In addition to hunger and thirst, there was crippling fear. Most men, women, and children on this and other deportation trains did not know that they were heading to Auschwitz, and to their deaths. But many Polish Jews had heard of the camp. Langfus, for example, knew it as a notorious punishment camp and a destination for Jewish transports. There were also rumors about mass extermination inside. Jews who lived closer to Auschwitz even heard about prisoners being thrown into “furnaces” or “gassed to death,” as a local girl from Będzin noted in her diary in early 1943. Despite such rumors, some deported Polish prisoners remained defiantly upbeat. “We are off to work. Think positive,” declared a letter thrown from another train en route from a Polish ghetto to Auschwitz in late 1942. But there was no way of masking the underlying anxieties. While Jews deported from central and western Europe had lived far from the epicenter of the Holocaust and often remained more hopeful that all that awaited them was hard labor (as German officials had promised them before departure and as postcards by friends and relatives, written under duress from the SS, seemed to confirm), Polish Jews had already suffered many months of misery and violence in the ghettos. Langfus and his family had lived through shortages and epidemics, and had witnessed beatings, slave labor, public executions, and murders. Like elsewhere in occupied Poland, talk about Nazi massacres in ghettos and camps had spread during 1942, and when the inhabitants of Maków Mazowiecki were told that they, too, would soon be deported, they were gripped by anxiety. Little Samuel Langfus sobbed inconsolably, screaming again and again: “I want to live!” His distraught father feared the worst, too. Shortly before he boarded the train to Auschwitz, Lejb Langfus spent a restless night in Mława, agonizing with others about their fate: “We were thinking about what would await us at the end of this journey: death or life?”84
The Auschwitz SS knew the answer. The camp authorities were routinely alerted about impending transports—by the responsible local police authorities or the RSHA (or both)—so that preparations could be made.85 Once a train approached, which could happen at all hours, the well-oiled SS machine got into gear. The officer on duty blew a whistle to alert the Commandant Staff, shouting: “Transport is here!” SS officers, doctors, drivers, block leaders, and the rest quickly took their positions. Medical orderlies sometimes drove straight to the gas chambers in Birkenau. Meanwhile, dozens of SS men climbed on trucks and motorcycles, and headed for the “Jews’ ramp” (Judenrampe), part of a new freight station between the camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau (from May 1944, transports arrived at another ramp inside Birkenau itself). As the train pulled up along the lengthy wooden platform, SS guards formed “a chain around the transport,” SS officer Franz Hössler testified in 1945; then the order was given to open the doors.86
The shock of arrival in Auschwitz was overwhelming. Lejb, Deborah, and Samuel Langfus, and the other Jews from Mława, had been in a daze for over a day when their train came to a sudden halt, late on December 6, 1942. Then everything seemed to happen at once. The doors flung open, and SS men and some inmates in striped uniforms hurried the Jews off the trains. To speed things up, they screamed and pushed those who hesitated. There were kicks and blows, though the guards rarely went further. Restraint was more likely to guarantee order and compliance, since it helped to deceive the victims about their fate. In great haste, the 2,500 or so Jews from Mława spilled onto the platform, clutching each other and their belongings; left behind were the bodies of old people and children who had been crushed to death during the journey.
Emerging from the dark train, the dazed prisoners blinked into harsh lights that “clouded their minds,” Lejb Langfus wrote some months later, in secret. Lampposts illuminated the large area around them, teeming with SS men with weapons and guard dogs. Amid the turmoil and terror, the bewildered Jews were forced to move away from the train and leave behind their bags, bundles, and suitcases, which were then piled up by inmates from the so-called Canada Commando. The loss of their possessions paralyzed the new arrivals, but they had no time to think before the SS told them to line up in two groups, men on one side, and women and most children on the other. The order left many prisoners numb. They had arrived in large families, but the guards quickly drove them apart, as siblings and spouses, sons and daughters, frantically tried to embrace one more time. “Dreadful crying could be heard,” noted Lejb Langfus, who had to let go of his wife and son. As the two columns formed, several yards apart, many prisoners lost sight of their loved ones and never saw them again. The columns, with five prisoners in each row, soon moved forward toward a small group of SS men who, as Langfus learned, decided their destiny: “The selection began.”87
In Auschwitz, regular SS selections of Jews on arrival had started in summer 1942, following Himmler’s decision that Jews unable to work should join the RSHA deportation trains.88 Since all Jews on board were doomed, Himmler had apparently approved selections as a means to determine when and how they would perish. Some would be registered for murderous forced labor; the rest would be gassed straightaway. By the time Lejb Langfus and the others from Mława arrived in Auschwitz—on one of the more than a dozen deportation transports in December 1942—such selections had long become routine.89 SS men were in a hurry and acted “pretty haphazardly,” according to the postwar confession of Rottenführer Pery Broad from the Auschwitz political office; often, the selections were over in one hour. As individual Jews stumbled forward to the head of the ramp, the SS officer in charge—mostly the camp doctor on duty, supported by other senior officials like the camp compound leaders and labor action leaders—had a quick glance, asked some of them about their age and occupation, and then gave a nod or wave, casually pointing to the left or the right. At the time, few prisoners knew that this brief gesture meant immediate death or temporary reprieve.90
The Auschwitz SS officials agreed on broad benchmarks for the selection of Jews, going beyond the criteria they had established during the earlier selections of suspected Soviet commissars.91 Dr. Fritz Klein, one of the Auschwitz SS physicians, put it succinctly: “It was the doctor’s job to pick out those who were unfit or unable to work. These included children, old people, and the sick.”92 Like everywhere else during the Nazi war on Jews, children were most vulnerable. Between 1942 and 1945, around 210,000 were deported to Auschwitz. Those under the age of fourteen were almost all gassed on arrival; so, too, were most of the older ones. In all, fewer than 2,500 Jewish children survived the initial selections.93 Many Jewish women were in great danger, too, even if they were in good health, as the SS murdered most mothers with younger children, rather than separating them at the ramp.94 Some mothers, meanwhile, abandoned their children with the best of intentions. After Olga Lengyel arrived in Auschwitz, she was determined to protect her son, Arvad, from what she feared would be hard labor. When she was asked by Dr. Klein how old her boy was, she insisted that he was under thirteen, although he looked older. Dr. Klein duly sent Arvad to the gas chambers. “How should I have known,” Lengyel wrote in despair after the war.95
Some new arrivals learned the truth just in time. As they climbed off the trains or waited at the ramp, inmates from the Canada Commando defied SS orders and told them three basic rules for the selections: act strong and healthy, claim to be between sixteen and forty years old, hand young children to elderly relatives.96 Such advice saved a number of Jews, at least temporarily.97 But it also caused dreadful dilemmas. Mothers, in particular, faced a split-second decision. To abandon their children on the barely comprehensible advice of a stranger? Or to join them and stand with a group ominously made up of the elderly and frail? There was no right decision based on ordinary moral norms. Instead, it was one of the “choiceless choices” in Auschwitz, as the scholar Lawrence Langer called them.98
Most Jews were murdered within hours of the selections at the ramp. In general, Commandant Höss always wanted more slaves; when SS Oberführer Schmelt interrupted deportation trains bound for Auschwitz and pulled out Jewish men for his own labor camps, Höss
and Eichmann agreed to foil such preselections, which deprived Auschwitz of the best workers.99 When it came to selections at the Auschwitz ramp, however, Höss was adamant that “only the very healthiest and very strongest Jews” should be spared. Otherwise, the camp would be overburdened by needy prisoners, creating worse conditions for everyone.100 Although there was some internal criticism of Höss’s hard-line approach, many Auschwitz SS men shared it. Despite all the talk of forced labor, Rottenführer Pery Broad testified, these men saw “the annihilation of the largest number of ‘enemies of the state’ as their primary task.”101 Some senior SS officers agreed, among them Reich physician Ernst Grawitz, who observed the mass murder in Auschwitz and supported extensive gassings as a radical weapon against illness in the KL.102 By contrast, Oswald Pohl and senior WVHA managers repeatedly reprimanded Höss, arguing that the Auschwitz SS should select as many Jews as possible for forced labor, including weak ones who could be deployed for a short period of time only.103 SS leader Heinrich Himmler, the ultimate authority, wavered between both sides of the argument.104
In the end, the default option for SS officers at the Auschwitz ramp was to point toward the gas chambers; on average, only around twenty percent of Jews were selected for forced labor and registered as Auschwitz prisoners (though there were significant variations between transports and over time).105 The SS applied a similar measure on the night of December 6, 1942, to the transport from Mława. Only 406 young and strong men were temporarily spared (unusually, the SS condemned all women on board). Among the chosen few was Lejb Langfus. His wife, Deborah, and his son, Samuel, disappeared into the other group, more than two thousand people strong. Langfus watched intently as women and children calmly climbed on board large SS trucks, illuminated in the bright lights. Many prisoners were deceived by the sight of polite SS men aiding ailing Jews onto the trucks, mistaking it as a sign of charity. Other SS men reassured the remaining Jewish men that they would soon meet their loved ones again; Langfus was told that he would see his family once a week in a special barrack. Then the trucks drove off and made their way to the gas chambers.106
Fire and Gas
The other Jews selected for the gas normally followed the same road as the trucks, marching for one and a half miles from the ramp, past the Birkenau camp and across a meadow, toward the converted farmhouses. “This is a one-way street,” Charlotte Delbo (who arrived from France in early 1943) later wrote, “but no one knows it.” During the march, SS men normally kept the prisoners in line with guard dogs. But they also kept up the deception, casually asking Jews about their jobs and background, and telling them that they were heading to the baths, for disinfection. Some prisoners were relieved to notice that they were followed by an ambulance, which was driving slowly at the rear of the column; occasionally, it even carried Jews unable to walk. But the ambulance was not meant to provide medical care. Its real purpose was to carry the SS doctor to oversee the gassing. The tins of Zyklon B were also on board. “Nobody was bothered in the slightest,” Commandant Höss recalled, “about profaning the sign of the Red Cross by driving to the extermination facilities.”107
When the final destination came into view, the first impression was reassuring: a little farmhouse and two wooden barracks (for undressing), surrounded by fruit trees. On site were more SS men and a group of inmates from the so-called Special Squad (Sonderkommando), who had to assist in mass murder. By the time the prisoner column had come to a halt, those who had earlier arrived by truck were often already inside the farmhouse. Before long, the others had joined them. Those who moved too slowly were hit by SS men and attacked by the dogs. As they stumbled inside, the last thing they saw was a sign on the open doors: “To the Baths.” Once the rooms had been crammed full of men, women, and children, the heavy doors were locked and the SS physician ordered the medical orderly to throw in the gas. SS doctor Johann Paul Kremer, who supervised numerous gassings in autumn 1942, later testified that he drove off after the “screams and noise of the victims” had died down.108 The gas chambers remained off-limits for some time, often overnight, as there was no mechanical ventilation in bunkers 1 and 2 to draw out the fumes.109
Once the doors were opened, prisoners from the special squad set to work. One of them was Lejb Langfus. After the SS had separated him from his wife and son at the ramp on December 6, 1942, he had marched into the Birkenau compound, together with the other Jewish men selected that day for slave labor. The next morning, they had been led from their barrack to the so-called Birkenau sauna for the usual admissions procedure. After a shower, they had their heads shaved and received striped uniforms; then they were tattooed. Two days later, on the evening of December 9, 1942, SS officers led by Hauptscharführer Otto Moll suddenly appeared in the prisoners’ barrack and announced that they would choose some strong inmates for a special assignment in a rubber factory. Each prisoner stepped forward and Moll took his pick. None of the three hundred or so Jewish men knew that they had really been selected for the Special Squad. Neither did they know that at the same time the corpses of their predecessors—the first Birkenau Special Squad—were burning inside the old crematorium.
The following day, December 10, most men from the new Special Squad were escorted out of the Birkenau compound, not to any rubber factory, but to the gas chambers, which were operating at full capacity that day (with almost 4,500 Jews arriving on transports from Holland, Germany, and Poland). Surrounded by SS men with guard dogs, Moll addressed the new Special Squad prisoners. They did not yet know that this small, blond man, who looked rather amiable, with his round and freckled face, was feared across the camp. Not only was he exceptionally brutal, Moll was also one of a small group of Camp SS experts in mass murder and cremation. After he had instructed the prisoners about their real task, he threatened anyone who refused to participate with beatings and wild dogs.110
The prisoners of the two Special Squads—one for each of the converted farmhouses—now split into different groups. Among the dozen or so prisoners who had to pull bodies out of the gas chambers on December 10, 1942, was a burly twenty-year-old with broad shoulders called Shlomo (Szlama) Dragon. Born in a small Polish town, he had lived for more than a year in the Warsaw ghetto, where his father and sister were to die, before escaping together with his older brother, Abraham. Exhausted, after hiding for months without papers, the two brothers eventually joined a transport to what they assumed was a forced labor camp. On December 6, 1942, they arrived in Auschwitz, on the same train that brought the muscular Lejb Langfus to the camp; like Langfus, the Dragon brothers were selected for the Special Squad.111
Wearing masks, Shlomo Dragon and the other men from his commando had to enter the gas chambers after they were opened on December 10, 1942; “it was very hot” inside, he testified a few years later, “and one could feel the gas.” Next, they had to drag out the entangled corpses. Complaining that the prisoners from the Special Squad were moving too carefully, Moll showed them how it was done. “He rolled up his sleeves,” Dragon recalled, “and threw the corpses through the door into the yard.” Here, other Special Squad members stripped the dead of anything the SS regarded as valuable. Some prisoners had to cut the hair of the dead, while so-called dentists pried open the corpses’ foaming mouths to rip out gold teeth (some “dentists” took regular breaks to vomit). Once the building was empty, Special Squad prisoners had to wash the floors, scatter more wood shavings, and touch up the white walls, until the bunker was ready for the next transport.112 From now on, this would be the life of Shlomo and Abraham Dragon, Lejb Langfus, and the others from the Special Squad.
Like many mass murderers before them, the Auschwitz SS men soon realized that it was easier to kill than to dispose of the victims. In their haste to create a large death camp, SS planners had given little thought to the corpses. When the mass extermination transports began in summer 1942, there was no working crematorium: the old one was out of commission, while the new one in Birkenau was not yet built. As the bodies of Jews gassed i
n Birkenau mounted up, the SS resorted to the same makeshift solution it had used months earlier, during the mass deaths of Soviet POWs, and buried the bodies in ditches in the Birkenau forest (together with thousands of deceased registered prisoners). But this soon proved impractical. By the time Himmler visited in mid-July 1942, the camp was engulfed in a sickening smell. In the heat of the summer, rotting body parts spilled out of mass graves, and there were concerns that the groundwater would be contaminated, threatening the whole region. With more extermination transports on the way, the Camp SS hurried to accelerate the completion of the new crematorium in Birkenau.113
Looking ahead, the WVHA construction experts around Hans Kammler agreed that a single new crematorium would no longer suffice, given the role of Auschwitz in the Holocaust. By August 1942, they had settled on three additional crematoria for Birkenau; together, the four new buildings would be able to burn one hundred and twenty thousand corpses each month. Soon, SS planners added an additional feature to the emerging Birkenau crematorium complex—gas chambers. Moving the gassings from the converted farmhouses into the new crematoria would allow the SS to murder and burn the victims in the same location (just like in the main camps’ old crematorium). Genocide would become more efficient. The almost identical crematoria II and III were now redesigned for mass murder, by turning the morgues in the basement into undressing rooms and gas chambers; mechanical ventilation was fitted to draw out the gas, and a lift was added for moving corpses to the incinerators on the ground floor. By contrast, the smaller crematoria IV and V had simpler structures, as they were designed from the start to accommodate mass gassings; both were long above-ground brick buildings, with undressing rooms, gas chambers (naturally ventilated), and incinerators, all on one level.114
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