Langbein Hermann. People in Auschwitz
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n It will probably never be possible to establish whether the so-called Budy
revolt in October 1942 was a desperate attempt at an uprising or a capricious
massacre. Because not a singleinmate survived,we are dependenton accounts
of ss men, and the most detailed report was given by ss Corporal Pery Broad.
At that time, the satellite camp Budy housed thewomen’s penal company. Ger-
man prostitutes were the inmate functionaries, and Jewish women had been
assigned to that company. Accordingto Broad,the majorityof them were from
Poland and the Ukraine, but commandant Höß remembered that they were
primarily Frenchwomen.They must have received exceptionally bad treatment
even by Auschwitz standards. Broad, who had been ordered to Budy together
with othermembers of thePolitical Department on the morning after the mas-
sacre in order to investigate its causes, has described what he saw there:
On the ground behind and beside the school building (which housed the
penal company), dozens of maimed and blood-encrusted female corpses
are lying around helter-skelter, all of them wearing only shabby prisoners’
shirts. Among the dead some half-dead women are writhing. Their moans
minglewith the buzzingof hugeswarms of flies that circle over sticky pools
of blood and smashed skulls, and this produces a peculiar kind of singing
that initially baffled those who came on the scene. Several corpses are en-
tangled in rigid positions in the barbed wire; others appear to have been
pushed out of the open dormer window.
Broad claims to have learned the cause of the massacre from survivors.
ss guards goaded the German inmate functionaries into beating the Jewish
women.As a result the favored German womenhad a bad conscience and lived
in constant fear that at some future date the women they were torturing would
have an opportunity to take revenge and turn them into victims. According to
Broad, the massacre was triggered by a German prostitute, Elfriede Schmidt,
and an ss guard who was having an affair with her. Maximilian Grabner, the
head of the Political Department, also testified that in those days some in-
terned female criminals had forbidden relationships with ss guards. ‘‘They
were afraid that a Jewish inmate might betray them, and so they staged a re-
volt and used the opportunity to exterminate the majority of the inmates (Jew-
ish women).’’ Höß also remembered this massacre: ‘‘What the Greens did to
those Jewish Frenchwomen! They tore them to pieces, killed them with axes,
choked them—simply horrible.’’ The ss closed this case in line with its tradi-
tion. The Jewish women who were still alive were murdered on the spot, and
six German inmate functionaries were killed by phenol injections on Octo-
ber 24.Thissaved the campadministrationthe embarrassingtaskof reporting
guards for breach of duty.
114 n the prisoners
n All these incidents constitute exceptions to the rule, which was that the
overwhelming majority of those who were taken to the gas chambers, the
lethal injections, and the BlackWall obeyed their murderers without resisting.
In their behavior, no difference based on their nationality or type of impris-
onment could be discerned. Eugen Kogon has made some additions to the
previously mentioned decisive factors that produced this phenomenon. In his
last hours a religious person would feel defiled by the blood of others. A per-
son governed by a sense of political responsibility was probably restrained by
the familiar ss system of reprisals that always hit uninvolved people as well.
Finally, Kogon believes that ‘‘masses never have a will—unless they receive it
from the outside or from individuals within their ranks’’ and that any panic
inhibits the mind and the will.
Liebehenschel, the new commandant of Auschwitz, temporarily stopped
camp selections, but in January 1944 all Jews were forced to line up again. At
that time Dr. Alfred Klahr, a leading Austrian communist who had to wear the
Star of David, urged the leaders of the resistance movement to stage a gen-
eral rebellion in an effort to offer some resistance to the renewed destruction
of the Jewish inmates. Though Klahr’s opinion carried weight with us, we re-
jected his proposal. A general uprising would have had no chance of success,
for the Russian front was still very far away and the groups of Polish parti-
sans in the neighboring mountains were weak. It would have been possible to
make some ss men join us in death, but it was certain that all inmates would
be cruelly exterminated, including those who knew nothing of the uprising
and would not have participated. We could not assume the responsibility for
such consequences. That we had made the right decision was subsequently
confirmed by the fact that 60,000 people, including Jews, survived the impris-
onment in Auschwitz. However, my conscience was not clear then or later,
and it is significant that I did not include in my Bericht this episode, which had
made a deep impression on me.
n Even though it was extremely difficult even to think of rebelling against the
masters who operated the machinery of destruction in a commanding man-
ner, inmates frequently strove to save acquaintances from destruction. This
wasoftendonebybribingss men. Robert Waitz reports howan inmate suffer-
ing from chronic nephritis was spirited out of a transport bound for the gas
chambers after Gerhard Neubert, the sdg of Monowitz, had received a bribe
of a hundred dollars. Jan Trajster remembers a similar incident: for a bribe of
fifty dollars and a liter of schnapps, Neubert removed the name of Zawadzki,
a Jew who had been deported from France, from the list of those to be gassed.
Leon Stasiak was able to save a North African named Siradien by giving an ss
The Inmate and Death n 115
man ten dollars. Evidently bribes were common in Monowitz, but they were
possible in Birkenau as well. Barbara Pozimska owes her life to a bribed ss
man who took her out of the death block. However, only an inmate who had
access to the treasures of Canada was able to help acquaintances in this way.
Carl Laszlo has described how he helped a friend save his son who was
stuck in an isolation block together with other selectees. Laszlo’s friend had
managed to smuggle a diamond into the camp, and with this precious stone
Laszlo gained access to that block. ‘‘The block elder was a Pole, the block
clerk an Austrian Jew. I asked both of them to take me to their room, where I
proposed that they release the boy in exchange for the diamond. They didn’t
seem at all surprised, but examined the stone carefully, nodded to each other,
and about ten minutes later I escorted the boy to his father.’’ Laszlo found out
how the block functionaries were able to arrange this. They grabbed another
inmate on the camp road, and the count was correct again. This indicates the
frightful problems that were inevitablyconnected with many individual rescue
actions.
With the aid of a block elder, Jacques Furmanski was able to change an
endangered friend temporarily into an ‘‘Aryan’’ and thus keep him out of the
selection lineup. ‘‘I was trembling with fear that the deception would be re-
vealed. All of us know the punishment: the indiscriminate detention of every-
one. A terrible responsibility. At the time I had no clear conception of the
risk.’’
n The overwhelming majorityof thosewhoweremurderedinAuschwitz never
even entered the camp, for they were escorted to the gas chambers immedi-
ately after leaving the trains.
The measures taken by the ss to camouflage their real intentions worked
well. From the camps where thevictimswere put on trains for‘‘resettlementin
the East’’ to the gas chambers, which were made to look like showers, every-
thing was a perfect deception. Rudolf Vrba, who had to work at the ramp for
a long time, has addressed this point. ‘‘The treatment of new arrivals by the
ss was variable; it depended on the condition of the transport that arrived in
Auschwitz, but also on the mood of the ss men who were involved. If 10 or
15 percent of the people on the transport had died on the way to Auschwitz,
there was not much to conceal, and the newcomers could not be impressed by
politeness. Thus the ss treated such people brutally. However, if they gained
the impression that the prisoners had no idea of what awaited them in Ausch-
witz, they treated them with relative courtesy.’’
Dr. Sigismund Bendel,a survivorof theSonderkommando,remembersthat
as late as June 1944 the ss managed to deceive people who had been deported
from the ghetto at Lodz. While they were being led to the crematorium, ss
116 n the prisoners
Master Sergeant Moll told them that they were to bathe and that hot coffee
would be ready for them afterward. This announcement was greeted with ap-
plause.Whensome children did not want to be put off untillaterand cried that
they were thirsty, the ss had some water brought to them. Bendel emphasizes
that ‘‘the deception was kept up to the last moment.’’
Deportees who were not sent to Auschwitz from Poland but from more dis-
tant countries, and not as late as mid-1944 but in 1942 and 1943, were much
easier marks for such deceptive maneuvers.True, rumors circulated about the
gassing facilities and the radio broadcasts of the Allies reported about them,
but these reports sounded so improbable that people refused to believe them.
Many years later Berlin Jews testified that while British broadcasts had in-
formed them about the extermination of the Jews and they had in this con-
nection heard the word ‘‘gassing’’ for the first time before they were deported
to Auschwitz in March 1943, ‘‘we did not believe it. There were all kinds of
rumors, but the full scope was simply unimaginable.’’
Despite the harsh visual lesson that they had already received, Jews doing
forced labor in the Blechhammer camp, which was not far from Auschwitz,
could not believe the rumors about the gas chambers and mass extermina-
tion that reached them in 1943. Added to this was the fact that Jewish func-
tionaries who knew about the machinery of destruction did not pass on their
information.This is true of the leadership of the Jewish ‘‘self-government’’ in
Theresienstadt and the responsible heads of the Jewish organization in Hun-
gary. Both received detailed information about what was going on in Ausch-
witz by escapees from the camp, but they kept silent even when the deporta-
tions from Theresienstadt and Hungary began. Rumkowski, the elder of the
Lodzghetto,went even furtheras he zealously fostereddoubts about thecredi-
bility of rumors that spoke of a mass extermination.
This is why Jews from the Lodz ghetto were, as late as mid-1944, as clue-
less as in Bendel’s description. This is why the name Auschwitz did not ‘‘stir
any memories or evoke any fear’’ (ElieWiesel) when they read it at the railroad
station. This is why, as Krystyna Zywulska attests, they had no idea what fate
awaited them. This is why, as Dov Paisikovic reports, they innocently entered
the buildings with the strikingly high smokestacks. The ss camp physician
Entress, who was frequently at the ramp before being transferred in Octo-
ber 1943, testified that he had the impression that ‘‘many prisoners on trans-
ports from the East already knew when they arrived in Auschwitz what was
in store for them, and thus there were terrible scenes.’’ Apparently the decep-
tive maneuvers of the ss worked with others. Thus Thomas Geve reports that
in the spring of 1944 Hungarian Jews in Birkenau desperately inquired about
the children’s camp. When these new arrivals were separated from their chil-
dren in the selection, the ss calmed them by saying that the children would
The Inmate and Death n 117
be housed in a separate children’s camp. Every day the women saw flames
coming out of the chimneys of the nearby crematoriums and were pursued
by the odor of burned human flesh, and yet they refused to believe the truth.
Occasionally children were allowed to live, and so the mothers regarded this
as an indication that the lies of the ss might be the truth after all.
Only in exceptional instances were inmates who came into contact with
new arrivals at the camp able to inform the latter. Since it was impossible
to put a guard beside each prisoner, it would have been possible to circum-
vent the rule that talking was strictly forbidden. However, an inmate could
not predict the reaction of a new arrival. Sometimes people were so perturbed
by hastily blurted-out information about gas chambers and mass murder that
they asked ss guards whether people were really being gassed. Such questions
were possible because the ss men, being interested in conducting the selec-
tions as smoothly as possible, often did not behave harshly, while the inmates
who had to clear the railroad cars were urged to hurry. Any inmate who issued
a warning faced a cruel death if the camp administration found out about it.
An additional consideration has been pointed out by Tadeusz Borowski: ‘‘It is
an unwritten law of the camp that human beings who are about to die are lied
to until the last moment. That is the only admissible form of compassion.’’
n Only someone who did not merely sense or fear the fate that awaited him
but knew it precisely could have made a desperate attempt to offer resistance
outside the gas chambers. The ss had seen to it that any such attempt was
bound to be futile.The area was fenced about with electrified barbed wire and
guards stood behind machine guns in the watchtowers. All stages, from de-
trainingto entering thegas chambers,were completed quickly, and thevictims
were constantly urged forward, which left no time or opportunity forany com-
munication. That left only the possibility of taking one or another henchman
with him when an inmate was sure that he was going to be murdered.
Such acts of desperation were committed. The best known of these is the
rebellion of the Jews who were transferred from Bergen-Belsen to Auschwitz
on October 23, 1943. Those 1,700 Jews, who, according to Höß’s testimony
in Nuremberg, were predominantly from the East, recognized their situation
when they were escorted from the ramp to a crematorium. Höß has described
what followed:
A transport from Belsen had arrived.When approximately two-thirds of the
prisoners, mostly men, were already in the gas chambers, a mutiny broke
out among the other third, who were undressing in an anteroom. Since the
inmates on the cremation detail could not cope with this, three or four ss
noncommissioned officers entered the room with their weapons in order
118 n the prisoners
to speed up the undressing. In the process the electric wires were torn, the
ss men were attacked, one was killed, and the others were disarmed. Since
that room was completely dark, a wild shooting match developed between
the ss guards at the exit and the inmates inside. When I got there, I had
the doors locked and the gassing process of the first two-thirds stopped.
Then I entered the room with flashlights and the guards, and we herded
the inmates into a corner. From there they were taken, one by one, to a
room adjoining the crematorium and shot with a small-caliber rifle on my
orders.
On that occasion the notorious ss roll call leader Schillinger was so seri-
ously injured that he died on the way to an infirmary in Kattowitz. Wilhelm
Emmerich, an ss sergeant, was also wounded and had a limp after his release
from the infirmary. Rumor has it that a female dancer wrested an ss man’s
revolver away from him when he was trying to tear her clothes off. Zelman
Lewental believes that this uprising was triggered by a young Jew.
Other acts of desperation at the gas chambers have not been so exhaus-
tively documented. On May 25, 1944, several hundred Hungarian Jews broke
out and attempted to hide in the underbrush near the crematoriums and in
ditches. Three days later there was another attempt to break out. In both in-
stances the guards used searchlights to ferret out the escapees and shot them.
The resistance movement sent a report about this to Cracow.
Efraim Stiebelmann once observed the following event: ‘‘A transport from
Lodz arrived, and Mengele chose thosewhowould work and thosewhowere to
be gassed. A woman with a daughteraged thirteen to fourteen did not want to
be separated from her. Mengele ordered a guard to take the girl away from her
by force,whereupon thewoman attackedthe guard, hit him, and scratched his
face. Mengele drew his pistol and shot mother and child. I saw this clearly.’’
Stiebelmann also learned about the consequences of this deed. ‘‘After that,
Mengele also sent the people from the transport who had already been chosen
for labor to the gas chambers with these words: ‘Away with this shit!’’’
Krystyna Zywulska remembers approximately 300 young Jewish women
who had been transferred from Majdanek. They were admitted to the camp
but taken to a gas chamber at night, probably because they had offered resis-
tance. Zywulska bases her conclusion on statements by the girls, with whom
she was able to talk beforehand, and also on the fact that after this action an
ss man was seen with a bandaged eye.
How many similarlydesperate acts were there towhich no one can bear wit-
ness? A chronicle that was buried near one of the crematoriums by a member
of the Sonderkommando lists acts of resistance and commemorates inmates
who went to their death proudly.To be sure, it also records instances in which
The Inmate and Death n 119
a person’s will to resist was broken in the last moment. Toward the end of
1942 young Jews from Przemysl planned to attack their murderers, and they
had alreadyconcealed knives in their sleeves. A physician from the same trans-
port betrayed this plan to the ss. After a guard had assured him that he had
thereby saved his life and that of his wife, the physician reassured the young
men, whereupon they stripped without making use of their weapons. When
they were all in the ‘‘showers,’’ the ss also pushed in the physician and his
wife. Then the door to the gas chamber was locked.
ss camp leader Franz Hofmann, who supervised numerous acts of exter-
mination, put it concisely when he said on October 24, 1961: ‘‘Naturally there
were disturbances among the inmates who had been selected to die. Then I
had to intervene in order to restore law and order.’’
n The idea of ending one’s life and thus all tortures and degradations sug-
gested itself in Auschwitz. Bruno Bettelheim, who did not have first-hand ex-
perience of extermination camps, extended the idea of suicide greatly when
he called the docility of the inmates who let themselves be taken to the gas
chambers without resisting ‘‘a form of suicide that does not require the energy
normally needed to decide on it and plan it.’’ Bettelheim argues that, ‘‘from a
psychological point of view, most inmates in the extermination camps com-
mitted suicide by going to their death without resisting.’’
I have reservations about this theory, for I observed too often how despite
the obvious hopelessness Muselmänner tried everything imaginable to get out
of selections or attempted to improve their appearance by slapping one an-
other’s faces to get red cheeks. Only when all their efforts had failed did they
allow themselves to be led impassively to their death.
If one does not define suicide as loosely as does Bettelheim, there were
fewer suicides in Auschwitz than one might assume. Carl Laszlo writes that
suicides were extremely rare in the camp, ‘‘possibly because that would have
been too cowardly.’’ The psychiatrist Paul Matussek reports that 10 percent of
the survivors interviewed by him said they had thought of committing suicide
in the camp. Hannah Arendt calls the rarity of suicides in the concentration
camps astonishing and attributes thisto ‘‘the destruction of individualityafter
the murder of the moral person and the extermination of the juristic person.’’
Those who made their observations in a camp express this more concretely.
Wladyslaw Fejkiel givesthe following reason for thesmall number of suicides:
‘‘This fact may be explained by the systematic starvation. A starving person is
indifferent to the problem of death and incapable of attempting suicide. The
few suicides in Auschwitz that are known to me were committed by inmates
who were hardly emaciated.’’
Benedikt Kautsky has a different explanation for the same phenomenon: ‘‘A
120 n the prisoners
striking observation that I made of myself and that was confirmed by a num-
ber of comrades was that at a point where I thought I would have to collapse
for physical or moral reasons my instinct for self-preservation appeared in the
guise of defiance. ‘Surely you aren’t going to do those pigs the favor of killing
yourself!’ This was an argument that one applied not only to others but much
more effectively to oneself.’’
Georges Wellers supplements Kautsky’s reflections by pointing out that,
according to his observations, many inmates, apart from personal motives,
clung to life so they might bear witness at a later date. Simon Laks confirms
this for himself: ‘‘I had firmly resolved not to go to my death willingly, come
what might. I wanted to see everything, go through everything, experience
everything, absorb everything. To what purpose, when I would never have an
opportunity to scream the result of my discoveries out to the world? Simply
because I did not want to exclude myself, exclude the witness that I could be.’’
In investigating the reasons for the small number of suicides, Kautsky evi-
dently has politically aware inmates in mind and Fejkiel the average kind.
Theirargumentssupplementeach otherandoverlap.Where an encounterwith
death was a daily occurrence, the quest for death lost its special and possibly
seductive nature.
Nevertheless, prisoners did end their lives—more frequently in the early
years of utter hopelessness than toward the end of the war. To them, a form
of suicide suggested itself that was the surest and required the least energy:
‘‘going into the wire.’’ In front of the electrically charged barbed wire that
fenced the camps in there was a death zone. Anyone who entered it was shot
at from the watchtowers, and those who were not hit were sure to be killed
by contact with the wire. Tadeusz Paczula reports that in the early period of
Auschwitz, when the inmates had to stand during the long roll calls after hard
work, shots frequently rang out.They were aimed at those who had gone into
the wire. In those days suicides aroused ‘‘no attention, no one was surprised,
no one felt sorry foranyone else, and the general indifference allowed no emo-
tions to develop.’’
At a later date, when the machinery of destruction was in place in Ausch-
witz, Josef Neumann had to make a daily inspection of the fences surrounding
the sections of the Birkenau camp. As a corpse carrier, he had to collect the
dead bodies. This is what he wrote about it: ‘‘As a rule, those who ran into the
fence at night were suicides. Their numbers varied. It was very high in trans-
ports from Holland, and I remember that at one time it rose to thirty. There
were fewer from the Slovak transports, perhaps five to ten. Eight to twelve
probably was the daily average. Most of thosewho ran into the wire were new-
comers, but there were also some who had been in the camp for some time.’’
Josef Neumann had to rely on his memory when he gave these figures
The Inmate and Death n 121
twenty years later, but the physician Otto Wolken kept statistics in the camp
that he was able to conceal. They cover the quarantine section, where the new
arrivals characterized by Neumann and others as especially prone to commit
suicide were sent, and the period between September 20, 1943, and Novem-
ber 1, 1944. Of a total of 1,902 inmates recorded as dead, only two are listed as
having been electrocuted and one as having been strangled. The other modes
of death registered byWolken do not indicate suicide. It is, of course, possible
that Neumann’s figures refer to a period before the fall of 1943 because Simon
Laks and René Coudy also report that in the summer of 1942 shots could fre-
quently be heard in Birkenau at night. They describe the reactions of Poles
with low numbers when Jews in the camp orchestra took their lives: ‘‘When
the number of musicians who had committed suicide the night before was
higher than usual, one of these gentlemen called us together and said: ‘You
sons of bitches, I warn you. If you continue to run into the wire, I’ll kill all of
you like dogs!’’’
Thereis conflicting information about suicidesin theTheresienstadt family
camp. While Jehuda Bacon, who was a child at the time, remembers that the
number of suicides there was high immediately after their arrival in Ausch-
witz but declined afterward, Hanna Hoffmann, who made her observations
as an adult, states that only a small number of inmates went into the wire.
Only when this hitherto privileged special camp was about to be liquidated
did many inmates break down and carry out their threat (to commit suicide).
In some casesthe proximate cause of suicide is known. Aron Bejlin,a physi-
cian interned in Birkenau, was asked by a Dutch physician who had just ar-
rived in the camp where he could meet his wife and children, from whom he
had been separated. Bejlin told his colleague the truth, which the Dutchman
at first did not believe; but when he was able to confirm it, he touched the
electrified fence.Vera Alexander remembers a Hungarian Jew who was able to
smuggle her small child into the camp. When the ss took it away from her,
she went into the wire at night.
Other forms of suicide have been reported as well. Maurice Schelleken re-
members that a Dutch physician took poison which he had been able to smug-
gle into the camp and conceal. Pery Broad writes the following about Russian
prisoners of war who were forced to build Birkenau in the winter of 1941–
42: ‘‘Hunger drove people insane. Every evening wagon loads of corpses were
taken to the Auschwitz crematorium. Half-dead inmates who were no longer
able to endure the indescribable torment voluntarily crept onto these wagons
and were killed like cattle.’’
Even after the end of the early and most terrible period of the new camp,
some cases of that type of suicide were recorded. Charlotte Delbo observed
women who voluntarily went to Block 25, where the victims of camp selec-
122 n the prisoners
tions had to wait for transportation to a gas chamber. When an ss man came
to inspect this death block, which was normally locked tight, they slipped in
behind him. A Czech inmate who wanted to die wangled his way twice into
the selectees. Friends saved him both times. He survived his time in the camp.
Dounia Ourisson-Wasserstrom has reported the following incident: ‘‘One
day I walked through a barracks and saw naked corpses on the floor. Some-
thing was stirring among the dead; it was a young girl who was not naked. I
pulled her out to the camp road and asked her, ‘Who are you?’ She answered
that she was a Greek Jew from Saloniki. ‘How long have you been here?’ ‘I
don’t know.’ ‘Why are you here?’ ‘I can’t live with the living any more, and so
I want to be with the dead.’ I gave her a piece of bread. In the evening she was
dead.’’ Two Yugoslav women are said to have committed suicide in Brody by
jumping into a cesspool and drowning.
Can the following incident reported by Feinstein also be described as a sui-
cide? One day the penal company did not march off to work but was ordered
to stand in front of the block. ss block leader Eckardt ordered the block elder
to supply fifty corpses by evening because space was needed for new arrivals.
Emil, the capo, a notorious murderer who wore a green triangle, asked the
waiting inmates whether anyone was tired of living. ‘‘Volunteers, come for-
ward! I’ll do it quickly, cleanly, and painlessly!’’ According to Feinstein, a few
dozen inmates came forward. ‘‘The first one was a sixteen-year-old lad from
Prague. He bent over a stool and said gently, ‘Capo, do it fast!’ The capo’s club
came down on the boy’s neck. ‘Next!’’’ This happened in February 1943.
Sometimes special circumstances caused the suicide of inmates who were
safe because of their good positions in the camp.The German capos Reinhold
Wienhold and Walter Walterscheid took their lives in the bunker, evidently be-
cause they feared that they would be tortured by the Political Department. On
October 27, 1944, when the attempted escape of the Austrian Ernst Burger, a
leader of the resistance movement, and of three Poles had been betrayed, all
of them took the poison that they had prudently procured, for they knew that
anyone subjected to the inhuman torture of the Political Department might
break down. Being anxious to interrogate prisoners who had tried to escape,
the ss immediately ordered that the stomachs of these men be pumped out,
but in the case of the Poles Zbigniew Raynoch and Czeslaw Duzel it was too
late. In the summer of 1943 Orli Reichert, the camp elder in the infirmary of
the women’s camp, attempted to kill herself. After friends had brought her
back to life, she explained that she could no longer endure the constant sight
of death.
Perhaps Anna Sussmann has given the clearest answer to the question why
the number of suicides was surprisingly low, and thereby the clearest refuta-
tion of Bettelheim’s thesis. In 1944 shewas lying in the infirmary and had rea-
The Inmate and Death n 123