The physical pain of starvation has never left me. It is the worst feeling in the world. You may not see the scars, but I feel them still, eighty years later, gnawing at my stomach. Hunger has a lasting effect, emotionally and physically.
Starvation triggered a very telling dream in Birkenau. It was so extraordinary that to this day, I can still recall its entire hallucinogenic weirdness. Naturally, it revolved around the thing that I was missing the most: food.
I was out walking and suddenly I came upon a lake that consisted entirely of egg yolks. They stretched as far as the eye could see. After surviving on gruel and stale bread, it’s obvious why I was fantasizing about eggs, my all-time favorite comfort food. I took off my white shoes, carefully broke the membrane on top of the egg lake and immersed myself up to my neck. I had the sensation of floating in a warm bath, and I began swimming, breaststroke. My eyes were level with the yolks, and I swallowed one whole with every stroke driving me forward. I swam and ate. Swam and ate.
I’m sure that my fellow prisoners fantasized about something similar. Starvation is difficult to describe. Imagine a monster inside you, devouring every single cell. Food becomes an obsession. You become crippled by a sinister inner chill. Every nook of your body craves sustenance because every internal organ, every joint, every cartilage is atrophying from a lack of nourishment. Your body is dying from the inside, in slow motion. Imagine feeling like that as a child and not being able to explain what was wrong.
Although I was only six, I could identify people on the verge of death. They seemed to collapse in on themselves until they were doubled up. In the slang of the camps, there was a word for them. They were known as Muselmann. Literally, it translates as Muslims — because they looked as though they were bent over in prayer. The term was used to describe those who were overcome by exhaustion and starvation, and who were so worn down, that they accepted that death was imminent and even a relief. Once a prisoner had reached this stage, there was virtually no way back.
The twelve-year-old girl who shared my bunk presented all the symptoms of a Muselmann. I knew she was dying from starvation. Her body was shutting down, and sure enough, the girl passed away in the middle of the night sometime in the autumn. I woke up in a panic and found her immobile and cold next to me. I was sad that she had died but also worried that we’d be kept standing for hours on end at Appell when the girl failed to respond to her number being called. I was also concerned on behalf of the block elder who had to count us. If the numbers didn’t add up and there was a suspicion someone had escaped, the elder would be in trouble with the Germans. I was scared of the elder, but I knew, even at that young age, that she was a victim of the Nazis as well.
The corpse was my responsibility because we shared a bed. I still could not read her number, but as I had heard it called many times over the past few months, I knew I would recognize the sound pattern. At dawn, I dragged the body to the barrack entrance and pulled her next to a pile of other children who had died in the night. Although the girl was little more than skin and bones, she was extremely heavy for a six-year-old to haul. At Appell, her number was called. I remember feeling an unusual sense of pride in dealing with the problem, despite not understanding numbers.
I raised my arm and responded triumphantly, “She’s dead”.
Chapter Thirteen. The Longest Walk
I remember the best breakfast I ever had in the extermination camp. If I close my eyes and think about it, I can still taste it and feel the texture on my tongue. For once, it wasn’t a coarse hunk of stale bread and watery soup. I don’t know what it was precisely; at the time, I thought it was porridge, whereas now I believe it was more likely to have been a standard German comfort dish, farina pudding: semolina cooked with sugar, and maybe condensed milk, which every German soldier carried in his knapsack as part of his hard rations. Whatever it was, for children like me who were starving and craving proper food, it was delicious.
“We have a special treat for you this morning”, said an adult voice. “Eat up. It’s cold outside. We are leaving”.
This meal was everything I wanted. I had been yearning for something sweet. It had substance and filled me up. I wolfed down the semolina and scraped every sticky grain off the tin cup with my spoon.
Ours was the last remaining children’s block. We all instinctively knew where the walk was going to take us. It didn’t matter. Our bellies were full for the first time in a long while. We were living from minute to minute. And in that moment, we were just thankful for the gift of food. When I think about that breakfast now, I find it distressing that even with children, the Nazis played mind games. They manipulated us to ensure we did exactly as we were told.
After we’d eaten, we came out of the barrack. Outside, it was freezing. The ground was rock-hard and covered in frost. I can’t be certain when it was, but it was probably the end of October or the start of November 1944. We turned left and walked toward the railway track. Our breath was steaming from our mouths. There must have been over fifty children aged from four to twelve, escorted by two female members of the SS. I was one of the smallest, extracting every ounce of warmth from the rough coat I wore over my shift dress. I was still wearing my white lace-up shoes and no socks. I was at the back of the line with another little girl, and we were talking as we walked.
Dead bodies, all thin, sharp angles, covered with frost, lay scattered on the ground, not far from the path we were taking. Their eyes seemed to follow us. Death could strike at any time and in many forms. People didn’t always die in their bunks like my bed companion had. I knew that they just dropped dead on the spot from starvation, exhaustion and disease. Maybe these people had just died in the past few minutes. Or maybe they had passed away the night before and hadn’t yet been collected by the Leichenkommando, the work teams responsible for corpses. Either way, the sight didn’t disturb us. The cadavers were merely part of the landscape.
We walked past another of the children’s barrack buildings. It was empty. We hadn’t seen those children for a few days. Some of the older ones in our line surmised that the SS had come for them, and they’d been taken to the crematorium.
“Maybe it’s our turn”, I said to my companion.
As ever, I had already accepted the idea that death was my fate. I wasn’t exactly sure what death was, or what happened afterward, but I remained convinced that all Jewish children had to die. As we were walking, whispers trickled down from the front of the line to the back. Someone had asked where we were going. The answer seemed to be that we were indeed heading to the gas chamber.
We kept on walking. The German breakfast was doing what it was intended to do. I was nervous but not excessively distressed. For once, I had a full stomach, and that inner cold that comes from starvation had, for the time being, disappeared.
Suddenly, a woman’s loud voice pierced my consciousness.
“Tola”.
I was confused. That was my name. For months I hadn’t heard it spoken outside the children’s barrack. To adults, I wasn’t Tola anymore. I was A-27633.
“That must be my mother”, I said to my companion. “She’s the only grown-up who knows my name. Yes, I’m sure it’s her”.