Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz

by József Debreczeni

He understands the psychological trick that is being played on him and the rest of the häftlinge, or prisoners, directing their loathing away from the lords of the Auschwitz universe and toward those who, to secure their own survival, have become the masters’ henchmen. It is a “diabolically imaginative Nazi system” that understands and exploits human nature, including that “old supposition—proven true on countless occasions—that the best slave driver is a slave accorded a privileged position.” The Nazis can maintain total control over three thousand men with just two hundred men of their own in part because they have guns, but also because they have deployed the timeless stratagem of the conqueror: divide and rule. Debreczeni describes all this as both guinea pig in and observer of a vicious social experiment. He is struck not only by the speed with which a new pecking order takes shape, how fast a fresh kapo kingpin is surrounded by courtiers, but also by the pattern that prevails among the Jewish members of the enforcer class: “Such towering figures of the Auschwitz hierarchy were recruited from among those who, back home, had stood on the bottom rungs of Jewish society. Those who’d made nothing of themselves—schnorrers, nebbishes, schlemiels, freeloaders, rogues, swindlers, idlers, slackers—all blossomed in this swamp.”