Appalling as the experiences of Otto Pressburger and Silvia Veselá were during their first hours in the camp, they do not represent what has come to be seen as the quintessential Auschwitz treatment on arrival. For one of the most infamous procedures associated with Auschwitz was only now about to beginâthe initial selection. This was the second of the two important changes to the camp that resulted from the arrival of the Slovakians. Periodic selection of some incoming transports had begun as early as the end of April, but systematic selection did not begin until July 4, 1942, when a transport from Slovakia arrived that was separated at once by the SS men into those who were useful for work and would be admitted to the camp, and those who were unfit for work and would be gassed immediately. Only now, two years after the camp received its first prisoners, had the authorities at Auschwitz finally begun the selection process for new inmates that would come to symbolize the cold-hearted terror of the place.
Eva Votavová, along with her father and mother, was on one of the first transports to be subjected to selection on arrival. This wave of Slovakian deportees contained a mix of old people, children, and those, like Eva, who were young and fit:
We arrived at Auschwitz station and had to align in rows of five. The painful scenes began there. They were separating the young from old and children. They separated my father from my mother and myself. From that moment I heard nothing about my father. When I saw him for the last time he looked worried, sad, and hopeless.
By now, some weeks after the completion of “The Little Red House,” another cottage a couple of hundred meters away, known as “The Little White House” or Bunker 2, had been converted into a killing installation with a capacity for about 1,200 people at any one time. Inside Bunker 2, four narrow rooms were constructed as gas chambers. This permitted better ventilation than had been possible in Bunker 1 (“The Little Red House”) and allowed the Zyklon B to be cleared more quickly from the cottage once the murders had taken placeâanother example of the constant small initiatives taken by the Auschwitz authorities to try and “improve” the killing process.
Otto Pressburger saw the new arrivals from Slovakia who had been selected to die waiting outside the cottages:
They used to sit thereâthey must have been eating their food from home. SS men were around them with dogs. They, of course, didn't know what was going to happen to them. We did not want to tell them. It would have been worse for them. We were thinking that the people who brought them here were not humans but some wild jungle creatures.
According to Otto Pressburger, during this period the gassings took place at night: “They never did it during the day; [because] people were probably shouting or trying to get out. We only saw the bodies next morning piled beside the pits.”
Pressburger was forced to work in a special unit, burying the bodies gassed in the two cottages:
To kill people with gas is very simple. You only seal the windows and doors to keep the gas inside. They locked the doors and in a couple of minutes they were all dead. They [the SS men] brought them [the bodies] to the holes where I used to work. We used to bury them the next morning. We put some powdered lime and soil over them. Just enough to cover the bodies so no one could see them.
It was an inadequate method of body disposal and, when the hot summer
arrived, the bodies thrown into pits started to putrify. Pressburger's job, already the stuff of nightmares, became even worse.
The dead bodies were becoming alive. They were rotting and coming out of the holes. Blood and dirt was everywhere and we had to take them out with our bare hands. It did not look like a dead body any moreâit was a rotten mass. We had to dig into that mass and sometimes we took out a head, sometimes a hand or a leg. The smell was unbearable. I had no choice [but to do this work] if I wanted to live. Otherwise they would kill me. I wanted to live. Sometimes I was questioning myself whether this life was worth living.
Once the bodies were disinterred, SS men ordered the prisoners to put them into giant, burning pitsâthe Auschwitz authorities thus improvised a makeshift crematorium while awaiting the completion of the conventional one nearby, says Pressburger.
We built a big fire with wood and petrol. We were throwing them [the bodies] right into it. There were always two of us throwing bodies inâone holding the bodies on the legs and the other on the arms. The stench was terrible. We were never given any extra food for this. The SS men were constantly drinking vodka or cognac or something else from bottles. They could not cope with it, either.
As he forced himself to carry on with the gruesome work of digging up the bodies and burning them, Pressburger also wrestled with an emotional traumaâthe death of his father. The prisoners were kept hungry and thirsty, and his father had drunk rainwater from puddlesâa common cause of infection and death. “The doctor who used to treat me as a child was in Auschwitz as well,” says Pressburger. “He told me never to drink that water [from the puddles]. Otherwise I would die within twenty-four hours. People always used to have swollen legs from drinking that rainwater. Water was coming out of their legs.” But his father was not so self-controlled, and he drank the water and died. After the initial shock and suffering of the loss, Pressburger realized that the only way he could survive was to try and
block out what was happening around himâeven the death of his own father. “The longer I wanted to live,” he says, “the sooner I had to forget.”
In exercising this iron self-controlâparticularly in dealing with the terrible pains of hunger and thirstâPressburger was unexpectedly helped by the memory of how he had acted in his childhood:
When I was a little kid my parents used to give me money to buy sandwiches on the way to school. But I never did. Instead I always got liquorice. So I had no food through the whole day apart from that liquorice until I got home in the afternoon.
This meant that, when he was in Birkenau and people around him were “going insane from hunger,” he was able to cope: “I was used to not eating much. It's the same even now.”
Otto Pressburger is not alone in believing that his ability to draw on the memory of past privation was crucial to his survival. As Jacob Zylberstein pointed out in the context of the Åódź ghetto, many of the arriving German Jews found it hard to cope with ghetto life because of their privileged backgrounds, while he and his family, who had come from relative poverty, did not have so far to fall. Silvia Veselá observed a similar phenomenon with rich, middle-class Slovakian women. Even in the transit camps in Slovakia, before they arrived at Auschwitz, they found it much harder to deal with conditions than women like her from poorer backgrounds. And, as a Soviet prisoner of war in Auschwitz, Pavel Stenkin found that his own harsh upbringing was now an advantage. As a child he had never had much foodâor indeed much affectionâand now the experience was a positive asset.
This form of “selection” within the ghettos and camps was, of course, precisely the concern Reinhard Heydrich had raised at the Wannsee conference. The Nazis were too wedded to the Darwinian notion of the survival of the fittest to allow the Jews who came through the horrors of forced labor to carry on livingâindeed, Nazi racial theory taught them that they had now isolated the very group they should most fear. This proscriptive insistence on following their own warped logic through to the bitter end is one of the factors that makes the Nazis' “Final Solution” different from some other genocides, like Stalin's murderous treatment of minority nationalities
within the Soviet Union. Stalin may have persecuted whole nations, but the Soviet system did not seek to eliminate them in their entirety. Yet, to fulfil the Nazis' purpose, every single Jew had to be removed from German territory one way or the other.
When Otto Pressburger returned recently to visit the burial sites at Birkenau, he remembered the thousands who came with him from Slovakia to Auschwitz and who could not make such a journey today:
It is terrible. I do remember standing [here] beside my father. The majority of the people working here were from my city. I knew all of them. Every day there were less and less of them. They must be still buried around here somewhere. There were only four of us who survived the three years.
In the spring and early summer of 1942, thousands of Jews, primarily from Upper Silesia and Slovakia, went to their deaths in “The Little Red House” and “The Little White House.” En route to the gas chambers in the cottages, SS officers like Palitzsch would chat with the Jews, asking each what trades or qualifications they possessed. Rudolf Höss emphasized in his memoirs how the key to successful mass murder on this scale was to conduct the whole process in an atmosphere of great calm. But it could happen, as Höss recorded, that if one person in the group approaching the gas chambers spoke of suffocation or murder “a sort of panic set in at once,” making the killing much more difficult. In later transports a careful watch was kept over individuals who were thought likely to cause trouble for the Nazis in this way. At the first sign of any attempt to disrupt the compliant atmosphere the Nazis had created, such people were discreetly moved away, taken out of sight of the others, and shot with a small-caliber gun that was quiet enough that those nearby would not hear the noise.
The emotional torment of mothers who suspected what was about to happen to them, as they walked with their children to their deaths under, as Höss puts it, “the blossom-laden fruit trees of the cottage orchard,”
39
is almost impossible to imagine. On one occasion, Höss records how a woman whispered to him, “How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful, darling children? Have you no heart at all?”; on another he saw a woman try to
throw her children out of the gas chamber as the door was closing, shouting, “At least let my precious children live!” These heartrending sights did cause some emotional disturbance in Höss, but nothing, according to his memoirs, that either a vigorous gallop on a horse or a few drinks could not chase away.
Concentrating the mass killing in a remote corner of the Birkenau site did mean that the routine of Auschwitz main camp was no longer disrupted by the murders. And, while life for the prisoners in the main camp remained as harsh as ever, for the SS members this had become a place where it was possible after work to relax in some comfort, as Tadeusz Rybacki,
40
who had been arrested by the Gestapo for suspected involvement in the Polish resistance, discovered.
After some months moving between different work kommandos, Rybacki finally obtained one of the most sought after jobs in Auschwitz main campâworking as a waiter in the SS dining room. After women guards affiliated with the SS arrived, at the same time as the Slovakian women in the spring of 1942, he witnessed several riotous evenings. “It was a gangster feast,” he says, recalling one particular night.
There was singing, drinking, slapping on the back, and all kinds of alcohol. I poured wine in their glasses and there was one SS woman who, when I gave her wine, started pulling my arm. She said to me, “Darling ...”, and everyone started looking at me. The situation for me was very dangerous and I almost spilt the wine, but luckily some SS man yelled at her, “Shut your mouth, you whore!” and she let go.
Later in the evening, he noticed another SS woman making advances towards him and the other waiters. “Some drunk, big woman was walking and swaying, going most probably to the toilet, and she saw us standing and she started making gestures to us suggestive of sexual intercourse. Our faces were stonelike and we were whispering to one another, âWhat does she want, that bitch?'”
The contrast between the louche life of the SS members and the brutal existence of the prisoners did not escape him:
Only the prisoners were to die of hungerâthe stay at the camp was a slow execution by creating the conditions of hunger, beating and hard labor. But they [the SS men] had everything. When we looked at the feast there was everything, there were all kinds of alcoholsâeven French cognacsâand nothing was lacking. It all looked so hideously like a devilish feastâyou cannot imagine what a terrible picture it was.
Nonetheless, Rybacki knew how lucky he was to be a waiter working in the dining room. The job was not only “under a roof”âessential, he felt, if he was to survive the winterâbut also brought him into direct contact with the single most important commodity in the campâfood. He and the other prisoners who worked as waiters would steal whatever food they could and hide it in the attic of the building. But their actions were not without risk. Once, when several members of the SS were standing at the buffet that adjoined the dining room, he and the other waiters heard a loud noise. They looked back into the dining room and “our hair stood on end. Suddenly we saw somebody's legs and half the body coming through the ceiling.” They knew at once what must have happened. One of the other waiters, searching for food in the attic, had slipped: “Up there you had to be careful to step on the beams, because otherwise you would fall through.” It was a potentially deadly situation for all of them. But, luckily, the SS men nearby were laughing and drinking so much that they did not turn back to look into the room. The prisoner who had fallen through managed to pull himself back up and the debris was swept away. But that still left the hole in the ceiling. Next morning when they arrived for work they simply bribed one of the SS guards with butter and sausage not to ask too many questions about the damage. Two days later the hole was mended.
Had it not taken place in Auschwitz, Tadeusz Rybacki's recollection of his friend falling through the ceiling, his legs dangling helplessly, would be almost comic; and the knowledge that he and his comrades escaped punishment by bribing a junior member of the SS is reminiscent of the manipulation of German guards in Allied POW camps so beloved of Hollywood producers attached to the semi-romanticization of the prison camp experience in the West. Set in Auschwitz as it is, however, his story carries none of these resonances. Instead, it is a telling reminder once again of how, by
early summer 1942, Auschwitz had evolved into two separate camps. Not just geographically, with Birkenau emerging from the mud slightly less than three kilometers away from Auschwitz main camp, but philosophically and psychologically as well. In one, prisoners like Tadeusz Rybacki did what they could to survive by scheming to get the best work and “organizing” additional food; in the other, men, women, and children were murdered within hours of arriving.