Under the onslaught of concentration camp despondency. Part Two

How to cite: Chylińska, M. Under the onslaught of concentration camp despondency. Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, T., trans. Medical Review – Auschwitz. February 2, 2019. https://www.mp.pl/auschwitz/. Originally published as “Pod naporem beznadziejności w obozie.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1987: 174–186.

Author

Mieczysława Chylińska, Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor, camp no. 44658, Ravensbrück and Neustadt-Glewe survivor.

Part Two

Loss of hope

I first noticed the phenomenon of loss of hope when I was in the Zugang (new prisoners’) block, soon after arriving in the camp. But I didn’t understand it well enough to recognise that it was one of the ways of destroying prisoners. As I have said already, my encounter with this block was a terrible shock, so terrible that at first I was not aware of where I was and what it all meant. I was so thrown off balance that I thought that the mud on the floor was not only on my feet but everywhere, everywhere within my field of vision.

As soon as I crossed the threshold of this block I was struck by its fetid stuffiness. It was only when I got up to the top doss or primitive cot that I noticed the wooden tubs near the door. They were dirty, stinking, and abhorrent. I realised that they must serve as the privy in this block which there was no intimate privacy at all. On seeing my surprise, an important-looking prisoner looked up and informed me in German that they were instead of latrines. I learned pretty soon that the Zugang block was a sort of quarantine preparing prisoners for the abnormalities and outrages to come. Its residents were to cotton on to the fact that what the SS-man at the gate with Arbeit macht frei over it had said about the short life ahead of them was certainly not an empty promise. So once and for all they had to give up the idea that they could get out of the concentration camp; that they had to come to terms with the fact that they were useless in Hitler’s new order in Europe. All this meant that as soon as night came I wanted something to happen to me. I could not imagine living in such terrible conditions. “Reality is bearable, because we haven’t yet experienced all of it. Or we haven’t experienced it all at the same time,” Zofia Nałkowska wrote in Medaliony (English edition Medallions), a collection of eight stories of Polish people who suffered Nazi German oppression.

Due to my breakdown I didn’t realise who my companions in this rather strange block were until some time had passed. What was worse, unlike myself in the ordinary striped Auschwitz gear, my fellow female inmates were given men’s grey-green working overalls to wear, with a Streife (stripe) made up of crosses painted in red varnish on the back. This and their shaven polls made them look more like men. It turned out they were Jewish women from Greece. Even though the concentration camp tried to make them look unsightly, in my eyes they were still attractive, good-looking, and elegant.

At one of the very first roll-calls I learned that there were 1,200 inmates plus a couple more in the women’s quarantine block. The huge quantity of them and the overcrowding due to the extreme congestion, was highly exhausting. It was precisely the quantity, not the number of inmates that accounted for the countless mass of “(camp) numbers.” And even though my companions turned out to be wonderfully quiet, having them all before my eyes at the same time made me squirm due to the surfeit of visual stimuli. From the very outset the restrained behaviour of the Greek girls seemed unnatural, especially when compared with the noisiness of the women in neighbouring blocks. I was surprised none of them tried to find out who I was and what I was like, while quite on the contrary, I was observing them with a lot of attention. I was also wondering why they showed concern only for their nearest and dearest, while I was interested both in them as an entire community as well as in its individual members. I wondered why their interpersonal exchanges were limited to a few sentences or even just a couple of words, and why they avoided establishing social relations with more people. And even though there were a lot of good points about their quietness, nevertheless in these particular circumstances it seemed unnatural.

I told myself that perhaps the reason for this were the language and cultural differences in the camp, or the different climate they came from – though of course the concept of culture stood in stark contrast to how the block was organised – and above all what could have crushed these Greek women were their experiences in the camp, just as my experiences had hit me very keenly. Often they would dismiss my interest with just a flick of the hand or a nod. The fact that these Greek women were in the quarantine block suggested that they could not have arrived in the camp very long before, though to tell the truth I had no information how long quarantine could last. Yet they still appeared to be physically fit, despite the sad look on their faces.

But their healthy appearance did not correspond at all with their high mortality rate. Every morning during roll-call outside the block there were about a dozen bodies which had breathed their last. I was alarmed to observe this time and time again. So they were dying, every day they were dying, Lord knows from what disease. When I asked an acquaintance why they had such a high death rate, she said, “When you see death every day it stops being something special, no-one gets sentimental about it. What’ll you gain by knowing the reason why they’re dying? It’s due to the concentration camp!” I got nothing more out of her. So I started telling myself, though I didn’t really believe it, that it must be that the Greek women had a lower biopsychological resilience, which given the ambient conditions, was killing them faster. It would have been too facile to imagine that they were dying, for instance, of homesickness for sunny Greece.

“Don’t they treat the sick here?” I kept asking my fellow-inmates. “When you’ve been here for long enough, you’ll see – they die at once.” I couldn’t understand what they die “at once” meant. When I kept on with my inquiries I was told, “They die because why should they continue to suffer, after all, they can’t expect to be freed.” Meanwhile every new day showed how many victims death was claiming “at once.” Every morning the Blockführerin (block functionary) fastidiously reported the data to the Aufseherin taking roll-call.

So presumably no-one in Birkenau bothered to inquire why the Greek women were dying. They died in the block, outside the block, usually in the evening or during the night. Their companions still left alive just shrugged their shoulders. One woman from a neighbouring block dismissed it with the following words, “They were brought to the concentration camp, they were supposed to die, and they died – what more do you want?” All I managed to gather was that their physical and mental condition had become unsettled.

The War finished, the concentration camp came to an end, and I, an erstwhile inmate of Auschwitz-Birkenau, continued to think that – to use the modern terminology – it was the generally poorer biopsychological constitution of the Greek women that unsettled their energetic and information metabolism, bringing about their premature death on a mass scale. Yet the weak points in this argument gave me no rest, so much that I kept returning to this vexing subject. The problem troubled me so much that I decided to look back in retrospect and search my memory for more helpful recollections.

If the Greek girls had shied away from making social contact with each other, there must have been a reason for it. It would have been unlikely for young people not to have the innate, genetically conditioned facility for socialising. For Nature to prevent them from exhibiting this ability in the way that is typical for humans. Therefore something must have happened to this aspect of the Greek girls’ activity. Something must have happened to the mechanisms which enable the individual not only to live for herself but to be of service to others, too.

On the basis of my knowledge (not least my personal knowledge) of some of the camp rituals practised on new prisoners and the way they knocked prisoners’ nervous processes out of balance, I assumed that owing to the accumulation of bad experiences, the Greek girls must have lost more and more of their ability to develop and nurture the motivating aspects of perseverance, oriented “away from” the camp and “towards” a brighter future. And by forfeiting their future they restricted themselves to times present and past. But the burden of the present overwhelmed them to such an extent that as a result of the traumas they had been though and continued to experience, their activity was relegated to the merely defensive, biologically conditioned aspect. They no longer had enough mental and psychological strength to give their thoughts a free rein to look forward to the future.

I was supported by my conviction I would live, that you could raise yourself up and get out of this satanic abyss, that the evil that was the concentration camp would be vanquished, if not soon then at some time in the future. They had evidently lost this conviction. And since the present in which they had to live was so unbearable, they reduced it within themselves down to the very last dot. As a result their inner expanse of positive emotions and experiences shrivelled and shrank, forced out by a relentlessly attacking negativism. I can still remember today how they fled from the camp realities, cowering by the walls of the block, in somewhat quieter places under the rafters.

It so happened that one day in these nooks and crannies I came across their death all “at once.” There were a few of them sitting on a beam snatched God only knows from where. Each one was propping up her head with one hand and staring out into the void. I thought they were having forty winks and wanted to move away as quietly as I could. But suddenly one of the hands slipped and the head dropped down. Thinking she had passed out, I rushed forward to help. But it turned out she had passed away. I turned to her neighbour and asked what had been wrong with her. She didn’t reply. Only then did I notice that they were all sitting in very much the same pose. It might have seemed strange, only I didn’t spend very much time wondering about it. I was more worried about the dead girl on the floor.

“What was wrong with her?” I asked a functionary who happened to be passing. “O, nothing, nothing, it was death,” I was told. “Did Death have her in his clutches for long?” I continued to ask. The functionary gave me a funny look and explained, “Usually up to a week, sometimes longer.” From then on I knew that the ones sitting on the beam and propping up their heads would soon “be finished.” Today I can add – death due to loss of hope came sneakily, on the quiet. It was foretold by the victim rapidly losing her psychosomatic activity, combined with a tendency to hide away in a quiet spot and assume the characteristic pose – just as sick animals do. But since they didn’t always have the right conditions for this, we may assume that they also died in other poses. The characteristic attitude of other prisoners to these facts shows that they were used to death manifested in this way.

The same happened with Jewish women from France, I remember, and somewhat later with Jewish women from Hungary. The Frenchwomen were in a block not far from my block. During roll-call their lines were straight ahead of me. At the outset there were as many of them as the Greek girls. The French girls looked just as young and not long in the concentration camp. They still looked quite healthy. If it were not for the bodies lying by the walls of the block I could have thought that the reason why their numbers were evidently going down was that they were being sent to other places. But those bodies revealed the whole truth. “They’re dropping down like flies in autumn,” a friend said. “Just like that?” I asked. “What d’yah mean, ‘just like that.’ The concentration camp’s killing them,” she replied. “Take a good look, and you’ll see that they’re all propping up their heads, and then, one by one, they just keel over and that’s the end of them. Why be ill, better end it all without kicking up a fuss,” she carried on. The words “dropping down,” promptly replaced by “that’s the end of them” summed up the Birkenau problem of death with no apparent cause of death.

Although the Hungarian women clung on to their lives more than the Greek and Frenchwomen did, and did not want to give up the chance for a better prospect, yet even with them deaths of the “end of them” type diminished their numbers. One evening after roll-call I looked in on their block. Already at first glance you could put the inmates into three groups: those standing by the cots and desperately looking for something, probably something to eat; those wandering about; and those in front of some cots and mindlessly staring into the void. As I watched them in turn I thought to myself, “Those next to the cots are indefatigably trying to keep themselves alive, the wandering ones are beginning to lose their grip, and those sort of unwittingly looking for a place on a bottom cot are probably semi-consciously making ready to pass into non-existence.” The “towards life” vector was in harmonious coexistence with the “away from life” vector.

I went up to one of those who were losing hold on themselves and asked how she was doing. She didn’t reply. I asked again. She mumbled something. I thought I could make out some words in German, “Schon nichts, nichts, nichts” (nothing anymore, nothing, nothing). “Did you have a selection?” I asked, and got the following answer, “Nein, nicht Selektion, death, Selektion... hier, hier just death,” which was supposed to mean that there had been no selection, but that death was there on the spot. At the time I did not think of her condition as losing hope, but as an escape from a life of no value. I went to another part of the block. Among the still fairly large crown of prisoners I spotted some sitting on the edge of the bottom cots in a familiar position. Their motionless eyes were staring out into space, into nothing, it seemed. Yet their gaze showed that they had withdrawn from everything, from life as well. Now I know that they were dying, having lost hope that things could change for the better. Now I know that in Birkenau depriving prisoners of hope was one of the ways of killing.

My observations showed that death by loss of hope did not attack all the national groups of women prisoners to the same extent. Women from Holland and Belgium were prone to it as much as the girls from Greece, France, and Hungary were, but it ravaged the Polish, Russian, and Yugoslav girls far less. The Roma group were particularly resilient mentally and psychologically. Their lifestyle made them tougher.

My hunch on the use of prisoners’ loss of hope as a way to destroy them was confirmed during a conversation with survivors of Botn, Korgen, and Pothus concentration camps in Norway. They, too, had witnessed deaths caused by loss of hope. The term used in those places to describe the phenomenon was the Serbo-Croatian phrase zgubio sa (“he lost himself”). The women in Birkenau called this type of death skończyła się (literally “she finished herself off” for “she was finished,” “that was her end”), which became the standard phrase. As regards the camps in Norway, it turned out that the SS physicians there were familiar with this kind of death. My interlocutors told me that those doctors had even conducted quasi-scientific research on the subject. But there has been no evidence so far that the world at large heard of their research.

When I retrieved the phenomenon from the depths of my memory, where it been overlaid with the mould of time, and when I took a fresh look at it, it made me think of Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker, which he made in 1880. The big difference between Rodin’s Thinker and the moribund concentration camp prisoners was in the eyes. In Rodin’s sculpture the eyes of the figure deep in thought and reaching down into his inner self, are searching for an idea that will transcend the universe, and are trying to attain to that idea, peruse it, and make it human. But nothing could be read from the eyes of the women in the concentration camp who carried the stigma of despondency. Those eyes were staring into space, without a ray of hope for a better future left in them. In Rodin’s sculpture the eyes show that the subject is searching for a life which is creative and brave, yet integrated, while the eyes of the prisoners revealed the want of thought and lack of hope which was driving their life out. So here we have a stark contrast in figures presented in a well-nigh identical pose – the contrast between the work created by a great artist, and the destruction perpetrated by the makers of genocide.

In Birkenau death caused by loss of hope could be observed primarily among the new prisoners, among them it was rampant. Rarely did I see or hear of cases among the “veterans.” I noticed that those prisoners succumbed to it who lost the mental resilience they had had up to that time. A descent into their inner self was an omen of imminent danger. Characteristically, attempts to get them out of this state of sinking seldom succeeded.

I remember one of my acquaintances saying, when I tried to comfort her, “What do I get by you or some others lasting out to liberation if I’m going to be consumed by the fires of the crematorium now?” Yet those who had known her for some time said that not even a concentration camp could crack up someone as strong as she was. I took a closer look at her. Despite the skinniness and pallor she still looked quite fit. If it weren’t for those eyes! Until recently they had been bright, looking straight ahead into the future. Suddenly, her companions said, something had started going wrong with the psychological perseverance typical for this prisoner. After a few days she was propping up her head and blandly staring into space. She didn’t respond to my attempts to start up a conversation, either. I gave her nearest neighbour a questioning look. “Well, yes, she’s nearing her end,” she said. “Her head will slump down any moment now, yet she was stronger than me. Losing her grip, you see, is taking her life away.” Those eyes are heralds of death in the concentration camp, as Stanisław Pigoń called it.

There is a saying that sudden despair can kill you. In the concentration camp despair built up as you were hit time and again by sudden blows superimposed one on another and so heavy that you couldn’t bear them all. They killed you surely and swiftly. The women overwhelmed with despondency did not “go on the fence,” neither did they try to commit suicide. They accepted what was happening to them as a self-stigma, and went through a characteristic mental acquiescence to it. Their experiences had weakened them so much that they gave in to them and passively awaited their last hour. If you wanted to build up your immunity, especially psychological immunity to the concentration camp, you had to practise and perfect your ability to dissociate yourself from all the evil that surrounded you, all the atrocities and all the malice – that was the foundation. You had to do something with your eyes to keep them from seeing everything; you had to keep your ears from hearing everything; you had to keep your emotions at bay and hold back the human feelings and reactions.

I saw the “she finished herself off” type of death even in Block 34, which was regarded as one of the “better” ones; it had bunks instead of cots and offered opportunities for “organising things,” thanks to which we got underwear, clothes, and even soap. It was in Block 34 that a Jewish woman from Łódź “finished herself off” before my very eyes. After a few days of squatting on the bottom bunk, she drooped her head and slumped down on the floor. The majority of us agreed that despair “got the better of her;” there was no remedy in the camp for despair. Yet none of us so much as mentioned that she had lost hope, because “hope” was a sort of strange and embarrassing word, suitable for “freedom,” not for the concentration camp. Instead we would use some other word, not connected with “hope”. Some even envied her for the gentle way she died.

I saw death due to loss of hope quite often in the block opposite the crematorium, which accommodated women of various nationalities. Yet none of them attributed much importance to this type of death, which might have seemed strange, but because it was so quiet they did not find it very disturbing. My friends from the concentration camp have the same opinion on the subject. So perhaps it is not surprising that I needed years to develop a clearer picture of the destruction which had been caused by depriving prisoners of their hope.

The extent of despondency varied. Two types could be observed, let’s call them narrow and broad despondency. The narrow type affected only some areas of the nervous system; while the broad type of despondency was extensive and attacked all the parts of the cortex simultaneously. It wasn’t hard to tell one from the other. A prisoner affected by the narrow type of despondency had poor defensive reactions only in some parts of her nervous system, generally in those responsible for mental responses. She still tried to find ways to defend herself. But a prisoner under the influence of the broad type of despondency was characterised by a progressive debilitation of all of her reactions, especially a more and more profound attenuation of her mental reactions, which brought her to a state of inertia involving the arrest of her nervous processes and a “withdrawal” into her inner self. The onset of this condition was a sign of imminent death, a death to which the moribund seemed to acquiesce. Due to the advanced stage of her diminution she ceased to defend herself and applied what was left of her activity to finding a relatively quieter spot to end her life. Occasionally partial loss of hope developed into full loss, which was irreversible.

Getting prisoners to lose hope was a method of destruction applied in a fully premeditated way as soon as they found themselves in the camp, and for the rest of the time they spent there. It was particularly intense in the early period of their confinement. It was so camouflaged that compared with other methods of destruction it did not look like a purposeful method used by the oppressors, but rather the outcome of the victim cracking up, which redistributed the responsibility, shoving some of it from the perpetrators to the victim. Only on closer scrutiny do we see that loss of hope was employed for the purpose of genocide. As a method it was so widespread that we shall probably never be able to arrive at a reliable estimate of the number of victims it killed.

End of Part Two

Translated from the original article: Chylińska, M. Pod naporem beznadziejności w obozie. Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1987.

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