Preview of The Nazis Knew My Name
Preview of The Nazis Knew My Name by Magda Hellinger & Maya Lee
Chapter One: Origins
I sat in a large, mirror-black limousine. Alongside me was SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer, commandant of the Nazis’ Auschwitz II–Birkenau concentration camp, wearing the imposing gray-green uniform of the SS, including a cap with the menacing Totenkopf (skull and crossbones) symbol on the band.
It was May 1944.
Kramer had only recently arrived at Birkenau, but his reputation had marched ahead of him—he was known as one of the most notorious commanders in the SS. He was a huge man, over six feet tall and with peculiarly enormous hands. Rumors were that he had killed more than one prisoner with those hands. Over the coming two months he would oversee the arrival of close to 430,000 Hungarian Jews, all transported in grossly overcrowded railway wagons. He would oversee the gassing to death, immediately after they arrived, of over three-quarters of these people in the camp’s killing factories. During this period the population of Auschwitz would reach its peak, as would its rate of extermination. Of the close to one million victims of the Auschwitz camp during World War II, nearly half would die in this short period, under Kramer’s command.
I was a prisoner. Somehow, I had already survived more than two years as an inmate of the Auschwitz–Birkenau death camp. I had endured disease and starvation, cruel punishments and abuse. I had narrowly escaped being sent to the gas chambers at least three times. On my left forearm I was branded with the tattoo “2318,” and this—dreiundzwanzig achtzehn in German—was my name to most of the SS guards. However, to Kramer and some of the other senior SS, I was one of very few prisoners who they called by name.
Kramer’s car traveled a short distance to what would become known as C Lager—Camp C, officially sector B-IIc—a newly completed prison within the Birkenau complex. The car stopped at the camp’s main gate and we got out. Stretching away in front of me, ringed by high, electrified fencing, lay two parallel rows of identical barrack-like timber buildings. Identical “camps” sat on either side of this one. The repetition seemed endless, and sinister.
Kramer stared down at me. “Here you will be Lagerälteste,” he said.
Lagerälteste. Camp elder. Camp “supervisor.” The pinnacle of the bizarre hierarchy of so-called prisoner functionaries. I had been chosen, without any say in the matter, to take charge of 30,000 newly arrived fellow female prisoners. It would be my job to coordinate food distribution and hygiene across this collection of thirty barracks. Each barrack could have been used to stable around forty horses comfortably, but now a thousand women would be crammed into each one. It would ultimately be my responsibility to ensure that all of these women emerged before dawn each morning, and again in the late afternoon, to stand in tidy ranks of five, sometimes for hours at a time, for regular Zählappell, roll calls. Any mishap, any misbehavior, any failure of a prisoner to show for the roll call, and Lagerführerin (SS camp leader) Irma Grese or one of her guards would blame me. On a whim, a disgruntled or drunk SS officer could send me to the gas chambers. Any failure of hygiene, any outbreak of disease, on my watch and I, along with all 30,000 inmates of Camp C, could be sent “up the chimney.”
I took in the scene, squinting dispassionately through the persistent haze of acrid smoke originating from tall brick chimneys barely visible in the middle distance. Dispassionately? That was the emotion I allowed myself to show Kramer. Deep inside, I held back a storm of feelings, an amplified version of the same things I had felt every day for the last two years. Fear, the same as every prisoner lived with, all day, every day. Dread, for the lives, thousands of them, that I knew would be lost no matter what I did. And determination, to continue the mission I believed I had, to save as many lives as I could regardless.
Preview of The Nazis Knew My Name by Magda Hellinger & Maya Lee
