Survivor

by Sam Pivnik

  I lied and told him Moyshe was my father. He said he knew him, long ago, before the war. This enigmatic link stayed with me for days but I couldn’t work out its significance. Manfred was a Gentile, a Christian Blockältester and I had no reason to trust him at all; but somehow I did. It wasn’t exactly friends in high places, but having a Blockältester on my side was a strange comfort to me.

  Throughout my time in Auschwitz-Birkenau I tried – we all did – to retain what dignity I could. This was reflected in a mania, prevalent among the SS and the Kapos, for cleanliness. They even had an orderly in each hut responsible for such things. The SS were terrified of typhus and spotted fever and endless scrubbing, shaving and delousing were deemed to be the way to keep them at bay. The image of constantly filthy concentration camps with Muselmänner wallowing in their own piss and shit comes partly from the experience of the shocked Allied troops who liberated the camps in 1945, by which time the SS had gone and the Kapos were busy making themselves equally scarce or reinventing their former roles.

  The Auschwitz-Birkenau site was low-lying and marshy, so the outside areas were often wet and muddy in the autumn and winter. The huts however were different. We scrubbed woodwork and folded blankets when we got them. For all we were 744 to a barrack, we did the best we could to keep clean. From time to time we were allowed the luxury of a hot shower. Every time I handled the bars of hard, white soap, I wondered what it was made from. Historians today have decided that the making of soap from human corpses is just so much anti-Nazi propaganda. I hope they’re right.

  Other attempts to retain dignity included an underground resistance movement in the camp. I wasn’t part of it myself, but I heard rumours. Some of this, perhaps most of it, came from the Gentile Poles in the camp from its earlier days before I arrived, but there were plenty of examples of individuals going it alone, refusing to go quietly. Late in October 1943 there was a lock-down because an SS man had been killed. A train-load of Jews had been brought in from KL Bergen-Belsen and the majority were taken to Crematoria II and III. In the women’s line a scuffle broke out. The version I heard, unlikely as it sounded, was that there were wealthy Jews from the west who had bribed the SS with the considerable resources still at their disposal with some vague notion of being allowed to slip quietly to Switzerland. The SS of course took the money and put its former owners on the trains to Auschwitz-Birkenau. One woman, realising as many did, what was going to happen, put on a strip-show for the benefit of the watching SS. She had been a dancer before all this madness and a couple of men, Unterscharführer Josef Schillinger and Rottenführer Wilhelm Emmerich, were captivated by her gyrations for long enough for her to grab Schillinger’s pistol from the holster at his waist and shoot both men several times. She then ducked back into the crowd of half-undressed women and a brawl ensued during which the SS had the devil’s own job to get their wounded comrades and the Sonderkommando out.

  They gassed those already in the chamber immediately and machine-gunned the rest. I never found out the name of this girl, but she became a heroine to all of us, especially because, for a while, the rumour ran that it was Karel Kurpanik who had been shot. Schillinger bled to death on the way to the hospital and Emmerich hobbled for the rest of his life.

  Rebellion was in the air that autumn. Not long after the Schillinger incident, a French Jew named Ulick, who was a Kapo, bribed an SS guard with jewellery to get him out beyond the outer wire. We heard nothing for two days and nights and the whole time we were locked in our huts, having to shit in the corner. After two days they brought him back – I don’t know how easily a Frenchman could blend in in occupied Poland – and he was interrogated as only the SS knew how.

  At the next roll-call Ulick was the centre of attention. I don’t remember the threatening speech that was made as we waited, shivering, in our lines. I don’t even remember who made it. All I remember was Ulick’s bruised and bloated face as he was made to kneel in front of us. An SS man put a bullet in the back of his head and he flopped forward, blood spraying from his skull. That wasn’t the last we saw of Ulick. The SS strung him up above the Appellplatz for days as a warning to the rest of us.

  For a long time I thought there was a surreal photographic record of my time on the Rampe. In one of several photographs taken during the camp’s existence showing the arrival of prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau is one with SS officers in the foreground and the cattle-trucks idling in the siding behind the bewildered crowd of new arrivals. There are a few men in striped uniforms – the Rampe Kommando. And on the extreme left is a boy, in profile, waiting to go to work after the selections had been made. Some friends contacted me some years ago and told me they felt sure the boy was me. He looks too blond perhaps – my hair was always dark – but with the shaved head it’s difficult to tell. But the boy can’t be me. The photo is part of an album found in a cupboard belonging to the SS at KL Dora-Mittelbau after the liberation. How it got there, I don’t know, because it was definitely taken at Auschwitz-Birkenau and by coincidence, the woman who found it was an Auschwitz survivor too. She was a Hungarian Jew called Lili Jacob but she did not arrive on the Rampe until May 1944 and the photograph is a record of her family’s arrival. I had left Auschwitz-Birkenau by then but I often wonder who the boy was, the lookalike from the Rampe Kommando. I hope he made it.

  And of course there were so many times when I nearly didn’t make it myself. Never more so than that December of 1943. It was then that I went down with typhus, Jew fever, and it astonishes me now that it took that long. The overcrowding was appalling. I’ve seen an inventory from January of that year that records twenty-one blocks as living quarters. Block Two, which was typical, had 234 beds and 702 mattresses – fine, you might think; except that there were 1,193 prisoners in that Block. Not that I ever had the idea or the opportunity of measuring it, but we each had 1.7 cubic metres of space. Wet straw, rotten boards, rats, all part of the lifestyle for us Untermenschen.

  So I collapsed on the Rampe, along with so many others who did the same through shock, exhaustion, heart attacks or because they’d been laid out by the short temper of the SS men. So they took me to the waiting room for the gas chamber. So I faced the Angel of Death. And you know already how that turned out.

  As I rested in my hospital bed, heart beating, cheeks wet with tears, I believed in miracles. The Angel of Death had let me live. Only in the cold rationalism of that night did I wonder if Blockältester Manfred may have been my miracle. He could cut no ice with the SS, especially someone as focused and driven as Mengele, but he certainly had clout with hospital orderlies. All it would take was a nod of the head, a name scribbled out of a ledger, some organisation and I would have escaped yet another selection.

  If this isn’t how it happened, then I must return again for an explanation to blind luck or even, dare I still believe it after all this time, some sort of divine intervention.

  I suppose I was in hospital for three or four days, getting a little stronger each day because of the relatively good food. Then they moved me out. I expected to go back to the Rampe Kommando. It was appalling, tragic work – ‘Tell them you’re eighteen. Tell them you can work.’ It had got so I was as experienced as Mengele at making selections, at least in my head. He of course continued to do it for real; so did Kurpanik. But the Rampe job had gone to somebody else and I was marched back to the familiar huts and fences of the Quarantine Block. And Unterscharführer Karel Kurpanik would be my charming host once again.

  But now I was streetwise and knew the score. I’d been at Auschwitz-Birkenau for six months and knew to keep my head down and avoid trouble. The ground around the huts had been levelled, killing God knows how many in process, and in that bitter, snow-crusted winter, there was surprisingly little for us to do. One day, perhaps in January 1944, I was standing gazing out beyond the perimeter wire when something odd caught my eye. A group of women prisoners were hacking away at a ditch with picks and shovels, watched, as always, by their Kapo. We didn’t see women often
at Auschwitz, except those on the Rampe. The women’s quarters stood away to the west, beyond the railway tracks and near the gas chambers and Crematoria II and III. They had gone, I assumed, through the same processes that we had. They wore badly-fitting clothes, rough clogs and scarves over their shaved heads to make them look a little more human. They never worked with the Rampe- or Sonderkommando, but in every other respect, their lives must have been as miserable as ours. As I stood there that morning, watching them and making sure none of the SS or Kapos were watching me, I wasn’t looking for my mother or for Hendla. I knew there was no point.

  What really held me transfixed was the women’s Kapo and I couldn’t take my eyes off her because I knew her. She was from Bedzin, a distant cousin of mine and her name was Gutscha.

  She saw me virtually the same moment I saw her and she crossed to the fence, ‘Szlamek Pivnik, is that you?’

  The sound of her voice, the smile on her face, whirled me back to a lost time I knew I’d never see again. I just nodded, unable to say anything.

  She thanked God I was still alive. She knew better than to ask after my family. She came as close to the wire as she dared. A Kapo she may have been, but talking to a male prisoner, other than to scream an order at him, was putting her life on the line and she told me that I needed to get out. They were going to kill us all here. Any chance I got, I was to get out. Did I understand? I still hadn’t spoken, hadn’t moved. She went on that if they wanted volunteers for work, I had to go. She made me promise that I’d do that.

  From somewhere I found my voice, ‘Yes,’ I nodded, ‘I promise.’

  ‘Good,’ she smiled at me. ‘Now go. Don’t let them see you talking to me.’

  And she turned away, bellowing at the women scrabbling at the frozen ground.

  ‘They’re going to kill us all here.’ I knew that already – how could I not? But there was something in the way Gutscha said it and something in what she asked me to do. Volunteer for work. The alternatives – that some people had tried, lashing out with a shovel, making a run for the perimeter wire and the guard towers – that wasn’t an escape attempt, it was suicide, guaranteed a bullet, electrocution on the fences or the walk past the garden to the gas. But volunteering for work outside the camp …

  In the insane world of Auschwitz-Birkenau that made a kind of sense.

  8

  The Prince’s Mine

  It must have been January when my chance came. At Auschwitz you didn’t volunteer. It wasn’t like school when you put your hand up to answer a question – ‘Please, sir! Me, sir!’ If there was to be a ‘me’ at all at Auschwitz, if I was to go on living, I had to keep my head down, keep quiet, not make eye contact. That was what the SS expected from their lofty Aryan pedestals and that was exactly what we inmates gave them. The only ‘progress’ at Auschwitz was by means of selection; somebody else’s choice. It was like the worst kind of nightmare interview – you had no idea what the selectors wanted. You could only hope for the best.

  I remember we were shivering in the snow on a bitter January morning roll-call, the wind biting through our thin striped jackets, our breath snaking out on the air. Grey faces under a grey sky. I could see Kurpanik across the square, deep in conversation with another SS man, wrapped in a greatcoat with his collar turned up. I always looked out for Kurpanik, the man who still haunts my dreams. It was a little comfort to me to know that he was some yards away that morning because that in itself meant he wasn’t within hitting distance.

  I found myself looking, guardedly under my eyelashes, at the SS man with him. I’d seen him before, on the Rampe and around the camp. He was in his mid forties, I suppose, his hair blond under his peaked cap with the death’s head, his shoulders square and broad. I’d never seen him at close quarters and didn’t realise then that he only had one eye. The missing one had been replaced by a glass one that didn’t move, a reminder of the war against the British on the Western Front in 1940. But I knew his name and I knew his reputation. He was SS-Hauptscharführer Otto Moll and at Auschwitz-Birkenau he was responsible for the gas chambers and the crematoria.

  My stomach lurched as Kurpanik broke off the conversation and marched over to us, his jackboots crunching on the ice. He muttered something I couldn’t catch to our Kapo. It was the start of another selection. All of us, I know, were thinking the same thing: what do they want? What’s the purpose of this one? There was a rising panic in all of us, but nobody moved. To do that, to break out of line, meant a bullet. In the twisted world of Auschwitz at least that made some sense. You broke the rules, you died. It was as simple as that. Everything else was just unnatural selection.

  ‘You. You. You.’ The Kapo wandered the lines, pointing at five, six, seven men. By the time he’d picked the eighth it was obvious that these were not fodder for the gas and the crematoria. He was choosing the strongest, the fittest of us. That was a relative term of course in Auschwitz, but we’d all long ago lost any ability to compare ourselves with the outside world or the world we had lost.

  The Kapo got to me. I was seventeen and stood perhaps five foot three. God knows what I weighed. He looked me up and down and passed on. No ‘You’. No selection. My brain was whirling. ‘Get out,’ Gutscha had said to me. ‘As soon as you can. Get out, Szlamek. They’re going to kill us all. Get out.’ There were fifty or sixty men standing in the chosen group, all of them older and bigger than me. ‘Get out, Szlamek. Get out.’ So I did. I just walked out of line and tagged on to the chosen group. I didn’t look to left or right, just straight ahead, so I didn’t see it coming. If it had been a bullet I wouldn’t have seen it wherever I looked. As it was, it was a stick with a burly Kapo on the other end of it and it thudded across my shoulder. I reeled at the sudden shock and pain; the Kapo snarled, ‘Where do you think you’re going, you little bastard?’

  ‘Leave him,’ I heard the chief Oberkapo say from behind me. ‘If he wants to go, let him,’ and he carried on along the ragged lines. ‘You. You.’ It was my lucky day. Another time I’d have been beaten to death. More blood on the snow. Another example to encourage the others.

  With the Nazis it was all about control. Heel-clicking and saluting and attention to duty. We ‘healthy’ ones stood in line again, shivering in the morning while the Blockschreiber took our numbers and wrote them down in his ledger, part of the tonnage of paperwork of which the Third Reich was still, at this time, so proud because it was the timetable of genocide. Then they ran us – presumably just to prove that the fitness selection was justified – over the snow to the guardroom at the north end of the Quarantine compound. My shoulder hurt, my feet were numb and my lungs felt like bursting. But none of that mattered. We were going out of the camp. We were leaving Auschwitz-Birkenau. Alive.

  Three grey-painted Opel trucks idled beyond the compound gates, their engines rattling, their exhaust fumes thick in the cold morning air. There was a Jeep there too; all of the vehicles had SS registration plates. We were loaded onto the lorries, herded together, packed tightly like the cattle-trucks. There were barked orders in German that we all knew so well – ‘Schnell. Schnell.’ There were SS everywhere, bristling with machine-pistols. Then one of them slammed shut the tailboard of my truck and slid the bolts. The gears jarred and we skidded our way out onto the road.

  We could see the camp through the canvas sides of the trucks as they flapped in the wind. The barbed wire, the lamp posts, the rows of huts and the crematoria endlessly belching smoke. What new madness was this? Were they taking us to the ovens by a more direct route now? Or were we actually riding in one of those death-trucks we’d all heard about, where carbon monoxide was pumped into the inside? A moment’s thought would have dispelled that fear. You’d never gas anybody in a truck with canvas sides.

  Then the time had passed and Auschwitz-Birkenau was a ghost that faded in the mist. We were bounced around on the ice-rutted roads of a Polish winter and the wind was cutting but we didn’t care. We were alive. We were out of Auschwitz. And I, for one, had forgo
tten how beautiful were the forests of silver birch.

  I don’t remember how long that journey lasted. I suppose it was an hour and a half on the frozen roads. In a way I wanted it to go on forever. Somebody once said it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive and that was certainly true of that truck journey that day.

  The arrival was at another camp, but it was altogether different from Auschwitz-Birkenau. It had an atmosphere of work, of purpose. The place was rectangular with a high brick wall around a central compound. The barracks here were single storey and looked new, built of brick and timber. There were guard towers at each corner of the place. Whatever this was, it was still lorded over by the SS and who knew what twist was waiting for us? I’d noticed mining gear as we’d driven in, the sort of derricks I remembered from Bedzin. There were railway sidings too with locomotives snorting and belching smoke. This was a coal mine.

  The inmates were the same as us. Ghosts in striped uniforms coming and going, watched carefully by the SS in combat greens with machine-pistols and rifles slung across their arms. And then, of course, it all started again. They’d counted us all out of Auschwitz-Birkenau; they were counting us all in here. We stood in frozen ranks in the central compound; they took our numbers. Then we had hot showers and were deloused. You can’t believe the joy of warm water when you’ve had so little of it. Delousing didn’t work very well but it was a sign they wanted you to live. Little signs of optimism. Little flashes of life.

  I was inspected by the camp doctor. I knew better than to make eye contact, but I knew this wasn’t Mengele. We hadn’t come round in some terrible circle of Hell to be enrolled in Auschwitz-Birkenau again. A medical orderly forced open my mouth and lifted my arms. I stood as straight and tall as I could. This was a more thorough check than the lightning, casual ‘You. You. You,’ of Auschwitz. This was a work camp; that much was clear. If we didn’t make this selection, they’d have sent us straight back to the ovens. Would I, I wonder, have noticed the silver birches then?