My Mother's Ring: A Holocaust Historical Novel

by Dana Fitzwater Cornell

  We asked them where our mother might be and how we might be able to see her. They told us it was impossible to visit the other camps, but relatives could secretly pass notes or see each other from behind the gates. It was prohibited to cross to the other sections of the camp without approval. There were camps for men, women, and gypsies, amongst others. Mother had likely just emerged from the quarantine camp for women and was probably entering the main women’s camp. I hoped to be able to see her, or at the very minimum to catch a glimpse of her sweet face, in a few days. The prisoners continued to offer us words of wisdom and advice, encouraging us to organize for a spoon and to always sleep fully clothed, shoes and all, so that nothing would be stolen from us. They spoke about mealtime, saying bread was like gold in the camp and must be protected. Some of the men said they portioned out their bread so that it lasted longer, while others advised against this, telling us the longer we had it in our possession, the greater the chance of it being stolen. They also warned us about the sick block, telling us those who entered rarely came back; it was a sure death sentence. If we were sick, they said, we were better off going to work than going to the sick block; if we couldn’t work then the Germans had no reason to waste resources keeping us alive. By the looks of the prisoners who had survived the camp for more than a few months, I could tell we were going to undergo extreme starvation and excessive labor. Looking at one emaciated prisoner, with hollowed out cheeks revealing his fragile bones and disproportionately large eyes, I feared what would happen to my body over time. Another prisoner who saw me staring told me that he was one of many “muselmanner,” a term given to severely emaciated prisoners on the verge of death.

  From one of my bunkmates, a man named Fryderyk who slept directly above me, I learned perhaps the most chilling details of the camp. Fryderyk’s brother, who I was told hadn’t slept in his bunk for three months, had been summoned to a special work detail in the main Auschwitz camp. Fryderyk stumbled across his brother one night while walking back to camp with his labor group. He looked over at the crematorium and saw that a backdoor was ajar. The doors were never left open so that no one could see the mysterious world sealed behind them. He couldn’t help but to look. Inside, he saw his brother along with a small group of prisoners prying out gold fillings from gassed prisoners’ mouths and placing the corpses into ovens to be burned. He said they worked like zombies, detached from reality or perhaps numb to the experience. Fryderyk’s brother was part of a ghastly work detail known as the “Sonderkommando”—prisoners who disposed of the dead. They lived in the basements of the crematoria and eventually met their end in the gas chambers after about three months. He said well-nourished, fatty bodies were being incinerated with emaciated prisoners in order to maximize the efficiency of the ovens. “The healthy are being cooked along with the weak,” he claimed. He went on to tell me that the Red Cross ambulances we had all seen moving through camp were not ambulances at all. “They bring the gas,” he said. “Zyklon B, the gas suffocating the victims in the chambers, is housed in those vehicles. Silver tins containing pellets of hydrogen cyanide are killing all of them.”

  I urged him to stop talking, but he wouldn’t. While a part of me wanted to know what was going on around me, another part of me just couldn’t let myself hear it. Fryderyk’s accounts became more graphic. He told about Nazi guards throwing crying babies into burning pits, statements about Jewish skin being used for lampshades, stories of hearing unnerving screams emitting from the crematoria, and narrations about prisoners’ hair being used in textile factories. He pleaded with me to listen, to believe him, because he said he knew people who could back up his stories. Taking all of this in, I inwardly shook with fear. I, like the other bunkmates around me, told him to just go to sleep. For doing so, I’ll never forgive myself. But, he had crossed the line. I found it too overwhelming to take in all of his vivid descriptions. I didn’t want to hear anymore of his or anyone else’s gruesome stories.

  When would I wake up from this nightmare sticky from sweat in my bed in Warsaw?

  CHAPTER 27

  The next morning Mendel and I had our first roll call in the main section of the men’s camp along with thousands of other prisoners. Fryderyk woke up early that day—he stood in place and swayed like a lunatic until the door opened—and as we walked to the roll call area, he broke away from the group, ran up to the electric fence, and embedded himself into the barbed wires. The guards had a tendency to let suicide-minded prisoners run into the fence without shooting them first. Perhaps Fryderyk thought he was going out of his mind, seeing things that weren’t actually there, and felt it better to end his life than to see such abominable sights. The daily littering of prisoners slung over the fence was a regular reminder of how close we all were to death. It was only later, towards the end of my stay, that I saw images similar to the ones Fryderyk had told me about.

  Without hesitation, the rest of us lined up in a once-grassy open space, worn down to bare earth from the thousands of men who had gathered there just like we were on that day, stood in rows of ten, and then proceeded to wait. Looking upward from where we were standing, I could see rows of wooden guard towers dotting the skyline. We were being watched from every possible angle. There was no escape. Tall birch trees sitting in low lying areas framed the boundaries of our prison. All of the hundreds of times I stood in the same location during roll call, I never once saw a bird nesting in the trees or flying overhead. It was obvious that the wildlife was avoiding our camp. From then on, roll call lasted no less than an hour, during which time we were expected to remain still, without fidgeting. When the process lasted for hours, men had no choice but to wet themselves as they stood in place. This happened to me more than once. Sometimes if the guards were in a particularly bad mood, they pulled out their steel whips and smacked nearby prisoners across the chest. For this reason, I did what I could to always line up in the center of a row in the middle of my group, keeping Mendel close to me. Although I was twenty years old and Mendel was eighteen and a half, I still viewed him as my baby brother, someone I had to protect.

  After our first roll call, as we were about to break away for breakfast, German voices projected over the strategically placed loudspeakers, specifying that we wait while a list of about two hundred numbers was called out. Mendel and I recognized our numbers and so we had to report back at the roll call area immediately after breakfast. We figured we had been summoned to join a labor group just as we had been told about the night before. Keeping our fingers crossed that we would be working within the main camp, Mendel and I joined the swarm of selected men, holding our heads high, hoping our assignment wouldn’t be too intolerable.

  We lined up behind four SS guards and six green-triangle bearing prisoners. As we walked behind them on high-traffic pathways, we scooted past rows of barracks like ours, by countless barbed wire enclosures, around hundreds of other prisoners who were also on their way to work, and even past masses of women prisoners. I took in everything around me, hoping to catch a glimpse of mother. The prisoners were decorated with colored patches like I was, but some of the colors I had not seen before. I later learned that bible researchers, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, wore violet, political opponents wore red, “asocials” such as prostitutes and vagrants wore black, gypsies wore brown, homosexuals wore pink, and criminals wore green. Some of the patches were further garnished with letters referring to countries or other designations. I realized that the Nazis were not just persecuting the Jews; whole segments of the European population were being annihilated. Every woman I saw, I stared at her face, analyzing her features for my mother’s. I observed that the women were dressed in variations of the men’s uniforms. Some wore gray-blue striped unflattering dresses, while others had beige ill-fitting dresses with black buttons pinned near their chests; still others wore two-piece uniforms just like mine, although white scarves graced their heads instead of caps. Some of the women had torn ear lobes—inflamed, split apart pieces of flesh that would later devel
op into scar tissue—which, I suspected, were injures incurred when sentimental jewelry was torn from their bodies. Perhaps it was a pair of earrings a boyfriend had given them for an anniversary that they had tried to keep. Now those earrings were buried in a pile somewhere in the camp, waiting in limbo to be sorted, stolen, or sold. Maybe a guard had taken them and presented them to one of his lovers, or maybe they were already on a train bound for Germany, ready to be turned into profit for the Third Reich. No one would love those earrings like the woman who had brought them into the camp. It made me wonder if mother had removed her ring on her own accord when she arrived or if she had it forcefully pulled from her finger. Was another woman—probably one of the demonic guard’s lovers—admiring it? Was my mother missing it? Was my mother even still alive? I had so many questions and so few answers.

  It was evident which prisoners had endured the labors of the camp and which had only just arrived by the numbers on their arms and by the manner in which their skin hung over their bones. The contrast between the new and old arrivals was stunning. Still considered a new arrival, I was glad. How long would it take before I looked just as haggard as the old arrivals? Was such a degenerating transformation inevitable?

  Looking back at the women I was passing, it seemed a majority of them had formed friendships. Many of them held each other’s hands as they walked, talking and engaging with one another like friends would do in a normal setting. I overheard encouraging exchanges—secret messages between females in the form of motivational whispers. Their friendships seemed to raise their morale, which undoubtedly aided in their survival. Acknowledging this, I whispered to Mendel that we needed to find a small group of men to bond with so that we could develop a sense of camaraderie during our internment. Agreeing with me without turning his head towards mine, I saw that his eyes were also trained on scanning the landscape looking for mother.

  Although we were pleasant with our bunkmates and most of our workmates, we never did develop a close-knit relationship with any of them. Some men formed close ties with others, but it seemed Mendel and I were just too focused on our own existence to divide our attention among a group of our peers. Perhaps this made us egocentric. I sometimes wonder if we were selfish, or if we would have fared better if we had connected with others, but who knows. All of our choices, we felt, were in our best interest given our circumstances. Mendel and I provided each other with a genetically linked eternal friendship, which we believed was an invaluable asset for us.

  Mendel and I continued looking for our mother as we walked to work, but we never caught sight of her. We ended up gathered around an open field at the back end of the camp past all of the sleeping blocks. The guards read out our numbers, dividing us into two evenly split groups. For the first time since our arrival, Mendel and I were separated. He joined a group already forming a few meters away, while I was led off in the other direction. The two groups were within eyesight of each other, easing my feeling of insecurity. At this point, two broad-shouldered SS men adorned in their typical, regal uniforms began to speak. I could not understand even a fraction of what they were telling us, causing my forehead to begin to sweat even though the chilly breeze of the autumn air was pounding me. The guards made whirling motions with their hands, sending them into a frenzy of ridiculous laughter. When they had composed themselves, they continued talking, this time in short staccato bursts, after which they broke apart and left the three green-triangle wearing prisoners to take over. We learned that these prisoners were distinguished only in that they were rigid and ruthless enough to earn the title “kapo.” We learned that kapos were leaders of work groups.

  Feeling lost—having no idea what I was being asked to do—I approached any prisoner who looked Polish, asking for a translation of the Germans’ statements. My chest was collapsing as angst gripped me. I was on the verge of passing out. I was clueless and I feared being beaten for not abiding by orders. When I was about to just copy what the other prisoners were doing, I came across a man who translated for me. He explained that we were in charge of building the outer shell of a crematorium with an attached gas chamber; brick by brick from the ground up we were to spend eleven hours a day completing our project. Mendel’s group was working on a similar assignment. Even though a crematorium was already operational in the main camp, in order to take care of the growing, unwanted human backlog there was a need for four of these awful buildings just in Auschwitz-Birkenau. It’s odd to me that we were told upfront that we would be constructing a crematorium. How did I participate in building an enclosure where innocent men, women, and children would be unknowingly led to their death? It’s unfathomable.

  Under duress from the guards and their dogs, we picked up our first bricks and began the painstaking process of building the structure. Unused to demanding, physical labor, I found it confusing to learn the process. I had never before even handled a brick so the work seemed daunting. Everyone, it seemed, felt the same way. Our first attempts to haul over the bricks, coat them in a cement-like mixture, and stack them together evenly proved fruitless. The foundation we built was lopsided. The kapos were annoyed. They rounded us up, ordering us to dismantle the pitiful mess we had created, telling us to start over. They pulled us into even smaller groups so that we formed a mock assembly line. The SS guards looked on, only paying half of their attention to us as they fell into a lively conversation, their dogs facing us with their tails wagging and their mouths drooling.

  My role in the assembly process was carrying armfuls of the bricks from wrapped palettes and walking them over to the bed of the structure so that the remainder of the assembly line could position them, affix them, and then level them. The weight of the bricks ate away at my back muscles, leading to tinges of pain that I still have today. The roughness of their edges was no competition for the thinness of my clothing, causing me to develop lacerations and abrasions across my arms and chest, covering my skin in lines that crisscrossed over me like laser-cut pieces of a puzzle. Over time we all became more efficient at our work, although it never became easier. We lived for our half-hour-long break for lunch—that is, when we were rewarded with it—and for the whistle that ended our workday. It would have been a completely different undertaking if we were just a couple of men, perhaps a building crew, who were contracted and paid. But, here in Auschwitz-Birkenau, we worked like slaves with no attention given to our basic human needs. There were no pauses to relax, not even for a second, because if we did, the guards would storm up to us, spit at us, yell at us, and abuse us. We were not a group of chummy coworkers; we were a group of miserable prisoners.

  Sundays—our days off—were like heaven. All day every day we dreamed of Sunday. We made up songs about this day, kissing the ground when we woke up every seventh day. The food was even better on Sundays. Small chunks of cheese or pieces of meat sometimes made their way into our bowls. These days revitalized us, empowering us with enough energy to begin another week, much like our birthday celebrations had in the ghetto.

  CHAPTER 28

  Over the span of five or six months, we spent six days a week building the crematorium regardless of the weather conditions. We marched off to work before the sun rose and didn’t return home until well after it set. My skin soon blistered from the constant sun exposure. For every brick we cemented in place, we were one brick closer to completing a monstrosity that would annihilate us. When we completed the smokestacks for the building, we were very much aware that some, if not all, of us might wind up exiting through them as miniscule particles of dust, floating out of them in ashy puffs of smoke as the crematorium exhaled after consuming its meal. Positioning the windows and doors into place—making the building look inviting rather than intimidating—we knew that we might look out of them one day, absorbing our last mental image of Mother Earth prior to being led into the basement and asphyxiated.