The Last Checkmate

by Gabriella Saab

  In November 1944, Mandel was assigned to the Mühldorf subcamp of Dachau and Elisabeth Volkenrath replaced her at Auschwitz. The US Army arrested Mandel on August 10, 1945, then handed her over to the Polish People’s Republic in November 1946. She was tried in Kraków during the Auschwitz trial and in November 1947 was sentenced to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out on January 24, 1948. She was thirty-six years old.

  Witold Pilecki

  Pilecki was born on May 13, 1901, to a noble, devoutly Roman Catholic Polish family. He served as a captain in the Polish army during the Polish-Soviet War, the Second Polish Republic, and World War II. During the German invasion of Poland, he served in the Nineteenth Infantry Division as a cavalry platoon commander; then his division was incorporated into the Forty-First Infantry Division, where Pilecki served as second in command.

  In October 1939 his division was disbanded and parts of it began to surrender, so Pilecki and his commander went into hiding in Warsaw, where they cofounded the Secret Polish Army, one of the first underground organizations in Poland. This resistance group was later incorporated into the Union for Armed Struggle, later renamed the Home Army. Pilecki later authored Witold’s Report, the first comprehensive Allied intelligence report on Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

  In 1940 he presented his plan to enter Auschwitz to gather intelligence and organize inmate resistance. His superiors provided him with a false identity: Tomasz Serafiński. On September 19, during a Warsaw street roundup, he was caught, detained for two days, then sent to Auschwitz and assigned prisoner number 4859. Pilecki organized the underground Union of Military Organizations (ZOW) at Auschwitz, and many smaller organizations at Auschwitz eventually merged with it. ZOW improved inmate morale, provided news from outside, distributed extra food and clothing to members, set up intelligence networks, and trained detachments in the event of a relief attack by the Home Army, arms airdrops, or airborne landing by the Polish First Independent Parachute Brigade, based in Britain. ZOW provided the Polish underground with information about the camp and sent reports to Warsaw starting in October 1940. Beginning in March 1941, the Polish resistance forwarded those reports to the British government in London. When the organization began, Pilecki organized its members into cells of five, so each member was in communication with only four others. If one member was caught, this limited the number of men he could potentially expose under torture.

  Pilecki worked in various kommandos, including carpentry, a weaving workshop, the tannery, and the parcel office. In 1942 Pilecki’s resistance movement used a radio transmitter to broadcast arrivals, deaths, and inmate conditions, then dismantled it that autumn, fearing the Germans might discover it. Through civilian workers, Pilecki sent out coded messages and obtained medicine and typhus vaccines. He hoped that either the Allies would drop arms or troops into the camp, or the Home Army would organize an assault; meanwhile, the camp Gestapo under SS-Untersturmführer Maximilian Grabner captured and killed many ZOW members.

  Pilecki decided to break out of the camp and personally convince the Home Army leaders that a rescue attempt was possible. After a clever plan involving faking a case of typhus and getting himself transferred to the bakery kommando, Pilecki and a few inmates enacted their escape on the evening of Easter Monday in 1943. At the bakery in town, they changed into civilian clothes provided by friends, took the back door off its hinges, and ran, carrying powdered tobacco to hide their scent from SS tracking dogs. While sheltering with a trusted contact, Pilecki contacted his Warsaw connections, saying he would remain near Auschwitz and form a detachment while he waited for permission to attack the camp; however, if his plan was denied and he was ordered to desist, he would return to Warsaw. In July, the Home Army commander was arrested, so Pilecki realized he wouldn’t get an answer yet. He went to Warsaw and exchanged letters with men in Auschwitz to keep up their spirits. In the fall of 1943, he presented his full plan of attack and wrote his final Auschwitz report. In 1944, he took part in the Warsaw Uprising. Despite his efforts, the Home Army did not have enough manpower to successfully attack Auschwitz.

  In Communist Poland after the war, Pilecki continued working for Polish military intelligence and collected evidence of Soviet atrocities. In May 1947, the Ministry of Public Security arrested and charged him with crimes including espionage, illegal border crossing, use of forged documents, and planned assassinations of ministry members. He pled guilty to all except the assassination plans and espionage, though he admitted to passing information to the Second Polish Corps; he considered himself an officer of the corps and claimed he wasn’t breaking any laws. He was tortured, and some reports claim he said that his time in Soviet custody was worse than his time at Auschwitz. Following a show trial, Pilecki was sentenced to execution and was shot in the back of the head in Mokotów Prison on May 8, 1948, at the age of forty-seven, leaving behind his wife and two children.

  In September 1990, Witold Pilecki and others sentenced in the show trial were rehabilitated. He was posthumously awarded the Order of Polonia Restituta in 1995 and the Order of the White Eagle in 2006, the highest Polish decoration. On September 6, 2013, he was promoted to colonel by the Minister of National Defense.

  Miscellaneous Facts and Info

  Maria’s Gestapo interrogation was heavily based on survivor testimony, including such occurrences as doors and windows left open so prisoners could overhear torture, secretaries taking notes, young women and girls being stripped to undergarments, and entire families being tormented to force confessions from the interrogated prisoner. Interrogations were typically carried out in the prisoner’s native tongue, which is why Ebner, Maria’s interrogator, offers to provide an interpreter. I wanted the exchange to remain between Maria and Ebner, so I didn’t include one. In contrast, during her second interrogation, Maria feigns ignorance of German so Hania can act as interpreter while Irena poses as a guard, thus allowing Maria their support and comfort.

  In Pawiak, prisoners used their bread rations to make chess pieces, rosaries, and trinkets to entertain themselves and boost morale. They combined bread with dirt, wire, hair, or whatever else they could find. I saw one of these chess sets when I toured the Museum of Pawiak Prison in Warsaw, and that’s where I found the inspiration for Maria’s father to make a pawn for her.

  Höss’s return from a trip to Berlin alludes to his actual meeting with Himmler in Berlin in June 1941, where he learned that Hitler had ordered the Final Solution to the Jewish question. I probably extended his actual absence, because I have him returning in July. Himmler had selected Auschwitz as the extermination site for Europe’s Jews “on account of its easy access by rail and also because the extensive site offered space for measures ensuring isolation.” Himmler described it as a “secret Reich matter,” so I use the same phrasing.

  The tattooing process was implemented a few years after the camp’s creation. Incoming Jewish transports were tattooed in the main camp starting in autumn 1941 and Birkenau in spring of 1942, and inmates who were incarcerated prior to those dates were tattooed in the spring of 1943. Certain groups were exempt, such as Polish civilians deported after the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. I took some liberty with the date and location of Maria’s tattooing and included her in the group of existing inmates who were subjected to the process. The date ties in historically with Witold Pilecki’s escape plan, and the location (Block 26) is the same as where she was registered. I wanted to take her back to the main camp to revisit her registration block and have a last encounter with Pilecki before he escapes. In actuality, she probably would have been taken to a female tattooist in a registration block in Birkenau. In the early days of the tattooing system, a metal stamp was pressed into the skin on the prisoner’s upper-left chest, then ink was rubbed into the wound. This method was abandoned in favor of a needle, and the location of the tattoo changed to the outer-left forearm, the inner side of the left upper forearm, and the lower left forearm. I wanted Maria’s on her inner-left forearm, right below her cigarette-burn
scars from interrogation, though she might have been more likely to have been tattooed on her outer forearm.

  The reader learns that Hania’s sister and niece were killed in the ghetto because they walked on the sidewalk rather than in the gutter when a group of SS men were approaching, so the SS men threw them back into the street and beat them. This was based on a Warsaw Ghetto survivor’s testimony, which described the punishments for walking on the sidewalk rather than in the gutter; the survivor mentioned a specific encounter where a group of SS men didn’t even say a word before throwing a Jew into the street and mercilessly beating him.

  Maria mentions a typhus epidemic and the women’s blocks being infested with fleas. If you look at the chapter dates containing those references, they tie in historically with a real camp typhus epidemic and a flea infestation in the women’s blocks. Similarly, prior to a selection, Hania mentions a roll call that had taken place three days before and had transformed into a selection, and if you were to check the date, you’d find that a roll call took place on the date Hania mentioned and then became a selection.

  When Maria seeks details of her family’s execution, she talks to Oskar, an SS guard who didn’t approve of what was happening in the camps but felt powerless to stop it and feared reprisal should he speak out. All Germans were not sadists like Fritzsch, who delighted in cruelty; many were brainwashed into believing they were operating with Germany’s best interests at heart, or they recognized that what they were doing was wrong but felt helpless to prevent it and resolved that duty to country stood above all else. The reader learns that the Florkowski children were killed first, which is often what the executioners did to torment parents, and that Maria’s parents faced Fritzsch rather than the wall, something many prisoners did as an act of defiance.

  I wanted Maria to establish a civilian resistance connection, which is how Mateusz came to be. His family owns the local bakery, and this was inspired by Pilecki’s escape plan. The Nazis took over many businesses, but in some cases civilians worked alongside prisoners. I imagined that Mateusz’s family owns the bakery through which Pilecki escapes, so he reports its success to Maria.

  When Irena is captured and sent to Auschwitz, she says she was caught taking a Jewish girl to live with a Catholic family. The Gestapo locked the girl and the family inside, set fire to the house, and made sure there were no survivors. That fate of the Jewish child and the family harboring her was a fictional version of eyewitness testimony.

  There’s a small detail in one scene where Maria is working in the kitchen and the kapo throws a piece of rotten potato at her to get her attention. This moment was inspired by a survivor’s testimony. The survivor described an occasion when a kapo threw a rock at him to get his attention, and he said it felt even more demeaning than beatings and curses, because throwing a rock is something a man would do to get an animal’s attention, not a human’s.

  The reader learns that Pilecki is responsible for the bribe that spared Irena’s life when she was sent to Auschwitz for execution. Guards were often easily bribed, and the nature of Irena’s escape was inspired by real events. She was given civilian clothing and driven out of the camp; a real prisoner named Kazimierz Piechowski, together with a few fellow inmates, stole SS uniforms and a car and drove out of the camp, right past the guards in the towers and those who opened the gate for them.

  When Irena returns to the camp disguised as a guard and tells Maria that she intends to help her escape, they end the conversation with an embrace, which takes Maria aback and causes her to reflect on what that embrace means to her. That scene was inspired by a quote from Eva Moses Kor, a Mengele twin who died on July 4, 2019: “Being so alone, a hug meant more than anybody could imagine because that replaced the human warmth that we were starving for. We were not only starved for food, but we were starved for human kindness.”

  Irena mentions that her mother and daughter left Warsaw because the Home Army planned an uprising. A collection of Warsaw Uprising survivor testimonies describes what occurred in the Mokotów district, where Irena and Maria’s families lived. When the uprising occurred in the Warsaw Ghetto, Himmler ordered the entire city and its population exterminated. Although the Mokotów district and Bałuckiego Street survived with minimal damage, it was a key district for the Home Army and fell during the suppression of Mokotów; then the Nazis carried out a string of rapes—including gang rapes—robberies, and murders in homes and hospitals. Irena is relieved that her mother and daughter fled to safety and says she knows what would have happened had they stayed, meaning both would have fallen victim to rape and murder.

  Jews and non-Jews were supposed to live in separate blocks, but the guards often disregarded this rule. This is how Maria and Hania end up being bunkmates in Birkenau.

  At one point, Maria learns that the hospital block has been “cleared” and that a resistance member was there and died. When the hospital grew overcrowded, the guards would order everyone executed in gas chambers or with phenol injections. Prisoners were often afraid of transfers because they didn’t know if the new camp would be better or worse than the current one. To avoid transfer, they’d bribe prisoners to take their name off the list or bribe a hospital staff member to admit them. Hospitalization was risky because if the hospital was ordered to be cleared, the resistance member would be killed alongside the sick, which did happen according to survivor testimonies.

  When Maria and Hania smuggle gunpowder capsules for the rebellion, Maria mentions passing the capsules to “a woman in the clothing detail.” This is a reference to Róża Robota, who worked in the clothing detail adjacent to one of the crematoria. Jewish women smuggled gunpowder from the Union Munitions Factory, where Maria takes a brief position so she can extend her support to these women; later, this employment is why she’s interrogated by the camp Gestapo. Robota and others passed the gunpowder to the Sonderkommando workers. On October 7, 1944, the Sonderkommando workers in Crematorium IV (near where my character Izaak is employed) heard a rumor that they were going to be liquidated. They panicked and planted explosives in Crematorium IV. This killed and injured a few guards, but the rebellion was crushed and hundreds of Sonderkommando workers were killed in reprisal. The gunpowder capsules among the destroyed crematorium were traced to the munitions factory, so Róża Robota, Ala Gertner, Estusia Wajcblum, and Regina Safirsztajn were captured and interrogated, but they didn’t betray anyone else involved. They were sentenced to hang, as Maria learns following her camp Gestapo interrogation, and were executed on January 6, 1945, in the presence of the entire women’s camp, a few short weeks prior to liberation.

  The death-march scene in which Maria witnesses a woman attempting to escape is inspired by a combination of survivor testimonies. One reported a man with a broken leg being left to die, and another reported a woman who ran into a field and got caught in a snowbank. A soldier drew his gun to shoot her, but when she realized that she was trapped, she begged him to do it. When he heard her pleas, he put the gun away and none of the other guards drew theirs; instead they ignored her and left her to die in the snowbank.

  Franz and his family signed the Deutsche Volksliste under the advice of church and resistance leaders. Many German-descended anti-Nazis did this to protect themselves and secure better rights, which helped them travel more freely and access better goods. They often used their elevated status to support the resistance.

  Following liberation, Hania mentions that her brother, Izaak, went to hunt Nazi war criminals. Later the reader learns that Izaak tracked down Protz to avenge everything Hania suffered at his hands. Izaak’s mission was inspired by groups like Nakam (Hebrew for “Revenge”), a group of Holocaust survivors who, in 1945, sought to kill six million Germans in reprisal for the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust. Many rogue groups like this hunted Nazi criminals and did so for years following the war, because many Nazis escaped without consequences.

  Many mental health issues were not well understood or addressed in those days, and post-trau
matic stress disorder (PTSD) was not diagnosed. Survivors had difficulty readjusting to normal life, and people either didn’t know how to help them or didn’t know that they needed help. Maria’s postliberation symptoms (flashbacks, headaches, restlessness, nightmares, mood swings, etc.) are now categorized as a type of PTSD specific to Holocaust survivors. After the war, she has no idea why she’s developed such issues and fears them, which contributes to the difficulties in her final confrontation with Fritzsch. She’s determined to keep the symptoms at bay and remain in control of herself, yet the environment—and Fritzsch himself—easily triggers her. Once he’s dead, the symptoms still won’t leave her alone, and Maria feels she’s the only one haunted by the past until Hania confesses that she experiences flashbacks, too. Maria learns how to cope, but even in the epilogue, we learn that the symptoms never leave her. Many Holocaust survivors were plagued by PTSD for the rest of their lives, even those who eventually found the help they needed.

  Many survivors didn’t speak of what they’d endured. This, coupled with the lack of therapy and other mental health resources, made it difficult for them to come to terms with what they had experienced. Some realized that sharing their story helped them cope, but most stayed silent for years, even their whole lives, and never wanted to revisit Auschwitz. When they did, many found that speaking of their experiences and going back to Auschwitz actually brought them peace. This is why Maria has such trouble speaking of her time in the camp, then starts to share her story, but she doesn’t feel a real sense of peace until she returns to Auschwitz many years later.

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.