The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery Read online

  Expensive villas and modest, yet trim, cottages which some Polish working man had spent a lifetime building disappeared, demolished by hand by the inmates—Poles urged on by clubs, beaten and abused with a whole flurry of “damns.”

  Work in the garden and on demolishing the houses provided an endless opportunity for beating and kicking.

  After tearing off the roofs, and taking down the walls, the hardest job was to remove the foundations, which were to disappear without trace. The holes were filled in and the owner, should he ever return, would be hard-pressed to find where his family nest had once stood.

  Why, we even dug up some of the trees. Nothing remained of the whole farmyard.

  While we were demolishing one of these farms I noticed a picture of Our Lady hanging on a bush and which, so it seemed to me, rested there alone and yet at peace, still intact amidst all this chaos and destruction.

  None of us wanted to destroy it.

  In the kapos’ minds just such a spot, exposed to the rain, snow and frost, would condemn it fastest to a life of misery.

  Much later, one could still see the picture in the snow-covered bush, encrusted with rime, its gold glittering and only the face and eyes showing through the central piece of glass which had not steamed up, affording our lads, who that winter were chased to work amidst hoarse shouting and kicking, a sight which led their thoughts to wing homewards, for some to wives, for others to mothers.

  Soaked at work, soaked at roll call, at night we put our wet prison clothes under our heads for a pillow.

  In the morning, you put on your wet clothes and went off barefoot in clogs that were falling off, without a cap, once again into the rain or the biting wind.

  It was already November.

  From time to time it snowed...

  Some of the fellows were flagging. They went to the hospital and never returned.

  Odd this: I was no Hercules, but I never had so much as a sniffle.

  After I had worked a few days in the garden Michał fitted me into his “twenty,” which he was allowed to handpick.

  He tended to choose men who had already been sworn in [to Pilecki’s organization], or those who, one could assume, would join our organization: worthwhile people, who deserved to be saved.

  Our “twenty” belonged to a “hundred,” which joined a dozen or so other “hundreds” going to Industriehof II.13

  There, a number of kapos were going nuts: Black August, Sigrod [Johann Siegruth], Bonitz [Bernard Bonitz], White August and others.

  There were a few teenage “whippersnappers,” volksdeutsch,14 helping the Germans and who took special delight in hitting inmates on the face, beating them with clubs and so on.

  One of them went too far and a few days later he was found hanged in one of the barracks: “He must have hanged himself, no one stopped him,” which was in line with the clear camp instructions.

  Michał, as vorarbeiter [foreman], and his “twenty” was given one of the small houses in a field to dismantle.

  There he took us and there we “slaved away” for a few weeks.

  We sat amongst the ruins of the house’s foundations and took it easy after work, occasionally using a pickaxe so that some sounds of work could be heard.

  From time to time a couple of us would carry out on a stretcher some of the rubble into which the walls and foundations of the demolished house were turning.

  This rubble was then used to build a road a few hundred meters away.

  No one in authority bothered to come over to this house lying a long way from the work of the other “hundreds.”

  The kapos had their hands so full finishing off a dozen or so “hundreds” filled with “damned Polish dogs” that they forgot about us, or just did not want to struggle across the muddy fields.

  Michał stood on guard watching carefully. If any SS man or kapo appeared in the immediate vicinity, then a couple of us with stretchers would move out, and the pickaxes would briskly strike the foundations’ cement and the cellar roofs.

  During work I stood next to Sławek Szpakowski. Our conversation revolved for the most part around culinary matters. We were both optimists. We came to the conclusion that we had almost identical taste in food. So Sławek devised the menu with which he would one day entertain me at his house in Warsaw, after we got out of the camp.

  From time to time, when the cold got to us and the rain would trickle inside our collars, we would take work a little more seriously and break off great slabs of concrete.

  In our “stripes,” with pickaxes and hammers, we presented a sight worthy only of a line from the song “hammer in hand, at the rock face we stand... ”15 and Sławek promised, after getting out of this inferno, to paint my portrait wearing my “stripes” and with a pickaxe.

  It must have been our optimism which kept us going, for everything else—reality—was very grim.

  Hunger was now gnawing at our entrails.

  Oh, if only we could have had that bread which we had put into those wheelbarrows on the day of our arrival at the camp.

  We had not yet learnt the true value of bread.

  Near our worksite, beyond the wire lying at the edge of the outer security perimeter, a cow and two goats were grazing and happily munching on cabbage leaves growing on the other side of the wire.

  There were no cabbage leaves on our side. They had all been eaten. Not by cows, but by creatures still somewhat resembling humans, by häftlings, by us.

  We ate raw mangelwurzels.16

  We envied the cows for they could eat mangelwurzels. A very high percentage of us had stomach problems. Durchfall (“the runs” or dysentery) was rife among the häftlings and was spreading to an ever larger number of inmates.

  For some reason I did not have stomach problems.

  Basic as it may seem—a healthy stomach was so important in the camp.

  Anyone who fell sick—had to show great willpower by not eating anything at all for a short time.

  A special diet was out of the question. It could be followed in the hospital, but it was initially very difficult to get admitted there and few returned—usually leaving by way of the crematorium chimney.

  Willpower, so critical, sometimes in these cases was not enough.

  Even when an inmate controlled himself and gave away his lunch and dried the bread, leaving it for the following day, or burnt it in the coals and then ate it to stop diarrhea, he had become so weakened by bowel movements that at work in a kommando, under the eye of a sadist with a club, this lack of strength meant that he was labelled “ein fauler Hund [a lazy dog]” and was beaten to death.

  Returning to camp for the noon and evening roll calls, twice a day, we all had to carry bricks.

  At first, for two days, we each carried 7 bricks, then for a few days it was 6 and eventually a norm of 5 was established.

  There were six two-story and fourteen single-story huts within the camp wire at the time we arrived. Eight new two-story blocks were being built on the parade ground and all the single-story ones were having a floor added.

  We carried all the building materials (bricks, iron, lime) by hand for several kilometers.

  Before the building work had been finished, many thousands of häftlings lost their lives on this project.

  Work in Michał’s “twenty” spared us all much effort. Honest Michał, guarding our safety outside the house, caught cold, contracted pneumonia and died in the hospital. He died in December.

  When he left us for the krankenbau [hospital], it was still the end of November; we were quickly “taken in hand” like all the other “twenties” and “hundreds.”

  The serious killing started up again.

  We were unloading freight cars, shunted onto a siding.

  Iron, glass, bricks, piping, iron drainage pipes.

  All the materials needed to expand the camp were brought in. The railroad cars had to be unloaded quickly. So once again to the accompaniment of clubs we all hurried, carried, stumbled, fell under the weight, s
ometimes doubled up under a two-ton beam or rail.

  Even those who did not fall were using up their reserves of energy, stored up evidently some time before.

  For them it was a daily surprise that they were still alive and walking, when we seemed to have crossed far beyond the threshold of what the strongest man could endure.

  Yes, we now developed on the one hand, a kind of great disdain for those who, owing to their physical bodies, had to be considered humans for better or worse and members of the human race, but there we also developed respect for this strange human nature, stronger for possessing a soul, and containing something apparently immortal within itself.

  To be sure, this was disproved by the dozens of corpses, which we dragged back, four of us to a corpse, to roll call in camp.

  The cold feet and hands, by which we held the corpses, were just bone covered in blue skin.

  Often indifferent eyes now looked out from the blue, gray and purple faces bearing traces of beatings.

  Some of the corpses, still warm, their heads smashed by a spade, swayed to the rhythm of the marching column which had to keep up the pace.

  Food, sufficient for someone just idling in a vegetative state, was far from adequate for work, for replenishing the energy used up by our muscles. Even more so when this same energy was also needed to warm our bodies, frozen by work in the open air.

  At the Industriehof II, after the loss of Michał, Sławek and I used our wits to weave artfully between the clubs to get ourselves always into the best group.

  Once we were set to unloading railroad cars, then in White August’s strassenbaukommando [road-construction kommando].

  When working in this kommando, we had to build a road near the storerooms and our nostrils were hit by a strong smell of smoked meat.

  Our sense of smell, sharpened by hunger, was then surprisingly sensitive.

  Our imaginations saw vividly rows of hams, bacon and tenderloin hanging.

  So what? It was not for us!

  These supplies had to be for the “master race.”

  In any case, so we joked, our sense of smell was evidence that we were no longer even human. The storerooms must have been about 40 meters away. Our noses were those of animals, not people.

  One thing always saved us; we never lost our sense of humor.

  Yet all these conditions put together began to wear us down for good.

  Carrying bricks back to camp, especially in the evening, I walked with an apparently confident step.

  In reality—I sometimes lost consciousness and walked several paces quite mechanically... as if in a trance... I was “out of it”... I could see green spots... It would not have taken much for me to stumble...

  When my brain started to function again and register my internal state, I would wake up...my thoughts would send a command to my brain: “You are not to give up for anything!”

  Then I continued... urged on by willpower alone...

  This state of incoherence passed slowly... I entered the camp gate. Now I understood the sign over the gate “Arbeit macht frei.”

  Oh, indeed... work sets you free... sets you free—of the camp... of consciousness... as I had experienced a moment or two before... sets the soul free of the body... sending that body to—the crematorium.

  Yet something had to be devised... something had to be done to arrest this process of weakening.

  When the three of us got together, myself and the two Władeks (Colonel 1 [Surmacki] and Dr. 2 [Dering]), Władek 2 would always ask: “Well, Tomasz, how are you feeling?” I would always reply with a cheerful expression that I felt fine.

  Initially they were surprised, then they grew accustomed to this and finally they believed that I felt fine.

  I could not have answered otherwise. Wanting to do my “work,” despite the fact that my comrades had already got down to it with a will and that one of them had managed to strengthen his position in the hospital where he was beginning to have some pull, and another had set up a “five” in the baubüro [construction site office], I still continually had to maintain that our “work” was perfectly feasible and to fight the psychosis to which No. 3 [Jerzy de Virion] was beginning to succumb, that conditions prevented it.

  How would it have looked if just once I had complained that I felt bad... or that I was weak... and that I was so overwhelmed with work that I was looking for anything to save myself ?

  It was obvious that then I would be unable to inspire anyone else or require anything of them.

  So I was fine—for the time being only as far as others were concerned—but later, as I describe below, gradually I really did begin to feel fine there, despite the constant danger and nervous tension, and not just superficially for general consumption.

  In a manner of speaking I developed a split personality.

  Then, while the body underwent torments, at times mentally one felt splendid and not just in some abstract sense.

  Satisfaction began to take root somewhere—in one’s physical brain both on account of spiritual experiences and of the interesting, purely intellectual, game I was playing.

  However, one had to save one’s own body, which in order to accomplish anything here, somehow had to be protected from being killed.

  Somehow one had to get indoors to prevent being worn down by the weather in the open air.

  Sławek’s dream was to get into the carving section of the carpenters’ shop.

  Then he would try to get me in too.

  By now there were two carpenters’ shops in the camp. There was a large one at Industriehof I and another small one in the main camp in Block 9 (old numbering system).

  One of my work colleagues from Warsaw, Captain 8 [Ferdynand Trojnicki], known as Fred, had already managed to get into this shop.

  In response to my questions, he informed me that I might be able to get in if I could somehow convince the shop’s vorarbeiter [foreman].

  The vorarbeiter was a Volksdeutsche, Wilhelm Westrych, who came from Pyry near Warsaw. He was inside for black-market currency dealing and was waiting to be released shortly.

  Though a Volksdeutsche, Westrych tried to have it both ways: working for the Germans he sometimes saved Poles, if he felt that there might be something in it for him in the future.

  He willingly saved formerly important people, so that if the Germans were defeated, he could call on them to whitewash his time working for the Germans.

  Therefore, I had to become someone important.

  It was then I decided to “go for the jackpot.”

  My comrade, Captain 8 [Ferdynand Trojnicki], agreed to prime the vorarbeiter and get him to come out in front of Block 8 (old numbering system) where he lived.

  That is where we had our conversation. I told him in a few words that it was not surprising that he did not remember me, for who could have heard of Tomasz … here I gave him my “prison name.”

  “It’s like this, I’m here under an alias.”

  The Fates now had my life in their hands … I thought of my Sienkiewicz.17

  All it would take was for the vorabeiter to report or mention to just one of the bunch of SS or kapos, with whom he mixed, that someone was there under an alias, for it to be all up with me.

  I won’t describe how I then went on to “charm” Westrych …

  I did it. He started to “sir” me, which coming from a vorarbeiter to a gray häftling no longer sounded like an insult; quite the opposite. He came to the conclusion that he must have seen me somewhere... perhaps in some pictures from a reception at the Royal Castle in Warsaw or somewhere else but, what was most important, he said that he always rescued decent Poles, for he felt himself to be one too and so on and so on, and that I was to come the next day to the carpenters’ shop (the small one) and he would square it with the shop’s kapo. I would almost certainly be taken on and he hoped that I would be grateful to him in future.

  Our conversation took place in the evening of the 7th of December.

  The following day,
the 8th of December, I found myself after roll call indoors in the carpenters’ shop.

  Hitherto, working in the fields, I had not worn a cap or socks. Here, indoors in the warmth, irony of ironies, on the 8th I received socks from Westrych, and on the 15th of December—a cap.

  In the shop he introduced me to the shop kapo as a good carpenter (bad ones were not taken on) who, nonetheless, was on probation.

  The kapo looked me over and then nodded his agreement.

  The workday passed in completely different conditions. It was warm, dry, and the work was clean.

  Punishment here was not a beating, but being expelled from these conditions—being thrown out of the carpenters’ shop and shoved back into the hell and torment of the camp proper.

  However, to be able to work here, you had to be able to do something.

  I’ve never lacked skills in my life, however there was no way round it, I knew nothing about carpentry.

  I stood at the workbench of a good carpenter, later to be a member of our organization, Corporal 9 [Czesław Wąsowski], his Christian name was Czesiek.

  Copying him and following his instructions I put my hand to movements which came naturally to a real carpenter.

  The kapo was in the shop and knew carpentry. Therefore, every movement had to appear professional.

  For the time being I was not doing anything major. I was planing boards or sawing with Czesiek, who remarked that for a first attempt it was not bad.

  The next day the kapo gave me an individual task. Now I had to come up with something on my own. Fortunately, it was nothing difficult and with Czesiek’s help it turned out quite well.

  That day we managed also to “wangle” Sławek into the carpenters’ shop since the kapo happened to be looking for a carver, and another fellow and I gave Sławek’s number as a good woodcarver.

  A few days later Czesiek received a new task from the kapo.

  Assigned to his workbench, I helped him and followed his instructions. He was quite pleased with me.

  No matter, when the kapo himself was dissatisfied with Czesiek’s approach to the task, both of us were thrown out of the carpenters’ shop with a bang: Czesiek the craftsman and I, his apprentice.