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

Chapter Ten. Farewell, Papa

It took a second or two for my eyes to acclimatize to the brightness. It came from a slash of blue sky above the silhouetted heads of the women through the open cattle car door. The travelers’ screams of terror became jumbled with those oh-so familiar guttural commands that needed no translation.

“Raus, raus, raus. Alle Juden raus. Schnell”.

So here we were. At last. Birkenau. The deadliest part of the enormous Auschwitz complex. We had reached the buffers. A small railway marshaling yard that for 1.1 million Jews constituted the end of the line and the end of their world.

All the tracks from occupied Europe snaked toward this platform. Everything my parents and I had endured during the previous five years had been leading to this moment. From here, as I was to find out, it was a walk of just a few hundred yards to Crematoria II and III, each with a gas chamber attached. German efficiency at its most despicable.

The chaos was bewildering and impossible for a child to comprehend. Blinking in the harsh sunlight and gasping from thirst, the women clambered down from the train from Starachowice. I saw them wince as the Germans carried on shouting at them. Then it was my turn. My mother helped me down to the platform, and at the age of five and ten months, I stepped into the heart of the Nazis’ belief system. A hundred and fifty starved, dehydrated, terrorized, disorientated, bereaved women and me. To the Germans, the passengers of my cattle car were the symbol of all evil. And now the gas chambers of the Birkenau extermination camp beckoned. The multitudes of human beings on the platform towered over me, but if I turned to my left, I could see a cluster of stout brick chimneys, about thirty feet tall, belching foul-smelling smoke. To my right was the Gate of Death, a redbrick gatehouse built over an arch through which trains arrived at the most detestable terminus the world has ever known.

Straight ahead, as far as the eye could see, barracks stretched for miles, almost to the horizon. The camp was as big as a medium-sized town. It was designed to hold more than 120,000 prisoners at any one time. That’s three times the size of Tomaszów Mazowiecki.

Mama clutched her small suitcase in one hand and my hand in the other as we stood in a maelstrom of fear and confusion. All around us were soldiers with guns, shouting orders. But I focused on the barking, salivating dogs that were as tall as I was.

“Mama, the dogs are going to eat me now. They’re going to kill me”.

“No, they’re not, Tola. They won’t touch you. They’re trained to kill. But only if you run. You’re not going to run, are you?”

“No, Mama”.

“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about”.

The butterflies in my stomach fluttered away. I was reassured. Mama always told me the truth. And I believed her. She would tell me what would happen, and sure enough, it would come to pass. So I trusted her. As ever, her calmness always steadied me when I wobbled.

I sized up the dogs again to try to get their measure. The soldiers were keeping them on a tight leash. They were muzzled, and I told myself that I would stand so still, they wouldn’t even think that I was going to run.

Then my mother said something that floored me: “Tola, I’m going to have to leave you for a few minutes”.

I was stunned into silence.

“I have to find your father. I have to know what’s happening to him. You stand right there, and don’t move. Don’t budge. Hold the suitcase. Don’t let anyone take the suitcase. Do you understand? Can you do that for me?”

“Okay, Mama. Of course”.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be as fast as I can”.

With that, she plunged into the crowd and headed down the platform toward the back of the train. I temporarily lost sight of her and felt a stab of anguish. Then, through the seething mass, I glimpsed her again with my father. I wanted to run over and join them. But I stayed put, as Mama had insisted. My parents were hugging and kissing and talking intently.

When I look back now, I’m still amazed at the gamble Mama took and the trust she placed in me. There I was, not yet six, all alone in the most dangerous place on earth, in a throng of confused and terrified people, surrounded by killers, at the mercy of the SS and just a few hundred yards from the nearest gas chamber.

I focused on the suitcase and gripped its handle as if my life depended on it. I had a job to do. Protecting my family’s clothes and our last few possessions was my mission. I concentrated with all my might. I was scared. But having a responsibility gave me courage. Nobody was going to take that suitcase. Remember, this was the girl who, at the age of three, was prepared to fight a German to save her favorite white fur coat.

I tried to turn myself into a statue. I steeled myself because the dogs were staring at me. In my peripheral vision, I saw squads of people in rough striped uniforms climbing into cattle cars. Their eyes took in the tragedy unfolding in front of them and they displayed indifference. Not a trace of emotion. These people had all seen too much. Nothing now could shock them. They hauled out the corpses of people who had died en route, removed latrine buckets and, trancelike, swabbed clean the wooden floors.

The workers were supposed to make the cars look presentable for reuse, as the train would depart soon for another ghetto or camp to pick up more human cargo. They had to remove all evidence of the cruelty suffered by the women who had propped me up, so the soldiers at the next roundup would have an easier time herding yet another set of victims bound for Birkenau. These Jewish sanitation crews were just another mundane yet essential component required to ensure the Nazis’ genocide ran smoothly.

Although terrified, I was fascinated by the madness swirling around me. It was as if I was in the eye of a hurricane. Clutching the suitcase somehow insulated me from the turbulence on the platform. All the while, I kept an eye on my parents. They embraced for the final time, and then my father disappeared. My heart sank.

Mama reappeared by my side, sobbing. “Tola, you and I are staying in Auschwitz. But your father isn’t”.

Somehow, Papa had found out he was being sent to Dachau. But first he had to be tattooed in Auschwitz. He wouldn’t be sent to Dachau without it. Wherever and whatever Dachau was. I found it impossible to grasp the enormity of what Mama was saying.

The shocks kept coming.

“Your father’s best friend was strangled by a man who went berserk during the journey. But don’t worry, Papa is safe. He loves you and he’s sending you kisses”.

The victim was Aaron Greenspan, who had lived one block away from us in Tomaszów Mazowiecki. He wasn’t the only person killed in my father’s car. Several other men died in a mass brawl that took place during the journey. There were no Germans inside the car to intervene, and so there was nothing to stop some men lashing out at others who had wronged them at Starachowice. The settling of scores among rival cliques is highlighted in historian Christopher R. Browning’s book Remembering Survival.

Papa didn’t have a violent bone in his body. He fell sick after leaving Starachowice, and Mama said his head and body were covered with boils and that he looked dreadful. In all probability, he caught an infection through a combination of stress and the insanitary, overcrowded conditions in the cattle car.

With Papa’s disappearance, my security and hopefulness disintegrated. He had been ever present in my life. He always came back at the end of the day, no matter how bad the day was. And now that certainty evaporated. But I consoled myself with the thought that at least he was alive and I was with Mama.

Then Mama surprised me again.

“Get undressed”, she said.

“Undressed?”

“Yes, come on. Take your clothes off”.

“Why do we have to take our clothes off?” I asked.

“They are checking us for deformities or diseases. If our bodies aren’t perfect, this is what is going to happen to us”, she said, pointing to smoke belching from a crematorium chimney.

I wasn’t too sure what it meant, but the tone in my mother’s voice implied it was sufficiently ominous that I should obey. We stripped off our soiled garments right next to the train. I was surrounded by scores of thin, pale, naked women trying unsuccessfully to protect their modesty from smirking, leering Nazis.

“How do I look?” I asked, pirouetting naked on the platform, next to the cattle car.

“You look beautiful. Perfect”, Mama replied.

“What about you?” I asked.

After slaving in the munitions factory from dawn to dusk for more than nine months, Mama was ghostly white. She had barely seen the sun in all that time. Her complexion was distinctly unhealthy.

“I’m fine as well”, she said, unconvincingly.

Mama started slapping her cheeks, to give her pallor a crimson tinge to try to pass muster at the inevitable health Selektion. It was essential to appear fit enough to work. A sickly demeanor was fatal. Other women had similar thoughts and were busy primping their own skin.

Suddenly, I was mesmerized by two women who had also seen the smoke and had started running. They were stark naked. A German shouted at the top of his voice.

“Halt. Oder wir schießen”[8].

The women kept going. There was a burst of gunfire and they fell like rag dolls. I was horrified. Those poor women knew exactly what the chimneys were. They followed their primal instincts to flee, even though it was futile. Now, all these years later, I take comfort in the knowledge that the women were killed instantly. If they’d gone to the gas chamber, it would have taken them approximately ten minutes to suffocate. Ten minutes of terror and the agony of gasping for breaths that never came.

It was a brutal introduction to Birkenau. Yet the male Nazis in uniform passing among the naked women didn’t react at all to the shooting. For them, it was just another frisson at the coalface of mass murder.

Mama slapped her cheeks one last time. The Germans were checking everyone’s body and hair closely. The inspections were intimate, invasive, and all the women were distressed.

“They’re looking for weapons”, Mama whispered. “Even a hairpin could be a weapon here”.

The men reached us. After an unpleasant inspection, we were approved. But the suitcase was taken from us. All that we had left in the world was inside that case. Those photographs. Those last remaining mementos. They were gone. Now we literally had nothing but our memories.

We were sent to a building close to the railway line, where we were given clothes. I was handed a long gray cotton shift dress that almost reached my ankles. The shoes I was given to replace the ones that had been confiscated were uncomfortable. But at least we weren’t naked anymore.

I was quickly learning to appreciate small mercies. But more indignity loomed when we were ordered to enter another wooden cabin. The floor was littered with human hair. Hair of all colors: dark brown, light brown, jet black, red, gray. But very little white hair. The elderly never made it this far.

“My poor child”, said a woman standing by a bench. “I’m going to have to cut off your braids”.

She lifted me onto the bench, and with two snips, my plaits fell to the floor and lay like stumps of light brown rope on the multicolored rug of shorn locks. I was mortified. I had been so proud of my long hair, which Mama had spent time braiding every morning. The woman then ran her clippers over what remained, leaving tracks of stubble. I was scared at how, at every stage of our induction to Birkenau, we were physically abused, humiliated and belittled.

Ostensibly, we were shaved for hygiene reasons, to reduce the chance of lice, but in truth, it was another element of the Germans’ psychological strategy. My hair had been part of my identity. They were dehumanizing us and attempting to demoralize us still further. Of course, there was also a practical reason for shearing us like sheep. They wanted our hair to fill mattresses. Nothing was wasted in Birkenau.

I didn’t know how my appearance had changed. I didn’t have a mirror. But it was impossible to hide how aggrieved I felt. The female barber registered my discomfort and gave me a rag to cover my head. I looked around for Mama but couldn’t identify her. Her countenance had changed. She, too, had lost her shoulder-length dark brown hair to the clippers. I was relieved when Mama placed her hand on my shorn head and, with a brave smile, took my hand.

We joined a column of newly shaved women and were led to a barrack block with row upon row of bare wooden bunks. Each bunk had three tiers. The best place to be was on top because you could sit up there without banging your head. The space between the wooden layers was less than two feet, and the only option was to lie down in them. Our family room in the Starachowice labor camp had at least offered some privacy. The sleeping arrangements here couldn’t have been more cramped.

Although there was still daylight outside, the cabin was dark and foreboding. It was what I imagined a big stable to look like. More suited to animals than humans, it was a barn, not a bedroom.

Mama and I were allocated a center bunk in the middle of the room. Of all the possible alternatives, this was the worst of all. I couldn’t climb in because our ledge was too high for me, so Mama helped me up and we sat facing each other, one of Mama’s legs dangling over the edge.

A woman appeared from nowhere and slapped Mama hard in the face. “You are in Auschwitz now”, she hissed. “You cannot sit any way you want”.

Although the woman wasn’t armed, the way she asserted her authority frightened me. She wasn’t German, but Jewish. She was a Blokälteste, or block elder — a veteran prisoner responsible for inducting newcomers. Other authority figures were called Kapos (from the Italian “capo”, meaning “boss”; the mafia uses that same word because of the fear it arouses), whom the Germans appointed as supervisors.

Mama turned to me and gave me another lesson in survival.

“More and more women will be joining us in this bunk. Unfortunately, we won’t have it all to ourselves like we did in Starachowice. When we go to sleep, try not to move too much because you will disturb the others.

“Sit and lie down next to me and I will try to make you as comfortable as I can. When you get off the bunk, go down like this, feet first”.

Mama slipped off the bunk as unobtrusively as she could. She seemed unnerved by the slapping and was anxious not to upset the block elder a second time.

“Apparently, we’ll be fed twice a day. Some warm soup and a piece of bread”.

She gave me a tin cup, a bowl and a spoon.

“Whatever you do, don’t lose them. These things can’t be replaced. If you misplace them, you won’t get any food and you’ll starve”.

Mama was worried about the possibility of someone stealing them. They were, after all, our only worldly possessions. She showed me a place in the corner of the bunk where we could hide them beneath some blankets. How sad we now had to worry about theft. Mama saved the worst news for last.

“Tola, you can’t go to the toilet whenever you want. The rules here are really tough. You can only go twice a day. Once in the morning, and once at night before lights-out.

“It’s the same for me as well. We will go together at the same time”.

“But, Mama, what if I have to go in between?”

“You will just have to hold it in. You will learn. If you don’t, you’ll be punished”.

Of all the rules, this one upset me the most. I wasn’t sure if I could control myself. But I learned.

By now, it was dinnertime. All the new inmates of the barrack stood in line with their cups. We were given a little soup and a piece of bread. I was truly exhausted — too tired to eat. But Mama insisted. And she gave me her bread ration as well. Only now, several hours after arriving in Birkenau, was I able to have a drink of water to slake my thirst.

With the passage of time, I now realize I was one of the fortunate ones from the train. An unknown number of people went straight to the gas chambers. But archives that survived the war show that 1,298 men and 409 women from our train were admitted to Birkenau after the selection process. Not all of them came from Starachowice. Some were picked up from other labor camps in the Radom district of Central Poland. These details are contained in an extraordinary eight-hundred-page book called Auschwitz Chronicle, compiled by a team of historians, supervised by Danuta Czech, a former resistance fighter who was head of research at the Official Auschwitz Museum.

Thanks to this painstaking research, I discovered that also on that day in 1944, five prisoners escaped from Birkenau, four of whom were shot during a pursuit.

All my life, I have wondered why I wasn’t killed upon arrival. It’s estimated that more than 230,000 children entered the Auschwitz complex. Almost all of them were murdered in Birkenau within hours of dismounting from the cattle cars. The Nazis had no use for children. They were a hindrance. They lacked the physical strength to become slave laborers. They required sustenance. They cost money. But more than anything, they represented the future of the Jewish people. And when they grew up, they could be witnesses. As far as the Nazis were concerned, they had to be exterminated. So why wasn’t I?

One theory is that we had the good fortune to arrive on a Sunday. As I pointed out, one of the crematoria at the end of the railway line was going flat out. But because Sunday was a day of rest, the murder factory was short of staff to escort us to the gas chamber, and they were either unable or unwilling to fire up another incinerator to dispose of the bodies.

Another theory is that around that time the Nazis were suffering a shortage of Zyklon B, the cyanide compound used in the gas chambers. And one further proposition comes from historian Christopher R. Browning, in his book about Starachowice, Remembering Survival, as mentioned earlier. Citing several survivors’ testimonies, Browning suggests that Kurt Otto Baumgarten, one of the more humane managers of Starachowice, “had intervened on behalf of his former prisoners and sent a letter with the transport, assuring the authorities in Birkenau that the Starachowice Jews were all good workers”.

But if that was the case, why did we have to go through a selection process at the platform?

There is no way of knowing definitively what it was that saved me. Perhaps it was a combination of all the above, but whatever it was, I’m grateful that I survived that first day. The challenge now was to survive every subsequent day in Birkenau.

Mama helped me to climb back onto the middle ledge of our bunk. I moved gingerly, trying not to tread on the women on the bottom layer. Mama climbed in beside me. On this night, we had the bunk to ourselves, although it wouldn’t always be that way. I snuggled up to Mama. Her scent was a palliative. In her arms, I was secure. At long last, after the worst journey of my life, I fell fast asleep.