What was shocking to learn was Auschwitz wasn’t just one place – it was a system of camps, and in total, there were around 49 sub-camps, including a Labour camp operated by a German company, IG Farben, called Monowitz. Auschwitz was not originally designed for mass murder, in fact, when it was built, the Nazis had not yet found a solution to the “Jewish Question”. Within Auschwitz I, the first arrival or prisoners came from the overcrowded Tarnow prison, in southern Poland on June 14th, 1940. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the camp also became a location for Soviet prisoners of war to be held. Eventually, people from a range of backgrounds were held at Auschwitz I, including so called criminals and “asocials”; a broad category for people who didn’t fit the Nazi ideal, such as gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Jewish. Prisoners were categorised, and wore coloured triangular patches representing their alleged status on their uniforms. This would affect their treatment, work duties, and any supposed privileges they might receive in the camp. It is important to remember that each person brought to Auschwitz was an individual, with their own personal story of how, and why they arrived there.
The journey to Birkenau was an horrific ordeal- the fear and uncertainty, combined with the often appalling conditions of the wagons, is something unimaginable to us. Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall, who was transported from Czechoslovakia, when asked about her journey to Auschwitz-Birkenau in an interview in 1990, replied: “How do I tell you about a train ride like that? About the dignity that is taken away from you when you need to use a bucket as a toilet in the middle of a compartment on a train, in front of everyone? About sharing water with every single person. About the mothers holding on to hungry children. The crying. The stink. The fear. It’s strange, fear gives out a certain smell, and that, mixed with the open bucket – it’s a smell I don’t believe one can ever forget. It’s not to be described.”. The Nazis had no interest in the comfort of their prisoners, and decisions about transport, were based entirely on economic considerations; the humanity of their cargo was not their concern. This operation - moving some 11 million Jews across Europe - required a huge infrastructure, and a great deal of planning. Every train needed to be booked, paid for, fuelled, driven hundreds of miles by multiple drivers, and guarded by SS men. The SS brokered deals with Albert Genzenmuller, the man responsible for the railway system across Nazi occupied Europe. To keep costs as low as possible, pricing systems were set up so that the SS would pay standard third class prices for adult Jews, whilst the cost for children under ten would be half the price, and children under four would not incur any cost. Where more than 400 people were going to be on board, train tickets were specially discounted to half price, so the SS aimed to get as many people onto every train as they possibly could, often using freight trains to keep the prices even lower. The SS only had to pay for return tickets for guards - journeys for the Jews were only one way.
What is difficult to do, must be done, and we must humanise the perpetrators of the Holocaust. This poses a challenge as nobody – military or civilian, was forced to participate in the Holocaust, and there is no historical evidence to inform us that those who didn't want to actively participate, would be punished or executed, in any way. In fact, they were oft assigned different posts, and when we think about Auschwitz, it’s easy to think about a sanitised, industrial process. However, it involved the roles of many individuals, intricately working together to make this genocide happen: those driving the trains, those organising the journeys, and those guarding prisoners. For the Holocaust to happen, huge numbers of civilian workers from every country in Europe had to be involved. How can one describe, or fathom the roles of these people? Perpetrators? Collaborators? Bystanders? Opportunists? Profiteers? Cowards? Is it even acceptable to define a person through a single term? For example, working for a train company which managed the transport of Jews to Auschwitz, provided an income for that driver, which could’ve supported their family, or might’ve ensured that the driver wasn’t drafted to fight on the front line. While without question, there would have been those who fully supported the crimes they were enabling, we cannot know the motivations of all those involved, and some may perhaps, have grappled with dilemmas of conscience. Thus, we cannot claim to know the intentions, or motivations of all of those “enablers”, as I would put it, therefore, the importance of the individual stories is yet again impressed upon us – not only for the victims, but also for those who were involved in enabling the Holocaust, as difficult as this.
Upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Jews went through a “selection” process, during which SS doctors would decide who could work as forced labourers; on average just 1 in 10 of the prisoners were selected for work. The remainder would be condemned to death in the gas chambers. Notwithstanding, it must be said that the selection was not a life-or-death decision; rather, the SS were deciding if the person was to face death now, or death later. After all, the Nazi policy, the so called “Final Solution”, resolved to murder every last Jew that they could capture. For those selected to work, the average life span would be between 6 weeks and 3 months, with very few exceptions, and for those selected for immediate death, it would be a matter of hours and minutes. The conditions in the camp were hardly imaginable: prisoners were separated by sex, had all their worldly possessions taken from them, their name was replaced with a number tattooed on their forearm, they were stripped, had their heads shaved, and were given a prisoner uniform. The process was designed to strip every prisoner of their individuality, and humanity. Prisoners were then packed into barracks that were deeply unsanitary and overcrowded – viewing them via virtual reality was a jarring process, as the barracks were made from wood – in summer, it would’ve been scorching, whilst in winter, the cold would’ve been piercing. Work duties, or forced slave labour, lasted from dawn until dusk (and beyond): starvation rations were administered, and the treatment inmates faced from guards, was relentlessly brutal. The slightest mistake could be met with the harshest of punishments, and it wasn’t uncommon for prisoners to be beaten, and killed without good reason, whilst selections from within the camp also regularly took place. Those weakened through these conditions were sent to the gas chambers, to be replaced by incoming prisoners. At its height, Birkenau held around 90,000 inmates living in these conditions.
To further understand what prisoners were subjected to, we must consider the horrific conditions in Auschwitz-Birkenau: there was minimal food and drink – rations consisted of small amounts of bread, a watery soup, and “ersatz”, or substitute coffee. The bread, if it can even be called that, was made from sawdust, and was indigestible, so the diet of prisoners would consist of whatever they could find – Kitty Hart-Moxon spoke about her first night in Auschwitz, and she was crammed next to a “Hungarian gypsy” in the bunks (which were also made out of wood, or stone, and had no other insulation or bedding), who died from the cold, and she realised this just as everyone was forced to wake up for the headcount, and she remembers, at that moment, “realising what [she] had to do to survive”, as she reached into the dead woman’s pockets, and took her bread ration out, because prisoner’s used to trade and barter with rations – trading equated to some hope of survival.
All prisoners were expected to work, and duties were often outdoors, or in dirty environments. The work was often backbreaking, which on such small rations, only added to the challenges facing prisoners for survival. With thousands of people crammed together with no sanitation to speak of, and illnesses such as dysentery, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and Durchfall, the barracks were foul places where cleanliness was impossible. The latrines or toilets, also point to how the Nazis sought to dehumanise prisoners in an obvious way. Firstly, the toilets were nothing more than concrete holes over a ditch, and the stench this would create, would be almost overpowering for prisoners. Prisoners would have to go to the toilet in front of each other, and would not be able to clean themselves effectively, making the entire process a humiliating experience. Furthermore, effective plumbing to remove the waste was never built, so it fell to prisoners to clear the pits, by emptying them manually, daily. This job, in almost any other situation, would be considered one of the worst jobs imaginable. However, within Birkenau, being a part of the “Scheisskomando” (literally the “shit commando”) was considered privileged work, as the guards would never enter these places, so the opportunity to organise – share information, barter, and conspire with other prisoners – was possible.
Primo Levi, a Jewish prisoner who was sent to the Monowitz camp, described how he questioned the need to wash, but was challenged by his fellow inmate who said: “[The camp] was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilisation. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength, for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent... so we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die.” A determination to survive and bear witness were clearly forms of resistance. However, to describe an act as simple as washing, as resistance may seem a little strange. Yet, this shows how maintaining humanity in a place designed to dehumanise, could be a small but significant triumph of the soul.
The camp was eventually liberated by Soviet forces on January 27th, 1945, however, by that time, the Nazis had forced tens of thousands of inmates back into Germany, via “death marches”. These were brutal, as prisoners were forced to march for up to 35 miles in the freezing cold to trains, that would transport them to locations inside Germany. The SS would summarily execute prisoners who could not keep up, and many reached destinations such as Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they were simply left to die. Kitty Hart-Moxon also gave an insight into her own death march in her testimony; she, and her mother, were taken, out of Auschwitz by train, to Gross-Rosen concentration camp – they were sorted again, and then put on another train to Reichenbach concentration camp, and were eventually forced to walk hundreds of miles, without shoes, away from the approaching Allies – with no suppliance of food or water, in unimaginably harsh weather conditions. Upon their arrival, the Soviets found around 5,000 people locked inside a deserted Birkenau; they were left to die. Whilst this was the end of their incarceration, the journey to discover what was left of their homes and families would take some months, and the journey to recover from this genocide, would take years – amounting to lifetimes.