I was standing on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau when my grandfather’s eyes met mine. He was very tall, nearly two meters, and my little grandmother was holding his hand. I hid. I watched them both walk toward the gas chamber, and I did nothing.
The SS announced every convoy before it arrived. That day, they announced a transport from Czechoslovakia. I had no idea my grandparents had been arrested. I had no idea they were on that train.
I only looked up and saw them. I saw friends of my parents arrive too. I saw men my age, thirty, thirty-five, forty years old, watch their entire families step off the cattle cars. Quite a few of them went with them.
They walked straight to the gas chamber. Bravely. Was I tempted to go with them? Yes.
Yes, I was. My job was to unload the trains. Each cattle wagon held eighty or even a hundred people. Often there were ten, fifteen, twenty-five bodies inside.
We loaded them onto carts with big wheels and pulled them to the crematorium. The Sonderkommando, the special commando of Jewish prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers, took over from there. Block 13 at Birkenau belonged to the Sonderkommando. They weren’t allowed to speak to other inmates.
They only left their block to use the latrines. A friend told me he once ran into his buddy from the Sonderkommando there. Overnight, after seeing his own father inside the gas chamber, the man’s hair had turned completely white. The Sonderkommando had a life expectancy of six months.
The Nazis exterminated them systematically so no witnesses to their crimes would survive. In 1944, the Hungarian convoys arrived almost without stopping. Between May sixteenth and July ninth, four hundred twenty-two thousand Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in one hundred forty-seven trains. Sometimes three or four convoys arrived in a single day.
The killing went on around the clock. They even came at night. I thought about this only recently, and I feel ashamed of it. We had become like animals.
We weren’t human beings anymore. When a convoy arrived in the evening, we had to work. And we weren’t unhappy about it. Because when we worked at night, we got a huge pot of sugary coffee, the coffee that had been made for the Germans.
We also got a double ration of bread, and a double ration of margarine or sausage. So I asked myself: did I ever really think about how terrible it was? Some people walked into the camp, and so many ended up next door. But we only thought of ourselves.
We thought, well, this is nice, we got extra food. When we walked back to the camp in the dark, the chimney wasn’t far away. We could see the flames rising from it. We’d say, oh well, it’ll be our turn one day.
All night it blazed. There were gunshots from people who didn’t want to enter the gas chambers. Then the next morning, complete silence. This went on for days.
When the Hungarian Jews started arriving, Canada, the storage facility where the Nazis kept the belongings of the murdered, ran short of workers. They came to our blocks and selected people to work there. I was separated from my sister. I was chosen to work in Canada.
It was a camp made of about twenty wooden barracks. One building held men’s clothes, another women’s clothes, another shoes, another suitcases, and one held everything jumbled together. We made bundles of ten jackets, tied them with string. Overcoats we bundled in fives.
In the evening, trucks arrived, we threw everything in, and they drove off to Germany. We sorted shoes into pairs. Everything from the gas chambers came to us in heaps. Fine suits were for the SS.
When we found a nice one, we ripped it to shreds so it could only be used for rags. We tore up money so the Germans couldn’t take it. There were heaps and heaps of clothes. An SS man with a dog patrolled on a bicycle, watching us closely.
But we still managed to steal. We stole toothbrushes, spoons, anything to give to our friends. In the camp, a spoon was worth a ration of bread. There was plenty to eat when the Hungarians arrived.
They carried so much food with them. I’d never seen anything like it. We couldn’t eat in front of the SS, but we could see our cheeks were getting fatter than the prisoners who stayed in Birkenau. Physically, Canada was far easier.
Roll call lasted only thirty minutes. We could shower every evening. We weren’t beaten. We found sugar and oats in the suitcases to add to our rations.
We preferred it there, of course. But mentally, it was another story. We were right next to the gas chambers and crematoriums. Whenever a train arrived, we knew the camp would be wrapped in black smoke the next day.
We knew what that meant. And we kept sorting clothes. I can still describe my arrival at Birkenau. I looked through the slits in the cattle car because I was standing near the door.
I saw endless rows of barracks and chimneys. I told myself they’d brought us here to work in a factory. Everything was silent. It was around two in the morning.
Then our door was flung open. People screamed in German, everyone out. The Kapos shouted at us. If a mother stepped off the train holding her daughter of seven or eight or ten years old by the hand, I would take the child and entrust her to an elderly person.
Because the elderly person with the child would be sent to the gas chamber. The mother, though, had a ninety-five percent chance of ending up in the camp. After the war, some of those mothers found me. They said, you bastard.
I asked why. Because you took my daughter from me. I told them, okay, I may be a bastard, but the fact is you’re alive. Maybe you remarried.
Maybe you had more children. I did what I could. Then came August 1944. I was in a small commando repairing the main road that ran through Birkenau to the crematoriums.
That day, Hungarian convoys arrived. Thousands of men, women, children, and old people filed past us along the road, dragging their luggage. The SS officer guarding us, there were only a few of us inmates, made us lie face down on the embankment. We weren’t allowed to turn around.
The procession went on for hours. Thousands of Hungarians were killed upon arrival because the camp was already full. It was terrible to see those families with children walking past us, not knowing where they were going. They looked at us lying on the ground and their eyes asked us what would happen next.
We couldn’t answer. But we knew they were walking straight to the gas chambers. I lost my faith during that time. It had still had some hold on me.
Outside the crematorium, I saw a yeshiva, a religious school. The rabbi wore a fur hat like the Hungarian Jews. The children, twelve, thirteen, maybe fourteen years old, all wore white stockings. They stood in line outside the crematorium in broad daylight, waiting.
I asked the good Lord to perform a miracle, to destroy the crematorium. Nothing happened. The children walked in, and it broke my heart completely. My uncle the rabbi once told me my faith would come back.
It never has. The crematoriums couldn’t keep up with the number of murdered Hungarians, so the Nazis burned corpses in open-air pits. I worked in the commando that dug those pits, right next to crematorium five. At the very end, when the Hungarians arrived, people were thrown into the flames alive.
I told myself it couldn’t be true. I thought I’d imagined it. But a Polish woman wrote a book describing everything that happened at Auschwitz, and she mentioned it. It was true.
In August 1944, a member of the Sonderkommando, Alberto Herrera, smuggled a camera out of Canada and photographed naked women walking toward the gas chamber. From inside the gas chamber of crematorium five, he photographed the dead being burned in the open air. The negatives were hidden in a tube of toothpaste and passed to the Polish resistance. The world had to know.
I knew those people were going to die. I told my father, we knew they’d been burned. And even so, we managed to handle it. The child I was coped with it.
We became accustomed to the horror. There is no why here, as Primo Levi said. You don’t try to understand. We passed information the way you’d say, the bread will be handed out soon.
That’s what was so abominable. They had broken us, destroyed the value of the individual, the very basis of our reason for existence. In October 1944, the Sonderkommando blew up crematorium four, the one closest to us. It had taken Polish women resistance fighters working at the munitions factory two months to steal enough gunpowder.
They passed it to men in our commando, who handed it to the Sonderkommando. That’s when they planned the revolt. I was there when everything went up. We danced.
I can’t tell you how we girls danced. We heard it, we felt it, and it was terrible. They were all killed, except for one survivor. The Nazis hunted down the four girls who had smuggled the powder.
Then we were treated to hangings. Two for the night shift, two for the day shift. It was appalling. In November 1944, with the Soviet Army approaching, the SS forced the prisoners to tear down and dynamite the three remaining crematoriums at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
They had to erase all evidence. The Allied aircraft flying over the camp in waves convinced us the end was near. The SS knew it too, and they were dangerous, very dangerous. At Monowitz, the Germans put up a huge Christmas tree with lights.
Whenever the air raid sirens sounded, they switched the lights off. We were thrilled, because it meant the Allies were coming. But we paid a high price. The Germans locked us out of the underground shelters while they hid inside.
The Americans bombed the factory heavily, and many deportees died. Then we began to hear Soviet cannon fire. It meant they were fifty to a hundred kilometers away. We thought, the Russians are close.
They’re coming to liberate us. One windy night, the camp doctors and the nurses hid. We saw the huts nearby in flames. The SS was burning the archives so no one would find a trace of their crimes.
I remember the morning of January eighteenth, 1945. We’d heard the cannons for days. We could see the glow of the Russian front. When they locked us in and said there was no work today, we thought they were going to take us to Birkenau and gas us.
At roll call, the Nazis announced, listen, you’re going to be evacuated. Get your things ready. You’re going to Germany. For us, it was one of the most important days we’d spent at Auschwitz.
Because they told us we were leaving. We walked out through the gates of Monowitz, the gates we were never supposed to leave alive. We didn’t know where we were going. But we were alive, and we were out.
The one thing we feared was that they would take us to Birkenau, because we knew it meant the gas chambers and the ovens. But the best part was, we were leaving Auschwitz and we hadn’t been gassed. We were all convinced that when they no longer had need of the orchestra, we’d be killed. But no.
We waved goodbye to Auschwitz. Sixty thousand inmates set off on the death marches. Three days through the snow. The weakest were shot on the spot.
The survivors were loaded onto open-top rail cars and shipped to camps across Germany. Seven thousand sick and disabled prisoners were left at Auschwitz to fend for themselves. The camp was suddenly deserted. It was winter.
To get a little water, I had to melt a lot of snow. A saucepan full of snow cooks down to almost nothing. I found a few potatoes and some water, and I survived. I stayed alone in the camp for about a week.
No medical care, no water, no basins. Then, little by little, the camp doctors and other deportees reappeared. And then we saw a Soviet infantryman walk in. We weren’t sure it was real.
We thought maybe he was a German disguised as a Russian. He saw our scrawny faces emerging from the bunks and he was stunned. He said a few words. I had a Russian neighbor, and I asked her what he said.
She told me, he said, poor people. The Soviet troops entered the abandoned Auschwitz complex on January twenty-seventh, 1945. They discovered evidence of mass slaughter on a scale unparalleled in history. The survivors were finally taken care of.
But most of the inmates evacuated on the eighteenth were moved from camp to camp in absolutely deadly conditions, and were not liberated until four months later, between April and May of 1945.
