Born Survivors (37 page)

The women on the train were just another problem for the camp commanders. But once they finally decided what to do with the new arrivals, Rachel and her sorry group were shaken from their exhaustion and herded fifty at a time down a flight of steps, having been told that they’d be taking a shower. With baby Mark hidden under her grimy dress, Rachel was so weak that she was barely aware of what was going on, but she remembered enough from Auschwitz to know what having a shower could mean. Mauthausen’s sixteen-square-metre gas chamber, disguised as a shower room, had already been used to ‘euthanise’ thousands of people in the camp since it was constructed, and camp records showed that 1,400 prisoners were gassed there during the final weeks. On 28 April, the day before the Freiberg train arrived, thirty-three Austrian Communists deemed ‘enemies of the state’ had been executed, along with five Polish prisoners, four Croatians and an Austrian with British nationality. The executions went ahead in spite of the presence in the camp of Red Cross officials negotiating to evacuate several hundred French and Benelux prisoners.

The gas chamber worked a little differently from those in Auschwitz, but it still used Zyklon B. The lethal crystals were tipped into a large metal box connected by a narrow pipe outside. A brick was heated and placed inside the box. Once the crystals reacted with the heat, the gas they emitted was blasted into the chamber by means of an electric fan.

The gas chamber at Mauthausen

Rachel knew nothing of this. She had no idea where her sisters were or even if they had survived the train journey. She had almost resigned herself to the fact that her husband Monik had been killed. She never expected to see her brave brother Moniek again and held out little hope for her parents and younger siblings at the hands of Dr Mengele and his cronies. She only knew that when she and her baby boy were pushed into a large tiled chamber with sinister-looking pipes, she believed that they were meant to die. It would have been a suitably pitiful end to the wretched existence the Nazis had forced on her and her family since the invasion of Poland six years earlier.

‘They took us some place to gas us,’ she said afterwards, ‘but the prisoners had dismantled the gas chambers so they couldn’t do it.’

It may never be known if Rachel and others from the train were really herded into the gas chamber that day, or whether they were taken to the genuine shower room at Mauthausen, closer to the
Appellplatz
. Reports differ, and in the confusion of the last few days of the war few authentic records were kept. Several statements by prisoners, clerks and SS officers indicate that the last gassings took place on 28 April, after which they stopped because further murders would have been too difficult to cover up. Numerous prisoners from the train avow that the intention was to gas them the day they arrived, but it isn’t known if this was a form of mental torture played on them by the Nazis, or if the SS officers who’d travelled with them were determined to fulfil their orders and eradicate those they’d brought so far.

Gerty Taussig, who may have been in the same group as Rachel, insisted the prisoners were meant to be gassed, not washed: ‘They sent us to the “showers”, fifty of us, but it was a gas chamber. The gas didn’t come out, so they threw us out again. They ran out of gas, I think. They weren’t dismantled – they just weren’t working any more.’

Rachel said that after they emerged from the chamber, dry, fully clothed and still alive, there was even more pandemonium in the camp. ‘All the Germans were running around and yelling then and one of them said, “Don’t worry, we will put them in the Russian camp and the lice will eat them to death.”’ The women were pushed back out onto the parade ground as the sun set; rain began to fall and they were given a little soup and water, courtesy of Red Cross parcels that had been delivered to the camp. Then they were forced to sit in the cold and wait for the first batch of ragged skeletons from their train who’d been considered strong enough to stagger up the hill.

‘They had to climb and it took them hours,’ said Rachel. Only when they’d finally arrived were the prisoners forced to drag themselves to their feet again and lurch down the hill to the Russian camp. There, a few hundred metres from where Anka and her baby lay in the sickbay, they were pushed through a gate in a fence of barbed wire charged with 2,000 volts and locked into one of the huts.

The steep climb to fortress Mauthausen

Gerty Taussig said, ‘There was nothing there but straw and bedbugs. I was sick with typhoid. I don’t know how I survived. I guess I was lucky.’ Other prisoners described the conditions. ‘We were very sick … Women were dying in each other’s arms … We had no feeling … We were like iron … We were lying half-dead in our own waste … We were waiting to die.’

Others, including Priska – carrying tiny Hana and her layette from the mothers of Horní Bříza – were still making the slow ascent up the hill. Priska fought for each breath in the more than two hours it
took her to climb to the fortress camp. Her baby, whimpering piteously from the pain of weeping sores under her grubby smock and bonnet, lay limp against her mother’s dry, depleted breasts.

In spite of their severely weakened state and visibly stricken feet, Priska and the surviving members of her group were jostled and beaten by the guards who’d accompanied them from Germany, who in turn were urged to savagery by agitated SS guards from the camp. Five abreast and barely clothed, the
Häftlinge
were prodded on through the picturesque town with its pretty window boxes and half-timbered buildings. Most of the inhabitants ignored them, but some spat at them or coldly told them they would all die when they reached the top of the hill.

Every now and again they were allowed a stop to catch their breath. Stunned, they drank in all they could of their brief glimpse of ‘the free world’, and especially its incredible scenery. For Priska, the view had at its heart the added poignancy of the Danube, a river that also ran through her lovely Bratislava. ‘Think only of beautiful things,’ Tibor had instructed her, so she tried desperately to focus not on her parching thirst or her crippling fear but on the astonishing lushness of the hedgerows, the meadows bursting with wild flowers, and the almost forgotten sound of birdsong.

The prisoners’ experience of arriving at Mauthausen differed widely, depending on whether they were loaded onto carts or forced to ascend the hill in columns via one of two different routes. Those marched in plain view through the centre of the market town felt completely invisible to locals who waved and called out greetings to the guards, inviting them to social events or asking what film was showing in the cinema. Some, desperate for a drink, broke ranks when they spotted the ancient stone fountain in the square. Lisa Miková said, ‘Half-starved, we dragged ourselves through the town. The thirst was so bad. There was a wonderful fountain in the centre and we all ran to it intending to drink but the locals chased us away and threw stones at us … There was a big row with the SS who beat us and pulled us back into line.’

The fountain in Mauthausen where the women were refused water

Those taken up a more rural back route where they would be less noticeable fell upon weeds growing at the side of the twisting lane, sucking on them through cracked lips. Some plucked cherry blossoms from the trees, gobbling them whole. Others fell onto scabby knees to lick water from a spring that trickled down the steepest part of the hill.

Priska clutched poorly Hana to her as she climbed, and in her reverie of starvation wondered if Tibor would ever know that he was a father or whether her daughter would live to see her one-month birthday on 12 May. ‘I desperately wanted to save my child,’ she said. ‘That was so important to me. More than anything in the world.’ Still in a daze, she eventually reached the fortress at dusk and breathlessly fell into line with the rest of the women, who’d
been pushed together into a crumpled mass of misery. ‘I could not recognise my friends after that horrible hunger,’ she said, but there was an even greater surprise in store. ‘In the courtyard there were packages from the Red Cross waiting for us. They gave us coffee and cake!’

Ravenous, and so thirsty they could hardly swallow, the women consumed as much as they could manage, convinced they were about to be gassed. A tall brick chimney towered over them, eclipsing hope. Made to wait for two hours after their small repast, they sensed the inevitability of what was about to happen. Too tired to fight or run, they could barely even lift their heads to look into the faces of those about to annihilate them.

Lisa Miková said, ‘We stood or sat in the courtyard and waited for the end. There were some male prisoner workers there and they asked us where we came from and told us we were in luck and that the gas chamber wasn’t working any more. One said, “Help isn’t far away. They won’t hurt you any more. They aren’t interested. They are too busy trying to leave.” We weren’t sure we believed them. Even if help was one day away then in that one day we could be killed.’

Slumped on the paving as an Alpine wind whistled straight through her, Priska was awoken from her delirium by the ‘cold’ voice of an unfamiliar SS officer. In a language she understood only too well, he explained to his colleagues as she listened that they’d run out of gas and that the new arrivals could go to the
Zigeunerbaracke
(gypsy barracks), where prisoners evacuated from Ravensbrück had recently been housed. ‘This transport can be put down there – for now.’ With the familiar cries of ‘
Schnell!
’ and the sudden sensation of guards and
Kapos
intimidatingly pressing around them once more, the women drew together protectively. As they prepared to be herded towards yet another unknown destination, baby Hana stirred and moaned. One of the female
Kapos
spotted the tiny bundle at Priska’s breast and shrieked, ‘
Ein Baby! – Ein Baby!
’ Another
Kapo
rushed forward, hands outstretched, to grab Hana as she cried, ‘
Keine Kinder hier!
’ (No children here!).

With strength she didn’t know she possessed, Priska fought them both off, spitting and clawing at their faces as each of them grabbed one of Hana’s skinny legs and began a deadly tug-of-war. ‘
Nein! Nein!
’ Priska screamed, fighting them like a savage. Her treasured layette fell to the ground and was trampled underfoot, lost for ever. For several minutes the tussle for Hana’s life hung in the balance as the three women and the baby howled their collective indignation. Then, almost as soon as the skirmish had begun, it stopped – when an unlikely person stepped in to intervene. An older female
Kapo
placed one hand on Priska’s shoulder and raised the other to her deputies, who immediately let go. Reaching out to stroke Hana’s head, she said quietly, ‘
Ich habe nicht ein Baby in sechs Jahren gesehen
’ (I haven’t seen a baby in six years), adding, ‘I should like to spend some time with her.’

Priska pulled a howl of protest back into her throat and stared at the camp veteran in astonishment. Without protest, the other
Kapos
backed away and Priska, her dress torn, realised that this could be her only chance to save her child. When the unknown saviour held out her hands to take Hana from her, Priska hesitated for a moment but then handed her over. ‘Follow me,’ the woman said, in an accent she recognised as Polish.