Prisoners of Fear - Reiner
Prisoners of Fear - Reiner
Prisoners of Fear - Reiner
PRISONERS OF FEAR
]>y
ELLA LINGENS-REINER
Doctor of Medicine and Law of the
finiversily of Vienna
With an Introduction by
ARTURO BAREA
LONDON
VICTOR GOLLANCZ LTD
1948
Copyright 1948 by Ella Lmgens-Remer
that others who were in the same camp at the same time might
have seen and felt vastly different things and could, with equal
A 2
justiiicatioiij teli what was true ibr theiiij and incket! aiiotlicr
I set them down that my story may lack nothing. Those who
have escaped the dark and terrible aspects of life will find my
brutality, my flash of rage in our final tragedy, easy enough to
blame, for they know what is wrong as well as any, but not
what is possible to tortured men. But those w'ho have been
under the shadow, who have gone down at last to elemental
things, will have a wider charity.
But we also realise how the little S.S. men were driven by dull
resentment or fear for themselves, how men and women can be
decent at one time and bestial at another, and how selfish
cowardice can create worse injustice, can lead to greater brutality
than deliberate cruelty alone could do.
This, to my mind, is the greatest value of PRISONERS OF
FEAR. It clearly shows us a danger we can combat because it
partly lies in ourselves and because we can tackle its social and
psychological causes, a danger which we once overcame in de-
feating the National Socialist powers, but which continues to
exist: that selfish cowardice which makes us shut our eyes to
coming conflicts and refrain from action, until our fear turns us
into mental and moral prisoners and exposes us to the risk of
becoming, physically, prisoners behind electrified wire or to
the equally terrible risk of sending other human beings as
,
war and that all the wonderful things Adolf Hitler has created
will be destroyed by the Unholy Alliance of our enemies. But
there is one achievement that will stand, and future generations
will thani: us for it
there is one fact which will never be reversed
except in the small neutral countries, there are no Jews left on
the European Continent. That the Jews will come back in appre-
ciable numbers from the Anglo-Saxon countries where they pros-
per is most unlikely. Anyhow, the Western Jews do not multiply.
Thus, the fact that we have exterminated, root and branch, the
muss reservoir in the East from which they were drawing fresh
force.s makes one thing certain we have freed Europe from the
:
Actually I had done very little. In fact, too little. There were
some friends of ours, Jews, who lived in Poland. An Ar)an
Pole brought us new's from them. He told us that the Germans
had killed six or seven million people in Poland Poles and Jews.
Could we help our friends and, if possible, other Jews to escape
abroad? Someone who had succeeded in getting away had left
us the address of a man who had helped him. We
thought \vc
could help others through him. Our friends came to us with the
papers of Polish agricultural labourers; we had them for a few-'
days in our house in Vienna, before they could be taken to the
Swiss frontier. The man who w'as supposed to help them was
himself a Jew. But he was a spy, a Jewish Gestapo spy: he had
allowed one person to escape so that he might catch othcr.s with
greater certainty. He led our friends straight into the hands of
the Gestapo. That was the story, as far as the Gestapo found
out. But, in addition, they discovered that ^ve had let a Jewish
girl live with us for three months, withou! registering her witli
the authorities. Also, a letter happened to arrive from some
Jewish friends of ours who lived in the United States and wrote
to us via Switzerland, in an attempt to get news about their (id
people whom they had left behind. This was enough to convince
the Gestapo that w^e had built up a vast organisation whidi they
believed to be in close contact with the Polish resistance move-
ment, as the people concerned were Polish Jc\vs. The most aggra-
vating single circumstance was the fact that I had been a member
of the local branch executive of the Austrian Social Democratic
Party.
My case appeared to be so important that the Head of the
Political Search Bureau (Politisches Fahndungsamt), a certain
Dolfij decided to handle it himself. At the interrogation I man-
aged at first to clear myself reasonably well. I found that the
dreaded omniscience of the Gestapo was nothing but a myth. In
reality they were fumbling in the dark. Any word which ad-
mitted the slightest detail was one word too many. This in itself
was part of the danger. It was bad enough if the Gestapo dis-
covered something. But if they failed to do so, they took you to
be diabolically clever and subtle, as you had apparently succeeded
in covering your tracks. And that was worse. For then they re-
garded you as the intellectual enemy whose mere existence was
a menace to the Reich. You had to grant them a certain power
of intuition they were able, if not to convict their enemies by
:
was the great art of these people to organise their doings so that
the right hand was able to ignore what* the left hand was doing.
After all, factories did exist in which some Jews had to work for
a time before they died. . . .
and Austria took the worst possible way out they made room
:
for some of those who had been standing (many, it is true, for
a ver)^ long time) by chasing away some of those who had been
sitting
tliat is, the Jews and the anti-Fascists. For those who
remained they supplied powder-barrels, on which they sat down
quite happily at first.
My interrogation was not particularly interesting in itsi^lf.
points had remained; and again there had not been any need for
violence, from their point of viewe Women who relusefl to answer
questions were put into solitary confinement, without work or
exercise; whether they were tortured at a later stage wns sotnelhing
their fellow-prisoners had no means of finding out. I was told of one
woman who had been exposed to the glare ofpowerful searchlights
and almost blinded, but I never saw her myself. Later, in the con-
centration camp, I usually tried to discover whether new-comers
had been tortured or ill-used during their interrogation, German
prisoners frequently answered in the negative. Nearly ail the
foreign prisoners answered in the affirmative. I myself saw Polish
women lying 'on the floor of the reception hut at Auschwitz un-
able to move : their buttocks, swollen and purplish-blue, showed
4
bleeding gashes, three to five inches long, np to one and a half
inches wide, up to an inch deep. Those women had been travel-
ling for three days, and their wounds were not even dressed. The
police had tried to make them give away the hide-out of a group
of Polish partisans. I pointed them out to Dr. Rohde, at that time
the camp doctor a good-natured man w^ho liked to show some
consideration to prisoners of every nationality, particularly to
women. I said to him: Took at these women; thats how they
arrive here after their interrogation. He appeared ver>^ un-
happy. I could see that he was embarrassed by what he saw,
that he disapproved of it, and that he reflected on the unpleasant-
ness it would mean for him if he were to report the case.
Though it could be argued that a report from the S.S. doctor
would in all probability have helped neither those poor w'omen
nor future victims, it is by no means a foregone conclusion. A
friend of mine whom I met in Dachau Concentration Gamp told
me that in the Dutch camp at Flight the camp doctor reported
on principle every case of tliis kind which came to his notice, and
so succeeded in getting a Gestapo chief one of the worse offenders
removed from his post. Even under the conditions of concentra-
tion camps personal courage sometimes achieved results ; but it
was not surprising that it was a rare thing, under the given con-
ditions. In the case of the Polish women, Dr. Rohde shrugged
and mumbled something about the injuries being merely super-
ficial. The women were left without medical attention until the
following morning. Yet that same camp doctor had once roused
our Chief Doctor and the dispenser in the middle of the night to
get salicylate for an old woman who complained of rheumatic
pains. . .But those were contradictions which I came to knmv
.
thought to go home. She heard a rumour that according to
German laws her marriage was not valid. She took her papers to
an office of the German Ivlilitary Command and asked to be sent
home. At first she was fortunate, in that the officer Interviewing
her was not a Nazi. He at once grasped the situation and whii;|,)cr-
ed into her car: Youre liick)^ nobody knows about you and your
marriage. Dont be a fool, woman: get out of here, quick ! But she
failed to understand. My marriage is invalid, isnt it? she tried to
explain, and repeated her request to be sent home. Site simply
did not know about the Nuremberg La\vs; even less ab<')ut their
validity abroad under the German rule. After the /knschliiss
she had not stayed more than a few weeks in Austria, so that
the racial laws had not been brought home to lier, ami before
the annexation of Austria they had meant nothing to her. When
she persisted in her request, another officer took her into custody.
For weeks she was dragged from prison to prison, until she was
brought to Vienna. At her trial her counsel maintained success-
fully that there was no evidence of her husband being a Jew.
She was sentenced to ten months imprisonment for contraven-
tion of marriage regulations, committed by concluding :i inarriagn^
abroad without the consent of the Registrar of her home town;
the months of imprisonment pending the trial were taken into
account, and she was set free on the spot. (This sccnis to have
been one of the cases of conscious sabotage of Nazi legislatiori
by an Austrian Court, which later induced Hiller to issue his
furious Judicial Ordinance complaining about the practice of the
judiciary.) The woman believed that the matter was settled,
and worked quietly as a clerk in an office, until one day she was
arrested by the Gestapo.
She told me in detail what had been said at her interrogation.
You w^ent to France and married a Jew? Yes, I did. But
please, sir, that matter is settled. Pve been in prison ten months
for it. Then well lock you up for a little longer, just to sliow
yoit that the matter is not settled. That was all. Apart from
these three sentences, nothing was said. When I was sent to the
cell the woman had been there for two months, worrying herself
to death in an effort to discover exactly why she had been arrested
again. When I had pieced her case together, from sucli in-
formation as she was able to give, I explained to her that she
had been re-arrested because the Gestapo had not been satisfied
ydth the mild construction the Court had applied to her offence,
instead of convicting her under the Nuremberg Racial Laws.
I added, trying to cheer her up, that she should not take her pre-
dicament too much to heart; it would pass at least she had the
knowledge of having been happy for a while. The woman looked
at me, her eyes big in her pale face, and said quietly : I was
not happy. I loved rny husband but all the time I was afraid
;
talcs. All the prisoners who had told the Gestapo lies, or had
simulated simple-mindedness, would keep this up with their fellow-
prisoners, if only because they feared that there might be spies
among them. Also there were professional criminals who lied on
principle. Therefore it w^as not advisable to take every man or
woman at face value who professed ignorance and innocence ; but
after a w'hile, with a little practice, it was not impossible to dis-
tinguish between real and sham simplicity.)
The woman whose story I want to quote was a genuinely simple
soul Her main misfortune Avas that she was practically illiterate.
9
She came from the Hungarian frontier-one of the parts of
Austria where the level of general education is lowest among the
older generations and was married to a carter, who had been
out of work for many years in the time before the annexation of
Austria. She had been anxious to earn some money, and had
registered with the Labour Exchange (pre-Nazi), but was never
offered a job. In the summer of 1939, when her husband was
working and she was no longer looking for a job, she suddenly
received a summons to report for work at an ordnance factory.
She thought this was a belated reply to her earlier applications,
in which she was now no longer interested. With diflicuity she
managed to decipher the main part of the communication, but
did not get to the sinister official formula failing which.
Even had she done so she would probably not have grasped its
implications. After this she received a few more official com-
munications to the same effect, was vaguely surprised at the
unexpected friendly interest the gentlemen of the Labour Ex-
change had developed in her, and threw them away as she had
done the first paper. Then she was suddenly arrested for refusal
to work and sabotage of the war effort. She was completely
dumbfounded. She could not understand why she had not been
given work when she needed it badly, and was to be forced to
work when she no longer wanted it. In vaiii she tried to make the
police officer understand that she could hardly read and that the
whole matter was beyond her. I know it means doing you a
wrong, the officer had told her, but I can do nothing about it.
Eve got my instructions from Berlin, and they say youre to be
sent to a camp in order to be taught to work. The woman spent
four years in concentration camps, first at Ravcnsbruck, later
at Auschwitz. Like many of her kind, she had been forgotten by
the authorities. Soon after her arrival in Auschwitz Camp she
contracted tuberculosis; she died in March 1943, in a state of
complete physical exhaustion she had first survived typhoid
and typhus, in order that she might be taught to work for the
German war effort. . . .
with other women. Some of them were free from their daily cares
and chores for the first time in many years. This was an im-
portant psychological point.
There are few^ people so continuously bound up in tasks which,
II
though smailj are of immense importance to tlicir families as are
IiousewiveSj particLilariy the house^vives of the working ciasy, wlic
have to go out to earn money, and to look after a household ifi
their spare time. In war-time housekeeping had become a most
exhausting and difficult business, for obvious reasons, and, in
addition, most of the women had to work long hours outside their
homes. Small wonder, then, that many of them regarded their
imprisonment in. a police cell as an odd sort of holiday, when they
could rest and relax. It was less easy for women who worried
about their children at home, but the others would soon feel
almost cheerful and at ease; as they had no other way of keeping
themselves occupied, they began to think they wanted to under-
stand how things hung together and to puzzle matters out.
Naturally the politically active among the prisoners made good
use of the excellent psychological opporlunity which thus oliered
itself. The elfectiveness of this form of political education among the
imagined that the prisoners learned to care even less. This iii-
dilTcrence towards imprisonment began to extend to criminal
offences as well The feeling of moral invulnerability which had
.
IS
CHAPTER TWO
JOURNEY TO THE GATES OF AUSCHWITZ
A SOBER ASSESSMENT ofmy positioii had made it clear to me
after the firstfew days that I was bound to land up in a concen-
tration camp. The Gestapo could not very well put me on trial
without exposing their decoy the last thing they wanted to do.
They had neither the intention nor actually the possibility of re-
leasing me. Therefore the camp was the ideal solution for them.
When I said this to the Gestapo official in charge of my case he
contradicted me so brazenly that he made me doubt for a moment.
He said No, we havent got any camps for women of your sort
:
its only the women who wont work that we send there. I am
Yet at the time I knew for a fact that he himself had proposed my
detention in camp for the duration.
It I was to meet again and again in
was the shady method that
the years that followed. An official only proposed, he did not
decide the term of detention in camp; but in Berlin such pro-
posals were confirmed as a matter of principle, because the local
Gestapo was given a free hand in dealing with cascjs. If there
was an obvious miscarriage of justice the blame alwa)'s fell on the
local Gestapo
but nobody ever assumed the responsibility.
In the police prison I tried to find out as much as possible
about concentration camps. Every Tuesday a transport left for
Auschwitz, every Thursday one for Raveiisbriick. Prisoners from
all the provinces were assembled in Vienna and sent on Irom
there in collective transports. My transport consisted of eighty
men and forty women most of the others were presumal}ly al)out
;
Salvation Army man who had felt such optimism regarding the
length of life in a concentration camp assured me that Auschwitz
was a rather mild camp. On the other hand, a police inspector,
who looked on with compassion while we were loaded into prison
vans, said to me So now its your turn, and unfortunatel}'' youre
:
!
in lor Auschwitz, not for Ravensbriick
Later I saw that ail those people had told the truth, and that
all the contradictory facts taken together made up the reality of
the camp, which to this very day seems unreal to me.
At first I was somewhat frightened at the prospect of ha%dng to
face, alone and unprotected, a situation in which my life would be
in danger, but I also felt curiosity and an urge to find out about
things. Besides, the long confinement in the narrow prison ceil
had begun to tell on me. Therefore, strange as this may sound, I
almost pleased when our departure \ras finally announced in
the middle of February. In my abysmal ignorance, and because
I had heard tales of meticulous inspection in matters of order and
cleanliness, I made a careful scrutiny of all the things I meant to
take with me to the camp, cleaning and refurbishing them as best
I could. The comb, which I should have been allowed to keep, was
left behind at the last moment; everything else was taken from me
in the end; and in the face of the unimaginable filth prevalent in
Auschwitz Camp my preparations seemed decidedly childish in re-
trospect. But my mental preparation for the things in store for me
was just as inadequate. In excuse I can only say that it w'ould have
15
been impossible to form a mental picture even remotely resemb-
ling the reality.
At last we were about had some food with us
to stari. V\ e all
only the Jewish women hadnothing whatsoever. One of the
wardresses her
name was Frau Hahn bought, with her own
money, iinrationcd snacks and gave them to these women so that
they should have some food during their journey. Another ward-
ress had shortly before l)een arrested because she had smiigglcxi
letters for the prisoners, not for money, but out of the goodiurss of
her heart. I was afraid that Frau Hahn would soon share the
same fate.
It seems right to me not to pass over those little acts of kindness
in silence. They n,dd up to a total \vhich dcscr\cs tobe pul iutn
the other side of the scales was to iind such people even aiiioiig
the camp guards.
At three oclock in the morning we \vere lined U]3 in the piison
yard. The clay before we had been allowed a ])ath and had been
disinfected a somewhat superfluous measure of precaution, for it
praying. There they knell, quiet and resigned one of them in- ;
four hours in the morning, and in the evening, too. But it never
comes out right.
Is it the same in winter?
It doesnt matter what the weather is. If youre sick, you go to
the hospital but there you only get worse ; and if you go to Hut 25
;
beaten to death with a rope ^whose fault is this war, if not the
fault of those damned Jews? As soon as he had gone one of the
policemen threw a food-packet over to me. I looked at him and
asked In spite of it? He answered Because of it ! Towards
: :
us would have fired a shot. I do not quite believe this the com- :
manding officer would have given the order to fire, and all of
them would have fired. But perhaps in the best of cases none
would have hit the mark. . . .
it. Fve got my little boy at home, and I must get back to him.
We marched past the gates of the mens camp; its brick build-
ingSy lit by dazzling searchlights, had a fairly solid look. But then
the road grew much worse. The watch-towers and, behind them,
the miserable hutments of the womens camp came into view.
It had the poetic name of Birkenau
"Birch-Grove near
Auschwitz, and at that period 13,000 women were living no,
were vegetating there.
My new friend seemed to hope that this sight would convert me
to his opinion, and made a last attempt: "Wont you give me
your watch, after all? he asked, almost pleading.
But I remained firm and cut short all further onslaughts:
"Havent I told you that I mean to stick it out?
He answered, genuinely sorry: "But, my dear child, you dont
know the Germans you do not know them.
His words still sounded in my ears when I stood in the camp
road and the gates cianJked shut behind me. I looked back.
Would they ever open again for me?
21
CHAPTER THREE
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
At four o'clock we arrived in the reception hut, whicii to a
novice did not look like a usable building. It was a shed, with
boards instead of solid walls on both sides, no windows, no floor-
ing. The stamped earth of the floor was so uneven that you could
push your whole arm through gaps between the ground and tlu^
boards. Equally wide chinks gaped between the walls and the.
xpof, which half-way up was pierced by two rows of skylights.
Two-thirds of the front and back walls were taken up !3y huge
barn doors. The inside was bare; there were a few bcdstc^ads:,
huddled in a corner, and a forlorn little iron stove. In the middle
of a winter night the room was damnably cold.
With us was a seventy-year-old woman, a German political
prisoner. She was here because she had not been willing to over-
look the fact that a Hitler Youth leader, a homosexual, had abused
her young grandson. She had addressed complaints to very high
quarters, insisting on her right and justice, until she ^vas sentenced
for defamation to two and a half years penal servitude and .sub-
sequent detention in a concentration camp. She had withstood
life in the penitentiary, with its severe but fairly clean and ordtrred
had lent my fur coat to a young woman who was strong and
healthy but had only a thin summer suit. While w^e were on the
move I did not feel the cold, even without a greatcoat. Here in
the shed I stood it for an hour, but then I asked her to let me
have my fur coat back, although I was wearing a thick winter
costume. It was simply like this will you be cold, or shall I be
:
cold? will you risk falling ill on entering the camp, or shall I?
will you survive, or shall I ? As soon as one sensed that this was
at stake everyone turned egotist. But, then, one was also quite
alone, with nobody to help in camp hardly a day passed when
;
I should have done well if during the first few days in camp I
had done nothing but watch and w'onder, without talking, let
^23
alone giving advice to others. Even now it weighs on niy mind
that I may have caused the death of a charming young Viennese
woman through my cocksure advice^ because I thought that I
was able to gauge the situation. Her name was Greti; she \\'as
twenty-four a pretty, gentle girl, quiet, modest and yet poised,
with blue eyes and enchanting brown curls. Everybody liked
her, and on' our journey she had been first favourite with tlic
guards. Altogether, healthy and strong, she was one of those who
had a chance to survive.
She told me her story one of the countless tragedies of our
time. Her father was an Aryan, her mother a Jewess. They were
divorced, and Greti was brought up in the Jewish faith by her
mother. This meant that according to the Racial Laws of
Nuremberg she counted as a Jewess (a Geltungsjiidin, in the Nazi
terminology). Nevertheless, she told people that she was of
^mixed blood, and so kept her job in a small hairdressing
establishment in a Vienna suburb, working busily and con-
tentedly. She lived in a free marriage with a young worker, an
Aryan, who refused to be frightened by the danger of being
sentenced for racial pollution, and took her into the iionic of
his parents. Then the pair had a child, whose birth was a com-
plicated story in itself. If the young woman had registered the
child on her own papers, she would have had to say Fiitlier un-
known, in order not to implicate her companion. But then she
would have run the risk that the youth welfime authorities might
have tried to trace the firth er, and so have discovered the whole
tangle; also, the young father was happy to have a child, and
wanted it to be oificially recognised as his. So Greti gave lurr
whole wardrobe to an Aryan cousin of hers in exchange for
the others identity papers, and went to the public ward of a hos-
pital to have her child. It was entered as the illegitimate cliild of
Gretls cousin and the real father. Then Greti lived for some time
in peace with her man and child, happy, if somewhat nervous
because of the constant danger. Somebody who \eas jealous of her
happiness denounced her she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz,
:
On the journey she did not wear the Jewish badge, tiie Star
of David, called herself half-Jewish (which she was in fact, but
not by the currently valid law), and told only me about the true
situation, I believed I was giving her sound advice wfieii I said
to her: Greti, be reasonable; tell them the truth at once when
we anive at the camp, or youll get into trouble; they 11 punish
you, and everythingll go wrong. Unfortunately, the young
woman agreed with me, and acted accordingly when, at last, at
eleven in the morning, an S.S. man tuimed up, took our par-
ticulars and asked about the reasons for our detention, upon
24
^vMcli he decided what kind of badge [Winkel] we would have to
wear. Political prisoners had to wear a red badge, members of
the religious sect Ernste Bibelforscher a purple one, anti-
social prisoners a black one, habitual criminals a green one.
The badges were allotted arbitrarily. If a prostitute had been
picked up while she was together with a Pole, she was given the
red, political badge instead of the black, anti-social badge.
If a woman had been taken into protective custody for over-
staying her leave she had to wear the black badge, unless she had
been working in a munition factory. If so she had committed the
political offence of Wehrkraftsabotage ^sabotage of the war effort
and had to wear the red badge, which carried with it certain
privileges in the camp. After the distribution of badges we were
given our numbers. German Aryan prisoners were just told
theirs, but the others had their number tattooed on the outside
all
of their forearm, and, if they were Jewish, the Star of David
left
fact, what I saw were a few members of the camp Mite^ who lived
on a higher than the rest of the prisoners.
level
The clerk dealt with me was an elegant Polish woman.
who
She asked How long do you think youll stay in the camp?
:
She was right, and it was my best piece of luck in the camp that
from the beginning I had the opportunity of washing every day.
Then the camp clothes were handed out to us. Rottenfuhrer
Klaus had given orders to dress the doctor decently. So I \vas
given a coarse linen shift, a pair of blue-and-white striped calico
26
drawers, a short-sleeved cotton jumper, a pair of fairly decent
rayon stockings, which I had to roil under my knees because I
had no belt or garters, a new prison dress striped in grey and
blue, made of a thick material in the shape of a sack, a long jacket
of the same material, a square white scarf for the head and a pair
of canvas shoes with wooden soles. I wore those shoes three days,
and cannot have walked more than 600 yards in them ; then one
of my legs became sore. I got a pair of leather boots instead. But
the other prisoners had to walk every day six miles to and from
their place of work in the fields in the same sort of clogs ; it is a
wonder to me that they ever managed it. Subsequently there was
always a number of patients whose toes or feet had been ampu-
tated because of gangrenous sores or frost-bite.
The clothing I was given was clean and in good repair. The
others got approximately the same, but in a less decent condition.
The Jewish women were given the uniforms of dead Russians,
which had only one advantage that of including trousers which
could, be stuffed into the boots. None of us looked particularly
beautiful. When Gretl was given one of those uniforms she pro-
tested quietly, but firmly, and pointed out that her hair had not
been shaved, since she was counted as a German. The Capo of
the establishment, a brutal vulgar female, who used to denounce
and trick her fellow-prisoners and had been, in private life, the
proprietress of a Munich brothel, shouted at her, hit her over the
head with a stick and dragged her back to the hairdresser,
shrieking: Off with her hair; the only thing that counts with
me is the tattoo mark! The girl looked round imploringly, but
her protector, the S.S. man, was no longer near. Five minutes
later she stood there with a close-cropped head, almost unrecognis-
able in a dirty Russian uniform which was much too small for
her. And for the first time she shed tears. Also a beautiful
Russian woman wept for the first time when her black curls were
shorn off, I did not quite understand it I believe that the loss of
;
my hair-which, after all, grows again would have impressed
me least. Bift nearly all the others agreed that they had found it
almost the worst of all ^worse than the tattooing. As a matter of
fact, cropping of the hair was one of the most dreaded penalties in
the camp.
J
waved good-bye to Gretl, then she was taken to the Jewish
block. Later I heard that she, tried on another occasion to stand
up a quarrel with the absolute
for her rights. It involved her in
ruler of her hut, the Hut Senior; she was transferred to the
punishment company. It meant the death sentence for her. At
that time it was practically impossible for a Jewish woman to sur-
vive a term in a punishment unit. If she had not followed my
B 2 27'
, advice, if from the beginning she had insisted on iicr mixed
"Aryaii-Jewish origin, she \\'ould not iiave been tattooed, and, as
a German political prisoner, she would have been given a
good job in the camp. The group of half-Jew ish pris(iiicrs was
subjected to a special check in the late summer of 19. [.3 then tliey,
;
too, were tattooed with the Jc^vish star and transierred to Ravens-
briick Gamp. But by that time Gretl might have got beyond the
worst stage in the camp.
While in the camp wc had become so callous that I gave no
more than a few fleeting thoughts to that splendid human being
who died miserably, senselessly, like countless others. Onh; now,
when I am writing these lines, 1 remember her with deep sorrow.
When we had been allotted our new clothes, ouf })i json num-
bers w^eresewn on to dress and jacket.
By the time we were all ready it was 3 p.m, W'c ^vcrc starving.
Now, they did not let us go hungry with intent. That is to say,
there was nobody who had decided that new arrivals should go
without food on their first day in camp. We did not eat because
we had not been put on a bread list. The hut clerks delivered
their so-called food reports at a fixed hour of the day. It meant
that they reported the number of prisoners in their huts, who
had to get their meals there, and then they fetched the corre-
sponding rations from the kitchen. As there were new arrivals
every day, it would not liave been very diflicult ti) put aside a
pail of soup for them but nobody saw to it, because nobody had
;
about three feet, and a row of bunks ranged at a right angle to the
first. Between the second row of bunks and the healing-bcnch in
the middle of the room; there was a passage five feel wide, crowded
with women who made a deafening noise. For quite a long time
I sat and stared at the turmoil, dumbfounded by the thought that
people were supposed to live like this for years on end.
Nobody took any notice of me. I was utterly alone. A heavy,
oppressive sense of fear gripped me. I found it hard to breathe.
What would come next? Fortunately I liad not much time to
indulge in dark thoughts. I had to find a place to sleep. It was
all so very different from prison. There, in the cell, you had to be
passive; everything was allotted to -v'cii; you were pushed hither
and thither hut you could be lazy. Here in the cam]) you had
to be active
constantly, intensely busy getting the most urgent
necessities.
When I realised that I should not automatically get a bed, I
fresh from the bath and really hasnt got any licef* Or; 'Fake
her in with ymu; shes from Vienna you know the song, Vienna,
Vienna ... The women whom she addressed turned round
indignantly and protested they had to be on their feet at five in
;
dirty, uncovered buckets for the night, so that we should not luu'e
to go to the latrine.
This involved me in a little adventure. A young girl told me to
empty one of the full buckets. As a newcomer I did not want to
refuse a small service. I picked up the bucket and asked where I
should empty it.
.Anywhere, she said, and pushed me through the door.
There I stood in the dark with my ljurden, and wondered
which way to turn. Anyw'herc? I thought. Surely tliat's not
possible? Well, anything seemed to be possible in this place. I
30
went straight on without naeeting anybody vv'hom I could have
asked, until I was afraid of 'losing my way back to the hut in the
darkness. Then I saw a ditch next to me. Quickly I emptied my
bucket and took back. The next day I saw that it had been the
it
ditch by the side of the main road of the camp. Of coui'se it was
strictly prohibited to empty ordure there, and if one of the war-
dresses had caught me at it she would have pushed my face into the
filth and forced me to clear it away with my hands. The girl in
my hut had known all this, and yet she had sent me out without
any warning. She supposed ^rightly, as events proved that I
w'ould empty the bucket somewhere nearby and be back quickly
the only thing in which she w'as interested. The risks I was
running in my ignorance meant nothing to her. She even tried to
send me out again, but then I noticed that, she had no armlet.
This meant so much I knew that she had no special function
and no right to give me orders. She had simply tried her luck
with me. I turned my back on her and went to sleep. Fortu-
nately there were enough blankets, so I was not cold.
The woman sleeping above me turned heavily in her bunk,
and from her palliasse a cloud of dust silted through the boards
down on to me. I passed my hand over my face and caught three
'
revolved round the ciuestion whether the roll had been complete
or not. At the time of my arrival this was the procedure at the:
the camp road. It was fairly easy to count the groups oiUside the
huts, but it puzzled me how the milling thousands of Jewish
women on the camp road could ever be counted. I never i'ouncl
out why they had to go out on to the road the only reason which
;
occurred to me was that between the Jewish huts there w'ris not a
single spot where one did not sink to the knees into mire and
marshy soil. Several months later the Jewish women were
ordered to form up in front of their huts, too, and then the roll-
calls finished more quickly. When all the prisoners were outside,
the wardresses their title was Blockfiihrcr (hut leader) went to
the huts and counted the prisoners lined up there. Tlic sum total
of those single figures was compared with the total figure worked
out from the lists. If the two figures tallied, the whistle ^vas
sounded again and the prisoners were dismissed. If they failed i< >
tally, the grave problem arose whether the count had been fault)',
or the sums had been added up wrongly, or one of the prisoners
had run away.
The working out of the total strength on paper wiis the duty
of the roll-clerk, who held one of the most important and
influential posts in the camp. At first several German prisoners
had been tried out in the job, but they had been hopeless. It was
not a simple calculation. Every day there\vcre arrivals, departures,
deaths, admissions to the hospital, releases from liospital, trans-
fers to and from outlying working parties, transfers from one hut
to another; and a single slip would ruin the whole result. Daring
the roll-call the wardresses would check, and check again, c(mnt
and count again, while the women had to stand there m the open,
endlessly. In the end the post of roll-clerk was givitn to an
intelligent Jewish woman who had worked a lot with timber
computations in civilian life; then at least the total on paper was
worked out' correctly. As far as the actual counting was con-
cerned, the hut leaders wanted to finish their shift as soon as
possible, and so they often reported the figure whicli the hut was
supposed to have, without checking on it. This would happen
for days on end, and when a mistake \vas discovered, it was just as
likely to have occurred days before,
32
In the early months the roll-call hardly ever tallied. 'No one
knew how many of the prisoners were alive and how many dead.
"Women died on the road, they jumped into pits, where their
bodies were found days later; the Hut Seniors did not know the
inmates of their huts and did not notice if someone was missing.
In addition, there was a babylonic confusion of languages. In
German, Polish, Russian, in Czech and in French, in all langu-
ages people were shouting and babbling. The result was chaos.
This explains how it could happen that the young girl in our
transport who had escaped from the camp in October and was
brought back in February was greeted with surprise nobody had :
was unlucky, she had to wait there one or two hours, in an un-
heated room, after which she was put under an icc-cold shower
and given new clothing. From the office she had to go to her hut,
which as a rule was not heated either, and in the evening she
had to stand outside the hut during the hours of the roll-call. In
summer this was just bearable; in winter it merely meant that
the women returned to hospital the next day.
After the w^-orking parties formed up and marched
tlie roll-call
away, I cannot report about the work done by prisoners from
my own experience, as I worked only in the hospital, inside the
camp. To judge by the information my patients gave me, it
varied very much. There were groups which did nothing at all.
This did not mean that the prisoners posted to them had a
pleasant life; every day they had to walk several miles in heavy
clogs, with torn stockings, and stay the whole day out in the open,
in every sort of weather; but they did nothing more to take the
example of the tree-nurseries than cut off or pick branches,
until they were marched back to camp.
Avery pretty young prostitute from Vienna who was forewoman
Capo of one of the working parties told me: I dont do any
work at all. I go to the ponds outside, with a hundred Jewish
women. There the S.S. man who escorts me starts fishing. I fry
the fish he catches, and we eat them together. In the meantime
the Jewesses cart round some pieces of turf and pile them up
somewhere, I dont know what for. Every now and then one of
the S.S. chiefs comes round, shouts at us and says our whole work
stinks,, so then the Jewesses have to i0.t up the turf somewhere else.
I dont bother about them; I go and fry my fish.
She was a so-called good Capo a prefect who left the other
prisoners in peace as long as she herself %vas left in peace; pre-
sumably frying fish was not the only thing she did for the S.S.
man. Other Capos beat the prisoners of their unit, mainly
34
because they themselves were kept under permanent pressure,
and other gi'oups had to work frantically. The decisive factor
'
benefit, so that they could make sure of getting strong young girls
and it looked as if at any moment they would pinch their leg and
arm muscles to test them. One manager would take 100 pieces,
another 500 or 1,000, plus a few nurses or a couple of women
doctors, and then another customer would turn up. We never
felt sure whether it was an advantage or a disadvantage to be
taken away. Certainly it meant the danger of bombing raids; and
perhaps the only thing to comfort us in the torture of camp life
was the fact that the Allied airmen knew and 'avoided the camp.
On the other hand, it was tempting not to sit behind electrified
wire at a time when the end of the war was in sight. We heard
that there was more freedom of movement and better food in the
small factory camps, but women who wei'e brought back to
Auschwitz unfit for work, with crippled limbs, told tales of cruel
exploitation. In some cases they were not allowed to go down to
the shelters during air raids, and the most terrible labour acci-
dents occurred when they were racked by nervous fear. Many of
those transports of human duds were sent direct into the gas
chambers on their return to the camp.
In spite of everything, most prisoners in the camp suffered
from an incorrigible optimism. x4gain and again they hoped that
their fate would become less severe. They took every small
improvement for a sign that the attitude of the S.S. had changed.
But their hopes were senseless. The small changes were nothing
but variations on a fixed theme, which ran arbitrary detention,
:
Allied victory.
37
CHAPTER FOUR
THE ORGANISATION OF A WOMENS
CONCENTRATION GAMP
Optimists occasionally ask me whether the treatment of
women in concentration camps was not, after all, slightly better
than that of the men. As far as the womens concentration camp
of Birkenau-Auschwitz is concerned, I have to answer both yes
and no. Compared with the average treatment of male prisoners,
the sadistic maltreatment of individual women prisoners did play
a minor role but for all that it existed, in an official as well as in
;
an unofficial form.
Like the men, women were given floggings of' twenty- five
strokes on the block. Himmler personally introduced the
measure on one of his visits to Ravensbriick Gamp during the war.
Sometimes the Gestapo would send women to a cam]) with tlie
instruction to give them a flogging of twenty-five or fift\' strokes
right at the beginning. This happened most frequently to the
Poles wenches. When the Camp Command wanted to apply
such a punishment to a woman prisoner for an ofTcncc committed
in camp, they had first to forward the application to Berlin and
then wait for an authorisation.
I knew a pretty young woman who had twice been given a
flogging of twenty-five strokes at Ravensbriick Gamp because she
had a love affair with a Pole. Between the floggings they had put
her for three days into the standing bunker, where cold ^vater
was let into the cell every two hours until it reached her chin.
When I saw her in Auschwitz three years later she was suffering
from a chronic inflammation of the ovaries. This was not an (ex-
ceptional case, though I personally did not meet many women in
our camp who had contracted a serious chronic illness as a result
of those official punishments.
It rarely happened that women were executed. I heard of
several cases, but during my time in camp it was not an everyday
occurrence, as it was in the mens camps. That is to in-
dividual executions of women were infrequent the mass gassing
of Jewish women is another matter, with which I siiaii deal
separately. Once a young Jewess, who had attempted to escape
and was recaptured, forestalled her public execution by cutting
her artery. She died with the words: My death doesnt matter,
38
but you swine will come to a miserable end/ Non-Jewish women
who attempted to escape were as a rule flogged, a penalty which
failed to prevent numerous attempts of the kind, some of them
successful. Like everything else in the camp, flogging was meted
out arbitrarily. Sometimes the blow would fall on hard-boiled
girls who had gone in for wholesale trafficking in jewellery or
spirits, sometimes on quiet Women who had done nothing. Once
one of the female prefects was given two floggings of tw^enty-five
strokes because a woman in her group had escaped on another
;
some obscure reason that particular prefect had been singled out,
that was all.
I must admit that heavy corporal punishment w^as not frequent
in our camp, which therefore had the name of a mild camp.
The majority of the victims were German anti-social prisoners
that is, prostitutes ^while most of the political prisoners I knew
were spared. To judge by reports, flogging was used far more in
Ravensbruck Gamp.
We had also the standing bunker and the water bunker
cells for special punishment. Then there was standing or kneeling
for a certain length of time, and there was the cropping of the hair.
But a comparatively small number of prisoners were victimised in
this way. The usual penalty w^as transfer to a ^punishment com-
pany. Later, life in such a unit was not very different from life
in the camp itself, ancf there was even a time when there w^as more
room for sleeping in the hut of the punishment company than in the
overcrowded huts of the other prisoners. Only those who had en-
joyed the privileges and better conditions connected with a special
function found it hard to be transferred to a punishment unit.
Another official punishment, not subjected to a special authori-
sation from Berlin, was the so-called Stalin-swing. The prison-
er had to sit on the floor with her knees drawn up to her chin
and her arms locked round her legs. Then a bar was pushed
under the hollow of her knees, and lifted so that the victim was
hanging from it. An S.S. man would tip the woman on her
shoulder, she would start swaying, and at every swing another
S.S. man would hit her on the buttocks with a stick or a whip.
Between the strokes she would be asked if she was now willing to
speak. This procedure was used in the investigation of offences.
I was often told, by prisoners as well as by S.S. men, that the
women showed an astounding resistance. The political prisoners,
in the first line the Polish women, were said to be particularly
39
tough. A rather simple girl once said Uj me: '"My gcKKjness, it^s
no more paiiifiii than having a child." When I objected that it
must be terrible to be humiliated in tirat fashion, she replied that
"we women had known for a long time that men were brutes,
which did not alter the fact that wc got the upper hand in the
end. Actually, it was my impression that men sulTcred more
under the flogging than women, and felt their humiliation at the
hands of feliow-men more deeply. Perhaps, though, the m,en were '
In any case, whatever ill usage there was and the least would
have been too much it seemed unimportant compared with the
terrible conditions of life in the camp and their disastrous effects
on the lives and health of the women prisoners. In this respect the
womens concentration camps were worse than the mens. Every
single little improvement every new building, every stove, every
lamp had to be wrested from the Gamp Command. The men,
however, had various other ways in which they could improve
matters. Many of them were put to work in S.S. factories or in
other workshops and plants, and could smuggle material into the
camp. In the ranks of the prisoners were men of every profession;
they were themselves able to manufacture what they most needed.
They built their houses, they made tables and cupboards, they in-
stalled water and electric light, they put in windows, repaired
We
walls, did all sorts of repairs without too much difficulty. were
dependent on working parties from' the mens camp to come over,
officially or unofficially, and do the most urgently needed work
for us.
For all these reasons the level of accommodation and hygiene,
and widi it the level of health, was far lower in the womens
camps than in the mens. At least in the central camp at Ausch-
'^vitz the men were quartered in brick-built houses with cellarp
41
there were decent, clean roads between the blocks, and even small
lawns with flower-beds outside the doors; there was a sports-
ground where they played football on Sundays. Meanwhile, in
our womens camp we were sitting in draughty, windowless huts
and sinking ankle-deep in mud every time we had to walk from
one hut to another. Certainly there existed mens camps, too,
which had our sort of converted stables for huts. In fact, all con-
centration camps started looking like ours, and were transformed
out of nothing by the prisoners themselves, /with the primitive
means at their disposal. But it took the men ver)^ much less time
to make their camp somewhat bearable than it took the women
prisoners.
When I came to the womens concentration camp at Birkenau-
Auschwitz in February, 1943, it was laid out on the usual pattern
there was a wide camp road in the middle, and three rows of huts,
each row consisting of three blocks, on either side, with the
kitchen at the extreme left and the reception hut at the extreme
right. On one side were the so-called good blocks, which
housed the hospital, the clothes and shoes store, the clerks
offices, the prisoner-functionaries and the German prisoners.
Those were the -windowless stables, all built like the reception
hut which I described in the preceding chapter. Their doors stili
bore the notice-boards with the regulations of the veterinary
police, which demanded a thorough-going decontamination oY
the premises every time one of the horses in the stable contracted
an infectious disease. The regulations did not hold good for
human beings.
In some of the stables the ground was floored with bricks, but
mostly the floor w-as of beaten earth. The cantp was situated in a
marshy district. But it was some time before the passages in the
huts were cemented, wliich certainly made them less damp, but
probably even colder than before. Stoves were set up only in the
course of the first winter I spent there, aiid some of the huts could
not be heated till the very end of that winter. At botii ends of each
hut a huge brick stove was placed, the pipe of u^hich ran the whole
length of the hut along the floor, parallel to the ])ipc coming from
the opposite stove. This formed a sort of heated fxuich about two
feet high. When there was enough fuel the stoves work(.d |uitc
well',and even the draughty sheds were more or less heated. But
in the winter of 1943 to 1944 my hut
mie oi the wards of the
hospitalwas heated on no more than fifteen occasions. For the
rest of the time we had to depend on the animal warmth of the
patients bodies
on what we called the warm-blood heating
system. A few of the huts had a sort of lobby at one end, so that
the wind did not sweep the interior every time the door opened.
42
On both sides of those lobbies were the most coveted luxury
rooms, reserved for the Hut Seniors, other prisoners holding
superior jobs in the camp, and ^in the hospital huts the
prisoner-doctors. Any one of us who managed to grab a place for
herself in one of those rooms felt like a queen. They had at least
a boarded floor and a small iron stove, which kept the room warm
on very little fuel, most of it stolen. There one could heat water
for cooking or washing, and so keep oneself and ones things clean.
In the evenings we had something like a private life in such a
room.
For six months I looked longingly at those rooms, as though at a
barred paradise. Then I spent eighteen months in a little closet
with a single window opening into the sick-ward I shared it with
;
five other women-doctors. And in spite of its mice and its bugs
the room was a little home to me, and it helped all of us to bear
the camp.
But only 400 to 500 women in the whole camp lived on this
scale. An additional
1,500 to 2,000 had a fairly tolerable existence
in small, clean huts they were members of the band, office clerks,
:
It was worst in the huts on the other side of the camp road.
They were extremely low stone buildings which had been erected
during the first world war for Russian prisoner's. They had no beds
at all Stone partitions reaching up to the ceiling divided them
into two parts, each of which was subdivided by short, rib-like
walls jutting out from the partitions. Between the ribs boards were
43
fixed in three tiers; they made bunks open on one sidc^ wliicii
looked like animals iairs in a zoo. In some cases the middle bunks
had windows, but all the lower bunks were without light. The
floor-boards of each bunk held three or four palliasses, one next
to the other, on which six to eight ^vomen had to sleep, occasionally
even as many as ten. It was said that a member of one of the S.S.
commissions w^hich came to visit the camp had once remarked
^You can keep rabbits like this, but not women, This was liow
ail the Jewish and non-German women in the camp had to live^
with the exception of those in special jobs a total of about 20,000
;
women.
Anyone wlio entered the womens camp at Auschwitz was
struck by the enormous differences in the appearance of the
prisoners. The overwhelming majority were walking skeletons,
aged and hideous, keeping on their feet as though by a miracle,
wrapped in dirty, ragged, striped prisoners ciotlies or in the
tatters of private clothes of an indefinite colour. Then there were
a certain number of women in decent striped clothes, whf looked
comparatively healthy and strong. These were the prisoners \vha
had managed to get into one of the better working parties, those
who received food-parcels from home, and finally those \vho were
so robust that they resisted the camp conditions. A
large per-
centage of the latter were Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs or Russians,
mostly women who had lived without any comfort at home, in
prunitive conditions, and so knew better how to adapt iliemscivcs
to life in the camp. Very few among the women irom Western
European countries managed to keep a decent level It wa.s in-
teresting to see that the Dutch women were among the dirtiest and
most neglected inmates of the camp; they did not know how to
help themselves without running water, while the Polish women
^vould wash their clothes with sand in a food-bowl.
The approximately 2,500 women who had better accommoda-
tion were also better dressed, -and as a rule ate very much better
than the rest. Some of them had food-parcels from home, and
this meant they had i;eiatives in the country or a family which
could afibrd black-market prices. The Polish women in particu-
lar were kept well supplied by their families, who often brought
financial ruin on themselves in doing so. It was touching to see
how' a distant cousin w^ould do his utmost to keep his relatives in
camp alive. Yet, in spite of this, Auschwitz was the mass grave
not only of the Jewish, but also of the Polish women. The number
of Polish women who died in Birkenau- Auschwitz up to 1944. was
estimated at 25,000.
Those of the privileged group who had no food-parcels were
usually able to establish good contacts in the camp, so that, after
44
a timCj they would get illegal extras, such as potatoes, margarine,
sausage, vegetables and bread.
An incredible amount of theft and barter went on in the camp.
Every morning at three a woman from the kitchen would turn up
in our room, with a little bag of potatoes tied round her waist
under her apron. In exchange we would give her any bread we
could spare, either from the supplies some of us got from home, or
out of I'ations left over in the hut during epidemics, when ten to
twenty women died in the course of a day, many more were un-
conscious and thus unable to take food, and the bread rations
destined for them were used by the medical personnel. This was a
privilege of the hospital Other prisoners worked in the stores or
on the bread distribution, still others in the clothing depots,
where they would filch things and exchange them for food. A few
prisoners worked in the factories, and were in touch with civilians
who would give them food in exchange for clothes, shoes, trinkets
and many other things.
I was always particularly upset by the traffic in medicaments
in the sick wards, A piece of bread was worth two aspirins, mar-
garine or fat bacon was paid for with cardiazol or sulphonamides.
Once I got hold of a girl who was peddling medicines in my hut,
and tried to tell her that it was not right to snatch the last bites
away from sick comrades in exchange for a little medicine. The
girl was Jewish. She told me that she had already been on the list
for the gas chamber because of general physical debility, and had
decided there and then to get more food for herself. She was work-
ing in the storage rooms. Every day she carried a few ampoules
back to the camp in her mouth, at the risk of the gravest penalty
if the control caught her, and sold them for bread and fats. She
looked well and strong, and it was difficult to blame her, as she
had stolen the medicaments from the S.S., not from her fellow-
prisoners. Later I found myself frequently compelled to tell my
typhus patients that' they should get stimulants in this way, be-
cause I simply had not enough for them.
Practically all the goods which were used for barter had been the
property of Jewish prisoners. The Jews from every European
*
country who were to be 'settled*^ in Poland were assembled by the
Gestapo in reception centres, schools or transition camps near
their homes, and organised in transports. They were told that
they would be put to work in Poland, and that they should take
with them their clothes and tools, including medical instruments,
as well as food for three days. Finally, Jewhh Gestapo agents
spread the rumour that it was advisable to sew valuables such as
foreign currency and jewellery into their clothes. I myself had
kept at home money and jewellery for a number of Jews. All
45
those unfortunates came to fetch their valuables before they
left.
decent prisoners for special jobs ^people who did not lay hands
on their comrades rations. But the traffic never ceased entirely
a fact which supplied the Gamp Command with the excellent
argument: Youre starving one another to death! Up to the
very, last it was impossible to eradicate stealing among fellow-
prisoners. Apparently this was not so in the camps at Dachau and
Buchenwald, where the political prisoners saw to it that anybody
could safely leave all his worldly goods in unlocked cupboards. In
Auschwitz there was little of this spirit. There were people who
even in that Sodom and Gomorrah had faith in the validity of
civilian ideas about property
they were lost unless they found
kindly friends to protect them. As a rule we had to assume that
everything would be spirited away, except things on which we
were sitting or things under the eyes of a reliable guard of our
choosing.
From time to time all the huts were searched, once under the
personal supervision of Josef Kramer. The courage with which
the women defended their possessions was astonishing. In the
first hut of our hospital Kramer still discovered various things. In
the second hut practically everything was hidden away when the
search started in the patients beds, under the instrument cup-
board and so on. I myself simply put my dresses on a clothes-
hanger and left my hut, quite openly, when Kramer came in by
the other door. When he had finished with the hut I took the
things in again. If one of the S.S. had asked me about the dresses
I should have answered that they had been confiscated and I had
been ordered to take them to a collection centre in the camp
doctors room. In fact, all the confiscated property went there,
and more than half of it was again stolen on the spot. The re-
mainder was taken to the clothing store; the prisoners working
there returned the things to their previous possessors, for friendly
words or The camp doctor, who was utterly dis-
for food.
interested in theproblem of how we were dressed, lectured the
medical staff and told us that our rooms had looked like the
boudoirs of demi-mondaines for this reason, and as .a punish-
;
ment, the hospital staff was no longer allowed to have two sets of
47
under-clo thing,, but was permitted only a single set. In the course
of the next few days ail of us %\'ore our confiscated clothes, the
S.S. saw and recognised them, and nobody bothered or asked
about their origin.
It must be obvious that this sort of large-scale theft was possible
only because the S.S. men and women, who were supposed to
supervise the prisoners at their work in the stores, stole themselves,
in competition and accord with the prisoners. No matter whether
they were kuver ranks or higher ranks, they stole, every one of
them. Even the' best types among the S.S., as far as we knew
them ill the camp, were no exception. For instance, the camp
doctor, Dr, Rohde, before going on leave which he was spending
with his wife, went to a Polish pi'honcr and asked the man to find
him a nice present for her. \Vhal he got was a. large pigskin
dressing-case. When he returned from kxive he told tlic prisoner
that his ivifc had liked it very much and sent many Oianks.
The goods lying about had no owner, and everyone v/lio had
anything to do with them, whether S.S. man or 'prisoner, non-
Jew or Jew, functionary or cleaner, tried to get hold of as much as
possible. Once I heard how a little S.S. man, an N.C.O., begged
one of the Jewish prisoners who worked in tlie reception ollice to
get him a fountain pen; the ])risoner told him grumpily to come
back another day, at the monumt he had no lime for him,
The corruption among the S.S. was past imaginatiom For a
pullover they would post letters, for toilet soap they would carry
messages to neighbouring camps, for a watch they would rt'gularly
supply foreign radio news. A Medical N.G.O. caught a xoung
nurse with lier lover, an inmate of lire mens camp; for two
pounds of sugar he left them alone with each oilier. Dr. Klein,
the camp doctor, had made himself unpopular with tlic Hut
Seniors of the hospital they bribed one of the Medical N.C.O.s
;
in jug. ^ ^
ment was stolen and the prisoners got the soup in its pristine form.
I ivas unable to stomach the brew, and soon stopped trying, be-
cause it gave me bad heartburn and diarrhoea. Even after my
typhus, when L often cried with hunger, I left that soup untouched.
In the sick w^ards many basins of soup were poured away, and
some of our patients literally starved to death in front of a plateful
of soup. The black flour of which it was made was indigesdble for
weakened bowels. The soup would run out of the womens bodies
unchanged from what it had been when they swallowed it. After
some time the soups improved slightly, and sometimes we got
spinach or soup made with fresh vegetables, mainly marrow, and
pickled cabbage, which did not taste too bad. A small number of
patients were given a diet consisting of soup made with semolina,
oat-flakes and macaroni cooked in water, on rare occasions even
in milk, which was disgustingly tasteless, but at least digestible.
In addition, patients got half a small loaf-later only a third of
good white bread per day, and four dekagrams of margarine
three times a week. All other prisoners got a quarter of a loaf of
Army bread (of dark flour) with either four dekagrams of mar-
garine or a slice of sausage the thickness of a little finger, or half a
soft cheese the size of a hand, or half a tablespoonful of jam. In
the morning and evening we had tea or coflee without sugai\ In
the camp extra rations were allotted alternately to the huts and
to the working parties they consisted of half an aiiny loaf and a
:
ditions had been good otherwise. But these prerequisites did not
exist. The women had been imprisoned for years, particularly
the Germans among them, and they consistently lost weight. But
the decisive point was that it was impossible to digest tiiat food
.adequately during an illness and the terrible epidemics spared
nobody. It was impossible to recover on that food during the con-
valescence period, particularly as evcr\'body who did no work got
only half the soup ration.
My own case serves as an illustration.During the thirteen days
of my typhus took no food at all, except apple-juice and tea with
I
two or three lumps of sugar per clay. During the last five days I
was unconscious. When I woke up after the crisis and felt a nag-
ging hunger, my first meal was a chunk of dry anny bread and a
piece of the stinking, soft cheese called Quargel in Austria One
.
stomach could take it, another could not. Three months after my
illness I looked a living corpse, and I recovered only when I re-
ceived many food parcels from home.
Once the camp doctor wanted to take blood tests, for a scientific
analysis, from ten women who had been a year in the camp and
lived on nothing but the official camp rations. He was unable to
.
carry out his piece of research because it was not possible to find
ten such women among the 25,000 then in the camp thc)^ did not
:
-exist, because those who had entered the camp a year before had
either had additional food or had died.
When I came into the camp in February, 1943, it had been in
existence for eleven months. In March, 1942, the first thousand
women had arrived at Auschwitz from Ravensbriick Camp, and
the first thousand Jewish women from Czechoslovakia, to start the
womens concentration camp at Birkenau, Those women lived
for five months in some houses in the mens camp, while the huts
in Birkenau were being set up. In August, when the hutments
were at a pinch usable, the women moved into the new camp. On
February 20th, 1943, I was given the number 36,088. At that
time only about 13,000 women out of the 36,087 who had arrived
before me were still alive. Of the thousand German women
prisoners whom the camp doctor at Ravensbriick had selected as
being particularly strong, and most of whom held privileged
positions, only 160 were still alive. The majority of these latter
were set free in the course of the following two years between
;
notes recording the further fate of the prisoners. All the Jewish
women of my transport were dead. Of the German women, one
lived, apart from myself. Thirteen of the Russians and Poles still
survived. The lower mortality rate among the last group was ex-
plained by the fact that practically all of them were young, robust
land-workers who had run away from their work on farms they ;
endured the camp better than the others. The Polish women of
all ages who came from towns showed the same mortality rate as
the Germans. I could continue these figures endlessly the picture
;
53
CHAPTER FIVE
GAMP HOSPITAL
The authorities had planned the camp hospital orBirkciiau
on the basis of medical statistics in the Aimy, the Labour Service
and similar organisations, where there was a maximum average of
three sick per loo. Thus, a camp destined for 20,000 women was
expected to have a sick roll of 600, and treatment-rooms, beds,
sheets, blankets and medical supplies were calculated accordingly.
But, at its best, Birkenau camp had never less than 2,000 inllie
hospital compound. The figure rose to 7,000 in times of epi-
demics and epidemics raged in both the winters I was there. Then
;
except for the few pails fetched from the baths in the central
office. The patients were as a rule given water for washing every
three or four days the intervals were longer if the nurse was lazy.
;
But how could one speak of laziness when there was no siiffi, at
the best a slop-pail, and the nurses had to take each basin to a
ditch over lOO yards away to empty it? Veiy often a nurse had to
look after fifty patients, in bad times as many as a hundred. The
nurses had to fetch coffee, soup and tea in the morning, at midday
and in the evening from a kitchen at the other end of the camp,
in heavy cauldror^s which four of them could scarcely carry.
I remember one particular day when there was not even water
for dish-washing in the hut. The metal bowls, smeared with the
cold blobs of yesterdays soup, were wiped with cellulose wads,
then filled with fresh soup and distributed. But of course the
women did not get the bowls they had used the day before.
Among them were not only all the bedridden patientswith
55
typhus, paratyphoid, typhoid fever, eiysipelas, open pulmonary
tuberculosis but also -women with fresh injuries, women suffering
from debility, and mothers with their newly born babies.
Yet this was the newest and best hut so to speak, the hut for
notables. It looked like all the others a stable with a row of
skylights, no windows, leaking walls but it had a brick floor,-
and even boards under the beds, though one board was loose and
gave if you trod on it, so that your foot would be anklc-decp in
water. Another of its advantages was that behind the row of beds
parallel with the wall there were no other beds squeezed in, and
we could get to each patient without great difiiculty. In other
huts where I had to work later I came to feci a special horror of
the back-row beds in which the women squatted as though in
cages. Even if the German hut was the best off in bed-linen, many
of its beds had but one sheet, which was washed only evciy six
to eight weeks, regardless of a change of patients. In other huts
there was usually no ground-sheet, only a blanket over the straw
mattress, and never any lop sheet. In the diarrhoea-room the
women lay on the bare palliasses or on the boards. Even the straw
mattresses were filled not with soft straw, but with wood fibre
and shavings, which grew lumpy; often they were not much
thicker than a thin eiderdown. If a patient died or was released
from hospital neither sheet nor blankets were changed. The
straw mattress ^vas shaken out, the blankets smoothed, and the
next sick woman was put into the bed. Patients suffering from
one of the most dreaded camp diseases, known by the beautiful
official term treatment-resisting intestinal catarrh, had liquid
evacuation fifteen to twenty times a day, even when they were
given large doses of opium. They, and the dying, often soiled their
beds. The nurse would wipe the straw mattress and the blankets
with a damp cloth or just with a cellulose swab, unless they -were
soaked through, and then the next victim would lie on them.
Mostly, two women shared a bed, and sometimes even three.
In other huts we had as many as four patients in each of the
lower bunks. It was not a rare occurrence for the over-loaded
upper bunk boards, straw mattress and inmates to crash down
on the women underneath, many of whom were gravely ill
But sometimes such an interlude was considered as a light relief.
Many of the women were naked, since we had not enough night-
dresses they had to lie on the bare straw mattresses, whose sack-
;
ing left its imprints on their skin. In the worst cases four women
shared one or two thin horse-blankets and that in winter, in an
unheated hut.
After all this it is scarcely necessary to say that a patient who
once entered the hut, perhaps with nothing worse than a septic
56
throat, would not leave had passed through most of the
until she
diseases assembled within the four walls. But the stamina of some
women was incredible. Our Hut Senior, a good-looking prosti-
tute, had been two years in Ravensbriick camp before coming to
Auschwitz. Here she contracted, one after the other, exanthe-
matic typhus and enteric typhoid fever, double pneumonia,
pleurisy and slight tuberculosis (apicitis specifica) after that she
;
body from my bed. Ive been lying with her for two hours now,
and Fm getting so cold ^while she investigated the mattress to
see if by any chance her dead bed-feilow had left her a parcel from
home.
The girls of the special worldng party which had nothing to
do but take away the dead the Leichenkommando ^were not
strong enough to cany bodies. So they mostly dragged them along
the floor to the stretcher. The men who came to fetch the corpses
for the crematorium grasped them by their hands and feet and
chucked them into a lorry. Where there was no consideration for
the living, how should there have been respect for the dead?
Only -when one of our doctor colleagues died did we make a slight
exception. We would put her on a stretcher and strew it ^vith pine-
branches. If she was a Pole, her country-women would pray
at the bier. Sometimes we would sing. Then wc would carry
out the stretcher ourselves, in the evening, and gently lift it on to
the lorry. The prisoner in charge of the lorry would read the
number tattooed on her aim, and shout into the dark night:
Number 76723 ail right? That was .all. In this way, I
accompanied forty women doctors during my two years in
Auschwitz. It was a great prmlege of our profession that we were
allowed our own death , as Rilke called it, instead of ending
like wild beasts.
were the conditions in our good German ward, it was
If these
worse in the other huts, and \vorst in the Jewish wards. In sum-
mer, when the hospital was less crowded, it was more bearable,
because as a rule each patient would have a bed to herself. After
my recovery from typhus in August, 1943, I started work in a
Polish convalescence wiivd. We
were four doctors for 300
patients then, with 275 beds. By November my three colleagues
were down with typhus and I \vas alone. There were 750 patients.
Everything drifted into my hut. It was originally meant for
convalescents after serious illnesses, but there were also old w^omen
and chronic patients tvho would never leave hospital. There
were women with T.B. whom I could not send to the tuber-
culosis station because it \vas overcrowded. There were patients
with typhus and typhoid whom I could not send to the hut for
infectious diseases because it, too, was overcrowded. They had
sent me all the mothers wth children under three, if cither the
5S
mother or the child was ill. In a corner was a boarded-up
cubicle with seven beds for twenty-two lunatics, among them a
raving maniac. Between ten and fifteen non-violent lunatics I
had to keep in the hut itself. Some of them would insist on helping
us. So it happened that one of the mad women got hold of a baby
while the mother was delirious and could not guard the child,
\^hich shared her bed. The lunatic ran gaily through the hut
with the child in her arms, while I shook with fear that she might
hurl it on the floor. I should have been powerless to prevent it.
Sometimes I looked round me in a daze. Was it possible that this
was not just a dream?
At one time the last three bunks in my hut were an evil vision no
painter could have rendered Goya would have been too idyllic.
In the lowest bunk was a lovely young Polish girl who sufiered
from a psychosis after typhus she was intermittently sobbing and
;
59
privilege to spend the winter in the hospital hut instead of in the
open camp. Though I was naturally prepared to cover this up
in the face of the S.S., I often asked myself if we were really acting
in the prisoners interests. We had to keep a certain percentage
of healthy people in the hut to help us with the nursing. For,
despite the terrible waste of human labour in the camp, the
authorities were absurdly economical in granting personnel to
the hospital compound. Eveiy complaint of ours that wc were
simply unable to cope with the work unless we had more helpers
was countered with the argument that outside the camp there
were far more patients per nurse than in the camp hospital. The
argument disregarded the fact that outside a nurse turned on a
hot- water tap to fill a bottle, while our nurses first had to organ-
ise fire for wamiing the water, then the water itself, and finally a
vessel that could serve as a hot-water bottle. But if, in addition to
the personnel, we kept a number of healthy women in the com-
pound, wc had so many beds less for sick people. Then, too, the
healthy ones were even more exposed to infection inside a hospital
hut than outside, although they had not to appear at roll calls
and were sheltered from wind and rain. A lengthy stay in the
hospital compound was in reality of help only to women ^vho
had passed through the whole range of infectious diseases and
those women were as a rule so weakened that they could hardly
get up from their beds.
Constantly I was forced to dismiss women from hospital treat-
ment who in any hospital outside would have been kept in bed,
or at least treated as convalescents, for another three months;
yet the hut became more and more overcrowded, until the work
was beyond anybodys capacity. I must confess that many
patients died before I even got round to examining them while I :
started with the examination at one end of the hut, newly arrived
patients died before I reached the other end. At that time I
worked every day from eight in the morning to seven or eight at
night. I had no day off; on Sundays, when I visited only the more
serious cases, I never finished before three p.m. But the bad
thing was not that vc had so much work to do after all, we
;
worked voluntarily, we could have gone for a walk, for all the
S.S. cared nobody checked up whether we did our job or not.
;
and those who had this prospect still before them. There were no
women who did not get it until spring, 1944, when the lice had
been got rid of. When I started my work in the German hut in
February, 1943, fourteen other women \vcre ])ostecl there as
nurses, cleaners and clerks. Onthe second day the first of them
had togo to bed with a temperature of 102 F. The day after the
fever rose to 105*^ F., by the evening she was blue in the face with
cyanosis, and that night she died. Every day one or two of the
staff fell ill, so that any systematic work became impossible. They
fell right and left, like blades of grass before the scythe.
The bodies of those who died during the night were put outside
the hut; next morning we would find them dreadfully mutilated
by During the epidemic of the following winter of 1943-4,
rats.
w'hen there were as many as 350 deaths per day, it was impossibk^
even during the day to take them into the utterly inadequate
mortuary. The corpses w^ere piled up, four and five layers deep,
along the whole length of the infectious hut. In the evening the
lorry would come to fetch them. Later the wall of bodies was
put alongside of another hut, not because the disease claimed
fewer victims in the infectious hut, but because the S.S. man who
drove the lorry had an affair with a girl transferred to the second
hut, and he wanted to make it easier to be with his girl while the
corpses were being loaded.
During the first winter of my stay in Auschwitz the mortality
rate of typhus was eighty per hundred patients in the second
;
62
winter was slightly lower. Two things were needed to treat this
it
patients with typhus, and while I went from one .to the other, I
put one, two or three exclamation marks after each ones name.
^
In the afternoon I got my supply of medicaments, and had to cal-
culate how many injections of stimulants I should be able to give.
As a rule was only just enough for those with three exclama-
tliere
tion marks, on rare occasions those with two marks got something,
and the patients with one exclamation mark were given an injec-
tion only when they or their friends managed to get a private supply
of stimulants. Before the sixth day of the illness I gave nothing
at all to those patients whose heart was healthy to begin with.
I had out. There was a patient in the crisis, gravely
to think it
the first cases were discovered and reported the S.S. hit upon a
drastic method : the sick were killed by intravenous injections of
benzine, to prevent the infection from spreading. Quite apart
from everytliing else, this was sheer madness, because it took
three to four days before typhus could be diagnosed with any cer-
tainty (this period was later reduced by the introduction of the
dried-blood test). During those days innumerable lice on the
patients body became infected, so that^tlie killing of young,
strong women with sound hearts, who might have been saved^
did nothing to limit the spreading of the disease. The result was
that we, the prisoner-doctors, simply disguised typhus as in-
fluenza in our lists.
When I arrived at the camp one of the S.S. men, Rotten-
63
fuhrer Klaus, recommended typhus patients to my special care.
Those people knew, of course, that the prisoner-doctors kept
typhus cases secret, but it would have been difficult to prove this,
among such a multitude of patients. The camp doctor at that
time Dr. Kitt could have found out, but he was afraid to.
On the one hand he knew perfectly ^vell that the benzine treat-
ment did not halt the epidemic he seemed not to approve of it
and on the other hand he feared that higher quarters would
blame him, as the man responsible for hygiene in the camp, be-
cause he had failed to stamp out the epidemic. Therefore he pre-
ferred to accept our influenza cases at their face value.
It is doubtful whether we were right in our altitude. By not
reporting typhus we relieved the S.S. of the obligation to take
energetic measures against the epidemic.
I was still fumbling for a way out when I myself contracted
typhus. After my convalescence the situation was different. We
had a new camp doctor Dr. Rohde, from Marbiirg-on-the-
Lahn, one of those kindly, muddle-headed people of whom it
seems impossible to understand why and how they could have
volunteered for the S.S. He was so popular with the prisoners
that a young Jewish nurse whose life he had saved went so far as to
say: T would protect him even if it costs my own life. But he,
too, was S.S. Camp Doctor at Auschwitz. . .
When the special Jewish sick hut proved insufficient, he took the
Jewish patients into the hospital compound and put them together
with the other patients; ,he reorganised the huts in surgical,
internal and infectious wards, while previously they had been
organised according to nationalities, and generally tried to pro-
ceed reasonably. In that summer of 1943 things .seemed to
improve, the infectious diseases declined. And yet . in October,
. .
1943, there were officially twenty cases of typhus on the sick list
Jewish and non-Jewish women, but no Germans. One day they
were all taken away: they never came back. They were killed.
The man under whose regime we had begun to breathe mozx
freely had not prevented their murder, just as he had not the
courage later on to refuse his co-operation in selections for the gas
chamber. We at once stopped reporting further typhus cases, with
Dr. Rohdes silent connivance. He feared himself that he might
get another order to commit murder, and he was grateful to us,
the prisoner-doctors, when we pretended to believe that he knew
nothing of the new outbreak of a typhus epidemic.
In fact, typhus was only stamped out when Hauptsturmfiihrer
Dr. Mengele, the ruthless cynic, became camp doctor. He collected
the 1,500 worst cases among the Jewish patients in a hospital
hut and sent them to the gas chamber. Thus he obtained an
64
empty hut, which was disinfected and supplied with new paliasses
and clean blankets. Then the patients of the nearest hut were
de-Ioused, examined and taken naked into the vermin-free hut,
which was put out of bounds. The same with the next hut, and so
on, until everything was clean. Given the circumstances, this was
the correct way of fighting and overcoming the epidemic. But
that the camp authorities did not think it necessary to build a new
hut for the purpose, that the cleaning-up began with the murder
of 1 ,500 Jewish womenthat was part of the horror of a situation
in which everything was perverted from its meaning, in which evil
was good and good evil.
Ninety-nine per cent, of the prisoners had a typhus attack be-
tween the third and tenth week of their stay in the camp. In the
autumn of 1943 the total of women prisoners in Birkenau- Ausch-
witz was 32,000, of whom 7,000 were in hospital, as a constant
figure. In the months from October, 1943, to February, 1944,
the average number of deaths was between 1 00 and 1 50 per day.
Despite the steady trickle of new-comers from outside, the total
figure of prisoners fell within two months to 24,000 The only
group among the prisoners of which a considerable number never
went down with typhus was the Russian group. Many of them
had passed through the illness when they were young children,
others had only a light attack. I had many Russian patients.
When they had a high temperature they would pull the blanket
over their heads and refuse treatment by the doctor. After a fort-
night they would emerge and ask to be released from hospital.
It was rare for them to suffer from complications.
When I was in charge of the convalescent hut practically all
those convalescing from grave illnesses were under me for a fort-
night to four weeks to recover. In the course of my work I
acquired so much practice in the auscultation of hearts that I
could say at once whether the patient had had typhus or not.
Only with the Russian women did I often make mistakes their :
the open wounds stayed covered with a diity, doughy layer of
paper. A secondary infection was almost inevitable, ail the more
so as the open gashes showed no progress inclosing. We attempted
to fight osdema by cardiacs and diuretics (medicaments stimulat-
ing the discharge of urine), dextro-glucosc, calcium and vita-
mins as far as they were available! The treatment had, of
course, a chance of success only if it was combined with strengthen-
ing noui'isliment. Most of the oedema patients contracted chronic
diarrhoea a liquid evacuation, a sort of oedema in the intestine
and died of general cardiac and circulatory insufficiency.
After the infectious hut, the diarrhoea hut had the highest
mortality rate. We tvere never certain of the cause of this sort of
diarrhoea. It occurred in connection with typhus, parat}q)hoid and
dysentery, but as a rule no pathogenic bacteria of the intestine
were found at an analysis of the faeces post-mortem dissections
:
the illnesses. In autumn, 1944, the special camp for gypsies near
our camp -was liquidated. There whole families with numerous
small cliildren had lived in even greater squalor than our prisoners,
though this hardly seems possible. The S.S. picked out the few
"
prisonerswho were still fit for work and sent them into ordnance
factories.The rest, about 4,000, were sent on transport. But
afteiwards the doctors of the gypsy camp were put into punish-
ment companies, because they had looked after the prisoners
health so badly that the authorities had unfortunately been
forced to have them gassed I
THE INFERNO
After my months in the concentration camp I thought
first six
a few hundred yards away and everybody who had been in the
;
crease the number of prisoners. For at that time iKnv huts had
been set up, new subsidiary camps opened, labour was needed for
the spring sowing on the large estate which was adrainistcnxl by
the camps and fed the prisoners as well as the S.S. gamsoii. Now,
by August, they had sufficient man-power for the harvesting also,
;
70
the mortality rate of the camp was considerably lower in t!ie sum-
mer than in winter-time, so that the number of the prisoners
could be kept at its level with the help of non-Jewish arrivals.
Fresh Jewish transports were gassed. A few weeks later, when the
crops were in, the number of prisoners was radically reduced by
the same methods, so that there should be fewer people to feed
through the winter.
After that beginning I saw countless transports pass along the
same road, and it is difficult to put this into words ail of us
grew accustomed to it. In the spring of 1944, after the occupation
of Hungary by the German troops, a new peak was reached. In
April our camp senior, Heinrich Schuster a shady man who was
on friendly terms with the S.S. told me that they were expecting
ihc arrival of 800,000 Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz for the
coming month. When I asked him what they meant to do with
them, he shrugged his shoulders. Then he explained that the
Commandant, von Hartenstein, an Austrian, and a relatively
decent individual to whom at least a few women owed |hcir release
from the camp, had applied for his transfer. Apparently he
wished to have no personal part in wirat was to come. The man
who took his place was Josef Kramer, whom the world knows as
the Beast of Bclsen, and who in the years before had carried
through the mass liquidation of Slovak and Polish Jews in
Ausdiwitz. He ^vas made commandant of all the camps at
Auschwitz.
The first time I saw Kramer, he was standing in the camp road
and, like a street urchin, throwing stones at two young nurses who
had angered him. The story ran that they had put out their tongues
at him, but though it is not quite impossible I do not believe it.
Fortunately they were separated from him by the wire netting
round the hospital compound. Afterwards he came to the hospi-
tal, ordered a roll-call of the whole stafi', and ran up and down
our ranks like a madman. Then he stopped, hitting his boots witli
his dog-whip an enormously bulky man, his bull-neck lowered,
;
his thick head and jowls purple with rage. I had plenty of time to
get a good look at him. Yes, this was what they looked like, those
hangmen and slaughterers like the creatures of a diseased
imagination, as though invented by a bad, because exaggerated
enemy propaganda. If something like evil incarnate were to exist
in this world, it would have to look like that man.
And he had been sent to deal with hundreds of thousands of
Jews from Hungary due at Auschwitz. He did the job.
At the end of April they laid a railway track from Auschwitz
station to the camp. In the beginning of May one goods train
after the other passed the camp and stopped at the gate. One or
71
two of the trucks were loaded with luggage, ail the others ^\dth
^
The ignorance of the doomed people, themselves made it pos-
sible to use relatively small S.S. units during their journey to the
slaughter-house. In my whole time in the camp I did not hear
shooting or any other symptom of resistance more than three or
four times, I was told that once a Jewish woman from Italy had
.pulled the revolver out of an S.S. mans belt and shot him with it,
and a few times people tried to escape.
^
Once an S.S. man told us about one of those attempts. At that
time they used to light enormous bonfires near the crematorium,
allegedly to burn the dirty, useless clothing of gassed people, for
which there was no room in the ovens. Reliable friends from an-
other camp, built nearer than ours to one of the crematoria, have
told me that they saw with their own eyes how babies torn from
their mothers arms were thrown directly into those fires, without
the detour through a gas-chamber. I did not see it myself; but I
must believe it, after all that happened.
One night a transport arrived in which people knew, or at least
guessed, what was coming. There were shouts, shooting, and a
group tried to break out. The S.S. man who told us about it had
been ordered to search the undergrowth for escaped prisoners. I
will try to render the words in which he told his story to another
doctor, myself, and a few girls, some of whom were Jewish It ;
was dark and rather cold, and I thought Id got the whole bunch
and could go home at last. Then I saw two children squatting
under a shrub. They were two boys, brothers, about four and
seven years old. I said to them, Come along, kids, its much too
cold here; over theres a beautiful big fire, and Ill take you
there. The bigger one smelt a rat, and said he wanted to stay
where he was. But the little one started crying and pestering his
big brother. He said, Gome, lets go with the uncle to the big
fire. So the seven-year-old gave in the kid didnt like it under the
;
could have heard a leaf drop. He looked round the circle with the
smug expression of a man who has handled a difficult, delicate
task with great tact and expects due praise. But when he saw our
frozen faces, his own face grew uncertain and a little embarrassed,
as if it were beginning to dawn on him that he should not be too
certain of our applause.
The people coming with a transport from Hungary left the
73
trucks in front of thecamp gates, where a group of S.S. men and
the campdoctor waited for them. There they were divided iiitc
two groups. On one side were those over fifty and under fourteen
and all those who looked sickly, on the other side the rest. The
first group was sent straight to the
gas-chamber. Ilie others
stayed in the or were sent on to war w'ork in ojie of tlie
camp
munition factories. various camp doctors, Di'. Koenig re-
Of our
peatedly declared that this duty at the railway track was a toriunj
for him, and he had to drink a lot of alcohol to stick it out. Dr.
Mengele, on the other hand, whistled and pointed his thumb to
one or the other group. We could never find out how many
of the new-comers were ranged in either group. Even an esti-
mate was difficult, because it was not always certain whether a
loaded truck was really going to a munition plant or to a crema-
torium. But there is one thing I can say as a witness from the
:
4th or 5th of May till the end of July, 1944, the four crematoria
round our camp were burning day and night wlihoiu a pause,
and the six-feet-high flames shot up from each ofthc four chimneys
continually. Thus did Josef Kramer liquidate the Hungarian Jews,
Yet, taken as a group, the Hungarian Jews were still lucky*,
when Germany needed new soldiers
in that they arrived at a time
and hardly any but foreign workers were employed in the war
This fact saved the physically stronger ones among
factories.
them, as their detention did not last more than a ytuir. Of the
Jews from other countries ^vho had arrived in the caiiifjs in the
preceding years, only a negligible percentage survic'cd. In our
camp approximately 99 per cent, of the Jewish women from
France, Holland, Greece and Germany died of illness. Ihc mor-
tality rate was somewhat lower among those from Czcdioslovalda,
Yugoslavia and Poland.
It is worth while to mention an instance "which illustrates the
.
occurred then and there. The young S.S. man could not come to
a decision. In the end he asked the clerk if these were ail the
Jewesses in the hut. She was scared, and said that there was still a
young girl. My heart stood still. Miriam Weiss, the daughter of a
post-master from Vinkovee in Croatia, was a charming young
thing who had just passed through typhus and, like all con-
valescents after this illness, looked like a ghost, a bundle of skin
and bones. She and her mother a good, gentle womanworked
as cleaners in the hospital. Since she belonged to the staff, the
clerk had not mentioned her name. Now, lacking the courage to
protect her, she called out in a trembling voice: "Frau Weiss,
bring your child here ! And the mother came, leading her nine-
teen-year-oid daughter, who could scarcely stand on her feet, to
join the other Avomen. I thought of Abraham leading Isaac to the
sacrificial altar.
75
seemed almost certain that the medical N.G.O. would put
It
hernumber on the gas-chamber list, as she looked so obviously
weak and unfit. In a last desperate attempt, I said that the girl
was a nurse. Since she v^7as really a cleaner, the protection from
selection which the camp doctor had obtained for his hospital
staff did not cover her case. But I would have told \rorsc lies in
that moment. My statement had its effect. The N.C.O. looked
round the room, shrugged, and left the hut without noting down a
single woman. When he had gone the girls mother fainted.
Eight months later I saw the girl again. She and her mother had
managed to wangle good jobs through compatriots working in the
man-power office, and she had been able to get decent, ample
food she was strong, and it was good to look at her.
:
prisoners
that is to say, the Chief Doctor, the two camp seniors,
and a girl from the office who had to take down the numbers of
the selected patients. It looked as if a mixed commission consist-
ing of S.S. and prisoners mostly Germans had come to decide
on the fate of the sick women. In reality, it was the S.S, doctor
who acted, while the prisoners had to stand by, passive and
powerless.
The camp doctor would line up all the Jewish patients on one
side of the heating-bench and make them walk past him, stark
naked, to the other side. All those who were too ill to get out of
bed were lost from the outset. Anyone who w^as agile enough to
leaj) over the heating-bench in an unguarded moment, and so to
avoid walking past the doctor, was saved. And a man calling
himself a physician stood there and gathered in the harvest of
death.
The rest of the prisoners
did everything in their power to ob-
struct the doctor and to save one or other of the victims; I do
not think that a single one among us withheld her help. e would W
hide women somewhere in the hutthe S.S. would order the
names to be called out from the index cards in the hospital file.
We would smuggle them into Aryan huts, or into huts where
the selection had already taken place thev would check up a
76
second time in all those huts. We would put their names on the
list of patients due for release from the hospital and send their index
woman stood there in the snow and begged us to hide her inside.
Our Hut Seniorshe would have been punished and degraded had
the woman been found in the hut during'^an inspection did not
dare to take the risk, and sent her aw'ay. I saw the woman next
day. She told me that she had thrown herself on a heap of corpses
next to our hut and pulled one of the bodies over her,-as a cover.
Thus she had stayed four or five hours, till the selection was over.
77
Tins was one of the women ^viio went under fear of extcrminaiioii
because they were unfit for life.
Occasionally Jewish women were hidden Ijy the camp author-
ities themselves. We had a wardress Frau Drcchslerj a former
secondary school teacher from Kc-siccj and one oi' the rnosi
nauseating and ruthless among the S.S. women. She liked to take
an active part in selections. Despite her professional anti-
Semitismj she used mostly Jewish girls in her team of runners
prisoners who sen-ed instead of a telephone system and carried
her orders quickly to the various posts of the camp because they
were good at languages. One of those girls, just recovering from
typhus, was suddenly transferred to my purely Aryan hut, on
the express orders of Wardress Drechsler. Ihc next day Wai'dress
Drechsler took part in a selection in the very same hut from u liich
the Jewish girl had come to us. In other words, the wardress had
hidden the girl from her own selection, clearly bccaiiS(j she lacked
the courage to protect her in the presence of other S.S. officers.
She wanted to keep her as a runner because she was userul, but
we had to bear the risk. For if the girl had been discovered in our
hut during a selection, the wardress would have been to deny
that she had ever given such an order.
Altogether, the contradictions in the conduct of the S.S. officers
bordered on lunacy. One camp doctor set up a Jewish hospilai
hut, obtained adequate medical supplies for it, and personally
looked after its inmates. Thus, Dr, Koenigs special interest was
attracted by the case of a Jewish woman who suffered from noma
the gangrenous ulcer of the cheek. He gave orders that she should
be treated with large quantities of sulphonamides and vitamins,
and visited her every day. A week later he sent iicr to the gas-
chamber. Dr. Thiio had a favourite among the g)^>sics, who
suffered the same fate as the Jews ; he brought the patient meat and
tomatoes with his own handsand sent him personally to the gas-
chamber. Indeed, it seems futile to try to understand those mental
processes otherwise than^by comparing them with the split con-
sciousness of schizophrenics. But camp conditions corrupted even
prisoners, until they came close to speaking like an S.S.
man. A
non-Jewish prisoner, brutal but cool-headed, once exclaimed
Dont go on giving medicines to the Jews. Its not that Ive got
anything against themso far as Pm concerned, they can all get
well. But its sheer nonsense to give them all those things
if theyre
going to be gassed anyway, and let our people die for lack
of
medicine!
At the end of a selection the camp numbci's of all selected
women were put on lists. The following days were
filled with a
hectic haggling. Whoever had a friend or relative on the list tried
7S
to pull every possible stringy whoever had .any sort of influence
with the higher S.S. attempted to save one or the
officers secretly
other of the doomed women. If it was at all plausible, some period
of medical study would be claimed ^for in this one point they
observed the Geneva Convention, which protects members of the
medical profession in war-time. Again and again the camp doctor
would be made to revise his sentence in a few cases. But the
suffering of those women, even if they were rescued in the end, is
beyond imagination.
It was neither just nor fair that some w^omen stayed alive, only
because they had certain contacts, while the others were left to die.
And yet it was better to have saved a few than none. Slowly, we
all grew blunted and saw the mass murder of Jews as something
which was horrifying but immutable. Then, when the list con-
tained a name which was familiar, which meant more than a
camp Aumber, which stood out from the multitude of nameless
victims, we would feel This cannot be, this must not be, it must
:
^80
rected in an official procedure such as I should have to tackle. If
they reported me because of continuous favouritism to Jews, if they
only put a note about it in my dossier, behind my back, my release
would be out of the question for years. At other times it would not
have been so very dangerous to talk to the camp doctor; but our
boss just then was a particularly fanatical anti-Semitea fact
which ruled him out. I should have to address myself to other
official quarters, and it was difficult for me to assess the conse-
quences of such an act There was little time left. I had to take a de-
cision if I wanted to make an attempt with any prospect of success.
In my mind I saw my little boy andlieard his touching voice as
he begged me at the leave-taking, his small arms round my neck
Mummy, stay with me ! And then the dark eyes of that young
comrade-in-prison implored me, and a husky voice said Ive :
The people who decreed and executed all the atrocities were not
so very many. But there was an infinite number of people who let
those atrocities happen because they lacked courage, and because
they evaded the issue with the sigh What could I do? when
there might have been some feasible w^ay of intervention. If I, too,
had gone so far as to turn away in silence, from fear of staying on
in the concentration camp, then I should be behaving just like
those others outside who remained passive from fear of being sent
to a concentration camp. Then the S.S. would indeed have
educated me, as the Gestapo official put it when he sent me to
the camp. But then the whole sacrifice of my personal life which
I had taken upon me up till now would become meaningless
sure that youll look after me when Pm ill, and get medicine for
me. My heart isnt exactly strong. She worked as a nurse in one
of the convalescent blocks, where there were also some German
patients.
Then the terrible winter of 1943-44 started, with its epidemics,
which spread to the medical staff as well ; for some time we had
only about fifteen physically fit women doctors to cope with our
7,000 patients. That was the time when I had to work alone with
my 700 patients, v/hile in the block in which my friend was a
nurse there was literally nobody to act as doctor for a whole week.
She fell ill just at that time. I went there in the evening, dead
tired from my own work, to see how she was getting on. As soon
as I entered the hut and the women saw my white overall, they
D (Prisoners of Fear) ^3
shouted at me from every side: Doctor, doctor, come to me!
Tm in such pain ... I cant breathe ... I need a dressing
They clutched at my hands, at the hem of my overall, they pulled
me from one side to the other, and so I had no other choice but to
go on working, although I felt as if I were at the end of my tether.
The next day I went there even later and went straight up to
something to the Jewess, and let us Germans die like dogs. Youre
a nice example of a German prisoner 1
put under embargo and the women fetched out from one after the
other. At first they were taken to the ill-famed Hut 25, later also
to a hut in the hospital compound. There they waited for death.
I have never been able to comprehend why there was practically
no resistance, only cries of despair, during any of the stages of the
calvary. Once I saw the last stage from very close by. A
runner
burst into our hut and asked for twenty strong women of the staff
to act as guards during a transport. I heard shouts ; the
huts Tsaw excited prisoners standing about, against the rules.
Smoke rose behind the roofs in the distance.
84
I had promised myself to keep in the background during any
riot in thecamp, because I realised that even in a successful rising
the foremost rank would pay. But it is one thing to reason with
oneseifj and another to act. I hoped that all this meant murder
and arson, and rah out of the hut to be with the others when we
were at last striking out against those swine. I hurried to a spot
from which I overlooked the transport block. What I saw
shattered me.
The gate of the hut w^as open. Prisoners formed cordons to the
right and the left, and between them sick Jewish women were
being driven out into the open. They walked on their bare feet,
some naked, some in their night-dresses. The ground was
covered with snow and pools of water. A few of the women had'
blanket which a pitying nurse had let them keep, but the majority
were chased from the hut without the cover of blankets.
Possibly this additional cruelty was not even deliberately im-
posed by the S.S. But it is difficult to speak about an act of
brutality on the part of the other prisoners, if one remembers that
in many huts there was only a single blanket between two or three
patients.
The sight of those pitiful figures, emaciated, covered with sores,
shivering with the cold and the fear of death, was like a blow in
the face. How
could those miserable creatures have revolted?
The only guard was an S.S. womanWardress Hasse, an evil,
vulgar, bloated female, who stood there, arms akimbo, a rubber
truncheon in one hand, and made them hurry. Farther down the
camp road smoked the small tar stove of a road-making party
this was what had kindled my precipitate hopes. And the healthy
nurses, prisoners themselves, who formed the cordons? A young
girl near me said If you dont do it, they send you along with
:
them. Nobody who has never passed through a similar test has a
right to condemn those women.
Hut 25 had room for approximately 50C) persons. Before
Christmas, 1944, they packed it with 2,000 women, some stark
naked, some in rags, without any palliasses or blankets. The hut
was, of course, unheated. The women were given a little soup,
and no bread. The soup cauldrons were pushed through a gap in
the door by the fire guard. There was nothing remotely like a
distribution of food. What would have been the use ? Once I tried
to look through a window, but saw nothing except a blur. Later
on, a girl from the fire guard told me about it. She said that the
floor of the hut was covered knee-high with corpses. Over them
lay. the dying and the half-dead, and those who were still alive
squatted on the top. Whenever the door was opened they only
asked, imploringly: Please, wont they fetch us for the gas at
85
last? We it any moreT' The stench in the hut ^vas
can't stand
overpowering. have no reason to doubt the veracity of tliis de-
I
scription. During the ten days \vhicii passed before the women
were taken away to the gas-chamber 700 out of 2,000 had died.
Another time several hundred women were taken back to their
huts, after having been in Hut 25, and then fetched again after a
few more days the Gamp Command liad had to wait for the per-
:
86
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE PRISONERS
People WHO were at liberty during the years of horror usually
receive us, the ex-prisoners of the concentration camps, with a
mixture of curiosity and compassion. They sometimes even over-
rate our physical sufferings, for had we been continually subjected
to the very worst conditions known to have existed in the camps,,
v'c could not have survived any more than our countless fellow-
prisoners.
Almost every prisoner passed through the harsh school of camp
lifein the first months of his or her detention. In our camp at
Auschwitz there were two small groups which went through this
stage rather more quickly and easily than the others the doctors
:
not in the camp; they let events 'pass by them, like a horrifying
film. But for those veterans of the camp the reality of life outside
had become blurred. They had transferred their ambitions and
emotions to the life inside the camp. Therefore they would fight
for positions not only because they intended to survive, but also
for their own sake, because it satisfied their need to wan powei',
recognition and a following wdthin the precincts. Some of them
invested their whole being in these matters, and so lost much of
their intellectual and even moral standards. Among the women
who were punished for jewel thefts by floggings of twenty-five
strokes were a few isolated German Communists. The woman
who was visited by the S.S. driver of the lorry loading the corpses
was a Communist. Later she had a child by him. But she was
nearing her fortieth year, had been nine years in prison, and had
always longed to have a child ; she could not know how long her
detention would last nor whether she would still be able to "have
a child once she was free.
90
It was depressing that so many had capitulated
almost in
S.S. mannerbefore the chance of getting a diamond ring, or
white bread, or a position. But how could one have demanded
more from women who had lived so many terrible years in such
surroundings? Rather it was astounding, and a tremendous
achievement, that some of them had preserved their personal
integrity in spite of everything. But the truly frightening thing
was that women who had striven for that integrity, who still took
lifeand ethics seriously, proved in the end too small for their over-
whelming destiny, and never noticed when they acted on prin-
ciples which were in reality those of National Socialism. Indeed,
the most dangerous victory National Socialism ever won was that
it imposed itself on the minds of its adversaries.
death the first had received a food parcel from home; the con-
valescent grabbed it. The women in the surrounding bunks all
of them either ill with typhus or just recovering from it saw her
eating the food, and apparently the sight was too much for them.
They reported it, as a case of theft among comrades, to the Gamp
Senior, a German Communist. Their contention was that the
girl had appropriated the parcel while the other woman was still
alive, though in a coma.
So that shreivd, serious, energetic woman, the Communist
Parly worker from Berlin, stood there and judged, called in and
affair before the S.S. Doctor, but will settle it among ourselves.
It must not happen here that one comrade is not safe from another.
You have committed a wrong against our community, you shall
expiate it by work for the community. You will work as a cleaner
here in the hut, '
Well, yes it was beautifully said, and difficult to contradict.
The girl was only eight days over the typhus crisis, and had a toxic
weakness of the heart. We attempted, rather timidly, to draw the
Camp Seniors attention to the danger heavy manual work would
entail. But she had no high opinion of doctors, and thought she
knew quite enough about such matters herself. The girl did not
look very weak (she may have owed this to the food parcel I), and
her appearance was more convincing than the Latin word
'myocarditis. I wondered. The Gamp Senior herself had had
D2 ' 9^
typhus. Had she forgotten that hunger is sheer torture to a con-
valescent? Some weeks later, when I was recovering from typhus,
I used to shed tears whenever the bread distribution
started at the
other end of the hut, so that my turn came a few minutes later.
Had the Gamp Senior forgotten, or had she never felt that torture,
because she was a prominent veteran prisoner who had never lacked
sufficient food? Yes, but the wretched girl had robbed a defence-
less sick woman Had the other been dead, or had she still been
! . , .
breathing? Not even we, the doctors, were quite certain who
among our patients were still technically alive at a given moment.
If the other girl had woken up from her coma and found the
bitterly needed parcel gone, it would have been very wrong
indeed ;
it would have been a crime. But now she was dead,
and the other at least alive. Who had more right to the dead
womans legacy, humanly speaking, than the- young girl who had
done her the last little services, who had put the glass of water to
her parched lips, and then felt the body at her side grow cold?
Would the other women have reported the premature appropria-
tion of the heritage if the girl had controlled her craving and
shared the food with them?
With some difficulty it was conceded that the sinner should at
first not be forced to help carry the heavy soup cauldrons. The
For this was a human being who might have lived. She had died,
not through the crimes of the S.S. (or not only because of them),
and not through a crime committed by prisoners who falsely
-called themselves comrades. No; she had died because of the
human and moral failure of somebody who desired to a
-champion of a new ethic, and was neither amoral, nor dominated
by selfish motives, nor made callous by her long imprisonment.
All this would have been understandable and pardonable under
the general conditions of the camp ; but the opposite was the case.
The Gamp Senior had acted from a conscious moral principle.
She wanted to keep the flag flying in the middle of chaos and
total moral collapse. She wanted to uphold the law of decency.
But in her rigid, meagre, cramped determination she could not
find the way to simple human tolerance and kindness. It was
bad to think that, if she had brought the affair before the S.S.
Doctor, he would probably have let the girl stay in bed on our
'92
urgent recommendation, because he was completely indifferent
to the fate of our food parcels.
Or did I misread the case? Had the Gamp Senior thought out
what she was doing? Had she deliberately risked the girls life so
as to maintain the correctness and authority of our self-administra-
tion?One was as possible as the other.
The problem of the prisoners discipline and honesty in dealings
with the S.S. imposed its own solution: it could only be total
theft and sabotage of everything belonging to the S.S. But this
natural law of behaviour made it all the more difficult to solve
the problem of self-imposed restrictions in the interest of an
internal decency of camp life. The prisoners delegates the
functionaries had as much power over the life or death of their
comrades as the S.S. themselves, and were no more forced to
account for it than were the S.S. Everything, then, depended on
the way in which they built up their system of responsibilities
admittedly a very heavy task. They had to face the question of
whether the community the
State had the primacy over
the well-being of individuals, the question of whether it was right
to sacrifice the individual to a higher purpose ; and hence the age-
old problem which, ever since Macchiavelli, has beset men in
politics the problem of ends and means. This is, surely, one
of the fundamental problems of human ethics, but it does not
admit an absolutely valid solution, even less a practical applica-
tion of an absolute solution. It will always be necessary to ask
Which ends can hallow which marginal means? And it will
probably always be a matter of differences in quantity, of a
constant weighing and levelling.
This was so very difficult for many of the German Communists
among the prisoners, because they were not conscious of the con-
tradiction inherent in their theoretical position. Whether one
should sacrifice the single human being to a higher end is a ques-
tion of morality which has been solved concretely in each historical
period ; the historic actors derived the detachment and strength
to act as they did from their subjective conviction that theirs was
the right solution. But a Socialist whose aim is an order of society
which, for the first time, accepts the happiness and dignity of the
individual as its raison d^etre must be aware that to him the prob-
lem of ends and means has a different aspect. There are aims
which
may be pursued best ^which perhaps must be pursuedat
the price of the sacrifice of individuals. If the aim is to build
pyramids, or the West Wall, it will be necessary to let slaves perish
in the course of the work. Perhaps it was admissible to burn
witches or Jews for the greater glory of a deity at least it is
difficult to prove the contrary to somebody who is convinced that
93
he lias do so and that his dcit\' approves of it, But there
the right to
is one case when can be proved that certain means are inad-
it
missible for the end, not alone for nK/ral reasons, but also for
logical reasons : the case of the Socialist.
If one^s end is to free the unknown human being frran the fetters
of a necessity in which he is but a means ; if the end is to cieate a
social order for the human individual, with his happiness and
personal dignity for its purpose and meaning-then it w'oiild be
a self-contradiction to pursue this end by sacriheing precis(;ly the
happiness and dignity of the individual. Other ends may admit
the sacrifice of the individual, out of their intrinsic logic, and of
them the saying that the end justifies the means may be true.
But the Socialist end cannot be justified by such moans, Ijccausc
they would annul it. This fact makes it so difficult to realise^, but
it also constitutes its moral superiority.
pected that somebody would say a few words, but none of her closer
party friends felt authorised, and we others did not wish to intrude.
Silentlywe carried the bier to the lorry and set it down on the
ground. One of us said We ought to sing something. Yesbut
:
what? The moving song for the victims of the Russian Revolution
of 1905, the Tmmortal Victims, was known to very few and
seemed too impersonal. A fighting song the Internationale?
Did they not dare it, or did they feel that it was out of place where
the fight was over and a human being had found peace? We agreed
on the beautiful old Lutheran hymn S'o nimm denn meine Hdnde^\
but the women had sung it only rarely, and did not know the in-
tricate melody. After the first few bars, somewhat out of tune, the
chorus petered out and then stopped. We gave it up and left,
most of us feeling that it would have been better if we had never
tried.
The political activity of the German Communist women did
not seem very extensive. I am not fully qualified to judge of it,
as I never belonged to their inner circle. But certainly I did not
observe them propagating their ideas among their fellow-
prisoners, nor were they as successful in this as the women Com-
munists from France, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia (who, of
course, had not been imprisoned for the same length of time) they :
had golden hair, a glowing skin and wide, shining eyes. Her
clean, strong features had an expression such as Napoleons
mother, Laetitia, might have had in her youth when she was
riding through the Corsican bush. She had come to our camp
as one of a large group of women partisans on her arrival she
;
that the Gestapo man in charge of her case had tried to discuss
things with her. He even wanted to give her an opportunity to
escape, and so win her sympathy, but she told him that a time
would come when he himself would be glad to escape with his
life. I asked her if she had never for a single second doubled the
98
Here and tliere among the German prisoners there was religious
faithj but it took the shape of silent dialogues with a God of whom
most of them despaired. The Germans in the camp, who suffered
the worst moral abasement, not only of their persons but of their
whole nation, had lost their faith in the mild Christian God of the
bright little Baroque churches of the villages, or in the majestic
God of the soaring Gothic cathedrals. Their only conception of
God was Jehovah the Avenger, the stern God of the Old Testa-
ment. On Him they counted as' the All-Powerful who would des-
troy the evil-doers and the apostates, visiting their iniquities unto
the third and fourth generation. Those among the Germans who
did not sink into apathy, or did not have the inner strength to rise
above the situation those who sought consolation in faithturned
in the camp into Bible Students {''Bibelforscher^\ Members of
the League of Earnest Bible-Students). They joined that group
of strange women who accepted everything calmly as though it
did not concern them, with the smile of the initiate who has
achieved the flight from reality into the world of mysticism.
In the peculiar life of the camp, however, this sort of escape
from reality was at the same time a special form of adjustment to
the new reality. The Bible-Students had discovered a method of
impressing the S.S. and obtaining a position in the camp such as
few other prisoners possessed. In Ravensbriick Gamp they had a
hilt to themselves. They refused any kind of work which had the
slightest connection with the German war effort ; they even refused
to do a stitch in the workshop where uniforms were made. The
authorities put them in an unheated hut, without any food ice- ;
cold water was poured on them from a hose, then they were left
standing in the open, in winter; afterwards they were locked up
in the dark cell for days on end. Many died, but the survivors
remained firm. They asserted that they would not try to escape,
'
robbers band though they were not useful for much else. They
stole like magpies, betrayed one another, and hated the prisoners
from higher social strata, particularly if they feared tjiat the latter
despised them.
Though one might have assumed that the absolute equality of
utter misery reigned in the camp, the problem of class differences
played an enormous role there. It existed doubly, as a continua-
tion of the class problems of the outside world, and as the problem
of class differences arising in the concentration camp itself. The
two sets of facts and problems overlapped.
To belong to a higher social stratum could be an advantage,
or a great disadvantage, but it was never unimportant. It was
an advantage to speak several languages, to be a doctor or a
scientist, to be able to draft letters and so forth ; it increased the
chances of getting a good post and keeping ones head above water.
But if the chance did not come off, if one had to work in the fields
as a common prisoner, it became the worst possible disadvantage
- to be at the mercy of work- trained prisoners and ruthless ward-
resses or sentries. It was an advantage to be able to keep the
S.S. at bay through a certain social adroitness and poise ; it was a
lOl
disadvantage as soon as one had to do with one of the S.S, people
who were out to give the toffs what for. It an advantage
when friendly, robust fellow-prisoners, of the working classes
helped one, if somewhat patronisingly, to tackle the discomfort of
primitive living conditions ; it was a disadvantage when one could
not hold ones own with others and vras stunned, too soft, too
civilized and too considerate.
I always tried to keep myself free from an instinctive favouritism
for women of my class, but I am not sure that I was always
successful. For instance, when I began my work iii the Polish
hut I did not speak their language. All the sick womeji were lying
in bed in the same sort of night-dresses, and differences of property
or social standing did not show up immediately. Yet the nurses
put the society ladies from Warsaw and Cracow together in one
or two rooms rooms was the term for a certain number of
bunks in charge of one nurse and the working-class women, who
were the majority, in the other rooms. When the hut became so
overcrowded that it was necessary to put a second patient into a
bunk, the two rooms of the ladies ^vcrc left unmoiested until in
the rest of the hut there were already three patients in each bunk,
I did not always find the courage to oppose this.
I tried to release patients from hospital solely on the strength
of medical considerations. The wealthy Poles got more food
parcels and recovered more quickly. But when I wanted to dis-
miss one of them she would talk to me in German or French, she
-would explain her physical ailments, dc.scribe her tragedy and
that of her family; I would be in personal contact with her-and
then I would find it even more difficult to send her out into the
unbearable camp winter. Often I let myself be persuaded. The
other women could not do that, they could only look at me with
sad eyes, and they remained numbers to me. There were count-
less imponderables, and consequently infinite dissatisfaction and
resentment.
Then there was the class structure of the camp as such. It was
dictated by the system of the prisoners self-administration.
Prisoners were grouped according to the huts in Nvhich they lived,
and according to the working parties to -which they -were posted.
The idea was to make both groupings coincide as much as
possible: for instance, the whole kitchen commando lived in a
special hut, as did the stores working party, and so on. But the
two systems often cut across each other.
The lowest rank in the hierarchy of functionaries in com-
mand of others was the Deputy Instructor, then follov'ed the
Instructor, the Capo, and in some cases, when several working
parties were occupied together on the same job, a Chief Capo.
102 '
Nearly every German prisoner who arrived at the camp fairly
fitjnot too old, and in her right mind, could reckon on being ap-
pointed at least a Deputy Instructor after the first week. This
meant that she was in charge of a few women during working
hours, and in most cases had no longer to do manual work herself
It also meant that the prisoners under her had the greatest interest
in not being beaten, kicked or over-worked by her, nor put in a
spot where they would have to stand in mud and water, or
exposed to the eyes of the S.S. In short, they had to do their best
to win her favour, by giving her a share of their food parcels from
home, or of stolen goods, or, at the worst, of their own rations.
The Instructors favour was more precious, and she never did
manual work herself. All this applied in an even higher degree to
the Capos. Chief among these was the Gamp Capo, one of the
most important persons in the camp, who was responsible for the
organisation of all working parties and for order throughout the
whole of the camp, except the huts. There was a parallel hierarchy
in the huts. In each one the Hut Senior and her Deputy were the
absolute rulers.
The Hut Seniors were queens in their own right, with staffs of
from five to ten women for the room services, to keep the hut
in order and distribute the food. They were supposed not to lay
hands on the prisoners under them, but many did, with the same
impunity as the S.S. people. If an ordinary prisoner complained
about them or had some sort of dispute with them, the Gamp
Senior as well as the wardresses invariably decided that the Hut
Seniors were in the right. It was almost impossible to get rid of
one of those functionaries in the normal waythat is, by arguing
that she was not up to her position, or abused it. It was usual to
ti'y to set a trap, to catch her in bed with a man or a woman,
or to
denounce her when she gave a piece of white bread to a prisoner
who was not entitled' to itperhaps out of real pity. The same
held good of the Gamp Senior, who ruled overall the Hut Seniors.
If one of these women was removed from her post, it usually
came about for the silliest and pettiest of reasons. Equally
ridiculous excuses also served to remove decent prisoners
functionaries, if someone had a grudge against them. Their
thrones v'erc rather shaky, and it 'tvas often only one step from the
Hut Seniors room to the punishment company.
A great many of the clerical posts were occupied by Polish
women, while nearly all Instructors and Capos were German
prisoners. Finally there were the linen, shoe and tool depots, and
the kitchen; in each of them, two, three or more women lived
in
having
a small room by themselves, and managed tolerably well,
direct access to valuable goods, All those women had legal,
semi-
103
legal and illegal opportunities to procure what they needed for
their existence. Also, they often received extra rations, death-
parcels, etc.,from the Camp Command as bonuses. They were
the prisoners who could eat their fill and who had the lives of the
other prisoners in their hands, through the size of the rations they
distributed, through the concession of a second helping of soup or
an extra slice of sausage. The difference between the life of an
American magnate and that of his youngest messenger-boy can-
not be so great as was the difference between the lives of the rank-
and-file and of the privileged prisoners. On the other hand,
prominent prisoners were worse off than the others if they were
politically marked persoris who had provoked the special ire of
the S.S. and whose destruction was desired in higher quarters.
But prisoners of this calibre were much rarer among the women
than among the men, and there were none among the German
women prisoners in Auschwitz.
It a well-known fact that brothels existed in the mens camps,
is
be trained for work here. The others decided for the brothel
Yet who would say that these girls were not blackmailed into
continuing their former profession?
The gi'oup of German anti-social prisoners comprised not
only the prostitutes, who may have deserved the label, but also
104
women who had broken a labour contract by over-staying their
holiday or something of the sort, and every shade and type be-
tween these working women and the professional tarts. There
was, for instance, the young daughter of a factory-owner. When
she was called up for national labour service, she somehow wangled
it so that she was given home work ; she was supposed to make three
the difference out of his pocket, while the daughter went off to a
bathing-place with an Air Force officeruntil she was found out
and sent to the camp.
Then there were poor, defenceless women who had stayed at
home from work because it was their washing day or because one
of their children was ill over-burdened creatures forced into
slave labour, who had been denounced for repeated absenteeism
by malicious Nazi bosses. There were young girls who had gone
home without permission because their fiance or their brother was
on leave from the front, and so forth. In an economy without
-unemployment labour discipline is an intricate problem. There
were, in fact, a number of work-shy people among our anti-
social prisoners. But it is beyond argument that to send these
women to a concentration camp for four or five years was no
solution of the problem.
When Commandant von Hartenstein came to Auschwitz in the
winter of 1943-44 he made a speech in which he said that in his
opinion the women had been imprisoned far too long. He would
review the files of all the German prisoners and find out whether
it was not possible to release the few survivors of the first German
105
any '^completed education, would not find the time for it.
Who was in a position to claim the release of one of those unfor- ,
the same old story. Those people did inhuman things, they im-
prisoned healthy young women for years in surroundings where
there was nothing for them to loveno man, no cluld, no animal,
no flower, only an ugliness which in itself was enough to rain any
woman. Then they let their prisoners lie two and three at a time
in the same bunk, for months on end, and when the women then
clutched at each other, trying to find joy, the S.S, doctor re-
proached the prisoner-doctor with not doing anything about it.
In their eyes sexual problems did not exist for women, while they
somehow acknowledged^ their existence in the case of the male
prisoners, if only by setting up brothels for them. This disregard
of facts was all the more astonishing as there were among the
female prisoners some with decided traits of pathological sexuality
women who wore mens clothes in the evenings whenever they
had an opportunity, and called 'themselves Otto and Fritz.
io6
A few were even imprisoned because of a sexual abnormality.
NevertbelesSj most of the Lesbian relationships were the product
of circumstances; they occurred rather more frequently in the
sick wardsj because there the girls had fewer occasions to meet
men than while they were working out of doors. It goes without
saying that those relationships led to numerous scenes and intri-
gues.
Lesbian love played a much smaller role in the other national
groups than in the German group. It was never clear to me
whether this fact was due to a specific tendency, or whether.it was
simply due to the far longer prison terms of the German women,
and to the circumstance that most of them had no ideal wliich
filled them and helped them to sublimate their urges
that they
did not feel responsible to anyone for their moral standards.
All this, then, adds up to my picture of the German prisoners
in Birkenau Gamp. There were among them honest and valuable
individuals, women of a certain greatness. They were to be found
among the Communists and other anti-Fascists, among those who
found themselves in camp almost by accident, among the prosti-
tutes and the other *anti-sociai prisoners, and even among the
green prisoners. But on the whole they were isolated figures.
In addition to all their hardships they bore the heavy lot of personal
loneliness, even if they found good friends among the prisoners of
other nationalities. As a closed group, the German prisoners had
a low standard. And precisely as a closed group, without dis-
crimination, the German prisoners were set over the Hite of Euro-
pean intelligence, over scholars, politicians, fighters, over simple
middle-class and working-class women of all the other European
nations.
107
fact it was the patients who were punished. Without under-
'
fied with me. Then I began to realise that I looked incredibly sure
of myself, precisely because with that sort of diagnosis and therapy
I had neither doubts nor problems. This gave the sick women the
feeling that they were in good hands and that I would always find
a solution. Moreover, they had feared that I, as a German, would
treat them tyrannically. Instead, I let them do as they liked, and
this suited them. Each patient had her pet theory about her ill-
ness, each diagnosed herself and obtained medicaments through
private channels whenever she could and all of them were quite
;
very grateful for it. But if you think it will prevent me from moving
you to the infectious hut, \vhich all of you try to avoid, then
you are making a bad investment. The girl left me the sausage,
and I transferred her all the same. When the news of my attitude
had circulated, I got somewhat fewer presents, but those I did
get w^ere probably given out of a genuine impulse.
Once one succeeded in overcoming the hatred and distrust of
the Polish women for anyone speaking German to be fair, their
justified hatred and distrust !
and once one convinced them that
one was on their side, their cordiality and hospitality were
boundless.
The Poles found it most difficult of all to bear the bondage of
foreign intruders in their homeland; in addition tljey bore the in-
finitely more dreadful oppression in the concentration camp, and
on top of it the subordination to other prisoners, particularly the
Germans. Next to the Jews the Poles were the biggest national
group in the camp. As most of them were physically strong, re-
ceived more food from home than anybody else, were not threat-
ened by gassing (at least not after 1943) and lived in a closely-knit
community, there existed a number of veteran Polish prisoners
109,
who had gone through t\phus and made a good recovery. These
women held goodj iniiuential positions in the camp administra-
tion they were intelligent, energetic and straight they thought it
;
:
the posts in which they would have been able to lielp, place,
protect and cover up other compatriots. They could not do any-
thing against the German functionaries who were backed by tlie
S.S., and they had not many conflicts with the smaller groups
the French, the Yugoslavs, etc. But they did get into conflicts with
the Jews. I shall have more to say about this later.
The great strength of the Polish group was its structure. The
anti-social dements "were an insignificant percentage. There were
a good many non-political women who had come to the camp
more or less accidentally, because they were picked up during a
police raid, or in connection with the black market, or because
they had left Yet these accidents mostly
their place of work, etc.
had something do with the national consciousness, tiie struggle
to
for freedom, the self-defence of the Polish people. There was, for
instance, a little dressmaker. Wiiiie she was delivering a dress,
the family of her customer ^vas arrested by the Gestapo, and she
was taken along tvith them. She had done nothing and tvas
completely innocent of politics, but when she was offered her
immediate release if she signed the German Nationals List she
refused and was sent to the camp. The number of those im-
prisoned for a mere nothing and of those who died in camp for
itwas legion. They were there because they had once spoken to
a Partisan, or because they were relatives of politically active
Poles, or quite simply because they were Polish.
Near Poznan two Germans happened to die very soon after
their admission to a hospital they had died from two different,
;
rare ilbesses, but the German authorities assumed that they had
been Idlied by Polish doctors, and arrested fifteen Poznan doctors,
men and women. The demand for an exhumation and post-
mortem of the two bodies was rejected, and die Poznan doctors
were sent to Auschwitz Camp. This is one example out of very
many.
Those Poles who had been non-political before their arrest
were educated to political consciousness through their detention,
through the camp, and through the guidance of the many active
fighters of the Polish Resistancethose innumerable Polish
poiiticiil prisoners whose spirit and courage were to be broken in
the camp but only grew in strength as long as they stood the
strain physically.
Ihad many conversations about politics with Polish fellow-
prisoners, in German or French, and later also in broken Polish.
I tried to learn and ^understand their ideas. Whether it was a
residue of distrust which made them cautious towards me, though
they liked me well enough, or whether there were other reasons,
I never really found out. Again and again I asked them the
obvious questions. Before the war, Poland had had two possi-
bilities that of ranging herself with Hitler against Russia, and
that of ranging herself with Russia against Plitler. Either would
have been feasible in itself. Why did Poland accept the German
giftof the Olsaland in 1938 and refuse the Russians the right to
march through its territory in the protection of Czechoslovakia?
On the other hand, why did not Poland let Hitler march to the
Russian frontier in 1939, if that was to be the line of policy? The
answer to these questions was; But we couldnt have allowed a
foreign army on Polish soil! The women who said this prayed
for the Russian advance, they fell on each others necks when they
heard that the Russians had crossed the Polish frontier and
occupied the first Polish towns towns turned into ruins and
rubble by the alternating advance and retreat of the Russians
and Germans. Gould they not have got the same result with less
sacrifices? I asked them: In 1938, Poland was a solid State
which could have confronted and matched the Russian army with
its own strong armed forces and its own intact national life. At
that lime you did not want it. Now, when you cannot have it like
this, you call in the Russians. What was your idea at the time?
I never got a satisfactory explanation. It seemed to me that the
majority of the Polish ^vomen in the camp were patriots without
also being politically mature.
Sometimes when I took part in one of their festivities I saw their
exuberant optimism and their firm' conviction that a free Poland
would rise again. I saw their faith binding them together in a
genuine, close national community, and the idea Poland filling
them so exclusively that it left them no urge to give that idea a
positive, social content.' I saw that nothing beyond the social
reality, nothing which would have been a significant mental reality,
separated the land-worker from the land-owner and aristocrat,
or the factory-worker from the bankers wife. And, seeing all
that, I sometimes felt the deepest sympathy for those unfortunate
people, together 'vvith a regretful sadness when I imagined the
future life of many of these women. Now that the implacable
reality of class conflicts is again to the fore, a great number may
be imprisoned in yet another camp. Do they still have their faith?
live together with them in the narrow confines of the camp. The
recklessness that inspired their resolute rejection of camp rules was
refreshing and encouraging, but it created problems which made
the position of all prisoner-functionaries much more difficult. I
greater and that I w'-as therefore beiier able to foresee the conse-
quencesmy Russian colleague knew quite as much as I did. But
there 'was a diiferencein our approach, in the importance each of
us gave to the exception that did not conform to tiie pattern. She
had argued: Out of ninety-five patients with heavy diarrhoea
who have been treated for three days with maximum doses of
sulphonamides, fifty can be considered cured, twenty-flve im-
proved ; fifteen did not respond to the tf-eatment five liavc grown
;
the police came and took me here for a rest. Her answer silenced
the S.S. Doctor completely.
Women of this type w^ere naturally incapable of fitting into the
camp and adjusting themselves to its conditions. They insisted on
their human rights, came into conflict with every authority in
the camp, and were so i-mpemous to persuasion that they w'erc
judged not quite normal. Then they were locked up with
violent schizophrenics and maniacs.
Once wulked with the greatest
a sixteen-year-old Russian girl
ease through the camp which happened to be open, and
gates,
by an oversight slipped past the control. A hundred yards farther
on an S.S. sentry stopped her and asked where she was going.
She answered candidly, Do domu/' home as if it w^ere the
most natural thing in the world. Not even our powers-that-be
could bring themselves to treat this as an attempt to escape, so she
was sent to my w^ard as a lunatic ^w'hile she had onl)' the
natural gravity of a child in a world that had gone mad.
n6
(d) Th Jews
not so very long since the gas chambers ceased their work,
It' is
had had the strength to stand the camp, although she was not one
of the youngest. She had survived the typhus epidemic in the
gypsy camp, with the heaviest odds against her and when that
camp was liquidated she took up work in our hospital. We be-
came fast friends, and our friendship still lasts. She is a wonderful
physician, and I owe to her everything I learned in the camp in
the medical field. The Nazis had allowed her to go on working at
the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin till 1938 and to attend scien-
congresses and in the end she, too, landed in Auschwitz.
tific
119
but you shouldnt ask. In the beginning I was able to help her
a little; later a Jewish Hut Senior looked after her.
Now I had at least a human being with whom I could discuss^
in my mother tongue, the matters that occupied me, a colleague
who even in the camp had a scientific interest in medicine and
whom I could consult on other questions than What should I
give that patient?
The firststep was to cover myself. I asked the camp doctor
officially ifhe would authorise me to employ the Jewish doctor as a
consultant specialist in the German ward. Sometimes when one
made an impersonal request to S.S. men of Dr. Koenigs type,
taking the same impersonal objectivity for granted on their side,
they would forget about their ideology and decide on merit.
The S.S. doctor had an interest in the good medical treatment of
the few surviving German prisoners; he realised that such a
treatment was more likely if this eminent doctor took part in it
than if I was alone. He gave his permission. After this I made a
list twice a week of the more interesting cases in my hut, and asked
At first I remonstrated with her why should she lend herself to
it? why should she let him
boast with her intellectual products?
She answered serenely: Ive published quite enough in my life;
I can afford to cede him this piece of research plus the kudos.
Fm happy that I can do scientific work again. Also, Fll be able to
help my test As long as I need them for my research
cases.
they are safe from selections, and I can even prescribe supple-
mentary food for them. I saw the force <jf her argument.
A few days later we were standing near a patients bed, irn-
mersed in our when a rimner came to tell my colleague
dlscAissiuii,
that they would work in Germany the w^ork waiting for them
:
down under a shrub, and in the evening they would march her
back to camp all to avoid her being sent to the hospital hut and
so being exposed to the danger of a selection. The Slovaks would
keep on their feet during a roll-call even when they suffered from
frightful abscesses or phlegmons and could scarcely breathe with
pain. A very great number of them died, but those who sur-
vived were proof against anything. They w^ere all experts in
camp technique; though they had no parcels from home
which made things more difficult for them than for the Poles
they knew how to get hold of food and clothing, and looked
healthy and spruce, some even elegant. And, in the camp, ones
appearance w^as very important. Not every one of them did it by
clean methodsthat is to say, by getting the things from friends
working in the various depots but somehow they all managed.
The tw^o queens of the camp, the roll-clerk and the Chief
Doctor of our hospital, were Jewesses from Slovakia. Both were
exceptionally good-looking, clever, gifted and decent. Both used
their position to help all prisoners, with the greatest fairness,
although they naturally helped first of all the Jewish prisoners
who needed protection and aid most urgently. I had not much to
123
do with Katya, the roll-clerk, and had little direct knowledge of
her work, but on the other hand I was able to observe the conduct
of our Chief Doctor, Ena Weiss, in close detail
The most striking thing about this woman, who was not yet
thirty, was the ice-cold self-control by which she hid her abysmal
hatred of the German rulers. Her self-confidence was so complete
that she never felt a seconds vacillation in dealing with the highest
S.S. officers. She kept them at bay by letting them feel her disdain
in a perfectly courteous manner. The way in which she made
those S.S. people depend on her, until they were convinced that
without her the whole thing would break down, amounted to
genius. She even made them publicly rebuke anti-Semitic remarks
by refractory German prisoners.
Yet her methods, completely comprehensible from the point of
view of the Jewish prisoners interests, were sometimes question-
able from the point of view of the sick in general. This led to certain
conflicts with the non-Jewish prisoners, particularly the Poles.
The prisoner-doctors could follow one of two methods in their
dealings with the S.S. doctors. The first was to appeal again and
again to a vestige of objectivity, comprehension and humanity in
them, despite everything and despite the inevitable discourage-
ment. It meant insisting continually that things could not go on,
as they were, and so wresting infinitesimal concessions and im-
provements from them. But tactics of this sort involved a great
danger it could lead to an increase in the slaughter of Jewish
:
point out the deficiencies of the hospital; the S.S. did not care,
anyhow, and it was best for us to keep silent and procure every-
thing through underground' channels. This, however, had the
effect that, whenever w^e raised a justified complaint we were
told : Now, whats this? You said yourselves that everything was
in order!
A similar problem arose about positions v/hich offered a certain-
degree of safety and the chance of better living conditions in the ;
camp hospital these were mainly the posts on the nursing staff.
The Jewish prisoners wanted to get in as many as possible of their
own people, who would then be safe from selections. The patients
in general wanted to get nurses who were strong and used to hard
work women of this kind were to be found in the first place among
;
the Poles, if only because most of them got plenty of food parcels
from home. Then the Poles argued: Oswiccim is in Poland; it
is the camp of the Polish intelligentzia and the Polish Resistance
she will get on even outside the hospital, but if I dismiss the Jewish
girl, she will be lost. She kept the Jewish nurse, although she
was rather less competent than the other. But not all non-Jewish
prisoners proceeded on the same principle, in the first place not
allthe Poles. Nor were all ofthem in a position to do so. As far as
I could judge the Polish population by our Poles in the camp,
anti-Semitism had extremely deep roots among them.
The difference between a Polish and a Jewish-Polish woman in
looks, behaviour and idiom was very great and immediately
obvious. In contrast, it was impossible to distinguish between a
French Jewess and a non-Jewish Frenchwoman, unless one
spotted the star of the Jewish badge. It \vas the age-old problem
of the assimilation of the Jews, Lack of assimilation was not made
less conspicuous, but, on the contraiy, it was accentuated, by the
pressure which weighed upon all of us in the camp. Moreover, the
negative selection to which I have referred was most noticeable
among the Polish-Jewijh prisoners, who therefore represented the
greatest problem.
I who had decided with such fairness
asked the Polish doctor
in the question of thetwo nurses whether she was an anti-Semite
like the others. She said Not in the sickening sense in which it
:
philo-Semitic. But I don't like the Jews they have never been
;
all my patientsfor gassing and cleared out all the things in the
hut, including your cardigan, which was practically finished.
Of course I said nothing. With a shudder, I walked through the
empty hut where only the day before human beings had
126
breathed, and trembled. Some weeks later I saw my colleague
againshe was wearing the cardigan. It was so silly; in the
meantime I had got myself another jacket and had completely for-
gotten about the cardigan. But I felt ashamed for this woman,
who at that time lived a life of no particular hardship and had no
need to make a stupid little deal out of the others tragedy. And
I had no inner defence against the scornful smile of the young
Pole who had deliberately driven this Jewish doctor from our roorn
by being nasty to her, while I had opposed it. I was reduced
to the argument that our colleague mightmight !not have
l)ehaved as she did had she stayed with us. Possibly she wanted to
take her revenge, and I was the only possible object, the only one
whom she could hurt; for anything she could have done to the
Pol6 would only have strengthened the latters anti-Semitic
convictions, and would not have hurt her.
The second incident hit me much more deeply. It made me
feel the ineradicable distrust against me, because' I was a
German.
For our Chief Doctor I felt admiration, sympathy and gratitude.
She had looked after me during my attack of typhus and had
saved my life. When I came to the camp, as the only German
woman doctor, my mere existence imphedadangerto her position;
in spite of this, she received me with perfect comradeship. Also,
she soon realised that I had not the slightest intention of ousting
her from her job. At the beginning I found it so difficult to get
my bearings that I would not have felt up to any greater task
such as hers. Later I did not want to be Chief Doctor, because it
would have brought me nothing but disadvantages. It would
have been intolerable for me to have to go round with the S.S.
doctors the whole day long and be present at the selections, when
the victims would have thought that I, with my German badge,
had an active role in them. As the Chief Doctors work had
nothing to do with the direct treatment of patients, my medical
work would have become much less interesting. I had every
interest in staying in my \vard and leaving the existing state of
affairs as it was.
Then came Dr. Klein; and the Poles, for whom he had a
predilection, tried to persuade him to make me Chief Doctor in-
stead of the Jewess. I made it perfectly clear to everybody that
I would never lend myself to an anti-Semitic intrigue, that I liked
Ena and was indebted to her. I went to her and assured her of
my loyalty. She had known me a year, and she had seen that I
always backed her. Also, she knew that I was in the camp because
I had tried to help Jews. Yet all this was of no account. From the
day when it looked as though Dr, Klein really would prefer me
127
to her and that her position was threatened, she made me feel her
understandable resentment and tried to send me away on one of
the Tactoiy transports, even when Dr. Klein had already been
replaced by other S.S. doctors whom she dominated or at least so
I was told by people who certainly ought to have known.
The whole petered out. I continued to be fond of her,
affair
though I occasionally opposed her measures, and I understood her
reaction: So shes just like the others . .
.1 understood it from
the bottom of my heart. There was nothing for which I should
not have forgiven a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz. But it did hurt
me.
Later, when I had been transferred from Auscluvilz'to Dachau,
I was present at the arrival of the U.S. troops. An American
Jew, who noted my German badge and found that I could speak
English, made use of the opportunity to speak to one of us. What
he asked me was: Say, what was the big idea? You wanted to
rule the world, didnt you? I told him that this had not been
my idea. Yeah, he said, now not one of you wants to admit it.
Alas, he was right not one of them wanted to admit it
: 1
128
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE GERMAN S.S.
bestial female helpers thought they were great ladies when they
could wear fur coats and who were so completely possessed by
their social ambitions that they felt neither frightened nor troubled
by the bitter sweat and blood of the prisoners who built their
houses, by the shrieks of the Jewish women from whom theyjook
their fur coats at the entrance to the gas chamber. The S.S. in its
daily life is one of the ugliest and meanest chapters in the history
of the Thousand-Year-Reich.
It is important to understand that the S.S. did not consist of
people all of the same t>Tpe. It contained, on the contrary, the
most divergent and, Indeed, contrasting minds and characters,
which complemented each other in a terrifying way and com*
milied the most irilniman crimes in an nnranny co-operadoii.
Not the leaders, but the lower ranks of the S.S., in their variety
of attitudes, were the decisive links in the chain, from our point
of view.
In March, 1943, a fire broke out in our camp of Birkenaii near
Auschwitz, in a store-room which held our private clothes. In all
likelihood the fire was started by the prisoners and warders
working in the depot because they got wind of an impending
inspection in which their large-scale thefts would have been dis-
off the lot of you, and then we could have gone home at last.
While he said it he looked into the far distance he must have
;
genuinely stupid men and women in one place. Once, when our
camp doctor discussed a matter of camp hygiene with us, the
doctor-prisoners, one of my colleagues suggested that an intelli-
gent wardress would be able to supervise the measure. The doctor
asked, astonished But have you ever seen an intelligent wardress?
:
I havent. Another S.S. man told me: You know, its like this.
If a girl is a street-walker, shes sent to camp as a prisoner. If she
only did her stuff in a bar, she gets sent to camp as a wardress.
This came close to the truth a great number of those S.S. women
:
were prostitutes of some sort, who were passed on among the S.S.
men, and often kept up a friendship with colleagues among the
prisoners. They lived their inane little life, were greedy for any-
thing which could be organised, knew no limit in taking bribes
131
and nearly all of them hoped to accumulate a tidy little sum which
would help them towards acquiring a household of their own.
I remember a ^vardress who felt dreadfully bored one cold,
foggy day.
Girls/ she said to us, imagine being at home, after a good
supper, and having a husband with a little car, and he would
take you to a nice cafe with a band I wonder if we shall ever get
something of the kind, ...
They all longed for this, and organised their thefts wdth this aim
in mind. They knew that the blood of murdered women was on
the trinkets and furs they stole, but did not think twice of it. It
practically never occurred to them that they had their share of
guilt in those murders. They closed their minds against such
ideas, and in general considered everything that happened a
matter for the men. They hardly ever had feelings like pity,
horror or shame. They had an elemental aversion for prisoners
who were prettier and more smartly dressed than they were.
One of those good-looking colleagues of mine once complained to
me The wwst guard is better than the best w^ardress. A few of
:
more or less success to ignore what was going on and those who
;
132
those of whom the German people should feel most deeply
ashamed? The deepest shame lies in the fact that they were let
loose to rage freely and that their savagery was considered desir-
able in high places. Otherwise, their cases border on the
pathological and call for the psychiatrists diagnosis rather than
for a moral judgment.
Worse, because more dangerous, were the people who in their
everyday life, and frequently in their dealings with prisoners,
were quite kindly, looked normal, and behaved like any other
average civilian and who were pleased with the mass murder,
without any deeper emotion, simply because it v^as an opportunity
for getting a pigskin bag or gold watch which they could never
have afforded to buy. Sometimes they would only feel this
individual satisfaction, sometimes they would express it in a more
general fashion, as by exclaiming: Look at the things they have,
those Jews! And people like us used to have nothing! Among
them were people little concerned with National Socialism as
such, its political and social aims or other tenets, and yet belonging
to it heart and soul
indeed, with fanaticism out of their joy at
the annihilation of the Jews.
One may find a key to their mental state by thinking of the
systematic mania of paranoics whose personality is unaltered out-
side that system, or by drawing on, say, Levy-Bruehls work on
the mind of primitive peoples. Levy-Bruehl ascribed to some
primitive peoples two spheres of thinking one which belonged to
:
everyday life, where acts were guided by the laws of logic and
another pre-logical thinking in his phraseology ^which was ;
or had personal profit from it, and in private life was a quiet,
modest, friendly person. I hoped to move her by my story of
Auschwitz Gamp, and finished by saying that no people had ever
inflicted so much evil on another group as the German nation on
the Jews. In reply she asked me blithely: 'Why? Is gassing such
a disagreeable death, then? I was struck silent.
The other group of S.S. intelligentsia in the camp were those
who refused to see the things around them. Among them were the
cow^ards who were afraid of losing their creed. Some sort of ideal-
ism untrammelled by knowledge may have made them believe in
the social and cultural aims which had been presented to them,
and on these premises they had accepted Hitler and his pro-
gramme. They had been told that it was necessary to educate
anti-social elementsthrough cleanliness, austerity and toil
until they became valuable citizens. Now they tried to interpret
the concentration camps as if they ^vere labour camps conducted
for that purpose.
Every social order is forced to tackle the problem of criminality,
and it is possible to argue that the idea of labour camps is more
progressive than that of penitentiaries. It was at this argument
that people of the type of which I am speaking \ised to dutch.
Whenever a new compound was built which was, at least to begin
with, clean and orderly; whenever prisoners got new' under-
clothing for once; whenever there ^vas a special treat, such as
palatable pickled cabbage at Christmas even for the Jewish
compound, they would w^elcome it as a first step towards the
principles they cherished, and would tr\' to bclic\c that those
principles would in the end defeat the gas chamber.
In practice there was much of the sort of contradiction in the
camps which is often put to the account of Nazi hypocrisy. An
X-ray apparatus would at times be used to cure Jewish children of
noma, gangrenous ulcer of the check, and at times to sterilise
their elder sisters. Weak patients \vouId one da)' be given extra
rations, and on the next day be punished by starvation. It is
doubtful whether this w'as common-or-garden hypocrisy it was :
transition stage. Few had the courage to see that this misbegotten
tissue of widely divergent tendencies led to horrible results.
Those were usually the people who, though failing to change
their basic attitude, tried to obtain small improvements here
and there, and who attempted to prevent the worst in their per-
sonal domainoccasionally They would be aghast when they
1
saw the practical shape of their ideals, but they were unable or
unwilling to renounce them. Still, they did try to behave rela-
tively decently, and they certainly were worried about the outcome
of it all. Many of them thought that everything was the fault of
the bosses in Berlin who did things so differently from the
way the Ftihrcr meant them.
Finally, there was the third group, the adversaries of the camp
system in the ranks of the. S.S. Of them, there was a certain
number even among the volunteers whose illusions had been
shattered, but most of them were among the men posted com-
pulsorily to the S.S. Some ^vere Socialists or Communists. They
would co-operate with the prisoners and sabotage the Camp
Command but since they often had bad experiences through the
;
people first realise and then freely accept their economic link
with the working classes, and in persuading them that they, the
workers, had something to say ^in a State whose machinery
was carrying out their liquidation, but in which many individuals
from their ranks attained real power through the Nazi Party and
its affiliated organisations. This process was incarnate in Hitler.
clean, decent dress for me, on her principle that German prisoners
were to be favoured. \Vhen one of us faced her wdth calm self-
confidence, she became subdued. It was essential to her mentality
that she should be asked about every detail, but even more essential
that she should stick to whatever decision she had once made.
As I was sheltered by the authority of Dr. Rohde, one of the
most decent S.S. doctors who w^ere ever in tlie camp, she had to
leave me alone, but the other prisoners w^ere at her mercy. Once
an extra cauldron of food was sent to Babice by mistake rather :
than distribute it ^which would have been against her principles
she let it go bad. She was constantly afraid of being tricked.
In her eyes, women lying ill with a temperature of 103 F, were
shamming, and she used to chase them out of the beds on the;
following day we would find that their illness was typhus. When
she saw a girl laughing, she w^ouid growl Youll soon forget
:
about laughing . . and when one of the girls cried, she would
be angry. She invented petty, senseless rules and punishments,
raged, against plucked eyebrows and well-fitting prison dresses,
and made herself ridiculouS by it. She saw herself as someone who
was severe, but just and she was a miserable, unhappy creature
;
who was loved by nobody, who loved nobody but her dog. In
our camp slie did not use that dog against prisoners, Init fed k
until it became fat, heavy and lazy. But this may have changed
at a later stage. It is not astonishing that this woman refused to
appeal against the death sentence. To her the defeat of her
Germany was the end.
The small outlying camp of Babice was an interesting sample
because of the Bormann woman and her counterpart, the Medical
N.G.O. Flagge. Johanna Bormann was compound leader and
the terror of i8o prisoners, who otherwise, as far as living, eating
and washing conditions were concerned, were infinitely better
olf than their colleagues in the big camp. Flagge was the good
spirit of the camp. In the fifties, a railway official in private life
(and in my opinion a former Social Democrat), he was called
Dad by the girls, whom he liked to spoil and call his children.
When it rained he ordered that the schoolrooms in which we were
housed should be heated, so that we should be able to dry our
clothes. If a girl suffered badly during her menstruation, he gave
her a permit to stop working for the day. Whenever he received
his ration of cake, or a gift of eggs from a peasant, he would give
them to me, our Polish nurse, and the Jewish doctor of the neigh-
bouring mens compound. Once he and his superior came into
our small surgery at four in the afternoon, and found both myself
and the nurse fast asleep. He told his chief: Let them sleep,
and they left. T'hat evening he timidly said to me: .You know,
one of you two really ought to be up at that time of the day it
might make things very awkward for me otherwise. His attitude
created an improbable, isolated idyll.
I once asked Flagge how a man of his sort could bear to be in
to rules, had gone to her room, had not known about the incident
until the morning, and was the only person in the whole place
whom nobody could suspect of having connived in the flight. But
.she-was the responsible supervisor of the compound. So there
she sat and cried bitterly at the lo.ss of one of her flock. On the
following day she was punished by being relieved of her post. A
result which our Medical N.C.O.s sen.se of justice had struggled in
vain to obtain was brought about through the arbitrary S.S.
principle by which people were made responsible for things out-
side their sphere of action. The S.S. applied this principle not
only against prisoners, but also against their best that is to say
their worst
members.
There existed two such forms of punishment in all the concen-
tration camps, which killed any genuine sense of responsibility and
which the Nazis were the first to employ. One was to make a
whole group responsible for an offence committed by one of its
members, particularly when the offender was not known. The
other w'as to make leaders responsible for whatever those
under them had done. The group punishment was calculated to
produce denunciations, as indeed it often succeeded in doing.
The ptinishment of the leaders was intended to prevent any future
possible co-operation or connivance of the higher ranks in matters
which would threaten them with degradation.
Both methods created impossible situations for us prisoners, in
cases where we had no idea who had done something, and so were
unable to denounce anybody, even if we had wanted to, and in
which there was no one who could have come forward with a
confession.
. The stupid futility of the method was brought home to me at the
beginning of my work in the camp hospital of Birkenau.
I was busy examining my patients when the order came Staff :
140
,
stove. The Head Wardress was furious. She gave us a lecture
about the sacredness of bread in the fifth year of the war, and told us
that the entire staff would have to stay lined up out there until the
offender had given herself up. In the meantime our patients were
aioncj with no one at hand to give them their food or a bedpan.
At first I found the open air a relief. But it was early March. A
gale started up and snow fell. It grew very cold. No culprit came
forward to face the angry wardress. It was uncertain whether one
of the staff or one of the patients had done the deed but even if the
;
mass murderers were also stupid little people who were always
afraid for their imagined dignity.
Those people were in a quandary. It was difficult for them to
keep up discipline, even more difficult among us women than
among the male prisoners. Unless our gaolers wanted to inflict
heavy punishment on uswhich would endanger our health and
lives-l-they resorted to this more readily with the men than with
the women, in spite of everything; they had no really effective
disciplinary means. For a factor decisive in normal life was com-
pletely absent in camp any moral recognition of the authorities.
:
They may not have known this, but they felt the result.
It will sound peculiar, but I felt somehow freer in camp, except
for the live wire which prevented me from going home, than I had
felt in the freedom outside, because I never felt bound by a single
one of the rules laid down by the S.S. I observed tliem only as
far as I considered the of benefit to them prisoners, and felt free to
break them whenever I was unobserved. At liberty outside a camp
or prison, you observe the laws, as a rule, even when you are not
afraid of being caught out in an act of disobedience.
In such a situation, penalties the aim of which was to appeal to
our sense of honour were simply ludicrous in our eyes. Once I
worked in an outlying post of Dachau Gamp, in a factory camp at
East Munich. There women prisoners were often punished by
being sent to the bunker of the mens camp. Theoretically
they were supposed to be kept in the cell three days and three
nights, on their feet, with nothing but bread and water. In
practice the men prisoners *or the girls themselves used to bribe
the S.S. After the nightly check-up they would get palliasses and
decent food on the second day they would be declared ill, with a
;
survival was good, whatever threatened our survival was bad and
to be avoided. It would never have occurred to us that the S.S.
men could humiliate or shame us by their methods of punishment.
I tried to make this clear to the Medical N.G.O., a man who
behaved decently to women prisoners and accepted frank talk in
private, I put it more or less in these words It is like this here
:
explain that this was quite the -wrong way of thinking, we had our
duty to our family, and go forth. After ail, their system of dominat-
ing the German prisoners was based on the pretence that we
could earn our release by good conduct this tied them to the
;
put her in a room by herselfthat is, the Hut Senior was forced to
give up her own room. The same Head Wardress helped the
Gamp Doctor to select the victims for the gas chamber.
Once I saw four charming little Jewish children waiting outside
H5
her office door, while their despairing mothers stood near them,
fearing the worst. O, as she was called (O stands for Oberauf-
seherinEtdid Wardress), fetched the children into her room;
five minutes later they reappeared, each clutching a packet of
cake and chocolate. The same Head Wardress shared the guilt in
the death of countless thousands of children their death in the
flames. She was capable of a normal, motherly womans re-
actions, and of turning herself into a wild beast.
She liked to make presents--of things which were not hers. I
knew it from my own experience. Much as I hated to ask favours
from those people, knowing that I w'ould get them, but knowing
also who were the givers, I sometimes forced myself, for the sake
of my child, to ask permission to write my son little special letters
illustrated with drawings. The Head Wardress w'ould not only
give me the permission every time, but she would show her sym-
pathy by slipping something into my hand, such as a dried fruit or
a tin of sardines. I w^ould take it with a shrug and go away. Once
she gave me a voucher for the parcels depot, and told me to get
a nice parcel. In the depot were the so-called death parcels,
which had been sent by the relatives of prisoners who had died,
but of whose deaths they had not yet been notified. This may well
have been one of the reasons why such notices were considerably
delayed. The S.S. used to distribute the parcels as a favour after
having taken their full share. I fetched my parcel I hap-
pened to glance at the address, and started it w'as directed to one
:
here is some chocolate for you, and if you behave, youll get some
again. Each of us was ^ven a small piece of chocolate taken
146
from Swiss Red Gross parcels. First we were dumbfounded, then
we had to take a hold on ourselves so as not to burst out laughing.
Nearly all of us were political prisoners; while the black' and
the green prisoners the non-political groups~had been trans-
ferred pending the liquidation of the camp, we had been left in
Auschwitz to do the responsible jobs among the prisoners. Among
us were a young Communist girl who had been nine years in
prison a journalist who had been a nm'se during the Spanish
;
Civil War grown-up women, mothers, who had suffered and wit-
;
nessed all the misery and crime -wt all had in us a reasoned,
deeply rooted hatred of our gaolers. Now those gaolers were
frightened, and attempted to placate and suborn us in the twelfth
hour with a piece of chocolate. This was how those brains
imagined the w'orld. . . .
stupid woman. What I said was: There arent any Jews left in
Vienna. This seemed to strike her as highly satisfactory, and she
made a favourable report on my conduct if it had depended on
;
her, I should have been released. But her favourable opinion did
not cut much ice in Berlin, and I remained where I was.
Another prisoner was less lucky with the Head Wardress. She
was a little Catholic lay-sister, a spinster in her forties, who would
not have harmed a fly and had not the faintest idea of politics.
She had grumbled about the unfaithful, had been sent to camp,
almost died of typhus, and was proposed for release after a years
detention. The good woman did not understand her situation at
all. When 0 asked her if she meant to join her order again
after her release, she did not try to evade an answer by saying, for
instance, that she did not know if the nursing order still existed,
or something of the sort, but answered eagerly : Oh yes ;
its just
the same as the brown nurses, only its Catholic. The Head
Wardress was angry: So, so and dont you know that it is the
;
fault of the Pope that the English are in Rome now? In our
camp there was neither a wireless nor a paper,* though papers
\\*ere smuggled into the camp by the men in any case, no news
;
that, six weeks before, the official inquiry about the girls release
had been dealt with by the Head Wardresswho, knowing the
girl personally, had been biased in favour of an Austrian, never
interrogated her, and made a recommendation for release: She
had been successfully educated in the concentration camp, and it
was to be assumed that she would now be a valuable member of
the national community What now? Should they report
the
offending statement to Berlin, as all other serious offences were
reported, and so reveal their blunder? Camp Leader Hassler, of
Beisen fame, who disliked both the Head Wardress and the
political prisoners (he preferred the black prisoners, the little
tarts, whom he pitied), was all for the report to Berlin. But it so
happened that he was in hot water over a timber theft, and shortly
after was sent away, allegedly to the S.S. Detention Camp at
Dachau ^which did not prevent his being made Leader of another
of the AuschVvitz Camps later on. This left the Head Wardress free
to gloss over the affair. In the end they decided on a Solomonic
procedure. The girl, who in the meantime had learned that she
would be released, had to report to the Political Section. She
was asked if she was willing to retract what she had said, and
answered Yes. Upon this she was sent home. These were the
principles by which the S.S. decided on pur detention in camp,
and so on the life or death of untold thousands of women.
Among the higher S.S. ranks, of which I mainly knew the camp
Koenig.
The child whom the Head Wardress wanted lor herself before
it was born turned out be a very charming baby girl, and
to
its romantically inclined mother christened it Dagmar. As the
birth took place in my hospital hut, I followed the tvhole
story from its beginnings. Two days after the delivery Dr. Koenig
came up to the mother, still in bed, and said "The child is not :
legally the child was not yet alive, as he had not signed the birth
certificate. And he was not \villing to sign it either, so he declared,
because Dagmar was not a German name. The child had to l)e
named differently. He departed after this. The young mother
cried bitterly for nine months she had been looking forward to a
;
begged him to sign the certificate after all, it was a Swedisli
name, and the Swedes were a friendly nation. He refused, be-
cause rihe Swedes were not a friendly nation; they disliked us
Germans. I still tried to treat the whole affair as a joke, and said
that possibly the S^vedes had a special liking for us, the prisoners.
Dr. Koenig let it pass ^rithout getting annoyed, but asked why the
the mother, insisted on the name Dagmar. When I
silly girl,
and police, following the data given 'by the mother, and since it
was not willing to make any alteration, the doctor would have to
sign. He did so, wild with fury, and wrote a denunciation to the
Ministry of the Interior in Berlin, in which he accused the
150
Political Section of the camp of having accepted an inadmissible
name' in excess of its authority. ^
,
All this happened in the days in which the Allied troops were
making their lightning advance through northern France Fin- ;
that he forbade this, and found another baby of one of the
Russian women4;o be given the breast.
This petty little story, with all its personal trimmings, is a
characteristic sample. But apart from this Dr. Koenig was in
reality one of those National Socialists who should be of particular
interest to anti-Fascists, because in their case an education in
human and European thinking is not quite as hopelessly doomed
to failure as in others. He was the type of German whom foreign
friends from pre-Hitler days would remember with sympathy and
with the constant query: How could this man degenerate in
such a way? What has possessed him? He cant be the same man.
He was intelligent, saw through pretence, really showed medical
knowledge a rare thing among camp doctors and had the will
to learn new things in his profession. Very quickly he discovered
the best among the Jewish doctors, and accepted their instruction
without arrogance or false shame. His judgment of people was
acute, he was objective, not petty, and in details not inhuman
he worked from morning till night without any regard for his per-
sonal comfort to bring some order into our hospital. In another
age he might have been one of the physicians who helped to give
German academic medicine a good name. And this man was a
genuine, convinced, fanatical National Socialist. How was it
possible?
Perhaps it can be said of him that he forced himself to be a good
Nazi. He had moments when he doubted his creed, and even
expressed his doubt. Once he said with a sigh to our Jewish
Chief Doctorj for whom he, like most of his colleagues, felt a deep
respect: Maybe the English way of living isnt so bad, after
ail. . . The slight doubt: Perhaps everything we do is quite
wrong, was ever present, threateningly present, in his mind;
he fought against it, he did not want to let it grow, and for this very
reason he became more rigid and fanatical than many another.
Oh yes, he esteemed British democratic liberalism but in his ;
!
pity it will fail into the hands of the Bolsheviks
153
I onct; iiad a personal conversation with him. He asked me wliy
I was in camp I recited my formula, and added that I had been
;
duped by a spy who had promised me to take some Jews across the
frontier. He shook his head and asked
But how could you be so silly as to believe that a thing like
that would come off?
Why not? I answered. There were quite a lot of cases of
people who managed it with money.
Yes, of coursewesellsome Jews,we should be idiots if wedidnt.
Well, I said, I simply hoped that you people would sell those
Jews too.
All right; but why did you go in for such things? What was
the good of it now youre sitting here!
*
well, you know, I see it like this its like skiing. One is caught by
:
an avalanche, and the other isnt. No skier gets upset about it.
As soon as I had said this, I felt frightened. I wondered if the man
would interpret it as an act of insolence, as proof of my lack of
respect for Germanys legal system, that I compared those measures
of punishment with the working of a blind, unjust force of nature.
I had over-rated his convictions. He was not offended, but gave
me an encouraging nod and said 'There you are, thats the right
:
way of looking at it, and youll stick it through like this. After-
wards my patient told me that he had advised her to be calmer
and adopt my point of view.
They had, after all, little faith in their own measures as little
own speeches. They hardly thought it worth while to
as in their
put up a facade. What they wanted was power and the riches
power ensures nothing else. They were even proud of their
frankness, those cynics ;
proud of their strength, which refused to
don an ideological cloak ; they appeared so very clever, so very
superior in their own eyes and they were so stupid that they were
hurtling to perdition without ever seeing it.
furniture. For some time there had been very few new arrivals,
and one was grateful that life was a little more tolerable in spite
of everything. Then came the Warsaw Rising. Twenty-five
thousand women came to us from the evacuated city, and condi-
tions again became chaotic. But even this influx was relatively
quickly absorbed eveiy day transports left for munition factories,
;
never allmv such a thing, and they wmuld prevent it." Doubtless
he spoke ^vilh honest conviction as far as he himself was concerned
but I wmnclered whether he was not, after all, under-rating the
number of those S.S, men who were determined to go to any
extreme. People of Fiagges typ.c of mind used to think before
1933 that there were too many people in Germany who would
never permit Plitler. . .
The day after the list for the transport had been drawm up, Dr,
Koenig came to me again and said angrily: Usually you are
quite a sensible person. How can you frighten your patients with
such senseless rumours ?'
Of course it w^as typical : it was I, not he, who had frightened
the patients I
I retorted, Well, won't you shoot us, w^hen the Russians come?
Again he evaded the issue: What do you mean, the Russians?
Where do you see Russians? My
question was left unanswered.
Shortly afterwards we were told that we had to evacuate the
camp as it was too big and needed too many guards ; we were to
move into the filthy camp formerly occupied by the gypsies. So
we went. The very sick women, many of them still with a high
temperature, were piled helter-skelter into lorries, eighty to one
hundred at a time. Two lorries moved 3,000 patients, plus the
medical staff, in a single afternoon. Well, we would manage again
somehow.
Next morning when I went out into the camp road, exhausted
from the strain and excitement of the move, I happened to meet
the Gamp Senior. She asked for my number, looked at a piece of
paper, and said: You're for Dachau; solitary transport; nine
o'clock at the Central Office,
For months I had been waiting to leave this place of horrors,
157
and now the day had come. Of course, I had hoped to leave it for
freedom. Now I was in for Dachau, all by myself. I had to part
from dear friends and to start from the beginning again, in an-
other camp. And one was so weary. At first I felt nothing but
fright and apprehension. But everything had to be done in a
mad rush. It was eight oclock. Pack the most necessary things
put on as many clothes as possible (I had a correct hunch that my
ridiculously small box would be ransacked when I left ; in fact the
wardress did not even leave me a towel or a nightdress) a bit of
food for the journey a hasty good-bye to the few fellow-prisoners
who happened to be about and then I stood in the office in front
of the camp doctor.
No question of your leaving, he said. Ive been told
nothing, and in any case I have too few doctors to keep things
going here thats an arbitrary interference by the Camp Com-
:
mand.
Apparently, then, he counted me among his assets. I felt
But then I thought the matter over quickly.
positively sought after.
The Allied advance in the West had been halted temporarily at
the West Wall presumably the Russians would be in Auschwitz
;
That meant that I was to travel for days on end, a single woman
among 500 men, most of whom had not seen a woman for years
and who were cooped up in cattle-trucks sixty and eighty at a
time.
I a doctor, and no longer very young, and I am not easily
am
frightened ;
but that was too much for me. Somewhat confused,
I stood on the raiWay platform in front of the train. I had been
told to get in somewhere, and nobody bothered about me any
more, I made up my mind, walked straight to the first cattle-
truck, which was reserved for the S.S. and asked the leader of the
transport to let me travel with the S.S. It is not quite clear to me
why this seemed a do not believe that it was
safer thing to do. I
because I preferred to be with compatriots on the contrary.
I just told myself that I would have more room in a truck with
twenty men than with eighty, and that these S.S. men had
possibly been more recently with their wives or sweethearts. I
also counted on a certain military discipline among them, and
on the fact that there would be secret rebels there, as in all S.S.
units, who would if necessary protect me.
Reality left my expectations far behind. I travelled for five days
and four nights -svith these eighteen S.S. men through Czecho-
slovakia and Bavaria. They lit a small stove, cooked soup and
made tea, shared their food with me and brought me news-
papers. During the night we slept on cellulose fibre. One of them
lent me his section of tent so that I was not cold. We got more
and more filthy, as it was not possible to wash I had the worst ;
problem, because there was no lavatory and the train did not stop
at stations, so that I had to climb on to the open coal-truck next to
us. But apart from this and other discomforts, it was not disagree-
able; it was the sort of life American hobos might lead. Ail the
time I listened to the men talking, and had long conversations
with every one of them. Among those eighteen S.S. men there
were exactly three genuine Nazis one was the leader of the trans-
:
The life I had led in those days was a life between imprison-
ment and liberty. And, after this, was I to go back once more
into the camp with its hated coercion, back once more behind
barbed wire? The thought seemed unbearable to me, and the
last night before we were due to arrive I cried bitterly. When we
said good-bye, the friend and comrade said to me: T could not
help you much, but it ^vould make me glad if you had the feeling
during these last few days that you were not alone. Rarely have
I been so grateful to any human being as to him.
Dachau at dusk, the journey through the little town where I
had cycled as a student, past the villas of the S.S. men to the
camp, which looked so different from Auschwitz, with the neatly
kept drive, the encircling walls and moat, the lodge with the big
gate like a medieval fortress. I was taken to the bunker the
^which struck my unspoilt eyes as being rather
prison building
like a better-class sports hotel. At that time the gaol sheltered the
notables among the prisoners German industrialists, foreign
officers, later alsoSchuschnigg, Schacht, Blum and the other
well-known politicians. I took my exercise in the yard at the same
time as a senior British officer. Colonel MacGrath. Every time
our paths crossed we exchanged a few words in English
Where do you come from?
From England.
I really wanted to know from wffiich town he came, but that did
not matter.
Lets hope therell soon be more of you here ...
162
He nodded confidently, sure of himself, and you could see tha L
he knew the others would soon follow.
Then the guard noticed our conversation and separated us. In
the evening the prisoner who was distributing the meal handed
me a whole parcel from GoL MacGrath white bread, soap, vita-
:
were one among many. And though the others were friends,
comrades, you still longed to be alone, as you long for a great
happiness.
Three days later I was fetched by a wardress we took the train
;
163
CHAPTER TEN
WOMEN-S WORKING PARTY
Late AT night we reached a large, unfinished building which
reminded me of the municipal blocks of flats in Vienna. It had
been planned by the Geiman Labour Front as a tenement house
for workers, and in fact it had many civilian inhabitants. One
wing of the building, together with its courtyard, had been separ**
ated in primitive fashion from the rest by barbed wire it housed ;
like normal life the so-called normal life had come to be like ours.
;
main they were not politically conscious, and had never done any
active political work. Altogether, the Polish women were prac-
tically always more remote from party politics than those from the
West but they very quickly grasped some of the exigencies of
;
camp life, such as the need for solidarity in the face of the S.S,,
the strict ban on denunciation, the necessity for ordering their lives
apart from and even in opposition to, the camp regulations. A
great part of the Dutch women behaved quite differently. They
were active fighters who knew what they were doing but at the
;
same time most of them were religiously and ethically, rather than
politically, conscious. Those women had even here preserved
something of the outlook of a free people of peasants and mer-
chants; they defended their rights as free human beings with
the forthright energy and the puritanism their forebears may have
165
shown in the times when they founded the small Dutcli settle-
ments in the New World. At the same time, however, they often
showed a rather rigid innocence and ingenuousness in the face of
the totally different and unprecedented situation in w^hich they
found themselves in the concentration camps. Among them I found
for the first time many other women who were imprisoned for the
same offence as myself. Every other one was detained for
aiding and abetting Jews, for procuring false papers for them,
for hiding Jewish children, and so forth.- In their attitude they
were strangely intransigent, and very often clashed wdth the
Polish women latters principle of live and let live.
because of the
The Commandant dismissed the Polish Camp Senior and put a
young Dutch nurse in her place, because he counted on the Dutch
correctness. Naturally there was pilfering in this working party
as everywhere else. Once the new Dutch Camp Senior said to the
Commandant: Please have the cellar window's wired you
should not lead the women into the temptation of stealing pota-
toes. I often argued with her about it. She was of the opinion
that it was wrong for some women to steal and eat their fill, while
others ate the thin soup and went hungry. I, on the other hand,
took the part of the Poles and, incidentally, of a considerable
number of the Dutch women, who thought that, once there w^ere
no potatoes left, the Commandant would have to get a new^ store
from the factory three days earlier than had been scheduled,
because, after all, he could not make soup out of nothing. In this
way the few buckets of potatoes w'hich we filched from him would
be a gain all round, and more than offset the danger of demoralisa-
tion. The Dutch girl could not accept this line of argument; it
would have made her feel as though she had given up something
which was infinitely valuable and even vital to her.
One Sunday morning, when it was 27 Fahrenheit below
freezing-point, the Commandant ordered all the w'omcn to line
up in the courtyard a sausage which he had bought as a Christ-
:
mas present for his wife, allegedly from his saved ration stamps,
had been stolen from the kitchen. He called in the prisoners one
by one and searched them apparently he was naive enough to
;
believe that the sausage had not been eaten immediately. The
w^omen were left standing out in the cold \rith utterly insufficient
underclothing or stockings.
After two hours I could not bear to watch it any more, and sug-
gested to the Camp Senior Lets report to him and say we did
:
that the camp doctor would catch me out during a surprise in-
spection. He thought it was as simple as that, while in fact no
doctor can prove another wrong when he says that, say, an
ovarian tumour had been palpable the previous day, and that,
after its dispersal to-day, the patient needed another three days m
bed. Apart from this, the camp doctor of Dachau had worries
other than a few women prisoners in Munich. He had little petrol
for his car, the train service was constantly interrupted, in Dachau
camp a typhus epidemic had broken out, and the doctor
itself
had not the slightest intention of coming to Munich for no good
reason whatever. In practice I was left free to do what I lied,
and this fact drove my Commandant into a frantic rage. The
tension between us grew more and more acute.
167
Once again be tried the method of tempting me ^viih promises.
Out of the blue lie turned up and asked me whether I had had
any special privileges in Auschwitz he was read)- to treat me as
;
pencils and posted the letter. I was not interested in the S.S.
rations. A patient of mine from Auschwitz, whom I had pulled
through typhus, was working in the S.S. kitchen, and she brought
me food from there anyway. It hardly tempted me to take walks,
with only a wardress, through the ruins of Munich. Apart from
ail this, I considered that what I was doing was professionally
correct. I preferred not to assume that he wanted to induce me
to an incorrect procedure. So things stayed as they were.
Slowly I even acquired a sort of civilian practice. A
worker had
an acqident on a nearby building site, a woman had a foreign
body in her eye-the medical service among the civilian popula-
tion had completely collapsed, there was no doctor within reach
who could have helped, and the first-aid ambulance, if it could
be reached at all, arrived hours later. The people in the neigh-
bourhood timidly approached the Commandant and asked him
to let them
consult me ^something which he found difBcixlt lo
refuse. Another group of patients came to me secretly: the
wardresses. It was strictly forbidden, but they had various pains
and ailments, and were not inclined to make the journey to
Dachau to the S.S. doctor for every little thing. One day, when I
had again given one of them some drops of belladonna to relieve
her stomach pains, and she asked me for goodness sake not to tel!
the Commandant, I asked her why not. Weve been told we
mustnt take anything from you, you might poison us. Those
people believed us capable of anything they themselves were ready
to do.
Once a wardress fell ill with was not diagnosed
scarlet fever. It
as such, and she was left bed among her colleagues, without
lying in
any treatment. They sent another wardress to me to inquire what
could be the matter with her, as she had a temperature of 103 F.
and a sore thrqat. I told them that I could not give an opinion
about a patient I had never seen. But the Commandant stuck to
his guns, and they were not allowed to fetch me. Finally, when
the Commandant happened not to be in the building, the S.S.
doctor from Dachau turned up, sent for me and asked me for
168
Gods sake to see to it another time that a woman with an in-
theyre not even ready to pay bonuses to the women Just let them
!
!
fork out, then the women will want to work ail right
However absurd this situation was, it was still more absurd
that this idea of his was justified by the facts. There were indeed
women and they were in the majority ^who were induced^ to
work more quickly by the prospect of a bonus which would entitle
them to buy a silly little notebook or an evil-smelling skin-cream,
and who quite forgot what they were doing and for whom. Who-
ever counted on the womens revolutionary will and spirit to
resist was in truth a worse psychologist than the Commandant.
Yet, that spirit and that will were there as well, and when they
l)roke through it was with a frighteningly sudden explosive force.
One of those unexpected outbursts once nearly cost me my head.
The supply situation in Munich had grown steadily worse;
the air raids again and again destroyed the supply lines. What
169
had been repaired one day was destroyed the next. The civilians
lived in cellars, spent hours walking to the place where they worked,
and found no warm food when they came home in the evenings.
The Head Wardress insisted: We shall win the war, even if wc
have to dig ourselves in with our bare hands. She had lost her hus-
band and two sons during the war, and considered that this sacri-
fice should not have been asked of her for nothing. We were pleased
at the way things were going, but at the same time we felt the
consequences most, and the women had little reseive of strength,
although only very few of them had been imprisoned for long.
We followed developments at the front with burning interest. We
knew it could not last long, and that helped us to carry on.
Aachen was the first German town to be occupied, but it was still
outside the West Wall Towards Christmas, when the factory
windows w^ere once again under repair and we w^ere left without
newspapers, the Commandant suddenly said: The counter-
offensive has started, the German troops are advancing into the
Eifel. It took our breath away. Would the new weapon, after
all ..? We had no means of checking whether he was telling a
.
that you said the calorie content of the prisoners food was so low
that they were bound to die within four months, and^ that this
made the women so desperate that they started this wild strike. !
So we have to consider you as the wire-puller of the whole affair
At the same time a triumphant grin spread over his foolish^ face.
At last he had got hold of something which would help him to
catch me out and liquidate me Simultaneously he had got rid of
!
the silly strike affair, for personally he was not really blood-
thirsty, and he ceriainly felt no urge to have all the fifteen women
killed off.
The story about the four Polish women was obviously nonsense.
None of the Poles would 'ever have denounced me, least of all in a
matter which did not concern their compatriots. Once I had told
the Dutch Camp Senior and a few other prisoners that in Ausch-
witz the ordinary women prisoners invariably died of starvation
within four months, if they did not die otherwise. I had also
said that, according to my assessment of the calorie content of our
food, one had to reckon on a monthly loss of weight of one to two
pounds. It was perfectly possible, with some good will, to construe
something ominous out of my remarks. Moreover, I had demon-
dangered men of Dachau? You know the end is coming, his life is
forfeit and just now you want to tie yourself to him?
;
she did not love the man. She had no inkling of real love, and was
only blinded by his power she had succumbed to his fascination,
;
She was willing to do so, and assured me that she would not look
at him again if he were to do me any harm. I do not know if this
was the decisive argument, or whether the evidence against me
was not sufficiently grave, so that I did not seem at all important
to the man in any case, he let me go scot free.
:
175
racked by fear. Icould no longer sleep, and I hardly ate a, I all.
After a few bites I had the sensation of being full up, even while
my stomach was empty and I was nearly fainting from w'eakness.
Once, when we left the shelter in the cellars after a heavy air raid
those v;ere the first bombing raids I had experienced I noticed
that my pulse was irregular, and at times as rapid as i6o per
minute. I had developed a t^^ical neurosis of the heart I had:
not the right simply to deliver me into the hands of the S.S. behind
my back. But, after all, it was over and done with, and there was
no point in chewing it over. Only now my hands were tied,
for I had committed the worst crime anyone could commit
in the Wehrmacht or in a concentration camp
I had made
myself conspicuous.
177
They sent a spy to us, a girl who pretended to be from the
Alsace, a medical student, and a niece of General de Gaulle.
Oddly enough, she earned with her a whole suitcase full of clothes.
By pure chance, one of the Frenchwomen in our camp knew
General de Gaulles real niece, Genevieve de Gaulle, who was
detained in Ravensbriick Camp, and therefore we knevr from
the first day that my new assistant in the sick-bay was a spy. I
treated her with velvet gloves, but I knew that every single one
of my words and actions was being observed, and it bothered me.
Once I told her You know, I really took you for a spy.
:
G (Prisoners of Fear)
179
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DACHAU: END AND BEGINNING
Life in a concentration camp was a chain of improvisations,
and thisapplied to the medical side of it as well. The first case of
ileus (twisting of the bowels) that occurred in our work-paity was
taken to a Munich hospital, but later acute cases for operation
were sent to Dachau and put into a room of a mens sick ward,
because it was decided that all prisoners must be treated within
the camp. In the long run this arrangement did not prove
satisfactory for women patients, and a small hospital for women
was organised. There a young wardress kept us under supervision
during the day. We were allowed to take our exercise in the
narrow yard, which was separated from the rest of the camp by
barbed wire. So we were a small concentration camp within the
concentration camp, and sometimes I found this confinement in
the small space and with a few people very oppressive in comparison
with Auschwitz Gamp. But in the end the separation was not very
strict. We were allowed into the mens hospital to visit the dentist
or for ultra-violet-ray treatment, while the doctors, a medical
assistant who had the keys, and the men who carried the food
came into our ward. There were other visits as well, fewer when
the wardress was at her post, more numerous when she was absent,
but on the whole she did not take her duty very seriously. We
lacked nothing. We had sufficient food, and of a better quality
also ; for every national group in the camp gave some of its Red
Cross food-parcels to the women prisoners. None of us went
hungry and no one was cold. The men organised dresses and
overcoats for us out of the stores, which were filled with clothing
from the Auschwitz stock stolen from the Jews. We gaily began to
cut, sew and fit clothes. I cannot believe that many women in
Germany were similarly occupied at that time.
Bombs were crashing round us, hardly a day passed without an
air raid on Munich or the near-by airfield of Schleissheim. In the
mens camp a terrible typhus epidemic was raging, which even
spread to our hut, and claimed one victim among us. Transports
of prisoners from evacuated camps in the north and west began to
pour into Dachau Gamp. An uncanny nervousness gripped both
Camp Command and prisoners. They devoured every newspaper
the break-through on the River Urft was successful, the West Wall
i8o
was passed now it was true But to us the war news came as
!
the worst came to the worst. But we hardly realised it. One of the
men said to me: When the brothel girls came to Dachau we
decided to boycott them. Not a single decent political prisoner
went to them. But when you came, and we knew for the first time
that real women were quite close to us, we were happy. They
came to us for a brief talk, to forget, for a quarter of an hour,
that they were in mortal danger. Therefore they did not want to
speak of the problems which filled their minds, they did not want
to worry us, and behaved as if there existed for us a normal life
with normal interests, friendship and love.
This atmosphere of affectionate consideration, and the silence
about the threatening dangers, calmed many of the women in the
sick ward, who felt unbelievably safe in the care of their male
comrades. Once, when I was profoundly depressed, an elderly
Dutchwoman asked me why I felt as I did. I told her that I could
not believe that the S.S. would let us escape alive, and that I did
not see any possibility of protecting ourselves. .She thought I was
talking nonsense: Things like that cant happen^ one cant
simply bump off thousands of people. (It was amazing that she
still did not know that one might not be capable of it, but
they, the S.S., were only too capable!) She felt certain that
everything would pass off peacefully ; the Americans would come,
the camp would be handed over to them, the Red Gross would
take us home. It sounded very simple, and she thought it the
most natural thing in the world. When events developed almost
as she had predicted, she naively told me after the liberation:
*
There you are ^why were you so afraid ? Even after the accom-
plished fact she had no inkling of the fate she had barely escaped,
no inkling of the fact that only the courage and energy of our
male comrades had averted the catastrophe. She was lucky. In
those days she was spared much sufferingand, after all, there
was no need for her to know about the things which might have
happened. We women were condemned to utter passivity. All
praise is due to the men who sacrificed themselves for us.
have survived four weeks more even there though I did not
really know what Belsen was. In Auschwitz we had been told that
Belsen was a considerably better camp, where Jews from
neutral countries, especially Latin-America, were detained. Some
pregnant women expecting their delivery were to be sent to Bel-
sen from our Munich factory camp, on the grounds that they
would be well cared for there. As Auschwitz seemed to us the
height of all possible horrors, we were perfectly willing to believe
that other camps were somewhat better. There were even
prisoners among the medical staff who volunteered for Belsen.
Perhaps the S.S. people who told us the fairy tale of Belsen be-
lieved in it themselves. In Berlin and elsewhere, far from the spot,
they used to repeat the story that Auschwitz was all right, that
there were thousands of beds in the camp hospital, lawns and
flower-beds were being kid out, a prisoners band was giving
weekly concerts. Probably the Gamp Command of Belsen made
similar claims, and the Auschwitz S.S., believing they had a
monopoly in lies, were ready to accept the story about the other
i8a
camp and to take the flower-beds (which really existed in most
camps!) for the key-note of Belsen! We prisoners usually dis-
counted 90 per cent, of whatever we were told, but did not quite
reject the remaining 10 per cent, so that we fell into every new
trap.
One day Herr Bach came into our sick ward at Dachau, be-
cause at the time he was courting the young wardress on duty
there. When he saw me he pretended to be astonished and asked
Oh, are you here? Whats the matter with you? A nervous
breakdown? He went on: Ill tell you something. This time
you got off, but take my advice I dont want to hear your name
again. A second time I shant let you scrape through. Anyhow,
why did you do such a silly thing? Just when you would have had
every chance of being released 1
I said: No, Herr Vernehmungsfiihrer, I know very well who
will be released now and who wont, and I know that people of
my sort wont be released before the end of the war. And after
that well be free anyway!
Youre quite wrong, he answered bitingly. People of your
sort and your ideas will still be in the concentration camp ten
years after the end of the war.
I could not help smiling, but only said: Ill risk that, Herr
Vernehmungsfiihrer.^^
,
The Allied troops had reached the Rhine He gave me a look,
!
mination evacuation surrender. The^ Danish and Norwegian
prisoners had been fetched away in big white buses by the Swedish
Red Gross we could hardly believe that they had really left, and
;
many set their hopes on this event, which was probably due to the
courting of Swedish mediation by the Nazis. We
heard tales of a
conference of leading Dachau camp officials, when communica-
tions with Berlin were cut. One of them had proposed the whole-
sale extermination of the prisoners ; it was said that he had been
voted down by eighteen to seven. Yet, those seven would have
been able to put the proposal into practice it was not likely that
:
She and one of her girl friends had become S.S. Wardresses,
because they had read an advertisement in the Volkischer Beo-
bachter saying: Healthy women and girls wanted for supervision
of foreign workers. The two had thought that it would be a
fairly easy job, in any case preferable to being called up for factory
work. They had applied, undergone a physical examination, and
were told that they would have to wear uniform and go through a
training course in Mecklenburg. It turned out that the place in
Mecklenburg was Ravensbriick Concentration Gamp, and the
uniform that of the S.S. They were not exactly pleased, but they
did not mind. The girls father pulled wires to get his daughter
away from the horrible Prussians of Ravensbriick, and to the
neighbouring indigenous horrors of Dachau; that was all.
When the young wardress went on duty in our hut she had to
pass the heap of bodies, the victims of the typhus epidemic, piled
in the hospital ground ; she met ihe sick people living skeletons
who swayed and crept to the treatment-room, and she was horri-
fied. Then she came in contact with prisoners.
You know, she said, they told me it is very bad in Dachau
but they said only criminals and anti-social elements are there.
But now, when I see you people ^youre really quite nice, even
the Poles nice ladies and gentlemen 1
I asked her what she thought about the course of the war (the
battle was still going on outside the West Wall).
The Fiihrer has promised us hes still got a new weapon. I
think it will be used very soon now.
It was interesting to see how she relied on this. In her case the
assurance lasted as long as the Allies occupied parts of Germany
which she did not personally know. When Frankfort-on-Main
was taken, she was shaken. A great-aunt of hers lived in a little
town near Frankfort, and she once had spent a holiday with her.
She imagined the old womans little house in the market square,
opposite the town hall. Now the American flag would wave from
the spire, and her great-aunt would see American sentries every
time she looked out of her window. It had become a reality to
the girl that the enemy was in the heart of the Reich. Until then
it had been a matter of politics, a matter for the men, which the
Frankfort-on-Main.
And what do you think now? I inquired.
She quickly found new comfort Oh, well, an American officer
:
tion plan of the S.S., including the marching orders and various
other details, and offered to help some important prisoners to
escape. Her father wrote a letter to a Dutch prisoner whom she
particularly timsted, insisting on his daughters complete inno-
cence and imploring him to take her under his protection. The
first time we heard the thunder of guns from the front, she fell on
At the last moment she asked her Dutch friend to make us give her
prison clothes and hide her among us. He proposed it to us, but
I did not like the idea. I found it too great a reward for a last-
186
minute change of mind. Yet it was not merely opportunism. She
had felta twinge of conscience all the time, but had repressed it.
Now it was released, and, with the impulse of her twenty years,
she surrendered herself to it, wanting to make up for the past.
In our ward there was a Jewess from Slovakia, a schizophrenic
in an advanced stage, with a marked split-personality and inci-
pient imbecility. In our hut she had been given a single room
with running waterhow I envied her There she would stand
!
the whole day long, at the barred window, singing over and over
again the opening bars of a Jewish love song. Every time the
camp doctor inspected the ward, he shrugged his shoulders and
sighed 'What shall I do with her? In the end he decided to try
:
took her away and killed her. We had seen so much evil, and
were occupied with so many worries, that we were unable to get
more excited about this case than about others.
But when the wardress was told she began to cry bitterly and
stammered again and again: But this is terrible, this is ter-
rible. ... She could not understand how we, the prisoners,
were not more deeply shaken.
In the end I was almost sorry for her and stroked her hair.
Youre a poor silly girl, I said, and she looked gratefully at me.
But when I asked her the next morning to take me to the diathermic
station, she refused it, very conscious of her position and authority
and said
No, there you only talk with the French doctor, and I cant
understand what you say. That doesnt suit me.
I was not angi7 with her, I would never have done her any
harm, and wished her well only the prison clothes were too good
for her, I felt.
The first to arrive were not the Americans, but the mass trans-
ports of prisoners from evacuated camps. They came in thou-
sands, utterly exhausted after many days marching, practically
without food, in rags, barefooted or in clogs, their feet covered in
blistersand festering sores. There was no room and no food for
them in Dachau. Many camped in the open. They could not
keep down the soup they were given, and died like flies. I had
become used to much in Auschwitz, but even there I had hardly
seen anything like those prisoners who had been driven senselessly
from one camp Then came a few hundred women
to the other.
prisoners, who werequartered in the former camp brothel, as
soon as its inmates had been evacuated to our old factory camp
in Munich. Those were wild days. Nobody knew if he would live
187
to see the next morning. Also the male prisoners were greatly
excited by the arrival of those healthy
women in our hut there
were, after all, only patients.
Then the news came that all men would be evacuated, with the
exception of the sick. There were about 7,000 patients unfit for
transport in the camp. The report was half true only the Ger-
:
mans and Russians had to go. I had a good friend, a doctor who
was an officer in the Red Army. He had escaped from a Stalag
and had been sent to Dachau. Like myself, he was a great
admirer of the French language. We used to sit on the ledge of
the bath in our ward, listen to the roar of the guns, read Baude-
laires poetry, and feel very close to one another. Now he was to
depart. Those men were to be taken to a new camp in the
Oetztal in Tirol, presumably as hostages. I knew the region well
from winter sports, and drew him a map which showed him an
escape route to peasants, friends of mine, in the Gschnitztal. The
transports formed up in the parade square, ready for departure,
but half of the men ran away and hid in the huts. Gamp dis-
had broken down, and even many of the S.S. had lost their
cipline
zeal. My
friend, too, got away, was able to hide, and sent me
word that he was safe. The j)risoner-functionaries and some
of the S.S. sabotaged. the evacuation. All the same, 6,000 men
were driven away on what came to be called the death march.
Most of them died
We women heard only incomplete and fragmentary reports of it.
In those days I was very busy, for 250 women who had marched
from Saxony to Dachau a march of fourteen days were in a
terrible state, and had to be bandaged.
Then, on the morning of Sunday, April 29th, white flags were
hoisted on the towers and the S.S. disappeared from the camp.
An international committee of prisoners took over the direction.
Our wardress came running into our hut in tears, hugged the
women and fled. She must have known that a detachment of
selected S.S. men stood ready for the annihilation of the camp.
At five in the afternoon, when I was sitting in the former camp
brothel bandaging one lacerated foot after the other, I heard
shooting outside, and then loud cries ofjoy. With a comrade from
Vienna who happened to be near I ran to the parade square the
gates stood open, and the first American soldiers were coming in.
We were saved, after all.
Only later did I hear about the true course of events. I still do
not know all the facts. They may have been described more
exactly and authoritatively by others. What I heard was that the
Commandant had opposed the extermination of the remaining
prisoners and had been shot and wounded by his subordinate,
188
Ruppert. When Ruppert then proceeded to put the devilish plan
into practice, the political prisoners went into action. The camp
^vas strictly closed, and not even the working parties leftit only a
;
organised, without permission, somehow, anyhow anything
to get home. They were the least disciplined among the prisoners,
but also perhaps those who had suffered the least mental damage
through life in the camp. They felt the craving to start real life
anew, to get back to their families and their work. Nothing could
keep them back, nothing slow them down. Once back home,
many of tlietn worked energetically and conscientiously for the
repatriation of those who had stayed on in the camp a task
189
which was neither simple nor easy. They founded the first com-
mittees from which the Associations of Concentration Gamp
Prisoners developed. They were the first to tell a startled world
about the unimaginable happenings in the camps. On the other
handj some of them found themselves in difficult situations,
especially those who had to cross frontiers and wander about
without papers, ration coupons or even money they found some
;
help among the population, but sometimes they were turned away
by suspicious people who had had bad experiences with criminal
ex-prisoners or persons who had posed as political victims.
Their sad fate was often quoted to us by our representatives
during the weeks after the camp had been taken over by the
American Military Government, when we began to be impatient
at the constant postponement of our return home.
A certain number of prisoners stayed in the camp because they
were afraid of that sort of complication. A great number stayed
because they were sick and unfit for transport. Others stayed out
of a sense of discipline. But with many individuals, in ail these
groups, other motives counted in their remaining, and even caused
it. One of those motives was a desire, which may seem childish, to
settle accounts on the spot and at last organise the camp accord-
ing to old, hitherto frustrated, ideas. Another motive was a faint
fear of the return into an ardently desired life.
During the first days it was one of my greatest joys that I could
have a room of my own in the womens hospital, and invite friends
for a glass of wine. And that I no longer had to ask the permission
of the stupid chief medical assistant when I wanted to leave the
yard. And other small things of the kind. Once, five English
officers, who had installed themselves in a beautiful S.S. house iii
the outskirts of the camp, invited me to a dinner, with several
courses and various wines. When I sat in a leather armchair,
smoking a cigarette, with a glass of gin before me, I thought I
had returned to the height of civilised life, and felt so gay, so
animated, that I was not even conscious of the fact that I had not
left the concentration camp. Days passed before I asked %' a
safe-conduct which entitled me to leave the camp, more days
before I asked friends to take me to Munich. And the first time I
walked on the sunny road to the little town of Dachau, accom-
panied by a friend, not in a group, without supervision, there
was only one circumstance which astonished me that this seemed
:
so natural, and that all the same it did not enter my mind to stay
outside the camp. In the evening it was just as natural to me to
go ffiome to the concentration camp.
Those of the Americans who had not seen other concentration
camps before were just as aghast at the sight of Dachau as the
190
British were at the sight of Belsen. The corpses, the sick people,
the half-starved, the ferocious young men who pounced upon the
stores of the camp and its surroundings; the vai^ious national
groups, with their mushroom organisations, their thousand par-
ticular demands, and their feuds the whole wild,
their solidarity,
released, emaciated, starved
;
medical assistants, who also were the Hut Seniors. These clever,
capable, but often rather self-assured men were justly proud of
their achievements, and did not feel like subordinating themselves
to the doctors. The doctors, in their turn, were justly disinclined
to let laymen interfere with their w-ork.
Certainly there were doctors among the prisoners who were not
very good at their job, but many others found that their life was
made cruelly difficult; they had to go short of food, cl6thing
and sleeping accommodation, until their working stamina was
lowered and it could be said with apparent truth that the
European languages, last but one Albanian (since there were five
Albanian prisoners in the camp), and last German. It was a
detail, a rather petty detail, and it was ,so understandable that
the contraiy would have been surprisingly generous. The main
point also the point which distinguished this procedure from the
previous S.S. procedure !
was that the library consisted almost
without exception of gbod German books, and that nobody^
ing tendency was for people to retire into their national groups
and to enjoy the restored freedom within its limits. Every national
group set up its new quarters somewhere within the quarantined
area, in the houses and barracks of the S.S., published periodicals
and organised small festivals. The most showy mass function was
organised by the Poles under the direction of their officers an^,
priests, the most artistically attractive show was given by the
Russians, with grotesque dancers whom everyone would have
taken for professionals and with stirring recitals by a highly cul-
tured young poet. The Germans had a serious, rather heavy
hour in memory of the dead, and the Austrians a cabaret show
with a professional actor as witty compere.
In the day-time the old game of organising went on in grand
style everybody wanted to take home as much as he could, since
;
lunatics were locked during the night. But the pressmen were
honestly moved and showed a warm, active sympathy for the
victims of the system. They really attempted to understand what
had happened in the place, so as to tell the world about it,
although it is unlikely that anyone will ever quite understand it
who did not go through it himself.
The officers of the G.I.C, took statements and asked for reports
on every detail. One of them came to me and asked if I would
be willing to give a description of the physical maltreatment I
had suffered in the concentration camp, and to sign the state-
ment with my full name. I agreed, but added that I certainly
could tell many terrible things, but had not been maltreated
myself in the naiTOw sense of the word. The officer looked at me
in surprise and doubt, as though wondering whether I had any
reason for protecting the S.S., or whether I was, after all, not a
genuine prisoner. I felt almost ashamed. But then he thanked me
and left without putting anything on paper. I should have
thought it better if he had noted down So-and-so many prisoners
:
you can come with us now, and wont have to wait for the other
Austrians in Dachau. In three days youll be with your child.
I could not thank her. I could not say a word.
A brief good-bye, and I got into the bus that was to take me
back to a life from which I had for so long been an outcast.
Would life take me back?
195