There is life after the Holocaust. The story of the three sisters who defeated Auschwitz

A fence and a whole tragedy of humanity separated more than two million Jews from the life they knew before the war. Of these, three sisters escaped, tell their story and call themselves survivors, not victims.

Before writing, Heather Morris learned to listen from her grandfather. Part of his life he listened to the sick in the hospital where he worked, and then he listened to Holocaust survivors. It started with the old Lale Sokolov, the one who tattooed the number on the arm of every Jew who came to the camp and, after many testimonies and stories about tragedy and forgiveness, reached the story of the three sisters, Cibi, Livi and Magda, who held of the promise made to the father never to part.

In an interview for “Weekend Adevărul”, the writer says that you don’t know true history through numbers and statistics, but through each individual testimony. She also says that the main lesson we learn from these people is forgiveness, something we can apply even in these troubled times, which not infrequently, many are tempted to be an eye for an eye. His books, testimonies of Holocaust survivors, have been translated and published

Heather Morris: It was actually one man’s desire to tell his story to someone who isn’t Jewish. I had a mutual friend, who was Jewish, and he suggested I meet him. It is about Lale Sokolov, whose story was the basis of the novel “The Tattooist from Auschwitz”. I didn’t know if he really had a story, I just listened to him – for a few weeks, I visited him almost daily. He was telling little incidents, without a specific timeline, but he felt listened to. His wife had just died, he was suffering and he needed to share his pain.

Grandpa’s lesson: listening

I grew up in a small village in New Zealand, in a large family. Every day after school I would stop by my great grandfather and talk to him, I think he felt sorry for me because I was the only girl with four brothers. He was the one who said to me: “If you want to learn anything in life, kid, just shut up and listen.” Then he would ask me: “What do you hear?”, and I would answer him that nothing. “Don’t be silly, there are so many things around us,” he said. And so he made me listen even to the sound of a tractor on the road, the barking of a dog, the cows entering the barn – all those noises, which were nothing to me, he said were “life”. Then he began to tell me his story and the three generations before him.

What was the most touching memory you shared?

He told me about his youth, when at 17 he fought in Africa. Just data, information, no emotional context – that’s how he was.

Have you thought about writing his story?

I thought about it, but I don’t know if he would have liked it. I can hear him saying “children should be seen, not heard. Go outside and play.” After I published the books about the Holocaust, I had the opportunity to meet relatives of people who survived, and they told me that after their death they learned many details about them. I remember a woman saying to me, just recently, “I went to my brother’s funeral and I learned so many things about him that I didn’t know.” That’s because we don’t say who we really are. Same with my grandfather.

“We never change”

When you had the opportunity to talk to the two sisters, what did you discover beyond the story, beyond the information? What did the body language tell you?

I noticed that in their 90s, they referred to themselves as children, especially when they were telling stories. Then I realized that we never really change. We learn, we mature, we receive education, but who we are as people is there, inside us, from the beginning. They still saw themselves as children, still 14-15-year-old girls – now only with more wrinkles, with more extra kilos.

So you don’t think a person can change completely after a tragic event?

You change your attitude, you change your perception of things around you, but inside, you remain the same. These women do not hate the Germans, neither then nor now, because their mother taught them not to hate. They just didn’t understand how an entire country could be mesmerized by that man.

A little luck, a little destinyWhat is the story behind the novel? How did you get in touch with the sisters?

It all goes back to Lale’s book, which was published in 50 countries, each with a different cover. It was first published in Australia, where I live, and had a simple cover: black, with two hands embracing the title. The hands belonged to Lale and his wife, Gita, and the tattooed numbers received at Auschwitz could be seen. From here, only two countries took over the cover: Brazil and Canada. While I was on a book tour in South Africa, I received an email from a man in Toronto telling me that he bought the book and took it to his mother in Tel Aviv. Seeing the cover, she immediately told him, “It must be about Lale and Gita. Look at the number on my arm, it’s three digits away from mine. I was on the same train to Auschwitz with her, we stayed in block 21 together”. His mother was Magda. He wanted to meet me and tell me what he lived there, to tell about the two fellows. We talked on the phone first, but after a few minutes of conversation, she told me that it would be best if I went to her place. There was something in her voice that made me fly from Johannesburg to Tel Aviv. And so I came to tell the story of her family.

Given this experience, can you say it was the hand of fate, pure luck, or mere happenstance?

I could say that the existence of that cover fixed there was, in part, luck. But also my way of being to never say “no”. If you don’t have a good reason to say no to life, say yes, because you never know where it might take you. I don’t know if it was the hand of fate. It is a Hebrew word that translates as “so it was to be”.

“Bashert” as I recall…

Yes exactly. That’s how I feel about this whole experience for so many years.

Impressive was the promise the three girls made to their father, never to be separated and to always take care of each other. But what caught my attention more was Cibi’s courage to stand up to Visik, a childhood friend who had defected to the Nazis. She confronted him before the deportation, once she arrived at Auschwitz, but also afterwards, when she was already on her way to Israel…

Cibi was the strong one. I didn’t get to meet her personally, but she told her story in a video for Steven Spielberg’s foundation when she was 70 years old. I didn’t understand what he was saying, because he was speaking in Hebrew – I had a translation – but I listened to the tone of his voice, the way he was telling the story. You would expect an elderly woman on camera with a journalist asking her questions to be embarrassed. But she was not like that. She was determined, downright sharp. While Livi was the complete opposite – shy, spoke shyly, looked for her family. So in Cibi, the 70-year-old woman, I saw Cibi the young – the same attitude, the courage to speak up for her. He admits that he has often crossed the line; only as many times as he says on the tape “I should have been shot for that”. He always takes risks.

What is the visual image they have been left with ever since?

Cibi said that when they arrived at Auschwitz, beyond the fence was a family with children, digging and planting vegetables. And he saw that it is the same sky, but their lives are separated, so tragically, by a fence.

From screenplay to novel

Why did you want to be this medium, this medium for keeping and passing on stories?

I started by writing film scripts. Actually, before the book, the book about Lale Sokolov was a screenplay – that’s what he saw me writing too. We worked with a production company in Australia to make the film, but it didn’t materialize due to lack of funds. I spent 12 years with Lale’s story as a script, until my sister-in-law told me “For God’s sake, write a book and publish it!” (laughs). They were tired of me complaining when I went to her and my brother’s, who lived near Hollywood, that no one could see a good story for a movie.

All the details that you reproduce so truthfully in the book – the shape of the ceiling, the smell, the floor of the room where the girls were kept – do you have it from interviews or did you also do additional documentation about Auschwitz?

It was all from their memory. Many stories were about tea and bread, for they had nothing else to eat – the bitter taste of food at that time.

The truth, beyond prejudice

Do you think that beyond the drama and elements of war, there is good? For example, write about the Nazis’ small acts of kindness towards the sisters, or even the love story between Lale and Gita, unfolding behind the walls of the concentration camp.

When Lale’s book first came out, many experts said there was no way this could have happened. But I knew it was so. There were survivors who confirmed their love story. Then their children who said “And my parents met at Birkenau”. I confessed to Lale that what he says about Baretzki (no – one of the most violent guards at Auschwitz) will seem incredible to many – how could he do all those gestures of humanity? Nobody ever said anything good about him. And Lale told me clearly “Yes, you will write. He was one of the worst people I knew, but there were times when he could have shot me and he didn’t, he helped me and Gita.” It’s the same story with the sisters. There was a female guard, about whom no one said anything good, but who helped the girls. And they insisted that I talk about it, it is part of their life story.

After all, you only spoke the truth…

Yes exactly. There are people who don’t want to accept that people are not just good or just bad – no one is just one way. I read the testimony of a survivor who said that “After we were released, we were called the angels of Auschwitz, that we had done nothing wrong. When in reality we were no angels at all. We’ve all done things we shouldn’t have done”. This seems the most realistic of anything I’ve ever read. Livi tells how one cold night she got a blanket for another girl and saved her life. But she confesses that she had to steal that blanket from someone else – she doesn’t know who it was or if he was still alive, but she lived with that guilt.

“Beyond numbers and statistics, we must stay with forgiveness”

There are many people who say that if you want to learn real history you don’t do it from novels and movies. What do you think about this?

We have archives, we have documents, yes. But we have to understand that everyone has their own story. Lale’s story is not the story of the Holocaust, but a story during the Holocaust. We say that over six million died then, that over a million perished in Auschwitz, and you get an idea of ​​what a tragic period of history it was, just from numbers and statistics. But if you want to know what it was like for someone to live then, you have to read testimony after testimony.

And then why didn’t you write a memoir, but a novel? The novel brings with it the accusation of fiction…

(laughs) Even if I tried, I couldn’t make up a story like that. Genres have some hard rules you have to follow. In a memoir you can’t put dialogue, you have to write only what the character experienced, not what others heard or told. Everything would be too flat, too rigid, constrained by rules. For example, I didn’t know Gita, but I talked to her friends who told me about her and what she lived there.

Talk about the importance of each voice. In your books, you have a male voice, a female voice, and the voices of three young women. How do they differ?

What matters most is their memory. Lale was young then, over 25 years old. He was more mature, educated and what we would call an opportunist – he himself described himself as such. Cilka, on the other hand, had no choice. To learn more about her, about what happened after Auschwitz, the Gulag period, I consulted several Russian historians, as well as Russian archives.

Talking to these survivors, to their families, aren’t you overwhelmed by the pain of their stories?

For 20 years, I worked in a hospital, and only people who suffered from a tragedy came there. I learned that their experiences and those of Holocaust survivors are theirs alone to keep. You can’t take away their pain, but it fades through stories. The transfer of feelings is done unconsciously – and this happened to me with Lale. When he saw me overcome with emotions, he hugged me and said “Look, I’m still here. Remember: I won!”. Music helped me cope with these emotions. After leaving Lale or the girls, I would sit in the car for 10-15 minutes, listen to music and then go back to my life.

The fault of the past, on the shoulders of the present?

Beyond history, beyond information, what can we take with us, in everyday life, from your novels?

Forgiveness. All the survivors I’ve met have told me that they don’t hate anyone, that they don’t blame anyone. We are too hard on ourselves. I received an email from a woman in Germany, the title of which was “Please forgive me”. She told me that after Lale’s death, I was the closest person to her and she was asking for forgiveness – being an adult, she found out that her grandfather was the engineer who designed the gas chambers. I told her that the descendants are not to blame for the sins of their parents and grandparents and I explained that I cannot forgive her because I have no reason to. But she insisted that she had to do something, so she became a volunteer at the Holocaust Museum.

But how can we forgive now, nowadays, when there are so many anti-seminist, homophobic movements? What are we doing?

We don’t have to condone or justify their actions, just not join them. They are just cowards who need support. Three things we have to do: never be a victim, never be a perpetrator, never be a bystander.

Sometimes, when we read these stories, we might feel a little guilty that we still live in peaceful times – nothing compares to the Holocaust and World War II. There is an episode in the book when Cibi eats a can of sardines, but then he starts to feel sick because he remembers that when they came there was a thin man with an empty can of sardines…

When you have that feeling, I think you just have to try to compensate and help someone poorer in your community. You have nothing else to do. And let’s not forget that Lale and the three sisters consider themselves survivors, not victims.