A Thousand Mothers

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to my wonderful husband, Christopher Webb, for patiently listening to me moan and whine during writer’s block and for your love and support over the past two years as I researched and researched, and for finally telling me to stop researching and start writing. Thank you for filling in facts and words for me when my brain stopped working and for always believing in me. Thank you for loving the history nerd that I am.

Thank you to Aunt Sheila for your daily phone calls and brainstorming sessions as we figured out plot holes and character points. Thank you for reading un-edited, horrible first drafts and for encouraging me to continue every time I wanted to quit. Your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions are scattered throughout this book, and I couldn’t have done it without you.

Thank you to Pam Hanson for traveling with me to interview my Ravensbrück Holocaust survivor and for never stopping me when I talked about the book incessantly. Thank you for thirty-one years of friendship, love, and support. You are the definition of best friend. And thank you for bringing me cake when I needed it.

Thank you to Billiejo Fogelsonger for being my sounding board and at times alpha reader. I appreciated your candor and honest feedback throughout the whole writing process.

A final thanks to Jenny Q at Historical Editorial for editing A Thousand Mothers and for designing the perfect cover for it. Your insightful notes and suggestions made me think and craft the perfect story. You took my vague and crazy ideas and turned them into something beautiful and amazing.

INTRODUCTION

A Thousand Mothers is a work of historical fiction, and most of the characters, apart from some well-known historical figures are the product of the author’s imagination. But the setting of Ravensbrück is true and is depicted as accurately as possible.

Ravensbrück Concentration Camp was the only Nazi concentration camp built for women. Between 1939 and 1945, approximately 130,000 prisoners from twenty-three countries passed through Ravensbrück’s gates. Around 92,000 women, children, and men were killed there. The prisoners were subjected to slave labor, starvation, shootings, lethal injections, gassings, and horrendous medical experimentation. It was a daily struggle to survive, and many real-life heroines stepped forward in the camp and helped others carry on. The prisoners created support networks and became each other’s surrogate families, which helped them find meaning and purpose in a world that was turned upside down.

Much of the original camp was destroyed after World War II when it fell under Soviet control. Since the reunification of Germany, the camp has been restored, and today Ravensbrück is a memorial to the women who endured so much while imprisoned behind its walls.

To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.

– Elie Wiesel

PROLOGUE

The German troops roared into Plonsk, on September 5, 1939, four days after invading Poland. The villagers felt the rumblings from the motorcycles and combat trucks armed with enormous machine guns before they saw the soldiers enter the city. Everyone hid in their homes, afraid of what would happen next.

The Germans began to take control of Jewish businesses and confiscate their property. Jewish businesses that the villagers had grown up with now had swastikas hanging in their windows. New laws forbade Jewish citizens from walking in the streets after 6:00 pm. and banned them from using public parks and attending cultural and religious activities. Soon the Nazis required every Jew to wear the yellow Star of David on their clothing. Within a month of the Germans’ arrival in Plonsk, the city’s beautiful synagogue, along with works of art and the two-hundred-year-old Torah, were destroyed. A shell of the building remained and became an egg warehouse.

Perl Kaczlowicz was a teacher in Plonsk and couldn’t believe it when an SS soldier came into her classroom and announced that the school was to be closed and sent her students home. Perl stood up to the soldier, demanding to know who had issued the order, but the soldier threatened to arrest her if she didn’t obey, so she stuffed books and papers into her rucksack before the soldier pushed her out the door. It broke her heart, but she remained determined to keep educating the children of Plonsk and taught classes in her home for anyone who wanted to attend. This was risky since the Germans didn’t allow Jews to congregate, but for several months Perl continued to hold clandestine classes.

Perl’s father and mother, Rudolf and Flora Goldschmidt owned a drugstore in Plonsk. They were devastated when soldiers took control of their business and they lost everything they had spent their whole lives building. Rudolf had the presence of mind to hide valuable drugs in his pockets before leaving the drugstore for the last time.

The Nazis established a Jewish council, the Judenrat, in Plonsk in July 1940 and gave them the job of implementing the Nazis’ policies for the Jews. They drafted men into forced labor and maintained control of the city.

Perl’s husband, Mattie, was a carpenter in Plonsk. The Germans put every available man to work, including Mattie’s father, Jacob, who had been badly injured years earlier in a construction accident. The Nazis gave Jacob and Mattie the job of building housing for the Germans. They worked daily from dawn until after dark and came home exhausted. Sometimes they returned battered and bruised, but when Perl asked what happened, the answer was always, I fell.

The demanding work began to take a toll on Jacob, and Perl gave an impassioned speech to the Judenrat asking them to excuse him from work because of his disability, but her pleas fell on deaf ears. The Nazis commanded all men and boys over the age of sixteen must work. If they couldn’t keep up with their job requirements, they would be deported or killed.

Orders came that every Jew must appear in the town square on April 30, 1941. This caused great fear since earlier roundups had resulted in family and friends disappearing. The day was hot and sticky as Perl, Mattie, and their families crowded together waiting to hear the news. A German officer announced that all Jews must leave their homes and move into the poorest part of the city. They were told to pack their things and report to their new living quarters within one week. The Germans posted moving schedules along with consequences for not obeying. The Plonsk ghetto had been established.

Perl remained optimistic as she packed the few belongings they could take to the ghetto. At least we are together, she told herself. At the designated time, the Kaczlowiczs and Goldschmidts moved into their new home, one room in a boarded-up, dilapidated apartment building without electricity or running water. They shared the three-room apartment with six other families, with little room to move, let alone live comfortably. Mattie, Perl, Irena, Mattie’s older sister, and Samuel, Mattie’s younger brother, slept on the floor while Jacob, Flora, and Rudolf slept on three cots pushed to one side of the room.

Every day the Judenrat distributed ration cards to each family and Perl and Irena stood in line for hours to receive their inadequate rations of poor-quality food. There was never enough, and it was common for the food to run out before everyone received their allotment. The women learned to cook with the limited food the Germans distributed, sometimes serving bland soup and hard bread twice a day.

Rudolf, along with a Jewish doctor, established a small hospital in the ghetto. He appealed to friends living elsewhere in Poland, and soon the hospital contained forty beds for the sickest patients. Rudolf brought as many drugs as he could into the ghetto but didn’t have enough to treat everyone who became ill.

Contagious diseases spread through the cramped, unsanitary living conditions of the ghetto, and Rudolf came down with typhus in the summer of 1941. He gave the remaining medicine he had to a young man with a family. The grateful man recovered, but on August 1, 1941, Rudolf, at forty-nine, died in his sleep.

Perl tried to hold classes in her overcrowded apartment at night, but parents, afraid the Nazis would kill them if caught, stopped sending their children. As the days became shorter and the air turned colder, Perl burned her books and lesson plans to heat their apartment.

With the help of Irena, Flora started a soup kitchen in their apartment and each day hundreds of hungry Jews lined up to receive a tiny bowl of diluted soup and a slice of brown bread. Wealthy Plonsk citizens made donations to help those living in the ghetto. They watched their friends die from hunger and disease, not knowing how to help them without drawing the Nazis’ attention to themselves. Still, it wasn’t enough, and Perl watched each morning as the Jewish Burial Society workers picked up the bodies of those who died during the night and buried them.

Polish citizens started a black market with Jews in the Ghetto, and for a while, Mattie supplemented their meager rations with meat bought with furniture or jewelry. But soon their rooms were bare and there was nothing left to sell. Smuggling was the last and the most frightening option, but they needed food and medicine. The Nazis made it clear that the punishment for smuggling was execution, but families had to take that chance, or they would starve.

Samuel became one of the youngest smugglers at the age of ten. He was small and able to squeeze through holes in the fence surrounding the ghetto. He had blond hair and blue eyes and looked Aryan, so no one stopped him as he wandered the streets outside the ghetto looking for food. Perl worried about the risks he was taking, but they depended on his contribution to help feed their family.

Smuggling grew more dangerous as Poles who had once been friends with the Jews began to report Jews to the gestapo when they saw them outside the ghetto. One day in October the Nazis ordered everyone in the ghetto to come to the town square to watch them execute two smugglers.

Perl knew that Samuel wasn’t frightened by what he saw but instead became more defiant and took greater risks. On a cold February morning, a Polish storekeeper alerted the gestapo that a young Jewish boy had come into his store begging for food. The storekeeper chased him out of his store, and later that afternoon, a German guard caught him as he slipped back into the ghetto with a rucksack full of stolen bread. The Nazis arrested Samuel and scheduled his execution for the next day.

Mattie and Perl pleaded with the Judenrat, demanding they do something, but their power was limited, and they couldn’t help Samuel. The next morning, they stood with Irena and Jacob at the synagogue, gripping each other’s hands as Nazi officers marched Samuel and two other smugglers through Plonsk on the way to their deaths. When they reached the courtyard behind the synagogue, soldiers forced the three prisoners to their knees facing the stone wall. Before kneeling, Samuel looked at his devastated family and gave them one last, somber smile. He closed his eyes, and a soldier shot him once in the head. Perl screamed as Samuel’s small body slumped on the frozen ground and his blood spilled out on the dirty snow. They weren’t permitted to bury Samuel, so the family returned to their cramped apartment in shock, fearing the future. Perl couldn’t help but wonder, If the Germans are executing children, what will they do next?

Rumors spread through the ghetto that more changes were coming. Before long, the Nazis ordered the Judenrat to make a list of the elderly, sick, and anyone unable to work, assuring them that these residents were going to a convalescent camp in the East. On this list were the names of Jacob Kaczlowicz and Flora Goldschmidt. Everyone in the ghetto heard the stories of the extermination camps, but no one believed them. The brother-in-law of a doctor in the ghetto had escaped from a death camp and returned to Plonsk. He told the Judenrat and the villagers about the horrors and murders he had seen, but they ignored him, thinking he had gone crazy. Though they experienced terror and destruction in the ghetto, everyone refused to believe that the Germans were capable of anything so incomprehensible.

The Nazis commanded everyone to assemble in the town center on October 28, 1942. Flora and Jacob stood with two hundred other Plonsk residents as they waited for instructions. The Germans ordered everyone to march to the train station, and it didn’t take long before they realized the Nazis were sending them to an extermination camp. The group panicked, and many tried to escape, but the SS guards were prepared and shot anyone who fled. Shouts and screams of pain filled the air as German soldiers shoved the elderly and sick into the waiting boxcars.

Flora’s eyes were lifeless as she held Perl’s cold hands and said good-bye to her daughter. Don’t weep for me. My time is ending, but you have your future ahead of you. Be brave and strong. Her voice broke and tears filled her eyes as she told Perl that she loved her one last time.

A guard grasped Flora around the waist and threw her into the train car. Perl crumpled to the ground, covering her face in anguish. Jacob didn’t say a word as he hugged Mattie and Irena good-bye and climbed into the overcrowded car. Mattie, Perl, and Irena were dumbstruck as soldiers sealed the cars and the train pulled out of the station.

Perl was inconsolable as she trudged back to the apartment. She had heard the stories about Jews being gassed but refused to believe them. Her only thoughts were of her mother and father-in-law and what would happen to them.

PART ONE

RAVENSBRÜCK

CHAPTER 1

December 1, 1942

N o! It’s not true! Mattie cried as he read the latest deportation schedule the Germans had posted in the city square. He read the list again, but it showed the same names. His eyes kept coming back to the same two names: Irena Kaczlowicz and Perl Kaczlowicz, his sister and wife.

Fat, wet snowflakes fell as he began the long walk to their apartment at the far end of the ghetto. The sun had just set, and the air had turned colder. He passed starving beggars and orphaned children, their stomachs swollen from hunger, huddling in the squalid streets, trying to get warm, but he didn’t register what he was seeing. His mind was in a fog, his thoughts scrambling as he struggled to come up with a plan to protect Irena and Perl. I can hide them. But he knew the Germans were searching for Jews who were missing, and if caught, the Nazis killed them along with those aiding them.

Mattie stood outside his apartment for several minutes, trying to regain his composure until, finally, with shaking hands, he pushed open the door.

***

Perl smiled as her husband entered the kitchen, but she felt the color drain from her face as she looked at his ashen features. She shut her eyes as sorrow and fear washed over her. She knew why Mattie looked crushed and took a deep, slow breath to bring her emotions under control. Every day the Germans forced women and children to leave the ghetto, sending them to an unknown destination in the east, and she knew it was only a matter of time before it was her turn. The once-overcrowded Plonsk ghetto was a third of its original size. They used to share their apartment with six other families, but now just the three of them remained. The Nazis still needed strong men to finish building their roads, but the women and children were disposable.

Irena, Mattie is home, Perl called to her sister-in-law, who had been working at the stove and didn’t hear her brother come into the kitchen.

Irena spun around and shook her head in denial as she took in the expression on Perl’s face. She clutched the kitchen table so hard her knuckles turned white. When will we have to leave? she asked with a trembling voice and hunched shoulders.

I have a plan. When it gets dark, we can sneak into Szerominek. It’s only a mile away, and we can hide in the orphanage, Mattie said.

No. I won’t hide. They will shoot you and us if they find us. The war will be over soon, and they’re sending us to a work camp. I’m too tired to fight or hide, Irena whispered.

Perl agreed with Irena, and the women began preparing for the next day.

They had twelve hours to pack a single suitcase and say good-bye. Mattie had killed a pigeon that morning, even though it was against the rules, and that night the three of them gathered around their battered kitchen table for one final dinner together. They tried to enjoy the rare treat, but no one had an appetite, and after pushing the food around on their plates, they gave up trying to eat. They pulled their chairs close to each other and lost track of time, reminiscing about their families and childhood. They told themselves that the war had to end soon, and this was but a brief separation.

***

Irena excused herself to get ready for bed, leaving Mattie and Perl to talk. Once alone in her bedroom, she was overcome with fear and couldn’t hold back her tears. She had never been so petrified in her life. She sat on her bed, shaking, her teeth chattering from fear and the cold that seeped into the unheated apartment.

She wished she was brave like Perl, who never seemed to worry or be afraid of anything, but she wasn’t. Nausea bubbled in her throat as she thought about how she would survive in the work camp. According to rumors in the ghetto, the Nazis killed anyone who was sick or lame. She had always been weak and sickly and walked with a limp caused by a beating from her father. She pounded her fist on her damaged leg in frustration and cursed her father, then immediately felt guilty for the anger and resentment she felt toward him. The Nazis had deported him two months earlier, and she didn’t know where he was or even if he was still alive.

***

Perl wept in anger and defeat that night in bed as Mattie held her. The Nazis had taken away everything she loved, her parents, her home, her school, and now she had to say good-bye to the love of her life. She clenched her jaw in frustration, feeling as if their world was spinning out of control. When she had no more tears to shed, she fell into an exhausted sleep, her body racked with sobs.

The next morning, both women were quiet as they dressed for the dreaded trip. They didn’t know how long it would take to get to the camp or what the conditions would be there, so they wore several layers of clothing and put an extra set of clothes and some bread in their satchels. Perl said a silent prayer for courage as she took off her wedding ring and gave it to Mattie to keep for her. She put on boots and a headscarf and prepared to go out into the frigid winter morning. The last thing she did was slip her Star of David armband over her coat sleeve and put her registration papers in her pocket. She clasped Irena’s hand as they left the apartment for the last time and never looked back as she, Irena, and Mattie walked in the freezing early hours of the morning toward the town square.

They joined the other two thousand women and children that were being deported that day, and before long, Nazi officers with their snarling dogs arrived. At 7:00 a.m., the despondent, silent group made their way to the train depot. When an endless line of closed boxcars came into view, people screamed and stumbled in the deep snow as panic set in.

Frightened women and children fled toward the forest, hoping to hide, but the German officers surrounded the group and shot anyone who tried to escape. The sound of gunfire and barking dogs mixed with the screams of the terrified, confused women.

The SS guards whipped and beat the astonished, terror-stricken women to make them move faster, and soon the shocked group was running toward the train platform to dodge the Germans’ whips and biting dogs.

Hurry, you Jewish dogs! the Nazis screamed at the group.

Confusion followed as women pushed and elbowed their way through the crowd, struggling to hold on to their children. They had no time to comprehend what was happening in the overwhelming commotion. Someone bumped Perl, causing her to lose her grip on Irena’s hand. Perl shouted her name as she watched her get lost in the surging crowd rushing toward the supposed safety of the interior of the train cars.

Perl looked on in horror when her neighbor from the ghetto who was walking next to her tried to run away. She only took two steps before a German soldier took aim and shot her. She had a blank expression on her face as her spotless gray coat turned red and she dropped to the ground. Before Perl could stop to help her, Mattie pulled her into his arms, tugging her away from the gruesome sight.

All around her the ground was littered with the bodies of women and children. Her mind refused to believe what her eyes were witnessing. She knew she only had a few minutes to say good-bye to Mattie, but she couldn’t think of any words to say.

Perl looked at Mattie as their world fell away. She didn’t need to speak as she gazed into her husband’s tear-filled eyes. A thousand memories rushed back to her, and she became oblivious for a few seconds to the pandemonium surrounding them. Neither spoke a word as they stood in silence. She tried to memorize what her husband looked like and realized that no matter what took place; he was her soulmate and the love of her life. They were in their own world as they kissed one last time.

I’ll see you soon was the only thing Perl said.

Perl turned away with one last sob and elbowed her way through the crowd until she found Irena at the end of the long line that led to a train car. She was trembling as she took her sister-in-law’s hand and didn’t let go as the Nazis crammed the women into the already-overcrowded space, forcing some to stand with their arms above their heads to make more room. They sealed the doors, plunging them into blackness, and the train moved out.

I love you, Mattie, Perl whispered to herself.

CHAPTER 2

The train lurched to a stop, but Perl didn’t know where she was or even how long they had been traveling. She knew they had boarded the train on Wednesday, December 2, but there were no windows in the stifling car, so day and night had become one. She thought the trip had taken two days, but her mind refused to form a coherent thought as she rubbed her gritty eyes and willed herself to focus. They had packed the women