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

Chapter Twelve. On My Own

I had no idea where I was when I woke up. I could feel my body. I could see and I could hear. But I felt strange. It was warm and I was comfortable. And I was alone in a single bed. The last time I had been conscious, I couldn’t open my eyelids, but now they moved freely. That was a relief. And that terrible feeling of having my mouth locked had also subsided.

“So you are awake at last”, said a kindly female voice.

“Where am I?”

“You are in the infirmary. You’ve been very sick. But now you are on the mend”.

“Mama?”

“She’s not far away. You’ve got to stay in bed for a while, until you get your strength back”.

I don’t know how long I was delirious. It could have been days. It could have been a week or more. But now it appeared that I was through the crisis. I had been struck down by a combination of scarlet fever and diphtheria. Both were common childhood ailments in the first half of the last century. Scarlet fever is contagious, caused by bacteria and generates a high temperature and sore throat. Diphtheria is also triggered by bacteria. It attacks the respiratory system and it’s nicknamed “the strangling angel” because, in the worst cases, it does just that — it chokes you to death.

I was fortunate to be alive on two counts: I had survived two potentially fatal illnesses. More significantly, I had also survived being sick; given the Nazis’ practice of culling the weak and infirm, and their ruthless slaughter of children, I was amazed that I was still breathing.

But history has taught us that infirmaries in camps like Birkenau were often staffed by Jewish prisoners who had been medics in their prewar lives. And despite being under constant threat of being murdered, nurses and doctors in the camps upheld the sacred Hippocratic oath to treat patients to the best of their ability. Where possible, they masked the symptoms of the sick and shielded them from their Nazi overseers so that, against the odds, their patients could leave the infirmaries, and had a chance of survival. It was an act of compassion and resistance.

I stayed at the infirmary a week longer to recuperate, and then it was time for me to leave. I donned the cotton shift dress that I was issued with when I arrived at the camp. But I had lost the uncomfortable shoes. The nurse went in search of a replacement pair and returned with some white lace-up high-top shoes. I slipped my feet into them and stood by the bed, perplexed.

The nurse looked at me quizzically.

“You don’t know how to put them on, do you?”

I nodded. I had put the right shoe on the left foot and vice versa.

“How old are you? Five and a half? A girl of your age should be able to put shoes on”.

She showed me how to do it. Then she took my hand. “Come with me. We’re going to your new barrack”.

“Are you taking me back to Mama?” I asked.

“No, you are going to the Kinderlager”. (The children’s camp.)

My heart started pounding. I was distressed by the news that Mama and I would be apart. I had become accustomed to being by myself in the hospital. But that was easy. The atmosphere was benign. I couldn’t comprehend the enormity of what being totally alone would mean.

My war was about to take on an entirely different complexion. Little did I know that everything I had been through over the past four years had been preparation for this moment. The only weapons I possessed were the things I had seen and the lessons I had learned. I had my wits. My powers of observation and self-preservation. I had no alternative but to be self-sufficient and resilient. I remember being sad that I wouldn’t be returned to Mama, but I didn’t cry. I wasn’t about to share my emotions with anyone else.

We left the infirmary and walked toward the chimneys spewing fumes. I felt as if everyone was staring at me as I walked with the nurse in my white lace-ups. I didn’t like the direction we were taking. The smell was getting stronger.

But then we turned right, crossed a road and cut across the railway tracks in front of a steam engine puffing away. We reached a barbed-wire fence with a big wooden gate. The nurse spoke to the guard, showed him a paper, and we were nodded through. I didn’t know where we were. But I do now. We were in what had been the Zigeunerfamilienlager—the Roma family camp. We walked in a straight line for about five minutes or so. There were anonymous barnlike barracks on either side of me. I wondered how far we would go because the camp seemed to stretch forever. But after we walked past a laundry on our right and a latrine reeking in the midsummer heat on our left, we reached our destination. Barrack Number Eleven in the Kinderlager. The nurse led me in, turned abruptly and walked out.

I was surprised at how many other children were there. There might have been fifty or seventy or so. One or two were smaller than me, but most were bigger and older. Where had they all come from? Had they been hiding in the camp? Maybe I wasn’t the only Jewish child in the world, after all? But where were their parents? There weren’t any adults in this section. I might not have been on my own, in that I was now part of a group, but without Mama by my side, nothing was the same.

To my surprise, I recognized two familiar faces from Tomaszów Mazowiecki and my heart skipped a beat: Frieda and Rena were standing at the entrance. They were cousins who were five and six years older than me. At that moment, I felt slightly less alone. Unfortunately for me, they weren’t in the barrack for long. Somehow, shortly after my arrival, their mothers managed to smuggle them out of the Kinderlager to a different part of the camp. I didn’t see them again until after the war.

But at least there was another friend from Tomaszów Mazowiecki. Rutka Greenspan was much closer to my age and had apparently been on the same train that brought me to Auschwitz. It was her father who had been strangled in the cattle car on the journey from the labor camp at Starachowice to Birkenau. Rutka did a double take when I walked into the barrack. I was overjoyed to see her. She was delighted to see me as well and we hugged each other tightly. I didn’t know whether she knew that her father was dead. The manner of his death was so awful, I decided to keep it to myself. I was trying to be kind.

But I must confess that occasionally I was a little cruel. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, hunger pangs woke me up. I would slip out of my bunk and squat on the line of warm bricks that ran down the center of the barrack. The bricks radiated heat from a small stove, and I loved the warmth on my bare feet. I was comforted. When I was warm enough, I’d stand up and prance along the bricks as quietly as possible. I felt tall and powerful. I’d tiptoe between the bunks and raise my arms and extend my fingers, as if I was a witch or a monster, casting a spell on the children who I thought were sleeping. It was just a game. But I learned later that Rutka was often awake as well, and on occasions I had towered over her with my arms outstretched like a Nazi eagle. My silhouette terrified her in Birkenau and was the source of nightmares for decades to follow.

There were other nights when I woke up and was petrified. Once, two SS soldiers came into our barrack in the middle of the night when all the other children were asleep and I was wide awake. I watched with horror as they went from bunk to bunk, peering at the children. I couldn’t work out what they were doing. I thought perhaps they were looking for twins on behalf of the Angel of Death, Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor, infamous for conducting excruciating live medical experiments on prisoners. Mengele’s laboratory was not far away, separated from our barrack by just a barbed-wire fence.

The older children in our building were aware of the atrocities that were being perpetrated just a few yards away, and the stories they told us added a new layer of fear to life in Birkenau. We heard that Mengele was fascinated by twins. He would dip one twin in boiling water, another in ice, and compare how they reacted. Mengele was a psychopath who abused his medical skills in the sick pursuit of racial purity. He conducted amputations without anesthetics. He injected the eyes of twins with chemicals to see if he could change their color. Mengele was trying to create the perfect Aryan blue for the “master race” of the future. One twin would be used as the guinea pig, the other as the control. And when the tests inevitably failed, both children would be murdered.

I remember trembling in my bunk, trying to convince myself that I would be safe from the soldiers’ attentions because I wasn’t a twin. Nevertheless, I lay there fretting that they would hear the pounding of my heart and would come and take me away, murder me, chop me up and use my liver to feed troops on the front lines.

I’m not suggesting the Germans were cannibals, but as a child of Auschwitz, I had seen evidence of the aftermath of dissections with my own eyes. During one particularly strange period, our block elder took us on walks around Birkenau. Supposedly, she did it to give us some exercise and fresh air, in a place where the atmosphere could not have been more putrid. During one ramble, I became separated from the main group, and being inquisitive, I opened the door of a small wooden building and saw that it was packed to the rafters with body parts and long-dead eyes staring back at me. I was shocked by the experience and slammed the door shut immediately, thinking, This has nothing to do with me.

I tried to forget what I had seen. But the image was planted in my brain and has frequently returned to upset me. Most recently, this happened in December 2021 as we were deep into drafting the manuscript for this book. I found myself thinking about Mengele’s evil works and for a few nights I was completely unable to sleep.

Like most Auschwitz survivors, I wish that Mengele had been faced with postwar justice. But he managed to evade Allied investigators and eventually made his way to South America. He apparently died of a heart attack near São Paulo in Brazil in 1979.

Living as close to Mengele for as long as we did demanded a safety valve: humor. Some of the older children in my barrack would pick on the younger ones with a particularly sick joke.

“I’ve just seen your mother”.

“No, you haven’t. I haven’t seen her since we arrived here. So how could you have seen her?”

“Would you like to see her?”

“Yes, of course”.

“See that smoke, that’s where she is. She’s coming out of the chimney”.

Of course, the dark humor was a defense mechanism to try to ward off the fear that we all experienced. We all felt vulnerable and alone without our parents. Still, a sense of camaraderie permeated the Kinderlager. We were bound together by our situation. But ultimately, I knew I could only depend upon myself.

Today, nearly eighty years later, I occasionally experience a similar sense of solitariness. Although I might be at the center of a large gathering of people, I still feel my family’s absence. It’s a phantom pain, as though part of me has been amputated. The sensation even surfaces when I am surrounded by my four children and eight grandchildren, during holidays like Hanukkah and Passover, when extended family enriches the experience. I’m reminded that my mother was the sole survivor of the Pinkusewicz family, who lost 150 members. Then there were my father’s parents, five of his siblings and all their families. They all perished. I still miss my uncle James after all these years.

I, too, was slated to die once my number came up. All I have to do today is look down to my left forearm and there it is: the constant reminder of who the Nazis wanted me to be. A-27633. Just a number waiting to be gassed. Over time, the tattoo has come to represent the exact opposite of what the Nazis intended. It was meant to dehumanize me. To reduce me to a number. To brand me. Like cattle or sheep. Instead, it has empowered me. It is also reaffirmation of my personal humanity, and of my obligation to those who weren’t as fortunate. In a way, it is symbolic of my ultimate moral victory over Hitler and his kind.

Only once was I embarrassed by the tattoo, when I was about twelve, not long after I arrived in America. I was straphanging on the subway in New York. Everyone in the carriage seemed to be staring at me and zeroing in on my left forearm. Nobody said a word. They just looked at the tattoo. I suddenly felt incredibly hot. I wanted to cover it up.

Not long afterward, I had a doctor’s appointment as part of a refugee resettlement program. In common with other refugees, I was checked out to make sure I was healthy.

“I’m going to give you a gift”, said the doctor. “I’m going to take away the number with a little plastic surgery. You’ll never know it was there. It’ll be just a little cut”.

I was only twelve. I might have been a refugee, but I was full of chutzpah. I pointed to my forehead and said, “If the number had been right here, I wouldn’t take it off. I did nothing wrong”.

I was angry that the doctor had even suggested it. The tattoo is my witness statement. I was there. I saw what happened.

I do know a few people who had their tattoos removed when they were young. They all regretted it. I can still remember the young Jewish woman who gave me my tattoo a few weeks after I was installed in the Kinderlager. Most prisoners were tattooed as soon as they entered Auschwitz. I don’t know why I wasn’t. Perhaps German bureaucracy had its shortcomings.

When our turn came, we all had to line up. Starving hungry and hoping for an extra ration, some girls pushed and shoved to reach the head of the line. Rutka from Tomaszów Mazowiecki ended up right in front of me. She was given the tattoo number A-27632.

The tattooist was about seventeen or eighteen years old. Back then, at my young age, I thought she was quite old. She was very nice and very careful, but her hand was shaking, and I thought to myself, This lady doesn’t like to do what she’s doing.

I watched every single move. I was fascinated by the mechanics. The needle hurt a little, but concentrating on what she was doing helped minimize the pain.

She didn’t have a machine like they do nowadays. She had a sharp needle that she dipped in a bottle of ink. She went backward and forward making pinpricks. Every dot was made separately. The woman talked to me gently as she was working.

“I’ll give you a very neat number. If you ever survive, you can buy a blouse with a long sleeve and nobody will know what happened to you. You won’t be embarrassed.

“Find yourself a cold wet rag to press against your number. It will hurt less. From now on, you don’t have a name. You only have a number. Memorize it. It’s important”.

Not long after she inked me, the tattooist was killed. Like so many others, she spent ten minutes choking to death. Why did they kill her? After all, she was working. She was just a small cog in the war machine, yet she was, in Nazi terms, gainfully employed. Perhaps she was too slow. Perhaps she was too gentle and too kind as she carried out a function she clearly despised. In Nazi terms, showing compassion was a crime, punishable by death.

The tattooist was right. I had to memorize the number. Even though I couldn’t read or write and didn’t yet know my numbers. At morning and evening roll call, when all the children gathered, I never once heard the block elder yell the name Tola Grossman. There were so many numbers that sounded like mine. I taught myself to hear the numbers grouped together. If the elder ever shouted out A-27633 and I failed to reply “Present”, she would stop and repeat it. And she would get angry, and life would become more unpleasant. There would always be some form of retribution for upsetting her. I was reminded that it was best to be anonymous, not to draw attention to myself. I had learned that lesson with my parents in the ghetto and the labor camp. But now I could see for myself the wisdom of that strategy.

The block elder at the Kinderlager had a range of punishments that she would administer. I already knew I could withstand her slaps without any difficulty. She was nowhere near as powerful as the SS woman I had aggravated in August. Most commonly, we were made to remain at attention at roll call for extended periods. Nobody wanted to stand forever. Reducing the food ration, however, was the most painful sanction. I was missing my mama’s physical presence, her love and nurturing soul. But now I understood how much I had relied on the morsels of bread she had given me from her own ration. Without that extra bread, I was hungrier than ever. The watery soup we were given in the Kinderlager was as insubstantial as it was in the barrack I shared with Mama. But there seemed to be even less of it. The hunger pangs lasted longer than before and I was permanently famished. The Nazis may not have slated us for the gas chamber yet. But they were certainly starving us to death.

Mama was obviously worried about the impact of the Birkenau diet on me. One day a woman came up to me and gave me a little pouch on a piece of string. It was September 7, 1944.

“It’s from your mama”, she said. “It’s your birthday present. You’re turning six”.

My mama was still alive! I looked inside the pouch. It was a chunk of bread. Never has a present meant as much to me as that morsel. It was full of my mother’s love and reminded me that she was thinking of me and, despite our terrible conditions, fighting for my life. I later discovered that my mother had stolen a potato to trade for that piece of bread. She was spotted and brutally beaten about the head. The punishment was so severe that Mama suffered acute headaches for the rest of her life. But she had managed to cling on to the bread.

The present lifted my spirits. I was so hungry that I could have eaten it there and then. But I resolved to save it for the moment when I was about to die from starvation. Death. Isn’t that what happened to every Jewish child? In my innocence, I thought that the bread could save my life and bring me back from the brink. So I put the pouch underneath the front of my dress and fell asleep on the bunk that I shared with another girl, who was about twice my age.

Squeaks and a stampede of tiny feet all over my body woke me up in the middle of the night. Rats had found my gift. I felt their claws on my skin. Several of them dived into the front of my dress and stole the bread, running off into the darkness to devour their prize. Other rats jumped off the bunk in pursuit. I felt for the pouch, but the rats had taken it all. There wasn’t a crumb left. Needless to say, my sixth birthday was not a happy one.

Each long day in Birkenau seemed to melt into the next one. But because I know what happened on my birthday, I’m able to give a precise date to my encounter with the rats. While researching the timeline in Auschwitz, I learned that two days earlier, on September 5, 1944, a girl called Anne Frank arrived at Birkenau from a transit camp called Westerbork in the Netherlands. The cattle cars contained 1,019 Dutch Jews, including seven who had been living in hiding for over two years in a narrow canal-side house in Prinsengracht 263, Amsterdam. Among them were Anne Frank, then aged fifteen, her sister, Margot, her mother, Edith, and father, Otto. Anne Frank’s final diary entry, written in the Secret Annex, hidden behind a bookcase, was on August 1, 1944, three days before her arrest by the Gestapo, after the family was betrayed.

In her diary, perhaps the most famous literary work of the Holocaust, Anne Frank wrote, “Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. The Gestapo are treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe where they’re sending all the Jews”.

She added: “If it’s this bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they’re being gassed. Perhaps that’s the quickest way to die”.

But the Holocaust was unpredictable. Anne Frank didn’t die quickly. She toiled as a slave laborer in Birkenau until November 1944 when she was transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp north of Hanover, where she died of sickness and exhaustion in February 1945. We never met, but we endured the same regime of malnutrition that ultimately contributed to her death.

The physical pain of starvation has never left me. It is the worst feeling in the world. You may not see the scars, but I feel them still, eighty years later, gnawing at my stomach. Hunger has a lasting effect, emotionally and physically.

Starvation triggered a very telling dream in Birkenau. It was so extraordinary that to this day, I can still recall its entire hallucinogenic weirdness. Naturally, it revolved around the thing that I was missing the most: food.

I was out walking and suddenly I came upon a lake that consisted entirely of egg yolks. They stretched as far as the eye could see. After surviving on gruel and stale bread, it’s obvious why I was fantasizing about eggs, my all-time favorite comfort food. I took off my white shoes, carefully broke the membrane on top of the egg lake and immersed myself up to my neck. I had the sensation of floating in a warm bath, and I began swimming, breaststroke. My eyes were level with the yolks, and I swallowed one whole with every stroke driving me forward. I swam and ate. Swam and ate.

I’m sure that my fellow prisoners fantasized about something similar. Starvation is difficult to describe. Imagine a monster inside you, devouring every single cell. Food becomes an obsession. You become crippled by a sinister inner chill. Every nook of your body craves sustenance because every internal organ, every joint, every cartilage is atrophying from a lack of nourishment. Your body is dying from the inside, in slow motion. Imagine feeling like that as a child and not being able to explain what was wrong.

Although I was only six, I could identify people on the verge of death. They seemed to collapse in on themselves until they were doubled up. In the slang of the camps, there was a word for them. They were known as Muselmann. Literally, it translates as Muslims — because they looked as though they were bent over in prayer. The term was used to describe those who were overcome by exhaustion and starvation, and who were so worn down, that they accepted that death was imminent and even a relief. Once a prisoner had reached this stage, there was virtually no way back.

The twelve-year-old girl who shared my bunk presented all the symptoms of a Muselmann. I knew she was dying from starvation. Her body was shutting down, and sure enough, the girl passed away in the middle of the night sometime in the autumn. I woke up in a panic and found her immobile and cold next to me. I was sad that she had died but also worried that we’d be kept standing for hours on end at Appell when the girl failed to respond to her number being called. I was also concerned on behalf of the block elder who had to count us. If the numbers didn’t add up and there was a suspicion someone had escaped, the elder would be in trouble with the Germans. I was scared of the elder, but I knew, even at that young age, that she was a victim of the Nazis as well.

The corpse was my responsibility because we shared a bed. I still could not read her number, but as I had heard it called many times over the past few months, I knew I would recognize the sound pattern. At dawn, I dragged the body to the barrack entrance and pulled her next to a pile of other children who had died in the night. Although the girl was little more than skin and bones, she was extremely heavy for a six-year-old to haul. At Appell, her number was called. I remember feeling an unusual sense of pride in dealing with the problem, despite not understanding numbers.

I raised my arm and responded triumphantly, “She’s dead”.