Mutti and I lay in our hospital bunk and listened to the sound of the guns. Sometimes the cannon fire seemed very close, then it would drift away again and cease. Days darkened into nights without any change in our condition. Scraps of information no longer reached the hospital block because the working barracks had all been evacuated. Every ‘able-bodied’ person had been force-marched out of the camp westwards. There were no new admittances or discharges, the only exits were those of the dead. Many people were dying every day of starvation, disease and hypothermia.
We sensed that the Russians were advancing. We waited for them, alternating between hope and despair. We prayed for them to arrive but we knew nothing of their progress. Nobody seemed to know what was happening. In any event, we were very scared that we would be eliminated before they arrived. We couldn’t believe the Germans would actually leave us to be liberated by the Russians.
There were fewer Germans around now and we were left alone more often. Appels had ceased. It was Christmas time but we were hardly aware of that. Mutti and I lay together on the bunk, huddled under thin ragged blankets. No one really thought that there was a chance we would survive.
Minni’s indomitable spirit was the one thing we were sure of. She was incredible. She held everyone together with great strength, showing undiminished cheerfulness as she organized the rations of bread and tea, and distributed the small amounts of medicine available. She spent the days constantly on the move, walking up and down the ward, directing the three other nurses in their duties of ministering to the dying and carrying out the dead. Every time she passed us she would give our bunk a determined slap and repeat, ‘We will get through.’
We were terrified of our fate but Minni’s cheerful courage seemed to radiate hope and prevented us from giving up.
On our bunk, Mutti and I fantasized about what we would do when we were free again. We talked about warm baths with soap, sleeping between clean sheets, eating with a knife and fork – all the civilized delights that we had taken for granted and that had been denied us for what seemed like a lifetime.
Our thoughts always centred on food. We invented glorious menus containing all our favourite dishes. How we would gorge ourselves! We imagined eating boiled potatoes, spreading butter on fresh bread and crunching our teeth into firm apples. We would pretend we were in a restaurant in Amsterdam. First of all we would select our soup, then the main course (I always chose roast chicken with rice and cauliflower) and then we would lie there, dreaming of delicious desserts – pancakes filled with jam or cream, chocolate pudding, apple pie. I always wanted to end my meal with a glass of milk for which I had a terrible craving. And all the while our stomachs ached with starvation.
At the beginning of January the SS appeared at the door of the barrack and shouted, ‘Everybody who can get up and walk – come outside.’
Minni rushed over to us looking very agitated.
‘Get up,’ she said sternly. ‘You have to come.’
‘But Mutti is too weak,’ I said.
‘She will just have to make the effort,’ said Minni firmly, and swept along the lines, insisting that anyone who could get out of their bunk and stand up had better do so and get outside.
Mutti’s emaciated condition had left her in a desperately weak state but she was determined to stay with me from now on.
‘Of course I can get up,’ she whispered. She feared we would be killed if we did not get outside. Only her willpower was giving her enough strength to stand up.
As soon as she managed to put her feet on the ground I wrapped her in a ragged blanket. I half-dragged, half-carried her out of the door. It was the first time she had been outside for months and she was almost fainting with the effort. She was very frail but totally determined that we should stay together. She leaned against me as we stood in the last row.
It was about eleven in the morning and bitterly cold. The temperature was far below zero. The icy air hit us, freezing the moisture on our bodies and making our face muscles so stiff that they stopped working. About half the women from the hospital block had managed to drag themselves outside.
The scene took my breath away. There was a clear, blue sky with no clouds at all. Snow lay still on the ground. It had transformed the entire compound, shrouding the huts and dirt tracks with a sheet of unblemished white. The land looked like Siberia. The bare ugliness of the camp had been smoothed over and turned, magically, into a winter fairyland.
We waited, assembled in neat rows, for further instructions but nothing happened. The SS had disappeared, leaving the Kappos standing around disconsolately, not knowing what was expected of them. We could all hear guns in the distance. We stood there for two hours, shivering inside our blankets.
Suddenly there was the wailing of an air-raid siren and agitated SS men reappeared, yelling at us to get back inside.
At dusk we were ordered out again. We stood there while the sun went down and it became darker and colder. Then there was another siren, so we all crept back into our cold bunks, frozen and shivering and very grateful to get our tiny portion of bread. Everyone was very nervous and frightened – including the Germans.
Although we remained inside throughout that night we just could not get warm again. The cold had seeped into our frail bodies and during those hours quite a few people died. In the morning I lay and watched as the dead were hauled off their bunks and dragged out into the snow by the nurses.
I saw Minni carry out several of her friends in her arms. Her face was haggard and blank. She came over to Mutti once or twice and touched her head pleading, ‘Hold on.’
This harassment went on for three days. Sometimes we were called out during the night to stand for hours in the bitter cold. Each time, when we were ordered outside again, more and more people stayed inside and did not attempt to obey the commands. By the evening of the third day I, too, decided that I had had enough. I wasn’t going to see Mutti subjected to any more misery.
‘It will be another false alarm, anyway,’ I assured her. So when the command came to get up and get outside we stayed on our bunk and fell into an exhausted sleep.
When we awoke next morning everything was still and quiet. There was no activity and the barrack seemed almost empty. I got up and went outside to investigate. It was a curious sensation; there was no one to be seen. Every SS guard and dog had disappeared. All the Kappos had vanished and most of the hospital patients had left too. Minni and the nursing staff had also gone.
It was another bitterly cold day but bright. Bodies of the dead lay at the side of the barrack slung one on top of the other. In the whole camp which had housed tens of thousands, there were now only one or two hundred souls left. Eighty per cent of these were too ill to move at all and lay waiting for death. The rest of us, a tiny contingent of living skin and bones, hung on with rising hope.
We knew we would have to try to survive alone until the Russians came and that might take several days or even weeks. And so we attempted to organize ourselves.
One Polish woman, Olga, who was not Jewish but had been a communist political prisoner, took command. She decided that she and I, with one or two other fitter inmates, should walk over to the kitchen block to see what food might be available. We also needed to find fresh water as all the pipes were frozen.
We wrapped ourselves in blankets and trudged across the snow to the kitchen barrack. We pushed against the doors, expecting them to be barred, but to our amazement they yielded immediately. What we saw when we entered made us cry out in delight. There, stacked up on the shelves which lined the walls, were hundreds of loaves of black bread – far more than we could ever eat in a year. It was like finding a treasure trove. We seized a loaf each and crammed chunks of bread into our mouths. We gorged ourselves on this limitless supply, then we filled our arms with as many loaves as we could carry and headed back to our barrack.
During the five minute walk I felt a wonderful elation. I was excited beyond belief and I could not wait to distribute the food – to be able to give strength back to everyone there. As I went round the bunks, tearing off huge hunks of bread and pressing them into the skeleton hands of the bedridden inmates I cried Thank God to myself over and over again. Some of them were too ill to eat much but they clasped the precious portions tightly against their bodies. We had barely taken enough but we were too weak to go back for more.
By now I was utterly exhausted and very confused. What if the Germans returned during the night and caught us? What if the Russians did not come in time to save us? I was extremely frightened because we were so alone. I began to realize that we might not survive after all, simply because we could not look after ourselves. There were so few able-bodied women who had enough strength even to walk about.
It was midday when Mutti and I ate some more bread. I lay down on my bunk to regain some strength, closed my eyes with relief and drifted into a fretful sleep. I was brought back to reality by Olga shaking me vigorously.
‘Get up and come down!’ she ordered. ‘I need you.’
‘Not now,’ I protested. ‘Please let me rest. I am worn out.’
‘I need you to carry out some dead bodies,’ she said firmly.
It was as if an immense black cloud had descended on me.
‘No! No!’ I cried out in panic.
She grabbed hold of me and pulled me up off the bunk. She held me by my shoulders and turned me around to face her.
‘You are young and still strong enough,’ she said looking firmly at me. ‘There is no one else. It is your duty. If you can carry bread, then you can carry out the dead.’
Through my panic and fear I could hear Mutti saying faintly, ‘Leave her, she’s too young. I will do it.’
Suddenly I came to my senses. I knew that Mutti had no strength at all. That was the moment I grew up – it was time I looked after Mutti.
It was the worst task I have ever had to perform in my whole life. I carried out the dead. Some were friends with whom I had talked about our liberation. Many were so diseased and stinking that it took all my courage to touch them. It was now dark and the moon shone on the other bodies which stared at me open-eyed from stiffened mounds of dead flesh and bones. Here were faces I had come to know and respect. I looked on mouths now agape that had given me wise counsel and encouragement; eyes that had gazed on me, lovingly, remembering their own dead children. I had always tried to ‘stand in’ for their loved ones and give back just a little of that love. There had been so little that we could give each other except love.
It was the first time I had been so involved with the dead and it horrified me to see the waste of people cut down in the prime of their lives. None of them were older than forty, many were much younger – women who had managed to retain enough hope to survive almost until the end.
I saw more people die in the next few days than I had seen in my whole time at Birkenau.
The sound of gunfire was intensifying in the distance, getting nearer all the time. I was with a sortie that went back to the kitchens next morning for a more thorough inspection. We were beginning to feel a little bolder now and started to move more freely around the camp site.
I spotted a hole in the wire fencing between sections of the camp.
‘I’m going to go through,’ I said, assuming the electric current had been switched off.
Luckily, I was right and soon two others followed me. Everything on the other side was quite deserted but in there we came upon the barracks where all the provisions had been stored.
It was like the re-enactment of a story from the Brothers Grimm. The first barrack was stacked with clothing, every article of apparel you could imagine from boots to berets. The second barrack held blankets and eiderdowns, all shelved neatly like a Swiss laundry house. The third barrack held the food stores.
As we entered the last barrack we could see boxes of wrapped cheeses, jars of jam, sacks of flour, heaps of potatoes – food beyond our wildest dreams and we starving skeletons just grabbed what we could easily lay our hands on and sat there and ate.
Eventually we returned to the second barrack and helped ourselves to large blankets to use as sacks. Just like Santa Claus, we filled our blankets with all the food we could manage. We knotted the four corners together and slung them over our shoulders. Excitedly, I set off to return to Mutti with the greatest of treasures and as we stepped outside to carry back our plunder it started to snow again, soft white flakes falling on our heads.
It suddenly occurred to us that we could revisit the clothes store for warmer clothes. I found a splendid pair of black leather military boots, all polished and clean. I put them on my poor swollen feet. They were large men’s boots with plenty of room, my first shoes without holes and protection at last from the bitter weather. I felt so smart as I plodded through the snow, keen to show them to Mutti. I did not notice any pain in my toes at all.
In the next few days we returned time and time again to find everything we needed, including all kinds of tools, hatchets, hacksaws, picks, knives. We distributed as much food and clothes as we could to the bedridden.
Mutti managed to accompany me the next day. She was eager to share my excitement although she was still very shaky. She held on to my arm as we trudged slowly through the thick layer of snow that had fallen overnight. She was amazed at the extent of the stock. She pulled out some clothes and found a dark blue woolly dress with a high polo-neck collar. Then she chose some long grey woollen stockings and a pair of black sturdy lace-up shoes which fitted her exactly. As she stood there with warm clothes covering her skinny body at last, and with her hair growing again, she asked, ‘Do I look alright?’
‘Mutti, you look marvellous,’ I replied and we wept together.
The best find of all was two feather eiderdowns with snug, downy fillings. They were fairly bulky but lightweight enough to carry around. We wrapped them round our bodies and from then on we four became inseparable!
17 January Warsaw liberated
Water everywhere was still frozen. At first, we melted snow. We would collect it in mugs or bowls but the amount of liquid was too small for our needs. At the entrance to the camp was a little water reservoir, more of a pond in fact, which was covered with ice and snow. Olga suggested that someone should attempt to hack into the ice to try and draw out water.
I volunteered to try. So, wearing my sturdy boots, I marched with Olga down to the pond, both of us armed with axes and buckets. We were determined to succeed. Using up a great deal of our limited energy, huffing and puffing, we managed to hack the brittle ice until it cracked and flew off in large blocks. It was a long and arduous task as the ice was over a foot thick. At last the broken ice gave way and we found ourselves staring at clear water beneath. We whooped with joy. The hole was just large enough to immerse our buckets and, feeling like Eskimos, we drew up the precious liquid and carried it back to the barrack.
We coped for a few days in this way, raiding the stores for food and smashing the ice daily for water. There was still nowhere we could really keep warm. There was no place in the barrack where we could make a fire, cook food or heat up any water. Oiga and Mutti talked it over and agreed to try and find a place outside the camp to improve our living conditions.
By now, those who could fend for themselves were doing so and the dead had no need of us.
I had noticed an empty house near the camp walls where the SS guards had been billeted. It was a custom-made wooden house and we thought it was bound to have some heating facilities. We decided to go and investigate. Yvette, a young French woman, heard our discussion and asked if she could come along. We still felt very insecure and agreed, since four was a safer number. Just as we were gathering ourselves up to leave we heard someone screaming outside. The barrack door was flung open and a woman yelled, ‘There’s a bear at the gate! A bear at the gate! Come quickly!’
Cautiously, we went outside towards the open gate and there, at the entrance, was the ‘bear’ – a huge being, covered from head to foot in bearskin with a look of utter amazement on his face. We stood and stared at each other and then carefully, I edged towards him with joy on my face.
Our liberator stood at the entrance to the camp, alone and strong. With outstretched arms I ran to him and hugged against him... and although our languages were not the same, what I said to him and what he said to me was understood by us both. The Russians had come!