Holocaust Gedenktag

Fortsetzung, Dienstag, 29. April 2003, 09:27 (vor 7878 Tagen) @ Smadar

In the middle of hell, God heard

But Lieberman left Auschwitz before the first
snow, and the way in which she was saved, as she
describes in the book, seems impossible - a work
of near fantasy. She remembers that the winter was
already at its height - maybe it was the end of
November 1944, she is not certain - when she heard
women whispering about a selection that was taking
place in the camp. Lieberman was a "musselman" (a
word used to describe the "walking dead" in the
camps), whose body weight was barely more than the
weight of her bones, and she knew she would not
pass the selection.

About 2,000 women were gathered in the selection
hut. At one end stood the naked women, and at the
other stood Mengele. All of a sudden, the head of
the block walked up to Lieberman´s mother and
asked her: "Is this girl yours? She won´t pass the
selection. Give her to me, I´ll conceal her."

"She took me to a room off to the side, and told
me to wait there until she could give me the sign
to leave," recalls Lieberman. "When she knocked on
the door, I went straight out into the hall, and I
had to climb up the steps, from the side, to join
with the women who´d been selected for work, but I
was afraid and I had no strength, and it took me
too long. The whole time, women were climbing the
stairs and none of them helped me. And then, as I
was slithering up the steps, Mengele caught me and
threw me toward the place where those sentenced to
die were standing."

At that moment, her mother was at the top of the
steps, but then their eyes met, and her daughter
sent her a kiss. In a single moment - Lieberman
doesn´t know how she managed to get past all the
women between them - her mother was standing
beside her. But her mother, Roza, had been
selected for the happy group that was to be used
for labor; Mengele noticed her, brought his whip
down on her back, and sent her back to the living.


Celinqa remained with the group that soon marched
off toward the furnaces. A few steps before the
crematoria, a command was given to turn left, and
the women who were sentenced to death were ordered
to wait in a room off to the side. "We were a
small group, and the Germans didn´t want to waste
a can of gas on us, so we had to wait until we
could be joined by other women from the next
selection," says Lieberman.

Holocaust survival stories are always random, and
astonishing. Lieberman, who grew up in a secular
family, does not believe that anything is random.
The story of her survival is so impossible that
she is convinced that it was there, in the middle
of hell, that God heard her. "The following day,
at noon, they asked for a few women to bring food
from the kitchen. I wanted to join, but the
blokowa, the woman responsible for the block, said
that I wouldn´t have the strength to pick up the
pot. At that moment I was like a little girl that
has to go outside and whom no one can stop. I have
to get out, I have to, maybe I´ll see mama. And
the blokowa says, `If you collapse, they´ll kill
you without any mercy.´ I will not collapse, I am
saying, and I go with all the others."