A Delayed Life Read online

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Latrine

  I don’t remember when we used the latrine or the washroom, which contained a metal trough and a line of faucets that trickled cold, brownish water.

  I think that not many people in the world have seen anything like the latrine of the family camp. It was used by the thousands of inmates, males on the right and females on the left. It had six concrete rows with round holes running from one end of the “block” to the other. Under them was a deep pit. Every day, some disinfectant was strewn into the pit. The pungent, acidic stink made our eyes water.

  The central double row was divided by a screen made of jute sacks, which hid the middle section of a standing person. The head and shoulders were exposed, and so were the knees. When the person sat down, however, his head was hidden by the screen, but his or her naked behind became visible in the gap.

  The great majority of the prisoners suffered from incessant diarrhea due to starvation, so the latrine was constantly crowded. At night we were locked in the blocks and had to relieve ourselves in pails near the back entrance. During the day there were many hours when we stood in formation in front of the block for roll call—Appell—to be counted by the SS men. The time left to use the latrine was therefore limited.

  You knew exactly whose behind was at your back, because you saw him walk in. If he sat down over the hole, you didn’t see his anus, only heard the plop, plop. But many couldn’t bear to sit on the concrete—even if not soiled, it was cold and scratchy—and they did their business bending forward with their hands on their knees. It was horrible but unavoidable to see the feces bursting out from the poor wretches’ backsides, often with blood, a sight one had to bear several times a day. We saw the men, and the men saw us women, and so did the children.…

  A very, very unpleasant memory—one I wish I could erase.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Life in the Camp

  A day in the family camp started with the Kapo shouting to get up. From a barrel we got brown, warm water called tea. Some we drank, the rest we used to wash our face and hands. Then came the Zählappell, everyone out into the freezing cold, standing in a column of five in a row. This was the standard in all the camps—five, ten, fifteen, twenty—it makes the counting easier. When the numbers didn’t tally—because there was now a corpse behind the barrack or a sick prisoner unable to get up was not counted—we stood for hours.

  All the adults had to work. I don’t remember what my parents did. The men carried stones in an attempt to pave the Lagerstrasse. When the stones sank in the soft mud or snow, the men were forced to carry the stones from one pile to another and back again. Women worked in several workshops or carried the soup barrels. Soup at noon contained mostly pieces of Dorschen (a kind of cattle-feed turnip), some potato, and other unidentifiable stuff. In the afternoon was another Zählappell and then free time. Since it was forbidden for women to enter the men’s barracks and for men to enter the women’s, I met with Mother and Father on the Lagerstrasse.

  One late afternoon in January or February, a boy called Pavel Glaser invited me for supper in the men’s Block 8. The Blockältester there was Jenda Hutter, a young man, who drilled his fellow prisoners. At the twice-daily Zählappell he would yell orders: “Mützen ab! Mützen auf!” The men had to snatch off their caps and put them on again. And again, five times, ten times, without end. Each of the survivors remembers it and wonders how their decent, nice friend from Terezín could have turned into such a beast.

  Pavel was a few years older than me. We knew each other from Terezín but were barely acquainted. How he managed to get me into the men’s block, I’ll never know. We sat cross-legged on his upper bunk and ate a sausage, cut into little cubes, sprinkled with vinegar. Unbelievable! Where did it come from? Had he received it in a parcel? But why would he share such a delicacy with an almost stranger? We were not friends, nor did he expect anything from me in return. To give up even a mouthful of food, when we were so terribly hungry, was almost inhuman. Perhaps mothers or loving wives were able to do it.

  But Pavel Glaser did it. He died only a few weeks later in the gas chamber. I wonder if anyone remembers him. I do, because of the sausage.

  * * *

  Within a short time the prisoners lost weight, looked shrunken, dragged their feet, had runny noses, and suffered from diarrhea. One could hardly think of anything else but food. The craving for food was overpowering.

  My father soon succumbed. The soft-spoken, gentle intellectual perished in Auschwitz only a few weeks after our arrival. He just wasted away until he couldn’t get up from his bunk. I noticed that he wasn’t standing in front of the men’s barracks at Zählappell. When it became dark, I sneaked into his barrack and saw him on the bunk. His eyes were closed, his unshaved face sunken. He did not move or react to my voice. Next to his head stood his bowl with the gray soup. I wondered at the fact that no one had stolen it.

  He lay there for another day. At night I suddenly woke as if someone had called me. I knew that my father was dead. Next morning I found it was true. The day was February 5; Father was forty-four years old.

  At the time, Mother was ill with diphtheria and was in the isolation ward. No one was allowed to enter, but I had to tell her about Father. I walked along the wall, knocked on the wood, and called, “Mama? Mama?” until I heard her answer. Through a slit between the planks I said, “Maminko, tatínek umřel.…” (Mama, Daddy died.…)

  * * *

  During the day, children were in Block 31, the Kinderblock. I don’t recall when I started to work there. That was thanks to Fredy Hirsch. He managed to make the SS commander agree to keep the children in the empty block during the day. Youngsters of fourteen to sixteen were not considered children but were employed as assistants. Fredy was Blockältester of this incongruous facility: a day-care home for children who were destined to die in the gas chambers a few months later.

  I was fourteen and a half. Fredy Hirsch appointed me to be the librarian of the smallest library in the world. My role was to watch over the twelve or so books that constituted the library. The books were a random collection. On the ramp, thousands of Jews arrived daily. They were led away, but their luggage remained behind. A number of lucky prisoners had the task of sorting their contents. When they found a book, they would somehow get it to the Kinderblock. I remember that one book was called A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells. Another was an atlas. One book had no cover, just loose pages. I have forgotten the other titles, but Ruth Bondy, who was an instructor, claims there was a Russian grammar book. Eva Merová, who also assisted in Block 31, remembers a book by Karel Čapek.

  Among the activities on the Kinderblock were “the talking books.” Instructors who remembered a particular book would walk from one group to another, recounting the narratives in installments. For instance, Ruth told Čapek’s The Gardener’s Year.

  Fredy! How we loved and admired him! All the children wanted to be like him. Not only in Auschwitz but also back in Prague on Hagibor sports field and in Terezín. He was a wonderful athlete, good-looking, dependable, and honest. Even the SS men had a certain respect for him.2The children would come to the Kinderblock in the morning, Appell was held indoors, and then the groups, according to age, sat on small stools in a circle with their instructor. There were no partitions and no floor, just packed earth. The horizontal brick chimney was warm because, unlike in the other blocks, here it was lit. I don’t remember with what fuel, but I enjoyed leaning my back on the warm bricks with my books in front of me.

  Otto Kraus was one of the educators. His group of twelve-year-old boys was in the same corner at the far end of the block, where I sat with the books. One of the boys was Arieh, the son of Jakob Edelstein, the former elder of the Jews in Terezín. I could watch Otto and the boys all day long. They learned a bit and played guessing games or held discussions. But Otto and I never spoke.

  Discipline on the block was not strict. Some children didn’t participate in the activities;
they were free to leave or do what they wanted, except disturb the others.

  There was no equipment, such as blackboards, chalk, pencils, or paper. Instruction was clandestine and only oral. The official version was that the children were learning German orders, or singing songs and playing games. We improvised. Some of the children “wrote” poems. We shaved a splinter of wood from our bunks and blackened the sharp end in the fire. A few words could be written with the tip and then it was singed again, until it became too short. Some paper could be salvaged from discarded pages behind the camp’s administration office, or from parcels, which some prisoners received from friends. (They would arrive half empty, robbed by the many hands through which they passed.)

  One day two prisoners managed to escape, and as a penalty, the SS ordered the heads of all the men in the camp to be shaved. We girls then decided to knit caps for the men on the Kinderblock. We got discarded sweaters from the clothes store, unraveled them, and made knitting needles from splinters of wood, which we rubbed on stones to make smooth.

  There’s one activity I remember well and with pleasure. It happened occasionally that Avi Fischer, one of the instructors (and, later in Israel, a neighbor and friend), spontaneously started a song with a few children. He would stand on the horizontal chimney and conduct, waving his arms. He sang the first stanza, and the children repeated the words in chorus. The song was in French—“Alouette, I will pluck the feathers from your head, from your wings, from your neck”—and Avi got carried away and added other parts of the bird which we would pluck. The children got more and more excited, other groups joining the chorus, until the whole block was filled with their voices. These were moments that raised our spirits.

  In spring, when it became warmer, the educators took the children outside to walk around the block or do exercises. But, at the same time, they could see the ramp beyond the fence, where thousands of Hungarian Jews were arriving daily in trains. They were led directly to the gas chambers. Their luggage remained behind and was sorted by a team of prisoners. Mountains of bread lay almost within reach, divided by the rail and the electrified fence.

  Most of the staff on the Kinderblock were men and women barely twenty years old. They were aware of their approaching deaths and must have been terrified. Yet they spent their remaining days with the children, creating for them a kind of haven in this hell. They are, in my eyes, the real heroes of Auschwitz.

  * * *

  One of the instructors on the Kinderblock was Mausi, aged about twenty-two. Her name was Marianne Hermann, but she was known as Mausi, because that’s what her mother had called her since childhood. Most people didn’t even know her real name.

  She was one of the two young women who painted the pictures on the wall in the Kinderblock. I don’t recall exactly what they depicted, except for the seven dwarfs from Disney’s Snow White, but these were painted by the other girl, Dina Gottliebová.

  In later life, Mausi drew the pictures again from memory, but I am not sure she recollected them correctly. They were an approximate replica that she made for the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem. But I, who had seen them every day, remember them differently. Some of the figures were perhaps the same, but others were definitely missing. It is too late now to discover what was painted on the wall. Many of the survivors of the Kinderblock are no longer alive, and we, the living, have mostly forgotten. But I think that it is not important whether there were Snow White and the seven dwarfs, Eskimos and igloos, Indians with arrows and bows, or a window with flowerpots that opened on a Swiss landscape. What matters is the story of the children and their dedicated educators, who were lost and have no graves.

  * * *

  In March 1944, half of our campmates, who had come three months before us, were loaded on trucks and taken away. The guards told them that they were going to another camp, but we soon learned the truth. They all died in the gas chambers. From that moment on, we knew that we would follow them in June.

  The remaining inmates of camp BIIb were stunned. The previous day, March 7, 1944, the blocks were still crowded with people, but on March 8 there was only the frightening silence. Many blocks were completely empty. Even the two small rooms at the entrance of each block, where the privileged Blockältesters had enjoyed their much-envied privacy, were now unoccupied.

  The Kinderblock was suddenly half empty. A new Blockältester, Seppl Lichtenstern, was appointed, and a new set of instructors. Jiří Frenkl, Avi Fischer, Otto Kraus, Hanka Fischl, Ruth Bondy, and Rejšík were some of them. They were among the survivors, and our friendship lasted all our lives.

  People began wandering along the muddy camp road and into the vacant blocks. The bunks were empty. But in the right corner of each row, the blankets were still folded in orderly stacks as the drill prescribed. I saw that they were wonderful, warm blankets, each as thick as three of ours.

  To own such a blanket would change my nights; I could wrap myself in it and be warm and able to sleep. But what if the owner returned? It would be theft; I could not do it. Yet it was certain that they were all dead. Can I take the blanket of a dead person? There were so many soft blankets, all neatly piled up on the bunks.

  A few people came into the empty block. Without any hesitation, they started to take blankets and anything else they could find. My dilemma was solved. I took a blanket for myself and one for Mother and returned to my own block.

  Yet the thought of the dead person under whose blanket I slept every night haunted me. Who was she? I knew she was a female, because it came from a women’s block. I didn’t speak about it with anyone. Many inmates now owned the blankets and other things that used to belong to the murdered people. The thought weighed heavily on my conscience. Sometimes I still feel guilty.

  * * *

  One day I perceived a young Polish prisoner between the barracks of the neighboring compound, which at the time was uninhabited. His striped uniform was of good quality, and he wore the beret that showed his rank as repairman. These prisoners had privileged status and could move freely between the compounds. They patched the roofs with tar paper and did other maintenance jobs. They also got more food and looked healthy and strong.

  The space between the wooden barracks and the electrically charged fence was carefully guarded by soldiers on the watchtowers. If one dared to get closer to the fence, they would shoot. I don’t remember why I went there, perhaps just to be away from the crowd, just to be by myself for a while.

  As I was walking on my side of the dividing fence, so did the repairman on the other, and at each gap between the barracks he smiled at me and made friendly gestures. The same happened a few days later and then again. Once he called out something in Polish, but I did not understand. The only word I made out was yayko, and he also showed something round with his hands.

  “Ah,” I said, “jabko” (which in Czech means apple).

  “No, no”—he waved his hand—“nie jabko, jajko!”

  I understood that he wanted to give me something. Of course he could not hand it to me; it was much too dangerous to get near the fence. A prisoner who touched the wires was electrocuted; some had chosen to end their lives this way. Nevertheless, I was eager to get whatever it was he wanted to give me. Next time, instead of walking between the barracks, I walked through the latrine, which had a back door facing the fence. I stood there hidden from view of the watchman, and when the Pole saw me, he motioned for me to wait.

  The space behind the row of barracks was empty now; the corpses laid out there every day had been collected early in the morning. The only person in view was an old Jewish prisoner, who was squatting near a low fire in which he burned old rags; perhaps because they were lice-infested. He might not have been old; in the camp even forty-year-old men looked ancient, unshaven, pale, and bent. He had quite an easy job compared to the work of the majority of men, who carried heavy stones to build the camp road.

  I was watching him while I waited when all of a sudden an SS guard stood opposite me. It was the one we called
the Priest, because he walked with his hands hidden crosswise in the sleeves of his long military coat. He was particularly feared by us; there was something terrifying in his seemingly gentle behavior and stealthy, slow walk, while we knew of his cold-hearted cruelty.

  He came so close to me that his face was just a few centimeters from mine, and I could smell his breath.

  “Was machst du hier?” he demanded, almost in a whisper.

  I did not dare step back, so I just lowered my eyes and pointed to the man at the fire.

  “Ich wollte mit dem Mann dort sprechen.” This meant: I wanted to speak to the squatting man.

  “Und warum wolltest du mit ihm sprechen?” Why did you want to speak with him?

  “Er ist ein Freund von meinem Vater,” I blurted out. He is a friend of my father.

  The SS man turned around, looked first at the prisoner tending the fire, then over the fence where no one was in sight, turned back to me, and stared into my face. I stood frozen, for what to me seemed like infinity, waiting for him to take out his gun and kill me.

  Then, without another word, he stepped aside and walked on along the fence, from time to time glancing over the fence at the neighboring compound. My Polish friend cleverly stayed hidden.

  A few days later, hunger made me overcome my fear, and I again stood at the back door of the latrine. The Pole noticed me and motioned for me to wait. He went into one of the barracks and reappeared, holding something in his hand. He looked around to make sure no one was watching; that day even the rag-burning man was not there. He stretched out his arm like a sportsman and threw something, and the white, round thing landed at my feet.

  I picked it up hurriedly and stared in amazement. It was a hardboiled egg. The last time I had seen an egg was before we were deported from home, two years before. An egg!