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The Nazis Knew My Name: A Remarkable Story of Survival and Courage in Auschwitz-Birkenau - Softcover

Hellinger, Magda

 
9781982181239: The Nazis Knew My Name: A Remarkable Story of Survival and Courage in Auschwitz-Birkenau
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1982181230 ISBN 13: 9781982181239
Verlag: Atria, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

The “thought-provoking…must-read” (Ariana Neumann, author of When Time Stopped) memoir by a Holocaust survivor who saved an untold number of lives at Auschwitz through everyday acts of courage and kindness—in the vein of A Bookshop in Berlin and The Nazi Officer’s Wife.

In March 1942, twenty-five-year-old kindergarten teacher Magda Hellinger and nearly a thousand other young women were deported as some of the first Jews to be sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The SS soon discovered that by putting prisoners in charge of the day-to-day accommodation blocks, they could deflect attention away from themselves. Magda was one such prisoner selected for leadership and put in charge of hundreds of women in the notorious Experimental Block 10. She found herself constantly walking a dangerously fine line: saving lives while avoiding suspicion by the SS and risking execution. Through her inner strength and shrewd survival instincts, she was able to rise above the horror and cruelty of the camps and build pivotal relationships with the women under her watch, and even some of Auschwitz’s most notorious Nazi senior officers.

Based on Magda’s personal account and completed by her daughter’s extensive research, this is “an unputdownable account of resilience and the power of compassion” (Booklist) in the face of indescribable evil.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Magda Hellinger was deported to Auschwitz on the second transport from Slovakia in March 1942, at the age of twenty-five. She was one of the very few to survive over three years in concentration camps. During her time in Auschwitz-Birkenau she held various prisoner functionary positions and had direct dealings with prominent SS personnel, using her unique position to save hundreds of lives.

Maya Lee is the daughter of Magda Hellinger. She is an accomplished businesswoman and fundraiser with several nonprofit organizations. After coauthoring an autobiography of her Holocaust-survivor husband, she encouraged her mother to document her own story. Maya subsequently conducted wide-ranging research to fill out her mother’s story. The Nazis Knew My Name is the result.

David Brewster is a Melbourne-based freelance writer whose work is centered on helping memoirists tell their stories. David’s published works include Scattered Pearls, cowritten with Sohila Zanjani, and Around the Grounds, cowritten with Peter Newlinds.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1: Origins CHAPTER 1 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.

One of my earliest memories is of confronting a man in uniform. It is one of those memories I’m not sure is my own, as I was only three years old. Perhaps I only remember the story. I do remember the bright red dress that, with a three-year-old’s stubbornness, I refused to give up for any other clothes, all the time ignoring a commotion going on in the house next door. This would have been fine, except that mixing Judaism with the color red was dangerous at that time.

It was 1919, two years after revolutionary Bolshevik Communists in Russia rose to power under their red flag. The newly established democracy of Czechoslovakia, born out of the postwar collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was one of the Allied countries committed to overthrowing the Bolsheviks. As anticommunist sentiment grew, the hunt was on across much of Europe for those suspected of being Communist sympathizers. A brewing conspiracy theory blaming Jews for starting the Russian Revolution made many Jewish people guilty of this “crime.”

In our hometown of Michalovce, at the eastern end of Czechoslovakia, rumors circulated that Jews would be executed as Communists. A delegation of Jews from Michalovce approached our neighbor, prominent citizen Mr. Elefant, pleading for safety. Mr. Elefant agreed to hide them, but when word of his resistance reached high-ranking Czech officials, he was ordered to surrender these Jews. After he refused, the officials burst into Mr. Elefant’s house, rounded up all who were hiding there, ordered them outside, and stood them up against a wall to be shot.

In our house I maintained my own resistance, and eventually, probably distracted by the noise next door, my mother gave in and let me put on my favorite dress. Moments later one of the Czech officials burst into our house, looking for more Jewish Communists, and the first color he would have seen was the bright red of my outfit. He was followed closely by Mr. Elefant, who continued his pleas to save the Jews.

My eyes locked onto the shiny buttons and paraphernalia of the official’s uniform. Feeling none of the fear in the room, I reached out with both arms and he obliged by picking me up. I chattered away while playing with his buttons and patting his serious face.

Mr. Elefant and my mother watched in amazement. After some moments, the official patted my hand, put me down, said goodbye to Mr. Elefant, then rounded up his colleagues and left.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Elefant,” cried my mother. “I didn’t want her to wear the red dress but she had to have it.”

“It is okay,” said Mr. Elefant. “That child distracted the officer and saved the lives of these poor, terrified people.”

I had arrived as the second child and only daughter of Ignac and Berta Hellinger about three years earlier, on August 19, 1916.

My earliest memories of my mother are of a happy young woman who was always singing from the operas she had attended in Budapest as a child. We had a big garden that was always full of fruit and vegetables, and in summer she would wake up early to harvest potatoes, corn, tomatoes… whatever was in season. I would climb the fruit trees for the best fruit, sometimes finding breakfast in one tree, lunch in another, and dinner in yet another. Mother was always cooking or baking her own bread and challah, a plaited bread made for Shabbat (the Sabbath). Thanks to the garden we always had plenty of food, and my mother was quick to share with any of our neighbors. If someone was in need, she would drop everything to help.

One day when I was still quite young, I was visiting the...

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Verlag
Atria
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1982181230
ISBN 13 
9781982181239
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande