Auschwitz

  The Sonderkommando had felt driven to action on October 7 by an announcement days before asking for “volunteers” to join Otto Moll, one of the most notorious SS overseers of the crematoria, who had recently left to become commandant of Gliwice sub-camp. They knew this was a ruse, because the last group of Sonderkommando who had been selected to “go” to Majdanek camp had instead been killed by the SS men and their bodies had been burnt overnight in crematorium 2. The next morning, some of the remaining Sonderkommando had recognized the half-burnt corpses of their comrades and any last illusions they had about the eventual fate the Nazis intended for them were dispelled.

  The Sonderkommando were also well aware that their usefulness to the Nazis had diminished considerably. Only the arrival of about 65,000 people—a result of the liquidation of the Łódź ghetto—during August and September had prevented the Nazis from cutting back on the number of Sonderkommando at Auschwitz earlier. Now, after no one had come forward to “volunteer” for the mythical transfer to Gliwice, the Sonderkommando learned that the Kapos in crematoria 4 and 5 had been told to come up with the names of three hundred Sonderkommando who would be “transferred to rubber factories”—factories that were just as imaginary as had been all the previous destinations for the Sonderkommando that the Nazis had promised.

  In response to the clear threat of their own immediate execution, at around 1.30 P.M. on Saturday, October 7th, the Sonderkommando in crematorium 4 mutinied.41 Armed with pickaxes and rocks, they attacked the SS guards as they came toward them and then set fire to the crematorium. After a few minutes of hand-to-hand fighting with the SS men, some Sonderkommando managed to escape into the nearby woods and reached the village of Rajsko beyond, but they were still trapped as they remained within the Auschwitz Zone of Interest. Meanwhile, the Sonderkommando in crematorium 2 also rose up against the SS men and shoved one of the guards, alive, into the lit ovens.

  About 250 members of the Sonderkommando were killed during the ensuing struggle in Auschwitz. All of those who escaped were later captured and shot, along with others suspected of involvement in the revolt—a total of 200 more people. Three SS members died as a consequence of the Sonderkommando action that day. But the revolt did save some lives. It must have been because of the chaos caused by the Sonderkommando in crematorium 4 that the SS guards emptied the gas chamber of crematorium 5 next door without killing Alice Lok Cahana and her group.

  Eight days after the Sonderkommando revolt at Auschwitz, the political situation in Hungary changed once more when Horthy’s non-compliant regime was overthrown with the help of the Nazi-backed Hungarian Arrow Cross militia. Eichmann, who had passed the months since the end of the deportations by having an affair and getting drunk, immediately called Kasztner for a meeting and greeted him with the words, “I’m back!” The Jews of Budapest, who had up to now largely escaped deportation, were his new target. It was impractical—given the nearness of the Red Army and the difficulties in organizing railway passage—to send them to Auschwitz. So Eichmann determined that they should walk to Vienna—more than 200 kilometers away.

  During November, tens of thousands of Jews from Budapest were forced out of the city and made to trek west to Austria, marching without food through rain and snow. The sight of this pitiful column appalled even hardened SS officers, and Eichmann was told to halt the deportations. He instead worked around the order and carried on, earning the vilification of representatives of neutral countries who observed the suffering. With more than 100,000 Jews still in Budapest waiting to become part of Eichmann’s sadistic planned march, Kurt Becher, always a more pragmatic Nazi, protested to Himmler about his colleague’s action. Becher—and Himmler—realized that the war must end soon, and that with Germany’s defeat ideology needed to be twinned with realism.

  Himmler called Becher and Eichmann to a meeting in his private train stationed at Triberg in the Black Forest. According to Becher, Himmler told Eichmann to cease the deportations of the Budapest Jews, saying that “If until now you have exterminated Jews, from now on, if I order you as I do, you must be a fosterer of Jews.”42 It was a dramatic about-face for Himmler, the man who had helped mastermind the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” But, as the war entered its last few months, still more surprises were to come from the Reichsführer SS.

  CHAPTER 6

  LIBERATION AND RETRIBUTION

  When the end came, it came quickly. One night in January 1945, as ten-year-old Eva Mozes Kor1 and her twin sister Miriam lay in their bunks at Auschwitz–Birkenau, they were suddenly awoken by a huge explosion. Outside the winter sky was red with flames. The Nazis had blown up the crematoria. Moments later, they were forced out of their barracks and marched with other twins—all of whom had been subject to Dr. Mengele’s experiments—down the road to Auschwitz main camp. It was a nightmarish scene. Above them they saw distant flashes of artillery, and in the darkness the SS men harried them on without respite. Any of the children who could not make the journey were shot and their bodies left by the side of the road. In the chaos two of the sets of twins lost their siblings, and never saw them again.

  Once in Auschwitz main camp, Eva and Miriam were left largely on their own. The rigid system of supervision by Kapos and guards had suddenly broken down and the prisoners looked after themselves. Eva even managed to break through the perimeter fence and walk to the edge of the Sola River, which ran along one side of the main camp, to try and get water. As she looked up from breaking the ice on the surface of the river, she saw a little girl about her own age on the other side of the bank. She was dressed in beautiful clothes, with carefully braided hair decorated with ribbons, and carried a school bag. It was an “almost unbelievable” sight to Eva—wearing rags and swarming with lice—who stood and stared at her. “This was my first realization since we arrived in Auschwitz,” she says, “that there was a world out there with children who looked like children, and who went to school.”

  Eva and Miriam are fortunate to be alive—because the Nazi plan was that they should die along with the rest of the several thousand prisoners who were left behind, judged too weak to take part in the mass exodus from Auschwitz. An order for their murder had been sent by SS Obergruppenführer (lieutenant general) Schmauser,2 the commander of the local area, on January 20. During the next seven days, special SS units murdered about 700 prisoners at Birkenau and nearby sub-camps. Nearly 8,000 other prisoners, including Eva and Miriam, escaped death because the Red Army was closing too rapidly on Auschwitz and the SS members were concerned more with saving themselves than with following orders.

  Shortly afterwards, the guns fell silent and, on January 27, Red Army soldiers from the First Ukrainian Front arrived at the complex. They found around 600 prisoners alive in the Monowitz slave labor camp next to the I.G. Farben Buna works, nearly 6,000 at Birkenau, and just more than 1,000 at Auschwitz main camp—including Eva and her sister Miriam. The first Eva heard that, for her, the suffering might be over was when one of the women in the barracks started shouting: “We’re free! We’re free! We’re free!” Eva ran to the door but could see nothing in the snow. Only after some minutes could she make out Red Army soldiers dressed in white camouflage coats. She recalls,We ran up to them and they gave us hugs, cookies, and chocolates. Being so alone, a hug meant more than anybody could imagine, because that replaced the human worth we were starving for. We were not only starved for food but we were starved for human kindness, and the Soviet Army did provide some of that. Actually, one of the things that I missed most after the war when we got back was that I desperately needed hugs and kisses and I never got any. And so when I lecture students I tell them, “When you go home this afternoon, please go and give your parents an extra hug and an extra kiss for all of us children who survived the camp and who had no one to hug and kiss.”

  Ivan Martynushkin was a lieutenant with a Red Army mortar company who fought his way with his comrades into Auschwitz town. But when he reached Birkenau, just hours after its liberation, there was a strange
calm. The former prisoners looked at him “with gratitude in their eyes” and with “forced smiles.” “We had a feeling that we had done something good,” he says, “a very good deed—that we had somehow fulfilled our duty.” But, significantly, although he says he and his comrades had “feelings of compassion” for the Auschwitz prisoners, they were not hugely affected by what they saw.

  You have to understand the psychology of people who have been at war. ... I already had more than a year of direct combat experience behind me, and during that time I had seen camps—not like this one, but they were nevertheless smaller prison camps. I had seen towns being destroyed. I had seen the destruction of villages. I had seen the suffering of our own people. I had seen small children maimed—there was not one village which had not experienced this horror, this tragedy, these sufferings.

  Ivan Martynushkin’s words are a useful reminder of the context in which Auschwitz would have been seen initially by many who fought on the Eastern Front. For them, it was a horror, true enough, but also just one more terrible sight in a war already overflowing with atrocity. Indeed, the liberation of Auschwitz was not huge news at the time. It was mentioned in the papers—Pravda published an account by their correspondent Boris Polevoi on February 23 and the story was picked up a few days later by the Jewish Chronicle in Britain—but the liberation was not publicized in the way that the discovery of Majdanek camp had been the previous summer. Majdanek had been the only other Nazi camp to use Zyklon B for killing (but on a much smaller scale than Auschwitz), and so it was possible for the press at first to see Auschwitz as “another Majdanek.” There were also a great deal of other competing stories for the newspapers to report in January 1945—not least the forthcoming meeting of the “Big Three” war leaders (Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin)4 at Yalta in the Crimea.

  But there was also perhaps one more reason why the liberation of Auschwitz was not a massive immediate news story in the West. The Red Army had discovered the camp, and already some were beginning to question the extent to which the alliance that had won the war would survive victory. Traces of an overtly Marxist interpretation of Auschwitz, as the ultimate capitalist factory where the workers were dispensable, were evident in Polevoi’s article in Pravda. It was a moment that marked the beginning of a rift in historical interpretation between East and West concerning the operation of the camps that would not be resolved until the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union. One of the least appealing aspects of the Soviet analysis of Auschwitz, now and later, was the downplaying of the scale of the suffering endured by Jews in the camp—the emphasis was on referring to everyone who died as collectively “victims of Fascism.”

  Back in January 1945, however, Eva Mozes Kor and her sister Miriam rightly considered themselves lucky to have been liberated by the Red Army. For, if they had not been left behind, then on January 18th, with the Red Army just a few kilometers away, the Germans would have included them among the other 65,000 so-called “fit” prisoners drawn from the huge complex of Auschwitz camps and they would have begun the journey west—on foot. These next few weeks would be remembered by many of the prisoners who were forced to take part in the evacuation as the worst experience they suffered while in captivity—worse than the constant selections, worse than the starvation diet in the camps, worse than the disease-ridden, freezing huts they lived in. For the Auschwitz prisoners were embarking on a journey that would become known—with complete accuracy—as a death march.

  The concept of the death march was not new to the Nazis. In January 1940 800 Polish prisoners of war, all Jews, were marched ninety-five kilometers from Lublin to Biała Podlaska.5 Only a handful survived the journey through Poland in winter, the majority froze to death or were killed by the SS men who accompanied them. In the following years, death marches were imposed by the Nazis on Jews following the liquidation of ghettos, and on Soviet prisoners of war as they were marched west to makeshift camps.

  As discussed in Chapter 5, however, it was in the autumn of 1944 that the biggest death marches of the war took place. One of the worst occurred in Hungary in November 1944 when, on Eichmann’s insistence, nearly 80,000 Jews, including women and children, were forced to march west from Budapest in the direction of Austria. Those who survived that appalling journey—a march so bad that even the Nazis commented on the brutality of it—eventually ended up in camps such as Mauthausen and Dachau. Thus, the death march that the Auschwitz inmates were about to embark upon had many bloody precedents.

  Prisoners were beaten out of the camp, clad in thin prison garb that offered wholly inadequate protection against the snow and bitter wind of a Polish winter, and assembled on the road to begin the march. It was at this moment that Franz Wunsch of the SS made his final gesture towards the woman he loved—the Jewish prisoner Helena Citrónová. As she stood with her sister Róžínka by the camp gates, shivering, he brought over “two pairs of warm shoes—fur-lined boots. Everyone else, poor things, were wearing clogs lined with newspapers. He was really endangering his life [giving them to us].” Wunsch told her that he was being sent to the front, but that his mother in Vienna would look after her and her sister because, as Jews at the end of the war, they would have “nowhere else to go.” He pressed a piece of paper with his mother’s address into Helena’s hand. But once he had left them Helena remembered her own father’s words to her: “Don’t forget who you are.” He had emphasized to her that she must always remember “I am a Jew and I have to remain a Jew.” Consequently, she threw away the address of Wunsch’s mother.

  And so the two women began the march west through the driving snow. Helena describes those first days as “unbelievably harsh.” She watched as around her other prisoners “dropped in the snow. They didn’t have any strength left and they died. Each person took care of himself. Total chaos. Whoever lived—lived. Whoever died—died.”

  Ibi Mann,6 a nineteen year old who had arrived at Auschwitz the previous year from Czechoslovakia, was also seared by her experience of the death march: “They gathered us in the middle of the night and we never knew the time, the hour, nothing. We were disconnected from the world.” Despite the noise of a Soviet bombardment nearby, the Nazis still insisted on first counting the prisoners and then marching them off in rows of five, “Anyone who dared even to bend over—who stopped even for a moment—was shot.”

  Like so many other prisoners who survived, Ibi Mann did not face the journey alone; her sister marched with her, offering constant encouragement. “I was saying, ‘This is the end—I can’t go any further,’ [but] she pulled me on by force.” At night they slept in barns—once even in a pigsty—or out in the open, sheltered only by bare trees and hedgerows. Ibi and her sister were two of the last to leave, and as they marched they passed ditches full of corpses. They struggled on as the snow turned to slush, invading their thin shoes and raising blisters and sores. Neither woman felt hunger on the march, just a raging thirst that they could never slake—they knew that if they bent down to eat a handful of slush they would be shot.

  Against this background of suffering, it is almost incredible that the Nazis were marching these inmates out of Auschwitz because they thought they represented a useful resource. At this stage in the war, slave labor was of great importance to them—by the end of 1944 around half a million prisoners were working in German factories.

  There were two main routes used by the Nazis to march the Auschwitz prisoners towards the Reich. One route was northwest through Mikolów, just less than fifty kilometers to the railway junction at Gleiwitz; the other was due west, about sixty-five kilometers to the train station at Wodzisław (Loslau). The torment, however, did not end there. Those prisoners who survived the march boarded trains that would take them on to camps in Germany and Austria. Ibi and her sister were herded into open freight cars that contained about “half a meter of snow.” Prisoners were crammed in so tightly that there was often no room to sit down.

  Morris Venezia,7 who had been a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, was another
who made this terrible train journey. He was one of the rare prisoners who managed to find a place to sit in one of the open cars. He still remembers the intense cold, the snow falling and lying on him and his friends, and the constant need to throw dead bodies from the car as those around him succumbed to the appalling conditions. He also recalls another aspect of his journey that is even more remarkable—committing murder.

  In the freight car with Morris and the other inmates was a German prisoner who was desperate to sit down, having stood in the snow for so long. He came to what he thought was a deal with Morris—for the price of some cigarettes he would be allowed to sit while Morris stood. Morris got up, took the cigarettes and smoked them while the German slumped in the corner of the truck. After ten minutes or so, when Morris had finished the cigarettes, he told the German to stand up. He refused. “So what I did,” says Morris, “was me and a couple of friends we sat on him. And [after] about thirty minutes or one hour he was suffocated and we threw him out of the wagon. No problem. We were glad we killed a German.”

  Even today Morris has “no problem” with having killed this German prisoner. It mattered not that the man he murdered had been a fellow inmate of Auschwitz. All that was important was the language he’d been speaking: “I was happy. They [the Germans] killed all my family, thirty or forty people, and I killed one German. Phuh! That was nothing. If I could kill a hundred of them I would be glad, because they destroyed us completely.” No matter how he is questioned on the subject, Morris is unable to see any difference between the Germans who ran Auschwitz and the German prisoner he killed on the cattle car on that freezing winter night in Poland. “Anyway,” he says, “I wanted to be seated too because I got tired. Why should he live because he gave me two or three cigarettes? He didn’t want to get up, so we sat on him and he passed away—easy.” Morris Venezia’s lack of concern for the German prisoner he and his comrades killed on their journey west is a reminder of the debased moral landscape of the camp, and of how each prisoner was often forced to consider his or her own survival above all else.