Hundsfeld · Lanka's Story

Chapter 4

Hundsfeld

Lanka and Margaret traveled from Auschwitz to Breslau in an ordinary passenger train, not in a cattle car, and the difference was enough that some of the women allowed themselves to hope they were being taken somewhere better.¹ They had been given cleaner clothing before they left, and for the first time since the ramp no one had counted them into the car like freight. From the station in Breslau they were marched on foot to Hundsfeld, a labor camp on the edge of the city, where they were put in a barrack that seemed to them almost comfortable.² Each woman had a bed of her own with a mattress filled with hay, a pillow, and a blanket, and twenty-four women shared the room, which had a long table in the middle. Every woman was also issued a bowl and a spoon. In Auschwitz they had eaten with their hands and had swallowed their soup because it was too full of sand and grass to chew, and Lanka said that having a bowl and a spoon made her feel like a person again.

The food was still poor, though it was better than what they had known. In the morning there was black coffee and a slice of bread, and in the evening a watery soup of rutabaga or beets, which was brought to the barrack late at night after the work was done. The camp elder, a Jewish prisoner from Košice, did what she could to ease their situation. She came from a very religious family that had kept a restaurant in her home city, and she and her sisters tried to keep a measure of order and a measure of kindness. She arranged for a portion of Hungarian-style goulash to be served on Sundays, and she rotated the extra helping among the barracks, so that one week the second barrack received more, the next week the third, and each group had its turn. She sometimes carried a pitcher of hot coffee with sugar out to the women who were working in the trenches, and they passed it from hand to hand and drank from the same vessel.³

The work began with digging. The women were set to excavating long trenches and laying pipes, and the prisoners called it plumber’s work, with a grim humor that Lanka retained. As the weather turned, the ground froze, and they had to break it with heavy picks that were hard to lift and harder to swing. The flying dirt and chips of ice cut their faces. One of the SS women who supervised them watched the work closely and was not satisfied with it, and on one occasion Lanka, trying to show that the job could be done, took up a pick and demonstrated. The woman took the pick from her, struck the frozen ground herself, and then turned on Lanka in a rage. She put her against a wall and fired a shot over her head. Lanka fell to the ground, believing she had been hit, and the SS woman ordered her to stand and struck her twice across the face.⁴ The blows landed on her ears, and she said afterward that the woman wanted to show her she was not dead. She was not afraid, because the life they were living hardly seemed worth holding on to, and she thought that at least in Breslau the dead were buried in the Jewish cemetery. When Margaret was assigned to the heavier digging details, Lanka volunteered for them as well, since she was afraid that her sister would not survive the work alone. She was chosen leader of the work group and reported to the guard at the gate how many prisoners she was taking out. As the trench deepened the women were almost cheerful. Lanka remembered being astonished to find them five feet down, singing and half dancing, in the hope that when they struck water the digging would stop. Some of the civilian overseers on the work site quietly handed the women gloves in the cold and told them to hide the gloves if an SS guard came near. The woman who gave Margaret her gloves was not SS.

After some weeks of outdoor labor the prisoners were moved into an ammunition factory.⁵ Lanka could not remember the name of the firm, which was the one detail of the camp that she said she had forgotten. After I research I discovered the women worked in the workshops of Rheinmetall-Borsig of Düsseldorf, which had a plant in Wrocław. The women worked twelve-hour shifts standing at their machines, without food during the shift, and received their half liter of soup only when they returned to the camp late in the night. Five women worked at each machine, producing very large cartridges, which she later described as machine-gun ammunition. One of the five shaped the casing and another drilled the hole, which had to be perfectly straight, and a hole made crooked was cause for a beating. The German overseers hit the women, as she remembered it, only on the head and never on the back, and always with the flat of the hand. She believed the repeated blows were the cause of a ringing in her ear that troubled her for years, and a doctor later asked her whether she had ever been hit there. Defective pieces could not simply be thrown away in the ordinary trash, because the guards inspected the bins and traced anything they found back to the women who had made it. A Czech civilian worker, who spoke a few words of her language, signaled to her one day from a distance and showed her what to do. When a casing was ruined she was to leave it behind the door of the lavatory, not quite closed, and he would remove it. She used the arrangement several times, for herself and for other women in her group.⁶ Only one girl was ever caught making a mistake, and the guards beat her so badly that all the women cried. They had feelings for one another, since they were nearly all young women who had done nothing.

By the end of 1944 the Soviet army was advancing across Poland toward Silesia, and the mood among the Germans at the factory and the camp began to change. A man at the camp, who wanted to be remembered as a hero when the Russians arrived, offered to hide some of the women. They were afraid to accept, because they could not know whether it was a trap or whether he would keep his word.⁷ On January 8, 1945, the SS ordered the camp evacuated, and Lanka remembered the date for the rest of her life.⁸ The women were formed into ranks of five and marched out on foot, each rank covered together in the blankets they had been given. Many of them had no shoes and had wrapped rags around their feet, and snow fell steadily. Lanka, Margaret, and two other women from home, one of them a girl Herschel had once dated, dragged one another along, and the guards shot anyone who stepped out of the line. More than once Lanka thought of leaving the column and taking her chances. Once she told Margaret that she could not go on and wanted to step out of the line and be finished. Margaret told her to look at the frozen bodies lying by the road and said that as long as they were alive they should keep walking. Lanka looked, and asked herself who would bury them, and decided she did not want to die that way. Some had coats, but many were wrapped only in blankets, and the SS woman who had told them the date marched with them.

They walked through Breslau and across a large bridge, and shortly after they had passed it the bridge was struck by a bomb and collapsed. If they had still been on it, she believed, most of them would have been killed, and if it had been bombed earlier the column might have been stopped and freed by the Soviet troops. Some of the women ran from the line and jumped onto a passing streetcar, and Lanka never learned what became of them, and she suspected that they did not get far, since they could not hide the numbers they wore, though she liked to think they were liberated by the Russians. The march continued night and day, and the food was a slice of heavy bread shared among five women. At some point the SS who had walked with them were replaced by other soldiers who arrived in jeeps, and the SS went back.

Before they reached the next camp, the column halted at a farm, and the women were driven into a barn full of hay. The farmer brought them hot water, which was the only warm drink they received during the march, and Lanka remembered how good it tasted. There was nothing to eat. The women, who had not slept for days, dug into the hay and lay pressed against one another for warmth, and they fell asleep at once. During the night many of them froze to death. Margaret cried out that someone lay across her legs, and Lanka kicked at the body to move it and found that the woman was dead. She told her sister not to kick, since the women were dead, and to draw her feet up under her. She told her sister that she would have to move and keep herself awake, that if she gave in she would end up like the woman beside her, and that she needed her and wanted her with her. In the morning the SS shouted for the women to get up, and those who could stand were driven back onto the road toward Gross-Rosen, and the dead were left lying in the hay.⁹

Footnotes

¹ Hundsfeld (Polish: Psie Pole) was a women’s subcamp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp system, established in 1944 on the edge of Breslau (today Wrocław, Poland). Gross-Rosen operated about twenty subcamps for women, most of them supplying labor for armaments factories, and many of the prisoners were Jewish women from Hungary and Poland who had been transferred from Auschwitz in the autumn of 1944. Her departure from Auschwitz around October 5, 1944, comes from the German record.

² Breslau lay about 200 kilometers northwest of Auschwitz, a journey of several hours by rail, though transport in wartime could take longer. The women were usually sent west to Gross-Rosen subcamps in the weeks after the labor selections in Birkenau.

³ Prisoners who held positions of authority in the women’s camps, such as the camp elder (Lagerälteste) or the block elders, could sometimes use them to improve conditions, though many did the opposite. Košice (Kassa in Hungarian) was a city annexed by Hungary in 1938, and its Jews were deported to Auschwitz in the same May 1944 operation as those of Subcarpathia.

⁴ The women’s subcamps were supervised by female SS overseers (Aufseherinnen), many of whom had been trained at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. They carried whips and sometimes pistols and were often as violent as their male counterparts. A mock execution of the kind Lanka describes was a recognized form of terror.

⁵ The Gross-Rosen Museum’s record for the Hundsfeld subcamp states that it held about 1,500 Jewish women from Poland, Hungary, Holland, Romania, and Germany, and that the women worked in the Breslau workshops of Rheinmetall-Borsig of Düsseldorf, in a plant near the camp on Grossweidelsdorfer Street. Her German restitution statement records the work as the production of machine-gun ammunition at the Hundsfeld munitions factory, about ten hours a day on the six weekdays, under constant guard, with the women kept apart from non-Jewish workers and marched to the factory and back in a closed column. In both interviews she remembered twelve-hour shifts.

⁶ The factories employed forced foreign laborers and civilian workers, including Czechs from the Protectorate, who were required to work in the Reich. Some of them quietly helped the prisoners, passing them food or warnings, and the discarding of defective pieces, which would otherwise be traced to the person who made them, was a recognized form of passive resistance.

⁷ In the winter of 1944–45, as the front drew closer, some Germans in contact with prisoners tried to improve their standing with the approaching Soviets. Prisoners, who had no way of telling a sincere offer from a trap, rarely accepted.

⁸ The Soviet winter offensive across the Vistula began on January 12, 1945, and the SS had begun to evacuate the camps of Silesia in the last days of December and early January. Tens of thousands of prisoners died on the marches, in extreme cold, from exposure, exhaustion, and shooting. Breslau was declared a fortress in January and was besieged by the Red Army from February. Her German statement dates the foot march to Gross-Rosen at about four days.

⁹ Prisoners who could not continue were shot or left to die, and in the barns where the columns stopped for the night it was common for some of the women to be dead by morning. The guards of these marches were often changed along the way as units moved through.