Hunger in the concentration camps. Part Two

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

Resilience to hunger

Although every prisoner went through an aggravating food shortage, not every prisoner reacted to it in the same way. Some were activated by hunger to search for extra food, while others were subdued by it and cast into lethargy and inertia. Not only a prisoner’s internal features, that is his or her personal disposition, impacted on his or her reaction to hunger. There were also external factors which played a considerable part. The next stories from our survivors give a very good account of the matter:

There can be no doubt that different prisoners reacted to hunger in different ways. I think that the following values a prisoner adhered (or did not adhere) to influenced his behaviour when he was hungry: (1) his religious and moral maturity, (2) the ideals he cherished, (3) the social and existential background he came from prior to his detention, (4) if he was elderly or ill, (5) if he was not fit physically, and especially if his mental health was not good, (6) if he did not follow any principles.

The surest of these conditions which helped a prisoner to manage his hunger was his religious and moral maturity. . . . I never heard of such people stealing and I never saw them behave in a degrading way. People with a strong character who kept to a set of ideals were able to put up with hunger, too. They did not crack up easily, either. . . .

Next, I think, came a prisoner’s home and social background, the conditions in which he was brought up and his living conditions before his arrest. I think prisoners who came from the working class were best able to endure hunger. Maybe they had to go through periods of hunger when they were still free. . . . I think that more prisoners with an intelligentsia background rather than working-class people ate all sorts of unwholesome plants. Perhaps it was easier for working-class people than for the educated to keep their common sense.

Age and poor health was another factor. These prisoners were able to accept death in a calm manner, more calmly than young people, even if they were slowly being starved to death. Age, sickness, and being aware that they had no more strength left made it easier for them to be reconciled to hunger and slowly die of it. (Jan Marszałek)

***

The climate of Birkenau was particularly unfavourable for the Greeks and they were the ones who most often turned into Muselmänner. They were also the ones who most often tried to eat things which are inedible. Whenever they did not have to work, their hands were constantly in their mouths: they sucked or bit their fingers, or chewed items of their clothing. They mumbled a mix of Greek and German words: essen , Suppe , heute salami, zulage¹ etc. I saw Greeks who were still in a reasonable condition eating raw potatoes. At that time for us Poles, that sort of behaviour was still repulsive... (Stefan Krupa)

***

From what I saw, the French women were the least resilient to conditions in the camp, hard labour and poor food. They were highly cultivated, patriotic activists accustomed to prosperity. They were very supportive to their compatriots. Alas, their health deteriorated quickly and they soon died. When they were standing in the roll call, they swooned and fell down at the very thought that they would be going out to work on the airfield. We were not allowed to help them until the roll call was over, they lay in the water or in the snow. It was only once the rest of the women prisoners had left for work that they were collected up and sent to the hospital. They found it very hard to endure the cold weather, and getting no vitamins. They used to pick weeds to make salads for a vitamin supply. They cracked up mentally and there were incidents of beautiful young girls going berserk. They had to be controlled without drawing the attention of the SS-men. The poor things ended by losing their senses completely and we never saw them again.

The Russian women put up with conditions in the camp best. Most of them were young, strong, and hard-working. Usually they worked in the kitchen, where they had to carry big, heavy cooking pots. But they had enough food and were in warm premises.

In general, Polish women were quite resilient and wanted to survive at all costs and resume their normal life. Survival in those macabre conditions depended on a lot of fortuitous circumstances. Often it was the young and strong women who broke down and died, while older and less fit ones survived. (A)

“Organising” food

A we know, the concentration camp diet allowed prisoners to survive for an average of three to six months. One of the things which gave inmates a chance to prolong their lives, sometimes for several years in the camp, was procuring extra food, often by “illegal” (illicit) means. Prisoners referred to all such methods of getting extra food as “organising” it. “Organising” certainly did not mean stealing. A prisoner who stole another prisoner’s bread was punished by other prisoners, while “organising” was regarded as a virtue and a sign that the prisoner was resourceful. Prisoners “organised” food not only for themselves but also for other prisoners.

To procure extra food or medications, prisoners needed to apply ingenious and sometimes risky strategies. Very often, they involved an elaborate plan designed in advance in which several prisoners took part in a chain of coordinated operations. Sometimes, however—and this applied chiefly to Muselm ä nner—“organising” food was an uncritical act of despair doomed to failure. Stanisław Takuski describes a variety of methods employed to “organise” food:

How people managed to satisfy their hunger. A person who had reached a certain stage of starvation could not replenish the full amount of food he needed in just one go, within a week or a month. To recover your strength and sense of wellness, you had to take a clinical approach to keeping yourself fed. There were many methods people used to stave off hunger, and here I will classify the ones I know from personal experience into material methods and propaganda measures.

Material methods were all the ways in which people tried to fill their stomach. When I was working in one of the kettles on the quarry, hauling granite blacks to the processing hall, on my way I used to pass a clump of Chenopodium album (lamb’s quarter) weeds. Each time I nipped a few of its velvety leaves, just a handful. I liked them when they were young. But once the weed flowered (in May), its leaves became bitter and no longer tasted nice. The bare stems showed that there must have been more aficionados of this veggie good for hares. We didn’t even spare the ants, never mind whether red or black, so long as they were still moving. . . .

In addition, whenever we got the chance, we also did “overtime” in the kitchen, peeling turnips, carrots, and mangelwurzels, especially when new prisoners were arriving. We were paid a litre of soup left over from the previous day’s dinner, it had gone sour by the time we got it. Also you could get a knock on the head with a turnip if the kapo caught you eating the vegetables.

We also hired our services on a night shift carrying bricks to the building site for new blocks. The pay for that was a litre of sour soup, too, but such occasions only happened sporadically and weren’t really worth it.

Another job we did on Saturdays was washing underwear for a high-ranking official in the camp, for which we got a camela of soup on the Sunday. In the Gusen prisoners’ jargon there were a lot of Spanish words for foodstuffs and utensils, such as patatos (potatoes), butifera (sausage), camela (bowl) etc.² Others brought flowers for the girls from the brothel, in return for bread or cigarettes.

I could go on and on giving more examples of how people acquired food, legally or illegally by organising it, starting from the sophisticated, well-planned methods, down to the simple collection of potato peels in return for washing a bowl.

The poorest (Muselmänner) rummaged in the waste bins, in vain looking for something to eat. What they found were rags, pieces of paper, buttons and other items of bric-a-brac which they treated as valuables and lodged them in the pocket on the left side of their jacket. Just like what we may see nowadays with poor, not quite sane tramps who wander about day in, day out, carrying all their belongings on their back. (Stanisław Takuski)

Kazimierz Tokarz describes a highly original method of organising potatoes:

August 1940 was a very “hungry” month in Auschwitz. I was working with my mates as a Dachdecker (roofer) on the kitchen, so I had the chance to warm myself next to the chimney, because it was very windy on the roof. Potato supplies were arriving in the kitchen and being peeled for the SS-men in the potato room. It was too tempting a chance to miss. One of us used to stand on guard while two others went down into the kitchen, quickly packed potatoes into their trousers and bolted up to the rooftop. Carefully looking round, we used to thread the potatoes onto a metal rod and lower them down into the chimney. There they were smoked and roasted. It was an excellent way to deal with our hunger.

But one day our luck ran out. The rod was burned right through and all the potatoes fell down the chimney into the hearth in the kitchen. The smell of burned potatoes attracted the nostrils of the kapo, who called us into the kitchen and gave us a good wallop with his stick. However, our hunger was stronger than our common sense and we did not give up roasting potatoes, only we always used a new metal rod which did not burn through so fast, and that’s how we reduced the risk of another bad break. (Kazimierz Tokarz)

The next story is about Soviet prisoners-of-war in Auschwitz and a group assault carried out in broad daylight on a convoy of carts transporting food:

At the turn of 1942 and 1943, when I was in the prisoners’ hospital, I was often in Block 21, where I was operated and later had my dressings changed. Through the barbed wire I observed the Soviet POWs at work. They were so starving and extremely exhausted, they moved about like ghosts. A cart loaded up with mangelwurzels and pulled by prisoners was passing by their compound. The POWs launched an attack on the cart and managed to snatch a few of the mangelwurzels, even though the SS-men escorting the carts tried to chase the attackers away and beat up a couple of them quite severely. I saw how one of the POWs grabbed a big mangelwurzel, took a few steps away from the cart and started to greedily gobble up the vegetable, along with the soil that had got embedded in it. One of the guards ran up to him, took his trophy away, and gave him a mighty bash on the head with it. The POW dropped down like he was dead and the mangelwurzel fell next to him. As soon as his oppressor was gone, the POW retrieved the mangelwurzel and went on biting into it, still lying there in the mud, until he had eaten it all. (Eugeniusz Niedojadło)

Sometimes “organising” food ended in tragedy. Here is an episode from Auschwitz in which a Hungarian woman paid with her life for an attempt to get a loaf of bread:

Hungarian women often came up to the electric fence to beg for bread. One day, I saw a young Jewish lad throwing a large loaf to them from the men’s camp on the other side. He wasn’t a baseball pitcher, so the loaf fell 50 cm away from the second fence.³ The Hungarian women by the electric fence hesitated. Finally, one of them plucked up the courage and decided to take a chance. She lay down beside the fence and put her right arm through it, supporting herself on her left arm. Her hand was not far away from the loaf. When she stretched out to reach it, her cheek brushed against one of the barbs on the wire... and she went stiff. A drop of blood appeared on her cheek. It was a dreadful sight—a dead person lying on the ground slightly raised up on her left arm and reaching out for a loaf of bread with her right hand . . . She stayed like that, and her friends stood round in a semi-circle watching her die. (Józef Ciepły)

The food trade

“The bread ration was the basic form of payment used in the camp for all the types of barter and service transactions,” Józef Lula, a survivor of the Monowitz sub-camp of Auschwitz, says to describe the value of a piece of bread. A slice of bread was the “legal tender” in the unofficial side of the camp’s affairs and served as the unit gauging value in the commercial exchange prisoners practised with other prisoners as well as with functionaries.

Jadwiga Apostoł-Staniszewska tells us how bartering was conducted in the camp:

The congestion in the middle of the barrack, which was not built up with bunks, was due to prisoners who were reasonably healthy and good at trade and exchange. They conducted a variety of “transactions,” bartering bread in exchange for onions, an onion for a small piece of margarine, margarine for a candle or a pinch of tobacco for a cigarette to supplement the body’s shortfall of nutrients. In that part of the barrack there was a peculiar, noisy hubbub augmented by the sharp language used in the camp on an everyday basis. Some of these women tried to leave the barrack during the “banquet” after roll call and barter their wares outside or in a neighbouring barrack, sniffing out any contraband which might have been smuggled in from outside, especially from the Effektenkam m er.⁴

The cost of diverse goods on the Auschwitz “price list” for items of food varied and depended on circumstances, most of all on the stage in the camp’s operations, the season of the year, and the potential for “organising” a given product or commodity. Maria Elżbieta Jezierska and Stanisław Takuski give us an idea of how it all worked:

Some women wanted to exchange their bread for sausage (but none wanted liver sausage) and thought it was better to have their stomach bloated rather than satiated. There were others who preferred to exchange the onions they got in a parcel for bread.

Here are the average prices in Birkenau: a portion of red Zulage⁵ sausage = 1 ration of bread; 1 large onion = 1 ration of bread; 5-6 raw potatoes = 1 ration of bread; a prisoner who cooked a potato soup for other prisoners had to be paid with a small helping of the soup, a bread ration or a large onion or a slice of bacon; a large extra portion of bread was worth a large slice of bacon, or (for instance) a sweater; a bread ration was worth a shirt etc. As you see, bread had a very high market price. You could also pay with bread or onions for a variety of services, such as, for instance, taking contraband past the gate to the camp, cooking, sewing or adapting prison gear. I don’t know the exact prices for these services, because I never had to pay them . . . For a piece of margarine, you could buy a dressing gown or a “civvies” dress; a bed sheet cost half a piece of margarine or half a bread ration; and for two pieces of margarine you could have a fine blanket. (Maria Elżbieta Jezierska)

***

Here, for comparison, are the prices of a bowl of soup served to prisoners for dinner and the price of a dinner for an SS-man’s dog. In 1942, when the hunger was at its worst, in the evening on the black market you could buy a bowl of thin soup for 5-7 cigarettes, whereas the price of a dog’s dinner ranged from 15 to 20 cigarettes. This ratio continued to hold more or less in 1943 as well, even though cigarettes were devalued and you could get prisoners’ soup for two to three cigarettes, but a dog’s dinner still cost up to ten fags. In other words, a dog’s dinner was worth five times as much as the soup served in the camp to prisoners. (Stanisław Takuski)

So, on the whole, bread and onions, the two basic items on the camp’s black market, for which there was always a demand, were “good value for money.” You could exchange them not only for other foodstuffs but also for a variety of services.

Stanisław Takuski’s laconic expression that a dog’s dinner was worth five times as much as a prisoner’s meal puts it in a nutshell. In Auschwitz, the idiomatic sayings that something was “worth a dog’s dinner” or “a dog’s life” lost their usual meaning. Paradoxically, inmates dreamed of having “a dog’s dinner” and leading “the life of a dog.”

Hunger stronger than death, or the theft of food

Prisoners who decided to keep some of their bread ration for later (even though its amount was insufficient in any case) had to take the risk that it could be stolen. Although the theft of bread was invariably a punishable offence, sometimes even with death, “hunger was stronger than death,” as Jadwiga Trębasiewicz put it. It was no good hiding any bread you left for later even in the most elaborate way—under your mattress, wrapping it in a piece of cloth and putting it under your shirt, or even sleeping on it, putting it under your head when you went to bed at night and waking up in the morning only to find that a smarter prisoner had eaten it. Luckily, the theft of bread was not a common occurrence. Still, most prisoners consumed all of their bread ration as soon as they got it, and fear of the penalty for bread theft was the deterrent that did the rest. The next stories show the circumstances that attended bread theft and the punishments meted out for it:

On 6 July 1940, along with a thousand and a few hundred other Auschwitz inmates, I went through a spell of hunger combined and thirst dealt out to us as a stand-to-attention punishment for the escape of a fellow-prisoner called Tadeusz Wiejowski. . . .

It so happened that the day before the stand-to-attention I only ate my Zulage, a slice of brawn, with a small piece of bread and drank it down with some “tea.” I carefully wrapped the rest of my bread in my handkerchief and when I went to bed, I slipped it under the mattress to keep it for breakfast the next day. That’s what I had been doing at the time, on the assumption that if I went to sleep, I’d forget I was hungry and cheat my hunger. In the morning I’d get up hungry, but that piece of bread which I’d have before going to work would help me get through the day at work.

Next morning I woke up early, before the gong,⁶ as hunger was tearing my guts out. I reached for the bread and wanted to eat it, but after a long search I realised that it had gone. I jumped out of bed and kicked up such a fuss that the room functionary actually discovered who had stolen it. But it was not much help, because not even a crumb was left. The row with the thief meant that I did not have the time to get my “herbs” before roll call, so I went to the morning roll call hungry and thirsty and—worst of all—disappointed. I had been looking forward to having that piece of bread for breakfast and drinking it down with tea, but instead I was left with an empty stomach. I had already gone for twelve hours without food or drink, and there was a whole day of hard work ahead of me. That day, I was at work for twelve hours, during which time I beat several carpets, washed six windows, cleaned six rooms in the SS officers’ quarters and washed a long corridor, but I didn’t manage to find anything to eat. I didn’t go to the midday meal, either, because I was punished with extra work for not beating one of the carpets properly. I was hungry and thirsty, and disappointed a second time all on the same day. My tongue went stiff from the thirst, my belly and guts were growling like a bear, I got spells of dizziness and felt a weird heaviness in the epigastric region.

All the time, I was desperate for something to eat, and even more for something to drink. That day, my luck was against me. Normally, I would have managed to find something in the waste bins, maybe a crust of bread or some leftovers. But that day, there was nothing at all. The rest of the moisture from my salivary glands had been extracted by the dust from beating the carpets, and there was plenty of dust around.

I was looking forward to my bowl of camp soup, hoping that the room functionary would leave some by for me, just as he did for all the others who hadn’t come in for dinner. I was looking forward to my “tea”, a whole bowl of liquid to quench my thirst, fill my stomach and intestines and free me at least for a while from those pangs of hunger and rumbling in my intestines. This hope was a comfort. First I counted the hours, then the quarter-hours and the minutes still left to the end of work. I knew that after work I would have to go through roll call, just like everyone else, but it would only be half an hour and afterwards—I would get something to eat and drink.

Oddly enough, that day roll call went on and on. First, when they counted us, the numbers didn’t tally, then the news came that one of the prisoners had escaped and we would be punished by having to stand out there until he was found. That was my third disappointment connected with hunger that day. The news made me crack up. I was thirsty, hungry, tired after a day of work and worse still—disappointed. You take hunger in a different way if you’re prepared for it, than if after a period of going hungry you are hoping to satisfy your hunger but find that the fast is to be prolonged indefinitely.

The stand-to-attention lasted twenty hours, from the evening roll call on 6 July to the afternoon hours of 7 July. My fast was much longer, as I’d had next to nothing to eat for 48 hours, and nothing to drink for 43 hours.

I was very cold during the night, when we were on stand-to-attention all the time and had to answer the call of nature down our trousers. I don’t know whether it was the shivers due to a raised temperature or because of a calorie deficit that I felt so cold. My body went numb and I no longer cared what would happen to me. . . .

Then I remembered that I had a piece of soap on me. I started chewing it bit by bit in the hope that I’d be able to cheat my hunger that way. . . . All I remember of the stand-to-attention was the very cold dusk at daybreak on 7 July, followed by an extraordinary sizzle in the afternoon hours. The feeling of hunger and thirst gave way to a state of semi-consciousness with which, admittedly, I even felt better. I don’t know how the roll call came to an end or how I got back to my block. I don’t know if I had anything to eat or drink. I lost consciousness completely. It wasn’t until the following day that I came round. I don’t suppose I could have gone without my portion of camp soup and tea after the roll call, but I can’t remember what it tasted like. At any rate, when I woke up, that devastating feeling of hunger and thirst had gone and next day I really enjoyed my camp soup and my bread ration and Zulage in the evening.

The experience of that stand-to-attention must have been extremely profound and painful, because of all the things that happened to me in the camp, it’s the one that has stuck in my memory most of all. (Eugeniusz Niedojadło)

***

Hunger was stronger than death, so the women prisoners risked their lives to steal carrots, potatoes, or sometimes even a chicken or fish from their workplace. They were on pins and needles as they crossed the gate with all these things on them, not knowing if they’d be able to pass without a body search. The “ladies” who stayed behind in the camp carried on with the men working in the craftsmen’s commandos. Every day roofers, mechanics, sewer cleaners and others used to come into the women’s camp for the repair and maintenance of buildings and devices. They would bring their “ladies” cigarettes and foodstuffs obtained in ways which they kept secret. So the women doing functionary jobs had quite a good life; they were important and indifferent to the general misery, they did not care about the starving and the Muselmänner. Only the quick-witted and resourceful had the right to live.

I saw a “toilet lady” pull the head of the one who’d done it down to the toilet seat, pushing her about and shouting, “Now lick it up, pig!” All the poor unfortunate had done was to let a few drops of urine fall on the toilet seat.

The “ladies” wanted to have a lot of leisure time.

The theft of bread was punishable by death, nonetheless hunger stifled people’s fear and exercised their skilfulness. Theft was a commonplace occurrence. Sisters would fight one another. Each thought her sibling was having more than her fair share of the parcels they got from home. Those who were informed on to the block senior were punished with a flogging—twenty or more strokes of the whip. Prisoners who got no help from outside and were no good at pilfering pestered the parcel moguls, begging for food, or even rummaged for leftovers in the rubbish cart outside the kitchen. Every day a commando of women doing the work of draught horses would take it out of the camp, scavenging on the way for anything they could find that they thought was good enough to eat on the spot, such as discarded or mouldy leftovers. Those who did this sentenced themselves to death. (Jadwiga Trębasiewicz)

The theft of bread was punished severely, sometimes the thief was killed. It was considered one of the worst crimes a prisoner could commit. This was one of the differences between the realities in a concentration camp and the social rules governing it from analogous situations in the free world outside. Nowadays in most countries and cultures, we take it for granted that generally people who steal food because of hunger are not punished for it, and if the culprit is hungry and commits this kind of theft to stave off his hunger, we tend to consider it a minor offence and take a tolerant approach to such thieves.

The next stories show the ruthless punishments meted out for the theft of bread. The “sentences” were carried out by prisoners or camp functionaries.

There were very severe punishments for the theft of food. On the first floor of Block 21 in Auschwitz, there was a case of a prisoner who stole a bread ration being killed by the block senior.

Bartering bread for cigarettes was punishable, too. As a rule, the one who took the bread got a stiffer penalty. But it did not apply to exchanges with civilian employees. When I was working in the Steyr armaments factory in Mauthausen, I used to be paid ten cigarettes a day, which I gave to the Austrian employees, who helped me out with food for it. Unfortunately, that was only towards the end of the War, in 1945. (Edward Czekierda)

***

We were all in the same boat, so there was no question of one man stealing from another man. . . . I must say that there was a high level of morale among prisoners as regards food. Later, however, morale started to fall and there were incidents of bread theft. They were, of course, due to prisoners’ need to stave off hunger and the egoistic attitude of those who subscribed to the idea that they had to put themselves first when it came to surviving the camp. . . . I remember times in 1941 when prisoners passed death sentences on other prisoners who stole bread and lynched them, in an attempt to stop such shameful practices. (Kazimierz Tokarz)

***

Incidents of bread theft were punished by death. Usually, this was done in the following way: the Lagerälteste,⁷ a strong guy, would bring the culprit down to the ground with one blow, put one of his feet on the thief’s throat and the other on his chest to crush his chest and throat.

The sight made even the boldest fellows forget for a long time about taking another’s bread ration. (Kazimierz Jankowski)

Parcels

This is not the place for a description of the way parcels of food and medicines were sent to various concentration camps. At any rate and in principle, parcels could be sent only as of the autumn of 1942. Several authors, survivors as well as people outside who organised the despatch of parcels, have addressed the subject. The accounts we present below describe a variety of good and bad aspects relating to the receipt of parcels in diverse camps.

In December 1944, there was a slight improvement in the situation of my brother Stefan, my cousin Adam, and myself in Lengelfeld⁸ concentration camp, because at this time we got a few food parcels from our family. . . . We always scrupulously shared the contents between the three of us and this modest amount of assistance meant a lot to us, especially morally. For us, the day we received our first parcel was a big holiday, and the hope that we would get more parcels was perhaps the decisive factor keeping us from breaking down mentally and letting us survive to the end of the War.

Even today, after the lapse of 32 years,⁹ I can still remember those strong, exceptionally emotional experiences we went through waiting in the roll call square for the clerk to call my camp number out, which meant that a parcel had arrived from our family. (Jan Myczkowski)

***

Parcels were a great help but sometimes—and this might sound paradoxical —they were the cause of additional torment. There was no question of keeping a parcel and using its contents over a couple of days. Your starving body was too much in need of food. But you stomach, which had been weakened by hunger, could not cope with such a lot of food consumed in one go; a prisoner simply gobbled up the whole of his parcel at once. So he got terrible stomach pains, and hence the camp saying, “When you get a parcel, you get the trots.” Painful but true. (Jan Starczewski)

***

It was no secret that some prisoners got alcohol in parcels from their family. Usually hidden in a pot of honey or marmalade. It was a prized commodity which helped to get your into the good books of functionaries like the block senior, room seniors, the kapo or the Vorarbeiter.¹⁰ (Stanisław Zasacki)

***

In Sachsenhausen,¹¹ hunger was the chief source of torment, bigger than all the other ordeals and troubles and eventually led to the breakdown of all the moral and ethical restraints. What else can you call the events that took place in the air raid shelter? But before I tell the macabre story of the shelter in Staaken,¹² I have to explain that some time after our arrival in this camp, prisoners were allowed to receive much bigger food parcels. This improved our situation very substantially . . . Before a parcel was delivered to its addressee, it was opened, and if the block senior and his assistants who examined its contents found things in it like bacon, fatback, tinned food, citrus fruit, or chocolate etc., they would curse and throw it into the corner, claiming that the food in it had gone bad and was inedible. They turned away the starving, disappointed prisoners and when they had finished their duties, they looted all the goodies. Nonetheless, most of the parcels reached their addressees.

Whenever the alarm for an air raid went off, and Berlin was frequently bombed at this time, prisoners would grab their “valuables” and go down into the shelter. . . . Some were so starving that they paid no attention to the dreadful noise of the bomb explosions and robbed other prisoners’ food parcels, snatching them from their owners, and if they met with resistance from a parcel’s owner, they would grab him by the throat and throttle him. These macabre incidents, especially those that took place at night, left a lasting impression on my memory, showing all too clearly what it means to be hungry and what Homo sapiens is capable of when he is overwhelmed by a craving for food. (Arnold Andrunik)

Manipulating hunger

Apart from its basic and ultimate purpose, which was debilitation and annihilation, starving prisoners was a useful tool in the hands of the oppressors to manipulate them in diverse ways, to humiliate, degrade and punish them, and sometimes though seldom to reward them. Driven to the extreme and tormented by having no food to eat or seeing food but not being allowed to eat it, some prisoners committed suicide.

To aggravate our hunger, especially before a holiday, they deliberately started rumours that they were going to get much better food for us, but after a few days, when we had been looking forward to eating out fill, they would close the kitchen for the entire holiday period and did not serve us any meals at all. To make us disgusted with our food, they served it in the hospital spittoons instead of food bowls. (A)

***

The Germans punished prisoners with a period of starvation for minor misdemeanours. I was punished in this way for not making my bed properly. I was without food for twenty-four hours and when others were eating, I had to stand with my face to the wall and was beaten by functionaries who were passing by. Not all prisoners could stand it. I saw some commit suicide because of it, though the idea never crossed my mind. (Antoni Kubica)

Using food to manipulate prisoners was one of the ways of exercising and flaunting power. Whoever distributed the bread had power and could make any demands he wanted with impunity. In the hands of functionaries, bread was an instrument to set prisoners against each other, or even to kill one other. The following story is a radical example of this sort of thing:

One day, an SS-man came up to a Jewish commando working in a water-logged ditch, showed a bread ration to one of the Jews and told him that he would get it if he drowned one of his mates. The prisoner set about drowning a fellow-prisoner, but the attacked man fought back and tried to defend himself. First one was under the water, then the other, while the SS-man stood on the bank egging them on. The result was that both of them drowned in the ditch, and the SS-man was very pleased with himself. (Kazimierz Tokarz)

Hunger disease and the Muselmann condition

Hunger disease or, as Urbański (1947) called it, “concentration camp debilitation,” affected nearly every concentration camp prisoner who survived the initial phase in the camp and had the chance to stay alive for any length of time. The somatic changes caused by food shortage were so profound that prisoners’ appearance changed. Sometimes, after a few months, people could hardly recognise their acquaintances or even their relatives. The same happened after liberation. On their return home, survivors were not recognised by their next of kin. Parents failed to recognise their own children.

No studies were conducted in the camps on hunger disease. The medical staff working in the prisoners’ hospitals had such a limited potential for action that they were barely able to provide the most basic care for their patients. In these conditions, food would have been the simple and most invaluable remedy; after all, the cause of most of the diseases was malnutrition and infection. But hunger disease was not treated with the provision of food.

That is why accounts of the appearance and behaviour of patients suffering from “concentration camp debilitation” are so invaluable, collected even now, after so many years. They help to reconstruct a picture of this disease and its symptoms. The following passage submitted by Jadwiga Apostoł-Staniszewska shows how detailed such information can be, even if it comes from people who are not health professionals:

Horrific was the sight of the faces of the women in Block No. 7, where I was sent in the evening of 1 December 1942 on crossing the gate into the camp and being officially “dubbed” a prisoner of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Those faces—and there were such a lot of them in that brick building that was once a stable—were not horrific because they were as pale as cadavers, but because of the grey, dirt-clad skin on them stretched over protruding cheekbones with uncannily big, terrified, unconscious, hungry eyes staring out from under them. Their gaze was insensible, and I, the new arrival, thought all those eyes were malicious, aggressive, hungering for food and news from the world outside, from which new prisoners were arriving every day. Some of those eyes which I had to meet before I reached my “haven” were dangerous. Those eyes sunken in hunger, the dismal look in them, with death staring out of them and as if hesitating whether to say the last word—I shall never forget them for as long as I live.

As I pushed my way through the crowd looking round for my sister or one of my friends . . ., I saw women hunched in their dens, sitting cross-legged in the lotus position. When they reached their doss, they would chew their bread. They did not cut their bread ration into slices, but simply used their teeth to pull off piece by piece of it, and staring out into space slowly and regularly moved their jaws, as if wanting to prolong the ceremony of eating unto infinity. I also saw that others were spreading something white on the piece of bread they had started to nibble. Later I learned it was a sliver of margarine known in the camp as a Zulage. They used their finger or a piece of crust to spread the margarine. I saw others who every time they brought up a piece of bread to their mouth would make a sign of the cross over it, lifting up their eyes, with the soffit of the next bunk barely a dozen or so centimetres above their heads. . . .

Most of the women ate their food on their bunks. Some did not eat all their bread in one go but saved a bit and tucked it away under their prison jacket or their mattress to protect it from thieves or the mice and rats on the prowl during the night. I never did that for the entire time I spent in the camps, convinced that what you had inside was yours. . . .

There is a Polish saying that fear has big eyes, but I think that hunger has the biggest eyes, like the ones I remember encountering as soon as I entered the camp; eyes that made a lasting impression on my memory. Pretty soon I must have had eyes like that myself, when I felt that my eye sockets were expanding and my sight was starting to stray more and more every time it received an order from my shrinking stomach and intestines. (Jadwiga Apostoł-Staniszewska)

Here we are reminded of the apposite descriptions of Muselmänner and their appearance in one of our earlier articles, which was also based on survivors’ responses to one of our questionnaires (Ryn and Kłodziński, 1983).¹³

One day, we were taken to the bath-house. There we could take a closer look at ourselves. We were indeed a sorry sight. Our figures had taken on a sharp-edged shape owing to protruding bones. All the hair on our chests, arms and legs was gone. Our pates were covered with a shrivelled, mossy layer of bristles. We were in our smooth birthday suits. Our skin had become matt and had lost its suppleness. Out fingernails had become as malleable as a piece of plastic and could readily be bent back and forth. (Józef Ciepły)

Mieczysław Stobierski, Hunger. Polished plaster cast statuary presenting a seated group of Muselmann women. Mechanical Records Department of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, reproduced after Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1984. Click the image to enlarge.

Starving prisoners came up one by one or in groups, went for the soup pots, spilled the soup and scooped it off the floor with their hands, ate it with the rubbish, not caring a damn about the hiding they were getting from the block senior or other functionaries. Unbelievably ravaged by hunger, thin and yellow-skinned, dirty and unkempt, the Muselmänner had gone insensitive to everything except one thing—food. They waited eagerly for the soup pots, trampling each other outside the blocks where the big-shots lived who weren’t interested in scraping out the pots down to the last drop. Here you could still scrounge something off the sides of the pot, using a spoon or your fingers or the palm of your hand. Though often the big shots would run out and apply their sticks to disperse the Muselmänner.

You would see them waiting for the potato peels.

They were the ones who went for the pots in a desperate lunge dictated by extreme starvation, gathered up the soup along with the soil, and ate it all up.

Often they’d be the ones chased away from the dustbins.

They were the ones who wandered about the streets in the camp, scruffy and bent double, completely overwhelmed by apathy, bags of bones still moving, taking a long time to die, up on their feet, dying of the debilitation of hunger. (Jan Marszałek)

The picture of hunger disease in survivors’ stories is presented not only in their description of its symptoms, but also of its course and rate of change. Although most survivors do not use the professional terminology or adopt a methodology, their remarks give us an idea of the successive phases and course of the disease. The following passage from Stanisław Takuski is not exceptional in this respect:

And now a few words about the consequences of hunger disease. Its successive stages were as follows: physical and mental debilitation, a bloated body due to hunger, shock induced by starvation, and several intermediate conditions. First you lose weight from day to day, down to about 40 kg.¹⁴ When I was working processing a block of stone, I couldn’t sit with the whole of my backside on the stool but had to use one buttock at a time.

Your bones hurt you. You could not take a deep breath, because your lungs hit against your ribs and hurt. Any time you took a deep breath, it hurt, so your breathing had to be shallow. The dust from the stone injured your respiratory tract. You spat blood. In addition, you had swellings. During the day, water collected up in your legs. If you pressed your finger against your leg, drops of dew would appear on it. It took a while for the depression to disappear. Our remedy was to put our feet up in bed on our mattresses raised and propped up on a Biegelbreit (ironing board). The water then moved down to your face. When I got up, my face was bloated. At work, the water travelled down to your feet again. It was a daily, recurrent cycle. Finally and inexorably the starvation shock came, and the ultimate stage of the advanced Muselmann condition. You lose consciousness and become less and less sensitive to external stimuli, you stop caring if they beat you up and laugh off pain, you stop feeling hungry but are still alive, until you starve to death completely. (Stanisław Takuski)

To sum up

Although hunger and hunger disease were the most excruciating type of suffering concentration camp inmates went through, strangely enough they have not been fully reflected in the publications on concentration camps and the medical works on the subject. The survivors’ stories we have collected in this article (chiefly from Auschwitz) have advanced a substantial contribution to what we know about hunger and starvation, the basic methods employed in the concentration camps to debilitate prisoners biologically. Contrary to the opinions of sceptics, even now, after the lapse of several decades since liberation, it is still worthwhile to look into the memoirs and personal experience of those who survived the concentration camps. The information which has been assembled, arranged and is systematically being published on subjects connected with the history of concentration camps is still enhancing our knowledge with new, hitherto unknown details with a value which is not only documentary but also scientific.

It turns out that the survivors’ personal stories of hunger and starvation saved from oblivion and put on record correlate very well with the general pattern of concentration camp life. In the camps, bread acquired a symbolic status, it stood for life and was also a symbol of value. Like anxiety, hunger determined prisoners’ behaviour and the standards they adopted, their chances of survival and the spectrum of what they experienced psychologically. We may claim that survivors have said and written the most shocking things about the concentration camp menu—the meagre bill of fare designed to starve them to death. People who have never been through the concentration camp experience are astonished how much you can live through and write about something there was such a want of—bread. Bread, humanity’s ancient, natural food, has once more been awarded a singular apotheosis. The dramatic ordeals of the concentration camps and the unspeakable hunger suffered there have as it were restored this foodstuff to its primary value, the value of life and strength. Only in the context of the concentration camp experience can we develop a better understanding of our everyday habits connected with bread and nutrition which survivors of concentration camps have passed on to us. Only in the context of the concentration camps does the respect for and custom of saving bread, which some might have thought an exaggeration verging on the “pathological,” acquire its authentic dimension and true sense. We should be devoting more attention to the significance of the word “bread” and the word “hunger” nowadays, when thousands, or indeed millions of people around the world, mostly children, are still dying of hunger.

The abnormalities attending human existence reached a new zenith in the concentration camps as regards hunger and the degenerate ways in which prisoners tried to satisfy their hunger. The stories our respondents have related are shocking and horrific. It would be futile to try to comment on them; all we may do is to record them.

The same applies to the rites of eating as practised in the camps. Here, too, the concentration camp system touched an incredible nadir in aberrant human behaviour. Elaborate ways of chewing a piece of bread, splitting it up into an infinite number of portions, saving it for an even “rainier day,” having it with miscellaneous, usually inedible additives to enhance the feeling of satiety and quantity—these were all customs making up a separate chapter in the story of the concentration camps.

Bread was the most precious commodity in the concentration camps and the sine qua non of survival, so there were good reasons why it was endowed with a commercial value and served as the legal tender on the in-camp black market. That is also why its theft was liable to the death penalty. Bread stood for life; many a time the theft of bread spelled death.

Nazi Germany starved its prisoners as part of its policy of mass extermination, but additionally the functionaries of Nazi Germany used starvation as a tool for physical and mental oppression. By depriving prisoners of their sustenance, which was dealt out in starvation rations anyway, they persecuted, humiliated and demeaned prisoners, forcing them to behave disrespectfully, treacherously, and sometimes even inhumanly with regard to other prisoners. Such tactics appealed to the lowest instincts, prompting prisoners to vent their anger on each other.

A look at the realities of the concentration camp from the point of view of hunger and starvation leads to more general reflection—questions on the source of the suffering, the root of the evil rampant in all the concentration camps. Questions arise on the bounds to human iniquity, man’s hatred of man; questions on the bounds to human suffering and its sense; whether the experience of the War and its concentration camps will be a lesson for humanity, now living in the shadow of a new, deadly and this time total danger. Is humankind capable at all of wisely and constructively using the experience of the last War?

In all their helplessness, confusion, and inability to adjust to the modern world, the survivors of the concentration camps clamour and cry out for the perpetuation of the memory of Auschwitz. As the German theologian and lawyer Dr Joachim Schwarz from Bad Boll said most appositely at the Warsaw Conference in April 1983, “From the very outset, there have been two memories, the memory of the perpetrators, which is trying to explain, rationalise, and dismiss the blame, classify it within the framework of higher duties; and the memory of the victims, those who died and those who survived: a memory that is bewildered, helpless, crying out and accusing, seeing no justification, no excuse, no sense.” (Schwarz, 1983)

What the survivors are demanding is not only that their past must be made known but also that their history and its mechanisms must be understood. Primo Levi, another survivor of Auschwitz, noticed this need and wrote in the postscript to his book: “It seems to me that it is in the terror, fear and dread which the Third Reich aroused that I see a unique symbol, the only one of its kind of the events, the significance of which has not yet been explained; the omen of a still greater disaster hanging over humanity, which will be avoided only if we all manage to understand what happened and stop what we are threatened with.” (Levi, 1969)¹⁵

Commenting on this remark, Joachim Schwarz continues his observations:

If this is what the survivors are telling us, then they have done far more than what we could have expected them to do. On the basis of their right to our remembrance, they have put themselves at our disposal; they stand before us as symbols, examples, and a warning. The victims are telling us, “If you remember us, if you face up to what happened, you will understand the warning which will either determine your doom or let you continue to live... The historiography of Auschwitz is still and will always be a moral claim,” (Schwarz, 1983)

The numerous statements made by Auschwitz survivors which we have cited above are such an immense appeal for remembrance and understanding. Their appeal also has an ethical dimension, since it touches on the evil in man.

The words of Pope John Paul II,¹⁶ albeit spoken in a different context, may provide an excellent, perfectly fitting conclusion to sum up these reflections:

. . . it seems that the roots of evil go down deeper, that evil is a mystery bigger than man, his history, and the means by which he tries to overcome it . . . When we look at the various efforts mankind has used to combat evil, especially in our own times, we get the impression that they have all been measures which stopped at the symptoms but did not reach down to the causes, the hidden sources of evil. We tend to forget that evil not only has a “physical” aspect but also an “ethical” aspect, and that the latter is the more fundamental.

. . . It is very hard for us to comprehend the full extent of the evil in which man has his part. Ultimately, it is a mystery greater than man and more profound than his heart. (John Paul II, 1983)

Read Part 1 of the article.

***

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

1. German for “food, soup, salami today, extra helping.”
2. Over 5 thousand Spanish prisoners are estimated to have been held in Mauthausen-Gusen, and hence other prisoners may have heard them use Spanish words for particular items, which then passed into the camp jargon and were mispronounced and misspelled by inmates with no knowledge of Spanish. The “Spanish” words cited by Takuski are perhaps mangled versions of patatas, butiferra, and cazoleta. https://www.mauthausen-memorial.org/en/Gusen/The-Concentration-Camp-Gusen/Prisoners/Spanish-Republicans.
3. About 18 inches.
4. The Effektenkammer (personal effects room) was a premises in Auschwitz which stored prisoners’ personal effects taken from them on arrival in exchange for striped prison gear. https://www.auschwitz.org/muzeum/o-dostepnych-danych/dokumenty-ewidencyjne/verzeichnisse.
5. Zulage—German for “extra” or “added,” here meaning “served to prisoners with their daily bread ration.” The slice of sausage Auschwitz inmates got was made of horsemeat, and that is probably why it is called “red.”
6. In Auschwitz a gong was struck for reveille to wake prisoners up. https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/life-in-the-camp/the-order-of-the-day.
7. The Lagerälteste (camp senior) was the highest office a prisoner could hold in a German concentration camp. He was directly under the camp commandant and his duty was to implement the commandant’s orders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapo.
8. Probably a misprint for Legenfeld, a sub-camp of Flossenbürg, which operated from October 1944 until April 1945. https://www.gedenkstaette-flossenbuerg.de/en/history/satellite-camps/lengenfeld.
9. Probably a misprint in the original Polish article for “42 years.”
10. Vorarbeiter—German for foreman.
11. Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg—a concentration camp near Berlin.
12. Staaken is a suburb of Berlin.
13. English translation online: “Teetering on the brink between life and death. A study on the concentration camp Muselmann.” Translated by Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa.
14. 90 lbs.
15. I did not find this passage in If This is a Man, the English version of Primo Levi’s book; perhaps it comes from a postscript to the German edition cited in the references to this article but not available in the English edition. I have translated the quotation from the Polish version in this article.
16. No reference is provided in the article to this quote, so I have translated it from the Polish text.

Notes by Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, Head Translator for the Medical Review Auschwitz project.

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.