My memories of a few prisoners of Majdanek

Day after day is passing by, full of my routine of work, bringing more and more new problems and pushing memories of the years we spent fighting against Nazism further and further back into oblivion. My memories of those who joined in that struggle are fading fast, too. So very many of them died; only a very few survived the concentration camps. And that’s yet another good reason to commemorate those who made a distinguished contribution to that struggle.

My work as a prisoner-doctor in the concentration camps gave me a good opportunity to get to know a lot of fellow inmates. I met intelligent and talented people trapped in a mesh of tragic incidents which could only have happened in a concentration camp. I remember modest and unobtrusive heroes whose self-sacrificing lives and the circumstances of their death are known only to a handful of witnesses. So I shall take advantage of the offer the editors of Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim have made me to write about my memories of some of the prisoners I knew when I was confined in Majdanek concentration camp.

I met Zbyszek Lickendorf, who was a young scout from Warsaw, in one of the hospital blocks. His vitality and sense of humour made him stand out from the rest of the patients. Sometimes when he felt better, he would help us tidy up the patients’ ward. He was a cheerful lad. His persistent, widely fluctuating temperature and vague changes in his lungs suggested that he might have tuberculosis. One day, when all the patients were being weighed and Zbyszek stood on the scales, his still childish face suddenly went serious and he said, “I’d be pleased if I could weigh as many kilos as my temperature in degrees Centigrade.” Zbyszek’s temperature was 39^oC (102.2^oF), and his weight was 37 kg (81 lbs). His weight was very low indeed, but if his temperature were 37 degrees, he wouldn’t be running a fever and could be pinning his hopes on surviving the concentration camp. But it was only 1942 and you couldn’t even hazard a guess when the War would come to an end. For a moment when he compared his temperature with his weight, all his youthful energy and determination to survive the camp was suddenly knocked off balance.

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Artwork by Marian Kołodziej. Photo by Piotr Markowski. Click the image to enlarge.

In another of the hospital blocks, I met a young Jewish boy from Slovakia. He looked about 16, and had been through epidemic typhus but felt quite well. He was witty and intelligent. One day, we got an order from the German chief physician to make a record on every patient’s temperature chart of the number of gold teeth he had. This was at the beginning of the operation for the removal of gold teeth from the corpses of prisoners who had died, which was to be carried out by an officially appointed SS man. Patients who were already in the hospital had no such entries made yet, so I announced the chief physician’s order with a request for information. I don’t remember whether anyone submitted a report or not, but when I announced the order a second time, the ward went dead silent. Then the young Slovak piped up, “I’ve not got any gold teeth, but I’ve a heart of gold.”

My young friend, you didn’t have any gold teeth yet, you hadn’t had the time for a hard life to spoil your fine, happy youth, and you hadn’t yet put a denture made of a precious, glittering metal into your mouth; you had a heart of gold, which is harder to extract than teeth. You would have been the joy of your parents and friends, you would have had a brilliant career ahead of you if it had not been for the Nazi German operation to accomplish “the Final Solution to the Jewish problem” in Europe.

*

Another encounter I had with another Jewish boy was quite difficult. One day, prisoners who worked in the warehouse sorting the belongings taken away from newly arrived prisoners brought me a breviary¹ they had found. On the front page there was an elegantly written dedication which said, “To my dearest son, Josef Roubiček – from his mother.” Using the services of friends who worked in the camp’s office, we tried to find Josef Roubiček. Two Slovaks answering to this name and surname were on the last train to arrive. The older one was about 50, and the younger one was about 17. Neither of them claimed the breviary. Both were scared and distrustful. Only rarely was the occupation a prisoner declared when his personal data were being entered in the camp register his real occupation, so this line of inquiry was of no help. The dedication suggested that the breviary belonged to the young boy. Eventually, after a long and sincere talk, he owned up and said he was the Josef Roubiček we were looking for.

Once we had earned his confidence, he told us his story. His father was Jewish and had died a few years earlier. His mother was a Slovak, and the previous year she had sent her only son to a Catholic seminary for protection. On the day he left home, she gave him the breviary with a dedication. As he was the child of a mixed marriage,² he ended up in Majdanek concentration camp. Josef Roubiček was a delicate, bashful lad, and rather vulnerable. He was quiet and slow, and did not fully realise where he was. He did not want to take the breviary because prisoners were not allowed to have books. He worked in a series of “good” commandos and died in the bloodiest Sonderbehandlung³ the Nazi Germans arranged for Jews on 3 November 1943 in all of their concentration camps in the Generalgouvernement.⁴

*

One day, a prisoner of about 40 arrived in a group of patients in the block of the prisoners’ hospital in which I was working. He was stout, well-built and quite muscular, and his gait was vigorous and agile. From under his big, dark and distinctive brows he scrutinised his surroundings warily. His conduct and demeanour made him stand out from the other patients. His name Jan Kozłowski didn’t mean anything to us. Communicating with Kozłowski during his illness was rather difficult; his answers to questions were short and to the point, and he didn’t make friends with anyone of the hospital staff, He was withdrawn and cautious.

Colleague Kozłowski’s general condition, which was good to start off with, started to deteriorate rapidly. In addition to the illness he came in with, he developed empyema. By that time he didn’t even have the strength to get down from his bunk. The prisoners working in the camp’s office told us that Kozlowski had obtained an official discharge from the camp (in other words, someone had bought him out, because there were practically no “ordinary” discharges), but could walk out into freedom (as we used to say) because of his illness. A dramatic fight for his life started. Many a time we made incisions into his pleural cavity; we even came by ampoules of glucose for him, and there were things from food parcels sent in by Polish organisations in Lublin. Kozłowski’s resolute nature helped us in the battle for his life. Alas, we lost that battle. Death was faster than freedom, and Colleague Kozłowski died.

Weeks later, when our memories of him were fading, one of our co-workers, the clerk of the hospital block who had arrived a year earlier in a trainload of prisoners from Warsaw, divulged Kozłowski’s story. In a sincere and dramatic conversation, he told his closest friends that Kozłowski had been an important figure in the Warsaw resistance movement. What a terrible thing it was, he added, to meet someone in a concentration camp you had grassed on under interrogation, but what was worse still was watching him for many days on his deathbed and knowing that his release had been settled. Colleague Kozłowski and our clerk had been mates in the resistance movement. Maybe there’s someone in Warsaw who still remembers the characteristic figure of Jan Kozlowski (that was his nom-de-guerre). That’s what his last days were like.

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Dr. Edward Nowak was a university friend of mine. He came from Rytro, a small place in a picturesque location in the Beskid Sądecki Mountains. He was a professional soldier, an officer cadet from the Officer Cadets’ Medical College⁵ who had come up to the University of Warsaw for Medicine. When he graduated in 1937, he was sent to serve in the First Infantry Regiment stationed in Wilno.⁶ In October 1939, when the fighting against Germany finished,⁷ he managed to escape from German captivity and return home to Rytro.

He did not want a quiet job as a doctor in a country health centre. Edek was a physician and an officer. He considered it his duty to continue the fight. In 1940 he tried to get to Hungary via Slovakia, and thereafter to France.⁸ The Germans caught him on the border and sent him to Tarnów prison, and from there to the newly established camp of Auschwitz.⁹ He was one of its first inmates, registered as No. 447. On graduation we had parted ways, and met again in Auschwitz. Edek worked as a nurse in the diarrhoea ward. He was reticent and kept himself to himself, but was self-sacrificing and ready to help, very thorough and hard-working.

From the time we met in Auschwitz in 1941, our lives followed a parallel course. In 1942 we were both transferred to Majdanek. Being sent to a new place and finding ourselves in the midst of strangers made us closer friends. In Majdanek Edek continued to work discreetly and selflessly; he was still the good, modest person and doctor he had always been. We all went down with typhus; those who did not catch it in their previous camps caught it in Majdanek. There were plenty of lice, and the epidemic went on non-stop. But Edward was the only one of us doctors who did not catch it. We joked that lice just slipped off him. But eventually he contracted it in the summer of 1943. He was in hospital in conditions that were good by concentration camp standards, under the meticulous care of Jan Nowak, our mutual colleague and friend.

Edek’s illness was severe and gave him a very hard time. We waited anxiously for the crisis, which should have come on the eleventh or twelfth day. But there was no temperature drop; instead there were neurological symptoms and his consciousness was seriously impaired. We tried a variety of medicines which were difficult to get, but none of them were of any use. On the fifteenth day of his illness, with mounting neurological symptoms aggravating his condition, Dr. Edward Nowak died, at the age of 33.

In the first days of his illness, he tried to convince us that he would pull through and live to see the end of the War. He used logical arguments; many of our friends had gone through typhus and hardly any of them had died. So far, he had been very lucky in the concentration camps. In Auschwitz he had worked in the prisoners’ hospital and had managed to leave Auschwitz, where conditions were much worse; Majdanek was an “easy” camp, and the end of the War was imminent.

Edek had one more argument that it would all turn out well in the end. He smiled as he told us the story. In 1938 in his estate near Wilno, an elderly lady whom he had never seen before told his fortune. She gave such an accurate picture of his past that he was convinced she could not be wrong about his future, either. Especially as she told him the peak of his career would come when he was 42.

We should not be surprised that given the extremely difficult conditions in a concentration camp, people tended to escape into irrationality and subconsciously tried to find an optimistic explanation for their unfounded expectations. Such beliefs, often based on sheer fancy, made them stronger and alleviated pain and hunger. Could that old lady who told Edek’s fortune have been wrong? Or maybe she foresaw that he would die pretty soon but discreetly kept it to herself, and instead told him a white lie that the best part of his life would come when he was 42? For the whole of his time in concentration camps, Dr. Edward Nowak was determined to stay alive and was convinced he would survive. Things turned out differently.

*

I met Dr. Franciszek Gabriel in Majdanek. He was one of the first doctors sent there from Sachsenhausen. He had a difficult and eventful life. He was born in 1904 in Wielki Dobrzyń in the Powiat¹⁰ of Opole,¹¹ as the youngest of many children in a Polish farmer’s family. He spoke good Polish and could write in Polish before he went to school. He attended grammar school in Nysa¹² and sat the school leaving examination in Racibórz.¹³ At grammar school, he was interested in music and played the piano and organ. When he finished school he was undecided whether to go up to university for medicine, or to a music college.

He chose medicine. He started his university studies in Wrocław¹⁴ and continued them in Berlin and Vienna, eventually returning to Breslau, where he engaged in social work. He joined Silesia Superior, an Upper Silesian students’ society and was a member of Harmonia, a Polish choral association, and of the Union of Polish Young People in Germany.¹⁵ He was modest and rather shy, but a popular member of the Polish students’ community in Wrocław. His Polish fellow-students still remember the Sunday masses in the Polish church, during which he played the finest church organ music.

On graduation, Dr. Gabriel worked in Bytom¹⁶ and Sławięcice¹⁷ in the Powiat of Gliwice.¹⁸ He was refused a licence to practise in medicine because he did not join the German physicians’ union, so he moved to Kwidzyn¹⁹ and took a job as a school doctor in the Polish grammar school. In late August 1939, he and the rest of the school’s staff and pupils were arrested. This was the start of Dr. Gabriel’s itinerary through the concentration camps. He was confined in Stutthof, and later in Sachsenhausen, from where he and a group of prisoner-doctors were sent to Majdanek, which is where I met him.

He was an even-tempered and tactful colleague. He did not like to show his emotions and kept himself to himself; it took him quite a bit of time before he developed a friendship, and he was cautious about it. He lived in his own world of music and patiently put up with the hardships of the concentration camp. His tranquil disposition passed on to us as well. He never made use of his perfect German with the camp authorities for personal interest. Our German was less than satisfactory, and anyone who wanted to engage in a discussion with the authorities, especially in matters involving a conflict, needed to speak fluent German. Dr. Gabriel helped out in such situations, often in a discreet way without having the interested man present. He would talk to the hospital kapo on his own, settle our differences and speak up for other inmates.

He was one of the most modest people I have ever known. We worked together in the prisoners’ hospital until March 1944. That’s when many of the prisoner-doctors left for Gross-Rosen on a big evacuation transport. Dr. Gabriel stayed in Majdanek with two or three other doctors and a small group of prisoners. On 22 July 1944, all the prisoners and doctors were hurriedly evacuated on foot for Auschwitz. Many escaped on the way. Dr. Gabriel tried to escape, too, but was unlucky. He was shot and we don’t even know where his grave is. That’s how this quiet and self-effacing man died. Throughout his life he had done all he could to keep himself from succumbing to Germanisation and he had always shown in public how proud he was of being Polish. May the sonorous organ music he loved so much serve as a last farewell.²⁰

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These very sketchy character studies present different concentration camp prisoners who had one feature in common – they were all determined to survive. After several years of confinement in a concentration camp and of observing my friends and very many other fellow-prisoners, I can say that our determination to stay alive and survive was a clear and common feature that marked out concentration camp prisoners. The perfectly planned and organised machinery of physical and mental terror, the violence and the yelling, the power lodged in the hands of criminals, the hunger and hard labour, the lack of rest and the diseases – none of this managed to make prisoners crack up.

Yet there were also pessimistic prisoners. There were plenty of reasons to make people break down. Normally, the end result of a total mental breakdown and a belief that life is pointless is suicide, which was very easy to commit in concentration camp conditions. Every prisoner knew that approaching the electric wire surrounding the camp meant death. The guards up on the sentry posts shot such prisoners without warning. And they were dead on–target. I saw very few of these suicides, which were called “going on the wire,” and I heard of only a few. Hanging was another way to commit suicide in the camp, yet in all the time I was held in concentration camps, I never heard of a suicide by hanging.

You might think a sick prisoner’s psychology would have been more unstable. I worked in prisoners’ hospitals for a long time, and cases of depression and suicide were very rare in them. If a patient left his barrack at night, he could be shot by the guards. Every prisoner knew that. In Majdanek it was easy to leave the barrack during the night. Yet I can recall only two or three such incidents. The way prisoners behaved during a selection²¹ showed their attitude and strength of character. I witnessed a couple of selections. Two of those I saw in Majdanek made a deep impression on my mind. The first was carried out on typhus patients. The German medical authorities selected over 20 of the weakest out of a group of about 150 typhus patients and earmarked them for death in the gas chamber.

The selected patients spent some time with us waiting to be transported to the gas chamber. They knew perfectly well what was in store for them, but they were calm and showed no signs of despair. They waited in a profound atmosphere of dignity and composure for the death looming ahead of them. Resigned to their fate, their tranquillity was not just due to the fact that were seriously ill and exhausted; it was also an expression of their attitude and character.

The second selection involved a review of all the patients in the prisoners’ hospital who were not bedridden and was intended to weed out the very weak ones. To stay alive, a prisoner had to run about a dozen metres. To win this race, even the feeblest patients gathered their physical and mental strength. The weakest started to run as fast as they could, only to drop down after a few paces.

In the hospital barracks, patients in the worst condition, patients who were irremediably debilitated, harassed by exhausting diarrhoea, well-nigh drained of their strength, insisted on being given medications. None of them asked us to help them die quicker.

*

Let’s now take a look at the prisoners of Majdanek from another angle. Very many jobs in the camp’s administrative units were held by Polish prisoners, who worked in its main office, its post office, and were managers of its warehouses and kitchen. They were good organisers and proved to be brisk, hard-working, and intelligent. They quickly learned and improved their German. They had a strong impact on their colleagues’ psychology and behaviour, and tried to get them better jobs. Fellow-prisoners like Stanisław Zelent, Jerzy Szczęśniewski, and Albin Boniecki attracted a retinue of followers, creating an atmosphere of mutual trust and amity. Prisoners who stuck together developed a mutual reliance on one another and did as much as they could for others in the group. They shared a common aim – to help each other to survive. The same thing happened in the other concentration camps I was a prisoner of (Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, and Leitmeritz), even though their inmates made up an international community.

Let’s consider what it was that made the Polish inmates held in the extremely hard and specific conditions of the concentration camps so full of energy and so determined to survive, and why it was that we had very few cases of mental breakdown ending in suicide. Majdanek was a concentration camp for Polish prisoners and it was located in an area with an indigenous Polish population. For the entire time it was in operation, its inmates were illicitly in constant touch with Polish organisations in the city of Lublin.²² Not only did they receive large consignments of food for sick prisoners, but parcels of food and medications were also arriving from the families of individual prisoners, as Dr. Stefania Perzanowska has written in this periodical.²³ Money was sent into the camp as well, and used to bribe the SS men. A plentiful stream of correspondence²⁴ flowed into and out of the camp. The fact that a collective effort was made to endow Majdanek with the best possible, sympathetic moral and material aid is a historic achievement that must be attributed to Polish society and the underground organisations which provided this aid. The prisoners knew they were receiving this welfare and benefited from it, growing stronger, recovering their trust in others, and regenerating their power to put up with the hardships of life in a concentration camp.

A very large number of the Poles imprisoned in Majdanek were political prisoners. They were sent to this camp from Warsaw, Lwów,²⁵ Radom, Kielce, and Lublin. Adjusting to the conditions in the camp was not easy, especially as they could not look forward to a release, nor to Polish forces liberating it. In 1942, notwithstanding the first German setbacks on the eastern front, the end of the War still seemed a long way off, and no one expected the Third Reich to collapse.

The first few months in the camp were the hardest. This was the time when many of our colleagues died. Once a new prisoner gained a foothold in the life of the camp or, so to speak, adapted to the new conditions, once he made friends with other inmates, and providing he was resilient enough, he had a basis for further continuance in the camp. Establishing contact with his family and with the welfare organisations in Lublin gave him a certain amount of stability. For many prisoners religion was an important issue. We observed a religious revival in many inmates. So religion was a key factor in the life of many prisoners, although often they did not make an outward show of it. Prisoners’ illicit correspondence kept their family ties alive: the fact that their nearest and dearest had not forgotten them was definitely a great help supporting their determination to survive and come to the assistance of their family, which they had been forced to leave to its own devices. Their strong belief in the cause for which they had been sent to the concentration camp obliged them to keep fighting against the ordeals of life in the camp. Whoever joined the underground resistance movement knew very well that he could be imprisoned, sent to a concentration camp, or killed.

Against all the odds, there was still a chance of survival. And concentration camp prisoners had to take that chance to return to their community and carry on working. That was an imperative for all who were political prisoners. They could not break down and start thinking of suicide. This fact was acknowledged by a Gestapo officer stationed in Mysłowice.²⁶ He told his subordinates who were registering new Polish political prisoners arriving in the prison to let them keep their trouser belts and braces. “They’re political, they’re not going to hang themselves,” he said.

There were many factors which contributed to prisoners’ determination to survive the concentration camps. But the most important one was a prisoner’s inner disposition. And that commands respect.

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Translated from original article: Sztaba, R., “O niektórych więźniach Majdanka.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1969.

1. A breviary is a prayer book used by Roman Catholic priests.
2. Under the German racial laws, Mischlinge were individuals of “mixed blood”, one of whose parents was Jewish). They were discriminated against and often treated in the same way as Jews. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mischling
3. Sonderbehandlung – the German for “special treatment.” In the terminology of the Nazi German concentration camps, “special treatment” was a euphemism for “mass killing.” The term is misprinted in the original Polish article.
4. Das Generalgouvernement (GG) was the name the Germans gave the part of occupied Poland which they did not annex and incorporate in Germany. The GG was ruled by Hans Frank and a German administration.
5. Polish name: Szkoła Podchorążych Sanitarnych
6. Before the Second World War the city of Wilno was on the territory of Poland. Now known as Vilnius, it is the capital of Lithuania.
7. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, thereby starting the Second World War. The Poles fought a defence campaign against Germany, and also against a second invader, Soviet Russia, which invaded Poland on 17 September. The Poles defended their country alone against the double invasion until 6 October 1939 (their allies, Britain and France, failed to send in troops to support them). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Poland
8. When Germany and the Soviet Union invaded and took control of the whole of Poland, Polish soldiers and those wishing to join the Polish forces abroad (first in France and later in Britain) tried to cross the border with Rumania.
9. Auschwitz was originally established as a concentration camp for Poles. Its first inmates arrived on 14 June 1940 from Tarnów jail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_mass_transport_to_Auschwitz_concentration_camp http://www.chsro.pl/pierwszy-transport/lista.html
10. In Poland the second-tier territorial administrative unit is called a powiat.
11. Before the Second World War, this part of the country (Upper Silesia), belonged to Germany. The city of Opole was known by its German name, Oppeln. Sztaba gives the Polish names of places mentioned in this article, and we do likewise in the translation, but in the notes we give the German name used at the time.
12. German name Neisse.
13. German name Ratibor.
14. German name Breslau
15. Original name Związek Młodziezy Polskiej w Niemczech.
16. German name Beuthen.
17. German name Slawentzitz; to expunge its evidently Slavic etymology, in 1938 the Nazi Germans changed it to Ehrenforst. In Sztaba’s article th Polish place name is misspelled. Sławięcice is now a district of the city of Kędzierzyn-Koźle. https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C5%82awi%C4%99cice
18. German name Gleiwitz.
19. German name Marienwerder.
20. All the names I have mentioned belong to real persons, and the discussions and events described really happened. I would like to thank Mr. Piotr Gabriel and Mr. Ludwik Affa for the particulars they have given me on the life of Dr. Franciszek Gabriel (note translated from the original).
21. In the official terminology the Germans used in concentration camps, “selection” meant selecting prisoners for death, either by phenol injection or in the gas chamber.
22. In fact, Majdanek was situated within the municipal bounds of Lublin, and its German authorities called it “KL Lublin” (Lublin concentration camp). http://www.majdanek.eu/en/history/general_information/1
23. See Stefania Perzanowska, “The women’s camp hospital at Majdanek” on this website at https://www.mp.pl/auschwitz/journal/english/223573,majdanek-womens-camp-hospital
24. Here “correspondence” means both the official letters and postcards as well as the unofficial, clandestine kites carried in and out secretly.
25. Before the Second World War, the city of Lwów was on the territory of the Republic of Poland. It is now in Ukraine and is known as Lviv.
26. The German name of the city of Mysłowice is Myslowitz; the article uses the Polish name and locates the place in the Voivodeship of Katowice. In 1940 the Germans established a large prison in Myslowitz, which was a sub-camp of Auschwitz. https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mys%C5%82owice#Historia

Unless indicated otherwise, notes by Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, Head Translator for the Medical Review Auschwitz project.

A publication funded in 2020–2021 within the DIALOG Program of the Ministry of Education and Science in Poland.