The May Beetles Read online

  Many aboard the train were weakened by hunger, having spent a month at the Simapuszta camp, and a number were ill. Those who were hungry became hungrier still. We ate what we had in our backpacks, and shared what we could with those who had nothing. It might be thought that a type of solidarity would develop in such a situation as ours, but in reality it did not. Sympathy, yes, but not true solidarity. My mother’s great priority was to keep her children and her husband alive, so she fed us as best she could. It was the same for other mothers and families. There was no need to apologise for favouring one’s own family; everyone understood, I’m sure.

  For the sick and weak, a journey of three hours on their feet would have been an ordeal. This journey would last three days. All were exhausted by the ordeal, driven almost mad by the continual dread we felt, and by the endless clatter of the metal wheels.

  People must relieve themselves, whatever the situation. Our toilets were buckets. On the first day of that nightmare journey, we managed some modesty when we were forced to use the buckets. As we squatted, a family member would shield us from view with a coat. But crammed together in a cattle car as we were, we soon came to see that modesty would have to be dispensed with. Some took longer than others to accept this necessity, but by the second day, coats were no longer held up to screen those using the buckets. Initially I felt shame, but I soon came to accept that it was our common lot – that I was one amongst seventy, and all of us were compelled to overcome our embarrassment.

  Then the train came to a halt. In the course of the journey, I had registered other stops. Even in the near delirium of my exhaustion, I had known at times that we were not moving. Maybe the train drivers were changing over; maybe something was blocking the way. But the train always resumed its journey, slowly at first, then gathering speed until the clack-clack-clack of the wheels had returned to its regular, rapid interval. This time it was different.

  I heard the release of steam from the engine, then silence. The tiny ventilation opening high on one of the walls of the carriage showed that it was dark outside. I’d been keeping track of time in a ragged way, and estimated that it was around four in the morning. It was the middle of spring and the days were lengthening.

  ‘We’ve stopped,’ I whispered to my mother. ‘We have arrived.’

  My mother didn’t reply. I think all of us in the darkness of the carriage had sensed what I had, and shared the same feelings of anticipation and dread. Then I heard something like the clanking of a chain, very brief. After that, the silence grew more intense. I wanted to whisper to my mother again but I restrained myself.

  What I did not know, what I could not have known, was that we had come to the gates of hell.

  CHAPTER 12

  Auschwitz

  A dog barked, and this set off more barking, deep and booming, like that of hunting dogs. The barking alone frightened me, but soon we heard harsh voices as well, male German voices. Then came the rasp of metal on metal. The latch of the sliding door of our carriage was being unfastened. With great force, the door was hauled open.

  We were not the closest to the doorway and at first I couldn’t see the soldiers or the dogs, but people were spilling out of the carriage so quickly that it seemed only a very short time before I stood at the doorway with a flashlight beam in my eyes. I slid out of the carriage to the hard ground, already looking around in panic for my mother, my father, Erna and Marta. For a few moments I couldn’t see them, then I could and a great rush of relief surged through me. I thought: ‘Let me not be alone here, not alone, please God!’ I reached out and seized hold of my father’s arm, and held tight. Marta and Erna were with my mother, keeping very close.

  All around was chaos. The dogs strained at their leashes, barking incessantly; the soldiers – the first German soldiers I had ever seen – pushed and shoved and shouted orders. The force they used was excessive. In the half-light of dawn, I could see that the other carriages were emptying too; the crowds on the ground beside each carriage were merging together. Amongst the German soldiers, certain officers seemed to have the greater authority. With shouted commands and with gestures, they made it understood that we were to separate into groups of male and female. Our belongings were to be dropped in a heap at a certain place. Twins – Zwillinge – were to form a special line. My father was forced away from the rest of us.

  As we shuffled along, we were taken through some tall iron gates. Grim, three-storey brick buildings flanked the gates, and a barbed-wire fence, maybe six or seven metres high, enclosed the entire camp. We did not know the name of the place; indeed, we did not know what country we were in, except that it wasn’t Hungary, not after three days of travelling north.

  In the midst of our induction into Auschwitz on the twenty-sixth of May, while waiting for the next command, we were told in an urgent whisper by someone who had heard it from someone else that my mother’s father, Grandfather Ignac, had been lifted from his carriage on the train and set down on the ground. He was asking for water; he was dying. It was impossible for us to get to him. I couldn’t grieve then, but when it came, that postponed grief, it came with a terrible force.

  We were searching amongst all of these frightened faces for my mother’s sister-in-law, Klara, and her three daughters: Mira, who was twelve, Mimi, seven, and Kati, just three. Their nanny, Frieda, was also with them. We found them and I held Mira tight by the hand.

  A tall, handsome German officer standing opposite the newly arrived Jews gestured with a wave of his hand which of two lines each of us was to join. What it meant if you were assigned to this line or that, we didn’t know. The officer wore a blue-grey uniform, a long great-coat with epaulettes, and a peaked cap with a badge at the front. He seemed to me almost tranquil, perfectly satisfied in his task, with not a trace of malice. This man was Josef Mengele; one of his lines led to the dormitories, the other to the gas chambers.

  A certain logic governed Mengele’s decisions. Mothers with small children were directed to join one line; mothers with grown daughters – such as the four of us – were directed to the other. Small children could not labour in the way that would be required, and if mothers were forcibly separated from their small children, they would become wild with grief, and of no use. So it was better that the mothers went to their deaths with their children, so Mengele’s logic said. Likewise, he sent the infirm and the aged to immediate deaths. Marta, Erna, Mother and I were all saved by this logic.

  Mira was sent to our line; I was still holding her hand in mine. She wasn’t looking at me but at all those in the other, bigger group. She was looking for her mother and sisters and nanny. She saw them in that crowd of the doomed. She released my hand and ran to join her family. I never saw her again. She would have gone up in smoke half an hour later.

  I kept close to my mother and sisters, and also to Annushka, the pampered daughter of the well-off Mr Zeger, who ran the Bohny factory in Nyírbátor. We had been ordered by the SS officers to form ourselves into rows of five, and now that Mira was gone we needed another person to complete our group. My mother called to Annushka, who had been separated from her mother. ‘Annushka! Come here! Come quickly!’ The expression on Annushka’s face showed her confusion and distress.

  The SS officers made their will known by shouting commands and making emphatic gestures. They seized people and demonstrated with them what we were to do. What they now indicated was that we were to walk in a certain direction, keeping in our lines of five. We were urged along to a huge, wooden hall; inside, inmates with scissors were waiting for us. My instinct was to stop and gaze around, unwilling to go further until I understood what was happening. But I could not. The women waiting with scissors, row upon row of them, wore uniformly blank expressions. On the wooden floor at their feet were piles of human hair; it was evident what was about to be done to us.

  Each of the inmates stood by a chair. We new arrivals were bustled along to take a seat, and with no delay at all our hair was shorn from our heads. The woman who sheared
me barely spoke. She lifted my soft, long locks and severed them quickly, moving my head to the left and right, forcing my head forward when she was working at the nape of my neck. I saw my hair falling to the floor, but I didn’t mourn it. I was quite sure that I would be forced to endure worse experiences than this. I sat still, listening to the rapid clipping of hundreds of scissors, and to the shouted orders of the guards. ‘Get a move on! Faster!’

  Once shorn of our hair, we were ordered to undress. Hundreds of women and girls began to remove their clothing, in clear sight of the male SS guards. Sick with embarrassment, I tried to keep my gaze on the floor as I let my garments fall to my feet. I had lost sight of my mother and my sisters and was in a fever of anxiety. Inmates approached us with tanks of disinfectant and sprayed us where we stood, all over our bodies. In places where the scissors had caused wounds in the flesh of my scalp, the disinfectant stung badly. I heard other women and girls yelping as they too endured that stinging. And always the shouting of the guards.

  Our induction was not yet finished. Big bundles of clothing were dumped on the floor, and inmates distributed garments to us. (I later realised that these garments had been owned by earlier arrivals, who by now were likely dead.) No attempt was made to match our height with the size of the garments. I was given a dress of jersey material patterned with colourful stripes, ludicrous to look at and far too big for me; the hem reached my ankles. The deep neckline of the thing was ornamented with frills, making it even more grotesque. It was like something a clown would wear.

  We girls and women – shorn, disinfected, dressed in that absurd array of garments – were now permitted to locate the other members of our individual groups in a vast room at the front of the hall. How would we recognise each other? What could we rely on for identification? We had been reduced to the essence of ourselves, and we hoped we could discern the essence of those we were seeking. I picked out Marta from amongst the hundreds of faces; she was dressed in clothing as foolish as mine. And then Erna – terribly altered, and yet once I knew it was her, she seemed not altered at all. My mother found us, her three daughters, and from her mouth came a great howl of laughter that was also a heartbroken sob, drawn up from the depths of her being. Her three daughters – look at them! My mother’s sobbing laughter infected us, and we howled too, a sound we had never before made in our lives. Others began laughing and sobbing simultaneously in just the same way, and in our hundreds we poured out our tears, the women and girls of Nyírbátor and its district, newly shorn at Auschwitz.

  The guards didn’t intervene to quell this mass hysteria. Perhaps they had witnessed the same thing in the past, and knew that the mad laughter would abate, which eventually it did. The shouted German commands then resumed. We were nudged and prodded and urged from the hall into a huge yard surrounded by tall wire fences. We rushed about in the yard, everyone hoping to find relatives. The hot May sun burned our naked skulls. We had not been told that we could not weep or call out for water, but we knew somehow that we must not. Five or six SS officers patrolled the perimeter of this crowd of hundreds, maybe even more than a thousand people. Some had dogs on leashes.

  The rushing about in the yard died down; those who’d hoped to find sisters, aunts, nieces had either succeeded or accepted disappointment. I looked at my mother’s face, below her bare skull. I was already becoming used to her new appearance. I saw the distress in her eyes but I also saw calm determination. I wasn’t able to think, with the supreme conviction of times past, ‘My mother will keep me from harm, always,’ and yet I still held tight to the vestiges of that belief. Even in her ill-fitting attire, she radiated confidence.

  At a little distance from where I stood in this dense crowd of frightened women and girls, a commotion had broken out – cries and shouts, wailing female voices. I stood on my tiptoes to see, but remained puzzled. My mother raised herself up as high as she could. ‘It’s the men,’ she said, with a catch in her voice. ‘They’re bringing the men through.’

  I pushed myself to the front of the crowd of women, pleading with God for a sight of my father. Behind the barbed wire were the men, all wearing striped, loose-fitting prison garments. And I saw him, my father in the striped pyjamas, on his face the dogged expression of a man who is suffering and who expects more to come. He was looking around, as all the men were, for a glimpse of a wife or daughter in the bizarrely dressed mass of shaven-headed women.

  I called out to him: ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ He didn’t turn his head. I screamed this time, ‘Daddy!’ and thrust my face towards him, only a couple of metres away. ‘Daddy! Please! It’s Baba!’ This time he looked at me, but without recognition. I was, after all, so altered from the last time he’d seen me, hours earlier. I called with all the force of my lungs, ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ and something in my voice, something in the imploring look on my face, pierced his fear and despair and he saw that it was me.

  For a few seconds he stared at me, and what was at first horror in his gaze – horror at the way I had been transformed into a rag-clad clown – changed to fatherly love and concern. Then he buried his face in his hands, and his shoulders shook with the rigour of his sobbing.

  The sight of my father in his striped prison garb, his hands covering his face, was to be the last I had of him.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Feather Factory

  Some amongst us guessed that we were in Poland. I had never before left Hungary, or not properly; in the days of freedom, I had travelled by train far enough north to have entered what had once been Slovakian territory. But it hardly mattered whether we were in Poland or Germany or any other country with a name we knew.

  Beyond the tall wire fences lay what could have been farmland, although the paddocks were neither cultivated nor grazed. If this was Poland, it was rural Poland. The air, at least, should have smelt wholesome, but it was foul. It wasn’t long before the inmates who had been at Auschwitz longer than us told us that those whom Mengele had sent to the other line were now being cremated. ‘Were they shot?’ someone asked. The answer was no: they were gassed to death. We were told this in a matter-of-fact way; the inmates, some of whom had been here for years, the ‘block elders’, were unsentimental. They had become seasoned witnesses to mass murder.

  Those who had arrived in the same train with us, and who had seen people they loved being sent to the other line by Mengele, refused to believe what the inmates told us. But in time they came to believe it, just as I accepted that Mira, Mimi, little Kati and Klara, their mother, were dead and gone.

  We were crammed into buildings that were designed to accommodate multitudes. Timber platforms – intended as bunks – ran down each side of a walkway of cement and bare earth that ran the full length of the building. Each platform had three levels and was about three metres wide; thirty-six people would sleep on each side. There was a gap of a metre or so between the sets of platforms, so that we could crawl onto the sleeping surface from either end. We huddled tightly together, not only through necessity but also for the sake of warmth. If you ended up in the middle of a row of twelve bodies, you faced a predicament if you needed to get to the latrines. One thousand, two-hundred and fifty women and girls were housed in each of these barn-like sheds.

  When I first saw the interior of these sheds, and understood how closely we were to be packed in, I thought, ‘No, this isn’t possible.’ Others, by their expressions, were thinking the same thing. Then I recalled the conditions in the cattle wagons that had brought us here and I knew that there was no mistake; what we would endure in the sheds was perfectly consistent with conditions on the train.

  A human being, especially one who has known comfort and kindness in the past, finds it a difficult thing to accept that other human beings can be blind to suffering. If you are despised and abused, it is natural to ask yourself why. Had I ever treated anyone in the way they were treating me? Had I ever left myself open to revenge? I had not. And yet my mother and sisters and I, and the hundreds of other women in the shed, accepted wha
t was done to us promptly enough. For reasons that no Jew has ever properly comprehended, we were despised. We accepted it.

  The sheds were much bigger than an animal barn, and more crowded. Up high, near the gables, some windows were visible. Although dirty, these let in a dingy light during the day. Wooden posts rose from the floor, supporting the roof. Along the centre of the walkway dividing the platforms ran a low brick wall, the height of a seat. What function this served I never knew.

  The shed was fitted with broad doors at one end, and these were thrown open during the day. When evening came the building was filled with the chatter of more than a thousand women and girls, subdued talk which lasted no longer than it took us to crawl onto our platforms and settle closely together. A block elder would sometimes stalk up and down the walkway while we settled. There were not so many guards, but we didn’t even fantasise about running away. Auschwitz was a prison of a particularly vile sort, but beyond the tall, electrified wire fences was the much vaster prison of Poland. There was no escape. (It was said, however, that Jews who were sent to work outside the wire would occasionally find a way to disappear into the forest.)

  Usually I slept on my platform with my body pressing against that of my mother and sisters. Sometimes I was next to other women. All social distinctions had been annihilated. The equality of the oppressed made us kind to each other. We ceased to bother about the fine discriminations people make when they live in comfort.