A Brilliant Life by Rachelle Unreich

Author:Rachelle Unreich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty

Mira had arrived at Auschwitz II-Birkenau three months earlier. With Allied armies starting to close in on the concentration camps, the Nazis were frantically trying to move their prisoners to forced labour camps within Germany.

She left Auschwitz nine days before the Red Army arrived, on 18 January 1945. Two days prior, the prisoners learned that the storerooms would be packed up, the warehouses set on fire. Mira was among those prisoners who suddenly had access to the food pantries and clothing storage facilities.

From the kitchen, she took a loaf of bread and some cheese. Other prisoners latched onto the things they had been deprived of for so long: large cans of meat, as well as heavy jars of fruit conserves. But Mira thought about what she would be capable of carrying in her weakened condition, and also considered which foodstuffs would not spoil.

When she reached the clothing storeroom, Mira saw prisoners grabbing new uniforms because theirs were worn and torn. But Mira’s was not. She looked around the room for something else, and immediately saw what she wanted: a pair of half-boots. Something her father used to say reverberated in her head. Since Spišská Stará Ves had always been so snowy and cold in winter, Dolfie had some sage advice. ‘Even when it is cold outside, if your feet are warm and dry, you will be all right and you won’t feel the cold so much.’ That was Mira’s thinking when she grabbed the shoes; she also helped herself to a coat to act as extra padding over her thin uniform.

She knew they would be travelling on foot. What she did not realise was that this walk would later be called a death march, dubbed thus because of how many people died while walking. Prisoners were forced to travel extremely long distances with little sustenance, while exposed to the freezing cold. If they could not keep up, or tried to run away, they were shot. They were shot even if all they wanted was to rest for a few minutes. Of the nearly sixty thousand prisoners – mainly Jewish – who left on death marches from Auschwitz, between nine and fifteen thousand would meet their end along the way.

* * *

The marches out of Auschwitz took place over a period of five days. Mira was among the group of women who left on 18 January. It was the middle of winter, and the temperature dropped to icy lows, plummeting to minus 20 degrees Celsius. The snow fell incessantly and the ground was wet with slush. To explain how cold it was would be to describe the way a person feels when they slip into ice water and then emerge – sodden, freezing, miserable. Imagine these withered women, so skinny that their bones looked ready to burst from beneath their skin, their collar bones protruding. Then imagine them so cold that the chill assaulted them like an enemy, vicious and strategic. It was a cold they could not stop thinking about, a cold that conspired to undo them.

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