Chapter 14

AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU¹

OŚWIĘCIM, POLAND

JANUARY 26, 1945

1:00 A.M.

The earth convulses as Krema V explodes. Tongues of flame turn the coal-black winter sky a bright red. Nazi SS guards watch the inferno intently, but only for as long as it takes to know that the destruction is complete, and there will be no need to place another round of dynamite charges. The grisly evidence is now destroyed.

The guards march to the nearby barracks and order the prisoners out into the snow. The skeletal children with their prison tattoos and shaved heads respond immediately, knowing that the punishment for being too slow is a bullet. The prisoners get in line. The SS guards are normally fond of neat, military-style rows, which allow them to take a head count. But on this night they are in a hurry.

The prisoners are ordered to march. Their destination is unclear, but the road soon takes them past the train station where they first entered this hellhole, and then on by the commandant’s lavish house. They are leaving Birkenau, though they know not why.

The entrance to Auschwitz

Their way is lit by the burning remains of Krema V. That horrible redbrick building where hundreds of thousands of their fellow prisoners entered, but where none walked out. Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped were led inside, locked in an airtight room, and then gassed when a cyanide-based pesticide known as Zyklon B² was dropped through the ventilation system. Death came slowly as the prisoners, unable to breathe, tried to claw their way out of the room, leaving scratch marks on the walls.

The bodies were then burned inside special ovens, with ashes going up the chimney flu, where they belched forth into the Polish sky and floated to the ground like snow, covering the nearby forests, ponds, and fields. The smell of death dominated the land.

But Krema V is no more. The other four Auschwitz crematoria have also been detonated. Adolf Hitler has ordered that the murders be stopped and that all proof of his atrocities be destroyed. Though taking heavy losses, the Soviet army has blown through the German defenses in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and is rapidly advancing west. To the north, the Russians have captured Warsaw, and are racing through Poland with the intent of occupying Berlin before the Americans and their Allies can get there. The Russians are so close to Auschwitz that the boom of their artillery can be heard in the distance, and the occasional barrel flash of a launching shell limns the horizon. The SS guards who have been ordered to destroy the crematoria are eager to move on, or they will soon become Russian prisoners—a certain death sentence for them.

But even now, when their thoughts are filled with plans to escape, the SS cannot stop themselves from killing. It has become a way of life for them over the past few years, as routine as eating breakfast. They have shot thousands by lining them up against the notorious “Black Wall,” as the firing squad barrier next to the medical experiments barracks is known. Now, as the SS men prod the prisoners through the snow, moving them to another section of the concentration camp on a road lined with electrified barbwire fences, those child prisoners unwilling or unable to walk the mile from the Birkenau section of the death camp³ to the main section of Auschwitz are immediately shot dead.

Those who bend down to quench their thirst by scooping snow into their mouths are shot dead.

Many of the children now marching through the snow are twins who have been the subject of cruel experiments by a madman named Dr. Josef Mengele.⁴ Those who stop to help their twins are also shot dead.

Ten-year-old Eva Mozes and her twin sister, Miriam, stumble through the snow. As veterans of Mengele’s experiments, their bodies are shattered. The “Angel of Death” showed them just one act of kindness, allowing them to keep their hair. The wind cuts through the thin prison uniforms the girls wear. Eva and Miriam’s toes tingle and then go numb in their loose-fitting clogs. They have been in Auschwitz for a year. They were the only Jews in their hometown of Portz, Romania, and until 1944 no one seemed to pay much attention to them. But then the Nazis forced them to move out of their home and into a Jewish ghetto to await transport to Auschwitz.

The memory of their arrival is still seared into Eva’s brain. After a seventy-hour ride from the Jewish ghetto in Şimleu Silvaniei, they stepped off the cattle cars. Guards⁵ yelled “Schnell, schnell”—“Quickly, quickly!”—as dog handlers allowed their snarling animals to lunge at the new arrivals.

The twins’ father, Alexander, and two older sisters, Edit and Aliz, were immediately separated from the rest of the family.

Jaffa, the girls’ mother, sought to protect her young daughters. She grasped each one tightly by the hand. But a quick-thinking guard immediately noticed the twins. That’s what they’d been trained to do: find twins and dwarves. With a gleam in his eye, that guard took the two girls to the special children’s barracks reserved for the patients of Dr. Mengele. Eva and Miriam screamed at the top of their lungs, crying and pleading as Jaffa was torn from them, soon to be gassed and burned. They never saw her again.

At age ten, the girls were completely on their own. Nevertheless, they were determined to live. “The first time I went to use the latrine located at the end of the children’s barracks, I was greeted by the scattered corpses of several children lying on the ground,” Eva will later remember. “It was there that I made a silent pledge—a vow to make sure that Miriam and I didn’t end up on that filthy floor.”

Auschwitz-Birkenau was built on top of a swamp, so conditions in the cramped barracks are always damp. A railway spur has run through the heart of the camp since spring of 1944, delivering new prisoners several times each day. Once the cattle cars stopped at the unloading ramp, prisoners were ordered to leave their belongings behind and to line up for processing. The elderly and women with children were designated for immediate extermination. Anyone under fourteen was also sent directly to the gas chambers, which made Eva and Miriam very lucky to be alive.

In all, 80 percent of those who survived the horrible journey from their homes to Auschwitz were sent straight to the gas chambers; only those deemed capable of working as slave labor were allowed to live.

There is no good job to have in a concentration camp. Some prisoners are chosen to serve as a kapo, a leader of the other prisoners. Along with that come extra rations, but also the dirty work of collaborating with the Nazis by spying on fellow prisoners, effectively signing the death sentences of those who step out of line.

The worst job of all goes to the prisoners who look fit and strong enough to serve in a Sonderkommando. They will work the ovens, observing the SS Blockführer as he gives the order to fill the gas chambers with Zyklon B, and then, afterward, carrying dead bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoria for burning. Each day they will grow weaker, thanks to the meager Auschwitz meal portions. And once they can no longer work, they themselves will be led into the gas chamber one final time.

The entire Auschwitz complex is ringed by barbwire and overseen by armed SS guards standing in almost three dozen watchtowers. The Birkenau section backs up to a forest, and any inmate who can find a way through the wire to make a run for it is shot on sight.

But this does not prevent escape attempts. Just a few months ago, in October 1944, two hundred and fifty Sonderkommandos smuggled gunpowder into Krema IV and blew it up. They then cut through the fence and escaped into the forest. But the SS quickly surrounded them. Though they lost three of their own in the attack, the SS killed all two hundred and fifty Sonderkommandos, then hanged four women suspected of smuggling the gunpowder out of a munitions factory and giving it to the mutineers.⁶

Upon arrival at Auschwitz, those chosen to live are given a uniform that they will wear night and day: smocks for the women, pants and shirts for the men. Normal footwear is replaced by clogs made of wood or leather, but no socks, causing many prisoners to get blisters, which eventually lead to infection. In many cases that leads to a slow and agonizing death from gangrene.

Hundreds of barracks house the brutalized prisoners. There are skylights but no windows. The floors are bare earth, and inmates sleep on wooden bunks stacked three tiers high. Rats are everywhere. The captives scratch constantly at the lice infesting their clothes and hair. The mattress is lice-infested straw, and blankets are often nothing more than rags.

Food is precious—and hoarded. Breakfast is just a cup of imitation coffee or tea. Lunch is thin soup. And dinner is a piece of black bread and a sliver of sausage. It is common practice to take a bite of bread, and then hide the rest in the lining of clothes until morning. When a prisoner dies in the night, the body is quickly searched for any hoarded bread.

Since March, Eva and Miriam spent much of their time in the hospital barracks. They received injections that made their bodies swell and their temperatures soar with fever. They suffered through experimental surgeries, and heard Mengele himself saying, with laughter, that they had just weeks to live. But even when death seemed imminent, Eva and Miriam knew they had to stay alive for each other. “If I had died,” Eva later explained. “My twin sister Miriam would have been killed with an injection to the heart and then Mengele would have done the comparative autopsies.”

The monstrous Mengele⁷ fled Auschwitz nine days ago, moving west with his files of research, to keep ahead of the Russians. Eva and Miriam Mozes remained behind, alive. But they are suffering from skin disease caused by lice bites, and their clothes are mere scraps of fabric. So now, with the Soviet army closing in on Auschwitz, they have no idea what will come next. The road on which the twins are marching leads directly to the Black Wall.

The prisoners march through the gates into Auschwitz I, as the main compound is known, passing beneath the sign that mocks them with the words Arbeit Macht Frei—“Work Will Set You Free.”⁸ This is a lie. Nothing will set them free but death or the liberation of the camps.

Normally a small city of prisoners, Auschwitz is nearly empty. The Nazis are dependent upon slave labor, and have transported sixty thousand Auschwitz prisoners off to other concentration camps.⁹

Eva and Miriam stand in the heart of Auschwitz. Corpses are everywhere. Some have been shot, and others simply starved to death. The bodies are contorted and unattended, frozen into the exact shape as when they breathed their last.

The twins have been left behind because the SS guards believe they will not survive. With the Soviets so close, they have no time for any more killing. Instead, SS men pile into trucks and frantically race away from Auschwitz, leaving the prisoners either to starve to death or to fall into the hands of the Russians.

A thousand prisoners mill about the camp or huddle inside the barracks. Among them is Dr. Adelaide Hautval, a French psychologist who was convicted of being an asozial—Nazi parlance for anyone whose behavior disrupts their idea of what constitutes proper social etiquette. Jesuit priests also fall into this category, as do Communists, socialists, and the more than one hundred thousand homosexuals who have died or will die in the death camps.

Hartval’s crime was publicly protesting that Jews in Nazi-occupied France were being treated unfairly. For this, she was sent to Auschwitz almost two years ago, where she has stayed alive by working in the hospital, treating those women suffering from the typhus that so often accompanies rat infestation. Eva, Miriam, and the other prisoners call her the Saint, but what the twins do not know is that Dr. Hautval refused to follow Mengele’s direct order that she perform grotesque surgeries on them.

And so the prisoners wait. Are they really free? Or will some worse fate befall them? Because if they’ve learned anything from their time in the death camps, it’s that just when things can’t seem to get more horrific they always do.

Meanwhile, the SS guards have vanished into the night.

*   *   *

A fifty-five-year-old German Jew lies in his wooden bunk in the men’s sick barracks at Auschwitz. It is 3:00 p.m. on January 27, 1945. Otto Frank’s daughters are not as lucky as Eva and Miriam Mozes, who will survive Auschwitz and go on with their lives. The Frank family moved to the Netherlands when the rise of Nazism increased anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany. On May 25, 1942, the London Telegraph ran a story with the headline “Germans Murder 700,000 Jews in Poland.” The Times of London was soon reporting, “Over One Million Jews Dead since the War Began,” whereupon the Guardian noted that seven million Jews were now in German custody, and that Eastern Europe was a “vast slaughterhouse of Jews.”

Still, neither Franklin Roosevelt nor Winston Churchill nor Joseph Stalin could effectively confront the atrocities.¹⁰ This was not a sinister plot, but rather an awareness that the Germans could not be stopped. The Jews could be saved only by the Allies’ winning the war. In a radio address to the American people on March 29, 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt made clear not only that he knew about Hitler’s determination to kill every Jew in Europe, but also his own plans ultimately to punish all involved.

Frank’s family went into hiding soon after those news reports emerged, moving into a secret apartment in Amsterdam. Life there was squalid and claustrophobic, but at least they were free. For two long years the Franks evaded detection by the Nazis. They were less than a month away from Amsterdam’s liberation by the Allies when the end came.

On August 4, 1944, a secret informant, whose name has never become known, gave away the family’s hiding place to the Gestapo. The Franks were arrested, and within a month Otto; his wife, Edith; and his teenage daughters, Margot and Annelies, arrived at Auschwitz.

As soon as they disembarked from their cattle cars, families were disrupted. Otto Frank has not seen his wife and daughters since September.

As he lies in his bunk this cold January day five months later, Frank does not know if his family members are alive or dead. He does not know that the women in his life, whom he loves so much, have suffered the indignity of being stripped naked within moments of their arrival at Auschwitz, their heads shaved for delousing, and then made to stand in line to have a number tattooed on their left forearms. That number, they were soon told, was their new identity. They no longer had a name.

During their time in Holland, young Annelies—just “Anne” to her family—kept a detailed journal of what their life in hiding was like. She was five feet, four inches tall, with an easy smile and dimples. Her eyes were gray, with just the slightest trace of green. Anne’s wavy hair, before the Germans shaved her skull smooth, was brown and fell to her shoulders.

Incredibly, both girls are still alive as Otto Frank hears ecstatic shouts from outside his barracks. “We’re free,” the prisoners are shouting. “We’re free.”

Soviet soldiers are marching into the camp, taking careful and cautious steps, suspicious of a surprise German attack. They wear winter-white camouflage uniforms and appear out of the snowy mist like apparitions. Eva Mozes cannot see them at first, because they blend into the winter landscape so well.

Anne Frank in 1941

But just as she is not sure of what she sees, so the Soviet soldiers are not sure of what they have stumbled upon: corpses everywhere, living skeletons, and the hollow faces of those who are being liberated but who are so close to death that it does not matter. “When I saw the people, it was skin and bones. They had no shoes, and it was freezing. They couldn’t even turn their heads, they stood like dead people,” the first Russian officer into the camp will later remember. “I told them, ‘The Russian army liberates you!’ They couldn’t understand. Some few who could touched our arms and said, ‘Is it true? Is it real?’”

The Soviet soldiers move from barracks to barracks, shocked at what they see.

“When I opened the barrack, I saw blood, dead people, and in between them, women still alive and naked,” Russian officer Anatoly Shapiro will remember. “It stank; you couldn’t stay a second. No one took the dead to a grave. It was unbelievable. The soldiers from my battalion asked me, ‘Let us go. We can’t stay. This is unbelievable.’”

Despite their brutal reputations, the Soviet soldiers are kind to the prisoners, who stare back at them “with gratitude in their eyes.” But the Russians have seen so much in this time of war that many are numb to the horrors before them. “I had seen towns being destroyed. I had seen the destruction of villages. I had seen the suffering of our own people. I had seen small children maimed—there was not one village that had not experienced this horror, this tragedy, these sufferings,” one Soviet soldier will note wearily.

And yet the Soviets see that Auschwitz is different. “We ran up to them,” Eva Mozes and her sister, Miriam, will later recall. “They gave us hugs, cookies, and chocolates. Being so alone, a hug meant more than anybody could imagine, because that replaced the human worth we were starving for. We were not only starved for worth, we were starved for human kindness, and the Soviet Army did provide some of that.”

Eva Mozes has kept the promise that she made to herself. Neither her corpse nor that of her sister will ever litter the filthy floor of a barracks lavatory.

*   *   *

As Otto Frank rises from his sickbed to celebrate his newfound freedom, his thoughts immediately turn to finding his family.

But he will never find them. Instead, in the weeks and months and years to come, he will discover threads of their travels, which will allow him to piece together the horrible ways in which they died.

Otto Frank’s beloved wife, Edith, died of starvation, right here at Auschwitz. His daughters were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, in northern Germany. Margot Frank died soon afterward.

Her sister, Anne, had just five weeks to live. She would die bald and covered with insect bites, her emaciated body finally done in by a typhoid outbreak that would kill seventeen thousand inmates at Bergen-Belsen.

She was just fifteen years old.¹¹

*   *   *

“Judaism,” Adolf Hitler tells the German people on the twelfth anniversary of the day he became chancellor, “began systematically to undermine our nation from within.”

Hitler’s physical health has further deteriorated. His hands shake. His eyes water. He is now taking twice-a-day injections of methamphetamine so he can function. And yet he and Eva Braun carry on the charade that the war can still be won. But Hitler’s location inside the bombed-out ruins of Berlin tells the true story. It has been two weeks since his personal train slunk into the once-proud capital of Germany in the dead of night. The curtains were drawn as a precaution against Allied bombing—though that is really more a habit than anything else. The Luftwaffe has been destroyed. American and British bombers are free to attack Berlin in broad daylight—which they do most days by nine in the morning, as the city’s embattled residents hurry off to work.

There will be no stopping the Allies on the Western Front; of that, Hitler is certain. To the east, where the Russian superiority is eleven soldiers for every Wehrmacht fighter, the situation is even worse.

On this very day, January 30, 1945, Hitler’s minister of armaments, Albert Speer, has sent Hitler a memo informing the Führer that the war is lost. Germany does not have the industrial capacity to churn out the tanks, planes, submarines, and bombs necessary to defeat the Allies. Nor does it have the manpower.

Nevertheless, Hitler has no plans to surrender. Nazi scientists are currently working on a new type of weapon known as an atomic bomb.¹² Once it is capable of being detonated, he can use it to wipe the Allied armies off the map. “On this day I do not want to leave any doubt about something else. Against an entire hostile world I once chose my road, according to my inner call, and strode it, as an unknown and nameless man, to final success; often they reported I was dead and always they wished I were, but in the end I remained victor in spite of all. My life today is with an equal exclusiveness determined by the duties incumbent on me.”

Hitler now makes his home in central Berlin, on the Wilhelmstrasse. He lives underground, in an elaborate bunker.¹³ The blond-haired, blue-eyed Eva Braun still tends to him, though she often spends time outside the bunker and does not sleep there most nights. She remains calm, believing that Hitler’s cruel genius can once again win the day. Living in an underground bunker is just one more precaution that is necessary in a time of war. Adding to the air of normalcy is that Hitler’s beloved German shepherd, Blondi, and her new puppies make their home in the bunker as well.

Even though he fears that a direct hit from an Allied bomb will kill him, Adolf Hitler ultimately believes he will be saved. “However grave the crisis may be at the moment, it will, despite everything, finally be mastered by our unalterable will, by our readiness for sacrifice and by our abilities. We shall overcome this calamity, too, and this fight, too, will not be won by central Asia but by Europe; and at its head will be the nation that has represented Europe against the East for 1,500 years and shall represent it for all times: our Greater German Reich, the German nation.”

Adolf Hitler has ninety days to live. He will never leave Berlin again.