Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz

by József Debreczeni

we have not seen a woman—neither old nor young—for months. The reason is hidden more deeply. We’ve been living amid horribly disfigured, revoltingly deformed human bodies. In a chamber of horrors full of sores and boils oozing disgust. Our twisted imaginations debase our earthly vessels, our own bodies and those of others, into nauseating cadavers.

I recall what I heard a doctor say lately. The key to it all is this: fat. Just about anyone at death’s door can be yanked back to life with a quarter kilogram of butter or lard. But where to buy a quarter kilogram of that? The fat and the barely boiled liver pour life into me.

Fateful events are piling up outside the barbed wire. Cologne fell at the beginning of March. The Allies have crossed the Rhine. The fight is raging for Berlin. Ten-ton bombs are showering by the thousands on German cities in ruins. In the second half of March, Frankfurt, Mannheim, and Danzig capitulate. After storming through Hungary, the Soviet forces are advancing into Austria and are at the gates of Vienna.

With the first day of spring, a new clamor bursts into the cacophony of the camp. Cannon fire!

Word has it that the liberators have stopped and have dug themselves in at Schweidnitz. So we must wait. Others claim that Dörnhau isn’t in the direction of the Soviet advance at all. They’ve gone around us. Both versions are equally dispiriting.

Liberators being Russian troops.

Disenchanted, we turn our attention back to picking lice off ourselves. We feel that the final chance has vanished into nothing. Once more the dying have no will to live; no longer do they grasp spasmodically at the straws of consciousness. Starvation, edema, typhus … Embittered, we shudder awake.… Here again is apathy, that numbing half sleep that sees us withdrawing into ourselves.

The camp staff postpones its packing. Transports neither arrive nor depart any longer. Newcomers don’t occupy the places of our dead. The overcrowding diminishes and the bunks empty out at a frightening pace. Nor is food served regularly anymore. The kitchen operates only at times, and even then just bunker soup is prepared. We get bread every other day. Provisions are dwindling, and there isn’t even a hint of being resupplied. To make up for this we get two tablespoons of sugar a day: it seems the supply is larger. For those with diarrhea, sugar is poison, but they devour it greedily. The result: a rise in deaths among them.

The kitchen workers impatiently pound away at the gate. Long minutes pass without reply. Without thinking, one of them grasps the handle and pushes it down. The gate opens wide. The guards didn’t even lock it. During this night, for the first time after so many months, we had been free again—without knowing it.… People rush outside. There is no one in front of the gate. The watchtower’s signal light is on, but the guard is nowhere to be seen. There’s no one even in the administration building, the local headquarters of the SS. The rooms are in disarray, with evidence of packing in a rush. The camp is empty. Tearful shouting erupts from throats all around, spreading like wildfire in this house of death: “They’ve fled!… The gray ones have fled!”

Perhaps it is not surprising that at such moments we belch up the most hideous instincts, whose seedlings have been watered by paranoid barbarism so attentively over the course of the past six years. So too, I seek to understand why, in that initial tumult of rapture, food and care do not find their way to the lame. The bedridden are now even more abandoned and the dying are dropping dead even more pitifully than yesterday. And yet the storeroom pillagers are up to their knees in sugar, potatoes, and canned goods.

Wüstegiersdorf is uninhabited. Except for a few old people and those with typhus, the residents have fled. Only the panicking mayor, at a loss for what to do, has remained to receive the entering troops.

Farkas has been in town, too. He reports: “Those few people who’ve stayed behind have no idea when the Russians might arrive. I’ve otherwise been able to confirm that my old notion is correct: The Nazis are not only murderers. They are also cowards. Their bootlicking, which knows no bounds, is revolting. Right before our eyes they make a big show of ripping up and spitting on Hitler pictures. They have the gall to claim and even to swear that they hadn’t a clue what thousands of people were undergoing in their immediate proximity. They believed that this was a run-of-the-mill POW camp; so they insist.

All this is naturally a despicable lie, for barely three kilometers away there’s a women’s camp, too. They must have known about that.…”

Nearly everyone from the camps that weren’t used as hospitals went on the road. Where? The answer to that question was clear: home! How? That much, no one knew.

The officer addresses us, the interpreter translating his words to German. He announces that within a few hours medical squadrons will arrive along with the troops. We’ll get all necessary help without delay. “Down with fascism! Long live freedom!” With that, he completes his short, soldierly speech.

The Soviet officer who first discovered the prisoners.

We are no longer in Germany: this, too, is happiness. Silesia has become part of Poland. Two days ago Wüstegiersdorf reverted to its former, Polish name. From now on it’s called Gierzcze-Pustének.