Voices from the Holocaust

by Jon E. Lewis

Today is working Sunday, Arbeitssonntag: we work until 1 p.m., then we return to camp for the shower, shave and general control for skin diseases and lice. And in the yards, everyone knew mysteriously that the selection would be today.

  The news arrived, as always surrounded by a halo of contradictory or suspect details: the selection in the infirmary took place this morning; the percentage was 7 per cent of the whole camp, 30, 50 per cent of the patients. At Birkenau, the crematorium chimney has been smoking for ten days. Room has to be made for an enormous convoy arriving from the Poznari ghetto. The young tell the young that all the old ones will be chosen. The healthy tell the healthy that only the ill will be chosen. Specialists will be excluded. German Jews will be excluded. Low Numbers will be excluded. You will be chosen. I will be excluded.

  At 1 p.m. exactly the yard empties in orderly fashion and for two hours the grey unending army files past the two control stations where, as on every day, we are counted and recounted, and past the military band which for two hours without interruptions plays, as on every day, those marches to which we must synchronize our steps at our entrance and our exit.

  It seems like every day, the kitchen chimney smokes as usual, the distribution of the soup is already beginning. But then the bell is heard, and at the moment we realize that we have arrived.

  Because this bell always sounds at dawn, when it means the reveille; but if it sounds during the day, it means Blocksperre, enclosure in huts, and this happens when there is a selection to prevent anyone avoiding it, or when those selected for the gas, to prevent anyone seeing them leave.

  Our Blockältester knows his business. He has made sure that we have all entered, he has the door locked, he has given everyone his card with his number, name, profession, age and nationality and he has ordered everyone to undress completely, except for shoes. We wait like this, naked, with the card in our hands, for the commission to reach our hut. We are hut 48, but one can never tell if they are going to begin at hut 1 or hut 60. At any rate, we can rest quietly at least for an hour, and there is no reason why we should not get under the blankets on the bunk and keep warm.

  Many are already drowsing when a barrage of orders, oaths and blows proclaims the imminent arrival of the commission. The Blockältester and his helpers, starting at the end of the dormitory, drive the crowd of frightened, naked people in front of them and cram them in the Tagesraum which is the Quartermaster’s office. The Tagesraum is a room seven yards by four: when the drive is over, a warm and compact human mass is jammed into the Tagesraum, perfectly filling all the corners, exercising such a pressure on the wooden walls as to make them creak.

  Now we are all in the Tagesraum, and besides there being no time, there is not even any room in which to be afraid. The feeling of the warm flesh pressing all around is unusual and not unpleasant. One has to take care to hold one’s nose so as to breathe, and not to crumple or lose the card in one’s hand.

  The Blockältester has closed the connecting door and has opened the other two which lead from the dormitory and the Tagesraum outside. Here, in front of the two doors, stands the arbiter of our fate, an SS subaltern. On his right is the Blockältester, on his left, the quartermaster of the hut. Each one of us, as he comes naked out of the Tagesraum into the cold October air, has to run the few steps between the two doors, give the card to the SS man and enter the dormitory door. The important thing for the Lager is not that the most useless prisoners be eliminated, but that free posts be quickly created, according to a certain percentage previously fixed.

  The selection is now over in our hut, but it continues in the others, so that we are still locked in. But as the soup-pots have arrived in the meantime, the Blockältester decides to proceed with the distribution at once. A double ration will be given to those selected. I have never discovered if this was a ridiculously charitable initiative of the Blockältester, or an explicit disposition of the SS, but in fact, in the interval of two or three days (sometimes even much longer) between the selection and the departure, the victims at Monowitz-Auschwitz enjoyed this privilege.

  Ziegler holds out his bowl, collects his normal ration and then waits there expectantly. ‘What do you want?’ ask the Blockältester: according to him, Ziegler is entitled to no supplement, and he drives him away, but Ziegler returns and humbly persists. He was on the left, everybody saw it, let the Blockältester check the cards; he has the right to a double ration. When he is given it, he goes quietly to his bunk to eat.

  Now everyone is busy scraping the bottom of his bowl with his spoon so as not to waste the last drops of the soup; a confused, metallic clatter, signifying the end of the day. Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backward and forward violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen.

  Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas-chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking any more? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again?

  If I were God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.

  The exact number of Jews who died at Auschwitz is unknown, but the figure is generally thought to be between 1.1 and 1.5 million. The last gassings took place in November 1944, by which time the SS were blowing up the camp in an attempt to destroy the evidence of what had occurred there.

  ‘Deaths, deaths, deaths’: A Day in the Life of a Prisoner, Bergen-Belsen, 13 January 1945

  ABEL J. HERZBERG

  13 January 1945 Yesterday marked our first year here. It has been a terrible year, far from home, from the children, without news from them, a year of disappointment. The transport to Palestine, the peace that did not come, a year of hunger, cold, hounding, persecution and humiliation. Fortunately, though, apart from a few bouts of dysentery, we have not been seriously ill.

  The food is getting worse and worse. At midday, swede soup, every day without a single potato. The ‘extra’ food is distributed centrally now. Every day there are genuine punch-ups over a ticket. Some are given to the Dienstbereiche and some to the doctor for the weak and the sick. Recriminations about favouritism, at every attempt, of course, to be as fair as possible.

  The extra food is distributed outdoors by a Kapo, accompanied by the inevitable blows with the ladle in every direction.

  The Kapo system has existed for three weeks now. Its characteristics are: hounding with truncheons and sticks when there is work to be done.

  Postcards dated early November have reached us from Amsterdam. Everything I had feared seems true. No gas, no electricity, two hundred grams of bread a day. Hunger and shortage. I fear it may be as bad as here. The game is lasting too long. Probably in Holland there will also be large numbers of deaths.

  Here it is increasing all the while. Today J. H. Yesterday O. S., Dr C., dentist F., et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Young B., nineteen years old, Ant. B., who therefore also did not help with preventing the hiring out of a camp blanket.

  There is no news. No parcels either. We have reached the bottom, and are therefore facing the worst hunger again.

  T. is bearing up extremely well. She keeps herself going and is full of courage. It is mostly men who die. If it carries on like this it will be a matter of a few months – then no one will be left.

  People look pitiful. Literally living corpses. They are dropping with tiredness and wretchedness.

  The Stubbenkommando is dreadful [work]. Although they get extra rations, they also get extra beatings. Yesterday afternoon, another court case. A large quantity of semolina had been stolen, a bag containing ten to fifteen kilos that one of the Hungarians was keeping for a group of Hungarians. The accuse
d were a Greek woman and her brother, who confessed. The woman we sentenced to five days’ bunker and the man to eight (three days on bread and water), and assignment to the Stubbenkommando. The Commandant changed this to: one month’s assignment to the Stubbenkommando, without any extra allocation. If, after one month, he has behaved himself, the bunker sentence will be quashed.

  This is all but the death penalty. At this time of the year Stubbenkommando without extra food is impossible. Stubben are tree stumps that must be dug up and dispatched.

  The court sittings have become onerous. The Kapos enter with their truncheons and sticks and stay to observe. One can imagine what remains of the independence of the bench and the rights of the accused. It is all unimaginably bad. Oh Holland, oh poor humanity! From time to time there is no bread at all here – from time to time (tonight, for example) we are not allowed to use the toilet. Those who have diarrhoea must go outdoors. We have procured some buckets for ourselves, discarded jam buckets.

  This morning, my neighbour had to resort to them.

  This morning his bunkmate discovered to his horror that his shoes were full. The other had soiled himself twice during the night.

  We are living amid the lice. For months I have not been able to change into clean underwear, nor had a shower. Naturally there is also no heating here, we suffer terribly from the cold in the huts, which are draughty and where the door is never shut.

  Deaths, deaths, deaths.

  For how long?

  Apparently, Westerbork was still in existence at the beginning of November. The persecution of the Jews continues. Nevertheless we are a year nearer to peace than on 13 January 1944.

  The Death March from Auschwitz, January 1945

  JOHN FINK

  In the autumn and winter of 1944–5 the SS did more than destroy the evidence of their extermination camps; they removed the inmates by forced marches westwards to labour camps and factories. It was a last cruelty visited on Europe’s Jews. With little food or clothing, tens of thousands perished, or were shot by SS guards.

  When we were marched out of Auschwitz-Birkenau on 18 January 1945, we didn’t know where we were going. The only ones left behind were the sick prisoners, about 8–9,000 of them, including Primo Levi; we thought they would all get killed because we couldn’t imagine that they would let anybody live.

  So we marched. Well, the weather was terrible and anybody who dropped back was shot in the back by the SS; so many. They were just left lying there, and there were already dead people lying there who had marched before us. These were the people who really couldn’t do it because most people didn’t even have shoes; they only had those wooden clogs and you couldn’t march in those in that terrible frost and snow. I had a pair of shoes, but the right and left weren’t the same. When you could keep your feet in order you had a chance of life; so many died because of their feet, many got water in their knees and the pus would come out of their bodies.

  Anyway, we marched during the night and in the morning they put us in an empty tyre factory. We rested there for a while, then we were ordered to march again. In the afternoon we must have reached the former German border. We marched through the streets of Gleiwitz, there were trams running and civilians about. The SS weren’t around us there and we were so desperate for food that we asked people where there was a concentration camp – can you imagine the mentality! We stayed two days in an overcrowded camp; no order there, nothing.

  After a day or two we were ordered to the railway yards. We were put on an open train: every carriage was filled with prisoners, you couldn’t sit down. We went on through the days and nights, the train would stop every so often because of the bombings. People died. We would just throw the dead out of the cattle trucks to make room to finally sit down. We came through Czechoslovakia and at the railway stations we would have to take the sick out and leave them on the platforms where the Gestapo would kill them in front of the civilians of those towns in Czechoslovakia and Austria. Then they took us to Mauthausen. By then the camp was so overcrowded that its Kommandant refused our unloading, so the train went on and on.

  Suddenly we came to Berlin. I knew Berlin, I saw the famous radio tower – that was 28 January 1945. We were unloaded in the big, old concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. Then back on the train again to Flossenburg, another overcrowded camp. Since the Americans were coming from one side, the Russians from another, and the British from up north, the noose was tightened. But they never got rid of the prisoners for some reason, except those who got killed or died on the way. Then I was loaded on another train and now we were sitting on the dead. We weren’t human any more, we weren’t supposed to be human anyway; that’s how I came to Belsen around 8 March 1945.

  The Death March from Auschwitz II, January 1945

  GIULIANA TEDESCHI

  Tedeschi ended up at Leipzig via Ravensbrück, with some of the journey undertaken in overcrowded cattle trucks, not a jot different from those that had taken her to Auschwitz originally.

  The column is getting longer; there are other women marching behind the Auschwitz group. The Birkenau women, 13–14,000 of us on the road in all.

  Will those we left behind be among them? Natalia, Dina, Ruth, and all the others? No, many women were sent by train to other work camps in Germany months ago. Then Dina and Ruth ... we must consider them lost; they have watched the others leave – everybody who could stand on their feet, that is – with indifferent, almost extinguished eyes. Now they are lying on their mattresses amid the empty bunks in the disorder of the hospital block that still shows all the signs of flight and evacuation. They expect nothing.

  The women have been marching since dawn. They have to stay in line to one side of the road; to the left, at regular intervals, are the Posten with their rifles slung across their backs, and a few Aufseherin; there are some women from the Polizei too with revolvers in their belts. Some have already overtaken the column on a wobbly cart, apparently looking to escape amid the general flight.

  We have done twenty miles and the sun is nearly down. The landscape remains stubbornly the same – a flat plain stretching endlessly away under the opaque whiteness of sky and snow, deadening the already exhausted senses. The Germans accelerate their pace, not allowing us any more stops. Perhaps there is some goal to reach? How many miles away, when? Or perhaps this march is to be infinite, without a break, without a goal? By now our legs move only from the force of momentum. The road is littered with blankets, since many women, exhausted by the effort, have decided to abandon them. You’re unable to lift your eyes to the sky; they remain stubbornly fixed on the ground, fascinated by the movement of the legs in the row before you, all advancing with the same rhythm – feet in clogs, feet wrapped in rags and strips of blankets, feet poking wretchedly out of torn shoes.

  Earlier on, in the sunshine, everybody had tried to keep their eyes on the progress of their friends. Some had pressed ahead to the front of the column, others had lost ground, and Violette, her nose even purpler than usual, eyes swollen with tears, could scarcely move her swollen legs.

  I said something to her as she walked alongside me; when I looked for her a few moments later, she was gone. The road had swallowed her up. In the morning five pairs of hands would reach out to help anybody who slipped on the ice; in the evening those who slipped lay where they fell. No one had the strength to do anything but push their legs forward, and even this was automatic, not willed. You stepped slightly to one side so as not to trample on the body you found beneath your feet, and you went on without looking.

  The moon came up, the landscape became ghostly. The wind howled in the dense pine woods; it slashed your face, cut through your thin clothes and into your bones.

  Came the echo of the first rifle shots fading away in the silent trees. We stopped, hesitant, listening, then, as if spurred on, dragged ourselves forward.

  ‘Olga ... Vicky ... Giuliana …’ Every so often we would call to each other in the dark, check that everybody was there; God help us if t
he bond of resistance that united us were to snap!

  By now Violette, the mother of a small French girl, and others likewise who hadn’t been able to keep the pace, were lying on their backs on the ground, black shapes in the whiteness, a small stream of blood trickling away in the snow.

  Liberation: A Jewess Meets a GI, April 1945

  GERDA WEISSMANN KLEIN

  Gerda Weissmann Klein was transported from the Bielsko Ghetto to the labour camp at Gross-Rosen in June 1942. She was liberated after the death march.

  All of a sudden I saw a strange car coming down the hill, no longer green, not bearing the swastika, but a white star. It was a sort of mud-splattered vehicle but I’ve never seen a brighter star in my life. And two men sort of jumped out, came running towards us, and one came towards where I stood. He was wearing battle gear ... he was wearing dark glasses and he spoke to me in German. And he said, ‘Does anybody here speak German or English?’ And I said, ‘I speak German.’ And I felt I had to tell him we are Jewish, and I didn’t know if he would know what the star means or anything … and I looked at him. I was a little afraid to tell him that but I said to him, ‘We’re Jewish, you know.’ He didn’t answer me for quite a while. And then his own voice sort of betrayed his own emotion and he said, ‘So am I.’ I would say it was the greatest hour of my life. And then he asked an incredible question. He said, ‘May I see the other ladies?’ … what we had been addressed as for six years and then to hear this man [call us that]. He looked to me like a young god … I weighed sixty-eight pounds. My hair was white … I hadn’t had a bath in years. And this creature asked for ‘the other ladies’. And I told him that most of the other girls were inside … They were too ill to walk, and he said, ‘Won’t you come with me?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ ... He held the door open for me to precede him and in that gesture restored me to humanity. And that young American today is my husband.

  The Liberation of Buchenwald: The Prisoner’s View, 5–10 April 1945