Once in Field Five, the Jews were driven into a large L-shaped barracks and ordered to strip. In the middle of the barracks the SS had placed large boxes, into which they ordered the Jews to throw all their valuables. The fence between Fields Five and Six was cut to provide an opening, and the naked Jews from the L-shaped barracks were driven toward long ditches, which had been dug on Field Six. It all happened very fast. The SS ordered the first ten Jews to lie down next to each other on the bottom of the first ditch, machine-gunned them, ordered the next ten to lie down on top of the freshly killed bodies, machine-gunned them in turn, and continued this procedure until the last layer of bodies reached the top of the ditch. Then they started farther down the ditch on a new layer of ten. Women and men were shot in separate ditches. The massacre took place to the sound of dance music—waltzes, fox trots, and tangos—which was played through loudspeakers.
The shooting started at six in the morning and ended about seven that night—thirteen hours. The SS men from the Sonderkommando who were doing the shooting changed shifts every three or four hours. Before the action started, they had selected three hundred Jewish men and three hundred Jewish women and locked them in a barracks. After they had killed eighteen thousand people, the SS walked alongside the ditches, looking for signs of life and finishing off any who were still moving or moaning. The six hundred Jewish men and women were then brought out from the barracks and made to search the clothing and other belongings left behind for valuables. After they finished doing this, the SS killed them as well.
On November 5 the Russian prisoners of war began the job of disposing of the bodies. First they extracted the gold teeth, then piled up the bodies, poured gasoline over them, and burned them. Afterward they sifted the ashes and shards of bone through sieves, looking for stones or gold they had missed before. Finally the remains, now powder, were poured into bags and taken to a nearby SS farm, where they were used as fertilizer.
Disposing of the bodies took almost two months. A few days before Christmas 1943, the SS had any depressions in the ditches filled with earth to make them level with the rest of the field; a Russian friend of the Stubenälteste was in the commando that did this work.
By this time I was used to atrocities, but this chilling account of the Majdanek massacre upset me terribly. I was scarcely able to sleep that night. A few days later, when our work commando was assigned to do clean-up work on Field Five, I couldn’t keep my eyes off Field Six, on the other side of the fence. There was no sign whatsoever of the mass killings that had taken place only a few months before and that haunted my mind. I couldn’t escape the vision of those thousands upon thousands of naked men and women being driven and beaten by the SS, forced to lie down, riddled by machine-gun bullets, and dying to the tune of music blaring from the loudspeakers. It made me almost ill. What was the use of fighting, of struggling so hard against all odds to survive? And if by some miracle we succeeded, was it worth it, to go on living in such an evil world? In spite of everything, however, deep inside me there was that strong instinctive desire to live, an intense curiosity about the outcome of it all, and a yearning to see these beasts punished.
About ten days after our arrival in Majdanek, several hundred more Jews, men and a few women, arrived from Radom, a town about a hundred kilometers from Majdanek. We couldn’t figure out what the Germans were up to. They’d killed tens of thousands of Jews in November, then they brought our little chemical commando from Budzyń, and here they were importing Jews from Radom for no apparent reason. What did it mean? While working in the aircraft plant in Budzyń, we felt the Germans had a reason for keeping us alive; they needed us for the war effort. When we left Budzyń, we had assumed they were sending us on some special assignment. So far, though, there seemed no rhyme or reason to our presence in Majdanek.
Rumors reached us that a new and successful Russian offensive had been launched, that the siege of Leningrad had lifted, and that Russian troops were victorious everywhere and were approaching the pre-1939 Polish border. There was no definite confirmation of these stories, however, not even a scrap of newspaper. Security in Majdanek was very tight, and we never left the camp. We were hungry, covered with lice, totally without contact with the outside world. I could scarcely bear even to look at Fred, he was so depressed and apathetic.
Early in April, after the morning Appel, we were told that all Jews (our group, together with the Radom Jews) were being shipped out. Once again, we tried to guess what was happening. Where were they taking us now? Had they intended to kill us, they could have done so easily in Majdanek, so probably that was not their immediate plan. Maybe they were going to make some use of the chemical commando after all. But in that case, why were they combining us with the Radom Jews? Once again, too, my brothers and I had to go through the process of inserting the tubes with our money inside our bodies; wherever they were taking us, we would have to undergo another search when we got there.
We were marched to the railway station, where a train with cattle cars waited on the siding. The SS opened the doors and started beating and shoving us inside. Our group tried to stay together. They packed us in so tightly that there was no room to lie down; we had to either sit or stand. After warning us that anyone attempting to escape would be shot by the guards stationed on the roof, they shut the doors and bolted them. It was dark inside the car, the only light coming in through the crack in the doors. Everyone was pushing and shoving, trying to make room for himself. Despite it all, though, I felt somewhat relieved. There was no knowing where they might be taking us and what was going to happen, but almost anything would be preferable to the nightmare of Majdanek.
It was at least two hours before the train even started to move. We couldn’t tell in which direction it was going, but at the first station where we stopped we heard the name of a town that one of the local people knew to be to the west of Majdanek. Where could we be going? Some thought to Germany, others perhaps to Auschwitz, which we knew was a huge extermination camp as well as a labor camp.
Those who couldn’t control their bladders and bowels started relieving themselves on the floor, and the smell of urine, feces, and sweat became overpowering. Some people had trouble breathing and cried out for help. No help came, because nobody could move. It was almost airless in there—but at least it wasn’t hot, otherwise few would have survived the trip. The train made frequent stops, but the guards kept us locked in the entire time. Some of the younger Jews from Radom who happened to be sitting a few feet away from me were trying to pry open a loose board in order to escape, but they didn’t succeed. Surprisingly, despite the frightful conditions, there were relatively few arguments or fights. Richie Krakowski, who was sitting near me, told me that this trip was a bed of roses compared to the one he had taken in the cattle car from Warsaw to Treblinka. At least our destination was unknown; they had known they were on their way to be gassed.
As the hours went by, my body began to ache from being squeezed so hard on all sides. A man next to me fell asleep on me, a dead weight. I tried to wake him, but he was too exhausted to respond. Someone next to me urinated on the floor, and my pants got wet. Night fell, and the air became heavier still. I had no trouble breathing, but some people began to gasp and choke. Somebody died—I heard weeping and sobbing. My brothers and I were fairly near each other, and from time to time we called each other’s names to reassure ourselves we were all alive. And the train rolled on.
At last daylight came, which cheered me a little. I tried to calculate the speed of the train and the distance to the German border, and figured it would take us about twenty-four hours to get there from Majdanek. By now the smell was so bad I was sick. Sometime late in the morning the train stopped again, and this time we heard the guards opening the doors. When our doors swung open and the light struck my eyes, I blinked at the shock. We had been in the dark for a long time.
The guards drove us out, screaming, “Juden—raus, raus, mach schnell!” I jumped out of the car, and we saw each other
in the light of day. We were all filthy and tired. My pants were soaked from sitting in the urine and feces that covered the floor, and I was hoping that they would take us to a shower soon.
The SS ordered us to form a column, and we started marching. I saw a sign reading “Płaszów,” which was a Polish place name. I would have preferred to be in Germany, where we probably would have a better chance to survive. Someone said we were near Krakow, a major Polish city in the southwest, and that Płaszów was a big concentration camp. Soon we saw in the distance the familiar barbed wire, guard towers, and entrance gate. Well, at least we were still alive. They hadn’t killed us yet, and as long as there’s life, there’s hope.
Płaszów
Upon entering the camp grounds, we were taken in tow by Jewish Kapos (group bosses), who showed us no mercy, pushing and kicking us as brutally as had the Ukrainians. After we were inside the reception barracks one of them actually jumped deliberately through an open window and crashed into us, feet first, knocking some of us down.
Here the search was not as thorough as it had been in Majdanek, but it didn’t matter, because our money was safe in the paper tubes inside our rectums. Once again, on our first visit to the latrine we had to search through our feces to extract the tubes.
People from our transport were exhausted from the long trip in the cattle cars, and the next day a few of them developed a high fever. Fred’s fears of a typhus epidemic spread by the lice in Majdanek had materialized. He went to the doctor in charge of the hospital—a Jew, a Dr. Gross—and informed him of this dangerous development, suggesting that he order an immediate quarantine to prevent the spread of the typhus to the rest of the camp. Dr. Gross agreed, and we were placed in separate barracks and isolated from the rest of the camp. Fred was the only person permitted to leave the quarantine area.
Płaszów
1 Offices
2 SS Barracks
3 The Gray House
4 The Red House
5 Goethe’s Villa
6 Barrack for the dogs
7 Cesspool
8 Warehouse
9 Warehouse
10 Quarry
11 Kitchen
12 Stable
13 Garage
14 House for the Germans
15 Hospital
16 Bathhouse
17 Construction square
18 Camp hospital
J. Bau (in: Proces ludobójcy Amona Goetha, Cracow, 1947, p. 375)
Over the next few days more and more people came down with the fever, among them Felek. At first we hoped that it was just a cold, but his temperature quickly shot up like the rest. He soon reached the crisis, his fever hovering around 104–105 degrees, and for a day or two it was touch and go, but then the fever started to drop. He was one of the last to fall ill; the spread of the disease seemed to have been arrested, and no new cases were reported. Miraculously not one of the thirty or forty who came down with typhus died, but those who recovered were very weak for a long time.
One day Dr. Gross came to visit our barracks. He ordered the convalescents to line up and started making notes in a book he was carrying. Fred saw that he was listing the prisoners’ numbers of the people who were the weakest; these included some who had never recovered from the journey in the cattle cars. He became suspicious and asked Gross about it. Gross replied that he needed the information to obtain extra rations for them, but it made Fred very uneasy; he didn’t trust Gross. However, after it was clear that the epidemic was over, our quarantine was lifted and we were moved to a regular barracks.
The first Appel in Płaszów was quite an experience. The entire camp, more than twenty thousand, lined up on the Appelplatz to be counted. The Jewish Kapos were running around helping the SS do the count, and often beating up the prisoners. The Appel took an hour and a half, and I was told that it sometimes went on for as long as three hours.
After the Appel we were marched out to work. Part of our group was taken to a construction site, a hospital for Wehrmacht officers. Bencio Fink, myself, and about thirty others were assigned to a work detail that was excavating the foundation of the hospital. The earth was heavy with clay, which made the work difficult. Other prisoners loaded the earth we had dug into trucks, and it moved along fast.
In the middle of the day they gave us about fifteen minutes to rest. My job in the Budzyń factory had made me soft, and I developed a large blister on my right hand.
When the workday was over, we formed a column and marched back to camp. At the gate they counted us twice before we were permitted to pass through. Supper consisted of a menashka of soup, which I forced myself to eat just to have something warm in my stomach. After supper was our first opportunity to learn about conditions in Płaszów. It was run internally by Chilowicz, a Jewish Lagerälteste, with the help of an aide, Finkelstein, and a number of Jewish Blockälteste and Kapos. All of them were brutal and corrupt, living well at the expense of their fellow Jews.
The camp commandant, Amon Goeth, was a demented sadist who hanged or shot people utterly at whim. From his house on the other side of the barbed wire he would observe prisoners inside the camp through a pair of binoculars, and if he didn’t like the look of a man, the way he walked, for instance, he would shoot him with his telescopic-sighted rifle. Goeth went around the camp accompanied by a dog, Rolf, who was trained to attack when Goeth cried, “Jude!” After Rolf had done his job, Goeth would finish the prisoner off by beating him to death with his large knout, or simply shooting him.
Whenever there had been an escape attempt, Goeth would select ten prisoners at random and either shoot them himself or have them shot on a nearby hill, called Hujowa Górka. Goeth was completely unpredictable. He ignored the strict Gestapo rules and kept a Jewish woman in his apartment as his mistress. He was brazen in his demands for constant payoffs from Chilowicz and his underlings.
Under Goeth’s leadership, frequent selections were conducted in the camp hospital, and those too sick or weak to work were taken to Hujowa Górka and shot. The mere mention of the name Hujowa Górka was enough to send a shiver through the ranks of prisoners. Many thousands of Jews had been killed there and buried in mass graves.
None of this information made us feel any better, but despite the hazards of life in a camp in which there were continual selections and shooting, it still seemed preferable to Majdanek, with its eerie emptiness and with no apparent reason for existing.
For the first time since we had left Budzyń, we heard reliable news from the front. The Russians were indeed continuing their offensive and had invaded the prewar Polish territories. The Allies were making progress in Italy. To our disappointment, though, there was still no word about the expected second front in the West. Again I felt that familiar mixture of exhilaration at the German defeats and despair over our infinitesimal chance of living to see the final Allied victory. Hitler and the SS had marked us down for death, we were in their hands, and nothing less than a miracle would save us.
We soon discovered that Płaszów was a much more commercialized place than the other camps. Here one could buy many things, not only food but other commodities as well. The Jews at the top of the hierarchy lived luxuriously, with the best food and even many conveniences and services. They exercised their power through a hundred or so Jewish policemen, Kapos, and Stubenälteste, who were also relatively comfortable. Apart from them, there were two classes of prisoners: those who had some money, and those who didn’t. The first group readily obtained extra bread and other food; the second group were starving to death on the camp rations—which were much smaller even than they were supposed to be. Trade with the outside world was brisk, and corruption rampant and highly organized: the prisoners’ rations were cut so that those in positions of power could divide the remainder among themselves and sell it.
In our barracks, in addition to a Jewish Stubenälteste, was a Kapo, a German prisoner named Fehringer. He wore a green triangle, signifying that he was a criminal. He had been sent to Płaszów fo
r the murder of his parents, and was sarcastically referred to as “the orphan.” Fehringer was of medium height, with smooth blond, almost white hair and gray-blue eyes. He was wiry and very alert, and spoke with great precision. He was cruel, always looking for the slightest pretext to attack the prisoners, and when he did, he was very methodical, like someone performing a mechanical task. He would hit his victim like a trained fighter, his fists so quick that it was impossible to protect oneself. Almost every day Fehringer would pick someone out for this treatment, and when he was finished with him, the man was ready for the hospital.
I tried hard to avoid Fehringer as far as possible, making sure not to break any rules. Fred had been given permission by Dr. Gross to send the prisoners who were too weak to work to the hospital, but he was warned that if he did this too freely, he would be punished. Fehringer’s victims pleaded with Fred to give them an admission pass to the hospital. They knew that it was a dangerous place, but many preferred to run the risk of the frequent selections so that they could stay in bed for a few days and recover. Fred found it difficult to refuse them.
After a few days Fehringer began to notice the absence of the people he had recently beaten up, and found out that it was Fred who was sending them to the hospital. One day he approached Fred and said in his cutting voice, “I hear, Dr. Orenstein, that you are a very good-hearted man. You better watch out. This is a concentration camp, not a resort.” When Fred told me of this, my heart sank and I begged him to be very careful. Fehringer was an extremely dangerous man to have as an enemy. Fred lifted his hands helplessly. “What can I do? When people come to me in such terrible shape, how can I refuse to help them?” It was an impossible dilemma.
I Shall Live Page 20