a Herman Sachnowitz reminisces: “On New Year’s Eve 1943 I was invited to a ‘party’ by Sammy […] He had ‘organized’ a cup of ersatz coffee with sugar for each of us, as well as enough alcohol from the surgical division for us to have a thimbleful each. We met at the hospital latrine for our mini-celebration, looked at each other furtively, drank our magnificent coffee, and returned to our blocks. I can’t recall that we said anything about the past year or even wished each other ‘Happy New Year.’”
(Herman Sachnowitz: Auschwitz. Ein norwegischer Jude überlebte, with Arnold Jacoby (Frankfurt am Main/Vienna/Zurich: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1981), p. 108. (Trans. KL))
b Ya’acov Silberstein says: “I’ll tell you one thing that God surely forgives me for. I couldn’t study there, keep the commandments, or pray. Anyone who could pray from memory, prayed. Great. What I could pray, I prayed. Nobody heard it. We couldn’t form a minyan of 10 men. Only in the block could you do that on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.”
(Ya'acov Silberstein, oral history interview [Hebr.], July 29–30, 2007. Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Norbert Wollheim Memorial, 19:06 minutes ff. (Transl. KL))
c Primo Levi describes an evening in the block: “From the outside door, secretly and looking around cautiously, the story-teller comes in. He is seated on Wachsmann’s bunk and at once gathers around him a small, attentive, silent crowd. He chants an interminable Yiddish rhapsody [...] in rhymed quatrains [...]; from the few words I understand, it must be a song that he composed himself, in which he has enclosed all the life of the Lager in minute detail.”
(Primo Levi: Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) [first published as If This Is a Man], p. 58.)
d Ya’acov Silberstein says: “Lisa [a civilian worker] stole explosives at the I.G. Farben plant site and gave them to me. I stuck them in here and brought them to the block every time. To whom? To the camp elder, also a German, his name was Paul, his number was 1, he got explosives from me. [...] We also had a link to Birkenau. The girls who worked in the special detachment did the same thing we did. They stole too. This added to it, a bit, because there wasn’t enough yet. Later on, when everything was ready, we blew up the crematoria. That was already in 1944; I don’t recall the exact date. We blew up the crematoria there.”
(Ya'acov Silberstein, oral history interview [Hebr.], July 29–30, 2007. Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Norbert Wollheim Memorial. (Transl. KL))
e Fritz Kleinmann tells about acts of sabotage: “We tried to offer resistance in every way, for example, through sabotage in our workplace. Admittedly, we had to expect the harshest reprisals and punishments, even when trivial things happened, such as dropping a sack of cement to make it split open. Before returning to camp, we often hung a water hose in a cement car and turned on the faucet.”
(Fritz Kleinmann: “Überleben im KZ.” In: Reinhold Gärtner / Fritz Kleinmann, eds.: Doch der Hund will nicht krepieren… Tagebuchnotizen aus Auschwitz (Thaur: Kulturverlag, 1995), pp. 34–114, here p. 98. (Transl. KL))
f In his autobiographical novel, Oszkár Betlen writes: “Without any special decision being made, a certain practice developed: each of us communists took four or five comrades, sat down with them, and talked with them to win them to our cause […] The teenagers in the block fell to my lot.”
(Oszkár Betlen: Leben auf dem Acker des Todes (Berlin: Dietz, 1962), p. 128. (Transl. KL))
g After liberation, Leon Stasiak stated: “The political underground movement in Monowitz consisted mostly of political prisoners who had come from Buchenwald. These political resistance groups tried, as far as possible, to secure material aid for their fellow-prisoners, etc. When we found out that there was a resistance movement in Poland, we succeeded in making contact with it. We prisoners made contact at the I.G. building site with foreign forced laborers from the various nations and English prisoners of war, besides Polish civilian workers. We exchanged information with the partisan groups from which we received political missions and material support. Thus, for example, clothing was secured for escape attempts. We once smuggled out a message to the individual countries in various languages (Greek, German, Hungarian, French) in a toothpaste tube through a civilian worker.”
(Leon Staischak [Stasiak], affidavit, September 3, 1947, NI-10928. Archive of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, Case VI, PDB 75 (e), pp. 181–186, here pp. 184–185.)
h Heinz Kahn, a male nurse in the prisoner infirmary and in the SS sick bay, says: “My prisoner ration was distributed on a rotating basis, and with the medications and leftover food that were brought along, the infirmary had some additional supplies.”
(Dr. Heinz Kahn: “Erlebnisse eines jungen deutschen Juden in Hermeskeil, Trier, Auschwitz und Buchenwald in den Jahren 1933 bis 1945.” In: Johannes Mötsch, ed.: Ein Eifler für Rheinland-Pfalz. Festschrift für Franz-Josef Heyen (Mainz: Gesellschaft für mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte, 2003), pp. 641–659, here p. 655. (Transl. KL))
i “Yet I must confess that I felt, and still feel, great admiration for both my religiously and politically committed comrades. They may have been ‘intellectual’ in the sense that we have adopted here, or they may not have been, that was not important. One way or another, in the decisive moments their political or religious belief was an inestimable help to them, while we sceptical and humanistic intellectuals took recourse, in vain, to our literary, philosophical, and artistic household gods. Whether they were militant Marxists, sectarian Jehovah’s Witnesses, or practicing Catholics, whether they were highly educated national economists and theologians or less versed workers and peasants, their belief or their ideology gave them that firm foothold in the world from which they spiritually unhinged the SS state. Under conditions that defy the imagination they conducted Mass, and as Orthodox Jews they fasted on the Day of Atonement although they actually lived the entire year in a condition of raging hunger. They held Marxist discussions on the future of Europe or they simply persevered in saying the Soviet Union will and must win. They survived better or died with more dignity than their irreligious or unpolitical intellectual comrades, who often were infinitely better educated and more practiced in exact thinking.”
(Jean Améry: At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (New York: Schocken, 1986), pp. 12–13.)
j “On January 18, 1945, the march out of camp began, in wintry temperatures and deep snow. Beforehand I packed infirmary documents and others from the prisoners’ typing room, which were supposed to be burned, into a bucket that had held jam. I soldered it and then plunged the bucket into the cesspit. After liberation, I told people where the docments were, and I saw them again during the Auschwitz trial in 1963–1964.”
(Dr. Heinz Kahn: “Erlebnisse eines jungen deutschen Juden in Hermeskeil, Trier, Auschwitz und Buchenwald in den Jahren 1933 bis 1945.” In: Johannes Mötsch, ed.: Ein Eifler für Rheinland-Pfalz. Festschrift für Franz-Josef Heyen (Mainz: Gesellschaft für mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte, 2003), pp. 641–659, here p. 655. (Transl. KL))
k Oszkár Betlen, a Hungarian Jew and a communist, describes the dilemma: as a clerk, he was in charge of the transport lists for Birkenau, to the gas chamber: “What was I supposed to do? On some pretext I could cross one, two, or even three names off the list. But what if others were sent in place of the people I saved? Then I had their fate on my conscience. Could I take it upon myself to decide who should go to almost certain death?”
(Oszkár Betlen: Leben auf dem Acker des Todes (Berlin: Dietz, 1962), pp. 170–171. (Transl. KL))
