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Otherwise the Germans had a sense of humor. I found out from my mother later, that when they separated the women and assigned them to work, they said that 400 young, possibly pretty girls should step forward, but only those who were virgin. Everyone was scared to death that they were going to be taken to the brothel. Of course, because there wasn’t any information. The humor of the Germans: they took them to Gleiwitz, to the soot factory, to one of the most difficult physical work. They took there expressly pretty, young, virgin girls. And in our camp, when we had been already there for several months, they once said that those who had gardener training should step forward. The son of our rabbi, the rabbi from Nagykanizsa, whom I will never forget that he taught us so that we wouldn’t know that we were Jewish and different from the majority, who was one year older than me and worked at a horticulture every summer, stepped forward saying that he was a gardener. He wanted to work outdoors, to be a gardener, about 30 of them stepped forward and they took them to the coal-mine in Jaworzno. [Editor’s note: Jaworzno – town 20-30 kilometers south-east from Katowice [today Poland], according to the memories of a former concentration camp inmate they mined the coal with bare hands. (Simon Rozenkier: Let Courts Give Closure To Holocaust Victims, in „Forward”, 12 December 2003]. This was the German humor. And the rabbi’s son died, the poor thing, he didn’t come back.
In the Lager there was no typhus, not even petechial typhus, because there was delousing every week. And generally, they didn’t bring in epidemics. They did bring in scabies, but there wasn’t any among us. There was bathing monthly, but every morning we had to wash with cold water down to our waist. One couldn’t exist without that, because it was obligatory. So the scabies spread, and a disease called ukrainska, because that also came from the Ukrainians. That was like a choleric diarrhea. A diarrhea which came out of one just like water or coffee. One couldn’t hold it back, everyone crapped himself, I did too, when I got it. Simply there wasn’t enough time not only to go to the toilet, but to take off one’s trousers. Everything came out of us. One could get dehydrated because of this, it was very dangerous, but the old prisoners told us that there was one way to get better, otherwise most people died of it, namely to not eat and drink at all for 24 hours. A complete Yom Kippur.
The Germans were very afraid of the petechial typhus. Every Saturday afternoon there was lice control, and they gave us new shirts and underwear. One couldn’t get some wonderful shirt or underwear. Some old ones, it wasn’t always clean, but it had been disinfected. They brought them from the disinfecting room, the smell of the chlorine could be still felt on them, and we could rip them off safely, because after a while we got another one. Otherwise we learned it from the old prisoners, that that was the way to solve it. There wasn’t any toilet paper and handkerchief. The handkerchief was the inside of my cap, and the external part was my shoe polisher.
After cleaning our shoes we got breakfast. We had to go to the block-stube, or to the tagesraum – that’s what they called the 3 by 8 meter small room which was separated in the front of the barrack, where the barrack commander and the Stubedienst [Editor’s note: inmate responsible for the order of the block.], namely the room servants lived, and there the room servants stood on two sides: one gave ma a piece of bread, the other one put that small thing on it, a third one poured half a liter of coffee into my mess-tin. Which was otherwise sweet, warm and bad, but we weren’t allowed to drink water. We drank coffee, and the next time soup. When everyone got his food then there was roll-call right away, because before marching out they counted everyone in front of the barrack. And at the gate again. When they counted us, we had to stand there with smeared shoes, and eaten breakfast. Those who couldn’t eat their food, it was their problem, or they had to put it away. There was no pocket on our clothes, was there? One had to position it so that it wouldn’t fall. We either ate the marmalade, or cut the bread and put the marmalade between the two pieces and held the bread with our shirt, we pressed it with the sleeve of our jacket. We lined up in front of the barrack, and the capo counted and checked who was missing. It was forbidden to stay in the barrack, because they beat up those who did, but if someone was ill or had some problem could go to the doctor. The only person who was a doctor at the hospital officially was doctor Konig [Edmund König], he was an SS doctor, he didn’t stay there. But the ex-director of the medical clinic in Vienna, doctor Vass from Kolozsvar [today Romania], the director of the dental clinic were there as prisoners, the most excellent doctors were there under the pretext of being hospital attendants, who could treat us the way they could, and with what they had. There was no penicillin yet at that time. Those who had some kind of disease got Ultraseptil, and they either got better, or they didn’t. And for example in case of injury there were four kinds of unguents. Boric Vaseline, zinc Vaseline and that black ointment which smelled like tar, called Ichtiol, and there was a brown one, which smelled a little bit like chocolate called Pellidol. At the hospital there wasn’t selection once a month, but once a week. And if someone spent 2 weeks at the hospital, in whatever shape he was, even if he would have gotten better the next day, was gassed.
After they counted us, as many as we were out of the 500, with the exception of the sick ones, we set off, walking in step, in rows of five, because the SS counted us again at the gate. And so that we would walk in step, there was a band, a brass band, I think with 8 or 10 musicians, who happened to be gypsies, and the band was called Music Capo. They played the best light opera tunes, and there was a small stand inside the gate, and they stood there and played until everyone marched out, and they always marched out the last, and marched in the first. They worked just like everyone else, but they were careful so that their fingers wouldn’t get hurt. There was a trumpet player, a cymbalist, a small drummer, a big drummer, but it was a brass band and it functioned. On the way the vorarbeiters, that is, the foremen, who were the alternates of the capos, kept running next to us and in front of us and they kept shouting ‘in straight lines’. This meant that we had to align ourselves with the one in front of us, because they could only count the people easily by fives. Because the Lager was on the other side of the road in comparison to the factory, they simply blocked the Krakow-Auschwitz main road with a chain of guards while we marched in and out. The chain of guards was made of two rows of guards with a rifle or a submachine-gun, and dogs, they stood there about 100 meters long, at 5 meters from each other. At noon we got a half an hour lunch break, I think, perhaps at 1, I don’t remember anymore. And we worked until dusk. The workday wasn’t determined in hours, but it depended on the daylight. Because by the time it got dark, even the last person had to be in the camp. So in the winter the workday was shorter than in the summer. And we set off later, because in the dark, until day-break none of the prisoners was allowed to leave the Lager. And when we marched it, we marched the same way, with music.
In the Lager we talked very much about food at first. About what we were going to eat at home. Then we got out of this habit. The truth is, that after I had had a good cry when they took my cap, and after I had experienced what my life in the camp was like, from then on I focused on starving the least possible, on not being very cold and to be beaten rarely. It didn’t matter to me anymore whether I would be liberated or would die, what happened to my family. Because, how should I put it, one couldn’t do anything with these thoughts. And I feel ashamed forever, and I will never forgive the Germans for this, that during these 2 months they made me accept it as an order. I mean that if I would have tried and survived for a couple years, then I would have become a vorarbeiter or a Stubedienst. I imagined a Lager career for myself, and nothing else outside the Lager. Apart from the fact that I could have died any time. How should I say it, that wasn’t a topic in itself. Who lives, lives, who has died, died. They selected someone, oh well, they did.
We had loss regularly, and the selection was ordered by the IG monthly, because most of the people, usually 10 percent, was in poor health. And they usually selected 1000 people each month. Those who were selected were gassed, and after that they brought another 1000, so the people shifted about continually. Until the 20th August I was in this so called Werkstatt [German for workshop]. The schedule was so that we worked until noon on Saturdays, and we got the afternoons off, so we were in the Lager. Louse control, cleaning, straw mattress filling, such activities. And among the Sundays there were so called free Sundays, but then we couldn’t live social life, but rested in the barrack and were happy that we were alive. On the other Sundays all the Lager had to go to work. Well, the 20th of August was a free Sunday, and the Americans, who had never bombed neither Birkenau, nor the rails, attacked the IG Farben, and they plastered the workshop where I had worked with bombs, nothing remained of it.
I was desperate, I thought I was going to commit suicide, that they would send me somewhere to work, and I said that I would rather run against the wire fence instead of struggling with the cable commando, here and there, outdoors. Because cable-laying was a very difficult work, it was the most difficult. At that time there were only leaden cables, one meter of that weighed 120 kilograms. First that had to be pulled out, unrolled from the drum, and before that the cable trench had to be dug. When they dug the cable trench the cable commando was happy, because that was an easy job. Because when the cable had to be pulled out, it was inhuman, very few survived it. I knew someone, he was from Nagykanizsa, who survived the cable commando. Everyone admired him. And I knew that I couldn’t endure this difficult work only for a couple weeks, and that they would select me for gassing, and I could go to die. Then 3 of my schoolmates from Nagykanizsa grabbed me, they simply sat on me and started to explain me that I shouldn’t be stupid, that I would endure and they would, too. Not everyone worked among such conditions as I did. And that I shouldn’t fool about but keep quiet. They sat on me during a half night. They saved my life, but unfortunately none of them lives anymore. On the next day they made new commandos, and they assigned me to the warehouse commando. This meant that I had to work in a warehouse. The warehouses were half roofed barn-like buildings, open on the side. And it happened that they found out that I could write and read in German. They assigned me to the gas-cylinder warehouse, to the hydrogen, oxygen, acetylene gas, and all kinds of huge cylinders, and I gave them out, and I kept a record of the number of cylinders each commando took, and as physical labor I loaded, I thought I would shit in my pants, because a cylinder weighed 80 kilograms, and I might have been around 50. And finally one of the workers from there realized that it was stupid to lift them, I only had to tilt them a little bit and roll them. They taught me how to roll a cylinder and how to keep the record, and everything.
Once, when there was lineup for the march back from work, the submachine-gun of one of the mad SS discharged, probably not on purpose. Three bullets went into my right leg, I sat down and said, ‘Oh my God’ and when we marched in I limped and went straight to the hospital. They treated my leg nicely, smeared it with one of those four ointments, and bandaged it with a bandage like crepe paper. They put gauze and cotton on it, bandaged it in all three places, and sent me back to the barrack, saying that I couldn’t stay in the hospital. I said I didn’t even want to stay there, because I knew what was what already. I went to work with my injured leg, I limped a little bit, but I still went, and because I didn’t really strain myself, because I only had to roll about 25 cylinders there and back each day, and I mostly sat and wrote, it didn’t really affect me. But the wound became poisoned and it became swollen. Then they told me that I had to stay in the hospital, otherwise I would have died in 4 days if they had left it so. People died of blood-poisoning. They operated it and I was admitted into the hospital.
In the Lager there was no typhus, not even petechial typhus, because there was delousing every week. And generally, they didn’t bring in epidemics. They did bring in scabies, but there wasn’t any among us. There was bathing monthly, but every morning we had to wash with cold water down to our waist. One couldn’t exist without that, because it was obligatory. So the scabies spread, and a disease called ukrainska, because that also came from the Ukrainians. That was like a choleric diarrhea. A diarrhea which came out of one just like water or coffee. One couldn’t hold it back, everyone crapped himself, I did too, when I got it. Simply there wasn’t enough time not only to go to the toilet, but to take off one’s trousers. Everything came out of us. One could get dehydrated because of this, it was very dangerous, but the old prisoners told us that there was one way to get better, otherwise most people died of it, namely to not eat and drink at all for 24 hours. A complete Yom Kippur.
The Germans were very afraid of the petechial typhus. Every Saturday afternoon there was lice control, and they gave us new shirts and underwear. One couldn’t get some wonderful shirt or underwear. Some old ones, it wasn’t always clean, but it had been disinfected. They brought them from the disinfecting room, the smell of the chlorine could be still felt on them, and we could rip them off safely, because after a while we got another one. Otherwise we learned it from the old prisoners, that that was the way to solve it. There wasn’t any toilet paper and handkerchief. The handkerchief was the inside of my cap, and the external part was my shoe polisher.
After cleaning our shoes we got breakfast. We had to go to the block-stube, or to the tagesraum – that’s what they called the 3 by 8 meter small room which was separated in the front of the barrack, where the barrack commander and the Stubedienst [Editor’s note: inmate responsible for the order of the block.], namely the room servants lived, and there the room servants stood on two sides: one gave ma a piece of bread, the other one put that small thing on it, a third one poured half a liter of coffee into my mess-tin. Which was otherwise sweet, warm and bad, but we weren’t allowed to drink water. We drank coffee, and the next time soup. When everyone got his food then there was roll-call right away, because before marching out they counted everyone in front of the barrack. And at the gate again. When they counted us, we had to stand there with smeared shoes, and eaten breakfast. Those who couldn’t eat their food, it was their problem, or they had to put it away. There was no pocket on our clothes, was there? One had to position it so that it wouldn’t fall. We either ate the marmalade, or cut the bread and put the marmalade between the two pieces and held the bread with our shirt, we pressed it with the sleeve of our jacket. We lined up in front of the barrack, and the capo counted and checked who was missing. It was forbidden to stay in the barrack, because they beat up those who did, but if someone was ill or had some problem could go to the doctor. The only person who was a doctor at the hospital officially was doctor Konig [Edmund König], he was an SS doctor, he didn’t stay there. But the ex-director of the medical clinic in Vienna, doctor Vass from Kolozsvar [today Romania], the director of the dental clinic were there as prisoners, the most excellent doctors were there under the pretext of being hospital attendants, who could treat us the way they could, and with what they had. There was no penicillin yet at that time. Those who had some kind of disease got Ultraseptil, and they either got better, or they didn’t. And for example in case of injury there were four kinds of unguents. Boric Vaseline, zinc Vaseline and that black ointment which smelled like tar, called Ichtiol, and there was a brown one, which smelled a little bit like chocolate called Pellidol. At the hospital there wasn’t selection once a month, but once a week. And if someone spent 2 weeks at the hospital, in whatever shape he was, even if he would have gotten better the next day, was gassed.
After they counted us, as many as we were out of the 500, with the exception of the sick ones, we set off, walking in step, in rows of five, because the SS counted us again at the gate. And so that we would walk in step, there was a band, a brass band, I think with 8 or 10 musicians, who happened to be gypsies, and the band was called Music Capo. They played the best light opera tunes, and there was a small stand inside the gate, and they stood there and played until everyone marched out, and they always marched out the last, and marched in the first. They worked just like everyone else, but they were careful so that their fingers wouldn’t get hurt. There was a trumpet player, a cymbalist, a small drummer, a big drummer, but it was a brass band and it functioned. On the way the vorarbeiters, that is, the foremen, who were the alternates of the capos, kept running next to us and in front of us and they kept shouting ‘in straight lines’. This meant that we had to align ourselves with the one in front of us, because they could only count the people easily by fives. Because the Lager was on the other side of the road in comparison to the factory, they simply blocked the Krakow-Auschwitz main road with a chain of guards while we marched in and out. The chain of guards was made of two rows of guards with a rifle or a submachine-gun, and dogs, they stood there about 100 meters long, at 5 meters from each other. At noon we got a half an hour lunch break, I think, perhaps at 1, I don’t remember anymore. And we worked until dusk. The workday wasn’t determined in hours, but it depended on the daylight. Because by the time it got dark, even the last person had to be in the camp. So in the winter the workday was shorter than in the summer. And we set off later, because in the dark, until day-break none of the prisoners was allowed to leave the Lager. And when we marched it, we marched the same way, with music.
In the Lager we talked very much about food at first. About what we were going to eat at home. Then we got out of this habit. The truth is, that after I had had a good cry when they took my cap, and after I had experienced what my life in the camp was like, from then on I focused on starving the least possible, on not being very cold and to be beaten rarely. It didn’t matter to me anymore whether I would be liberated or would die, what happened to my family. Because, how should I put it, one couldn’t do anything with these thoughts. And I feel ashamed forever, and I will never forgive the Germans for this, that during these 2 months they made me accept it as an order. I mean that if I would have tried and survived for a couple years, then I would have become a vorarbeiter or a Stubedienst. I imagined a Lager career for myself, and nothing else outside the Lager. Apart from the fact that I could have died any time. How should I say it, that wasn’t a topic in itself. Who lives, lives, who has died, died. They selected someone, oh well, they did.
We had loss regularly, and the selection was ordered by the IG monthly, because most of the people, usually 10 percent, was in poor health. And they usually selected 1000 people each month. Those who were selected were gassed, and after that they brought another 1000, so the people shifted about continually. Until the 20th August I was in this so called Werkstatt [German for workshop]. The schedule was so that we worked until noon on Saturdays, and we got the afternoons off, so we were in the Lager. Louse control, cleaning, straw mattress filling, such activities. And among the Sundays there were so called free Sundays, but then we couldn’t live social life, but rested in the barrack and were happy that we were alive. On the other Sundays all the Lager had to go to work. Well, the 20th of August was a free Sunday, and the Americans, who had never bombed neither Birkenau, nor the rails, attacked the IG Farben, and they plastered the workshop where I had worked with bombs, nothing remained of it.
I was desperate, I thought I was going to commit suicide, that they would send me somewhere to work, and I said that I would rather run against the wire fence instead of struggling with the cable commando, here and there, outdoors. Because cable-laying was a very difficult work, it was the most difficult. At that time there were only leaden cables, one meter of that weighed 120 kilograms. First that had to be pulled out, unrolled from the drum, and before that the cable trench had to be dug. When they dug the cable trench the cable commando was happy, because that was an easy job. Because when the cable had to be pulled out, it was inhuman, very few survived it. I knew someone, he was from Nagykanizsa, who survived the cable commando. Everyone admired him. And I knew that I couldn’t endure this difficult work only for a couple weeks, and that they would select me for gassing, and I could go to die. Then 3 of my schoolmates from Nagykanizsa grabbed me, they simply sat on me and started to explain me that I shouldn’t be stupid, that I would endure and they would, too. Not everyone worked among such conditions as I did. And that I shouldn’t fool about but keep quiet. They sat on me during a half night. They saved my life, but unfortunately none of them lives anymore. On the next day they made new commandos, and they assigned me to the warehouse commando. This meant that I had to work in a warehouse. The warehouses were half roofed barn-like buildings, open on the side. And it happened that they found out that I could write and read in German. They assigned me to the gas-cylinder warehouse, to the hydrogen, oxygen, acetylene gas, and all kinds of huge cylinders, and I gave them out, and I kept a record of the number of cylinders each commando took, and as physical labor I loaded, I thought I would shit in my pants, because a cylinder weighed 80 kilograms, and I might have been around 50. And finally one of the workers from there realized that it was stupid to lift them, I only had to tilt them a little bit and roll them. They taught me how to roll a cylinder and how to keep the record, and everything.
Once, when there was lineup for the march back from work, the submachine-gun of one of the mad SS discharged, probably not on purpose. Three bullets went into my right leg, I sat down and said, ‘Oh my God’ and when we marched in I limped and went straight to the hospital. They treated my leg nicely, smeared it with one of those four ointments, and bandaged it with a bandage like crepe paper. They put gauze and cotton on it, bandaged it in all three places, and sent me back to the barrack, saying that I couldn’t stay in the hospital. I said I didn’t even want to stay there, because I knew what was what already. I went to work with my injured leg, I limped a little bit, but I still went, and because I didn’t really strain myself, because I only had to roll about 25 cylinders there and back each day, and I mostly sat and wrote, it didn’t really affect me. But the wound became poisoned and it became swollen. Then they told me that I had to stay in the hospital, otherwise I would have died in 4 days if they had left it so. People died of blood-poisoning. They operated it and I was admitted into the hospital.
Period
Interview
Ferenc Leicht