Born Survivors (36 page)

Frau Strasser was reassigned to work in a tank factory where she was caught helping prisoners there too. Arrested by the Gestapo, she was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she almost died but was saved by a resistance doctor and managed to survive the war.

In February 1945 there was a mass escape of Russian prisoners from KZ Mauthausen and a few local farmers took enormous risks
in hiding some of them. Many locals however took part in a so-called ‘hare hunt’, tracking down and shooting the fugitives, having been warned they were hardened criminals who would harm their families. Of more than four hundred Russians who escaped, many were shot or froze to death overnight. Two were hidden in the attic of the local mayor’s house by his staff. Of the fifty-seven recaptured alive, only eleven survived.

A nun who worked in a local infirmary run by the Order of the Holy Cross recorded the frustrations of those in the town who wanted to intervene but felt unable to do anything. ‘How much one wants to help these people, but sadly the harsh rules of the SS do not allow it and each small act of assistance put one’s own life in great danger.’ Other townspeople met secretly to discuss what they might be able to do to help the prisoners, but most were too afraid to act. Many were unwilling or unable to fully grasp the truth of what was happening on the hill, or lived in mortal fear of the same fate. Some complained about the smell of the camp, the smoke and ash from the crematorium that drifted into town. To appease them, the SS commanders ordered that the crematorium staff only ‘put the burners on’ at night. To address concerns about the possible spread of communicable diseases, they also set up a
Sonderrevier
or special sickbay (it was this which would later become known as the infirmary camp), staffed by prisoner-doctors, to try to contain the many infectious epidemics that it was feared would jeopardise the health of local residents.

The only remaining record of a formal complaint to the local political party about the mistreatment of Mauthausen’s prisoners was in 1941 from a farmer’s wife named Eleonore Gusenbauer, whose farmhouse overlooked the quarry and who consequently witnessed several shootings there. She wrote:

Those who are not shot cleanly remain alive for some time and so are left to lie next to the dead for hours and even half days … I am often an unwilling witness to such crimes … [which] takes such a toll on my nerves that I will not be able to endure this for long. I ask that an instruction be commissioned to cease such inhuman acts, or that it be done somewhere else where one does not see it.

It was to this town and to this camp that, after their sixteen-day journey crisscrossing Europe, the human ruins of KZ Freiberg finally arrived. Among them were Priska and her seventeen-day-old daughter Hana, Rachel and nine-day-old Mark, and Anka, heavy with child. Still none of them knew of the others, and still each was struggling to survive from moment to moment.

A few minutes after Train 90124 ended its long journey at Mauthausen railway station, experienced hands undid the bolts and the doors to their jail were pulled open. Many of the occupants had failed to survive the previous few days. Those still alive were dulled by shock and dazzled by the light that streamed into their sealed wagons. Wild-looking creatures, they emerged bug-eyed and delirious. Before they could even catch their breath, they were tugged from the wagons by SS guards and pushed into ragged columns on a purpose-built loading ramp just a few hundred metres from the sparkling waters of the Danube.

In the incongruous beauty of that place on the north bank of the river, all Anka could see on the wall opposite her were big black letters spelling out the name that translated to ‘toll house’ – MAUTHAUSEN. That deadly configuration of characters not only rammed home to her the truth on that bitterly cold spring evening of Sunday, 29 April 1945, it was enough to trigger her first contraction. Not even the optimism of Scarlett O’Hara could save her now. Tomorrow had come.

‘As soon as I saw written that which I didn’t want to see – my birth pains started,’ she said. ‘Even if I couldn’t imagine anything else, that was that. It was a fact … I was so frightened that I started labour. Mauthausen was in the same category as Auschwitz. Gas chambers, selections – in short, an extermination camp.’

Lisa Miková felt the same. ‘We saw the station name and knew it was something like Auschwitz. “OK,” we said. “That is the same, so this is the end.” We stared at each other and it was terrible how we looked – skin and bone skeletons. So dirty and full of lice. We looked dead already.’

Anka braved the first contraction that tore through her body. Paralysed with horror and pain, still she tried not to let on that she was about to give birth and gripped the wagon door for a few more seconds to catch her breath. Almost nine months earlier to the day, in the languid summer of August 1944, when all her loved ones had most likely already gone up the flue at Birkenau, she and Bernd had comforted each other in their charming cubbyhole in Terezín. Defiantly, they’d planned a child to replace little Dan whose death had almost broken them four months earlier. A few weeks after their second baby was conceived, Bernd Nathan was also sent East. Anka had no idea if he was still alive and she tried not to lose hope but, having experienced Birkenau, she feared the worst. That would mean that all she had left was this baby whose existence she’d hidden and whose tenacity in the face of hourly perils she couldn’t help but admire.

She’d been petrified of the consequences of giving birth in the Freiberg factory. She had fought against going into labour in an open coal wagon. She would have been staggered and humbled to know that there were two mothers and their babies on the same train who had done just those things. Now it was her turn, and all she could think was that she was about to deliver a child that would most likely be thrown straight into a gas chamber, along with its mother.

Clutching her belly and struggling for breath, Anka somehow climbed down from her squalid wagon as brutish guards swarmed all around them. When her legs buckled she collapsed into a crumpled heap in the dirt. Dragged to one side with others too weak to move, she lay doubled up and vaguely aware of a farmer’s cart being brought forward. She watched as the sick and the dying were flung
up onto it in a haphazard pile of torsos and limbs, then she was thrown on top. ‘Those who could walk were marched off up to the
Festung
or fortress,’ she said. ‘They unloaded all the people who were sick or dying and put them on a cart because the camp was on the top of the hill above Mauthausen.’

As the peasant cart moved off creakily, Anka lay feverish and disorientated amongst the sweaty bodies, staring back down the hill at the most breathtaking view. Even though she was pressed up against so many rank-smelling women dying of typhus, and even as her waters broke in all that filth and vermin, she couldn’t help but gaze around her in wonder. ‘I was as hungry as a wolf, weighed about thirty-five kilos, and had no idea what was waiting for me at the top … As if I didn’t have any other worries, I admired the country side!’

It was around eight o’clock at night and the sun was setting over the valley as she half-lay, half-sat, overwhelmed by the spectacular sight after more than two weeks inside a blackened wagon deprived of any beauty. ‘The sun was shining and it was cold something awful, but such a beautiful spring evening. We were going up the hill and I noticed the Danube below and the [fields] that were already beginning to turn green … I thought I had never seen anything more beautiful in my life – maybe the last nice thing I would see on this earth.’

By the time the cart had climbed the two and a half kilometres to the top of the hill, though, her contractions had worsened and the picture-postcard scenery of Upper Austria with its churches,
Schlösser
and distant snow-covered Alps was no longer a distraction. The shocking reality of her situation helped rob her of her breath. ‘The cart was smelly and muddy and I was with those creatures, without hair and in those rags. There were women dying and lice in millions, crawling all over the place. The poor women were unconscious and leaning on me and lying across my legs. I was sitting up and my baby started to come,’ she said. ‘I had only one fear – that the baby wouldn’t survive.’

As they drew closer to KZ Mauthausen she turned to see, looming before her, the formidable stone fortress, built boulder on boulder by its unfortunate inmates. Her baby starting to push its way out between her legs, she looked up at the enormous wooden gates with their glowering granite watchtowers that gave an eagle’s-eye view as far as the Alps. Within those walls, she feared there would be no possible escape.

The main gates at Mauthausen where Anka’s baby was born

Knowing that she needed help, she suddenly spotted shuffling alongside the cart the Russian prisoner-doctor who had worked in the Freiberg infirmary alongside Dr Mautnerová. ‘I begged her to help me but she just waved her hand, shrugged, and walked the other way. She didn’t even look at me, or say, “I’m sorry. It will be all right.”’

Holding onto herself and still trying to prevent the inevitable, Anka was manhandled from the cart in the shadow of the gates and inexplicably loaded into an open wooden wagon, ‘like one in which you transport coal’. Squashed in with the same women, plus a few
others who appeared to have lost all control of their mental faculties, she was stupefied. Her eyes squeezed shut against the pain, Anka felt the wagon move off – away from those infernal gates – as it made its way slowly down to the
Sanitätslager
, the infirmary, next to the football pitch.

As her baby continued to push its way out, Anka screamed but then stopped herself because of the proximity of the SS. There was at least one guard accompanying the cart, and another steering it and acting as a human brake. The one closest to her said, ‘
Du kannst weiter schreien
’ (You can keep on screaming), but she never knew if he was being compassionate or sarcastic. Convulsed with pain and convinced those were to be her final minutes on earth, she raged freely.

Anka said, ‘All the time this was going on I was thinking of my mother Ida – not that she would be sorry for me, but how she would say, “How dare you have a child under those circumstances! I mean on a cart … not having washed for three weeks?” … She would be so cross!’ As the sun went down, and in those hellish conditions that Ida Kauderová would have so objected to, Anka finally gave birth. Her newborn slipped from her body in a mess of blood and mucus, a surprisingly quick delivery after her first protracted labour with Dan, but then it was so very small. ‘Suddenly my baby was here – it was out!’ The tiny infant didn’t breathe and it didn’t move. ‘For maybe seven to ten minutes it did not stir; it did not cry … I was sitting up and the women were lying across me, and the baby was there and it was – indescribable!’

Moments later, the cart drew to a halt at the infirmary and someone summoned a prisoner-doctor who, she discovered much later, had been the chief obstetrician of a hospital in Belgrade. ‘He came running out and he cut off the baby, smacked its bottom [to make it cry and breathe], and everything was fine. It started to cry … He told me, “It’s a boy.” Somebody wrapped it in paper and suddenly I was terribly happy.’

Anka had secretly wanted a little girl but she cradled her miracle
baby and decided to name him Martin. She asked someone the time and date, determined to remember that her child was born at precisely 8.30 p.m. on 29 April 1945. Taken inside, she was astonished to find herself being helped to a bunk in which she was allowed to lie on her own. Even though there was a dreadful stink of excrement and the place was far from sanitary, she knew that the rest of the prisoners would have been less fortunate.

Her shrunken infant with a full head of dark hair was laid flat upon her chest, just as Dan had been the previous year. A baby so small should have been put in a heated incubator, but Anka gave her child vital skin-to-skin contact and became ‘the best incubator in the world’.

‘I was as happy as I could be – under those circumstances,’ she said. ‘I was the happiest person in the world.’

There was no such joy for Rachel and baby Mark. They were loaded onto a similar cart of the dying at the station and driven straight to the hungry gates of the camp, which were waiting for them, jaws open. Pulled from the wagon once they were over the threshold few re-crossed, they were pushed into a tattered line and told to wait in a vast elongated
Appellplatz
made by hand from square boulders filled in with tiny granite stones. All around them, the camp appeared to be in a state of high chaos. Choking smoke filled the air as documents were thrown into the incinerators to be reduced to ash, along with the corpses of those most recently gassed. German soldiers ran around waving pieces of paper as if they were preparing for something major to happen.

None of the women from Freiberg was aware that in the previous few months the size of the camp’s population had doubled, thanks to the steady stream of evacuees arriving via the death marches. The situation was completely unmanageable. Food had virtually run out, disease was out of control, and even a provisional tent camp had been overrun. At this point in the war an estimated eight hundred inmates a day were dying in Mauthausen and its sub-camps and, in spite of the large number of newcomers, overall
prisoner numbers would be down by 20,000 on the previous month. The German guards were eager to leave no trace of their crimes, especially after 23 April when Churchill, Stalin and Truman had ordered a massive airdrop of leaflets in every language which threatened to ‘relentlessly pursue and punish’ anyone guilty of mistreating prisoners. This, coupled with the fact that Red Army and American forces were almost upon them, meant that the world was close to discovering what had truly been taking place in this scenic region of Austria for the previous six years.