April 1944 was unusually sunny. In the air you could feel the warm breezes of spring. This year, in the neighborhood of the railroad tracks that led straight to the crematorium, the women were at work laying sidewalks and arranging bunches of flowers. The earth, which smelled of freedom, was freshly dug, and hope entered our hearts. Not far from the fence, new earth was piled up and topped with a floor. This was where the camp orchestra gave concerts and singers sang famous solos. Once a week, after lunch, those concerts took place in the area. Anyone who could drag his feet came. Benches were taken out of the barracks. The healthier people stood or sat on the ground. Those who were able to get to the concert listened, and their thoughts would escape far beyond the present stinking, sordid life.
The orchestra consisted of many instruments. The conductors were a Russian woman and a Hungarian woman. A beautiful Hungarian woman was the soloist. The members of the orchestra wore identical outfits, and the soloist even wore an evening gown. I can remember one of those red, low-cut dresses in which she did not hesitate to appear for the performance. The Russian girl was young—very poised and calm. As soon as she tapped with her baton, the Strauss waltzes started flowing immediately. Everything looked so innocent, but we who knew how much human misery, degradation, and suffering were being covered by this curtain of music, and how many shattered dreams were there, were startled by this seeming innocence. The second conductor was dark and fiery. She also played the violin, and as she played she turned one way and another, setting the rhythm of a czardas for the orchestra, which accompanied her as she played the longing notes of a gypsy melody.
Sometimes, near the barbed wire, a train would go by, carrying Jews from the west in Pullman cars. The people tried to get to the window to wave to us. They took in the ideal picture, which calmed them and allowed them to believe that they were really going to work and that there would even be time for play. I lowered my head, realizing that I was taking part in this deception that was helping the Germans to send millions of people, without difficulty, to a torturous death.
One warm April day Esther came to the infirmary. She approached me and said very quietly, “I have a very important matter to discuss with you. Can we discuss it privately?”
I knew Esther from the Bialystok Ghetto. On 16 August 1943, the Bialystok Ghetto had been liquidated. For three months Esther, her husband, her mother, and a five-year-old niece who perished in Slonim,1 hid with me in a bunker built in my apartment. At the time she was a young woman. I doubt that she was even twenty years old. She had a pretty face but it was not an interesting one. I remember that in the bunker we had a lot of trouble with her, because she had no talents and could not be counted on to help out. When the German gendarmes discovered our bunker they shot her husband on the spot. As soon as the three females arrived at Auschwitz, the Germans took away the little girl whom she had cared for affectionately, and a few months later her mother was taken at a selection. Esther was alone in Auschwitz.
She stood before me, now, peculiarly thick, red in the face and a little embarrassed. Maybe she was pregnant.
“As you can see for yourself,” she blurted out, “I am going to give birth any day now. All this time I’ve been going to work, but now I want to stay in the hospital. I want to give birth to this baby. It’s my first baby. It moves. It kicks me. It will probably be a son. My husband is not here anymore. That’s his son. Please help me,” she ended her pleading.
I turned to stone. Didn’t she know what Mengele did to women who had babies in the camp? I looked into her happy eyes and at her enraptured features. For the first minute I really did not know what to tell her. Could I extinguish the happiness that emanated from her whole body? Or maybe I should just say nothing. Maybe I should let her live through her great love for her first baby and let the worst come later.
Orli had told me once how Mengele explained to her why he killed Jewish women together with their children. “When a Jewish child is born, or when a woman comes to the camp with a child already,” he had explained, “I don’t know what to do with the child. I can’t set the child free because there are no longer any Jews who live in freedom. I can’t let the child stay in the camp because there are no facilities in the camp that would enable the child to develop normally. It would not be humanitarian to send a child to the ovens without permitting the mother to be there to witness the child’s death. That is why I send the mother and the child to the gas ovens together.”
Imagine that cynical criminal justifying his hideous crimes in the name of humanitarianism, making a mockery of the tenderest of all feelings, a mother’s love for her children.
I had seen the conditions under which Jewish women gave birth in the camp. A doctor from the infirmary took me to one of the births. “Come with me,” she said. “Join me in witnessing the crimes of Auschwitz and the depths of human suffering.”
On our way to the block in field “B” Mancy told me that the women who were due to deliver were not taken to the infirmary. The delivery took place in the block where the woman lived. “You see,” she said, “the birth has to take place in secrecy. Nobody is supposed to know about it. In the hospital block it is impossible to conceal the birth of a child from the Germans. Our procedure now is to kill the baby after birth in such a way that the mother doesn’t know about it.”
“What? You kill it?” I stopped in the middle of the path.
“It’s very simple,” Mancy continued. “We give the baby an injection. After that, the baby dies. The mother is told that the baby was born dead. After dark, the baby is thrown on a pile of corpses, and in that manner we save the mother. I want so much for the babies to be born dead, but out of spite they are born healthy. I simply don’t know why the children are healthy. The pregnant women do heavy work till the last day; there is no food; and in spite of it all, the children are healthy. My worry now is that I don’t have any injections left.”
It was already dark when we arrived at the block. The women took us to the woman in labor. Mancy told her to lie on the ground under the board bed. She herself hid there too. “Remember,” she said to her quietly, “you are forbidden to utter a sound. Everything has to take place in complete silence. Nobody should know that you are giving birth.” She told me to bring her a bucket of cold water. She put it next to her.
“Sit next to me. You will be my helper,” she said to me.
Two women stood near the bed. One of them was guarding the entrance to the block.
The birth started. The woman bit her lips in pain until she drew blood. But she did not utter even one sound. She held my hands so tightly that afterwards I had black and blue marks. Finally, the baby was born. Mancy put her hand over his mouth so he would not cry, and then she put his head in the bucket of cold water. She was drowning him like a blind kitten. I felt faint. I had to get out from under the bed.
“The baby was born dead,” Mancy said. Later, she wrapped the dead baby in an old shirt, and the woman who was guarding the entrance took the baby and left to put it on a pile of corpses. The mother was saved.
Right then Esther, who knew nothing, was standing in front of me, wanting to go to the hospital to give birth to a baby like thousands of other women in the world. She was listening to the movements of her baby and was happy. She did not know that if a German doctor found out she would die with her baby. I decided to tell her everything.
“You see, Esther,” I started, “you can’t give birth to a living baby. It must die before anybody finds out about it. Otherwise, you will die with it.”
“What? A dead baby? I want to have a live baby. I am sure that when Mengele sees it he will let me raise it in the camp. It is going to be a beauty because my husband was very handsome. You knew him. I want to have it in the infirmary.”
Mancy and Marusia talked to her, but without success. The same day she went to the infirmary, and that night she gave birth to a beautiful baby boy.
She lay there in bed with the baby, very happy. The attendants tried to convince her not to feed the baby so that it would die of hunger. Esther would not hear of it. She gave the baby her breast and talked with wonder about how beautifully it suckled. The supervisor of the infirmary had a duty to report all births, but somehow she delayed. She had pity on Esther.
On the third day of Esther’s stay in the hospital block, the first day of the Passover holiday, a big selection took place. I was on the block when Mengele and an SS man came in. They both stood on the stove. The gate was bolted, and every sick woman was paraded naked in front of them. In his tightly closed fist Mengele held a pencil whose point stuck out a little way from his palm. The SS man read, and at the same time, wrote down the numbers, while Mengele pushed the pencil into his fist with a slow movement of his thumb. This meant death. The red-headed SS man put down a cross next to the designated number. Finally, Esther’s turn came. She went naked, and in her arms she held the baby. She held it up high as though she wanted to show them what a beautiful and healthy son she had. Mengele slowly pushed the pencil into his clenched fist.
1 A small city in eastern Poland with a substantial but fluctuating Jewish population before World War II. Ruled by Poland between World War I and World War II, it was captured by the Germans on 17 July 1941.