by Eddy de Wind
“Look around at all the people imprisoned here,” the Russian continued. “Most of them are Polish, with those red triangles with a P on them—political prisoners—but I guarantee you that 90 percent are black marketeers, or that their political activities were at most stupid statements they made when drunk. The Germans with a red triangle are more likely to be real political prisoners. Some of them have been imprisoned for ten years, but there aren’t many here. Most of them are already dead anyway. Then you’ve got the Russians, who, as I said, mostly have black triangles. In reality they’re actual political prisoners, because their refusal to work was a political act. The worst scum are often the greens. If the triangle is pointing up, they’re Berufsverbrecher, professional criminals. Pointing down means an occasional criminal. In the camps they get to lord it over the others. As Lagerälteste, some of them have the deaths of hundreds of fellow prisoners on their consciences. But that, too, is all so random. I knew a German from Cologne who scattered political pamphlets from a plane in 1936—anti-Nazi of course. He was caught and they proved that he had accepted money from an illegal organization to pay for the printing costs. They gave him a green triangle—as a criminal. If he’d printed them at his own expense, it would have been a red triangle.”
Evening had fallen in the meantime and Hans needed to check upstairs for a moment. It was a large attic, sleeping three hundred, almost all of whom were lying directly on the cement floor. They were all Jews. A few days earlier a Jew had been caught urinating in a food bowl. Sometimes they weren’t allowed outside for half a day and this fellow had a bladder complaint and couldn’t hold it in that long. That was why a friend from a work block had brought a separate bowl for him, but those excuses weren’t accepted. They beat him black and blue and, as always, if one Jew had done something wrong, all of the Jews were swine. The Blockältester had seized the opportunity to move them all up to the attic, simultaneously making room on the lower floors for the Poles, who no longer had to sleep more than two a bunk.
The attic was a ghastly shambles: an unpolished cement floor, a leaky roof, and two small windows to provide fresh air to three hundred people. The men had to lie on the floor in their linen uniforms with one blanket for two men. In the daytime they jostled for a seat on a couple of rafters or had to stand because there were neither chairs nor tables. They had been living like this for five weeks now, as none of them were allowed to leave the block because of the scarlet fever.
All the sick prisoners from the entire block were crammed into a corner that was partitioned off with walls made of board. The filth was appalling. Still, there was an advantage to this, as they weren’t being trampled by the hundreds of others shuffling back and forth across the attic. But if a Pole or a Russian fell ill, all kinds of difficulties arose. Of course the patient would rather stay in bed downstairs than move up to the filthy sick corner, but sick prisoners weren’t allowed to stay in the rooms because of the risk of contagion. After all, you could never say in advance that a particular case of angina with a 104-degree fever was definitely scarlet fever. The patient would scheme a little with the Stubenältester, who in turn spoke to the Blockältester, and then, regardless of what Hans had ordered, the sick prisoner stayed just where he was. It was clear that he didn’t belong there from a hygiene point of view, but from the sick man’s perspective it was very understandable. In the attic he wouldn’t get any rest or fresh air, and would receive no more treatment than downstairs.
There were almost no bandages and even less medicine. For two days Hans was given thirty aspirins for 1,200 people. And with all these prisoners jammed in together, many of them fell ill. It had taken quite a lot of effort for him to get those thirty tablets. He’d had to go to Dering, the head of the Krankenbau.
The patients were lying in their corner. Several of them had a high fever and hadn’t been able to eat for days because their throats were so sore. There was a special kitchen for restricted diets attached to the Krankenbau, but to use it you needed a note from the Blockältester, who didn’t have time for things like that. Still, it was very stupid of Hans to complain to Dering the following day about the conditions and about the Blockältester hitting him.
At first Dering kicked up an enormous fuss, saying that a Blockältester hitting a doctor was a disgrace and an insult to the whole Krankenbau, but then the Blockältester himself joined them. They talked a little in Polish and Dering calmed down. He would investigate the matter further.
An hour later he sent for Hans again. “I see that you don’t have enough tact for this situation. You’re going back to the block where you first worked.”
When he got to Block 9 they had already heard about it. Zielina, the head doctor, ridiculed him for having let them ride roughshod over him like that.
Hans was sent to Dr. Valentin, the head of outpatients: “You were lucky. Dering could have reported you to the Lagerarzt immediately, then you would have gone straight into a coal mine. Oh well, whether they get rid of you today or next week…”
“What do you mean?”
“Ah, dopey doesn’t know anything about it, of course. Haven’t you heard of the Pfleger cutback—sorry, Pfleger transport?”
“What’s that?”
“Next week sixty Pfleger have to go to Buna. They say they’re setting up a new hospital there.”
“That’s not so bad,” Hans ventured.
“Boy, are you naive,” Valentin mocked. “They say they’re going to Buna as Pfleger and doctors, but you’ll see that not one of them ends up in the infirmary, unless it’s as a patient who’s been worked half to death!”
Things didn’t look good. Hans had only been in the camp for a relatively short period. He would be sent away before others who had been here much longer. That evening he discussed the situation with Eli Polak and Klempfner, a Czech doctor from the upstairs ward. Klempfner had already spent four years in various camps and knew the ins and outs.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Ten people have to go from this block, but you’ll see, you won’t be one of them.”
“How do you know that?”
“Zielina is making the list and he thinks highly of both of you.”
“Well, I’m sure he doesn’t think highly of me anymore after the way I made a fool of myself in quarantine,” Hans sneered.
“Don’t say that. You didn’t make a fool of yourself at all. You were much too fair, of course, and you have far too many scruples. You wanted to stick up for the sick and that rubbed his lordship the Blockältester the wrong way because it was too much work. But Zielina’s a fine fellow and he’s well aware of what’s really going on. You mustn’t lump all Poles into the same basket.”
Klempfner was right. A few days later Zielina let Hans know unofficially that everything would be all right. He was going to keep him and Eli because he thought the Dutch were decent types. Still, there were victims among the Dutch prisoners all the same: Tony Haaksteen and Gerard van Wijk. Zielina’s not keeping them was understandable. They weren’t doctors and they had been in the camp the shortest. Tony wasn’t popular; he was nervous, yelled at the patients terribly, and got into regular conflicts with the other Pfleger. But Hans thought it was an awful shame about Gerard. He was a gentle, intelligent lad. He was fairly weak and had already coughed up blood a couple of times.
“What are they going to do with us?” Gerard asked.
“Well, you’re going to that new hospital there.” Hans didn’t actually believe this, but what use was there in upsetting the poor fellow even more?
The Pfleger left on a Wednesday. They had washed and they were wearing “new” clothes. That was a bad sign because Pfleger or doctors who were really going to keep working in their “profession” didn’t need to swap their clean suits for rags.
On Thursday afternoon, when Hans arrived with a soup kettle, he found the women in Block 10 in something of a panic. Professor Samuel had been taken away from his work that morning on orders of Standortarzt Wirths, the SS doctor in ch
arge of all Lagerärzte in the Auschwitz area. The rumor was that he had to go to Birkenau to find new female subjects for their experiments. The girls were convinced that the block’s current residents would then be put in outside Kommandos. They had submitted to the experiments and would end up dying like dogs in a gravel pit anyway.
Hans had heard a different story and reassured Friedel: “For the last couple of weeks there’s been a conflict between Samuel and Clauberg. It seems that Samuel wanted to protect the staff more and asked the Standortarzt if forty ‘deserving’ women who worked in the block, and were already on his list, could be exempted from the Clauberg experiments.”
“It’s possible,” Friedel said. “There’s so much conniving going on here. Yesterday Brewda had an enormous quarrel with Sylvia, Clauberg’s assistant, a foul girl. She already said a month ago that the staff were all going to be done too. After characters like that have been in a camp for two or three years and obtained some power, they forget they’re prisoners themselves too.”
“Who’s Brewda?” Hans asked.
“Our current Blockälteste. She’s a doctor, but she sabotages the experiments when she can.”
Hans went to Block 9 to hear what Klempfner thought.
“If Samuel gets shot at Birkenau, Brewda won’t stay on as Blockälteste either,” he said.
“Then they’ll probably use the staff for experiments too?”
“Probably, but is that so bad? It’s better than the first interpretation, that Samuel’s gone to get new guinea pigs. They’re better off getting an injection than being sent to Birkenau. Those experiments aren’t that terrible. Sure, those Greek girls were horribly mauled, but among Clauberg’s subjects there’s only been the sporadic death and a few cases of peritonitis, and we don’t actually know the percentage of infertility.”
Hans agreed with Klempfner inasmuch as anything was better than Birkenau. But he couldn’t go along with his opinion that the experiments “weren’t that terrible.”
“Even if they only harm a single hair on those women’s heads, it’s still as bad a crime as a major operation, because the nature of the crime is not determined by the seriousness of the experiment, but by the compulsion under which it is carried out. Anyway, if the experiment wasn’t serious they wouldn’t have to force prisoners to take part. If I want to set up an innocent study, I can find people who are willing to volunteer to take part at an ordinary clinic. Their using prisoners is proof in itself that something’s wrong. Economically, capitalist progress often comes at the expense of workers. But IG Farben8 wanting progress at the expense of our women’s bodies, that’s something that not even modern capitalism would approve in any country except Germany.”
“You’re right there,” Klempfner replied. “It really is remarkable that the fascists, when protecting big business, whose tool they are, so often resort to pre-capitalist means.”
“How’s that?”
“Take their power structure. It’s pure feudalism. Here in the camp you see it in a stylized version. A camp is a kind of duchy. The Lagerältester is the liege lord by the grace of the SS. He exercises his power by granting privileges. The Blockälteste are the counts; their position as petty potentates allows them to ‘organize.’ Their staff are like minor nobility terrorizing the land. Take our block’s doorkeeper, for example.
“In an ordinary hospital the doorkeeper is paid a wage for the work he does. Here he’s a person of power. From each visitor he allows in, he demands a cigarette or more. Each service he carries out for a patient has to be paid for. That’s how he looks after number one. Only the masses, who don’t have a position of power, die on a liter of soup and a ration of bread a day. It’s the crudest possible connection between power and rights. Completely undemocratic, feudal.”
When Hans went to go downstairs, someone called out to him.
“Hello, Van Dam, are you here too?”
Lying on a middle bunk was a tall young man, skin and bones and too weak to raise himself up in bed.
“Lex, how long have you been here?”
It was Lex van Weren, the jazz trumpet player Hans used to play with now and then.
“Did you know that Jack de Vries is here too?” Lex asked. “He’s working in one of the mining Kommandos. And Maurice van Kleef. He’s in the Birkenau orchestra.”
“How did he manage that?”
“In Birkenau Jews are allowed in the orchestra. It’s got a load of Dutch celebrities in it. Johnny and Jones, and Han Hollander too.”
They reminisced and Lex told him what it had been like in Jawischowitz,9 in the coal mine: “With two of you, you have to fill forty carts a day. That’s the same amount as the civilian workers, the professional miners. But they know the trade, and if you don’t know how to use a pickaxe you don’t get a single coal loose. That means a beating. The first day we only filled five carts. That was so little it counted as sabotage. But believe me, it’s the most you can manage. For punishment they put us in the Stehbunker that night. That’s a cellar that’s too low to stand up in, but you can’t lie down either, because there’s an inch of water on the floor. So you spend the whole night bent over in the pitch black. You can understand how rotten you feel the next day and that you’re hardly able to work at all. Then you get another beating and different punishments. No one can bear treatment like that. The civilians get normal food with a miner’s supplement. We have to live off a ration of bread and a liter of soup. When the miners get back home they have some peace and quiet; they go to sleep or spend an hour in the pub. But we have roll call with knee bends, flat on your stomach in the mud—‘stand up, lie down, stand up’—and so on for hours on end. Then into your bunk, eight men on one wide wooden bed, cold, no rest. At four in the morning they wake you up and it starts all over again.
“No chance to be sick. Diarrhea? Get to work! Fever? Get to work! Until you’re this close to death. And the risks underground! They don’t take any safety measures at all in the galleries where prisoners work. Accidents all the time. Stupid, because their own production suffers as a result. We arrived half a year ago with a thousand people from Holland. They picked out three hundred men. The rest were probably gassed. We, the three hundred, were sent to the mines. About fifteen are alive now. I was lucky: one day the Lagerältester came traipsing up with an old French horn. How he got it, I don’t know, but he asked me if it was true that I could play the trumpet. Then I played for the Rapportführer: ‘Silent Night.’ It was Christmas and all evening they wanted to hear the same thing over and over again. ‘Silent Night.’ I had to think of the night in the Stehbunker. Anyhow, then they made me a room orderly. I didn’t need to go down the mine anymore. I had to clean the barracks, fetch bread, and do jobs like that. Now and then I played something for the big shots, then I got something extra to eat. Yes, you need a special stroke of luck here, otherwise they grind you down without mercy.”
“Indeed, gentlemen, indeed.” An affected, posh voice came from the top bunk.
“What kind of joker are you?” Hans asked.
“My name’s Menko and it’s true, I am a joker, but I’ve been playing jokes on the SS. I’ve been imprisoned since January 1941.”
Hans gave him a disbelieving look. “Transports to Poland hadn’t even started in January ’41.”
“No, I was picked up with the Geuzen.10 At the trial in ’41, they sentenced me to death.”
“What are you doing here then?” another Dutchman interjected.
“You, Sir, are another joker, but a damned feeble one. Nonetheless, I shall answer you. I have been through at least a dozen prisons and just as many camps. But as is so often the case with people who have been sentenced to death, you wait for your execution and it doesn’t come. The most extreme is Buchenwald. There are hundreds of prisoners there who have been sentenced to death. Now and then they send a transport to Nebellager Natzweiler.”
“Why is it called a Nebellager?”
“Patience, gentlemen. In Natzweiler the executions ta
ke place ‘zwischen Nacht und Nebel,’ at the crack of dawn. That has something mystical and heathen about it. The Übermensch is full of these atavistic tendencies. Anyway, I was supposed to go on a transport to Natzweiler. But in Buchenwald the political prisoners were in the key positions—in the administration and so on. When a transport of tradesmen had to be sent to Sachsenhausen—which used to be called Oranienburg—they put as many of the people with death sentences on it as they could. After a lot of hither and thither I ended up in Auschwitz and I’m just fine here. With my Mussulman body, I was put down for a selection last week. The poor sods were picked up the next day, but I pulled another fast one. I’m not registered here in the card system as a Jew, but as a Schutzhäftling. I’m not part of the nameless army of millions that will go up in smoke here. There are documents about me; I’m involved in a legal process. I’m only allowed to die by execution and they’re not executing me here in Auschwitz either. They’re counting on me, as a Jew, dropping dead by myself.”
“There are more cases like that,” Hans told him. “In Birkenau there’s a fellow called Boas, a French teacher from Amsterdam. He had got a job as an interpreter with the workers on the Channel coast, using forged papers. He and two friends were caught. Espionage trial. All sentenced to death. The friends, who had kept quiet about being Jewish, were put before the firing squad immediately, but Boas admitted to being a Jew.
“The SS officer told him: ‘You, Jew, you’re going to Auschwitz. You’ll end up begging for death, it will be so bad.’ Now Boas is in a good Kommando and if his luck holds, he’ll come through it alive, by virtue of being a Jew.”
With so many Pfleger gone, Hans was very busy, lugging things around from the morning gong until night, when the gong rang for bed. Early in the morning, immediately after getting up, there was the kettle Kommando: fetching tea, bringing it round, washing plates, and making the bed. Meanwhile the Stubenältester had already started mopping the ward, as everything had to be clean by eight o’clock at the latest. That was when the SDG did his inspection.