VIII. The Camps

The March of the Living is a two-mile solemn walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau. You will march past the brick barracks which housed the laborers to the temporary wooden "blocks" built for those doomed to death.

You will also visit the death camps of Treblinka and Majdanek, two camps as different today as day and night. You will thus see three of the original six death camps, all of which were erected in Poland. (The others were Chelmno, Belzec and Sobibor.) There was killing done in many of the over 4,000 camps spread throughout Europe. All six of the death camps built by the Nazis were established in Poland. Factories of death. An entire industry established for the sole purpose of killing Jews, with the ultimate product - ashes.

How can we prepare you for the first time you see Auschwitz?

How can we adjust your eyes to imagine the hell which took place at Treblinka?

How can we protect your mind and soul from the sight of a crematorium and ashes of Majdanek?

You are the one who can prepare; you are the one who can help adjust; you are the one who can try to protect, by reading this chapter carefully.

Read the articles. Study the descriptions of the camps. Use your imagination, close your eyes once in a while and propel yourself into the reading. In a few months when you get off the bus and walk into the camps you will find your mind wandering back to the readings. You will understand why we have stressed the importance of study.

Objectives

1. You will begin to understand how the concentration and death camps were established and how they worked.

2. You will begin to get a feel for the "life-style" of those who lived beyond the first day as well as those who didn't.

3. You will begin to understand the terror created at the camps, and how it affected the inmates.

4. You will read eyewitness accounts describing attempts at survival and realize why these reports are so important.

5. You will begin to learn about the three camps we will visit in Poland.

6. You will learn about the camps as they were in full operation, so that you will be able to compare them to the way they look today.

7. You will begin to understand the progression from cities, to ghettos, to camps, to death camps to ashes - each circle diminishing the Jew's existence - until it simply vanished.

Reading #1

The March takes you to Poland, only one of the countries involved in the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. We just don't have time to encounter all the countries, and all the camps. In this article and Reading #2, we give you a brief look at the wide scope of camps in other parts of Europe.

Concentration & Death Camps - The Nazi Concentration Camps - Yad Vashem, Jerusalem

In an effort to deal with groups of people whom the Nazis considered to be "subhuman," a variety of concentration camps were established throughout Europe from 1933 until the end of World War II. The early camps began as detention centers in the mid-1930's for Communists, homosexuals, and political dissidents. With the onset of the war in 1939, the need for laborers resulted in the creation of forced labor camps in which prisoners became virtual slaves. Here, Jews and others were subjected to the most inhuman treatment, often resulting in death through illness, starvation, beatings, or execution.

In 1942, with the adoption of the "Final Solution," the Nazi plan to murder all European Jews, the emphasis shifted from concentration camps to death camps. The sole purpose of those camps was to murder millions of Jews by gassing them and burning their remains.

In December 1941, Chelmno, the first death camp, was established. The camp consisted of little more than a garage and several trucks in which carbon monoxide was the killing tool for about one thousand Jews a day. By July 1942, the camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were created. By the fall of 1943, these camps in northern Poland had already accomplished their tasks and ceased to function.

The location of the hundreds of concentration camps and death camps reveal much about the Nazi mentality and raise some significant questions for discussion. It is now estimated that there were over 4,000 camps in Europe.

Locations of camps:

Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, France, Galicia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Libya, Lichtenberg, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Rumania, Russia, Yugoslavia

Questions:

1. Where were most of the concentration camps located? How can their location be explained? (Refer to map on next page)

2. What were the advantages or disadvantages of the placement of the camps? Why were they placed where they were?

3. Do you believe it was possible for millions of people to have been tortured and murdered in the death camps without the local population being awareof what was happening? Explain.

Reading #2

Reading #3

The March has tried to teach you about "words." But how can we teach you about places like Auschwitz when the words don't exist in the English language, or any other language? This article will give you a preview on what we mean.

The Kingdom Of Auschwitz (Excerpted from Atlantic Monthly) - Otto Friedrich

The first Transport Juden, consisting of 999 Jewish women from Slovakia, arrived on March 26, 1942, at the Auschwitz railroad station. "A cheerful little station," as a prisoner named Tadeusz Borowski later wrote, "very much like any other provincial railway stop: a small square framed by tall chestnuts and paved with yellow gravel." Since the Birkenau gas chambers had not yet been built, the women were stripped, their heads were shaved, and they were confined in Blocks 1 to 10 of the main camp, separated by a high fence from the men's barracks. They were made to stand for hours at roll call, and beaten, and then sent out in work gangs, and beaten again.

The SS men routed the starving and terrified prisoners out of the freight cars, ordered them to abandon all their possessions, and then whipped them into line to prepare for the process known as "selection." The two SS doctors had been assigned by rotation to choose a few of the hardiest prisoners to be preserved for the Auschwitz labor commands. These doctors (the most notable was Josef Mengele who liked to wear white gloves and to whistle themes from Wagner's operas as he worked) surveyed each newcomer for a few seconds and then waved him on in one direction or another. A wave to the left - though most of his newcomers did not realize it - meant survival, an assignment to hard labor in the construction gangs. A wave to the right meant the gas chamber. Anyone more than about forty years of age was waved to the right. Most women went to the right. Almost all children under fifteen went to the right. Families that asked to stay together were reunited and sent to the right. Only about 10 percent of each transport, on the average, went to the left - sometimes more, sometimes less, according to the whim of the SS doctors.

The May 12 transport that brought 1,500 Jews from Sosnowiec marked a turning point in the short history of Auschwitz, for this was the first trainload of Jews who were not imprisoned, not shorn, not sent out in work gangs, not beaten or shot. This time, there was no selection on the ramp at the railroad station, no division of families, no separation of those who were fit to work from the old and sick and the children. These 1,500 Jews from Sosnowiec were the first to be sent directly to the gas chambers - all of them. And with that, Auschwitz finally became what it had always been destined to become: not just a prisoner-of-war camp, not just a slave-labor camp, but a Vernichtungslager, an "extermination camp." Vernichtung means more than that. It means to make something into nothing. Annihilation.

Auschwitz was a society of extraordinary complexity. It had its own soccer stadium, its own library, its own photographic lab, and its own symphony orchestra. It had its own Polish nationalist underground and its own Polish Communist underground - not to mention separate Russian, Slovakian, French, and Austrian resistance groups - whose members fought and sometimes killed each other. It also had its underground religious services, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. There was no reason that a death camp should have a hospital at all, and yet the one at Auschwitz grew to considerable size, with about sixty doctors and more than 300 nurses. It had a surgical department and an operating theater, and special sections for infectious diseases, internal injuries, and dentistry. Auschwitz even had its own brothel, known as "the puff," which favored prisoners could enter by earning chits for good behavior. Crafty veterans of the camp would gather at the office where the chits were handed out, and if any model prisoner failed to claim his due, one of the old-timers would quickly step forward to claim it for him.

Here, and later in the four new crematoria at Birkenau, the Final Solution took place. What happened can best be described in the detached words of Rudolf Hoess who was in command of all this: "The door would now be quickly screwed up and the gas discharged by the waiting disinfectors through vents in the ceilings of the gas chambers, down a shaft that led to the floor. This insured the rapid distribution of the gas. It could be observed through the peephole in the door that those who were standing nearest to the induction vents were killed at once. It can be said that about one-third died straight away. The remainder staggered about and began to scream and struggle for air. The screaming, however, soon changed to the death rattle and in a few minutes all lay still . . . The door was opened half an hour after the induction of the gas, and the ventilation switched on . . . The special detachment now set about removing the gold teeth and cutting the hair from the women. After this, the bodies were taken up by elevator and laid in front of the ovens, which had meanwhile been stoked up. Depending on the size of the bodies, up to three corpses could be put into one oven at the same time. The time required for cremation . . . took twenty minutes. As previously stated, ovens I and II could cremate about 2,000 bodies in 24 hours, but a higher number was not possible without causing damage to the installations.

Just as the arrival in Auschwitz seemed a relief after days in the crowded freight cars, the arrival in the quarantine barracks seemed a relief after the process of selection and registration. It was, however, a new kind of ordeal, designed to test whether the SS doctors on the ramp had been correct in their choice of survivors. Roll call was 4:30 A.M., and sometimes the prisoners had to stand in formation all day long. They were drilled in camp routine, trained to form ranks of five, to take off their caps on command, to perform such drudgery as digging ditches and moving rocks, and to take part in "physical training." This physical training, also known as "sport," consisted of running in position until a kapo ordered the prisoners to drop to the ground and start hopping like frogs; than a kapo ordered the prisoners to get up and start running again. "Sport" is a fairly common form of gymnastic drill, but the Auschwitz version lasted for hours, and anyone who faltered was kicked and beaten. After a fifteen-minute break for lunch, the SS training continued with, for example, singing classes. Jews were taught to sing an anti-Semitic song; prisoners of all kinds were taught a song in praise of their own imprisonment. At 3 P.M. the "sport" resumed, and continued until 6:30. Then came another roll call, sometimes lasting two hours. Those who failed to satisfy their guards had to stand at attention all night long. Lagerfuhrer Fritzsch, the man who had first tried out Zyklon B on the Russian prisoners, liked to tell the newcomers: "You have come to a concentration camp, not to a sanatorium, and there is only way out - through the chimney. Anyone who does not like it can try hanging himself on the wires (an Auschwitz slang phrase that described the most easily available form of suicide: the electrified wire that surrounded the camp carried a current of 6,000 volts). If there are Jews in this shipment, they have no right to live longer than a fortnight; if there are priests, their period is one month - the first, three months."

After four to eight weeks in quarantine, the prisoners came to believe that life might be better if they could only reach the main camp. Once again they were deluded. Auschwitz was designed, just as Fritzsch warned, to work its victims to death. More than 1,000 prisoners were herded into brick barracks built for 400, according to a plan designed by one of the prisoners in the Auschwitz building office. They slept in three-tiered wooden bunks, half-a-dozen prisoners to a bunk, often with no mattresses or blankets. There was little air and less ventilation. The place stank. The prisoners' only consolation was that Birkenau was even worse.

Instead of overcrowded brick barracks, there were overcrowded wooden huts, with leaking roofs and dirt floors that turned to muck. Auschwitz proper had yellowish running water and a primitive sewage system. Birkenau had only a few privies; at night, the only facilities were some overflowing buckets. At least half of the prisoners - and often two-thirds or more - suffered the miseries and humiliation of chronic diarrhea. Many succumbed to typhus. And the rats were everywhere. When someone died during the night, according to a prisoner named Judith Sternberg Newman, the rats "would get at the body before it was cold, and eat the flesh in such a way that it was unrecognizable before morning."

Out of this struggle for survival, therefore, a prison hierarchy emerged, a hierarchy in which men and women who lived on the brink of death managed to postpone their fate by edging past other prisoners. The hierarchy expressed itself in symbols, all designed to contradict the symbolism of the SS. Just as the SS degraded the prisoners by ordering them to wear shapeless rags, the most resilient and imaginative prisoners fought back by commissioning captive tailors to dress them in the most beautifully fitted prison costumes. Among the women, similarly, prestige attended anyone whose shaven skull began to grow hair again, or who appeared at work in a handsome skirt. All these self-assertions were forbidden, of course, and therefore anyone who appeared in full-grown hair or attractive clothing was assumed to be under someone's protection, a member of the hierarchy.

The kapos were never safe, however, from the ferocity of the SS. If one of them faltered, he could be instantly reduced to the rank of common prisoner, and he knew very well what revenge awaited him in the barracks at night. ("We...dragged him onto the cement floor under the stove." Borowski wrote of one such retribution, "where the entire block, grunting and growling, trampled him to death.") In the eyes of the Nazis, the kapos, who strutted about with their clubs, remained no more than criminals, useful in performing disciplinary chores in whatever way best suited the camp's reigning aristocracy: the SS.

The worst crime that a prisoner could commit at Auschwitz, and therefore the crime most sternly punished, was to attempt an escape. There were more than 600 cases. Once the roll call disclosed that someone was missing, the sirens began wailing and everything stopped. The prisoners had to stand at attention for hours while detachments of SS men set forth with their dogs to hunt for the fugitive. For as long as three days, the hunt would continue through all the fields and marshes that surrounded Auschwitz. About two-thirds of the time, the pursuers soon found their prey. After torturing him to make him confess who had helped him escape, the SS made him parade around the camp with a sign that said, "Hurrah! I'm back!" Then they gathered all the other prisoners to watch his punishment, and they hanged him.

At 3 P.M. on January 27, 1945, more than a week after the SS evacuation, some white-caped reconnaissance scouts for the First Ukrainian Front emerged from the woods and saw the rows of barracks, the miles of barbed wire, the empty guard posts. Inside the camp, they found some 7,650 of those half-dead prisoners whom the SS had judged too feeble to be worth evacuating. (This number, like so many Auschwitz statistics, is hardly more than an official approximation. Indeed, the total number of Auschwitz survivors is almost as cloudy as the number of dead. The estimates generally run around 30,000, which means that of all the prisoners shipped to Auschwitz, fewer than one percent lived.) "There was a mad rush to shake them by the hand and shout out our gratitude," said one of the survivors, Karel Ornstein. "Several prisoners waved red scarves. The shouts of joy (could) have gone on forever."

Elie Wiesel, who managed to survive being sent to Auschwitz as a boy, remembered the place as hellish, but when he returned in 1979, he was overwhelmed by its beauty. "The low clouds, the dense forest, the calm solemnity of the scenery," he wrote. "The silence is peaceful, soothing." When Wiesel tried to decipher the meaning of that serene graveyard, he was helpless. "How was it possible?" he wrote. "We shall never understand. Even if we manage somehow to learn every aspect of that insane project, we will never understand it . . . I think I must have read all the books - memoirs, documents, scholarly essays and testimonies written on the subject. I understand it less and less."

Questions:

1. Why did Wiesel call it "Planet Auschwitz"?

2. Why is "Annihilation Camp" a better name than even "Death Camp"?

3. Give examples of the humiliation, demoralization and degradation heaped upon the Jewish inmates.

4. Define the following terms:

a. Kapo

b. Labor Camp

c. Zyklon-B

d. "Sport"

e. Appel : "roll call" (defined on pg. VIII-14)

f. SS

Reading #4

"All roads lead to Auschwitz" (file copy)

Reading #5

Before Reading #5, think about how you would react to the various situations explained below. Try to imagine yourself "living" through these experiences.

The Survivor - by Terrence Despres (excerpts)

I. Excremental Assault

It began in the trains, in the locked boxcars -- eighty to a hundred people per car --crossing Europe to the camps in Poland:

The temperature started to rise, as the freight car was enclosed and body heat had no outlet...The only place to urinate was through a slot in the skylight, though whoever tried, usually missed, spilling urine on the floor...When dawn finally rose...we were all quite ill and shattered, crushed not only by the weight of fatigue but by the stifling, moist atmosphere and the foul odor of excrement....There was no latrine, no provision....On top of everything else, a lot of people had vomited on the floor. We were to live for days on end breathing those foul smells, and soon we lived in the foulness itself (<M>Kessel, 50-51<D>).

Everybody in the block had typhus...it came to Belsen Bergen in its most violent, most painful, deadliest form. The diarrhea caused by it became uncontrollable. It flooded the bottom of the cages, dripping through the cracks into the faces of the women lying in the cages below, and mixed with blood, pus and urine, formed a slimy, fetid mud on the floor of the barracks (Perl, 171).

The latrines were a spectacle unto themselves:

There was one latrine for thirty to thirty two thousand women and we were permitted to use it only at certain hours of the day. We stood in line to get into this tiny building knee-deep in human excrement. As we all suffered from dysentery, we could rarely wait until our turn came, and soiled our ragged clothes, which never came off our bodies, thus adding to the horror of our existence by the terrible smell which surrounded us like a cloud. The latrine consisted of a deep ditch with planks thrown across it at certain intervals. We squatted on these planks like birds perched on a telegraph wire, so close together that we could not help soiling one another <M>(Perl, 33)<D>.

Prisoners lucky enough to work in one of the camp hospitals, therefore able to enjoy some measure of privacy, were not thereby exempt from the latrine's special horror:

"I had to step into human excreta, into urine soaked with blood, into stools of patients suffering from highly contagious diseases. Only then could one reach the hole, surrounded by the most inexpressible dirt" (Weiss,69). The new prisoner's initiation into camp life was complete when he "realized that there was no toilet paper"---

The fact is that prisoners were systematically subjected to filth They were the deliberate target of excremental assault. Defilement was a constant threat, a condition of life from day to day, and at any moment it was liable to take abruptly vicious and sometimes fatal forms. The favorite pastime of one Kapo was to stop prisoners just before they reached the latrine. He would force an inmate to stand at attention for questioning; them make him "squat in deep knee-bends until the poor man could no longer control his sphincter and "exploded", then beat him; and only then, "covered with his own excrement, the victim would be allowed to drag himself to the latrine" (Donat, 178). In another instance, prisoners were forced to lie in rows on the ground, and each man, when he was finally allowed to get up, "had to urinate across the heads of the others"; and there was "one night when they refined their treatment by making each man urinate into another's mouth" (Wells, 91.)

In Birkenau, soup bowls were periodically taken from the prisoners and thrown into the latrine, from which they had to be retrieved: "When you put it to your lips for the first time, you smell nothing suspicious. Other pairs of hands trembling with impatience wait for it, they seize it the moment you have finished drinking: Only later, much later, does a repelling odor hit your nostrils."
(Szmaglewska 154)

Again, conditions like these were not accidental; they were determined by a deliberate policy which aimed at complete humiliation and debasement of prisoners. Why this was necessary is not at first apparent, since none of the goals of the camp system--to spread terror, to provide slaves, to exterminate populations--required the kind of thoroughness with which conditions of defilement were enforced. But here too, for all is madness, there was method and reason. This special kind of evil is a natural outcome of power when it becomes absolute, and in the totalitarian world of the campsite very nearly was.

Defilement had its lesser logic as well. "In Buchenwald", says one survivor, "it was a principle to depress the morale of prisoners to the lowest possible level, thereby preventing the development of fellow-feeling or co-operation among the victims" (Weinstock,92). How much self-esteem can one maintain, how readily can one respond with respect to the needs of another, if both stink, if both are caked with mud and feces? We tend to forget how camp prisoners looked and smelled, especially those who had given up the will to live, and in consequence the enormous revulsion and disgust which naturally arose among prisoners.

And here is a final vastly significant reason why in the camps the prisoners were so degraded. This made it easier for the SS to do their job. It made mass murder less than human. They looked inferior. In Gitta Sereny's series of interviews with Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka, there are moments of fearful insight. Here is one of the most telling:

"Why," I asked Stangl, "if they were going to kill them anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation, why the cruelty?""To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies," he said. "To make it possible for them to do what they did" (101).

II. Nightmare and Waking

One Survivor remarks that in camp he did not wake fellow prisoners when one of them was having a nightmare; he knew that no matter how bad the dream might be, reality was worse. And what, really, could be worse than to wake up in a concentration camp? The most ghastly moment of the twenty-four hours of camp life," says a survivor of Auschwitz, "was the awakening, when, at a still nocturnal hour, the three shrill blows of a whistle tore us pitilessly from our exhausted sleep and from the longings of our dreams" (Frankl, 31). "The moment of awakening," says another, "was the most horrible" (Zywulska, 33). Or finally:

Awakening is the hardest moment -- no matter whether these are your first days in the camp, days full of despair, where every morning you relive the painful shock, or whether you have been here long, very long, where each morning reminds you that you lack strength to begin a new day, a day identical with all previous days (Szmaglewska,4).

The wonder is they got up at all. Camp prisoners were permanently exhausted, they were often sick, and a night's sleep was four or five hours at most. Under such stress we might expect a retreat into unconsciousness, into coma, as when a person faints from shock or excess of pain. Where did the strength to get up come from? And why return to a reality so terrible? Prisoners were driven awake by fear, by anxiety and often by the blows of a whip or club. But mainly they got up for the same reason any of us do; essential activities have to be performed; organisms must interact with and find protection from, their environment. Prisoners either got up or died; they either faced an unbearable world knowing they would have to bear it, or gave up.

In "The Informed Heart" Bruno Bettelheim observes that the "vast majority of the thousands of prisoners who died at Buchenwald each year died soon" (146). That was true everywhere in the world of the camps: newcomers had the highest death rate. We might therefore ask, as Bettelheim does, "why, in the concentration camp, although some prisoners survived and others got killed, such a sizable number simply dies" (145). His answer is that they "died of exhaustion, both physical and psychological, due to a loss of desire to live"(146) Loss of desire to live is one of the primary symptoms of the period of initial collapse, and large numbers of men and women died because during this crucial stage of imprisonment they failed to strive for life with every fiber of their being. But still, loss of the will to live is a symptom, not a cause. The fact is that prisoners "died soon" from a complex of conditions and forces which nothing in the whole of their lives had prepared them to face or even imagine: from prolonged terror and shock; from radical loss both of identity and of faith in the capacity of goodness to prevail against the evil surrounding them. They died simply for lack of information, because they did not know what to do or how to act. Very often, too, they died of mourning, of grief for the deaths of their family and friends.

III. Life in Death

In "Night," Elie Wiesel records two moments of advice, two prescriptions for survival in the concentration camp. The first came from an "old" prisoner speaking to the new arrivals:

1. "We are all brothers, and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive" (52).

The second was an anonymous inmate's comment:

Listen to me, boy. Don't forget that you're in a concentration camp. Here, every man has to fight for himself and not think of anyone else. Even of his father. Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends. Everyone lives and dies for himself alone (122).

Help one another. Every man for himself. The conflict is classic, and nowhere more starkly stressed than in the concentration camp ordeal. For as soon as survivors wake to the reality of their predicament they must choose. They must decide which view will govern their behavior and their perception of camp life as a whole. In extremity the claims of self-interest seem sounder, more logical; and the second prescription --help only thyself--dominates the description of events in Wiesel's books: men fight among themselves, fathers contend with sons to the death. The rule of war was total, or so he implies. Yet Wiesel did not abandon his father, and the prisoner who gave kind advice was, after all, a man living in Auschwitz.

Survivors often remark that if a prisoner were to obey all camp roles he or she would be dead in a month. As a woman who survived Auschwitz says, "According to even the Camp Commandant...the obedient Haftlinge could only survive for three months at the very most. Those who lived longer did so only by cheating the authorities" (Hart, 66). Or as a survivor of Buchenwald says, they "gradually realized that obedience meant death. The only hope of survival lay in resistance" (Weinstock, 34)

The concentration camps were in this world and yet not in this world, places where behavior was grossly exaggerated, without apparent logic, yet fiercely hostile and encompassing. These are the components of nightmare, and if they join with the prisoner's psychic state--the confusion and stunned emotion, the dread and impotence, the split between a self that is victim and a self which, as through the wrong end of a telescope, merely watches--then the sense of nightmare is bound to prevail. During this time the prisoner suffers a terrible sleep, as when the young Wiesel saw what in shape and feeling could only be a nightmare:

Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load---little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it--saw it with my own eyes....Was I awake? I could not believe it...No, none of this could be true. It was a nightmare (Night, 42)

Smuggling is only one example of "organizing." Prisoners working in factories performed daily acts of sabotage and theft. Those who worked in the notorious medical blocks stole medicines, jockeyed names, lied about symptoms, and in Buchenwald they used the typhus wards, which the SS would not go near, to hide men whose names had come up on the death lists. Others kept up contact with partisan groups and helped arrange escapes. Still others circulated news of the progress of the war --news on which camp morale depended. In Soviet camps there was mass theft of camp supplies, especially coal and construction materials, both essential to survival in an arctic climate. Camp facilities were used for "illegal" activities: "Buildings designed for the manufacture of heavy equipment also housed independent workshops for producing goods out of pilfered materials, waste, and remnants." (Gilboa)

On the surface, cooperation with camp administration appeared total. But underneath, moral sanity reasserted itself, response to necessity was characterized by resistance, and the worst effects of extremity were thereby transcended. In a literal sense, these countless, concrete acts of subterfuge constituted the "underlife" of the death camps. By doing what had to be done (disobey) in the only way it could be done (collectively) survivors kept their social being, and therefore their essential humanity, intact.

Prisoners survived through concrete acts of mutual aid, and over time these many small deeds, like fibers in the shuttle of a clumsy loom, grew into a general fabric of debt and care. At roll-call, for instance, or Appel, as it was called in the Nazi camps,prisoners had to form up hours before dawn and stand at attention in thin rags through rain and snow. This occurred again in the evening, and took at least two hours, sometimes three and four, and every survivor remembers roll-calls which lasted all night. Prisoners had to stand there the whole time, caps off, caps on, as SS officers strolled past the ranks. Any irregularity was punished savagely, and irregularities were numerous. Prisoners fainted, collapsed from exhaustion and sickness, simply fell dead on the spot. "Those winter Appels," says a survivor of Buchenwald, "were actually a form of extermination."

Help was forbidden, of course, but there was some safety in numbers, for among so many thousands of prisoners packed together, the SS could view any particular rank only briefly. But despite danger, the need to help persisted, often in elaborate ways. It regularly happened that sick prisoners were carried to roll-call by comrades, who then took turns supporting them. Sometimes this went on for days, and care for the sick did not end with roll-call. Many men and women were nursed back to health by friends who "organized" extra food, who shuffled the sick man back and forth from barracks to barracks, who propped him up at roll-call, and kept him out of sight during "selections" and while he was delirious. In one case a prisoner with typhus was snuggled every day into the "Canada" work detail and hidden in the great piles of clothing where he could rest. This particular rescue involved getting the sick man through a gate guarded by a Kapo whose job was to spot sick and feeble prisoners and club them to death. Each day, therefore, two prisoners supported the sick man almost to the gate, and then left him to march through on his own. Once past the guard they propped him up again.

The survivor's experience is evidence that the need to help is as basic as the need for help, a fact which points to the radically social nature of life in extremity and explains an unexpected but very widespread activity among survivors. In the concentration camps a major form of behavior was gift-giving. Inmates were continually giving and sharing little items with each other, and small acts like these were continuously valuable both as morale boosters and often as real aids in the struggle for life. Sometimes the gift was given outright, with no apparent relation between donor and receiver.

Order emerges, people turn to one another in "neighborly help." This pattern was everywhere apparent in the world of the camps. Giving and receiving were perpetual, and we can only imagine the intensity of such transactions. When men and women know that they are dying, smallest favors can shake the frail world of their being with seismic force. The power of such moments is enormous and the bonds thus created go far deeper than guilt or pride or ordinary obligation. And perhaps the most striking thing about this kind of giving, apart from the extreme gratitude it could generate, is the fact that pity played no part:

"Yet, how little sometimes suffices to save a perishing man, a glance, a word, a gesture. Once I gave a fellow prisoner a boiled potato and he never stopped thanking me for having saved his life. Another time I helped someone to regain his feet after he had fallen during a march. He not only reached our destination alive, but survived the war; and he maintains that without my help that one time he would never have gotten up, he would have been killed where he lay. In the camp it was easier to get a piece of bread than a kind word. Prisoners helped one another as best they could, but they shied away from sentiments. Help, yes, compassion no" (Donat, 237)

Questions:

1. Would you have "cheated, stolen and smuggled" to stay alive? Explain your answer.

2. "Prisoners survived through concrete acts of mutual aid." Define and explain.

Reading #6

If Readings #3 and #5 were difficult, then #6 continues to be necessary reading. The March cannot answer all the "big" questions, but can help answer some of the little ones, such as, "How did it work?" This article may help you to understand.

"The Death House," Inside the Third Reich - William Shirer

"We had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. These would be marched by one of the doctors, who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit to work were sent into the camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work." Always Herr Hoess kept making improvements in the art of mass killing.

"Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated, while at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated.

We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz."

The gas chambers themselves and the adjoining crematoria, viewed from a short distance, were not sinister-looking places at all; it was impossible to make them out for what they were. Over them were well-kept lawns with flower borders; the signs at the entrances merely said BATHS. The unsuspecting Jews thought they were simply being taken to the baths for the delousing which was customary at all camps. And taken to the accompaniment of sweet music!

For there was light music. An orchestra of "young and pretty girls all dressed in white blouses and navy-blue skirts" as one survivor remembered, had been formed from among the inmates. While the selection was being made for the gas chambers this unique musical ensemble played gay tunes from The Merry Widow and Tales of Hoffmann. Nothing solemn and somber from Beethoven. The death marches at Auschwitz were sprightly and merry tunes, straight out of Viennese and Parisian operettas.

To such music, recalling as it did happier and more frivolous times, the men, women and children were led into the "bath houses" where they were told to undress preparatory to taking a "shower." Sometimes they were even given towels. Once they were inside the "shower-room" --and perhaps this was the first moment that they may have suspected something was amiss, for as many as two thousand of them were packed into the chamber like sardines, making it difficult to take a bath --the massive door was slid shut, locked and hermetically sealed.

Through heavy-glass portholes the executioners could watch what happened. The naked prisoners below would be looking up at the showers from which no water spouted or perhaps at the floor wondering why there were no drains. It took some moments for the gas to have much effect. But soon the inmates became aware that it was issuing from the perforations in the vents. It was then that they usually panicked, crowding away from the pipes and finally stampeding toward the huge metal door where as Reitlinger puts it, "they piled up in one blue clammy blood-spattered pyramid, clawing and mauling each other even in death."

Twenty or thirty minutes later when the huge mass of naked flesh had ceased to writhe, pumps drew out the poisonous air, the large door was opened and the men of the Sonderkommando took over. These were Jewish male inmates who were promised their lives and adequate food in return for performing the most ghastly job of all. Protected with gas masks and rubber boots and wielding hoses they went to work. Reitlinger has described it.

"Their first task was to remove the blood and defecations before dragging the clawing dead apart with hoses and hooks, the prelude to the ghastly search for gold and the removal of teeth and hair which were regarded by the Germans as strategic materials. Then the journey by lift or rail-wagon to the furnaces, the mill that ground the clinker to fine ash, and the truck that scattered the ashes in the stream of the Sola."

Questions:

1. Why was it important to keep the Jews "unsuspecting" of what lay ahead until the very last possible moment?

2. Why were Jews "fooled" by the music and the "bath-houses"?

Reading #7

Much has been written about Treblinka. In a few months you will walk into this death camp. We cannot fully prepare you for this experience. This article will help.

Treblinka - G. Reitlinger, Final Solution (1968)

Treblinka, one of the main Nazi extermination centers during World War II. Known until then as a small railroad station between Siedice and Malkinia, located approximately 62 miles (100 km) northeast of Warsaw, Treblinka became the final destination for transports that brought Jews from the ghettos of the General Government and about ten European countries to their death. The Jews were brought to Treblinka under the pretext of alleged resettlement in former Soviet territories that had been occupied. The actual site of mass slaughter was located approximately 2.5 miles (4 km) from the station, camouflaged inside a pine forest. On the border of this area was a platform for the train that carried the Jews from the station in consignments of 15-20 cars, which reached the camp on a side track especially built for this purpose.

Treblinka II: The Culmination of "Efficiency" in the Extermination of Jews (July 23, 1942-Oct. 14, 1943). After the beginning of mass slaughter in the Belzec and Sobibor camps in March and May 1942, Treblinka II became the third and, in terms of capacity, the largest camp for the extermination of Jews in the General Government. The stationary gas chambers installed in the above-mentioned camps used a uniform organizational and technical system based on a common operational center located in Lublin. The creator and head of this center, the S.S. and Polizeifuehrer of the district, Odilo Globocnik was appointed by Himmler as a high official in charge of the "Final Solution" of the Jewish question on a European scale. He acted in close collaboration with Reichsamtsleiter Victor Brack, the former chief of the euthanasia program in Germany.

Mobile gas chambers constructed on the model of the lethal sanitary vans tested in Germany were put into operation in the parts of Poland annexed by the Reich (Wartheland) and in some former Soviet territories. The main obstacle to the mass application of these vans was their limited capacity. Mass shooting of the Jewish inhabitants in the U.S.S.R. by the Einsatzgruppen was no less problematic from the Nazi point of view. These massacres caused misgivings in commanding military circles; they caused too much noise and were carried out in broad daylight, and also left too many wounded or unhurt witnesses who could flee the graves. To employ this method on territories near European centers and even in Germany itself was out of the question.

A solution was achieved by the division of labor and the coordination of individual sections. The functions of rounding up the victims at their places of residence and their extermination at the place of execution were separated. One of the Einsatzgruppen(the notorious Einsatz Reinhardt)was to continue to act but in the framework of Globocnik's camps its activities were connected mainly with deportation. As a result, the transports directed to the camps had fixed quotas. After a fixed number of "heads" and transports had been dispatched from a given place, the Einsatz team was free to perform its Aktion in another place. This ensured the death factories a regular and plentiful supply of human material.

The services of the railway network of the Reich and the occupied countries comprised a link in this chain. Transport was a difficult matter at a time when all the railways were swamped with military personnel and supplies. In addition, the trains for transporting Jews from Western and Central Europe had to be ordinary long-distance passenger trains in order to prevent the suspicions of the victims and soothe the conscience of some satellite circles. Jews from the Polish ghettos were being "resettled" without such ceremonies. Freight trains and cattle cars escorted by murderers were filled beyond capacity with people designated for extermination. For hours, and sometimes days these trains would stand on the side tracks allowing other transports to pass, and thus a large proportion of the deportees (mainly babies, the aged and the sick) lacking water, air and sanitary arrangement, frequently died before reaching their destination.

Those who arrived alive were awaited by the third link in the chain -- a team of executioners. It was their duty to get the largest possible number of victims through the respective stages of the procedure at lightning speed, to strip them of the last remnants of their possessions including their hair, gold teeth and dentures; to supervise the removal of the corpses; and to sort out the remaining belongings for shipment to Germany.

The large area of Treblinka (32 acres; 13 hectares) was divided into two sectors. In the first, the larger one, the victims were received and classified and their remaining possessions were sorted out and dispatched. In the second were two buildings containing gas chambers and a field of mass graves dug up by mechanical excavators. Three gas chambers (measuring 25 square meters each) were located in the building erected earlier, and ten more chambers, twice as large, were in the building erected at a later date. The staff of both sectors consisted of about 30 S.S. men. 200-300 so-called Ukrainians (that is, members of the auxiliary services), and about 1,000-1,500 Jewish prisoners who were recruited for the work from among the younger men and after having been brought to a state of emaciation were often replaced by men from new transports.

In Treblinka there were also camouflage buildings such as "Lazarette" and "train change stations" intended to prevent any self-defending reaction from the victims. The entire procedure was set in motion the moment the vans arrived at the loading platform. After the doors of the vans were pulled aside, a horde of Germans and Ukrainians rushed at the victims, shouting, and beating them. They would throw the victims out of the vans, wounding and injuring them straightaway and causing the miserable people unbelievable shock. Shortly thereafter the Hoellenspektaket ("inferno show") would begin. Men and women were separated and families were broken up without being allowed the opportunity for farewells. Men were ordered to undress at the square. While their heads and faces were being whipped, they had to snatch armfuls of clothing and bring them to a large pile to be sorted. A prisoner from the Jewish staff dealt bits of string to men to tie their shoes into pairs. In a nearby barrack another Jewish prisoner would distribute bits of string to women for the same purpose. From the "changing room," women would go over to the "hairdressers," where their hair would be cut off. It would then be used in some industries of the Third Reich.

No pain and no humiliation were spared to those sentenced to death.

The victims would be stood in a row -- ready for the "chase" - naked and barefoot, even in the worst winter days. Before them stretched a 150-yard path connecting both sectors of the camp called by the Germans Schlauch or, more "wittily" Himmel-strasse ("Way to Heaven). The condemned ran between the rows of torturers, who shouted, battered them with their whips, pricked them with bayonets. Among the shouts, the barking of an enormous hound (the famed dog Bari who belonged to the principal sadist of the camp, nicknamed "Doll) would be heard. Excited by the cries, the hound would tear chunks of flesh from the victims' bodies. The victims screamed as well and cursed, some of them calling Shema Yisrael or "down with Hitler." All inhibitions abandoned, even the men howled with pain; children cried, women were frantic with fear. This route to the gas chambers also had its name Himmelfahrt ("Ascension") in the camp slang.

Perhaps Brack's experts instructed the executioners that if victims arrived at the chambers out of breath, the effect of the gas would be hastened and the time of agony shortened. The condemned were probably oblivious of this aspect, but they would already be hurriedly running and pushing in order to get to their only refuge left in the world after what had happened to them.

After it was ascertained by looking through the peepholes, that all movement had ceased, the trap door was lifted from the outside and a sight unparalleled in its ghastly nightmarishness would be revealed. The corpses "stood" pressed one against the other ("like basalt pillars") and appeared to be staring with the horror of suffocation. The first corpses had to be pulled out with hoops, and after that they fell out in heaps on the concrete platforms. They were pale and damp and bathed in perspiration and the secretions of the last defecation, the buttocks and faces were blue, mouths open, teeth bared, and bloody effusions oozed out from the mouths and noses.

In the corridors the staff began cleaning and washing the chambers for the next shift, sprinkling the Himmelstrasse with fresh sand, while on the side of the graves, men began the run with the corpses, under a storm of blows and threat of pistols, toward the enormous graves. The grave diggers placed corpses in the gigantic cavities head to feet, and feet to head, in order to put in the maximum number. On the way to the graves stood a squad of "dentists" whose duty it was to pull out gold teeth and dentures from the mouths of the corpses. Another group of specialists was to check quickly whether there were any diamonds hidden in the corpse's rectums or in the women's vaginas. From time to time single shots were fired by the guards to increase the zeal of the grave diggers standing in the grave full of blood, pus, and dreadful stench. Whoever was beaten up, had a trace of blood, or a bruise left on his face, was finished off with a bullet after the roll call. And there was also musical accompaniment to the shows of Treblinka: at first klezmorim from the surrounding villages and later an excellent chamber orchestra played under the direction of Arthur Gold known for his jazz ensemble from Warsaw. In addition there was a choir which every evening sang the idyllic song "Gute Nacht, Gute Nacht, shlaft gut bis der Morgen erwucht" and a marching song composed by one of the prisoners. None of those musicians survived Treblinka.

Acts of Resistance. The greatest number of transports occurred in the late summer and autumn of 1942. During the winter the frequency and number of transports abated. After the German defeat at Stalingrad and foreseeing the need to retreat from the Eastern front, the Nazi authorities decided to cremate the corpses in order to eliminate the traces of their crimes.

A special corps of Jewish prisoners, coded by the number 1005, was set upon the grounds where the mass graves were placed. After Himmler's visit to Treblinka in February, 1943, the monstrous action of pulling the corpses out of the mass graves and burning them on iron grates began. In most of the 1005 squads, the commandants of this difficult task were forced to stop killing the already trained prisoners and their replacement by new ones. This however, did not lessen the prisoners' belief that they would also be shot and burned the moment their task was finished. That is when plans for rebellion and escape were born and ripened in almost all such groups in the second half of 1943 and in the first half of 1944. Sometimes these plans even partially succeeded despite losses. The same happened in Treblinka. (See other articles for details)

The Aftermath. As a result of interviews and investigations conducted after the liberation it appeared that although the wooden barracks were burned down, August 2, 1943 was not the last day of activities in Treblinka II. Most of the German and Ukrainian staff remained alive. They completed the burning of the corpses and dealt with some transports in the main from the General Government, up to September. In October 1943 all buildings were blown up and the entire area was plowed and sown with fodder, in order to obliterate all traces of the crime. According to the data collected by the Polish authorities, apart from Jews from the General Government and Reichskommissariat Ost (Bialystok and Grodno). Jews from several Central and West European countries (Germany, Austria, Bohemia-Moravia, Slovakia, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg) and from Balkan countries (Greece, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria) were murdered there. Coins and identity cards of the citizens of more than 30 countries were found among other exhibits unearthed in the campgrounds. In addition to Jews, a certain number of Poles and gypsies were also murdered there. According to the calculations of Judge Z. Lukaskiewicz, the number of victims murdered in Treblinka amounted to at least 731,600. The basis of this calculation was the railway documentation and an estimation of the average number of vans and people. This number which was published in 1946, must be enlarged and rounded out to about 750,000 on the basis of German documents discovered later on by Jewish researchers.

Reading #8

Bomba, a survivor, is now a barber, the same job he performed for the Nazis at Treblinka. Touch your hair -- go ahead. Imagine Bomba cutting hair in Treblinka, when the turn came for someone he knew to have his hair cut. What would you tell them? It's in Reading #8.

Abraham Bomba, the Barber in Treblinka - Shoah, (filmed by Claude Lanzmann)

How did it look, the gas chamber?

It was not a big room, around twelve feet by twelve feet. But in that room they pushed in a lot of women, almost one on top of another. But like I mentioned before, when we came in, we didn't know what we were going to do. And then one of the kapos came in and said: "Barbers, you have to do a job to make all those women coming in believe that they are just taking a haircut and going in to take a shower, and from there they go out from this place." We know already that there is no way of going out from this room, because this room was the last place they went in alive, and they will never go out alive again.

Can you describe precisely?

Describe precisely...We were waiting there until the transport came in. Women with children pushed in to that place. We the barbers started to cut their hair, and some of them - I would say all of them - some of them knew already what was going to happen to them. We tried to do the best we could - to be the most human we could.

Excuse me. How did it happen when the women came into the gas chamber? Were you yourself already in the gas chamber?

I said we were already in the gas chamber, waiting over there for the transport to come in. Inside the gas chamber - we were already in.

And suddenly you saw the women coming?

Yes, they came in.

How were they?

They were undressed, naked, without clothes, without anything else - completely naked. All the women and all the children, because they came from the undressing barrack - the barrack before going into the gas chamber - where they had undressed themselves.

What did you feel the first time you saw all these naked women?

I felt accordingly I got to do what they told me, to cut their hair in a way that it looked like the barber was doing his job for a woman, and I set out to give them both, to take off as much hair as I could, because they needed women's hair to be transported to Germany.

Did you shave them?

No, we didn't. We just cut their hair and made them believe they were getting a nice haircut.

You cut with what - with scissors?

Yes, with scissors and comb, without any clippers. Just like a man's haircut, I would say. Not a boy, to take off all their hair, but just to have the imagination that they're getting a nice haircut.

There were no mirrors?

No, there were no mirrors. There were just benches - not chairs, just benches - where we worked, about sixteen or seventeen barbers, and we had a lot of women in. Every haircut took about two minutes, no more than that because there were a lot of women to come in and get rid of their hair.

Can you imitate how you did it?

How we did it - cut as fast as we could. We were quite a number of us professional barbers, and the way we did