The Girl Who Survived the Gas Chamber at Auschwitz

The story of an unnamed sixteen-year-old found alive beneath the bodies in an Auschwitz gas chamber.

By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

The first thing we know about her is that she was sent to Auschwitz with her parents. She was sixteen years old and had lived an entire life before the day they were forced onto a train, though almost every detail of that life has been lost. We do not know her name, the place she considered home, or what she understood about the danger closing around her family. The historical record preserves only the final hour of her life, witnessed by Miklós Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish physician who was imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau and forced to work under Josef Mengele.

Her family was caught in one of the largest and most concentrated deportation campaigns of the Holocaust. German forces occupied Hungary in March 1944, and between May 15 and July 9, Hungarian authorities, acting under the direction of the German SS, deported approximately 440,000 Jews. Most were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the majority were murdered in the gas chambers shortly after reaching the camp. The speed of the operation meant that Jewish communities across Hungary were emptied within a matter of weeks, even as the war had begun to turn decisively against Germany.

Readers who have followed my writing about Eva Mozes Kor will recognize this period. Eva, her twin sister Miriam, and the rest of the Mozes family were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944 as part of this same campaign. Mengele selected the ten-year-old twins on the ramp and sent them to the barracks that housed the children used in his experiments. Eva’s parents and two older sisters were murdered in the gas chambers. While Eva and Miriam were being subjected to Mengele’s experiments, this unnamed sixteen-year-old entered the camp on another Hungarian transport.

Her story survives because Nyiszli worked inside one of the crematoria. His medical training had made him useful to Mengele, who forced him to conduct autopsies and other medical work in a room built near the gas chamber. This placed Nyiszli alongside the Sonderkommando, a group of prisoners, most of them Jewish, whom the SS forced to remove bodies from the chambers and carry them to the ovens or burning pits. Because these men possessed direct knowledge of the extermination process, they were isolated from other prisoners and regularly murdered by the SS.

On the day Nyiszli encountered the girl, the Sonderkommando had begun clearing the bodies of a recently murdered transport. Another train was expected, which meant the chamber had to be emptied quickly. From his room, Nyiszli could hear the lift operating beyond the wall and the sound of its door closing as bodies were carried toward the ovens. Work was proceeding at full speed when the prisoner supervising the Sonderkommando rushed into the room and told Nyiszli that the men had found a woman alive among the dead.

Nyiszli grabbed the medical bag he kept nearby and hurried downstairs. Near the wall of the chamber, partially covered by bodies, he saw a young girl convulsing and struggling to breathe. He initially estimated her age at about fifteen. The Sonderkommando men freed her, and Nyiszli carried her into the room where they changed their clothes. He remembered the lightness of her body as he placed her on a bench.

Nyiszli gave her three injections in rapid succession. The men removed their heavy coats and covered her cold body while someone went to the kitchen in search of tea or soup. He was struck by the concern with which they gathered around her. These prisoners spent their days handling the bodies of people murdered in the chambers and understood that the SS intended to kill them as well. Yet when they discovered one child breathing beneath the dead, Nyiszli wrote, they tried to save her as though she were their own.

Their efforts began to take effect. The girl coughed and expelled thick fluid from her lungs. Her breathing became deeper, and her pulse strengthened as color returned to her face. When she opened her eyes, she stared blankly toward the ceiling before looking at the men surrounding her. She appeared unable to understand what she was seeing and closed her eyes again.

As her awareness returned, so did her memory. She recalled the train and the line she had been made to join after reaching the camp. From there, she remembered moving with the crowd into a vast underground room filled with bright light. The prisoners were ordered to undress before being pushed naked into another chamber. Everything happened with such speed that she had little opportunity to understand where she was or what was being done to them.

She remembered the people around her becoming frightened and searching among them for her family. Unable to find her parents, she remained close to the wall and waited. The lights went out, and something began to sting her eyes and throat. She started to choke before losing consciousness. Nyiszli wrote that everything after that moment had been an abyss.

The return of these memories left her increasingly agitated. She raised her head from the bench and looked around the room as her face began to contort. She then seized Nyiszli by the lapels and tried desperately to sit upright. He attempted to settle her back onto the bench, but she renewed the effort with what strength remained. Eventually, exhaustion overcame her, and she lay back beneath the coats. Nyiszli saw tears gather in her eyes, though she did not cry.

Because of her condition, he asked only enough questions to learn that she was sixteen and had been deported with her parents on one of the Hungarian transports. Their fate is absent from the written account, but they were almost certainly among those murdered in the chamber. The girl did not know this yet, though her frantic search for them as her memory returned suggests that she already feared it.

Someone brought her a cup of hot broth, which she was able to drink. The Sonderkommando men had gathered small pieces of food and wanted to give those to her as well, but Nyiszli feared that her weakened body could not tolerate them. He covered her to the neck with the men’s coats and told her to sleep while he and the others discussed what they might do.

The difficulty was larger than treating her injuries. No prisoner who entered the crematorium was permitted to leave alive. The girl had seen the inside of a gas chamber and could tell other prisoners what happened there. Her survival therefore placed her in immediate danger from the SS, regardless of whether her body recovered.

A large women’s road-building detail worked near the crematorium each day, and the men considered using it to move her into the camp. If they could keep her hidden until evening, she might join the women as they returned to their barracks. Thousands of women were imprisoned in that part of Birkenau, many of whom did not know one another, so a new face might escape notice. Her survival would then depend upon her ability to remain silent about what she had experienced.

Before they could attempt the plan, SS-Oberscharführer Erich Muhsfeldt came to inspect the crematorium. As he passed the open doorway, he noticed the men gathered inside and entered the room. By that point he had already seen the girl, and Nyiszli decided to appeal to him directly.

Nyiszli explained what had happened and offered a theory about how she had survived. He believed that she had been knocked down during the struggle inside the chamber and had fallen near a damp section of the concrete floor. The bodies above her may have limited her exposure to the Zyklon B. This was Nyiszli’s medical inference, and the precise reason for her survival cannot be established. What mattered in that room was that a girl who had entered the gas chamber with hundreds of others was now breathing beneath the coats of the men who had carried her out.

Nyiszli told Muhsfeldt about the women’s work detail and asked him to permit the girl to be taken into the camp. Nyiszli recalled that Muhsfeldt considered the request and said the plan might have been possible if she had been two or three years older. He said that the plan might have been possible if she had been two or three years older. A woman of twenty, in his estimation, would recognize the need for silence, while a sixteen-year-old would tell someone what had happened. Once she began speaking, the news of her survival would spread throughout the camp.

Muhsfeldt ordered her death because he believed she would talk.

About fifteen minutes later, the girl was carried into an anteroom and killed with a bullet to the back of the head. Muhsfeldt sent another SS man to perform the execution.

There is something especially revealing in the time that passed between the opening of her eyes and the gunshot. Her death was no longer part of the anonymous killing of a transport. The people in the room had seen her breathe and heard enough of her story to know that she was sixteen and had come with her parents. They had watched her drink from a cup and struggle to raise herself from the bench. The SS then made a separate decision to kill her because she possessed knowledge of what had happened inside the chamber.

The response of the Sonderkommando prisoners is equally important to the account. The SS had forced these men into daily proximity to mass murder and placed them under continual threat of death. Even within those conditions, they recognized the girl’s life as something worth protecting. They interrupted their work, covered her with clothing they needed themselves, and began planning how to move her beyond the crematorium gates. Nyiszli’s description of them as fathers fighting for their own child is among the most human details in the passage.

The girl’s courage appears in similarly concrete terms. She had survived the poison and regained consciousness in a room beside the chamber where her parents had almost certainly been killed. As she began to understand what had happened, she did not become serene or composed. She was terrified. She gripped Nyiszli’s coat and fought to sit up even after her body had been pushed beyond ordinary endurance. Her courage consisted of the body’s continued insistence upon life when nearly everything around her had been organized toward her death.

This is also where I think of Eva. Years later, Eva would describe becoming gravely ill after one of Mengele’s injections and hearing him predict that she would be dead within two weeks. When she became too weak to walk, she crawled across the barracks floor to reach water while repeating to herself that she must survive. Eva lived long enough to explain the determination that carried her through that moment. The sixteen-year-old in Nyiszli’s account had only a few minutes in which to speak, so we cannot know what she thought as she tried to lift herself from the bench. We know only that she tried.

Nyiszli never recorded her name. His questions were limited by her condition and by the danger gathering around them, so he learned only her age and that she had come with her parents. The name by which they had known her disappeared with the world from which the family had been taken. Still, Nyiszli preserved enough to keep her from vanishing entirely into the number of people murdered that day. He remembered the lightness of her body when he lifted her and the coats piled around her. He remembered her hands gripping his lapels as she tried to rise.

The SS feared that, if she lived, she would tell other people what she had seen. They killed her before she had the opportunity. Nyiszli survived Auschwitz and wrote the account they had tried to prevent, which means that her experience became known even though her name did not. We are left with the image of a sixteen-year-old girl who came to Auschwitz with her parents, opened her eyes after the gas chamber, and used the last of her strength to sit upright. That is how she remains in the record, and it is enough to ask that we remember her.

A Note on the Source

This essay is based primarily on Chapter XX of Miklós Nyiszli’s memoir, published in English under the titles Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account and I Was Doctor Mengele’s Assistant. Nyiszli wrote his testimony soon after the war, drawing upon his experiences as a Jewish prisoner forced to perform medical work under Josef Mengele. His memoir remains an important account of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria, although scholars have identified errors in some of its technical and numerical details.

The episode described here is known through Nyiszli’s testimony. No surviving independent record identifies the girl or confirms the conversation he reported with Erich Muhsfeldt. This essay therefore presents the discovery of the girl, the prisoners’ efforts to save her, and Muhsfeldt’s stated reason for ordering her death as Nyiszli remembered them. His explanation for how she survived the gas chamber was a medical inference made under extraordinary circumstances and cannot be independently established.

Jill Szoo Wilson

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