Born Survivors (42 page)

Hana’s birth certificate

Each mother then received an official Austrian
Geburtsurkunde
(birth certificate). Hana was incorrectly listed as Edith Hanna Löwenbein, born in Freiberg on 12 April 1945, with the addition ‘
Gefangenen-Bahntransport
’ (caught a railway transport). There was no mention of her birth without medical care on a wooden plank in a German slave labour factory the day before she and her mother were forcibly evacuated by train. Tibor was listed as her father and
‘Piri’ as her mother, and of both it was said, ‘
Jetziger wohnort unbekannt
’ (present address unknown), before giving their former residence in Bratislava.

Mark’s birth certificate

Eva’s birth certificate

Mark and Eva’s birthplace was listed as ‘Mauthausen’ or ‘Mauthausen
früheres Konzentrationslager
’ (former concentration camp), and the dates of each delivery as 20 and 29 April respectively. They too were of no fixed abode. The registrar who signed Mark’s birth certificate could never have imagined how he’d been delivered in an open coal wagon in the rain near Most. With baby Eva, who’d arrived on a filthy cart in the shadow of the camp’s gates, the certificate registered the time of her birth as 8.30 p.m. but gave no indication of its gruesome circumstances.

Armed with these important pieces of paper, plus a provisional identity card that listed their names and dates of birth, and a document signed by the International Red Cross to prove that they’d been in a camp, the three women were finally declared well enough to travel. Each was further issued with a dated slip of paper, signed by a deputy of the new commanding officer of Mauthausen, stating that they were free of infectious diseases. The Red Cross handed out clothes and caps to as many survivors as possible – some of whom were still dressed in the tattered clothing they’d been thrown years before. The survivors fought over any sweaters with a coveted ‘Made in the USA’ label. Then, along with the rest of the refugees, they just had to wait for transport back to their chosen land to become available.

The women had been in the custody of the Nazis for between eight months and almost four years. For all of them it felt like a lifetime. Aged between twenty-six and twenty-nine, and considering themselves less Jewish than most, they were changed beyond recognition, physically and psychologically. They could barely remember the life they’d led before, with all its freedoms, or the carefree joys of being young and in love. As Rachel said, ‘I was an old woman when I came out at twenty-six.’

The Russian prisoners-of-war who had somehow managed to survive such extreme cruelty in Mauthausen were the first to leave the camp – on 16 May 1945 – and were given a moving send-off. As people crowded into the
Appellplatz
to bid them farewell, the
Soviets took what they called ‘The Mauthausen Oath’, swearing to follow a common path to freedom, continue to fight against hatred between peoples, and strive for social and national justice. ‘The gates to one of the worst and most bloody concentration camps are being opened,’ they announced. ‘We are about to return to our countries … The liberated prisoners … give thanks from the bottom of our hearts for the liberation made possible by the victorious allied nations … Long live freedom!’

The Americans and the Red Cross handed out care packages of cigarettes, toiletries and basic food supplies to last them the journey. As the remaining survivors watched the Russians leave, they too allowed themselves to contemplate an imminent return to their homelands. Somewhere far beyond those granite walls were lives remembered from long ago. Those who had avoided being ensnared in the Nazi machine were going about their daily business, rebuilding their homes, repairing the infrastructure of their towns, raising their children and making new ones. Ordinary people would return to their ordinary jobs and attempt to forget the war – as these survivors would have to try to do.

So many of their family members and friends would never return home, but they hoped there would still be some they could rely on. Priska, at twenty-nine, wondered if her childhood friend Gizka would still be in Zlaté Moravce and whether she’d been able to keep the family valuables safe. Electrical and communication systems across Europe had been ravaged, so there was no way to telephone her – if she had even known the number. As she braced herself to leave, she vowed to keep in touch with Edita, her protector for so long, and share whatever trials they each faced when they went home.

No matter how many relatives she might have lost to the horrors of Auschwitz, Rachel knew she was blessed to still have three of her younger sisters with her. So many of those around them had lost every single member of their family and yet she, Sala, Ester and Bala still had each other.

Anka, twenty-eight, had the ever-faithful Mitzka at her side. They had lived and almost died together for four years and their bond would be lifelong. There were so many other good friends too – women who had grieved with her over the loss of baby Dan, and who had rallied around when Eva was born.

What none of the young mothers knew was the whereabouts of their husbands – Tibor, Monik and Bernd. The whip-smart journalist, the loyal factory owner and the handsome architect: three decent young men with hopes and dreams who’d swept the girls off their feet and married them just before the start of the seismic events that had since ravaged all their lives. Had they survived too? Was there a chance that each new mother and child might be reunited with their men in a fairytale ending that would trump the Nazi plan for them all? Or had their dreams been turned to dust? There was only one way to find out. And to see what was left of the countries they had been raised in, each of which had suffered a different fate.

Slovakia had been liberated by Soviet troops in April 1945. Of its 90,000 Jews, only 20,000 survived. The arrival of the Red Army was the precursor to the country’s takeover by the Communist Party three years later to become part of the Eastern Bloc, a status it would have for over forty years. First, though, the Slovaks expelled all ethnic Germans and welcomed back its citizens. They sent ferries to the nearby Austrian port of Enns to bring home the Slovak prisoners of Mauthausen via the now relatively calm waters of the River Danube. In a journey that lasted less than a week, Priska would sail with Hana some two hundred and seventy kilometres east and arrive in the heart of Bratislava, the city she so loved. She would disembark at the wharf only a short walk from the apartment where she and Tibor had been arrested just after Yom Kippur in September 1944. The spinster Edita would return to a devastated Hungary and see what was left of the people she knew and loved. But the two women were never to lose contact.

Poland was changed beyond all recognition. With the largest Jewish population on the European continent, it had been at the epicentre of the Holocaust. Poland not only suffered catastrophic damage from aerial bombardment but lost millions of its citizens. Under Soviet control after the Red Army staked its claim, its minority groups were all but vanished and its German citizens forced to flee. Many Poles refused to go home and fled instead to US-controlled Germany. Rachel and her sisters considered going there too, but the promise they had made to their father was too important to break.

The Polish and Allied authorities arranged for cattle trucks to collect those who’d survived Mauthausen and wanted to go home. The wagons were cleaned out and their doors were kept unlocked so as not to remind the survivors of their terrifying journeys to the camps. Rachel, baby Mark and her three surviving siblings would be given food and water and allowed to sit comfortably on bench seats. Then they would make the eight-hundred-kilometre journey back to the country that had lost almost all of its Jews and unwitting been the host of the worst death camps.

Anka had the least distance to travel, but it was no longer a matter of simply returning to the country she’d known. Her destination was Prague, two hundred kilometres away, but the city had experienced a bloody three-day revolution that began on 5 May, the same day KZ Mauthausen was liberated. The Czech and Soviet soldiers of the Revolutionary Guard overthrew the Nazis two days before Germany’s official capitulation and then called over the Czech radio waves for ‘Death to all Germans!’ Vengeful citizens took to the streets and hundreds of German soldiers and civilians were killed, often by brutal means. The militia turned several members of the SS and Wehrmacht into ‘human torches’, and mobs hounded down men, women and children, regardless of their stance during the war. Eminent professors and doctors were among those mutilated, shot or lynched.

The uprising came to an end the day before the Red Army
arrived in Prague on 9 May to claim its territory and begin the expulsion from Czechoslovakia of around three million ethnic Germans – and the murder of several thousand. Anka had married an ethnic German, which left her in limbo. As a Jew, Bernd had lost his German citizenship under the Nuremberg Laws and his new wife couldn’t become a German citizen either. However, because she’d married a German she officially became German as far as the authorities were concerned. Even though she’d never renounced her mother country, this meant that she lost her Czech citizenship. As a result, after the war she was both homeless and stateless, as well as possibly being widowed and with a sickly baby in tow, an unenviable position to be in. As May came and went, all she knew was that – after four years in ghettos and camps – she desperately wanted to go home.

With the country suffering chronic fuel shortages, the Czech authorities had no trains available to send to Austria at first, so its several hundred compatriots were stranded in the camp. To speed things up, the prisoners dispatched to Prague their most prominent Czech, a law professor from Charles University by the name of Dr Vratislav Busek, who’d been imprisoned for political reasons five years earlier. Within less than a week the professor arrived back in Austria with news of a train. It was waiting for them at the station of České Budějovice, where the Czech people had dressed it with flowers and a huge banner that read
Z pekla Mauthausen – domú
, ‘From the hell of Mauthausen – back home’. Anka and her baby, along with her friends from Terezín, would travel by bus or truck and then back to Prague by rail together to try to discover the fates of their husbands and families.

In shabby, mismatched clothing, the three new mothers with their tiny babies were swallowed up in the mass exodus of others preparing to leave Mauthausen throughout the summer of 1945. Grainy black and white photographs taken by American soldiers show endless snaking lines of the dispossessed like a human river spilling from the camp and down the hill towards the town.
Standing patiently in numbered columns waiting for army or Red Cross trucks to take them to the station, muster point or wharf, those who’d had such promising futures before being snatched from all they’d ever known were now penniless refugees.