Auschwitz (17 page)

The strain of ghetto life had a profound effect on Lucille's mother, who

Lucille and her younger sister were now alone in the ghetto—two orphans who had to cope as best they could.

Two months later the Germans entered the ghetto themselves to conduct selections, searching for those who were not fit for work—the elderly, the sick, and the young. Lucille describes how Rumkowski, the leader of the ghetto, asked mothers in the ghetto to cooperate and give up their children to the Germans.

Lucille did all she could to try and ensure her younger sister was spared—she put make-up on her, and encouraged her to appear fit and healthy. Lucille did have some hope—she thought her sister might be safe because she was twelve years old and the cut-off age for selection was eleven. But when the Germans arrived they still carried her away: “They took my sister—they were not supposed to. I tried to get up on the truck with her. The end of a gun hit my arms and I couldn't get on the truck, and those people disappeared.” Even as she watched in despair as her young sister was taken away, Lucille had no idea that she was being transported directly to be murdered. “It never dawned on us to reason what they would do with a young person, or a very old person, who would not be able to work. We were never rational enough to figure that one out. We just assumed they would be alive.”

Utterly alone and emotionally devastated, Lucille still forced herself to go looking for work in the ghetto. Significantly, when she eventually found her first job it was through one of the few “connections” she had—a fellow German Jew from Hamburg. He had convinced Rumkowski that the ghetto needed “improvements,” like parks and open spaces, and Lucille worked with him on the plans. After a few months Rumkowski closed the department, but Lucille had made useful contacts. A new acquaintance from Vienna worked in one of the administrative departments in the same building, and through her she managed to get another job—filling out applications to be sent to the Germans for coal rations for the following winter. Life in the ghetto so far had taught Lucille a hard lesson: “You really couldn't trust anybody, because if I would tell a co-worker something she would use it for her advantage. You had to be very careful. There was a lot of back-stabbing, and you can understand why—it was a matter of life and death.”

One day, Rumkowski arrived at the office to select workers for a new factory within the ghetto. Lucille was “terrified” of meeting him—because this
sixty-six year old, who looked like everyone's grandfather, had a bad reputation. “I had heard rumors. I knew he had a vile temper. If he got angry he would take his cane and hit you. He was an absolute dictator within limits, which came from the German side. I think most people were afraid of him.” Lucille hid in the hallway and tried to escape notice, but her name was on a list and eventually she was called in to see Rumkowski. “He sat on a chair. He had white hair and darkened glasses. He held his cane in his right hand and for a moment he appeared to me like the king on a throne. He asked me where I was from, what languages I spoke, what my father did, where my family was, if I had any family left. I answered the questions and his last words were, ‘Oh, you'll hear from me.' I didn't pay much attention to it.”

After Rumkowski's visit, Lucille's boss moved her to the statistical department: “I don't know why they transferred me. It could have been to hide me away because it was a very quiet, secret office.” But then came a phone call from Rumkowski's secretary—he wanted Lucille. When she reported to the main administrative building she found a number of other women of her own age already there. Rumkowski gave them all jobs working in a kitchen he was starting for “deserving workers.” Some of the young women would be waitresses in the dining room and some, like Lucille, would work in the adjacent office. “He said he would take me and I would figure out, if we had fifty kilo of red beets, how many portions it would make.” As a reward for working in the new kitchen Lucille would get an extra meal each day. “It was very meaningful,” she says. “As you would say today, it was a very big deal.” When she left to go to work in the kitchen her boss gave her one final word of warning about Rumkowski: “I think he used the word ‘pig' in Polish.” Her boss was right. In almost every ghetto that the Nazis established the Jewish leader behaved responsibly—but not in Łódź. Rumkowski was known to put people on the deportation list because he himself wanted to be rid of them, and he committed still more personal offences, as Lucille was about to discover.

Lucille started work in the kitchen, and quickly realized that this was one of Rumkowski's pet projects. Almost every evening he would pay a visit—something she came to dread.

Lucille was most definitely not a willing participant in this “trade,” but she was certain that, if she did not let Rumkowski abuse her, her “life was at stake.” “If I would have run away he would have had me deported—I mean that was very clear.”

“Rumkowski did take advantage of young women,” confirms Jacob Zylberstein, who witnessed how the leader of the ghetto behaved when he saw another young woman whom he fancied. “We were all in the dining room and he just comes in, took a hand around her and just walks out with her. I saw that. Not anybody told me, but I saw that.” Zylberstein also believes that a woman's life might very well have been “in danger” if she did not consent to Rumkowski's wishes. “Personally I didn't like the man,” he adds. “I didn't like what he represents.”

After some weeks the kitchen closed and Lucille was sent to a leather factory within the ghetto to sew belts for the German army. She never saw Rumkowski again. All that was left was the damage he had done, “I felt disgusted and I felt angry and I felt abused.” In 1944, both Lucille and Rumkowski were among the Jews from Łódź who were transported to Auschwitz when the ghetto was finally closed. Rumkowski and his family died in the gas chambers of Birkenau. Lucille, as a young woman, was selected not for immediate death but for work, and was saved by the defeat of the Nazis in May 1945.

It was nearly three years after she had first been deported from Germany that Lucille Eichengreen eventually arrived at Auschwitz. But the first Jews from outside Poland were sent there as early as the spring of 1942, and the story of how they came to be on trains to the camp is one of the most shocking and surprising in the history of the Nazis' “Final Solution.” They came from Slovakia, a country whose northern border was less than eighty kilometers from Auschwitz.

Slovakia had a troubled history; as an independent state it was just three years old, created in March 1939 after the Nazis had annexed the adjoining Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia. Prior to 1939 Slovakia had been part of Czechoslovakia, and before 1918 it had been incorporated into Hungary. The president of Slovakia was Josef Tiso, a Catholic priest, leader of the fiercely nationalistic Slovak People's Party of Hlinka. Tiso allied Slovakia with the Nazis, and a Treaty of Protection allowed Germany to control Slovak foreign policy. The Slovakian government enthusiastically adopted anti-Semitic measures against the 90,000 Slovak Jews—in rapid succession regulations were introduced to seize Jewish businesses, encourage Jewish emigration, exclude Jews from public life, and to make them wear a yellow star. The effect of these measures on the Slovakian Jewish community was swift and brutal.

Eva Votavová,
³¹
was at that time a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl.

A striking feature of the persecution of the Slovakian Jews was the speed with which friend became foe. There was no gradual transformation—it was as if a switch had suddenly been turned on. “The young German boys [ethnic Germans living in Slovakia] were starting to act like Nazis,” says Otto Pressburger,
³²
a Slovakian Jew who was fifteen years old in 1939.

It was obvious to Otto Pressburger that the primary motivation for this change in attitude towards the Jews was greed.

The Slovakian Hlinka guards were the shock troops in the anti-Jewish actions, acting against the Jews like Nazi storm troopers, and like their Nazi counterparts they dripped anti-Semitism from every pore. “Slovaks were happy to take the [Jewish] stores and become rich,” says Michal Kabáč,
³³
one of the Hlinka guards.

It is a striking feature of the inherent illogicality of anti-Semitic prejudice that Michal Kabáč, like Hans Friedrich in Chapter 1, sees no contradiction in simultaneously blaming the Jews for being both lazy and industrious—jealous that they built up powerful and successful businesses while claiming that they never worked. In so far as there is any logic to Friedrich's and Kabáč's position, it is that they maintain the Jews did not do “real” work like farming but chose to be dealers or shopkeepers—areas of activity, of course, that the Jews had concentrated on precisely because for centuries they had been banned in many European countries from owning land.

For the Nazis, Auschwitz was now suddenly a tempting place to send the Slovakian Jews. Himmler realized that no more Soviet POWs would be sent to Auschwitz—the stalemate between the Germans and the Soviets close to Moscow made it obvious that the War in the East would not be over as swiftly as had been anticipated. Captured Red Army soldiers were now thought to be too valuable a source of forced labor to be squandered in a camp like Auschwitz, and Goering would soon formally confirm that all available Soviet POWs must work in armaments factories. As a result, Birkenau could no longer be used for the purpose originally contemplated. And who could fill the gap left by the Soviet POWs? Himmler, ever adept at swift policy shifts, had the answer immediately—the Jews.

And the Jews were exactly the people the Slovak authorities now wanted to deport. As far back as the autumn of 1941, the Nazis had asked the Slovaks to provide forced laborers to work in the Reich. Now, in February 1942, the Slovaks offered up 20,000 Jews—including their families. Tiso and the rest of the Slovak government had no more desire to retain women and children after their breadwinners were gone than did the Nazis on the Eastern Front. It was much easier for the Slovak authorities if everyone went. But what was easier for the Slovaks was not easier for the Nazis. Lacking the necessary extermination capacity, they had no desire at this time to accept Jews who could not work.