The Daughter of Auschwitz by Tova Friedman

Author:Tova Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2022-07-17T18:14:29+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

REFUSING TO CRY

Birkenau extermination camp,

German-occupied Southern Poland.

Summer 1944

Age 5

Those first few days in Birkenau were simply terrifying. Although my solitary time in the darkness in Starachowice had been frightening, it was certainly not as intimidating. At least there I had been on my own and was spared close contact with the SS and other enforcers; here, I was exposed to them all the time. Mama was close at hand and doing her best to protect me, but I was convinced that they were constantly watching me. All of them. There was no hiding place. And the industrial scale of the extermination camp, the noise it generated, the frequent arrival of trains hauling cattle cars on the conveyor belt of death were overwhelming. I felt that I could be shot at any moment.

The haunted looks of my fellow prisoners, their cowering demeanor and the overriding sense of terror corroded my spirit. Fear is a virus that is contagious, infecting virtually everyone it touches. Immunity is difficult, if not impossible to acquire.

Although I was only five years old, I could detect that the women all around me had abandoned any semblance of optimism. While I couldn’t possibly have known it then, I know now that Mama and I arrived in Birkenau at a time of maximum tension. Having completed the annihilation of more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews, the SS were about to liquidate the Zigeunerfamilienlager—the Gypsy family camp in Birkenau.

The mass murder of the Gypsies, as the Roma and Sinti people were called back then, had been two months in the planning. It was supposed to happen in the middle of May 1944, but the Roma were alerted to the plan to kill them and broke into an equipment store, grabbing any potential weapons they could: knives, spades, hammers, pickaxes, crowbars and stones. Among the Roma men were former military veterans who had no intention of going quietly to the gas chambers, and 600 of them barricaded themselves into a barrack building.

Armed with machine guns, the SS surrounded the Zigeunerfamilienlager and ordered the men to surrender and come out. When they refused, the SS retreated rather than risk casualties. This moral victory, on May 16, 1944, is now celebrated as Romani Resistance Day.

The Roma’s defiance troubled the Nazis. They feared it would trigger a mutiny throughout the camp. So they took their time to dispose of the Roma and did so by stealth. In order to reduce potential resistance, they split the 6,000 people in the Zigeunerfamilienlager into smaller groups. On May 23, 1944, they shipped out more than 1,500 to other camps within the Third Reich. Then, on August 2, two days after we arrived from Starachowice, an empty train pulled into the platform not far from our barracks. The SS ordered another 1,400 Roma men and boys on board. At seven o’clock that evening, the train set off northwestward on a four-hundred-mile journey. The Roma were bound for Buchenwald, another big, notorious concentration camp inside Germany’s borders.

About that time, Mama and I were outside our barrack along with the other inmates taking part in the evening Appell.

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