by Sam Pivnik
I don’t want to think too much about that scene, when the Sonderkommando – more special units – slid open the heavy doors and began hauling the bodies out. Most of the corpses had crowded nearest the door scrabbling at the jamb in their desperation to get out. Some were still standing, others sitting or curled up, trampled by the others. They were all covered in blood and shit and piss and had all turned bright pink.
The Sonderkommando shaved off the women’s hair and that of any men who still wore their hair in Jewish ringlets. Gold was ripped from their teeth. Any jewellery still on fingers was taken. Everything had a street value. Then the defiled, gassed remnants of people were dragged to the crematoria where they were burned. I know now that eight days before I arrived at Auschwitz a letter from the camp authorities to Administrative Group C of the Economic-Administrative office of the SS in Berlin gave the capacities of those crematoria. In any 24-hour period, Crematorium I could ‘accommodate’ 340 corpses; II could handle 1,440; III 1,440; IV 768; V 768 – a sickening total of 4,756 corpses in one day.
I lived with this knowledge – or some of it – during my time on the Rampe. Sometimes the thought of it became too much for me and I sank to a level of despair I can’t describe. But always there was the notion of survival, the will to go on, day by day, coping with whatever the Nazi bastards threw at me.
What they threw at me on the Rampe was ghastly enough. You could say it was nothing compared with the duties of the Sonderkommando and I’d agree with that, but the Sonderkommando were replaced every few months and certainly after each big ‘consignment’ was processed. The unwilling perpetrators became the victims; those doling out special treatment were at the receiving end of it themselves. In a sick sort of way, there were jobs for life at Auschwitz, but that could mean only a few days.
Some of the cattle-trucks had been on the rails for days and the state of them at the siding in Auschwitz-Birkenau was ghastly. The people themselves were so crammed in that they had no room to relieve themselves. The lavatory was a bucket in one corner if they were lucky and most of them, even the tolerably well-dressed, arrived caked in shit and piss, horribly embarrassed about the whole experience. The stench in those trucks when they’d gone was indescribable. I’d try to hold my breath as I went in with the others, hauling out luggage – a battered suitcase, a child’s teddy-bear, spectacles, false teeth.
In the summer, with no water on board the trains, people died of suffocation and dehydration – I knew what it was like to go without water. In the winter, they just froze to death, despite the numbers of bodies in the trucks. I dragged their bodies out with the others of the Rampe Kommando, dead heads lolling back, or limbs stiff with rigor mortis. We stacked them neatly on the Rampe alongside their luggage, then loaded them onto handcarts that were rattled off to the crematoria by yet another special unit. From these crematoria black smoke belched constantly and the night sky glowed.
I’m not proud of my work on the Rampe. I became, along with everyone else, a human vulture. The floor of a cattle-truck suddenly empty after days can be a treasure trove. Notes, coins, rings, brooches, dropped in the shit by people who no longer knew or cared what they’d brought with them. We were all between the devil and the deep. If we took such items and were seen to have taken them, we’d join the next group on the trucks or the walk to the crematoria gates. But if we didn’t, we’d die anyway because we were slowly starving to death. All around me were Muselmänner who were days or hours away from the gas, their buttocks flabby, their ribs visible through their skin, their eyes sunken and their will to fight on, gone.
Our job was to load anything left on the concrete or in the cattle-trucks onto hand carts that were then taken to one of the sorting warehouses like the one we all called Kanada. Any food we found – cheese, bread, sausage – we ate where we stood, crouching over in the process of picking up luggage and stuffing it in our mouths. As long as it didn’t interfere with our work, the Kapos and the SS let it go on. I don’t remember exactly when it was because the days blurred and times of year no longer add up in any memory, but on one particular day I saw the sun shine on something on my cart. You get used to fast, furtive movements in a situation when your life depends on them and the shiny thing was in my pocket in a second. It was a bracelet, maybe a present from a husband to his wife, boyfriend to girlfriend, father to daughter, I don’t know. I only knew it had a street value.
Normally I’d have passed this to a Vorarbeiter, a foreman who would in turn pass it to a Kapo. Prisoners like me didn’t have the clout to make deals – I still remembered Yitzak and his diamonds – so I decided to keep it. This must have been one of the most stupid decisions I’ve ever made in my life. Stealing from the Rampe was a death sentence and even if I got away with that, any trust I’d managed to build up with the Kapo would be gone and the end result would be the same.
As time went on that bracelet became an albatross around my neck. I had the presence of mind to hide it away from my bunk, stuffed behind a loose plank behind the wall. It didn’t occur to me that the men on the nearest bunk would get the blame if it was found and I was still agonising over what to do with the thing when there was a commotion one morning in the barracks. Someone had found the bracelet. There were over 400 of us living in that Block and most of those worked on the Rampe so the chance of it coming back to bite me was fairly remote. The Kapo was furious and selected three or four of us at random to deliver beatings. If I’d have been braver I’d have owned up, taken the thrashing that someone else got. I’m sure my father would have expected that; my old headmaster, Mr Rapaport, certainly would. But this was Auschwitz-Birkenau; the rules were different. And you never put your hand up for anything.
I presume the Kapo traded the bracelet for vodka or cigarettes. He couldn’t go to the SS as its very presence in our Block would rebound on him. It was a lesson I took to heart however: Szlamek, don’t be too bloody clever.
This organisation, trading what you had, was a way of life in the camps. If you had nothing to trade, if you couldn’t steal the odd scrap from the Rampe and if you were young and pretty, you could trade your body. Some of the Kapos and Blockälteste had been imprisoned by the Nazis for sex crimes in the first place. We of course had no links with the women’s camp at all, so in the savage, all-male preserve of the men’s quarters, many of the Kapos took out their sexual frustrations on their piepels, bum boys who were too young and weak to fight them off. There was no point in complaining about this. Reporting a Kapo or anyone else to the SS invited death. And most people preferred sexual abuse – it is not, whatever cliché they used in my grandfather’s day, a fate worse than death. The saddest thing about this was that once a boy had lost his appeal or a particular Kapo got bored with him, he would disappear, gone to those gates, floating, like a memory, with the smoke of the chimneys.
Survival was all about food. I’d long ago ignored my father’s aversion to pork and very occasionally it came my way in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but only in the form of skin or fat thrown into the monotonous soup to give the illusion of flavour. I remember once we had a surprise for supper – pickled mussels from Holland. I’ve no idea how this manna fell into our lap having been sieved through the corruption of the kitchen Kapos, but we got them. Seafood was a luxury to anyone in Central and Eastern Europe even before the war and shellfish was not kosher, so it raised a dilemma. It’s a testimony to the faith of my people that even with everything we faced, as we were slowly starving to death, the old standards stood; the anathema remained.
One of my Block mates grunted as he saw what had landed in his bowl, that he wasn’t eating that; he didn’t eat worms. This was not a problem for Western Jews – the French, Belgians and Dutch who had arrived by now were tucking in with a will. One of them told me how good they were and that I ought to eat them. If I didn’t, he would. Gingerly I scooped a mussel onto my bread and tried it. He was absolutely right and I wolfed the lot, wiping my bowl to get all the juices.
It’s odd, but af
ter all this time I can’t remember what Block I lived in while working on the Rampe. I remember we had to pass through the main gate to reach it. I do remember our Blockschrieber, a Viennese Jew and that my Blockältester was Maurice, a nice man among so many who weren’t. The Kapos who watched us on the Rampe changed with the shifts but they were normally Manfred or Hans. Manfred was a professional criminal, wearing his distinctive green triangle. He was built like a brick privy and got nasty if anybody crossed him, but his bark was worse than his bite and he certainly never hit me. Hans wore a black triangle and for all I knew could have been a murderer. He was a snappy dresser as far as any prisoner could be in Auschwitz-Birkenau and usually wore riding boots like the SS officers.
And, to my horror, Unterscharführer Kurpanik joined us on the Rampe too. Just because he could.
All my life up to this point I hadn’t travelled very far. With the exception of the annual family holiday eighty kilometres away in the Garden of Eden, I had always lived in Bedzin. Even Auschwitz-Birkenau was a short train ride away. Now I was coming into contact with people from all over Europe and it was a real eye-opener. I remember the Greek Jews in particular. Their country had been overrun in the summer of 1941 and several of them were billeted with us on the Rampe Kommando, having survived the selections. It wasn’t hard to see why they had – some of them had been professional wrestlers before the war and they had muscles to prove it. You can read the statistics today – between March and August 1943, 48,633 Jews were deported from Thessalonika and only 11,747 survived selection. A particular group, mostly Germans, Austrians and Czechs, stood out because of their good clothes. Some of the men I remember wore German medals pinned to their jackets from the First World War – how ironic was that? They’d bled on the Eastern Front for Germany and now the Germans were going to kill them. The SS ripped these medals from their clothing and threw them on the ground, telling them they weren’t worthy to wear badges of honour like that. Life unworthy of life. They had come from Terezin in Czechoslovakia, the camp the Nazis called KL Theresienstadt, about thirty-five kilometres from Prague. This was a model camp with a humane reputation, set up by the Deputy SS Reichsführer Heydrich for ‘special’ prisoners, men with exceptional war records or Jews married to Aryans before the Nuremberg Laws made this impossible. By late 1943 Theresienstadt was just another transit camp, a holding facility before the cattle-trucks were loaded up for Auschwitz.
Even so, no selection was used on the Theresienstadt Jews. Instead they were all taken to the Familienlager, the Family Camp. This stood in section BIIb of Auschwitz-Birkenau, next to the Quarantine Block I knew only too well. I suppose there were those who hated the Theresienstadt Jews. Almost all of us on the Rampe Kommando had lost family – loved ones who failed the selections and had gone to the gas chambers. Yet here were families kept not only alive, but together. I often wonder whether this wasn’t one of the more sophisticated tortures dreamed up by the SS. They even set up a Kindergarten, a nursery school, for the littlest ones and the older ones actually produced a camp newspaper and put on puppet shows. We knew nothing of this, but the rumours of better food rations in the Family Camp and the lack of hard, physical work grated on the rest of us. It was all about propaganda, of course. We didn’t know it at the time but as 1943 became 1944 the war was going badly for the Reich. Perhaps they were hedging their bets, even as early as this; perhaps they wanted to impress the occasional Red Cross deputation that came to the camp. Look, the SS would say, this is the ‘terrible’ KL Auschwitz-Birkenau, where children sing songs in classrooms painted with fairytale scenes and everybody wears their own clothes and are well fed; tell the rest of the world about that.
But this special treatment didn’t last for long. The Family Camp was in the next section to ours, beyond the wire and I often saw how the camp women were abused by the Kapos and Blockälteste. They would single out the prettiest and shove them against a barracks wall before pulling up their shifts and raping them.
Another group I remember who came in one afternoon were several dozen young men, Polish Gentiles. The whispers spread quickly. They were partisans, enemy fighters against the Reich. We all knew how empty that word was. The Orthodox Jews of Bedzin who had been machine-gunned and pistol-whipped by the Einsatzgruppen had been labelled ‘partisans’ – it was just more propaganda to give the world some vague justification for Nazi atrocities; many of the ‘partisans’ who had died were women and children. These newcomers were not registered as we had been – there was no shaving or tattooing for them – instead they were rounded up in a corner of the quarantine area and made to wait. For us it was another lock-down, the barracks padlocked but I saw what was happening before we were all inside. A team of Kapos, under orders from the SS, crowded round them and started to beat them with shovels, pick-handles and clubs. They threw them against the wire, where the sudden crackle, blue flashes and smell of burning clothes and flesh announced another electrocution. Once a man was clubbed to the ground, a Kapo would lay a shovel shaft across his throat and stand on both ends of it, crushing his windpipe. These partisans were not ghetto Jews, Muselmänner with no fight left in them. There must have been a mini battle which is presumably why we were locked down. A full-scale riot was not something the SS wanted. In the morning, the evidence was plain enough. Between the barrack huts in the quarantine compound lay a large heap of bodies, piled on one another, broken heads and ripped clothes. I couldn’t see much damage to the Kapos, but I wouldn’t expect to, they were the ones with the weapons. And no doubt if things had got out of hand, the guns of the SS would have come to their rescue.
These appalling rituals took place more than once and the only survivor of them that I am aware of was Antoni Czortek, known as Kajtek. He was already a boxing legend throughout Poland before the war, a medal-winning champion who had fought at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The SS kept him alive for their own entertainment. He was a bantamweight but they pitted him against much heavier men no less than fifteen times. No doubt this was another chance for a little wager among the SS who watched the bouts, cheering and whistling for their man. Kajtek himself was like a gladiator in Ancient Rome. Every fight was literally to the death in the sense that if he lost, the SS promised to shoot him.
After the constant torture of the Quarantine Block initiation, life on the Rampe had its compensations. It was a little like Killov’s factory back in Bedzin – we sometimes had Sunday afternoons off. The trains rolled in regularly but there were lulls. It was almost eerily quiet in the camp during the day. At various times we could hear the strains of the camp orchestra wafting on the breeze. Needless to say, it was always German music. It took time to round up people from the ghettoes, still more time to train them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. During the gaps, on the slacker occasions, the Kapos would organise football matches or boxing and wrestling bouts which we were allowed to watch. The Greek wrestlers of course were the stars here and the SS and Kapos got quite excited about it all. Money was clearly changing hands among them, betting on the outcome of the bouts.
On one of the ‘games’ days, there was a flurry of excitement, a breath of pre-war freedom I could not quite believe. One of the other Bedzin Jews whispered to me, ‘Guess what? Nunberg is here!’
My memory of this footballing hero was very clear. I’d often watched him playing in the Hakoah stadium back home and I was a real fan. He was probably the best goalie in Silesia and the best in Poland. Tall, blond and muscular, he could easily have passed for an Aryan, although he was Jewish and had worked before the war for one of the rich industrialists, perhaps Furstenberg in Bedzin, with as much time off as he needed for training. In the chaos of the ghettoes and its liquidation, I have no idea what happened to Nunberg. He couldn’t have come on the train with me or I’d have been aware of him in the Quarantine Block. Yet, this Sunday, the legend that was Nunberg was going to strut his stuff, Jews vs. Gentiles.
The SS turned up in force on the Appellplatz, laid out as a temporary football pitch. There w
ere jeers and anti-Semitic taunts and my mind wandered back to my childhood when we’d end up cracking heads with the Gentile lads back home. This of course was a vicious parody of that, a flash of my past through the dark mirror of the Holocaust. I remember standing on the sidelines staring at the apparition in the Jewish goal. Gone was the laughing six-footer that had been Nunberg and in his place was a shambling, shuffling Muselmänn, his eyes staring and sunken in his grey, drawn face. He looked confused, not able to follow the play and barely able to catch the ball. I don’t remember the score but I can make a pretty good guess as to which side won. A few days later we heard that Nunberg had gone to the gas chamber. There would be no more autographs from him.
I must have been working on the Rampe for about five weeks when I was approached by a political prisoner. He was not from my hut or even my Block and he too was called Manfred. You rarely got surnames at Auschwitz-Birkenau, unless they belonged to the SS, in which case they were always prefixed by a rank. This man had heard my name on the Appellplatz or perhaps seen it written down in some ledger, because he asked me if I knew Moyshe Pivnik, the tailor from Szopoenice. To this day, I don’t know why I said what I did, but there was something about this Manfred I knew I could trust and that the link with Uncle Moyshe was somehow important.