Auschwitz Lullaby

by Mario Escobar

  Behind me, the children were crying. Only Otis stayed calm. He had come up beside me, as if he could help me fight the three wild animals.

  The rest of the prisoners and their children formed a semicircle around us, not wanting to miss any of the action. My heart was racing. The little bit of vitality I had left flushed intensely in that moment, to help me take these women on. I could not allow them to humiliate me again. The coats were the only thing standing between my children and certain death.

  “If you won’t give them up easily, it’ll have to be the hard way,” the woman said, making a first attempt to stab me.

  I managed to dodge and hit her in the stomach with my other arm. She bent over in pain, but the other two women jumped on me and yanked my hair, dragging me down to the muddy floor. The first woman seized her chance and sat hard on my chest, pressing the awl to my throat. Otis hit at one of the women, but one push was enough to send him flying into the koia.

  “Your brats are going to be left motherless, but that hardly matters. They were going to die sooner or later. People like you don’t survive long in a place like this.”

  I tried to sit up, but the other two women were pinning my arms down. I thought about begging, but it would have made no difference. The poor Russian women were hardly more than savage beasts.

  Just then Blaz showed up in the doorway, followed by several men and women. Gypsies from barrack 14 had come en masse to help us.

  “Russians, leave the Gadje alone!” shouted the old woman I had met the day before.

  My three assailants stood up defiantly, but when they saw the dozen men and women armed with knives, awls, and other homemade weapons, they merely stepped aside and let the Germans come toward me.

  “Get your things. They’ve already given you clearance to move into our barrack,” the old woman said, smiling. She looked around and spat out, “This woman is untouchable, you hear me? If you even think about getting close to her or trying to hurt her, we won’t stop ’til you’re all dead. Understood?”

  Her words had the desired effect on the Russians. I gathered our few remaining possessions and left the barrack with the children clinging to me. The German Gypsies surrounded us like a personal escort and took us back to their barrack, with no kapos interfering. Apparently they held significant sway in the camp and no one messed with them. The old woman showed me the koia where we could sleep. This barrack was a slight step up from the others. They kept it cleaner, and there were fewer prisoners here. It was no paradise, but at least it was less of an inferno than our first hours in Auschwitz.

  After I put our things in our new area, I noticed that my vision was growing blurry. Before I could sit down, I slumped to the floor. When I came to, several women were around me, while others were comforting my children.

  The old woman had my head in her lap, and when she saw my eyes open, she asked how long it had been since I had eaten. She held a sausage of some sort out to me. I took a few bites—it was just going bad—but then I shook my head and said she should give it to the children.

  “We’ll get them something in a minute, but if you don’t eat, they won’t have a mother to take care of them, and they’ll be sent to barrack 16, where the orphans go. Those poor babies don’t last long.”

  I ate the rest of the sausage slowly, savoring it like a succulent delicacy. It had been several days since any solid food had passed my lips. Very soon I felt a bit of strength returning. I sat up a little and looked at my children. They were playing with another child in the barrack. They seemed calmer and less fearful than before.

  “You’ll all be fine here. We’ve got no luxuries, but we help each other out. Tomorrow you’ll start work at the hospital. The doctors were very pleased to learn that there was a new nurse at the camp.” The old woman smiled as she spoke.

  That was music to my ears. In a place like Auschwitz, having a role to play might be the one thing that saved you from a certain death.

  “Where will the children go while I work?” I asked her, suddenly anxious again.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll watch them. We’ve got plenty of sick in our midst. You’ll pay us back in time with your care,” she answered.

  “What’s your name?” I asked. She had never volunteered the information.

  “Anna, Anna Rosenberg, though many just call me Oma.”

  That night I slept decently for the first time since we had been forced out of our apartment. Somehow, the merest breath of hope had returned. Now I was part of a community, and they would help protect me. My main concern then became my husband’s whereabouts. I had had no news of him since we were separated upon arrival to the camp. Some women had told me it was very difficult to make contact with anyone outside of our camp, but I did not want to give up on the idea.

  Sometimes, when reality scrapes against your heart, it is better to avoid it with daydreams. Thus, when I closed my eyes, I tried to imagine how our life would be when all this was over. Johann would return to the Philharmonic, our children would go to college, and we would buy a small house on the outskirts of Berlin. When our grandchildren were born, we would play with them beside the warm hearth while the snow fell gently outside and blanketed the world in a delicious white.

  FIVE

  MAY 1943

  AUSCHWITZ

  Of all that I dreamed about during those long nights of watching and waiting, the only thing that came true was the blanket of snow that covered all the Birkenau mud. No one expected it at the end of May, but there it was nonetheless, harvesting a good number of defenseless lives now freed forever from pain and suffering, thanks to the lady in white. The work ahead in the following weeks was exhausting. Several of the long-staying veterans who had once lived in the quarters of the Polish army at Auschwitz I told me the sign over the gate leading into the camp—Arbeit macht frei—read “Work sets you free.” Every day, dozens of people passed through the hospital, most dying within two or three days. The members of the health-care team did not have the medicine, surgical equipment, or pain relief necessary to adequately treat the invalids.

  I worked with a Polish nurse named Ludwika and under Dr. Senkteller. The nurse was Jewish and had suffered through several ghettos before landing at the camp. Her face reflected better than any other I encountered the insensitivity one was at risk of contracting in Auschwitz. Dr. Senkteller apparently had not given up yet, fighting with the camp for access to medicine and better treatment for his poor patients. Both of them were excellent professionals and people, but without surgical equipment or medicine, they could do little to fight the rampant gangrene, typhus, malaria, dysentery, and diarrhea, given the deplorable hygiene and diet allowed the prisoners. Typhus was a serious concern at the camp. The number of cases had multiplied, especially since the arrival of a party of Czech Gypsies. The only way to prevent the spread of the disease was to completely disinfect the barracks. The new medical chief of staff, Dr. Mengele, had proposed the measure.

  For some time we had been working under the supervision of Dr. Wirths, but Birkenau was bursting at the seams, and they had sent new doctors from Berlin. Wirths, the chief doctor, was from an entire family of doctors. While he always put on a good face to calm his guinea pigs, he rarely showed anything like humanity. Dr. Senkteller told me that one time Wirths, in the presence of Dr. Senkteller’s brother Edward, had operated on a patient without administering anesthesia. The Auschwitz patient had several malignant tumors, and the chief doctor was torturing the dying man without the least sign of compassion. Patients often had panic attacks when they saw us approaching in our white aprons. For them, we were nothing less than the essence of pain and drawn-out suffering.

  The medical team at the Zigeunerfamilienlager talked of little but the new arrival in charge of the hospital. Dr. Mengele was a young man just over thirty years old who had been injured on the Russian front. The first time I saw him, he struck me as a handsome, polite, agreeable man. He was always smiling, especially with the children. He did not seem like the
other Nazis in Auschwitz who, with their gray or black uniforms, looked like death lords harvesting the fields of Poland with their scythes.

  Yet the new sanitary measures of the new chief doctor at the Zigeunerfamilienlager could not have been more extreme. By the end of May, the barracks were disinfected as prescribed. I oversaw the process for barrack 14, where my children and I were living then. Those were particularly difficult days in the camp. The cold in Birkenau was a very humid cold. Once it seeped into the marrow of your bones, nothing could stop your shaking.

  That freezing morning, the kapos and scribes were charged with driving all the prisoners out of the barracks. Families ran hither and yon half-dressed, as the guards had not allowed anyone to take anything out of the koia. First, prisoners were forced to completely strip down. Then, on threat of beating, they were forced to get into a tub with disinfectant that burned their skin. I recall one woman, Ana, who was carrying a baby. The naked body of the child was pink with cold, but they did not allow her to cover the baby. She begged and pleaded, and finally one of the guards yanked the baby out of her hands. The poor thing was hardly moving, half-frozen from the cold and sluggish from weakness. The guard plunged the creature into the disinfectant and, after he came out half-drowned and with his skin on fire, she handed him back to his mother. The mother screamed in pain while the child died in her arms.

  The guards and kapos did not care if the prisoners were elderly, women, or children: everyone had to be disinfected. And right after, they shaved their hair and beards. Then the prisoners were left to stand naked in the snow until they were allowed entrance into the bathroom to tidy up and get dressed. The barracks were disinfected, but within days they were once again a breeding ground for parasites. The cruel, brutal disinfection had been for naught.

  A few days later, on May 25, when there were new cases of typhus, Dr. Mengele called all the doctors and nurses together in barrack 28, where all the medical staff lived except for me. I continued living in barrack 14 with my children. After the first few days of his interventions, we had all learned to fear the SS official. Mengele stood with his fists on his hips and a frown on his face, saying, “Typhus is back, and barracks 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13 are infected. We can’t allow the epidemic to spread. The recent disinfection measures have not produced the desired effect. Therefore, I have given orders to eliminate all the members of barracks 8 through 14.”

  Our jaws dropped. We were horrified at Mengele’s words. The suffering of the past few days of disinfection had been worthless. What did he mean by eliminate? What would happen to the prisoners of all those barracks? No one spoke up. Extremely aware that one word might mean immediate death, no one dared contradict an SS officer.

  When he finished speaking, Mengele turned his back to indicate the meeting was over. One by one, my colleagues left the room, but I stayed put, waiting until I was alone with him. Ludwika tugged my white blouse to get me to leave, but I stayed where I was.

  Mengele finally turned and saw me standing there, my head down. He cleared his throat, impatient to hear what I had to say.

  “Herr Doktor . . .”

  “What do you want? Your number is . . . ?”

  “I’m the nurse, Helene Hannemann. My parents are German, and I studied at the University of Berlin.”

  “You’re German? Then you’re a Jew?”

  “No, Herr Doktor. I’m Aryan, as is my entire family.”

  “Then you’re a political prisoner?”

  “No, I’m here to take care of my children. My husband is a Gypsy, and the police thought my children should be brought here, but I could not allow them to remain without their mother,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t have time for moving personal stories. I’m here to keep the camp from going extinct. The plague of typhus will do us all in within a matter of weeks if we don’t take drastic measures.”

  The doctor seemed to intuit what I was going to ask. Despite his affable mannerisms and his wide smile, he was nothing less than the ferocious SS officer his uniform proclaimed him to be.

  “You’ve said that you’ll eliminate all the members of barracks 8 through 14. That’s over fifteen hundred innocent people.” My voice was trembling.

  “A minor inconvenience. Otherwise, over twenty thousand Gypsies throughout the camp will die,” he answered dryly.

  “Barracks 8 and 14 aren’t infected . . .” My words faltered.

  “But due to their close proximity to those that are, there are very likely cases of the disease,” he said. It seemed as if he was tiring of the conversation.

  “If there were a new outbreak, you could eliminate those barracks,” I said.

  “It’s out of the question. Much better to prevent than to treat. The laws of war are harsh. In times like these, we all have to make sacrifices. You’ve no idea what I’ve had to put up with on the Russian front. This place is paradise on earth in comparison.” He shook his head with disgust.

  I was sweating then. He seemed completely unwilling to listen to me, and I had already risked too much. My life meant absolutely nothing to him. He could do away with me with the stroke of a pen, and that in a very steady hand.

  He was impatient. “What’s the problem? Do you have family members in those barracks?”

  “Yes, my children are in barrack 14,” I said, hesitating. He might use the information against me.

  “Well, we’ll take your children out of the barrack if that’s what’s worrying you. Are you happy now? You can go.” He dismissed me dryly.

  I remained standing. The German took two steps forward, his black boots slapping against the wooden floor. He came so close to my face that I could smell his cologne. I had not inhaled anything so pleasant in weeks.

  “And now what do you want?” he asked with a furrowed brow and twisted mouth.

  “I’m begging you to spare barracks 8 and 14, Herr Doktor. It would be criminal to kill all those innocent people.” I couldn’t believe the words had come out of my mouth. I had just signed my death sentence.

  He looked at me, startled. The word criminal seemed to anger him, but he calmed himself before answering. I imagined that no one had spoken to him like that, much less a prisoner. I do not know if my saving graces were my Aryan looks or the bravery of my actions, but the fact is that Mengele bent over the table, wrote a note, and handed it to me.

  “Barracks 8 and 14 will be spared. If there is even one case of typhus, I will eliminate them immediately, understood? I’m not doing this for you. I just want you to understand I don’t enjoy any of this. We have to sacrifice the weak so the strong can survive. The only way for nature to stay the course is for us to let her choose who should live and who should die.”

  “Yes, Herr Doktor,” I answered, trembling, though I tried to steady my pulse when he handed me the paper signed with his fountain pen.

  “Take this letter to the secretary, Guttenberger. She won’t have processed the order yet,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Don’t thank me, Frau Hannemann. My job here is to save the camp and do my duties, not to cater to the lives of the inmates. Germany is keeping thousands of non-Aryans alive, but it won’t do so for free or by tending to absurd humanitarian concerns,” he answered arrogantly.

  I got out of the barrack as quickly as I could and nearly ran to the office. I did not want the revised order to arrive too late. I was out of breath by the time I arrived. One of the Nazi guards, Maria Mandel, approached. The wound I had received at her hand right after we arrived at Auschwitz was still not fully healed.

  “Where do you think you’re going, Gypsy slut?” she asked, whip raised.

  “I have orders from Dr. Mengele.” I held out the paper.

  She made as if to crumple it up and throw it away, but another guard appeared behind her. Irma Grese hissed, “Are you looking for trouble? Don’t you recognize Mengele’s signature on that?”

  Mandel frowned. She checked the signature and allowed me to go through.
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  Barely daring to breathe, I entered the main room and left the paper on the desk of Elisabeth Guttenberger. She was a smart, beautiful Gypsy. We had hardly exchanged a handful of words, but most prisoners spoke well of her. Her family had sold antiques and stringed instruments in Stuttgart. Her father had been a deputy in the Reichstag and one of the most renowned members of the Gypsy community.

  “Dr. Mengele has halted the elimination of barracks 8 and 14,” I said, still trying to catch my breath.

  “Thank God for that at least. When I saw the order, my blood turned cold,” Elisabeth said, sealing the paper.

  “I’m so sorry for all who will die tomorrow,” I replied.

  “The one sure thing here is that we’re all going to die. But if we can save anyone, our daily struggles will have been worth it,” Elisabeth answered. “I’ve been here since the middle of March, and all I’ve seen is death and desolation. They arrested my entire family in Munich. Several of my brothers and sisters are here in the camp, and I try to use my position to help them, but it’s almost pointless. There’s nothing to share around.”

  “At least you’ve got a decent job now,” I said.

  “When we got here, we had to build the barracks and the streets of the camp. My father couldn’t handle the pace of the work, and he was the first to die. Who knows how many of us will make it out of here alive? Sometimes I think none of us will.”

  Her words drove home once again the inexorable reality of Auschwitz. Delaying the deaths of a few was pointless if we were all going to die here.

  Mandel’s entrance put an abrupt end to the conversation. That fearsome woman could crack your soul with a simple glance. I never could understand how the guards had achieved such an advanced degree of dehumanization. I finally just accepted the fact that they saw us as beasts they had to watch over and exterminate if necessary. I walked back to my barrack slowly, taking a deep breath before entering. I let it out slowly as I entered and saw all the German Gypsies. If I had gotten to the office a few minutes later, all of these people would have been killed the next day.