by Eddy de Wind
Jewish women—slave laborers—could be thrashed at will. But if an SS man felt the urge, he would just as likely take a Jewish girl: “And if you’re not willing, I’ll use force.” If a prisoner was caught “organizing” a piece of bread, he would be caned. But the trade in gold and diamonds, and in the slaughterhouse (once fourteen pigs in one go), went through the SS.
In the autumn of 1943 a sabotage plot was discovered in Majdanek, the concentration camp near Lublin. The SS then decided to eliminate all eighteen thousand Jews in one day. An enormous right-angled trench was dug. The people undressed in one side of the right angle, then walked around the corner to be gunned down. The racket of the machine guns and the cries of the victims were drowned out by five orchestras.
Lagerarzt Klein was an expert at selections. One evening the entire camp population had to file naked past the Rapportführer in the old laundry. They got undressed outside on Birkenallee. Standing at the entrance were a few Blockälteste, who gave everyone a shove. Those who stumbled over the doorstep were Mussulmen. Those who marched past the gentlemen with their chests puffed up were through. They picked out about a thousand that way and then stuffed them in an empty block. In the night all the non-Jews were released. The next day the Jews filed past the Lagerarzt between Blocks 8 and 9 while he checked whether there weren’t perhaps some strong ones left amongst them. He was having an animated conversation with Hössler, the Lagerführer, and mostly had his back to the passing column. Now and then he turned around and picked out someone at random, who was then saved for a while.
In the camp at that time, two blocks, 22 and 23, were surrounded by barbed wire. Women were apparently going to be moved into them. In Block 23 they set up a small outpatients clinic.
Friedel began looking worse and worse. She couldn’t cope with the night shifts in the sewing workshop and was coughing more and more, and regularly running a temperature. Hans decided to go to the Lagerarzt to ask if she could be sent to the new outpatients as a Pflegerin.
Valentin, the head doctor of the upstairs wards, thought Hans had gone mad. The Lagerarzt would just “smash him in the gob.” He could kick him out of the hospital into a heavy Kommando for that kind of impudence. You weren’t even allowed to know your wife was here, let alone speak to the Lagerarzt about it.
But Hans was counting on the inconsistency, the split personality these SS officers displayed. And sure enough, the same man who had dispatched thousands to their deaths, because they were sick or weak, was happy for Friedel to be transferred from the sewing workshop to the outpatients in Block 23 “because the dust in those old clothes was giving her such a terrible cough.”
After the mass selection that claimed Professor Frijda, the Krankenbau was half empty. The Pfleger started to worry. “If there’s another selection like that, they’ll get rid of a bunch of Pfleger at the same time. There’s far too many.”
With danger approaching, there was a sudden need to be heroic. Whereas before nobody had thought of resistance, they now felt that they couldn’t simply surrender. One evening Klempfner, a Czech doctor from the upstairs ward, summoned Hans and Eli Polak to his room.
“There’s an organization in the camp. Naturally, I can’t tell you any details, but in our block there are now fifteen people willing to follow me. Will you join us?”
“Of course,” Eli said. “What have we got to lose?”
“If something’s about to happen, I’ll send for one of you to come and receive instructions. Then it will all be clear.”
It never got that far. After about a week the order came: Block 9 was being dissolved. The patients and Pfleger were moving to Block 19 (another hospital block, which was also half empty). Hans’s ward would remain intact. Zielina was being kept on as head doctor. In Block 19 the Blockältester was Sepp Rittner: a gigantic fellow, a Communist who’d already spent eight years in camps, but always with sunny Viennese humor, “Wiener Blut,” that refused to be cooled by Prussian tyranny. Hans had known him since coming to Auschwitz and they were close friends. Now the good life could begin.
In Block 19 Hans rose and became a prominent. Ochodsky, the ward doctor, had been put on a transport, and Zielina, who had now taken on the treatment of the non-Jewish patients, left more or less everything to Hans.
Now that he was treating patients, he didn’t need to do the dirty work anymore, and as he was in much closer contact with them, he was also given much more from their packages.
He went to visit Friedel every day to take her some of his treasures. After all, she was now back in a block in the same camp. Of course, it was dangerous! In just the first weeks, two men were shot dead while trying to talk to the women at the fence. On Sunday evening it was an eighteen-year-old boy. He had discovered his sister, who he hadn’t seen for half a year. But the greatest frauds always stay unpunished the longest. That was what Hans was counting on as he strolled through the gate to Block 23 every day holding a sphygmomanometer or a bottle under one arm. Sometimes he was carrying scales with a fellow doctor. The more they caught the eye, the better. And if an SS guard asked any questions, they were doctors at work, on their way to the female outpatients.
The only danger was the SDG, a Romanian Rottenführer, who knew all too well that Hans had absolutely no business being there. On one occasion he did catch them, when Hans and Friedel were sitting down together to talk. He threatened them and kicked Hans out, but didn’t take it any further.
On a Sunday soon after New Year, Alfonso Colet came up to Hans. Colet was the new Kapo in disinfection. He was a Spaniard, one of the many Loyalists who had fled Franco. In France he had fallen into German hands—out of the fat and into the fire—and ended up in a concentration camp. Here in Auschwitz he was the central figure in a small group of Spaniards and Rotspanier, “Spanish Reds,” who were Germans who had fought on the side of the government in the Spanish Civil War and been handed over to Hitler by Franco, then sent to concentration camps.
“You coming to Block 23?” Colet asked.
“What’s your excuse?”
“Nobody questions me. Anyway, tomorrow my lads are disinfecting Block 23. That’s why I want to go there today to have a look at what needs to be done.”
Colet was friends with Sara, the acting Blockälteste, a Belgian. He and Hans set off after the midday soup and spent the whole afternoon at Block 23 in the Blockälteste room, talking nineteen to the dozen with the women and having a great time. Later they were joined by a Kapo from the kitchen block who was having a relationship with the Blockälteste and arrived with a bottle of gin.
The block clerk was at the fence as a lookout and would raise the alarm if an SS man was heading for the women’s blocks. The men from the work details who wanted to look at the girls on their free Sunday afternoon had been driven off with blows, but it never occurred to the guards that anybody could be as brazen as Colet and Hans. Stealing half a million is safer than stealing half a guilder.
Colet told them about the new Jewish Lagerältester. Since all of the Poles had been put on transports and most of the Germans had been conscripted into the SS, almost everyone left in the camp was Jewish. As a result they had even appointed a Jewish Lagerältester, but after two days the man had gone mad; he had developed megalomania. He was lying on his bed in his room when Kaduk, the second Rapportführer, came in and ordered him to get up. But the Lagerältester said that he wouldn’t dream of letting Kaduk order him around and that he, as Lagerältester, was not the Rapportführer’s errand boy. They had an enormous row and the Lagerältester was now in the bunker.
The women laughed heartily because for someone in a concentration camp it really is very funny to hear about a Häftling, even the Lagerältester, behaving like that to the Rapportführer.
Hans was better informed: “What happened isn’t funny at all. Alfonso’s story is the official version, the one the SS is putting about. In reality the case is very different. Red Cross packages came for the camp and the Germans needed a signature from a prisoner
s’ representative as proof the packages had been distributed. The Lagerältester refused. Now he’s in the bunker and he definitely won’t be getting out alive.”
The kitchen Kapo’s gin proved stronger than the Lagerältester’s sad fate, so their spirits weren’t dampened too much. They only had three chairs for the six of them, but kept their behavior within the limits of decency—although the limits of decency were, of course, somewhat different here from how they had been at home.
Friedel was too in love to talk very much, but Sara dominated the conversation. She chattered away about the big group of men who had been in the block on New Year’s Eve. They had bribed the Blockführer who was on duty with a bottle of gin. Hans had his own information about the resulting party too. Not only had the Jews been able to get on to better work details recently, they were even in the orchestra. Jewish musicians had been brought in to Auschwitz from all the nearby camps. They had formed a swing band amongst themselves. All Dutch, because the orchestra’s best musicians were Dutch, and definitely when it came to jazz. There was Jack de Vries and Maurice van Kleef, Lex van Weeren and Sally van der Kloot. Also Ab Frank, bandmaster of the Bouwmeester Revue. Hans had played clarinet with them. He’d been there that New Year’s Eve too, but had gone straight to Friedel’s room. Sara couldn’t have known that, and there was no reason she should either.
Half drunk, Sara rattled away. Now about the Sauna. The Sauna was the large washroom with two hundred showers. The Kommando that worked there was the most popular of all. You could see more naked women there than anywhere in the world. Sometimes a thousand at once. The men who worked there could be real swine. Some of them walked among the women and harassed them shamelessly. For half a packet of margarine you could turn out with the Kommando for a day. If women from Birkenau were coming to wash that day, tough luck, because that was a nasty sight. All those worn out, emaciated bodies, almost as dirty after washing as before. But if the women were from Auschwitz, from the better Kommandos, then…
The most brazen were the SS, of course, who went there for their entertainment. They made the women do gymnastics for them and carried out “inspections.” A girl here in the block was already pregnant.
Friedel and Hans were not as animated as the others. It was all great fun, an afternoon like that, but being so close to each other made the longing grow so much—the longing for freedom, for a home, for children, for life. They were privileged, unique among the thousands here, but even the benefits were a poor substitute.
Hans grew somber. He always got like that when he drank. Friedel tried to cheer him up, stroking his head and joking about his going bald. But he spoke of the future and the decision that was almost upon them. Yesterday’s newspaper had reported for the first time on the Russian offensive. The Russians had mounted an attack and the Germans needed to “shorten the front to gain time for the necessary countermeasures to take effect.” The decision couldn’t be far away now. The front was only 90 miles from Auschwitz. The tension was rising.
The tension kept rising. On Tuesday evening the newspapers wrote about “Distrikt Krakau.” On Wednesday the Krakauer Zeitung didn’t arrive. There were more and more air-raid alarms, more and more blackouts, undoubtedly caused by partisans. Sometimes in the night they could already hear the artillery—if dull and very distant. Wednesday evening: Hans and Eli were working in the outpatients in Block 28. They were on duty there once a week. It was awful work. You only had a few pieces of paper and a bit of ointment to dress wounds. To get an aspirin for a patient you had to work through a mountain of bureaucracy and then mostly there turned out to be nothing available anyway. Unless the patient had cigarettes or margarine—then he could sort it out with the outpatients Pfleger, who did have dressings and aspirin. He in turn bought them from the prisoners who worked in the SS infirmary, where the attics were full of inexhaustible supplies: bandages, medicaments, toiletries, whatever you wanted. The prisoners got almost none of that through official channels. But Hans had something in his pocket: a roll of sticking plaster and some gauze. He either “organized” it at the Block 19 outpatients or bought it himself to dress the Dutch patients’ wounds. He had bread to spare and couldn’t take it all to Friedel.
As a result they were soon surrounded by Dutch patients. It was slow working by candlelight; chaos had crept in. All over outpatients, small groups were engaged in intense discussion. The issue that was preoccupying them: evacuation, extermination, or surrendering to the Russians? None of them came to a conclusion. Everything was equally plausible.
Later in the evening some women came with a female patient who needed an operation. Dr. Alina Brewda was with them. For a half a year she had been the Blockälteste of Block 10—until she refused to cooperate with a particular experiment. She was Friedel’s guardian angel and, as such, Hans knew her well.
A female overseer and a Blockführer had accompanied the women, but they couldn’t escape the tension either and left them to their fate. Brewda came over to Hans and asked him what the men thought of it all.
He didn’t know; he was just glad the end was in sight.
Brewda was in a dark mood. She had seen too much. She was from Warsaw, where half a million Jews had been squeezed into the ghetto, which had room for 150,000. From there they were successively carted off. Once in Treblinka, the SS killed 23,000 in a single day, probably their record. More even than the 18,000 in one day in Majdanek. The Warsaw Jews saw that there was no way out and the uprising began. That was in April 1943.
They got weapons from the Poles outside the ghetto and hid in the old buildings. The SS had great difficulty forcing their way through the streets and when they finally had the ghetto in their hands, armed Jews were still concealed everywhere in the cellars and the sewage canals that are so numerous in an old city. The entrances to the cellars were camouflaged: you slid a sink cabinet to one side or raised a rug. At night they emerged and carried out bloodbaths among the SS occupiers. Unable to gain control over these underground forces, they were left with only one option: they mined all of the houses and blew them up.
“Only a few thousand escaped,” said Brewda, “like me.”
Later they all fell into the hands of the SS again. The uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto was a case study of a people’s war. It was doomed to failure. A half a million badly armed Jews couldn’t win the war against Hitler. There are still hundreds of thousands buried under the rubble, but they dragged more than 20,000 SS troops into the grave with them.
When a child starts to cry, the mother wakes from the deepest sleep. Even if the sensory contact with the outside world has been broken in sleep, the mind remains alert, especially if we’re expecting something. At three in the morning the gong began to sound and within a few seconds the whole camp was in an uproar. Hans dressed quickly. When he got outside he saw men streaming out of all of the blocks and lining up as if for roll call. Evacuation, after all. It was bitterly cold and fine snow was drifting down. But nobody seemed to feel it. Everyone was too excited because the end was approaching. Whatever happened, Auschwitz was finished.
Blocks 23 and 24 were still completely dark.
Hans went back into the Krankenbau to ask Sepp what they had to do.
“Nothing,” Sepp said. “There aren’t any instructions yet for the sick. And anyway, we don’t have any clothes for them. I’m not letting them go like this.”
Sepp was right and Hans urged people to stay calm. But almost everyone had got out of bed and many of them were walking around the camp, looking for friends they wanted to say goodbye to.
Half an hour after the gong, there was a roll call. The numbers weren’t right anywhere. But what could they do? The roll call was abandoned and the men had to form up in their Kommandos, like every other morning.
At five the first groups left. They were made up of non-vital Kommandos like roadworks and river gravel. The factory and food production Kommandos were going to stay.
Even as they were marching off, rumors arose that, as a
lways, were a clear reflection of people’s hopes. “Half are going on transport now. The rest will stay and carry on working. The machines will all be carted off and we’ll stay until the Russians get here.”
Long lines of farmers’ wagons were driven into the camp. They loaded up bread and preserves from the kitchen storerooms and then set off after the transports that had left. Meanwhile the lights had gone on in Block 23. Hans went around to the back. Nobody was watching out to see if anybody was standing by the barbed wire. But how to catch their attention? He whistled all kinds of tunes. Then he tried the Belgian national anthem, La Brabançonne. That worked. Sara opened her window. Yes, she would call Friedel.
“Friedel, stay as long as you can!”
“Sweetheart, no, that’s much too dangerous.”
“Listen to me.”
They disagreed. Then Friedel had to go. She needed to arrange clothes. Later, when it was light, Hans would try to get into the block.
He walked back past the long lines of those who were leaving. They were shivering from the cold as they had already been standing outside for a couple of hours and had almost no clothes on. Those few linen rags offered no protection. Some of them had wrapped themselves in blankets. But many hadn’t dared. As if keeping the camp intact made any difference now it was being abandoned.
The Pfleger were lined up in Block 19. Sepp had received his instructions. Clothes for the patients were going to be issued in the Bekleidungskammer and they had to go there with stretchers to pick them up.
At eight o’clock the designated Kommandos left. It was now light and Hans was heading back to Block 23 when he bumped into the Rottenführer, who was looking for Pfleger for a job in the women’s block. His only option was to lay his cards on the table, asking if he could go with them to say goodbye to his wife. The Romanian grinned.