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

Chapter Four. Caligula’s Thumb

Just in case we didn’t get the message the first time, it was repeated in Polish and Yiddish. The soldiers were bellowing into bullhorns. They were screaming the commands that every Jew dreaded.

“Alle Juden raus. Alle Juden raus”.

The words were full of venom. The guards knew just how brutally the day was going to play out. They had their orders. No matter how many times they had killed before, they were psyching themselves up to spill even more blood. They were creating confusion and panic, breaking down our resistance to make it easier to herd us wherever they wanted.

Mama had time to put a coat on me to protect me against the cold. We stumbled into the courtyard, through an archway and into the street. We were surrounded by soldiers in different-colored uniforms shouting orders at us from all directions. Their eyes bulged from hatred and the exertion of yelling. Some leaned backward, pulling on the choke collars of their attack dogs to rein them in. The dogs breathed in our collective fear. Their slobbering, slavering jaws wanted to know what terror tasted like. They were itching to feast on it. Their claws drummed the cobblestones in frustration. Those awful, terrible dogs. Snarling, growling, baying. Merciless.

Down on the cobbles of Krzyżowa Street, I felt smaller than ever before. The soldiers all towered above me. Through half-closed eyes, I scanned our tormentors. I tried not to twist my head, to avoid attracting attention from the wall of helmeted skulls, baring their teeth, like a pack of wolves, contorting their faces as they spat out their bile.

I didn’t know what kind of weapons the guards were carrying. I only knew that they looked more dangerous than the rifles that cracked and the pistols that popped. All the while, the soldiers swiveled their guns from side to side in a sweeping motion. I was afraid they would open fire at any moment. It felt as though the guns kept coming back to point directly at me. It was terrifying for a four-year-old. And now, having reread my father’s contribution to the Yizkor book, I understand what I was witnessing: “All of the Jews of the ghetto were ousted from their houses into the courtyards, where the Jewish police, and Gestapo, Ukrainians and Blue Police armed with submachine guns as if going into battle, were waiting for them”.

I now know that the Blue Police my father refers to were Polish police officers, or “murderers in uniform”, as they’ve been labeled by historian Jan Grabowski, a professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Ottawa.

The only officers who didn’t have guns were the Jewish policemen, like my father. “From the houses more and more Jews arrived, guarded by Jewish policemen. These Jews had been given severe warnings by Commandant Pichler”, he writes.

Pichler’s Reich police unit comprised former soldiers who were members of the Nazi party and affiliated to the SS. They were as brutal as any fanatical Jew-hating storm trooper.

What seems obvious to me from my father’s testimony is that the Jewish policemen were told by Pichler there would be dire consequences if they disobeyed orders to help round up their fellow Jews. Because then my father writes: “And therefore, a Jewish policeman had to escort his own family, lest they be killed on the spot”. It must have been so heartbreaking for him.

Holding their weapons at waist height, the soldiers aimed at us and ordered us to line up. They were organizing us as if we were about to march in a parade. We had to stand still and not move a muscle. I kept quiet and was conscious of the bustle of ill-shod shuffling feet, nervous snatched conversations and all of us breathing heavily with fear and exertion. Suddenly, I was shaken by the jarring rasp of guns being fired.

“Shots rang out nearby, the first victims fell and there were many wounded, crying for help”, writes my father. He goes on:

We filed down Krzyżowa Street and turned right when we reached the bottom. Other children were whimpering. I knew better than to cry. Mama had taught me well. Some were carried in their parents’ arms and had a clear view of the carnage. I was surrounded by people taller than me, but through the gaps, I saw corpses on the ground. Blood trickling along the flagstones. I heard people wailing as they passed bodies they recognized. My father picks up the story:

I trembled as I walked with my mother, gripping her hand. I was always terrified of being separated from Mama. She was my protector in chief. I can’t precisely remember where my father was. But now I realize he must have been close by, on the outside of the marching column. I wished he was next to me, holding my other hand. The experience was terrifying for Mama and me. It must also have been excruciating for my father. Being separated from us, knowing that we were being subjected to the vicious whims of the Gestapo, that he could do nothing. He was there, hating being forced to submit to the Germans, but doing his utmost to try to save us while, at the same time, bearing witness. I can tell from the language he uses that he must have been crying the whole time he was writing.

The hospital courtyard was called the Umschlagplatz—literally a place for the transhipment or transfer of cargo. A sinister euphemism if ever there was one. From here, hundreds of Jews were marched to the railway station. I don’t remember seeing the hospital. But I distinctly remember marching to a churchyard. Here, again, is my father’s eyewitness account: “Not far from the hospital courtyard, in Wiecznsość Street, where the small church was situated, a painstaking inspection took place, as the Gestapo soldiers again and again perused the documents permitting the Jews to remain in the ghetto and work for the Germans”.

This was another part of the dreaded selection process. By now, my father was with us, to make sure, as he wrote earlier, we weren’t killed on the spot. We lined up by the church, behind a brick wall that was taller than me, waiting to go through a black wrought-iron double gate. But first we had to go through Selektion.

How ironic that the Godless Gestapo chose a church as the location to deliver judgment. St. Wenceslas was a small, rustic, whitewashed wooden Catholic church, with a steep, sloping roof and an onion-shaped steeple above the nave where the altar would have been. On either side of the church lay symmetrical paths.

Barring the way was a uniformed officer, sitting at a table, checking people’s papers to determine whether they were qualified to work and worth preserving. For the time being. My father was in the lead. Mama stood behind him, clutching me in her arms. I wrapped mine around her neck. I distinctly recall the electric tension in the air as we got closer to the selection officer. Mama was terrified. Her chest was heaving, and I could feel her heart thumping. Two other children were clinging to the back of her skirt. They were my cousins. One was four years old, the same as me. The other was five. They were the daughters of my aunt, my mother’s sister. She motioned them to join Mama just before she was led off by the Gestapo. As she was being hustled away, my aunt begged Mama to save her girls. We were all standing behind another family.

“Papiere!” the Nazi snarled.

The man in the queue in front of us handed over his documents. The officer leafed through a cluster of identity cards imprinted with an array of Third Reich stamps and said, “You only have documents for four. Why do I see six people?”

“I’m taking my younger sister and her son”, the man replied. “They’re strong and they’re going to work”.

“But you only have papers for four people, so why are you taking six?” the officer persisted.

The man became distressed and tried to appeal to the gatekeeper’s sense of reason. There was desperation in his voice as he pleaded.

“But, Herr Oberleutnant, you’re looking for people to work, aren’t you? Please, sir, let us through. Bitte”.

“Do you take me for a fool? Lügner!”[3] growled the Gestapo officer. He raised his thumb and snarled as he rotated his wrist to the left.

“Links”[4].

Left meant death. Rechts, or right, meant life.

The man gasped as he registered the enormity of the sentence that had just been passed. But he composed himself and led the five members of his family through the gate and took the path to his left. I watched them walk beside the church, along the stone path, beyond a small clump of trees. There, they sat on the ground, huddled together in the cold along with the rest of the Damned — Jews heading toward the cattle car train and, as we now know, onward to the Treblinka extermination camp.

The Gestapo officer watched the family over his shoulder, then he peered up at us. From my vantage point in Mama’s arms, I looked down on the uniformed man, swaddled in his thick trench coat, comfortable and warm, while we all shivered from fear and the chill in the Polish air. I couldn’t see his eyes. But as he tilted his head to look at my parents, I had a perfect view of the insignia on his hat. What a strange-looking bird, I thought. I had seen it before, but never so close. There was a grinning death’s-head silver skull and crossbones next to the shiny peak of his cap, above which was the Reichsadler, Nazi Germany’s Imperial Eagle.

Hitler had appropriated the heraldic emblem of the Ancient Roman Empire. His territorial conquests mirrored many Roman ones. But he garnished his Imperial Eagle with a swastika, debasing Rome’s civilizing legacy.

The Gestapo officer sitting at the table before us was a modern Barbarian, immaculate in Nazi tailoring. He emulated Caligula, the despotic first-century Roman emperor who used his thumb to dictate the fates of defeated gladiators. How many other uniformed Caligulas were sitting at tables outside shtetls and ghettos across Central Europe, deciding with the wave of a finger who could walk right through the gate of life to become a slave laborer and who would trudge left toward cattle cars transporting them directly to the inferno?

“Wie viele?”[5]

My father didn’t say anything. Mama also hesitated for a moment, then she drew a breath. “Three”, she said, as she reached behind her and pushed her nieces away.

“Rechts”, replied the officer, with a twist of his thumb.

My father led the way. Mama put me down.

“Take Papa’s hand”, she said.

I did as Mama told me and immediately felt a sense of security from the big, warm hand wrapped around mine. We walked through the iron gate and took the path to the officer’s right, toward a small cemetery. Together, Mama, Papa and I walked into the churchyard.

I looked back and saw my two little cousins standing alone, until someone took them away. They were never seen again.

The Gestapo officer hadn’t even glanced at my parents’ papers. It was an abominable illustration of how we could only make bad or worse choices. How could my mother possibly have known that the Nazi wouldn’t examine the documents? Why hadn’t he checked them? Normally, they were so fastidious.

Mama had had to make a lightning-fast decision. She’d had no time to consider all the options. Every calculation was based on instinct. Above all else, from the start of the Holocaust through to the very end, Mama’s preeminent consideration was my survival. As was my father’s. Thanks to them, I was one of the handful of Jewish children from Tomaszów Mazowiecki to survive the Shoah.

At the age of four, I had no understanding of the significance of the exchange between my parents and the Nazi. Years later, however, when I was old enough to understand, Mama broke down in tears and told me about the Gestapo officer sitting at that table.

“He didn’t even open the papers. I killed my sister’s children. I forced them to let go of me. How can I forget their faces? I killed them”.

It was a pivotal moment in Mama’s life from which she never recovered. Until her dying day, she was tormented by hypothetical what-if questions. What if she had said we were a group of five instead of three? Would they still be alive? But on that day, there was no time to dwell on the death sentence imposed on my cousins. Her immediate priority was to ensure that we lived through the next few dangerous hours.