Hanna
Sylvia hugged each of us in turn, saying, “We won’t forget you. Stick together if you can. Stay strong and remember who you are.”
Then a guard shouted at us to get a move on, and we filed to a different barracks, where we found ourselves among a crowd of other terrified women.
We had no idea where we were being taken, but were herded into a convoy of cattle wagons, sixty to a truck, overseen by male SS guards rather than the usual female staff.
Remembering Sylvia’s words, the three of us stuck together as the close-packed truck bumped and swayed over rough roads all day and all night. Thin rays of winter sunlight slanted through a ventilation grille as morning broke, and I worked out that we were heading in a roughly easterly direction.
During our time at Ravensbrück, the names of other camps had been whispered among the prisoners, so Auschwitz was a place we’d heard of before. A crust of hardened snow lay on the ground as we climbed out of the truck and stood there, blinking in the daylight.
Guards patrolled with dogs, rifles slung over their shoulders, and they made us line up before a concrete ramp, a little like a station platform.
With harsh shouts and brusque gestures, we were forced to walk along the ramp to where a farther cluster of guards stood watching at the far end.
A tall, fair-haired officer seemed to be in charge.
With a flick of his hand, he would direct each new arrival to go left or right, splitting us into two groups.
I noticed that those who looked to be in better health gathered to the right, while the elderly and the weak shuffled to the left.
Kirsten stepped onto the ramp first. She and Liv had both been suffering from poor health, but I saw how she drew herself up, holding her head high, and walked with confident strides to the other end.
She was directed to step to the right, and then it was my turn.
I followed her example, trying to look like someone capable of working hard.
I, too, was waved to the right-hand group.
I looked back toward Liv, trying to encourage her with a smile and a nod as she stepped onto the ramp. She looked so fragile as she walked across it in her black headscarf, as though a gust of wind could blow her away. With a flick of his hand, the officer sent her to the left.
I froze for a split second, then took a step toward the officer, placing my hand on the sleeve of his greatcoat. With a shout, one of the other guards roughly pushed me back into line. The fair-haired man turned to look at me with distaste, a flicker of anger passing across his face.
“Please,” I said. “Don’t split us up. She’s my twin sister. Let me go with her.”
I can still remember the way his expression changed when he heard that.
He scrutinized me for a moment, then looked across at Liv.
“Twins? Well, in that case, we have a special place for you, do we not?” He turned to one of his colleagues, an SS officer with straight black hair and eyes as cold and dark as the night.
“Josef, another pair here for you, I think,” he said.
He beckoned Liv back to the group Kirsten and I were in, and I felt a momentary flush of relief.
The dark-haired man scrutinized us, too, making me look away as his eyes scanned our faces, and then he said something in German to another of the guards, who gestured to us to step to one side.
As we were being ushered away, I glanced back over my shoulder.
I saw Kirsten’s face in the crowd, white and stark with terror.
And I saw the dark-haired officer smile as he watched us go.
But there was nothing the slightest bit reassuring in his expression.
My words might have saved Liv. But they had condemned us both.
*
Our black-and-white dresses were taken from us in the shower block, where they were shaving the heads of the other women who stood in line, terrified, shivering, and naked.
But the guard who had accompanied us said something to the female prisoner who was taking off the hair, and we were waved past, into a cold shower.
Afterward, when they gave us back our clothes, we found that large red crosses had been painted onto the front of our dresses.
Now we were doubly labeled, with the black NN and the red X, but next came the worst labeling of all.
The others had been transformed from individual women into a uniform horde.
Their shaven heads made them look raw and vulnerable, and they shivered in the thin blue-and-white-striped shifts they’d been issued to wear.
I felt guilty that Liv and I had been allowed to keep our hair and tried to hide it a little better with my black headscarf.
We all lined up at the next doorway, shuffling forward slowly to the table on the far side of the room.
There, another woman prisoner sat, her eyes dead and expressionless as she worked.
First, she held the instrument with its needle to the flame of a lamp and then she dipped it into a bottle of ink.
One by one, she tattooed the arms of each prisoner, stabbing the needle into the skin to make a series of numbers.
Some cried out with the pain, others bit their lips, trying not to react.
When it came to my turn, I was determined to stay quiet, mostly to keep how much it hurt from Liv, who stood behind me.
But she and I have always felt each other’s pain.
As the tattooist formed the final number, a sudden sound behind me made me twist, jerking my arm.
Watching what was being done to me, Liv had fainted.
Two guards hurried forward to bring her round.
I tried to bend down to help her, but my arm was held in a viselike grip.
The tattooist tutted in annoyance, because my movement had made the last digit smudge a little.
She frowned at it, then shrugged, dismissing me, and carried on with her grim task as Liv was pushed to the table and forcibly held there by the guards while her own number was branded into her skin.
The two of us walked in silence, numb with the shock of what had just happened, as we were led away from the others.
The camp was a blur of buildings and groups of prisoners with the same deadened eyes of the tattooist, but the one thing I still remember vividly is the smell.
It blanketed the air like a thick fog, clinging to our clothes and filling our nostrils with the inescapable stench of death.
I thought of the other line of people back at the end of the ramp, the elderly ones and the children, the ones who were weaker, who had been led away in a different direction, and I swallowed hard, stumbling a little. Liv reached out a hand to steady me.
We walked through a gap in a barbed-wire fence, patrolled by a pair of guards with dogs, and were led to the door of a barracks, then ushered inside.
The room was similar to the one at Ravensbrück, with bunk beds from floor to rafters, but I was relieved to see it wasn’t as overcrowded.
Watched by many pairs of eyes, a woman who seemed to be in charge of the hut directed us to a top bunk at the far end, which we were to share.
We climbed onto it, and I took stock of our surroundings.
The room was filled with other women, each one of us half of a pair of twins.
Some were huddled round the stove near the door; others sat on their beds, talking quietly and picking lice from one another’s hair.
But in some of the bunks, thin figures lay prone, exhausted and ill-looking.
One woman moaned in pain, her sister attempting to get her to drink some water from the tin cup she held to her lips.
Liv lay trembling beside me, her eyes huge with anguish at all she’d just witnessed, the flesh of her arm burning red around the numbers brutally inscribed there. I took her hand in mine. “We are alive,” I told her. “We will survive. We just need to stay together, come what may.”
*
Survival became the obsession that consumed our days.
I learned to eat every crumb of the chunk of dark bread we were given for supper and to drink every last drop of the bitter, watery ersatz coffee ladled into our tin mugs, making sure Liv did the same.
The hut we were in was overseen by a Polish woman named Marta.
Her head was shaven, and she wore the same blue-and-white-striped uniform as the other prisoners, but she held herself with a dignity and a grace that so many of the other prisoners seemed to have lost. On the first evening, she produced a tube of antiseptic ointment from her pocket and told us to dab a little onto the tattoos on our arms to stop them getting infected.
She watched me curiously as I did so. “We don’t get many non-Jews put here,” she said.
“And you’re not from the Romany camp. Are you Jehovah’s Witnesses, maybe? ”
I shook my head. “We were arrested for working against the Nazi regime.” I pointed to the NN stitched to my sleeve.
She raised her eyebrows at that. “With that blond hair and those blue eyes, normally you would have ended up somewhere else. But then Dr. Mengele does prioritize twins over everything. You’re lucky, it’s better in here than out there.” She jabbed a thumb toward the window.
I looked round at the other women lying in their bunks or sitting hunched near the stove. “If this is better, I dread to think what the rest of the camp is like,” I said.