Auschwitz (28 page)

Else Abt
³⁸
was one of several hundred German Jehovah's Witnesses sent to Auschwitz. Born in 1914 in Danzig, she was brought up as a Lutheran but introduced to her new faith by friends. She married another Jehovah's Witness, gave birth to a daughter in 1939, and tried to live as peacefully as possible. Her family's troubles began when her husband refused to employ his engineering skills to help the Nazi war effort. He was arrested and she escaped imprisonment only because she was nursing their child. When her daughter was two and a half, however, the Gestapo came for her. In a heartrending scene, with her little girl calling out, “Leave me my mummy! Leave me my mummy!” and grabbing at the trousers of the Gestapo officer, Else Abt was taken away, her child left in the care of friends.

When she arrived at Auschwitz Else noticed a transport in front of her that contained Jewish women. “They were treated worse than animals, from what we could see. These SS men came and treated us humanely, but the
Jewesses weren't treated humanely—that was a shock.” Before Auschwitz, Else Abt had scarcely ever encountered Jews.

Once at Auschwitz, Else Abt was told that all she had to do to secure immediate release was to renounce her faith—the Jehovah's Witnesses were thus the only category of prisoner in the concentration camp system who simply had to sign a declaration to obtain their freedom. But the majority did not, for many, like Else Abt, believed Auschwitz was a test:

And so the German Jehovah's Witnesses became the perfect house-servants for German officers at Auschwitz—much preferred to Poles, who were only used when there weren't enough Witnesses to go around. Else Abt worked in the home of one of the senior SS members, his wife, and their small daughter. She cleaned the house, cooked their meals, and looked after their little girl. Her attitude was that “it wasn't the child's fault [that she was in Auschwitz]. It wasn't the wife's fault.” She performed her duties conscientiously and with compassion—even devotedly nursing the little girl when she fell sick and earning the thanks of her parents.

It was scarcely any wonder, then, that the Jehovah's Witnesses were the prisoners Rudolf Höss liked best—and not just because of their troublefree
behavior. He had first come into contact with them in substantial numbers at Sachsenhausen in the late 1930s, when they were sent to the camp for refusing to do military service. Höss's records the extraordinary power of their belief—something that made a huge impression on him. When they were flogged because they did not conform to the rules of the camp he says that, far from begging for mercy, they asked to be thrashed again so that they could suffer more for their faith. He witnessed the execution of two Witnesses by firing squad, and was astonished to see that they held their hands up to the sky with blissful expressions as they awaited their fate. Höss imagined that the early Christian martyrs must have gone to their deaths the same way.

The behavior of the Jehovah's Witnesses had a huge impact not just on Höss, but on his superior officers as well. “On many occasions,” Höss records,

At Auschwitz, Höss and his wife employed two Jehovah's Witnesses in their own house, and were touched by the care they lavished on their children. Höss describes many of the Witnesses as “wonderful beings.”
⁴⁰
Significantly, Höss also records that he believes the Witnesses felt it was “right” that the Jews should be exterminated, as their ancestors had been the ones who had handed Jesus over to be killed; this, however, is an attitude that Else Abt denies. She believed that the SS was doing wrong—serving a “demon”—by murdering the Jews. However, she thought she should show her own faith by her “attitude.” This created an odd situation—she was faithfully, almost lovingly, looking after the daughter of an SS officer at Auschwitz, while the Nazis denied her access to her own little girl. She explains how she attempted to rationalize her circumstances by saying she felt she had to “do good for any person,” including members of the SS. Indeed, she admits that she would have worked dutifully in Hitler's house had she
been told to. And to add further to this complex emotional mix, she could walk away from the camp and return to her own daughter at any moment she chose, just by signing a paper that stated she had renounced her faith. But Else Abt never signed: “That would have meant compromising. I never did it.”

In a further twist to this strange story, when Else Abt was eventually able to return home after the war, she discovered that her little girl had been looked after by one of the few Jehovah's Witnesses who had renounced their faith in order to gain freedom. “We came to visit him and his wife because they had brought up our daughter, and he cried like a little child because he was a coward.” Else Abt was not particularly grateful to him for taking care of her daughter because “I wouldn't have been worried [about her]. There would always be people who would have helped. We weren't dependent on one person—our creator knows to send us what we need when we need it and will always intervene.” Her daughter became a Jehovah's Witness herself. As a result, Else Abt says,

To those who lack the certainty of faith expressed by Else Abt, it is hard to see how a creator was “looking out” for the Jehovah's Witnesses who Höss describes as being shot in Sachsenhausen. Nor does he seem to have been “looking out” for the Poles, Soviet prisoners, the sick, Jews, and countless others who lost their lives so cruelly at Auschwitz. But one of the intriguing aspects of the theological position taken by Else Abt is that such atrocities are immediately explicable to her—simply evidence of the will of a higher power whom we cannot fully understand but in whom we must have absolute faith. If God permits this to happen, then it is for a reason—it is only that we do not yet fully understand what that reason is.

One must be careful of making an immediate and glib comparison—as Himmler did—between this attitude of mind and the fanaticism of the Nazis, not least because Jehovah's Witnesses—unlike the Nazis—believe in
treating people with compassion and kindness. Nonetheless, if one substitutes “Hitler” for “Jehovah” in Else Abt's testimony the words do bear a striking resemblance to the ideological position taken by SS men like Höss.

As 1942 came to an end, the SS had created a settled environment for itself at Auschwitz. The SS members had their servants, they had their jobs, and, for the most part, they had found a successful way of distancing themselves from the killing. And it was not just at Auschwitz that this process of turning mass murder into an ordered profession was taking place.

Treblinka was transformed during the same period. Franz Stangl had replaced the incompetent Eberl as commandant in September 1942 and had immediately set about reorganizing the camp. Transports were stopped while the bodies that lay littered around were removed and the camp was cleaned up. Both Stangl and Wirth also identified at once the fundamental problem that Eberl had faced in making the killing operation function smoothly—the capacity of the gas chambers. As a result, a much larger gassing facility—a brick building with a central corridor off which ran eight separate small gas chambers—was built immediately. In the new facility, each of the individual chambers could also be accessed from outside, which meant that clearing them of corpses would be much easier than before. The new gas chambers had a total capacity of over 3,000 people, more than six times greater than the previous complex.

Along with the construction of the new gas chambers, which were ready for use by October, Stangl initiated a number of measures that were all calculated to lull the suspicions of the arriving Jews. The hut by the platform where the Jews arrived was painted to look like a normal railway station, with signs for waiting rooms. Flowers were planted in tubs, and the whole reception area was kept as clean and ordered as possible.

Until recently, no one knew exactly how many people were killed during 1942 in death camps like Treblinka. The Nazis destroyed any documentation that would have revealed the truth, and as a consequence estimates varied widely. But a few years ago a discovery was made in the Public Record Office in London that raised our level of knowledge.
⁴¹
It is the text of a German cable, intercepted and then decoded by the British, which contains the statistics of the killing tally of the Operation Reinhard death camps as of December 31, 1942. (After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in
June 1942 the killing operation in Poland had been named “Operation Reinhard” in his “honor.”)

The German cable reveals that Treblinka, Bełźec, Sobibór, and Majdanek (a much smaller-capacity camp in the Lublin district) had so far murdered a total of 1,274,166 people. That figure is further broken down as 24,733 at Majdanek, 101,370 at Sobibór, and 434,508 at Bełźec. The figure given in the intercepted cable for Treblinka is 71,355, but that is obviously a typing error, as to reach the total of 1,274,166 the number killed at Treblinka must be 713,555. Treblinka was thus—officially—the largest killing center in the Nazi state during 1942. Auschwitz was left far behind.

But not for long.

I
n the history of Auschwitz and the Nazis' “Final Solution,” 1943 was a year of transformation. During 1941, the majority of the killing had been committed by special mobile units in the occupied Soviet Union; in 1942, the Operation Reinhard camps dominated the process of mass murder; but now, three years after it was first opened, it was Auschwitz's turn to assume a central role. And, like so much about this history, the reasons for the change are complex and multifaceted.

At some time in early 1943, Himmler toured Treblinka and Sobibór and observed firsthand the work of his killers. The Operation Reinhard camps had so far murdered 1.65 million people (97 percent of the eventual total of 1.7 million people killed in these camps).
¹
As a result of this “success,” on February 16, Himmler ordered the Warsaw ghetto to be liquidated. As Himmler would have perceived it, there was now no need for the ghetto to exist.

Then, in April, the unthinkable happened—that is, unthinkable as far as the Nazis were concerned. The Jews in the Warsaw ghetto started fighting back and, for the first time, the Nazis faced coordinated armed resistance from a determined number of Jews. The conflict could not have occurred in a more exposed place—right in the center of the capital of Poland.
²

The initial deportations from the Warsaw ghetto—the largest ghetto that the Nazis had established—had proceeded without incident during the summer of 1942. About 300,000 Jews had been deported to Treblinka,
leaving a ghetto population of around 60,000. Certain that the Nazis intended to murder them all, more and more of those Jews who remained joined the Jewish Fighting Organization (Źydowska Organizacja Bojowa), which had been established in the ghetto in July 1942. Together with mem bers of the Jewish Military Union (Źydowski Związek Wojskowy) they planned to resist any further attempts at deportation.

There was some resistance to the Nazis' apparent attempt to clear the ghetto in January 1943, but several thousand Jews were still taken. The Jewish leadership believed that its opposition had prevented the total liquidation of the ghetto, but it is now known that the Nazis' action at this time was always intended to reduce the Jewish population by no more than some 8,000. Nonetheless, this act of resistance convinced the Jews that they were capable of frustrating the Germans' intentions. They now prepared to defend themselves against the Nazis' attempt to destroy the ghetto completely, which they knew must come soon.

Ahron Karmi,
³
then twenty-one years old, was one of the Warsaw ghetto Jews planning to resist. He already had experienced one miraculous escape from death the previous year, when he had managed to leap from the train that was carrying his father and himself to Treblinka.