On her way to the assembly place, Rachel examined her orange fingernails, which were slowly growing back in pale pink. It looked quite artistic, as if she’d used orange nail polish and had forgotten to paint a tiny strip. An angry red scar reminded her of the awful burn that had cut short her ordeal in the Tannenberg camp. Taking up her assigned spot in the courtyard, she let her mind wander back to the ammunition factory.
Since she’d returned to the main camp, despite the smaller rations, she felt better and the constant coughing had subsided. But the best thing was that after several days she’d lost the acid taste in her mouth. She wondered how many of her former workmates were still alive, and then determined she shouldn’t be thinking about those types of things. It was too depressing.
Right now, she wanted to concentrate her entire energy on finding Mindel. She squared her shoulders, standing straight with the newfound hope and couldn’t help the tiniest trace of a smile to appear on her face.
“You, over there,” the guard barked at her.
Rachel blinked several times as she realized she’d allowed her mind to drift and didn’t have a clue as to what was happening. When the guard raised his baton, she hurried to the area he indicated, fear gripping her as she didn’t have the slightest idea why or for what she had been selected.
“What’s going on?” she asked one of the other women, dismayed that while she’d been daydreaming, she’d forgotten to actively try looking sickly enough to avoid being selected.
“Work detail. Salt mines.”
“The salt mines?” Rachel’s knees wobbled and were about to give out. Only the thought of a truncheon slamming down on her kept her from falling, while her mind screamed: No! Not now! She wanted to hurl herself at the guard, scratch out his eyes, strangle him…or beg for mercy…but she did none of that. Instead she stayed frozen in place, knowing that nothing she did would change the guard’s mind, but could mean her death.
She decided to cling to the notion that this was one of the work details where people returned each night to the camp and she’d still be able to meet Mindel at the fence.
“Move! Fast!” the SS guard barked, and Rachel forced her feet to walk in line with the other women, resisting the urge to look back. But with every step away from the camp, her hopes vanished some more, until they reached the train ramp, where she and Mindel had arrived so many months ago.
No! Please not in the railcars! But there was no doubt about the Nazis’ intentions and soon enough all the women had been herded into the waiting cattle wagons. Once the doors were locked and bolted, she just hoped the journey would actually take her to the salt mines and not to the unimaginable horrors of the extermination camps the newcomers from Auschwitz had told them about.
21
Finally, the day drew to an end and it was time to line up for dinner. Mindel was the first in the queue and wolfed down her tepid soup even quicker than usual. She impressed once again on Laszlo the need to cover for her absence and darted off to meet Hanneli next to the fence.
It was such an exciting turn of events, her cheeks were burning hot and for the first time in weeks she didn’t feel cold. Once she’d found Rachel everything would turn out just fine. Maybe her sister could even come to live with her in the orphans' barracks. Mother Brinkmann sure wouldn’t mind having another big girl to help her with the smaller children.
“Hanneli!” she gasped, out of breath, as soon as she saw the girl.
“Shush!” Hanneli scolded her. “We mustn’t draw any attention to us. We’ll stay in the shadow waiting silently until we hear steps approach, understood?”
Mindel nodded, ashamed for her exuberance. Like everyone else she knew it was never a good idea to alert the SS, because as long as the children kept quiet, the SS usually left them alone.
Hanneli held her hand as they stood near the fence and waited. Once they heard steps approach and Mindel’s heart beat so fast she couldn’t hear anything but the rushing of blood in her ears. Hanneli held a finger in front of her lips and Mindel understood. She wouldn’t make a single sound.
The steps were loud and heavy – SS. Once they were gone, Mindel whispered, “Why have they put this straw in the fence? How are we supposed to see my sister?”
“The straw was put there because too many people were looking for friends and relatives in the other part. That’s why you can only talk to your sister, not see her.”
The explanation felt like a punch to her gut and Mindel had to hold back her tears. Why wouldn’t the SS guards want them to see their family? There were so many things she didn’t grasp. Nothing in this camp made sense to her, but since grown-ups tended to behave in a peculiar way, she’d always shrugged it away.
Mindel’s feet were getting numb standing motionless in the too-small shoes and icy cold crept up her legs, which she’d wrapped in sheets of old newspaper, held together by threads from a blanket. She gave a cursory glance at Hanneli, hoping the older girl would allow her to jump from one leg to the other, to get the blood circulating again. But Hanneli shook her head and put her finger over her lips again. Soft footsteps approached and then stopped.
“Hanneli, are you there?” a female voice asked from the other side of the fence.
Mindel couldn’t contain her excitement any longer and yelled, “Yes. Yes. Is Rachel with you?”
A silence ensued on the other side, until Hanneli said in a low voice, “Not so loud, Mindel.”
She pressed her hand over her mouth, anxious to do as she was told. But the words spoken next shattered all her resolve.
“It’s me. Anne. But Rachel couldn’t come. She’s been selected for a work detail.”
Mindel had no idea what that meant and wanted to ask a thousand questions, but Hanneli told her, “Keep silent. We’ll talk later.”
Then she and this other girl called Anne chatted for a while. Before they turned to leave, Anne called over the fence, “Hey, Mindel. Rachel always talked about your special friend. Who is this?”
Mindel withdrew her doll from inside her dress and held her up high, even though Anne wouldn’t be able to see her. “Paula, my doll. Rachel made her for me and she always called her my special friend.”
Hanneli wrapped an arm around her shoulder, “Now we know that it really is your sister.”
“But…” Mindel courageously held back her tears and wanted to tell Anne greetings for Rachel, but in this moment a vicious voice barked on the other side of the fence, “You! Get away from the fence. Fast!”
They heard shuffling feet, stomping footfalls and then nothing. Anne was gone.
“Don’t be sad,” Hanneli tried to console her. “We know your sister is alive, and that’s more than some others can say about their family.”
“But…why did they take her away?” Mindel cried, tears rolling down her cheeks.
“I don’t know why any of this is happening, but hopefully she’ll be back soon. I’ll go and talk to Anne whenever I can, and as soon as your sister returns to the camp, she’ll let us know.”
Mindel was so sad. Devastated.
Despite Hanneli’s reassuring words she couldn’t see anything positive in what had just happened. She’d been so excited to talk to Rachel and now this!
Scuffing her feet, she returned to the orphans’ barracks, sneaking inside just when Mother Brinkmann closed the book and asked what Fluff’s newest adventure should be about. But not even Fluff could brighten her mood this night.
Much later, when she heard the heavy breathing of the sleeping children, she finally let her tears fall and cried herself to sleep.
The next day, Mother Brinkmann returned from running an errand in the middle of the day with a pair of shoes in her hands.
“Mindel, these are for you.”
Mindel looked at the brown, battered shoes that seemed to be at least double the size of her own.
“Try them on,” Mother Brinkmann urged her.
The shoes were way too big, and her heels slipped out with every step. Mi
ndel giggled, “It feels like walking in Father’s rain boots.”
“They were the only ones we could get. Wait a moment.” Mother Brinkmann went to her secret stash of useful things and returned with two newspaper sheets. She crumpled them and stuffed each one deep into the shoes. “Try again.”
“Much better.” Mindel beamed at the prospect that her toes wouldn’t hurt so much anymore. She walked around, still unsteady in her oversized shoes. When she walked back, Mother Brinkmann was holding her old shoes in her hand, a furrow across her forehead.
“Timmy, come here,” she called and a small, meager boy of four years obeyed. Mindel looked at him. Timmy was so much smaller than she was, how come he was the same age?
Mother Brinkmann gave Timmy Mindel’s shoes, and then she gave Timmy’s shoes to a girl of two who’d just learned to walk in her stockinged feet and for lack of shoes hadn’t been allowed to leave the hut when winter had set in.
“Can I have new shoes, too? My toes always feel bruised,” Laszlo said.
Mother Brinkmann asked him to remove his shoes and socks and then frowned when she saw his toes. “Laszlo, why didn’t you say something sooner? These are going to get infected if you’re not careful. You can’t continue to walk around in these shoes, and I don’t know when Herr Brinkmann will be able to trade for a pair of shoes big enough for you. The bigger, the more in-demand they are.” She shook her head. “I’ll have to cut a hole in the toe of each shoe. That would give your toes some room to move about.”
Laszlo grinned. “Let’s do that.”
“But you’ll have to make sure and wiggle your toes when standing in the food queue. If you don’t they’ll freeze up and fall off.”
“No, they won’t,” he said with a cheeky grin.
“Yes, they will. Now, promise me you’ll keep moving your toes and I’ll make a hole in your shoes.”
“I promise.”
Mother Brinkmann went to work and when she was finished, he walked around the barracks, modeling his open-roofed shoes for everyone. The other children giggled with delight.
One of the girls who always pretended to be grown-up looked at Laszlo and rolled her eyes. “He’s going to be freezing all of the time now and his shoes will be full of snow and mud.”
“Well, he won’t have to worry about getting an infection that requires him to lose his entire foot,” Mother Brinkmann said, effectively ending that discussion.
Several children begged Mother Brinkmann to cut the caps off of their shoes as well. She refused, explaining she wasn’t going to disfigure perfectly good shoes. The children accepted her ruling and immediately set their minds to making up a rhyme about Laszlo’s toes falling off. A few of them, including Mindel, started to walk around on their heels, pretending they had no toes at all. Giggling hilariously, they bumped into each other, and played at being angry about the clumsy toe-less people milling about.
22
Utter desperation had conquered Rachel. Two interminable weeks earlier, she’d found her sister and missed meeting her by a whisker, when the rotten Nazis had selected her to work in the salt mines.
With exhaustion tugging at every fiber in her body, she trudged the short march from her new camp to the mine. Everything here was deplorable: the living conditions, the food, the work…and above all the salt. She swore that she’d never again eat a single morsel of salt should she make it out of there alive.
From morning to night, the women had to toil in the underground mines, never once seeing the light of the day. The rations were so meager, she never noticed the difference between before a meal and after, and regularly forgot whether she’d already eaten or not.
Armed with a pickaxe she hacked at the rock, breaking out the salt. Where the work at the ammunition factory had been tedious and perilous, here it was back-breaking physical labor, apt to wear down a strong and healthy man.
The emaciated women first had to break out the salty rock and then grind it to tiny pieces that were later used to refine the pure salt. Every day they climbed into the shaft, where the salt was deposited between layers of rock deep inside the ground.
There was no respite from the salt and it took only a few days until Rachel’s skin was raw from exposure. The slightest sweating or rubbing irritated her skin to the point that she believed it was catching fire. The worst, though, were her hands. Littered with blisters from the pickaxe there seemed to be no patch of intact skin left on the raw flesh and every time she came into contact with the vicious salt – always – it literally was like rubbing salt into her wounds.
Rachel was in so much agony at all times that she had forgotten how it felt to be pain-free. The only good thing about working in the shaft was that the SS rarely bothered them down there. Even the comparatively mild temperatures in the mine turned out more of a curse than a blessing, because every time she walked outside the harsh cold bit into her bones and numbed her limbs. At least then, she didn’t feel the pain anymore.
Every day Rachel collapsed deeper into a state of depression, until she no longer found a reason to stay alive. Let the Nazis win. She was ready to give them the satisfaction of dying right then and there. Rachel wasn’t the only one pushed to the edge of sanity, since most of the women had lost the will to survive and simple subsisted in a state of complete apathy.
In camp jargon, people like her who suffered from the hunger disease, a combination of starvation and exhaustion, were called Muselmänner – former human beings who’d become apathetic to anything including their own fate and were unresponsive to even the most barbaric treatment by the Nazis. It was as if she had already ceased to exist and by some divine mistake, her dried-up shell continued to walk the earth without an actual being inside.
Those women who still had a clear thought in their minds often actively sought to end their misery. Just this morning one of the women had broken away from the line during their march to the salt mine. The SS guards hadn’t wavered for a second and shot her in the back, leaving a darkened spot on the pristine white snow.
Rachel lifted her shovel once more, her muscles screaming in protest and her heart filling with envy at the other woman’s escape from this living hell. She ignored the pain, emptied the shovel into the mine car and picked up another load.
Her agony didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Her mind seemed to be filled with cotton balls and the viscosity of her thoughts wouldn’t allow her to imagine anything beyond her current surroundings. Shovel up. Unload. Down. Fill. Up. Unload. Down. Fill. Up…
Working back to back with another woman, she never once paused. Her throat was rougher than a grater, and what wouldn’t she have given for a glass of water? Alas, there’d be no water until dinner time, and even the alluring snow tantalizing her to bend down and grab a handful on her march to the camp was off limits. Verboten. Bend down and die. Stop working and die. Continue working and die another day.
At night, Rachel lay down on the bunk and closed her eyes, wishing death might claim her in her sleep and save her from another miserable day in the mines. The agony both from sore muscles and bones clashed with a different type of pain coming from inside her body. It was more than just the ubiquitous hunger, and felt as if her very organs were not cooperating anymore. Together they created an explosion reaching every single cell in her body, causing her heart to stutter, red stars to appear in front of her fluttering eyes and her mind to go numb.
A few days later, she snapped. As the mine car rolled along the tracks, Rachel suddenly stretched her back, threw down her shovel and launched herself in front of the railcar.
“What are you doing?” the woman working next to her asked, jerking Rachel back.
“I’m done.”
“So, what? You’re going to let the railcar run over you? That’s completely idiotic.”
“Why, because I want to take control back of when I die and how?”
“No, I understand that, but there are changes happening. The war is in its last throes. I can feel it.”
“I can’t,” Rachel said, trying to shake off the other woman’s arm as she took a step forward. But the opportunity had passed; the car was already in front of her.
Rachel felt like crying but no tears would come. The SS wouldn’t let her live, and this woman wouldn’t let her die. She didn’t want to subsist any longer in this twilight zone between life and death. But with the railcar passed by and an SS guard approaching, what choice did she have but to pick up her shovel and go back to work?
“We have to survive,” the other woman said. “Hold on, dear, because it won’t take much longer.”
Rachel nodded with fatalism, since all her willpower had been used up in her failed suicide attempt.
23
Mindel and Laszlo were standing in line for the orphans’ barracks bread ration when Laura came along.
“Hey, Mindel, hey, Laszlo. Have you heard there’s another transport going to Switzerland real soon?” she said, coming over. But seeing Mindel’s oversized shoes, she glared at her. “Where did you get these from?”
“Why? Mother Brinkmann gave them to me, because my own were getting too small.”
“You…little thief…you…vulture…body-stripper…you…!” Laura heaved with emotions and Mindel couldn’t make any sense of her words. “Give me the shoes, right now! They belong to Augusta!” Laura screamed, attracting the attention of the adults, and unfortunately of the SS guards, who strode toward them, menacing with their truncheons.
It took Laszlo only a second to take a decision and he whisper-yelled, “Run. Fast.”
Losing their place in the line was an awful thing, because it meant risking that all the rations were distributed before they reached the end, and then they’d get scolded by Mother Brinkmann. But on the other hand, being beaten by the guards was an even worse prospect.
The three children took off and Mindel arrived breathless behind the latrines, where they sought cover. Because of the horrible stink, the SS wouldn’t follow them there.
The Road to Liberation: Trials and Triumphs of WWII Page 10
