The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery

by Captain Witold Pilecki

  The last thing needed was the arrival of “Perełka” and his Alsatian.

  Sometimes interrogations were carried out like that, and the hanging man was fed salad dressing, in other words vinegar, to prevent him fainting too soon.

  And the fourth, the highest punishment was death by shooting—a quick death and thus more humanitarian and indeed genuinely requested by those tortured for a long time.

  “Shooting” is not quite accurate; more accurate would be “shooting down,” or even killing.

  This also took place on Block 13 (old numbering system).

  There was a yard there, hemmed in by Blocks 12 and 13. On the east side it was enclosed by a wall linking the two blocks, called the “wall of tears.” On the west side there was also a wall with a gate, usually closed, blocking the view. It was opened for a live victim or in order to toss out bloody corpses.

  Passing that way one could often detect the smell of an abattoir.

  A red stream ran through the gutter.

  The gutter was whitewashed and yet on an almost daily basis a new stream of red flowed between its white sides.

  Oh, if only that were not blood... not human blood... not Polish blood... and the best Polish blood too... then... who knows... one could even have admired the contrast of colors...

  That was outside.

  Inside, however, terrible and dreadful things took place.

  There, in the enclosed yard, the executioner Palitzsch, a handsome lad who never beat anyone in the camp (that was not his style), was the principal director of terrifying scenes.

  The condemned, in a row, having undressed and now naked, stood one after the other by the “wall of tears” while he would put a small-caliber pistol to the back of their head and end their life.

  He would sometimes employ the kind of bolt used to kill cattle.

  The spring-loaded bolt would pierce the skull and the brain and kill.

  Sometimes a group of civilians who had been tortured and interrogated in the cellars and who had now been handed over to Palitzsch for some fun would be led out.

  Palitzsch would order the girls to undress and run in a circle around the enclosed yard.

  Standing in the middle of the yard he would take his time picking a victim, then he would aim, shoot and kill them all one by one.

  None of them knew who would die next, or who would live for a few more moments, or who might be taken back for further interrogation.

  He—improved his aim.

  These scenes were witnessed from Block 12 by several block supervisors standing guard to prevent a häftling from approaching the window.

  The windows were covered in wire netting, but not thoroughly enough; so everything was visible.

  Another time, a family standing in the yard by the “wall of tears” was seen from Block 12.

  First of all, Palitzsch shot the father, killing him before the eyes of his wife and two children.

  Yad Vashem/ Stanisław Mucha

  The “Wall of Tears”

  In front of the brick wall between Blocks 12 and 13 (old numbering system), the Germans built another removable wall: the “Wall of Tears,” also called the “Wall of Death” or the “Black Wall .” Made of wood covered with cork painted black, its function was to absorb the bullets of the firing squad—protecting the brickwork and preventing bullets from ricocheting back at the executioners.

  ABM

  SS Hauptscharführer Gerhard Palitzsch.

  Then he killed the little girl who was gripping her pale mother’s hand.

  Then he grabbed the small child which the unfortunate woman was cuddling to her breast. He grasped it by the legs and smashed its little head against the wall.

  Finally he killed the mother, semi-conscious from grief.

  This scene was recounted to me so precisely and so identically by a number of friends who had witnessed it that I have no doubt that that is what happened.

  For Christmas of 1940 inmates were for the first time allowed to receive parcels from their families.

  But not food parcels, oh no!

  We were not allowed to receive food parcels for fear we might have it too easy.

  The first parcel arrived at Auschwitz. It was a clothes parcel, containing a number of previously specified items: a sweater, a scarf, gloves, ear muffs, socks.

  Nothing more could be sent. Someone’s parcel contained underwear—it went to the sack in the effektenkammer [storeroom for inmates’ personal belongings] with the inmate’s number and stayed there.

  That is how it was then.

  We later managed to get into everything, with the help of fellows in the know.

  There was just one parcel, one a year, at Christmas, with no food, but still valuable because of the warm clothes, and precious because it came from home.

  Over Christmas, Westrych and the carpenters’ shop kapo managed to wangle for the carpenters some additional cooking pots of an excellent stew from the SS kitchen, and the arriving carpenters were in for a treat in the shop.

  These pots came around a number of times and also later, brought in secretly by the SS who received money collected from us by Westrych.

  The year 1941 began for me with more carpentry work in Block 5, where I continued to come up with new jobs.

  The block chief left me completely alone.

  Here I met a friend, Gierych [Bolesław Gierych], the son of friends of mine whose flat in Oryol I had used for clandestine purposes in 1916–1917.

  The Lagerältester, Leo [Leon Wietschorek] (inmate number 30), came around to Block 5 almost daily.

  If an SS man or the Lagerältester came into the room one had to call out “Achtung” and report.

  I would do this faultlessly, adding to my report: “... ein Tischler bei der Arbeit! [... carpenter at his post, sir!]”

  This suited Wietschorek. He was not in the least interested in what I had been spending so much time doing there as he strutted around like a peacock.

  Block 5 was the “youngsters’ block,” with boys between the ages of 15 and 18 whom the Third Reich still hoped to bring around.

  They took some sort of courses there.

  Leo would come around daily, for he liked young people and he liked boys... too much. He was a pervert.

  Here he chose victims for his perversions. He fed them, plumped them up, forcing them to comply through favors and the threat of the Penal Company, and when he had had enough of his boy, he would hang him in the toilet, usually at night, so as to avoid having an awkward witness to behavior which was forbidden in the camp.

  About the 15th of January I was standing by the window when Leo came into the room.

  I failed to notice him and did not call out “Achtung,” for my attention was distracted by a zugang outside. I also saw Colonel 11 [Tadeusz Reklewski] through the window.

  Leo was visibly displeased with me. He came over and said: “You’ve been hanging around this block too long. I don’t want to see you here tomorrow.”

  I told Westrych this, but he nonetheless ordered me to go there the next day.

  So, on the following day, I again went off to Block 5.

  Leo arrived shortly after I did, saw me and fell into a rage. “Deine Nummer? [Your number?]” he bellowed and unusually he did not strike me. “Rrrrraus! mit dem alles! [Get out! and take your stuff with you!]” he said pointing to my tools.

  I got out sharpish and he took my number, shouting after me that I would be kicked out of the carpenters’ shop that same day.

  Back at the shop I recounted the incident to Westrych.

  A moment later Leo burst in.

  By a stroke of luck, the kapo was not in the shop. Westrych was acting for him and he let Leo shout to his heart’s content and then explained that his carpenter had reported the incident the previous day, but that he had ordered him to go back to Block 5 that morning to collect all the tools. Leo calmed down.

  I remained a carpenter, working, just to be on the safe side, in the shop’s second room,
also on Block 9.

  A few days later, Westrych ordered me to take my tools and follow him somewhere in the camp.

  He took me to Block 15 (old numbering system).

  This was the hospital, which went by the German name krankenbau.

  The hospital block chief, a slightly crazy German, wanted things to be tidy, however, on his block.

  Westrych had suggested to him only the day before to put slats around the straw mattresses.

  There were no beds.

  The sick lay side by side on the floor in terrible conditions.

  The mattresses, thrown on the floor so that the sick had their heads to the wall, were not always straight and hardly improved matters. So it had been decided to put slats at the end of the mattresses which were arranged along the walls in two rows the length of the ward.

  These slats running evenly the length of the ward would create in the center of the floor an evenly framed pathway.

  The block chief gave me a good look and asked if I could do a good job. Bad work would mean a beating on the bench; good work would mean daily “seconds.”

  So I got down to work, and ward after ward I provided every mattress with a frame with slats which I attached to the floor with square blocks.

  I was given (Westrych sent him) an engineer from Warsaw to help me.

  Both of us got our daily “seconds.”

  We had plenty of food on the block.

  It was issued for everyone, but some of the sick wanted nothing to eat.

  The engineer from Warsaw caught the flu here. Admitted to the hospital in the same block in the conditions current in the krankenbau, with its terrible lice, he soon died.

  I finished off the slats by myself.

  Then my turn came. I either picked up some kind of flu or caught cold at roll call.

  The winter was quite severe. To be sure, we had been issued coats even before Christmas, but they were “ersatz” without linings and gave little protection from the frost.

  I fought my sickness for several days.

  I had a temperature and on some days in the evening it was as high as 39 degrees [Celsius],23 so that I would have been admitted to the hospital without any inside connections. But I did not want to go to the hospital.

  There were two reasons for this: the terrible lice in the hospital, and an end to my job in the carpenters’ shop.

  I fought as best I could, but the sickness had gripped me and did not want to let go.

  The worst was standing at roll call running a temperature and with the wind driving through me.

  I have no idea how this struggle would have ended.

  Something quite different took a hand.

  On the block, in Room 1, conditions were still bearable. After “room supervisor” Drozd, we got a new one—Antek Potocki.

  Some of us had various cleaning responsibilities.

  Mine were the windows, doors and lights.

  Everything might have worked out on the block were it not for the fact that we were all “somewhat” lice-ridden.

  Every evening we did some serious hunting in our shirts.

  I used to kill about a hundred of them daily on the assumption that more would not appear during the night, but by morning another hundred would be there.

  Then it was hard to hunt down any more, for the lights went out at a certain time. During the day at work there was no time for this.

  At night they would crawl from the blankets onto our shirts. Even if one could have got them all off the blanket during the night, it would have achieved nothing: during the day the blankets were all stacked together and so every day one got another blanket. By the warm fire, these little creatures were only too happy to wander from one blanket to another.

  Finally, delousing was ordered.

  Unfortunately, this came at a very bad time for me.

  I was running a high temperature.

  That evening we were told to undress. We handed over our clothes, threaded on a wire, to be steamed.

  Then we went naked to take a shower in Block 18 (old numbering system) and then naked to Block 17 (old numbering system). There we spent the whole night naked, several hundred of us to a room, and it was terribly stuffy.

  In the morning, we were issued clothes and set off across the parade ground to Block 3 in the wind and the frost.

  I had given my coat to Antek Potocki who was also sick.

  That night did me in.

  I went to the hospital almost unconscious. After again being sprayed with water in the waschraum [washroom], I was put on Block 15 (old numbering system) in Room 7 (where I had been affixing the slats to the floor), which had terrible lice.

  The next few nights, doing constant battle with the lice, were, I think, my hardest in the camp.

  I did not want to submit and let the lice devour me.

  But how was I to defend myself here?

  If you looked at the blanket under the light, its whole surface was constantly heaving.

  There were all sorts of them: small and large, swollen, elongated, white and gray, red with blood, some had horizontal stripes, others had vertical ones... they crawled slowly up people’s backs and then quickly slid off.

  I was revolted, and resolved firmly not to allow myself to be eaten by this disgusting horde.

  I tied my long johns firmly around my ankles and my waist and buttoned up my shirt at the neck and the wrists.

  There was no question of killing them one by one; I crushed whole handfuls with a swift motion, gathering them from my neck and feet.

  Exhausted by the temperature and the constant movement, my body craved sleep.

  My head fell, but then I dragged myself back.

  I could not under any circumstances allow myself to go to sleep.

  To fall asleep meant to stop fighting and to allow oneself to be eaten.

  Within an hour my hands were stained red from crushing this filth’s bloody bodies.

  It was a hopeless task to destroy them all.

  We lay packed tightly together, our bodies covered in blankets, our backs or sides touching.

  Not everyone fought. Some were unconscious, others just wheezed, others were no longer able to fight.

  An unconscious older inmate (a highlander) lay next to me. His face, which I shall never manage to forget, was a few dozen centimeters from my head; it was covered in a motionless crust of lice of all sizes which had burrowed into the skin.

  To my left lay an inmate (Narkun), who had died. His blanket had been pulled over his head and a stretcher was awaited.

  Meanwhile the lice on his blanket started to perk up and head in my direction.

  In order to kill the lice in one’s own blanket, one would perhaps had to have pounded the blanket time and again with a blunt stone on an even floor.

  But trying to protect oneself on either side was almost as fruitless as trying to arrest a stream in full flow: impossible to stop the flow or destroy it completely.

  Here I have to admit that for the first time I began to doubt that I had the strength to fight, indeed to want to fight.

  My psychological state was dangerous. To doubt one’s will to fight was to crack.

  Once I became aware of this, I felt better.

  I continued to crush lice on my neck and feet.

  The corpse was replaced by a new patient, a boy of perhaps eighteen, named Salwa, whose Christian name was Edek.

  When I dozed off he would protect me from the stream of invaders coming from the right, sometimes scooping them up with a knife and sometimes a spoon.

  He fought his own battle on his own blanket and so I had a neighbor protecting my left flank, providing me with a little more peace.

  He would also buy me bread from patients who were too sick to eat.

  I ate—everything.

  I do have a strange character, as I have discovered more than once.

  Others, when running a fever, do not eat; I eat like a horse.

  I invite anyone who, on reading this sh
rugs, to get to know me better, then he might discover that all my life I have done things back to front.

  In this ward there were a few fine people, who eased what was left of these sick people’s lives.

  There were Janek Hrebenda and Tadeusz Burski, both fine, good people working with the sick. There was not much that they could do, but whatever was within their power, then the sick got it.

  However, it was obvious that they could not change conditions.

  There was a time in the summer when it had been forbidden to open the windows to prevent the sick catching cold and everyone suffocated in the heat and the stench.

  Now, when there was a hard frost, all the windows were opened wide twice a day and the place was aired for a long time, the icy air from the windows creeping along the floor, shaking the huddled forms lying under a thin, wretched blanket with a blast of cold.

  I struggled with the lice more than with the sickness for three days and two nights.

  The third day, almost at the end of my strength, I decided to reveal my weakness to Władek.

  Using a new friend, Tadek Burski, I wrote a card to Dr. 2 [Władysław Dering].

  All cards in the camp were suspect. They could be interpreted as two inmates who were acting against the interests of the Third Reich trying to get in touch.

  I wrote: “If you don’t get me out of here at once, then I will use up all my reserves of strength fighting lice. In my present condition I am rapidly approaching the crematorium chimney.” I gave my location.

  A few hours later, Dr. 2 [Władysław Dering] appeared, assisted by Dr. 12 [Edward Nowak].

  Both were officially only pflegers (nurses).

  A Pole could not officially be a doctor there.

  However, Dr. 2 [Władysław Dering] had so successfully managed to cope that he already had some say in the running of the hospital.

  Dr. 2 [Władysław Dering] was going around the ward (it was not his department).

  He pretended not to know me.

  He turned to Dr. 12 [Edward Nowak] saying: “What’s wrong with this fellow? Can you look him over?”

  It turned out that I had pneumonia in my left lung.