I have channeled the trauma into what I call “undoing Hitler’s plan”. He wanted to stamp out our faith by murdering our children. I have spent most of my adult life doing the opposite by ensuring my own family is steeped in our culture. My eight grandchildren are testament to our continuity.
In this memoir I will be referring to this genocide as the Holocaust, however the ancient biblical term for utter destruction, Shoah, is more accurate in expressing this uniquely Jewish tragedy.
Auschwitz imprinted itself in my DNA. Almost everything I have done in my postwar life, every decision I have made, has been shaped by my experiences during the Holocaust.
I am a survivor. That comes with a survivor’s obligation — to represent 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis. They cannot speak. So, above all, I must speak on their behalf.
Chapter One. Running for our Lives
I didn’t know what to do. None of the other children in my barrack knew what to do. The noise outside was horrifying. I had never heard anything like it before. So much shooting. Volleys and single shots. A pistol and a rifle made different sounds. I’d seen and heard both in action up close. Rifles cracked and pistols popped. The result was the same. People fell down and bled. Sometimes they cried out. Sometimes it happened too fast for them to make a sound. Like when they were popped in the back of the head or neck. Other times, they just rattled and rasped and gurgled. That was the worst. The gurgling. My ears hated it. I wanted the gurgling to stop. For them and for me.
Somewhere outside the barrack, there were cracks and pops and rat-a-tata, rat-a-tata-tata. The fast sounds were machine guns. I’d seen them in action as well. I knew the damage they caused. And they terrified me.
Glass rattled in the window frames that ran the length of each wall, about ten to fifteen feet above my head in the eaves. Normally, the glass shook from the wind. This was different. It was like a storm without lightning. What sounded like thunder rumbled in the distance. Although the wooden walls muffled the din outside, it seemed as if all the people in all the barracks were moaning or screaming at once. All the dogs in the camp were growling and barking with more malice than usual. Those dogs. Those fearsome, wicked dogs.
I could hear the German guards yelling at the tops of their voices. I despised their guttural language. I was gripped with fear whenever the Germans opened their mouths.
I never heard German spoken softly. It was always harsh, alien and, more often than not, accompanied by violence. Formed in the back of their throats, so many words burst forth, snarling and spitting and hissing. Like the high-voltage barbed-wire fence that kept us caged in and sometimes electrocuted any of us who had managed to die on our own terms, not in a manner dictated by the Nazis. Many prisoners were shot before they reached the wire.
The German voices seemed angrier than usual. Was this what the end of the world sounded like? The war was closer than it had ever been. For once, a war with soldiers fighting each other. Not the war that I had witnessed, where well-fed brutes in gray and black uniforms trampled starving women and the elderly to the ground and then shot them in the back or in the head. Where children were dispatched to gas chambers and flew out of chimneys in tiny, charred flakes.
I couldn’t tell what lay behind the tension seeping through the timber-planked walls. I glanced up at the long windows. Viewed from an acute angle, through the slits of glass above, the sky seemed strange. Of course, it was gloomy because it was deep winter. But it seemed darker than it should have been. Was that smoke in the air? Were those particles dropping to the ground? They were not the usual ones. These seemed bigger. Was there fire outside? Were flames getting closer? All it would take was one spark and our barrack would be a funeral pyre. I had knots in my empty stomach. I felt more trapped than ever.
I did what I habitually did when I needed solace. I climbed onto the wall of red bricks that ran the length of the barrack. The bricks were about two feet above the ground. They acted as a divider between rows of three-decker bunks on either side and absorbed heat from an oven in the center of the room. Although the fire was dying out, there was a little warmth still in the bricks. I sat on my haunches, wiggling my toes on them to extract the maximum amount of comfort.
There were so many children in my block, I couldn’t count them. Forty, fifty, sixty, maybe. The oldest were nearly teenagers. I was one of the youngest and smallest. We all had smudged, dirty faces and sunken eyes, ringed black from sleeplessness and starvation. We were mostly clad in rags that hung from our bones. Some of the children wore striped uniforms.
None of us knew what was going on. There hadn’t been the morning Appell—roll call. The numbers on my left forearm suddenly felt itchy. For the first time since they were carved into my flesh, they had been ignored. A-27633. The identity imposed on me by the Nazis. I hadn’t heard it being called out. Our routine had been broken. Something strange was definitely taking place.
We hadn’t been fed and were ravenous. We should have lined up for a crust of dry bread and a bowl of lukewarm gruel containing, if we were lucky, traces of indeterminate vegetables. Hunger pangs punched us all in the gut.
How long had we been left like this? I had no means of measuring time, apart from watching daylight lifting the shadows inside the barrack and then watching them return. It couldn’t be long before the sun, wherever that was, would sink beneath the level of the windows, and we’d soon be in total darkness again.
Coughing, sniffing and whimpering rippled around the bunks. Despite the arctic temperature, the block reeked of urine-soaked blankets and of feces from overflowing bedpans. Some children were mewling or trying to suppress their tears. Crying was contagious. It made us all miserable. Once you started, you felt even sadder than usual. You began thinking about how dreadful life was and then you couldn’t stop. I didn’t succumb. I never cried. Although I felt like sobbing, I set my jaw and rose above it.
Mama taught me never to cry, no matter how frail or scared I felt. For someone so young, I’m proud to say, I had a strong will.
“Where has the Blokälteste gone?”
“I haven’t seen her today”.
“I haven’t seen her since yesterday”.
“She’s not here. Let’s go outside”.
“No, we mustn’t go outside”.
“If she catches us, she’ll beat us, and she’ll report us to the Germans”.
The Blokälteste was the woman in charge, or block elder, who carried out the Germans’ orders. Like us, she was Jewish. The Germans rewarded her with extra food and a space of her own. She had quite an appetite. I thought she was sturdy. But then, to a child, everyone was big. In return for carrying out the Nazis’ dirty work, the block elder could stretch out and sleep in peace without someone else stealing the blanket or jabbing her in the back with their knees or elbows.
Although the block elder used fear to control us, her presence provided a sense of Ordnung muss sein[1], as the Germans never tired of saying. I don’t mind admitting I was afraid of the woman. But without her, there was chaos. And, worst of all, no food.
Normally, all the barracks were locked and bolted. The block elder must have been in such a hurry to leave, whenever that was, that she hadn’t bothered to count us or secure the door. I was tempted to sneak outside, but the noise was too scary. None of the children dared cross the threshold. It was as if a force field was restraining us. We had been conditioned to obey commands and couldn’t move without them.