Signs of Survival, page 1
To my two children, David and Elizabeth,
and my nephew and nieces,
Ira, Hetty, and Sara
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1: The Sound of Boots
Chapter 2: Hidden Stars
Chapter 3: The Farm
Chapter 4: The Last Jews in Bratislava
Chapter 5: The Train
Chapter 6: Betrayed
Chapter 7: Bergen-Belsen
Chapter 8: Monster Doctors
Chapter 9: April 1945—FREEDOM
Chapter 10: Summer 1945—SWEDEN
Chapter 11: 1948—NEW YORK
Chapter 12: Return to Bratislava
Chapter 13: Return to Bergen-Belsen
Chapter 14: A Toilet-Paper Diary
Lost
Epilogue
Photographs
About the Authors
Copyright
RENEE: IN 1943, GERMAN soldiers rounded up the Jews living in my city, Bratislava, and sent them to death camps to be killed. There would be eight to twelve soldiers marching together from house to house, knocking on doors, and yelling, “Get ready to leave! You have one hour!” I remember the stomping of their boots on the cobblestoned streets.
My parents, younger sister, and I lived in a fourth-floor apartment, and when I heard the sound of those boots, I ran to warn my family. Then we rushed into a room at the back of the apartment and hid. When the soldiers knocked on our door, we didn’t answer and stayed as quiet as possible.
I was ten years old then, and my sister was eight. The responsibility was on me to warn everyone when the soldiers were coming because my sister and both my parents were deaf.
I was my family’s ears.
HERTA: MY NAME IS Herta Myers. I’m Renee’s younger sister. I was born two years after her, in 1935. When I was a little girl, I was the only deaf child in our town. In our family there were several deaf people like me, going back a few generations, including both our parents: our mother, Henrietta, and our father, Julius. We communicated using sign language.
RENEE: We grew up in Bratislava, the capital of what was then called Czechoslovakia. Many years after World War II, Czechoslovakia was split into two independent states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Back then, Bratislava was a city of 120,000 people, including 15,000 Jews. In 1939, when the Nazis occupied our city, most of our country was renamed the Slovak Republic, which was then controlled by Germany. Many ethnic Germans lived in and around Bratislava.
Jews living in Bratislava’s more elegant neighborhoods were ordered to leave their homes and move into what was called the Old Town, which was a ghetto for the poor. That was where my family began living, in an apartment on the fourth floor of an old four-story brick building. In warm weather, my sister and I grew peas by wrapping them in wet cotton balls. We put the balls into little pots of soil on the windowsill and watched over the next few weeks as pea tendrils sprouted and curled up around the iron railings of the window. From our window, we could also peer down in the evening and see our father returning from his office.
Because the Nazis forbade Jewish children from attending school, I did not start my formal education until after the war, when I was almost twelve years old. By then the only subject I didn’t have to catch up on was reading, which my father had started teaching me when I was five years old. I remember how much joy I felt when my parents gave me several books for my fifth birthday. That year my mother was often annoyed with me, because I never answered when she called me. My nose was always buried in my books.
HERTA: Our parents were intelligent people, but because they could not hear, they did not attend a typical college. Instead, they went to the Vienna School for the Deaf. After graduating, my father became a master jeweler, and my mother worked as a dressmaker.
RENEE: Once the Nazis occupied Bratislava in 1939, they regularly entered the homes of Jews and forced them to turn over their jewelry and silverware. Because my father was an expert jeweler, the Slovak firm he worked for ordered him to melt down the stolen silver and use it to make chalices and crosses for local churches. I remember him coming home with designs for these objects and looking so sad.
HERTA: At first my parents wanted me to go to the School for the Deaf like they had done, but after the Nazis took over our city, my parents were scared that I would go to school one day and never come back. So we moved about seventy miles west of Bratislava to Brno, where there was a big Jewish community, and for a while we did feel more comfortable there.
My father tried to homeschool me, but I was lazy and had no interest in most subjects. I’d tell him, “Oh, let’s do that subject tomorrow—or maybe the day after.” Then I would run outside and walk around Brno with my sister, Renee. Because I was deaf, I had to rely on her to be my playmate, and there were times I complained to my mother that I felt lonely. My mother was always willing to give me her time and attention, so despite the loneliness, I considered myself a happy child.
RENEE: I have one recollection of the German presence at that time, which was when Hitler came through Brno in a car surrounded by Nazi soldiers. All the non-Jews of Brno ran into the streets, cheering and waving Nazi flags, and I remember my father telling me and Herta to stay away from the crowds.
“We are not going to show any support,” he said.
I’m sure there was more to it than what my father was saying. He must have known it would be dangerous for us as Jewish children to go outside with so many non-Jews in the streets, cheering Hitler. My father was no doubt afraid that some harm would come to us. As a six-year-old child, I had no idea about politics, although I recall feeling comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time—comfortable because I spoke German like many people around us, but uncomfortable because most of our neighbors hated us because we were Jews.
My parents must have decided things would get worse now that Hitler had visited Brno, and so they announced we would immediately be returning to Bratislava. We had heard what Nazis did to Jews: The Germans arrested them and sent them to “resettlement” camps. In those days, we had not yet heard the name “concentration camps,” but whatever they were called, we knew the camps were dangerous for Jews. To avoid the risk of being arrested and sent to a camp, we packed our bags and returned to our apartment in Bratislava.
Back in Bratislava, at first nothing happened to us. German soldiers there just patrolled the streets as usual. Then it got worse. The soldiers began beating up Jews, and local antisemitic Slovaks also abused us and called us “Dirty Jews!” and other nasty things when we passed them in the street.
The abuse got worse once the Nazis forced all Jews to sew a yellow star—the Star of David, a symbol of the Jewish people—on their outer clothing. That was the Nazis’ way of singling us out in public. One day Herta and I came home and saw our mother sewing yellow cloth stars on our coats.
“Let’s not do this,” I signed to her. “If we wear the star, then we can’t hide the fact that we are Jews, and it will be worse for us.”
“We have no choice,” she signed with sadness. “We have to wear the star. It’s the law.”
Wearing that star was going to make life harder for me and my sister, since we loved to roam freely around the city. We came up with the idea of wearing scarves and draping them around our shoulders so they covered the stars on our coats. That worked for a while, and we continued wandering around Bratislava. Still, we were afraid.
What will happen to us, I wondered, if they find out we’re Jews?
HERTA: Our mother was always busy at home, making dresses and cleaning the apartment. My father’s jewelry store was about a half mile away, and before the Nazis came to Bratislava, I used to visit him there after school. The visits ended once the Nazis arrived and forced us to wear that yellow star. If the Germans caught us without it, there would be trouble. Everyone in Bratislava was registered in the city’s official records, and if the Germans wanted to find us, they could easily get our names and addresses.
RENEE: By 1941, our part of the city had become inundated with Jews who had been forced to leave their homes and find a place to live in the segregated Jewish quarter. Our apartment building was completely overcrowded. My parents had been ordered to take in six people in addition to our family. What I did to maintain some sense of freedom was to stay out of our apartment as much as I could. Even though the atmosphere on the streets was by now quite hostile, I preferred being out and about in the city.
Nazis and other antisemites in Bratislava were beating up Jews every day, but strangely never me. I asked a teacher in our neighborhood, “Why do people who hate Jews beat up other Jews but not me?”
“Because you have blond hair,” she said.
In those days, the popular idea of a good-looking German was someone with blond hair and blue eyes. My hair was blond and that seemed to make me a little more acceptable, so I was able to move around town.
The worst thing that I saw when I was walking around Bratislava was the transports. These were truckloads of people, mainly Jews, rounded up by Nazi soldiers and sent to “resettlement” camps. Those transports terrified me. Nazi police stormed into the homes of Jews and yelled, “Get out! Get out quickly! Take only one suitcase!” If anyone tried to take something more, such as a blanket, the Germans grabbed it and threw it on the floor.
During roundups, the police hit people to make them move faster, especially old people, sick people, and children. It was a way of behaving that I had never witnessed, not even in nightmares.
There were perhaps as many as a thousand people at a time in these transports. I personally knew many of the people who were mistreated and sent away, and I could hardly imagine how devastating the experience was for them.
When the Nazis conducted a roundup, they came marching, eight to twelve soldiers at a time. I became good at recognizing the sound of the soldiers’ boots on the street outside our window. It was my responsibility to be on guard and warn my deaf sister and our deaf parents of any danger. So I was constantly listening for the sound of those boots. When I heard the soldiers coming or the screams of people being sent away, I’d run to my family and tell them in sign language, “We have to hide.”
HERTA: One day, Renee was walking around town without the yellow star, and the police caught her.
“Where is your star?” they yelled.
She broke away from them and ran home. She burst into our apartment, and my father looked at her coat and asked the same question: “Where is your star?” He was so afraid that something bad was going to happen to us.
Our fears increased every day.
RENEE: BY 1943, MY parents realized our situation was hopeless and there was no point living in this fearful way. They knew a family with a farm some miles away, in the foothills of the Tatra Mountains, and they asked the husband and wife to please take me and Herta and hide us on their farm. The farm couple agreed, on the condition that my parents pay them a large amount of money each month. Even though the couple insisted on being paid, they were still taking a big risk to their own lives.
HERTA: The couple who owned the farm were also deaf and had met my parents at a meeting of deaf people living in the area. In exchange for the monthly payments, the farmer and his wife let us stay, and they also hid the fact that we were Jewish. We didn’t have to go to church, but Renee and I had to pretend we were Christians. For example, when we walked by a priest, we had to cross ourselves.
RENEE: Before my sister and I left to live on that farm, my mother took all the yellow stars off our clothing. Once we arrived there, we pretended to be Christian. I felt terrible crossing myself and worried that we’d be punished in some way for pretending we were Christians, but it worked. We played with the children in the village, and no one suspected we were Jews. Still, it wasn’t always fun. Many of the village children didn’t have shoes, so they were always trying to take ours. And they poked fun at Herta for being deaf, so after a while we started keeping to ourselves most of the time.
HERTA: The only other person living on the farm was the farmers’ son, who was much older than me and Renee. Because we had so few children to play with, we stayed busy watching the grown-ups cut the grass, feed the cows and pigs, make sausages, and do other chores. One day, Renee decided that she would no longer eat the sausages, which were made with pork. We were from a religious Jewish family, and eating pork was forbidden by Jewish dietary laws. Well, I didn’t stop eating the sausages, and Renee was ready to disown me. She complained more and more about wanting to go home, and the farmer and his wife were getting fed up with us.
Then my father paid us a surprise visit. Oh, I was so happy to see him. But he warned us that he could stay only one night and that the next morning he would have to go back to Bratislava.
“Why can’t you stay longer?” I asked him.
He said, “If a Jew wants to leave town, the Nazis give him an official paper with a time limit of only one day. It’s better than nothing.”
I agreed.
The next morning, my father came quietly into our room and kissed us on our foreheads.
“Why are you waking me up?” I asked him.
He just kept kissing me and hugging me. I didn’t know that this would be the last time I would ever see my father. I have always regretted that I was sleepy and didn’t hug him back. I’m sure my father understood I didn’t mean to ignore him, but that is one regret I will have for the rest of my life.
RENEE: IN SPRING OF 1944, the farmers’ son announced that he and his parents had not heard from our mother and father in a long time. “Your parents have failed to pay for the last five months of your stay,” he said, “so now you have to leave.” Then he put us in their wagon and drove us back to Bratislava—and just left us there on the street.
I took my sister by the hand, and we walked around looking for a place to stay. One thing I noticed right away was that it seemed the transports had ceased. There were no more roundups, no shouting, and in one sense it was a relief. But in another sense, it was scary, because I realized that we might be the last Jews in Bratislava and that all the others might have been taken away.
There were some non-Jewish people we knew living in Bratislava, and Herta and I went around knocking on their doors, asking if they could tell us where our parents were. They all told us the same thing: They didn’t know where our parents were. Later, we found out that our parents had been sent to a concentration camp, but none of our neighbors were willing to tell us. No one explained that our parents had been deported, so we lived with the vain hope that we might find them.
I took Herta to see a mattress maker we knew. He agreed to let us hide at night on the top floor of the building where he had his workshop, even though it was risky for him. During the day, we had to stay out of the building because he had workers there. Some of the workers were antisemitic, and if they knew Jews were hiding there, they’d certainly betray us to the Nazis. For three weeks, Herta and I spent our days walking around Bratislava, going into shops, visiting churches, and wandering all over waiting for night.
After three weeks of living like that, the mattress maker told us his workers had become suspicious because they had found bread crumbs. He was afraid the workers would complain to the Nazi authorities that their boss was hiding Jews, and he told us he couldn’t keep us any longer. We had to find some other place to hide. We packed our one little bag, climbed down the stairs, and were again on the streets of Bratislava.
I remember one harrowing episode. Herta and I were walking down a street, and somebody who had known our parents saw us. He must have recognized me because of my hair, which was short, blond, and tightly curled.
“Come here!” he shouted. “Don’t worry. I’m going to take care of you.”
I was suspicious and careful to watch for any clues of danger, and I knew immediately I couldn’t trust him. By then I had lost trust in more or less everybody.
“No,” I told him, “we’re not going with you,” and I took Herta by the hand, and we started running.
He chased us, so it was a good thing we knew the streets of Bratislava well. We weaved our way down streets, around corners, and through little openings in buildings. Finally, after about twenty minutes, we managed to lose him.
We were scared of again meeting the man who had chased us, scared of meeting anyone who knew we were Jews. We’d been on that farm and away from the town for about nine months, so I hoped we’d grown tall enough that it would be harder for anyone to recognize us—but what were we to do now? Where could we go?
The thought that my sister and I might be the last Jews in Bratislava was terrifying. I couldn’t bear it. I kept thinking, Have all the other Jews been sent away to be killed? I don’t want us to be the last ones alive.
I held our little suitcase in one hand and Herta with the other hand, and we walked and walked, scrounging for food and looking for a place to stay. I knocked on the doors of anyone we knew who was still there, and they slammed the doors right in our faces—not saying a word, not explaining, just as if we were beggars.
That’s when I understood that we were indeed the last Jews in Bratislava.
RENEE: I TOLD HERTA, “We can’t live this way. We will die on the street. We might as well just go to the police and turn ourselves in.”
