by Malka Adler
We told her, because we have no spoons.
She kicked the bucket in the corner and screamed like an SSman, so eat without spoons, you spoiled Hungarians, eat. We drank the soup from the plate and ate a piece of bread. They put Bromine in the bread to stop us menstruating. The belly swelled and menstruation stopped.
Early in the morning we heard shouting.
The Kapo called, roll call, get up quickly, everyone outside for roll call. In the distance we heard the ring of a bell. We went outside to the empty ground between the two blocs. Five hundred women in a thin dress, without a sweater, without a coat. There were stars in the sky, and I felt the sting of a thousand pins in my flesh.
We stood in fives. I stood in front with the shorter girls, the taller ones stood at the back. I knew that without food they’d think I was a child in kindergarten and was very worried. The Kapo’s aides began to count us. In the middle of the count there was confusion and they began the count from the beginning. The aide who was counting my row, a particularly tall young woman with the face of a Cossack, went on counting and made a mistake. She cursed as if she was in a market and then she brought her stick down on several heads, hach. hach. hach.
They finally finished counting. But the numbers didn’t match the lists they had in their hands. I heard arguments and feet stamping on the ground, and then the Kapo screamed, idiot, idiots. I realized they were afraid of a mistake, and again they began to count as if they had no other plan for us. An hour passed, two hours passed, three, we were yelled at, stand straight, Jewish cows, straight as a ruler. The aides’ sticks flew indiscriminately about heads. I heard weeping and suffering. I felt as if a butcher’s knife was flaying my skin, strip by strip. I could no longer stand straight and was afraid of the Cossack’s rage. I saw wet marks on the ground. There was a sharp smell of urine in the air. Suddenly shouts, sport! Sport! Everyone down on your knees, down, stinking Hungarians, hands up. We went down on our knees. The bones in my body hurt. I couldn’t stretch my hands above my head. The Cossack approached me. She had white balls at the edges of her mouth, and a cold fire in her eyes. She raised her stick and hit me on the elbows. I felt an electric shock to my brain. After a few moments we heard an order: Get up. We got up. Sit. We sat. Get up. Sit. Get up. I couldn’t get up. And then came the order, straighten up, quickly, quickly. Some of the women in the group began to shout at one another, go back, go forward, one of the girls screamed at me, nu, get up, get up, it’ll be your fault if we never get out of here.
In the meantime, morning came and a bright light covered the barracks. They looked like heavy, frightening lumps in the mist. In the distance I heard the orchestra of Auschwitz with their marches and the female SS guards who arrived in gray uniforms, with a hat and red ribbon on the sleeve. On the ribbon was the symbol of the swastika in a white circle. The female German guards raised the left hand in a diagonal salute with Heil Hitler as we’d heard on the radio, and then the SS guards began to count us again. The mouth of the guard at my row turned down as if she was disgusted, she screamed, the row is crooked, crooked, and she strode off to Edit Elifant.
The Kapo paled, leaped up and began to hit us with her stick.
Finally, the roll call ended and we were told that all the prisoners were to receive a tattooed number on the arm. We didn’t receive a number. Edit Elifant made sure they didn’t come to tattoo our arms. We went back to the bloc. I fell on the bunk and was asleep in a moment.
One of the girls in my five-some was a painter. She knew how to draw faces. She drew Edit Elifant’s face and gave it to her. She was happy with the drawing, and gave her a kerchief in return. Afterwards she took the kerchief, divided it in two and left. Then she came back with two more kerchiefs. And she cut up another kerchief, and returned with two more. Gradually she dressed all the girls in the bloc with the kerchief. At least our head and ears were warm. We saw that Edit Elifant wanted to help us. She sometimes brought us food in secret, potatoes, bread. We felt we had a bloc supervisor like a mother, on condition there were no Germans in the area.
One day they took us to the shower.
We went into the shower where we stripped and were given soap. The shower supervisor, a fat woman with sores on her face, shouted, wash thoroughly, and use soap in all the stinking places of your bodies. I’ll smell each and every one of you after the shower. She shook a fat finger in front of our faces and went out. I thought, another disgusting Slovakian house-cleaner, and I began to pray. I was sure she was lying and gas would soon come out of the shower-head.
I looked at the women beside me. They all had a thin, white body with sharp bones, some had blue marks on the body, some had sores from scratching. Even breasts shrank in Auschwitz, only the belly was swollen. The women wept, shouted, one of them began to eat her soap. She had a long, ballerina-like neck, long thin legs. She shrieked, you won’t kill me, filthy Germans, I’ll die alone. Someone tried to take the soap from her. She bit her on the hand, took another bite and vomited. Another young woman lay on the floor and began to kick. Weeping, I don’t want to die. I want to live, why won’t they let me live? We wept with her. Next to her stood a young woman of my height with a flat chest and two dark nipples. She bent over the woman on the floor, pressed her forehead, and slapped her face hard. I don’t know where she got the strength in her hands. The woman on the floor fell silent, we all fell silent in turn. And then the young woman with the flat chest put out a hand and helped her up. My head began to spin like a carousel. I leaned against the shower wall. Closed my eyes, and saw my mother. She was walking along the ramp, swinging her arms at her sides, and she walked away from me. I wanted to call her, Mama, wait for me, wait, and then came the water. Hot water. We hugged, jumped, soaped ourselves quickly, helping each other soap the back, laughing aloud, I was still worried because I looked so small.
After the shower I saw a man come to visit Edit Elifant. He entered her private room at the front of the bloc. I think the man was Mengele. He came several times. Sometimes he brought Maryanka with him. A small Polish girl, Maryanka was beautiful with blue eyes, a small nose, cheeks like red apples, and straight blond hair. Mengele asked her to look after the girl. I saw that Mengele loved Maryanka. He’d look at her with soft, laughing eyes. I saw that Maryanka wasn’t afraid of Mengele. She had the smile of a woman who knows how to manage. She smiled with a closed mouth. Her eyelashes fluttered delicately like small butterflies. She’d put her small fingers on her belly and stroke it gently. One day, Maryanka was left with Edit Elifant and Edit made her braids. Maryanka sang Polish songs to her. She had a thin voice like a bird. Edit liked to listen to her. Sometimes they sang the refrain together. The songs we heard from the front room made us weep onto our dresses. I missed my family, grandfather, grandmother, uncles, aunts, everyone. One of the girls in the bloc was left without eyelashes and eyebrows because of Maryanka’s songs. She would fall upon her eyebrows mainly during the trills. Then she’d go on to the hair on her head, it had just begun to grow and she already had holes in her bald head. The young woman who slept underneath my bunk didn’t have a smooth place left on her breasts because of those songs. One morning the two were taken in the Selektion. It was after an evening when Maryanka had sung and sung, unceasingly. They were actually happy songs.
Edit Elifant saved us from certain death.
She had her ways. The Germans wanted to separate us in the Selektion. She said to Mengele, I have an older group of women who can work, what shall I do? Mengele said, put them to work. She took us for small, unimportant jobs, like cleaning, carrying pots, things like that. I worked fast, I volunteered to carry large pots as if I was strong. One day they did a Selektion and Edit Elifant couldn’t interfere. An enormous SS soldier held a stick and gloves in his hand. We stood in line next to the bloc. He signaled me towards the old women. I went towards the old women, knowing in my heart that this was the end for me. In the meantime, they shouted at the women who had passed the Selektion to stand in lines of five. Not far from
me stood a foursome of young women. I waited until the soldier turned and jumped into the middle of the foursome. I stood on the tips of my toes, filled out my chest, raised my shoulders. I straightened up as if I was tall and strong. The women began to walk. I remained among them. I was saved from the gas, for the time being.
A few days went by and another Selektion.
We stood in line on the way to the crematorium. Beside me stood several other girls, the thinnest in our bloc. Our Kapo approached us. She said to the German soldiers: I need women to bring soup from the kitchen. Let me take a few women. The Germans agreed. She took women from our group, I was one of them. She took us back to the bloc and I was saved for the time being. Edit Elifant saved more and more women. She cut the gray hair that had begun to grow on some of the women. She gave us ointment to rub into a bruise or rash on our skin. Sometimes women were sent to the crematorium because of a small bruise. She’d move us from one place to another and invent jobs for us to do, so we’d be away from evil eyes. She’d get girls out of the clutches of soldiers on all kinds of pretexts. Sometimes, she’d save Jewesses close to the crematorium, where the death ambulance stood with its red cross and boxes of Zyklon B. Near the Germans she screamed and used her stick, but I saw the great sadness in her face. She had large, brown, moist eyes like a woman who loves. She could have been a nurse or a good doctor in a hospital.
At Birkenau they forced us to write postcards to our villages.
They forced us to say that we felt good. We wrote lies. Many lies. We wrote about good food. We wrote about barracks with beds and a blanket and a sheet. We wrote that we had good work, trees and birds, and beautiful gardens with sweet-smelling flowers. We didn’t write in the postcards that the sweet smell had nothing to do with flowers.
Ever since Auschwitz I can’t go anywhere near a barbeque. In America they eat a lot of barbeque. I keep away from it. I eat gefilte fish, meatballs, and cholent, and a lot of vegetables, and bread. I always have reserve bread in the drawer, always. I also have two rows of sliced bread in the freezer, want to see?
Sarah laughs, and she has mischievous eyes and the laugh of a girl. And then she gets up from her chair, washes her hands, says, and now a break, let’s have some coffee.
New York City, 2001
11:00 coffee break in Sarah’s kitchen.
I look at Sarah. Sarah is seventy-nine, a small slender woman, with an upright back, straight white hair, her eyes are wise and her gaze is sharp and relentless. Sarah talks and wipes the table and her fingers draw large circles and small circles, and the circles blend into one another, and sometimes the fingers move away to the edge of the table and then she tugs at the edge of the tablecloth, and returns to the middle, and again wipes the floral plastic tablecloth, starting other circles, as if the oilcloth is an enormous camp, requiring more and more circles in order to live.
If Dov had been in Sarah’s kitchen, he’d have said, oy, Sarah, Sarah, what our sister went through, and she was so small. If Yitzhak had been in Sarah’s kitchen, he’d have said, Sarah was alone, and Sarah went through many Selektion and she defeated the SSmen, damn them, why? Because she had brains, and luck, a Kapo like Edit Elifant is great good luck in life. And then Dov would have said, pity we didn’t have a Kapo like her with us. And then Yitzhak would have said, Dov, we were there for each other, Sarah was alone.
Chapter 54
Sarah
One day we were told to leave Birkenau.
We didn’t want to go, we were certain it was a trap with an opening to heaven. They sent us by cattle train to Gelsenkirchen in Germany. It was a sunny day and the clouds were like crumpled cotton wool. Yugoslav and German SSmen traveled with us on the train. German SSman wasn’t as hard as Yugoslav SSman. The German SSman could hit a girl and go. Yugoslav SSman would beat a girl until she fell to the floor and stopped moving, and then he’d send his hungry dog to the girl.
In Gelsenkirchen we worked cleaning up ruins.
The Americans bombed German factories, and we carried large stones to a pile. Our hands were full of scratches and sores, our backs burned and I couldn’t feel our feet. I was worried those legs would break and I’d find myself lying in the rubble. I remember walking with a stone in my hands and sometimes, just from the rustle of an SSman passing by, I’d fall. Sometimes I’d just fall and I saw that actually nobody had passed by, and then I’d say to myself, Sarah, you didn’t have to fall. Sometimes I’d hear a shout, or the thud of a stone that fell from someone’s hands, and I’d fall, and if I didn’t get up quickly enough, they’d aim a rifle at me. That’s why I learned to get up right away, let’s say I was lying on my back, or on my belly, or on my side, I’d immediately bring my leg up to my belly, stick my fingers in the ground, and push hard with my hands, and jump straight into a standing position.
After a few weeks in Gelsenkirchen, they sent some of the prisoners by subway to Essen in Germany, don’t remember how many girls. They sent us to a military camp to work in the munitions factory. We had to check the strength of metals with a special machine. The Germans took strong metals to build tanks. Naturally we also sent weak metals to their tanks. I remember that at work I felt the hunger was dissolving my mind, there were times I couldn’t remember what to do with the metal because of the hunger. I’d be thinking of something, and suddenly it would be erased in the middle. Let’s say I didn’t know whether to cut a piece of the dress I wore for a handkerchief and a kerchief, or whether it would be better to leave a three-quarter skirt because of the falls and sores on my knee. I had a constant problem with bread in the morning: Leave a piece of the bread I got in the morning for later, or eat it all at once, and just like that, in the middle of the thought, there’d be a white screen in front of my eyes and I couldn’t remember the question.
Women began to steal bread. Women would fight over a cabbage leaf. Women could fight with their fists or bite a back to get to the bottom of a pot of soup. Many women fell ill and died. I saw them on their bunks in the morning. They looked like a pile of dirty garments before laundry. I only thought about one thing, how would I, Sarah, die: by a bomb from a plane, illness, gas in the shower, or hunger. I didn’t know what would be better for me. With a bomb, one could finish in a flash, for instance, if a plane reaches our factory and drops a pile of bombs, and then the concrete ceiling falls on my head, that’s good. But what would happen if a piece of concrete fell on my leg, and I’m caught there and don’t die? Would someone save me? Not a chance. And maybe illness is better, an illness that ends quickly, dysentery, or typhus, maybe pneumonia. And what would happen if the illness progresses slowly and I’d be half dead? In my heart I asked for gas. Best to die by gas, like my mother. A few minutes and that’s it, but gas revolted me. Gas went together with cremation in an oven, and the smell of burned flesh, that’s what Edit Elifant said, and I didn’t want to end like a chicken. I was twenty and I wanted to live.
I had almost no flesh on me, I was bone and dry skin, thin as a piece of paper in a notebook. I so badly wanted bread and water. I couldn’t push in the line, the slightest touch and I’d fall to the floor. I tried to stand aside and wait for my turn for soup that was salty. The salt burned my throat, and we got no water. One day I couldn’t bear it any longer. One of the girls in the camp approached a German soldier with a gun and a water canteen. She said to the soldier, give me water or shoot me with your gun. The soldier screamed at her to get back in line. She didn’t move. Stood up straight, looking right at him. Said, give me water or shoot me now. The soldier gave her water and she got back in line.
Prisoners of war worked in the camp next to us.
Russian, Italian, and French soldiers. The Germans forbade us to talk to the prisoners of war. We ignored them and went to the prisoners of war. A French prisoner of war made head clips out of wire and smuggled them into the women’s camp. Our hair had grown a bit and we began to wear head clips, above the ear, on the sides near the temples, where there was a small ponytail, or a fringe. We stank
with filth, with infected sores on the soles of our feet, our arms, and we insisted on clips in our hair. We blew kisses to the French prisoner of war. Italian soldiers gave us soap. Some women exchanged soap for bread. Sometimes we found a water tap in some corner, we’d have a quick wash under the tap and hide the soap under our arms. We didn’t go near the Russian prisoners of war. Their glance was evil and suspicious.
One day the Americans bombed the factory in Essen.
The siren sounded just as they called us to eat. We ignored it, maybe because it was a beautiful, moonlit night. The Germans took no interest in the moon, nor did the Russian prisoners of war, they wanted to eat. The Germans had to kill several prisoners of war to get them into the bunker.
I sat hunched up in the bunker, my heart pounding from the bombing that rocked the walls like a ship. After a few minutes the bombs got nearer the bunker, like a hundred-ton hammer on the head. I felt pressure and pain in my ears, and heat and moisture on my whole body. I remember calling out to God to be there. To take the time to look down on the suffering. I whispered, help, God, help, and I promise to be a good Jewess, a Jewess who observes the Mitzvoth with Shabbat and the holidays, just get me out of this hell.
The bombing ended and I remained alive, but the factory was completely destroyed. The soldiers returned us to the camp in a small train. We waited at the camp for a few days and then they returned us to the factory to clear away the rubble. One group worked during the day and another at night. We were about a hundred in each group. It was winter with snow and storms, nonetheless they forced us to walk a distance of a few hours every day. We’d wrap ourselves in blankets from the night and set off. It was one fine day when I noticed that even the beautiful women had stopped being beautiful and had blemishes on their skin and blue sores around the nose and mouth. However, there were still some particularly beautiful women, I was the smallest with the most blemishes. As we walked along the road, someone would always fall, and I wondered how I, Sarah, still hung on.
