by Eddy de Wind
“Does the gentleman think it’s a casino here perhaps?”
Hans was not usually shy of an excuse. But in this instant hatred flared inside him. He found it so difficult to suppress and felt such an urge to kick the pipsqueak to the ground that he was only able to stammer out a few incomprehensible syllables.
“We’ll sort it out,” said the mighty one, noting down the number Hans wore on his left breast. Hans slunk off and spoke to no one about his adventure. The next morning Paul came up to him.
“Son, what’s going on? Your number came in from the Schreibstube, you have to go up to the front of the camp.”
“To the front of the camp” meant to the gate, where the Rapportführer had his office. He had to wait in the small hallway of the Blockführerstube.
Kaduk, the Rapportführer, addressed Hans: “150822.”
“Zum Befehl,” he responded. At your command.
“Überstellung Strafkommando Birkenau.”
He was being sent to the punishment detail at Birkenau.
Hans’s head was still spinning when the SS Sturmmann who was going to escort him to the punishment detail arrived. His legs felt like lead and he found it hard to keep up. Midway between Auschwitz and Birkenau was the large viaduct over the railway yards of the town of Auschwitz. From there, the road followed a branch of the railway line and after about a third of a mile, they reached Birkenau. The tracks and road entered the camp through a gate in the main building and formed the midline of an enormous sea of barracks.
Eight or ten side roads ran off the railway line at right angles and were flanked on both sides by rows of thirty-five to forty barracks. The left side of the camp was called FKL, the Frauenkonzentrationslager. On the right was the Arbeitslager Birkenau. So-called because, although it was a labor camp by name, the conditions were even worse here than in the women’s concentration camp. This was where the crematoriums were—four in number.
Roll calls and inspections, food distribution, and Kommandos would have been impossible to organize if they had allowed all two hundred thousand prisoners free access to the entire grounds of Birkenau. That was why each side street, with its rows of barracks, formed a distinct camp. All of these camps had their own number or letter and were cut off from each other by barbed wire. As a consequence, it was possible for a husband and wife, or mother and daughter, to live in Birkenau for months without knowing of each other’s existence, as all the camps were kept strictly separate and the only communication was between adjoining camps and poor.
Still, contact between men and women, although highly dangerous, was more extensive here than in the small, orderly camp of Auschwitz I. They sought and found each other in the food-transport Kommandos and on many other occasions. Through their work, the Kapos and other foremen in particular had ample opportunity to come into contact with women. A lot of the female Kommandos were even led by male prisoners and many a woman counted herself lucky to have a “rich” boyfriend—for instance one of the men who worked on the bread wagons and had an abundant supply of bread to satisfy his girlfriend’s hunger for food, out of gratitude for her satisfying his hunger for love.
One evening Hans met a prisoner who had been in Buchenwald. They talked about the “evil” of Auschwitz, where the moral degeneration of the Häftlinge seemed more advanced than in any other camp.
“At Buchenwald the political prisoners have succeeded, after a long struggle, in gaining control over the entire internal leadership of the camp. They even had the cooperation of a few SS people along the way. If a green—a professional criminal—got too big for his boots, he’d get a note telling him to report to the infirmary. One injection and that was him taken care of.”
“Are conditions a lot better there than here?” Hans asked.
“‘Organizing’ doesn’t exist at Buchenwald, only concerted theft from the SS stores for the benefit of all. A cook who steals something from the kitchen gets beaten to death on the spot. Anybody who swaps cigarettes for food is severely punished.”
It wasn’t like that at Auschwitz. There, everyone spent the whole day thinking about how to filch as much as possible, and mostly at the expense of their comrades. There were complete black markets in the free minutes after roll call.
“In Buchenwald the political prisoners boycotted the brothel. No Dutchman ever set foot in it,” the Buchenwalder claimed. “It’s not like that here. Anybody who’s not Jewish and is therefore allowed in the brothel uses it as much as possible, and the illegal intercourse between men and women here in Birkenau is out-and-out prostitution.”
Hans disagreed. “You can’t apply concepts from normal society to camp conditions. If a girl gives herself for a piece of bread or a liter of soup, you mustn’t judge too severely.”
“But it’s just the same with prostitutes,” the Buchenwalder said. “How often doesn’t it happen that a woman gets pregnant from a love affair, gives birth to an illegitimate child, and is abandoned by the man? She gets excluded from all kinds of circles and prostitution is the only way she has left to provide for herself and the child.”
They had to rush all day long. Hans was in a building-yard Kommando. Long lines of men carrying bricks nonstop. Sometimes it would be railway sleepers or heavy steel girders that scraped the skin off their shoulders. They weren’t hit much. The actual punishment detail no longer existed. Now and then they’d catch a blow or a boot, but it was rare for someone to be beaten to death at work.
A year earlier things had been very different. At work Hans had spoken to a Greek who had told him in a surge of self-reproach that he had once given a mate who had been beaten half to death a couple of extra kicks. At that stage, the rule in the camp had been that you weren’t allowed to leave the dead lying on the ground at roll call, but had to take them inside. Those kicks meant he was able to carry the body away with a friend and got to spend half a day resting. Another time, the Greek was in a bunk in the hospital next to someone who was severely ill and seemed unconscious. He had taken the man’s bread to eat it, but the poor wretch had started yelling. If people had realized the Greek had stolen the sick man’s bread, they would have beaten him to within an inch of his life. That was why he pressed his hand over the other man’s mouth, but still he wouldn’t shut up. He’d pressed and pressed until the man suffocated. Hans asked the Buchenwalder what he, with his superior camp ethics, thought of this. Hans himself considered every method to stay alive in the camp permissible, as long as it wasn’t at the expense of a comrade.
A Dutch Catholic, a medical student, joined the conversation: “My Jesuit once gave me an example: two men are sitting on a wooden raft that can only carry one person. One pushes the other off and he drowns. Does that make him guilty? No, because if one of the two hadn’t died, they would have both been lost.”
As an ethical guideline, Hans found that rather opportunistic, but acceptable if necessary. The example wasn’t applicable to the Greek though, because he hadn’t saved his life with that one piece of bread. If he carried on like that, he would be forced to kill someone else for another piece of bread the next day, and again the day after. If it comes down to “you or me,” everybody says “me,” but it wasn’t like that in the camp. You could obtain advantages for yourself at the expense of others, but you couldn’t save your life. And since no ethical system—Christian or humanistic—can approve of obtaining an advantage at the expense of greater suffering by others, the Greek’s behavior was indefensible.
Conversations like this were rare, as by the time the work was done and the Kommandos had been dismissed, it was roll call, which sometimes took half an hour but often went on for two hours or more. It didn’t matter whether it was mild spring weather or pelting down hail. Then, after roll call, a long queue for bread, often followed by all kinds of inspections: a clothing inspection, for instance, to see whether there might be a button missing from your striped gala costume and to make sure your shoes were clean, i.e. not covered in mud.
If you took each of the
factors separately, it was possible to live in one of these Kommandos. The work was heavy, but in itself bearable. The blows hurt, but you weren’t beaten to death. You didn’t get much bread and soup, but it would have sustained a life of indolence. But the combination of all these elements—so much work and the blows with so little food—was unbearable. And the worst thing was the lack of rest. Work, roll call, inspections, fetching food, and, when you were finally lying on a bunk in a motley company of eight men from all over Europe, the futile battle against lice and fleas. Dozing off, waking up, scratching. Then getting yourself under control again. Lie still. Just let the lice crawl. Going back to sleep, waking up again. Arguing with your neighbor. Then you’ve scratched your leg open, you feel blood, that’s going to turn into a sore, please, no more scratching. Then you’ve done it again! Exhaustion and no rest, feeling deeply miserable.
At night you have to get up—sometimes three times—from the soup and early cardiac weakness. That means climbing over three men and having to walk a few hundred yards to the latrine, a board floor with no less than forty holes in it. Outside there’s a sentry to make sure nobody urinates outdoors. You’d get a thrashing.
Your neighbor, who’s some kind of Balkan peasant, is more practical. He’s smuggled a food bowl into bed with him and doesn’t have to get up. But who’s going to eat out of that bowl in the morning? No, you couldn’t bring yourself to do that. It’s better to walk two hundred yards.
At four in the morning you get up. Undershirts off, wash. A few drops of water, no soap. Dry yourself with your undershirt. Often you don’t even get a turn at the tap. Maybe you’ll find a puddle with rainwater on the way. Then—it’s still not dawn—turning out, counting the Kommando. After standing for a long, long time, the Kommando sets off. At the gate the head Kapo reports: “Building yard, 693 men.” Fear! If it’s too many, if 660 are enough, the Obersturmführer will count off 33 at random. They’ll be ordered to one side. Nobody will ever see them again.
What you do see is the flame, the eternal flame from the crematorium chimney. Day and night, the fire. Always the awareness that people are burning there. People like yourself, with a brain and a heart that pumps their blood—that miraculous liquid—through an endless network of blood vessels, alive in all their fibers, in their most insignificant cells. God’s miraculous creation.
Sometimes the weather is damp and smoke hangs over the camp. That smell of scorched meat, of steak being fried in a pan that hasn’t been greased properly. That’s your breakfast because you don’t have any bread left anyway. At times like that you can’t bear it anymore. You’re tired, sick, and disgusted by yourself, because you are a man and the SS, too, are “men.”
After five weeks the letter: “I’ve tracked you down! A man who delivers wood to your camp’s kitchen has found you. I’ll speak to the Lagerarzt. Stick it out a little longer.”
It took another week before the block clerk came to get him. Hans was checked out at the administrative building and sent back to Auschwitz.
Block 9 had undergone a great change. There was a new Blockältester.
The previous week the Lagerarzt had come to select the Mussulmen. When the trucks arrived a day later to pick up the unlucky men, one was missing, an Italian Jew. Enormous tumult. In the evening the man came back of his own accord. He had turned out with the building-yard Kommando and spent the whole day lugging bags of cement. When the job was finished, the foreman had even praised him for his application. He had only wanted to prove that he wasn’t a Mussulman, that he was still able to work hard.
The Lagerarzt, who came back the next day, wasn’t receptive to that logic. He had the man taken away immediately and then called in Paul. His letting something like that happen in his block was a scandal. He’d given the Jew a thorough beating at least, he hoped. But Paul was obstinate and, since falling in love with a Jewish girl, had developed a deep empathy for the Jews in the camp.
“I don’t beat sick people.”
Then the Lagerarzt began bellowing that in the end Communist riffraff always showed their true colors. They were Jew-lovers, scum, filthy red swine. The grand physician punched Paul right in the face. Twice, three times, until blood was pouring from his lips. Half an hour later there was a new Blockältester. It was Zlobinsky, a Pole, the former doorkeeper of Block 21. He had a reputation for being sly and coarse. He was difficult, inspected beds, screamed if there was a single straw on the floor, and harried everyone to work as hard as they possibly could.
But after a couple of weeks he fell in love with a girl from Block 10. From then on he spent the whole day sitting at the window and the Pfleger could doze off again and let the room orderlies—recovering patients—do all of the work.
The day after his return, Hans went next door to Block 10 with the kettle Kommando to see Friedel. They were so happy his adventure had turned out well.
“How did you pull it off?” he asked.
“I just went to Klein, the Lagerarzt, explained what had happened, and that you were my husband, and then he wrote down your number.”
“It’s incomprehensible. That’s the same dog who kicked out Paul last week, after first holding a selection. At the start of the month he was in Birkenau and cleared out the entire Czech family Lager in two days. A thousand men were put on work transport. Five and a half thousand went up the chimney: older men, women, and children.”
“You see that often. You can’t reason with the younger SS at all, but the older ones, who commit crimes on a grand scale, are sometimes humane in minor things, like now, with you.”
“I don’t think that’s a point in their favor,” Hans said. “On the contrary. The youngsters have been raised in the spirit of blood and soil. They don’t know any better. But those older ones, like the Lagerarzt, show through those minor acts that they still harbor a remnant of their upbringing. They didn’t learn this inhumanity from an early age and had no need to embrace it. That’s why they’re guiltier than the young Nazi sheep, who have never known better.”
They talked for a while longer. Friedel told him about the injections with malarial blood and the high fevers the women suffered as a result of the artificially induced malaria.
It was now easy to get into Block 10 and less dangerous to stay there.
Large groups of Poles were being put on transports regularly and that gave the Jews opportunities to occupy better positions. They could now work in the Bekleidungskammer and the photographic studio. There were even a few in the kitchen, and Jewish doctors were no longer limited by preference to the filthiest jobs, but actually did some real medical work. As a result it was now possible for a Jew to go into Block 10 under the pretext of some job or other, whereas previously the Poles had kept such pleasant tasks to themselves.
On the one hand, then, the Polish transports gave them a much more bearable life; on the other, it made them very anxious. The Poles were put on transports, as were the Russians. The Reich Germans, inasmuch as they weren’t political prisoners, were incorporated into the SS. All this was clearly influenced by the German withdrawals and the constantly approaching front.
Now—in the summer of 1944—the Russians had already reached Radom, midway between Lemberg and Krakow. That was only 125 miles from Auschwitz. The next offensive could reach the camp. What would happen to its inmates then?
There were various opinions circulating: an evacuation of the camp, for one. That wouldn’t be simple, because although its occupation rate was greatly reduced, the entire Auschwitz complex still held some 120,000 prisoners. Others were convinced the Germans would exterminate them all. There were very few optimists who believed they would let the witnesses to their outrages fall into Russian hands alive.
They were living in a turmoil of growing tension.
In July, a climax: “The Führer is dead. Wehrmacht and SS are fighting each other everywhere. The generals have taken over the government.” Never before had rumors like these done the rounds and been believed so firmly.
&n
bsp; But although it was even claimed the next day that the war was over and a new German government had begun negotiations with the Allies, the SS remained at their posts. Despite this, the rumors were closer to the truth than ever before. Days later they read in an already outdated newspaper—which the non-Jews were allowed to subscribe to—how the Von Witzleben11 affair had played out in reality.
The rumors that circulated in the camp were always a caricature, an exaggeration of reality, but you could be sure that there was something going on, even though it was often difficult to discover the true scale of the facts.
It was like that with Block 10 too. For half a year now there had been constant talk of Block 10 being relocated. A new barracks complex had been built a couple hundred yards from the camp. The SS had moved in, and one building was supposedly for Block 10.
Always that fear of their approaching separation. But nothing happened. Until in August the rumor took on more concrete form. Five of the new buildings were going to be women’s blocks. Block 10 would be housed there along with the better female Kommandos, like those working in the SS laundry and the munitions factories.
And suddenly, the day of the move arrived. For hours the women stood lined up outside: counting, counting, and counting again. Nobody understood what they were waiting for, but Hans and Friedel were glad of it. There were hardly any SS around and they could talk at length, longer than ever. This farewell turned into their longest and calmest conversation for a year. Hans wanted to know what would happen to them in the new block.
“I think they’ll just continue the experiments. This week they were working under high pressure in Block 10. Apparently nobody was allowed to go to the new block who’s not on the Clauberg and Goebel list and that means being injected at least once. The staff weren’t exempt anymore either.”