A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (15 page)

The same calculation did not apply, however, to the head of Steinöl Ltd., Prof. Solms Wilhelm Wittig, who had a slave labor camp built for him by the SS at Schandelah, outside Braunschweig. What happened in
Aussenlager
Schandelah did not differ substantially from what happened in
Aussenlager
Schillstrasse, but the two hundred or so prisoners who died at Schandelah while working as slaves for Steinöl Ltd. came largely from the main camp at Neuengamme and not from Auschwitz, and they died principally while mining oil shale rather than making trucks and were primarily non-Jewish citizens of the victorious Allied states, rather than stateless Jews from the Łódź ghetto, and perhaps it was this last little difference that ruined the calculation for Prof. Solms Wilhelm Wittig. On January 2, 1947, he was
put on trial in front of a British military court and a month later sentenced to death by hanging for “treatment of Allied state citizens in contravention of international law.” Another factor that may have influenced the calculation was that operations at Steinöl Ltd. were of no postwar value, as there was no further demand for synthetic gasoline, whereas operations at Firma Büssing were considered to have a bright future. Admittedly, Prof. Wittig had his death sentence commuted to a twenty-year jail term from which he was reprieved in May 1955, so basically the same calculation applied to him as to Rudolf Egger, but the commandant of
Aussenlager
Schandelah, SS-Unterscharführer Friedrich Ebsen, was hanged with three of his subordinates on May 2, 1947, in Hamelin prison. It should here be noted that Friedrich Ebsen took his orders from the commandant of the Schillstrasse camp, SS-Hauptscharführer Max Kirstein, who was neither hanged nor sent to prison for his actions. Had there been a trial of Max Kirstein, it would have been revealed that he had a particular predilection for abusing his Jewish captives, referring to them by the abbreviation “3F,”
faul, frech, fett
(lazy, insolent, fat). If he was feeling talkative, he sometimes extended this into a whole sentence, incorporating 4 Fs:
Wenn ein Jude zu viel frisst, dann wird er fett und faul und schliesslich auch frech
(If a Jew stuffs himself he grows fat and lazy and in the end insolent).

So no sentence was ever passed on the repulsive acts in Braunschweig. People were enslaved, used, and destroyed, but no one was held to account. The shameless lie triumphed, as did the shameless calculation weighing the value of truck production against the value of justice—but as a wise rabbi has now been allowed to point out from a factory wall in Braunschweig, the future has a long past.

In the memorial area at Schillstrasse, Rudolf Egger-Büssing’s past has caught up with him. On three gray boards, made of unbreakable acrylic and screwed tightly to a wall topped with sharp spikes to deter vandals, Christoph Egger-Büssing writes of his grandfather: “The facts are incontrovertible. I belong to a family that profited, directly and indirectly, from National Socialism. My grandfather was responsible for the exploitation of concentration camp inmates at Firma Büssing. The camp that was built beside his factory was a scene of inhumanity, a
Schauplatz von Unmenschlichkeit
.”

These are hard words from a grandson, particularly a grandson who also says that he loved and admired his grandfather. “The child in me cannot comprehend to this day,” writes Christoph Egger-Büssing, “how Rudolf Egger-Büssing the private individual could allow the business leader of the same name to do what he did.”

Diese Verstörung wird bleiben
. The harm is done and will endure.

He makes a point of saying that we can’t simply assume such harm will be remembered. That the easier reaction is blatant lies or convenient silence, that he himself would prefer to have kept quiet rather than speaking out, and that amnesia has time on its side.

They’re fine words, and perhaps essentially true, and that’s why I regard Dr. Liedke with a kind of love or tenderness as he walks quietly at my side, patiently showing me the memorial plaques and stones that line your road from Auschwitz and might not have been placed there had Dr. Liedke not been on hand to produce his painstakingly excavated fragments, documents, and testimonies.

With Karl Liedke’s research in my briefcase and his map in my hand, I leave Braunschweig in March 2005 to follow the continuation of your road through the German camp archipelago in March 1945.

Maybe first I ought to say something about Auschwitz. At least about how you get out from there. Everyone knows, or ought to know, how you get there. It’s unimaginable in its own way, but no mystery to posterity. You arrive in a barred and bolted cattle car that pulls in to a platform built in the spring of 1944 at walking distance from the gas chambers and crematoriums in order to speed up the murder and annihilation of Europe’s Jews. You’re transported in the same car as the rest of your family, along with what remains of the family from apartment number 3 at 18 Franciszkańska, among them the eighteen-year-old girl, really a woman now, the one you call Haluś and are in love with, who on this “nightmarish night on the way to hell” falls asleep with her head in your lap. I find it hard to imagine how anyone can fall asleep on such a journey, but then I find it hard to imagine such a journey at all. At any rate, that’s how you recall the journey to Auschwitz in the letter you write on January 15, 1946, in a place very far from hell, to the young woman who is to be my mother: “You had fallen asleep on my lap and when you woke up, you burst into tears. That’s how I saw you in my imagination and that’s how I see you today.”

Maybe Haluś really did fall asleep on your lap. Or perhaps you just remember her falling asleep there because that’s how you have to remember her once you’ve been parted and you’ve
lost each other and you’ve been ordered to join separate columns five abreast, men in one column and women and children in another, to be sorted onward into hell.

About the arrival much has already been said. What happens to you and Haluś happens with monotonous inconceivability to hundreds of thousands of people, who to the last cannot or will not understand what sort of place they’ve arrived in. On the ramp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, your mother Hadassah is sorted out for the gas chambers, as are Haluś’s mother Rachel and father Jakob, and Haluś’s sister Dorka and her five-year-old son Obadja, as are most of the remaining Jews from the Łódź ghetto.

For them Auschwitz works as planned. Nothing remains. Not even a registration card with a name or a number. No numbers for those who shall never have existed. Death in the gas chambers is collective, anonymous, naked, and painstakingly shrouded in euphemisms (changing room, shower room, etc.), stage props (signs, birches, Red Cross vans, etc.), and unfathomability.

Unfathomability above all. A large part of the success rests on that.

The unfathomability.

From the smaller group, those not selected for the gas chambers, death makes a temporary, tactical retreat. The daily “maintenance” of the swelling camp requires thousands upon thousands of new slave laborers, the majority of whom starve to death, work to death, are beaten to death, get a bullet in the back of the neck or a phenol injection in the heart, or are reselected and sent to the gas chambers. On the platform in Auschwitz-Birkenau a certain Dr. Josef Mengele is also waiting, routinely selecting living human beings for deadly medical experiments. Subordinated to Auschwitz-Birkenau, moreover, is a growing archipelago of
Aussenlager
serving an expanding
circle of German industries that build their entire operations on the selection of slaves from among the people delivered to the gas chambers. The largest business involved in this system is the IG Farben chemical industry conglomerate, which has been given its own camp in Auschwitz, Auschwitz III-Monowitz, also known as the Buna camp after the Buna works, the name of the factory that produces synthetic rubber and synthetic fuel and where some 30,000 slave laborers are worked to death.

Those selected to work themselves to death generally get a number tattooed on their forearm and are entered with pedantic precision into the registers of the SS bureaucracy. Every day at Auschwitz there are excruciating, hour-long roll calls, where the prisoners are assembled in straight lines so a check can be made on who’s living, who’s dead, who’s missing, and who’s too weak to work and therefore must die. Of the 405,000 people given a registration number on arrival at Auschwitz, 340,000 die. Of the 67,000 Jews delivered from the Łódź ghetto, 3,000 are given registration numbers in Auschwitz, while 19,000 are allocated to a no-man’s-land between slave labor and gas chamber and left unregistered until further notice.

You belong to the latter group. You don’t get a number tattooed on your forearm. For some reason, unknown until further notice, you’re allowed to live as part of a not yet fully processed human reserve. Since May 1944, the Birkenau II extermination camp has had separate sections for people being kept alive while awaiting full processing. In the former camp for Gypsies (section BIIe), its 3,000 inhabitants having been fully processed in the gas chambers on August 2, 1944, there are vacant barracks, as there are in section BIIb, where 7,000 men, women, and children from the Theresienstadt ghetto, the so-called family camp, were kept until they too were fully processed, at night, between July 10 and
12, 1944. The not fully processed Jews from the Łódź ghetto are kept in the standard hellish conditions, or perhaps even worse, as they’re forced to sleep outside, or on the floor, or sitting in long rows with the prisoner in front pressed between the legs of the prisoner behind. Nor are they given their own spoons and bowls, which is a precondition for survival in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The daily starvation rations of “soup” must be eaten without spoons from a bowl shared by four, however that is to be managed. A spoon and a bowl of your own is one of the differences between hell and paradise. Another is the smell of burned flesh. Everyone bears witness to that smell, including you. You all bear witness to the smell and the black smoke and the nightly flames from the tall chimneys a few kilometers away, all of you who survive the days and nights waiting to be fully processed in Birkenau II, where the gas chambers go full throttle and the crematoriums can’t keep up and bodies have to be burned in huge pits in the open air.

This is probably one of the reasons for the delay in fully processing you: the pressure on the crematoriums. Another is the pressure from the fast-growing camp archipelago beyond the province of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Virtually every industry of any size in the now surrounded Germany is crying out for slaves. In the autumn of 1944, the camp archipelago extends new branches even farther into Germany, with almost every German concentration camp acting as a central command for countless outer camps and under camps and subdivisions that must be filled with slaves, but the only remaining slave reserve of any size is the Jews who are being delivered to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. In the late summer of 1944 some 30,000 Jews, mainly from Hungary and Poland, are set aside for possible onward delivery. Not all those set aside are delivered, and not all who are
delivered survive, but being set aside for onward delivery is the first step on the road from Auschwitz.

I don’t know how you keep track of the days and nights in Auschwitz. I understand how hard it is to keep track of such things when one’s in a state of shock and the days and nights seem to blur together, but eighteen months later you write in a letter that you were in Auschwitz for twelve days. You also write that the sorting of prisoners starts immediately and that prisoners are shifted from barrack to barrack and disappear from view as the sorting proceeds, and that after a day or so you’re separated from the Szames brothers. That’s all you say about the Szames brothers, but Haluś, to whom your letter is addressed, clearly knows who they are, so I assume that you all must have known each other in Łódź, and that you all have arrived at Auschwitz in the same transport, and that with the Szames brothers yet another link to the world before Auschwitz disappears.

I assume that’s why you mention it.

It must be noted, however, that you’re not alone in Auschwitz. If you were alone, I find it hard to imagine that you’d be selected for onward delivery, and still harder that you’d survive. The pickers and choosers of Birkenau II pick the biggest and strongest and those who make the most convincing case for possessing the required skills. Now you may be as fit and strong as any young man could be after four years in the ghetto and twelve days in Auschwitz, but you’re slight of build and not very tall or particularly pushy or enterprising—if you’ll forgive me for saying that. So I can’t imagine that you would have made it through the intrusive checks and interrogations at the selections for onward delivery on your own. One of the selection procedures involves setting up a wooden bar and rejecting all those
who don’t reach it. I’m not sure you would have reached the bar, nor am I sure you would have made a convincing case for being an experienced welder or lathe turner or electrician or whatever skill was demanded at the moment. There were people who made it through anyway, by a mixture of enterprise and desperation, but I think you made it because you weren’t on your own. After the selection on the ramp, you still have your brother Naftali or Natek at your side, six years older than you, with more experience of life and, I think, a stronger survival instinct. Or at any rate, I think your survival is a compelling reason for him to survive. I think it’s he who pulls you with him out of Auschwitz.