Auschwitz (44 page)

The concept of the death march was not new to the Nazis. In January 1940 800 Polish prisoners of war, all Jews, were marched ninety-five kilometers from Lublin to Biała Podlaska.
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Only a handful survived the journey through Poland in winter, the majority froze to death or were killed by the SS men who accompanied them. In the following years, death marches were imposed by the Nazis on Jews following the liquidation of ghettos, and on Soviet prisoners of war as they were marched west to makeshift camps.

As discussed in Chapter 5, however, it was in the autumn of 1944 that the biggest death marches of the war took place. One of the worst occurred in Hungary in November 1944 when, on Eichmann's insistence, nearly 80,000 Jews, including women and children, were forced to march west
from Budapest in the direction of Austria. Those who survived that appalling journey—a march so bad that even the Nazis commented on the brutality of it—eventually ended up in camps such as Mauthausen and Dachau. Thus, the death march that the Auschwitz inmates were about to embark upon had many bloody precedents.

Prisoners were beaten out of the camp, clad in thin prison garb that offered wholly inadequate protection against the snow and bitter wind of a Polish winter, and assembled on the road to begin the march. It was at this moment that Franz Wunsch of the SS made his final gesture towards the woman he loved—the Jewish prisoner Helena Citrónová. As she stood with her sister Róžínka by the camp gates, shivering, he brought over “two pairs of warm shoes—fur-lined boots. Everyone else, poor things, were wearing clogs lined with newspapers. He was really endangering his life [giving them to us].” Wunsch told her that he was being sent to the front, but that his mother in Vienna would look after her and her sister because, as Jews at the end of the war, they would have “nowhere else to go.” He pressed a piece of paper with his mother's address into Helena's hand. But once he had left them Helena remembered her own father's words to her: “Don't forget who you are.” He had emphasized to her that she must always remember “I am a Jew and I have to remain a Jew.” Consequently, she threw away the address of Wunsch's mother.

And so the two women began the march west through the driving snow. Helena describes those first days as “unbelievably harsh.” She watched as around her other prisoners “dropped in the snow. They didn't have any strength left and they died. Each person took care of himself. Total chaos. Whoever lived—lived. Whoever died—died.”

Ibi Mann,
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a nineteen year old who had arrived at Auschwitz the previous year from Czechoslovakia, was also seared by her experience of the death march: “They gathered us in the middle of the night and we never knew the time, the hour, nothing. We were disconnected from the world.” Despite the noise of a Soviet bombardment nearby, the Nazis still insisted on first counting the prisoners and then marching them off in rows of five, “Anyone who dared even to bend over—who stopped even for a moment—was shot.”

Like so many other prisoners who survived, Ibi Mann did not face the
journey alone; her sister marched with her, offering constant encouragement. “I was saying, ‘This is the end—I can't go any further,' [but] she pulled me on by force.” At night they slept in barns—once even in a pigsty—or out in the open, sheltered only by bare trees and hedgerows. Ibi and her sister were two of the last to leave, and as they marched they passed ditches full of corpses. They struggled on as the snow turned to slush, invading their thin shoes and raising blisters and sores. Neither woman felt hunger on the march, just a raging thirst that they could never slake—they knew that if they bent down to eat a handful of slush they would be shot.

Against this background of suffering, it is almost incredible that the Nazis were marching these inmates out of Auschwitz because they thought they represented a useful resource. At this stage in the war, slave labor was of great importance to them—by the end of 1944 around half a million prisoners were working in German factories.

There were two main routes used by the Nazis to march the Auschwitz prisoners towards the Reich. One route was northwest through Mikolów, just less than fifty kilometers to the railway junction at Gleiwitz; the other was due west, about sixty-five kilometers to the train station at Wodzisław (Loslau). The torment, however, did not end there. Those prisoners who survived the march boarded trains that would take them on to camps in Germany and Austria. Ibi and her sister were herded into open freight cars that contained about “half a meter of snow.” Prisoners were crammed in so tightly that there was often no room to sit down.

Morris Venezia,
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who had been a Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, was another who made this terrible train journey. He was one of the rare prisoners who managed to find a place to sit in one of the open cars. He still remembers the intense cold, the snow falling and lying on him and his friends, and the constant need to throw dead bodies from the car as those around him succumbed to the appalling conditions. He also recalls another aspect of his journey that is even more remarkable—committing murder.

In the freight car with Morris and the other inmates was a German prisoner who was desperate to sit down, having stood in the snow for so long. He came to what he thought was a deal with Morris—for the price of some cigarettes he would be allowed to sit while Morris stood. Morris got up, took the cigarettes and smoked them while the German slumped in the corner
of the truck. After ten minutes or so, when Morris had finished the cigarettes, he told the German to stand up. He refused. “So what I did,” says Morris, “was me and a couple of friends we sat on him. And [after] about thirty minutes or one hour he was suffocated and we threw him out of the wagon. No problem. We were glad we killed a German.”

Even today Morris has “no problem” with having killed this German prisoner. It mattered not that the man he murdered had been a fellow inmate of Auschwitz. All that was important was the language he'd been speaking: “I was happy. They [the Germans] killed all my family, thirty or forty people, and I killed one German. Phuh! That was nothing. If I could kill a hundred of them I would be glad, because they destroyed us completely.” No matter how he is questioned on the subject, Morris is unable to see any difference between the Germans who ran Auschwitz and the German prisoner he killed on the cattle car on that freezing winter night in Poland. “Anyway,” he says, “I wanted to be seated too because I got tired. Why should he live because he gave me two or three cigarettes? He didn't want to get up, so we sat on him and he passed away—easy.” Morris Venezia's lack of concern for the German prisoner he and his comrades killed on their journey west is a reminder of the debased moral landscape of the camp, and of how each prisoner was often forced to consider his or her own survival above all else.

The destination for about 20,000 of the Auschwitz prisoners was Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony. As discussed in Chapter 5, Bergen-Belsen is infamous today primarily because of the heartrending film footage that was shot there in the aftermath of the British liberation of the camp on April 15, 1945. These appalling images of emaciated bodies and walking skeletons rightly shocked the world when they were shown. But they also created a perception of the camp that does not reflect the reality of its original conception and, in the process, the film adds to the confusion that exists in many people's minds about the difference between a concentration camp and a dedicated death camp.

While, at its inception in 1943, Bergen-Belsen had been intended as a place for “privileged” Jews who were to be held as hostages, in the spring of 1944 it took on another function as prisoners considered unable to do useful work were sent there from other camps. These prisoners suffered appallingly at Bergen-Belsen, where they were particularly brutally treated by
the German Kapos. The preconditions for the transformation of Bergen-Belsen into the scene of horror the Allies liberated in the spring of 1945 also were subsequently completed by three additional factors: the appointment of Josef Kramer as camp commandant in December 1944; the decision to remove any “privileges” that may have existed in the camp for any “exchange Jews”; and the flood of new arrivals from the death marches in the early months of 1945. An idea of the scale of change at Bergen-Belsen can be gained from simple numbers—at the end of 1944 there were approximately 15,000 inmates at the camp; when the British arrived in April 1945 there were 60,000. Virtually no effort was made by the Germans to house or feed this massive influx.

As always in history, however, statistics give little hint of individual experience—that only can be gained by listening to stories like that of Alice Lok Cahana and her sister Edith who were at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945. They had thought Auschwitz at the limits of what human beings could endure—but life here was worse. Alice and Edith arrived at the camp when there was an epidemic of typhoid raging through the huts. Overcrowding meant there were no bunks and scarcely any accommodation of any kind. There was no food and virtually no water. The Auschwitz prisoners had essentially been corralled into this one space and left to die.

Over the next few weeks many lost control mentally. “There's no vocabulary that can tell what was Bergen-Belsen,” says Alice. Every night a woman who slept near them “went berserk” and stamped on Alice and her sister. The barracks were half built and what had been erected was falling apart: “When you had to go to the bathroom, you had to step over people. Some people fell into the cracks in the corridor.” Day and night they heard the cry of “Water, mother! Water, mother!”

Renee Salt
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was another Auschwitz prisoner who had been transported to Bergen-Belsen—she was sixteen years old in 1945. Her first sight of the camp, after being forced down a road littered with dead bodies from previous transports, was a vision from hell: “We saw skeletons walking, their arms and legs were like matchsticks—the bones protruding through the remains of their skin. The stench that arose from the camp was terribly overpowering. It seemed that, after all we've been through already, this was something new and horribly different.”

All traces of the organization of the camp had broken down. Roll-calls were no longer held—people didn't even have the strength to get up—and without food the prisoners were starving to death. Within three weeks Renee knew that she was dying. Then, as she veered towards unconsciousness, someone pointed out to her a tank in the distance—a British tank. She collapsed and did not regain consciousness for ten days. When she awoke she was in a British delousing center, being washed in disinfectant, utterly weak—but free.

On April 15, 1945, someone shouted, “Liberated! We are liberated!” says Alice Lok Cahana. She immediately leapt up and said to her sister: “What is liberation? I have to find liberation before it melts away.” She staggered out of the barrack and saw Allied soldiers in jeeps. But her joy was short-lived, because by now Edith was sicker than ever, and shortly after the British arrived she was taken to a Red Cross hospital. Alice wanted to stay with her, but the British soldiers insisted that she was not ill enough to remain with her sister. Alice protested: “I said, ‘You don't understand—we can't be separated. I can help you here. I can take out the bedpan.'” She tried to lift up the bedpan, but she could barely walk herself. As she reached the door a soldier picked her up, put her in a jeep and took her back to the barrack.

Alice, however, having protected her sister through the torment of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, was not to be put off so easily. The next day, despite her own frailty, she walked back to the hospital. She arrived just as Edith was being placed in an ambulance. Quickly she climbed on board herself, announcing: “Here I am. I'm going with you. Wherever they take you.” But the same soldier who had driven her back to the camp the previous day recognized her and said: “Are you here again? You can't be here. We have to take your sister to another hospital—a military hospital.” Alice was forced to get down from the ambulance and watch as her sister was driven away.

So began Alice's search for her sister—one which lasted for half a century. She tried to trace Edith through the Red Cross, through any means she could think of, but she heard nothing—not, that is, until fifty-three years after her sister's disappearance when she discovered in the records of Bergen-Belsen that an Edith Schwartz had died on June 2, 1945. Schwartz was the maiden name of Alice's mother, and one that Edith had used in the camp so as to pretend not to be Alice's sister. She had been frightened that if the
Nazis had known they were related they would have done their best to separate them.

So, after a fifty-three-year wait—fifty-three years in which every time the phone rang or every time a letter was delivered Alice had prayed it was news of Edith—having endured all this emotional suffering, she discovered that her sister had lived for only a few days after they had parted. Alice had protected her sister through the deportation from Hungary and Auschwitz, on the death march and amidst the starvation and disease of Bergen-Belsen, but in the end the Nazis had still killed her. “Liberation came too late for you, my beloved sister,” wrote Alice in a poem shortly after she learned the news of Edith's death. “How could they do it? How? Why?”

One of the men most responsible for Edith's death, Heinrich Himmler, would, in the early days of the implementation of the “Final Solution,” have had no difficulty in answering the two questions posed by Alice Lok Cahana in the most brutal and simplistic way: The Jews were to die because he and his Führer perceived they were a threat. But his actions during the last months of the war were a good deal less straightforward. Himmler's approval of the “Jews for trucks” scheme in Hungary in 1944, and his use of Bandi Grosz to open a channel through which peace feelers could be explored, have already been discussed. These schemes came to little, but they show the way Himmler's mind was now working. Pragmatism, rather than ideological rigidity, was the way forward as far as the Reichsführer SS was concerned.