Langbein Hermann. People in Auschwitz
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
The ss medics needed willing, skillful, and tireless accomplices. Such an
activity could not be forced. That a man could refuse to give injections was
demonstrated by Dr.Mikulas Korn. After Panszyczyk left Auschwitz, Korn was
invited by the sdg Erich Hentl to take over his work. Even though he was a
Jew and thus had to fear the consequences of a refusal more than any ‘‘Aryan,’’
Korn did not accept the invitation. Nothing was done to him, and he survived
Auschwitz.
It has been reported that Szymkowiak once had scruples. ‘‘He was gener-
ally known as a sadist,’’ wrote Czeslaw Sowul, ‘‘and was used for killing cam-
paigns. When children were taken to the infirmary early in 1943 to receive in-
jections, he refused to administer them. sdg Herbert Scherpe called him a pig
and slapped his face.’’ Nevertheless, Szymkowiak did not kill these children.
Wladyslaw Fejkiel remembers that Szymkowiak helped to preserve patients
from those injections before Klehr, for reasons unknown to Fejkiel, prevailed
upon him to administer them. Stössel’s conduct, too, was not as unambigu-
ous as Panszczyk’s. As Czeslaw Ostankowicz has testified, Stössel saved many
lives, and not just those of Poles. He warned comrades against informers and
even used his power to get rid of dangerous specimens.
It was probably because of an abnormal disposition that Panszczyk be-
came a murderoushenchman.This is indicatedbyobservations made by Adam
Zacharski, who reports that Panszczyk was noticeably restless on mornings
beforeinjections but was calmand behaved normallyafterthe killings in Block
20.Panszczyk,who had beena student at an artacademy,onceshowedZachar-
ski a picture he had painted. It showed a Christ figure with a crown of thorns
and a bloody face rising from a lake filled with blood instead of water.
Willingly performing services in the ss machinery of killing did not save
those men’s lives any more than it had saved the informers’ lives. During an
action against Polishofficers, Stössel wasshotat theBlackWall in March 1943.
A short time before that, Stefan Boratyski had been imprisoned in the same
cell as Stössel. He remembers that Grabner, the head of the Political Depart-
ment, twice asked Stössel whether he was prepared to work for him. Stössel
just shook his head; he did not want to buy his life in that way.
Szymkowiak was transferred to the Gypsy camp, where he succumbed to
injuries in the summer of 1943. An operation could not save him. Evidently
the revenge of his fellow inmates had reached him.
Panszczyk was transferred to Neuengamme after fellow Polish inmates had
ousted him from the infirmary by threatening to reveal his homosexual activi-
ties. There, Poles who knew him from Auschwitz kept asking him whether he
remembered this or that man, giving names of people to whom he had admin-
istered lethal injections in Auschwitz. He is said to have finally lost control,
banged his head against the wall, and sought the protection of the comman-
184 n the prisoners
dant of the camp. He was assigned to a detail that had to look for bombs in
nearby Hamburg, and that is where he died.
Only Peter Welsch survived the camp. He has been moving from place to
place in Germany restlessly. Living on a pension, he has changed his place of
residence half a dozen times in a few years.
n The ss not only looked for accomplices in administering their injections
but also used inmates as executioners. Leo Vos reports about a Jewish inmate
who had a privileged position as a bath attendant in the Blechhammer labor
camp, where the population was almost exclusively Jewish. In return for that
he had to function as a hangman when the camp administration ordered an
execution. When this bath attendant once again had to practice his second
profession, the man sentenced to death with a noose around his neck called
out to him: ‘‘A fine job you picked out for yourself!’’ This caused the bath at-
tendant’s nerves to snap; when he returned to his room, he moaned: ‘‘Who
suffers more, the hanged man or the inmate who is forced to be a hangman?’’
This question may be called demagogic, primitively egotistical, or even pro-
vocative, but it does touch on a problem whose solution is not as simple as
it may seem to an outsider. The case of ‘‘Bunker Jakob’’ demonstrates this
vividly.
Jakob Kozelczuk, a Jew, came to Auschwitz from eastern Poland in late
January 1943. On the ramp he attracted the attention of the ss because of
his height and his unusual athletic build. Jakob was a boxer and rumored to
have been the trainer of the German world champion Max Schmeling, though
Schmeling denied this. Because of his physical attributes, the ss assigned him
to the bunkeras a Kalfaktor (handyman) fortasks formerly performed by a Ger-
man and then by a Pole. The bunker assistant was supposed to be a man of
exceptional strength, for he not only had to keep the place clean and distrib-
ute food under the supervision of an ss man on duty but also had to assist
when the bunker was ausgestaubt (dusted off), as Grabner liked to put it. On
such occasions the inmates of the cellar cells were taken up to the washroom
and forced to undress,whereupon the Kalfaktor took them by twos to the Black
Wall.
The bunker Kalfaktor enjoyed many privileges. Jakob lived by himself in
a small room in the bunker block and was able to ‘‘organize’’ whatever he
wanted in the camp, for who would not have wanted to be in Bunker Jakob’s
good graces? He could even establish intimate contact with women because
they were also locked up in the bunker. Since the block leader on duty was
often too lazy to go down to the cellar, Jakob opened the cells himself. I met
Jakob shortly after I had been taken to the bunker, and this is what I wrote
about it in my Bericht:
Creating Accomplices n 185
Collect my thoughts. First: Don’t I have something on me? I search my
pockets, but inconspicuously, so that others (in my cell) should not notice
it. In my breast pocket there is a slip with numbers of Jewish inmates that
Lokmanis gave me yesterday. I was supposed to see whether I could get
them placed on a good detail. I’ve got to get rid of this slip, but how? I
don’t want to tear it up or throw it away in the presence of the others.
The door is open again. Now Lachmann (the ss man from the Politi-
cal Department who took me to the bunker) is standing in the doorway.
‘‘Come.’’ Hebeckons to me and asks Jakob, ‘‘Haveyou alreadyfrisked him?’’
‘‘Yes, sir, Herr Unterscharführer, very carefully. All he has is a handker-
chief.’’ Jakob stands at attention.
‘‘Take your shoes off!’’ He examines my shoes carefully to make sure I
haven’t hidden anything in them. I can hear my heart pound. ‘‘He’ll be put
on the other side. Solitary.’’ Again we pass through two doors with iron
bars and reach a dark hallway. This time Jakob unlocks the last door. An
empty cell. I am alone. The slip of paper! I quickly pull it out, rip it into tiny
pieces, and throw these into a pail that contains some liquid. Jakob lied to
Lachmann. He has helped me.
If Lachmann had checked my pockets, not only my life but the lives of
the bearers of those numbers would have been forfeited. During my deten-
tion in the bunker I confirmed the role that Jakob had been assigned at the
bunker selections. I have described the first selection that I experienced in
these words:
By now many people have been placed in my cell. One day the usual mo-
notony is interrupted: ‘‘Clean up everything; the commission is coming.’’
This is what Jakob tells every cell when coffee is given out in the morn-
ing....
Keys. The clattering of the barred door. Footsteps, a lot of them. Then
indistinct voices. No sound can be heard from us. All of us live with our
ears. Now they are in our corridor.
‘‘Be quiet, we can’t hear anything.’’ A few men push toward the door.
‘‘Line up, they’re coming!’’
We form a line, and I am at the head, facing the door. The creaking of
a key. I feel my heart pound. The door is open. Grabner stands there, and
next to him are Hofmann, an ss first lieutenant and deputy camp leader,
and the ss roll call leader, as well as a few caps and faces that I don’t know.
Jakob is among them.
I can see all this all too clearly, as if it were a sharp photograph. I try not
to let my voice betray my excitement when I speak. ‘‘Everyone give his num-
186 n the prisoners
ber!’’ bellows the ss roll call leader. He grabs my sleeve and gives it a twist.
‘‘Inmate 60-3-55,’’ I say and can’t help thinking that it sounds like a tele-
phone number. ‘‘Him I need right away. Out with him.’’ The voice comes
from behind, and I recognize it immediately as Lachmann’s. Before I can
start to go, I am dragged out. ‘‘But put him on the side; he’s going to be in-
terrogated.’’ That was Grabner’s voice, and he spoke to Jakob, who is now
gripping my arm and dragging me to the end of the corridor.
‘‘Nothing will happen to you,’’ he whispers and then slaps my face. Per-
haps he is afraid that someone has seen him speaking with me. I am led
on. In the anteroom many men are lined up in quintuple file. Their faces
are pale. Or is it the artificial light down here? Jakob pushes me into a dark
corner. ‘‘Stay put here.’’ I can’t see or hear any more.
I stand there for a long time. Footsteps, voices, all the time footsteps
and voices. Then commands: ‘‘Right face!’’ Then shuffling, clattering,
marching.
How long have I been standing here? I’ve lost all sense of time. It is a
long, dark moment between life and death. Jakob comes for me. I am alone
with him. He leads me up through the bars and puts me in the corridor.
Three men are standing there as well. The others—the many besides us—
I haven’t seen anywhere.
When I was brought back from the hearing, my cell was empty. This is all
my Bericht says: ‘‘‘Where have the others gone?’ Jakob slams the door shut
without responding.’’
After the next selections I knew both the ritual and Jakob’s duties. ‘‘When
the noonday meal is distributed, I look Jakob in the face,’’ I wrote in my Bericht.
‘‘When our eyes meet, he nods to me, gently and sadly. Poor Jakob.’’
Jakob, whom the block clerk Jan Pilecki called illiterate, spoke a strange
mixture of Yiddish and German, Polish and Russian. I observed him intently,
the way an inmate observes everything that takes place outside his cell. One
day he mentioned that he had been to South America, and from then on I
communicated with him via scraps of Spanish; that way we could be fairly
certain that we had no unwelcome eavesdroppers on our brief conversations
when Jakob had to open the cells by himself. He gave me information and
transmitted messages from me to prisoners in other cells.
Manypeople had similarexperienceswith Jakob.‘‘Jakobmade a lot of fuss,’’
wrote Curt Posener, ‘‘but he also helped a lot. Sometimes he brought blan-
kets and cigarettes.’’ He gave Tadeusz Joachimowski news of accomplices and
drew Stefan Boratynski’s attention to an informer who had been locked up
in his cell. Under the pretext that he needed him for cleaning, Jakob let Josef
Neumann speak with an accomplice in another cell. Simon Slezak, who was
Creating Accomplices n 187
tortured on the swing, gave this testimony: ‘‘I believe I owe it to Jakob that
I got off relatively unhurt. He looked after me and cared for me very circum-
spectly, just as he cared for the other men who had been tortured.’’ On orders
from the Political Department Henryk Bartosiewicz was locked up in a stand-
up cell of the bunker, where he was to be given neither food nor drink, but
together with Pilecki Jakob found ways of feeding him secretly.
As a bunker Kalfaktor, Jakob also had to administer corporal punishment.
Thomas Geve reports that experienced inmates rejoiced when they received
this punishment from Jakob rather than from an ss man. He was a fearful
sight when he counted out twenty-five whacks, but his blows hurt less than
those of ss men. Joseph Hermann states that after he had been sentenced to
receive twenty-five blows Jakob administered this punishment in such gentle
fashion that he suffered no serious injuries but only bruises. How many others
did Jakob help who can no longer testify to this?
In American captivity, ss roll call leader Claussen wrote that Jakob aided
primarily his coreligionists. After my release from the bunker, I learned that
my Jewish friends in the resistance movement had asked Jakob to help me be-
cause I was helping Jews in the camp. However, Jakob helped me right after
my arrival in the bunker when that message could not have reached him yet.
The testimonies of Bartosiewicz, Joachimowski, and Boratynski also indicate
that Jakob helped not just Jews or persons on whose behalf Jewish friends had
intervened with him.
On several occasions Jakob had to act as a hangman at executions in the
roll call area. One day, when a Jew was to be hanged, the rope broke. Jakob was
temporarily put in a bunker cell, and the condemned man was hanged again.
There are also negative judgments about Jakob. As far as I can tell, these are
from persons who observed him performing his functions but did not witness
his quiet relief actions.What should Jakob have done? If he had refused to do
what was demanded of him, this would have been tantamount to suicide, for
he wore the Star of David. If he had asked me at the time what he should do,
I would surely have advised him to stick it out and continue to help as best he
could.
On the other hand, many sheer opportunists defend themselves by saying
that if they had refused to participate in atrocities, these would still have been
committed, and possibly in even crueler fashion. Generally speaking, this ar-
gument is inadmissible even in the case of people caught in a predicament as
inmates. Who can decide when it is correct to incur guilt in order to be able
to help and when it is false?
After the war Jakob worked as a showman and strongman in Israel, where
he died. Legal proceedings that had been instituted against him were dropped
after the receipt of numerous exonerating testimonies.
188 n the prisoners
n If a prisoner became a collaborator of the ss, he had to reckon with the
merciless revenge of his fellow inmates as soon as he lost the protection of
the camp administration.This revenge was easiest when an informer was rec-
ognized after his transfer to another camp and before performing the same
services there. Henry Bulawko reports about a Jew from Marseille who had
been recruited as an informer by the Gestapo in France and was hunted down
and beaten to death on his arrival in Auschwitz. I still remember how a new-
comer was mercilessly chased through the camp by fellow prisoners until he
finally ran into the high-tension wire and died. He, too, had betrayed others
while still living in freedom and had been recognized. I was disconcerted by
the savagery of this unmerciful hounding, but—like the overwhelming ma-
jority of my fellow inmates—I approved of lynch law in such a situation.
Abraham Matuszak testified how one day a traitor was stoned in Monowitz
with the approval of the camp elder. Oszkár Betlen reports how in the same
camp the capo of Commando 21, ‘‘one of the meanest fellows, a man who has
the blood of many prisoners on his hands,’’ was thrown into a filthy latrine,
where he choked to death. Afterward, other capos who were also notorious
floggers looked ‘‘timidly and worriedly at the human beings whom they had
whipped and hounded only yesterday. What was in store for them? Wouldn’t
some of them be found suffocated in the latrine one day? For no one in the
camp doubted that the capo of Commando 21 did not wind up at the bottom
of the latrine by accident.’’
The ss was understanding in such cases of instant justice as long as one of
its important agents was not involved.
Prisoners who took justice into their own hands did not always reach their
goals. Judith Sternberg-Newman reports about a Croatian Jew named Schulz
who mistreated the female inmates in his charge as the capo in the Union
Commando. One evening Schulz was given such a beating that he was found
the next morning lying in the snow in front of the barracks unconscious and
with broken ribs.Thecampadministrationsawto it that Schulz’sinjuries were
healed; he returned to his post and is reputed to have given more severe beat-
ings than before. However, according to a report by Ludovic Breiner, he did
not escape revenge. Schulz was evacuated to Buchenwald, where he was ap-
pointed as a capo again. After the liberation, Polish Jews who had been forced
to work under him drowned him in a tub used for purposes of disinfection.
An attempt to apply lynch law to the infamous ss garrison physician of the
Birkenau men’s infirmary, the Polish army physician Zenon Zenkteller, was
unsuccessful. As long as he worked under the protection of the ss physicians,
he was unassailable. When Poles with old numbers were transferred to other
camps, Zenkteller was also scheduled to leave Auschwitz in the fall of 1944.
The railwaycars were still at theramp in Birkenau when inmates began to beat
Creating Accomplices n 189
the hated physician, and thus Zenkteller had a chance to beg an ss physician
known to him for help. He was pulled out of the transport, taken back to the
camp, and remained in his office.
I have already described how the vengeance of his fellow inmates caught
up with Panszczyk in Neuengamme. Dov Paisikovic, who was assigned to the
Sonderkommando, has reported a case of instant justice with a special back-
ground. In the summer of 1944 the Nazis liquidated the Lodz ghetto and de-
ported the last inhabitants to Auschwitz. At that time Rumkowski, the Jewish
elder of this ghetto, and his family were transported to Auschwitz and taken
directly to one of the big crematoriums. Jews from Lodz were members of the
Sonderkommando that had to work in this crematorium.They recognized the
hated Rumkowski in the anteroom of the gas chamber and beat him to death.
When I asked Paisikovic how the ss men reacted to this scene, his answer
was, ‘‘They enjoyed it.’’ Others claim that Rumkowski died after being shot in
the neck by an ss man. However, since Paisikovic assured me that he was an
eyewitness of the scene described by him, he is probably more credible.
With a few exceptions, those who sold themselves to the executioner in
the extermination camp were not able to buy their lives, and yet even intelli-
gent persons attempted this way of saving themselves. Under the conditions
of Auschwitz, there was all too often a failure not just of character but also of
intellect.
190 n the prisoners
the sonderkommando
nnn
Onlyoneofthemanyss men who saw a gas chamber after it had been re-
opened described his impression without sugarcoating it. Richard Böck tes-
tified as follows on November 2, 1960: ‘‘The corpses were so entangled that
it was impossible to recognize whom the various limbs and other body parts
belonged to. I, for example, saw that one of the people who were gassed put
his index finger a few centimeters deep into another man’s eye sockets.’’
It was the daily duty of the inmates on the Sonderkommando to take those
corpses to the ovens in the crematoriums or to the pyres.
Sigismund Bendel was assigned to this detail as a physician because mem-
bers of this strictly isolated squad who took sick could not be admitted to the
infirmary. Bendel, one of the very few survivors of the Sonderkommando, has
presented the observations he was able to make with a certain detachment:
‘‘For two endless minutes one could hear people beating against the walls.
Screams that no longer sounded human. After that nothing.’’ After the gas
chamber had been opened, the sight gave the impression that those locked in
it had still engaged in a hopeless struggle against death. Entangled corpses
full of blood oozed out of the chamber. The still warm bodies were handled
by a barber who cut their hair and a dentist who extracted their gold teeth.
‘‘And now incredible hell broke loose. Men whom I knew, such as a learned
lawyer from Saloniki or an engineer from Budapest, no longer had anything
human about them. They were veritable devils. Amid blows from the cudgels
and lashes from the whips of the ss, they ran like men possessed in order to
complete their tasks as soon as possible. Thick black smoke rose from the
pits. All this happened so quickly and was so unimaginable that I thought
I was dreaming.’’ Bendel concludes his account with these words: ‘‘An hour
later everything was in order again.The men piled up the ashes that they took
fromthepit. Another transportarrived at Crematorium IV.’’ That was everyday
life in the Sonderkommando. Bendel testified about his own activity before a
British military court in 1945: ‘‘I had to help if, for example, a man burned his
feet in human fat.’’ The inmates on the Sonderkommando had to douse the
corpses with the fat that flowed from the pyres so they would burn better.
Not everyone of the few survivors of the Sonderkommando is prepared to
speak about his experiences, and one must respect their silence.
Henryk Porebski, an electrician who had to take care of the installations of
the crematoriums and thus came in contact with the Sonderkommando, knew
that members of this detail had buried notes next to Crematorium II. It is due
to his constant urging that seventeen years after the liberation of Auschwitz
these documents were finally dug up. Despite the fact that these papers were
carefully wrapped, they were not in good condition after all that time, and
often only scraps of sentences could be deciphered.This is what can be read at
the beginning: ‘‘Written by...exactlyat...Sonderkommando of Cremato-
rium II, Aug. 5, 1944 by Zelman Lewental, Ciechanow, Poland.’’ Later it says:
‘‘No one can imagine exactly how things happened, for it is unimaginable that
a precise account of our experiences can be given....We,however—asmall
group of gray people who will give historians a rather hard time...butalso
the psychologists who want to know and investigate the mental condition of
the people who tackled this dismal and dirty work; oh, that is interesting! But
who knows whether theseinvestigators will fathom the truth,whether anyone
willbeabletothoroughly...’’
Dov Paisikovic remembers Lewental, who was probably twenty-five to
twenty-seven at the time, walked with a stoop, and was exempted from the
worst work because he did barracks duty. Paisikovic describes him as ‘‘excep-
tionally capable and decent.’’ A year latera notebook of Lewental’s was dug up
near the ruins of Crematorium II; written in Yiddish, it also describes events
involving the Sonderkommando, though only fragments could be deciphered.
Other, less voluminous manuscripts by members of the Sonderkommando
have been found and afford certain insights.
Anyone who wants to consider the conduct of members of a Sonderkom-
mando must remember Lewental’s warning. All comparisons are bound to
fail. The boundary lines that were crossed by forced labor of this kind cannot
be crossed even in thought after the fact. We have to take note of what may
be learned about the existence and behavior of these human beings.
n Only in the beginning did ss camp leader Schwarzhuber select from the
Jews lined up in theBirkenau men’s camp thosewhowere assigned to the Son-
derkommando. ‘‘He had a great eye for it,’’ writes Szmulewski, who observed
that Schwarzhuber made his choices not only on the basis of a strong build
but also with regard to a man’s physiognomy. Later it became the rule that
young, vigorous people were assigned to the Sonderkommando straight from
the ramp, before they had become acquainted with the camp. In exceptional
cases persons were assigned to it by way of punishment—for example, Szyja
Rosenblum in May 1944 because he had escaped from a labor camp and was
wearing a German uniform when he was captured. Only a small number of
‘‘Aryans’’ were put on this detail: several Poles and Germans served as capos,
and in April 1944 nineteen Russians, who had previously been members of a
Sonderkommando in Majdanek, were assigned to it. According to Paisikovic,
192 n the prisoners
they were officers. When the scope of the extermination reached its zenith in
the spring of that year, the Sonderkommando was expanded to a thousand
inmates.
The ss tolerated the appropriation of food and alcohol by members of this
detail.Therewas more than enough in the possession of thevictims when they
went to the gas chambers. Besides, valuables of all kinds were hidden in the
clothes and belongings that they left behind in the undressing rooms next to
the chambers; the members of the Sonderkommando had to remove those be-
longings, and the ss could not prevent the inmates from appropriating some
of the valuables as well. The last items that the naked victims relinquished
outside the door to the gas chamber were their shoes, which members of the
Sonderkommando had to collect. Paisikovic told me that valuables were fre-
quently hidden in these shoes: ‘‘It is understandable that people concealed in
the last object that they were allowed to keep things that they wanted to retain
if possible.’’
Many who were interned in Birkenau have observed members of the Son-
derkommando.Allthat Lucie Adelsbergercan say is that‘‘thesewereno longer
human countenances but distorted, demented faces.’’ This is what Vrba and
Wetzler wrote in their report after their escape: ‘‘The people on the Sonder-
kommando have separate housing. The other inmates have little contact with
them, if only because of the terrible smell that emanates from them. They
are always filthy, totally unkempt and seedy, and exceedingly brutal and ruth-
less. It is not unusual for one man simply to beat another to death.’’ ss camp
leader Aumeier later characterized the members of the Sonderkommando as
‘‘hulking, well-nourished Jewish inmates.’’
Tadeusz Joachimowski was roll call clerk in the section of Birkenau that
housed the Sonderkommando in an isolated block. He has provided the fol-
lowing description:
When I went to Block 3 and entered the room occupied by the camp elder
and camp capo, I saw a big table with a cloth of white linen at which about
twenty Jews from the Sonderkommando were sitting. Karl Seefeld put plat-
ters with choice ham, sausage, fish, and other foods on the table, and those
around it enjoyed the feast. After-dinner treats included chocolate and an
assortment of fruit. With the exception of the Jews, those present selected
whatever foods they fancied and filled their bellies. Only when pure alcohol
and cognac were served did the Jews cheer up and drink in order to drown
their sorrows.
Erich Altmann remembers the following statement by a member of the
Sonderkommando: ‘‘A decent transport is finally coming again. I don’t have
anything sensible to eat anymore!’’
The Sonderkommando n 193