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Smoke Over Birkenau [Illustrated Edition]
Smoke Over Birkenau [Illustrated Edition]
Smoke Over Birkenau [Illustrated Edition]
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Smoke Over Birkenau [Illustrated Edition]

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Includes 204 photos, plans and maps illustrating The Holocaust

Arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 for involvement in the resistance, the author spent three years in Birkenau. Severyna Szmaglewska (1916-1992) began writing this book immediately after escaping from an evacuation transport in January 1945, and it is the first account of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and an eloquent and important analysis of the individual experience of modern war. It was ready for print before the end of 1945, after several months of feverish work. In February 1946 the International Tribunal in Nuremberg included it in the material making up the charges against the Nazi perpetrators, and called upon the author to give testimony. Since 1945, Smoke over Birkenau has been reprinted frequently and widely translated. Critics, and three generations of readers, praised it for truthfulness, accuracy, and lasting literary merit: as memories of war-time genocide fade with the passage of time, Szmaglewska’s readers are able to stay in touch with extremes of experience which must never be forgotten. “Smoke over Birkenau is not a book about death or hatred,” one critic wrote. “It is a powerful act of the will to live and a profession of the noblest humanism. The victorious idea of life is woven through every page. Maintaining, cultivating, and instilling in oneself the imperative: You must endure! You must live! – a plan carried out unswervingly despite everything.”-Print ed.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 6, 2015
ISBN9781786255792
Smoke Over Birkenau [Illustrated Edition]

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    The emotional honesty and brute courage of one who experienced and witnessed this evil.

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Smoke Over Birkenau [Illustrated Edition] - Seweryna Szmaglewska

This edition is published by PICKLE PARTNERS PUBLISHING—www.picklepartnerspublishing.com

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Text originally published in 1947 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2015, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

Smoke Over Birkenau

Seweryna Szmaglewska

Translated from the Polish by Jadwiga Rynas

Table Of Contents

Contents

Table Of Contents 4

Foreword 5

Part I — Year 1942 8

Chapter 1 — arbeit...arbeit...arbeit... 8

Chapter II — it is only the grippe 23

Chapter III — delousing day 42

Chapter IV — the humor of chief efinger 53

Part II — Year 1943 69

Chapter V — Kommando 117 69

Chapter VI — Sunday 84

Chapter VII — an important visitor is expected 90

Chapter VIII — to freedom 97

Chapter IX — s.k. 107

Chapter X — the new camp 118

Chapter XI — alegri from sunny greece 126

Chapter XII — the battlefield 133

Part III — Year 1944 157

Chapter XIII — the camp is waiting 157

Chapter XIV — the cyclone 161

Chapter XV — laughter or fear? 176

Chapter XVI — dream of freedom 183

Chapter XVII — nach deutschland 198

Chapter XVIII — liquidation 207

Part IV — Year 1945 217

Chapter XIX — january 1945 217

Chapter XX — epilogue 221

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 225

Images Of The Holocaust 226

Views of the Shoah 227

Transportation 254

The Ghettos 261

The Einsatzgruppen 296

Mauthausen-Gusen 304

The Aktion Reinhardt Camps 314

Bełżec 314

Treblinka 329

Sobibor 335

Majdanek 340

Chelmno 349

Auschwitz-Birkenau 357

Dachau 381

Ravensbrück 389

The Architects of Destruction 393

Heinrich Himmler 393

Reinhard Heydrich 403

Adolf Eichmann 412

Josef Mengele 415

Maps 417

Foreword

UP TO JANUARY 18, 1945, a total of about five million people were burned in the crematories of Oswiecim{1} and Birkenau{2}. Of this number more than three million were Jews, poisoned by gas or the victims of epidemics. The balance were Aryans—Poles (arrested by the Gestapo or participants in the Warsaw uprising of 1944); Russians; Yugoslavs; Czechs; English; Dutch; French; Belgians; Italians; Ukrainians; Estonians; German criminals; children of all nationalities, either brought to the concentration camps or born there; and gypsies. A whole camp of gypsy families was taken to the gas chamber. These figures are only approximate. They were given out at the time of the liquidation of the camp by the people working in the Political Department of Oswiecim.

My long stay in the camp (1942-1945) and the variety of work I performed gave me a chance to fathom many of its secrets. The most secret matters were handled by the prisoners. Through their hands, perfunctorily and laboriously performing what they were ordered to perform, passed the registration of the living and of those who were sent directly from the trains to death, without undergoing the routine of tattooing and registration. The indescribable chaos and the impossibility of establishing the identity of the living and dead caused the introduction of tattooing. This was a great tactical blunder on the part of the camp authorities, because today it can be established by these figures what a small percentage of Oswiecim prisoners remained alive. Although all the papers were destroyed—carloads of Todesmeldungen (death certificates) were burnt by the prisoners—as long as the last number in the files is known, it is very easy to figure out how many died in Oswiecim.

Hundreds of thousands of people entered the camp. Where are they now? Only a few thousand left the camp. The Germans did not stop to think that each number pricked into a prisoner’s arm became a document. By tattooing, milestones were erected of thousands, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. Let us try to call them today for one more general roll call. Let us try to range them in lines of five abreast and figure out how many out of each thousand escaped death —I know that the resulting figure would be appallingly low. The few of us would stand, as a living tragic document—as so many separate links of a big chain of people deprived of life—preserved by some freak of fate.

Today the barracks are empty in Oswiecim and Birkenau. It was an accident that the hasty liquidation of the camp was interrupted. The plan of liquidation foresaw a complete erasure of all tracks of the most bloody part of the Oswiecim camp—Birkenau. If the site of the barracks and crematorium were overgrown with grass, it would perhaps be easier to cleanse this matter before Europe and the entire world. But things happened differently. The Red Army raced forward like fire at an unexpectedly rapid tempo. The camp was taken by surprise.

Today may be pointed out the exact places where blood flowed most abundantly. (Is there one inch of ground where blood did not flow?) Although in 1944 gardens were made, flowers planted and concerts organized, this did not erase from our memory the sight of naked corpses lying in monstrous piles by the barracks. It did not erase the memory of selections, as a result of which the old, sick and infirm were dragged to Block 25, the block of death. Too long were the hours of agony of those ill of typhus and dysentery, lying in the mud, to be ever forgotten. General roll calls told too obviously what a small percentage remained alive. Among the dead were artists, people of great talents and genius, people great in the past and potentially great in the future. From these many deaths, from these horrible human hecatombs, from every pair of expiring eyes a numb entreaty arose, the last testament of the dying. This testament remained in the memory of all those who yet lived and widened the walls of the hearts; it seemed that it would break the wires and open the gates, that it would cry to the entire world, and that that cry would reach the free nations, the freedom-loving peoples.

Few of us return from Oswiecim. When, on that memorable day in January 1945, the gates of the camp were opened wide and thousands of people were hastily taken out under a heavy escort; when a several-mile-long procession of beggars, bent in misery, moved along the trek Oswiecim-Gross Rosen; when that procession went along the Silesian roads, leaving here and there in the snow the dark figure of a dead body, finished off by an SS man—the people from neighboring towns and villages stopped in amazement. From the thresholds of the houses, from afar, afraid to get too near this ominous road, they raised their hands and made the sign of the cross over the passing people.

Is it possible, they cried, that there were so many thousands of people in Oswiecim? Can it be true?

The wretched crawlers were not allowed to say a word, to stop before these Silesians and cry:

No, this is not true. Not this many thousand people were in Oswiecim. There were many, many more. Those who walk here are only a handful; these are what are left. The majority of the survivors have already been deported to the interior of Germany; they were being deported during the whole of the last year.

Today, while I write these words, the aching feet of my home-coming companions still toil along the unknown roads of Germany. They are on the move all the time. Through the noise of life and through the silence of loneliness their heavy, weary step is heard.

My story tells of only one fragment of the gigantic machine of death that was Oswiecim. I will give only the data of what I observed or what I myself endured directly. The events described by me took place in Birkenau (Oswiecim II). To avoid any misunderstanding, I wish to state that I do not intend in any way to exaggerate the importance of the facts or to change them for propaganda’s sake. Some things need no exaggeration. All that I will write here I am prepared to testify before any tribunal.

These are the experiences and observations of one person alone—a drop in the vast, immeasurable ocean.

Without doubt there will be others who return alive from Oswiecim and who will talk. There will be others who will come back from many other camps.

But the majority will never return and will never talk.

Part I — Year 1942

Chapter 1 — arbeit...arbeit...arbeit...

DARK NIGHT. More than a thousand women are asleep on strange scaffoldings, in one great room. A thick darkness, filled with breathing and exhalations. Even the blankets which you never see by daylight seem a part of that darkness. You wrap them around you as closely as possible, grateful for the little warmth they give your exhausted bodies. In spite of yourself you try to guess their previous course and you loathe them. Huddled-up bodies, at times ten crowded into two square yards, grow benumbed on the hard bedding. A brief awakening, a sudden rending of the screen of dreams, the painful consciousness that this is Oswiecim. You huddle closer to your sleeping neighbor, with an insane joy if it is someone dear, with depression if it is someone alien or hostile. Sleep, the faithful ally, falls quickly over the mortally tired people, deadening all sensations. Those who are able to sleep sleep hard as though with a condensed sleep, absorbing the rest with all their nervous systems. The nights are short in a concentration camp. And while you lie immovably in the dark cavern of your bed you must throw off the weariness of the past day and find the necessary strength for the next.

In the silence of the sleeping barracks coughs resound continually in a multi-voiced cascade. Sometimes someone screams in her sleep, uttering with horror the German words which terrorize her during the day.

Not one of the sleeping women hears the prolonged whistles for rising which resound simultaneously from several points of the camp. But already the guards who eagerly perform their duties by day or night let their presence be known. A gloomy, whiny "Aufstehen! (Up!) echoes through the entire barracks, pauses over those asleep while the guards strike their cudgels on the boards of each bed. It is completely dark. From somewhere in the depth of the beds comes a suppressed moan. Someone just awakened and moved her ailing body for the first time that night. Awakening is the hardest moment—no matter whether these are your first days in the camp, days full of despair, where every morning you relive the painful shock, or whether you have been here long, very long, where each morning reminds you that you lack strength to begin a new day, a day identical with all the previous days. The nagging Aufstehen!" resounds uninterruptedly. At last the irritated voice of the night guard departs from the German of which she knows only that one ill-pronounced word and changes into Polish, which she speaks freely and fluently:

"Get up, you filthy dung, you damned intelligentsia, get up with you! Lo-o-s! Aufstehen!"

This time the cudgel does not stop on the boards, it penetrates deeper, striking the legs, arms and heads of the sleeping women. Commotion follows. The awakened women rise submissively. Their wandering hands search in the darkness for their shoes hidden under the strawsacks. Jogging each other they put on those items of clothing which they took off for the night. From the lairs near the walls the women begin to squeeze into the narrow passages, which are already overcrowded. The barracks can hold so many people only when they stay on top of those platforms called koys (in male camps, buksas). As soon as they climb down and stand on the floor they can find room only with the greatest of difficulty. But the barracks is not the place for them during the day. They only sleep there, leave it a few minutes after the rising whistles are blown and return to it late at night.

Birkenau in 1942. A marshy plain surrounded by electric wires. There are no roads or paths between the blocks. The entire camp has no water. There is no sewage disposal, a condition which prevailed to the very end. Garbage, excrement and rubbish lay around, foul and rotten. No bird ever flies low over Birkenau though, God knows, the prisoners strain their eyes to search the skies for them during the roll calls, which last for hours. Guided by smell or instinct, the birds avoid the place. Birkenau does not exist officially. Its name never appears in an address. It is Oswiecim II. From the way it is built you can see that it was not originally intended to hold people for any length of time. It is a kind of precrematorium waiting room, calculated for twenty to thirty thousand people. And this is how it originated:

On a meadow surrounded by wires, two identical groups of barracks were erected in the winter of 1941-42: fifteen brick barracks and fifteen wooden barracks. They had neither floors nor ceilings, but were covered with roofs through which snow and rain freely penetrated. Signs that hung on the doors proclaimed the buildings to be Pferdeställe (stables) and gave instructions for the treatment of diseased horses. In some of the barracks these signs were left hanging to the last day—as were the iron rings placed in the walls at the level of horses’ heads.

In that part of the camp Death moved in before the inmates did; many Oswiecim prisoners fell in the mud of Birkenau and died while working on the construction.

At first the wooden barracks were inaccessible to Poles, and the picture of Birkenau in 1942 is that of the brick barracks alone. Studying the structure of the interior of one of the brick barracks one can easily reconstruct its original appearance. There are four rows of stalls, like small cells, with no ceilings, separated by thin walls two yards high. Two rows adjoin in the center, and the other two are lined against the outside walls. Thus two narrow passages are formed for the attendant who, as he goes along, has a horse on either side of him. There are more than fifty such stalls in each brick building. And the whole place gets but a meager light from four small windows in the roof and from small windows in the outside walls. The stables were made over for human beings in a very simple way:

In each stall were erected two wooden platforms, one about a yard from the ground, the other a yard above the first. Each platform was built by nailing together two doors brought from near-by houses. This arrangement provides more than one hundred fifty sleeping bunks in each barracks, three in each stall: one on the ground, the other two on wooden platforms.

On each bunk lay two strawsacks stuffed with nine pounds of shavings or of reeds from near-by ponds (as prescribed by camp rules, on the day when new). Each bunk is occupied by six to ten persons, which means that eighteen to thirty people now sleep in a place designed for one horse. At times, when there is a great influx of new arrivals, one barracks, which is actually one room, is made to hold twelve hundred people.

The interior of the barracks reminds one of a huge chicken coop or rabbit warren. The lowest koys are the worst. They are wet and ‘cold, because of the earthen floor which on rainy days gets so trampled that the shoes sink deep into it. They are dark, because scores of trampling legs are continually in the way of light. They are too low for a woman to sit erect. At night they are attacked by packs of rats. The middle koys are almost as miserable, but have somewhat more light. Although the muddy boot of the woman climbing to the upper koy in the darkness often strikes the head of the person sleeping in the middle koy, at least the strawsacks are dry. The upper koys are light and have enough air. There you not only can sit erect, but can kneel or even stand up. Although on rainy days these advantages may disappear in the face of the leaking roof, nevertheless the upper koys are generally considered to be the best. No artificial light is provided in the brick blocks, and women returning from work at night crawl into their lairs in darkness. In darkness they search for their blankets, and in darkness they take off their clothes. How hard it is—no food packages from home were allowed at that time—to afford to buy a candle from those who work in the warehouses! How much bread or margarine you must deny yourself to be able at last in the evening to stand a candle by your side, take off your shirt, and in this light proceed to catch the lice. Some women are able to do it without light, by touch, but the others must content themselves with fishing out only the large lice while the small ones and the nits escape.

Dark cage-like lairs—dim flickering light from the sparsely placed candles—nude, emaciated women, blue with cold, their shaved heads huddled into scrawny shoulders, arched over a heap of filthy rags, feverishly catching the vermin and cautiously killing them on the edge of the koys—this is the picture of the barracks in 1942. Dirty garments, never washed for lack of water, just rid of vermin.

The women fight the dirt. Special methods are invented, perfected and generally adopted. But the struggle is unavailing. As I said, on each bunk sleep several women, lying next to each other. Even if after countless efforts by common labor, they succeed in ridding their blankets and clothing of the pests and to bring their bed to the status of relative cleanness, all their work becomes futile the moment a Zugang of new inmates arrives from another barracks. If they bring new lice and scabies, so common in the camp, all the others sharing their blankets are afflicted and the work has to be started again from the beginning.

In the two passages between the scaffoldings of bunks the night guard, assisted by the blokowa (block supervisor) and the sztubowa (room overseer) now shoves and prods the prisoners toward the doors, using hands and clubs. The dense mob proceeds slowly and unwillingly, loath to go out into the damp cold of the night. The women move on, half asleep, half conscious, head touching head, shoulder touching shoulder. You cannot tell who walks beside you under the cover of dark rags. From the threshold comes the gurgle of mud churned by many feet. The light of the stars and the moon, dimmed by the glare coming from the wires around the camp, silhouettes the bent bodies of the moving women, heavily plodding through the mud with feet wrapped in rags.

Sometimes a face appears for a moment in the light to disappear again in the shadow of the night. Some faces have in their features an absolute stillness and a strange tranquillity, as if their owners had died long before and their faces were coagulated into a speechless sorrow. These can never be forgotten. The features of others are distorted by passion, wrath, anger. These you try to forget.

Those whose strength has not entirely failed and whose feet are not too swollen have still time, before the morning roll call, to run for water. There is a great scarcity of water, during this period, in the entire camp of Birkenau. It is better not to venture into the kitchen or the disinfecting barracks, which are always full of new arrivals, if you do not want your skull cracked by the bludgeon of an SS man. One faucet behind the toilet supplies all the available water for fifteen brick and fifteen wooden barracks. It works best in the early morning, before the roll-call whistle. (Even if it is occasionally turned on during the day you are not there to use it. You are away at work.) If you get up early enough, if you are lucky and the water has been actually turned on that day, if you can squeeze through the mob of hundreds or thousands of women, if you can avoid the club of the German Capo—you may, at best, obtain a cupful of water in your bowl. Now—if the crushing mob does not spill it for you—you may do with it as you please. You may drink it, or wash your clothes, or wash yourself—whatever you like.

Over the large area shadowy figures move in the white light of the electric wires to and from the toilets, painfully dragging their feet through the ankle-deep mud. Sometimes a woman falls and tries in vain to rise by her own strength. Falling and rising, she becomes ever weaker, until at last an attack of pain forces her to remain where she is. Ghostlike figures lie here and there, sometimes far off by the wires, sometimes underfoot so that you must avoid stepping on them. Someone moans in the darkness. In the dim light you cannot see who are dead or who call for help.

But the block supervisor and the room leader have already begun to form the lines for the roll call. Most of them have no conception of physical training, of drill or even of arithmetic. Therefore the arranging and counting take an unbelievably long time. Coffee has been distributed in the meantime; this is our only food before a day of toil. Hands numb from cold eagerly seize the tin bowl with its drop of black liquid in the bottom. The coffee has long ceased to steam, yet your trembling lips search for a little warmth, your hands cup the bowl for what warmth there is.

The stars begin to pale, but no dawn appears in the east. After counting the people in front of their block, the room leaders next bring out those who have fever or are weakened by dysentery and place them either on stools or on the ground. Finally they carry out the dying and lay them in front of the block to be counted. The limp human figures stretched out on the wet ground, with blankets carelessly thrown over them, hold the eyes of the healthy, recently arrived women. Someone explains in a low voice:

See! The one they are bringing now is Mrs. Pietkiewicz, the wife of a captain in the Polish armed forces. She will die any day now. And that is Mrs. Zahorska, the writer. It is the women of that kind who suffer the most. There is Dr. Garlicka, the gynaecologist from Warsaw; next to her is Mrs. Grocholska of the Polish Radio Broadcasting Company.

No use turning your eyes away—you see the same sight in front of all the other barracks, everywhere. So you just stare ahead and think of the fever that will strike you as it has struck down the others. Someone murmurs, as if talking to herself:

Isn’t it good though that Birkenau is so surrounded by secrecy that the children do not know how their mothers die?

Through the twilight, the barracks with the women ranged before them, five abreast, gradually come to view. Mist from the neighboring bogs shrouds everything. It wraps itself around the entire camp, causing an illusion of a lonely island in the middle of an ocean of fog. Thousands of people are visible before the barracks, but beyond the wires there is no one over an area of many miles. From time to time, above the mist, a red jet of flame bursts from the crematorium. A sense of emptiness and isolation creeps slowly over us as the morning mist draws near the wires and begins its struggle with the light. Here and there on the wires a blood-red lamp glows, a witness to the death-bringing charge of the current. It is like a signal, like a bait thrown by the hand of Death. Watching it brings restlessness. Suddenly a small object draws away from the dark mass before the barracks and slowly moves toward the red signal. In the mist you can hardly tell from a distance that it is a human being. As if hypnotized by an alien will, and completely succumbing, the figure moves slowly forward without turning or hesitating. The flow of electricity through the wires makes them look like frosty silver strands stretched evenly between posts of concrete.

Between the wires and the ditch that runs around the entire camp there is a narrow strip of ground, perhaps half a yard wide, never trampled by any feet.

The camp ground is crust-like and hardened from thousands of milling feet, but here on this narrow strip grass grows luxuriantly, covered by dew every morning. In the winter the snow lies there immaculately white. This strip of land waits for any who have lost the hope that freedom may ever come to them, for any who choose to leave by way of this clean and narrow path. Already the dim figure of the woman is near, it has passed the little dirt bridge and has stopped below the red-glowing lamp. No doubt she hears the mysterious singing of the wires, which constantly hum and vibrate. She throws up her arms and falls. A shot from the guardhouse ... her body hangs on the wires like a dark, limp rag on a bramble. All is silent. The morning roll call has not yet ended. Nobody ran to save her, to prevent the suicide. Whoever would have followed her to that strip of death, without express orders from the SS man, would have fallen too, pierced by a bullet.

From elsewhere in the camp come similar shots that testify to similar suicides. The morning chill is becoming unbearable. As far as the eye can reach, throughout the entire camp grounds, the figures standing in the fog cower, stamp their feet or jump about to keep warm. But the block supervisor brings the worst news:

The roll call does not tally. (In 1942 the roll call seldom tallied.)

The block supervisor starts to recount and the SS women to verify. Then they go to the wires to count the dead and add them to their figures, while a group of Capos and Ober-capos, led by the Lager Aelteste (camp senior) go in search of those who did not appear at roll call. For three-quarters of an hour, sometimes for an hour, from the moment the discrepancy is discovered, these guards are busy dragging from various dark recesses of the night, from unfrequented corners behind the blocks, from ditches and depressions in the ground, all those wretched beings whose only desire was to die quietly, who, with the remnants of their vanishing strength, found a secluded spot to exhale their last breath. But it is not to be. They are forced to appear, once more, at roll call. Pushed, cursed at, they drag themselves through the encampment to where the others have been standing for such a long time.

A wretched creature whose mind is dimmed by illness is led out. She is unable to tell in which of the fifteen brick barracks she is living and in which formation she should appear at roll call. She cannot tell her number or name (in 1942 numbers were not yet tattooed on the arms) .

And the roll still stands in the entire camp. The benumbed women pray: God, let someone recognize that sick woman. No thoughts are left, only that prayer.

The noise coming from the male camp tells us that the men are already leaving for work. And indeed on the road, bordered on both sides by the electric wires of the two camps, a group appears. From the fog strains of music are heard. The emaciated figures in grayish, striped garments form a strangely somber contrast with the gay music they play. As they stand in the cold, huddled together in a flock and playing music before the day has as yet actually begun, they look more like the fog itself than human beings. At that moment the gate of the male camp opens and the men step out on the road, five abreast, in a solid column. At the end of the road, near a small house, SS men are waiting. The men walk evenly to the rhythm of the music. The attentive Capo with a yellow band on his arm shouts loudly:

"Links! links! links!—und—links! (To the left, left—and—left)."

Silent and quiet they march, deprived of all will, without eagerness—and without protest. The first rows are already close to the SS men and new ones still emerge from the gate. Now the Capo tears the cap off his head and shouts to the marching column:

"Muetzen ab! (Hats off!)"

There is something ignominious in the sight of the shaved heads of the defenseless men marching docilely before a handful of armed Germans; there is something repellent in the attitude of the Capo, with his cap pressed against his striped trousers, standing at attention and reporting to the SS men. Another gate is opened and the column passes through. Another column ... another Capo ... once more rows of five ... once more left ... the same scene re-enacted. Like the others, the men are gray and thin, their shaved heads protruding motionless. Like the others they hold their hands close to their trousers. Their robot-like movements inspire awe. They march like some huge, dead army on parade—they march on—more men and more men appear. How easy to count them—five in a row. One thousand go by—two—ten thousand and they are still coming. If your father or brother or son marched there, you would not know him, so young do the old men look because of their frail figures and so old do young boys look because of their lined faces. All equally rigid and dead, they move on continuously without a break in ranks, they move on past the playing band, past the SS men, past the guardhouse, beyond the gate, beyond the wires, out into the field.

The stars paled long ago, the sky grayed, and in the east glows the first rosy light bringing the nostalgic thought that’ there, to the northeast of this place, is Warsaw, is home with all the dear people. Will any of them ever understand the mysteries of Oswiecim?

It is growing lighter, each object is now distinctly outlined, the mist has completely disappeared to reveal the vista of vast meadows beyond the wires. The rosy reflection of the dawn outlines with a delicate hue the immovable shape of the woman lying across the wires. Her right arm raised upward is caught on a barbed wire and remains thus, stretched toward the sky in a gesture of prayer. The head dangling inertly backwards shows the face of a young girl. It is livid from the electric charge.

The subdued camp, coagulated into motionless groups of women for the roll call, is finally stirred to life by the longed-for voice of the whistle. It releases a Babel of many tongues. It is time to leave the camp, a time of undescribable confusion. Hoarse Capos and Anweisers (group leaders) race about, collecting people for work. Above this tumult resounds the unceasing barking of the dogs which are waiting with the SS men at the gate to take the people to work.

There is one group in the camp which never leaves the gates and thus never experiences the hardships of toiling in the field.

Mrs. Monika Galicyna is responsible for this group, apparently the only Polish woman Anweiser at this time. The red armband is her sign of authority. All those who are no longer capable of hard labor strive to work with Monika. Every morning after roll call Monika takes her group to the warehouse to get tools. On the way more women continually attach themselves to her group begging her with their eyes to let them stay. Monika never refuses and her group is therefore always too numerous. In the warehouse she gazes out the window to give her women the chance to get warm under the roof, and only when an SS uniform appears close by does Monika say:

We must go.

Armed with spades, brooms, wheelbarrows, they start out to clean up the camp. A score of sick women hide away every day. They know that Monika will not beat them or make them work, and that she watches incessantly for intrusion from the direction of the barracks housing the block leader’s office. Occasionally she turns to the women and says calmly:

"Please! Pretend to work, the Oberaufseherin (head supervisor) is coming."

Monika was the first to prove by her behavior that a camp official can make life easier for her companions and can help them. Unfortunately, very few of the later officials acted as Monika did. But those few who were clement did a great deal toward improving the lot of the prisoners.

Actually this small section protected by Monika almost does not count. The majority of the women must labor outside in the so-called Aussenarbeit (field work) .

Rows of miserable creatures move through the gate. They march rigidly, mechanically, past the formidable blond Head Supervisor Mandel, who condemns to death without moving an eyelash. They pass Raportführer (recording officer) Taube, who has a special knack of unexpectedly planting his fist in a woman’s face with such a formidable blow that even the strongest topples instantly over. They pass Aufseherin Drechsler, a Pole-baiter. That hatred is written all over her degenerate face, with its ugly protruding jaws. They pass Aufseherin Hasse, who hits you in the face first and then starts a conversation. They pass Lager Aelteste Bubi, a woman with a long criminal record. Her appearance and behavior are a perplexing mixture of the male and the female.

The only wish of the women marching past these Germans is to avoid their glances, to avoid attracting their attention in any way. The only desire is to be but an insignificant part of the moving caterpillar. Those who walk in the middle of the column are safer from the clubs of the SS men raised to count the passing women and frequently dropped, for the slightest reason, on the heads of those who walk on the outside.

At both sides of the gate, as if at the portals of the mythical Hades, great dogs of various breeds howl, bark, foam with rage, and strain at their leashes. These dogs are trained to attack people when released. A few SS men, their number depending on the size of the column, leave the gate and fall in behind each column. They carry submachine guns and lead the dogs.

It is daybreak, but the sun is not yet visible, only pink streaks of dawn. The trees and the tufts of grass are covered with silvery frost. In a roadside shed stands a German guard wrapped from head to toe in a huge sheepskin. He draws his fur collar about his ears. He beats his sides with his heavily gloved hands, and his heavy boots stamp briskly. Yes, the October morning is quite chilly.

The bare legs of the marching women grow blue with cold, the feet painfully dragging the heelless wooden sabots grow numb, the bent backs shiver. The lucky woman wears a sweater, but the majority wear only a thin dress made of ticking, with short sleeves. Even the closely shaved heads are cold when the wind lifts the ends of kerchiefs tied under the chin, German fashion.

The sunrise finds everybody moving to work: from the section adjoining the city, which gives the camp the name of Oswiecim, from all the gates of the well-hidden Birkenau, three miles from Oswiecim, move long columns, all equally hungry and chilled. Some go to work near by, others go farther, some go very far. On days when walking is not made too burdensome by the cold, mud or clodded earth, this is the chance to think freely.

Is there one among them who did not start her day by thinking: How many more days? When time passed and brought no change, days was replaced by weeks and later by months. Years passed and still the rising sun greeted the columns of grayish striped figures on their way to work. Then the heart lacked the courage to ask: When?

One large column of Polish women turns to the left and stops at the last corner house of the men’s camp, which later was to house the preliminary quarantine. There, three chiefs choose the required number of women for each task. One group remains right there to load small conveyer cars; a second proceeds much farther to the newly built barracks; a third follows a

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