Berlin: The Topography of Terror

Tomorrow morning we will leave early for a flight to Brussels and from there to Toronto, regaining the six hours we lost on the way here two and a half weeks ago. I walked by Checkpoint Charley today, just a couple of blocks from our hotel. It was a very crowded area with many tour buses parked about its location on Friedrichstrasse. Two blocks west of there we visited a large area museum called The Topography of Terror. It is on the location of the former buildings that housed the offices of the Gestapo and the SS. There people were held, tortured, beaten, and executed from the earliest days of Nazi power. It now houses a large, partially outdoor, partially indoor exhibit detailing the rise to power, the years of domination, and the final days of the Nazi regime, including material about later trials of war criminals and their results. The Centre has had a number of exhibits over the years and has published a book on each. I came away with four significantly heavy tomes on different aspects of the Nazi years, adding to the other volumes that I’ve been lugging around during our tour. The Centre and the exhibits are most impressive and powerful. Like at other places that we have visited, there were many people taking the two to three hours (at least) needed to go through the whole place. Again the mood was reflective and the atmosphere quiet. We saw people our age but more often younger people were there – not school groups, just young people with friends or partners. They wanted to know about the history and they were taking it seriously.

Though our journey is over, I intend to continue this blog about the Nazis and the Holocaust, using the materials that I have accumulated as well as other resources that I have sent for. As mentioned in an earlier post, when I get my photographs organized, I will post them under another blog title, the link for which I will post.

Berlin: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

We returned by train to Berlin yesterday, to the same hotel AND even to the same room! On the way we chatted with a young woman from the Silesian area of the Czech Republic. (Silesia again is divided between Poland and the Czech lands.) She is currently a student of economics at a university in Potsdam, close to Berlin. She said that under communism many people in her country became lazy, got used to things not being great but at least predictable, so they focussed on family life and didn’t bother with personal ambition. It is different for her generation who must stir themselves if they want to survive in the new, more competitive world. When I mentioned that we had visited Auschwitz, she made a series of strange (though charming) faces to indicate the repulsiveness of this idea. She said that she was once planning to go – whether with friends or with her school, she didn’t say, but her mother discouraged her from the idea, saying that it would be too much for her. It might very well have been. It’s a quite overwhelming experience.

After we settled into our present and former room, we walked over to the massive Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe which is close to the Brandenburg Gate. It has two components: the first is external – a 19,000 sq. meter open area upon which 2711 concrete blocks have been placed – called The Field of Stelae, representing those who were murdered in the Holocaust. Underneath the memorial is an information centre that houses a powerful permanent exhibit giving both an overview of the numerical and geographical dimensions of the Holocaust as well as delving into the personal and family histories of 15 different Jewish families from throughout the areas of Nazi domination. The exhibit also records the capture and murder of the Roma and Sinti peoples. As well the foundation of this memorial is responsible for the Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime. Many visitors made their way through the different rooms of the exhibit along with us. The atmosphere was entirely quiet, each person absorbed in his or her own interaction with the photographs and historical notes throughout. The experience was at once powerful and meditative.

At each of the sites that we have visited I have been able to purchase otherwise difficult to access literature about the Holocaust. At the Memorial yesterday I bought a book entitled KL Auschwitz Seen by the SS, first published in 1970 but recently re-released. It contains three documents authored by former SS men all of whom worked at Auschwitz: Rudolph Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz for most of its existence, Johann Paul Kremer, a medical doctor who was assigned to Auschwitz in August, 1942 but who stayed only about three months, and, Perry Broad, who volunteered for the SS in 1941 and acted as a guard at Auschwitz from then until the camp was abandoned in early 1945 before the Soviet takeover. The Hoss document is a part of the autobiography written by him before his execution by hanging in 1947 at Auschwitz 1. (The site chosen stood between the beautiful house where he had lived with his wife and five children and the initial gas chamber that he had set up in 1941. His gallows still stand on the site; we saw it during our tour.) The part of Hoss’ autobiography reprinted in this edition concerns only his period at Auschwitz. Dr Kremer kept a personal diary during his three months at the camp which was found by British after the war when he was arrested. Broad, when also arrested by the British, gave to them an account that he had written, describing the crimes of the SS at Auschwitz.

A foreword to this set of documents is written by Jerzy Rawicz, himself a prisoner at Auschwitz and at Mauthausen during the war. Afterward his work focussed mainly on Polish-German questions and on the investigation of Nazi crimes in Poland. He was the author of a collection of Auschwitz stories and of a book about Rudolph Hoss. Rawicz stresses the importance of Hoss’ recollections as the most detailed summary of much of the organization and functioning of the camp throughout its history. At the same time he underscores the fact that Hoss’ account, though “open and frank” consistently places himself in a good light – the tortures and terrible crimes committed on a day to day basis were the result of men under him who refused to go along with his desire to treat the prisoners more humanely in order to get them to work more efficiently. The tone of his reminiscences continually has the effect of blaming the victims. Rawicz notes that many commentators looking at the veracity of Hoss’ statements seemed to have been taken in by his seemingly forthcoming “confession.” Rawicz summarizes Hoss’ attitude in the following manner: “In other words – Soviet prisoners were killing their own countrymen, Jews were murdering other Jews, and the Poles were murdering other Poles. These lies and slanders of Hoss, just like the lie that it needed only courage to escape from Auschwitz, have so far been missed by the commentators.”

As I continue through this set of documents, I will write about facts that they might contain that shed further light on the world that was Auschwitz.

Auschwitz 5: Sonderkommandos

Our train from Prague to Dresden past along the beautiful Elbe River, scenic in all directions. Across from us sat a young man, Sebastian, a German student engineer who had just spent six months in The Czech Republic on an internship. We talked with him for some time about many things, including about the way people his age in Germany think about or deal with things related to the Nazis and WWII. He said that as students at every age and grade they were taught about the Nazis and about the atrocities that had occurred – perhaps too much he said. He said that of course, these things were terrible and we must know about them and be careful that they cannot happen again. At the same time he doesn’t feel any responsibility for them as an individual, nor does he think of his present day nation as responsible for them. His grandparents, who were in their early teens at the beginning of the war, did not like to talk about it so he knew little from them. One grandmother achieved a rank within the Hitler Youth which gave her the right to carry the German flag in parades. Her father who was a long-time communist would not allow her to bring it into the house. Luckily for the family they lived in a small out-of-the-way place so her father was never denounced and arrested as a communist.

At the end of the war Sebastian’s grandparents suffered a fate common to many of the German people living in Silesia, a large area in the southwest of present-day Poland. Silesia over the centuries was part of Germany, Poland, and the current Czech republic, either whole or divided. There was a large Germanic population living there at the beginning of the war, many families, like Sebastian’s, for generations. This area was one of the first overrun by the Germans in their blitzkrieg offensive in September, 1939. In 1945 the Soviet’s advance through Silesia ruthlessly punished all Germans in its path; thousands, perhaps tens of thousands were raped and murdered. Ethnic Germans fled when possible; many of those who remained were forced to relocate to Germany as by the Potsdam Conference, this area was ceded to Poland, now an “independent” country, though about to become a Soviet satellite. Sebastian was aware that his grandparents had suffered greatly from the Soviet advance and their relocation into a devastated Germany. Speaking of the current situation, he spoke about the sensitivity of the German people and press to categorizing any group in terms of racial bias. It simply cannot happen as international opinion would immediately be aroused. During his time in the Czech Republic he was aware from different indications of the fairly open discrimination against the Roma people there, something he said could not happen in Germany now.

I have been reading another book about the Sonderkommandos that I purchased at Auschwitz 2: Birkenau. It is the transcript of a number of interviews done by Jan Poludniak of Henryk Mandelbaum, a former Sonderkommando survivor of Auschwitz. Jan Poludniak was born in 1926 in Katowice, the main city of Silesia in Poland. He and his family were evicted from their home to central Poland during the German occupation. In 1944 he was held as a hostage at the concentration camp Plazow, near Krakow. After the war he worked as a journalist and was the originator of a Polish centre for the recording of Auschwitz ex-prisoners testimonies. Henryk Mandelbaum was born in 1922 to a Jewish family in a village in Poland. When his family was forced into a nearby ghetto, Mandelbaum managed to elude the German troops and with the help of neighbours stay hidden until 1944. In 1943 his family was transported from their ghetto to Auschwitz where they were all murdered. On April 10, 1944 he was himself captured and sent to Auschwitz; there he was chosen to work in the crematoria. In January, 1945 he was able to escape from the forced march of many thousands of prisoners leaving Birkenau; he was protected by Polish people and survived the war.

Mandelbaum remained in Poland afterward and gave testimony at the trials of the war criminals from Auschwitz. He often visited the Auschwitz memorial museum and would talk with groups and individuals about his experiences. At one of the bookstores at Auschwitz 1 we talked with a woman who had worked there for the past 13 years. She showed us an album of photographs of Auschwitz survivors who had returned to visit the camp, now a museum and memorial. She also had begun a few years ago to collect their autographs in a special book. Tears welled up as she spoke with us about those people and how she loved them; they are her special friends, she said.  As her own family is not especially interested in Auschwitz or its survivors, when she dies (she might be about 40 years old now), she said she wanted to be sure that her collection of photographs and pictures went to someone who truly cared about what had happened there. Mandelbaum, who died in 2008, and visited often, was undoubtedly one of her “special friends.”

It’s quite different to read Mandelbaum’s words and those of Nyiszli. Nyiszli was an educated and sophisticated person who, one sensed reading his book, elaborated some details that shone a good light upon himself. Mandelbaum, who unlike Nyiszli, actually did the strenuous and horror-filled work of escorting newly arrived victims to the undressing room and later of disposing of their corpses left in the gas chambers, spoke simply and with little evasion to his interviewer. He acknowledged that once he realized what he was asked to do by his jailers that he might have refused and joined the others being taken to be murdered. But he was young and he wanted to live. He believed that his sacrifice would be meaningless because the SS would simply designate someone else to take his place. He, like Nyiszli worked in the crematoria area during those extremely busy months of 1944 when the SS was struggling to kill as many Jews as possible before the Soviets pushed their way west. During that time almost a half a million Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz, along with the populations of many ghettos like Lodz and Theresienstadt. His interviews confirm much of Nyiszli’s testimony about the period but also differs in some ways. It was true that the Sonderkommando units were themselves killed by the SS guards from time to time but usually during slower periods when there was less demand for their services. As they could not be allowed back into the regular camp population, they would be murdered, always in an unexpected manner and time in order to avoid their resistance.

When he first began working at the crematoria he and his team of workers did not live in the area set aside above one crematorium as did the group that Nyiszli wrote about. Rather they were returned after their shifts to a special spot in one of the regular camps at Birkenau. They were separate from the other prisoners but had some opportunities to communicate with them. In this way he met with briefly and agreed to help a Polish prisoner whose family had been close to his own when they were children. For this man he took enormous risks, stealing some of the gold and money from the properties left in the undressing room at the gas chamber. His friend needed these to bribe guards in an escape attempt with some others. Their escape was successful. Mandelbaum and others would sometimes bring items of clothing with them back from the chambers which they would drop along their route between the neighbouring camps for others to find them. On one occasion Mandelbaum was caught doing this and was punished with 25 blows on the back. Later in the summer of 1944 his team was moved to the attic of crematoria II and III described by Nyiszli.

Jan Poludniak pressed Mandelbaum about his early impressions when he first came to the gas chamber and saw the bodies dead there.  Mandelbaum replied: “The first time it made an incredible impression on me. Shocking. I was broken by what I saw, for never in my life had I seen, had I even thought that people could be murdered in that way..... (Then having to pull them down to be burned), everything inside me died, it all died because never in my life had I witnessed something like this, you see.  It’s difficult, it is difficult to explain my first impressions. When I think about what I have seen and what I have been through, even today (about 50 years after the events) as I sit here talking I feel like someone who has risen from the dead..... risen from the dead.” Poludniak asked if the men became indifferent to the humans they were burning once they became accustomed to the work. Mandelbaum agreed that that happened, saying, “from a normal person you became quite different, like an animal.” He could have rebelled but “I wanted something else. I wanted to tell the world that I had come from another world. I wanted to survive this world and tell the people... but you were unfeeling, that’s obvious ...Inside in such situations, do you know what a person experiences? It cannot be described, it’s impossible. You really needed to be healthy because only someone able to resist, in full health was able to experience this so that the heart didn’t burst, so that you didn’t experience too great a shock, so that you didn’t go crazy.”

Asked if there were co-workers who did break down, Mandelbaum replied, “Yes, indeed.” He would say to his companions, “Tough, we’re here, we know what is planned for us but we need to have this tiny ray of hope. Perhaps there’ll come a time when we’ll be freed.” He spoke of the despair formerly devout people felt, leading them to abandon their faiths, no longer believing in God or in justice. If the camp was purgatory, they would say, then the Sonderkommando work was hell and there is no other hell. Mandelbaum also described in his interviews some details of the revolt that took place in the crematoria in October 1944. It had been conceived as a camp-wide experience but was precipitated when guards came to take away one section of the Sonderkommando, who then began the revolt. Mandelbaum himself was working in a different part of the crematoria complex that day so was not involved. When the revolt was subdued, however, all of the men were rounded up and made to lie on their faces on the floor with their hands behind their backs. The SS-men then shot every third man. An investigation into the revolt and its instigators went on for several weeks, involving people throughout the whole of the camp. Some were tortured and later executed, including four women who had been instrumental in getting explosives to the Sonderkommandos.

Mandelbaum told Poludniak some of his post-war difficulties: “After liberation when I went out into the street, I didn’t know if I was walking on the pavement or on the road. I was too busy looking around, making sure that nobody would suddenly grab me by the coat or trousers and drag me back to the camp.” He had constant nightmares about that period and about the work he had done. Asked by Poludniak if he felt hatred for the Germans, he said he did not, though he did hate the murderers who sadistically committed such crimes. He told about incidents in which he knew that Germans had helped prisoners. He believed that it is important to not give in to hatred “because that is exactly what can turn a decent person into a fiend.”

I continue to be interested in these men and what happened to them and also in the men who became SS or Gestapo members. What were the things that motivated them to follow those paths? What did they think of as they moved deeper and deeper into acts of criminality? Did they feel regret or guilt during or after the end of the war? Many clearly involved in murder were tried and executed soon after the war, not just at Nuremberg which tried the main leaders, but also in different countries, related to the crimes committed there. But many people also evaded capture and imprisonment.

Prague: Theresienstadt

I am beginning to feel ready to go home. We left Toronto two weeks ago last night and have had an intense round of Berlin, Warsaw, Krakow, Vienna, and Prague. Tomorrow we will go to Dresden for just overnight, go on to Berlin for two nights, and then home. We have had several very powerful experiences, the strongest without doubt being at Auschwitz. Yesterday we spent four hours at the fortress town of Terezin, the place called Theresienstadt by the Germans. The site is comprised of two distinct fortified structures: the so-called small fortress, the place used as a prison for political prisoners by the Germans, and the large fortress, the actual town, used by them as a ghetto or camp. Both were built in the late 18^th century by the Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II in preparation for a coming war with the Prussians. From that time on it was a military barracks, walled and strongly fortified.

We were part of a nine person group tour which started out from the Intercontinental Hotel at the edge of the former Jewish area of Prague.  Our guide, Vida, who grew up under the Soviet regime in Czechoslovakia, was told at the age of 14 by her parents that she is Jewish. Her father was a member of one of the many Prague families that was sent to Theresienstadt in 1941. In 1944 he was sent to Auschwitz with a large contingent of Czech Jews. Because he was young and in relatively good condition he was one of the approximately 1,500 men and women who were chosen for slave labour when the Czech camp was “liquidated” in August. In early 1945 he was sent from there to Buchenwald again as a slave labourer, escaped capture, and was hidden by a family in Pilsen, later liberated by the Americans. Under the Soviets, Jews, like other groups, were not allowed to practice their religion; as well there were other discriminations against Jews that led Vida’s parents, who themselves were non-religious, to underplay their Jewish heritage. Vida was interested though and became involved with the existing remnants of the community, despite the concern of her parents and the strong opposition of her older brother. With the fall of the communist regime the freedom to practice one’s religion was restored to all citizens.

The tone of Vida’s approach to her people’s history before, during, and after the Nazi period differed considerably from that of Andrezij, our guide in Warsaw. He seemed to be imbued with a living awareness of the tragedies that had befallen Polish Jews. Vida, on the other hand, spoke throughout in a determinedly up-beat manner about the Czech people’s tolerant approach to Judaism throughout the past century and presumably beyond. She related details of the incarceration of Jews from Prague and later from other countries at Theresienstadt, of later deportations to the Baltic States and to Auschwitz, and of the epidemics of typhus and “spotted fever” that swept the camp even as liberation came. We watched a film partially of clips from a movie made by the SS depicting happy Theresienstadt inmates playing soccer before an enormous crowd, children cheerfully cavorting in a park, and well-dressed ladies chatting over a cup of tea. The clear intention of the film was to assure the international community of the Nazis’ good treatment of Jews who had been removed from their homes: the government has given a lovely spa town to the Jews to live in according to their own ways. In the version that we saw, the clips of that film were juxtaposed with stills of drawings and paintings done by children and by the many artists resident there. These conveyed a radically different picture: nightmare scenarios of starving, dispirited men, women, and children, crowded into rooms filled with bunks, and lining up for inadequate food in open courtyards.

The guides that we have encountered during our travels exemplify for me, each in her or his own way, some of the complexity of how Europeans currently deal with their experiences of the past century. Martin Jander, a non-Jew from a family of Nazi sympathizers, takes interested tourist to sites in Berlin which relate to the history of the Jews in Germany. He communicates quite passionately his conviction that much more could have been done by ordinary Germans to help the Jews during the Nazi period and his disdain for conventionally spouted ideas that people simply didn’t know what was happening. Andrezij, grandson of a Jew who escaped into the USSR and became a dedicated communist, son of a mother who was a sceptic of the worker’s paradise and who married a non-Jewish Pole, is at 28 a fully self-identified Jew who volunteers in Warsaw to teach people about the tragedies suffered by his people. In Krakow, Jakub, who though a non-Jew, found after his university years an empty niche (as there are so few Jews resident in the Krakow area), and developed his business in genealogy and touring for mostly non-Europeans Jews interested in tracing their roots. His touring approach is informative but decidedly uninvolved. In Prague Vida, daughter of secular Jews, married to a non-Jewish Czech, seems to embody what she proclaims to be the Czech ready acceptance of all cultures and religions. The tenor of her remarks was factual, informative, and interesting, but with little of the personal intensity or compassion one felt when touring with Martin or Andrezij, for example.

Theresienstadt was a ghetto with its own special features but like all of the places devised by the Nazis to segregate Jews from Aryans, it was a destination which doomed the vast majority of its inhabitants to a life of deprivation of every kind, and ultimately to death by starvation, disease, or in the case of those deported later to Auschwitz, within the gas chambers.

We have taken quite a few photos at Auschwitz and at Theresienstadt, for example, which I have not posted as the blog format that I have gives me little control over their order. I plan to post them later under a different blog name which I will post within this one.

Auschwitz 4

Nyiszli learned soon from his location in the crematoria complex that there were other ways that people were murdered here aside from gassing them. Every evening several trucks would arrive carrying about 70 men or women brought from one of the existing sections of the camp. They were chosen generally because their productive value was no longer high enough to, “make it worth maintaining them.” They would be forcibly brought into the crematorium, made to undress, and then taken individually into an adjoining room where an SS officer would shoot them in the back of the head with a small calibre gun. The body would be dragged off and the next prisoner admitted. Their clothing was disposed of and the bodies were taken to the ovens or, if these were not currently operational, to an open pit pyre which was kept burning beyond the area of the crematoria. All who were brought by lorry were aware from the moment of their selection that they were about to be murdered. Their screams and struggles reverberated throughout the complex until they were silenced by death.

On one occasion when Nyiszli was sent to the area of the pyre to collect some medicines and eyeglasses that had been left among the property of murdered people, he witnessed another use to which this burning pile was put. Several trains had arrived that day and all four crematoria were heavily laden with those selected for immediate death. The overflow was directed to the pyre. There, groups of about 400 at a time were sent into a simple hut, forced with shouts and beating to remove their clothing, then individually grabbed and pulled screaming down the path to the edge of the pyre where an SS officer would shoot them in the head; then his or her body was unceremoniously thrown onto the burning pile below them. Many were still alive when they were pushed into the fire.

Nyiszli was present in the camp throughout the remaining months of 1944. The largest contingent of people to be murdered were his own: 438,000 Jews were deported from Hungary beginning in May. Families who had been sent earlier from Theresienstadt near Prague were living together in one of the sub-camps of the facility. On July 10-12 this group (12,000 according to Nyiszli; closer to 9,000 from other sources) was “liquidated.” Groups like the Czechs and the Roma had not undergone selection at their arrival at Birkenau. Young and old, they had been able to live together and have some form of family existence despite the terrible conditions. On the morning chosen for the action against them all other prisoners were confined to barracks. Heavily armed troops cordoned off the area surrounding the Czech camp and a selection was made. Those being loaded into lorries knew immediately their destination; the crying and screaming could be heard throughout the complex. About 1,500 men and women were selected to be sent to work camps; the others were taken to the crematoria. On August 2, the “Gypsy” camp of about 3,000 was wiped out in the same way. Shortly afterward the deportation of 67,000 Jews from Lodz to Auschwitz began. Also in August 13,000 Poles were sent there following the Warsaw uprising.

Much has been written about the immorality and cruelty among those who “chose” to work for the SS in camps. Their numbers were in the tens of thousands. The conditions of their beginning to work, of the manner in which they operated, and how they viewed what they were doing must have varied considerably among this population. Nyiszli, far from being judgemental of the Sonderkommandos with whom he worked, clearly saw them as co-workers, caught unwittingly, as he was himself in a terrible position. The men were chosen usually at the time of selection because they were young and healthy. Some stepped forward when a general search was made, for example, for dentists or dental assistants thinking that they might be able to do something useful in the camp related to their profession, little realizing that they would be put to work removing the gold teeth and dentures of corpses.  Knowing nothing of the crematoria or its business until arriving there, theirs was hardly a question of choice. Once realizing the horrors that they were involved with, some did refuse to work and were immediately killed. They learned very early on that their own time was limited and that they would never escape the crazed universe within which they operated. Some managed to deal with this; others succumbed to depression and attempted or succeeded in committing suicide.

Because the Sonderkommandos were well housed and fed there was considerably less friction and competition among them than was endemic within the concentration and work camps. They recognized one another as members of a team that had a job to do but that soon would be annihilated; generally they looked out for one another. Their common enemy was their SS guards; even there, however, even there was some sense of understanding. The guards themselves had an inkling of the fact that they too would never be permitted to re-enter regular society: the possibility of their disclosing the terrible secrets of the crematoria were too great. There was an unacknowledged collusion among all who worked within the crematoria premises by which some tiny portion of the confiscated gold was collected by the Sonderkommandos, turned into 140gm discs, smuggled out of the crematoria premises to purchase perishable foods more difficult to obtain. All within the area participated at least by having knowledge of the activity and all received its benefits.

Nyiszli states clearly that he found some of the Sonderkommandos with whom he associated to be decent men. He cites as an example a situation in which a group of 500 women were constructing a road close to the crematoria fence by moving stones to it. The women were guarded by two SS men with dogs. Gaining permission from their own guards, some of the Kommandos made contact with the SS men watching over the women and handed each a box of cigarettes. Individually then they casually approached the gate adjoining the outside area and handed a prepared bundle of food, clothing, and cigarettes to each woman who approached them. They repeated the practice again the following day. These men did not know the woman and had nothing personal to gain from what might have been sufficient cause for their own instant deaths. They did it, Nyiszli says “as a matter of honour.” Nyiszli himself would take medicines with him on his walks about the crematoria perimeter and leave these close to places where they might be found.

Nyiszli gives an account of the co-operative work of a number of the Sonderkommandos and himself to leave a document describing the activities of the crematoria to future readers. One of the senior officers of the SS had commissioned a group of the Kommandos to make a special bed for him; it was to be transported to his home when finished. Nyiszli hit on the idea of producing the document, sealing it a metal tube and hiding it among the springs of the bed. The document was copied by one of the men in calligraphy and 200 of the Sonderkommandos signed it. A second copy in another metal case was buried in the courtyard of the crematorium. These documents have never been found though five others of this nature were discovered, four buried in the grounds of the crematoria.

In October, 1944 some of the men with whom Nyiszli had worked developed a plan to break out of the crematorium premises and the camp. Under cover of air strikes by the Allies which were happening more frequently, Polish partisans in the area had been able to breech the fences of the compound and to leave explosives for the men. This seems to have been part of a broader plan of the partisans to liberate the camp. Sensing that the SS would be moving soon to eliminate part of their compliment, the Kommandos decided to strike early. Before they did, however, the SS sent in special troops and a fierce fight broke out between the two groups. An explosion in Crematorium III reduced it to rubble, killing many of the Sonderkommandos who had retreated there. Some escaped the camp but were hunted down and executed. In all 451 of the Sonderkommandos died in the attempt for freedom. Three SS men also died in the battle and twelve were wounded.

In November word came from Berlin that the killing at Birkenau was to be stopped. The mass murders in the gas chambers did cease at that point but other groups continued to be killed by shooting. The remaining Sonderkommandos were killed by SS troops as they were no longer needed in the crematoria and would not be allowed into the general population. Nyiszli and the few doctors working with him on Mengele’s “research” were spared as he continued to need their help. By early January, 1945, however, the entire camp was mobilized as the Soviet troops grew closer. Discovering that their SS guards had left the crematoria, Nyiszli and his colleagues dressed in warm clothing and left the area, heading toward the centre of the camp. They mingled with the thousands of prisoners being ordered out of Birkenau, to walk in long columns toward Germany. Nyiszli and the others knew that if it was discovered by the SS that they had been workers at the crematoria their lives would have been immediately forfeited. Over the next few months Nyiszli managed to stay alive as he went with other prisoners on their long death march to elude the approaching Soviets. Nyiszli did survive and returned to his home. His memoirs were published in Hungarian in 1946.

On January 17, 1945 there were still over 67,000 prisoners at Auschwitz and its subsidiary camps. On the eighteenth all but about 7,000 were marched in long columns to another centre 69 kilometres away. Many died enroute. The Soviets liberated Auschwitz on January 27. Before leaving the SS blew up the remaining crematoria and tried to burn any buildings containing records. These efforts were not entirely successful, however. Many documents were saved and used in later criminal proceedings. Nyiszli gave evidence at the Nuremberg trials, the most publicized of the many trials after the war.

We are in Prague now; today we will go to the town of Terezin to visit the former concentration camp of Theresienstadt.

Auschwitz 3

Two books that I am currently reading are Miklos Nyiszli’s “I Was Doctor Mengele’s Assistant,” and Primo Levi’s “If This Is A Man.” The two differ not just in content but in tone. Though not himself an especially sympathetic individual, Nyiszli provides detail of the heart of Auschwitz 2: Birkenau, the gas chamber/crematoria complex, as well as the relationship of his superior, Mengele, to the whole. Levi, who on arrival was sent on to Auschwitz 3: Monowitz-Buna, an industrial slave labour camp close to the other sites, gives, on the other hand, a thoughtful recounting of his introduction to and daily struggle to survive the brutal conditions of the work camp. Both men came to Auschwitz in 1944: Levi, about the beginning of March from Italy, and Nyiszli, in May from Hungary. On January 27, 1945 the 7,000 prisoners still alive in the camp were discovered by Soviet forces moving eastward toward Germany. The survival of both men was at least in part due to their relatively short period in the camps though death came to many quickly and without preamble. I will write at another time about the conditions of their survival. Their subsequent writings are important documents for an understanding of the day-to-day working of the different sections of Auschwitz, and, especially with those of Levi, thoughtful reflections on the effects of such incarceration upon human beings.

Nyiszli arrived at Auschwitz 2: Birkenau in the company of 26 other physicians, 8 pharmacists, their wives, children, and parents. Their boxcar was one of 40 carrying about 4,000 Hungarian Jews. Mengele, a young SS officer, was in charge of the process of greeting. Under his orders, other SS troops separated men from women and children into two long groups. Speaking with calm, reassuring voices the SS told the newcomers that they were being sent to be bathed and would be reunited with their families later. Next the lines filed singly by Mengele who with a hand gesture sent some to the left and some to the right. To the left went mainly women with children, the ill, infirm, and the elderly. To the right, a smaller group, those who looked capable of work. Those on the left were taken further along the path beside the train and eventually disappeared behind a clump of trees, through a gate leading to the crematoria. Mengele addressed the group of physicians who remained, asking for an experienced pathologist. Nyiszli stepped forward.

Mengele himself took Nyiszli by car to one of the many areas within the camp structure: Camp F. Here his personal information was written onto an index card by one of the prisoner-doctors of that camp; his clothes were taken; he was bathed, shaven of all hair; tattooed with his camp identification: A8450; and given fresh, civilian clothing. Through slats in his boxcar when arriving, Nyiszli had seen the enormity of the Birkenau facility and the hundreds of one-story barracks laid out in straight lines from the central axis of the railroad’s pathway. On the disembarking platform he had noticed the enormous chimneys further on, spouting flames, with smoke that filled the air with the stench of burning hair and meat. He realized that they were massive crematoria. Nyiszli remained in Camp F for a few days until he had proven his worth to Mengele by performing some autopsies for him. In the meantime he learned a great deal about Birkenau from the block overseer, a former career criminal, and the doctors of Camp F with whom he lived and slept.

Tens of thousands of prisoners were kept in barracks within tightly confined spaces. All were awakened by dawn by other prisoners, forced out of their barracks regardless of weather, and forced to stand in file for roll call rituals that could take hours. Those who died during the night would be brought out and laid at the back. He saw the “Gypsy camp,” an enclosure of about 4500 people allowed to live together in the barracks as families. Their sole responsibility was the policing of neighbouring Jewish camps and barracks, where Nyiszli states, “they exercised their authority with unimaginable cruelty.” One despised “race” set upon another. Within the Gypsy camp was the experimental barracks, as it was on these people that Mengele and his co-workers focused their so-called research. Identical twins were closely examined and compared with one another. If one died from any cause (or was murdered), his or her twin was immediately murdered with an injection directly into the heart. Autopsies were conducted on both – one of the functions for which Nyiszli had been chosen. There was a curiosity about multiple births, an idea that if its mechanism could be understood, that German women could produce more offspring for the Reich. Another focus was on dwarfs and others with unusual deformities. Their skeletons were preserved and sent to the genetic studies offices in Berlin. Nyiszli began to realize their conceived function: to show future generations of Germanic conquerors why degenerate races had to be destroyed: to prevent their contamination of the purity of Aryan blood.

Having proven his worth to Mengele, Nyiszli was taken on his third day in the camp to an area farther along the unloading ramp, through a locked gate, and into a spacious lawn courtyard. Central to this area was a redbrick building with its chimney spewing flames. He was to reside and work at Crematorium 1. Nyiszli was given a pleasant room to himself, a modern dissecting room, clothing as he wished from the storeroom, and food from the SS kitchen; he was not obliged to attend roll call, nor was he answerable to anyone but Mengele himself. Aside from his laboratory work and autopsies, he was to provide medical care to the 120 SS men and 860 Sonderkommando prisoners who lived and worked in the four crematoria premises. He was to visit all of the sick daily and report their numbers and conditions to the commander of the crematoria. He could move without escort among the four crematoria and was given all medicines, instruments, and dressings necessary for his work.

On his first evening at the crematorium Nyiszli was invited to have supper with the Sonderkommandos who were not on duty. Their space was a large corridor with single beds on either side; each bed was covered with silk. Some of the prisoners were asleep – half the Kommandos rested while the others worked their shift. The crematoria functioned continually, 24 hours a day. The Kommandos were able to take anything they wanted from the transports: clothing, bedding, books, food, and alcohol. The dining table was covered with a lovely cloth and laid with fine porcelain dishes. With them Nyiszli enjoyed fine food, cigarettes, and tea laced with rum. In conversation with his hosts he learned the history of the crematoria: they had been built out of stone and concrete two years earlier by tens of thousands of prisoners who had been driven in all weather and on little food. As these men fell by the wayside from exhaustion or brutality, newly arrived workers were put in their places. When the furnaces were completed, the workers themselves were among their first victims.

The position that the Sonderkommandos found themselves in when chosen for crematoria duty seemed preferable to that of the ordinary prisoner in the camp. Their initiation showed them clearly its limitation, however. The first job of every newly selected Kommando force was to disrobe and burn the members of the previous group who, earlier had been surrounded and shot by a squad of SS troops. Each group lasted about four months and was then replaced. Nyiszli had no illusions that he would not share a similar fate when the time came. No prisoner could be allowed to leave the crematoria except as they quipped, “up the chimney.” The secrets of Birkenau were absolutely to remain there.

The next day Nyiszli observed the entire procedure from the introduction of “the selected” to the crematorium facility to its finale: the removal of ashes. The thousands of people brought there that day had been told that they were to enter a rest camp. Accompanied by SS men, they came through the gate to the facility and walked along the pathway to concrete steps leading underground. A notice board in several languages announced a bathing and disinfecting facility. The group of about 3000 people then entered a large, brightly lit chamber about 200 meters long. Benches and above these, hangers for clothing were distributed about the sides of the room and at columns. They were to undress and to tie their clothing and shoes carefully, memorizing the number of the bench near where it was left. Confusion at the order to undress among all of these people – men, women, and children – was stilled when the order was given again, this time urgently and with impatience. SS men at the far end of the room opened the large doors and the now naked people crowded into the next room, half the size of the original. In the center were pillars with metal conduits and a kind of latticework down their sides. The SS and Sonderkommandos left and the doors were slammed shut. The lights went out. Outside a van arrived with two officers with four green tins. They crossed over to the flat roof of the shower room, donned gas equipment, and poured the greenish-coloured beans down the shaft. Zyklon B vapourizes on contact with air. Within seconds the room was filled with gas and within five minutes all were dead.

After twenty minutes extractor fans were turned on to dissipate the gas. Lorries arrived on which some Sonderkommandos began to load the people’s clothing; these would later be sorted, disinfected, and sent to German distribution centres. Sonderkommandos wearing gas masks and rubber boots hosed the bodies down with jets of water. Each body was then separated from the pile and pulled to a lift outside the chamber. When the number of bodies reached about 25 the lift would take them up to the area of the ovens. Here another squad took them from the lift and down to one of 15 burning ovens. Before placing them in the oven, however, their heads were shaved and any gold teeth extracted. Rings or chains were removed and placed through a slit in a locked case. Nyiszli estimated that about 8-10 kilos of gold were collected daily in each crematorium. After this final indignity, bodies were placed onto metal stretchers and were tipped into the white-hot flames. Ashes in the courtyard were loaded onto lorries and driven to the Vistula to be dumped.

I know that these details are very difficult to read about. Nonetheless they are what was done to over a million people who arrived in boxcars from 1942 until the crematoria were destroyed in 1944. Over the next months Nyiszli learned further things about the functioning of the camp. He entered into a conspiracy with some of the Sonderkommandos to document the criminal activities of the camp and to find a way of communicating with the outside world. He was also present for the rebellion of Kommando 12. I will write more about these things in my next post.

Auschwitz 2

In October, 1941 Auschwitz became a primary site for the incarceration of Soviet prisoners of war. This move was coincident with the development of a large new camp three kilometers away from the original camp, now known as Auschwitz 1. The new site was built on 40 square kilometers of land expropriated from pre-existing villages which were completely razed. Thousands of prisoners were employed over the winter building the complex of hundreds of one-story buildings. Also under construction were four enormous separate underground gas chamber bunkers, each with its accompanying complement of crematoria, as well as housing for the Special Squads, the Sonderkommandos, who under SS supervision facilitated the murder and cremation of up to 20,000 victims each day. Trains arriving at the new site, named Auschwitz 2: Birkenau, passed through the main gate, stopping at a platform area several hundred yards along. The doors of the 40 or so cars would be opened and the people would pour out, relieved by their liberation from days of travel. It was there  that by May, 1942 the selections of prisoners to be sent immediately to the gas chambers and those to be kept for labour were made by the camp's chief doctor, Mengele.

Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian pathologist was among an early transport of Jews from Hungary in 1944 when the Germans, not content with their ally, invaded Hungary. He was chosen by Mengele to be one of his assistants, specifically because he had been trained in Germany and because he was a known specialist in the area of autopsies. Mengele wanted precise reports from the autopsies of those whom he chose to experiment on. These were sent to Berlin to the centre for scientific research. Nyiszli survived his Auschwitz experience, though he had not expected to. He was aware from the beginning that anyone who entered the camp, and especially anyone who entered the area of the crematoria and thus knew its secrets, would never leave alive. After liberation, Nyiszli wrote his memoirs. These along with a document written by a group of Sonderkommando reveal details of the processes undergone by those selected for immediate death in the gas chambers.

We are in Vienna now but I am quite uninterested in it. Our hotel is close to St Stephen’s square and thus to all of the important old city places, but other than going out for some groceries or for a walk, I am not into it. I am reading Nyiszli’s memoire of Auschwitz. My idea was to continue to do some writing about being there and to supplement what we learned there with Myiszli’s book and others that I have purchased. Since being at Auschwitz, however, I have been having difficulty continuing to write. I believe that I have been somewhat traumatized by coming up against the raw reality of the machinery put in place to kill whole populations of people for no other reason but hatred. People kill other people and have always done so from the earliest times. Just as animals do, we have quarreled and fought over territories and resources. In historical times we call it war. What the Nazi leadership promoted and what so many went along with was different. It was deliberately conceived and executed murder.

The booklet Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Past and the Present that I picked up while there leads off with a number of quotations from some of the leading Nazis. In 1937 at the Hitler Youth rally held during the Nazi Party convention at Nuremberg, Hitler told these young people: “We will educate our young so that the entire world will shake in front of them. I want the young to be capable of violence, imperious, indomitable, cruel.” And from some of his commanders: Hans Frank, Governor General of Occupied Poland: Jews are a race that must be totally exterminated. Otto Thierack, Reich Minister of Justice: We must free the German nation of Poles, Russian, Jews, and Gypsies. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer SS: The most important task is to root out all Polish leaders in order to render them harmless. All specialists of Polish decent will be exploited for the needs of our war industry and then all Poles will disappear from the face of the earth.

I have read statements of this kind many times without especially being affected by them. Their authors have seemed outrageously arrogant. My knowledge that they and others like them were defeated in the end rendered them in some way ridiculous, overblown caricatures. But that dismissal has had the effect of distancing me from the reality of the absolute power in the collective hands of such people over millions of others. It is the true stuff of nightmares. Within the nightmare those millions experienced the destruction of all that was dear and of value to them. Walking about the now partially barren fields of Auschwitz 2: Birkenau – an immense area of land surrounded by barbed wire, at one time electrified and patrolled by armed guards and dogs – seeing the buildings that remain, knowing that the people who inhabited them successively, lived, worked, starved, and died of illness or in the routine selections for the chambers, I was smitten body and soul with the horror that was Auschwitz.

I want to stay with my intention to write about the details that I learn from various sources. I understand that this material is difficult and that some will not want to read it. But for whatever inner reasons, some of which I understand, some of which I may never know, it is important to me to be constant to this purpose. 

Auschwitz

There are no words with which to write about Auschwitz. There is a lot of information about it in the booklets – the statistics, the various stages of its development, the atrocities committed there, the individuals who lived and died there; the Sonderkommandos who were pressed into service to take thousands of men, women, and children to be undressed, herded naked into “showers,”  to listen to their screams and dying agonies, then to remove their corpses and transmit them to the enormous ovens built at Birkenau for their cremation, their liquidation, their annihilation, their rendering unto ashes which could be then used as land fill or in some places as gravel on pathways. Their atoms dissolved from their human bodies and freed to enter into other forms – as they were in the beginning and shall be universe without end. Amen. When I close my eyes I see only pictures: the brick prison buildings, two stories high with basements, of the original Auschwitz 1.

It was a Polish army barracks, taken over by the invading Germans and made into a concentration camp for educated Poles who might spark a germ of resistance. Quickly all university professors, doctors, government officials and administrators, as well as known members of communist or social democratic movements were arrested; as police prisons became overcrowded, the decision was made to transport them here. Soon Jews were sent to join them and over the next years the population became substantially Jewish, though always with others: prisoners of war (Soviets, not prisoners from western countries), Roma people, homosexuals, other political prisoners. The original barracks was expanded using the labour of the prisoners. More buildings, more diverse uses. One, Block 11, at the end of a corridor of buildings was known as the building of death. Prisoners were taken there to be tortured as punishment for infractions of the rules though most housed there awaited execution. The “legal” forms passed into law by the Nazi government required certain rituals to be performed beforehand. I am speaking here of the early days of the war – roughly 1939-41. Of course many were killed in the camps themselves during these years by starvation, overwork, and brutal treatment at the hands of their guards or fellow prisoners. But official decisions to execute continued to be ritualized. Political prisoners or prisoners of war would be housed in the building of death. There they would be subjected to various forms of torture designed to extract confessions of their adversity to the German state. Once they had been reduced to the stage of non-being, in the sense of being incapable of further protest, they would be taken individually before a “court,” an officer representing the government. This procedure occurred in the front, first floor room of the building of death. Here the accusation against the prisoner was read and the sentence of death pronounced. It took on average about one minute. The prisoner was then taken to an adjacent room where he was stripped of his clothing. He was led naked out a door at the side to a courtyard where by a wall he was shot in the back of the head. His corpse was removed for cremation in the ovens at the far end of the rows of buildings. In another moment the door of the building of death would open and the next naked prisoner being brought for execution appeared. One SS officer would be the executioner for all indicted and sentenced that day, perhaps a hundred or so.

It was in this building that the first experiment was conducted that  opened the possibility of truly mass executions. In Germany itself and later in Poland death by suffocation was used for “unwanted” groups who were driven about in trucks with the exhaust fed into the back. It was effective but inefficient as only limited numbers could be killed in this way. Many were killed by firearms, tens of thousands at a time even, as I have written about in earlier posts, but this was messy, distressing to the murderers as well as to other adjacent populations, and besides, left traces of evidence in the mass graves scattered about the countryside. Rudolph Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz was away from his post on the occasion in September, 1941 that his next in command had an idea to use a substance on hand to kill lice. In solution Cyclone B, as it was known, was sprayed on prisoners entering a Lager after they had been shaved. It was known to be highly toxic. As an experiment he had an area of the basement of the building of death sealed as tightly as possible. Residing there at the time were about 600 Soviet prisoners and 250 Poles being held before their “court” proceedings. The anti-lice pellets were poured into openings for air; the Germans waited 24 hours before venturing into the basement, but discovering that some of the prisoners still lived, resealed the space for a further 24 hours. All had died; the experiment was successful and could be replicated.

In a bunker by the relatively small crematoria ovens a space was cleared for mass gassing. It was here that the first purposely selected groups were murdered. Very likely they were people already imprisoned in the Lager who had become too ill or too debilitated to work efficiently. Space at the Lager was never sufficient for the numbers continually being sent there so this method of elimination of those “without use” or those of “no further use” was inspired. Forgotten or with some bureaucratic slight of hand the “legal” form of the “courtroom” was abandoned. The selection process was finessed as the need to prevent panic among those about to die was deemed important to efficiency and order. They were given the formula: take off all of your clothes; you will be given a shower and provided with new clothing. Other prisoners chosen to speed the process would press them insistently; if lagging they would be screamed at, hit or whipped, and chased naked across the space leading to “the shower.” Bundled and locked within, in moments they would experience pellets being dropped by an SS functionary through spaces in the roof above. As the gas arose and spread the awareness of the victims focused on the reality that they were all being murdered. The screams and struggles of the dying within the chamber was so loud and distressing that trucks with their motors running were placed around the perimeter of the building to mask the sounds from others who might soon be gathered to a similar fate.

The shortcomings of this newly developed means of mass extermination were clear: larger gas chambers and larger ovens were needed; also the gas chambers had to be buried underground to avoid the noise problem of the original chamber. Moreover more facilities would be required to house, sort, pack, and  ready for transportation to Germany, all of the usable artifacts taken from those sent to the chambers. Space for prisoners to provide various services such as the latter, those to be with the people selected to die from initial choice to cremation, those to work on the continually needed infrastructure, and those who would work in subsidiary industries not necessarily related to the purposes of Auschwitz but providing income for the SS who farmed out their slave labourers to German and Polish factories and businesses. As Auschwitz was roughly at the centre of the territories taken by or allied to Germany and because of its good system of communication, it was deemed the place to focus the now consciously formulated program entitled “The Final Solution” of the Jewish “problem.” In October, 1941, several months before the Wannsee Conference, work began on the second phase of the camp: Auschwitz 2: Birkenau.

I will continue to write about Auschwitz for some time though we have left Poland and are now in Vienna. Hearing about the activities of Auschwitz gives only the palest glimpse of the reality that being there does. Auschwitz was of human invention, construction, and administration – conceived with ingenuity and intelligence for a purpose that most truly is called “diabolical,” though it must be understood that rather than pertaining to the “devil,” its activities pertain to humanity, to the heart of darkness that human beings are capable of reaching.

Krakow: Day 2

This morning broke bright and lovely. At 9:30 Jakub (pronounced Yah-cub) met us here at the hotel to take us on a tour of Jewish Warsaw. Jakub is not himself Jewish but since university has specialized in tours related to the Jewish population as well as genealogical searches for the Polish ancestors of Jews living in other countries. Currently few Jewish people live in Krakow – only 150 are registered at the fairly new JCC (established with money from Prince Charles) but there is a demand for services of this kind from Jews of the diaspora. We went by taxi with him to an area south of the Old Town but north of the Vistula River, called Kazamir. In the middle ages this was a separate town from Krakow, a place where Jews and other foreigners were allowed to settle. Though many Western countries like France and England were then closed to Jews, Poland was receptive to their settlement. In the 14^th century, the king, Kazamir the Great, recognized that for Poland to develop it needed many more inhabitants. He sent out invitations to various groups, ensuring the accommodation of their people.  Jews settled in a defined area in the newly forming town that Kazamir named after himself.

Because Krakow did not suffer extensive damage during WWII that area is fairly extant. The General Government, Polish lands taken by German forces soon after their blitzkrieg invasion, was headed by Hans Frank. Frank made Krakow the capital of his bailiwick, and in doing so ensured that it was a pleasant place for  himself and his German associates. Much less so for the Poles and the Jews. Hitler’s plans for the Jews and the Poles (all Slavic peoples actually) had been clear from the beginning of his ascendency. The Jews would be driven from Europe in some fashion; it would become “Jew-free.” Slavs, whom he saw as a “race” inferior to Aryans would become slaves, working for the superior Germanic peoples.

The pre-war population of Krakow was less than 200,000 people, about 68,000 of whom were Jews. Restrictions against them were enforced immediately after the Sept 6/39 taking of Krakow: enforced labour was decreed for all Jews between 14-60; all were to wear the identifying Star of David; free movement in the city was curtailed; they could no longer use public parks or transportation; and, state pensions were taken from them. In April, 1940 a ghetto was formed on the right bank of the Vistula. Gentiles living there had 17 days to leave and  all but 16,000 Jews (those needed for Krakow’s economy) were compelled to relocate into a densely populated area with several families sharing an apartment, taking turns using the one kitchen and bathroom. Later a wall of 2-3 meters was built around the ghetto; its four gates were policed on the outside by German and Polish police and on the inside by Jewish police.

In June and in October, 1942 two groups totaling 11,000 Krakow Jews were sent to the death camp at Belzec. In December the ghetto was divided into sections A and B: Ghetto A was for working people and Ghetto B for all others. Meanwhile a forced labour camp for Jews was being constructed nearby at Plaszow. In February, 1943 the workers at the camp from the ghetto were barracked there, rather than returned at night to the ghetto and in March the order was given to liquidate the ghetto. This happened on the 13^th and 14^th of the month. About 6,000 workers from Ghetto A were sent to Plaszow; those living in Ghetto B were either murdered on the spot or deported to Auschwitz. The “liquidation” of the ghetto was conducted with incredible brutality: children and older people were taken into different streets and shot; their bodies were stripped and the naked corpses were loaded onto lorries for transport to Plaszow and mass burial. The ghetto area was cleaned up and resettled with other Poles. The central square of the former ghetto, the place where groups would be assembled for transportation is now a memorial. It is a simple, bare space with 68 fixed metal chairs symbolizing the over 68,000 Jews murdered by the Germans.

Jakub showed us around the area in Kazamir where the Jews had settled originally. After they were forcibly taken to the ghetto, others moved into the area. Over the war years and under the Soviets it fell into great disrepair. More recently it has become a tourist attraction and a centre for music and nightlife for Krakow’s large young population.

Oscar Schindler’s ceramic factory was located in the area close to the former ghetto. With the popularity of the movie about the rescue of his Jewish workers from certain death, international interest in the factory prompted the city to use the site for a permanent exhibit entitled Krakow Under Nazi Occupation: 1939-45. The exhibit was opened in 2010. Other than the factory gate and Schindler’s office little of the original site remains. It is a truly impressive exhibit, using multi-media effects, it conveys a harrowing sense of the horrors of the war for all Poles living in the city. The Germans killed three million Jews and three million non-Jewish Poles during their six year domination of the country. The museum was filled when we visited it; groups of young people as well as people like ourselves from outside the country walked through its corridors.

Under the Soviets the official line about the war was similar to that given to the East Germans: the bad fascists attacked you innocent Poles; we good communists rescued you. Now let’s get on with building a workers’ paradise. After 1989 and the end of the communist grip on Poland, Polish people have had to come to terms with aspects of their own history that they had preferred not to remember. After the war with the return of the Jewish survivors there had been pogroms; neighbours had murdered neighbours struggling over property rights, creating another level of insecurity for Jews and prompting their mass emigration to Palestine and to the west. Jakub said that there are on-going debates in the universities and among the younger generations about levels of culpability among their own people for actions taken against the Jews. There is a movement in Krakow to remember and to acknowledge the sufferings of the Jews during the war. Every year on the Sunday following the liquidation of the ghetto a March of Remembrance is organized. Beginning at the square in the former ghetto marchers walk silently from there to the former concentration camp in Plaszow.

Tomorrow we will visit Auschwitz/Birkenau.

Krakow

The great thing about our train trip to Krakow from Warsaw (about 3 ½ hours) is that it was on a really old fashioned train. Nothing whatsoever fancy; washroom as basic and unsightly as could be imagined; BUT: the car had separate compartments – a long narrow aisle along one side and compartments with glass doors that shut on the other. In theory each should hold eight people, sitting four to a side on the provided upholstered bench; luggage overhead on two racks/side. There were not a lot of people on board and since most were young, Polish-speaking kids, I figured they wouldn’t be keen to share with us. Right. And so I had an entire padded bench to myself to stretch out on and sleep much of the way here. It was quite heavenly.

Old Town Krakow is a world heritage site because of its preserved medieval character. It sustained little damage in the war, unlike Warsaw which was gratuitously pulverized by the Germans. We took a taxi to our hotel situated right around the corner from the enormous main square. I ought to have been, but was not alerted by its name: Antique Apartments. There is no elevator. It is a holdover from prehistoric times. What is more our room is on the 5^th floor – in Canadian terms that is the 6^th because Europeans call the ground floor zero. There are 26 steps per flight. That is a staggering 130 steps in total each time we brave the climb. We are really in the garret; it has that feel to it. But we are comfortable.

I had read of the beauty of the Old Town and must admit that it is quite spectacular. It is the largest medieval main square in Europe, I heard a young man tell his tour group. St Peter’s and St Mark’s are larger but they are 17^th century, not medieval. It is quite cold here right now, possibly as low as 10C degrees when we were walking about, but we enjoyed the sights and had some supper in the impressively high-ceilinged basement of one of the many restaurants on the square. Lots of people were sitting out at tables on the square enjoying their repasts despite the cold and the wind.

Tomorrow morning we will meet with another tour guide – Jakub – who will give us a 4-5 hour tour of Jewish Krakow. The next afternoon we will go on a group tour to Auschwitz/Birchenau. Oscar Schindler’s ceramic factory was here in Krakow. Since Spielberg made his movie about him in 1993, the site has been turned into a memorial, not just of Schindler, but of the history of the war and the Holocaust. We hope to visit it as well while we are here.

While travelling I have been reading Primo Levi’s last book, The Drowned and the Saved. He considers various realities of “Lager” existence within the whole context of Nazi aggression against those whom they marked as subhuman or in some fashion dangerous to their aims. “Lager” is the German word for camp. Writing of the trauma of the entry into the Lager, he recognizes that its brutality was a deliberately employed ritual used to annihilate the individual’s sense of personal dignity and to reduce him or her to a primitive state, shattering any germ of resistance. The entrance to the world of the Lager was marked by immediate kicks and blows, often in the face, a barrage of shouted orders, being stripped naked and having all bodily hair shaved, and then outfitted in rags, deliberately chosen to be too large or too small. The desire to find sympathetic co-prisoners was thwarted by Lager conditions that reduced most to sealed-off monads engaged in hidden and continuous struggles simply to survive.

Levi discards any notion of the “bad” guards and the “good” prisoners. The lived reality was far more complex. Levi insists that “It is naïve, absurd and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism was, sanctifies its victims: on the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them similar to itself, and this all the more possible when they are available, blank, and lack a political or moral armature.” As in prisons or closed systems everywhere basic, base, one might say, elements rule the day. One thinks of The Lord of the Flies. “Privileged” prisoners, those who found ways to supplement the starvation diet of the Lager, though in the minority, were proportionately higher among survivors. Levi calls the moral ambiguity created by the imperative to live “the grey zone.” He distinguishes between the criminal activities of the system and its henchmen and those of the prisoners themselves. The latter he refuses to judge, knowing well the exact conditions of their quest for survival.

Warsaw: Museum of the History of Polish Jews

This morning we took a walk from our hotel to the Old Town of Warsaw, about a half an hour north along the somewhat winding thoroughfare called Mowy Swait. It is a lovely street, not as wide a boulevard as many of the modern streets around the central portion of the city, but wide enough for bus and car traffic as well as commodious sidewalks aside a profusion of shops, cafes, and restaurants. Many buildings have a stucco exterior which has been painted brightly. Periodically one encounters a grand church or government building of 18 or 19 century vintage. There are large statues raised to Warsaw luminaries like Copernicus. On one side a park holds an exhibit of photographs showing Warsaw before, during, and after the war. Much of the city was destroyed in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising in which partisans and citizens of all backgrounds fought the German army and lost spectacularly. It was a brave attack made by Polish people who hoped to repell the Germans by themselves, not depending upon the Soviet army that waited just across the River Vistula. When the uprising was over vast tracts of the city had been utterly destroyed. Much of the populous was herded from their homes by the Soviets and placed in refugee camps. The road back to a reconstructed city was a long and difficult one. Further from the centre where many buildings were replaced by replicas of the originals, there are innumerable “Soviet-style” enclaves, especially the 1940-50s housing units that were needed so badly after the destruction of the war. A massive Stalinist technical building stands close by the central train station, a “gift” to the Polish people. At the same time there are many creative and interesting examples of high rise architecture in that same district.

This afternoon we toured the Museum of the History of Polish Jews which will be fully open next year. The building itself is complete and there are some temporary exhibits available. We sat for some time watching home movies made of Jewish Poles between the two world wars. There were many delightful pictures of people goofing around for the camera, of young women putting on lipstick and flirting with whomever was filming them, of families self-consciously recording their relationships, and of day-to-day market scenes. The sense of the whole was rich, lively, a people happy with their lives and with themselves. The museum is set on land that was reduced to rubble with the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. Across from the entrance to the museum is a massive sculpture commemorating the heroes of the ghetto uprising. A film about the museum said that the sculpture honors the dead and the museum makes a bridge now to the living: to explore and celebrate and revitalize the lives of Jews in Poland from the earliest days and into the future.

Tomorrow we will take a train to Krakow (as it is spelled here.) 

Warsaw: Ghetto and Cemetery

This morning at 9:30AM we met with Andrezej Jankowski in the lobby of our hotel. He was our guide to the former Jewish ghetto area and our teacher about the life of the Jewish people in Warsaw before, during, and somewhat, after the war. He is a fine young fellow, just 28, a “third generation” Jew. His grandfather, only 19 when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, followed his older brother into Russia. In 1941 when Russia in turn was invaded, he was evacuated to the Urals where he spent the rest of the war assisting in the movement into and setting up of industrial plants in the interior of Russia to avoid their falling into German hands. He became a committed communist and returned to Poland after the war, never giving up his idealism regarding Stalin and the Party -- despite the difficulties the Polish people experienced under the Soviet regime from 1945-1989. The great, all-equal world did not materialize for anyone. Jews were allowed greater latitude in some ways but a clearly delineated glass ceiling remained. Andrezej’s mother, who was sceptical about her father’s adherence to the communist ideology, married a Gentile Pole. Andrezej, himself, is firmly identified as a Jew, a Reform Jew with clear left politics. He spends part of his time involved with the Taube Institute that works within Warsaw’s Jewish community, strengthening connections among the various strands of the community but also teaching people like Andrezej, as well as people from around the world, how to explain the Holocaust and the history of the Jews in Poland. They are a major genealogical source for Jews wanting to trace their ancestors in Poland.

We were with Andrezej for four hours, walking the entire time in a healthy downpour. During the visit we had stimulating conversations with him on many topics of mutual interest. He told us about himself and questioned us about our interest in the Holocaust. We talked about responsibility, guilt, the roles of the Judenrat, about life in the ghetto during the war, about the Zionist movement, the founding of Israel, the current Palestinian situation, and the continual founding of settlements on the West Bank. He told us a lot about the leaders of the ghetto uprising – this as we visited some of their graves. These were the ones who had survived and had died natural deaths. The others had  been buried in mass graves along a corridor within the old Jewish cemetery. We stood quietly by this place aware that thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands had been summarily piled upon one another for disposal here and in other locations periodically discovered during construction projects around Warsaw.

The cemetery is such a powerful place. It is a vast area, closely packed with elaborate gravestones, all set within a forest of tall, lush trees. The Germans did not destroy the cemetery during their time in Warsaw because they needed it. It was right at the edge of the ghetto. In the first year after the ghetto was established over 100,000 inhabitants died of starvation and disease. The Germans were very afraid of typhus and other communicable diseases and needed a close-by burial place for all of these corpses. They allowed the carts with corpses to travel fairly unmolested from the confines of the ghetto to the cemetery. Funerals or other rituals were not allowed but burial was essential and needed to be facilitated quickly. Because the Gentile part of the city lay on the other side of the cemetery, these funerary excursions became conduits for individuals needing to leave, and occasionally, to come into the ghetto. It was also an avenue for smuggling food.

The cemetery had the greatest impact of all of the places that Andrezej took us to because it is intact. It carries the weight of the actual living Jews of Warsaw from the early nineteenth century – their rituals, their respect for the living and the dead, the desire for continuity between generations. It is powerful and beautiful in its austerity. (Unfortunately I was unable to get clear photos of the cemetery because of the darkness of the day and its situation within the trees. The few that I have do not convey its impact.) Little else of Jewish history here remains embodied in actual structures within which one can sense the lives of the people who once inhabited them. The ghetto itself was deliberately destroyed during and after the uprising. A few buildings remain, most notably a relatively small synagogue which continues to be used by the orthodox (and attended by others during high holidays.) It survived because the SS were using it as a stable during their time in Warsaw. We saw other bits and pieces: the pylons upon which had been built a bridge over a main traffic artery to let people in the ghetto travel from one smaller area  to the larger; some golden plaques about 4-5” square placed in sidewalks commemorating individual lost during the Holocaust; a piece of the wall which was originally the front of a building along the edge of the ghetto. Nothing had the impact of the cemetery, however. It is a silent, profound marker of a thriving, prosperous community that was deliberately destroyed out of sheer hatred.

The  ghetto itself encompassed a vast area. At the beginning of the war Warsaw had a population of about 1,000,000, one-third of whom were Jews. When the ghetto was established the process took about a month for Gentiles living in the designated area to move outside and Jews living outside, to move in. Soon 360,000 Warsaw Jews and about 90,000 Jews from other, smaller areas to the west were crammed into an increasingly dense and over-populated area. Within its walls were businesses, synagogues, houses of prayer, and churches. There were people of all classes, degrees of orthodoxy, well-meaning and opportunist, the good and the bad: in short, like most other communities. Within a year the transportations began. Each day 5-7,000 people would be gathered at one side of the ghetto to board  cattle cars provided to take them “to the eastern settlements,” in fact, to the gas chambers at Treblinka.

Before the war the population of Polish Jews had been between 3,300,000. At the end of the war no more than 300,000 remained. As survivors began to return from camps or from hiding another wave of persecution, this time from Poles, took place. Some were murdered by people who were frightened that the homes or businesses they had acquired when the Jews were placed in the ghetto or transported, would be taken from them. Already profoundly traumatized by their war experiences and feeling unsafe within their former country, most decided to leave Poland. The emigrations were to Palestine or to the west, to England and to North or South America. Andrezej said that in Warsaw now there are about 600 Jews registered in the synagogues, and perhaps another 1400 in the community not registered but who show up at festivals throughout the year. How many others there may be who have severed bonds over the post-war generations, is difficult to assess.

I told Andrezej about the comments made by a Toronto acquaintance whose extended family had been murdered during the war. He would never come to Poland himself because he is convinced that all Poles are anti-Semites and that for Jews Poland is nothing now but a cemetery. Andrezej’s own sense is that there is a degree of anti-Semitism but that the majority of Poles, like most people everywhere, simply live their own lives, address their own concerns and don’t worry themselves about other groups within the society. At either end of this spectrum, however, is both the group that hate Jews and demonstrated this in the ways that they assisted the Germans in their atrocities and afterward in various ways, and the group that relates to the Jews as fellow human beings, those who helped to hide and thus save thousands during the war.

Today we will visit the partially opened Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Warsaw

Our train journey to Warsaw is a five and a half hour ride. The land we have been travelling through since leaving Berlin is fairly flat, much of it farmland with stretches of forested areas. Though it is called an express train we have stopped (briefly) at several places already to take on more passengers. Our car is quite entirely full now. A few seats behind, a young North American girl is having a protracted argument with the conductor about the validity of her ticket. Still, it is restful to be on the train after the last few days of fairly incessant activity.

We have an arrangement to meet tomorrow morning at our hotel with a man who will take us on a half-day tour of the important sites of Jewish Warsaw. In fact most were obliterated during the war when the ghetto was destroyed. Since, other places have arisen to memorialize that past and to focus the activities of the greatly reduced, but growing, city Jewish population. As in most of the large cities in Europe, Jewish people have enjoyed a variable welcome. In the fifteenth century the tolerance of Warsaw’s government attracted Jews from other locales in relatively large numbers. However, as they began to prosper, jealous tradesmen mounted strong opposition to their presence and they were forced to leave the city centre and settle in other districts. Late in the 17^th century the ban on their living in the centre of Warsaw was lifted; the Warsaw Jewish Commune was founded and a cemetery established. After 1815 when Poland came under Russian rule, restrictions on Jewish life and settlement were once again imposed. Nonetheless Jewish social, artistic, intellectual, and professional life flourished in the second half of the 19^th century. The post WWI settlements made Poland once again an independent country, extending further the integration of Polish Jews, particularly urban Jews, in the life of the country. In the 1930s the Jewish people comprised 30% of the population of Warsaw.

With the outbreak of WWII that world entirely was changed. Jews were ordered to wear the Star of David prominently on their outer clothing and in October, 1940 an extensive ghetto was established, within which the Germans locked 350,000 Jewish people. Hunger, disease, and increasing repression by the Nazis meant an ever-rising death toll within the ghetto. Jews from other Polish areas and from outside Poland were brought continually into the already densely populated area. On July 22, 1941, the SS began a series of mass transportations of Jews from the ghetto to the death camp of Treblinka. By September, 1942 most had been transported though Jews from elsewhere continued to replace them. Some of the original residents remained as well, some of whom had managed to go into hiding. When the Germans began organizing further transportations in April, 1943 it was decided by an already organized resistance cell within the ghetto to stage an uprising. They knew that their cause was hopeless but preferred to die on their own terms. The Germans were held at bay for nearly three weeks. In the ensuing battles the ghetto was destroyed. The Great Synagogue, symbol of the Jewish community had been in use as a warehouse since the German victory. To signify the entire destruction of Jewish Warsaw the SS blew it up. A concentration camp was set up on the site of the former ghetto in August, 1943. About 5,000 Jews from Hungary, France, and Greece were brought from Auschwitz and housed there. They were used as slave labourers in the ghetto land, destroying the burned houses and sorting bricks and metals for further use. A year later some were liberated at the time of the Warsaw uprising. The ruined city was occupied by the Soviet army on January, 1945. Few Jews survived the war in Warsaw. Those who did so mainly owed their lives to Polish citizens who hid and fed them.

Under the Soviets Jews suffered other forms of discrimination. Since the fall of the USSR conditions have improved significantly here in Poland. Next year a major new Museum of the History of Polish Jews will open. It already is partially available for visitors with some temporary exhibits. We will be taking the English tour on Wednesday.

We have arrived in Warsaw. The train station is next to an enormous mall with ulta-modern architecture and very stylish shops. Across the broad avenues surrounding it are six- or seven-story 19th century buildings check-to-jowl, looking quite elegant. Across from them with great ostentation stands an enormous "wedding cake" building a la Seven Sisters' buildings of Moscow. It was built during the Soviet era to house a technical institute -- "a gift" from the technical workers of the USSR to their Polish comrades. Our hotel in Warsaw is fairly close to the city center and also to the train station – which has helped us find our way around without difficulty. Poland is in the European Union but is not on the Euro. As a result goods and services are considerably less expensive here than they were in Berlin -- a blessed relief.