“Raus, raus”, the Germans bellowed. “Alle Juden heraus. Heraus, schnell, schnell”.
My heart began pounding. I couldn’t see anything. All my nerve endings were on fire. But I remembered Mama’s parting words: “No matter what you hear, do not move until I return”.
My body went rigid. I heard shooting and screaming as patients were hauled from beds, jarring their emaciated frames as they fell to the floor. I heard the fear in their voices as guttural German commands zapped like machine pistols around the infirmary. Leather gloves smacked skin and bone. A woman cried in pain. There was a shot, quickly followed by another.
Now it was my turn. A soldier approached my bed. He moved slowly and deliberately. Gravel trapped in the soles of his jackboots ground on the floorboards as he drew closer. He was breathing heavily. I kept my breaths as shallow as possible so the blanket wouldn’t move. I breathed toward the ground. And then I held my breath for as long as I could. The soldier seemed to take an age assuring himself my bedmate was dead. Eventually, he moved on. I fought hard not to gasp as I exhaled. I listened as soldiers went from room to room, dragging patients from beds onto the floor. They were shooting people in the building and outside. The screaming and the shooting camouflaged the sounds of my breathing. I did not budge an inch.
Then it went quiet. I tried to work out whether the Germans had left the infirmary. I wanted to rip off the blanket and look. But I didn’t dare move. Mama had told me to stay put. I trusted Mama. I lay there waiting and listening. Time had no meaning. I had no way of telling how long I lay there.
Then I smelled smoke. At first, it was bearable. But within minutes the smoke filled my lungs and started to crush them. I struggled to breathe. Yet still I hugged the cold corpse and stayed beneath the blanket. I refused to cough. I could have choked or burned to death. I was following Mama’s instructions to the letter. The smoke intensified. I was finding it harder to breathe. I was desperate for fresh air but still resisted the urge to cough. Suddenly, the blanket was tugged from the bed.
“Quick, we’ve got to get out of here. They’ve set the building on fire”.
She sat me up.
“They’ve gone, Tola. They’ve gone”.
It was Mama. She’d kept her promise. Mama had come back. She, too, had been clutching a corpse and pretending to be dead.
There was astonishment in Mama’s voice and a sense of joy that I had never heard before.
“Where are your shoes?” she asked.
The white lace-up shoes I had worn since the previous summer had vanished. “We’ll have to leave without them. We have to go. We don’t have much time”.
I scanned the barrack. All around me, women were climbing out of beds. The half dead were pushing cadavers out of the way. They fell to the ground with a soft thud. It seemed as though corpses were flying off the beds. Floorboards cantilevered into the air as coughing, skeletal figures in rags pried themselves out of hiding places and shook off dust and dirt. It looked like the dead were coming back to life.
I grasped Mama’s hand and walked barefoot out of the burning infirmary and into the snow. Scores of buildings were on fire. Birkenau truly was an inferno. Fresh corpses littered the frozen ground. These were the people I’d heard being executed outside. They had been cut down because they were physically incapable of joining what would be later termed the Death March. That could so easily have been Mama and me.
There were no SS, no SD, no Nazis of any description to be seen. They had all vanished. Our astonishment was shared by other surviving inmates of Birkenau, as the realization dawned that the guards had abandoned their posts and fled. As the crowd ventured toward the railway tracks that had brought us all to Birkenau, I could see silhouettes in the gathering dusk, across the flat terrain more than a mile away, beyond the Gate of Death. The last group of prisoners to leave under guard numbered around 350 children, women and men. I have no idea what happened to them. Perhaps they suffered a similar fate to those on the Death March, who were murdered on the way or died from starvation and exposure.
I was finally free to cry. But I didn’t. I was too hungry. More than anything, I was craving food.
Now free to roam, the prisoners broke into storerooms and found enough rations to feed an army. Word rapidly spread that there was food aplenty. Collective madness descended as people sought to alleviate their hunger pains. Using whatever implements they could find, they forced open cans of processed meats and other delicacies.
That night, Birkenau glowed every shade of red. Flames flickered in barrack blocks torched by the Germans. Some had been reduced to cinders. Abandoned prisoners in thin rags clustered around bonfires, warming their bones and trying to grasp the concept of freedom. For the first time in six years, flames meant life, not extinction. Searchlights no longer beamed from watchtowers. And although there was no power in the electric fences — electricity and water supplies had been knocked out during a recent Allied bombing raid — most prisoners stayed inside.
Mama and I wandered back to her barrack block and clambered into a bunk together. For the first time in almost five months, I snuggled up to her as tightly as I could possibly get. Her body had changed. There was much less of her than there used to be. But she still had the scent of my mama.
Thankfully, that night no other women shared our bunk. I descended into the most secure, tranquil sleep I had enjoyed in ages. I even slept through a huge explosion in the middle of the night when an SS demolition squad blew up Crematorium V. It was the last military action by the Germans in Birkenau.
For me and Mama, the war was over. Now new battles began. We had to fight the complications of peace. And our demons.
Chapter Fifteen. Liberation
For two days, the sounds of fighting grew louder and closer. Although our Nazi oppressors were nowhere to be seen, there was an underlying fear that they might return. We found ourselves in a peculiar hinterland between incarceration and freedom. Our jailers had fled, but the survivors left inside the barbed wire not only had no place to go, we were confused, traumatized, sickly and, of course, exhausted. The trepidation and dire conditions, however, were counterbalanced by a wave of optimism, an emotion that had been absent among my people for my entire life.
“The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming” was the repeated refrain as the day wore on.
And for once, optimism was rewarded. As the light was fading, we caught the first glimpse of our liberators. I stood next to Mama at the barbed-wire fence, looking toward the redbrick Gate of Death. We were lost in a crowd of mainly women who had the physical strength to stand for hours in the freezing cold. Although most were little more than skeletons, they managed to shout and scream and cheer and whistle. It was the happiest sound I had ever heard.
Marching behind a giant red flag, with a gold hammer and sickle in the corner, the soldiers pushed open the gate to a roar of welcome. Some prisoners were dancing, fueled by adrenaline and affirmation that against all odds, they had defied extermination. Women rushed forward and kissed the soldiers on the cheeks. So did some of the men. Others fell to their knees and kissed the boots of the victorious Russians.