My Mother's Ring: A Holocaust Historical Novel

by Dana Fitzwater Cornell

  Mendel and I had not quite become “muselmanner.” Like the other prisoners who had survived years of hardship in the ghettos, we had a slight advantage to prisoners who hadn’t been previously confined because our bodies were familiar with starvation-level diets and we had already learned how to trade for necessities. Repairing shoes for the guards in exchange for food and the ability to put patches in our clogs definitely aided in our survival.

  Another reason why we were not resigned to death was because we had developed an alliance with one of the cooks. He smuggled us bits of food and I stole leather patches from the guard’s office closet for him and his father. Without this additional sustenance—though much of it was moldy and stale—it is doubtful that we would have survived our time in Auschwitz-Birkenau. We foraged for the same fare that the excessive swarms of rats also searched for—scraps of potato peels, morsels of rotting cabbage, carrots, turnips, and crumbs of bread—in garbage cans and in the dirt. If we found something on the ground that resembled a food item, we ran to it, seeking something to placate our growling stomachs. The rats nibbled on decaying piles of corpses when the crematoria couldn’t keep up with the disposal. I wondered if any prisoners were ever tempted to follow suit. Even a greater concern than food, however, was thirst. We could fool ourselves into thinking we weren’t hungry but we always knew that we were thirsty. In fulfilling this desire, nothing was out of the question. We scooped up murky handfuls from puddles, placed our heads into drainpipes, and spent our time in the showers drinking the water while bathing.

  Finally, in May of 1944 after suffering through an unseasonably cold spring, Mendel and I were placed on a list to be removed from Auschwitz-Birkenau when two huge transports of prisoners arrived from Hungary and from liquidated Polish ghettos, greatly straining the resources of the camp. Everyone was jumbled around as space was made for the new arrivals. They were considered more precious than those of us already living in the camp because, having not endured a beaten-down camp existence, they were healthier and stronger than us and therefore better workers. By this time, the number of digits in prisoner tattoos had increased; I had even noticed tattoos preceded by offset numbers or letters. There were too many prisoners for the camp to contain. Many of my fellow prisoners were sent to the gas chambers, while others, like Mendel and me, were transported to another location.

  I would like to interject to provide additional information about the crematorium I had helped to build. After the war, I learned that it had been destroyed several months after I left the camp by a group of prisoners during a revolt. If I recall correctly, the “Sonderkommando” (crematoria workers) learned that they were going to be liquidated sooner than expected and a new batch of workers was to be brought in, but they were unwilling to accept their impending fate. Together with a network of prisoners, including Soviet Prisoners of War and women from the main Auschwitz camp who worked in nearby munitions factories, they banded together to smuggle and transport explosives to the crematorium. On the appointed day, incited by their dwindling life clock, they rose up, slamming the door on death, and destroyed one of the crematoriums. They then made a valiant effort to escape from the camp by cutting a barbed wire fence, running into the woods, and sprinting towards freedom. In the end, the escaped prisoners were discovered and executed, along with their assistants, but not before a handful of SS guards were killed. Amidst the chaos, hundreds of other inmates were murdered. The incident is just one of many testaments to the fact that we did not saunter willingly to our deaths. Some of us lost our lives actively resisting Nazi oppression.

  But, as I said, when Mendel and I were preparing to leave Auschwitz-Birkenau and its evil crematoria and gas chambers behind, we were unaware of any plans of revolt. We were apprehensive yet relieved to be leaving. By this point, we were among the small group of veteran prisoners in the camp, the group who passed along their knowledge and experience to new arrivals. We had made it through nearly two years of selections, starvation, and sicknesses. We pushed around words to describe this phenomenon such as “luck,” “blessing,” “purpose,” and “fate,” but we decided there was no adequate explanation. It didn’t matter what force had spared us, from within us or from around us. “One more day”: that is what Mendel and I said to each other every morning. If we could just make it through “one more day” every day then we would live to see the end of the war.

  We wondered where we were going. We thought nothing could be worse than the hell we had already lived through.

  We were wrong. Things became much worse.

  We were only given a twelve-hour notice prior to our departure, but perhaps it made no difference if we had only been given twelve minutes because we had no personal belongings to collect and clean or errands to run in preparation for our trip. We also had no one to say “goodbye” to. Such a word was unheard of in the camp—you were never given the opportunity to say “farewell” to a loved one and you never said it lightly in parting because you never wanted your current meeting to be your last. The only two people Mendel would have liked to see before he left were Dorothy and mother, particularly Dorothy. While he was worried about our mother, his romantic young mind was consumed with thoughts of his lover, the one person who had brought him a smidgen of joy while in the camp. Since he hadn’t seen her after his punishment detail, he didn’t know if she had perished, if she had been transferred, or if she had simply lost interest in him. He had no way of contacting her. I was really only concerned about mother. I thought she was still in the camp wondering why we hadn’t returned to see her. I wanted to track her down, but I didn’t have the ability to do so. I was blessed to still have her ring. Ever since she had gifted it to me, I had concealed it in various parts of my body during countless inspections, nearly choking on it more than once. I figured that if it was discovered at least I would die with a part of my family inside me. As I prepared to depart from the camp, I was comforted knowing that my family would be traveling with me to a new place; I believed that their spirits were inside the ring, just as mother had said.

  CHAPTER 34

  Shuffled around like cards, we made our third move in less than four years. The night prior to our departure, I blocked out the usual coughing and snoring from my neighbors and the typical dribbles of bodily fluids seeping down from the mattress above me.

  When morning came, the nearly one thousand of us selected to be transferred—all of us young men in fairly decent physical condition considering our surroundings—were counted and recounted and then instructed to walk for about three kilometers to a nearby section of railroad track. Making our way under the watchful eye of more than twenty SS guards, Mendel stood close to me, fearing that we might become separated before starting our journey. When we reached our destination, a dozen open-roofed wooden boxcars were linked together on the track, awaiting our arrival. At that moment, despair set in. I feared that the trip might be worse than the one we took to Auschwitz-Birkenau. At least the roofs had been closed in the cattle cars so that while we were sandwiched together we were not completely exposed to the elements. How far would we be traveling like this? How far could we travel like this?

  Then the whipping and beating began as we were quickly pushed into the boxcars. The guards pushed us together into groups and yanked us this way and that, plucking us from one group and introducing us to another. All the while they shouted at us, yelling commands to move quickly as was their usual tempo. There seemed to be no method to their grouping—it was all a game to them. It was always a game to them. We were like stuffed animals in an arcade machine with a claw device and the guards honed in on us until they snatched us from our resting place and then moved us about as if we were toys. But we were not presents to be enjoyed once we were extracted, we were victims to be manipulated and destroyed. In the process, Mendel was shoved into another group. I held onto him with every ounce of strength I had in my body, but a guard beat my arms with increasingly vigorous thwacks until I had no choice but to let go of him. At that mo
ment, my brother, who I had always looked out for, was herded into one of the boxcars. He kept straining his neck to look back at me, but the guards kept pushing him onward. My heart shattered as I watched him drift away. My only comfort was that we would be traveling on the same track. I often wonder if I could have held on to him longer, if I could have fought off the guard. I believe that the guards purposely sought out prisoners who clung together so that they could separate them. They despised alliances. They preferred for us to be isolated and despondent.

  In the next moment, I was handed a fistful of bread and a ladle of soup and loaded into a boxcar along with a hundred or so other men from a host of different countries. I felt the emptiness of the universe as Mendel no longer stood next to me. I imagined that there were others in the transport who felt as I did—no two members of the same family were in my compartment—but I didn’t know and I didn’t ask. No one felt like talking as we pulled away from the camp.

  Though it was the middle of May when we set out on our voyage and the weather was breezy and temperate with a cloud-speckled, sun-filled sky, the warmth from our bodies heated the car to an uncomfortable level. Many of us began shedding our button up shirts, attempting to cool ourselves down. Some of us sat in the car, while others, like me, had to stand pressed up against the communal mass our bodies created. All kinds of odors radiated from the compartment, but we failed to care. We drifted in and out of sleep, in some ways relieved to have time to rest. During the first day of our journey I consumed all but a quarter-sized piece of my bread. I hid the rest of it in my shirt pocket.

  Three days in, we stopped at a rail station somewhere in Poland and were given another ration of bread and soup, this one larger than the first. At that point, we knew that the next leg of our trip would be longer than the last. My thoughts kept wandering to visions of Mendel. I wondered how he was faring and if I would see him when we disembarked.

  As we continued moving along the railroad track, we felt a desire to verbally connect to our fellow passengers. Sitting in silence was too much to bear. Streams of different languages filled the air. I communicated with a few Polish and Yiddish speakers who were scattered within the car. Eventually, everyone shifted to be closer to those they could converse with. Human interaction through animated chatter eased the passage of time.

  Although traveling during the day was awful since insects made their way into the car biting and stinging us, the nights were far worse. The spring air nipped at our frail bodies, reaching through our clothing to release a chill that was absorbed into our bones. During the night we felt the consequences of our loneliness. Even though we felt the bodies of our fellow passengers against our own, the quietness of the night blanketed us in desperation as we were left alone to our thoughts.

  Every few days, the brakes of the train were engaged briefly for reasons unannounced to us. As soon as our progress was halted, a pack of SS men jumped off the train and stood around, barricading us from escaping from the boxcars. Two men in a compartment directly in front of mine timed it so that as they felt the train beginning to decelerate, they hurled themselves out of the boxcar in a gallant effort to flee. One of the men caught his pant leg on a bolt connecting the planks and was sucked underneath the belly of his boxcar and onto the tracks where he was crushed by all of the remaining cars including mine. The other man made it safely out of the boxcar and away from the tracks, but he tumbled awkwardly when he landed, injuring his knee; he was consequently shot when the train came to a standstill.

  Seeing this, we were all reminded, yet again, of the direness of our situation. Only on one occasion were these pauses used to replace our long ago consumed rations and to haul out the deceased from the boxcars. During this instance, a lifeless man was removed from my car. A sick part of me wished that more men had expired so that I had more room to breathe. As our journey continued, twenty men passed away from illness and starvation. We simply lifted these men and threw them out of the moving car. It was the only thing we could do to make the situation more endurable for the living.

  As we pressed on, our stomachs continuously shrank and we welcomed rainy days so that we had something to drink, something to moisten our tongues. Increasingly, our discussions turned to our destination. We came to the conclusion that we were most likely headed to another work camp, not to an extermination center. If the Germans had wanted to annihilate us, they wouldn’t have wasted time and resources transporting us. They could have easily gotten rid of us in the gas chambers back in Auschwitz-Birkenau if killing us was their intention. Would we be treated more humanely in our new camp, if in fact we were headed to a camp?

  Every fleeting day was a day closer to our destination or a day closer to our deaths, or perhaps both. We had no indication of where or when we were going to stop. Like my transport from the Warsaw Ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau, everyone handled the trip differently. Some men became consumed with hopelessness, others wailed uncontrollably, many were overcome with the motivation to survive, and still others became mentally unstable, lost in their own spacey world. I experienced waves of peaks of determined endurance and valleys of listless despair. We were all victims of severe dehydration although our bodies reacted varyingly from producing headaches to hallucinations. Countless men closed their eyes in pain grappling at their temples, trying to ease the chiseling throbbing beneath their skulls. I fought off periods of confusion and dizziness although I thankfully escaped the headaches.

  We watched the landscape change as we moved in a southwestward path, observing how the terrain changed from flatland to mountainous and just about everything in between, crossing out of Poland and passing into Czechoslovakia and finally rolling into Austria. The stunning scenery once we entered Austria was breathtaking. Gorgeous evergreen trees flanked the railway, awakening our senses with the fresh smell of sweet pine, calming our nerves. Serene, quaint, bucolic towns also passed through our field of vision. Such beauty had not existed in our lives for years. Our confinement caused us to assume that the war had destroyed everything wonderful, including vegetation, all over Europe. But now we realized life went on as usual in some places. Maybe our lives would return to normal at some point, too?

  The days ticked by and I soon lost count of them. Finally, on a humid evening the train came to a resting state at a railway station in Upper Austria somewhere in the Alps, stirring up curiosity within my compartment. Debates were sparked about how long we had traveled, but the consensus was that it had been eleven days since we were removed from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Looking around, I saw a small sign with the word “Mauthausen” tacked to the platform wall of the station. The word meant nothing to me. Rows of SS guards lined up along the train with their bloodthirsty dogs and we were commanded to rapidly exit from the boxcars and form a line five people across. In so doing, I searched for Mendel in the sea of prisoners, needing to confirm that he had survived the journey. Pushed and shoved as I made my way forward, everything faded from view as I set my sights on finding him, propelled by instinct. My brain registered nothing in my peripheral field of vision as I searched. If he had perished during the course of the trip, I felt that I might not have the strength to continue. I had to find him, for if I didn’t I feared that I might fall into the dirt and plead for death to cloak me in darkness, carrying me into its immense nothingness. I don’t know how long I plowed through the mob searching for him, but it felt like an eternity.

  Relief came when I saw him frantically making his way toward me. Huge smiles took over our faces and we hugged as though we had been apart for years. At the same time, one of the guards saw us and shouted at us to get into line. Doing as we were instructed, we fell into place, forming a row with three other men. When everyone was lined up, we set off on a march that would cover about five kilometers. We were nearly starved, dehydrated, and had not flexed our muscles in almost two weeks. As we walked, we were unaware if the trek would last one kilometer or one hundred kilometers.

  CHAPTER 35

  As we walked past
civilian houses and stores, children threw stones at us, laughing at our misfortune. Adults mocked us, shouting obscenities and taunting us with promises of food and then slapping us in the face if we approached them. It was demoralizing and dehumanizing. I asked myself how a place full of awe-inspiring wilderness could house such despicable people. Had the whole world gone crazy? Was there no hospitable place left on earth?

  More than an hour after setting out, we were led up a steep hill. Reaching the top, we saw an enormous stone complex directly in front of us. To me it looked like something out of a nightmare; a twisted, evil-filled prison where people came to die.

  Climbing up the hill, the dirt forming our path seemed to reflect the foreboding color creeping into the sky as the sun slipped out of view for the night. Chilly gusts of wind battered us as we reached the top, seemingly letting us know that we had arrived at an unwelcoming place. My body vibrated with fear, forming tiny goosebumps along my skin. An uneasy feeling paralyzed me, sending electric pulses from my scalp down to my toes. Before even entering into the compound, I knew that we had reached a parade ground of death.

  In the next moment, we rounded a curve and were face to face with the gates of the building. Elaborately carved wooden doors that would have been perceived as impressive works of art had they been in any other setting stood eerily tall with an enormous brass Nazi-worshipped eagle proudly displayed above them. The doors were bordered by two even taller stone guard towers, both of which were occupied by soldiers with rifles trained on us. Forming the boundaries of the fortress were hundreds of meters of massive stone walls capped with curls of barbed wire. The line of men I was part of broke apart as the sheer scope of our situation set in. The guards fired a barrage of bullets past us, making it clear that no hesitation would be made to kill us if we disobeyed. Since we had no weapons to answer the call of the guards’ rifles, we did as we were told.