FROM THESSALONIKI TO AUSCHWITZ AND BACK
MEMORIES OF A SURVIVOR FROM THESSALONIKI
ERIKA MYRIAM KOUNIO AMARIGLIO
VALLENTINE MITCHELL 2000
Translated into English by Theresa Sundt (neé Amariglio) Thessaloniki 1998
PART III
Chapter 3: Arrival in Auschwitz and Birkenau
• It was 20 March 1943. Another stop, but this time they opened the doors. Wild cries, dogs barking, noise.
• It was pitch dark and huge spotlights pierced the darkness, blinding us. ‘Climb out at once!’ they were yelling. ‘Faster ! Faster!’ – but nobody understood.
• Stunned by the long journey, stiff, hungry, frightened, desperate, everyone tried to jump out of the railroad cars, throwing their bundles and suitcases to the ground.
• There was confusion, screaming. The SS were running about everywhere, some with revolvers in their hands, others with whips, shouting ‘Come on! Come on! Out! Out! Faster! Faster!’
• The SS-men held dogs on leashes, and the dogs barked ferociously. Baring their teeth and growling, they tried to break loose and throw themselves on us. I still remember, as though it were happening now, how I looked at them in complete astonishment. It suddenly struck me that I could not tell who were the more savage, the SS-men or their dogs.
• The cold was terrible, it froze our faces, hands and feet. We were chilled to the bone. Mothers held their babies tightly in their arms, and the older children clung to their skirts.
• In front of the railroad cars, apart from the SS, there were men in striped clothes with shaven heads. They assisted people in climbing out of the railroad cars. They tried to tell us something, their eyes filled with horror and sympathy.
• They were prisoners in the crematorium detachment, trying to assemble our baggage. How many of them met their own relatives and friends in this way … How horrifying!
• Father, confused and frightened like the rest of us, pushed us to one side. ‘Don’t move from the spot,’ he told us.
• The Germans shouted out orders: ‘All the children, the elderly, the ill and the women go to this side.’
• After a while the officer in charge of our transport and an SS-man, approached us. They stopped my father, who was about to push us towards the crowd going to the trucks.
• The SS-man asked him, ‘Are you and your wife the ones who speak German? ‘Yes,’ answered father and added, ‘My children also speak very good German!’
• ‘How old are they?’ This time father made us two to three years older, insisting, ‘They are seventeen/eighteen.’
• How many tragic scenes remain unforgettable in my mind. Mothers whose children were taken away – running after them so that they wouldn’t be separated. Old people calling to their child who remained behind. They snatched a young woman’s baby by force and pushed her to the other side. Screams, sobs, farewells. And the smartly dressed SS-men shouting and raging in their midst.
• Everything had happened so quickly! All the people who got off the train had disappeared with the trucks. None of our travelling companions were there anymore, there was just us and some SS-men.
• After some time a car with a Red Cross emblem finally stopped in front of us. ‘Climb in,’ an SS-man told us, and off we went.
• ‘Coincidences had saved us: all four of us spoke German, and because of my mother’s despair we were in the first transport. What a coincidence it was that of the 2,800 people in the first transport, there was no one else who could speak German. And the Germans needed people to act as interpreters.
• Fifty years later I reread facts the Germans themselves recorded. I feel the same terrible sense of resignation at this unbelievable, horrible, unheard-of event. The Germans wrote that on 20 March 1943 an RSHA (the Nazi Department of Security, organized in 1939) transport from Greece arrived. About 2,800 Jewish men, women and children from the Thessaloniki ghetto were on board. After the selection, 417 men were admitted to the camp (among them my father, who was given the number 109564, and my brother, 109565) and 192 women (among them my mother 38911, and myself, 38912).
• The rest of the ‘persons’ – people like you and me, like your mother, your grandmother, your aunt, your father, your grandfather and your brothers and sisters – 2,191 people in all – a number reached by adding up individual ‘human lives’ – were immediately trucked away and put to death in gas chambers.
• And this was just the first transport from Greece – I am not talking about the others who came before us from all over Europe – and I am not talking about the remaining 15 transports that followed from the ghetto in Thessaloniki, with approximately the same number in each transport, until a total of 46,000 Thessalonikian Jews had arrived; – of whom 96% were put to death on arrival.
• It is unimaginable, so frightening and inconceivable, so difficult to believe.
• For the first time after many years I started to read more and more of the depositions of witnesses. I became outraged over and over again, as if I were not myself a former inmate of one of history’s most terrible extermination camps.
• And to top all those feelings, my exasperation flared up even more when I read the written orders of the SS and even more their reports, the photographs, the pedantically detailed records with all the details, many of which we saved despite the National Socialist’s efforts to destroy all the evidence.
• Together with the survivors’ testimonies there are documents that the SS did not destroy, preserving their orders, meetings, photographs and films.
• A young school child visited an exhibition organized in 1993 by the Jewish community of Thessaloniki, which included photographs and many objects connected with the Holocaust. He asked his father, full of astonishment: ‘But were the Germans really stupid enough to keep all these records?’
• It was around 2.30 or 3.00 a.m. when mother and I arrived at our destination. We had stopped on the way there, and my brother and father had disappeared in the custody of an SS-officer. I can still remember my father’s look and feel his hand clasping mine before he climbed out.
• The car stopped in front of a building. It was pitch dark all around us, a knock on the door, and a woman opened with a questioning expression. She wore a striped dress with a white kerchief on her head. She looked half asleep.
• ‘Keep them here, they will stay for a few days until they are picked up,’ said the SS-man who had accompanied us, and then he left.
• The door closed and ‘Maria’ – that was her name – plied us with questions. ‘Who are you? Where are you from? Why didn’t they take you with the rest of them? How is it that you speak German? Who is protecting you?’
• After a six-day trip in the railroad car, sitting up the whole time, we were finally permitted to lie down. It seemed to me that I had slept for only five minutes when a very loud ringing woke us up.
• It was 4.30 a.m. and around me I saw the women, whom I mistook for men when we arrived in the night, quickly getting ready.
• We asked where all the people had been taken who got into the trucks. For a moment dead silence reigned, a few women started to drift away from us, and two or three of them began to tell us the unbelievable, the unheard of: ‘They don’t exist any more, they burned them all, they are smoke rising from the smoke stacks…’
• Our misfortune to be in the first transport was actually our good fortune. Thanks to a coincidence we had been spared the first experience, the terrible shock that all the newcomers went through when they entered the camp gates. How lucky we were – to this day I can hardly believe it.
• Sarika described to me her first shock three days later when they took my mother and me to Birkenau concentration camp to cut our hair, tattoo a number on our left arm and bring us to the barrack housing the office of the ‘Political Department’, the camp Gestapo, where we were to work as translators and interpreters.
• When they were led away from the station, the girls had to walk in the cold, the coldest night of their lives, to a large barrack – the delousing block. ‘We were shaking,’ she told me, ‘from the cold, the frost, the hardship, hunger and the terrible fear that had taken hold of us.’
• ‘They ordered us to undress and to wait. To wait for what? For how long? How embarrassed I felt standing stark naked while the SS-men walked around us, how humiliating, how degrading!’
• ‘After a long time, it seemed to me like years, we proceeded to a room where women prisoners in striped outfits were cutting our hair with quick clumsy, abrupt movements. We looked at each other in despair and didn’t recognize each other.’
• ‘They took us to the showers. At the entrance they gave us a rock-hard piece of soap to wash with. The water alternated between boiling hot and ice cold.’
• Then, after registration and receiving a serial number, their number was tattooed on to their left arm. Now they were all numbers in the concentration camp. Who knew for how long?
• Sarika hurriedly told me all this, her voice despairing, in a corner of the latrine where we accidentally met. She also told me that she was supposed to work in the labor detachments which worked outside the camp.
• Already on this first day in Auschwitz we learned all the details about what exactly an extermination camp was. The information the girls gave us before they went to work was supplemented by Maria, as we helped her with her chores.
• She told us about the gas chambers, about the crematoria where they burned the corpses so nothing would remain. She told us about the selections that were made twice a day, every day.
• I did not believe her until I had experienced and seen everything with my own eyes.
• On the left side of our ‘dress’ we had to sew the number they gave us printed on a white strip of fabric. On the right side we wore two triangles, a yellow one and a red one, one on top of the other, forming a star of David. In the middle of the star was printed a letter ‘G’ for Greece.
• The Christian ‘political prisoners’ wore only a single red triangle. If they were not ‘political’ prisoners, they wore ‘angles’ of a different color, green for criminals, pink for homosexuals, black for ‘asocial persons’, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses. In this way we knew immediately how each prisoner was classified by the Nazis.
• The living conditions in Birkenau were appalling. There was an endless plot of land with a row of identical wood barracks, the so-called ‘blocks’ where the prisoners lived as long as they survived.
• Inside there were the three-level bunk beds. They were wide enough for three or four people, but there were never less than eight or ten people in them. On top of the slats were straw-filled sacks intended to serve as ‘mattresses’ and two or three thread-bare, lice-infested wool blankets.
• Every night before we went to bed we examined our clothes for lice. We sat half-naked in the freezing room, huddled on our ‘beds’, searching the seams of our clothes for lice. Then, pressed against each other to keep warm, we tried to sleep.
• Every day, early at dawn, they woke us up with bells and wild shouting. ‘Quick! Get dressed! Come out for the roll call.’ Without anything warm to drink, still half asleep, we had to get out in the cold and stand in rows until the SS and the person in charge of the block came and counted us.
• The SS-men came half-an-hour later, wearing warm winter coats and holding dogs on leashes. With an air of superiority and hardness, the SS walked up and down counting us. We stood at attention, motionless, waiting. If the number was correct, everything was in order and we could return to our block.
• But most of the time something was not in order. Prisoners often died during the night and no one noticed. The block would be searched until they found the inmate who had died or was too ill to get up.
• Many girls, unable to endure this any longer, ended their own lives. They would throw themselves against the electric fences, and in the morning they were found dead, their flesh burned to the wires.
• A picture of Birkenau as it was then still haunts my dreams at night.
• Every day after roll call each department’s kapo would assemble the women in uniform rows of five and then they were ready to pass through the big gates of the camp.
• On the left side of the gate the camp ‘orchestra’ stood and played military marches until all the prisoners had passed through. On the other side stood the camp’s chief physician with two SS-women selecting the thinnest, palest and most terrified prisoners who were sent to Block 25 and from there to the gas chambers.
• An additional selection took place late in the afternoon at the return from work.
• After our hair had been shaved off and a number tattooed on our arms, they led us to a barrack, a ‘block’, where we were to work in future. That was the office of the Politische Abteilung (PA), the camp Gestapo, the SS.
• The PA was the most important office the Germans had in the camp. All the orders for the camp were sent there and then passed on. That is where they kept detailed records of all the events that happened every day everywhere in the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps.
• That is where they kept all the lists with the names of the people who had passed the selection and those who would be sent to the gas chambers. All the orders from the RSHA, all orders for executions, all interrogations, everything was steered from the PA.
• In order to run the camp administration, the SS employed mostly women prisoners and a few men as ‘personnel’.
• Lore Shelley called her book about the prisoners who worked in the PA Secretaries of Death (New York: Shengold, 1986), because it was well known that anyone who worked for the crematoria would never leave the camp alive.
• Not because of hardship or hunger, but because they were the most important witnesses to the German crimes. This is the reason why they regularly replaced the people working in these Kommandos. They killed them in the gas chambers and then replaced them so there would be no witnesses.
• My mother’s job was to write the newcomers’ personal facts on a specially printed form, i.e., the name and surname of each prisoner. Every time she wrote a name on the special forms, Sarah had to be written next to a woman’s name, Israel next to a man’s name.
• In the Auschwitz museum the printed forms have been preserved with my brother’s and cousin Emilia’s names written on 20 March 1943. Although the SS destroyed many documents before they abandoned the camp to the Russians, they didn’t succeed in destroying everything and making every document disappear as they wanted to. By another ‘coincidence’, my brother’s and my cousin’s forms were among those not destroyed.
• I usually went to any of the secretaries who needed me to act as an interpreter. The transports from Greece arrived one after the other.
Chapter 4: Bookkeeper of Death in Auschwitz