Born Survivors (5 page)

Priska and Tibor in Bratislava 1943

No one knew. Nor did they know what had happened to their loved ones, from whom they heard nothing. Rumours had been circulating in Bratislava for months about the camps Jews and others were sent to as word occasionally came back from some of the transports. People were being worked or starved to death or executed in brutal ways, it was said. News reports from America and Britain in 1942 claimed that Jews especially were being methodically murdered. These stories became wilder still after April 1944, when the Slovak prisoner Rudolf Vrba and escapee Alfred Wetzler emerged from a camp nobody had heard of in southern Poland to warn of mass exterminations involving the use of gas chambers and crematoria. The two men’s detailed report on Auschwitz-Birkenau, complete with graphic illustrations, wasn’t widely circulated for some time and many didn’t credit it even then – although from then on, people became far more suspicious and avoided transports East at all costs.

Priska and Tibor couldn’t allow themselves to believe the tales, which seemed too far-fetched to be credible. The general feeling among their friends was that such stories were either the ramblings of men driven insane by imprisonment, or exaggerated as anti-Nazi propaganda. In spite of all they’d endured, it was beyond their comprehension that Hitler really meant what he said when he’d promised to eradicate every human being of undesirable ethnic origin in order to create a master race. The Germans were, after all, one of the world’s most cultured and civilised peoples. The nation that had produced Bach and Goethe, Mozart and Beethoven, Einstein, Nietzsche and Dürer couldn’t possibly create such a monstrous plan – could it?

Maintaining their hopes of an imminent resolution to a war they didn’t fully understand, the couple carried on with their lives as best they could. In the middle of June 1944, a week before their third wedding anniversary, Priska and Tibor decided to try again for a child. Two months later the relative calm they’d enjoyed for almost two years was shattered by the Slovak National Uprising, an
armed insurrection intended to overthrow the puppet state. Priska’s brother Janko was one of thousands of ordinary citizens and partisans who did their utmost to end the fascist regime under which they were forced to live.

The violent rebellion began in the Low Tatras on 29 August 1944, and quickly spread until German Wehrmacht forces were sent in two months later to viciously crush it. Thousands died. After that, everything changed. The soldiers who’d been sent to wreak revenge quickly occupied the whole country under the auspices of the Gestapo, who moved in to impose order on those who’d dared disobey the Führer. One of the first tasks of the security police they brought with them was to force President Tiso to resume the transportations of the remainder of the Slovak Jews. Desperate to avoid such a fate, thousands went into hiding or fled to Hungary or other countries where they hoped they might be safer.

Trying to remain optimistic in the face of what seemed an increasingly inevitable outcome, Priska and her husband chose to stay in Bratislava where they’d successfully managed to avoid capture for so long. Each day they went undiscovered felt like a gift, especially when each week brought more good news about the war. Paris had been liberated, along with key ports in France and Belgium. The Allies had begun an airborne assault on Holland. Surely Germany would capitulate soon?

On Tuesday, 26 September 1944, the couple celebrated Tibor’s thirtieth birthday. It happened to fall that year on Yom Kippur, the ‘Sabbath of Sabbaths’, a twenty-five-hour period of fasting for the Day of Atonement and the most holy of Jewish observances. Having scrubbed their hands, as was their custom, they sat together and enjoyed a meal cobbled together from whatever was available. They were not only celebrating Tibor’s birthday but the new life Priska had been carrying beneath her heart for a little more than eight weeks. Together they prayed that this, their fourth baby, might survive.

Two days later, their hopes for happiness were shattered when
three members of the
Freiwillige Schutzstaffel
(Volunteer SS) – largely comprised of Slovak ethnic German paramilitaries – burst into their apartment and ordered them to pack their belongings into two small suitcases, together weighing no more than fifty kilograms.

‘They were horrible,’ Priska said. ‘They were arrogant. They hardly spoke and I didn’t say anything either … I knew how to stay calm in the face of adversity. I didn’t start anything.’

On that fine autumn day and at a cost to the Slovak government of 1,000 Reichsmarks, Priska and Tibor Löwenbein were ‘dragged’ from their home and forced into the back of a large black van. They had to leave behind Tibor’s collections of stamps, his pipes, shirts, well-stocked bookcase and precious notebooks containing years of writing.

The young couple were driven first to the large Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Heydukova Strasse. Kept waiting there for hours with scores of others sitting on the floor or on their luggage, they feared for their lives, while Priska was stricken by a bout of morning sickness – the first she’d ever suffered. Fighting waves of nausea, she clung to Tibor who kept telling her to remember their little one. ‘My husband was just caressing me and saying, “Maybe they’ll send us home,
Pirečko
.” I was only thinking about my baby. I wanted that baby so very much.’

Later that day, they and 2,000 other Jews were transferred by bus to the small railway station at Lamač and then sent sixty kilometres east to the sprawling Sered’ labour and transit camp in the Danubian lowland. A former military base, Sered’ had been run by the
Hlinka
Guard prior to the uprising but then came under the supervision of SS officer Alois Brunner, assistant to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi
Obersturmbannführer
(lieutenant colonel) and one of the chief perpetrators of Hitler’s so-called ‘Final Solution to the Jewish question’.

Brunner had been sent to Sered’ to personally supervise the deportation of the last of the Slovak Jews after his success in overseeing
a similar operation in Vichy France. Often seen wearing his favourite white uniform, Brunner is believed to have been responsible for the transportation of over 100,000 people to Auschwitz.

Jews being unloaded from cattle wagons at Auschwitz

Those who arrived in Sered’ were herded into wooden barracks that were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer numbers. The prisoners’ dehumanisation began with early morning roll calls, or
Appelle
, and a strict regimen of hard physical labour or domestic duties. Crammed into every available space, they were expected to exist each day on a half mug full of bitter ‘coffee’, some anaemic soup of questionable origin, and a little stale bread. Some of the more devout Jews used the hot water masquerading as food to wash their hands before they carefully sliced and shared out their pitiful rations.

On Yom Kippur, the day Priska and her husband had been observing in Bratislava, the Nazis at Sered’ roasted a whole pig in the middle of the camp and laughingly invited the half-starved Jews
to share it. Not one is reported to have stepped forward, in spite of their hunger.

The first transportations East from Sered’ started almost immediately after Priska and Tibor arrived by bus, as Brunner supervised the ‘liquidation’ of the camp in readiness for the next influx of prisoners. On 30 September 1944, the almost 2,000 Bratislavan Jews were marched from their barracks by Slovak and Hungarian SS officers in the middle of the night, and lined up in military formation before being shoved into freight wagons. Between eighty and a hundred people were squashed into each boxcar, with barely room to breathe, let alone move. Once the heavy wooden doors were slid shut, leaving them suffocating in the semi-darkness, the smallest of the children were passed over the heads of the others, to be held on the laps of those who had a little room to sit on a narrow plank at the back. The rest could only stand or squat.

There was no sanitation other than an empty wooden bucket and a tin can full of water, and each wagon was soon stinking and unhygienic as the pail slopped its contents at every jolt. Some tried to empty it out of the tiny window but a barbed-wire grille prevented it from being tipped up completely, so people were forced to defecate or urinate where they stood, soiling their clothes.

Without food, fresh air or water, the sweating, despairing humans were crushed against one another. Those who could see through narrow cracks in the wood called out the names of the towns they passed as they continued on their three-hundred-kilometre journey northeast. By the time they crossed the Polish border, some of the eldest prisoners recited the Jewish prayer for the dead and then simply shut down. Those who died were hurled off at stops along the way, making a little more room for the living. Like thousands of Jews transported from Sered’ in abominable conditions during the final months of 1944, these 1,860 Slovak Jews realised that they were headed somewhere they would almost certainly be treated most harshly and might well meet their deaths.

Priska and Tibor were as fearful as everyone else, but still they kept trying to reassure each other that all would be well and they’d return home with their child. Priska especially was determined not to give up, because ‘I liked my life so much.’ She reminded Tibor that her ability to speak a number of languages would allow her to converse with the other prisoners and even the SS, who might treat her with a little more respect. She had a brain and she knew how to use it, she assured him.

Priska’s faith was always important to her and she relied on it during those dark hours as their locomotive pulled them ever eastwards. ‘Belief in God is the most important thing in the world. When someone has faith they must be a decent person and know how to behave. Every night I greet my God before I fall asleep.’ Having been christened as an evangelical, she rarely thought of herself as Jewish, an irony that wasn’t wasted on her as she and Tibor were treated without a shred of compassion on account of their faith. ‘It is terrible what they did to the Jews,’ she admitted. ‘Horrible. Like animals. Men are men, and a man to a man has to act properly. They treated the Jews terribly. We were stuck in a freight train and … then thrown out of there. They behaved appallingly.’

The train journey lasted more than twenty-four hours as those squashed on board continued to wonder where they were heading and whether they’d be reunited with the loved ones taken from them two years earlier. Would Priska see her sister Boežka and her parents again? Might she be reunited with friends from Zlaté Moravce with whom she’d swum, sung and spoken English and German? Would Tibor be able to comfort his widowed mother at last?

An increasingly distressed Tibor didn’t believe so and could hardly bear to see his wife suffer. Retching and without any water or fresh air, she struggled for breath in the dark, fetid wagon as he held her to him, kissed her hair and tried to console her. Hardly stopping to catch his own breath he spoke to her constantly,
reminding her to think positively no matter what, and to focus only on joyful things. Just as in his letters he had spoken of her ‘light piercing the dark clouds’, so he tried to keep her hopeful for the future.

As the train trundled remorselessly on, though, his courage began to fail him. If this was how they were being treated now, then what further cruelty awaited them at their destination? Holding Priska closer still, he openly prayed that she and his yearned-for baby would at least survive. Realising that this could be their last chance, the couple decided to choose a name for their child in that unlikeliest of places. Whispering, they picked Hanka (more formally Hana) for a girl – after her grandmother’s sister – and Miško (Michael) for a boy.

Standing next to the young couple in the dimly lit wagon was Edita Kelamanová, a thirty-three-year-old Hungarian spinster from Bratislava. She couldn’t help but overhear their conversation and she was moved. Over the growling of the train, Edita told Tibor, ‘I promise that if your wife and I remain together, I will take care of her.’ From a wealthy, educated background, Edita not only considered it her
mitzvah
or moral duty but hoped that if she did as she promised, then her prayers that she be saved and have a husband of her own one day might be answered. Tibor thanked the kind stranger as Priska, who recognised her accent, added softly in Hungarian, ‘
Köszönöm
’ – thank you.

All cried out as the train jerked to a standstill at a central train depot at the border of Poland and the German Reich, where the prisoners were formally handed over to the new authorities. The doors to their stifling wagons didn’t open and they had no idea what was happening as they waited in a siding. Then the train from Sered’ gave a convulsive twitch and moved off again, until a few hours later it suddenly was buffeted sideways onto a dedicated rail spur and clanked violently to a halt at the railway ramp in the heart of Auschwitz II-Birkenau. It was Sunday, 1 October 1944. Beyond the sealed doors of their prison-on-wheels, the occupants of the
train immediately recognised the sounds of violence – men shouting and dogs barking – and knew then that they had reached their destination.