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

Chapter One. Running for our Lives

I didn’t know what to do. None of the other children in my barrack knew what to do. The noise outside was horrifying. I had never heard anything like it before. So much shooting. Volleys and single shots. A pistol and a rifle made different sounds. I’d seen and heard both in action up close. Rifles cracked and pistols popped. The result was the same. People fell down and bled. Sometimes they cried out. Sometimes it happened too fast for them to make a sound. Like when they were popped in the back of the head or neck. Other times, they just rattled and rasped and gurgled. That was the worst. The gurgling. My ears hated it. I wanted the gurgling to stop. For them and for me.

Somewhere outside the barrack, there were cracks and pops and rat-a-tata, rat-a-tata-tata. The fast sounds were machine guns. I’d seen them in action as well. I knew the damage they caused. And they terrified me.

Glass rattled in the window frames that ran the length of each wall, about ten to fifteen feet above my head in the eaves. Normally, the glass shook from the wind. This was different. It was like a storm without lightning. What sounded like thunder rumbled in the distance. Although the wooden walls muffled the din outside, it seemed as if all the people in all the barracks were moaning or screaming at once. All the dogs in the camp were growling and barking with more malice than usual. Those dogs. Those fearsome, wicked dogs.

I could hear the German guards yelling at the tops of their voices. I despised their guttural language. I was gripped with fear whenever the Germans opened their mouths.

I never heard German spoken softly. It was always harsh, alien and, more often than not, accompanied by violence. Formed in the back of their throats, so many words burst forth, snarling and spitting and hissing. Like the high-voltage barbed-wire fence that kept us caged in and sometimes electrocuted any of us who had managed to die on our own terms, not in a manner dictated by the Nazis. Many prisoners were shot before they reached the wire.

The German voices seemed angrier than usual. Was this what the end of the world sounded like? The war was closer than it had ever been. For once, a war with soldiers fighting each other. Not the war that I had witnessed, where well-fed brutes in gray and black uniforms trampled starving women and the elderly to the ground and then shot them in the back or in the head. Where children were dispatched to gas chambers and flew out of chimneys in tiny, charred flakes.

I couldn’t tell what lay behind the tension seeping through the timber-planked walls. I glanced up at the long windows. Viewed from an acute angle, through the slits of glass above, the sky seemed strange. Of course, it was gloomy because it was deep winter. But it seemed darker than it should have been. Was that smoke in the air? Were those particles dropping to the ground? They were not the usual ones. These seemed bigger. Was there fire outside? Were flames getting closer? All it would take was one spark and our barrack would be a funeral pyre. I had knots in my empty stomach. I felt more trapped than ever.

I did what I habitually did when I needed solace. I climbed onto the wall of red bricks that ran the length of the barrack. The bricks were about two feet above the ground. They acted as a divider between rows of three-decker bunks on either side and absorbed heat from an oven in the center of the room. Although the fire was dying out, there was a little warmth still in the bricks. I sat on my haunches, wiggling my toes on them to extract the maximum amount of comfort.

There were so many children in my block, I couldn’t count them. Forty, fifty, sixty, maybe. The oldest were nearly teenagers. I was one of the youngest and smallest. We all had smudged, dirty faces and sunken eyes, ringed black from sleeplessness and starvation. We were mostly clad in rags that hung from our bones. Some of the children wore striped uniforms.

None of us knew what was going on. There hadn’t been the morning Appell—roll call. The numbers on my left forearm suddenly felt itchy. For the first time since they were carved into my flesh, they had been ignored. A-27633. The identity imposed on me by the Nazis. I hadn’t heard it being called out. Our routine had been broken. Something strange was definitely taking place.

We hadn’t been fed and were ravenous. We should have lined up for a crust of dry bread and a bowl of lukewarm gruel containing, if we were lucky, traces of indeterminate vegetables. Hunger pangs punched us all in the gut.

How long had we been left like this? I had no means of measuring time, apart from watching daylight lifting the shadows inside the barrack and then watching them return. It couldn’t be long before the sun, wherever that was, would sink beneath the level of the windows, and we’d soon be in total darkness again.

Coughing, sniffing and whimpering rippled around the bunks. Despite the arctic temperature, the block reeked of urine-soaked blankets and of feces from overflowing bedpans. Some children were mewling or trying to suppress their tears. Crying was contagious. It made us all miserable. Once you started, you felt even sadder than usual. You began thinking about how dreadful life was and then you couldn’t stop. I didn’t succumb. I never cried. Although I felt like sobbing, I set my jaw and rose above it.

Mama taught me never to cry, no matter how frail or scared I felt. For someone so young, I’m proud to say, I had a strong will.

“Where has the Blokälteste gone?”

“I haven’t seen her today”.

“I haven’t seen her since yesterday”.

“She’s not here. Let’s go outside”.

“No, we mustn’t go outside”.

“If she catches us, she’ll beat us, and she’ll report us to the Germans”.

The Blokälteste was the woman in charge, or block elder, who carried out the Germans’ orders. Like us, she was Jewish. The Germans rewarded her with extra food and a space of her own. She had quite an appetite. I thought she was sturdy. But then, to a child, everyone was big. In return for carrying out the Nazis’ dirty work, the block elder could stretch out and sleep in peace without someone else stealing the blanket or jabbing her in the back with their knees or elbows.

Although the block elder used fear to control us, her presence provided a sense of Ordnung muss sein[1], as the Germans never tired of saying. I don’t mind admitting I was afraid of the woman. But without her, there was chaos. And, worst of all, no food.

Normally, all the barracks were locked and bolted. The block elder must have been in such a hurry to leave, whenever that was, that she hadn’t bothered to count us or secure the door. I was tempted to sneak outside, but the noise was too scary. None of the children dared cross the threshold. It was as if a force field was restraining us. We had been conditioned to obey commands and couldn’t move without them.

Suddenly, the door opened. We all jumped.

In walked a woman I didn’t recognize. She looked terrible. Her features were distorted by malnutrition. Her face was little more than a skull covered in parchment-thin skin. Her eyes had retreated into their sockets. But her body was puffy. Starvation did that to a person. It made their flesh swell. Tufts of dark brown hair sprouted from beneath a piece of cloth fashioned into a scarf in a futile attempt to seal in some warmth.

The woman looked at me.

“Tola!” she exclaimed. “There you are, my child!”

Relief swept over her face. Her taut cheek muscles relaxed, and her eyes sparkled. The voice was weak but familiar. So were her sad green eyes, as well as her faint smile. I stood up on the bricks, confused. She looked more like a scarecrow than a human being. She sounded like my mama, but was it really her?

And what was she doing in my barrack? She was supposed to be in the women’s section. I had been taken away from her five months earlier in the high summer after I fell sick. I had heard her voice close by when we walked to the gas chamber and when we walked back again. But I hadn’t seen her. In fact, I hadn’t seen Mama’s face for so long that I had forgotten what she looked like. I had become accustomed to not having a mother or father. I had forgotten that I had anybody on this earth. I thought I was all alone. But now maybe I wasn’t? I was confused. The woman noticed my hesitation.

“Tola, it’s me. Mama”, she said, with a bigger smile.

I was incredulous.

Is that really my mama? I wondered.

I jumped down from the bricks and ran up to her. I felt a smile spread across my face from ear to ear. It was the first real happiness I had experienced in months.

She crouched down, held my face and looked me straight in the eyes. Then she wrapped her arms around me and kissed me. I hugged her back as tightly as I could. She smelled like my mama. It truly was my beautiful mama. Prisoner A-27791. My mama.

“Listen to me, Tola. They are rounding up people to walk to Germany. All the way to Germany, hundreds of miles away”, said Mama. “Look at me. I’m going to be shot. I’m going to die. I can’t walk. Look at my feet”. She pointed downward.

Mama wasn’t wearing shoes. Her feet were swathed in rags. They looked as though they had been bandaged in a hurry. The undersides were saturated, and moisture was leeching upward. Chafed red from the cold, Mama’s calves and ankles were swollen, a sure sign of starvation. The camp was full of scarecrows and skeletons.

“Maybe you will make it. You might survive the march. But this is not a world for children. I don’t want you to survive alone. So let’s try to hide. There’s a chance we can survive together. And if we die, we’ll die here together. Will you come with me?”

“Yes, Mama. Yes, I will”, I replied.

Ever since I was born, I had inhabited a world where being Jewish meant you were destined to die. It was perfectly normal to be asked to die. All Jewish children died. And I always did what Mama said. Mama always told me the truth. I trusted Mama. I didn’t trust anyone else. Mama told me the truth because knowing the truth could save my life. That’s what Mama said. And she repeated it. In the ghetto. In the labor camp. In the cattle car. And before we were separated in the concentration camp.

Although she had spoken of dying together, Mama lifted my spirits by saying we had a chance of living, if I followed her instructions. As always, she was being truthful. Other parents might have tried to hide the truth in such circumstances. Not my mama. She believed that information was power, and it could save my life.

For months I had been alone. There had been no one to protect me. I always thought I would die alone. Whatever death was. But now I had someone who cared for me. I would do whatever Mama asked. A wave of relief washed over me as I realized I was no longer alone. Mama said nothing. She took me by the hand and led me out of the barrack block.

We were hit by the smell of burning. The sound of wood crackling, spitting. Was it a huge log fire? More than anything, I was desperate for any kind of warmth to unfreeze my body. But then Mama squeezed my hand and I forgot about the cold. The sky was full of smoke. The fire was close. It was loud and made me nervous. Woodsmoke mixed with other smells. Something oily. The black stuff they put on roads and roofs. And there was something else. The rotten smell of garbage being burned. Tons of it.

Mama’s head jerked left and right and back again as she looked for potential trouble. Hand in hand, we walked briskly through the snow in silence. She seemed to know where she was going. I knew I had to be as quiet as possible. Making a noise could get you killed. Mama didn’t need to say anything. Her urgency transmitted itself to me. I was electrified by the adventure. My hunger pangs vanished. Mama’s love made me feel safe and secure. The rags on her feet squelched with every step. I didn’t register the snow seeping through my thin white lace-up shoes straight to my sockless feet. I only felt the warmth of Mama’s hand and her love coursing through my very being.

I couldn’t quite believe what my eyes were seeing. For the first time ever, there were no SS troops or their German stooges blocking our path. Briefly, as we crossed gaps between the buildings, I caught glimpses in the distance of soldiers in trench coats, corralling prisoners and preparing for the march to Germany. The Nazis seemed to be cursing and screaming orders.

I was almost exactly a year older than the war. I had never known freedom. My survival depended on my ability to judge the mood of my captors. Despite their brutality, I knew that ordinarily the Germans were terrifyingly composed. This morning they had been verging on hysteria and fired point-blank at wretches who were too slow to obey.

I didn’t wince in the face of murder. I had witnessed violent death for as long as I could recall. I had learned to suppress my emotions. What scared me were the German shepherds and their savage, frothing jaws. Straining at the leashes of their handlers, those awful dogs were bigger than I was. When Mama and I had arrived at the platform and got down from the cattle car back in the summer, I had seen the dogs chasing people along the rail tracks in the direction of the chimneys and the smoke.

I never looked in the eyes of the SS, the Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s elite military corps, which contained the Third Reich’s most fanatical Nazis. I had managed to avoid their fury for more than half a year. Mama had taught me well: “Whenever you pass a German, always look down or look away. Never catch their gaze. Never ever look them in the eye. They hate it. It makes them angry, and they’ll lash out. They might even kill you”.

I saw their black riding breeches, the smart, highly polished boots — those SS jackboots that came up to the knees. I saw their swagger sticks, the daggers hanging from their belts, their death’s-head symbols and trigger fingers. I looked as far as their shoulders and their epaulets. I might have seen an Iron Cross on a chest or around a neck. I thought this was the uniform worn by all the non-Jewish men on earth. But I never looked at their faces. I had, however, stared into the eyes of the dogs. And they stared right back. They slobbered and drooled and snarled and growled and flexed the sinews in their necks. The dogs wanted to sink their teeth into my flesh and rip me to pieces.

Mama gripped my hand and made sure we stayed close to the low wooden buildings. We were on the northwestern side of the extermination camp, better known as Birkenau, which was formally part of the Auschwitz complex. On our right, we had cover from buildings that comprised the male infirmary. On our left were row upon row of barrack blocks separating them from the camp’s entrance gate — the Gate of Death — where prisoners were gathering for the exodus. As stealthily as she could, Mama shepherded me southward. We headed toward the railway line that had brought us to Birkenau six months earlier.

Truck engines throbbed in the distance, some setting off, others idling. Commands shouted into bullhorns competed for attention. Once or twice, Mama pulled me into the lee of a building, and we crouched as low as we could get. We were desperate to be invisible. Although we were some distance from the watchtowers on the perimeter fence, I knew that if the guards spotted us, they would open fire or alert soldiers below. And if we were caught, we would be forced into the line. Surrounded by the men and their dogs. Unable to escape the march that Mama said would kill her.

Where possible, we ducked into shadows and rode our luck. The density of the barracks helped to shield us. But more than anything, we were helped by the Germans’ panic. The Russians were coming. They weren’t far away. The vengeful Russians. The Nazis were in such a hurry to flee that they didn’t notice that prisoners A-27791 and A-27633, the girl with the white lace-up shoes, were making a break for it.

An adrenaline rush heightened my senses. My ears and nose told me almost as much as my eyes. What was missing was the stench that had hung over the camp ever since we had arrived. That sickening, lingering aroma. The sulfurous, bad-egg shtinkt—the stink of burning hair blended with roasting flesh that flew up the nostrils, fastening itself, limpet-like, to nerve endings and memory alike. For once, I didn’t have that nauseating taste in my mouth.

Today was much noisier than yesterday when I had been outside by myself for a few minutes. I had been intrigued by the silence from the other children’s hut, two buildings down the row from ours. It was eerily quiet, and so I’d peeked inside, despite the risk of upsetting the block elder in charge. But I wasn’t challenged. The building was empty. The children had simply disappeared.

As I clung to Mama’s hand, I found I couldn’t ignore the cold anymore. I wished I had some mittens. I had seen a pair of gloves attached to a string by a girl’s coat in the barrack next door. My fingers were freezing. I really needed some respite from the cold. Scavenging was the norm. It was an essential part of survival in this place. It wasn’t the same as stealing. But I hadn’t taken the gloves. As soon as I could speak and understand, I had been taught to be honest and kind. The girl to whom they belonged might need them if she returned; although I knew in my heart she wasn’t coming back. Still, I didn’t want to benefit from her death. And so I’d left the gloves hanging there.

After ten minutes or so, we reached the building Mama had been seeking. She pulled me inside. The block was a women’s infirmary, although there was precious little medical equipment to be seen. It was a staging post between life and death. Scores of beds were occupied by the dead and the dying. In their haste, the Germans had abandoned them. The room reverberated with moans and women sobbing.

Mama went from bed to bed, shaking the outlines of the blankets. Sometimes a woman twitched. Where there were signs of life, Mama moved on. I couldn’t work out what she was doing, and I was too scared to ask. Mama checked every bed, putting the back of her hand on corpses.

“That one is cold”, Mama said, resuming her search.

And I finally understood what Mama was seeking. She reached beneath a blanket and touched another body. This one didn’t move. But it was still warm. The woman had only just expired.

“Tola, listen to me”, said Mama. “You have to do everything I tell you. If you don’t, there’s a risk you’ll be killed”.

“Yes, Mama”.

“Take off your shoes and climb into bed”.

I unlaced the white lace-ups as quickly as I could. The bed was higher than the bunk I normally slept in, and I needed help to get onto the frame.

“Get under this blanket, cover yourself and lie down facing the floor. You’re going to lie next to the woman and I’m going to cover you so that nothing is visible. Not your feet or your head. You must lie here very quietly. Not a word out of you. No matter what happens, no matter what you hear. Do you hear me? I will be the only person who’s going to uncover you. Nobody else”.

She leaned in closer.

“You must breathe toward the ground. You stay there and do not move. Do not move. You stay there until I come to get you. Do you understand?”

“All right, Mama”.

Mama’s word was the law. Ignoring her could be fatal.

My bed companion must have been about twenty years old. She was not unlike hundreds of corpses I had seen. Bags of contorted, jagged bones held together by skin. Skulls with mouths locked in silent screams. The dead woman was pretty. And definitely younger than Mama.

“Put your arms around her”, Mama commanded.

She maneuvered my head beneath the corpse’s armpit and entwined our legs. Then she pulled up the blanket so the dead woman’s head was just showing.

“I’m leaving now, Tola”, she said. “I have to go and hide as well. But I won’t be far away. I will come back and get you. No matter what you hear, do not move until I return. Under any circumstances. Do you promise?”

“Yes, Mama. I promise”.

I did exactly as Mama said. I barely moved. I wasn’t afraid of the corpse. Why should I be? The pretty woman was dead and couldn’t hurt me. She was a friend who might save my life. My protector. So I followed Mama’s instructions, hugged the dead woman and waited.

At first, the corpse was warm. I was grateful for that. Feeling returned to my feet after tramping through the snow. But slowly, slowly, the corpse became cooler. I lay there listening, taking shallow breaths and waiting. I wondered why the pretty woman had died. I presumed it was hunger.

I was extraordinarily calm. A strange kind of peace came over me. I relaxed and began to visualize a doll with a green face. Not a complete doll. Just a head. I’d seen it sticking out of the mud as we ran. I didn’t know whether the head and body had become separated. Or whether the body was still attached to the head beneath the mud. I’d wanted to pick the head up. But we hadn’t had time to stop.

The head had friendly eyes and a kind mouth. I wanted that doll’s head. I didn’t have any toys here in the camp. I didn’t want to play. I didn’t know what playing was. Life was just about surviving. But I wanted the doll’s head to talk to and to keep me company. What pretty eyes she’d had.

My eyes began to feel heavy. I felt safe. Mama was nearby. The adrenaline from our adventure out in the open had subsided.

Then I heard the boots.