Nothing Better Demonstrates Why Allegations of Labour Anti-Semitism are Fake than the Labour Right's Hostility to Roma and Travellers

 The Romani Uprising in Auschwitz, 16 May 1944

16.5.2018 0:01

Below is an article written on the anniversary of the Romani Uprising in Auschwitz. The bourgeois media treats the Holocaust as a Jewish only affair because the Holocaust has been transformed into an ideological weapon. The Holocaust is employed in the service of Zionism and Britain’s relationship with Israel and the United States. The Gypsies unlike Jews are still in much the same ways as they were before the Hitler era and that is why, at best, they are a footnote in the Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations.

For example Matteo Salvini, the Italian Deputy Prime Minister, on coming into office proposed a census of Roma with the purpose of deporting those who were not Italians. Far-right Italy minister vows 'action' to expel thousands of Roma

The contents page of John Mann's Guide to Dealing with Anti-Social Behaviour - Travellers were given as an example with Neighbours from Hell

If those alleging that the Labour Party is ‘institutionally anti-Semitic’ were sincerely opposed to racism then you would expect they would throw their arms up in horror at attacks on Gypsies and Roma, who were killed in similar proportions to the Jews in the Holocaust.

Instead one of the leading protagonists John Mann issued a vile ‘Handbook on anti-social behaviour’ in Bassetlaw. Its Contents helpfully listed examples of anti-social behaviour and hazards to civilised life, such as alcohol, graffiti, rubbish and neighbours from hell were Travellers.

Up and down the country Labour Councils have persecuted Gypsies and Travellers. Nor is it just Labour Councils.  The Tories have been even worse.  Prime amongst them these racists was Lord Eric Pickles, Chairman of the Conservative Friends of Israel.  When Pickles was Communities Secretary he provided half the £12m funding Basildon Council needed in order to evict hundreds of Travellers from Dale Farm in 2011.  See Lord Eric Pickles – Why is this Racist Bigot Britain’s Special Envoy on Holocaust Issues?

An SS man handling a Roma woman with an iron bar

Indeed almost all of the proponents of fake Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ have records of attacks on asylum seekers and Islamaphobia. As I have repeatedly detailed Tom Watson has one of the worst records when it comes to racism.

Not only did he back racist Labour MP ‘poor Phil’ Woolas to the hilt when the the High Court removed him as an MP in 2011 for a campaign based around ‘making the white folk angry’ but he was the Campaigns Organiser for Liam Byrne in the 2004 by-election in Birmingham Hodge Hill. In The ghost of Enoch Nick Cohen described the gay bashing, racist campaign that Watson ran when ‘Labour reshuffled the pack and played the race card’ against the Lib Dems.’ One Labour leaflet carried the slogan: "Labour is on your side, the Lib Dems are on the side of failed asylum seekers."

Closing the doors on the deportation trains

Former City banker Byrne told the voters,

'The Lib Dems want to keep giving welfare benefits to failed asylum seekers. They voted for this in Parliament on 1 March 2004. They want your money -and mine - to go to failed asylum seekers.'

If this isn’t playing the race card it is difficult to know what is.

Of course the media isn’t interested in this or indeed in any other form of racism. Anti-asylum seeker stories are their bread and butter. Only ‘anti-Semitism’ concerns them.  Why?  Because it is tied to British foreign policy interests, the special relationship with the United States and support for Israel.

Roma having just disembarked from the trains to Auschwitz

Below is part of the hidden history of the Holocaust. The Gypsy revolt in Auschwitz in 1944 when the Nazis moved to terminate the gypsy camp that had been set up there to deceive the Red Cross.

It’s a history that the Holocaust Memorial Day ignores because it doesn’t fit in with the deployment of the Holocaust as a propaganda weapon. That is why there are no Gypsy or Traveller representatives on the Committee that organises the Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations.

Tony Greenstein

Auschwitz (PHOTO: Gabriela Hrabaňová)

  

On 16 May 1944, in the concentration camp at Auschwitz, something completely extraordinary occurred:  Romani people imprisoned in the so-called "Gypsy Camp" there rebelled against the SS. This historical event is still almost unknown in the Czech Republic, but 16 May is becoming more and more popular worldwide as Romani Resistance Day.  

What happened in Auschwitz on 16 May? News server Romea.cz publishes below in full translation a never-before published study by historian Michal Schuster that describes the Romani uprising there.

The "Gypsy Family Camp" in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp, 1944

The year 1944 can simply be called the closing phase of the so-called "Final Solution to the Gypsy question" in Nazi-occupied Europe, including on the territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. After transporting most Roma to the Auschwitz complex during 1943, smaller transports there took place during 1944. On 16 May 1944 the first attempt to annihilate all the members of the so-called "Gypsy Camp" at Auschwitz-Birkenau took place and was prevented by an uprising of the prisoners there. The most tragic event did finally take place and the camp and its inhabitants were entirely destroyed at the beginning of August 1944.  

Labour Right-winger Lukey Stanger described Travellers as a 'nasty blight on communities'

First attempt to destroy the "Gypsy Camp" and the Romani prisoners' uprising

The commander of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, ordered at the beginning of 1944 the acceleration of the work already underway in one section of Birkenau, primarily the construction of ramps and the rails for the three-rail branch of the Oświęcim-Katowice railway line, which led to Crematorium I and Crematorium II. The commander of all the crematoria, SS Otto Moll, had to ensure, during the course of one week, repairs to all the crematoria, completion of the construction of the buildings, and the start of new construction, as well as the erection of several rooms where the prisoners were stripped near the repaired Bunker II and behind Crematorium V. The prisoners also dug two big pits for burning corpses.¹

Romani girl  looking out from deportation train

All of the preparations were performed in order to receive a transport of Jews from Hungary. Those new prisoners who were labeled capable of work during the selection would need accommodation, so the highest SS command at the main camp decided on 15 May 1944 to kill everyone in the "Gypsy Family Camp". That would free up space in all of camp B-II-e for more of the Jews from Hungary. ²

The final action was to have been performed on the evening of 16 May, when the gong was rung announcing a ban on leaving the camp (the so-called Lagersperre) and it was closed. Trucks drove up and parked in front of the gate to the camp; 50 -60 members of a special SS commando unit jumped out of them and called on the prisoners to quickly leave the residential blocks. Inside the blocks, however, a tense silence prevailed and the prisoners refused to come out, barricading the doors and desperately preparing to defend themselves with rocks and work tools. The members of the SS commando unit were startled by this disobedience and their commander decided to postpone the action.³

SS Men at Auschwitz

Romani Holocaust survivor Hugo Höllenreiner (born 1933 in Munich), who was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp with his family in 1943, later recalled those moments of resistance as follows:  "There were about seven or eight men, definitely, who came to the gate. Dad shouted out - the whole building trembled when he shouted:  'We're not coming out! You come in here! We're waiting here! If you want something, you have to come inside!' "⁴

Luke Stanger deploying 'antisemitism' as a weapon against the only Black woman candidate in Brighton & Hove's council elections - to its shame the Labour Party suspended her and lost the election

The entire event was described in a report by Tadeusz Joachimowski (1908-1979)5[1], a former Polish political prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp who was assigned to be a "scribe" (a writer) in the "Gypsy Camp", as follows:  "The last commander of the Gypsy Camp and the current rapportführer [reporting officer] was Bonigut.⁶ He was probably from Yugoslavia. He disagreed with the approaches and tactics of the SS. He was a very good person. 

On 15 May 1944 he came after me and said things looked bad for the Gypsy Camp. An order had been issued to destroy it and had reportedly already received confirmation from the political department through Dr Mengele. The Gypsy Camp was to be destroyed and its crew killed using gas. There were roughly 6 500 Gypsies in the camp at that time. 

Bonigut entrusted me with informing those Gypsies whom I trusted about what was ahead. He asked me to warn them so they would not go like sheep to the slaughter. He also told me that the signal for the beginning of the action would be the Lagersperre and that the Gypsies should not leave their barracks. Bonigut himself warned several Gypsies of the action. I also (secretly) performed this task. The next day at around 7 PM I heard the gong announcing the Lagersperre. Automobiles drove up in front of the Gypsy Camp and 50 - 60 SS men armed with machine guns got out of them. They immediately surrounded the buildings where the Gypsies lived. Some SS members entered this residential area shouting 'Los, los'. There was total calm in the barracks. The Gypsies, armed with handcuffs, knives, shovels and stones, waited to see what would happen. They did not leave the barracks. The SS members were appalled and left themselves. After a brief consultation, they went to find the Blockführerstube [the commander of that block] in order to inform the commander of the action. After some time I heard a whistle. The SS men who were surrounding the barracks left their positions, got back in the automobiles, and drove away. The closure of the camp was lifted. On the next day (17 May 1944), Lagerführer Bonigut came to me and said the Gypsies were rescued, for now...".⁷

While there was no open clash between the Romani prisoners and the SS members, this event played a significant role. It decidedly was not the habit in the concentration camps for the prisoners to resist a planned, prepared action en masse right before it was to be undertaken. There is absolutely no doubt that the armed SS commando could have suppressed this act of resistance, but decided not to go into an open confrontation with the prisoners and preferred to achieve their aims in another way. This event is unequivocally an uprising and occupies a significant place in the tragic history of the Holocaust of the European Roma.  

In the so-called "Gypsy Camp" at Birkenau there were approximately 6 500 prisoners, half of whom were subsequently put into quarantine in the main camp, some at the end of May and start of June, others at the start of August 1944.⁸ They included prisoners from Bohemia, Germany, and Poland.⁹

The destruction of the "Gypsy Camp" at Birkenau

About 10 000 women from Hungary then arrived at the "Gypsy Camp" and were accommodated in the odd-numbered blocks, while the Romani prisoners were put on the even-numbered side. They moved a second time into the rear half of the camp when men from Hungary arrived and were put in the front section of the camp. In July 1944, Himmler decided to destroy the rest of the "Gypsy Camp".¹⁰ On the morning of 1 August, those prisoners fit for work were supposed to report for transport elsewhere, and Antonín Absolon-Růžička (born 30 September 1930 in the Moravian village of Mistřín) took advantage of the opportunity.¹¹ He later recalled:  "One day in summer when I heard on the grounds¹² that a new transport was leaving and lining up at the gate, I ran out there, naked, fleeing the blocks and heading for the canteen. I met my sister Jana on the way. She asked where I was running to and I told her I wanted to leave with the transport. She started to persuade me not to leave, saying we two were the only ones left, that I should stay with her. All I know is that I told her I had to go. I didn't even say good-bye I was in such a hurry...".¹³

On the next day, 2 August 1944, the final transports to the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Ravensbrück were put together out of all the female and male prisoners fit for work from the "Gypsy Camp". There were 918 boys and men sent to Buchenwald, of whom 151 had Protectorate citizenship. At the Buchenwald concentration camp, thanks to these transports from Auschwitz, the number of Romani and Sinti prisoners almost doubled.¹⁴ The Ravensbrück transports included 490 female prisoners. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to determine their state or territorial citizenship.¹⁵  Nevertheless, women from the Protectorate were certainly among them.

Through these six work transports, these female and male prisoners left the camp at Birkenau for good, because at the time the so-called "Gypsy Family Camp" was about to be destroyed and the fate of its remaining prisoners had been decided.¹⁶

After their departure, only the elderly, mothers with children and the fathers who didn't want to leave their families, and orphans remained in the "Gypsy Camp". During the late night of 2 August and the early morning hours of 3 August the block was closed (Blocksperre) and the 2 897 children, elderly people, the infirm and women were taken in trucks to the courtyard of Crematorium V. There their unexpected resistance had to be broken, after which they were herded into the gas chambers.¹⁷

Those horrible moments were described by a member of the so-called Special Division (Sonderkommando), Filip Müller (born 1922 in the Slovak town of Sered'):  "The room for removing clothing was stuffed full of people by midnight. The anxiety was growing minute by minute... desperate cries could be heard from all sides, accusations, lamentations, remorse. The voices called out in chorus:  'We are Germans of the Reich! We've done nothing wrong!' From elsewhere could be heard:  'We want to live! Why do you want to kill us?'... The liquidation proceeded as usual. Moll and his aides unlocked the safeties on their pistols and rifles and uncompromisingly called on those who had taken their clothes off to leave the room and go into the three spaces where they would be poisoned with gas. On that final trip many were weeping with desperation... Even from within the gas chambers, for a long time afterward, we heard intermittent calls and cries until the gas performed its work and the last voices were snuffed out."¹⁸

The bodies of the murdered, who included many prisoners from the Protectorate, were then burned in the pits near the Crematorium because it was not yet running.¹⁹

A recollection of the murder of those in the "Gypsy Camp" was also recorded by camp commander Rudolf Höss in his memoirs:  "They did not know what awaited them until the final moment; they only realized it when they were brought into Crematorium No.V. It was not easy to lead them into the chamber. I didn't see it, but Schwarzhuber told me about it, that no liquidation action of the Jews had been as difficult as the liquidation of the Gypsies."²⁰

During this action, camp doctor Josef Mengele personally shot dead the male Romani twins on whom he had been performing experiments in order to subsequently use their bodies for autopsy. The female twins were transferred to the Hindenburg concentration camp. Irma Valdová-Krausová survived with her sisters because of that, and later recalled:  "On that day Dr Mengele came to the camp at 18:30 in order to take the remaining twins away, including my two sisters Anna and Alžběta. Of my entire extended family, I was their only relative left, and they did not want to leave me, no matter the cost. During the confusion they put me in the car as well, which saved me from a certain death."²1

This mass murder was followed by the brutal killing of the female and male prisoners who, after being transported elsewhere, had been sent back to Auschwitz-Birkenau to die in the gas chambers because they were exhausted and unfit for work. For this purpose, 200 Roman boys were sent from the concentration camp at Buchenwald on 26 September 1944 and 800 Romani men were sent on 10 October 1944. On 11 October 1944 and then on 14 October 1944 a total of 217 Romani girls and women were sent back to Auschwitz from the work commando units at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Some underwent a second selection and were once again transported back to Ravensbrück, while the rest ended up, like all of the boys and men who were returned to Auschwitz, in the gas chambers.²²

International Romani Holocaust Day

The year 1944 and its place in Romani history remains alive, and what is important is that the tragic events of the Roma Holocaust are finally earning a firm place in European and world history. The year 2014 marked 70 years since the mass annihilation of the so-called "Gypsy Family Camp" at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

On 2 August 2014 the former camp at Birkenau was the scene of a commemorative gathering featuring representatives of European Romani organizations, representatives of the Polish Government, authorities and local municipalities, diplomats, survivors, witnesses and relatives of the prisoners. The day of 2 August has been designated International Romani Holocaust Day and is a significant state day in Poland.²³

Footnotes:

1.    Kladivová, Vlasta: Konečná stanice Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olomouc 1994, pp. 77-78

2.    Kladivová, V.: Konečná stanice Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olomouc 1994, p. 78.

3.    Nečas, Ctibor: Holocaust českých Romů, 1999, s. 170; LEWY, Guenter: The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies. Oxford University Press, 1999, p 320; Right to Remember – A Handbook for Education with Young People on the Roma Genocide. Council of Europe, 2014, p 81; BASTIAN, Till: Sinti und Roma im Dritten Reich: Geschichte einer Verfolgung. München: C.H.Beck Verlag, 2001, p 62.

4.    For the testimony of H. Höllenreiner, see Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte, Signatur: zz-1460.03,http://www.hdbg.eu/zeitzeugen/video.php?id=563

5.    Along with the other prisoners, he saved the prison's inventory books from the "Gypsy Camp"; see Die Sinti und Roma im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau / Memorial Book. The Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau / Ksiega Pamieci. Cyganie w obozie koncentracyjnym Auschwitz-Birkenau, ed. State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau in cooperation with the Documentation and Culture Center of German Sinti and Roma (Heidelberg), Volume 1, München/London/New York/Paris 1993, p. XXXI.

6.    Georg Bonigut worked at the "Gypsy Camp" from 13 December 1943 as reporting officer (Rapportführer) for Auschwitz-Birkenau. At the end of May 1944 he was appointed commander of the camp (Schutzhaftlagerführer) in the "Gypsy Camp", where he remained until it was destroyed. He then became commander of the block and commander of reporting at the Auschwitz III-Charlottengrube concentration camp. See Gedenkbuch. Die Sinti und Roma im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau / Memorial Book. The Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau / Ksiega Pamieci. Cyganie w obozie koncentracyjnym Auschwitz-Birkenau, ed. State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, in collaboration with the Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma (Heidelberg), volume 2, München/London/New York/Paris 1993, p 1647.

7.    Nacistická genocida Sintů a Romů: katalog ke stálé výstavě ve Státním Muzeu v Osvětimi. Romano džaniben, 2009, p. 288-289.

8.    Nečas: Holocaust českých Romů, 1999, p 170.

9.    Kladivová, V.: Konečná stanice Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olomouc 1994, p 79.

10.  Kladivová, V.: Konečná stanice Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olomouc 1994, p 80.

11.  Kladivová, V.: Konečná stanice Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olomouc 1994, p 81.

12.  The grounds of the military hospital (Häftlingskrankenbau).

13.  Nemůžeme zapomenout = Našťi bisteras: nucená táborová koncentrace ve vyprávěních romských pamětníků, shromáždil a uspořádal Ctibor Nečas. 1. vydání. Olomouc:
Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, 1994, p 64.

14.  Nacistická genocida Sintů a Romů, katalog, 2009, p 300.

15.  Nečas: Historický kalendář, 2008, p 64.

16.  Kladivová, V.: Konečná stanice Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olomouc 1994, p 79; Nečas: Holocaust českých Romů, 1999, p 170.

17.  Kladivová, V.: Konečná stanice Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olomouc 1994, p 82; Nečas: Historický kalendář, 2008, p 64.

18.  Nacistická genocida Sintů a Romů: katalog ke stálé výstavě ve Státním Muzeu v Osvětimi. Romano džaniben, 2009, p 294.

19.  Nečas: Holocaust českých Romů, 1999, p 171.

20.  Wspomnienia Rudolfa Hössa, komendanta obozu oświęncimskego, Wydawnictwo prawnicze Warszava, 1956, p 116; Kladivová, V.: Konečná stanice Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olomouc 1994, p 88.

21.  Kladivová, V.: Konečná stanice Auschwitz-Birkenau. Olomouc 1994, p 83.

22.  Nečas: Holocaust českých Romů, 1999, p 171.

23.  Schuster, Michal: Genocida Romů v českých zemích a její reflexe. In: Romano voďi 25.10.2012, ps.

Michal Schuster, Museum of Romani Culture, translated by Gwendolyn Albert

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[1]

A MEMOIR OF AUSCHWITZ AND BIRKENAU

Much has been written about Auschwitz extermination camp.  However this piece provides insight into the unique savagery of the barbarities of fascism and its factories of death.

Birkenau-Auschwitz in January 1945 after the Soviets had captured it

Auschwitz wasn’t officially known of as an extermination or death camp, as opposed to a concentration camp, until April 1944 with the writing of the Auschwitz Protocols.  However British Intelligence was aware of the activities of Auschwitz far earlier owing to decryption of Nazi signals.  At Bletchley Park, the SS code had been broken early in the war including communications with the extermination camps.  During the summer of 1941 Order Police reports of mass shootings in Occupied Russia were deciphered.

The truth is as Walter Lacquer’s Terrible Secret shows, there was no interest, either by the West or the Zionists in uncovering the secret of Auschwitz.  That was why it remained undiscovered.

We should not be deterred from understanding what happened in the Holocaust and why, simply because today the Zionist movement, the Israeli state and the Western capitalist states exploit what happened over 70 years ago in order to justify Israel's racist obscenities.  Zionism, with its creation of a state based on race, defames the memory of those who died, Jewish and non-Jewish, in Auschwitz and Birkenau.  That however is never a reason to deny that the Holocaust took place.  The Zionists create holocaust denial through their exploitation of the memory of the millions who died.  Indeed they deliberately create the false ideology of holocaust denial in order to 'prove' that the anti-Semitism which they create is still alive.

Tony Greenstein

The famous and cynical slogan 'Work Makes You Free' which was above Nazi concentration camps - the same idea was adopted by Ian Duncan Smith when cutting social security benefits in Britain

The Auschwitz experiences of Ukrainian Marxist Roman Rosdolsky

Monthly Review. 39.8 (Jan. 1988): p33.

The literature on Auschwitz is now extensive and there may, at first, seem to be little point in publishing yet another memoir of one of its former inmates, all the more so when the memoir is brief and adds no new facts to those already well-known to the world. But it is the person and perspective of the author which give the memoir below some claim to our attention. The author was the Ukrainian Marxist Roman Rosdolsky (1898-1967), who was arrested by the Gestapo in Cracow in 1942 for aiding Jews. Rosdolsky had been one of the founders and leading theoreticians of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, but he left the party in opposition to Stalinism in the late 1920s. He remained true to the principles of revolutionary Marxism for the rest of his life. Since the 1930s he devoted himself to scholarship, producing a number of important studies in German and Polish on the agrarian history of East Central Europe and on the history and interpretation of Marxism. Part of the latter series was his very famous work on The Making of Marx's Capital (Pluto Press, 1981).

Aerial reconnaissance of Birkenau

The text which appears below was originally published in the Ukrainian emigre socialist journal Oborona in 1956 and reprinted by another Ukrainian socialist journal, Diialoh, in 1984. This is its first appearance in translation.

--John-Paul Himka (Professor of History, University of Alberta).

Dear Editor:

Thank you very much for mentioning the "death museum at Auschwitz" in your periodical. Permit me to use the occasion of your remarks to share with Oborona's readers some memoirs concerning my own stay in the camp at Auschwitz.

The American correspondent whose words you paraphrase was mistaken only in one point: Auschwitz was not only a "death camp" but also an enormous forced-labor camp, with numerous subsidiary camps spread over considerable territory; on the average it held some 80,000 slaves of the German Reich. It was a sui generis "state within a state," with a whole series of industrial, mining, and even agricultural enterprises. Its goal was to extract as much labor as possible from the prisoners working there, while spending as little as possible on feeding them. In this sense the entire camp was also an enormous "death factory" in which--especially in its first years of existence (1940-42)--the average prisoner did not remain alive longer than three or four months.

Fortunately for me, I wasn't taken to Auschwitz until early 1943, that is, at the time when the regime in the central camp, Auschwitz proper, where there were 15,000 prisoners on the average, had begun to relax. This relaxation was shown, above all, in that after May of 1943 the so-called Kapos, Blockaltester, and Stubendienste no longer had the right to kill with impunity prisoners subordinate to them; before then, such murders were everyday business. The Kapos, etc., were prisoners, generally professional criminals, appointed by the camp authorities to head work teams and keep charge over the barracks in which we lived. This "reform" was mainly motivated by the labor shortage which the Third Reich was beginning to feel; the Hitlerites decided to "economize" on human material that was still fit to work. True, even in the first months of 1943 they still sent all cripples, old people, typhus convalescents, and people with swollen legs or no teeth to the crematorium. I myself was in the camp "hospital" and lived through two large-scale "sortings" in which Hitlerite doctors combed through the patients, sending several hundred to the gas chamber. But by the middle of 1943 this particular horror had passed for us, i.e., for the so-called Aryans (non-Jews), and we could report sick and go to the hospital without risking death. To the unfortunate Jews, however, and only to them, this reform did not apply. Still, some months later, we witnessed a horrific spectacle as a dozen or so trucks pulled into the camp and took hundreds of people from the hospital, clad only in their shirts, to the gas chamber.

women huddled in their bunk after Auschwitz had been captured

So much for the central camp at Auschwitz, which--I repeat--during 1943-44 began to become more and more like ordinary Nazi labor camps such as Dachau, Oranienburg, and Buchenwald. But three kilometers from us was a huge subsidiary camp, Birkenau (in Polish: Brzezinki), where living and working conditions were a hundred percent worse than our own; it had gas chambers and six crematoria in which people were killed with poison gas and the corpses burned day and night. Here the gates of Hitler's hell were thrown wide open.

Trzebinia sub-camp of Auschwitz

Even before I had arrived in Auschwitz, Birkenau had "finished off" 16,000 select Soviet POWs: Red Army officers, politruki, Communists, intellectuals. Of that entire transport only fifty persons survived. Here, too, several dozen thousand "recalcitrant" Poles met their Golgotha. And this was a gigantic cemetery for the Jewish population of almost all of continental Europe.

For the whole of two years, 1943 and 1944, transports would arrive at Birkenau with thousands of Jews from Poland, Slovakia, Bohemia, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Greece. Only a small portion of them--specialists of all sorts--were chosen to work in our camp and Birkenau. The rest, and all women and children, were immediately dispatched to the gas. It was such an everyday occurrence and we grew so accustomed to it that we began to note as extraordinary those days when there were no Jewish transports and no flames shot up from the chimneys of the crematoria.

The reader will ask how I know all this. Unfortunately, not just from conversations with other prisoners in Auschwitz and Birkenau; I was forced to witness it. From spring 1943 until autumn 1944 I worked as a carpenter on the second floor of a huge factory, Deutsche Ausrustungswerke, which stood halfway between the main camp and Birkenau. The large factory windows looked out over Birkenau. From them we saw, maybe a hundred paces from us, the end of the railroad tracks leading to Birkenau as well as, and above all, the chimneys of the crematoria. We could have no doubt about what went on beyond the gates of Birkenau's hell. There's no point in going into all we experienced and how we grew old inside during that year and a half. I'll just describe the most terrible period, the so-called "Hungarian action" of the summer of 1944.

Beginning May 4 of that year, and day in, day out thereafter, four or five long trainloads of Hungarian Jews would pull into the tracks before our windows. They were unloaded in a hurry, and any bundles anyone had were taken away. Then SS-men came and divided the new arrivals into two groups, separating the men from the women and children. They chased them all off to the "showers," that is, to the gas chambers. Immediately afterwards a special work team went through the bundles, removing food and clothing and searching for money and gold. The barracks of this work team were separated from our factory only by a wooden fence. The team was made up of several dozen young women prisoners, each wearing a red kerchief on her head. They were allowed to eat whatever perishable food they found in the bundles. This dreadful work team was generally referred to as "Canada."

By the first week of May "Canada's" yard was already piled high with bundles. We were always tormented by hunger, and the bolder prisoners among us began to steal these bundles from behind the fence. At the same time the smoke began to billow from all six crematoria. And this was not all. Just next to Birkenau, to the right of us, lay a birch forest (hence the name Brzezinki/Birkenau). A huge fire began to blaze in the woods, the flames alternating with thick, yellowish-grey smoke. A few days later we found out what was happening: the crematoria were unable to handle thousands of corpses, so a deep pit was dug in the Birkenau woods to burn the unfortunate victims. Some time at the end of May our factory received an order to supply Birkenau with a dozen or so iron-tipped hooks four meters long. At the head of the order, which I read with my own eyes, it said: Ungarische Aktion.

True, today on both sides of the "iron curtain" they design and produce bombs that can destroy and pulverize just as many living people in the span of one minute. But the Third Reich did not yet know the blessings of modern technology.

How did all these horrors affect the life of our work team? Imagine: rows of work tables, at which stand our carpenters, sad as can be and "blacker than the black earth"--mainly French Jews and Poles. No one speaks. All eyes are focused on the woods of Birkenau and the crematoria. Only now and again someone laughs bitterly, hysterically, and then wipes tears from his cheeks. It was impossible to open the window, since the air was completely permeated by the intolerable, stifling odor of burnt flesh. "Ich rieche, rieche Menschenfleisch (I smell, I smell human flesh)," my friend Ludwig, an Austrian, tells me, using the words of a witch from one of Grimm's fairy tales. Only the witch smelled in the air the scent of two children, and we smelled the odor of burned corpses, thousands of corpses.

But human nature is tough, astonishingly tough. Day after day we went to our factory, stared at the bloody incandescence of the Birkenau woods, and none of us went insane, none of us took our own lives. Yet could we have entertained any hope of evading death in the gas chamber? After all, we were witnesses to one of the greatest crimes in human history! One of our carpenters said to me: "Today it's them [the Hungarian Jews], tomorrow it's us [the Jewish specialists in the camp], and the day after it's you [all the non-Jews]." And this resolution of the matter struck us all as the only rational one from the Hitlerites' standpoint, the only possible one. How else to be rid of the witnesses to their crime? Only one faint hope flickered in some of our hearts: that the collapse of the Third Reich would catch those beasts by surprise before they could accomplish their plans and that at the last minute fear of retribution would stay their hands. But during the entire month of August, we ourselves had to dig a great pit in the central camp, just like the one that had been dug in the Birkenau woods. Officially it was called a Luftschutzkeller (air-raid cellar), but there was not one prisoner in the whole camp who was fooled by this name.

For me personally the hell of Auschwitz came to an end unexpectedly. In the first days of September I was included in a transport of Polish and Soviet prisoners being sent from Auschwitz to Ravensbruck, near Berlin. When they herded us into the wagons, we still kept thinking that they were going to transport us to Birkenau, to the gas chambers. But our train moved west and the glow from the crematoria disappeared from sight. We began to breathe fresh, unpoisoned air. And though we knew that death lies in wait for all prisoners in Hitler's camps, we were none the less as happy as children, because we had been snatched from the hell of Auschwitz.

Why do I write about this? Why reopen old wounds? Let me just recall one small episode. It was in the camp, on Sunday, after lunch. A group of prisoners were lying on their bunks and talking about the end of the war, which they expected was approaching. A young Pole, Kazik, turned to an older prisoner, whom everyone called "the professor," and asked him: "Professor, what will happen to Auschwitz after the war?"

"What do you think should happen?" answered "the professor." "We'll go home."

"Don't talk nonsense, professor," said Kazik. "No one here will get out alive."

"That's true," said the professor. "But, still, the living should not abandon hope [words of the Polish poet Juliusz Stowacki]! And as for Auschwitz itself, the new Poland will build a great museum here and for years delegations from all of Europe will visit it. On every stone, on every path, they'll lay a wreath: because each inch of this earth is soaked with blood. And later, when the barracks collapse, when the roads are overgrown with grass and when they have forgotten about us, there will be new and even worse wars, and even worse bestialities. Because humanity stands before two possibilities: either it comes up with a better social order or it perishes in barbarism and cannibalism."

The unfortunate professor was only repeating the words already spoken by the socialist thinker Friedrich Engels 80 years ago. I had heard them several times before the war. But in the bunks of Auschwitz they sounded more real and more correct than ever in the past. And who today, after all the Auschwitzes, Kolymas, and atom bombs, can doubt the truth of these words?

Source Citation   (MLA 8^th Edition)

Rosdolsky, Roman. "A memoir of Auschwitz and Birkenau." Monthly Review, Jan. 1988, p. 33+. Academic OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.

Gale Document Number:  GALE|A6319771