The Counterfeit Countess by Elizabeth B. White & Joanna Sliwa

Author:Elizabeth B. White & Joanna Sliwa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2024-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN CAT AND MOUSE

On a sub-0° day in early January 1944, a ghastly parade coursed slowly along the streets from Lublin’s freight station to Majdanek. Hundreds of skeletons dressed in flimsy striped uniforms lurched through the snow in their wooden clogs, struggling to hold themselves upright in the unrelenting wind. Every few yards, a body fell, so the parade left a two-kilometer string of corpses in its wake. Three months earlier, these skeletons had been mostly young, healthy men from nearly every country that Germany occupied. Then, they had been forced to labor in the tunnels of the Buchenwald subcamp Dora, where the Germans planned to manufacture a new class of strategic missiles. Now, injuries, starvation, and disease had rendered these men worthless to the SS, which had packed them into unheated boxcars and sent them on the long journey to Majdanek without food or water. At the freight station, prisoners incapable of walking and the corpses of those who died en route were stacked on top of one another in trucks that delivered them to the camp.

This was just one of the transports that brought some 8,000 desperately ill and disabled prisoners to Majdanek in the first three months of 1944. Since the SS industries in Lublin were shut down following Operation Harvest Festival, Majdanek had lost its purpose as a reservoir of labor for the SS. In December 1943, it was designated a “convalescent camp,” in reality, a place where prisoners deemed useless were sent from other camps to die. Their maladies included end-stage TB, intestinal infections, kidney failure, shattered bones, and blindness brought on by the conditions of their forced labor. The men of this transport from Dora, many of them French, were placed in barracks in Field IV and left there without any medical treatment to subsist on the meager camp diet. After three weeks, those still alive were moved to the lice- and flea-infested barracks of the men’s infirmary. After three months, of the 250 young Frenchmen in the transport, only eight still survived.1

Soon after the Dora transport arrived, Janina received a coded message from Henryk Szcześniewski, an AK member imprisoned in Field III. The compound had received 1,500 prisoners from the sick transports who were desperately ill with dysentery, and one third of them had already died. He urged Janina to get medication to the compound as quickly as possible.

Janina immediately sent Lublin Polish Care Committee employees out to scour the city and nearby towns for antidysentery drugs, and by the next morning they had accumulated 1,000 doses. However, since there was no longer an infirmary in Field III, she could not obtain official authorization to deliver it there. Anxious to get the medicine to the compounds before that afternoon’s soup delivery, she called Petrak and claimed that, because of a shortage of trucks, she needed to deliver the soup in two transports. He agreed to issue her two passes to the protective custody camp that day. Janina’s AK colleagues in the care committee

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