KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (102 page)

Prisoner reactions to public hangings—sometimes
sarcastically called “German cultural evenings”—varied.
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Some quietly swore revenge or yelled in protest.
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Others were unmoved, blaming the executed inmates for the collective SS abuse that often followed escapes. The most common reaction, perhaps, was dread. One former Mauthausen inmate recalled that after the execution of two recaptured German prisoners, one of them so badly wounded he had
to be carried to the gallows, he quickly lost any urge to flee himself: “The spectacle has worked: better to kick the bucket in the quarry than to go to the gallows!”
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Public executions were not the only SS means of deterrence. Occasionally, the authorities took family members of escaped inmates as hostages to the KL.
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The Camp SS also punished fellow prisoners in place of escaped ones. From
early on, there were torturous roll calls, beatings, and other abuses. Later on, the SS resorted to murder, as well. Following the escape of a Polish inmate in spring 1941, the Auschwitz SS starved ten others to death in the bunker. A few months later, following a further escape, the SS punished another group of prisoners in the same way. To save one of these doomed men, the Franciscan priest
Maksymilian Kolbe stepped forward to die in his stead. The SS accepted his sacrifice, but after he had survived for more than two weeks, its patience ran out; Kolbe was administered a lethal injection.
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Collective executions soon became a regular form of deterrence, in Auschwitz and some other KL. Among the many victims was Janusz Pogonowski, the young Polish prisoner who had remained in touch
with his family by secret letters. He was one of twelve prisoners hanged in Auschwitz on the evening of July 19, 1943, in front of rows of other inmates, following the escape of three colleagues from his labor commando.
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The SS policy of collective punishment showed some effect, as prisoners thought twice about running away. And they had mixed feelings about the escapes of others. On the one
hand, such escapes could boost prisoner morale, as every SS setback did, and offered hope that the world would learn about their fate.
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On the other hand, inmates dreaded the terror that often followed.
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The SS was well aware that many prisoners saw escapees as traitors against the community, and sometimes exploited their anger, as in the case of the waiter Alfred Wittig, a “green” prisoner
in Sachsenhausen. One afternoon in summer 1940, Wittig went missing. While the SS searched the camp, all prisoners had to stand to attention, deep into the night. When the SS finally dismissed them from the roll call square, several had collapsed. The search for Wittig resumed the following morning and after he was discovered—hidden under a pile of sand—an SS officer delivered him to the other prisoners:
“Do with him what you want.” Seething about their suffering the previous night, dozens of them trampled Wittig to death. For once, the cause of death was recorded accurately on the official paperwork, because the SS had not been directly involved: “Injury to lung and other internal organs (beaten to death by fellow prisoners).”
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Resistance by the Doomed

Mala Zimetbaum and Edek Gali
ń
ski became
lovers in Auschwitz, sometime in the second half of World War II. Theirs was one of the few relationships to blossom in the KL, and it has since become a symbol of hope and tragedy in the camps, commemorated in books, films, and a graphic novel.
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Both were veterans of Auschwitz. Zimetbaum, a Polish Jew, was deported from Belgium in September 1942, while Gali
ń
ski had arrived more than two years
earlier, on the first transport of Polish political prisoners. Over time, both gained privileged posts that allowed them to rendezvous in the X-ray room of the infirmary in the Birkenau women’s compound. They often talked about running away together, and after careful planning, they risked everything on the afternoon of Saturday, June 24, 1944. Dressed in stolen SS uniforms, they left the camp,
each on their own, and strolled into town, as if they were SS staff on weekend leave. After they were reunited on the banks of the Vistula, they tried to make it to Slovakia. But after they had spent two weeks on the run, exhausted and lost in the Carpathian Mountains, border guards caught them. When they returned to Auschwitz, the SS threw them into the bunker—Gali
ń
ski’s inscriptions on the walls
are still legible today—and condemned them to die.

But the day of their execution, September 15, 1944, did not proceed as the SS had planned. Edek Gali
ń
ski was marched along rows of prisoners in one of the Birkenau compounds for men and led up to the scaffold. Before the SS could read out his sentence, however, Gali
ń
ski tried to hang himself. Held back by officials, he shouted a rallying cry
as the executioner pulled the floor from under his feet. Over in the Birkenau women’s compound, Mala Zimetbaum also defied the SS. As she was escorted to the gallows on the roll call square, she produced a razor blade and cut her wrist. When an SS man tried to stop her, she hit him. Stunned officials dragged her away, and she was last seen, more dead than alive, on a cart near the crematorium. Zimetbaum
lived on in the memory of the other prisoners. Not only had she escaped from Auschwitz, she had confronted her tormentors, shattering the carefully staged SS spectacle. “For the first time we saw a Jewish prisoner raise h[er] hand against a German,” a young survivor later said with admiration.
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Defiance by the doomed was unusual, but it was not unprecedented. To stop condemned prisoners like
Edek and Mala from addressing the others, SS officials sometimes gagged them before public executions.
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But the perpetrators knew that executions could still unite the other inmates in their loathing of the SS. This was one reason, no doubt, why most Camp SS murders took place in secret. But even behind closed doors, some prisoners resisted, attacking their killers, or shouting political slogans
before they died. SS men tried to laugh off such incidents, but they must have been unsettled, because they had failed to break their victims.
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There was defiance at the Birkenau gas chambers, too. Some prisoners—Jews, Gypsies, and others—fought back as the SS pushed them inside, though such desperate resistance was in vain. Others sang political songs or religious hymns on their way to the
gas.
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One of the most celebrated acts occurred on October 23, 1943, when, outside the Birkenau gas chambers, a Jewish prisoner wrestled a gun from the SS and shot at the guards, amid a general commotion. Unterscharführer Josef Schillinger was fatally wounded and another official seriously injured before SS men regained control and slaughtered the inmates; one guard was later commended for helping
to “stifle the rebellion” through “determined action.” The sensational news of Schillinger’s death quickly reached other parts of the camp, and there were many rumors about what, exactly, had happened. In the most popular telling, the killer was a striking young woman, a dancer. As for Schillinger, the word among prisoners was that, as he lay dying, he had whimpered: “O God, my God, what have
I done to deserve such suffering.” These final words may have sprung from revenge fantasies, but the subsequent SS rage was all too real; at night, guards fired machine guns into the Birkenau camp compound, mowing down more than a dozen prisoners. Of course, these deaths barely registered among the Auschwitz SS, which had long become used to mass murder on a far bigger scale.
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An Uprising in
Auschwitz

It was just after lunchtime on Saturday, October 7, 1944, a bright autumn day under a cloudless sky, when a small group of SS men entered the yard outside crematorium IV in Auschwitz-Birkenau and ordered nearly three hundred Special Squad prisoners to line up. The SS announced a selection, supposedly for transfer to another camp, and began to pick out some men. Not all of them came
forward, however, and the situation grew tense. Suddenly, one of the oldest prisoners, the Polish Jew Chaim Neuhoff, lunged forward and attacked an SS man with a hammer. Others joined in. Wielding stones, axes, and iron bars, they forced the SS behind the compound’s barbed wire. The air in Birkenau filled with screams, shots, and the sound of sirens, and also with smoke—not from burning bodies, as
usual, but from the crematorium building itself, which the prisoners had set ablaze. The uprising of the Birkenau Special Squad had begun.
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This moment had been coming for months. “For a long time, we, the ‘Special Squad,’ wanted to put a stop to our terrible work,” Salmen Gradowski wrote in Birkenau in autumn 1944. “We wanted to do something big.”
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There had been talk of an uprising back
in spring 1944, probably in connection with the imminent liquidation of the Birkenau family camp (which occurred in March), but in the end nothing came of it. Still, the conspirators started to collect arms, including hand grenades, filled with explosives stolen by female prisoners at the nearby Union armaments works and smuggled into the Special Squad. The clamor for armed action became more persistent
from midsummer 1944. Special Squad prisoners thought that most of them would be surplus to SS requirements, once the mass gassings of Hungarian Jews had ended. Given the advance of the Red Army, it also seemed likely that Auschwitz would be evacuated, and the prisoners feared that the SS would execute them before leaving; after all, they bore the darkest secrets of the Nazi Final Solution
(similar fears had triggered the uprisings in Treblinka and Sobibor the previous year). The men of the Birkenau Special Squad lived in heightened anticipation, but so volatile was their position that the plan for action had to be repeatedly postponed. Soon, the situation gained even greater urgency. On September 23, 1944, the SS selected two hundred Special Squad members, allegedly for transport to
a different KL. The others learned the truth the following day, when they found the charred remains of their comrades in the crematorium. When the SS announced in early October that another selection would follow within days, the prisoners at crematorium IV suspected that this would be their death sentence. They would have to move now or never.
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But the Birkenau rebels were poorly prepared.
They could not count on the prisoner underground elsewhere in the camp to join them, after these groups had concluded that a violent confrontation with the SS could only end in a massacre. There was an insoluble conflict of interest between Special Squad prisoners, who had nothing to lose, and most other inmates, who hoped to see out the final months. “Unlike us, they did not have to hurry,” Salmen
Lewental noted bitterly in autumn 1944.
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In fact, the Special Squad itself was divided over the issue of armed action; some prisoners were too exhausted, others wanted to wait for a more opportune moment, when the whole camp would rise up with them. Among those who counseled caution were the main leaders of the Special Squad, who did not face immediate selection on October 7, 1944, and decided
against participating in the uprising. Not only were the remaining rebels isolated, they were badly organized. There had been no time to make proper plans, and confusion mired the revolt from the start. Once crematorium IV was on fire, the prisoners could not reach their grenades hidden inside; the strongest weapons were left unused, buried under the collapsing roof of the building.
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The uprising
was doomed from the outset. Within minutes, SS reinforcements arrived at crematorium IV to shoot at the exposed prisoners, easy to pick out in the bright daylight. One survivor peered into the yard of the compound and saw scores of his comrades “lying very still in their bloodstained prison uniforms,” with SS men firing at anyone who still stirred. By then, most of the remaining prisoners had
run across the path to the adjacent crematorium V, hiding inside. SS guards soon dragged them out, threw them on the floor, together with other recaptured inmates, and shot them in the back of the neck. When the SS had finished, more than 250 corpses covered the grounds of the two crematoria.
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Meanwhile, around thirty minutes after Chaim Neuhoff had struck the first blow at crematorium IV,
a second uprising broke out at crematorium II. The Special Squad prisoners there had heard the shots fired nearby and seen smoke rising. Following the instructions of their leaders, they initially remained calm. When some SS men came marching toward their compound, however, a group of Soviet POWs panicked and pushed a German Kapo into the burning furnace. The other Special Squad prisoners at crematorium
II now had to join them, whether they wanted to or not, and armed themselves with knives and hand grenades. After they cut a hole in the fence surrounding their compound, up to one hundred prisoners escaped. But the SS hunted them all down; some got as far as the small town of Rajsko, a couple of miles away, hiding in a shed until the SS surrounded it and burned it to the ground.

The reprisals
were not over yet. Over the coming weeks, the SS executed most survivors of the uprising, among them Lejb Langfus, who was murdered after the last Special Squad selection on November 26, 1944. Just before, he had written a final note: “We are sure that they will lead us to our deaths.” Among the other victims were four female prisoners who had smuggled explosives into Birkenau. One of them, Estusia
Wajcblum, sent a last letter to her sister from the bunker, after weeks of SS torture: “Those outside of my window still have hope, but I have nothing … everything is lost and I so want to live.”
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In contrast to the revolts at Sobibor and Treblinka, where several hundred prisoners had evaded their pursuers, not a single Special Squad prisoner got away. This was due to the greater SS presence
around Auschwitz and the elaborate security arrangements, which had been strengthened earlier that year to thwart an uprising. Within a few hours of the revolt, the SS had slaughtered more than two-thirds of the estimated 660 Birkenau Special Squad members (the SS itself lost three men, who were mourned as heroes). Only those Special Squad prisoners stationed at crematorium III, who did not rise
up, were left unscathed and carried on with their duties as if nothing had happened.
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