Auschwitz (43 page)

There is, however, another, still more sinister, reason why Alice did not realize the significance of the room in which she was waiting. Even after sixty years, her strongest memory of approaching the crematorium is of the red flowers—perhaps geraniums—growing in window boxes. Flowers were unheard of in Auschwitz and, to Alice, they symbolized the safe and secure life she had left behind.

The touches like this—flowers in the window boxes of the crematorium—are what raise the killing process that the Nazis devised above mere brutality to a level of cynicism as yet unsurpassed in the so-called “civilized” world.

Alice survived that day because of a monumentally unlikely piece of luck—she was sitting in the gas chamber on October 7. This was a unique day in the history of Auschwitz—the day of the Sonderkommando revolt. Some of the Sonderkommando had been planning to rise up against their guards back in June, in a revolt organized with the help of an underground resistance movement run by Yaacov Kamiński, but the SS learned of the plans. It was almost impossible for Jewish prisoners to sustain a secret resistance movement for any length of time at Auschwitz because of the network of Kapos who so closely supervised them and, of course, because of their appalling mortality rate in the camp. Kamiński was informed upon and killed, but the nucleus of his group survived and continued to try and “organize” whatever weapons they could—knives, pickaxes, and the like—and negotiate with others through the wire in the rest of Birkenau to gain access to further supplies.

The Sonderkommando had felt driven to action on October 7 by an announcement days before asking for “volunteers” to join Otto Moll, one of the most notorious SS overseers of the crematoria, who had recently left to become commandant of Gliwice sub-camp. They knew this was a ruse, because the last group of Sonderkommando who had been selected to “go” to Majdanek camp had instead been killed by the SS men and their bodies had been burnt overnight in crematorium 2. The next morning, some of the remaining Sonderkommando had recognized the half-burnt corpses of their comrades and any last illusions they had about the eventual fate the Nazis intended for them were dispelled.

The Sonderkommando were also well aware that their usefulness to the Nazis had diminished considerably. Only the arrival of about 65,000 people—a result of the liquidation of the Łódź ghetto—during August and
September had prevented the Nazis from cutting back on the number of Sonderkommando at Auschwitz earlier. Now, after no one had come forward to “volunteer” for the mythical transfer to Gliwice, the Sonderkommando learned that the Kapos in crematoria 4 and 5 had been told to come up with the names of three hundred Sonderkommando who would be “transferred to rubber factories”—factories that were just as imaginary as had been all the previous destinations for the Sonderkommando that the Nazis had promised.

In response to the clear threat of their own immediate execution, at around 1.30 P.M. on Saturday, October 7th, the Sonderkommando in crematorium 4 mutinied.
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Armed with pickaxes and rocks, they attacked the SS guards as they came toward them and then set fire to the crematorium. After a few minutes of hand-to-hand fighting with the SS men, some Sonderkommando managed to escape into the nearby woods and reached the village of Rajsko beyond, but they were still trapped as they remained within the Auschwitz Zone of Interest. Meanwhile, the Sonderkommando in crematorium 2 also rose up against the SS men and shoved one of the guards, alive, into the lit ovens.

About 250 members of the Sonderkommando were killed during the ensuing struggle in Auschwitz. All of those who escaped were later captured and shot, along with others suspected of involvement in the revolt—a total of 200 more people. Three SS members died as a consequence of the Sonderkommando action that day. But the revolt did save some lives. It must have been because of the chaos caused by the Sonderkommando in crematorium 4 that the SS guards emptied the gas chamber of crematorium 5 next door without killing Alice Lok Cahana and her group.

Eight days after the Sonderkommando revolt at Auschwitz, the political situation in Hungary changed once more when Horthy's non-compliant regime was overthrown with the help of the Nazi-backed Hungarian Arrow Cross militia. Eichmann, who had passed the months since the end of the deportations by having an affair and getting drunk, immediately called Kasztner for a meeting and greeted him with the words, “I'm back!” The Jews of Budapest, who had up to now largely escaped deportation, were his new target. It was impractical—given the nearness of the Red Army and the difficulties in organizing railway passage—to send them to Auschwitz.
So Eichmann determined that they should walk to Vienna—more than 200 kilometers away.

During November, tens of thousands of Jews from Budapest were forced out of the city and made to trek west to Austria, marching without food through rain and snow. The sight of this pitiful column appalled even hardened SS officers, and Eichmann was told to halt the deportations. He instead worked around the order and carried on, earning the vilification of representatives of neutral countries who observed the suffering. With more than 100,000 Jews still in Budapest waiting to become part of Eichmann's sadistic planned march, Kurt Becher, always a more pragmatic Nazi, protested to Himmler about his colleague's action. Becher—and Himmler—realized that the war must end soon, and that with Germany's defeat ideology needed to be twinned with realism.

Himmler called Becher and Eichmann to a meeting in his private train stationed at Triberg in the Black Forest. According to Becher, Himmler told Eichmann to cease the deportations of the Budapest Jews, saying that “If until now you have exterminated Jews, from now on, if I order you as I do, you must be a fosterer of Jews.”
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It was a dramatic about-face for Himmler, the man who had helped mastermind the Nazis' “Final Solution.” But, as the war entered its last few months, still more surprises were to come from the Reichsführer SS.

W
hen the end came, it came quickly. One night in January 1945, as ten-year-old Eva Mozes Kor
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and her twin sister Miriam lay in their bunks at Auschwitz–Birkenau, they were suddenly awoken by a huge explosion. Outside the winter sky was red with flames. The Nazis had blown up the crematoria. Moments later, they were forced out of their barracks and marched with other twins—all of whom had been subject to Dr. Mengele's experiments—down the road to Auschwitz main camp. It was a nightmarish scene. Above them they saw distant flashes of artillery, and in the darkness the SS men harried them on without respite. Any of the children who could not make the journey were shot and their bodies left by the side of the road. In the chaos two of the sets of twins lost their siblings, and never saw them again.

Once in Auschwitz main camp, Eva and Miriam were left largely on their own. The rigid system of supervision by Kapos and guards had suddenly broken down and the prisoners looked after themselves. Eva even managed to break through the perimeter fence and walk to the edge of the Sola River, which ran along one side of the main camp, to try and get water. As she looked up from breaking the ice on the surface of the river, she saw a little girl about her own age on the other side of the bank. She was dressed in beautiful clothes, with carefully braided hair decorated with ribbons, and carried a school bag. It was an “almost unbelievable” sight to Eva—wearing rags and swarming with lice—who stood and stared at her. “This was my first realization
since we arrived in Auschwitz,” she says, “that there was a world out there with children who looked like children, and who went to school.”

Eva and Miriam are fortunate to be alive—because the Nazi plan was that they should die along with the rest of the several thousand prisoners who were left behind, judged too weak to take part in the mass exodus from Auschwitz. An order for their murder had been sent by SS Obergruppenführer (lieutenant general) Schmauser,
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the commander of the local area, on January 20. During the next seven days, special SS units murdered about 700 prisoners at Birkenau and nearby sub-camps. Nearly 8,000 other prisoners, including Eva and Miriam, escaped death because the Red Army was closing too rapidly on Auschwitz and the SS members were concerned more with saving themselves than with following orders.

Shortly afterwards, the guns fell silent and, on January 27, Red Army soldiers from the First Ukrainian Front arrived at the complex. They found around 600 prisoners alive in the Monowitz slave labor camp next to the I.G. Farben Buna works, nearly 6,000 at Birkenau, and just more than 1,000 at Auschwitz main camp—including Eva and her sister Miriam. The first Eva heard that, for her, the suffering might be over was when one of the women in the barracks started shouting: “We're free! We're free! We're free!” Eva ran to the door but could see nothing in the snow. Only after some minutes could she make out Red Army soldiers dressed in white camouflage coats. She recalls,

Ivan Martynushkin was a lieutenant with a Red Army mortar company
who fought his way with his comrades into Auschwitz town. But when he reached Birkenau, just hours after its liberation, there was a strange calm. The former prisoners looked at him “with gratitude in their eyes” and with “forced smiles.” “We had a feeling that we had done something good,” he says, “a very good deed—that we had somehow fulfilled our duty.” But, significantly, although he says he and his comrades had “feelings of compassion” for the Auschwitz prisoners, they were not hugely affected by what they saw.

Ivan Martynushkin's words are a useful reminder of the context in which Auschwitz would have been seen initially by many who fought on the Eastern Front. For them, it was a horror, true enough, but also just one more terrible sight in a war already overflowing with atrocity. Indeed, the liberation of Auschwitz was not huge news at the time. It was mentioned in the papers—
Pravda
published an account by their correspondent Boris Polevoi on February 2
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and the story was picked up a few days later by the
Jewish Chronicle
in Britain—but the liberation was not publicized in the way that the discovery of Majdanek camp had been the previous summer. Majdanek had been the only other Nazi camp to use Zyklon B for killing (but on a much smaller scale than Auschwitz), and so it was possible for the press at first to see Auschwitz as “another Majdanek.” There were also a great deal of other competing stories for the newspapers to report in January 1945—not least the forthcoming meeting of the “Big Three” war leaders (Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin)
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at Yalta in the Crimea.

But there was also perhaps one more reason why the liberation of Auschwitz was not a massive immediate news story in the West. The Red Army had discovered the camp, and already some were beginning to question the extent
to which the alliance that had won the war would survive victory. Traces of an overtly Marxist interpretation of Auschwitz, as the ultimate capitalist factory where the workers were dispensable, were evident in Polevoi's article in
Pravda
. It was a moment that marked the beginning of a rift in historical interpretation between East and West concerning the operation of the camps that would not be resolved until the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union. One of the least appealing aspects of the Soviet analysis of Auschwitz, now and later, was the downplaying of the scale of the suffering endured by Jews in the camp—the emphasis was on referring to everyone who died as collectively “victims of Fascism.”

Back in January 1945, however, Eva Mozes Kor and her sister Miriam rightly considered themselves lucky to have been liberated by the Red Army. For, if they had not been left behind, then on January 18th, with the Red Army just a few kilometers away, the Germans would have included them among the other 65,000 so-called “fit” prisoners drawn from the huge complex of Auschwitz camps and they would have begun the journey west—on foot. These next few weeks would be remembered by many of the prisoners who were forced to take part in the evacuation as the worst experience they suffered while in captivity—worse than the constant selections, worse than the starvation diet in the camps, worse than the disease-ridden, freezing huts they lived in. For the Auschwitz prisoners were embarking on a journey that would become known—with complete accuracy—as a death march.