The Testimony    (7 page)

There was a woman from Austria who also progressed from labour to concentration to extermination camps, and now intoned all day: ‘
Mann kann sich an alles
gewöhnen.
’ (One can get used to everything.) She had little else to say, and we regarded her as one of the deranged. But Frieda talked to her sometimes and said that this repetition of what was a fact was her way of coping, not madness.

Our morale was sinking fast, but on the rare days when the watery soup contained a few solid particles, potato or cabbage, there would be a wave of rumours about the imminent end of the war. It seemed that an extra calorie could generate a spark of hope.

Another momentary morale booster was any message thrown secretly over the fence by the men. It would usually be good news about German defeats or Allied advances, all probably invented to cheer us up, but it was good to get a message saying the Germans were in retreat and the war was bound to end next week.

The messages were written on a piece of paper, which was wrapped around a pebble and tied with a thread pulled out of cloth. If you could get a bit of paper, either blown in by wind or smuggled in by the male prisoners who came to empty latrines, a message could be sent back across the fence to the male section. One woman owned a small piece of pencil that she lent in exchange for a bit of your soup. Pebbles were easy to find, and a thread pulled out of your dress would wrap the paper round the little stone. The messages were usually enquiries about relatives—‘is Josef Bloom from Warsaw among you? + return the paper’.

Once, the men sent us a small pencil and extra paper, and asked us where we came from. In reply we also asked about the date, since we had lost count of days and weeks. We often asked them the date; once we found it out we tried to keep time from then on, but the person who was counting the days died soon after and we were again confused on this matter. We were confused in many ways: rumour had it that barbiturates were added to our drinking water.

Sending messages over was my task, and involved waiting till the tower guard looked the other way, then throwing the message and pebble swiftly and far enough over the fence, and into a group of men, so that it was not seen landing on the open ground.

One day I was caught by the overseer and became the star of a public flogging. The ‘special assembly’ whistle ordered all to gather outside the nearby barracks. My crime was announced and I was put face down across a wooden box and lashed with a leather strap. The usual quota was fifty lashes. There was a strange silence, a lack of the usual noises in the camp. After forty lashes—counted aloud by the lasher—there was a sudden stop, and the whistle sounded to disperse. This started a rumour that the Germans were leaving the camp. It had to be something of that magnitude to cut short a public flogging. The reason remained a mystery. I remember staggering back to the barrack in the arms of a very distressed Frieda. She, Mother and Goldie spent the night putting wet rags on my swollen and bleeding back.

I think it was a few days after this that the front door of the barrack was opened for an inspection by high-ranking army officers. I was curled up on the floor nearby and heard the woman overseer say, ‘
Da haben
wir unsere Untermenschen.
’ (Here we keep our sub-humans.) The men covered their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs and walked away quickly.

In a rare moment of reflection I thought that, yes, it was a fair description. We now barely resembled normal humans. Covered in lice, filth and festering sores, many of us with double incontinence, we fought for scraps of food and abused each other. The language we used matched the surrounding reality: we referred to our guards in strings of obscenities and used crude, single, angry words instead of sentences. The normal language used by newcomers sounded pompous and ridiculously out of place. I thought any form of aesthetics would seem incongruous here. Frieda agreed and said that, after five-and-a-half years of systematic deprivations, indignities and the special inhumanities practised in Stutthof, we were now, demonstrably, the sub-human ‘scum of the species’ that the Germans had pledged to remove. Mission accomplished!

There were frequent reshuffles of inmates from one section of the camp to another, either to fill vacancies or for no obvious reason. On such occasions we compared our experiences with the ‘newcomers’ who had been under different command. There was such variety in the modes of physical abuse, punishment and torture carried out: some were made to stand naked for hours in the freezing outdoors, others made to crawl on all fours in a circle under a cracking whip.

Drunk with total power over the lives of others, the section commandants added their own creative embellishments to the common task of extermination. (Thus, in testimonies of survivors, there are variations in the treatments they experienced. Holocaust deniers have seized on these variations, claiming that such ‘discrepancies’ invalidate all reports, and therefore the existence of this well-planned and efficient mass extermination.)

Late in 1944, groups of new inmates were put into our half-empty barracks—young Hungarian women forced to work on German farms. They arrived healthy and well fed, and stood in shock at the sight of us: ghosts and skeletons moving slowly in filth and stench.

Those of us who could still feel anything felt sorry for them, for they were doomed to die from dysentery and dehydration within days. We had slid into this hell gradually, acquiring immunity and coping tricks on the way; but they had suddenly crashed from a great height. Few could cope with that. Frieda tried to help them by answering their many questions. They spoke in Hungarian and huddled in a corner away from the sub-humans.

One night I found one of them lying on the slippery edge of the latrine and screaming in pain. I got Frieda and others to help drag her inside. Soon she delivered a five- or six-month-old dead foetus. To cut the umbilical cord, we cracked a small side window and used the sharp pieces of glass. But there was no way to stem her profuse bleeding. Goldie raised the woman’s legs, but shook her head in despair. Frieda spoke to the woman softly and cradled her head in her lap. I wrapped the baby and pieces of glass in rags, keeping one for some unforeseen need, took the parcel to the latrine and pushed it well down with a wooden paling. Frieda stayed with the woman till she died of blood loss. A few days later the baby’s body could be seen floating on the surface of the excreta. (I see it occasionally in my nightmares.) We feared repercussions, but none came.

The months of the year announced themselves, approximately, through the seasonal weather. It was winter now, late November or early December, we thought. The random beatings and punishments became more frequent and more brutal. We hoped this meant that Germany was losing the war and the guards were venting their frustration on us. Our female overseers used a variety of gadgets: rubber hoses, pleated wires, sharpened sticks, long leather whips with a metal ball at the end. They swapped them for the fun of using a new one. We used the trick of shifting slightly so that not all blows fell on the same spot, but it was difficult to dodge these sudden, frenzied attacks. On several occasions, I was asked my age and received a corresponding number of lashes. My mother said I was beaten more often than others because I glared and bristled with hatred and disgust towards the Germans. She asked me what I hoped to achieve by it. I did not think I was exceptional in this, and certainly did not set out to provoke beatings.

The camp commandant visited more often too. He lived in a cottage outside the camp at the edge of the forest, and we could see him playing with a toddler and a puppy dog outside his house. We saw a tender and affectionate man, but once inside our camp he became a monster and his attacks, unlike the others, were always predictable. His method was to deliver a karate-like chop to the area between the ear and the chin, which never failed to cause a loss of balance, and one always fell backwards. He would then sink the heel of his heavy army boots into various parts of the victim’s body. We learned not to turn over to protect the face and abdomen because he then kicked harder to turn the victim up again. Frieda called him a Jekyll-and-Hyde type—another puzzle to me, until she related Stevenson’s story of good and evil.

Mr Hyde used his routine on me one day, and it got me a fracture of the skull (the ethmoid, as I learned later) and a broken nose, several broken ribs and two days in a coma. I was still unconscious the next day, and absent from the rollcall. I was dumped on the pile of bodies outside the barrack, but Mother and Frieda dragged me back before the cart arrived. Somehow they propped me up for rollcall on the following day. For some days afterwards I was badly bruised, and all movement, even breathing, was painful. At rollcall Frieda, who stood behind me, was caught propping me up again, and got several lashes for doing so.

The special assemblies also became more frequent during this time, and we were required to watch the hangings of one or more men. There was no announcement of their crimes; we thought most were Russian prisoners of war.

I remember one in particular. Some struggled and others went quietly, but this young boy burst out singing the Soviet national anthem in a beautiful tenor voice. He sang until he slumped in the noose. He too is a sharp picture in my memory, with Frieda sobbing quietly beside me. That night Mother said she could no longer find words to talk, and we huddled in silence.

The date of Christmas Eve announced itself through the raucous singing of carols by the drunken guards in their quarters. Christ’s birthday was celebrated with more beatings and a lot of random shooting.

I think it was a few days later that Frieda spoke to me about my mother and some childhood memories. She added that in a world that allowed Stutthof to happen she did not want to be. I took it as one of her global statements, and did not focus on it. Later, when she did not return to our usual place in the barrack I thought that she was with the Hungarian group. I set out looking for her in the morning and spotted her body ‘on the wire’, electrocuted and suspended by the barbs caught in her clothes. The guard in the tower yelled and pointed his gun at me when I tried to approach.

‘In a world that allows Stutthof to happen I do not want to be,’ she had told me the day before, and I did not get the message. If I had, I could have talked her out of suicide; I could have watched her all night to stop her ‘going on the wire’.

A panicky thought added itself to my guilt and despair: that Mother might also ‘go on the wire’. Like Frieda, she too made global remarks. I spent the whole night stressing her obligation to me and to Father who, I said, would look for us after the war. I extracted a promise that she would not give up. Mother was now very weak and emaciated.

Then, within two days, most of us became very ill and our barracks had large signs placed outside saying, ‘Typhus’. Goldie, who was a physician, said that the fact that there was not a gradual spread of infection suggested it was somehow induced deliberately. Overseers in gas masks and protective clothing entered our enclosure only to roll a barrel of soup on the snow-covered ground from the gate toward the barracks.

I lost consciousness. When I regained it some days later, I was among very few survivors, surrounded by many dead, all in puddles of excreta. Mother was next to me, skeletal, unconscious and unable to hear my pleas to hang on. She had terrible pressure sores, and from one of her elbows the bone was protruding. It would have helped to get some snow from outside to wash the pus and muck out of these sores, but I was too weak to crawl out. So I tried to lick them dry. There was no other way.

A few in our barrack had not succumbed to typhus, apparently due to immunity from a previous exposure to the disease. They tried to feed those unable to move. Goldie, too, was alive nearby.

I don’t know when we heard the distant thunder; a storm, we thought. But a message from the male side said it was the artillery of the approaching Russian army. I kept repeating this into Mother’s ear, as if to penetrate the wall of unconsciousness. I hugged her, and then felt her long sigh and her last heartbeat. Goldie felt her pulse and cried. I think it was late January 1945, and I don’t know how to describe my feelings then.

SASHA

There is no doubt my survival was at the expense of that of my parents. I was in better than average physical condition when sent to the concentration camp because of their insistence that I consume the largest portion of our food rations. And they, therefore, were in worse than average condition.

The rest was sheer luck. Each day brought new and sudden chances of being ‘exterminated’. The number of my lucky escapes, particularly during the chaos towards the end of the war, was truly amazing.

I did hope, and I wanted to live, but so must have millions of those who died.

How did I survive? I guess by still being alive, but only just, in March (I think) 1945, when units of the Russian army occupied the part of East Prussia where I was a prisoner. In January that year the typhus epidemic in Stutthof decimated the inmates a few weeks before the liberation. The survivors were very weak, and many unable to stand up.