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.