Today, January 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.1 The date was chosen because it represents the date 80 years ago on which Auschwitz was liberated by the Russians.
Liberation has an uplifting sound to it. It is associated in one’s mind with heroism on the part of the liberators and freedom on the part of the victims.
My mother was a slave labourer at Auschwitz as the camp began to crumble. For her, the end of Auschwitz was not a liberation, but a liquidation that entailed new torture.
The Nazis sent my mother to Auschwitz when she was 16. She has already been taken from her home and forced to exist with the rest of her family in the squalid ghetto of Kisvárda.
On May 31, 1944, she and her parents, along with her two sisters, elderly grandmother, and aunt and uncle were forced into cattle cars along with other Jews and shipped to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Upon the train’s arrival, she was separated from her family, all of whom were sent to the gas chamber immediately. Her parents. Her grandmother. Her aunt and uncle. Her younger 14-year-old sister, Éva, and her older 18-year-old sister, Klára.
Alone, she suffered the insufferable. Not knowing yet, what would become of her family. Would she see them again? Where were they? What was this place?
After being “processed”—shaved, deloused, and given prisoners’ rags to wear, she was told by a female Kapo that, “like many of you, I arrived with my family but now I am alone.” The Kapo pointed to the smoke stack and explained that there is where your family is. They have been turned into ashes.
Can you fathom the depravity of the system that enables such a reality to exist, one so corrosively evil that it extends across space and time to mark all of humanity forever? I cannot put myself in her shoes and, to be honest, I do not even want to try.
My mother was fortunate, however, in that she met a cousin in Auschwitz, Magda Klein, who was a few years older than her and also alone. There in Auschwitz, they bonded.
One day, while my mother was in a line waiting to have a number tattooed on her arm, Magda was put in another line. My mother panicked at the thought of being separated from Magda and snuck out of her line, climbed through a window, found Magda and joined her line, at great personal risk to her life.
She was fortunate to have gambled that day, for the two, along with 14 others, were sent into slave labour, at a satellite work camp, and life there was far better than it was in the main camp.
The liberation of Auschwitz, or rather the expected liberation, triggered the start of its liquidation. My mother and Magda were sent back to the main camp, which had deteriorated even for a death camp.
A few weeks later, Magda and my mother were sent by train to the Stutthof concentration camp, about 22 miles east of Danzig (Gdansk). Once again, they were sent from the main camp to a satellite work camp, where they were forced to perform hard labour in winter without winter clothes and almost no food.
They faced the threat of frostbite, starvation and illness every day. An illness that lasted more than a day would usually result in one’s murder, so they tried not to be sick for long.
The liquidation of Stutthof with the impending approach of the Russians soon followed, thrusting my mother and Magda from one living hell into another. They were nearly worked to death. Now, the Jews were to be walked to death.
Magda and my mother were sent on one of the many death marches that occurred between January and April 1945.
When Magda could go on no more, she collapsed and told my mother to go on, but my mother lay down by her side and refused to leave her. My mother told her to pretend they were dead and when the Nazi soldier screamed at them to get up they continued to play dead.
The soldier kicked them into the ditch, and when another soldier wanted to shoot them, the first soldier said they were dead already and not to waste his bullets. Fortunately, the second soldier took his advice.
They hid in a local’s house that first night but were thrown out in the morning. As they walked the next day, they came to a more populated area and when they saw a police officer, they went to hide in a house.
The family was surprisingly kind to them and asked only that when the Russians would arrive, to tell them they were good people who protected and fed them. Well, the Russians soon arrived. They broke into the house, shot the man who was wearing military decorations, and proceeded to rape the daughter. My mother tried to intervene, but the older and wiser Magda slapped her in the face and explained it was time to leave.
My mother and Magda survived the liquidation of two concentration camps but they weren’t free. Russian soldiers were not liberators and they threatened my mother and Magda with rape. Never mind that they were Jewish Holocaust survivors. As one told my mother, “Jewish was good.” Good for raping, that is.
Although they successfully evaded that fate, they witnessed a female Holocaust survivor who was lying dead in a pool of blood next to a drunken Russian soldier who was still passed out.
On one occasion, they were loaded onto a truck to be sent to Siberia. Fortunately, a more senior officer who they had met and who was kind to them, spotted them and demanded they be released.
And so it was. No liberation. Only post-liquidation survival. A slow crawl back to humanity with precariousness at every point on the way.
Several weeks later, when they received word that the rail lines were working again, they boarded a train for Hungary. Russian soldiers were on it drunk and urinating on the floor. As my mother recounted in her memoirs, a woman spat and said, “These filthy Jews are coming back.” The experience made my mother especially happy to have survived. She wanted those bloody antisemites to feel defeated.
Liberation proved to be self-made and incremental.
Magda returned to Kisvárda and my mother went to Ujpest where she had learned her brother had survived and was in prison. He had impersonated a Hungarian officer during the war and managed to save many Jews. When this was explained to the Russians, he was set free.
In Ujpest, my mother was approached by a young man named Miklós (Nick) Mandel who offered her a meal voucher. She explained that she didn’t know Ujpest well, but he offered to take her to dinner.
My parents, Veronika (Vera) Schwartz and Miklós (Nick) Mandel, married on March 4, 1947, in the Windsheim DP camp.
My mother’s brother, Zoltan (Zoli), was also with them. That same year, the three emigrated to the US travelling on the USS Ernie Pyle.
My mother and her brother had an uncle Nick who came to Canada as a stowaway before the war started. He met them in New York and brought them to Montreal.
Magda stayed in Hungary. Her boyfriend survived and they were reunited and married. Remarkably, my mother and Magda never saw each other again, but I met her and her family in 2008 on a visit to Budapest.
I keep a picture of her right beside my desk to always remember her. Without her, my mother almost surely would not have survived. She, more than anyone, comforted her in her darkest hours.
The rest is history.
Technically, it’s the 28th, but when I started the post it was still the 27th.
I cried so much reading this. Thank you.
My Jewish father was on a Project Paperclip team exfiltrating German scientists so the Russians couldn't get them during the last chaotic months of the Nazi collapse. He and the Dutch scientist Dr. Gerard Kuiper (as in Kuiper Belt) traveled through the chaos in a jeep. My father, being a Calech sophomore dropout because of getting drafted, and having researched rockets during the war, was tasked with finding and defusing booby traps. Part of their job was going through file cabinets in abandoned buildings gathering scientific research documents. He said the retreating Nazis jammed human body parts into file cabinet drawers.
"...woman spat and said, “These filthy Jews are coming back.”
And people wonder why so many were desperate for a Jewish homeland and why these cult-like campus demonstrators for Hamas' snide comments that we should "go back to Europe" are so painful. My only hope is that one day, they will look back at what they did and wonder, "What in the hell was I thinking"?