I looked to my right and there were all these thin women, who seemed to be half naked, pressed up against a barbed-wire fence. They all looked terrible, displaying the hallmarks of starvation.
“Tola, where are you going? What’s going on?” my mother shouted.
I couldn’t see Mama in among the crowd. All I heard was her voice.
“We’re going to the crematorium”, I replied, almost jauntily.
Suddenly, all the women behind the wire began screaming and ululating. We carried on walking and the screaming became louder and more desperate. I turned to my young companion and said, “I don’t understand why they are crying. Every Jewish child has to go to the crematorium. What are they crying about?”
We must have been walking for about fifteen minutes. Then, just before we reached the railway track, we turned right, close to a long, single-story T-shaped building with sloping roofs. It resembled a large community hall, apart from the incongruous annex on the side with a squat brick-built chimney emitting that foul-smelling smoke. The warmth of the breakfast was wearing off. We were freezing, especially those who didn’t have shoes.
“Go down the steps”, ordered a soldier in an SS uniform.
We did as we were told and entered a stark, bare concrete room with gray walls. Coat hooks lined the walls. What a sinister and scary place it was. This was the anteroom for the gas chamber in Crematorium III.
“Hang up your clothes in such a way that you will know exactly where they are when you come out. You are going to have a shower now”.
The concrete walls amplified the bitter temperatures. I undressed and immediately began shivering. Rarely in my life have I felt so cold. I stood on tiptoe, hung up my clothes and placed my shoes neatly beneath them. I looked down to see if there were any landmarks on the floor that I would recognize later. Then I looked to the left and right to determine which children were on either side of me for when we emerged from the shower. Except, I had this sixth sense that we wouldn’t be coming out.
Still the guards maintained the delusion that we would. Some of the older children were sobbing. Some quietly. Others less so. The noise upset the German desire for order, and more than once, they told us to shut up.
The guards distributed ragged threadbare towels, reinforcing the fiction that we were only in this dungeon for a shower. The towels didn’t pacify the older ones. I was given a small orange one, which I wrapped around myself by tucking it under my arms. It gave me momentary warmth, although I soon started shivering again. Echoes of whimpering children, suffering from the cold and sheer terror, filled the room. Some were swept along by the sense of doom that descended on us. Not me. I remained silent. I didn’t cry. I had resigned myself to my fate. Whatever that may be. As long as I could escape the cold.
We all huddled together in that concrete waiting room, a few feet from the shower doors. I didn’t feel afraid. And I didn’t miss my parents. This event, whatever it was, was something I had anticipated. Wrapped in our thin towels, freezing, shivering and shaking, we clung to each other for warmth. We watched and listened as, on the far side of the room, uniformed SS guards with clipboards barked at each other. They seemed to be confused. Ordinarily, German operations ran like clockwork, but on this frigid morning, the mechanics of the Nazi war machine appeared to have malfunctioned.
We waited and waited. The tension was excruciating. The whimpering was getting under the skin of the Germans, who repeatedly yelled at us to be quiet. We remained standing, wrapped in our towels for hours. Suddenly, a harsh command snapped us to attention.
“Raus, raus”[9].
We were ordered to get dressed as quickly as possible and to go back to our barrack.
“It’s the wrong block”, I heard someone say. “We’ll take them another time”.
We filed out of the waiting room, back up the stairs and retraced our steps toward the Kinderlager, escorted again by two SS guards. This time the women’s camp was on our left. The same gaunt women who had seen us pass before pressed themselves against the barbed-wire fence once again. This time, however, their voices were full of relief and amazement.
“Tola, what happened? Tell me what happened”, Mama yelled.
Once again, I couldn’t see her in the crowd.
“They got the wrong block”, I yelled back. “They’re going to take us another time”.
Matter of fact, as always, even at that young age.
In the history of the Holocaust, of all the millions who entered gas chambers in Poland, such as Auschwitz, Majdanek, Chełmno, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor, there were very few who somehow survived the experience. Our group of children was probably the largest number to live to tell the tale.
I always thought my escape was a miracle of the Holocaust. To this day, I don’t know if we were saved because, as I thought at the time, there was confusion over which children were scheduled for extermination. But if we were indeed the last children in Birkenau, how could the SS have been expecting another group to be gassed?
During the research for this book, another possibility has surfaced. If our entry to the gas chamber took place on or after November 2, 1944, it’s entirely feasible that we were saved by Heinrich Himmler, the second most powerful man in the Third Reich, and one of the architects of the Final Solution. Because on this date, Himmler decreed that there were to be no more gassings using the cyanide-based Zyklon B. His order defied Hitler, who was insistent that the extermination of the Jews continued until the task was completed.
One of the catalysts for Himmler’s decision was recognition that the Allies were by then aware of the scale of the genocide being perpetrated by the Nazis. The turning point happened in late July 1944 when, in a lightning-fast attack, the Soviet Red Army captured the Majdanek extermination camp, 220 miles northeast of Auschwitz. The Russians took the place intact, before the Germans had a chance to destroy the gas chambers and other infrastructure. Evidence of Nazi war crimes was then indisputable.
The prime witnesses were workers called Sonderkommandos. Predominantly Jews, their function was to do the most revolting tasks to save the Nazis from further soiling their bloodstained hands. The Germans tried to make the Sonderkommandos complicit, forcing them to lead their fellow Jews to the gas chambers, sometimes shepherding their own friends and families to their deaths. Then, after the cyanide had done its work, they were required to remove the corpses and load them into the crematoria. And when the crematoria were overwhelmed, they burned cadavers in open pits.
The Sonderkommandos were the walking dead. They knew too much. They saw everything the Nazis did. As potential witnesses, they posed a threat to the Germans, if justice ever presented itself. Performing tasks the Germans weren’t willing to undertake prolonged the lives of Sonderkommandos by a few months, maybe a year. They enjoyed slightly better rations than the average Birkenau prisoner. But they were doomed the moment they were coerced into joining.
On October 7, 1944, after hearing that they were about to be killed, 250 Sonderkommandos staged the biggest revolt in the short bloody history of Auschwitz-Birkenau. They made improvised bombs and hand grenades using mess tins and explosives smuggled to them by female slave laborers who’d been working in a munitions factory. After attacking SS guards with knives, rocks, hammers and crowbars, they managed to damage Crematorium IV, which, like Crematorium V, was set in pine trees that were almost in a direct line from the front door of our barrack. Three members of the SS were killed, including one who was thrown into the open furnace of the crematorium. We cowered inside as the fierce battle took place just a few hundred yards away. Using blasts from exploding oxygen canisters and resulting fire as cover, some of the prisoners tried to escape. The Sonderkommandos had seen what had happened to their predecessors and preferred to go down fighting. None of them made it. The SS killed all 250. A further 200 co-conspirators were killed.