Voices from the Holocaust

by Jon E. Lewis

  A Girl is Found Alive in the Gas-chamber, Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944

  MIKLOS NYISZLI

  Nyiszli was a Jew and a medical doctor; he was spared the gas-chamber in order that he might help the SS medical staff perform ‘scientific’ experiments on inmates.

  In number one crematorium’s gas-chamber 3,000 dead bodies were piled up. The Sonderkommando had already begun to untangle the lattice of flesh ... the chief of the gas-chamber commando almost tore the hinges off the door to my room as he arrived out of breath, his eyes wide with fear or surprise. ‘Doctor,’ he said, ‘come quickly. We just found a girl alive at the bottom of a pile of corpses.’

  I grabbed my instrument case, which was always ready, and dashed to the gas-chamber. Against the wall, near the entrance to the immense room, half covered with bodies, I saw a girl in the throes of a death rattle, her body seized with convulsions. The gas commando men around me were in a state of panic. Nothing like this had ever happened in the course of their horrible career.

  We moved the still-living body from the corpses pressing against it. I gathered the tiny adolescent body into my arms and carried it back to the room adjoining the gas-chamber … I laid the body on a bench. A frail young girl, almost a child, she could have been no more than fifteen.

  I took out my syringe and, taking her arm – she had not yet recovered consciousness and was breathing with difficulty – I administered three intravenous injections. My companions covered her body, which was as cold as ice, with a heavy overcoat. One ran to the kitchen to fetch some tea and warm broth. Everybody wanted to help as if she were his own child.

  The reaction was swift. The child was seized by a fit of coughing which brought up a thick globule of phlegm from her lungs. She opened her eyes and looked fixedly at the ceiling. I kept a close watch for every sign of life. Her breathing became deeper and more and more regular. Her lungs, tortured by the gas, inhaled the fresh air avidly. Her pulse became perceptible, the result of the injections. I waited impatiently. I saw that within a few minutes she was going to regain consciousness: her circulation began to bring colour back into her cheeks, and her delicate face became human again.

  I made a sign for my companions to withdraw. I was going to attempt something I knew without saying was doomed to failure ... From our numerous contacts, I had been able to ascertain that Mussfeld had a high esteem for the medical expert’s professional qualities … And this was the man I had to deal with, the man I had to talk into allowing a single life to be spared.

  I calmly related the terrible case we found ourselves confronted with. I described for his benefit what pains the child must have suffered in the undressing room, and the horrible scenes that preceded death in the gas-chamber. When the room had been plunged into darkness, she had breathed in a few lungfuls of Zyklon gas. Only a few, though, for her fragile body had given way under the pushing and shoving of the mass as they fought against death. By chances she had fallen with her face against the wet concrete floor. That bit of humidity had kept her from being asphyxiated, for Zyklon gas does not react under humid conditions.

  These were my arguments, and I asked him to do something for the child. He listened to me attentively then asked me exactly what I proposed doing. I saw by his expression that I had put him face to face with a practically impossible problem.

  ‘There’s no way of getting round it,’ he said, ‘the child will have to die.’ Half an hour later the young girl was led, or rather carried, into the furnace room hallway, and there Mussfeld sent another in his place to do the job. A bullet in the back of the neck.

  Mala Zimetbaum, July 1944

  RAYA KAGAN

  A Belgian Jew of Polish descent, Mala Zimetbaum escaped from Auschwitz with the aid of her boyfriend and fellow inmate, Edward Galinek. After two weeks of freedom, the couple were recaptured. Nonetheless her escape and her bravery at her public execution made her a heroine, among her peers and subsequent generations. Raya Kagan, Auschwitz prisoner, made the following testimony during the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961:

  Q. What happened to Mala Zimetbaum?

  A. I had known Mala Zimetbaum since the summer of 1942. At that time, she became a Laeuferin – a messenger between blocks and a liaison between the Blockführerstube, the Kapo and the prisoners. She was a young girl, of Polish origin, but she had been living in Belgium and arrived with the Belgian transport. She was very decent. She was known throughout the camp, since she helped everybody. And her opportunities and the power, as it were, that she possessed were never wrongfully exploited by her, as was often done by the Kapos. She suffered like everybody else. However, she had better conditions – she was able to take a shower in Birkenau.

  And suddenly, in the summer of 1944, I heard – I was sitting in the room of my superior – there was a telephone call – and suddenly, I heard them ringing and alerting all the Kripo and the Stapoleitstelle, all stations of the gendarmerie, and I heard the name of the prisoner, Mala Zimetbaum. She had escaped. The escape was organized. She fled in the uniform of the SS, of an Aufseherin (supervisor). The escape occurred on a Saturday afternoon when there was a reduced camp guard. Another Pole escaped with her. They met beyond the camp, on their way to Slovakia. We hoped – we had great hopes – every morning when we got up, that possibly she would succeed.

  It is important to note that Mala had many opportunities – she had access to the documents. And it was said that she had stolen documents from the Blockführerstube relating to the SD, and that she wanted to publish them abroad. I must remark here that her courage was well known, but there was also a legend about Mala, and I am not sure whether it is correct that she managed to steal the documents, but it was said of her that she was capable of doing so. A fortnight later, we learned that they had been captured; they were caught in a very foolish way, right on the border, by customs officials. Apparently, they had lost their way and asked which way to go. There they had to cross mountains, to pass through the Carpathians. That was when they were captured. It seemed strange to the customs officers that a couple ...

  Q. At any rate, she was sent back to Auschwitz?

  A. She was returned to Auschwitz. This Polish man was interrogated in our block, and not only in our block. Our hut, in which we worked, was close to the small crematorium which was already out of action, but it was a favourite place for our interrogators, mainly for Wilhelm Burger, who had invented his own forms of torture. There was a torture instrument there called a see-saw. That was where he took this Pole. We saw him there, passing by after terrible tortures. He was hanged in the Auschwitz camp. Mala was taken to Birkenau. Interrogations took place once again in Auschwitz, and we saw her.

  Q. Did you speak to her?

  A. Yes, I asked her how she was.

  Q. You went in to her?

  A. No. She was in a small hut – that was where people waited to be interrogated.

  Q. What did she do?

  A. Serenely and heroically, she said, somewhat ironically: ‘I am always well.’

  Presiding Judge: In what language did she say this?

  Witness Kagan: In German.

  Q. What did she say?

  A. ‘Mir geht e simmer wohl.’

  Q. What happened to her in the end?

  A. Eventually they brought her to Birkenau. They held a major roll-call, and Mandel, the Schutzlagerführerin (leader of the protective camp), Marie Mandel, made a speech and demanded a spectacular and exemplary punishment for her. Mala had succeeded in placing a razor blade in her sleeve and, at the time of the roll-call, she cut open her veins. The SS man went up to her and began mocking and cursing her. Then, with a hand covered in blood, she slapped his cheek and – again, this may be a legend – she said to him: ‘I shall die as a heroine, and you will die like a dog.’ After that, she was taken, in this very terrible state, to the Revier, and in the evening she was put on a cart and taken to the crematorium.

  Portrait of a Muselmann, Auschwitz, 1944

  AHARON BEILIN />
  ‘Muselmann’ was ironic camp slang for an inmate who was near-dead from starvation and overwork. Beilin was a Jewish doctor incarcerated in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

  They began speaking about food. Usually this was a taboo. Two things were taboo – crematoria and food. Food – that was a reflex, a conditioned reflex; because whenever people spoke about food the secretion of digestive acids would increase, and people tried not to speak about food. As soon as a person lost that self-control and began remembering the good food which he used to have at home in the good old times, such a talk was called a ‘muselmann conversation’.

  That was the first stage, and we knew that within a day or two, he would enter the second stage. There was not such a rigorous division, but he would stop taking an interest in his surroundings and would also cease reacting to orders, and his motions would become very slow, his face frozen like a mask. He would no longer have control over his bowels. He would relieve himself where he was. He was not even turning over when he lay down.

  And thus he entered the ‘muselmannship’. It was a skeleton with bloated legs. And these people, because they wanted to drag them from the blocks to the roll-call, they were placed forcibly next to the wall with their hands above their heads, their face to the wall for support, and it was a skeleton with grey face that would lean against the wall, swaying back and forth. They had no sense of balance. That was the typical muselmann, who would be taken afterwards by the ‘skeleton’ Kommando with the real bodies.

  A Day in the Life of a Prisoner, Bergen-Belsen, 13 September 1944

  ABEL J. HERZBERG

  The Dutch lawyer Herzberg was a so-called ‘privileged Jew’, one kept alive by the Nazis for possible use as a bargaining counter with the Allies.

  13 September, A day in B-B. Yesterday: roll-call 6.15 a.m. Roll-call 9.00 a.m. Roll-call does not tally. Kept standing till 11.00 a.m. Air-raid alert. Roll-call still does not tally. Roll-call adjourned. 12.30 p.m. duty roll-call. 1.30 p.m. Roll-call for all the women. 3.00 p.m. Roll-call. Roll-call does not tally. 5.00 p.m. Roll-call tallies. Air-raid alert. 7.10 p.m. Roll-call. It gets dark. Roll-call does not tally. 9.10 p.m. Roll-call tallies. We stood for hours, hours and hours. The French women are diametrically opposed to Prussian discipline. They never forget their lipstick and speak Yiddish. Their parents fled Poland because of the Russians and the children were deported from Paris by the Germans and wherever they were, they were nationalists. What will happen to the grandchildren? They are remarkable women these Polish-French Jewesses. Returning from work on the fourteenth of July, they marched through the gate singing the Marseillaise. The Germans threatened collective punishment if they did it again.

  The Great Selection in Auschwitz, October 1944

  PRIMO LEVI

  Levi was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Italy in 1919. His early life was little troubled by anti-Semitism, and he even joined the Fascist youth movement. This youthful indiscretion behind him, he joined the Giustizia e Libertà partisan movement and, following his capture by the Fascist authorities was sent to Auschwitz, arriving in February 1944. Prisoner No. 174,517 spent eleven months in the camp before its liberation by the Red Army in January 1945, the period described in his famous memoirs If This is a Man and Survival in Auschwitz.

  We fought with all our strength to prevent the arrival of winter. We clung to all the warm hours, at every dusk we tried to keep the sun in the sky for a little longer, but it was all in vain. Yesterday evening the sun went down irrevocably behind a confusion of dirty clouds, chimney stacks and wires, and today it is winter.

  We know what it means because we were here last winter; and the others will soon learn. It means that in the course of these months, from October till April, seven out of ten of us will die. Whoever does not die will suffer minute by minute, all day, every day: from the morning before dawn until the distribution of the evening soup we will have to keep our muscles continually tensed, dance from foot to foot, beat our arms under our shoulders against the cold. We will have to spend bread to acquire gloves, and lose hours of sleep to repair them when they become unstitched. As it will no longer be possible to eat in the open, we will have to eat our meals in the hut, on our feet, everyone will be assigned an area of floor as large as a hand, as it is forbidden to rest against the bunks. Wounds will open on everyone’s hands, and to be given a bandage will mean waiting every evening for hours on one’s feet in the snow and wind.

  Just as our hunger is not that feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word. We say ‘hunger’, we say ‘tiredness’, ‘fear’, ‘pain’, we say ‘winter’ and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have been born; and only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing nearer.

  In the same way in which one sees a hope end, winter arrived this morning. We realized it when we left the hut to go and wash: there were no stars, the dark grey of dawn, when we assembled for work, no one spoke. When we saw the first flakes of snow, we thought that if at the same time last year they had told us that we would have seen another winter in the Lager, we would have gone and touched the electric wire-fence; and that even now we would go if we were logical, were it not for this last senseless crazy residue of unavoidable hope.

  Because ‘winter’ means yet another thing.

  Last spring the Germans had constructed huge tents in an open space in the Lager. For the whole of the good season each of them had catered for over a thousand men: now the tents had been taken down, and an excess two thousand guests crowded our huts. We old prisoners knew that the Germans did not like these irregularities and that something would soon happen to reduce our number.

  One feels the selections arriving. ‘Selekcja’: the hybrid Latin and Polish word is heard once, twice, many times, interpolated in foreign conversations; at first we cannot distinguish it, then it forces itself on our attention, and in the end it persecutes us.

  This morning the Poles had said ‘Selekcja’. The Poles are the first to find out the news, and they generally try not to let it spread around, because to know something which the others still do not know can always be useful. By the time that everyone realizes that a selection is imminent, the few possibilities of evading it (corrupting some doctor or some prominent with bread or tobacco; leaving the hut for Ka-Be or vice-versa at the right moment so as to cross with the commission) are already their monopoly.

  In the days which follow, the atmosphere of the Lager and the yard is filled with ‘Selekcja’: nobody knows anything definite, but all speak about it, even the Polish, Italian, French civilian workers whom we secretly see in the yard. Yet the result is hardly a wave of despondency: our collective morale is too inarticulate and flat to be unstable. The fight against hunger, cold and work leaves little margin for thought, even for this thought. Everybody reacts in his own way, but hardly anyone with those attitudes which would seem the most plausible as the most realistic, that is with resignation or despair.

  All those able to find a way out, try to take it; but they are the minority because it is very difficult to escape from a selection. The Germans apply themselves to these things with great skill and diligence.

  Whoever is unable to prepare for it materially, seeks defence elsewhere. In the latrines, in the washroom, we show each other our chests, our buttocks, our thighs, and our comrades reassure us: ‘You are all right, it will certainly not be your turn this time ... du bist kein Muselmann … more probably mine …’ and they undo their braces in turn and pull up their shirts.

  Nobody refuses this charity to another: nobody is so sure of his own lot [as] to be able to condemn others. I brazenly lied to old Wertheimer; I told him that if they questioned h
im, he should reply that he was forty-five, and he should not forget to have a shave the evening before, even if it cost him a quarter-ration of bread; apart from that he need have no fears, and in any case it was by no means certain that it was a selection for the gas-chamber; had he not heard the Blockältester say that those chosen would go to Jaworszno, to a convalescent camp?

  It is absurd of Wertheimer to hope: he looks sixty, he has enormous varicose veins, he hardly even notices the hunger any more. But he lies down on his bed, serene and quiet, and replies to someone who asks with my own words; they are the command-words in the camp these days: I myself repeated them just as – apart from details – Chajim told them to me, Chajim, who has been in the Lager for three years, and being strong and robust is wonderfully sure of himself; and I believed them.

  On this slender basis I also lived through the great selection of October 1944 with inconceivable tranquillity. I was tranquil because I managed to lie to myself sufficiently. The fact that I was not selected depended above all on chance and does not prove that my faith was well-founded.

  Monsieur Pinkert is also, a priori, condemned: it is enough to look at his eyes. He calls me over with a sign, and with a confidential air tells me that he has been informed – he cannot tell me the source of information – that this time there is really something new: the Holy See, by means of the International Red Cross ... in short, he personally guarantees both for himself and for me, in the most absolute manner, that every danger is ruled out; as a civilian he was, as is well known, attaché to the Belgian Embassy at Warsaw.

  Thus in various ways, even those days of vigil, which in the telling seem as if they ought to have passed every limit of human torment, went by not very differently from other days.

  The discipline in both the Lager and Buna is in no way relaxed: the work, cold and hunger are sufficient to fill up every thinking moment.