Smoke Over Birkenau [Illustrated Edition]

Seweryna Szmaglewska, Jadwiga Rynas

• Publisher: Normanby Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781786255792
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

Includes 204 photos, plans and maps illustrating The HolocaustArrested by the Gestapo in 1942 for involvement in the resistance, the author spent three years in Birkenau. Severyna Szmaglewska (1916-1992) began writing this book immediately after escaping from an evacuation transport in January 1945, and it is the first account of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and an eloquent and important analysis of the individual experience of modern war. It was ready for print before the end of 1945, after several months of feverish work. In February 1946 the International Tribunal in Nuremberg included it in the material making up the charges against the Nazi perpetrators, and called upon the author to give testimony. Since 1945, Smoke over Birkenau has been reprinted frequently and widely translated. Critics, and three generations of readers, praised it for truthfulness, accuracy, and lasting literary merit: as memories of war-time genocide fade with the passage of time, Szmaglewska's readers are able to stay in touch with extremes of experience which must never be forgotten. "Smoke over Birkenau is not a book about death or hatred, " one critic wrote. "It is a powerful act of the will to live and a profession of the noblest humanism. The victorious idea of life is woven through every page. Maintaining, cultivating, and instilling in oneself the imperative: You must endure! You must live! – a plan carried out unswervingly despite everything."-Print ed.

Part I — Year 1942

Chapter 1 — arbeit...arbeit...arbeit...

DARK NIGHT. More than a thousand women are asleep on strange scaffoldings, in one great room. A thick darkness, filled with breathing and exhalations. Even the blankets which you never see by daylight seem a part of that darkness. You wrap them around you as closely as possible, grateful for the little warmth they give your exhausted bodies. In spite of yourself you try to guess their previous course and you loathe them. Huddled-up bodies, at times ten crowded into two square yards, grow benumbed on the hard bedding. A brief awakening, a sudden rending of the screen of dreams, the painful consciousness that this is Oswiecim. You huddle closer to your sleeping neighbor, with an insane joy if it is someone dear, with depression if it is someone alien or hostile. Sleep, the faithful ally, falls quickly over the mortally tired people, deadening all sensations. Those who are able to sleep sleep hard as though with a condensed sleep, absorbing the rest with all their nervous systems. The nights are short in a concentration camp. And while you lie immovably in the dark cavern of your bed you must throw off the weariness of the past day and find the necessary strength for the next.

In the silence of the sleeping barracks coughs resound continually in a multi-voiced cascade. Sometimes someone screams in her sleep, uttering with horror the German words which terrorize her during the day.

Not one of the sleeping women hears the prolonged whistles for rising which resound simultaneously from several points of the camp. But already the guards who eagerly perform their duties by day or night let their presence be known. A gloomy, whiny “Aufstehen! (Up!)” echoes through the entire barracks, pauses over those asleep while the guards strike their cudgels on the boards of each bed. It is completely dark. From somewhere in the depth of the beds comes a suppressed moan. Someone just awakened and moved her ailing body for the first time that night. Awakening is the hardest moment—no matter whether these are your first days in the camp, days full of despair, where every morning you relive the painful shock, or whether you have been here long, very long, where each morning reminds you that you lack strength to begin a new day, a day identical with all the previous days. The nagging “Aufstehen!” resounds uninterruptedly. At last the irritated voice of the night guard departs from the German of which she knows only that one ill-pronounced word and changes into Polish, which she speaks freely and fluently:

“Get up, you filthy dung, you damned intelligentsia, get up with you! Lo-o-s! Aufstehen!”

This time the cudgel does not stop on the boards, it penetrates deeper, striking the legs, arms and heads of the sleeping women. Commotion follows. The awakened women rise submissively. Their wandering hands search in the darkness for their shoes hidden under the strawsacks. Jogging each other they put on those items of clothing which they took off for the night. From the lairs near the walls the women begin to squeeze into the narrow passages, which are already overcrowded. The barracks can hold so many people only when they stay on top of those platforms called koys (in male camps, buksas). As soon as they climb down and stand on the floor they can find room only with the greatest of difficulty. But the barracks is not the place for them during the day. They only sleep there, leave it a few minutes after the rising whistles are blown and return to it late at night.

Birkenau in 1942. A marshy plain surrounded by electric wires. There are no roads or paths between the blocks. The entire camp has no water. There is no sewage disposal, a condition which prevailed to the very end. Garbage, excrement and rubbish lay around, foul and rotten. No bird ever flies low over Birkenau though, God knows, the prisoners strain their eyes to search the skies for them during the roll calls, which last for hours. Guided by smell or instinct, the birds avoid the place. Birkenau does not exist officially. Its name never appears in an address. It is Oswiecim II. From the way it is built you can see that it was not originally intended to hold people for any length of time. It is a kind of precrematorium waiting room, calculated for twenty to thirty thousand people. And this is how it originated:

On a meadow surrounded by wires, two identical groups of barracks were erected in the winter of 1941-42: fifteen brick barracks and fifteen wooden barracks. They had neither floors nor ceilings, but were covered with roofs through which snow and rain freely penetrated. Signs that hung on the doors proclaimed the buildings to be Pferdeställe (stables) and gave instructions for the treatment of diseased horses. In some of the barracks these signs were left hanging to the last day—as were the iron rings placed in the walls at the level of horses’ heads.

In that part of the camp Death moved in before the inmates did; many Oswiecim prisoners fell in the mud of Birkenau and died while working on the construction.

At first the wooden barracks were inaccessible to Poles, and the picture of Birkenau in 1942 is that of the brick barracks alone. Studying the structure of the interior of one of the brick barracks one can easily reconstruct its original appearance. There are four rows of stalls, like small cells, with no ceilings, separated by thin walls two yards high. Two rows adjoin in the center, and the other two are lined against the outside walls. Thus two narrow passages are formed for the attendant who, as he goes along, has a horse on either side of him. There are more than fifty such stalls in each brick building. And the whole place gets but a meager light from four small windows in the roof and from small windows in the outside walls. The stables were made over for human beings in a very simple way:

In each stall were erected two wooden platforms, one about a yard from the ground, the other a yard above the first. Each platform was built by nailing together two doors brought from near-by houses. This arrangement provides more than one hundred fifty sleeping bunks in each barracks, three in each stall: one on the ground, the other two on wooden platforms.

On each bunk lay two strawsacks stuffed with nine pounds of shavings or of reeds from near-by ponds (as prescribed by camp rules, on the day when new). Each bunk is occupied by six to ten persons, which means that eighteen to thirty people now sleep in a place designed for one horse. At times, when there is a great influx of new arrivals, one barracks, which is actually one room, is made to hold twelve hundred people.

The interior of the barracks reminds one of a huge chicken coop or rabbit warren. The lowest koys are the worst. They are wet and ‘cold, because of the earthen floor which on rainy days gets so trampled that the shoes sink deep into it. They are dark, because scores of trampling legs are continually in the way of light. They are too low for a woman to sit erect. At night they are attacked by packs of rats. The middle koys are almost as miserable, but have somewhat more light. Although the muddy boot of the woman climbing to the upper koy in the darkness often strikes the head of the person sleeping in the middle koy, at least the strawsacks are dry. The upper koys are light and have enough air. There you not only can sit erect, but can kneel or even stand up. Although on rainy days these advantages may disappear in the face of the leaking roof, nevertheless the upper koys are generally considered to be the best. No artificial light is provided in the brick blocks, and women returning from work at night crawl into their lairs in darkness. In darkness they search for their blankets, and in darkness they take off their clothes. How hard it is—no food packages from home were allowed at that time—to afford to buy a candle from those who work in the warehouses! How much bread or margarine you must deny yourself to be able at last in the evening to stand a candle by your side, take off your shirt, and in this light proceed to catch the lice. Some women are able to do it without light, by touch, but the others must content themselves with fishing out only the large lice while the small ones and the nits escape.

Dark cage-like lairs—dim flickering light from the sparsely placed candles—nude, emaciated women, blue with cold, their shaved heads huddled into scrawny shoulders, arched over a heap of filthy rags, feverishly catching the vermin and cautiously killing them on the edge of the koys—this is the picture of the barracks in 1942. Dirty garments, never washed for lack of water, just rid of vermin.

The women fight the dirt. Special methods are invented, perfected and generally adopted. But the struggle is unavailing. As I said, on each bunk sleep several women, lying next to each other. Even if after countless efforts by common labor, they succeed in ridding their blankets and clothing of the pests and to bring their bed to the status of relative cleanness, all their work becomes futile the moment a Zugang of new inmates arrives from another barracks. If they bring new lice and scabies, so common in the camp, all the others sharing their blankets are afflicted and the work has to be started again from the beginning.

In the two passages between the scaffoldings of bunks the night guard, assisted by the blokowa (block supervisor) and the sztubowa (room overseer) now shoves and prods the prisoners toward the doors, using hands and clubs. The dense mob proceeds slowly and unwillingly, loath to go out into the damp cold of the night. The women move on, half asleep, half conscious, head touching head, shoulder touching shoulder. You cannot tell who walks beside you under the cover of dark rags. From the threshold comes the gurgle of mud churned by many feet. The light of the stars and the moon, dimmed by the glare coming from the wires around the camp, silhouettes the bent bodies of the moving women, heavily plodding through the mud with feet wrapped in rags.

Sometimes a face appears for a moment in the light to disappear again in the shadow of the night. Some faces have in their features an absolute stillness and a strange tranquillity, as if their owners had died long before and their faces were coagulated into a speechless sorrow. These can never be forgotten. The features of others are distorted by passion, wrath, anger. These you try to forget.

Those whose strength has not entirely failed and whose feet are not too swollen have still time, before the morning roll call, to run for water. There is a great scarcity of water, during this period, in the entire camp of Birkenau. It is better not to venture into the kitchen or the disinfecting barracks, which are always full of new arrivals, if you do not want your skull cracked by the bludgeon of an SS man. One faucet behind the toilet supplies all the available water for fifteen brick and fifteen wooden barracks. It works best in the early morning, before the roll-call whistle. (Even if it is occasionally turned on during the day you are not there to use it. You are away at work.) If you get up early enough, if you are lucky and the water has been actually turned on that day, if you can squeeze through the mob of hundreds or thousands of women, if you can avoid the club of the German Capo—you may, at best, obtain a cupful of water in your bowl. Now—if the crushing mob does not spill it for you—you may do with it as you please. You may drink it, or wash your clothes, or wash yourself—whatever you like.

Over the large area shadowy figures move in the white light of the electric wires to and from the toilets, painfully dragging their feet through the ankle-deep mud. Sometimes a woman falls and tries in vain to rise by her own strength. Falling and rising, she becomes ever weaker, until at last an attack of pain forces her to remain where she is. Ghostlike figures lie here and there, sometimes far off by the wires, sometimes underfoot so that you must avoid stepping on them. Someone moans in the darkness. In the dim light you cannot see who are dead or who call for help.

But the block supervisor and the room leader have already begun to form the lines for the roll call. Most of them have no conception of physical training, of drill or even of arithmetic. Therefore the arranging and counting take an unbelievably long time. Coffee has been distributed in the meantime; this is our only food before a day of toil. Hands numb from cold eagerly seize the tin bowl with its drop of black liquid in the bottom. The coffee has long ceased to steam, yet your trembling lips search for a little warmth, your hands cup the bowl for what warmth there is.

The stars begin to pale, but no dawn appears in the east. After counting the people in front of their block, the room leaders next bring out those who have fever or are weakened by dysentery and place them either on stools or on the ground. Finally they carry out the dying and lay them in front of the block to be counted. The limp human figures stretched out on the wet ground, with blankets carelessly thrown over them, hold the eyes of the healthy, recently arrived women. Someone explains in a low voice:

“See! The one they are bringing now is Mrs. Pietkiewicz, the wife of a captain in the Polish armed forces. She will die any day now. And that is Mrs. Zahorska, the writer. It is the women of that kind who suffer the most. There is Dr. Garlicka, the gynaecologist from Warsaw; next to her is Mrs. Grocholska of the Polish Radio Broadcasting Company.”

No use turning your eyes away—you see the same sight in front of all the other barracks, everywhere. So you just stare ahead and think of the fever that will strike you as it has struck down the others. Someone murmurs, as if talking to herself:

“Isn’t it good though that Birkenau is so surrounded by secrecy that the children do not know how their mothers die?”

Through the twilight, the barracks with the women ranged before them, five abreast, gradually come to view. Mist from the neighboring bogs shrouds everything. It wraps itself around the entire camp, causing an illusion of a lonely island in the middle of an ocean of fog. Thousands of people are visible before the barracks, but beyond the wires there is no one over an area of many miles. From time to time, above the mist, a red jet of flame bursts from the crematorium. A sense of emptiness and isolation creeps slowly over us as the morning mist draws near the wires and begins its struggle with the light. Here and there on the wires a blood-red lamp glows, a witness to the death-bringing charge of the current. It is like a signal, like a bait thrown by the hand of Death. Watching it brings restlessness. Suddenly a small object draws away from the dark mass before the barracks and slowly moves toward the red signal. In the mist you can hardly tell from a distance that it is a human being. As if hypnotized by an alien will, and completely succumbing, the figure moves slowly forward without turning or hesitating. The flow of electricity through the wires makes them look like frosty silver strands stretched evenly between posts of concrete.

Between the wires and the ditch that runs around the entire camp there is a narrow strip of ground, perhaps half a yard wide, never trampled by any feet.

The camp ground is crust-like and hardened from thousands of milling feet, but here on this narrow strip grass grows luxuriantly, covered by dew every morning. In the winter the snow lies there immaculately white. This strip of land waits for any who have lost the hope that freedom may ever come to them, for any who choose to leave by way of this clean and narrow path. Already the dim figure of the woman is near, it has passed the little dirt bridge and has stopped below the red-glowing lamp. No doubt she hears the mysterious singing of the wires, which constantly hum and vibrate. She throws up her arms and falls. A shot from the guardhouse ... her body hangs on the wires like a dark, limp rag on a bramble. All is silent. The morning roll call has not yet ended. Nobody ran to save her, to prevent the suicide. Whoever would have followed her to that strip of death, without express orders from the SS man, would have fallen too, pierced by a bullet.

From elsewhere in the camp come similar shots that testify to similar suicides. The morning chill is becoming unbearable. As far as the eye can reach, throughout the entire camp grounds, the figures standing in the fog cower, stamp their feet or jump about to keep warm. But the block supervisor brings the worst news:

“The roll call does not tally.” (In 1942 the roll call seldom tallied.)

The block supervisor starts to recount and the SS women to verify. Then they go to the wires to count the dead and add them to their figures, while a group of Capos and Ober-capos, led by the Lager Aelteste (camp senior) go in search of those who did not appear at roll call. For three-quar...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Part I - Year 1942
• Part II - Year 1943
• Part III - Year 1944
• Part IV - Year 1945