Armageddon - Max Hastings [297]
One day after an inspection, an SS man said: “Anyone who can speak fluent German, step forward.” Several women did so. A civilian who was standing beside the officer pointed to two, of whom Edith was one. Two days later, she found herself among a group of 200, once more loaded upon a train. “It was impossible to feel relief, because one had no idea where we were going.” After two days on the train, they were unloaded at the small town of Penig, near Magdeburg, and marched to a barracks. This was Ebensee concentration camp. An SS guard said: “Tomorrow, you work.” They found themselves among Poles, Russians, Italians in a factory manufacturing aircraft parts, working twelve-hour shifts, often at night, every day walking two miles each way from the barracks to the assembly line. Their guards were not allowed into the factory. Their rations remained at starvation level. They suffered all manner of sores and diseases. Yet they were alive.
Edith was so weakened that she found it very hard to work, and lived in terror of being marked for extermination. She was saved by a German—their civilian supervisor, Herr Kaiser. In these most awful of circumstances, in a world from which almost all humanity had been banished, she received from this man an infinitesimal allowance of kindness, just sufficient to preserve her life. Kaiser would sometimes say to her: “If you feel too tired to work, you can go to sleep.” He brought the girls a little food. He allowed them to hunt among the garbage for potatoes. “He was a fine man.” In measuring the abominable deeds of the Nazi era, the charity of a few such men as Kaiser should be placed on the balance against the enormities of his countrymen. It required courage to retain even such small shreds of decency in Hitler’s Germany.
Towards the end, Edith’s health failed completely: “I had no more strength. I gave up. I knew I could not take it any more.” Kaiser arranged for her to be hidden in the hospital, where the doctor granted her three days off work. Even a few months earlier, her flagging health would have provoked a death sentence. Yet now, in early April 1945, “we could see fear in the faces of the SS. They were not strict any more. They stopped shouting at us.” Edith knew that she had been living on the very lip of the grave, from which so many millions of other Nazi captives toppled in. But she was held back. She survived. It is, perhaps, worth reflecting upon the predicament of Edith Gabor while reading the minutes of British Foreign Office official Arminius Dew. He wrote on 1 September 1944, during the impassioned controversy about Allied policy in the face of increasing intelligence about the Holocaust: “In my opinion, a disproportionate amount of the time of the Office is wasted on dealing with these wailing Jews.”
It is hard to fathom the logic which caused the Nazis to transport children along with parents to slave-labour camps in Hitler’s empire, and then to keep some alive, while dispatching hundreds of thousands of others to the gas chambers. The administrative inconvenience, not to mention the cost of providing food, however little, for children, must have significantly outweighed the value of a mother’s services. Gennady Trofimov was eight when he, together with his newborn sister Anna, was shipped to Latvia with their mother and grandmother from Novgorod, in the autumn of 1943. Their father had gone to the war in June 1941. Their mother, who worked in a local china factory, said later that watching her husband and hundreds like him board the train to join the Red Army seemed like watching wheat being scythed. She repeated again