The Testimony (5 page)
Authors: Halina Wagowska
Gradually, during the years of slave labour, I lost the habit of daydreaming and of recollecting moments, objects and sounds of beauty and happy events in my past. I guess that at first this was a way of dealing with the collapse of my world. But survival instincts concentrated my tiny wits on dealing with each moment in a guarded way in order to minimise the risks and dangers of each day, and to cope with the sudden, unpredictable whims of our masters.
This adjustment to reality and its demands was costly for children like me: it prevented normal development and learning, and caused a regression to the existence of a primitive creature. This process intensified during the following years.
By mid 1944 starvation, the freezing winters and disease had claimed many lives in the ghetto. I am told that, of the initial 167,000 inmates, there were 70,000 left when, in July 1944, it was announced that we would be transferred to another labour camp. We were each allowed to take a small suitcase of belongings. I filled all my pockets with family photographs.
The journey out of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto was memorable. The closed goods trains were so overcrowded that we had to take turns at sitting down. We travelled very slowly, and there were frequent stops for several hours. On two occasions we got off to get bread and water from the last wagon. Though this was in an open field, we were not allowed to take out the dead or clean the wagons, only to empty the buckets that served as toilets.
One of the escorting soldiers found a young baby in our wagon. He tore it from the mother, swung it upwards by the leg and smashed its skull on the floor. Blood and yellow bits of brain oozed out. He was about to shoot the mother but changed his mind, grinned and left. An officer looked in and said something about not allowing vermin to multiply. The mother went berserk. She wailed or laughed like a hyena—a nightmarish sound—for the rest of the journey, which took three days and nights.
Arrival at the camp was a relief and then a new shock. We stepped out of the wagons onto a long platform, into fresh air and midday light. The terrible journey was obviously at an end. Soldiers with rifles at the ready urged us along—
‘Schnell! schnell!’
—towards the entrance of the camp. Some officers held large Alsatian dogs on short leashes. Chaim Rumkowski was in the same transport, and was driven in an open car along the platform. He waved to us, said ‘Do not worry,’ and soon, when a shot was heard, someone near me said, ‘That is the end of him.’
Inside, the first segregation took place by ordering all men to the right, all women to the left. Father looked back at us, Mother and me, and waved. This was the last time I saw him.
The place contained many barracks, and was surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence with lampposts and watchtowers. The inmates wore white- and grey-striped pyjama-like uniforms, and some were engaged in the task of processing the new arrivals. One group pushed our luggage out of sight.
The first processing barrack contained a row of wooden benches. We sat down to have our hair shaved off and our mouths and fingers searched for gold. Female soldiers did the shaving while a man collected jewellery in a large glass jar. Those with gold crowns on their teeth were ordered into a corner where another woman in uniform removed the gold with what looked like a pair of pliers. The screaming testified to the pain of this ‘waste not, want not’ practice.
Further shouted orders told us to undress, leave our clothes at the door and proceed in a single line to the next barrack. As we walked naked between two rows of armed soldiers, a man in a white coat ordered some to step to one side, to select and separate the frail and emaciated from those who still had some muscles.
Mother and I passed this selection for life or death. In the second barrack we were disinfected in an acrid-smelling shower room. The shower made some women exclaim ‘Thank God!’ and I learned that they had expected gas, not water, to issue from the pipes above. A viscous, pink fluid was painted on our shaven heads, armpits and pubes, and we were given uniforms.
The ‘old’ inmates worked in and around the processing barracks, packing our clothes, spectacles and shoes, and sweeping the cut hair into a heap. I still have a vivid recollection of a large heap of hair, a mixture of colours, textures, plaits, buns and ponytails tied with ribbons. It occasionally appears in a dream that has nothing to do with my war years. (This hair was later fumigated and used to fill furniture, pillows and mattresses and to make haircloth.)
As they worked they gave us valuable advice. Hardly moving their lips and with eyes averted they whispered that this was a section of Auschwitz called Birkenau. They pointed out a guard as a mad, trigger-happy one. ‘Keep away from your mother; they separate relatives,’ one said to me. Another told me, ‘You are in a swamp,’ which was a bit puzzling at the time. Bending down to the ground I asked in a whisper how I could get the photographs left in my confiscated clothes. He hissed back, ‘Idiot! No ghetto here! Bullets fly! Move away!’ This ventriloquism and its monosyllabic language was a useful skill I acquired and used.
We were told to form a queue to get numbered. We could now see those who had been selected from among our group before the shower. They were climbing into a couple of trucks through the back doors and were all very thin, crippled or old.
It was evening now, and there was a sudden heavy downpour of rain. Swearing, the guards marched the line of women into a nearby barrack, but I and several others were taken towards the trucks. There was a pile of wooden planks that we had to put on the now swampy ground in front of the trucks to prevent them getting bogged down. We were kicked and pushed into the mud by the soaked guards for not working fast enough. Empty trucks kept coming back for more cargo. Late that night we were put into a barrack and I was now separated from Mother.
At first, resistance seemed possible but doomed to failure. For individuals, such acts were suicidal, and mass reprisals usually followed. In my experience, if someone wanted to resist or defy there was group pressure to conform, for fear of collective punishment. Groups were guarded and treated in a way that precluded organised resistance to any action by the Germans. I believe the frequent changing, breaking up and reshuffling of people was done deliberately to prevent organised action. The resultant loss of friendships and trust one may have formed was an additional deprivation and kept morale low. Even the deliberate separation of family members (sisters, mothers and daughters) so strictly carried out must have been done for the same reason.
In the barracks, we slept on bunks, had to assemble each day at dawn and stand at attention to be counted. We were given a tin plate, a mug and spoon. A portion of soup, a piece of bread and some coffee-like fluid were our daily food ration. Toilets consisted of a row of buckets. The effect of the disinfectants soon wore off and we became infested with lice. The now-frequent autumn rain turned the marshy terrain of our section of the camp into a swamp, ankle-deep in many places.
More planks of wood had to be put over puddles on the road and, as trucks passed over them, I was overwhelmed by the fear that Mother might be inside. Then, in one of the reshuffles of inmates to keep the barracks full and make room for new arrivals, I was reunited with Mother. We did not speak, just held hands all night.
There were many naked parades to cull the frail and to select new workers for the various tasks around the camp. From a distance, Mother was able to see me at my tasks in our barracks. She was among those not selected for tasks, surely because she had fewer muscles on her skeleton than I—and that was because of the way that my parents had augmented my food rations in Litzmannstadt with some of theirs. This was a great source of guilt for me, and because she was not employed I was scared that on my return from work I might not find her there.
During naked parades the contrast one made with the next person in line could be decisive in being culled or not, or being selected for work. Comparatively better nourished, at my parents’ expense, I did not have to seek a contrast, but took care not to stand next to Mother, for whom I would have been an unfavourable contrast. This positioning for advantage was obviously always to someone else’s disadvantage.
Eight of us were ordered into a task-force known as the Tod Kommando, the death squad, and more came from other barracks. Each morning we walked to one of the nearby crematoria where carts full of piled-up bodies were pulled and pushed towards the ovens by male inmates. Many hundreds of bodies were taken from the gas chambers every day to this one, only one of several such furnaces.
We put each body on a long plank of wood and let it slide in through one of the semi-oval iron doors. Occasionally, we could feel a weak pulse in the arm or leg as we moved the bodies, but no other signs of life. We were kicked or beaten when seen to be slowing down, and worked seven long days each week. There were armed overseers in uniforms that suggested higher rank and they were obsessed with speed and efficiency. The carts were ordered into new positions so that unloading could be done from both sides at one time.
I clearly recall a large wire crate full of pairs of spectacles—unfolded, some with broken lenses—being taken to the collection area. I remember thinking that had they all been folded they would take up less space. The maniacal efficiency around me was imprinting itself on me. Years later, when able to reflect, I thought that a world-best-practice abattoir probably could not match the speed and efficiency of the slaughtering and processing of carcasses in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp. This was one of the unique features of this Holocaust.
While hunger, pain and cold tormented my body, my mind was filled with hatred and fears. My fears were several: the rational fear of pain and humiliation, which led to strategies to avoid them; the panic of losing my parents; the anxiety about facing a slow and tortured death, which brought the wish for quick oblivion; the vague fear of possibly surviving—why me?—alone among so many dead. Here, loading bodies into the ovens, I experienced a new, catastrophic sort of fear at the thought that I might find the body of Mother or Father, or both. This fear brought on breathlessness and near paralysis.
It was such a great relief to find Mother still in the barrack on my return at night and to share the extra piece of bread I got for my work. Mother spent many hours each day looking across the barbed wire into the male section, trying to spot Father among the thousands of men.
The ovens were shut down periodically to remove the ashes that accumulated below. These ashes, with bits of charred bones, teeth and parts of dentures, were used to reclaim the swamp. We carried them in buckets to a selected area and used the bottom of the emptied bucket to push them into the mud. A new efficiency measure was introduced one day: tying two buckets together in a way that allowed us to carry four buckets each.
The reclaiming of the swamp was easier physically and emotionally than filling the ovens. Somehow it was not so dire and, irrationally, I was not paralysed by that same fear. Over the several weeks of my work in the crematoria I wished that these breaks in the swamp were more frequent and longer.
* * *
In 1973 I followed with great interest the superb TV series
The Ascent of Man.
It was presented by Professor Joseph Bronowski, whom I admired as a gifted teacher. Gradually I formed an image of the progress of humankind: many nations shuffling slowly on the road from barbarism towards civilisation by removing, step by step, brutal and cruel traditions and practices, and by changing selfish, uncaring attitudes. Some groups of people were ahead of others; some moved very slowly; and some occasionally did a U-turn and regressed, like Nazi Germany.
At the end of this series Joseph Bronowski is seen standing, then squatting, on the swamp of Birkenau in Auschwitz. He picks up some soil and says that the ashes of his relatives lie here.
Instantly I thought that, for all I knew, I may have been the one who put them into this swamp. I was surprised by the shock I felt, and the sharp and prolonged return of memory. It took me a long time to stop walking through the ashes again.