This must be it, I thought. This is the end! I want to live, I want to live!
In the physician’s office we were told to strip to the waist. I removed the little sack from my neck, with the piece of broken glass and charred wood that Arthur and I gathered from our Temple the day before he left Bielitz. It might show as a dark spot on my chest. I kept the sack in my hand.
“Arthur,” I whispered, “be with me, I am so afraid.”
I shivered in the summer heat. Slowly the line crept forward.
“Your name?” a female voice asked.
“Gerda Weissmann.” My voice sounded high and unnatural. I heard it trail off in the dark room and there was the sound of the pencil scratching over the paper, checking my name.
As in a dream, I stepped onto a platform. From far away I heard the doctor’s voice directing me how to stand. The cold plate touching my bare breast roused a familiar sensation of horror, reminding me of the time when the SS man had pointed his gun at my chest, demanding to know where Papa was. I closed my eyes. I held my lids tightly shut. There was the clicking of a switch, then another.
I waited in another line while my plate was developed. Why did it take so long? Then I heard the doctor snap. “Clear!”
I saw him pointing at me. “Clear! Clear!” he said, pointing to others.
We returned to camp. Ilse was sitting on the bunk, her face white.
“Ilse!” I called frantically.
She jumped up.
“Are you all right?” she whispered hoarsely.
I nodded. “And you?”
She nodded too.
We embraced. We had a lease on life for another two months!
A week later the tubercular girls departed. There was one among them whom I had gotten to know fairly well. I went to see her before she left. We embraced, there was nothing to say. What does one say to someone who knows that in a few days she won’t be alive any more?
It is often said that it is best that we cannot know the future, but this case was an exception. About two years later, when I was working in Munich, I was in the German Museum, looking through some lists of refugees that were published there daily, when I heard a gay voice call to me.
“Isn’t that Gerda? It’s me, not my ghost,” said a rosy girl in a blue sweater.
As she came closer, I remembered our sad farewell in Grünberg before she had left for Auschwitz. As she embraced me, we both started to cry. Then she told me what had happened. When her group reached Auschwitz they were taken to the death house, but traffic was heavy there. Things were so busy, they had to wait for death. As she sat on the ground she idly dug into the soil of which she was soon to become a part. The gesture was her salvation, for she unearthed a handful of gems. To what forgotten soul had they belonged?
The girl was momentarily dazed. Then she ran up to an SS guard–what had she to lose? “Help me,” she pleaded, and gave him the bundle. “I want to live.”
Somehow he got her and two other girls from her group places to work in the kitchen. That parcel of gems saved three lives, even though the guard could have taken the gift and refused to help the girls. When she finished her story, I asked the girl about her lungs.
She smiled. “That is another strange story. I went to a number of doctors, but they found nothing wrong. Perhaps that is another miracle, or perhaps the doctor in Grünberg made a mistake.”
Whatever the explanation was, the girl had been given back her life.
As the hot summer wore on, conditions in Grünberg became worse. Working hours grew longer; there was less food; the transports to Auschwitz were more frequent.
For a time I worked on the night shift. Here I became friendly with Liesel Stepper. We talked many hours in the daytime when we should have slept. She told me she was in love with a boy from Vienna, and though she had not heard from him in years, she thought of him constantly. She was relatively free of bitterness. Together we dreamed of the wonderful life we should have when the war would be over.
One day a heavy summer rain fell; thunder and lightning tore the sky. I woke and saw Liesel lying motionless on her bunk, her eyes wide open. I called her.
She turned slowly toward me. “I will put on the red raincoat,” she said. “No, the blue one is better for today. I will go out into the garden; the grass will be wet. I will pick up the apples that the storm blew down. It tastes wonderful, that cold wet apple. But I better hurry, I have an appointment later.”
“With the dressmaker?” I interrupted, falling in with her mood.
We played the game to perfection.
One morning in September I was returning to camp from the factory, looking forward to some sleep. My head constantly felt heavy and dull, my legs hurt from running all night after the devilish spinning machine.
Suddenly, when our guard had his head turned, a piece of bread was thrown over the fence into the courtyard. The girl ahead of me quickly picked up the bread and as she did, I heard her faint, terror-stricken voice whisper, “Don’t give me away!”
The SS man saw the incident. He demanded to know who threw the bread. We knew there would be a penalty–head-shaving, beating, or worse. One by one we were questioned.
“I don’t know,” was each answer.
Then the husky SS guard with his heavy arm would hit the tired face, again and again. I was frightened. I would rather have gone without food, or worked twenty-four hours straight through, than bear physical punishment.
But my turn came, and I muttered an exhausted, “I don’t know.”
I felt a heavy blow over my eyes.
“Who?” he demanded.
“I don’t know,” I repeated.
Another blow fell, deafening my left ear. I swayed and staggered toward the building. When I finally reached my bunk I sat there without undressing. My face was puffed and bruised, my skin and lips were moist with blood. I must have cried without knowing it.
Thirty girls were beaten that morning. I don’t know what the blows did to the others, but they shattered the wall of strength that I had built for myself. Neither propaganda talks, designed to break our morale, nor hunger, nor work, no matter how hard, had affected my resistance as had the brutal blows of that guard.
If only they don’t touch my flesh, I can survive, I thought.
Survive? All of a sudden it did not seem worth while. All the suffering and agony, for what? How could we be free when they would kill us first? How much longer would it last? It was now September, 1944–five years since the Germans had taken Bielitz–and there was still no end in sight.
How long could we go on? When would it be my turn to go to Auschwitz? How many more X-ray examinations could I pass before I would be doomed?
Ilse, who worked on the day shift, came back at noon. She walked quietly past my bunk, thinking I was asleep. I called her. When she turned around she was smiling. I hid my bruised face under the blanket. She turned away from me so that I could not see what she was doing, and dug into her pocket.
“I brought you a present!” she announced triumphantly.
There, on a fresh leaf, was one red, slightly mashed raspberry!
As I sat up, she stared at my face. The raspberry rolled under the bunk. I crawled under to get it. I ate it slowly, dust and all; its sweet juice mingled with the saltiness on my lips.
A few days later fortune smiled at me. The incredible happened.
Suse Kunz and I were chosen for different work. There was an old German in the spinning room who weighed the finished crates of yarn, recorded the weights in a ledger, and put each crate on a conveyor belt which carried it to storage. One day we noticed that the crates remained piled up at the end of the row of machines; the man who kept the production records had not come. The Obermeister, or head foreman, went from machine to machine several times that day. In the afternoon he called Suse and me, and asked whether we could write. We both said we could.
“Now,” he said, shaking a bony finger, “that requires thinking; I don’t know if you
would be able to do it.”
I wondered if he wanted to hurt us, or if he really thought that we were some type of animal. He showed us the ledger columns in which each machine was listed by number, with spaces to note the weight of material each machine produced. Then he made us enter a few figures.
“Lightly,” he cautioned, “so we can erase it, in case of error. Think,” he repeated. “Think!”
With serious faces, we both thought. We almost burst into laughter. We passed the tests well, and were told that one of us would work days, the other nights. The foreman then took us to his office and gave us each a folded piece of paper.
“Give them to the Lagerführerin,” he said.
Out of sight, we looked at the messages. We had been given hard-labor cards, entitling each of us to an extra bowl of food daily. An extra bowl–we were rich! That meant that Ilse and I would not be hungry any more and it meant the same for Suse and Liesel.
The work was very hard. We had to lift the heavy crates and carefully place them on the running belt; a crooked crate might tangle with the yarn or cause congestion, and this would have meant sabotage. But I liked the work. I was not confined to one machine. Instead, I went all over the vast halls. Other workers envied me, and stared when they saw me walking around with the ledger.
It was interesting to walk through the spinning halls. Huge machines tore the raw materials to shreds. These shreds were beaten into a loose, cotton-like substance that a carding machine then combed into loose strips that could be spun. Each spinning hall had its own carding machine.
During the long hours of the autumn nights, while the machines hummed busily and the sleepwalking skeletons ran after the threads, I walked through the plant, weighing the heavy crates, entering the amounts of yarn that helped Germany’s economy–helped Germany fight us.
Deliveries of old clothes arrived daily from Auschwitz to be shredded up and converted into yarn. A number of the girls who ran the shredding machines insisted that they had recognized their parents’ clothes. We had heard that in Auschwitz prisoners were told to undress for showers; that they were then handed bread rations and sent into the “showers”–only when the vents opened it was not water but gas.
Once as I passed the shredder I thought I saw Mama’s coat. I turned away, praying, then forced myself to look again. It was just a black coat. It could have been anybody’s–hundreds of people wore black coats.
And as always when in despair, I started to think of my homecoming. I placed and replaced details upon details, playing with the fragments of my dreams. Who would come home first? I always wished that I should come last–walk into the house to find them all there. At times, I thought I would reach home late at night. The house would be dark. I would not wake them. I would go to the garden and wait. I would watch the sun rise. Then I would approach the house. Mama would be wearing her flowered housecoat. No, she wouldn’t–we had given it away for a pound of margarine and a loaf of bread. Well, anyway, breakfast would be on the table. Arthur wouldn’t be there and Mama would say to me, “Go wake Arthur, you know he never gets down in time.”
I would run up the stairs. My brother’s hair would be tousled, as it always was in the morning. “Arthur,” I would whisper. He would mutter something and turn over and pretend to go back to sleep. Then, realizing I had come back, he would sit up with wide-open eyes, stretching out his arms. It would be as it had always been, from the time when I had brought him my book of fairy tales to read. He had read them to me for years before I learned to read. And we would come downstairs together, holding hands as we had done when we were small, so I should not stumble. We would come down, and Papa and Mama would be holding hands too. We would approach Papa for benediction, as we had done as children. We both would have to bow, for we had gotten so tall. And Papa would kiss the Bible even as his father had before him, when he returned from Siberia. And Papa would speak the words of Jacob: “I had not thought to see your face again, but God …”
The night wore on. The horizon became lighter. Another day was coming to Grünberg. The machines seemed to go faster. The shredder rolled louder, tearing to bits the clothes from Auschwitz–and I held in my heart the picture of my homecoming.
Chapter 11
ON THE LAST DAY OF NOVEMBER WE DIDN’T MARCH TO WORK. I was now on the day shift and after the morning roll call, for which we usually assembled shortly before 5:00 A.M., we were kept standing in the cold courtyard for several hours. Finally two open trucks drove through the gates, halted, and thirty or forty young women in smart, trim SS uniforms dismounted and waited in the outer yard.
Then came a staff car. A few high-ranking officers got out and went into the building that housed us. Our names were called in alphabetical groups. Those who were called went in but did not come out again. Panic mounted. We could not imagine what was going on inside and of course we assumed the worst. The morning wore on. Around noon Ilse’s name–Kleinzähler–was called. She embraced me, her eyes filled with tears.
“Stop it, Ilse!” I snapped. “Stop it, or I will go crazy. Nothing will happen!”
But I was not at all sure. Inwardly I was afraid, and when Ilse was gone, I nearly gave way. The thought that something was happening to Ilse and not to me at the same time drove me into a frenzy. The hours until I was called in the late afternoon seemed endless.
I was among the last twenty-five girls. We were told to undress completely. I was rebellious and furious, but we all did as we were told. We were then marched into the dining hall. I clenched my fists and stood erect.
The army officers and the SS women were seated at a long table. In the center of the floor was a circle drawn with chalk. I felt as if I were stepping on hot coals as I stepped into the circle. My body burned. I closed my eyes to blot out their staring.
I was given a number–895A–and told to dress and go to my bunk. When I got there I was relieved to see Ilse. No one was yet sure of the meaning of the examination.
The officers departed and the SS women took charge of the camp; they were everywhere and watched us every moment. In time rumors began to circulate: it was said that there were many, many sick and wounded soldiers who needed the amusement that pretty and healthy girls could provide.
“Never,” I vowed. “Rather tuberculosis and Auschwitz than that!”
The situation led to my discovering that one of the girls from Sosnowitz had some poison and that she was willing to sell some of it for a price.
I wanted that poison. I had no money, but I still had the diamond and pearl pendant Mama had sewn into the padding of my coat. With Ilse on the lookout for intruders I went to my bunk and carefully removed the pendant from my coat. I kissed it quickly, remembering how well it had looked on Mama’s throat. Then I went in search of the girl with the poison. After some haggling, I surrendered the pendant for two tiny, white flat packets. One I gave to Ilse. We folded them in cotton padding and inserted them in our shoe linings. My ski boot felt uncomfortable at first, but after a short time I was hardly aware of the packet.
Two weeks passed and nothing happened. Nobody was called out or sent away and we were not taken to be X-rayed. Nothing much changed except that we were now awakened at 4:00 A.M. instead of 5:00 and made to stand a long Appell in the courtyard before going to work. The SS women counted us over and over. Each morning the process became more and more drawn out until they started to wake us half an hour earlier. It was bitterly cold during those morning hours.
One morning in December there was snow on the ground when we awoke. Winter was here again.
A few days later there were several air-raid alarms. They were the first we experienced. The German workers ran for shelter while we stayed in the factory with the current turned off and the machines idle. We tried hard not to look too pleased. Then we were told that we must go to the shelter when the alarm sounded. Apparently nobody wanted to risk his skin watching us.
The sirens began to howl more and more frequently. The Germans threw frightened glances t
oward the sky and hatefully looked at us. Let them worry now, we gloated. Let them sit on the charred remains of their homes. Let them see their families killed. Then will they shout “Heil Hitler!”?
“It’s coming,” whispered my heart. “Their downfall is coming!” But I was not naïve. I knew that it would not come without increased suffering on our part.
Christmas passed. There was no Christmas spirit that year. The new year came–the year of 1945.
In January the sirens blew almost daily. Less and less production was entered into the books. At noon one day the electricity went off. The supervisors stood talking excitedly. The SS women took us back to camp. Something drastic had happened. Perhaps the war was over.
That night we were ordered to take all our belongings and go into the dining hall. The door to our sleeping quarters was barricaded. After being given food we huddled together, waiting.
It was snowing heavily. After a time we heard the courtyard gates burst open. Every heart beat faster in expectation. There were shrieks and screams and cries outside. We could hear running feet and shouting from the other side of the barricaded doors. Those of us who sat next to the doors started calling to the newcomers in our sleeping quarters.
They were Jewish girls. They had come from another camp and had been walking for five days. Now we were to join them. They thought we were going to Oranienburg, a concentration camp like Auschwitz, to be gassed. Auschwitz, they said, had been captured by the Russians, who had reconquered Poland and were crossing the German frontier. The English and Americans were invading Germany from the West. Would a miracle happen before we reached the gas chambers?
And so the last stretch of the war began. Not in peaceful Bolkenhain, not in the coal cars of Marzdorf, the night shifts of Landeshut. Nor were we to endure it in tuberculosis-ridden Grünberg. I was certain that we would meet freedom somewhere in the open, and that we would meet it soon.
“You are crazy!” Suse said. “We will never see the liberation, for they will see to it. They would leave us here if they did not want us killed.”
All But My Life Page 18
