All the women prisoners from the barrack where I bunked with Mama were lined up in rows of five. It was one of the longest Appells we’d ever had. I lost track of the number of times our block elder had counted us. Every time she counted, she reached the same number. That meant there was nobody missing from our barrack. But perhaps there was a shortfall of prisoners in one of the other barracks in this massive complex. Maybe one or more inmates had managed to burrow beneath the electric fence and were making a dash for freedom.
There was a strip of no-man’s-land in front of the perimeter fences, clearly marked with signs stenciled with skull and crossbones and the word “Halt”. The Germans would shoot you if you entered that death zone. They wanted us to die on their terms, not on those of our own choosing. Several times at night, I’d been woken up by shooting. Bad news inevitably followed.
Escapes infuriated the Germans, not least because they didn’t want evidence of their crimes to reach the Americans, British or Russians, who were slowly but surely tightening their vise around the Third Reich. On the day after we arrived in Birkenau, the bodies of five people shot while trying to break out were strung up at the entrance to the men’s camp to discourage others from even thinking about it.
Among the women in our barrack, escapes provoked mixed emotions. Of course, they all hoped the fugitives would evade their pursuers and make it to safety. It was courageous, but such a predictable waste of life, as so many never got much farther than the fences before being cut down. But when news of an escape trickled down to our hut, it was always accompanied by a sense of irritation that we would pay the price. Our food rations might be cut, or, as on that day, we’d be compelled to stand to attention at a never-ending Appell, shifting from foot to foot to prevent cramp setting in, and anxious that we’d be subjected to a random act of punishment.
Normally, at Appell, I would try to stand at the back, so as not to attract attention. But on this occasion, I found myself in the front row. I started to fidget after having been stuck there for so long, but I didn’t shift from my position. My mistake was to turn my head around and look behind me.
Suddenly, a female guard towered over me. She was a member of the SS-Gefolge—which literally means the SS entourage. The woman was every bit as intimidating as her male counterparts. If anything, she was even more sinister, given that she wore a skirt and Nazi insignia on the left breast of her uniform.
The woman hauled me out of the line and started slapping my face. She was hitting my cheeks with an open hand. First one side, then the other. I had to lift my face up toward the guard. I knew that was what she wanted. I glanced over at my mother, and Mama looked back at me, but she didn’t say anything because she didn’t know what the consequences would be. So she had to keep quiet, even though she felt like coming to my aid. I knew she couldn’t interfere. But we communicated with our eyes.
Hold on.
The blows kept coming. The SS guard used all her strength. I looked her square in the face as she laid into me and I thought to myself, You can hit me until you kill me, but you will never know how much it hurts.
My cheeks were burning from the attack, but I refused to cry. Even at that age, I had no intention of being a victim. I didn’t know what the word “resistance” meant. But intrinsically, I felt it. I refused to be broken and nobody was going to destroy my inner core. Not one tear for my abuser.
My mind used that same coping mechanism I had first encountered in Starachowice: dissociation. As the slaps rained down, my consciousness took a ride and I had another out-of-body experience. It was as if I was floating above the barrack and was watching the scene from on high. Down there, a woman in black was beating a helpless, starving Jewish child. The helicopter view helped to numb the pain.
I don’t recall how long the assault lasted. She was trying to knock me to the floor, or at least make me cry. But I remained standing and silent. I wanted the punishment to finish, but I wasn’t going to let her know. Eventually, she became too tired to continue. I looked at her hand. It was bright red. My cheeks stung and began to swell.
“Next time, stand still”, she hissed as she pushed me back in line and walked away.
I just stood very still next to Mama. I was numb. We didn’t say anything. We didn’t need to. My body was heaving with the shock of the violence and relief that it was over.
Only after the woman had walked away did I allow the tears to fall in silence. And they continued silently in my bunk for the rest of the day. I had learned an important lesson. As a prisoner, I would never ever cry in public, even if it meant the punishment lasted longer. It only encouraged our tormentors. They fed on our weaknesses.
I wasn’t very far from Mama every moment of that beating, but I felt very much alone. We were trapped in a living nightmare. In a nightmare, nothing makes sense; everything is scrambled and unpredictable. So was our war. Neither Mama nor I knew what would have happened if she had intervened. Mama could have been shot. I could have been shot. Or we both could have been killed. There were no rules. Even if there were rules, they kept changing in a way you could never anticipate. All we could do was cling on and trust in luck.
I remember the time I spent with Mama in the first month in Birkenau vividly, although it was quite routine and mundane. Our days never started well because nights were invariably rough and there was no such thing as restorative sleep. Mama and I rarely had the bunk to ourselves, as a constant rotation of bedmates was imposed upon us. The whole bunk structure would creak and shift as scores of women twitched and rolled over at random. People tried to be considerate, but their pasts conspired against them and there would often be screams as a flashback roared to life and traumatized them once more.
Women whose contours became familiar during the night would suddenly disappear. We never knew where they had gone. Maybe to another barrack, or another work camp in the Auschwitz complex. Or they had been put to sleep in one of the gas chambers at the end of the railway line. Or perhaps they just couldn’t take any more and had made a dash for the nearest electrified barbed-wire fence.
We spent endless hours waiting in lines. Reaching the latrine in the morning tested bladder control to the limit. Hundreds of women needed to relieve themselves at the same time. The latrine had a barrack all to itself. A slit trench ran down the middle, covered by a series of raised wooden planks, punctuated every few feet with holes designed to accommodate women, not children. The size of the holes troubled me. I used to cling on to the planks for fear of tumbling into the reeking cesspit below.
Sometimes, I was able to pay an unscheduled visit to the latrine. Usually, it would happen in the evening, when our block elder was in her room and had “company”. It was strictly verboten (forbidden) for Germans to fraternize with Jews. But proximity to death is a heady aphrodisiac. No doubt, the elder received something in return for her favors. Perhaps a few extra days on earth. Or another bread ration. People did whatever they needed to do to survive. Mama would wait for the elder’s latch to click shut and she would tell me to hurry to the latrine and back.