I
have only been back to that place once, since I left, and I still have
nightmares about it. I had lived there for three years, with mama, papa and
Rebecca. Jon, my elder brother, had been forced to fight, and it was only after
the war had finished, that I discovered his death, two years previously. There
had been four rooms to the simple chalet style house; a bathroom, a kitchen, and
two bedrooms. The bedrooms, were simply rooms, one for the males, and one for
the females, where blankets were laid out for us to sleep on. We lived in this
tiny space, together with four other couples, who had seven more children
between them. Slowly though, our parents were going 'to the showers' from which
they would never return. Once one parent had gone, the children would go with
the remaining, when it was their turn to be called up. There was no pattern, it
seemed to be random, and we lived eternally in fear of the list, which would be
read out each morning at role call. And
then each evening, we would huddle in the kitchen, which served as our living
space while the dying screams of the terrified Jews attacked us from the shower
room that stood just a little way across the dusty site.
In
the bathroom was the spot where, on 14th June 1942 mama gave birth to
another baby boy, and I could see her pain again, when I returned, just has she
had been that day, when they took her baby away, the same day as his birth. I
was told then that he was put with the other babies, which I did not know then
to be a mass graveyard. I still think about my little brother, and how he might
have turned out if he were born under other circumstances. We named him Franz,
meaning freeman.
I
saw the kitchen, where the cupboards stood that I had been locked in, while
soldiers searched for Mr Harris who had tried to escape one summer. That night
they shot my father, they said that he had plotted with Mr Harris to escape.
The
soldiers made my mother, Rebecca and me stand at the front of the crowd at roll
call that night, and we had to look straight into the eyes of my father as they
shot him. I was only thirteen.
There
was my bedroom, where I had slept each night after working for nineteen solid
hours in the sewing rooms, with a ten-minute break for lunch. I will never be
able to sew again, I promised myself that the day I left Majdanek, but it was
that that kept me alive. They always needed women to sew, and on my sixteenth
birthday, when my mother and Rebecca were taken to the showers, I was ordered to
move my belongings into the sewing room, were I lived with the other single
women for the remaining six months of my stay there. It was not in that sewing
room though, that I had experienced every emotion known to mankind, fear, hate,
love, and joy. The appreciation of life was great, but we lived in fear, and
poverty. Six people who had survived without any intervention from the Nazis
died from the typhoid, and that was just in my house. By the time the Danish
soldiers freed us. It was that day, that I left my house, dropping everything
that I owned to follow these men away from that hatred place, not once thinking
that I would return. And on my way out, I saw for the first time the fire that
burned all day and night, and I finally knew where my family had gone.
I
returned to Majdanek ten years later, with my husband, Johanne, a survivor of
Belzec. We were going back to Europe for the first time since our escape, and I
had never cried so much before, sharp, stinging tears. I swore there and then
that I would never step back onto those soils again, and I left through the
officers' gate and said goodbye to my house with four rooms. My home bittersweet
home.
by
Nicola Plumb (c)2000
[imagine]
What
do you think of the story? Let nic know at [email protected]
