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.