A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (25 page)
Read A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz Online
Authors: Goran Rosenberg
Only the situations and poses change.
Sima assisting at the examination of a naked boy on a chair, in front of a woman in white, the boy looking into the camera.
Sima with a young girl getting treatment in a dentist’s chair, flanked by two women in white, the girl’s face in profile, gently held still by two hands.
Sima at a desk, against the bright light from a window, reflections from sheets of paper and the desktop softly lighting her face, and through the overexposed windowpane a searching look from a boy whose nose scarcely reaches the windowsill. A photographer with a camera is hardly an everyday sight in the ghetto.
Sima standing behind two children, a boy and a girl, her hands on their shoulders, a cigarette in her right hand. The boy is said to be my cousin Obadja. Also in the picture are two older boys with big Stars of David sewn on the right lapels of their skimpy jackets.
One last photograph of a woman, very blurred, and in fact not of Sima but of the woman who is to be my mother. It’s taken in the summer of 1945 in the Jewish cemetery in the city of Słupsk,
which until recently was a German city called Stolp, and where the Jewish cemetery was filled mainly with men who had given their lives for
Das Vaterland
in the First World War. In the last week of June 1945, a month and a half after the German surrender, Sima Staw, born August 2, 1920, is buried here. In the blurred photo, the woman who is to be my mother is sitting at her grave.
I’m amazed that the Nazis have left any part of the cemetery untouched (the oldest part is confiscated by the Gestapo in 1942, who turn the chapel of rest into accommodations for civilian forced labor), that they have not taken the opportunity to obliterate the traces of those already dead as well.
In the blurry picture, row upon row of tall gravestones.
When, much later, my sister Lilian tries to find Sima’s grave, there’s no grave to be found. In the 1970s, the Jewish cemetery in Słupsk is razed to the ground. The gravestones are turned into fragments and building material, the cemetery into something else.
On the ramp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Staw sisters are categorized as not fully processed human reserves and a few days
later transported onward to Stutthof, a concentration camp near Danzig on the Baltic coast. In August and September 1944, 11,464 not fully processed prisoners are transported from Auschwitz to Stutthof (Polish researchers have unearthed the Germans’ lists and counted up the numbers), some 7,000 of them women from the liquidated ghetto in Łódź. The full processing in Stutthof costs most of them their lives. Stutthof too is surrounded by an archipelago of slave camps, but most of the prisoners from Łódź via Auschwitz die of starvation and sickness in the main camp. It also has a primitive gas chamber, about 175 cubic feet in size (still standing), in which a thousand or more people, most of them women, are murdered with Zyklon B between August and November 1944. Others are murdered in a railroad car on a siding leading to the crematorium. Others are murdered by phenol injection or shot in the back of the head in the crematorium building itself. As the Eastern Front draws nearer, the Stutthof slave labor camps are evacuated, and eventually the main camp as well. Of the 15,000 who are evacuated, 3,000 survive. On January 31, 1945, between 3,000 and 4,000 prisoners from Stutthof are herded onto the beach near Palmnicken (today Yantarny in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad) and driven into the sea. Fifteen survive.
No one is intended to survive the full processing in Stutthof.
Bronka doesn’t survive Stutthof. She dies from typhus just a few weeks after her arrival from Auschwitz. Bluma, Sima, and Hala survive until the evacuations in February–March 1945. At the selection of prisoners for evacuation, Hala’s sick with typhus and can hardly stand on her feet, still less march on them. In Stutthof, typhus is a method of killing, or a reason for killing by other means.
Yet Hala marches all the same, or rather is carried by her sisters. The prisoners walk in a column, five abreast. Anyone
who can’t keep up or falls out of the ranks is shot dead. Many can’t keep up and fall out of the ranks. Reduced ranks are filled from behind. I picture Bluma and Sima in the middle of a row with Hala between them. None of them remembers how long the march goes on. All of them remember the snow and the cold, and the dread that every night will be their last, but none of them remembers how many days and nights pass before the last night comes. On the last night, the prisoners are herded into a barn. It’s rumored that the Germans are going to burn the barn down and them with it. The front is close now, and no one believes the Germans intend to leave anyone alive behind.
On the last night, liberation is as unexpected as it is uneventful. In the morning, the SS guards are gone. Within an hour or two, a Red Army unit arrives and on that day, or maybe on the day after—nobody really remembers—the prisoners are taken from Stutthof to a military camp near Słupsk.
As the war is not yet over, the Staw sisters remain in Słupsk, where they come under the protection of a Soviet major by the name of Klebanov. Women on their own, in a town controlled by young men desensitized by war, are in need of protection, no doubt about that. Why Major Klebanov takes them under his wing, equips them with Soviet uniforms, and has them work for the Red Army isn’t clear to me. Though not less clear, really, than why there are people who behave humanely even in the most inhumane of circumstances. The sisters’ work consists of sorting and packing drugs from a German pharmaceutical factory in Słupsk for shipment to the Soviet Union. Almost everything of value in Słupsk is to be sorted and packed for shipment to the Soviet Union, so there’s plenty to keep them busy until the end of the war in May.
In June 1945, Bluma goes to Łódź to see whether there’s anything or anyone to go back to.
A week after Bluma sets off, Sima falls ill. Some kind of poisoning. Her skin turns yellow. It all happens very fast. By the time Bluma receives the telegram from Hala saying Sima’s ill, Sima is dead.
Sima dies in a German hospital, which for Hala is a sufficient cause of death.
Hala Staw is not yet twenty when she, alone, buries her sister in the Jewish cemetery in Słupsk.
Though not all alone. Someone takes that blurred photo by the grave. Perhaps someone also takes her arm as she rises to go on. A few weeks later, Bluma takes her to Łódź. There’s no longer anything or anyone to go back to, but Bluma’s eleven years older and has an enterprising spirit, and soon she has found a way for them both to support themselves, at a firm dealing in surplus textiles. On the firm’s letterhead is printed “Textile and fancy goods wholesaler Łódź Drapery, B. Staw, 56 Pietrowska, Łódź—Tel. 122-84.”
The business does quite well, and new bonds are being forged, and it’s no longer a matter of course for either of them to leave Łódź and continue their journey to somewhere else.
On January 15, 1946, David Rosenberg sends a jubilant letter in duplicate from Furudal to Hala at two different addresses. The letter sent to Łódź reaches its recipient in just a few days.
Hala’s reply, which takes six weeks to get to Alingsås, is reserved in its tone, with no pet names, no terms of endearment,
no promises, no dreams, nothing that emotionally corresponds to the jubilant lines in the letter of January 15. And when the letter from Łódź finally reaches Alingsås, there are so many questions to be asked in return:
Why do you write so little about yourself, I know absolutely nothing. I do understand how hard it is to put these things down on paper. But I implore you to write it all down. What tragedy have you had to go through? Write to me about it all. Tell me everything, I beg you again.
And in the next letter:
Why do you write so little, it tells me nothing at all about how you really are. You told me you were going somewhere, but not where, and nothing about how you lost Sima (just that it was tragic). I’m begging you as hard as I can to write me a long letter about everything, about what happened to all of you after we got separated in Auschwitz.
In Hala’s next letter from Łódź, sent in March, the reticence is explained:
My beloved Dawidek!
Don’t be surprised at such a start to my letter. After yours of March 7, 1946, I feel I can safely express myself that way. Please don’t think your words aroused any other sort of feeling in me, my feelings were the same as yours.
The letter of January 18 was the first one I sent to you, before I even knew your address. Dawidek, it was no mistake. I was very careful with my words, in case … I didn’t want to hurt you, but neither did I want to risk my position as a woman.
Anyway, I wasn’t sure until the moment I got your letter, which
reawakened some of my old feelings. And now perhaps you understand me?
So if everything could work out the way we’ve been thinking it would be wonderful, Dawidek!
You must now write a very affectionate letter where you sort of hint that I’m your wife, then perhaps I can take it to the Consulate.
On March 27, Hala receives a letter from Alingsås. It says:
You can’t imagine how much I was longing for your letter. I had reckoned on it coming much sooner, but obviously the postal service isn’t working normally yet over there. Every day after work I hurried home (so to speak), thinking to myself that there might be a letter from Hala waiting. I didn’t know what could have happened, why there was no word from you. Hadn’t my letter got through to you? Had you moved to a different place?
Hala replies from Łódź on April 8:
I’m ready to risk everything to be with you.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to come to you. As I told you, it’s difficult for a young girl like me to use one of the illegal routes. I’ve already explained the reasons. It’s not just cowardice.
I have a sister, friends, acquaintances, but still no peace of mind. I feel dreadfully lonely.
Dawidek! Can you imagine the moment when we meet? The time seems like a century to me.
Don’t worry! Everything will work out. Look on the bright side.
Everything does work out in the end, but not in accordance with any of their plans. Not the plan for Hala to go to Gdansk or Gdynia to get smuggled on board a ship to Sweden. Nor the plan for David to join the crew of a ship to Poland and smuggle Hala
aboard. Nor the plan to find a Swedish citizen who will stand surety of ten thousand kronor for Hala.
Everything works out by dint of two lies.
She gets herself from Poland to Germany as a Polish citizen of German ethnic origins, and she gets herself from Germany to Sweden as Hella Cwaighaft.
Perhaps no more needs to be said about how the woman who is to be my mother comes into the picture.
Bertil drags his left leg along after him. It’s withered and stunted and a few inches shorter than his other leg and firmly encased in a metal and leather splint. Without the splint, Bertil wouldn’t be able to walk, at least not without crutches. As it is, he gets along by twitching his left hip to propel his left leg forward to a point even with his right and then supporting himself on the splint as he throws his right leg forward. His body lurches wildly with each step. Forward and back. Up and down. The cage around his left leg rattles and squeaks.