An Auschwitz Alphabet

*(Note from saveterrislife / Melissa: I am a Christian and do not
agree with the section(s) / views on God).

http://www.spectacle.org/695/ausch.html

Compiled, and with commentary and original content by, Jonathan
Wallace jw@...
Introduction

Arbeit Macht Frei
Block 10
Clothing and nakedness
Doctors
Escape
Filth and cleanliness
God (Note from saveterrislife / Melissa: I am a Christian and do not
agree with the section(s) / views on God).
Hope
Injections
The Judge
Krematoria
Language
Muselmanner
Nutrition
Ordnungsdienst
Perpetrators
Question
Resistance
Selections
Tomorrow morning
United States
Victims
Why
Xrays
Yesterday and Today
Zyklon B


Epitaphs
An Excerpt From the Passover Service

What I Learned From Auschwitz


An Interview With Ken McVay
A Letter From My Uncle

Sources: Books; Links



THOSE WHO DO NOT LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT



AN AUSCHWITZ ALPHABET
http://www.spectacle.org/695/ausch.html




EXCERPTS FROM "AN AUSCHWITZ ALPHABET"

Injections

The most medical of all Auschwitz killing methods was the phenol
injection, which was institutionalized during the relatively early
phases of Auschwitz. A patient was brought to a treatment room and
there administered a drug by a physician or (in most cases) his
assistant, who wore a white coat and used a syringe and needle for
the injection. In camp jargon, there were the active verb spritzen
(to "inject, squirt, spray"), the passive verb abgespritzt ("to be
injected off", or killed) and equivalent noun forms
meaning "syringing" and "phenoling".
Initially, phenol was injected into a victim's vein, maximizing the
medical aura of the entire procedure...Before long, the technique was
changed to injecting the phenol directly into the heart. Some
witnesses thought that the change was made because the veins were
sometimes hard to locate, but the real reason seems to have been the
greater killing efficiency of a direct cardiac injection. Patients
injected by vein might linger for minutes or even an hour or
more...The "concentrated aqueous solution of phenol" that was
developed proved "inexpensive, easy to use, and absolutely effective
when introduced into the heart ventricle", so that an injection of
ten to fifteen millileters into the heart caused death within fifteen
seconds.

Phenol injections were given in Block 20:

At that point two Jewish prisoner assistants brought a victim into
the room (sometimes victims were brought in two at a time) and
positioned him or her on a footstool, usually so that the right arm
covered the victim's eyes and the left arm was raised sideways in a
horizontal position....The idea was for the victim's chest to be
thrust out so that the cardiac area was maximally accessible for the
lethal injection, and for him or her to be unable to see what was
happening....The person giving the injection--most often the SDG
Josef Klehr--filled his syringe from the bottle and then thrust the
needle directly into the heart of the seated prisoner and emptied the
contents of the syringe.

Thus, an average of two minutes and 22 seconds sufficed to murder one
prisoner.

Lifton, 254-259.

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Krematoria

Himmler inspected Auschwitz on March 1, 1941, and ordered that a POW
camp be built...Among other projects, the plan provided for the
construction of a crematorium capable of incinerating 1,440 bodies in
24 hours. It was projected to consist of five three-retort ovens for
burning bodies, one oven for burning refuse, and one underground
mortuary. The site was to be in the main camp at Auschwitz.
In consideration of the ongoing preparations for the extermination of
Jews, it was decided to adapt the installation for mass killing by
constructing a gas chamber next to it, in an underground facility
also dedicated as a mortuary. The second room was to serve as
a "dressing room". Both were to be ventilated mechanically.

An order placed with the firm Topf and Sons of Erfurt on October 22,
1941, stressed the urgency of the entire undertaking, demanding fast
delivery: two weeks for technical drawings of the foundations and
three months for parts of the ovens...However, before the
construction work began, Heinz Kammler, chief of Group C of the SS
Economic-Administrative Main Office and one of the closest associates
of Himmler, arrived at Auschwitz on February 27, 1942 and ordered
that the five-oven crematorium projected for Auschwitz be constructed
at Birkenau.

Despite the hectic pace of work, which went on day and night, the
approved deadlines for launching the crematoria failed to be met. The
camp administration did not take delivery of the crematoria and gas
chambers until the spring and summer of 1943...

A letter from the Zentralbauleitung to Group C of June 28, 1943
indicates that the capacity for a 24-hour period was estimated at 340
bodies for crematorium I; 1,440 each for crematoria II and III; and
768 each for crematoria IV and V. Thus the five crematoria could
incinerate 4,765 bodies each day...

The furnace room occupied the largest interior space on the ground
floor of the crematorium. It housed five furnaces, each with three
retorts (about 2m long, 80 cm wide, and 1m high) that were used to
push the bodies into the furnace. There were two generators of coke
gas on the opposite side. The fumes were funneled to a single chimney
through flues under the floor. Initially, the furnaces of crematorium
II were equipped with a forced-draft installation. The draft was
produced by three intake ventilators situated between the furnaces
and the chimney. Within a short time, however, they burned out...

In addition, crematoria II and III were equipped with special
furnaces for incinerating less-valuable articles, such as personal
papers, women's purses, books, and toys that were found in the
luggage of the murdered victims...The disinfected hair of gassed
women was dried in the attic...

In the gas chamber's anteroom, the bodies were relieved of spectacles
and artificial limbs, and the women's hair was cut off. Thereupon the
corpses were loaded on the elevator platform and lifted to the ground
floor. Some of the corpses were dragged directly to the oven area.
Others were moved to the corpse storage room opposite the elevator,
which also served as a site of executions by shooting. Just before
incineration, Sonderkommando prisoners removed jewelry, which they
tossed into a special numbered crate.

Teeth with metal fillings, crowns, and bridges made of gold or other
precious metals were extracted from the mouths of the gassed victims
and deposited in a crate marked "Zahnstation" (dental station)....

It took about four hours to empty the gas chamber. Initially, the
corpses were delivered to the furnaces on small trolleys that ran on
rails, as was done in the main camp. The trolleys also served to load
the corpses into the furnace retorts. This arrangement, however, did
not last long. On the initiative of the Kapo August Bruck, special
corpse stretchers, which could be rolled into the retorts, were
introduced. To facilitate the loading, the corpse stretchers were
lubricated with soapy water. Methods of loading the corpses varied;
each team servicing the furnaces had its own technique. For example,
H. Tauber's team would put two corpses into one retort two times,
then add as many children's corpses as possible to the second load.

It took about 20 minutes to cremate three corpses in one retort.
However, in their efforts to reduce the number of loadings, prisoners
cremated four to five corpses at one time, and extended the cremation
time to about 25 to 30 minutes. When the time was up, the next load
would be put into the retort, regardless of the degree of
incineration of the preceding load. The incompletely incinerated
bones fell through the grill into the ash pit, were ground with
wooden mortars along with the ashes, then poured into pits near the
crematorium. Next they were removed from the pits and poured into the
Vistula river or nearby ponds. Sometimes they were used to prepare
compost; other times they were used directly to fertilize the fields
of the camp farms.

Anatomy, pp. 164-170.


Great columns of smoke rise from the crematoria and merge up above
into a huge black river which very slowly floats across the sky over
Birkenau and disappears beyond the forests in the direction of
Trzebinia. The "Sosnowiec-Bedzin" transport is already burning.
Borowski, p. 49.


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Nutrition
http://www.spectacle.org/695/food.html

Theoretically, each prisoner was entitled to a daily ration of 350
grams of bread, half a liter of ersatz coffee for breakfast, and one
liter of turnip and potato potato soup for lunch. Also, four times a
week each prisoner was to receive a soup ration of 20 grams of meat,
but in practice soup rarely reached the bowls from which the
prisoners ate. The official daily value of food for prisoners
employed in light work stood at 1,700 calories and for prisoners
doing strenuous work, 2,150 calories. An analysis done after the war
of the actual food content ranged from 1,300 calories for light-work
prisoners to 1,700 calories for prisoners performing hard labor. The
difference was caused by plunder of food by SS personnel and
functionary-prisoners. Inequality pervaded the food distribution
system. The kapo, or the prisoner entrusted with ladling out the
soup, made sure that the thicker, more nourishing contents from the
bottom would reach "proper" prisoners, whereas the others had to
content themselves with a watery substance from the top of the pot...
Under these conditions, supplementary food was tantamount to
survival... The bread ration thus served as a currency of sorts. The
functionaries, who made up perhaps 3 to 5 percent of the prisoner
population, exchanged their supplementary bread and soup for higher-
quality and tastier victuals.

Prisoners condemned to subsist on the official ration lost weight
rapidly, and their survival odds diminished accordingly.

Anatomy, pp. 24-25.


During an air-raid
Near the kitchen, two cauldrons of steaming hot soup had been left,
half full. Two cauldrons of soup, right in the middle of the path,
with no one guarding them!...

Suddenly, we saw the door of Block 37 open imperceptibly. A man
appeared, crawling like a worm in the direction of the cauldrons.

Hundreds of eyes followed his movements. Hundreds of men crawled with
him, scraping their knees with his on the gravel. Every heart
trembled, but with envy above all. This man had dared.

He reached the first cauldron. Hearts raced: he had succeeded.
Jealousy consumed us, burned us up like straw. We never thought for a
moment of admiring him. Poor hero, committing suicide for a ration of
soup! In our thoughts, we were murdering him.

Stretched out by the cauldron, he was now trying to raise himself up
to the edge. Either from weakness or fear, he stayed there, trying,
no doubt, to muster up the last of his strength. At last he succeeded
in hoisting himself onto the edge of the pot. For a moment, he seemed
to be looking at himself, seeking his ghostlike reflection in the
soup. Then, for no apparent reason, he let out a terrible cry, a
rattle such as I had never heard before, and, his mouth open, thrust
his head toward the still steaming liquid. We jumped at the
explosion. Falling back onto the ground, his face stained with soup,
the man writhed for a few seconds at the foot of the cauldron, then
he moved no more.

Wiesel, pp. 56-57.


We have learnt the value of food; now we also diligently scrape the
bottom of the bowl after the ration and we hold it under our chins
when we eat bread so as not to lose the crumbs. We, too, know it is
not the same thing to be given a ladlefull of soup from the top or
from the bottom of the vat, and we are already able to judge,
according to the capacity of the various vats, what is the most
suitable place to try and reach in the queue when we line up...
Here I am, then, on the bottom. One learns quickly enough to wipe out
the past and the future when one is forced to. A fortnight after my
arrival I already had the prescribed hunger, that chronic hunger
unknown to free men, which makes one dream at night, and settles in
all the limbs of one's body...

The Market is always very active...Here scores of prisoners driven
desperate by hunger prowl around, with lips half-open and eyes
gleaming, lured by a deceptive instinct to where the merchandise
shown makes the gnawing of their stomachs more acute and their
salvation more assiduous. In the best cases they possess a miserable
half-ration of bread which, with painful effort, they have saved
since the morning, in the senseless hope of a chance to make an
advantageous bargain with some ingenuous person, unaware of the
prices of the moment. Some of these, with savage patience, acquire
with their half-ration two pints of soup which, once in their
possession, they subject to a methodical examination with a view to
extracting the few pieces of potato lying at the bottom; this done,
they exchange it for bread, and the bread for another two pints to
denaturalize, and so on, until their nerves are exhausted, or until
some victim, catching them in the act, inflicts on them a severe
lesson, exposing them to public derision.

Levi, Survival, pp. 33, 36-37, 78.

The average diet in Auschwitz permitted a prisoner to remain alive no
more than three months, after which time symptoms of emaciation
and "hunger disease" set in; and the early hospital blocks served as
places "where the people suffering from the hunger disease could
spend the time from the beginning of the sickness until their death."
Lifton, p. 187.

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Perpetrators
http://www.spectacle.org/695/perp.html

Adolf Eichmann was the bureaucrat in charge of Jewish emigration from
pre-war Germany and, later, of the logistics of collecting the Jews
and shipping them to concentration camps. In the former role, he had
worked closely with the leadership of Jewish communities. He was
kidnapped in Argentina by Israeli forces in 1960 and taken to Israel,
where he was put on trial, convicted and hanged. Eichmann visited
Auschwitz on a number of occasions, and told the following story to
his Israeli interrogator:

Now and then, the comedy breaks into the horror itself, and results
in stories, presumably true enough, whose macabre humor surpasses
that of any Surrealist invention. Such was the story told by Eichmann
during the police examination about the unlucky Kommerzialrat Storfer
of Vienna, one of the representatives of the Jewish community.
Eichmann had recieved a telegram from Rudolf Hoss, Commandant of
Auschwitz, telling him that Storfer had arrived and had urgently
requested to see Eichmann. "I said to myself: OK, this man has always
behaved well, that is worth my while... I'll go there myself and see
what is the matter with him. And I go to Ebner [chief of the Gestapo
in Vienna], and Ebner says--I remember it only vaguely--'If only he
had not been so clumsy; he went into hiding and tried to escape,'
something of the sort. And the police arrested him and sent him to
the concentration camp, and, according to the orders of the
Reichsfuhrer [Himmler], no one could get out once he was in. Nothing
could be done, neither Dr. Ebner nor I nor anybody else could do
anything about it. I went to Auschwitz and asked Hoss to see
Storfer. 'Yes, yes, [Hoss said], he is in one of the labor gangs.'
With Storfer afterward, it was normal and human, we had a normal,
human encounter. He told me all his grief and sorrow: I said: 'Well,
my dear old friend [Ja, mein lieber guter Storfer], we certainly got
it! What rotten luck!' And I also said, 'Look, I really cannot help
you, because according to orders from the Reichsfuhrer nobody can get
out. I can't get you out. Dr. Ebner can't get you out...And then I
asked him how he was. And he said, yes, he wondered if he couldn't be
let off work, it was heavy work. And then I said to Hoss: 'Work--
Storfer won't have to work!' But Hoss said: 'Everyone works here.' So
I said, 'OK,' I said, 'I'll make out a chit to the effect that
Storfer has to keep the gravel paths in order with a broom,' there
were little gravel paths there, 'and that he has the right to sit
down with his broom on one of the benches.' [To Storfer] I
said: 'Will that be all right, Mr. Storfer? Will that suit you?'
Whereupon he was very pleased, and we shook hands, and then he was
given the broom, and sat down on his bench. It was a great inner joy
to me that I could at least see the man with whom I had worked for so
many long years, and that we could speak with each other.' Six weeks
after this normal human encounter, Storfer was dead--not gassed,
apparently, but shot.

Arendt, pp. 50-51.


It is not clear which were the gravel paths which Storfer was
appointed to sweep; but Primo Levi says that the paths in the S.S.
village adjoining the camp were spread with human ashes and bits of
bone from the crematoria (Levi, Drowned, p. 125.)


Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was an Einsatzgruppen general in the East
responsible for the shooting of hundreds of thousands of Jews. (About
two million of the war's six million Jewish victims were killed in
this manner.) During a visit during which Himmler witnessed the
murder of one hundred Jews, Bach-Zelewski told him:
Look at the eyes of the men in this Kommando, how deeply shaken they
are! These men are finished (fertig) for the rest of their lives.
What kind of followers are we training here? Either neurotics or
savages!

In 1942, Bach-Zelewski had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized
for "psychic exhaustion" and "hallucinations connected with the
shootings of Jews" However, he recovered and went back to killing
(Lifton, pp. 159, 437).

Bach-Zelewski's fate after the war makes an interesting footnote. He
was tried in 1961 for his part in the murders of the S.A., the rival
German military arm, in 1934, and sentenced to three and one half
years; he was then tried again in 1962 for the murder of six
Communists in 1933, and sentenced to life. Neither indictment
mentioned his Einsatzgruppen activities. Arendt says: "He was also
the only one in this category who in 1952 had denounced himself
publicly for mass murder, but he was never prosecuted for it" (p. 16).


What is Bach-Zelewski's relevance to Auschwitz? His difficulties were
the inspiration for the decision to use gas as the means of murder.
Hoss, the Auschwitz kommandant, wrote:
I had heard Eichmann's description of Jews being mown down by the
Einsatzkommandos armed with machine guns and machine pistols. Many
gruesome scenes are said to have taken place, people running away
after being shot, the finishing off of the wounded and particularly
of the women and the children. Many members of the Einsatzkommandos,
unable to endure wading through blood any longer, had committed
suicide. Some had even gone mad. Most of the members of these
Kommandos had to rely on alcohol when carrying out their horrible
work.

Lifton, p. 159.

Hoss, the architect and creator of the most prominent of death camps,
began the search that resulted in the selection of Zyklon B as the
agent of killing.

Hoss wrote his memoirs in 1947, shortly before he was hung for his
role in the murder of the victims of Auschwitz. He may be the
prototypical Nazi. He was raised religious and had participated in
pilgrimages to Lourdes and other shrines. He entered the military and
then became involved with the Nazis at the very beginning. In 1923,
he participated in beating a suspected informer to death and was sent
to prison, where he went mad:

Then I would sink exhausted onto the bed and fall asleep, only to
wake again after a short time bathed in sweat from my nightmares. In
these confused dreams, I was always being pursued and killed, or
falling over a precipice.

Freed in an amnesty in 1928, he later joined the SS under Himmler and
was assigned to construct a camp in the Polish town of Oswiecim
(Auschwitz to the Germans) in 1940. He had already served at Dachau,
where he was uncomfortably thrilled the first time he saw a prisoner
flogged: "I went hot and cold all over...I am unable to give an
explanation of this."

Contrast his view of his religious upbringing:

I was taught that my highest duty was to help those in need. It was
constantly impressed on me in forceful terms that I must obey
promptly the wishes and commands of my parents, teachers and
priests...

Or his views on work:

All my life I have thoroughly enjoyed working. I have done plenty of
hard, physical work, under the severest physical conditions, in the
coal mines, in oil refineries, and in brickyards...Work in prison
[is] a means of training for those prisoners who are fundamentally
unstable and who need to learn the meaning of endurance and
perseverance...

Hoss, of course, was responsible for placing the slogan Arbeit Macht
Frei over the camp's gate.

In his memoirs, Hoss claimed to exemplify leadership, setting the
example for his men: "When reveille sounded for the SS men in the
ranks, I too must get out of bed..."

In 1941, Himmler summoned Hoss to Berlin, and told him secretly to
transform Auschwitz into an extermination camp. According to Hoss,
Himmler said:

The Fuhrer has ordered that the Jewish question be solved once and
for all...I have now decided to entrust this task to you. It is
difficult and onerous and calls for complete devotion notwithstanding
the difficulties that may arise... You will treat this order as
absolutely secret, even from your superiors...The Jews are the sworn
enemies of the German people and must be eradicated. Every Jew that
we can lay our hands on is to be destroyed now during the war,
without exception.

Himmler's emissary to Hoss to discuss the details was Adolf Eichmann.
Eichmann revealed his plan for the shipment of Jews to Auschwitz,
first from Poland, then Czechoslovakia, then Western Europe. The men
walked the fields looking for a suitable location for a gas chamber
until they found an abandoned farmhouse which was "most suitable":

It was isolated and screened by woods and hedges, and it was also not
far from the railroad...We calculated that after gasproofing the
premises then available, it would be possible to kill about eight
hundred people simultaneously with a suitable gas.

(Friedrich, pp. 2-19.)

Hoss stole food from the prisoner's supplies for his family, and had
prisoners build his furniture; he lived a life of such comfort that
his wife was said to have remarked, "I will live here until I die."
However, he took a non-Jewish camp inmate, Eleanor Hodys, as
mistress, got her pregnant, then tried to have her murdered. She was
rescued by the SS Judge investigating corruption in the camp, and
taken to Munich, where the SS killed her at the end of the war.
(Friedrich, pp. 50-51.)

After listening to Hoss testify at Nuremberg, one of the defense
attorneys said:

It rained blood, one breathed ashes, the smell of burned corpses
poisoned the atmosphere.

Conot, p. 376.


It is easy to forget about them when focusing on figures like
Eichmann or Hoss, but the industrialists who were eager to create
factories at Auschwitz were perpetrators of the horror too:
Many prominent German corporations--among them Krupp, Siemens and
Bayer--were interested in what might be negotiated. Auschwitz began
developing a network of outlying subcamps, thirty-four in all. The
prisoners worked at a cement plant...a coal mine...a steel
factory...a shoe factory...The biggest of these Auschwitz subcamps
was the I.G. Farben plant...The plant was known as Buna because its
principal purpose was to produce synthetic rubber; its other main
installation was a hydrogenation plant designed to convert coal into
oil...The Auschwitz factories [were] the largest in the Farben empire.

Conditions at [Buna] were much like those at Auschwitz--the dawn roll
calls, the starvation rations, the labor gangs sent out for twelve
hours at a time, forced to work at the double, beaten by guards,
harried by giant dogs. The prisoners who died of overwork--dozens of
them every day--had to be hauled back to camp at nightfall so that
they could be propped up and counted at the next morning's roll call.
About 25,000 people, ultimately, were killed in the construction of
the I.G. Farben plant...One of the enduring mysteries of Auschwitz is
that this plant, built at such cost and such suffering, never
actually produced one ounce of synthetic rubber.

Friedrich, pp. 41-42.

After the initial Nuremberg trial, a trial was held of the I.G.
Farben industrialists responsible for Buna. "[T]welve were found not
guilty, five received sentences of one to four years, and six of five
to eight years." Conot, p. 517.

There was also a commerce in the clothes, glasses, and hair of the
murdered. Primo Levi wrote:

I myself found in Katowitz, after the liberation, innumerable
packages of forms by which the heads of German families were
authorized to draw clothes and shoes for adults and for children from
the Auschwitz warehouses; did no-one ask himself where so many
children's shoes were coming from?

Levi, Drowned, pp. 179-180.

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The Question
http://www.spectacle.org/695/question.html

The Frankfurt judge, who had heard endless protestations about
irresistable orders from higher authorities, was amazed by Dr.
Lingens' testimony. "Do you wish to say,"he asked, "that everyone
could decide for himself to be either good or evil in Auschwitz?"
"That is exactly what I wish to say," Dr. Lingens answered.

Friedrich, p. 23

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Resistance
http://www.spectacle.org/695/resist.html

Resistance was almost impossible in Auschwitz, where disobedience
meant torture and death, for one's peers as well as oneself.
Nevertheless, it occurred. The most notable instance was that of the
Sonderkommando that seized a crematorium.
Just months before the liberation of the camp, when it was already
known that the Russian army was approaching, the SS caught wind of
the fact that the last of the Sonderkommando--the squads of Jewish
prisoners formed to shepherd their fellows to the gas chamber-- were
planning an uprising. They determined to eliminate them all.

On October 7, 1944, as the SS were forming a detail of three hundred
members of the Sonderkommando for some outside work (this was thought
to be a ruse to separate and execute them) the Sonderkommando began
pelting the SS with stones and drove them off. They packed
crematorium IV with explosives they had "organized" or stolen, and
blew it up. Eighty to one hundred trucks of SS men arrived and the
Sonderkommando fought them with stolen machine guns and grenades they
had been stockpiling; the SS responded in kind and by unleashing
fifty attack dogs.

Sonderkommando in other units rose up too; some seized crematorium II
and threw an SS man and a kapo into the furnace alive. Some men cut
holes in the barbed wire and fled, but in the wrong direction,
remaining within the larger confines of the extended camp. The SS
trapped some in a barn and set fire to it, and hunted others down in
the woods; by the end of the day, hundreds of members of the
Sonderkommando had been burned or shot to death.

After the revolt was put down, the remaining two hundred members of
the Sonderkommando were executed, some with flamethrowers.

Friedrich, pp. 80-85.

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Selections

http://www.spectacle.org/695/select.html


Selections for the gas chamber were made upon arrival at Auschwitz,
and then periodically afterwards to cull the Muselmanner as they
weakened. The doctors of Auschwitz were intimately involved in the
selection process. Many accounts tell of arriving trainloads being
met by Dr. Mengele at the ramp, impeccably dressed, whistling to
himself as he gestured to the right (for life) and to the left (for
death.) Children, their mothers, the aged, all those too weak to work
were sent to the gas at Auschwitz.

Selections in the camp occurred at rollcalls. Prisoners were forced
to stand naked in the cold, often for hours at a time, while doctors
and SS men examined them to determine who would live and who would
die. Inmates knew to jog in place, show any energy they could, to
avoid being sent to die.




Selections at the ramp
The heaps grow. Suitcases, bundles, blankets, coats, handbags that
open as they fall, spilling coins, gold, watches; mountains of bread
pile up at the exits, heaps of marmalade, jams, masses of meat,
sausages; sugar spills on the gravel. Trucks, loaded with people,
start up with a deafening roar and drive off amidst the wailing and
screaming of the women separated from their children, and the
stupefied silence of the men left behind. They are the ones who had
been ordered to step to the right--the healthy and the young who will
go to the camp. In the end, they too will not escape death, but first
they must work....

Here is a woman--she walks quickly, but tries to appear calm. A small
child with a pink cherub's face runs after her, and, unable to keep
up, stretches out his little arms and cries:'Mama! Mama!'

'Pick up your child, woman!'

'Its not mine, sir, not mine!' she shouts hysterically and runs on,
covering her faced with her hands. She wants to hide, she wants to
reach those who will not ride the trucks, those who will go on foot,
those who will stay alive. She is young, healthy, good-looking, she
wants to live...

Andrei, a sailor from Sevastopol, grabs hold of her. His eyes are
glassy from vodka and the heat. With one powerful blow he knocks her
off her feet, then, as she falls, takes her by the hair and pulls her
up again....

'Ah, you bloody Jewess! So you're running from your own child! I'll
show you, you w***e!' His huge hand chokes her, he lifts her in the
air and heaves her on to the truck like a sack of grain.

'Here! And take this with you, b***h!" and he throws the child at her
feet...

Several other men are carrying a small girl with only one leg. They
hold her by the arms and the one leg. Tears are running down her face
and she whispers faintly: 'Sir, it hurts, it hurts....' They throw
her on the truck on top of the corpses. She will burn alive along
with them.

Borowski, 38-46.



A vast platform appeared before us, lit up by reflectors. A little
beyond it, a row of lorries...We had to climb down with our luggage
and deposit it alongside the train. In a moment, the platform was
swarming with shadows...

A dozen SS men stood around, legs akimbo, with an indifferent air. At
a certain moment they moved among us, and in a subdued tone of voice,
with faces of stone, began to interrogate us rapidly.....'How old?
Healthy or ill?" And on the basis of the reply they pointed in two
different directions.

Everything was silent as an aquarium, or as in certain dream
sequences. We had expected something more apocalyptic: they seemed
simple police agents. It was disconcerting and disarming. Someone
dared to ask for his luggage: they replied 'luggage afterwards'.
Someone else did not want to leave his wife: they said,'together
again afterwards.' Many mothers did not want to be separated from
their children: they said 'good, good, stay with child.'...

In less than ten minutes all the fit men had been collected together
in a group. What happened to the others, to the women, to the
children, to the old men, we could establish neither then or later:
the night swallowed them up, purely and simply. Today, however, we
know that in that rapid and summary choice each one of us had been
judged capable or not of working usefully for the Reich; we know that
of our convoy no more than ninety-six men and twenty-nine women
entered the respective camps of Monowitz-Buna and Birkenau, and that
of all the others, more than five hundred in number, none was living
two days later.

Levi, Survival, pp. 19-20.



Mengele at the ramp
Some described a quality of playfulness in his detachment,
his "walking back and forth... [with a] cheerful expression on his
face....almost like he had fun...routine fun....He was very playful."

[P]risoners were struck by the contrast between what he looked like
and what he was. One survivor described him as "good-looking...very
cultivated", declared that "he really didn't look like a murderer,"
but immediately added, "He hit my father with his stick on his neck
and sent him in a certain direction [to the gas chambers]." Or, "he
was brutal, but in a gentlemanly, depraved way." For Mengele's
studied detachment could be interrupted by outbreaks of rage and
violence, especially when encountering resistance to his sense of the
Auschwitz rules. For instance, an arriving teenager, directed by
Mengele to the right while her mother and younger sisters were sent
to the left, "begged and wept" because she did not want to be
separated from them: "[Mengele then] grabbed me by the hair, dragged
me on the ground, and beat me. When my mother also tried to beg him,
he beat her with his cane"....

Lifton, p. 343.




Selections in the camp

http://www.spectacle.org/695/select.html

One feels the selections arriving. "Selekcja": the hybrid latin and
Polish word is heard once, twice, many times, interpolated in foreign
conversations; at first we cannot distinguish it, then it forces
itself on our attention, and in the end it persecutes us...

Yet the result is hardly a wave of despondency: our collective morale
is too inarticulate and flat to be unstable. The fight against
hunger, cold and work leaves little margin for thought, even for this
thought. Everybody reacts in his own way, but hardly anyone with
those attitudes which would seem the most plausible as the most
realistic, that is with resignation or despair.

All those able to find a way out, try to take it: but they are the
minority because it is very difficult to escape from a selection. The
Germans apply themselves to these things with great skill and
diligence.

Whoever is unable to prepare for it materially, seeks defense
elsewhere. In the latrines, in the washroom, we show each other our
chests, our buttocks, our thighs, and our comrades reassure us: "You
are all right, it will certainly not be your turn this time,...du
bist kein Muselmann..."

Our Blockaltester knows his business. He has made sure that we have
all entered, he has the door locked, he has given everyone his card
with his number, name, profession and nationality and he has ordered
everyone to undress completely, except for shoes. We wait like this,
naked, with the cards in our hands, for the commission to reach our
hut. We are hut 48, but one can never tell if they are going to begin
at hut 1 or hut 60....

The Blockaltester and his helpers, starting at the end of the
dormitory, drive the flock of frightened, naked people in front of
them and cram them in the Tagesraum...a room seven yards by four:
when the drive is over, a warm and compact human mass is jammed into
the Tagesraum, perfectly filling all the corners, exercising such a
pressure on the wooden walls as to make them creak....

Here, in front of the two doors, stands the arbiter of our fate, an
SS subaltern... Each one of us, as he comes naked out of the
Tagesraum into the cold October air, has to run the few steps between
the two doors, give the card to the SS man and enter the dormitory
door. The SS man, in the fraction of a second between two successive
crossings, with a glance at one's back and front, judges everyone's
fate, and in turn gives the card to the man on his right or on his
left, and this is the life or death of each of us...

Nobody yet knows with certainty his own fate, it has first of all to
be established whether the condemned cards were those on the right or
the left. By now there is no longer any point in sparing each other's
feelings with superstitious scruples. Everybody crowds around the
oldest, the most wasted-away and most "Muselmann"; if their cards
went to the left, the left is certainly the side of the condemned...

A double ration will be given to those selected. I have never
discovered if this was a ridiculously charitable initiative of the
Blockaltester, or an explicit disposition of the SS, but in fact, in
the interval of two or three days (sometimes even much longer)
between the selection and the departure, the victims at Monowitz-
Auschwitz enjoyed this privilege...

Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk on the top row, I see
and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying
backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has
not been chosen.

Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the
bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the
gas chamber the day after tomorrow...Can Kuhn fail to realize that
next time it will be his turn?... If I was God, I would spit at
Kuhn's prayer.

Levi, Survival, pp. 123-130.

http://www.spectacle.org/695/select.html




Tomorrow Morning

http://www.spectacle.org/695/tomor.html

"Tomorrow morning" was Auschwitz slang for "never" (Levi, Survival,
p. 133).

http://www.spectacle.org/695/tomor.html




Victims

http://www.spectacle.org/695/victim.html

The entire gypsy camp at Auschwitz, of 4000 people, was exterminated
on August 1, 1944:
Set up as a family camp, the Gypsy unit rapidly deteriorated and
became extraordinarily filthy and unhygienic even for Auschwitz, a
place of starving babies, children and adults. B. insisted that there
were "sufficient rations...delivered to the camp for all of them to
survive", but that certain adult Gypsies of high standing kept most
of the food, thus denying it to all others, including hungry
children. The Auschwitz leaders, "shocked" by the situation, came to
the conclusion that it was virtually impossible to change it and that
the only solution was to "gas the entire camp." According to B.,
Mengele strongly opposed that decision, made several trips to Berlin
to try and get it reversed, and went so far as to declare to other
Auschwitz authorities that annihilating the Gypsy camp would be "a
crime."

[Most other sources agree that Mengele was in favor of killing the
Gypsies.]

Prisoner doctors who had worked there at the time told me that
Mengele seemed to be all over the camp at once that day, actively
supervising arrangements for getting the Gypsies to the gas chamber.
He had been close to some of the Gypsy children-- bringing them food
and candy, sometimes little toys, and taking them for brief outings.
Whenever he appeared, they would greet him warmly with the
cry, "Onkel ['Uncle'] Mengele!" But that day, the children were
frightened. Dr. Alexander O. described the scene and one child's plea
to Mengele:


Mengele arrived at around eight o'clock or seven-thirty. It was day-
light. He came, and then the children....A Gypsy girl of eleven,
twelve,....the oldest [child] of a whole family--maybe thirteen, with
malnutrition sometimes they grow less. "Onkel Mengele [she calls], my
little brother cries himself to death. We do not know where our
mother is. He cries himself to death, Onkel Mengele!" Where did she
go to complain? To Mengele--to the one she loves and knows she is
loved by, because he loved them. His answer: "Willst du die Schnauze
halten!" He said it in a common, vulgar way....but...with a sort of
tenderness..."Why don't you shut your little trap!"
Others told how Mengele combed the blocks, tracking down Gypsy
children who had hidden, and how he himself transported a group of
those children in a car to the gas chamber--drawing upon their trust
for him and speaking tenderly and reassuringly to them until the end.

Lifton, pp. 323; 185-186.


I went out again and went to the block where my children were. They
were only skin and bone, unrecognizable. They lay there, one can say,
already dying. And so I said to my father, bring the children to the
sick bay, bring the children in, I said, I will see what I can do.
Had they come in there earlier, it might have made a difference. And
so my father brought in the eldest the next day, she was ten. And
when I saw her, she could not speak a word anymore. She only lay
there, her eyes open, and not a word. Could only lie there, was more
dead than...only breathed. So I spoke to her... then she died. They
simply threw her there, with the other corpses. My own child.
And so one after the other. The one, she was six, was already dead
when I came there. I did not see her anymore. Not long after, the
other one died too. They were only skin and bones. Skin and bones,
nothing else, one could count the ribs. The eyes so deep in the head.
The children were dead, all three.

Testimony of a Gypsy woman survivor of the Gypsy family camp,
Anatomy, p. 452.



This is the reason why three-year-old Emilia died: the historical
necessity of killing the children of Jews was self-demonstrative to
the Germans. Emilia, daughter of Aldo Levi of Milan, was a curious,
ambitious, cheerful, intelligent child; her parents had succeeded in
washing her during the journey in the packed car in a tub with tepid
water which the degenerate German engineer had allowed them to draw
from the engine that was dragging us all to death.
Thus, in an instant, our women, our parents, our children
disappeared. We saw them for a short while as an obscure mass at the
other end of the platform; then we saw nothing more.

Levi, Survival p. 20.



The three victims mounted together onto the chairs.
The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses.

"Long live liberty!" cried the two adults.

But the child was silent.

"Where is God? Where is He?" someone behind me asked.

At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over...

Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. Their
tongues hung swollen, blue-tinged. But the third rope was still
moving; being so light, the child was still alive...

For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life
and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him
full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him.
His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed.

Behind me, I heard the same man asking:

"Where is God now?"

And I heard a voice within me answer him:

"Where is He? Here He is--He is hanging here on this gallows..."

That night the soup tasted of corpses.

Wiesel, p. 72.


The number of people murdered at Auschwitz is an open question. The
best estimate is that 1.1 million died there, 90% of them Jews.
Immediately after the war, Soviet and Polish commissions reported
four million victims of the camp; Camp Commandant Rudolf Hoss
testified that three million died there.

It is impossible to ascertain exactly how many people were at
Auschwitz for two reasons. First of all, no records were kept of
people murdered after selections at the train station; they were
never assigned numbers or entered into camp records but vanished into
what the Nazis themselves called "night and fog" ("nacht und nebel").
Secondly, the Nazis destroyed many records before abandoning
Auschwitz.

Scholars such as Franciszek Piper, writing in Anatomy, pp. 61-76,
arrive at their estimates by looking at the more accurate records of
people deported to Auschwitz from various countries, and then
subtracting the number of people known to have been transferred to
other camps or to have survived the war.

Based on these calculations (1,300,000 deportees minus 200,000
survivors), at least 1,100,000 persons were killed or died in the
camp.

Piper, p. 71.



Franciszek Gajnowiczek....is a stooped, gray-haired man who has
survived Auschwitz to testify that when he was selected at random for
execution one day in 1941, a Franciscan priest named Maximilian Kolbe
stepped forward and volunteered to take his place, and did take his
place and did die. (The Vatican in due time proclaimed Kolbe to be
beatified and well on the way to sainthood.)
Friedrich, 102.

http://www.spectacle.org/695/victim.html



Why

http://www.spectacle.org/695/why.html

Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within
hand's reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at
once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away
from me. "Warum?" I asked him in my poor German. "Hier ist kein
warum," (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a
shove.
Levi, Survival, p. 29.

http://www.spectacle.org/695/why.html




Yesterday and Today

http://www.spectacle.org/695/yester.html

How often when we talk about genocide, in World War II or in Bosnia
or Rwanda today, do we acknowledge that our country, the United
States of America (under the same Constitution, with its Bill of
Rights, that we honor today), was founded on genocide?
The following is an eyewitness account of the Sand Creek massacre of
1864, when 105 Cheyenne women and children were mutilated and
murdered by U.S. troops under Colonel J.M. Chivington:

There seemed to be indiscriminate slaughter of men, women, children.
There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for
protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a
white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she
was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterward
killed, and four or five bucks outside. The squaws offered no
resistance. Everyone I saw dead was scalped. I saw one squaw cut open
with an unborn child, as I thought, lying by her side....I saw quite
a number of infants in arms killed with their mothers.

Another witness:

I also heard of numerous instances in which men had cut out the
private parts of females and stretched them over the saddle-bows and
wore them over their hats while riding in the ranks.

Colonel Chivington, at a speech not long before the massacre,
advocated the killing and scalping of all Indians, even
infants: "Nits make lice!"

Source: Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Washington Square
Press, 1981), pp. 88-89.



In 1948, the Israelis committed genocide at Deir Yassin.
The villagers resisted the 120 Jewish attackers, as they had a right
to, and a heavy machine gun and a mortar were brought up to end the
battle. Then the raiding party entered the village and started
behaving like a Nazi Einsatzkommando. Twenty-three men were led off
to a quarry and executed in cold blood, and between 90 and 230 others
were shot down in the village.

Menachem Begin's statement afterwards:

Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest....

News of Deir Yassin spread quickly and was influential in causing
much of the Arab population to flee the borders of the newly declared
Israeli state. Israel, of course, has built a whole structure of
ownership based on the "abandonment" of their houses and lands, as
well as arguing ceaselessly that those who fled in 1948 did so
needlessly and do not deserve to come back.

(Source for the Deir Yassin information: Paul Johnson, A History of
the Jews (Harper Perennial, 1987).




Americans committed genocide in Vietnam and were never punished:
The mass executions had occurred in stages--principally at the main
trail leading into the village and later at the irrigation ditch. One
of those taken to the trail site was Truong Thi Le, aged 30, who lost
nine members of her immediate family, including her husband, mother,
three brothers, and a 17 year old daughter...she was rounded up with
her 6-year-old son...when the shooting began, she pushed him into the
paddy field beside the trail and lay on top of his body, pressing him
down, urging him not to cry...Two corpses were on top of her and when
she raised her head slightly as the shooting stopped she could see
soldiers still moving. They appeared to be pointing toward people on
the ground. They began shooting those who were alive all over again.

Bilton and Sim, Four Hours in My Lai, (Penguin, 1992), pp. 157-158.



Genocide is with us today and we are doing nothing about it:
Then, she says, Mr. Viskovic forced them out of the apartment.
Outside, he pointed his weapon at Mrs. Sestovic and made her lie down
on the road. Then he ordered her to crawl along the road as he kicked
her repeatedly. Finally, she and the two teenagers were pushed into a
small bus filled with Muslims and taken to the Susica camp.

Conditions at the camp, where a former Serbian guard has said up to
3,000 Muslims were killed over four months, were appalling.

Mrs. Sestovic is particularly haunted by the memory of seeing two men-
-Durmo Handzic and Izmet Dedic--beaten to death, by recurrent
nightmares about another Muslim whose ear was progressively sliced
off on four consecutive nights by Serbian guards and by the
recollection of the commander of the camp, Dragan Nikolic, holding up
a cigarette butt and saying, "This is now worth more than all of your
Muslim lives put together."

Excerpt from an article in the December 31, 1994 New York Times.


Let no-one think that the Holocaust was a unique event in human
history: it exceeded other genocides only in efficiency and numbers,
but was not different in kind.

http://www.spectacle.org/695/yester.html


AN AUSCHWITZ ALPHABET
http://www.spectacle.org/695/ausch.html




THOSE WHO DO NOT LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT