Born Survivors (41 page)

When Allied commanders arrived in the camp to see the horrors for themselves, they insisted that KZ Mauthausen be opened to public view and that the bystanders of the town be brought up the hill to see what the Nazis had perpetrated in their midst. The weeping residents pressed handkerchiefs to their noses and swore they hadn’t known what was going on, in spite of the permanent stink and smoke that had hung over them like a pall. The authorities then insisted that they ‘volunteer’ to help care for the living. This included soaping down survivors using water pumped from the Danube, sterilising or burning their clothing and linen, and spraying them with DDT to try to eradicate the lice.

The prized one-acre
Sportsplatz
, the football pitch where Austrians had cheered on the SS team, was turned into a mass grave for almost a thousand victims. Naked, they were almost all unidentifiable and many were in a state of decomposition. Units from A Company 56th Armored Engineers were brought in with bulldozers and buckets fixed to tanks to dig trenches thirty metres long, two metres deep and three metres wide. Among them was Sergeant Ray Buch, who arrived on 10 May. ‘We were working to dig these trenches … in the soccer field where the SS had built a platform out of rocks … It was so hard to dig with a bulldozer. We had to get somebody to dig the bigger rocks out by hand. We tried dynamiting a couple of them but granite is the hardest rock there is … they tried to get people in head to foot … To get more in the grave without piling them on top of each other. Five hundred in each heap. One wagonload had two hundred corpses in it. The bodies were so packed in it was hard to tell how many were in them.’

Mauthausen graves and infirmary

German prisoners-of-war, including former guards and SS officers, were forced to help lay the dead to rest with a little dignity. The civilians of Mauthausen who’d benefited from the SS presence were also summoned back to the camp in their ‘Sunday best’. Weeping and crying, men and women were forced to dig more graves, load the corpses onto wagons from the barracks, and lay them side by side in rows of one hundred and fifty. The graves were backfilled with rocks and soil and the final resting place of each body was marked with either a white cross or a Star of David. Many featured the names and dates of death of those interred, but even more were marked ‘Unknown’. Prayers were said for the dead and locals were summoned to attend the mass funerals with their children.

After the relief of liberation, and their disbelief at still being alive when so many had perished, the survivors continued to vent their anger on the perpetrators of their suffering. When they weren’t digging graves, the German POWs were forced to clean
out the latrines, dismantle and burn the most heavily infested barracks, work in the quarry, or do the kinds of dehumanising jobs they’d forced thousands of prisoners to do.

In spite of all attempts to keep the camp locked down, homes, farms and shops in and around Mauthausen were frequently raided and the people of the town – frightened, ashamed or guilty – usually handed over food, drink and clothing to those who asked, all of whom appeared horribly wretched and sick.

As May progressed and the summer sun began to drive the chill from the survivors’ bones, the situation in the camp improved greatly. Tinged with death and translucently pale, hundreds crawled from their bunks to lie on the grass or wherever they could find a space and fall asleep. The sunshine seemed to soften the harshness of their surroundings and the sound of birds singing mellowed some of their most painful memories. Although most were impatient to leave the place that for many had been a living hell, even more feared life beyond its walls. The Allies had agreed to repatriate every survivor they’d liberated but many felt unable to return to countries like Germany, Poland or the Soviet Union, where entire communities had been massacred and there was still widespread hatred of the Jews. They agonised continually about what had happened to their loved ones and longed to be reunited with any who might have survived, but what dangers lay in wait if they went back to claim appropriated property? Did they even have ‘homes’ any more?

Old and young alike were so traumatised by their experiences that they didn’t know what they wanted. Their psychological scars would be deep and lifelong. An untold number killed themselves rather than face up to the gulf between what they hoped for and the reality that awaited them. Others, incarcerated for so long, were lightheaded at the concept of freedom and wanted to make a fresh start. Thousands planned a mass exodus to the ‘promised land’, Mandatory Palestine, which they also called ‘Eretz Yisrael’, or to America, Canada or Australia – nations where they hoped to
rebuild their lives and remain safe. But there would undoubtedly be great hardships in starting again with nothing and they were painfully aware that countries with strict immigration policies would hardly welcome hordes of destitute refugees.

The indecision as to where to go and what to do caused a massive refugee crisis, which initially had to be administered by Allied military personnel. There were between eight and nine million survivors of the war to settle into Displaced Persons (DP) camps run by the army, or by voluntary agencies such as the Quaker Relief Team, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the Red Cross and the International Refugee Organisation. Although some of the smaller DP camps were setup in schools, hotels and hospitals, the most obvious place to establish them for such large numbers of people was in former garrisons, labour camps, or the very barracks where the survivors had been imprisoned. For a few weeks until the end of July 1945, KZ Mauthausen became a kind of DP camp – one of 2,500 throughout Germany, Italy, France, Switzerland, England and Austria. Within these once-electrified fences, the dispossessed were clothed and fed, housed, registered, treated, and classified ready for repatriation. They then had to wait for a country to agree to take them or for a relative to sponsor them from abroad. For some, the process took years, and the long-term treatment of those uprooted from their homes and facing an uncertain future was often less compassionate than it might have been.

In order to speed up the procedure, the Red Cross did what it could, while the UNRRA established the Central Tracing Bureau, which helped survivors try to find their relatives by publishing lists of the living in newspapers and making daily broadcasts on the radio. Volunteers interviewed every prisoner and filled out a corresponding number of forms. They were eventually able to repatriate between six and seven million people and help 1.5 million emigrate – but it proved to be a colossal, lengthy, and often controversial undertaking.

For those entrusted with the repatriation of Mauthausen’s more than 40,000 refugees of twenty-four nationalities back to places they wanted to live or had once considered home, the task was no less of a logistical nightmare. Not only were the majority physically or psychologically damaged but they had hardly any clothes, no money and no documents. Europe was a melting pot. With most of the local trains, boats and motor vehicles already requisitioned to bring in supplies or to ferry troops and machinery back home, there wasn’t enough transport to handle the overwhelming numbers who wished to travel to every corner of the globe. Transportation for all those repatriated would be free, but decisions had to be made about who would fund their return – the Allies or the governments who’d arranged for their deportation in the first place. In the end, the costs were for the most part borne equally.

Another major problem was that no one could prove they were who they claimed to be. Every man, woman and child who’d survived the concentration, extermination and labour camps would require an identification document of some description, and yet most had nothing but a number tattooed on their arm or one memorised from their daily
Appelle
. Many of the Nazi records had been burned or taken away and there was no means of knowing where these people officially belonged.

Even when they were eventually issued with new papers, there was mounting uncertainty about what would be waiting for those whose entire communities had been wiped off the face of the earth. There were news stories of people being exiled or murdered when they returned to their homes. Widows and orphans were considered especially vulnerable, and many soldiers did their best to persuade them that they would be better off trying to get into America.

Survivor Klara Löffová, who was befriended by a nineteen-year-old American GI named Max, from Brooklyn, New York, was sorely tempted. Max took such a liking to her that he brought her extra food and some of the all-important American cigarettes that were to become the currency of the camp. When it was finally time for her
to say goodbye, Max ‘formally’ introduced himself and extended his hand. She started to put out her hand but then pulled it back in shame, because she was still infested with lice and ingrained with filth. He took her hand anyway and then kissed it. She never forgot that kindness; she did, eventually, go to live in America, where the story of the kind soldier became such a part of her family’s history that her grandson was named Max in his honour.

Priska, gazing nostalgically at the waters of the Danube far below the camp, was desperately homesick for Bratislava and wanted to get back there with baby Hana as soon as possible. She was convinced that Tibor would be waiting for them in their apartment, surrounded by his notebooks and pipes. It had been months since she’d last seen him – through the wire in Auschwitz – but ‘thinking only beautiful things’ she had never allowed herself to believe that he might not have survived.

For Rachel and her sisters – all still in their twenties – there was only one place they wanted to go. ‘Our father had always said that if we were separated, then right after the war we should all come back to Pabianice and meet there again,’ said Sala. ‘So as soon as we were all strong enough, that was where we decided to go.’ Rachel hoped that if Monik was still alive, he would find her there and finally be able to meet the son he didn’t even know she’d been expecting. She had no idea if they still owned the family factories, but either way they would have to start again and try to make a new life for themselves.

Anka, with little Eva, had nowhere to go but back to Czechoslovakia, but she was in ‘a daze’ because she had no idea what she would find. ‘I knew that my parents and my sisters were not alive – that was a matter of deduction – but I still didn’t know about my husband Bernd.’ Would anything be left for them in Třebechovice pod Orebem? Would her father’s leather factory and her sister Ruzena’s villa still belong to them, or would they have been seized or even burned down? Did she want to remain in Europe at all if there was nothing and no one left?

There felt to be so much uncertainty and confusion all around them. No country in Europe had been left untouched by the war and the Continent was in turmoil. As the Allies continued to hunt down the Nazis, they began to amass evidence of more and more atrocities. Thousands of Germans fled their homes or were forced to leave. Hundreds of SS officers and members of the high command were arrested for trial and execution but many more slipped through the net; they included the Freiberg
Unterscharführer
, Richard ‘Šára’ Beck, who was never brought to justice.

Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s trusted deputy and one of the people considered to bear most responsibility for the Holocaust, was captured on 23 May 1945. The
Reichsführer
of the SS, who controlled the concentration camps and had personally visited Auschwitz and Mauthausen to see for himself how well the Final Solution was being enacted, bit down on a cyanide pill hidden in his mouth and killed himself before he could be tried.

In June 1945, Dr Josef Mengele – the ‘Angel of Death’ – was captured by the Americans, before being mistakenly released a month later. Posing as a farmhand, he changed his name and remained on the run for the rest of his life, until his death by drowning in Brazil in 1979. His wife had divorced him and his son disowned him soon after the war. Mengele remained unrepentant until his death and always claimed he was only obeying orders. He would never have heard about Priska, Rachel and Anka and their babies, who’d slipped through his manicured hands at Auschwitz.

Luck, courage and determination had sustained the three women through the war and they would need all those qualities as they contemplated life ‘Afterwards’. Everything had changed. They had nothing but questions without answers. Where were their loved ones? How would their lives be? As one prisoner said, ‘Physically and emotionally, I was nothing but a question mark.’

Before they could even consider booking their places on any available transports to take them home, there was one legal formality each of the mothers had to go through – certifying the births
of their babies. Each child had to be registered at Mauthausen City Hall, which was done between 14 and 17 May 1945. As soon as they were strong enough, Rachel and Anka made the journey back down the hill into the town and paid the nominal fee before filling in the relevant forms. Priska – unable to face the townspeople – asked her friend Magda Gregorová’s husband, actor Martin Gregor (who’d been reunited with his wife in the camp), to do it for her.