Lanka's Story·Part 5 of 8
The January March, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, and the Train to Bergen-Belsen
Chapter 5
The January March, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, and the Road to Bergen-Belsen
The road to Gross-Rosen was longer than any of the women had expected, and neither Lanka nor Margaret could say afterward how many days it took them to cover it, since they walked by night as well as by day and the days ran together, although her German Pension Statement puts it at about four. When the column finally reached the main camp, it found a place already crowded with prisoners who had been driven in from the east ahead of the Soviet advance.¹ Lanka and Margaret remained there for a few weeks, until the end of January or the first days of February, though she could not recall the exact length of the stay. Twice a day the women were made to stand outdoors for the roll call while the SS counted them in the bitter cold, and the only food was the same thin soup they had known for months, sometimes made from rutabaga and sometimes from beets. On the days when beet soup was served it tasted better than anything they had been given in a long time. There was almost no work for them to do, because the camp was already being emptied as the front moved closer.
From Gross-Rosen the women were loaded into freight cars and sent south toward Mauthausen, a journey that lasted three days.² The cars had no roofs or only partial ones, and the snow fell directly on the prisoners, who licked it from their sleeves and from one another’s blankets because there was no water. Two German soldiers rode in the car with them, and when the girls grabbed at the food the soldiers had been given, one of them, who understood how hungry they were, did not shout. There was almost nothing to eat. Women died where they stood or sat, and since there was no space to move the bodies they remained among the living for the rest of the journey. The starvation had begun to distort their bodies, and the swollen stomachs of those who had gone longest without food were a common and terrible sight.³ In one of the cars two sisters had been traveling together, and when one of them died and froze, the other, in the crush and in the confusion of her grief, threw herself on the body and split it open. Lanka said that the women around them were going out of their minds. She spent much of the journey standing over Margaret, who was too weak to stand, and shielding her from the press of the crowd, and when her own strength began to fail she told her sister to get up so that she could sit down in her place. The moment Margaret moved, the crowd collapsed into the space and crushed Lanka against the floor, and she could not breathe. She believed she would die there. Somehow she dragged herself back onto her feet and pushed the others away, and she said afterward that it was fate that she lived.
They arrived at Mauthausen in the first days of February 1945.⁴ The women were ordered to strip and to walk naked past a row of doctors, who were examining them for signs of illness, and anyone who showed a sore or a swelling was pulled aside. Several of the doctors were Czech prisoners, and they spoke to the women quietly in Czech as they passed, telling them not to be ashamed, that none of this was their fault, and to keep moving. Lanka and Margaret passed the examination without difficulty. They had grown up on a farm with plenty of milk and cheese, and their skin had never broken down as the skin of many women from the cities had, so that even after months of starvation there was nothing on their bodies to mark them. They were given striped uniforms, like pajamas, and a single blanket each, and then they were driven into barracks that had no floor but black earth, and they lay down on the dirt. Lanka did not know that Mauthausen had a gas chamber and learned of it only after the war. For the rest of her life she would not buy anything with stripes on it, and her daughters knew it.
They stayed at Mauthausen for roughly two weeks. Air-raid sirens sounded almost every day, and the women lay in their barracks and wondered whether the SS would kill them before the Allies arrived or whether they would be freed. At the end of that time they were packed up again and marched out. They came under attack from the air near the Austrian frontier, where fighting could be seen in the distance, and the planes came over by the hundreds, as thick as flocks of birds rising from a field.⁵ The guards ordered everyone to lie down. Lanka pulled Margaret under her and lay across her, determined that if one of them was to be killed it would be herself, and the earth thrown up by the explosions covered both of them. After one heavy blast she could no longer move. She thought she was dead, and her mind seemed to go away from her. Then the guards were shouting at them to get up and striking her, and she understood that she was alive. She told Margaret to stand, and Margaret, who had been crying beneath her, got to her feet.
The women were then put on a train, and it was not a cattle train this time but an ordinary passenger train with seats, and some of the Hungarian girls said that they were being taken home. Lanka told them that they were fools, that the Germans had brought them to this place in order to kill them, and that they would not now send them home. The compartments seated five to a side, and others sat on the floor, and the women took turns climbing onto the luggage racks to sleep, each one waking when her time was up so that the next could rest. The train ran on for a very long time and then entered an area of heavy fighting, where it was bombed. The cars at the rear of the train held non-Jewish prisoners, and these took the direct hits, so that many of them were killed. The Jewish women in the forward cars were not touched, though they were left without food. The prisoners who survived in the rear cars crawled out and turned on the Jewish women in a rage, beating them and demanding to know why God had spared the Jews and let them die.⁶ Some of the survivors from the rear cars said afterward that wherever the Jews went they would go too, since nothing had happened to the Jews and only to them.
The train could not go any farther, and it stood in open country for about ten days, as the women who survived with Lanka remembered it. No food was given out. In the daytime the women were permitted to leave the cars, and they dug in the frozen fields for potatoes, scooped up snow, and searched the garbage heaps behind nearby farmhouses, and found almost nothing. On some days they caught mice and cooked them over small fires. Lanka said afterward that everything tasted good to a starving person who wanted to live. The German guards seemed to have little to eat themselves. At last the track was repaired, and the train moved to the siding where it had been blocked and began to run again.
It carried them north, and it stopped some distance short of Bergen-Belsen, and the women had to walk the rest of the way, which took two days. Lanka called it the hardest walk of her life. She and four other girls from her part of the country held one another up and dragged the ones who could no longer move on their own, and she was half carrying Margaret. When they reached the gates of the camp they could barely stand.
According to the official record, Lanka entered Bergen-Belsen at the end of February 1945.⁷ In the space of ten months she had passed through Auschwitz at the height of the Hungarian killing, through a Silesian labor camp in the January evacuations, and through Gross-Rosen and Mauthausen in the final collapse of the camp system, and she had reached the place where she would stay until the end.
Footnotes
¹ Gross-Rosen, in Lower Silesia, was the center of a network of subcamps. In January and February 1945, as the Soviet army advanced across Silesia, the SS evacuated the subcamps and sent the prisoners on marches and rail transports toward the west and south, and the main camp was crowded with arrivals. The camp was itself evacuated in the first weeks of February.
² Prisoners were evacuated in open or partly open freight cars, often with no food or water and with no protection from the snow, and many died during these journeys. Between January and mid-May 1945, of the approximately 700,000 prisoners still held in the Nazi concentration camp system, at least 250,000 died on death marches, in open transports, or inside the collapsing camps.
³ Prolonged starvation causes a fluid retention known as famine edema, in which the abdomen and limbs become swollen. It was common among the prisoners in the final months of the war.
⁴ Mauthausen, near Linz in Austria, was designated a Category III camp, the harshest classification in the Nazi system. Its central feature was the Wiener Graben granite quarry and the “Stairs of Death.” A gas chamber operated there from 1942. In the final months of the war the camp and its subcamps received tens of thousands of evacuated prisoners, and mortality from starvation, disease, and direct killing rose sharply. Among the prisoners who worked as medical staff were Czechs. The camp was liberated by the U.S. Army on May 5, 1945.
⁵ Allied air raids on cities and rail lines in Austria and southern Germany increased sharply in the early months of 1945, and trains carrying prisoners were sometimes attacked from the air, since the aircraft could not tell what the trains carried.
⁶ The transports of the final months often mixed Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners, and the resentments between groups of prisoners, which the SS had cultivated for years, could turn violent under extreme hunger and fear.
⁷ Bergen-Belsen, near Celle in northern Germany, became a collecting point for prisoners evacuated from the east and the south in the last months of the war. Conditions in the camp worsened rapidly as the numbers swelled, and a typhus epidemic spread through it in the early spring of 1945.