The May Beetles Read online

  A stubendienst was in a position to feed herself a little more than the stipulated quantity of soup, and Erna and I both did. We fed our mother and Marta and Annushka more too. It was one of the benefits of the job. Those who had been denied extra would certainly have known that I did not deny myself or my family members; indeed, they would have been shocked if they thought Erna and I had forgone that privilege.

  Within two weeks of our arrival at Stutthof we were joined by a number of Lithuanian women, all of whom were in a more wretched state than we Hungarians. Since 1940 the Jews of Lithuania had endured savage persecution by both the Nazis and the Lithuanians themselves. Most of the Lithuanian Jewish community of two hundred and eight thousand were murdered; by the end of the war, only thirteen thousand survived.

  The new arrivals told us that the non-Jewish Lithuanians had been willing and enthusiastic deputies of the Nazis, accepting the task of murdering Jews without the slightest demurral. Usually this was done in village or town squares; the victims were shot in such a way that they fell into pits which they themselves had dug. Another method was to crowd Jews into a synagogue or barn, which was then set alight. Tales were also told of some few Lithuanians of great courage who had refused to join in the massacres, and were themselves shot or hanged. What the Lithuanian Jewish women had seen and suffered went beyond anything we had faced before 1944, and it showed in their faces. Their community had been one of the most vibrant and learned in Europe before the war. I pitied these women deeply. I didn’t weep for them; none of us did. But I knew that they had experienced the most dreadful suffering.

  It does not take much to kill a human being. One tiny microbe can do it, once it multiplies. A scratch that becomes infected. But it is just as true to say that it takes a great deal to kill a human being. Starved, exhausted, sick, we can yet survive. Most of the women and girls at Stutthof – and, no doubt, most of the men – were sick enough and starved enough and exhausted enough to have died, but we didn’t, not unless we were murdered. My sisters and our mother didn’t know where our father was, or whether he was alive or dead. We knew that Grandfather Ignac was dead. Our hearts were broken, but we held on to life.

  Six weeks we survived in Stuthoff. In that time I sometimes experienced moments of complete blankness, of thinking nothing. Then a day came when we heard that we were to be sent to another camp. We didn’t know why. News never reached us of the progress of the war, but this was the time when the Russians were advancing rapidly from the east. By early September 1944 the Germans were making a steady retreat, and Stutthof lay in the path of the Russian push towards Danzig. All we knew was that fifteen hundred of us were to be marched south, to somewhere in Poland. The SS must have wanted to keep us alive as slave labour.

  Our destination, it was said, was to be a small town by the name of Baumgarten. Over the centuries, many Germans had settled in the region of our imprisonment, and quite a few towns had German names. So it was to Baumgarten that we marched, a slave army of Hungarian and Lithuanian women, guarded by twelve SS soldiers, a couple of them officers. They walked with us, some at the front, some on either side, a couple at the back.

  The autumn weather was mild; the sun shone through the morning mist. The meadows were thriving with the lush grasses of the summer that had passed, and wildflowers of many colours grew everywhere. My mother was enchanted – she could never exhaust her love of greenery and fresh blooms, even in her starved state.

  As we crossed the meadows, I noticed a friend of mine from Nyírbátor behaving oddly. She had become mentally unbalanced while we were at Auschwitz, the result of all that she had endured before she came to the camp and in the camp itself. My friend, a beautiful young woman, had been horribly abused, forced to cater to the lust of German soldiers. And now she had gone mad. Most days she could cope to a degree, with our help, but on this day something had given way in her mind. She sat down amongst the wildflowers, picking them, studying them fondly, singing to them. The great danger was that the soldiers would notice her, conclude that she was of no further use to anyone and shoot her.

  I was anxious but I went to her, knelt and spoke soothingly: ‘Yes, the flowers are pretty but we must keep walking … We must, so stand up now, come along, take some flowers with you …’ The expression on my friend’s face was like that of a child, and yet in her eyes I could still detect all that haunted her. She continued with us, but at the next selection she, her two sisters and their mother were taken back to Auschwitz.

  After two days on the road we reached Baumgarten. Tents had been set up in a field to accommodate us – ten women to a tent. Before we settled for the night, we were instructed by the SS to clear an area of cow dung. This cleared area was to be the site of the kitchen. One of the officers, Oberschütze Huppert, made it known that he wanted five of us at the site early in the morning to set up the kitchen.

  We settled into our tents for the night, two rows of five, body to body, with no more than rags to cover us. We were exhausted after walking for two entire days. As I prepared for sleep, I saw that Erna was keeping her eyes wide open. ‘Erna, take your rest,’ I whispered.

  ‘Don’t worry about me, Baba,’ she said. ‘Close your eyes.’

  I did, and slept deeply. I woke just before dawn, feeling some movement beside me. It was Erna: she had remained awake all night in order to be the first one at the kitchen. She wanted the kitchen job so that she could secure extra rations for her family. She went off without a word and was the first to meet Oberschütze Huppert at the kitchen site. She impressed him with her zeal and became a favourite of his from that morning on.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Slave Army

  The work the Germans had in mind for us was digging, and what they wanted dug were trenches. Some had to be about a metre deep, with the turf of the top layer piled on the lip of the ditch in small squares. From these trenches the retreating German soldiers would fire at the Russians as they advanced. We also had to dig some deeper trenches, about two metres, which it was hoped would block the Russian tanks. We were given shovels and mattocks, told what type of trench was required, and ordered to begin work.

  The digging was arduous, and it went on all day, without respite. The earth was hard. Winter was coming and the moisture in the soil was beginning to freeze. Scarcely any rations were provided for us but we were expected to labour away without complaint. Some poor women could barely raise their mattocks to strike the earth, but they had to find the strength to keep at it all day. The SS stood over us and called out, ‘Schneller, schneller’ – faster, faster. They separated the weak and ailing from the rest and took them away. Those of us who were a little stronger encouraged the weak to persist.

  We received our breakfast before we started work for the day: black coffee from the dregs, and black bread made from grain husks. After that we got nothing until late in the afternoon, when we trudged back to the camp. Erna, in her role as kitchen maid, now slept near the site of the kitchen. Oberschütze Huppert allowed her to take a small container of extra food back to us, for which we were profoundly grateful. We did not eat this extra food in front of the others but in secret. Oberschütze Huppert was quite solicitous of the wellbeing of Erna and her family: he sometimes even asked if she had remembered to set aside extra rations for her mother. Erna also heated bricks and placed them in our bedding to warm our frozen toes.

  After six weeks digging ditches in Baumgarten, we were told to pack up and assemble. Then we resumed our journey south, again on foot. The strategy behind our move from Stutthof to Baumgarten only became evident with the passing of time. We were in northern Poland, on the eastern side of the great Vistula River. The Germans must have hoped that the river would hold up the advance of the Red Army, and that the ditches we were digging would be a further barrier. But the German plan to survive by digging trenches in northern Poland was desperate; no army with the thirst for revenge that the Russians had developed over four years of fighting the Germans was likely to stop its pursuit.


  Our march south took us to a new camp outside the village of Malchof. Of the village itself, we saw little – a glimpse of homesteads across the fields; the belltower of a small church. Once again we were accommodated in tents, and once again Erna lived at the site of the kitchen, still enjoying the goodwill of Oberschütze Huppert. We were now well into September of 1944, and the nights and mornings were piercingly cold.

  By this time our work as ditch-diggers was visible in the skin of our hands, which were worn and calloused, and so ingrained with dirt that it seemed impossible that they might ever be clean again. We had become so habituated to the life we were compelled to live – to the labour, to the scarce food, to the cold – that we could no longer think of the end of the war.

  It must have been mid-November when we abandoned the camp at Malchof and marched further south to a camp outside the village of Fridendorf. The landscape remained the same: the pastures of the broad Vistula floodplain, farmhouses in the distance or sometimes closer. If civilians – Poles or ethnic Germans – ever saw us, they paid little attention. We were merely a part of the war, not in the least interesting. Wars had rolled over the plains of northern Poland for centuries.

  At Fridendorf I became ill with a respiratory infection. My temperature shot up to thirty-nine degrees and I was despatched to the camp’s hospital tent. It might sound odd, but our camp included a tent set aside for this purpose. The SS shot many prisoners who fell ill but they couldn’t kill everyone: they needed us to dig their ditches. And in fact there was more to it than this. A familiarity had developed between the slave masters and the slaves. Our relationships weren’t as anonymous as they had been in the early days; some humanity had crept in.

  It was early December 1944 when I went to hospital, the depths of winter. Ten patients filled the tent, most suffering from illnesses that had their source in poor nutrition and fatigue, or respiratory conditions like mine. I was happy to be in the hospital, for the weather outside was dreadful – snow and icy winds – and the ground as hard as granite. Within the tent, a wood stove kept the temperature bearable. We never got any medication: you either lived or died. Food was brought to the tent twice a day, and I benefitted from the extra rations that Erna sent from the field kitchen.

  In order to remain in the hospital, though, my temperature had to exceed ‘normal’, or thirty-seven degrees. After a short time my fever disappeared and it became necessary to resort to trickery. When a thermometer was placed under my armpit, I would wait until the medical attendant turned to another patient, then I’d remove it and rub it vigorously against my bedding until the silver thread rose. Then I’d put it back under my armpit. The attendant would return, study the thermometer and say, ‘Okay, you have to stay here for another day.’

  Another benefit of being ill and confined to bed was the opportunity it gave me to daydream with my friend Csopi, who was about my age. We spoke with longing of the day we would be free. We fantasised about our first ball gowns: what they would look like, the material they would be made from, the colour (green for me, pink for Csopi).

  There was a Lithuanian girl, younger than me and Csopi, who languished in a bunk below us. We never paid much attention to her; we were so involved with ourselves and our daydreams. One evening we heard her talking to herself in Yiddish, and we leaned over the side of our bunk to listen more closely. ‘The lice are leaving my head voluntarily,’ she said. ‘Look, they’re going. Leaving my hair. Leaving my body.’ Her eyes were wide open and staring, and she touched her hair with quick, picking motions. Csopi whispered to me: ‘She’s going to die.’

  In the morning my mother came to visit me, and she saw immediately that the poor girl was dead. ‘She has gone,’ she said. Crouching beside the small body, my mother released a deep sigh and spoke a few words of a viduy. It is a mitzvah to speak such a prayer before your own death, and a mitzvah, too, if you help another with a viduy.

  My mother resolved that this unhappy child should be given a proper burial. But the ground was frozen. She fetched a bucket of hot water from the kitchen, thawed a small patch of ground and scooped out a layer of earth with a strip of metal. Then she fetched more hot water, thawed another layer and excavated deeper. She continued until she was satisfied that the child could be decently laid to rest. My mother told me later that when she carried the girl’s body to the grave, her limbs were still supple, her flesh soft. And she weighed no more than a cat, she was so thin.

  It was in hospital that I discovered something that very few people in the world have ever known: absolute proof of the existence of a benevolent God. One morning I was told by a medical attendant that it was snowing heavily outside – a blizzard. I thought of my mother and Marta and Annushka slaving away with their tools in the bitter cold, and of all the other women, and I whispered this prayer to God: ‘If You are God and You hear this, make the SS cancel work for today. Make the SS see that people cannot labour in such conditions, please, I beg of You. If You make this happen, I will believe – I promise, I will believe in You!’ Then, within minutes of my prayer, Marta came to the hospital tent to tell me that the SS had cancelled the digging for that day. I was overjoyed, and my faith, which had faded a few years earlier under intellectual scrutiny, returned to me.

  Thus I was in hospital on my seventeenth birthday. One year earlier, at home in Nyírbátor, I had been pampered and given presents. This year the day was as special for me as my mother and sisters could make it. They came to visit me in the hospital tent. My mother gave me a gold coin, a Napoleon, that she had found sewn to a coat she’d been given at Auschwitz. The coin had been covered in fabric and made to resemble a button. My mother, sensing there was something underneath the fabric, had picked the cloth away and found the hidden treasure. I had nowhere to spend the coin and would have to conceal it all over again, but my mother wanted me to have something that day, as a token of her love and perhaps also as a promise of better times to come.

  After four and a half weeks, my phoney fever had run its course and I was sent back to join the slave army. Snow lay thick on the ground, and the wind was torture. I got ready to go with my mother and Marta and Annushka to the site of the digging. It was the nineteenth of January, 1945, a Friday.

  That morning, the ‘head girls’ chosen by the SS to carry out various tasks hurried around saying that the guards wanted us to assemble immediately: we would be leaving the camp. No reason was given for the evacuation. We hurried to assemble, speculating what it might mean. The Russians are coming … Germany has been defeated … We are all to be killed and buried … We are going to Germany …

  As it turned out, one of the reasons for the assembly was to weed out those too weak to travel; they would remain in the camp. A number of women and girls were suffering horribly from boils on their flesh, and from chilblains that had compounded into something that would have required surgical treatment. Others were so malnourished that they could walk no more than a few steps. The women left behind would be shot; we were in no doubt about that. Some accepted their approaching death with equanimity; others felt wretched that what little life was left in their bodies was to be snuffed out. And, of course, for many there was the torment of leaving family members behind. As it turned out, some of the stronger ones with ailing daughters or sisters decided to stay behind and die.

  My friend Csopi had a sister a year older than her, a timid and hesitant girl named Barbara. She was quite ill at the time of the assembly, and in pain from chilblains. She had made up her mind to stay at the camp and accept death. She begged her sister to remain with her. Csopi didn’t want to die and didn’t want to part from me, and somehow she persuaded Barbara to attempt the march to wherever we were going.

  Another young woman I admired was Dora Cohen, who came from Kaunas, in Lithuania. She was a woman of great warmth and had a luminous intelligence. We all loved Dora; even the SS appreciated that she was an extraordinary person, and respected her. On that Friday morning, when news of the evacuation spread
through the camp, Dora was ill – she had one of the many sicknesses that you can suffer when you are malnourished. So Dora was not amongst those who assembled for the evacuation, and we who knew her well were distraught.

  Some years later, in Israel, I was taking a bachelor friend of mine to meet a cousin I hoped he might marry. I saw a well-dressed woman coming towards me on the footpath, and I recognised her. I was thunderstruck. ‘Dora, dear God!’ I cried. We laughed and kissed, then we introduced our companions and chatted a while. ‘When we were left behind, we were waiting to die,’ Dora said. ‘But the guards did not stay – the SS abandoned us. And then a few days later the Russians came, and they treated us very well.’

  We were told to form a column, five abreast, for the evacuation of the camp. We had no possessions, of course, other than a bowl, a spoon and a lice-ridden blanket each. We wore our blankets for warmth, arranging them on our bodies like coats. We also took our most precious items: the challah cover that my mother had fashioned into a bag, and inside it the bread we’d saved. The guards did not give us food; clearly they had made no plans for that as the evacuation had been too sudden.

  It was winter in Poland, and the wind cut us to the bone as we marched. We wore wooden clogs, without socks. The snow hardened on the wood, creating a wedge, and often we slipped and fell onto the frozen ground. We helped one another up. ‘Girls, try to keep your feet,’ our mother said. ‘Keep walking.’ We all knew that the SS would haul us aside and shoot us if they saw us fall. Every so often I found the will to look over my shoulder at Csopi and Barbara. Walking was an ordeal for me, so I couldn’t imagine what Barbara was enduring with her chilblains.