Survivor

by Sam Pivnik

  Nathan and the chicken man were next, but these went badly. When you hang a man on a chair, his neck doesn’t break. There isn’t enough drop and there isn’t enough weight. The old executioners will tell you it’s an exact science, that the neck snaps at the third vertebrae and death is almost instantaneous. It wasn’t like that, that Sunday in Fürstengrube. Those men strangled to death and Nathan and the chicken man took minutes to die.

  We were ordered back into line as the visitors’ party got up, hardly noticing the hanged men at all. They walked over to the administration building, nattering casually about this and that, no doubt looking forward to their schnapps. After all, it was a long drive from the Auschwitz main camp. They’d earned it.

  We were turned away, away from the men we’d killed, back to our barracks, back to the humdrum routine of Fürstengrube where men died every day because they were largely of no consequence.

  Only I had looked into Maurice’s face. It is a face I see in my dreams to this day.

  ‘Long Life.’

  9

  Death March

  The hangings of Maurice and the others didn’t mark the end of the escape attempts. Someone I remembered from Bedzin, but whose name I never knew, had the idea to hide out in a disused tunnel. This was never likely to work; he knew as well as any of us that the evening roll-call would find him out; it would only be a matter of simple deduction by the SS to realise he must be somewhere in the mine. I often wonder what he intended to do, how he would have got through the gates or past the wire. In the event, he didn’t get the chance. Either the SS had worked out his plan or someone, for extra soup or half a sausage, had informed on him. When the SS found him, crouching in the blackness of his tunnel, Oberkapo Michael Eschmann was given the ‘honour’ of shooting him on the spot and they left his body for the rats.

  The Russians didn’t have much more time for us Jews than the Nazis, so it was odd to find a Jewish officer arriving at the end of June from the Red Army. He was a quiet, determined man, probably in his mid-twenties, and wore a red triangle on his prison jacket to show his status as a political prisoner. Officially, such men were called Schutzhäftlinge, protective prisoners, and whereas most of these were harmless victims of the Nazi state, some were actually dangerous partisans. This man was and the guards watched him like hawks.

  The chance he took was huge but it could have worked. He realised that of the four guard towers at the camp’s corners, only two were manned during the day. If he could get close enough, he could get into one of the empty ones – he chose the tower to the east – and out of a window on the outside of the wire. He would then have to run for it before the alarm was raised, but once at the trees, he had a reasonable chance to keep going. What he couldn’t have expected was that Oberscharführer Schmidt would be waiting for him on the outside with a squad of men. We heard the shots at our various work stations and carried on working. You didn’t look up, express concern, show any sign that anything out of the ordinary had happened. They brought the Russian back into the camp on a plank carried by two prisoners, his arms and legs dangling grotesquely.

  This was the last escape attempt I remember, perhaps because of the way it ended. Schmidt and his thugs weren’t just waiting beyond the perimeter fence by accident. They knew exactly when and where the Russian was going to make a break for it. And that could only mean one thing: someone had informed on him. There was no shortage of suspects and the rumours, as always, spread like wildfire. There was no solidarity in a place like Fürstengrube. The Maurerschule and our work on the mine gave me a sense of purpose and even pride in our work; the hangings of Maurice and the others ought to have drawn us together. But it doesn’t work like that. For every good deed in the camps, there were dozens of bad ones. Heroes are the men on the outside, who can still come and go as they please; men who have free will. We couldn’t come and go unless a Kapo or the SS said we could. And many of us had no will left.

  Who had blown the whistle on the Russian officer? It might have been the Russian lad in the kitchen who had smuggled food for the man’s escape? It could have been Hermann Josef or any of the senior Kapos keen to cosy up to Max Schmidt. But there was another school of thought and that one gained ground as time went on and that was Bronek Jakubowicz. He was already at Fürstengrube when I arrived and had been brought there with his father and brother. He came from Dobra, near Lodz, and had been a dentist before the war. To everyone’s surprise, Otto Moll had set up a dental laboratory in the camp and equipped it with the latest equipment – this at a time when there was nothing as impressive at Auschwitz-Birkenau – and installed Jakubowicz as the camp dentist. He never treated fellow Jews of course – dental treatment was reserved for the SS and the occasional political prisoner. There was never any conclusive proof that Jakubowicz had been the informant but he spent too much time kissing arse with Max Schmidt and Hermann Josef for the liking of most of us.

  Shots ringing out in Fürstengrube were rare. It was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz-Birkenau and shootings only happened when Otto Moll had been drinking or there was some infringement which the SS thought merited execution. But we heard them one day at the end of my shift in the mine. Covered in coal dust and clinging, sticky mud, we had the untold luxury of a shower, part of the SS obsession with cleanliness. On this particular day however, there was no hot water. The boiler had broken down and the orderly, a prisoner called Chaskele, had not had time to fix it before the end of the shift.

  We trudged back to our barracks, cold and filthy, under the gaze of Oberscharführer Schmidt. The man suddenly went berserk and to this day I don’t know why. Did he see it as a reflection on him, that his camp was running at less than 100% efficiency? Was he in a bad mood about something else already and was this the last straw? He stormed off in search of Chaskele, bawling him out in a way that echoed around the whole compound, telling the man his future except that he had no future. Schmidt whipped out his pistol and shot the man twice at pointblank range. Again, no one ‘noticed’. We continued in a line to our hut, looking neither left nor right. The murder of Chaskele happened a little out of my eye-line. All I saw was Schmidt, face still taut with fury, striding back to his office and holstering his gun. He slammed the door. I suppose it had the desired effect. If a boiler breaks down at Fürstengrube, they kill you. Another lesson courtesy of the SS.

  It must have been the August of 1944 that another hanging took place. By now, time was running out for the Third Reich. The British, Americans and Free French were pushing across France from their D-Day beachheads of two months earlier and in Warsaw a Home Army was beginning to carry out operations in preparation for the arrival of the Russians. Snippets of this reached us from somebody who had spoken to somebody who had heard the news over the radio from the BBC. We had no way of knowing what was true and what wasn’t in this mad game of Chinese whispers; and of course the BBC were playing a propaganda game too.

  What we did know was that five Poles, Gentiles, were taken away under heavy armed escort for the Auschwitz main camp. The story went – and this one came in an unguarded moment from Hermann Josef himself – that they had been in contact with partisans of the Home Army that was causing chaos in Warsaw. Exactly how they could have done this and to what effect was never seriously considered. We were again on the Appellplatz towards the end of that month when the five were brought back, battered and bloody, to be hanged for the entertainment of the SS and as a warning to us. This time, thank God, I was not chosen as an executioner, was not the one to rip a stool away from a man, leaving him to strangle to death in the stifling August air. But the rumours ran like wildfire that Hermann Josef was the man responsible for bringing them to the attention of the SS. Each of the five roared at him across the Appellplatz, screaming that he was as guilty as they were and demanding to know why he wasn’t up there on the gallows with them. The cry was taken up by many of us in our lines and it took nearly an hour for the SS to maintain order and carry the executions out.

>   That was the summer that the Hungarians came to Fürstengrube. They brought with them grim news from Auschwitz-Birkenau. The speed of extermination was increasing – not until after the war would the world find out that nearly half a million people were gassed during this period. If you read the statistics today you will learn that on two days and nights in July, 7,000 people from the family camp of Theresienstadt Jews were gassed. On 2 August the gypsy camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau was similarly liquidated – nearly 3,000 died.

  By November the world had turned again. We didn’t notice any change at first. The roll-calls, the work at the mine, the accidents and the brutality continued. But the selections stopped. Nobody was being sent back to Auschwitz-Birkenau, not even the Muselmänner or accident and disease cases. Gentiles were being shipped out, it was true, but they were relatively strong and healthy so we had to assume they were being shipped to another sub-camp. Our numbers were falling and that should have been good news for us but the food supply was becoming increasingly hit and miss as the war began to pinch the Reich and even us ‘privileged’ workers felt it.

  I had turned nineteen that September and spent yet another Hanukkah behind the wire. It was early in January 1945 that I heard a noise I hadn’t heard before – at least not on that scale. It was a vibration really, something that always worried men who eked out a living underground. We glanced at each other when we heard it under the watch of the Kapos and the SS. We whispered about it in the tunnels and our bunks. I don’t remember who said it first, but someone realised what that vibration was; it was artillery fire, the roar and crash of the Russians miles away. But it was getting nearer.

  Did we feel elation? Delight? Near hysteria at the prospect of liberation? Perhaps; but if any of us entertained those thoughts, we soon dismissed them in the face of our reality. The wire was still there, the watchtowers, the perimeter guards. They could still hang us on the Appellplatz or shoot us in our bunks; set up explosives and bring the roof down on our heads in the tunnels. What would the SS do? Smile and shake our hands and say it had all been some sort of bad dream? A joke?

  19 January 1945. That day the Russian General Ivan Konev took Kraków and Tarnov and Marshal Georgi Zhukov liberated Lodz. It was probably Konev’s guns we had heard. I had no idea how close freedom was, but at Fürstengrube what was happening had an immediate effect. As we stood in the ice and snow of the Appellplatz that morning, we suddenly heard a crash and roar. The camp’s administration block was going up in flames, black smoke belching into the sky. The SS stood by, petrol cans in their hands, admiring their handiwork. They were burning records, the names, the numbers and the details of men long dead or still barely alive, trying desperately to conceal the evidence of the greatest mass murder in recorded history. At camps all over Europe, similar bonfires raged, similar lines were being drawn in the sand.

  Oberkapo Hermann Josef broke the news to us. Sounding as matter of fact as if he were sharing holiday plans with us, he told us we would be moving to a camp in Austria, starting with a march to the railway station. We should bring any food and warm clothes we had.

  I remember being struck by the rich irony of Oberkapo Hermann’s words. The SS had warm overcoats and plenty of food still; the Kapos would get by. The rest of us had our thin uniforms. In a way, I was lucky. I’d traded some cigarettes the day before for a solid pair of workman’s boots. They were old and the leather was cracked but they were paradise in comparison with the clogs I’d brought from Auschwitz-Birkenau. All I had in the way of food was the bread ration I’d saved, as usual, from breakfast. But they gave us extra bread and a tiny portion of butter and marmalade.

  We were formed up into a column. And they made us wait all afternoon. This was different from the usual trek to the mine entrance. There must have been 700 of us, wrapped in whatever rags we had, shuffling along as best we could, sliding and scraping on the ice. Nearly 300 men stayed behind, too ill and too weak to walk. In the Quarantine Block in Auschwitz-Birkenau these ‘idlers’ would have been beaten and shot, but not now. Now, as we marched away through that bitter January evening, we saw them still standing on the Appellplatz, shoulders hunched, eyes sunken in their heads. The SS marched with us, to the head and rear of the column and along our flanks. They looked as grim and miserable as we did, collars turned up, rifles and rucksacks on their backs. No one looked behind. No one was going back.

  * * *

  What began on that icy January evening has come to be known as a death march. Dozens of them were happening all over Europe in the winter and spring of 1945 and they have been extensively researched and analysed by historians. I am not an historian. I am not a psychologist or a sociologist. I can’t begin to tell you what impelled Oberscharführer Schmidt to take us west except for a natural impulse to get the hell away from the Russians. I can’t explain why he felt it necessary to take us all with him or where he thought he was going. All I can tell you is what happened to me.

  The weather was terrible. Polish winters are always grim, but for men weakened by slave labour and starvation, it was lethal. And I couldn’t help thinking that this was what it was all about. The SS, the Wehrmacht, the entire Reich, were on the run and the end of the war was in sight. But it would not be a rout, not yet at least. The SS still, literally, called the shots. They still had the power of life and death over us and they would decide how, where, why and when at last we died. Anyone who stepped out of line, anyone who staggered and fell by the roadside, went down to an SS bullet. If you wanted to pee, you did it walking along, the warm liquid soaking into your trousers rapidly cooling and then freezing. If you wanted to shit … you didn’t want to shit. There was no talking, just the clatter of clogs and boots on the crunching snow. This monotonous rhythm was punctuated now and then by the crack of a rifle and another heavy bullet, fired at close range, slammed into a fragile body. No bullet ever missed. No target ever survived.

  Evening of 20 January, the end of the second day of our march. Oberkapo Hermann Josef had told us we were marching to the railway station; where the hell was it? Another Nazi lie? Another ruse by the SS so gifted in the variety of their torture methods? We were crammed into a barracks once home to the Polish army and more recently to the Wehrmacht. There were thousands of us there, in every makeshift uniform you can think of, the stripes of the concentration camps most evident. Many men couldn’t fit into the buildings and had to sleep in the sub-zero temperatures outside. Men from Auschwitz I, men from Birkenau, men from Monowitz. Many – perhaps the majority – were Jews. It was like a nation on the march again, like the refugees we’d seen fleeing through Bedzin all that time ago, like the Pivniks were when we were herded out of the Kamionka. We got no food that night and precious little sleep for all we were exhausted. And the place, someone told me, was Gleiwitz, where all this madness was supposed to have started the day before my thirteenth birthday, when Poland attacked, without warning or provocation, a German radio station.

  Except that now, Gleiwitz was another concentration camp linked to the collapsing industry of the Reich. The women made lampblack; the men made weapons of war.

  The next day dawned raw and cold. I had eaten almost nothing for two days and breakfast of a bread crust and ersatz coffee barely made any difference. We were formed up into a column again and marched along icy roads to the promised railway siding. Hermann Josef hadn’t told us the station would be two days’ excruciating walk away. The freight cars were open-topped trucks, of the type they used to haul coal and coke. It would be worse than freezing in those but it was better than walking and in that sense not as appalling, perhaps, as some of the other death marches. They loaded us onto the train and I was grateful for the overcrowding because it gave us greater body warmth. But we weren’t going anywhere. The train just waited in the siding, steam crystallising on the morning air. The mid-morning brought the sound of artillery fire again and occasionally even the crack and rattle of rifles. This was the Soviet 17th Army pushing ever westward out of Kraków and Katowice and
it terrified the SS, who ran for it.

  I didn’t know what was happening and instinctively we all crouched below the frozen sides of the trucks, keeping our heads down, so I didn’t actually see the SS go. Others did; they just vanished into the woods. A stationary train in a railway siding makes a tempting target for aircraft or long-range artillery and from what we’d heard of the Red Army, they weren’t going to ask any questions or worry about what today you’d call friendly fire. The train carried Reich markings so it was a legitimate target.

  Some of the prisoners, too exhausted or desperate to take the tension any more, climbed over the truck rails and dropped to the tracks or the platform. They ran for the woods where I knew the SS would be waiting and I didn’t have the nerve to try it myself. How long the panic lasted I don’t know, but bullets started whizzing overhead and bouncing off the metalwork on the trucks, tearing through the planking. One or two of the men were hit, dropping like stones to the truck floor or falling on the living, their blood warm and dark against the icy grime of the rest of us. The SS were back and this was their announcement of the fact. We cowered under the brief barrage and then the engine snorted into life and we were rolling.

  I often think it ironic that I arrived at Auschwitz in a passenger car which still had, for all its grim connotations, a modicum of pre-war civilian civility about it. It was taking men, women and children to their deaths but it had a veneer of sophistication. These coal trucks had nothing, except an increasing number of corpses, and we rode the rails for seven days. Men died in that appalling week, of cold and exposure, of exhaustion and malnutrition, of wounds old and new inflicted by the SS and the Kapos. We hauled some of them over the side and watched them flop onto the frozen embankments before rolling away into the bushes and the dead grass. Others became useful seats. You forgot they were once people. Now they were relatively soft padding where you could perch while you tried to rub some feeling back into your frostbitten feet.