Not long afterward, I had a doctor’s appointment as part of a refugee resettlement program. In common with other refugees, I was checked out to make sure I was healthy.
“I’m going to give you a gift”, said the doctor. “I’m going to take away the number with a little plastic surgery. You’ll never know it was there. It’ll be just a little cut”.
I was only twelve. I might have been a refugee, but I was full of chutzpah. I pointed to my forehead and said, “If the number had been right here, I wouldn’t take it off. I did nothing wrong”.
I was angry that the doctor had even suggested it. The tattoo is my witness statement. I was there. I saw what happened.
I do know a few people who had their tattoos removed when they were young. They all regretted it. I can still remember the young Jewish woman who gave me my tattoo a few weeks after I was installed in the Kinderlager. Most prisoners were tattooed as soon as they entered Auschwitz. I don’t know why I wasn’t. Perhaps German bureaucracy had its shortcomings.
When our turn came, we all had to line up. Starving hungry and hoping for an extra ration, some girls pushed and shoved to reach the head of the line. Rutka from Tomaszów Mazowiecki ended up right in front of me. She was given the tattoo number A-27632.
The tattooist was about seventeen or eighteen years old. Back then, at my young age, I thought she was quite old. She was very nice and very careful, but her hand was shaking, and I thought to myself, This lady doesn’t like to do what she’s doing.
I watched every single move. I was fascinated by the mechanics. The needle hurt a little, but concentrating on what she was doing helped minimize the pain.
She didn’t have a machine like they do nowadays. She had a sharp needle that she dipped in a bottle of ink. She went backward and forward making pinpricks. Every dot was made separately. The woman talked to me gently as she was working.
“I’ll give you a very neat number. If you ever survive, you can buy a blouse with a long sleeve and nobody will know what happened to you. You won’t be embarrassed.
“Find yourself a cold wet rag to press against your number. It will hurt less. From now on, you don’t have a name. You only have a number. Memorize it. It’s important”.
Not long after she inked me, the tattooist was killed. Like so many others, she spent ten minutes choking to death. Why did they kill her? After all, she was working. She was just a small cog in the war machine, yet she was, in Nazi terms, gainfully employed. Perhaps she was too slow. Perhaps she was too gentle and too kind as she carried out a function she clearly despised. In Nazi terms, showing compassion was a crime, punishable by death.
The tattooist was right. I had to memorize the number. Even though I couldn’t read or write and didn’t yet know my numbers. At morning and evening roll call, when all the children gathered, I never once heard the block elder yell the name Tola Grossman. There were so many numbers that sounded like mine. I taught myself to hear the numbers grouped together. If the elder ever shouted out A-27633 and I failed to reply “Present”, she would stop and repeat it. And she would get angry, and life would become more unpleasant. There would always be some form of retribution for upsetting her. I was reminded that it was best to be anonymous, not to draw attention to myself. I had learned that lesson with my parents in the ghetto and the labor camp. But now I could see for myself the wisdom of that strategy.
The block elder at the Kinderlager had a range of punishments that she would administer. I already knew I could withstand her slaps without any difficulty. She was nowhere near as powerful as the SS woman I had aggravated in August. Most commonly, we were made to remain at attention at roll call for extended periods. Nobody wanted to stand forever. Reducing the food ration, however, was the most painful sanction. I was missing my mama’s physical presence, her love and nurturing soul. But now I understood how much I had relied on the morsels of bread she had given me from her own ration. Without that extra bread, I was hungrier than ever. The watery soup we were given in the Kinderlager was as insubstantial as it was in the barrack I shared with Mama. But there seemed to be even less of it. The hunger pangs lasted longer than before and I was permanently famished. The Nazis may not have slated us for the gas chamber yet. But they were certainly starving us to death.
Mama was obviously worried about the impact of the Birkenau diet on me. One day a woman came up to me and gave me a little pouch on a piece of string. It was September 7, 1944.
“It’s from your mama”, she said. “It’s your birthday present. You’re turning six”.
My mama was still alive! I looked inside the pouch. It was a chunk of bread. Never has a present meant as much to me as that morsel. It was full of my mother’s love and reminded me that she was thinking of me and, despite our terrible conditions, fighting for my life. I later discovered that my mother had stolen a potato to trade for that piece of bread. She was spotted and brutally beaten about the head. The punishment was so severe that Mama suffered acute headaches for the rest of her life. But she had managed to cling on to the bread.
The present lifted my spirits. I was so hungry that I could have eaten it there and then. But I resolved to save it for the moment when I was about to die from starvation. Death. Isn’t that what happened to every Jewish child? In my innocence, I thought that the bread could save my life and bring me back from the brink. So I put the pouch underneath the front of my dress and fell asleep on the bunk that I shared with another girl, who was about twice my age.
Squeaks and a stampede of tiny feet all over my body woke me up in the middle of the night. Rats had found my gift. I felt their claws on my skin. Several of them dived into the front of my dress and stole the bread, running off into the darkness to devour their prize. Other rats jumped off the bunk in pursuit. I felt for the pouch, but the rats had taken it all. There wasn’t a crumb left. Needless to say, my sixth birthday was not a happy one.
Each long day in Birkenau seemed to melt into the next one. But because I know what happened on my birthday, I’m able to give a precise date to my encounter with the rats. While researching the timeline in Auschwitz, I learned that two days earlier, on September 5, 1944, a girl called Anne Frank arrived at Birkenau from a transit camp called Westerbork in the Netherlands. The cattle cars contained 1,019 Dutch Jews, including seven who had been living in hiding for over two years in a narrow canal-side house in Prinsengracht 263, Amsterdam. Among them were Anne Frank, then aged fifteen, her sister, Margot, her mother, Edith, and father, Otto. Anne Frank’s final diary entry, written in the Secret Annex, hidden behind a bookcase, was on August 1, 1944, three days before her arrest by the Gestapo, after the family was betrayed.
In her diary, perhaps the most famous literary work of the Holocaust, Anne Frank wrote, “Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. The Gestapo are treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe where they’re sending all the Jews”.
She added: “If it’s this bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they’re being gassed. Perhaps that’s the quickest way to die”.
But the Holocaust was unpredictable. Anne Frank didn’t die quickly. She toiled as a slave laborer in Birkenau until November 1944 when she was transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp north of Hanover, where she died of sickness and exhaustion in February 1945. We never met, but we endured the same regime of malnutrition that ultimately contributed to her death.