Always, I wanted to live.
In Camps 1 and 2, where the Jews were whose work made Sobibor function, there were few who did not wish to live. Only twice do I remember that a prisoner ran at the wire and started to climb, in the certain knowledge that the Ukrainians in the guard tower would shoot and kill. I learned that life is the flame of a candle. Whatever the gale of misery, we shelter it and try to protect it. Those who knew their fate, understood that they were condemned, would — not often — fight the guards as they were herded from the train. They would be shot on the platform or clubbed, then dragged down the Tube. Most of those close to death spent their last minutes in prayer.
For us, in Camps 1 and 2, however awful the experiences, there was little thought of death as a release. Few believed liberty came with it. To survive, to wake at first light the next morning, was the goal. Some claimed it was their duty to survive in the hope they would become a witness to the atrocity of Sobibor. For most it was the simple glory of breathing that next morning, the freshness of the air, the scent of the pines, and forgetting the foulness of the smoke from the burning pits.
There was a brothel for the Ukrainian guards outside the perimeter. The girls there, at first, were not Jews but prostitutes from Lublin. I heard it said that they were ugly, old, diseased … It was even said that a farmer from Zlobec sent his twelve-year-old daughter there for money because the Ukrainians wanted younger girls.
There were no prostitutes from Lublin for the SS, the Germans. They used Jewesses. For a month after I had learned this I waited for it to be my turn to be taken to the Forester House, which the Germans called the Swallow’s Nest. I knew I would be taken one evening. In the days of waiting, I could have killed myself. I could have eaten glass, I could have spat in the face of an officer and been beaten to death, I could have run at the wire and been shot. Instead I waited.
Three days before I was taken, I knew it would be soon. The Germans relied on the capos to bring Jewish girls to the SS house. The capo who supervised us in the sewing room came and stood behind me. She reached over my shoulder and held my breast. Her fingers seemed to weigh it, as if it were fruit in the Wlodawa market, and then she reached lower, poked at my stomach as if to learn whether I was slim under the loose smock I wore. I endured, after that, three days of waiting because I wanted to live.
It was the late afternoon, a Friday. It was February. It was cold. We were in the barracks. I was on my bunk when the capo came for me. She stood in the door, pointed to me and beckoned. In the month since I had known about the Forester House, I had seen six Jewesses taken out of our camp, and only one had returned. I did not think about five, but of one. She sat, always alone, in a corner of the compound, or apart from the rest of us at a bench in the workshop, or she lay on her bunk hunched up and cried without sound. She did not talk of it.
As she took me out into the dark and the night chill, towards the lights of the internal fence and the gate, the capo said to me, If you want to see the light of the morning, be alive. Don’t fight them but appear to enjoy it.’
There was music in their house, from a gramophone. The capo escorted me through the gate into their compound, and in through the back entrance to their house. I heard the music, very loud, and their shouting. In the kitchen I was told to strip by the capo, then a tin bath was produced from a cupboard. I stood in it and she poured water over me from a jug. I was soaped, then dried with a towel. I was given underclothes with French labels, and I thought they had belonged to a lady who had been brought from France in the Pullman cars, who had been innocent of the purpose of Sobibor and had worn her best underwear and silk stockings for the journey to her ‘new home in the east’. The clothes would have been left in a neat little pile, then the lady would have run down the Tube, thinking of the cleansing shower ahead and the chance to dress again. I wore the brassiere, the knickers, the suspender belt and the silk stockings of the dead. My hair was smoothed, and perfume — I was disgusted by it — squirted over me. The capo took me to the door, and said, ‘Show you enjoy it and please them. Then you may live. Show you hate it, and you will die. You decide.’ She opened the door, pushed me through it, and I heard it slam behind me. A wall of noise, their music and shouting hit me, and all their eyes were on me.
They wanted me to dance. I wasn’t a whore, I was a girl whose father repaired clocks in the town of Wlodawa. I didn’t know how to dance other than to the folk music of our people. They clapped to the beat, and I tried to dance. I’m not ashamed that I tried, because it was for survival.
They were drunk.
They weren’t young — not as old as my father but far older than I was.
Perhaps I didn’t dance well enough. Perhaps it was the urge in them.
I was pushed from behind and tripped from the side.
I was on the carpet. The underclothes were torn off me. One made a bandanna of a silk stocking, and I recognized him as being in charge of Ukrainian guards. I was naked. But my mother and my grandmother had been naked when they had been taken down the Tube, and they had not had the chance to live. I could accept my nakedness, and their eyes on me, as the price paid.
I bled when it started. The first grunted and pushed, swore and heaved. He had taken off none of his uniform, had only unbuttoned his trousers, and his boots forced apart my ankles. They would have seen the blood, and they cheered. Glasses were thrown into the fire, and I screamed at the pain, which excited them still more. The first hadn’t finished when he was pulled off, because others wanted to feel my blood. By the third, I moved. I did it to live. I let my hips rise when they thrust and drop when they withdrew. One was sick on me, and it was wiped away with their handkerchiefs. They all did it to me, except the senior officer. All — except SS Scharführer Helmut Schwarz, who usually commanded and supervised the men’s work parties outside the compound — penetrated me, and then they came round a second time. I was on the carpet till they staggered back from me, exhausted and limp.
He took me upstairs. They cheered Scharführer Schwarz when he led me out through the door. He took me to his room and hung a dressing-gown over my shoulders. I understood. There was a photograph of his family beside his bed. A father in full uniform stood and his hand rested on the shoulder of a girl, his daughter, and a mother gazed proudly at her man and her growing child. He thought me like his daughter. He sat on the bed and held my hand. He was near to tears, and if I had had a knife I could have slit his throat, but then I would not have lived.
I became his. I was the property of Scharführer Helmut Schwarz, and in his room I acted the part of his daughter and the bastard stroked me each time I was brought to him. Did not come into me, but stroked me, and I would pant and groan as if I took pleasure from him. There was danger. An SS man, Groth, fell in love with a Jewish girl, and softened in his attitude towards us — animals, a subhuman species — and when he was on leave the girl was taken down the Tube and shot. Other girls, Austrian Jewesses called Ruth and Gisela, who had been actresses in Vienna and were far more beautiful than I, were taken to the Forester House, then shot the next morning. I did not know if I would live.
He went on leave, went back to Munich to see his wife and stroke his daughter. The women helped me. I had no protection. They put ash on my face so that I looked older. I shuffled with bent shoulders so that my bosom was hidden. New girls came, younger girls, and were taken to the Forester Hut, but I never went back. I was forgotten, and I lived.