By now I had been on the block of the Jewish zugangi for a whole week. During this entire period I doubt that I had managed to get even as much as two bowls of soup for lunch. As soon as I would get close to the soup can I would be pushed away brutally. Those who were stronger took my portion. When I tried to object I was hit over the head with my own bowl. In the block with me was a young beautiful girl from Bialystok named Karola. Every crumb of bread that she could get hold of, and every spoonful of soup she could grab she shared with me. If not for her I doubt whether I would have survived the hard lot of a zugang.
January 1944 was unusually cold. The stars were still glittering in the frosty sky when they chased us out to the front of the block for roll call. As the cliché would have it, “the stars winked at us happily.” I trembled from cold in my long, black silk dress dotted with holes. To me the stars looked vengeful and pitiless. They lined us up in ranks of five. Every row had to be straight and was formed according to height, from tallest to shortest. The poor old women did not understand what those crazed blokowe required of them. Without scruple, young, well-dressed, well-fed women beat the faces of women old enough to be their mothers. Standing in front of the ranks of taut women, the sztubowa shouted, “Achtung!” which brought out the blokowa. She was a young, Jewish girl from Slovakia, about twenty years of age, beautiful, elegant, and slightly pink from sleep and frost. She was beautifully dressed. I remember that she had on a blue rain cape with a hood which was tossed over her winter coat. It seemed to me at the time that she was unusually beautiful, almost an unearthly being. She floated through the rows of taut bodies with dignity. Apparently she liked the way we stood, because she stood aside without saying a word. We had to wait a long time for the SS men to appear so that we could have a proper roll call that would ascertain that not even one prisoner might be hiding and that all the prisoners were standing there ready to welcome the angel of death.
I sat on my bunk gazing at the scene that was being played out in front of me. From the moment I got to Auschwitz I was completely detached. I disconnected my heart and intellect in an act of self-defense, despair, and hopelessness. I sipped hot coffee, which I had managed to procure, looking at the unreal world around me. A few beds away from me there were two Greek women asleep. They were very dark and beautiful. The short one, a cheerful, helpful woman, had already managed to get to the top of the block of zugangen. She was a dressmaker who had somehow beguiled the blokowa with her skill and then spent her whole day sitting in the blokowa’s room sewing. At night she would return to the barracks well fed and brimming with confidence. A young girl of about fifteen slept next to her. She was skinny and had huge eyes. All day she sat on her bed, her knees under her chin, and cried. Tears big as peas ran down her cheeks. She would not win the fight for life. She would perish for sure. Cruelty would squash her; she would not be able to resist it. She was not physically strong, and had no experience, no meanness, no selfishness.
With some difficulty we managed to communicate. She knew a little German. “Mother, my mother,” she whispered in despair, “went to the gas as soon as we got to the camp. She is not here any more. Only her ashes remain.” In the evening she quietly sang a Hungarian song for me, a song about a mother which became very popular after the war. She sang in such a way that until this very day I remember her and her song. She missed maternal warmth in this terrible world that was entirely beyond her comprehension.
The Jewish women from Holland were big, broad, and tall, with light, freckled complexions. In their eyes you could see only wonder, not even fear or despair, only bewilderment. They were amazed when they received heavy blows from the sztubowe and from the other low-life characters who had quickly acquired the camp life style: hit if you do not want to be beaten. They did not push in line for soup or bread, and they slept on the floor because a more aggressive person had taken the upper bunk. They did not even bother to wash their faces.
“Where can we wash in this dump?” one of them countered in amazement when I asked her why she did not wash. “There is no bathtub here,” she explained.
It was important to wash, even if it meant rubbing your face with a fistful of snow. The effort to wash your face is an expression of life. The women from Holland did not fight to survive. They very quickly became “mussulmen,” and many of them died right on the block of the zugangen.
The Jewish women from Germany behaved in such a way as to keep themselves separated from the rest of the prisoners. “How did we get here with this rabble from the East?” said their offended expressions. “After all, we are from Germany.” Their heads were shaven, just like ours, and they were dressed like clowns, the same as we were, but they still imagined that the Germans would eventually remove them from the Jewish block and that the theory of herrenvolk would serve to elevate them above the Jews from other countries. “I am German, not Jewish,” one of them, an older woman, kept repeating. “What will the SS men do with us? They can’t treat us like this.” These women despised us, their fellow victims, more than they hated the SS men who had taken their homes and pushed them to the edge of the abyss. “I am German,” the old woman yelled at the sztubowa as the sztubowa pushed her away from the soup can.
“As far as I’m concerned, you’re a stinking zugang, just like everybody else around here,” the sztubowa shouted back at her as she delivered a blow to her face.
Where does this pride come from? Where do they get that self-assurance? It was the Germans who started this present persecution of Jews, and the trouble started in Germany much earlier than in other countries. I remember Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany who came to Poland in 1934. They knew by that time what the Germans are capable of. They had witnessed for themselves the terrible methods that the Germans were ready to use to destroy the Jews. Why, therefore, did they look at us with such disgust in this death camp? They probably subscribed to the German theory, “Germany above everything.” So how was it possible that their fellow Germans should force them to mingle shoulder-to-shoulder with this East European rabble?
The blocks of the Jewish zugangen, like all the other blocks, were ruled by the Jewish women from Slovakia. In 1944 they were the real aristocrats of the camp. It seems strange, but in this congregation of misery, baseness, and fear, they sparkled with an unusual luster. They were the first prisoners in Auschwitz, and they felt a certain pride in having built the camp. When they were brought there in 1940, there was nothing but swampland, but now there were barracks, blocks, offices, and streets.
“While we were building this place,” they said, “and were being plagued by malaria, you were sleeping in warm beds.” They spoke with such hatred and contempt to the zugangen as if the zugangen deserved nothing better than ill treatment and death. We existed only so they might have somebody to kick around, somebody to beat up on, somebody to serve as a background to their reflected glory.
To the right of the block entrance was a room where the blokowa and the clerk lived. Sometimes, when the door was partly open, I could manage to peek in. There were two beds of normal width. On the beds were two pink silk quilts. The room also contained a table, chairs, glasses, and dishes. Sometimes the blokowa and the clerk would come into the block early in the morning wearing long silk bathrobes. I thought I must be dreaming. They received all these wonders from their fellow countrywomen who worked in the effektenkammer, where they sorted out the things brought into the camp by the zugangen. In exchange for these items they gave the workers from the effektenkammer bread, margarine, and salami, which they stole out of our rations. The SS men saw the splendor in which the camp functionaries lived, but all this took place with their silent approval. It was a devilish system in which the SS men and the functionaries were united by a chain of cruelty. The contrast between their splendor and our misery kept them constantly aware of what they stood to lose in the event that they failed to carry out the orders of the SS men. They used whatever methods were necessary to assure their own survival and their relatively comfortable way of life. If the voice of conscience chanced to awake in them, they would quiet it continuously with the same arguments: “We suffered so much the first few years. We lived through those hard times. Now we are not going to die for the sake of some dirty zugang.”
The sztubowe, of whom there were a few, slept comfortably in the block, often on goose down. Among them were Polish Jews from the earlier transports. They were the leaders on the block, and in most instances they were vulgar and coarse. They tried with all their might to ingratiate themselves with the blokowa and the kapo. They marched with a mannish step, their arms swinging at their sides. Every few minutes they would dole out some fire and brimstone from which it was impossible to escape without humiliating yourself. The women used to walk around with blackened eyes, which we elegantly called sunglasses. Cruelty towards the weak and humility towards the strong was the rule here.
We used to sit on our beds, silent, hunched over, waiting for the worst. In her long robe the blokowa would inspect the block, looking straight in front of her. She did not see us at all. She walked with a slow, majestic step, her proud head held high. You would not believe that she was a prisoner, just like the rest of us, and the lowest category of prisoner, at that, a Jew. Once she caught an old woman in front of the block who was apparently unable to reach the toilet, which was a considerable distance from the block. We heard an especially inhuman moaning of a victim being beaten without pity: “Oh you swine! Do you think I’m going to suffer for you? Die, you stinker,” she finished. In front of the block lay a rag of a human being, covered with mud. Madame blokowa returned to her warm room.