I watched everyone carefully, for one could never tell how a fellow might behave after having passed through Aleja Szucha30 and the Pawiak in Warsaw.
Some were exhausted; some were broken.
Not everyone was suited to our organization or to new underground work.
Major 38 [Chmielewski], who had worked with us in Warsaw using the nom de guerre “Sęp II,” on seeing me for the first time on the parade ground at Auschwitz in the summer of ’41 delightedly rushed over calling out loudly “Ah, so you’re here, the Warsaw Gestapo chopped my a— into little pieces asking what had happened to Witold... Have you been here long?... You do have an old number... How did you manage it?... But I saw you two months ago in Warsaw... That’s what I told them at Aleja Szucha,” he shouted in the presence of a dozen or so of my friends, blowing my cover, for here I was Tomasz.
Fortunately, there were no rogues among us.
As for how I had managed to be in Warsaw two months before... it appeared to me simply that, after being beaten at Aleja Szucha, he had gone slightly soft in the head.
It turned out much later that there was a completely different reason.31
Out of the dozen or so of my old colleagues who arrived over the course of these months, 25 [Stefan Bielecki] and 29 [Włodzimierz Makaliński] were the most useful to me in my work and I trusted them almost as much as I trusted myself.
Standing in the corner of a room in the zugang blocks and watching these people who had just arrived from the outside world and who still had, so to speak, the dust of Warsaw on them, one felt slightly odd.
As if one had more than one person inside.
One of these people wanted to feel sorry for himself and longed for the outside world, were it not for the shame he felt at such a thought.
However, another was stronger, and it was he who felt within him the joy of victory over impulses and the trivia to which people become attached in the real world, but which were of no value here.
The third one watched with a kind of pity, but not in the worst sense of that word, but with a certain inner, friendly smile, indulgently looking at these new arrivals who were still addressing each other formally using professional titles and military ranks.
Good Lord! How quickly you will have to shed all that; the sooner the better.
Here, the first order of business was finishing off the intelligentsia, because that was what the camp authorities had been instructed to do, but also because if an intellectual, unsuited to a manual craft in the workshops, failed to get into the camp’s reservoir of intellectuals—the baubüro [construction site office], the schreibstube [office], the hospital, the effektenkammer [storeroom for inmates’ personal belongings] and the bekleidungskammer [clothing storeroom]—he died, for he contributed nothing here, since an intellectual, even one possessing great knowledge, was unfortunately sometimes lacking in practical skills.
Furthermore, he was more delicate, unused to physical labor and any old food.
It is sad, but if I want to present a true picture of the camp, I cannot ignore this.
Anyone reading this who thinks that I am out to “blacken” the intelligentsia is wrong.
I believe that I could be considered one of them, but that does not mean that I am not to write the bitter truth.
A high percentage of the intellectuals brought to the camp had few survival skills. They did not realize that they needed to conceal their professional pedigrees for the time being as well as possible beneath a flexible approach, seeking a way to scrabble for their lives in this stony, harsh concentration camp soil.
Professional courtesy was out; they needed to come to grips with the conditions.
Engineers could not demand to work in an office, nor doctors to work in the hospital; they had to content themselves with the slightest “hole” through which they could wiggle out of a zugang block to find some work which the camp authorities found useful and which was not an affront to a Pole’s honor.
There was no “puffing up” because one was a lawyer, which was of absolutely no consequence here.
One had above all to be on good terms with every Pole, if one was not a bastard, and take advantage of any kind of help and repay it in kind.
For here the only way to live was cooperating in friendship and work... helping one another.
But how many did not understand that!
How many egoists there were about whom one could say: “he neither seeks the wave, nor it him.”32 Such people had to die. We had too little and so many to save.
Furthermore, the willpower was lacking not to eat everything one could not digest, and not all our intellectuals had strong stomachs.
“Stupid, f— intellectual,” was the most insulting epithet in the camp.
From the spring of ’41 the camp population gained the word “muselmann,” for that is what the German authorities called an inmate who, nearing the end, was weak and could barely walk—and the word caught on.
In the words of a camp ditty:
“... muselmänner. . . flapping like a banner...”
This was a being on the dividing line between life and... the crematorium chimney.
It was very difficult for him to regain his strength, he usually ended up in the hospital or on the schonungsblock [the so-called convalescence block] (Block 14 using the old numbering system; Block 19 in the new system) where several hundred of these wraiths could benefit from the camp authorities’ mercy and stand all day in rows in the corridors doing nothing; but this standing also finished them off.
The mortality rate in this block was enormous.
In July of ’41, as I was passing a group of a dozen or so young boys, aged 16 or 17, brought straight from their school desks for singing patriotic songs, one of them, 39 [Kazimierz Radwański], rushed over to me shouting: “Uncle!” Blown again.
However, I was pleased, obviously not that he was there, but at getting some family news.
A few weeks later, in the carpenters’ shop, in the machine shop, someone’s eyes bored into mine and without blinking stared at me carefully.
I held their gaze.
A short man, an inmate, a Pole, came over and asked me if I was XY, giving my real name.
I told him he was wrong. But he would not be put off, assuring me that there was nothing to fear.
A few weeks later, he was sworn in and was working for us: 40 [Tadeusz Szydlik].
He was working in the carpentry machine shop.
I swelled our ranks in the carpenters’ shop by swearing in three brave Poles: 41 [Stanisław Stawiszyński], 42 [Tadeusz Lech] and 43 [Antoni Koszczyński].
Shortly afterwards, 44 [Wincenty Gawron], 45 [Stanisław Gutkiewicz] and 46 [Wiktor Śniegucki] joined us.
I was managing by now to cope in the carpenters’ shop.
Fate decreed that my work and profile as a “sort of carpenter” did not bother the kapos.
Once only, as I was preparing boards for gluing on my own, Oberkapo Balke stood a few paces behind and watched me for a moment, of which I was unaware; he then called over Kapo Walter and pointing to me said slowly, enunciating the words: “Wer ist das? [Who’s that?],” but they moved on leaving me to my work.
I was told this by some of my friends next to whose work stations the kapos had been standing.
He apparently was aware that I was not a carpenter.
In fact Balke was an interesting person. Tall, handsome and with an intelligent appearance, he was rather stiff and cold.
On Sundays, when they tormented us with the so-called blocksperre [confinement to blocks] until noon, we were locked in for various uniform inspections, then Balke would appear and order all carpenters onto the parade ground where he paraded us, rearranged us and formed us up in twenties, assigning “twenty” leaders and kept us on the parade ground in the sun, with the orchestra playing until blocksperre was over. Then he would cheerfully dismiss us with a smile and let us return to our blocks.
Our camp was continually growing.
The running total, of course, came to over 20,000 inmates, but over 10,000 had vanished into the crematorium.
The camp was growing in another way; it was building.
In addition to the eight blocks on the parade ground (which led to a change of numbering throughout the camp) and the fact that they were extending the camp in the direction of Industriehof I, branches were being rapidly built in the main camp—the so-called stammlager. One was at so-called “Buna,” 8 kilometers to the east of the camp, where they were working on a factory for making artificial rubber; another branch of our stammlager was the newly created camp of Birkenau (Brzezinka), named after a little birch wood. It was also called “Rajsko,” which had nothing to do with the village of Rajsko (Birkenau was several kilometers to the west; the village of Rajsko was to the south); the name was simply ironic.33
Droves of people were dying on the building sites at both subcamps.
Every day hundreds of inmates marched out to Buna before morning roll call. They got up much earlier than we did and returned several hours after we had finished our workday.
Barracks were being built at Birkenau—wooden and still virginally new ones.
Only later would nightmarish things take place at Birkenau-Rajsko.
Framers and carpenters were needed to build the barracks and, in the absence of a large number of framers, carpenters were brought in at the start.
That meant working in the open air, in the rain and later the snow, urged on by the kapos’ clubs, since orders were to build this hell in Rajsko as quickly as possible.
Carpenters from our shop were to be sent there—to die.
Balke had to supply these carpenters. He did it unwillingly. He took his time choosing.
This was a difficult time for the carpenters and apparently also for him.
Most of the carpenters who went to build the barracks in the open air (about a third of all the carpenters went) died there: they caught cold or simply collapsed from exhaustion.
Therefore, he assigned the worst craftsmen.
He would look at me carefully as if thinking: “assign him or not?”
And somehow he would continue down the line of standing carpenters awaiting their fate, leaving me in the shop.
A minute percentage of people in Auschwitz were released.
They were usually fellows from Warsaw street round-ups with no records whose families bought them out, using a variety of intermediaries who had got in on this act, and sometimes fell afoul of blackmailers or charlatans. Or by families with their own connections at foreign consulates, or even at Aleja Szucha.
In the autumn of ’40 about 70–80 people from the Warsaw transports were released.
In the course of ’41, releases were very rare, merely a handful in all before the autumn (several dozen in all) until in the autumn of ’41 about 200 inmates were sent to the “freedom” block (set aside for this purpose), where they were “quarantined” before leaving the camp.
That means they were given better food to make them more presentable, they were not beaten, and those bearing the marks of beatings or injuries were kept in the hospital for these to heal and in order to convalesce, so as not to leave with evidence of the treatment meted out to inmates at Auschwitz.
However, taking into account that those arriving at the camp in November 1941 were given camp numbers over 25,000, what did over three hundred releases mean?
Every released inmate, after getting into his civilian clothes (from the bags in the effektenkammer in which his things had been hanging), had to go either alone, or with a group of other fellows being released, through the little wooden hut (where the postzensurstelle [mail censorship office] was also located) where an SS man would say goodbye, making it quite plain that, once free, he was to say not a word about the camp at Auschwitz.
If anyone were to ask what it was like in Auschwitz, the inmate was to reply: “Go and find out for yourself !” (a naive suggestion).
And, if the German authorities learned that one of those released had failed to keep his mouth shut, he would rapidly find himself back at Auschwitz (this was more convincing, and former inmates of Auschwitz really did stay silent as the grave).
The game which I was now playing in Auschwitz was dangerous.
This sentence does not really convey the reality; in fact, I had gone far beyond what people in the real world would consider dangerous, simply passing through the wires into the camp was beyond dangerous.
Indeed, the work I had begun completely absorbed me, and since it was beginning to pick up speed in line with my plan, I really began to worry that my family might buy me out, like some of the other fellows, and interrupt the game I was playing, for I also had no record and had been brought in from a round-up.
So, unable to reveal my work, I wrote to my family that everything was just fine, that they should not raise my case and that I wanted to stay on. Fate would decide whether I would get out and so on.
I received in return a reply that Janek W. [Jan Włodarkiewicz], whose conscience troubled him when he learnt where I was, kept asking everyone: “Why did he go?” However, he stayed true and told the family when they asked for help in buying me out that he didn’t have the money for it.
I discovered a way to send letters to my family writing in Polish.
A young friend of mine 47 [name unknown], going to work in the town, had managed to make contact with the locals through whom I sent two letters to my family.
My letters were sent on to [Home Army] High Command.
In addition to those initial colleagues from Warsaw I have mentioned, I met here in Auschwitz at the beginning of ’41 Stach 48 [Stanisław Ozimek], who was shipped out to the quarry, and in the summer of ’41 Janek 49 [Jan Dangel] who was sick and whom we managed to get on a transport to Dachau, which was a much better camp than Auschwitz.
A number of escape attempts led the camp authorities to decide to apply collective responsibility and (starting in the spring of ’41) ten inmates were shot for each successful escapee.34
The selection of ten men to die for one escapee was a difficult moment for the camp and especially for the block where the selection was being made.
At that time we, as an organization, took a clear position against escapes.
We organized no escapes and opposed any thought of them, as evidence of extreme egoism, until there were major changes in this area.
For the time being all escapes were lone ventures having nothing to do with our organization.
A “death selection” was held immediately following the roll call at which an escapee’s absence had been discovered.
The Camp Commandant and his retinue arrived in front of the block in which the escapee had been living, now standing in ten ranks, and walking down a rank he would point to inmates who appealed to him or who maybe did not.
This rank would then take “five paces forward” and the whole retinue walked down the next rank.
Some ranks had several people picked; others had none.
Those who looked death bravely in the eye were usually not chosen.
Not everyone could take the tension and sometimes someone would run forward, behind the inspecting team’s back, to the rank already inspected; these types were usually spotted and taken off to their death.
It once happened that a young inmate was chosen, whereupon an old man, a priest, stepped out of the ranks and asked the Camp Commandant to take him and release the young man.
This was a powerful moment and the block froze in amazement.
The Commandant agreed.
The heroic priest went to his death and the other inmate returned to the ranks.35
The political department was hard at work—leading to shootings for “outside” cases.
The camp authorities were especially pleased when they managed to assemble a largish group of Poles to be shot on days which had
been formerly celebrated on the outside, in Poland.
Almost as a matter of course we had a larger “cull” on the 3rd of May36 and the 11th of November,37 and once, as a bonus, we had a group of Poles shot on the 19th of March.38
When I had been in the “outside world” and longing for some creative work with a chisel, or a bit of carving, I had thought to myself: well, since I just never seem to have the time for this, they might as well put me in jail.
Fortune has always shone on me and it must have been listening in.
Now I was locked up, so I needed to try my hand at carving, about which I knew absolutely nothing.
The carpentry department had a carving shop.
With the exception of a couple of professionally trained painters such as 44 [Wincenty Gawron] and 45 [Stanisław Gutkiewicz], everyone working there was a woodcarver, most of them from the Polish mountains.
With the help of 44 [Wincenty Gawron] and 45 [Stanisław Gutkiewicz] I got into the carving shop.
My transfer was easier, given that the carving shop was a subunit of the carpenters’ shop where I had been working for several months.
The head of the shop was a fine fellow: 52 [Tadeusz Myszkowski].
I arrived there (1 Nov. ’41) and made a couple of drawings of paper knives.
I was told: “That’s fine... on paper, but now please do it in wood.”
So I began work as a permanent member of the carving shop.
During my first week I carved three knives.
The first knife was really an opportunity for me to get used to holding and using the tools, the second was a little better and as for the third—52 [Tadeusz Myszkowski] showed it to the woodcarvers saying: “That’s how you carve a knife!”
So the work went fine.
On one side sat 42 [Tadeusz Lech]—a first-rate fellow and always cheerful—and on the other my friend 45 [Stanisław Gutkiewicz].
On the morning of 11 Nov. ’41, comrade 42 [Tadeusz Lech] came over and said: “I’ve had a strange dream, I feel that they’re going to ‘top’ me today. Perhaps it’s nothing, but at least I can take comfort in dying on the 11th of November.”
The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery Page 12