From time to time, the women were jolted awake by gunshots. Probably someone in the men’s ward tried to break out, Renia figured. Escape was impossible: the windows had metal screens, the doors were locked, the prison walls were dotted with lookout posts. Guards surrounded the building and changed every two hours, shooting three times at anything suspicious.
Some mornings, she heard that men had hung themselves during the night, or that a woman tried to flee from the bathroom and was beaten and locked in a dark cell.
Renia spent sleepless nights thinking of escaping. But how?
*
One day five Jewish women from Sosnowiec arrived. They’d bleached their hair in disguise but were caught at the Katowice station. A Polish kid suspected them and alerted the Gestapo. All their possessions had been confiscated. Renia spoke to them at night, but was careful to hide her own Jewish identity; would they recognize her from the area? At the same time, recognition of her identity was one of the things she craved most. No one in the world knew where she was; she needed to tell someone, in case she died, so they would know. So someone would know.
Every few days, more Jewish women arrived. One was caught during a routine paper inspection. Another was hiding in the house of a gendarme’s friend; she didn’t know who exposed her. The entire German family was arrested. An elderly mother and her two daughters were caught on the train with bad papers—one cried and confessed to being Jewish. Most of the women, Renia wrote, had been turned over to the Gestapo by Poles.
When a group of twenty Jewish women was assembled, they were sent to Auschwitz. Renia’s heart heaved seeing them leave. These were her people, even though they didn’t know. They are being sent, and I stay behind. They deluded themselves until the last second—maybe the war would end!—but as they left, they wept, knowing full well they were going to die. Everyone cried with them.
Names of women wanted for interrogation were announced without warning. Some women fainted when they heard theirs called and were brought into the examination room on stretchers. The next day, they’d return beaten to a pulp. Sometimes they came back dead.
Most of the prisoners were suspected of political activity. Among them were entire families. Mothers and daughters were with Renia; the husbands, in the men’s ward. A woman might be told during an interrogation that her husband had been killed or sent to Auschwitz. Mothers received this type of notification about their sons and daughters all the time. They would lose their will to live; everyone was affected.
Renia learned that many Polish men and women were executed for helping Jews. They hanged one woman who was suspected of hiding her Jewish former employer. Just twenty-five, she left behind two young children, a husband, and parents. Some prisoners were women in mixed marriages, brought in as hostages because their Jewish husbands were hiding from the police. Some didn’t even know why they were arrested. They’d been locked up for three years, without formal accusations or anyone looking into their cases. It was also common to be sentenced in absentia: the incarcerated person would not know why or when she’d be executed. Once, an entire village—several hundred people—came in together. Apparently, the villagers had been in contact with a partisan.
One day Renia was in the yard during a break, and four trucks full of children arrived. Partisan gangs operated in that area; the Germans took revenge by tormenting innocent people, stealing their kids. The children lived in a special cell under the care of an elderly prisoner. They were fed and interrogated just like the adults. Seeing the whip, children would confess to anything and everything. These forced confessions were good enough for the Nazis. The children were sent to schools in Germany, where they were “educated” to become “respectable Germans.”
One Polish woman showed Renia her hands: no fingernails. They’d fallen out after hot pins had been stuck underneath them. Her heels were rotten from being beaten with burning metal rods. Her armpits showed the marks of chains. She’d been hung for half an hour and beaten; then they’d hung her upside down and continued. The top of her head was bald where her hair had been pulled out. And what did she do to deserve all this? In 1940 her son had disappeared. Rumor had it that he was leading a gang of partisans. They suspected that his relatives had contact with him. She was the last person alive from her entire family.