Auschwitz (19 page)

Appalling as the experiences of Otto Pressburger and Silvia Veselá were during their first hours in the camp, they do not represent what has come to be seen as the quintessential Auschwitz treatment on arrival. For one of the most infamous procedures associated with Auschwitz was only now about to begin—the initial selection. This was the second of the two important changes to the camp that resulted from the arrival of the Slovakians. Periodic selection of some incoming transports had begun as early as the end of April, but systematic selection did not begin until July 4, 1942, when a transport from Slovakia arrived that was separated at once by the SS men into those who were useful for work and would be admitted to the camp, and those who were unfit for work and would be gassed immediately. Only now, two years after the camp received its first prisoners, had the authorities at Auschwitz finally begun the selection process for new inmates that would come to symbolize the cold-hearted terror of the place.

Eva Votavová, along with her father and mother, was on one of the first transports to be subjected to selection on arrival. This wave of Slovakian deportees contained a mix of old people, children, and those, like Eva, who were young and fit:

By now, some weeks after the completion of “The Little Red House,” another cottage a couple of hundred meters away, known as “The Little White House” or Bunker 2, had been converted into a killing installation with a capacity for about 1,200 people at any one time. Inside Bunker 2, four narrow rooms were constructed as gas chambers. This permitted better ventilation than had been possible in Bunker 1 (“The Little Red House”) and allowed the Zyklon B to be cleared more quickly from the cottage once the murders had taken place—another example of the constant small initiatives taken by the Auschwitz authorities to try and “improve” the killing process.

Otto Pressburger saw the new arrivals from Slovakia who had been selected to die waiting outside the cottages:

According to Otto Pressburger, during this period the gassings took place at night: “They never did it during the day; [because] people were probably shouting or trying to get out. We only saw the bodies next morning piled beside the pits.”

Pressburger was forced to work in a special unit, burying the bodies gassed in the two cottages:

It was an inadequate method of body disposal and, when the hot summer
arrived, the bodies thrown into pits started to putrify. Pressburger's job, already the stuff of nightmares, became even worse.

Once the bodies were disinterred, SS men ordered the prisoners to put them into giant, burning pits—the Auschwitz authorities thus improvised a makeshift crematorium while awaiting the completion of the conventional one nearby, says Pressburger.

As he forced himself to carry on with the gruesome work of digging up the bodies and burning them, Pressburger also wrestled with an emotional trauma—the death of his father. The prisoners were kept hungry and thirsty, and his father had drunk rainwater from puddles—a common cause of infection and death. “The doctor who used to treat me as a child was in Auschwitz as well,” says Pressburger. “He told me never to drink that water [from the puddles]. Otherwise I would die within twenty-four hours. People always used to have swollen legs from drinking that rainwater. Water was coming out of their legs.” But his father was not so self-controlled, and he drank the water and died. After the initial shock and suffering of the loss, Pressburger realized that the only way he could survive was to try and
block out what was happening around him—even the death of his own father. “The longer I wanted to live,” he says, “the sooner I had to forget.”

In exercising this iron self-control—particularly in dealing with the terrible pains of hunger and thirst—Pressburger was unexpectedly helped by the memory of how he had acted in his childhood:

This meant that, when he was in Birkenau and people around him were “going insane from hunger,” he was able to cope: “I was used to not eating much. It's the same even now.”

Otto Pressburger is not alone in believing that his ability to draw on the memory of past privation was crucial to his survival. As Jacob Zylberstein pointed out in the context of the Łódź ghetto, many of the arriving German Jews found it hard to cope with ghetto life because of their privileged backgrounds, while he and his family, who had come from relative poverty, did not have so far to fall. Silvia Veselá observed a similar phenomenon with rich, middle-class Slovakian women. Even in the transit camps in Slovakia, before they arrived at Auschwitz, they found it much harder to deal with conditions than women like her from poorer backgrounds. And, as a Soviet prisoner of war in Auschwitz, Pavel Stenkin found that his own harsh upbringing was now an advantage. As a child he had never had much food—or indeed much affection—and now the experience was a positive asset.

This form of “selection” within the ghettos and camps was, of course, precisely the concern Reinhard Heydrich had raised at the Wannsee conference. The Nazis were too wedded to the Darwinian notion of the survival of the fittest to allow the Jews who came through the horrors of forced labor to carry on living—indeed, Nazi racial theory taught them that they had now isolated the very group they should most fear. This proscriptive insistence on following their own warped logic through to the bitter end is one of the factors that makes the Nazis' “Final Solution” different from some other genocides, like Stalin's murderous treatment of minority nationalities
within the Soviet Union. Stalin may have persecuted whole nations, but the Soviet system did not seek to eliminate them in their entirety. Yet, to fulfil the Nazis' purpose, every single Jew had to be removed from German territory one way or the other.

When Otto Pressburger returned recently to visit the burial sites at Birkenau, he remembered the thousands who came with him from Slovakia to Auschwitz and who could not make such a journey today:

In the spring and early summer of 1942, thousands of Jews, primarily from Upper Silesia and Slovakia, went to their deaths in “The Little Red House” and “The Little White House.” En route to the gas chambers in the cottages, SS officers like Palitzsch would chat with the Jews, asking each what trades or qualifications they possessed. Rudolf Höss emphasized in his memoirs how the key to successful mass murder on this scale was to conduct the whole process in an atmosphere of great calm. But it could happen, as Höss recorded, that if one person in the group approaching the gas chambers spoke of suffocation or murder “a sort of panic set in at once,” making the killing much more difficult. In later transports a careful watch was kept over individuals who were thought likely to cause trouble for the Nazis in this way. At the first sign of any attempt to disrupt the compliant atmosphere the Nazis had created, such people were discreetly moved away, taken out of sight of the others, and shot with a small-caliber gun that was quiet enough that those nearby would not hear the noise.

The emotional torment of mothers who suspected what was about to happen to them, as they walked with their children to their deaths under, as Höss puts it, “the blossom-laden fruit trees of the cottage orchard,”
³⁹
is almost impossible to imagine. On one occasion, Höss records how a woman whispered to him, “How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful, darling children? Have you no heart at all?”; on another he saw a woman try to
throw her children out of the gas chamber as the door was closing, shouting, “At least let my precious children live!” These heartrending sights did cause some emotional disturbance in Höss, but nothing, according to his memoirs, that either a vigorous gallop on a horse or a few drinks could not chase away.

Concentrating the mass killing in a remote corner of the Birkenau site did mean that the routine of Auschwitz main camp was no longer disrupted by the murders. And, while life for the prisoners in the main camp remained as harsh as ever, for the SS members this had become a place where it was possible after work to relax in some comfort, as Tadeusz Rybacki,
⁴⁰
who had been arrested by the Gestapo for suspected involvement in the Polish resistance, discovered.

After some months moving between different work kommandos, Rybacki finally obtained one of the most sought after jobs in Auschwitz main camp—working as a waiter in the SS dining room. After women guards affiliated with the SS arrived, at the same time as the Slovakian women in the spring of 1942, he witnessed several riotous evenings. “It was a gangster feast,” he says, recalling one particular night.

Later in the evening, he noticed another SS woman making advances towards him and the other waiters. “Some drunk, big woman was walking and swaying, going most probably to the toilet, and she saw us standing and she started making gestures to us suggestive of sexual intercourse. Our faces were stonelike and we were whispering to one another, ‘What does she want, that bitch?'”

The contrast between the louche life of the SS members and the brutal existence of the prisoners did not escape him:

Nonetheless, Rybacki knew how lucky he was to be a waiter working in the dining room. The job was not only “under a roof”—essential, he felt, if he was to survive the winter—but also brought him into direct contact with the single most important commodity in the camp—food. He and the other prisoners who worked as waiters would steal whatever food they could and hide it in the attic of the building. But their actions were not without risk. Once, when several members of the SS were standing at the buffet that adjoined the dining room, he and the other waiters heard a loud noise. They looked back into the dining room and “our hair stood on end. Suddenly we saw somebody's legs and half the body coming through the ceiling.” They knew at once what must have happened. One of the other waiters, searching for food in the attic, had slipped: “Up there you had to be careful to step on the beams, because otherwise you would fall through.” It was a potentially deadly situation for all of them. But, luckily, the SS men nearby were laughing and drinking so much that they did not turn back to look into the room. The prisoner who had fallen through managed to pull himself back up and the debris was swept away. But that still left the hole in the ceiling. Next morning when they arrived for work they simply bribed one of the SS guards with butter and sausage not to ask too many questions about the damage. Two days later the hole was mended.

Had it not taken place in Auschwitz, Tadeusz Rybacki's recollection of his friend falling through the ceiling, his legs dangling helplessly, would be almost comic; and the knowledge that he and his comrades escaped punishment by bribing a junior member of the SS is reminiscent of the manipulation of German guards in Allied POW camps so beloved of Hollywood producers attached to the semi-romanticization of the prison camp experience in the West. Set in Auschwitz as it is, however, his story carries none of these resonances. Instead, it is a telling reminder once again of how, by
early summer 1942, Auschwitz had evolved into two separate camps. Not just geographically, with Birkenau emerging from the mud slightly less than three kilometers away from Auschwitz main camp, but philosophically and psychologically as well. In one, prisoners like Tadeusz Rybacki did what they could to survive by scheming to get the best work and “organizing” additional food; in the other, men, women, and children were murdered within hours of arriving.