Last Stop Auschwitz

by Eddy de Wind

  After that there were all kinds of jobs to do inside the block. One day the corridor needed to be thoroughly cleaned and they were at it all morning with buckets of water, scrubbing and mopping; the next day it was helping the Scheissmeister by scraping out the latrines. One day it was unloading coal, another delousing the upstairs ward when lice had been spotted again. It was hard work, because in the whole block with its four hundred patients there were only thirty Pfleger and half of those were prominents: Poles, Reich Germans, and “low numbers” whose only concern was “organizing” as much food as possible. That left just ten of them at most for the heavy work. Then came the midday soup, with a repeat of the morning rituals.

  One day, after the soup, a messenger came from Block 21: transport Kommando. Thirty of them turned out, this time without a wagon. They were taken to the old crematorium, two hundred yards from the camp. It was no longer in use. Now that all of the extermination was being done in Birkenau, there were only “normal” deaths in Auschwitz and the few bodies were taken to the Birkenau furnaces on corpse wagons in the evenings.

  In one of the rooms in the crematorium there were enormous stacks of tins: the urns of the Poles whose bodies had been burnt there. In contrast to Jews, “Aryans” were cremated individually. A clay number was placed on each body and the ashes were put in a tin urn. The family received a death notice and could claim the urn. But, over the years, forty thousand urns had been left behind and now had to be moved to another room.

  The men formed a long chain right through the cellars where the three large furnaces were and tossed the urns to each other as if they were cheeses or loaves of bread. Never before had so many dead passed through Hans’s hands as in those few hours. The tins were rusty and if you dropped one, it broke open. That didn’t matter: one of the lads had a broom and swept all the ashes into a pile. Who would ever request them now?

  They arrived back in the block just before roll call, which only took a few minutes. They lined up, the SDG came, the Blockältester reported: “Block 9 with 31 Pfleger lined up for roll call, none sick.” Then the SDG gave a wave and they were dismissed.

  After roll call, Hans had to go upstairs to help Dr. Valentin in outpatients. There was an enormous racket on the stairs. Zielina, as nervous as ever, had exploded in fury at a man who had tried to go to the latrines without any wooden sandals—barefoot, in other words—which was strictly forbidden. In his rage, he had hit the man in the face, but Zielina had a good heart and when the man burst into tears, he was even more upset than his victim. He raced downstairs and came back with a piece of bread—bread from home, out of his own package—which he gave to the man. The years in concentration camps had left their mark on Zielina, but they hadn’t ruined him.

  In outpatients Valentin was already ranting. He was a half-Jew who had been a doctor in the navy. Not a bad man, but a real Prussian. He would roar at anyone at the slightest provocation, but if you responded by looking around in bewilderment, he’d burst out laughing.

  “So, look who else is here. Dutch barns must be full of babies, the way you all leave the door open. You were naive enough to think the Pfleger were going to the Krankenbau in Buna, remember? I just got news. They’re all in the outside Kommando. So…” And then to the various doctors who had come to assist with the daily dressings: “Come with me for a moment. I’ll show you something.”

  He led them to the bed of a patient who had terrible hiccups. “He’s been like this for three days,” Valentin recounted, “and nothing I’ve done has helped. He has also had a high fever, up to 104 degrees in the evenings for a week now. What do you think it is?”

  They thought for a while.

  Hans suggested: “It could be meningitis. That often leads to symptoms of nervous irritation like hiccups.”

  “Wrong,” Valentin said. “It’s typhus without the rash, not infrequent. He’s from an infected camp.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous to keep him here on the ward?” one of the Frenchmen asked.

  “Not at all, we don’t have any lice at the moment and he’s been thoroughly decontaminated. Anyway, there’s no question of my reporting him. It wouldn’t be the first time a whole block went to the gas chamber after a case of typhus. Make sure you keep your mouths shut.”

  Then the outpatients parade began. The patients came in through the back door with their undershirts up or completely removed, depending on what needed dressing. Their wounds were often awful—boils and abscesses—and the worst thing was that they all had to be dressed with paper. After half an hour, outpatients stank so badly it was almost unbearable. On top of that, everything was dirty and greasy from Mitigal, the oil they used for scabies and one of the few medicaments in stock.

  Suddenly Eli stormed in: “Did you know Kalker’s dead?”

  They were shocked.

  “Didn’t it help?” Hans asked.

  “No, it was too expensive. He needed a lot more sulfa, but none of the Dutchmen had enough supplies to pay for it all.”

  They discussed it for a while until Valentin erupted: “Keep your chitchat for teatime. Just like home; I always had to take care of everything there too, but I’m not doing it anymore.”

  The Blockältester came in. He needed four men and took Hans with him. They went to Block 21 with the SDG and picked up an examination chair that had to be taken to the brothel. There was a crowd out the front with a long line of Reich Germans and Poles. Jews were not admitted.

  Business had not yet started and upstairs the ladies were clumped together arguing with the supervising doctor and nurse. The doctor had to be present when the men came in and paid their Reichsmark—Reichsmarks they earned as a bonus from their work. He gave them an injection and a stamp on the left arm and when they came out again a quarter of an hour later, they got another injection and a stamp on the right arm. At the exit there was an SS guard who checked to make sure they had both stamps. This was to prevent the spread of venereal disease.

  One of the ladies gave Hans a tug on the ear and said, “What are you doing here, boy? You’re not allowed in here.”

  “Just do your job,” Hans sneered. “I’m here for mine.”

  “Yeah, sure,” she replied. “Arbeit macht frei… Krematorium drei!”

  Back in the block it was already late in the evening and, as always, Hans had to sweep the room before he could go to sleep. But before he’d finished, the Blockältester came and started ranting about the light still being on even though the evening gong had long since rung. Quickly, Hans undressed and went to bed.

  It had been a long day—sixteen hours without a break! And what for? For a long time until he finally fell asleep the madam’s parody echoed in his ear: “Work will set you free… Crematorium three!”

  Time passed. Sometimes things went a little better for Hans and Friedel, sometimes worse. The selections returned regularly and there were always more friends for them to mourn. And they weren’t always the severely ill or those who had been worked half to death.

  People with jobs in the camp weren’t safe. Auschwitz workers were constantly being put on transports to other camps. People who worked in the better Kommandos weren’t safe from the selections either. And once they’d been put on a transport they generally didn’t last long. Who could survive working in the mines? Who was capable of dredging gravel out of the river fourteen hours a day, often up to the waist in the water? Who could bear the blows and resist the infections?

  Spring came, and with it the sparse birds. Birds that ventured to this cold corner of Silesia, braving the bleak weather on the north side of the Beskid Mountains. But spring came and the sun had life energy and that energy penetrated everything. No barbed wire, no wall, no SS could stop the sun.

  With the sun, new life came into those who were doomed to die, and new hope unfurled in their hearts, like fresh green leaves released from tiny buds to receive the rays of new light. The air was mild and moist, the sky was bright blue, and hearts beat faster as they tasted spring. It was as if t
heir blood had become more liquid and was flowing through their veins with renewed zeal. As if their souls were trembling in their bodies, together with the air, which was shimmering over the green fields. A tension came into them, as old as the history of mankind, but new again now, after this soul-chilling winter.

  And as Hans and Friedel stood at the windows of their blocks looking at each other, the unattainable, and at the mountains, the unreachable, they felt like Adam and Eve longing for a paradise—not one they had been driven out of, but one they had never known. A deep sigh and their souls left their shackled bodies and floated off into the hazy distance, and for a moment the camp no longer existed. The horrors had disappeared, along with the wire and the wall. Their souls, united with each other and the whole cosmos, billowed away over the river and marshes to that glorious blue land of promise on the horizon. Then they looked at each other again, and in them rose that one word, which they did not speak out loud, yet heard in the other’s voice across the distance that separated them: “When?”

  When would their longing for freedom, for being able to love each other in freedom, be fulfilled? Freedom together seemed inconceivable, and a gruesome fear passed through them when they thought of the death camp in which they were imprisoned. And when their thoughts, no longer carried aloft by fantasy, returned to reality, her fingers curled tightly around the wire and his hands gripped the window frame, as if they were both straining themselves to the limit to break something, something that was blocking them off from everything.

  Then they sighed again, but this sigh was very different. Now it was full of regret and grieving for the dreamland they were convinced would never be theirs.

  That evening Hans felt ill. He went straight to bed after roll call and asked one of the lads to fetch a thermometer from outpatients. His temperature was only up a little bit and he realized he was just suffering from the tensions spring had set off in him.

  But why not take a few days’ rest? Paul wouldn’t give him any trouble. Paul was in love. For weeks now, he had been sitting at the window of his room watching out for that one small woman who was so friendly to a kind older man. Because Paul really had become kindhearted since falling in love with a Dutch Jew from the women’s block. He no longer harassed the Pfleger and he had stopped swearing at them. It was an honest love on Paul’s part—an honest, compassionate love.

  He and Hans had formed an alliance. Hans took Paul’s notes and packages to Block 10; Paul let Hans take it easy whenever he could. That was why Hans was able to stay sick for a couple of days without worrying; nobody would call him to account. He sent a note to Friedel with the kettle carriers, telling her that he was taking a couple of days’ rest and she needn’t worry. The next day he got a long letter in reply:

  Dear sweetheart,

  I’m glad you’re getting some rest now and not driving yourself into the ground so much. I can get by without seeing each other for a couple of days and without you taking care of extra food for me.

  Yesterday was a special day. I had been asking the Blockälteste for a long time and finally I was allowed to go with the herb Kommando. At eight a.m. we left the camp. We walked a long way and also came close to Birkenau. I saw Lotte Spatel there and the other girls who left our block last month. With some of them, the experiments had been completed. With others, they had failed. There were also some, like Lotte and the French Communists, who had refused to submit to the experiments.

  Altogether seventy of them were put on the transport three weeks ago. It’s awful to see those women in Birkenau. How they have changed. Heads shaved completely bald and with bare feet, nothing but a piece of sacking to cover their bodies, bound together with a cord. You know, Hans, they’re not women anymore, they’re creatures, asexual creatures. Our girls still look fairly good, but how long will that last?

  I spoke to Lotte for a moment. She quickly scrawled out a few words for her husband, Heini, but the overseer came up right away and gave her a clip. Then she went back to lugging bricks. You’re right—if I got sent to Birkenau I wouldn’t last long. I’m already coughing so much as it is.

  It was a beautiful day. We looked for herbs in the woods. Chamomile and all kinds of other herbs. They use them to make Heilkräutertee. It was joyous: you could feel spring in every stem, in every blossom. Here in the camp everything is as dry and dead as ever, but the woods have already come back to life with birds and with new shoots on the branches of the trees.

  We came back late in the afternoon. I was dead on my feet. I wasn’t used to it.

  The evening was horrific. Yesterday afternoon there was a Standgericht. Three cars arrived with “judges.” In a nearby village they’d picked up more than three hundred Poles—the entire population. Only two were acquitted. The executions were in the evening.

  We could hear it all perfectly. It was in the inner courtyard of Block 11, right next door. On that side our windows are boarded over and the Blockälteste made sure we didn’t look through the chinks, because then they would have been sure to shoot at the windows.

  The mood in our block was worse than ever. The room orderlies were raging and the clerk was lashing out constantly. They’re all women—Slovakians—who spent a long time in Birkenau. Of course, things were hideous for them there, but now they think they have to make it hideous for us too. “If you’d been in Birkenau, you’d be long dead by now,” they say, and that’s why we have to undergo their harsh treatment now. Always that system of taking it out on others.

  At seven, the shooting started. We were so nervous and it was so muggy and close in the room and every time a volley sounded it went right through us. It was as if it was going to be our turn next, we felt it that intensely.

  First the order to fire, then a volley, then the bodies being dragged away. And it kept on going like that. And then the cries of the victims. A girl begging for mercy because she was still so young and so desperate to live. The men, who shouted out all kinds of patriotic slogans like “Hitler verrecke!”and “Es lebe Polen!”

  The mood in our block has been so bad lately anyway. It must be because it’s spring and being shut up in a gloomy room with some two hundred women, waiting until you’re called for. And they call for so many of us. I can tell you some more about it now, as I know more or less what they’re doing. You know about Schumann’s experiments, don’t you? He took Greek girls aged about seventeen and put them in an electric ultra-shortwave field, with one plate on their abdomen and another on their buttocks. It burnt the ovaries, but the electric current caused horrific wounds and the girls suffered enormous pain. Inasmuch as they healed, they were then operated on to see how the internal organs, especially the ovaries, had been burnt.

  Slawa explained to me that this method is madness: they want to find an easy sterilization technique so that they can sterilize all kinds of people, like Poles, Russians, and, if it suits them, maybe the Dutch too. But this way the women are not only sterile, they’re castrated as well.

  After the experiments were completed, they sent the girls to Birkenau. A month later, they brought them back for operations to see how it had worked. Schumann removed their ovaries to see what kind of condition they were in. Imagine it: nine abdominal operations in two-and-a-quarter hours. They didn’t sterilize the instruments once between operations.

  Then there are Samuel’s experiments, which you know more about than I do. He’s been at almost all of the women, some four hundred. They suffer dreadful pain. Anyway, you know that. It can’t be true that he just removes a small piece of mucosa because it gives the women terrible trouble and they all need stitches.

  When Schumann failed, Professor Clauberg came. He’s apparently a well-known gynecologist from Kattowitz. He injects a white, cement-like liquid into the women’s uteruses and X-rays them at the same time. Clauberg says it’s to find a replacement for Lipiodol. You see, in Germany they don’t have any iodine to use as a contrast medium for X-ray photography. I don’t know if that’s entirely true. It could also be int
ended as some kind of sterilization technique.

  Well, that’s enough nastiness for one day. Don’t be angry at me for not writing more pleasant things, but you were so keen to know everything exactly.

  Bye, sweetheart, have a good rest…

  And then a hundred more sweet words and wishes followed, stirring that great longing in Hans once again. He leapt out of bed and got dressed. It was half past three and the soup kettle had already been delivered, but he was desperate to see her, to speak to her for a moment, to comfort her and try to build up her spirits.

  The door to Block 10 was open. The doorkeeper didn’t seem to be around. Hans hesitated for a second and then, for the first time, went in just like that, without a kettle. In the corridor he saw a Dutchwoman, who went to get Friedel for him. But no sooner were they standing opposite each other than the doorkeeper came sailing out of one of the rooms and started yelling. Where did he get the nerve, in the middle of the day! If she’d kept herself under control a little, it would have all turned out all right, but she screamed so much that things had to go wrong. Hans started getting nervous. Suddenly Goebel was there in front of him.

  Dr. Goebel was a puny little chap in civilian riding breeches, which are not flattering at all if you have spindly legs. With his light sports jacket he gave the impression of a low-level civil servant who’s picked up something at a clearance sale. But the women hated and feared him.

  Clauberg could be reasonable sometimes and would often spare a woman if she had some reason to request not being injected. But two weeks ago Goebel had appeared and seemed to have come to Block 10 as some kind of supervisor. He stuck his nose into everything and mercilessly forced all of the women to participate in the experiments. He wasn’t a medical doctor, but a chemist from IG Farben, the company that funded the experiments and had a financial interest in the new liquids. Goebel was coarse and sarcastic and had the meanness that was typical of all these people who had never learnt to lead and suddenly had power over others.