A prisoner doctor’s memories of Falkenberg and Ebensee

It will never be possible to close the discussion about Nazi German concentration camps and the mass extermination of civilians of Polish and Jewish descent as well as people of other nationalities on the German–occupied territories of Poland and Europe. On the other hand, the vast quantity of those materials that have been collected and published so far is overwhelming, both due to their volume and shocking contents, so there is a risk that soon the reader’s, listener’s or viewer’s perception may become blunted. With the passage of time, remembrance is a more and more difficult task. This is especially true of the younger generations, who know the War only through the memories of their seniors, and those people who did not experience its cruelties. Given that, our most vital obligation is to fight indifference among those who are not politically aware and do not understand the current situation.

West German propaganda is very active. It is constantly watching and examining our territory in order to identify the points of weakest resistance and to strike us politically—at least for the time being—while resorting to its duplicitous strategies: hypocrisy, lies, falsehood, libel, flattery offered to the naive and powerless, and threats targeted at those who are defiant and unflinching. Its propaganda is accompanied by the policies of revisionism and revanchism, and the proposals of purportedly peaceful shifts of borders go hand in hand with an enormous armament effort.¹

Therefore it is our obligation to remember that Poland’s thousand years of fighting for independence and statehood² is not over and we are still in deadly peril, so the entire nation has to demonstrate its utmost, unanimous resolution and be on full alert. Aware of all those circumstances, we reach back to our tragic past. Undoubtedly, reflections like mine, besides the purely medical considerations, have given rise to the publication of Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, because it is out of the question to separate these matters from politics altogether. For we are not just looking at the past, which cannot be altered anyway, but on the conclusions which may be drawn from it and applied in the present and the future.

As I begin an account of my wartime experiences, I do realize that, in essence, I shall not be able to say anything new; neither am I out for flash effects.

I am not going to describe exactly what happened to me when the Germans occupied Lwów:³ on the anniversary of the assassination of Symon Petliura,⁴ I was arrested by the Gestapo in a street round-up and I might have been the only survivor out of the people detained on that day, perhaps just because I am a doctor, or perhaps the Gestapo man released me on a whim. I managed to leave Lwów in November 1941, so neither did I participate in, nor witness the great tragedy of the local Jewish population. I shall not describe the liquidation of the Tarnów ghetto⁵ when, in three stages, one half of the Jews from Tarnów and its environs were killed on the spot while the other half were deported to extermination camps at Belzec, Plaszow, and Auschwitz. As we know, out of the 30 thousand Jewish inhabitants of Tarnów and its neighbouring areas, only a handful have survived thanks to the military defeat of the Third Reich. At this point, I shall only confirm that members of the Nazi Party wearing their uniforms assisted in what was euphemistically called “re-settlement operations.” During the first of those operations, I saw and recognized the head of the German economic department of the municipality of Tarnów, who entered my flat with a whip and revolver in his hand. I shall not write of Plaszow, where I was held for eight months: those of my fellow inmates who were imprisoned there from the moment when it was established until it was closed down are definitely better qualified to do that.

I decided to describe my relatively uneventful incarceration in Falkenberg partly because of the fact that the history of the small Nazi German labour camps for Jews in Lower Silesia, which were actually sub-camps of Gross-Rosen and functioned under the umbrella name Lager Riese (Riesengebirge), is little known. This network of labour camps included Bernsdorf, Bolkenhein, Brünnlitz, Görlitz, Grünberg, Halbstadt, Hirschberg, Ober Hohenelbe, Kaltwasser, Kittlitztreben, Kratzau, Buchwald-Hohenwiese, Dörnhau, Erlenbusch, Falkenberg, Faulbrück, Freiburg, Friedland, Fürstenstein, Fünfteichen, Gabersdorf, Gebhardsdorf, Gellenau, Geppersdorf, Grafenort, Reichenbach, Tannhausen, Bad Warmbrunn, Waldenburg, Wischkowitz, Kurzbach, Langenbielau, Lehmwasser, Ludwigsdorf, Mährisch Weisswasser, Marzbachtal, Märzdorf, Mittelsteine, Oberaltstadt, Parschnitz, Peterswaldau, Wolfsberg, Wüstegiersdorf, Wüstewaltersdorf, Zittau, and Markstädt.⁶

I want to show that even in a labour camp as small as Falkenberg, where prisoners were not gassed or shot, the extermination of Jewish detainees, who were not allowed to receive food parcels, proceeded swiftly and surely. Why were they not gassed or shot? In the second half of 1944, Germany was withdrawing along the entire eastern front, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Soviet troops had crossed the 1939 Polish eastern border, and were approaching East Prussia and entering Romania. On 6 June 1944, British and US troops landed in Normandy and were advancing towards the Third Reich, while intense Allied air raids continued against Germany. The Third Reich had conscripted all of its able-bodied men, and was suffering from a shortage of manpower in its labour force. It also wanted to hide its armaments factories in underground adits. It was becoming clear that Germany would be defeated and judged by its opponents, and that the history of the Second World War would present the views of the winners. Therefore, the choice of an extermination method had become important.

On a chilly but sunny morning, 6 May 1944 if I am not mistaken, Gross-Rosen received a transport of 500 Jewish prisoners deported from Plaszow. We marched through the town, which was still asleep. At the gate to the camp, we were given a welcome by its brass band, which accompanied us with music all the way to the roll call square. There we were told to strip and remained naked when we were being registered by the camp office clerks. Just when I took off my clothes, all of a sudden and for no clear reason, a huge SS man kicked me right below the heart. I fell down unconscious and came to only when summoned by a fellow inmate to get up. So I jumped to my feet, realizing that the SS man standing over my body and yelling “Auf!” was all too eager to kick me to death, as they would do in the camps, if I did not obey his order. Luckily, the modest effect of that assault was two broken ribs, which made it difficult for me for some time to move about the camp grounds. From that morning until the evening, we had to stand naked and freezing in the roll call square before we were allowed to use the bath-house. After a hasty wash, we were issued with striped prison gear for the summer, given camp numbers, and billeted in the basement⁷ of a big block. On the following day, we were accosted by Genek [Eugeniusz] Kuziora from Tarnów, who came to our block to check if any of his friends were among the new arrivals. He told me that out of his transport of one hundred prisoners from Tarnów jail, which had been dispatched to Gross-Rosen on 14 April 1942, only six were still alive, by an extremely lucky chance.

On the same day, the prisoner dentists made a record of our gold teeth, for we were not expected to pull through, but to serve the Third Reich both in life and death. Then we were split into two groups each of 250 men and packed tighter than sardines onto trucks. My group was taken to work in the labour camp at Falkenberg. Later we learned that the other group of former Plaszow prisoners had been moved to Wüstegiersdorf, which was the headquarters of Lager Riese. Before we were able to get off, one of the fellow prisoners died standing on board the truck: he had internal injuries after he had been beaten in Gross-Rosen by a block functionary, a German Berufsverbrecher (recidivist criminal).

The commandant of Falkenberg camp—an NCO aged about 55 and a butcher by trade, who boasted of having volunteered to join one of the first SS companies—refused to receive the body of the dead prisoner during the admission procedure. A death certificate had to be issued to complete the formalities. One of my fellow prisoners said I was a doctor, so I had to confirm that the poor fellow was dead. It was my first, sad task as a doctor in Falkenberg.

The camp was still being arranged. It held about 300 prisoners from Greece, Yugoslavia (territories between the Sava and Drava Rivers), Slovakia, and Hungary. They slept in about ten small, conical cardboard tents. All of them were survivors of Auschwitz, many suffered from gastrointestinal problems caused by long-term starvation, abscesses on the limbs, or erysipelas. There were also three large, empty barracks in the camp. My group was quartered in one of them. The second accommodated the three hundred men when their tents were dismantled. There was no kitchen yet. Coffee was brewed out of doors, and soup and bread had to be delivered daily. [Prior to my arrival,] the camp had no doctor. The commandant told me to take care of the sick and dispensed a few dozen aspirin tablets, about ten used razor blades, and a few packs of gauze and wadding. Previously he was the one who served in the capacity of a nurse. Given the circumstances, at first my job involved just changing dressings and keeping the sick prisoners in the infirmary (which at first had just one, and later two rooms).

The other prisoners had to walk every day to work in the stone quarries, adits, and workshops. They also unloaded freight trains. Some fellow inmates from that unit soon provided the camp pharmacy with Vaseline, dressings etc. We cooked willow bark to obtain salicylic acid. An old Hungarian pharmacist named Farkasz⁸ used resin to make ointments. The workshop workers made lancets, splints, and crutches. Cuts were sutured using needles and thread from the tailors’ and shoemakers’ workshops.

With the arrival of new transports from Auschwitz, carrying Jews from Slovakia, Hungary, and the Litzmannstadt ghetto, the camp now had 1,500 detainees. By that time, it had acquired a kitchen and a latrine. I received the commandant’s permission to employ three more prisoner doctors. They were Dr Pajewski, a valued internist from Łódź; Dr Kemme, an experienced doctor from the area of Košice (the Slovak peasants tried to prevent his being sent away to a concentration camp); and an elderly, seasoned Hungarian doctor from the area of Lake Balaton. They fulfilled their duties as physicians to the best of their abilities and knowledge, and their conduct was absolutely commendable. Two dentists were employed too (with one pair of dental pliers between them). The provisions and hygiene were the responsibilities of Engler, a prisoner from Novi Sad, who used to be a nurse during the First World War. The clerk was Adam Last from Kraków, who usually had to draft the daily reports at night, because the number of our patients kept changing until the late hours. He often fell asleep over the paperwork. We managed to keep the rest of the prisoner doctors in the camp for its medical service.

In the summer of 1944, the number of patients and the death rate were relatively moderate, although prisoners were undernourished both as regards the quality and quantity of their food rations, forced to perform hard labour, and exhausted by marching to and from work, while especially the weaker ones were always being pushed around by the guards and beaten with rifle butts. However, at that stage, their bodies started compensating for low caloric intake by breaking down their tissue reserves.⁹ So before the winter began—as the malnourished prisoners had to walk 6–7 kilometres to and from work in cold and rainy weather, work largely outdoors, and spend hours on end in roll calls—the number of bedridden patients, unfit for work (even by the camp standards), rose to 200 (so they filled an entire barrack), and up to two died every day. Yet, I was told these were the lowest figures within the entire network of Lager Riese labour camps.

The deficit in the labour force was made up as and when new transports came in. Some small transports were also dispatched to the neighbouring camps: for such transfers the commandant selected the most emaciated prisoners who were still able to walk. The statistics show that the mortality rate was rising dramatically, so it is clear that the camp would have had to close down after a year or two if it had not been for the new arrivals.

In the summer we were visited once a month by Dr Rindfleisch, an SS physician from Wüstegiersdorf. He never entered the hospital barrack and would just ask a few questions, give his orders, and receive written reports, which I was supposed to hand in im Laufschritt, as he had specifically instructed, “stepping lively.” The documents, and especially the death certificates, could never name prolonged starvation as the cause of death. The quantities of pharmaceuticals and other medical products that we received were minimal. The direct supervisor of the medical staff was a sixty-year-old fat insurance clerk from Wuppertal, who had served as an orderly during the First World War. His job was to walk around the hospital barrack in the morning. He was both harmless and useless. Following the evacuation from Auschwitz, the supervising SS physician in Lager Riese was the infamous Dr Thilo.¹⁰ Being interested only in the reports, he never entered the infirmary either. During his only visit in Falkenberg, he ordered me punished with twenty-five strokes of the stick, because the camp was infested with lice. The same punishment was meted out to the block functionaries for poor hygiene in the barracks. Thilo said lice could be cracked by hand. After a while, he sent in some sulphonamides and salicylates.

The most common health problems were exactly those that Prof. Janina Kowalczykowa describes as hunger disease caused by calorie and animal protein deficit, and vitamin deficiency. The sick were snuffed out as easily as candles. For instance, one of the prisoners, a butcher, who was in excellent physical shape upon arrival in the camp and had plenty of fat tissue, because his diet had been more than adequate (he used to eat over a kilo of fatty meat), lost scores of kilos within just a month due to the exhausting routine and malnutrition. Those who had lived on a poor diet prior to incarceration proved to be hardier in the adverse conditions of the camp.

There were two important changes in how the camp was managed. The first commandant, whom I have mentioned, treated it as his own farmyard. He walked and poked around, from time to time beating the prisoners with a stick, like a cowherd clouting his cattle. During the roll call he would give me a dressing down, because, in his opinion, we had too many sick prisoners. Sometimes he inspected the hospital barrack, but there were no serious incidents. On a few occasions, he ordered me to examine the guards who felt unwell, explaining that long distances would have to be covered to reach a [German] doctor, while he had no means of transport. The first commandant had to resign due to intrigues and rivalry with the local Gestapo branch (though he used to meet with its officers over a beer in town). He was accused of having a homosexual relationship with a Greek prisoner who used to cook coffee next to the commandant’s barrack in the initial phase of the camp’s operations. One day, the commandant took a stick and made the Greek fellow board the transport that was being expedited, calling him a sloven. News of this kind reached us from the neighbouring Organisation Todtcamp, where a small group of our fellow inmates did repair work;¹¹ their foreman was a bank clerk from Budapest who built up a reputation as a man we could trust.

I became involved in the intrigues, because a few times I was called over to see the commandant of the O. T.camp. On one occasion, I was told to examine a young woman cook who was the commandant’s girlfriend, in the presence of her mother. I wrote out a prescription for a medicine carelessly and did not sign it. It went from the nearest pharmacy straight to the Gestapo. So one day the camp was visited by two plain-clothes Gestapo men with a typewriter. They found me in the hospital barrack and wanted to know who had ordered me to examine Germans, stressing that it was not me they were after, but the commandant, and that I was not to fear him (“Er wird sich schwer hüten, dich anzugreifen“¹²). A report was prepared on the spot, in which I said that on each occasion I had acted on the orders of the commandant and with his knowledge. When the Gestapo officers left, the commandant turned up, explaining he had let them into the camp because he thought they needed to consult a doctor (“Ich habe gedacht, dass sich einer von ihnen die Pfeife angebrannt hat.”¹³). As soon as he heard my explanations, he said he would ruin me. Two days later, he was sent away to supervise a smaller labour camp.

The new commandant was a clown and a drunk who used to sit in the roll call square and play the accordion. During roll calls he kicked the prisoners in the calves or punched them on the nose to cause bleeding. The weaker ones went down to the ground straightaway. That was one of the good old survival tricks in the camp. Shortly afterwards, there was another change in the management of the camp, this time for the better. Yet the situation of the prisoners, whom the weeks and months of incarceration had left exhausted both physically and mentally, was becoming unbearable. A few men committed suicide by hanging themselves and one threw himself under the wheels of a truck. Such behaviour was contagious. Kantos, an emaciated Greek, fell off a truck, breaking the base of his skull. He still came out to attend the evening roll call, supported by his brothers, but died the following night. There were seven Kantos brothers in the camp, they all slept in the same room and were a loving family. All night long the bereaved six filled the place with loud lamenting for their brother and moved all the prisoners to tears.

I was ordered to select a group of poorly prisoners who were not patients of the infirmary for transportation to a “rest camp” or a “hospital camp,” and of course I was worried, so I did not hide my suspicions. To my surprise, the prisoners vied with each other to be put on that transport. When I voiced my fears, one of them, the Hungarian pharmacist, said he did not care any longer, because he had had enough of those marches to work and being pushed about with cudgels. After the War, I learned that this group had indeed been taken to the hospital in Dörnhau.¹⁴ It was a preliminary to the evacuation of Falkenberg, which was to take place soon.

We overheard some news about the capture of Gleiwitz¹⁵ by Soviet troops, and then about the siege of Breslau.¹⁶ The evacuation of Falkenberg was being discussed more and more openly. In February 1945, we could hear the thudding cannonade in Breslau. At the end of the month¹⁷ the day of the evacuation arrived. In the early morning, the sick from the hospital barrack were loaded onto horse carts. Adam Last, who joined the transport of the sick because he had acute bronchitis, told me after the War that they were taken to the hospital in Dörnhau. There, the patients just stayed on their bunks, deprived of hope and bitten by lice, and received even poorer food rations than before. The mortality rate was extremely high. Adam Last, who survived thanks to his skill in writing the complicated reports, said that by the end of the War as many as seventy prisoners were dying every day there due to starvation. Just before liberation, Dörnhau was also hit by an epidemic of typhus.

The rest of the prisoners left Falkenberg on foot. There were two inmates who did not join the march. One was the clerk of the main office, a Dutchman who helped with the administrative work in O.T. and must have established connections of some kind there, and the other was his pet, a young boy from Bielsko, who used to drive to the nearest town to buy bread from a privately owned bakery. Presumably, by that time the Germans wanted to help them out in order to have some sort of alibi: the other prisoners were not punished for the escape of the missing pair. On the first day, with temperatures down to -20 Centigrade, we walked 18 kilometres to the next labour camp, where we stayed for the night. On the following morning, we were joined by the prisoners of that camp and plodded on. We usually spent the night in railway depots full of scrap metal, so there was not enough room to lie down and prisoners fought for a place to kip. When thirsty, we usually had to swallow snow. Food was delivered erratically and it was of a much worse quality. As a rule, laggards were shot on the way. The weaker prisoners died of starvation diarrhoea and pneumonia. We left dozens of corpses at each stopover. One of the deceased was the elderly Hungarian doctor, who passed away due to heart failure after a few days on the road. A group of prisoners was separated from us and trudged to Germany, as we were to learn later. It included Dr Pajewski, who allegedly died during the march too. As I had been unable to verify that information, it did not feel right for me to pass it on to his wife, who followed the route that had been taken by my group and after the War looked for him in Ebensee. My group reached Kłodzko¹⁸ and then had to cross a mountain pass to get to Czechoslovakia. There we were herded into freight cars and driven around the Czech Basin. We were starving and cold. We stopped for a few hours in Plzeň.¹⁹ When the German guards were not looking, the Czech women working as ticket inspectors chucked their packed lunches for us to catch, and so did the workers from the industrial plants nearby. At the station, we saw a transport of young Slovaks: a present from Jozef Tiso,²⁰ president of the puppet state, to the Third Reich; they were to serve in the Luftwaffe. Travelling hither and thither, we even hit Karlovy Vary (German name Karlsbad), which does not lie on the way from Silesia to Upper Austria. In the Czech Basin, patches of grass were visible under the thin blanket of snow, but Upper Austria greeted us with temperatures well below zero and thick snow again. After three weeks of anguish, we reached Ebensee. More than half of the prisoners died in the premeditated torture on this journey, killed with a gun, starved to death, or dying of exhaustion or disease.

Ebensee held about 15 thousand prisoners. The veteran inmates soon informed us that you could leave it only through the crematorium chimney. There were very many cases of typhus and typhoid. The hospital camp had an infectious ward. There were thousands of prisoners in the camp evacuated from Auschwitz and many doctors among them, but only a few were working in the hospital.

We slept three nights in the open air, four to a barrack wall panel serving as a bed and sharing our blankets. Initially, only the strongest of us were taken to the washroom to be deloused, so as not to waste the effort on the weaker prisoners, who were expected to die soon. After washing, we had to run about a hundred metres naked to the storage room to collect our striped gear. Finally, we were given a barrack that had neither windows nor doors. It was only after a few days that we were taken to a barrack with doors and windows. We found it difficult to sleep, as our feet and hands were frostbitten.

We worked for the armaments industry, boring adits in the rock, which were safe from air-raid attacks. The alarm went off pretty often. We had to walk 4–5 kilometres to work. Along this hilly terrain, we had to go up two steep wooden stairways, which killed many of the exhausted prisoners. I can recall a situation when four emaciated prisoners were unable to heave a huge rock and load it onto a cart. The irate old German foreman managed to lift it unaided. He still had enough strength to cudgel our backs for being “work-shy.” We felt the consequences of that beating for several days. On our way back from work we had to carry stretchers with the bodies of those who had died or just fallen into a coma due to starvation. They were all piled up indiscriminately in a corner of a cold barrack. By dawn, they were all frozen stiff, although the unconscious ones could have been revived with hot coffee or doses of glucose, not to mention blood transfusions. Dr Kemme, as I heard from his son, died in the camp hospital, where he had been admitted with an infected wound in the hand. By that time, I, too, had become a Muselmann,²¹ but avoided being sent to hospital. I knew of only two prisoners who survived the hospital and were discharged. Both were protégés of influential functionaries.

A few days before liberation, three prisoners were hanged for petty theft, e.g. stealing a piece of rubber to mend a torn shoe, although previously such incidents had been disregarded. The detainees returning to the camp from work had to walk past the gallows. The SS men terrorised us, fearing a rebellion as Allied troops were approaching.

On the night of 5 May 1945, all the German personnel of the camp disappeared, but a few of the tormentors, e.g. the Kapo of the hospital, a German orderly, I presume, were lynched by the prisoners. In the morning, we saw US troops arrive. Those inmates who felt strong enough ventured out of the camp in search of food, because initially deliveries were scarce. I joined the hospital transport and was moved to Bad Ischl, where we were treated in a converted building. I weighed under 40 kilos. My sed rate was 100 mm/h. We were under the care of doctors from an Austrian aviation regiment and fed soup and noodles. No protein foods were available. As we were famished and our bowels were bloated, the Nudeln left them undigested. At the same time, we could hear our doctors merrily feasting downstairs, enjoying wine and more nourishing refreshments, while many survivors were still dying of starvation and bedsores in the hospital. They just couldn’t care about us and the nurses only changed dressings, while sometimes just a little transfusion would have started the process of convalescence. Such were the circumstances of the death of my fellow patient, a nineteen-year-old youngster from Kraków. Another patient, who kept asking for milk, eggs, or cheese, was tricked into a straitjacket and dispatched to a mental hospital. I do not know what happened to him later. It all meant that even after Germany’s capitulation, a war was still being waged against us.

Several weeks passed and I found myself in a group of patients who were transported back to the camp hospital in Ebensee. And so again we had to use our old bunks, this time with no pallets or mattresses. The planks were covered with a single blanket. We complained to the US doctors who were looking after us, and suggested some pillows could be brought from town. Their answer was as follows: “We’re not like the Germans and don’t rob anybody of anything, and our vehicles are needed in the war with Japan.” We had to accept it. It was the summer of 1945, so we could stand it. We were provided with a sufficient amount of tinned food. The treatment was adequate. We were getting better day by day.

I was discharged from the hospital and transferred to a Polish DP camp in the neighbourhood. I saw former SS men travelling in guarded trucks to work in the woods. The US soldiers would put down their rifles and relax in the sun, while the SS men sat on the grass and smoked cigarettes. That camp sheltered survivors of other concentration camps in the area as well as young Polish men and women who had been deported to Germany during the War to work as slave farmhands; some of the women had babies with them. There were also lowlifes and those who had collaborated with the Germans and decided to leave Poland with the retreating German forces. UNRRA²² gave us good provisions.

The Americans were billeted in private lodgings in Ebensee. It was a scorching hot summer and teenage girls would loiter around with the soldiers. Such promiscuity would have been unthinkable at the time in the United States, which was still a puritan country. African Americans had suddenly found themselves in a European paradise, where white girls were available to them. Fraternization continued. The products in circulation included chocolate, tinned food, and alcohol. US Army surplus goods were traded on a grand scale.

I worked for the medical service in the camp. In September 1945, I returned to Poland on the second transport, which took all the members of the camp’s self-government. We took the camp documents with us. Those who stayed behind had the status of displaced persons.²³ Following my return home, I spent the whole of 1946 and 1947 convalescing in various hospitals in Kraków.

What thoughts do I have, now that twenty years have passed? I am a doctor who survived the Nazi German concentration camps, but lost all my family as a result of Nazi crimes and the German system of mass extermination.

Regrettably, we can see that history is repeating itself. In West Germany, a big party and government coalition came to power, which means there is practically no parliamentary opposition. The government has a majority that is sufficient to vote amendments to the constitution as well as pass a Notstandgesetz (state of emergency act). The purpose of that law is to eliminate any opposition outside the Bundestag if and when the need arises. Even today, the trade unions have very little to say. West Germany’s new Eastern policy has been sufficiently commented on and exposed in Warsaw and Karlovy Vary.²⁴ We are witnessing the madness of revisionism, which is a threat to the German people and the entire world. There are no grounds for optimism.

***

Translated from original article: Rubin, Bronisław. “Wspomnienia lekarza z Falkenbergu i Ebensee.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1968.

1. At the time when this article was published, West Germany and Poland were in antagonistic military and political alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact respectively.^a
2. Officially and conventionally, 966 is the year marking the beginning of the Polish State, when Mieszko I, Prince of Greater Poland, and his subjects were converted to Christianity.^a
3. This city is now known as Lviv and is in Ukraine. In 1918–1939 until the outbreak of the Second World War, the City ofLwów was in the Republic of Poland. On 1 September 1939, Nazi Germany started the War by invading Poland, and on 17 September the Soviet Union, its ally on the grounds of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, attacked Poland from the east. Soviet forces entered Lwów on 22 September 1939 and held it until Hitler broke his agreement with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. From that time until the collapse and disintegration of the USSR in 1990–1991, Lwów and its region was in Soviet hands. Poland lost its eastern territories to the USSR and was ostensibly “compensated” for the loss with lands which had belonged to Germany to the west and north of Poland’s pre-war territory (the result was a net loss in area for Poland). The information Rubin gives in this article is incomplete and defective due to Communist censorship in People’s Poland, which prohibited any mention of the Soviet invasion of Poland and annexation of Polish territory. https://muzeum1939.pl/poznajwystaweglowna-22-wrzesnia-1939-r-poczatek-okupacji-sowieckiej-lwowa/aktualnosci/3785.html.^a
4. Symon Petliura (1879–1926), Ukrainian politician, supreme commander of the Ukrainian army and President of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, 1919-1921. Ally of Poland in the Polish–Bolshevik War of 1919–1920. Lived in exile after the Soviets overran Ukraine and incorporated it in the USSR. Assassinated by the Soviets in Paris in 1926. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symon_Petliura^a
5. For more on the Tarnów ghetto, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarn%C3%B3w_Ghetto; and https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/tarnow^a
6. Most of these places were sub-camps of Gross-Rosen concentration camp, and some, e.g. Falkenberg, were part of the Riese complex of labour camps. However, Faulbrück, Gellenau, Wallbrunn, Wirschkowitz, Lehmwasser, and Markstädt were not sub-camps of Gross-Rosen. Faulbrück, Gellenau, and Markstädt were labour camps for Jews belonging to the Schmelt organization, who were later put under Gross-Rosen. Many of the names were misspelled by Rubin in the original Polish article. Currently used Polish or Czech versions of the toponyms can be found e.g. at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_subcamps_of_Gross-Rosen and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Riese.^{b, c}
7. A virtual tour on the following website shows that this camp did indeed have subterranean facilities under its residential barracks.https://wirtualnyspacer.gross-rosen.eu/^c
8. Perhaps a misspelling of the Hungarian name Farkas (“Wolf”).^c
9. The effects of long-term starvation in Auschwitz prisoners are described in Kowalczykowa, Janina, “Choroba głodowa w obozie koncentracyjnym w Oświęcimiu,” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim 1961 (la), pp. 58–60. [original note] The English version ofKowalczykowa’s article about this is available at https://www.mp.pl/auschwitz/journal/english/215170,hunger-disease-in-auschwitz. See also the English version of Prof. Bláha’s article (on this website).^c
10. SS-Obersturmführer Dr Heinz Thilo (1911–1945), SS No. 126436, German war criminal. He was relocated from Auschwitz and arrived in the main camp of Gross-Rosen on 9 October 1944. He was probably appointed head physician of Riese in January 1945. Thilo was arrested after the War and committed suicide in prison. He is believed to have called Auschwitz the anus mundi (the world’s anus).^b
11. Organisation Todt (O.T.), a Nazi German civil and military engineering organisation established in 1938 by Fritz Todt and later run by Albert Speer. It played an important part in the construction of concentration camps and the management of the slave labour industry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_Todt^a
12. “He’ll be very careful not to do you in.”^{c, a}
13. “I thought that one of them must have got his blowpipe burned.” In Hitler’s Germany, Germans were not allowed to see non-German doctors for medical treatment, but this rule was flouted in countries under German occupation whenever a German patient wanted to keep his ailment secret from his superiors and the German authorities.^{c, a}
14. This German place name is misspelled in the original Polish article.^a
15. Now Gliwice, Poland.^c
16. Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland) was one of the last battles on the European eastern front. The city was besieged by the Red Army for three months until 6 May 1945. It was left in ruins and with heavy casualties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Breslau^a
17. The evacuation of Falkenberg took place in early February 1945. The column of its prisoners reached the nearby camp of Wolfsberg, which was also part of the Riese complex. On 16 February, Falkenberg and Wolfsberg inmates continued the march, Friedland, another sub-camp of Gross-Rosen being the next stopover. On the third day of the journey the prisoners arrived at Trautenau (now Trutnov, Czechia), from where they had to travel in open cargo carriages.^a
18. Kłodzko is the Polish name of the place, which is now in Poland. At the time it would have been known as Glatz, its German name.^c
19. The original article uses the Polish name for this place, Pilzno.^c
20. Jozef Tiso (1887–1947), collaborationist politician and president of the Slovak Republic, a client state of Nazi Germany during the Second World War following the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia when Nazi Germany invaded that country in 1938 and took over the Czech part, setting up a puppet state in Slovakia. Josef Tiso was executed in Czechoslovakia after the War for war crimes and crimes against humanity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jozef_Tiso^a
21. Muselmannwas the term in German concentration camps for the extreme stage of starvation disease, when all the victim’s defence mechanisms degenerated into a state of atrophy, his sense of hunger and pain disappeared, and his body teetered on the edge between life and death. ^a
22. UNRRA—United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, an international organization run largely on American funds and catering for DPs after the War. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Relief_and_Rehabilitation_Administration ^a
23. Displaced persons were those who had been resettled to Nazi Germany from the occupied countries and after the War stayed in West Germany in camps arranged for them (original editors’ note).
24. The background to the deliberately vague remarks in the conclusion of this article are the developments in Czechoslovakia generally referred to as the Prague Spring, i.e. the process of liberalization which started in January 1968 and continued until the Soviet Union supported by Poland and other Warsaw Pact countries sent troops in August 1968 to occupy Czechoslovakia. https://enrs.eu/article/warsaw-pact-invasion-of-czechoslovakia^a

a—notes by Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, Head Translator for the Medical Review Auschwitz project; b—notes by Dorota Sula, Expert Consultant for the Medical Review Auschwitz project; c—notes by Marta Kapera, the translator of the original Polish text into English.

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