Langbein Hermann. People in Auschwitz
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thessthought that these qualities were developed particularly in careercrimi-
nals, and that is why they recruited German Greens for the Dirlewanger Unit.
Another result was that some members of the ss were punished for favoring
prisoners, and a few were even imprisoned for that reason.
This means that any description of people in Auschwitz must heed Bene-
dikt Kautsky’s warning that ‘‘nothing is falser than a simple black-and-white
picture.’’ Sincethe present studydeals with extremes in humanbehavior under
the conditions of an extermination camp, more space is given to a description
of people whose reactions differed from what was expected of them than to
an account of standard reactions.This applies to those prisoners who allowed
themselves to be misused as an extension of their oppressors. Olga Lengyel’s
reference to the camp leaders’ responsibility for crimes committed by their
lackeys as well retains its validity. The same is true of the guards, and there
too exceptions (that is, human emotions) are more interesting than the rule.
n Everyone who was placed in the milieu of a Nazi concentration camp ex-
perienced a shock that the camp administration deliberately exacerbated by its
especially brutal treatment of new arrivals.The shock caused byconfrontation
with an extermination camp was even more enduring.
Even though I had already become acquainted with the ss system in Da-
chau, came to Auschwitz in the company of good friends, and there met like-
minded persons who familiarized me with the special qualities of an extermi-
nation camp, my first encounter with the machinery of destruction was still
a great shock. In Dachau I had hoped to survive the camp, but in Auschwitz
I quickly lost this hope. As a clerk in the infirmaries of the two camps, I re-
ceived impressive visual instruction. In Dachau we spoke of a bad day if ten or
more deaths were to be reported, but in Auschwitz we used seven typewriters
on day and night shifts to prepare just such reports.
An incomparably greater shock was suffered by those who had not come
from another concentration camp but had enjoyed freedom before being sent
to Auschwitz, who had no friends and thus had to cope with everything alone,
who were not privileged like us Germans or Austrians, and who at the ramp
were brutally separated from their relatives,whose fate they would soon learn.
In addition, experienced inmates could hardly help someone who suffered the
consequences of a shock. The fact that people in Auschwitz had few chances
to think of matters that did not directly concern them was not the only rea-
son. A host of informers made it risky to converse openly with someonewhom
one did not know well and who had as yet no camp experience. A thought-
less remark or reaction could mean mortal danger not only for the novice but
also for his informant. Officially, an inmate was not supposed to know any-
thing about the machinery of mass extermination, and talking about it was
64 n the prisoners
taboo. Precisely at the time when a helpless new arrival had the greatest need
for support, he remained woefully isolated.
The arrival shock, which was most painful for those persecuted for ‘‘racial’’
reasons, has been described many times—for instance, by Dr. Erwin Toffler,
who was eighteen when he entered the camp in the spring of 1944: ‘‘I thought
I was dreaming. Even today the whole thing seems like an ugly dream to me.
The selection, the noise, and the smell of smoke awakened me, and it was
clear to me that I had arrived at the last stop of my life.’’
Zdenka Fantlova, who was transferred fromTheresienstadt to Auschwitz in
October 1944 as a younggirl and sent toa laborcampaftera few weeks,writes:
‘‘Auschwitz was such a terrible shock forme that my memories of it and every-
thing I experienced there appear to be shrouded in a veil of mist. During my
entire stay there, it felt as though someone had hit me on the head. For a long
time I was unable to comprehend that what I had experienced was reality. I
stopped thinking and feeling. That was the only help given us by nature to
preserve our health.’’
Eduard de Wind sums up his experiences as a physician who treated many
fellow sufferers by saying that in most cases the very first impressions were
forgotten. ‘‘It was a shock phase in which a profound regression of the entire
personality took place. For a brief period of time, the inmates lived in a kind
of dreamlike state.’’
Like Fantlova, Grete Salus was deported to Auschwitz from Theresienstadt
in October 1944. Shortly after her liberation she wrote down her first impres-
sions of the extermination camp. ‘‘As soon as we jumped out of the railroad
car,we were engulfed and, half unconscious, floated along toward something
horrible that we could only sense deep in our subconscious. Now everything
unfolded with breathtaking speed. Only some of it remained fixed, like flash
photography, but everything else did not penetrate into our consciousness.’’
Salus has this to say about the greatest shock,which was caused by the tearing
asunderof families at the ramp: ‘‘At first my husband and I were still together.
People did and said senseless things—a last clinging to something real and
familiar. A female friend of mine passed some chocolates around; my husband
took a piece and said: ‘I’ll be right back, I’m going back to the train to take
this chocolate to my sick friend.’ This was the last time I saw my husband,
and these were the last words I heard from him.’’
There are numerous descriptions of first impressions of the camp. Salus
has summarized hers as follows: ‘‘Schneller, schneller, schneller (faster, faster,
faster)—it still rings in my ears, this word that from now on hounded us day
and night, whipped us on, and never gave us any rest. On the double—that
was the watchword; eat, sleep, work, die on the double....Ioftenasked
people with the same experiences what their impressions were on their arrival
Under the Power of the Camp n 65
in Auschwitz. Most of them weren’t able to tell me much about it, and almost
all of them said they were utterly addled and half dazed, as though they had
been hit on the head. They all perceived the floodlights as torturous and the
noise as unbearable.’’
Albert Menasche has described how the word schnell cast a shadow over
everything from thevery beginning. Max Mannheimer’s impression: ‘‘Move—
dalli—seems part of the camp lingo.’’ Norbert Fryd speaks of a ‘‘new incarna-
tion of the ruck zuck (chop-chop) type.’’
Hanna Hoffmann has retained this memory of her arrival in Auschwitz in
December 1943: ‘‘The door of the railway car was torn open. Outside striped
figures were running around. They dragged us off the train pushing, beating,
and shouting, ‘Leave your luggage! Schneller, schneller, schneller,lineupbyfives.’
Outside, one of the striped men whispered to me, ‘Don’t get on the truck, it’s
going to the gas!’ and loudly, ‘Get on the truck quick!’ One after another is
grabbed and thrown in a truck. We are not given any time to think it over.’’
Edith Bruck, who was twelve when she arrived in Auschwitz on a transport
from Hungary in the spring of 1944, has reported that Jewish women from
Poland and Slovakia gave her advice while their hair was being cut. Between
barked orders, they whispered to her that an inmate should never admit to
being under sixteen or over forty-five years of age. Bruck has this to say about
her condition: ‘‘I was as though drunk, and I could not manage to focus my
mind on anything.’’
Elie Wiesel remembers a similar episode. After he and his father had left
the carriage at the ramp, an inmate asked him how old he was.
‘‘Going on fifteen.’’
‘‘No, eighteen.’’
‘‘No,’’ I replied. ‘‘Fifteen.’’
‘‘Listen to me, dummkopf.’’
Then he asked my father his age, and the answer was, ‘‘Fifty years.’’
The man was even more enraged now. ‘‘No, not fifty. Forty.Understand?
Eighteen and forty.’’ Then he disappeared into the night.
Nina Weilova, who was deported to Auschwitz from Theresienstadt, re-
members what Czech inmates whispered to them when they helped them get
out of the railway carriage. ‘‘Don’t tell them that you’re sick; otherwise, you
go to the gas chambers.’’
Jacques Furmanski has given this description of his first night in the camp:
‘‘It is significant that during that night I did not think of myself and that my
mind was not troubled byany memoryof the past. I was the object of a diaboli-
cal experiment that was being made on me, or in me. I thought that this was
66 n the prisoners
just an individual reaction on my part, but my comrades confirmed that they
had been in the same stateas well.’’ Furmanskitried to explain this emptiness:
‘‘I believe that the multiplicity of the terrible impressions that were concen-
trated on one day crushed us completely. A horrendously heavy weight lay on
us and in us. It took us a long time to free ourselves from this pressure.’’
This is how Julien Unger captured his first impressions of life in the Bir-
kenau camp in 1943. ‘‘Even things that could make life a little easier—some
soap, a bath, etc.—are here occasions for suffering and drama.’’ As the reason
for this, he identifies ‘‘the prevailing contempt for human beings that spells
the end of any community.’’
Eugen Kogon put it succinctly. ‘‘Terror renders an average person helpless
and frequently overwhelms even strong personalities for a period of time.’’
To veteran inmates, helpless, distraught, and disoriented newcomers pre-
sented a picture of miserythat rarely inspired compassion; far more frequently
it provoked contempt from people who were stronger and incomprehension
on the part of those who had become inured. It even spawned some sadistic
jokes.
I remember the lecture given to us new arrivals by Karl Kapp, the camp
elder of Dachau. No ss man was present in the washroom, but Kapp acted
as though he were a member of the ss as he talked about our future...im-
periously, threateningly, and fully aware of his power and our powerlessness.
Yet Kapp had himself been imprisoned as a political opponent of the Nazis
and knew that we, Austrian volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, had fought
against Nazism.
Oszkár Betlen has described thewelcoming speech given by Tadek, a young
Polish dormitory elder, to a group of prisoners transferred from Buchenwald
to Auschwitz in the fall of 1942, when all Jews were concentrated in Ausch-
witz. With his hands on his hips and his legs spread apart, he said: ‘‘This is
Auschwitz!’’ Betlen adds: ‘‘He seemed to enjoy saying this, as though he were
proud of the camp in which tens of thousands of his compatriots had been
murdered.’’ Tadek said in his speech: ‘‘They’ve sent you here to croak. Anyone
who opens his mouth or doesn’t keep things in order will leave through the
chimney all the sooner.’’
I have described an episode from the spring of 1944 when the first trans-
ports of Hungarian Jews arrived in Auschwitz. At that time a group of new
arrivals were assigned to Block 4 in the main camp, where my friend Ernst
Burger was block clerk.
I go with Ernst to the cellar, where the majority of new arrivals are housed.
A capo is talking to them, and we listen. He asks them about Hungary, how
things look on the outside.Then a Hungarian asks: ‘‘Can you tell me where
Under the Power of the Camp n 67
my parents and my wife are? I said farewell to them on our arrival, and they
were put on a truck. A gentleman from the ss said older men and women
should get on the trucks so they wouldn’t have to walk so far. But I haven’t
been able to see them here yet.’’
‘‘You jackass, you’ll never see them again. Your wife has been singing
hallelujahs for quite a while now, and your parents are coughing; you see,
they swallowed a bit too much gas.’’
The capo looks around triumphantly. He must think he made a delight-
ful joke. The Jew smiles crookedly, incredulously.
If someone met acquaintances who had been in the camp for some time,
this is what happened in some instances, according to Marc Klein: ‘‘On our
first evening in the camp, French colleagues who had been in the main camp
for some time sought me out in the quarantine section in order to get news
of France, and they cautiously revealed the terrible secret of Birkenau. There
were a fewcomrades, tobe sure,who implored us not to give credence to those
sinister rumors. At a much later date I understood that these encouraging re-
marks had been nothing but pious lies.’’
As Klein says, it was weeks or months before the new arrivals slowly com-
prehended the purpose of the arrival selection.
n When a prisoner had weathered the arrival shock, he was subject to the
camp life of the nameless persons that were crammed into the blocks. Jean
Améry has described theconsequences of the ‘‘compression of human masses
in the narrowest spaces.’’ Since the victims ‘‘constantly saw, smelled, and
touched one another, they were deindividualized and turned into an opaque
mass of flesh.’’ As a result they were ‘‘nothing but a surfeit to one another.’’
Jenny Spritzer observed the same thing: ‘‘The camp made a person mean and
egotistical, and anyone who did not help himself with his elbows invariably
perished—except for very lucky souls who had pull and were helped in that
way.’’
Observing himself and others, Elie A. Cohen concluded that thewill to sur-
vive crowds out any other thoughts. He was not interested in the fate of his
fellow prisoners. ‘‘The instinct of self-preservation is very strong,’’ he writes.
All too quickly one could become a person who lived in extreme fashion in the
‘‘here and now,’’ as Eduard de Wind put it, or who lived ‘‘only in the present,
without past or future’’ (Grete Salus). Viktor Frankl reports a constantly re-
curring sigh that all of us probably still remember: ‘‘Another day gone by!’’
The average prisoner was not able to be alone anywhere for even a minute.
Everywhere he was constantly surrounded by a hectic crowd that was forever
foraging for something edible. Louise Alcan describes her furtive nocturnal
68 n the prisoners
visits to the latrine where she could enjoy being alone: ‘‘I stay there in order
to enjoy some quiet and solitude. The ambiance may not be ideal, but we are
in the camp and I have no choice.’’ The unceasing noise made by an excessive
number of people crammed into one block strained the nerves to the limit of
the bearable. ‘‘Eight hundred nervous women crammed into a small space,’’
writes Alcan, ‘‘produce permanent disquiet.The only thing I appreciate about
the roll call is the quiet.’’
Désiré Haffner had the strength to describe the consequences of the loss
of individuality in Birkenau, where it was at its worst, with the detachment of
a physician: ‘‘The feelings of the unfortunate prisoners soon become blunted,
and a state of inurement and indifference to suffering develops. These pris-
oners confirm the observation that an organism readily reduces its receptivity
to outside stimuli of exceptional intensity if these stimuli are repeated regu-
larly and with the same strength. The deaths of others, and even the proba-
bility of one’s own impending death, no longer make an impression. People
do not even turn their heads when they hear the screams of prisoners being
strangled, and I have seen some who ate while having to witness hangings.’’
Viktor Frankl confirms this total devaluation: ‘‘Suffering, sick, dying, dead
people—all these are such familiar sights after a few weeks in the camp that
theycannolongerstirtheemotions.’’
A report by Teddy Pietrzykowski, a Pole from the first transport, confirms
this observation. Teddy, who worked in the ss infirmary, was able to observe
from a trapdoor the gassings in the crematorium opposite that building. ‘‘The
first time I saw it,’’ Teddy told me, ‘‘I felt physically ill. The second and third
time also hurt, but after that not as much. Then I didn’t watch any more.’’
On account of the everyday nature of death, people hardly thought about
the fact that they would have to die, but only wondered how their death would
come. ‘‘People had conversations,’’ writes Jean Améry, ‘‘about the length of
time it would take for the gas to be effective in a gas chamber.They speculated
about the painfulness of death by phenol injections. Should they wish for a
blow on the head or a slow death from exhaustion in the infirmary?...For
an inmate death had no sting—none that hurt, none that stimulated thought.
This may explain why a camp inmate was tormented by fear of certain types
of death but rarely had a fear of death as such.’’ Judith Sternberg-Newman
confirmed that concisely when she wrote: ‘‘I feared death less than I feared
beatings.’’
I became aware of the blunting of my feelings with a shudder when my
friend Hiasl Neumeier died of typhus. We had been transferred from Dachau
to Auschwitz together; he became block elder of the infection block and was
infected there. During his illness I visited him every morning before our de-
tail set out for work. When I came to his room one morning, the nurse told
Under the Power of the Camp n 69
me that Hiasl’s corpse was in the washroom. Because he was a block elder,
his body had not been taken to the mortuary immediately. In the washroom
I saw Hiasl’s body, which was wrapped in a sheet. At a later date I described
my emotions: ‘‘I am quite empty—not sad but empty.’’ I was gripped by fear
at that time: ‘‘I tell myself not to become blunted.’’
Without a kind of thick skin that covered one’s emotions, it was impos-
sible to exist in Auschwitz. It was easy to forget that a newcomer had not
yet grown such a protective skin, and for that reason such a person’s bewil-
derment, emotional outbursts, and dismay frequently inspired mockery and
contempt.
n When a person had survived the first and hardest period, become familiar
with the camp laws, and established connections, he or she gradually became
an ‘‘old inmate.’’ This type is characterized, according to Eugen Kogon, by de-
monstrative hardness and emotional primitivism. It developed more clearly
in camps with a long tradition and a greater percentage of Germans who had
been interned for years than it did in Auschwitz, where there was constant
change.
In accordance with an unwritten law in all camps, new arrivals were as-
signed hard physical labor, whereas ‘‘old numbers’’ were more likely to get
a good detail. The ss did not have to enforce this law rigorously, for it was
respected by the inmate hierarchy. A good detail was accompanied by better
accommodations in blocks that were not so crowded, received more food,
and had fewer beatings. What was at least as important for those who were
members of a good detail and bore an old number was that they were able
to procure better prisoners’ garb.That the old adage ‘‘clothes make the man’’
had greater significance in a concentration camp than elsewhere may be illus-
trated by an episode described by Georges Wellers. Serving as a nurse in the
Monowitz infirmary, he wanted to help a friend who was still on the lowest
rung of the camp hierarchy. Wellers dressed carefully and visited him in his
block. He behaved like a big shot, smoked ostentatiously, though this was
strictly prohibited to an ordinary inmate, and stood in the middle of the cor-
ridor so that everyone who wished to pass had to beg his leave—in short, he
made sure that those in charge of the barracks noticed what acquaintances
his friend had, for he knew that a bit of the glamour he exuded as a vip would
be reflected on his poor friend. As a matter of fact, the latter’s standing rose
markedly after that visit.
Prisoners who owned clean clothes without patches, wore shined shoes,
and were always clean-shaven were respected even by the ss, at least up to a
point. As the secretary of the ss garrison physician I was able to procure all
these things, for members of the ss were interested in the cleanliness of in-
70 n the prisoners
mates whose work brought them in contact with them. I had sewn a breast
pocket on my prisoner’s coat, the tacitly accepted privilege of a clerk. When I
walked through the camp with full awareness of the impression made by this
attire, I was fairly safe from the capricious harassment of even the most ag-
gressive functionaries, prisoners that any inmate who did not stand out from
the crowd had to guard against. A made-to-measure suit was capable of pre-
serving a life in Auschwitz.
‘‘Old numbers’’ were bound together by a certain solidarity. Alfred Wetzler
reports (under the pseudonym Jozef Lanik) howa block elder in Birkenau hesi-
tated to proceed against an inmate with a low number who had behaved dis-
respectfully and finally dropped the matter ‘‘because otherwise he would have
made an enemy of every older inmate.’’
All too often, ‘‘old hands’’ looked down contemptuouslyon thosewho were
least equipped for the merciless struggle for existence. Primo Levi has com-
mented on this as follows: ‘‘The social structure of the camp is based on the
suppression of the nonprivileged by the privileged.’’ And Bruno Bettelheim
writes that ‘‘the fear of sinking to the subhuman strata was a strong spur to
engage in a class struggle against them.’’
Erich Altmann remembers a frequently heard argument that was used by
old hands to justify their harsh treatment of newcomers and that others must
have heard as well: ‘‘This is a paradise now. In 1940 and 1941 we had to suffer
much more. Why should you be better off ?’’ Others heard that same sort of
reasoning which stuck in Altmann’s mind.
Friedel de Wind was given a hard time in the experimental block by Jewish
women from Slovakia who had been appointed dormitory elders. ‘‘They had a
miserable time of it, and now they feel they have to make life miserable for us
as well. ‘If you’d been in Birkenau in those days, you’d be long dead.’ That’s
what they tell us, and this is why we have to endure all their brutality. Always
the system of taking out one’s feelings on others.’’
Kogon’s interpretation of this frequent boasting about earlier suffering is
that the old hands attempted to ‘‘preserve their superiority in the concen-
tration camp’’ by debasing the new arrivals. Benedikt Kautsky believes that
once an inmate who has had to undergo a personality change acclimates, he
becomes ‘‘aggressive, cantankerous, mistrustful, and in extreme cases even
treacherous....Sincethegreatmajorityoftheinmatesadopt these character-
istics, even a placid person must assume an aggressive stance, for otherwise
he would not be able to stand his ground.’’
n Added to this personality change is a tendency that has been observed by
psychologists with first-hand experience of a camp. If a person is interned in
a rigorously run camp for an indefinite period of time, his psyche regresses
Under the Power of the Camp n 71
to that of a child. Just as a child is completely defenseless against the orders
of a strict father, an inmate must constantly be terrified of the whims of an
all-powerful ss man.
There is some merit to assertions that because of their total dependence in
the kz inmates tended to demonize their guards. ‘‘They viewed the ss men as
powerful adversaries and claimed they were not even human,’’ writes Bruno
Bettelheim on the basis of experience gathered in Dachau and Buchenwald
before the war, and he points to a benefit of this schematic oversimplifica-
tion: ‘‘This enabled an inmate to submit without debasing himself.’’ Bettel-
heim even goes further by stating that the stereotype permitted a prisoner to
‘‘identify subserviently with the great power of the ss. Then he was able to en-
joy the limited security produced by complete submission and participate in
the power of the ss in a circuitous fashion.’’
On the basis of his experiences in Auschwitz, Elie A. Cohen asserts that
prisoners identified with their oppressors with mingled feelings of hate and
love, contempt and admiration. Other psychologists who had to experience
the kz reached similar conclusions. Eugen Kogon speaks of an adaptation of
friendto foe: ‘‘The antitheticaltypes develop similarities in their primitiveway
of thinking, in their feelings, their military demeanor, tone, and corruption.’’
It is possible that some survivors of concentration camps will reject such
conclusions indignantly, and I am sure that all such persons can adduce ex-
amples to refute the general validity of these theses. But has our memory not
preserved many contrasting examples as well? It was not just capos, block
elders, or corrupt criminals who aped ss men in their brutality, their capri-
ciousness, and even their outward appearance. How many prisoners liked to
wear breeches and boots, provided they were able to ‘‘organize’’ such apparel,
how many copied the bellowed commands of the ss and tried very hard to ap-
pear as little Führers in their domains? I remember a young Jew who had been
assigned to a good labor detail and used this opportunity to procure tight-
fitting breeches and boots. Even though he hated the Nazis with a passion, he
was visibly proud of his smart and dashing military appearance. Persons of
this type who unconsciously strove for assimilation adopted from their mas-
ters their contempt for any weakness as well, and their aggressive impulses
were directed against the weakest.
A typical scene described by Tadeusz Borowski may serve to demonstrate
the extent to which the Nazi master morality held sway: After the food has
been served, the coveted second helping is distributed. ‘‘The capo points his
cooking spoon at those who are to be given a second helping. Only the better
workers, the stronger and healthier prisoners receive it. A sick, weak person
has no right to a second bowl of nettle soup. Not a drop of it can be wasted
on people who will go through the chimney anyway.’’
72 n the prisoners
Seweryna Szmaglewska speaks of an ‘‘odd reversal of concepts. Everyone
who is weak, helpless, and sick is persecuted, punished, trampled’’—and not
only by the ss but by many prisoners as well.
With unsparing frankness Tadeusz Borowski reports how the anger of the
inmates who had to clear the dirt, feces, and corpses of the deportees from
the trains at the ramp was directed at these new arrivals. ‘‘The ramp gets on
your nerves, you get angry, and it is easiest to vent your rage on the weaker
persons.’’
Elie Wiesel did forced labor in the Buna Works together with his father.
One day the prisoners acted clumsily as they loaded diesel motors, and this
so enraged their capo Idek that he started beating them with a pole, hitting
Wiesel’s father. The son, a young boy at the time, tried to get out of Idek’s
range; later he described his feelings in these words: ‘‘If I felt hatred at that
moment, it was not directed against the capo but against my father.’’ Afterall,
it was his clumsiness that had caused Idek’s fit of rage. ‘‘What has life in the
concentration camp made out of me?’’ asks Wiesel.
Theprisoners’ assimilation to the lifestandardized by the ssled to excesses
that remain all but incomprehensible to outsiders. Gerda Schneider, a camp
elder, had been imprisoned as a communist for many years before she was
sent to Auschwitz. Many people have testified that she used her position cou-
rageously to help her fellow sufferers. Anna Palarczyk, a block elder directly
subordinate to Schneider, confirms this but adds: ‘‘She had been imprisoned
since 1933 and was no longer normal, for she beat people.’’
Another example may illustrate how this could come about. Margit Teitel-
baum was dormitory elder in Block 23. One day someone from her barracks
was missing at the roll call, and the ss was furious. It turned out that a Jewish
woman from Holland had hidden in a pallet. Since Teitelbaum was respon-
sible for all inhabitants in her barracks, she was given twenty-five lashes on
her behind with a whip in front of all those assembled.The Dutch woman was
shot.
Such methods frequently served their purpose. Those in charge used any
means to enforce the discipline for which they were responsible. Whipping
proved to be the most effective method, and so it was preferred by the camp
leadership. Katarina Princz told me that a block elder once beat her cousin
because she, being completely exhausted and sick, had concealed herself at
roll call time. Princz concluded her story with a question: ‘‘Didn’t she do the
right thing?’’ This remark will be understood only by someone who is familiar
with the methods of the ss.
An episode from the trial of Karl Kapp, thecamp elderof Dachau, indicates
the extent to which the system of holding an inmate functionary responsible
for those under his control influenced the thinking of old prisoners. One of
Under the Power of the Camp n 73