Langbein Hermann. People in Auschwitz
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the East, and so I wanted to find out whether or not they were true. As some-
one born in the days of the Habsburg Empire, I simply could not believe those
stories. We have always been tolerant and humane. Thus I was transferred on
July 1, 1942, and took a position as a nurse in the section for infectious dis-
eases.’’
Others pretended to be blind and deaf when they heard something, but
Maria Stromberger searched for the truth. In her section there were two ty-
phus patients who had recently been released from Auschwitz—presumably
Upper Silesians who had signed the German ethnic register, for at that time
a number of Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) were released from the camp if
they declared their loyalty to the German people, and the two patients spoke
German. Maria Stromberger recalls that one was employed in the gasworks
and the other man in a nitrogen factory. Nurse Maria testified that ‘‘both men
shouted out terrible thingsin theirdeliriums.They were in the grip of unimag-
inable angst, and so we had to isolate them.Their feverish condition was such
that one of the men became violent toward me.’’ When Maria asked the men
about what they were expressing in their feverish nightmares, ‘‘they folded
their hands and begged me: ‘Nurse, if you value your life and also our lives,
you will never mention these things. They are based on the truth.’’’
When the men told her that nurses in Auschwitz wore the same garb as she
did, Maria asked to be transferred there. At a later date her sister wrote me: ‘‘I
did not want her to go there, but she told me, ‘I want to see how things really
are; perhaps I can do some good there. Trust me.’’’
The transfer occurred on October 1, 1942. Edek Pys was a Polish inmate
who worked in the diet kitchen of the ss infirmary and thus had the most
direct contact with Nurse Maria, the manager of that kitchen. Years later he
wrote to me, saying that having had bad experiences with other nurses he did
not trust Maria at first:
Maria also kept her distance from us as far as professional relationships
were concerned. She seemed to be rigorous, and so we only discussed mat-
ters relating to our duties in those days. She gave orders, and I carried them
out to the letter. One day something surprising happened. It was already
evening. We did not go into the camp because we were ‘‘under orders.’’
Only Nurse Maria and I were in the kitchen. I was washing dishes when I
heard a bang in the camp, not far from our kitchen window. I already knew
what that meant. In those days inmates very often ‘‘went into the wire.’’
At the same time I heard a soft cry behind me, where Nurse Maria was
standing by the window. I turned around and saw that she had turned quite
pale and feebly sank into a chair. She almost fainted. I got frightened and
called Nurse Margarete. Aftera few minutes everything was all right again,
464 n the jailers
but Maria immediately went home. She did not come to work for two or
three days. When she returned, she asked me what had happened that day.
I explained it to the nurse and also told her the probable reason for that
inmate’s decision to go ‘‘into the wire.’’ I noticed that she was unable to
grasp this.
At that time Edek began to trust Nurse Maria and spoke frankly with her.
He remembers that ‘‘shewanted to knowall about theramp.’’ He told his com-
rades that Nurse Maria was trustworthy. On one occasion Staszek Baranski
drew their attention to this when people were being gassed in the cremato-
rium across the way (later called ‘‘the old crematorium’’). From the window of
the ss infirmary it was possible to observe the ‘‘disinfectors’’ as they poured
poison gas into the shafts that had been affixed to the roof of the building,
half of which was sunk into the ground.
At a later date Nurse Maria described her relationship with the prisoners
in these words: ‘‘A detail consisting of Polish inmates was employed at the ss
infirmary, and I established contact with these men. It was hard to gain the
trust of these embittered young people, but I finally succeeded, and I must say
that they offered me consolation.’’
Maria helped the prisoners wherever she could. She gave them food, regu-
larly set aside for them some of the extra rations for ss men suffering from
typhus (including chocolate, fruit, champagne, and the like), and procured
medicines for them. She entrusted the key to the attic to Teddy Pietrzykowski
so that he could pick out medications up there undisturbed. When inmates
were caught smuggling food, she backed them up. Edek has described the
lengths to which she went with her help:
One day in November 1942 I had a high fever and a very severe headache.
However, I did not want to admit that I was sick because in those days there
was a typhus epidemic. (To combat it, both the lice that carried this ill-
ness and the patients were sent to the gas.) Thus, as usual, I marched off
to work every day. Nurse Maria recognized my condition. She took me to
the bathroom of the ss infirmary, put me in the last stall on the left, gave
me a few blankets and a pillow, and told me to lie there quietly. I had to be
quiet because from time to time ss men came to the room to wash. This
was hard, especially when I had to vomit. The nurse came in occasionally
to give me injections and put compresses on my head.
At length Edek had to go to the infirmary after all, and Nurse Maria sent
him medicines. ‘‘When the illness had run its course and I returned to the ss
infirmary in a greatly weakened state, she made especially light meals for me.
She was truly like a mother to me and to all of us.’’
Civilians in Auschwitz n 465
Maria helped other inmates as well. Hunia Hecht, who worked in the ss
tailoring workshop, reports that ‘‘Nurse Maria always brought us something
when she came to see us.’’ The foreman of this workshop, Marta Minarikova-
Fuchs, told me that Nurse Maria tried to arrange her visits in such a way that
no ss man was there at the same time, and so she was able to give them news
about the situation at the front. The women on this detail first learned from
her about the landing of the Allies in France in June 1944. Whenever Marta
askedherforsome medicine,NurseMaria could alwaysbe relied onto bring it.
None of us ever thought of offering her a ‘‘payment’’ for her help, which
was the usual thing to do if an inmate asked an ss man for a favor. Edek has
reported an incident that is typical of Nurse Maria. Once he suggested that
she pretend to start a fight with him, for people were already talking about
her attitude toward the inmates, which differed so radically from the attitude
of all the others. She replied only that she was not an ss man and would not
even pretend to do anything that ran counter to her convictions.
She transmitted and received mail for many members of our detail, includ-
ing myself. When I gave her a letter to my family in Vienna for the first time,
I left it unsealed, but she sealed it in my presence without reading it. On an-
other occasion, when she went home on leave, she offered to visit my relatives
in Vienna on the way. At that time I gave her the material that my brother used
for a flyer (I have reported about this in another context). In an effort to mini-
mize the risk for Nurse Maria, Ernst procured a clothes brush whose wooden
part had been hollowed out, and we concealed the papers in this cavity. The
brush was screwed together in such a way that the screw heads were hidden
among the bristles. Nurse Maria took the brush without asking any questions.
In the summer of 1944 I was preparing my escape. This is what I wrote in
my Bericht: ‘‘I have also spoken with Nurse Maria and told her about our es-
cape.This was necessary because she has been corresponding with my brother
in Vienna. Now she can’t write him anymore because after I leave Auschwitz
the mail will surely be checked at home. She just looks at me with her brown
eyes and says, ‘If you think it’s necessary, do it. But be careful and don’t rush
anything.’ Before I leave the kitchen, she says, ‘If I didn’t know that you are an
atheistic communist, I would now bless you with the sign of the cross.’ ‘Do
it, nurse. And I thank you for everything.’’’
After we had to discontinue our preparations foran escape and I was trans-
ferred to a satellite camp of Neuengamme, I wrote my friends in Auschwitz
via Nurse Maria. The inexperience of the guards in that camp enabled me to
send letters by regular mail, thus bypassing the camp censors. Nurse Maria
addressed the reply to me in care of the camp, but she encoded news about
my friends so skillfully that the censors could have no idea of what it was all
about.
466 n the jailers
As Edek Pys reports, Nurse Maria took another step forward at that time:
‘‘When she had decided to work with the resistance movement, she went on
leave to Bregenz (where her family lived). On her return she gave me two revol-
vers,a9mmcaliber with three cartridges and a 6.35 mm caliber with thirteen
cartridges. She said the guns belonged to her father and I should choose one.
I took the 6.35 caliber, of course.’’
October 27, 1944, was a black day for the inmate detail in the ss infirmary.
The attempted escape that the leadership of the resistance organization had
planned and in which the artist Zbyszek from this detail was to participate
was betrayed. Nurse Maria was one of the very few people who knew about
the preparations for an escape. She did not let the shock caused by this failure
disconcert her. On assignment from the resistance movement, she traveled to
Königshütte and Kattowitz in the following weeks and transmitted not only
letters but also fake ids, Polish underground newspapers, and finally explo-
sives. Edek remembers that Nurse Maria was once instructed to hand a small
package to a man in an ss uniform at the Auschwitz railroad station at a pre-
arranged time. To enable the man to identify her, she was supposed to wear a
cape over her nurse’s uniform. Neither Edek nor Nurse Maria knew what was
in the package, but Maria carried out her assignment.
ThereasonforhertransferfromAuschwitzin December1944 cannolonger
be precisely reconstructed. She later told me indignantly that the ss garri-
son physician had her admitted to a sanatorium for morphine addicts even
though she had never taken any narcotics.The only explanation I can give for
Dr.Wirths’s action is that he might have heard rumors about the help she gave
inmates and wanted to put her out of the Political Department’s reach.
After the end of the war Nurse Maria returned toVorarlberg, where she was
arrested by the French occupation forces. Edek Pys has preserved a letter that
she addressed to him in Poland from her place of detention on July 18, 1946.
Here is an excerpt from it:
At present I am in an internment camp! I am suspected of having treated
inmates with phenol during my service in Auschwitz. Don’t laugh, Edek!
This is serious!—You know, I am surrounded by Nazis, ss, Gestapo! I, their
greatest enemy! And I have to listen to the complaints about the injustice
of what people are now doing with them. Then I see in my mind’s eye the
experiences of Auschwitz.
I can see the fiery glow of the pyres; I smell the stench of burned flesh;
I see the miserable processions of returning details, followed by the dead;
I feel the choking worry about you that I had every morning until I saw you
before me again safe and sound; and I could scream into these people’s
faces and blindly lash out at them. The craziest thing about it is that I still
Civilians in Auschwitz n 467
have to keep quiet, for otherwise they might boycott me. But this time will
pass, too, and I shall be free again. What I shall do then I don’t know. I feel
so empty and drained, and I have no joy. It seems to me that I have scat-
tered my wealth of love in Auschwitz. I have reached my objective. What
more can I do?
After she had finally been freed on the basis of interventions by survivors
of Auschwitz, she never again practiced the profession that she had loved so
much. Maria lived in seclusion in Bregenz and worked in a textile factory. Only
once did she make a public appearance—when she was a witness in Warsaw
and passionately and irately hurled her accusation at Commandant Höß.
In May 1957 her great heart stopped beating.
468 n the jailers
Afterward
inmates after liberation
nnn
The advance of the Russian troops brought the history of the extermination
camp Auschwitz to an end. In the wintry cold the inmates were driven away
in miserable processions that have become known as death marches. Many of
those who had been able to save their lives in the camp perished at that time;
because they were not able to continue marching, some froze or starved to
death,while others were shot.Thosewho managed to survive the marches and
ensuing rides, frequently in open freight trains, experienced the final chapter
in the history of the concentration camps in other camps. It was a phase of
hunger beyond measure.
Dr. Georg Straka has described the condition in which the evacuees were
delivered to other camps: ‘‘Driven by blows, they sometimes suddenly moved
forward like a herd of cattle, with one pushing another. It was impossible
to get their names out of them; even the kindest words were not powerful
enough to make them speak. A long, expressionless starewas all. If they made
an effort to answer, their tongues were unable to reach their palates to utter
a sound. All one noticed was their poisonous breath, which seemed to come
from innards already in a state of decomposition.’’
Some inmates met acquaintances in those camps and with their help and
camp experience managed to escape the lowest rung of the hierarchy to which
every new arrival was assigned. However, many did not, and their suffering
did not end until the Allies reached the camps in central Germany—unless
death had come as a surcease earlier.
Among the last camps to be liberated was Theresienstadt. Many prisoners
were transferred there in the very last days after the advancing Allied armies
had caused camps located farther west to be evacuated. A considerable num-
ber of inmates came from Auschwitz on long circuitous routes. H. G. Adler,
the chronicler of Theresienstadt, has described the dissolution caused there
by those transfers in the last days of the war:
Now no rules and regulations were in force anymore, not even camp regu-
lations; the degraded inmates were no longer willing to observe them. If a
human being has reached an end point that surrounds him as an unbridge-
able abyss, a point where stark despair is coupled alternatively with indif-
ference and furious aggressiveness, who would invoke even a modicum of
law and order that might have redounded to the benefit of those unfortu-
nates? How childish and hopeless such an enterprise must have appeared!
These people no longer had any faith; they did not believe in anything or
anyone; they did not believe in themselves anymore. Everything was extin-
guished and devalued. For them there no longer was a friend or breath of
human warmth.
Here is an eyewitness report: ‘‘A few prisoners...aresittingontheground
impassively. They react only to food. The filth and the squalor make it impos-
sible to make out their features. Those greedy expressions of brutish human
animals. It is too horrible to describe. And it is impossible to help them.’’
Elsewhere Adler writes: ‘‘Any attempt at empathy is futile because every life
gathered between the wires is strange and incomprehensible. Nothing of the
existence of these lost souls can be translated into a language that anyone on
the outsidewould understand....Itisnotnecessary to describe these human
beings. Ithasfrequentlybeendone—all toofrequently, Ibelieve—and the hor-
ror of their outward appearance, which grips one only once but soon inspires
only disgust and revulsion, has made commentators overlook the essential
thing: the moral problem that will remain posed for humanity in the future
as well.’’ Adler concludes with this stern admonition: ‘‘Anyone who has not
experienced this destruction himself does not know and will never know. He
must keep silent. He has to listen and examine his mission in his own mind
and as a human being living in the world.’’
n Primo Levi was among the ill inmates who were left behind at the evacua-
tion of Auschwitz; at that timehewas in the Monowitz infirmary. He has given
the following description of the last days of a patient in the anxious ten days
between the evacuation and the liberation:
Now it hit Somogyi, a Hungarian chemist of about fifty, thin, tall, and taci-
turn. He had recovered from typhus and scarlet fever, but now there was
something new. He developed a high fever. Having said nothing for about
five days, he opened his mouth today and said in a strong voice: ‘‘I have a
bread ration under my straw pallet. Divide it among the three of you. I’m
not eating any more.’’
We did not know what to reply but did not touch the bread. Half of his
face was swollen. When he was conscious, he morosely kept silent.
However, that evening and night, and then continually for two days, his
silence was broken by delirium. Following a last endless dream about sub-
mission and slavery, he murmured, ‘‘Jawohl,’’ every time he exhaled. With
every deflation of his pitiful chest, ‘‘Jawohl !’’ resounded, regularly and per-
472 n Afterward
sistently as from a machine, thousands of times, so that one was tempted
to shake him, choke him, or at least get him to change the word.
Levi has described his feelings when the Russian troops finally reached
Monowitz: ‘‘The news did not immediately excite me. For many months I had
known no pain, joy, or fear, except for that uninvolved, remote way that is
characteristic of the camp and that one could call conditional. I thought that
if I now had my earlier faculty for feeling, this would be an extremely exciting
moment.’’
A few months later Mira Honel, who had stayed behind to nurse ill inmates,
also described her feelings on that historic January 27, 1945: ‘‘The Russians
are here, and our torment is ended. Freedom,you are here! I’ve been expecting
you for such a long time and with so much confidence. I was certain that you
would come. It seems to me that I have been victorious. Even though I have
no weapons in my hands, I feel as if I fought to attain you, as if I had devoted
my entire life to this struggle. But why am I so sad now that I have won you
and possess you? I always told myself that I might die of joy on this day. So
why am I not happy now?’’
According to Honel, because the patients had always been forced by blows
to carry out all orders, they thought that everything was permitted after the
departure of the ss. They relieved themselves next to their beds and refused
to lift a finger to safeguard even minimal order. Only gradually could life be
put on an orderly basis again.
The physician Eduard de Wind, who had, like Honel, remained with the
patients, reports that after the departure of the ss the ss clothing depot, the
property depot, and the pantries were plundered in the main camp.Vodka was
found in a cellar, and in the evening some inmates had diarrhea and others
were stinking drunk.
Primo Levi has described the first days after the liberation in the Monowitz
infirmary:
Meanwhile the thaw that we had feared for so many days arrived, and as
the snow gradually melted, the camp was transformed into a nauseating
morass. Dead bodies and garbage polluted the air. And the grim reaper
had not stopped mowing. The sick died in their cold beds by the dozen.
Others dropped dead on the muddy paths as if hit by lightning; these in-
cluded the greediest survivors who, blindly yielding to the imperious urge
of our chronic hunger, had gorged themselves with the meat rations of the
Russians, who were still involved in fighting at the nearby front and sent
these gifts to the camp at irregular intervals—ranging from very little to
enormous amounts.
Inmates after Liberation n 473