KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps

by Nikolaus Wachsmann

  Choosing life in the Birkenau Special Squad was one of the most impossible “choiceless choices” facing prisoners in Auschwitz.65 What kind of life was this, amidst all the dead? Some men became inured to the suffering, acting indifferent and cruel, and focused only on the material benefits. Others suffered from the daily corrosion of their souls, and escaped into drink. It was not just the horror of mass murder—the pleas, the screams, the bodies, the blood—that haunted them, but their deep sense of guilt, having been deprived by the SS “of even the solace of innocence,” in Primo Levi’s words.66 But there were also acts of kindness and courage. As they did not expect to survive, several Special Squad prisoners documented the crimes they witnessed, knowing that no other inmates would come closer to the Nazi heart of darkness. Writing such secret notes required bravery, teamwork, and ingenuity. The great personal risk was worth it, the prisoners felt, to preserve their voices for future generations. Nine different documents, buried on the grounds of the Birkenau killing complex, were recovered after liberation. Among them was a brief message by one of the last surviving members of the Special Squad—he has never been identified—written on November 26, 1944. Certain that he was about to be murdered, he added a final note to several others he had buried earlier in boxes and receptacles near crematoria II and III. At the end of his message, he made this last plea: “I am asking for everything to be arranged together and published with the title ‘Amidst a Nightmare of Crime.’”67

  Women and Men

  During the Holocaust, women moved from the fringes toward the center of the concentration camp system. For years, female prisoners had been marginal. But the 1942 decision to use camps in occupied eastern Europe for the “annihilation through labor” of Jewish prisoners irrespective of their gender changed everything. In Majdanek, Jewish women accounted for over one-third of all prisoners by spring 1943.68 In Auschwitz, the ratio of female to male inmates fell to less than 1:2 by the end of 1943; and the vast majority of these imprisoned women were Jewish.69 Back in Ravensbrück, female prisoners had initially remained insulated from some of the worst SS excesses. Not so in eastern Europe. From the moment they first set foot in Auschwitz in spring 1942, women faced dreadful conditions, ruinous labor, and extreme violence. Official SS statistics confirm the deadly reality of their lives. During July 1943, registered female prisoners were more than twenty times more likely to die in Auschwitz than in Ravensbrück.70 In all, an estimated fifty-four thousand registered women lost their lives in Auschwitz in 1942–43.71

  Of all the female prisoners in the hands of the SS, Jewish women faced the gravest danger. Inside eastern European KL, their mortality rate was broadly similar to that of Jewish men.72 In fact, it was even higher, if one includes those killed without formal registration (since more Jewish women than men were singled out for immediate extermination on arrival). Overall, the gender-determined delay in Camp SS terror came to an end in 1942–43, at least for Jewish women in eastern Europe. However, this did not mean that their experiences were now identical to those of Jewish men. Many gendered differences remained, while others, such as pregnancy, gained new significance.

  Previously, prisoner pregnancies had been regarded as a peripheral problem by the Camp SS. Overall numbers of female prisoners had been relatively small anyway, and there was also a ban (at least on paper) on sending pregnant women to state prisons and concentration camps.73 But as the war continued, this ban became increasingly meaningless, especially during the mass deportations of the Holocaust: the Nazi Final Solution targeted all Jews. In Auschwitz, visibly pregnant Jewish women were selected on arrival and gassed; a few were subjected to atrocities at the ramp, like a Greek woman who was kicked so hard in the stomach by an SS man in summer 1943 that she immediately aborted.74 Jewish prisoners whose pregnancy was discovered later on, after they had joined the ranks of registered slave laborers, were also regularly gassed, either before or after giving birth, and their newborns were killed, too. “Jewish children were immediately exterminated,” the former Birkenau camp compound leader Johann Schwarzhuber admitted after the war. In other KL in the east, too, babies born inside were murdered; in Riga, SS men even preserved the corpses of a few infants in a special solution. Meanwhile, some women returned to work after they had suffered a stillbirth or after prisoner doctors had carried out a secret abortion.75 In Auschwitz, prisoner doctors and orderlies even conspired to kill newborn children to save the mothers. “And so, the Germans succeeded in making murderers of even us,” Olga Lengyel, who worked in the Birkenau infirmary, wrote after the war. “To this day the picture of those murdered babies haunts me.”76

  Male prisoners in Auschwitz had been incredulous when they heard about the new women’s compound.77 But contacts remained sporadic, at least in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the prisoners were strictly separated by sex.78 For the most part, encounters with the opposite sex did not go beyond brief glimpses from afar, which often caused pity and horror. The destruction of masculine and feminine traits—reducing prisoners to bald and gaunt figures—demonstrated the powers of the SS. In the absence of mirrors, it was also a brutal reminder of each prisoner’s own desexualization and dehumanization.79 Occasionally, men and women in Auschwitz-Birkenau managed to exchange a quick word at the fence or to throw some food across. A few husbands and wives even corresponded by letter, carried by civilian workers and non-Jewish inmates. But such contacts were rare, and their impotence to fulfill gendered expectations—protecting female friends or relatives—deepened the anguish of some Jewish men.80

  The situation was rather different in the new main concentration camps and satellites established in eastern Europe in 1943–44. Here, too, Jewish prisoners were normally separated by gender—in different compounds, barracks, or rooms—but the layout of these camps made strict isolation more difficult. The closer contact between men and women also reflected the previous use of some of these sites as ghettos or forced labor camps. In KL Plaszow, for example, men and women were still allowed to meet up in the evenings, walking through the unlocked gate that separated their compounds. Elsewhere, men and women worked in the same labor commandos.81 Once again, SS rules regarded as immutable in established concentration camps were eroded in the new camps for Jews.

  The detention of male and female prisoners in the same camps soon gave rise to salacious stories among both prisoners and SS.82 After the war, the obsession with sex in the camps grew further, spawning a perverse pornography of pain. Following a spate of sadomasochistic films in the 1970s, Primo Levi pleaded: “Please, all you cinema producers, leave the women’s camps alone.”83 In reality, sexual activity had largely been the preserve of a few privileged prisoners. In the short lives of most Jewish KL prisoners during the Holocaust, it had played little or no role: starvation killed their sex drive before it killed them.84 An Austrian Jew, who had come to Auschwitz in 1942, recalled that his sexual urges had simply vanished.85 Most women experienced the same. A Jewish teacher deported from Hungary to Auschwitz in 1944 noted in her diary that she “ceased to be a sexual being” (for many younger women, such feelings were intensified because they stopped menstruating in the camps).86 Any encounters that did occur often involved an element of exploitation or force, at least in the case of Jewish prisoners. Most common was probably sex for survival, with prisoners making pragmatic decisions to become intimate with privileged inmates, mostly non-Jews, in exchange for essential goods like food or clothing.87 Instead of flowers, one survivor recalled, a man might bring a woman a piece of margarine. In this way, sex became another commodity to be exchanged in the camps’ flourishing underground economy.88

  Children

  The Holocaust was unprecedented, it has often been said, because of the Nazis’ intention to annihilate an entire people, “down to its last member” in the words of Elie Wiesel.89 The program of all-out mass extermination meant that countless families were dragged to SS concentration camps together. On arrival, they were almost always ripped apart, and most were dead within hours, a
t least in a death camp like Auschwitz. The survivors suffered a dual trauma. In addition to the shock of Auschwitz, which hit all new prisoners, they soon learned that their wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, or children had already been killed in the nearby gas chambers.

  After Salmen Gradowski was allocated a prisoner barrack in Birkenau, having just survived the initial selection following his deportation from Grodno ghetto (Bialystok district) in late 1942, he and other men on his transport immediately asked the more experienced inmates about the fate of their families: What had happened since their separation at the ramp? The veterans answered with brutal honesty, as Gradowski recorded in secret notes buried on the grounds of the camp: “They are already in heaven,” the veterans said, and: “Your families have already been let go with the smoke.” Auschwitz was an extermination camp, the newcomers were told, and the first rule was to “leave behind all sorrow about your families.”90

  Many other recent arrivals were initiated similarly, but once the awful truth sank in, they reacted in very different ways. Some tried to repress their grief; when Dr. Elie Cohen, a thirty-four-year-old Dutch Jew who arrived in Auschwitz from Westerbork in September 1943, learned that his wife and son had been murdered in the gas chambers, he just wanted “to keep it up”—to go on living (as he later wrote).91 Other men and women broke down. Magda Zelikovitz remembers that she went “completely mad” after she realized that her seven-year-old son, her mother, and the rest of her family (with whom she had just been deported from Budapest) had been gassed: “I did not want to live anymore.” Other prisoners stopped her several times from throwing herself into the electric fence.92

  The shock of Auschwitz was greatest for children who suddenly found themselves abandoned. Although the vast majority of Jewish children were murdered on arrival, thousands were registered as prisoners, here and in the other KL for Jews in the east. Albert Abraham Buton was just thirteen years old when he was separated from his mother and father at the Auschwitz ramp in April 1943, after their deportation from Salonika. His parents were taken straight to the gas chambers, leaving Albert and his brother behind. “We couldn’t think, we were so stunned,” he recalled, “we were unable to grasp what was happening.”93 As more child prisoners like Buton were registered (both Jews and non-Jews), the average age of the prisoner population fell. In Majdanek, the authorities responded by creating a new position in the prisoner hierarchy: in addition to the camp elder, there was now a camp youngest, who received special SS privileges.94

  The SS was partially blind to the age of its prisoners and forced the younger victims to undergo many of the same hardships as adults. Many children, too, suffered abuse, hunger, and roll calls, as well as hard labor. Mascha Rolnikaite was sixteen years old when she had to carry heavy rocks and push carts full of stones and sand on construction sites near the Riga satellite camp Strasdenhof. Other youths worked as gardeners and bricklayers. As for those judged too young to work, small children in Majdanek had to march in circles all day.95 Nor were child prisoners exempt from SS beatings and official punishments like the penal companies.96 Some suffered an even worse fate. In the Vaivara satellite camp Narva, for example, ten-year-old Mordchaj was strung up, after a failed escape, by the SS commando leader as a warning to all others (the SS man later cut him down and he survived).97

  Selections posed a constant threat, as the children learned only too well. After one of the periodic selections among Jews in the Birkenau quarantine camp, a prisoner doctor briefly spoke to a small boy from Będzin called Jurek, who was among those chosen to die. When the doctor asked him how he was, the boy answered: “I am not afraid, everything is so dreadful here, it can only be better up there.”98 Some SS sweeps targeted children only. In Majdanek, Jewish children and babies were taken to a special barrack, cut off from the women’s compound by barbed wire. At regular intervals, SS men emptied this barrack, driving the victims into the gas chambers. Some children escaped, only to be pulled out of hiding by guard dogs. Others struggled with the guards. “The children screamed and did not want to go,” the Majdanek survivor Henrika Mitron testified after the war. “The children were dragged around and thrown on the truck.”99

  There was no room for innocence in the KL. Children had to live by the rules of the camp and were often forced to act like adults.100 Terror even seeped into the games they occasionally played, such as “Caps off” and “Roll call,” where older children pretended to be Kapos or SS guards and chased the younger ones. In Birkenau, there was a game called “Gas chamber,” though none of the children wanted to enact their own deaths. Instead, they used stones to represent the doomed, throwing them into a trench—the gas chamber—and mimicking the screams of those pressed inside.101

  No child could survive alone. Occasionally, adult prisoners tried to protect those who had been separated from their parents, acting as their so-called camp mothers or fathers. “We were … really well taken care of,” recalled Janka Avram, one of the small number of Jewish children to survive Plaszow, “because the thousands of Jewish women who had lost their children to the death camps treated us like their own.”102 More commonly, children stayed with one of their own parents, though their relationships invariably changed. While younger children were terrified of being separated, older ones often grew up fast; as their parents’ authority was eroded by helplessness and illness, they sometimes assumed the role of protector and provider.103

  Several camps in the east, in addition to Majdanek, had special barracks for isolating Jewish children.104 In Vaivara, they were placed in the lower part of the Ereda satellite camp, together with sick prisoners. Conditions were dreadful. Built on marshy ground, the primitive huts offered no protection from the elements; in winter, it was so cold that the prisoners’ hair sometimes froze to the ground as they were sleeping. Among the children languishing here was a five-year-old girl who had been deported to Estonia in summer 1943 with her mother from the Wilna ghetto. Her mother was held in the upper part of Ereda, less than a mile away, and although it was forbidden, she tried to sneak past the SS guards every day to visit her daughter. When her girl became gravely ill, she smuggled her out of the children’s compound and hid her in a barrack for adults. But the girl was discovered by the SS camp leader just before a death transport left the camp. “I cried for a whole night,” the mother later wrote, “fell to his feet and kissed the boots of the murderer, he should not take my child from me, but it was no use.” The next morning, the girl was taken away with several hundred other children, and she was murdered a few days later in Auschwitz-Birkenau.105

  Close to the Birkenau extermination complex, where these children from Ereda were gassed and burned, lay one of the most unusual compounds in any of the concentration camps: the so-called family camp, a special sector for Jewish families deported from Theresienstadt, the dismal Nazi ghetto for elderly and so-called privileged Jews in the Czech Protectorate, which shared some similarities with the KL.106 The Birkenau family camp had been set up after the arrival of two transports from Theresienstadt in September 1943, carrying some five thousand Jewish men, women, and children, almost all of them Czech Jews; in December 1943, further mass transports from the ghetto arrived in the family camp (this was not the only such compound in Birkenau, as the SS also forced families into the so-called Gypsy camp). Inside, Jewish men and women were divided into barracks on opposite sides of the path dissecting the compound, but they could meet before evening roll call or secretly in the latrines during the day.

  Conditions in the family camp were appalling—around one in four Jews perished within six months of their arrival in September 1943—but they were still better than in some other parts of the Auschwitz complex. Compared to other Jews in Birkenau, the prisoners enjoyed numerous privileges. They kept some of their possessions and clothes, even their own hair, and received occasional food packages from outside. Most strikingly, Jews were not subjected to SS selections, neither on arrival nor over the following months. The reason for these exceptions is n
ot clear. Most likely, Himmler wanted to use the Birkenau family camp as a propaganda showcase in case of a visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross (just as the SS planned to deceive the Red Cross with the “model” ghetto Theresienstadt). Whatever the reason, other Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz looked with disbelief and envy upon the family camp.107

  Among the prisoners in the Birkenau family camp were several thousand children. During the day, many of those under the age of fourteen were allowed into the children’s block, run by Fredy Hirsch, a charismatic twenty-eight-year-old German Jew who had already played a leading role in youth welfare in Theresienstadt. While there were barracks for children in other parts of Birkenau, too, the one in the family camp was unique, reflecting the compound’s special status. Despite shortages of everything, from paper to pens, Hirsch and the other teachers drew up a full curriculum. There were songs, stories, and German lessons, as well as sports and games. Older children wrote their own newspaper and painted the walls of the barrack. And the children put on plays, including a musical based on the cartoon Snow White. But such eerie moments of normality in the midst of terror—epitomized by Jewish children dancing and singing Disney tunes, just a few hundred yards from the Birkenau gas chambers—did not last long. In the night from March 8 to 9, 1944, barely a week after Adolf Eichmann had inspected the family camp, the SS murdered some 3,800 inmates, who had arrived the previous September, in the gas chambers of crematoria II and III. Among the dead were many of the children; their mentor Fredy Hirsch had committed suicide hours earlier, after another prisoner had told him about the SS plans.108