KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (59 page)

Jews arriving in the Herzogenbusch
transit camp were relieved that conditions were better than they had feared. When Helga Deen, an eighteen-year-old from Tilburg, came to the camp on June 1, 1943, she noted in her secret diary that “until now, it is not as bad as all that,” adding: “there is nothing dreadful here.” But the lethal SS intentions were merely masked; terror lurked and it soon raised its head. In July 1943, after
barely one month in the camp, Helga Deen and her family were deported to the east and murdered. This was part of a larger SS action in summer 1943, during which the great majority of Jewish prisoners in Herzogenbusch—more than ten thousand—were sent to their deaths in Sobibor; for them, life in the KL had been no more than a brief lull on the road to a death camp. Among the small number of prisoners
left behind, who now had their privileges cut, were some skilled workers at the Philips factory and a few Jewish leaders, such as Arthur Lehmann. The truth about Nazi intentions was slowly dawning on them, but their special status in the camp could not save them from deportation, and in early June 1944, the SS removed the last group of Jews from Herzogenbusch. “I am very melancholic,” one of them
scribbled in a note on the train to Auschwitz. Lehmann himself had already been taken away in March 1944, and eventually ended up in the Auschwitz satellite camp at Laurahütte. Compared to a KL like Auschwitz, he later wrote, conditions in Vught had been “extraordinarily good.”
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Although Auschwitz played an increasingly important part in the Holocaust from summer 1942, it was a junior partner
early on, far surpassed by other sites of terror. The main hubs for lethal Jewish forced labor were still located elsewhere. At the end of 1942, just 12,650 Jewish prisoners were registered in Auschwitz. By comparison, nearly three hundred thousand Jews were still alive in the General Government, according to the SS, most of them toiling in large ghettos like Warsaw (fifty thousand inmates). Ghettos
in other parts of Nazi Europe, such as Lodz (eighty-seven thousand) and Theresienstadt (fifty thousand), also held far more Jews than Auschwitz. Even in Silesia itself, Auschwitz was still outstripped by regional forced labor camps for Jews under SS Oberführer Albrecht Schmelt.
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As for Auschwitz as a death camp, it was eclipsed by Globocnik’s death camps. In 1942, around 190,000 Jews died in
Auschwitz, the great majority of them in the Birkenau gas chambers.
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By contrast, the three Globocnik death camps claimed around 1,500,000 victims that year; more than 800,000 were murdered in Treblinka alone, a small number of Gypsies among them.
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It was only during 1943—when Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were wound down, having fulfilled their mission of murdering most Jews in the General
Government, and when most of the remaining ghettos and labor camps were eradicated, too—that Auschwitz moved into the center of the Holocaust.
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Arrival in Auschwitz

One freezing morning in late 1942, a large column of Polish Jews set off from a square outside the gates of M
ł
awa ghetto (Zichenau district) and marched through sludge and snow on the open roads toward the town’s railway station.
The men, women, and children were cold and exhausted, having spent the previous night among the dark ruins of a large mill on the ghetto grounds. But belligerent German guards set a brisk pace and the Jews stumbled forward, carrying rucksacks, suitcases, and bundles with their last possessions. Among them was Lejb Langfus, a religious scholar in his early thirties, his wife, Deborah, and their eight-year-old
son, Samuel. Like many others on the march, they had recently been deported to M
ł
awa from the small ghetto Maków Mazowiecki, which was liquidated by the Nazi authorities during the second half of November 1942. Bathed in sweat, Langfus and the others eventually arrived at the railway station, where police and SS men forced them to line up alongside a train and then pushed them inside. Some families
were separated in the confusion, but Langfus held on to his wife and son, and they squeezed into one of the boxcars. After all the doors were sealed, sometime around midday, the train slowly pulled away. It was heading for Auschwitz.
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Conditions inside were unbearable, as on most trains to death camps from eastern Europe. Since mass deportations of Jews had started in summer 1942, the German
authorities in the east relied on closed, windowless freight trains, which quickly filled with the stench of the sick, urine, and excrement on the floor. Lejb Langfus and the others were standing upright, pressed together so tightly that they could not sit, kneel, or lie down, or reach the provisions in their bags. Soon, everyone in the stifling car was desperate for something to drink. “Thirst ruled
everything,” Langfus later wrote in secret notes in Auschwitz. An eerie silence settled over his car. Most people were only half-conscious, too drained to talk. The children were listless, too, with their “cracked lips and completely dried-out throats.” There was only one moment of respite: when the train briefly stopped, two Polish policemen appeared at the door and gave prisoners some water,
in exchange for their wedding rings.
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In addition to hunger and thirst, there was crippling fear. Most men, women, and children on this and other deportation trains did not know that they were heading to Auschwitz, and to their deaths. But many Polish Jews had heard of the camp. Langfus, for example, knew it as a notorious punishment camp and a destination for Jewish transports. There were also
rumors about mass extermination inside. Jews who lived closer to Auschwitz even heard about prisoners being thrown into “furnaces” or “gassed to death,” as a local girl from B
ę
dzin noted in her diary in early 1943. Despite such rumors, some deported Polish prisoners remained defiantly upbeat. “We are off to work. Think positive,” declared a letter thrown from another train en route from a Polish
ghetto to Auschwitz in late 1942. But there was no way of masking the underlying anxieties. While Jews deported from central and western Europe had lived far from the epicenter of the Holocaust and often remained more hopeful that all that awaited them was hard labor (as German officials had promised them before departure and as postcards by friends and relatives, written under duress from the
SS, seemed to confirm), Polish Jews had already suffered many months of misery and violence in the ghettos. Langfus and his family had lived through shortages and epidemics, and had witnessed beatings, slave labor, public executions, and murders. Like elsewhere in occupied Poland, talk about Nazi massacres in ghettos and camps had spread during 1942, and when the inhabitants of Maków Mazowiecki were
told that they, too, would soon be deported, they were gripped by anxiety. Little Samuel Langfus sobbed inconsolably, screaming again and again: “I want to live!” His distraught father feared the worst, too. Shortly before he boarded the train to Auschwitz, Lejb Langfus spent a restless night in M
ł
awa, agonizing with others about their fate: “We were thinking about what would await us at the end
of this journey: death or life?”
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The Auschwitz SS knew the answer. The camp authorities were routinely alerted about impending transports—by the responsible local police authorities or the RSHA (or both)—so that preparations could be made.
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Once a train approached, which could happen at all hours, the well-oiled SS machine got into gear. The officer on duty blew a whistle to alert the Commandant
Staff, shouting: “Transport is here!” SS officers, doctors, drivers, block leaders, and the rest quickly took their positions. Medical orderlies sometimes drove straight to the gas chambers in Birkenau. Meanwhile, dozens of SS men climbed on trucks and motorcycles, and headed for the “Jews’ ramp” (
Judenrampe
), part of a new freight station between the camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau (from May
1944, transports arrived at another ramp inside Birkenau itself). As the train pulled up along the lengthy wooden platform, SS guards formed “a chain around the transport,” SS officer Franz Hössler testified in 1945; then the order was given to open the doors.
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The shock of arrival in Auschwitz was overwhelming. Lejb, Deborah, and Samuel Langfus, and the other Jews from M
ł
awa, had been in a
daze for over a day when their train came to a sudden halt, late on December 6, 1942. Then everything seemed to happen at once. The doors flung open, and SS men and some inmates in striped uniforms hurried the Jews off the trains. To speed things up, they screamed and pushed those who hesitated. There were kicks and blows, though the guards rarely went further. Restraint was more likely to guarantee
order and compliance, since it helped to deceive the victims about their fate. In great haste, the 2,500 or so Jews from M
ł
awa spilled onto the platform, clutching each other and their belongings; left behind were the bodies of old people and children who had been crushed to death during the journey.

Emerging from the dark train, the dazed prisoners blinked into harsh lights that “clouded their
minds,” Lejb Langfus wrote some months later, in secret. Lampposts illuminated the large area around them, teeming with SS men with weapons and guard dogs. Amid the turmoil and terror, the bewildered Jews were forced to move away from the train and leave behind their bags, bundles, and suitcases, which were then piled up by inmates from the so-called Canada Commando. The loss of their possessions
paralyzed the new arrivals, but they had no time to think before the SS told them to line up in two groups, men on one side, and women and most children on the other. The order left many prisoners numb. They had arrived in large families, but the guards quickly drove them apart, as siblings and spouses, sons and daughters, frantically tried to embrace one more time. “Dreadful crying could be heard,”
noted Lejb Langfus, who had to let go of his wife and son. As the two columns formed, several yards apart, many prisoners lost sight of their loved ones and never saw them again. The columns, with five prisoners in each row, soon moved forward toward a small group of SS men who, as Langfus learned, decided their destiny: “The selection began.”
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In Auschwitz, regular SS selections of Jews on
arrival had started in summer 1942, following Himmler’s decision that Jews unable to work should join the RSHA deportation trains.
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Since all Jews on board were doomed, Himmler had apparently approved selections as a means to determine when and how they would perish. Some would be registered for murderous forced labor; the rest would be gassed straightaway. By the time Lejb Langfus and the others
from M
ł
awa arrived in Auschwitz—on one of the more than a dozen deportation transports in December 1942—such selections had long become routine.
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SS men were in a hurry and acted “pretty haphazardly,” according to the postwar confession of Rottenführer Pery Broad from the Auschwitz political office; often, the selections were over in one hour. As individual Jews stumbled forward to the head of
the ramp, the SS officer in charge—mostly the camp doctor on duty, supported by other senior officials like the camp compound leaders and labor action leaders—had a quick glance, asked some of them about their age and occupation, and then gave a nod or wave, casually pointing to the left or the right. At the time, few prisoners knew that this brief gesture meant immediate death or temporary reprieve.
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The Auschwitz SS officials agreed on broad benchmarks for the selection of Jews, going beyond the criteria they had established during the earlier selections of suspected Soviet commissars.
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Dr. Fritz Klein, one of the Auschwitz SS physicians, put it succinctly: “It was the doctor’s job to pick out those who were unfit or unable to work. These included children, old people, and the sick.”
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Like
everywhere else during the Nazi war on Jews, children were most vulnerable. Between 1942 and 1945, around 210,000 were deported to Auschwitz. Those under the age of fourteen were almost all gassed on arrival; so, too, were most of the older ones. In all, fewer than 2,500 Jewish children survived the initial selections.
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Many Jewish women were in great danger, too, even if they were in good health,
as the SS murdered most mothers with younger children, rather than separating them at the ramp.
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Some mothers, meanwhile, abandoned their children with the best of intentions. After Olga Lengyel arrived in Auschwitz, she was determined to protect her son, Arvad, from what she feared would be hard labor. When she was asked by Dr. Klein how old her boy was, she insisted that he was under thirteen,
although he looked older. Dr. Klein duly sent Arvad to the gas chambers. “How should I have known,” Lengyel wrote in despair after the war.
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Some new arrivals learned the truth just in time. As they climbed off the trains or waited at the ramp, inmates from the Canada Commando defied SS orders and told them three basic rules for the selections: act strong and healthy, claim to be between sixteen
and forty years old, hand young children to elderly relatives.
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Such advice saved a number of Jews, at least temporarily.
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But it also caused dreadful dilemmas. Mothers, in particular, faced a split-second decision. To abandon their children on the barely comprehensible advice of a stranger? Or to join them and stand with a group ominously made up of the elderly and frail? There was no right
decision based on ordinary moral norms. Instead, it was one of the “choiceless choices” in Auschwitz, as the scholar Lawrence Langer called them.
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Most Jews were murdered within hours of the selections at the ramp. In general, Commandant Höss always wanted more slaves; when SS Oberführer Schmelt interrupted deportation trains bound for Auschwitz and pulled out Jewish men for his own labor camps,
Höss and Eichmann agreed to foil such preselections, which deprived Auschwitz of the best workers.
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When it came to selections at the Auschwitz ramp, however, Höss was adamant that “only the very healthiest and very strongest Jews” should be spared. Otherwise, the camp would be overburdened by needy prisoners, creating worse conditions for everyone.
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Although there was some internal criticism
of Höss’s hard-line approach, many Auschwitz SS men shared it. Despite all the talk of forced labor, Rottenführer Pery Broad testified, these men saw “the annihilation of the largest number of ‘enemies of the state’ as their primary task.”
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Some senior SS officers agreed, among them Reich physician Ernst Grawitz, who observed the mass murder in Auschwitz and supported extensive gassings as a
radical weapon against illness in the KL.
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By contrast, Oswald Pohl and senior WVHA managers repeatedly reprimanded Höss, arguing that the Auschwitz SS should select as many Jews as possible for forced labor, including weak ones who could be deployed for a short period of time only.
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SS leader Heinrich Himmler, the ultimate authority, wavered between both sides of the argument.
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