Somehow the order did not “hit the spot.” No one believed in release. Our eyes had seen too many murders for their owners to be set free.
Furthermore, reading it out at such a harrowing moment was oh so very German.
The wave of humanitarian methods of killing— a testament to our tormentors’ culture—produced the quite open dispatch of inmates from the hospital blocks to the gas chamber.
When, several days in succession, so many people were admitted to the hospital that there was no room and they were even lying three to a bed, Klehr’s appetite for the needle had been satisfied and the hospital was still packed, then the sick were taken in trucks to the gas chambers in Birkenau.
Initially, this was done with a certain amount of shame, taking the inmates at night, late in the evening or in the early morning so that no one could see.
Then, slowly, as the whole camp learnt of this practice and the authorities stopped feeling ashamed of the “sick tourists,” they took the “sick tourists” off to the gas in broad daylight.
Sometimes this was done during roll call when a reinforced guard detail and the barrels of their guns stared coldly at us from the watch towers.
More than one inmate, being driven to the gas and recognizing a friend in the ranks, would call out:
“’Bye, Jaś. Take care!...” He would wave his cap or hand and ride on “in fine spirits.”
Everyone in the camp knew where they were going. So why was that fellow so pleased?
I daresay that he had already seen so much and suffered so much that he did not imagine anything worse after death.
One day, 41 [Stanisław Stawiszyński] ran up to me in camp saying that he had recognized (had clearly seen) Colonel 62 [Jan Karcz] amongst those brought in from Birkenau to be shot.
The information was confirmed. Colonel 62 [Jan Karcz], a gallant officer, lost his life.
I gave these several dozen pages in which I described scenes from Auschwitz to several friends to read.
They stated that I sometimes repeated myself. That’s possible—partly from a lack of time to reread everything one more time, but also because this great “mill” grinding people into dust, or, if you prefer, a “steamroller” crushing human transports, revolved around one and the same axis, whose name was—destruction.
Yet fragments of individual scenes from camp, repeated daily—over three hundred of them in a year—on another day but in similar fashion showed, sporadically or regularly, the same side of the steamroller in all its detail... and if one watched this for almost a thousand days... Well then? If people living comfortably in the outside world make a minimal effort to read these pages and focus a few times on a single image? Especially if it is illuminated from the other side!
Perhaps it is better, at least to a small extent, that those reading along with us join us in thought, which is as different as are two and a thousand, for we were ordered a thousand times to look and no one could get bored.
There was no time there for English “spleen”!
And yet I want to repeat myself again.
It was hard to look at the columns of women, worn out by work, dragging themselves across the mud.
Their faces have become gray... their clothes muddied... They move along, holding up the weak “muselmänner.”
There are still a few whose strong spirit supports their own and others’ muscles.
There are eyes which continue to look boldly around trying to dress their ranks.
I don’t know whether it was harder to look at those who returned in the evening tired from work or at those who in the morning, with a whole day before them, headed off to the fields, supposedly having rested, holding up their weaker comrades.
One saw faces and physiques which were unprepared for, and unsuited to, hard work in the fields.
One saw too our country lasses, supposedly accustomed to hard work, worn out just as much as the “ladies.”
They were all marched on foot for kilometers to work, whether the weather was fine or rainy.
When the women sank into the mud, the “heroes” riding alongside them on horseback with dogs, cowboys, herded them like sheep or cattle, shouting and smoking cigarettes.
By now we had a real Tower of Babel in the camp. Many languages were spoken. For in addition to the Poles, Germans, Bolsheviks and Czechs, a few Belgians, Yugoslavs and Bulgarians, French and Dutch were brought in, as well as some Norwegians and finally Greeks.
I remember that the French received numbers above forty-five thousand.
They lasted less than anyone else. Unsuited for work or friendship. Sickly weaklings and foolishly stubborn.
The SS men would pull out of the ranks of arriving Jewish transports, waiting in their hundreds for their “bath” in the gas chamber, some of the young girls, saving them from death.
Apparently admiring the naked form, they would pick out every day several of the best looking.
If after a few days a girl continued to be able to save her life, paying for it with her beauty or some other form of cunning, she might sometimes be assigned to the schreibstube [office], or the sick room, or the camp offices.
However, there were few slots and many beauties.
The SS men would in the same manner pull out some of the young Jewish men from the hundreds going to the gas chambers.
They were processed normally. They came onto our blocks and to various kommandos.
This was another way of dealing with the remaining Jews in the world.
I have already mentioned that for a time the Jews, assigned for a short spell to indoor work, had written letters, sending them to their families saying they were happy here and they wrote alongside us, in other words twice a month, on Sundays.
Now, on the blocks where the Jews were living, SS men would show up from time to time, usually on a weekday. (We continued to write our letters on Sundays.) Coming in the evenings, the SS men would round up all the Jews living on that block and order them to sit at the same table.
They gave out standard camp letter forms and ordered them to write to their families, their relatives and if they didn’t have any, to their friends.
They stood over them waiting for them to finish.
Then they would collect the letters themselves, sending them to various European countries.
If any of these hapless Jews had even thought of writing that he was unhappy... Everyone wrote that they were fine...
When our camp Jews had completed correctly their task of reassuring all the other hapless Jews in other countries and became “a useless burden to the camp,” they were then finished off as quickly as possible by being transferred to hard work somewhere in Birkenau, or sometimes even straight to the Penal Company.
In the Penal Company, meanwhile, they were as always—finished off.
There was a Jew there, widely known as “the Strangler.”49 He had a daily quota of at least a dozen Jews to finish off. It depended on the Penal Company’s overall strength.
On any given day an unpleasant death awaited the Jews destined for elimination from their powerfully built fellow-Jew, “the Strangler.”
Every half an hour, more frequently or sometimes less, depending on the size of the queue for death, “the Strangler” ordered his selected prey to lie down on the ground on his back (he quickly and efficiently laid out anyone resisting), then he would place the handle of a spade on the lying man’s neck and would then jump on the handle using his whole body weight. The handle crushed the throat. “The Strangler” would rock, shifting his weight from the left then back to the right-hand side.
The poor Jew under the spade croaked, kicked his legs, died. The thug sometimes told his victim not to fear and that death would come quickly.
In the Penal Company, “the Strangler” and the Jews assigned to him to be finished off were treated as a sort of autonomous sub-kommando of death.
In fact, the Penal Company, which had a majority of Poles, lived and died apart, accepting the same death in
another fashion.
That summer, a large number of inmates were suddenly transferred to the Penal Company at the same time.
This instruction came down from the political department, where a review of the files had established that these inmates’ cases “on the outside” had been proved.
Among my friends and members of our organization in the camp the following were transferred to the Penal Company in Rajsko: Officer Cadet Platoon Sergeant 26 [Stanisław Maringe], First Lieutenant 27 [Jerzy Poraziński], Captain 124 [Tadeusz Chrościcki] (the father) and 125 [Tadeusz Lucjan Chrościcki] (the son).
Some time later I received a rather recklessly sent card from First Lieutenant 27 [Jerzy Poraziński] which, however, made it to me and in which he wrote... “I inform you that since we must soon become nothing but puffs of smoke, we shall try our luck tomorrow during work... We have little chance of success... Bid my family farewell, and if you can and if you are still alive, tell them that if I die, I do so fighting...”
The following day before nightfall the news came that that evening, at the signal announcing the end of work at Rajsko, the inmates of the Penal Company had all made a dash for it, trying to escape.
Whether it had been poorly organized or maybe someone had betrayed them and then everyone would have had to be warned, or perhaps conditions were too difficult, suffice it to say that the SS killed just about all the inmates, about 70 of them. German kapos efficiently helped the SS in the catching and killing.
Supposedly they had spared a few.
It was also said that over a dozen had got away. Supposedly some had swum the Vistula. However, the information was very contradictory. Three years later, though, I did learn from Romek G. that out of that group, 125 [Tadeusz Lucjan Chrościcki] (the son of my Warsaw colleague) had somehow managed to avoid death then.
We knew that just as our inmates had once suffered on the blocks from lice, so in the women’s camp, in the blocks isolated from ours, there was a great infestation of fleas.
We could not understand where it had come from, nor how these insects made such a gender distinction between the inmates. It turned out later that some kommandos from the women’s camp had worked in flea-infested buildings and had brought the creatures back with them.
The insects, finding themselves now in good conditions, made themselves at home, chasing away the previous white tenants.
Shortly thereafter, the women were transferred from us and from blocks in the main camp to Rajsko-Birkenau, where they died in terrible conditions in wooden huts.
There was a lack of running water and lavatories in these blocks.
Some of them slept on the ground, for the blocks made from planks had no floors.
They floundered in mud above their ankles, for there were no drains or roads.
In the morning they remained in their hundreds on the parade ground, having no more strength for work. Downcast, these numb martyrs no longer looked like women.
They soon benefited from the camp authorities’ “mercy,” going by the hundred to the gas chambers.
Over two thousand beings, once women, were gassed. A huge number of fleas remained on the blocks vacated by the women.
The carpenters who went to these blocks in order to make repairs to the windows or doors before male kommandos were moved back in, spoke of the terrible work in this kingdom of “brunettes,” which jumped around the empty blocks in whole swarms.
Hungry, they rushed at the new arrivals, small dots, biting one after the other.
Nothing helped, not tying one’s trouser legs at the ankle nor one’s sleeves at the cuffs, so the carpenters immediately tore off their clothes putting them in some place free from fleas, and naked they would fight them off as animals grazing in the field beat off flies.
They swarmed all over the floor and if you looked at them in sunlight one got the impression of so many fountains.
By now we had lavatories and nice bathrooms in all the blocks in our camp. Drainage and running water were now the norm. Mechanical pumps worked in the cellars of three blocks supplying the whole camp with water.
A great many inmates had laid down their lives building all these improvements.
So now a zugang arrived in conditions different from those in which we had once been kept and in which we had also been “finished off ” by the lack of washing facilities and the lack of a quiet moment in some lavatory.
Now someone was responsible for tidiness—a post which was the envy of many. He would sit in the lavatory eating his soup, he always had seconds, and it bothered him not a whit that his dining room was unusual. He would calmly carry on eating, shouting at the häftlings to go about their business in the beautiful lavatory faster.
The women who were moved from the kinds of conditions we had in the blocks in ’42 to the primitive conditions of Rajsko, felt this all the more.
After the women had been moved, the high fence which had been built in the spring to separate us from the other sex remained until the whole camp was deloused.
However, the fleas somehow coped with the fence. Not all of them, but apparently the more enterprising amongst them, and after somehow making it over they rushed at our camp, finding plenty of nourishment on our blocks.
Meanwhile, developments in the spoon shop meant that one needed to start thinking about some other job, for we had turned out thousands of spoons and it was quite likely that our kommando would be disbanded.
Then, thanks to the influence of my friends 111 [name unknown], 19 [Tadeusz Słowiaczek] and 52 [Tadeusz Myszkowski], a place was found for me in the carpenters’ shop, amongst the élite (once upon a time run by Konrad).
For the time being I worked with a master carpenter 111 [name unknown] in one workshop, but when 111 [name unknown] and 127 [name unknown] came down one after the other with typhus, I remained in a group of master craftsmen in the workshop on my own, having to pretend to be an expert and responsible for the shop’s output.
There was a new kapo who, after the idiot Hulajnoga’s [Scooter’s] death (from typhus), had taken over the carpenters’ kommando (in the tannery).
My position became difficult. I was given drawings for custom-made furniture, which I was supposed to produce on my own out of wood.
Although I did only twelve days on my own in that workshop, I have to admit that I was mentally exhausted.
I didn’t want to come a cropper and yet I wasn’t a professional. In any event I made a folding cupboard and although a first-rate craftsman 92 [Wacław Weszke] came to my shop to finish it off, I did for those twelve days successfully manage to impersonate a master carpenter for the fussy, but foolish, kapo.
By now I was not a complete novice at carpentry (the rest was down to ingenuity), but I greeted the arrival of 92 [Wacław Weszke] in my workshop, which he had chosen deliberately, with real delight.
Thereafter, I had more time to devote to setting up the “network” there, to coordinating our organization’s work, meeting fellows in the tannery itself or on the pretext of picking out materials in the storeroom where planks were kept, conferring with 50 [Jan Mielcarek “Wernyhora”] and 106 [name unknown] on a pile of new straw mattresses reaching up to the ceiling. Through cracks in the roof we watched Erik’s movements or the Commandant’s, as if from a superb observation post.
Typhus continued to make its mark painfully, and delousing was carried out in the SS barracks.
People were sick on every block.
In our room (no. 7, Block 25), daily someone went off to the hospital sick with typhus.
By then we had one bunk for two of us.
The first of our crowd to come down was Officer Cadet 94 [name unknown], followed by Corporal 91 [Stanisław Polkowski], 71 [Jan Mosdorf], then 73 [Piotr Kownacki], 95 [name unknown], then 111 [name unknown] who was sharing a bunk with me, 93 [name unknown]—(then it becomes hard to remember who followed whom to the hospital). Just about everyone came down one after the other.
A great many never returned, riding
the cart full of corpses to the crematorium.
Daily, one could see a couple of faces one knew amongst the bodies of häftlings tossed like wood onto the cart.
For the time being I did not come down with typhus.
Dr. 2 [Władysław Dering] appeared, suggesting that I inoculate myself against typhus; he had (secretly) obtained the vaccine from “outside”; however, I had to think what to do, since if I had already been infected by typhus-bearing lice (which was highly probable since I had been sharing a bunk with 111 [name unknown] who had already come down with it, and since from the initial infection to the first temperature usually took about a fortnight), then the vaccine was not to be administered, for it could lead to death.
However, coming to the conclusion that I had not been infected, I decided on the inoculation.
Out of our crowd of thirty lads standing at the head of our block at roll call, maybe seven or eight remained. The rest had died from typhus.
Out of our members the following died: brave Wernyhora 50 [Jan Mielcarek], 53 [Józef Chramiec], 54 [Stefan Gaik], 58 [Andrzej Marduła], 71 [Jan Mosdorf], 73 [Piotr Kownacki], 91 [Stanisław Polkowski], 94 [name unknown], 126 [Tadeusz Czechowski] and my much-missed friend 30 [Eugeniusz Triebling].
To be honest, can I write that someone was “much-missed”? I missed them all.
I tried so hard to save Captain 30 [Eugeniusz Triebling]. He was always cheerful, he kept up people’s spirits with his sense of humor and “seconds” bowl; several people were always being kept alive near him.
Before the typhus he suddenly caught a blood infection, which was cured: Dr. 2 [Władysław Dering] made a quick operation on his arm and removed the danger.
Then, a week later, he caught typhus, went to Block 28 where for a few days he would hospitably invite his friends to join him in eating delicacies brought in for him from “Canada,” loudly calling out: “God has provided, good people have brought it, now you eat it up.”
He had a high temperature, he kept talking and talking, he amusingly said that he must live, even if he were to have his head under his arm, but he would get out of Auschwitz, since he had endured terrible things in Hamburg and that he must see his Jasia. So saying he caught meningitis.
The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery Page 18