“… Imagine … such a good carpenter messing up on his joints,” the other carpenters discussed our sad case. Czesiek had not messed up, he had simply understood that the kapo had not wanted any joints in a custom-made item.
One way or another, this was a hard blow.
We were kicked out into the camp proper for negligence at work and sent to a penal detail “on the barrows” at the Lagerältester’s [Head Inmate’s] disposal.
The day “on the barrows” in the camp proper began with a hard morning.
Bruno and the Lagerkapo (the discipline kapo) cut us no slack.
There was a sharp frost, but laufschritt [doing things at the double] did not permit us to feel the cold.
However, our strength was another matter. Czesiek, having worked some time in the carpenters’ shop, had managed to regain his strength. I was saved by the few days’ rest in the warmth when I had managed to regain some of my strength.
But we were not complete novices.
Czesiek during the morning and I in the afternoon managed to sneak off for a bit of shelter, each in a different block.
We began to know our way around the camp, which a zugang could not do without risking a beating.
The day somehow passed, but what now?
Czesiek did not return to the small carpenters’ shop. I later met him elsewhere.
But Westrych had obviously decided to take a major interest in me...
He informed me through Fred (Captain 8 [Ferdynand Trojnicki]), that I was to come to the carpenters’ shop the next morning after roll call.
The following day he explained to the kapo that I had only been following Czesiek’s instructions, that I was a decent carpenter and the kapo agreed that I could continue working there.
To ensure that I did not run afoul of the kapo again, Westrych came up with a carpentry job outside the shop. There, the kapo was watching the carpenters’ hands and movements, so he led me to Block 5 (old numbering system) and handed me over to the block chief, Baltosiński [Baltaziński in some sources], telling him that I could make him a wooden shoe-scraper, a coal scuttle, repair the window frame and other such minor tasks which did not require a first-class carpenter.
Furthermore, as I learned later from Jurek 10 [name unknown], he told Baltosiński to watch out for me and feed me up a bit, for this might come in handy, given that I was not just anybody. Apparently those pictures from the Castle were still oddly bouncing around in his head and reminding him of me.
I worked on Block 5 in room no. 2 whose master was a barber from Warsaw, Stasiek Polkowski.
There I carried out the previously mentioned tasks.
I repaired, or made new cupboards for the room supervisors from pieces of old cupboards brought from the shop.
They gave me some extra food there in the rooms. Baltosiński sent me “seconds” of soup—I began to regain my strength.
Thus I worked through December and the beginning of January of ’41 until the incident with Leo, which I shall recount below.
The year 1940 was drawing to a close.
However, before I turn to 1941 in Auschwitz, I would like to add a few “camp pictures,” which are part of 1940.
The German murderers’ bestiality, which underscored the depraved instincts of the outcasts and sometime criminals— concentration camp inmates for some years—who were now our superiors in Auschwitz, took the most varied forms.
In the Penal Company these brutes enjoyed themselves crushing testicles, mainly Jews’ testicles, with a wooden hammer on a small board.
At Industriehof II an SS man nicknamed “Perełka” [“Pearly”] would train his Alsatian to attack people by using humans for practice, which bothered no one.
The dog would attack häftlings running by at work, knock the weakened victims to the ground, bite into their bodies, tear them with its teeth, rip their testicles and throttle them.
The first inmate to escape from Auschwitz through what was then still the single wire fence, as yet not electrified, was named, as if to taunt the prison authorities, Wiejowski.18
The authorities went berserk.
After it had been established at roll call that an inmate was missing, the camp was kept at attention on the parade ground for 18 hours as a punishment.
It goes without saying that no one could manage to stand at attention.
At the end of this “punishment parade” people were in a pitiful state.
SS men and kapos ran through the ranks which were without food and unable to go to the toilet, beating with clubs those who could no longer stay on their feet.
Some inmates simply collapsed from exhaustion.
To the appeals of the doctor, a German, the Camp Commandant replied:
“Let them die. I’ll stand them down when half are dying.”
The doctor then began to go through the lines encouraging people to lie down.
When the majority were already lying on the ground and the kapos had got tired of clubbing people, an end was finally called to the “punishment parade.”
Over the next few months work was done on perimeter security. A second wire fence was built around the first one at a few meters’ distance.
On two sides a high concrete fence was erected outside the wire, preventing anyone outside seeing into the camp.
Much later, the wire fence was heavily electrified.
The camp was surrounded between the concrete and wire fences with wooden watchtowers, which covered the parade ground and the camp by virtue of their location and automatic weapons and on which soldiers stood careful watch.
Therefore, escape attempts were made not from the camp itself, but from work details which went outside.
Retaliation for escapes gradually relaxed to the extent that we would stand at roll call only so long that, if it was an evening roll call, we could eat some cold food before the night-time gong.
However, there were no rules about this and at times we missed supper or lunch.
The punishment for an escape was not relaxed.
An escapee always paid with his life: he was killed immediately after capture, or put in the bunker, or publicly hanged.
A häftling caught trying to escape was dressed up for a joke in a dunce’s cap and other fripperies.
A sign was hung around his neck on a piece of string saying “I am a dunce...I tried to escape...” and so on. He would also have a drum fitted around his waist and thus, comically dressed and banging on the drum, he would take his last walk on this earth past his comrades standing in ranks at roll call to the delight of the jeering camp “dogs.”
The blocks, lined up for roll call, watched this macabre comedy in complete silence.
Until the culprit was found, the blocks stood “on punishment parade.”
Several hundred inmates under the supervision of a pack of kapos and packs of dogs went off to find the escapee (escapees), who was hidden usually somewhere between the inner and outer perimeter fences, if he had not yet managed to cross the outer one.
Sentries on watchtowers at the outer perimeter were stood down only when the evening roll call tallied with the number of inmates in the camp that day.
One evening roll call, on an exceptionally cold and rainy day when rain interspersed with snow was falling, a piercing siren rang out with the bad news of a “punishment parade.”
It was established that two inmates were missing.
A “punishment parade” was called until the escapees, who had to be hiding somewhere in Industriehof II, were found.
Kapos, and a couple of hundred inmates, were then sent out on a search, which took a long time.
That day the snow, the rain, exhaustion after work, the inmates’ inadequate clothing, were painfully finishing us off on “punishment parade.”
Finally, the gong signaled that the escapees had been found.
Only the inert bodies of these unfortunates made it back to camp.
One of the thugs, furious at the extension of the workday, had dr
iven a narrow board into the back right through the kidneys and stomach of one of them, who was carried back to the camp, unconscious with a bruised and twisted face, by four thugs.
Yes, escapes did not pay and were an act of great selfishness, since a “punishment parade” by thousands of one’s comrades in the cold resulted in hundreds of corpses.
They died, simply from the cold, having used up all their remaining strength.
They were taken to the hospital where they died during the night.
Sometimes, even though no one had escaped, but the weather was dreadful, we were kept at roll call a long time, for several hours, until they got the numbers right.
The authorities went indoors somewhere, supposedly to do some simple arithmetic; we were finished off by the cold, or the rain, or the snow, and the requirement to stand motionlessly in one place.
You had to fight with your whole body, tense your muscles and release them in order to create some warmth and save your own life.
At roll calls an SS man, a blockführer [block supervisor], received a report from the block chief. After receiving a report from several blocks, the SS man would go to the desk of the Rapportführer [SS officer responsible for discipline and roll calls], who was Obersturmführer 19 Palitzsch [Gerhard Palitzsch].
Palitzsch, whom I shall describe later, was feared like the devil even by the SS. He would send SS men to the bunker at the slightest provocation, and on the basis of a report from him an SS man could be sent to the front.
Hence everyone feared Palitzsch and when he appeared there was silence.
Silesians—people whom I had once taken to be Poles, but who for the most part had recently turned their back on their Polish heritage—now began scrambling up to be block chiefs.
Having formerly had a very good opinion of them, I now could not believe my own eyes. They killed off Poles, no longer seeing them as some of their own, while taking themselves to be some kind of German tribe.
I once asked a vorarbeiter [foreman] from Silesia: “Why are you beating him, he’s a Pole?”
“But I’m no Pole; I’m from Silesia. My parents wanted to make a Pole out of me, but a Silesian—that’s a German. Poles live in Warsaw and not in Silesia.”
And he went on beating the other fellow with his club.
There were two block chiefs, Silesians—Skrzypek [Alfred Skrzypek] and Bednarek [Emil Bednarek]—who were perhaps worse than the worst German.
They clubbed to death such a large number of inmates that even Bloody Aloiz, who in any event had slackened off a bit, could not keep up with these thugs.
Every day standing at evening roll call we could see at the left end of the block wheelbarrows standing next to these killers with inmates’ corpses on them.
They boasted of their work to the SS, to whom they reported the numbers present.
However, one cannot generalize, for just as everywhere else, here too there were exceptions to the rule.
An exception was a Silesian who was a good Pole, and when you came across one, you could confidently put your life in his hands—he was your friend for life.
There was such a Silesian, block chief Alfred Włodarczyk and there was Smyczek [Wilhelm Smyczek]; there were also Silesians in our “fives,” about which more later.
Bloody Aloiz, whom I have mentioned, was now no longer a block chief.
Block 17a (old numbering system) was used to store sacks with inmates’ clothes.
Transports of inmates kept arriving, increasing the numbers on the rolls; but the size of the camp itself did not grow.
The surplus left through the crematorium chimney.
However, our effects—sacks with our earthly possessions which we had once used—were carefully stored.
They now occupied all the spare space in Block 18. Therefore, the space allocated to the effektenkammer [storeroom for inmates’ personal belongings] was expanded by a floor on Block 17 (Block 17a), and all the inmates were transferred to different blocks.
From the 26th of October I had been living on Block 3a (on the first floor of Block 3).
The block chief in Block 3a was Koprowiak [Stanisław Koprowiak]; someone had said good things to me about him and his past in another prison.
Here, I saw him beat from time to time; perhaps his nerves were going.
However, he tended to beat only when a German was watching.
Perhaps he wanted to protect his life, or his position. He was one of the best block chiefs as far as Poles were concerned.
On Block 3a I lived in room 1, whose supervisor was Drozd [Franciszek Drozd]. A good fellow, he treated people in the room well, without beatings. In this matter, the block chief left him a free hand.
It was from a first-floor window of this block that one day I saw a sight which has stuck in my mind.
It was a workday on which I remained in camp. I was going to the dispensary where I had been summoned by a note.
On my return I remained on the block.
It was raining and it was a dreary day.
The Penal Company was working on the parade ground carrying gravel which was being dug out of a hole. There was also a kommando standing around, freezing and “doing PE.”
Three SS men stood by the hole, and unable to leave out of fear of Palitzsch or the Commandant who was poking around the camp that day, they had devised a game. They were agreeing something and everyone was putting a banknote on a brick.
Then they would bury an inmate head down in the sand covering the upper part of his body in the hole and, looking at their watches, they would see how many minutes his legs would continue to move.
A new form of football pools, I thought to myself.
Clearly he who was closest to guessing how long someone buried in the sand would continue to move his legs before dying, scooped the pot.
Thus did 1940 come to an end.
Before I managed to get into the carpenters’ shop with all its advantages, including extra food on Block 5, the hunger twisting my entrails became so powerful that I began to devour with my eyes the bread of those who, already in “good jobs,” could save some of theirs for the morning, and I began what I think was the hardest battle in my life with myself.
The whole issue was how to eat now and still leave something for the morning...
But what is the point of writing about hunger for people with full stomachs... or for those who, getting parcels from home or from the Red Cross and not living under the threat of hard labor, complained afterwards how hungry they were.20
Ah!... the crisis of hunger arrives in all its different degrees.
There were times when one felt oneself capable of cutting off a piece from a corpse lying outside the hospital.
It was then, just before Christmas, that they began to issue us barley gruel in the morning instead of “tea,” which was a great blessing, but I do not know who was responsible. (It continued until the spring.)
A couple of beautifully lit Christmas trees were put up in the camp for Christmas.
In the evening the kapos laid two häftlings on two benches under the trees and gave them 25 strokes on that part of the body which out in the free world has been called soft.
This was supposed to be a German joke.
Punishments in Auschwitz were graded as follows:
The lightest punishment was a bench beating. It took place in public in the presence of all blocks at roll call.
The “execution block” was prepared—a bench with slots for the hands and legs on both sides.
Two SS thugs stood there (often Seidler himself and sometimes Lagerältester Bruno) and one was beaten on the naked body so as not to spoil one’s clothes.
One was beaten with a whip or sometimes a heavy cane.
After a dozen strokes the body was badly cut. Blood spurted and the remaining blows were on raw meat.
I witnessed this on several occasions.
Men sometimes got 50 strokes, even 75.
One day, when the punishment was 100 str
okes, the häftling, some poor wretch, expired at around the 90th stroke.
If the victim was still alive, he was then meant to stand up, do a few squats to restore the blood flow and, standing at attention, say thank you for the just punishment.
The next punishment was the bunker.
There were two types of bunker. The normal bunker consisted of cells in the cellars of Block 13 (old numbering system),where inmates were kept usually before interrogation and at the pleasure of the political department,21 as were also kapos and SS men as a punishment.
The cells of the normal bunker occupied three parts of the cellar on Block 13; in the last quarter of the cellar was a cell like the others, but without light, and called the “black hole.”
At one end of the block the cellar corridor turned ninety degrees right and ended immediately.
In this stub of the corridor there were three quite different small bunkers. They were the three so-called stehbunker (standing bunkers).
Beyond a rectangular opening in the wall, through which one could only enter bent double, there was a sort of cupboard 80 cm by 80 cm and 2 meters high,22 so that one could stand upright easily.
With the help of clubs, four inmates who had been sentenced to the stehbunker were shoved into one of these “cupboards” which was closed with bars and they were left there all night (from 7 in the evening until 6 in the morning).
It appears impossible, and yet there are witnesses and there are those still alive today who were punished in the stehbunker with their comrades, eight at a time.
They were let out in the morning and sent off to work and for the night they were again squeezed in like sardines, locked behind iron bars till morning.
The usual sentence was five nights, but there were also much longer ones.
Those who had no connections among the work detail “higher ups,” were usually finished off at work after one or two nights for lack of energy.
Those who could take a break with the kapo’s permission during the day at work could somehow get through this punishment.
The third punishment was the simple “pole” borrowed from the Austrians.
Added to that, the duty SS man would, for the fun of it, from time to time swing the man hanging by his arms tied behind his back. Then the joints creaked and the ropes bit into the body.
The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery Page 8