Last Stop Auschwitz

by Eddy de Wind

  “And you—how did you manage to get out of it?” Hans asked, terrified that she was about to admit what he had feared for so long. Never had they given up hope of coming through it all alive and if Friedel had been “gespritzt,” she might be permanently infertile. She could tell how scared he was.

  “There were thirty-four nurses and other staff who hadn’t been through it yet. We all had to come before Clauberg to explain why we hadn’t had our turn yet and to hear when we had to come in for the test. Those who refused would be sent to Birkenau. When I was standing before him, I told him I was suffering from an inflammation of the renal pelvis. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s not possible at the moment then. That could be fatal.’ Fortunately nobody checked me because I got over that inflammation a month ago.”

  It was astonishing that she had said the one thing that hit the mark. She was a layman, but must have had wondrous intuition.

  Toward midday the women marched off. Now they would no longer be able to see each other whenever they wanted to, but the men who worked in the new blocks could still deliver letters and packages. Friedel would try to come into the camp to see the dentist or the radiologist as often as she could, and that would allow them to still meet.

  Most of the men knew nothing about their wives at all. Some, like Eli, knew that they were dead, but even those who knew their wives were in an adjoining camp, like Birkenau for instance, had never had any opportunity to contact them. Hans and Friedel still had nothing to complain about.

  Roll call was over and Hans and Eli were walking along Birkenallee. It was still oppressively hot. Later it would be crowded here, but most of the Häftlinge were still in their blocks waiting for their bread. For the moment there were only some prominents and Pfleger around. Sitting on a bench were Dr. Valentin and Professor Mansfeld. Valentin called out to Hans, “So, are you back to normal again now?”

  Hans hadn’t realized he’d been acting abnormally. They sat down on the grass next to their older colleagues. “Being sad seems very normal to me,” Hans said.

  “That face of yours the whole day long. What have you got to complain about? You’ll be sure to find another opportunity to get in touch with your wife.”

  “Yes, but nowhere near as easily, and if she gets into difficulties of any kind I won’t be able to help her.”

  “What kind of difficulties could come up now?” the professor asked.

  “You’d be surprised, Prof,” Eli replied. “There’s still a lot they’re capable of. First of all, there are two X-ray rooms in that new block. They can work on an even larger scale than in Block 10. Or you might have heard of those new test experiments they’re going to do. There’s a row of small rooms in the new block that are apparently intended for bringing women together with men. Then you can see from the result whether or not the sterilization method was effective.”

  Hans didn’t believe it. “Come on now, there are so many stories. There’s also constant talk of a Jewish brothel that’s going to be opened on the first of September.”

  Eli thought the two rumors had to be based on something. “Maybe the tests will be carried out in a kind of brothel.”

  “Then I hope there’s not a single man who makes use of it.”

  Professor Mansfeld joined the conversation. “Don’t be ridiculous. If they take it into their heads to try something like that, you won’t have any opportunity to dissuade them.”

  “His wife hasn’t even been injected. What is there to test?” Eli said.

  “Ah, that doesn’t mean much one way or the other,” the professor continued. “You can’t expect any logic from our overlords. Their experiments are neither logical nor systematic. They’re just whims. Whatever pops into their head, they try it out. Last month in a camp near Köningshütte, an Oberscharführer locked three men and three women up with each other in a small room for several days. He took away all their clothes and observed their behavior closely. Then he stuffed one of the men with food, let another eat normally, and didn’t give the third anything at all. He was trying to test the influence of nutrition on sexual performance. Even a child understands that something like that is too insane.”

  Hans agreed. “Exactly, that’s just a personal whim. Take those tests with sedatives for instance. Last week an SS man came into Block 19 and picked out three men. They were given a powder, dissolved in real coffee. Shortly afterward, they fell asleep. Two never woke up again; the third happened to come to after thirty-six hours. I can imagine how they hit on ‘research’ like that. The gentleman from the SS was a little upset by the Von Witzleben affair and couldn’t get to sleep at night. In his home apothecary he found some powders from Canada, but he was a bit timid about trying them. So why not a ‘scientific experiment’ with a few Häftlinge?”

  Eli interrupted him. “It’s nonsense to even try to analyze an experiment like that. A waste of time. That experiment at Köningshütte is nothing more than the perverse gratification of a man who wanted to observe those people’s sex lives. Experiments like the ones in Block 10 are a different matter.”

  “Wrong, Sir,” the professor snapped. “From a humanitarian and scientific perspective, none of the experiments carried out by Germans, in fact all of German science since 1933, has been a hair better. A major factor, of course, has been the expulsion of all Jewish scholars. Throughout the history of German science there have been remarkably large numbers of Jewish and foreign scholars. You find an especially large number of Poles among ‘German’ scientists. People like Copernicus have been annexed in the propaganda to demonstrate German superiority!”

  “What if Hitler hadn’t kicked out the Jews?”

  “German science still wouldn’t have produced much. After all, science means: investigate and conclude. In Germany the conclusion is determined in advance. It has to agree with state dogma. As long as it’s about purely technical discoveries—for the war industry or in the field of medicine—research results are happily accepted, but as soon as a German scholar ventures into historical or philosophical territory, he knows in advance which conclusion his research has to lead to, and if he’s stupid enough to come up with a result that conflicts with National Socialist doctrine, he won’t last long.”

  “I understand all of that perfectly, Professor. But getting back to our women. These are purely technical experiments here, so they can be carried out properly.”

  “Science is a system that has developed in service of human society. For that reason alone, research into mass sterilization can’t be set up scientifically. Because German science doesn’t serve humanity, but the German race. In any case, look at the practice. Who is playing a role here? Clauberg, Goebel, people from the Gestapo, and Samuel, who’s trying to save his own skin. The experiments are carried out by a Scharführer who doesn’t have a clue and derives his authority from a former career as a toothbrush salesman. No, Sir, research that goes against every human principle has nothing to do with science. If one of my former lab assistants had treated a laboratory animal the way the women are treated here, I would have marched him to the door myself.”

  Mansfeld’s account made a great impression on them, but no sooner had he finished than the Block 9 messenger came up to them: they had to go straight back. They were moving to Block 8 that same evening. For a couple of hours they had to work hard: dismantling cabinets and tables, and packing medicaments. But fortunately a countermand arrived: moving tomorrow.

  It was an arduous day’s work: carrying patients, straw mattresses, and beds. Block 8 was a filthy, run-down quarantine block. Blocks 9 and 10 were going to be used for Gypsies. Entire families: men, women, and masses of children. They were privileged prisoners who, for unknown reasons, had escaped Birkenau and were being sent to camps in Germany. Generally it was no different for the Gypsies than for the Jews. They were a much smaller group than the Jews and had occupied a much less important social position in the various European countries, but in Birkenau they went “up the chimney” all the same. Yet more proof that
the persecution of the Jews was not essentially an “anti-capitalist struggle against the global Jewish plutocracy.”

  Practiced in hate, the SS was an organ for the oppression of their own German people and related nations. They rehearsed their methods on the Jews, Russians, and Gypsies under the motto of racial purification. The camps of Ellecom, in the Netherlands on the edge of the Veluwe, and Stutthof, near Danzig,12 were officially considered SS training camps—Schulungslager. In the camps, the members of the SS were able to satisfy the sadistic tendencies that had been aroused in them, and because they were given these opportunities of satisfaction, they remained obedient followers of Hitler until the end.

  After a week, they had cleaned the block and done it up a little. The patients were covered with blankets that were still soiled from their predecessors. They were wearing undershirts that were “disinfected once a month” but never washed and therefore marked with brown bloodstains and spotted black with flea dirt. But at first sight everything was clean, the floors were shining white, and the beds nicely painted. It had been an expensive week because they didn’t get any official supplies and had to pay for the paint for the beds and doors with food, bread, and margarine that was, therefore, no longer available for the patients.

  Unfortunately, more Gypsies arrived on the ninth day and Block 8 moved to Block 7. There were now two thousand Gypsies in the camp and it was a bigger mess than ever. After all, Auschwitz was a “bad” camp. A barbed-wire fence was erected around the three Gypsy blocks and there were always two sentries on duty, but that didn’t prevent a brisk trade from developing at the wire.

  The Gypsies received more bread than the others and used it to buy sausage and potatoes, which were smuggled into the camp by the ordinary prisoners. This led to a devaluation of bread. Whereas a ration of bread was initially worth twelve potatoes, you could now only get seven for it.

  The Gypsies played music and danced all day, and the men at the fence feasted their eyes until the guards chased them off with blows or subjected them to punishments for loitering around the camp during work time. But things got even more out of hand after dark. Then men from the camp would find a way into the Gypsy blocks and a lot of the Gypsy women would slip through the barbed-wire fencing to fill their own stomachs properly for once and sweeten the lives of the Blockälteste and Kapos, who often had a room of their own in the work blocks. Although they could also get by without a room, as long as there was something to eat and drink.

  Raids in the middle of the night. The SS searching for women in all the beds in the whole camp. So many victims! Every morning the barbed wire needed to be repaired again. Hans didn’t like the uproar. Seeing the Gypsies enjoying themselves only made you more intensely aware of everything you were missing in the camp. It made you feel even more like someone who has been buried alive. He had little interest in the Gypsy women.

  The time he used to spend outside Friedel’s window, talking to her, he now spent upstairs with fellow doctors or talking to Professor Frijda, the Amsterdam professor of economics, who had been a patient in the Krankenbau for a week now. The old man had arrived on the last Dutch transport. By chance he’d got in the right line after getting off the train. In Auschwitz he was put in the roadworks Kommando. After just a few weeks of dragging wagons all day, he hadn’t been able to hold up any longer and had been admitted to hospital. He was soon very popular among the doctors because of his friendly, modest attitude. They found “le professeur hollandaise” “très charmant.” But for Hans he was a great worry.

  In the mornings, even before the gong, the men were already jostling at the windows of Block 7, which was opposite Block 8, to see the women washing themselves. Then the Blockältester came and chased the patients back into bed. But he didn’t come into the Pflegerstube and the Pfleger amused themselves at length with erotic sign-language conversations with Gypsy women in various states of undress.

  In a situation where even Saint Anthony would have succumbed to temptation, Hans did look across at the other block now and then, but only fleetingly, because seeing women only heightened his longing for Friedel.

  Maintaining communication hadn’t been easy. Krebs, the Dutch dental technician, had already spent a few days in the bunker for passing on letters to the women. A letter from Hans had been among them. During his interrogation, Krebs had explained that it was a letter from a man to his own wife. There was nothing special in it. Krebs was one of the few Dutch prominents and that was lucky for him, because with the help of his boss, the Obersturmführer of the dental clinic, the matter was soon settled.

  Friedel’s hospital visit hadn’t gone well either. She did come each Wednesday when the girls came to the Krankenbau for their consultations, but the SDG was always there. He was a dirty character, a Romanian. The foreign SS men were always even crueler than the Germans. He gave the girls a hard time, stood over them while they were being examined and then often disappeared upstairs with one of them, taking her to one of the opticians’ or chemists’ rooms.

  The lads would quickly seize the opportunity to talk to their wives. This time it was Hans, Majzel, and De Hond, who had been let in for a moment by the second SDG. Friedel told him about the new block. There weren’t any experiments there. The girls had been allocated to all kinds of Kommandos. She was on a night shift, making clothes. It wasn’t easy: twelve hours on the go in an attic, in the dust, sewing old rags, and if she didn’t complete her quota they hit her. She couldn’t bear the dust and couldn’t stop coughing. It wasn’t long before the Romanian was back again. He’d been drinking and made some filthy remarks before chasing out all of the men.

  When would he see Friedel again? He had to think of something better. That was on Wednesday. On Thursday all the Gypsies left, and on Friday they had to move again. They were going back to Block 9, which was now very much the worse for wear.

  The next morning: “Achtung, Lagerarzt!” He didn’t go to the wards, where it was still a great mess, but headed straight to the Blockältester’s room, where he spoke to the head doctor for a few minutes. After he was gone, Zielina called all of the doctors into outpatients.

  A list had to be made of all patients. Next to the names the doctor had to fill in whether or not the patient could be discharged, and if not, how much longer he would have to stay in the hospital: one, two, three weeks, or longer than three. Their expressions were dark because they realized that there was something nasty behind it, and the discussion grew heated as they tried to identify the limit: how long someone would be allowed to be sick without risking the gas chamber.

  Hans spent a long time talking to Flechner, the French doctor who was treating Frijda, about the professor’s fate. They couldn’t say he was healthy. If they did, he would be discharged immediately and at the moment he couldn’t walk a hundred yards. But they didn’t dare say “longer than three weeks” either. That would seal his fate. To make matters worse, the Lagerarzt had taken all of the index cards with him, so simply making the professor disappear by hiding him was no longer an option.

  They called in Zielina and decided together to write down three weeks. There is no decision in his life that Hans regrets as much.

  The next day the card index was returned—except the cards of the Jews who had to stay in the hospital for more than two weeks. These patients were to be picked up the next day “to be put to work at the Birkenau Weaving Mill in a light Kommando.” The Birkenau Weaving Mill was “the world’s biggest factory.” Under this pretext they had already taken a couple of million people to the gas chamber.

  Zielina gave Hans Sunday morning off. The Kapo of the roadworks Kommando was a friend of Leen Sanders’s and—thanks to Leen’s recommendation and a packet of cigarettes contributed for this purpose by a Polish patient—willing to let Hans turn out with his detail. Thirty men were working in the new female camp and they smuggled Hans in with them.

  He wasn’t the only guest. At least half of the Sunday Kommando was interested in the girls. The SS hadn’t
latched on to this trick yet and as a result they could walk around the female camp relatively undisturbed. As long as they always had a shovel or a few slabs with them to immediately set to work if an SS man or one of the female overseers was in the vicinity, the Kapo said.

  Various lads disappeared into one of the attics with their girlfriends. But Friedel wasn’t interested in that kind of “stolen love.” They stood behind a door in her block and were able to talk undisturbed for a long time. Hans poured out his heart to her about Frijda.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” Friedel comforted him. “In most cases where you don’t give a patient the best medicine, nobody can blame you for it, although that’s much more to be expected from you than making the right choice with a vicious trick like this.”

  That was true and Hans tried not to dwell on his feelings of self-reproach.

  The next day the trucks came. Hans felt miserable. Off went Professor Frijda, the former rector of the University of Amsterdam, a man who had once presented Queen Wilhelmina with an honorary degree. He shook hands with Hans and asked him to pass on his regards to his loved ones, should he survive.

  “But, Professor, you will see them again yourself.”

  What else was he supposed to say? He didn’t have the courage to simply speak the truth. He had to go along with the lies about Birkenau.

  Then an SS man came up and hurried the professor onto the truck. Dressed in a grimy undershirt and wearing wooden sandals, one of Holland’s best-known and most highly regarded academics climbed up onto the back of the truck that would take him to the gas chamber.

  With the SS you never knew where you were. You witnessed the grossest contradictions: in the morning when thousands marched out five abreast in straight lines to face a day of blows, hunger, and murderously hard labor, the orchestra, made up of fifty prisoners, would be playing at the gate. Once the doctors had to compile lists of those who were eligible for supplementary nutrition. The day after the lists were handed in, all of the malnourished misfortunates were hauled off to the gas chamber.