This image is taken from an important movie called The Grey Zone. It shows men of Sonderkommando 12 eating a feast at dinner. In late 1944, S 12 had over 800 men. Their job was to reassure, kill and process the bodies of the people on the transports. They were at the core of the system and so the heart of the moral issue of The Grey Zone. More detail on their role in a later post.
To have any chance of survival, a prisoner had to find a way to get out of the general population. They had to find a job or a role that put them on the side of their oppressors. They had to enter the Grey Zone. In this post I will show you the highlights of this moral landscape.
If, on arrival, you were selected to live, you were assigned to a hut. Each hut had a Kapo, who lived in their own apartment, who had access to more clothes, heat and food and who had the power of life and death over you. The Kapo also ran the work details. Levi says "There is not a prisoner who does not remember his amazement at the time: the first threats, the first insults, the first blows came not from the SS but from "colleagues", from those mysterious personages who nevertheless wore the same striped tunic that they the new arrivals had just put on."
The Kapo would have lived in the quarters on the top right. They wore a distinctive armband. Most were not Jewish but were from the criminal group. In every hut but one, Hut 14 in BfII, it was every man or woman for themselves. "..the arrival in the Lager was indeed a shock because of the surprise it entailed. ...One entered hoping at least for the solidarity of one's companions in misfortune, but the hoped for allies, except in special cases, were not there; there were instead a thousand sealed off monads, and between them a desperate and continuous struggle." (Levi)
The fact that Kitty Hart-Moxon's mother was with her, saved them both. Often, one would be on the verge of collapse and would be saved by the other. But even more important was mental toughness. The situation in the camp was so dire that only those who were mentally tough had any chance. We see this part of her character when Kitty awoke on her first morning at the camp. The woman next to her was cold. Her bunkmate had died in the night. Kitty, only a teenager, stripped the dead woman, took her clothes and put them on her own body. She also found a piece of bread in the woman's pocket and ate it. Surviving demanded a total focus on survival. Kitty said it was much easier to die. Levi quotes Ella Lingens-Reiner, a doctor who saved many people, who, when asked how she survived, replied, "My principle is: I come first, second and third."
No matter how tough you were, you also had to get indoor work and more food. Outside hard labour was not survivable.
You could not live more than 4 months if assigned to this. You did anything you could to get a better "job". Getting a job cleaning out the latrines was a life-saver for Kitty Hart-Moxon.
The best job of all was to work in Kanada where the job was to sort the personal effects of the dead. Here there was lots of food and clothes. We can see the results in the picture below.
But there was a catch to this job. Because workers in Kanada knew what was really going on, they could never return to the main camp. Kitty was told, on her arrival in Kanada, that the only way out was up the chimney.
There were many "Trustee Jobs as well. These included prisoner Doctors and people with special skills that were required. Getting such jobs was often a lottery. A request might be made in a barracks. No one knew if the call for a doctor or a cobbler was just a ruse for selection. Dr Countess Martina Puzyna, was in a rock breaking gang when she contracted typhus and ended up in hospital. Mengele, on his rounds, asked her who she was. When she told him that she was a doctor, he asked where she had trained. Impressed by her answer, he made sure she recovered and added her to his staff as his anthropologist.
This is the Grey Zone.
Survival was only possible if you chose the Grey Zone. But for many of those, their sense of shame grew year by year after their release. You could not win. You died inside the camp or you died inside later.
In my next post, I wish to explore, the moral issues that confronted the guards. For to dismiss them all as "simply" evil, is to miss the question of "Under what circumstances might you are I be that guard?" For is not that the question today as we make hatred of the "other" paramount in our daily lives?
