Armageddon - Max Hastings [292]
Arrival at the camp shattered the fantasy. Their luggage was abandoned by the tracks, never to be seen again. The Kapos—“trusties” recruited from among prisoners—herded them into the camp, where more than half were gassed immediately. Once heads had been shaved, the survivors, who retained only their own belts and shoes, laughed nervously at each other about the dramatic change in their appearances. Their first hours were spent “in a strange mixture of very long waits and sudden bursts of activity.” Herszburg was among those sent to the nearby camp at Birkenau, thrown into a barracks among a thousand prisoners in transit to either work camps or gas chambers Throughout his time in the camp, he suffered desperately from loneliness. Eventually he made a few friends. But, one by one, they died.
In his progress through the Nazi concentration-camp system during the ten months that followed, it is striking that Herszburg thought Auschwitz–Birkenau nowhere near as bad as some of its rivals, such as Belsen. “We remained reasonably clean. It was not a working camp. We grew suntanned, and did not suffer from lack of sleep. I was seldom hit, and seldom spoken to. I once saw the body of a man who had electrocuted himself hanging on the wire, but there were few suicides—we were far too preoccupied with trying to survive. I saw no hangings or shootings. I never saw anyone die.” This was part of the demented genius of the Birkenau system: the inmates were maintained in a state of docility, because death took place beyond their vision. Yet every inmate knew the meaning of the “selections” which took place early in the morning or late at night. Sometimes, men were chosen on the basis of visible health, once by passing them under a horizontal bar: those who touched it lived, those too short or too stooped died. Sometimes the men selected chose to delude themselves that they were leaving Birkenau to work in Germany, though in reality they died. On other occasions, men were indeed sent to labour camps. After a selection, “we seemed able to erase it from our minds . . . and to carry on in the usual camp routine.” Herszburg saw no examples of mental breakdown, “perhaps because we were not called upon to make any decisions.”
After ten weeks in Birkenau, he was sent with a work detail to Brunswick. The journey, which provoked a brief spasm of hope, lasted two days. On arrival, however, this proved the worst camp in which he lived. The prisoners worked twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, in an auto factory. Many died of starvation. “Some experts on concentration camps assure me that I must have had a very strong will to live. Simply because I did not die, I have some difficulty in proving them wrong. In spite of their knowledge, I feel that their theory . . . is wrong—I was at my lowest then.” He noted that most of those who survived were short and stocky like himself. The only skills which he identified in himself was those of “absolute obedience to our masters and the ability to go without food for fairly long periods of time.” The only relief, the only glimmer of hope, in these cruel days came with the air raids: “The sound of sirens always filled me with joy, as it did all other prisoners . . . The brave pilots . . . probably never realised how much hope and joy they gave us in the winter of 1944.”
Early in 1945, after five months in Brunswick, Herszburg was transferred to the neighbouring camp of Watendstedt. He was dispatched from the compound each day to the V2 rocket component assembly line at the Hermann Göring works. The plant had been so badly damaged by bombing that there was little to do save clear wreckage: “I felt much better there.” As the Allied armies approached, the prisoners were once more loaded on to trains. They travelled for three days across the shrinking Reich to Ravensbrück. For the first time since Herszburg had entered the Lodz ghetto, a guard chatted to them as human beings. At the camp, Jews were ordered to step forward. They were astounded to be handed Red Cross parcels. Fear of approaching retribution