by Sam Pivnik
Over the next few days I grew to hate the shit-man Yitzak. His diamond had not only bought him extra food, it excused him from work duties too. While the rest of us were loading rocks and staggering with our full aprons feeling the clubs and kicks of the Kapos, Yitzak was lying on his back in Block Ten, scratching his balls and staring at the ceiling. He probably thought he was set for life. But he was wrong.
I don’t know how many jewels a man can swallow and stay alive. In Yitzak’s case it was three or four – a very finite future, that. The stones were probably worth a small fortune but in Auschwitz-Birkenau such value was meaningless. Morons like the Kapos traded them on the camp’s black market for vodka, wine or cigarettes; organising, it was called. I sometimes wonder if anybody who knew their real worth ever got hold of them. In a corner of Block Ten was a stube, a side room where the Kapos drank and slept in relative luxury. No doubt that’s where they planned what to do with Yitzak. A couple of days after he’d shit his last stone, Kurpanik killed him. I didn’t see it myself but the rumour got round very quickly and it made sense. What delight it would have given that psychopath to beat the shit out of a Jew who was altogether too smug to be kept alive.
It’s amazing to me now how quickly the routine of the Quarantine Block became a way of life. We were in fact living on a razor’s edge all the time because every day our ranks got fewer and every roll-call was a selection that could mean death. I’d been there for about a week, I suppose, when again, during the morning call, they asked for tailors to work in the shop in the main camp making and repairing uniforms for the Waffen-SS. This time I seriously considered it. The back-breaking, exhausting ritual of the rock-carrying was taking its toll, even for a fit lad like me, just weeks short of my seventeenth birthday. Some, it had already killed. Tailoring would mean sitting down all day, under a roof and operating a machine, something I could probably do in my sleep. But something told me not to put my hand up. Life in the workshops was no life at all. No rumours from elsewhere. No opportunity to operate the black market. Just a slow, living death through starvation. And I could just imagine how little a slip you’d have to make to get the usual treatment from the Kapos. How many stitches did you need to drop before they dropped you?
It must have been my tenth day in the Quarantine Block, though to be honest I was finding it difficult to keep count. It was the middle of August and that morning the Blockschreiber, the clerk, called out eight or ten numbers. One of them was mine. Another selection. No rhyme. No reason. And certainly no explanation. I looked around. There was no one to say goodbye to. It’s a hard thing to write now, but we weren’t comrades. We were all going through the same Hell and you’d think that would bind us together, give us a ‘them and us’ mentality, but it wasn’t like that. Fear drove wedges between us and it was every man for himself. The familiar faces from Bedzin were already fewer now, ten days in, and I was standing with strangers, my bowl in hand and a crust of bread in my pocket, saved from breakfast.
Then we were on the run again. Only the dying walked in Auschwitz; the rest of us moved at whatever speed the Kapo dictated. He ran us out beyond the perimeter fence, between the rows of vicious barbs and the hum of electric wire. For the first time I saw the rest of the camp, prisoners in stripes toiling away at whatever pointless task the Kapos had decided they should. Armed SS men prowled the outer perimeter, eyes like hawks, fingers resting expectantly on triggers. The camp seemed endless, blocks with rows and rows of barracks like Number Ten stretching away into the haze of August; KL Auschwitz-Birkenau like a dark stain on the golden harvest fields of Poland.
We must have jogged for ten minutes. And for each of us that little, dirty chipped bowl was like the Holy Grail of the Christians. I saw it as a symbol of hope, something which, once you’d found it, you must hang onto at all costs because, if they were running us to the gas chamber, surely we wouldn’t be taking our bowls with us? We turned sharp left into a compound exactly the same as the one we’d just left and our names and our numbers were written down in yet another ledger by yet another Blockschreiber in yet another block.
I didn’t realise it at the time but I had passed a kind of initiation test. I’d gone into the Quarantine Block a hopelessly naïve kid, my family ripped from me and my dignity removed. I had slept with dying men, eaten with them, worked with them, shit with them. I looked at the new Kapos here in this section of the camp. What little tricks did they have up their sleeves, I wondered, before they decided it was my turn to die?
7
The Rampe
The day dawned like any other – shouting Kapos, latrine visit, wash house, roll-call, bread, sausage and ‘coffee’. They weren’t going to kill us, not today. Because the day, from this point on, was different. There was no running with heavy loads, no being driven with clubs and boots. The Kapos organised us into details and I was to join the Rampe Kommando, the platform detachment. It meant nothing to me then, but as time went on I remembered the striped-uniformed lunatic who whispered to me on the day I arrived, ‘Tell them you’re eighteen.’ I looked down at the blue and white stripes, the battered clogs, my cracked, sore hands. If I’d had a mirror I’d probably have burst into tears – I had become that lunatic.
It was a railway siding, just like any other all over Europe, but this was Auschwitz-Birkenau, so it was different. Because the Pivniks had arrived nearly two weeks ago in a passenger train, that’s what I expected to see, but the first locomotive to arrive was pulling cattle-trucks and I remembered I had seen them shunting through Bedzin before they liquidated the ghetto. And I remembered the frightened eyes staring out from the darkness between the slats. Did sheep look like that, I wondered, on their way to the slaughter?
We stood in rows behind the SS men with their guns and dogs while the trains pulled into position and waited. There was no move to unlock the doors and let the ‘passengers’ out. The SS were going about their business, checking that everything was ready. Calmness, order, even a kind of peace. I remembered the sudden quiet that had descended when we arrived and I realised now what that was all about. There must be order, there must be calm. The people on that train were desperate, terrified, suffering from thirst and hunger. God alone knew how long they’d been on the rails. The last thing the SS wanted was a running fight on their hands.
There was an eerie silence, punctuated now and again by the snort of the locomotive or the bark of a dog. The cattle-trucks themselves were totally silent, with the odd glimpse of a frightened face peering out behind the barbed wire that criss-crossed the slats. I got to learn as the weeks went by that these were the vital ventilation holes that meant life or death for the occupants. I couldn’t yet catch the smell inside the trucks themselves.
There was no whistle, no shouted order that I can remember, but by long-learned practice the SS guards moved closer to the trucks, their dogs snapping and snarling, barking over and over again. Intimidation, that was the name of the game. In the years ahead I would often be asked why these new arrivals didn’t fight back, take their chances. There were supposed to be eighty of them per truck, but there were often more. Collectively they outnumbered the SS on the Rampe. I understand it did happen sometimes, but not while I was there. Most of the occupants of the trucks were the old, the sick, women and children. Some of them were already dying. No one had the physical or emotional strength to take on an army of SS men with dogs, guns and cudgels. This was a front line of a very different kind.
The padlocks were undone, the doors hauled back with loud bangs and rattles. People spilled out onto the platform, blinking in the morning sun. They were disorientated, having been in semi-darkness for however long. I couldn’t take my eyes from theirs – large, popping eyes trying to acclimatise, brains trying to take in what was happening and where they were. And the cacophony of Hell started up as I’d remembered it, the snarled orders in guttural German: ‘Raus! Raus! Get off the fucking train, Scheissjuden! Move it, Dreckjuden! Shit-Jew! Dirt Jew! Keep it quiet you Jewish scum! Get ove
r here, line up!’
Over the weeks ahead I saw countless train-loads arrive. The occupants of the trucks were mostly Jews, but they came from everywhere and it occurred to me that they couldn’t understand what was being said to them. None of them could have missed the essential message however, because it couldn’t be clearer. Orders here came with a stick. The new arrivals were always dirty and scruffy, wherever they had once called home. The men had several days’ stubble on their faces, the women with wild hair, and no trace of make-up. French and Dutch Jews tended to be well-dressed; men in long overcoats and Homburgs, women in sharp-shouldered dresses, fashionable in the 1940s. The Greeks were particularly fashionable in the lightweight clothes of their homeland, which would have killed them in the average Polish winter, camp or no camp. Most bizarre of all were the Carpathian Jews from Romania, their wild mountains written all over them in animal skins and fur jackets; Dracula’s children.
The yelling and the dogs and the swift clouts from clubs would quickly have their effects no matter where the travellers came from. The dogs carried on barking and terrified children could not be quieted, despite the best efforts of their parents. Imagine Waterloo station at rush hour, but with the sound turned right down. The prisoners huddled together in the centre of the Rampe, herded there by the dogs. When the SS barked an order, the whole crowd rippled in response, like a sharp wind through a cornfield in the Garden of Eden so long ago.
Whatever selection processes these newcomers had been through just to get here, this was the one that mattered most. I don’t think it was that first day on the Rampe that I knew what had happened to my own family, but every day confirmed its likelihood. A point of a finger, to left or to right, the random decision of a madman; an SS officer playing judge, jury and executioner; the godless playing God – it was as simple and irrevocable as that.
I knew the drill by now, the strong and the young, men or women, were selected to live. They would go through what I had – the pointless Quarantine process in Block IIa or its female equivalent. Some of them would die of exhaustion, malnutrition, disease. Others would go down under the boots and cudgels of the Kapos. The rest … the rest would be escorted in their last walk by men like me, in striped uniforms, waiting to carry out their orders. They were a special unit taking an entire people to the gates of death.
That first morning on the Rampe followed a pattern I would get used to. Once the prisoners were cowed and quiet, the mood of the guards changed. They were working now, carrying out their duties with that Teutonic efficiency for which the Nazis were famous. This was actually brilliant psychology. It was a version of the good cop/bad cop interrogation techniques so beloved of TV shows and detective novels. A brute had just yelled at them, hit them with his club, let his dog bite them. Now a gentleman came forward, almost apologetic for what had happened.
Chief among these gentlemen was the officer with the grey doeskin gloves I had seen when I arrived, with his immaculate uniform, kind face and the gap in his front teeth. He often wore his white coat over his tunic of a captain of the Waffen-SS and there were many there who took comfort from that coat. Every doctor throughout Europe, even a Nazi, had taken the Hippocratic oath – ‘First, do no harm.’ Even now, even after the ghastly train ride and the ordeal of disembarkation, even now, all would be well. There was a doctor in charge. He was SS Hauptsturmführer Josef Mengele and he became notorious in these years as the Angel of Death. A dedicated doctor, he was fascinated by twins, and unbeknownst to us at the time, he used his enormous, even limitless power to experiment on them in the camp hospital. He was also a dedicated Nazi so the people parading before him on the Rampe were simply guinea pigs or laboratory rats. They were not human beings at all.
In all the time I worked on the Rampe I never heard Mengele raise his voice or be anything other than utterly charming. His keen eyes missed nothing. Other SS men might have to ask, ‘How old are you? Are you well? What is your profession?’ but all I ever heard Mengele say was ‘Are there any twins here?’ or occasionally ‘Are these your children?’ He never spoke to me or even, as far as I know, registered me at all, but perhaps I was wrong.
Our job was to collect the belongings that had been dumped on the Rampe. The new arrivals were told to leave their bags there; that they would get them back later and we’d pile up suitcases neatly. It wasn’t part of our responsibility to mix with the prisoners – in fact, we weren’t supposed to talk to them at all – but I ended doing exactly what that ‘lunatic’ had tried to do for me when I got here from the Kamionka. I targeted the younger ones, kids my age or younger, but in their teens – ‘Tell them you’re eighteen.’ ‘Tell them you’ve got a trade.’ ‘You’re strong, you can carry bricks.’ There wasn’t time to be more inventive and the risks were too high. Most of the time they just looked at me, uncomprehending, my fierce whispers making no sense at all.
Once the selections had been made and the lines sorted, I’d find myself, in unguarded moments, staring after the straggling line of kids and women, walking the way my family had walked. I could see them in my imagination, my father holding hands with Hendla and Chana, my mother with the boys around her. I had never actually seen this, but I saw so many family groups like it, it had to have been this way.
Some were loaded into trucks, as my family had been. Others, when the numbers were too great, walked through the site of Birkenau III, still under construction. The more curious, the less cowed, would have asked questions. ‘Where are we going?’ ‘What’s going to happen to us?’ The more naïve would have asked, ‘When can we see our menfolk? What about our luggage?’ They were going into a building, a large underground room to be deloused with disinfectant. I don’t suppose anyone asked what the disinfectant was called, but it was Zyklon B, in a canister like a coffee tin, containing pellets of hydrocyanic acid. You couldn’t be too careful in camps like this, with so many people coming in daily from the ghettoes; disease was rampant so delousing was essential. Lice carried typhus and typhus was often deadly. What the SS guards didn’t tell their would-be questioners was that Zyklon B was always deadly.
Some must have understood what was really happening. There had been rumours about Auschwitz and camps like it for years, even though the scale of the killings had only escalated over the last eighteen months. Most human beings, faced with a walk to their deaths, just can’t take it in, can’t believe what is about to happen. Mothers with children were always pointed to the left-hand column and they walked on, hand in hand, better to die together than be parted. Some mothers made a split-second decision to save their child, passing a whining, crying toddler to a relative in some vague, hopeless hope they’d be reunited later. Others did as my mother did and pushed their child into the right-hand column. Work sets you free and the young and the able-bodied could work – ‘Tell them you’re eighteen. Tell them you’re eighteen.’
Sometimes on the Rampe I saw the opposite situation. A family was broken up, left and right but an occasional man or woman from the right would cross to the left, take up the hand of a little one, put an arm round an old relative, walk with their heads high. They were the real heroes of Auschwitz-Birkenau. As for the SS, they shrugged and let them go. It was only the crossings from left to right they put a stop to.
There was one situation where we weren’t required on the Rampe and the SS did the job themselves. This was one night in April when the Kindertransporten arrived. We could hear the whistle and hiss of the locomotives from our block and everything that followed. The SS declared a Blocksperre, a lock-down, and the bolts were slid and padlocked on every hut in the men’s camp. At seventeen I was still a kid myself, and didn’t understand what it meant to be a father, but most of the men who still lived at Auschwitz-Birkenau were older than me and fathers themselves. There was no need for selection on the Rampe in those still watches of the night. Children were just mouths to feed, encumbrances, nuisances. Every child on these transports was marshalled to the left and all we could do was lie in our cramped
bunks listening to the unearthly screaming of the children walking to their deaths. Years later I would learn that these were Jewish children from an orphanage at Izieu in France, torn from the safety of their institution by SS officer Klaus Barbie who was in charge of the Gestapo in nearby Lyons. All forty-two of them died that night along with the five adults accompanying them. I don’t remember if I’d heard of the other kind of Kindertransporte, the sort that got very young Jews out of harm’s way to neutral countries or to Britain. The only kind I knew was a one-way ticket to oblivion.
In the morning, we’d go through the usual motions and then out onto the Rampe to collect the debris of the night’s arrivals. On the way there, we saw the bodies of the children, laid out naked and cold in the morning. More fuel for the fires. Through our tears we picked up the little coats, the shoes, the toys, trousers and dresses. Some had the child’s name written neatly inside them – Miriam, Isaac, Solomon, Bathsheva – lovingly written by a mother who had only wanted what was best for her child. We scraped up the battlefield remnants, stacking them all into neat piles. Neat and tidy, just the way the SS liked it.
From the Rampe, everybody in the left-hand column was led like the Pied Piper of Hamelin’s children into the huge room and told to undress. Eight hundred of them at a time, humiliated, frightened. Old ladies who had never taken their clothes off in front of anybody, not even their husbands. Teenage girls, self-conscious about their newly developing bodies. None of this mattered to the SS. These brief lives were about to end anyway. Anyone who sensed something was wrong, who was about to make a fuss, was taken out of the equation, out of the unrobing room, and a bullet would blast into his or her head.
When all 800 were inside, split roughly in halves between two chambers, the SS men slammed the doors shut and bolted them. A grill was slid back in the ceiling and the pellets of Zyklon B were thrown in. What happened next was a simple chemical equation; Zyklon B + Oxygen = Cyanide Gas. It also equals death. Those nearest the holes in the ceilings died first and every day of my life since then I have hoped that my family were nearest. If you were very young, or very old, or you gulped in the atmosphere in a desperate, convulsive attempt to stay alive, you died quickly. If you were further away from the holes or strong or young, you died slowly, but after twenty minutes it was all over. At various pressure times, when the cattle-trucks came in thick and fast, the doors would be opened after ten minutes.
