“I don’t think they’re planning to gas us,” she whispered to Kostek. “I mean, they’ve already locked us inside. All they have to do is drop the gas. Why all this song and dance about an escapee?”
A few heads turned to her. The last thing she wanted was to give them hope when they could be annihilated in the next instant, but Hössler lying to them simply didn’t make sense.
“Well?” She nudged a man with a Kapo’s armband in the ribs. “Go on. Tell him we’ll comply before they change their minds and gas us all on principle. It is, after all, easier to count dead bodies than living humans.”
That last argument propelled them to action. Several voices at once identified themselves as Sonderkommando leaders and promised their full cooperation.
After a torturously long minute, the sound of the door handle turning on the opposite side broke the tense silence. When the heavy metal door opened—slowly and cautiously—the first thing the inmates saw were the muzzles of three machine guns blocking the narrow corridor. Behind the guards manning them stood the top crematorium SS brass, guns drawn as well.
Only Hössler wasn’t armed. Perfectly undisturbed, he held a clipboard in his hand with a mechanical pencil attached to it by a string.
“Everyone, try to stand as closely to that wall as possible.” He indicated the left side of the gas chamber. After the prisoners moved obediently to one side, he nodded in satisfaction. “Good. We’ll have a roll call now. After we establish that everyone is present, you shall all be released.”
The men exchanged anxious looks; then, all heads turned expectantly to Hössler once more.
“When I call your number, you shall step forward, say Jawohl, and after I acknowledge you, you will move to stand on the opposite side.”
“So that no sly apes call ‘present’ for their absent comrades,” Moll inserted, a smirk visible on his face.
Hössler turned to him, annoyed at the interruption, and obliterated him with such a withering look that Moll retreated back into shadows at once—away from his superior’s ire.
The first one to cross the vast room was one of the Poles with a low number—a camp veteran, just like Edek. Soon, more and more inmates joined him on the opposite side. Hössler started when he noticed Mala in the thinning crowd of prisoners.
“Mala? What are you doing here?”
“I brought a message to Kostek, from the Kanada detail,” Mala explained hurriedly. “Their Kommandoführer is on leave and they’re working out the new schedule for trucks to pick up the clothes from the crematoriums.”
Technically, it wasn’t a lie. Mala was camp-savvy enough to have a good excuse to be where she had no business being each time she ventured on resistance business.
“Why hasn’t anyone reported this to me?” Hössler turned to his underlings, glowering. As though on command, all of them riveted their gaze to their boots, suddenly finding them positively fascinating. “I asked you a question.” Hössler didn’t raise his voice one bit, but everyone, the inmates and the SS included, ceased breathing at once. “Why is my Läuferin locked here, along with the Sonderkommando, and no one has reported this to me?”
“Herr Obersturmführer, allow me—” Mala stepped forward, wetting her lips. “Kostek tried to alert Hauptscharführer Moll to my presence here, but…” She purposely let the words hang in a strained silence.
Hössler had seen Kostek’s bruised face. She needn’t finish her explanation.
His face blotched red with anger, Moll stared at Mala in silent fury, his hand clasping the butt of his gun as though itching to put it to action. You insolent Jew-bitch, his twisted expression read, I won’t forget this.
“Come here.” Hössler signed to her with his clipboard. “Stand next to me. I’m going to the office anyway. You’ll walk with me.”
“Jawohl, Herr Obersturmführer.”
Mala made her way among the machine guns and only resumed her normal breathing once she was standing by Hössler’s side.
“With you—” the camp leader threw another annihilating glare in Moll’s direction, “I shall deal later. It’s a punishable offence, the failure to report such things to one’s superior.”
Mala stood with her back to Moll, but she could feel his good eye drilling holes in the back of her head the entire time that Hössler conducted his roll call. The satisfaction from making things hot for Moll as a revenge for his treatment of Kostek was short-lived. She had just made an enemy that would jump on the first chance to slaughter her in the manner of which only he was capable. In spite of herself, Mala inched closer to Hössler.
If only there was a way out of this all. But it was Auschwitz, the Grim Reaper’s abode, with SS harvesting souls at will and hopes going up in smoke from the industrial chimneys. Here, death had many faces. Moll was only one of them.
Twelve
Edek kept running his hand over his new blue overalls—the official uniform of the Birkenau fitters’ Kommando. He hadn’t grown used to it yet, just like he hadn’t grown used to the fact that he was now one step closer to freedom. It was Lubusch who made his transfer possible to the sector D of Birkenau men’s camp after Edek had been released from the sickbay. Edek made a solemn promise to himself that when he was out of this place, when the war was over, he would find his namesake, shake his hand and have a drink with him—to freedom and to brotherhood. And to such wars never taking place for centuries to come.
“I suppose congratulations are in order.”
He jumped at the voice and banged his head on the sink the pipe under which he was presently fixing. Lubusch’s recommendations must have been glowing indeed since the local SS put him to work in their own quarters, where the tiles were shining and clean, the toilets porcelain and white, where Zarah Leander sang about love through the loudspeakers on the radio, and mirrors lined the walls and in which Edek didn’t particularly like to look.
“Mala.” Still holding his head—he would have a nice-looking bump on top of it tomorrow—Edek straightened before the young woman. He was beaming at her like a fool, but with the best will in the world, he couldn’t wipe that grin off his face.
“No need to break your head on my account.” Her caramel eyes were shining with mirth. “The SS shall see to it for you.”
“That much is true.” Edek rubbed the sore spot in embarrassment. “One can always count on them in such matters.”
She watched him for a time with apparent interest and Edek watched her back, suddenly self-conscious and thankful for the Kanada Kommando outfitting him with freshly disinfected overalls that didn’t stink of stale sweat and hardened grease. As he studied Mala’s face, Edek discovered that oddly enough, instead of bringing out imperfections, the harsh artificial light of the SS latrine brought some luminous quality to her pallid, radiant skin instead. Under the bright lamps, her golden hair burst into color, shining and healthy, as though in defiance of all the illness and death surrounding her. But it was her eyes that riveted him with some inexplicable, magnetic force. Such steely, rebellious power was concentrated in them and yet such warmth radiated from their amber specks, and Edek felt all the layers of horror he’d lived through fall off him gradually like dried plaster. For a few precious moments, he felt free of the camp. She stood in front of him, hands in pockets, beaming, her cheeks fresh with frost, and time itself didn’t dare to move forward.
“I almost couldn’t believe it when I was processing your transfer order in the camp office,” Mala broke the pregnant pause. “I thought it was you who deserted our little paradise last Tuesday.”
“Without bidding goodbye to you? I wouldn’t dare.”
She arched a lively brow. “Your friend Wiesław was speaking the truth then. You must have been quite a ladies’ man back home.”
Edek stared at her in mute horror.
“He said that?” He finally managed the words. In his mind, he was ready to slaughter his so-called friend.
Mala tormented him with her face, devoid of any expression for a f
ew moments, but then suddenly burst into laughter. Edek thought he’d never heard anything so beautiful. Its notes echoed around the washroom and, suddenly, the camp indeed seemed like a paradise to him.
“No, he didn’t. I was pulling your leg.”
Edek breathed out in relief. “I never thanked you for the Strafblock,” he spoke at length, fumbling with pliers. “For the blanket and for the straw pallet.”
“I never thanked you for sending Wiesław with goods for me.”
“I wanted to make sure that you’d still have them if…” He desperately scrambled for words. Saying “if I died” seemed wrong somehow; not when she stood before him with her golden crown of hair and those death-defying eyes. He couldn’t bring himself to even mention death in her presence. “If something happened to me,” Edek finished carefully instead.
“I couldn’t let anything happen to you.”
Her tone was conversational and yet there was some hidden message behind those simple words that made Edek’s heart stumble in his chest and miss a beat.
“Thank you,” he repeated and instantly cursed his own stupidity inwardly for not saying what he truly wanted to say to her.
“You’re welcome.”
The moment was lost. Idiot, Edek closed his eyes, his cheeks burning with frustration.
All business once again, Mala glanced over her shoulder. “I found a blank for your Ausweis. There’s a problem though.”
It took him great effort, but Edek managed to recover himself. “What problem?”
“It requires a photograph.”
“A photograph?” he repeated after her like a demented parrot.
“Yes, a picture of the inmate, whom an SS guard accompanies. Now, I know you don’t want to give away much of your plan—who am I to you, after all?—but I have to ask you out of sheer necessity: can you get a photo? I won’t even ask whether it’s for you or Wiesław or both; you’ll glue it inside yourself. But you need the photo.”
“It’s for Wiesław. The plan is, we walk through the gates together, I dressed as an SS man and Wiesław as an inmate I’m taking for a job outside the camp. You were right before when you said that no SS guard would agree to go through with such a dangerous enterprise. But he might risk giving us his old uniform, and that’s precisely what we’re counting on.”
Edek hadn’t the faintest idea why he’d just blurted out the entire scheme to the woman he scarcely knew; he only knew that he trusted her. Trusted her with a secret that could get him and his best friend executed and yet, there he stood, pouring his most sacred thoughts to her without a shade of doubt in his mind that she would rather take the plan to her grave than betray it to the Nazis.
Something changed in Mala’s expression. The wry grin was gone and in its place was a look of wonder and disbelief at the fact that he was so open with her, and something else that Edek couldn’t quite detect.
She didn’t ask for any more details, merely nodded and murmured, “Wiesław’s photo then,” under her breath, solemn and already working things out in her mind.
“Can a camera be had in Birkenau?” Edek asked, already knowing the answer.
“Mhm. And the film to go with it. And a darkroom hidden in the back of a barracks.” She gave him a look full of scorn and, instead of crying out in desperation, he laughed in embarrassment. She even managed to lighten such a tragic situation.
For a time, Mala paced the washroom, her brows drawn tightly in concentration. Edek watched her in silence and didn’t dare move in order not to disturb her. Suddenly, she came to an abrupt halt and turned to face him.
“Wiesław arrived with the same transport as you, didn’t he?”
Edek nodded.
“So, he’s a low number, too?”
“He is.” He held his breath, feeling that she was onto something, and yet, much too afraid to believe it.
“Back in 1940 and 1941, the SS were still taking photos of the new arrivals. They stopped the practice when the Jewish Aktion went into full swing and they simply didn’t have the time to process all of them.” A dark shadow passed over Mala’s face at the mention of the mass deportation and extermination of the European Jews, most of whom ended up in the Auschwitz gas chambers. “So, his photo must be attached to his file. I only received your transfer orders but not files themselves. They must be still kept in the main office in Auschwitz.” Mala tapped her forearm with one of her long fingers, staring through Edek as she was planning something feverishly in her mind. “I could get that from their office.”
“Will they give it to you?”
“If I tell them that the camp leader Hössler wants it, they will.”
“And if they call for a confirmation?”
“My good friend and colleague, Zippy, shall pick up the phone and confirm it for them.”
“What if they insist on speaking to Hössler directly?”
Mala grinned darkly. “No one insists on speaking to Hössler if they can help it. Trust me.”
“I trust you,” Edek said, meaning something quite different.
There was a long pause, the hail ticking on the window like a clock, Zarah Leander’s song pouring out of the loudspeakers that carried long and far above the camp. Edek hoped that it would take Mala a few weeks to procure the file, the photo and the blasted Ausweis, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted it any longer. He found that, the closer he was getting to freedom, the less he wanted it. It had suddenly dawned on him that without her, it didn’t amount to much.
Auschwitz’s concrete road was a welcome change from the hardened-mud road in Birkenau. It was spotless, freshly cleared of snow by the special Kommando; only by Block 11, the infamous punishment and execution block, there was a fresh puddle of blood and a trail of it heading in the direction of the old crematorium. Mala walked around it carefully, inwardly relieved that she hadn’t caught sight of the death cart itself.
Among many Auschwitz horrors, the death cart and the grisly Kommando manning it was one of the worst as far as Mala was concerned. The wooden wagon piled high with corpses and pulled by four grotesque inmates’ “horses” had been one of her first impressions of Auschwitz that had annihilated all of her hopes of getting out of that place alive. Still a fresh arrival, deceived, like many, by the camp’s gates’ slogan that work would set them free, Mala had stood riveted to her spot, staring at the inmates pitching the bodies straight out of the barracks’ window and into the awaiting arms of the prisoners in the cart.
At the sight, her brain had refused to process the mortifying truth. She had wondered if it was a sewing detail of some sort, and whether they were about to transport the mannequins somewhere. But, gradually, her eyes began to absorb it all—the gray flesh stretched over the bones; the genitals, on the account of which the cart Kommando was making crude jokes—I’ll be, look at that fellow’s asset! Must have served him well back home—the caved-in skulls from which the brain matter was leaking through the boards of the cart and onto the spotless concrete; the sightless eyes and toothless mouths opened in their last silent screams.
To this day, Mala couldn’t tell what terrified her more: the sight of it, the sickening sound of the bodies hitting the boards that grew progressively duller as flesh was piled upon flesh, the meticulous efficiency with which the Kommando was stacking the day’s “harvest” as they jokingly called it… or the cheerful whistle of the Kapo as he accompanied the cart pulled by the inmates who looked like they’d end up in it within a day or two.
Lost in the nightmare of her memories, Mala didn’t realize that she had stopped altogether in the middle of the street. Only when two inmates hustled by her with water buckets and brushes, bending down to clean the blood off the road, did she emerge from its dark spell, forcing her legs to move again.
She walked along familiar streets with strangely civilian names to them—Cherry Street and Camp Street and, naturally, Adolf Hitler Street—the nameplates announcing them accompanied by carvings depicting daily camp life. Under one such nameplate
was an inmate being beaten by a Kapo, under a second, an SS man’s dog biting a prisoner in the buttocks—comical stuff that the guards must have found perfectly delightful. She walked past the two-story, red-brick barracks with their numbers highlighted by bright lanterns, and past the trees, now bare and skeletal and oddly befitting the place, much more appropriate than when they stood proud and green and in full bloom as though mocking the local population, just like the crude street name carvings that mocked them as well.
At last, the Kommandantur building came into view. In front of the entrance, a guard was smoking. Mala recognized him from her previous visits to the main camp office. He was a somewhat permanent fixture there, a young man with a known weakness for sweets that inmates in need of a favor used to their advantage, and a gun slung over his shoulder that he must have only fired during the obligatory training. Unlike most of the SS in Auschwitz, he never shouted, never hit anyone, and generally preferred to carry out shifts as a Kommandantur sentry instead of dealing with the inmates. Mala had a strong suspicion that he wasn’t too ideologically inclined; merely didn’t fancy freezing his bones in some dugout on the Eastern front under heavy Soviet artillery fire.
“Good morning, Herr Rottenführer.”
He waved her off even before she had a chance to present him her Ausweis. Almost everyone in Auschwitz-Birkenau knew Mala and her runner’s armband by now.
“Good morning, Mala. Herr Kommandant is not in.”
“It’s all right. I just need a recently transferred inmate’s file from the office. They forgot to send it in and you know how Obersturmführer Hössler gets when the paperwork isn’t in order.”
“Go on then.” He stepped aside and motioned her in with a somewhat theatrical urgency about him. “I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble.”
The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz: A totally gripping and absolutely heartbreaking World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story Page 10
