The Girl in the Striped Dress: A completely heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story

by Ellie Midwood

  “Our friend Novák?” Carter insinuated in jest, motioning his head toward the Slovak. The latter’s cheeks instantly assumed a deep blush, only confirming Dr. Hoffman’s guess concerning Andrej’s true feelings.

  “Mr. Novák didn’t have enough power to make any life or death decisions,” he mused out loud. “No. We’re talking only about SS men. Not even Kapos. It had to be someone who wore the uniform.”

  “So, she doesn’t actually love her husband then?”

  Dr. Hoffman inclined his head to one side, chewing on his lip. “I believe that she believes that she does. Like a schizophrenic believes that he is made entirely of glass. This is how he sees reality and no amount of therapy will persuade him in the opposite. I believe that she had persuaded herself that she loved him because it helped her survive. That lie, into which she forced herself, eventually became a reality for her. I do believe that she’s fully dependent on him but whether she would have fallen in love with him during normal circumstances? I can’t tell you that with any degree of certainty. It’s all just a theory, of course,” he added quickly, giving Carter a somewhat apologetic smile. “I can’t diagnose something modern psychiatry has never had to deal with before. Or perhaps, she does love him after all and I’m searching for an illness where there isn’t one.”

  He stopped abruptly when he saw Franz Dahler escort his wife into the cafeteria. With his palm positioned firmly on the small of Helena’s back, Dahler was pointing at an unoccupied table positioned in the furthest corner. Through the general buzz of the cafeteria, Dr. Hoffman could barely decipher the German words – apparently, the couple’s official language.

  “Why don’t you go sit over there and I’ll grab us something to eat? Unless you want to stay in line with me?”

  Helena replied something much too softly for the psychiatrist to hear. Dahler laughed at her response. His white teeth glistened in the bright light of the overhead lamps. “Point taken. Do you also want me to take sauerkraut if they have it? And something sweet, too? Coffee, as usual?”

  It was then that the Austrian’s gaze fell on the table, which Dr. Hoffman shared with Carter and Novák. He acknowledged the psychiatrist – the only one out of the group who was facing him – with a somewhat stilted, embarrassed nod and whispered something to Helena. She turned to Dr. Hoffman, offered him a small wave and quickly made a hasty escape toward the corner table where she sat facing the wall instead of the room. Dr. Hoffman smiled wistfully at such a strange choice of seating arrangements, as did Dahler, when he approached the psychiatrist’s table.

  “I’m sorry.” This time, the Austrian offered the same apologetic smile to everyone around the table since now it was all three men observing him, two with curiosity and one with unmasked hatred. “She’s a bit skittish. She was afraid you’d ask us to share the table with you and she’s had enough people around her today. She’d rather stare at the wall and my ugly mug.”

  Dr. Hoffman smiled in understanding. “I very well imagine she could use some respite from us all.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dahler repeated again, gestured to his watch (Dr. Hoffman had the impression that he would stay there and apologize some more had his time not been limited) and quickly headed to the end of the line in front of the food court.

  Carter snorted softly in amazement. “What do you know? The stony-faced Teutonic Knight can actually smile when caught unawares.”

  “I believe that Otto Ohlendorf, who annihilated the entire Jewish population of South Ukraine and Moldova, was smiling at you too when you were interviewing him,” Novák commented poisonously.

  “He did,” Dr. Hoffman conceded surprisingly easily. The Slovak regarded him with suspicion. The psychiatrist, however, only nodded a few times to some thoughts of his own, before repeating quietly once again, “He did.”

  15

  Helena

  Auschwitz-Birkenau. November 1942

  Rottenführer Gröning was seeing off the newly promoted Unterscharführer Dahler, all smiles and countless back pats. They had become fast friends in the course of a mere couple of months, most likely owing to the fact that Dahler shared much more in common with the new accountant than with his other comrade, Wolff. Surrounded by the grinning inmates of the Sonderkommando, Gröning helped his new friend adjust the backpack on his shoulders, bursting at the seams with all the goods the inmates had stuffed there just that morning – unbeknownst to Unterscharführer Dahler, of course. Let it be a surprise for him when he opens it on the train. From the Kommando, with love; so that when he comes back, he’ll say a good word, for us, to Voss and we won’t be sent to the gas, as our four months expiration date approaches.

  No one spoke of it but the SS men serving in the regular camp went on leave with a change of clothes and a single, mandatory, camp-provided food parcel. The Kanada and Sonderkommando supervisors went on leave like kings, weighed down with the murdered people’s possessions and all sorts of delicacies, thoroughly pretending that they had not the faintest idea of what their inmates had shoved in their pockets and backpacks and sewn into their uniforms’ seams.

  I watched them say their farewells from my sorting station with sudden alarm. Unterscharführer Dahler was still here, yet with a sudden harsh lucidity, I sensed his absence from the camp. Wary-eyed, I observed my surroundings in a futile effort to persuade myself that nothing horrible was truly happening. The “old numbers” had ceased their transactions just to renew their black-market trading as soon as the two SS men were out of the warehouse. All around me, the girls were still sorting the clothes; Maria, with her Kapo armband and a club at her hip, waited for her masters to leave just to resume her chatting with the inmates who were on kitchen duty that day. After lunch, Rottenführer Gröning, with a box full of foreign currency, would come out of his office and smoke in the doors as he waited for the staff car to arrive and drive him to the Kommandantur. Sonderkommando men would still hurl suitcases from yet another truck into a pile next to the warehouse – everything would once again become so ordinary and mundane. Only, along with Dahler, the very sense of security would be gone. Throwing yet another frantic look around, I suddenly realized that I had no one to turn to if anything happened.

  As though sensing my unease, Unterscharführer Dahler caught my glance and offered me a barely perceptible nod before turning back to Gröning and quickly saying something in his ear. The latter looked at me closely through his lenses but nodded stiffly nevertheless. And just like that, after a final parting handshake, both were gone – Dahler, to the truck that would give him a ride to the train station, Gröning, back to his office – and I suddenly couldn’t get my breath, for never in my life had I felt so utterly abandoned and alone, even with Róžínka by my side.

  She was oblivious to my mood, just like she was oblivious to everything around her. That day, she worked as diligently as always; she had the strongest incentive, after all. Herr Unterscharführer had told her that if she worked hard enough, he’d grant her the permission to visit her darling babies in the children’s Lager. Perhaps, when he comes back from his leave and hears Kapo Maria’s report about how hard she had worked—

  “What children? Are you mad?” Just her misfortune, Maria overheard Róžínka’s usual murmurs and there was no Unterscharführer Dahler around anymore to stop her cold, mocking laughter. “Your children have been feeding the worms for months now, you half-witted Scheiße-Jude! The Sonderkommando are burning what’s left of them in pits. Yes, those very ones in the field, behind the bunkers.”

  For an instant, Róžínka had lost her very faculty of speech. She stood there and blinked at the sneering Kapo like an owl. “But Herr Unterscharführer said—”

  “Herr Unterscharführer lied!”

  The entire barracks stood still after that shout.

  On the verge of tears, yet still refusing to believe Maria’s cruel words, Róžínka whispered, “But why would he—”

  “Because the SS love inventing lies like that to taunt you, on purpose. It�
�s funny to see the look on your faces afterward.”

  Without saying another word, numb with grief, Róžínka turned slowly back to her sorting station and resumed her work. She didn’t say another word throughout the entire day. In the evening, she refused her bread for the first time. A week later, I woke up in the middle of the night just to find her side of our two-person bunk empty and, having burst out of the barracks against all regulations, had just made it in time to pull her away from the wire, to which she was so resolutely crawling. Self-imposed starvation wasn’t killing her fast enough, and thus, she decided that the electric wire would do the trick instead.

  “What are you doing?!” I whisper-screamed in her ear, hurling myself on top of her body and pressing her into the snow. “Just what do you think you’re doing, you stupid, stupid—” I gasped and suddenly couldn’t bring myself to utter another word.

  Then, the tears came; mine, not hers. Stroking her black hair, now streaked with mourning gray, I sobbed my heart out. Only then did she still herself and stop her suicidal crawling, right near the guard’s tower, across the death zone. The camp’s rule for the guards prescribed shooting any inmate who had entered it but the guard above us, with the mouth of his machine-gun pointing downward, only regarded us sorrowfully with his head tilted to one side and from time to time took a pull on his cigarette. I remembered Dahler saying that they had begun conscripting elderly men to take over the young SS men’s duties after the latter had all been sent to the Eastern Front. Highlighted by the glare from his searchlight, he eventually motioned for us to get up and get lost before all three of us would get in trouble. I wondered if he had daughters of our age at home.

  After that incident, Róžínka was back to her slow self-starvation, still positively refusing to exchange a single word with me. To be sure, she was still alive thanks to Unterscharführer Dahler’s action, but it appeared that now a part of her died along with her children and without them, she was as good as condemned to death, refusing to eat, moving like an automaton and simply waiting for the life to abandon her body that was wasting itself away day by day. Through my new acquaintance from the Sonderkommando, Andrej, I managed to procure some sort of pills for her that he had suggested could help but they only succeeded in numbing her senses enough to prevent her from going to the wire. However, they did nothing to remedy a mother’s heart torn to shreds in such a brutal manner. And so, she sat next to me staring vacantly ahead, a mess-kit, from which she had poured the contents into mine, lying forgotten in her limp hands.

  I ate my soup and tasted the salt of my own tears in it. The silent treatment stung the worst. Perhaps, it would have been more merciful to have let her die along with her children but I was a selfish sister and couldn’t bear to imagine being alone in this place any longer. Little wonder she now despised me for my selfishness.

  “Róžínka, you must eat something,” I spoke to her quietly. “If you don’t eat, they will send you to the gas. The monthly disinfection is coming up. If a doctor sees how thin you are, he’ll mark your name on the list and it’ll be over for you. No one will help you then, not even Unterscharführer –”

  I suddenly stumbled over the familiar name. He isn’t even here, you stupid sow. Should have appreciated him better when he was. Murderer’s hands, my foot. Who else here cares if you die tomorrow? Not a single soul.

  I clutched my mess-kit tighter, just to hold onto something tangible, solid; just not to feel the ground go from under me.

  “Unterscharführer Dahler?” She gave me an odd, cold look. “Perhaps I would have preferred it that way. Has that thought ever occurred to you?”

  I stared at her in disbelief. “But how can you possibly say that?”

  “You’re not a mother,” she replied without emotion and turned away. “You won’t understand.”

  “That’s a fine thing to do, to throw that in my face,” I argued bitterly, tears welling up again.

  “You’ve changed a lot, Lena.”

  “The camp life does it to you,” I barked bitterly back.

  “Conspiring with an SS man in such a manner, behind my back—”

  “No one conspired against you! He only invented that Children’s Lager tale because I asked him to, to make it a bit easier for you in the very beginning! Would you have rather heard it from him the same way as Maria did it to you, on your very first day? Like they do with the rest of the new arrivals when they point at the crematorium chimneys and tell them to wave goodbye to their relatives that go up in smoke? Would that have been more merciful?”

  “More merciful would have been to leave me with my children so that I could have held them in my arms while they were dying, as any mother should. And you two robbed me – and them – of that.”

  She could have stabbed me in my chest with the same effect. I stifled a sob. I hardly ever cried here, but now I suddenly felt it coming. I thought I had grown used to this, to this unbearable isolation and solitude among the faceless crowds, to the constant fear of death that prickled one’s spine at the slightest of provocations, to the savage dog-eat-dog world that prompted a young son to rob his elderly father of the last piece of bread just to get caught by the Kapo and get clubbed to death along with his old man, to the corruption that was the second universal language after German and to the hope that perished daily in the gas chambers along with each new transport and tasted like ashes on one’s bloodless tongue.

  It was coming in waves now, surging up and choking me with the severity of it and scratched against the back of my throat like barbed wire. My own sister wished nothing to do with me any longer. I had no one left in this entire, hostile world.

  Franz, a hateful and uninvited thought came, and I clutched at my own hair just to rip off the very thought of him out of my mind.

  “I’m sorry that I asked him to drag you out of there, Róžínka.” I wiped my face with my sleeve and made a move to get up. “I’m sorry I was so selfish. Go ahead and slowly kill yourself, so that I lose not only my nephews but my sister as well, in front of my own eyes. Leave me all alone here. That’s a good sister.”

  I hurled all of these childish screams at her when I should have begged for her forgiveness but the environment here did strange things to one’s psyche and when one only thinks of survival for months, to no apparent end, should it really be expected of such a damaged person to do anything logical or decent?

  She still caught my sleeve before I could set off back to my work detail and pulled me into a tight embrace instead. Tears streamed down my cheeks. My entire body was shaking with sobs.

  “It’s me, who should be apologizing,” she finally said with a sigh. “I should have thought of you. Of course, I won’t abandon you, my poor little darling.” She was only ten years older than me but I was always her little darling. She was my second mother, my most intimate friend and I almost lost her – twice. “I’ll start eating, I promise.”

  She kissed the top of my head, covered with a blue kerchief. From the safety of her embrace, I caught Maria regarding us with a mocking expression, full of cruel scorn.

  Exposed and vulnerable, we waited for our turn in the disinfection facilities – a pitiful sea of naked bodies. While our clothes were being sprayed with some sort of chemicals, which invariably caused unbearable itching and irritation, we lined up in front of the men with shears, for our monthly ritual. It was Róžínka’s third time only – she had to undergo a mandatory disinfection process as soon as her name was officially on the list of the Kanada Kommando – but she still couldn’t overcome her emotions that such a humiliating treatment brought. That’s precisely how one could tell the new members of the Kommando from the old ones. The new ones still stood covering their breasts with their arms and were red with embarrassment. We had long gotten used to the procedure; to the SS doctors present, to the female SS overseers rushing us, to their male SS counterparts standing there and watching the whole spectacle just for the entertainment. We, Kanada women, were well-fed compared to the others.
We were allowed to keep our hair. We were still attractive to them due to all that.

  When my turn came, I obediently stepped in front of a political prisoner, a Red Triangle. I raised my arms, jerking briefly when the cold metal touched my armpits. In a few moments, it was all over with.

  “Open your legs, please.”

  From his accent and polite manner, I deduced that he was, most likely, Polish intelligentsia. I grinned bitterly in spite of myself at the entire rotten business around us. A university professor or some such, shaving off Jewish girls’ pubic hair. He looked equally embarrassed by such a sad state of affairs.

  I had just stepped in line waiting in front of the doors that said Bath and Disinfection when one of the three SS doctors present called me over. I never learned his name but recognized him at once, as he never missed a chance to conduct personal searches on the inmates that caught his eye. That would make sense with the fresh arrivals who might have smuggled some valuables that way but with us, however, it was a pure whim of his, from which he drew his sexual pleasure. That was the only explanation for his actions, for no one heard of a single case when he would find something on us, the Kanada Kommando, that is.

  I stared straight ahead of me as he gripped my hips with his cold hands covered in rubber gloves and shoved his probing fingers inside of me. It took all the will in the world not to wince in disgust and to keep one’s face impassive during such revolting, invasive searches, for one single twitch of an eye could be interpreted as utter disrespect for the Master Race and the doctors were the ones who decided who would live and who would die here. Antagonizing them in such a manner would certainly earn one a one-way ticket to the gassing facility and we all were aware of it. Perhaps, lost in his indoctrination and propaganda-induced illusion, he considered it a great honor for us to experience an Aryan man touching us in the most intimate manner. To keep our lives, we had to pretend that it was.