Auschwitz I - Block 22b - memories

On the left side of the camp road there were 15 brick buildings in three rows. On the right side there were wooden barracks, painted green. To the very same barracks, in which the captives had died, more than 15,000 women were brought.

There were battered straw mattresses in the bunks. In fact they were dirty and torn paper sacks, filled with old, pulverised straw. We were dirty and louse-infested. We already had fleas and lice in the previous camp, but what we found in these barracks went far beyond any understanding of dirt and insects. Huge, hungry lice wandered across the mattresses, like ants in a dug-up anthill. (…) Rats large like cats strolled on the barrack’s dirt floor and on the ceiling beams. We didn’t even react anymore when we saw rats.

Here, in these barracks, everything was damp, the floor sagged when stepped on, the mattresses stunk of mould and human sweat. On rainy days, water leaked through the damaged roof straight onto our heads. (…)

This was an indescribable den of dirt and misery. Here the strongest body and the most invincible character would give up.

Anna Tytoniak (no. 6866)

The former male camp Birkenau BIb is a symmetrical reflection of the female camp BIa. (...) On both sides of the road between the camps, there is a kitchen, identical in both male and female camp, and further there is the disinfection barrack. (...) The living quarters and lavatories are arranged in the same way. (...) The men left leaving only empty barracks, identical to those in the female camp. (...) The barrack is nowadays overflowed with women of various nationalities, full of hubbub, din and arguments. There they are - Jewesses from Poland, Greece, Slovakia, there are Poles, swarthy Gypsies and dark, little Croatians. They don’t understand one another. They fight for space, for blankets, for bowls, for a glass of water. Foreign-language shouts and curses can be heard constantly. One cannot fall asleep in here. When women go to sleep, from the cracks in the bunks, millions, billions of bedbugs come out. (...) Female prisoners have to sleep squeezed tightly on dirty shakedowns. The lower, clayish bunks, worse than a kennel, are overcrowded just like the upper ones, but groups of newcomers turn up constantly and the barrack wardress places them on the overloaded bunks, using a staff. (...) The living conditions are health-destroying, leading to physical and mental debasement. They kill.

Seweryna Szmaglewska (no.  22090)