Auschwitz
By SARAH GA1NHAM WARSAW ONCE having seen Auschwitz, the only place in Poland that the Poles don't mind you naming in German, it is impossible not to agree with Henry Moore; when he was judging the designs for an Auschwitz Memorial he wrote that for this task a Michelangelo would be needed and none was to be found. He told me that he doubted if any work of art could express Auschwitz because a work of art must by its nature have something of beauty in it. My own impression now, and it was by no means the first concentra- tion camp I had seen, is that any artist who feels he could express what this place means lacks the humility which must be the first condition of even looking at the ghost-thickened horror. It was an artist on a very different level, Miss. Josephine Baker, who had written in the visitors' book of the reception, block (then and now), among the banalities and the pompous self-righteousnesses, 71 n'y a que le silence.' For there is no way to tell anyone what Auschwitz is like.
Auschwitz was the general name for several camps which expanded from the original brick- built barracks and from the factories of the SS trade department around. Birkenau was the first and largest of the new areas. It was built of those long low wooden barracks, creosoted and with square windows and surrounded by wire, that were to be seen all over Central Europe after the war, the national symbol of the Herrenvolk. The fac- tories built by the work-commandos are still working, though no longer the property of Buna, I. G. Farben or Krupp as they were then. Of the survivors not one who was a citizen of Poland, as distinct from a Stateless DP who might well have been Polish, has ever received a penny of com- pensation from the deep coffers of Krupp or the inheritors of I. G. Farben.
Nobody knows, or ever will know now, how many died there. But probably over half a million Jews were gassed there directly, or almost directly, from the transports, They were selected at sight as they came off the trains on to the ramp—the line had been extended into the camp near the gas stations—and were never listed or even numbered. If the crematoria were overloaded they spent a day or so waiting to be gassed in a special enclosure. No rations -or water were delivered to that enclosure, since they were to die so soon and no work to be got out of them. Of those selected for work and of the non-Jewish prisoners another half a million more or less are missing from the lists of prisoners from first to last. And these are only the dead who cannot be accounted for.
For the killing, the gassing was no problem. After a couple of experiments with buildings and methods that problem was solved satisfactorily. The Cyklon B gas crystals were manufactured by 1. G. Farben and were delivered in tins rather like paint tins listed in stores and transportation lists as 'materials for the resettlement programme of the Jews in the East'; true enough as far as it went. The real problem was the cremating. Mass gassing worked, but they never really solved the cremation problem because mass cremations did not work out. When the piles got too much for them they would load the corpses on to trucks and drive them the short drive into the woods. Prisoners dug trenches and the naked dead were slung in, petrol poured over and burned in the open. It was unsatisfactory because of the smell, the chpncy results and the waste of petrol. The bones were loaded in wheelbarrows and thrown into the swamp ponds on the heath and in the woods. The ponds used to be deep, but now they are only a foot or so of water. The new bed is bone-scrap; you can see the white scraps glinting in the bog water. Until a year or so ago there were constant bubbles of gas breaking out of the ponds, but now the water is quite still; all the gas is dispersed.
The gas chambers and crematoria were bloiWn up before the SS evacuated the camp of Birkenau, and much of the barrack space as well. The occupants of the barracks had already started on their long walk. One column walked to Maut- hausen in Lower Austria. They started off, as a survivor told me in our common language, the tongue of his gaolers, about seventeen .hundred men. When we got there, he said, we were thirty- seven.
Some of the barracks had not been blown up in time. The female barracks those were; of the male barracks only the square brick chimney stacks still stood in rows. As I went past them slowly in the brilliant spring sunshine they were quiet and neutral behind their wire and the fattest of fat hares sat about in the thick grass, not even running from us. There were many birds; it was almost a natural bird sanctuary in the crumbling wooden barracks and the new, small bushes grow- ing up. Pheasants scuttled about. I wondered if the SS officers had shoots on their days off. Many of them must have been crack shots.
A rectangle of greened water was cut into strips by rough planking like bridges. These were the lavatories. Near by were rounded half-built brick buildings, and I asked the survivor what they were. 'They meant to use the latrine gas,' he said, 'and make fertilisers too. But there was something wrong with the designing and it didn't work, so they dropped the idea.' It doesn't seem possible, but then neither does the cut-off hair of the gassed women and you can see the hair, dusty masses of it heaped up behind glass, and the letters in German to a felt-making firm. All this property as well as the factories which used the SS-leased 'labour force were supposed to show a profit, the hair, the gold teeth, the bone-scrap for fertilisers. One of the SS-administrators, a Slovene from Trieste called Odilo Globocnik, got into trouble with his chiefs because he embezzled the takings and kept double books to cheat his superiors just like a business man dodging income tax.
I had expected the boring insult of propaganda jargon from the survivor. Though he must have been a Party pensioner, for he was a non-Jewish ex-political prisoner, there was none. I suppose the place itself with its crowded ghosts had cleaned him of it, for he talked calmly without hatred or any other emotion. Just as, the passing time and weather had cleaned the huts, the wire, the watch- towers and the woods of birch and pine of their filth. The filth of an enormous littleness, a malice of mean little minds that made a world in their own image.
In the finish the impression is of that small-scale meanness multiplied by millions but remaining small. Looking back over years of puzzled thought and reading there is no result; one still has no idea how it could have happened. The end impression is bathos, a horrible clownishness.
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