The Redhead of Auschwitz

This narrative nonfiction work tells the story of Rosie Greenstein, a Jewish girl with distinctive red hair from Crasna, a village on the border of Hungary and Romania. Written by her granddaughter Nechama Birnbaum in Rosie's first-person voice, the biography alternates between prewar childhood and Holocaust experience, tracing Rosie's journey through Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, a forced-labor ammunition factory, and a death march, to liberation and the rebuilding of her life.

On May 10, 1944, 18-year-old Rosie heard drums summoning all Jews to Crasna's Town Square. A Gendarmerie officer, a member of Hungary's rural police force, ordered them to pack only clothing and food, leaving valuables behind. Rosie returned home with her sister Leah, 17, brother Yecheskel, 13, and their widowed mother, Chaya Necha. Rosie hid Mama's engagement ring but threw it down the outhouse rather than surrender it. Officers strip-searched the women and forced them onto buggies to the Klein Brickyard of Cehei, a makeshift ghetto. Prisoners hauled bricks in blazing heat with almost no food. Rosie witnessed soldiers hang a child from a tree for sport. Mr. Waldman, a family friend, was tortured and died. Leah secretly volunteered to be interrogated in Mama's place, but because their family was not wealthy, the officers let her go.

Interspersed with these events are flashbacks to Rosie's childhood. In 1935, nine-year-old Rosie discovered a deep love of dance. Her grandfather Zaidy visited nightly, telling Rosie that souls spoke the language of music. When a visiting dance master from Bucharest wanted to train her, Mama forbade it, and Zaidy consoled Rosie by waltzing with her. Rosie cherished the red hair she inherited from her father, who died when she was five, even though old women spat at her in the market, believing red hair harbored the devil. After Hungary's 1940 takeover of Crasna, the family's circumstances declined, and Leah became the primary breadwinner through dressmaking. A man arriving from Poland warned of Jews being killed there, but the community dismissed him.

On May 31, 1944, Rosie and Leah were herded onto cattle cars. After days in suffocating heat with no sanitation, the train stopped at a platform teeming with soldiers and barking dogs. Mama told Rosie and Leah they must stay together no matter what. At the selection, guards of the SS, the Nazi paramilitary force, sorted prisoners for labor or death. A man on a chair flicked his finger: Rosie and Leah were sent right, Mama left. Yecheskel was sent right but broke away and ran to Mama. The crowd swallowed them.

At Auschwitz, a prisoner shaved Rosie's red hair while singing a Yiddish lullaby. Rosie caught her reflection in broken glass and could not recognize the figure staring back. She silently vowed never to cut her hair again. After fainting from hunger and being revived by an unknown person, she was led to Barrack 21. The Blockälteste, a prisoner charged with maintaining order, told them the smoke overhead was their families burning. Rosie refused to believe it. Her bunkmates, women from the city of Satu Mare, adopted her, calling her "little Crasna."

Daily life followed a brutal pattern: predawn roll calls, labor breaking boulders, and near-starvation rations. Rosie befriended Bailu Turnover, a frail 17-year-old from a wealthy Satu Mare family. She reconnected with Chanky, Uncle Duvid's wife, whose two-year-old son was taken from her at the selection and given to Chanky's mother, who was sent left. When childhood friends discussed their acceptance of death as martyrs, Rosie rejected their resignation, insisting she was going home. She never saw them again.

Rosie adapted through cunning and will. She hid in off-rotation barracks to avoid lethal labor, traded bread for cheese, and sneaked out at night to wash with lye. When an SS health selection assigned her to the sick group for a scratch on her back, she ran back to Leah's side repeatedly, enduring savage beatings until the SS woman gave up. The girls sent to the sick side were never seen again.

In November 1944, the SS led prisoners along a flower-lined path with live music toward what they called a shower. The prisoners entered a cement room with shower heads, but no water came. An SS officer, furious that needed laborers were sent to the gas chambers, pulled them out. They were transported to Bergen-Belsen, where conditions worsened, and then to the Duderstadt ammunition factory in a German forest. Rosie washed bullets and cannon balls. A young SS manager repeatedly threatened to hang her; Rosie refused to show fear. She sabotaged the supply by dropping bullets to the bottom of her wash basin. An older German soldier named Ediger noticed but warned her gently, telling her the Allies were winning. When the manager announced a quota count, Rosie arrived to find all the bullets neatly stacked: Ediger had fished them out overnight, revealing he had a granddaughter her age.

In early April 1945, Allied planes bombed the prisoners' train, and the survivors were forced on a death march lasting two weeks. SS soldiers shot anyone who stopped or fell behind. Rosie, starved and skeletal, told Leah she could not go on. Leah gripped her arm and refused to let her stop, telling Rosie she had no right to give up after keeping Leah alive through everything. As Rosie forced herself forward, she felt unseen presences lift her from both sides. Her feet did not touch the ground until they arrived at Theresienstadt, where the prisoners were locked in an underground bunker. On the night of May 8, 1945, prolonged bombing was heard, then silence. A man opened the door and told them they were free. Rosie climbed out and discovered flowers blooming on the ground above the bunker.

The journey home was chaotic. The sisters rode atop trains, fending off assaults by Russian soldiers. In Crasna, Hershel Frankel, a fellow survivor staying at Raizy's house who had lost his wife and three children, told Rosie the truth: Mama and Yecheskel were sent directly to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Rosie cried for a week. She learned that Aunt Chana and her five children were also murdered. Unable to bear reminders of her lost family, Rosie traveled to Satu Mare, where Uncle Duvid and Chanky had opened a restaurant for survivors. She fell in love with Yitzchak Heilbrun, a cousin who avoided deportation with a gentile's identity papers. Leah married Avrumi Frankel, a young man who had declared his intention to marry her at Theresienstadt, and departed for Romania, separating the sisters for the first time since their mother's command to stay together.

In the Epilogue, narrated by Nechama, Rosie and Yitzchak married at a displaced persons camp with strangers as their wedding party. Denied entry to Israel due to Rosie's latent tuberculosis, they emigrated to America and settled in Brooklyn, New York. Rosie and Leah lost contact during the postwar chaos but reconnected and spoke daily for decades until Leah's death in 2014. At 41, Rosie gave birth to a redheaded daughter, Nechama's mother. As of the book's writing, 95-year-old Rosie has 5 children, 28 grandchildren, 120 great-grandchildren, and 7 great-great-grandchildren. Nechama closes by urging readers to remember the Holocaust and to counter evil by recognizing the shared humanity in all people.