Word from Herman
Close quarters, Birkeneau barracks
One night, while she was in her bunk, she was handed a note by a young man, named Jimmy. It read: “My beautiful Sonja! If you get this note, I’ll feel a whole lot better. Look up at the sky tonight. You’ll see the moon. So will I. We’re leaving tomorrow. Don’t know where to. Jimmy turned out to be a good friend. America is going to take care of us. This will be over soon. I’ll find you in Amsterdam. I promise. I love you.” HR
Now she knew Herman was alive, but she didn’t know where he was. Life in Birkenau was extremely difficult. There were times when prisoners were given an opportunity to leave the camp and work outside its walls. Sonja let several of these opportunities pass her by, but then decided that indeed she should leave the camp as long as she was capable of working.
The winter of 1944 was unrelentingly cold. Often the wind-chill factor made it to -32 degrees. Nonetheless, Sonja, and other inmates were put on a train and traveled to a tiny hamlet, Birnbäumel, which consisted of ten or so farms.
When they finally got off the rail car, two women had frozen to death. Nearly one thousand thin, unwashed, sickly-looking women walked knee-deep in snow, for about three-quarters of a mile into the forest. They arrived at a deserted camp.
The first thing she noticed was the absence of guard towers and barbed wire. There were no chimneys, and the unbearable stench was absent. Instead of a sadistic block leader, a friendly Hungarian Camp Police lived with her family in a separate shed. There were ten round horse stables. Since the horses were used to standing on firm ground, the wooden stables had no floorboards and the outside paneling stopped eight inches above the ground.
One hundred women were assigned to one stable. They shared twenty-five straw mattresses and a few old, dirty, torn up horse blankets. The mattresses were placed in a circle around a small stove in the center. There was no running water. They washed with snow.
The moment they arrived, they were handed shovels and ordered to fill up the eight-inch opening to stop the draft. When that was done, they were famished, but it was six o’clock and time for roll call. An SS captain appeared.
“Is there a secretary in this group?”
Maybe mother was right after all and my typing skills will come in handy. If I get through this, I can follow a nursing…Her thoughts were interrupted.
“Is there a secretary in this group?” She stepped forward.
“I’m a secretary, Herr Hauptsturmführer.”
He walked over to her.
“Show me your hands.”
He saw her abscessed thumb with the nail missing and screamed at her. “What are you thinking, you dirty, rotten Jewish swine?”
The first blow drove the air from her lungs. She lost her balance and fell to the snow. Enraged, he kicked her mercilessly.
Sonja, just as the other women were forced to work in the stables and later to dig “until you see water!” They dug from six in the morning to six in the evening, knee-deep in the snow, while warmly dressed guards talked and joked around a campfire.
