Mama started slapping her cheeks, to give her pallor a crimson tinge to try to pass muster at the inevitable health Selektion. It was essential to appear fit enough to work. A sickly demeanor was fatal. Other women had similar thoughts and were busy primping their own skin.
Suddenly, I was mesmerized by two women who had also seen the smoke and had started running. They were stark naked. A German shouted at the top of his voice.
“Halt. Oder wir schießen”[8].
The women kept going. There was a burst of gunfire and they fell like rag dolls. I was horrified. Those poor women knew exactly what the chimneys were. They followed their primal instincts to flee, even though it was futile. Now, all these years later, I take comfort in the knowledge that the women were killed instantly. If they’d gone to the gas chamber, it would have taken them approximately ten minutes to suffocate. Ten minutes of terror and the agony of gasping for breaths that never came.
It was a brutal introduction to Birkenau. Yet the male Nazis in uniform passing among the naked women didn’t react at all to the shooting. For them, it was just another frisson at the coalface of mass murder.
Mama slapped her cheeks one last time. The Germans were checking everyone’s body and hair closely. The inspections were intimate, invasive, and all the women were distressed.
“They’re looking for weapons”, Mama whispered. “Even a hairpin could be a weapon here”.
The men reached us. After an unpleasant inspection, we were approved. But the suitcase was taken from us. All that we had left in the world was inside that case. Those photographs. Those last remaining mementos. They were gone. Now we literally had nothing but our memories.
We were sent to a building close to the railway line, where we were given clothes. I was handed a long gray cotton shift dress that almost reached my ankles. The shoes I was given to replace the ones that had been confiscated were uncomfortable. But at least we weren’t naked anymore.
I was quickly learning to appreciate small mercies. But more indignity loomed when we were ordered to enter another wooden cabin. The floor was littered with human hair. Hair of all colors: dark brown, light brown, jet black, red, gray. But very little white hair. The elderly never made it this far.
“My poor child”, said a woman standing by a bench. “I’m going to have to cut off your braids”.
She lifted me onto the bench, and with two snips, my plaits fell to the floor and lay like stumps of light brown rope on the multicolored rug of shorn locks. I was mortified. I had been so proud of my long hair, which Mama had spent time braiding every morning. The woman then ran her clippers over what remained, leaving tracks of stubble. I was scared at how, at every stage of our induction to Birkenau, we were physically abused, humiliated and belittled.
Ostensibly, we were shaved for hygiene reasons, to reduce the chance of lice, but in truth, it was another element of the Germans’ psychological strategy. My hair had been part of my identity. They were dehumanizing us and attempting to demoralize us still further. Of course, there was also a practical reason for shearing us like sheep. They wanted our hair to fill mattresses. Nothing was wasted in Birkenau.
I didn’t know how my appearance had changed. I didn’t have a mirror. But it was impossible to hide how aggrieved I felt. The female barber registered my discomfort and gave me a rag to cover my head. I looked around for Mama but couldn’t identify her. Her countenance had changed. She, too, had lost her shoulder-length dark brown hair to the clippers. I was relieved when Mama placed her hand on my shorn head and, with a brave smile, took my hand.
We joined a column of newly shaved women and were led to a barrack block with row upon row of bare wooden bunks. Each bunk had three tiers. The best place to be was on top because you could sit up there without banging your head. The space between the wooden layers was less than two feet, and the only option was to lie down in them. Our family room in the Starachowice labor camp had at least offered some privacy. The sleeping arrangements here couldn’t have been more cramped.
Although there was still daylight outside, the cabin was dark and foreboding. It was what I imagined a big stable to look like. More suited to animals than humans, it was a barn, not a bedroom.
Mama and I were allocated a center bunk in the middle of the room. Of all the possible alternatives, this was the worst of all. I couldn’t climb in because our ledge was too high for me, so Mama helped me up and we sat facing each other, one of Mama’s legs dangling over the edge.
A woman appeared from nowhere and slapped Mama hard in the face. “You are in Auschwitz now”, she hissed. “You cannot sit any way you want”.
Although the woman wasn’t armed, the way she asserted her authority frightened me. She wasn’t German, but Jewish. She was a Blokälteste, or block elder — a veteran prisoner responsible for inducting newcomers. Other authority figures were called Kapos (from the Italian “capo”, meaning “boss”; the mafia uses that same word because of the fear it arouses), whom the Germans appointed as supervisors.
Mama turned to me and gave me another lesson in survival.
“More and more women will be joining us in this bunk. Unfortunately, we won’t have it all to ourselves like we did in Starachowice. When we go to sleep, try not to move too much because you will disturb the others.
“Sit and lie down next to me and I will try to make you as comfortable as I can. When you get off the bunk, go down like this, feet first”.
Mama slipped off the bunk as unobtrusively as she could. She seemed unnerved by the slapping and was anxious not to upset the block elder a second time.
“Apparently, we’ll be fed twice a day. Some warm soup and a piece of bread”.
She gave me a tin cup, a bowl and a spoon.
“Whatever you do, don’t lose them. These things can’t be replaced. If you misplace them, you won’t get any food and you’ll starve”.
Mama was worried about the possibility of someone stealing them. They were, after all, our only worldly possessions. She showed me a place in the corner of the bunk where we could hide them beneath some blankets. How sad we now had to worry about theft. Mama saved the worst news for last.
“Tola, you can’t go to the toilet whenever you want. The rules here are really tough. You can only go twice a day. Once in the morning, and once at night before lights-out.
“It’s the same for me as well. We will go together at the same time”.
“But, Mama, what if I have to go in between?”
“You will just have to hold it in. You will learn. If you don’t, you’ll be punished”.
Of all the rules, this one upset me the most. I wasn’t sure if I could control myself. But I learned.
By now, it was dinnertime. All the new inmates of the barrack stood in line with their cups. We were given a little soup and a piece of bread. I was truly exhausted — too tired to eat. But Mama insisted. And she gave me her bread ration as well. Only now, several hours after arriving in Birkenau, was I able to have a drink of water to slake my thirst.
With the passage of time, I now realize I was one of the fortunate ones from the train. An unknown number of people went straight to the gas chambers. But archives that survived the war show that 1,298 men and 409 women from our train were admitted to Birkenau after the selection process. Not all of them came from Starachowice. Some were picked up from other labor camps in the Radom district of Central Poland. These details are contained in an extraordinary eight-hundred-page book called Auschwitz Chronicle, compiled by a team of historians, supervised by Danuta Czech, a former resistance fighter who was head of research at the Official Auschwitz Museum.