In the afternoon we descended on Ravensbrück1 like a swarm of locusts. Even here the word “Auschwitz” caused anxiety and fear. The prisoners here looked at us with fear in their eyes, because we were terrifying to see. The days of marching without rest, the terrible trip standing in the open railway car, hunger and thirst, the stink that hovered over our column—all this made us seem like shadows swaying down the road to Hell.
I searched the column for acquaintances, and I staggered along the side of the column like a wounded bird. It was impossible to recognize anybody. It struck me, then, that we had come to Ravensbrück only to die. They pushed us into a barrack. Nine women were assigned to one three-decker bed. The camp was in a state of total disarray. The evacuation of Auschwitz had unnerved the SS men. It took their minds off us. First of all, sleep. The need for sleep is stronger than hunger. We threw ourselves onto the beds, the floor, any place, like dead souls. I remember that the blokowa tried to count us. She kept yelling repeatedly, “Achtung!” The sztubowe were beating the sleeping faces, and we kept on sleeping. Finally they let us alone. After all, it was January 1945.
From the very first moment that we arrived in Ravensbrück, they were already talking about a transport that would take us further. There was no place to put us here. Everyone wanted to stay a little longer, to rest and to eat, even though the food was even worse here than in Auschwitz. We received a crumb of pasty bread in the morning, and then we waited for the soup that we received for lunch and supper. The soup had no fat in it, and you could sip endlessly without feeling even a dent in your hunger.
“What do you think?” asked Irka. “How many plates of this soup can you eat?” I thought very hard about this question. Then I told her, “I think I could eat it without end.”
“You know what?” Irka continued, “This evening I will steal a can of soup from the kitchen. Those twenty-five liters. We’ll eat, yes?”
There were four of us. We would have to consume the soup so nobody would notice and then put the empty can back in the kitchen.
“How will you do it?” asked Marusia.
“Simply. In the evening we will both go to the kitchen, pretending to get soup for a certain block. Right under the cook’s nose I will throw her a block number that doesn’t exist. She will pour the soup and we will hand it to you through the window.” Our bed was located near the window.
“And if it doesn’t come off?” Rwieta worried.
“The worst we will get is a rap on the head with the ladle. It’s worth trying.”
In the evening Irka and Marusia went to the kitchen, while Rwieta and I waited at the window. As we waited for them to show up our eyes almost popped out. Then we saw them walking in the middle of the road, carrying what looked like a thermos of soup. They made a spurt in our direction, and before we knew it the thermos was lying on our bed covered with a blanket. So as not to attract attention, we had to wait until supper time before we could eat our bottomless plate of soup. Finally, it was supper time. We sat on the bed eating barley soup. We hid the thermos near the window and kept refilling our plates with our cups, so that our plates were always full.
“So,” Irka asked, “will you eat like this for a long time? My stomach is like a drum, but I still like the soup.”
“I think,” said the sweating Rwieta, “that we will not be able to finish the soup. Maybe we should offer some to the neighbors.”
“No,” we all answered. “They will think that we stole the can from the block and they will hit us, or they will complain to the blokowa.”
We spent the whole night eating the soup in secret. Just before dawn we threw the empty thermos far from the barrack, in the middle of the road.
“We really had a feast,” we told each other.
Every day transports left Ravensbrück. We knew that our turn would come.
“It would be good if you didn’t have to go anywhere,” Marusia once said to me. How did one organize this? I would have to come up with something. Actually, I did not feel well. I had wounds on my legs, which had gotten frostbitten during the evacuation. The transports were difficult. Only a healthy person could survive them. I was afraid of the transport, but there was no place to hide.
On the evening of that same day, Marusia returned from her wanderings in the camp very happy. First of all, she had found work for me in a repair shop where they mended the camp clothes. I could stay in Ravensbrück. The second bit of news elicited a shout of “hurrah” from us. In Ravensbrück there were no French girls, no Sonias or Evas. They had stayed in Auschwitz. Orli, whom Marusia had met, told her that Auschwitz had already been liberated. The Germans did not blow it to bits. They did not have time. The Russian army was there. “Hurrah,” yelled Rwieta. “Hurrah.” We had tears in our eyes.
Why had we let ourselves be evacuated? Why had we not stayed in Auschwitz? We had feared for our lives, and during the evacuation our lives were hanging by a hair. What lay in wait for us? How many evacuations and transports full of fear and suffering did we still have to bear? Letting ourselves be evacuated was a false step on our part, I thought, for which we would have to pay.
The next morning I went to the workshop. It consisted of a large room with a long table in the middle. On the table were piles of torn clothes. The women sat at the table with needles in their hands. The work was easy. Marusia had really pulled it off. The kapo from the shop greeted me cordially. At last I had it made. I thought, I will be able to survive here until the war ends. In the evening the girls told me that they had reported themselves for the transport. In that way, they thought, they would all go together. The next day, after roll call, they all left. I was left alone.
I cried under the blanket at night. I was not used to being alone. In the camp the wall separating one human being from another was sometimes so thin that it was transparent. That was how close I felt to the girls who left that day. Would I be able to manage in this strange camp among these unfamiliar women? In the morning, after roll call, I went to the shop and I did not return to the block until evening. The days went by in Ravensbrück. I had been there for three weeks. Then, unexpectedly, the shop was closed. One day, just as we were sitting down to mend the clothes, an SS man came storming in with whip in hand.
“The mending is all over. Get out of here,” he screamed.
As we stood, stunned and indecisive, at the table, he started hitting us on the head with the whip. We barely managed to get out of there with our lives. I took a few steps and stood in the middle of the road, not knowing what to do. Where should I go now? Where could I hide? I knew that as soon as I got back to the block they would chase me to the transport. “What do I do, now,” I thought, with despair in my heart.
I reminded myself that Dr. Frumka worked in the Ravensbrück area. She had been with us for a long time in Auschwitz, and then, before the evacuation, she had left to go to Ravensbrück.
Frumka was an unusually fine person. Her entire being glowed with nobility and honesty. I had to find her. She would certainly help me. I went from block to block, inquiring about her of anyone I met. Finally, after a few hours, I was shown the block where Dr. Frumka worked.
At the entrance the orderly stopped me.
“Frumka is sick. She has pneumonia. She is in bed in the area. Go to the window. I will send her to you,” she finished, seeing my troubled face.
I stood at the window, feeling that the last straw I could cling to had sunken into the deep. Frumka appeared, looking quite wretched. Quickly I told her everything.
“I have been sick and confined to bed for two weeks now,” she told me. “I haven’t been working, so I can’t check you into the hospital. What shall I do with you?” she concluded worriedly.
I looked around carefully, looking for a hole I could hide in. I was afraid to go back to the block, but I was not allowed to stay there any longer. Frumka started thinking aloud, casting about for a solution, and her words drifted to my ears as through a fog. Suddenly a thought struggled to the surface which made me feel as light as if a ton of bricks had fallen from my shoulders. Why was I worrying so much about my rotten life? If I had a child with me, or another person who was close to me, then I might have had some reason to worry. But since I was alone, let fate take its course. What will be will be. Even today I remember how all my worries left me and I felt as free and as light as a bird.
“Goodbye, Frumka,” I said with a laugh, and I left.
“Wait, you maniac,” Frumka shouted. “Where are you going? Tell me what you have decided.”
I did not answer her. I just waved my hand to her. The struggle for life bored me. I returned to the block, and an hour later I was aboard a transport. I was given half a loaf of bread, a piece of salami, and I did not give a damn about what might happen after that.
1 A concentration camp in eastern Germany, about fifty miles north of Berlin and twenty miles north of Sachsenhausen. It became a way station and dumping ground for dying captives on death marches as the Nazis tried desperately to finish their attempted genocide.