All the others, my parents, sisters, brothers, the relatives with us on the train, they were all exterminated the night before.”
Only Lipa and a cousin on his father’s side were still alive. “From there we went to the barracks of Birkenau; we spent hours in the Appellplatz, famished and exhausted. We had not had anything to eat or drink since the ghetto. We had to support the prisoners who were about to fall down. The barracks was full of beds. We had to ask permission to go to the toilet, which was a barrel with planks on it. They ladled vegetable soup into our mess kits; the Germans called it Durgensuppe. It had no flavor, but we had to fill our stomachs. During those two terrible weeks, the journey by train, the time in the barracks, I had to learn to live in a new way. In the ghetto, I had slept with my parents, I had a blanket, but here I was alone. The few things I had to make my life happy had been taken away from me when I got on the train. There was no drinking water. We had to bathe ourselves standing up, in front of the others. How could human beings do this? The only things of your own were your shoes, and if they were good shoes you would live longer; you had less chance of getting sick. Any kind of help, like giving someone a glass of water, was forbidden. If you helped a sick person, you were risking your own life. The sick and the injured were left where they were until they died. If they were lucky, they went to the Revier, a sort of hospital. There you were subjected to every sort of medical experiment until you died. Those who could work went to Commando X or Y; those who couldn’t went to Commando Himmel, the clinic. And then they were burned in the crematory. You always had to watch what was happening around you. The policy of the Germans was always Vernichtung, annihilation. And there were two ways of achieving this: gassing the unfit, the women, the children, the sick, and the elderly; and working the fit to death. The saying was Vernichtung durch Arbeit.”
Lipa was always thinking about his loved ones. “You thought about your parents who had died in that horrible way, and about the fact that you were left alone. There was no one to tell you what was happening. But the others were all alone, too. There were some who were trying to make it through the pain, and some who just couldn’t. They threw themselves against the high-voltage wires, or killed themselves in other ways. In Auschwitz, I thought that I would be strong, the Germans would need me. One day we were taken to the train station in Birkenau. The orchestra was playing. Our only ‘property’ was the mess kit and a piece of bread. The train left in the evening, and the bread was our only food for four days. We had no water.”
On a Sunday morning, the train stopped in Mauthausen, in Austria, not far from where Hitler was born. “We walked for four miles, toward an uninhabited place, and on a hill we could see guard towers. And the SS opened the huge gate. We entered the Appellplatz. There were two marble buildings in front of us, built by the prisoners with stones from the nearby quarry. From the balcony, the commandant informed us of the rules we had to follow. After that, we went through another door. The ground was covered with gravel, and there were barracks on both sides. On the right were the gas chambers, the crematory, and the laundry. Our barracks were empty, no tables or beds. We had to state our names and birthdates, one by one. They told you that from that moment on, you would be called by your registration number. My name was 68.864. When they called out your name, you had to respond ‘Jawohl,’ that’s me. That number was stamped on both of my pants legs and on my jacket, together with a red triangle and the letter J.” It was the initial for Juden, Jew.
“In the afternoon, they gave us soup and three and a half ounces of bread, and we were sent to the barracks for the night. It was the end of June, it was hot, the sun was blazing, and we were not given anything to drink. There were no mattresses, and we were crammed together side by side. Our sleep was disturbed by cries and wails of pain. We stayed like this from Sunday to Thursday, when they took us to the trains going to Melk, on the Danube, to a concentration camp in the mountains. On the gate it said ‘Pioneern Kaserme,’ and it was the base of the military engineers. In one building was the general headquarters, and in another were the kapos. We slept in the garages. We were divided into work groups, and I was put together with a friend from my village. Our job was to build the tunnel walls.”
The plant was used by Daimler-Benz to build modern aircraft. “An engineer in the SS was in charge of the work. The entire process was carried forward with German precision. There was an electric fence to keep us from escaping. In the evening, after counting us and counting those who had died that day, they brought us back to the camp. Occasionally they gave us cigarettes as a reward, and these could be exchanged for some soup, some bread, or a good pair of shoes taken from the dead. But the food was never enough to satisfy us; there were too few calories, and our bodies had no energy reserves. Many died and were burned in the crematory.”
Lipa was able to assess the progress of the war from three things: “from what the trains were transporting, from the number of tanks, and from the mood of the Germans. After D-Day, we saw the airplanes that were going to bomb the German cities. We were overjoyed to see the four-plane formations in the sky. But in the camp, the Germans’ dedication to the extermination never waned. When the Russians took Vienna, forty miles away from us, instead of letting us go the Germans took us to Linz. On the fourth day of the march, we were sleeping in the Austrian cold. Many died, or were shot because they couldn’t walk.”
They arrived in Ebensee, where there was another Daimler complex. “There were three sleeping in the same spot, and in the morning you realized that the one sleeping next to you was dead. There wasn’t enough food, and the death rate rose dramatically. Death was present everywhere. Our job was to build new train tracks to replace the ones that had been bombed. One Friday, I was assigned to work in the tunnels. In the afternoon, we were taken outside to have some soup. The SS officer told us that just this once we would have the chance to be ‘normal’ people. We didn’t return to the tunnels after lunch. It was a fantastic day. Each of us found a spot to lie in the sun. We felt we would be set free any day. One morning, the commandant announced that the Americans were going to try to take the camp, and that the SS were going to fight. He told us that if we wanted to save ourselves, we would have to go into the tunnels. We refused, and he disappeared; we never saw him again. There was no more order in the camp. Some went around looking for food, while the stronger prisoners lynched the kapos.”
The Americans arrived on Sunday, but they left almost immediately. “My friends and I, blood brothers whose cooperation had been the secret of our survival, found ourselves free again. It was as if we had been reborn. The memories of our families exterminated in Auschwitz, the knowledge that we were alone in the world and far from home . . . who could we talk to about this? Who could advise us? My friend and I were exhausted, without enough strength to walk. Our last meal had been some bread the day before. And we left the camp for the city. We had grown accustomed to the images of our imprisonment—so the lake, the mountains, the farming village all fascinated us.”
They came to the city of Ebensee, to another labor camp. “We stayed there for three weeks, drinking milk, eating eggs, eating chocolate. I signed the list of people from Czechoslovakia, and we were divided by nationality. I wanted to find somewhere new to go, not go back to the place where I was born and see the people who for years had ignored our sufferings. I had lost my faith in God on the night in Auschwitz when I saw that horror, the innocent Jews walking to their death, their faith in God still strong. Their only crime was that they were Jews. Then I thought: how could the world ignore what was happening to the Jews? Europe knew and saw. Hitler had been very clear about his intention: the final solution to the problem of the Jews. I wanted no part in that world. One day the Jewish soldiers from Israel, called the Brigade, and the English and Americans brought faith and hope to the camp. They helped us believe that the Jews could defend themselves and have a state of their own. They could be ‘Jews in Palestine.’ Then why not build their state there? Europe had been destroyed, the cities had been razed to the ground, and the Allied armies were there. Normal life hadn’t resumed yet.”
After more than a month in the camp, Lipa was taken to Prague. “The Czechs welcomed us and gave us medicine, they invited us to eat in their homes, and they wanted to know what had happened. I saw some of the others reunite with their relatives, and I desperately wanted to meet one of my own. I knew that my parents were dead, but I thought I might be able to find some other relative. I went back home, but I discovered that all of the Jewish