Auschwitz_ A Doctor's Eyewitness Account - Miklos Nyiszli [80]
We stayed in Barracks 33 for three days, during which we had nothing to do. Our food was not too bad and we were thus more or less able to recuperate from our three-week march.
On the third day of our stay an SS officer, accompanied by a general, visited our barracks and ordered anyone who had formerly worked in the Auschwitz KZ to step forward.
My blood froze in my veins. Methodical race that they are, the Germans no doubt had a muster list containing the names or numbers of those who had worked at Auschwitz. It seemed likely. And yet . . . thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that this was merely a ruse, an attempt to single out from the mass those capable of revealing the sordid mysteries of the crematoriums. If they had really had a list all they would have had to do was to check our tattoo numbers. No one knew me here. I waited, the blood pounding in my ears; there was complete silence in the barracks as the seconds ticked slowly by. And then they left. I had won again. Once again the wheel of death had spun and passed me by.
That night we were given the striped jerkin of prisoners and taken by the mountain path to the Mauthausen railway station. There we were loaded into the inevitable boxcars, 7,000 souls in all, and sent to the Melk an der Donau concentration camp. It was only a short journey and, for a change, fairly comfortable, that is, we were not stacked in like sardines but had room enough to sit on the floor. Three hours after we had climbed into the cars we climbed down again.
The Melk KZ, like that of Mauthausen, sat on the crest of a hill overlooking the surrounding countryside. Originally a prison, bearing the name of Freiherr Von Birabo, its immense barracks were large enough to accommodate 15,000 criminals at a time. The picturesque beauty of the countryside mitigated our pain and discomfort: the enormous, baroque-style monastery projected from the rocky hill, and, below, the Danube wound sinuously on its way, forming a picture of unforgettable beauty. The Danube was a river we associated with our home and country. Seeing it now made us feel that home was not quite so far away.
XXXVIII
THE SPRING OF 1945 CAME EARLY. IT was now the beginning of April, and the trees that rose from the ditches lining the barbed-wire fences of Melk were already green. On the banks of the Danube a green carpet replaced the snow, only patches of which remained to remind us of the severe winter through which we had just passed.
I had been living in the KZ for eight weeks, through good days and bad, but the experience had sapped my strength and left me tired and weak. Only the hope of an early liberation kept me from slipping into a state of utter lethargy and indifference.
Here everything was disintegrating. The final phases of the Third Reich’s collapse were unfolding before our eyes. Defeated armies passed in interminable columns towards the interior of a country already reduced to smoking ruins. On the Danube, whose waters were swollen from the melting snows, hundreds of boats and barges transported the inhabitants of evacuated cities. The Third Reich’s dream of a millennium was crumbling. The conviction of a people born to rule, of a Master Race, was giving way to bitter disillusionment. The peoples of Europe, avid for freedom, no longer lived in the fear that their town or city might, by a simple, arbitrary stroke of the conqueror’s pen, be wiped off the map; there was no longer any danger of seeing their homes plundered, of having themselves stripped of all they owned, of feeling the needlepoint tattoo numbers on their arms, of being shipped to forced labor camps and guarded by police dogs and SS troops whose badge was the death’s head.
The pyromaniacs of the Third Reich were now playing their final scene on the stage of the world: they who had set the world aflame were now perishing in their own fires. The raucous-voiced corporal, whose words, “Deutschland Über