by Jay Winik
In the distance, the prisoners could see tall chimneys dominating the skyline, and bright orange plumes of flame that seemed to shoot into the clouds.
Not knowing what else to do, the prisoners fiddled with their luggage, or whispered hesitantly to a family member, or quietly called out to a friend as though things were normal, when of course they were anything but. Meanwhile, a few camp prisoners with hollow eyes and gaunt bodies managed to slip through the lines of the newcomers, mumbling to old men that they must say they “are younger,” and telling young boys to say that they “are older,” and pleading with all to deny that they were weak, ill, famished, or fatigued. At the same time, a thick cordon of SS men, with eyes like ice, ominously strode back and forth. Soon they began to quickly interrogate the Jews, one by one, in pidgin Dutch, Slovak, Czech, or Hungarian. “How old?” “Healthy or ill?” While the prisoners shuffled into formation, a senior officer climbed onto the platform. The most notorious of these was the Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele. Thrusting out a finger, the senior medical officer would begin to point, left, right, left, right. Anyone who was fit, or robust, or who at least appeared robust, was put in one line. Everyone else—invariably grandparents, the elderly, girls, little children, and babies—was put in another line. One line meant the work camp. The other line meant the gas chambers. The prisoners were separated by sex.
After a packed trainload had arrived, Mengele asked one father, “Old man, what do you do?”
“Farmwork,” he replied hesitantly. He was told to go right, until Mengele shouted for him to return. “Put out your hand!” Mengele slapped him violently across the face and shoved him into the other line—the line for slaughter. “Schnell!” (“Fast!”), he called out. “Schnell!” It was the last time the man’s teenage son ever saw him.
The leashed dogs, German shepherds and Doberman pinschers, continued to bark.
Someone mustered the courage to ask about his luggage. Here the SS proved they were as cunning as they were remorseless. “Luggage afterward,” came the brisk reply. Invariably mothers wanted to stay with their children. The SS said, “Good, good, stay with child.” One husband wanted to accompany his wife—they had been put in different lines—and the SS calmly insisted, “Together again afterward.”
After the selections were made, those slated to die were marched to one of five gas chambers, under a rain of baton blows at every step along the way. Yet they had no idea what lay in store for them; the Nazis had carefully concealed their true intentions at every stage. The prisoners were taken past a gate strung with barbed wire, through double rows of SS men lining a twisted path, and past ominous watchtowers housing German soldiers with machine guns. Each of the crematoriums was like its own Potemkin village, having a separate entrance and concealed partially by a handsome wicker fence, along with elegantly tended flower beds, which gave the entire structure almost a welcoming appearance, even an appearance of repose.
BUT THE INTRICATE LAYERS of false fronts seldom worked completely. Although their march to the chambers was shrouded in mystery, it was also laden with terror. Shivering and anxious, three hundred to four hundred terrified prisoners at a time were hustled to an underground staircase that led to a changing room. The snaking line seemingly stretched the length of several football fields. Still more prisoners usually huddled outside waiting for their turn.
They knew something was amiss—the whole area was ringed with armed SS men and snarling dogs—but for the most part, they remained composed. The reasons varied. They may have been exhausted by their long journey, or cowed by the surroundings, or simply paralyzed by fear. Or perhaps they were somehow seduced by the reassuring sight of a truck marked with a Red Cross parked alongside them. Few wanted to believe in the horror that awaited them. Few could have imagined that they would be reduced to ashes within several hours. In what world was such a ghastly fate possible?
Still, a mother might panic and a child might begin to cry uncontrollably, upon which they were promptly taken behind the building by SS guards. One camp inmate who managed to survive would recall lying in his barracks, his hands pressed to his ears, listening to people being shot outside and knowing that the falling snow was mingling with ashes from the crematorium.
The women, children, and old men were sent in first, and only afterward the healthier, stronger men. When they reached the undressing room they saw that it had the lulling appearance of an international information center. Innocuous-looking signs in French, German, Hungarian, and Greek were displayed, pointing the newcomers to the “Bathroom” and the “Disinfection Room.” In the changing room itself there were orderly benches on which people could comfortably sit—by this stage a welcome respite—as well as clean, numbered coat hooks all along the wall. To complete the pretense, the Nazis told the prisoners to carefully remember the numbers so that they’d be able to find their personal effects more easily after they showered. As the prisoners looked around, they also saw signs with messages such as “Through Cleanliness to Freedom,” “Lice Can Kill,” and “Wash Yourself.” To prevent any resistance, the Germans also promised the famished prisoners a meal just after “disinfection.”
The deceit lasted until the very final moments. To Greek Jews preparing to undress in the anteroom outside the gas chambers, SS Obersturmführer Franz Hossler is recalled to have said, “On behalf of the camp administration I bid you welcome. This is not a holiday resort but a labor camp. Just as our soldiers risk their lives at the front to gain victory for the Third Reich, you will have to work here for the welfare of a new Europe. How you tackle this task is entirely up to you. The chance is there for every one of you. We shall look after your health, and we shall also offer you well-paid work. After the war we shall assess everyone according to his merits and treat him accordingly.”
Still speaking in a calm tone, Hossler added, “Now, would you please all get undressed. Hang your clothes on the hooks we have provided and please remember your number. When you’ve had your bath there will be a bowl of soup and coffee or tea for all. Oh yes, before I forget, after your bath, please have ready your certificates, diplomas, school reports and any other documents so that we can employ everybody according to his or her training and ability.” And finally, “Would diabetics who are not allowed sugar report to staff on duty after their baths?”
Despite the Nazis’ best efforts, the children were inevitably terrified. The setting was too bizarre, too cold, too forbidding. Many mothers, by now almost delusional with hope, hurried to be first in line and get it all over with as quickly as possible, if only for the sake of their children. Still, even the sight of what looked like showerheads was not enough to dispel the doubts that crept in. Nor was the fact that sometimes the SS, actually wearing white coats, ladled out soap and handed out towels before they slammed the heavy doors to the gas chambers.
Typically at this stage, the prisoners began to whisper to each other.
The men were the last to be shoved into the chambers. As many as two thousand people were now tightly wedged like paving stones in a room built to accommodate only half that number. Two thousand was almost as many people as were cut down in Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, or about the same number as the Allied dead at the bitter battle of El Alamein in North Africa, or slightly more than half the number who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
All that remained was to wait.
The waiting, sometimes lasting two hours, was hell. It was punctuated by little moments of cruelty. The SS often amused themselves by flicking the lights on and off in the gas chamber, a perverse form of torture. When no water came out of the showerheads and the light was flicked off, the prisoners began to shriek hysterically; they now knew they were somehow going to die. But when the light was flicked on again, there was a sound, a huge collective sigh by people hopeful that the operation had been canceled and they had miraculously been given a reprieve.
They hadn’t. The massive airtight door to the gas chamber was locked with an iron bolt
that screwed tight. With ruthless efficiency, the SS opened a tin of Zyklon B and emptied it into a special cone. An SS doctor supervised the entire operation; he would watch through a peephole consisting of a double pane of glass and a thick metal grid strong enough to withstand the desperate blows of the suffocating prisoners. Now, the lights were turned off for the last time.
It was dark; no one could see.
The end began with a series of small actions.
After the bolting of the door, the gas quickly began to fill the room, not from the ceiling, as one would expect, but from the ground upward. Little children began to violently hug their parents—though too often, terrified boys and girls became separated from their parents and scrambled around, desperately calling for them. Their hearts racing, couples held hands. Then the screaming began. And so did a terrible struggle. Those standing nearest the gas fell dead almost immediately. But many of the others fought for life with every ounce of their strength. They huddled together, they screamed together, they gasped for air together. And tragically, they often struggled against one another bitterly in those final minutes. Instinctively, hundreds of people tried to push their way to the door, since they knew where it was. They hoped to force their way out; in the process, however, the weaker people, the aged, and the children were trampled, their crushed bodies piling up. Meanwhile, some victims sought to climb higher, because the higher they got the more air there was. Once again, the strongest were on the top, and in these last horrid death battles, as one survivor later observed, “the father had no way of knowing that his little son lay beneath him.”
Children’s skulls were crushed. Flailing in the dark, hundreds of people were battered beyond recognition. There was the stench of vomit and of blood—from noses and ears—and everywhere human excrement.
As the minutes passed and the steel door would not budge, the gas kept coming. Soon the bloodcurdling screams turned into a death rattle, and the death rattle turned into the faintest of gasps. Within minutes, everyone had collapsed, and the bodies began to shut down. Their hands moved weakly; their feet kicked pathetically; their eyes clouded over. After twenty minutes, the job was done.
Standing outside the heavy, reinforced door, the supervising doctors followed the killing. Most didn’t watch. In the words of Hans Munch, one of the Nazi doctors at Auschwitz, “The door was thick. You could hear a noise. You could compare that noise to the sound of a beehive . . . a certain buzzing sound. And if you did this frequently, you didn’t have to look. You would know only by listening.”
When they were all dead, a ventilator sucked out the poison gas. In gas chambers five and six, where there were no ventilators, the doors were simply opened.
The bodies lay in great heaps, three feet or four feet high, or more.
After the dead were cleared away, the Nazis would repeat the process all over again within a matter of hours.
A LITTLE GIRL ON HER way to Auschwitz wrote, “Of what use is the sun in a world without day? Of what use is a God when his only duty is to punish?”
WHILE THESE KILLINGS WERE in progress, the surviving inmates, only months from their own deaths, simply waited. Noisy engines ran and horns roared to drown out the cries and other sounds of the dying, but the remaining prisoners knew better. As it happened, it was not the Germans or Poles, but a special squad of the Sonderkommando—invariably Jewish inmates pressed into service—who pulled the corpses out of the gas chamber. Their job was agonizing. It was also backbreaking. More often than not the bodies were so twisted together that they were difficult to disentangle. After ripping them apart, the workers of the Sonderkommando had to pry gold teeth systematically out of the gums of the dead; wrench wedding rings from their fingers; and, stepping over the mounds of bodies, separate those who had died clutching their loved ones. They even were ordered to tear open the anuses and vaginas of the cadavers to look for hidden jewelry. Mute, with dazed expressions, they meticulously cut off the flowing hair of the dead women, sorting it first into huge piles before stuffing it into large sacks. Sweating and numb with horror, the squads then carted the corpses in tubs, up to ten freshly murdered people at a time, to the ovens, where they were laid out on stretchers before being inserted. Because the ovens worked overtime, the crematoriums repeatedly overheated and failed, so specialists from Berlin were constantly being called in to repair the equipment. When the crematoriums were temporarily disabled, the corpses were instead burned in mass graves, or incineration trenches. Even for the Nazis, it was a laborious, complicated process.
With the SS guards supervising, the Sonderkommando had to repeatedly stoke great fires. With heavy steel hooks, they stirred the burning bodies. As the fire took hold of the corpses, there came the sweetish smell of burning flesh—“an inconvenient smell of smoke” was how one Nazi doctor once laconically described it—and the smoke slowly wafted into the camp and settled over the town of Auschwitz itself.
Chillingly, when the dead were reduced to ashes, these were never buried but were instead put to use. The fine, gray remains were used not only to fertilize the fields of the camp’s farms, but also as filler for new roads and walking paths, and even for insulating the SS barracks against the frigid Polish cold. Any unburned bones, usually the pelvic bones, were smashed to dust. As for the piles of human hair? They were warmed on the rooftops of the crematorium.
No detail was too small for the German Reich, and at Auschwitz, the Germans seemingly overlooked nothing. The Nazis benefited immensely from the dead. The piles of leftover eyeglasses—whether the lenses were cracked or perfect and the frames bent or broken—were turned over to the state. The piles of human hair, whether coarse or fine, light or dark, were used to stuff mattresses, or spun into thread, or turned into rope. Hair was also made into felt for the Nazi machinery of war. Customers paid handsomely for these human products: the Bremen Wool Carding company offered 50 pfennig per kilo; the Alex Zink Felt Factory near Nuremberg was another purchaser. And fertilizer companies purchased bags of human bonemeal from the SS.
Then there was the luggage of the dead, which was laboriously collected and sorted. Here, again, no source of loot was overlooked. There were the stacks of food and the coats, shirts, socks, silks, minks, overcoats, black frock coats, blouses embroidered with gold, furs of all kinds, belts, and underwear; there were vials of medicine and hundreds of thousands of pills; and there were the cartloads of household goods and crates of chairs, tables, and rugs. Moreover, there were wads of cash in various currencies, lire, francs, English pounds, and black market dollars, not to mention the assorted clocks, glittering gems and other fine jewelry, and even little bottles of Chanel. There were, too, delicately perfumed soaps and eau de cologne. And that was hardly all. The volume of shoes alone was mind-numbing: farmers’ shoes, merchants’ shoes, soldiers’ shoes, old shoes, new shoes, boots and rubbers, leggings and slippers, shoes worn right through the soles, shoes of gleaming new leather. They were black and gray and red, even white. There were high heels, low heels, shoes with open toes. There were evening slippers and Dutch wooden shoes, pumps and beach sandals and high laced women’s shoes. There were the small buckle shoes of so many little children taken from their mothers. These personal effects were housed in thirty separate barracks surrounded by barbed wire; the storage grounds were called “Canada”—Canada because the inmates who came up with the name thought it to be a fabulously rich nation.
The effects of the dead became state property, and the German people its recipients. The treasures were immense: Every month more than a ton of jewels, melted nuggets of gold, and bundles of currency were loaded into heavy, lead-lined boxes, which were shipped to Berlin. German pilots and U-boat crews were awarded the wristwatches of the dead; so were Berliners whose homes had been reduced to rubble by the Allied air raids. Ethnic German settlers received countless household goods, French perfumes, toilet soaps, and textiles; tots in Berlin received the collected children’s toys. The notorious Reichsbank received precious metals; the ambitious
Reich Youth Leadership received money; the insatiable German manufacturer IG Farben received gold and silver. The troops on the eastern front received remodeled fur coats, while hundreds of thousands of men’s shirts and women’s blouses were sent to cities and towns inside Germany. As for such rare luxuries as diamonds and jewel-encrusted bracelets? The SS simply pocketed these themselves. Even the civilians of the town of Auschwitz wanted to profit from the repositories of goods; they asked camp administrators if the belongings of the dead might be for sale at a discount, or better still, be given away.
There had once been a time when the Germans rode the crest of a great age: they were champions of the arts and sciences, and lovers of literature. They supported the finest poetry, the grandest music, and the best of philosophy. But now, as D-Day approached, they specialized in one thing and one thing only: the science of murder.
3
Escape, Part 1
SOUTH CAROLINA WAS HARDLY Roosevelt’s first trip south while he was in office. He returned time and again to heal in the waters at Warm Springs during his years in the White House, and after the 1940 election, Roosevelt had taken a ten-day cruise through the Caribbean for pleasure and relaxation. In fact, in the spring of 1944, he had originally hoped to go to the Caribbean again, to fish and sun himself at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, though his fragile health and the exigencies of war made such a trip impossible.
