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Being in Auschwitz

“Dear reader, I write these words in the moments of my greatest despair.” So begins a text by Zalmen Gradowski, composed in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944
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Being in Auschwitz
Lived experience and the Holocaust

“Das Gefangenenlager” (The prison camp), 1940, by Felix Nussbaum (1904–44)

“Das Gefangenenlager” (The prison camp), 1940, by Felix Nussbaum (1904–44)

“Dear reader, I write these words in the moments of my greatest despair.” So begins a text by Zalmen Gradowski, composed in Auschwitz-Birkenau in spring 1944 and discovered after liberation, in a tin near the destroyed crematoria. Gradowski had been deported to the death camp in late 1942. His wife Sonia, his mother and two sisters were murdered within hours, together with hundreds of other Polish Jews on the same train. Gradowski belonged to a much smaller group selected for slave labour, and the SS soon sent him to the dreaded Sonderkommando: prisoners who had to assist in the mass murder of others.

Until his own death in the camp in October 1944, Gradowski secretly chronicled the never-ending procession of the doomed to the gas chambers, from their tears as they undressed to their ashes being carted away in wheelbarrows. He hoped fervently that his writings would one day be found and help future generations “form an image” of the “hell of Birkenau-Auschwitz”. Addressing his readers directly, he issued this appeal: “It is for you to imagine the reality”.

Auschwitz has not been forgotten, as Gradowski had feared. As the single most lethal site of the Holocaust, where the SS murdered around a million Jews, it occupies a central place in collective memory. But the Auschwitz of popular imagination often bears little relation to the Auschwitz Gradowski had lived and died in. As a global emblem of evil, the camp has become unmoored from its actuality. Popular images float free of their historical context, gravitating towards myth and misconception.

It is often said, for example, that Auschwitz was a different planet, so alien that even birds did not sing there. But the camp was all too real, and so was the surrounding countryside. It was so rich in wildlife, in fact, that employees of IG Farben, the German firm that enslaved thousands of prisoners, went birding together, while a trained ornithologist among the SS guards meticulously surveyed the local species – ducks, storks, cuckoos – for scholarly publications.

How can we meet Gradowski’s appeal to “imagine the reality” of Auschwitz? How can we make the camp more recognizable? Lifting faces from the crowd, as historians sometimes do, personalizes the nameless horror. But we should go further and look more closely at what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called “felt life”, uncovering the immediate experiences of prisoners, perpetrators and onlookers, and how they were understood at the time. Revealing these textures of everyday life – the ordinary in the extraordinary – can demystify Auschwitz and render it more palpable. It moves the spotlight from the camp as a remote monument to suffering, standing outside time, to the historical reality of living and dying in Auschwitz.

Contemporary documents and later testimonies are filled with traces of lived experience. These traces are so abundant, in fact, that we need to filter them, magnifying key aspects to bring them into sharper relief. One such aspect is the material landscape of persecution. A closer engagement with places and spaces, and their emotional and sensory dimension, helps to ground the camp and reveals elements of lived experience that often remain hidden on the edges of historical visibility, starting with the topography of Auschwitz itself.

After the German invasion of Poland in autumn 1939, SS officers soon scouted locations for a new concentration camp to repress the Polish resistance. They settled on the Upper Silesian town Oświęcim (renamed Auschwitz by the occupiers), attracted by good transport links and a large barrack compound on the outskirts that would form the initial core of the new camp. The local environment was not over-hospitable, however, and in the years to come, SS men and IG Farben employees would often grumble about the poor working conditions – about insects and infections – which they blamed, in their colonial mindset, on the “primitive east”.

What was a nuisance to the occupiers posed an existential threat to prisoners weakened by SS abuse. Starved and sick, they saw the natural world as yet another adversary. Each morning, anxious inmates checked on the unpredictable weather, as each season brought its own torment. In spring and autumn, heavy rains and strong winds drenched those toiling outside. A thick sea of mud covered much of the grounds and clung to tired feet and tattered clothes, encroaching even on prisoners’ dreams. “When it rains we would like to cry”, Primo Levi later wrote.

After the soil had dried in the summer sun, stretches of the camp turned desolate and dusty. The heat bore down on sunburnt inmates, who suffered more than ever from bugs and mosquitoes. Worst of all was the maddening thirst, which left many mouths too dry to speak. But prisoners also feared the cold. Thin uniforms and cheap barracks afforded little protection against icy gusts and snow. Winter, the prisoners knew, was the season of frostbite and amputations.

While inmates were generally at the mercy of the SS and the elements, there was some room, however small, for their agency. Prisoners secretly ate snow to quench their thirst and used it to clean themselves. They also sought, as much as they could, to work in more sheltered places, aware that this could be the difference between life and death.

The SS, meanwhile, was busy remaking the natural landscape, using slave labour. Plants and trees were added to beautify SS offices and to conceal SS crimes. Such changes to the natural landscape were accompanied by a sweeping transformation of the built environment.

The buildings and ruins, and 8 miles of fencing, that make up the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial today are concrete remains of what was a vast city of terror. In addition to prisoner compounds, there had been workshops and warehouses, garages and laundries, bakeries and an abattoir; the SS settlement even had its own kindergarten. Many of these places lay inside the SS-controlled “interest zone”, spread over 15 square miles, which included the dark heart of the complex – the main camp and the nearby Birkenau extension. Beyond lay some three dozen satellite camps, mostly near factories, farms and mines; the largest was Monowitz, where prisoners toiled for IG Farben. There were vast differences between these sites. Prisoners in the main camp, for instance, feared transfers to the marshy soil and rickety barracks of Birkenau, where thirst, dirt and disease always seemed so much worse.

When we visit the Auschwitz memorial today, the site appears still and static. To imagine the past, we must unfreeze it. SS men on bikes, motorcycles and in cars crossed the complex at all times. Inmates were constantly on the move, too, running to latrines, marching to work, staggering to infirmaries. Day and night, trains and vans brought new arrivals, or took inmates from one location to another. Sonderkommando prisoners like Zalmen Gradowski, stationed by the crematoria, knew that more victims were on their way when they heard the “well-known rumble of the truck wheels”.
The SS also constantly received deliveries, from building materials to poison gas, and dispatched countless items, from prisoner-made military supplies to the belongings of murdered Jews; towards the end, it even shipped out parts of the crematoria, hoping to reuse them elsewhere.

The camp, then, was always in motion. This was true for people and goods, and also for the spaces they traversed. Because Auschwitz was one big construction site. It never looked the same, from one day to the next, as buildings were demolished, extended and newly built. As late as September 1944, just months before liberation in January 1945, the Camp SS held a grand ceremony to unveil its big new staff hospital. This project was led by the local SS Construction Authority, which designed everything from doorknobs to entire compounds like Birkenau with its four crematoria.

Once completed, new buildings entered the fabric of everyday life. The Birkenau crematoria, for example, served as unremitting reminders of what awaited many prisoners registered for slave labour. Although few of them could see the buildings directly, they were still ever-present. Inmates smelled the burning flesh, and saw the red glow above at night and the thick smoke during the day.
Construction was not just about cementing SS dominance, however. Inadvertently, it also created spaces for prisoner agency.

The more civilian contractors worked on site, the more opportunities for barter and bribes. All the clutter and commotion also made it harder to exercise full control, as blocked sightlines opened the way for illicit activities, from rest to escape.
This was not the only area where SS plans and practices failed to align. Nazi leaders saw the Second World War as a historic opportunity to settle German “living space”, bringing murderous economic exploitation and ethnic cleansing to occupied Eastern Europe. Auschwitz was directly affected.

After the invasion of the Soviet Union, the SS leader Heinrich Himmler pursued the enslavement of Soviet POWs for an enormous construction programme to “make the east German”, and in October 1941 the SS began to build Birkenau, as a giant slave labour hub for Soviet soldiers. But this never materialized: far fewer POWs arrived than expected, and most who did soon died. From 1942, vast numbers of Jews were deported to the new complex instead, as Birkenau was repurposed as a Holocaust death camp.

Some scholars see camps like Auschwitz as sites of total SS domination. This was certainly what the perpetrators wanted them to be. But their monumental designs often bore little resemblance to built reality. Priorities changed, again and again, and SS planners were thwarted by supply shortages, bad weather and (most critically) by mass deaths among their slave labour force. In the end, grand visions regularly gave way to quick fixes, resulting in what the historian Paul Jaskot, writing about the architecture of the Holocaust, called the “lack of a rationally planned and controlled space”. Clearly, the popular image of Auschwitz as a straight-line, single-track totalitarian machine is inaccurate.

Flux and fluidity also shaped the visible and invisible boundaries that divided Auschwitz into distinct zones. Mostly, these social spaces were SS creations, to isolate prisoners according to criteria like health, age and background. In early summer 1944, when Birkenau reached its lethal extreme, it contained around a dozen fenced-off sectors: slave labourers were separated from the sick, newcomers from veterans, and men from women (except for two family compounds, for Sinti and Roma, and for Jews deported from the Theresienstadt ghetto). Rigid schedules dictated when prisoners had to be where. Only a few privileged inmates could enter sectors other than their own, and even their movements were restricted.

But the SS was never in absolute control over these spaces, as prisoners developed what the historian Tim Cole described as “spatial strategies of survival”. Despite all their suffering and fears, not all inmates were suspended in a state of complete helplessness. They established illicit places to talk, pray and cook, and even to get drunk: after hauling bodies to the main camp crematorium, prisoners from the corpse carrier commando sometimes gathered in the autopsy room, unobserved, and drank cocktails reeking of petrol and formaldehyde.

The Camp SS, for all its power, was not all-seeing. In fact, SS staff often avoided close encounters with inmates, fearing attacks and disease. The fences were not just meant to prevent escapes, they also kept prisoners at a distance from the SS. It was no coincidence that the huts of SS block leaders, who oversaw individual compounds in Birkenau, stood outside the barbed wire.

In addition to boundaries separating SS and prisoners, there were boundaries between SS staff, based on rank, gender and function. Among the most secluded places were the gas chambers and crematoria at the far end of Birkenau. Cordoned off, they were staffed by a small group of SS experts in mass murder, who saw themselves as the toughest among their peers. This was a hypermasculine space, with female guards excluded on principle.

The most critical border was the one separating the camp complex from the outside. Prisoner compounds were enclosed by wires, fences and towers: Auschwitz was “a German concentration camp”, Obersturmführer Karl Fritzsch warned the first Polish prisoners in June 1940, with “no exit except through the chimney of the crematorium”. But most prisoners only spent the nights inside their compounds. During the day, they moved outside for slave labour, closely watched by armed sentries. Other sentries manned guard posts, forming large chains around parts of the SS “interest zone”. In the evenings, after prisoners returned to their compounds, the large sentry chains were pulled back again.In this way, the Auschwitz camp borders extended and contracted daily.

For the SS, the boundary around the camp was about controlling prisoners, as well as the flow of goods and knowledge. But outside labour inevitably made it more porous, creating spaces for clandestine interactions between prisoners and locals: Polish civilians passed on food and medicine, for instance, and also gathered information about the camp.

News about SS crimes was also transmitted by other locals – SS wives, IG Farben employees, railway workers, German policemen. Rumours spread through Auschwitz town, as did some evidence. No fence could stop strong winds from blowing rotten fumes from Birkenau to the railway station and beyond. One day, sometime after she had moved from Berlin to Auschwitz, a German teacher returned home from the town’s high school to find her desk covered in what looked like cigar ash. Her landlady explained that it was “human ash” from the camp, where they were “again burning some in the crematorium”.

The materiality of mass murder – the stench, the smoke, the cremated remains – highlights the role of the senses in Auschwitz. For the prisoners, some of whom reported a sharpening of smell and hearing, survival itself depended on the senses. The daily rhythm of the camp, for example, was measured by gongs, bells, sirens and whistles. While prisoner perceptions of temporality altered, as one day dissolved into the next, each of these days was segmented by SS sounds. In the absence of clocks and watches, it was the soundscape of SS power that marked prisoner time and ruled their movements, starting with reveille and roll call in the morning. Anyone who missed a beat was in grave danger.

The senses also shaped the inner lives of prisoners, setting off streams of memories. The rare taste of home-baked bread was a reminder of freedom, as was the unfamiliar feeling of sitting on a proper chair. The sight of a distant fire evoked memories of roaring fireplaces back home, and the murmur of a quiet prayer transported prisoners back to the synagogues or churches of their childhood. When Primo Levi, who had studied chemistry in Turin, entered an IG Farben lab, he was hit by fumes from the past: “For a moment the large semidark room at the university, my fourth year, the mild air of May in Italy comes back to me with brutal violence and immediately vanishes”.

Despite the significance of the senses for prisoners, they are largely absent from studies of Auschwitz. Back in the 1970s, the pioneering Holocaust scholar Terrence Des Pres noted that we “tend to forget how camp prisoners looked and smelled”. Few historians have followed his lead to examine the more visceral elements of everyday life in the camp – held back, perhaps, by fears that this might sully the victims’ dignity. But blocking out the bodily reality of SS abuse only helps to sanitize the camps and sanctify the victims, creating yet more myths.

To imagine Auschwitz, we must imagine a daily assault on the senses. In his work, Des Pres depicted the “excremental assault” of the camps, with prisoners and compounds steeped in urine and faeces. “In the early days of the Birkenau camp”, one survivor recalled, “the distinctive stench could be smelled within a radius of at least 1 kilometre.” Des Pres was wrong to think of this as a deliberate SS strategy to debase prisoners; the rampant diarrhoea among inmates was really a consequence of starvation rations and overcrowding. But he was right to explore olfactory aspects of a place like Auschwitz. Excrement was everywhere, after all, and diarrhoea – which forced some prisoners to empty their bowels over twenty times a day – shamed and gravely weakened the victims.

Smell also became a strong marker of inmate hierarchies, further reinforcing them. The few more privileged prisoners had access to water, medication, clean clothes, sometimes even perfume, which they “organized” from magazines holding the property of murdered Jews. The lower-most prisoners, meanwhile, gave off the most pungent odour; shunned by others, they were in constant danger of being sent to the gas.

Of course, smell, like other senses, is culturally mediated: a scent regarded as pleasant by one group can be disgusting to another. Take the Auschwitz latrine. In Des Pres’s reading, its smell was that of humiliation and death. But its meaning for prisoners was more complex than that. For all the suffering that took place at the latrines, some inmates associated their smell with safety. Prisoners who supervised those emptying the ditches saw it as a cushy job, while others sometimes found refuge here, from the rain or the guards’ prying eyes. For Primo Levi, the latrine was “an oasis of peace”, highlighting how much Auschwitz altered individual sensibilities.

It was a different matter for the perpetrators. Dominant social groups often attribute “bad odours” to the “other”: the poor, prostitutes, ethnic minorities. For the guards and their accomplices, the odour of Auschwitz heightened their perception of prisoners as subhuman – dangerous, dirty and diseased. When Primo Levi once dared to address one of the civilian laboratory workers at IG Farben, she immediately complained to her supervisor about the affront of this “stinking Jew”.

Some exceptions were made. Inmates working in offices could wash more frequently and got better uniforms, to spare SS managers the most offensive smells and protect them from illness. But not all were reassured. Unterscharführer Bernhard Kristan, from the Political Department, was terrified of touching the door handle to an office of Jewish prisoner clerks, opening it instead with his elbow. Evidently, fears ran deep among the SS, not just among the inmates.

These fears draw our attention to the camp’s rich emotional landscape, another element of lived experience that remains a largely blank slate. A systematic study of the emotions in Auschwitz could start with Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of “emotional communities” – groups that distinguish desirable feelings from deviant ones, and prescribe specific ways for expressing them. The Camp SS formed one such emotional community, and one of its rules was that staff should show no empathy for prisoners. Occasional disquiet about the fate of an individual victim, such as a crying child, may be tolerated in private. But open displays of discomfort or dismay were off limits.

In his memoirs, the Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss describes suppressing his feelings of distress during murders. The emotional ideal he modelled was that of the “political soldier”, who acted in cold blood, with a stony heart and an iron fist, but without taking any pleasure in the prisoners’ suffering. Höss clung to a perverted ideal of duty and decency, as did his leader Heinrich Himmler. While Himmler wanted his men to feel proud about writing “a glorious page in our history”, as he called the Holocaust, he also imagined them as “hard, without being cruel”. Many SS men on the ground made no such distinction and committed furious assaults. Some performed theatrical displays of hatred to advance their careers, in spaces which soon became associated with extreme violence, like the roll-call square.

SS violence established clear-cut emotional norms for prisoners. Inmates soon learnt that anyone who stood out could become a target. This made all expressions of emotion potentially dangerous, since any sound or gesture – any sign of anger or anguish – could attract attention. And so prisoners tried to remain impassive during their encounters with the SS. These emotional restrictions extended throughout the camp’s routines and spaces. After one of the Jewish prisoner clerks, who had to process death certificates in Auschwitz, came across the record of her own brother’s death, one day in 1942, she slumped forward and sobbed into her hands. But after she heard SS voices next door, she desperately calmed herself. “She stopped crying”, a friend recalled. “Only her red eyes and the shivers running through her body attested to her suffering.”

Other inmates could not cry at all. Zalmen Gradowski wrote in the spring of 1944 that he was unable to “shed a tear” for his murdered family. “In the nearly 16 months I have spent in this life of hell, I have not yet had a single day to withdraw into my own world, to sense, perceive, feel my great misfortune.” This suggests a certain numbing of emotions. And yet, Gradowski’s notes are suffused with feeling, including his burning desire for revenge. SS domination did not turn victims like him into “ghastly marionettes with human faces”, as Hannah Arendt once suggested. On the contrary, prisoner testimonies point to the complex emotional life in Auschwitz, full of shame and envy, friendship and love.

In his plea, written in the face of almost certain death, Zalmen Gradowski asks us to do something impossible: to imagine all the horror of Auschwitz. In its totality, Auschwitz lies beyond our imagination. Still we must try. Otherwise the resulting void will continue to be filled by myths. To paraphrase Tony Judt: because the Holocaust cannot be remembered exactly as it was, it is liable to be remembered as it was not.

The task of historians is to combat “simplification and stereotype”, Primo Levi wrote, helping others to perceive more clearly “the experience” of the camps. One way to better understand this experience is to pay closer attention to the spatial, sensory and emotional dimensions of Auschwitz, and their intersection. When we do so, even the smallest spaces can reveal much about the camp.

Consider the bunk, which loomed large in prisoner lives, but has attracted little scholarly interest. Inmates who made it back to their quarters had survived for another day. But few found rest. Pressed into suffocatingly small spaces, many dreaded the night. The wooden shavings and rotting straw on the bunks crawled with fleas and chafed against sore skins. The constant scuffles also kept prisoners awake, as did the stench from the buckets, above all in the heat of summer. Others were jolted awake by sudden groans from the sick and those in the grip of nightmares. All the emotions and sensations attached to the bunks remind us that the agony of Auschwitz was unceasing, unending, hour upon hour.

And yet for some prisoners, the bunks also held a little warmth. For Zalmen Gradowski, the horror of the Sonderkommando was sometimes forgotten amid friendship, study and worship. And the bunk was also a place where pain occasionally dissolved into brief, blissful dreams, filled with sweet sensations – though this made waking up all the more terrifying. Half asleep, Gradowski writes, a prisoner would still see faces of loved ones, hear their laughter and feel their warm touch. But then the prisoner realized, with bottomless dread, where he was and that his family was long gone. “Ah, why, for what purpose had the gong woken him? If only he could remain in this idyllic dream forever – asleep. He would die a happy death.”

Nikolaus Wachsmann is Professor in Modern European History at Birkbeck College, University of London. His books include KL: A history of the Nazi concentration camps,
 
What it teaches us is that the wiping out and / or marginalisation/ghettoisation of whole people's within any nation state should not be tolerated.
 
Methuselah said:
I can still clearly remember and will never forget, going to the Regal cinema in Broadway (Norris Green) and seeing the newsreels of Belsen at the end of the war. I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. I was 10 years old.
Click to expand...
Ever since I first saw images of camp inmates and the mounds of skeletal bodies I have never ever forgotten that moment.
This as a 10 year old in the museum in the Fort Perch Rock in New Brighton. I must have stood fixated for 15 minutes or so with my mates telling me to leave. I couldn't.
It has remained with me to this day and has moulded how I feel about the Jews.
On a side issue it was only after he died, did I discover one of my cousin's husband was one of the first Allied soldiers into Belsen, and he only told my cousin a few years before his passing such was his horror.
 
Silent enim lēgēs inter arma.

For any of you who know Latin or have read classics, this famous saying by Cicero regrettably sums up the wretched horrors of WWII, and war in general.

Like @tsubaki rightly mentions, you've got to understand that the people that the Allgemeine, Totenkopfverbände (camp guard) and Waffen-SS employed.

These were scum bags of the highest order who, in most cases, were able to act in the most depraved manner and were actually able to flourish at doing so.

However, it really isn't as simple as that because the chaotic system of Nazi power, with survival of the fittest, allowed it to happen: bureaucrats and their pens.

People pushed to advance themselves and with such overlapping bureaucracy, the decisions were often made lower down the chain, albeit allowed from above.

One of doing this was by showing how efficiently you could eradicate the supposed 'untermensch', which pretty literally translates as below/inferior people.

"I can kill more jews and gypsies than you...I can kill them quicker than you." Vile hatred was allowed to flourish, and with it came profit which fuelled it further.

In my ol' university days, I studied it in quite a lot of detail and it surprised me how the moderate functionalism argument holds a serious amount of weight.

In layman's terms, Hitler and his cronies obviously hated the Jews and talked about their annihilation, but it really came about over time because of a 'need.'

They showed supposed humanity when they considered the terrible impact it was having on the Einsatzgruppen, so they started to use mobile vans to gas them.

This spread into wider camps, which had previously been used for slave labours, and the chambers and furnaces became ever more efficient.

This culminates with the places like Sobidor and Treblinka which weren't concentration camps - they were pure death camps. Straight there to die, no more.

Add to that, you have the whole aspect of profiteering and turning the factories of death into a place of manpower, money making and medical experiment.

Genuinely, it still baffles me how as a society it can so quickly and easily lead to such horrors, and people today hold similar views or discredit the holocaust.

Don't get me wrong, I am not excusing the soldiers who took part, no at all, however it worries me how propaganda and indoctrination can be so successful.

An oath for a German soldier was binding (for life) and was almost a supernatural entity or a tangible thing for all, so to use that was very, very clever.

A good series to watch about Auschwitz and the Final Solution in general is this early 2000 documentary by the BBC. Unfortunately, the episodes are going soon!

Another saying that stays in my mind when ever thinking of what happened...

"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness." - Joseph Conrad.
 
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