My Mother's Ring: A Holocaust Historical Novel

by Dana Fitzwater Cornell

  Crippled with fear, we proceeded through the gate. The heavy doors made a banging thud as they were shut and locked behind us. Bumped around as a group of several hundred men filled the space, Mendel and I moved as one unit until we found a place to stand on the edge of the group. Large hunks of granite covered the walls, floors, and many of the buildings, emitting a cold, heartless vibe.

  Unsure of what might happen next, we waited in silence in an uncovered stone courtyard. We were then commanded to toss our bowls into a box and strip naked and toss our clothes into a pile in the corner. At that moment, I knew that we would not be dressing in our own clothes again; unlike the systematic process of undressing at Auschwitz-Birkenau, we were not deceived into believing that our clothes would be returned to us following registration. We were also told to remove our shoes and throw them into another pile. Mendel and I found it easy to give up our threadbare clothing since it had long ago worn to shreds, but parting with our nicely patched clogs with thick leather insoles—our second-chance lifeline—was distressing. We were the last transport to shed our clothing. As the population of the camp increased, the required production of camp uniforms could not be met, meaning that future prisoners had to wear the clothes they arrived in for the duration of their confinement. Our shoes and clothes mixed together with the others, and all that I had left was mother’s ring, which I gripped into the palm of my hand before putting it into my mouth and swallowing it; I would retrieve it later.

  As we unclothed, the guards stormed up to ten or twelve random men and wrestled them to the ground. The jagged edges of the embedded rocks lining the courtyard pierced the victims, bloodying their foreheads, knees, elbows, and hands. The guards then shackled the defenseless men to the stone wall by their hands and feet using iron rings and chains. Such callous cruelty, a hazing ritual, was another method employed to show us that we were entirely at the mercy of the guards.

  It was dark by the time we unrobed and unrelenting waves of wind lashed at our exposed bodies as we stood idle with no further directions as hour after hour passed by. Although my body was nearly twenty-two years old, it felt like the body of an eighty year old because of everything it had been through. Cries of frustration from the restrained men echoed throughout the space all night, disrupting any attempts we made to sleep.

  Finally, when daylight appeared, the guards reemerged in the courtyard. One of them, a burly beast of a man with shoulders so large that they buried his neck, turned and pointed to the ornate gate we had entered through the night before. He told us: “You come in there,” followed with a point to two chimneys off to the left side of us. He ended by telling us: “And you come out there.”

  Having heard those words, we stood reflectively as we soaked them in. At that point, another guard told us we had entered the Mauthausen-Gusen camp complex, a network of more than fifty concentration camps. We were standing in the main camp, Mauthausen. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were in the process of being registered into one of the toughest and deadliest Nazi-led camps.

  None of the information we were given assisted us in any way; it left us with countless questions, which we could not ask. The demeaning initiation process, combined with the nearly two-week claustrophobia-induced travel, proved far too bitter for some of my fellow prisoners to accept. Men who were barely holding on to atoms of sanity when we had set out from Auschwitz-Birkenau were on the verge of aggregated meltdowns. These men stumbled around in a psychotic stupor with their heads pointed to the late-spring sky, muttering unnerving phrases. They proclaimed: “death is near,” “keep your distance,” and “bloodshed all around.” The guards curiously looked on as these men became unhinged, enjoying the fruits of the Nazi-organized full-body brutality. I felt my temperature drop and my skin grow pale as I listened to their menacing words, watching as they mentally drifted off into an altered phantom existence.

  One man hobbled up to me, his knees bowing oddly inward as he walked, shouting for me to look at where he was pointing. “There, over there—can’t you see it? The evil spirit stands robed in ashes on that building, ready to welcome us.” I looked and yet I did not see anything aside from two smokestacks that were connected to the crematorium. Even so, his terrifying predictions petrified me. In the next moment, he leapt over to the “evil spirit” with his last burst of energy, bellowing that he was “ready.” That’s when the SS mowed him down in a storm of gunfire. The man who only seconds before was a living, breathing human, albeit a half-crazed one, had become an unresponsive, contorted bundle that was shedding pools of blood onto the ground. There was no mercy. The guards enjoyed watching us unravel, but they enjoyed slaying us even more.

  As the rest of us clumped closer together out of fear, we had no choice but to remain fully exposed as we waited in line. Hungry and tired from our trip, Mendel and I cautiously slid our way forward for three long hours until we were registered. When we approached the long, generic-looking table, we saw a row of prisoners with green triangles affixed to their shirts—criminal prisoners I presumed, just like in Auschwitz-Birkenau—sitting at the tables, ready to write down our personal identification information into ledgers. One of the men looked up at me and in a monotone, disinterested tone of voice asked me to say and spell my name. This man actually wants to know my name, I thought to myself. For the first time in years I would not be considered just a number. Perhaps Mauthausen wouldn’t be such a horrendous place. Pride shuttled through my veins, pumping life back into my scrawny body, when I said the words “Henryk Frankowski” aloud. Looking over at Mendel, I noticed that he experienced a similar feeling—his eyes brightened as he recited his name. At that moment I realized how important strings of precisely arranged letters are in defining who we are. Numbers made me feel insignificant while letters made me feel respectable. Either way, I was still me in mind and body, and yet this tiny distinction made a world of difference to how I felt. It is remarkable how labels can alter our frame of mind.

  Lost in my own pensive thoughts, I failed to notice the object dangling in front of me. I was standing there mulling over the importance of names when the prisoner who registered me demanded I grab hold of the object he was presenting me.

  And in that moment I once again became just another number.

  A rectangular piece of metal engraved with a row of numbers fastened to a short piece of metal twine declared my new identity. Affixing it to my wrist as the other prisoners did, aside from those who were given wire long enough to fit around their necks, I felt my soul wilting in despair. Inwardly decomposing upon myself, shriveling and curling up like a flower that has been deprived of sunlight and nutrients, I begged for death to cradle me. My feet glued to the stone floor, I felt like giving up.

  I was beginning to wonder who I truly was. I had one number indelibly imprinted on my left forearm, another number knotted around my left wrist, and a name no one seemed to care about.

  Snaking around the walls of the courtyard, our line of naked prisoners tainted with periodic inclusions of guards made its way through a long wooden building, an occupied barracks, where we took turns having our heads, chests, underarms, backs, and pubic hair shaved as we stood in front of the gaunt prisoner barbers. It was a similar experience as my encounters at Auschwitz-Birkenau, complete with the rusty blades and flesh-stinging sensations, but it was no less mortifying each time it was done. The only difference was that our entire head was shaved slightly further away from our scalp, leaving a few centimeters of hair sticking out from the root, and then a deeper swipe of the blade, the width of the razor, cut from our forehead to the nape of our neck.

  We were hurried out of the barracks and into a stone building where we were visually inspected and individually fully submerged into a giant vat of disinfectant. As I waited in line, I watched the men ahead of me disappear into the metal drum only to reappear a few seconds later flailing their arms as they gasped for air. If only I had been the first one in line, then I wouldn’t have had to witness what lay ahead for me.
Fearing that I might hyperventilate, I took a slow deep breath as two guards pushed me into the sterilizing liquid. My lips curled underneath my teeth and my eyes sealed shut, I clutched my flimsy glasses in one of my hands and held my breath as my head disappeared under the cloudy water, which was dirty from hundreds of soiled men. Immediately, I kicked my feet frantically until I bobbed to the surface, gulping steamy, bitter air smelling of rancid almonds because of the insecticide. My open wounds pulsated with pain. One of the guards pulled me out of the trough and called for the next prisoner in line to take my place.

  Following this, we were corralled together into a cement-lined shower room. Worrying if gas or water would stream out of the shower heads, we stood in waiting as the metal door was closed, looking up at the thin pipes in the ceiling with apprehension. It was like the guards wanted to tease us—we saw them looking at us through the rounded glass window in the door—because they waited more than ten minutes before they turned on the water. Although it was lukewarm but bordering on cold, we greeted its arrival with the presentation of our tongues. Feeling it soak into my pores, my outlook changed yet again. Throughout my life in the camps, since the outbreak of the war, my emotions constantly teetered like an unbalanced seesaw.

  As soon as the water stopped flowing, the door was opened and we were ordered to vacate the shower room. As we did, we were handed an armful of clothing, which we were told was a uniform consisting of a pair of pants, a shirt, a button up jacket, and a pair of shoes. There was no time to verify the contents in our hands as we exited the stone building. What we were given was what we would wear. Only after we were outside could we look at our uniforms as we dressed in them. In my arms I found a striped gray-blue paper-thin jacket, just like the one I had worn before, already adorned with a yellow triangle and marred by loose stitches on the breast pocket. It was obvious that my jacket had previously belonged to another prisoner. I found it unsettling that the guards didn’t sew our numbers into our uniforms; they probably didn’t want to waste their time in doing so since they knew we wouldn’t last long here anyway. Aside from a small percentage of matching uniforms, even our pants didn’t coordinate with our jackets. My pants were a khaki beige color while others were black, white, or plain gray. My shoes were wooden clogs with wooden soles and canvas upper coverings. Other variations of the shoes given out that day were fully wooden clogs and wooden clogs with leather uppers. I greatly missed my perfectly modified old clogs. Having to resort back to wearing uncomfortable shoes was deflating.

  Once we were dressed, the same two guards who had addressed us hours prior reappeared, this time with pistols. They notified us that we were going to be divided into factions—a small portion of men would be staying in the main camp while the rest of us would be transferred to satellite camps. We didn’t know which of the two choices was the most favorable.

  Very swiftly, we were divided into ten or so groups. Leading up to this, it hadn’t even occurred to me that Mendel and I might be separated. We had both made the trip to the camp and I assumed we would be staying together since everyone from the transport was registered in the same fashion. All of a sudden, clarity overtook me and I whispered to Mendel, telling him to move away from me. I figured that since the guards routinely tore apart families we would stand a better chance of ending up in the same group if we didn’t appear to be acquaintances. Mendel pushed his way through the crowd, ending up roughly six meters away from me. All we could do was hope for the one-in-ten chance that we would wind up together. I said the words “Mendel, me, Mendel, me” repeatedly in my head as we waited for our assignments. In a matter of seconds, I was pointed into what ended up being the smallest group and Mendel was pointed into one of the largest. All hope was lost. There was no goodbye, no hugging, as I watched my brother take one last look at me as he was led away and out of the front gates, his hands holding up his baggy pants.

  CHAPTER 36

  I wouldn’t let myself believe that was the last time I would ever see Mendel. I begged for father and Blima to comfort me. I had to shake the pessimistic thoughts that were plaguing me. I had to resuscitate my dwindling energy supply. I knew that I would not survive even until the next morning if I let negativity overtake me.

  Realizing this, I shook my head, effectively casting away my feelings of gloom. I instead turned my focus on the thirty or forty men standing together with me. We were the only group remaining in the courtyard; all of the others had been taken away to other camps. We were all Jewish, which I easily concluded from the yellow triangles on our jackets, and were men of varying builds, although we were all corpselike from our time in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Stunned from our sudden separation from the other groups, we wondered if we should feel blessed or cursed.

  With no time for introductions, we were led to the left side of the courtyard to a green-painted wooden barracks with functioning windows. Making our way inside by scooting clumsily in our uncomfortable new shoes, we saw that it was full of bunks but devoid of men. The hundreds of current inhabitants were laboring somewhere in or around the camp. We were assigned to bunks that already slept two to four men on each level, so that we would be sleeping three to five men across. For the first time, I was assigned to a top-level bunk. I only wished Mendel could share it with me. Even so, it was impossible to imagine how I would fit into such a small space. The three-level wooden bunks with burlap-covered straw mattresses looked similar to the ones we had slept in while at Auschwitz-Birkenau; they were too small for even one man to sleep without feeling cramped, let alone three, four, or five.

  Bunks assigned, we were then each issued a cup, a bowl, and a spoon. I greeted my new possessions with fondness—they meant we might finally be given something substantial to eat and drink. As it turns out, we had to wait for several more hours until the workday was over and dinner was served. Beginning to tie these items around the string of our pants for safekeeping, the guards jeered at our bizarre behavior, pointing to a wall of shelves parceled into tiny cubbies. We were to store our utensils in our assigned spaces when not in use. Apprehensively, I tucked my objects into my cubby as the guards left the barracks. Immediately, I worried about their safety.

  Three inmates approached us, all of them political prisoners. I can’t recall their names; by that point in my camp tenure I found it pointless to memorize names. While I have mentioned that our “superiors” demeaned us by referring to us by our prisoner numbers and not our names, conversely our “superiors” commanded respect—which obviously none of us had for them—by requiring us to address them using their names. This distinction was just another way we were debased. Moreover, even though my peers and I spoke to each other by name, with the constant reorganizations and selections I preferred not to learn their names so that when they disappeared I could pretend they had just been a figment of my imagination. Not knowing their names made it easier for me to cope when they went away—to suffer or to die.

  The three political prisoners introduced themselves as our block elder, block registrar, and room elder. They were the leaders of our barracks. As they went over the camp protocol, we learned that they we were replacements for prisoners who had recently perished in “an accident” at the stone quarry. We also learned that we would not be isolated from the non-Jewish prisoners and we would bypass the typical quarantine period because our labor was immediately needed. This meant that there was no time to get acquainted with the fundamentals of the camp—we were expected to dive right into the grueling routine.

  As I listened to these men, these strangers addressing us, I began to question if in fact the other groups were taken to different camps or if we had all been duped as we had been in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Was it possible that the nine other aggregates were already on their way to the gas chambers? No matter how hard I kept trying to cast aside similar questions, they kept lurching their way back inside my brain. I feared that my brother, one of the people I had vowed to always protect, might never be able to fulfill his dream of becoming a teacher. I wo
ndered if my grandparents were still living covert lives in hiding or if they had been discovered. I questioned how my former teachers, childhood friends, and neighbors from Warsaw were faring and if they ever thought about me, too. Churning years of unsoiled memories over in my head, I thought back to innocent little Blima with her doll-like, sweet face. I felt the guilty weight of all of the souls of my family who had been killed since the war began. The Nazis held our lives in their rifle-wielding hands and they decided when it was our time to leave this earth. Traits that the Germans favored varied from day to day so that no one knew what was advantageous and what was disadvantageous. The same group of young women judged as desirable candidates for work one day could be rejected during selections the very next day. If labor-related voids didn’t exist, entire transports were sentenced to death. They treated us like perishable food, disposing of us when we were no longer beneficial to them. When I thought about it, I realized that perhaps our expiration dates were encrypted within our unique prisoner numbers. Maybe they were already recorded in the camp ledger so that each day we were unknowingly getting closer to our imminent doom.

  Lost in a sea of unspeakable visions, I was thankful when an annoyed prisoner shouted for me to move. Judging by his tone, it was not the first time. I had zoned out during the leaders’ introductions. I shrugged, unconcerned. I hadn’t noticed that a small band was playing outside somewhere in the background, indicating that the laborers were arriving back to camp for the evening. While I stood with my group outside my newly assigned barracks, I scanned the borders of the rectangular-shaped camp as the sun began to set, watching hundreds of deathly thin prisoners—all bearing shaved heads with stripes down the middle—sluggishly shifting up the hill to the outdoor stone-covered assembly ground for roll call. I found it odd that very few of the inmates displayed yellow triangles on their jackets like me; instead most of them appeared to be political, criminal, or asocial prisoners. Equally as strange, I noticed an almost total lack of women in the camp. Throughout roll call, which was held individually by barracks, I mentally cataloged my observations. The senseless beating, repetitive recounting, and motionless standing were no different than roll calls had been in Auschwitz-Birkenau. I was unfazed when the process took three hours that night.