Last Stop Auschwitz by Eliazar de Wind

Author:Eliazar de Wind
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2020-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

Dear sweetheart,

I’m glad you’re getting some rest now and not driving yourself into the ground so much. I can get by without seeing each other for a couple of days and without you taking care of extra food for me.

Yesterday was a special day. I had been asking the Blockälteste for a long time and finally I was allowed to go with the herb Kommando. At eight a.m. we left the camp. We walked a long way and also came close to Birkenau. I saw Lotte Spatel there and the other girls who left our block last month. With some of them, the experiments had been completed. With others, they had failed. There were also some, like Lotte and the French Communists, who had refused to submit to the experiments.

Altogether seventy of them were put on the transport three weeks ago. It’s awful to see those women in Birkenau. How they have changed. Heads shaved completely bald and with bare feet, nothing but a piece of sacking to cover their bodies, bound together with a cord. You know, Hans, they’re not women anymore, they’re creatures, asexual creatures. Our girls still look fairly good, but how long will that last?

I spoke to Lotte for a moment. She quickly scrawled out a few words for her husband, Heini, but the overseer came up right away and gave her a clip. Then she went back to lugging bricks. You’re right—if I got sent to Birkenau I wouldn’t last long. I’m already coughing so much as it is.

It was a beautiful day. We looked for herbs in the woods. Chamomile and all kinds of other herbs. They use them to make Heilkräutertee. It was joyous: you could feel spring in every stem, in every blossom. Here in the camp everything is as dry and dead as ever, but the woods have already come back to life with birds and with new shoots on the branches of the trees.

We came back late in the afternoon. I was dead on my feet. I wasn’t used to it.

The evening was horrific. Yesterday afternoon there was a Standgericht. Three cars arrived with “judges.” In a nearby village they’d picked up more than three hundred Poles—the entire population. Only two were acquitted. The executions were in the evening.

We could hear it all perfectly. It was in the inner courtyard of Block 11, right next door. On that side our windows are boarded over and the Blockälteste made sure we didn’t look through the chinks, because then they would have been sure to shoot at the windows.

The mood in our block was worse than ever. The room orderlies were raging and the clerk was lashing out constantly. They’re all women—Slovakians—who spent a long time in Birkenau. Of course, things were hideous for them there, but now they think they have to make it hideous for us too. “If you’d been in Birkenau, you’d be long dead by now,” they say, and that’s why we have to undergo their harsh treatment now.

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