Hanged at Auschwitz: An Extraordinary Memoir of Survival by Sam Kessel

Author:Sam Kessel [Kessel, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461741510
Publisher: Cooper Square Press
Published: 2001-12-04T06:00:00+00:00

8 AUSCHWITZ

I WAS SAVED, but for how long?

Everything depended on living conditions at Auschwitz. For after this medical examination, where my life hung by a thread, I was assigned to the main camp. The doomed group on the left, once again loaded onto the trucks, were driven outside the camp and we never found out any details of their end.

We few who escaped their fate went into the Auschwitz Krankenbau. The week I spent there was a real godsend to me, before having to resume hard work again.

Of the twenty-eight red brick barracks at Auschwitz, four made up the Krankenbau. It wasn’t a proper sanitorium, of course. Patients lay on lumpy mattresses in three-decker bunks, three men to a bunk, and they still got the same awful rutabaga soup and hard black bread. They received no more medical care here than in the outlying infirmaries. And it goes without saying that we still underwent periodic thinnings of our crowded beds by the doctor.

Yet despite all that, this place was almost comfortable compared to the stinking hellhole of Jaworzno. Most amazing to us were the clean toilets in every barracks—a cleanliness unparalleled in our experience. The Auschwitz Krankenbau was blessedly free of the foul smell that reigned in other camps, and for this we were grateful.

The medical staff seemed more professional—not that one could exactly sing the praises of the indifferent doctor assigned to my case, who really had little to do with my recovery. But I was lucky enough to have an orderly who performed extra services for me despite his thousand other pressing duties. A few months later he was to provide me with still more valuable help.

It was he too who volunteered some rather interesting information. Until the beginning of 1943, Auschwitz had been under the direction of the Nazis’ most ferocious killer. He had the prisoners, mostly Jewish, slaughtered in wholesale lots. After he left the situation eased a little; whether the new Lagerführer was actually less bloodthirsty or merely hoping to increase his charges’ work capacity, in any case he adopted a more humane policy. He forbade all corporal punishment except for disciplinary measures, and he had a notice put up announcing that the inmates’ lives would be spared if they did their work properly.

Theoretically these principles still obtained when I was transferred from Jaworzno to Auschwitz in November 1943. The situation was to remain stable for some time, a fact that doubtless explained the main camp’s relatively good reputation among prisoners in satellite camps. I well knew the climate of terror in the nearest, Birkenau.

Sadly, the new principles remained mainly just principles, for there was no way of preventing even a kapo from just clobbering anyone he had a mind to, much less of challenging an S.S. officer’s rights. Every convict knew what dire reprisals would descend on him if he made a complaint. Though we were struck at random less often, we were “punished” more, and nothing was easier than to find some pretext for punishment.

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