Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
At the camp platform the trains were unloaded five cars at a time, and the victims, separated by sex, were sent in to undress for their “bath.” Once naked, they were marched and—as the realization of some horror about to overtake them grew—driven, down a long, curved corridor between two greenery-covered fences, toward the gas chambers. So great were the numbers that hundreds had to await their turn to enter, sometimes in cold so severe that children’s feet froze to the ground. Very occasionally, boys and girls were extracted from the mass to serve as “work Jews,” or as cooks and orderlies for the camp officers. Most of these were murdered later, but a few would survive to describe the unimaginable.
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The volume of killings was so massive that the gas chambers, as well as the train tracks, often had to be closed down for repairs and expansions. Nor were the various methods of corpse disposal up to the task, a situation that led to the piling up of bodies and temporary, improvised killing methods. It was during such a breakdown that one of the few eyewitnesses to the satanic scenes at the extermination camps, the young Polish Resistance courier Jan Karski, managed to get into Belzec disguised as a guard. His words, which he would carry out to the Allies in the autumn of 1942, need no elaboration:
As we approached to within a few hundred yards of the camp the shouts, cries and shots cut off further conversation.… We passed through a small grove of decrepit looking trees and emerged directly in front of the loud, sobbing, reeking camp of death. It was on a large, flat plain and occupied about a square mile … surrounded on all sides by a formidable barbed wire fence.… The camp itself contained a few small sheds or barracks. The rest of the area was completely covered by a dense, pulsating, throbbing, noisy human mass. Starved, stinking, gesticulating, insane human beings in constant agitated motion. Through them … walked the German police and the militia men. They walked in silence, their faces bored and indifferent.… A small child, clad in a few rags was lying on the ground. He was all alone and crouched quivering on the ground, staring up with the frightened eyes of a rabbit. No one paid any attention to him.… There was no organization of any kind. None of them could possibly help or share with each other.… They had become, at this stage, completely dehumanized. The chaos, the squalor, the hideousness of it all was simply indescribable. There was a suffocating stench of sweat, filth, decay, damp straw and
excrement.… Finally I noticed a change in the motion of the guards … they walked less and they all seemed to be glancing in the same direction—at the passage to the [train] track.… The whole system had been worked out with crude effectiveness. The outlet of the passage was blocked off by two cars of the freight train … so that any attempt … to escape … would have been completely impossible.… A volley of shots from the rear sent the whole mass surging forward madly.… Impelled and controlled by this ring of fire, they filled the two cars quickly.… Alternately swinging and firing with their rifles, the policemen were forcing still more people into the cars which were already over-full.… The floors of the car had been covered with … quicklime.… Here the lime served a double purpose.… The moist flesh coming in contact with the lime is rapidly dehydrated and burned. The occupants of the cars would be literally burned to death before long … the lime would prevent decomposing bodies from spreading disease. It was efficient and inexpensive.… It took three hours to fill up the entire train by repetitions of this procedure. It was twilight when the forty-six cars were packed.… From one end to the other, the train with its quivering cargo of flesh, seemed to throb, vibrate, rock and jump … moan and sob, wail and howl. Then these … ceased.… The train would travel about eighty miles and finally come to a halt in an empty … field. Then nothing at all would happen. The train would stand stock-still, patiently waiting while death penetrated into every corner of its interior. This would take from two to four days.
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Conditions in the labor camps for Jews selected for forced labor were extremely varied, and assignments were a matter of luck. Some workers might find themselves in small, private factories where food, bedding, and general treatment were very good.
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Others were simply graced with good luck, as was eleven-year-old Arek Hersh. In 1940 Arek was deported as a quota substitute for his father to a particularly brutal camp at Otoczno on the Warsaw-Berlin train line, where track was repaired. Water was hauled to the camp in a long tank pulled by roped-together teenagers. One of the guards, who apparently felt sorry for the small boy, released him from the harness and let him walk beside the contraption. The camp commandant also took a shine to Arek and used him as an orderly for a time before sending him back to the ghetto, but not before Arek had accidentally witnessed a group of his friends being loaded by force into some “strange-looking lorries” that were supposed to be taking
the laborers “home,” but that in fact were mobile gas chambers. When the ghetto was liquidated in 1942, Arek, still too small to work, was accidentally put in a group going to the workshops of the Lodz Ghetto instead of to Chelmno, where the rest of his family perished. Sent to Auschwitz from Lodz, he once again managed to switch from the line of the condemned to that of those going to work, and ultimately survived the war.
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Arek and those in the nice factories were fortunate indeed. For most, the labor camps were a nightmare from the beginning. The sufferings of the inmates who had preceded them were often all too clear At Jedlinsk, where thousands of Russian POWs had died of starvation, Sam Dresner was shown floorboards that the dying soldiers had gnawed in their desperate hunger. At the huge and notorious camp at Skarzysko-Kamienna, fifteen-year-old Chaim Olmer, who arrived at night, was greeted by a surreal scene that was “like something out of hell. Yellow people, dressed in paper sacks, shuffled along as if in a dream.” Near his hut, “the smell was unbearable. By the washroom was a big wooden crate. The dead bodies were put into it and it was emptied when it was full.”
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The inmates were yellow from working with picrine, a chemical that worked its way into the skin and lungs and usually caused death within three months.
There was no peace in these camps. The heavy work was designed to kill. Inmates were regularly shot and hanged. Those who got too thin and weak on the pathetic rations were selected once again and sent to the death camps. Typhus swept the barracks. Transfers from one camp to another were arbitrary and frequent, but sometimes a new place provided more humane conditions, especially if the supervisor was of the type immortalized by Oskar Schindler.
Lowest of the low though they were, the Jewish young people occasionally found others to pity. The labor camp at Czestochowianka was near another, which held 10,000 Russian prisoners of war who suddenly disappeared. The puzzled Jewish prisoners were told by local Poles that the Russians had deliberately been fed cabbage soup infested with green caterpillars. In two weeks all but twenty-four of them, who had purposely been given uncontaminated food, had died of dysentery. The survivors, after burying their comrades, were also killed. No wonder the spoons used to stir Russian soup were kept separate.
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By June 1943, with the Soviets retaking large areas of the Ukraine and the extermination camps being closed down, an estimated 120,000 Polish Jews still survived in the ZALs of the General Gouvernement. Their chances of survival might have seemed to have improved, but in November,
43,000 of these laborers would be slaughtered without warning in a five-day orgy cynically named Operation Harvest Festival. The purge put a large dent even in the production schedules of the SS’s own war industries and dismayed other officials and factory owners, whose productivity was constantly being reduced both by the German draft and by the wanton killing or starvation of assigned workers.
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Continuing pressure from industry did lead to a slight amelioration in the treatment of the workers and, as the war ground on, the use of concentration camp labor of all origins in the armaments industry continued to grow, rising eventually to some 500,000 inmates, of whom at least 25 percent were Jews. This policy was enthusiastically, if schizophrenically, backed by Himmler, whose agencies simultaneously continued to exterminate thousands in the by now hugely expanded facilities at Auschwitz and in hundreds of other camps. In an even greater reversal of Nazi policy, the greatest number of Jewish forced laborers, all considered expendable, would be put to work on a vast network of secret underground factories within the virtually
judenrein
Reich itself. The majority would come from Hungary, whose Vichy-like government had protected its own Jews until early 1944.
The inefficiency of the selection process for these slave laborers was, in general, a shock to industrialists more interested in production than extermination. On several occasions armaments czar Albert Speer and others complained that most of the “workers” sent to them were old people and children. One vast underground plant at Landsberg, in Bavaria, received a transport of middle-class Hungarian Jews and their families. After a time, the SS sent a unit from Dachau to surround the camp and truck the children away to an unknown destination. The project engineer, who protested this action, was also horrified to see that “almost half the people” on a train bringing more workers were dead; he later asked Speer “how the people in Berlin thought we could work with these half dead people, many of them women and almost-children.”
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Survival for these workers, many very young, was a true miracle. So ghastly were the conditions in the underground world that even Speer, during an inspection of the notorious Camp Dora in the Harz Mountains, where the V-2 rockets were to be produced, was badly shaken at the sight of “dead men” and “those still alive” who “were skeletons.”
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Indeed, Speer and his staff were so upset that the official record of their trip pathetically made note of a rather different sort of forced journey: “This tremendous mission drew on the leaders’ last reserves of strength. Some
of the men were so affected that they had to be forcibly sent off on vacations to restore their nerves.”
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Despite all the segregation of sexes and nationalities and the ferocious propaganda forbidding fraternization and its more advanced aspects, including sexual intercourse, which for many categories of workers could bring a death sentence, foreign laborers of all nations found Germans and one another, made love, and produced babies. More babies came into the Reich in utero on the terrible transport trains. This natural process was a major headache for the labor procurers and even more so for the racial agencies assigned to protect the purity of German blood. A pregnant woman’s productivity was naturally lower, and after giving birth, in those days, she was not considered fit to return to the workplace for several weeks. In the early days of the importation of Eastern workers, pregnant women were simply sent home, but it soon became clear that getting pregnant was a good way to escape forced labor, and this practice was stopped.
From the beginning, the slightest contact between male forced laborers, no matter what their origin, and German women was strictly forbidden.
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As we have seen, Polish boys who became involved with German girls were executed, unless they were found to be of high racial value. Making contact with French and Dutch workers was much easier, as these were sometimes allowed out of their camps. But, despite repeated efforts of the race agencies to do so, the death sentence was not imposed on the Western workers, as such drastic action would not only violate the Geneva Convention, but would also surely be reported at home and might encourage even greater resistance than was already going on. Punishment of the Western men therefore usually consisted of prison sentences of a year or two.
German girls, who to the outrage of the Nazi authorities seem to have been quite attracted to “foreigners” and little concerned with racial issues, did not have a good time of it either if a relationship was discovered. Even a small act of kindness, such as giving a worker on a town construction project a cup of tea or a piece of bread, could bring down a Gestapo investigation upon the donor. These inquiries were often initiated by anonymous letters from informants with some nasty imagined reason to seek revenge on the victim. Punishments, imposed after interrogations in which questions of the most personal nature were asked, ranged from head shaving or some other form of public humiliation to jail sentences of varying lengths.
To drive the point home in some jurisdictions, Polish and Eastern workers involved in such cases were executed in public.
Out in the countryside, where foreign farmworkers often became part of the family, and the
droit du seigneur
was tempting, things were harder. To combat fraternization there, farmers had, early on, been given leaflets exhorting them:
Maintain the purity of German blood! That applies to both men and women! Just as it is considered the greatest disgrace to become involved with a Jew, any German engaging in intimate relations with a Polish male or female is guilty of sinful behavior. Despise the bestial urges of this race! Be racially conscious and protect your children. Otherwise you will forfeit your greatest asset: your honor.
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None of this seems to have been effective: by early 1941 fraternization incidents were increasing, leading the authorities to push the factories to construct more brothels, at least for the Western workers. These facilities were given special allocations of bedding by the rationing agencies, and large numbers of foreign ladies were recruited to occupy them. Eastern workers did not have brothels per se. Men and women were supposed to be recruited “in equal numbers,” after which nature could, apparently, take its course. Despite these regulations, the SD estimated that by January 1942 there were nearly 20,000 illegitimate German–foreign labor babies, a number that did not include those born within the labor community itself. Clearly, more drastic measures were needed.
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