Karolina's Twins

by Ronald H. Balson

  “‘For days?’

  “‘Regrettably so. But for you, there are only fifty miles to go and only forty people in your car. Remember, when you get there, look strong and do not cause trouble. Survival, it’s all about survival.’”

  “Just as Colonel Müller had said,” noted Catherine.

  Lena lifted her eyebrows and nodded. “You have to keep telling yourself; you can get through this. You can do it. It became my mantra. ‘You can do this.’ You claw, you fight. If you give up, you become another statistic.

  “When the time came, my group was loaded into the last car. It was an empty wooden boxcar with no openings. There were two buckets inside, which a guard removed. Forty of us filed into the car and the guard returned with the two buckets. One of them had cloudy water and a ladle. The other was quite distinctly the receptacle for human waste. It had been emptied but not cleaned. The door was shut and locked, leaving us all in a dark, humid container.

  “With a jerk and a snap, the car lurched forward, knocking some us off our feet and spilling some of the drinking water through the cracks in the floor. The excrement bucket tipped over, but no one had used it yet. There was very little air in the car. I quickly got the sense of why the people in the forward cars were screaming.

  “The trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau took less than three hours. Thankfully, none of us needed to drink the remaining foul water or relieve ourselves in the bucket. We had ample room to sit on the floor. No one died and no one convulsed. We rode in silence. Compared to the other cars on our train, we were the fortunate ones. The trip was dark, quiet and relatively peaceful. The arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau was anything but.

  “The doors were pulled open and bright sunlight poured in, temporarily blinding us. The scene on the platform below was a frontal assault on all of our senses. Two trains, sitting side by side on parallel tracks, were unloading passengers simultaneously. Thousands of prisoners alighting from dozens of boxcars. Soldiers were screaming, dogs were barking, people whose legs were unsteady from the cramped trip were falling down and were being trampled. The sonderkommandos—inmates in blue-and-gray-striped uniforms who served as lackeys to the SS—were herding people into two lines, kicking and swinging sticks and batons. ‘Raus, raus,’ they shouted, pulling people, dead and alive, from the boxcars. Dozens of armed guards—the rank and file Schutzstaffel—stood on the perimeter with rifles at the ready.

  “Women were shoved into one line and men into another. Loose children were running, looking for their parents. Women shouted for their separated sons, men shouted for their wives. Names. I heard so many yell names. ‘Selma, where are you?’ ‘Nina.’ ‘Maurice.’

  “People kept trying to hold onto their suitcases and their duffels, but the sonderkommandos kept telling them that all the luggage would be sorted and delivered to them later that night. ‘Don’t worry about your belongings, just get into line and we’ll bring your bags to you later.’

  “‘Men to the left, women to the right. Five across. Men to the left, women to the right. March straight ahead. Keep moving.’

  “It was perfectly orchestrated chaos. If it wasn’t the blinding sunlight, or the abusive sonderkommandos, or the shouting, or the dogs, then it was the stench. As soon as you stepped down from the boxcar, this horrible, rancid smell overpowered you. I’d never smelled anything like that before, and I can’t even give you a comparison. But it was obviously coming from the four chimneys.

  “At the front of each line were the SS officers. They were elegantly dressed in their uniforms. Shiny black boots and belts. Hats square upon their heads. They were the selectors. They’d look at you and point. You go this way, you go that way. You go to the right, you to the left. Dispassionate, indifferent, impassive SS officers, occasionally joking among themselves. Passing the time until their shift was done. Each person was examined for a few seconds, like a grocery shopper looking through a bin for the best head of lettuce. Point to the left, point to the right. No discussion. No appeal. They were sorting people as if they were sorting mail, and with just as little emotion.

  “As we shuffled forward, the woman in front of me, thin and sickly, kept pinching her cheeks, hard, twisting, trying to get color into them. When she arrived at the front, she smiled and puffed out her chest. ‘Links!’ the SS officer barked, meaning you go to the left. Then he looked at me. ‘Rechts.’ You go to the right. There were fewer women on the right; most of the women in line went to the left. My group headed south toward the women’s barracks. The line on the left headed west toward the chimneys. Almost all of the Hungarians who came on the train were sent to the left and were immediately taken to buildings I later learned were gas chambers.”

  Catherine looked confused. “All the Hungarians?”

  “Hungary, as you may know, was an ally of Germany, but all during the war, Hungary’s prime minister refused to deport their Jews to the camps. It wasn’t until the spring of 1944, when German troops occupied Hungary, that transports of Jews to Auschwitz began. The week I arrived, eighteen trains of Hungarian Jews were unloaded, and nine out of ten prisoners were sent directly to the gas chambers. They weren’t registered, they weren’t numbered. They filed directly into disrobing rooms and then to the gas chambers. Over four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews were murdered by poison gas between May and July, 1944.

  “As for me, Marek was right, I was selected for labor and marched with other women to be processed. We were each issued a card with our camp registration number. Then we were taken to the barbers, who cut off our hair and shaved our heads and our bodies. All body hair was removed. No lotion, of course. All of us suffered razor burn, nicks and cuts. Naked, we were marched to the showers and sprayed with some stinging disinfectant that burned everywhere that the sharp razors had been. Next, we were all issued striped uniforms and headscarves. My uniform had a yellow triangle stitched on the left pocket pointing down, and a red triangle on top of it pointing up. When they were layered, they looked like a Jewish star. Yellow signified I was a Jewish prisoner; red signified a political prisoner.

  “Next, they took us to be photographed. We were asked for our names, our addresses and our next of kin. At that point, I broke down, because I had to answer ‘none.’ Finally, we stood in a line and stepped forward to a table, where my left arm was painfully tattooed with a needle and some black liquid. From then on, my forearm would identify me as a numbered piece of German inventory. I ceased being a human being with a name. With my insignia uniform, my shaven head and my numbered tattoo, I had officially been dehumanized.”

  Lena pulled back the sleeve on her left arm. There, on the outside of her forearm was the identification—A18943. Catherine swallowed hard.

  “After registration, we were all taken to barracks. When I first stepped off the train and looked at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I saw rows and rows of long, wooden barracks over acres of property. As far as the eye could see. Birkenau’s barracks were all identical, patterned after horse stables, and shipped prefabricated from Germany. Inside, against each long wall, were three levels of wooden shelving—three-tiered sleeping bunks where seven to eight hundred inmates slept. Eight to a bunk. At its height, Birkenau housed ninety thousand prisoners.

  “But that’s not where they put me. There was an older section to the left with brick barracks, known as sector B1, and that’s where I was assigned. Inside my building there were sixty partitions, each with three levels, for a total of one hundred and eighty sleeping spaces. Nothing more than cubbyholes. Each one was about five feet wide. In each cubbyhole, four women squeezed in on a bed of loose straw. A total of seven hundred and twenty women were housed in my building. One toilet.

  “I entered the building and looked around for an available sleeping place, a partition with only three women. As I walked down the aisle, I received unwelcome stares. If I stopped before a space that had only three women, they glared at me defiantly and shook their heads, and I kept walking. I walked up and down the same aisles two or three times. Nobody wanted me
. As much as I had told myself, ‘Keep going, you can do this,’ I was ready to throw in the towel. I cried. Enough was enough. What more could be heaped on my back? My own people had turned against me and didn’t want me. I was truly at the end of the road. Finally, a young woman said, ‘We have room for you.’

  “I climbed into the bottom tier, with a concrete floor, and tried to make myself as small as possible, but as you can see, I am not a small woman. ‘I’m Chaya,’ said the young woman. ‘Don’t think unkindly of the others; most of them are very nice. It’s just that they would rather sleep three rather than four in their bunk. I’ll help you get acquainted.’” Lena paused and wiped a tear. “Chaya was a beautiful woman.”

  Catherine smiled sympathetically and set a box of tissues on the table. “Tell me about Chaya. What was her full name? What did she look like?”

  “Ha. What did any of us look like? Heads shaven, skin and bones, no makeup, pasty white complexions, sores from biting bugs. Some of us had lost teeth; the rest were yellowed. We saw beauty in a different way. A deeper way. Chaya Aronovich was a beautiful person. She took the time to befriend me and teach me the ropes.

  “I must admit that I was a bit standoffish at first. I didn’t want to get close to her. I didn’t think I could handle the loss of another emotional connection. In the last three years I had lost so many people I cared about. My mother, my father, Milosz, Yossi, Karolina, Muriel, David and our babies. I didn’t think I could do it again—get close to somebody and have her ripped out of my life. I didn’t think I could give away another piece of my heart. But you know what, I was wrong. The heart regenerates. It always manufactures another piece to give away.

  “Auschwitz was frightening. The first day had been overwhelming. Chaya took me under her wing and gave me the emotional support to keep going. She introduced me to the girls in the barracks. Once I wasn’t a threat to their sleeping arrangements, they were friendly. Chaya helped me to settle into my routine.

  “Every morning at four-thirty, a loud metal gong woke us up. We’d rush to stand in line to use the toilet, and then hurry to stand out in the yard waiting for an SS officer to come and count us. Sometimes he’d get there by six. Sometimes later. After he counted us, a kapo would bring the morning’s meal—a cup of ersatz coffee. No food. From there we’d separate into our work squads to be marched to our job locations. I worked in the Birkenau kitchen.

  “I helped prepare lunch for the inmates, which consisted of soup, usually just vegetable, but occasionally there were tiny scraps of meat. Soup was delivered throughout the camp in large barrels. For supper, I’d help prepare a four-inch loaf of bread with either an ounce of meat or a pat of butter or jam. The total caloric value was less than a thousand, carefully designed by the Nazis to result in malnutrition and ultimately debilitation. Remember, Birkenau was built as an extermination camp—to kill people. The kitchens were feeding over seventy thousand people, but they were only expected to live three months. By then, malnutrition, weakness, exposure, hypothermia, or some other cause would end your Birkenau tenancy and make room for the next occupant.

  “Besides the horrendous knowledge that thousands of people were being murdered every day, right where you lived and slept and ate, it was torture for us to bear witness to the senseless cruelties that were dished out right before our eyes by the kapos, the blockführers, and the SS. Although the men were victimized more than the women, it was not unusual to see flogging, beating, humiliation, or even a random execution. The SS had the authority to deliver any punishment they saw fit, including death on the impulse of the moment. Throughout the summer, trains pulled in and new arrivals were marched straight to the gas chambers. The crematoriums ran twenty-four hours a day. Auschwitz-Birkenau at its peak was killing two thousand an hour.

  “Chaya was an observant woman. She would pray every morning. She told me she kept the Sabbath every week. She urged me to pray with her, but I scoffed. How did she even know when it was Friday? All the days were the same in Auschwitz.

  “‘How can you still believe in God, Chaya, while our people suffer in concentration camps? Where is he? Where is God Almighty? Show him to me. Where is God in Auschwitz?’

  “She answered me calmly. ‘He’s right here, Lena. You just have to bring him in. That’s what’s most important. In this most evil of places, God is pure goodness and I bring him in, right into these barracks. Right into the face of every Nazi. Every woman in this building is a Jew, and the Nazis have made every possible effort to eradicate Judaism. But as long as we stay true to our faith, they fail. They can take everything I have, but they can’t take my Jewishness. So, in the depths of this camp, I defy them. I defeat them.’

  “I thought of Yossi and said, ‘I knew a man in Chrzanów who you would have liked very much.’

  “‘Tomorrow is Shabbat,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ll join me.’

  “The following night, when we had all bedded down, Chaya got up and went to the middle of the cell block. She pretended to light candles. She had no candles, she had no matches, but we could see them in our mind. She said the hamotzi over a piece of bread that she had saved. She drank a cup of water like it was wine. One by one, the other inmates in our building got up and stood behind her. Not all of them, but many. They joined her in the prayers. Chaya passed around small crumbs of the bread she had blessed. Then they all joined her in softly singing Lecha Dodi, the ancient liturgical poem sung to greet the Sabbath bride. It was moving, Catherine. She had brought God into the camp, right into our barracks. From then on, every Friday, with the other women, I would join her.

  “In the fall, things began to change. We started to notice the bombing. U.S. army air force planes flying from their base in Italy could now reach our area. Installations and strategic targets, like the IG Farben plant, were within a few miles and planes flew over Auschwitz all the time.”

  “Were you frightened by the sound of the bombing?” Catherine said. “Didn’t you worry that Auschwitz would be bombed?”

  “We would have welcomed it. You get to a point where you no longer fear death. You don’t want to die, but you know it’s a possibility and you’re not afraid. If the Allies were to bomb Auschwitz, I would have cheered. There’s nothing I would have rather seen than a bomb fall on the crematoriums and the gas chambers and take out the Nazi killing machines. If it took out the SS and the sonderkommandos as well, then I would have thought it was a very good day.”

  “Even if it meant that some of you would die?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s still quite a controversy over whether the Allies should have bombed Auschwitz, isn’t there?”

  “Well, they chose not to. They knew about Auschwitz; they had reports and aerial photographs. They wavered on whether they should or shouldn’t. They even made plans. But in the end they set the plans aside. There are lots of theories on why they didn’t. Some say that in 1944 the planes weren’t capable of surgical strikes. They couldn’t bomb with sufficient accuracy to take out just the gas chambers and crematoriums without risking the death of seventy thousand inmates.

  “Others argue that the Allies were committed to use their air raids for military and strategic targets only, not to save prisoners. In 1944, the U.S. air force command said it couldn’t do raids over Auschwitz without diverting substantial air support from other venues. That wasn’t true. The U.S. was already bombing in the Auschwitz area—IG Farben was five miles away.

  “For me, the explanation that makes the most sense is that no military branch wanted to take responsibility for killing tens of thousands of Jews. Germany was the guilty party for killing Jews. Germany was running death camps. Germany would be solely responsible for the deaths of millions of civilians, not bombs from Allied planes. The plan finally adopted by the Allies was to liberate the Jews by ground forces. After all, the Russians were very close to Auschwitz and had already liberated the Majdanek death camp east of Lublin.

  “As the air raids increased and the Russians closed in,
the Nazis began to dismantle the camp. Their plan was to destroy the camp and all evidence of the genocide. In September and October, the sonderkommandos, who served the Nazis by clearing out the bodies from the gas chambers and taking them to the crematoriums, were all gathered and executed. The Nazis wanted no witnesses, no one left behind to tell the story. They expected all the Auschwitz-Birkenau inmates to die or to be transferred to other camps to die.

  “All but one of the crematoriums and one gas chamber were shut down by the end of the year. Instead of trains bringing in prisoners, we now saw blocks of inmates being loaded onto trains to go to other camps deep inside Germany. Half the prison population was gone by the end of 1944.

  “Every day, every night, we heard the sounds of bombs and gunfire. It was music. It was the Allied air force orchestra’s percussion section. Boom boom. The Russians were just a few miles from our camp and we heard their gunfire. Boom. The Germans hastily began to destroy what was left of Auschwitz-Birkenau, trying to leave no trace of the camp and its horrors. They set fire to wooden barracks, they burned buildings to the ground. They blew up the crematoriums. But they weren’t about to let the prisoners go. They weren’t done with us.

  “On the night of January 18, 1945, my building was rousted from sleep about three A.M. Everybody was ordered to stand outside for roll call. It was snowing and very cold. The snow on the ground was at least a foot deep. We stood outside in our dresses, thin hooded overcoats and wooden shoes. No socks. Finally, we were counted and told to line up in groups of five. This was to be the Auschwitz death march.

  “The plan was to have us walk through several villages to the Wodzislaw train station for transport to Buchenwald, Mauthausen or other camps deep in Germany. The march was expected to take less than a week and cover thirty-five miles. They gave us each a loaf of bread, a slab of butter and told us to make it last.