“Auschwitz. A Monograph of the Human”. Part 4. Emotions

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 4. Emotions
Read by: Grey Stafford

The concentration camp transferred a person into a world where one’s very existence seemed impossible. A world where a prisoner had to adapt fairly quickly or die. People are sometimes subjected to situations the full extent of which they cannot imagine. This is what happens on war fronts or in the face of exceptional catastrophes. Through its profound dehumanization, the camp positioned its victims within yet another extreme situation. Still, it was apparent that the possibilities of human adaptation to conditions that even the most daring imagination could have predicted, are enormous.

Victor Frankl
“If someone now asked of us the truth of Dostoevski’s statement that flatly defines man as a being who can get used to anything, we would reply, “Yes, a man can get used to anything, but do not ask us how.””.

The camp led people into a constant state of tension. The reasons for this tension, however, were varied: from the will to survive, to pangs of hunger and thirst, to the fear for one’s loved ones or the fact that one had observed what was happening to other prisoners, or to the victims taken from the train wagons directly to the gas chambers. Perhaps more competent here would be the opinions of a psychologist or psychiatrist, not that of a historian, because it was probably a combination of various types of tensions; all of them highly traumatic, concerning extreme limits that did not reflect any previous experiences, now occurring constantly and simultaneously, mounting in succession, together with the camp’s planned dehumanization, producing an exceptionally strong and distinct emotional pressure. It was so strong that after the war, survivors fully agreed with the statement that the experience cannot be explained nor communicated in any way to people who had not themselves been through a concentration camp.

Paula Gruber-Herszkopf
“At the end of spring, when many Hungarian transports were arriving and the crematoria were working at full capacity, the Germans also used pits. Despite the camouflage, we could see thick, dirty smoke clouds rising from behind the trees and flames shooting from the ground. The stink of burning flesh made us nauseated. The whole gave an unreal impression, just like a macabre dream”.

Krystyna Żywulska
“Anyone who has not experienced it, will not understand it, the same way no one will ever feel our anguish and torment despite our most faithful account of it. Besides, why should we describe these most horrible scenes? They will certainly arouse horror. After all, our suffering lies primarily in the continuity and the hopelessness. We are constantly in a state of mental and physical pain. It’s as if someone close to you is constantly dying, as if someone is constantly spitting on you, and as if all of it is happening at the same time. I don’t know how to translate it so that free people can understand it”.

Most of the descriptions by former prisoners are of their own struggles to survive or of the fate of their loved ones. With pain, they touch upon the question of longing, especially the longing for murdered family members. There is one topic that particularly draws our attention in accounts describing Auschwitz during its second phase of operation, when it was not only a concentration camp, but also a mass extermination center: in the background of all described events was the constant presence of crematorium smoke. In Auschwitz I, in Monowitz and some other sub-camps, the smoke was felt but not seen, and perhaps for this reason it was even more terrifying, an intangible menace, discernibly present, but unknown. In Birkenau, it was routine.

Nate Leipciger
“On some days, the smoke from the crematoria obscured the sun, creating a continuous dull grey transition from day to night. We watched as transport after transport arrived and people were marched or transported by trucks to the gas chambers. The smell of coal dust, mixed with the distinctive smell of the burning of human flesh, permeated the whole area. It was a horrible realization that the Nazis intended to kill us all. Our days were numbered, and we knew it”.

Undoubtedly, emotional reactions to events in the camp varied. Not every event affected everyone in the same way. People focused on their immediate surroundings, on the few people they knew, and on themselves. This is natural. A more comprehensive analysis of the emotional states resulting from “finding oneself in hell” would most probably require considering the stage at which a given prisoner was in the process of becoming a Muselmann. While a person who is in relatively good shape and still strong may attempt to assess the situation, analyze it and experience emotional states known to all of us, a person who is on the verge of death by starvation, exhausted, disoriented, lost, reacts only to direct stimuli.
However, even when constantly threatened, with the constant presence of death in very diverse forms, prisoners would experience moments so extreme that would lead to their unhingement. The signals probably varied from person to person—often it was a sudden realization of the sheer scale of the mass murder or the fate of the children in the camp. It seems that with their adaptation to living under constant tension, former prisoners signalized in their accounts that certain extreme situations took place and caused very diverse reactions: sudden bouts of stress and nervousness, but also apathy and numbness. The first quote concerns assistance in leading a group of sick prisoners into the basement of block 11, where the SS next killed them with Zyklon B.

Konrad Szwed
“A darkness descended over my eyes. The sight of people suffering, their cries and calls were gut-wrenching, caused an unspeakable pain. Half-conscious, stunned by the shouting of the torturers and the groaning of the dying, it was as if I was coming out of hell. I felt my head burning, and my heart burning. Before my eyes, the specter of terrible death by suffocation. I ran away, wanting to hide under a pile of stones, to fall underground, not see humans being harmed and the terrible crime of killing human dignity”.

The second quote is a description of the evacuation of block 25 in Birkenau, ironically called the waiting room because that was where women prisoners selected to be murdered in the gas chambers were held for even as long as several days, without food or water and fully aware of what awaited them.

Simone Alizon
“It was a hallucinatory scene. It was some unbelievable madness. It was so shocking, so unimaginable, so unacceptable that the soul refused to believe what it saw, what eyesight registered; likewise, the noise and terrifying screams that assaulted the ears”.

The following descriptions concern mass death. The first is extremely telling because it illustrates what survivors creating the post-war exhibits at Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum attempted to express with piles of thousands of shoes, small children’s shoes and sandals.

Stanisław Sattler
“I have received an order to burn this without delay. Coming to his place, I saw in the yard, close to his fireplace a very large heap of small childrens’ shoes, sandals, slippers and boots. Looking at the pile of thousands and thousands of childrens’ shoes, a sudden traumatic shudder passed through me; something split, something broke in me. In my shock, I hallucinated, I saw the faces or terror stricken, frightened, naked children, who for fear, could not even cry. Children who could not understand, who had done nothing to deserve their fate. I lost consciousness and fell down”.

Anna Kowalczykowa
“One day, I must have been working in the kitchen half a year by then, the girls called me outside. When I approached the wires, I saw trucks, packed with prisoners from the hospital in the men’s camp, driving to the gas chambers. There were about four thousand of them. That was the first time I fainted in the camp. I was resuscitated by an SS man, who beat me so hard that I lay in a puddle of blood”.

The most difficult situation in this respect was that of the Sonderkommando prisoners, who assisted the victims in entering the gas chambers, then pulled out their bodies, cut their hair, knocked out their gold teeth, and finally burned the corpses in the crematorium ovens.638 It is difficult to analyze the emotional condition of these prisoners in comparison with the prisoners of other Kommandos. Even after the war they were accused of complicity, and for decades they remained silent. If Auschwitz was another world, the work conditions of the Sonderkommando—from the perspective of human experience—was its most extreme degeneration. Prisoners’ emotions in the camp were the same or reducible to a common median. Hell has its circles, but—may Dante Alighieri forgive me—they do not have to be concentric.

Kazimierz Smoleń
“After some time, Grabner told Mietek that he could get assigned to “light work.” That light work was the burning of corpses in the crematorium. Of course, everything went well at first. He worked indoors, it was warm, he had more food. But when I met him a couple of years later in Birkenau, he was desperate. Crying, he said he wanted to “break out” of that Kommando, but it was impossible”.

Shaul Chasan
“I’d stopped being human by then. If I’d been human, I couldn’t have endured it for even one minute. We kept going because we’d lost our humanity”.

Leon Cohen
“We were totally drained. We blocked up our hearts; we were dehumanized. We worked like machines”.
It is important to note that this momentary total nervous breakdown could have resulted from very traumatic experiences of seeing children or disabled people or some other shocking situations, and each prisoner’s response depended on personal knowledge, experiences, imaginations as well as that specific person’s mental resilience.

Adolf Gawalewicz
“I am ordered to take my place on a stool at a large table. My work-mates are mentally ill, deranged. We have to wind into balls yarn and thread undone from old clothes. Two days I spent among the deranged. I cannot describe the horror and terror of the hellishly long hours I never thought would end. All of these inmates were mentally ill, driven insane as result of tortures they had been subjected to during Gestapo investigations, or simply because they were psychologically unable to cope with concentration camp living conditions”.

Witold Pilecki
“And our sanity was not the same as that of other people, that is for sure… as that of people far, far away, there “on eart”… The men we were back “on earth” were dying—we were transforming and becoming different”.

The desire to survive required the prisoners to detach themselves from all they constantly saw and felt, no matter how utterly unacceptable these situations were.646 The mental stress of confronting them soon led to indifference and apathy.

Victor Frankl
“These reactions, as I have described them, began to change in a few days. The prisoner passed from the first to the second phase; the phase of relative apathy, in which he achieved a kind of emotional death”.
“Apathy, the main symptom of the second phase, was a necessary mechanism of self-defense. Reality dimmed, and all efforts and all emotions were centered on one task: preserving one’s own life and that of the other fellow”.

Gabor (Neumann) Nyiro
“Prisoners behaved variously in the barracks. Some stood still in apathy, trying to understand the meaning of their fate. Other searched for strength and encouragement in prayer. Others paced in all directions, rebelling and cursing to let off steam. And some hid in some corner of the barrack, hoping that they would be left alone”.

Zofia Kossak
“Those who once pretended to be indifferent as a tactic, soon became genuinely indifferent. They became accustomed. Indifference and becoming accustomed are dangerous things because they obscure the real criterion, they are the start of a slippery slope on which it is hard to stop”.

Apathetic states came very quickly, most of the survivors speak of a period of at most a few days, sometimes a week since their deportation to the camp. While emotional disengagement654 could prevent a person from panicking or suffering uncontrollable stress, deep apathy could also become a dangerous factor that would weaken the essential will to survive, as well as the equally essential ability to make sober decisions at all times.

Peter Ornstein
“People sometimes collapsed and died on the spot. Often, totally emaciated and mentally unfocused individuals could be seen stumbling along the way, completely out of contact with their surroundings and beyond any kind of helpful intervention. A high degree of apathy could also be observed in prisoners who, while still functioning, had given up all hope of surviving this ordeal”.

Roman Taul
“Us old camp hands already know that after mental breakdown, there follows physical breakdown and the chimney”.

Hence the need to find a golden mean—which was not possible for everyone in the camp—a balance between becoming indifferent to what seemed unbearable, but at the same time not succumbing to self-doubt and apathy. Adaptation that did not lead to submission was a defense mechanism, as some have noted with surprise, observing the unbelievable, but nonetheless apparent, and sometimes colossal, human abilities in this respect.

Adam Ziemba
“Indeed, the feeling of helplessness had a very negative effect on every prisoner and reduced their sensitivity and reaction to phenomena which in normal circumstances would have shaken their very soul”.

Tadeusz Niedzielski
“The crematorium atmosphere, hunger and beatings made us soulless people, automatons powered by nerves”.

Viktor Frankl
“The sufferers, the dying and the dead, became such commonplace sights to him after a few weeks of camp life that they could not move him anymore”.

The everydayness that with time ceased to surprise anyone resulted in the fact that the death of a fellow prisoner—unless it was someone very close—first and foremost created the opportunity to acquire that person’s shoes, clothes, bowl, spoon or bread. Only later—if at all—did it evoke empathetic thoughts about the deceased.

Stanisław Tyblewski
“I have witnessed more than once how at the table during a meal, people exhausted to their absolute limits would die with the spoon still in their mouth—he was eating, eating and then with eyes open, his head suddenly slumps as if struck with a truncheon and never got up. No one was concerned because everyone was hungry and if the dying prisoner still had some soup left, there’d always be someone willing to finish it off”.

But—no matter how we look at it with our post-war eyes—attaining this sense of detachment seemed essential, and that was frequently confirmed by the survivors. It was only with such an attitude that one could adapt to the otherness of Auschwitz, comprehend its principles and mechanisms, to try to overcome them every day. It was only by integrating with all that was different and inhuman that they had a chance—at least for a moment—to overcome the system, to trick it, to direct their fate in a way which they imagined and felt it should be determined.

Charles Naparstek
“And this absurd and suffocating world seems obvious to me as if no other one existed. I have no concerns nor any questions. No worries. I’m at an age when a man adapts and economizes on everything, eliminating moral suffering, emotions, reminiscences and regrets, that’s a life imperative”.

Those who were unable to accept the new norms, in other words, not as a new axiomatic system of ethics or morality, but as the objective condition of the camp, had a far more difficult situation in terms of emotions and decision-making. One may probably assume that their stance is under-represented in the accounts of survivors as most of them perished.

Bogusław Dąbrowski
“Many prisoners were getting used to the constant crimes committed in the camp. It progressed like an anesthesia to all the horrors. But it was different in my case. Throughout the three years of my stay in Auschwitz, I experienced the crimes consistently strongly, and it was exhausting”.

However, in the case of most survivors, confronting the most extreme experiences, even the incessant practice of mass murder, the relentless specter of successive victims proceeding from the railway ramp to the gas chambers, entire families, children and the elderly—triggered defense mechanisms. One aspect of empathetic or emotional numbness toward newly arrived victims was particularly apparent. The arrival of new transports was inextricably associated in the camp with the hope of acquiring food, warm clothes, better shoes, essential gear or anything that was in the luggage of the victims, which was sorted in the so-called Canada warehouses at the end of Birkenau. Unable to influence the fate of the victims, this hope constituted a response to the strong need to rationalize what was taking place on the ramp and on the way to the gas chambers.

Errikos Sevillas
“No day passed without our seeing at least one line of people on their way to die. Finally, we became so accustomed to it that it no longer made any impression on us. We had begun to lose our humanity”.

Adolf Gawalewicz
“If someone were to suddenly wake me from deep sleep and ask me what I associated with “the mass extermination of the Hungarian Jews”, even today I’d immediately reply: “The ghastly, sickening, sweetish, pungent stench of burned corpses and… goose lard.” What a cynical and amoral comparison to make! Indeed. But there is nothing I can do about the fact that at the “feasts” of prominent functionaries and on the concentration camp black market there suddenly appeared this delicacy, robbed from dozens of Hungarian gassed victims …”

The symptoms of extreme detachment from reality were probably experienced—perhaps not constantly, but occasionally—by every prisoner, especially when one was reduced to extreme exhaustion and an existence that bordered life and death. Camp hospitals were naturally an arena for such events.

Czesław Jaworski
“Once, when as a doctor I was running a hospital ward in Auschwitz, one of the patients reported to me that a fellow prisoner he was sharing a bed with had probably died because he had stopped breathing. Having confirmed the prisoner’s death, I told the patient to move to a vacant bed. How great was my surprise when the patient, an 18-year-old boy, started asking me to let him stay in the bet with the deceased man because his body was still warm, and with him it would be warmer than in a bed alone…”

Ultimately, everyone attempted to escape from thoughts about the pits of hell where they lived. The SS personnel, as well as the privileged prisoner functionaries, and so-called “old numbers” often escaped to alcohol (usually vodka) taken from the baggage of new transports or (in exchange for valuables stolen from the victims) purchased from the civilian workers of German construction firms hired by the SS in the expansion of the concentration camp complex.

Edward Halek
“The organization of the resistance movement in Birkenau was run [in the summer of 1943] by the socialist Roman Frankiewicz, who worked in the Schreibstube. This was a very wise and brave man. His only weakness was that he frequently got drunk. And indeed, this is hardly surprising. Many prisoners in Birkenau, seeing the crematoria, the smoke from the chimneys and pyres, sought oblivion in vodka, which they acquired by various means”.

For the vast majority of prisoners such possibilities of reacting against or escaping from camp reality were, of course, unattainable. Nevertheless, they still had to maintain balance between a certain amount of detachment and succumbing to total apathy. In order to survive the camp, one had to understand and feel its logic. One had to become—as Konstanty Piekarski later put it—a homo campoconcentratus.

Konstanty Piekarski
“I was not the person I had once been. Transformed into some kind of concentration camp being, I was almost incapable of imagining that, in this other world within our sight, people were well fed and lived peaceful lives”.

This was the fourth 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
Greg Littlefield
Mike Skagerlind
Michael Takiff
Tom Vamos
Kate Hannah Weinrieb
and Therese McLaughlin

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

Testimonies and memoirs used into the podcast:
Victor Frankl (119104), “Man’s Search For Meaning”, p. 30.
Paula Gruber-Herszkopf (n.n.), “Lasting Pain”, p. 123.
Krystyna Żywulska (55908), “I Survived Auschwitz”, p. 128.
Nate Leipciger (133628), “The Weight of Freedom”, p. 79.
Konrad Szweda (7669), Account in: Testimonies, vol. 32, p. 83.
Simone Alizon (31776), “L’exercice de vivre”, p. 181.
Stanisław Sattler (68652), “Prisoner of 68 Months”, pp. 100-101.
Anna Kowalczykowa (27658), Account in: Testimonies, vol. 19, p. 66.
Kazimierz Smoleń (1327), Account in: Testimonies, vol. 75, pp. 173-174.
Shaul Chasan (182527), Interview in: Greif, We Wept Without Tears, p. 273.
Leon Cohen (182492), Interview in: Greif, We Wept Without Tears, p. 305.
Adolf Gawalewicz (9225), “Reflections”, p. 51.
Witold Pilecki (4859), “Witold’s Report From Auschwitz”, p. 27.
Victor Frankl (119104), “Man’s Search For Meaning”, p. 33.
Ibid., p. 40.
Zofia Kossak (64491), „Z otchłani”, p. 86.
Peter Ornstein (174440), [Surviving Auschwitz and a Death March], USHMM Collection, 2009.336, p. 12.
Roman Taul (1108), Account in: Memoirs, vol. 62, p. 36.
Adam Ziemba (21855), “A Piece of Bread”, p. 65-66.
Tadeusz Niedzielski (423), Account in: Memoirs, vol. 76, p. 26.
Victor Frankl (119104), “Man’s Search For Meaning”, p. 34.
Stanisław Tyblewski (9605), Account in: Memoirs, vol. 68, p. 105.
Naparstek (65710), “J’ai vécu l’extermination des Juifs d’Europe au “Canada,” “p. 94.
Bogusław Dąbrowski (18375), in: Dąbrowski, „Nietypowy więzień”, p. 12.
Errikos Sevillias (182699), “Athens – Auschwitz”, p. 39.
Adolf Gawalewicz (9225), “Reflections”, p. 78.
Czesław Jaworski (31070), Account in: Memoirs, vol. 4, p. 170.
Edward Halek (39676), Account in: Testimonies, vol. 78, p. 35.
Konstanty Piekarski (4618), “Escaping Hell”, p. 98.