The World at War (48 page)

DOV PAISIKOWIC

Several minutes later the SS company sergeant major arrived. He was the head of all the crematoria. He received us very nicely and said, 'Here you will have enough to eat, but you will have to work a lot.' The doors were suddenly opened to the gas chambers. People, naked people, started falling out. We were all frightened, no one dared ask what it all was. We were immediately taken to the other side of this house and there we saw hell on this earth – large piles of dead people, and people dragging these dead to a long pit, about thirty metres in length and ten metres in width. There was a huge fire there, with tree trunks. On the other side fat was being taken out of this pit with a bucket. We remained almost unconscious and we did not know what to do in such a situation, but we had no alternative and we had to immediately begin working. Four people would take hold of one dead person but the SS came and said, no, each one of you will take one. He showed us how, with a simple walking stick, to take one under the chin, to put the stick on the neck and drag the dead to the pit as one would drag a rag or a piece of wood. At the pit there were still others who pushed the dead into the pit.

LANCE CORPORAL BOCK

They opened the door – it was a prisoners' Sonderkommando who did that – then a blue haze came out. I looked in and I saw a pyramid. They had all climbed up on top of each other until the last one stood at the very top, all one on top of the other and then the prisoners had to go in and tear it apart. They were all tangled, one had his arm down by another's foot and then round it and back up again and his fingers were sticking in someone else's eye, so deep. They were all tangled, they had to tug and pull very hard to disentangle all these people. Then we went back to the hall and now it was the turn of the last lot to get undressed, the ones who had managed to hang back a bit all the time. One girl with beautiful black hair, a beautiful girl, was crouching there and didn't want to get undressed and an SS man came up and said, 'I suppose you don't want to get undressed,' and she tossed her hair back and laughed a little. Then he went away and came back with two prisoners and they literally tore the clothes off her then they each grabbed an arm and they dragged her across to Bunker One and pushed her in there. Then the prisoners had to check where the small children had been hidden and covered up. They pulled them out and opened the doors quickly again and threw all the children in and slammed the doors.

DR MORGEN

The experience of Auschwitz was a terrible one for me and I had planned to cross the border and go into Switzerland. But then on this long journey I reconsidered it all – if you go and tell them all this, who will believe you? I could hardly believe my eyes and ears when I saw it all for the first time and something where there has never been anything like it before, and it all seems absolutely impossible anyway – how should I prove it? And I was genuinely afraid they would just say to me, 'He's an agent provocateur, a spy or a madman.' I just couldn't imagine any positive result from it. It could only lead to me or my parents having to suffer an awful lot, pointlessly too since I could not change anything. But I said to myself, even if I can't get those who are responsible for this extermination of millions, I can at least bring the executives to justice in so far as they deviate from the path of so-called legality and act on their own initiative to enrich themselves, to cover up crimes, or out of power-mania, or whatever all the reasons were for violating prisoners. For that I could bring them to justice, to shut these monsters up and put an end to their activities. I kept trying to arouse an examination of it all, but how can you change a system, particularly when there's a war going on?

WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS

A pile of women's bodies, an enormous pile, you have probably seen the photographs, but the smell and the horror of it. There were little children playing touch around the pile of these bodies and that was the final, horrible end. In the huts typhoid, everything, had broken out and you couldn't hear yourself speak for the death rattle. There were people lying on top of each other, sick, vomiting, withered bodies crawling on their hands and knees. I went into one area where they had to seal it off because of typhus; through the wire came what I thought were broken twigs, they were the arms of people and the voice, the croaking sound of voices that had withered at the roots, and I'll never forget it. Sometimes you wake up at night and you hear sounds and you think you're in
Belsen again, that horrible, awful sick smell and the final indignity of taking the human body and bulldozing it as if it was worth nothing. You were surrounded by this neutral pine forest and I can't look at Christmas trees sometimes without remembering Belsen behind it. It was sealed off in this dark north German plain and you felt you'd reached the cesspit of the human mind.

ANTHONY EDEN

Auschwitz was very long range as far as our people were concerned, and certainly until the later stages in the war I should imagine out of range. There are some Jewish organisations who feel to this day it would have been good if we could have bombed Auschwitz. I don't really know how it could have helped anybody even if we could have done it. You can't bomb with that accuracy, it certainly would have killed a lot of people, and then of course it was in enemy territory and even if as a result of the bombing some people had got out, they would have been in a hostile country – where could they have got to or was there any real hope that they could have escaped? I hardly think so. We decided against it, and we didn't even ask Bomber Harris to consider the project. So we may have been right or wrong, but that was how the decision was taken. As one considers all the possible alternatives one comes back to what was the main thing to do, which was to win the war, not disperse our effort more than we absolutely had to. It was only by winning the war that we could hope to save the lives of any unfortunate Jews who were still survivors from the terrible and unforgivable treatment to which they were subjected.

DR STEPHEN AMBROSE

American historian

Jews realised overwhelmingly that when push comes to shove a Jew can only look to another Jew for support. This gave a tremendous boost to Zionism, which had been an important force before the war among world Jewry but not decisive in the way that it was to become after the war. The only solution for the Jews was to have their homeland back and so they took it. The Jews had moral capital piled up in the West upon which they could draw for a long time. It seems to be running out, but immediately after the war the West had a very guilty conscience about what had happened. Had Hitler not attacked Poland and instead concentrated his efforts exclusively on eliminating Germany's Jews, it's perfectly evident the West would have allowed him to do so. He could have killed all Germany's Jews and no one in the West was going to raise a finger to stop him.

RITA BOAS-KOUPMANN

We were brought to freedom in a train, not with those SS people but with soldiers, old-men soldiers. They told us you are lucky, you go to Sweden and Hitler is dead. One of the girls said, 'Hitler is dead, now I'll see my daughter again.' She never had told us during all the years she had a daughter. We couldn't believe we were free until we saw for the first time of our life English soldiers. Then I knew we were in Denmark and the people from Denmark were running to the train with bread and cigarettes and I remember that one woman took out her lovely white shoes and gave them to me. I took of course the shoes in my hands but my feet were not clean and I was sick – but I like to say I came out of the war with a pair of white shoes.

DR ADOLF GAWALEWICZ

Polish–Jewish lawyer and Auschwitz survivor

I had to drink urine in the wagon. A couple of months later, on the yacht of a rich Swedish lady, I drank a glass of champagne. Then I told her that our generation had to note in their lives enormous contrasts such as between drinks – urine and champagne. This was received, rightly, with disgust although at the time the joke seemed to me excellent, excellent. This was already the first contact with the fact that what we went through will be difficult to understand even for our contemporaries, and much more difficult for the generations that have already no personal experience from those days.

YAACOV SILBERSTEIN

Rabbi Frankforter had one wish. He gave me his will. He said, 'You see what they are doing with us day in, day out. They are finishing us. I will be the first victim here, as I am a rabbi. This is why they will want to finish me before the rest.' He asked me to do one thing. He blessed me and said, 'You are still young and you will remain alive. I have only one request for you that you should never let people forget. Tell everyone what they did to us at this small camp, in Buchenwald. Wherever you go tell this, also to your children so that they should pass it on.' This is why I insist on it even today – 'To remember and not to forget'.

CHAPTER 19
CASABLANCA AND TEHRAN

One of the least explored of the major themes of the Second World War is the degree to which the Americans, deliberately or accidentally, pursued policies that ensured Britain would be completely exhausted by the end of hostilities. President Roosevelt's formidable wife, Eleanor, once said that he did not think, he decided, and he announced one such unilateral decision at the closing press briefing of the Allied conference at Casablanca in January 1943. The conference had been dominated by the better-prepared British, and from it emerged a joint plan for the allocation of mainly US resources within the framework of a 'Germany First' policy. Without discussing his announcement with Winston Churchill or even his own Chiefs of Staff Roosevelt announced that the war must end with the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers and their allies. No policy could have been better designed to ensure that Germany and Japan would fight to the bitter end and that, consequently, American hegemony would be near absolute in a shattered post-war world. Later, at the meeting of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill at Tehran at the end of November 1943, Roosevelt sought to ingratiate himself with the Soviet dictator by snubbing Churchill. Ironically, Stalin respected Churchill as a brave man and an honest opponent, and despised Roosevelt for his disloyalty. Roosevelt's outlook and that of several high-ranking Soviet sympathisers in his administration was born of their naïve belief that Communism was simply a more drastic version of their own Progressivism. This aspect of American policy, decidedly awkward in the light of the ensuing Cold War, was airbrushed out of post-war history. It is evident that the Americans were,
quite understandably, not interested in fighting to preserve the British Umpire, and attitude surveys of US troops fighting in north-west Europe testify to a wider cultural gap between them and the British than we sometimes like to imagine. In this context we should perhaps let the great Lord Palmerston speak for Roosevelt: 'We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.'

REAR ADMIRAL LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN

British Chief of Combined Operations

At Casablanca the British and American Chiefs of Staff arrived first; we had three or four days entirely alone before Churchill and Roosevelt turned up. It didn't go very well, we took up positions, the British with Alanbrooke as our spokesman were pressing for a continued Mediterranean strategy; we were there, it was the obvious thing to do. The Americans wanted to land immediately in France, and engage the Germans on the mainland of Europe and also to give more pressure to the Pacific. All the arguments that Admiral King developed for the Pacific we developed for the Mediterranean, and it was about the third day we agreed a paper on facts, and alternatives and possibilities. Admiral Cook, who was the Director of Naval Plans for the Americans, had absolutely nobody on his staff who knew anything about landing craft at all, so I lent him all my combined operations staff and helped him produce the position paper. The position paper worked miracles and we began to see a way through. By the time we met Roosevelt and Churchill we had five
priorities. Priority one was unquestioned security of sea communications – if we lost the Battle of the Atlantic we'd lost the war and all escorts, all anti-submarine aircraft, a great effort was to be put into that. Priority two was to continue aid to Russia – obviously if Russia was out of the war then we'd be in a bad way too. Priority three was that the British protocol in the Mediterranean prevailed and the Americans agreed that they would not withdraw their land forces from the Mediterranean, a great saving of shipping. Priority four, called Bolero, was the continued influx into England of American forces and the operations into and out of England by them, which included the possibility of the capture of Guernsey before the main invasion. Priority five was the Pacific. There was no question of holding back resources that were needed so everybody was happy, and the President and the Prime Minister were very pleased with our work.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL ALBERT WEDERMEYER

Author of the US Army's 'Victory Program', also known as 'Germany First'
My still vivid impression of the British delegation at Casablanca, the Prime Minister and his military chiefs, concerned their skills in negotiation – they were really very good. They were a team with a game plan and well rehearsed in the plays. They maintained the initiative through all stages of the discussion because they had formed clear ideas of their objectives and they had coordinated the political and the military factors and worked out detailed proposals. By contrast, our own American team was not well prepared and I was the responsible individual. Our basic political and military aims were vaguely conceived and there'd been little opportunity for our military chiefs to talk to the President and obtain his approval for certain aspects of our strategy. Our various Service Chiefs were not even in accord on many issues. Although I disagreed with some of the British positions at that time I wholeheartedly admired their performance in negotiating. Later, when Chief of Army Staff General Marshall heard about this – as he noted this in the course of the discussions – he approved of certain changes that 1 recommended, which greatly improved our planning and negotiating in subsequent conferences.