Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sector BIIc, Late May to October 1944

Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sector BIIc, Late May to October 1944 - Chapter 3

Late May and June 1944: the peak of the Hungarian action

When she walked into BIIc, Birkenau was running at the highest tempo in its history. The deportations from Hungary had begun on May 15 and were carried out by Hungarian gendarmerie under the direction of Eichmann’s small German team. They moved in the Hungarian “zones” described in Phase 2, working from the northeast, Subcarpathia and the Carpathian region, toward the Danube and Budapest. In roughly eight weeks, 147 trains delivered something over 430,000 people, with the commonly cited total around 437,000. That produced days with three or four trains, and some single days when over 10,000 people were processed. The SS leadership she met was also new. Richard Baer had replaced Arthur Liebehenschel as garrison commandant in mid-May. Josef Kramer was in charge at Birkenau. Rudolf Höss had been brought back from Oranienburg on May 8 to run the Hungarian operation personally. That was Aktion Höss, which chapter 2 covered. He left again in late July when the work was done.

The capacity of the killing apparatus was overwhelmed. Crematoria II through V had a paper capacity of a little over four thousand bodies a day, and that figure was never sustainable for long. To keep pace, the SS reopened the old gassing installation known as Bunker 2, which had sat idle, and dug and used open burning pits in the ground behind Crematorium V. Corpses burned in the open air, day and night, which produced the glow, the ash, and the smell of burnt flesh that almost every Hungarian survivor describes. She says that on the ramp she could smell it, and that her mother said people were being burned. Her mother’s “Men harget Mentshen men brent” is a faithful rendering of what Hungarian Jews reported in that first hour. It is also, historically, evidence of how quickly the information had reached them by rumor, in contrast to the prior failure to believe it, which she describes in the pre-deportation context. The Sonderkommando, the prisoner squad forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria, was expanded to meet the load. In the weeks after the Hungarian transports began, it was raised from a few hundred men to something near nine hundred. They lived in the crematorium buildings, were rotated in shifts, and were periodically killed and replaced. What mattered for the women in BIIc was that the Sonderkommando was entirely invisible to them as persons but fully present as a source of fire and ash.

Information leaving the camp was also at its peak. The Slovak Jews Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler had escaped on April 7, 1944, precisely to warn the Hungarian community of what was coming, and their report reached Slovakia and Switzerland. It was in circulation among Allied and neutral governments and Jewish organizations at about the time she arrived. Two more escapees, Czesław Mordowicz and Arnošt Rosin, left on May 27, the day before Shavuot, and carried fresh news about the Hungarian arrivals. The knowledge in the outside world was real, and the transports kept coming. That is the first piece of context for her remark on the Hungarian women’s disbelief: the information existed, and the people in the cattle cars lacked it.

Within BIIc, her description of the physical conditions is in line with what other Hungarian women record. The stable barracks, built to be horse stalls, were jammed far beyond any reasonable occupancy, with many hundreds of women per barrack and sometimes over a thousand. The bunks were rough wood, in three tiers, with no mattresses and often no blankets. Her figure of twelve girls on the top, fourteen in the middle, and fourteen on the bottom of a bay, and the rule that if one turned, all turned, fits the standard descriptions. Women lay on their sides, like spoons, and the splinters she mentions appear in the testimony of many survivors. Her “five of us” on a bunk position, with her mother, sister, and two others, fits the likelihood that groups from the same town were kept together, since the SS did little to sort them. The chief fact about the first weeks is that none of the usual routines of a camp had yet been established for them. They had no work, no names, and no numbers, and the daily rhythm consisted of the Appell, the soup and bread, and the waiting.

The Zählappell, the roll call, was the main axis of the day. In BIIc it was held at the barracks in the early morning, and it routinely lasted two to four hours, longer when the count did not tally or when a selection was under way. Hungarian women in thin dresses stood in rows of five, which is why her description of five-abreast lines matches the structure of the camp throughout. The count had to match exactly, and a missing woman, or a dead woman, had to be accounted for. This is relevant to her account of hiding, which I will discuss below.

In the morning there was a hot ersatz drink, a “coffee”. At midday or evening there was a ration of soup, typically around a liter or less, made from rutabag, often with grit and sand, and sometimes with grass or nettle-like greens. In the evening there was a piece of bread, which in her barrack was shared in a ratio that she describes as dividing a slice into three. The calorie values are usually for a woman even without a work assignment is starvation by any measure. Her statement that the grass soup had to be swallowed and not chewed, and that her mother taught them this, is consistent with the reports of other survivors about the grit in the soup. The detail that her mother ate less in order to give to the sister is a standard pattern in the testimony of mothers in the women’s camp.

The lice and the sanitation are among the most heavily documented aspects of BIIc. The sector had a small number of latrine barracks, with long concrete benches over open trenches, for thousands of women, and access was controlled by the Blockowas and by the Appell schedule. There were severe outbreaks of dysentery and, over the summer, typhus, which she mentions in connection with herself and her sister, though in the context of Bergen-Belsen. Delousing was done periodically through the Zentralsauna. She describes being sent to bathe and returning to the same lice-ridden clothes, which matches the recurring failure of the SS to disinfect the clothing while processing the bodies. Her statement that after a trip to the bath she would check herself to see if she was alive indicates that, as with other survivors, she associated showers with the possibility of gas. That fear was not irrational. The Zyklon B facilities were physically similar to the showers, and some bath groups really were sent to the gas chambers.

Her “latrine” is the main surprise: she says it was a long bathroom with toilets all over and that it was clean. That differs from the usual image of filth, and it fits only in the early period. A latrine in the first weeks of the Hungarian influx may well have been relatively clean, before the epidemics, or it might refer to a particular barrack cleaned by a prisoner detail. Hiding in the latrines was a recognized tactic, noted in the testimony of other women, because latrine barracks were large, sometimes ignored, and located near the barracks.

The stone-chopping detail is documented in the sense that the SS used prisoners to break stones and bricks into gravel for roads, drainage, and construction. The Birkenau complex was in ongoing building in 1944, including the BIII sector, and the process was labor-intensive. A Hungarian woman who had been a farm girl in a Carpathian village, as she was, would have been less incapacitated by the work than a woman from Budapest or Miskolc, which matches her comment that the “city girls” cried and had their hands chopped while she “worked hard.” That she says “not everyday” is also consistent. For most of the summer, large numbers of unregistered women in BIIc had no assignment at all, and the SS used them in rotating details as needs arose. The rest of the time, they were left in the barracks and in the compound. Much of the daily experience for many Hungarian women was this enforced idleness, with Appell, soup, and bread as the only events.

Her recollection that, during idle time, women in the barrack talked about food and traded recipes is one of the most widely corroborated features of camp life. Women’s accounts from Ravensbrück, Terezín, Birkenau, and other camps describe the recitation of recipes as a collective ritual that held hunger at bay. The Terezín cookbook compiled by Mina Pächter is the best-known artifact. The Minnesota Starvation Experiment, begun in the United States late in 1944, gave a clinical parallel when the healthy volunteers became obsessed with recipes and cookbooks. Her remark that “you shiver and you feel you are eating that food” describes the physical response that those accounts also record. The link she draws to her present-day dieting, and to her question of why she should diet when she was so hungry, belongs to the post-war phases, though it shows how durable the effect was.

Late June and early July: the end of the Hungarian transports and the cousin in the Czech camp

Near the end of June, the deportation operation approached its limit. The Hungarian authorities, urged on by László Endre and László Baky at the Interior Ministry, had cleared the provinces, and the last zone, around Budapest’s suburbs, was scheduled for early July. At the same time international pressure on Admiral Horthy intensified, driven by the Vrba–Wetzler report, appeals from the Pope, from King Gustav of Sweden, and from the American government, and by the Allied bombing of Budapest. Horthy ordered an end to the deportations in the first week of July. The last transports to Auschwitz went before the halt took full effect, around July 9, and the Jews of Budapest were temporarily spared. That is a key moment for her context because it marks the point at which the great flood of new arrivals ended. After this, the camp began to deal with its excess. The numbers of Hungarian women in BIIc started to fall in the following weeks, as the SS shipped batches of selected women to Reich armaments plants in the first of the large dispatches. That was a prelude to the transport that took her in October.

She places the cousin in the Czech lager, in the exchange of bread for shoes, in this early period. The Czech family camp in BIIb is one of the stranger features of Birkenau’s history. Jews from Terezín were deported to Auschwitz in September 1943 and again in December 1943 and May 1944, and were housed in BIIb as a family camp, where they were not shaved, kept their civilian clothes, could write letters, and had a children’s block and a school. They were marked for “special treatment with six months’ quarantine” (SB 6), and when the six months expired, in March 1944, the first group, around 3,800 people, was gassed. The next group, which arrived in December 1943, was spared on a promise that was never fulfilled. Her cousin, living in a camp with such relative privileges, would plausibly have had access to spare bread and the means to trade. The barter of shoes, since the family camp inmates had better clothing and could obtain items from the Kanada warehouses through the networks of the male workers. That the cousin was a “Czech” cousin from a family from Subcarpathian Czechoslovakia raises a question. The family camp held Jews deported from Terezín, many of them Bohemian, Moravian, and some Slovak and German. A cousin from the Subcarpathian region might have been in Terezín if she had moved west, and that is an inquiry I would pursue through the Terezín database and the family camp lists.

This is where the Czech camp’s fate matters. In the first days of July 1944, the SS conducted a selection of the remaining people in BIIb. Roughly three thousand were chosen for work, including many women, who were sent to Reich camps, and roughly three thousand were gassed on the night of July 10 and 11, with some accounts extending the killing to July 12. Figures vary by source, so I would give them as approximate. The women who were spared were dispatched to labor in Germany, and BIIb was then emptied and used to house women from other transports, including Hungarian women. If the cousin was still in the family camp when the liquidation happened, she either went to the gas or was among those shipped out. Her statement that the cousin was “across from us” does not tell us which, and her account does not mention the liquidation. The July selection happened within sight and hearing of BIIc, and women there saw the families march and heard the cries. A woman whose cousin was in that camp would have been well aware of it, and her failure to mention it in the 1991 interview could reflect that the interview did not ask, or that she did not remember, or that the cousin had already been transferred. The bread-and-shoes exchange can be dated to a window from the first weeks after her arrival to about July 10, which provides a hard end point.

Her description of the shoes is also precise on a point of camp economy. She said that she kept her father’s handmade boots through the initial processing, a rare instance, and then they were stolen. Shoes were the most coveted and most stolen item in Birkenau, because without footwear a woman could not stand Appell in mud and would be selected soon after. She replaced them with men’s shoes, then wooden clogs. The clogs, the so-called Holzschuhe, were the standard issue for prisoners and were widely hated for the sores they caused.

The functionaries, the veterans, and the violence

The camp’s internal hierarchy shaped the daily lives of Hungarian women more directly than the SS did. In the women’s camp, the SS delegated the management of the barracks to prisoner functionaries: the Blockälteste (the Blockowa, in the Slavic form she uses), her assistants, the Stubendienst, and the Kapos who led work details. The functionaries held power over rations, the work assignments, and the Appell, and they had authority to beat. Many were Polish non-Jews or Slovak Jews, and these groups were among the longest-serving women in the camp. The first transport to Auschwitz that the SS officially recognized was a train of about 999 young Jewish women from Slovakia on March 26, 1942, and thousands more Slovak Jews followed through that year. Those who survived the first deadly winters and typhus epidemics became the camp’s veteran population, and many rose to positions of authority. By the spring of 1944, a number of Slovak Jewish women held key functionary posts in the women’s sector.

This bears directly on the claim she reports from the Blockowa, that she had “suffered five years there in Auschwitz,” and the line “When you were eating cholent, I was already hungry. You just came? I am here the fifth year already.” Literally, this cannot be true. Auschwitz I opened in June 1940, the women’s camp began in March 1942, and in the summer of 1944 the longest-serving Slovak woman would have been there a little over two years. The Birkenau women’s camp itself was only two years old. Two interpretations are plausible. The Blockowa may have been speaking of the “fifth year of the war,” which began in September 1939 and would be the fifth in 1944, or of her years of persecution since the Slovak anti-Jewish laws and labor camps of 1940 to 1942. Or the figure was an inflated claim, common among veterans who wanted to impress newcomers, or it could have been altered in Lanka’s retelling. I would classify it as rhetorical, with the “third year” as the plausible literal truth. The cholent comment is an authentic note of veteran contempt for the newly arrived, who were “from home,” who had been eating well until weeks earlier, and who, in the veterans’ view, did not understand where they were. Tensions between the Slovak and Polish veterans and the Hungarian newcomers were noted by many survivors. The veterans spoke Slovak, Yiddish, or German and viewed the Hungarians as naive and pampered, while the Hungarians sometimes viewed the Slovak veterans as hardened and corrupt. Her story of Hungarian women shouting “Magyarok, take us home” fits the same pattern, because the newcomers had trusted that the Hungarian authorities, their own countrymen, would intervene, and the veterans mocked that trust.

The beating of her mother is the central act of violence in this phase. She names the aggressor as a Kapo in one section and a Blockowa in the next, and also describes her as Hungarian from Chop in one place and Slovak with five years’ service in another. That is a conflict, that the transcript does not resolve. These are two different women, a Kapo from Chop who hit her mother and a Slovak Blockowa who generally terrorized the barrack, which the interviewer’s questions appear to conflate. The second is that the Slovak description refers to the same woman, with “Hungarian” meaning “from the Hungarian-annexed region,” since Chop was in Subcarpathia and had become Hungarian in 1938–39 after being Czechoslovak. Chop is a railway junction town near Ungvár, so “Hungarian” and “Czech” are both plausible nationalities for someone from there, and “Slovak” would be a stretch. I would flag the identity as unresolved and note that her mother knew the woman’s family, which suggests the Chop identification. The detail that her mother confronted the woman, saying “Look what she did to me,” is consistent with a Hungarian Orthodox mother’s sense of proper conduct, and it also carried risk. A Kapo could retaliate, and it was dangerous to protest. That the beating occurred while her mother was resting against the bunk end is typical of the violence of Kapos in the women’s camp, which was often arbitrary and tied to infractions of posture or order.

The confrontation in Gothenburg is a post-war episode and falls outside the Auschwitz chronology, but it belongs in this chapters analysis. After the war, survivors repeatedly met former functionaries in the DP camps and refugee communities, and the question of how to treat them was fraught. Primo Levi’s “gray zone” describes the moral ambiguity of the privileged prisoners, who had power over others and used it to survive. Some were denounced, tried before Jewish honor courts in the DP camps, or prosecuted under Israel’s 1950 law punishing Nazi collaborators, which brought a number of Kapo trials in the 1950s. I do not know of a formal proceeding in Gothenburg, and the episode appears to have been a personal confrontation at the Czechoslovak consulate. The relevant point for historians is that Lanka’s anger remained alive, and that she assigned responsibility to the Jewish functionary, not only to the SS, which parallels many other survivors’ sense of betrayal by those who beat their own.

July to August 1944: the Czech camp, the Gypsy camp, and the arrival of Łódź

After the end of the Hungarian operation, the SS turned to clearing out the camp’s special sectors. The Czech family camp was dealt with in July, as described. The Gypsy camp, BIIe, followed. The Roma and Sinti had been brought to Auschwitz from February 1943 in families, housed in BIIe, and subjected to starvation, epidemics, and medical experimentation. Josef Mengele was the physician of the sector and conducted his twin research there. In April and again in the summer of 1944, the SS sent several thousand able-bodied Roma and Sinti to labor camps in the Reich. On May 16, 1944, the SS tried to liquidate the camp, and the Roma and Sinti, warned of the plan, armed themselves with whatever tools they had and refused to leave their barracks. The SS retreated. The second attempt, on the night of August 2–3, succeeded. The remaining people, about 2,900, mostly women, children, and the elderly, were taken by truck to the gas chambers over the course of the night. The camp was empty by morning. BIIe adjoined the same row of sectors as BIIc, and women could have heard and seen the trucks and the commotion, though not necessarily the details. Her interview does not mention it, and the omission, like that of the Czech camp, reflects the difficulty of fitting these large events into a personal narrative. She might have been aware of it, but I cannot assume she was.

The same weeks saw major new arrivals. The Łódź ghetto, the last large ghetto in occupied Poland, was liquidated in the summer of 1944, with the final deportations starting at the end of June and going on through August. Tens of thousands of its inhabitants, around sixty to seventy thousand over a period of three weeks, were sent to Auschwitz in August, and most were gassed upon arrival. A minority were selected for labor and shipped on, and the survivors of those transports were in the camp over the following months. The Łódź women filled sectors in the women’s camp that had been emptied. The Warsaw Uprising began on August 1, and after its suppression, the Germans sent a large number of the city’s civilians into the camp system. Thousands of Warsaw women, children, and men were sent to Auschwitz from the transit camp at Pruszków between August and October, perhaps around thirteen thousand in total, with many then transferred to other camps in the Reich. These Polish arrivals were registered, and some were tattooed. They were a visible presence in the camp in September and October, and women in BIIc could have seen the long columns of civilians in their own clothes. Her account does not mention them, which again does not mean she was unaware.

At the end of August, the Slovak National Uprising began, and in its aftermath the Germans occupied Slovakia and began the deportation of the remaining Slovak Jews. In late September, transports from Terezín, which marked the final chapter for the Czech Jews, began arriving in Birkenau, and most of those people were gassed. These transports, about eighteen thousand over a month, reached the camp in the final weeks before she left.

Allied bombing entered the camp’s life in this period. On August 20, 1944, a large American force of B-17s from the Fifteenth Air Force, based in Italy, bombed the IG Farben synthetic fuel plant at Monowitz, the site of Auschwitz III, and some bombs fell on the SS barracks near it. On September 13, another raid hit the area and caused damage on the grounds of the main camp, killing SS men and prisoners, according to the Chronicle. Prisoners, including women, watched the planes passing high overhead, and survivors’ accounts describe a mixture of hope and fear, since bombs did not discriminate. The Allies had the capacity to bomb Birkenau’s gas chambers or the rail lines leading to them, and the Jewish organizations had asked, in the spring and summer of 1944, for such action. The U.S. War Department declined, reasoning that it was a diversion of resources, and the question remains debated by historians. In this respect the bombing of the Monowitz plant was a sharp irony, since it showed the Allies could reach the site. Her testimony does not mention these raids at Auschwitz, though it does describe the bombing of the Breslau bridge, which belongs to Phase 4.

The blondes, the coal, and the kitchen

Undated in her account but plausibly falling between late June and September are two episodes involving selection and choice: the selection of blondes and the refusal of the kitchen. They are best taken together, because both concern the SS’s and the functionaries’ practice of drawing particular women out of the mass.

On the blondes, she says that the SS selected only blonde women and that the rumor was that they were being taken “for the soldiers.” She and her sister ran back to their mother, smeared coal on their stubble, and were passed over. As to the historical frame, in the camp rumor mill, the idea that a selection of attractive women meant brothel service had real currency. The SS did operate a camp brothel in Auschwitz I, Block 24, from 1943, staffed by non-Jewish women prisoners, and Jewish women were excluded by the racial rules. So the specific rumor that Jewish blondes were being selected for soldiers was probably false, but it was fear-laden and plausible to the women. What the selection actually was is uncertain. The SS often picked women by appearance for specific work details, and in the summer of 1944, with the demand for labor from the Reich armaments sector rising, selections by height, age, and health were common. There were also details such as the Kanada sorting barracks, where the SS preferred healthy and clean-looking women, and the SS and officer households. Hair color was a mark of the Aryan type, and it is conceivable that the SS wanted blonde women for visible roles. Whatever the purpose, the sisters’ response was to try to stay with their mother rather than risk separation, a decision consistent with her theme of family loyalty. The detail that their heads were shaved “anyway” is accurate. Hungarian women were shaved on arrival and periodically thereafter, and stubble would grow over a few weeks. Darkening the stubble with coal is a plausible improvisation, and while I know of no other explicit parallel in published testimony, similar tactics, such as smearing dirt to disguise one’s appearance, are recorded. She mentions “Block 29” in this episode, and I would want to check BIIc’s block numbering, but the reference is consistent with the existence of numbered barracks in the sector.

On the kitchen and the tattoo, she states that she could have worked in the kitchen but refused because she did not want to be separated from her mother and sister, and that the kitchen workers were tattooed, while the C Lager women were not. The kitchen detail was one of the most privileged assignments, because it gave access to food, and the people selected for it were registered, which meant being given a number. This is consistent with the history. Registered prisoners were tattooed, and the women in BIIc who were not registered lacked numbers. Her statement that she “could have had better” and that she did not take it “on account of them” is a strong example of the kind of choice that survivors describe, in which a means of survival was forgone for loyalty. The reference to “girls in different camps” suggests that the kitchen detail was in another sector, probably the main women’s camp in BIa or BIb, which would have required leaving BIIc. I would not rule out that some elements are shaped by retrospective pride, but the choice is there, and the practice of recruiting from the new arrivals for the kitchen is attested.

The Belgian physician and the loss of faith

Her argument with the physician from Belgium is placed in the period when they were chopping stones. She says she questioned where God was and predicted that no one would leave, and the doctor slapped her and said that there must be a God and that “we are all sinners and that’s why we’re here.” Historically, there were Jewish women doctors from all over Europe in the Birkenau women’s camp, and many worked in the hospital blocks under SS supervision. The best-known Hungarian example is Gisella Perl, from Sighet, who arrived in May 1944 and later wrote of her work in the camp. A Belgian woman physician is plausible. Belgian Jews were deported from the Mechelen camp to Auschwitz in numerous transports from 1942 to 1944, and some of the women were professionals. That she was chopping stones and not working in the Revier is less typical but possible in a period when prisoner doctors were not all employed in the hospital.

The theological exchange itself is worth noting. The doctor’s reply, “we are all sinners and that’s why we’re here,” echoes the traditional formula of the festival liturgy, “because of our sins we were exiled from our land.” It is a classic expression of the doctrine of collective punishment, and it was widely held among observant Jews in the camps. Hungarian Orthodox women from Subcarpathia, a region of intense Hasidic piety, mostly held the traditional view, and Lanka, from an observant but rural background, is portraying her break with it. Her account of her mother reacting to the shaving with “See, God punished you,” and her answer, “God punished all of us. Where is He?” in the second interview, shows the same tension. It was a theological dispute within her own family, as well as with a stranger, and the slap indicates how seriously the community took the denial of divine providence. The mother’s reprimand and the doctor’s slap fit a pattern in which pious prisoners policed heresy, partly out of conviction and partly out of fear that blasphemy would bring further punishment. Her partial return to faith, which she describes in the 1991 interview, and her statement that she would never again be as Orthodox as she was in Europe, belong to the long-term legacy.

September: selections, the High Holidays, and the question of escape

By September, the camp was changing. The Soviet summer offensive, Operation Bagration, had begun on June 22 and destroyed Army Group Center. Majdanek was liberated in late July. The SS knew that the front was approaching and began, in a first wave, to move prisoners out of Auschwitz and into the Reich to maintain armaments production and to avoid leaving witnesses. Between August and the end of the year, tens of thousands of prisoners were sent to other camps. Selections in the women’s camp occurred regularly in this period. They were of two kinds: selections for transport to the Reich, which required fitness, and selections for the gas chambers, which targeted the sick, the weak, and the old. The two were not always separable, because the same SS doctors conducted them, and women who failed one might be sent to the other. The Jewish High Holidays in 1944 fell on September 18–19 (Rosh Hashanah) and September 27 (Yom Kippur), and several survivors link selections to the holidays, though I would treat those links cautiously. Her mother’s final selection, on her account, was based on her gray hair and apparent age. A woman of forty-four looking old was in a dangerous category, because the SS preferred women under about forty for labor transport. Having survived the initial selection at the ramp, when her age was borderline, she was removed in the fall when the SS made the criteria for transfer to the Reich more rigorous. The reference to gray hair under the wig is consistent with an Orthodox woman who wore a sheitel and had cropped her hair, and whose stubble regrew gray after the head shaving.

On the matter of escape, the question you put to your grandmother has a clear historical answer. Auschwitz had a chain of sentries around the camp complex and a zone of about forty square kilometers outside it, the Interessengebiet, which was patrolled. Inside, the camps were ringed with double fences of electrified barbed wire and watchtowers, and guards were authorized to shoot. Any escape provoked a massive search, with dogs, the sentry chain, and the local population, which was offered rewards. According to the museum’s research, there were about 800 recorded escape attempts, of which roughly 144 succeeded, a very small proportion given the size of the prisoner population. The consequences for those left behind were severe: the escapee’s block mates might be punished, and in some cases the SS took reprisals against relatives. Women’s escapes were rarer than men’s. The most celebrated escape from the women’s camp was that of Mala Zimetbaum, a Polish-Belgian Jewish prisoner who worked as an interpreter and runner, and Edek Galiński, a Polish political prisoner, on June 24, 1944. They were caught after a couple of weeks, and Mala was executed in the women’s camp in September in front of the assembled prisoners. That is the best-known public execution in the women’s sector in that summer and shows the pattern your grandmother described, in which an escape was followed by a public spectacle, with prisoners ordered to watch. In Lanka’s case, there were additional reasons she did not try. Her own explanation in the interview concerns the ghetto and the train, where her fear was of separation from her parents. In Birkenau, her mother and sister were with her, and leaving them would have meant abandoning them. For an unregistered woman with a shaved head and no papers, the odds were hopeless.

October 1944: the revolt, the selection, and the departure

On October 7, 1944, the Sonderkommando in Birkenau rose in revolt. The immediate trigger was an SS order to select some three hundred men for transfer, and the prisoners understood that this meant killing. The men had been preparing for months, with weapons and explosives smuggled in by women working at the Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke munitions factory, among them Roza Robota, Ala Gertner, Regina Safirsztain, and Estera Wajcblum. Using the smuggled explosives and tools, the men of Crematorium IV set the building on fire and attacked the SS. Prisoners from Crematorium II also joined, and some cut through the fence and fled. The SS suppressed the revolt within hours. About 250 Sonderkommando men were killed in the fighting or immediately after, and around 450 more were killed afterward. At least three SS men died. Crematorium IV was destroyed and not rebuilt. Crematorium IV stood in the western part of Birkenau, near BIIe and the crematoria area, and the sounds of gunfire and the smoke were visible and audible from other sectors. Women in BIIc might have heard shooting or seen smoke on the day, and I would ask whether she mentioned any such memory in other contexts, though her 1991 interview contains none. The revolt was a rare act of armed resistance, and its failure was typical. It occurred while she was either still in BIIc or shortly before she left, depending on the date of her transport.

The date of her transport remains to be settled. She says October, and in Day 2 that they were taken in “the last October,” meaning perhaps late October. In that period the SS conducted multiple transfers of women to the Reich, and the destination of her transport, a Gross-Rosen subcamp at Hundsfeld near Breslau, matches the known pattern of Hungarian women dispatched to Lower Silesian labor camps. I would cross-check the transfer lists of the Gross-Rosen complex and the Auschwitz Chronicle for dates. The significance of the revolt for her is its timing: it occurred within days or weeks of her departure, and the SS, after the revolt, tightened security and accelerated the dispatch of prisoners.

Her description of the departure matches the usual procedure. Women selected for transport were examined by SS physicians, usually naked, in front of the Blockowa and Aufseherinnen. They were sent to the Zentralsauna for bathing, disinfecting, and issue of clean clothing. They were then taken to the ramp and loaded onto a train. Her statement that the train was “a regular train” and not a cattle car is consistent with some Reich transfers of women, in which passenger or mixed-class carriages were used. The route from Auschwitz to Breslau is natural, and she says they went by train to Breslau and then walked to Hundsfeld. The age criterion for these transports, with women over about forty typically rejected, makes her mother’s rejection at forty-four predictable. Her mother’s words, as reported, “Gnädige Frau, lassen Sie mich mit meinen Kindern,” addressed to an SS woman, and the response, “Du bist zu alt zu arbeiten,” are consistent with what other women report, namely the helplessness and the mother’s plea for her children.