By Chance Alone (10 page)

I
was carried into the operating room and my bloody jacket, pants, and boots were removed. I was placed on an operating table, and someone put a mask on my face and administered ether. When I awoke, I found myself in a bed with the taste of anaesthetic in my mouth. My head was bandaged, and I was groggy and weak. I was surprised that I was still alive after the traumatic experience of the previous day. Looking at my surroundings, I saw patients who were sickly and skeletal. Instinct told me that I needed to leave this place as soon as possible. Although I was dizzy and weak, I managed to get out of bed on my own. I was determined to walk around the ward by holding on to the bed frames. Eventually, I had to lie back down to gain strength.

A photo of Dr. Tadeusz Orzeszko, taken on his incarceration at Auschwitz I, July 29, 1943.

There were two doctors in charge of this ward: Dr. Jakob Gordon, a Polish Jew, and a French Jew named Dr. Samuel Steinberg. At mid-morning, the chief surgeon, a Polish political prisoner named Dr. Tadeusz Orzeszko, came into the room to check on the patients who were recovering from operations.
When it was my turn to be examined, Dr. Gordon removed the paper bandages and the chief surgeon inspected the wound on the back of my head. Satisfied, Dr. Orzeszko instructed Dr. Gordon to put on new bandages.

To my surprise, I found my boots placed carefully under my bed. But I wore a straggly surgical gown and had no other clothes. When I asked Dr. Gordon if he could get me some coverings, he obliged by giving me a pair of white cotton pants and a white shirt. These were the clothes worn by the doctors under their white coats. I felt clean and presentable for the first time in months. The daily rations were the same, but I was given a watery Cream of Wheat–type cereal, which was reserved for hospital patients. When this cereal got cold, it became rubbery and I could hardly swallow it.

All patients still in the ward after three days were deemed unfit for work and taken to the gas chambers. On the morning of my third day in the ward, the SS sergeant in charge of barrack
21
arrived with stretcher-bearers and began to collect the tags of the patients to be removed. As each patient was laid on the stretcher, his identity card was placed beside him. When my turn came, I feared I was in great danger. The stretcher-bearers carried us down the stairs to the main hallway; from there, we were to be taken out the door and loaded onto waiting trucks.

The chief surgeon, Dr. Orzeszko, was standing in the main hallway when we appeared. He was a tall, well-muscled man, with short blond hair and steel-blue eyes. He had an aura of calm confidence about him. When he saw me, he stopped the stretcher-bearers, helped me get up, and took my identification tag. He then led me to the prep room of the surgery, where he gave me a lab coat and told me that I would now do the
cleaning and other duties required for the efficient running of the operating theatre.

Prior to my recruitment, this job was filled by a young Polish medical student who was serving a one-year sentence as a political prisoner. He was due to be released in about three days, and I would be his replacement. The student trained me during his remaining days on the job, and I keenly observed him and learned the importance of running the unit smoothly and efficiently. There was a long list of things to do. I had confidence in my cleaning abilities because of my apprentice work with the furrier, but it was intimidating to see medical instruments and other equipment that I had no idea how to use. I was determined to succeed, however, and I knew my life depended on my performance.

The prep room had two sinks with hot and cold water where the surgeons washed before surgery. There was a huge autoclave for sterilizing sheets, gowns, masks, gloves, and other items, and a sterilizer for instruments with several trays and a timer that had to be set. I had to learn these and many other duties. The shelves in the credenzas were neatly laid out with instruments such as clamps, scalpels, hammers, saws, chisels, scissors of all shapes and sizes, syringes, and needles. There were two worktables to prepare items and compounds before surgeries. The storage cabinets were filled with supplies such as paper bandages, cotton balls, gypsum for casts, cleaning supplies, disinfectants, brooms and mops, buckets, and other odds and ends. The surgery itself had a basic operating table with an overhead light, several portable floodlights, and a credenza in which Novocain and ether were stored. We did not have blood plasma or intravenous therapy.

At first, I was not comfortable watching the surgeons perform,
particularly when I saw them make the opening incision. But I quickly became used to the sight of blood and the gore of the operating room. When the surgeons finished their job, they came out through the swinging door into the prep room and removed their gowns and gloves. Two orderlies would arrive, put the patient on a gurney, and take him to the upstairs ward. It was my job to immediately mop the floor and clean and disinfect the operating table. I had to be quick about it. Within thirty minutes, another patient would be laid out on the table and made ready for his operation. I had all the responsibility for the efficient upkeep of these two rooms so that the doctors could continue to perform their tasks.

Every night, patients awaiting surgery the next day had to receive enemas. My duty was to administer the enema and help the patients evacuate their bowels. I did not like this task in the beginning, but it became routine and necessary. If the patient didn't have an enema, he could soil the operating table and the post-surgery cleanup would be twice as difficult.

Day after day, new patients arrived at barrack
21
. They were skeletal, weak, and sickly, and near the end of their struggles. They also knew that unless they could walk out of that ward on their own two feet, their next stop was the gas chamber. So every patient faced a bleak dilemma. Many had severe hernias, phlegmon (flesh-eating disease), broken limbs, burst appendices, or severe injuries from bullets that tore the flesh and destroyed bones. Watching them stoically accept their fate inside the twisted logic of the concentration camp made me realize how brave they were.

The surgeons at barrack
21
did their very best under impossible conditions. The surgery ward was, in many respects, a ruse
to show how “well” the Nazis looked after their inmates. These patients were destined for annihilation, because in most cases they were beyond help. But the surgeons still took their job seriously and did the best they could for their patients. The doctors were themselves prisoners, and they had to dance to the tune of the SS officers in charge of the camp. My job, in the scheme of things, was simply to make sure that the operating room was shiny and clean at all times.

My workday started at
7
a.m. and usually lasted for twelve hours. My system was strict and precise. I started my day by sprinkling talcum powder on the floor of the prep room and the surgery, and then standing on two rags and using my feet in a polishing motion until the linoleum shone. I picked up the freshly washed linens, gowns, and masks from the laundry barracks and packed them neatly into three perforated drums. Next, I loaded the drums into the autoclave, closed and bolted the lid, and turned on the high-pressure steam so that the linens were sterilized. Finally, I prepared the instruments for that day's operations. When the surgeons arrived at
10
a.m., I had the water boiled for their tea and I took a fifteen-minute break before the first operation began. The patients were lined up on a bench in the hallway, and I called their numbers in the order that was given to me. While the surgeons were washing up, I helped the patient onto the table and covered him with a sheet, and then I went to the prep room to help the surgeons tie their gowns and masks and to hold the latex gloves so they could put their hands into them. Patients who were being operated on from the waist down were given a spinal needle with Novocain by the doctors. Sometimes I had to administer ether to those who were being operated on above the waist, and I instructed them to count
backwards from thirty to one as the ether took effect. My final task was to bring the instruments to the operating table and lay them out before the assistant surgeon.

After the last operation of the day, the surgeons left and I was charged with putting the rooms in order again for the next day. I realized quite early on that I had to have an efficient system so that no time would be wasted and the work would flow easily. At the end of the day, my job involved gathering all the bloody sheets, gowns, towels, and masks and delivering them to the laundry barracks next door for cleaning. This laundry was open twenty-four hours a day, disinfecting clothing for thousands of inmates. I got to know the Kapo in charge, and one day I dared to ask him for a clean jacket and pants. He took me to a pile of clothes and let me pick garments that fit me better than what I had on. I also managed to get clean material for dusting and cleaning the operating theatre and prep room, and some material to wrap around my feet for socks. He was an important contact. I was not in the upper strata of the camp hierarchy, but working in the hospital did give me some small privileges. In the camp, we used the word
organizuj
to mean ways to improve our lot or survive the debilitating hunger. If you found an extra resource that could be bartered for shoes, food, or clothing, it could make the difference between life and death.

My next task after the laundry was to sweep and mop the operating room floors—and the walls, if necessary. Then I had to wash all the instruments, especially the clamps, which had to be brushed carefully to eliminate any tissue on them; the scissors, syringes, scalpels, and needles I kept separately to avoid cuts to my fingers. When they were clean, I laid them out to dry; all the moisture had to be removed before they were placed into the
credenzas in an organized fashion. The scalpels also had to be sharpened on a fine stone and made ready for use.

When the prep room and operating room were clean and ready for the next day, I put out the lights and went upstairs to my bunk in a room I shared with the doctors and the orderlies. I was dead tired at the end of every day, but it always took me a while to fall asleep. I realized how lucky I was to be working in barrack
21
in spite of my devastating head injury, which had actually turned out to be my lucky break.

O
ne afternoon, I saw a female patient brought in by ambulance from Auschwitz II–Birkenau, supposedly for an operation to repair a burst appendix. Dr. Orzeszko reached into a closed cabinet and retrieved a special instrument with a long stem and an oval-shaped scraper at the end. I had not seen this type of instrument in use before. The patient was a healthy-looking woman and her head was not shaved like those of the other female inmates. While I sterilized the instruments, I heard the doctor speak with her in Polish and I guessed that she was a more prominent inmate. Before the operation began, several Polish political prisoners, barracks elders, and room elders arrived in the prep room and huddled with Dr. Orzeszko. From the little Polish that I understood, I gathered that they were going to position themselves all the way to the main gate and warn us if there were any SS officers heading toward the surgery.

I watched as Dr. Orzeszko made the initial incision for an appendix operation and then simply tied up the veins and immediately stitched up the wound. Was this some kind of
surface operation? I was confused, but it was not for me to ask questions. I was instructed to fetch an empty pail, and when I came back, I found the patient strapped into leg holders. Dr. Orzeszko told me to crouch under the operating table, holding the pail while he inserted the long instrument into the patient's vagina. Blood started to flow into the pail within minutes, and I saw the tiny head, arms, and legs of a fetus. The doctor told me to immediately flush the pail's contents away, and to make sure that no one saw me do it. When I came back to the operating room, I unstrapped the patient's legs and cleaned her body of blood; the orderlies put her on a stretcher and loaded her into the ambulance, and she was gone. This was the only time I saw a female patient attended to.

I was tense throughout the operation, and I understood how dangerous a situation it was. When the woman was safely on her way back to Auschwitz II–Birkenau, I sensed that the two surgeons breathed a sigh of relief—more, I assumed, because they had not been caught with her, and not so much because the procedure was a success. This type of cooperation was possible because the Polish political prisoners were in a different category than Jews and others. Any Jewish woman who was found to be pregnant was immediately put to death, because the Nazi racial ideology was founded on the eradication of all Jewish children. But pregnancy was also a risk for Polish prisoners. The Polish inmates had a sophisticated underground resistance that operated right under the noses of the Nazis, and because of that, they were able to help each other in critical situations. Had the camp administrators found out about the abortion, I'm sure that we would all have been done for.

***

On another occasion, a patient was brought to barrack
21
accompanied by two Gestapo men. They arrived after the day's surgeries had ended and I was cleaning up. They instructed me to summon the two surgeons to the operating room immediately. When Dr. Orzeszko arrived in the prep room, they gave him an envelope with X-ray films. The patient was around sixty years old, and he was infected with tuberculosis in two of his ribs just above his heart. He was distinguished and well dressed, with longer hair and a beautiful tweed jacket. Dr. Orzeszko spoke to him in German about his symptoms, and I detected a Hungarian accent in his speech. It appeared that he was doing important work for the Nazi regime.

I helped the man undress and get onto the table, and I covered him with a sheet. Dr. Orzeszko told me to fetch and sterilize certain instruments, including a stainless-steel handsaw and cutting pliers. I sensed that this was going to be a difficult operation. Dr. Orzeszko and his assistant surgeon discussed the procedure they were going to follow: they would cut a four-inch length of bone from the two diseased ribs near the heart. They seemed concerned about how they could perform this operation with such limited instruments and resources, but they nevertheless got ready to proceed. I had to shave the patient's left chest area, then he was put to sleep and the operation began.

After the first incision, the veins were clamped and the two ribs were exposed. Dr. Orzeszko sawed the man's ribs carefully, aware of the risks with the heart so near. After a long day of operating, he must have been very tired and I had to continually wipe his forehead of sweat. Eventually, the diseased ribs were
removed and I could see the heart pumping in the patient's chest. Unfortunately, Dr. Orzeszko could not find one unclamped vein, and it was bleeding profusely. He filled a bucket with bloody gauze and seemed very concerned because the patient's heartbeat was slowing and he was losing a lot of blood. Immediate action had to be taken.

Dr. Orzeszko told me to grab a loaf of bread from the pantry in the prep room, use it to bribe an orderly in the ward upstairs, and bring him down to the operating theatre. This orderly was placed on a gurney next to the operating table, and Dr. Orzeszko rigged up a tube with two needles. One was inserted into a vein in the patient's left hand and the other into a vein the orderly's right hand. A valve to control the blood flow was operated by Dr. Orzeszko's assistant. If the blood flow was not regulated, it could have put the patient into shock. This was a direct body-to-body blood transfusion.

Dr. Orzeszko watched carefully as the patient's heartbeat and colour seemed to stabilize. He also managed to find and clamp the bleeding vein. All of us in the operating room were quite relieved. The veins were tied, the clamps were removed and counted, and the incision was stitched up. We hoped the men's blood types were compatible, but we had no way of knowing. The patient was put back into the ambulance, and he and his entourage left the camp. I marvelled at the quick thinking and stamina of the doctors who performed under these circumstances, and I learned an important lesson about how to act in situations for which you're unprepared, and how to use the resources that are at hand.

***

The prep room (above) contained sinks for washing up; an autoclave for sterilizing gowns, linens and other items; a large corner fireplace; a sterilizer for instruments; and a storage cabinet with glass doors. The operating room (below) was austerely equipped with the most basic implements. Photos courtesy of Yad Vashem.

One day, a young man dressed in partisan clothes—riding pants, riding boots, a heavy pullover, and a short winter coat—was brought to the operating room by an ambulance guarded by two Gestapo men. The femur of his right leg was completely shattered and only hanging on by some muscles. The Gestapo agents told Dr. Orzeszko that if he failed to save the man's life, he would forfeit his own.

When we placed the patient on the operating table, it was obvious he had lost a lot of blood. It was a terrible wound. Dr. Orzeszko spoke to the man in Polish while I was in the prep room getting the instruments ready. The assistant surgeon worked on several steel plates, drilling holes and making strips that could be used to join the shattered bones with screws. I placed all these items, together with the instruments, into the sterilization chamber. It was a very difficult operation because Dr. Orzeszko had to remove several inches of bone and join the stumps with the steel plates. He tried to give the patient as much height as possible when joining the bones, but the wounded leg still ended up being two inches shorter than the good one. The patient was in a coma when he was taken to barrack
11
by the Gestapo.

I later learned that, prior to the operation, Dr. Orzeszko had found out the man was a member of the Polish resistance and asked him about the location of his home unit. Knowing that the only reason the Gestapo wanted to save his life was to torture him for information when he recovered, Dr. Orzeszko put him into a medically induced coma to buy enough time to warn the man's unit to disperse or relocate before the Gestapo could extract their whereabouts.

***

Phlegmon, a flesh-eating disease, was prevalent among prisoners because of the lack of food and nourishment. On one occasion, we operated on a patient with a severe case that had spread above one knee, meaning the leg had to be amputated. I was instructed to hold the leg while the doctor sawed through the femur to sever it. After the amputation, I found myself holding the diseased leg and wondering what to do with it. Although I had seen countless operations by that point, I had never before been in this situation, and I was quite upset. I placed the leg on the floor of the operating room and watched as the doctors closed the wound on the patient's thigh. A tube was inserted for drainage, and he was removed to the upstairs ward. I got busy cleaning up the room and the instruments, but I avoided attending to the leg on the floor. At last, Dr. Orzeszko told me to take it to the experimental barracks next to the surgery. I had never been to barrack
22
before, but I'd heard that terrible experiments were performed there. I did not want to hear about these experiments, and I certainly did not want to see them. But I had a job to do.

I wrapped the leg in a sheet, put it over my shoulder, and set off for barrack
22
. The building emitted a strong smell of form-aldehyde. I reported my presence to the SS officer in charge and asked him where to deposit the leg. He led me to a room that had formaldehyde-filled tubs crammed with human body parts of all kinds. When he told me to throw the leg in one, I gingerly lowered it in without the sheet. My whole body shivered from the sights and odours of this barracks, and I couldn't wait to get away.

On my way out, I saw a group of naked young boys huddled together in a room. These boys had been castrated, and I saw surgical thread hanging from their penises; they appeared to be
in a state of shock and confusion. I couldn't see in their eyes or demeanour even the tiniest spark of life. I returned hastily to the barracks and continued my work, thankful that I was still whole but unable to forget the look in those boys' eyes.

***

In the months of July, August, and September of
1944
, American bombers flew overhead at noon almost on a daily basis. They were targeting installations that were producing ammunitions and other war materials, such as the Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke near Auschwitz I and the I.G. Farben synthetic rubber plant at Monowitz (Auschwitz III). A siren alerted the camp population that a bombing raid was imminent, and all units working within a reasonable distance of the camp were to return to ensure that no one could escape during heavy bombing. Once all the work units were inside the camp, the main gate was locked and the high-voltage wires activated to deter any escapees.

A single Pathfinder airplane would fly overhead and drop a flare to mark the place for the bombers to begin releasing their payload. Within minutes, you could hear the drone of the bombers' powerful engines. It was quite a sight. They flew in squadrons, spaced evenly, in a display of force that filled me with hope. Finally it appeared that higher powers were coming and my chain of slavery would be broken. I thought that America was coming to liberate us, and that the Nazis would be made to pay for all the evils they had perpetrated.

As the bombs fell, the ground shook like an earthquake and shrapnel flew through the air. Under my breath, I said, “Keep dropping the bombs.” Later I learned that the US Air Force
bombed during the day, and the British Royal Air Force bombed throughout the night. The camp's anti-aircraft guns, which were purposely placed near the perimeter fence to ensure their safety, fired on the squadrons of bombers, but the planes were mostly out of range. One airplane was hit and started to spin to earth—an upsetting sight until I saw parachutes open and knew the crew had exited the stricken aircraft. By the summer of
1944
, the Allies ruled the skies over occupied Poland, and I never saw a single German fighter plane attack the Allied bombers. I longed to be as free as the pilots above, whose movements were not controlled by evil forces.