Born Survivors (33 page)

Because the track ahead was being repaired – a process that would take at least twenty-four hours – the train was shunted into the marshalling yard of the kaolin factory adjacent to the station. At more than half a kilometre long, many of its furthest wagons couldn’t even be seen from the town as they curved around the bend.

Even under Nazi occupation, the train was officially within Mr Pavlíček’s remit, so he ignored the efforts of SS guards to keep him back and insisted on walking the full length of it in the rain. That is when the full horror of its living cargo first struck him. Many of the wagon doors had been opened and he was astounded to see hundreds of cadaverous creatures sick or dying of starvation, disease, damp and cold. Repelled by their smell and appearance, he was even more shocked by the behaviour towards them of the guards – especially the female ones – which was, he said, brutal and ‘rude’.

Realising that the prisoners in the open wagons were especially vulnerable in the almost constant rain and ‘extremely cold weather’, the stationmaster demanded to speak to the commander of the transport, to whom he made a bold suggestion. The Vlasovite train abandoned a week earlier had been pulling several closed freight wagons, so Mr Pavlíček proposed that as many as possible from the open wagons be relocated into them ‘for humanitarian reasons’. Those who knew him all agreed that he took a great risk in challenging
Unterscharführer
Šára, who initially pushed him aside and could very easily have shot him for his impudence. But the kindly
stationmaster was determined to do something to help the prisoners temporarily under his control, and so he persisted.

Jaroslav Lang, a ten-year-old boy in 1945, glanced out of the window of his family house just fifty metres from the tracks and was intrigued to see the unusually long freight train in the sidings. ‘There had been no school that day because there were planes everywhere in the skies and it was too dangerous. My older brother Milan and I saw the train and we watched the stationmaster arguing with the SS commandant, but still we didn’t know what was happening. There were several officers and many Germans with guns. They were very strict and the SS were bellowing at people to stay away. They clearly didn’t want us to see anything. But it was the first time Milan and I had ever seen the SS or Germans with helmets in our town. As little boys we wanted to see everything. It was very exciting.’

Mr Pavlíček’s tense negotiations continued for several hours and, after offering generous supplies of food and drink for the guards, he finally persuaded Šára to agree to move as many of the shivering women as could be accommodated in the covered wagons. ‘The exchange was made after an agreement from the commander of transport,’ he said later. ‘The people in the wagons were hungry and no one had access to them at night. While moving the transport and delivering them to the closed wagons, I succeeded in getting some food to them, which I could only do at night-time.’

Priska was one of the lucky ones moved, as were Rachel and those closest to death, but the heavily pregnant Anka remained in an open wagon, completely unaware of what was happening further down the train.

When Mr Pavlíček saw how grateful the prisoners were for this small kindness and realised what terrible condition they were in, he had an idea. It had been by sheer chance that their train had stopped in Horní Bříza but – as a devout Catholic – he wanted to do what was morally right. At 6.30 a.m. the following morning, Sunday, 22 April, instead of going to mass he paid a visit to Josef
Zoubek, the director of the kaolin factory, and Antonín Wirth, the landlord of the
Tovární Hostinec
, the local inn, which doubled as the factory social club and was situated next to the station. He asked the two men how quickly they could prepare a large quantity of food to be given to the prisoners – ‘if the commander of the transport agrees’.

As he suspected, the
Unterscharführer
was even more resistant to this latest suggestion. Intent on obeying his orders until the final days of the war, he saw no point in feeding those destined to die. He couldn’t openly admit as much to the stationmaster, though. After protracted negotiation, an agreement was eventually struck that a canteen would be made available at the town’s expense to serve one hot meal to the half-starved
Häftlinge
while they were in Mr Pavlíček’s jurisdiction.

Word of the prisoners’ plight quickly spread around the citizens of Horní Bříza, who gathered whatever they could spare and hurried to the three-storey social club carrying baskets of bread, eggs, fruit, meats and cheeses. Ten-year-old Jaroslav Lang said, ‘To begin with we didn’t even know there were prisoners on the train, but when we saw people carrying food to the station we followed them and realised what was happening. That’s when we ran home to our mother and asked for some bread to give them. She was very afraid but still she gave us a little something. Everyone was living on coupons at the time because of the shortages, but they gave up their own rations for those on the train.’

Sensing the urgency of the situation and his townspeople’s eagerness to help, Mr Pavlíček enlisted the local schoolteacher, Jan Rajšl, to coordinate the supplies of food that began to flood in. Rajšl was perfect for the job – ‘strict but fair’. He lived in the teacher’s house, played the violin, and rode a bicycle to school. The miller, Jan Kovář, and the butcher, Mr Kočandrie, also volunteered their services and delivered flour, pastry and sausages. Many other people from surrounding areas rushed to help, although all were kept well away from the prisoners by the guards who formed a cordon along the
length of the train, standing at fifty-metre intervals with their rifles raised.

Throughout that Sunday, the kitchens at the inn went into overdrive, with staff hurrying from their homes on their day off and everyone offering their services. Between them they baked 5,000 loaves and prepared huge platters of pastries and pots of coffee. Bags of soft buns and baskets of hard-boiled eggs were brought for the sick.

Meanwhile, Mr Pavlíček continued to patrol his domain and check on the prisoners, hoping to speak to a few of them privately. He discovered that they were mostly Czech although many nationalities were represented, including Greeks. He later described their condition as ‘very bad’. When he told them that he was coordinating the distribution of some food for them all, they repeatedly urged him to hand it to them personally and not to the guards, who would steal it and not feed them a thing. The concept appalled him.

He was further shocked to find in one of the wagons a fellow stationmaster, a Mr Šiška from a neighbouring town, as well as Ilsa Fischerová, the widow of Plzeň dentist Dr Otto Fischer who’d been beaten to death during a camp evacuation. Mrs Fischerová, thirty-nine, and her seventeen-year-old daughter Hanka had been in Auschwitz and Freiberg with the rest of the women and they begged Mr Pavlíček to send a message to their loved ones that they were still alive. Their snatched conversation was brusquely interrupted when the
Unterscharführer
spotted the dentist’s wife talking to the stationmaster and mercilessly beat her to the ground. Prevented from intervening, Mr Pavlíček had no choice but to walk away, but he did rush back to the station to transmit the message to the woman’s family as he’d been asked.

Survivor Liška Rudolf also managed to speak to the station master through the tiny window of her closed freight wagon. ‘On the morning of the 22nd I met Mr Pavlíček,’ she said. ‘He saw in my eyes that I was hungry and he told me, “I will send you some food.” … Later the leader of the transport asked me why I spoke to a civilian
in an enemy area. He told me, “You’d better not be near the window again or I will have you eliminated.”’ Later still, with the doors to her wagon slightly open, two slices of bread and jam were thrown in and she managed to grab them as the other
Häftlinge
gave her murderous stares. ‘The whole wagon envied me,’ she said. ‘In the afternoon I received two buns and two eggs the same way.’

The stationmaster continued to feed whomever he could while promising to send messages to prisoners’ loved ones, at continual risk to himself. As he passed one wagon, he heard a baby cry. Horrified, he demanded to know how many children were on the train. Šára did not want to tell him and certainly didn’t want others to know. When he finally admitted that there were ‘two or three’ infants on board, the stationmaster insisted on seeing them; he was stunned to discover undernourished newborns with few or no clothes to wear.

News of the ‘babies on the death train’ spread through Horní Bříza like a bushfire. Some, like Hana and Mark, had come from Freiberg, while others belonged to the women from Venusberg (none of whose babies are known to have survived). Still, amidst the chaos and confusion of so many thousands of people, not one of the mothers was aware of the others. Mr Pavlíček immediately summoned the local doctor so that he could check the babies over and medically examine their mothers. ‘I told the commander that the local doctor, Dr Jan Roth, was available to help the sick.’ His request was brusquely denied. ‘I was told that they had their own doctor, who was one of the prisoners.’

Upset that he couldn’t help, Dr Roth went home and told his wife, who was pregnant with their first child. Mrs Rothová had a layette of baby clothes prepared for her new arrival, but when she heard about the babies on the train she delivered the tiny hand-stitched clothes to Mr Pavlíček and asked him to ensure the newborns were each given something to wear. Two other mothers, Mrs Benesová and Mrs Krahuliková, likewise donated items and Mr Pavlíček did as he was asked. ‘They thanked me with tears in their eyes … For these mothers special food was prepared,’ he said.

Priska was one of the lucky women who received food for herself and clothing for Hana, as well as nappies, swaddling clothes and a blanket. ‘There was a complete set of clothes. There were even cosmetic items such as talc and soap and all the hygienic things one needs for the correct care of a baby.’ When she looked at the beautiful embroidered garments, she was ashamed to even touch them with her soot-blackened hands. She was even more reluctant to dress Hana in them, for her baby’s skin had broken out in running sores. Pressing the tiny dresses to her face, Priska smelled starch and fresh linen – aromas that reminded her of a time when to be clean had been the norm. Putting them carefully to one side, she resolved to keep them for when she and Hana reached their destination and could – she prayed – have a long-awaited wash.

Breaking open a bread roll she’d been given, Priska found a note inside which read in Czech:
Hold on! Be strong! It will not last much longer!
She allowed herself a fleeting moment of happiness. Others, finding similar messages of support in the rolls and sandwiches they were given, were equally moved.

Further down the train, Rachel and her son received nothing that night. Like Priska, she’d been grateful to be moved to the warmer freight cars, but with the women in such close proximity to each other and only one small window for ventilation, the air inside quickly became unendurable, and there was no longer any rain water to drink.

Anka, at the far end of the train, wasn’t even aware that clothes were being handed out or food prepared. Losing her grip on reality and on life, she was simply grateful that the train had halted for a while and that, with the door of her wagon open, she had a brief respite from being crushed. By then, she said, ‘It wasn’t even a question of surviving one day at a time. It was a question of surviving each new hour.’ Supervised by guards, she stood in the doorway covered in sores, her skin blackened with soot. Sustained by nothing but hope, she inhaled the forest air and thought of the times she’d strolled through woods with friends or family. Such nostalgia
was mental torture, so she once again summoned her literary heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, to remind herself, ‘I’ll think about it tomorrow.’

She added, ‘It is just my luck that I was born like that with that sort of nature which helped me enormously all through my life … It is sheer stupid optimism, nothing else. Whatever happened, I said, “I’ll think about it tomorrow,” and tomorrow it was already changed somehow … I was so lucky that I didn’t die, which I could have done every minute of the day.’

Hearing voices, Anka looked up and saw a group of people hurrying past, presumably on their way to deliver food. ‘They didn’t expect what they saw,’ she said. ‘One of them was a farmer and he stopped in his tracks. I will never forget the look on his face when he stared at this pregnant corpse, weighing maybe sixty-five pounds and most of it belly … a scarcely living skeleton without hair and dirty as you can imagine.’ She said that as the colour drained from his face, he must have thought that he’d stumbled into some sort of apocalypse. ‘You would think people knew what to expect but they really had no idea there.’ Standing nearby was the SS commandant, armed with a gun and a whip, and he glared at the farmer until he staggered away in shock. Five minutes later, though, he returned with a glass of milk and, boldly approaching the wagon, held it out to Anka.

She stared at him incredulously. ‘I hate milk … never in my life before did I touch milk and never after, but I took it.’ As she did so, the
Unterscharfuhrer
raised his whip above shoulder height as if to beat her with it. ‘The farmer was so stunned he almost fell to the floor and died. He didn’t say anything but I could see it in his face. His expression spoke volumes when he saw what was about to happen. I do not know why, but the commander lowered his whip then and I drank that milk, which was like an elixir of life. I enjoyed it like nothing on earth … it was like nectar … I think at the time it may have saved my life. After that glass I was as strong as an ox … That glass of milk brought my humanity back.’

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and passed the glass back to her stunned Samaritan. Then she thanked him in her native Czech before retreating back into her coke-caked prison cell.

Priska was the luckiest of all the mothers. As well as the layette, she was personally fed bread and jam by Mr Pavlíček – ‘the best thing I ever tasted!’ She said people were ‘lined up’ to help, and when some of the guards from Freiberg saw what was happening they asked what news there was of the mother and baby born in the factory.