by Peter Quinn
“‘For now,’ Gertner said to me, ‘consider yourself lucky. The man to whom you’ve been sent is SS-Hauptsturmführer Karsten Heinz, a fellow of the Institute for Racial Biology and Anthropology. As long as Dr. Heinz finds you useful, you’ll be allowed to live. But you must be careful. Heinz is crafty, demanding, and at the first provocation—whether real or perceived—he’ll dispatch you to the gas chambers.’
“A moment later, I was summoned to meet Heinz. Expecting a tall, blond athlete—the Nordic archetype—I was received by a stout, very short SS officer. He had me stand at attention for several minutes, eyeing me from a distance, as if I were a farm animal. When he came closer, I noticed how the soles and heels of his boots elevated his height.
“Gertner subsequently explained that though Heinz had been too short to serve in the elite SS, his research in racial science so endeared him to SS-Reichsführer Himmler, he was allowed to wear boots that raised him to the minimum requirement of five feet, six inches. Jealous of the favor he enjoyed from the SS hierarchy, his comrades referred to him behind his back as der Blaue Engel—the Blue Angel—a scornful allusion to the heels worn by Marlene Dietrich in the movie of the same name.
“When he headed a program at the camp to find the most efficient method of sterilizing Jewish women, the prisoners under his direction, aware of his nickname, altered it to der Blaue Teufel—the Blue Devil—a better reflection of his true nature.
“Gertner wouldn’t go into what was involved in Heinz’s ‘research,’ other than to say that he was fanatically insistent about keeping it secret, threatening immediate execution of anyone who so much as mentioned the work to another inmate or to Heinz’s own medical associates.”
Niskolczi paused. The flames in the coal-packed stove emitted a low hum. “I asked Gertner if he could find out what had happened to my wife and daughters. He came back the next day. They were alive, he reported. They’d been put to work. I chose to believe him. What else could I do? Sometimes it seemed as if we’d all been sucked into some mass hallucination, a collective bad dream. But then I’d wake and be instantly confronted with the reality of where I was.”
Heinz provided a steady supply of “specimens” for dissection. The bodies were those of captured Soviet political commissars and intelligence officers as well as “randomly selected Jews from a variety of different professions and classes.” They were accompanied by questionnaires that required “precise and exhaustive” weighing and measuring of organs and bones.
Niskolczi looked through the files that Heinz—“or, more accurately, his prior assistants, since dispatched to the gas chamber”—had compiled during a similar process of dissection and measurement performed on scores of dwarfs, epileptics, cripples, and hunchbacks. In his notes, he referred to his “menagerie of subhumans.” His intent, he noted, was to find a shared biological basis for “racial deviance.”
Heinz complimented Niskolczi’s work in the highest terms. “He announced that the purpose of the research was to assist in establishing an ‘indisputable biological link between Judaism and Bolshevism.’ I looked at him incredulously, thinking perhaps that he was toying with me. But he wasn’t. The obvious irony of assigning this task to a ‘racially diseased Jew’ simply didn’t enter his mind.”
The cadavers kept coming. Although they had all been killed the same way—“by direct injection of chloroform into the heart”—Niskolczi noticed that the Soviet POWs had been subjected to “extreme physical abuse and torture.” He also noted that no matter what anatomical measurements he made, Heinz altered them to support the illusion that he was pursuing a legitimate course of research.
One evening, when Heinz had left for the day, Niskolczi went into Heinz’s office to deposit a pile of reports. Opening a cabinet drawer that had inadvertently been left unlocked, he made another discovery: The systematic torture Heinz inflicted on captured Soviet intelligence officers had produced thick files on the spy networks the Soviets had insinuated among the British and Americans. Rather than forwarding them to his superiors, Heinz kept these to himself.
Soon after making this discovery, Niskolczi was summoned by Heinz and given the “ghoulish task of preparing a representative selection of the Jewish-Bolshevik racial type.” This involved boiling the bodies so flesh could easily be stripped away, then drying and bleaching the bones in a gasoline bath. As soon as properly prepared, the bones were to be shipped to the Anatomy Institute of the Reich University of Strassburg, professionally mounted, and permanently displayed in a public exhibit.
“I had figured out the game Heinz was playing,” Niskolczi said. “Knowing the war was lost, he avoided transfer to a combat unit on the Eastern Front by catering to Himmler’s racial fantasies, while at the same time compiling an account of Soviet espionage he could use to ingratiate himself with the Allies when he reached their lines.”
Niskolczi got to his feet. “I must step outside to relieve myself.” He left his coat on the floor.
Van Hull drank from the flask. “How’s the ankle?”
“Not as bad as before.” Dunne took his turn with the flask and passed it back.
When Niskolczi returned, a rush of frigid air followed. He resumed his position next to Van Hull, sitting silently. Struggling against sleep, Dunne jerked his head up as it sank onto his chest, causing a sharp crimp in his neck. He took a deep breath. Niskolczi had resumed his story. Dunne was unsure how much, if anything, he’d missed.
“… Sonderkommando.” Niskolczi repeated the word: “Sonderkommando.”
“A special task force?” Van Hull asked.
“Yes, in English that’s what it means.”
“Did Heinz reassign you?”
“No, he resisted. He claimed ‘his contribution to Nazi racial science’ was being slighted by his rivals within the SS. In truth, he feared a transfer to the front. But he was overruled. The camp was running at full capacity. All the personnel were stretched, but none more so than the eight hundred and fifty prisoners of the Sonderkommando. The nature of their work meant they were in constant need of medical attention for cuts, bruises, burns, and pulled muscles.
“Gertner had a deeper knowledge of the camp than I did. He turned pale when he learned of my reassignment. I was whisked to the Sonderkommando’s tightly sequestered quarters on a Sunday night. I was stunned. The men all had their own beds. They were dressed in civilian clothes, quality trousers and shirts taken from the baggage of deceased deportees. Some were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes.
“The head prisoner—the kapo in chief—was a burly Slovakian Jew. He invited me outside for a smoke. ‘Tomorrow will be exhausting,’ he said. ‘So tonight relax and enjoy the privileges of the Twelfth Sonderkommando.’
“‘You mean there are eleven besides this?’ I asked.
“He laughed. ‘I mean there were eleven before this.’
“I presumed he was joking, but there was no merriment in his eyes—only fear mixed with madness. He took hold of my arm. ‘This is hell, Doctor. The real hell. The other eleven were all liquidated. The devils in charge will leave no witnesses.’
“I tried to sleep that night but was wide awake when we were roused from our beds. The kapo assigned me to accompany him and the lead squad of two hundred men as they rushed to their posts in what he described as one of the camp’s four crematoria.
“A large shipment of several thousand Hungarian Jews had arrived in forty-five boxcars. The first column, mostly women, children, and the aged, was marched to a set of steps that descended to a bunker marked ‘Baths and Disinfecting Room.’ When they were all inside, the metal door was locked and secured with an iron bar.
“From where I stood, I watched as a car bearing the insignia of the International Red Cross pulled up. A crisply dressed SS officer stepped out and deposited green metal canisters in pipes atop the bunker. Nobody spoke. Whatever was happening inside that bunker was utterly sealed off from the summer’s day outside. Eventually, the order was given to put the exhaust system into
operation.
“After about twenty minutes, the door was opened. The tangled knot of naked limbs reached to the ceiling. Despite the exhaust fans, a sulfurous stink clouded the air. The Sonderkommando sprang into action, hosed the chamber with jets of water to wash away the pool of blood, urine, and feces, pulled apart the bodies, and hauled them to the freight elevators. When they reached the incineration room, crews removed their hair and extracted their gold teeth.
“Men sweated and gagged. A skinny young man who looked to be the youngest of the group dropped to his knees. He appeared in a state of shock. The kapo kicked him and hauled him to his feet. He dropped again. An SS guard came over and shot him in the back of the head. His corpse was stripped and thrown in with the rest.
“The well-fired ovens allowed for rapid immolation. The ashes, still warm, were shoveled onto a truck, hauled to the Vistula, and dumped.”
The choking sound that Niskolczi made might have been a cough or a sob.
“There’s no need to go on, Doctor,” Van Hull said.
Niskolczi might have misunderstood Van Hull or more likely he posed the question to himself: “Why did I go on? Why didn’t I kill myself? Was it the instinct for survival? Or perhaps the oath I took as a doctor to ‘do no harm’? Thousands of human beings overcome that instinct each day, killing themselves or sacrificing themselves in causes that range from noble to deranged. Doctors are no exception.
“I think the reason was, first, after a very short while, it’s impossible to truly appreciate hell while you’re still in it. Despite its horrors, it quickly assumes the aspects of the everyday. You get up and go on with business. This is what makes an eternity in hell tolerable. It’s the point that Dante missed, I think. As a tourist, he didn’t grasp that to see hell from the outside—or merely to visit—is to miss the numbness it induces.
“Second, I came to feel that perhaps I was fated to survive—that I still had some role to play. I wasn’t sure if I was deluding myself, justifying my own existence. How can one be objective in such circumstances? Deluded or not, I decided if I was to die, they’d have to kill me.”
The fire had subsided. Van Hull walked barefoot to the stove, rebuilt the pile of coals, and stoked it with the shovel. On the way back, he stumbled over one of the sleeping forms on the floor but did not fall.
Niskolczi recounted that along with the psychic and physical exhaustion that enveloped the Sonderkommando came an all-consuming focus on staying alive another day in hopes an unexpected turn of events—sudden arrival of the Red Army, Allied bombing, troopers dropping from the sky, something, anything—would end this hell.
After a week, he’d lost all track of time. He was asleep in his bunk when the kapo woke him and told him to report to the SS officer in charge. “I didn’t know what infraction I’d committed. It hardly mattered. I was certain I was about to be shot. Instead, he informed me I was being sent back to my work with Heinz. I’m sure this is the only time in the history of Auschwitz such a thing happened.”
The urge for sleep had left Dunne. He stared at the small red-and-yellow sun that burned in the belly of the stove, its murmur barely audible.
“I’d been saved by Heinz’s cowardice. By convincing Himmler that he needed my expertise to achieve his ‘scientific breakthrough,’ he ensured he wouldn’t be among the myriad Germans killed or captured each day by the Red Army. Unfortunately, my assistant, Gertner, paid the price. Ordered to take my place in the Sonderkommando, he killed himself by drinking a beaker of calcium chloride.”
Niskolczi was immediately returned to the “repetitious, inane work of autopsying Soviet and Jewish corpses.” Yet though Auschwitz functioned as before, there’d been a palpable change in atmosphere. Guards as well as the inmates knew it was now a question of when, not if, the Soviets would arrive, which raised another question: When and how would Auschwitz and its remaining inmates be liquidated?
Niskolczi spoke in a more animated tone than before: “This was driven home the day the camp was rocked by explosions. At first we almost cheered, thinking the Red Army had arrived. Then it became apparent the Sonderkommando had succeeded in staging a revolt. They blew up one of the crematoria and engaged the SS in pitched battle for over an hour before they were annihilated.”
Despite what had taken place, the death factory stayed busy. The remnant of 70,000 Jews left alive from the original 500,000 sequestered in the Łód ghetto arrived by train. Ninety-five percent were immediately gassed.
“It crossed my mind,” Niskolczi said, “that the Red Army had already passed us by, that the camp would operate until the last Jew had been delivered into the ovens, that only then would it stop, the buildings razed, the ground covered over, every trace wiped away so that the future would never be troubled by Auschwitz’s existence.”
Finally Niskolczi was summoned one morning to the infirmary. A shipment of several hundred ill deportees had arrived. He was stunned by the instruction “to help treat them.” The gassings had ended. The factory was closed. The dismantling of the crematoria began. The men of the Thirteenth—and last—Sonderkommando were taken to the forest and executed by flamethrower.
Heinz ordered Niskolczi to pack the research results for shipment to Mauthausen, “where the work will continue.” On New Year’s Day 1945, he ignored Heinz’s summons to report to his office and watched from an adjoining barracks as a “visibly drunk and frightened Heinz” had two SS orderlies load the files with intelligence extracted from Soviet POWs into staff cars. They hurriedly drove away.
The remaining SS supervised the destruction of the barracks. Knowing that Heinz had ordered his execution—that he’d escaped solely because of Heinz’s fear of falling into Soviet hands—Niskolczi slipped into the prisoners’ ranks as they were marched out of camp. “I glanced back a final time at the Gates of Hell. The legend atop, Arbeit Macht Frei—Work Will Make You Free—mocked all we had survived. Yet even now, der Blaue Teufel and his brethren hadn’t finished their work.”
The prisoners were herded through heavy snow and brutal cold. Those who faltered were beaten; those who lay down, shot. An SS officer halted the column and shouted Niskolczi’s name several times. “I didn’t respond. I knew Heinz hoped to correct his oversight in not having me killed.”
They continued until the survivors were loaded on boxcars. Several prisoners came down with typhus. Learning of the outbreak, the train crew re-routed off the main north-south track onto a trunk line and fled on foot.
“This is where we were when you found us, gentlemen. Now please, enough said. It’s time you got some sleep.” Niskolczi lay down and drew the overcoat around him.
The undertone of fretful mutterings, snores, hacking coughs was discordant and constant. Staring at a ceiling smudged by half a century of dust and smoke, Dunne needed a few minutes to piece together where he was. He sat up. His dry, rough tongue had the texture of sandpaper; buzz above his eyes, more annoying than painful. What part hangover? What part echo of Niskolczi’s recounting of his time in Auschwitz? He wasn’t sure.
Van Hull was in the same position—staring at the fire—as when Dunne fell asleep.
“That was the worst gin I’ve had since Prohibition.” Dunne rubbed his temples.
Van Hull got up and shoveled coal onto the fire. He turned the large earthen flask upside down. “Worst of all, it’s gone.” He walked outside.
Niskolczi went to the window. Morning sky was as drab and uninteresting as the station’s soot-stained ceiling. “You must let me look at that ankle.” He knelt beside Dunne, lifted the leg, and pressed around the ankle with his thumbs. “Any pain?”
“Some. But less than before.”
Framed in the thin round rims of his glasses, Niskolczi’s blue eyes were sunk deep in their sockets. “You should stay off it as much as possible.”
Van Hull came back in and offered Niskolczi the flask. “I filled it with water from the pump. It’ll have to do unless you know the secret of turning water into wine.”
&nbs
p; “That kind of magic belongs to priests, not physicians.” Niskolczi swigged the cold, metallic-tasting water.
“When was the last time you had anything to eat?”
“Me?” The oversized coat hung on Dr. Niskolczi limply.
“All of you.” Van Hull swept his hand over the sleeping forms on the floor.
Dr. Niskolczi rubbed his glasses on his sleeve. “I … I really can’t say.”
Van Hull disappeared into the back room and returned with two empty burlap sacks. He handed one to Dr. Niskolczi. “We’re going on a foraging expedition.”
“I’m going, too.” Using the wall for support, Dunne got up. “Give me that crutch.”
Niskolczi shook his head. “It’s better you stay off that ankle.”
“Save your breath, Doctor. His is a breed that resists listening to reason.” Van Hull retrieved the crutch from beside the door. He pulled the .45 from his belt. “The doctor and I will be the point men. You provide the cover.”
Dunne checked the magazine. “Lot of good this will do if the Krauts are around.”
“Beats nothing.” Van Hull went out the door.
Dunne fumbled in his pocket in hopes of finding the cigarette butt that had been there the night before. The lethal pill spilled on the floor.
Niskolczi picked it up and weighed it in his palm. He seemed about to say something but gave it back to Dunne without uttering a word.
They followed Van Hull into the empty, uneven, half-paved, half-cobblestone street. He looked around. “Where do you suppose everyone went, Doctor?”
“There was no one here when we arrived.” Niskolczi buttoned his coat, put on a cap, and pulled down the earflaps. “Or perhaps there was but they were afraid to come near the boxcars because they knew they were filled with the sick.”
They stepped through shattered storefronts. The gutted interiors were stripped of anything salvageable. Random machine-gun spray pockmarked the facades of shops next to the square.