Langbein Hermann. People in Auschwitz
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The Dutch physician Eduard de Wind has also provided a description of a
Muselmann: ‘‘I watched young people sink into a state of total apathy in a few
days. A Dutch physician was accidentally kicked in the heel. He developed a
mild inflammation, went to bed, and died four days later without displaying
any clear symptoms. This can be called a form of suicide.’’
Aron Bejlin summed up his observations as follows:
The Muselmann stage is the final phase of malnutrition. It is very interesting
to observe how a person who reaches this stage begins to talk constantly
about food. There are two subjects that the inmates of Auschwitz regard as
taboo: the crematoriums and food.
By way of conditioned reflexes, talking about food stimulates the pro-
duction of stomach acid and thus increases hunger, which is why one
shouldnot talkabout eating.If someonelost controlandkept talkingabout
meals he had eaten at home, this was the first sign that he was turning into
a Muselmann.We knew that such a man would soon not react any more, that
he would lose interest in his surroundings and stop obeying commands.
His movements were going to become slow and his face masklike; his re-
flexes would stop functioning, and he would become incontinent without
noticing it. He was not going to rise from his pallet but would remain
lying on it motionlessly—in short, hewould turn into a Muselmann,acorpse
standing on swollen legs. When we had to come out for roll call, we would
place such men against the wall with their arms raised. It was only a skele-
ton with a gray face that now leaned against the wall without moving, for
it had lost its sense of balance.
n Fejkiel also mentions the uncontrollable mania for fantasizing about food.
‘‘The Muselmänner showed some signs of life only when they saw food, or when
their eyes or ears received some impression that evoked thoughts of food.’’
Every day strong inmates had to carry the soup kettles from the kitchen to
the infirmary. On one occasion dozens of Muselmänner flung themselves at the
soup carriers ‘‘like locusts,’’ overturning the kettles. ‘‘The starving attackers
laid into the mixture of soup and earth and slurped it up while lying on their
bellies. After a short time the camp road had been licked clean; both the soup
and the dirt were gone.’’
Kitty Hart remembers a similar scene in the women’s camp: ‘‘Some soup
had been spilled during the transport. The inmates stretched out on the
ground and licked the spilled soup from the dirty ground. Others rummaged
around in the garbage for potato peels.’’
Tadeusz Paczula remembers ‘‘a very likable prisoner, a professor at theWar-
saw Graduate School of Business. One time some cheese was served that
94 n the prisoners
teemed with worms and was so runny in the literal sense of theword that even
the most desperate starvelings decided to forgo this delicacy. The professor,
however, requested this side dish and consumed it with the greatest appetite
without paying any attention to the live creatures in it.’’
Fejkiel has not forgotten the jurist ‘‘in whose pallet we found after his death
two thick bundles with all kinds of original recipes that he had hidden there.’’
At one time Max Mannheimer was quite close to becoming a Muselmann,
but some strokes of luck restored him to life. He describes his condition quite
unreservedly: ‘‘I eat the potatoes unpeeled, and I keep my eye on those who
are still strong enough to peel their potatoes. I beg them for their peels. I eat
them. No, I wolf them down. Like an animal. As if I were afraid. Perhaps of
the envy of the other peel eaters. I am ashamed—and keep a sharp eye on the
peelers.’’
‘‘I know about the futility of those hunger fantasies,’’ writes Primo Levi,
‘‘but I cannot escape the general rule, and thus I see dancing in my mind’s
eye the macaroni that my friends and I had just prepared in an Italian refugee
camp when we were suddenly informed that we would be transported here the
next day. We were just about to eat the macaroni (it was so good and yellow
and firm), but, like blockheads and idiots, we left it uneaten. If we had only
known! Could this happen to us again?...What an absurdity. If there was
any certainty in the world, it was this: it won’t happen to us again.’’
Elsewhere Levi writes: ‘‘Fourteen days after my arrival I already experience
real hunger, the chronic hunger that free men do not know, that produces
dreams at night and dwells in every limb of our bodies. My own body is no
longer mine; my belly is bloated, my limbs are withered, my face is swollen in
the morning and hollowed in the evening.’’ In his memoir Levi includes what
may be described as a refrain: ‘‘Who could imagine a time with no hunger?
The camp is hunger. We ourselves are hunger, living hunger.’’
‘‘My only interest,’’ writes Elie Wiesel, ‘‘was my daily soup and my piece of
bread. Bread and soup—that was my whole life. I was all body, and perhaps
even less: an emaciated body.’’
Albert Menasche writes: ‘‘We were practically like wild animals. Our only
activity was to escape being beaten with clubs and above all to get some food.
Our greatest desire was to end the hunger pangs.’’
Henry Bulawko describes how three Greek Jews in the satellite camp Ja-
worzno chased a dog and stole some bones from him.
This is what Lucie Adelsberger, a physician, had to sayon the same subject:
‘‘Anyone acquainted with hunger knows that it is not just a vegetative, animal
sensation in the stomach, but a nerve-shattering agony, an attack on the en-
tire personality. Hunger makes a person vicious and corrupts his character.
Many things about the inmates that rightly appear monstrous to an outsider
The Muselmann n 95
becomecomprehensible and partlyexcusablefromthe perspective of hunger.’’
Adelsberger confesses that hunger made her cry like a little child.
n Maria Elzbieta Jezierska has described the depths to which a person can
sink if the voraciousness of a convalescent is added to the chronic hunger of
a Muselmann. ‘‘Having survived typhus, Paula lies in the infirmary and with a
terrible, corrosive, murderous envy stares at those who were able to ‘organize’
a bowl of soup. ‘To kill and then possess a bowl of soup’—that is what she
is thinking.’’ Jezierska continues with her description, which could not have
been fabricated:
Paula feels a horrendous hatred well up within her, the monstrous envy
of a beggar. She can feel the sweaty, hot, disgusting bodies of the typhus
patients that had been thrown togetherwith hers on this bunk bed that was
designed for only one person. Now she raises her head. If you only croaked
at long last!
It’s true; a few weeks earlier she was one of these and like them moaned
softly and piteously all night long. Sweat and urine ran down her body,
too, and she was as defenseless against bedbugs as they were. But then she
passed out. And these vile people stay awake! What use do they have for
food? And yet they guard it like the healthiest prisoners.
Seethingwith rage, Paula stares at the pointed nose of the Novak woman
that juts upward, like a dead person’s. Near the top of her pallet Novak has
a box in which she collects bread. She gobbles the soup, even though Paula
has warned her that it would harm her. But she eats ravenously despite her
diarrhea, and then she soils her bed.
Paula looks daggers at the barely living profile of thewoman whose dirty
heels are under her shoulders. Every night she wonders whether her time
has come. Novak is getting weaker and weaker, and there is no chance that
she can get up to use the pail. Novak cannot even lift her body, and the only
thing she can still do is to put her bread ration in the box. As she does so,
her eyes gleam feverishly.
Novak’s hollow eyes flash when bread is distributed, and her hand is
stretched out like a red root to receive it. She holds the bread and tenderly
presses it against her bosom, as a mother does with her child, but her hand
is as firm as the claw of a hawk. As if bewitched, Paula stares at the other
woman’s bread and she cannot avert her eyes all day. For the first time,
Novak has been too feeble to put the bread in the box.
Eveninghas come and Novakis not dead yet. Paula looks around quickly.
No, no one will see it. Cautiously she moves closer to Novak and listens.
No, she is definitely no longer conscious. Cautiously, carefully she touches
96 n the prisoners
the bread and tries to remove it from the hand of the moribund woman,
but in her death struggle her fingers have closed so tightly around the
slice of bread that Paula is unable to remove it. Paula trembles, in her
thoughts mutters curses and obscenities, and tugs at Novak’s hand harder
and harder, obeying the commands of life in the face of death.
She can feel the body beside her slowly getting colder. At last! Paula calls
the night guard, who drags the dead bodydown. Paula gets hold of the box,
but the bread in it is mildewed. Nevertheless, Paula eats everything that is
not completely green.Two days later she dies amid excruciating pain. From
under her pallet her neighbors pull out a box with a few uneaten pieces of
bread. These are not mildewed.
Judith Sternberg-Newman saw how inmates stole bread from their dying
comrades and ate it even if it was soiled by excrement. She confesses that she
pulled a concealed bread ration from under the body of a woman who had just
died.
Gisella Perl’s experiences as an inmate physician in Mexico were as fol-
lows: ‘‘I was always busiest after the food rations had been distributed. There
were bloodied heads to bandage, broken ribs to treat, and wounds to clean. I
worked and worked even though I knew full well that it was hopeless, for the
next day everything would start up all over again and even the patients would
probably be the same.’’
Tadeusz Borowski has described how people could be driven beyond all
limits:
Twenty Russians were to be shot in Birkenau, and all prisoners had to line
upand watch theexecution. Inaddition, they wouldhave togowithout sup-
per by way of punishment. ‘‘Ready, set, fire!’’ said the commandant with-
out raising his voice. The carbines barked and the soldiers jumped back
a pace to avoid being spattered by the smashed skulls. The Russians tot-
tered and plopped down like heavy sacks, smearing the stones with blood
and splattered brains. Putting their carbines over their shoulders, the sol-
diers quickly walked off in the direction of the watchtower. The corpses
were temporarily dragged under the barbed wire.The commandant and his
retinue got into a Skoda that, emitting gas clouds, backed out of the gate.
No sooner had the graying, tanned commandant driven off than the
silent crowd, which had kept pressing forward toward the road, emitted
an ominous growl and rushed up to the bloody stones, where there was a
thunderous outburst. The cudgels of the block and dormitory elders, who
had been summoned from all over the camp, quickly drove the rioters back
into their barracks. I was standing on the side of the place of execution and
was not able to come up close. But the next morning, when we were herded
The Muselmann n 97
out to work again, a run-down Estonian Jew who was carting pipes with
me kept assuring me zealously that a human brain was really so delicate
that it could be eaten raw, without cooking it.
And here is Borowski’s definition: ‘‘One isn’t really hungry until one re-
gards another human being as something edible.’’
Until the end, the pain caused by chronic hunger remained the predomi-
nant feeling. Jacques Furmanski reports about a comrade who was destined
fordeath at a selection and had nothing to say but to request a piece of bread:
‘‘The only thing I have left is the ability to eat! Eat! Die with a full stomach!’’
When the number of those taken to the crematorium was so small that it
would not have been cost-effective to fill a big gas chamber with Zyklon B, the
victims were shot. A member of the Sonderkommando has described such a
shooting, and his notes were unearthed at a later date: ‘‘A group of emaciated,
starving Jews was brought in from some camp. They undressed in the court-
yard and one by one went to be shot. They were terribly hungry and begged
for a piece of bread to sustain them for the short time they still had to live.
Inmates brought a large amount of bread. The eyes of the new arrivals, which
had been dimmed by the horrendous hunger, blazed in a wild outburst of joy.
With both hands they seized a piece of bread and devoured it greedily while
they were climbing the stairs to be shot.’’
n What was harder to bear, hunger or thirst? This question was posed to the
nameless people interned in Birkenau. In the main camp the water supply was
sufficient for inmates to quench their thirst, though they had to fight for a
place in the washroom. Kazimierz Smolen has put it concisely: ‘‘The sanitary
and hygienic conditions in the main camp were miserable, but those in Bir-
kenau were truly hopeless.’’ Simon Laks describes conditions in the Birkenau
men’s camp in the summer of 1942, when it had housed prisoners for only a
few months. ‘‘Therewas no water in the camp.Therewas only one operational
pump, and it was reserved for the kitchen. Anyone who wanted a few drops
had to pay for them with bread.’’
On August 16, 1942, the women’s camp was moved to section B I of Bir-
kenau. Hilda Horakova has provided a description of the early period of that
camp: ‘‘Therewas onlyonewell, and some corpses had falleninto it.We had to
push those bodies down so we could draw some water.’’ Anna Palarczyk also
comments on that well, which was part of the kitchen, though she does not
remember any corpses in it. At night women tormented by thirst crept there,
though it was forbidden to do so. Occasionally, a secret attempt to draw water
fromthewellcaused a feeblewomanto fallinand drown. Anna Palarczyk,who
had been deported in mid-August 1942, was not able to wash until Christmas-
98 n the prisoners
time, and even this was possible only because a friend had been able to ‘‘orga-
nize’’ a kettle with water.
Dounia Ourisson-Wasserstrom, who arrived in Auschwitz a month before
Palarczyk, writes: ‘‘At first I washed with tea, which was an undetermined
brown liquid, but in winter I washed with snow.’’
On January 27, 1943, some Frenchwomen arrived at the women’s camp,
which by then had been in operation for almost half a year. Among them was
Maria-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, who later testified in Nuremberg about the
water supply:
When we arrived, there was only one faucet for 12,000 inmates. The water
was not potable and flowed only intermittently. This faucet was located in
the washrooms for Germans, and the only access was past guards, Ger-
man criminals who beat us unmercifully. Hence it was almost impossible
to wash or to clean one’s underwear. In more than three months we were
not able to put on clean underwear. When there was snow, we let it melt
so we could wash with it, and in spring we used, on our way to work, the
same puddle of water at the edge of the road for drinking and washing our
shirts and pants. Then we washed our hands in the dirty water.
Marie-Elisa Nordmann-Cohen confirms this account when she writes:
‘‘Most of us did not wash for a few months, unless we were able to do so with
snow or rainwater.’’ Charlotte Delbo, who arrived in Auschwitz on the same
transport, remembers vividly that ‘‘those who remained in Block 26 lived there
for seventy-six days without being able to wash.’’ In those days an inmate re-
ceived only an eighth of a liter of herbal tea daily.
Shortly after the end of the war Zofia Litwinska testified as follows: ‘‘I was
assigned to clean the latrines. We had to wash them with our hands. Inmates
were very eager to get this job, because it allowed them to wash a bit.’’
Kitty Hart observed the following conditions as late as April 1943: ‘‘At the
exit some liquid was distributed. It had been a long time since I had had any-
thing to drink, and so I was terribly thirsty. Finally it was my turn and they
poured something in my rations cup. It was a foul-smelling, dark, blue-gray
herbal brew. I smelled it, tasted it, and was nauseated. Two girls next to me
conferred: ‘Shall we drink it today or wash with it?’ They decided to share one
portion and use the other one for washing. They also warned me not to drink
too much, for otherwise I would get diarrhea.’’
After she had familiarized herself with the camp, Kitty Hart saw only one
way to get water: ‘‘In the sauna there was water, but only vips had access to it.
If an ordinary inmate tried to get in, she was given a beating and thrown out.
I realized that it was especially important to be better dressed if one wanted
to make an impression and not to be regarded as an ordinary prisoner.’’ But
The Muselmann n 99
how was a dirty, stinking inmate to obtain good clothes or be assigned to a
detail where she could ‘‘organize’’ such things? Only on rare occasions was it
possible to break through the vicious circle.
Hermine Horvath has given this description of the Gypsy camp: ‘‘Since
therewas nowater, feverish inmates often drank urine.Thepails in which they
relieved themselves were used to serve us food after they had been washed.’’
Things were not much different in the quarantine section of Birkenau as
late as spring 1944. André Blécourt reports how he sneaked out of his bar-
racks at night in order to enjoy drinking water from a nearby ditch into which
inmates had urinated and in which there were dead rats.
When the Mexico section of the Birkenau camp began to receive prisoners
in the spring of 1944, conditions there were if anything worse than those in
the early period of the women’s camp. Katalin Vidor has described the follow-
ing scene: ‘‘Zoska blurts out, ‘Hope to God it doesn’t rain!’ ‘No, it shouldn’t
stop raining,’ interjects a woman, cups her hands to get some water from a
puddle, and slurps it down. A group of women washes in the puddles, for
there is only one kind of water: the kind that is bestowed by heaven.’’
In his primitive mode of expression, the block leader Stefan Baretzki de-
scribed to the Frankfurt court the conditions in that section of the camp.
There were a few thousand women in the Mexico section.They slept on the
bare ground, they didn’t even have a blanket. Only one barrel of water was
brought there every day. I was ordered by the Labor Assignment Office to
take such a barrel there. The people from the orchestra carried the water
in. Jewish women from Slovakia (evidently inmate functionaries) were in
there, and they begged us: ‘‘Bring more water!’’ But that was hard for me. I
can’t bring water again until noon, when no one notices it, when the other
guards are away. The female wardens in Mexico agreed that I should bring
water. And now and then I brought water at noon. The inmates gave the
guards cigarettes for it, but I didn’t take any.
Later Baretzki told me that Cylka, the camp elder, had bribed the guards. He
also stated why thesepractices were not stopped: ‘‘WhenI talkedwith sscamp
leader Schwarzhuber about it, he kept telling me, ‘That’s none of your busi-
ness, it’s high time for you to understand that these are Jews!’’’
Henryk Porebski, who was in charge of maintaining the electric installa-
tions in Birkenau, has called attention to one causeof the chronic lack of water
in that camp complex. The four big crematoriums needed a lot of water, and
so the construction people installed pumps that were to be used primarily for
the crematoriums.
In March 1941 Professor Zunker was asked to test the water in Auschwitz.
He came to the conclusion that it was not potable and should not even be used
100 n the prisoners
as a mouthwash. As a result the guards received sufficient supplies of min-
eral water. On August 31, 1942, the ss physician Johann Paul Kremer entered
in his diary: ‘‘The water is polluted and so we are drinking seltzer, which is
distributed free of charge (Mattoni).’’
n Chronic hunger and thirst; the separation from relatives that, as soon be-
came apparent, was permanent; the utter hopelessness of ever getting out of
the Auschwitz mill—all this turned human beings into Muselmänner. Here is
how Jean Améry describes this type: ‘‘The so-called Muselmann, as an inmate
who was giving up on himself and had been given up by his comrades was
called in the camp lingo, no longer had a space of consciousness in which
good and evil, nobility and meanness, intelligence and stupidity could con-
front one another. He was a walking corpse, a bundle of physical functions in
its death throes.’’
Vilo Jurkovic has also provided a portrait of the Muselmann: ‘‘That was a
bag of skin and bones, an emaciated human being barely able to drag himself
along and devoid of will and strength, a person with a nasal discharge that
ran down his mouth and chin, a dirty person clad in rags and often completely
lice-ridden, suffering from severe diarrhea, with a resultant soiling of under-
wear, a person with sunken or bulging eyeballs—a true picture of misery,
weakness, hopelessness, and horror!’’
The ss physician Hans Münch diagnosed in Muselmänner not only a com-
plete indifference to their surroundings but also a shattering credulity. That
credulity is probably the reason why many of them allowed themselves to be
deceived by the transparent maneuvers of the camp administration when a
selection doomed them to death. The American psychologist Martin Wangh
regards the obsequiousness that was sometimes displayed by Muselmänner as
a consequence of their general devitalization.
Benedikt Kautsky has concerned himself with indications that an inmate
was deteriorating and about to become a Muselmann:
A decline in personal hygiene was the surest indication of impending dan-
ger. Particularly in the winter, washing was regarded as a superfluous loss
of calories; inmates resisted getting fresh air into their block and went to
bed in their clothes. This change usually coincided with an inmate’s ten-
dency to shun any avoidable physical exertion; his gait became slow and
shuffling, and his energy at work was reduced to a minimum. Naturally,
this filthy, brutish, slothful creature became the target of all sorts of brutal
acts and jokes. In point of fact, it was really difficult for a dormitory elder
or foreman to cope with a person who reacted only to the strongest forms
of pressure.
The Muselmann n 101
Kautsky goes on to say: ‘‘There were many inmates who did not get up at
night to relieve themselves. As a consequence of the high water content of the
food, the number of pathological bed wetters was extremely high, but there
were quite a few inmates who became bed wetters because they lacked self-
control.’’
There were other factors that frequently inhibited prisoners from going to
the latrine at night. Leo Diamant has mentioned one: ‘‘On several occasions
I saw in the morning the corpses of inmates who had been shot during the
night by guards in the watchtowers when they were leaving the block to visit
the toilets. This is why we stayed in the block and relieved ourselves into the
mess tin.’’
Like many others, Kautsky observed that numerous intellectuals let them-
selves go, but ‘‘it would,of course, be wrong to see in this slackening of physi-
cal self-discipline only a characteristic of the intellectuals.’’ Their decline to
the level of a Muselmann was more noticeable than that of others, and this led
to generalizations that Kautsky rightly rejects.
And what about the death of the Muselmänner? Jakob Laks writes laconi-
cally that ‘‘an acquaintance of mine died one morning while putting on his
pants,’’ and Maria-Claude Vaillant-Couturier observes that ‘‘the organism was
so weakened that a person died the way a clock stops.’’ She has this to say
about the reaction of the survivors: ‘‘She has stopped suffering. But we have
to carry her to the camp now.’’
Jurkovic explains why a Muselmann became an object of contempt and dis-
gust rather than compassion on thepart of his fellowinmates: ‘‘TheMuselmann
condition was dreaded by the inmates because no one knew when he might
suffer such a fate himself and be a certain candidate for the gas chamber or
another kind of death.’’ Added to this was the fact that Muselmänner frequently
provoked the anger of the others: ‘‘These were creatures in the final stage of
humanness who acted only like unreasoning animals.’’ Viktor Frankl observed
that they reacted only if they were yelled at, ‘‘but even this often failed, and
then it really took great self-control not to strike out at them, for in the face
of the apathy of others one’s own irritability assumed immeasurable dimen-
sions.’’
These inmates posed ever new problems for those who had anything to do
with them. For example, theycrawled out of sight at roll call time even though
they must have known that all those lined up had to remain standing until the
last missing inmate had been found.
n JuliaSkodovahadalreadycomeperilouslyclose to theMuselmann stagewhen
she was assigned to a detail that was housed in the ss staff building under in-
comparably more favorable conditions. For the first time she was able to take
102 n the prisoners
a morning shower in the basement of that building because the administra-
tion wanted inmates whose work brought them in contact with the ss to be
clean. ‘‘It’s breathtaking,’’ she writes. ‘‘Warm water flows from the showers,
and it can even be regulated. No, this luxury can’t be described. It’s what a
blind man must feel like when a miracle has restored his eyesight.’’ She has
given this description of her first day in this new workplace: ‘‘One day passed
during which I was hungry but not beaten or hounded, one dayduring which I
wasn’t soaked by the rain or scorched by a merciless sun.This one day sufficed
to make me a human being again and let me grasp the suffering of others, not
just my own.’’ Skodova has described this transformation as follows:
We are beginning to feel that we are human beings. Physically we are in-
comparably better off, but we are all the more severely and more frequently
beset by mental depressions. Because as long as a person cannot think of
anything but hunger and filth, as long as one is tormented by thirst and
pain, as long as one cannot satisfy the most elementary human needs, con-
cepts like ‘‘parents,’’ ‘‘home,’’ ‘‘forest and flowers’’ are hidden somewhere
in the depths of consciousness and very rarely penetrate to the surface. But
if you have already eaten your bread and are lying in a bed without fleas
and lice, then all this comes to the surface of consciousness and begins to
torment you. I have never cried here. Despite all the misery and terror that
I have experienced here, my eyes have remained dry, but when I lie in bed
now, I am shaken by sobs.
Pelagia Lewinska mustered the energy to keep herself from sliding into a
Muselmann’s death:
Aftertheirdaily work and a roll call that lasted forhours, theinmates finally
had time to rest. And precisely at that moment they had to think of clean-
ing themselves. It is dark and rainy, the dirty camp road is slippery, and
every step makes one sink into the mud. The latrines with the water taps
(which later were installed in the women’s camp) are on the other side of
the camp. We are utterly exhausted.
We have to get up. Only a few inmates are capable of such an exertion.
If we didn’t feel the urge to go to the latrine, none of us would muster the
necessary strength. But for us this meant more—an act of will with the aim
of mastering difficulties, proving capable of making this little effort, giving
clear evidence of unmistakable resistance. In our case this was a protest
that was meant to say: We won’t let ourselves go.
As for me, the fact that I forced myself to clean my shoes was proof that
I still was my own master. Most of the time the efforts I made were utterly
futile. The next morning my shoes were, after a few steps, as dirty as they
The Muselmann n 103