The Girl in the Striped Dress: A completely heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story Read online

  The Girl in the Striped Dress

  A completely heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story

  Ellie Midwood

  Books by Ellie Midwood

  The Girl in the Striped Dress

  The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz

  The Violinist of Auschwitz

  Available in Audio

  The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz (available in the UK and the US)

  The Violinist of Auschwitz (available in the UK and the US)

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  2. Helena

  3. Helena

  4. Helena

  5. Helena

  6. Helena

  7. Helena

  Chapter 8

  9. Helena

  10. Helena

  11. Helena

  12. Helena

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  15. Helena

  16. Helena

  17. Helena

  18. Helena

  19. Helena

  20. Helena

  21. Helena

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  24. Helena

  25. Helena

  26. Helena

  27. Helena

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  30. Franz

  31. Franz

  Chapter 32

  The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz

  Hear More from Ellie

  Books by Ellie Midwood

  A Letter from Ellie

  The Violinist of Auschwitz

  A Note on the History

  Acknowledgments

  To R. Love you.

  Introduction

  The Girl in the Striped Dress is a novel mostly based on a true story. I shall go into more detail concerning the authenticity of certain characters and events in the “Author’s Note” at the end of the novel but I felt the need to write this short introduction since this story is quite different from what I have learned about Auschwitz throughout the years. I’ve read countless memoirs and historical studies and most of them concentrated on regular inmates and their sufferings; quite often those were the stories of survival against all odds, which took place in the overcrowded, filthy barracks and in the open-air work details, where the inmates were constantly beaten and harassed by the Kapos and the brutal SS men – in short, the stories of extermination through labor, which the survivors were fortunate to live to tell. Based on those memoirs and studies, this has always been my general impression of Auschwitz-Birkenau. However, Helena’s story is quite different and I wished to give you, my readers, a quick insight into her experiences in Auschwitz-Birkenau before the novel even begins.

  In the spring of 1942, two thousand young women from Slovakia were deported to the concentration camp in Auschwitz. Helena Citrónová was among them. Not long before that, a wounded Waffen-SS soldier, Franz Wunsch, was transferred from the Eastern Front to Auschwitz after being declared unfit for further active duty. Helena was scheduled to die in the gas chamber on March 22, however, by lucky chance, the day before that, Wunsch’s comrades brought her into their barrack to sing Franz a song, since it was his birthday. According to the testimonies given after the war by both Helena and Franz, he enjoyed the girl’s singing so much, he demanded that her execution be canceled and instead signed her up to work under his command, in the so-called Kanada work detail.

  The last names of the main characters, Helena and Franz were changed; most of the names of the real historical figures who served or were incarcerated in Auschwitz-Birkenau, remained unchanged, just like their personality and actions which I tried my best to transfer into the novel, relying on the survivors’ memoirs, historical documents, and different studies conducted throughout the years by different historians.

  Most of the action in The Girl in the Striped Dress takes place in the so-called Kanada work detail – a complex, which consisted of a number of warehouses and storing and disinfecting facilities. Kanada (original German spelling was preserved for this novel) was nicknamed so by the inmates due to the fact that the sorting detail, to which the new arrivals’ possessions were brought to be sorted, was constantly overflowing with clothes, jewelry, and currencies of different countries. They believed Canada to be the land of riches and since, in the Auschwitz Kanada, just about anything could be found, the name stuck. The sorted items were later disinfected and shipped to Germany, while the gold and money went to the Reichsbank. Most of the inmates working there were female and it was one of the most sought-after work details in the entire camp since the labor was not hard and the inmates were allowed to grow out their hair, wear civilian clothes, and take the food and other items for personal use. The women assigned to the Kanada had quite a different life from the women living in the Birkenau women’s camp (the Kanada girls’ barracks were situated in the Kanada itself, separately from the women’s camp) and the living conditions there were considerably different. The Kanada women were also allowed to take showers daily and were hardly ever subjects for selections, which, in contrast, were conducted systematically in the regular camp.

  Here’s what the survivors had to say about the Kanada:

  “The girls who work there have everything – perfume, cologne – and they look as if their hairdos were the work of the top hairdresser of Paris. Apart from freedom, they have everything a woman can dream of. They also know love; the proximity of men, both inmates and SS men, makes this inevitable… Ten meters from their barracks, on the other side of the barbed wire, rise the rectangular chimneys of the crematoriums that burn constantly, burn the owners of all the goods that these admirable creatures sort in these barracks.” – Simon Laks and René Coudy, members of the Birkenau orchestra. (credit: “People in Auschwitz” by H. Langbein).

  Kitty Hart, one of the Kanada girls, described her experiences in these words: “It was a splendid summer. The sun was hot and we, who had been assigned the night shift, found it hard to sleep during the day. We usually got up in the early afternoon and if the weather was fair, we lay on the grass in front of our barracks, sunbathing and splashing water over ourselves to cool down. Often, we danced and sang and we even formed a little band. We began to laugh and joke again. I spent many hours reading books that those destined for gassing had taken along on their transport to Poland. Our situation was surely one of the most insane in the whole world. All around us were the screams of the dying, destruction, the smoking chimneys that darkened and polluted the air with the soot and the stench of charred corpses. I suppose what we primarily cared about in those days was not to lose our minds and that is why we laughed and sang even so close to the flaming inferno. It is astonishing what body and soul can endure if they have to. One can get accustomed to almost anything.” (credit: “People in Auschwitz” by H. Langbein).

  What follows, is Helena’s – the Kanada girl’s – story.

  Chapter One

  Germany, 1947

  Under the warm yellow glow of the overhead lamps, Dr. Hoffman was leafing through Franz Dahler’s Spruchkammerakte – Denazification Tribunal folder, entirely ignoring the commotion around him. He couldn’t blame his US army colleagues for being excited. It’s not every day that such a curious case of this sort was being heard. After the Denazification program had been transferred to the control of the Germans, in March of the previous year, the Americans we
re only too glad to reduce their role to supervising the tribunals in their sector, instead of presiding over them. They felt they’d done their duty with the Nuremberg Trials; they hanged all the major perpetrators – now, let the Germans sort their own kind into the guilty ones and… not-as-guilty-as-the-others, Dr. Hoffman caught himself thinking.

  Ordinarily, he wouldn’t even have been present here. The Denazification Tribunal for minor criminals didn’t require a psychiatrist’s conclusion; only the Chairman’s verdict usually given after a ridiculously cursory perusal of the evidence and a miserable two-hours-long hearing and that’s if the defendant was lucky to get two hours out of the Court. The system was so overwhelmed with these hearings, the chairmen wished to send the defendants on their merry way as soon as it was possible, for, in place of one, forty new former POWs were expecting their turn with their summons to oral proceedings at the ready.

  It was all understandable, too, that the American Public Safety Branch supervising them didn’t blame the German chairmen for being so quick to hand out “not guilty” verdicts. If the defendant wasn’t found guilty of participating in major war crimes or crimes against humanity, he was let go with a mere slap on the wrist and a restriction in employment. So what that you trashed a Jewish grocer’s store in 1938 and reported his neighbor to the Gestapo? No public office for you, for now, my good fellow but by all means, walk the streets free, unlike the said Jew and the neighbor, who both died, not directly by your hand but with your help nevertheless. That doesn’t make you a major offender or even an offender who is subject to imprisonment. A follower or a nominal Nazi, at best.

  Dr. Hoffman wondered how soon such “exonerated” followers and nominal Nazis would find their way back to positions of importance once the US Army left Germany to her own devices. He also wondered if this would be the case with this young man, looking out from the photo, attached to his folder, with honest, black-and-white eyes. For some reason, the fellow ignored his right to an attorney, insisting that he could defend himself perfectly fine. The psychiatrist lifted the picture to reexamine Dahler’s Arbeitsblatt – a worksheet that was placed on top of the file.

  Last name: Dahler

  First Name: Franz

  Occupation: Auto Mechanic

  Town: Munich

  Street address…

  Dr. Hoffman ignored the rest and shifted his attention to the Vermögensübersicht – financial statement prepared by Dahler. Nothing noteworthy was here, no buildings or apartments to his name; only a family house in Austria owned together with his mother, in which he didn’t reside. A bank account showed just a little over three thousand RM to his name; no artwork, jewelry, or gold listed. In the line “animals,” Dahler wrote, Prinz, an Alsatian, most likely misunderstanding that he was supposed to list domestic animals which could bring profit and not pets. In spite of himself, Dr. Hoffman caught himself smiling at this, not with malice but with genuine amusement.

  Army rank: Unterscharführer SS, SS-Totenkopfverbände

  Wartime employment: Waffen-SS (discharged due to injury); KZ Auschwitz, Kommandoführer; Waffen-SS (taken POW by the US Army).

  War crimes or crimes against humanity: Not charged

  Not charged. Dr. Hoffman closed the case and patted his pocket absentmindedly in search of cigarettes. Most of the former SS men of a relatively low rank sported the same exact verdict – a life ticket, basically – in their papers given to them by the US War Department upon their early release from the POW camps. Only the vilest of criminals was actually brought up on charges. Small fish like Dahler, despite – most definitely – having their fair share of blood on their hands, were simply “not charged.” Not “acquitted” but simply “not charged.” Because, if the War Department began detaining and prosecuting every single such guard, they would run out of jails and gallows for these former Nazis.

  Former or not, that was another question altogether, if Dr. Hoffman were entirely honest. So, the simple Denazification hearing, it was for Dahler, so that he’d get his clearance stamped and find even better employment and live his life while his victims…

  The psychiatrist lifted his eyes, framed by metal-framed spectacles, to the clock on the wall. Within ten minutes, the session would start. A slight pang of excitement, or giddiness perhaps, prickled his lungs with its icy needles with every drag he took on his cigarette. Unlike the rest of the officers in the room, he didn’t speculate on the outcome of the trial; he didn’t talk at all. He rarely did, as a matter of fact. His entire life he’d been a keen observer of human character, a scientist taking the greatest pleasure in studying human nature and the deepest layers of a person’s psyche.

  Words, he had found, a long time ago, were almost always aimed at concealing the truth. He preferred listening to the tone of the voice, watching closely instinctual gestures, noting the slightest discrepancies between what was being said and how it was being said and that was one of the reasons why he was here that day.

  Andrej Novák, a former Auschwitz inmate, insisted that justice ought to be served and not the regular “exonerated” bull-manure one, but the real sort, the pre-war sort, in his own words. According to him, this particular defendant had to pay for his crimes like no other. Once again, Dr. Hoffman regarded the Slovak closely. One didn’t need a degree in psychiatry to notice the young man’s agitation. He paced the room as though set on wearing out the carpet that had miraculously survived the bombing and smoked like a fiend. One ought to feel for him; so young and already so very broken.

  “I don’t understand. Why not just arrest him and throw him in jail,” Andrej Novák hissed under his breath in his accented English. Dr. Hoffman glimpsed a bulging vein on the young man’s forehead. Novák was in his twenties, a handsome fellow in that half-brutish, half-brooding way that was characteristic of his type – the survivors who’d been through hell and were now firmly set on serving that hell back to the ones who had put them through it. The newly emerging Nazi-hunters, the dangerous and eerily heroic types, who instilled both fear and respect into anyone who’d come in contact with them. “Or better hang him at once – he deserves it like no one—”

  “It’s a Denazification court, not a wild-west lynching,” Lieutenant Carter, one of the Public Safety Branch officers, remarked in an even tone. Quite a few medals adorned his chest – a testament to his bravery in action ever since the D-Day landing. Unlike Dr. Hoffman, he was a real soldier, not a pencil-pusher as Hoffman considered himself to be. Carter, dark-haired, virile Carter, almost radiated strength whenever he entered the room, yet everything intellectual he left to his colleague, Dr. Hoffman, for consideration. Just like Hoffman considered himself a pencil-pusher, Carter just as unabashedly referred to himself as a simple GI, no fancy degrees here. Carter was one of the first interrogators of the captured war criminals in early 1945; Dr. Hoffman – an analytic, supplied his opinions concerning the said war criminals and signed Carter’s reports to the OSS, with his own verdict attached. Carter knew how to get answers out of men and Dr. Hoffman knew when the answer was a lie. They made a good team; everyone around thought so. “I understand that the matter is still raw and personal to you—”

  “Personal?” Novák glared fiercely at Carter. “Of course it’s goddamn personal. He whipped my back on quite a few occasions and nearly shoved me into the fire pit – alive – once! If that’s not personal, I don’t know what is! He was detained, along with high-ranking criminals, in a POW camp by your own War Department officers! What I don’t understand is why they dropped the charges against him. He’s a murderer to the marrow of his bones!”

  “And that’s precisely the reason why you’re here in the first place,” Carter countered, unimpressed. “Your being a co-plaintiff and a witness for the prosecution will certainly help us clarify matters. However, we must stick to the procedure. As of now, it’s your word against his.” Novák was just about to interject something but Carter stopped him by raising both of his great paws in the air. “No disrespect. I, personally, bel
ieve you. However, he’s bringing his own witness who will be testifying in his defense—”

  “A woman who he was abusing systematically while she was at his complete mercy in the camp and whom he forced to marry him to get his Denazification clearance out of you people!” The last words Novák outright shouted.

  Dr. Hoffman shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He agreed with Carter completely; bringing former concentration camp inmates into the courtroom wasn’t the best idea. Working with them on hunting down war criminals was one thing. In such cases, their help was truly invaluable. However, putting them face to face with their former abusers never ended well. As a psychiatrist, it was his most profound conviction that the less former inmates had to do with their former captors the better. Let them get their closure from the verdict. If a perpetrator is found guilty and that sets them free; let them rebuild their lives, forget all that nightmare once and for all. Living obsessed with that grim, all-consuming hatred didn’t do them any good. It only corroded them gradually from the inside, the acidic memory of the bloodstained past.

  He hadn’t always held such a conviction. On the contrary, at the very beginning of his “local” career, when he was first posted here in Germany, an idealistic, relatively young psychiatrist with a fresh diploma and a burning desire to help, he was thoroughly convinced that facing the former oppressors would help the victims. But, having witnessed major relapses after progress had already been made and even following suicides, he eventually acquired a polar-opposite view of the matter. The extermination camp cases were the worst ones and particularly Auschwitz and Mauthausen. Those two, had left no one unscarred.