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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and Operation
of
the Gas Chambers © |
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Page 164 |
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“Volunteers are wanted for a coalmine, but
the seven electricians must not present themselves "
For me, it was a
case of leaving my present kommando or dying there. Seeing the gassed victims
and wallowing in the reddish mud was absolutely unbearable and made me ill. I
made my decision: ‘if they catch me, too bad! I'm going to
die!’
They lined us up before an SS doctor. We undressed so that he
could check that we were not ‘muselmans’, that is that there still
remained some flesh on our buttocks. In addition, he made us jump over a ditch
50 or 60 centimeters wide; for me it was child’s play, but not for all the
deportees. Fortunately our SS man was not there, otherwise he would recognised
me.” |
However, while Mr. Benroubi was unaware of his
“luck” which he in fact thought was a misfortune, Mr Gabarz knew
exactly what he was doing. The two men worked almost side by side as from 4th
September 1942, without ever getting to know one another.
[Extracts
from "Un Survivant": |
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| (2) THE SONDERKOMMANDO [pages 109 to 115] |
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“One morning the work of our electrician
kommando was interrupted: inspection. We had to line up in a single row and not
in fives. An SS came along. He chose seven deportees, including myself and
Grestain (the future chief electrician of Jawischowitz). We seven had no idea
what job awaited us. All we knew was that it was electrical work. I was scared.
‘Now they're going to see that I know nothing about electricity, that I'm
an amateur and that I'm a bad one at that’.
The SS did not ask if
we were real tradesmen. I noticed other strange things: I I had never seen such
a small kommando, seven people! What is more, an SS took the place of Capo and
then not an ordinary SS man, but an but an Unterscharführer, the
equivalent, I think, of a sergeant...
But back to my new kommando The
SS was marching three meters from us. I don't know whether he was afraid of
being attacked or whether he was simply trying to avoid breathing our smell.
Contrary to habit, he said nothing. He did not accuse us of marching too slowly
or incorrectly. If I had not learnt to know the SS, I would have thought that
this one was a man like other men, and not a machine for killing and torturing.
Once only, during the march, he addressed us in friendly terms, too
friendly, with the voice of a father addressing his children, explaining our
future privileges Each of us would have three cigarettes and a bottle of beer
or another drink of our choice (the water there was terrible). We would eat our
fill and in a week’s time, if we worked well, we would have new clothes
and the official right to wash ourselves, we couldn't wish for a better fate.
All seven of us, on arrival, without exchanging a word, understood why
our SS had been so benevolent. Immediately my stomach turned over. We saw big
rectangles traced on the ground twenty or thirty meters wide by fifty or wide
by fifty or sixty meters long. In one of them the ground was stained red. Three
regularly spaced posts with reflectors top stood in the middle. The second
rectangle was a simple outline on the ground, the soil was the normal color and
instead of the posts, three holes had been dug.
The SS explained:
‘You see the installation here (he pointed at the posts in the first
rectangle.) Over there (he showed the second rectangle) the same thing. You're
the electricians, get to it’. Then he withdrew thirty or forty meters Why
so far? I do not know. Perhaps the previous kommando had revolted?
We
began our work. Our team of seven included only real professionals. One had
been given special hooks to hoist himself to the top of the posts. He
disconnected the electricity and brought down the wires and the reflector Then
we got ourselves into position to pull out the posts. And then wallow in the
red, and the red was blood. The first contact with it gave us the shivers and
we lost the power to speak. And yet we already knew about it. But between
knowing and experiencing there is just no comparison. Underneath us there were
men like us and, for sure the team of our seven predecessors was also beneath
our feet…
We carried the three posts, wedged them in the holes
that had already been dug and installed the reflectors. This first day we
scarcely worked three hours. Then we stayed shut in the hut where we ate. We
were forbidden to look at what was happening outside.
The second day we
were on the site a little earlier than the first. We had to wait at a distance
while the besonderkommando (that’s what my comrades and I called it in
Yiddish: the German word is Sonderkommando ‘special Kommando’]
finished its work — work that I shall describe for you in a moment.
As the days went by our Unterscharführer became more and more
negligent to his surveillance of us. What was the point? It was impossible for
us to escape. So we saw everything without really trying to.
We saw
a sort of barn closed on three sides, identical to those where our farmers keep
the hay, and not far from it three or four pretty little buildings like country
houses, only the first of which was close enough to be clearly visible.
The convoys arrived, adult men and little boys together, women, girls
and babies together. They went, completely naked, in groups of twenty t owards
the little house. Despite the distance, we could see that they were not afraid.
A strange kommando, dressed in white, led them; four men only, plus two
SS. When the people had entered the house, they were shut in by a fairly strong
door.
When the door was well and truly bolted, an SS passed with a
can (the can I saw looked exactly like a pot of paint) and disappeared from
our eyes, hidden by the house. Then, we heard a bang, that of some opening,
a trap door rather than a window. Twice, after this bang, we heard the
prayer SHEMA ISRAEL [‘LISTEN ISRAEL, Eternal is our God, the
Eternal is one...’ a basic Jewish prayer], then we heard cries, but very
faintly.
From time to time, at the last minute, just before disappearing
behind the door, the people understood. I saw one group of men revolt. The case
had been foreseen: a kommando of four or five people was waiting beside the
entrance and pushed them inside while an SS used his revolver to shoot some in
the head.
The external aspect of the little house was so ordinary that
such incidents were very rare. In seven days, I saw only one revolt with my own
eyes. But others took place, for several times, from afar we heard the same
characteristic sound of a shot at point blank range. |
But let us return to the morning of the second
day. The rectangle where we had the previous day installed the posts had been
dug out and transformed into a kind of empty swimming pool with cleanly cut
edges, about one meter fifty deep. The ground had been left around our posts to
stop them falling.
Some rails were installed, starting one meter
from the little house. As soon as the Jews were gassed, a new team came along
and added rails as far as the edge of the swimming pool. This group also
belonged to the besonderkommando. The men of this kommando ate well; they were
properly dressed. They lived entirely separately and no longer returned to our
camp to sleep. The SS said that in a week we would be enrolled with them. So I
now had less than a week in which I had to try something, however desperate.
We saw the special commando put platform trolleys on the rails. Then
they brought out the men, women and children who had been gassed to load them
on these flat wagons. In order not to lose any on the way, they stacked
them like sacks of flour, five widthways, five lengthways. Their work was tough
and their Capo, a German, would not allow a moment's rest He was constantly
crying: “Schneller! Schneller! (Faster Faster!) otherwise I'll wipe you
out, I'll gas you on the spot ” and he kicked them . All the men, women
and children were very quickly thrown in the hole and covered with
earth.
Then we went into action, wallowing in human blood to
recover the lamp posts. I could not understand why the corpses bled. The
pressure when they heaped earth on them? Or the effect of the gas? My six
companions had received almost new shoes, but not me because my mountain shoes
were still in good condition.
At night, another kommando certainly came
to dig a new swimming pool around and in the light of our lamp posts because we
found it the next morning on arriving. I never saw this kommando, but a comrade
said that once he was in group that had this task. He was taken from his hut,
with many other deportees, perhaps 200. They did not belong to the
besonderkommando but were from the camp and had not guessed the purpose of this
hole.
On the fourth day we were allowed to approach the special
kommando at the door of a gas chamber. What we saw shocked us. Whole families
holding together in bunches. Dead children still clinging to their mothers, and
separating them was a horrible task. All of them had bulging eyes and twisted
horrified faces. That day they had brought a transport of women with their
children. It seemed to us that most of them had strangled their children and we
could understand that watching the child’s agony would be unbearable. They
had preferred to shorten the suffering by killing them with their own
hands.
For the men of the besonderkommando, it must have been just as
bad. We imagined one of them by chance seeing his mother or sister or father or
wife or a member of his family. What could he do? Nothing.
One day
Grastain, the electrician, went into one of the little houses to repair a wire
and told us: ‘The interior is empty and very dark without any windows. I
didn't have time to look in detail, I was too scared.’
From our position, we could see the victims only at the
moment when they arrived near the closest gas chamber. Some of us thought that
they took off their clothes in the barn, but I disagreed. In there they would
have discovered a store of masses of hair, classified by color, stocks of
dolls, spectacles. clothing, everything well sorted and neatly stocked. They
would realize that it was a trap. Furthermore, the women would refuse to
undress in public. No, in my opinion there were, a little further away and
hidden from our eyes, huts from where the people undressed before passing
behind the barn without ever seeing its contents…
Recently I have
been trying to collect all my memories of the gas chambers into a coherent
whole. But in my head they appear as a series of photographs, clear and fixed.
I can look at them one at a time, but have difficulty in arranging them
logically.
So, the hole was enormous, designed to bury several thousand
Jews. In any case if it had contained only a few corpses, the ground would not
have been impregnated with blood. Now, four houses and twenty persons per house
was not enough to fill such a swimming pool.
I believe that the
besonder worked a part of the night. We saw only the last group of victims, the
previous ones being already buried in the grave. However, such an explanation
does not agree with another of my memories: one morning on arriving I went to
the edge of the grave. I was made to back away, but I had a chance to see the
depth and it was still empty. I think that that particular night, the besonder
for once had rested and that the grave was simply going to be filled with the
bodies of comrades killed in the camp. It was necessary to get rid of the
bodies and at the time the Krematorium was still not completed.
These
little gassing houses belonged to the first type of installation at Birkenau.
They were later replaced by industrial gas chambers where a thousand people at
a time were liquidated and then not buried but immediately passed on to the
Krematorium. I fortunately was not a witness of that, but was informed
indirectly.
On the other hand, I learnt from the mouth of an
eyewitness, Erko Hajblum (a prisoner with the number 49269 who had not come
from Pithiviers but from Beaune-al-Rolande) what happened to our swimming pools
for corpses. I leave him to tell the story:” |
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“When the first Krematorium furnace was
operational, the victims were removed to be burnt. I was in the kommando that
disinterred the dead, thousands of dead.
We waded through a mixture of
putrifying bodies and mud. We should have had gas masks. The bodies seemed to
come up to the surface, as if the ground didn't want them. What you went
through, Maurice, is nothing besides that. After a week I thought I was going
mad and decided to commit suicide by letting myself die, as many comrades had
done around me.
I was saved by a friend who worked at Kanada, the big
Birkenau sorting center. He couldn't stand seeing all these clothes and
personal objects coming from gassed Jews. He succeeded in getting into the
bricklayer kommando as an instructor, and he gave me his place.
Two
months later, I met a deportee still employed on disinterring the dead. No more
mud: the ground had frozen. The soil and the bodies had to be broken up with
pickaxes.” |
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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique and operation
of the gas
chambers
Jean-Claude Pressac
© 1989, The Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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