From Ghetto to Death Camp: A Memoir of Privilege and Luck by Timothy Braatz & Anatol Chari

Author:Timothy Braatz & Anatol Chari [Braatz, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: The Disproportionate Press
Published: 2011-12-14T05:00:00+00:00

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Death Camp

In a death camp, there is nothing but death. Most concentration camps were labor camps, as the Germans exploited the slave labor of Jews, political prisoners, criminal prisoners, and prisoners of war. Auschwitz-Berkenau was both an extermination camp and a labor camp. Some prisoners were gassed immediately, and others were kept as workers. Bergen-Belsen was a death camp. It was not an extermination camp in the sense of having gas chambers. The Germans were not systematically gassing or shooting people. But they didn’t feed you either. They didn’t address the problem of typhoid fever. They just left you to die. Bergen-Belsen was actually a series of camps, and it was enormous. I was in the “death camp” section of the “men’s camp”—that’s how it was called—but the entire place was a death camp.[79] Krepierungslager. A slow, painful death camp. A death dump. There was no pretense of usefulness. You went there to die. When International Red Cross personnel and British troops arrived at Bergen-Belsen, they liberated sixty thousand prisoners. Twenty-five percent of the sixty thousand died within two months.[80] One hundred percent would have died if the liberators had arrived three weeks later. At Bergen-Belsen, there was no hope.

We arrived in the dark. Bergen-Belsen transports usually arrived and departed at night to make things less obvious to the local citizenry. From the train station, we walked for about two miles to the camp. We were already exhausted from the long trip, and the ground was slippery with snow. Five or six prisoners fell and couldn’t get up. They were as good as dead. The SS guards left them in the snow to be accounted for the next day. As we approached the camp, I saw clean and neat buildings, with glass windows, and I thought, “Gee, nice buildings, nice camp.” Those were the SS buildings, outside the fence. We walked through the gate and it wasn’t so nice any more. There were no lights on, indoors or out, but I could tell this was a dirty camp.

The SS guards stayed back and the camp functionaries—lower middle-management German and Polish prisoners—took over. Wielding whips and large clubs, they screamed at us and herded us into five barracks. It was dark and chaotic. It was terrifying. I was tired and just wanted to rest. Inside the barracks, the sleeping facilities were two long, slightly-slanted shelves that came together like a peaked roof. At the peak, wooden boards served as “pillows.” There were no blankets. In the darkness, you had to push and shove and find a place on the wooden shelf. When I lay down, I heard a familiar voice on the other side of the peak.

“Beryl?” I asked. Beryl was Berek K., the Sonder who organized even more than I did in the ghetto.

“Oh,” he replied, “Tolek.” He had gone from the ghetto to Auschwitz to a Gross-Rosen sub-camp, then joined our transport to Bergen-Belsen. The next morning, when I could see Beryl’s face, I didn’t recognize him. He was so emaciated.

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