Castles’s Reviews > People in Auschwitz > Status Update

There is another burden that we have to bear. Many years later I caught myself instinctively asking myself when I met a person, “How would he have behaved in Auschwitz? Would he have stood the test or failed?”

“When the ovens were burning, the leaping flame was five meters high and could be seen from the railroad station which was full of civilians. No one said anything. There also were furlough trains that often stopped in Auschwitz. Sometimes the whole station was fogged; then the Wehrmacht officers looked out the window and asked why there was such a sweet smell. But no one had the courage to ask, What’s going on?

Among the guards there were some individuals who suffered nervous breakdowns in the face of the mass murders. Jan Pilecki heard about an SS man who was evidently rendered insane by a campaign in which primarily Jewish children were gassed. He is said to have been gassed together with the children when he began to rave. A guard told Thomas Geve that many SS men became mad.

physician Janina Kowalczykowa confirms the stoppage of menstruation. She agrees that in addition to malnutrition there was a psychic component, namely constant fear. Even women who received above-average nourishment lost their period, The Russian commission that examined the inmates remaining in the camp after the liberation came to the conclusion that 97 percent of the women had no period during their imprisonment.

On another occasion Lengyel observed him attacking an unfortunate inmate and smashing her skull with his cudgel. Kramer’s portrait is filled out by his wife’s statement before a British military court. She testified: “The children have been everything to my husband. He is such a music lover.”

Rudolf fucking Höss: “Only in these Polish prisons did I learn what humaneness is. I, who as commandant of Auschwitz did so much damage and caused so much suffering to the Polish people [...], encountered a human understanding that often made me feel profoundly ashamed—not only from the top officials but also from the simplest guards. Many of them were former inmates of Auschwitz or other camps.”