I was surprised at how many other children were there. There might have been fifty or seventy or so. One or two were smaller than me, but most were bigger and older. Where had they all come from? Had they been hiding in the camp? Maybe I wasn’t the only Jewish child in the world, after all? But where were their parents? There weren’t any adults in this section. I might not have been on my own, in that I was now part of a group, but without Mama by my side, nothing was the same.
To my surprise, I recognized two familiar faces from Tomaszów Mazowiecki and my heart skipped a beat: Frieda and Rena were standing at the entrance. They were cousins who were five and six years older than me. At that moment, I felt slightly less alone. Unfortunately for me, they weren’t in the barrack for long. Somehow, shortly after my arrival, their mothers managed to smuggle them out of the Kinderlager to a different part of the camp. I didn’t see them again until after the war.
But at least there was another friend from Tomaszów Mazowiecki. Rutka Greenspan was much closer to my age and had apparently been on the same train that brought me to Auschwitz. It was her father who had been strangled in the cattle car on the journey from the labor camp at Starachowice to Birkenau. Rutka did a double take when I walked into the barrack. I was overjoyed to see her. She was delighted to see me as well and we hugged each other tightly. I didn’t know whether she knew that her father was dead. The manner of his death was so awful, I decided to keep it to myself. I was trying to be kind.
But I must confess that occasionally I was a little cruel. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, hunger pangs woke me up. I would slip out of my bunk and squat on the line of warm bricks that ran down the center of the barrack. The bricks radiated heat from a small stove, and I loved the warmth on my bare feet. I was comforted. When I was warm enough, I’d stand up and prance along the bricks as quietly as possible. I felt tall and powerful. I’d tiptoe between the bunks and raise my arms and extend my fingers, as if I was a witch or a monster, casting a spell on the children who I thought were sleeping. It was just a game. But I learned later that Rutka was often awake as well, and on occasions I had towered over her with my arms outstretched like a Nazi eagle. My silhouette terrified her in Birkenau and was the source of nightmares for decades to follow.
There were other nights when I woke up and was petrified. Once, two SS soldiers came into our barrack in the middle of the night when all the other children were asleep and I was wide awake. I watched with horror as they went from bunk to bunk, peering at the children. I couldn’t work out what they were doing. I thought perhaps they were looking for twins on behalf of the Angel of Death, Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor, infamous for conducting excruciating live medical experiments on prisoners. Mengele’s laboratory was not far away, separated from our barrack by just a barbed-wire fence.
The older children in our building were aware of the atrocities that were being perpetrated just a few yards away, and the stories they told us added a new layer of fear to life in Birkenau. We heard that Mengele was fascinated by twins. He would dip one twin in boiling water, another in ice, and compare how they reacted. Mengele was a psychopath who abused his medical skills in the sick pursuit of racial purity. He conducted amputations without anesthetics. He injected the eyes of twins with chemicals to see if he could change their color. Mengele was trying to create the perfect Aryan blue for the “master race” of the future. One twin would be used as the guinea pig, the other as the control. And when the tests inevitably failed, both children would be murdered.
I remember trembling in my bunk, trying to convince myself that I would be safe from the soldiers’ attentions because I wasn’t a twin. Nevertheless, I lay there fretting that they would hear the pounding of my heart and would come and take me away, murder me, chop me up and use my liver to feed troops on the front lines.
I’m not suggesting the Germans were cannibals, but as a child of Auschwitz, I had seen evidence of the aftermath of dissections with my own eyes. During one particularly strange period, our block elder took us on walks around Birkenau. Supposedly, she did it to give us some exercise and fresh air, in a place where the atmosphere could not have been more putrid. During one ramble, I became separated from the main group, and being inquisitive, I opened the door of a small wooden building and saw that it was packed to the rafters with body parts and long-dead eyes staring back at me. I was shocked by the experience and slammed the door shut immediately, thinking, This has nothing to do with me.
I tried to forget what I had seen. But the image was planted in my brain and has frequently returned to upset me. Most recently, this happened in December 2021 as we were deep into drafting the manuscript for this book. I found myself thinking about Mengele’s evil works and for a few nights I was completely unable to sleep.
Like most Auschwitz survivors, I wish that Mengele had been faced with postwar justice. But he managed to evade Allied investigators and eventually made his way to South America. He apparently died of a heart attack near São Paulo in Brazil in 1979.
Living as close to Mengele for as long as we did demanded a safety valve: humor. Some of the older children in my barrack would pick on the younger ones with a particularly sick joke.
“I’ve just seen your mother”.
“No, you haven’t. I haven’t seen her since we arrived here. So how could you have seen her?”
“Would you like to see her?”
“Yes, of course”.
“See that smoke, that’s where she is. She’s coming out of the chimney”.
Of course, the dark humor was a defense mechanism to try to ward off the fear that we all experienced. We all felt vulnerable and alone without our parents. Still, a sense of camaraderie permeated the Kinderlager. We were bound together by our situation. But ultimately, I knew I could only depend upon myself.
Today, nearly eighty years later, I occasionally experience a similar sense of solitariness. Although I might be at the center of a large gathering of people, I still feel my family’s absence. It’s a phantom pain, as though part of me has been amputated. The sensation even surfaces when I am surrounded by my four children and eight grandchildren, during holidays like Hanukkah and Passover, when extended family enriches the experience. I’m reminded that my mother was the sole survivor of the Pinkusewicz family, who lost 150 members. Then there were my father’s parents, five of his siblings and all their families. They all perished. I still miss my uncle James after all these years.
I, too, was slated to die once my number came up. All I have to do today is look down to my left forearm and there it is: the constant reminder of who the Nazis wanted me to be. A-27633. Just a number waiting to be gassed. Over time, the tattoo has come to represent the exact opposite of what the Nazis intended. It was meant to dehumanize me. To reduce me to a number. To brand me. Like cattle or sheep. Instead, it has empowered me. It is also reaffirmation of my personal humanity, and of my obligation to those who weren’t as fortunate. In a way, it is symbolic of my ultimate moral victory over Hitler and his kind.
Only once was I embarrassed by the tattoo, when I was about twelve, not long after I arrived in America. I was straphanging on the subway in New York. Everyone in the carriage seemed to be staring at me and zeroing in on my left forearm. Nobody said a word. They just looked at the tattoo. I suddenly felt incredibly hot. I wanted to cover it up.