At Auschwitz the zugangi (new arrivals) were at the bottom of the ladder. They were pariahs who were treated contemptuously by the other prisoners. They were beaten and kicked mercilessly and endlessly. They constantly tormented themselves over the orders and commands that were unfamiliar to them and that they could not understand. Zugangi—the new prisoners who did not know how to “organize”—did not know how or where to hide; they made themselves absurd trying to defend their human dignity. Just for fun the sztubowa would beat a new prisoner on the face for a long time, until the eyes looked as if they were blue “eyeglasses.” The new inmate would be so surprised that she would not even shield her face and would look around innocently and ask: “Why are you hitting me? I am a human being.”
The sztubowa would answer, “You are a zugang, a stinking zugang. For my part you can drop dead right now.”
On 13 January 1944, I became a zugang, a stinking, hungry, battered outcast of a zugang. That evening, along with the entire transport, I entered the camp through a huge gate on which you could see a sign in iron letters reading: “Arbeit macht frei.”1 Immediately after entering we were chased into the baths, to the sauna. At that time I was not aware that this infamous phrase evoked feelings of terror in all the prisoners. That gate was the entrance to the valley of death. It was impossible for anyone to imagine what awaited a human being in this death trap. We were ushered through a place that looked like an amphitheatre and from there into the showers. We undressed completely and sat down on the benches. Since the room was unheated we shivered from cold. We waited for the SS men to visit us. They arrived. “Achtung!” the blokowa shouted. We jumped up from our places and stood naked in front of a large group of SS men who looked us over slowly, with disdain in their eyes.
It was terrible. Old women with large stomachs and sagging breasts, poor and wrinkled, stood at attention in front of them, taking pains at all costs to hide their age.
“Where is the barber?” shouted an SS man.
Barber? What kind of barber? What kind of a ball are we going to, naked with a fancy hairdo? A few prisoners hustled into the room, with large scissors in their hands. They situated themselves in front of the stairs.
“Why are you staring, you idiots? Form a line and step up to have your hair cut.” The blokowa was shouting and hitting people in the face, pushing them toward the barber. She hit hard, apparently wanting to demonstrate to the SS men how well qualified she was for the job.
The shearing of the sheep had started, and with scissors so dull that they tore bunches of hair out of our heads. There was one big difference between us and sheep, however. The sheep bleated as they were being shorn, but we stood there in silence with tears streaming down our cheeks.
“Spread your legs,” yelled the blokowa. And the body hair was shorn too.
All of this took place very quickly, to the accompaniment of shouts and blows, which fell thickly on our heads and shoulders. We ceased to exist as thinking, feeling entities. We were not allowed any modesty in front of these strange men. We were nothing more than objects on which they performed their duties, non-sentient things that they could examine from all angles. It did not bother them that cutting hair close to the skin with dull scissors was excruciatingly painful. It did not bother them that we were women and that without our hair we felt totally humiliated.
Once again, we were sitting on the benches, naked, the hair on our heads, what was left of it, cut in layers, all of us hunched over from the cold. I was looking for acquaintances among those transformed figures, and truly, I did not recognize anybody. How tragic, and at the same time, how comic, everybody looked. Think of it. Once upon a time, each of us was capable of awakening feelings of love and affection. Each of us once had some value, her own world of intimate dreams and desires.
In a few hours we were robbed of everything that had been ours personally. We were shown that here in Auschwitz we were just numbers, without faces or souls.
“Which one is Liza? Step out,” shouted the blokowa.
Liza was a young, pretty girl. I remember how, in Bialystok, she used to arrange musical evenings, at which she sang Russian songs and arias from operas and operettas.
“You know how to sing?” the blokowa asked, and without waiting for an answer she told her to sing something in German for the SS men. Naked, with her head shorn, Liza started singing in a deep voice, “Auch ich war einst ein reicher.”2 In front of her lounged the SS men and the barbers, with scissors in their hands. The blokowa and all of us in the auditorium watched that scene and were witnesses to it.
I was so tired that I began to feel faint. The air undulated in front of me, and everything—the SS men, Liza, and the men with the scissors—started revolving around me. Nothing was real. It was as if I were looking at a picture from another world. Suddenly the SS man who was standing closest to Liza hit her with a stick and told her to shut up. In a minute we were pushed into another room, the shower room. We stood in front of the showers, waiting for the warm water. Suddenly we jumped as if we had been scalded. Ice water came spurting out of the showers. “Wash!” bellowed the blokowa when we jumped away from the freezing water. Our teeth chattered from the cold, and the cold water came pouring down on us as if we were standing under a waterfall.
In the next room we were given any old rags that were handy. I was given a long, black, silk dress, full of holes, and nothing else besides that. Outside there was a very hard frost. For our feet they gave us wooden clogs and no stockings. I looked like a typical zugang with a shaved head, in a silk dress full of holes, with no boots, and with fear and hunger in my eyes. I imagined that thousands of fingers were pointing at me saying, “Here is a victim you can hit; you can pour your anger out on her and she will not protest, not even if you perform unusual acts of torture on her. If she can’t take it, that will be even better. There will be one zugang less.”
We were taken to the block of zugangi. It consisted of a huge barracks, with a long brick oven, about fifty centimeters high, running the whole length of it. On both sides of the barracks were deep trenches. The sleeping accommodations were in the trenches and on two decks of shelves built into the walls. There were some soiled blankets, and that was it. I pushed myself into one of the spaces and tried to sleep. But that was impossible. All night long the women scrambled from their sleeping places and went outside, where, in front of the block, stood a wooden chest at which you could take care of your personal needs. The women had colds, and they would barely have returned to their lodgings before they had to jump out again. The bustle in the barracks was constant. Every few minutes the gate creaked.
‘What’s going on here? What kind of promenades do we have here?” shouted one of the functionaries who slept in the room. She rushed out of the block and found a few women with stretched-out behinds over the chest. I heard moaning. None of us would allow herself to scream. All the women standing over the chest were pushed into it. Then the functionary proclaimed, “Nobody had better move, because if you do I will kill you like a dog.” Everything was quiet. Only low sighing and moaning. Suddenly I noticed an old lady in the next bed squat and start peeing in a pot from which she would drink coffee in the morning. She looked at me, embarrassed, and put her finger to her lips so that I would not say anything to anybody. I assured her with a nod of my head. Could she do otherwise?
1 “Work makes you free
2 “Once I used to be rich also.”