Last Stop Auschwitz

by Eddy de Wind

  The newcomers began to make associations with descriptions of forced labor in previous centuries—galley slaves and convicts—and then came the incomprehensible thought, now I am a convict too. Things one had only known from books—Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead—and from the film I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang suddenly became reality.

  Then the lads were at the gate and seeing the camp they would have to live in for the first time. Above the gate, in decorative cast iron, the concentration camp slogan: ARBEIT MACHT FREI.

  A suggestion designed to reconcile the thousands who would enter here to their fate, by offering them a glimmer of hope.

  Keeping that hope alive until the last moment was part of the camp system. Besides perhaps in individual threats, the SS never admitted that extermination was the goal. Artificially launched rumors seeped through the crowded camp like an anesthetic poison, feeding irrational illusions and keeping the prisoners from active resistance. The suggestion that work would set you free was soon rendered ineffective by the first conversations with more senior camp residents, among them some of our compatriots.

  The truth about the tortures, infectious diseases, starvation, and especially the weekly recurring “selections,” in which the weakest were picked out and taken to the gas chambers, was flung mercilessly in the newcomers’ faces.

  I remember speaking to a Dutchman—perhaps an hour after my arrival in the camp. He was a strong, well-built young man, who also looked well nourished. He predicted that none of us would get out alive. I still clung to him: “How long have you been here then?”

  “A year.”

  “But then it must be bearable!”

  Unfortunately, the Dutchman wasted no time in shattering my illusions by telling me that he was the last survivor from his transport of one thousand people. He was a champion boxer and the SS appreciated his boxing skills so much that they had taken him under their wing.

  In this way we soon knew very precisely which fate was in store for us. The exhausting work, the meager daily rations, and the lack of rest already made it clear to us that camp life was unbearable. And when we first saw the wagons with the most exhausted prisoners leaving for Birkenau, the part of the camp with the crematoriums, there was no more room for doubt. Although our rational minds were convinced, irrational hope remained. Hope was mainly nourished by the rumors, which were, in turn, fed by hope, but besides this there were also peculiar facts: for instance, many of the prisoners worked in Krupp and IG Farben factories and in the so-called Deutsche Ausrüstungswerkstatte. There they were given certain privileges: an extra half liter of soup and sometimes extra bread, a straw mattress to themselves that they didn’t need to share with two or three other men. Sometimes they even got “pay,” a Prämienschein of one mark, which they could use to buy onions in the canteen, or lavatory paper, an enormous luxury.

  If we spoke to the older prisoners about these facts, they only responded with a sneer. They knew all too well how it would end. Nonetheless they had to admit that something had changed in the camp, and when we sometimes bemoaned our fate, they mocked us. “You have no idea what a camp is. Compared to our day it’s a sanatorium here now.” We were constantly hurled back and forth from hope to dread, from emotional, irrational hope to reasoned dread, the virtual certainty that this would all mean the end.

  This mixture of conflicting responses is not that strange. It is familiar to everyone. But in the camp the divergence was so strong, there was such a distance between thought and emotion, that it was scarcely possible to speak of a mixture anymore. It was so overwhelming that there were two consciousnesses living in each person—one knowing and the other hoping—moving independently of each other and having virtually no influence on each other.

  The certainty of the approaching end gave rise to a numbed resignation, but in those urgent moments when a prisoner was in danger of succumbing, the quiet hope was a stimulus to hold out a little longer.

  In this way one always lasted a little longer in the camp than one could have lasted according to human calculations.

  The six phases of the confrontation with the concentration camp had the effect of an equal number of psychic traumas: the confiscation of the baggage, the separation of the families, the impressions of the people working outside the camp, the sight of the camp with its electrified barbed wire, the shaving and the tattooing with the Häftlingsnummer, and, above all, the newcomers’ communications with the senior prisoners are comparable to the most intense traumas we see in the field of traumatic neuroses. And the reaction to these traumas was the same as the reaction to an intense, acute shock: the result was a stuporous condition. Stupor characterized the prisoners’ behavior in the first weeks. They were quiet and inhibited, and unable to understand the snarled orders in concentration camp jargon.

  They found it impossible to get the soup, which they would later crave, down their throats, and the slowness of their reactions made an extremely stupid impression on the more senior prisoners and especially the SS. This was the “blödes Schwein” stage in which many perished. When they failed to properly follow the orders they had not understood, they were beaten to death, or their awkward behavior resulted in their being assigned to the heaviest Kommandos, where they had to carry out unbearable labor. There were also some, though these were the least in number, who showed a different attitude right from the start. They refused to bend the knee and behaved fairly arrogantly, trying to withstand the law of the concentration camp with their iron will and putting on a show of bravery. They too soon went under. Rather than “blöd,” they were “frech” and those who were frech were also beaten to death, albeit for other reasons than the Blöde. Still there were also some who, after a short while, managed to find an attitude that made it possible to bear the camp over a longer period thanks to a peculiar kind of adaptation, which is such an interesting phenomenon that I would like to take as an additional subject for this study. And although I realize that what I will now say is still very incomplete and in many points disputable, I believe nonetheless that I have sufficient material to justify elaborating my chain of thought for you. To immediately give you a picture of a prisoner who found the right style, I will read you a passage from the case history of a patient who spent a long time in camps and recently came to me because of the difficulties he is having adapting.

  The patient said the following: “I don’t understand myself how I came through it. Of the four hundred men who were transported to Buna with me, only thirty were left after a year. I always just let myself go. When the Kapo hit me, I thought, just beat me to death. When there was a bombing raid, I thought, if only I’m lucky enough to be hit by a bomb. I was completely apathetic. When the Dutch lads spoke to me, I thought, ah, just let them talk, and couldn’t follow the conversation. The Kapo said, ‘I don’t understand why you’re not in the crematorium yet.’ I shirked work as much as I could and if they noticed, they’d sometimes beat me to the ground; I didn’t care. In the end I didn’t feel the blows anymore. I didn’t bleed from them anymore either. Once during a selection I was written down, standing among dozens of Mussulmen. The next day I presented to the Lagerarzt, who asked me what my profession was. I said ‘warehouseman.’ If I’d said ‘diamond cutter,’ I’d have been gone. They always said, ‘All you Jews are good for is cutting diamonds and doing business.’ On an impulse, I answered ‘warehouseman.’”

  In this man we see a remarkable capacity to let insult and injury pass him by virtually unnoticed. Later we even heard from him that eventually he almost found it pleasant to be tormented. The line from Exodus we can find on the urn tomb in Westerbork is applicable to him: “Pure oil from olives, beaten, beaten and pounded, to bear suffering as light.”

  Although I can’t go too deeply into the theoretical background of this capacity to “bear suffering as light,” I would like to draw several parallels and would primarily recall what Freud has described for us in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, although it’s certainly not necessary to
quote Freud in this company. And we are also familiar with just how much the death drive Freud posits in that essay is still a moot point. Nonetheless we must admit that people like the patient I have just described had adapted strongly to the idea of dying. And in their cases we can clearly apply the opinion of Carp,4 who puts it a little more broadly when he says that people whose individual earthly existence has become unbearable because of certain tensions long for a resolution of this existence and a continuation in another. And is it not abundantly clear that the stupor we have described in the newcomers was a consequence of this death principle? The prisoner who had actually given up on life under the influence of psychic trauma had reconciled himself to the idea of dying. He was certain that he would one day get out of the camp, but believed—to express it in concentration camp terms—that it would be “durch den Kamin,” by way of the crematorium chimney; or, in other words, “I will definitely get out, if not horizontally, vertically.” The prisoner was like a Raskolnikov.5 He sought misery and humiliation. For him, blows and hunger were no longer traumas but aids to achieve his goal: death. If this condition continued, death would be the result. If the prisoner did not get beaten to death, he would die from disease, and it was apparent that the exceptionally florid tubercular processes we saw in the camp were exacerbated by a desire to die.

  We have seen that the man who surrendered completely to the camp soon perished, but the man who resisted with all his vitality exhausted his energies quickly as well, using up his mental and physical reserves in a futile struggle against the law of “L’Univers concentrationnaire.” This brings us to the paradox that reconciling oneself to death was a vital condition for the prisoner, that it was necessary for him to submit, and that his only chance of staying alive was if he, alongside this submission, which really can be called a form of inner acceptance, retained sufficient vitality to give the right answer at critical moments, just as our patient, who had let himself go completely, answered warehouseman instead of diamond cutter in the moment when the Lagerarzt was choosing his victims for the gas chambers.

  Compared to ordinary life, staying alive in the camp required a different relationship between vitality and what I—to avoid discussions about the term “death drive”—would like to call the death principle. Whereas in ordinary life vitality generally has the upper hand and the death principle only dominates in pathological conditions such as melancholy, its domination in the concentration camp was a necessity. To summarize, I can say that the stuporous prisoner who was completely dominated by the death principle perished from it, as did those who resisted the camp with all their vitality. The prisoner who wanted to have a chance of life had to develop a certain camp psyche, the deeper basis of which was an altered attitude to death.

  Let us now analyze the factors that made the emergence of such a camp psyche possible. In the first instance several physical factors.

  Various experiences, particularly in the last war, have made it clear how much deficiencies play a role in the decline of mental function. This decline is not regular, but selective. The vitamin B complex in particular seems to play a role. During the autopsies carried out by Russian doctors on prisoners who had died after liberation, I saw very remarkable abnormalities. The intestinal wall had become as thin as parchment, which was explained as epithelium loss from B deficiency. In cerebro we saw petechiae, a presentation similar to that of Wernicke encephalopathy, and although there is still a shortage of facts regarding deficiency psychoses, I would like to draw attention to experiments by American researchers who evoked psychotic states by putting experimental subjects on a diet that was low in vitamin B6, niacin. May I also draw attention to Grewel’s description of “anaemia perniciosa,” not a direct result of malnutrition, but nonetheless a deficiency disease:

  “Speed of action and resilience decline. The same applies to thought processes. Psychological tone is reduced… Sometimes there are over-sensitivities, including to pain and emotions… Apathy alternates with fits of anger, irritability and affectability.”

  It is apparent that these few facts require further study. Nonetheless I am convinced that we will gain the most not from studies of the prisoners’ physical conditions, but by paying particular attention to the sociological conditions in which they lived. And this brings us to the second group of factors that give rise to the development of a camp psyche.

  The word sociological may sound inflated, until one realizes that a conglomeration of tens of thousands up to as many as 200,000 people, as in Auschwitz-Birkenau, cannot simply be seen as an unstructured crowd. Instead, various social ranks operated within this mass and could not but influence the psychological condition of the individuals.

  In order to explain the social relations in the concentration camps, I must first summarize several facts from the history of these camps. The first ones were set up in 1933: small camps with two to three hundred prisoners each. These had a purely political function in relation to the Nazi takeover. In addition they were a practicing ground for SS methods. The SS was trained there for its later task of European domination.

  Around the start of the war, the camps’ second function developed. The mass extermination of the Jews became an economic necessity for the German conduct of the war. This led to the large death camps Majdanek and Treblinka, and the largest, Auschwitz. But once such enormous SS cities had arisen, it turned out that these could also fulfill a further function. In 1937, Pohl, who was in charge of the economic side of the camps, uttered his historic words: Warum sollte die SS nichts verdienen,6 and increasingly from then on, the camps became enormous factories in which the prisoners labored as brutally exploited workers.

  Initially all of the prisoners in the camps were treated equally badly, but gradually a separate class arose among them of prisoners favored by the SS, the Kapos and Blockälteste, who served as an extension of the SS and allowed them to put as many prisoners as possible to work. In 1937 the first public limited companies in concentration camps were created. The shareholders were… members of the SS. During the war important branches of German industrial concerns (Krupp, IG Farben) were established in the camps. The prisoners were hired from the SS for six marks a day. In his book The Theory and Practice of Hell, Kogon7 calculated that the profit per prisoner per day was approximately four marks, which across all camps came to hundreds of thousands of marks a day, and billions over the whole war. After all, nine and a half million people died there,8 of whom approximately forty percent produced several months of profit for the SS.

  As long as there were enough Jews and political adversaries in all of the countries of Europe, the SS was reckless with prisoners’ lives. But around 1943 the supply began to dwindle and it therefore became necessary to relax the regime in the camps to safeguard war production and SS profiteering. This gave the prisoners a little breathing space. We see that the SS had two contradictory goals with its prisoners: on the one hand, rapid and efficient mass extermination; on the other, sparing them for the economic benefit they could generate. In 1944 this split in the mentality of the camp reached a climax with the double function of death camp and economically essential labor camp. The remarkable tension that existed in the prisoners between surrendering to death and their constantly recurring bursts of vitality, the inner ambivalence, being thrown back and forth between hope and dread, was sustained by its emotional resonance with the split nature of the social environment.

  This already indicates a likely link between two apparently independent phenomena, the sociological structure of the camp and the prisoners’ psychic structure. We see how a social form that is essentially different from any society we know can also cause psychological changes of a depth we could not have previously suspected. It goes without saying that there is important individual variation in the ability to adjust to the camp environment by developing the psychic state described above. There was a great difference between the reactions of Eastern European Jews with their strong Slavic streak, who had been accustomed to antisemi
tism from an early age, and those of Western Jews. When it came to the Dutch, the Jewish proletarians—the orange vendor from Waterloo Square and the cigar maker from Uilenburg—were made of sterner stuff than members of the prosperous middle class, whose entire facade of self-importance collapsed at the first blow or swear word, at least when they had no deeper source of self-esteem than their social position. In general in the camp we saw that those whose lives had some kind of religious alignment (this in the broadest sense, also as a devotion to a political system or a humanistic philosophy) were the quickest to recover from the initial stupor. It is therefore no coincidence that both the faithful Christians and those who would seem to be their psychological opposites, the communists, were best at holding their own in the camp and even found opportunities to achieve some degree of anti-fascist organization. The same phenomenon was seen in the Dutch resistance with the close-knit groups around the underground newspapers Trouw and De Waarheid.

  Of course the adaptive mechanisms described above did not apply to the ruling group among the prisoners, the Kapos and Blockälteste, often sadists and psychopaths and as bad as the SS buddies they drank with and joined in visits to the brothel. But of those prisoners who suffered the full misery of the camp, it can be said that, inasmuch as they managed to stick it out, it was because they had so deeply reconciled themselves to the idea of going under and because the normally dominant vital urge only manifested itself incidentally, in truly critical moments. A small reserve of this will to live could be kept for those moments because in the background of consciousness the thought remained alive that existence might have another meaning than just making it through another day.

  Even now, years after the war, we regularly see how difficult it is to reverse the far-reaching alteration of personality that took place in the camps. For this reason it seems to me that an insight into the living conditions that formed the people in the camps, which I have sketched briefly above, is a necessary prerequisite if we are to offer help to the disequilibrated former prisoners who visit our practices.