The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert

Author:Martin Gilbert [Gilbert, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780795337192
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2014-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

The wealth collected in ‘Canada’ came from Jews who were alive on arrival at Birkenau, but who were dead by the time their belongings had been sorted. Just before being gassed, further ‘wealth’ was extracted from the women: their hair. On 4 January 1943 the head office of the SS administration wrote to all concentration camp commandants, including Hoess at Auschwitz, requesting them to forward human hair for processing at the firm of Alex Zink, Filzfabrik A.G., at Roth near Nuremberg. For each kilogramme of human hair, camp commandants would receive half a mark.61

From January 7 to January 24, fifteen trains reached Auschwitz, from Belgium, Holland, Berlin, Grodno and the Bialystok region. From them, about four thousand Jews were selected for the barracks, and more than twenty thousand gassed. To enable such numbers to be ‘processed’ rapidly, and even to increase the scale and pace of the killing, four new crematoria were under construction, planned to come into operation in March. On the train from Belgium which arrived on January 18, 387 men and 81 women were sent to the barracks, while the remaining 1,558 deportees, including all the children and old people, were gassed.62

On the train which left Theresienstadt on January 20, 160 young women and 80 young men were taken to the barracks at Birkenau, and the remaining 1,760 Jews loaded into lorries and driven to the gas-chamber. Only 2 of the 160 women and 80 men survived the slave labour of the next six weeks. Taken to marshland four miles from Auschwitz, they were forced to stand knee-deep in the marsh, digging out sand and stones. They were barefoot, and dressed in rags. Many, as the historian of Theresienstadt has recorded, ‘contracted frostbite and their festering fingers fell off’. But, crippled as they were, they had to carry on. SS women beat them with sticks and set Alsatian dogs on them. They had to rise at 3.30 a.m.; for breakfast they were given tea made of herbs; at 5 a.m. they marched to their place of work whence they returned between 6 and 7 p.m. to the strains of the camp band, carrying the bodies of their fellow prisoners murdered at work by the SS men. Their supper consisted of saltless hot water, with pieces of beetroot or bits of nettles swimming in it, and four ounces of bread.63

One of those who recorded some of the events at Birkenau was a member of the Sonderkommando whose twenty-nine-page notebook was found in 1952 buried near one of the crematoria. He recorded how, at the beginning of 1943:

The gas-chamber was crowded with Jews and one Jewish boy remained outside. A certain sergeant came to him and wanted to kill him with a stick. He mangled him in a brutish manner, blood was dripping on all sides, when all of a sudden the maltreated boy, who had been lying motionless, jumped to his feet and began to regard, quietly and silently, his cruel murderer with his childish gaze. The sergeant burst into loud cynical laughter, took out his revolver and shot the boy.

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