The Child of Auschwitz: Absolutely heartbreaking World War 2 historical fiction Read online

  The Child of Auschwitz

  Absolutely heartbreaking World War Two historical fiction

  Lily Graham

  Books by Lily Graham

  The Child of Auschwitz

  The Paris Secret

  The Island Villa

  Summer at Seafall Cottage

  The Summer Escape

  Christmas at Hope Cottage

  A Cornish Christmas

  Contents

  *

  *

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  The Paris Secret

  Lily’s Email Sign-Up

  Books by Lily Graham

  A Letter from Lily

  The Island Villa

  Summer at Seafall Cottage

  The Summer Escape

  Christmas at Hope Cottage

  A Cornish Christmas

  Acknowledgements

  Inspired by real events

  For Lydia

  *

  I was born into a world that had forbidden my existence.

  The simple fact of me, had any of the authorities known, would have been enough to end my life before it had even begun.

  Still, I came. Small, and half-starved, yet determined to be alive, on one of the coldest nights in one of the darkest places in human history. Not knowing or understanding that my struggle was only just beginning.

  The women who helped me bowed their shaved heads and cried the tears I could not as they huddled together with their slight frames to offer me protection.

  I barely made a sound, my underdeveloped lungs unable to allow me to cry. It would make my life hard, a price I would pay for all my years, but it is why I survived.

  You see, there were children born in Auschwitz.

  And I was one of them.

  *

  Prague, present day

  It was November and the cold was an uninvited guest. Naděje’s knees cracked as she stood up to put another log on the wood burner. Outside, the fog had risen and the streetlight transformed the horizon into an amber, cotton wool haze. It was a muffled, insular sort of night made for reflection, and endless cups of coffee. Bed was a comfort she would deny herself until it was done.

  She looked at the stack of letters before her, and with her ageing fingers felt the deep scores where her mother’s pen had bled rivers of blue.

  She’d put this off for too long. Waited for the right moment to tell a story that began long before she was born. For the right words. The right time.

  But life doesn’t wait till we are ready. More often than not, it throws us into the deep end and asks us to swim. Ready or not.

  There was a soft tap on the door, and Kamila, her grand-daughter, popped her dark head beyond the door, sighing when she found her at her desk. Her eyes saying a thousand words, with her mouth soon following, as it usually did. ‘You’ll wear yourself out, Babička, keeping this up, you know what the doctor said.’

  Naděje peered at the young woman over her glasses, her blue eyes penetrating, the way they did when she was standing at a podium, and asking her students to think about things a different way. ‘What do doctors really know about the human spirit, dítě? They trust only what they can put in a bottle or explain in black and white. But I have seen what people can do – what they can conquer, what they can survive – if they only will it so.’

  Kamila knew better than to argue with her grandmother about philosophy. So she tried for a simple, undeniable truth instead. ‘But we all need sleep, Babička, even you.’

  Naděje’s lips curled in acknowledgement, and she chose an old lie like a worn pair of slippers, comfortable and familiar. ‘Ten more minutes, that’s all.’ Then she looked up, eyes hopeful. ‘And, perhaps, another coffee?’

  Kamila made a sound that was a mix of amusement and resignation. ‘All right. But after that it’s bedtime,’ she said firmly, pressing her lips against her grandmother’s temple, before making her way to the coffee machine on the other side of the room.

  Naděje nodded, but they both knew better. She’d be here till it was done, however long that took. She put her glasses back on her nose, and turned over a fresh sheet of paper. Then she touched the photograph in its gilt frame that was always on her desk, of a young, thin woman with very short dark hair and a baby in her arms.

  She had one last story to tell.

  Theirs.

  And it began in hell on earth.

  Chapter One

  Auschwitz, December 1942

  ‘Are you mad, Kritzelei?’ hissed Sofie in her ear, eyes huge and full of fear, the criss-cross of scars on her newly shaved head livid against the whiteness of her skull. ‘Do you want them to shoot us? Keep moving.’

  Eva Adami stumbled on beneath a torrent of heavy rain in her too big, mismatched clogs, almost losing one to the thick, relentless mud churned up by thousands of feet before her. It was still dark, perhaps sometime after four a.m. though the harsh floodlights made it appear much later. She hunched over as she moved, trying to keep herself warm. A thankless, futile task. The downpour seemed to bend itself spitefully to slip beneath her neckline. She hated the Appell. The twice daily roll call, where they were expected to scramble outside and wait, no matter the weather, no matter whether they were dressed or not, while they were counted and then recounted, for hours and hours on end. Disobedience could cost your life. But then so could almost anything in this place.

  She turned to look at her friend, an odd look on her thin face, her hazel-coloured eyes appeared even larger in her head due to her shaved, dark hair. ‘We’ve only been here a week. That’s what Helga just said.’

  There was a thin exhalation of breath, followed by a low curse.

  A week. Here.

  A week since their humanity had been stripped away from them. When they were rounded up like cattle and shoved inside a foul train that stank of death and degradation, barely able to breathe for days with the press of bodies. Only to arrive to utter chaos – noise and shouting, rough handled, then sorted into groups and led into a large hall, where they were stripped and paraded naked in front of leering SS guards, their heads shaved by rough hands. Afterwards they had scrambled to put on clothing, choosing from an array of mismatched used items and spat out.

  Eva didn’t know that she could still feel shock after all she’d been through so far, but somehow, Helga’s words had done it.

  ‘A week in hell,’ muttered Vanda, echoing her thoughts. Her red hair, pale skin and freckles belied her Czech-Hungarian heritage. ‘It figures that it would feel
like an eternity.’ She had been on the train with them. They’d travelled standing up for two days. There had been one bucket for food, and one for the shared waste of fifty women.

  ‘You think you need longer than a week to ruin a life?’ muttered Helga, sounding disbelieving. She was in her fifties but looked much older, her dark grey hair had begun to grow out in lank strips and her eyes had that glazed look that some of the others had, like she was a walking ghost. She had been here longer than them by several months, and the time had begun to take its toll, especially on her patience with the other new arrivals, like Eva. ‘Don’t you know by now that a life can flip just like that?’ she said, slapping a palm against her thin wrist, causing them all to flinch at the sound like a bullet. She shook her head, then refused to look back at them.

  Eva did know. Better than some.

  Still, she couldn’t help thinking that just a week before, she had no idea that such a place – one designed solely for extermination – even existed. A place that made Terezín, the Jewish concentration camp and ghetto outside Prague that she had called home for the past year, seem like a dream.

  ‘No, hell would have been better,’ muttered Vanda as Helga moved forward again, and they followed, her lips twitching in a wry semblance of a grin as she looked back at them.

  They all turned to look at her, puzzled, as one of the German Shepherds began to snap and snarl on his lead, his fur standing on end, ready to tear them apart, and leave a bloody trail of their remains in the mud.

  Vanda gazed back at the dog, not even flinching. ‘We’d be warm, at least.’

  Eva snorted. It was surprising what one found funny now.

  At the midday ‘meal’ they stood in line waiting for their allotted litre of soup. Eva used her hand as a cup for the watery liquid, not getting nearly the amount she was meant to as no matter how hard she tried, without a mug, precious liquid still spilt to the floor. The food had a peculiar smell and taste. There were some who had refused to eat it when they’d first arrived, and even she – who knew far too well about hunger coming from Terezín – had found it hard to choke it down in the beginning, but now they all gulped it desperately. There was a rumour that the guards laced it with something to keep them calm, and to stop their menstruation. It didn’t work on the former, and time would tell about the latter. She suspected starvation rations would take care of that eventually anyway, though it wasn’t a sure thing, some poor women still got their periods, despite everything.

  The soup tasted truly awful, but she would have given anything for more. She had no space in her mind for the fear of what damage possibly poisoned food might do to her body in the long-term, all she could worry about now was surviving today, and that meant trying, somehow, to get more.

  In the evenings at around seven, after the workday was complete and they had ‘free time’ – which they just spent in their barracks anyway – they were given a three-hundred-gram slice of black bread, and a teaspoon of jam or margarine, which they were meant to save half of for breakfast. Few were able to wait, and had to start the day with a grainy coffee substitute that didn’t taste of much, until they finally got the soup.

  ‘The first thing we’re going to do,’ she told Sofie after they’d finished eating, watching as one of the women who’d been here longer stepped forward for a bigger portion, aided by a battered metal mug in her hands, ‘is get our own mugs, or maybe even bowls.’

  Those with such luxuries managed to get a larger portion as well as bigger pieces of vegetables. Such a simple utensil, but one that could make the difference between life or death here.

  Sofie stared, then shook her head, laughing despite herself. The sound was sweet and unexpected, like birdsong on a bleak winter’s morning. ‘A bowl? Here? Kritzelei, always aiming for the stars. And how do you suggest we do that?’

  Eva’s lips twitched in response, her hazel-coloured eyes alight. Sofie had given her the nickname ‘Kritzelei’, back in Terezín where the two had first met. It meant ‘doodle’, because Eva was prone to daydreaming and seeing the world the way she would like it to be. She had once been an artist and illustrator with a promising future, before the Nazis had decided otherwise.

  In Terezín, Eva had become an artist at other things though, through necessity. Like ‘sluicing’ – redistributing belongings which had been taken away from them in ‘The Schleuse’, the area where prisoners were taken in to the camp and dispossessed of their things. Sluicing wasn’t really stealing, it was more like giving back, just with interest.

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ she said watching as a woman, so thin she seemed to have been made of matchsticks, floated past. ‘But we have to try. We can’t end up like them.’

  ‘We call them Muselmann,’ Helga had whispered, shortly after introducing herself, on their first night in the freezing barracks, where more than a hundred women slept eight to hard, wooden bunks that ran across the room over three levels, resembling cages.

  Eva had looked on to where Helga’s gnarled, red finger was pointing to a husk-like shape of a woman, whose soul appeared to have checked out some time ago.

  ‘Muselmann?’

  ‘Like kneeling men at prayer. All folded in on themselves. They’re the ones who have just simply given up.’

  Eva blinked, trying to take that in, amongst everything else that had happened today. Was that her future here? Was it Sofie’s?

  ‘Can you blame them?’ asked Vanda as a young girl, who had also been with them on the train, broke down in sobs.

  Suddenly, a Kapo, a long-time female prisoner placed in charge of their barracks, came forward and struck the sobbing girl across the face and told her to keep quiet or she’d call a guard to permanently shut her up.

  ‘She’s not as cruel as the others,’ said Helga, meaning the other Kapos, some of whom were as evil as the guards, mimicking their sadism to curry favour with them; some appeared to have retained a semblance of their humanity. As Eva and Sofie stared, Helga explained, ‘The crying girl just found out what happened to her mother,’ she whispered. ‘Better that she learns to just accept it quickly and not make a fuss or she’ll follow after her, fast.’

  Eva felt a chill run down her spine that had nothing to do with the cold in the freezing barracks. ‘Where have they taken her mother?’ she asked.

  The old woman was hunched over like an old crow, her dusty, greying black hair had begun to grow back, flat and lank against her head, like moth-eaten feathers. She looked at her like the answer was obvious, then pointed outside, even though they couldn’t really see out the small cracks. ‘To the chimney.’

  Eva gasped, clutching onto Sofie as she realised. ‘They burn them?’

  Sofie closed her eyes in mute horror.

  Helga nodded, her expression benign. Her large, dark eyes, rimmed with fine, purplish wrinkles were lifeless, even as she said, ‘We’re all going to die here. The sooner we accept that the better.’ Then she turned around, and lay down, facing the other side of the wall in the bunk, apparently tired of talking, and explaining the inevitable to the new arrivals.

  Eva swallowed as she listened to the sound of the girl’s muffled sobbing, her heart thudding painfully in her chest. She shared a silent look of horror with Sofie and Vanda.

  As night fell they were given a three-inch piece of black bread, and there was nothing to do besides try and sleep. She fitted her body next to Sofie’s. The bunk was hard, there was a thin, dirty blanket which they all attempted to share. Despite the press of the others, it was still freezing. Her feet were bare as she hadn’t managed to find any socks or stockings after they’d stripped them naked for what passed as a shower, where they had simply smeared water over their dirty skin, and put even dirtier clothes on their cold, wet frames. It would be sometime before they would begin to fear showers, but for now they were blissfully ignorant. For now, processing this was enough. She wore a ragamuffin ensemble that consisted of an old, long-sleeved coat dress several sizes too big, and a thin, striped, man’s jac
ket, as well as mismatched clogs, which she was warned to keep on her feet, even as she slept, in case of theft.

  She turned over, her eyes staring at the wooden bunk above her head, making them groan as it meant everyone had to turn too. Helga’s bleak words reverberated inside her skull, like a sledgehammer.

  ‘We will live,’ she whispered to Sofie, reaching for her friend’s hand in the dark night. ‘We will survive this, like we did Terezín.’

  ‘How?’ whispered Sofie.

  Her straight-talking, tough-as-anything friend turned dark, fearful eyes towards her. There were heavy shadows beneath her eyes – there had been little sleep on the train and she suspected there would be little sleep in the days ahead too. ‘There’s a woman here who said they’ve killed everyone in her village – they were all taken and shot on their first day – almost everyone here has lost their parents or partners, or children.’

  Eva stared at her in the dark, trying to take that in.

  ‘Exactly,’ hissed Helga, who sat up with a grimace, then turned back to give them a dirty look for keeping her awake. Her eyes were glazed, almost feverish in their sudden anger. A few of the other women moaned at the disturbance. Helga ignored them as she lectured Eva. ‘You think you’re special? That you, out of everyone here, deserves to live?’