Reflecting on my situation, I decided that I could not spend the night outdoors without seriously imperiling my chances for survival. I had to get into the baths today. Poor Denis was wandering aimlessly about, hatless, without his glasses, like a man asleep. His gaze was troubled and he was muttering unintelligible words to himself as he walked. I took him by the arm and dragged him with me, hoping that I could somehow get us both into the baths. But before we had gone more than a few steps he slipped away and was lost in the seething mass of humanity. I called his name, shouting at the top of my lungs, but to no avail. The wind was so strong I could hardly hear my own voice.
Sensing the danger, I forced my way through the crowd and approached the steps leading down into the baths. At last I worked my way to the front row. Several SS armed with rubber clubs were guarding the entrance. A group of forty people was already assembled, waiting to go in. They were all Aryans.
Once again I made a snap decision: leaving the crowd I approached an SS Oberschaarführer and addressed him in a self-assured tone of voice:
“Herr Oberschaarführer, I’m the doctor for the Auschwitz convoy. Let me into the baths.”
He looked me over. My respectable clothes, perhaps my determined manner, or, more likely, my perfect command of German seemed to make an impression on him. At any rate, turning to his colleagues posted near the entrance, he said:
“Let the doctor go inside.”
I descended alone, preceding the group of forty who were waiting beside the stairway. Safe! And how easy it had been! Yes, sometimes it pays to make up one’s mind on the spur of the moment.
The warm air of the baths soon lent new strength to my almost frozen legs. After days and days of cold, at long last a warm room! The bath itself also did me a world of good. Our clothes were considered contaminated, and we had to give them up. I was sorry to hand over my overcoat, my suit and my warm woolen sweater, but at least was happy to see that they let me keep my shoes. A good pair of shoes could easily be an important factor in saving one’s life in the KZ.
I put my shoes back on and rejoined the group that had just finished bathing. Otherwise naked, we started back towards the path leading to the baths, where we waited for half an hour till there were enough of us to fill an entire barracks. After a warm bath, to remain outside in an icy wind, with the temperature close to zero, was to flirt with death.
At length another group of forty joined us and we started off. The SS guard made us keep in step as we walked, but after marching only 50 yards we reached Barracks 33 of the quarantine camp.
A prisoner, wearing the familiar green insignia of a criminal offender, was posted in front of the entrance: our barracks chief. He handed every newcomer a fourth of a loaf of bread; a little farther on a clerk slapped a spoonful of margarine, made of meat fat, on the bread. We were also given half a pint of steaming hot coffee.
After 10 days of privation this seemed like a royal feast. Having downed my food, I looked around for a likely place to lie down, and finally settled on a secluded corner, where I judged that my chances of being walked on would be fairly slim. I lay on the floor, for there were no beds in the quarantine camp. Nevertheless, I slept soundly until reveille.
Waking, my first thoughts were for those still standing—provided they were still able to stand—in the freezing cold, waiting to get into the baths.
We stayed in Barracks 33 for three days, during which we had nothing to do. Our food was not too bad and we were thus more or less able to recuperate from our three-week march.
On the third day of our stay an SS officer, accompanied by a general, visited our barracks and ordered anyone who had formerly worked in the Auschwitz KZ to step forward.
My blood froze in my veins. Methodical race that they are, the Germans no doubt had a muster list containing the names or numbers of those who had worked at Auschwitz. It seemed likely. And yet . . . thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that this was merely a ruse, an attempt to single out from the mass those capable of revealing the sordid mysteries of the crematoriums. If they had really had a list all they would have had to do was to check our tattoo numbers. No one knew me here. I waited, the blood pounding in my ears; there was complete silence in the barracks as the seconds ticked slowly by. And then they left. I had won again. Once again the wheel of death had spun and passed me by.
That night we were given the striped jerkin of prisoners and taken by the mountain path to the Mauthausen railway station. There we were loaded into the inevitable boxcars, 7,000 souls in all, and sent to the Melk an der Donau concentration camp. It was only a short journey and, for a change, fairly comfortable, that is, we were not stacked in like sardines but had room enough to sit on the floor. Three hours after we had climbed into the cars we climbed down again.
The Melk KZ, like that of Mauthausen, sat on the crest of a hill overlooking the surrounding countryside. Originally a prison, bearing the name of Freiherr Von Birabo, its immense barracks were large enough to accommodate 15,000 criminals at a time. The picturesque beauty of the countryside mitigated our pain and discomfort: the enormous, baroque-style monastery projected from the rocky hill, and, below, the Danube wound sinuously on its way, forming a picture of unforgettable beauty. The Danube was a river we associated with our home and country. Seeing it now made us feel that home was not quite so far away.
XXXVIII
THE SPRING OF 1945 CAME EARLY. IT was now the beginning of April, and the trees that rose from the ditches lining the barbed-wire fences of Melk were already green. On the banks of the Danube a green carpet replaced the snow, only patches of which remained to remind us of the severe winter through which we had just passed.
I had been living in the KZ for eight weeks, through good days and bad, but the experience had sapped my strength and left me tired and weak. Only the hope of an early liberation kept me from slipping into a state of utter lethargy and indifference.
Here everything was disintegrating. The final phases of the Third Reich’s collapse were unfolding before our eyes. Defeated armies passed in interminable columns towards the interior of a country already reduced to smoking ruins. On the Danube, whose waters were swollen from the melting snows, hundreds of boats and barges transported the inhabitants of evacuated cities. The Third Reich’s dream of a millennium was crumbling. The conviction of a people born to rule, of a Master Race, was giving way to bitter disillusionment. The peoples of Europe, avid for freedom, no longer lived in the fear that their town or city might, by a simple, arbitrary stroke of the conqueror’s pen, be wiped off the map; there was no longer any danger of seeing their homes plundered, of having themselves stripped of all they owned, of feeling the needlepoint tattoo numbers on their arms, of being shipped to forced labor camps and guarded by police dogs and SS troops whose badge was the death’s head.
The pyromaniacs of the Third Reich were now playing their final scene on the stage of the world: they who had set the world aflame were now perishing in their own fires. The raucous-voiced corporal, whose words, “Deutschland Über Alles” had been heard on the wavelengths of the entire world for over a decade, was now trembling in his underground bunker. The uncompromising pride of the Third Reich had been broken by the world-wide collaboration of people not avid of conquest, but of freedom.
On April 7th, 1945, the string of arc lights set on top of the poles to which the barbed wires were fastened did not come on. Darkness and silence closed in on the abandoned spot. The camp was empty, the gate closed. The 7,000 prisoners had been taken farther inland, first by boat, then along the roads swarming with refugees. For seven long days and nights we traveled, till at last we reached our new destination, the Ebensee concentration camp, the fourth KZ through whose yawning gates I had passed.
Upon arrival, the inevitable and interminable roll call. Then the bath. And then again the quarantine camp, with its filthy barracks, its guards armed with rubber clubs, its hard floor. I blindly submitted to these three customary phases. During roll call a cold
wind was blowing and a driving rain soaked my clothes. Bitterness overwhelmed me. I knew that it could only be a matter of days before we were liberated, but for the moment we were still living in a world of confusion and indecision. And yet, when the moment for decision finally arrived, perhaps it would be an ill-starred one for us all. The end of our captivity could quite conceivably turn into a bloody tragedy: they might kill us all before the impending moment of liberation arrived.
After twelve months of imprisonment, at a time when all law had ceased to exist, such an end would indeed be in keeping with the customs of the Third Reich.
But such was not the case. On May 5th a white flag flew from the Ebensee watch tower. It was finished. They had laid down their arms. The sun was shining brightly when, at nine o’clock, an American light tank, with three soldiers aboard, arrived and took possession of the camp.
We were free.
EPILOGUE
SICK AT HEART, AND PHYSICALLY ILL, I started my long voyage homeward. The trip was not a pleasant one: everywhere I looked I saw, where flourishing cities and towns had once stood, nothing but gutted ruins and the collective, white-crossed graves of the dead.
I dreaded the truth, fearing to return to an empty, plundered home, a home where neither parents nor wife, daughter nor sister, would be waiting to greet me with warmth and affection. Persecution and sorrow, the horrors of the crematorium and funeral pyres, my eight months in the kommando of the living dead, had dulled my sense of good and evil.
I felt that I should rest, try to regain my strength. But, I kept asking myself, for what? On the one hand, illness racked my body; on the other, the bloody past froze my heart. My eyes had followed countless innocent souls to the gas chambers, witnessed the unbelievable spectacle of the funeral pyres. And I myself, carrying out the orders of a demented doctor, had dissected hundreds of bodies, so that a science based on false theories might benefit from the deaths of those millions of victims. I had cut the flesh of healthy young girls and prepared nourishment for the mad doctor’s bacteriological cultures. I had immersed the bodies of dwarfs and cripples in calcium chloride, or had them boiled so that the carefully prepared skeletons might safely reach the Third Reich’s museums to justify, for future generations, the destruction of an entire race. And even though all this was now past, I would still have to cope with it in my thoughts and dreams. I could never erase these memories from my mind.
At least twice I had felt the wings of death brush by me: once, prostrate on the ground, with a company of SS trained in the art of summary execution poised above me, I had escaped unharmed. But three thousand of my friends, who had also known the terrible secrets of the crematoriums, had not been so lucky. I had marched for hundreds of kilometers through fields of snow, fighting the cold, hunger, and my own exhaustion, merely to reach another concentration camp. The road I had traveled had indeed been long.
Now, home again, nothing. I wandered aimlessly through silent rooms. Free, but not from my bloody past, nor from the deep-rooted grief that filled my mind and gnawed at my sanity. And the future seemed just as dark. I walked like my own ghost, a restless figure in the once familiar streets. The only times I managed to shake off my state of depression and lethargy was when, mistakenly, I thought for a fleeting second that someone I saw or briefly encountered on the street was a member of my family.
One afternoon, several weeks after my return, I felt chilly and sat down near the fireplace, hoping to derive a little comfort from the cheerful glow that filled the room. It grew late; dusk was falling. The doorbell roused me from my daydreams. Before I could get up to answer it my wife and daughter burst into the room!
They were in good health and had just been freed from Bergen-Belsen, one of the most notorious of the extermination camps. But that was as much as they were able to tell me before breaking down. For hours they sobbed uncontrollably. I was content just to hold them in my arms, while the flood of their grief flowed from their tortured minds and hearts. Their sobs, a language I was well familiar with, slowly subsided.
We had much to do, much to relate, much to rebuild. I knew it would take much time and infinite patience before we could resume any sort of really normal life. But all that mattered was that we were alive . . . and together again. Life suddenly became meaningful again. I would begin practicing, yes . . . But I swore that as long as I lived I would never lift a scalpel again. . . .
1 The quarantine camp was that area to which the prisoners selected for the right-hand column were first sent. They were kept there till they had bathed, been disinfected and shaved, and had traded their civilian clothes for a prisoner’s burlap. Later they were sent to various sections throughout the camp.—Tr.
2 Hoess, the camp commander, testified at Nuremberg that the camp held 140,000 prisoners when filled to capacity.—Tr.
3 Kapo is the abbreviation of Kamaradschafts Polizei. The Kapo-in-chief was generally a German prisoner serving a sentence for some non-political crime. A few of them tried to ease the lot of their fellow sufferers, but most were the faithful servants of the SS.—Tr.
4 Dr. Nyiszli came to the United States in the summer of 1939, and remained until February of 1940, as a member of the Rumanian delegation to the World’s Fair. He had intended to bring his family over and settle in America. But during his stay war broke out and he returned to his family. Once back, it was impossible for him to leave the country again. As a result, Auschwitz.—Tr.
5 In reply to a query concerning the origin and composition of cyclon gas, Dr. Nyiszli wrote that it was manufactured during the war by the I. G. Farben Co., and that, although it was classified as Geheimmittel, that is, confidential or secret, he was able to ascertain that the name “cyclon” came from the abbreviation of its essential elements: cyanide, chlorine and nitrogen. During the Nuremberg trials the Farben Co. claimed that it had been manufactured only as a disinfectant. However, as Dr. Nyiszli pointed out in his testimony, there were two types of cyclon in existence, type A and type B. They came in identical containers; only the marking A and B differentiated them. Type A was a disinfectant; type B was used to exterminate millions.—Tr.
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