The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (50 page)

the first Russians arrived, did Marcel feel any sense of relief. “ We had put together a few little red flags, as we were afraid.” The first Red Army officer Marcel encoun- tered, he recalled, “was a Jew from Kiev.”
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During this strange ten-day passage between slavery and freedom, Primo Levi and his ill, emaciated com- panions in his block also managed to stay alive. With the camp virtually empty, they could roam the grounds at will. They scoured the camp for useful objects—a truck battery, some turnips, even a few down quilts looted from the hurriedly evacuated barracks of the SS guards. These men worked together, showed great ingenuity, but also a necessary ruthlessness, for there were many ill and dying patients in the infirmary, lying in pools of filth and excrement, shivering in the cold, who begged for help, imploring Primo and his friends for soup, food, water, anything. They could do nothing for them, and many of them died.

There was no question of leaving the camp. The gates were open and the barbed wire breached in various places, but the cold, their illnesses, and total uncertain- ty of where to go kept them in the camp, amid piles of frozen corpses and burned-out barracks. Levi recalled that many prisoners “fell ill with pneumonia and diar- rhea; those who were unable to move themselves, or

lacked the energy to do so, lay lethargic in their bunks, benumbed by the cold, and nobody realized when they died.” Levi and his small band of diseased bunkmates clung to life. Only one of the eleven men in their room died: Sómogyi, a fifty-year-old Hungarian chemist. On the night of January 26, after days of torment, he dropped out of his bunk onto the concrete floor, dead from typhus and scarlet fever. Levi and his comrades awoke the next day, ate breakfast, emptied the latrine bucket, and then—only then—carted the body outside. While they were tipping the dead man’s body into a pit—in this “world of death and phantoms”—the Rus- sian horsemen (significantly, four horsemen) arrived. On this day, January 27, 1945, Primo started on yet an- other journey—of almost a year in duration—toward home.
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OST OF THE prisoners in Auschwitz on Janu- ary 18, 1945, were not so fortunate as Levi and the others in his company. In a final act of

wanton cruelty and insanity, the Germans forced the great majority of the surviving inmates—about 56,000 people—out of the camp and transported them, on foot and on rail, toward other camps farther west. Al- though little scholarly work has been conducted on

these “death marches,” the experience forms a cen- tral part of most testimonies given by survivors. For some, the death march was an altogether new level of pain and terror—”worse than all the camp years,” said one survivor.
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All across Poland, Germany, Aus- tria, and Czechoslovakia in the early months of 1945, hundreds of such murderous convoys crawled along the roadways, choking them with the dead and dying. These marches started on a large scale with the evacu- ation of Auschwitz in January and continued right up until the very day of the German surrender. Soon after Auschwitz was emptied, the 47,000 inmates from the Stutthof camp were similarly evacuated. Then in early February, the large camp of Gross-Rosen—where many Auschwitz prisoners had been sent—was emptied; its 40,000 prisoners were pushed ever westward. As the Russians drove into Germany from the East, and the U.S., British, and other Allied forces penetrated deeper into Germany from the west, the entire camp system was thrown into chaos: perhaps 750,000 camp prison- ers were vomited out onto the muddy, battle-scarred roads of central Europe, and herded toward the center of Germany. As many as 250,000 of them died.
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January 18, when this hellish trek began, was a day of “great confusion throughout the camp,” recalled Filip Müller, a survivor of three years in Auschwitz. “Early in

the morning, columns of smoke could be seen rising in all parts of the camp. Quite obviously the SS men were destroying card indexes and other documents.” As the sounds of Russian artillery came closer, “the prisoners were seized by alarm and euphoria at one and the same time.” Formed up into enormous columns, the prison- ers set out at midnight. “ The snow crunched under our feet, a cold wind blew into our faces. We talked about nothing but where they were taking us and what they intended to do with us.”
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The evacuation inevitably brought new torments to the prisoners. The SS guards who oversaw the marching columns beat and frequently killed marchers, espe- cially those who could not keep up with the merciless pace. Eli Wiesel, a skeletal fifteen-year-old boy who had survived seven months in Auschwitz alongside his father, remembered being forced to run the entire way to a rail junction at Gleiwitz—a distance of some thirty miles—without any pause. They were given no food, no water—they ate the snow off the shoulders of the men in front of them—and those who stumbled were shot dead where they lay.
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“As we formed into a ragged column,” remembered Sara Nomberg-Przytyk of her transport of women from Birkenau, “SS men escorted us with dogs on each side.” Amidst the freezing wind could be heard, every few minutes, the crack of shots

as the guards killed another woman. “ The bodies were thrown onto the side of the road. We walked through a valley of death formed by the bodies of the prisoners.” Within a few hours, her “skin was completely peeled from my feet. I could feel the blood swishing around inside my boots.”
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And for those who straggled, in- stant execution. “A few steps ahead of me,” wrote Mar- co Nahon of his convoy, “I see a prisoner collapse by the roadside, completely exhausted. His face is livid. It is easy to see that he cannot walk another step. An SS guard who has seen him approaches and stands before him. Very quietly, he takes his rifle from his shoulder strap, places the barrel a few inches from the poor dev- il’s head, and shoots.”
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Once at the railhead in Gleiwitz, some prisoners were packed onto open train cars; others remained on foot for countless miles of further marching in the bit- ter January cold. They went to various destinations: Gross-Rosen, then on to Buchenwald, Dachau, or Mau- thausen. Riding on the trains, in the bitter cold, was little better than marching on foot, especially because no food of any kind was provided. “ When we came into Czechoslovakia,” recalled a Frenchman, Marcel Stourdze, “the locals threw us bread. That was it; oth- erwise, nothing to eat.” Henry B. recalled that extreme measures were required to survive. “It’s not nice to say,

but you had to urinate on your feet to keep the gan- grene out of your wounds; or if you couldn’t do it you got someone else to do it.” Fred B., who marched from Auschwitz to Gleiwitz and was then shipped in a cat- tle car to Gross-Rosen, recalled that by the time of his arrival in Buchenwald he had endured seven straight days on the train convoy without food. He survived on snow. “After seven days in these cattle cars,” he recalled of his physical deterioration, “you couldn’t recognize your own body. It wasn’t your own body.” Henry F., who had been at the Auschwitz subcamp Blechhammer, es- timated that of the 4,000 who marched out of his camp in mid-January, only 1,500 made it to Gross-Rosen. The rest were shot or died along the way. Of the 56,000 men and women forced out of the Auschwitz camp complex between January 17 and 21, some 15,000 would be dead by the end of the war.
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Why were these prisoners marched across central Eu- rope in these miserable columns, under such extreme duress? Who gave the orders to evacuate the camps, and where were the prisoners supposed to be going? And to what end? After all, if the chief objective of the German leadership had been to fulfill Hitler’s fi- nal wishes and liquidate every remaining Jew in their custody, this could have been carried out in the camps themselves. Why require them to march across Poland

and Germany, often aimlessly, toward other camps that were already being emptied, or toward railheads that were desperately needed for military purposes? And if the idea was to secret the Jews away from the sight of the advancing Allies, why leave so many corpses along the roads on which the Allies were sure to pass in a matter of days? None of these questions lends itself to easy answers.

The evidence, though patchy, suggests that in the last months of the war, the central control and ruthless efficiency that had characterized the operation of the massive camp system and the murder of many millions of people had begun to break down. In the fall of 1944, SS chief Heinrich Himmler began to plan for the dis- mantling of the concentration camps. Yet his concern with the needs of the war industries led him away from a policy of immediate extermination of the remaining prisoners. Healthy prisoners were to be shipped into the Reich to serve as a labor force; the ill and the sick, presumably, would be killed. The earliest evidence for such a plan of general evacuation dates from July 21, 1944, though it does not come from Himmler. The head of the security police for occupied Poland (the General Government, as it was called by the Germans) ordered that prisons be evacuated, their inmates shipped to other concentration camps or, if necessary, killed to

prevent their being liberated. The orders also specified that corpses be disposed of by incineration, thus re- vealing the concern of the retreating Germans to cover up the scale of their crimes.
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Not until late December 1944, with the Red Army rapidly advancing through Poland, were precise evacuation plans issued. The instructions from the gauleiter of Upper Silesia, Fritz Bracht, issued on December 21, 1944, make it clear that the prisoners from Auschwitz were to be transported and redeployed to other labor camps. The evacuation was to be carried out via forced marches, because it was expected that the rail lines and rolling stock would be taken up by military needs. The prisoners would go on foot, and any sign of disruption or resistance was to be put down immediately “with the utmost severity.” Here was a free license to shoot prisoners.
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In mid- January 1945, Himmler gave the order to evacuate all the eastern camps, demanding that “no healthy pris- oners remain in any of the camps.” The former com- mandant of Auschwitz acknowledged that “this was the death sentence for thousands of prisoners.”
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Over the next four months, convoys choked the roads, leav- ing the dead and dying scattered in the ditches of ru- ral Germany. Only with superhuman effort did these marchers survive, after walking mile upon mile along frozen roads, in ill-fitting clothes, under a hail of blows and abuse from sadistic guards. Even then, survival

was no certainty, for once they were herded into camps such as Dachau, Buchenwald, and Belsen, they faced a constant risk of death from typhus, dysentery, or star- vation. It is no wonder, then, that when the first Allied soldiers arrived at the gates of these camps in early April 1945, the scenes they encountered shocked them more than anything they had yet seen in a war filled with death and destruction.

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MERICA’S ENCOUNTER WITH the camps began at Ohrdruf, a small labor camp about thirty miles west of Weimar. This was a subcamp of Buchen-

wald, and though Ohrdruf was small in size, it offered vivid evidence of German atrocities: fetid barracks, torture rooms, piles of burnt bodies. It was not the first camp American soldiers had entered—that was Natz- weiler, in German-occupied Alsasce—but Ohrdruf has particular importance because General Dwight Eisen- hower visited it on April 12, along with Generals George Patton and Omar Bradley. There were almost no survi- vors there, as the camp had been emptied a few days earlier and the SS guards shot the last remaining la- borers. In the yard of the camp, Ike and his generals observed a twisted mass of smoldering, charred bones. Patton explained later that the guards had built “a sort

of mammoth griddle of 60 cm. railway tracks laid on a brick foundation. The bodies were piled on this and they attempted to burn them. The attempt was a bad failure. Actually, one could not help but think of some gigantic cannibalistic barbecue. In the pit itself were arms and legs and portions of bodies sticking out of the green water which partially filled it.” Patton, a man who had seen just about every kind of battlefield hor- ror, dashed behind a shed and vomited.
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It was only the start. About sixty miles to the north, on April 11, American soldiers entered the camp complex at Nordhausen, which housed prisoners working in the subterranean V-1 and V-2 rocket factories. Three thousand corpses lay in disordered heaps on the camp grounds, with a few hundred survivors aimlessly wan- dering among them. Immediately, U.S. Army officers enrolled local townspeople in burial brigades, and over the course of the next few days, under the stern watch of American soldiers, German civilians dug a series of long narrow trenches on a hill overlooking the camp. Then they carted the corpses to the burial site and laid them in these shallow mass graves.
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