Suddenly, the door opened. We all jumped.
In walked a woman I didn’t recognize. She looked terrible. Her features were distorted by malnutrition. Her face was little more than a skull covered in parchment-thin skin. Her eyes had retreated into their sockets. But her body was puffy. Starvation did that to a person. It made their flesh swell. Tufts of dark brown hair sprouted from beneath a piece of cloth fashioned into a scarf in a futile attempt to seal in some warmth.
The woman looked at me.
“Tola!” she exclaimed. “There you are, my child!”
Relief swept over her face. Her taut cheek muscles relaxed, and her eyes sparkled. The voice was weak but familiar. So were her sad green eyes, as well as her faint smile. I stood up on the bricks, confused. She looked more like a scarecrow than a human being. She sounded like my mama, but was it really her?
And what was she doing in my barrack? She was supposed to be in the women’s section. I had been taken away from her five months earlier in the high summer after I fell sick. I had heard her voice close by when we walked to the gas chamber and when we walked back again. But I hadn’t seen her. In fact, I hadn’t seen Mama’s face for so long that I had forgotten what she looked like. I had become accustomed to not having a mother or father. I had forgotten that I had anybody on this earth. I thought I was all alone. But now maybe I wasn’t? I was confused. The woman noticed my hesitation.
“Tola, it’s me. Mama”, she said, with a bigger smile.
I was incredulous.
Is that really my mama? I wondered.
I jumped down from the bricks and ran up to her. I felt a smile spread across my face from ear to ear. It was the first real happiness I had experienced in months.
She crouched down, held my face and looked me straight in the eyes. Then she wrapped her arms around me and kissed me. I hugged her back as tightly as I could. She smelled like my mama. It truly was my beautiful mama. Prisoner A-27791. My mama.
“Listen to me, Tola. They are rounding up people to walk to Germany. All the way to Germany, hundreds of miles away”, said Mama. “Look at me. I’m going to be shot. I’m going to die. I can’t walk. Look at my feet”. She pointed downward.
Mama wasn’t wearing shoes. Her feet were swathed in rags. They looked as though they had been bandaged in a hurry. The undersides were saturated, and moisture was leeching upward. Chafed red from the cold, Mama’s calves and ankles were swollen, a sure sign of starvation. The camp was full of scarecrows and skeletons.
“Maybe you will make it. You might survive the march. But this is not a world for children. I don’t want you to survive alone. So let’s try to hide. There’s a chance we can survive together. And if we die, we’ll die here together. Will you come with me?”
“Yes, Mama. Yes, I will”, I replied.
Ever since I was born, I had inhabited a world where being Jewish meant you were destined to die. It was perfectly normal to be asked to die. All Jewish children died. And I always did what Mama said. Mama always told me the truth. I trusted Mama. I didn’t trust anyone else. Mama told me the truth because knowing the truth could save my life. That’s what Mama said. And she repeated it. In the ghetto. In the labor camp. In the cattle car. And before we were separated in the concentration camp.
Although she had spoken of dying together, Mama lifted my spirits by saying we had a chance of living, if I followed her instructions. As always, she was being truthful. Other parents might have tried to hide the truth in such circumstances. Not my mama. She believed that information was power, and it could save my life.
For months I had been alone. There had been no one to protect me. I always thought I would die alone. Whatever death was. But now I had someone who cared for me. I would do whatever Mama asked. A wave of relief washed over me as I realized I was no longer alone. Mama said nothing. She took me by the hand and led me out of the barrack block.
We were hit by the smell of burning. The sound of wood crackling, spitting. Was it a huge log fire? More than anything, I was desperate for any kind of warmth to unfreeze my body. But then Mama squeezed my hand and I forgot about the cold. The sky was full of smoke. The fire was close. It was loud and made me nervous. Woodsmoke mixed with other smells. Something oily. The black stuff they put on roads and roofs. And there was something else. The rotten smell of garbage being burned. Tons of it.
Mama’s head jerked left and right and back again as she looked for potential trouble. Hand in hand, we walked briskly through the snow in silence. She seemed to know where she was going. I knew I had to be as quiet as possible. Making a noise could get you killed. Mama didn’t need to say anything. Her urgency transmitted itself to me. I was electrified by the adventure. My hunger pangs vanished. Mama’s love made me feel safe and secure. The rags on her feet squelched with every step. I didn’t register the snow seeping through my thin white lace-up shoes straight to my sockless feet. I only felt the warmth of Mama’s hand and her love coursing through my very being.
I couldn’t quite believe what my eyes were seeing. For the first time ever, there were no SS troops or their German stooges blocking our path. Briefly, as we crossed gaps between the buildings, I caught glimpses in the distance of soldiers in trench coats, corralling prisoners and preparing for the march to Germany. The Nazis seemed to be cursing and screaming orders.
I was almost exactly a year older than the war. I had never known freedom. My survival depended on my ability to judge the mood of my captors. Despite their brutality, I knew that ordinarily the Germans were terrifyingly composed. This morning they had been verging on hysteria and fired point-blank at wretches who were too slow to obey.
I didn’t wince in the face of murder. I had witnessed violent death for as long as I could recall. I had learned to suppress my emotions. What scared me were the German shepherds and their savage, frothing jaws. Straining at the leashes of their handlers, those awful dogs were bigger than I was. When Mama and I had arrived at the platform and got down from the cattle car back in the summer, I had seen the dogs chasing people along the rail tracks in the direction of the chimneys and the smoke.
I never looked in the eyes of the SS, the Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s elite military corps, which contained the Third Reich’s most fanatical Nazis. I had managed to avoid their fury for more than half a year. Mama had taught me welclass="underline" “Whenever you pass a German, always look down or look away. Never catch their gaze. Never ever look them in the eye. They hate it. It makes them angry, and they’ll lash out. They might even kill you”.
I saw their black riding breeches, the smart, highly polished boots — those SS jackboots that came up to the knees. I saw their swagger sticks, the daggers hanging from their belts, their death’s-head symbols and trigger fingers. I looked as far as their shoulders and their epaulets. I might have seen an Iron Cross on a chest or around a neck. I thought this was the uniform worn by all the non-Jewish men on earth. But I never looked at their faces. I had, however, stared into the eyes of the dogs. And they stared right back. They slobbered and drooled and snarled and growled and flexed the sinews in their necks. The dogs wanted to sink their teeth into my flesh and rip me to pieces.
Mama gripped my hand and made sure we stayed close to the low wooden buildings. We were on the northwestern side of the extermination camp, better known as Birkenau, which was formally part of the Auschwitz complex. On our right, we had cover from buildings that comprised the male infirmary. On our left were row upon row of barrack blocks separating them from the camp’s entrance gate — the Gate of Death — where prisoners were gathering for the exodus. As stealthily as she could, Mama shepherded me southward. We headed toward the railway line that had brought us to Birkenau six months earlier.