Irene Bleier Muskal
We left this miserable hole Friday morning. A uniformed German SS soldier appeared and called on rabbis and families with four children and more to gather at the center of the yard. Our empty stomachs rumbling, we heard this Nazi bawl out instructions to us. We were about to start a long ‘walking tour.’ For many of us, this would be a death march to Auschwitz. I recall that he told us that there is no need to put up resistance, as we would not be beaten—he has family too, and he is not a human dog.
Thus, after starving for four days, we commenced our march. German SS guards watched from both sides as we marched in rows of five. None of us tried to escape. We were too depressed, our will power broken down, wholly tormented. We soon arrived at a camp overcrowded with other fellow, desperate Jews, stopped for a while, and then continued the humiliating journey. As Jewish men aged 18-48 were long ago taken to forced labor camps, the marching contingent was composed of young girls, mothers, babies, and children, along with many old and sick human souls. Trucks carried our backpacks while we marched for grueling hours in our mournful procession through small towns. The Christian townsfolk stared at us, nobody pouring tears, nobody expressing sympathy.
We arrived one afternoon at a small farm known as St. George Plains, where we were accommodated to empty tobacco sheds. The armed Hungarian gendarmes who carefully watched our frightened moves let us walk outside a fixed distance from the sheds during the day. We saw how a heartless gendarme chased away a Jewish child who tried to pick up some food he spotted on the ground.
The weather was beautiful this June afternoon. Ordinarily, an early summer day such as this would elevate my soul and give joy to my body. Soft warmth full of promise. But now all I felt was immense sadness, no joy could penetrate me. At nightfall, we were all herded inside the sheds to lie down on the bare earth. We were cold and hungry, sleep did not come easily.
Another day of beautiful, joyous sunshine came Saturday morning, but not for us on June 25, 1944. By Sunday afternoon, we packed our backpacks and prepared to board the nearby train trucks. When we entered the strongly chloroformed boxcars,[*] many people became dizzy or fainted. Ninety people crowded into each boxcar, and we were each given half a slice of tasty dark bread and a little water, which we quickly consumed. Quite a few people died during this weeklong journey.
We were too exhausted to cry about the present or worry about our future. Subconsciously, though, we feared the worst. Indeed, we later found out that our premonitions were well founded. We later found out that not only did the Hungarian government give us away to the Nazis for annihilation; they also paid the full cost of transport to the death camps.
As the Jewish transports did not appear on the regular railway schedule, we were often stranded for hours under the blazing sun waiting for our turn to travel. We received no food or water. People urinated and took care of their natural needs aboard the train, spreading a putrid odor. Small children and babies cried themselves to sleep out of sheer exhaustion, from hunger and thirst, from the wholly wretched situation we were in. Some of the men donned their tefillin[*] and fervently beseeched the Almighty to save us, ‘Look upon your forsaken children, see what the world is doing to them and send help; pull us out of this catastrophe before it is too late—if it isn't already.’
The transport hurtled along mostly at night, rocking us to sleep. We dreamed of freedom, of home, of plentiful food and water. Each time the train stopped, so did our dreams. We sadly woke up to the dreadful reality. During air raids, the cowardly SS guards locked us inside the train, taking cover themselves in bomb shelters.
Our transport stopped one day by the train station, with many Hungarian soldiers and civilians all around. My cousin Magda peeked out of a tiny window at the side of the boxcar and begged a Hungarian officer for a little water. He promptly denied Magda's request. How could anyone be so cruel? Even dangerous criminals condemned to death receive their last request. Why are innocent Jews treated even worse? Is there no more justice left on earth?
My mom and us children resided just beneath a small window, so we saw much breathtaking scenery as the train swiftly raced along. Normally, this would be uplifting, but now we were engulfed by depression.
Our journey reached a turning point on Thursday afternoon as we left Hungarian territory, soon arriving at a nearby small Polish town. Our transport was delayed at the station and another transport with Jews being deported to annihilation centers stood nearby.
July 11, 2013/Kraków, Poland
We are picking up speed along the tracks, night train to the East. Hours and hours of clacking and swaying in the dark, in cramped and claustrophobic compartments across the Czech Republic from Prague to Poland. A little unsettling.
We arrive in Kraków, Poland, in the morning. The German Army arrived on September 6, 1939. We will be here for a couple days. They stayed for several years. We rest up, tonight. For tomorrow, the tour continues. We are heading to Auschwitz, 50 miles to the west.
July 12, 2013/ Auschwitz-Birkenau
So the day that many of us approach with a bit of apprehension is finally here. We are on the bus from our hotel in Kraków to Auschwitz.
As we roll southward, our tour leader Stephen points out an impressive large building on the top of a hill that looks like a five-star hotel. Built after the German invasion in 1939, it was a rest and relaxation villa for Wehrmacht officers rotating off the Russian front to unwind for a bit, as industrialized mass murder was unfolding every single day less than an hour away.
Soon we see the road signs for Oswiecim, the small Polish town at a railroad hub that has become one of the most visited tourist sites in Poland. Most of the world knows it by its German name—Auschwitz.
The bus lumbers into the overcrowded parking lot and docks in the slot. The driver kills the engine. And it begins to rain as our other leader, Elaine, relates the story of her mother’s family, the idyllic childhood in this beautiful prewar country, a young teen when the nation is invaded, the oldest of four children. No one on the bus makes a sound. It is now raining very hard, pounding out a terrible rhythm as she reconstructs the sequence of the destruction of her family.
What is this place? Our guide Alicja is a top-notch scholar, and she leads us on a day-long tour that is hard to put into words.
We begin at Auschwitz I, the first camp. This place is centrally located, a railway hub dating back to the turn of the century.
The first prisoners, after it is converted from a Polish military facility, are Soviet POWs and Polish prisoners and other ‘security risks’ who will be worked to death slowly expanding this camp, and the much larger Auschwitz II-Birkenau. She walks us through the exhibits and the displays at the various blocks. Block 4 is the ‘Extermination Exhibit.’ We think about the words, the language. Extermination—as if the victims were vermin. Over 1,100,000 human beings were killed here, most of them Jews. Now, 1.4 million people visit here every year.
We see the map with the spiderlike rail lines radiating outward from Auschwitz like tentacles, from northern Poland, from Germany, Hungary, as far south as Greece and as west as Paris and the Netherlands. In the summer of 1944, tens of thousands were murdered here, per day; Primo Levi put the record at 24,000 on a single day in August 1944.[37]
We see the large-scale terra cotta model of the process, which the German engineers had perfected at Auschwitz II-Birkenau—the arrival of the transports, the undressing rooms with signs admonishing bewildered people to hang their belongings carefully and to remember the number of the wall pegs where they left them for quick retrieval later. We peer into the shower rooms that could fit in some cases entire transports, which were in fact the hermetically sealed gas chambers. The figurines of the Germans stand above them with their gas masks, waiting for the proper temperature to be reached through body heat, just the right humidity to be achieved before dropping in the pellets so the gas released would work more effectively. The anguished death throes of the thousands of naked figu
rines assault our senses. The process is not complete until the corpses are carried out by the sondercommando slaves, defiled for any gold fillings, the hair shorn from the women, the bodies then burned in the open air behind or cremated in the ovens.
But the experience is just beginning. Minutes before, we were looking at a terra cotta model. And now in Block 5 we will be presented with the evidence. This is an exhibition, after all. Exhibit A is about to slap us in the face. Hard.
It is a room, 50 feet long, with nothing but human hair piled several feet back and as many feet tall. My heart skips a beat.
What do our eyes perceive? Now we see a photo of stacks of bale bags, carefully labeled, packed, and stacked, awaiting shipment back to the Reich for use in various products for the German war effort. Slippers for submariners so they can walk quietly aboard ship to evade Allied sonar. Stuffing for the seats of German pilots.
We shuffle on in silence with hundreds of others past the mountains of spectacles, the pots and pans, the suitcases carefully labelled by their owners with chalk on the orders of the perpetrators, again, for ‘quick retrieval after disinfection.’ And the shoes. Sorted. Case after case of women’s shoes. Men’s footwear. And then, the children’s shoes.
Our knowledgeable guide takes us into Block 27, the new exhibit on the Shoah. This is a temporary relief of sorts as now we see faces, film and stills, of prewar Jewish life, projected on the walls. We hear songs and voices.
At the end is the Book of Life, rows of giant suspended volumes containing four million names compiled thus far. A moving moment when Elaine and others in our tight-knit group find entire pages with the names and dates of family members murdered during the Holocaust. There are gasps. And tears.
And now it is on to Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
*
After the ‘tour’ of Auschwitz I, we have lunch on the bus in the parking lot, and then drive the three kilometers through town to Birkenau.
The entry tower is the iconic symbol of evil, menacing and devouring as we are pulled closer on this overcast day. We follow the guide up the stairs in the tower. From here we can see the sheer vastness of the camp.
Dozens of long, narrow women’s barracks, brick, still stand, albeit some braced with wood on the gable ends to keep them from toppling until they can be re-pointed. Alicja indicates that historic preservation here is a major concern.
The rest of the camp is many square kilometers of row upon row of foundations and brick chimney stubs, surrounded by the intimidating curved and tapered concrete posts dotted with white insulators and strung with miles of parallel lines of barbed wire. In the summer of 1944, when hundreds of thousands of Hungarian families were deported here, the rail lines came right into the camp. Following the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944, over 400,000 Hungarian Jews were deported and murdered at Auschwitz.
The Walk
Our guide leads us along the path through the camp that leads to the gas chamber and crematorium. We walk in silence along the roadway, the only sound the crunching of brick fragments and gravel underfoot. It appears to have been paved with brick, slave labor of course, though in some spots it is hard to tell anymore. No one speaks, and on and on we walk.
Two minutes.
Five minutes.
Ten minutes.
Fifteen minutes. I’ve been on historic battlefields that are smaller than this site.
Finally we reach the end of the camp where the kitchens stood. A round concrete ring rises out of the earth, maybe 6 feet in diameter. Someone finally speaks and asks Alicja what it was. A giant flowerpot. It was for flowers. She tells us that they were also placed near the entrances of the gas chambers.
Flowers at the gas chambers.
We turn left, and keep walking past interpretative signage. It seems like we are walking outside of the camp perimeter, but we are not. Beautiful woods of white birch appear, and we are walking on the edge of the woods with the camp to our left.
We stop near another sign and rest for a moment, allowing the others to catch up. Then our guide calls our attention to the photo on the sign, showing Hungarian mothers and children doing the same thing we are doing. Halting and resting.
And a short path through the woods will take us to the ruins of the gas chamber/crematorium Number Five.
We are resting at the spot they rested at, 20 minutes after walking, immediately after disembarking from overcrowded transports that they had been traveling on for days. Here they waited, anxiously, as their turn to approach the chamber would come. But the victims of the transport ahead of them had to be removed from the chamber first. Some days in the summer of 1944, these victims were backed up for hours.
I pick up a rock from the path and carry it with me past the ruins. At the ash field there is more signage and a memorial asking visitors not to walk through the field. I place my stone on the memorial, looking down to watch where I step. But it is probably a futile gesture—this whole place is an ash yard, a graveyard. So many Hungarian Jews were killed in the Auschwitz camps in that season of murder that the crematoria were incapable of burning all the bodies, so open-air burning pits had to be utilized.
We turn again and walk past the remains of crematorium Number Four to the disinfection center for those selected to be worked to death. Again, a system. Disrobing. Wading through disinfectant. Shower. Uniform thrown at you, mismatched clogs or shoes.
Elaine’s mother spent two years here. Her grandmother and the little ones were selected upon arrival. Her mom’s beloved sister was murdered in the quarry after slipping while carrying a large pot of soup in the ice and snow with three other girls. Today is a hard day. I want to comfort Elaine, to carry her pack for her. I feel helpless. There is nothing I can do.
The Red Army liberated this place on January 27, 1945. At the Soviet memorial constructed near the two destroyed gas chambers/crematorium at the end, we have a remembrance ceremony. Kaddish is recited in Hebrew. I read it aloud in English today to the group. With tears, Elaine tells us that she feels her grandmother smiling down on this extraordinary group of dedicated teachers. A lump rises, again. I swallow hard and try to blink back the wetness I feel welling in my eyes. Glad for the sunglasses, even though there is no sun. The plaque reminds:
‘A Warning to Humanity.’
We light candles, turn our backs, and just walk out, which allows for another twenty-minute stretch of quiet, personal reflection. We have come to the epicenter of evil. We have been here, we try to process—but we just cannot.
So, to introduce some of the major players—the pictures in this photo album surfaced only a few years ago and were studied by my friends at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
I don’t make it a habit to showcase the perpetrators, but in one incredible photograph, taken at Auschwitz, you can see some of them. Commandant Höss was hung at Auschwitz following his trial after the war. Kramer, whom we met before, was executed by the British after his stint presiding over the horrors of Belsen following his transfer there. Of course, smiling Dr. Mengele escaped to Argentina and died in a drowning accident in the late 1970s. A casual shot. Another day at the office.
People did these unspeakable acts to other people. But the ‘monster’ myth is just that. I suppose it is one way of coping with the unthinkable. Let the perpetrators off the hook, in a sense, labeling them ‘monsters,’ not humans capable of deeply evil deeds, and move on. But to me, it kind of absolves them of something. They are not ‘human,’ after all, so what does one expect of them?
Others may choose not to think about such things at all. I certainly do not blame them. But to me, to not think about it is to forget, and to forget is as good as saying that it did not happen. But you can’t just talk about the history, the chronology. To really try to understand, one has to know the stories of the individuals who were here. We need the individuals to speak to us. And then, we need to give them the voice that was taken from them.
*
The Bleier and Meisels families
appear to have been spared an arrival at Auschwitz in late June of 1945 due to logistical railroad complications and/or other events beyond local control; the transport was shunted back into Hungary, and then proceeded to Austria, where they worked for several months as slave farm laborers, as the mayor of Vienna had made an appeal to Nazi authorities for workers.[38] Little did they know that they were now also pawns in a twisted chess match, a complex late-war scheme involving the exchange of Hungarian Jews by Nazi leaders for economic gain. [39]
Strasshof Concentration Camp, Austria
Irene Bleier Muskal
After a while, our transport's locomotive went to the rear—we were going to travel backwards. We soon went back onto Hungarian soil. At first, we fooled ourselves into believing that the Hungarian government claimed us back, and would not let us be taken to annihilation. It took just a short while, however, for us to face our destiny. Now our transport traveled swiftly. We left behind the country that we mistakenly believed was our homeland.
Leslie Meisels
The doors closed, and the train took off to an unknown destination. In that closed-in, dark, crowded place we were given two 25-liter pails, one with drinking water and one for human waste. The water was soon gone, and the waste pail flowed over. These were changed, refilled, and emptied once a day when we stopped at a station. On the seventh day, we arrived at a town called Strasshof in Austria, about 25 kilometers northeast of Vienna, a central transit station for deportees arriving from Hungary and other places. When the door opened, we heard Germans harshly yelling, ‘Raus! Raus!’ ‘Out! Out!’ As we left our car, I saw several bodies being carried out from each of the wagons. Six or eight bodies were carried out of ours. Many had succumbed from lack of food, water, and ventilation.
A Train Near Magdeburg Page 16