Lola is eating a spinach-and-mushroom omelet at the Inn of the Seventh Ray in Topanga Canyon, Calif. Her knife lightly slices a snippet off and, scraping up some cheese sauce, butters it on. ”Here. Try the omelet,” she says to me.
We are outdoors. A string of little white lights bulbs is perched in the pines around us. Behind us a brook pitter-patters along. No doubt other people sitting here on these lilac cushions took an exotic route to this rainbow`s end in California, commencing, perhaps, in a truck in Central America or a lurching ship on the China Sea. Lola`s emigration began from a barracks at Auschwitz in January, 1945, but for Lola the next 12 months were so utterly astonishing that I went to Europe to see if I could document them. I`m back and I tell her now, ”It all checks out, Lola. It`s true.”
”I told you. Have some more bread,” she says, passing me a plate with a pile of fresh-baked honey bread on it. ”I like bread. It`s what we dreamt of at Auschwitz.”
”You told me you also dreamt of getting revenge,” I say.
”We dreamt that, too,” Lola says. ”We dreamt that what the Germans did, we would do to them someday. We would force them to stand in the cold, 20 below, half-naked, naked, force them to stand there humiliated like us. We would force them to lift up rocks, impossible rocks, to break their backs carrying them to and fro. We would beat them all to a bloody pulp, we . . . . ”
Lola pauses. She stares at her plate silently. On the terrace a harpist nudges the notes of ”The Little Fountain” by Samuel Pratt. ”Everyone dreamt it at Auschwitz,” Lola whispers.
”But you were the one who did it,” I say.
Lola smiles sadly. ”I really did it,” she says.
–
At 5 o`clock on the coal-black morning of Friday, Jan. 12, 1945, the hoarse commands of ”Fire!” resounded over the Russian front along the Vistula River in Poland. Moments later, the earth seemed to split apart as cannon, rocket and mortar shells exploded over the sleeping soldiers of Adolf Hitler`s army.
The shelling continued for 107 minutes. When it finally stopped, the German soldiers who were still standing were acting punch-drunk, the blood coming out of their ears, noses and half-open mouths as Russia`s 3 million soldiers advanced upon them. On the Russian tanks was painted, ”To Berlin!” Five days later, the Russian tanks and cannons had rolled 100 miles west, and now their shells rattled the windows of the Haus der Waffen SS in the town of Oswiecim (or Auschwitz), Poland.
Inside were the men and women of Hitler`s private army, the SS, who for the last five years had been feasting on pork, pike, duck, roasted hare and red cabbage, washing them down with Mattoni seltzer and Bulgarian wine.
By Jan. 17, the SS was practically panic-stricken by Russia`s guns. Heinrich Himmler, in his underground bunker in Berlin, ordered them to flee to Grossrachen, Germany, 200 miles west, and to take along the 64,438 murderers, prostitutes, robbers and Jews it had imprisoned at Auschwitz.
As they cursed them, the SS descended on the cold stables where the 60,000 lived, two or three dozen to every stall.
”Get up! Get up!” the SS shouted, as the rats that were snuggling by the men and women scooted away. ”You stinking pigs! Get out!” the SS continued, stomping down the wet aisles. To avoid their lice, the SS didn`t touch anyone except with a boot, strap, bullwhip or, in one woman officer`s hands, a whip with a ruby-encrusted handle.
”Faster! Faster!” the SS shouted, shooting and killing all who were immobilized by weariness, weakness or typhus. Then the SS watched as the 60,000 snatched up their only possessions, their shoes, and ran outside.
”We`re marching!” the SS shouted, and the slaves tramped out of Auschwitz past the electrified wires to the cadence of ”Links! Links! Links!”-”To your left!”
One of them that winter night was Lola Potok, a Jew from Poland. She was not quite 24.
–
It was snowing on the road to Germany, the snow turning to ice on Lola`s eyebrows. Not far behind her, the Russians had copies of Pravda to line their boots; the SS was using the Abendpost, but Lola was walking in two left shoes, her knees knocking together, bleeding, the blood dripping an inch or two before freezing on her bare legs. She wore an old dress and an overcoat with the sign of a slave on its shoulders: a cross of red paint. But the cold crept through it, through skin, through bones, till the one ember was Lola`s heart. Her family was all she thought of. Born 20 miles away in Bedzin to a father and mother versed in the Torah, Lola had 10 older brothers and sisters: a boxer, a pop-band leader, a University of London philologist and a pilot among them. But when the Germans smashed in her family`s door in 1943, shouting, ”You dirty Jews! Out!” and shipped off in cattle cars many of these brothers and sisters, as well as nephews, nieces and Lola`s beloved mother and baby to Auschwitz, the only one the Germans considered fit to work was Lola, then 21. As far as she knew, the rest were selected by Josef Mengele, the SS doctor, to be gassed-or, in one case, hanged-and be cremated. Lola`s baby, Itusia, was yanked out of her arms; she never saw ”Itu” again. Now, two years later, as 60,000 people moved like the Doomed, as SS in black woolen cloaks cried, ”Go on!” as SS dogs in black woolen blankets growled, as SS in pell-mell retreat shot the people who, for any reason, stopped, and as Lola hobbled by 100, 200, 300 corpses-now, Lola just thought of Zlata, of Ada.
Stumbling beside her, Zlata and Ada, the wives of two of her brothers, were, to her knowledge, her only surviving relatives. It was Lola who had kept them alive at Auschwitz by spooning the ill-smelling soup (Was it turnip?
Nettle? Rutabaga? The slaves believed it was poison ivy) in their mouths, telling them, ”Eat it,” Zlata and Ada crying, ”I can`t,” Lola insisting,
”Swallow it,” and Zlata and Ada downing it, holding their noses. Even tonight, Lola sneaked from the slow-moving column to dig up four frozen potatoes to pass to Zlata and Ada, who put them under their armpits to thaw before wolfing them down.
Wednesday . . . Thursday . . . Friday . . . The 60,000 or 50,000 or 40,000 were on a death march through the snow. At twilight on Saturday, Lola whispered to Zlata in Yiddish, ”I`ve had it, I`m walking away.”
”Lola, they`ll kill you!” Zlata whispered.
”So then they`ll kill me. If that is my destiny, it will happen right here. Come with me.”
”No, Lola, we`ll never see you! We`ll never . . . Be careful!” Zlata whispered, as Lola slipped from the Hosts of Hell.
Now, alongside the road observing the passing parade were some German civilians, and Zlata saw Lola sidle among them. In the dim light, the Germans didn`t see the red cross on Lola`s coat, but, as Zlata looked on in horror, an SS man with his Luger and his snarling dog charged up to Lola yelling, but Zlata didn`t hear what. As the SS prodded her on, Zlata heard the crack of a Luger in the cold air and thought, ”Lola`s dead.”
A hundred days later, Zlata would stand trembling in the city of Gliwice, Poland, as a military motorcycle roared up to her, and a Pole in a fine green uniform vaulted off wearing a .38. Off would come the big goggles and the eagle-insignia hat and, as a shower of golden blond hair came down, Zlata would gasp, ”Lola! Lola! It`s you!”
Lola was now the commandant of a prison for German soldiers, Gestapo police and SS. Zlata gasped, ”Lola, what do you do?”
”Everything,” Lola would say. ”We do to them what they did to us at Auschwitz.”
–
That night in January, 1945, the SS man had yelled at Lola, ”Do you belong with the Jews?” Lola was down to 66 pounds, but her overcoat hid her. Her sunken cheeks could be those of a high-fashion model, and her blond hair, as short as a brush`s bristles, was covered by a simple scarf. Her head held high, Lola looked the SS in the eye and yelled, ”What, are you crazy?” and the SS man moved on.
So far, so good. Lola turned to a German civilian in a black raincoat.
”You know,” Lola said in German, ”I`ve got a cross on my coat and I want to cover it. Could you give me your raincoat please?”
”No! I cannot! But this I can give you,” the man said, and he reached in his pocket for the equivalent of 60 cents. ”I`ve just come from a labor camp, too.”
Lola thanked the man and trudged through the snow to collapse in a nearby coal shack.
In the morning the roosters awoke her. Lola was in a village near Germany. It was Sunday, the church bells were ringing, and Poles and Germans were walking along the empty road by the snow-statue corpses of Jews, going to Mass.
Trusting luck, Lola walked up to a man and said in Polish, ”I`m cold, I`m frozen, I want to warm up.” The old man said nothing, but he led her to a potbellied stove in his living room as a woman in the bedroom shouted, ”No!
You can`t let her in! She`ll get us all killed, she`ll-”
”Shut up,” the man said, and he brought her a cup of coffee, cake and a pair of scissors, needle and thread. With shivering fingers, Lola cut the bottom off her coat to sew on top of the red cross, concealing it. She thanked the man and started walking east.
In all she walked 30 miles. That night in the city of Myslowice, Lola used the money the man gave her to take a slow train to Katowice and then a trolley to Chorzow, where she collapsed at the door of her sister`s former husband, a German businessman.
One week later, the Russians rolled into Chorzow, liberating her. Her weight in the next three months rose to 110.
Her health back, Lola arranged to visit the opulent office in Poland where, for six years, the Gestapo commandant in Katowice had sat, his chandelier over him, his two crossed swords and his picture of Hitler behind him. It was here that a chum of Lola`s, Pinek Monka, a Jew, had been tortured almost to death in 1943 by the Gestapo, which, at last, unwisely returned him to Bedzin, where he became a leader in the Polish resistance. After two daring years of raiding the German camps, Pinek now had that same crystal-chandeliered office as internal-security chief for the Polish provisional government, and Lola was there to visit him. He wept when she told him that her mother had died in Auschwitz, as had her infant daughter and at least 12 of her sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews and, in a sense, much of Lola herself.
”I want revenge,” Lola told him.
”But Lola, you`re not a murderer. You`re not a Nazi,” Pinek said. ”How would you do it?”
”I don`t know,” Lola said, though she dreamt of shooting, stabbing, strangling the SS with their own ruby-handled whips. ”I want them to suffer like us.”
Pinek knew Lola well. They had gone to school in Bedzin together and to a Zionist camp in the mountains near Czechoslovakia. Pinek thought, ”Lola`s a Potok, a tough little girl, a Cossack.” He told her, ”Lola, I`ve got the job for you. One where you can say, `I`m the boss now. Whatever I want to do I can do, but . . . but I won`t do it.` ” Then Pinek offered her a job as the commandant of a prison for German soldiers, Gestapo police and SS.
Lola said, ”I`ll take it.”
–
So early in May, 1945, the war continuing in Berlin and the Russians closing in on Hitler, Lola Potok, age 24, stood in her trim green uniform as 1,000 men in Nazi black and Nazi green marched into the big stone prison in the city of Gliwice.
Lola`s heart started hammering as she checked out the incoming prisoners for any SS from Auschwitz. High on her hit list were Rudolf Hoess, Franz Hoessler and Josef Mengele: Hoess, the camp commandant, the man who had
”shuddered” at shooting the Jews and had switched to hydrocyanide gas;
Hoessler, the commandant of the women`s camp, who had put Lola`s lovely niece on the cart to the ”shower room” and its same hydrocyanide gas; and the doctor, Mengele, who had put Lola`s name on his hydrocyanide list.
”I don`t know how,” Lola thought, ”but if I see them, I`ll kill them.” But the three weren`t in this first shipment, and Lola returned to her office, disappointed.
Besides Poles, Lola had hired some Jews, survivors of Auschwitz themselves, to be guards under her, and one sunny day in May a couple of these gaunt guards came to Lola`s office with one German prisoner, saying he seemed suspicious. Lola agreed that the fat-faced aristocratic man of 40 couldn`t be a private, as the stripe on his sleeve proclaimed, and she asked him in German, ”Who are you?”
”A soldier,” the German said. ”An ordinary soldier.”
”In what unit?”
”The 24th Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion, 24th Panzer Division.” Or some such address.
”Mmm. What battles were you in?”
”Sevastopol, Stalingrad . . . ” Or some such conductor`s call.
”You`re sure you`re not an SS?”
”No! I am an ordinary soldier!”
”Are you really sure?”
”I`m sure! I was drafted for the Fatherland!”
”All right,” Lola said. ”Undress him,” and, while the German stood there like a court-martialed man, one Jew pulled off his old faded jacket, his shirt and his undershirt, lifted up his flabby left arm and, in his armpit, discovered the tiny blood-type tattoo that all the SS were labeled with.
At the same time, the other guard opened the man`s jacket pocket, finding a black-and-white photograph of him wearing an SS black hat and Gestapo coat. ”You liar!” Lola shouted, and almost involuntarily slapped the German`s face with the back of her hand. ”How many Jews did you kill?”
”Not any!” the German cried. ”I wasn`t in a concentration camp! I worked in an office in Gliwice!”
”That`s worse!” Lola shouted. She smacked the German`s frightened face, and the two Jewish guards joined in to beat him and kick him, the blood running from the German`s nose. ”An office!” cried Lola. ”The higher you are, the more of a killer you are!”
”No, I wasn`t that big!” the German pleaded, falling down on his knees. ”I wasn`t a big shot inside the SS!”
”You were! You pig! It shows all over your bloated face! You were a privileged bastard!”
”I didn`t kill any Jews!”
”You liar!” Lola shouted, booting his grasping hands away. Oh, how he disgusted her! The pig! The big groveling hog! If only he`d cop to killing Jews, then Lola wouldn`t be so conscience-stricken at hitting him! If only he`d tell her, ”Yes, I was at Auschwitz, and I`m the one responsible for the murder of Itu, Ida, Edzia, Yadzia, Abramik. . . . ” ah, Lola could even rip out his heart without hearing the still small voice that told her, ”It`s wrong. It`s wrong.”
How dare the man ruin her sweet revenge by declining to tell her, ”I did it!” Red with rage, Lola again slapped the German, shouting, ”Take him away!”
One needn`t wonder about the fate of the fat-faced man. He was surely killed in 1945. The only question can be, Who did it? The hangman at Nuremberg? The Allies? The Russians? The Poles? Or the Jews at Lola`s topsy-turvy prison?
–
