“Auschwitz. A Monograph of the Human”. Part 2. Death

Transcription of the podcast

The book ‘Auschwitz. A Monograph on the Human’ is the first of its kind in the world to try to depict human emotions within the reality of Auschwitz camp. Its author, Museum Director Dr. Piotr Cywiński, draws on fragments of memoirs and testimonies from more than 450 Survivors. It is the words of these direct witnesses that form the basis of this reflection on the human condition amid the process of dehumanization at the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz. In the podcast, we present ten chapters of this unique story about humanity facing the most extreme test.

Part 2 – Death
Read by Grey Stafford

While in our normal lives, the subject of death is naturally associated with eschatological questions, in the camp it was different. Death not only marked the end of someone’s life, it loomed at every instant. It was present from the very beginning, constantly, every day, unremittingly. For death was ubiquitous. Not knowing whose ashes were now rising with the smoke into the air, whether one’s neighbour on the bunk was still asleep or already dead, and generally who was still alive and who was not, meant that death was not something that occurred at the very end. It reigned in the camp.

The camp experience was an experience of closeness of death, its tangibility, ubiquity and corporeality. The camp and death are two fully interlinked concepts. For many people—usually never having encountered death other than through a ritualized, funereal form of mourning—contact with death as a constant partner in life was undoubtedly a massive shock. It was one of the basic causes of stress felt in the first phase of adaptation to the camp.

Filip Muller
“It was the first time in my life that I had touched a dead body. She was not yet quite cold”.

Hilda Hrabovecka
“Until the age of seventeen, I had never been near a dying, let alone a dead person; from that first night in Auschwitz, suffering and death became a part of my everyday existence”.

The following are the words of a Polish 14-year-old girl about her peer from Hungary who, having lost her entire family, would come to the bunk she shared with her mother in search of surrogate maternal love. They slept together on the same bunk under the same blanket:

Ester Friedman
“One morning I was awakened by Eli’s strange coldness. She had died hugging me, holding my hand. For a long time, I still felt her hand in mine and cried, where are you, Eli, where are you? For the first time I had lain the whole night with someone who was dead, and it was terrible”.

If such experiences, treated separately, could have a deeply stigmatizing and traumatic effect, then what occurs when similar experiences touch a person frequently every day and every night? What happens to the observer’s psyche if, upon awaking he or she sees the dead, or those falling to ground during roll call, those dying in the midst of labor, those throwing themselves upon the electrified barbed wire fence, those beaten and murdered by SS men and kapos, those lying—dead—outside virtually every barrack?

Jadwiga Apostoł-Staniszewska
“The dead were everywhere. At every time of day and night, you saw them in the mud in front of the barracks, inside the barracks, in the field where we worked, under the gate, and on the barbed wire fence surrounding our camp. The camp population did not fluctuate much, only the faces changed. Vast numbers were disappearing just as fast vast new numbers were emerging”.

The meaning of death, previously a transcendental, ineffable threshold, shrouded in religious mystery, loses its original connotations. It becomes a daily routine. What occurs as a result is a process—in light of the memoirs—which is not only that of familiarization, but also extreme indifference to the sight of death.

Jerzy Pozimski
“I feel disgusted with myself—because I am starting to get used to death, to the daily sight of people being clubbed to death, strangled at work, to the sight of those who died of diarrhea from whom the better shoes or garments are taken…”

Marta Ślisz-Oyrzyńska
“On the other hand, the sight of corpses strewn in the camp or all piled up over time ceased to impress me. It did not occur to me that these were people. Piles of corpses lying splattered in the mud or transported in handcarts or by “porters”—did not impress me much. Occasionally my heart did skip a beat when I saw a more attention-grabbing corpse, e.g. with a nose or cheeks gnawed away by rats, without fingers or toes. But a “normal corpse” was just a corpse which you simply ignored”.

In this taming of death, the camp community used special words and phrases to label it, which most fully demonstrates the search for a new language because normal language was not suited to describe the situation.

Bronisław Jureczek
“Your kapo Franz is already now in the Himmelkommando”.

Jan Stawarz
“… “they took him” or “gone to demolition,” “got smashed,” “got the pin” or “flew out through the chimney”…”

In this situation, we should consider how perceptions of the importance of life and death changed, how they were mutually significant and how they correlated with one other. In the shadow of the concentration camp saying Sowieso: Krematorium, these two extreme aspects of humanity required reevaluation. Comments on this subject in witness accounts are generally short, curtailing any speculation, as if the authors were not entirely convinced that the subject should be broached, as if they did not believe that those who had not experienced it, those with their preconceived perceptions of life and death, would be able to understand.

Isidore Greengrass
“Life was very cheap in the camp. It didn’t mean a thing”.

Stanisław Kobylański
“Death was as common a phenomenon in the camp as poverty, beatings, hunger and did not make an impression on the prisoners”.

Załmen Gradowski
“For I myself have been condemned to death … can the dead mourn the dead?”

Such a strong experience of the inevitability, everydayness, ubiquity and, one is even pushed to say, “normality” of death, sometimes left profound traces on the minds and emotions of the survivors.

Henryk Król
“From the camp I have a permanent scar—I am insensitive to death, to the sight of the dead. I have already buried many of my closet family members, but, for example, I am never moved by the sight of a body in a coffin. Initially I thought I had become abnormal with regard to emotions. But that is not the case. I can be moved by a good movie—but not the death of another human being. This is the trauma I have taken from the camp, where every day you saw many, sometimes very many corpses, where human life was of no value”.

Yet this experience did not just concern the sight of corpses. Death is not only a state, it is also a transitional process, the process of dying. Prisoners saw people still alive whose fate had already been sealed—people who were selected, separated from the rest and taken to the gas chambers. They saw people with the knowledge that they were prospectless, that they were faced with the final minutes, if even a quarter of an hour, of their lives. Unlike the still unsuspecting, uninitiated newcomers, these experienced prisoners knew the limits of hope and knew when death became inevitable.

Pelagia Lewińska
“Some of those who were selected cried, sometimes they even screamed and resisted leaving the ranks, but most of them usually went in silence, with dignity. Why did they go so calmly, being fully aware of what awaited them? I think it was a resignation that they had accepted a long time ago as the only stance. Many of them were completely unflustered, they looked at the remainder of us straight in the eye, a goodbye; some even raised their hand as a farewell gesture, they seemed to say: Today it’s us—tomorrow you”.

Mieczysław Bednarski
“The other group stood three steps to the left of us. We stood and waited for further ordinances. Suddenly, in the group next to ours, we heard a murmur. I noticed tears in the eyes of some of the men, which were dripping in large droplets down their denim. But they were still standing motionless. At some point, they started throwing handkerchiefs, pocketknives and other small items at us. “What does this mean?!” I asked the old prisoner standing next me. “They don’t need it,” he replied. “They’re going to be shot… Can’t you see how even the numbers are?” I quickly counted the tens. Yes, ten tens, together a hundred”.

Elisa Springer
“The tragedy of our despair and the temporary nature of our existence meant that all too quickly we forgot about out companions in misery, who so easily turned into dust, and yet just a moment ago, barely a few hours ago, these people, they share the dirty bunks with us, they shared pieces of brad and hopes that we would get out of the camp alive”.

Therefore, death itself, so tangible and so present, in fact eluded all the words and definitions acquired in life. Hence, there were two types of death: one was invisible, universal and theoretical, and the other was mundane, corporeal, which one saw and with which one coexisted every day.

Jadwiga Apostoł-Staniszewska
“Death in the extermination camp did not have angel wings. She was naked, stripped of holiness and dignity, deprived of all feelings, devoid of words, songs and ceremonies. Gloomy as night, quiet and nameless. No one mourned, no one talked, no one remembered, no one was moved by her. She existed in all of us. The murdered had no graves, no marked places, no snare drums, no bird song”.

Zofia Kossak
“They lay where they fell. No one in the death camp respected death, human remains were treated like abandoned rags, therefore some of the dead lay face down on the ground, their limp arms positioned awkwardly as they had been pitched off the carrier—others face up, eyes wide open and lips in a frozen scream. Bodies covered with wounds thrown randomly, one on top of the other, across, diagonally”.

August Kowalczyk
“For I had seen so many deaths; people being led away to be shot, the corpses of colleagues we had to carry on our backs and the constant sense of imminent danger, such were the everyday elements of our lives. And yet a sudden feeling of outrage and pity for a sow and her piglets destined for the prisoners’ kitchen. Why would a human being behave in such a way?”.

Death in the camp was becoming so ubiquitous that it became possible to reap benefits from it. If, for example, many transports would arrive to the camp, that could be deemed as generally beneficial for the camp’s secondary market. If, in turn, the death rate grew in a given block, there was an anticipation for greater food rations to share before the deaths were recorded during roll call. The sight of a dying prisoner could be seen as an opportunity to make use of his or her uneaten bread, or relatively good shoes, or perhaps to barter his or her spoon, canteen, cap or other item of clothing. Even a place specifically designated for death could safely be utilized for another purpose.

Konstanty Piekarski
“On Christmas Eve, 1940, I was invited by Albert to come down to the morgue for a Christmas dinner. It was a curious place for such an occasion, but then it was also one of the safest places in the camp. SS men did not go there; even kapos and blockelders avoided it”.

Death in the camp was at times predictable, its approach could be felt, be it because of a nervous breakdown or a physical one, and the biological consequences of deteriorating health. Every day, there were dramatic farewells, and yet at times it was silence that would escort the fellow prisoner to the final crossroads of human life.

Tadeusz Sobolewicz
“He [my father] rose up from his bunk, looked at me, and said in a quiet voice: “I fear this illness is going to kill me. I feel very bad. Should something happen to me and you were to be released from camp, look after your mother—and divide fairly among yourselves whatever belongings are left after me.” I listened to him transfixed. I didn’t understand—I didn’t want to understand —what he was saying. I snapped out of my trance and responded: “But Daddy, what are you talking about? You must get better.” But as the words were leaving my lips, I suddenly realized that I didn’t believe in it myself. Father drew my h ead towards his chest and added in a frail whisper: “Tell Mother that I always loved her, and I was always faithful to her.” He kissed my shaven head and then sank back into his bed. I gave him a wave and on parting said: “Maybe will be able to visit you sometime. Hold on.” But he didn’t hear me. He was already somewhere else”.

Charlotte Delbo
“Now you can tell who was grazed by death last night, who will be taken away this evening. For death is imprinted on the face, clings implacably to it, and our eyes do not need to meet for all of us to realize as we look at Suzanne Rose that he is going to die, that Mounette is going to die. Death is imprinted on the skin drawn tight over the cheekbones, the skin stuck to the eye-sockets stuck to the jawbones. And we know that is no use now to call forth their home, or their home, or their son, their mother. It is too late. There is nothing we can do for them”.

The commonness of death permeated the minds of prisoners, forcing them to think of the impending end of their own lives. Regardless of one’s attachment to life, of hope, or of the struggle to survive, the awareness of the fragility of the existence of other prisoners forced one to consider the fragility of one’s own existence.

Aleksander Giermański
“There were two kinds of death in the camp. One, the worst kind, was the slow death resulting from the applied methods of wearing people down, loss of strength, disease, diarrhea, infection, death from exhaustion. … The mood of those awaiting death was one of helplessness, despair, most often indifference and rarely panic. I did not see then even want to save themselves, because they lacked the will, often they also lacked the will to live. … I was more concerned with the second type of death: the sudden death of those sentenced to be shot, hanged, gassed, etc. This was a different type of death and was experienced differently by those who were sentenced”.

Ruth Bindefeld Neray

“I did not realize that I had accepted my death and that the permission to die I gave myself at the time of the beating allowed me to go beyond all reasonable limits, beyond all fear”.

Yet there loomed yet another kind of death over the camp. Nearby were the smoking crematoria and the glow of burning pits. This death was invisible, but olfactorily perceptible. It was a death that was camouflaged, but very much alive; for the prisoners of the Jewish transports, or for all those whose close ones were selected later in the camp, in camp hospitals or during roll call.

Shari Lebovitz
“We tried not to think about it but there was nothing else to think about’”.

Miriam Harel
“My neighbor, Mrs Codesh, had arrived there from Wilno with her 15-year-old son. When she saw the children being directed to the left, she advised him: “Go with the children. They will probably get a glass of milk.” Then in Israel, on the day of her only son’s birthday, she took a load of pills. She was 40. She was unable to forgive herself for sending him to die”.

This awareness of the proximity of the machines of mass extermination was especially palpable in Birkenau. Silence on this grim subject in numerous accounts is indicative of its traumatic nature. At times it is apparent that the authors attempt to mitigate this fear by highlighting the fact that many did not expect the fate of their deportation. Everyone in the camp, however, saw, sensed and heard the presence of such death; yet at the same time, no one apart from Sonderkommando prisoners saw it directly. The Birkenau inmates saw the victims go calmly, waiting their turn in the wood in front of crematoriums IV and V. And no one knew which was better, as was recorded in a discussion at one of the camp offices:

Raya Kagan
““Better for them if they go to their deaths without knowing about it,” said Frau Mendelson. We fell silent”.
Especially in Birkenau, in the second half of 1943 and in 1944, when the new crematoria were fully operational, everyone saw and knew. This was no longer death, it was murder. Mass murder. Interestingly, the actual word “murder” very rarely appears in survivors’ memoirs. This too may be a certain trace of the taming of death.

Maria Jezierska
“Thousands of children, women and men, the young and old, the healthy and sick were led towards the crematoria. It was the most difficult period for us in the camp. Awareness of the helplessness of these people, as well as awareness that after the Jews, it would be our turn, forced us to turn to ourselves, and at the same time some instinct of self-defense told us not to know and not to think about it. Yet there was no escape from the crematorium smoke and the smell of the bodies. During night silence, I heard with my ears the cries of children being burned alive”.

Józef Majchrzak
“It is difficult to describe something as terrible as the death of thousands of people in a gas chamber. For ten minutes, from a distance of 400-500 meters away, came to our barracks the most inhuman, unimaginably desperate cries of thousands of people terribly suffering. This was followed by an ominous silence which was as cruel as the cry of death”.

Zofia Posmysz
“I got up before the rest. When I left that barrack in total silence, because the camp was still asleep, and was on my way to the latrine, the atmosphere was unearthly. Like a fairy-tale. Right outside the door, you entered a fog [crematorium smoke]. It was a heavy suspension. Of an almost solid consistency. I’m neither a chemist nor a physicist and I don’t know how to explain it. But once I had taken a few steps, behind me remained a passage, cut out of that fog. Only after a while did it disappear”.

Information about what actually was taking place in the gas chambers and crematoria, as well as the outdoor pyres is found in the accounts of former members of the Sonderkommando. There was no escape from there other than as smoke through the chimneys. Witnessing this daily, the Sonderkommando were convinced that as a Geheimnisträger – secret keepers – they would themselves eventually be murdered, so that the perpetrators would be able to remove all traces and witnesses of that epicentre of evil.

Alter Feinsilber
“When after the gassing we were ordered to throw bodies into the furnace, we would sometimes find someone who was still showing signs of life, and we didn’t want to throw them into a furnace alive; then, one of the SS men would finish them off with a shot from his revolver”.

Feliks Rosenthal
“From around a thousand gassed people, a still alive child was retrieved. The SS men gave the child some milk, and when it recovered consciousness, they shot it dead”.

Wanda Maliszewska
“We experienced so many terrible things in the camp that it is difficult to recall all of them now. But I will never forget when one day, I don’t remember the date, I saw living children being thrown onto a burning pyre in the crematorium area”.

Shlomo Venezia
“But on seeing the body burning I thought the dead were perhaps luckier than the living; they were no longer forced to endure this hell on earth, to see the cruelty of men”.

The tragedy of everyday life in the camp, where every possible effort was subjected to the ultimate goal of avoiding death, while one was living literally among the dead and with a perceived inevitability of the end of ones’ own existence, led the prisoners to view death as a sort of liberation.

Suzanne Birnbaum
“We regretted we hadn’t been gassed immediately after arriving in the camp. What for so much suffering so as to die one day of exhaustion after terrible days of beatings, harassment and insults?”

Bogusław Dąbrowski
“Those who died could even be considered lucky. “This hell is no longer their concern”, the prisoners used to say, A prisoner risked his life virtually every hour”.

Every prisoner death was scrupulously registered in camp documents. Unfortunately, none of the Sterbebücher have survived to this day. The numbering of prisoners and noting their presence at roll calls allowed the SS to have current records of the prisoner population. Therefore, from the administrative point of view, death was in no way a dramatic event, it only carried with it the completion of necessary bureaucratic formalities. It became an administrative activity with rigorously observed procedures that were more important than actual facts.

Julian Kiwała
“I remember a shocking incident in the black 28 mortuary, Auschwitz. It happened one day, after the copses of those murdered with phenol injections administered by SDG Klehr in block 20 had been delivered and deposited in the morgue, one or two hours later, a prisoner emerged out of the mass of corpses and crawling on his hands and knees, in a state of utter bewilderment, tried to escape up the steps to the ground floor. After a few steps, he lost balance and fell, striking his forehead on the edge of a step. Shocked by the sight, the mortuary prisoners ran and carried the prisoner back to the corpses and laid him alongside on a stretcher that happened to be there. Several doctors came. They measured the sick man’s pulse. Could anything at all be done help a prisoner who was already featured in the camp register as dead?”

Hermann Langbein
“In Dachau we spoke of a bad day if ten or more deaths were to be reported, but in Auschwitz we used seven typewriters on day and nights shifts to prepare just such reports”.

Roman Taul
“The death registers were next bound in volumes”.

This was the second episode of the podcast based on the book by Dr Piotr Cywiński ‘Auschwitz. A Monograph on the Human’.

Read by: Grey Stafford

The voices of the survivors were provided by volunteer narrators from the Auschwitz Memorial:

Toon Dreessen
Sarah Edwards
Mike Skagerlind
Michael Takiff
Tom Vamos
Kate Weinrieb
and Therese McLaughlin

Adaptation for the podcast: Agnieszka Juskowiak-Sawicka
Introduction words: Paweł Sawicki
Music: JivexMusic

Testimonies and memoirs used into the podcast:
Filip Müller (29236), “Auschwitz Inferno. The Testimony of a Sonderkommando”, trans. Susanne Flatauer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 12.
Hilda Hrabovecká (n.n.), “Arm With a Tattooed Number” (Bratislava: Marenčin PT, 2002), p. 39.
Ester Friedman (A-26615), „Daleka droga do domu”, p. 77.
Jadwiga Apostoł-Staniszewska (26273), „Echa okupacyjnych lat”, p. 307.
Jerzy Pozimski (1099), Account in: Testimonies, vol. 52, p. 170.
Maria Ślisz-Oyrzyńska (40275), cited in: Ryn, Kłodziński (20019), „Śmierć”, p. 82.
Bronisław Jureczek (26672), Account in: Testimonies, vol. 3, p. 404.
Jan Stawarz (39534), cited in: Ryn, Kłodziński (20019), „Śmierć”, p. 61.
Isidore Greengrass (87224), “Judaism Is Indestructible”, p. 83.
Stanisław Kobylański (575), Account in: Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 267.
Zalmen Gradowski (n.n.), “From the Heart of Hell”, p. 110.
Henryk Król (1183), Account in: Testimonies, vol. 75, p. 210.
Pelagia Lewińska (32292), Oświęcim, p. 58.
Mieczysław Bednarski (30951), „W szponach Gestapo”, p. 179.
Elisa Springer (A-24020), „Milczenie żywych”, pp. 82-83.
Jadwiga Apostoł-Staniszewska (26273), “Wobec śmierci w Brzezince i Ravensbrück,” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim (1981), pp. 167-168.
Zofia Kossak (64491), „Z otchłani”, p. 42.
August Kowalczyk (6804), “A Barbed Wire Refrain II”, pp. 44-45.
Konstanty Piekarski (4618), “Escaping Hell”, p. 80.
Tadeusz Sobolewicz (23053), “But I Survived”, pp. 126-127.
Charlotte Delbo (31661), “None of Us Will Return”, pp. 64-65.
Aleksander Giermański (716), cited in: Ryn, Kłodziński (20019), „Śmierć”, pp. 62-63.
Ruth Bindefeld Neray (75912), To Auschwitz and Back (Sudbury: Sudbury Press, 1997), p. 75.
Shari Lebovitz (39439), [“Shari: A True Story”], p. 90.
Miriam Harel (n.n.), „Teraz już możesz płakać”, p. 123.
Raya Kagan (7984), “Des femmes au bureau de l’enfer”, p. 229.
Maria Jezierska (24449), Account in: Testimonies, vol. 8, p. 1145.
Józef Majchrzak (33204), cited in: Ryn, Kłodziński (20019), „Śmierć”, p. 65.
Zofia Posmysz (7566), „Królestwo za mgłą”, p. 141.
Alter Feinsilber (27675), Testimony in the Rudolf Höss trial, [IPN GK 196/82], in: Chronicles of Terror, vol. 5, p. 260.
Felix Rosenthal (176475), Account in: Testimonies, vol. 9, p. 1244.
Wanda Miszewska (44756), Account in: Testimonies, vol. 101, s. 146.
Shlomo Venezia (182727), “Inside the Gas Chambers”, p. 62.
Suzanne Birnbaum (74837), “Une Française juive est revenue” (Maulévrier: Hérault-Editions, 1991), p. 42
Bogusław Dąbrowski (18375), in: Dąbrowski, „Nietypowy więzień Auschwitz-Birkenau”, p. 43.
Julian Kiwała (9143), Account in: Testimonies, vol. 40, p. 171.
Hermann Langbein (60355), “People in Auschwitz”, p. 91.
Roman Taul (1108), Account in: Testimonies, vol. 9, p. 1265.