Shoot Me, I'm Already Dead

by Julia Navarro

  The nurse made a sign for us to leave. The poor woman could tell us nothing, and if we had insisted then we would only have made her suffering worse.

  “This is a terrible place,” Gustav murmured.

  It was. How could it not be? The souls of thousands of women remained in that camp, in those barracks, in the hospital where those monsters had pitilessly experimented on women’s bodies before reducing them to nothing. These souls were confined within the walls of the gas chambers.

  The soldiers had liberated the camp, but they couldn’t liberate the souls from the extreme suffering the Nazis had inflicted on their bodies.

  “It’s horrible . . . I can’t bear thinking about what happened here,” Gustav said as we got into Colonel Williams’s car and drove back to Berlin.

  We were quiet throughout the whole journey. Silence was becoming the norm between us. I think that all we really wanted was to escape.

  Two days later we visited Auschwitz. Boris had arranged it now that Poland was under the control of the Soviets.

  Williams could not come with us this time, but Boris provided us with safe-conducts so that no one would stop us. He also recommended a friend of his, a captain called Anatoly Ignatiev.

  “We’re from the same village, we’ve known each other since we were children, although he’s a little older than I am. If you take a good bottle of whisky he’ll appreciate it.”

  Gustav got hold of a couple of bottles on the black market. We shared them with Captain Ignatiev, because in those days Gustav and I used alcohol to lose consciousness and overcome the pain we felt.

  Captain Ignatiev was waiting for us in Krakow. He looked like Boris. He was tall and strongly built and just as expansive, and he made us take a drink even before we set off for Auschwitz.

  “We will go tomorrow, it’s better if you rest tonight. I’m only doing this for Boris; my stomach turns every time I visit that camp.”

  I asked him to help me look among the survivors for someone who might have known my sister.

  “I don’t recommend it,” he said.

  But I insisted. I needed to meet my sister here, to feel her suffering, to feel her despair, her dreams, because I was sure that Dalida would not have given up even at the end. I had always admired her strength of character, her way of facing up to life without caring about the consequences.

  As we approached the camp it started to rain mercilessly. I felt my pulse quickening as we went through the entrance. I stopped dead when I saw just how large this place was, where millions of people, most of them Jews, had been killed on an industrial scale.

  Anatoly Ignatiev guided us through the three camps, he let us go everywhere, to the barracks where the prisoners had sheltered, the kitchens, the places where Dr. Mengele had carried out his cruel experiments, the gas chambers, and the rooms where the dead people were sorted as if their corpses were those of animals. First their skin and then their hair was removed to make wax and other goods, then their gold teeth were taken out, and finally they were taken to the crematoria ovens . . .

  I don’t know how many hours we spent in the death camp, all I know is that we had to stop a couple of times for me to vomit. Ravensbrück had moved us; Auschwitz froze our blood. It was a city, a small city raised up with a single objective: to kill.

  The train lines stopped here, because here the only destination was death.

  “You’ve seen enough, let’s go,” Anatoly Ignatiev insisted.

  But I did not want to escape. If my father and Dalida had suffered here, if their lives had been stolen from them in this place, then I needed at least to withstand visiting it, to face up to this place where the spirits of the dead seemed fated to dwell forever.

  I saw Dalida, yes, I saw her as she tried to walk in the mud. I felt her despair when they pushed her into the barracks where she had to live for a long year. She must have tried to cheer herself up, telling herself that after being tortured by the Gestapo nothing worse could happen to her. Maybe a woman as desperate as she was had come over to greet her and tell her that this was the place where people came to die, whether it be days or months the end was the same for everyone. She listened attentively to all the advice she was given. Which of the guards was the most sadistic, the work they had to do, the desperation to discover that there was no way to escape from here.

  Dalida had a personality like a magnet, so soon she had friends to share her misery with, her own misfortune and those like her. And she had told them about Palestine. Of course she had. Palestine, the rediscovered home, the land that was waiting for them.

  I was sick when I left Auschwitz. I had a fever, my stomach hurt, I needed air. I asked Gustav to go get drunk with Anatoly Ignatiev on his own, I needed to put myself back together.

  When I got back to the hotel I fell onto my bed and went to sleep straight away. I don’t know how I managed to sleep, but I did, and in my sleep I saw the depths of hell. The hell I saw in my dream, my hell, was nothing other than Auschwitz.

  The next morning Gustav woke me, worried about my health.

  “We’ll go back to Berlin so you can see a doctor.”

  “I won’t see a German doctor. Never,” I replied.

  Gustav was scared by my insistence.

  “But . . .”

  “We are Jews, do you think we can put our lives in the hands of a German? All of them, they all knew about it and it seemed fine to them, they are all guilty of genocide, and you want me to go to a German doctor, to have someone see me who either said nothing, or else openly welcomed the Final Solution.”

  “You can’t blame all the Germans,” Gustav said.

  “Yes, yes, I can, and I will, they are all guilty. And I will never, never forgive them. We cannot forgive them, don’t you see what they have done? The Holocaust was not the action of a single madman, or of a group of men, but it was the action of an entire country, and they are all guilty. I am disgusted to think that some of them now want to make the world think that they knew nothing.”

  “Please, Ezekiel, stop going over it again and again, or else you’ll go mad!”

  “I may go mad, but however mad I become, my madness will not make me kill all the Germans. You know why? Because this was not the act of madmen; it was a perfectly thought-through, organized, and executed plan. There is not a single grain of madness in what they did. For God’s sake, Gustav, let’s not pardon them by calling them mad!”

  Captain Anatoly Ignatiev called us to tell us he had found someone who had known Dalida. She was a woman who, like my sister, had been forced to prostitute herself to the soldiers who guarded the camp, those cursed devils of the SS.

  She was named Sara Cohen and she was Greek, from Thessaloniki. She was in a Red Cross camp.

  I thought about my mother. Miriam. Her family had come to Palestine after being expelled from Spain and taking refuge in Thessaloniki. So I felt that I had a link to this woman not just because she had known my sister, but because my mother could not explain who she was without taking into account her Greek origins.

  It was not easy to get permission to talk to the survivors of the camps that were under Red Cross control, but with the help of Boris and Captain Ignatiev, we managed to get to see Sara Cohen.

  When we finally found her we thought we were visiting a ghost camp. Hundreds of skeletal men and women, exhausted, their gazes lost in the distance, all trying to return to the land of the living, were walking from one side to the other, followed by a nurse, or a doctor, or a good samaritan who was helping in the work of the camp.

  The doctor who met us said his name was Ralf Levinsohn and he told us to be careful and not to do anything that might make this woman who was prepared to speak with us sink any deeper into the pain that had swallowed her.

  “Sara Cohen went through Dr. Mengele’s hands and if she’s not dead it is because the SS officers took a fancy to her. But she has
suffered more than any human being can bear. Her physical health is fragile but her mental state is even more so. She is very young, she has just turned twenty-five, and she is finally escaping from a battle between madness and reason, but she is on the border and we are worried that we might lose her.”

  We followed Dr. Levinsohn to a ward where several patients were sitting around without looking at one another, each one trying to escape from the visions of hell that would accompany them until their dying day.

  Sara was sitting in a corner. Her eyes were closed and she appeared to be sleeping.

  “Sara . . . Sara, I’ve brought these men I told you about . . . They’re related to your friend Dalida . . .” The doctor spoke so softly that it was difficult to hear him.

  For a few seconds she didn’t move and made no sign that she had heard him, then with an agonizing slowness she opened her eyes and looked at me. At that moment I fell in love with her.

  I don’t know how long we spent looking at each other. I didn’t know if she was trying to judge me, or was looking for traces of Dalida in me. I couldn’t look away from her eyes because, even in her extreme fragility, she seemed to me to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Yes, the green of her eyes had faded a little through what she had been forced to see, and her body seemed to be broken into pieces, a heap of inert bones, and her blonde hair was dull and her hands were rough, but even so, her beauty did not appear to be of this world. I don’t know why I thought of Katia. Until this moment Katia had seemed to me the most beautiful woman in the world. But Katia’s beauty had been earthly, elegant, full, whereas Sara Cohen seemed to be a transparent butterfly with broken wings.

  Gustav held my arm and squeezed it to show how worried he was about Sara, and the doctor looked at us expectantly, and just as he was about to tell us that we should go, she spoke.

  “Ezekiel . . .” She said my name in a whisper.

  “Yes, I am Ezekiel Zucker, Dalida’s brother.”

  “I want to get out of here, I want to go home . . . ,” she murmured.

  “I will take you, I promise. I give you my word that I will take you.”

  Gustav and the doctor looked at me in surprise. I had made such a ringing affirmation that I thought they were scared that nothing would stop me from fulfilling the promise I had just made to Sara Cohen.

  “She told me about you . . . She missed you . . . She missed her mother. At night, when we came back from . . .” Sara closed her eyes and I knew that she was seeing what had happened. “Well, you know . . . She would throw herself on the bed and cry and call for her mother in a low voice. She asked her forgiveness for having left her, and I would get up and try to comfort her. I said that her mother would forgive her everything. Dalida wouldn’t forgive herself. She blamed herself for being so selfish as to leave Palestine to live in Paris and London, to have dresses, go to parties . . . She loved her father, and admired his new wife. Katia? Yes, I think she said her name was Katia.”

  She closed her eyes again. You could see that she was exhausted by the effort of speaking, of remembering.

  “You should rest,” the doctor said. “Maybe these gentlemen can come back tomorrow . . .”

  But she opened her eyes and looked at me in fright.

  “No, no . . . I’m not tired, I want to speak, I want to leave this place, he promised that he would take me away from here . . . I don’t want to be here . . .”

  I went up to her and took her hand. She pulled herself away with such violence that I was scared. I felt confused. She seemed to repel all physical contact, but a second later she held her hand out to me and started to cry.

  “You shouldn’t have taken her hand,” the doctor scolded me. “I think that’s quite enough for today . . .”

  Sara insisted once again.

  “I want to speak. I want to tell them what I know. And then I want to leave here,” she repeated.

  “We don’t want to upset her, we can come back tomorrow,” Gustav said.

  “I will speak, I will speak . . . I was in Auschwitz when Dalida arrived. I had been here for a few months, yes, I remember that they put us on the train in March 1943 . . . The Jews in Thessaloniki had thought they would survive until as late as ’43 . . . We had been confined to the ghetto, we had been thrown out of our homes, we had lost everything of value that we owned, but we thought that we might keep our lives. But in February the men came . . .”

  “Sara, you have to tell these men what you remember of Dalida.” Dr. Levinsohn tried to stop her from getting lost in her own memories.

  “Let her carry on, I want to know everything,” I said to the doctor.

  “I don’t know if it will do her any good . . . ,” he protested.

  “Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner were their names. Everything got worse when they arrived. We had to have the yellow star sewn to our overcoats and we couldn’t go outside at night, we couldn’t use the tram, we couldn’t go into a café; the Jews were thrown out of all the unions, of any organization they were members of . . . They ordered that all the Jewish houses should have a mark so that they could be identified. We weren’t allowed to work, so we had to sell all that we had, until they forbade us from doing that as well. The time came then when the SS men decided to confine us all in a single space near the station . . . They put barbed wire around it and posted guards to see that we didn’t escape. It was an area of town that had been built a century before by Jews who were fleeing the tsar’s pogroms . . . Who would have said that this place of freedom would become a prison . . . We organized ourselves as best we could, but we barely had enough to eat. They had taken everything away from us. Then Brunner announced one day that we were to be sent to Krakow and that we would start a new life there in a Jewish colony. None of us wanted to go. Thessaloniki was our own little country, the country our ancestors had founded when they left Spain. My father was an old man, my mother was younger than he was, but she fell sick during these months of captivity and I was in part the cause of her sickness. I had a boyfriend, Nikos, a Greek and a Christian. We had planned to escape, to go to Istanbul, where we could live without the pressure of his parents or mine. A Jew and a Christian! But we loved each other and didn’t care about religion. When we were locked in the camp I was already pregnant. In the middle of the disaster another disaster: a Jewish girl pregnant and without a husband. Nikos did what he could to get me out of the camp, risking his life because as well as wanting to rescue a Jew, he was a member of the KKE, the Greek Communist Party. But all his efforts were in vain. They arrested him and shot him. When they made us board the train I was so desperate I didn’t even care where we were being taken.”

  Sara closed her eyes again. The doctor came up to me and whispered in my ear, trying to stop her from hearing:

  “She’s wandering, maybe she won’t tell you anything about your sister.”

  I said that I was prepared to listen to her, that her story was the story of millions of souls and that these stories were a part of my own story.

  She opened her eyes again and I saw that she seemed to have difficulty focusing her eyes. When she did so, then she continued.

  “You can’t imagine what it is to feel that you are less than anyone else. For the SS men we were not human, and so we didn’t deserve to be treated as though we were. We weren’t allowed off the train until we reached Krakow, Auschwitz . . . Imagine, hundreds of people in these cattle cars, without even a corner to do their most intimate activities. The stench was disgusting and as each day went by we ourselves lost whatever remained of our humanity. When we got to the camp, the SS guards separated us. My father and my mother were sent to join a large group of older people; the younger and stronger ones were sent to the other side. I shouted out because I did not want to be separated from my parents, but one of the guards hit me with the butt of his gun and I fell to the floor with a wound on my head. Another guard came over and kicked me in the
stomach so hard that I felt it right in my guts. ‘Get up, bitch!’ he shouted, and I don’t know where I found the strength, but I stood up, as I knew that had I not done so he would have killed me where I lay. I heard my mother’s laments and my father’s angry voice as he tried to get across to help me. But they were beaten as well. Then they were marched off to a set of barracks. That night they were sent with all the other old and sick people to the gas chambers. I went into labor that night. The women in the barracks helped me bring my children into the world under cover of darkness, in the light of a single candle stub that they kept alight I don’t know how. I don’t know how they managed it. One of them opened up my flesh with her own hands to take my children out of my insides. Another one put her hand over my mouth to stop my screams from alerting the guards. ‘It might be bad to give birth here, but it would be far worse if you were in Dr. Mengele’s ward,’ a young woman of my age murmured. I don’t know how long I took to give birth, but I remember that it was dawn when finally they put my children into my arms. They were two beautiful boys, identical. I could barely move. I was exhausted and had lost a lot of blood, but I felt more alive than I ever had before, ready to defend my sons from the evil that I was sure was falling over us like snow. For all that I tried to hide myself in the barracks, the guards found me. My children cried and were hungry and there was not a single drop of milk in my breasts. They beat me to make me get up and one of them went to find his superior. When that man came in . . . he looked me up and down and ordered the kapos to take my sons to Dr. Mengele’s ward. ‘He’ll be happy with this present,’ he said with a laugh. I started to scream and tried to stop them taking them from me . . . They beat me and I fell unconscious to the floor. When I came to I felt the man’s breath so close to my face that I was about to vomit. ‘Excellent . . . Excellent . . . She’s coming round,’ the words made their way into my head. When I recovered the power of speech I asked for my sons, but the man made a gesture with his hand that I should not bother him. I asked again. A nurse injected something into my arm and I lost consciousness. If it had not been for my children I shouldn’t have wanted to come back to the land of the living. I came back because I thought I could save them. I don’t know what they did with my body, but Dr. Mengele had fun experimenting on me. They injected me with substances, I don’t know what they were, and they examined my uterus to see what extraordinary capacities my womb had to produce twins. The more I asked for my children the more they refused to answer my questions, until one day a nurse said: ‘They are not your sons, they belong to the doctor now.’ They sent me back to my barracks one day. I could barely walk, I don’t know what they had done to me, but I felt my guts burning and I didn’t stop bleeding. ‘If she lives she will work, if she doesn’t work she’s no use, so you’ll know what to do with her,’ I heard a guard say to one of the kapos. But I lived. I had made up my mind to live, to rescue my children from wherever they might be. I knew nothing about Dr. Mengele, my companions in the barracks told me about his passion for twins, his murderous experiments. I don’t know why, but one of the guards took a shine to me, and I was forced to become a prostitute. Some women were forced to prostitute themselves to our guards in the camp. The soldiers abused us, and even the officers used us to let off steam every now and then. In Auschwitz, if they gave you a piece of soap and ordered you to wash, then you knew what was in store for you. There was another woman whom they used as a prostitute as well in the camp at the same time as me. She was older than I was and seemed resigned to it. ‘If you struggle it will be worse, they’ll beat you and they’ll rape you all the same,’ she said, but I found it impossible to give in without a struggle. I hated those men. The guard who had chosen me was angry because they sent me to his superior’s dormitory. The man didn’t even look at me. He pushed me against the wall, ripped off my clothes, and raped me. I stayed still, trying to control this disgust that rose and rose in my throat until I vomited. When the sergeant was tired of raping me I still had to suffer twice more, once from the guard who had picked me out and again by a friend of his. The rapes became a routine. I don’t know how many soldiers, how many officers, how many kapos all abused me. I can still feel those strange hands running over my body, mistreating my flesh, humiliating me and turning me into a soulless whore. The sergeant from the first day made it his habit to be first with me every night, and then he didn’t care what they did with me. As the weeks went by he started to speak to me, I barely listened to him and replied with indifference, what should I care what he had to say to me? But one day I thought that the man might be able to tell me something about my children. When I asked him, he was thoughtful. Me, a subhuman, asking him about what had happened to my children. I don’t know why, but he promised to find out what had happened to them. The next day he swore to me that my children were well, that Dr. Mengele was treating them as if they were a real treasure, that nothing bad would happen to them, and that if I were a little more responsive when I was under his body then he might even take me to see them. I obeyed. Yes, I obeyed. The promise that I might see my children overcame my desire to keep my dignity and to stop my body from becoming more than a simple object. I asked him every night when I was going to see my children, and he slapped me and told me not to pressure him and to behave. He never took me to see them. I wouldn’t have been able to even if he had wanted to help me . . . When your sister Dalida came she took a bed next to mine. The woman who had been in it had died of a heart attack. The first day she arrived the first thing she asked was how she could escape. The other women told her that it was impossible and that if she tried then all she would do was hasten her date with death. But she was so determined that a few days later I went up to her and said that if she found a way to escape then I would go with her, although first she would have to help me find my children. I told her my story and she told me hers and we started to dream of escape. Less than a month had gone by when they gave your sister a piece of soap and asked her to wash. She cried so much that I didn’t know how to comfort her. The first night she was raped by half a dozen guards. When she came back to the barracks at dawn she could barely walk and the dried blood on her legs was like some macabre drawing. I hugged her so that she wouldn’t feel alone, but from that night onwards, just as had happened to me, Dalida’s heart was frozen.”