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

Chapter Fourteen. Deliverance

After my close encounter with the gas chamber, the next moment of maximum peril came at the end of January 1945 as history closed in on Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Just because the Nazis had been ordered to stop gassing us didn’t mean the murdering had ended. Although the gas chambers were now out of action, life wasn’t any safer. They were still executing people. Prisoners were still dying from sickness, malnutrition and exhaustion. But for the first time since the Nazis had swept to power, their priority was now self-preservation. Although our guards, the fanatical SS, took pride in their reputation for being the cream of the German military, like many bullies, they became cowards when confronted by opposition.

There were bombing raids by American planes on factories attached to the Auschwitz complex. Despite the danger to the slave laborers inside, the attacks were welcomed by them as a sign that liberation might soon be at hand. The rumble of artillery grew louder as the Soviet Red Army moved in from the east. When they approached the city of Kraków, forty miles from Birkenau, on January 17, 1945, prisoners witnessed a state of panic and chaos among drunken SS personnel.

The Germans were now in a race against time. Prisoners didn’t need newspapers or radio broadcasts to know what was happening. They overheard soldiers’ anxious conversations. The SS were experiencing pangs of real fear, perhaps for the first time. Birkenau had been a soft posting. All it entailed was murdering harmless civilians. Nobody in their right mind volunteered for the Russian front, where no quarter was proffered by enemy nor winter. Now the Russian front was on their doorstep. The sacrifice of Stalingrad was fresh in the Soviet memory. More than a million Russian troops and civilians were killed there, the bloodiest battle of the Second World War. The Soviet victory on the banks of the Volga River in the winter of 1942 finally turned the tide of the war in the east against Germany. Retribution was on the tip of every Red Army bayonet. Storming westward, the Russians swept aside all opposition. They were just a few days from arriving at our gates.

The Germans began the evacuation of Birkenau on January 18, 1945. The worst genocide in the history of humankind had taken place within the confines of these electrified fences. The Nazis attempted to sanitize the crime scene, or at least leave as little evidence as possible. They blew up Crematoria II and III. Only Crematorium V remained intact. They incinerated the records and files so diligently gathered over the previous few years, but their biggest problem was that there were so many witnesses left. Sixty thousand prisoners remained in Auschwitz, Birkenau and Monowitz, the main components of the Auschwitz complex.

The Nazis started gathering prisoners to either transport them or force them to march westward toward Germany. On the first day of this operation, some 5,000 women and children left Birkenau, wearing clogs or barefoot and in columns of five hundred escorted by SS guards. Anyone who was too sick or weak was summarily shot. Like wounded animals, the Germans were at their most dangerous now that they felt threatened. Over the course of the next week, the mayhem intensified as the Russians drew ever closer.

On the morning of January 25, 1945, the block elder in Mama’s building said the evacuation of the camp was nearly finished. She told the women that those who could walk would have to leave, and all those who couldn’t would be “taken care of”. Mama knew what that meant. She waited for her opportunity, and when the elder’s back was turned, she slipped out of the barracks to fetch me.

Mama understood the enormity of this day: it offered the prospect of freedom. After six years of slavery, starvation and degradation, liberation was perhaps just hours away. In her own small way, Mama had resisted for the duration of the war. Every day that she and I survived was an act of defiance. On this day of all days, she couldn’t afford to be passive. It was unthinkable that we might succumb to the Holocaust in these last turbulent hours. For the first time in the war, Mama had a slight chance to dictate how her day might end. Her sixth sense, her intuition, had served her well in the past. She had to follow her instincts while keeping her eyes wide open.

The confusion in the camp, the smoke from the fires and the murk of winter all worked in our favor. Mama achieved her objective. She managed to take me to the infirmary and hide me in a bed with a covered corpse.

What Mama didn’t know, and what I’ve learned since, is that at two o’clock that afternoon, large numbers of SD troops were sent into our camp to force all the remaining Jews out into the open. SD stood for Sicherheitsdienst, the security service — possibly the most dangerous outfit within the German armed forces. Their function was to act as mobile killing units.

As soon as I heard their boots, I snapped out of my daydream about the doll with the green face. I was instantly alert. I had time to mold myself as close as possible to the shape of the corpse, and then I remained as still as possible. My presence of mind in staying calm and clutching the cadaver a little tighter was testimony to the education in survival Mama had given me.

“Raus, raus”, the Germans bellowed. “Alle Juden heraus. Heraus, schnell, schnell”.

My heart began pounding. I couldn’t see anything. All my nerve endings were on fire. But I remembered Mama’s parting words: “No matter what you hear, do not move until I return”.

My body went rigid. I heard shooting and screaming as patients were hauled from beds, jarring their emaciated frames as they fell to the floor. I heard the fear in their voices as guttural German commands zapped like machine pistols around the infirmary. Leather gloves smacked skin and bone. A woman cried in pain. There was a shot, quickly followed by another.

Now it was my turn. A soldier approached my bed. He moved slowly and deliberately. Gravel trapped in the soles of his jackboots ground on the floorboards as he drew closer. He was breathing heavily. I kept my breaths as shallow as possible so the blanket wouldn’t move. I breathed toward the ground. And then I held my breath for as long as I could. The soldier seemed to take an age assuring himself my bedmate was dead. Eventually, he moved on. I fought hard not to gasp as I exhaled. I listened as soldiers went from room to room, dragging patients from beds onto the floor. They were shooting people in the building and outside. The screaming and the shooting camouflaged the sounds of my breathing. I did not budge an inch.

Then it went quiet. I tried to work out whether the Germans had left the infirmary. I wanted to rip off the blanket and look. But I didn’t dare move. Mama had told me to stay put. I trusted Mama. I lay there waiting and listening. Time had no meaning. I had no way of telling how long I lay there.

Then I smelled smoke. At first, it was bearable. But within minutes the smoke filled my lungs and started to crush them. I struggled to breathe. Yet still I hugged the cold corpse and stayed beneath the blanket. I refused to cough. I could have choked or burned to death. I was following Mama’s instructions to the letter. The smoke intensified. I was finding it harder to breathe. I was desperate for fresh air but still resisted the urge to cough. Suddenly, the blanket was tugged from the bed.

“Quick, we’ve got to get out of here. They’ve set the building on fire”.

She sat me up.

“They’ve gone, Tola. They’ve gone”.

It was Mama. She’d kept her promise. Mama had come back. She, too, had been clutching a corpse and pretending to be dead.

There was astonishment in Mama’s voice and a sense of joy that I had never heard before.

“Where are your shoes?” she asked.

The white lace-up shoes I had worn since the previous summer had vanished. “We’ll have to leave without them. We have to go. We don’t have much time”.

I scanned the barrack. All around me, women were climbing out of beds. The half dead were pushing cadavers out of the way. They fell to the ground with a soft thud. It seemed as though corpses were flying off the beds. Floorboards cantilevered into the air as coughing, skeletal figures in rags pried themselves out of hiding places and shook off dust and dirt. It looked like the dead were coming back to life.

I grasped Mama’s hand and walked barefoot out of the burning infirmary and into the snow. Scores of buildings were on fire. Birkenau truly was an inferno. Fresh corpses littered the frozen ground. These were the people I’d heard being executed outside. They had been cut down because they were physically incapable of joining what would be later termed the Death March. That could so easily have been Mama and me.

There were no SS, no SD, no Nazis of any description to be seen. They had all vanished. Our astonishment was shared by other surviving inmates of Birkenau, as the realization dawned that the guards had abandoned their posts and fled. As the crowd ventured toward the railway tracks that had brought us all to Birkenau, I could see silhouettes in the gathering dusk, across the flat terrain more than a mile away, beyond the Gate of Death. The last group of prisoners to leave under guard numbered around 350 children, women and men. I have no idea what happened to them. Perhaps they suffered a similar fate to those on the Death March, who were murdered on the way or died from starvation and exposure.

I was finally free to cry. But I didn’t. I was too hungry. More than anything, I was craving food.

Now free to roam, the prisoners broke into storerooms and found enough rations to feed an army. Word rapidly spread that there was food aplenty. Collective madness descended as people sought to alleviate their hunger pains. Using whatever implements they could find, they forced open cans of processed meats and other delicacies.

That night, Birkenau glowed every shade of red. Flames flickered in barrack blocks torched by the Germans. Some had been reduced to cinders. Abandoned prisoners in thin rags clustered around bonfires, warming their bones and trying to grasp the concept of freedom. For the first time in six years, flames meant life, not extinction. Searchlights no longer beamed from watchtowers. And although there was no power in the electric fences — electricity and water supplies had been knocked out during a recent Allied bombing raid — most prisoners stayed inside.

Mama and I wandered back to her barrack block and clambered into a bunk together. For the first time in almost five months, I snuggled up to her as tightly as I could possibly get. Her body had changed. There was much less of her than there used to be. But she still had the scent of my mama.

Thankfully, that night no other women shared our bunk. I descended into the most secure, tranquil sleep I had enjoyed in ages. I even slept through a huge explosion in the middle of the night when an SS demolition squad blew up Crematorium V. It was the last military action by the Germans in Birkenau.

For me and Mama, the war was over. Now new battles began. We had to fight the complications of peace. And our demons.