But Enough About You: Essays (18 page)

Sixty thousand, out of about one and a half million, survived Auschwitz. If you made it through the first weeks, you stood a chance of making it. Some even managed to survive five years, from 1940 to 1945. By contrast, out of six hundred thousand at Belzec, three people survived.

It feels colder inside the cell blocks, where the exhibits are. There is a blown-up photograph of Himmler viewing Auschwitz’s first inmates, Soviet POWs. Polish political prisoners, the intelligentsia, priests followed. Two years later, with the construction of the much larger Birkenau three kilometers away, the camp became ground zero for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”

Between October 1941 and March 1942, some ten thousand Soviet prisoners died here. Jarek as well as the exhibits use the word
murder
instead of die, or kill, or exterminate. It takes some time before the ear, accustomed to modern euphemisms, adjusts to the straightforward terminology.

“The method for murdering the Soviets was in many cases simple,” Jarek says. “Put them in a field, surround them with barbed wire, and leave them.” Some became so resigned from hunger that
they would climb themselves onto the wagons of corpses. There was cannibalism. In Tadeusz Borowski’s short story “The Supper,” a group of Russians who have tried to escape are lined up, arms tied behind them with barbed wire, and shot point-blank through the back of the head in front of a crowd of starving prisoners. The prisoners clamor and rush forward and must be dispersed with clubs. “The following day . . . a Jew from Estonia who was helping me haul steel bars tried to convince me all day that human brains are, in fact, so tender you can eat them raw.” Borowski was at Auschwitz. He survived and later put his head in a gas stove at the age of twenty-nine.

More exhibits. The Nazis kept meticulous records, which in the end meant that there was a vast amount to destroy as the Red Army approached in January 1945. Every death—murder—was written down. Jarek points to a photocopy of a ledger that survived. “The reason given was never ‘bullet’ or ‘gas,’ but instead ‘heart attack’ or ‘kidney function.’ ” Deaths are listed in intervals of minutes.

In the next case are photocopies of transit passes for the trucks that brought the cannisters of Zyklon B pellets. The contents are listed as “material for the displacement of Jews.” Here are the minutes from the Wannsee Conference outside Berlin on January 20, 1942, the meeting of the board of directors of the corporation in charge of the Final Solution. These are free of euphemism. One page shows the goal: a column of numbers, country-by-country tallies, with a bottom line of eleven million.

Up a flight of stairs, around a corner. No more paperwork. Now it becomes vivid: two tons of human hair behind glass. Mounds upon mounds, amorphous and hard to take in at first, until you focus and see the pigtails and braids. Jarek remarks that they were going to send some of this to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, but in the end it was declined as “too much.” The hair was shorn after the gassings, then efficiently dried in the crematoria so it could be industrially spun into carpeting.

Here is a large pile of spectacles, a spidery mass of rusted wire-frames and dusty lenses. These were left with the clothing in the dressing rooms, so the last things seen through these glasses would have been nervous kapos and Death’s-Head guards.

Behind another wall of glass is a jumble of rusted artificial limbs, canes, crutches, braces. Like the hair, it blurs into abstraction until the eye settles on a child’s fake leg. Now it’s into another room and the suitcases, piles and piles of shriveled leather suitcases. They wrote their names on them in large white letters. Jarek points out the word for “orphan” in Dutch. Hundreds of names. I write down one: PETR EISLER 1942 KIND. The year of his birth and his child—
kinder
—status. In the next room comes the display of children’s clothing, pacifiers, rattles, hairbrushes. Then the shoes, a mountain of them. Finally the empty canisters of Zyklon B, perhaps a hundred or more, in a pile. By the calculations of Rudolph Hoss, Auschwitz’s first commandant, it required seven kilos of Zyklon to murder—not the word he used—1,500 people, so this pile here might have sufficed for perhaps 75,000 or 100,000 human beings. It appears from the tops that they refined the process of opening the cans. Some are jagged, others have been smoothly cut, as if in one motion by a machine. Across from this display is a clay diorama of a gas chamber in action. Once everyone was inside, between 700 and 1,500, depending on which of the five gas chambers it was, the doors and windows were sealed tight. The bluish pellets of diatomite soaked in hydrocyanic acid were poured through chutes. Exposed to oxygen, the pellets gave off prussic acid, blocking the exchange of oxygen in the blood. Those close to the chutes died instantly, the ones farther away took longer. Hoss watched one gassing through a peephole. In his
Reminiscences
before he was hanged in 1947 he describes clinically that it took two or more minutes before the screams turned to moans. Still they didn’t open the doors for half an hour, just in case. After that it was safe for the
Sonderkommando
, the prisoner work crews, to wade into the tangle of bodies, vomit, and excrement to get the hair and the gold teeth and drag the bodies next door to the crematorium. The work paid well and was competed for: one-fifth liter of vodka, five cigarettes, a hundred grams of sausage for each job.

It’s gotten colder outside. We’re approaching Block 10 now, where Professor Doctor Carl Clauberg, a university professor of
gynecology described by Borowski as “a man in a green hunting outfit and a gay little Tyrolian hat decorated with many brightly shining sports emblems, a man with the face of a kindly satyr,” sterilized women and men with chemicals and roentgens and infected children with disease, for science. He was released from prison by the Soviets in 1956. Jarek says, “He went back to Germany and took out an advertisement in the newspaper saying, ‘Dr. Clauberg is seeking an assistant.’ He did not even change his name.” A trace of a smile. “He was arrested and died the same year, of poor health.” Elsewhere at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dr. Josef Mengele performed his experiments on twins and dwarves.

In the courtyard between Block 10 and Block 11 is the Wall of Death. There is a sign urging quiet, so you approach slowly and reverently, as you might an important tomb. Visitors have placed six bouquets of flowers at its base. A woman is crouching, trying to get a red votive candle lit. People have left pebbles in every inch of the creases in the wall, in the Jewish manner of mourning. Jarek tells what happened here. Prisoners who had been tried by the SS, for trying to escape, taking food, for whatever reason, were taken out into the courtyard naked, in twos. A strong kapo, who before he came here had worked in the circus, held them face to the wall. An SS man shot them at the base of the skull, with a short air pistol if there were a lot of executions to be done, so that the camp would not ring with incessant gunshots.

A former prisoner, a Dr. Boleslaw Zbozien, described what he witnessed here one day:

Sometime, I cannot remember the exact date, we encountered [SS sergeant-major Gerhard] Palitzsch on the streets of the camp at Auschwitz. Before him, he was driving a man and a woman. The woman was carrying a small child in her arms, and two larger children, around four and seven years old, walked next to her. The entire group was walking in the direction of Block 11. I made it with some colleagues to Block 21 in time. From a window in a room on the ground floor, we gazed out at the courtyard to Block 11, standing on a table
in the room. As long as I live, the scene that played out before my eyes will be engraved in my memory. The man and woman did not resist when Palitzsch stood them before the Wall of Death. It all took place in the greatest calm. The man held the hand of the child who stood on his left side. The second child stood between them; they both held his hand. The mother clasped the youngest to her breast. Palitzsch first shot the baby through the head. The shot to the back of the head exploded its skull . . . and induced massive bleeding. The baby struggled like a fish, but the mother only held him more firmly to herself. Palitzsch next shot the child standing in the middle. The man and woman . . . continued to stand without moving, like statues. Later, Palitzch struggled with the oldest child, who would not allow himself to be shot. He threw him to the ground and shot him at the base of the head while standing on his shoulders. He then shot the woman, and at the very last, the man. This was the greatest monstrosity . . . After that, although many executions were carried out, I did not watch them.

We place our pebbles. Jarek says, “Between five thousand and twenty thousand people were shot here.”

We go into Block 11. The faded sign above the door reads,
BLOK SMIERCI
.

Block of Death. Just inside the door on the left is the room where they held the proceedings. Jarek remarks that the SS officer who sentenced five thousand Poles here to die was still alive last year, living in Germany, age ninety-two. We ask why. He shrugs. At the far end on the corridor, on the left, looking out into the courtyard, is the room where the condemned were stripped and held. An illustration depicts a naked girl holding on to her mother’s legs as the SS guard comes for them. High on the wall, a prisoner scratched graffiti, a name and the date and the words, “Sentenced to die.” Beneath that is the date of the next day and the words, “I’m still here.”

In the basement of Block 11, the first gassing with Zyklon B took place. Six hundred Soviet POWs and two hundred and fifty Poles
were locked in. They poured in the pellets. It took twenty hours to kill—murder—them all. This is how they learned the correct dosage.

Cell 18 was the “Starvation Cell.” If a prisoner escaped, the
Lagerfuhrer
, or commandant, would select ten prisoners from the escapee’s block. They would be shut in this cell without food or water and left to die. Generally this took a week.

In August of 1941 there was an escape. One of the prisoners, Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Franciscan missionary, asked the commandant to let him take the place of one of the ten men selected to starve. Father Kolbe was still alive in the cell two weeks later, after the others had all died. They finished him off with an injection of carbolic acid. He was canonized as a Roman Catholic saint by Pope John Paul II in 1981. Candles burn in the cell for him and the others who were murdered here.

In another room in the basement of Block 11 are the four “Standing Cells.” Each measures about a yard square, with a small hole for ventilation. Four prisoners were crammed in at a time and left all night, sent out to work in the morning, and returned here at night. This punishment might last three days, or two weeks. The sign says that it produced “extreme emaciation and a slow, agonising death.”

In the hall as we leave the basement I ask what the pipes are. Jarek explains that it’s the only cell block in Auschwitz with central heating. “Because it was officially a Gestapo prison, it had to be heated.” The second and last smile of the day. “Rules.”

We walk past Cell Block 21, where Doctor Zbozien witnessed the murder of the Polish family, past a memorial stone left by President Chaim Herzog of Israel with a quote from Psalms 38:18, “My sorrow is continually before me.” We walk past the gallows where they hanged prisoners twelve at a time, past the cell block where the whorehouse was on the second floor. “It was Himmler’s idea, to give incentive to the non-Jewish prisoners.” Borowski wrote about this in one of his stories. The prisoners’ name for it was “Puff.”

Outside the barbed wire you come to Gas Chamber and Crematorium Number I, Auschwitz’s first functional one after the initial experiment in the basement of Block 11. Seventy thousand were murdered here. It’s the only intact crematorium out of five at Auschwitz.
The SS dynamited the other four at Birkenau as the Red Army was closing in.

We stand inside and look up through the opening where SS men in gas masks poured the pellets. Through the door at the end are the ovens. These could incinerate 340 bodies a day. Jarek shows how the slide worked. It still does. A bouquet of roses has been left on one. The German company that made these, he says, finally went bankrupt in the 1960s.

A short lunch in the cafeteria, borscht and croquettes and nonalcoholic beer, since they don’t serve alcohol at Auschwitz, no matter how much you could use a drink. Soup for the prisoners consisted of nettles and water. Morning tea was brewed from oak leaves. For dinner, wormy bread with a smear of lard. Some of the survivors weighed sixty pounds.

Birkenau is a five-minute car ride. This is Konzentrationlager Auschwitz II, Auschwitz concentration camp number two, built in 1942 in pursuance of the Wannsee Conference goals. “Compared to Birkenau,” Jarek remarks, “Auschwitz was a Hilton.” Birkenau is how the Germans said Brezinzka, which means Birch Wood, the name of the Polish village that was here. Auschwitz was how they said Oswiecim. Oz-vee-chim. The town once had a sizable Jewish population of its own.

The rail line that approaches Birkenau runs through a red brick guard tower and this is familiar from photographs and documentaries. The prisoners called it the Gate of Death. From May to October 1944, 600,000 Hungarian Jews—a line of numbers in the Wannsee document—came through here. In the spring of 1944, at the height of Auschwitz’s efficiency, ten thousand arrived here each day.

We go up into the tower. Jarek opens a window and stands back and says quietly, “Birkenau.” It’s here, rather than at the Wall of Death or Cell Block 11, that many visitors break down and weep. Perhaps it’s because of vastness that confronts them. You’re looking out on an area 3,000 feet wide by 2,100 feet deep: 174 barracks, 4 crematoria, surrounded by double fences of barbed wire and guard towers.
The crematoria could handle only about five thousand bodies a day, so at times to keep up they had to burn bodies in the fields by the woods in the distance. The stench from that, and from the early mass graves of Soviet POWs, is described in the literature.