The Book of Deceased Soviet POWs - memories

The second, large transport of Soviet POWs arrived at the camp at late autumn of the same year. I cannot recall the numbers of this transport, but it for sure included several thousands of people. They arrived completely ruined. (...) To find room for these POWs, several barracks located in the front part of the camp were emptied and separated from the remaining terrain with wires. (…)

            They applied another manner to kill them. They were given little amounts of thin soup and occasionally (not every day) a portion of poor bread. It was decided to break them with hunger. To prevent any organized reaction from their side, informers started to pick out party members, commissioners and social activists. Those people were executed by a firing squad every day, in groups. The remaining part was divided into working commandos and sent to work. Every commando had a dozen or so bandit-prisoners, kapos, Vorarbeiters and proper SS men ascribed, whose task was to beat and kill. Each group that came back was controlled by Lagerführer himself, and if there were not enough corpses brought to the camp, he would reproach the capos and call them for higher activity.

In winter 1941/1942 a Typhus fever epidemic outbroken in the Soviet POWs camp. Although the course of the sickness was mild, almost all sick prisoners died as a result of injection of phenol. Therefore, a dozen or so thousands of people were liquidated within a very short time, from October to March. Only a few hundreds of POWs survived, and then were moved to the camp in Birkenau.

There might be some evidence of forgeries performed by the SS doctors found in the retained Book of Deceased Soviet POWs. All murdered POWs have a forged medical diagnosis put into the "reason of death" column. These are heart, lung and other organs diseases, which they never contracted. The rhythm of deaths following each other is striking. They died every several minutes (in the papers), one after the other.

Władysław Fejkiel (No 5647)

There was a part of the block No 1 separated in the Soviet POWs camp for a camp hospital for them. Me together with Dr Józef Żegleń, were commended to work in this hospital. (…)

About 200 wooden beds with three levels could be fitted in five rooms for the sick. (...) Equipment of the hospital was more than modest: one wooden couchette, a few stools, one scalpel, one pair of scissors, two pairs of tweezers, one thermometer, one sandglass for measuring heartbeat, wooden spatulas, some cellulose wadding, a few bandages and a dozen or so paper bands. When it come to medicines, we were given 20-30 painkillers, the same number of aspirin and carbon tablets, a small bottle of heart medication, some hydrogen peroxide solution, some rivanol and lysol. (...) to keep necessary hospital records, I was provided with three identical thick notebooks with 240 pages each, to keep the Book of sick (Krankenbuch), the Book of ambulatory admissions (Ambulanzbuch) and the Book of deceased (Totenbuch). (…)

Within the first days of October 1941, we cleaned and ordered "our" hospital, established the books and made the beds. We obtained a list of reasons of deaths from our hospital office, and we prepared a record of 80 of most often used of them, for our own use. We were not told to keep any other documents, such as medical histories etc. (...) We shared the work with doctor Żegleń. He, as he was older, took care of the living, i.e. the sick, I took care of corpses of the killed and deceased.

We had very small amounts of the sick. Until registration of the POWs, we were not allowed to admit anyone to the hospital. They brought only the dying ones, or simply left the deceased on the street, in front of the block 1. We needed to identify them, find out what block they came from, and take care so everything is alright during the assembly. More and more deceased and killed were brought from commandos, directly before the assembly, and piled up in front of the hospital. They were just counted and added to the hospital's records during the evening assembly, so the general number was alright. Therefore, actually having no sick persons, we needed to report several dozens or hundreds of deaths every day. I was absolutely willing to express this in the Totenbuch, which I kept. So I started to mark each death in the following way: those, who really died in the hospital, were marked in the "place of death" column with a "KB" symbol, with a room number added, e.g.: „KB7”, „KB8”. The killed and the remaining deceased were recorded as: „KB” or „KB+”. After reviewing the retained Totenbuch I may conclude that within the first 8 days of KGL existence, 580 POWs died there. Out of them only 88 individuals died in a hospital bed, out of whom 34 needed to be recorded as "unbekannt" - unknown, i.e. upon admission to the hospital they were already unconscious, thus unable to provide their names. The rest died or was killed during work.

            While wondering on keeping the Book of deceased, I came to a conclusion that something attracting attention needs to be introduced. So I incorporated a special defamiliarization in the "time of death" column. I wrote down regular time intervals between deaths, taking place every three to five minutes. Apart from that, the recorded hours fell only in the scope of working time, between the morning and evening assembly. I recorded a real, night time of death only in several cases, in case of POWs, who died in the hospital. (…)

At the beginning, those deceased and killed during work were brought to the camp on horse-drawn carts, then on heavy vehicles or even on dumper trucks. Physical condition of the POWs was so poor that they were incapable of carrying the bodies of their colleagues to the camp. The problem of storing the bodies existed from the very beginning. There was no proper room. Permanent overload of the crematorium I in the main camp with bodies of the prisoners killed with gas caused that no bodies from the POW camp were admitted. We were told to store bodies of the POWs in washing rooms and basements of block No 3. More than 650 bodies were collected there. Then, on 28.10.1941, we were ordered to remove beds from the rooms of the sick in block 1, and to pile the corpses there. But we run out of space in the block No 1 already on 1 November, so the bodies were stored under the blue sky, between the blocks No 1 and 2.  Not until 4 November, when the number of bodies reached 2000, did they start to transport them to Birkenau and bury in mass wholes, when they already were in a state of advanced decay. (…)

Kazimierz Hałgas (No 5670)

In the second half of 1941, I was transferred to the Soviet POWs camp, where I became a Pfleger. Regardless to that I also worked as a Leichenträger. The mortuary was located in the basement of the block No 3. The corpses laid there for two or even three weeks. The bodies were already decomposed. Enormous fetor could be smelled there. As the Leichenträger, I transported the corpses in a special military cart with horses. The cart was operated by two or sometimes four prisoners, usually escorted by two SS men. Sometimes, even several carts were used to transport the prisoners.

            There were wholes dug in the ground nearby a forest in Birkenau, where the dead bodies were thrown into. The corpses were then covered with chloride and 50 cm of soil. The whole, which I brought the corpses to, was 40 m long, about 30 m wide and 2.5 m deep.

Czesław Bartys (No 710)