Anezka came to Ohrdruf on the fourth cattle car train
from Kaschau a week before it was bombarded. The Hungarian police had assisted
German soldiers in deporting its entire Jewish population of 12,000 in a matter
of days. Her memories of her beloved town were now a dream far from the
conditions she now faced and the life she would be forced to live. German
soldiers raided neighborhoods searching for gold, paintings, anything of value
that was unacceptable and undeserving for Jews to own.
She was separated from her
mother and father before being prodded into the cart. She feared the worst for
her father as he had already began falling ill right before the early morning
ambush. Supervising police officials refused him to be treated before the
deportation. He was most likely in the infirm cart…if he even made the trip.
Her mother had been pulled from her hand as they entered the train station,
disappearing into the mass. There was no one with her now; just her memories, a
broken soul, and fear.
The trek seemed like a travel
into another world, another lifetime away. In reality, it was only a five-day
journey packed in a cart with 90 other prisoners. The other people in her cart,
though recognizable townspeople, were now strangers of the same fate. Some she
vaguely recognized from her childhood, others she would forget, as many would
not survive the dark and frigid transport. Her face soiled in tears, Anzeka
struggled to keep warm. The only garments she was able to grab before being
hurried out of her home were the night clothes she had on when she was pulled
from her bed, her mother’s house shoes that were too small for her wide feet,
and her father’s white overcoat he wore when he was practicing medicine.
The
smell was what affected her the most. Five days of suffocating in the middle of
the cart with little air or light, five days of other persons’ body odor, five
days of human urine and feces, five days of not knowing, five days of death.
Her father being a doctor, had always instilled in her to have good hygiene,
and her mother always kept a clean home. Anzeka was not used to such
conditions. How much longer could she bare this filth? How much longer would
she wonder about her parents? How much longer could she live through the agony?
When the doors slid open, the
dawn’s rays flooded the cart and blinded the prisoners. The clammy morning air
rushed their lungs, many coughing forcefully as their bodies remembered what it
felt like to breathe.
“Everybody out, Now!” shouted a
frail, thin man who entered the cart. His facial structure was defined deep
into his skull, every bone and muscle identifiable on his thin face.
“Men to the right. Women,
children, and the old to the left,” shouted another man. He was taller but
equally thin. He stretched his arm out pulling on the coats of the prisoners as
they hurried off the cart. His arm…it looked more like a tree limb on the last
days of autumn. It was just there; lifeless and cold, flesh pulled on bone.
Both men wearing striped shirts draped off their shoulders and pants many sizes
too big.
Anzeka was finally pulled from
the sea of bodies. She turned around looking for her mother, her father, any
face she could find comfort in. Maybe she had been crammed in the same cart
with her parents or a close friend and had not known. She was pushed towards
the left with the other women and children. The cries screeched out as families
members were once again torn apart. She looked around some more, hoping
someone’s eyes would recognize hers. But they were all the same, distant and
fearful. She was able to see the last prisoners exit the cart and then the two
men begin to drag out the bodies of the old, weak, and of the dead.
She was filed into a line
where the prisoners were to be evaluated. Heads turned in all directions looking
for loved ones. Mothers and wives fell to the ground in cries for their
husbands and sons. 
Gunshots rang for those daring
to escape the crowd. The lines moved fast. Anzeka saw she was not too far from
the German soldiers in the front evaluating the new arrivals. As the prisoners
were looked over, they were dragged in different directions. Some mothers were
allowed to be with their children, others belting out mercy not to be
separated. It was now her turn for selection. She found herself in front of a
man with a white overcoat much like her father’s.
He was tall, dark haired, with
a scholarly mannerism about him. He was dangerously handsome. How could it be
that he could be part of this ugly army of murderers? She stood at attention
looking through him. He smiled and whispered to another physician next to him
who scribbled on his clipboard. “You are very beautiful for a Jewish girl,” he
told her. “How old are you?” His voice was something harmonic. Soothing
compared to the moans and screams she had endured for those five days, yet it
sounded final.
Without making eye contact she
replied, “15.”
He grinned at the SS officer
next to him holding a rifle at the ready, “Put her in the F kommando.” He
motioned his head to have her taken away. As the officer pulled her away the
beautiful man yelled back, “Halt!” His body did an about face and he marched up
to Anzeka, “Though you are an exceptional beauty of your species, my dear, you
are still a dog. And dogs do not practice medicine. Take off that coat.” The
officer ripped her father’s coat off her shoulders. She gave resistance but
eventually was stripped of her father’s last embrace. It was the last thing she
had to remember him by, the last piece of love from him that she owned.
She would later come to
know this beautiful devil was the infamous Dr. Mengele, “The Angel of Death”
himself. The officer clubbed her in the back of the head, threw the coat to the
mud, and hauled her off to a truck full of other young women huddled in the
back...To be continued...
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