Female prisoners—Polish too—were constantly being taken to their executions. After any kind of incident against the Germans, several would be hung in the city squares as a warning to the Polish people. One night the girls were forced out of bed to run to another building in lines of ten. Bela was seventh in line; Lonka, ninth. Every tenth was told to move sideways. Bela found out later that they were hanged from lampposts throughout Warsaw.
The prisoners received very little news from outside, but sometimes Polish secretaries brought in bits of newspaper. When they heard Russian planes fly overhead, they were thrilled.
On Sundays, an entire entourage inspected them. One week, Bela begged the Polish commander for a job, saying she’d go crazy without work. The next day, she got a position in the laundromat. She told the commander that her friend “Chrisa” also wanted work, and so Lonka was sent to the kitchen to peel potatoes. The work distracted them from hunger and weakness and sped up the day. Lonka stole a few potatoes and cooked them on the hearth in the kitchen. She gave several to Shoshana for the Jewish women.
Bela continued to be interrogated over four months. Once, she was told that if she didn’t confess who’d given her weapons, she would be killed immediately. As always, she insisted they were hers. She was kicked and beaten, then dragged through the streets to a forest and told she had one more hour to live. After a while, though, the guards relented and brought her back to the cell. Lonka was waiting at the window. “When I saw her face,” Bela wrote later, “I forgot about my pain.”
In November 1942 fifty names were read aloud: deportation. Bela and Lonka were on the list. Bela was actually excited: finally, maybe, a chance to escape. The girls were given bread and jam, forced into covered vehicles filled with guards, commanded to silence, and then pushed into a pitch-black prisoner train with no openings. Bela and Lonka sat in a corner in their summer dresses, hugging each other, warming each other, staying alert the whole time.
Many hours later, they arrived and disembarked. A band played German march tunes. They read the name of the station: Auschwitz. The ironwork above the gate read, “Arbeit macht frei.” Bela didn’t know what this meant, but right away she noticed that while the entrance was huge, there were no exits.
*
Auschwitz-Birkenau was established originally as a prison and slave labor camp for Polish leaders and intellectuals. Now Bela and Lonka were separated from the Jews, ordered to march past barbed wire, past hundreds of women in stripes watching them, yelling, sick, beaten. The Slovakian Jewish women who worked in the showers were happy that Poles had been brought in. Bela was tormented by having to hide her true identity from her own people.
They took Bela’s boots and leather jacket. Standing naked, she was inspected by male inmates for infections. She wanted to die. She tried to bribe the haircutter to leave more on her head instead of just “stairs” （layers）。 “If I don’t have hair,” the cutter said, “you won’t either.” Bela reminded herself, As long as I have a head on my shoulders, my hair will grow again. Then she received clothing: striped dress, jacket with a shoelace, and water canteen. No bra, no underwear. Clogs that didn’t fit. After hours of standing, her right arm was tattooed with digits. Electric pen. Awful pain. But no one around her cried as they became numbers. The rain poured. On a mat on the muddy ground, Lonka and Bela huddled in the corner and fell asleep.
At three in the morning, roll call. Bare feet sinking into mud, tens of thousands of women, half asleep, pounding one another on the back to stay warm. Hours of standing. Armed guards and dogs on leashes. No water to drink. Then marching, marching, forced into rhythm with a rubber club. Weaker women who fell were beaten. The guards were agitated with the women for not understanding German. Rain poured. Bela was soaked. They were taken to be photographed so they could be tracked if they escaped—once with a kerchief, once without. Bela’s “mug shot” showed her smiling, even looking healthy.
An entire day of waiting, marching, starving. Bela slept on the top bunk—farthest from the rats—at the feet of six other women, smelling burning flesh from the crematoria in the distance. She lay in her wet clothes without blankets, unable to move an inch all night. At least the other women’s body heat kept her warm. During the night, she was jabbed by sharp objects in the mattress. Later, she found out these were the bones of previous prisoners. That was her first day at Auschwitz.