to feel safe marching them to work.23
In the factories, work went on at full pace. The previous night, an Ameri‑
can plane had flown over Monowitz and the Buna Werke at low altitude, illuminating the whole area with parachute flares and taking photographs.
Photos taken the day before had shown nearly a thousand bomb craters in the factory complex and forty‑four wrecked buildings, but the nighttime images revealed that repairs were well in hand and that the synthetic fuel plant—the most important of all—was virtually untouched.24
On January 17 the prisoners in Monowitz were held back at roll call again.
They remained on standby throughout the morning, and in the afternoon they were marched to the factories. After only two and a half hours’ work they were marched back again.
The SS were becoming extremely jittery. Each morning, the rumble of artil‑
lery was a little less distant. Cracow was still holding out, but on this day the chief of the General Government*—most of which had now fallen to the Red Army—was strafed and bombed by Russian planes while departing the city, turning his withdrawal into a rout. By evening, the Soviet guns were nearer still, and the Auschwitz commandant, SS‑Major Richard Baer, gave orders to begin evacuating the camps.
Invalids were to be left behind, and any prisoner who resisted, delayed, or escaped was to be shot immediately.25 “My dear ones!” wrote Jósef Cyrankie‑
wicz, leader of the Auschwitz I resistance, to his partisan contacts in Cracow,
“We are experiencing the evacuation. Chaos. Panic among the drunken SS.”26
He begged the partisans to arrange a visit to Auschwitz by the Red Cross, to prevent a massacre of the sick. In fact there wouldn’t be time; the evacuation was well under way.
That same evening, all the patients in the prisoner hospital in Monowitz were examined by the doctors; those who were well enough to march were
* German‑occupied southeast region of Poland
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struck off the patient list. The rest—numbering over eight hundred—were left to the care of nineteen volunteer medical staff.27
The following day, Thursday, January 18, all eight thousand prisoners in Monowitz were kept standing on the square all day—hour after hour in the bone‑aching cold. Fritz and Gustav, aware that the end was imminent, had put on their civilian clothes under their uniforms, ready to make a break for it the moment they got the opportunity. At least with their extra layers they were slightly less painfully cold than their comrades. Dusk began to gather.
Finally, at 4:30 pm, the SS guards came among them, ordering them into columns. With their limbs numb and joints seizing up, the prisoners were assembled like an army division into company‑size units of about one hundred, further grouped into battalion‑size units of around a thousand, which in turn formed three larger units, each containing up to three thousand. SS officers, Blockführers, and guards took command of each unit.28 Anticipating trouble, every SS man had his rifle, pistol, or machine pistol ready in his hands. Fritz thought regretfully about his guns, concealed somewhere in the hospital laun‑
dry. It was impossible to get anywhere near them now. If he and his comrades were massacred, they’d have no chance of fighting back.
Disturbingly, SS‑Sergeant Otto Moll was on hand. Moll wasn’t part of the Monowitz guard battalion; notoriously he’d been director of the Birkenau gas chambers and crematoria. He walked among the waiting columns as they were issued with their meager marching rations, dishing out abuse while they got their bread, margarine, and jam. Moll, personally responsible for tens of thou‑
sands of murders, was a deeply unsettling presence in these circumstances.
He stopped beside Gustav, drawn by something about his appearance, looked him up and down, then gave him two hard slaps across the face, left and right.
Gustav staggered and recovered. Moll moved on.29
At last the order was given and the columns began to move. Tired already from standing in the bitter cold all day, they marched off the roll‑call square, five abreast, wheeling left onto the camp street. Passing the barrack blocks, the kitchens, the little empty building where the camp orchestra had lived, the prisoners walked out through the open gateway. They were leaving a place which for some of them had been home for over two years. A few of the old survivors like Gustav and Fritz—especially Fritz—had helped build it from bare grassy fields; their comrades’ blood had gone into its construction, and pain, blood, and terror had been the unrelenting life of the place ever since. But it 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 262
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was home nonetheless, by simple virtue of the animal urge to belong and attach oneself to the place where one ate and slept and shat; however much one hated it, it was where friends were, and where every stone and timber was familiar.
Where they were going, they had no idea. West, that was all they knew.
All the Monowitz subcamps were on the move—over thirty‑five thousand men and women taking to the snow‑lined roads leading west from the town called Oświęcim.30
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Part IV
S u r v i v a l
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18 Death Train
FRITZ SAT CLOSE BESIDE HIS PAPA, huddling together for warmth.
Around them sat their friends. It was early morning, and the cold was beyond imagining. They had no shelter, no food, no fires: just one another. They were bone weary; there were men among them who would never get to their feet again when this rest stop was over.
For the first few kilometers after leaving Monowitz, Fritz and Gustav and the other fitter, better‑fed prisoners had helped their weaker comrades along.
From the very start, the thousands of starved and sick had struggled to keep up with the march, slow as it was. If anyone lagged behind, he would be beaten by the SS with a rifle butt and driven onward. If he fell down in the middle of the pack, the semi‑conscious marchers following behind would trample over him. Fritz and the others did what they could, but comradeship could only stretch so far. They were scarcely beyond Oświęcim when they ran out of strength and had to leave the weakest to fare as best they could. They just kept walking, father and son sticking close together, heads down, one foot in front of the other on the compacted snow and ice, hour after hour through darkness swirling with flecks of snow. They hugged their jackets tight around them and closed their ears to the sporadic gunshots from the rear of the col‑
umn as stragglers were murdered.
To Fritz and Gustav it was like a repeat of the forced march, so many years ago, along the Blood Road to Buchenwald. But this was worse—infinitely, inconceivably worse. There had been an end in sight then; this march seemed doomed to go on forever. Close by Fritz a Blockführer marched, pistol in hand; Fritz could sense the man’s terror of the pursuing Russians and the murderous feelings it provoked in his heart.
267
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Dawn had broken, and by Gustav’s reckoning they had trudged forty‑two kilometers when they reached the outskirts of the town of Nikolai.* The column was directed off the road into an industrial area—an abandoned brickworks.
The SS guards needed a rest almost as much as the wretched prisoners. Find‑
ing what shelter they could among the stacks of bricks and relics of the yard, the prisoners sat close for warmth.
Fritz and his papa stayed awake despite the weariness consuming them; they gues
sed that anyone who slept in this cold would never wake again. Talk‑
ing with some comrades who had been in different parts of the column, they discovered that several Polish prisoners—including three of Fritz’s friends—
had slipped away and escaped. There were SS all along the column, but they couldn’t be everywhere all the time, and in the darkness a person desperate or courageous enough could dodge away without being noticed.
“We should do that,” Gustav said to Fritz. “We should make a run for it.”
Together they could make a go of it—Gustav spoke decent Polish, so they’d have no trouble finding their way and getting help. They could hook up with partisans or just head south toward Austria. But for all his preparations, all his determination to resist, Fritz’s heart quailed as his papa talked. There was one very big problem: Fritz himself spoke no Polish. If they were separated, he’d be sunk. In Fritz’s opinion, they should wait until they reached German soil, where they both spoke the language. There they could make a run for it, discard their camp uniforms, and become civilians. Gustav was dubious. Ger‑
many was still hundreds of kilometers away, and who could tell if they would ever reach it? They might succumb to exhaustion and a bullet by then—even assuming the SS intended them to survive that far.
Their discussion was cut short by the order to move. They’d only had a couple of hours, and no rest at all worth the name, when they hauled them‑
selves to their feet. Some people who had slept remained where they were.
Hypothermia had taken them, and their bodies were already beginning to freeze solid. There were others who were still alive but too weak to stand; the SS went among the crowds, kicking and chivvying, shooting dead any who couldn’t be roused.1
There was confusion when another march of several thousand prisoners from the subcamp at Günthergrube crossed paths with the Monowitz march.
* Now Mikołów, Poland
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While the Monowitz SS herded their charges on westward, their Günthergrube colleagues drove their columns of walking specters toward the Gleiwitz III subcamp.2 Gustav, Fritz, and their comrades trudged on.
Behind them stretched a nightmare of trampled snow and scattered corpses, leading all the way back to Auschwitz. At this moment, the last evacuations were leaving Birkenau; over the next few days, the remaining SS would force Jews who had been too weak to evacuate to clear up and burn the stacks of corpses outside the gas chambers. Other teams prepared to dynamite the cre‑
matoria buildings, while elsewhere SS clerks were burning records. Some SS
personnel, conscious of their crimes and their likely fate, were already wearing civilian clothes under their uniforms, pilfered from Birkenau’s Canada section, where the incriminating mountains of loot were also being put to the torch. In the end the sheer weight of the crimes committed here would defy all efforts to erase the evidence.
The second leg of the march, from the brickyard at Nikolai, was a little shorter than the first. That same evening, twenty‑four hours after leaving Monowitz behind, the column reached the town of Gleiwitz,* where there were several subcamps belonging to the Auschwitz system. The Monowit‑
zers were herded into Gleiwitz II, a small enclosure that had housed around a thousand male and female inmates. The camp had served the Deutsche Gasrusswerke factory, which made carbon black, a highly toxic chemical compound used in rubber manufacture. The camp was deserted, the prison‑
ers having been evacuated the previous day by their exceptionally panicky SS guards.3 The Monowitz prisoners crammed themselves into the barrack blocks; they were overcrowded, given nothing to eat, but thankful at least for shelter, where they could sleep.
Two days and nights they remained in Gleiwitz while the SS organized their onward journey. Unlike the poor souls whose death marches would continue on foot all the way to Germany, the men of Monowitz would be going by train.
On January 21, a Sunday, they were rousted from their huts and marched to the city freight yard, where their transports were waiting on the track. Instead of the usual closed boxcars that had brought most of them to Auschwitz, the four long trains were made up of open‑top freight cars, the type used for car‑
* Now Gliwice, Poland
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rying coal and gravel. They were of various sizes, some with sides only waist high, others higher than a man. After rations had been doled out—half a loaf of bread each, with one hundred grams of sausage—Fritz and Gustav climbed into one of the larger ones, along with more than 130 other men. They clam‑
bered up the sheer sides and dropped down with a clang on the steel floor, which echoed less with each pair of feet until the last few had to squeeze into gaps between the rest.
Every other car had a braking house, a little windowed hut raised above the level of the cars in which the brakemen took shelter. In each one an SS
guard took post, armed with a rifle or machine pistol. “Anyone who puts his head above the sides will be shot,” warned the Blockführer in charge of loading.
The train began to vibrate, and steam and smoke from the locomotive made a thick fog in the icy air. At last, with the clang and bang of couplings and shriek of wheels, the train began to move, dragging its load of four thou‑
sand souls.4 As it built up speed, the men in the open cars were exposed to an abominable cold—a wind roared across the tops, dropping the temperature to twenty degrees below zero.*
The motion of the train rocked Gustav’s body from side to side. He sat with his knees drawn up to his chest, with Fritz close beside him, hugged up against the terrible cold.
Beneath them, the wheels hissed on the rails, clanks and clangs from couplings, the sporadic jolts: the hissing‑squealing‑clanking‑banging of steel‑
wheeled boxes on rails was a never‑ending, nightmare music. The Holocaust was a crime made of journeys, crisscrossing Europe to the accompaniment of a tuneless score of protesting machinery.
After leaving Gleiwitz, the train had diverged from the other three, heading south toward Rybnik. The next morning they had stopped at Loslau† to take on hundreds more evacuated prisoners from the Charlottengrube subcamp.5
After that, they had crossed into Czechoslovakia. Despite the warning from the Blockführer, Gustav had peeped over the side from time to time, gauging
* ‑4°F
† Now Wodzisław Śląski, Poland
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the progress of their journey, noting when they passed through Oderberg,*
and that they bypassed Brno altogether. The train never stopped but went painfully slowly, and so far it had taken two freezing nights and a day to cross Czechoslovakia. By Gustav’s reckoning, the information they’d been given—
that they were being taken to Mauthausen concentration camp—appeared to be correct. The thought was simultaneously thrilling and terrifying; Mauthausen’s reputation was dire, and Gustav had witnessed the violent temperament of its criminal prisoners in the batch sent to Monowitz. But it was in Austria, in the beautiful hill country near Linz. Austria! Soon Gustav and his Fritzl would be on the soil of their homeland for the first time in over five years. And there they would almost certainly die. In Mauthausen they’d have none of the sup‑
port system built up in Auschwitz, and would be subjected to an even harsher, even more murderous regime of kapos and SS.
That was if they made it that far. Even as Gustav turned the thoughts over in his mind, there was a stir among his fellow prisoners. Another had passed away.
Weakness, sickness, and hypothermia were killing them off steadily. A friend of the dead man stripped the jacket and pants off the body and put them on over his own.
The body was passed across the car and stacked in the corner with the other corpses, all stripped to their underwear and frozen solid. That corner also served as the latrine, and even in the cold the stench was abominable.
The deaths at least had the virtue of making more room to sit. Gustav looked around at the gaunt faces, the deep shadows beneath the eyes, the cheekbones whittled to ridges by starvation. Some had managed to eke out their ration, and as the fourth day of the journey passed, they nibbled their last crusts. Gustav and Fritz had none left. By the time they reached Mauthausen there would be nothing left of them but a carload of corpses. Gustav could already feel his strength slipping away, a slow ebb tide eroding his will. Only one thought was on his mind now: escape.
He spoke quietly to Fritz. The time would soon come when it would be too late; it had to be now. They had their disguises under their uniforms; if they could slip over the side during the night, they might not be noticed by the guards in the brake houses. Soon they would be in Austria, and language would be no problem at all. They could make their way to Vienna and find
* Now Bohumín, Czech Republic
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a hiding place. Olly or Lintschi or one of their other good friends would take care of them. Fritz agreed eagerly.
That night they tested the watchfulness of the guards. With help from a couple of friends, they lifted a corpse from the stack, heaving the dead weight up to the rim of the sidewall, and pushed it over. As it went flailing away into the darkness, they waited for a yell from the brake house and a burst of gunfire
. . . but nothing came. This would be easy. All they had to do was wait until they crossed into Austria.
The next morning—January 25, the fourth day since leaving Gleiwitz—the train reached Lundenburg,* just a few kilometers from the Austrian border.
The Stone Crusher Page 35