the canvas. The bench seats were occupied by other ghetto survivors and soldiers equipped for battle. We had to sit on the floor on our suitcases. Other soldiers who were guarding us raised the tailgate. Nobody said anything as the chain bolts locked the back of the truck into place. My parents just looked at each other and tried to avoid catching the eyes of the Germans.

This was the first time that I’d been on the other side of the barbed wire. Curiosity overwhelmed me as we bumped along the road. I now know that we were heading into the sun. We were driving southeast. From my perch on the suitcase, huddled next to my mama, I could barely see over the top of the tailgate, but it was interesting for me to look at the view, as the town of Tomaszów Mazowiecki disappeared behind us. There were peasants harvesting in fields, loading straw onto horse-drawn carts. Back then, I didn’t understand what they were doing or that this was what normal life looked like. Such were the limits of a child’s experience inside the ghetto.

After we had driven for a short time, I sensed that my fellow passengers exhaled a collective sigh of relief. I didn’t know then why the tension eased. But now I do. We had driven beyond the Jewish cemetery. And we hadn’t stopped. Perhaps this time the Germans were telling the truth. Perhaps we would survive this day. And wake up the next. Maybe we were really going to the stated destination. Starachowice.

We bounced up and down on our suitcases in solemn silence. My fellow passengers were in mourning. They were leaving behind childhood homes, murdered parents, spouses, children and friends, some of whom had no known graves, although their bodies lay close to the tombs of generations of ancestors in the Jewish cemetery. Would they ever return, to place stones on the graves, as Jews do, to signify that their dead are not forgotten? We were being exiled from our history. A people which loses its past faces a desolate future.

I was fortunate. I still had my mother and father. I snuggled up close to Mama, seeking comfort from her scent and the familiar outline of her body. A sense of security and the hypnotic rumbling of the wheels lulled me to sleep. Once, I was jolted awake, and she fed me a piece of bread.

After two or three hours, traveling at a sedate pace, our journey came to an end. From the back of the truck, I saw soldiers closing security gates behind us, and as we drove deeper into the camp, the panorama of our new prison revealed itself. It was surrounded by tall, barbed-wire fences, just like those that had encircled the ghetto in Tomaszów Mazowiecki. But tall watchtowers in strategic positions around the perimeter made it significantly different. I noticed those immediately. The lookout points on top were equipped with bigger guns than I’d ever seen before. And in their crow’s nests, the guards kept their eyes trained on us as we rattled along.

“You see those towers and those guns, Tola?” my mother whispered. “From there, the guards can always observe you. You must always behave in a way that you won’t be shot”.

“Yes, Mama”.

The truck came to a halt in the middle of an open square.

After dismounting, everyone from the truck was scattered around this new, sinister labor camp. A guard with a machine gun directed us to our accommodation. After three years living in squalid, overcrowded rooms, we had no idea what to expect. We had become accustomed to our conditions constantly deteriorating. So it came as a pleasant surprise to discover that we had been allocated a room all to ourselves.

Even more astonishing was the realization that, for the first time in my life, I had my own bunk. We were in the family barrack. Apparently, Jews were provided with reasonable quarters because they were the best factory workers — more productive than Gentile Polish civilians who were forced to work there as well. We were also informed that the quality of our food would improve.

What was this extraordinary place? Why were conditions here better than in Tomaszów Mazowiecki, just seventy miles away?

Within the city of Starachowice were four labor camps providing workers for a sprawling armaments and industrial complex. It was a critical component of Nazi Germany’s war machine, supplying a third of all the munitions for every branch of the German military. There was an enormous steel plant connected to a wide array of production lines manufacturing shell casings for artillery and bombs, stick grenades and bullets of various calibers. The air was badly polluted from the furnaces and chemical works that were an integral part of the weapons industry. Smog from the chimneys was accompanied by the low-frequency grinding of heavy machinery. The war might have been a long way from Starachowice, but it was far from peaceful there. The engine room of German aggression never slept. There was no escape from its all-pervasive hum.

The most critical factor for my family now was that my mother and father were useful. They may have been slave laborers, but their ability to work afforded us a protective shield, albeit one without a guarantee.

With the benefit of nearly eighty years’ hindsight, it’s now possible to say that the attitude of the Germans running Starachowice provided us with a lifeline. They were far more pragmatic than the Nazis in Berlin, who were ideologically committed to the complete annihilation of the Jews. The main concerns of the Starachowice directors were meeting production targets and ensuring that ammunition supplies to the Wehrmacht—the German military — were maintained.

After the Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad a few months earlier, German forces were engaged in a debilitating rearguard action. Soviet confidence surged, as did production rates in the Communist arms industry. The rate of attrition along the eight-hundred-mile-long Eastern Front, where the two mighty armies clashed, was crippling. German ammunition stocks needed constant replenishment.

So the simple logic at Starachowice was that the munitions factories required a steady supply of workers to keep production lines operating. If large numbers of laborers were sent to the gas chambers, production would falter and so would the German army.

Therefore, it made sense to keep the Jews alive. In this small corner of the Third Reich, we were fortunate that there were some influential Germans who were bold enough to defy Hitler’s zealots.

But that didn’t mean we were safe. Far from it. We were now isolated from our friends from Tomaszów Mazowiecki. Back there, we knew who we could trust. We had been among them all our lives. We had a network we could rely on. Here, we were strangers, and so was everyone else. We had to be more wary and tread carefully. The guards ringing Starachowice and posted in the towers were Ukrainian volunteers. They had joined the Nazi forces of their own free will because they shared their pathological hatred of the Jews. If anything, the Ukrainians were more fanatical than some Germans. They wouldn’t hesitate to kill us, given half a chance.

As we unpacked and settled in, Mama laid out the rules to ensure that I stayed alive.

“Your father and I will be gone most of the day. We will be working at the ammunition factory. You will be on your own and responsible for your own safety. During the day, someone will give you something to eat, and we will give you something more when we return at night”.

This was going to be a radically new experience. I had never been on my own before. I knew no one here apart from Rutka, one of my friends from Tomaszów Mazowiecki, who was among those who’d been brought to Starachowice. But we had no idea where she and her family had been billeted. As it transpired, during our entire incarceration in the Arbeitslager—the labor camp — I never once saw Rutka. That’s how big it was.

On the night of September 5, 1943, I could have slept on my own for the very first time. But I didn’t dare, and instead, I climbed into bed with my parents.

The next morning, before she went to work, Mama drilled into me the rules of Starachowice etiquette.

“You must behave like this. If you don’t, the Germans might kill you. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mama”.

“Always step to the side when a German is passing you. Do not run, just step to the side”.

“Yes, Mama”.

“Whatever you do, do not look them in the eye. You mustn’t do it. Look at something else. Like their belt. No higher than that. And make sure that if you have a head covering, like a scarf or a hat, you take it off.

“And last of all, put your hands behind your back and clasp them together. Do you understand? Are you sure?”

“Yes, Mama”.

To make sure this submissive behavior became ingrained as second nature, she practiced with me every day before heading to the factory. She woke me up at five o’clock in the morning and pretended to be a German, strutting loudly around the room, as if she was wearing jackboots. I did exactly what she taught me: I stepped out of the way, bowed my head and put my hands behind my back.

Then my parents would kiss me and climb onto one of the waiting trucks. The factory where they worked was about half an hour away. It would barely be dawn, and I would not see them until late at night.

I could have stayed alone at the barrack, but the silence scared me. All the adults had gone to work, and at first, I didn’t see or hear any other children. The place seemed to be totally empty. So I went outside, because that felt safer, even though the Ukrainians were watching me from the towers. Other children must have made the same decision. I did not see many girls, but I spotted a group of boys running around and playing rough games beneath the gaze of the guards.

When I tried to join in the boys’ games, they would only accept me if I played the Jew. They were all Jewish and always wanted to be the Nazis. (Children often identify with an aggressor, and having been exposed to such behavior, it’s not surprising the boys wanted to replicate the power and supremacy of the Germans.) Being a girl and younger, I never got a chance to play the Nazi. And as I couldn’t fight, I was always the victim. They pretended sticks were rifles, and I had to run as fast as I could while they chased me, making gun noises and yelling, “Stop, you dirty Jew. Or we’ll kill you”.

If they caught me, they would hit me gently with sticks. Sometimes, one of the boys would get carried away, forget it was just a game and hurt me. Then I’d run and hide among the barracks and wait until my parents came home. Or I would run to our building and shelter underneath. But I soon forgot the pain. I chose to be outside with the other children and risk a beating. It was more important for me to have any kind of relationship than none. What’s interesting to me now is that I preferred to be frightened than alone. Psychologists would recognize that I was presenting the characteristics of someone in an abusive relationship. That’s an understatement when it comes to describing my life at the time.

Reenacting our daily tribulations in play made us even hungrier than usual. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, someone would give us some food. It was usually a piece of bread or some soup. But it was never enough, and we were constantly hungry. We used to head to a building containing a kitchen and scour the garbage bins. We rarely found anything edible. If we did, we devoured it. But at the end of the working day, I was always certain to eat. My parents were fed during their shift at the factory. The German management wanted their slaves to keep their energy levels up. And Mama would always save something for me.

All the while, we were acting out childhood fantasies under the watchful gaze of the Ukrainian guards in their towers. Although they looked menacing, I never saw them open fire. But there were frequent reminders that the boundary between life and death in Starachowice was razor thin.

One day everyone in the camp was summoned to the central parade ground, the Appellplatz. There were loudspeakers throughout the complex and the tone of the harsh voice making the announcement left no room for doubt. Attendance was compulsory.

“I’m going to take you now, and I’m going to show you what’s going to happen to you if you don’t follow the rules”, my mama said. “And the reason I’m doing this is because I’m not here to take care of you. You have to take care of yourself”.

Hundreds of people shuffled into the square looking nervous. I gripped Mama’s hand as tightly as possible. Everyone’s eyes were drawn to a woman who was attached to a pole with a rope. Her hands were tied behind her back.

Putting a bullhorn to his mouth, a uniformed officer outlined the nature of her “crime”. The woman had, in the Germans’ eyes, broken one of the cardinal rules of the Starachowice camp. She had displayed disrespect.

The woman had had the audacity to come face-to-face with a German soldier inside the camp. She had maintained eye contact and refused to yield the right of way. As a child, I was shocked that an adult didn’t know the rules as well as my mama and had behaved wrongly. There was only one sentence for such a willful act of defiance.

Mama squeezed my hand and whispered, “Remember what I taught you? Watch”.

Most mothers would have urged their children to look away, or clasped a hand over their eyes to shield them from witnessing further atrocities. Not my mama. These were extraordinary times and Mama was doing her utmost to keep me alive. She was trying to teach me that actions had consequences and I needed to see them for myself to understand the reality of the world we inhabited.

I watched as the officer walked up to the woman. He pulled the pistol from his holster and shot her in the head at point-blank range. She slumped to the ground. Her husband and their three children screamed and ran sobbing to her body as it lay contorted around the pole. All four of them collapsed on the ground next to her, rocking back and forth, weeping hysterically. The crowd dispersed, abandoning them to their grief.

I turned to my mother and whispered, “Mama, you promise me you will obey all the rules?”

She nodded and replied, “And so will you”.

That night, silence descended on the camp as people contemplated the execution and its implication. Even here, although the Jews were useful as slave laborers, they were, ultimately, dispensable.

Over the ensuing months, fewer and fewer people came home from the factories. There were industrial accidents in the steelworks. Some died in the weapons plants following exposure to toxic chemicals.

“Some workers are careless”, Mama said. “They inhale a yellow powder which destroys their lungs. You always have to be on guard, even at work”.

I remember they called it the yellow death. I now understand that the victims were poisoned by TNT, the explosive compound in bombs and shells. There was probably little the slave laborers could do to protect themselves from chemicals, short of covering their faces with a damp cloth.

Almost every night, my parents had a similar conversation: as long as they were careful and useful, they would be kept alive. But how long would it last?

Time passed slowly in Starachowice. A long, frigid winter came and went. My routine never seemed to vary. The most important thing for us as a family was that we were still alive and together, although my parents spent most of their waking hours on the factory floor.

The major discomfort was our growing hunger. The amount of food we were given started to tail off. I had no concept of measuring time, apart from an innate sense of when I expected to be fed. My stomach was a very reliable clock. I would look forward to lunchtimes, when Rivka, a pregnant Jewish woman who lived in the family barracks, provided us with a small serving of soup and bread. Normally, after eating, we would return to our rough game of Catch the Jew.

But one afternoon, in the spring of 1944, when I was about five and a half years old, Rivka kept us with her longer. I remember the day well. It was sunny and warm. On the floor, next to our table, Rivka had constructed a makeshift stove by laying a square of bricks, covered with a piece of tin. She had left enough space to ignite a small fire from paper and twigs. We all had a mess tin each, into which she poured some flour. She mixed some flour and water in her own mess tin to create a simple dough. Then she poured just the right amount of water into our tins and said, “Now copy what I have done. Try to make sure all the flour is moist and make the dough as smooth as possible”.

All the children embraced the lesson. I remember the sense of joy of being taught something new and of my fingers getting sticky.

“Now flatten the dough with your fists, until it is as even as you can make it. Use your hands to get rid of any lumps. It has to be as flat as possible”.

Then she showed us how to take a fork and put holes in the dough.

“Children, you have to do this as quickly as possible. Hurry up”.

We all responded to the urgency in her voice. I assumed she was exhorting us to speed up because what we were doing was illicit. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the guard towers. Their machine guns were pointing in our direction. I was afraid the soldiers would cut us down if we didn’t finish quickly enough.

Rivka put each of the mess tins in turn over the flames. The dough baked very quickly. And the finished product smelled delicious. I wanted to feast on mine straight away.

“Now, children, I know you are starving”, she said, “but you are not allowed to take even one bite. Under any circumstances. What you must do is to take it home to your parents, and then you will share it tonight. Do you understand?”

It was difficult for me to comply because Rivka was right — I was starving. But by now, being obedient was second nature to me.

As usual, my parents returned to the family barracks late. It might have been ten or eleven o’clock in the evening. I was fast asleep, clutching my creation. Gently, they woke me up.

“Look what I’ve made for you”, I said, bursting with pride.

My father carefully broke the cracker into three equal pieces and said a prayer. My mother burst into tears. “Oh, it’s the first night of Passover”, she sobbed.

Mama had toiled so hard in the weapons factory that she had lost track of time.

“Do you remember Passover last year?” she asked my father.

“Yes”, he replied. “It was the day the Warsaw Ghetto uprising began”.

“So much has happened since then”, said Mama. “I simply can’t believe it”.

“And we didn’t have matzah to break”, said my father. “But we still had family and friends. Thank you, Tola, for this wonderful, thoughtful gift”.

Tears flowed down Mama’s cheeks as she thought about the loss of her family and their Passover celebrations in the past.

Passover is one of the most important festivals in the Jewish calendar. Each springtime we celebrate Moses leading the escape of the children of Israel from Egypt after two hundred years of servitude. The essence of that story is liberation, and matzah symbolizes the hardship of slavery and the Jewish people’s escape to freedom. We call it the bread of affliction.

Passover during the Holocaust years was especially poignant. It’s hard to imagine another time in the entire history of the Jewish people when its symbolism would have evoked more pain.

When I look back, I realize that as I let the cracker melt in my mouth, savoring the taste and the time capsule it was creating, that was the moment I understood that certain foods have spiritual significance that transcend the notion of fuel for the body.

For the first time in my life, I was eating something that was fuel for the soul. When Rivka told us to hurry up, it wasn’t because the guards were going to shoot us, although if they had known what we were doing, they might have been tempted. It was because Jewish tradition dictates that the process of making matzah is concluded within eighteen minutes, from the first moment the dough is prepared to the second it is fully baked. We were replicating the experience of our ancestors all those centuries earlier: back then, the matzah ingredients were the only provisions the Jews had and they didn’t have enough time to let their dough rise as they made their escape. The message is that they trusted God to provide. And He didn’t fail them.

Baking matzah in wartime conditions, under the noses of the guards, was a lesson with several layers of significance that has stayed with me all my life. Not only was it an act of self-determination and sedition, but Rivka was also imbuing us with dignity and self-respect. The Germans were wiping us out, but as long as there were children who understood the traditions that formed our identity, our people had a chance of renaissance one day in the future.

On April 7, 1944, in the family barracks in Starachowice, encircled by barbed wire and watchtowers and trigger-happy Ukrainian fascists, my parents wondered how much longer they would have to endure their own slavery. As my little family finished off the last crumbs of our matzah in deepest, darkest occupied Central Poland, the question hanging in the air was: When will God deliver us from the evil of the Nazis? No answer was forthcoming.

In fact, life was about to become more precarious. And I was the canary in the coal mine who detected that the air was becoming toxic. I didn’t realize it back then, but the long hours I spent apart from my parents were helping to make me street-smart. I was developing a strong inner core of self-reliance and independence. I was observant, and my radar for detecting potential trouble improved with every passing day. Little did I know that those skills would soon be invaluable.

Roaming relatively freely within the confines of the barbed wire, I began to notice that people were disappearing. I wandered around the family quarters looking for friends to play with and discovered that more and more rooms were empty. Most doors were ajar, and when I went inside, I understood what had happened. The ghetto had schooled me well. I saw the abandoned furniture, clothes and toys. I knew these people would never return.

Occasionally, I found some leftover food. I ate it but touched nothing else. I was troubled when I went in search of one of my closest friends on the other side of the main square and there was no trace of her or her family. The other rooms nearby were also silent. I broke the news to my parents when they returned home that night.

“I knew it”, my mother gasped. “That whole street has probably been taken. The rumors about Selektions must be true”.

“We’ve got to find a hiding place”, said my father.

A few days later, early in the morning, just as my parents were due to start their shift at the munitions plant, we heard that the SS were rounding up children from the family barracks.

“Quick, they’re coming. You’ve got to hide”, Papa shouted.

I watched as he opened a trapdoor that he had created in the ceiling. I hadn’t realized it was there. He had camouflaged it with a small rack of hanging clothes. Papa stood on a bed, lifted me up and pushed me into the gap between the ceiling and the sloping roof. I looked down and saw Mama squeezing herself through the trapdoor, being pushed from behind by my father.

As soon as she was in, he closed the flap and rearranged the clothes below. I crouched in my mother’s lap, and she clasped her hand over my mouth. I couldn’t believe the strength in her hand. She had my face in a viselike grip.

“Tola, you’ve got to stay completely silent”, she said. “It’s absolutely essential. Don’t make a sound. If you do, we both could die”.

I grunted an indecipherable response. Then I heard the door of our barrack block burst open, along with the terrifying fusion of running jackboots, guttural commands and weapons being cocked. My father had closed the trapdoor just in time.

Through the thin ceiling boards, I heard soldiers shouting at him.

“We told you to get out. Why are you still here? Get out!”

“Okay, I’m leaving”.

I heard Papa walk out of the room. Suddenly, there was a burst of gunfire through the ceiling. I felt a gale of bullets whistling past my body. Some of them slammed into the beams of the attic above my head. I felt like screaming. But my mother had her hand so tightly over my mouth, I couldn’t make a sound, even if I’d wanted to.

Her breathing was slow and quiet. I exhaled in sync with her. Eventually, we heard the soldiers leave the room and Mama slightly relaxed her grip. There was a chink of light through a rotten wooden plank in the roof and I was able to look down into the square. I had a clear view of soldiers manhandling children into trucks. I think they were SS, as they looked similar to the troops at the massacre at St. Wenceslas Church in Tomaszów Mazowiecki.

I saw the kids whom I’d played with. They were all around my age — five, six or seven. It was Kinderselektion. Children’s selection. It was their time to die because the Nazis were liquidating the camp and they didn’t have room for children. They were making it Kinderrein. Child pure. Cleansed of children.

Mothers were pleading in vain as they were separated from their children. I can still hear their screams if I close my eyes and replay that scene in my mind. Some parents tried to get into the trucks with their children. With their guns raised, the soldiers forced them back. The parents were fighting for their children’s lives against impossible odds.

There was one sight I will never ever forget. A mother was engaged in a tug-of-war with a soldier. Caught in the middle was a baby. The mother was clutching her child’s upper body under the arms, while the brute in uniform was pulling the baby’s legs with all his might. Neither would yield. They were using such strength that the baby was dismembered.

The parts of the child’s body were hurled onto the truck. It was the worst thing I ever saw and gives me nightmares to this day. Although I have done my utmost to block out the image, it’s lodged deep inside my brain. I never talked about that incident with my mother to try to keep it at bay, but it keeps coming back to haunt me.

Infanticide is the most despicable act of war. The Germans were aping evil empires from the beginning of time that eviscerated their enemies’ spirits and hopes for the future by slaughtering their children.

The mother’s cry was the most harrowing I ever heard. I knew that I was supposed to remain silent, but in the face of such barbarity, my self-restraint faltered. As ever, Mama was one step ahead and clamped her hand tighter than before, stifling the scream that was rising in my throat.

I watched through the gap in the roof until the roundup was finished. I should have averted my eyes, but something inside compelled me to bear witness. The arguing and wailing in a jumble of German, Polish and Yiddish seemed interminable. But there was only ever going to be one outcome. The trucks pulled away, and not long afterward, the early summer air was punctured by bursts of distant machine-gun fire. My playmates tumbled into a mass grave dug by their parents earlier that week. My father had been among them. Not only had he been forced to prepare a tomb for his parents, but at gunpoint, he had also had to dig a grave for his child. Me. But somehow, I had cheated death. Again. The Nazis used us to bury our own people. To me, Poland is nothing but a mass grave for the Jews.

Eventually, when the commotion had subsided, my father returned to our room. He opened the hatch to the roof space and helped Mama and me climb down. My face was black-and-blue from my mother’s grip. The bruising lasted for weeks.

The mass murder of the children of Starachowice changed the pattern of my life immediately, as the light went out of my world.

“Tola, you can’t play outside again”, said my mama. “It’s far too dangerous for you. You saw what happened to those other children”.

I was more of a prisoner than ever before. For endless hour upon hour, I would be in solitary confinement in what I knew as the Dark Room. The sensory deprivation of such treatment is hard enough for an adult to bear. Imagine what it’s like for a child of five and a half who has been exposed to more than four years of carnage close at hand. A child whose experiences of life were far worse than any flights of nightmarish fantasy the mind can conjure.

The next day, I briefly caught sight of the dawn of a summer’s day through the open door as my parents left for their shift at the ammunition factory. I knew that I wouldn’t see them until long after the sun had set. My mother secured a blanket over the window. Not a chink of light penetrated the gloom. I was under strict instructions to stay away from the window.

“The guards might be able to see your shadow on the blanket if you go too close to the window”, Mama explained. “Under no circumstances are you to touch the blanket or peek outside. It has to appear as though our room is empty, that no one is home. You must be invisible. Do you promise to obey me?”

“Yes, Mama”.

“Okay. Be brave. We’ll bring you some food when we return”.

After hugging me with tears in their eyes, they closed the door and the slash of dawn disappeared. I took the piece of bread they had left me and ate it. It was still early, and I plunged into a deep slumber.

When I woke, I began to worry what would happen if my parents didn’t come back. No one would find me. Maybe I’d starve to death. I contemplated the alternative. What would happen if the Germans conducted a search and discovered me? I knew what the consequence would be. That thought alone was enough to keep me away from the window.

I sat on my bunk debating with myself. I convinced myself that my parents would never abandon me. I was certain of their unconditional love. But then I remembered the yellow powder that the workers sometimes inhaled and the stories my parents recounted about their colleagues succumbing to the yellow death. What would happen to me if they were careless and they, too, were poisoned at the factory? There were graves near the factory where the victims of the powder were buried. Would I ever see Mama and Papa again? The questions kept going in circles in my mind and they spun so quickly that I became almost dizzy.

I have no idea how many days I spent alone with my fears in the darkness while the summer sun shone on Starachowice. My isolation might have lasted for weeks. I yearned for the sound of other children, just to be reassured that I wasn’t completely alone. Although I was silent, and I strained to listen to the world beyond the blanket at the window, I didn’t hear the voice or laughter or tears of another child, or a mother’s words. I began to wonder whether all the other Jewish children in the world were dead. Was I the last remaining one on earth? If so, I had to survive.

In my braver moments, I convinced myself that it was better to be alone. I no longer had to play Catch the Jew with those rough boys. I didn’t have to run away frightened. I didn’t have to endure the beatings with their stick guns. I persuaded myself that I was fortunate I wasn’t one of those children on the trucks who had been driven away and had never come back. My internal argument was supported by the regular sound of gunfire far away in the distance. But the solitude always overwhelmed me. My mind would begin to float. Things became unreal and I became detached from my circumstances. I was no longer frightened or worried. I zoned out.

I know now that the clinical term for what was happening to me is dissociation. It is a condition where the mind activates a protective mechanism when a person is unable to cope with a situation. A person feels disconnected from themselves and the world around them. It’s a way of dealing with stress or trauma. In the most extreme cases, it becomes a personality disorder that can last for years. But I believe my condition back then was short-lived. My survival instincts were so strong, even at such a young age, that I had the mental resources to be able to handle reality when it really mattered.

One day in particular stands out. For once, I was not in solitary confinement. My mother had stayed home for some reason. Before the Kinderselektion, I used to chat away brightly to my parents when we were together in our room. Since the murders, I had learned to keep my voice down, because officially, I didn’t exist. Mama and I were having a whispered conversation when we heard boots approaching. We stopped talking immediately. To our horror, there was a rap on the door. For a moment Mama was paralyzed with indecision. The soldier knocked again, less patiently this time. Mama had no choice and knew she had to open the door.

Without being told, I understood what I had to do. I jumped behind her and tried to minimize my profile behind her skirt, keeping my arms by my sides and breathing as gently as I could. I can’t remember the nature of the conversation over the threshold, but it continued for an agonizingly long time. I could sense my mother’s relief when the soldier turned on his heel and she was able to close the door. I have no idea to this day whether I truly was hidden from view, or whether the soldier had seen me and had chosen not to notice. Either way, it was yet another close call.

The next day, Mama didn’t return to work again. When I asked her why, she replied, “They are closing the camp”.

My heart soared. At last, I could leave the darkness. I savored the thought of stepping over the threshold in the morning, enjoying the warmth of the sun on my face and the breeze in my hair.

Then my radar kicked in. I noticed my mother was unusually quiet. She had begun packing a small suitcase. I studied her face. Her eyes weren’t focusing on clothes but on an image somewhere inside her head. She looked stunned and shocked. Clearly, the imminent change in our circumstances was not benign.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Auschwitz”.