“Lose all of your clothes, you filthy sows! Schnell, schnell, schnell, move it, move it, quick! Everything off; yes, your dirty undergarments also, my gentle piglets.” A harsh snap of the whip was followed by someone’s startled cry. “Quit your stalling and get the line moving before something happens.”
Still, some tried to protest; usually, the matrons from the Orthodox families. Their tearful pleas weren’t about themselves, either; it was their young daughters’ modesty they were concerned about the most: Do with us as you please, but spare the girls, Frau Aufseherin! The sheltered, wide-eyed, petrified girls who trembled in their mothers’ protective embraces before being torn from the loving arms. The girls who were shoved toward the nearest male inmate on duty, who questioned “if they wished to undress themselves or required assistance? Because they were all too glad to deliver.”
Loud guffaws came from the inmate functionary’s comrades. They worked at the next station—a vast room where chairs had been set up in the usual German orderly manner and where the naked, humiliated, crying girls’ hair was shorn by the industrial shaving machines.
It was the shaving that would remain Mala’s worst memory of her own first day at Auschwitz, for as long as she would live. A year and a half had passed since a Red Triangle prisoner ran his coarse fingers through her dark-blond locks—like gold! A shame, really—and tutted in apparent disapproval as Mala’s beautiful hair fell in clumps over her bare shoulders, into her lap and open palms.
As though in defiance, or out of some desire to preserve at least something of her former self, she had clasped one of the locks in her palm and refused to part with it, even when they were being chased through the disinfection block. She held onto it when they were dunked into a tub of some green and atrociously smelling chemical solution; she didn’t let go of it when powder was thrown on her nicked and already-burning scalp, armpits, and pubic area; she kept it clasped in her fist when they were shoved into the dingy room with showerheads glaring at them ominously from the ceiling. Later, Mala had learned that the gas chamber looked precisely the same. Fortunately for her, the receiving SS doctor on the ramp was looking for persons with knowledge of languages and she fluently spoke six. No gas for Mala that day; a regular shower only. Essential inmates were in short supply; she learned it quickly enough.
The Orthodox girls parted with their hair with a sort of a resigned apathy. They would have to part with it soon regardless; it was a custom for a Jewish bride to shave her head on the night of her wedding and keep it shaved for the rest of her life, wearing turbans or wigs in public, and remaining as bald as the day she was born until her death. But Mala wasn’t raised in a religious Jewish household. Her father positively refused the idea of the commune, of a woman’s sole role being a mother and homemaker, of having to consult religious leaders on just about any major decision, and so, he had moved his entire family from the Polish city of Brzesko to a much more cosmopolitan Antwerp in Belgium and raised his daughter to be an independent and self-sufficient young woman.
Against Orthodox rules, Pinkus Zimetbaum encouraged Mala to get the best education he could provide and, when the family business fell on hard times due to his rapidly progressing blindness, he would not stop expressing his gratitude to Mala for picking up the role of the breadwinner. To be sure, their old conservative Polish community’s rabbis would have never approved of a young woman working in the well-known fashion store Maison Lilian, but Pinkus did, and not only did he approve, he actively encouraged his daughter to make her own living so that she wouldn’t have to be dependent on anyone’s goodwill.
“This way, if something happens to me, you shall be able to support yourself, Mally. I brought you here, to Antwerp, so you would live your own life, the way you want and not the way the commune sees fit. So you would discover love all on your own, instead of marrying someone a commune’s matchmaker found for you. I couldn’t bear the thought of it—you, being unhappy. I want you to be as free as you wish and enjoy everything the world has to offer. You’re such a brilliant girl, Mally. A brilliant girl and a free spirit, of which I’m immensely proud. Do not allow anyone to take your freedom away.”
But the Nazis came to Belgium after they swallowed up the other European countries just as effortlessly and, unlike Mala’s father, they didn’t care one whit whether she was Orthodox or assimilated. A Jew was a Jew and the only good Jew was a dead one, or at least one working for the prosperity of the Reich—such was the latest psychology among the Germans. Next, the familiar business came—the holding camp in Malines, the cattle train, Auschwitz, number 19880 tattooed into her skin.
First, they took her freedom. Then, they took her hair. The latter Mala had already managed to get back. One day, she would regain the former; she swore it to herself.
Now, a camp veteran, she watched these new girls being shorn like sheep with somber, pitying eyes and couldn’t help but run her fingers through her own hair, as though to ensure that it was still there, that she had pulled through, that she had clawed her way to the very top of the local totem pole and was safe from abuse and obliteration. And yet, she still carried that lock of shorn hair neatly tucked in the small cloth bag she kept in her skirt’s pocket. It was a reminder of her freedom lost and her promise to regain it one day.
“This is the abuse of human rights that goes beyond any comprehension!” cried out one woman now. “We aren’t criminals; what reason do you have for putting us here and treating us as such?”
Instantly alarmed, Mala glanced up sharply at the woman who dared to speak up. She was still dressed, very smartly at that, in a tweed suit and patent leather shoes. Mala noticed one of the inmate functionaries already ogling them with unhealthy interest.
Pushing herself off the wall against which she was leaning, Mala made a move toward the vocal lady, who hadn’t, apparently, grasped the fact that there was no such notion as human rights in this death factory.
Refusing to be silenced by the terrified crowd around her, her voice was gathering volume and conviction along with it. “I studied international law. There has never been a precedent such as this in the civilized nations’ history that free people were rounded up and herded like sheep for slaughter into camps against their will. I demand to speak to the representatives of the international—”
A blow from a Kapo’s baton put an abrupt end to her complaint. He had administered it atop her scalp with the impersonal cruelty of a butcher who had long grown used to the job and performed it mechanically and exemplarily well. Like a puppet, from which someone had just cut a string, the woman fell in a heap at the Kapo’s feet.
“Is the big-mouthed bitch dead?” the SS warden inquired from behind the desk. She had not once raised her elegantly coiffured head from the list, onto which she was writing the names and numbers.
The Kapo dealt a sharp kick into the woman’s midsection. The entire block could hear the air escape her lungs; yet, the Kapo’s most recent victim had not budged.
“Jawohl, Frau Aufseherin,” the Kapo confirmed, undisturbed. “Process her.” He gestured to two of his underlings. He didn’t need any more direct orders from the uniformed woman. He was a well-oiled killing machine, with a wooden baton at his hip as a sign of the SS-granted authorization to reduce the numbers of the undesirables, with empty eyes devoid of any emotion.
The corpse was stripped bare without further ceremony. In the corner, by the tall sacks already filled with the discarded clothing, two women from the Kanada—the sorting Kommando where the prisoners’ belongings were confiscated and redistributed—were arguing over the dead woman’s jacket. Mala watched on as another inmate was already shaving the former lawyer’s curled hair, while his Kommando mate was probing her orifices for hidden valuables.
“Just two golden fillings in her mouth,” he announced the result of his search.
An inmate dentist was already waiting nearby with the pliers at the ready.
The SS warden gasped suddenly. “That blasted cow! Does anyone kno
w her name?”
“Helga Schwarz,” the Kapo supplied his victim’s name after consulting the documents that the Kanada Kommando left lying on the floor—their only interest was in the clothing, not yet another dead Jew’s identity.
“Dr. Helga Schwarz,” Mala corrected him very softly. “She was a Doctor of Law.”
It was oddly pleasing to see that the warden added “doctor” before the woman’s name in the list that she handed to Mala, allowing the murdered woman that last dignity at least in death.
As Mala carried the processing block paperwork to the camp office to be filed, she kept whispering Dr. Schwarz’s name under her breath, committing it to her memory. The Nazis and their subordinates may have slaughtered and already forgotten her, one of their countless victims, but Mala wouldn’t. She would carry her memory out of the camp and tell the world that Dr. Schwarz had died a hero, fighting for her fellow sufferers’ rights till the end.
Three
Auschwitz
As it always was in the middle of the afternoon, the camp locksmith shop was abuzz with activity. The machines roared and hummed; now and then, sparks descended upon the concrete floor in a shimmering waterfall. Metal shavings crunched under the boots of the Kapos, who strolled about with an air of importance, their coarse fingers caressing the handles of their batons, while their hard, piercing eyes searched for the slightest excuse to apply their clubs to one’s back. The strong smell of iron and grease hung in the air.
After a rather superficial inspection, Edek hurled a metal part he’d just produced into a wooden box. It was his two hundred and seventy seventh for today, he realized with a sort of grim self-loathing. He didn’t mind making the locks, but then, one day, Karl, one of their Kapos—a short, mean-spirited German whose mouth was permanently twisted into a malicious smirk—had informed them of their products’ ultimate destination. Suddenly, everyone’s stomach had contracted with revulsion for contributing to the successful functioning of the Nazi terror machine.
“The Gestapo jails, my gentle lambs,” Karl had declared in a singsong, jeering voice. It was obvious from his hateful smile the diabolical pleasure he was drawing from their communal look of mute, stunned disbelief. “You’re helping lock up your own people. They shall thank you, I’m sure, when they arrive here. If, they make it this far.”
Karl was a professional criminal, sent to Auschwitz for re-educational purposes. Edek always found it perplexing, the fact that the German justice system placed murderers, rapists, and thieves above them, former ordinary civilians who had never broken the law, solely on blood principle. According to the Nazis’ warped logic, Reichsdeutsche criminals could be re-educated; in contrast, Polish nationals, Soviet prisoners of war and Jews belonged in concentration camps.
In the midnight silence of his barrack, Edek often lay wide awake and searched his memory to pinpoint the exact day when the world had turned upside down, when the criminals began to be hailed as heroes, when free press had turned into a propaganda machine, when a narcissistic, cruel dictator started to be looked upon with reverence as a savior of the nation—and could not. Soon, he ceased thinking about it altogether. It outraged his sense of justice far too much; it made him tremble with righteous indignation and, in Auschwitz, wasting one’s nerves on empty illusions was a sure ticket to the gas.
“Whatever are you getting yourself wound up for?” Wiesław had demanded one night, his voice thick with sleep. They shared a bunk and all of Edek’s tossing must have gotten to him after all. “You’re wasting precious energy for nothing. Will your perfect logic about the world order persuade the SS to release you? Fat chance. So quit your stirring and exasperated sighing and off to sleep with you. In a place like this, one ought to forget about such matters in order to survive. Now, what you need to remember is who from the SS kitchen trades bread for cigarettes and which Kapo won’t bash your head in for spending more than a minute in the latrine. Those are the matters of paramount importance. All else is irrelevant.”
Two hundred and seventy-eight. Now, Edek marked the number on the sheet and thought about the extra ration of turnip soup he would receive if he produced five hundred of such details—the reward for over-completing the daily quota, according to the new Kommandant’s orders. The old one had operated slightly differently: he simply sent the prisoners who couldn’t keep up to the crematoriums.
Two hundred and seventy-eight details to produce two hundred and seventy-eight locks to lock two hundred and seventy-eight people up in the dingy Gestapo cellars that stunk of blood and death. It was beyond comprehension, the fact that such numbers could exist in the first place, that there were so many people for the Nazis to lock up. But then Edek roved his gaze around and saw that the numbers added up after all. The Auschwitz crematoriums had swallowed up hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—up until now and it was Edek’s profound conviction that Auschwitz was far from being the only such place where people were murdered for nothing more than the wrong nationality charges.
A runner’s shout—“Mail for Rottenführer Lubusch!”—brought Edek out of his bleak reverie. He wiped his grease-smudged hands on a rag and took the letter from the boy, almost grateful for the distraction.
“Run along, I’ll give it to him,” Edek promised the boy. “Herr Rottenführer is in his office. I was just heading there anyway.”
Near the entrance of the Kommandoführer’s office, two Kapos were smoking. At the sight of someone turning the corner, they froze stiff with fear, but then, seeing that it was only an inmate, relaxed their shoulders and continued to gossip about recent Auschwitz affairs.
Edek paused in front of the door, pulled the striped cap off his shaved head, adjusted his uniform and knocked.
“Enter.”
Rottenführer Lubusch, their work detail’s direct supervisor, was writing something at his desk. He was a young man who appeared older than his years due to the pensive, somewhat forlorn look in his pale eyes; a type that belonged in the dusty libraries of the old world’s universities instead of the oil-slicked locksmith workshop in Auschwitz. Everything about him—his sensitive hands with long, slender fingers, the air of quiet sophistication that wasn’t acquired and cultivated but rather inherited, even the manner in which his dark hair was parted on the right, sharp as though slashed with a razor—stroke a false note with the SS uniform that he was wearing. It was form-fitting and elegant, but it suited him just as poorly as a striped uniform suited Polish intelligentsia. Perhaps that was the reason why Lubusch constantly scratched under his collar and winced uncomfortably, complaining about the coarse material or the soap the laundry Kommando used. His very skin rejected it, or at least, such was Edek’s conviction.
Edek saluted sharply—he didn’t mind saluting this particular SS man—and approached Lubusch’s desk.
“A letter for you, Herr Rottenführer. And the production numbers for the first half of the day. I’m in charge of the lunch distribution today—”
But Lubusch was no longer listening. Having recognized the small, careful handwriting on the envelope, he snatched it eagerly from Edek’s hand and tore into it, a warm smile growing on his face, instantly transforming it.
“You know where to put it.” Without looking up, he waved Edek toward the filing cabinet, seemingly forgetting that it was his duty to sign and stamp the list first.
Concealing a knowing grin, Edek retreated to the cabinet and pulled out the drawer with the current month’s files, shuffling through them with purposeful slowness to give his superior his privacy. Lubusch had always been a decent fellow, but after he went on leave about a year ago and returned with a slim golden band around his finger, his treatment of the inmates had mellowed and he even began to actively help them behind his own Kapo’s backs.
Edek stalled for as long as he thought was appropriate, cleared his throat as softly as possible and opened his mouth as he turned to face Lubusch. What a scatterbrain I am today, Herr Rottenführer! he planned to say. Your signature and the stamp—
But he was stopped in his tracks, paralyzed by what he had seen.
The letter still clenched in his hand, Lubusch was lying face down on his folded arms, looking like a man who had just been shot. He was perfectly motionless; only the fingers of his free hand were clenching and unclenching in impotent desperation.
Frightened and unsure of himself, Edek made a move toward the door; opened and closed his mouth, unable to produce a single sound, and began to search the office frantically for anything, literally anything—
A water carafe! He rushed across the room, grasped it by the neck, and nearly spilled the water onto the doily—a present from Lubusch’s wife, he was sure of it. While filling the glass, he tiptoed toward the desk and put the glass near the SS officer’s hand as quietly as possible.
“Water, Herr Rottenführer?” he asked gently.
Whether it was the genuine concern in Edek’s voice or the gesture itself, Lubusch finally broke. His shoulders began to quiver with silent, pitiful sobs that, for some reason, tore at Edek’s heart as though it was he who was suffering.
Remembering the Kapos in the corridor, Edek rushed to the door and promptly turned the key in the lock. He brought it to Lubusch and, just as he did with the glass of water, nudged it delicately toward the Kommandoführer’s pale hand, under his fingers. After that, he straightened next to the SS man’s desk and remained as still as a statue, guarding his master with grave, silent dignity.
An entire minute must have passed before Lubusch raised his head and slowly wiped his face with the back of his hand. To Edek’s surprise, he didn’t seem embarrassed in the slightest with his tears and didn’t bother hiding his vulnerability. He simply sat gazing vacantly ahead with his bright, wet eyes—astonishingly human, almost noble in his sudden fragility.
The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz: A totally gripping and absolutely heartbreaking World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story Page 2
