The Road to Liberation: Trials and Triumphs of WWII

by Marion Kummerow

  But as awful as it was to work in the ammunition factory, it did come with some perks as she found out during dinner time: every woman received a glass of milk together with her thin soup. It was the first time since her capture that she’d seen or tasted milk. Real milk. Fond memories of home flooded her brain and made her smile.

  “Why do they give us milk, when they haven’t done so in any of the other camps before?” she asked one of the women who’d been there for quite a while.

  “Not out of the goodness of their hearts, obviously,” the thin and bald woman said. “It works against the acid taste in our mouths and supposedly offsets the poisoning effects of the vapors we inhale all day.”

  The days passed, and while the work didn’t get any easier, it was mindless work. Performing the same exercise over and over, for twelve hours each day, was boring and tedious, but Rachel became more or less accustomed to the grind and, as the other woman had promised, the coughing diminished.

  9

  It was so hot. Mindel’s tongue was glued to the roof of her mouth, but of course nobody cared. She wouldn’t get a single drop of water before this horrible never-ending roll call was over, and God only knew how long that would take. Stupid SS!

  She did not understand why it took that long to count the prisoners. The SS guards were adults, so why couldn’t they count the prisoners without having to start over and over again the way she had to do when counting beyond three? It didn’t make sense, and doubts about the SS’s intelligence crept into her mind.

  Next time she saw Hanneli, she would ask the older girl about it. By now she knew Hanneli was fifteen. Grown-up enough to know about such things, but not yet too old to be untrustworthy.

  The sun steadily rose higher into the sky, scorching everyone on the ground. Laszlo had said it was August. She remembered that back home August was when the entire village was out in the fields, harvesting the crops. But here in the camp, they were only standing around, waiting. And the horrid SS guards wouldn’t even let them wait in the shadow of the huts, which would have been so much more comfortable. The SS really had no idea about how life was supposed to be.

  An old woman standing nearby collapsed and, despite the guard’s outrage, whipping and beating her, she wouldn’t get up. Mindel watched the spectacle with wide-open eyes, voicelessly murmuring, “Don’t be stupid, get up!”

  But nothing happened. The woman lay motionless on the ground and after a while, the guard stopped beating her and moved on. Mindel shook her head. It wasn’t the first time she’d witnessed such an event. According to Hanneli, the people who stopped moving were dead.

  Mother had always told Mindel that after a person’s death, the soul lived on and went to God’s side. So, she stood there watching closely what would happen next. She really wanted to see the soul and how it flew up into the sky. But nothing happened, and the corpse lay there like a stick. Nothing, not even a shadow, or a feather, rose up to the sky.

  Mindel was disappointed. Somehow what her mother had taught her didn’t seem to happen in real life. Could her mother have been wrong, or had she lied to Mindel? The enormity of her suspicion caused her heart to tense painfully.

  That was another topic she would have to ask Hanneli about. Once she’d tried to ask Laszlo about the souls flying to heaven, but he’d only groaned and told her that she was a baby if she still believed that.

  It was a disappointment, indeed. If her soul didn’t fly up to the clouds after she died, then she wouldn’t be able to frolic with the unicorns and neither could she look down from above to find her sister.

  Her thirst was getting worse and standing in the scorching sun, she began to feel light-headed, but since she wasn’t certain anymore about the whole flying in the skies thing, she decided it was better not to die and forced herself to stay standing upright.

  The despicable roll call continued, another woman stumbled, falling into the person to her right and causing quite a ruckus. Mindel watched as the other woman tried to stand up straight again, but an SS guard was already by her side, hitting her with his truncheon.

  She cried out and fell forward, and Mindel watched in horror as the guards released the snarling dogs. The scream was stuck in her throat, but for the life of her she couldn’t look away as the horrible spectacle unfolded in front of her.

  She loved all animals, and dogs especially. Her parents had had a watchdog at the farm, good old Rex. He dutifully barked at strangers and once he’d bitten a burglar in the calf and kept him in place until Father came running along.

  But the camp dogs were not friendly or lovable.

  Most of them were German shepherds and kept on very tight leashes. They barked without reason, lunged at the prisoners, and even bit them from time to time. Today, though, what Mindel watched was something she would never be able to forget, something her father had assured her no dog was capable of doing.

  The guards released the dogs, and all three of them descended upon the woman who was on her hands and knees, struggling to get back on her feet. The dogs jumped on her, and Mindel finally closed her eyes, and put her hands on her ears, but she still heard the snapping jaws, the ripping of flesh and above all the bone-chilling screams.

  Then it was silent again.

  Mindel peeked through her lids and gasped. There was blood everywhere. One of the guards shook his head and joked that the dogs were going to need a bath. Since nobody else moved or said a word, she removed the hands from her ears, stood a bit taller and looked straight ahead into the distance. Surely, in the mauled body there wasn’t a soul left that could move into the sky.

  When the roll call finally ended, many more prisoners had collapsed to the ground. The SS sent every person on a work detail away, leaving only the old, sick and young waiting to be dismissed.

  One of the guards looked at Hanneli, who was standing several rows away from Mindel. “You! Come here!”

  The girl obeyed and he yelled at her: “Take that filthy group of brats and see to it that they bring the living prisoners back to the barracks. Leave the dead for the Sonderkommando.”

  Hanneli nodded and called the children around her to explain, “We have to bring everyone who’s still alive back to the barracks.”

  “But how do we know?” a girl about Mindel’s age asked.

  “If they move or breathe when you poke them, drag them back to their hut. You’d best work in groups of four, because the people can be rather heavy,” Hanneli said.

  That made sense. Mindel admired the older girl for her grasp of the situation. She hadn’t even thought about the weight of an injured person.

  “What about if they don’t move or breathe?” Mindel asked.

  “Then they’re dead and later the Sonderkommando will take them to the crematorium. And don’t forget to count how many people you return to the huts and how many are dead. The SS will want to know.” Hanneli assigned the children into groups, always two older ones with two younger ones.

  Ruth and Fabian were in Mindel’s group along with an older girl she’d seen before but didn’t actually know.

  “I’m Laura,” the girl said and then beckoned them forward. “Let’s get going.”

  They approached the first person lying on the ground. This one was obviously dead, her eyes wide open, as was her mouth. She was so gaunt she looked very scary and Mindel took a wide berth around her body.

  “Can you count?” Laura asked her.

  “To five.” Mindel put up the fingers of one hand.

  “Good, you count the sticks and Fabian the living.”

  Mindel nodded, pressing her lips together at the prospect of her very important task. She moved to the next fallen person, while Laura and Ruth were helping someone up and half-carrying her to the huts. Mindel stooped down and looked at the grayish, emaciated woman, who seemed to be asleep. Not sure how to decide whether the person was alive or not, she remembered Hanneli’s instructions to poke them.

  At first, she did very softly, and when no reaction came,
a bit harder. The woman didn’t move. Was that enough to determine whether a person was actually dead? Mindel had some doubts and looked up at Fabian, who waited a few steps behind.

  “You have to poke harder,” he said.

  It didn’t feel right, but Mindel shoved the woman – hard. She still didn’t move. “I think she’s dead.”

  “We must be sure, because they’ll put her in the oven.”

  Mindel felt all the blood draining from her face. The ovens. No, she certainly wouldn’t want someone to be burned alive. She got up and kicked the woman with all her strength in the midriff. Still no reaction.

  “She really is dead,” Fabian said and backed off to check on the next person.

  “That’s two.” Mindel hadn’t forgotten her task of counting the corpses. By the time Laura and Ruth returned, she’d run out of fingers for counting. “That’s how many we got,” she told Laura and showed two hands, “and then one more.”

  “Eleven?” Laura asked.

  Mindel had no idea, but nodded anyway.

  “And how many living?” Laura turned to Fabian.

  “Only three. Come here, I’ll show you where they are.” He led the small group to the first of the injured and together they managed to get all the people in their assigned rows back to the huts.

  “That was so exhausting,” Mindel complained and only now remembered her horrible thirst. With the excitement of having to count corpses she’d completely forgotten about it, but now it returned with a vengeance and she hoped the tap behind one of the huts where they got water for sweeping the floors would give a few drops.

  She was lucky and with much patience managed to fill her mug with almost two inches of water that she drank greedily. It tasted foul and muddy, but who was she to complain? Then she shuffled across the courtyard to her own hut, her legs too tired to take proper steps. All she wanted was to climb into her bunk and sleep until the much-talked-about Allies would come and rescue her. Not paying attention, she bumped against someone and the next moment, a voice snarled at her. “Filthy brat!”

  She looked up and saw a guard pulling a whip from his belt and swinging it at her. It struck her on the back, and she cried out. Stupefied, she stared at him, until a loud shout snapped her to attention.

  “Run! Mindel! Run!” a boy shouted.

  She didn’t know who’d shouted and didn’t care either, she simply obeyed and her little feet moved her away from the vicious SS man as fast as they could. Panting, she reached her hut, dropped on the first available bunk and lay there face-down. Too exhausted to move, she stayed curled on her side, drifting in and out of sleep, dreaming of her beloved parents, who’d been taken away by the mean mayor Herr Keller, leaving Mindel and her three siblings to fend for themselves.

  That kind girl Lotte had given them food and shelter, but Herr Keller had discovered them again. Tears flowed as she hoped her brothers were still alive and safe. As for Rachel, despite not having seen her since she first arrived in Bergen-Belsen, Mindel clung to the idea that her sister was still somewhere around. She missed her so much. She missed her entire family so much.

  “Mindel, are you alright?” Laszlo interrupted her sleep.

  “Yes. I’m so tired. And my back hurts.”

  “I saw the guard whipping you. Let me have a look.” He pushed up her dress and hissed in a breath. “It’s only a stripe, not even blood. You’re lucky.”

  “Why did he hit me? I bumped into him by accident. I didn’t mean it!” Mindel asked, trying to keep the whine out of her voice.

  “It’s just the way they are. Mean.” Laszlo lay down and she turned and hugged him tight. He truly was her best friend.

  After a while she whispered, “Do you think my sister’s still in one of the other compounds?”

  “Hard to say. Adults have it so much harder than we do. They have to work.”

  “I need to find her.”

  “You tried that, remember?”

  “I asked every single person in the compound. Maybe I can sneak across the fence and ask around there?”

  “Don’t do that. You’ll only get into trouble,” Laszlo said, before they both fell asleep until the grown-ups returned from their work detail and the owner of the bunk shooed them away.

  10

  The Tannenberg camp had a new commandant, even more sadistic than the previous one. He loved interminable roll calls and delighted in making the tired women stand still for hours after they returned from their grueling twelve-hour shifts at the Rheinmetall factory or on road construction.

  Left and right, depleted women collapsed and the vicious guards beat them until they either managed to get back up or died trying. Rachel’s own life was hanging by a thread, because she’d swayed and buckled several times already, but every time she had managed by force of sheer willpower to stagger upright again.

  This night, she was even more tired than usual. The acid taste in her mouth forced her to gag every so often and the stabbing ache in her stomach urged her to lie down and curl into a ball. Instead, she pushed her shoulders back, somehow finding the strength to stand up without locking her knees. That was a mistake many of the women made, thinking it would keep them upright, only it usually rendered them unconscious.

  “Oh no, not die Schwarze,” whispered her neighbor.

  Rachel glanced to her left and inwardly cringed, her cracked hands clutching her skirt. Susanne Hille, called the black, because of her pitch-black hair, was striding down the line of women, an evil sneer on her face. She was the youngest guard, maybe twenty years old, but cruel beyond anything Rachel had ever witnessed before, certainly worse than all of the male guards taken together. Her trademark was to randomly strike the inmates with the wooden baton she always carried in her hand.

  The vicious thing about die Schwarze was that she never targeted the women who’d fallen, but those visibly hanging by a thread, trying to keep upright. Like Rachel today. Her heart stopped beating as the despised guard entered her row. With that sadistic smile on her lips, she walked down, inspecting the women, until she lunged with her truncheon at the second one in the row.

  The high-pitched shriek pierced through marrow and bone, and Rachel involuntarily winced, only to bite the inside of her lip. All the while, Susanne Hille continued her walk, picking new targets every couple of prisoners.

  “Not the selections,” her neighbor once again whispered.

  Rachel again glanced to the side and watched as Susanne Hille began selecting women from the line. They were shoved to the side and would later be marched away. Where to, nobody knew. The one thing Rachel knew was that nobody ever had seen a selected woman again.

  Rumors had it they were returned to the main camp at Bergen-Belsen, but others were not so sure. A group of Jewish women who’d been transported from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen were sure they’d “go through the chimney”.

  Rachel did not believe this. Naturally there was a crematorium at the main camp to burn the corpses, but unlike in Auschwitz – if these women were to be believed – nobody had ever been taken to the showers and gassed in there.

  Still, she’d rather not find out what happened with the unfortunate chosen ones and kept herself as motionless as she could, while her thoughts wandered, pondering what could have made a young and pretty woman like Susanne Hille act so callously toward her fellow human beings. What could make any of the SS guards act the way they did?

  Naturally, she didn’t find an answer to her philosophical musings and shrugged, pulling up instead a picture of Mindel in her mind’s eye. Her sweet little sister. Would she ever see her again? Was she even alive? Probably not.

  But despite knowing better, Rachel clung to the idea that one day she’d hold her in her arms again. One day, when the Nazis had lost the war and the Jews were free again.

  From the information the newcomers brought, there was no doubt that the Nazis were on the losing end, as also evidenced by the Allied planes crisscrossing the sky high above them, with rarely a Luftwaffe craft
seen chasing them.

  11

  The very next morning during breakfast Mindel asked every newcomer if they’d seen her sister. Generally, the women wouldn’t listen or gave a sad smile and said, “There are so many girls named Rachel around, without knowing her last name it’s impossible.”

  If only Mindel could remember…but as much as she tried, nothing came up. Laszlo suggested jogging her memory by tossing out all the last names he and the gang could think off, but nothing. One name sounded as unfamiliar as the next one. The one thing Mindel learned from her renewed efforts to find her sister was that the most likely place where Rachel could be was the Women’s camp.

  “I’ll go and ask there,” Mindel said, but the other children only laughed.

  “It’s impossible to go there, there’s a fence between the two camps,” Laszlo said.

  “Well, unless you have money or goods to bribe the guards,” Ruth added.

  Mindel wanted to cry. She possessed no money or anything else save the clothes she wore and her doll Paula. And she sincerely doubted a guard would be interested in her doll.

  “I don’t know why you’re still worrying about this. Your sister is probably dead by now, anyway.”

  Mindel looked at Ruth and burst into tears.

  Laszlo wrapped an arm around her shoulder and snarled at Ruth, “Why did you say that?”

  Ruth pouted, murmured something and left, while Laszlo hugged Mindel close, trying to comfort her. “Don’t worry. Ruth doesn’t know anything. I’m sure your sister is still alive and we will find her.”

  “You will help me?” She looked at him from behind a veil of tears.