In this second post in this series, I want to share with you a general landscape of the camp. What you will see is how it has been designed with great care to make it easy to kill up to 6,000 people a day. In this post I will focus on the physical design. In the next post, we will explore the Grey Zone, which is the cultural design or how the SS enlisted the inmates to do most of the work.
The lead picture is of a transport to the "East" from Westerbork, the main transit camp in the Netherlands from 1942/44. Westerbork is about 2 hours by car or train north east from Amsterdam. Anne Frank and her family were on the last transport to leave Westerbork. Here is the manifest that documents the Frank's transport. Note how punctilious the bureaucracy is.
Transports from Westerbork left every Tuesday. From July 1942 until September 3, 1944, the Germans deported 97,776 Jews from Westerbork: 54,930 to Auschwitz in 68 transports, 34,313 to Sobibor in 19 transports, 4,771 to the Theresienstadt ghetto in 7 transports, and 3,762 to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 9 transports. Most of those deported to Auschwitz and Sobibor were killed upon arrival.
The tension on the weekends must have been extreme. If you were not on the transport, you had another week of hard but not impossible life. My protagonist, Lev Weissmann was on one of these transports to Birkenau. He left two weeks after his elderly adopted parents in the late spring of 1944 and arrived at night.
In this scene, recreated in the the movie, Schindler's List, we see a transport arriving at night. It comes through the gates to the new internal ramp constructed by Hoess to facilitate the Hungarian "Aktion". This meant that the "cargo" could be unloaded only a short walk from the Krema's II, III and IV and the entire process could take place within an hour. Before this, prisoners were unloaded at the Juden Ramp on the main railway line about a mile from the camp. Prisoners were trucked into the camp then.
This is a real photo of "Selection". It is from an album that has the only "official" images from the camp and documents a transport in 1944 from Hungary. The photos were taken at the end of May or beginning of June 1944, either by Ernst Hofmann or by Bernhard Walter, two SS men whose task was to take ID photos and fingerprints of the inmates (not of the Jews who were sent directly to the gas chambers). The photos show the arrival of Hungarian Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia. Many of them came from the Berehovo Ghetto, which itself was a collecting point for Jews from several other small towns.
In charge is the smart looking officer in the middle talking to his sergeant. This might be Captain Doctor Mengele but no one can be sure. He certainly fits the bill in terms of Mengele's typical smart turnout. His stature at the camp might also have meant that it was he who was the centrepiece on that day. Mengele worked at Selection more than any other officer at the camp. Note how the women and children are in one line and the men in another. The rule of thumb was that mothers with small children went automatically to the Krema. The age cut off officially for children was 16. Though we know that older looking children often were sent to the right and to work in the camp. The ONLY exception for small children were if you were a twin or a dwarf and then only if Mengele was on duty.
When the Ovitz family arrived that were mainly dwarves but also regular sized people + a couple who claimed to be family members, Mengele spared them all. His interest was genetics.
The Patriarch of the family was Avram, on the far left of the picture. Avram has a leading role in this part of the book.
Lev, aged 16, passes selection. Like Livia Bitton-Jackson and Marc Berkowitz, who is also a twin, Lev is strikingly Aryan in appearance. He also looks astonishingly like the son of Mengele's sponsor. More about that in the next post. We and Mengele discover on the next day that Lev, though only 16, is also an expert diamond sorter. This skill is key to his survival.
Diamonds play a major role in how the money worked in the camps. Easy to hide, many wealthy victims secreted diamonds about their body and their clothes. Few escaped detection after selection when all the clothes and the bodies were examined. The issue that I create, that saves Lev, is that only an expert can tell the value of a stone. With thousands of diamonds coming into the camp, along with other jewels, money and gold, the SS were able to finance much of the costs of the holocaust. In our case, we learn that knowing the true value of diamonds also gave the leadership of the camp an opportunity to obtain their own financial lifeline for when the war was lost.
Lev is sent to a special hut, Hut 14 in BII f in the "hospital area, next to Kanada, for his first night. This is where Mengele housed the male twins and dwarves. In charge of this hut was one of the true heroes of the camp, Zvi Spiegel. Much more on him later.
This is Birkenau. Birkenau is where the main killing takes place. You can see the railway entering from the bottom left.
Mengele's Birkenau office, in one of the brown buildings, is only feet away from where selection takes place. You can see how the ramp then leads directly to Krema's II and III. Krema I is in AI and was not a feature in the main "Aktions". In Krema II, is the office and lodgings for Dr Miklos Nyiszli. He is of course a Jew and an inmate and is Mengele's pathologist. Mengele built up quite a staff of Jewish Doctors. Nyiszli's account is my primary source for much of my assessment of Mengele. He met almost daily with him. His book also forms the basis of the film, The Grey Zone. His book and the movie offer a compelling vision of life at the core of the death process at the camp.
Hut 14 is located in the centre of the map in the "Hospital" centre and just down from the 14 huts that make up "Kanada" where the good of all the victims are sorted, stored and sent back to the Reich. This is where Lev will have his office later.
The Women's Camp is above Mengele's office to the left.
It's a short walk from selection to Kremas II and III.
Here is a larger view of the entire Auschwitz system in mid 1944, at the peak of the Holocaust. Birkenau (AII or BII), is the main killing zone. See how Hoess has constructed a rail spur to enter the camp off the main line. The old Judenramp was a parallel siding to the main line just before the new line peels off. To the right is the old camp, (AI). This is the one in red brick with the gateway that says Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes you Free). The yellow box at the bottom right of AI is Kommandant Hoess' family residence.
What separates Auschwitz from the other camps is its position in the European railway system.
In the Holocaust, all rails lead to Auschwitz and sending loot back to Berlin is a day trip for a train.
In my next post, we will explore the human process that the SS used to run this factory of death.
