Authors: Henry Orenstein
The evening Appel was called, and we lined up on the Appelplatz of Field Three. A separate Appel was held on each field; on ours, we were the only Jews, the others being mostly Poles and Russian prisoners of war. During the Appel the SS man doing the count noticed our yellow triangles. He stopped in surprise and asked the SS man in charge of our block about us. Our guard shook his head; he didn't know what we were doing there either. After the Appel we went back to our barracks and they brought the container with the evening soup. As in Budzy
Å
, it was practically nothing but water.
The latrine was filthy too, as it had been in Budzy
Å
. On my first
visit there I had to be careful not to lose the tube with the paper money in my rectum. Crouching, I felt every bit of feces with my fingers, searching for the tube. I had to be very careful not to arouse suspicion, and yet make sure not to miss it. Finally I found itâa happy moment. That money could well mean the difference between life and death. I cleaned the tube off and put it in my pocket. Later I was able to borrow a needle and thread and sew it into my uniform.
I lay down on my bunk that night with a heavy heart. It was very cold, but I managed a few hours of fitful sleep. They got us out of our bunks at four in the morning, even earlier than in Budzy
Å
. The morning bread ration was small, with a little marmalade and some ersatz coffee. After the Appel they kept our group on Field Three and gave us clean-up work to do. Having become used to working indoors in Budzy
Å
, it was tough working outside all day in the sub-zero cold, with a wind that penetrated to our bones, which by now were covered with little more than the thin fabric of our striped uniforms.
Fred was sent to work in the camp hospital. Most of the beds were empty after the November massacre, but the temperature charts were still attached to the beds. Many of them showed fevers as high as a hundred and five, and Fred was sure there were a great many cases of typhus in Majdanek. With such heavy infestations of lice everywhere in the camp, it was inevitable that typhus would spread among us, which could mean death to our whole commando.
The days that followed brought little change. We were very hungry, but afraid to try to buy bread with the paper money we had left, being unable yet to trust anyone in Majdanek. The bitter cold continued, and our group suffered severely. We all regretted having registered for this chemical commando. Work in the Heinkel factory in Budzy
Å
had been comparatively light, and even though we had been in constant danger, there was still enough spirit for an occasional joke or reminiscing about the past. Here everything was gray and hopeless.
Most of our group changed markedly in their appearance and attitude. Fred in particular became depressed over the typhus. Within a few days he began to look like a Musulman, walking around in a stupor, his head hanging low and tilted to one side. He even stopped shaving. This was particularly upsetting to my brothers and me, because Fred had always kept himself neat and clean, and had usually been optimistic. We tried hard to cheer him up, but without success.
One evening I asked the Russian Stubenälteste to tell me about the massacre of the Jews in November. He shook his head. “You don't want to know.” But I persisted. He had been in Majdanek for about a year. The hunger was so bad, the beatings so severe, and shootings so continuous that the life span of a new arrival averaged only about three months. Over one hundred thousand people, most of them Jews, had died in Majdanek even before the November massacre.
Then, in the first two days of November 1943, there were signs of increased SS activity, with hundreds of new guards and dogs arriving. On November 3 there were eighteen thousand Jews in Majdanek, including a couple of thousand in two small satellite camps. Most were Polish, but there were a number of Slovakian and Dutch Jews, and a few hundred German Jews. After the morning Appel that day, instead of the usual
“Arbeit Kommandos formieren”
(Work commandos, assemble), the SS ordered the Jews to be separated from the Gentiles. The latter from Field Five were taken to Field Four, and the Jews from Fields One through Four were ordered to run to Field Five. On the way they were beaten and kicked by hundreds of the SS special commandos, who used trained dogs to attack the prisoners who weren't moving quickly enough.
Once in Field Five, the Jews were driven into a large L-shaped barracks and ordered to strip. In the middle of the barracks the SS
had placed large boxes, into which they ordered the Jews to throw all their valuables. The fence between Fields Five and Six was cut to provide an opening, and the naked Jews from the L-shaped barracks were driven toward long ditches, which had been dug on Field Six. It all happened very fast. The SS ordered the first ten Jews to lie down next to each other on the bottom of the first ditch, machine-gunned them, ordered the next ten to lie down on top of the freshly killed bodies, machine-gunned them in turn, and continued this procedure until the last layer of bodies reached the top of the ditch. Then they started farther down the ditch on a new layer of ten. Women and men were shot in separate ditches. The massacre took place to the sound of dance musicâwaltzes, fox trots, and tangosâwhich was played through loudspeakers.
The shooting started at six in the morning and ended about seven that nightâthirteen hours. The SS men from the
Sonderkommando
who were doing the shooting changed shifts every three or four hours. Before the action started, they had selected three hundred Jewish men and three hundred Jewish women and locked them in a barracks. After they had killed eighteen thousand people, the SS walked alongside the ditches, looking for signs of life and finishing off any who were still moving or moaning. The six hundred Jewish men and women were then brought out from the barracks and made to search the clothing and other belongings left behind for valuables. After they finished doing this, the SS killed them as well.
On November 5 the Russian prisoners of war began the job of disposing of the bodies. First they extracted the gold teeth, then piled up the bodies, poured gasoline over them, and burned them. Afterward they sifted the ashes and shards of bone through sieves, looking for stones or gold they had missed before. Finally the remains, now powder, were poured into bags and taken to a nearby SS farm, where they were used as fertilizer.
Disposing of the bodies took almost two months. A few days before Christmas 1943, the SS had any depressions in the ditches filled with earth to make them level with the rest of the field; a Russian friend of the Stubenälteste was in the commando that did this work.
By this time I was used to atrocities, but this chilling account of the Majdanek massacre upset me terribly. I was scarcely able to sleep that night. A few days later, when our work commando was assigned to do clean-up work on Field Five, I couldn't keep my eyes off Field Six, on the other side of the fence. There was no sign whatsoever of the mass killings that had taken place only a few months before and that haunted my mind. I couldn't escape the vision of those thousands upon thousands of naked men and women being driven and beaten by the SS, forced to lie down, riddled by machine-gun bullets, and dying to the tune of music blaring from the loudspeakers. It made me almost ill. What was the use of fighting, of struggling so hard against all odds to survive? And if by some miracle we succeeded, was it worth it, to go on living in such an evil world? In spite of everything, however, deep inside me there was that strong instinctive desire to live, an intense curiosity about the outcome of it all, and a yearning to see these beasts punished.
About ten days after our arrival in Majdanek, several hundred more Jews, men and a few women, arrived from Radom, a town about a hundred kilometers from Majdanek. We couldn't figure out what the Germans were up to. They'd killed tens of thousands of Jews in November, then they brought our little chemical commando from Budzy
Å
, and here they were importing Jews from Radom for no apparent reason. What did it mean? While working in the aircraft plant in Budzy
Å
, we felt the Germans had a reason for keeping us alive; they needed us for the war effort. When we left Budzy
Å
, we had assumed they were sending us on some special assignment. So far, though, there seemed no rhyme or reason to our presence in Majdanek.
Rumors reached us that a new and successful Russian offensive had been launched, that the siege of Leningrad had lifted, and that Russian troops were victorious everywhere and were approaching the pre-1939 Polish border. There was no definite confirmation of these stories, however, not even a scrap of newspaper. Security in Majdanek was very tight, and we never left the camp. We were hungry, covered with lice, totally without contact with the outside world. I could scarcely bear even to look at Fred, he was so depressed and apathetic.
Early in April, after the morning Appel, we were told that all Jews (our group, together with the Radom Jews) were being shipped out. Once again, we tried to guess what was happening. Where were they taking us now? Had they intended to kill us, they could have done so easily in Majdanek, so probably that was not their immediate plan. Maybe they were going to make some use of the chemical commando after all. But in that case, why were they combining us with the Radom Jews? Once again, too, my brothers and I had to go through the process of inserting the tubes with our money inside our bodies; wherever they were taking us, we would have to undergo another search when we got there.
We were marched to the railway station, where a train with cattle cars waited on the siding. The SS opened the doors and started beating and shoving us inside. Our group tried to stay together. They packed us in so tightly that there was no room to lie down; we had to either sit or stand. After warning us that anyone attempting to escape would be shot by the guards stationed on the roof, they shut the doors and bolted them. It was dark inside the car, the only light coming in through the crack in the doors. Everyone was pushing and shoving, trying to make room for himself. Despite it all, though, I felt somewhat relieved. There was no knowing where they might be taking us and what was going
to happen, but almost anything would be preferable to the nightmare of Majdanek.
It was at least two hours before the train even started to move. We couldn't tell in which direction it was going, but at the first station where we stopped we heard the name of a town that one of the local people knew to be to the west of Majdanek. Where could we be going? Some thought to Germany, others perhaps to Auschwitz, which we knew was a huge extermination camp as well as a labor camp.
Those who couldn't control their bladders and bowels started relieving themselves on the floor, and the smell of urine, feces, and sweat became overpowering. Some people had trouble breathing and cried out for help. No help came, because nobody could move. It was almost airless in thereâbut at least it wasn't hot, otherwise few would have survived the trip. The train made frequent stops, but the guards kept us locked in the entire time. Some of the younger Jews from Radom who happened to be sitting a few feet away from me were trying to pry open a loose board in order to escape, but they didn't succeed. Surprisingly, despite the frightful conditions, there were relatively few arguments or fights. Richie Krakowski, who was sitting near me, told me that this trip was a bed of roses compared to the one he had taken in the cattle car from Warsaw to Treblinka. At least our destination was unknown; they had known they were on their way to be gassed.
As the hours went by, my body began to ache from being squeezed so hard on all sides. A man next to me fell asleep on me, a dead weight. I tried to wake him, but he was too exhausted to respond. Someone next to me urinated on the floor, and my pants got wet. Night fell, and the air became heavier still. I had no trouble breathing, but some people began to gasp and choke. Somebody diedâI heard weeping and sobbing. My brothers and I were fairly
near each other, and from time to time we called each other's names to reassure ourselves we were all alive. And the train rolled on.
At last daylight came, which cheered me a little. I tried to calculate the speed of the train and the distance to the German border, and figured it would take us about twenty-four hours to get there from Majdanek. By now the smell was so bad I was sick. Sometime late in the morning the train stopped again, and this time we heard the guards opening the doors. When our doors swung open and the light struck my eyes, I blinked at the shock. We had been in the dark for a long time.
The guards drove us out, screaming,
“Judenâraus, raus, mach schnell!”
I jumped out of the car, and we saw each other in the light of day. We were all filthy and tired. My pants were soaked from sitting in the urine and feces that covered the floor, and I was hoping that they would take us to a shower soon.
The SS ordered us to form a column, and we started marching. I saw a sign reading “PÅaszów,” which was a Polish place name. I would have preferred to be in Germany, where we probably would have a better chance to survive. Someone said we were near Krakow, a major Polish city in the southwest, and that PÅaszów was a big concentration camp. Soon we saw in the distance the familiar barbed wire, guard towers, and entrance gate. Well, at least we were still alive. They hadn't killed us yet, and as long as there's life, there's hope.
Upon entering the camp grounds, we were taken in tow by Jewish Kapos (group bosses), who showed us no mercy, pushing and kicking us as brutally as had the Ukrainians. After we were inside the reception barracks one of them actually jumped deliberately through an open window and crashed into us, feet first, knocking some of us down.
Here the search was not as thorough as it had been in Majdanek, but it didn't matter, because our money was safe in the paper tubes inside our rectums. Once again, on our first visit to the latrine we had to search through our feces to extract the tubes.