Auschwitz_ A Doctor's Eyewitness Account - Miklos Nyiszli [36]
The quarantine camp, C Camp, D Camp and the F section were terribly overcrowded, despite the quotas which were filled daily for shipment to more distant camps. In the Czech Camp both the children and aged had been greatly weakened by their two-year ordeal: the children’s bodies were mere skin and bones, and the elderly prisoners were so weak they could scarcely walk. Both had to relinquish their places to new arrivals who were still strong enough to work.
During the preceding weeks their situation had steadily worsened. When the first Hungarian convoys had begun arriving their rations had been sharply reduced. Then, a few weeks later, when the stream of new deportees had swelled to flood proportions, the camp authorities had found themselves faced with a serious shortage of food. As usual, their remedy had been both drastic and efficient: they had practically suppressed the Czech Camp rations altogether.
Hunger had reduced the prisoners to raving, moaning maniacs. Within a few days their already weakened organisms had disintegrated entirely. Diarrhea, dysentery and typhus had begun their deadly work. Fifty or sixty deaths a day was normal. Their last days were spent in indescribable suffering, till at last death came and set them free.
The closing of all barracks was ordered early in the morning. Several hundred SS soldiers surrounded the Czech area and ordered the inmates to assemble. Their cries of terror as they were loaded onto the waiting vans were terrible to hear, for after two years in the KZ they no longer had any illusions about what lay in store for them. “Liquidation Day” found some 12,000 prisoners left in the Czech Camp. From among that number 1,500 able-bodied men and women were chosen, along with eight physicians. The rest were sent to number two and number three crematoriums. On the following day the Czech Camp was silent and deserted. I saw a truck loaded with ashes leave the crematorium and head towards the Vistula.
Thus the Auschwitz muster rolls were reduced by more than 12,000 “units,” and one more bloody page was added to the Auschwitz archives. That page contained only the following brief inscription: “The Czech section of the Auschwitz concentration camp was liquidated this date due to a prevalence of typhus among the prisoners. Signed: Dr. Mengele, Hauptsturmführer I Lagerazt.”
The eight physicians from the Czech Camp who, thanks to Dr. Epstein’s intervention, had been spared, were sent to the F Camp’s hospital barracks, either because they were physically and mentally exhausted after their superhuman efforts in caring for their fellow-prisoners, or because they were infected with typhus.
On the day following the liquidation of the Czech Camp I paid an official visit to F Camp. There I met the eight doctors who had escaped death and had a chance to talk with them, and in particular with Dr. Heller, whose name was well known in medical circles. From his lips I learned the full story of the suffering and death of Czechoslovakia’s Jewish elite. Since then, all eight have perished. They were true doctors. I hold their memory in deep esteem.
XV
THE C CAMP, WHICH WAS SITUATED near the Czech Camp, was composed of Hungarian Jewish women, often as many as 60,000 at a time, in spite of the daily shipments to distant camps. It was in this heavily overpopulated camp that the doctors one day discovered among the inmates of one of the barracks the symptoms of scarlet fever. By Dr. Mengele’s order that barracks, as well as those on either side of it, was quarantined. The quarantine lasted only a short time: from morning till evening, hardly twelve hours. At dusk trucks arrived to embark the inmates of these three barracks to the crematoriums. Such were the efficacious methods employed by Dr. Mengele to prevent the spread of contagious diseases.
The Czech Camp and C Camp had already felt the effects of Dr. Mengele’s battle against the outbreak