Langbein Hermann. People in Auschwitz

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the camp, but we always went to the children’s theater, and so we were already

used to the children.’’

Maurice Cling, who was ﬁfteen when he arrived at the camp in 1944, col-

lapsed at work during the ﬁrst snowfall because of utter exhaustion and was

determined not to get up. However, a capo who had treated him brutally up

to that time astonished him by suddenly displaying compassion and saving

his life. Protected by a directive from the German capo, Cling remained in the

inﬁrmary until the evacuation. ‘‘Don’t kill this little fellow, don’t send him

to the crematorium!’’ Cling ascribes his rescue to the sympathy of the capo;

he could not have known that the gassings had already stopped at that time.

Nevertheless, the attitude of the capo remains remarkable; even brutal types

were much more likely to displaycompassion for young prisoners than forold

ones.

n Added to all that has so far been described was the fact that in Auschwitz

everything was incalculable and nothing impossible. From a logical point of

view, and even if viewed from the perspective of the exterminators, much re-

mained inexplicable. No onewas safe from surprises, and in exceptional cases

these could have a positive eﬀect.

Inmates who had come into direct contact with the machinery of destruc-

tion were eventually killed as bearers of secrets—this was a rule. However,

the female clerks of the Political Department, the bunker trusty, and the male

nurses who had to carry the corpses out of the bunker cells after the ﬁrst trial

gassing—all remained alive. Wojciech Barcz, one of those nurses who had ex-

pected to be killed, said: ‘‘On many later occasions, too, I learned that among

the ss there were again and again surprises and inconsistencies.’’

Even to a person with a lot of camp experience, nothing appeared impos-

sible, and this may explain the naïveté with which even ‘‘old hands’’ gave cre-

dence to promises of ss men.

Staszek Slezak may serve as an example. This Czech, born in 1920, was

charged, as a professional,with the maintenance of the X-ray equipment used

by Dr. Horst Schumann for his experiments in sterilization in Birkenau. Schu-

mann had such a good relationshipwith this inmate that hesometimes shared

his breakfast with him. Artur Rablin, who also worked for Schumann for a

short time, wondered about ‘‘the great cordiality between these two men.’’

Rablin remembers Slezak, who trusted Schumann ‘‘implicitly,’’ telling him

that if he ever got out of the camp, he would owe this to Schumann, for he

was advocating his release. Rablin, who was afraid of what would happen to

him as a bearer of secrets, sought and found a way of getting out of the dan-

gerous work in the immediate vicinity of the experiments on human beings,

and he advised his friend Slezak to change his detail, too. But the latter trusted

84 n the prisoners

Schumann’s promises more than he did his friend’s counsel. When it ﬁnally

dawned on Slezak that he would not be released, it was already too late to

get another assignment, and the Political Department frustrated such an at-

tempt. In early January 1945 Slezak was transferred to Mauthausen together

with other bearers of secrets—Polish capos of the Sonderkommando—and

shot there. The choice of such a roundabout way evidently represented an at-

tempt by the ss to shroud the fate of bearers of secrets in mystery.

Leo Vos, who was interned in the Blechhammer labor camp in Upper Sile-

sia together with other Dutch Jews, reports that the integration of this camp

into the Auschwitz complex in April 1944 initially brought improvements.The

roll call was shortened, enabling the inmates to get a little more sleep; the

distribution of food was better organized; and the laundry was changed more

frequently. The inmates of Blechhammer did not notice until later that this

integration had brought them into the sphere of an extermination camp.

It was characteristic of an ‘‘old’’ prisoner that he feared any change. Grete

Salus was able to closely observe this type of person marked by camp life:

‘‘Thanks to their knowledge of all of the camp tricks, their living conditions

were bearable, but they feared any change, for this would force them to start

all over again on an unfamiliar footing. Of course, there were gas chambers

and deaths, but that hardly bothered them. They knew about death here, but

thanks to their experiences and connections they could often obtain an ex-

tension and even hope to escape death altogether. But they did not know the

death that awaited them if there was a change; to that kind of death they were

vulnerable, without knowledge, like all the others.’’

Adelaide Hautval reports about the victims of the experimental Block 10.

Since they were never told what purpose those experiments were to serve, they

had to fear everything imaginable, including the possibility that they were

the subjects of artiﬁcial insemination and might give birth to deformed chil-

dren. Added to this fear was the pain of the surgical procedures. And yet,

Hautval writes, ‘‘the instinct of self-preservation is so strongly anchored in

human beings that most women were so afraid of being transferred to Birke-

nau that they preferred this hell, which at least left them one hope: ‘Perhaps

they will let us live afterward!’ Only one group of Jewish women who had al-

ready had one operation refused anotherand preferred a transfer to Birkenau,

where they faced extermination. We remember their courage with a great deal

of sympathy.’’

Friedel de Wind, one of the ‘‘guinea pigs’’ in that block, secretly wrote her

husband, an inmate of the camp, a letter in which she described the fate of

those women. ‘‘Yesterday was a special day. We marched almost as far as Bir-

kenau. That is where I had seen Lotte Spittel and the other girls, including

the French communists, who had refused to undergo the experiments. They

Under the Power of the Camp n 85

and seventy others were transferred three weeks ago. It is horrible to see the

women in Birkenau. How they have changed! They are completely bald and

barefoot; on their bodies they have nothing but a piece of jute tied together

with string. These are not women anymore; they are sexless creatures.’’

Johanna Nachemstein gave this simple testimony: ‘‘I tried not to protest

(as she was brought in for experiments) because I knew from my colleagues

that every four or six weeks there was a transport to the gas chamber. I did it

to prolong or save my life.’’

n On March 3, 1943, the central administration ordered the transfer of 1,000

Polish prisoners who were healthy and fully ﬁt for work to each of the follow-

ing camps: Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, Neuengamme, and Sach-

senhausen.These men had ample camp experience, and the idea was to reduce

the percentage of such experienced Poles in Auschwitz for security reasons.

When all good work details were checked for Poles with low numbers, there

were numerous interventions by commando leaders who had been bribed. At

that time and later, when there were more transfers of Poles from Auschwitz,

all kinds of ruses were employed because everyone wanted to get out of these

transports. Höß commented on this as follows: ‘‘Although the general con-

ditions in Auschwitz were anything but good, no Polish inmate wanted to be

transferred to another camp. As soon as they found out they were to be trans-

ferred, they pulled all strings to be exempted or deferred. In 1943, when a

blanket order came to transfer all Poles to camps in the Reich, I was swamped

with petitions from all factories that claimed that these workers were indis-

pensable. None of them could do without the Poles.The exchange simply had

to be eﬀected by force and by percentages.’’

To the motives cited above by Salus it should be added, in the case of the

Poles, that in Auschwitz they could hope to strengthen their connections with

their homeland. They also knew that in Auschwitz the Poles occupied a hard-

won top position in the camp hierarchy that they had in no other camp. How-

ever, quite a few Czechs and Frenchmen managed to get out of the transfer

transports, after the central administration had ordered that these nationali-

ties be transferred to less endangered camps.When the Austrian Ella Lingens

was transferred to Dachau in November 1944, she at ﬁrst felt—as shewrites—

nothing but fear and depression. These feelings were caused by separation

from dear friends and by the necessity to start all over again.

The German Werner Krumme was declared unworthy to bear arms and

was sent to Auschwitz because he had refused to divorce his Jewish wife. The

death of his wife in the camp removed the reason for this unworthiness, and

Krumme was conscripted into the Wehrmacht. Since he had a privileged posi-

tion in the Labor Assignment Oﬃce, he strove with some success to delay his

86 n the prisoners

release from the camp. Simon Laks and René Coudy report that Kopka, an

ethnic German and head of the Birkenau camp orchestra, was anything but

overjoyed when he was sent to the quarantine section in preparation for his

release. Both cases, however, represent rare exceptions. In the camp Krumme

and Kopka had everything that was at the disposal of a vip and for entirely

understandable reasons the thought of serving in the German army after their

incarceration was not an unalloyed joy.

Zalman Kleinmann reports how he, together with other adolescents from

the Theresienstadt family camp, swindled his way onto a transport that was

leaving Auschwitz. Ana Novac describes her transport from Auschwitz after

threeweeks in thecamp as themost beautifuldepartureof her life.This is sup-

plemented by H. G. Adler in his account of the terror spread in Theresienstadt

byevery transport to parts unknown. ‘‘Only forthosewho landedin Auschwitz

did a transport lose its paralyzing horror, its almost transcendental nature, for

now they knew the possibility or certainty of ruin.’’ Like Novac, Adler had to

wait for a few weeks in 1944 in the shadow of the crematoriums of Auschwitz

to be transported to a labor camp.

n Inan extermination campeverycriterion of normallifeis bound to fail.This

was Auschwitz: gas chambers, selections, the processions of human beings

who marched to their death like puppets—designated by David Rousset as

the most horrible thing of all—as well as Canada with its inexhaustible abun-

dance even in the last year of the war; the Black Wall and the bloody tracks on

the camp road that marked the path of the vehicles in which prisoners who

had been shot were taken to the crematorium; the anonymity of death that

inhibited any martyrdom, and boozing bouts of prisoners and their guards.

Auschwitz taught a sensitive person like Grete Salus to make this confession:

‘‘Much as I would like to, I cannotwrite a heroic epic about people. All I cansay

is that a human being should never have to endure as much as he can endure,

and never should a human being have to see that there is no longer anything

human in the highest degree of suﬀering.’’

Starvation was as much a daily phenomenon in Auschwitz as the sight of

capos who had stuﬀed themselves. There were all kinds of epidemics, from

noma, a disease that produces holes in the cheeks of children, to typhus, the

camp disease of Auschwitz. Any reasoning person had to conclude that there

was no chance of leaving Auschwitz other than through a chimney, and yet

this insane hope could never be completely stiﬂed: perhaps a string of lucky

accidents will permit me to slip through and survive. For anyone who wore an

ssuniform oreven the armband of an inmatewith a function, killingsomeone

whenever they felt like it was a trivial matter, one hardly worth mentioning.

And yet, in thissameAuschwitz a never-ending struggle forthelives of friends

Under the Power of the Camp n 87

was carried on by nameless companions in misfortune, a ﬁght that never let

up despite depressing failures and obvious hopelessness. A resistance move-

ment that fought terror with some success was also part of Auschwitz. ‘‘Each

one of us did something that at least touched his or her human dignity,’’ wrote

Grete Salus. Is there a survivorof Auschwitz who can question this statement?

Being inured to death and suﬀering; greedily grabbing any chance of enjoy-

ment; going dead while still alive; choosing to expose oneself to additional

dangers; smuggling medications into the camp—all this added up to Ausch-

witz. Some were able to drink champagne in Auschwitz, and no one knew in

the morningwhat theday would bring.Therewere inhumane punishments for

triﬂing transgressions—for example, if an inmate did not keep the respect-

ful distance of three paces from an ill-humored ss man. On the other hand,

there were ss men who had aﬀairs with female prisoners. It was possible to

bribe ss oﬃcers, but an inmate had to be wary of good friends, for anyone

could turn traitor if he was tortured by the Political Department. All too often

Auschwitz was covered by a cloud that exuded a sweetishly insipid smell, the

smell of burnt human ﬂesh.

In Auschwitz nothing was inconceivable, no extreme too harsh. Anything

was possible, literally anything. People lived there until they were killed. How

did they live? How did they cope with life in Auschwitz?

88 n the prisoners

THE MUSELMANN

nnn

In accordance with the Auschwitz law of giving the weakest the hardest time,

the worst conditions were to be found in the Birkenau women’s camp. Pelagia

Lewinska has described these as follows:

No lights. The blocks are never lit. Movement and noise as in a beehive.

Women’s voices in various languages (Polish, French, Czech, Russian) that

are devoid of energyand feeling. Here and there the gleam of small burning

candles. This illumination does not permit a wide view, but it is possible to

make out the broad outlines of the barracks, which is divided by beams in

sucha waythat boards are placed onthree tiers,each one meter high. Living

beings emerge from them as from sheds. The barracks resembles a huge

barn that is twenty-four meters long and ten meters wide. It has no ceiling

but is covered directly by a roof. In lieu of boards the well-trodden ground

is covered with bricks of diﬀerent sizes. The barracks was built in accor-

dance with the principle that there should be maximal room for sleeping.

The beams on three levels along the walls and in the middle of the barracks

support the bunk beds. Wooden beams separate the barracks lengthwise

into bunks; each of these is around two meters wide and deep and no more

than a meter high.There is only room for three if a woman wants to move a

bit more freely and turn around without bumping her neighbor. In an area

of four square meters it is not easy to provideroom formore. In spiteof this

the blocks that had to house 800 to 1,000 persons are so jam-packed that

seven or eight women have to share a bunk. Since the ﬂoor of the lowest

level is formed by bricks, a woman has to crawl in as into a doghouse; there

she lies on the moist bricks and is completely without air. The uppermost

level touches the roof; in the winter water comes in, and in the summer the

women’s heads roast. The only things to lie on are paper pallets with a bit

of wood wool; in each bunk there are at most three such pallets and one

blanket. If a woman wants to reach the topmost bed, she has to step on

the lower bunks. The inmates are terribly hemmed in as they climb to their

beds. In that narrow bunk they have to organize their entire life, which is

really reduced to eating and sleeping.

When Lewinska was admitted to that camp, it had been in operation for

ﬁve months, and thevery worst defects were already a thing of the past. In Au-

gust 1942, 15,000 women were the ﬁrst to be transferred to the camp.The ap-

pearance of these inmates has been described by Désiré Haﬀner: ‘‘Their skele-

tal appearance, their shaved skulls, their blood-streaked bodies, their scaly

skin—all this made it hard for an observer to recognize them as women. The

lack of any hygiene was even more perceptible among them than in the men’s

camp because of the pungent odor that came from their blocks, the smell of

thousands of women who had not been able to wash for months. Their work

is as hard as the men’s, and as a rule they are even worse dressed. They are

usually seen bareheaded and barefoot, and sometimes they are naked.’’

Seweryna Szmaglewska observed the columns of prisoners marching oﬀ to

work from the nearby Birkenau men’s camp:

Prisoners marching ﬁve abreast keep streaming out of the gate. Now the

capo pulls his cap oﬀ, screams in the direction of the marching columns,

‘‘Caps oﬀ!’’ and runs towardthessmen.Thereis somethingalmost shame-

ful about the sight of the shaved heads of the defenseless prisoners, who

obediently march past some armed Germans, and there is something ut-

terly repulsive about the ﬁgure of the capo, who stands at attention and

presses his cap against his striped pants as he makes his report.The second

gate is opened, and one column after another march out. And again there

is a capo, and there are rows of ﬁve, the same thing over and over again.

All are equally skinny and equally black. Those shaved heads are alike, and

everywhere those ﬁngers stretched out against the trouser seams. Thus

they march, like a big, lifeless army, to the last parade. New columns keep

streaming out of the camp, and they are easily counted. The ﬁrst thousand

have marched past, two thousand, ten thousand. They march and march.

If your father, your brother, or your son were among them, you would not

recognize him, for these emaciated ﬁgures are all alike. A young lad has

the same furrowed face as an old man.

n While still under the shock of arrival, nameless new inmates faced a merci-

less struggle for their bare existence in a world that was so very diﬀerent from

the one they had known.

‘‘Just survive, survive, that is what it is all about,’’ writes Franciszek Jaz-

wiecki retrospectively, ‘‘and the forms of survival are extreme and disgusting,

they are not worth the price of living.’’ Nevertheless, prisoners were forced by

their instincts to seek a way of surviving.

In the quarantine section, which Julien Unger likened to a menagerie with

defenseless animals that were subjected to drills by tamers without compas-

sion, there began the struggle for a second helping of camp soup, water, a

better bed, a bit of blanket—in short, the most elementary things. The re-

90 n the prisoners

sult of this drill has been described by Max Mannheimer, who was sent to the

Birkenau quarantine section from Theresienstadt in early February 1943:

Dr. Beck from Ungarisch-Brod is lying in the lowest bed with a high fever.

We drag him out and prop him up for the roll call. The next day he is at

death’s door, and two inmates try to take the dying man’s shoes oﬀ. He

has good ones, and shoes mean a lot in this cold and mud. The inmates

scuﬄe and the stronger wins. A few minutes later Dr. Beck is no longer

alive. We say Kaddish. His body is put outside the block, and he is counted

at the roll call. He is not the onlyone, for several corpses are delivered from

other blocks, and a work detailthat deals with the dead arrives.That is what

happens every day. Now I know what quarantine means: a sieve with big

holes.

The footwear of dying people was not the only desirable item. Ella Lingens

writes: ‘‘I have seen how blankets were snatched away from dying women with

the words ‘You don’t need this any more.’’’

In the spring of 1944, when the Jews from Hungary, a veritable ﬂood, were

awaiting their further fate crammed together in the unﬁnished Mexico sec-

tion, a relentless ﬁght broke out, as reported by Carl Laszlo, over ‘‘who would

spend the night sitting up and who would lie down. The more or less bad

physical position, the constant need to watch for thieves of shoes or bread,

and the stale air’’ deprived sleep of its function to regenerate energy. In a bar-

racks with enough sleeping room forat most 300 people, 1,000 prisoners had

to lie on a bare concrete ﬂoor without bunk beds or straw.

A person with camp experience could very quickly tell whether a newcomer

could survive or would perish. Robert Waitz, a physician who was able to ob-

serve new arrivals in Monowitz, estimates that it was possible to tell in eight

or ten days. Anyone whose willpower was crushed by the burden of the camp

soon bore the marks of impending death on his face.

Those destroyed human beings were called Muselmänner in Auschwitz, and

later this designation was used in other camps as well. I heard it the ﬁrst time

when I came to Auschwitz; in Dachau inmates who were in poor shape were

called, in the Bavarian dialect, Kretiner (cretins).

Physicians have given a precise description of the Muselmänner’s condition.

Wladyslaw Fejkiel, probably the most experienced among the inmate physi-

cians, has provided this clinical picture:

The symptoms of starvation may be divided into two stages. The ﬁrst is

characterized by a great weight loss, muscular weakness, and progressive

decline in kinetic energy. During this stage there was as yet no serious

damage to the organism. The patient’s only symptoms were slowness of

The Muselmann n 91

movement and debility. Apart from a certain excitability and typical irrita-

bility, there were no emotional changes. It was hard to discern a boundary

line between the ﬁrst and the second stages. In some patients the transi-

tion was gradual; with others it came very rapidly. It may be estimated that

the second stage began when the starveling had lost one-third of his nor-

mal weight. In addition to further weight loss his facial expression began

to change. His gaze became clouded, and his face assumed an apathetic,

absent, mournful expression. His eyes were veiled and his eyeballs hollow.

His skin began to turn a pale gray, had a paper-thin, hard appearance, and

started to peel. It was very susceptible to all kinds of infection, particu-

larly scabies. The patient’s hair became shaggy, lusterless, and brittle. His

head became elongated, and his cheekbones and eye sockets stood out.The

patient breathed slowly and spoke softly with a great eﬀort.

At this stage edemas appeared, and their size depended on the length

of the starvation. They appeared ﬁrst on the eyelids and feet, the location

being governed by the time of day. In the morning, after a night’s rest, they

were most visible on the face, and in theeveningon the feet and legs. As the

starvation proceeded, these edemas developed and, in the case of people

who had to do a lot of standing, spread to the thighs, buttocks, scrotum,

and even to the stomach. In addition to the swellings, there was diarrhea,

and often diarrhea developed before the swellings.

At this stage, the patients became indiﬀerent to everything that went

on around them and detached themselves from all ties to their environ-

ment. If they could still move, theydid so slowly and without bending their

knees. As a consequence of their low body temperature, which was usually

thirty-six degrees Centigrade, they shivered from the cold.

Anyone who observed a group of patients from a distance had the im-

pression of seeing praying Arabs. This accounts for the designation Musel-

männer that was current in the camp for starving prisoners.

Janina Kowalczykowa observed in the inﬁrmary female Muselmänner (in the

camp lingo women inmates who were in bad physical and emotional shape

were called such):

Starving,weakened,and constantlyfreezing patientslikedto gatheraround

the stove in the inﬁrmary barracks, or rather, by the brick chimney canal

that ran lengthwise through the barracks. Often the patients sat on this

canal as on a bench, and this caused serious burns, up to the third degree,

on the back of the thighs and the buttocks. Sometimes the patients did not

even feel the burns.

One case I witnessed was that of a female patient at an advanced stage of

starvation whose soles were chewed oﬀ at night by rats in such a way that

92 n the prisoners

on the surface only the carefully preserved tendons were left. The woman

did not react at all. After a bandage was applied, she lived for two more

days.

The Polish professor Jan Obrychi has published his observations in the in-

ﬁrmaryof themain camp.‘‘Apathyand drowsiness (became apparent), a slow-

ing down and weakening of the entire life process, particularly the psychic

kind. Such patients had bad vision and hearing. Their apperception, associa-

tion, train of thought, and any kind of reaction had slowed down. As a re-

sult they carried out orders more slowly; this was misinterpreted as a sign of

passive resistance and occasioned bestial torture on the part of ss men and

(inmate) functionaries.’’

Désiré Haﬀner has given this description of the Muselmänner in the Birkenau

men’s camp:

What impressed one most about the appearance of the prisoners was their

extreme emaciation. In a few days they lost ten, twenty, thirty, and even

forty kilograms. This striking weight loss is accompanied by a total atro-

phy of the muscles. The zygomatic arches become more prominent, the

cheeks are hollow, the jawbone protrudes.Thepatient’s limbs have become

mere bones covered with withered, wrinkled, scaly, gray and yellow skin;

the thorax is like a wasp waist; the ribs project; the intercostal spaces are

sunken; and the abdomen is hollow. The gluteal muscles are the only ones

that are still intact and have preserved a certain tone. Intestinal protru-

sion is frequently observed.The weight of these cachectic adults ﬂuctuates

between twenty-ﬁve and thirty-ﬁve kilograms.

Coupled with this rapid muscular atrophy, the rapid weight loss is strik-

ing. Soon we shall not be able to recognize our comrades whom we have

notseenforonlyafewdays.

The inmate Otto Wolken, who served as a physician in the quarantine sec-

tion of Birkenau, was able to save records that indicate the height and weight

of seven prisoners. One inmate, who was 156 centimeters tall, weighed 28

kilograms; another, who was 167 centimeters tall, had a weight of 34.5 kilo-

grams; and a third was 171 centimeters in height and weighed 35.5 kilograms.

Here are the remaining statistics: 173 centimeters and 39 kilos; 175 centi-

meters and 39.5 kilos; 180 centimeters and 36.5 kilos; 180 centimeters and 43

kilos. A Polish commission that examined patients left behind in Auschwitz

in May 1945 recorded the weight of a woman, who was born in 1914 and was

160 centimeters tall, as 25 kilos; another had a height of 155 centimeters and a

weight of 23 kilos. It may be assumed that Wolken and the Polish commission

recorded extreme cases, but these were not rare.

The Muselmann n 93