THE girl in the hayloft whispered that she was named Sara, that she was Jewish, and that she, her sister Hannah and her mother Gita had been among 1,200 women from nearby Stutthof labour camp rounded up by the SS for a stumbling death march to the sea.* After a month of snow, starvation, beatings and executions, just 300 remained. Sara herself was almost executed after a desperate attempt to buy bread with a diamond ring.* At Gita’s insistence, Sara unwillingly slipped away, never to see Gita or Hannah again.*
The POWs nursed her for three weeks under the Commandant’s nose, until on the shortest possible notice the entire Stalag was evacuated, leaving barely enough time to entrust Sara to a kindly lady in the village.
Sara eventually reached the USA, where she became a nurse, and spent more than twenty years tracking down the men who saved her life. “Why did you do it?” someone once asked them. “Well,” they explained, “we’re British.”
Stutthof was a sprawling labour camp over many sites, chiefly at Sztutowo 20 miles east of Gdansk. Originally, most of the inmates were non-Jewish Poles, but more and more Jewish people were brought in from the Baltic States in 1944, as the advance of the Russian army forced Germany to retreat. Over 60,000 people died in the camp, of disease, starvation or execution.
“I didn’t mind being killed” Sara said later. “But not in front of my mother."
Sara lost her father, her sister, two uncles, four aunts and six cousins to the Holocaust. Later, after settling in the United States of America, she took her sister’s name, Hannah. Although she obeyed her mother and fled the column alone, Sara’s intention was actually to come back with food, but she collapsed with exhaustion in the barn and would have died but for Stan and his friends.