The story of Martha Zaudy: Prisoner 596

The story of Martha Zaudy: Prisoner 596

5 April 2017

MARTHA Zaudy — prisoner 596.

How did her suitcase come to be among thousands on display at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp? How did she end up there?

Did she survive or was she one of the 1.1million people, most of them Jewish, murdered in the most frightening prison on earth. Martha Zaudy.

Arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau last week as guests of the Holocaust Educational Trust, 200 A-level history students from Northern Ireland, were urged to consider the individuals behind the overwhelming evidence of mass murder they were about to witness.

Guides from the charity dedicated to remembering six million Jewish people exterminated in the Holocaust emphasised the importance of personalising the horror to the students, who were the first from Northern Ireland to partake in the trust’s Lessons from Auschwitz Project since 2008.

They recommended seeing the extinguished Jewish people as individuals rather than a single human mass, repeating the advice to the teenagers during the full day tour of the myriad of horrors that is Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Find one name, our own guide suggested as we passed under the notorious archway Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Sets You Free), and think of who that person was.

It was a sobering task, focusing on one person as we walked down a hall decorated with framed mugshots of condemned prisoners in striped pyjamas, imagining what toddler owned the tiny and well worn steel-capped boots in the mountain of discarded shoes and wondering who had chosen to wear her best red stilettos for what was undoubtedly her transportation to death at Auschwitz. 

As our group filed past piles of pots and pans, chipped and broken, I asked myself who might have carefully carried the white bowl painted with orange and green flowers across Europe, in misheld belief that the pretty piece of crockery might serve her family in their new life.

Looking for an age-appropriate story to bring home to my own children, Martha Zaudy’s name, emblazoned on a battered brown suitcase in Auschwitz museum, particularly jumped out as that of a potential protagonist, if not only because Martha is quite a familiar forename at home. 

One of six million people exterminated in the Holocaust, I considered Martha as a woman, a wife and daughter, and possibly as one of the many mothers murdered while holding their children’s hands.

Google has told me since my return home that Martha Zaudy was born Martha Benjamin on August 22, 1891.

She was first imprisoned in the infamous Terezin ghetto following her transportation there from the affluent Berlin district of Charlottenburg by the Nazis on November 5, 1942.

Martha was transported with her husband, Dr Karl Zaudy, who had sought refuge in the city when Jewish doctors were banned from practising in his native Dusseldorf. They had married just one year previously.

Of the 100 people transported with her to Terezin, she was one of just 15 to survive. Her husband did not. He was murdered a week before his wife’s birthday on August 15, 1943.

The following year, on October 23, 1944, Martha was transported with 1,714 prisoners to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

This move was part of the ghetto’s mass evacuation by Nazis pursuing their final solution. Records show that Martha’s train was one of the very last to bring prisoners from Terezin to almost certain death at Auschwitz.

Disembarking from the most appalling of cattle carriages, she would have been instructed to label her handheld suitcase, a cruel ploy exercised by captors to keep prisoners calm by inferring there was life ahead. Such lies were a tiny torture in comparison with what was to come.

As she handed over her bag to a soldier to be neatly painted with her name and number, she did not know that only 197 of those with her on that railway platform would survive what were the dying months of World War Two.

Within weeks Marha Zaudy was murdered.

It is not clear how she died, but the Aushwitz-Birkenau tour revealed many possibilities. 

It may have been a gas chamber where the bodies of millions of women, men and children fell, in a forest shooting carried out by the SS as the allies closed in, or even on the barbaric death march from the camp in January 1945.

Perhaps it was hanging, starvation or Typhus. The only certainty is that Martha, widowed so soon after finding war-time love and after defying death in captivity for over two years, was exterminated on the brink of freedom. She was 53.

Martha Zaudy 596 was one of six million Jewish people extinguished in the Holocaust.