A Time to Speak by Helen Lewis

Author:Helen Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstaff Press Ltd
Published: 2011-11-21T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

We arrived from Terezín on 20 May 1944. Until that day, we knew nothing of extermination camps or of gas chambers. We had been told that we were going to a labour camp. After the trauma of discovering the nature of the place, we came to realise that by some curious paradox it was not the living conditions that were the worst aspect of Birkenau, but that life itself was a nightmare.

In the shock of the first hour it was a relief to see a familiar face, to look into a pair of eyes that expressed the same stunned disbelief one felt oneself. Mitzi was a big strong girl with a practical streak and a sound mind, without a trace of hysteria. To see her in a state of profound shock was frightening, but also consoling. We had liked each other before, and we became friends in those first hours and days, when the reality of the place and our roles in it began to sink in.

One such occasion was when she and I stood together in line for the tattooing ceremony. Before Auschwitz, I had never seen anybody wearing a tattoo. I associated them in my mind with the heroic tales of the braves in The Last of the Mohicans. The actual tattooing was not painful, but there was a dreadful finality in the act. We also had to sign a curious document which stated that we were to be held in Birkenau for an undisclosed period of time, after which we were to undergo Sonderbehandlung – special treatment – by order of the Reichsführer.

Amid the soul-destroying restrictions and deprivations of daily life in Terezín, I had thought of home in Prague, even under German occupation, as a lost paradise. Now I found myself remembering the ghetto’s ugliness with something like the same nostalgia. In Terezín, on the ramparts and in the hospital garden, there had been grass and even a few flowers. Trees bore leaves, or were bare, according to the seasons, and birds sang and called to each other. Here nature had died, alongside the people. The birds had flown from the all-pervading black smoke of the crematoria and their departure had left a silence that was like a scream. In Terezín people still had the recognisable features and characteristics of their former individual existence. Here, the inmates who had arrived the previous December had acquired a uniformity of thought and word, as if they had all been marked by the same inexplicable experience. They displayed a cruel, almost sadistic, urge to initiate us newcomers into the dark secrets of Birkenau, and to describe to us what lay ahead. The transformation that even the most gentle among them had undergone was frightening.

A short time after our arrival Paul and I were walking along the Lagerstrasse when we heard our names called out. It was our young friend Erwin. He looked dapper in an immaculately ironed prison uniform and wore his cap at a rakish angle. He greeted us with immense pleasure, as if we were meeting at a holiday resort.

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