The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (49 page)

It is uncomfortable to think that at the very moment when the Allied cause seemed most just, when the good war really fulfilled its promise—the moment when Hitler’s camps finally were torn open and their inmates freed—that Jewish survivors of Hitler’s atroci- ties found little joy in the proceedings. Their physical deterioration, the looming presence of death every- where in the camps, the absence of lost loved ones—all these complex emotions left survivors at a loss, con- fused, benumbed. The dominant impression of the mo- ment of liberation that one takes from the accounts of survivors is one of immense sorrow mixed with shame,

anger, and humiliation. Liberation brought freedom, but freedom weighed heavily on the survivors. For now began the mourning, the tallying up of losses, and the search for an answer to that great unanswerable ques- tion that hangs over these events: why did this hap- pen?

The moment of liberation was no easier for the soldiers doing the liberating. The young men who stumbled across Hitler’s camps in the spring of 1945 were on the whole oblivious to Hitler’s genocidal war on the Jews. During the war, the death camps remained largely in- visible to the American public, and even when U.S. government officials came to know in 1942 significant details about Hitler’s war on Europe’s Jews, they did not use this information to galvanize public opinion or to refine America’s war aims. Because U.S. soldiers had not been told what to expect when they arrived at the camps, they also had not been told how to react or what to say about what they saw. The words they spoke, and the first reactions of the press corps that entered the camps alongside the soldiers, reveal much about what liberation looked like as it unfolded: an awkward, painful moment, a hideous encounter with a kind of war even battle-hardened soldiers could not have imagined.

These two groups of people—Jewish survivors and Al- lied liberators—found themselves locked in a tense standoff in the months immediately following the war. Liberated Jews, mostly from Poland, refused to return to their blood-soaked homeland, for their families, homes, synagogues, and towns had been eradicated, and the Communist-controlled regime in postwar Po- land offered them little solace or encouragement. Jews nourished the hope that they could travel to British- controlled Palestine, to join the fledgling Jewish settle- ment there and begin a new life. But the British gov- ernment closed this avenue of escape even to the few surviving Jews of the Holocaust, fearful that additional Jewish immigration to Palestine would further inflame the region, and weaken Britain’s colonial hold on the territory. And so Jews waited, settling against their will in rough-hewn huts and disused barracks, mostly in the American zone of Germany, beseeching their lib- erators for aid, help, and attention. The British and American governments provided little more than tem- porary shelter and barely adequate sustenance. In the months and years after May 1945, thousands of Jews continued to live in camps in the heart of the country that had caused them such torment, bearing their sor- rows and looking anxiously into a future they could not divine. For these men and women and children, caught in limbo between slavery and freedom, liberation had

come, and gone.

8: A Host of Corpses: Liberating Hitler’s Camps

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USCHWITZ WAS THE German name for Os- wicim, a town about thirty miles west of Krakow, in southern Poland—an area annexed to the Re-

ich after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. It was conveniently located on the main rail lines coming from Germany, Poland, and western and south- ern Europe. Built on the site of a former Austro-Hun- garian artillery barracks, it grew into a vast complex of three concentration camps and thirty-six subcamps. Auschwitz I was opened in June 1940, chiefly to hold Polish political prisoners. Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, began construction in October 1941. It was initially in- tended to house POWs but by the spring of 1942 was designated chiefly as a killing center, with gas cham- bers built for this purpose. It also housed the women’s camp. Auschwitz III, or Buna-Monowitz, supplied forced labor to nearby I. G. Farben, the factory where the Germans were attempting to develop synthetic oil and rubber. It was here that Primo Levi had been incarcerated and forced to work in the chemical sec- tion of the camp. The Auschwitz complex covered some twenty-five square miles, and was the largest of Hitler’s extermination camps.

Other extermination camps— Chelmno, Sobibór, Belzec, Treblinka, and Majdanek—were used for kill- ing mainly Polish Jews; Auschwitz received transports of Jews from all across Europe. Jews from Upper Silesia began to arrive in February 1942, followed by the first transports of Jews from France and Slovakia in March. Trains from Holland began to arrive in July, trains from Belgium and Yugoslavia brought Jews in August 1942, and transports from Czechoslovakia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Latvia, and Austria delivered victims between De- cember 1942 and November 1943. In August 1944, the last significant community of Jews left in Poland—those in the Lód ghetto—were sent to Auschwitz and liqui- dated. The final large transports into the camp, from May to early July 1944, carried some 430,000 Hungar- ian Jews. Most of them were exterminated upon their arrival. At a minimum, 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz; 960,000 of them were Jews.
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Auschwitz was not the first of Hitler’s camps to be liberated. As the Soviet Army moved farther into ter- ritory once held by the Germans, increasing evidence of the scale and nature of the Nazi barbarity became available to the Allied public. On July 24, 1944, the Red Army took the Polish city of Lublin, and discovered a massive death camp—Majdanek—two miles from the city center. This camp had been the setting for the gas-

sing, shooting, and incineration of at least 59,000 Jews (though some estimates are much higher).
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The SS had evacuated the camp and the prisoners before the So- viet troops arrived, but in haste they left most of the evidence of their work intact. The Soviets allowed war correspondents of the Allied armies to come and gape at the gas chambers and crematoria, and soon news- papers around the world carried photographs and descriptions of the gruesome scene. Correspondents viewed vast storehouses, filled with clothing, luggage, piles of razors, scissors, pencils, notebooks, and, in one cavernous room, 850,000 pairs of shoes. In another storeroom, toys: “marbles, jigsaw puzzles, teddy bears, pink celluloid dolls, and an American-made Mickey Mouse,” according to a Newsweek reporter. Nearby, an enormous pile of bones and ash lay next to the neat- ly tended vegetable gardens. The Russian officer in charge captured the essence of the scene by declaring: “ This is German food production. Kill people; fertilize cabbages.”
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Hitler was infuriated by the sloppy work of the camp’s SS officers in failing to destroy the evidence of geno- cide at Majdanek, and as a consequence Reichsführer- SS Heinrich Himmler—chief of the SS and architect of the Final Solution—began to plan for the gradual evacuation of the many camps and prisoners still un-

der German control.
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Weak and ill prisoners were to be killed, while others capable of labor were to be transferred into the Reich, where they might con- tinue to toil in German war industries. At Auschwitz, the gradual dismantling of the massive camp complex commenced. Camp officials began to burn documents, and prisoners were assigned the horrific duty of dig- ging up bodies previously buried in mass graves and incinerating the remains so as to hide the evidence of the camp’s activities. Transfers of prisoners picked up pace in the summer, and between August and Decem- ber 1944, some 65,000 prisoners were sent westward, most to Buchenwald, Dachau, and Ravensbrück. In November, Himmler halted the gassing of prisoners at Auschwitz, and work details began to drill holes in the concrete foundations of the gas chambers in prepara- tion for their demolition.
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As of January 17, 1945, when the last roll call was held, there were still about 67,000 prisoners in the entire Auschwitz complex, including Birkenau, Monowitz, and the various nearby subcamps.
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These men and women formed a cross-section of tormented Europe: among their number were Gypsies, Russian POWs, German political prisoners, French, Poles, Yugoslavs, Dutch, Belgians, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Italians, Greeks, and Croatians. Most, but by no means all, were

Jews. Over the course of January 17–21, about 56,000 of these long-suffering people were formed into groups and marched out of the camp—human convoys des- tined for other camps farther inside the Third Reich. After the prisoners’ hurried departure, SS soldiers blew up the crematoria and gas chambers, set fire to storehouses of goods stolen from the captives, and attempted to destroy any remaining documents con- cerning the operations of the camp. Aerial bombard- ment of the factories at Buna-Monowitz furthered the destruction of the camp. (Allied bombing of the rubber and oil plants at Buna had increased in the previous months, but no air strikes ever targeted the crematoria or gas chambers.) By the time units of the Red Army entered Birkenau on January 27, much of the camp was in ruins. Only 7,600 prisoners—those too ill to walk— remained in the entire complex when the Soviet troops arrived.

On January 18, when the Germans evacuated the camp, one of two possible fates lay before the prisoners: to march westward, or to stay behind. The general view of the prisoners at the time was that evacuation was the better choice. Those who were too ill to walk, it was assumed, would be shot, or if not shot, simply forgot- ten and left to starve. Those who marched out of the camp were fearful, but they were leaving Auschwitz,

and that at least offered some slight reason for hope. In fact, those that stayed behind—if they did not suc- cumb to hunger or disease—proved to be the lucky ones. After ten days of lonely isolation, they were liber- ated by the advancing Russian army. Primo Levi found himself among this group. Yet his was an atypical story. The less well-known but far more common experience for the Jews of Auschwitz who survived into 1945 was a horror-filled, exhausting series of convoys—the aptly named death marches—that took them into the heart of war-stricken Germany. For thousands of Auschwitz inmates, and for hundreds of thousands of camp pris- oners across central Europe, these marches ended in an agonizing death.

Primo Levi stayed behind in Auschwitz on January 18 and survived the war. He was, he insists, lucky, as he had been throughout his year in the camp. After all, he survived. “ There was no general rule” to surviving, he maintained, “except entering the camp in good health and knowing German. Barring this, luck dominated.” And what luck: Levi arrived in Auschwitz on February 26, 1944, in a transport of 650 Jewish men, women, and children deported from the Fossoli camp, near Mod- ena in northern Italy. Of this group, 95 men and 29 women were assigned numbers, and life. The rest—526 people—were immediately killed in the gas chambers.

And when he returned to Italy in late 1945, he was ac- companied by only three fellow deportees from that convoy. Levi’s luck came in various forms: he was de- ported to Auschwitz only in 1944, when the chances of survival for skilled laborers had become somewhat better due to the demands of the German war machine for certain goods produced at Buna-Monowitz. He also had help from others at critical moments, particularly one Lorenzo, a Catholic mason from Italy who had been drafted by the Germans in 1942 for labor at the Buna complex. Lorenzo, living in a workers’ barracks out- side the camp, was able to smuggle to Primo small por- tions of extra food. And he got sick only once, but—as he put it—”at the right moment.” On January 11, 1945, Levi came down with scarlet fever and was sent to the infectious ward of the infirmary, which allowed him access to a bunk—”really quite clean”—and doses of sulpha drugs. When the Germans evacuated the camp on January 18, Levi—weak, exhausted, and feverish— stayed in his bunk. Levi thus avoided a death march that would in all likelihood have killed him.
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For ten days after the departure of the German guards, the camp was in limbo. A few thousand prisoners clung to life, and hope, during this strange interregnum. Marcel W. was one of them. A Frenchman of Polish ori- gin and a Jew, Marcel had been arrested by the Vichy

police during the infamous Vel d’Hiv roundup in Paris in July 1942.
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He was sent to Birkenau, along with his father and brother, neither of whom survived the war. His skills as a watchmaker and a mason allowed him to secure much-valued assignments to various work kom- mandos and the support of other French prisoners kept him alive at critical moments, for example, when he contracted tuberculosis in March 1943. Transferred in July 1943 to an arms factory in Silesia, he was returned to Buna-Monowitz in November 1944. He recalled that by January 1945, one could hear the sound of advancing Soviet artillery, and this prompted a mixture of hope and anxiety among the prisoners: what would happen to us, they wondered, when the war turned against the Germans? For Marcel, as for Primo Levi, a providential illness intervened. Sometime around January 11, Mar- cel suffered a serious foot injury. He reluctantly went to the infirmary, his foot swollen and pus-filled. There, his toenail was removed and the pus flushed out, and he was assigned a berth in the surgery to recover. Thus, on January 18, the day of the evacuation, he was in his sickbed. It brought little comfort: “ We were afraid of staying,” he remembered. “ We expected to be killed.”

Marcel vividly recalled that during the night of Janu- ary 18, a massive aerial bombardment of the camp oc- curred, which he thought ironic since the only people

left in the camp were ill prisoners. The camp was badly damaged, and the barracks near his were set on fire. His hut was unscathed, however, and the morning of January 19—the day of his twenty-first birthday—he felt that “his life was his again.” He was among a lucky few, however. Of the 800 patients in the infirmary, he estimated that 500 died within the next ten days. There was, after all, no food distribution, water, or electricity. Only those well enough to forage could hope to survive. Moreover, a vast column of German soldiers, tanks, trucks, and artillery—the German army in full re- treat—passed by the camp, leaving the sick men deeply uneasy about their fate. Periodically, shells struck the camp, as the Germans and Russians engaged in run- ning battles. Worse, various SS and SD (security ser- vice) soldiers intermittently appeared at the camp to carry out further murders of the remaining Jews. On January 20, a camp guard, SS Corporal Perschel, reap- peared and ordered the shooting of some two hundred women in the women’s camp in Birkenau. On January 22, another unit of SD soldiers returned to Birkenau and murdered five Russian POWs who were alleged to possess hidden weapons. They also shot prisoners on the camp grounds. And on January 25, another unit of SD soldiers carried out random shootings in Birkenau. The Germans killed as many as three hundred camp prisoners in these final days.
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Only on January 27, when