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

by Ellie Midwood

  “They all have been working in this Kommando for years now. They have their own system that they’re used to and you’re only upsetting it with all your incessant slave-driving and shouting. They won’t work any faster than they physically can. Let them be.”

  He had already opened his mouth to bring up one argument or another, quote some insufferable postulate perhaps – most likely he’d been informed about my political unreliability upon arrival – but then shot a sidelong glance at my “Wound Badge” that I had brought from the Eastern Front along with my limp and only saluted again. At least combat experience carried some weight for them so far. If it hadn’t been for that, the snotty-faced sod would be writing a report on me in the Old Man’s office within an hour. And in spite of all I had said to Gröning, I didn’t fancy one little bit landing in Bunker 11 once again. It was cool and quiet there and they fed me just fine but the mere thought of not seeing Helena again turned me cold with horror.

  She glanced up quickly from her sorting table. I caught just a fleeting ghost of a smile on her face – in gratitude for curbing the new fellow’s enthusiasm, no doubt – and then it was gone before I could warm myself in its light. We stayed away from each other since our arrest in May, as much as it was possible for both of us to bear. I didn’t bring her into my office anymore and neither did she speak to me unless addressed first. Before releasing me, Schurz muttered something to the extent that he really ought to have shot the wench instead of releasing her and I suddenly wasn’t so sure whether I wanted to put his goodwill to the test with further defiance of the racial laws. And so, all of our interaction had ceased to rare looks, exchanged when no one was watching and an odd I love you to death, also whispered in passing.

  Rolf found himself on the wrong end of my affections, instead and soon grew lazy and tender from all the back pats and ear scratches and half of my rations fed to his growing belly. He was as good as mine now. His former handler was not coming back anytime soon, they said. They said he was in some good clinic near the Alps.

  “Herr Unterscharführer!” The greenhorn again. I turned to him, obliging him with a politely bored smile. His face was flushed but he didn’t gasp for air after his sprint. The Sieg Rune and the Sports badge were well-deserved then. “Dr. Mengele was asking for you. He says, he needs you on the ramp. The new transport has just arrived and they’re short-handed with the SS staff.”

  July heat was raging outside and yet, I was suddenly cold, almost on the verge of trembling at the mere mention of that hateful name.

  “I’m not allowed on the ramp.” I tried worming my way out of the duty, which I had not the slightest inclination to perform. Perhaps, I should have joked about the Old Man and his new passport. Perhaps, the bunker was not such a bad affair after all.

  “You are now. He asked for you specifically.”

  “Why me?”

  He hesitated before answering. “He said he has a lot of cattle and you’re good with the whip.” He grinned. He thought the joke to be amusing, no doubt. He liked me now, the newfound respect reflecting in his eyes.

  I set off before I could comment something vile to that, which I would later regret. I still had Helena to see to and whether I liked it or not, landing myself in more trouble with the authorities would not help me in the slightest.

  The ramp was in wild confusion. It swarmed with people. A moaning, sweat-drenched sea of bodies that hardly parted, even at the sight of the viciously barking Alsatian. They hadn’t had water in days, they pleaded. The children needed food. Their elderly sat on the ground, resigned and almost already dead. Moll was not there, only Dr. Mengele, outfitted in an immaculate uniform as was his habit, his black hair shining in the sun like an onyx crown of some underworld’s god, eyes fixated on the crowd, searching, hunting for his usual twins or dwarfs, no doubt. I made a step toward him but he waved me off, much to my relief.

  “I have the selection under control. I only need you to escort these people to the showers. I have only Sonderkommando men here and no officers to supervise them. Moll is supposed to be here but as you can see for yourself, he is not.”

  I looked ahead of myself, ignoring the crowd’s moans and pleas. The showers, also known as Crematorium V, to which Mengele gracefully pointed with the tip of his whip, loomed up against the smoke-filled sky. The Sonderkommando fellow, with his sleeves rolled up, looked up at me inquisitively. I knew that this was where I had to begin speaking to the people, spinning the tales to pacify them, promising them cold coffee or tea after their nice, refreshing shower, lie convincingly about the children’s camp to make them undress their children faster, lull them into blissful ignorance so that they’d go there willingly and didn’t give us any trouble by screaming and pleading for their lives. But with the best will in the world, I couldn’t open my mouth. Silent and grim, I motioned the column, doomed by Mengele’s mere movement of the hand, after myself.

  Murmurs began growing louder behind my back. Someone grew bold enough to shout a question about the smoke coming out of the showers. Surely, showers didn’t need any ovens, did they?

  Yet, I still marched ahead with stubborn resolution. Let them start a riot. Let them know where we’re going. Let them trample and maul us all. The whole affair could go to the devil for all I cared. None of us were leaving this place alive, a sudden revelation occurred to me. Might as well get it over with now.

  Alarmed by the growing unease among the crowd and my persistent silence, the Sonderkommando began pacifying people on their own.

  “The smoke, that’s coming from the heater, my good man; from the heater to warm the water for the showers.” The familiar story began. “Surely, you don’t want your elderly and your children to stand under ice-cold water. The water here is pumped straight from the wells and it’s blisteringly cold, I tell you! They can catch a cold with the sudden change in temperature and such things are dangerous at their age. Who’s burning people alive in the field? Who told you such a silly thing, my good woman? Those are bog fires that are burning. Don’t you see how thick the smoke is? And the smell? That’s the bogs! That’s the smell specific to the bogs. There are so many bogs in Poland; you don’t have that sort of thing in Hungary, I know. That’s the specific smell of the bogs. They catch fire every summer. We’ve grown used to it by now. We hardly even notice it…”

  An ugly smirk sat on my face. Well, that much was true, out of his whole speech.

  Unterscharführer Gorges, Kommandoführer of Crematorium V, met me in front of the building with a grin and a friendly handshake.

  “Ah! The reinforcements!” He beamed at me. He was tan and gleaming with health. “Would you do me one last little favor? We are terribly out of people, as you can clearly see.”

  “Yes, Mengele told me and you all do have my sympathies but I really ought to be back in the Kanada.” I made a move to leave but he clasped my sleeve before I had a chance to escape.

  “The truck for your Kanada is being loaded as we speak,” he rushed to reassure me. Indeed, a Red Cross truck – a pacifying sight for the new arrivals’ eyes – was backed and parked carefully right in front of the double doors from which a passage led into a changing room so that no one would see what exactly was being loaded into it – the belongings of the ones who had just been gassed and who were being burned, now, in the crematorium, in the exact same building. Water heater, my foot. “It will only take up ten minutes of your precious time. The driver will give you a ride back and I shall be forever in your debt. There’s more where this came from.”

  His hand brushed my pocket ever so slightly but I’d grown used to such gestures by now. With a chilling lack of interest, I wondered what exactly he dropped into it; gold, diamonds, or dollars. I contemplated taking it out and shoving it back into his hand but now, at the sight of the approaching end, it was unwise to make enemies and Gorges was no brute, unlike Moll. One could negotiate with him when the occasion called for it. Sod it, I was growing logical, like Gröning.

  I forced a sm
ile onto my face and gave him the wink of a co-conspirator. “I don’t need a bribe to help out a comrade in need but one day, I shall take you up on your word. Perhaps, you’ll be able to help me with something.”

  “You only need to say the word, Dahler.”

  “I will. What is it that you need?”

  Several people strayed away from the column and began collecting water out of the puddles on the ground. The puddles came from hoses, with which the Sonderkommando cleaned the corpses of the foam, blood, urine, and feces inside the gas chambers. They were in such constant use that the ground around the crematorium itself was soaked with water, running from the hydrants. Gorges allowed them such a pitiful last favor and didn’t even order them back into the line.

  The elderly sat on the grass, shielding their heads from the sun with their handbags or newspapers. They even took newspapers with them. They were Hungarians, the city people, for the most part. They could have very well been Reichsdeutsche – they looked exactly the same, well-mannered, well-dressed, much too timid to start any revolt. Now I understood why Gorges had no qualms on their account. He’d gassed far too many of them, since May, to know that these people wouldn’t give him any trouble. They went to their death peacefully, placated with the reasonable explanations offered by the friendly Sonderkommando and the SS. He beamed again, utterly satisfied with himself.

  “One last favor.” He stepped closer and spoke close to my ear so that the people wouldn’t hear his words. “All six ovens are full but there’s still a batch of stiffs left to burn and we need to put these people in there before they start putting two and two together, eh? Sitting on the grass and thinking doesn’t really benefit the order of things here. The Kommando have already cleaned out the chamber itself and stacked all the stiffs outside, behind the screen. While they’re finishing loading up their belongings onto the truck, escort the Sonderkommando men with those remaining stiffs outside to Moll’s detail, will you? I’m a bit swamped here, as you can see and it’s against the rules to let them go alone, without an SS man’s supervision.”

  “Naturally,” I replied evenly.

  “Rules are rules.” He spread his arms in a helpless, apologetic gesture, breaking into yet another sunny grin.

  “And orders are orders,” I muttered before turning on my heel and proceeding towards the back of the crematorium. I still noticed how his smile faltered after those last words of mine.

  The tall, solid, 3-meters-tall camouflage screens, protecting the unsuspecting eyes of the new arrivals from the ghastly picture of the pits in the field that lie a mere hundred meters from the crematorium, were also Moll’s invention. Much like the flowers he had made the inmates plant in front of the crematoria before the Hungarian action went into full swing. And much like cheap decorations, they opened the ugly truth to one’s sight as soon as one stepped behind the screens and came face to face with the Grim Reaper himself. There were enough corpses there, some already stacked one on top of the other, some were laid out in neat, ghastly rows as the dentists were busy wrenching gold crowns out of their mouths, to assure me of his presence somewhere near. Three Sonderkommando men were so consumed by shearing dead women’s hair, they failed to notice my presence, much like the ones who crouched by the corpses, searching their orifices for hidden valuables.

  The Sonderkommando corpse bearers, who sat on the ground next to the “cleared” corpses and smoked, jumped to their feet at once and tore their striped hats off their heads before freezing to attention next to the handcarts. I guessed those were used for the transportation of the bodies.

  But it wasn’t the stacks of arms and legs hanging helplessly off their sides that made the breath catch in my throat at once. Three young women, as naked as on the day they were born, huddled together behind the Sonderkommando men’s stiff backs.

  “What is the meaning of this?!” I shouted at the inmates, anger rising in me at once. Rolf growled and pulled on the leash, still tightly secured in my hand. A raw lust for destruction arose in me, along with the desire to set the dog on the bastards.

  They exchanged alarmed looks, blinked uncomprehendingly and then, as though remembering the young women, began talking all together at once.

  “It’s not our doing, Herr Unterscharführer!”

  “On Hauptscharführer Moll’s orders!”

  “He was just here before the last gassing—”

  “These three begged him to be killed at the same time—”

  “He ordered not to gas them—”

  “He ordered to take them down to his detail as soon as we go there—”

  “It was him, he made them undress so that the clothes wouldn’t be ruined…”

  “We wouldn’t touch them, Herr Unterscharführer! You may ask them yourself—”

  “We only waited for someone to escort us, Herr Unterscharführer…”

  My face must have softened enough for them to breathe out in relief and stop their protesting.

  “Well, I’m here now. Let’s go,” I grumbled.

  The bearers picked up the handles of the wheelbarrows and the women reluctantly stepped onto the path to which I motioned. Thus, our ghastly funeral procession began marching toward the raging inferno.

  Dante really had no imagination when he was describing his hell, let me tell you. Boiling pits of lava with demons shoving sinners into them with pitchforks? How grotesquely fantastic and improbable. How almost beautifully gothic and fear-of-God inspiring.

  Here, the main demon wore a white summer uniform with a Cross with Swords – for the distinctive service to the Reich, no less – and shouted his insults at the fire stokers who didn’t turn corpses in pits fast enough for his liking. Under the mournful looks of the elderly men in their watchtowers (I still wonder what they were making of all this, brought into this hell not by conviction but by conscription; former farmers, for the most part, or injured frontline soldiers like myself, all of them of our fathers’ age), Moll strutted along the length of the pits with his Alsatian at his heel and instructed Jewish stokers on how to burn their own kin more efficiently.

  The heat from the raging fire brushed my cheeks even though we’d barely made it half of the way along the path. The women must have felt it too or began recognizing that it wasn’t wood that the SS were burning in those strange pits but human bodies. One of the bearers prodded the girls gently in the backs, urging them forward. The young women were slowing them down and the bearers didn’t fancy facing Moll’s wrath in the slightest. There were rumors that he had shoved someone alive into one of those pits for angering him. No one knew what precisely occurred but as a result, no one wished to get on Moll’s wrong side from then on.

  I wiped the sweat that broke out on my forehead, either from the heat that was growing more and more intolerable with every step or from nausea that was rising in my stomach. I kept swallowing with difficulty but the back of my throat was suddenly dry as though wiped raw with sandpaper. The women stopped altogether, positively refusing to take another step. I left them to their own devices.

  Now, I’ll just force myself to walk up to that pit, report to Moll that his bearers and women are here, turn my back on all this business and let him do whatever the devil he wants.

  I should have gone with Gröning to the front.

  I should have caught that shrapnel into my guts and not the damn knee and died like a hero instead of…

  “Herr Hauptscharführer!” I surprised even myself with how calm and collected my voice sounded and how crisp and snappy the salute came out as soon as Moll turned around and faced me. He nodded his approval at such excellent military bearing as he called it. His freckled face was pink and glowing from the heat. Tongues of the red-blue fires reflected in his glass eye, gaily dancing on its unseeing surface. The other one, the good one, observed me mischievously. “Allow me to report; the bearers are here with the bodies cleared for cremation. The rest shall be escorted by Unterscharführer Gorges as soon as he finishes with admitting the new arrivals.�
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  He nodded in satisfaction. The good eye was now regarding Rolf who sat patiently at my feet – a mirror reflection of Moll’s Alsatian.

  “Beautiful dog.”

  “Thank you, Herr Hauptscharführer. He’s a very good dog.”

  “How is he with the prisoners?”

  I hesitated before replying, unsure of what he expected me to say. “He… keeps them in line, Herr Hauptscharführer.”

  He grinned deviously. The glass eye began unnerving me with its unblinking stare. Just to escape its incessant ogling, I tried looking past him but now I was boring my gaze directly into the stacks and stacks of corpses and I grew lightheaded instead. I swallowed once again, tasting the bile in the back of my throat. I closed my eyes – to hell with what he thinks – but they were still there, in front of my closed eyelids, their bodies turning and moving of their own volition as though coming alive as soon as the flames touched them.

  “You seem a bit pale, Unterscharführer.” Moll’s voice cut into the nightmare, mocking and slightly amused. “Are you all right?”

  I forced myself to blink my eyes open. My hand brushed my pocket instinctively. A flask was hidden there, so close and so out of reach.

  “I’m a bit warm, Herr Hauptscharführer.”

  “I should think so.” His hyena’s chuckles were far louder than the ringing in my ears.

  One of the stokers stood boring his eyes into me. I recognized him despite the waves of heat distorting his features. Andrej Novák. Slowly, intentionally slowly, he reached into the stacks and stacks of bodies and began prodding at them. The sizzling noise where their bellies burst, torn open by the fire, the ghastly movements of their partially-charred arms raising, by themselves, as though in mocking salutes, as the muscles stiffened with heat; their skin covered in blisters that kept rupturing and leaking human fat that fueled the fire even more and lit it white – he wanted me to see it all, to face what exactly my kin was doing to his.

  Wild screaming pierced the air around us. The SS men were driving the women closer to the pit with the muzzles of their guns and crude shoves in the backs. Encouraged by Moll’s chuckling – everyone knew he got his kicks from such disgusting things – his underlings began pushing the women forward with even greater enthusiasm until the poor creatures tore away from them and ran like frightened deer toward the barbed-wire fence surrounding the area.