Langbein Hermann. People in Auschwitz

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Here are notes made by Seweryna Szmaglewska: ‘‘Sonderkommando—

drunken Jews who treat their Jewish brethren who are destined to die just as

the ss men do. A sad example of human aberration in the blazing jungle that

is Birkenau. Even so, members of the same Sonderkommando venture to get

close to the electric wire and bring the Jewish men and women in the camp

last greetings fromtheir relatives before they entered the crematorium. Some-

times they bring along some mementos, photos, or letters as a last sign of

life.’’ In fact, according to a report by Czeslaw Ostankowicz, inmates on the

Sonderkommando, who, as Ostankowicz emphasizes, included good com-

rades,procured complete surgical equipment forthe inﬁrmaryof thewomen’s

camp.

Krystyna Zywulska once asked an inmate on the Sonderkommando, whose

intelligent appearance had attracted her attention, how he was able to do such

work day after day. He sounded nervous and irritated as he replied:

Do you people think that I volunteered for this work? What was I to do?

Sure, I could have gone into the wire, like so many comrades. But I want to

survive.Maybe a miraclewill happen! We could be liberated todayor tomor-

row. And then I want to take revenge as a direct witness of their crimes. If

this work doesn’t make you crazy on the ﬁrst day, you get used to it. Do you

think that those who work in a munitions factory have a much nobleroccu-

pation? Or the girls who sort the things in Canada so they can be taken to

Germany? We’re all working for them on their orders. Believe me, I don’t

want to survive for the sake of living. I don’t have anyone anymore be-

cause they have gassed my whole family. But I want to live so I can report

about it and take revenge. Do you think the members of the Sonderkom-

mando are monsters? I tell you, they are like the others, only much more

unhappy.

Elie Wiesel came to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 together with Bela

Katz, and the latter was immediately separated from the others because of his

physical strength. Later Katz sent word to his friend that he had been assigned

to the Sonderkommando, where he was forced to push his own father into the

gas chamber.

Tadeusz Joachimowski became acquainted with a foreman on the Sonder-

kommando named Lewkowicz and commented on him as follows: ‘‘All his

relatives had been killed in Auschwitz, and thus he did not have much to live

for, except that he wanted to take revenge on the murderers.’’ Survivors of

Auschwitz have repeatedly reported that members of the Sonderkommando

called out to them: ‘‘When you leave the camp, talk, write, and scream so the

world may learn what is happening here!’’

194 n the prisoners

n Filip Müller is the only survivor who was a member of this detail for years.

As a heating specialist, he was able to escape several liquidation actions. He

has reported that many inmates were completely brutalized and desperate. A

widely disseminated saying was ‘‘If we live just one hour longer, that is the

only important thing.’’ ‘‘Others were quite apathetic,’’ he writes. ‘‘They didn’t

care about anything because they had no one anymore.These were not human

beings but robots.’’ Lewental wrote with awe-inspiring honesty: ‘‘I must tell

the truth here. In the course of time some members of this group let them-

selves go to such an extent that we were simply ashamed.’’

All of themknewthat theywould themselves be killedin a gas chamber,just

as earlier Sonderkommando members had been. Elie Cohen remembers that

when members of the Sonderkommando were being taken to the gas cham-

ber after a general lockup had been ordered in the camp, they spoke without

visible fear about where they were going.

The camp physician Horst Fischer described for the court the liquidation

of a Sonderkommando in these words: ‘‘First of all, the detail and ss Techni-

cal Sergeant Moll—well, how shall I put it? They drank alcohol, the inmates

werealso given alcohol,and whenthey were drunk, theirquarters were locked,

Zyklon B was poured through somewindow, and that’s how they were killed.’’

For ss men it was so self-evident that all members of a Sonderkommando

were to be killed that ssroll call leader Kaduk bristled when hewas confronted

in a Frankfurt jail with the testimony of a survivor of that detail: ‘‘It seems

impossible to me that the witness should have survived Auschwitz as a mem-

ber of the Sonderkommando. I know for certain that all the members of that

detail were eliminated from time to time. Then none of them were left; even

the inmate functionaries were included. One time I observed how a Birkenau

Sonderkommando was taken to the main camp and killed in the small crema-

torium.’’

However, Kaduk overestimated the thoroughness of the camp administra-

tion in the ﬁnal phase of the camp. When Auschwitz was being evacuated,

the ss panicked and overlooked killing the surviving members of the Sonder-

kommando and other bearers of secrets who had mingled with the other pris-

oners in the general confusion. In Mauthausen, where most inmates had been

transferred, the camp administration wanted to rectify the oversight and pick

out the members of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando from the thousands of

transfers. But because all prisoners already bore Mauthausen inmate num-

bers, some of them managed to evade this belated extermination campaign.

Several prisoners escaped from the evacuation transport to Mauthausen and

survived.

No fear of death, at the same time a mania for living just one hour longer,

an apathy that made human beings descend to the level of brutish robots, and

The Sonderkommando n 195

sophisticated escapesfromextermination—these antitheses,too, point to the

boundary lines beyond which questions must remain unanswered.

n Such lines were crossed when an unfortunate individual was thrust into the

Sonderkommando directly from the ramp. Dov Paisikovic, who was twenty

when this fate befell him, remembers his ﬁrst day on the Sonderkommando

only too well. At that time the detail was being enlarged for the ‘‘Hungarian

campaign.’’ Together with 250 others, who like him had been selected from

one of the ﬁrst transports of Hungarians, Paisikovic had to carry and drag

corpses from morning to evening out of the farmhouse that had been con-

verted into a bunker for gassings and was being used again because the ca-

pacity of the gas chambers was insuﬃcient.The ss kept driving them on. ‘‘We

didn’t even have a bite at noon or in the evening,’’ writes Paisikovic. ‘‘We had

to drag the corpses from the house to the pits, and then other inmates threw

them in. Many of us jumped into the ﬁre out of despair.’’

When 435 Jews deported from Corfu were assigned to the Sonderkom-

mando on July 22, 1944, they refusedtowork there and were gassed.TheKalen-

darium compiled by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum lists this action,

whichhardlyanyoneknewabout. In Auschwitzheroismall toooftenremained

unnoticed.

Henryk Porebski has called my attention to diﬀerences within the detail.

The majority of inmates who had been assigned to transport corpses were

jealous of the furnace men, who were not only spared this worst of jobs but

as specialists also had better chances to survive the periodic exterminations.

Porebski has this to say about those who had to clear the gas chambers: ‘‘I

could not ﬁnd any common language with them. They were completely im-

bued with the will to live, the will to survive this terrible fate that had been

forced on them. They developed an inordinate zeal in their work, as though

this was the price of their future life.’’ On the command ‘‘Sticks out!’’ this

unskilled majority of the Sonderkommando had to get clubs from a room in

the crematorium and with the aid of them see to it that the orders of the ss

were instantly obeyed. This command was given when the victims refused to

undress in the anteroom of the gas chamber.

At the age of fourteen Jehuda Bacon belonged to a motorized detail that

worked in the crematoriums in winter, collecting ashes that were scattered

on the roads and paths. He also encountered people who were anything but

bestial. One of them was Kalmin Furman, who was from Luna near Grodno,

bore number 80,810, and was probably around twenty-ﬁve at the time. He was

always friendly and helpful to thevery young inmates and told Bacon his story.

One time, when Furman was supposed to take his parents to be burned, he

tried to hang himself but was cut down in time. Afterward, he was excused

196 n the prisoners

from working on corpses, but he received a special assignment: When ss men

were shooting prisoners in a special room in the crematorium, Furman had

to hold the victims’ arms. If someone made a noise, he was held by his ear,

which enabled the ss to take accurate shots at his neck. When I asked Bacon

whether Furman ever indicated how he was able to endure this, he replied

that Furman wanted to observe how men behaved before their death. When

there were no shootings, Furman had to repair machines—on one occasion a

sewing machine, as Bacon remembers.

The Pole Zdislaw Mikolajski was able to escape assignment to the Sonder-

kommando. To be sure, conditions were exceptionally favorable at the time.

Mikolajski had been a skilled worker in the ss dental clinic for a consider-

able period of time when his boss, the ss dentist Dr. Schulte, ordered him to

clean gold teeth that had been extracted from corpses. Mikolajski refused to

obey this order, and Schulte did not insist on it and gave this order to another

inmate. Mikolajski was able to do this because his boss appreciated him as

a specialist and because, by working together, the two men had developed a

certain personal relationship.

n Mietek Morawa, who as a Pole had not sewn a Star of David on his inmate’s

uniform either, was twenty when he was taken from Cracow to Auschwitz in

October 1940. He soon came to the attention of the head of the Political De-

partment, for Morawa had to take care of the bicycles that ss men rode into

the camp. Since Grabner noticed that Mietek was performing his duties con-

scientiously and speedily, he assignedhim work in the ﬁrst crematorium when

inmates were not yet killed with poison gas in Auschwitz. Morawa remained

on this detailafterthe installation of themachineryof extermination. Grabner

spared him at several liquidations of the Sonderkommando, and Morawa re-

ceived the armband of a capo. As a vip who had been on the same detail from

the beginning, he became better known than all the others. When Paisikovic

was assigned to him, Morawa was the senior capo of the Sonderkommando

that had to work in Crematoriums I and II. No one knew more about the ma-

chinery of extermination than he did. Acquaintances urged him to utilize his

good relationshipwith Grabner and prevail on him to transfer him to another,

less perilous detail. Grabner, however, calmed Morawa by assuring him that

he was not in any danger. Even when the biggest campaigns of extermination

were concluded in the summer of 1944 and Morawa’s friends advised him to

venture an escape, now that the members of the Sonderkommando were ex-

pected to be murdered, Morawa did nothing, even though as senior capo he

could have takenadvantageof his freedomof movement and the long hair that

he had been permitted to grow. Blind trust in the Political Department was

probably not the only factor that kept him from acting, for on one occasion

The Sonderkommando n 197

Mietek tearfully told Kazimierz Smolen,whom he had met in the Gypsy camp,

that he knew he would never get out of the camp. With the help of friends he

ﬁnally tried to smuggle his way onto a transport that was leaving for another

camp, but the camp elder Danisch recognized Morawa and pulled him out at

the last moment. In the end Morawa had to take the path that Staszek Slezak

and other capos of the Sonderkommando also had to take. In early 1945 he

was transferred to Mauthausen together with these men and was shot there a

short time before the liberation of that camp.

Judgments about Morawa diﬀer. Poles who knew him well gave assurances

that they never heard complaints about him and that he was ‘‘all right,’’ but

the verdicts of Jews were diﬀerent. Filip Müller claims that Mietek was a rabid

anti-Semite. ‘‘When Jews were being shot, he performed his duty—holding a

victim’s head—with pleasure, but when Poles were involved, he was desper-

ate.’’ Morawa’s former block elder, a Polish ‘‘Aryan,’’ recalls that other capos

of the detail feared him. Tadeusz Joachimowski believes that young Mietek

became so brutalized on the Sonderkommando because he saw nothing that

could have aroused compassion in him.

Only those who accept this argument can fully appreciate the conduct of

another senior capo who also became well known. Stanislaw Kaminski was,

to be sure, much older than Morawa when he arrived in the summer of 1942

with a Jewish transport from Bialystok and was assigned to the Auschwitz

Sonderkommando. Paisikovic has estimated his age at thirty to forty, and he

describes him as short and of above average intelligence. Kaminski must have

become a capo quickly, for André Lettich, who was assigned to the Sonder-

kommando as a nurse in January 1943 but was soon ableto leave it, remembers

that Kaminski already wore a capo’s armband at the time.

There are many positive judgments of Kaminski. Henryk Porebski aﬃrms

that Kaminski frequently gave him gold and medicines to transmit to the re-

sistance movement. In his attitude toward his fellow prisoners, he resembled

another capo, the ‘‘Aryan’’ Polish teacher Józef Ilczuk, born in 1910, about

whom Bacon has made this statement: ‘‘When there was nobody in the gas

chambers, the capo permitted us to warm up there when we had ﬁnished our

work.’’ Like Morawa and Slezak, Ilczuk was killed in Mauthausen.

Kaminski’s importance does not derive merely from the fact that he helped

others. Several people have independently described him as a prime mover in

the preparations for the uprising of the Sonderkommando, at least at a time

when the groundwork had reached a stage where a revolt seemed possible to

its organizers.

n Earlier plans for a rebellion have become known. Adolf Weiß (from Slo-

vakia) reports that he was assigned to a detail that worked on the construc-

198 n the prisoners

tion of the crematoriums, and there he came in contact with members of the

Sonderkommando, including compatriots from Holicˇ. The capo of the Son-

derkommando’s night shift, also a Slovak named Weiß, wanted to bribe an

ss man, had established contact with civilians outside the camp, planned a

breakout, and hoped to ﬁnd support out there. The capo of the day shift, a

French Jew, learned of the plan and wanted to ﬂee with the others, but they

rejected him. (Adolf Weiß never learned the reasons for this refusal.) This

caused theday-shift capo tobetraythe schemeto the ss—evidently because he

feared that hewould be killed if the escape was successful.The block in which

those working the night shift were housed was surrounded and all the men

were taken to the main camp, where they were gassed. Capos, junior capos,

and foremen, as well as those assigned to the day shift,were shot in Birkenau.

Alfred Wetzler remembers this shooting, and the Auschwitz Kalendarium re-

ports about it under the date December 3, 1942. The traitor had already been

killed with a spade by members of the night shift. Before the shootingWetzler

had received a letter from a man who wanted to participate in this attempted

breakout in which he said farewell to his sister, who was also interned in

Auschwitz. Adolf Weiß concludes his account with these words: ‘‘The next

day the ss staﬀed a new Sonderkommando with Jews who had been deported

from Sosnowitz.’’

This did not deter Kaminski and his friends.They were under pressure be-

cause, at the time of the large operation against Hungarian Jews and inmates

of the Lodz ghetto, the Sonderkommando had been enlarged to nearly a thou-

sand inmates (the ﬁgure 932 has been documented) and on the basis of past

practice the liquidation of the Sonderkommando was to be expected. Accord-

ing to Paisikovic, at that time the Sonderkommando was composed of Jews

from Poland, France, Czechoslovakia, Greece, and Hungary. Paisikovic also

remembers a Dutch Jew. Shortly after the liberation, Slama Dragon stated that

the Sonderkommandowas largelycomprised of 500 Hungarian and 200 Greek

Jews.

When 200 members of the Sonderkommandowere taken to the main camp

in September and gassed there—something that despite all the eﬀorts to keep

it secret could not be concealed from the surviving members of the Sonder-

kommando—Kaminski suggested to the leadership of the resistance move-

ment that a general uprising be organized. Since I had been transferred from

Auschwitz in late August 1944, I did not ﬁnd out more about it. However,

Dawid Szmulewski reports that on two occasions Ernst Burger had discus-

sions with members of the Sonderkommando in Birkenau,where he had man-

aged to go. Burger could not be questioned about the substance of these dis-

cussions because he had been hanged in Auschwitz. However, at that time

the leadership evidently could not decide on organizing a general uprising be-

The Sonderkommando n 199

cause it thought it could not assume responsibility for staking everything on

one chance. As Henryk Porebski remembers it, he transmitted to the organiz-

ers in the Sonderkommando a message from Józef Cyrankiewicz, who urged

them to avoid staging an uprising at any cost. Despite all this, Kaminski and

two Greeks who had participated in an earlier discussion of these plans with

Porebski decided to organize a rebellion of the Sonderkommando, which had

nothing to lose. The name of one of the two Greeks has been passed along;

Eduard de Wind writes about Errera from Larissa and Albert Menasche men-

tions Alexander Hereirra. While Paisikovic does not remember the name, he

does recall that a very intelligent Greek who was known on the detail for

his beautiful singing took part in the preparatory work. Even though at that

time the leaders of the resistance movement in the camp could not make up

their minds about organizing a general uprising together with the Sonder-

kommando, theydid support the Sonderkommando’sown resistance group to

the best of theirability.Women whowereworkingin theUnion munitions fac-

tory smuggled explosives out, and those were used by the Sonderkommando

to make hand grenades. Porebski has described them as ‘‘little tin containers

ﬁlled with gunpowder, small stones, crumbled bricks, and a fuse.’’ The resis-

tance organization’s vacillation engendered bitterness among those who had

been planning an uprising of the directly threatened Sonderkommando. In a

letter that was dug up later, Zelman Gradowski wrote: ‘‘We wanted to accom-

plish a great thing, but the people from the camp, some of the Jews, Russians,

and Poles, held us back with all their strength and forced us to postpone the

date of the uprising.’’ In this connection Lewental goes so far as to say that

they were left isolated and that ‘‘the Poles that were in contact with us double-

crossed us.’’

Tadeusz Joachimowski,who was employed as a clerk, heard about theplans

for an uprising from Lewkowicz, a foreman. Lewkowicz was originally from

Poland, but he had been deported from France, to which he had immigrated.

Russians were probably involved in the preparation as well, though Paisiko-

vic says that they were not briefed about the plans because they drank a great

deal and it was feared that they might make incautious remarks while intoxi-

cated. Lewental has called the Russians ‘‘the best element of our action.’’

Alter Fajnzylberg, who was interned in Auschwitz under the name Jankow-

ski and is among the few survivors of the Sonderkommando, testiﬁed at the

Höß trial that the organizers of the uprising were in touch with prisoners who

worked in the sauna and in Canada as well as with the small number of sur-

vivors of the Russian prisoners of war who had worked on the construction of

Birkenau and with the women’s camp. The group that planned the uprising

sawto itthat documentsaboutthemass murderthey hadpersonally witnessed

200 n the prisoners

were buried. It is to Henryk Porebski’s credit that the documents have been

exhumed.

Kaminski did not live to see the uprising. He was shot by the ss, which in-

formed the members of the detail that their capo had been executed because

he had tried to kill an ss man. Survivors of the Sonderkommando surmise

that Mietek Morawa might have betrayed Kaminski because the latter had just

briefed him on plans for the uprising. According to Milton Buki, Kaminski

told Mietek about his intentions when they were having drinks together, and

Morawa then informed the ss. Lewental also writes that Mietek informed on

Kaminski. The Greek man did not live to see the day on which the uprising

began, for he had already been killed while trying to escape.

n On Saturday, October 7, 1944, the headquarters of theresistance movement

notiﬁed its contacts in the Sonderkommando that the camp administration

was about to destroy this detail, which had 663 members on that day. Now

quick action was of the essence. A German criminal who was serving as senior

capo in Crematorium III evidently learned of the preparations and wanted to

report them to the ss. In order to forestall this betrayal, the inmates killed

their senior capo. According to another version, Max Fleischer, a member of

the Sonderkommando, betrayed the planned uprising to an ss man, and this

provoked the premature beginning of the revolt in Crematorium III. No mat-

ter which version is correct, the plan of a joint revolt in all four crematoriums

failed in any case. The Sonderkommando in Crematoriums II and IV had no

opportunity to join in the rebellion, and only the inmates who worked in Cre-

matorium I managed to do so.

The rebels blew up Crematorium II, cut the barbed wire facingthewomen’s

camp, and broke out.The ss,which was instantlyalerted,was able to quell the

rebellion bloodily.Theprisoners whowere stillfoundinthe crematorium were

shotthereand the fugitives were hunted down.Thenextday, theLaborAssign-

ment Oﬃce in Birkenau reported that the Sonderkommando consisted of 212

inmates.This jibes roughly with the numbers given by Fajnzylberg, who stated

at the Höß trial that 455 were killed. As far as is known, no one managed

to escape. Fajnzylberg mentioned that four ss sergeants were killed, but ss

documents list only three—namelyRudolf Erler,Willi Freese, and Josef Purke.

Fajnzylberg also said that twelve ss men were wounded. Crematorium III was

rendered unusable.

Since none of the rebels survived, information about the organizers of the

uprising canbe derivedonly fromsecondarysources.EmanuelMinkand David

Szmulewski, who were active in the resistance movement in Birkenau, give

pride of place as organizers to Józef Warszawski and Jankiel Handelsman,

The Sonderkommando n 201

Poles who had emigrated to Paris and joined the resistance there.Warszawski

was born in 1906, Handelsman in 1908, and both were experienced commu-

nists. Szmulewski also names Daniel Finkelstein, a Polish tailor who had also

emigrated to France, Lajb Langfus, and a man he knew only by his ﬁrst name,

Ajzyk. Relying on preserved documents of the international resistance move-

ment and testimony at the Höß trial, Danuta Czech identiﬁes as organizers of

the rebellion Warszawski, Langfus, Ajzyk Kalniak (presumably the man also

named by Szmulewski),Zelman Gradowski, Józef Dresinski, and Lajb Panusz.

It is known that three days after the rebellion Handelsman was locked up in

the bunker with Wrobel and twelve other inmates and tortured to death there.

Eduard de Wind recalls a conversation that he had shortly after the evacua-

tion of Auschwitz with Kabeli, a professor of literature at the University of

Athens,who, like deWind, had remained in the camp. Kabeli, who had served

ontheSonderkommandofora year, named someGreekJews whom he knewto

have participated in the organization of the uprising: Baruch, Burdo, Carasso,

Ardite, and Jachon.

Despite its bloody end, the importance of the rebellion cannot be over-

estimated. ‘‘This uprising showed the non-Jewish inmates of Auschwitz who

shared the Jews’ fate what Jews were able to do.’’ That is a proud statement

by Israel Gutmann, who was involved in smuggling explosives into the hands

of the Sonderkommando. Ana Novac, who in October 1944 had already been

transferred to a labor camp outside the Auschwitz complex, remembers a fe-

male physician’s report that a crematorium was blown up in Auschwitz. ‘‘It

was as though fear had been pushed aside and we were a head taller,’’ she

writes.That one can point to the uprising of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando

in addition to the revolts in the extermination camps Sobibor and Treblinka

means a great deal to Jews who are writing the history of their people during

the period of Nazi rule.

Isolated acts of heroism and unimaginable brutalization—these existed

in juxtaposition. If someone should seek an answer to the question why the

members of the Sonderkommando who were destined to die did not at least

clarify the situation for their fellow Jews, thereby prompting them to make

some gesture of resistance, no matter how impotent, the following incident

may serve as a reply. On one occasion a memberof the Sonderkommando told

thosewho hadstripped in an anteroomof the gas chamberand werewaitingto

be taken to the bath what was in store for them in the adjoining chamber. Evi-

dently the reaction of the victims betrayed this to the supervising ss men. As

a deterrent, they shoved the warner into one of the ovens of the crematorium,

and his comrades had to watch.

This is what we read on one of the sheets of paper buried by Zelman Lewen-

tal: ‘‘The whole truth is much more tragic, much more horrible.’’

202 n the prisoners

the inmate infirmary

nnn

Psychic shock and brutal physical terror, excessively hard and overlong labor,

chronic malnutrition, and chaotic hygienic conditions—thesewere the causes

of numerous illnesses in Auschwitz.

A number of inmate physicians have put on record their medical experi-

ences. Wladyslaw Fejkiel, Désiré Haﬀner, and others published them soon

after their liberation. Fejkiel’s experiences came from the main camp, where

this Polish physician worked for fouryears,ﬁrst as anurse, then as a physician,

and ﬁnallyas campelderof the hkb. Désiré Haﬀnerworked for more than two

years in the hkb of the Birkenau men’s camp. Otto Wolken, an inmate physi-

cian placed in the Birkenau quarantine section, kept records about illnesses

and causes of death there from September 20, 1943, to November, 1, 1944.

These have been preserved. Wolken has given the following commentary on

his statistics: ‘‘The average population of the camp was 4,000 to 6,000 souls,

who were housed in fourteen blocks. Since this was a quarantine section, the

inmates remained there for only six to eight weeks, in rare cases twelve, and

were used only for work inside the camp.’’ According to these statistics, dur-

ing this period of more than thirteen months, 4,023 persons were transferred

from the quarantine section to the part of the Birkenau camp where the inﬁr-

mary in which Haﬀner worked was located at that time.The number of people

who died in the quarantine section was 1,902. Wolken’s records contain in-

formation about the illnesses of these nearly 6,000 inmates. During the same

period, 2,534 inmates of the quarantine section were selected to die in the gas

chambers. No medical diagnosis of their maladies was made, and hence none

shows up in the statistics.

Illnesses resulting from malnutrition supply the greatest percentage by far.

Diarrhea, edemas, and the like were diagnosed in 42.7 percent of those trans-

ferred to the inﬁrmary and 52.7 percent of the patients who died in the quar-

antine section. According to Haﬀner’s observations, new patients frequently

displayed edemas as earlyas the third or fourth day, and in elderly people these

appeared on the ﬁrst day. They were probably caused by chronic malnutrition

and overtaxing of the heart. Haﬀner observed that the widespread diarrhea

produced up to twenty and even ﬁfty bowel movements per day. Latrines were

usually located quite a distance from the barracks, and therefore every trip to

the latrine was a strain on an inmate who had not been admitted to the inﬁr-