Bury Me Standing

by Isabel Fonseca

  Abram Rozenberg, who worked as a gravedigger in the ghetto, had the job of bringing dead Gypsies to the Jewish cemetery.

  There were 3–4 such transports daily. There were eight to ten corpses each time, with old people and children among them.… I noticed that most of the corpses were battered, some having bruises on the neck which indicated that they were hung.… Many corpses were massacred … with broken arms and legs. They probably resisted. I don’t know for sure, but having seen the corpses I arrived at this conclusion.… I found out that the Kripo [the Reich’s Kriminalpolizei] came every day ordering Gypsies to hang their kin. The hanging took place in a blacksmith’s shop at 84/6 Brzezinska St.…

  Gypsies—like the Jewish inmates—were also made to act as policemen and guards over their own people: “Behind the double barbed wire fence … there were three Gypsies standing guard. They were camp policemen, wearing armbands and carrying billyclubs. Upon seeing the approaching SS Scharführer, or officer, they ran towards some Gypsies standing nearby and beat them severely.” Forcing the victims to take part in their own extermination made them into the asocials and criminals they were cast as in Nazi ideology; somehow it had to be—or had to be made to be—their fault.

  Long before the creation of a camp for the Gypsies at Auschwitz, the ruthlessly genocidal character of their murder was clear enough. Once in the ghetto, and later in the death camp, the pretext of criminality was no longer necessary. The alleviation of this especially laborious hypocrisy must have eased the killing, particularly the killing of very small “criminals.”

  Abram Rozenberg remembered the murder of a child:

  It was in the Fall, I don’t remember exactly what year [1941], when at nine, ten in the morning a wagon arrived and I together with my co-workers removed a box with corpses in it. At that point we heard a child’s wailing. Impulsively we jumped aside, but within a second I approached the box and opened the lid. A small Gypsy child fell out. It had convulsions. I cut the rope which was still on its neck, with a pen knife. The child convulsed for a while, but soon regained consciousness. We could not understand what the child was saying. We deliberated how to hide the child, but just then Sztajnberg, the cemetery chief, came with Hercberg, the prison boss, and they told us to take the child back to the ghetto hospital. They soon contacted the Kripo, who took the child out of the hospital. The next day the child, dead, was brought to the cemetery. It was savagely murdered. It was a girl, 3, 4 years old.

  Six hundred and thirteen Gypsies died inside the Lódz ghetto; the rest were sent to Chelmno, the experimental extermination camp where 350,000 people were murdered. “The experience with the Gypsy prisoners in Lódz,” Ficowski argues, “was to serve the Nazis in organizing a huge center of annihilation of the Gypsies in Auschwitz [a year later].” Jan Dernowski, a Pole who witnessed these transports on his way to work, remembered a daily column

  of about ten three-ton trucks, bearing SS licence [plates]. These trucks, tightly covered by tarpaulins, were escorted on either end by armed Gestapo men carrying machine guns and traveling by car.… Looking on with horror at this procession of death—since I well knew the purpose of this voyage—I heard cries and moans of the transported from beneath the slightly lifted tarpaulins. They were cries not only of women and children, but also of men, handsome, genuine Gypsies.

  One of the few prisoners who escaped from Chelmno, Michal Podklebnik, remembered that “after the liquidation of Jews from many small towns, transports from the Lódz ghetto started arriving. First came the Gypsies, about five thousand of them, and after them the Jews.” The immediate motivation for the removal of the Gypsies to Chelmno was not ideological: it was fear of the typhus epidemic that was ravaging their horribly crowded section of the ghetto. Generally it was Jews who went first to the gas chambers. This too was mostly prompted by pragmatism: the houses of Jews were needed to accommodate returning Germans.

  Chelmno was a death camp, not a concentration camp, and prisoners were usually killed on arrival. But before they were allowed to die, the Gypsies, like the Jews, were subjected to the usual grotesque deceptions. They were promised “good food and a transfer for work in the East.” But first, a shower. It was January. They undressed in a heated room and passed through a door marked “To the Bath.” They were told that they would be taking a shuttle van to the bathhouses, but in fact the charade fell apart here. Gendarmes beat the prisoners into the trucks. These were mobile gassing units which then transported the dead to a dumping ground in a wood—and a grave shared with Jews—before returning for the next load of “bathers.”

  There were no survivors of the Lódz Gypsy ghetto, which existed for only two months. The Biuletyn Kroniki Codiennej (the Daily Chronicle of the ghetto) for April 29 and 30, 1942, reported:

  In the buildings left by the Gypsies relatively large quantities of provisions were found, such as vegetables, sugar and bread hard as rock. All provisions were disinfected with chloride. Some other things, such as clothing, musical instruments, knives etc were also found there. After clean-up is completed the buildings will be turned into factories for the manufacture of straw shoes.

  A year later, in February of 1943, the first transports of German Gypsies arrived in the new camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The inmates were mainly German and Czech Gypsies, but they also came from Austria, Poland, Russia, Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary, Holland, Lithuania, Norway, Belgium, and France.

  Mieczyslaw Janka, a Polish survivor, remembers the Gypsy family camp next to the hospital at Birkenau. “The Gypsy men would accompany our singing while their women danced. For this we would throw them bits of onion and cigarettes. One night the Gypsies were taken away and burned.” Outsiders’ recollections of the Zigeunerlager, cut off as always from other inmates, were often of sounds—we heard them (they would say), their singing, their playing, their crying, their moans and screams, and then, “one night,” their silence. That night was August 2, 1944.

  The Zigeunerlager differed from the rest of Auschwitz-Birkenau in several ways. Gypsy men, women, and their many children were allowed to stay together, as families. (There was also a Czech Familienlager.) Until near the end, they also kept their hair—and their possessions and their money, which made it possible, in the beginning, to buy and barter for food. They wore their own clothes, with black triangles sewn on—black for asocial (or sometimes green, for criminal); and with a “Z” for Zigeuner tattooed on the left arm. And at first, as my Polish guide disdainfully pointed out, they were not sent out on work duty; they were not listed in the Arbeitseinsatz, the register of working people. Gypsies therefore were not subjected to the regular selections, in which doctors the year round sent naked prisoners trotting either to the right or to the left—to work or to their deaths. Towards the end, uniformed young Gypsies were sent to work in the main camp, and a group of two hundred women was sent outside the camp to level the ground and to gather stones in their skirts. Otherwise the Gypsies were only “selected” once: when the entire camp was liquidated under high-level orders from Berlin. By then only around four thousand out of twenty-three thousand Gypsies remained alive.

  Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor, was particularly interested in the Gypsies. When the orders came for their mass murder, he was devastated; he had become passionately involved in his research. Nevertheless, according to one witness, he was “all over the camp” that day, tracking down every last hidden child. Those who had escaped the previous night’s transports he put in his own car and drove to the gas chambers himself. And the Gypsy children went willingly, for this was a man who had long shown them affection and given them candy; they adored and trusted Mengele, and would run after him calling, “Uncle Pepi! Uncle Pepi!”

  Mengele maintained what one of its passengers called “a very macabre sort of ship of fools”: a special block of dwarves, giants, people with one blue and one brown eye, and—of overriding interest to the doctor—twins. According to one prisoner doctor who was made to work with Mengele, “In the Gypsy camp
[he] kept samples of hair, eyes [of twins], equipment to take fingerprints, handprints, footprints.” And once he’d finished he would send their body parts—eyes especially but sometimes the whole head—to his old institute in Berlin before sending the remains to the crematorium (autopsies on twins were performed separately, in a special lab near the crematorium). Many of the twins were Gypsies. And some of his Gypsy twins were not twins: seeing the preferential treatment (better food, clean bunks, no beatings) some women presented two children of the same size as twins. Twins had their own block in the men’s camp, the women’s camp, and in the Gypsy camp. They were especially valuable subjects for the study of “identical inherited dispositions”—towards criminality, in the case of Gypsies. Though it was true that most twins had a better chance of surviving than regular prisoners, this was not the case for all. In one night Mengele personally injected fourteen healthy Gypsy twin children in the heart with chloroform, in order to get on with the dissection of their corpses.

  No reason is given for the bundling of Gypsies into their own camp, behind their own electrical fence, where conditions were atrocious even by Auschwitz standards. Perhaps they were separated out in the interests of unrestrained research. If the early urban Gypsy camps were ideal sites for initial genealogical work, Auschwitz-Birkenau was a perfect death lab. Mengele was perhaps unusually appreciative of such opportunities; he was also the head doctor at Birkenau, and, it seems, was given free run of the Gypsy camp. In this segregated zoo of captive subjects, rare diseases could be cultivated and observed, and “cures” tried out. In Dachau and Buchenwald Gypsies were injected with sea-water to discover, on behalf of the German navy, how long humans could survive on saltwater. At Auschwitz disease and hereditary conditions were the main interest (though tests of acid on skin or injections in the eyes to change their color also took place here, among other exotic experiments). Thus an outbreak of scabies was the occasion for a treatment which involved moving the lacerated patient at set intervals from cement tub to cement tub, each containing a different salt-and-acid solution. And when treatment failed, autopsies could be performed immediately.

  Indeed, if there was disagreement between doctors over which among competing ailments was most badly ravaging a particular prisoner, he or she could be dissected without delay. Mengele shot, or, as he would say, “sacrificed,” his favorite pair of twins, a “splendid set” of seven-year-old Gypsy boys, to settle just such a “dispute” (tuberculosis was suspected). “It must be there,” Mengele had insisted to one of the prisoner doctors, and then he returned an hour later, “now speaking calmly.” He said: “You are right. There was nothing.” In that time he had killed both boys and examined their lungs and other organs.

  The menu of epidemics in the Zigeunerlager included typhus fever, typhoid, scurvy, dysentery, and scabies, along with lice and boils. There was a makeshift hospital—sick Gypsies were not sent to the main hospital which was just next to their camp—but the only medicine was a small amount of camphor. Women gave birth on top of the stovepipes which ran horizontally along the length of the barracks. And some of them didn’t: in advanced stages of pregnancy women might be injected with typhus fever to see the effect on the fetus. A witness counted eighty-six such cases.

  The most exotic ailment to develop in the camp was noma—a normally rare form of gangrene affecting the face and mouth. In his memoir, Commandant Hoess evinces a distinct frisson as he reports on the outbreak. The “children [were] sick from noma, which always terrified me because it looked like leprosy; these emaciated children with big holes in their cheeks, this slow decomposition of the human body!”

  It is well known that noma is caused by malnutrition and extreme debility; nevertheless, Mengele found a racial explanation for the disease. Observing a “little bundle of bones”—a Gypsy boy with advanced noma—Mengele asked another prisoner, “Would you believe this kid is ten years old?” He attributed the child’s decrepitude to membership of “this kind of race,” rather than to a fatal iatrogenic condition—that is to say, one nurtured by doctors.

  A Nazi photograph of a Gypsy in the Belzec concentration camp, marked for reduction by the photographer, 1940 (photo credits 7.5)

  Similarly, a colleague and friend of Mengele’s, referred to by Robert Jay Lifton in The Nazi Doctors only as Ernst B., spoke of the conditions in the Zigeunerlager at Auschwitz: they “were atrocious … worse than in all other camps,” and constituted “a very great problem.” Dr. B. added, “Since I survived that Gypsy camp, I have developed the worst possible opinion of Gypsies. And when I see a Gypsy I make sure to get away quickly.… I can’t stand to hear Gypsy music.” Dr. B. then backdates his disgust. Though he was “deeply interested” in the Gypsy situation, he was also appalled by what he described as scenes of fathers and mothers eating while permitting their children to starve.

  The desperate projection of guilt is clear enough; it was of course doctors like Ernst B. who were starving the children—and their parents (the all-orphan barracks were a constant and growing feature of the Gypsy camp). The allegation rings false for other reasons. Family feeling seems to have been stronger than personal survival among the Gypsies. Though it is hard to imagine the SS commandant of Auschwitz being “moved” by Gypsy tears, Rudolf Hoess’s recollections nevertheless sound more characteristic:

  In personal relationships they were very aggressive; within the framework of the particular tribes they were united and attached to each other. In camp, when a selection of people for work took place and families had to be separated, there were moving scenes full of suffering and tears. The Gypsies would calm down and be comforted only when told they would be together later on.

  Kalderash Gypsies in Belzec. Nazi photograph, marked for reduction by the photographer, 1940. (photo credits 7.6)

  “For a time,” Hoess remembers, “the Gypsies fit for work who were in the main Auschwitz camp tried everything so they could see their families, even at a distance.… Often, during roll call, we had to search for the younger Gypsies. They would sneak out to the Gypsy camp [3.5 kilometers away], because they missed their families.”

  That they were allowed to stay together as families at all is a measure of the trouble they caused, or were expected to cause, when they were separated. There were many cases of individual resistance during the final liquidation of the Zigeunerlager—especially from the women, it seems. The day before the gassing of all remaining Gypsies, Mengele had one prisoner transferred to the women’s camp, perhaps because her husband was a German. However, her children had been left behind to await their death. “You don’t even have the guts to kill me,” she reportedly shouted at him, seconds before being shot dead. One Sinti camp functionary threw herself on an SS officer, grabbing for his eyes like a wild animal before she too was shot. Was it to reassure these troublesome mothers or to gratify the Nazi sense of humor that a kindergarten was established, complete with merry-go-round, for the frail children of the Zigeunerlager just over a month before they were killed?

  The Hungarian Jews brought to Auschwitz were briefly lodged in the emptied Gypsy camp; after they were murdered, it was converted into a women’s hospital.

  When I began my research I had it in mind that the Gypsies were “the new Jews” of Eastern Europe. Here they are, scattered in huge numbers as the Jews were before them, and they have been the first casualties of the nascent democracies. But they are not the new Jews: the Gypsies, alongside the Jews, are ancient scapegoats. The Jews poisoned the wells; the Gypsies brought the plague.

  Before the Enlightenment, Gypsies and Jews together represented the migrant poor in the European imagination. Indeed, according to some myths, Gypsies were Jews. Collin de Plancy, in his Dictionnaire Infernal (1845), tells how the Jews of fourteenth-century France and Germany, blamed for the plagues ravaging those countries, fled into the forests, where they remained for fifty years, living in underground caves. By the time they came out, the story goes, with nothing left of their traditional professions and wit
h no capital, they were forced to make their way by telling fortunes. They said they came from Egypt (a familiar yarn about Gypsies made freshly plausible by the new attribution of a Semitic origin). De Plancy describes their “disguised jargon” as a mixture of “Hebrew and bad German”—which commentators have swiftly identified as Yiddish (though the language of the nomadic Jenische, or the German-influenced dialect of the Sinti, would have fit as well). However stylized this story may be, the desire to establish a Semitic origin for the Gypsies is easily explained by the compelling similarities of their common destiny in persecution and diaspora.

  The Auschwitz survivor Karl Stojka’s rendering of the Zigeunerlager, which he signed with his camp number, Z5742. “I saw how they burned …” he said of the night of August 2, 1944. “The Gypsy camp stands empty.” Stojka’s little brother, Ossi, aged seven, died in the camp, and his father, thirty-two, was killed at Mauthausen. (photo credits 7.8)

  Jews and Gypsies have their own “national” languages and their own traditional laws and articulated codes of ethics, rituals, and behavior; both have been identified with particular professions, sometimes the same professions (those combining craftsmanship with trade, as would suit migrants). And increasingly, for better or for worse, both have also been alienated from their traditional culture by their dependence on the culture of the “host” society.