Accursed Births
The most poignant problem that faced us in caring for our companions was that of the accouchements. As soon as a baby was delivered at the infirmary, mother and child were both sent to the gas chamber. That was the unrelenting decision of our masters. Only when the infant was not likely to survive or when it was stillborn was the mother spared and allowed to return to her barrack. The conclusion we drew from this was simple: the Germans did not want the newborn to live; if they did, the mothers, too, must die.
We five whose responsibility it was to bring these infants into the world—the world of Birkenau-Auschwitz—felt the burden of this monstrous conclusion which defied all human and moral law. That it was also nonsensical from a medical point of view, did not matter for the moment. How many sleepless nights we spent turning this tragic dilemma over in our minds. And in the morning the mothers and their babies both went to their deaths.
One day we decided we had been weak long enough. We must at least save the mothers. To carry out our plan, we would have to make the infants pass for stillborn. Even so, many precautions must be taken, for if the Germans were ever to suspect it, we, too, would be sent to the gas chambers—and probably to the torture chamber first.
Now when we were notified that a woman’s labor pains had started during the day, we did not take the patient to the infirmary. We stretched her out on a blanket in one of the bottom koias of the barrack in the presence of her neighbors.
When the pains began during the night, we ventured to take the woman to the infirmary, for at least in the dark we might proceed comparatively unobserved. In the koia we could hardly make a decent examination. In the infirmary we had our examination table. Still we lacked antiseptic, and the danger of infection was enormous, for this was the same room in which we treated purulent wounds!
Unfortunately, the fate of the baby always had to be the same. After taking every precaution, we pinched and closed the little tike’s nostrils and when it opened its mouth to breathe, we gave it a dose of a lethal product. An injection might have been quicker, but that would have left a trace and we dared not let the Germans suspect the truth.
We placed the dead infant in the same box which had brought it from the barrack, if the accouchement had taken place there. As far as the camp administration was concerned, this was a stillbirth.
And so, the Germans succeeded in making murderers of even us. To this day the picture of those murdered babies haunts me. Our own children had perished in the gas chambers and were cremated in the Birkenau ovens, and we dispatched the lives of others before their first voices had left their tiny lungs. Often I sit and think what kind of fate would these little creatures, snuffed out on the threshold of life, have had? Who knows? Perhaps we killed a Pasteur, a Mozart, an Einstein. Even if those infants had been destined to live uneventful lives, our crimes were no less terrible. The only meager consolation is that by these murders we saved the mothers. Without our intervention they would have endured worse sufferings, for they would have been thrown into the crematory ovens while still alive.
Yet I try in vain to make my conscience acquit me. I still see the infants issuing from their mothers. I can feel their warm little bodies as I held them. I marvel to what depths these Germans made us descend!
* * *
Our masters did not wait for births to take action against fertility in Auschwitz. Intermittently—for all their measures, without exception, were intermittent and subject to capricious change—they sent all pregnant women to the gas chamber.
Generally, pregnant women who came in the Jewish transports were immediately ordered to the left when they arrived at the station. The women usually wore several layers of clothing, one on top of the other, which they hoped to keep. So even obvious cases of pregnancy were difficult to discover before the deportees were made to shed their apparel. Besides, they could not count on the preliminary control to catch the very early pregnancies.
Even inside the camp it was not easy to determine which women were in the family way. For the word went around that it was extremely dangerous to be found pregnant. Those who arrived in this condition, therefore, hid themselves when they could and, to this end, had the active cooperation of their neighbors.
Incredible as it may seem, some succeeded in concealing their conditions to the last moment, and the deliveries took place secretly in the barracks. I shall never, as long as I live, forget the morning when, during roll call, in the midst of the deathlike silence among the thousands of deportees, a piercing cry arose. A woman had unexpectedly been seized with her first labor pains. It is not necessary to describe what happened to this poor soul.
It was not long before the Germans noticed that in the successive trains of deportees an extraordinarily low percentage of pregnancies was reported. They decided to take more energetic measures; one could always depend upon them for that.
The barrack doctors, whose duty it was to report pregnant women, received strict orders. Nevertheless, I more than once saw the doctors defy every danger and certify that a woman was not pregnant when they positively knew that she was. Dr G. stood up to the infamous Dr Mengele, medical director of the camp, and denied every case of pregnancy that could possibly be contested. Later, the camp infirmary somehow secured a drug which, through injection, brought about premature births. What could we do? Wherever possible, the doctors resorted to this procedure, which was certainly the lesser horror for the mother.
Still, the number of pregnancies remained unbelievably low, and the Germans resorted to their usual trickery. They announced that pregnant women, even such Jewesses as were still alive, would be given special treatment. They would be allowed to remain away from roll call, to receive a larger ration of bread and soup, and be permitted to sleep in a special barrack. Finally, the promise was made that they would be transferred to a hospital as soon as their time came. “The camp is not a maternity ward,” proclaimed Dr Mengele. This tragically true statement appeared to offer great hopes to many of the unfortunate women.
Why should anyone here believe anything the Germans said? First, because many never saw the final horrors until it was too late for them to communicate the truth to their neighbors. Second, because no human being could comprehend the ultimate goals of which they were capable, which they plotted daily, and which was part of their master plan for world conquest.
Dr Mengele never missed the chance to ask the women indiscreet and improper questions. He made no secret of his amusement when he learned that one of the pregnant deportees had not seen her soldier husband for many months. Another time he hunted out a fifteen-year-old girl whose pregnancy was clearly dated from her arrival in the camp. He questioned her at length and insisted on the most intimate details. When his curiosity was finally satisfied, he sent her off with the next herd of selectionees. The camp was no maternity ward. It was only the antechamber to Hell.