The Nazis then investigated how the explosives had fallen into the hands of the Sonderkommandos. Four women prisoners were sentenced to death, tortured for weeks and subsequently hanged in Auschwitz. The Sonderkommandos’ last stand did, however, achieve one notable success: Crematorium IV was damaged beyond repair and had to be demolished.
After Himmler’s decree that gassing operations cease, work on dismantling the other gas chambers and crematoria began. Women prisoners like my mother were ordered to start demolishing Crematorium III and its gas chamber, the one that almost claimed my life. They had to remove the metal tracks that led to the line of ovens. The tracks’ purpose had been to speed up the process of cremation. Sonderkommandos would load up small carts with bodies and push them along the tracks to the individual ovens.
The women were ordered to lay grass turf over all the pits that had been used for burning corpses when the crematoria couldn’t handle the load. They were also required to sift through human ash remains before they were dumped in the nearby Vistula River. Some women tried to hide bones so they could be used as evidence later. The women knew that the Russians, and with them maybe justice, were on the way. It’s extraordinary to think that at a time when the German Third Reich was facing its greatest threat, from the might of the Soviet Army, the SS were ordering women to plant trees on the sites of the former burning pits, to make it look as though nothing had happened.
The last time I was in a gas chamber was on January 26, 2020. I returned for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the camp’s liberation. I walked into the preserved chamber, in Crematorium I, near the famous entrance gate to Auschwitz, with its sardonic welcome, Arbeit Macht Frei. The relatively small chamber, with three or four ovens and metal trays for pushing corpses into the flames, became redundant because it couldn’t handle the industrial-scale extermination at the heart of the Final Solution.
I thought I was tough enough to cope with entering a place replete with nightmarish personal memories and which symbolizes the crimes against my people. But after a couple of minutes, I could hardly breathe and had to leave quickly. The experience was too much for me.
Chapter Fourteen. Deliverance
After my close encounter with the gas chamber, the next moment of maximum peril came at the end of January 1945 as history closed in on Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Just because the Nazis had been ordered to stop gassing us didn’t mean the murdering had ended. Although the gas chambers were now out of action, life wasn’t any safer. They were still executing people. Prisoners were still dying from sickness, malnutrition and exhaustion. But for the first time since the Nazis had swept to power, their priority was now self-preservation. Although our guards, the fanatical SS, took pride in their reputation for being the cream of the German military, like many bullies, they became cowards when confronted by opposition.
There were bombing raids by American planes on factories attached to the Auschwitz complex. Despite the danger to the slave laborers inside, the attacks were welcomed by them as a sign that liberation might soon be at hand. The rumble of artillery grew louder as the Soviet Red Army moved in from the east. When they approached the city of Kraków, forty miles from Birkenau, on January 17, 1945, prisoners witnessed a state of panic and chaos among drunken SS personnel.
The Germans were now in a race against time. Prisoners didn’t need newspapers or radio broadcasts to know what was happening. They overheard soldiers’ anxious conversations. The SS were experiencing pangs of real fear, perhaps for the first time. Birkenau had been a soft posting. All it entailed was murdering harmless civilians. Nobody in their right mind volunteered for the Russian front, where no quarter was proffered by enemy nor winter. Now the Russian front was on their doorstep. The sacrifice of Stalingrad was fresh in the Soviet memory. More than a million Russian troops and civilians were killed there, the bloodiest battle of the Second World War. The Soviet victory on the banks of the Volga River in the winter of 1942 finally turned the tide of the war in the east against Germany. Retribution was on the tip of every Red Army bayonet. Storming westward, the Russians swept aside all opposition. They were just a few days from arriving at our gates.
The Germans began the evacuation of Birkenau on January 18, 1945. The worst genocide in the history of humankind had taken place within the confines of these electrified fences. The Nazis attempted to sanitize the crime scene, or at least leave as little evidence as possible. They blew up Crematoria II and III. Only Crematorium V remained intact. They incinerated the records and files so diligently gathered over the previous few years, but their biggest problem was that there were so many witnesses left. Sixty thousand prisoners remained in Auschwitz, Birkenau and Monowitz, the main components of the Auschwitz complex.
The Nazis started gathering prisoners to either transport them or force them to march westward toward Germany. On the first day of this operation, some 5,000 women and children left Birkenau, wearing clogs or barefoot and in columns of five hundred escorted by SS guards. Anyone who was too sick or weak was summarily shot. Like wounded animals, the Germans were at their most dangerous now that they felt threatened. Over the course of the next week, the mayhem intensified as the Russians drew ever closer.
On the morning of January 25, 1945, the block elder in Mama’s building said the evacuation of the camp was nearly finished. She told the women that those who could walk would have to leave, and all those who couldn’t would be “taken care of”. Mama knew what that meant. She waited for her opportunity, and when the elder’s back was turned, she slipped out of the barracks to fetch me.
Mama understood the enormity of this day: it offered the prospect of freedom. After six years of slavery, starvation and degradation, liberation was perhaps just hours away. In her own small way, Mama had resisted for the duration of the war. Every day that she and I survived was an act of defiance. On this day of all days, she couldn’t afford to be passive. It was unthinkable that we might succumb to the Holocaust in these last turbulent hours. For the first time in the war, Mama had a slight chance to dictate how her day might end. Her sixth sense, her intuition, had served her well in the past. She had to follow her instincts while keeping her eyes wide open.
The confusion in the camp, the smoke from the fires and the murk of winter all worked in our favor. Mama achieved her objective. She managed to take me to the infirmary and hide me in a bed with a covered corpse.
What Mama didn’t know, and what I’ve learned since, is that at two o’clock that afternoon, large numbers of SD troops were sent into our camp to force all the remaining Jews out into the open. SD stood for Sicherheitsdienst, the security service — possibly the most dangerous outfit within the German armed forces. Their function was to act as mobile killing units.
As soon as I heard their boots, I snapped out of my daydream about the doll with the green face. I was instantly alert. I had time to mold myself as close as possible to the shape of the corpse, and then I remained as still as possible. My presence of mind in staying calm and clutching the cadaver a little tighter was testimony to the education in survival Mama had given me.