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

Chapter Eleven. Refusing to Cry

Those first few days in Birkenau were simply terrifying. Although my solitary time in the darkness in Starachowice had been frightening, it was certainly not as intimidating. At least there I had been on my own and was spared close contact with the SS and other enforcers; here, I was exposed to them all the time. Mama was close at hand and doing her best to protect me, but I was convinced that they were constantly watching me. All of them. There was no hiding place. And the industrial scale of the extermination camp, the noise it generated, the frequent arrival of trains hauling cattle cars on the conveyor belt of death were overwhelming. I felt that I could be shot at any moment.

The haunted looks of my fellow prisoners, their cowering demeanor and the overriding sense of terror corroded my spirit. Fear is a virus that is contagious, infecting virtually everyone it touches. Immunity is difficult, if not impossible to acquire.

Although I was only five years old, I could detect that the women all around me had abandoned any semblance of optimism. While I couldn’t possibly have known it then, I know now that Mama and I arrived in Birkenau at a time of maximum tension. Having completed the annihilation of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews, the SS were about to liquidate the Zigeunerfamilienlager — the Gypsy family camp in Birkenau.

The mass murder of the Gypsies, as the Roma and Sinti people were called back then, had been two months in the planning. It was supposed to happen in the middle of May 1944, but the Roma were alerted to the plan to kill them and broke into an equipment store, grabbing any potential weapons they could: knives, spades, hammers, pickaxes, crowbars and stones. Among the Roma men were former military veterans who had no intention of going quietly to the gas chambers, and 600 of them barricaded themselves into a barrack building.

Armed with machine guns, the SS surrounded the Zigeunerfamilienlager and ordered the men to surrender and come out. When they refused, the SS retreated rather than risk casualties. This moral victory, on May 16, 1944, is now celebrated as Romani Resistance Day.

The Roma’s defiance troubled the Nazis. They feared it would trigger a mutiny throughout the camp. So they took their time to dispose of the Roma and did so by stealth. In order to reduce potential resistance, they split the 6,000 people in the Zigeunerfamilienlager into smaller groups. On May 23, 1944, they shipped out more than 1,500 to other camps within the Third Reich. Then, on August 2, two days after we arrived from Starachowice, an empty train pulled into the platform not far from our barracks. The SS ordered another 1,400 Roma men and boys on board. At seven o’clock that evening, the train set off northwestward on a four-hundred-mile journey. The Roma were bound for Buchenwald, another big, notorious concentration camp inside Germany’s borders.

About that time, Mama and I were outside our barrack along with the other inmates taking part in the evening Appell. This was a twice-daily event. Every morning and evening, we were ordered to parade outside and be counted. Everyone had to be present and correct, or we would be forced to stand outside to attention, until the Germans were satisfied. Rain or shine. They were obsessive about counting. They could do it for hours on end.

Appell was always a tedious and frequently nerve-racking experience. But looking back now, I realize that day’s particular roll call was crackling with tension. The SS knew the Roma were about to die and were on edge. And when the guards were twitchy, prisoners suffered.

After roll call was dismissed and we went back inside, the SS made their move. With all the Roma men of fighting age locked in cattle cars and heading north, the Zigeunerfamilienlager now only contained elderly and sick men, as well as women and children. In total, 2,890 of the most vulnerable. The guards distributed bread and salami and told them they were being taken to another camp. As part of the ruse, the SS loaded them onto trucks and drove them less than a mile to the gas chamber next to Crematorium V, surrounded by pine trees. Their bodies were burned in open pits.

Between 300,000 and 500,000 Roma perished in the Holocaust. Like the Jews, there was no place for them in the ethnically pure world of Adolf Hitler. Dismissed as Untermenschen, Jews were at the bottom of the pile of the Führer’s distorted racial pyramid. The Roma were just above them. Hitler wanted the Third Reich to be populated by a “master race” of Aryans — blue-eyed, blond-haired people of Nordic stock — wiping out those he regarded as inferior.

While the human race has many variations, there is more that unites us than divides us. From bitter experience, I can tell you we all smell the same when we are cremated. Jews, Roma, homosexuals, people of color — all those whom Hitler tried to eradicate.

That smell. It is unforgettable. I just have to close my eyes and, nearly eighty years on, the memory assaults my nostrils. It will remain with me to my last breath, as will the overriding sense of fear and hunger at Birkenau.

Not long after the Roma camp was liquidated, there was one unforgettable Appell. My legs were tired, we’d been standing outside in the heat for hours and I didn’t know what time it was. The sun was high in the sky and there was no shade outside our block. It must have been the afternoon, and we’d been there since we’d eaten what passed for breakfast: a warm, indescribable drink and a chunk of bread. How much longer would I have to stand still?

All the women prisoners from the barrack where I bunked with Mama were lined up in rows of five. It was one of the longest Appells we’d ever had. I lost track of the number of times our block elder had counted us. Every time she counted, she reached the same number. That meant there was nobody missing from our barrack. But perhaps there was a shortfall of prisoners in one of the other barracks in this massive complex. Maybe one or more inmates had managed to burrow beneath the electric fence and were making a dash for freedom.

There was a strip of no-man’s-land in front of the perimeter fences, clearly marked with signs stenciled with skull and crossbones and the word “Halt”. The Germans would shoot you if you entered that death zone. They wanted us to die on their terms, not on those of our own choosing. Several times at night, I’d been woken up by shooting. Bad news inevitably followed.

Escapes infuriated the Germans, not least because they didn’t want evidence of their crimes to reach the Americans, British or Russians, who were slowly but surely tightening their vise around the Third Reich. On the day after we arrived in Birkenau, the bodies of five people shot while trying to break out were strung up at the entrance to the men’s camp to discourage others from even thinking about it.

Among the women in our barrack, escapes provoked mixed emotions. Of course, they all hoped the fugitives would evade their pursuers and make it to safety. It was courageous, but such a predictable waste of life, as so many never got much farther than the fences before being cut down. But when news of an escape trickled down to our hut, it was always accompanied by a sense of irritation that we would pay the price. Our food rations might be cut, or, as on that day, we’d be compelled to stand to attention at a never-ending Appell, shifting from foot to foot to prevent cramp setting in, and anxious that we’d be subjected to a random act of punishment.

Normally, at Appell, I would try to stand at the back, so as not to attract attention. But on this occasion, I found myself in the front row. I started to fidget after having been stuck there for so long, but I didn’t shift from my position. My mistake was to turn my head around and look behind me.

Suddenly, a female guard towered over me. She was a member of the SS-Gefolge—which literally means the SS entourage. The woman was every bit as intimidating as her male counterparts. If anything, she was even more sinister, given that she wore a skirt and Nazi insignia on the left breast of her uniform.

The woman hauled me out of the line and started slapping my face. She was hitting my cheeks with an open hand. First one side, then the other. I had to lift my face up toward the guard. I knew that was what she wanted. I glanced over at my mother, and Mama looked back at me, but she didn’t say anything because she didn’t know what the consequences would be. So she had to keep quiet, even though she felt like coming to my aid. I knew she couldn’t interfere. But we communicated with our eyes.

Hold on.

The blows kept coming. The SS guard used all her strength. I looked her square in the face as she laid into me and I thought to myself, You can hit me until you kill me, but you will never know how much it hurts.

My cheeks were burning from the attack, but I refused to cry. Even at that age, I had no intention of being a victim. I didn’t know what the word “resistance” meant. But intrinsically, I felt it. I refused to be broken and nobody was going to destroy my inner core. Not one tear for my abuser.

My mind used that same coping mechanism I had first encountered in Starachowice: dissociation. As the slaps rained down, my consciousness took a ride and I had another out-of-body experience. It was as if I was floating above the barrack and was watching the scene from on high. Down there, a woman in black was beating a helpless, starving Jewish child. The helicopter view helped to numb the pain.

I don’t recall how long the assault lasted. She was trying to knock me to the floor, or at least make me cry. But I remained standing and silent. I wanted the punishment to finish, but I wasn’t going to let her know. Eventually, she became too tired to continue. I looked at her hand. It was bright red. My cheeks stung and began to swell.

“Next time, stand still”, she hissed as she pushed me back in line and walked away.

I just stood very still next to Mama. I was numb. We didn’t say anything. We didn’t need to. My body was heaving with the shock of the violence and relief that it was over.

Only after the woman had walked away did I allow the tears to fall in silence. And they continued silently in my bunk for the rest of the day. I had learned an important lesson. As a prisoner, I would never ever cry in public, even if it meant the punishment lasted longer. It only encouraged our tormentors. They fed on our weaknesses.

I wasn’t very far from Mama every moment of that beating, but I felt very much alone. We were trapped in a living nightmare. In a nightmare, nothing makes sense; everything is scrambled and unpredictable. So was our war. Neither Mama nor I knew what would have happened if she had intervened. Mama could have been shot. I could have been shot. Or we both could have been killed. There were no rules. Even if there were rules, they kept changing in a way you could never anticipate. All we could do was cling on and trust in luck.

I remember the time I spent with Mama in the first month in Birkenau vividly, although it was quite routine and mundane. Our days never started well because nights were invariably rough and there was no such thing as restorative sleep. Mama and I rarely had the bunk to ourselves, as a constant rotation of bedmates was imposed upon us. The whole bunk structure would creak and shift as scores of women twitched and rolled over at random. People tried to be considerate, but their pasts conspired against them and there would often be screams as a flashback roared to life and traumatized them once more.

Women whose contours became familiar during the night would suddenly disappear. We never knew where they had gone. Maybe to another barrack, or another work camp in the Auschwitz complex. Or they had been put to sleep in one of the gas chambers at the end of the railway line. Or perhaps they just couldn’t take any more and had made a dash for the nearest electrified barbed-wire fence.

We spent endless hours waiting in lines. Reaching the latrine in the morning tested bladder control to the limit. Hundreds of women needed to relieve themselves at the same time. The latrine had a barrack all to itself. A slit trench ran down the middle, covered by a series of raised wooden planks, punctuated every few feet with holes designed to accommodate women, not children. The size of the holes troubled me. I used to cling on to the planks for fear of tumbling into the reeking cesspit below.

Sometimes, I was able to pay an unscheduled visit to the latrine. Usually, it would happen in the evening, when our block elder was in her room and had “company”. It was strictly verboten (forbidden) for Germans to fraternize with Jews. But proximity to death is a heady aphrodisiac. No doubt, the elder received something in return for her favors. Perhaps a few extra days on earth. Or another bread ration. People did whatever they needed to do to survive. Mama would wait for the elder’s latch to click shut and she would tell me to hurry to the latrine and back.

If we weren’t waiting in line for the cesspit, we were lining up to be fed. There was no good place to be in the food line. Near the front, the gruel was warmer than when you were at the rear. But if you were among the last to be fed, there might be more chunks of lukewarm or cold turnip at the bottom of the tureen.

I was always hungry. But despite the malnutrition, my body was growing, as was my appetite. Mama tried to alleviate the pangs by giving me her bread ration. I rarely saw her eat. She seemed to survive on air. Life improved slightly when she was put to work in a potato warehouse. Occasionally, she stole a potato and I would eat it raw. Supplementing our diets in this way was perilous: if she’d been caught with a potato in the fold of her dress, she could have faced summary execution. But Mama was wily and got away with it. Sometimes she would trade a potato for a hunk of bread, which she would always give to me.

Our routine rarely varied. Life was a blur of basic functions. Sleep, wake, latrine, eat, Appell. Repeat. It’s extraordinary what you can become accustomed to and how much hardship you can endure. Luxuries were little things: an extra mouthful of bread could improve your day, an unexpected smile would lift the misery for an hour or more. This was my world and I accepted it, along with its all-pervasive stench of roasting flesh from the crematoria. I even got used to that.

But the stink of the latrine was hard to take. Once, I was bursting to breaking point. I ran to the latrine and jumped up onto the wooden platform. I was in such a hurry that I misjudged my leap, and because I was so small, I slipped backward through a hole and into the slurry. The indignity and stench were bad enough, but worst of all, I couldn’t climb out. I was stuck up to my knees and surrounded by squealing rats swimming through the waste. My screams alerted Mama, who was never far away. She was horrified. Other women came to help. I was wedged beneath the wooden plank for what seemed an eternity. After several attempts, the women gripped me under the shoulders and pulled me to safety. Mama hosed me down, but without soap, the smell lingered for days. It was horrible.

Not long after my dip in the latrine, I fell sick. There must have been all manner of bacteria and germs down there. I woke up one morning and was shocked to realize I couldn’t see. A solidified crust of pus had superglued my eyelashes together. I worked away at one eye and managed to free it a touch.

Then, a couple of days later, I woke up and my throat felt like it was on fire, it was so dry and swollen. And my teeth seemed to be bolted together and my jaw had locked up, making it impossible to eat. I started to fret. I might have only been five, but I was smart enough to know that sick people were killed. I was so scared that I didn’t even tell Mama. I was afraid someone would overhear our conversation and I’d disappear. My eyes were stuck together with pus again, and I was holding on to the bunks to move around.

Mama soon noticed that I wasn’t well. But for the first time in her life, she was unable to control what happened to me next. Matters were taken out of her hands when other women in the block also realized that I was sick. In their weakened state, they were afraid of contagion, and I was taken away.