KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (97 page)

Veteran prisoners had some respect for one another, because they knew what it meant to survive, and the “old hands,” as they were known, also shared a certain distrust
of newcomers. In Auschwitz, Rudolf Vrba recalled, there was a kind of “mafia of the establishment,” and in other KL, too, veterans had the edge.
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The difference from newcomers was visible to all, with experienced prisoners wearing lower numbers and cleaner uniforms.
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One could even tell them apart in the dark of the barracks at night, as they used peculiar words and phrases—the language of the
camps.
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Mastering this idiom was essential for survival. Nothing was more important for new arrivals than to learn some basic German, the language of the SS and hence the language of power. Orders were generally given in German, from “
Antreten!
” (“Line up!”) and
“Mützen ab!”
(“Caps off!”) at roll call to all the exhortations to pick up the pace:
“Schneller!” “Los!” “Tempo!” “Aber Dalli!”
Prisoners
also had to answer in German whenever they reported:
“Häftling 12969 meldet sich zur Stelle.”
Even when prisoners talked in their native tongue, they used German terms for certain objects, tasks, and spaces.
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Primo Levi knew that the rudimentary German he had picked up as a student was invaluable: “Knowing German meant life.” To improve his chances of survival, he took German lessons from a fellow
prisoner, paying him with bread: “I believe that never was bread better spent.”
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Those who understood the language of the camp could hope to become old hands themselves, while incomprehension cast prisoners adrift and exposed them to punishment; it was not for nothing that inmates in Mauthausen referred to the truncheons wielded by Kapos as
Dolmetscher
(translators).
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In addition to their peculiar
vocabulary, the veterans used a different tone—sharp, coarse, and cruel.
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Occasionally, they adopted euphemistic SS terms when it came to death and murder, such as “departure,” “finish off,” and “going through the chimney.” But most words left nothing to the imagination. “Shit faster, slut,” a Kapo shouted at a woman in the Auschwitz latrine, “or I’ll kill you and throw you in the shit.” There
was no place for decorum. Among the many common terms of abuse among the prisoners, the Czech inmate Drahomír Bárta noted in his Ebensee diary in summer 1944, were “swine” and “shithead.”
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This vulgar tone reflected the prisoners’ debasement, but it also offered an outlet for fears and frustrations. Dark jokes had a similar function, with sarcasm and gallows humor becoming typical traits of
KL veterans. “The discovery of this humor,” David Rousset wrote later, “enabled many of us to survive.”
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Humor was a defense mechanism that distanced prisoners—however briefly—from the horror of the KL. Nothing was off-limits, neither the food (in Sachsenhausen, a disgusting herring paste was known as “cat shit”), the SS humiliations (in Dachau, a strip shaved across the prisoners’ closely cropped
hair was known as a “lice motorway”), nor death itself (in Buchenwald, prisoners joked about the shape of the clouds coming from the crematorium). There were plenty of jokes about fellow prisoners, as well, not least the new arrivals. Those who expected that they would soon be released were goaded by more experienced prisoners: “The first fifteen years are the hardest. Then a man gets used to
it.” In this way, the old hands bolstered their status as hard-bitten veterans, standing above the newcomers, who still had everything to learn about the camps.
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After surviving for several years in Auschwitz, following his arrival on the first mass transport in June 1940, Wies
ł
aw Kielar (prisoner number 290) was one of these longtimers. Through his contacts to other Polish veterans, he had
access to vital goods and extra food, including occasional treats like sausage and ham. When he contracted typhus, he received medicine from friends, and when the SS selected him because he was sick, his experience and connections saved him from the gas chambers. Like other veterans, Kielar escaped the worst labor details; stationed in the infirmary, he was barely working at all by 1943, having perfected
the life-saving skill of dodging labor. His fear of daily violence diminished, too, as other Kapos were careful not to tangle with long-time prisoners like him who might have powerful friends; even a few SS men showed respect. Nonetheless, Kielar could never feel secure. He knew that everything he had gained—through chance, cunning, and sacrifice—could be lost from one day to the next. And
this day came in November 1944, when Kielar was deported to the Neuengamme satellite camp Porta Westfalica. Privileged prisoners like him dreaded such transfers, because they often fell back down the pecking order; now they were the newcomers who found themselves at the mercy of privileged prisoners.
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The prisoner elite sometimes seemed to live in a world apart. Ordinary prisoners had no respite
from the daily struggle for survival. Privileged prisoners, by contrast, enjoyed the luxury of leisure. Though limited and regulated, their activities still promised to carry them to a different place, transcending the camp.
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Among the diversions permitted by the SS was sports, with male prisoners, in particular, participating in a range of activities.
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Soccer was especially popular, as it was
in Nazi ghettos like Theresienstadt, with regular matches between national teams being played in several KL, often on Sundays. Or the privileged few might watch a boxing contest between prisoners, who were rewarded for their efforts with food. Though these spectacles were intended as entertainment for the prisoner elite and SS men, who liked to place bets, some inmates saw something subversive
in them, not least when a foreigner sent a German to the canvas.
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The SS also sanctioned some cultural activities of privileged prisoners. On Sundays, they could attend concerts by camp orchestras, listening to a varied repertoire from opera to popular music.
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More solitary pleasures included the reading of books from KL libraries, which grew during the war. “The camp library is superb! Especially
in the field of classical literature,” the Dutch writer and left-wing journalist Nico Rost noted in his Dachau diary in summer 1944.
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In several camps, the SS even put on feature films. Some prisoners briefly lost themselves in the drama and romance up on the screen, but terror and death were never far away. In Buchenwald, the hall used as a cinema doubled as a torture chamber, while films in
Birkenau were shown near the crematoria complex; returning to his barrack one night, after watching an operetta, Wies
ł
aw Kielar passed a large group of Jewish men, women, and children on their way to the gas chamber.
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Most incongruous of all were the handful of marriages of well-connected inmates, like that celebrated in Auschwitz on March 18, 1944, when the Austrian Communist Rudolf Friemel
wed his bride, who visited from Vienna with their small son. Following the civil ceremony in town and the reception in an SS barrack, the couple walked through the main camp toward the brothel, where they spent their wedding night. The other prisoners talked about little else, well aware that Auschwitz registry officials were normally concerned not with marriage certificates but with death notices—including
that of Rudolf Friemel, who was hanged in late December 1944 after a failed escape attempt.
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At first glance, the sight of KL prisoners at leisure seems extraordinary. But it was in keeping with the SS vision of the concentration camps. After all, the Camp SS had always maintained traces of normality, and just like fragrant flower beds, a prisoner library projected an orderly image to visitors
and staff alike. More pressingly, the SS wanted to win the compliance of selected prisoners through incentives, offering benefits in return for obedience. In turn, the leisure activities added to the already stupendous inequalities between victims of Nazi terror. Few sights capture this gulf more starkly than that of athletic soccer players in bright outfits and studded boots fighting for the
ball, while emaciated prisoners in tattered rags nearby fought for their lives.
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The worlds of the privileged and the doomed often collided, as they did on Sunday, July 9, 1944, in Ebensee. That afternoon, Drahomír Bárta performed his usual Kapo duties as an interpreter, and translated between an escaped Polish prisoner, who begged for mercy, and his captors. After Bárta witnessed the prisoner
being beaten by the SS and maimed by a dog, he passed the rest of this day, as he sometimes did on Sundays, by playing volleyball with friends.
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KAPOS

Just as the figure of the
Muselmann
is taken to symbolize the destruction of prisoners’ bodies, the figure of the Kapo often stands for the corrosion of their souls. Their image as henchmen emerged from many testimonies of fellow inmates who
survived the KL. Describing the role of Kapos in Auschwitz, the Hungarian Jew Irena Rosenwasser simply said: “they knew they were on top, because they could beat and kill and send to the gas.”
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The influence of prisoner functionaries did indeed increase dramatically during World War II. As staff shortages became more acute—with the ratio between SS and prisoners falling from below 1:2 in the
late 1930s to around 1:15 by mid-1943—the authorities appointed more prisoners as supervisors and clerks.
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This was true above all in the new satellite camps, where veteran inmates were indispensable to the largely inexperienced SS staff; the first Auschwitz camp elder, Bruno Brodniewicz, widely regarded by other inmates as a vengeful tyrant, later served as camp elder in the satellites Neu-Dachs,
Eintrachthütte, and Bismarckhütte.
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Prisoners knew that the status and privileges attached to Kapo positions could prolong their lives—in Ebensee, prisoner functionaries were almost ten times more likely to survive than ordinary inmates—and few turned down such posts when they came their way.
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The greatest beneficiaries were Germans like Brodniewicz, who occupied many of the coveted posts.
To the mass of regular prisoners, they seemed like a breed apart: they were “the demigods of the camp.”
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This description captures the sense of awe felt by other inmates, but it also makes clear that Kapos were not untouchable. The SS men were still the supreme beings and could push anyone from the pantheon without notice.

Power and Privilege

The rise of Kapos during the war seemed unstoppable.
Block elders held ever more sway, as SS inspections became less frequent (owing to lack of staff and fear of disease), and the influence of labor supervisors grew, too; as early as 1941, the inmate appointed as chief overseer on the Auschwitz IG Farben building site had more than a dozen Kapos under him, who in turn directed between fifty and one hundred prisoners each.
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Kapos also performed
a range of new functions, gaining access to almost all areas of the KL. As the internal SS organization grew more complex, and paperwork mounted up, additional inmates were drafted into administrative positions. In the orderly room, the statistical nerve center of the main camps, Kapos collated data about inmate numbers and composition, and supervised the assignment of prisoners to barracks. In the
political office, too, prisoners were entrusted with clerical duties, from registering new inmates to typing SS correspondence. And in the labor action office, Kapos compiled reports about output and, most crucially, helped to allocate prisoners to labor details and satellite camps.
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Many of the new Kapo duties were about coercion and terror, particularly in the second half of the war. When
it came to corporal punishment, the SS now relied on block elders and other functionaries to whip fellow prisoners, for a small reward of money or cigarettes.
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In addition, the SS established Kapo squads, particularly in the larger KL, to extend the surveillance of prisoners by prisoners. Widely known as the camp police, their main function was the maintenance of “order and discipline,” in the
words of a former Buchenwald squad member. In practice, this meant patrolling the compounds, initiating new inmates, and guarding food depots against prisoner thefts, often with force.
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Some Kapos, both male and female, were directly involved in mass murder, selecting weak and sick inmates, escorting condemned prisoners to execution sites, or killing them. Emil Mahl, the senior Kapo in the
Dachau crematorium, helped to hang up to one thousand prisoners in 1944–45. “My participation consisted of putting the noose around the necks of the prisoners,” he later admitted.
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It was also not uncommon for Kapos to receive open or thinly veiled instructions to murder certain prisoners on the sly. And Kapos murdered on their own initiative, too, acting far more brutally than before the war.
Even pleas from desperate inmates—for food, clothing, or admission to the infirmary—could trigger lethal responses, as in the case of a Polish Jew who asked for bread during a deportation to a Flossenbürg satellite camp in early 1945, only to be beaten to death by a German Kapo.
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Such were the powers accumulated by some Kapos that even their SS masters became a little uneasy. In general, any
concerns were far outweighed by the expected benefits: here was an easy and effective mechanism for ruling more camps with fewer SS staff. But there was a risk that dominant prisoners would scheme against SS officials and gain too many insights into their criminal and corrupt practices. The KL authorities responded by replacing suspect Kapos with other inmates (or even SS officials), and punishing
them with the bunker or worse.
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