by Tec, Nechama
CHAPTER FOUR
The Concentration Camps
Bela Chazan Yaari was born in 1922 into a Jewish Orthodox family in the small Polish town of Rizyszczyce. Her father died when Bela was five years old, leaving her mother to take care of her eight children. An independent woman, she opened a grocery store, which gave the family an adequate income. She insisted that her children not feel sorry for themselves nor refer to themselves as orphans. Bela’s mother was a broad-minded woman, encouraging her children to become familiar with a wide range of political principles. Not surprisingly, as a young teenager, Bela joined the leftist Hehalutz organization, hoping to eventually settle in Palestine. After Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Bela and a large contingent of Zionist comrades attempted to immigrate to the Soviet Union. When they were refused entry, they returned to their home in German-occupied Poland.
After the Germans formed Jewish ghettos, Bela’s Hehalutz comrades reacted by creating an underground. When she lived in the ghetto, Bela was employed as an assistant nurse, but she worked as a courier in the Hehalutz underground. This meant that she moved illegally in and out of the ghetto. Bela’s Aryan looks made it easy for her to pass for a Christian. However, her somewhat limited knowledge of Polish was a problem. With time, as her underground responsibilities grew, Bela learned how to better hide her Jewish identity. She traveled extensively to cities such as Vilna, Warsaw, Bialystok, as well as to many smaller communities. Her successes gave her courage, making her feel invulnerable.
At one point her underground duties took her to the city of Grodno, where she rented a room from a Polish family. Occasionally, Bela would sneak underground comrades in need of temporary shelter into her rooms. One such man was the underground leader, Mordechai Tennenbaum. When he left, she overheard the young son of her landlady say to his mother: “Mama, Jews are coming here.” Such a comment spelled danger. Unobtrusively, Bela gave up her room and relocated to the Bialystok ghetto.
Soon news reached her that one of the Hehalutz underground’s most courageous and daring couriers, Lonka Kozibrodzka, had failed to return from a mission. For weeks her comrades waited for her return. Eventually someone discovered that Lonka was being held in the Pawiak prison, in Warsaw. Bela set out to find out how she might help. At a train station on the outskirts of Warsaw, two Gestapo men stopped her. They showed Bela a photograph of her in the company of Lonka and one other woman courier, whom the authorities could not identify. Bela admitted that she knew this photo and that it had been taken by the three friends as a souvenir. She told them that she had lost touch with Lonka and the third girlfriend. She was arrested. Over the course of the interrogation that followed, Bela slowly realized that the authorities were unaware that the women were Jews.
The Gestapo placed Bela in a cell in Pawiak prison. From time to time they would take her out for further interrogations. She soon learned that Lonka had befriended two imprisoned Polish underground figures. These prisoners thought that Lonka and Bela were members of the Polish underground. Lonka and Bela never revealed their secrets and were transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp as Poles rather than Jews. They were transported together with two Polish physicians, Dr. Katarzyna Laniewska and Dr. Anna Czuperska, with whom they became friends. In Auschwitz, Lonka was employed as a German/Polish translator. Bela worked as a nurse.
Among her Jewish underground comrades, Lonka was admired for her courage and strength. She was willing to face up to all kinds of danger, relying on her outgoing and friendly personality. However, the move to Auschwitz had broken Lonka’s spirit. Soon she contracted typhus. Too weak to fight the illness, Lonka gave up on life and died. Dr. Czuperska, a gentle and good-natured person, also succumbed to typhus and died.
Distraught, Bela tried to keep up her strength by concentrating on helping those who needed her help the most. Occasionally she was assigned to the job of serving soup to the starving Jewish prisoners. She overheard them commenting in Yiddish how surprised and grateful they were that this Christian prisoner (meaning Bela) served them the most nourishing soup from the bottom of the pot. Bela had witnessed several visits by Dr. Josef Mengele. During one of these, she heard him order Dr. Laniewska to prepare for him a list of names of the weakest women. Mengele’s request was obvious. He wanted to send these women to the crematoria. Dr. Laniewska refused to prepare such a list. Furious, Mengele kicked her with such ferocity that she never recovered from the injuries she sustained and died.
Bela managed not to lose hope and overcame the horrors of Auschwitz. None of her Polish coworkers ever discovered her Jewishness. She recalls that when the other Polish prisoners learned after the war that she was Jewish, they were furious. “They resented me and left me all to myself. I had no one. Earlier, in Auschwitz before they knew that I was Jewish, when I offered to them help and attention, they had no trouble welcoming me. But clearly in their eyes my Jewishness made me completely unacceptable. How different these anti-Semitic Polish riff-raff were when I compared them with the noble and gentle physicians, Czuperska and Laniewska!”1
The concentration camps were an outgrowth of the German occupation of Poland. The idea to erect one in the Polish town of Oswiencin was endorsed by the SS, who argued that existing prisons could not accommodate the growing number of Poles who would intensify their opposition to the Third Reich. By June 1940 Auschwitz—the German term for Oswiencin—had become a reality. Initially, its entire prisoner population consisted of members of the Polish elite (intellectuals, literary figures, professionals, clergy, and army officers), but it expanded steadily, eventually including inmates from all of occupied Europe, including some satellite countries. The continuous flow of prisoners led to an expansion into three major parts: Auschwitz I, the main concentration camp, Birkenau, which became Auschwitz II, and Auschwitz III, also referred to as Monowitz.2 With time, the entire Auschwitz complex included an estimated fifty subcamps.
Considering the horrors Auschwitz inmates had to endure, it is amazing that any of them had the strength even to contemplate resistance. Some have, indeed, argued that the only kind of opposition the Auschwitz/Birkenau inmates could be expected to have engaged in were efforts to save the lives, and/or improve the fate of, their fellow prisoners.3 Specifically, too, it has been argued by some that chronic hunger, in itself, eroded most of the prisoners’ ability to care for others. Others have pointed out that the ability to participate in any kind of underground activity was dependent on chance encounters with like-minded individuals. Still others have thought that by overcoming nightmarish circumstances some individuals would become more receptive to the needs and deprivations of others.4 Anyone who became involved in concentration camp resistance would naturally be exposed to increased risk. And yet, the evidence suggests that by becoming resisters, some prisoners helped others overcome “the paralyzing feeling of being helplessly at the mercy of all-powerful abysmally evil forces.”5
As mentioned, at the start of the Auschwitz/Birkenau history, the Polish political prisoners made up the vast majority of its population. Their large numbers and cultural familiarity with the camps’ surroundings conferred special advantages. Unlike the subsequent groups of inmates, Poles could more easily establish lines of communication with the local population. Significantly, too, local Poles were willing to extend help to these Polish prisoners: food, information, and a range of other services.
From the beginning, one of the central figures among the Polish Auschwitz/Birkenau resisters was Witold Pilecki. A captain in the Polish Army, he had eluded capture and ignored the German order for Polish officers to come forward and register with the authorities. Pilecki was one of an estimated 20,000 Polish officers who successfully hid their prewar military rank from the Germans. As most former Polish military men, he automatically became a member of the AK. With the approval of the AK superiors, Pilecki attached himself to a street roundup of Polish men in Krakow. As a part of this group, he was transferred to Auschwitz and registered under the assumed name of Tomasz Serafinsk
i.6
In Auschwitz, Pilecki began by organizing a resistance movement, identified as the Zwiazek Walki Zbrojnej, or “Union of Armed Struggle” (ZWZ).7 He also set out to improve the lives of the Polish prisoners by smuggling extra food and medical supplies into the camp. Simultaneously, he succeeded in supplying information about life in Auschwitz to the underground in Poland and to the Allies abroad.
In one of the 1942 transports, two additional Polish underground figures arrived: Jozef Cyrankiewicz, a socialist, and Tadeusz Holuj, who identified himself unofficially as a communist.8 Additional arrivals of new prisoners, some of whom had underground connections, created new opportunities for cooperation among a variety of groups, Polish and non-Polish. Nevertheless, true to their national traditions, the Polish underground members identified themselves with a variety of political parties.9
Whether a resistance group was eager to cooperate with others depended, in part, on the group’s self-image. Those perceived as weak were naturally more dependent on help from the more powerful groups. For small groups, cooperation often translated into mutual help and an increase in power. Added to the diverse Polish underground groups in Auschwitz were two new small resistance groups: Czech and Austrian. Each of these wanted to cooperate with other resistance units. In contrast, other underground movements refused to have any contact with specific resistance groups. This was true of the German political prisoners, who refused to cooperate with any Polish and/or Jewish resisters. This was unusual because these German political prisoners identified themselves as communists or socialists and thus were naturally philosophically aligned with these other groups.10 In their case, racial and ethnic prejudices overshadowed any shared political ideologies.
Needless to say, there were variations in how effective cooperation was for whom and under what circumstances. Poles were generally more likely to help Poles. Their shared nationality, however, did not always act as a unifier. Nationality was sometimes trumped by political ideology. Political and humane considerations could and did lead to mixed results. The political prisoner Hermann Langbein, an Austrian communist, had a mixed record. At certain moments he would devote himself to camp improvements that affected the fate of the entire prisoner population. On the other hand, he often made special efforts on behalf of his communist comrades at the expense of prisoners who belonged to other political groups.
In assessing the plight of Jewish prisoners, most Holocaust scholars agree with Langbein that “Jewish concentration camp inmates had the hardest, most murderous jobs, the worst food, and that they were confronted by the most horrendous living circumstances. Inevitably then, Jewish inmates were least equipped to stand up to their German oppressors.”11 Such conclusions further suggest that only a tiny minority of Jewish prisoners was ever in a position to attempt resistance.
Nevertheless, the history of the Auschwitz/Birkenau camps also points to the existence of several Jewish resistance groups, and their story underscores cooperative underground contacts between Jewish and non-Jewish resistance movements. Naturally, the German SS determined who was sent to what kind of camps at what time. Time of arrival, ethnic identification, and the size of the group affected the establishments of resistance groups. One 1942 transport to Auschwitz became the nucleus for the first and subsequent Jewish resistance groups. These arrivals included several Jewish young people from the Polish city Ciechanow. Most of them belonged to the leftist Zionist organization Hashomer Hatzair. Among them some of the recognizable names were Mordechai Bielanowicz (later known as Hilleli), Roza Robota (figure 4.1), Noah Zabludowicz, and Yakov Kaminski.
Around that time, too, the SS created a new and large group of Jewish laborers. Identified as Sonderkommandos, or Kommandos, they were a part of a group that had to perform the most gruesome tasks. These new duties were a byproduct of a diabolic German invention: the gassing and burning of Jewish victims. The Kommandos emerged in 1942, when gassing and disposing of bodies became systemic. It coincided with Yakov Kaminski’s arrival, as a part of the Ciechanow group. It was, indeed, Yakov’s misfortune to be appointed head of the Sonderkommando in crematorium IV, in Birkenau. Forced to take on this horrendous job, Yakov began to organize a Jewish resistance group, which expanded to incorporate workers from Birkenau crematoria II, III, IV, and V.
FIGURE 4.1 Members of the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth movement in Ciechanow on an outing in the woods, circa 1933. Among those pictured is Roza Robota (top row, left). (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Eliyahu Mallenbaum)
Only Jewish male prisoners were selected for the Kommando jobs. These men had to remove bodies from the gas chambers and burn them, either in fire pits or in ovens, which were a part of the crematoria complex. The SS were responsible for the selection of these Jewish men, as well as for their supervision. In time the Kommando inmates included Jews from a variety of European countries. These special squads lived in quarters close to the crematorium in which they worked. They were better fed than most other Jewish inmates, but isolated from the rest of the population. They were closely watched and severely punished for the slightest transgressions.
The SS kept them at their jobs for a limited and, purposely, unspecified period of time. The SS officers would decide when to retire a group of these laborers. Retirement in Auschwitz meant that they would be gassed. Kommandos who were still working were forced to burn the bodies of their comrades. The Kommando members knew that at any moment, unexpectedly and in the relatively near future, they too would be gassed and their bodies would be cremated.
Although the SS were obsessed with keeping these Kommando laborers separated from the rest of the prison population, they never succeeded in isolating them entirely. Under Kaminski’s leadership, the Kommando underground groups managed to establish and maintain contacts not only with the rest of the crematoria but also with a variety of resistance groups.
By 1943, some underground groups became focused on the idea of a general rebellion in Auschwitz/Birkenau. The goal of this large uprising was to destroy the entire compound and at the same time save as many inmates as possible. The supporters of this revolt called themselves the Auschwitz Kampfgruppe (Struggle Group). In charge of this movement were communists, socialists, and groups from a range of other leftist parties. The Kampfgruppe aimed at including resisters with varying political ideologies. They argued that membership in this broad organization should not be based on size or strength. While these ideals were agreed upon in principle, they were not easily implemented. The actual planning for this revolt was still not complete as 1943 was coming to an end.12
The initiator and leader of the Kampfgruppe was the Polish socialist Jozef Cyrankiewicz. He argued that in principle those who were a part of this movement “were ready to fight for their freedom and that they shared a common respect for the right to life of every other nation, whether small or the smallest, whether the most defenseless—simply put, people and mankind.”13 Talks between the Kampfgruppe and those who represented the AK were set in motion. But the AK, as the biggest and best-run Polish underground, expected the Kampfgruppe to play a subordinate role in this large-scale uprising. During the ensuing discussions between the Kampfgruppe and the AK, as represented by Cyrankiewicz and Pilecki, the issue of power-sharing became the basic stumbling block. In the end, no agreement could be reached.14
In part, this deadlock probably convinced Pilecki that for the uprising in Auschwitz/Birkenau to be successful the AK would need help from the outside. To accomplish this, Pilecki arranged to escape from the camp, which he did—fleeing from an offsite camp bakery where he had received a night shift work detail. On the outside, at AK headquarters in Krakow, Pilecki reviewed the internal circumstances of the Auschwitz/Birkenau camps with his superiors. He tried to persuade them that with AK’s outside support an overall camp uprising could be successful. But Pilecki’s arguments fell on deaf ears. His superiors emphasized AK’s lack of resources to pull off such a rebellion. They argued that according to their information there were
an estimated 46,000 sick men and 10,000 sick women in Auschwitz and Birkenau. To parachute into the camp was out of the question. Involvement by the AK could succeed only within the context of a disintegrating German occupation. The unilateral conclusion of the AK Headquarters was such that at this point in the war—this was still early in 1943—such broad efforts would inevitably end in catastrophe.15
Disappointed, Pilecki had no recourse. He accepted the decision of his superiors, even though it had inflicted a heavy blow to his sense of altruism and to his profound sense of mission.16 This meeting, in effect, terminated Pilecki’s direct involvement with the Auschwitz concentration camp.
After steady involvement with the underground in Poland, he moved to Italy, but longed to return and in 1945, he did. This was a time when Polish patriotism was looked upon with suspicion by the USSR, which was in virtual control of the country. Upon his return to Poland, Pilecki was arrested on charges of treason and illegal transmissions of secrets to the Polish government-in-exile in London. He was executed in 1948. Neither the exact date nor the exact place of his execution were ever revealed. At that time, Jozef Cyrankiewicz, the former comrade and close associate of Pilecki in the Auschwitz underground, was the Prime Minister of Poland.17