Auschwitz_ A Doctor's Eyewitness Account - Miklos Nyiszli [81]
On April 7th, 1945, the string of arc lights set on top of the poles to which the barbed wires were fastened did not come on. Darkness and silence closed in on the abandoned spot. The camp was empty, the gate closed. The 7,000 prisoners had been taken farther inland, first by boat, then along the roads swarming with refugees. For seven long days and nights we traveled, till at last we reached our new destination, the Ebensee concentration camp, the fourth KZ through whose yawning gates I had passed.
Upon arrival, the inevitable and interminable roll call. Then the bath. And then again the quarantine camp, with its filthy barracks, its guards armed with rubber clubs, its hard floor. I blindly submitted to these three customary phases. During roll call a cold wind was blowing and a driving rain soaked my clothes. Bitterness overwhelmed me. I knew that it could only be a matter of days before we were liberated, but for the moment we were still living in a world of confusion and indecision. And yet, when the moment for decision finally arrived, perhaps it would be an ill-starred one for us all. The end of our captivity could quite conceivably turn into a bloody tragedy: they might kill us all before the impending moment of liberation arrived.
After twelve months of imprisonment, at a time when all law had ceased to exist, such an end would indeed be in keeping with the customs of the Third Reich.
But such was not the case. On May 5th a white flag flew from the Ebensee watch tower. It was finished. They had laid down their arms. The sun was shining brightly when, at nine o’clock, an American light tank, with three soldiers aboard, arrived and took possession of the camp.
We were free.
EPILOGUE
SICK AT HEART, AND PHYSICALLY ILL, I started my long voyage homeward. The trip was not a pleasant one: everywhere I looked I saw, where flourishing cities and towns had once stood, nothing but gutted ruins and the collective, white-crossed graves of the dead.
I dreaded the truth, fearing to return to an empty, plundered home, a home where neither parents nor wife, daughter nor sister, would be waiting to greet me with warmth and affection. Persecution and sorrow, the horrors of the crematorium and funeral pyres, my eight months in the kommando of the living dead, had dulled my sense of good and evil.
I felt that I should rest, try to regain my strength. But, I kept asking myself, for what? On the one hand, illness racked my body; on the other, the bloody past froze my heart. My eyes had followed countless innocent souls to the gas chambers, witnessed the unbelievable spectacle of the funeral pyres. And I myself, carrying out the orders of a demented doctor, had dissected hundreds of bodies, so that a science based on false theories might benefit from the deaths of those millions of victims. I had cut the flesh of healthy young girls and prepared nourishment for the mad doctor’s bacteriological cultures. I had immersed the bodies of dwarfs and cripples in calcium chloride, or had them boiled so that the carefully prepared skeletons might safely reach the Third Reich’s museums to justify, for future generations, the destruction of an entire race. And even though all this was now past, I would still have to cope with it in my thoughts and dreams. I could never erase these memories from my mind.
At least twice I had felt the wings of death brush by me: once, prostrate on the ground, with a company of SS trained in the art of summary execution poised above me, I had escaped unharmed. But three thousand of my friends, who had also known the terrible secrets of the crematoriums, had not been so lucky. I had marched for hundreds of kilometers through fields of snow, fighting the cold, hunger, and my own exhaustion, merely to reach another concentration camp. The road