A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy

by Thomas Buergenthal

  Years later, when asked about Auschwitz and what it was like, I would reply that I was lucky to get into Auschwitz. This response would invariably produce a shocked look on the face of the person who had asked the question. But I really meant what I said. Most people who arrived at the Birkenau rail platform had to undergo a so-called selection. Here the children, the elderly, and the invalids were separated from the rest of the people in their transport and taken directly to the gas chambers. Our group was spared the selection process. The SS officers in charge must not have ordered it because they probably assumed, since our transport came from a labor camp, that children and others not able to work had already been eliminated in those camps. Had there been a selection, I would have been killed before ever making it into the camp. That is what I meant with my flippant remark about being lucky to get into Auschwitz.

  Of course, when we arrived in Birkenau, I did not know what to expect, nor did I know that I had escaped the deadly selection process. As soon as we stepped out of our freight cars onto the station platform, all men were ordered to line up on one side and all women on the other. But for one brief moment a few months later, this was the last time I was to see my mother until we were reunited on December 29, 1946, almost two and half years after our separation. We could not really say good-bye, because the SS guards were constantly yelling for us to move, hitting and kicking anyone who did not immediately do what they were ordered to do. I was too scared to cry or even to wave to her and stayed close to my father.

  My father held on to me as we were marched away from the station toward a big building. Here we were ordered to take off our clothes and made to run through some showers and a disinfecting foot pool. Along the way, our hair was shorn off, and we were thrown the same blue and white striped prison uniforms we had seen on entering Auschwitz. It was at this point that my father whispered to me that we had made it, for it was only when we had received the uniforms that he could be sure that we were not being taken to the gas chambers.

  With that process behind us, we were again ordered to line up and march. We must have walked for quite some time before we came upon rows and rows of barracks as far as the eye could see. Streets — actually unpaved roads — cut through the long rows of barracks. High barbed wire fences on either side of the rows of barracks divided what looked like a large town into sizable individual camps, each with its own gate and guard towers. Later I was to learn that these individual camps were identified by letters of the alphabet. For example, women were housed in camps B and C, men in camp D, and so on. Our destination was camp E, better known as the Gypsy camp. That camp had housed many thousands of Gypsy families. All of them — men, women, and children — were murdered shortly before we arrived. Only the name remained to remind us of yet another horrendous crime committed in the name of the master race.

  The entrance to the Gypsy camp, consisting of a movable barbed wire gate, was guarded by the SS with their dogs. Once inside the camp, we were ordered to line up in single file behind a group of barracks and made to roll up our left sleeves. At one end of the line, two inmates sat at a wooden table. Each of us had to move up to the table, state our name, and stretch out our left arm. I was walking ahead of my father in the line and did not quite know what was happening. Then I saw that each inmate at the table was holding something that looked like a pen with a thin needle at the end, and that they were writing something on the outstretched arms after dunking the pens into an ink pot: we were being tattooed. When my turn came, I was afraid that it would hurt, but it went so fast that I could hardly feel it. Now I had a new name: B-2930, and it was the only “name” that mattered here. The number, now somewhat faded, is still there on my left arm. It remains a part of me and serves as a reminder, not so much of my past, but of the obligation I deem incumbent on me, as a witness and survivor of Auschwitz, to fight the ideologies of hate and of racial and religious superiority that have for centuries caused so much suffering to mankind.

  My father, who was right behind me in the tattoo line, became B-2931. Our numbers were also printed on a strip of cloth with a yellow triangle, the color identifying us as Jews. (There were different colors to distinguish between different types of inmates. Political prisoners, for example, were given red triangles. Other colors were assigned to homosexuals, criminals, and so on.) Some forty-five years later, when I returned to Auschwitz and gave the person in charge of the archives my name in order to find out when precisely I had arrived there in 1944, she asked for my number. I looked surprised since I had always heard that the Germans kept very precise records in their camps. “By the time you arrived,” she explained, “there was such a large influx of new arrivals that the SS no longer bothered to record the names of inmates, only their numbers.” Sure enough, once she had my number, she was able to provide the date I needed. The card with my number even disclosed how many people had come with me to Auschwitz from Kielce. It occurred to me then that unlike those of us who survived Auschwitz and can document our existence in that camp by reference to our numbers, those prisoners who died in its crematoriums after the SS had stopped recording their names have left behind no trace of their presence in that terrible place. No bodies, no names; only ashes and numbers. It is hard to imagine a greater affront to human dignity.

  After we had been tattooed, we were assigned to our barracks. Ours was a wooden structure like all the others in the Gypsy camp, with a mud floor that divided two long rows of wide, triple-level, wooden bunks. Once in the barrack, we were greeted by a burly prisoner with a cane. This, I was to learn right away, was the Blockältester, or barrack boss. He kept pointing to the bunks and yelling in Polish and Yiddish, “Ten men to each level!” Whoever did not move fast enough for him was hit or kicked. My father and I found a bunk, picked the middle level, and were soon joined by eight other inmates. Then we were ordered to lie on our stomachs with our heads pointing toward the middle of the barrack. I can’t recall whether we were given blankets, but I am sure that we had no mattresses.

  Although we were not given anything to eat that evening, the very thought of food was forced out of my mind by what happened that night. Into the barrack strutted two or three well-fed inmates with canes and clubs. They wore armbands that identified them as Kapo. Kapos were inmates who, together with the barrack bosses, ran the camp for the SS and terrorized their fellow inmates, day in and day out. Right after the Kapos had greeted our barrack boss, one of them yelled in German, “Spiegel, you son of a bitch. Get down. We want to talk to you!” As soon as Spiegel stood before them, the men surrounded him and started to hit him with their fists and clubs: on his face, his head, his legs, his arms. The more Spiegel begged for mercy and screamed, the more the Kapos beat him. From what I could make out as the Kapos yelled while beating him, Spiegel had apparently denounced one of them to the Gestapo in Kielce, with the result that the denounced man had been sent to Auschwitz some two years earlier.

  Spiegel was soon on his knees and then flat on the ground, begging to be allowed to die. He was covered with blood and no longer really trying to protect himself against the blows that continued to rain down on him. The Kapos then picked up Spiegel and began to push and pull him out of the barrack. We did not see what happened next. Later we heard that the Kapos had dragged Spiegel to the fence and that he died on the fence. Our camp, like the others in Birkenau, was enclosed by a highly electrified fence that emitted a perennial buzz. The fence separated those of us in the Gypsy camp from camp D on one side and camp F on the other. A single wire strung about a meter high and a meter from the fence on either side warned inmates not to get any closer lest they be electrocuted. Spiegel must have died by being thrown against the fence or by crawling into it. Gradually, I came to realize that it was not uncommon for inmates to commit suicide by what was known as “walking into the fence.”

  It is difficult not to wonder whether it ever occurred to these Kapos that they were no different from Spiegel. He denounced fellow Jews to the Gestapo because he believed that
he was thereby prolonging his own life, whereas the Kapos allowed themselves to become the surrogates of the SS by beating their fellow inmates, forcing them to work to total exhaustion, and depriving them of their rations, knowing full well that by these actions they hastened the deaths of the prisoners. All that in order to improve the Kapos’ own chances of survival. Thus, besides testing the morality of those who became neither informers nor Kapos, the concentration camps were laboratories for the survival of the brutish. Both Spiegel and the Kapo he had denounced had been friends of my parents. Both had been with us in Katowice. At that time they had been my “uncles.” I seem to recall that the Kapo whom Spiegel had denounced had been a dental technician or a dentist in his prior life; I never knew what Spiegel’s profession had been. Had they not ended up in the camps, they probably would have remained decent human beings. What is it in the human character that gives some individuals the moral strength not to sacrifice their decency and dignity, regardless of the costs to themselves, whereas others become murderously ruthless in the hope of ensuring their own survival?

  I remember very little about my activities in the days immediately following the Spiegel beating. Of course, I thought a lot about my mother and missed her very much. I wondered what she was doing, whether they had also cut off her hair as they had ours, whether she had enough to eat, and whether she had to live in a barrack similar to ours. In those early days, I was also introduced to the Auschwitz feeding system. We would be awakened early in the morning and made to line up in front of a big kettle from which an inmate with a ladle would pour out a liquid that looked like black coffee. Next to him stood the barrack boss, cutting slices of black bread. The bread was frequently moldy and the slices rather small. I soon noticed that not everyone got the same amount of bread. Those the barrack boss did not like would get a smaller piece or no bread at all, while his friends and he himself would keep whole loaves. Complaints would invite a beating. In the evening, we would be served the day’s only other meal. It consisted, as a rule, of some tasteless, watery turnip soup. Since we got no bread in the evening, I would try to save a little piece of my morning bread for later in the day, hiding it very carefully so that it would not be stolen.

  That, more or less, was all we had to eat. On such a diet, some people gradually became Muselmans, the name given to inmates who had become totally emaciated, walked around in a stupor, stopped eating altogether, and in no time died quietly. I soon learned that if somebody became a Muselman, he would not live very long. That was the fate of a friend of my parents whom I had called “Uncle” for as long as I could remember. He and his wife had been with us in Katowice. He was Jewish; she was not. And while, as a German gentile, she could have left him and gone back to Germany, she refused to do so and helped him as best she could. In Kielce, she lived outside the ghetto and somehow managed to get food to him; she did the same in the labor camp. I still remember them talking over the fence in the ghetto. Access to Auschwitz or anywhere near the camp was closed to her, and he, a big man, simply could not live on the rations we received. When I saw him a few weeks after we had arrived in Auschwitz, he was the skinniest human being I had ever seen. He no longer recognized my father or me and kept mumbling to himself. After the war, my mother and I visited his wife, who had returned to her native Hamburg. Of course, she wanted to know when I had last seen her husband and whether I knew what had happened to him. I lied and told her that the last time I had seen him, he was his usual friendly self, although somewhat thinner. I simply could not bring myself to tell this woman, whom we all admired for her courage and loyalty to her husband, the truth about his last days. She had suffered enough.

  I do not remember how long my father and I remained in the barrack we occupied when we first arrived in the Gypsy camp. A Kapo who took part in the terrible beating of Spiegel was in charge of a barrack that served as a kind of warehouse, where the clothing taken from people on their arrival in Auschwitz was sorted and eventually shipped out. Where it went, I never knew. To help us, the Kapo had my father and me and a few of his other friends from Kielce assigned to his barrack. We slept there and worked there. In many ways, this was a lifesaving break for us. We were no longer subjected to the maltreatment dished out in the other barrack, we had a little more food, and we had a bunk bed with blankets and a straw mattress. Equally important, we could keep warm with some of the clothes stored in the barrack.

  In our new barrack, my father and I shared a bunk with my friend Walter and his stepfather. Walter had managed to avoid being murdered with the children of Kielce because he was a few years older than most of them and was rather tall. After we had moved into our new barrack, Walter got very sick. His father took him to the infirmary, where he was admitted after being diagnosed with diphtheria. The barracks serving as the infirmary of the Gypsy camp were located kitty-corner across from our barrack. Less than a week after Walter had entered the infirmary, we were awakened one night by terrible noises coming from across the street. SS trucks with their motors running were standing outside the infirmary, while SS guards herded screaming patients into the trucks. Of course, the patients knew that they were being taken to the gas chambers, and we knew that the SS was thinning out the population of the infirmary to make room for new patients. They would do that every few weeks; that is why it was so dangerous to go to the infirmary. In the morning, we learned that Walter was among those who had been taken away. His stepfather kept blaming himself for Walter’s death because he had taken him to the infirmary, but we all knew that he had had no choice, given Walter’s illness. I still do not understand how it was possible for Walter to come down with diphtheria while I, sleeping next to him, escaped being infected. Was it just luck, or is it possible that he did not really have this highly contagious disease?

  Every few weeks, the SS would enter the Gypsy camp and embark on its periodic selections. These selections were usually conducted by one or two SS doctors, most often under the supervision of the infamous Dr. Mengele, known as the Angel of Death, whose very name made me tremble with fear. The selections would take place early in the morning, after all the inmates had been lined up in front of their barracks and counted. Even when there was no selection, the daily counting process was an ordeal that could take hours, particularly when someone appeared to be missing. The missing person usually turned out to be an inmate who had died overnight. The daily counting was frequently accompanied by beatings and at times also by hangings. Soon after we had arrived in Auschwitz, my father, seeing how routine selections were conducted and that children were most at risk, came up with a strategy to beat the system. Every morning when we had to line up for the daily counting exercise, I would try to stand all the way in the back and very close to the entrance of the barrack. As soon as we had been counted and if it appeared that there might be a selection, I would try to slip back into the barrack and hide. That strategy saved me a number of times. It was not always easy to execute, however, because I had to disappear without being seen by the SS or the barrack boss, but I was never caught.

  Selections were sometimes also conducted randomly. Mengele would enter the camp with some of his assistants and order any children or sick or old people he encountered in the barracks or walking outside to be taken away. My father discussed this problem with our Kapo friend, who suggested that a real job might provide me with some protection. A few days later, I was hired by the Kapo of the sauna, as the camp’s bathhouse was called. Here newly arrived inmates from other subcamps were given a walk-through shower and had their clothes disinfected. My job — I now think that it may have been created as a favor to my father’s friend — consisted mainly of running errands for my new boss. Whenever an SS guard stopped me somewhere in the camp, which happened from time to time, I would identify myself as the sauna’s errand boy and be permitted to be on my way. The job gave me a greater sense of security than I had had before when meeting up with an SS guard, although it was always hard not to tremble when called over by one of them.


  At times too I would have to deliver a message or a package to someone at another camp. I try in vain to recall how I was able to leave and come back, but I remember being sent once, together with another person, to one of the crematoriums (we used that term generically to refer both to the gas chambers and the crematoriums). We had to pick up the gas my sauna boss needed for the disinfection of clothes. Of course, I was terribly afraid to go near the place but had to do it anyway. When we got there, we were greeted by inmates who worked at the crematoriums. Their job was to remove the bodies from the gas chambers and burn them in the crematoriums. They were all strong young men who joked around with us, probably because they sensed that we were terrified to be so close to the gas chambers. After we told them what we had come for, they gave us some containers of gas to take back to the sauna. The person who had accompanied me thought that we had been given the same Zyklon gas that was used to kill people in the gas chambers. I have no way of knowing whether that was true, although it made some sense, considering that we got it from the crematorium.

  The air in Auschwitz always smelled foul because of the smoke that came out of the crematorium chimneys. The odor and smoke was strongest with every new transport that arrived in Birkenau, because the people who could not pass the initial selection process on the station platform were immediately herded into the gas chambers. Whenever the crematoriums were being operated at night, the sky above them would take on a reddish brown color. One summer, many decades after the war, I visited Auschwitz and saw birds and wildflowers in what used to be Birkenau. It suddenly struck me that I had never seen a bird before in Auschwitz. The smoke must have kept them away. Nor can I remember seeing any grass or trees there. The soil turned to mud when it rained and remained mud for days on end, except in the winter when a mixture of dirty snow and ice covered the ground.