Two Rings (22 page)

Mima was my partner, too, for the appels. Though we were known as the ammunition workers, we weren't given much to do at the camp. At some point, we realized that we were being kept in reserve for transport to factories inside Germany that needed slave labor. In the meantime, our days were taken up mostly by the appels, which lasted several hours each, once in the morning and once again in the evening. We were made to line up in rows outside our barracks, and whatever the weather, we stood and waited to be counted.

A woman from our barracks, Mrs. Lax, collapsed once during an appel. It was summer and ferociously hot. She was between forty and fifty years old, and she couldn't remain standing so long in the heat. The guard saw her collapse, and she was punished for her weakness.

Mrs. Lax was told to kneel on the stony ground while holding a brick in each hand with her arms outstretched. When she dropped her arms to her sides or fell from her bleeding knees to rest—as happened once or twice—the guard beat her with a stick and restarted her timing from the begining. How long did Mrs. Lax have to stay that way? After two minutes, your arms are on fire; after two hours?

The rest of us from the barracks had to stand in our rows and watch, striving to keep our strength so that we, too, wouldn't fall.

Mima knew I had a tendency to faint. I was small to begin with, and I had lost a lot of weight. Every so often, sometimes
during an appel, but sometimes just during the day, the world would all of a sudden get hazy before me and I would black out. Once, after I had fainted, a woman I knew slightly from the Radom factory—she was a twin, and she had been experimented on by Mengele—saw me on the ground and came over to me and offered me a little piece of raw potato she had. It was to help me wake up, she said. This matters, I think—that such kindness was possible, even in Auschwitz. If a guard saw me fainting during an appel, however, I would certainly be punished, and if a selection were to occur and someone saw the paleness of my face, I might get taken away to be gassed.

Mima always had with her a little bit of red brick. How did she manage that? I wonder. Was it the same piece through all those months, or did she scavenge bits and pieces from the ground? I don't know.

There is so much I don't know.

If Mima saw that I looked too white, if she thought I was about to faint, she would take her bit of brick and rub it hard against my cheeks. She wanted to redden me. She wanted to disguise my pallor. The rubbing brought some color back to my cheeks and turned them the color of the brick, too—it would rub off on my ashen skin. Rough rouge in a death camp.

It was during the appels, too, that women were chosen for transport. Everyone wanted to go. We didn't know where the chosen women would be taken—we were told to factories to make guns—but any place was better than this; to be taken for a transport was a ticket out of hell.

Here, too, Mima was always thinking about me. Twice she was chosen for a transport; twice she had the chance to leave.
But each time, she positioned herself at the back of the gathering group, and when she saw that I was not part of the transport, she slipped away and stayed behind. To be with me. To lend me her shoe for a pillow. To redden my cheeks with a bit of brick. To take care of me.

Mima saw to my shoes as well. She knew how I suffered from those wooden clogs. My feet were a mess of splinters and sores from the endless rubbing of the rough wood against my bare skin. One day, a truck passed through our section of the camp. Its open back was piled high with shoes, the shoes of girls and women who had been killed, girls and women who had been gassed. Shoes of the dead.

In an instant, Mima ran to the truck, jumped up alongside it, and snatched a pair of shoes from the back. She could have been beaten for that—killed, even; many, many people were killed for less. But no one saw, or no one cared.

She brought the shoes back for me.

They were children's shoes, maybe three sizes too small. But I didn't mind. They were real leather shoes, and no matter how small, they were infinitely better than the clogs. I untied the laces and pushed my feet in. I had to curl my toes under to get my feet to fit. And I had to walk that way, too—with my toes curled under. And this gave me cramps, to walk with my toes curled. To this day, my feet aren't right—my toes grew deformed from some young girl's shoes. But they were shoes. Real leather shoes that Mima had risked her life to steal for me.

Why was Mima not as afraid of our captors as I was? I was so frightened all the time.

The commander of our barracks section was a Jewish woman from Czechoslovakia; she wasn't much older than I—
in her early twenties, I would guess—but she was hardened and cruel, and it pleased her to demean us.
Radomske kurwa
—Radomer whore—she called each of us. That's the greeting she used the very first time she came into our barracks, and she called us whores routinely afterward. We were already so humiliated, why did she have to add this slur to our disgrace? When winter came and the cold tore at us, digging its fingers deep into our chests, when we were maybe just a little slow to get outside to stand for our endless appels, she would come into our barracks and beat us with her stick, curse us as whores, and make us move faster.

Such gratuitous cruelty. And from a Jew. She had dull gray-blue eyes, I remember, and a flattened, open face that hid nothing, though there seemed really nothing to her, no dreams, no desires, other than her routine brutality. She was cruel in an almost casual way, as if her malice were a habit and not something that arose only in outbursts, in sudden response to some infraction, real or perceived. Her viciousness was her essence.

Was this woman so vicious all her life? Was Auschwitz only an outlet to enact a barbarity that already existed? Or did Auschwitz create this cruelty in her?

Does it matter?

The woman scared me to my core.

 

 

 

One might think that women guards would be kinder than men, gentler in their treatment of other human beings. But in my experience, this wasn't true. The women guards, Jews as well as the SS, were no less sadistic.

Once, just after a selection had ended and those of us not taken away were starting to disperse from our ranks to head back to our barracks, a group of women guards came after us, yelling at us to run, to get out of their way, to get back to our barracks. Everyone scrambled in different directions, following their command as best we could. I, too, started at once to run, but I couldn't move fast enough. My little leather shoes were too small for me; they made it hard to run. I was trying, though; I was. I was running for dear life, trying to get out of the guards' way. They were chasing us with some kind of stick in their hands—walking sticks, I suppose, because the sticks had pointed nails at their tip. I stumbled and fell. One of the guards caught up with me. She stood over me there on the ground; breathing hard, she lifted her stick in the air and began to smack me with it. She beat me on my head, my neck, my back.

The world is awry; this is what I mean when I say that Auschwitz was unrecognizable, even to us, even as we lived it. How was I to make sense of this woman beating me—I was doing what she said; I was running out of her way, just as the guards had commanded. But then, no one thought to make sense of these things—Jews treating other Jews with ferocity, SS guards delivering punishments without cause. No one tried to explain anything. All our attention, all our energy, was directed toward the most elemental issues—how to hold on to one's bread, how to stay standing for one minute more, how never to get noticed by anyone looking your way.

One time, quite early on, we were moved to a different area of the camp. I don't know why they moved us—we weren't
told and we had nothing more to do in the new area than we had before. In our new barracks, we saw in the middle of the room a barrel filled with boiled potatoes. The women were all excited—food! An unexpected godsend. The potatoes were still warm, as if they had just been given to whoever lived in this barracks before us, women who must have just been taken away. The potatoes were the food of the dead, but we didn't care. To us they were a godsend still. Everyone ran to the barrel, reaching in to grab a potato. But then, after just a bite, everyone spit it out, coughing, gnashing her teeth. There was something wrong with the potatoes; they were rotten, or poisoned in some way.

A second barrel was in the barracks—this one was to be our latrine. I needed to use it, but it was too tall for me. I couldn't reach my bottom to its top. So I decided to sneak out. It was nighttime, and I thought perhaps I might find a corner of the yard to relieve myself unnoticed. Another girl thought the same, and we crept out together. She ran first, I followed just behind her. She found a place in the darkness; I, unfortunately, was discovered by a guard. The woman grabbed me by the top of my dress and paused for a moment, a second only, to look at me. Such hatred I don't think I had ever seen. I was disgusting to her, revolting, worth nothing at all. She raised her hand and struck me hard on the side of my head with her open palm. I fell to the ground, my ear ringing sharply and searing inside. I think she tore my eardrum, because for months afterward, I couldn't hear in that ear.

I had only gone out to urinate. What, dear God, was so hateful about that?

Life is supposed to make sense. Even cruelty, even when unjustified, should still make some sense; it should still be possible to explain according to some rationale. An explanation is not the same as an excuse; I'm not talking about morality here. I'm talking about a simple human expectation that there are reasons for human action. But in Auschwitz, nothing made sense.

 

 

 

In Auschwitz, I lost whatever was left of my faith.

When I was growing up, my faith was simple, but it was pure. As a child, I had watched my teacher at Beis Yaakov praying in the corner every day, and I trusted in her devotion; I believed that there was a God listening to her private prayers. From my grandparents, from my schooling, from my life in Radom, I was brought up to believe in the God of our liturgy and our rituals. A God who created the heavens and the earth and saw that His creation was good, a God who heard the crying of the Israelites in Egypt and parted the Red Sea to free His people from slavery, a God who made a little bit of oil miraculously last for eight days. This was my God, the God I believed in—a God who loved His people, Israel, and performed miracles on their behalf.

But what about here? Why not here? There were no miracles in Auschwitz.

The day it ended for me, the day I can say clearly that my faith died, was Yom Kippur, 1944. Two years earlier on that day, I had watched the German commander of the Radom ammunitions factory make a mockery of the holiest day of the Jewish year, offering up what he called a sacrifice by shooting a
good and gentle man to scare us into compliance. Now it was again Yom Kippur, and in the intervening months, more people had been killed than I could tally.

I went outside the barracks soon after we had returned from the morning appel. The sky overhead was smoky black, the air rank with the smell of something rancid and sour. Looking up at that blackness, I knew suddenly that there was no escape for me. Others among us had already been chosen for transport to factories elsewhere in Germany. But I had not been chosen. For me, there would be no exit from this place except through those chimneys. I knew this with certainty: It wasn't a foreboding or a fear or a premonition. It was knowledge—solid, unshakeable: I would be next, my flesh turned to smoke, my body blackening the sky.

I turned to someone nearby to ask what it was that filled the air with a smell so foul. She told me what she had heard, what people were saying in the camp. She told me matter-of-factly. Why is the sky so black? Why is the smell so bad? Because the Germans are burning the bodies of the Jews and they are collecting the fat that drips from the flesh and they are using it to make soap.

This is what I was told.

Soap.

I had once been given soap in Auschwitz, a coarse, rectangular bar with the initials RJF impressed onto it. I didn't know then what the letters stood for, but on that Yom Kippur, someone told me. On Yom Kippur, the day when Jews turn toward their God and seek atonement for their sins, the day when, one prays, God forgives His people and draws near to them in love and reconciliation, on this day, I learned the
meaning of RJF—
Rein Juden Fett
, Pure Jewish Fat. They had offered us a cleansing with the corpses of our fellow Jews.

I was seventeen years old. I was a widow and, for all I knew, an orphan as well. I looked into the swelling blackness of that dark, deserted sky; I breathed the putrid, sickening smell of burning human flesh, and I knew that all I had learned, all I had trusted in, all I had believed, was empty, was wrong, a sorrowful lie.

“Where is God? Where is God?” I cried. “If there is a God, why does He not intervene? Now is the time for miracles.”

But there were no miracles.