Thanks to this painstaking research, I discovered that also on that day in 1944, five prisoners escaped from Birkenau, four of whom were shot during a pursuit.
All my life, I have wondered why I wasn’t killed upon arrival. It’s estimated that more than 230,000 children entered the Auschwitz complex. Almost all of them were murdered in Birkenau within hours of dismounting from the cattle cars. The Nazis had no use for children. They were a hindrance. They lacked the physical strength to become slave laborers. They required sustenance. They cost money. But more than anything, they represented the future of the Jewish people. And when they grew up, they could be witnesses. As far as the Nazis were concerned, they had to be exterminated. So why wasn’t I?
One theory is that we had the good fortune to arrive on a Sunday. As I pointed out, one of the crematoria at the end of the railway line was going flat out. But because Sunday was a day of rest, the murder factory was short of staff to escort us to the gas chamber, and they were either unable or unwilling to fire up another incinerator to dispose of the bodies.
Another theory is that around that time the Nazis were suffering a shortage of Zyklon B, the cyanide compound used in the gas chambers. And one further proposition comes from historian Christopher R. Browning, in his book about Starachowice, Remembering Survival, as mentioned earlier. Citing several survivors’ testimonies, Browning suggests that Kurt Otto Baumgarten, one of the more humane managers of Starachowice, “had intervened on behalf of his former prisoners and sent a letter with the transport, assuring the authorities in Birkenau that the Starachowice Jews were all good workers”.
But if that was the case, why did we have to go through a selection process at the platform?
There is no way of knowing definitively what it was that saved me. Perhaps it was a combination of all the above, but whatever it was, I’m grateful that I survived that first day. The challenge now was to survive every subsequent day in Birkenau.
Mama helped me to climb back onto the middle ledge of our bunk. I moved gingerly, trying not to tread on the women on the bottom layer. Mama climbed in beside me. On this night, we had the bunk to ourselves, although it wouldn’t always be that way. I snuggled up to Mama. Her scent was a palliative. In her arms, I was secure. At long last, after the worst journey of my life, I fell fast asleep.
Chapter Eleven. Refusing to Cry
Those first few days in Birkenau were simply terrifying. Although my solitary time in the darkness in Starachowice had been frightening, it was certainly not as intimidating. At least there I had been on my own and was spared close contact with the SS and other enforcers; here, I was exposed to them all the time. Mama was close at hand and doing her best to protect me, but I was convinced that they were constantly watching me. All of them. There was no hiding place. And the industrial scale of the extermination camp, the noise it generated, the frequent arrival of trains hauling cattle cars on the conveyor belt of death were overwhelming. I felt that I could be shot at any moment.
The haunted looks of my fellow prisoners, their cowering demeanor and the overriding sense of terror corroded my spirit. Fear is a virus that is contagious, infecting virtually everyone it touches. Immunity is difficult, if not impossible to acquire.
Although I was only five years old, I could detect that the women all around me had abandoned any semblance of optimism. While I couldn’t possibly have known it then, I know now that Mama and I arrived in Birkenau at a time of maximum tension. Having completed the annihilation of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews, the SS were about to liquidate the Zigeunerfamilienlager — the Gypsy family camp in Birkenau.
The mass murder of the Gypsies, as the Roma and Sinti people were called back then, had been two months in the planning. It was supposed to happen in the middle of May 1944, but the Roma were alerted to the plan to kill them and broke into an equipment store, grabbing any potential weapons they could: knives, spades, hammers, pickaxes, crowbars and stones. Among the Roma men were former military veterans who had no intention of going quietly to the gas chambers, and 600 of them barricaded themselves into a barrack building.
Armed with machine guns, the SS surrounded the Zigeunerfamilienlager and ordered the men to surrender and come out. When they refused, the SS retreated rather than risk casualties. This moral victory, on May 16, 1944, is now celebrated as Romani Resistance Day.
The Roma’s defiance troubled the Nazis. They feared it would trigger a mutiny throughout the camp. So they took their time to dispose of the Roma and did so by stealth. In order to reduce potential resistance, they split the 6,000 people in the Zigeunerfamilienlager into smaller groups. On May 23, 1944, they shipped out more than 1,500 to other camps within the Third Reich. Then, on August 2, two days after we arrived from Starachowice, an empty train pulled into the platform not far from our barracks. The SS ordered another 1,400 Roma men and boys on board. At seven o’clock that evening, the train set off northwestward on a four-hundred-mile journey. The Roma were bound for Buchenwald, another big, notorious concentration camp inside Germany’s borders.
About that time, Mama and I were outside our barrack along with the other inmates taking part in the evening Appell. This was a twice-daily event. Every morning and evening, we were ordered to parade outside and be counted. Everyone had to be present and correct, or we would be forced to stand outside to attention, until the Germans were satisfied. Rain or shine. They were obsessive about counting. They could do it for hours on end.
Appell was always a tedious and frequently nerve-racking experience. But looking back now, I realize that day’s particular roll call was crackling with tension. The SS knew the Roma were about to die and were on edge. And when the guards were twitchy, prisoners suffered.
After roll call was dismissed and we went back inside, the SS made their move. With all the Roma men of fighting age locked in cattle cars and heading north, the Zigeunerfamilienlager now only contained elderly and sick men, as well as women and children. In total, 2,890 of the most vulnerable. The guards distributed bread and salami and told them they were being taken to another camp. As part of the ruse, the SS loaded them onto trucks and drove them less than a mile to the gas chamber next to Crematorium V, surrounded by pine trees. Their bodies were burned in open pits.
Between 300,000 and 500,000 Roma perished in the Holocaust. Like the Jews, there was no place for them in the ethnically pure world of Adolf Hitler. Dismissed as Untermenschen, Jews were at the bottom of the pile of the Führer’s distorted racial pyramid. The Roma were just above them. Hitler wanted the Third Reich to be populated by a “master race” of Aryans — blue-eyed, blond-haired people of Nordic stock — wiping out those he regarded as inferior.
While the human race has many variations, there is more that unites us than divides us. From bitter experience, I can tell you we all smell the same when we are cremated. Jews, Roma, homosexuals, people of color — all those whom Hitler tried to eradicate.
That smell. It is unforgettable. I just have to close my eyes and, nearly eighty years on, the memory assaults my nostrils. It will remain with me to my last breath, as will the overriding sense of fear and hunger at Birkenau.
Not long after the Roma camp was liquidated, there was one unforgettable Appell. My legs were tired, we’d been standing outside in the heat for hours and I didn’t know what time it was. The sun was high in the sky and there was no shade outside our block. It must have been the afternoon, and we’d been there since we’d eaten what passed for breakfast: a warm, indescribable drink and a chunk of bread. How much longer would I have to stand still?