Kabáč had little direct contact with Slovakian Jews before knowingly sending them to their deaths. There were no Jews living in his village, and he admits he himself never had any “problem” with the Jews in Slovakia. He enthusiastically embraced anti-Semitism not because of any personal experience but because he was a fervent nationalist, proud that Slovakia was now an independent country, and he was told by the Slovakian leadership that “the Jews were liars and were robbing the Slovaks.”
Michal Kabáč’s story is a telling reminder of how quickly prejudice can take root when presented as part of a package of values, the majority of which are more immediately attractive. Kabáč adopted violent anti-Semitism to demonstrate that he was a committed and patriotic Slovakian nationalist—and in the process he gained financially, because he now stole from the Jews and dressed the crime up as some kind of “rightful vengeance.” Silvia Veselá witnessed first-hand how quickly the prevailing morality changed in Slovakia:I thought about it several times. Human material is very bendable. You can do anything with it. When money and life are involved, you seldom meet a person that is willing to sacrifice for you. It hurt, it really hurt when I, for example, saw my schoolmate shouting with her fist raised, “It serves you right!” Since that time I do not expect anything of people.
In the meantime, at Auschwitz attempts continued to improve the killing facility of the camp. On February 27, 1942, Rudolf Höss, the SS architect Karl Bischoff, and Hans Kammler, head of the central SS buildings office,37 held a meeting at which they decided to move the location of the crematorium that had been planned for Auschwitz 1 to the new camp at Birkenau. The intention was to site the new crematorium in a far corner near a small cottage. This cottage was to be converted quickly into a makeshift killing installation by bricking up the existing doors and windows, gutting the inside, and creating two sealed spaces that could be used as gas chambers. New entrances would lead directly into each gas chamber, and a hatch would be placed high in the brickwork of the wall to allow crystals of Zyklon B to be thrown inside.
The cottage, known as “The Little Red House” or “Bunker 1” was used for the first time as a place of murder at the end of March 1942, when a transport of Jews from the local area who were considered unfit to work in the forced labor program were sent to Auschwitz. Around 800 people could be murdered in “The Little Red House” at any one time, crammed tightly into the gas chambers.
Höss now had at his disposal a murder facility that did not suffer from the disadvantages of the crematorium in Auschwitz 1. No matter how loudly those being gassed in “The Little Red House” screamed, no disturbance was caused to the normal operation of the camp. But Höss knew it would be many months (in fact it was more than a year) before a crematorium could be built nearby to dispose of the bodies killed in this make-shift gas chamber. So, having solved one of his problems (how to kill in relative secret), he had created another (how to dispose of the evidence).
The first transports that arrived from Slovakia in March 1942 were not selected on arrival—everyone was admitted to the camp. But that did not prevent the SS men and Kapos from immediately terrorizing the new inmates, as Otto Pressburger, who was on one of these transports, experienced first-hand:From the station we had to run [to Auschwitz 1] in groups of five. They [the SS men] shouted, “Schnell laufen! Laufen, laufen, laufen!” And we ran. They killed on the spot those who could not run. We felt we were less than dogs. We had been told that we were going to work, not that we were going to a concentration camp.
The next morning, after a night with no food or drink, Otto Pressburger, his father, and the rest of the Slovak transport of around 1,000 men were made to run from the main camp up to the building site that was Birkenau. He estimates that around seventy to eighty people were killed on the way. Birkenau, deep in mud and other filth, was an appalling place. As Perry Broad of the SS recalled, “Conditions in Birkenau were considerably worse than in Auschwitz [main camp]. Feet drop into a sticky bog at every step. There was hardly any water for washing.”38 Prisoners existed in an environment of utter degradation, covered in dirt and their own feces.
Once in Birkenau, Otto Pressburger gained an immediate introduction to the brutal regime of the camp. When he saw that a young Polish boy had stolen his father’s belt, he caught the boy and punched him. Another prisoner quickly told him that he had made a potentially fatal mistake. The young boy was a “pipel”—camp slang for the young servant of a Kapo (and someone with whom the Kapo often had a homosexual relationship). “We had to run back to the barracks and hide,” says Otto Pressburger.
The Kapo of the block entered the barracks and ordered us to lie down—head facing towards the aisle. There was the “pipel” coming looking for me. He didn’t recognize me. We all looked alike—no hair [all the prisoners had their head shaved on arrival] and the same clothes. I was very lucky, otherwise they would have killed me.
On that first day at work in Birkenau, Otto Pressburger witnessed another incident that demonstrated in an even more bestial way the desperate situation in which he now found himself:We went to work to build roads—Kapos and SS men were supervising us. There was one Jew from our town, a tall and strong man from a rich family. The Kapo spotted his gold teeth and asked him to give them to him. He answered that he could not do that, but the Kapo persisted that he must. He still said he could not give him his gold teeth. The Kapo got angry and said we must all obey his orders. He took the shovel and hit him over the head a couple of times until he fell down. The Kapo turned him upside down and put the shovel on his throat and stood on it. He broke his neck and used the shovel to get the teeth out of his mouth. Not far away stood another Jew who asked the Kapo how he could do this. The Kapo came over and said he’d show him. And he killed him the same way. Then he told us never to ask questions and to mind our own business. That evening we had to carry twelve dead bodies with us back to the barracks. He killed them just for fun. All this happened the first day at work.
Murderous behavior by the Kapos had been a feature of Auschwitz from the very beginning, so the experience of these newcomers, though horrific, was nothing out of the ordinary for the camp. But the culture (if one can use such a word in the context of Auschwitz) of the place nonetheless was about to change in two major ways as a result of the arrival of the Slovakians.
The first change occurred because women were now admitted—up to this point Auschwitz had been an exclusively male institution. But the arrival of women did not have the remotest “civilizing” effect on those in authority at the camp—almost the opposite, as Silvia Veselá witnessed. She arrived at Auschwitz shortly after Otto Pressburger, on a transport containing several hundred women and one man—a Jewish doctor who had been permitted by the Slovak authorities to accompany the women.
When we came to Auschwitz we were kicked out of the railway trucks, and the SS officers started to shout at our doctor, trying to find out why he was the only man on the transport. He replied in perfect German: “I am a doctor, and I was assigned here by the central Jewish conference. My role is to accompany the transport and I was told I would then go back to Slovakia.” Then an SS officer pulled out a gun and shot him dead. They just simply shot him dead in front of my eyes. Just because he was the only man amongst so many women. That was the first shock for me.
The Slovakian women were then marched to Auschwitz main camp. “We saw high barracks and a gate,” says Silvia Veselá. “Above the gate was written, ‘Arbeit macht frei’—‘Work sets you free.’ So we thought we had come there to work.” Several of the blocks in the main camp had been emptied and made ready for the women, who were ordered to strip off their clothes and hand over any valuables they had not already given up. “Although the Germans hated us so much, they did not hesitate to take our clothes, shoes and jewelry. Explain this to me,” demands Silvia Veselá. “I always had this question—why didn’t they feel an aversion to our belongings?”
As the Slovakian women sat, naked, having their heads shaved, an
SS officer entered the room and ordered five of them to go to the doctor’s office. “He wanted to examine Jewish women,” says Silvia Veselá,and see if they were real virgins. He also wanted to know if Jewish women were clean. After they carried out the examination they were surprised—but in a negative sense. They couldn’t believe we were so clean. Moreover, more than 90 percent of us were virgins. These were all religious Jewish women. There was no way any of them would allow a man to touch her before the wedding. But in the course of the examination every girl was deprived of her virginity—the doctors used their fingers. They were all deflowered—another way to humiliate them. A friend of mine who was from a religious family told me: “I wanted to keep my virginity for my man, and I lost it this way!”
Appalling as the experiences of Otto Pressburger and Silvia Veselá were during their first hours in the camp, they do not represent what has come to be seen as the quintessential Auschwitz treatment on arrival. For one of the most infamous procedures associated with Auschwitz was only now about to begin—the initial selection. This was the second of the two important changes to the camp that resulted from the arrival of the Slovakians. Periodic selection of some incoming transports had begun as early as the end of April, but systematic selection did not begin until July 4, 1942, when a transport from Slovakia arrived that was separated at once by the SS men into those who were useful for work and would be admitted to the camp, and those who were unfit for work and would be gassed immediately. Only now, two years after the camp received its first prisoners, had the authorities at Auschwitz finally begun the selection process for new inmates that would come to symbolize the cold-hearted terror of the place.
Eva Votavová, along with her father and mother, was on one of the first transports to be subjected to selection on arrival. This wave of Slovakian deportees contained a mix of old people, children, and those, like Eva, who were young and fit:We arrived at Auschwitz station and had to align in rows of five. The painful scenes began there. They were separating the young from old and children. They separated my father from my mother and myself. From that moment I heard nothing about my father. When I saw him for the last time he looked worried, sad, and hopeless.
By now, some weeks after the completion of “The Little Red House,” another cottage a couple of hundred meters away, known as “The Little White House” or Bunker 2, had been converted into a killing installation with a capacity for about 1,200 people at any one time. Inside Bunker 2, four narrow rooms were constructed as gas chambers. This permitted better ventilation than had been possible in Bunker 1 (“The Little Red House”) and allowed the Zyklon B to be cleared more quickly from the cottage once the murders had taken place—another example of the constant small initiatives taken by the Auschwitz authorities to try and “improve” the killing process.
Otto Pressburger saw the new arrivals from Slovakia who had been selected to die waiting outside the cottages:They used to sit there—they must have been eating their food from home. SS men were around them with dogs. They, of course, didn’t know what was going to happen to them. We did not want to tell them. It would have been worse for them. We were thinking that the people who brought them here were not humans but some wild jungle creatures.
According to Otto Pressburger, during this period the gassings took place at night: “They never did it during the day; [because] people were probably shouting or trying to get out. We only saw the bodies next morning piled beside the pits.”
Pressburger was forced to work in a special unit, burying the bodies gassed in the two cottages:To kill people with gas is very simple. You only seal the windows and doors to keep the gas inside. They locked the doors and in a couple of minutes they were all dead. They [the SS men] brought them [the bodies] to the holes where I used to work. We used to bury them the next morning. We put some powdered lime and soil over them. Just enough to cover the bodies so no one could see them.
It was an inadequate method of body disposal and, when the hot summer arrived, the bodies thrown into pits started to putrify. Pressburger’s job, already the stuff of nightmares, became even worse.
The dead bodies were becoming alive. They were rotting and coming out of the holes. Blood and dirt was everywhere and we had to take them out with our bare hands. It did not look like a dead body any more—it was a rotten mass. We had to dig into that mass and sometimes we took out a head, sometimes a hand or a leg. The smell was unbearable. I had no choice [but to do this work] if I wanted to live. Otherwise they would kill me. I wanted to live. Sometimes I was questioning myself whether this life was worth living.
Once the bodies were disinterred, SS men ordered the prisoners to put them into giant, burning pits—the Auschwitz authorities thus improvised a makeshift crematorium while awaiting the completion of the conventional one nearby, says Pressburger.
We built a big fire with wood and petrol. We were throwing them [the bodies] right into it. There were always two of us throwing bodies in—one holding the bodies on the legs and the other on the arms. The stench was terrible. We were never given any extra food for this. The SS men were constantly drinking vodka or cognac or something else from bottles. They could not cope with it, either.
As he forced himself to carry on with the gruesome work of digging up the bodies and burning them, Pressburger also wrestled with an emotional trauma—the death of his father. The prisoners were kept hungry and thirsty, and his father had drunk rainwater from puddles—a common cause of infection and death. “The doctor who used to treat me as a child was in Auschwitz as well,” says Pressburger. “He told me never to drink that water [from the puddles]. Otherwise I would die within twenty-four hours. People always used to have swollen legs from drinking that rainwater. Water was coming out of their legs.” But his father was not so self-controlled, and he drank the water and died. After the initial shock and suffering of the loss, Pressburger realized that the only way he could survive was to try and block out what was happening around him—even the death of his own father. “The longer I wanted to live,” he says, “the sooner I had to forget.”
In exercising this iron self-control—particularly in dealing with the terrible pains of hunger and thirst—Pressburger was unexpectedly helped by the memory of how he had acted in his childhood:When I was a little kid my parents used to give me money to buy sandwiches on the way to school. But I never did. Instead I always got liquorice. So I had no food through the whole day apart from that liquorice until I got home in the afternoon.
This meant that, when he was in Birkenau and people around him were “going insane from hunger,” he was able to cope: “I was used to not eating much. It’s the same even now.”
Otto Pressburger is not alone in believing that his ability to draw on the memory of past privation was crucial to his survival. As Jacob Zylberstein pointed out in the context of the Łódź ghetto, many of the arriving German Jews found it hard to cope with ghetto life because of their privileged backgrounds, while he and his family, who had come from relative poverty, did not have so far to fall. Silvia Veselá observed a similar phenomenon with rich, middle-class Slovakian women. Even in the transit camps in Slovakia, before they arrived at Auschwitz, they found it much harder to deal with conditions than women like her from poorer backgrounds. And, as a Soviet prisoner of war in Auschwitz, Pavel Stenkin found that his own harsh upbringing was now an advantage. As a child he had never had much food—or indeed much affection—and now the experience was a positive asset.
This form of “selection” within the ghettos and camps was, of course, precisely the concern Reinhard Heydrich had raised at the Wannsee conference. The Nazis were too wedded to the Darwinian notion of the survival of the fittest to allow the Jews who came through the horrors of forced labor to carry on living—indeed, Nazi racial theory taught them that they had now isolated the very group they should most fear. This proscriptive insistence on following their own warped logic through to the bitter end is one of the factors that makes the Nazis’ “Final Solution” dif
ferent from some other genocides, like Stalin’s murderous treatment of minority nationalities within the Soviet Union. Stalin may have persecuted whole nations, but the Soviet system did not seek to eliminate them in their entirety. Yet, to fulfil the Nazis’ purpose, every single Jew had to be removed from German territory one way or the other.
When Otto Pressburger returned recently to visit the burial sites at Birkenau, he remembered the thousands who came with him from Slovakia to Auschwitz and who could not make such a journey today:It is terrible. I do remember standing [here] beside my father. The majority of the people working here were from my city. I knew all of them. Every day there were less and less of them. They must be still buried around here somewhere. There were only four of us who survived the three years.
In the spring and early summer of 1942, thousands of Jews, primarily from Upper Silesia and Slovakia, went to their deaths in “The Little Red House” and “The Little White House.” En route to the gas chambers in the cottages, SS officers like Palitzsch would chat with the Jews, asking each what trades or qualifications they possessed. Rudolf Höss emphasized in his memoirs how the key to successful mass murder on this scale was to conduct the whole process in an atmosphere of great calm. But it could happen, as Höss recorded, that if one person in the group approaching the gas chambers spoke of suffocation or murder “a sort of panic set in at once,” making the killing much more difficult. In later transports a careful watch was kept over individuals who were thought likely to cause trouble for the Nazis in this way. At the first sign of any attempt to disrupt the compliant atmosphere the Nazis had created, such people were discreetly moved away, taken out of sight of the others, and shot with a small-caliber gun that was quiet enough that those nearby would not hear the noise.
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