A New Reason for Living
Occasionally, men came to our infirmary. These were usually internees employed in the women’s camps as laborers. When they returned to their places in the evening, their infirmaries were closed. We could not refuse to treat them, although it was strictly verboten by the Germans. Their injuries had resulted from accidents at work.
Among these ailing men was an elderly Frenchman, whom I shall call “L.” He was a regular visitor to the infirmary because of a bad wound on his foot.
L. was a charming person, and we welcomed him gladly. Each time he brought comforting news about the military and political situation in Europe. While we nursed his injuries, he soothed our troubled spirits.
L. was almost the only source of world news we had. At least he gave reliable information, not fantastic rumors. From the attitude of our jailers it was impossible to draw any conclusions, for they seemed to regard the camp as a permanent institution. Seen from Auschwitz-Birkenau, the bloody war was far away and almost unreal. Indeed, we had no war experiences except infrequent air raid alarms. When the latter sounded, the brave S.S. fled from the camp at full speed to hide in the forests, pausing only to return us to our camps. They carefully locked all the gates: the inmates were exposed to the danger of the expected bombs, while the S.S. sought shelter.
Because I was going through a serious nervous depression, the news that L. brought was a real boost to my morale. In material things my situation had improved since I had started to work at the infirmary. Yet my life seemed a frightful burden. I had lost my parents and my children, and I had no word of my husband, the only person whose existence could keep me in the land of the living. I was mentally ripe for suicide. My companions saw that I was wasting away before their eyes.
One day L. took me aside. “You have no right to throw away your life,” he scolded. “If this existence has no more meaning for you personally, you must go on if only to try to relieve the sufferings of the others around you. Your position is perfect for rendering service in many ways.”
He gave me a penetrating glance. “Obviously,” he continued, “this will not be without danger. But isn’t danger our daily bread here? The essential thing is to have a goal, a purpose.”
It was my turn to look squarely into his eyes. “I’m at your service. What must I do?”
“You can do two things for us,” he replied. “First, you can carefully give out all the news that I give you. This is of the utmost importance to keep up the morale of our internees. Do you agree?”
The dissemination of “false news” was forbidden by the Germans on pain of death. But what was death? I did not even think of it.
“Second,” he went on, “your job makes you ideal to serve as a post office. People will bring you letters and parcels. You will deliver them according to the instructions you are given. And not a word to anyone, not even to your best friends. For if you are ever caught, you will be questioned, and we do not want any witnesses against you. Not everybody can stand torture! Do you think you would be strong enough to take their torture?”
I was silent. Were there more sufferings one could undergo? “I could try to be strong.”
He reflected, then added: “Still another thing. We must observe everything that goes on here. Later we shall write down everything we’ve seen. When the war is over the world must know about this. It must know the truth.”
From that moment on I had a new reason for living. I was a member of the resistance movement.
After the interview I had the opportunity to meet others in our “underground.” We limited our relations to our work and did not try to learn one another’s names. Caution made this mandatory so that we could avoid betraying each other if we should be arrested and tortured.
Through these new contacts, I finally learned the minutest details about the gas chamber and the crematories.
* * *
In the beginning, those who were condemned to death at Birkenau were either shot in the forest of Braezinsky or gassed at the infamous white house in the camp. The corpses were incinerated in a “death pit.” After 1941 four crematory ovens were put into service and the “output” of this immense extermination plant was increased enormously.
At first, Jews and non-Jews were sent to the crematory equally, without favor. After June, 1943, the gas chamber and the crematory ovens were reserved exclusively for Jews and Gypsies. Except for reprisal or by error, Aryans were not sent there. But generally, Aryans were executed by shooting, hanging, or by poison injections.
Of the four crematory units at Birkenau, two were huge and consumed enormous numbers of bodies. The other two were smaller. Each unit consisted of an oven, a vast hall, and a gas chamber.
Above each rose a high chimney, which was usually fed by nine fires. The four ovens at Birkenau were heated by a total of thirty fires. Each oven had large openings. That is, there were 120 openings, into each of which three corpses could be placed at one time. That meant they could dispose of 360 corpses per operation. That was only the beginning of the Nazi “Production Schedule.”
Three hundred and sixty corpses every half hour, which was all the time it took to reduce human flesh to ashes, made 720 per hour, or 17,280 corpses per twenty-four hour shift. And the ovens, with murderous efficiency, functioned day and night.
However, one must also take into account the death pits, which could destroy another 8,000 cadavers a day. In round numbers, about 24,000 corpses were handled each day. An admirable production record—one that speaks well for German industry.
Even while in camp I obtained very detailed statistics on the number of convoys which arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942 and 1943. Today, the Allies know the exact number of such arrivals, for these figures were attested to many times in the course of the war criminals’ trials. I shall cite only a few examples.
In February, 1943, two or three trains arrived at Birkenau every day. Each was thirty to fifty cars long. These transports included a large proportion of Jews, but also numbers of other enemies of the Nazi regime—political prisoners of all nationalities, ordinary criminals, and a considerable number of Russian prisoners of war. However, the supreme specialty of Auschwitz-Birkenau was the extermination of the Jews of Europe, the undesirable element par excellence, according to Nazi doctrine. Hundreds of thousands of them were burned in the crematory ovens.
Sometimes the ovens were so overtaxed that they could not do all the work even on the twenty-four-hour-a-day shift. The Germans then had to burn the corpses in the “death pits.” These were trenches about sixy yards long and about four yards wide. They were provided with a cunning system of ditches to drain off the human fat.
There was also a time when the trains came in even greater numbers. In 1943, 47,000 Greek Jews were brought to Birkenau. Thirty-nine thousand were executed immediately. The others were interned, but they died like flies, unable to adapt themselves to the climate. Indeed, the Greeks and the Italians, probably because they were most poorly nourished before they came, bore up least well under the cold and the privations. In 1944 came the turn of the Hungarian Jews, and more than a half million of them were exterminated.
I have the figures only for the months of May, June, and July, 1944. Dr Pasche, a French doctor of the Sonderkommando, in the crematory, who was in a position to gather statistics on the rate of exterminations, provided me with these:
| May, 1944 | 360,000 |
| June, 1944 | 512,000 |
| From the 1st to the 26th of July, 1944 | 442,000 |
| ________ | |
| 1,314,000 |
In less than a quarter of a year the Germans had “liquidated” more than 1,300,000 persons at Auschwitz-Birkenau!
* * *
I had ample opportunity to witness the arrival of new trainloads of deportees. One day, in the company of three other internees, I was sent out for blankets for the infirmary.
When we reached the station, a transport had just steamed in. The cattle cars were being emptied of the bruised and starved human beings who had traveled together, about one hundred packed together into each car. From this vast, miserable assembly piteous cries rose in every language of Europe; in French, Rumanian, Polish, Czech, Dutch, Greek, Spanish, Italian; who knows how many more?
“Water! Water! Something to drink!”
When I myself had arrived I had seen everything through a haze of incredulity, and I had been unable to make out details; one could hardly believe what one saw. By now I had learned to interpret everything. I recognized certain S.S. chiefs. I identified the infamous Kramer, whom the newspapers were to call “the Beast of Belsen,” and whose powerful presence dominated the scene. His cold mask, under his bristling hair, surveyed the deportees with a hard, piercing expression. Gazing at him I was fascinated, as one looking at a cobra. Never shall I forget the thin smile of satisfaction on his lips at the sight of this mass of humanity so completely reduced to dependence upon his mercy.
While the deportees were being disembarked, the camp orchestra, inmates in striped pajamas, played swing tunes to welcome the new arrivals. The gas chamber waited, but the victims must be soothed first. Indeed, the selections at the station were usually made to the tune of languorous tangos, jazz numbers, and popular ballads.
To one side the ambulance trucks waited for the sick and aged. I have already described the first selection. The old, the sick, and children under twelve or fourteen were sent to the left, the rest to the right. To the left meant the gas chamber and the crematory of Birkenau, to the right meant temporary reprieve in Auschwitz.
Everything had to be “correct” at this lugubrious ceremony. Even the S.S. troops scrupulously observed the rules of the game. They had an interest in avoiding incidents. By such tactics, a few guards could maintain order among these thousands of condemned.
Distressing episodes resulted from the separations, but the Nazis showed that they were not petty. When a young woman insisted that she would not be separated from her old mother, they often gave in and let the deportee rejoin the person she did not want to leave. Together they went to the left—to quick death.
Then, always to the sound of music—I could not help but think of the Pied Piper of the legend—the two cortèges began their procession. In the meantime, the service internees had assembled the baggage. The deportees still believed they would get their possessions back when they arrived at their destinations.
Other internees placed the sick into the Red Cross ambulances. They handled them tenderly until the marching columns were out of sight, then the behavior of these S.S. slaves changed completely. Brutally, they threw the sick into the dumping trucks, as if they were sacks of potatoes, for the ambulances were now filled. As soon as everybody was pushed in, with the prisoners groaning and shouting out of sheer terror, the cargo was sent off to the crematory ovens.
Thanks to the direct evidence which I gathered through Dr Pasche and others in the underground, I can reconstruct the last living hours of those who were sent to the left!
To the captivating tunes played by the internee musicians, whose own eyes misted with tears, the cortège of the condemned wound toward Birkenau. Fortunately, they were unconscious of the fate that awaited them. They saw a group of red brick buildings agreeably laid out and assumed it was a hospital. The S.S. troops escorting them were irreproachably “correct.” They were hardly that polite dealing with selectionees from the camp, whom it was not necessary to treat with kid gloves; but the newly arrived had to be handled properly to the very end.
The condemned were led into a long underground viaduct called “Local B,” which resembled the hall of a bath house. Up to two thousand persons could be accommodated. The “Bath Director,” in a white blouse, distributed towels and soap—one more detail in the immense show. The prisoners then removed their clothing and disposed of their valuables on a huge table. Under the clothes hangers were plaques declaring in every European language, “If you want your effects when you go out, please make note of the number of your hanger.”
The “bath” for which the condemned were being prepared was nothing but the gas chamber, which was right off the hall. This room was equipped with many showers, the sight of which had a reassuring effect upon the deportees. But the apparatus did not function, and no water came to the faucets.
Once the condemned had filled the low, narrow gas chamber, the Germans stopped the play. The mask was off. Precautions were no longer necessary. The victims could not escape nor offer the least resistance. Sometimes the condemned, as though warned by some sixth sense, recoiled at the threshold. The Germans pushed them in brutally, not hesitating to fire their pistols into the mass. As many as possible were crowded into the room. When one or two children were left out, they were thrown on top of the heads of the adults. Then the heavy door shut like a slab of a crypt.
Horrible scenes took place within the gas chamber, although it is doubtful if the poor souls suspected even then. The Germans did not turn on the gas immediately. They waited. For the gas experts had found it was necessary to let the temperature of the room mount by a few degrees. The animal heat given off by the human herd would facilitate the action of the gas.
As the heat increased, the air fouled. Many of the condemned were said to have died before the gas was turned on.
On the ceiling of the chamber was a square opening, latticed and covered with glass. When the time came, an S.S. guard, in a gas mask, opened the peephole and released a cylinder of “Cyclone-B,” a gas with a base of hydrate of cyanide which was made at Dessau.
Cyclone-B was said to have a devastating effect. Yet this did not always happen, probably because there were so many men and women to kill that the Germans economized. Besides, some of the condemned may have had high resistance. In any case, there were frequently survivors; but the Germans had no mercy. Still breathing, the dying victims were taken to the crematory and shoved into the ovens.
According to the evidence of former internees at Birkenau, many eminent Nazi personalities, political men and others, were present when the crematory and the gas chambers were inaugurated. They were reported to have expressed their admiration for the functional capacity of the enormous extermination plant. On the inauguration day 12,000 Polish Jews were put to death, a minor sacrifice to the Nazi Moloch.
* * *
The Germans did let a few thousand deportees at a time live, but only to facilitate the extermination of millions of others. They made these victims perform their dirty work. They were part of the “Sonderkommando.” Three or four hundred serviced each crematory oven. Their duties consisted of pushing the condemned into the gas chambers and, after the mass murder was accomplished, of opening the doors and hauling out the corpses. Doctors and dentists were preferred for certain tasks, the latter to salvage the precious metal in the false teeth of the cadavers. The members of the Sonderkommando also had to cut the hair of the victims, a reclamation that provided additional revenue for the National Socialist economy.
Dr Pasche, who was himself impressed into the Sonderkommando, provided me with the daily routine of the crematory personnel. For, paradoxical as it may seem—and this was not the only paradox in the camps—the Germans furnished a special doctor to care for the slaves in the extermination plant. Dr Pasche was active in the resistance movement and at the risk of his life kept day-by-day statistics. He communicated his data only to a few of whom he was absolutely certain, in the hope that one day these figures would be brought before the world. Dr Pasche had no illusions about what awaited him. Indeed, he was “liquidated” long before the liberation of Auschwitz.
From the eyewitness reports, one can gather what the spectacle in the gas chamber was after the doors were opened. In their hideous suffering, the condemned had tried to crawl on top of one another. During their agonies some had dug their fingernails into the flesh of their neighbors. As a rule the corpses were so compressed and entangled that it was impossible to separate them. The German technicians invented special hook-tipped poles which were thrust deep into the flesh of the corpses to pull them out.
Once extracted from the gas chamber, the cadavers were transported to the crematory. I have already mentioned that it was not unusual that a few victims should still be alive. But they were treated as dead and were burned with the dead.
A hoist lifted the bodies into the ovens. The corpses were sorted methodically. The babies went in first, as kindling, then came the bodies of the emaciated, and finally the larger bodies.
Meanwhile the reclamation service functioned relentlessly. The dentists pulled gold and silver teeth, bridges, crowns, and plates. Other officials of the Sonderkommando gathered rings, for, despite every control some internees had kept theirs. Naturally, the Germans did not want to lose anything valuable.
The Nordic Supermen knew how to profit from everything. Immense casks were used to gather the human grease which had melted down at high temperatures. It was not surprising that the camp soap had such a peculiar odor. Nor was it astonishing that the internees became suspicious at the sight of certain pieces of fat sausage!
Even the ashes of the corpses were utilized—as fertilizer on the farms and gardens in the surrounding areas. The “surplus” was carted to the Vistula. The waters of this river carried off the remains of thousands of unfortunate deportees.
The work of the Sonderkommando was indeed the hardest and most loathsome. Two shifts worked twelve hours in relays. This staff had special quarters in the camp and contact with the other inmates was strictly forbidden. Sometimes, as punishment, they were not even permitted to go back to the camp but had to live in the building which housed the crematories. There they had enough heat, but what a ghastly place in which to eat and sleep!
The life of the members of the Sonderkommando was truly infernal. Many among them went insane. Often a husband was forced to burn his wife; a father, his children; a son, his parents; a brother, his sister.
At the end of three or four months in this inferno the workers of the Sonderkommando were ready for their turn. The Germans had included that in the schedule. The men were gassed and then burned by those who had been brought to take their places. The extermination plant could not let up in production even while it changed personnel.
* * *
I had then two reasons to live: one, to work with the resistance movement and help as long as I could stand upon my feet; two, to dream and pray for the day to come when I could go free and tell the world, “This is what I saw with my own eyes. It must never be allowed to happen again!”