Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account (17 page)

The woman, who was about 30 but who looked closer to 50, had gathered her waning forces and thrown herself at Mussfeld’s feet, begging him to spare her life and those of her ten- and twelve-year-old children. She had worked for five years in a clothing factory in the ghetto, she said, making uniforms for the German army. She was still willing to work, to do anything, if only they would let her live.

All this was quite useless. Here there was no salvation. They had to die. Yet the KZ’s past must also have had its effect on the
Ober;
he sent another man in his place to perform the murder.

THAT WAS ANOTHER LITTLE EPISODE we forgot, for it was absolutely necessary to forget it if we wanted to keep from going mad. Darkness before and darkness behind. . . .

As always, drink was a great help, a momentary but necessary respite. When I thought of the past, it often seemed to me that all this was merely a horrible dream. My only desire was to forget everything, to think of nothing.

It was now November, 1944. Snow was falling in big flakes, veiling everything in a swirl of white. The watch towers were barely visible, vague fingers of gray rising above us. The wind sang even louder in the barbed wires, and still the only birds to darken the sky were the crows.

I went for a short walk before nightfall. The weather was hardly conducive, but the cold wind was invigorating, soothing my tired nerves. I made several turns around the courtyard; my steps took me past the stairway leading down into the gas chambers. I paused there for a few seconds, remembering that today was All Saints’ Day. A deadly silence brooded over Auschwitz. The cold concrete steps descended and dissolved into darkness. These same steps where four million people, guilty of no crime, had bade life good-bye and descended to their death, knowing that even in death their tormented bodies would not be granted the sanctuary of a grave. Standing there alone, on the top step of this, their last brief voyage on earth, I felt it my duty to pause and think of them for a moment with heartfelt compassion, in the name of their relatives and friends who, perhaps happy and well, were still alive somewhere in the world.

I left the godforsaken spot and returned to my room. Opening the door, I noticed that the room was not lighted as usual by a strong bulb, but by the flickering light of a single candle. My first impression was that there must be something wrong with the electricity. But then I saw that my associate, the ex-professor of the Szombathely Medical School, was sitting with his elbows on the table, his head resting in his hands, his empty eyes staring at the candle flame, his thoughts a thousand miles away. He did not even notice my presence. The eery light flickered strangely on his face. I touched him lightly on the shoulder:

“Denis,” I said softly, “in whose memory did you light a candle here?”

His reply was confused. He mumbled something about his father-in-law and his mother-in-law, both of whom had been dead for fifteen years, and did not even mention his wife and son who, according to the testimony of some of the Sonderkommando members, had perished here. It was easy to see that he was displaying all the symptoms of depressive melancholy and regressive amnesia.

Taking him by the shoulders, I helped him across the room and put him to bed, then stood there, gazing down at him.

Poor friend and learned physician, my sensitive and gentle companion, instead of treating and curing the sick you yourself have fallen beneath the yoke of death, and now belong to death’s kingdom. For many months you have witnessed such suffering and horror as the human mind can scarcely conceive, as he who sees cannot believe. Perhaps it is for the best that your nerves have betrayed you, that a benevolent veil of forgetfulness has fallen upon your mind. Now, at least, you need not fret or worry about what the future may hold in store for you.

AFTER SEVERAL DAYS OF SILENCE, THE customary noises of the crematorium began again. The motors of the big ventilators purred once again, reawakening the furnace flames. The arrival of the Theresienstadt ghetto had been announced.

Since the founding of the Czechoslovakian Republic, Theresienstadt had been primarily a garrison town. The Germans, however, changed the appearance of the city completely, to the point of moving the civilian population away and setting up a model ghetto there. This ghetto housed Jews deported from Austria, Holland and Czechoslovakia itself, about 60,000 in all. The living conditions of the inhabitants were relatively good. They could exercise their professions freely, receive and send mail, and they were aided by the Red Cross. In fact, teams from the International Red Cross paid periodic visits to the little city and, on each occasion, made favorable reports concerning the living conditions and treatment of prisoners.

Thus the Germans got what they wanted from the creation of this model ghetto, for these reports by the International Red Cross had the effect of neutralizing, or better yet, of qualifying as evil slander the rumors going round concerning the horrors of the KZ and the crematoriums.

But now, on the eve of its collapse, the Third Reich ceased to worry any longer about world opinion, and rejected even the mask of its shady humanism. It began to liquidate without delay the Jews still in its custody.

So it was that the turn of the model ghetto at Theresienstadt arrived. When they reached Auschwitz, the still healthy men of this ghetto had the following convocation in their possession:

The whole story of obligatory labor was of course an infamous lie, merely a pretext to carry out the liquidation without interruption and to recoup some sorely needed instruments, scarce tools and winter clothing needed by the German populace. Twenty thousand men, fully capable of working and in the full flush of their youth, died in the gas chambers and were incinerated in the crematory ovens. It took 48 hours to exterminate them all. For several days afterwards, silence again reigned in the crematorium.

Two weeks later, still more deportee trains began arriving, in endless succession, at the Jewish ramp. Women and children scrambled out of the box cars. There was no selection. All were directed to the left.

On the floor of the undressing room lay hundreds of tracts, which read:

As a result of this diabolically conceived notice, twenty thousand women and children who wanted only to ease their husbands’ lot, to join their fathers, followed them into the gas chambers and crematory ovens.

EARLY IN THE MORNING OF NOVEMBER 17th, 1944, an SS noncommissioned officer came into my room and informed me confidentially that, upon order of higher authority, it was henceforth forbidden to kill any more prisoners, by any means whatsoever, in the KZ. After having witnessed so many lies, I found it impossible to take him at his word, and expressed my doubts on the matter. But he reasserted forcefully that such were the instructions that had been received by radio only a short while before, both at the crematoriums and at the SS political kommando. We would soon see whether or not they were true. Personally, I feared it was only another trick.

Before the end of the morning, however, I had occasion to verify the truth of his statement. A train of five box cars bearing 500 sick and debilitated prisoners who thought they were being transferred to a rest camp stopped on the rails running between number one and two crematoriums. They were met by an SS political commission, who conversed at some length with the commandant and the SS guards accompanying the convoy. At last, before the gates of death, the train was turned round, and its occupants sent to the F camp hospital barracks.

This was the first time during my stay in the crematoriums that a convoy sent to Auschwitz’s “rest camp” had not been liquidated, either by gas or the
Ober’s
revolver, within an hour after its arrival, but had, on the contrary, been given medical attention and allowed to rest in the beds of the camp’s hospital barracks.

Scarcely an hour later another train arrived, bearing 500 Slovakian Jews: a group of old people, women, and young children. They got out of the cars. I watched carefully for what would follow. Lineup and selection were the standard order of procedure on the Jewish ramp. But what I now witnessed was completely out of keeping with practice. The weary travelers took their heavy luggage with them when they got down and without exception moved off to the right in the direction of D Camp. Mothers pushed baby carriages before them, and the young helped the aged to walk. My immediate reaction was one of enthusiasm. There could be no doubt about it: the crematorium gates had remained closed before the convoys sent to their death.

For the KZ prisoners the event was a good omen, giving rise to hope. For the Sonderkommando, however, the omen was bad, signifying that the end was near. I was quite sure that the liquidation would be carried out even before the end of the four-month period.

A new life began in the KZ. There were no more violent deaths, but the bloody past had to be hidden. The crematoriums had to be demolished, the pyre ditches filled in, and any witness to or participant in the horrors perpetrated here had to disappear. Fully conscious of our impending doom, we greeted the change with a mixture of joy and resignation.

Of the millions of souls sent here from the four corners of Europe, by order of the demented Führer, the pyromaniac of the Third Reich, to be assembled less than an hour before their death on unloading ramps ominously lighted by the butchers of Maydanek, Treblinka, Auschwitz, Birkenau, a few thousand would come out alive.

Feeling uneasy, I paid a return visit about noon to the SS radioman who had informed me of the good news earlier in the day. I wanted to know what decisions had been made in the course of the morning. Had any decision been made concerning the Sonderkommando, and, if so, what? Luckily he was alone in the room and I could talk to him freely.

“The Sonderkommando? Why yes,” he said affably. “In a few days you’ll all be sent to work in an underground war plant not far from Breslau.”

I did not believe a word of what he said. For once, however, I knew that his lies were not intended to lull me into a false sense of security. He merely wanted to spare me the bad news, for not so long ago I had cared for him and cured him of a serious illness.

IT WAS 2 P.M. I HAD JUST FINISHED lunch and was seated by the window of my room, staring at the sky and clouds, that bore the promise of an early snow, when a strident yell from the oven-room passageway broke the silence:

“Alle antreten, alle antreten!”

This was an order we were accustomed to hearing twice a day, in the morning and evening, for muster. Coming at this hour, however, it augured no good.

“Antreten, alle antreten!”
the order rang out again, this time more peremptory and impatient than before.

Heavy footsteps resounded just in front of our door. An SS opened it a crack and shouted again:
“Antreten, antreten!”
With sinking hearts we headed for the crematorium courtyard, where a group of well-armed SS already encircled a group of kommando men as we walked up to join them. There was neither surprise nor the faintest sign of protest from anyone. The SS, their machine guns leveled, waited patiently till the last stragglers had joined the group. I glanced around for the last time. The motionless pines that formed a little tunnel at the end of the courtyard were blanketed with snow. All was quiet and very peaceful.

In a few minutes, an order: “To the left, to the left!” We left the courtyard, but instead of going along the road, our guards had us walk towards number two crematorium, directly opposite. We crossed the courtyard of number two, knowing that this would be the last walk we would ever take. They led us into the crematorium furnace room, but none of the SS guards remained inside with us. Instead, they spread out in a circle around the building, stationed at intervals near the doors and windows, their guns poised, ready to fire. The doors were shut and the windows covered with heavy iron bars, completely thwarting any possibility of escape. Our comrades from number two were also present, and a few minutes later they unlocked the door and sent in the kommando from number four. Four hundred and sixty men in all, waiting to die. The only thing we did not know for sure was the method that would be used to exterminate us. We were specialists in the matter, having seen all methods in operation. Would it be in the gas chamber? I hardly thought so, not with the Sonderkommando. Machine guns? Not at all convenient in a room like this. Most likely they intended killing two birds with one stone, that is, blow up the building and us along with it. A plan worthy of the SS. Or perhaps they would toss a phosphorous bomb through one of the windows. That would be an equally effective method, one that had already been tried before, on the deportees from the Milo ghetto. What they had done then was load the deportees into box cars that were so dilapidated as to be of no further use, then toss a bomb inside.

The men of the Sonderkommando were sitting on the concrete floor of the furnace room wherever they could find room, waiting anxiously but silently for the next move.

Suddenly the silence was broken. One of the kommando crew, a thin, sickly, black-haired man about thirty years old whose eyes were magnified by a pair of thick glasses, jumped to his feet and began to speak in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear. It was the “Dayen,” the rabbi of a small church community in Poland. A self-taught man, whose knowledge was vast both in the spiritual and temporal realms, he was the ascetic member of the Sonderkommando. In conformance with the tenets of his religion, he ate sparingly, accepting only bread, margarine and onions from the well-stocked kommando larder. He had been assigned to the cremation kommando, but because of his religious fanaticism I had talked the
Ober
into excusing him from this frightful work. The argument I had used with the
Ober
had simply been that this man could not be of much use for the heavy work involved in cremation, since he was weak from his self-imposed, ascetic diet. “Besides,” I had argued, “he only slows up the work by pausing over each body to murmur prayers for its salvation. And there are often several thousand souls a day to pray for.”

These had been my arguments, but they had sufficed, strangely enough, and the
Ober
had assigned him to burn the pile of refuse which was forever accumulating in the courtyard of number two. This refuse, called “Canada” by the SS, was composed of objects that had once belonged to the deportees, objects of such little material value that they were considered not worth being salvaged: various foodstuffs, documents, diplomas, military decorations, passports, marriage certificates, prayer books, holy objects and Bibles that the deportees had brought with them into captivity.

This little hill called Canada daily consumed hundreds of thousands of photographs—pictures of young married couples, elderly groups, charming children and pretty girls—together with innumerable prayer books, in many of which I found carefully inked notations recording the dates of important events—births, marriages, deaths—in the lives of the various families. Sometimes there were flowers, culled from the graves of beloved parents in all the Jewish cemeteries of Europe, pressed between the pages and piously preserved. Prayer beads and odds and ends of all sorts rounded out the smoldering hill.

This was where the “Dayen” worked, or rather, where he did not work, for all he did was watch the fires burn. Even so he was dissatisfied, for his religious beliefs forbade him from participating in the burning of prayer books or holy objects. I felt sorry for him, but could do nothing further to help him. It was impossible to obtain an easier job, for we were, after all, only members of the kommando of the living dead.

This then was the man who began to speak:

“Fellow Jews. . . . An inscrutable Will has sent our people to its death; fate has allotted us the cruelest of tasks, that of participating in our own destruction, of witnessing our own disappearance, down to the very ashes to which we are reduced. In no instance have the heavens opened to send showers and put out the funeral pyre flames.

“We must accept, resignedly, as Sons of Israel should, that this is the way things must be. God has so ordained it. Why? It is not for us, miserable humans, to seek the answer.

“This is the fate that has befallen us. Do not be afraid of death. What is life worth, even if, by some strange miracle, we should manage to remain alive? We would return to our cities and towns to find cold and pillaged homes. In every room, in every corner, the memory of those who have disappeared would lurk, haunting our tear-filled eyes. Stripped of family and relatives, we would wander like the restless, shuffling shadows of our former selves, of our completed pasts, finding nowhere any peace or rest.”

Flames burned in his eyes; his thin face was transfigured. Perhaps, as he spoke, he was already in touch with the beyond. Dead silence filled the room, interrupted only by the occasional scratching of a match as someone lighted a cigarette. Now and then a heavy sigh expressed a last farewell bid by one of us to the living and to the dead.

The heavy doors swung open. Oberschaarführer Steinberg entered the room, accompanied by two guards, machine guns in hand.

“Ärzte heraus.
All doctors outside!” he shouted impatiently.

My two colleagues and I, and the lab assistant, left the room. Steinberg and the two SS soldiers halted halfway between the two crematoriums. The Ober gave me a sheaf of papers he had been holding in his hand on which there was a list of numbers and told me to find mine and strike it out. The papers contained the tattoo numbers of every man in the Sonderkommando. I took out my pen and, after hunting for a while, found my number and drew a line through it. He then told me to do the same for my comrades. This done, he accompanied us to number one gate and told us to return to our room, and not to leave it. We did as ordered.

The following morning a five-truck convoy arrived in the crematorium courtyard and dumped out its cargo of bodies, those of the old Sonderkommando. A new group of thirty men carried them to the incineration room, where they were laid out in front of the ovens. Terrible burn scars covered their bodies. Their faces and clothing were so charred that it was all but impossible to identify them, especially since their tattoo numbers had disappeared.

After death by gas, on the pyre, by chloroform injections, by a bullet in the back of the neck, by phosphorous bomb, here was a sixth way of killing which I had not previously discovered.

During the night our comrades had been taken into a nearby forest and killed by flame throwers. That we four were still alive did not by any means signify that they wanted to spare us, but simply that we were still indispensable to them. In allowing us to remain alive, Dr. Mengele had merely granted us another reprieve. Once again, the thought gave us neither comfort nor joy.