Irene Weiss b. 1914, Ardanovce, Slovakian Republic (pre-Czechoslovakia). Immigrated to Australia 1949.

Typewriters clacked and filing cards were shuffled up to the last moment in Auschwitz. A chilling record of the living and dead was kept by “secretaries of death”. Irene Weiss was one of them. Together with her sister Janka, she outlived the Holocaust because some of her 3 ½ years of internment were spent in the camp’s Politische Abteilung (“political department”). As a secretary, she was housed separately and could keep clean, because SS personnel were afraid of rampant disease. This gave her the physical strength she needed to record the gruesome statistics. Office skills and the German language which she learned as a young girl in Slovakia, saved her life. Black humour saved her sanity. She still smiles as she recalls that she actually sent a postcard to her husband, but a tear falls as she remembers it was the last one he read.

   l) Irene Weiss in Topolcany, Slovakia in 1948
   r) Irene Weiss today

Days, months and years seem to merge together in the apparently disconnected narrative of Irene’s story. It jumps from fevered, typhus-induced hallucinations of drowning in a puddle to the healing powers of cabbage water. It describes the elegant young women who arrived at the camp and the hollowed shadows they became. It tells of the harsh outside labour, in stark contrast to the softness of nightdresses and eiderdowns, meant to impress the Red Cross. It is an illogical story, for how can such a story have logic?

From her home in the Slovakian Republic, Irene was first deported to Auschwitz Number One, in 1942. In July 1942 she was transferred with all the women of Auschwitz to Birkenau. In December of that year she was sent back to Auschwitz, where she continued to work as a secretary until January 1945. On January 17 1945 she set out on a Death March to Ravensbruck. After one month in Ravensbruck she was moved to another camp, called Neustadt-Gleve in Mecklenburg. On May 2 1945 British soldiers arrived and liberated Neustadt-Gleve, but Irene remembers that they only stayed a few hours; after them, Russian soldiers came. With other liberated prisoners, Irene walked as far as the northern border of Germany.

After migrating to Australia in 1949, Irene, her second husband and her sister’s family eventually built up a successful timber business. But life has been unfair, as Irene was widowed again soon after her arrival in Australia. Still, she says her story is a miracle. She is chairperson of several Australian Jewish communal bodies and is a board member of her synagogue. Despite having lost so much, Irene gives generously to worthwhile causes, because she believes this is the most rational thing to do.

Read Irene Weiss’s full story in Lore Shelley’s book Secretaries of Death