When I was young, my mother used to tell me, "If you ever get lost in a grocery store, or any store for that matter, go to the front of the store and wait for me there." Alright, sweetie?" I nodded and agreed. Of course, the other option would be to get a worker to call her over the intercom. But more often than not, number one worked just fine.
A little over eighty years ago, Rebecca Blumenfeld taught her youngest child, Golda, the very same thing.
On the march that had made her Mama very nervous, Golda had gotten separated from the rest of her family. Someone's knee had bumped into the side of her head and sent her twirling. The skirt she'd held onto after that was a grandmother's skirt, not the soft-flowered one her mother wore. She let go once she realized the wrong bunch of fabric was tangled in her little fists. She stood still, moving only to let the flow of people pass her right and left. Golda knew that if she stayed still and waited, her mother would return to find her. Searching for her wouldn't do any good; they would chase each other in circles like the neighbor's dog chased his tail.
The rush of people passed. She did the very thing that young children do when threatened.
She sat down, criss-crossed applesauce, and waited for her mother to come and pick her up.
But it wasn't her mother who found her.
One of the SS men who'd been trailing behind the group that was herded to the chambers saw the little girl plop down onto the ground.
"Fräulein?" Golda looked up into the handsome face of a middle-aged German man of Austrian descent. He had wrinkles around his eyes - just like her Papa did. He kneeled in the dust and met her eye to eye. "You were separated from your mother?"
"Yes. She was somewhere in the crowd, and then...I don't know where she is." She spoke with a lisp. SS-Untersturmführer Felix Lauber had a daughter who couldn't have been a day older than Golda. She lisped in the same childish manner.
"Well, we can't have you sitting here alone, " he said. He straightened up until he towered over her, but she didn't feel scared. She stood up and held out her hand.
"Can you bring me to her?"
"That's what I was planning on doing, " he said warmly. He leaned down and picked her up, carrying her on one arm as he marched round the bend and down the alley he knew the others had been led through. "You should stick to your kind—your family."
"I didn't mean to get lost."
"Of course not." He said. Golda didn't like the looks of the building they approached in his long gait.
"That's an ugly place. My home is prettier."
"You'll only be there for a bit." He said and pinched her cheek. "Home is where family is, right?"
"I guess." She mumbled. Golda was beginning to like the man less. He also held her a bit too tightly, as if he were fraid she'd try to scramble away. She hated it when grown-ups pinched her cheeks or squeezed her too tight.
He nodded at the other SS men outside the chamber and walked right in. They stood left and right, unimpressed and waiting to get along with the procedure.
Lauber knew it was a far-fetched hope for him to find her mother. But, in a matter of seconds and to his great surprise, a woman barreled into him from the left and snatched the little girl.
"Oh, Golda! I thought I'd lost you! Oh, baby," Rebecca kissed the child over and over again. "Thank you, sir!" she said with a wide smile. I was so nervous about her; I was afraid it might be days until I found her again."
"Now, now, it's all good, you're back together again." He patted her on the arm reassuringly and turned to leave.
"God bless your soul," Rebecca said to him without looking up. She was already busy checking her child for bruises as if it had been hours rather than minutes since they had been apart. Gold wiggled in her grip.
Felix Lauber was the last person who exited the chamber that evening.
He watched as his comrade closed the door, then leaned over to another SS man smoking a cigarette beside him. "Imagine my little Emmeline going to school with a brat like her. Sits down in the middle of the damn road like she owns it."
"By the time your little Emmeline goes to school, there will be no Jewish children in Germany, " his counterpart replied.
"Thank God for that." The SS-Untersturmführer replied and lit a cigarette of his own.
Abraham Blumenfeld never received confirmation about his family's deaths. He was transferred to the Natzweiler Struthof a few months after he arrived at Auschwitz.