My Mother's Ring: A Holocaust Historical Novel

by Dana Fitzwater Cornell

  At last, once we had all been counted and accounted for, we were fed. The thick, dark veil of night accompanied us. I can’t recall how many days it had been since my last meal, but I gulped down my bowl of foul lukewarm soup like it had been a month since I had exercised my taste buds. I wanted to talk with the men who had just returned so that I could ask questions about the camp, but they were unapproachable. They grabbed their soup and walked away with it. With only an hour of free time between dinner and sleep, most of them headed to the washrooms—which were ill-equipped and a several minute walk from the barracks—where they attempted to clean themselves and their uniforms. My first bit of downtime was spent in a fog. Fear of the unknown caused the line between my desire to live and my acceptance of death to blur. I had to forcefully push that line apart and swing the pendulum back towards wanting to live. It would have been so easy to give up before I ever started working in the camp. I knew that death by my own accord would have ended my suffering in a flash, but I couldn’t do it even though I knew it meant months, or even years, of misery were ahead of me.

  In the end, recollections of the long ago advice about endurance from my mother compelled me to gather intelligence about surviving in the camp. Therefore, I returned to my barracks to look for a seasoned prisoner to talk with. After using one of the round cleaning basins inside the barracks to rinse out my cup, bowl, and spoon, I headed to my bunk. My bunkmates had not returned from the washroom so I looked around for someone else who might be willing to answer my questions. Sitting on the unfinished floor several bunks away from mine with his head bent in concentration, a red-triangle prisoner was using a simple, splintered needle he had carved from a stick and a small pile of straw ripped vertically into thin threads to darn a hole in his pants. He looked both resourceful and knowledgeable. No matter how standoffish he might be, I decided to demand he be of assistance to me.

  Full of confidence, I approached the man and introduced myself to him. He looked up briefly without recognition, absorbed in his sewing. I moved closer to him and repeated myself in a louder voice. He grunted sharply, threw some straw at me, and muttered to himself. Figuring he was attempting to get rid of me, I prepared to plead with him. Luckily, I didn’t have to. Instead, his behavior reversed. He put down his needle, nodded at me, and invited me to sit down on the floor beside him. I respectfully thanked him for accepting me into his personal space and although I was slightly troubled because of his conduct, I took a seat next to him. I shouldn’t have found his behavior so unusual; camp life bent everyone’s social skills. Our tempers flared uncontrollably and our emotions changed suddenly and unpredictably. With his hands moving instinctively over his torn garments, he continued sewing as I rattled off a series of questions about Mauthausen, probing him incessantly. Under the glow of the one bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, we engaged in a lengthy discussion until the rest of the five hundred prisoners returned to the building and the light was extinguished. Over the next several weeks, he acted as my mentor.

  Lying on my straw mattress that first night, the full length of my body uncomfortably pressed like a canned sardine between two men I hadn’t even met yet, I turned the words of my newest acquaintance over in my mind. I sifted through the information I had learned, mentally categorizing it into files, storing it away for when I might need to unearth it later. Through that kind, selfless man I learned a bounty of knowledge, useful and otherwise.

  Much of what he said gave me a general background about the camp, allowing me to understand where I was and what the Mauthausen-Gusen complex was all about. He had survived the arduous conditions of the camp for nearly a year. Immediately following the outbreak of the war, he had fled to Czechoslovakia from Poland where he was rounded up for political reasons. A spiteful coworker had accused him of opposing the Nazi party; therefore he was imprisoned in various camps until he finally ended up in Mauthausen.

  Apparently, the entire camp complex spanned more than thirty-five acres, comprising about fifty camps, with Mauthausen as the main camp and a much-feared sister camp called Gusen located about five kilometers to the northwest. He told me about the nearly useless camp hospital where first aid was the relative extent of the services offered since life-saving medicines were in short supply. He explained that spotted fever had run rampant a few years prior, killing off many prisoners, and how Soviet POWs were formerly secluded in a separate camp where they were treated cruelly. He also told me about the camp band, which he said had just formally split up, although a few members continued to play during roll calls, executions, and when prisoners walked to and from work. He explained how the camp was a vast melting pot of prisoners from across Europe, including men from Spain, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, France, Belgium, Greece, Luxembourg, Italy, Hungary, and so forth. He fathomed that the lack of women might be attributed to the demanding physical labor required of the inmates, although he did mention that some women worked in the SS brothel. He could not answer my questions about the disproportionately large number of intelligentsia, asocials, and political and criminal prisoners that outnumbered the Jewish prisoners, but he presumed that “they are coming.” He told me that some lucky prisoners—none of them Jews—could receive letters and packages and were even earning small wages that they could use in the camp canteen to buy food and supplies. These prisoners were also treated to bed sheets and weekly showers. Moreover, a few of the very lucky were invited to participate in the Sunday football (soccer) games the SS played on the open field adjacent to the camp. I further learned that the labor force had previously been focused on mining granite in the nearby rock quarry for reconstruction projects in German towns but had recently shifted towards digging underground facilities to manufacture armaments for the German Army. He had worked in the stone quarry since his arrival despite the cutbacks, and he recounted frightening scenes about his experiences, warning me about a landmark connected to the quarry known throughout the camp as the “Stairs of Death.” Tales of torture, including witnessing men being drowned alive in large barrels and seeing prisoners tormented to the point where they committed mass suicide in order to escape the pain, mixed with stories about extreme forms of punishment made me realize that the camp I was a part of was no less horrifying than Auschwitz-Birkenau. In fact, after that conversation I knew…it might be even worse.

  CHAPTER 37

  I slept that first night restlessly, wrestling with the information I had just absorbed. Less than four hours after I had climbed into my bunk, I was awakened by the earsplitting sounds of a bell announcing it was time to spring to life and begin the day. It was not yet five in the morning. I mimicked the actions of the other men, helping to flatten the straw mattress while crouching on the edge of the bunk, balancing so that I would not fall to the floor. Then I ran through the darkness the half a kilometer or so to the toilets, taking my turn sitting on the bare planks with rough-cut holes running the span of the building. Following this, I fought my way to the communal basins, splashing a handful of muddy water on my face, and grabbing my cup, bowl, and spoon from my cubby. I hurried to the food distribution site, eagerly awaiting something, although I knew it wouldn’t be satisfying or tasty, to soothe my hollow stomach. Showing my metal bracelet to the cook, I received my cup of vile coffee and watery soup. By that point, I failed to care how horrendous the food tasted. If it quenched my thirst and placated my growling belly, it was a welcomed gift. Having eaten, I returned my utensils to their proper place and joined the rows of twenty men across already forming beside my barracks for roll call.

  With no executions to carry out and no discrepancy in the numbers, we were quickly led away in our labor groups to our work sites. I joined the group of men I had arrived with from Auschwitz-Birkenau and many of the men from my barracks, including my new, self-appointed mentor. Marching out the front gates in our rigid wooden shoes with SS guards and kapos intermingled between us, we walked past the lower level of the camp where the SS barracks were and continued walking for probabl
y a distance of a kilometer and a half before coming to a steep incline. The group hesitated for a moment, as if fear disabled them, before heading down a multitude of stone steps that led down to a vast stone quarry. In that moment I realized I was walking down the infamous “Stairs of Death” my new friend had warned me about. I sensed a heavy shade of misery floating above me as I descended into the quarry, feeling cold nips of pain from the ghosts of those who had perished there. I knew that quarry work would not be easy.

  When we reached the bottom of the steps, the guards wasted no time in firing off a string of commands. They yelled the usual orders to “hurry,” “rush,” and “run.” In response, the kapos rounded us up and directed us into groups of five or six, telling us to grab a cart and pickaxes and shovels from the pile of supplies in the near corner of the quarry and to begin breaking apart sections of granite into large chunks. My group of six men consisted of prisoners from Italy and France, making it impossible for us to communicate verbally. Aggravating at first, we eventually fell into a routine. Our job—along with most of the other groups—was to hack away at the embedded stone with our handheld tools until large sections were freed from the earth, at which point we hoisted them onto the edge of the cart and shoved them inside. Oftentimes, tiny shards of rock would break apart from the impact, sending projectiles at us. Facial cuts and ocular injuries were unavoidable. Once our cart was full, we wheeled it for a few minutes along specially designed tracks until we reached the edge of the Danube River. Here, all of the carts were unloaded by another labor group and the contents were loaded onto ships bound for Germany. We did that for ten or eleven hours, with a short break for our lunch ration, as the kapos badgered and violated us and as the SS guards hungrily eyed us, always at the ready to fire their rifles and unleash their dogs when they needed a spark of entertainment. Over time, I found that the kapos were generally more mean-spirited than the SS guards; it seemed that they felt as though they had something to prove, like they feared that if they were too soft on us then they might be replaced (i.e., annihilated).

  Adjusting to the strenuous work proved to be an extremely slow process, especially since my body was already dangerously thin. Despite this, I somehow managed to make it through my first day in the stone quarry while three of my fellow men did not. One man was crushed under the weight of a falling rock, while the other two collapsed from exhaustion. These men were carried back to camp where their identification numbers were recorded before they were disposed of. The Nazis didn’t care how many men perished that day or any day, they were only concerned about balancing their ledgers—the number of prisoners on their lists had to be accounted for. I felt fortunate that everyone I shared a cart with survived to see the following day.

  Roll call lasted for several hours that night, probably because once we arrived to the assembly square it began to rain and the temperature plummeted. The guards loved watching us suffer through extreme weather conditions from the protection of their towers. Our misery was their pleasure. A torrential downpour hosed us in a bitterly cold shower, flirting with the layers of dirt covering our bodies, sending streams of muddy liquid down our soaked uniforms. Despite constantly wiping my glasses, I couldn’t see through the lenses. I cursed my nearsighted eyes, hating how they only added to my grief. All I wanted to do was to eat my dinner and fall into my bunk.

  Finally, when they had humored themselves enough, the guards relented and excused us. Our soup was as cold as the ambient temperature by that point, but it made no difference to us. We just needed calories to carry us through to the next day and it didn’t matter what they tasted like. That night our hour of free time was deleted; we only had three hours between dinner and breakfast.

  And so my days were consumed with working in the stone quarry Monday through Saturday afternoon with only a break on Sunday to rest. It was backbreaking, soul-eroding work. The massive slabs of granite cut apart my hands as I chiseled away at them just like the bricks had sliced my hands in Auschwitz-Birkenau, except the granite was sharper and bit down deeper. My hands were a bloody mess by the time each workday ended; eventually I no longer felt the pain. Muscles in my shoulders and back strained to flex a little further every day, resulting in recurring convulsions. With only a few ounces of soup and bits of bread and perhaps the occasional cold, thumb-sized piece of meat or potato, the flesh around my ribs sank deeper towards my organs a little more each week. My feet—confined to my ridiculous wooden clogs—became full of blisters and sores. All around me, more and more men took on the look of walking corpses. Lice ran up and down my body at all hours of the day, biting my nearly destroyed body. Although our clothing was occasionally disinfected, our bodies rarely were. As a barracks, we were taken to the showers only once every one or two months, but only those who were strong enough could fight for a coveted spot under the spigots. Weekly we were annoyed with the shaving of our heads and bodies when a collection of prisoner barbers entered our barracks and sheared us.

  The kapos further aggravated our situation by berating us for the most trivial of matters, finding any excuse to criticize us. The SS guards used us as bait for their twisted games by parading us past the dog kennels and letting German shepherds loose at random. For sport, they sometimes even asked for volunteers to join phony work parties; once the group assembled they plowed them down with gunfire. There was no relief anywhere. The situation for all of us in Mauthausen was beyond bleak.

  As spring and summer made way for fall—glossing over my birthday without a pause—fall then made way for winter and our situation inside the camp only diminished. An epidemic of typhus tore through the camp, eradicating hundreds of prisoners. By that time, many large transports of Jews, women, and adolescent prisoners had arrived and workshops were converted into barracks. I had become well versed in the ins and outs of the camp, due in large part to my mentor. He taught me valuable information, including how to bandage my wounds using discarded items found in trashcans. Without his guidance on all levels, I am doubtful that I would have survived. I owe my life to him. When he failed to return to camp on his own accord on a November evening in 1944, my heart burned in agony as I lowered his stretcher to the ground. My mentor had died and a piece of me did, too. With pieces of my soul breaking off with each loss I experienced, I feared that there would soon be nothing left of me.

  CHAPTER 38

  It is unfathomable how much heartache and pain the human body can endure. Even if that pain is not directly pinpointed at you, you can obliquely feel it. A prime example of this played out during morning roll call after I had been in the camp for six months. As we were visually examined, one of the SS guards approached a prisoner who appeared strangely fuller in appearance than the rest of us. His body looked lumpy and plump. The guard walked up to this man and tore open his jacket with his hands, causing short fibers of straw to spill onto the man’s feet. He had packed straw from his mattress into his uniform—attempting to conceal it by folding the excess material from his clothing over it—in order to form a barrier from the frigid temperatures. “What’s this? You think a cockroach like you deserves warmth?” the guard yelled, yanking the trembling middle-aged man out of line and pulling him to the front of the assembly square, instructing all barracks to coagulate together. We were forced to watch as the reprimanded prisoner stood there, frightened, awaiting his sentence. Within minutes, another guard walked up to the prisoner, bearing a handful of raw pork he had taken from the SS kitchen. He tore apart the loose stitches holding the straw to the clothing and replaced the straw with the meat.

  Meanwhile, the man thrashed around, trying in vain to fight off the guard. In the next instant, two guards who were holding onto the leashes of their trained attack dogs joined the scene. Their dogs lunged forward gnashing their teeth, hungry to bite into the meat, but the guards didn’t let them loose. The unconditioned leather of the dogs’ leashes cracked in areas from the stress, straining and stretching to a near-snapping point, extending the prisoner’s terror as he anticipat
ed their release. The next thing I knew, the dogs were let loose and they knocked the man over. They stood on top of him eating away at his flesh, trying to get to the pork, and in so doing, ripping the man’s meat off his bones. Ear-piercing, gut-wrenching screams projected from the man, petrifying us all.

  I tried to distance myself from the scene, attempting to retain my composure, putting up an emotional shield from the situation. I had been surrounded by similar scenes for years and so I told myself that I shouldn’t be intimidated or disturbed by the gruesome, malicious act. I drifted back to my childhood in Warsaw. In that moment I was riding my bike over a cobblestone road, thudding along, pedaling next to my friends. In the next frame, I was standing in front of a grand cathedral, awaiting my princess. With the blink of my eyes, I was then standing in our apartment, breathing in the aroma of potato pierogies, my mouth salivating. I was lost in a trance, reminiscing about the way things were when my family was all still together and no worry was too great for mother to ease away with her words.