A Train in Winter (28 page)
Authors: Caroline Moorehead
It grew colder and in the dim light of the windowless cattle trucks the women huddled together, rubbing each other’s backs. One of the women took Simone, whose teeth were chattering, into her arms. The buckets were soon full to the brim with urine, and it splashed out, but then it froze, which made it better. Though the bread and sausage were soon eaten, thirst was more tormenting than hunger and whenever the train paused in a station, the women begged for water; Marie-Claude kept shouting at the top of her voice: ‘Give us something to drink, we’re thirsty.’ Nothing was given to them. Soon, they fell silent, trying to conserve their saliva. The second night, the train stopped at Halle so that the cars containing the men could be uncoupled; their destination, it turned out, was the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, though at the time no one knew. The Brabander family, though they had yet to discover this, were now split up.
On Tuesday morning, 26 January 1943, the train stopped at Breslau, where the women were given tepid water to drink. It had become much colder and what little stubs of bread remained were frozen solid. They could hear Polish voices. When they moved off again, the women posted at the holes in the planks stared out at a vast white snowy landscape, deserted, flat and frozen. That night, the train stopped and did not move again.
It was not the cold that hit the women as the cattle truck doors were pulled back in the pale light of a Silesian dawn: they were cold already, so cold that almost all feeling had left their bodies. It was the noise. The first sounds were shouts, orders rattled out, fierce and rapid, the German words incomprehensible but the meaning—to hurry, to move, to climb down, to get into line, to leave the heavier suitcases—was plain. More frightening were the sounds made by the dogs, snarling, growling, barking as they pulled on their leads to get at the women.
One by one, helping each other, putting out a steadying hand, clutching one another’s shoulders, trying not to fall or to panic, the 230 women climbed down on to rough ground, fearful and confused. They felt weak from lack of food and their mouths were parched from thirst. All around them stretched an enormous frozen plain, with trees in the distance. Deep snow, that looked as grey as the immense grey sky above, lay as far as the eye could see. Stiff and shocked, huddling close together, they shuffled into ragged lines of five, one behind the other, as ordered by the shouting soldiers. Among the SS men with guns were a number of women, in long black capes, their hoods high above military caps, and tall black leather boots. They reminded Poupette of crows. The SS had truncheons and whips. The platform, with its single line, stood out in the countryside on its own; there were no buildings, no station.
The order was given to march. Marie-Claude, who spoke good German, translated, and her words were repeated back down the line. As they moved off across the icy, slippery, uneven ground in their thin shoes, they saw approaching in the half-light a group of women who seemed to belong to another world, emaciated, stumbling, their heads shaven and wearing a grotesque assortment of ill-fitting clothes, most of them striped. The smell the women gave off was repugnant, unidentifiable. ‘How filthy they are,’ Lulu said to her neighbours. ‘They could at least wash.’ Simone noticed that the women’s faces were almost purple with cold. In the distance they could now see lights, hung at regular distances across a vast area.
A little further on they encountered a party of thin, ragged men, wearing the same striped clothes. None replied to their calls. As they walked, Jacqueline, the young secretary with the very sweet voice, began to sing the Marseillaise, soon picked up by a 23-year-old locksmith’s daughter called Raymonde Salez, who had taken part in an attack on the German bookshop in Paris, and then, in ones and twos by the others. The women straightened their shoulders and tried to stand taller. So it was that singing loudly the 230 women approached the double rows of barbed wire and the watchtowers and passed under the sign that said
Arbeit Macht Frei
and into the camp, where other women, amazed to hear such sounds, opened the windows of their huts to listen. The Frenchwomen had no idea where they were, though Marie-Claude had translated a sign nailed to a post spotted along the way:
Vernichtungslager
. ‘
Nichts
,’ she said, ‘nothing, nothingness, toward nothing.’ Had they heard the words Auschwitz or Birkenau, they would have meant nothing to them.
In the summer of 1941, Heinrich Himmler, supreme head of the SS and chief of the German police, appointed a former sergeant in the German army, a man called Rudolf Hoess who had been sentenced to ten years in prison for murdering a teacher suspected of treachery, as commandant of the new camp of Auschwitz in Silesia. This camp, he told him, was to be different from the several hundred concentration, slave and prisoner-of-war camps already scattered around Germany and occupied Europe. It was going to be an extermination camp, ‘the largest such centre of all times’, and Hoess was to come up with ideas as to how it could function most effectively.
Hoess was not a sadist in the way of Eichmann, but he was obsessed with order, duty, obedience and efficiency. He had a model for how a concentration camp should be run, based on Theodor Eicke’s camp at Dachau, opened in 1933 to take the ‘dangerous enemies of the state’: political opponents, clergymen, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, beggars, the mentally ill. Here the SS had been trained to humiliate and torture their prisoners, and were themselves subject to collective punishments designed to destroy all sense of self-worth and to pit one against another. The camps, as Eicke created them, were closed worlds, where inhumanity was routine, barbarity the norm, and the inmates reduced to filthy, diseased animals, whose deaths from hunger, sickness and brutality were all part of the system. But what Hoess was now ordered to come up with was a killing machine, a means of getting rid of people efficiently and rapidly, particularly in view of the Final Solution currently being discussed: the extermination of the Jews of Europe, and in their wake others the Reich might wish to discard and eliminate. As he would later say, by the time the war was coming to an end, he was commandant of the greatest facility for mass murder in the history of man.
The first camp, Auschwitz proper, had opened on the edge of a small Polish district town called Oswiecim, 30 kilometres from Katowice, the industrial heart of Silesia, which had been annexed by the Reich in 1939. Here had been sent three hundred Jews from Oswiecim to tear down an old Polish cavalry barracks and evict twelve hundred people living in nearby shacks and cabins. They were soon followed by Soviet prisoners of war who continued to level the ground and work on the new camp, but who died in tens of thousands from lack of food and water, disease and the savagery of the guards set to watch over them. The marshes around the confluence of the Vistula and the Sola were extremely unhealthy, and in winter an icy wind blew from the east; in the spring, when the melting snows left a thick gluey mud, little grew.
Part of this foggy, humid valley of swamps was Birkenau, whose name in German meant birch grove. When Himmler visited the area in March 1941 plans were discussed to build a second camp here for 100,000 prisoners of war as well as for slave workers for a new industrial IG Farben plant, whose synthetic chemistry was crucial to the German war effort. The site, surrounded by mines, quarries and lime pits, with plentiful water, was also well provided with railway links. It was not long after work began on Birkenau that Himmler informed Hoess that the Final Solution was to be implemented and that the extermination of Europe’s Jews was now official policy, with Birkenau as a main killing centre. The question was: how to kill great numbers of people without a blood bath, which upset the executioners? And how to dispose of their bodies? Mass machine-gunning and toxic injections to the heart by phenol were messy and unreliable. Something aseptic and impersonal was needed.
The barracks at Birkenau
Collective gassing using motors had already been tried out, but proved too limited. Hoess’s deputy, Karl Fritsch, suggested experimenting with Zyklon B, a poison used on rats and cockroaches and produced by a subsidiary of IG Farben, Degesch. It came in the form of pellets the size of haricot beans, which, soaked in prussic acid, turned into gas in enclosed and packed spaces. Zyklon B rendered people unconscious in just a few minutes. A first trial was carried out on six hundred Soviet prisoners of war and two hundred sick men and Hoess was delighted with the result: there was no blood and no distress to the executioners. The first purpose-built gas chamber, in an isolated farmhouse, was ready for use in January 1942, a year before the French women reached Birkenau; a second, in another farmhouse, opened in June. Between them, they could gas to death two thousand people a day. The bodies were at first buried in vast pits, but later, for greater efficiency, they were drenched with oil and wood alcohol and burnt.
But the camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau had a second purpose, which by the end of 1942 was becoming essential to the Germans. With more and more soldiers tied up on the eastern front, and a growing shortage of armaments and supplies for the army, the camps were turning into important centres of slave labour: the strong and the fit were picked out and sent to one of the many industrial enterprises springing up around the camps, the weak and the infirm ‘selected’ on arrival and sent straight to the gas chambers. Destruction by punishing, backbreaking, brutal work would serve the ultimate goal of extermination as effectively as instant killing, with the added advantage of providing for the German war effort in the meantime. As an SS officer was heard to say: ‘You are all condemned to die but the execution of your sentence will take a little time.’
By early 1943, IG Farben’s presence, along with that of other major industrial concerns, was already contributing to the camp’s expansion and eventual evolution into the Nazis’ main industrialised killing centre. Under pressure to increase the supply of synthetic fuel, IG Farben’s men were proving as brutal as the SS guards, meeting the trains as they arrived to select welders, chemists and electricians. There was no mercy for the frail. The quarries, mines, factories and marshes were already death traps for emaciated, sick, underfed men and women, without protective clothing, harried by dogs, permanently terrified.
By the time the French women arrived in Birkenau, the camp’s dual activities were just reaching their full potential. Every new train, for the most part filled with Jews from the ghettos of Holland, France, Belgium, Greece, Germany, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Poland, brought a small number—perhaps 10 to 15 per cent of the total—of people judged fit enough to be worked to death. The rest—the elderly, the infirm, the children, the women with babies or who were pregnant—were sent straight from the railway siding to the gas chambers.
Four new crematoria, built by Topf and Sons, were almost completed, together with underground undressing rooms, which would not only vastly speed up the process of extermination—in theory 4,416 people would be ‘processed’ every twenty-four hours—but remove the smell of burning flesh that hung over the surrounding countryside. Under the new streamlined system, teams of
Sonderkommando
prisoners
*
loaded the ovens, having extracted gold from teeth for shipment back to the Reichsbank in ingots, shorn the hair for later use as felt and thread, removed the ashes from the grates and taken the crushed residue by lorry to the river Vistula. The forty-fourth transport of French Jews from Drancy reached Birkenau shortly before the arrival of the French women. All but a very few of the people on board had been gassed. Plans were now pushing ahead to receive the gypsy populations of occupied Europe.
Alongside its function as a death and labour camp, Birkenau had, since the late spring of 1942, been the main women’s camp in the Auschwitz complex. Here, in January 1943, were living some 15,000 women from every corner of Europe, in conditions worse than those in all other parts of the camp. There was appalling overcrowding, a chronic lack of water, and latrines which were no more than open concrete sewers deep in mud and excrement. Together with endemic typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis, scabies and impetigo, the women suffered from abscesses that seemed never to heal. Already severely malnourished, they were dying at the rate of about a fifth of their number every month. Debilitated, covered in sores, their limbs bloated, they inhabited a world in which all normal patterns of behaviour had broken down, in which men and women of the SS, free of constraints, exercised a reign of violence, corruption and depersonalisation, in which not to steal or to lie would most likely result in death, and in which the worst traits to be found in human beings, not their best ones, were rewarded. And over them presided a hierarchy of female
kapos
, inmate supervisors and
Blockältesten
, ‘block elders’, for the most part German criminal prisoners who effectively collaborated with the SS, whose own survival depended on brutality and whose viciousness and vindictiveness was said far to surpass that of their male counterparts.
*
Later, Primo Levi would write of the women of Birkenau that they ‘stumbled about like ghosts, without any will of their own… These stumbling corpses were a terrible sight.’