Born Survivors (34 page)

‘She lives! She lives!’ someone cried, incredulously.

Not everyone did. Nineteen men and nineteen women died on the train at Horní Bříza that day and their weightless corpses were thrown onto the tracks. Mr Pavlíček saw them being discarded like rubbish and insisted that they be given a proper burial. ‘I asked the commander to tell me the names or numbers of the dead because they had died on railway land,’ he said. ‘I was denied, with a note that these people “meant nothing to the world”.’

Appalled by the commandant’s attitude, he alerted the local police, who sent uniformed officer Josef Šefl to investigate. The sergeant issued the transport commander with an official document from the town hall to confirm that the corpses of thirty-eight prisoners had been removed from the train. He and Mr Pavlíček were then able to achieve a little dignity for the dead when later that night, under cover of darkness, the Germans dug graves and laid them to rest in the forest.

As the light faded, the commandant finally agreed that the large quantities of food prepared so lovingly by the people of the town could be brought from the inn. The plan was to give every prisoner a bowl of traditional Czech potato soup, a loaf of real white bread, some coffee, pastry and fruit. The
Unterscharführer
was said to be ‘furious’ when the stationmaster insisted that he and his people be the ones to serve it to the prisoners on the station platform, rather than giving it to the guards. After further strained
argument and with the hot food at risk of being rejected or spoiled, the commandant eventually agreed, but he decreed that only Mr Pavlíček and Mr Wirth would be allowed to serve the meal, or to see any of the prisoners at close quarters. Everyone else was to be kept well away.

Memorial to the dead from the train in Horní Bříza cemetery

The Plzeň dentist’s daughter, Hana Fischerová, and her mother were among those fed. ‘The railway inspector and all the staff tried to do everything they could for us. The people behaved so nicely. They cooked the soup in the canteen and I’m sure there will not be better food in my life than that soup.’ Other prisoners concurred.
One said, ‘I will never forget that bread and that potato soup which we ate with tears falling. I think none of us will. It is one of the little things that stayed with me – a beautiful memory.’ Another said she could barely grasp that white bread still existed and couldn’t stop crying over this ‘greeting from another world’. Isolated for so long, the prisoners thought they’d been abandoned until the stationmaster and his neighbours risked their lives to help them. Light briefly pierced their darkness.

Liška Rudolf remembered, ‘In the evening almost the whole transport received soup and bread. Everybody was crying with happiness and saying, “We came through Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Germany, France and nowhere did anyone see us! Only in Czechoslovakia the people have heart … We will never forget Horní Bříza.”’ Klara Löffová said, ‘The whole village came with soup and bread … It seemed like a miracle. We thought this was home; these were our people and we were theirs.’

Jaroslav Lang and his brother Milan hid in the forest to watch the prisoners being fed, wagon by wagon. He said, ‘We were kept quite a distance away and we couldn’t see very well but we could tell that the prisoners being brought forward for food were sad and exhausted. They had to hold onto each other just to walk. A lot of them were wearing uniforms and caps and they kept thanking everyone.’ The boys couldn’t tell if the inmates were male or female. ‘They were taken out of their wagons in lines with guards on either side so that they couldn’t escape. They had no bowls and so they had to eat one by one; some ate with their hands. It took a very long time and not everyone on the train was fed.’

In spite of Mr Pavlíček’s intentions, many received nothing. Although the prisoners had been fed separately, the SS stole much of the food on the pretence of handing it out to speed things up, while some of the furthest wagons were completely overlooked. Lisa Miková said, ‘In the place we stopped they asked to bring us some food. The SS commandant said we will give it to them and distribute it but they took most of it and gave us a few potatoes.’

Jaroslav Lang, still watching the train from the woods with his brother, said, ‘We saw one of the prisoners ask for food and a German went to whip him, but he was too quick and he ducked out of the way. When we saw that we were very afraid. Then the rain started again and it grew dark and we could see tracer fire and hear aeroplanes. The Germans started shouting and there was a lot of shooting so we ran away. The next day we heard that some prisoners escaped from their lines or from the wagons.’ It was, he added quietly, ‘an experience to be remembered your whole life’.

Hana Selzarová, twenty-three and from Prague, who weighed seventy-seven pounds, was one of the women who escaped from the train that night in the rain. In her rags, she slipped away from an SS guard standing on duty in a waterproof cape, and stumbled into the forest. As shots rang out, she saw a light in the distance and ran towards it to discover it was the police station. But when she went inside she was told, ‘Oh my God! Go away. We would have to arrest you!’ They directed her to some local houses where they promised she would get help. ‘There they gave me other clothes and a scarf because I didn’t have much hair. They gave me something to eat and even money for the trip and told me where to catch the train.’ She stayed overnight and then left the next morning for Prague, where a friend took her in.

Vaclav Stepanek from Horní Bříza was seventeen years old when two women who’d slipped away from their guards knocked on the door of his parents’ house in the woods three hundred metres from the station. The women – one of whom may have been Hana Selzarová –said they were from Plzeň and Prague and wanted to know how far it was to Plzeň. ‘They were in prison clothing and very hungry,’ Vaclav said. ‘My parents gave them food and something to wear. Everyone knew about the transport by then and was very sorry for them.’

His father, a woodsman, agreed to let the women hide in his barn. ‘They weren’t the first people my parents had hidden in the barn,’ said Vaclav. ‘My mother was very frightened but we hoped
that if they were found we could just claim we didn’t know they were there. They left early the next morning and from that day on, we never heard a word from them. I always wondered what happened to them.’

Having fed as many prisoners as possible, including Priska and Rachel, Mr Pavlíček could do little more. The remainder of the food was given to the commandant, who lied to him that it would be divided amongst the prisoners later. When the stationmaster received word from Plzeň that the railway line ahead had finally been cleared, he knew he had no further excuse to delay the train. Speaking to the commandant one last time, he tried to persuade him to leave the prisoners in the siding and make his escape with his guards, but the
Unterscharführer
was ‘beyond persuasion’ and determined to do his duty right until the end. He even asked Mr Pavlíček which was the best route to Bavaria, refusing to listen when he warned him he was unlikely to get that far alive.

‘We heard his conversation with the stationmaster who was trying to convince him to leave us here,’ said Czech survivor Helga Weiss, who was fourteen at the time. ‘They would take care of us, he said – food, everything … [he] wouldn’t hear of it. He wants to leave here at any cost.’

There was nothing more Mr Pavlíček or the townspeople could do to keep the prisoners from death. At 6.21 p.m. on Monday, 21 April, with a newly designated number – 90124 – the transport from Freiberg left the sanctuary of Horní Bříza to head south in a cloud of steam. Full of despair, the stationmaster watched the final wagon disappear around the bend and prayed that the war would end in time to save its cargo of hapless souls.

Leaving all kindness behind, those on board train 90124 crawled through Plzeň a city dearly familiar to many of them. ‘It was an unforgettable and horrible moment,’ said one woman from the city. ‘To see our home and then go past it.’ Two days later, the Škoda Panzer factory they had passed was reduced to rubble. Seventy per cent of it was obliterated with incendiary and fragmentation bombs.
The train lines were also decimated. The
Häftlinge
had just missed the air raids that might have either killed or saved them. There would be many more frustrations and delays as the Nazis’ plans were repeatedly confounded by bombs and the increasing danger posed by the two approaching fronts. The Red Army was closing in, and the Germans were more afraid of them than they were of the Americans.

Still not sure where to go, or which concentration camp would agree to take almost 3,000 prisoners, the DR directed the train further and further along the narrow line south. Every station passed was noted with increasing anxiety through the slits of windows or over the tops of wagons. Each name was repeated out loud for all to hear – ‘Plana! – Tachov! –Bor! – Domažlice! – Nýrsko!’ – as those women strong enough to speak cried, ‘That’s my home town!’ or ‘My family live there!’ Those who could see out fell into a nostalgic silence as they watched the achingly beautiful countryside roll by, with well-fed animals in the fields and citizens free to do as they pleased.

The latest German order to the train driver and his SS guards was to proceed to Železná Ruda, but then the authorities heard that General Patton’s Third Army was already there, so they had no choice but to turn it back to Nýrsko. On or about 27 April, the transport reached the town of Běšiny, where fifty male prisoners strong enough to walk were enlisted to help repair the bombed railway track to Klatovy so that the train could carry on. Those left behind were allowed out briefly to relieve themselves, swill out the soot, urine and excrement, and throw off their dead. Some tore up reeds to eat or fell onto a rivulet to quench parched throats, while the guards gobbled up the leftover pastries from Horní Bříza.

When the rail repair detail returned, Liška Rudolf said that the men told them the people of Klatovy had wept when they saw them and tried to give them food but had been pushed aside by the SS. ‘In the evening the people from Běšiny and other areas came carrying boxes full of bread, buns, salami, soup. But everything had
to be taken to the kitchen of the SS men. We were watching through the window and singing Czech songs. It went well – we got just a few lashes of the whip. From all the gifts, though, nothing was shared.’

After more waiting, the Nazis heard that it was possible to send the Freiberg train southwest through Horaždovice and Strakonice to the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria. But the German high command was in total disorder and Nazi control over Europe was almost at an end. The Soviets had reached Berlin, Mussolini had been captured and would soon be hanged, and the German forces in the Ruhr had surrendered. On 28 April, after more delays, they were stopped in a siding near České Budějovice, a town full of fleeing Germans. The following day, the US Seventh Army liberated Dachau, saving the women of Freiberg from their latest potential destination. Opened by Himmler and hailed as the prototype for all later camps, Dachau had set itself up as a ‘school of violence’ for the SS who attended a training college within its grounds. An estimated 200,000 people had been imprisoned there, of whom more than 40,000 perished.

During one remote overnight stop, as the night sky filled with the noise of flak and tracer fire, some of the women were surprised to hear a loud wrenching noise in their wagon. They were even more shocked when the face of a Czech partisan appeared through a gap he’d created in the planking to allow prisoners to escape. Ironically, most were too weak, sick or scared to try, although several did flee – including the paediatrician Edita Mautnerová, who’d helped pregnant Anka when she’d hurt her leg and had delivered Priska’s and Rachel’s babies. She took her chance to live and survived the war. Once the escape was discovered, the SS, demanding to know who’d helped them and where they’d gone, beat the remaining women in the wagon. Most were past caring. Barely conscious, many simply lay down and died. Others were unravelling mentally.

Liška Rudolf said, ‘The prisoners were howling with hunger … some were going crazy because of hunger, the eyes shining as beasts
in the dark night.’ For many, the moment their locomotive gathered speed in the night at České Budějovice to head south on the venerable
Summerauer bahn
line from Czechoslovakia to Austria was one of the worst of their entire incarceration. The long dark nights on the train had always been something to dread, but that night – their last and darkest night, lying numbly in their rocking train – was surely the longest of all.

Lisa Miková said, ‘When we changed direction we said, “My God, they will take us to somewhere terrible!” That really shook us. We were very afraid. Everybody thought her own thoughts – there were no more stories; no more talk. Like everyone else I didn’t want to believe it but I knew my family was dead. I thought if we have to go to the gas chambers too, so be it. We were all too tired to fight.’ This emotional surrender after so many years of survival rippled throughout the wagons once it was realised that the only possible route left to their train was across the border into Austria and the city of Linz. For the only camp near Linz was one that many of the prisoners feared almost as much as Auschwitz.