The Child of Auschwitz

by Lily Graham

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction; Romance

Synopsis

‘She touched the photograph in its gilt frame that was always on her desk, of a young, thin woman with very short hair and a baby in her arms. She had one last story to tell. Theirs. And it began in hell on earth.’ It is 1942 and Eva Adami has boarded a train to Auschwitz. Barely able to breathe due to the press of bodies and exhausted from standing up for two days, she can think only of her longed-for reunion with her husband Michal, who was sent there six months earlier. But when Eva arrives at Auschwitz, there is no sign of Michal and the stark reality of the camp comes crashing down upon her. As she lies heartbroken and shivering on a thin mattress, her head shaved by rough hands, she hears a whisper. Her bunkmate, Sofie, is reaching out her hand... As the days pass, the two women learn each other’s hopes and dreams – Eva’s is that she will find Michal alive in this terrible place, and Sofie’s is that she will be reunited with her son Tomas, over the border in an orphanage in Austria. Sofie sees the chance to engineer one last meeting between Eva and Michal and knows she must take it even if means befriending the enemy… But when Eva realises she is pregnant she fears she has endangered both their lives. The women promise to protect each other’s children, should the worst occur. For they are determined to hold on to the last flower of hope in the shadows and degradation: their precious children, who they pray will live to tell their story when they no longer can. A heart-breaking story of survival, where life or death relies on the smallest chance and happiness can be found in the darkest times. Fans of The Choice and The Tattooist of Auschwitz will fall in love with this beautiful novel. Readers are captivated by The Child of Auschwitz: ‘ This hauntingly heart-breaking story is one of pure, instinctual survival. It is a story of fierce friendships, unbreakable spirits, and the most powerful love possible … I was so spellbound by this captivating, riveting read that I could not put it down until I read every last word.’ Goodreads Reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘ This book grabbed me from the first sentence and didn't let me go for the entire journey. I had goosebumps while reading… It is a beautiful story.’ Goodreads Reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘You will cry, you will be addicted from the start and will find it hard to put down. This book ranks high on my favourite books list a BRILLIANT book and worth far more than 5* in my opinion EXCELLENT.’ Goodreads Reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘A book that plays with your emotions, sad and poignant in parts and a book I just couldn’t put down. A compelling, haunting story. Read it in one day.’ Goodreads Reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘This stunning historical fiction in the setting of Auschwitz will haunt me for a long time to come. It’s a story of love, hope and told through a combination of the present and the past flashbacks. It completely captivated me that I read it in a day because I just couldn’t stop’ Goodreads Reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘The Child of Auschwitz by Lily Graham. Such a beautifully written, incredible story of love, loss, friendship, family… this book was very, very good.’ Abbygabbyreadsrightnow, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘This beautiful story needs to be read and cherished.’ Netgalley Reviewer,⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘This story will stay with me. And despite the despicable conditions love can be born of the situation.. if I could rate higher than five stars I would. Superb!’ Goodreads Reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘I found this such an emotional and evocative read and it kept me gripped and turning those pages well into the night. …Great characterization and rich descriptive prose that made you feel the cold and their everyday hunger and agony made this a 5 stars highly recommended read from me.’ Netgalley Reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Release date: November 8, 2019

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 350

Sample

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.

‘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 jacket, 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?’

Eva shook her head. ‘No. I don’t.’

Helga raised a thin brow. ‘Yet you think, somehow, you will make it out of this alive?’ she hissed.

‘Keep quiet!’ shouted the Kapo, appearing suddenly from her room at the end of the barracks. ‘Or I will have you shot here and now!’

They quietened fast.

Eva lay back down, and stared at the wood above her head, then she whispered to Sofie, ‘We will live, and I will find Michal again.’

Helga made a sound with the back of her throat, incredulous. ‘Your husband?’ she guessed. ‘You’re an absolute fool. No one here can afford to think that way – it’s better, trust me, to forget who you once were, that life is over now.’

Eva dashed away an angry tear, thinking: Muselmann. ‘No. That’s how we can’t afford to think – like there’s no hope left, because that’s the only way they really win.’

Auschwitz was the size of a small city. At the entrance to the gates was a lie: Arbeit Macht Frei. Work Makes You Free.

Eva flexed her jaw at the thought. Unless the Nazis meant the ultimate freedom –from life. She shuffled forward near a barbed fence in her too-large clogs that slipped and allowed the cold, dirty mud to envelop her frozen toes, causing shooting pains up her calves as she went.

Auschwitz operated as both an extermination and labour camp. It had originally started life as a detention centre for political prisoners, but after Hitler’s Final Solution – which called for the mass killing of all Jews, and other non-desirables, such as the disabled, gypsies, homosexuals and others deemed unfit to live in Nazi Germany – it had officially transformed into their largest killing machine.

Eva was in Birkenau, or Auschwitz II-Birkenau as it was officially known, the biggest of the camp facilities, which could hold more than 80,000 prisoners. It was one of over forty such complexes.

Eva looked up past the expanse of mud churned up by tens of thousands of feet, past the long brick building with the guard turret above to the rows of decrepit wooden barracks, to a small team of men a hundred metres away, who were repairing a roof.

Michal was here, somewhere. He could even be amongst those men.

She knew that the chances of one of those men being her husband – or even knowing of him, in a camp this size, with so many buildings, covering such vast distances – was slim. But if she could only find a way to speak to them, maybe someone would know something. Maybe someone, somehow, would be able to tell her something.

It was why she was here after all.

When everyone in Terezín, which acted as a transit camp as well as ghetto, had tried their best to get their names off the transport lists, Eva had volunteered to come. Here. She’d volunteered, hoping to follow her husband, before she’d known exactly what that meant. She wasn’t the only wife to do so, countless women were here for the same reason.

An SS guard saw her stare at the group of men, a twitchy hand nearing his gun. She shuffled on in the mud as fast as she could towards the laundry, where she’d been assigned for the day with the other women in the queue up ahead. She raised her chin, and gave one last look at the guard before she went, and thought. I would do it again. Even knowing what I do now. If it means I find you, Mic. . .