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 IV

 

Chapter 4: Bookkeeper of Death in Auschwitz

• On 8 June 1943 the last transport arrived from Thessaloniki. Our presence was no longer necessary in Birkenau. They needed us in the central offices.
• The camp was entirely surrounded by a double row of electrified fences. Located at regular intervals were guard towers, from which SS-men watched the camp grounds. They also had powerful spotlights that rotated to the left and the right to illuminate the camp.
• Outside the men’s camp, not far from the gate, stood another building with its own electrified fence. That building was called the ‘Stabsgebäude’, the staff building. It housed about 300 women who worked for the SS, just as we had worked in the PA.
• Our clothes always had to be clean and tidy. In order to protect their health, the SS demanded cleanliness from the prisoners who came in contact with them, and the ‘faultless appearance of their clothes!’
• They put my mother and me to work in the ‘Todesabteilung’ (section of the dead). This section’s job was, from day to day, to prepare death-certificates for deceased male and female prisoners who had not come to the camp on the RSHA trains, as we had, but rather from prisons or who had been captured in raids, and also for those who died in the camp from hunger, hardship, typhus, beatings, torture and so on.
• For prisoners the SS killed for fun or amusement, or other reasons, the death-certificate would list as the cause of death ‘Auf der Flucht gestorben’, which meant they had died while trying to escape.
• Every time a Christian died, a ‘letter’ was sent to the family expressing the administration’s condolences and stating the cause of death. Each letter ended with a postscript asking if the relatives would like to receive the ashes of the deceased, and if so, to send a certain amount of marks to cover the costs.
• The people on the SB lists had received ‘special treatment’, in other words they had been killed in the gas chambers.
• Often I was alone in the office and had some free time. First I read my Polish colleague’s files. They were all political prisoners and had been held in Auschwitz since 1940. This is the reason why their numbers were so low.
• In 1986 my fellow prisoner Lore Shelley interviewed all the survivors of our Kommando who wanted to tell about their experiences and their job for the camp’s Gestapo. Her book, Secretaries of Death is very enlightening.
• Despite the attempt by the SS to destroy anything they put down in writing, not everything has been lost, and the documents are available to everybody who wants to study them, in the Auschwitz museum, in Yad Va’shem, and in other archives.
• One day – it must have been the middle of July 1943 – they called me to the office of the SS-man Perry Broad to work as an interpreter. There was a prisoner there in bad shape, a real Muselmänn.
• He was wearing a prisoner’s striped outfit, and in his hand he was nervously clutching the cap that all male prisoners wore. He was in a frantic state and was talking loudly in Greek. He talked so fast and was so out of breath that at first I could not understand him. Tears were streaming from his eyes.
• He tried to explain to the SS-man that he was not Jewish, that he was on the train with the Jews by mistake. He had formerly sold koulouria, round bread sticks, at the station whenever a transport train departed.
• The last time he was swept along by the crowd, and the Germans shoved and forced people to walk even faster. Together with everybody else he was forced on to the train.
• ‘Explain to them,’ he was saying, ‘you understand that I m not Jewish, I want them to understand this, too. Here, I will take off my trousers to show them I was never circumcised.’
• The Germans did not let him continue speaking. They grabbed him and threw him outside. I returned to my work. There was never a day in our offices when something upsetting did not happen.
• Once, to our great anxiety, they carried out a selection of thousands of Jewish prisoners who were in a bad state. The camp was again overcrowded, and space had to be freed for the Jews who kept arriving in thousands every day. We worked steadily until late in the night for nervous, angry SS-men who spurred us on: faster, faster!
• After a razzia (police raid) in the women’s camp at Birkenau, I found the names of my dear classmates Dorin Kovo and Rita Saltiel while reading the lists. Fifty years later, even today I feel my heart contract, and the same sob I felt then sticks in my throat.
• Over the grapevine, news of the war sometimes penetrated into the camp – even that the Germans were starting to lose. Suddenly a ray of hope would light up our hearts, only to dim again the next day.
• A Polish prisoner was the physician, a Dr Vasilevsky. After he examined my mother, he told her she had mastoiditis and he would have to operate without an anaesthetic. ‘Woe to both of us if you cry out,’ he warned her.
• My mother suffered through the painful operation without uttering a sound. She herself does not remember how she managed to walk back to our block.
• All the prisoners to be punished had to first go through an ‘interrogation’ by the PA Department. ‘Interrogation’ meant torture, and one of the worst torturers was SS Staff-Sergeant Friedrich Wilhelm Boger. Many times in the evening my workmates would talk to us about the ‘interrogations’. They were themselves terribly shaken, for the prisoner’s screams of desperation and pain echoed in their ears incessantly, making sleep impossible.
• Once, when the day was especially ‘torturing’, as Aranka told me characteristically, she grabbed my arm and with tears in her eyes said: ‘Listen my little one, listen carefully to all that we say to you and try never to forget anything you see and hear in this place. You might survive. I certainly will not, and then you must speak out and tell what happened here.’
• Fortunately, both Aranka and Maryla survived, and they have also told of their experiences in Lore Shelley’s book.
• The black wall that joined Blocks 10 and 11 was the wall where executions were held. Block 10 was the block where experiments were performed on prisoners by Dr Mengele and Professor Dr Clauberg.
• The transports from Greece were arriving one after the other at that time (1943-44), and from these transports they would choose young girls, ‘virgins’ and young married women. Among others, they experimented in hopes of finding ways to sterilize men and women faster and more effectively.
• When I returned from the camp I wanted to talk to people, to tell them what happened in the concentration camps, to make them understand the level of brutality and inhumanity to which people could sink when they let themselves be possessed by their worst instincts.
• The few times I tried to talk about my experiences, I realized that everything I had said was so horrifying that it seemed unbelievable that these things could have happened.
• People wanted neither to listen to me nor to believe my story. They would look at me as if I were from a different planet, and I could read in their eyes: ‘Stop, I think you are exaggerating, things like that don’t happen!’
• Little by little, all the burning memories came to be hermetically locked away in the back of my mind. I had to live, to find myself, to start my own family. “Leave things as they are, don’t poison your life or that of the people around you, it will not change anything anyway,’ I would tell myself.
• Fifty years later, when together with Alberto Nar we interviewed the few remaining survivors, I opened the hermetically sealed compartments of my mind. I learned more details about what happened in Block 10, and I could not sleep for many nights. Still, what they said was little in comparison with the horrible reality they had lived through.
• A colleague from the men’s camp came into the offices of the Politische Abteilung and whispered that they had taken ten men from Block 11 and hanged them on ten gallows which they had set up in front of the camp kitchen.
• They had called the men up for a roll call, forcing them to watch the execution as an example for anyone considering an escape attempt.
• One day no SS-personnel happened to be in the office. One of our colleagues called to my mother and me. We peered out the window at an endless line of trucks filled with prisoners hadaing for the gas chambers and crematoria.
• In one of the trucks we could see little children waving their hands. An unforgettable picture of the Sosnowitz transports was permanently printed in my mind.
• What shocked me most was when they caught prisoners who had escaped. The violent chase by the SS-men and their dogs, the prisoner’s agony, his frantic efforts to find a hiding place, his desperation.
• Every escape from the camp meant a new crisis. The SS-people became terribly tense and angry, as though they were personally offended. They took it out on the prisoners, keeping them standing at attention for hours in cold weather and hot until they determined who was missing.
• The fugitives who were not shot during their capture were put in the punishment detachment, where the living conditions and the work were even worse than hard labor. Most of them did not last long.
• The four new crematoria worked non-stop. Close to Christmas we heard of another big selection in the Birkenau women’s camp. They ‘selected’ and burned more than 1,000 women one day. At almost the same time 2,500 persons arrived from Theresienstadt.
• The year 1944 came without any change in our lives, without any hope. But something was stirring in the outside world. One of my colleagues found a newspaper on the desk of an SS-man and secretly read it. The news about the German war effort was not good. We would talk about it in our beds at night, full of excitement, wondering if something decisive would happen soon.

 

Chapter 5: Times of Terror and Hope of Survival

• The 26 March 1944 was a day like any other, but for me personally a very special day. It is the day on which I sensed what love, brotherhood, assistance and creativity there was in the camp despite all the torturers. For in this hell that they had created for us there was still a ray of sunshine.
• It was my birthday, and my friend did not want the occasion to pass unnoticed. When we returned from work that evening, I found a small flower on my bed, around which several items had been arranged.
• I stood there, my mouth open wide with surprise, and a lump in my throat from emotion that left me speechless. Even today when I remember this occasion it brings tears to my eyes.
• One day my mother and I were called to the office next door. A specialist in ‘racial science’ and his assistant had arrived from Berlin, and they had been allocated space to carry on their ‘research’. This ‘research’ consisted in making casts of heads representing the various ‘races’ found in the camp.
• Somebody from the SS had told the researchers that among the persons who worked there were two Greek women. It was an opportunity to make ‘heads’ of the Greek race.
• From the beginning there was a nucleus of resistance in the camp. At first it was rather limited and insignificant, but starting in mid-1944 and continuing thereafter it became quite important.
• The war news got worse and worse for the Germans. This seemed to make them more aggressive. The number of transports from the various countries of Europe to the camp increased.
• Eichmann came to the camp for an ‘inspection’ in early 1944. Between 80 and 100 prisoners were ordered to reinforce the special squads working in the gas chambers.
• The ‘transports’ continued to arrive in the same numbers from France, Belgium and Yugoslavia. Almost every day we had new arrivals by the thousands.
• Suddenly without warning, transports started arriving from Hungary, one after the other from the middle of May to early July 1944. The crematoria worked non-stop, yet still they could not keep up.
• They dug deep pits, threw wood and corpses into them and set them on fire. They burned the dead there, because the crematoria could not cope with such a massive influx.
• Dounia, one of the PA messengers, told us one day when the SS were away from the office that endless lines of people were standing outside the station waiting their turn to die in the gas chambers and be burned in the crematoria.
• ‘As I was coming here,’ she continued, ‘I saw women in their summer dresses, may holding a parasol to protect them from the sun, others holding their babies and children! They were waiting patiently – for what?’ This scene has remained burned into my memory all these years, as if I had watched it in person.
• The smell of burnt flesh lingered in the air, and at night the heavens were glowing red – and this went on for weeks that seemed unending. One time somebody brought news that the SS were throwing live infants and young children up to two years old into the flames in the fire pits they had constructed.
• ‘If we ever leave this place alive, I say to you again,’ my dear friend Aranka told me, ‘you must never forget this, and you must tell it, so the whole world will know what is happening here.’ She repeated these words exactly as she had done before.
• Throughout May, June and July of 1944 transports arrived daily from Hungary. The SS-people became extremely nervous and shouted constantly. Kirschner, the chief, was in a rage, and poor Edith Grünwald, his  secretary, used to come out of his office white as a sheet to pass on his orders. Often their breath reeked strongly of Schnapps, and they worked in a semi-drunken state.
• The transports continued. One transport from Poland contained 2,500 people, 80% of whom were children. A new transport arrived from Theresienstadt with 2,500 people. The grapevine went to work. For the Germans the news was very bad. Rumors said they had evacuated the camp at Lublin because the Russians were coming. Was this true? Was it possible?
• Suddenly an order came from the Staff Sergeant Kirschner: We are to collect all the files of those who had died up to now in the Auschwitz camp. They were loaded into a truck and, we learned later, were burned. ‘What is happening,’ we asked ourselves. They were covering their tracks.
• It was a beautiful day in September when we heard the alarm siren wail for a long time. This was the first time this had happened for us, and we were at a loss. Not only we, but also the SS.
• We could hear the SS giving orders, running about like madmen, shouting. We had just got into the basement when we heard bombs exploding, and the whole building shook.
• I don’t know how, but in the panic we found ourselves in the men’s camp, and the men and women prisoners were standing together. Suddenly, without realizing this at first, I saw my father supported by my brother to keep him from collapsing. I embraced him and he held me tight in his arms, crying.
• This did not last for long. The totally shocked SS-people, who had scattered to seek shelter, started to get a grip on themselves: shouting, beating and threatening us with their guns, they separated us in order to drive us back to our barracks.
• From the Birkenau offices a strange list arrived to be entered which included about 200 men’s names. At the end of the list was an ‘SB’ stamp, i.e., special treatment. They had started to liquidate the ‘witnesses’!
• One morning we learned that the gypsy camp had been totally liquidated. They gassed and burned 800 people in all.
• One day my colleague Willy Pajak from the Auschwitz office came and whispered to me, ‘Greece is free! The Germans have left.’
• Life went on in the camp. Every now and then we heard planes flying overhead, but nothing happened. It was already late November 1944. The SS destroyed Crematorium III and attempted to eradicate every trace.
• It was 6 January 1945, a date I will never forget. At the evening roll call all the women of the camp had to witness the hanging of four girls who worked in the ‘Union’. ‘This is how we punish all traitors.’
• One day, it must have been 10 or 12 January 1945, our Kommando received the order: ‘Drop everything you are doing and proceed to the crematorium.”
• When the door opened a sweet sickly smell forced its way into our nostrils. Holding our noses we entered. Decomposed corpses lay everywhere around us. We proceeded onward, passed through by an old gas chamber and entered another room where there were two huge ovens – a crematorium.
• An empty truck, on which corpses were piled and driven to the crematorium, was still standing there. All around us were skulls and bones and filth and a pervasive foul smell.
• An SS-man opened a door, and we found ourselves in a room with many rows of wooden shelves. Arranged in an orderly manner on the shelves, one next to the other, were big urns. We found ourselves in a huge ossuary, and our job was to ‘clean’ it.
• We formed a human chain leading to the entrance door of the crematorium, where the last girl gave the urns to the SS-men outside, who loaded them on to a waiting truck.
• For an instant I lost my grip on an urn, it slipped from my hand and fell to the ground. Ashes and bones covered me from head to feet.
• For three whole days we worked continuously without stopping. There must have been thousands of urns. One girl mentions 6,000 in her testimony. These urns obviously belonged to Christian prisoners who had died since the camp was set up: of hunger, hardship and torture – not in the gas chambers.

 

Chapter 6: Ravensbrück, Malchov and Liberation

Chapter 7: A new Life