What the Jews did know for certain was that the Hungarian gendarmerie, as well as many other Hungarians, were getting rich at their expense. Israel Abelesz watched as members of the gendarmerie searched the Jews and stole ‘money and jewellery’, while Alice Lok Cahana’s family lost not just their house but their whole business – sold for a pittance to a non-Jewish man called Mr Krüger. ‘I was so embarrassed,’ she says, as she and her family were forced out of their town. ‘The scene of going out of Egypt came to my mind. And here was Mr Krüger watching us go by, not with compassion but with glee – the owner of our factory, the owner of our house.’12 Elsewhere in Hungary there were even reports that the gendarmerie tortured Jews to make them reveal where they had hidden their money.13
Central to Eichmann’s plan for the deportation of the Jews in Hungary was the role of Auschwitz. This place was not the crude ‘solution’ to the Nazis’ ‘Jewish problem’ that had been offered by the Reinhard camps. No, the complex of camps at Auschwitz offered a multifaceted answer to the perennial Nazi question of how to deal with the Jews. Part of that, as we have seen, was the sense of permanence of the place, and the development of a more efficient killing process during 1943 with the opening of four new crematoria/gas-chamber complexes at Birkenau. But there were also more recent ‘improvements’. It was only now, for example, that a railway spur was completed that allowed new arrivals to enter under an arch in the red-brick guardhouse of Birkenau directly into the camp. Previously the arrival ramp had been close to the main railway line, roughly halfway between Auschwitz main camp and Birkenau. But with the new railway track inside Birkenau the journey to the crematoria and gas chambers for those selected to die was just a few minutes’ walk. It had taken four years for Auschwitz to evolve to this point, but the images of Auschwitz Birkenau from this short period of a few months have become emblematic not just of Auschwitz but of the entire Holocaust – to a large extent because photographs taken by the SS of the arrival of a transport of Hungarian Jews at Birkenau survived the war.
However, more important than any enhancements in the murder procedure was what Auschwitz had become in conceptual terms. For Auschwitz was not just the biggest murder factory ever built – where people became ashes just a few hours after arrival – it was also, by now, an efficient sorting machine for human beings. The idea was that Hungarian Jews would first be selected on arrival inside the camp at Auschwitz Birkenau, with the old, children and others who looked unfit sent straight to the gas chambers. The remaining Jews would usually be held in a ‘quarantine’ camp within Birkenau for several weeks, and then either allocated to work camps in the Auschwitz area or sent further away, often to camps near industrial concerns within the Reich. Those working in the camps near to Auschwitz would be returned to Birkenau to be murdered once they were deemed no longer useful.
Himmler, working to the wishes of his Führer, had finally devised a physical institution that appeared to solve the question that had dogged Nazi policy on the Jews since the beginning of the extermination process – how does one reconcile the usefulness of the Jews as workers with the ideological desire to eliminate them? Heydrich at the Wannsee conference in January 1942 had talked about working the Jews to death by making them build roads in the east, but the practical details of how this could be put into effect had never been thought through. Instead there had been a series of disputes between those who wanted to preserve the Jews to exploit their labour and those who wanted to kill them. Not only did Auschwitz bridge those two apparently irreconcilable objectives – as long as there remained a steady supply of replacement workers – but it did so within a secure environment. There was little risk of revolt at Auschwitz – the secure area around Auschwitz, known as the ‘zone of interest’, extended far beyond the wires of Birkenau and the main camp, and within Birkenau the various sections of the camp were fenced off from each other. A mass escape along the lines of the uprisings at Treblinka or Sobibór was all but inconceivable. Auschwitz and its network of sub-camps serving various industrial concerns was a self-contained universe. Once inmates entered it, they could live, work and die there – at every stage under the controlling eyes of the SS. It is this – the fact that Auschwitz by this point had become the practical manifestation of the Nazis’ ideological imperative – that helps make Auschwitz the most potent symbol of the Holocaust.
In July 1944, Israel Abelesz experienced first hand how Auschwitz impacted on the Hungarian Jews. He and his family arrived at Auschwitz Birkenau in a freight train after several days’ journey from western Hungary. His train travelled down the new railway spur, under the archway in the guardhouse, directly into the camp. The doors were opened and everyone was ordered out of the wagons. ‘We were told just the people should get out,’ he says, ‘and they should leave their luggage behind – the luggage will be distributed later.’ He remembers that while ‘everything went so fast’, the arrival process still seemed well organized. ‘The prisoners who came out to receive us,’ he says, ‘they brought water. So everybody who was thirsty could drink water.’ He believes this was so that the new arrivals would not get ‘panicky’. ‘We just asked them,’ he says, “what is it here?” They said, “It’s a labour camp.” ’14
The Sonderkommandos on the ramp helped organize the separation of the Jews into two groups: ‘They said, children with their mother, they should go in one row’ and men into another. ‘That’s when I saw my little brother who was eleven years old, he went with my mother, being a child, and that’s the last time I saw them. And I was standing in front of a smart-looking German officer with my father and my older brother, who was sixteen at that time. And the German officer looks at me and he says to me in German, how old are you? So I said to him, “I am fourteen.” ’ Israel added that his birthday had been just a few days before. The SS man ‘smiled back, “Oh, Geburtstag, sehr gut [birthday, very good]. You go with your brother.” And my father also was sort of following us, and he says [to him], “No, no, you go this way.” In a nice [way], just pointing with a little baton.’
Israel Abelesz remembers the SS wanted ‘everybody’ to ‘be reassured’ so they didn’t make ‘any scenes’. ‘Their purpose’, he says, was ‘really speed, like in a factory. It was like on a conveyor belt, and there shouldn’t be any hitch in the conveyor-belt system.’ When he witnessed what was happening, he ‘thought everything’s going to be all right. We are going to work here – like everybody else. I saw those Jewish prisoners, [and thought] we are going to be prisoners like them and we are going to be sent out to work somewhere near by.’ As for his mother, father and younger brother who had been selected to join a different group, he ‘thought they would also be all right. They would be in a different camp.’ After all, that’s what the arriving Jews were told by the prisoners who met them on the ramp. ‘They said, “They’re going to a different camp.” ’
After Israel had been at Birkenau for about three weeks, one dramatic event convinced him that his mother, father and younger brother had been murdered. On the night of 2 August, he heard ‘screaming and crying … and dogs barking’. The noise came from the direction of the Gypsy camp, near his own prison barracks. And ‘in the morning there were no Gypsies in the camp.’ Overnight, following orders from Himmler, the entire Gypsy camp had been liquidated – around 2,800 Roma and Sinti had been murdered. ‘Then I realized’, says Israel, ‘that if they do that to the Gypsies, they would do that to us – or they have done it to us. And gradually it came to our mind that, yes, those people who were not able to work, they went to the gas chambers.’
For the whole summer of 1944 Israel lived in a section of Birkenau that he describes as a ‘labour pool’. There were regular selections from within the group, and the chosen prisoners were taken away to work as forced labour, either within the Auschwitz zone of interest or elsewhere in the Nazi empire. Now that he realized that Birkenau contained gas chambers, Israel was desperate to ‘get away from Auschwitz’. As a consequence he ‘always volunteered’ whenever t
he SS announced they were selecting workers. But they didn’t pick him. He was small – even for a fourteen-year-old – and bigger and stronger prisoners were taken ahead of him.
Israel became increasingly anxious. Not only was he never picked, but he was growing weaker. ‘Every day there was rationing of food – it was just not enough, a starvation diet. And the overwhelming feeling besides the fear of death is the feeling of hunger. The feeling of hunger is such an overpowering feeling that it covers up any other feeling, any other human feelings … [you become] just like a dog who is looking for food.’15
After three months at Birkenau he saw a new and terrifying sight. Just outside his hut the Germans assembled a measuring bar. Those who reached the required height would be sent to one group, those who were under that height to another. Israel just ‘couldn’t reach it’ so he was put with the group who had failed the test. They were predominantly children between the ages of twelve and sixteen who had survived the initial selection at the ramp because, as Israel had witnessed, ‘there was always a few borderline cases. I mean, both through the upper age and the lower age.’
Israel and the others ‘were told that they are going to the children’s camp. Where they are going to have much better treatment. I didn’t believe it.’ A number of others in the group didn’t believe the promise either, but ‘I suppose they were in such despair by then that they just said it’s no good. No good to fight, we’re giving up, sort of. I mean there were people who went to the electric wires and just killed themselves. They just didn’t want to live like that … they gave up. There’s no purpose in life. I mean it was a terrible situation. People who were part of a family, they lived in a family, suddenly they were thrown into the worst part of hell … your people are getting sent to the gas. It was not a gradual transformation, just suddenly. And it was such a shock for people, they couldn’t take it … In my experience there was no hysterics. The people accepted fatalistically what’s going to happen to them. There was no screaming. Maybe – I heard in the night when they were taking them in the gas chamber there was a bit of screaming. Otherwise, what is to scream? To whom do you scream? You accept your fate. Well, a condemned man in his cell is screaming all night? I don’t think so.’
Determined to survive, he used the confusion of the selection process to his advantage and simply ‘ran over to correct side’ where he hid with the group who had passed the test. But it was only a short reprieve. Shortly afterwards he failed another selection. This time he was saved because he started ‘crying’ and pleading with the SS man, saying, ‘But I’m fit to work, I can work.’ A Kapo slapped him and told him to shut up, but the German SS man said to the Kapo, ‘Oh, leave him, leave him alone.’ As a result ‘he took somebody else instead of me. I just don’t know why I was spared … But that’s what happened with me. So I had the feeling that I’ve been fated by God to survive. I had this strong feeling by then that somehow I will manage to survive. After I managed to get through the selections, I always had a strong feeling … I mean it’s a series of fortunes that I’m here.’
However, Israel didn’t rely entirely on the belief that he was ‘fated by God to survive’. He also looked out for himself. ‘I had with me my brother,’ he says, ‘who was two years older than me and he had more feeling [for others] … I never had this feeling. I was a bit more selfish. For instance, I remember one of the children was crying one morning that his ration of bread was stolen in the night and he’s so hungry. I remember my brother gave a piece of his bread to this boy … I said to him, but why have you given it away, you don’t need [to do] this. “His need is bigger than mine” [said his brother]. This is something I always admired in him.’
By a combination of luck and sharp wits, Israel Abelesz managed to survive until the camps were liberated. But though he was no longer in the hands of the Nazis, he was still tormented by what he had experienced. ‘I don’t know how to deal with it … hardly a day passes when I’m lying in bed and I cannot sleep for one reason or another, [I] always look at those faces of the children [selected to die] and my imagination goes: what’s happened in their last minute? When they were in the gas chambers and the Zyklon B started and they couldn’t breathe any more? And they realized that we are going to get suffocated from the gas. What was in their mind?’
The lethal reality of life in Auschwitz forced many to reconsider their faith. ‘I became an atheist immediately after deportation,’ said Ruth Matias, another Hungarian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1944. ‘My father never wronged a soul, and not only was he wronged, but also so many small innocent children. I saw it with my own eyes, they caught them by their feet, banged them against the wall and their brains split open … Now I am fatalist.’ In Auschwitz she also saw how traditional family bonds of care were tested to breaking point. ‘I saw a girl hitting her mother. The mother would not eat anything but gave her entire ration to her daughter, and still, if the mother took as much as one spoon of food for herself, the daughter hit her … The mother would defend her daughter; be angry at our interference, “Don’t mix in, I’m not hungry.” ’16
As the Hungarian Jews discovered, the Nazis were selecting Jews to work not just in the factories around Auschwitz, but also within the territory of the pre-war Reich. Yet for years a basic tenet of Nazi ideology had been that the Jews should be expelled from these lands. So once again the Nazis demonstrated that there was no absolute ideological clarity in the way they implemented their Final Solution, given that this change in policy was purely pragmatic and was designed to address a labour shortage. It also meant, of course, that unlike the Jews who worked in the network of factories and mines in the immediate area of Auschwitz, the Jews working in the Reich were out of the reach of the gas chambers of Birkenau. Many of them would still die of starvation, disease and beatings, but they did so out of the orbit of Auschwitz.
At the same time as the Hungarian Jews suffered in Auschwitz Birkenau, a mile and a half away Tadeusz Smreczyński tried to survive in Auschwitz main camp. Most of the Poles he had arrived at Auschwitz with a few weeks before had already been sent to the gas chambers, and in early July 1944 he thought it was his turn to die. In the middle of the night, the SS ordered him to join a group of several hundred prisoners and march to Birkenau. ‘Nobody told us what was going to happen,’ he says. ‘During our march we were surrounded by SS men, and one of my friends proposed that we attack them if they are taking us to the gas chambers, because a fast death from a bullet is better than being suffocated for a dozen minutes.’17
But Tadeusz and the rest of his group were not on their way to the gas chambers. They were loaded on to freight wagons at the ramp in Birkenau and taken far away, across the border into Austria to a destination that was almost as infamous as Auschwitz. For Tadeusz Smreczyński had been transferred to one of the most notorious concentration camps in the entire Reich – Mauthausen, near Linz in Austria. Mauthausen opened in the summer of 1938, and had been conceived from the beginning as a very different kind of camp from the traditional Dachau model. To begin with, unlike Dachau, the location of Mauthausen camp had been selected primarily for economic reasons. The camp was next to a vast granite quarry, and prisoners were forced to work here under the most appalling conditions, lugging blocks up the ‘stairs of death’ from the quarry floor.
Before the war, few Jews were sent to Mauthausen. The inmates were primarily those the Nazis claimed were ‘incorrigible’ criminals or ‘antisocials’. But that policy changed in 1941 when hundreds of Dutch Jews were deported to the camp in reprisal for acts of resistance in the Netherlands. Most of these Dutch Jews were dead in a matter of weeks. So dreadful was the experience for the Dutch Jews at Mauthausen that the Nazis in the Netherlands subsequently used the place as a threat – if the Jews did not agree to be deported to the east, then more Jews would be sent to Mauthausen. The reality of this Austrian concentration camp was therefore presented as a more terrifying prospect than the unknown fate that awaited the Dutch Jews if they boarded the deport
ation trains. The Nazis themselves even recognized the special brutality of Mauthausen. When Reinhard Heydrich had split concentration camps into categories, Mauthausen had been placed in the most severe group of all. Thus while many inmates in Birkenau longed to be selected for a transport out of Auschwitz, simply leaving the Auschwitz zone of interest was no guarantee that their prospects of survival would improve.
Mauthausen was at the heart of an enormous series of business concerns – some owned by the SS, others by private enterprise. The granite quarry was under the aegis of DEST – Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH, the German Earth and Stone Company – a commercial venture run by the SS. But Mauthausen also supplied workers for outside companies involved in a variety of manufacturing businesses – from armaments to pharmaceuticals. As a consequence, scores of sub-camps were established to service these factories, and the complex rivalled Auschwitz in terms of scale and variety. Mauthausen was also similar to Auschwitz in another respect – a gas chamber was built at the camp. It was used for the first time in spring 1942 around the time that gassings began in the Little Red House at Birkenau. Like the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the one at Mauthausen, though smaller, used Zyklon B. But despite the presence of the gas chamber, Mauthausen was never a camp primarily concerned with the Final Solution, even at the height of the extermination process elsewhere. About 200,000 prisoners were sent to Mauthausen in the course of its existence. Poles made up the largest ethnic group, with approximately 40,000 Polish prisoners deported to the camp. Altogether around half of all those sent to Mauthausen died there, including an estimated 14,000 Jews.18
‘They brought us to Mauthausen,’ remembers Tadeusz Smreczyński. ‘SS men from Mauthausen surrounded our train. Meanwhile the armed SS escort from Auschwitz were standing on the platform doing their best to kick or hit everybody leaving the train with their rifle butts, as if saying goodbye. I saw what was happening. I waited at the back of the train, gathered speed and jumped out of the wagon a few metres away from the escorting guards. I did it to avoid being hit and I was not. New SS guards escorted us to Mauthausen camp. Dawn was breaking. The windows [of the houses] were shut but you could see the curtains open slightly as the Austrians discreetly watched what was happening. We reached the camp. It was situated on a hill with beautiful scenery around and the Alps visible – an area of exceptional beauty where people were meeting their tragic fate.’19
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