Four Scraps of Bread

by Hollander-Lafon, Magda; Fuller, Anthony T. ;

  In no other country was the Final Solution carried out with such conscious inhumanity and speed. It should also be pointed out that the political decision makers had at their disposal all the tools of the state—police and security forces—without which the deportation en masse of 437,403 Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau between May 15 and July 9, 1944, would not have been possible.

  Once the decisions were made, local police began their raids, starting with the region where the Hollanders lived. This region was the closest to the Polish border and to the advancing Red Army troops. Starting on April 16, Jews from sixty villages near Nyíregyháza were arrested and taken to houses identified as belonging to members of the Jewish community, which constituted the town’s ghetto. On April 27, it was the turn of the Jewish inhabitants of Nyíregyháza. Esther, Magda, and Irene were betrayed by neighbors, which was a common practice; the Gestapo and the Hungarian police registered more than thirty-five thousand such reports. Magda’s father, Adolf, was not there when they were arrested. (Magda later learned that he had died in the ghetto “hospital” before his deportation.) Before they left, Magda saw neighborhood residents hurry into her family’s home to get their hands on what the Hollanders had had to leave behind.

  Between fifteen thousand and seventeen thousand Jews remained concentrated in a few homes for about ten days—a very visible enclave right in the center of town, under police guard. There might have been twelve to fourteen people per room. They were then rounded up in other places, which they walked to while carrying their bags and being abused. Magda and her mother and sister were penned in Harangod-Birke, a locality with three large hay barns. Families would sleep on the ground. The police continued to search them so that they could steal from them.

  After a few days, the Jews set off once more for Nagykálló station, about 9 miles away. Weakened by hunger and ill treatment, they were forced into cattle wagons big enough for forty-five to fifty people but which ninety, one hundred, or even more had to get into. The police repeated as they pushed them, “Don’t worry, you are going to work.” And they believed it. The journey in darkness lasted three days. There was a bucket that served as a latrine, a water can, and a little food for some of them. The process of extermination had already begun.

  Starting in spring 1944, anticipating the arrival of between twelve thousand and fourteen thousand Hungarian Jews each day, the commandant of the Birkenau camp had had the railroad extended up to 200 yards from the crematorium and quadrupled the number of special commandoes for the gas chambers. At the end of May 1944, Magda’s convoy arrived at the so-called Hungarian unloading ramp in the bitter cold of a dark, early morning. Some deportees were assigned to organize the arrivals. They knew what was going on. Risking his life, one of these prisoners passed between the rows several times and Magda heard him murmuring without moving his lips: “You are eighteen years old, you are eighteen years old …”

  First, the adults were separated into two rows, the men in one and the women in the other. According to their gender, the children remained with one of their parents, to avoid any attempts at resistance, and to ensure as much calm as possible. Then the selection proper would begin: those who would go into the camp sent to the right, and those who would be gassed immediately sent to the left. Joseph Mengele11 participated in the selection process for Magda’s convoy. When he asked her age, she replied, “Eighteen years old.” He pointed to the right with his cane. Esther and Irene went to the left.

  Those who were “fit for work” were taken to the “sauna.” On the way in there was a round tray on which the women had to put whatever they still had in their possession. In it Magda placed photos of her family. The women were pushed into a room. They were shaved with brutal handling and blunt tools. In the following room was the shower, where a few drops of water, now icy, now scalding, would fall, with no soap or washcloth to get rid of the dirt, the sweat, and the smell of the wagons. Then finally disinfection by puffs of burning, irritating white powder.

  A beige smock, more or less in the right size, was then thrown at the still wet prisoners. By the time they left this building the process of dehumanization had begun. Another step should have been getting a tattoo. But like some other Hungarians, Magda was not tattooed, perhaps because they were destined to be gassed quickly, or perhaps to be sent as laborers to other camps.

  The female prisoners ended up in a group of barracks known as “quarantine.” Completely lost, yet sure they were in a work camp, they wondered where their loved ones were, and questioned the Blockälteste.12 The woman pointed toward the chimneys above the ovens. “Look over there.” Magda saw the smoke and flames but did not understand. “Look, your mother and your sister are already in there …”

  In quarantine, Magda learned the rules that governed the deadly logic of the concentration camp: hunger, violence by the commandants, thefts, endless roll calls in the sun by rows of five, and the exhausted bodies collapsing. After a couple of weeks Magda was transferred to Lager BIIc, known as the “Hungarian women’s camp.” Almost a thousand deportees were crammed into these blocks. At night between six and ten bodies had to find room on each bed frame.

  During the day they had to work. Magda had to join several work groups: she broke rocks, was ordered to pick up dead bodies from around the barracks, and she carted human ashes—a job normally reserved for men. When about forty women were up for selection Magda was assigned to Crematorium IV, where she had to shovel ashes into a cart, which she then pushed to a nearby lake. It was necessary to go into the water in order to tip out the contents. Several times Magda thought she would drown. From the lake she saw Ditch V, where bodies were burning. The smoke was thick and the smell unbearable. Magda witnessed the worst horrors; like the Sonderkommandos,13 she was never meant to survive.

  In this camp she experienced the violence of Edwige, commandant of Block VIII, and caught the eye of Irma Grese, monitor-in-chief, who was known for her sadism and perversity. It was also there that she received four scraps of moldy bread from a “muslim” (a term used in the camps to indicate a detainee who was worn out, emaciated, and hovering near death) and at the same time a message that later inspired her testimony.

  Rumors about Lager BIIc being eliminated circulated regularly, but surged when the Gypsy camp was liquidated on the night of August 2, 1944. During a roll call on the morning of August 20, 1944, Magda left the row she was in, feeling it was destined for the gas chambers, given the sorry state of the prisoners’ backs and feet, which she had learned to “read.” She managed to slip into the next row. Hence she found herself in a group of “forced laborers” destined for Walldorf,14 near Frankfurt in Germany. Walldorf was part of the vast network of concentration camps that had been developed across Germany since the beginning of the war, and which bore a significant share of the war effort. In order to meet the insatiable demands of the German arms industry, Auschwitz-Birkenau had become a gigantic pool of labor.

  The journey lasted three days. On August 22, the seventeen hundred Hungarian Jewish women “ordered” from Birkenau arrived on the outskirts of Frankfurt at a work camp placed under the command of Natzweiler concentration camp.

  The project assigned to this camp was enormous. It was led by the Todt organization—the construction department of the Arms Ministry—and had been awarded to the Züblin firm. It involved building a concrete runway from which the Messerschmitt Me 262 could take off. This was the first jet aircraft and was set to be the flagship of the Führer’s army. Other infrastructure projects were also planned: a railroad to bring equipment to the airport; areas in the forest to park the aircraft, which would also be camouflaged so as not to be seen by Allied air forces; and two secondary airstrips at the edge of the woods with a road connecting them. The women were registered when they arrived. Magda was the 785th detainee, with the number 27787.

  At Walldorf, Magda nailed ties along the railroad. It was where she got to know the “good guard,” who was from Ukraine. Starting in October 1944 the airport wa
s regularly bombed. With the Allies progressing on the Western Front, Walldorf was closed on November 23. Officially, only six deaths were recorded there. However, it would appear that some 1,650 of the women detained were moved to Ravensbrück concentration camp. In reality then, fifty women probably died.

  They arrived around November 27. Magda must have been registered, but her number is unknown, as the SS destroyed more than half of their archives in April 1945. The Hungarian women were sent direct from the cattle wagons into the hell of Ravensbrück—a military tent that the commandant had had set up between two wooden barracks in August 1944 to deal with the influx of arrivals to a camp that was already overcrowded. Polish women from the Warsaw ghetto, Hungarian women evacuated from Auschwitz, some French women—more than three thousand were held there, sometimes with children, sleeping right on the ground with no way to protect themselves from the intense cold, nor even the most rudimentary comfort. Epidemics raged, as did madness. Magda stayed there for ten days before she was transferred to a wooden barrack, where her main activity was the battle against lice. Only once was she sent to work, in a sand yard.

  During a roll call on December 19, Magda switched rows once again and thus left for another work camp in southern Silesia: Zillertal. Based in the small industrial town of Erdmannsdorf, this camp had been active since the autumn of 1940. Principally a forced labor camp for Jews, about 150 Jewish women from Poland worked there in a weaving factory under the command of the Schmelt organization,15 on behalf of the Erdmannsdorfer Leinenfabrik company. In July, 200 Hungarian Jewish women from Auschwitz had arrived, and 150 more at the beginning of December 1944. With Magda’s convoy, consisting of about 50 detainees, the total population of the camp approached 500 people. Offloaded around December 24, the women were, as ever, counted and recounted. Conditions of survival were less extreme than in Birkenau: there was a water faucet in the huts, and one bed per person. The trip of about two miles between the camp and the factory was done on foot, twice a day, in the snow. The noise in the factory was deafening; the shuttles had to be thrown back and forth relentlessly. Monitored and abused, the forced laborers produced material for military uniforms.

  However, with the Soviet army now at the borders of the Reich, the immense concentration camps had to be hastily evacuated to places deeper inside Germany so that the deportees could continue to “support” the war effort of a rapidly crumbling empire. On February 17, the women held at Zillertal were separated into two groups: about two hundred were transferred 45 miles away to Gablonz,16 another external camp, and the remaining three hundred, including Magda, went to Morchenstern, on the other side of the Giant Mountains.17

  In the depths of winter these woman walked almost 40 miles through the mountains at a rate of about 6–7.5 miles per day, barely clothed and with their blankets on their backs. Without food, they ate snow. One week later the column arrived at the destination set by the SS leaders: Morchenstern, one of the Gross-Rosen concentration camps, in the Sudeten mountains. The women were sent to work at Iserwerke, a factory producing parts for the Me 262 fighter. However, as the Allies advanced farther toward the heart of Germany, the bombing raids intensified. As a result, on March 12, the Iserwerke equipment and deportees were transferred to the Mittelbau area.

  On Thursday, March 15, 1945, the train arrived in Nordhausen, a medium-size industrial town in northern Thuringia. Hungry, thirsty, and exhausted, 294 women stumbled out of the wagons. They were registered as “Hungarian Jews,” and the reference number F-150 was assigned to Magda. Next they walked to the village of Grosswerther,18 which had become a totally improvised satellite camp, using the barns of the village’s two inns. The SS held the women prisoner there for more than three weeks. Around thirty women, including Magda, were sent several times to one of the underground factories in Nordhausen, which was the nerve center of the Reich’s final war effort. They were supposed to make nails for the production of A4 airplanes, but the women spread word to sabotage the work.

  After Allied aircraft bombed Nordhausen, the women were abandoned in the rooms of the inns. On the morning of April 4, the SS lined them up for another convoy. They journeyed eleven miles to the town of Bleicherode,19 where they slept on the floor of a schoolhouse. The next day they walked eight miles to Bischofferode.

  The situation was becoming more and more confused. Some women set off again by truck, while others continued on foot, including Magda, who, along with four other Hungarian women, managed to leave the column and hide in the woods. They spent six days there. By chance, on April 12 an American tank stopped in the surroundings. One of the women stepped out, followed by the other four, skeletonlike and ravaged by parasites. Before continuing on their way, the soldiers entrusted the women to some farmers with orders to feed and dress them, and let them wash. The group was then taken to a so-called transit camp, almost certainly within Dora or one of the other camps of the complex.

  After three weeks in this displaced persons camp, Magda and her four compatriots—not one of them wishing to return to Hungary, where no one was waiting for them—managed to board a train they believed was heading to France, the country that in their minds was the land of their freedom. However, they got off the train in Namur, a major city in the French-speaking part of Belgium, drawn by the smell of bread and by the reception that resistance fighters were enjoying there. Once they were identified as Jewish, they were given to an American rabbi, probably from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Refugee Aid organization. Suffering from tuberculosis, Magda was treated in the town’s hospital. The rabbi then made a house available to the five survivors. Magda stayed there from May to September 1945.

  She studied to become a childhood educator and learned French. For almost ten years she lived and worked in Belgium, and was subjected to regular inquiries by the immigration police, with whom she had to renew her claim for a residence permit many times.

  Magda is the only survivor from her family, and one of the few from her home town or, more broadly, the Hungarian Jewish community: in 46 days and 147 convoys, 437,403 people were deported. Of them, 350,000 were murdered on arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau …

  NOTES

  Notes to the Text

  1. Auschwitz was one of the Nazis’ principal concentration camps. The complex was located in an occupied area of Poland, and approximately 1.1 million prisoners—90 percent of them Jewish—were killed there starting in September 1941.

  2. Ravensbrück was a women’s concentration camp located just over 50 miles north of Berlin. Approximately 50,000 prisoners, out of at least 130,000 who passed through the camp at some point during World War II, died there.

  3. This is a reference to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, which was established in 1943 to provide labor for a munitions factory on the outskirts of Nordhausen, a city in central Germany, approximately half way between Berlin and Cologne.

  4. Zillertal, near Erdmannsdorf in southwestern Poland, was one of the Gross-Rosen concentration camps.

  5. The Schutzstaffel, or “defense corps,” was an elite Nazi paramilitary organization.

  6. Birkenau was one of the main elements of the Auschwitz complex. It was a combined concentration/extermination camp.

  7. Bischofferode is a city in central Germany, west of Nordhausen.

  8. Namur is a large city in southern Belgium, the capital of the French-speaking area.

  9. The Paths of Time was published in 1977 by Éditions ouvrières, with a preface by Roger Ikor. This new version has been revised and corrected by the author.

  10. Darquier de Pellepoix was commissioner for Jewish affairs in the pro-Nazi collaborationist government of Vichy France. He made these comments in a notorious interview given to L’Express magazine in 1978.

  Notes to the Historical Note

  11. Only the SS camp physicians (Lagerärzte) were authorized to oversee the selection process, which they referred to as “platform service.” Joseph Mengele, SS physician for the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp,
frequently carried out the selection, sorting the Häftlinge (fit for work) from the non-Häftlinge. He was also guilty of numerous pseudomedical experiments.

  12. The most senior resident of the block.

  13. Groups of detainees responsible for operating the crematoria and destined to be put to death.

  14. Walldorf was one of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camps. It operated in late 1944.

  15. The Schmelt organization was a network of 177 labor camps in western Poland. Conditions were less extreme there than in other camps, but the organization was absorbed by Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen in 1943.

  16. Gablonz was one of the Gross-Rosen concentration camps, located in today’s Czech Republic.

  17. The Giant Mountains, known as the Riesengebirge in German, straddle the present-day border between Poland and the Czech Republic.

  18. Grosswerther is a village approximately 3 miles southwest of Nordhausen.

  19. Bleicherode is a small town to the west of Nordhausen.

  For many years, Magda Hollander-Lafon has shared her experiences with thousands of high-school students. First published in French in 2012 as Quatre petits bouts de pain, Hollander-Lafon’s book has won two prestigious literary awards in France, including the 2012 Panorama-La Procure prize for books on spirituality. It has been translated into six languages and now into English.

  ANTHONY T. FULLER has extensive experience translating literature as well as political and current affairs documents. He founded and was the first president from 2005 to 2012 of the Princeton, New Jersey, chapter of the Alliance Française, an international grouping of French-language educational and cultural institutions.