Lisette had a strange face. It was as if it consisted of two elements that did not match. Her chin and jaw were sharp. You would think that they were those of a crude person, even an evil one. But her cheeks were round and flushed. She had an upturned nose, happy hazel eyes, and while I cannot remember the shape of her mouth, I do recall that there was always a cheerful smile on her lips. I must admit that her smile actually annoyed me. I met Lisette in Auschwitz in 1944, at the most dreadful period, when the sky over the camp was always red and the air reeked with the odor of burning flesh.
It was a macabre summer. There were times when I felt as though everything happening around me was unreal, that it must be the product of a sick imagination. Transports kept arriving day and night, and most of them went straight to the gas. Young, healthy women were instantly inscribed in the book of death. Completely naked, they were herded to an enclosure behind barbed wire. There they waited, under the July sun, without shade, without food, and without water.
The day was one marked by unusual bustle and activity. Trains arrived and departed. The Germans bellowed whenever someone tried to disrupt the established order, whenever someone failed to stand squarely in the line of death, whenever someone tried to hold on to a single valise that remained of all her possessions. All of the activity proceeded at a quickened tempo so that the people would not have a minute’s respite during which they might stop to think and perhaps plan some opposition to their captors. “Schneller, schneller,”1 the Germans barked, and the people running from the clubs and guns fell inevitably into the German whirlpool. At the very entrance to the bath house stood the camp doctor, the celebrated Mengele, beautiful, elegant, with a smile that inspired trust. With a careless motion of his hand he directed some to the right and some to the left. Women with children, old people, the weak and the sick were on one side of the ramp. The young and healthy were on the other side. In front of Mengele everything was silent. There was no conversation. Everybody went in the direction casually indicated by the stick, not knowing that a verdict of life or death had just been pronounced on them. No one with a normal mind could comprehend this Hell.
Lisette went on walking through the camp with a cheerful smile on her lips, which drove me mad. We often discussed Lisette, especially with the girls from France, who knew her well. “How can she smile?” I asked. It gave me the creeps.
“I will tell you why she is smiling,” Masha said to me. “She is just happy.”
“What are you talking about? Happy?” I screamed, “Here in Auschwitz, happy? Is she blind and deaf to what is going on around her?”
“Don’t interrupt me,” said Masha. “If you let me talk I will explain everything. She is happy because her husband is not with her. When they arrested her he managed to run away, and now he is free. He is a wonderful young man. She loves him enormously. She also left her little daughter in freedom. Now she has only one thought in her head: how good it is that they are not in this Hell, that Mengele isn’t telling them to go to one side or the other, that they are out of the reach of the Auschwitz murderers. When she thinks about that, a happy smile blooms on her lips.”
I understood. From that time on, whenever I saw her smile, I winked, letting her know that I understood and that her smile did not bother me. Now I could share her happy secret.
I remember clearly that summer day in 1944 when Lisette stopped smiling. A transport of prisoners arrived from France, and among them was Lisette’s husband. For a while the news that her husband was in Auschwitz was an unconfirmed rumor, and though Lisette did not believe it she tried to make certain one way or another.
She did not have to wait long. The prisoners who brought the laundry into the hospital brought a letter from him.
“I am with you,” Rarol wrote. “I would be happy, except for the komando I have been assigned to. Right from the transport I was assigned to the komando that works in the crematorium. I don’t know what kind of work I will be doing, but I don’t think I will be able to stand it here very long.”
In the evening Lisette brought the letter to us so that we might read it. She was crazed with despair. Her beloved was in the lowest ring of Hell. The komando that worked in the crematorium lived only a few months. After a few months the Germans would liquidate the entire komando and choose a whole new set of people from the transports that were arriving in Auschwitz daily. They thought that in this way they would be able to bury the evidence of the atrocities they were committing here.
From this time on a letter from the crematorium would arrive every day, each time through a different channel.
“Dreadful,” wrote Karol. “Today the men from the komando cooked soup for themselves in a pot which was supported by human bones. When I expressed my horror to them, they merely laughed.”
“Dear Lisette,” he wrote the next day. “Imagine, with the gold stolen from the people that have gone to the gas, the members of the komando buy liquor, sausage, and the best meats. Between the gassings they have drinking parties. I want to vomit when I see such things. They only laugh at me and say that a living corpse is not supposed to have scruples. I won’t be able to hold out. I just can’t cope with the situation. What shall I do?”
We read those terrible letters and tried not to look at Lisette, who grasped our hands and kept repeating, “Advise me, girls. Something must be done. I can’t refuse his request for help. What is he supposed to do? How should he conduct himself those few months that he has to live?”
Later a letter came from him informing us that he had made his own decision. He had decided to commit suicide. “Forgive me, Lisette. I can’t do any differently. I can’t look at the bodies disfigured by pain that we drag out of the gas chambers, or at the suffering women and small children. I want to die. I don’t want to be a witness to the baseness of human beings, as, for example, a son pushing his father into the ovens. That is what happens in our komando.”
Then the anti-Fascist organization in Auschwitz, of which Lisette was a member and to which she now turned for help, made a momentous decision: “Let Karol organize a group from among the komando and let them blow up the crematorium. The organization will help.”
The last autumn of Hitler’s reign was approaching. The blowing up of one of the four crematoria that smoked day and night could not take place without creating an echo. It would instill courage in the prisoners, and the noise of the explosion would inform the people outside the camp of our fight. That is what most of us thought. But how did Lisette feel? For her, and she knew it very well, the exploding crematorium would announce the death of her husband.
Lisette was very calm. You could see her face turn to stone. She did not discuss the subject with us. Once she showed me a letter from Karol to the directors in which he agreed to carry out the project. Among other things, he had written, “I am so happy. Now I know why I am alive.” I remember that at this point I wanted to correct the letter. To my way of thinking it should have said, “Now I have something to live for.” I remember that day vividly when the crematorium was blasted into rubble. It was fall already, but warm and sunny, not golden, because there were no leaves in the camp to be gilded by the autumn sun. The time for the evening roll call was approaching. Suddenly a tremendous roar rent the air. I knew what it meant. Immediately the Germans announced a blocksperre—no one could leave the blocks. We stood at the half open gate and listened. From a distance we heard the screaming of the Germans and we heard shooting. We thought we heard the sound of people running away. A little later we heard the singing of the “Internationale,” loud and clear, and sung in a mixture of languages. The dying greeted the revolution and announced the end of fascism. It sounded like the slogan with which the gladiators traditionally greeted Caesar: “Caesari, morituri te salutant”—“Caesar, those about to die salute you.” Then there was more shooting, more screams, and finally a resounding silence.
The evening roll call started. As usual, the komandos came through the gate, and as usual the camp orchestra was playing. All of the women kept their heads bowed so that the SS men would not be able to read the joy sparkling in their eyes. We were proud of those who had died as heroes. How different it was from the dying that we were witness to day after day.
It was dark when Masza rushed into the infirmary. “A doctor. Quick, a doctor! Lisette’s cut her veins.” We all ran. When we got there she was already bandaged. She was lying on the bunk, pale, with the old smile on her lips. “He is not here in this Hell. He left,” she kept repeating over and over.
1 “Faster, faster.”