polishing silver or setting the table. She even combed her non-existent long hair and managed to deny reality so completely that we had to drag her out to the queue for food.
One of the tricks for survival was pretending to be dead. A convincing performance took some guile. It wouldn’t do to just lie there relaxed with closed eyes, because most real corpses were twisted in agony. I devised a useful position with head thrown back, arm covering the face and legs drawn up in a foetal mode. In winter, when breath steamed in the icy air, I breathed shallowly and rapidly under my arm so that any steam was re-inhaled before it became visible.
This accomplishment saved me from bullets or beatings on several occasions. I tried to pass this useful trick on to Mother, Frieda and Goldie but they did not use it.
At that time in Stutthof there were bodies everywhere: on the fences or the ground below them—those who suicided by electrocution; on the gallows—bodies from recent hangings; yesterday’s dead waiting to be taken away, today’s dead not yet removed from the barracks. As cold weather approached we stole their clothes. There were frequent suicides by climbing the high barbed-wire fence after it was electrified at dusk. Sometimes the clothing got so firmly caught on the barbs that the body remained there, hanging like a twisted scarecrow.
Unpredictability was the order of the days and nights of the war, all five years and nine months of it. In the various prisons, we were entirely at the mercy of the whims of prison guards and commandants. Their personalities, moods and sadistic inventiveness brought ever-changing and unexpected events into our existence. Some of the unpredictability was planned and deliberate, as in the frequent, random relocations of prisoners from one barrack to another. Yet such is the force of habit that we got used to it.
Physical and verbal abuse lost its humiliating effect on us through its frequency, and because it only incriminated the Germans. But their spitting in our faces was hard to get used to: to me, it was very depressing.
The gross overcrowding we were periodically subjected to was an insidious and effective form of torture. While having others ‘in the same boat’ was a blessing, it turned into a curse when we were packed like sardines. It had a rapidly dehumanising effect. Not much respect for one’s fellow human beings survives inside a mass of tightly packed humans who are pushing and shoving and gasping to breathe and trying to move their numbed limbs. It devastates the morale and crushes even the blackest sense of humour. (The sight of a truck tightly packed with animals still makes me shudder.)
There was a woman from Austria who also progressed from labour to concentration to extermination camps, and now intoned all day: ‘ Mann kann sich an alles gewöhnen. ’ (One can get used to everything.) She had little else to say, and we regarded her as one of the deranged. But Frieda talked to her sometimes and said that this repetition of what was a fact was her way of coping, not madness.
Our morale was sinking fast, but on the rare days when the watery soup contained a few solid particles, potato or cabbage, there would be a wave of rumours about the imminent end of the war. It seemed that an extra calorie could generate a spark of hope.
Another momentary morale booster was any message thrown secretly over the fence by the men. It would usually be good news about German defeats or Allied advances, all probably invented to cheer us up, but it was good to get a message saying the Germans were in retreat and the war was bound to end next week.
The messages were written on a piece of paper, which was wrapped around a pebble and tied with a thread pulled out of cloth. If you could get a bit of paper, either blown in by wind or smuggled in by the male prisoners who came to empty latrines, a message could be sent back across the fence to the male section. One woman owned a small
One of the tricks for survival was pretending to be dead. A convincing performance took some guile. It wouldn’t do to just lie there relaxed with closed eyes, because most real corpses were twisted in agony. I devised a useful position with head thrown back, arm covering the face and legs drawn up in a foetal mode. In winter, when breath steamed in the icy air, I breathed shallowly and rapidly under my arm so that any steam was re-inhaled before it became visible.
This accomplishment saved me from bullets or beatings on several occasions. I tried to pass this useful trick on to Mother, Frieda and Goldie but they did not use it.
At that time in Stutthof there were bodies everywhere: on the fences or the ground below them—those who suicided by electrocution; on the gallows—bodies from recent hangings; yesterday’s dead waiting to be taken away, today’s dead not yet removed from the barracks. As cold weather approached we stole their clothes. There were frequent suicides by climbing the high barbed-wire fence after it was electrified at dusk. Sometimes the clothing got so firmly caught on the barbs that the body remained there, hanging like a twisted scarecrow.
Unpredictability was the order of the days and nights of the war, all five years and nine months of it. In the various prisons, we were entirely at the mercy of the whims of prison guards and commandants. Their personalities, moods and sadistic inventiveness brought ever-changing and unexpected events into our existence. Some of the unpredictability was planned and deliberate, as in the frequent, random relocations of prisoners from one barrack to another. Yet such is the force of habit that we got used to it.
Physical and verbal abuse lost its humiliating effect on us through its frequency, and because it only incriminated the Germans. But their spitting in our faces was hard to get used to: to me, it was very depressing.
The gross overcrowding we were periodically subjected to was an insidious and effective form of torture. While having others ‘in the same boat’ was a blessing, it turned into a curse when we were packed like sardines. It had a rapidly dehumanising effect. Not much respect for one’s fellow human beings survives inside a mass of tightly packed humans who are pushing and shoving and gasping to breathe and trying to move their numbed limbs. It devastates the morale and crushes even the blackest sense of humour. (The sight of a truck tightly packed with animals still makes me shudder.)
There was a woman from Austria who also progressed from labour to concentration to extermination camps, and now intoned all day: ‘ Mann kann sich an alles gewöhnen. ’ (One can get used to everything.) She had little else to say, and we regarded her as one of the deranged. But Frieda talked to her sometimes and said that this repetition of what was a fact was her way of coping, not madness.
Our morale was sinking fast, but on the rare days when the watery soup contained a few solid particles, potato or cabbage, there would be a wave of rumours about the imminent end of the war. It seemed that an extra calorie could generate a spark of hope.
Another momentary morale booster was any message thrown secretly over the fence by the men. It would usually be good news about German defeats or Allied advances, all probably invented to cheer us up, but it was good to get a message saying the Germans were in retreat and the war was bound to end next week.
The messages were written on a piece of paper, which was wrapped around a pebble and tied with a thread pulled out of cloth. If you could get a bit of paper, either blown in by wind or smuggled in by the male prisoners who came to empty latrines, a message could be sent back across the fence to the male section. One woman owned a small
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