Langbein Hermann. People in Auschwitz

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planation for the strange behavior of Geisler, who was now a grown man:

‘‘Behind every question, no matter how innocent, they hear the voice of the

investigating judge: ‘Why did you survive and the others die? What did you

do? What do you know?’ And in the background of all these questions there

is this one: ‘Whom did you betray?’’’

Like to many others, decades later Jean Améry is still distressed by the re-

proach that he did not take revenge on his tormenters. ‘‘That they and I did

not rise up,’’ he writes, ‘‘remains our very painful wound that keeps opening

up.’’ When the Dutchman Eduard de Wind entered the Birkenau camp com-

plex after his liberation, he felt that he was a bad person. ‘‘What gives me the

right to live? Why am I better oﬀ than the millions who perished?’’

Elie Wiesel writes: ‘‘I am alive, therefore I am guilty. I am still here be-

cause a friend, a comrade, or an unknown person died in my stead.’’ Wiesel

has analyzed how this guilt feeling could arise. ‘‘The number alone, the quota,

counted. Therefore an inmate who had been spared, especially after a selec-

tion, could not suppress a ﬁrst reaction: a feeling of joy. After one moment,

one week, or an eternity, this angst-laden joy was transformed into guilt. The

liberating feeling of having been spared is tantamount to this confession: I

congratulate myself on having made another inmate go in my stead.’’

At examinations of former kz inmates, Paul Matussek got to hear state-

ments like this one: ‘‘We Jews are guilty, too, and perhaps more than the

others. We have failed.’’

Ella Lingens speaks for many who received preferential positions as Ger-

mans when she writes:

And doesn’t every one of us repatriates walk around with a guilt feeling

that our henchmen so seldom have and that derives from doubt? Am I alive

because the others have died in my stead? Because I had my own bed with

two blankets even though I knew that four women were lying in another

bed with only one blanket and could never really sleep? Because I was able

to eat a double ration of bread since the patient for whom the block had

still received a ration was unconscious and at death’s door and therefore

unable to eat it? Becausea grateful patient had ‘‘organized’’ warm felt boots

for me from the property depot, while the vast majority of the women were

rubbing their frozen feet raw in their heavy wooden shoes? Because I had

a job that was part of the machinery created by the ss to keep the camp

from sinking into a chaos from which no productivity of any kind could be

extracted anymore? Because in all our wretchedness we were indispensable

to the powers that be and our survival was important to them, because we

thus constituted a little cog in this enormous machinery of destruction?

Simon Laks and René Coudy also write with unsparing frankness:

484 n Afterward

Only a very small number of kz inmates returned. All those who survived

Auschwitz owe this not just to luck, toughness, willpower, or resistance.

These factors certainly contributed eﬀectively to our rescue, but they would

surely have proved inadequate if we had not recognized with lightning

speed that we had to push aside a major part of our old morality, our ‘‘hu-

manity,’’ and all the beneﬁts of our civilization to keep from going under in

the camp—in short, that we had to use all our resources to integrate our-

selves into the society of which we had become a part, to adapt ourselves

to its mode of thinking, its customs, its views, its educational methods,

and its laws. We are well aware that, given the extent to which we adapted

both instinctively and knowingly, we all became more or less inhuman and

therefore objectionable to the society to which we were fortunate enough

to return. A deep abyss separates us from that society, possibly forever. Its

literary, moral, emotional, and even humorous vocabulary is far too limited

to speak in our favor. Even the most truthful reports and the most precise

descriptions can never reproduce the reality to which we were exposed. We

make no eﬀort to ﬁll up this abyss because we know that this would be

impossible. We are a bit like Pirandello’s characters in search of an author

who could tell our story, but we are sure that we shall never ﬁnd one.

Primo Levi speaks of the shame ‘‘felt by a righteous man, a guilt imposed

on him by another that torments him because it exists, because it has been ir-

revocably brought into the world of existing things, and because his good will

is worth little or nothing and not strong enough to prevent it.’’ This shame

beset Levi and his fellow suﬀerers when they were liberated by Russian troops

‘‘because we felt that there could never be anything good or pure enough to

expunge our past and that the traces of sinfulness would remain in us forever,

in the memory of those who experienced it, in the places where it happened

and in the reports that we would make about it. For this reason—and this is

the enormous privilege of our generation and of my people—no one has ever

been better able than we to comprehend the incurable nature of sinfulness

that spreads like a contagious disease.’’

In the fall of 1960 Imo Moszkowicz, who was interned as an adolescent,

wrote to the Frankfurt court that he did not want to appear as a witness: ‘‘If I

could present my nightmares in court, I would surely be an important witness.

But, except for cold sweat, there is not much left in the morning....Ican’t

let the time in the camp erupt in me again. I have to forget it—otherwise, I’ll

eventually croak from it.’’ Moszkowicz was interned as a teenager.

n In 1967, when Michal Kula, a graduate engineer, was questioned by a Polish

judge about his experiences in Auschwitz, hewas ﬁfty-six years old.The other-

Inmates after Liberation n 485

wise sober record concludes with these words: ‘‘At present my state of health

is bad. The Auschwitz concentration camp branded me with the mark of fear,

anxiety, and nervous breakdown. I often ﬁnd myself on the verge of losing my

will to live. I suﬀer from insomnia and often dream that I am in Auschwitz.

Every time I wake up I am happy to be lying in my bed. Those nights are a

nightmare for me.’’ Kula died a year later.

Even as a young girl, Hermine Horvath had to endure persecutions and hu-

miliations before she was deported to Auschwitz from southern Burgenland

as a Gypsy in 1943. In 1958 she spoke about her fate in the Gypsy camp:

I was often assigned to the night watch on Block 27. The tracks to the cre-

matoriums were right next to our block. The oppressive stench of burned

human ﬂesh was constantly in the air.The distance between us and the cre-

matorium was about 200 or 300 meters. Men had to dig a large pit there,

and a ﬁre burned in it. When I was on night watch again, all the blocks

were ordered to be locked; no one was permitted to leave or even look

out. This was the surest sign that thousands were being driven to their

deaths again. I could hear terrible screams. These forced me to open the

gate and look out, even though I knew that if I was caught, I would be put

to death. What I saw was so horrible that I fainted. Live people were being

thrown in the ﬁre. Since that hour I have been suﬀering from epileptic

seizures.

Frau Horvath has described her condition as follows: ‘‘The greatest desire

would be to be able to work again, but I can’t do it. If the sun shines on my

head just a bit, I simply fall down. The physicians have no real understanding

of any of that.Theycan’t imagine what we lived through, and they may believe

that I don’t want to work.’’ Frau Horvath died a few months later, not even

thirty-ﬁve years old.

Manydied untimelydeaths even though they seemed tobe relatively healthy

right after their liberation. Dr. Joseph Heller, who examined deportees who

had returned to France, reported that ‘‘one of the most astonishing phe-

nomena noted in returnees from the camps was the premature aging of the

former inmates.’’

C. B. was misused in Auschwitz by Horst Schumann for sterilization ex-

periments and castrated. At that time he was not even twenty-ﬁve. In 1946

he gave this testimony in Nuremberg: ‘‘I feel very dispirited and am ashamed

of my castration. The worst thing is that I have no future anymore. I eat very

little and still grow fat.’’ In the transcript it is noted: ‘‘While the witness is

speaking, he starts to cry.’’

During the same experiments in Auschwitz, Benno C., twenty-one years of

age, had one testicle removed. According to a medical report, in freedom he

486 n Afterward

was unable to shed the feeling that this caused everyone to look at him. He

was engaged to be married three times, but each time that C. told his ﬁancée

about this operation, she broke the engagement. The physician’s diagnosis

was ‘‘psychological impotence.’’

The frequentlycited Grete Salus has found valid words foranother problem

as well: ‘‘The proverb ‘Time heals all wounds’ seems to have been turned into

its opposite among us. The greater the elapsed time and our distance from

our experiences become, the more we seem to forget what value our bare lives

used to have for us. We are becoming fastidious, perhaps too fastidious, as

creditors of a debt whose collection is an almost hopeless undertaking. Some

of us have become quite apathetic; many have returned to the past and wal-

lowed in their pain; and still others despair and go farther and farther astray

in a jungle with no exit.’’

n It is, however, not my intention to paint a one-sided picture of all survivors

of Auschwitz almost breaking down under the load of their memories. If an

uninvolved person hears some conversations between Auschwitzers about the

time they spent in the camp together, he may get the impression that they as-

sociate only cheerful memories with that place. ‘‘I remember primarily funny

incidents in Auschwitz.’’ This statement by Sonja Fischmann-Fritz applies not

only to her.

When I was in Israel in 1968, I received an invitation from a woman I knew

in Auschwitz. I asked her to invite friends from her time in Auschwitz as well

because I was collecting material for this study and hoped that talking with

them would give me valuable information. I knew that in Auschwitz she and

her friends had been housed in the staﬀ building, the home of members of

the details that were doing clerical work for the ss. I shall always remember

that afternoon in Ramla. Twenty women, almost all of them deported on the

ﬁrst transports from Slovakia, had gathered in the apartment. In deference

to me they spoke German; after all, knowledge of that language had been re-

quired for an assignment to a good detail. Nevertheless, I received very little

information for my work because they all talked at the same time, reminded

one another of funny episodes, laughed, and had a rip-roaring good time. An

unsuspecting listener might have believed that these women were exchanging

beautiful memories of their youth.

The American psychiatrist Klaus D. Hoppe observed during serial exami-

nations of survivors with marked psychological impairments that depressing

experiences from the period of persecution were frequently minimized and

limited in their signiﬁcance—evidently because remembering them caused

too much pain.There may be a simpler reason whyaccounts of funnyepisodes

are dominant in many conversations between Auschwitzers. We need not re-

Inmates after Liberation n 487

mind each other of selections and mountains of corpses.To be sure, survivors

of Auschwitz who had to exist there on the bottommost rung of the camp

hierarchy have no memories that can provide amusement. Only those who

were exempted from starvation can remember episodes that can afterward be

laughed about.

Many feel a need to revisit the place where they had to experience so much.

I know some Poles who live in the vicinity of Auschwitz and for a long time

made pilgrimages to ‘‘their’’ Auschwitz every Sunday. On many occasions I

observed that Auschwitzers behave strangely in the former camp. If one of

them meets a stranger in that place, which is now the site of a museum, he

acts like a host. Should one call what transpires when an Auschwitzer guides

outsiders through ‘‘his camp’’ a kind of local patriotism or pride? I observed

such a reaction in myself when I visited the camp again. Between 1954 and

1961, when I was the general secretary of the International Auschwitz Com-

mittee, I frequently went to Auschwitz, the place repeatedly chosen by the

committee for its conferences. When our deliberations had been completed, I

usually took a solitary walk through the camp—undisturbed because the mu-

seum was closed. It is hard to describe my feelings on such occasions. The

present became unreal. Every corner stirred memories, but the past remained

unreal as well. I felt as though I were walking between eras.

While Auschwitz acts like a magnet on many, others strive desperately to

repress any memory of it. When I was looking for witnesses for the Ausch-

witz trial in Frankfurt and contacted two women who must have learned more

in the camp than the average inmate, the replies I received were not from

them but from their relatives. One went as follows: ‘‘She desires to have no

more contact with Auschwitz because she hopes that this will cure her ner-

vous condition.’’ The husband of the other woman asked me not to write her

anymore because she did not want to be reminded of the past, lived only for

her children, and never talked about Auschwitz. I fear, however, that those

two women exemplify what Gisa Landau says about herself: ‘‘I would like to

forget the camp, but that can’t be done.’’

Othershave decidedto continueoccupying themselves withwhathappened

in Auschwitz because they feel duty-bound to do so. With a self-sacriﬁcing

spirit that commands respect, Auschwitzers have been working for years in

the camp museum, which includes an archive of great value for the study of

contemporary history. They have taken it upon themselves to live in the camp

area whose atmosphere surrounds them day and night. Henryk Porebski re-

peatedly wentinto thecamp anddid not letbureaucraticandtechnicalimpedi-

ments discourage him. Finally, in July 1961 the documents that the inmates

on the Sonderkommando had buried—and that Porebski had known about—

were found near the ruins of Crematorium III amid buttons, bottles, cutlery,

488 n Afterward

Hungarian, Czech, German, and Polish coins as well as other remnants from

the property of murdered prisoners.

The fate of the prisoners in Auschwitz varied greatly, and so do the sur-

vivors’ memories of their time in the camp. For the vast majority of them it

meant a sum total of suﬀerings, humiliations, and shocks that is too great for

their memory. To many Germans, Auschwitz is not merely a memory of terror

and trouble; the time spent there was for them that epoch in their lives when

they possessed an abundance of power they did not even come close to having

in any other period of their lives. This is especially true of criminals who were

despised and banished before and after the kz but made everyone in the camp

tremble. By virtue of their positions, they could indulge in pasha-like whims

and humiliate people who would have avoided any contact with them in an-

other situation. In fact they were courted by such inmates. In Auschwitz, and

only during that period, they felt appreciated.

Not only German criminals and thosewho had adapted to them in an eﬀort

to join them at the top of the inmate hierarchy, but also German political pris-

oners, who clearly distanced themselves from the criminal upper crust of the

camp, associate with Auschwitz the memory of a time when they were more

important than in any other period of their lives. Even afterward they still feel

superior to those who knew the camp from the perspective of an anonymous

person among the gray mass of prisoners. In some of them this has reached

the point where they like to play the role of an infallible expert.

Walter Petzold fancies himself in such a role. For almost four years he was

a capo of various details. Because of his camp experience and good reputa-

tion as a political prisoner, he was appointed to an arbitration commission

that was to make decisions in controversial cases involving former inmates

who did forced labor for the Buna Works and after the end of the war de-

manded compensation from IG Farben.With great assurance Petzold rejected

as incorrect the accounts by former inmates of Buna-Monowitz that did not

accord with his recollection. Petzold did not believe that a certain factor ap-

plied to him—namely, that everyone has necessarily preserved in his memory

a one-sided picture from his perspective and that no one could know every-

thing about a camp from his own experience. He was also called to Frankfurt

as a witness in the Auschwitz trial. After most of the eyewitness testimony had

been given, the court went to Auschwitz for an on-site inspection. It turned

out that Petzold’sprecisely presented testimony must have been erroneousbe-

cause it was impossible to see from the place he had speciﬁed what he claimed

to have observed from it.When the prosecutor in the Auschwitz trial inVienna

pointed out to him that some of his testimony was in contradiction to clearly

documented facts, Petzold responded harshly, ‘‘Mr. Prosecutor, who was in

Auschwitz, you or I?’’

Inmates after Liberation n 489

Before his detention in the kz, Ludwig Wörl had lived in rather modest

circumstances in Munich. As the ﬁrst camp elder with a red triangle in Ausch-

witz, a man who preserved his sense of political responsibility in this top posi-

tion, he contributed a great deal to the improvement of conditions. After his

liberation he could not resign himself to the fact that he was no longer the

camp elder—that is, the top man. Having returned to his modest milieu, he

felt misunderstood and insuﬃciently appreciated, and he indiscriminately at-

tacked all comrades who had occupied a lower position in Auschwitz than he

had but in freedom belonged to a higher social stratum. He wound up quar-

reling with God and the world. His bitterness developed into a persecution

complex.When he fell ill, he resisted any medical treatment because he feared

a physician might ‘‘inject’’ him—that is, kill him in the Auschwitz style. ‘‘He

viewed himself as the great man of Auschwitz,’’ said Werner Krumme, who

was his friend in Auschwitz and afterward in Munich. ‘‘He thought he was the

only authority on all matters involving Auschwitz. He probably imagined that

hewould be oﬀered an important political position, though he had no qualiﬁ-

cations forone.’’ In Wörl’s case, too, the eﬀort to appear as an unimpeachable

authority in all matters relating to Auschwitz resulted in having a part of his

testimony in the Auschwitz trial disproved by an on-site inspection. With the

exception of the statements given by Petzold and Wörl, nearly all of the other

ones were conﬁrmed by such inspections.

It was primarily Germans who remembered Auschwitz as their ‘‘great

time,’’ but they were not the only ones. At a conference Ella Lingens reported

about an Austrian Jew who said the years he spent in Auschwitz were his last

good period. He was on the staﬀ of the inﬁrmary there, which spared him the

worst, and within modest bounds he had chances to help inmates he knew.

After the liberation he was incapable of resuming a normal life.

n For all those who survived the camp, Auschwitz has remained the central

experience accompanying the rest of their lives.

The psychiatrist Eduard de Wind, who has experienced this in himself and

in many patients, has come to this interesting conclusion: ‘‘I regard it as en-

tirely possible that compulsive thinking about the camp, which so often ap-

pears in former inmates as a kind of obsessive-compulsive syndrome, and

even nightmares about the camp actually have a consolatory function. A

former inmate cannot think of the future without thinking of death, but when

he remembers what he has suﬀered he also has the feeling that despite every-

thing he did not die but instead pulled through. Thus the memory of his ter-

rible experiences also has a consoling function.’’

Dr. Wanda Poltawska writes: ‘‘I want to forget, but I can’t. This is not a

problem of willpower; here thewill alone is not suﬃcient. Perhaps one should

490 n Afterward

do the opposite: not try to forget but always think of it, think of it so intensely

that such situations will never be repeated for anyone. Would this relieve the

tense anxiety states and horrible memories?’’

Similar considerations inﬂuenced my decision to occupy myself for years

with problems related to complex situation of Auschwitz and accept the fact

that this does not diminish the distance between those leading normal lives

and myself. I had to learn to avoid ﬁne, big phrases like ‘‘neveragain.’’ No mat-

ter how impressive these may sound, history since 1945 has shown that the

possibility of repetitions cannot be easily excluded. For this very reason the

study of interpersonal relationships in as extreme a situation as was deliber-

ately created in Auschwitz appears to be especially important. It should serve

as a warningbydemonstrating what sorts of behavior patterns canbe imposed

on human beings.

The general statements that I have made about Germans in the camp apply

to me as well. I did not wear the armband of a functionary, but in no other

period of my life did I shoulder as much responsibility as I did in my two years

in Auschwitz. In that sense Auschwitz was a ‘‘great time’’ in my life, too. One

is ﬂattered to be occasionally reminded of what even an inmate could achieve

under exceptionally favorable conditions. Self-reproaches are the other side

of the coin. I have been asked if this, that, or the other thing should not have

been tried, whether I was not infected by the brutal harshness of the camp

atmosphere. All things considered, I ﬁnd that my constant occupation with

this past has more of a consoling than a burdening eﬀect on me.

When we, the survivors who have made it our task to acquaint coming gen-

erations with what became possible in Nazi extermination camps, want to

present the facts to others, we have gotten into the habit—independently of

one another and without any prearrangement—of saying nothing about our

most horrendous experiences because they are beyond the human power of

imagination. If knowledge of Auschwitz is to be beneﬁcial, those who have

experienced the camp must try to be considerate of those who learn about it

many years later.

n We have taken on a function that has been discussed by German psychia-

trists: ‘‘Whether or not they know or want it, objective social reality has cast

people who were once deprived of all rights in the role of prosecutors of all

other people—especially Germans, of course.’’ Many of us perform this func-

tion consciously. The impetus for the Auschwitz trials was provided by sur-

vivors of the camp. The same psychiatrists have also noted a certain social

isolation, ‘‘amultilayeredphenomenonthat onlypartiallyderivesfromthesuf-

ferings in the camp and the transplantation to a new environment. Though

these factors may be regressive, in many survivors the feeling of social exclu-

Inmates after Liberation n 491

sion increases, even if people around them are anything but uncomprehend-

ing and indiﬀerent. Someone who was in a concentration camp is a marked

man and uninhibited contact with him is more diﬃcult in every instance.’’ I

can only conﬁrm such insights.

Many physicians have studied the consequences of internment in an exter-

mination camp. Psychiatrists who have themselves experienced such an im-

prisonment are in a much more advantageous position for this sort of study

than their colleagues—not only because they can draw on their own experi-

ences, but also because patients treated by them are more likely to shed the

inhibitions caused by the fear that the physician might not believe every-

thing they told him. Psychiatrists who lack the bond of a shared camp experi-

ence with their patients have complained about the inhibiting eﬀects of this

fear.

From his investigations Professor Leo Eitinger, who was himself in Ausch-

witz, gained the insight that survivors of the concentration camps cannot be

compared with other patients who have been described in professional pub-

lications. German psychiatrists have conﬁrmed this. ‘‘Unlike a returnee who

was injured in thewar, a survivorof a kl simply is not a returnee.’’ Particularly

those who were persecuted for ‘‘racial’’ reasons generally lost their families as

well as the roots that had bound them to their homeland.Thus Ernst-Günther

Schenck’s comparisons with prisoners of war are not valid.

In support of his thesis, Eitinger points out that while history has recorded

various forms of slavery as well as attempts by victors to exterminate defeated

nations, the Hitler regime was the ﬁrst to place the capabilities of modern

technology in the service of the painstakingly planned extermination of hu-

man groups. Hence survivors from these groups oﬀer an investigator two ex-

ceptional opportunities. Never before has a physician been able to examine

so many individuals who were sentenced to death but who remained alive be-

cause the end of the war impeded the completion of the work of destruction.

The families of those destined to die were murdered, their lives completely

destroyed and their world reduced to rubble. As a result, they not only suf-

fered a psychophysical shock of the greatest magnitude but afterward were

isolated in the world without any anchorage. Since then, many of them have

been living in ‘‘incurable loneliness.’’

Eitinger documents his ﬁndings with statistical material that he gathered

in Israel in 1961 and 1962,when he questioned 554 formerconcentration camp

inmates. Every one of them lost at least a close relative, and more than three-

fourths were the only survivors of their families. When they were asked about

their greatest shock, about one-third of them stated that it was the complete

separation from relatives and friends.

German psychiatrists have come to the following conclusion:

492 n Afterward

The general attitude of distrust and embitterment that may be demon-

strated in virtually all who suﬀered severe persecution derives from the

destruction of the supporting foundation of human society. Experiences

that cause the radical and protracted destruction of interpersonal relation-

ships combine with the persecuted person’s conﬂicted involvement with

theworld around him after his liberation and produce a pathological struc-

ture of relationships that is an important basic feature of the experiential

personality change.

E. C.Trautmann, who made his observations in the United States, towhich

many survivors emigrated after their liberation, has noted an additional fac-

tor: an anxiety-producingconditionof forlornness thatwasexacerbated bythe

unfamiliar language. Others speak in this connection of a depression caused

by deracination. Professor Ulrich Venzlaﬀ assesses emigration following con-

ﬁnement in a kz andastayinadp (displaced persons) camp as a ‘‘psychic

burden that many can no longer bear.’’ He observed that after a certain latency

period in the course of emigration there were severe nervous breakdowns.

Another frequently observed phenomenon, an overhasty marriage, can also

be interpreted as a consequence of this rootlessness. Many survivors looked

for some way to reestablish earlier bonds. Women frequently chose an older

man who had known their murdered fathers. According to Trautmann’s ob-

servations, in many instances ‘‘these attachments, born of distress, turned

into an unsatisfactory marriage that was full of conﬂicts. This makes them

an early example of the perpetuation of disturbed interpersonal relationships

after the liberation in the form of an institutionalized permanent conﬂict.’’

Paul Matussek has found that ‘‘the choice of a spouse is clearly determined

by the fate of persecution.’’ He cites such statements as this one: ‘‘A person

who was in a camp can only abide another former camp inmate as a partner.

No one else understands what happened there.’’ Thus the shared suﬀering

becomes the basis of a matrimonial bond. Professor Ulrich Venzlaﬀ has ob-

served ‘‘a frequent rush into marriage between psychologically defective part-

ners without an inneremotionalrelationship.’’ And headds:‘‘It is a depressing

fact that a particularly high percentage of the children from such marriages

display behavioral disturbances and neurotic symptoms.’’

Not a single one of the 130 former kz inmates whom Paul Matussek ex-

amined has come out of conﬁnement without chronic disorders. Leo Eitinger

examined survivors of Nazi concentration camps in two Israeli kibbutzim. All

were able to work, but only three of them were healthy and ﬁt. The two ex-

aminations were conducted without recompense for the subjects, thus elimi-

nating symptoms that might resemble a compensation neurosis.

The previously mentioned team of Cracow physicians that examined

Inmates after Liberation n 493