Mady D. The Spirit of Goodness

Love Carried Me Home: Women Surviving Auschwitz
by Joy Erlichman Miller, Ph.D

(Page 2 of 2)

Chapter 1

Madeline (Mady) D. was born on April 29, 1930, in Berehovo, Czechoslovakia. Within this small city, she and her older brother were raised in a tight-knit, middle-income family. Mady's father was a businessman who worked out of his home.

Brought up in a family that valued education, Mady received both formal schooling during the day and religious education in the late afternoon. In 1938 anti-Semitic sentiment was increasing in her world. Her father was an avid reader of the newspaper and listened to news of world events on the radio. The family heard about what was happening in Poland but for the most part believed that the reports were nothing more than tales of horror that had been exaggerated to scare the Jews. For the most part, the Jewish community disregarded the stories.

In November 1938, Germany rewarded Hungary by annexing territory to Hungary. Mady's hometown of Berehovo was part of this annexation. Educational opportunities began to dwindle as teachers became increasingly anti-Semitic. Jewish doctors and lawyers were not allowed to practice their professions, and Jewish doctors were limited to treating Jewish patients. Businesses were slowly taken over by the Hungarian government and Aryan businessmen.

In March 1944, Hitler invaded Hungary. Mady was thirteen years old. All Jews were ordered to wear a yellow, six-pointed Star of David on the fronts and backs of their garments, a symbol that designated them as second-class citizens. In April of that year, Jews, including Mady and her family, were rounded up and told to leave their homes with only a small satchel of belongings. While forced to live in a small ghetto with no beds or cots, the families lived in covered areas similar to market stalls or carports.

After being coerced into giving all valuables and money to the German authorities, Mady's father narrowly escaped being shot when some forgotten money was discovered in one of his vest pockets. This occurred on Mady's fourteenth birthday, and she recalled that it was one of the happiest moments of her life when her father was released and not shot, as threatened, by the Germans. Mady observed that the Hungarian police were much more brutal than the Germans and that they were rewarded for beatings and cruelty to Jewish prisoners. “We didn't have any guns. We had nothing to protect ourselves with. So when we were herded out of our homes and into this ghetto, all we had with us (was) that little change of clothing and nothing else. So we had no way of protecting (ourselves) and we had no way . . . it just made no . . . no sense to really protect (ourselves) although we tried, and those that did were beaten up something terrible. But we had no way of protecting against all these guns and against these SS and against these soldiers . . . you know, the police.”

About two weeks later the Nazis liquidated the ghetto and moved Mady and her family in cattle cars to an unknown destination. Countless people died in the cattle cars while packed into cramped quarters with no food or sanitation. After three days and three nights, the train stopped at the gates of Auschwitz. Mady vividly remembered entering the camp in the dark, smelling the odor that filled the air and seeing the flames in the distance. “The odor that was coming in through those little windows into those cattle cars was horrible. We didn't know what that was. It was burning, like burning flesh, but who would . . . whose mind would enter something like this?”

The group heard howling dogs and German voices as they waited in the train until daybreak. When the cattle-car doors opened, they saw electrified barbed-wire fences. People in German uniforms and people in striped uniforms began pulling them off the trains. “We just saw them take off these dead people, and we were still to stand in line there because the police-I mean the SS-at this point already were there with their police dogs and we were standing there because nobody dared to move. They (would) just release the dogs, who tore people apart.”

Men and women were separated while people in striped uniforms whispered to the group that they were in Auschwitz where “all your parents and your grandparents and your babies were killed and will be killed.” The prisoners were falsely reassured by the SS-told to stay calm and that they would be cared for-while the striped-uniform inmates warned them that they would never make it out of Auschwitz alive.

Mady's father and brother were taken to one side and Mady and her mother to another line, where guards directed them along a ramp. The healthier people were separated from the older people and little children.

“But my mother was a very, very intelligent woman. . . . And when she saw this well-dressed officer who had a couple of . . . assistants near him . . . and when she saw that this officer was directing the older people to go in one direction and the younger people in the other direction, she must have had some kind of intuition.” She pinched Mady's cheeks and instructed her to stand tall so she would look healthy. In perfect German, Mady's mother informed the officer, who happened to be Dr. Josef Mengele, that she was forty-three and that Mady was fourteen. Mady and her mother were then directed to the line of those who would live and were sent to the showers.

Mady, along with the rest of the group, was told to enter the showers for washing and disinfection. Unknown to the survivors, the other group was being exterminated in the gas chambers nearby. All head and body hair was shaven after the women exited the showers. Mady remembered the women's humiliation as they stood naked, trying to cover their bodies, while men shaved them. Completely shaven, each woman was given a large gray shirtdress and exited the showers. People were unable to recognize their now-bald family members and had to call out names to find their missing relatives. Women were moved to a crowded barracks with wooden sleeping bunks and packed into the space so tightly that it was impossible for anyone to turn over.

To counter their dehydration the next day, many people grabbed desperately for a little water from puddles or a fountain, not knowing that the water supply was contaminated from the fluids of the dead seeping underground into the water system. The water poisoned some and others became very sick and unable to stand, and the women in the roll-call lines assisted each other to create the illusion that they were strong enough to continue through the day.

Mady and her mother, having been selected by Mengele, were transferred one week later to a work-camp ammunition factory in Breslau (Mady has always believed this was because her mother was a blue-eyed blonde who spoke fluent German). The work camp utilized approximately five hundred to six hundred women, most from Poland, who survived longer than average because they were particularly strong and previously hardened by harsh conditions. The majority of these Polish women had been ghettoized or imprisoned in other concentration camp settings for many years. All were awakened each day at 5:00 in the morning, counted, and given a small piece of moldy, dark bread and some lukewarm brown water. Her mother was fearful for Mady's health and rationed the bread during the day. Mady discovered later that her mother had been giving Mady a portion of her own bread to increase the chances of her daughter's survival. Mady said her mother would do anything possible to protect her daughter from harm and suffering. On many occasions Mady's mother encouraged her to try harder to continue working: “Try. Make believe you are doing it even if you . . . you're unable to. . . . Try a little harder. . . . Maybe we'll get out of here soon. Maybe we're gonna see your father and brother. . . . Maybe we'll see your grandparents and aunts and uncles when we come back. . . . Just hold on a little bit longer.”

Mady knew they were making parts used in bomb settings for airplanes and other pieces of ammunition but that they had no choice except to do as they were told. “And we were working in this factory and you have to understand what we were . . . what we had to do in order to survive because whoever resisted was killed on the spot so there was no if . . . it was a choice. Either to live or to die. If you did what you were told, then temporarily you know that you are alive. . . . We had to make . . . help manufacture that if we wanted to survive. And human nature is very funny. We all want to live. The oldest and the sickest person in this world wants to go on living. That is human nature.”

Mady and her mother remained in a women's camp called Peterswaldau (part of Gross-Rosen) for almost one year while working in the ammunition factory. Near the end of the war, no supplies were available to manufacture ammunition, so the workers were forced to dig foxholes. “I must have weighed maybe fifty or sixty pounds. I was like a skeleton . . . and whoever couldn't perform, they just killed.”

One morning, the small camp was especially quiet, and the prisoners soon learned that the SS had fled during the night (May 8, 1945). Russian soldiers liberated the group and cared for the prisoners for two or three weeks.

Mady and her mother attempted to regain their strength so they could return to their family. Hoping that father and husband, brother and son, would still be alive, mother and daughter traveled home to discover that their neighbors had taken their home, their business and all their valuables. While waiting in their hometown, hoping to reunite with their family, Mady and her mother were told that both the men had perished in a labor camp and that Mady's father had witnessed the death of his son and given up all hope when he was told that the Germans had killed all the women. Mady later discovered that only three of her mother's eight siblings had survived, along with four of her cousins.

Mady and her mother stayed in a displaced persons' camp for four years and then emigrated to the United States on March 9, 1949, where they lived with Mady's aunt and uncle in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A year later Mady and her mother moved to New York City to be in a larger Jewish community. Mady suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (fear, nightmares, vomiting) for a number of years. “I was afraid that the Nazis were still out there. I was having nightmares . . . for many years. I was still reliving everything. The trip to Auschwitz, the beatings, the killings, the dead people taken off the train . . . the dogs that were released and jumped on people . . . and tore them apart.”

At age nineteen, Mady met a young man who encouraged her to return to school and accompanied her to the first classes at Theodore Roosevelt High School. She met another Holocaust survivor at night school and married him six months later in 1956, and their family grew to include two sons and two grandchildren.

Mady continued her education and later became an interior decorator. Her mother remarried, then died of cancer in 1978. Mady has been very active in the activities of the Holocaust Memorial Museum Houston and is one of four survivors who created a permanent exhibit there. She also has been part of the museum's speaker's bureau since 1980.

In 2000, Mady attended “The Gathering of Survivors” in Washington, D.C. She is dedicated to teaching the lessons of the Shoah and often quotes George Santayana, an American philosopher: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

© 2000 Simcha Press

About the Author

Joy Erlichman Miller, Ph.D. is an internationally known licensed psychotherapist, professional trainer and author. She is an Illinois state Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor as well as a Certified Master Addictions Counselor. Additionally, Dr. Miller is a part-time instructor at Bradley University teaching in the Graduate ELH program. Dr. Miller is a frequent expert on national television and has appeared on the Sally Jessy Raphael, Oprah, Jenny Jones, Montel Williams and Geraldo Rivera shows. Her works have been featured in various national magazines and over 30 newspapers around the country. She has hosted her own radio show for five years on a CBS affiliate and currently presents a mental health segment on the local CBS television station.