My Mother's Ring: A Holocaust Historical Novel

by Dana Fitzwater Cornell

  Scrambling to find Mendel, I kept falling to the dirt as I wobbled in my shoes because of my injured knee. A myriad of stray, partially burnt papers tumbled in the wind in front of me, somehow seeming to steer me in the right direction. Pushing past masses of prisoners, I kept plugging along towards the kitchen. Once there, I noticed that it was unprotected and empty. Enormous metal pots containing the last meal’s remnants caked inside were thrown on their sides, spilling their scant contents onto the floor. Pausing to scrape one of the neglected pots and scoop the nourishment into my palms, I then left through the back door, frantically looking for Mendel. I asked each prisoner I passed if he knew where the new cook was. I looked everywhere for him.

  I was determined to stay in the Gusen complex until I found him even if that meant I would have to hide in the barracks pretending I was one of the sick. Fortunately, it did not come to that. I saw him standing with a group of prisoners near the lavatory building preparing to exit the camp. Running for him, I felt rejuvenated. My knee no longer ached, my organs no longer felt deprived. It was a surreal experience.

  At last I would be able to be with my brother, the male in this world whom I loved most. When he saw me, he reached his arms out towards me, fervently hugging me. This time, the guards, who were young and inexperienced, were too preoccupied to punish us. By the time the jumbled messages trickled down to them they were inaccurate, but the rookie guards had no way of knowing that they had received erroneous information. As a result, we were steered out through a side entrance with another group while the rest of the prisoners left the camp through the front gate. We questioned our leaders about the disparity, only to be told to “shut up” because they were “just following orders.” I was sure that they must have been afraid just like we were, but they never let their emotions show.

  Therefore, we set out on foot in our typical rows of five into the unknown. Except for the rumbling of artillery in the background, it was a beautiful, mild late-April afternoon, without wind or rain. The temperature was only slightly chilly and the fluffy clouds from the morning were strewn apart, melting into the blueness of the sky. Only later would we learn that the Nazis were centralizing the Mauthausen complex satellite camps; we were supposed to march towards Mauthausen, just five kilometers away, but our novice commanders had interpreted the orders to centralize as meaning that we were supposed to head to the heart of Germany.

  I often wonder how my life would have played out differently if Mendel and I had been part of a different group.

  I must admit that at the time I hardly gave it another thought as the other groups went one way and we went the other. My focus was on Mendel not on which direction a compass needle was pointing us. Wanting to hear every detail of his life since we departed in Mauthausen, my mouth could not keep up with my thoughts. We talked about everything as we walked along under heavy guard in the rear of the pack.

  For some reason the soldiers didn’t stop us from communicating; perhaps they were too preoccupied with their own thoughts about the advancing troops to bother to quiet us. Maybe they were wondering what consequences they might have to face if, by some chance, the Allies happened to win the war. Were they afraid that they would become prisoners of the very camp they had been in charge of?

  Not realizing our own weakness during our conversation, our dialogue was uninterrupted for two or three hours until we noticed the toll the hike had been taking on our bodies. The bones in the kneecap of my injured leg grated together, causing me great pain. My feet were blistering and hurting from my shoes; men weren’t meant to walk on rigid, wooden blocks.

  I told Mendel about my experience on the “Stairs of Death,” omitting only the most morbid of details. I described my time working in the granite quarry and in the Gusen tunnels. Telling him about how mother’s poetry and her ring kept me afloat, I choked back tears. Years of tough camp life had desensitized me to many things but it had not wiped away the sentiment I had for my family. Mendel actively listened, nodding his head and reacting to my stories with passion. His first question to me, however, was if I had seen his lovely Dorothy. When I told him that I hadn’t, he rubbed the side of his face, closing his eyes for a moment, looking deflated. Maybe I should have lied to him, telling him I had seen her and she was happy, healthy, and anxiously awaiting seeing him again. Maybe I should have told him something recent about her whereabouts to give him hope. Would a white lie have been more beneficial to him than the stone-cold truth? I don’t know.

  Following this awkward moment, Mendel expounded on his life since our separation. He told me how he had wound up in Gusen I after being removed from Mauthausen. Shortly after arriving, he ran into the very cook—a man of commendable character—we had both established a relationship with in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Upon seeing Mendel staggering about in a decrepit state, his heartstrings bled for Mendel, prompting him to help Mendel get a job in the kitchen. Although Mendel had no culinary training or interest, the man had vouched for his qualifications. As a result, Mendel had prepared the twice-daily dreadful soups in all three of the Gusen camps over the course of his enslavement. He said it wasn’t hard to learn how to slap a few rotten vegetables into a pot of simmering water; the challenge was serving his distasteful concoctions to the hungry men who he knew would not live off of them. Connections were so important in the camps. They brought about turning points for many of us, Mendel included.

  My brother spoke with a mature air about him that I had not noticed before. It was then that I realized he didn’t need me to protect him as I thought he had and for that I was thankful. He had fended for himself for nearly a year without my assistance. The boy I still viewed him as had disappeared. Every parent hopes that their children will one day grow into capable individuals who can lead their own lives, and although I was not Mendel’s parent, I viewed myself as a father figure for him. I felt proud to see that he had blossomed into an adult despite the frightful events we were living through. I couldn’t wait to kick back with him in the local gathering places back in Warsaw after we were liberated.

  Only when we flinched upon hearing a gun blast did we stop talking. Behind us, a frail prisoner who had fallen to the back of the pack had been shot in the temple. It was a sign to all of us to keep up or be killed.

  For the next six hours, the lot of us, all of us ill to some degree and basically lumbering along as motile packages of skin and bone, continued on without pausing to rest. We were in no condition to walk, let alone hike for the entire day. Thirst, hunger, and pain consumed us. Due to our low input, our output was almost nonexistent. When I had to go, I tried to keep it in as long as I could; I didn’t want my body to become dehydrated even quicker. If I’d had a container in which to collect it, I would have drank it. I tried aiming it into my hands while moving, but it leaked through my fingers before it could accumulate.

  There was no way of knowing how long our journey would last. Having learned to ration our food many years earlier, we only nibbled on our supplies. Our cans of sardines, however, provided us with intense frustration; without an instrument to pry the lids off, they remained in our pockets, adding to our agony as they weighed us down. Because of this, a few men hurled them onto the pavement in exasperation, refusing to lug them around after ineffectively clawing at them. Other prisoners were happy to pick up the discarded cans. I held onto mine, trying to devise a way to open it.

  When the moon had risen in place amongst the stars, we finally stopped walking and passed out in an abandoned barn for the night. By that time, four men had found their final resting places on the road. Without Mendel, perhaps I would have been one of them.

  When we entered the barn it smelled of old manure and hay, but once we all filed inside it reeked of bleeding feet and infection. Coughing and moaning, we nestled into the hay. Smoking and talking, the Germans sat outside around a small campfire as we slept.

  It seemed that as soon as we stopped to rest we were back on the road walking. Not all of us joined the group though; two
or three men gave up and were subsequently killed as they sat in the barn. For the rest of us, that day was similar to the previous one, except we were met with sneers and projectiles from onlookers. How the people we walked by could treat us, sickly and skeletal, in such a hurtful manner is beyond my comprehension. We did nothing malicious to them, but they felt a need to attack us. Having become accustomed to criticism over the years, we did our best to brush aside these encounters.

  As the next three days went by, Mendel and I kept each other moving along through both rainstorms and sunshine. His health, however, rapidly declined. He developed a barking cough and a burning fever. We both did our best to pretend he would be alright, but deep down we knew that he wouldn’t be able to keep up with the group’s pace for very much longer. At night when we stopped to rest, I wiped his brow with my sleeve, quietly whispering jokes so that he would keep his spirits up. He humored me by smiling even though he must have felt his life slipping away.

  As a collective unit, our row initiated an energy saving practice that we learned from the prisoners who participated in the “Death Marches” from Auschwitz. We took turns sleeping while walking. How this worked was simple: one man in the center of the row nodded off while continuing to move his legs forward automatically as the rest of the row squeezed tightly together, holding the dozing man upright. While asleep, you didn’t feel your pain or realize how exhausted you were. We let Mendel, the weakest of the row, stay in the center for longer than the rest of us. It seems like it would be impossible to execute today, but back then it somehow worked. Who knows how many lives were saved by using this method.

  Before we set out on the morning of the fifth day, a German riding on a motorcycle zipped by us and then circled back around. He got off his bike and then walked up to one of the guards, obviously angry. The two men spoke for several minutes during which time their voices grew louder and eventually ended in shouting. Unable to decipher what the argument was about, we waited in fear.

  And then we were told that we were turning back towards where we started. When we received the news, our response was not positive. No one wanted to go back to Gusen. Walking without a destination seemed more appealing than returning to that diabolical camp. What would happen to us once we returned to Gusen?

  Mendel and I were lying in an open field, the place where the whole group had spent the night, sucking the dew from blades of grass when the information reached us. Mendel immediately said “no” over and over again like he had become delusional. He tugged off his too-tight clogs, showing me a multitude of festering, flesh-invading blisters. Infected, puss-filled sores covered the bottom and top of both of his feet—evidence of their repeated exposure to damp and cold conditions. His toenails were peeled away from his skin, exposing the tender, spongy nail bed underneath. Soaked in a moist bath of sweat, he reached out and grabbed my hand, shoving a lump of paper in it, telling me to “find Dorothy and tell her I knew I wanted to marry her from the first time I laid my eyes on her.” With that, I knew that he had resigned himself to death.

  I bargained with him to stand up and continue walking. I told him that the war wouldn’t last forever; the Allies were advancing and we might soon be free. I told him how much I loved him and needed him to stick with me, but he just didn’t have the strength to battle through any more obstacles. I felt that I would surely die without him. I pleaded with him to keep fighting for the both of us. I reminded him of his dream to educate and how so many children would miss out on having a wonderful teacher if he gave up. He squeezed my hand when I mentioned teaching, but what he needed was medical attention not motivational discourse. I felt pitiful knowing that I couldn’t help him. My brother was wasting away right in front of me and I had no power to reverse his decline. Even worse, the guards were rounding up the group for our departure as he was taking his last breaths. I had to make the decision to stay with him and to hold his hand until the end, thereby solidifying my destiny, or to stand up and to join the group, thus leaving him to die alone.

  In the end, I chose life just as mother had always told me to do. I kissed Mendel on the forehead as I untangled my fingers from his, slipping the note to Dorothy into my pocket. As his arm fell into the grass, his identification bracelet slipped off his bony wrist, a sure sign to me of his imminent demise. Before I moved away from him, I stole the morsels of food he had stored in his clothing, knowing that he would not benefit from them. Had it been colder, I would have taken his clothing, too.

  Of all of the lamentable memories I have, losing my brother is the most tragic.

  I can’t believe I just walked away from him as he died.

  He didn’t even have a chance to drift off peacefully.

  As I turned around to face the group, I heard a single gunshot behind me. The sound caused my eyes to shut and my shoulders to lift. I knew that Mendel had been killed, but I couldn’t bring myself to look back at his immobile body. I felt a mix of relief, horror, sadness, and anger. Part of me was relieved that Mendel didn’t have to suffer alone, but most of me was angry that he—like the rest of us—had to suffer at all.

  Would he have survived if we weren’t mistakenly marched in the wrong direction?

  CHAPTER 46

  By the time I made my way towards the group, a guard was making his way towards me. Unable to tolerate tardiness, he knocked me over in anger, causing me to smack my face on the ground, cracking one of the lenses of my already broken frames. The frames had long since bent out of shape, but I had repaired them with pieces of discarded yarn over the years. However, once the lens shattered, my vision became distorted. My eyes took time to adjust to their new view of the world. Rather than feeling upset, I felt grateful to have kept them intact for so many years. I took the necklace from around my neck and placed the ring on my smallest finger, cupping my other hand around it to conceal it; I needed to see it to remind me what I was staying alive for. Falling into step with the rest of the group, I felt certain that my mother must still be alive somewhere.

  Attempting to keep my mind occupied, the following words came to mind as I walked along:

  I will put one foot in front of the other—

  Walking for my brother.

  Although my vision is teary and blurry,

  Although I’m going back, I will not worry.

  I will hold my head high, just like my mother.

  One step, two steps, so many steps I take as I go—

  Clomping and stomping, my frailty I will not show.

  Over the next five days, we made our way back to Gusen as the calendar flipped to May. During this time, our group thinned by dozens of men. Regrettably, during our second pass of the streets, we walked by the lifeless men who had fallen behind during our first pass; they were decomposing in the same places they had been killed. All we could do was to step around them as we walked, but not all of us had the power left to take the additional steps to avoid the bodies.

  All around us the Austrian infrastructure was collapsing as the warfront moved closer. Store windows were shattering from the blasts as the smell of gunpowder filled the air. At that moment we were all afraid. Whenever an explosion occurred so close to our group that it sent debris flying our way, we all jumped to the ground, even the guards. But the bombs weren’t the only things we were scared of; we were also fearful of the future. Since the war seemed to be in its final days, the guards were beginning to wonder what would become of them. As prisoners, we didn’t even know if the Germans would let us live to see the end of the war.

  The only bright point of the grueling march occurred when a young girl clothed in a frilly orange dress handed an apple she was holding to the man on the end of my row. She was waiting to cross the street with her mother when she saw us limping along. Her mother gazed at us meekly, sympathizing with us. I looked at her and lifted my fingers, but stopped short of waving. Their reaction to us was in contrast to the actions of all of the other people we had passed. As I heard the crisp apple being bitten into, I imagined that
I was sitting under the trees on my grandparents’ farm sinking my teeth into apple after sweet apple.

  Pining for water and struggling to continue, my mucus membranes dried out and my throat turned to cotton. My saliva vanished and it became impossible to swallow. Each night, I worked to open my can of sardines—the last of my food supply. When I finally broke through the aluminum shield with a sharp stone, I dropped the tiny fish into my mouth with satisfaction, devouring every bit of water inside the can. To this day, I haven’t eaten a fish that tastes as delicious as those sardines tasted on that day. A part of me thinks that I wasn’t able to open the can until my body truly needed the extra fuel. Had I been able to open the sardines sooner, I would have consumed them before my body desperately required them. However, my momentary satiation was suspended when the saltiness of the meal intensified my desire for water.

  When we approached the Gusen complex, the guards pushed us onwards until we arrived at Mauthausen. Once we were inside the gates, they wandered off, looking for the other soldiers. So much had changed since I had last been in the camp. A colony of tents filled the surrounding area, flooding the adjoining fields with masses of prisoners. Every patch of earth was littered with something: bodies, feces, tents, men, and so forth. Roughly ten thousand corpses filled a gigantic, uncovered hole, many of them causalities from the recent typhus epidemic.