“Auschwitz. A Monograph of the Human”. Part 9. Suicide

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 9. Suicide
Read by Grey Stafford

Questions about suicides are difficult. Analysis of survivors’ memoirs reveals large discrepancies in their assessment of this issue. On the one hand, many accounts mention suicides, giving the impression—especially in Birkenau—that people had to be “pulled down from the wires” almost on a daily basis. On the other hand, according to some,1687 cases of people taking their own lives—in relation to the sheer scale of humiliation and dehumanization—were relatively rare.

Hadassah Rosensaft
“I often wonder why there were so few suicides. It would have been so easy just to touch the electrified barbed wire. But what is suicide? Is it an act of courage or weakness?”.

Viktor Frankl
“There was little point in committing suicide, since, for the average inmate, life expectation calculating objectively and counting all likely chances, was very poor”.

On account of the burning of the concentration camp reports, today it is impossible to precisely determine the number of suicides in the camp. Even their most evident forms—prisoners throwing themselves against the electrified barbed wire fence—are not properly recorded. But even if those records had survived, and even if they honestly reflected the facts, they would not encompass all those fatal moments of doubt, when a prisoner gave up the fight and in one way or another submitted to death. That will always remain an unwritten history.

Szymon Laks
“Hundreds, thousands of deportees could not endure this sudden passage from one world to another, an antipodal one whose existence they could not have imagined in their most nightmarish hallucinations. Such people, after a few days, sometimes after a few hours, in the camp, “went to the wires.””.

The causes of suicide were generally complex. In the case of the Jews, the first wave of suicides took place in the first hours or days after arrival to the camp and was undoubtedly the result of becoming aware of the scale of the Holocaust, the murdering of their loved ones, parents, spouses, children. An additional element crushing all hope was the lack of any prospect of returning to the previous world, even in the event of liberation.

David Wisnia
“Typically, an average of five people of each transport would commit suicide. These people would ask the striped prisoners what was going on and the prisoners would tell them. The horror was visible from the railroad tracks. The stinking fire, gobbling away and its infinite human feast was right over the fence for all to see. The suicide victims made the last decision they would ever be able to make for themselves by heading to the electric barbed-wire fence. Many of them were shot before they could reach the fire by guards in the lookout towers whose orders were to shoot anyone who “attempted escape.” On my third or fourth day of Leichenkommando there were an unusually high number of bodies—very heavy. “How come there are so many today?” somebody called out. Hours before, a transport had come in from Germany. These people hadn‘t ever really considered themselves Jewish. They were possibly second or third generation descendants of people who maybe had one Jewish parent or one Jewish grandparent. Or possibly they had fought in War World I for Germany and never believed that they country could betray them in this way. In any case, the most likely hadn’t been practicing Jews and had fought of themselves solely as Germans, not as Jews. Finding themselves in a place like Birkenau had been particularly bitter, and an inordinately large number of them had chosen to end their lives”.

For prisoners who survived the initial shock, moments of breakdown came later. General weakening of the body also weakened the will, and if in addition to this the prisoner succumbed to an illness or for some other reason was unable able to perform work, and therefore almost certainly then be subjected to more beatings, that was generally sufficient for such a person to lose all hope.

Jan Marszałek
“Prisoners, beaten, kicked, humiliated, rushed on and threatened, lived in the atmosphere of the murders carried out on thousands of innocent people every day, in the atmosphere of the stinking fumes of the victims’ bodies being burned day and night. It was all a terrible mental burden, incomprehensible to anyone who was not there and had not experienced it personally. Hence, not only the hunger, hard labor, beating and kicking, humiliation, diseases and epidemics, but also that terrible mental burden, the daily atmosphere of the unpunished murder of thousands of innocent people that broke prisoners and deprived them of all hope and strength to struggle to survive. Many went to the high voltage barbed wire fence and committed suicide”.

Charles Liblau
“They would rather end their lives this way than to perish in the gas chambers. The men that committed suicide were primarily the wounded, the sick or the desperate who experienced no comforting gestures of human warmth in their solitude and misery”.

Leon Arditti
“His mind surrendered before his body did. At a moment unperceived by him, he accepted death. After that, it was only a brief time before death gave the order for suicide”.

Sometimes the onset of autumnal chills or a break in the weather was enough.

Jakub Wolman
“The worst days were the rainy days. The majority of suicides were committed on rainy days. Try to imagine: a famished, weak, poorly dressed man. It starts to rain. You are standing in that rain, standing for ten hours, and it rains constantly, you are soaked wet, your shirt is sticking to your back, it is cold, wet dirt sticks to the shovel, the wet shovel slips in your hands. So people broke down, threw away their shovels and went off to get themselves shot”.

Naturally, there are very few first-hand accounts of former prisoners who actually took such desperate steps. Nevertheless, those that do exist fully confirm the descriptions of other prisoners.

Dov Paisikovic
“I came to the conclusion that dying in this situation would not be the worst thing—[it’d be] a salvation”.

Miriam Harel
“It is night, I have decided to commit suicide. Damn it all! I’ve had enough! All my innate optimism is gone. I lie at the front of the bunk. With my hand, I feel the protruding nail. I start cutting my veins. Suddenly someone’s strong hand grabs me. It is the woman lying beside me, who felt my rapid movements. “What are you doing?” she asked. “I don’t want to be burned. I’d rather do it myself…” “Are you mad?” she whispers into my ear, “you want to die? You’re so young!” “I’m 40! Mengele took my twelve-year-old twins. I won’t have any more children, and yet I want to live! Understand?” She quickly tears off the sleeve of my bloodstained dress and bandages my injured wrist. It’s only a skin wound. My veins are still intact. “Sleep, child!” she commands”.

The high voltage wires were the most common means of committing suicide, but of course only if one does not count the various, difficult to classify, cases of breakdown, where prisoners simply stopped fighting for their lives and, in sadness and with indifference, submitted to what the system had in store for them, and this resulted in death.

Bohumil Pohl
“Some of our Czech colleagues did not know the [German] language, so I translated for them what was written in their letters from home. One day one such prisoner came to me, his surname was Thürberger and he was from Karviná. His wife wrote that she missed him and that she had moved the bed directly opposite the door, so that she would immediately see him when he entered the room. After I had translated this letter, my colleague became very sad. That night, which was clear and bright from the light of the moon, he committed suicide by throwing himself against the camp fence. I supposed he couldn’t bear being separated from his wife, whom he had married just a day before his arrest”.

Kitty Hart
“Death seemed an easy way out. All that was necessary was a slight touch of the electrified fence which held us prisoners and finish…. Every day girls were found dead near the fence. I so often toyed with this idea, and why I really clung to my life so desperately I don’t know. Probably because I was a coward and lacked the courage to take it”.

Ruth Elias
“We gradually became inured to these deaths, our feelings dulled, and after a time we almost considered it in everyday occurrence: “Have you seen so-and-so?“ “Oh, she went up to the fence yesterday“.”

There were cases of “arranging death” with the SS man on duty in the watchtower. The guard would shoot dead the prisoner committing suicide before he or she reached the wire fence. The victim would have a quicker death, the SS man would receive a few extra days of leave or some other bonus for preventing an escape, and camp authorities would not have shut down the electricity to detach the victim from the barbed wire.

Maria Żumańska
“In the camp, there were suicides. Very often a women prisoner in such a case would tell the SS man guarding them that she no longer wanted to live and would go the barbed wire fence, so he should shoot her. This was an agreement between the prisoner and the guard”.

Ernst Toch
“Due to hunger and weight loss (from 74 kg to around 40 kg), I had a mental breakdown and requested that he [the SS man] should shoot me. He explained that I would have to pretend an attempt to escape, and then he would be able to shoot me”.

Apart from “going to the fence,” there were also other types of suicide, be it during work, or by hanging, by the cutting of veins or by poisoning.

Jerzy Tabeau
“Race played an important role in this case, an Aryan had to be in a very bad state to be put to death with a [phenol] injection, but 80%–90% of the Jews reporting to hospital were sentenced to be injected. Many of them knew about it and reported to hospital to commit suicide, preferring this to throwing themselves against high voltage wires”.

Miklosz Nyiszli
“Every time I visited the Sonderkommando quarters there were those who would take me to one side and confidentially ask me for a poison that killed swiftly and effectively. I always refused. Today I regret it. It would have been better for them to die quickly, as and when they wanted to. They wanted to kill themselves, instead they were murdered by their oppressors”.

Some of those who were unwilling to throw themselves against the electrified fence, chose instead to be selected for the gas chamber. This was done especially by the Jews and it was perceived as a way of joining their previously murdered families.

Elżbieta Wawrzyczek
“The sick, the weak, and those with wounds and ulcers—were put to one side. Because I was exhausted after typhus—I was also put to one side. I was pulled out of that group by my block supervisor, Stenia, who put in my place an even weaker prisoner—a Jewish woman who had asked to be sent to die and shorten her suffering”.

Avraham Harshalom
“Many of the women from our town chose to go the gas chambers voluntarily. When the camp doctor came around to perform a selection, Dr. Lisa Meschengisser, no longer able to bear her torment, begged in broken tones: “Add me to the ‘chosen ones.’” The doctor granted her request. The 17-year-old daughter of the head of the Judenrat likewise asked to join those to be taken from the transit camp; the doctor graciously consented to add her to the list of those consigned to the gas chambers”.

An attempted suicide—if it failed—could be severely punished, and even with death. Ultimately, as a number, a prisoner was merely the dehumanized property of the Third Reich, marked with the tattoo on his or her forearm. Any attempts to make an independent decision, even regarding the ultimate issue, were treated as insubordination and a violation of the rules.

Raya Kagan
“Suicide was considered to be a crime: one of the paradoxes of Auschwitz. Those who had attempted to commit suicide and failed, were punished”.

Szymon Laks
“Some threw themselves on the wires. The size of the orchestra changed almost from day to day and in time shrank catastrophically. Things got so bad that one day Agdan sailed into me with a threat, “You, Dolmetscher, tell those bastards that if they don’t stop going to the wires, I’ll kill them like dogs!” However, I succeeded, not without difficulty, in explaining to him that it would be better to lose a few musicians than the entire orchestra, whose core and best element was the “foreign kikes”.”

This was the nineth 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 of 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 memories used into the podcast:
Hadassah Rosensaft (52406), “Yesterday”, p. 39.
Victor Frankl (119104), “Man’s Search For Meaning”, p. 31.
Szymon Laks (49543), “Music of Another World”, pp. 18-19.
Dawid Wisnia (83526), “One Voice, Two Lives”, pp. 42-43.
Jan Marszałek (18857), cited in: Ryn, Kłodziński (20019), „Śmierć”, p. 63.
Charles Liblau (n.n.), “Les kapos d’Auschwitz”, p. 27
Leon Arditti (169738), “Vouloir vivre”, p. 85.
Jakub Wolman (33611), Testimonies in the trial of Rudolf Höss [IPN GK 196/87], in: Chronicles of Terror, vol. 5, p. 116.
Dov Paisikovic (A-3076), Account in: Testimonies, vol. 44, p. 105.
Miriam Harel (n.n.), „Teraz już możesz płakać”, pp. 126-127.
Bohumil Pohl (25632), Account in: Testimonies, vol. 78, p. 179.
Kitty Hart (39934), “I Am Alive”, p. 66.
Ruth Elias (73643), “Triumph of Hope”, p. 112.
Maria Żumańska (29940), Account in: Testimonies, vol. 4, p. 426.
Ernst Toch (70231), Account in: Testimonies, vol. 9, p. 1288.
Jerzy Tabeau (27273), Report in: ‘Raporty uciekinierów z KL Auschwitz’, p. 95.
Miklosz Nyiszli (A 8450), “I Was Doctor Mengele’s Assistant”, p. 54.
Elżbieta Wawrzyczek (33324), Account in: Testimonies, vol. 21, p. 9.
Avram Harshalom (99288), “Alive From the Ashes”, p. 83.
Raya Kagan (7984), “Des femmes au bureau de l’enfer”, p. 95.
Szymon Laks (49543), “Music of Another World”, p. 47.