Langbein Hermann. People in Auschwitz
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Here is Levi’s balance sheet: ‘‘About 800 of us remained behind in the infir-
mary of Buna-Monowitz. Of these, approximately 500 died of their illnesses
or froze or starved to death before the arrival of the Russians, and another 200
died on the days that followed, despite all the help they received.’’
Tadeusz Chowaniec, a Polish physician who entered the camp three days
after the Russian troops, has provided this report:
In a brick barracks we found several female prisoners, two or more to a
bunk. Was it really the third day after the liberation? Had time stopped for
these women—had nothing changed for them? Only the wild shooting of
the ss men could no longer be heard, and the dogs did not yelp anymore,
but the women still wore their striped garb. They had difficulty moving;
it seemed as though every movement was carefully thought out and as-
sessed. Their expressionless, mostly cold eyes aroused shame in us. Had
they used up all their joy and enthusiasm on the first day, when all the pris-
oners rushed intothe armsof theSovietsoldiers? They had the samebunks,
but now they were free and knew that food was no longer a problem. I was
sure that their apathy would fade and they would enjoy their freedom when
their aching bones, slack muscles, and emaciated bodies had returned to
their normal condition,when they had really and truly been restored to life.
The Russian medical commission diagnosed severe psychological illnesses
in most of the liberated prisoners. Primo Levi has described a case of com-
plete mental ruin. A boy of twelve, called Klein-Kiepura (Little Kiepura), was
a protégé of the camp capo and widely known as ‘‘the little mascot of Buna-
Monowitz.’’ ‘‘Except for his patron no one loved him,’’ writes Levi. ‘‘Well fed
and well dressed, he led a dubious and frivolous favorite’s life in the shade of
power until the last day, an existence interwoven with gossip, informing, and
twisted passions.’’
Klein-Kiepura remained in the camp as a convalescent and like all other
patients was taken from Monowitz to the better-equipped main camp by the
Russians. There Levi encountered him again:
For two days he was silent and lay in bed all doubled up and staring into
space, with clenched fists on his chest. Then he suddenly started talking,
and we yearned for his silence. The little Kiepura spoke as in a dream, and
his dream was that he had been promoted and become a capo. We didn’t
know whetherthis was madness ora child’sbit of black humor. Incessantly
the boy sang and whistled in his bed the Buna marches, the brutal rhythms
to which we marched with our tired feet every evening and morning. He
screamed German commands to a nonexistent group of slaves. ‘‘Get up,
you swine! Understand? Make your beds, but on the double! Shine your
474 n Afterward
shoes! Line up for lice check, foot check! Let me see your feet,you bunch of
pigs. Filthy again, you son of a bitch? You just watch out, I’m not joking. I’ll
catch you yet, and then you’ll be off to the crematorium.’’ He screamed like
a German drill sergeant. ‘‘Line up, dress ranks, face right! Collars down!
Forward march! Keep in step with the music! Stand at attention!’’ After a
pause, he said in a shrill, arrogant voice: ‘‘We’re not in a sanatorium here.
This is a German camp by the name of Auschwitz, and the only way out is
through the chimney; if that’s okay with you, fine; and if you don’t like it,
all you have to do is go into the electric wire.’’
n Elie Wiesel was transferred to Buchenwald, where he was liberated. ‘‘Our
first actionas free men,’’ hewrites, ‘‘was tostorm the pantries.We didn’tthink
of our parents or of taking revenge; our only thought was of bread.’’ Wiesel
was still a child when he was sent to the camp.
Because I was able to live under far more favorable conditions than the vast
majority of the inmates, it is hard to compare my reaction with that of others.
I escaped from an evacuation transport at the Salzwedel railroad station on
April 11, 1945. Later I found out that those who remained on the train were
loaded on boats that were sunk in Lübeck Bay shortly before the end of the
war. I vividly remember the great joy with which the reencounter with nature
filled me when I walked through a bright forest on a soft carpet of moss as
well as on numerous subsequent occasions. On the other hand, the reunion
with human societyaroused only dull feelings in me. I avoided every conversa-
tion that was not absolutely necessary, but I did not shun conversations with
former inmates or prisoners of war. In such circumstances, however, other
inhibitions often arose. Former inmates regarded me, a German, as one of the
privileged people in the camp whose domination had caused their suffering,
and soon I came to sense this. On the first of May, the traditional holiday of
the workers’ movement, which I had not experienced in freedom since 1938,
I was taking a solitary walk along a canal on the periphery of Hannover when
I heard singing in the distance. Russian songs. Somewhere liberated people
were celebrating. At first I wanted to join them, but then I did not have the
nerve to do so. Would they accept me as one of them? Sadly and desolately I
remained alone.
Since I knew that my family was in Vienna, a longing that crowded out all
other feelings led me to disregard the regulation that barred civilians from
using the highways and to set out for my homeland on a bicycle even before
Germany’s final surrender. I delegated my need for revenge to the English,
who had taken me under their protection in Hannover. I gave them an ac-
count of my experiences and observations in the camps that I had written on a
Inmates after Liberation n 475
typewriter placed at mydisposal by them.When I turned in my typescript, I ex-
perienced the first disappointment in this realm, which was to be followed by
many more. My manuscript was accepted as if it were an unimportant docu-
ment, and no supplementary questions were directed at me. I never heard
about any reaction to this memorandum. I completed my trip in barely two
weeks. I was home.
Again and again a former inmate remembers by day and during the night
the other world that he experienced in the camps, just as a convalescent be-
comes aware of his feverish deliriums; he knows that this other world existed,
but his memory of it remains unreal.Years later my brother claimed that I was
still living as I did in the kz. He was the best judge of that because he had
known me best in the period before my internment. Yet my way back to nor-
mal human society was much simpler than that of the vast majority of former
prisoners. I found my relatives and acquaintances again, and I had not physi-
cally deteriorated because there had been an adequate supply of food in the
small labor camp where I had wound up.
‘‘Just as a joint becomes stiff if it is not moved for a long time,’’ writes the
physician Max Mikorey, ‘‘a person’s emotional life also becomes constricted
and stiffens aftersuch prolongedcatastrophic burdens as years of detention in
a kz. Such psychological damage can frequently outlast the original oppres-
sive situation for years and sometimes even become permanent. This applies
particularly to young people, whose free personal development can be very
seriously damaged by a lengthy internment.’’
Some young men have described how they experienced the liberation. Carl
Laszlo is one of these. ‘‘A survivor found himself in a world in which he was
nothing but a question mark. This world seemed alien to him and he felt like
a guest in it.While he thought he was living like other people, he remained so
intimately bound up with the realm of shades that it attracted him more than
the world of life and noise. The great driving force, the desire to survive, be-
came irrelevant, and suicide as a logical consequence and ultimate liberation
could no longer be rejected out of hand.’’
Primo Levi has described his feelings on his journey to his Italian home-
land:
What would we find at home? How much of our selves had been consumed,
extinguished? Were we returning richer or poorer? Stronger or weaker? We
did not know, but we did know that a fresh trial, for good orevil, awaited us
on the threshold of our houses, and we anticipated it with dread. Together
with our tired blood the poison of Auschwitz coursed through our veins.
Where were we to get the strength to start a new life, to break the barriers,
the hedges that proliferate around a forsaken house and empty rooms dur-
476 n Afterward
ing every absence? Soon, on the very next day, we would have to do battle
with as yet unknown enemies inside and outside us. With what weapons,
with what energy, with what willpower? We felt as old as the hills, pressed
to the ground by a year of the most horrible memories, worn out and de-
fenseless.
Tadeusz Borowski has recorded his first thoughts in freedom. He would
like to take a rest from his instincts, ‘‘but first, you know, I’d like to cut a
throat or two, just to rid myself of the camp psychosis and get over my camp
complex, the complex of eternally taking off my cap and having to watch de-
fenseless human beings being beaten and murdered, the complex of angst. I
fear that none of us will ever get rid of all that. I don’t know whether we’ll
survive it, but I wish that some day we’ll get to the point where we call things
by their proper name, as brave people do.’’ Borowski was twenty-three when
he was released from the world of the extermination camps, one year older
than Laszlo and three years younger than Levi. At age twenty-eight he ended
his life, which was destroyed before it had a chance to develop.
Ernst Israel Bornstein, who is Borowski’s age, draws not only on his own
experience. On assignment from an American institute, he has recorded the
biographies of companions in misfortune who are his age. With the detach-
ment of more than a decade, he summarizes his findings as follows: ‘‘It is
impossible to free oneself of the burden that one has borne for years as some-
one condemned to be exterminated, as a dehumanized creature. The years of
angst and oppression have left in the psyche damage that is as irreparable as
damage to the gray matter of the central nervous system. While a former in-
mate of a concentration camp may laugh and be merry with others, he aches
and bleeds inside because the old wounds will not heal. Even though he has
left the spatially limited concentration camp, the terrible atmosphere of the
camp still encompasses him; it is as though the kz were still inside him.’’
Elie Wiesel has characterized the survivors in these words: ‘‘These human
beings have been amputated, but instead of lacking a leg or an eye, they lack
the will to live and joie de vivre. They are no longer human beings. The shock
caused a spring inside them to snap. Sooner or later the consequences become
apparent.’’
Women have also describedtheirfeelings afterthe liberation.RuthKersting
said: ‘‘After theliberation, I didn’t want tosee humans—onlyanimals.’’ People
had caused her too great a disappointment. Charlotte Delbo writes about a
French friend: ‘‘She too believes that the others don’t understand her.’’ The
littleword ‘‘too’’ indicates that Delbo frequently had similar experiences. Dora
Lorska wrote in 1965: ‘‘The impression I had on my first day (in Auschwitz)
was, so to speak, a mixture of hell and insane asylum, and I am still not en-
Inmates after Liberation n 477
tirely rid of this experience.’’ Soon after making this statement, she died at the
age of fifty-two. Grete Salus writes: ‘‘Most people have some physical defect,
but the crack in the foundation of our human existence is far less curable.’’
Elsewhere she writes: ‘‘Only now do we feel the wounds that have been in-
flicted on us. Suddenly our firm skin is no longer there; in fact, our innards
have, as it were, been turned inside out and shrink from any contact with this
world.’’
David Rousset has summed up his reflections in these words:
The world of the concentration camps is isolated and self-contained. It
continues to exist on earth as a dead star that carries corpses. Normal peo-
ple do not know that anything is possible. Even if the eyewitness reports
compel their minds to admit it, their muscles do not believe it.The inmates
of the concentration camps know it. A soldier who spent months under
fire at the front has become acquainted with death. Every hour of their lives
death dwelt with the inmates of the concentration camps and showed them
all its faces.They have touched all its masks.They have experienced fear as
an ever-present obsession. They have before their eyes the humiliation of
the beatings, the weakness of the body under the whip. They have learned
how devastating hunger can be. For years they moved through the fantas-
tic scenery of every destroyed human dignity. They are separated from the
others by an experience that is impossible to convey.
All of us have probably learned that even those close to us react with in-
comprehension, that a kind of jealousy can actually manifest itself when what
has been experienced and lived through, what separates us from the others,
once again asserts itself. ‘‘When you arewith an Auschwitzer,you immediately
behave quite differently.’’ We frequently hear such statements.
A team of physicians at the psychiatric clinic of the Cracow Medical Acad-
emy found in an examination of seventy-seven survivors of Auschwitz that
twenty-two of them have a stronger relationship with friends from the camp
than with friends from normal life. The former are even closer to them than
members of their immediate family. Auschwitzers were not even able to adapt
fully to communities in which life was organized collectively. When I asked
one of the leaders of an Israeli kibbutz especially rich in tradition whether
the Auschwitzers in that community still differed from the others after two
decades, he replied that ‘‘they all bear a burden.’’
The world around us promotes a group exclusivity of the Auschwitzers.We
harbored the vague idea that after Auschwitz everything would have to change
for the better, that mankind would learn a lesson from our experiences. Then
we had to realize that people were not even interested in them. All too often
478 n Afterward
the vapid, obtrusive pity that we experienced was like an escape to conven-
tional feelings and, in fact, gave the impression of dishonesty.
German psychiatrists have reported about a Jewish woman who had been
deported to Auschwitz from France at the age of eighteen and delayed her re-
turn home because shewas afraid of what shewould find there. She finally did
return and described her feelings as follows: ‘‘I came back expecting a differ-
ent reception after everything I had gone through. The indifference of people
to the past hurt me. I no longer understood them, and they no longer under-
stood me.This is how it has been to this day. I could not stand the superficial
compassion of my coreligionists who had been spared.’’
JennySpritzer writes: ‘‘I correspond with most of my friends and colleagues
(from Auschwitz) who lived to see the end of the war and thus their liberation.
Strangely enough, they unanimously claim that they are actually disappointed
with life in freedom. What is the reason for this? Did we imagine life as too
beautiful?’’ Grete Salus has given an answer to this question: ‘‘We thought
that we would find peace in the heart of a world that was beating for us and
for our fate. That this is not so is a heavy blow for us that makes it difficult
for us to find ourselves again. I am sure we are too demanding and during
our imprisonment fashioned a world in our dreams that does not and cannot
exist. We have experienced an extreme, real evil. We thought we would now
experience the other extreme, real goodness.We have lost the proper sense of
proportion and must first find the road between these two extremes.’’
Lucie Adelsberger writes: ‘‘It is not only the world around us that has
changed; we ourselves have been reshaped. In fairy tales and legends we read
that angels and messengers from heaven who are sent down to earth go astray
and cannot find their way. Some of this also applies to those who return to
earth from hell. Human ideas and standards dissolved. Everything there was
oversized and excessive in its dynamics, and consequently our conceptions
were changed and it is hard to get accustomed to normative paths again.
After so much meanness and misfortune one expects a plethora of kindness
and happiness that is not of this world.’’ Adelsberger also points to another
change: ‘‘Our sense of proportion has shifted in another respect as well, and
perhaps this must be regarded as a defect. If one has experienced the dissolu-
tion of everything—moneyand property, honorand fame—which leftonly the
inner bearing of a person, one develops a profound disdain for the externals
of life.’’
This has been confirmed by many. Thus the team of Polish psychiatrists
has documented this disdain by quoting such statements of survivors as ‘‘Ma-
terial matters are now less important to me’’ or ‘‘In the struggle forexistence I
have become a minimalist; I am satisfied with food and a roof over my head.’’
Inmates after Liberation n 479
Other reactions to the past in a kz must be registered as well. Persons who
had learned in thecamps at a veryearlyage that one can survive only if one dis-
regards all regulations and prohibitions and observes ‘‘Never get caught’’ as
one’s only commandment have frequently become criminals. Moral scruples
appear ludicrous to such people. They brush aside warnings of older people
because those people failed miserably with their moral ideas in Auschwitz,
while the younger ones, who had been forced to rely on their inner resources,
coped with life far better.
The thick skin around our emotional world that protected us in the camp
separates us from people with normal feelings in freedom. ‘‘For a long time I
found it ridiculous when I saw people weep at funerals.’’ The team of Polish
psychiatrists cites such a statement as typical.
On my return to Vienna in May 1945, I learned that my Viennese friends
Rudi Friemel,Vickerl Vesely, and Ernst Burger had been hanged shortly before
the evacuation. The last-named was the person with whom I had the greatest
mutual understanding and whom I esteemed the most. I reacted to this news,
which was a great blow to me, in typical Auschwitz fashion: it has happened,
and one has to come to terms with it. After I had given a lecture on Ausch-
witz, a woman came up to me and asked whether I had by any chance met a
certain Rudi Friemel in the camp. I answered in the affirmative, and she won-
dered what had become of him. I replied briefly and soberly that Friemel was
hanged in the roll call area on December 30, 1944. The woman broke down
and wept uncontrollably. Afterward my brother, who had witnessed this inci-
dent, berated me for having given her this news so harshly and abruptly. My
only response was this: ‘‘Well, who broke this news gently to me?’’Ittookmea
very long time to put my life back on a normal track. I have remained skeptical
about public outbursts of emotion.
On one occasion Dov Paisikovic told me that he felt neither joy nor pain.
Lord Russell of Liverpool discerned such an emotional emptiness in Kitty
Hart, who had been deported to Auschwitz at the age of fourteen: ‘‘She be-
lieves that basically there is no limit to a human being’s emotional endurance.
At first a person feels impotent hatred, but then a point is suddenly reached
where all feelings of love and hatred have been deadened and nothing is left
but a kind of indifference. Even when she learned, at the end of the war, about
the death of her father, whom she had loved very much, she felt no pain. She
made every effort to mourn him, but she no longer had any feelings—no love,
no hatred, no bitterness.’’
n As a result of all this, strange habits become apparent. For a long time I did
not like it when someone said, ‘‘After you,’’ because in the camp an inmate
480 n Afterward
always had to walk ahead of the escorting guard. Dr.Wanda Poltawska reports
about a woman who was panic-stricken when someone walked behind her.
This fear was incomprehensible to her. She had been sent to Auschwitz as a
small child and had no conscious memory of her time in the camp. I am in the
habit of transgressing against prohibitions even when this makes no sense at
all. If, for example, there is a zebra stripe indicating a pedestrian crossing, I
am tempted to walk just outside this stripe even if that is not a shortcut for
me. An acquaintance of mine is reluctant to enter a telephone booth; he is
evidently afraid of feeling locked in.
The same Frenchwoman who complained to the psychiatrists about the
lack of comprehensionand thesuperficialcompassion that sheperceived after
herreturnmarriedaformerkz inmate. ‘‘If I go to the country with my hus-
band and see a freight train with cattle cars at a railway crossing, I nod and
say nothing but have it in my head and heart again. It’s the same when I see
smoke rising somewhere, and that’s the way it has been for eighteen years
now.’’
There is another burden that we have to bear. Many years later I caught
myself instinctively asking myself when I met a person, ‘‘How would he have
behaved in Auschwitz? Would he have stood the test or failed?’’ Rudolf Vrba
has described the same phenomenon: ‘‘We thought that we had become ac-
climated, but a barrier always remained. There was always something that re-
minded us of our recent past. Time and time again we noticed that we were
relating everything to Auschwitz and judging everything by Auschwitz stan-
dards that no one else knew or understood. Every time we thought we were
normal people, our past again rose before us and destroyed our illusions.’’
Grete Salus has described thesameaffliction: ‘‘UnfortunatelyI catch myself
trying to read what is behind persons’ faces and to imagine how they would
behave in one situation or another. And when I view them in that way, I see
almost nothing but failures. This is a heavy burden when it is added to all the
other things that we kz people continue to bear in life.’’
There are even heavier burdens. In Auschwitz Dounia Ourisson-Wasser-
strom was compelled to watch Boger pick up a small child by his legs and kill
him by beating his head against the wall. Then she had to wash off the blood.
‘‘Since then I haven’t been able to look at a child without crying,’’ she says.
When she became pregnant after the liberation, she had an abortion.
Orli Reichert-Wald also avoidedthe sight of children after the liberation. As
the camp elder in the infirmary, she had to watch all too often how ss medics
killed babies and infants by injecting them with poison. Nor was she able to
tolerate music, since it always reminded her of the camp orchestra that had
to play during the transport of selectees from the infirmary in order to drown
Inmates after Liberation n 481
out the moans and screams of those who were being taken to the gas cham-
ber. Although Orli was spared the fate of a Muselmann in Auschwitz and was
able to lead a well-ordered life after the liberation, her nervous system was
destroyed. I called on her in 1960, when witnesses were being sought for the
Frankfurt trial of ss guards in Auschwitz. After all, by virtue of her position
in the camp she had learned more than most others. When she checked a list
of names that I had handed her, her hands trembled so much that I tried to
take the list from her in order to end her obvious torment. However, she in-
sisted on reading all of it, gave me a detailed account of her recollections, and
refused to cut short a conversation that so visibly agitated her. Less than two
years later, Orli was buried, and a friend said that her fourth attempt at com-
mitting suicide had been successful. According to her friend Jeanne Juda, ‘‘She
was always distressed by the belief that she had not done even more for the
inmates.’’ Yet therewas hardly anyone else who did his or her job at Auschwitz
as selflessly as Orli.
n Even if the life of many Auschwitzers is normal by day, it differs from that
of the others; there are the nights, the dreams.
Edith Bruck was deported at the age of twelve. She has this to say about
the early period of regained freedom: ‘‘I often dreamt about death, blood, and
camps, and sometimes I dreaded falling asleep because the night was nothing
but a nightmare.’’
Elisabeth Guttenberger was seventeen when she was deported to Ausch-
witz as a Gypsy. She lost thirty relatives there. Many years later she said: ‘‘I
think it is an understatement when I say that I have dreamt of Auschwitz a
thousand times, about that terrible time when hunger and death were domi-
nant. I was a healthy girl when they sent me there. But I was sick when I left
the camp, and I am still sick today.’’
Primo Levi was another person plagued by dreams:
It took me many months (after returning home) to shed my habit of always
looking down while walking, as if I were constantly in search of some-
thing to eat or of things that could quickly be pocketed and exchanged for
bread. And I am still afflicted with a horrible dream that sometimes re-
curs frequently and at other times rarely. It is a dream within a dream; its
details vary but its substance remains the same. I am sitting at the family
table, am among friends, at work, or in a verdant landscape; at any rate,
the environment is friendly, apparently relaxed and devoid of pain. Yet I am
beset by a faint, yet deep feeling of apprehension, a clear presentiment of a
threatening danger. And, as a matter of fact, either gradually or with bru-
tal suddenness everything around me dissolves in the course of the dream;
482 n Afterward
the surroundings, the walls, and the people recede, and my feeling of op-
pression increases, becomes more urgent and more distinct. All around me
is chaos; I am alone in the center of a gray, whirling void, and suddenly I
know what it means, have always known it. I am in the camp again, noth-
ing is real but the camp, everything else was a brief breather, a hallucina-
tion, a dream—the family, burgeoning nature, the home.The inner dream,
the dream of peace, has ended, but the outer dream goes on icily. I hear a
well-known voice, a single word, not commanding but short and muted,
the morning command of Auschwitz, a foreign word that is dreaded and
expected: ‘‘Wstawacˇ’’ (rise).
Dov Paisikovic told me in 1968 that he frequently hits his wife in his sleep.
‘‘My worst dreams,’’ he said ‘‘are those in which the mountains of corpses
grow higher and start moving toward me.’’ The dead bodies that he and the
other members of the Sonderkommando had to take to the ovens and fiery
pits of Auschwitz expanded in the heat, and consequently it was possible for
these piles to set themselves in motion.
André Lettich, who came to the camp as a mature man and after the libera-
tion practiced medicine in France again, toldme in 1971 that hewas repeatedly
pursued by nightmares, even though the day before he had in no way been
reminded of Auschwitz. The same thing was reported by Franz Danimann. As
for me, I do not dream of the camp very often, and when I do, my dream is
far less torturous—probably because I suffered much less than Guttenberger,
Levi,or Paisikovic, perhaps because I repeatedlyconcern myself with this sub-
ject during the day. Most of my dreams about the camp relate to the bunker,
where I was closest to death.
n ErichGumbel,a psychoanalyst who gatheredhis material about this subject
in Israel, writes that many former inmates lead a double life. Outwardly they
appear to be normal, but in their dreams they continue to be persecuted; they
suffer from feelings of guilt and cannot understand why they, of all people,
survived the kz. Gumbel adds that it is hard to help them. H. Bensheim, who
examined patients in the General Workers’ Hospital in Haifa, was also fre-
quently asked, ‘‘Why did I survive?’’
At the beginning of the war Ernst Papanek, who was living in Paris at the
time, took care of Emil Geisler, who had fled there from Germany as a child
because he was Jewish and therefore had to fear for his life. Geisler was de-
ported to Auschwitz at the age of sixteen. He managed to escape from the
extermination camp and thus was the only survivor of the seventy adolescents
on his transport. When Papanek encountered him again in an Israeli kibbutz
in 1956, Geisler was very pleased but strikingly taciturn. Papanek had an ex-
Inmates after Liberation n 483