Goran Rosenberg - A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

I assume that’s why you mention it.

It must be noted, however, that you’re not alone in Auschwitz. If you were alone, I find it hard to imagine that you’d be selected for onward delivery, and still harder that you’d survive. The pickers and choosers of Birkenau II pick the biggest and strongest and those who make the most convincing case for possessing the required skills. Now you may be as fit and strong as any young man could be after four years in the ghetto and twelve days in Auschwitz, but you’re slight of build and not very tall or particularly pushy or enterprising — if you’ll forgive me for saying that. So I can’t imagine that you would have made it through the intrusive checks and interrogations at the selections for onward delivery on your own. One of the selection procedures involves setting up a wooden bar and rejecting all those who don’t reach it. I’m not sure you would have reached the bar, nor am I sure you would have made a convincing case for being an experienced welder or lathe turner or electrician or whatever skill was demanded at the moment. There were people who made it through anyway, by a mixture of enterprise and desperation, but I think you made it because you weren’t on your own. After the selection on the ramp, you still have your brother Naftali or Natek at your side, six years older than you, with more experience of life and, I think, a stronger survival instinct. Or at any rate, I think your survival is a compelling reason for him to survive. I think it’s he who pulls you with him out of Auschwitz.

Many stories of survival are stories like that: one person pulls another along with him.

Being alone is a cause of death in Auschwitz.

It’s just the two of you now, nobody else.

On the third day in Auschwitz, you come across Beno.

“You wouldn’t have recognized him,” you write in that letter to Haluś.

He’d grown so fat you could hardly see his eyes. I was still exhausted from the overture [the arrival at Auschwitz], felt punch-drunk and was reeling about like an idiot, and Beno made the whole thing worse. I simply didn’t recognize him, he’d got into such a brutal way of expressing himself. This is what he told me: “Everyone except my sister ended up in the chimneys. Our lives are worthless, all you can do is enjoy eating and drinking, because we won’t get out of here alive whatever happens. You know what, David, I don’t believe in those transports. I bet they go to the chimneys, too.” I told him it was all the same to me, I was still going to sign up for a transport, and things would have to take their course. I wanted to get on a transport as soon as possible, at any cost.

And in another letter: “There’s not a lot to say about Beno. He didn’t behave well at all, not that he harmed anybody, but there was a time, my first days in Auschwitz, when he could have helped me quite a bit but didn’t. He pretended not to notice me.”

This Beno has evidently been in Auschwitz for some time and knows what’s going on there and has been promoted to some kind of Kapo or guard and gets plenty to eat at the expense of his fellow prisoners, and seeing him in Auschwitz affects you deeply. Among all the things that happen to you in Auschwitz and that you want to tell Haluś in a letter dated from Alingsås on March 10, 1946, the Beno episode looms large. You write more about your encounter with Beno than about anything else. I can only guess why that might be, and my guess is that you and Beno not only knew each other in the ghetto but were close friends, perhaps best friends, or at any rate close enough for his behavior to affect you deeply, and that the image of the fat, brutal Beno in Auschwitz still haunts you. Especially as Beno eventually turns up at the camp in Braunschweig, having left Auschwitz along the same narrow road as you.

It’s your reaction to Beno that tells me you wouldn’t have come through Auschwitz on your own.

Particularly the fact that in the letter, you forgive him.

Forgive him for what? If you had been a person capable of surviving Auschwitz on your own, there would have been nothing to forgive. What Beno did to you was what being alone did to people in Auschwitz.

Being alone was lethal in many ways.

“What he did means nothing anymore,” you write to your Haluś. “I forgave him long ago.”

On the twelfth day in Auschwitz, your brother and you, Natek and David Rosenberg, manage to get onto the first transport of Jewish men from Auschwitz to Braunschweig. To the very last, you’re convinced you’re going to a coal mine in Silesia. There are many rumors about where the transports are going, and of all the possibilities, a killing coal mine in Silesia may be the least bad. To Haluś you write: “After 24 hours the journey ended, and when we got off the train I couldn’t believe my eyes, we were standing in a freight depot in the suburbs of Braunschweig.”

At the end of March 1945, when the Büssing factories are bombed out of use, the slave camps in Braunschweig are evacuated. As ever more factories in Germany are bombed out of use, the slaves who can no longer be put to work in them are transported onward, primarily to other camps with factories still in operation.

When there are no factories left, the slave transports are left with no purpose — other than to erase all traces of the slave operation itself.

This is when hell reasserts itself.

First, your group is evacuated by truck to Aussenlager Salzgitter-Watenstedt, which in conjunction with Salzgitter-Drütte and Salzgitter-Bad supplies slave labor for the production of steel and ammunition in the Reichswerke Hermann Göring. The reason the Reichswerke Hermann Göring is still in operation is that production has largely been moved underground. You’re put to work for two weeks, clearing the underground factory floors from falling debris after Allied bombing raids, but soon even the subterranean machinery for the production of German artillery shells is stopped, because American artillery shells have started falling on the factory complex.

Twenty-four hours before American troops occupy the Reichswerke Hermann Göring, you and some 1,600 other prisoners are loaded onto a train of open freight cars for immediate and chaotic evacuation to other parts of the camp archipelago. Every remaining prisoner in Watenstedt is loaded on board. The sick and the dying are brought from their sickbeds and wards on trucks, piled on top of each other like planks of wood, and then distributed among the freight cars. There can be no explanation for this precipitate evacuation, which includes the weak, the sick, and the dying, other than the intention to remove every last trace of you all.

It’s the night of April 5–6, 1945, and there’s a month to go until the German surrender, and the road from Auschwitz is still long. On the train pulling out of the station at Salzgitter-Watenstedt is the French doctor Georges Salan, who in Braunschweig had wondered why the Auschwitz Jews so desperately tried to avoid being allocated to transports of the sick. Maybe now he’s not wondering anymore, because this is evidently a transport of the sick, and clearly a deadly one to boot. At any rate, death will be a logical consequence — and ultimately the purpose — of the conditions on the train. In every car there are between 50 and 60 prisoners, writes Salan. In every car there are between 80 and 90 prisoners, you write. There’s food but no water, writes Salan. There’s neither food nor water, you write. Maybe there are classes on this train, one for Jews and another for the rest, which makes no difference in the long run, because on the train everyone falls ill, and more and more are dying. There are no latrine buckets in the cars, so the prisoners relieve themselves in the food containers and try to dispose of the contents overboard, with varying degrees of success. Those who die are put in the last car of the train. There are many dying as the train with the open freight cars meanders like a Flying Dutchman through the German camp archipelago, searching for a camp or a grave to dump its cargo in.