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ALSO BY HEATHER DUNE MACADAM
Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz The Weeping Buddha
999
The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Transport to Auschwitz
HEATHER DUNE MACADAM
CITADEL PRESS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
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ISBN: 978-0-8065-3936-2
Library of Congress Control Number 2019944522.
Electronic edition:
ISBN-13: 978-0-8065-3938-6 (e-book)
ISBN-10: 0-8065-3938-0 (e-book)
for Edith
in memory of
Lea
&
Adela
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword
Author’s Note
Principal Characters on First Transport
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part Two
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Part Three
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Homecomings
Afterwards
One Final Word
List of Photographs and Illustrations
Archives
Source Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Notes
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
—VIRGINIA WOOLF
The measure of any Society is how it treats its
women and girls.
—MICHELLE OBAMA
Woman must write her Self: must write about
women and bring women to writing . . . Woman must
put herself into the text—as into the world and into
history...
—HÉLÈNE CIXOUS, “The
Laugh of the Medusa”
Foreword
BY CAROLINE MOOREHEAD
NO ONE KNOWS FOR CERTAIN, or will ever know, the precise number of people who were transported to Auschwitz between 1941 and 1944, and who died there, though most scholars accept a figure of one million. But Heather Dune Macadam does know exactly how many women from Slovakia were put on the first convoy that reached the camp on March 26, 1942. She also knows, through meticulous research in archives and from interviews with survivors, that the almost one thousand young Jewish women, some no older than fifteen, were rounded up across Slovakia in the spring of 1942 and told that they were being sent to do government work service in newly occupied Poland, and that they would be away no more than a few months. Very few returned.
Basing her research on lists held in Yad Vashem in Israel, on testimonies in the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual Archives and the Slovak National Archives, and tracing the few women still alive today, as well as talking to their relatives and descendants, Macadam has managed to re-create not only the backgrounds of the women on the first convoy but also their day-to-day lives—and deaths—during their years in Auschwitz. Her task was made harder, and her findings more impressive, by the loss of records and the different names and nicknames used, as well as their varied spellings, and by the length of time that has elapsed since the Second World War. Writing about the Holocaust and the death camps is not, as she rightly says, easy. The way she has chosen to do it, using a novelist’s license to re-imagine scenes and re-create conversations, lends immediacy to her text.
IT WAS ONLY in the late winter of 1940–41 that IG Farben settled on Auschwitz and its surroundings, conveniently close to a railway junction and to a number of mines and with plentiful supplies of water, for the construction of a major new plant in which to make artificial rubber and synthetic gasoline. Auschwitz was also given a mandate to play a role in the “Final Solution of the Jewish question,” a place where, alongside labor allocations, prisoners could be killed rapidly and their bodies as rapidly disposed of. When, in September, a first experiment using prussic acid, or Zyklon B, proved effective in the gassing of 850 inmates, Rudolf Höss, the camp’s first commandant, saw in it an answer to the “Jewish problem.” Since camp physicians assured him that the gas was “bloodless,” he concluded that it would spare his men the trauma of witnessing unpleasant sights.
First, however, the camp needed to be built. An architect, Dr. Hans Stosberg, was asked to draw up plans. At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, the Reich Main Security Office estimated that occupied Europe would yield a total of just under eleven million Jews. As Reinhard Heydrich, second in the SS hierarchy to Heinrich Himmler, put it, they should be “put to work in a suitable way within the framework of the Final Solution.” Those too frail, too young, or too old to work were to be killed straight away. The stronger would work and were to be killed in due course since “this natural elite, if released, must be viewed as the potential germ cell of a new Jewish order.”
Slovakia was the first satellite state to become a deportation country. For over a thousand years part of the kingdom of Hungary, and since the end of the First World War part of Czechoslovakia, it had become an independent country only in 1939, under German protection, ceding much of its autonomy in exchange for economic assistance. Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest, became president, banned opposition parties, imposed censorship, formed a nationalist guard, and fanned anti-semitism, which had been growing since the arrival of waves of Jewish refugees fleeing Austria after the Anschluss. A census put the number of Jews at 89,000, or 3.4 percent of the population.
The order for unmarried Jewish women between the ages of sixteen and thirty-six to register and bring their belongings to a gathering point was not initially viewed as alarming, though a few prescient families made desperate attempts to hide their daughters. Indeed, some of the girls found the idea of going to work abroad exciting, particularly when they were assured that they would soon be home. Their innocence made the shock of arrival at the gates of Auschwitz more brutal, and there was no one there to prepare them for the horrors to come.
That same day, 999 German women arrived from Ravensbruck, which was already
full with 5,000 prisoners and could take no more. Having been selected before leaving as suitable functionaries, they oversaw the young Jewish women’s work of dismantling buildings, clearing the land, digging, and transporting earth and materials, as well as in agriculture and cattle raising, thereby freeing the men already at Auschwitz to work on the heavier tasks of expanding the camp. Coming from large and loving families, accustomed to gentle manners and comfortable living, the Slovakian women found themselves shouted at, stripped naked, shaved, subject to interminable roll calls in the freezing dawn, forced to walk barefoot in mud, fighting for rations, subject to arbitrary punishments, worked to exhaustion and often to death. They were hungry, sick, terrified. The female guards, from Ravensbruck, were later admitted by Höss to have “far surpassed their male equivalents in toughness, squalor, vindictiveness and depravity.” By the end of 1942, two thirds of the women on the first convoy were dead.
And Auschwitz itself kept growing. Jews from all over occupied Europe, from France and Belgium, Greece and Yugoslavia, Norway and later from Hungary, poured in, soon arriving at the rate of some three trains every two days, each train consisting of 50 freight cars containing more than 80 prisoners each. By June 1943, four crematoria were up and running, able to burn 4,736 corpses per day. Most of the new arrivals, whole families with babies and small children, went straight to the gas ovens.
The surviving Slovakian women, their bodies and minds grown stronger, devised strategies to stay alive, volunteering for the nastiest jobs, or finding safety in sewing or farming details or in the camp offices, becoming adept at escaping the daily extermination of the weakest, those who fell ill or who had become too emaciated for useful work. It was, notes Macadam, “a survival seesaw.” The luckier found occupation in “Canada,” the ironical prison term for the property plundered by the Nazis from the arriving Jews who had been instructed to bring with them from home between 66 and 100 pounds of things they thought they might need. Blankets, coats, spectacles, crockery, medical instruments, sewing machines, shoes, wristwatches, furniture overflowed across an extensive network of depots from where teams of the more fortunate or canny men and women inmates, working in continuous shifts, prepared shipments to put on the trains back to Germany. It was later estimated that at least two crates, weighing a thousand kilos each and containing valuables, were shipped back to Berlin every week.
For a long time, the Slovakian women’s families at home had no idea where their daughters had gone. The few postcards that arrived, with cryptic references to long-dead relations, were puzzling and often so peculiar that many parents were able to persuade themselves that their daughters were safe and being cared for. But as the months passed, so fear spread, and it grew worse as fresh roundups took whole families away. One of the most poignant moments in Macadam’s book is the arrival of family members in Auschwitz, greeted with horror by the surviving women, only too aware of the fate that awaited their parents and siblings.
Much has been written about the experience of Auschwitz, the battle for survival, the typhus, the gassings, the ever-worsening conditions, the starvation and brutality, and Macadam does not shy away from the horror. Books such as this one are essential: they remind modern readers of events that should never be forgotten.
Her book is good, too, on the background to the Slovakian deportations, on the life of the Jewish communities before the war, the buildup of Jewish persecution, and on the innocence of the families as they prepared their daughters for deportation. She writes just as evocatively on the sadness of the few who survived and returned home to find their parents dead, their shops boarded up, their houses and possessions grabbed by neighbors. Of the Slovakian prewar Jewish population, 70,000 people—over 80 percent—were dead and the postwar one-party regime banned all discussion of the Holocaust. Those on the first transport had left home as girls. Three and a half years later they came back as women, old beyond their years, who had seen, suffered, endured too much. Just surviving made them suspect: what had they done, what moral compromises had they made, not to have died with their friends?
THERE IS AN IMAGE at the end of this fine book which stays long in the mind. One of the surviving young women, Linda, having escaped Auschwitz and the death marches that took the lives of many survivors, having crossed countries in chaos and devastated by the war, at constant risk of being raped, finds herself at last on a train bound for home. The carriages are full to overflowing with refugees, so she climbs on to the roof and it is there, perched high on the slowly moving train, that she looks out across a landscape which is not full of barbed wire or watchtowers, or guards with guns. She is, she realizes, free; it is spring, and the trees are turning green.
Author’s Note
“IT IS TOO LITTLE, too late,” Ruzena Gräber Knieža says in German. The phone line crackles. My husband, who is translating for me, shrugs. At the time, Ruzena was the only survivor I had found who was still alive who had been on the first transport to Auschwitz; her prisoner number was #1649. A few months earlier, she had been willing to be interviewed for a documentary I wanted to produce on the first girls in Auschwitz; however, my own health prevented me from flying to Switzerland to interview her. Now she is the one who is ill.
I try to explain that my main interest is speaking to her about Slovakia and how she and the other girls were collected and betrayed by their government. She sighs and says, “I don’t want to think about Auschwitz before I die.” At ninety-two years of age, can we blame her?
I send her a thank-you card, and then locate her testimony on the USC Shoah Visual Archive. It is in German. We can translate it, but the Shoah archive did not ask the questions I wanted to ask. Questions that have arisen since I met and worked with Rena Kornreich Gelissen, a survivor from the first transport, in 1992, over twenty-five years ago. Since I wrote Rena’s Promise, family members of women who were on the first transport have contacted me with more stories about their cousins, aunts, mothers, and grandmothers, and with that information, more questions arose. I have filmed and recorded interviews with these families, but without a living survivor willing to speak with me—and a family who would let me speak with her—those questions were never going to be answered. I understand the desire to protect these elderly women; if you survived three years in Auschwitz and the death camps and lived into your nineties, why should you have to think about that hell? I do not want to hurt anyone, especially these amazing women, by asking painful questions that raise the specters of the past.
A year after my conversation with Ruzena, I sent an email out to second-generation (2G) families and asked if anyone wanted to retrace their mother’s journey to Auschwitz from Slovakia on the 75th anniversary of the first transport. Quite a few people responded with interest, but in the end it was a small, intimate group of three families: Erna and Fela Dranger’s sons from Israel (Avi and Akiva); Ida Eigerman Newman’s family from America (Tammy and Sharon, and Tammy’s children: Daniella and Jonathan) and Marta F. Gregor’s daughter (Orna from Australia). Then, a few weeks before we were set to meet, I learned that ninety-two-year-old Edith Friedman Grosman (#1970) was going to be the guest of honor at the 75th-anniversary ceremonies. A few days later, Edith and I were speaking via FaceTime. We clicked immediately and she told me she would be happy to meet me and my camera crew in Slovakia. Two weeks later, we were sitting together in an early Soviet bloc–style hotel room with dingy white walls and hideous décor, and I was asking her the questions I had not known to ask Rena Kornreich (#1716) twenty-five years earlier.
Like Rena, Edith is vibrant, quick-witted and sharp. A little bird of a woman who lights up the room. Our time together in Slovakia was a whirlwind that took us to the barracks where she and the other girls were held and to the train station from which they were deported. At the ceremonies, we met the president and prime minister of Slovakia, the Israeli ambassador to Slovakia, and children of other survivors. In a powerful homage of tears and hugs, the second-generation group I was traveling with bonded with
Slovak second-generation families. At the end of our week, my husband told me, “This is not just a documentary. You have to write a book.”
Writing about Auschwitz is not easy. It is not the sort of project one takes on lightly, but with Edith beside me, I was willing to try. This book would not be a memoir, though. It would be about all of them, or as many as I could find information on and fit into this complex history. In Canada, I found another survivor, Ella Rutman (#1950), and I flew to Toronto to bring the two survivors together. Edith and Ella remembered each other, but even at their advanced ages they were wary. As they spoke in Slovak, Edith cast a pained glance at me. This was not the warm bond I had imagined—Edith had not liked Ella when they were in Auschwitz, I realized. The meeting was awkward and distant until the two old women began looking through a magnifying glass at the numbers on their left forearms.
“I can’t see my number anymore, it is so faded,” Edith said.
The memories are fading as well. But the truth is there, if you know where to find it. Looking at old photos with Edith one day, I noticed Ruzena Gräber Knieža’s face.
“Did you know Ruzena?” I asked.
“Of course!” Edith answered, as if this were the most obvious question in the world. “We were in class together and good friends with Ruzena and her husband, Emil Knieža, after the war. He was a writer like my husband. We used to visit them in Switzerland.”
I had come full circle.
MANY OF THESE WOMEN knew each other before Auschwitz, either from their hometowns or villages, schools or synagogues; however, in the USC Shoah Archive testimonies, it is rare that anyone mentions a girl’s maiden name. Sometimes, a survivor mentions a girl by her nickname or gives a physical description of a friend, so it can be hard to confirm if survivors are speaking about someone from the first transport. Margie Becker’s (#1955) testimony is one of those rarities where the full names of the girls she and Edith grew up with are almost always mentioned, and because of the photograph of their class, Edith has been able to identify most of those girls. It had never even occurred to me to ask Edith if she knew Ruzena before I saw them together in their class photo, because Ruzena’s name on the list of deportees lists her as being from a different town. I didn’t know she had lived in Humenné when she was a young girl. If only I had started this journey when they were all still alive.