"She was quite beautiful, very tall," Lola said. "She was dressed elegantly and wore makeup. She had a husband and a daughter my age. She ordered me around. I had to clean her room."
Lola and her mother were then sent to the labor camp in P?aszow, a southern suburb of Krakow. P?aszow was commanded by Amon Goth, a brutal SS officer who routinely shot prisoners for sport and was portrayed in the 1993 film "Schindler's List." Goth was hanged after the war.
Lola and her mother were put to work with other prisoners digging up a Jewish cemetery. The headstones were used for paving roads and constructing latrines. After spending two months in P?aszow they were sent to work in a munitions factory hidden in a forest near Poinki. It was there Lola was forced to watch the hanging of four or five Jews who had tried to escape. She took her mother's place in the front of the formation of prisoners to spare her the sight of the hangings.
"They were calm and collected," Lola said of the condemned...
"They had their hands tied behind their backs. They said something before they died, but I don't remember what. We were ordered to look at the hanging. We could not turn away our heads. As I watched, I saw what a horrific death it is -- you can actually see life being squeezed out of the body. The face purple, red, almost swelling, as the hanging body twitches in last rebellion. The wife of one of the men, belly swollen with child, stood by the gallows the whole week as the Germans kept the spectacle on display."
Lola was eventually transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The journey by train took three days. When she stumbled off the train with her mother, aunt and her cousin, she ran toward a ditch to get a drink of water. She visited Auschwitz-Birkenau years later and searched out the ditch. She said the death camp stripped of the emaciated bodies, stench, fear, shootings, barking dogs, beatings, smoke from the crematoriums, shouts of the guards, overcrowded barracks and foul, overflowing latrines failed to convey its reality. "They should plow it under and plant a field," she said.
"I did not recognize my mother when we got off the train," she remembered of her arrival at the camp. "She scared me. It was like seeing a ghost. She was drawn. She had big, round eyes."
They were quarantined in Camp C after being shaved, sprayed with DDT and tattooed. She remembers seeing a group of dwarfs in the camp. "They were so beautiful," she said. "I wanted to play with them. They were like dolls. On the second or third night they all disappeared."
She and her mother spent about eight months working in Birkenau. At one point they were stripped and forced into a gas chamber with a large group of women before the execution was abruptly canceled. Lola had begged her mother before entering the gas chamber for their last piece of bread. "I said, 'I don't want to die hungry,'" she remembered. "My mother, said, 'When we come out you will tell me you are hungry.' I said, 'I don't care.' And she gave me the bread. When we got out of the gas chamber my mother said, 'I told you so.'"
The women were later put to work twisting strips of oilcloth into braids to be used, she believed, to make plane doors airtight.
"Two guards would pull on the ends of the braid, and if it broke the workers would be beaten, often to death," she said.
In January 1945, with Soviet forces advancing on occupied Poland, the Nazi guards began to plan the destruction of the crematoriums. They told the prisoners the Birkenau camp would be dynamited and ordered some 60,000 prisoners from Birkenau and the satellite camps to begin a 35-mile march through the snow to a freight yard. Fifteen thousand prisoners died on the march. Lola's aunt and cousin, who survived the war, hid under a pile of corpses. Lola and her mother, shortly before joining the march, found turnips in a barracks and gorged themselves. The turnips gave her mother diarrhea.
"My mother ripped a piece of her dress and asked me very shyly the next morning if I could wash her off, and that is when I felt what love is," she said.
"She told me they would dynamite the camp and we should leave, that I could withstand the march. We walked through the night. We passed our town, Katowice. We saw the lights. The next day my mother wasn't feeling good. She was dizzy. She asked me for a little sugar. We were not allowed to bend down for snow. If you bent down they would shoot you. There were bodies on the sides of the road. But my mother asked me for some snow. I bent down quickly to get her some snow. The women around us helped my mother for a little while. They walked with her. Then my mother couldn't walk. There was a tree. She lay down. She told me, 'Run quickly and maybe you will save myself.' Then a German materialized. I fought with him. I told him, 'You have a mother. You know what it means to have a mother. Let her rest a minute and she will be able to get up.' He smiled. I will always remember that strange smile. Something amused him. By that time his pistol was drawn. The soldiers began to hit me and push me away. He shot her. I was on the road again. At one point my little sack fell down. I picked it up. I thought to myself, you picked up the sack but you did not pick up your mother. Years later, as I replayed the scene of my mother's death, her laying, reclining under that tree with her arms a bit outstretched, I thought of her as being crucified."
Lola made it to the freight yard and was loaded onto open cars. She was transported to Ravensbruck, a women's concentration camp in northern Germany. She was then put on a train to the Malhof camp. As Allied soldiers neared Malhof, the Germans closed the camp. Lola was soon marching again. Then the guards began to disappear. She remembers the bloated and blackened bodies of soldiers in the fields. One morning she and the other prisoners saw the camp commander in civilian clothes riding away on a bicycle. The war was over.
There is, somewhere in the vastness of the universe, amid galaxies and stars that light emanating from our planet takes decades to reach, the airy image of a girl playing with a doll in the Polish town of Katowice, the image of a girl terrified and clutched by her mother near a bombed bridge, the image of a girl hiding with her brother under a pile of sawdust and accepting a small piece of bread, the image of a girl shaking the hand of the Nazi governor of Poland and the image of a girl in her mother's arms in a basement listening to men and women about to die singing Shema Yisrael. There is, too, the image of a girl telling a German soldier with a drawn pistol, "You have a mother."
"I believe in God and heaven," Lola said last week. "I speak to my husband, who I lost three years ago, and my parents. My belief saves me from talking to walls and air."
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