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

Chapter Thirteen. The Longest Walk

I remember the best breakfast I ever had in the extermination camp. If I close my eyes and think about it, I can still taste it and feel the texture on my tongue. For once, it wasn’t a coarse hunk of stale bread and watery soup. I don’t know what it was precisely; at the time, I thought it was porridge, whereas now I believe it was more likely to have been a standard German comfort dish, farina pudding: semolina cooked with sugar, and maybe condensed milk, which every German soldier carried in his knapsack as part of his hard rations. Whatever it was, for children like me who were starving and craving proper food, it was delicious.

“We have a special treat for you this morning”, said an adult voice. “Eat up. It’s cold outside. We are leaving”.

This meal was everything I wanted. I had been yearning for something sweet. It had substance and filled me up. I wolfed down the semolina and scraped every sticky grain off the tin cup with my spoon.

Ours was the last remaining children’s block. We all instinctively knew where the walk was going to take us. It didn’t matter. Our bellies were full for the first time in a long while. We were living from minute to minute. And in that moment, we were just thankful for the gift of food. When I think about that breakfast now, I find it distressing that even with children, the Nazis played mind games. They manipulated us to ensure we did exactly as we were told.

After we’d eaten, we came out of the barrack. Outside, it was freezing. The ground was rock-hard and covered in frost. I can’t be certain when it was, but it was probably the end of October or the start of November 1944. We turned left and walked toward the railway track. Our breath was steaming from our mouths. There must have been over fifty children aged from four to twelve, escorted by two female members of the SS. I was one of the smallest, extracting every ounce of warmth from the rough coat I wore over my shift dress. I was still wearing my white lace-up shoes and no socks. I was at the back of the line with another little girl, and we were talking as we walked.

Dead bodies, all thin, sharp angles, covered with frost, lay scattered on the ground, not far from the path we were taking. Their eyes seemed to follow us. Death could strike at any time and in many forms. People didn’t always die in their bunks like my bed companion had. I knew that they just dropped dead on the spot from starvation, exhaustion and disease. Maybe these people had just died in the past few minutes. Or maybe they had passed away the night before and hadn’t yet been collected by the Leichenkommando, the work teams responsible for corpses. Either way, the sight didn’t disturb us. The cadavers were merely part of the landscape.

We walked past another of the children’s barrack buildings. It was empty. We hadn’t seen those children for a few days. Some of the older ones in our line surmised that the SS had come for them, and they’d been taken to the crematorium.

“Maybe it’s our turn”, I said to my companion.

As ever, I had already accepted the idea that death was my fate. I wasn’t exactly sure what death was, or what happened afterward, but I remained convinced that all Jewish children had to die. As we were walking, whispers trickled down from the front of the line to the back. Someone had asked where we were going. The answer seemed to be that we were indeed heading to the gas chamber.

We kept on walking. The German breakfast was doing what it was intended to do. I was nervous but not excessively distressed. For once, I had a full stomach, and that inner cold that comes from starvation had, for the time being, disappeared.

Suddenly, a woman’s loud voice pierced my consciousness.

“Tola”.

I was confused. That was my name. For months I hadn’t heard it spoken outside the children’s barrack. To adults, I wasn’t Tola anymore. I was A-27633.

“That must be my mother”, I said to my companion. “She’s the only grown-up who knows my name. Yes, I’m sure it’s her”.

I looked to my right and there were all these thin women, who seemed to be half naked, pressed up against a barbed-wire fence. They all looked terrible, displaying the hallmarks of starvation.

“Tola, where are you going? What’s going on?” my mother shouted.

I couldn’t see Mama in among the crowd. All I heard was her voice.

“We’re going to the crematorium”, I replied, almost jauntily.

Suddenly, all the women behind the wire began screaming and ululating. We carried on walking and the screaming became louder and more desperate. I turned to my young companion and said, “I don’t understand why they are crying. Every Jewish child has to go to the crematorium. What are they crying about?”

We must have been walking for about fifteen minutes. Then, just before we reached the railway track, we turned right, close to a long, single-story T-shaped building with sloping roofs. It resembled a large community hall, apart from the incongruous annex on the side with a squat brick-built chimney emitting that foul-smelling smoke. The warmth of the breakfast was wearing off. We were freezing, especially those who didn’t have shoes.

“Go down the steps”, ordered a soldier in an SS uniform.

We did as we were told and entered a stark, bare concrete room with gray walls. Coat hooks lined the walls. What a sinister and scary place it was. This was the anteroom for the gas chamber in Crematorium III.

“Hang up your clothes in such a way that you will know exactly where they are when you come out. You are going to have a shower now”.

The concrete walls amplified the bitter temperatures. I undressed and immediately began shivering. Rarely in my life have I felt so cold. I stood on tiptoe, hung up my clothes and placed my shoes neatly beneath them. I looked down to see if there were any landmarks on the floor that I would recognize later. Then I looked to the left and right to determine which children were on either side of me for when we emerged from the shower. Except, I had this sixth sense that we wouldn’t be coming out.

Still the guards maintained the delusion that we would. Some of the older children were sobbing. Some quietly. Others less so. The noise upset the German desire for order, and more than once, they told us to shut up.

The guards distributed ragged threadbare towels, reinforcing the fiction that we were only in this dungeon for a shower. The towels didn’t pacify the older ones. I was given a small orange one, which I wrapped around myself by tucking it under my arms. It gave me momentary warmth, although I soon started shivering again. Echoes of whimpering children, suffering from the cold and sheer terror, filled the room. Some were swept along by the sense of doom that descended on us. Not me. I remained silent. I didn’t cry. I had resigned myself to my fate. Whatever that may be. As long as I could escape the cold.

We all huddled together in that concrete waiting room, a few feet from the shower doors. I didn’t feel afraid. And I didn’t miss my parents. This event, whatever it was, was something I had anticipated. Wrapped in our thin towels, freezing, shivering and shaking, we clung to each other for warmth. We watched and listened as, on the far side of the room, uniformed SS guards with clipboards barked at each other. They seemed to be confused. Ordinarily, German operations ran like clockwork, but on this frigid morning, the mechanics of the Nazi war machine appeared to have malfunctioned.

We waited and waited. The tension was excruciating. The whimpering was getting under the skin of the Germans, who repeatedly yelled at us to be quiet. We remained standing, wrapped in our towels for hours. Suddenly, a harsh command snapped us to attention.

“Raus, raus”[9].

We were ordered to get dressed as quickly as possible and to go back to our barrack.

“It’s the wrong block”, I heard someone say. “We’ll take them another time”.

We filed out of the waiting room, back up the stairs and retraced our steps toward the Kinderlager, escorted again by two SS guards. This time the women’s camp was on our left. The same gaunt women who had seen us pass before pressed themselves against the barbed-wire fence once again. This time, however, their voices were full of relief and amazement.

“Tola, what happened? Tell me what happened”, Mama yelled.

Once again, I couldn’t see her in the crowd.

“They got the wrong block”, I yelled back. “They’re going to take us another time”.

Matter of fact, as always, even at that young age.

In the history of the Holocaust, of all the millions who entered gas chambers in Poland, such as Auschwitz, Majdanek, Chełmno, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor, there were very few who somehow survived the experience. Our group of children was probably the largest number to live to tell the tale.

I always thought my escape was a miracle of the Holocaust. To this day, I don’t know if we were saved because, as I thought at the time, there was confusion over which children were scheduled for extermination. But if we were indeed the last children in Birkenau, how could the SS have been expecting another group to be gassed?

During the research for this book, another possibility has surfaced. If our entry to the gas chamber took place on or after November 2, 1944, it’s entirely feasible that we were saved by Heinrich Himmler, the second most powerful man in the Third Reich, and one of the architects of the Final Solution. Because on this date, Himmler decreed that there were to be no more gassings using the cyanide-based Zyklon B. His order defied Hitler, who was insistent that the extermination of the Jews continued until the task was completed.

One of the catalysts for Himmler’s decision was recognition that the Allies were by then aware of the scale of the genocide being perpetrated by the Nazis. The turning point happened in late July 1944 when, in a lightning-fast attack, the Soviet Red Army captured the Majdanek extermination camp, 220 miles northeast of Auschwitz. The Russians took the place intact, before the Germans had a chance to destroy the gas chambers and other infrastructure. Evidence of Nazi war crimes was then indisputable.

The prime witnesses were workers called Sonderkommandos. Predominantly Jews, their function was to do the most revolting tasks to save the Nazis from further soiling their bloodstained hands. The Germans tried to make the Sonderkommandos complicit, forcing them to lead their fellow Jews to the gas chambers, sometimes shepherding their own friends and families to their deaths. Then, after the cyanide had done its work, they were required to remove the corpses and load them into the crematoria. And when the crematoria were overwhelmed, they burned cadavers in open pits.

The Sonderkommandos were the walking dead. They knew too much. They saw everything the Nazis did. As potential witnesses, they posed a threat to the Germans, if justice ever presented itself. Performing tasks the Germans weren’t willing to undertake prolonged the lives of Sonderkommandos by a few months, maybe a year. They enjoyed slightly better rations than the average Birkenau prisoner. But they were doomed the moment they were coerced into joining.

On October 7, 1944, after hearing that they were about to be killed, 250 Sonderkommandos staged the biggest revolt in the short bloody history of Auschwitz-Birkenau. They made improvised bombs and hand grenades using mess tins and explosives smuggled to them by female slave laborers who’d been working in a munitions factory. After attacking SS guards with knives, rocks, hammers and crowbars, they managed to damage Crematorium IV, which, like Crematorium V, was set in pine trees that were almost in a direct line from the front door of our barrack. Three members of the SS were killed, including one who was thrown into the open furnace of the crematorium. We cowered inside as the fierce battle took place just a few hundred yards away. Using blasts from exploding oxygen canisters and resulting fire as cover, some of the prisoners tried to escape. The Sonderkommandos had seen what had happened to their predecessors and preferred to go down fighting. None of them made it. The SS killed all 250. A further 200 co-conspirators were killed.

The Nazis then investigated how the explosives had fallen into the hands of the Sonderkommandos. Four women prisoners were sentenced to death, tortured for weeks and subsequently hanged in Auschwitz. The Sonderkommandos’ last stand did, however, achieve one notable success: Crematorium IV was damaged beyond repair and had to be demolished.

After Himmler’s decree that gassing operations cease, work on dismantling the other gas chambers and crematoria began. Women prisoners like my mother were ordered to start demolishing Crematorium III and its gas chamber, the one that almost claimed my life. They had to remove the metal tracks that led to the line of ovens. The tracks’ purpose had been to speed up the process of cremation. Sonderkommandos would load up small carts with bodies and push them along the tracks to the individual ovens.

The women were ordered to lay grass turf over all the pits that had been used for burning corpses when the crematoria couldn’t handle the load. They were also required to sift through human ash remains before they were dumped in the nearby Vistula River. Some women tried to hide bones so they could be used as evidence later. The women knew that the Russians, and with them maybe justice, were on the way. It’s extraordinary to think that at a time when the German Third Reich was facing its greatest threat, from the might of the Soviet Army, the SS were ordering women to plant trees on the sites of the former burning pits, to make it look as though nothing had happened.

The last time I was in a gas chamber was on January 26, 2020. I returned for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the camp’s liberation. I walked into the preserved chamber, in Crematorium I, near the famous entrance gate to Auschwitz, with its sardonic welcome, Arbeit Macht Frei. The relatively small chamber, with three or four ovens and metal trays for pushing corpses into the flames, became redundant because it couldn’t handle the industrial-scale extermination at the heart of the Final Solution.

I thought I was tough enough to cope with entering a place replete with nightmarish personal memories and which symbolizes the crimes against my people. But after a couple of minutes, I could hardly breathe and had to leave quickly. The experience was too much for me.