Felice was taken to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Gross-Rosen was a huge complex of work camps that stretched across Lower Silesia, Sudentenland, and the eastern part of what was to become the GDR. The Lower Silesian village of Rogoźnica itself was located sixty kilometers from Wrocław (Breslau). The camp, which was owned by DEST, the German Excavation and Stone Works, Inc., had been established in May 1939 near the granite quarry of Gross-Rosen. Opened on August 2, 1940, as headquarters of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, it became a separate camp on May 1 of the following year, with a series of “external camp detachments,” or subcamps, engaged in labor for major German industrial firms.
Either factories were established close to the camps or the external detachments were located in proximity to the armament factories. Each of these subcamps maintained a “prisoner force” of several hundred slave laborers, but in most cases a thousand or many more prisoners were involved. In the final two years of the war more and more of these subcamps were established, so that there were about a hundred such units on record.
They produced goods for the German industrial firms of Rheinmetall-Borsig, IG-Farben, Siemens-Halske, the FAMO (Vehicle and Motor) Works, Dynamit Nobel, Vereinigte Deutsche Metallwerke, Krupp, Vereinigte Textilwerke, the aircraft works of Aerobau, the Concordia Spinning Mill and many others. Unskilled laborers were paid four Reichsmarks a day, skilled laborers six Reichsmarks. In December 1944 a net surplus of roughly thirty million Reichsmarks was transferred to Berlin.
A total of roughly 130,000 prisoners passed through Gross-Rosen, forty to fifty thousand of whom died at the camp or during evacuation. The concentration camp of Gross-Rosen was also used by the Breslau Gestapo for executions. All files on prisoners who died there were burned in early 1945.
After the SS reorganized its method for exploiting Jewish labor, and due to the evacuations of the Płaszów and Auschwitz-Birkenau camps, more and more Jews were brought to Gross-Rosen starting in late 1943. When the work camps of “Organization Schmelt” were integrated into the Gross-Rosen camp complex, the “supply” of women continued without interruption until January 1945: Jewish women especially from Poland and Hungary, but also from Romania, Austria, Yugoslavia, Belgium, and France, as well as from Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, and—like Felice—from the German Reich. They were assigned especially to the external camp detachments, forty-six in all, of which four were mixed sex. On January 1, 1945, there were roughly eighty thousand prisoners in the entire Gross-Rosen system, 26,000 of whom were Jewish women. Like Buchenwald and Stutthof, Gross-Rosen was among the camps with a large share of female prisoners in their subcamps. Many of the women’s camps served the textile industry, others were created for Jewish women who—like Felice—were put to work building fortifications at the eastern border of the province of Lower Silesia. In January and February 1945 about half of the prisoners in the women’s subcamps were marched into the interior of the German Reich to Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and Dora-Mittelbau. An unknown number of women unable to continue on the death march were shot along the way or froze to death. A larger group of prisoners on the death march managed to escape one night. Those who were left behind because they were sick, and who were not shot—as in Kurzbach—were liberated by the Red Army on May 8 and 9, 1945.
Little has been written on Gross-Rosen, and nothing at all on the women’s camps. “The fate of the women of Gross-Rosen, now there’s a topic! There’s not one book on it, not one study,” Mieczysław Mołdawa, former inmate and author of a work on Gross-Rosen, wrote to me from Warsaw.
At the end of February 1944 Stella Leibler, a Polish stenographer, was brought to the women’s branch camp of Peterswaldau bei Wałbrzych (Waldenburg). Today Wałbrzych houses the small archive of the Gross-Rosen camp.
Stella Leibler:
Peterswaldau was not yet a concentration camp when we arrived there. It was housed in the servants’ quarters of a castle belonging to a Count von Frick. We slept in two-tiered bunk beds and there were lockers in the corridors, half a locker to each person.
On the day after our arrival we were taken to an arms factory. I had just gotten over a case of typhus a short time before and was very weak and afraid that I would be given work where I would have to stand all day. I was assigned to a machine that stamped out directional pointers. To stamp the aluminum pointers I had to use all the strength in both my hands to press a lever. But that wasn’t the heaviest work. The room also contained machines operated by girls who had to stand as they worked, and these machines manufactured bomb parts. Even heavier was the work in the section where so-called “bomb bodies” were bathed in acid. This labor was so hazardous to your health that the girls who worked there were even given milk to drink. Sometimes we had to carry the crates with the finished parts to the castle’s chapel, where they were stored. The crates were so heavy that we sometimes almost fainted before we got there.
The rations they gave us were just enough to starve on: one-third of a loaf of black bread each day, a little piece of margarine, a little piece of sausage, cheese or marmalade, or a heavy black syrup made of beets. At noon we got half a bowl of vegetable soup.
One day a doctor arrived. We had to strip naked so that he could determine whether or not we would be allowed to remain at the camp. Several days later an officer of the Wehrmacht arrived in the company of female guards who collected all of our valuables. Even our suitcases were taken from us. We were issued one change of underwear and outer garment and assigned numbers. My number was 26,764. That’s when hell began. When we needed to relieve ourselves we had to stand at attention and say, “Frau Guard, may I be excused?” Whether or not we were allowed to go depended entirely on her mood; several times the foreman had to intervene. The guards beat us.
One day we returned from work in a pouring rain. We reported for roll call on entering the camp and waited for the guard who had the authority to dismiss us. It’s hard to say how long we stood there, perhaps an hour or so, maybe an hour and a half. When finally we were dismissed we had to help each other pull our feet out of the mud. It was as if we had taken root there. We had to hold each other up, we were so weak from standing in the pouring rain.
A Scharführer from Auschwitz once came to the camp for two weeks, and that is how we found out about the extent of the suffering there. On Sundays, the only day we could spend the whole day in camp, they held drills. It is a sign of how bad things were that during this period two girls ran away and two others had their heads shaved. One of them had become friends with a German woman who sat next to her at the factory, and the other girl, a heavy smoker, had given a note to a worker who wasn’t an inmate, asking for a pack of cigarettes.
After some time went by—it was August of 1944—we were transferred from the castle to a building that formerly had been a spinning or weaving mill. Our place in the count’s castle was taken by men and women who had been brought to Peterswaldau from Warsaw, following the Warsaw uprising. The mill had once belonged to a Jew named Zwanziger. It was a bleak building with a courtyard. For lack of space we were put in bunk beds three high, and there were no lockers at all. We kept our change of underclothes and outer garment, along with our ration of bread, under the straw sacks we slept on. The toilets were located in the courtyard. We were locked in at night and couldn’t get to the toilets, so they gave us one single bucket to share, which of course was insufficient for a roomful of twenty women. It is difficult for me to describe what we had to go through in order to hold out until morning.
Activity at the factory was frenzied, and a night shift was introduced. One day as we were leaving the factory to report for roll call, a colleague stumbled and sprained her foot. I ran over to help her when one of the women guards rushed up to me and began beating me on the back with her fists. Everything went black, and I was half-unconscious from the pain when I took my place in line.
In the fourteen months I spent at the camp, three or four transports left from there to go to Gross-Rosen. One of them never arrived. They had ordered all those too weak to walk to report for transport, to take them to a “sanatorium,” they said. Those who reported were old women and girls who were totally exhausted, and they took these women out to a field and shot them.
Each day before we entered the munitions factory we went down a steep stone stairway to the cloakroom where we hung up our coats. On frosty days these steps were covered in ice. The female guards made a game of pushing the girls down the steps.
Due to a shortage of materials less and less work was being done in the munitions factories. The heavy machines were oiled and ready for transport. There was a rumor that we would be sent to work underground, where the work conditions were inhuman. The rumor was that after two months we would go blind, and then we would be shot.
Meanwhile, my health was getting worse. I once suffered a weak spell while I was working and my Kapo led me out to the corridor, and allowed me to sit on a windowsill. The guard came down the steps and said, “Well, what are you two doing here?” My Kapo said, “If you felt like she does, you’d sit down too.” The guard jumped on her at this and began hitting her with her fists. My Kapo—Jetka Ringer, from Auschwitz—was a good person, she never yelled. She did what she could to help us, within the realm of the possible. The head Kapo was a beast. She screamed and beat us and kicked us.
Later I became seriously ill. I could hardly drag myself back to the camp. After a doctor examined me she complained, “You wait to come to me until you’re almost dead, how am I supposed to help you then?” She sent me to an infirmary where I stayed for a few days until I felt better.
In the meantime the front was moving ever closer. They began digging trenches as a defense against the tanks, and the women inmates were supposed to help with this. They lined us up in rows of four. Two women—the Jewish elder and the doctor—walked down the rows and weeded out those who were too weak. I was among them. When they counted us it turned out that one of us had to go back and join the others; they had dismissed one too many of us. Despite my weakened condition I volunteered, and off we marched. We passed through some city or other, maybe it was Reichenbach, which is called Dzierźoniów today. You could see the fighting from there. We saw one building that had been cut in two by a bomb, you could see inside the rooms. This foot march was my final feat. We were not taken back to work in the factory, but they made us do one more thing. We had to throw crates of bombs—bombs we had made—into a pond so that they wouldn’t fall into enemy hands. That was a happy day for us.
Unfortunately, I was not only unable to lift the crates, I couldn’t even walk. How many of the girls died? One died during inspection call, and she immediately was carried away. Now that liberation was near more than one of us was on her way to the grave. And then something happened that was a first in the history of the concentration camps. An utterly exhausted woman by the name of Freda Lieberman, who held a master’s degree in German, was transferred to a convent a few weeks before liberation. Who had authorized this? It could only have been the camp commandant.
So wrote Stella Leibler in a letter to me dated June 10, 1992. However, things were actually very different. Freda Lieberman, a Germanist, was born in 1914 in Trzebinia. Her name is now Friederike Cohensius and she lives in Nahariya, Israel. She wrote to me the following description of her stay in Peterswaldau:
We had to do heavy work in a factory. Working and starving. One day I fainted and was brought to the infirmary. When I opened my eyes it was dark and then I heard a voice: “Don’t be afraid, we just want to do some experiments.” I was laid naked on a table and then the pain started. Injections, taking blood. . . . I am not able to describe what I went through. The man was wearing a white smock and his assistant called him Dr. Wagner. It is important for science, he said. The Germans were notorious liars and invented the story about the convent in order to explain my disappearance to the other slave laborers.
When the remaining prisoners in the camp were liberated, Freda Lieberman was found on a cot, unable to move, and brought to the hospital in Wałbrzych. After recovering she stayed in Wałbrzych and spent two years working there as the director of the Department for Education and Culture. In this position she was responsible for the city’s first Polish schools, libraries, cinemas, theaters, and newspapers. She became an honorary citizen of the city in 1997.
Felice arrived at Auschwitz from Theresienstadt on October 9, 1944. It was a time when Jewish workers were in great demand by the war industry, so policies dictating their extermination were coming to an end. On October 7 a desperate Sonderkommando armed with explosives, three hand grenades, and insulated flat-nose pliers to cut through the barbed wire dared to stage an uprising at Auschwitz. Crematorium III was set on fire and 450 camp inmates and three SS men were killed. Four women who worked in the Union factory and had supplied the commando with the explosives were publicly hanged.
In Auschwitz the women had to undress and were given new clothes. Beate Mohr, who Felice knew from Theresienstadt—and who now lives in San Francisco—received an evening gown. It got shorter and shorter every day, since she tore strips off bit by bit to use the fabric as toilet paper. The women’s heads were shaved and they were given a prisoner number, which was used from then on instead of their name.
After one week, Felice and Beate, as young women classified as fit for work, were forced to take a two-week-long foot march to Gross-Rosen, and from there, together with a thousand others, to the women’s subcamp at Kurzbach (Buckolowe), about fifty kilometers north of Wrocław. Most of the women were Hungarian, Slovakian, and Romanian Jews who had been in Auschwitz since early summer 1944. There was also a group of women made up of Polish Jews from the Lodz ghetto, as well as Dutch, Czech, Austrian, and German Jews, most of whom had been deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz in October 1944. They were housed in two former stables of the Hatzfeld Palace. The buildings were surrounded by barbed wire and provided the most primitive lodgings. The infirmary was located in a smaller building, the former pigsty. There were quite a few mothers and daughters in the camp together. The prisoners did not wear prisoners’ uniforms, but light civilian clothing. In order to make it difficult to escape, the clothes were marked with oil paint on the back. To protect themselves from the severe cold the women draped themselves in blankets during the day; at night they were damp and didn’t keep them warm. Many women were given only paper sacks to use as blankets at night. They wore wooden clogs. Each day the prisoners received a bit of soup, bread, and coffee. Two Hungarian farmers taught Felice and Beate how to ration the meager portions of bread. One of them even had a knife. She cut the bread into thin slices and chewed very slowly. Those who gobbled down their bread quickly had worse chances of survival. Sometimes they also received raw meat, from which it was easy to get sick. And now and then they got a bit of jam.
The Todt Organization gave them their instructions and oversaw their work. The prisoners were assigned to groups of one hundred women each. After a long march of several kilometers to get to work, the women had to cut down trees and dig tank ditches using primitive tools. The frozen ground in winter made this a murderous ordeal without any prospects of success. Malnourishment, cold, abuse, and the exhausting work caused many women to become unable to work, and the infirmary was overflowing. An unknown number of women died in the camp. Their bodies were carried in a cart to a forest near Książęca Wieś, where they were buried.
Ruth Klüger, a Viennese Jew living in California and Göttingen today, has written in her 1992 book, weiter leben [English: Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2001)], about the time she spent at Christianstadt, a subcamp of Gross-Rosen. The camp lay in the vicinity of the eastern German city of Guben, and supplied female slave laborers to the Dynamit Nobel firm. Nevertheless, for twelve-year-old Ruth, who was sent there only because she claimed during a “selection” at Auschwitz that she was fifteen, the labor camp gave her a chance to escape the sure death that had been awaiting her. At Christianstadt she slept with her mother in a green barracks that had been divided into rooms, each room housing six to twelve women. Occasionally a prisoner was punished by having her hair shorn, but generally, she wrote, the female personnel at the camp were not as brutal as the men of the SS.
The winter of 1944–45 was a particularly cold one. Mornings, Ruth and the other women were wakened by sirens and had to report for roll call in the dark. They were given a black brew that only resembled coffee and a piece of bread to take with them, and then were marched off in rows of three. A guard walked beside them, attempting to keep the women in step with her whistle. All of the women were so undernourished that none of them menstruated, a fact Felice had mentioned in one of her letters.
The women of Christianstadt worked clearing forests. They dug up the stumps of felled trees and carried them away, split wood and hauled rails. Occasionally they were loaned out to the civilian population to sit in attics and arrange rows of onions to be braided with string. The villagers stared at them as if they were wild animals. Ruth sometimes had to work in the quarry at Gross-Rosen, where her thin clothing offered little protection against the terribly bitter cold. She wrapped her feet in newspaper, which helped somewhat, but the sores on her feet became infected. Later the women were given warmer clothing for the winter, chosen from a pile of bright things that probably had come from Auschwitz. They had to cut a piece out of the upper back of each item of clothing and sew a yellow patch in its place.
With the approach of the Soviet army in January, the women hoped that the Germans would simply surrender the camp to the Russians. Instead, the Germans evacuated the prisoners on foot. These deportations from one camp to another at the end of the war, writes Ruth Klüger in retrospect, often were not intended as death marches—it was just that the German organizational capacity had collapsed. Ruth and her mother were among those evacuated. Following an exhausting day’s march, the SS, which was in charge, confiscated a barn, and the women passed the night there, crowded unbearably close together. On the second evening Ruth and her mother managed to escape.
Lilly hoped that Felice would be able to save herself in a similar fashion.