Auschwitz-Birkenau

Chapter 3

Auschwitz-Birkenau

After the selection, the women who had been sent to the right, Lanka, her mother, and Margaret among them, were marched to a large building where they were ordered to undress completely and to leave their belongings in a pile.¹ Lanka laid down the sweater that her brother had paid a woman to knit for her, folding it with care because it was the thing she prized most, and it was taken along with everything else. The women were allowed to keep their shoes, and Lanka still had the pair her father had made for her. While they waited in line, shivering in the early cold, a girl began to cry and asked when she would see her mother again. One of the prisoners who had been in the camp for years, a Jewish woman who was already worn down by it, pointed to the chimneys and told her that her mother was in the smoke and that she could smell the burning flesh. The remark was cruel, but it was true, and the new arrivals were so angry at the woman for saying it that they could hardly listen. The exchange stayed with Lanka for the rest of her life.

Their heads were shaved, and each woman was given a single thin dress with nothing beneath it. Many were still damp from the disinfection when they were marched out to the section of the camp known as C Lager.² Lanka had never seen her mother unclothed, since in the world they came from a mother and daughter did not see each other that way, and now they stood side by side in the cold, shaved and naked, with nothing to cover themselves. Her mother had worn a wig since her marriage, and under it her hair had turned gray, and in her distress she told Lanka that God had punished her for having let her own hair grow back after her wedding. Lanka, who was twenty-four and had already lost something of her faith, answered that God had punished everyone and asked where He was. Her mother was angry that she had said it, and the exchange left a distance between them that neither of them knew how to close.⁵

C Lager was a long row of low barracks that had been built as stables, and the women of Hungary were crowded into it in thousands.³ The bunks were rough wooden shelves stacked three high, and each tier held a dozen or more women lying in rows, so closely packed that none of them could turn without the others turning too. There were no blankets and no mattresses, and the splinters worked into the skin of their backs and legs, so that the women spent part of each day picking them out of one another. Lanka slept in one row with her mother, Margaret, and two other girls, and her mother, who had once slept on a farm with plenty of room, lay awake and listened to the others breathe. The smoke from the crematoria hung over the camp for most of the summer, and at night there was a glow on the horizon. The trains kept coming day and night, and the women learned to tell, from the sounds on the ramp and from the direction in which the columns walked, whether another transport had arrived.⁶

The day began before dawn with the roll call, the Zählappell, when the women were counted outdoors in rows and kept standing, sometimes for hours, regardless of the weather.⁷ After the count they were given a cup of black liquid that was called coffee and a slice of bread, which Lanka cut into three pieces for herself, her mother, and Margaret. In the evening came a half liter of soup, made from rutabaga or from grass, and thick with sand and grit that stuck between the teeth.⁴ Her mother taught the girls to swallow it without chewing, so that the grit would pass down with the liquid, and Lanka said later that this was how she learned to eat in the camp. The beets that occasionally appeared in the soup seemed like a delicacy to them.

In the camp Lanka sometimes told her mother how much she wished they had even one of the potatoes that had filled the cellar at home. Her mother began to cry and said that she had known there would be a hunger but had never imagined one like this, and she was so weak from it that she trembled. The bread was cut in three each day, and her mother, who ate almost nothing herself and gave her own portion to Margaret, was convinced that Lanka gave the smaller piece to her sister and pressed her to give more. It was what she had always done. At home in Nowosielica she put extra cream on Margaret’s breakfast, because Margaret was thin. Lanka, who was as hungry as Margaret, felt that her mother wanted her sister to live and did not care whether she did. One day, in a fit of anger, she told her mother so and asked what she was supposed to eat. She then went to the electrified wire and threw herself against it, intending to kill herself, but the current had been switched off and nothing happened. The girls who were with her asked why she had done it, and when she told them they brought her back. Her mother, who was frightened, asked if she had lost her mind and told her that she wanted her to live too, and that she gave Margaret more only because she was so thin and so small.

In the evenings the women who were too weak to do anything sat on the bunks and talked, and what they talked about was food. One woman gave recipes in great detail, and the others listened, and Lanka said that they could almost taste what was described. In the daytime many of the women were put to work chopping stones for road building, and she was among them.⁸ The stones had to be broken into small pieces, and the chips flew into their faces and eyes, and some of the girls from the cities cried because the work tore their hands. Lanka, who had grown up doing farm work, found it easier, but her eyes suffered, and she was afraid of going blind. She said that if there was a God He had not been there when they needed Him. A woman physician from Belgium who worked next to her, and who believed deeply, said that there must be a God and that the women were all sinners and were being punished for it, and when Lanka answered that there could be no God to allow this and that none of them would ever leave the place, the woman struck her across the mouth. Lanka thought the woman had lost her mind. She nevertheless went on praying to her grandfather, asking him to hold his right hand over her, and she did so for the rest of her life. She also told herself over and over that she had to live, and that she would, and that she meant to see the Germans pay for it. She could think of a dozen miracles that would have been easy for a God who wished to stop it, such as the gas chambers collapsing or a tornado sweeping the place away, and none came.

Lice were everywhere, in the clothes and the straw and the hair that had begun to grow back, and almost everyone in the barrack suffered from diarrhea. The camp’s latrines were long open sheds with rows of seats, and they were the only place where a woman could be alone for a moment. Lanka, her mother, and Margaret discovered that during the large selections the latrine, which stood two doors from their barrack, was a place the guards did not look. They would hide there while the transport was being assembled, then slip into the line of the barrack when it came back from the roll call, and no one noticed that they had been absent because the SS counted by numbers and the numbers added up. They did this more than once.⁹

Selections took place continually. When they happened, the women were made to walk naked in front of the doctors, and anyone with a sore or a swelling or a visible weakness was sent to the other side. Lanka and her sister had grown up on a farm, with plenty of milk and cheese, and their skin was clean and unmarked, so they passed every time. Her mother also passed, since she was strong and she had come into the camp in good health, though her hair had become so gray that it made her look older than forty-four.

On one occasion the SS set out to select blonde women for what was said to be work for the soldiers, and Lanka and Margaret ran to a barrack she remembered as Block 29 and hid.¹⁰ They rubbed coal into the stubble on their shaved heads to darken it, so that no one would recognize them as blondes, and then they ran back to their mother. Lanka learned afterward that some of the blondes who were taken away were put to work for civilians, a few of whom took pity on the girls and gave them extra bread, and that those who were still at Auschwitz when the camp was emptied were freed by the Russians earlier than she was. She never regretted it. Lanka had no wish to be separated from her mother, and it was for that reason that she had refused another offer, which came to her in the summer. She was told that she could work in the kitchen if she wished, where there was more to eat, but the women who were selected for the kitchen were taken to another part of the camp and given a tattoo, which was something the women of C Lager did not receive, and she would not be parted from her mother and her sister. She admitted later that it would have been better for her to go, since a woman who worked in the kitchen could always find something to eat, but she had made her choice.¹¹

The women of the camp were not treated cruelly only by the SS. The block elders and the Kapos who supervised them were prisoners, and many of them beat the others to keep their own positions. Lanka was slapped by her block elder, who was a Slovak woman, from Michalovce, whose husband was a doctor, and who kept a room of her own that an SS woman often visited, when she fainted at the roll call, and the same woman taunted the new arrivals by saying that when they were eating cholent at home she had already been hungry for years. For a short time the block elder made Lanka responsible for her bunk and for dividing its bread. People from her father’s town and from the town where her uncle had lived crowded around her asking for a little more, and she, who could not bear to see old women cry, gave out more than she was allowed. The block elder struck her with a stick and told her that next time she would get nothing. Lanka gave up the job, because she had never been able to eat for herself and her mother until the others were served. ¹² One day a Kapo, a Hungarian woman from Chop, whose mother and sister Lanka’s mother had known, saw her mother leaning against the end of the bunks and struck her across the back with a stick. Her mother, who was not afraid of her, went to her and said that she should be ashamed, and showed her the welt that had risen on her back. Lanka wanted to attack the woman, but she did not dare, because the block elder would have beaten her, and she held the grudge for many years.

The women who had just arrived from Hungarian towns such as Kisvárda still believed that their own countrymen would protect them, and some of them called out in Hungarian to anyone who might be a compatriot, begging to be taken home. Lanka said to one of them that she was foolish, that the Hungarians had brought her here, and that she would never go home, and the woman did not believe her. By then Lanka had understood what the others had not.

Her shoes, which her father had made, were stolen from her in the barrack, and she had to go barefoot until she managed to get word to a cousin who was held in the Czech camp that lay just across from C Lager.¹³ The cousin saved her own bread and traded it for a pair of men’s shoes and sent them to her, and Lanka wore them until she was given wooden clogs, and she did not remember what became of the clogs. The cousin’s camp was cleared in July.

One day in the late summer the area around the women’s work site was suddenly emptied of prisoners and guards, and a group of high-ranking visitors appeared on the open ground beyond. Lanka recognized Heinrich Himmler among them, escorting a man she took to be Adolf Hitler on a tour of the camp. She and the other women were far enough away that the party did not notice them, and she later told me that Himmler was showing his visitor how efficiently the system of selection, labor, and extermination was working.¹⁴

Escape was virtually impossible, but some people attempted it. When two brothers were caught trying to flee, the SS ordered the whole section of the camp to assemble and watch. A gallows had been prepared, and the prisoners expected an ordinary hanging, but after the nooses had been placed around the brothers’ necks the guards did not remove the support beneath their feet. They used the ropes to cut through the men’s necks, beheading them in front of the assembled prisoners, and the message was clear to everyone who saw it.¹⁵

By the autumn the camp had changed. Transports from Hungary had ceased in early July, but others had followed, from the ghetto of Łódź in August and from Warsaw after the uprising, and the crematoria burned almost without a pause. On a number of afternoons the women heard the sound of bombers overhead, and some of them cheered, because the planes were passing over the industrial works near the camp.¹⁶ The Soviet army was drawing closer, and the SS had begun to transfer prisoners who could still work to camps inside Germany, where the factories needed labor. In the first days of October a selection was made of the women of C Lager who were to be sent west.¹⁷ The SS looked at their hands and at their hair, which had begun to grow back, and took the women who appeared healthy.

Lanka and Margaret were chosen for the transport, but their mother was not. At forty-four, with her hair gone gray and her strength worn down by six months of hunger, she looked to the SS like an old woman. The two sisters ran back to her, and the three of them spent the night in the latrine of the new barrack, where no one came to look for them. In the morning, when the transport was formed, they slipped into the line again with their mother between them. The guards were counting and the count came out right, and for a moment it seemed that the three of them might stay together. Lanka always believed that her mother, a hardworking woman, would have survived if she had been allowed to.

It did not last. At the building where the women were to be bathed and given clean clothes for the journey, a Polish woman who held authority among the prisoners singled out her mother and told her in German that she was too old to work. Her mother cried out to the guard that she be allowed to remain with her children, and she begged her in German to let her go with them, but the woman took her away. Her mother turned to Lanka before she was taken and told her to be a mother to her sister and to take care of her. The next day Lanka stood at the window of the barrack and saw a column of women walking past toward the gas chambers, and her mother was among them.

Lanka and Margaret were put on a train, and it carried them away from Auschwitz in the first days of October, around the fifth, bound for a labor camp near Breslau.¹⁸ Lanka wept the whole way, because she knew that all of the people she had come with were left behind and that there was nothing of them but ashes, though she did not know where. Margaret, who had always taken life as it came, did not cry. She sat beside her sister and said nothing, and the train moved west.

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Footnotes

¹ Lanka arrived at Birkenau on May 29, 1944, during the peak of the deportations from Hungary. Between mid-May and early July roughly 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported, almost all to Auschwitz, and the great majority were killed on arrival. Höss had returned in early May to take charge of the operation. A new railway spur brought the trains onto a ramp inside Birkenau, the crematoria were repaired and expanded, and the Sonderkommando, the prisoners who worked the gas chambers and crematoria, was enlarged to several hundred men. When the crematoria could not keep pace, bodies were burned in open pits.

² The building was probably the Zentralsauna, a large disinfection and processing facility finished in Birkenau in early 1944, where arrivals were stripped, shaved, disinfected, and issued clothing. Prisoners who were admitted to the camp registry received a tattooed number. In the summer of 1944 the volume of arrivals overwhelmed the process, and many Hungarian women passed through unregistered, which is why Lanka and her family were not tattooed. C Lager was the prisoners’ name for sector BIIc, which had been prepared for the Hungarian women.

³ The barracks in sector BII were brick buildings of a stable type, and by the summer of 1944 each held several hundred women or more. Sector BIIc adjoined BIIb, the Czech family camp, and BIIe, the Gypsy camp.

⁴ The standard ration at Birkenau was a coffee substitute in the morning, a small piece of bread, and a watery soup, usually of rutabaga or turnips, in the evening, and it was far below subsistence. The mortality from hunger and disease was very high.

⁵ A married Orthodox woman covered her hair, usually with a wig or scarf. The shaving of the head was among the first acts of the processing, and for religious women it was a deliberate humiliation as well as a hygienic measure.

⁶ Trains from Hungary arrived at Birkenau day and night through June and early July. The smoke of the crematoria and of the open burning pits was visible for miles, and the glow could be seen at night.

⁷ The Zählappell, the roll call, was held at dawn and again in the evening, and prisoners were made to stand until the count was correct, whatever the weather. At Birkenau it could take several hours.

⁸ Work details at Birkenau included road building, drainage, and construction in the camp, and women of C Lager were assigned to them regularly. Her German restitution statement also records the stone breaking, which she says was needed for road construction, the prison clothing, the hair cut short, and her stay at Auschwitz-Birkenau until October 5, 1944.

⁹ Camp functionaries and guards counted prisoners by block, and a prisoner who slipped into a block’s line was unlikely to be noticed if the number matched. Hiding in the latrines during selections is described in a number of survivor testimonies.

¹⁰ In the summer of 1944 the SS selected young women from the women’s camp for labor transports to Germany, where they were sent to munitions and other factories, and rumors circulated in the camp that women were being selected for brothels. The SS did maintain brothels in several camps, including one in Auschwitz I.

¹¹ In the Auschwitz system, women who were registered and assigned to a work detail such as the kitchen were tattooed, while the unregistered transit prisoners of C Lager were not. Work in the kitchen gave access to extra food and was prized.

¹² The first transports of Slovak Jewish women arrived at Auschwitz in March 1942, more than two years before the Hungarian arrivals, and many of them had risen into the positions of block elder and Kapo by 1944. Her sense of how long the woman had been there reflects the way veterans spoke to new arrivals, and the women of the Hungarian transports often found them harsher than the SS. Chop was a rail junction town in Subcarpathian Rus’, not far from Ungvár.

¹³ The Czech family camp, sector BIIb, held Jews deported from Theresienstadt in September and December 1943. Its inmates were kept together in families and allowed to keep their clothes. In March 1944 the first group was killed in the gas chambers, and on July 10–12, 1944, after a selection of those fit for labor, roughly 3,000 of the remaining prisoners were gassed.

¹⁴ Hitler is not known to have visited any concentration camp, and Himmler’s documented visits to Auschwitz were in 1941 and 1942. High-ranking SS officers and officials did tour Birkenau during the Hungarian operation, and a prisoner seeing a group of senior men from a distance in this period could well have taken it to be a visit of the highest leaders.

¹⁵ Public executions of recaptured escapees were carried out before assembled prisoners at Auschwitz, usually by hanging, and were intended as a deterrent. The women’s camp at Birkenau was among the places where they were held.

¹⁶ The Łódź ghetto was liquidated in August 1944, and tens of thousands of its Jews were deported to Auschwitz. In August and September, deportees from the Warsaw Uprising were brought to the camp. The Gypsy camp, sector BIIe, was liquidated on August 2–3, 1944. American bombers attacked the I.G. Farben works at Monowitz, a few miles from Birkenau, on August 20 and again on September 13.

¹⁷ From the late summer of 1944, as the Soviet army approached, the SS sent prisoners who were still fit to work from Auschwitz to camps in Germany. Women sent west in this period went to labor subcamps of Gross-Rosen and other main camps.

¹⁸ Two days after Lanka and Margaret left, on October 7, 1944, the Sonderkommando revolted. They set fire to Crematorium IV and put it out of action, and the SS killed about 450 of them. Four women who had supplied the explosives from a munitions factory, among them Roza Robota, were hanged in January 1945.