Although historians have long understood the process of gassing human beings at killing centers such as Auschwitz, we know little of the anguish these victims experienced in those terrifying minutes before they perished in the gas chamber. Survival of such an ordeal, either at stationary facilities or in gas vans, miraculously did occur, but it was extremely rare; in the majority of cases, attending guards subsequently murdered any surviving victims. Thus, few eyewitnesses have been left to recount what they endured.14
14. Survival in the less technologically complex gas vans did occasionally occur. Drivers often halted the gassing procedure as soon as the screams of the victims had ceased, which did not necessarily guarantee that all individuals within the van were dead. Eyewitness testimony indicates that SS guards routinely shot those victims who survived the gas vans at Chełmno. Famously, a Soviet civilian survived a gassing of mental patients in a gas van at Krasnodar on the Kuban River in present-day Russia and testified concerning his experience at the 1943 Krasnodar Trial, the first war crimes proceedings against Axis criminals and their accomplices.
In his 1946 memoir, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, Hungarian prisoner-physician Miklós Nyiszli gives us an idea of how such a gassing must have seemed to a child in Auschwitz in 1944. In June of that year, Nyiszli was deported with his wife and young daughter from Oradea, in present day Romania,15 to Auschwitz. Volunteering to work as a physician in the prisoner barracks, Nyiszli came to the attention of Birkenau camp physician Josef Mengele, who commandeered the young doctor to aid in his own “research.” Forced to assist Mengele with his experimentation, Nyiszli was quartered in Birkenau’s Crematorium III, which he shared with the Jewish Sonderkommando responsible for the removal and disposal of corpses after gassing. In this context Nyiszli encountered a young girl who emerged alive from the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
15. Oradea had, along with northern Transylvania, been ceded by Hungary to Romania in the 1919 Treaty of Trianon. Hungary regained the territory in 1940 but was forced to return it to Romania in 1947.
Document 5-5. Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, trans. Tibère Kremer and Richard Seaver (Hungarian ed., 1946; New York: Frederick Fell Publishers, 1960), 114–20.
In Number One Crematorium’s gas chamber 3,000 dead were piled up. The Sonderkommando had already begun to untangle the lattice of flesh. The noise of the elevators and the sound of their clanging doors reached my room. The work moved ahead double time. The gas chambers had to be cleared, for the arrival of a new convoy had been announced.
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 the pile of corpses.”
I grabbed my instrument case, which was always ready, and dashed to the gas chamber. Against the wall, near the entrance of the immense room, half covered with other bodies, I saw a girl in the throes of a death-rattle, her body seized with convulsions. The gas Kommando men around me were in a state of panic. Nothing like this had ever happened in the course of their horrible career.
We removed the still-living body from the corpses pressing against it. I gathered the tiny adolescent body into my arms and carried it back into the room adjoining the gas chamber, where normally the gas Kommando men change clothes for work. 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. [. . .]
She looked around her with astonishment, and glanced at us. She still did not realize what was happening to her, and was still incapable of distinguishing the present, of knowing whether she was dreaming or really awake. A veil of mist clouded her consciousness. Perhaps she vaguely remembered a train, a long line of boxcars which had brought her here. Then she had lined up for selection and, before she knew what was happening, been swept along by the current of the mass into a large, brilliantly lighted underground room. Everything had happened so quickly. Perhaps she remembered that everyone had had to undress. The impression had been disagreeable, but everybody had yielded resignedly to the order. And so, naked, she had been swept along into another room. The second room had also been lighted by powerful lamps. Completely bewildered, she had let her gaze wander over the mass huddled there, but found none of her family. Pressed close against the wall, she had waited, her heart frozen, for what was going to happen. All of a sudden, the lights had gone out, leaving her enveloped in total darkness. Something had stung her eyes, seized her throat, suffocated her. She had fainted. There her memories ceased.
Her movements were becoming more and more animated; she tried to move her hands, her feet, to turn her head left and right. [. . .] I received the first reply to my questions. Not wanting to tire her, I asked only a few. I learned that she was sixteen years old, and that she had come with her parents in a convoy from Transylvania. [. . .]
What could one do with a young girl in the crematorium’s Sonderkommando? I knew the past history of the place: no one had ever come out of here alive, either from the convoys or the Sonderkommando.16
16. After several months at their ghastly labor, members of the Sonderkommando were routinely murdered and replaced in their duties by a fresh detachment of prisoners.
Little time remained for reflection. [Oberscharführer] Mussfeld arrived to supervise the work, as was his wont. [. . .] 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 B] 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 chance she had fallen with her face against the wet concrete floor. That bit of humidity had kept her from being asphyxiated, for [Zyklon B] 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. [. . .] One solution would have been to put her in front of the crematorium gate. A Kommando of women always worked there. She could have slipped in among them and accompanied them back to the camp barracks after they had finished work. She would never relate what had happened to her. The presence of one new face among so many thousands would never be detected, for no one in the camp knew all the other inmates.
If she had been three or four years older that might have worked. A girl of twenty would have been able to understand clearly the miraculous circumstances of her survival, and have enough foresight not to tell anyone about them. She would wait for better times, like so many other thousands were waiting, to recount what she had lived through. But Mussfeld thought that a young girl of sixteen would in all naiveté tell the first person she met where she had just come from, what she had seen and what she had lived through. The news would spread like wildfire, and we would all be forced to pay for it with our lives.
“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.
In a Living Hell: Survival in Camps
Beginning in the autumn months of 1943, prisoners resident in Birkenau, the camp that housed Auschwitz’s killing center, were privy to a strange and puzzling sight. Those venturing near the area of the cam
p designated “B II b” could see young children—hundreds of them—playing, performing calisthenics, and engaging in study in the company of their teachers and guardians. With the exception of those youngsters—many of them twins—whom camp physician Dr. Josef Mengele had selected for medical experimentation and housed in Block 10, there were, practically speaking, no Jewish children in Birkenau.17 The vast majority of young persons arriving at Auschwitz perished immediately in the gas chambers. To Auschwitz prisoners, the image was jarring: unshorn and relatively well-fed youngsters gamboling about their blocks in civilian clothes. Where had these children come from, and what were they doing in Birkenau?
17. Nili Keren, “The Family Camp,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994), 431.
The children in question belonged to a unique group of prisoners from the Terezin ghetto who for nearly a year formed the Theresienstadt family camp. In September 1943, five thousand Czech Jews, among them over one thousand youngsters and adolescents,18 arrived at Auschwitz from Theresienstadt. Spared the customary selection, they were brought directly to a special part of the Birkenau quarantine area close to the main entrance gate. Placed within a separate barracks network, designated “B II b,” these Jews were processed as special prisoners with the designation “SB6.” Although they received tattooed prisoner numbers upon their arms, their hair remained unshorn, and they were allowed to retain their civilian clothing. Men and women were housed in separate blocks, but prisoners could move freely within the small camp, and children could remain with their parents.19 These Jews were not assigned to labor brigades and were allowed, even encouraged, to write letters as well as to receive correspondence and parcels from outside Auschwitz.
18. See Helena Kubica, “Children,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994), 415.
19. In the late spring of 1944, shortly before the liquidation of the family camp, a separate block was designated for children so that they no longer slept in their parents’ barracks.
At the time, no one understood the purpose of the family camp or why its inhabitants received such preferential treatment. When a further transport of five thousand Jews from Theresienstadt arrived at Birkenau that December and were added to their ranks, residents of the little camp could only infer from their privileged existence that they had been spared for a reason and that their fate would be essentially different from that of other prisoners. However, on the night of March 7, 1944, exactly six months after their arrival from Theresienstadt to the family camp, prisoners from the first transport of Jews were assembled and taken to the gas chamber without a selection. Gradually, the significance of the notation “SB6” in the Czech Jews’ prisoner records became clear. The code implied Sonderbehandlung (special treatment)20 in six months, suggesting that six months after their arrival, surviving Jews from the December transport would share the fate of earlier family camp members.
20. This was a Nazi euphemism for execution or killing.
But what could explain the curious delay between the arrival and gassing of these deportees, and why were those ultimately doomed to perish in the crematoria detained under such privileged circumstances? Most historians believe that the answer to this question lies in the correspondence between Nazi authorities and officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Succumbing to pressure following the deportation of Danish Jews to Theresienstadt, German administrators arranged to allow representatives of the ICRC to inspect the Theresienstadt ghetto on June 23, 1944. Originally Nazi officials had planned to include a Red Cross visit to Birkenau in the ICRC’s itinerary in order to deflect allegations that camps like Auschwitz represented industrialized killing centers that were claiming the lives of thousands of Jews and other persecutees. Just as Theresienstadt became a sanitized “model ghetto” for ICRC visitors, the Theresienstadt family camp would “give the lie” to rumors of the mass murder of European Jewry. International Red Cross members, however, were satisfied after their visit to Theresienstadt that Jews transferred there remained in the ghetto and were relatively well cared for. Correspondence from Birkenau to relatives and friends in Theresienstadt, relating the satisfactory conditions at the camp, furnished further evidence that speculation about the systematic murder of Jews in Auschwitz was “unfounded.” After ten months, the family camp in Birkenau had served its purpose. In July 1944, survivors of the camp’s December transports were put to a selection. The majority was gassed, while the camp itself was liquidated.
Thirteen-year-old Michal Kraus arrived at Auschwitz with his parents from Theresienstadt in December 1943. The teenager had been raised in the Bohemian town of Nachod, where his father, Karl Kraus, was a physician. In December 1942, the Krauses, like many Czech Jews, were deported to Theresienstadt. One year later, the small family came with a transport of five thousand Jews from the Terezin ghetto to Birkenau and was absorbed within the family camp. For six months the Krauses lived there in relative safety. Then, in June 1944, Kraus’s mother, Lotte, was transferred to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig (Gdańsk), where she perished in January 1945. In early July, camp officials moved to eliminate the family camp and subjected its residents to the selection process. Michal numbered among the eighty-nine young boys, aged fourteen to sixteen, spared by Auschwitz camp physician Josef Mengele for reasons that remain unclear. These “Birkenau Boys,” as they came to be known, were removed to the men’s camp (Männerlager) and initially settled in the punishment block there. From this vantage point, the young Kraus could observe the gassing and incineration of friends and loved ones in the family camp, including his father, who was killed on July 11. Michal eventually lodged in the Unterkunft-Verwaltung, the housing administration. He survived Auschwitz as a runner (Läufer), a messenger assigned to convey communications and supplies among officials in the heart of the extermination camp.
In the early months of 1945, the fourteen-year-old endured a series of forced marches from Auschwitz to Gleiwitz and then to several camps and subcamps of the Mauthausen concentration camp system. On May 5, 1945, he was liberated by American forces at the Gunskirchen Lager in Upper Austria. Returning orphaned to Czechoslovakia, the teenager reconstructed his Holocaust experiences in a three-volume chronicle, completed in 1947. Michal’s postwar diary, which he dedicated to his slain parents, yields unique insight into the experiences and viewpoints of children during the Holocaust. Punctuated by remarkable illustrations, such as the images included here of the blazing crematoria, the journal is an extraordinary story of survival in the charnel world of the death camp.
Document 5-6. Diary of Michal (Michael) Kraus, handwritten with illustrations, 1945–1947, 54–60, USHMMA, Acc. 2006.51, Michael Kraus Collection (translated from the Czech).
At that time—in the summer of 1944, at the beginning of July, I saw my dearest parents for the last time. It is hard for me to describe how I felt at the time.
Generally speaking, with every transport, new names appeared: [Blechhammer], Belsen, Buchenwald. Mother left on the 5th or the 8th to Stutthof from the Frauenlager [women’s camp] together with Vera Loewenbach, with whom she has been together since the first.
I did not know that we would never, never see each other again. Maybe it was better. And then they selected us, eighty-nine boys. The others had to stay behind and . . . it is a horror to think about it. Leaving father was terrible. I see him in front of me, emaciated, sick. How he cried, he who had always been so good to everyone, and now I left him behind, left him to die. I can’t think about this because it was the most horrible moment of my life.
They led us to the gate, in the direction of the Sauna21—the crematorium lay nearby. We were surprised that they took us to the Sauna in
the Gypsy Camp and then to Block 13, the men’s camp.
21. In Birkenau, this building housed shower and steam rooms for the disinfection of registered prisoners.
It is painful to remember all those who at that time remained in B II b, so that they could be gassed later on—hundreds of acquaintances and comrades, those who never returned from the transports. [. . .]
We came to a block where the Sonderkommando lived. In the beginning we fared well. From the Hungarian [name illegible], we stole a lot of food that was destined for the men’s camp. There I became a Läufer [runner or messenger] in the Unterkunft. I met a lot of people there, good ones and bad ones. I didn’t have too bad a time.
On July 11, I did not sleep. The night was bright, the sky red. Of that—I cannot talk about it. On July 11, they killed my father. I balled my fists, I cried, and I promised to avenge him. Many of us lost their loved ones that day. [. . .]
The sky was burning!
Yes, it really was! At night the windows of the block were completely red. All the crematoria worked in full swing. The gas chambers continuously choked their victims. It was a slaughterhouse such as the world had never seen. Tens of thousands went daily to the gas. They hounded them out of the cattle cars directly to their deaths. And sometimes directly into the flames. And that was what we were supposed to see in the camp!
In its brief months of existence, the Theresienstadt family camp at Birkenau was a haven for children who might otherwise have gone directly to the gas. Among the first arrivals to the family camp from Theresienstadt in September 1943 was Fredy Hirsch, a well-known educator and a youth leader in the Terezin ghetto. Hirsch used his privileged circumstances at the camp to improve the lot of hundreds of children assigned there. He arranged with camp officials to create a separate children’s block (Block 31) where youngsters might receive educational instruction, engage in structured play, and obtain more appropriate and nutritious meals.
Children during the Holocaust Page 25