KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (67 page)

But nothing compared to the Special Squad in Auschwitz. Initially, just a handful of prisoners had worked in the old Auschwitz crematorium. But after Auschwitz turned into a death camp in 1942, the SS established a large, permanent prisoner commando at the Birkenau killing complex.
Their work temporarily saved these inmates from extermination, though often not for long. While the SS did not murder all Special Squad members at regular intervals (as some survivors and historians suggest), there were selections just as elsewhere in the camp; weak and sick prisoners—sometimes as many as twenty or more a week—were killed with phenol injections in the infirmary. Moreover,
the SS occasionally killed a proportion of the prisoners, to reduce the relative size of the Special Squad, during periods when fewer deportation trains arrived. In the end, only a few survived from 1942 through to 1945, among them the brothers Shlomo and Abraham Dragon, whom we encountered earlier.

Overall, more than 2,200 men were forced into the Auschwitz Special Squad during its existence.
There were some Polish and German supervisors, like the chief Kapo August Brück. A German prisoner with a green triangle, Brück had worked in the Buchenwald crematorium from 1940, before the SS transferred him to Auschwitz in March 1943 to oversee the Special Squad at the newly built Birkenau crematoria; in contrast to some other supervisors, Kapo August, as the others called him, was regarded as
decent (his privileges as a prominent prisoner could not protect him and he died of typhus in late December 1943). Almost all the rest of the Special Squad was made up of Jewish prisoners. They lived apart from the rest of the inmates, first in isolated blocks in Birkenau and later, from early summer 1944, on the grounds of the crematorium complex itself. Like other KL inmates thrown together as
Jews, their backgrounds varied widely in terms of education, religion, and age; the oldest was in his fifties, the youngest not yet twenty. The men came from more than a dozen countries and often formed loose groups along national lines. Communication proved difficult across cultural and linguistic barriers, especially for those, like Greek Jews, who spoke neither Yiddish nor German, the two main
languages used by the Special Squad prisoners.
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In a morbid twist of fate, it was the Jewish prisoners closest to the inferno of the Holocaust who enjoyed the best living conditions. Looking back in early November 1944 on his life in the Special Squad, in a secret letter to his wife and daughter that never reached them, the forty-three-year-old Chaim Herman, a Polish Jew, wrote that prisoners
like him had everything but freedom: “I am very well dressed, housed and fed, I am in the best of health” (he was murdered by the SS three weeks later).
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The prisoners could help themselves to possessions left behind by those who had gone to the gas. They were dressed in warm clothes and proper underwear, and rarely suffered hunger. Among the effects of the dead, they found not only coffee and
cigarettes, but delicacies from all across Europe: olives from Greece, cheese from Holland, goose meat from Hungary.
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And unlike other Jewish inmates in Auschwitz, Special Squad prisoners could move rather freely around their quarters. After the transfer to their new sleeping quarters under the roof of crematoria II and III, they had heated rooms, running water, and proper toilets—unimaginable
luxuries for any other Jewish prisoners in the camp. Their quarters were furnished with the goods of the dead: tables covered with porcelain plates and tablecloths, and comfortable bedding and blankets on the bunks.
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The Special Squad prisoners also shared an unusual relationship with the SS, as working side by side inside the “death factory” created a certain bond. Prisoners still greatly feared
the SS, and with good reason. But they built up personal relationships, which tended to lessen arbitrary violence. These prisoners were not part of a faceless mass but familiar to SS men by name. On some Sundays, when they were off-duty, the guards even played soccer against the prisoners, right by the crematorium. Other SS men and inmates watched, clapped, and shouted their support, Primo Levi
wrote, “as if, rather than at the gates of hell, the game were taking place on the village green.”
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This close relationship with the SS only added to the loathing some other Jews in Auschwitz felt for the Special Squad. Its duties were widely known—details spread via the few non-Jewish Kapos, for example, who slept in regular barracks—and there was plenty of talk about its alleged brutality
toward the doomed.
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There were also rumors that the SS selected only the most violent criminals for the Special Squad. Such hostile feelings were summed up by two Slovakian Jews in 1944: the men of the Special Squad were shunned by others, they wrote, because they “stink terribly” and were “completely degenerate and incredibly brutal and ruthless.”
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Even some of the doomed, on their way to the
gas chamber, called the Special Squad “Jewish murderer[s].”
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The indicted prisoners knew that they were infamous. When Filip Müller met his father in the Birkenau compound, he was too ashamed to admit that he was part of the Special Squad.
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The stigma remained after liberation and has not vanished even today.
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But we must remember that the Special Squad members were caught in a hell made by
the SS. None of them had volunteered and many felt, at first, that they would be unable to adapt. “I thought I was going insane,” one survivor recalled. Initially, they often worked in a trance, like robots. In secret papers buried in a jar near crematorium III in autumn 1944, Salmen Lewental, a Polish student who had arrived in Auschwitz in December 1942 with his family, wrote that during his first
day in the Special Squad “none of us were fully conscious.”
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The men selected for the Special Squad soon realized that their only options were obedience or death. A few committed suicide. Others were murdered for insubordination; when five Jewish inmates reported sick after their first day in the crematorium, sometime in 1943, the SS killed them straightaway. Even small mistakes could prove
lethal; at least one prisoner “dentist” was burned alive by the SS for sabotage because he had overlooked a gold tooth inside a corpse’s mouth.
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Most prisoners chose to comply and to live, at least for the moment. In his secret notes, Salmen Lewental captured the anguish of the Special Squad in an existential cry: “And the truth is that one wants to live at any cost, one wishes to live, because
one is alive, because the whole world is alive.”
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Choosing life in the Birkenau Special Squad was one of the most impossible “choiceless choices” facing prisoners in Auschwitz.
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What kind of life was this, amidst all the dead? Some men became inured to the suffering, acting indifferent and cruel, and focused only on the material benefits. Others suffered from the daily corrosion of their souls,
and escaped into drink. It was not just the horror of mass murder—the pleas, the screams, the bodies, the blood—that haunted them, but their deep sense of guilt, having been deprived by the SS “of even the solace of innocence,” in Primo Levi’s words.
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But there were also acts of kindness and courage. As they did not expect to survive, several Special Squad prisoners documented the crimes they
witnessed, knowing that no other inmates would come closer to the Nazi heart of darkness. Writing such secret notes required bravery, teamwork, and ingenuity. The great personal risk was worth it, the prisoners felt, to preserve their voices for future generations. Nine different documents, buried on the grounds of the Birkenau killing complex, were recovered after liberation. Among them was a brief
message by one of the last surviving members of the Special Squad—he has never been identified—written on November 26, 1944. Certain that he was about to be murdered, he added a final note to several others he had buried earlier in boxes and receptacles near crematoria II and III. At the end of his message, he made this last plea: “I am asking for everything to be arranged together and published
with the title ‘Amidst a Nightmare of Crime.’”
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Women and Men

During the Holocaust, women moved from the fringes toward the center of the concentration camp system. For years, female prisoners had been marginal. But the 1942 decision to use camps in occupied eastern Europe for the “annihilation through labor” of Jewish prisoners irrespective of their gender changed everything. In Majdanek,
Jewish women accounted for over one-third of all prisoners by spring 1943.
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In Auschwitz, the ratio of female to male inmates fell to less than 1:2 by the end of 1943; and the vast majority of these imprisoned women were Jewish.
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Back in Ravensbrück, female prisoners had initially remained insulated from some of the worst SS excesses. Not so in eastern Europe. From the moment they first set
foot in Auschwitz in spring 1942, women faced dreadful conditions, ruinous labor, and extreme violence. Official SS statistics confirm the deadly reality of their lives. During July 1943, registered female prisoners were more than twenty times more likely to die in Auschwitz than in Ravensbrück.
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In all, an estimated fifty-four thousand registered women lost their lives in Auschwitz in 1942–43.
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Of all the female prisoners in the hands of the SS, Jewish women faced the gravest danger. Inside eastern European KL, their mortality rate was broadly similar to that of Jewish men.
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In fact, it was even higher, if one includes those killed without formal registration (since more Jewish women than men were singled out for immediate extermination on arrival). Overall, the gender-determined delay
in Camp SS terror came to an end in 1942–43, at least for Jewish women in eastern Europe. However, this did not mean that their experiences were now identical to those of Jewish men. Many gendered differences remained, while others, such as pregnancy, gained new significance.

Previously, prisoner pregnancies had been regarded as a peripheral problem by the Camp SS. Overall numbers of female prisoners
had been relatively small anyway, and there was also a ban (at least on paper) on sending pregnant women to state prisons and concentration camps.
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But as the war continued, this ban became increasingly meaningless, especially during the mass deportations of the Holocaust: the Nazi Final Solution targeted all Jews. In Auschwitz, visibly pregnant Jewish women were selected on arrival and gassed;
a few were subjected to atrocities at the ramp, like a Greek woman who was kicked so hard in the stomach by an SS man in summer 1943 that she immediately aborted.
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Jewish prisoners whose pregnancy was discovered later on, after they had joined the ranks of registered slave laborers, were also regularly gassed, either before or after giving birth, and their newborns were killed, too. “Jewish children
were immediately exterminated,” the former Birkenau camp compound leader Johann Schwarzhuber admitted after the war. In other KL in the east, too, babies born inside were murdered; in Riga, SS men even preserved the corpses of a few infants in a special solution. Meanwhile, some women returned to work after they had suffered a stillbirth or after prisoner doctors had carried out a secret abortion.
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In Auschwitz, prisoner doctors and orderlies even conspired to kill newborn children to save the mothers. “And so, the Germans succeeded in making murderers of even us,” Olga Lengyel, who worked in the Birkenau infirmary, wrote after the war. “To this day the picture of those murdered babies haunts me.”
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Male prisoners in Auschwitz had been incredulous when they heard about the new women’s compound.
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But contacts remained sporadic, at least in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the prisoners were strictly separated by sex.
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For the most part, encounters with the opposite sex did not go beyond brief glimpses from afar, which often caused pity and horror. The destruction of masculine and feminine traits—reducing prisoners to bald and gaunt figures—demonstrated the powers of the SS. In the absence of
mirrors, it was also a brutal reminder of each prisoner’s own desexualization and dehumanization.
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Occasionally, men and women in Auschwitz-Birkenau managed to exchange a quick word at the fence or to throw some food across. A few husbands and wives even corresponded by letter, carried by civilian workers and non-Jewish inmates. But such contacts were rare, and their impotence to fulfill gendered
expectations—protecting female friends or relatives—deepened the anguish of some Jewish men.
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The situation was rather different in the new main concentration camps and satellites established in eastern Europe in 1943–44. Here, too, Jewish prisoners were normally separated by gender—in different compounds, barracks, or rooms—but the layout of these camps made strict isolation more difficult.
The closer contact between men and women also reflected the previous use of some of these sites as ghettos or forced labor camps. In KL Plaszow, for example, men and women were still allowed to meet up in the evenings, walking through the unlocked gate that separated their compounds. Elsewhere, men and women worked in the same labor commandos.
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Once again, SS rules regarded as immutable in established
concentration camps were eroded in the new camps for Jews.

The detention of male and female prisoners in the same camps soon gave rise to salacious stories among both prisoners and SS.
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After the war, the obsession with sex in the camps grew further, spawning a perverse pornography of pain. Following a spate of sadomasochistic films in the 1970s, Primo Levi pleaded: “Please, all you cinema producers,
leave the women’s camps alone.”
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In reality, sexual activity had largely been the preserve of a few privileged prisoners. In the short lives of most Jewish KL prisoners during the Holocaust, it had played little or no role: starvation killed their sex drive before it killed them.
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An Austrian Jew, who had come to Auschwitz in 1942, recalled that his sexual urges had simply vanished.
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Most women
experienced the same. A Jewish teacher deported from Hungary to Auschwitz in 1944 noted in her diary that she “ceased to be a sexual being” (for many younger women, such feelings were intensified because they stopped menstruating in the camps).
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Any encounters that did occur often involved an element of exploitation or force, at least in the case of Jewish prisoners. Most common was probably
sex for survival, with prisoners making pragmatic decisions to become intimate with privileged inmates, mostly non-Jews, in exchange for essential goods like food or clothing.
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Instead of flowers, one survivor recalled, a man might bring a woman a piece of margarine. In this way, sex became another commodity to be exchanged in the camps’ flourishing underground economy.
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