By Monsignor Noel C. Burtenshaw

On September 3, 1939, little Lola Barkowska awoke to the rumble of tanks in the streets of her native Lotz. For months Hitler had been hurling threats that he would waltz into Poland at will. Lola’s view from her window assured he had.

Recalling the occasion from her North Atlanta home, Lola, now Mrs. Rubin Lansky, remembered her first thoughts as she watched the German divisions pass. “My immediate reaction was, there will be no school today.”

For the young Polish Jewess and so many like her, there would be no regular school ever again. The next six years would be a daily living hell for Lola Barkowska, her family and millions of Jews and Christians in Poland. For many of them it would end among the common quick-line graves of the infamous concentration camp at Auschwitz.

Lola Lansky is a Survivor of “the camps.” She and her family were initiated to the horrors at Auschwitz. After a living death internment of six years, liberation came for Lola and her sister Helen at Berginbeisen, Germany in April, 1945. “I call it my second birthday. I will always remember the British troops who liberated us,” recalls the pert and pretty blond, “but they arrived one day too late. My mother died in the prison hospital the previous day. For two weeks she had suffered with typhoid.”

Lola never found her mother’s body. With the 500 others who died each day from neglect or starvation, she was quickly buried in one of Belsen’s mass graves.

But for Lola, it all began back in Auschwitz. “I was thrilled to see the pope visit the camp,” she said excitedly. “This Pope knows - he protected Jews during the war, he suffered himself. On his first visit home as pope, he singled out this awful place. Perhaps now the world will realize.”

Obviously Lola and her survivor husband, Rubin, cannot forget. Vividly she recalled the cattle boxes that took her and her family from the ghetto in Lotz in central Poland to Auschwitz in the south. She was 16. “There were thousands of us jammed into those stench-filled boxes. Luckily my littlest sister, just six months old, had died before we left. At least, she did not have to face the horrors of the camp.”

The arrival procedure was always the same. The men and boys were separated from the women and girls. A doctor quickly inspected the newcomers. Those he motioned to his right were prepared for forced labor, the old and weak and anyone else chosen for his left, were never heard of again. Later on, the belching chimneys at the far end of the camp would tell Lola the sad and startling tale of their destination.

The inhumanities of Auschwitz occurred every minute of every day. “All our possessions were taken,” recalls Lola, “our clothes, the little possessions we carried with us, all rings and jewelry. Even our hair was cut and sold by the Germans. We were left nothing of our own.”

Although four million died in the dread camp, overcrowding was always a problem. “The barracks we slept in was originally a large stable. Bunks were heaped high, many were squeezed into each bunk. No eating utensils were issued. We ate our thin soup each day from a bowl. They dehumanized us.”

Work was the key to life in the camp. “Sickness usually meant death,” recalls the Atlanta survivor, “we hid our pains and aches, and especially serious illness. The weak were quickly taken never to be heard from again.”

The trade mark of the survivors, now proudly worn, is the tattoo forever visible on one arm. Lola Lansky did not receive the famous stamp (although her friend Maria, whom I met, did). “I was obviously set aside for other work. After eight weeks my mother, sister and a group of women and I were sent to Germany as forced labor in a munitions factory. I will never forget my last view of Auschwitz. It was the chimneys and the awful smoke and, of course, the stench. We asked some prisoners at the gates about the smell. They told us they are burning people. ‘O my God,’ I thought.”

Mrs. Lansky still tells her story throughout schools and clubs in Atlanta. She carries with her a stripped camp uniform worn by her uncle. The number is clearly imprinted 96864.

Lola and Rubin returned to Poland in 1975. She holds fond memories of growing up in her native Lotz. “I had wonderful Christian friends,” she says, “although there was always anti-Semitism in the communities. The churches preached, at Easter time, that we were the Christ-killers. I believe the German persecution was more easily accepted because of those attitudes.”

Lola’s happiest moment came when she realized that her father and brother survived the terrors of Auschwitz. “I could not believe it when I saw their name on the survivors’ list, it was a miracle.”

Others in her family were not so blessed. Grandparents, uncles, cousins and friends were exterminated - many in Auschwitz.

As Lola Lansky watched John Paul II kneel and pray in that dreadful death camp, standing as a monument, lest we forget, she recalled the words that were emblazoned across the gates of Auschwitz, “Work will set you free.”

It was a lie, of course. The crematoriums said it, the massive graves said it and the one and a half million Jewish children who died there, said it.

In some way the visit of the Polish pope to Auschwitz brought some hope that the tyrant’s lies would never again be told or tolerated.