The railway track ended at Birkenau near the women’s concentration camp. The main Auschwitz men’s camp was four or five kilometres away. It was a beautifully hot May day, when spring flowers are at their best, but as I looked around there was nothing growing anywhere in sight, not even a tree or a bush. The whole area was a dried-up desert of barren earth and dust.
Mutti and I walked in line with the other captives. Many Dutch from Westerbork were there and I caught sight of Franzi a little ahead of us. At first we were glad to move forward, stretching our legs without the encumbrance of heavy baggage, but we soon became part of a weary trail of tramping, thirsty women.
After a march of about twenty minutes and in a state of near exhaustion, we reached the gate of the huge compound.
Row upon row of ugly wooden barracks stretched into the distance enclosed by electrified barbed wire higher than a man. Sentries in tall watchtowers overlooked the camp surrounds. We were now defenceless captives, entirely in the hands of the Germans. Even in the heat I shivered.
Once inside the compound we were marshalled into a barrack to stand waiting for our ‘reception’. And there we waited. We had been without food or drink for more than twenty-four hours. When some women fainted and fell to the ground no one took any notice of them. I thought it was cruel until I began to envy them. Unconsciousness would have been a welcome relief.
Hundreds of us stood in the airless barrack guarded by only a few German soldiers with rifles pointing at us. After a wait that seemed endless our ‘reception committee’ eventually appeared: eight women all dressed in striped blue and grey prison uniforms. Their grey faces sneered at us as they walked along our lines.
These women were the Kappos, Polish prisoners of war who were used by the SS to administer the concentration camps. They strode through our ranks, pushing and punching us.
‘Welcome to Birkenau,’ they jeered. ‘You’re the lucky ones, you’ve only just arrived – we’ve been here for years. We’re in charge here and you will obey our orders. Your luck has just run out!’
A heavily built Kappo moved out in front of us.
‘Can you smell the camp crematorium?’ she shouted viciously. ‘That’s where your dear relatives have been gassed in what they thought were shower rooms. They’re burning now. You’ll never see them again!’
We tried not to listen. She was just trying to frighten us. We did not believe her; it was simply too terrible to contemplate.
‘You are filthy Jews!’ shouted the chief Kappo, ‘and we are going to delouse you... after that you will be tattooed, shaved and clothed.’
Mutti stepped forward from the line.
‘We are all thirsty, we need water,’ she pleaded.
She should have known they’d have no time for such a simple request. Their faces, hardened by their own suffering, showed little concern for us – we were new prisoners who had experienced relatively little hardship in the war until now. They ordered her to get back in line but she began to sway and nearly fainted. She did not fall, however, because we were all pressed very close together. One of the Kappos who seemed a bit kinder came and patted Mutti’s face to revive her.
‘Don’t faint, it’s dangerous,’ she said. ‘You will get water but not yet.’ Turning to everyone else she warned, ‘Don’t drink the tap water. It carries typhus and dysentery.’
I stood there in my heavy overcoat and hat, feeling as if I were dying of thirst. My feet were hurting too. I looked down at my dust-covered shoes. Inside them, under my instep, were specially made steel supports that Mutti insisted I wear because I was so flat-footed. I wished I could take them off and sit down.
At last we were herded into a large building with an ante-room where we had to leave any last belongings we possessed, including everything that we wore. I did not want to undress and be naked but I knew I had no choice. Mutti was undressing and then I saw Franzi doing the same, so how could I protest? As I took my shoes off, Mutti reminded me to keep hold of my metal supports in case they got lost, so I walked along with the rest, all of us completely naked, into a large shower room, carrying my supports with me.
The shower room was a large concrete shell with no windows or cubicles. Along the ceiling I could see pipes capped with nozzles. There were drainage runs and outlet holes in the floor.
As we huddled together and waited, the doors were closed behind us. I thought of the things the Kappos had told us. Were these showers water or gas? I began to shake with fear and Mutti gripped my hand tightly. Suddenly cold water poured down on to our heads.
There were no flannels or soap but the cool water revived me and I began to wash away the last three days of weary travelling. I scooped up a small amount of water and moistened my parched lips. Mutti patted my bottom and smiled at me; her fair hair, now darkened by the water, lay against her head, curling over her ears and at the nape of her neck. I thought how young she looked. I loved her so much.
Eventually the flow of water ceased, doors at the other side of the shower room were thrown open and we were able to walk out. I looked around for a towel but there were none supplied, nor any clothes. Our wet bodies had to steam in the heat of the afternoon.
We were ordered to walk in single file towards a couple of women prisoners who were shaving everyone’s hair. All hair was being removed. My pubic hair was soft and new – I had watched it appear over the last two years as I turned into a woman and now I was going to have to submit to having it shaved off.
‘Open your legs,’ the Kappo ordered.
I was intensely embarrassed as she scraped the razor over my soft skin. I did not see the reason for this humiliation. After that she shaved under my arms, but when she started to cut off the hair on my head with large blunt scissors Mutti could not resist trying to interfere on my behalf.
She tousled my hair with her hand and said to the Kappo, ‘She’s very young, leave her a little hair on her head!’ There was Mutti beginning to take charge! Incredibly the woman complied and left me with an inch of golden spikes framing my forehead.
Mutti smiled at me.
‘That looks quite sweet,’ she said encouragingly.
‘Where are your steel supports?’ she demanded, just as they were chopping off the hair on her head.
I must have left them in the shower,’ I said. They were the last things I had been worrying about.
‘Oh, Eva, really!’ she said in exasperation, as much with her own condition as mine; she looked strangely unlike my mother as her hair fell away. ‘How will you manage to correct your bad feet without proper supports?’
‘I’ll go back and get them,’ I said, but as I turned I was immediately prevented from moving further by a Kappo with a truncheon, who barred my way and warned me to stand back.
She was directing the line of naked and shorn women to a table at the far end of the room where everyone was being questioned in turn about their names, ages and professions. It was just like being admitted into a hospital. Every detail was written down on a form. This efficiency gave us a sense of being enrolled. As I stood and listened I noticed that everybody in front of me suddenly seemed to have a useful profession. Ordinary housewives declared themselves to be ‘cooks’ or ‘dressmakers’, ‘shoemenders’ or ‘nurses’ so when I came to give them my details I said I was a secretary.
From time to time SS men came in and strolled around to look and leer at our bodies. It was a sport for them to pinch the bottoms of younger, attractive women and I felt really degraded when one of the men walked near to me and then pinched my bottom.
We are being treated like cattle – not people, I thought.
We were lined up to be tattooed on our arm with numbers corresponding to those on our admission papers. Mutti was branded first and when it was my turn she stood beside me with her arm round my shoulder.
‘She is only a child,’ Mutti said. ‘Don’t hurt her.’ Once again the woman acquiesced so that the tattoo on my left arm was done as gently as it could be and my number came out much fainter than the others.
All this processing had taken hours. We were very thirsty and feeling faint. I was so thirsty that I promised myself I would drink the first water I saw.
At last we were moved on to the final ‘reception room’ where we were given some clothing. Everybody was issued with one pair of knickers of indiscriminate size, one overgarment handed out at random and two shoes. Not a pair of shoes, not even a right and left shoe, just two odd shoes. None of them matched and we spent some time going round to each other trying to swap garments and shoes to fit.
So much for my steel supports! I thought.
As we were about to be let outside, I heard the SS screaming at the Kappo guards. They in turn shouted at us to get back into line. We were all queued up again to be re-tattooed. Apparently, there had been some error in the numbering and the ‘clerk’ had made a mistake. My number which was A/5232 was changed to A/5272. She simply scored a line through the ‘3’ and tattooed ‘7’ on top, just as I might have corrected mistakes in my exercise book. Even with tattooing everything had to be done exactly by the book.
The ordeal was finally over. We stepped out into the early evening light to be marshalled to our quarters. As we began to move forward in fives I spied an outside tap on the wall of one of the buildings. I could not resist it. Darting over I turned on the tap, put my mouth to the stream of water and drank. It was so wonderful to taste that refreshing liquid. Several others copied me and ran over to the tap before we were screamed at and pushed back into line.
It was a weary walk for us in unaccustomed footwear along a dry and dusty road. We stumbled towards the quarantine block where we were to be kept apart from the rest of the camp for the next three weeks. It seemed ridiculous to take such precautions.
Birkenau was the largest of the Auschwitz camps – a vast complex of barrack buildings divided and subdivided by barbed wire and electrified fencing. Some of the buildings had originally been designed as stables, others had been built by former generations of inmates. The entire camp held tens of thousands of prisoners and the compound we were taken to contained about twenty barracks, each housing approximately 500 to 800 women.
There were two Kappos – barrack bosses – in each building whose task was to administer the block according to Nazi regulations. For the most part they were Polish Christians, though a few were Jews. They survived as long as they were tough enough to control the rest of us. They had special privileges and their own small rooms with stoves at the end of the block where they could cook their own food and keep warm.
We, on the other hand, had no facilities at all. We had to sleep ten to a bed – and a ‘bed’ was one tier of a three-level wooden bunk. That first night, when we were ordered to get into bed, I climbed into a middle bunk with Mutti and eight others. We had not been given any food or water since we had arrived. Even though it was still early evening we were told we had missed supper and would have to wait for breakfast.
I was utterly exhausted. Oblivious to everything, including our bedmates, I lay in Mutti’s arms and slept.
In the early hours of the following morning before the sun was up (it was about 4.00 a.m.), the Kappo women appeared and yelled at us to get up and make our beds – even this routine was strictly regimented; the blankets had to be fitted and tucked in absolutely symmetrically. Then we had to sweep the barracks – funnily enough, there was little dirt or rubbish because we had no food or possessions so, while our quarters were relatively clean, it was only we who were filthy and vermin-ridden. Then we were ordered outside for roll-call (Appel). It was warm, the sky luminous with a pale yellow light that gradually merged into blue. As we stood in rows of five I watched the dawn appear. The whole camp was outside waiting to be counted. Every woman prisoner was called out for Appel, in lines along the length of the camp, while German guards and their dogs walked along the rows. The count lasted for two hours. We had to stand without moving, looking straight ahead for as long as it took.
It was to be a test of endurance we would have to face twice every day of our life in the camp. On this warm, summer morning it was inconceivable that we would be subjected to this kind of torture throughout the bitterly cold Polish winter dawns without anything warmer to wear than the clothes we stood up in. Nor did I imagine then that if just one digit of the count was wrong, the whole process would have to begin again. Inevitably, as time wore on into winter, deaths would throw the count out and the ordeal would inflict more deaths the following night.
The first Appel was a special torment because we had still been given neither food nor water. By this time I was so hungry I was desperate for something to eat, but we were not dismissed until the sun was up and only then were we allowed to return to the barrack where food and drink was distributed. Everyone was given a piece of black bread about four inches thick. Cold black substitute coffee without sugar was handed out in chipped enamel or old tin mugs to one in every five people. As there were not enough utensils to go around it meant the portion in each mug had to be shared by five. This was the usual system and we quickly learned that possession of one’s own mug was necessary to get one’s share. Mutti and I eventually had to sacrifice several rations of bread between us to obtain a mug.
But this morning I hung on to the mug until it was pulled away from me by another desperately thirsty woman. I don’t think Mutti had any at all. I ate all my bread immediately without realizing that it was supposed to last for the whole day.
After this feast we were led to the latrines. These were in a barrack five blocks away from ours and consisted simply of an open sewer running down the centre of the barrack. Along the middle was a higher stone walk where a supervising Kappo could march the length of the latrines. Each concrete side had about thirty round openings set over the open sewer. There were no facilities for cleanliness or hygiene; no toilet paper, no flushing water and certainly no privacy. As we entered the barrack the stench was overpowering.
One of the golden rules that Pappy had tried to impress upon me was never actually to sit on a strange toilet seat so I tried to stand – as did several others: we all shared a feeling of intense disgust. However, when the walking Kappo eventually came up behind me she hit me so hard across my shoulders with her stick that it forced me to sit down. She walked along striking out with vigour at anyone who tried to stand.
‘You will be brought here three times a day in a whole group,’ she told us contemptuously, ‘and you had better use it properly.’
And with that, we were marched back to an open courtyard surrounded by barbed-wire fencing outside the perimeter of the barrack and left there to spend the rest of the day.
The sun beat down on our unprotected, newly shaven heads; it burned the backs of our necks and ears and made my fair skin red and sore. There was no shade, nowhere to sit, and nothing to do.
The routine was to be the same for the next three weeks. We were left outside all day, even if it rained. When the skies opened we were drenched and the dry dust turned into a muddy quagmire around our ankles. We could not avoid being caked in mud and dirt. Every refinement of ordinary human living, even simple shelter, was denied to us. We were being treated like animals – rather worse, because we were not even fed or watered.
We spent the days talking to each other in small groups. Most of us had come from Holland and since we were sharing the same fate we tried to become friendly with those around us. We met Franzi again and she joined our little group. She had been through the same ordeal as we had and although she had not lost her quiet courage, now she seemed to need a little comfort herself.
‘Eva reminds me of Irene, my little sister,’ she said to Mutti catching hold of my hand and squeezing it. ‘So we can be a kind of family in here, can’t we?’
‘Of course,’ said Mutti. ‘We will try to take care of each other as best we can.’
It was only a token reassurance in such awful circumstances but from that moment onwards we became trusted friends.