The authorities were going nuts, searching, ripping up floors in the workshops in Industriehof I and in the warehouses.
We broadcast infrequently, at different times and it was hard to catch us.
The authorities gave up searching in the main camp, and concentrated on the outside areas near the town of Oświęcim [Auschwitz]. They reasoned that our ability to provide detailed information on the camp came from our contact with an outside organization via civilian workers. They searched the gemeinschaftslager [the camp for civilian forced laborers].
There was indeed contact with the civilian population.
The route from us led through the civilian population (amongst whom there were members of our organization on the outside) in Brzeszcze.
The route also led through the gemeinschaftslager by way of those who worked for us as ostensibly our superiors, and then led to Buna, also by way of civilian workers.
In this way I sent out to the “free world” a whole stack of German cipher keys, the so-called verkehrsabkürzungen, also sneaked out of the funkstelle.
From the free world we received medicine, anti-typhus shots; on the one hand we had Dr. 2 [Władysław Dering] working on this, and on the other my friend 59 [Henryk Bartosiewicz].
My friend 59 [Henryk Bartosiewicz] was an interesting fellow.
He did everything “with a smile” and things just worked out for him.
He was always rescuing and feeding a few fellows in his room and in the tannery, to put them back on their feet so that they could cope on their own.
He was forever rescuing someone by bringing him into the tannery.
He never did things by halves, acting bravely and with a certain pushiness where others would have held back.
Large, broad-shouldered, with a smiling face and a big heart.
When Heinrich Himmler arrived with some commission, 59 [Henryk Bartosiewicz] was block supervisor on Block 6 (old numbering system) and was instructed on how to report to Himmler, before whom all trembled. So when the great day came and Himmler entered the room, 59 [Henryk Bartosiewicz] stood before him and... said nothing... and then laughed and Himmler also laughed.
Perhaps what saved him was the fact that Himmler was accompanied by two civilian gentlemen and that perhaps such gentle treatment of a häftling was good publicity.
Yet another time, 59 [Henryk Bartosiewicz], seeing through the tannery window an inspection team in the courtyard which was inspecting the warehouses and which was heading for the door leading into the great hall where the tanners were working, grabbed a rubber hose and, ostensibly cleaning up for the team, he began spraying the walls and floors and intentionally and thoroughly hosed down the team, composed of German officers, then he dropped the hose as if horrified and again he got away with it.
As the columns entered the camp, grim thoughts on the inmates’ minds, suddenly 59 [Henryk Bartosiewicz] in a carrying voice could be heard issuing commands in Polish and counting loudly: “One... two... three...”
USHMM/IPN
During a tour of the Auschwitz III building site, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler extends his hand in greeting to the engineers supervising the construction.
ABM
Inmates’ orchestra.
USHMM/IPN
Inmates’ orchestra during a Sunday concert for the SS men in Auschwitz.
No doubt, he also had his faults, but then who doesn’t?
In any event, he always had a great many supporters around him and he could have impressed and led a great many.
The final releases of 1942 were in March and a couple of fellows in the orchestra were released, since the Commandant who, as I mentioned, loved music, had got the authorities in Berlin to agree to a couple of members of the orchestra being released each year.
It had been announced to the orchestra that anyone who tried to play really well would be released and so the orchestra played beautifully. The Commandant was intoxicated with music.
Every year, those who were the least needed in the orchestra were released.
After March there were no more releases throughout the whole of 1942, given the unwanted existence in the outside world of any witnesses of Auschwitz, or especially of what began to take place in Auschwitz in 1942.
Finally, the first women—prostitutes and criminals—were brought from German prisons to Auschwitz, to a part of the camp whose barracks were separated from us by a high wall, and they were appointed as the training cadre for the women who were shortly to be brought there—honest women, “political criminals.”
In Rajsko, the first daily gassings of people began in the gas chambers which were now ready.
On the 16th of March45 (of ’42), 120 Polish women were brought in.
They smiled at the inmates who were entering the camp in columns.
After interrogations and maybe some special torturing, which no one could confirm, that same evening wagons took to the crematorium a number of bloody corpses in pieces, with severed heads, hands, breasts.
The old crematorium was unable to burn the bodies from our central camp and also the bodies from Rajsko. (The chimney built in 1940 had cracked and collapsed from the constant heat of the bodies. A new one was built.)
So the bodies were buried in wide pits using kommandos composed of Jews to do the work.
Two new crematoria with electric ovens were being hastily constructed in Rajsko-Birkenau.
The plans were drawn up in the baubüro [construction site office].
In the words of the fellows in the baubüro, each crematorium would have eight stations, each of which could take two bodies.
Electric incineration would take three minutes.
The plans were sent off to Berlin.
After approval, they returned with instructions to complete the work initially by the 1st of February, then the deadline was moved to the 1st of March and in March they were ready.
Now the factory began to work at full steam.
An order came down to destroy all signs of previous killings. So began the work of digging up all the bodies buried in ditches, of which there were tens of thousands.
The bodies were already decomposing. A terrible stench surrounded these great opened communal graves.
Those working on some of the older ones had to wear gas masks.
The size of this job from hell was enormous.
Over a thousand a day from the new transports were gassed. The corpses were burnt in the new crematoria.
Cranes were used to bring up the bodies from the pits and they dug their metal talons into the disintegrating corpses.
In places small fountains of stinking pus spurted.
The body parts torn from the piles of corpses by the cranes and dug up by hand were taken to huge piles where wood and the remains of human beings were stacked alternately.
These piles were then lit and sometimes the petrol was not spared...
The piles then burned day and night for two and a half months, spreading around Auschwitz the stench of burning meat and human bones.
The kommandos assigned to this task were composed exclusively of Jews and lived for only two weeks. They were then gassed and their corpses were burnt by other newly arrived Jews, formed into new kommandos, unaware that they were to live for only two weeks and hoped to survive longer.
The beautiful horse chestnuts and apple trees bloomed...
It was above all at this time of the year, the spring, when one felt one’s imprisonment most keenly.
When marching along the gray road towards the tannery in a column raising clouds of dust, one saw the beautiful red light of the dawn shining on the white flowers in the orchards and on the trees by the roadside, or on the return journey we would encounter young couples out walking, breathing in the beauty of springtime, or women peacefully pushing their children in prams—then the thought uncomfortably bouncing around one’s brain would arise … swirling around, stubbornly seeking some solution to the insoluble question:
Were w
e all... people?
Those walking amongst the flowers and those heading for the gas chambers?
Those constantly marching alongside us with their bayonets … and we—for some years now the damned?
They brought in the first large female transports and put them in the segregated blocks (Nos. 1–10, new numbering system).
Shortly thereafter female transports began to arrive one after another.
German, Jewish, Polish women arrived.
They were all entrusted to the care of criminal elements: prostitutes and common criminals.
With the exception of the Germans, they all had their heads and body hair shaved.
This was done by our male barbers.
The interest of the barbers, starved of female company, changed quickly to exhaustion as their eyes’ earlier unrequited desires were now overloaded with distaste.
The women were in the same circumstances as the male inmates.
They did not experience the same killing methods as in the first year, for in the men’s camp the methods had already changed. Yet they too were finished off in the open air by the rain, the cold, the work to which they were unaccustomed, the lack of rest and the roll call parades.
We daily encountered the same columns of women whom we would pass heading off to work in different directions.
We recognized a number of profiles, heads and pretty little faces.
Initially holding up well, the girls quickly lost the sparkle in their eyes, their smiles and the spring in their step.
Some of them continued to smile, but more sorrowfully.
Yad Vashem/Otto Dov Kulka
Construction of the roof of Gas Chamber III—Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Yad Vashem/Otto Dov Kulka
Crematorium IV under construction— Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Yad Vashem/Otto Dov Kulka
Incinerators in Crematorium III—Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Their faces grew gray, animal hunger began to stare out of their eyes, they were turning into that camp phenomenon: muselmänner.
We more often began to notice the lack of familiar faces in their “fives.”
The columns of women heading out to be finished off at work were also escorted by “people resembling human beings,” dressed in the heroic uniforms of German soldiers, together with a whole pack of dogs.
In the fields two, or sometimes just one, “hero” with a few dogs guarded hundreds of women.
They were weakened and could only dream of escaping.
From the spring (of ’42) we were surprised by the sight of all the muselmänner, still standing around as before in a group by the kitchen for inspection, being freely admitted to the krankenbau [hospital].
After that no one stood around in a group; everyone went straight to the krankenbau on Block 28 (new numbering system) where they were freely admitted with no fuss.
Things are looking up, the inmates said to one another. There are no beatings. People are admitted to the hospital and so on.
Indeed. In some of the hospital wards several patients lay on a single bed, yet they were still freely admitted.
Only an SS man named Klehr would go there daily and take down the numbers of the weakest inmates.
The word was that they would probably get an extra helping to keep them going.
The numbers noted down were later read out and those häftlings were sent to Block 20 (new numbering system).
Soon thereafter these numbers could be seen in the daily pile of corpses lying in front of the hospital (every inmate admitted to the hospital had a large number written on the skin on his chest with a chemical pen so that there would be no problem with identification after death when the daily list of those killed and those who had died was drawn up.)
They were being finished off with phenol—a new method.
Thus did the image of Auschwitz change radically.
No longer did one see (at least not within the confines of the stammlager [main camp] itself) heads being crushed by spades, people killed by having boards hammered into their intestines, or an inmate lying helpless having his chest crushed, his ribs cracked by the heavy boots of degenerate butchers jumping with their whole weight on his chest.
Now quietly and calmly the inmates whose numbers had been taken down in the krankenbau by a German (SS) doctor, undressed and stood completely naked on the corridor of Block 20 (new numbering system) calmly awaiting their turn.
They entered the waschraum [washroom] singly through a curtain and were placed on a chair, two executioners pulled back their shoulders pushing forward their chest, and the SS man Klehr gave them a phenol injection with a long needle straight into the heart.
At first the injection was made intravenously, but the victim lived too long—several minutes—so in order to save time the system was changed and the injection was made straight into the heart and the inmate lived much less— a few seconds.
The still-twitching body was pushed into the toilet behind a wall and the next number entered.
Yes, this was a much more intelligent method of murder, but still terrible in its secretiveness.
Everyone standing in the corridor knew what awaited them.
Passing the queue one saw friends and said: “Greetings Jaś or Staś, today it’s your turn, tomorrow it could be me!”
They were not necessarily very ill or even exhausted.
Some of them ended up there only because Klehr did not like them, and their number then stayed on the “needle list”—there was no way out.
Now, there were different butchers from those in the camp’s early days, but I daresay they could still be called degenerates.
Klehr murdered with the needle with great concentration, a deranged expression on his face and a sadistic smile, making a tick on the wall after every murder.
In my time there he extended the list of those killed by him to 14,000 and daily boasted about this with great satisfaction, like a hunter describing his successes.
An inmate, Pańszczyk [Mieczysław Pańszczyk], to his eternal shame, volunteered to give his fellows injections into the heart and killed quite a few less, about 4,000.
Klehr had an incident.
One day, after taking care of everyone in the queue for an injection, he entered as usual the toilet where the dying häftlings were dumped to admire his handiwork for the day, when one of the “corpses” came to life (there must have been an error and he had received too little phenol), stood up and started to stagger over the other corpses like a drunk towards Klehr saying: “Du hast mir zu wenig gegeben, gib mir noch etwas!... [You didn’t give me enough, let me have a little more!]”
Klehr went white, but not panicking, rushed at him— the executioner’s apparently cultured mask slipping—pulled out his pistol and without shooting, not wishing to make a noise, he finished off his victim by hitting him over the head with the butt.
The krankenbau room orderlies gave a daily report on the number of deaths on their wards.
There was an incident (I know of at least one, there could have been more) when an orderly made a mistake, giving a living man’s number instead of a dead man’s.
The report went to the main schreibstube [office].
For fear of being removed from his post and for his own peace of mind, this criminal told the sick man, a zugang who did not even understand what was going on, to get up and stand in the queue for one of Klehr’s injections.
One extra person made no difference to Klehr.
Thus did the orderly correct his mistake, for the man who died in his ward and the other who got one of Klehr’s “shots” were now both well and truly dead, and the report was accurate, for the number of the man on the ward who had died had been added to it.
However, we did have a great number of orderlies in the hospital who were very good Poles.
We twice needed numbers altered and this was carried out easily and without harming anyone.
During the high death rate from typhus, when great numbers of corp
ses were thrown out daily from a number of blocks, two of our people were admitted to hospital as serious cases; we saved them by writing their numbers on corpses with similar numbers, taking care too that the dead men did not have any serious unfinished business with the political department.
Thus, also equipped with changed personal details (provided by colleagues in the schreibstube), we managed to get them into Birkenau straight from the hospital.
There they were completely unknown, new numbers, zugangs, their trail ran cold and the plan worked.
Our organization continued to expand.
I proposed to Colonel 64 [Kazimierz Rawicz] that he nominate my friend Bohdan, Major 85 [Zygmunt Bohdanowski] as overall military commander in the event of action, since in Warsaw in 1940 I had considered him for a similar post in the underground.
Colonel 64 [Kazimierz Rawicz] willingly agreed.
Bohdan knew the area, for some years before he had commanded a battery of the 5th Horse Artillery Regiment there.
I decided then, and Colonel 64 [Kazimierz Rawicz] approved the idea, to develop a plan of eventual action based on four key objectives which we had identified.
This was due to the fact that in order to take over the camp in accordance with our work’s eventual aim, we needed to prepare detachments along parallel lines. One system for a workday operation. Another one for nighttime or days off when we were in our blocks, and this for the reason that we still were not living in blocks as complete kommandos. Thus there was one set of contacts, links and commanders during the workday, another on the blocks.
Therefore, the plan had to be based on an outline of essential objectives which required individual preparation.
It was then that the need to fill four command positions emerged.
I proposed Captain46 60 [Stanisław Kazuba] for one of them, Captain 114 [Tadeusz Paolone] for the second one; Second Lieutenant 61 [Konstanty Piekarski] recommended First Lieutenant 115 [name unknown] for the third one and Captain 116 [Zygmunt Pawłowicz—in the camp as Julian Trzęsimiech] for the fourth one. Colonel 64 [Kazimierz Rawicz] and Major 85 [Zygmunt Bohdanowski] agreed with us.
Eventually, with the help of comrade 59 [Henryk Bartosiewicz] and after long discussions on the need for agreement, and the essential requirement to be able to stay silent even if one of us ended up in the bunker and was interrogated by the butchers of the political department, Colonel 23 [Aleksander Stawarz] and Lieutenant Colonel 24 [Karol Kumuniecki] join us.
The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery Page 16