Renia blacked out. No memory, no feeling. After some time, she sensed someone open her mouth and pour in water. Her eyes remained shut. Someone was speaking, close to her face. “She’s already dead. She’s cold and foaming at the mouth.” More buckets of water were poured on her. She was half naked and freezing and pretended to be unconscious. Two Gestapo men checked her pulse, slapped her a few times. “We still have her—she has a heartbeat.” They leaned in closer, to hear if she was saying anything. They looked into her bulging, crazed eyes. “She’s completely lost it.” They laid her on a bench. Blood and water oozed off of her. In that moment, she regretted having been brought back to life. She would be beaten again, and she would not be able to take it next time. Her heart was hardly beating. She took comfort in the thought that now that they’d realized they wouldn’t get anything from her, they would just shoot her.
Renia was unable to stand up on her own. One Gestapo man bandaged her head with a soiled rag, put her sweater over her, held her by the arm, and led her to the desk. He handed her the report and said, “Sign your name on these insolent lies.” As he spoke, his wife entered. She winced when she saw Renia’s face, and turned away. Then she noticed Renia’s watch on the table and told her husband that since Renia was going to die anyway, she wanted it. He explained that she’d get the watch, but not yet. This angered her, and she left in a huff.
The Gestapo helped Renia hold the pen, and she signed.
Next, they called a taxi.
The driver invited the Gestapo guard to sit next to him, since she was so “unpleasant.”
But the guard refused. “Even though she looks like a corpse,” he said, “she’s capable of tearing the door down and escaping.”
Nighttime. Darkness. From the men’s conversation, she realized she was not returning to Katowice but being taken to the prison at Mys?owice.
The taxi driver chuckled. “I suppose it’s the only remedy for her insolence.”
Chapter 26
Sisters, Revenge!
Renia and Anna
SEPTEMBER 1943
Mys?owice. They entered a large courtyard in the darkness. Giant dogs leapt at them from all sides. Armed guards roamed the yard, ready for action. The Gestapo man went inside to hand her testimony to the office, then returned to the cab and was driven off. A new Gestaponik, about twenty-two years old, looked at Renia. “They really plowed your skin good, didn’t they?”
Renia didn’t answer.
With his fist, he gestured for her to follow him.
He locked her in a cellar. She squinted to see in the dark. One bed. She couldn’t sit, couldn’t lie down because of the pain. Unbearable pain. Finally, she managed to stretch out on her stomach. Her bones, ribs, and spine felt like they’d been broken to pieces. Her whole body was swollen. She could not move her arms or legs.
How she envied those who’d died. “I never would have thought any human being could endure such beatings,” she later wrote. “A tree would have broken like a matchstick if it had been struck like I was, and still I’m alive, breathing and thinking.”
Renia’s memory was off, though; things were confused in her mind. She was lucid enough to tell that her thoughts were not lucid. This, of course, was not ideal.
Her condition worsened. She lay on that bed in bandages for days. For lunch, she was given diluted soup and a glass of water, which she used to wash her mouth and face. She hadn’t showered. There was nowhere to relieve herself. The stench was suffocating. So was the darkness. She’d been buried alive. “I await my death, but at no avail” is how she later described her state of mind. “You can’t order death.”
*
A week in, a young woman arrived at her cell. She brought Renia to an office. A Gestapo agent questioned her and took down details. Renia was surprised. Why had she not been executed? Would they lock her in another cell? The woman took her to a bath and, seeing her pain, helped her undress.