The Stable Boy of Auschwitz: A heartbreaking true story of courage and survival by Henry Oster & Dexter Ford

Author:Henry Oster & Dexter Ford [Oster, Henry & Ford, Dexter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781803148571
Publisher: Thread
Published: 2023-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

26 THE GAUNTLET AND THE ONE-EYED NAZI

My job as a runner gave me some freedom to find food, but it sometimes led me into situations that scared me out of my mind. In Auschwitz you could fool yourself into feeling that you were relatively safe one minute, and the next minute you’d be dead. So I never knew what I might be stumbling into.

Every twenty days or so we were given a shower in a special barrack block adjacent to the camp’s main latrine. After work, long after dark, we stable boys were marched in and ordered to take off our clothes. The Nazis were constantly looking for signs of weakness. There were always more people coming into Auschwitz. To make room, people already there had to die. This was the end of the line. If you looked hurt or sick or more starved than the others, you would be selected for death.

The vultures of the SS took the opportunity to inspect their prisoners at these occasional showers. We were already undressed and lined up, so it was a perfect opportunity for them to check our scrawny bodies, to see if we had any wounds or signs of disease, to determine whether we could go on for a few more weeks of slave labor. Or whether we were used up, expired—not worth feeding for another day.

We had all heard through the camp grapevine what these selections meant. If you got a shower, you were OK. If not—well, that was your tough luck. Prisoners who didn’t pass would be pulled out of the shower line, forced to put their clothes back on, and held apart in the barracks.

In the morning those poor unwashed Jews would be trucked to the Birkenau gas chambers.

For some reason we stable boys seemed to be immune to being selected. There may have been some order given, by some anonymous Nazi, that we were not to be singled out and murdered. We never really knew why, but our group of 131 boys was always waved straight through to the showers.

This was fortunate for us, but the experience was heart-rending. We could not avoid passing the mass of men who had been pulled out of line before we had arrived. They would be held under guard overnight, to prevent them from finding a place to hide, or escaping into the camp and telling the other prisoners about their fate. Once the Nazis had them, they never let them go.

Because we came back to camp later than everyone else, we would be forced to walk past nearly every prisoner who had been selected to die the next morning. Imagine looking into the face of a man—a man who has done nothing wrong—who has just realized that this would be his last night alive. Now multiply that by 100 or more—the number of doomed, desperate Jews who were already singled out when we filed past, stark naked, to take our showers.

Some seemed resigned. Some acted angry. Some—most of them—just looked shocked and horrified.

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