by Sam Pivnik
During that first day as we were allotted to our barracks. I noticed, we all did, that the inside walls were spattered with dark brown streaks. It was blood that had run in rivulets to the floor. People had died here, recently and in large numbers.
That night, I learned where we were. You won’t find the place on any map today although a society of Holocaust memorial people have marked it with a huge cross in the forest. The place was called Fürstengrube, which roughly means the Prince’s Mine and it was one of the many sub-camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau that had an industrial purpose. Long before the war it had been called Harceska, a typical, small-scale coal mine that had been shut for years because the tunnels had become dangerous. It stood next to the village of Wesola and the nearest town was Myslowice. I didn’t realise the exact position and if I had, incarceration here would have been all the harder to take. I was no more than sixteen kilometres from Bedzin. In the good old days, I could have caught a train and been there in less than an hour, back at Modzejowska Street with mother and father and Hendla and Nathan in my dreams … Just as well I didn’t know.
Mines like Fürstengrube had acquired a new lease of life when the Germans invaded Poland. Uneconomic mines and qualms over dangerous shafts and tunnels belonged to the niceties of a free world at peace. They had no place at all in 1944. The industrial giant I.G. Farben had bought the mine three years before and had re-opened it. The coal extracted was used to make synthetic rubber for the war effort.
Plan of Fürstengrube. Based on a drawing by Hermann Josef, 1965.
None of us realised our new situation or fully grasped its significance. We were now part of a labour force, albeit slave labour, and were doing our bit for the German economy. While back in Berlin, Hermann Göring spoke of guns, not butter, the desperate tunnels of Fürstengrube were churning out coal to be trained to Monowitz where the production plant carried out the necessary chemical processes. The SS charged four Deutschmarks a day for an unskilled labourer like me; six marks for a skilled man. None of this of course appeared as wages and very little was used to maintain the mine. I suppose the SS attitude was that they had a virtually inexhaustible supply of slave labour and any one of us could easily be replaced.
They had started serious work at Fürstengrube in the summer of 1943 and Jewish labourers had built the camp under the guns of the SS. Within weeks, they were shipped out and new people like us were brought in from Auschwitz I and from Birkenau. And there were Russians there too, prisoners of war from Stalin’s Red Army. There was an irony here that was not lost on us Polish Jews. In 1939 the Wehrmacht had overrun Poland so quickly because they knew their forward units would not tangle with the Russians who had already agreed to carve my country up with the Germans. The shoe was on the other foot now and these men had been imprisoned by their former allies.
Actual living conditions in Fürstengrube were not very different from Auschwitz-Birkenau. For all the barracks were newer, they were still spartan and extremely basic. Ours was a rectangular building in the centre of the compound, specifically housing skilled workers. Here was the building school with shoemakers’ and tailors’ workshops next door. We were packed like sardines in three-tier bunks and the ‘beds’ consisted of a straw-filled sack-cloth palliasse which formed a mattress. The single blanket was made of burlap, but it felt like it had been knitted from barbed wire. The food was the same too – breakfast was the usual ersatz coffee, made of barley or acorn. That was used to wash down a single slice of bread and piece of sausage. More coffee in the evening when we had the watery soup made from potatoes or turnips.
My first job was not unlike the one I’d left behind – welcoming new arrivals. Yet it was in another way totally different. There were no cattle-trucks here, no Rampe and no one was passing in on their way to the gas chambers. Under the orders of the ever-watchful SS guard commander, I opened and closed the main gate at the north-east corner as trucks and SS vehicles went in and out. After a few days, there was another selection. As usual, the standing in line, the pointed finger, the sheer randomness of it all. But as things turned out, this one wasn’t actually random at all.
This time I landed on my feet. If Fürstengrube was the way out of Hell, the Maurerschule was halfway to Paradise. A group of us were sent to this Builders’ School in the centre of the compound and taught a trade. It might have been what I would have ended up doing at home if there had been no war – working for one of the big industries in Bedzin. There were carpentry workshops with the tap-tapping of hammers and the smell of planed wood; bricklaying with its mysteries of the German-bond pattern brought in wherever the Swastika flew; there were cement works with shovels scooping and mixing the great piles of grey sludge.
In the rather more normal atmosphere of the Maurerschule, some of us became friends. We were all wary about this, because selections were still so arbitrary, violence still so random, that forging lasting friendships wasn’t wise. We’d all lost family in these madhouses; we didn’t want to lose friends too. Even so, Henry Bawnik and I became friends. We called him Herzko and he had flat feet. We became amicable rivals in the building trade in the days and weeks ahead.
And so, Szlamek Pivnik, Number 135913, became a first-class bricklayer. I learned to take accurate measurements, make rough and ready sketches and plans, learned how to dig foundation ditches and build walls which, like the Reich for which I now worked, would last for a thousand years. My instructor was one of the team of civilian builders who worked on the site. It took a lot of imagination after Auschwitz-Birkenau to realise that these men went home after a day’s work. Their home life probably wasn’t as normal as all that, because although we didn’t know it, all Hell was beginning to close in on the Third Reich. The Red Army had not only held against the assaults of the Wehrmacht; it was now actually pushing them back and winning victories. It’s ironic that I can’t, after all this time, remember the name of my bricklayer instructor. He was an SS man of course, a Volksdeutscher lance-corporal who had been a builder in Silesia before the war. He wasn’t kind exactly, but he treated us as human beings at least. He never raised his hand to any of us nor even shouted and if that description has elements of Mengele, it is difficult to imagine two men more different.
For two weeks we learned our trade in the Maurerschule and then we were unleashed to carry out the work itself. This was a new experience for me, not only working alongside contract-worker civilians from all over Europe – there were a surprising number of Belgians – and local Poles, but having skilled status. My SS value would have gone up to six marks a day had I but known it, but that was translated in a way into more food. We were given a Premiumschein, a ticket for the camp canteen which gave us thick soup, bread or a couple of cigarettes. This of course, as in civilian prisons all over the world, was currency. I didn’t smoke then – that was a bad habit I picked up later – so I found myself operating in a black market. Cigarettes bought more food, some of it smuggled in by the contractors coming through the gates each day. They were rarely searched, perhaps because the SS couldn’t imagine any Christian Pole wanting to trade with a Jew.
I suppose somewhere along the line during training I must have impressed someone, perhaps the Silesian bricklayer, because as we began work for real I was made Vorarbeiter, foreman. There was a strict hierarchy at Fürstengrube, as at all camps – it was a Nazi and a German preoccupation. At the top of the tree was Moll, the Lagerführer or commandant and below him a team of underlings with various responsibilities – the training workshops, the hospital, the kitchens, security and so on. Below them came the Kapos, that mixed bag of saints and sinners – mostly sinners – who were the banes of our lives. As at Auschwitz-Birkenau, have a good one and life was bearable. Have a bad one – Rudi, for instance – and you might as well throw yourself on the wire. Most of these men were working class and had already proved themselves as efficient workers with a ruthless streak. The Gentile Kapos barked, ‘You fucking Jews,’ at us morning, noon and night. The Jewish ones, hardene
d criminals with a grudge against society, said things like, ‘You ate roast duck and mouthwatering cakes at home while I went hungry.’ Yes. I lost count of the roast ducks we’d eaten in the Kamionka!
Vorarbeiter was a long way down the chain of command, but I was no longer right at the bottom. I got better food, a half-decent pair of shoes and something akin to respect from the newcomers. On the other hand I was seventeen and had no idea how to handle even this tiny bit of power they had given me. It was a two-edged sword. In Fürstengrube you were either the solution or you were the problem and I discovered how difficult it is to run with the hare and hounds at the same time. I now had responsibility. Until that February all I had to look out for was Sam Pivnik. Now, if anybody in my squad was slacking or something went wrong, a Kapo would come to me. ‘Pivnik, sort it out. That man. See to him.’ That man could be my friend. Perhaps we’d bunked together at Auschwitz-Birkenau, frozen alongside each other in the lines in the compound, sweated side by side carrying bricks until our hands were bleeding and raw. I couldn’t save him. I wasn’t in a position to administer a light reprimand. There were no slaps on the wrist at Fürstengrube, just sticks, fists and boots.
One of the bigwigs at the camp who had been brought over by Moll from Auschwitz-Birkenau was Otto Breiten. He was Lagerälteste when I first arrived and I never really got to know him because he left that February for the Eastern Front. Breiten was a political prisoner, one of those whose status had always been higher than us Jews and as camp senior he commanded considerable respect. That month, a circular was sent round all concentration camps – any political prisoner who applied for frontline service would be given amnesty. This was Breiten’s way out of his own particular hellhole and he took it. He couldn’t have known what that transfer actually meant. Like most other volunteers, he ended up in the SS Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger, one of the most despicable and desperate units of the Waffen-SS. They were a bunch of criminals who were unleashed against Jews in Byelorussia and Eastern Poland under the excuse of anti-partisan warfare. Oskar Dirlewanger himself, it became widely known after the war, was responsible for thousands of deaths of men, women and children in the Wola suburb of Warsaw during the uprising there. Breiten probably took part in this because it happened six months after he left Fürstengrube.
Breiten’s place as camp senior was filled by an Oberkapo who had a fascinating background. He wore the red triangle of the political prisoners but he was in fact a half Jew. He was Hermann Josef referred to by the Nazis as a Mischling, the product of a mixed marriage, and he always looked over his shoulder as a result. He came from Augsburg in Bavaria and was an architect before the war, born of a Jewish father but a Christian mother. This, in the racially, blood-obsessed world of the SS, made Josef a second-class citizen. And doubly so, because in the Thirties he had been an active member of the Social Democrat Party in Germany, firm (if liberal) opponents of the Nazis. He was in his late thirties, I think and cultured. He was tall and strikingly handsome, with an aristocratic manner reflected in the expensive leather boots he always wore. We called him Schwarz (Black) and I have no idea why. He was important to us because he represented something of a go-between for us and Hauptscharführer Moll.
I had little to do with Otto Moll and that was fine by me. Close up, his unmoving glass eye was terrifying. He drank vodka like it was going out of fashion and when he was drunk he was dangerous and unpredictable. I remember one occasion when Moll was strolling near the water storage tank in the camp compound with a couple of SS men. Until this day I had rather a soft spot for that water tank. To begin with, I’d helped build it on the suggestion of Oberkapo Hermann and Herzko and I got to grips with the corners and the fancier brickwork, each of us watching the other to make sure he didn’t do too good a job. When the work was finished and the water pumped in, Hermann would sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, let us swim there. It was here that Herzko’s flat feet became very evident and we didn’t let him forget it. Neither of us knew that in the future our swimming skills would be necessary to stay alive.
On this particular day, Otto Moll was celebrating his departure for another camp and intended to have some fun on his last day. He was drunk and a prisoner walked past him too close for the Hauptscharführer’s liking. He pushed the man into the water. I don’t know whether he could swim or whether the icy water would have killed him anyway. I didn’t find out because Moll pulled his pistol out of his holster and shot the man dead, like a fish in a barrel. I stood transfixed for a moment, then realised that I might be the next bit of target practice for the Kommandant and I got myself out of there. Looking back, a lot of the SS drank heavily, especially in the afternoons and evenings, and it’s not difficult to see why. I have no sympathy for them after everything I have seen but they were, I now realise, locked into the same nightmare as I was.
Moll had been a landscape gardener before the war and I think he actually supervised a little of that at Auschwitz-Birkenau before the killing took over and his special responsibility became the gas chambers. He liked to watch football and on Sunday afternoons when we were given the only real rest period in the week, we’d organise teams and kick a ball around. I suspect this had more to do with the civilians on site, who had better food and more energy than the rest of us, but I used to play because kicking a ball somehow symbolised reality. This was what I used to do as a kid; it was how ‘normal’ people passed their weekend.
If I’d played well, Hauptscharführer Moll would clap me on the shoulder or ruffle what hair I had. And this, I learned later, was how I was selected for the Maurerschule in the first place. It wasn’t simply a pointed finger, a meaningless choice. Oberkapo Hermann had set up the school in my first days at Fürstengrube and both he and Moll had been quietly impressed by my footballing skills – hence the selection in my favour. There were those in the SS who would have been appalled by Moll’s behaviour – to have favourites among Jews would have been frowned upon and to touch a Jew was just not done. On the other hand, remembering how that monster touched me makes my skin crawl even today.
And crawling was what I was doing now on a regular basis. You get used to the darkness underground, the rats and the heady fumes of the coal itself. What you never get used to is the fact that you can’t always stand upright, but have to move at a crouch or push yourself into the blackness on your elbows. I have enormous respect for men who work underground; it’s not something I ever want to do again. We worked eight-hour shifts, from six in the morning till two in the afternoon; or two until ten; or the night shift, ten to six. I was on the night shift where the Kapo was Hans, a Christian political prisoner with a red star. He had been a miner before the war and had bad legs and a clicking hip to prove it. Needless to say, he kept this little fact from the SS with his happy-go-lucky personality. These shifts were another little reminder of the outside world, because civilian miners from all over Europe worked them too, and because Hans had been a trade unionist before the Nazis made trade unions illegal. There was always the risk – the dripping water that could become a torrent, the cracking timber that could bring the roof down. Added to that, we were slave labour and we were expendable. I was as black as the miners themselves, our eyes oddly bright against the masks of soot and even though it was my job to check the timbers and the joists, I breathed in the same dust as they did. Coal gets everywhere – in your nose, your lungs. It clogs your ears and becomes ingrained in your skin. And on the way back from our shifts, the SS would insist that we sang. Anyone who wasn’t opening their mouths, making a noise or was missing the beat got a rifle butt for their pains.
In that atmosphere, cramped and confined as we were, accidents were bound to happen. I was on the night shift – this might have been in March or April, I don’t remember – and I was fixing joists. There was a creaking sound, almost a groan deep in the tunnel. When you hear that, you run. It’s instinctive. You’re not going to be able to fix it, to take the weight of the world on your shoulders, so you get out. Except that I wasn’t
ready for the terrifying speed of what happened next. I’d got maybe a couple of yards and the roof came down, grey rock thudding and crashing in the clouds of black dust. I was thrown onto my back by the impact and my legs were pinned by rubble. I shut my eyes, expecting the rest of the tunnel to follow, burying me alive. But there was nothing. Just the rattle of small stones and the gradual settling of dust. I’d lost my lamp and was in total blackness. I daren’t move for fear of dislodging more of the tunnel.
Then I heard the shouts, the clatter of shovels and the tapping of picks. ‘Over here!’ I heard somebody shout and shafts of light from torches were darting everywhere as they hauled me out. My back was wrenched – and it still plays me up today – and I’d cracked a rib so that earned me two nights in the infirmary. About the only drug they had was aspirin and because I was a Vorarbeiter I was given some. It didn’t help much to fight the pain but at least I knew I’d get over this. There’d be no Angel of Death hovering by my bedside with another selection.
But the next brush with death was entirely my own fault and it led to a change in my status I wasn’t altogether sorry for. We were working above ground and I was supervising my squad putting up scaffolding for some new building near the main entrance. With us were the Baumeisters or Steigers, the civilian engineers engaged on the construction of the new mine. I heard a commotion and went to see what was going on. One of the Steigers had hit his head on a piece of scaffolding that was sticking out. He was in charge of the Russian prisoners of war, his head was bleeding and he was less than pleased.
He bawled at me and called me a stupid bloody Yid. ‘Can’t you see that’s dangerous?’ he shouted. ‘I could have really hurt myself.’
