Memories of Auschwitz
Barbara Stimler
Barbara Stimler lives in an immaculate bungalow in Stanmore, north London. “All my life I wanted to have a nice home,” she says, “because I lost my home when I was 12 years old.” Stimler is 77 but looks younger in her smart grey suit. She cries when she relates her experiences, but despite the stress she is a regular speaker at schools. “The children listen to me as if they are glued on,” she says. “They don’t move. I get myself very exhausted when I talk to them, but I somehow feel lighter in my heart. After I have spoken, the children shake hands with me and hug me and thank me for coming. The boys are even more emotional than the girls.”
Stimler was born in Poland, in the town of Aleksandrow Kujawski, close to the German border. There was no phony war here: the Germans invaded on Friday September 1, 1939. “We were straightaway bombed,” she recalls. “The corner of our house was hit immediately and our neighbours were killed.”
She was 12 years old, the only daughter of Sarah and Jakob, who owned a small textile shop. She was, she says, “the apple of my father’s eye”. She has a photograph of the two of them walking hand in hand in her home town, her proud father, dark and thick-set, in his man-of-the-world homburg.
After the invasion, the family moved from town to town in increasing desperation. Her father was arrested, her mother beaten up, she was molested by SS guards. Routine terror. They spent some time in a concentration camp in Kutno, central Poland, where the gates were locked and bread thrown over the walls to the starving inmates. They were among the few who escaped Kutno, but it was a brief stay of execution. In March 1941, all the Jewish men in the town of Lubranec, where they were staying with her uncle, were suddenly rounded up. This included her father, her uncle and his two sons. They were taken to a camp near Poznan – she and her mother received a postcard – and then silence. She assumes her father was killed in Auschwitz .
Two months later, she and her mother were transported to the 140,000-strong Lodz ghetto. Stimler got a job in a children’s hospital – “If you were not working in the ghetto, you didn’t get a [food] token and the soup was the most important thing of the day” – and her mother worked in a kitchen. They ate; they lived. Then her mother became ill and went to hospital. Treatment was rudimentary and an operation left her paralysed. Now Stimler, still barely 15, had to fend for the two of them.
“One day, when I was going to work, they were closing the street,” she says, her voice breaking. “I said, ‘What am I going to do with my mother?’ I carried her into the garden and put her into a hole in the ground, covered her up and went to work, praying to God that she would be there when I got back because I knew when they got her they will finish her off . . . I come back in the evening and she is there.”
If Stimler’s later experiences in Auschwitz -Birkenau were grotesque, the Lodz ghetto was its own corner of hell, one made more hideously draining by her mother’s condition. In Auschwitz , at least, the battle was only to keep herself alive. Caged like animals, treated worse than animals, the prisoners relied on instinct. In the ghetto, there was a community of sorts, though governed by terror.
“One day,” recalls Stimler, “two lorries came to the children’s hospital. They told all the children to go into the lorries. The children don’t want to go in the lorries; they are hiding themselves behind us. I didn’t know what they’re going to do with the children and I can’t go with them because my mother is at home. Eventually the children left, and do you know what they did with them? They finished them in the lorries, gassed them. Now I have to look for another job.”
After the Wannsee conference in January 1942, at which the SS determined on the “final solution”, the ghetto clearances and deportations accelerated. Auschwitz -Birkenau beckoned. “One Sunday in the summer of 1943, two SS men came to our house and took me away,” says Stimler. “I just stood in the door and said, ‘Mamma, God should be with us.’ “ She never saw her mother again or discovered what happened to her. She assumes she was shot immediately. Now Stimler was alone.
“They took me to the cattle trains, gave us each a loaf of bread, put us in these trains, we were like sardines. In the middle was a barrel with water. When the train was going, the water was splashing everywhere the stench, nobody can imagine. Two women were feeding me with sugar. I didn’t know where we were going, but they did. I’d never heard of Auschwitz , I thought we were going to work.
“Eventually the train stopped, everybody should get out. It was night when we got there. We had to go one after the other to the gate Mengele was standing there [Josef Mengele, a senior doctor in the camp and the arbiter of life and death, notorious for his experiments on prisoners]. I didn’t know who Mengele was now I know. These girls are still feeding me with sugar. He takes your hand and looks at the front and back, and out. I go to the right. They put us in fives and start counting us, counting us for ever.
“I can see a big chimney and the stench coming out from it is incredible. I still don’t know where I am. It gets a bit lighter and I can see the barracks surrounded by electrified wire. A woman comes out of one of the barracks. She has no hair, she has no shoes, she wears a short dress. How could I think that in two hours I would look exactly the same? I thought maybe in this barracks they have mentally ill women.”
Stimler spent a year in Auschwitz until, in the summer of 1944, she was moved to a work camp called Pirshkow on the Polish-German border, where she and 1,000 Polish and Hungarian women, all Jews, had to dig anti-tank ditches, fortifications against the advancing Soviet army. The following February, with the German army in flight, the contingent began a march to Bergen-Belsen, one of the “death marches” faced by many of the surviving prisoners as the Nazis sought both to hide the evidence of their crimes and to fulfil Hitler’s “prophecy” that no Jews would survive in Europe.
Each night, the exhausted marchers, who had no food and lived on snow, would bed down in barns. One morning, Stimler hid beneath a covering of straw. German soldiers would bayonet the straw to make sure no one was hiding there, but she was far enough down to evade the blade. She was free and eventually fell into the hands of the Russians. Before the war, her extended family in Poland numbered around 80. She had so many cousins, she couldn’t even remember all their names. She was the sole survivor.
Stimler came to the UK in 1946, married in 1948, built up a clothing business with her husband (who had fought in the Polish army, under British command, in the war), and had two sons. She built the home she craved. She had a nervous breakdown in 1956, a year after her younger son was born she had her tattoo removed on the advice of her psychiatrist she rarely talked of her experiences, not even to her husband.
Then, 10 years ago, she recorded her story for the British Library. “The interviewer sat opposite me. I just looked at one spot, and I was getting redder and redder, but it was very helpful,” she says. Her granddaughter presented flowers to the Queen at the opening of the permanent exhibition on the Holocaust in the Imperial War Museum in 2000 (an event that, Stimler noticed, was sparsely covered by the mainstream media). Since then she has retold her story in many schools. “When I speak to the children, I ask myself, ‘Do they believe me?’ Because sometimes I don’t believe it myself.”
Leon Greenman
The first thing you notice about Leon Greenman’s large but shabby terraced house in Ilford is that it has mesh shutters. He had them put up 10 years ago, soon after the National Front threw bricks through the windows. Two years ago, he received a Christmas card from the local fascists telling him he would make a lovely lampshade. Don’t tell Greenman that nazism is a dry-as-dust historical phenomenon.
Greenman is an amazing 94, living alone in one room of his cold house a room piled with papers and portraits of the wife and child he lost in the Holocaust, and of mementoes of his postwar days as a singer of ballads. The other rooms in the house are, he says, full of the goods he used to sell on street stalls, once the Beatles had done for the world of dance bands. He retired from the markets more than 20 years ago, so maybe the ladies’ handbags in the locked-up rooms are back in fashion now.
The most poignant portrait on his living-room wall is of his son, Barnett “Barney” Greenman, born on March 17 1940 gassed in Auschwitz two and a half years later. Child and victim of war. Long, curly hair and a gorgeous, girlish face, thrusting a hand to a future that was to be denied him. Even now, had he lived, Barney would be only 64. The Holocaust. Greenman, small, wiry, a boxer in his youth, fought on, has spent 60 years combating racism, was awarded the OBE for his struggle, but in truth never recovered from that blow.
He was born in London, one of six children, but his paternal grandparents were Dutch and his father took the family to live in Rotterdam when Leon was five. His mother had died three years earlier and his father, struggling with his large family, had married his housekeeper. She beat Leon the schoolmasters beat Leon he took up boxing, a pocket battleship, unsinkable. He worked in a barber’s shop and later in his wife Else’s father’s book business, commuting between London and Rotterdam.
Greenman’s failure to leave Rotterdam before the Nazi occupation of Holland in May 1940 was a catalogue of catastrophes. He intended to leave in 1938 but was reassured by the Munich agreement the British consul told him that, as a British passport holder, he would be evacuated in the event of war, but when war came, the embassy staff fled he gave his passport to a friend for safe keeping the friend panicked and burned it. Greenman was paperless, stateless, friendless. In October 1942, he and his wife and son were taken to the nearby Westerbork concentration camp. Four months later, they were moved to Auschwitz . Greenman was one of 700 Dutch Jews in that consignment he and one other man survived.
In his book, An Englishman in Auschwitz , Greenman describes his arrival in Birkenau. “The women were separated from the men: Else and Barney were marched about 20 yards away to a queue of women . . . I tried to watch Else. I could see her clearly against the blue lights. She could see me, too, for she threw me a kiss and held our child up for me to see. What was going through her mind, I will never know. Perhaps she was pleased that the journey had come to an end. We had been promised that we could meet at the weekends after our work was done. We will have a lot to talk about, I thought to myself.”
“I thought they must be still alive,” says Greenman now. “I didn’t know they were gassed within hours. I didn’t know about gassing. In my mind, there was nothing wrong with them. I told myself I would find them. They were somewhere in the camp. We’ll wait and see. That went on day after day after day. The thought that I would see them again kept me going.”
Greenman’s hairdressing helped him survive: one of his jobs in the camp was to shave the inmates’ beards. In September 1943, he was sent to the work camp at Monowitz, where he was employed as a builder, extending the camp. “You were there to work and to die,” he says, “and the big fellers went quicker than the little ones.” Greenman is a little over five feet tall and built for survival. He endured almost a year and a half in Monowitz, then a 60-mile death march to Gleiwitz, and a nightmarish five-day journey in open cattle trucks to Buchenwald, from which he was liberated by American forces on April 11 1945. A tiny man with the largest of hearts, in this tiny, paper-strewn room that contains the century.
Anita Lasker Wallfisch
Anita Lasker Wallfisch is a cellist. Music is her life music also saved her life: she played in the women’s orchestra in Auschwitz . The orchestra played marches as the slave labourers left the camp for each day’s murderous work and when, if, they returned. They also gave concerts for the SS, who, as good Germans, adored music. Reinhard Heydrich, the orchestrator of the final solution, was an accomplished violinist.
At 79, Lasker Wallfisch’s intellect burns bright. She plays Scrabble at weekends with a survivor of the Theresienstadt camp who is 101 and speaks half a dozen languages. “We don’t score,” says Lasker Wallfisch. “We play for the beauty of the words.” She does not treat the Holocaust as the centre of her life, but as an episode in her life. After the war, she married a concert pianist went on to be a professional cellist with the English Chamber Orchestra her son, Raphael, is a distinguished cellist her grandsons, too, are musicians. Despite the war, the camps, there is continuity.
Lasker Wallfisch is from a professional Jewish family, living in Breslau, then part of Germany, now in Poland and renamed Wroclaw. Her father was a lawyer her mother a fine violinist she had two sisters, Marianne and Renata, both a few years older. They suffered discrimination from 1933, and by the time war broke out their situation was desperate. “My father had fought at the front in the first war,” she says. “He had the Iron Cross and kidded himself that it couldn’t be as bad as it seemed, but it slowly got as bad as it could be.”
Marianne, the eldest sister, had fled to England, but in April 1942 Anita’s parents were taken away. She had no official notification of their fate, but believes they were murdered at Isbica, near Lublin, in Poland. “I’ll never be sure what happened,” she says, “but it is possible that they were among the people who were forced to dig their own graves and then shot into them.”
She and Renata were not deported because they were working in a paper factory. There, they met French prisoners of war, and started forging papers to enable French slave labourers to cross back into France. In September 1942 they themselves tried to escape to France, but were arrested at Breslau station by the Gestapo. Only their suitcase, which they had already put on the train, escaped.
Her descriptions of life under the Nazis are startlingly matter-of-fact it was lunacy, surreal. “Life was completely arbitrary. You didn’t know what was going to happen the next moment.” She says she never lost her sense of the absurdity of what was happening. Take that suitcase. The Gestapo were anxious about its loss, and carefully noted its size and colour. “I had been in prison for about a year,” she recalls. “Then one day I was called down. A suitcase has arrived: could I identify it? It was my suitcase. They stole everything, they killed everybody, but that suitcase really mattered to them. They had found the suitcase and everything was fine, though I never saw it again because it then went into the vaults of the prison and later I saw a guard wearing one of my dresses.”
Lasker Wallfisch and her sister were eventually sent to Auschwitz on separate prison trains, a far less squalid way to arrive than by cattle truck. Less dangerous, too, since there was no selection on arrival. In the inverted world of Auschwitz , criminals were valued more highly than Jews. Better yet was to be a prisoner who played the cello.
“When I arrived, the girl [a fellow inmate, not an SS guard] processing me asked me what I did before the war. I told her I played the cello. What a stupid thing to say. ‘Fantastic,’ she said. ‘You’ll be saved.’ She called the conductor of the orchestra, Alma Rose. As it happens, they didn’t have a cellist. There were crazy instruments in the orchestra – mandolins, accordions – but no cello, so I was like manna from heaven.”
Playing in the 40-strong orchestra saved her – and saved her sister too, since Anita was able to supplement Renata’s meagre rations. “As long as they wanted an orchestra, they couldn’t put us in the gas chamber,” she says. “That stupid they wouldn’t be, because we are not really replaceable. Somebody who carries stones is replaceable.”
Does she feel guilty about the relatively privileged existence she led? “You don’t feel guilty. You arrive in Auschwitz and you think you’re going to be gassed. But something different happens. Somebody gives you a cello and says, ‘Play something.’ Are you going to say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t play here I only play in Carnegie Hall’? No, you’re bloody lucky, glad, surprised. Guilty, no.”
By October 1944, Alma Rose had died, the orchestra was missing her leadership and playing poorly, the Russians were advancing, it was time to leave. Fortunately, I don’t ask her what happened to the cello. “I was interviewed once,” she volunteers, “and the woman asked me whether I still played the cello I played in Auschwitz . I threw her out. I said, ‘Don’t come and interview me if you haven’t got the slightest idea of my story.’ We were sent from Auschwitz to Belsen [near Hanover in northern Germany]. Do you think you say, ‘Excuse me, I’ve got to pack my cello up’?”
She was taken on a train with 3,000 others to Belsen. “It was a very small camp when we arrived,” she says, “nothing like it was later. There were no barracks for us, so we were put in tents then the tents collapsed in the rain. Suddenly there were barracks – God knows what happened to the people there before us. People ask me which was worse, Auschwitz or Belsen? But they were completely different. Auschwitz was a well-organised extermination camp with all the apparatus. In Belsen they didn’t need the apparatus you just perished anyway. There was no food, there were diseases, it was the end – and then the death marches arrived. There were no facilities, nothing. It was complete chaos. We were there for six months, with nothing to eat. Occasionally, somebody found a turnip. After the liberation, the allies found that there was food there. They just hadn’t given it to us.”
Renata, who could speak English, became an interpreter with the British army, and suggested her sister enlist as well. “She said to me, ‘Why don’t you become an interpreter too?’ I said. ‘I can’t speak English.’ She said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ So I became an interpreter and we were part of the British army.” They contacted Marianne back in the UK, and in 1946 Anita and Renata moved to Britain. Anita had a successful musical career Renata worked for the BBC, married and moved to France, where she made films and still lives Marianne, who escaped the camps, died soon after the war in childbirth. “Such,” says Lasker Wallfisch, “are the ironies of fate.”
Maria and Alec Ossowski
Maria and Alec Ossowski sparkle. So does their antique shop – “It’s called Ossowski’s, of course!” – in London’s Belgravia. Their shop specialises in 18th-century furniture. Alec is 82, Maria is 79, and their love, undimmed 60 years after they first met, fills the room. This is a Holocaust story with the happiest of endings.
The Ossowskis are Polish non-Jews, a category often forgotten. Some 140,000 were sent to Auschwitz fewer than half returned. Alec was sent to the camp because he had worked for the Polish resistance, dispatching SS officers. “I did it with pleasure,” he says. “My brother Edmund had already been killed by the Nazis and I had seen my mother crying.” Maria was sent because the Gestapo thought she was in the resistance, but she had been an unwitting courier for a friend of her family, delivering packages to a house that was suspected of harbouring partisans.
Maria was taken to Auschwitz in May 1943 Alec, three months later. Maria went with 120 other female political prisoners 30 survived. The survival rate was far higher than for Jews because there was no initial selection for death and they got better treatment, though malnourishment, disease and the brutality of the guards still took a devastating toll. Maria dug drainage ditches and was then moved to an outcamp, where conditions were better. Alec, who spoke fluent German, worked in the hospital at Auschwitz – first as “Scheissmeister”, cleaning the toilets, then as a clerk.
Maria was one of the few inmates who owed her survival to Josef Mengele. “The transfer to the outcamp saved my life,” she says. “There is no doubt about it. I had TB in both lungs, typhoid fever. I was ready to exit. Fifty of us applied for three jobs at the camp. They were to be chosen by Mengele. We had to walk in front of him naked. A friend of mine who worked with him told me later that I got through because I was so young and slim. I had the sort of boyish figure that he adored and my skin was very soft and clear. He hated women with large, sagging breasts and bad skin, and my skin had somehow survived everything in the camp. That’s how I got through.”
Alec’s desire to resist never deserted him, and in the hospital he managed to account for one SS man. “A new doctor came,” he recalls. “He smelt beautifully, while we were all grey. We had to come to attention when he arrived, he was very nasty, but this stupid nit hung his overcoat near us. There was a Hungarian Jew who was ill with typhus, so I scooped the lice from under his arm and put it inside the coat. The doctor got the disease and died. Somehow, for Russians, typhoid was just an illness – they must have been immune through ancestry. Poles, too, not too bad. But the Germans died.”
From Maria and Alec, perhaps because their conditions were better, you get more sense of the camp as a functioning social entity not solely a killing machine. Somehow, life went on, even though you were close to a crematorium whose leaping flames spoke of annihilation. “When the transports arrived, there were columns of people waiting to be killed,” says Alec. “A line of people stretching from here to Sloane Square [perhaps half a mile from where we are talking]. Here we were eating, talking, joking, hoping to survive until next day, while down there were people waiting to die.”
“It is the day after day you survive, hour after hour,” says Maria. “There is no other philosophy. You go from moment to moment and say, ‘I am still alive.’ Your sense of self-preservation is on a high all the time. People who couldn’t take it hanged themselves on the electric wires. I had two friends who did this, one of them a very educated doctor. She just couldn’t take it any more. But you couldn’t ask why this was happening. There was no answer. If you start asking such a question, you start asking, ‘Where is the God?’ Sometimes you did ask where was the God, but then on the other hand you needed him sometimes on your side.”
Alec was sent to Buchenwald in August 1944. He tells a story analogous to Anita Lasker Wallfisch’s lost suitcase. “They evacuate us,” he says. “A letter comes for me to Auschwitz . The bloody Russians are coming, but no, the German postal service cross out Auschwitz and send the letter on to me in Buchenwald. Can you imagine that? I had a new number, so they even have to work out what my number had been changed to in order to send it on to me. Strange nation.”
Maria, too, ended up in Buchenwald early in 1945, but was then taken on another march towards Dresden. She and three friends fled the column and hid in a forest for two weeks, living on nettles, before she was “liberated” by the Russian army, who told her that Poland was now part of the Soviet Union. She and two of her friends met six western prisoners of war, stole bicycles from the Russians and pedalled west for three days.
Eventually, they crossed the bridge over the river Mulde, which separated the Russian and American armies, were given new clothes and sent to the British-occupied sector in north Germany. She fetched up in a camp called Northeim, where she met the handsome Alec, by whom she immediately became pregnant. “I was very curious to know what it was all about,” she says. Their first son was born in Italy, where both had joined the Polish army under British command. That gave them a route into Britain, where they settled, prospered, built their antiques business. They did not see Poland again until 1960. When Maria finally returned home, her mother did not recognise her.
“I never doubted that I would survive,” says Alec. “The irony is that some of us committed suicide after liberation because again you have to fight for life.” “Some survivors had a feeling of absolutely unnecessary guilt,” echoes Maria. “Why was it me?” they ask. “I often ask myself, ‘Why was it me?’ but then I accept it with good grace. OK, it was me, so how lucky am I?”
Trude Levi
In 1944, the Nazis turned their attention to the Hungarian Jews. Within three months, 437,000 had been rounded up. Most were sent to Auschwitz. Few survived. One who did was Trude Levi, now 80 and living in a neat house in Mill Hill, north London, filled with cards, books, sculptures, memories. She lectures in schools has written two books, A Cat Called Adolf and Did You Ever Meet Hitler, Miss? was for many years a librarian, responsible for the Jewish collection at University College London. A life of achievement.
Levi was born in Szombathely on the Austrian border. Her father was a Hungarian doctor her mother was Austrian she grew up bilingual. The household was filled with music: her father played the violin and had written a book on the psychology of music, her brother was studying piano, she played the cello. Her father was also a socialist, involved in leftwing politics – a subversive in the eyes of the Nazis when they occupied Hungary, a wartime ally, on March 19 1944.
Levi was working in Budapest when the tanks rolled in. “It was a beautiful Sunday morning. I had taken the tram along the Danube and on the way back all along the riverbank there were German tanks and soldiers with machine-guns. They were losing the war and you would have thought they would have needed all their rollingstock and manpower for the front instead they sent it to Hungary to take away the Jews.”
Non-Jewish friends offered to hide Levi, but she wanted to see her parents again. “I decided to go back mainly because the last time I was at home
I had had a terrible row with my father. I had left without saying goodbye and I wanted to go back and make peace with him.”
It took her a month to get permission to travel, and she didn’t leave for Szombathely until April 24 – a day after her 20th birthday. “I had to wear a yellow star; I was only allowed to sit on the train if there was an empty bench I was not allowed to sit next to anyone, speak to anyone, go to the toilet or go to the restaurant. I arrived a few minutes after six o’clock. After six no Jews were supposed to be in the street. Jews were not permitted to board a tram. I arrived with a rucksack, a heavy suitcase and with a cello on my other arm, and had to walk through town. I was stopped constantly. People said, “How dare you be in the street after six o’clock?’ I was called ‘dirty Jew’, ‘Jewish pig’. I was spat at, kicked.
“When I got home I found my mother, who was 49 years old and been quite energetic, a completely broken, confused old woman. The flat was in complete disarray. All the books, over 3,000 of them, were on the floor, my father’s medical instruments were in a heap, and my father wasn’t there. Two SS men had come, searched the flat for subversive literature and took my father away.”
In early May, Levi and her mother were taken to Szombathely’s newly formed ghetto. (Her brother was in the Hungarian army and was put to work in the mines after the occupation. He survived, but the brutality of a Hungarian foreman, who amused himself by throwing rocks at him, damaged his pianist’s hands.) At the end of June, Levi and her mother were moved to a concentration camp and then to a transit camp, where they were reunited with her father. On July 1, under a hot sun, they were put into a cattle truck with 120 other Jews n all intellectuals, the SS assured them – and dispatched on the five-day train journey to Auschwitz .
She recalls that hellish journey with vivid, unswerving detail. “We tried to deal with the situation in a civilised manner: we built benches to sit on out of suitcases. There were two buckets for our human needs. First of all, we had to overcome our inhibitions, because we were men, women and children, but two buckets were not sufficient for 120 people and ith every jolt of the train muck spilled out and we had to sit in the muck.
“At one point on the second day, the train stopped and the loudspeakers told us to get ready to get out, so we destroyed our seats and everybody took their luggage and we stood there. Then it got dark and the train started with a jolt. We fell over each other and from then on people were hysterical. There was very little air – two small openings sealed with barbed wire. Because we didn’t get enough air, we became dehydrated our lips were broken up and hurt very badly I had a piece of bread and wanted to eat it but I couldn’t swallow any more.
“People started screaming people started going mad people started having heart attacks and dying, and we travelled with the dead and the mad and the screaming for five days and five nights. On the sixth day, in the morning, the train stopped, the doors were opened, soldiers shouted, ‘Out out, quickly quickly,’ and told us to leave our luggage, we would get it later. Of course we never saw our belongings again. We had arrived in Auschwitz . It was July 7 1944.”
Levi’s mother had collapsed and was dragged from the wagon to be gassed. She was separated from her father and never saw him again. She later unearthed documents showing that he was still alive on August 2, but believes he was gassed soon afterwards following a large selection by Mengele and camp commandant Rudolf Hoss.
Levi was put into a bunkless barrack with 1,200 women. “We could only sit as we had in the cattle truck – back to back, arms pulled in. There was a yellowish, greyish powdery soil and we were just sitting on the ground.” Their days were spent being endlessly counted, standing in the assembly area for hour after hour. “All the figures in the camp had to tally,” says Levi.
“We were there until August 2 when we were called out of the barracks,” she remembers. “We had to stand in rows of five at the assembly place – all the women from Birkenau B2. We were told to strip naked – it was still dark and freezing cold – because we were going to have a medical examination. We stood there for 14 hours until it was nearly dark again, when Hoss and Mengele arrived and we had to pass in front of them showing the palm of our hand (I still have no idea why it was the palm) and Mengele said – I’m using the term he used in German – ‘Open your mug.’ I think he wanted to see whether you had gold teeth. Anyway, he said right or left. I suppose the people with gold teeth all went right because those who went right, that was the end of them. I was sent left.”
Levi had been selected for life. She was sent to a work camp called Hessisch-Lichtenau near Kassel in central Germany, where she worked in a munitions factory (all the time, with her Hungarian co-workers, trying discreetly to sabotage the bombs they were assembling). She was there until the following March, when the advance of the allies forced its closure. She was taken to Tekla camp near Leipzig, and then on a death march, back and forth across the river Elbe, Americans to the west, Russians to the east, spotter planes above targeting the SS guards, who donned risoners’ outfits to avoid being shot at. Ten days with only snow and, once, raw horsemeat and some uncooked rice to eat, teeth falling out, and anyone who couldn’t stand shot by the SS.
“I could hardly walk any more, I was completely finished,” says Levi. “The sun started to rise and while we were crossing the bridge over the Elbe, I experienced one of the most beautiful sunrises in my life. I arrived at the other side when the sun was up and I collapsed. I knew it was the end of me. They are going to shoot me now. Two guards came, they first shouted at me to get up, but I couldn’t, so they butted me with their guns. Then one of them said, ‘Oh leave her, she’s not worth a bullet,’ and they walked away to chase those who could still walk.”
Three years later, Levi was telling her tale in Durban, South Africa, where she was staying with her first husband, a Hungarian musician. “I was one of the first survivors to go there,” she says, “and I was asked by a Jewish organisation to tell them what happened to me. I had a memory lapse after the war and there were quite a lot of things I didn’t remember yet, so what I told them was about half of what happened. I didn’t have a penny to my name the dress I had on I picked up from the floor of a Jewish charity organisation – it didn’t quite fit and I gave my talk to women who had come after the pogroms in Russia, so they knew about persecution. I told my story and, afterwards, a woman came up to me and said, ‘My dear, I’m sure you went through a lot, but I am also sure that you exaggerated.’ Another woman came up to me and said, ‘If you would dress a little bit nicer, you would be quite a pretty thing.’ I saw that there was no point in talking. They just didn’t understand.”
Mayer Hersh
Mayer Hersh, a Polish Jew, is 78. After the war, he settled in Manchester and worked as a tailor, a high-class tailor. His father had also been a tailor in Sieradz, near Lodz, before he and his large family were consumed by the Holocaust. Only Mayer and his brother Jakob survived from an immediate family of eight, an extended family of close to a hundred. Today, he wears a well-cut suit he tells his story with power and precision, patiently putting up with my attempts to move him on, to compress the incompressible into four hours. How dare I? A story of nine camps, a long story of miraculous survival.
Hersh was 13 when war broke out. His recollection of that first day of war, the day of doom for his little town and his Orthodox Jewish family, is vivid. “It was the first day of the new term, and I was getting ready for school. It was half past six school started at eight. My father said: ‘Mayer, there’s no need to rush, you most probably won’t be going to school today.’ Little did we know that the school would never reopen for Jewish students.
“At first, I was quite excited. After all, a war I have never lived though a war. Shooting, excitement, adventure, things a young boy would think about. We had no television, didn’t even have a radio, hardly ever went to the cinema. This was going to be the excitement of my life. And then I realised, when I saw how worried my mum and dad were, that this was more serious than I could ever understand. Adventure it was, but the saddest in my life.”
In spring 1940, he and Jakob were taken away to be slave labourers. The SS came and called them out. There was no time for farewells. Mayer was transported to Otoczna, 100 miles from Sieradz, and put to work building the railway that, a year later, would supply the eastern front.
Only later did he discover what happened to his family. “In August 1942, the whole ghetto in Sieradz, numbering about 4,000 people, was rounded up and taken to a convent in our town. They were kept there for five days with no food or water for two days, not even allowed to use the toilet. How do we know the details? The nuns kept a diary. They tried to give some milk or water to the children. The Germans wouldn’t allow it. They took out what they considered still able-bodied people, who they intended to put to work in a clothing factory. My father was a tailor, so was my sister Kayla. They were taken out with about 270 others and moved to the ghetto of Lodz. The rest [including his mother and three younger siblings] were taken out in batches and transported to Chelmno, where they were made to get undressed, hand over all their valuables such as wedding rings, and forced into a gassing van, more than 50 at a time. Three of these gassing vans were able to murder 97,000 people in three months.”
Hersh was taken from camp to camp, as the railway was extended, and in May 1943 found himself in Auschwitz . There was, though, no selection on arrival he had come as a slave labourer, to work on enlarging the camp. “We were taken to a hut, where we were stripped, searched and tattooed,” he recalls. “Then we were taken to the block where we would be sleeping. The block leader said: ‘Listen, you men, do you think Auschwitz is a holiday camp? Nobody survives here. Can you see those crematoria chimneys over there? That’s where you are all going to end up.’ Pleasant thought. We were allocated different shelves, or bunk beds as some people call them. They were on three levels, no mattresses, no straw, and you were very fortunate if you were agile enough to get to the very top, because those on the lower levels suffered terrible indignities. People had diarrhoea, all kinds of rubbish is falling down, and then the SS men or the guards would indulge in their usual sport of beating the prisoners at a reachable level.”
In August 1943, he met his brother Jakob in the camp and advised him to ask for a transfer to the coal mines in Silesia- advice that probably saved Jakob’s life, since, though the job was desperately hard, it got him out of the camp. Mayer, meanwhile, worked on the construction of a new part of the camp called “Mexico”, which was designated for Jews and political prisoners from Britain. By now, there was no chance of Britain being invaded Germany was losing the war. But the building plans had been laid, and it was slavishly followed through.
Hersh didn’t leave Auschwitz until November 1944, when he was taken to Stutthof near the Baltic Sea, then to Stuttgart, and then to a camp called Gotha, where he worked in an underground bunker loading ammunition on to trucks. The day before the allies arrived, the workers began a forced march to Buchenwald, the last part of it through the mountains. “Anyone who stopped got a single bullet through the head. They didn’t waste a bullet. For the first time, I had lost all hope. I was in total despair, but the man next to me, a complete stranger, said, ‘You can’t give up now, the war is virtually finished.’ That made me carry on.”
That was early April. The war was all but done, yet Hersh still had to make the most infernal journey of all. “With the allies approaching, they took us Jews and the Russian prisoners of war on open coal wagons, a hundred men to a wagon, standing up packed like sardines, to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. Because the lines were clogged with troop movements, we spent days in sidings and a journey that should have taken a few days took three weeks. We had no food or water people were dying like flies. Whenever the train stopped, we would get off and pick up a few leaves and grass to eat and some snow for water. I saw men try to roast the leather from their shoes over an open fire I even saw Russian prisoners of war turn to cannibalism. There was no flesh on the bodies, so they had to eat the organs. I couldn’t do it myself, but nor could I blame them.” Of the hundred or so men in each wagon at the beginning, Hersh estimates that only five or 10 made it to Theresienstadt, where, a few days later, the Russian army liberated the camp.
Jakob, too, had been liberated. He went back to Sieradz in search of family members. Not only were there none there, but a Polish Christian now occupied the family’s old house and Jakob was threatened with death if he stayed in the town. He went to Germany and then to Israel, where he lived until his death in 2003. Later, Mayer discovered that his father had been gassed on arrival in Auschwitz in August 1944, while his beautiful, adventurous sister, Kayla, had died when three prison ships were sunk in the Baltic in 1945. It is is not clear whether they were scuttled by the Germans or bombed by the allies.
Mayer came to Britain with a Jewish refugee group, settled in Manchester, married, ran a successful tailor’s business, retired in the 1970s and, for the first time, began to talk about an adolescence spent in the camps. For 30 years after the war, he says, no one wanted to know. “People weren’t interested, not just English people, but Jews too. I remember a Jewish man visiting a group of us in about 1946 and asking whether we got any education in the camps. We could have killed him, choked him there and then. How could a man, a Jewish man, ask such an unfeeling question?” Now people will listen, do want to know, and Mayer says that lecturing on the Holocaust helps to sublimate the pain of losing so many members of his family.
“In 1944,” he says, “I was daydreaming – when I had a chance to daydream – that maybe I’ll get through and survive, knowing by that time that not many people will. I thought how wonderful it would be if I do survive, how people will put me on a pedestal. You know how the childish mind works. Well, I am on a pedestal, I am given certain honours, you come to interview me. To me, this is a fulfilment. But why is it a fulfilment? Because I’m talking about my family, whose lives were extinguished and whose voices were obliterated. The perpetrators also wanted the memory of these people to be obliterated, and that’s something I don’t want to happen. I want their memory to be preserved for eternity.”
← Miscellaneous pieces Home
