Armageddon (82 page)

The girls’ party was led to the station by Hungarian SS and loaded into boxcars. Red Cross workers, surprisingly, were allowed to give them some water and a big can of tomatoes. Then they embarked on a journey which lasted for days, without air or light or exercise, or any hint of where they were going. At last they saw a station sign bearing the name RAVENSBRÜCK. Polish “trusties” and dog-handlers marched them into the camp. “Where are we?” asked Edith in bewilderment. “My dear,” said another woman simply, “you are in a death camp.” She was confused by the sight of a bakery, until it was explained to her that this was the crematorium. In a tent, they were ordered to strip. Edith shed her Rumanian hand-made shoes, angora-trimmed coat, blouse and tailored skirt. She laid down her favourite compact and crocodile handbag. “You won’t need those again,” said an SS woman contemptuously. It was December 1944. They were marched naked to another building where they were given clogs and camp uniforms, to which they were required to affix their numbers. They were led to showers, where they found themselves expected to wash with bleach rather than soap. “More! More!” shouted an SS woman. “Dirty Jews!” The soldiers laughed. Most of the group were genteel, bourgeois, highly educated young women, who had never in their lives been seen naked by anyone save their families. Their heads were shaved. A woman screamed: “What would my husband say?”

They worked in the fields, struggling pathetically to drive spades into the iron-hard winter ground. One morning at
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, an SS woman threw a bucket of water over Edith, for the fun of seeing her eyelashes freeze and turn to lead within seconds. Whenever an SS guard spoke to her, she was convinced that her last hour had come. For a time, she stopped eating. Friends forced bread down her throat. Nine children had come with their group. All were were taken away. The mother of one nine-year-old boy succumbed to grief and died within days. After a month, their group was summoned for a new medical examination, once more naked while their hands and mouths were examined. An SS woman said: “Now I want to see if Jewish women are smart enough to stand this without complaining!” She advanced down the line inserting a rod in their private parts, one by one. Edith’s friend Kathy screamed, “I am a virgin!,” which provoked more laughter from the guards.

One day after an inspection, an SS man said: “Anyone who can speak fluent German, step forward.” Several women did so. A civilian who was standing beside the officer pointed to two, of whom Edith was one. Two days later, she found herself among a group of 200, once more loaded upon a train. “It was impossible to feel relief, because one had no idea where we were going.” After two days on the train, they were unloaded at the small town of Penig, near Magdeburg, and marched to a barracks. This was Ebensee concentration camp. An SS guard said: “Tomorrow, you work.” They found themselves among Poles, Russians, Italians in a factory manufacturing aircraft parts, working twelve-hour shifts, often at night, every day walking two miles each way from the barracks to the assembly line. Their guards were not allowed into the factory. Their rations remained at starvation level. They suffered all manner of sores and diseases. Yet they were alive.

Edith was so weakened that she found it very hard to work, and lived in terror of being marked for extermination. She was saved by a German—their civilian supervisor, Herr Kaiser. In these most awful of circumstances, in a world from which almost all humanity had been banished, she received from this man an infinitesimal allowance of kindness, just sufficient to preserve her life. Kaiser would sometimes say to her: “If you feel too tired to work, you can go to sleep.” He brought the girls a little food. He allowed them to hunt among the garbage for potatoes. “He was a fine man.” In measuring the abominable deeds of the Nazi era, the charity of a few such men as Kaiser should be placed on the balance against the enormities of his countrymen. It required courage to retain even such small shreds of decency in Hitler’s Germany.

Towards the end, Edith’s health failed completely: “I had no more strength. I gave up. I knew I could not take it any more.” Kaiser arranged for her to be hidden in the hospital, where the doctor granted her three days off work. Even a few months earlier, her flagging health would have provoked a death sentence. Yet now, in early April 1945, “we could see fear in the faces of the SS. They were not strict any more. They stopped shouting at us.” Edith knew that she had been living on the very lip of the grave, from which so many millions of other Nazi captives toppled in. But she was held back. She survived. It is, perhaps, worth reflecting upon the predicament of Edith Gabor while reading the minutes of British Foreign Office official Arminius Dew. He wrote on 1 September 1944, during the impassioned controversy about Allied policy in the face of increasing intelligence about the Holocaust: “In my opinion, a disproportionate amount of the time of the Office is wasted on dealing with these wailing Jews.”

It is hard to fathom the logic which caused the Nazis to transport children along with parents to slave-labour camps in Hitler’s empire, and then to keep some alive, while dispatching hundreds of thousands of others to the gas chambers. The administrative inconvenience, not to mention the cost of providing food, however little, for children, must have significantly outweighed the value of a mother’s services. Gennady Trofimov was eight when he, together with his newborn sister Anna, was shipped to Latvia with their mother and grandmother from Novgorod, in the autumn of 1943. Their father had gone to the war in June 1941. Their mother, who worked in a local china factory, said later that watching her husband and hundreds like him board the train to join the Red Army seemed like watching wheat being scythed. She repeated again and again: “I don’t care what state he comes home in, even if he is a cripple—I just want him back.” Grigory Trofimov was killed in one of the first battles, fighting without training, without even knowing how to hold a rifle.

The surviving family members subsisted almost entirely on potatoes through two years of German occupation. Their journey to Latvia among a mass of other local peasants was a week-long nightmare, interrupted by interminable halts, because partisans had cut the rail track. Near Riga, families were separated. “The old people, we discovered later, went immediately to become soap,” said Gennady Trofimov. “Children became blood donors. Mothers worked in the fields.” They became the slaves of local farmers, fed only at their whim. Gennady earned his first pay, a loaf of bread, for a day’s labour driving a horse which powered a loom to make fibre out of flax. “We did not even understand the meaning of the word misery,” he said. “All we knew was that we were hungry all the time. If we found something to eat, that meant a tiny moment of happiness.”

In the autumn of 1944, as the Red Army swept across Latvia, they were moved into a barracks in Riga. “We lived like animals, sleeping on the floor, scavenging for rubbish,” said Gennady. His grandmother looked after little Anna, while his mother was sent out to dig trenches for the Germans. The Russians were already bombing the port. At the age of three, Anna could tell the difference between an aircraft bomb and an artillery shell, from personal experience. The whole family fell on their knees and prayed through the air raids. They celebrated every religious holiday. Their grandmother proved a woman of iron, one also possessed of great gifts. Though she was illiterate, she had spent much of her life working as a nanny for rich families. She had an extraordinary fund of proverbs, jokes and fairy stories, which for almost four years were the only entertainments they experienced. “It was a miracle that we survived,” said Gennady. He spent the days wandering the town, searching for food. At the age of ten, he possessed no toys, had never attended a school, could not write or read more than a few words glimpsed on shop signs. Almost the only game known to him and scores of other hapless urchins around the barracks was to take turns to crouch in an old motor tyre and roll each other down the street in it. In the winter of 1944, the family was sent to another farm in southern Latvia, where they spent the rest of the war. “My only memory of life was as a struggle,” said Gennady. “My mother seemed very ordinary. Yet she proved to be a heroine, because she kept us alive.”

Viktor Mamontov was sixteen when he was captured by the Germans in 1942. He had survived the siege of Leningrad, in which his father died of starvation, while he himself worked twelve hours a day in a shell factory. His elder brother was killed in one of the first battles, fighting armed with a spade because there were not enough rifles. Mamontov was evacuated to a town near the Black Sea, and was in hospital recovering from pneumonia when the Germans overran the area. He fled for his life among thousands of terrified young soldiers who were throwing away their weapons and uniforms. After being wounded by a bomb fragment, he was taken into captivity by the Germans. He escaped, and roamed the Crimea for a time until he was caught riding on a German train without papers. He was shipped among a consignment of Jews, partisans and other “antisocial elements” to a concentration camp near Bremen.

At first, he worked among 800 others in a canning factory, sleeping on the concrete floor, starving. Then he was transferred to load ballast on to trains and clear air-raid salvage and unexploded bombs. Late in 1943, a group of prisoners were denounced for plotting an escape, and he found himself among them. The indicted men were transferred to a prison at Wissemünde, and then to the 21st Punishment Camp near Brunswick. This was his worst experience yet. All 400 prisoners were required to run rather than walk everywhere. Polish “trusties” ran the camp, which was entirely occupied by Poles and Russians. Polish guards rather than SS carried out most of the beatings. The prisoners were employed upon removing waste from a metalworks and crushing it into roadmaking material.

Mamontov was too weak to walk when he left 21st Punishment Camp after serving his eight-week sentence. He was sent briefly to a transit camp near Leipzig, and thence to Buchenwald. They did little work in Buchenwald. They merely lingered on the cusp between life and death. After a few months, he was transferred to Dora, an outstation of Buchenwald, from which the inmates marched every morning into a mountain factory where V2 rockets were assembled. “We believed that no one would be allowed to leave the place alive, because it was top secret.”

They were an extraordinary miscellany. There were some French and a few British prisoners. Two of Mamontov’s Russian friends, Pavel Ostrovsky and Sergei Fomichev, had been sent there for attempted escapes. Both died. Yosef Ardginski, an Uzbek, was suspected of helping partisans. He survived. They all exchanged addresses soon after they arrived, so that if any man lived he might inform families of the fate of others. There were a few German political prisoners, who had a radio. This kept them informed about the war. After the Warsaw Rising, there was an influx of Poles. Alleged indiscipline was rewarded with twenty-five lashes. German behaviour became much uglier when evidence emerged that some prisoners were sabotaging rocket parts. Rations were cut. Anyone suspected of sabotage was summarily executed, sometimes by hanging in the workshops in front of the other slaves.

In 1945, “conditions became appalling,” said Mamontov. Some days, there was no bread, merely a few boiled potatoes. The camp possessed a small crematorium, but now there were too many corpses to burn overnight. Each morning as the prisoners marched to work, they saw the dead heaped outside. Mamontov attributed his own survival to some inner strength: “I never panicked. Those who panicked and thought they would die did die.” But in those first months of 1945 despair seemed very close. One night in March, the alarm sounded, and they were suddenly marched to a train waiting near by. “We had no idea where we were being taken. At stations, we would push a jug between the slats of the boxcar, and sometimes a railworker would fill it with water.” It took them a week of hell to travel fifty-five miles. When the train stopped, they were marched three miles to their destined camp. Stragglers who collapsed were shot beside the road. Their new home was Belsen. When they arrived on 4 April the administration of the camp was collapsing. Prisoners received no food at all. Bodies littered the compounds. They slept among corpses in the barracks. “The stench was indescribable . . . I cannot imagine how I survived.”

Georgi Semenyak was a young gunner from Leningrad, captured in July 1941 after walking for three weeks eastwards, trying to stay ahead of the German invaders. His subsequent experience was an odyssey through the hierarchy of misery within the Nazi prison industry. He spent his first two years of captivity in PoW camps in Poland. In November 1943, an informer denounced a large group of prisoners for organizing an anniversary celebration of the Revolution. Eighty-four men were sent to a slave-labour camp at Stutthof near Danzig, where 12,000 Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian and French prisoners were being literally worked into their graves. “The Germans obviously did not care whether we lived or died. We believed that we were doomed.” They were summoned to
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each morning by a bugle call from one of the watchtowers. They lived chiefly off beet soup. The work itself was futile—relentless earth-moving designed solely to occupy the prisoners. He noted one grotesque irony—in PoW camp, they had been forbidden to sing. At Stutthof, it was a privilege of the damned to sing. “Every nationality was treated terribly, but Russians were treated worse than anyone except Jews and Gypsies.”

Every nationality save the Russians was allowed to send one postcard a month home, which had to be written in German. Semenyak spoke the language, and wrote endless cards for foreign fellow prisoners: “Dear mama and papa, I live well here. We get enough to eat and drink. Nevertheless, could you send us some bread . . .” As the Russians swept across East Prussia, the prisoners were evacuated from Stutthof and marched westwards away from the Red Army. By April 1945, their captors had run out of places to drive them to. Semenyak was among several thousand Stutthof prisoners whom the Germans determined to remove by sea. They were loaded on to barges, then towed by a tug from river estuary to estuary, searching in vain for a path into the Reich which had not yet fallen to the Soviets.