The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery by Pilecki Captain Witold

Author:Pilecki, Captain Witold [Pilecki, Captain Witold]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781607720140
Publisher: Aquila Polonica
Published: 2014-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

We knew that just as our inmates had once suffered on the blocks from lice, so in the women’s camp, in the blocks isolated from ours, there was a great infestation of fleas.

We could not understand where it had come from, nor how these insects made such a gender distinction between the inmates. It turned out later that some kommandos from the women’s camp had worked in flea-infested buildings and had brought the creatures back with them.

The insects, finding themselves now in good conditions, made themselves at home, chasing away the previous white tenants.

Shortly thereafter, the women were transferred from us and from blocks in the main camp to Rajsko-Birkenau, where they died in terrible conditions in wooden huts.

There was a lack of running water and lavatories in these blocks.

Some of them slept on the ground, for the blocks made from planks had no floors.

They floundered in mud above their ankles, for there were no drains or roads.

In the morning they remained in their hundreds on the parade ground, having no more strength for work. Downcast, these numb martyrs no longer looked like women.

They soon benefited from the camp authorities’ “mercy,” going by the hundred to the gas chambers.

Over two thousand beings, once women, were gassed. A huge number of fleas remained on the blocks vacated by the women.

The carpenters who went to these blocks in order to make repairs to the windows or doors before male kommandos were moved back in, spoke of the terrible work in this kingdom of “brunettes,” which jumped around the empty blocks in whole swarms.

Hungry, they rushed at the new arrivals, small dots, biting one after the other.

Nothing helped, not tying one’s trouser legs at the ankle nor one’s sleeves at the cuffs, so the carpenters immediately tore off their clothes putting them in some place free from fleas, and naked they would fight them off as animals grazing in the field beat off flies.

They swarmed all over the floor and if you looked at them in sunlight one got the impression of so many fountains.

By now we had lavatories and nice bathrooms in all the blocks in our camp. Drainage and running water were now the norm. Mechanical pumps worked in the cellars of three blocks supplying the whole camp with water.

A great many inmates had laid down their lives building all these improvements.

So now a zugang arrived in conditions different from those in which we had once been kept and in which we had also been “finished off ” by the lack of washing facilities and the lack of a quiet moment in some lavatory.

Now someone was responsible for tidiness—a post which was the envy of many. He would sit in the lavatory eating his soup, he always had seconds, and it bothered him not a whit that his dining room was unusual. He would calmly carry on eating, shouting at the häftlings to go about their business in the beautiful lavatory faster.

The women who were moved from the kinds of conditions we had in the blocks in ’42 to the primitive conditions of Rajsko, felt this all the more.

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