Hunger in the concentration camps. Part One.

How to cite: Ryn, Zdzisław Jan, and Kłodziński, Stanisław. Hunger in the concentration camps. Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, Teresa, trans. Medical Review – Auschwitz. November 8, 2022. Originally published in Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1984: 21–37.

Author

Zdzisław Jan Ryn, PhD, 1938–2022, Professor of Psychiatry, Head of Department of Social Pathology – Chair of Psychiatry (em.), Collegium Medicum, Jagiellonian University, Kraków. Vice-Dean of Nicolaus Copernicus Academy of Medicine 1981–1984. Ambassador of Poland to Chile and Bolivia (1991–1996) and Argentina (2007–2008). Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Physical Education (AWF) in Kraków. Co-editor of Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, initiator of the contemporary Medical Review Auschwitz project.

Stanisław Kłodziński, MD, 1918–1990, lung specialist, Department of Pneumology, Kraków Medical Academy, Co-editor of Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, Auschwitz survivor (No. 20019). Wikipedia article in English.

This is Part 1 of the article. Read Part 2 here.

Aim, method and materials

The basic aim of this paper is to present the nature of hunger and starvation as the most common type of suffering experienced by concentration camp prisoners. Unlike the majority of studies on this question, we have concentrated on the subjective aspect of how prisoners experienced this affliction and what it implied for their conduct and everyday lives.

To accomplish this task, we used the questionnaire technique, just as we have done in our research on other medical and psychological aspects of concentration camp confinement. We adapted our research method for application in the population of survivors, chiefly of Auschwitz, to whom we had access. In October 1976 Stanisław Kłodziński sent out a questionnaire entitled “Głód w hitlerowskim więzieniu i obozie koncentracyjnym—moje osobiste odczucia i spostrzeżenia” [Hunger in Nazi German prisons and concentration camps: my personal experience and observations] to 250 survivors. Most of them were already elderly at the time when they responded to the questionnaire, and that is why some dictated their remarks to other persons because they could not write their answers on their own, either by hand or using a typewriter.

Apart from the information section, the questionnaire contained the following appeal addressed to the survivors:

This time we want to collect materials on hunger and starvation in concentration camps, presented from the point of view of the experience of individual survivors. Up to now, the approach taken to hunger and malnutrition has been chiefly medical, e.g. hunger disease, the food available in the camp, Muselmänner etc. We feel not enough has been done to collect survivors’ subjective, personal observations on this issue. Prisoners must certainly have experienced concentration camp hunger in various ways, depending on numerous factors, such as their earlier life, age, psychological and physical resilience, social background and the country from which they came, their ideology and/or political views, the work they did in the camp and the conditions in which they were kept, their state of health, their individual needs and habits connected with food, their access to food in the camp etc.

We are looking for information not only on hunger due to a shortage of food but also on thirst and other types of deprivation. We ask you to present an account of your personal experiences connected with going hungry and being thirsty, ways of “cheating” hunger and trying to get the better of its consequences (such as using surrogates for food, sucking things which were inedible or your fingers, smoking tobacco, trying to economise on movement and effort, sleeping longer, trying to ignore the subject of food or the opposite, focusing attention on eating, dreaming or having daydreams about food, etc.). Other relevant aspects we are interested in are descriptions of the way prisoners’ behaviour changed under the impact of hunger, the so-called “organising”1 of food, emotional reactions, moral attitudes and infringements of the moral code due to hunger, the theft of food, hunger applied as a punishment etc. Finally, we also want you to describe your subjective experiences connected with hunger, your thoughts, wishes, daydreams, conversations, your sensitivity to stimuli associated with food and eating, and your description of any psychic or mental disturbances or disorders you went through in connection with being starved and thirsty.

Please give your name and the concentration camp in which you were held, your camp number, and whether you want us to keep your answers anonymous.

Signed—Stanisław Kłodziński

By the end of 1977, we received 106 responses, 30 from women and 76 from men. We got no answer from 134 persons, either due to change of address, the addressee’s death, or for other undetermined reasons. We did not manage to establish how many survivors refused to answer our questionnaire even though they received it. Most of those who responded live in Kraków and its environs, or in the south and south-eastern part of Poland. A few live in Silesia, Warsaw, Poznań, Szczecin, Piotrków Trybunalski, Bystrzyca, Wrocław, Łódź, or Gdańsk. Most of them are survivors of Auschwitz or Auschwitz-Birkenau; some were confined in other concentration camps, such as Dachau, Gross-Rosen, Neuengamme, Ravensbrück, Gusen, Mauthausen etc. Many were held successively in several camps. Hence, in cases when a survivor does not state the camp in which he or she was held, we give an explanatory comment or note in square brackets.

The materials we collected were amount to about 700 standard pages of typescript, which we arranged and bound in two volumes entitled “Ankieta—głód w  hitlerowskim więzieniu i obozie koncentracyjnym” [Questionnaire: Hunger in Nazi German prisons and concentration camps], Volume I and Volume II. Volume I contains information on the content of the materials and the method used to collect it, a copy of the questionnaire, and a detailed list of the respondents, their camp numbers and current addresses. This will help us to contact our respondents in future.

As in our earlier surveys, we received a wide variety of types of response in terms of subject-matter, length, and material form.

About thirty of the responses we got were mature, practically monographic studies of hunger and starvation in a concentration camp, usually typescripts of a score or more pages. The outstanding, most eye-catching contributions in this group were by Jadwiga Apostoł-Staniszewska (16 handwritten pages), Father Jan Marszałek (12 pages of typescript), Marian Zieliński (18 pages of typescript), Stefan Krupa (26 pages of typescript), Józef Cieply (22 pages of typescript), Mieczysława Chylińska (26 pages of handwriting), and Roman Grzyb (22 pages of typescript).

These responses are arranged on the whole in a way that meets our expectations; however, sometimes they go beyond the subject of the questionnaire and address a number of important, sometimes very personal issues, but not connected with our main subject of interest. That is why these records deserve more attention from other points of view.

Some of the replies are short, one- or two-page accounts which treat the subject very briefly and in a generalising way, so many of them do not meet our expectations at all, neither do they go into details nor take an individual approach to the subject. Nonetheless, they are still relevant responses, and we have used passages from them to present the more general conclusions we have drawn from the project.

Once we had read all the replies sent in to our questionnaire thoroughly and in a critical, in-depth manner, we selected those passages from them which were strictly connected with our subject of interest. Next, we made another review of the replies we got to the questionnaire to eliminate answers which duplicated or gave very similar information to what we already had from another respondent. In this way, we obtained our final selection of passages and arranged them in sub-chapters corresponding to the order we had chosen for our study.

We had so much material that we decided to divide it into two basic chapters. Chapter One, which constitutes the contents of this article, concentrates on the instrumental nature of concentration camp hunger: how starvation served as a tool used in the system operated by the SS. Chapter Two, which we envisage as a separate article, is to present the subjective observations connected with the way prisoners experienced hunger in the Nazi German prisons and concentration camps, and is to have a bibliography of its own.

The overwhelming majority of our respondents authorised us to publish their names and surnames, which we put in brackets after the passage quoted from their questionnaire. In the list of our respondents we also give their camp numbers. A few of our respondents want to keep their replies anonymous, so instead of giving their name and surname, we put a capital A (for “anonymous”) after the passage quoted from their questionnaire.

A review of the bibliography

Food shortage was the most common ordeal in the concentration camps, and no inmate could avoid it. Hence, suffering from hunger was such a ubiquitous phenomenon. Hunger disease, no matter whether acute or chronic, was the direct or indirect cause of death for thousands of prisoners who managed to evade other forms of extermination.

That is why hunger and hunger disease, along with its associated symptoms, just like the feeling of anxiety and being under a threat, is one of the topics most frequently addressed in the recollections of concentration camp survivors. It is also one of the issues most frequently studied in the bibliography and scholarship on concentration camps.

Numerous papers have been published on this subject in PrzeglądLekarskiOświęcim as well. The very first issue, which appeared in 1961 and carried the papers delivered at two sessions of the Kraków Medical Society,2 that is the Kraków branch of the Polish Medical Society,3 held respectively in February and May 1960. One of the papers published on this occasion, marking the fifteenth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz (1961), was Janina Kowalczykowa’s study of hunger disease in Auschwitz, entitled “Choroba głodowa w obozie koncentracyjnym w Oświecimiu.”4 In her opening sentence, Kowalczykowa calls hunger disease one of the most notorious experiments conducted on the prisoners of Auschwitz on a mass scale.

She focuses her attention on the aetiology, pathogenesis, and symptoms of hunger disease, especially its somatic symptoms. However, she does not say why some prisoners suffering from the disease developed oedemas,5 while others did not. The emaciation of some women prisoners due to hunger disease is shown in their weight on liberation, for example, prisoner No. A 27859, who was 155 cm tall, weighed 23 kg,6 while prisoner No. 44884 was 160 cm tall and weighed 25 kg.7

On the basis of her observations during her confinement in Auschwitz, Kowalczykowa described a series of characteristic features typical for hunger disease which other authors had not mentioned in their work, such as changes in skin colour, large numbers of young people with greying hair, changes in the voice of hunger disease victims, and also specific psychic changes.

The medical examinations Bolesław Urbański carried out on survivors straight after the liberation of Auschwitz in 1947 show that 95% of the victims of hunger disease had oedemas, and only 5% had the “dry” form of the disease. In view of the specific aetiological aspects contributing to the condition, Urbański used the term “concentration camp debilitation” to underline its distinctive, separate nature.

In 1967, Hans Münch published a paper entitled “Głód i czas przeżycia w obozie oświęcimskim” [Hunger and survival time in Auschwitz]. Münch’s work is unique, because he was a German physician and a member of the medical staff of Auschwitz. Dr Jan Sehn8 encouraged him to write an article, which he compiled in detention in a Polish remand prison. It was an important contribution, made by a physician who was a German functionary in Auschwitz. His paper contains detailed observations and calculations based on the records of the SS Institute of Hygiene,9 showing that the average survival time for Auschwitz prisoners amounted to about six months, and that it took about fifteen months for an inmate to be reduced to the Muselmann condition.10

A paper of special interest in the context of the materials we have collected came from Stanisław Sterkowicz in 1971, who based his article on concentration camp debilitation due to hunger on his medical observation of himself and his colleagues in the Muselmann condition in Neuengamme. Even though this author qualifies his contribution with a remark that his observations are very personal, nonetheless his division of the characteristic symptoms and course the disease took into four phases is worth a special mention. Sterkowicz distinguishes an initial phase, followed by a phase of prostration, a stagnation phase marking the onset of the Muselmann condition, and finally the full Muselmann condition. There were no clear boundaries between the phases, which could overlap and gradually pass into the next stage, bringing to light its characteristic physical and psychic symptoms. Sterkowicz gave a good description of prisoners’ behaviour in the different stages of concentration camp debilitation. None of the later contributions to the bibliography gives such a good overview of hunger disease in a concentration camp and how prisoners tried to survive it.

There can be no doubt that for many concentration camp prisoners hunger was the sole cause of death, and no further complications were at play. Howard H. Ingling, quoted by Makowski in a 1968 article,11 gave a succinct description of this kind of death: these prisoners’ “inanition must have gone beyond a point of no return, which no treatment could reverse. Death of starvation is presumably a painless type of death. The moribund person does not seem to be suffering, just staring into space without noticing anything and giving the impression of not wanting anything any longer. His breathing gradually becomes shallower and shallower, and eventually all his vital processes stop and he slips practically unnoticeably from life into death.”

Hunger and being starved in German concentration camps is a recurrent subject practically in every survivor’s recollections, in the published work as well as in the handwritten statements preserved in museums attached to the memorial sites for particular concentration camps, especially Auschwitz. There are so many of these source materials and they are so extensive that we cannot give even a cursory description of them in this article.

Discussion of the replies returned to the questionnaire

The questionnaire

The large number of replies we received to our questionnaire showed that we had made a good choice of a research subject. As we had expected, hunger and starvation in German prisons and concentration camps left indelible memories and injuries on survivors’ psychology, and despite the lapse of forty years released a surge of recollections, some of them very painful but all well worth recording even from a distance of so many years. Most of our respondents concurred that this was a key issue for the assessment of what they had suffered in the camp as well as its subsequent after-effects.

Thank you for inviting me to make a contribution to such an important issue, hunger in the concentration camps. For me, you are bang on target, because I went through this experience very painfully, and my memories of hunger keep returning sub-consciously in my dreams, daydreams and recollections.

I apologise for being so late with a reply, but it’s only when I’m on holiday that I get a chance to write on any subject I like. The facts I give below are either things I experienced or observed personally. I have not written about things I just heard or am not sure about. (Stanisław Takuski)

It’s an intriguing subject and concerns an extremely important aspect of life in the concentration camp. Hunger was the crucial factor determining whether a prisoner would live or die. Every prisoner who turned into a Muselmann due to starvation was put in a “to be or not to be” situation. Due to hunger, his fate was in the concentration camp balance. (Józef Kret)

Hunger that was so merciless and so boundless, so inescapable, hunger that terrified you day and night with visions of death, hunger that made people crack up or turned them into heroes, hunger resulting from a “scientific” programme of extermination—that’s the kind of hunger I want to write about. Time has not erased it from my memory.

I still can’t bring myself to automatically wipe off the crumbs of bread left on the table, and often I stop for a moment in front of a pile of freshly baked loaves of bread and a thought flashes through my mind, “eh, if only I could have taken a look at that then and felt sated just with the smell...”

We are still talking and writing about the hunger we had behind the barbed wire fence of the concentration camp, and probably that’s not the end yet. That hunger turned bread into something sacred.12 Bread was home and family, your deepest longing, home meant freedom, and freedom was a fresh loaf of bread, which you could cut into slices just as you liked, with no worries and knowing that today was a good day and that tomorrow would be even better. Hunger and bread—these two points were inseparable. Every prisoner viewed hunger from the vantage-point of bread, and bread from the vantage-point of hunger. It’s a complex subject, though you’d think it was so simple.

So those who are working on concentration camp issues are quite right that everything that happened in the isolated-off world of the concentration camps and has been studied in arduous scientific research and synopses should be confirmed and supplemented by the survivors. It’s absolutely right that we should be supplementing the strictly scientific data on the food rations that brought people to the Muselmann condition and death with the observations of those who swallowed their saliva, chewed things, sniffed about not so much for things to eat but rather for something to devour, or who all the time had the inexorable image of a raw spud, a swede, or a clove of garlic on their mind. (Jadwiga Apostoł-Staniszewska)

For many survivors, returning to their memories of the concentration camp was unpleasant, and composing a reply to our questionnaire was problematic for subjective as well as objective reasons. For example, “Here I want to stop, because sometimes as I’m writing these recollections my hands start to tremble, and at night I’m sure to be back in the camp among those cruel SS torturers.” (Bolesław Dziamski)

A few of the replies were taken down by respondents’ relatives or friends. The following passage tells of the circumstances in which this usually happened: “This answer to your questionnaire was taken down by me, that is the daughter of Antoni Kubica, because Dad’s state of health prevents him from writing it down himself. Yours sincerely, Anna Kubica, Rybarzowice,13 9 February 1977.”

We also got some useful advice and practical observations on our method of collecting information:

Finally, I would like to suggest you could also invite the survivors of Bergen-Belsen.14 There are just a few of us left, but there are still some who can certainly recall a lot of details as well as their own experiences. But I think it would be worthwhile to put the questions more precisely. (Jan Starczewski)

This respondent had good reasons to remind us about Bergen-Belsen, where the hunger was at its most devastating and on a mass scale just before liberation. Thousands of inmates were dying with no food at all.

General observations on hunger

Anxiety and hunger were the two predominant experiences in the way concentration camp inmates encountered and reacted to the threats to their life. These two experiences epitomised and summed up the broad range of all the other biological and psychological torments suffered in the camp. Anxiety and hunger penetrated prisoners’ psycho-physical and spiritual constitution. Anxiety and hunger were present practically all the time and in every individually, diversely suffered ordeal; they were permanent fixtures, intermingling and taking on different intensities and shades. And it was around these two experiences that all the prisoners’ thoughts, feelings, and expectations revolved. Anxiety and hunger were usually the strongest stimuli goading prisoners into activity and self-defence, but they were also the most frequent cause of breakdowns and death. Anxiety and hunger sealed a prisoner’s fate. They left the deepest mark on him, his physically shrinking body and his fading psyche. Anxiety and hunger overlapped; they were superimposed on one another and, depending on the individual’s predisposition, gave him visions of experiences that were terrible or magnificent, degrading or elevating, life-giving or lethal.

Hunger and anxiety, those most rudimentary ailments in the concentration camps, were the stuff that visions of experiences and behaviours were made of. Visions covering the entire spectrum of human potential, from villainy and butchery to altruism and sainthood. The concentration camp was marked by two extremities: bread and a good word, versus no bread and a malicious word. “Word” and “bread” stood as symbols for life and death. Just as a “good word” could raise the spirit of the most abused prisoner and be the decisive factor determining his survival, so too “bread”, both in the colloquial, material sense as well as in the figurative meaning, was a symbol for life and surviving the camp. Likewise, “a word of malice” and a want of “bread” spelled death. These symbolic words triggered absolutely different and opposite attitudes and behaviours in prisoners. As Maria Jabłońska wrote in her questionnaire, “for a spoonful of sustenance or a drop of water you could either kill someone or shower blessings upon him.”

Before we pass on to citing passages from survivors’ observations on the instrumental nature of hunger and being starved in the concentration camps, it might be a good idea to present some of the more general reflections they sent in regarding hunger in the camps.

It’s generally known that hunger was one of the main concentration camp ordeals, but different people experienced and reacted to it in different ways. It depended on many factors, including their origin (such as Slavic, Germanic, Latin, Greek, Jewish etc.), the climate zone they arrived from, their intelligence and culture, their physical condition and resilience etc. The most resilient to hunger were the Slavs; Jews, especially Greek and Hungarian Jews were the least resilient. Prisoners with a military background made up a separate group, especially those with a special training (e.g. paratroopers, trained saboteurs and subversives etc.).

There were different reactions to hunger—sluggishness, irritability, sometimes lethargy, somnolence, or apathy. There were people who, when vexed by hunger, talked their heads off about eating and cooking, about they were going to eat after liberation. (Jarosław Warchoła)

***

Hunger was an additional concentration camp torment so enormous that people who have never gone through real hunger will understand it. It took various forms, with symptoms like headaches, a continual craving for food, or stomach spasms. Today I wonder if I really went through it. Of course, I was young and strong, and weighed 70 kg, but 35 kg15 when I went home, no one in my family recognised me. (Melania Śmierciak)

I was so hungry that my first bowl of concentration camp soup seemed like a gift from heaven. (Stefan Świszczowski)

Like the high-voltage wire fencing off the camp, the long hours standing on roll call out in the open air come rain or shine, like the SS man and his dog—hunger was a factor that determined a prisoner’s existence. (A)

You needed Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, and Neustadt-Gleve to appreciate what hunger means. It was only there, in the concentration camps, that for me the word “hunger” became the designate of its name. I learned that hunger can mean different things, that “I’m hungry” is not the same as “I am going hungry,” not the same as “I’m suffering from hunger,” and not the same as hunger disease. (Mieczysława Chylińska)

This is how we get a series of virtually unsolicited observations on the word “hunger” itself, on its various meanings and shades of meaning, and on the vocabulary used in the camp for food, sustenance, and bread. Let’s quote a few of these remarks from the questionnaires:

This short little word “hunger” harbours so many sad colours, so many grim associations, so many shades of grey, that if we were to utter it only in a jocular, not very serious way, it would immediately evoke a reaction in people who have been really hungry, even just once in their lives. (Jadwiga Apostoł-Staniszewska)

One of the very frequent subjects of our conversations and discussions, especially in the period when I was working in the Korbflechterei [basket-weaving room], sitting by the wall plaiting baskets, was food, preparing and eating it. We never used anything but endearments to name particular items of food, like kartofelkinamasełku [delicious buttered potatoes], śledzikśmietance [an appetising piece of herring in cream sauce], bułeczka [a scrumptious bread roll], masełko [a little knob of butter], sosik [a wee dab of sauce], zrazik [a tasty little meat roll] etc. (Józef Ludwig)

Recalling memories of the concentration camp despite the passage of time and as if in defiance of the self-defensive tendency of the human memory to erase unpleasant recollections, not only refreshes the “somatic” memory by evoking physical symptoms of hunger but also encourages people to ask questions:

Every time you give the subject some deeper thought, every time you recall those dreadful times out of the recesses of your memory, it makes you agitated, there’s a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes. A lot of questions come to mind: why did it happen, and what was it all for? Why did human beings lose so many of their human qualities? Who’s to blame for it happening? You get personal questions: why did I suffer so much? Did my suffering help anyone? Did anyone get the idea that all this suffering was necessary and served a good purpose? Did I have to submit and be ready for destruction? After all, so many of the people around me did not go through this kind of suffering, they lived in peace and now are still comfortably off... So who needed all this suffering and what did I suffer for? Alas, you can’t rid yourself of these annoying questions. (Stefan Krupa)

The word “hunger” and its basic physical substrate sometimes conjured up associations with other kinds of suffering, deprivation, that is “hungering for” or going without other resources apart from food. Let’s cite the observations of Maria Elżbieta Jezierska on “thirsting” for privacy and having to do without religion and beauty:

I can’t say how many women prisoners yearned for privacy. Personally, I always reacted strongly to having other people around me, even if they didn’t say anything and did not move about. I think it must be some kind of sensitivity to other people’s “radiation.” Things like processions, socialising in a café, or staying in a boarding school tire me out.

Every second you spent in the concentration camp you were in the company of other people, so I deliberately sought privacy. I would go outside at night and that gave me a special kind of pleasure. My craving for privacy was due to the constant presence of other people. You could not be alone in the toilet; if you were ill, you could not moan or pretend you were not in pain; your naked body was there for all to see; everyone knew what their neighbour was suffering from and if he had pooped his pants. You could not enjoy a letter you got in privacy; you got no privacy to weep or to die. You were denied even that last right! All the repugnant instances of death were laid bare . . ..

The craving for beauty made me go crazy, because everything around—the earth, the architecture, people, clothing—was filthy and disgusting. That was when I discovered the beauty of the sky, not just at sunrise and sunset, but also when it was foggy and during an autumn gale, when it was raining and at night. I watched and waited for a view of the faraway hills of Żywiec which sometimes appeared. They were sapphire-blue and at their finest when they suddenly loomed up just before a shower of rain, which was so dangerous for a prisoner... In Ravensbrück I watched the fine, vintage fir trees on the other side of the wall, as they came to light against the sky at daybreak. (Maria Elżbieta Jezierska)

Jezierska divided up concentration camp hunger into physical hunger and psychological hunger.

The worst type of hunger was thirst. Having no water to drink evoked obsessive dreams: water coming out of a tap, a river, a lake, a glass of water (curiously, not tea or a glass of milk but a glass of water). Then there was hunger and hankering after bread, potatoes, sugar and fats, craving for fruit and, of the vegetables, wanting onions. As well as missing salt! I’ve listed them all in the order of my biggest need, with bread and potatoes always top of the list . . .. But apart from physical hunger, there were also psychological forms of deprivation that afflicted me, missing privacy and intimacy, missing religion, yearning for beauty, longing for books. There was a deprivation that straddled the border between the physical and psychological types of hunger—missing personal cleanliness and a clean environment, including the desire to take a breath of fresh air, not air contaminated with the stink of the concentration camp. (Maria Elżbieta Jezierska)

On the basis of these few comments we may expect that hunger in a concentration camp meant more than just the basic experience of the physical shortage of food but something that involved a far more complex world of psychological and spiritual experiences with roots going back into each inmate’s individual past, as well as impacting on his as yet unknown future.

The concentration camp menu

The bill of fare served in the concentration camp is perhaps the most frequently addressed topic in survivors’ recollections. If you start looking through the publications, the memoirs as well as the scientific studies, you can have a go at devising two “concentration camp menus.” One for what was available for inmates, in what quantities and in what conditions it was eaten. And the second for what they actually had but cannot be found on any of the world’s menus, never mind the unimaginable diversity of what people around the globe eat. In this chapter we’re not going to look at the quality or quantity of meals in the concentration camp, because it’s been done so many times already, with irrefutable proof that the food was doled out in starvation rations designed to bring prisoners to their deaths by starvation. Instead, we’ll cite some of our survivors’ statements on what they had to eat in various camps and how they ate it, and the memories they still have of it now, after forty years.

Concentration camp soup was made almost entirely of potatoes which were unwashed and unpeeled, just cut up into small pieces. I warned fellow-prisoners to spit out the peels, but in vain. Not only did they eat their peel, but even asked for the bits of peel we spat out. (Stefan Świszczowski)

Over three months my weight went down terribly and I looked like a skeleton. All I had to eat was bread made of sawdust with margarine and mouldy cheese, pieces of swede peel scavenged on the waste dump, and sometimes grated raw potato. The soup we had for dinner was made of mangelwurzel, dried swede and kale of the type used for table decoration. It was either bland and tasteless or pungent and had saltpetre in it. Your body needed acids, which prisoners never got in their food. After you had your bowl of pungent soup, you wanted to drink it down, but the water was contaminated and had rust in it. I could do without drinking it, that’s why I survived the camp. Some of my fellow-prisoners used to eat this soup and drank it down with dirty water and got Durchfall (diarrhoea), so a lot of them had yellow eyelids and died with their boots on. (Stanisława Buda)

Stanisław Takuski writes:

I’ll give a detailed description of hunger in Gusen, the concentration camp I was confined in for three years, having to work in a granite quarry. Gusen was full of contrasts. On the one hand, it was set in a beautiful Alpine landscape with the blue, winding Danube, but on the other hand the hunger was apocalyptic. No wonder—it was a camp full of poverty. The end product of our labour was stone, but you couldn’t eat it.

I’ll start with the menu. Meals in the camp were served in very meagre portions; they were low-quality in terms of caloric value, monotonous, and cooked in large quantities like pig fodder. I spent over a dozen seasons of the year in Gusen, and could figure out from the food what season we were in. Spring started with a spell of shortages called the hungry gap: we got the pomace of sugar beet, that is the fibrous pulp left after all the juice containing sucrose has been extracted. It is normally used as cattle fodder, has a terrible, sickening taste and it’s hard to swallow down. That marked the end of the “good” winter months. Then came the spinach season. Local farmers rolled up in front of the kitchen with cartloads of spinach ordered for the camp. But spinach is not the same everywhere. Thanks to Nazi Germany, I had my first taste of spinach, which was not cultivated in my village. But when I returned home and now and again fancied a bit of its rich content of iron, I soon found there was a huge difference. In Gusen, the spinach was harvested en masse, weeds and all, replenished with the side products of the previous year’s sunny autumn, such as dried oak leaves, twigs, shrivelled little frogs, sand etc.—it all went into the camp’s cooking pots without much ado, whereupon, garnished with a few spuds, it was served up at the high table. But as the hungry gap neared its peak, the soup got thinner and thinner, reaching a minimum in June, when it consisted of water and two or three cabbage leaves.

The hunger grew more and more vexing, it gave you a dreadful burning sensation all over your body, in your entrails, everywhere. I don’t know where its epicentre lay, maybe in the sub-conscious and the plans you made to get an extra bowl, just one more bowl tonight at suppertime. It was not a question of surviving tomorrow and the day after. Just having your fill today, right now, at this particular hour—that was your motive for action, making a hard decision, and achieving success. The scorching sun of summer shrivelled up prisoners working in the quarry. They developed the shape and colour of the Muselmann. You were terribly hungry and thirsty. (Stanisław Takuski)

***

In the first days of my detention in the bunker of Block 1116 I did not eat the meagre meal brought to me at lunchtime . . . it was some sort of gluey gruel in an aluminium dinner tin, and when I put a spoon into it, the entire contents stuck fast to the spoon so that when I lifted it up, all of it including the tin came up with it. I licked that glue-like stuff to try its flavour but couldn’t figure out what it was made of, what’s more, there was no salt in it.

For supper I was given food with too much salt, one evening it was a piece of salted herring, another time a lump of salted Quargel cheese, another night a slice of brawn made of horsemeat and blood with salt on top. And nothing to drink. Breakfast was a clay cup of unsweetened black coffee, and every third day mint tea with no sugar, and that was it.

As long as my body still had a reserve of the necessary nutrients I had on me when I was imprisoned, I did not fancy eating any of the things I was served. But as time went on and I started to feel I was losing more and more of my strength and weight, I forced myself to take the food I was given. I was being overwhelmed by a feeling of hopelessness, all the greater as at the time I was in a solitary cell, so I had no one to help me and no spiritual support.

For supper on the night before an interrogation, I would get the said salted herring, brawn, or Quargel, or alternatively Avo17 soup with a huge dose of salt. When I had eaten this fare, I was so thirsty, I felt my digestive tract was burning. The only remedy was to drink the water from the slop bucket, but there was a lot of Lysol18 in it. The consequences were disastrous. But the taste of Lysol neutralised my hunger and thirst. Later, thanks to sympathetic functionary prisoners, from time to time I got some tobacco, and smoking sated my hunger. (Wiktor Myrdko)

***

Probably the greatest hunger I went through was when I was held in Flossenbürg,19 from mid-January 1944 to 21 April 1945. This camp was chock-a-block already in January, but new evacuation transports were still arriving from other concentration camps in the east and west. The basic meal was breakfast, which prisoners who were working got around 9 o’clock. But a large majority of the prisoners were not working, so they had to do with a smaller and smaller portion of bread and soup. The spécialité de la maison of the camp’s cuisine was never adding any salt to the meals. I never imagined a total lack of salt could be such a nuisance. People would swap their portion of bread or their soup for just a tiny lump or half a teaspoon of salt. (Stefan Świszczowski)

These accounts show that prisoners’ attention was focused on everything connected with eating and quenching their thirst, and that the daily routine in the camps was strictly dependent on the meals.

Now we shall quote one more account, this time the story of the “usual,” everyday trouble a woman prisoner held in Auschwitz went through trying to satisfy her hunger and her attempts to cheat it.

Hunger was perhaps the predominant sensation I experienced for well-nigh the entire time of my confinement in the camp.

I had spent a relatively short spell in prison, and there I was in such a state of shock and fear of the interrogations that I hardly ever felt hungry. All the time, I had a lump in my throat and collywobbles. In my first days in the camp, when it seemed surviving the day would not be easy, I did not feel I was hungry. It was only after I recovered from typhus, having spent about three weeks in hospital with hardly anything to eat and after being discharged when I went out to work in the fields that I felt terribly hungry.

I would gobble up my evening portion of bread still during roll call. But soon I was so hungry that it made me sick and I couldn’t get to sleep. In the morning, after I had taken my herb tea, I could hardly wait for the soup, which sometimes was so thin that I hardly felt it, but you had to last out on it until the evening roll call. For me the biggest ordeal was when I had to watch others eating, and sometimes showing off their selfishness—at such times hunger was literally tearing my guts out.

I could not put up with hunger, but I was not very good at finding ways to beat it. I did not get parcels. Sometimes my friends shared something from their parcels with me, and sometimes they would even give me their camp ration of bread. Perhaps they were more resilient and, as they said, I had “such hungry eyes.” The veterans, more experienced prisoners, told us to take our time eating, chew our food well and for a long time. It would make us feel we had eaten more.

I can’t remember anyone I was with ever sucking her fingers and I didn’t do that, either. Sometimes I went to the rubbish dump to scavenge for rotting cabbage leaves or swede peel.

After a short time, I started to lose my senses and lost interest in everything that was not connected with food. I didn’t care what I was eating, as long as I filled my stomach. I was close to turning into a Muselmann, maybe I was one already.

But a lack of courage, or perhaps what was left of my sense of decency kept me from stealing . . .. We had long conversations on culinary matters, we exchanged recipes and loved to talk about the delicacies we would be having once we were liberated.

I used to dream of having a lot of bread rolls with ham and sausage like the ones we had before the War, and of coffee with milk. I dreamed of coffee and drinking beverages especially when I was ill and running a fever of 41 degrees Celsius,20 when those monsters, the Jewish women from Slovakia, dealt out just a little cup of herb tea to us and used masses of it to wash their hair and practically had baths in it. I would have given half my life for a sip of water. We were thirsty when we were working in the fields, but even thirstier during a heat wave. We would look out for puddles in the footprints left by horses’ hooves, or if there were any ponds nearby. But there’d be big trouble if an SS-man caught us at it . . ..

In February, they transferred us to Neustadt-Glewe, and once there, they kept us alive until liberation. We had 100 grams of bread a day and a quarter of a litre of a sort of soup. We didn’t have to work, so we moved about, barely standing up on our feet. Every step I took made my stomach churn.

One day, I sneaked into the kitchen and snatched a piece of mouldy bread. It had gone green and my friends cried, “What are you up to, that’s poison!” but I ate it and nothing happened.

Even our conversations were petering out because every word you said made your stomach turn. We were waiting, either for death or liberation. (Bronisława Bukowińska)

Abnormalities

The experience of hunger, or more precisely, being starved, made the more sensitive prisoners lapse into drastically abnormal types of behaviour associated with eating. They lost their common sense and self-awareness, stopped listening to warnings from fellow-prisoners and gave in to the overwhelming feeling of hunger, eating practically anything they happened to lay their hands on. Sometimes the experience of hunger was so immense that it was impossible to bear. Its enormity could not be put into words, and even now, when so much time has passed, survivors still cannot find the words to describe it. They have come up with a few catchphrases such as “Hunger is a big word,” (coined by Jadwiga Apostoł-Staniszewska), or “Hunger was a terrible master!” (Andrzej Makowski’s21 expression). Sometimes extreme hunger made all the social rules collapse, shattering standards and customary forms of behaviour. Prisoners robbed each other’s food, broke into the camp kitchen, and in extreme situations went as far as to practise necrophagia. To assuage his hunger, an extremely hungry prisoner could fix his attention on any object, dead or alive (especially alive); it could even be his own flesh. With other prisoners, it was their self-awareness that succumbed and filled up with pathological visions, delusions or hallucinations connected with food, while still others tried to cheat hunger by indulging in daydreams.


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

The statements we quote below, most of them by survivors of Auschwitz, show the extent of hunger and the measures prisoners resorted to in their attempts to be rid of the feeling even for a brief moment.

I spent four and a half years in Auschwitz and went through various times there but all the while I was plagued by hunger. There were few times or days when I felt I had eaten my fill. On many occasions, hunger forced me to go to the extreme, for instance I ate “black sugar,” that is molasses22 set aside for the fodder ration for the horses, or beet pulp for the cattle fodder ration, diverse leftovers for the pigswill, and even frozen steamed potatoes which had gone bad or raw fodder beets ripped out of a field, grains gleaned straight from an ear of rye, simply anything that could fill my stomach, often to the detriment of my health. But the biggest hunger and absolute debilitation I ever felt came from 1 to 13 April 1945, when we were put on a coal train from Mittelbau to Ravensbrück, fifty men to a freight car, with no food at all for the thirteen days of the journey. When we were allowed to alight on an embankment, we ate the grass that grew between the stones along the track . . ..

I must add that there are times when to relieve your hunger, you will even eat things that are poisonous. There were vats of diverse oils and tars stored in the warehouse, and one of them was marked Fischtran, “fish oil.” For a long time I hesitated, but finally I was so hungry that plucked up the courage to try it and poured some on my piece of bread. It smelled like cod-liver oil but it must have been something else, because after eating it I got such dreadful stomach convulsions and was sick for several days until my stomach got rid of all the Fischtran. (Bronisław Gościński)

People also ate certain mineral substances:

One day, I saw my colleagues taking something out of a pile of coal and eating it. It was a soft kind of coal. Your hunger was so immense that you ate anything you came by . . .. (Szczepan Robak)

Antoni Kubica relates a similar story:

. . . we ate whatever we laid our hands on, even stones and carrion, we sucked or chewed whatever we could, we bit off pieces of our fingernails and ate plaster ripped off the walls, anything to cheat our stomachs. The Germans in the camp’s canteen used to sell a salad but unfortunately you could not eat it because it was bad for you. If you ate it, you got swellings all over your body. (Antoni Kubica)

***

Drinking too much of the mineral water we were given in the camp at Dora23 turned out to be dangerous, even though it was medicinal water. As there was no water at all in Dora, in the first quarter of 1944 we had a certain kind of mineral water supplied straight to the tunnel. It was supposed to be natural mineral water, the taste was slightly salty but not bad. Not only did it make you much hungrier if you drank it, but it also made you hanker for specific foods yet still did not quench your thirst.

I tried it out on myself. You really had to have a lot of willpower to start drinking it and stop before it was too late. Experienced prisoners took one or two sips and then laid their bottles aside. Anyone who could not control himself and kept drinking it, by the next day would have his face and the whole of his body bloated, and that finished him off. (Stanisław Naskalski)

There are particularly drastic stories of prisoners eating various animals. Usually it was frogs, which are a delicacy for Frenchmen, while prisoners of other nationalities only ate frogs if in desperate need. The stories we quote below show the ingenious methods prisoners used to “hunt” different animals in the camp and how they cooked them.

One of the active ways of fighting off hunger was by searching for food, sniffing it out, looking for it in and outside the camp. When the nasty winter was over and the first blades of grass started to appear in the fields, we ate them, telling ourselves that if they were good for animals, why should they be bad for humans. At this time, I remember, the French girls ate dandelions as a surrogate for lettuce and encouraged us to do so. I didn’t like it, it was bitter but the French girls considered themselves lucky if they managed to catch a frog. They ate only the legs and threw the rest away, and said that if they only had frogs, they would be able to survive the worst. Incidentally, a very small number of the Frenchwomen survived, and I don’t think any at all of the Greek women survived. They were not accustomed to the climate or the food, so they dropped like flies. (Jadwiga Apostoł-Staniszewska)

My friends in the camp used to cook a broth made of frogs, it had a pleasant smell but I didn’t try it. They also ate snails and a salad made of dandelions. I didn’t eat any salt, but the Russian women ate a lot of salt coloured pink or green, which was used to dry grain. (Stanisława Buda)

***

The lucky ones were those who were sent to sort potatoes in the storage clamps, which they searched through for a variety of delicacies such as potatoes that were going mushy or rotten. They ate as much as they could of that, and then they’d get the trots, stomach aches, and very often it would spell the end for them.

I remember a prisoner coming up to me and handing me a potato cut in half. Inside it had gone completely yellow. “Eat it,” he said, “It’s better than a pear.” But I didn’t, I was worried about the likely consequences, getting a stomach ache. One of the prisoners, a Greek, used to catch mice and ate them live; he often brought them into the camp and would eat them in front of other prisoners. The block senior heard of it and told him next time to do it in front of him (he wanted to see that prisoner eating a mouse because he didn’t really believe him, but that was because the functionary was never hungry). Next time, when the prisoner brought in a mouse, the block senior called a meeting and told him to eat the mouse. The prisoner did so, evidently relishing it. The block senior must have still had some kind feelings left, because he gave the prisoner two pieces of bread and margarine, making him very happy. The prisoner kissed the bread ten times over before he began to eat it, making a big show of it. (Władysław Stawarz)

Here’s another episode from Auschwitz:

I was working on dismantling potato clamps. We had to load the potatoes up on lorries which took them to the station. While on the job, we used to eat half-rotten potatoes; they tasted like salted gherkins. Others ate raw mice—there were a lot of mice there. But if an SS-man caught a Muselmann with a mouse or a rotten spud, he would beat him up and made him stand for twelve hours at the gate to the camp with that mouse or rotten potato. However, few if any could do it, and usually the Lagerführer24would finish him off. (Stanisław Biedroń)

***

I remember a disgusting thing that used to go on in Gross-Rosen on rainy days in the spring of 1943. Some prisoners would pick earthworms up from the soil and swallow them. (Arnold Andrunik)

There was no mercy for larger animals, either. Especially for dogs. Prisoners pilfered the food from their bowls, or the dogs themselves fell victim and soon turned into delicious dog broth, as the next passage shows:

There were a few German civilian professionals working on the floor of the factory [at Falkensee concentration camp], supervising the work of the prisoners. When they were on night shift, they would often bring in their dogs, usually fine thoroughbreds. Often these dogs would run away from their masters and saunter off from the offices into the production halls. Alas, just as often they would end up as victims of starving prisoners.

I remember a prisoner from Kraków who worked in my group. He was a butcher by trade and caught stray dogs. Having enticed his victim in a manner known only to himself, he would kill it straightaway and joint it behind a huge machine. A couple of prisoners stood on guard, while others carefully removed all the evidence of the procedure using water and a rubber hosepipe. The broth was cooked in a bucket on an improvised electric cooker. The whole procedure was carried out clandestinely and was over in just a short time, and those who took part in it would then enjoy and greedily savour real, albeit not beef, broth and meat. It all went on for some time, and they were very careful and disciplined, so no one was ever caught. Usually it took place in the small hours, when the foremen had got tired and were poking about in their cubby-hole offices. We had mixed feelings, but usually we were amused, when right to the end of the shift we kept hearing the foreman summoning his pet and we watched him searching for it... (Arnold Andrunik)

***

The following incident which I witnessed some time around mid-1942 [in Auschwitz] may serve to show what hunger could do to prisoners and how far it could make them change their behaviour. One day in the toilets of Block 15, next to one of the toilet bowls a prisoner vomited the salad he had just purchased in the canteen. A few minutes later, another prisoner who had completely turned into a Muselmann came in, collected up the mess from the floor and ate it. (Stefan Kępa)

***

I remember seeing the following incident happen in Auschwitz in 1943. One of the prisoners working in the kitchen was rewarded by being allowed to have an “extra.” He ate so much that later he was sick. Another prisoner, a very thin Muselmann, was sitting next to him. The Muselmann collected up the undigested pieces of food the other man had thrown up, rinsed them and ate them. I remember him well, sometimes I used to help him. He used to pull the Rollwagen,25 he had also worked as a delivery man for the metal shop, bringing in materials and dinner for the metalworkers, but he was caught stealing potatoes from the cooking pot and lost the job. (Jan Liwacz)

These episodes need no commentary. They show the profound aberrations which may be come about due to hunger and the enthralment into which hunger cast starving prisoners. Compared with the above stories, eating wicker, horse fodder, or beech nuts may seem far more natural.

I remember an incident which happened in the basket-weaving commando of Auschwitz. The prisoners working in this commando used to peel off the outer skin of the wicker fibre, rinse it in water, cook it, cut it up into small pieces, and eat it. After a while, they would get a severe stomach cramp, but what wouldn’t you do to satisfy your hunger. (Stefan Hądzel)

***

A banquet better than all banquets was held in Malchow,26 and should go down in the history of the women who were prisoners in that camp. . . . One day, a cart rolled up and the carter put fodder bags on his horses’ necks. Little Ludwiczka went up to one of the horses, took his fodder bag off and stole it. With her heart in her mouth and the fodder bag under her arm, she dashed into our room. Before she managed to say anything or take a breather, we had dived our hands in and disposed of all the horse’s dinner. It consisted of some kind of dried pomace mixed with dried grass. It was certainly not food intended for humans, but I never had such a tasty delicacy in the whole of my time in Malchow. (Jadwiga Apostoł-Staniszewska)

***

In Buchenwald I worked in the forest and always deluded myself, hoping in vain that I would forage and find something to eat under the snow. But all the soil in the neighbourhood had been scorched. Next to the spruce wood in which we worked, there was a copse of beech trees which had not been scorched, and under the snow around them I happened to find my “Canada”27—some beech nuts. I had never been familiar with beech trees or their nuts before. But when I examined these pips or sharp-pointed nuts, I was convinced they would be edible. I made my discovery during work and when I had eaten a couple nothing happened, so quite on the contrary, it encouraged me to eat some more. I waited impatiently for the midday break to eat my fill of these nuts.

During the midday break in Buchenwald, all the work commandos assembled in a designated venue and the prisoners got tea or coffee, and even soup in some commandos. My commando only got a beverage. Hunger made me prefer the nuts. During my dinner breaks I would slip out and like a mole forage for nuts under the snow. In the evening, when I was sitting at the dinner table with my friends, I would treat them to the nuts. However, I tried to keep my discovery secret from the rest of the commando, so as not to encourage prospective competitors, after all it was a limited zone of bounty. This method of getting sustenance gave me something, especially the delusion that I was eating something, that for a large part of the day I had something in my mouth. (Stefan Krupa)

The rites of eating

Concentration camp conditions brought fundamental changes in the way people took their meals. You had to adapt to a variety of complications: queuing up, not having enough bowls to go round, eating in a hurry so as to finish within the time allowed, not keeping to the rudimentary rules of hygiene and aesthetics etc. Permanent hunger and the food shortage gave rise to eating habits specific for the concentration camps. Stanisław Takuski gives a good description of this in his questionnaire:

Now I want to say something about the rites of eating, the ways in which people satisfied their hunger. I think there must have been a specific rite for the community in each of the camps. The rite, in other words the ritual of eating, was a set of physical and spiritual procedures connected with the way prisoners sated their hunger and it was treated very seriously.

In fact, queuing up in front of the soup pot for your litre from it was not particularly hard. The pots had a fixed capacity. Every prisoner was aware of the law of physics that the solid components are heavier and are at the bottom of the soup. So everyone tried to use elbow power to be number 15 to 20 in the queue to a 25-litre pot of soup, because this was the interval for which the law of probability said you could expect to get a spud or two, or even three—what a success. This success would be the subject of conversation during the entire dinner break, or maybe all the breaks in the whole week. It was unbelievable. Yet it was a conjecture based on common sense.

Once emptied, the pots waited to be returned to the camp. But before that happened, they would be meticulously cleaned of the microscopic leftovers stuck to their walls and bottom. This was done using wooden scrapers or spatulas, which would be rubbed to and fro to remove the thin layer of prized dregs. Inmates kept these spatulas, along with a little weighing device to check they were getting their full bread ration, in a homemade inner pocket on the left side of their prison gear. The pocket also held other paraphernalia a prisoner needed. Once a week after their return from work, it all went onto a pile of rubbish during a routine check on the roll call square, only to be retrieved later and come back home to prisoners’ pockets.

In the last resort, there was another useful tool for cleaning soup pots—your tongue, but you had to take care the overseers didn’t catch you. Otherwise, you could leave your head in the pot.

If having the midday mean was done in a grasping, nervy manner, supper was a real ceremony. The sharing out of a loaf of bread between three or four men was conducted absolutely fairly. This was when your little weighing balance came in handy. It was made of a little crosspiece with two weighing pans made of tin container tops attached at either end. Portions of bread would be weighed and exactly balanced against each other. I used to eat my bread ration sitting on my bunk, breaking it up into tiny pieces and eating them one at a time.

The large amount of saliva you secreted during a meal made you feel you had had enough. That’s what you were told by the veterans, who had had a lot of experience. No one left their portion of bread till the morning, unless they had a key for their locker. At night the smarter inmates—I’m not going to call them thieves because you can hardly call someone who takes someone else’s bread because he’s hungry a “thief”—used to go on the prowl round their own and other blocks. A sorry fate was in store for a poor fellow caught red-handed. The block elder or another functionary responsible for the block had the privilege of torturing the culprit to death by drowning him in the barrel or sending him on the electric fence etc. Thieves and cut-throats turned judges—terrible! A piece of bread really worked like a magnet, attracting the gaze of even the most decent hungry-guts, whether he was a monk, a lawyer, a farmer, a crook or whatever his station in civilian life might have been. Sometimes a prisoner would appropriate the bread ration belonging to his friend, sometimes a father took his son’s bread or vice-versa. Bread was a priceless treasure. The hungry man knew of no property laws, his eyes ingested someone else’s slice, and he ingested it physically whenever he got the chance. (Stanisław Takuski)

Here’s a list of the ingenious ways in which prisoners ate their bread, their main source of sustenance:

People tried a variety of ways to fool their hunger: some gobbled up their bread ration fast and as soon as they got it, worried they might not eat it within the time allowed; others cut their bread into small slices, spread it with a very thin coat of margarine and on top they put slivers of potatoes cooked unpeeled like pigswill, or a piece of raw fodder beet, or thick slices of onion if they had some from a parcel. These people usually managed to divide their bread up for two meals. Then there were others who liked to toast their bread on the metal heaters.

Getting a parcel with bread that had gone mouldy was tragic. To prevent it, prisoners asked [in letters to their families] for hardtack, which their families would first fry in lard ... (Maria Elżbieta Jezierska)

***

In my block some fellow-prisoners put a small slice of their bread ration aside every day, so as to collect up half a loaf for Sunday. When Sunday came, they would take their bread up to the top bunk and eat it there very slowly, slice by slice, relishing every bite out of sight of envious eyes. It was a sort of bread feast. These people would put up with more hunger during the week to have their fill of bread at least on Sunday. (Jan Marszałek)

***

Finally, the bread which had crumbled up into pieces was distributed in the following way. Every table designated with a number for a particular group had its own Tischälteste,28 who would sort the crumbs into little piles, adding or taking some off until he was satisfied all the portions were right. It was no use shouting or protesting that your portion was smaller than someone else’s.

You were given a token with a number, which you put into a bag. The bag was then given a shake and prisoners came up one by one in their order on a list, drew out a counter and took their bread ration in accordance with the number on the table. This system continued almost to the end, that is to the evacuation of Dora. (A)

***

Two of my friends and I used to collect up our rations of bread. We cut it up into very thin slices. In the evening, we had it at a table covered with a little white cloth, sipping our coffee very slowly. We had a second portion in the morning, and toasted a third portion on a machine used for making aircraft components which we worked at. We had this portion for elevenses, drinking it down with some boiled water. We saved a little slice to collect up six for Sunday, when we didn’t go to work and were very hungry. It was a good method, even though we ate very little, but more often. Our eating habit and the thought that we had something put by for breakfast and as a reserve kept us going. For the whole time in the concentration camp, culinary recipes were the most frequent subject of our conversations, and we also talked about the fine dinners we had attended with a full description of all the dishes that had been served at them. (Aniela Turecka-Wajd)

***

I had become a bit used to going hungry, and that’s why I used to divide the very small amount of food I got into equal portions. Of course, I ate all the midday meal in one go, but I divided the portion of bread we got for supper into two, had one for supper and kept the other for breakfast, for which they only gave some unsweetened herb tea.

Saving your bread for breakfast was very risky, because others saw you do it and would steal it during the night. I used to put mine under the mattress where I had my head when I went to sleep, and somehow that worked for me. Other prisoners greedily gobbled up all their bread in one go, and still others ate half their bread ration, and sold the other half for a cigarette. That annoyed and surprised me. I don’t know what they found stronger, hunger or tobacco addiction. Those prisoners usually died sooner. (Władysław Stawarz)

Nikodem Pieszczoch applied different but equally effective tactics. Here is his account:

At mealtimes your hunger was much worse. When the time of the meal passed, you didn’t feel so hungry at all. I didn’t smoke, so I traded the cigarettes I bought in the canteen on the black market outside Block 5 (now Block 13). Baltaziński the block senior used to whack us on the back to drive off the traders. For the whole time I was a Muselmann, I kept my ability to think clearly and always used my common sense. For instance, I tried eating potato peels with marmalade but gave it up when it came to me that they were dirty and hard to digest. I couldn’t swallow coffee dregs. I was not persuaded that splitting up the bread ration you got for supper into tiny little slices with something spread on them and saving some for breakfast was a good idea. I ate slowly but had the whole portion at one sitting. I did not drink water and limited my intake of liquids.

Before the first parcels arrived, I got the idea that having a surplus of food would be dangerous and made deals with my friends that we would share any parcels we received on an equal basis. That saved us. When I got my first parcel, one kilo of cooked bacon with garlic, I only had a small piece of it and shared out the rest with the partners to the deal. Eating fat gave me diarrhoea, but it was not bloody dysentery. So I went on a strict diet of dry bread, exchanging all the “extras” and beverages (the soup) for bread. In addition, I burned wood in the braziers and ate the charcoal. I recovered from the diarrhoea and did not get any problems with losing my balance or having eye trouble. All the time, my mind was working normally and I did my best not to overexert myself, organised extra food, and steered clear of rain and the cold. I pretended to be working but was very careful not to be caught at it.

I got extra food from my friends in the deal. Maybe there was not a lot of it, but the very thought that there was someone you could rely on and go round the blocks in the hope of getting support kept me going and “fed” me. Usually I’d return without any extras, but still hoping that tomorrow I’d be luckier. A healthy body could digest a bowl of potato soup which had settled into a jelly. The people in the Schonungsblock29 looked up to me, an “old number.”30 That was in the spring of 1940: “where’ve you been keeping yourself?” they wondered. I didn’t eat grass or raw mangelwurzel. But I did eat a crow baked in mud and dog meat cooked in the Holzhof31 dog pound, pieces of dry bread and other leftovers scavenged from the bins in the SS barracks. However, I was very careful to see that it was clean. I grew accustomed to being hungry, just as you can become used to anything. (Nikodem Pieszczoch)

***

I was always hungry all day long, and it was such a nuisance that I used to look at everything around and consider whether it was edible, and if so, then how to get hold of it. When I was collecting in the harvest from the fields and bringing the sheaves into various barns, on the sly I tried to pull out a few grains of rye and eat them. I never managed to collect a lot of them, because there were SS men bullying us to work faster and if they caught anyone chewing grains, they would beat him black and blue. The most difficult thing for me was trying to fall asleep on an empty stomach. I always left my daily ration of bread and margarine to eat the next morning before roll call, and all I would have in the evening would be just the extras to the bread, such as a slice of brawn, a piece of cheese or marmalade, and once a week it would be a few unpeeled potatoes. On the other hand, I tried to get as much of the so-called “tea” or other hot beverage as I could from the room functionary. I took my extra portion of tea just before falling asleep, and that’s how I cheated my stomach and could fall asleep quicker. In this way, I didn’t feel so hungry at least for the first few hours at work. (Adam Jurkiewicz)

***

At this time, that is the winter of 1941/42, for a room housing over two hundred of us, we had only 5, literally five bowls between us when the food pot came round. And of course there were no spoons. Prisoners lined up in rows of five. The first five came up to the soup pot, each man holding a bowl. They got a ladle of soup, drank it up as fast as they could standing up and handed the bowls over to the next five, who did the same, right to the last group. The room functionary hurried us on to be quick and prisoners who were waiting would try to snatch a bowl from those who were still having their soup. Prisoners who had finished drinking their soup tried to lick or scrape off the remains still on the side of the bowl, while the next men tried to snatch the bowl from them... (Józef Ludwig)

The purpose of these ingenious ways of eating was to prolong the meal itself and cheat the senses, as well as one’s body and feeling of hunger. Many of these methods were practised by large numbers of inmates and experienced prisoners passed them on to new arrivals. Some methods were used only by individuals who kept them secret. The methods given above show how much mental effort it took to design such procedures.

One day in the Landwirtschaft,31 the boys from the basket-weaving shop organised some bones meant for the dogs. Of course, there was still some meat left on those bones. There were three of these fellows. They bit the remnants of the meat off the bones, while the rest of us stared at them as if spellbound. The first one bit off the meat, the second man chewed off whatever was still left and handed the bone over to the last man. I remember how I envied him as I watched him, I was so mad at him that he was biting it all off so thoroughly. Each of us was hoping that eventually we would get a bone. Even if there was nothing left on it, you could still suck it as much as you could. And you didn’t feel there was anything disgusting about it, even though so many prisoners had bitten, chewed, and sucked the same bone... (Józef Ludwig)

***

Now you had to save what was left of your strength. I implemented a clever way to economise on moving about, that is, I only moved and worked when I was being watched by my tormentor. I employed this energy-saving method in all the physical labour I did, especially in the penal commando.

After a time, I also started saving my mental energy, taking care to keep calm and spiritually balanced, and trying not to think about anything except things that would help to keep me reasonably fit. (Józef Kret)

Often delusions brought on by hunger turned out to have a beneficial effect, enhancing a prisoner’s impression of satiety as if he or she had acquired a small trophy or a fortuitous gift of food.

I spent about three weeks in the prisoners’ hospital. There was hardly any access to us from the outside. Nonetheless, thanks to the prisoner nurses, we managed to get occasional visits. That’s how I got a piece of mangelwurzel, and another time a half-rotten apple in a parcel which my sister brought me from home. I could go on and on writing about that apple, though I don’t remember at all if I ate it, if I ate it all or just the edible part. But I held that apple in my hand. I looked at it and tried to enjoy looking at it. Afterwards I had unforgettable, wonderful hallucinations about it, they were vitalising though oddly distant and of course unreal. As soon as I closed my eyes, I saw piles of apples on market stalls, in baskets, or in orchards, but as soon as I opened my eyes, it was all gone. For a few days, I kept returning to those delusions, which were joined by visions of other delicacies, which I fed on and fell into state of exhilaration as if I were on drugs. Who knows, perhaps they had an irrational role of their own to play, perhaps they were really keeping me fed . . ., because for all intents and purposes, I don’t really know to whom or what I owe the fact that I pulled through two diseases, typhus and tonsillitis one after another, combined with a fever; who or what I have to thank for surviving hunger and Durchfall, which I went through in the prisoners’ hospital. (Jadwiga Apostoł-Staniszewska)

Read Part 2 of the article.

***

Translated from original article: Ryn, Zdzisław Jan, and Kłodziński, Stanisław. “Glód w obozie koncentracyjnym.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1984.


Notes
  1. In the prisoners’ concentration camp jargon, “organising” meant obtaining indispensable items, especially food, by fair means or foul. See below in this article.a
  2. Polish name: Krakowskie Towarzystwo Lekarskie.a
  3. Polish name: Polskie Towarzystwo Lekarskie.a
  4. The English version of this article, “Hunger disease in Auschwitz,” is available on the Medical Review – Auschwitz website, at https://www.mp.pl/auschwitz/journal/english/215170,hunger-disease-in-auschwitz.b
  5. Oedemas developed as a consequence of the fall in the content of proteins, vitamins, and microelements in a starving inmate’s body due to the accumulation of toxins owing to intensive tissue catabolism. Oedemas caused by a shortfall of protein and cardiac failure emerged on prisoners’ feet, thighs and shins, and on the faces and buttocks of those who were bedbound.b
  6. 5 ft 1” and 50 lbs.a
  7. 5 ft 3” and 55 lbs.a
  8. After the War, Dr Jan Sehn was the chief prosecutor collecting the evidence against the Nazi German criminals tried by Polish courts.a
  9. German name: Hygiene Institut der Waffen-SS und Polizei Auschwitz O/S.a
  10. The expression Muselmann was used by concentration camp inmates to refer to fellow-prisoners reduced by inanition to human wrecks in the ultimate stage of hunger disease, just before they died. See below in this article.a
  11. The English version of Makowski’s article, entitled “Malnutrition of political prisoners (after Howard H. Ingling),” is on this website.a
  12. Chleb, the Polish word for “bread,” is often used metonymically for food in general.a
  13. Rybarzowice is a small place in the Silesian part of Poland.a
  14. Bergen-Belsen was a concentration camp in Lower Saxony, Germany. As of 1943 it was also a military field hospital as well as a camp for Jews due to be exchanged for Germans interned abroad. The observations British military physicians made in Bergen-Belsen following its liberation were the first medical reports on the state of health of survivors to be published in the medical press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergen-Belsen_concentration_camp.b
  15. Approx. 154 and 77 lbs. respectively.a
  16. Auschwitz prisoners condemned to death were sent to Block 11, “Death Block”, and kept in dark, solitary cells called “the Bunker.” https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/punishments-and-executions/block-11.a
  17. Avo was a German powdered food extract which was added to prisoners’ food. https://www.auschwitz.org/historia/zycie-w-obozie/wyzywienie.a
  18. Lysol—a substance used as a cleaning liquid and antiseptic disinfectant, first manufactured in Germany in 1889 to combat a cholera epidemic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysol.a
  19. Flossenbürg was a German concentration camp in the Upper Palatinate forest, Germany. https://www.gedenkstaette-flossenbuerg.de/en/history/flossenbuerg.a
  20. 105.8 degrees Fahrenheit.a
  21. Perhaps a different prisoner, Andrzej Makowski, not Antoni Makowski, whose paper is quoted in the references but with the wrong date of publication (1963 instead of 1968). The English translation of Antoni Makowski’s article is due to be posted up on this website.a
  22. By “black sugar” this survivor means the side-product of the refining of sugar beet. This substance contains sucrose, glucose and fructose but is unpalatable to humans and generally used in animal fodder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molasses. Beet pulp is a fibrous by-product of the refining of sugar beet, and is used in animal fodder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beet_pulp.a
  23. Mittelbau-Dora was a sub-camp of Buchenwald in the Harz Mountains (Germany), and held an underground armament factory. https://www.buchenwald.de/en/1347.a
  24. The Lagerführer was the second most senior German official in the camp, responsible directly to the camp’s commandant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_command_of_Auschwitz_concentration_camp.a
  25. The Rollwagen in Auschwitz was a hand cart used for the disposal of corpses. It was pulled by a special commando of prisoners.a
  26. Malchow was a sub-camp of Ravensbrück located in Mecklemburg, Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malchow_concentration_camp a
  27. “Canada” was a storehouse of goods and valuables confiscated from new prisoners on arrival. It was located at a distance from the main camp of Auschwitz. Canada was considered a land of plenty, and hence the name of the storage facility.a
  28. Tischälteste—literally “table senior,” a loan from German by analogy to the terms for other functionaries, e.g. Blockälteste (block senior) etc.b
  29. Schonungsblock—German for convalescents’ block. a
  30. An “old number”—a veteran inmate of the concentration camp with a low prison number. a
  31. Holzhof—German for lumberyard. a
  32. Landwirtschafts-betriebe—German for “agricultural units.” Auschwitz operated agricultural properties right until it was closed down in January 1945, and prisoners were sent out, first from the main camp and later from special sub-camps to work on the farms. https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/auschwitz-sub-camps; https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landwirtschaftsbetriebe_des_KZ_Auschwitz.a

a—notes by Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, Head Translator for the Medical Review Auschwitz project; b—notes by Maria Ciesielska, Head Translator for the Medical Review Auschwitz project.

References

Kowalczykowa, Janina. 1961. “Choroba głodowa w obozie koncentracyjnym w Oświęcimiu.” PrzeglądLekarskiOświęcim: 28-31. English translation online: “Hunger disease in Auschwitz.” Translated by Władysław Chłopicki. https://www.mp.pl/auschwitz/journal/english/215170,hunger-disease-in-auschwitz

Levi, Primo. 1969. Ist das einMensch? Erinnerungen an Auschwitz. Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer Verlag. English translation of the original Italian edition: If This is a Man. Translated by Stuart Woolf. New York: Orion Press, 1959.

Makowski, Antoni. 1968. “Niedożywienie więźniów politycznych (według pracy Howarda H. Inglinga).”PrzeglądLekarskiOświęcim: 47-53. English translation forthcoming on this website.

Münch, Hans. 1967. “Głód I czas przeżycia w obozie oświęcimskim.” Przegląd Lekarski Oświęcim:79-88.

Ryn, Zdzisław, and Stanisław Kłodziński. 1983. “Na granicy życia i śmierci. Studium obozowego muzułmaństwa.” PrzeglądLekarskiOświęcim: 27-73. English translation online: “Teetering on the brink between life and death. A study on the concentration camp Muselmann.” Translated by Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa. https://www.mp.pl/auschwitz/journal/english/170025,teetering-on-the-brink-between-life-and-death-a-study-on-the-concentration-camp-muselmann

Schwarz, Joachim. 1983. “Przeżyłem Oświęcim. Jak żyć teraz? Kilka aspektów historiografii.” Główna Komisja badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce. Międzynarodowa Sesja Naukowa pt. „Hitlerowskie ludobójstwo w Polsce i Europie 1939-1945”, Warszawa, 14-17 kwietnia 1983 r. (19-page photocopy).

Sterkowicz, Stanisław. 1971. “Uwagi o obozowym wyniszczeniu.” PrzeglądLekarskiOświęcim: 17-22. English translation forthcoming on this website.

Urbański, Bolesław. 1948. “Własne spostrzeżenia nad chorobą głodową więźniów oświęcimskich.” In Pamiętnik XIV zjazdu Towarzystwa Internistów Polskich we Wrocławiu w r. 1947. Edward Szczeklik, Zofia Czeżowska, and Stanisław Bühn (eds.). Wrocław: Komitet Miejscowy Towarzystwa Internistów Polskich , 375-379.

List of respondents

We will publish the full list of respondents to our questionnaire in Part Two of our study on hunger. Here are the names of the respondents whose questionnaires have been cited in this article, with their Auschwitz prison numbers in brackets after their names.

Arnold Andrunik (21164); Jadwiga Apostoł-Staniszewska (26273); Stanisław Biedroń (92266); Stanisława Buda (34310); Bronisława Bukowińska (30513); Józef Ciepły (169400); Mieczysława Chylińska (44658); Edward Czekierda (869); Bolesław Dziamski (7723); Bronisław Gościński (403); Stefan Hądzel (22542); Kazimierz Jankowski (35010); Maria Elżbieta Jezierska (24449); Adam Jurkiewicz (476); Stefan Kępa (799); Stefan Krupa (123348); Józef Kret (20020); Antoni Kubica (7617); Jan Liwacz (1010); Józef Ludwig (23791); Józef Lula (126942); Andrzej Makowski (5654) [Antoni Makowski (131791), author of the cited article on malnutrition, is not named on the list of respondents—Translator’s note]; Jan Marszałek (18857); Jan Myczkowski (27630); Wiktor Myrdko (18478); Eugeniusz Niedojadło (213); Nikodem Pieszczoch (673); Szczepan Robak (86499); Jan Starczewski (121625); Władysław Stawarz (93234); Melania Śmierciak (32388); Stefan Świszczowski (20033); Stanisław Takuski (35049); Kazimierz Tokarz (282); Jadwiga Trębasiewicz (44133); Aniela Turecka-Wajd (23368); Jarosław Warchoła (121698); Stefan Zasacki (150155).

We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to the above-named survivors as well as to all who took the trouble to answer our questionnaire on hunger in the concentration camps.

A public task financed by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of Public Diplomacy 2022 (Dyplomacja Publiczna 2022) competition.
The contents of this site reflect the views held by the authors and do not constitute the official position of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

We use cookies to ensure you get the best browsing experience on our website. Refer to our Cookies Information and Privacy Policy for more details.