Auschwitz (38 page)

Höss's memoirs are silent on his true feelings about returning to the camp, but it is not hard to suggest reasons why he would have been happy to be in control of Auschwitz once again. First, he must have felt a strong proprietorial interest in the camp—after all, he had been commandant from the moment of its inception. Secondly, he would have known how comparatively rich the Hungarian Jews were, and there is a strong possibility that he sought to profit personally from their demise. Perhaps more importantly than all that, however, this would be a major operation and Höss, an absolute believer in the necessity of the “Final Solution,” would have relished the task ahead.

For the majority of Jews in Hungary, this was to be the beginning of a nightmare. The change from relative safety and affluence to imprisonment and despair occurred more swiftly here than in any other country subjected to the Nazis' “Final Solution.” At the start of March 1944, Alice Lok Cahana
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had been living happily with her family in the town of Sárvár Sárvár, close to the Austrian border. She felt they had a joyous life. The grandfather owned a large carpet-weaving factory and the family was relatively wealthy. Once the Nazis arrived, however, the factory and Alice's family's home were sold within weeks to a man named Krüger—for one dollar. Shortly afterwards, like hundreds of thousands of other Hungarian Jews, they were forced to board trains to take them to Auschwitz. As Alice, who was then fifteen, and her sister Edith, two years older, walked under guard with the rest of their family to the railway station, they passed directly in front of their old house and saw Mr. Krüger sitting by the window. “I was so embarrassed,” says Alice Lok Cahana.

As they neared the railway station, Alice experienced an even stronger sense of the sudden, shocking change that was taking place in their lives: “The train station always had a wonderful memory for me, because Father had a business office in Budapest and we would always accompany him to the station on Monday and then wait for him to come back on Thursday, and he would always bring us something.” Yet now, this place that she associated with such happiness had mutated into something entirely different: “We saw cattle trains! I told my sister, ‘It's a mistake! They have cattle trains here—they can't mean we should go in cattle trains. Grandfather cannot sit on the floor in a cattle train!'” But, of course, it was no mistake. They boarded the train, the doors were slammed shut, and the only light that entered was what filtered through the narrow wooden slats of the cattle truck. In the shadows they could see their grandfather trying to sit on the baggage, their mother next to him. It was very hot, and soon the air became rancid with the smell of sweat and excrement from the bucket in the corner that had to serve as their toilet. It was four days before they reached Auschwitz.

“When we arrived,” says Alice, “I told Edith that nothing can be so bad as this cattle train—I'm sure they will want us to work, and for the children there will be better food.” Once out of the train and milling around on the ramp inside Birkenau, Alice was told by her sister to go and stand with the children, because they were both convinced that children would be better treated than adults. After all, they reasoned, the Germans came from a civilized country. So Alice, who was tall for her age, stood with the children and their mothers—the very group, of course, that in the warped logic of the camp the Nazis wished to murder most quickly. Dr. Mengele, who was conducting the selection on the ramp that day, saw Alice waiting there and was curious about her—was she an exceptionally tall child or a very young mother? “Haben Sie Kinder?” (“Have you children?”) Mengele asked. Alice, who had learned German at school, replied that she was only fifteen. Mengele then told her to stand in another line—among a group of adults and adolescents not selected for immediate death. Shortly afterwards she was taken to the “sauna” in Birkenau where she showered, had her head shaved, and was given ragged clothes three times too big for her.

Alice then found herself allocated to the women's camp in Birkenau. By
now she had lost contact with her mother, father, grandfather, and sister—her entire family. Desperate for news of them, she started to ask questions of the other women in the block. Insistently she demanded to know where the rest of her family, in particular Edith, had been taken. But then the Block Kapo came over and slapped her face. “You don't ask questions here!” she screamed. “Be quiet from now on!”

But Alice was determined not to be quiet—at whatever cost, she meant to find her sister. She seized upon the next chance she had to ask more questions when everyone in the block was awoken at four o'clock the next morning and ordered to visit the latrines en masse. Here, in the gloom, amidst the filth and the smell of an open sewer, she asked if anyone knew where the last Hungarian transport might have been taken. Eventually she found one woman who said she thought she knew—perhaps they were in the compound immediately next to them. But Alice still had no idea how to contact any of her relatives who might be there. Auschwitz–Birkenau was divided by impenetrable fences into a series of smaller sub-camps, and it was forbidden to pass from one to another without express permission. Then another inmate told her that every morning the same person delivered putrid ersatz coffee to both camps. If Alice could write a message, then maybe she could persuade the woman who delivered the coffee to take it.

Alice soon learned that favors had to be bought in Auschwitz, and she gave up her ration of bread for a scrap of paper and a pencil. She wrote a note to Edith saying, “I am in block 12 camp C,” and managed to bribe the woman who made the coffee deliveries to take it. Then, by what Alice describes as “some miracle,” a few days later her note was returned and scrawled on it were the words “I am coming—Edith.” One morning, shortly afterwards, Edith herself was among the women bringing back the empty coffee cups. “I just held her hand,” says Alice, “and we were together. And we swore to each other that we will never be parted again.”

Alice Lok Cahana and her sister Edith were just two of the more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews transported to Auschwitz. The percentage on each transport selected for forced labor varied—sometimes it was as low as 10 percent, sometimes around 30 percent—but the majority of people on board each train were always sent to the gas chambers. The camp had never seen a killing spree like it, with more than 320,000 murdered in less
than eight weeks—indeed, for sustained killing within the Nazi State the only comparable slaughter on that scale was the initial murders in Treblinka, which cost Dr. Eberl his job.

To keep up with the pace of the arriving transports, the Nazis increased the number of Sonderkommando working in the four crematoria at Auschwitz from just more than 200 to nearly 900. These Sonderkommando were the people who had the most gruesome job in the camp: They helped guide and reassure the new arrivals as they walked into the gas chambers, and cleaned up after the murders.

Dario Gabbai
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and Morris Venezia,
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cousins from Thessalonika in Greece, were two prisoners unwittingly caught in the Nazis' Sonderkommando recruitment drive. They arrived at Auschwitz in April 1944, and when the Germans asked if anyone had experience as a barber they volunteered. Morris's father had owned a barbershop and, even though Dario knew nothing of the craft, Morris told him to put his hand up—like so many relatives in Auschwitz, they took comfort in knowing that whatever they had to face they would face together.

Morris and Dario were taken to a brick building in Birkenau, given huge scissors, which they thought more suitable for shearing sheep than cutting human hair, and led into a room that was packed with naked human bodies. “We couldn't believe it,” says Morris. “They looked like sardines in a can!” The Kapo who accompanied them started clambering over the bodies, cutting off the women's hair at a frantic rate, demonstrating what he wanted Morris and Dario to do. But when the two of them both tried to cut the hair of the dead women they were wary of standing on the bodies and moved carefully around them. This angered the Kapo, who beat them with his cane. So they cut more quickly, moving among the corpses, but as Dario stood on the stomach of one dead woman he pushed gas out through her mouth and the body emitted a groaning noise. “Dario was so scared,” says Morris, “that he jumped from the top of the dead bodies.”

There had been no explanation from the Kapo or the Germans about the nature of the job they were now expected to do, no preparation, just immediate immersion in a world of horror. “Unbelievable!” says Morris. “How could I feel? Nobody can imagine what really happened and what the Germans were doing to us.” What they did not know at the time was that
the authorities at Auschwitz and other concentration camps had been ordered by the SS economic division in August 1942 to collect any human hair longer than about a couple of centimeters. It was to be spun into thread to make “felt socks for submarine crews and felt hose for railways.”
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Dario and Morris learned that, to survive, they needed to adapt—and quickly. As transport after transport was brought down into the basement of the crematorium, they swiftly mastered the routine of their job. The new arrivals would be forced into the long underground undressing room. Then, as the Germans shouted, “Schnell! Schnell!” they were told to take their clothes off and to remember where they had placed them, because the Germans also said they would need to recover them after their shower. Many of the women shouted, “Shame! Shame!” as they were forced to rush naked towards the gas chamber that lay beyond. Says Dario Gabbai,

The gas chambers of crematoria 2 and 3 were below ground, so the delivery of the Zyklon B once the chamber was crammed with people and the door secured was relatively straightforward. Standing outside on the gas chamber roof, members of the SS would take off hatches that gave them access to special wire columns in the gas chamber below. They would then place canisters of Zyklon B inside the columns and lower them, sealing the hatch again once the gas had reached the bottom.

From the other side of the locked door, Dario Gabbai and Morris Venezia heard children and their mothers crying and scratching the walls. Morris remembers how, when the gas chamber was crammed with around a thousand people, he heard voices calling out, “God! God!” “Like a voice from the catacombs—I still hear this kind of voice in my head.” After the noise ceased, powerful fans were turned on to remove the gas, and then it was time for Morris, Dario and the other Sonderkommando to go to work. Dario recalls,

The Sonderkommando had to remove the bodies from the gas chamber and transport them via a small corpse lift up to the crematorium ovens on the ground floor above them. Then they had to re-enter the gas chamber wielding powerful hoses and clean up the blood and excrement that was on the walls and floor.

This whole horrific operation was often supervised by as few as two SS men. Even when the killing process was stretched to the limit there were only ever a handful of SS members around. This, of course, limited to a minimum the number of Germans who might be subjected to the kind of psychological damage that members of the killing squads in the East had suffered. Far from there being reports of psychological breakdowns among the few SS men who oversaw the actual killings, however, there were instances where the Germans seem to have taken sadistic pleasure in what they did.

Dario Gabbai remembers one member of the SS who would occasionally visit the crematorium, select seven or eight beautiful girls and tell them to get undressed in front of the Sonderkommando. Then he would shoot them in their breasts or their private parts so that they died right in front of them. “There are no feelings at that time,” says Dario. “We knew our days were numbered too—that we could never survive in such an environment. But everything becomes a habit.”

Morris Venezia remembers one night during the height of the Hungarian action when three young women, two sisters and a friend, approached one of the SS men and asked to be killed together. The SS man was “very happy” to do as they asked, so he arranged them in one line, took out his revolver and shot all three of them with one bullet. According to Morris Venezia,

In a striking example of how testimony from survivors today can chime accurately with contemporary records, Morris and Dario's experiences tally closely with letters written by other Sonderkommando, which they buried in containers around the site of the crematoria. These fragments, recovered after the war, contain some of the most moving material in the history of Auschwitz—not least because every one of those who recorded their experiences was subsequently murdered. Fragments of one letter, written by an unknown Sonderkommando, discovered in the ground near the remains of crematorium 3 in 1952, give examples of sexual sadism similar to the acts recalled by Dario and Morris.