Assistance for Jewish children in Gusen II

In Gusen II there were three more blocks behind our four, and they were full of Jews brought there in the autumn of 1944,¹ after the concentration camp in P3aszów for Jewish inmates had been closed down. Their arrival made a strange impression on us old “veterans” of camp life, hardened to all the kickers that the cruel existence there could bring. Above all, we felt moved, embarrassed, and full of both anger and pity for those poor things. The majority of those prisoners deemed to be “dangerous” for the national interest of the mighty Third Reich consisted of children – boys aged seven to twelve, occasionally as old as fourteen. On average, there was probably one adult Jew for every three children, either a father, a relative, or a completely unrelated man.

Even some of the most diehard kapos and German prisoners, usual assistants to the German slaughterers, were deeply moved to see these children. What followed was a camp-wide operation to provide aid for the Jewish children on a permanent basis; it was generally thought that the initiative was spontaneous rather than organised by specific groups. Nevertheless, we were well aware of the truth of that matter, because of course it was started by us Poles. We divided the tasks among each other. Some of us were responsible for “organising” warmer clothes for the upcoming winter, another group of Poles tried to hustle up additional food for the little ones. Finally, some other older inmates were conducting activities to save the youngsters from being exhausted by hard labour in the camp.

Moreover, each of us had his own individual charges under his personal care, two to four boys, depending on his “organising” potential, “camp seniority”, and connections with German fat cats. I was one of the first to make my own choice of charges, rather by chance than design. It was the Bia3obroda family from Charsznica in the district of Miechów: a father in his forties and his three sons aged nine, ten, and twelve – very nice kids jabbering in fluent German. I have to say that Jewish children from Poland were very intelligent, even the Germans always admitted that.

When, after some time, the boys had received a bit of nourishment and looked more or less normal – and almost all of them were really pretty children – you were really pleased to see them, chat with them, give them advice how to behave and how not to get into SS officers’ black books. In short, you would treat them as persons who were dear to you, the same way a good uncle treats his favourite nephews.

The camp management treated them like regular prisoners for quite a long time. They were subject to camp discipline without any relief. They had to work and turn up to roll calls. Their food rations were strictly defined, they were beaten and persecuted for real and alleged offenses against camp rules. At first, one of the parodies was the practice of sending children to work on the construction of underground factories in Sankt Georgen near Linz.² Each group of workers was assigned several boys and told to put their camp numbers on the list of regular adult prisoners employed there.

The Germans promptly managed to obtain small shovels and pickaxes for them, which were to serve them for eight hours of incessant labour. The Nazis set daily production schedules for the children and obliged the commando’s kapo to systematically monitor the progress and efficiency of the little ones’ work. As deputy clerk for the group, I was sometimes allowed to pass my hammer on to one of the helpers and walk about the tunnels to see how the other groups of drillers were working and check whether we were not lagging behind or going too fast. The former would be dangerous for us, and the latter for our companions from neighbouring groups if the Germans from the camp’s administrative office or technicians from the companies conducting the works noticed any such thing.

It was not so bad if the boys had to work morning or afternoon shifts. Some would just stand there holding their shovels and pickaxes, moving them and sometimes pretending to work. Others were sitting and resting, hiding behind the posts supporting the ceiling of the tunnel. They took turns doing this, as we had taught and advised them. We developed a well-organised system of signalling for all the directions of access to the tunnel. The links in the system were the oldest boys and our colleagues who were keeping watch along the most dangerous sections. Members of the camp resistance movement had ensured that the whole group was highly trained and well-rehearsed in signalling and watching out for danger. The issue of labour efficiency was on our shoulders. First of all, we drew up dud daily reports, but also did more of the labour, and somehow it worked.

The worst thing, however, was the night shift. Sometime around midnight most of the boys were dropping off, stealthily lying on the ground and sleeping like logs. Communication was fallible since it was difficult to wake the children up. They were dizzy, struggling to remain on their feet and hardly able even to pretend to be working when Gestapo officers³ or technical supervisors appeared. We were ratted out a couple of times. Once the Germans cottoned on to what was going on, they would appear out of the blue and pummel the poor, terrified little ones with sticks, not sparing us some pounding and kicks, either.

The management of the Messerschmitt and Steyer⁴ companies were not pleased with the situation. They had concluded contracts with the camp to take on a certain number of prisoners as workers and were paying for them, and what they got were mostly children who not only did not work but were also causing trouble which in turn was slowing down the labour of the adult workers. We had a few befriended Czechs among the civilian technical supervisors, whom we secretly informed on the very first day of the SS mafia’s doings concerning the children. Although these Czechs had no particularly significant power, they promised that when they got the chance they would inform the management of the works, after more material had been collected to serve as grounds to change the contract with the SS.

Despite such diligent care for the children in those terrible living and working conditions, a few little ones died during those few weeks of work in the tunnels. Stooping, poorly clothed and undernourished, with no chance for physical activity other than hard labour, they were exposed to damp and cold, which was such a nuisance in the tunnels, especially during the night shifts. As a result, they would easily catch a cold, run a high fever, and get a stomach disorder or bloody diarrhea. Medical care provided in the camp hospital did not make much difference to these poor things, although the doctors who were inmates, a Spaniard and a Russian, were generous with their efforts to help them.

Finally, the kids were dismissed from the underground works and from Oberkommando Sankt Georgen.⁵ Since no company wanted to employ them, they had to stay in the camp. By order of the camp’s commandant, Hauptscharführer Franz Gottfried Schulz,⁶ their task was to keep the camp tidy and clean, working under the supervision of Lagerkapo Johann van Loosen. Their job was to clean, sweep up, scrub stools and floors in their barracks, clean the shoes of German prisoners, move not so heavy items, help with the extension work in the camp, collect straw and paper in the roll-call square, paths, and passages between barracks. A group of older boys was designated to peel potatoes and help in the kitchen. The situation of some of them was gradually improving.

My Bia3obroda family were popping into my block quite often. Their father was pretty fortunate too, working either in the camp’s clothes warehouse, the kitchen, or the hospital. He was gradually changing jobs for better and better ones, as we had got him out of the drudgery of labour in the underground tunnels. He even began to develop his own “connections”, but still not well enough to help his sons out. So they would visit me one by one to get something to eat. Unfortunately, food shortage started to stare me in the face too.

The last package I received from my friends in Sosnowiec was in October 1944. Nothing more after that. The situation was the same with my colleagues. An extra bowl of soup at dinner-time as a reward for the functionary’s job I performed in the commando – that was still not enough. Two of my companions from the neighbouring bunk suggested how to get out of this difficult situation. They were two young Soviet officers, Sasha and Vanya, with a befriended Spaniard, who had agreed to smuggle a few kilograms of raw potatoes into the block in exchange for a few cooked ones. The only thing we had to do was to find a way to cook them. Finally, one of the prisoners “organised” an old 10-litre jam tub from the kitchen. We smuggled in an iron plate from the mechanical workshop, and then a piece of wire. Our method to cook potatoes was very simple. We would put unpeeled potatoes into the metal tub, add water and cover it with the iron plate connected to the wire. Then the other end of the wire was skillfully connected to the power socket or switch. The potatoes were ready in thirty minutes, and if they were smaller they were ready even sooner. In this way, between eight and ten people were able to eat their fill.

Naturally enough, the whole business was deadly dangerous. It would have been enough for one of the German bigshots, an unfriendly non-Polish inmate, or even a nasty compatriot to notice what we were up to. We would have been accused of sabotage and all those involved without exception would have been hanged absolutely officially. That is why we took all the possible precautions. I did the job of electrician and cook, and my Russian friends stood on the lookout and were excellent at their task. Sometimes we used the services of some of our old mates. We developed a whole system of signalling down to the last details.

Understandably, it could only be done when the conditions were favourable enough – when the barrack was empty, the prisoners were out at work and the barrack supervisor and his helpers were busy doing their jobs and not pottering around in the room. Some days were so “hot” that the “party” had to be put off, even though there was a rich supply of “material”. The Bia3obroda family were also enjoying the fruits of our venture, although they were not in the know about details. The head of the family showed little interest in the nitty-gritty, and I told his sons that I had a friend in the kitchen who supplied me from time to time with a large number of cooked potatoes.

One time, when the youngest, Mietek (Moshe), was leaving my room with his pockets stuffed with potatoes, he came across Leopold the block supervisor. The startled boy made a step back. Leo began to “play around” with Mietek in his own way until he had told him where he had got his haul from. Summoned by this cutthroat, I explained that it was a gift from a friend working in the kitchen. “Beware!” said Leo, “if you’re lying, you’re goosed!” But he never lifted a finger against me. My friend from the kitchen, Józek P., told me later that Leopold asked his kapo if it was possible to take out a fairly large number of cooked potatoes to the barracks. Leo must have received a satisfactory answer because he did not pick on me anymore. When conditions were favourable, which happened rarely, we even cooked twice a day and were able to provide food for other Jewish boys as well.

A few of the adult Jews from P3aszów had been kapos to the very last moment there, that is until the camp was evacuated to Gusen, and they were kapos in the worst sense of the word. I remember when, shortly after the arrival of the entire P3aszów transport, we were standing at the gate to set off for the ramp and later to work, I was approached by a small Jewish boy who said, “Mister Schreiber (clerk), can I have a moment?” Then he whispered into my ear, “That last one on the right-hand side, in the fourth group of five in your commando, is a cutthroat from P3aszów, he was a kapo there, he murdered my uncle.” The boy gave me the names of both the accused and the murdered uncle, but both of them have now escaped my memory. That Jewish kapo was in the Möglegrube pit for quite a long time but later disappeared from sight. I did not see him at all in any of the labour groups of Sankt Georgen.

The registration of prisoners at our workplace was again conducted by Wies3aw Kowalski from LódY, but I was too absorbed with other matters to ask Wies3aw about the fate of that prison number. As my friends informed me when we were discussing the situation of the Jews in the camp, which, by the way, happened after liberation, all the Jews who had abuse of their brethren from P3aszów on their conscience had disappeared from the camp before its liberation. I think they were finished off by their kindred, and even if not by other Jewish prisoners themselves, they might have died at the hands of hired slaughterers, whom the camp was never short of. For a slice of bread, a bowl of soup, a cigarette. Such things would go unnoticed. Nobody inquired about the cause of death as long as the prison number was recorded in the register of deaths.

In the last months of the war there were more than eight thousand prisoners in Gusen⁷ and seven thousand⁸ were employed by Oberkommando Sankt Georgen.⁹ Scores of deaths were recorded in the register every day. The causes of death were usually the very same as in other concentration camps, nowadays generally known. Deaths due to assassination and starvation should be included here. Hunger was tormenting the majority of prisoners. By March and April 1945 a loaf of bread of just over a kilogram (2.2 lb.) was being shared between ten people. Dinner consisted of a liter of some disgusting weed which they called “spinach”, seasoned with some starch. If you did not weasel and had no help from somewhere, you slowly starved to death. But only a few could weasel, there was nowhere to take food from and nowhere to hide it. We veterans had contacts with civilian workers in Sankt Georgen. But that was close to nothing since they had a scant amount of food to spare. Cases of necrophagia were not uncommon. It happened that the buttocks were cut out of corpses and eaten.

At that time, only one category of prisoners started to be better off. It was the Jews, especially the Polish Jews. They were receiving food packages from the International Red Cross in Geneva. Many a time I saw my former charges leave the camp office, where the packages were distributed, with sizeable packages under their arms, and flash through the camp yard to their blocks. I was not that badly off, but I must admit I would not have refused a treat better than potatoes, “weeds” and black bread hard as concrete, with a scant amount of flour in its ingredients. But there was no spontaneous treat from the boys that used to be under my care, the nightmare of the camp had hardened human nature, and I would never have asked myself.

Shortly before the liberation of the camp – of which we were not sure in the face of obvious German preparations for the final attrition of prisoners in the tunnels – I met old Białobroda in the square. After an initial exchange of words, I asked him what he would do if he managed to get out of the camp alive. Without hesitation, he said they would leave for Palestine. I received the same information from a few other befriended Jews. Based on more assumptions of a different nature, I concluded that there must have been a clandestine Jewish organisation within the camp in touch with the outside world, and I was not wrong. Nowadays, it is a well-known fact that many Polish Jews saved from the Nazi German camps eventually left for Israel. A few left for other countries, mostly to places where they had family members or some closer or more distant relatives or friends.

Hungarian Jews represented a well-knit national group – 90% of them were representatives of the intelligentsia of various occupations, including the liberal professions, all adults. They were loyal to one another, always helping each other and caring for weaker fellow-sufferers. They spoke only Hungarian between themselves. At every step, they emphasised that they were Hungarians of the Judaic religion. In conversations with other inmates, they used High German. They always said how much they liked the Polish people. I had the chance to meet them only at work since they were accommodated in very remote blocks. I met many doctors among them, and several worked with me in the Möglegrubekommando.

The Hungarians were a surplus team, so already by the spring of 1945, they did not have much to do. Sometimes they substituted for other prisoners at shovel and pickaxe work but were inexperienced in the job, so they were clumsy and at times quite amusing, which oftentimes made one of our SS officers furious. He was our one-armed supervisor at work,¹⁰ very sadistic and spiteful, constantly reproaching them for being the best-fed, porkiest and laziest of all the labourers. I must admit that at the beginning they did indeed look well. They were sent to Gusen shortly after being arrested in the second half of 1944. However, by the end of the camp’s existence most of them were a macabre sight. Gaunt, yellow faces with sagging cheeks, with what used to be bellies, now just skin hanging down. Their numbers were going down faster than those for the Polish Jews. In the spring of 1945, taking advantage of a stop to the oppression of Jewish prisoners in the camp, which happened for a reason then completely unknown to anyone of us, the Hungarian Jews still alive were still going to work, but they did not even put on a show of working.

In February 1944, our adit was visited by SS officer “Suchałapka” (“Dry Paw”), who summoned the doctors, assigned five prisoners to each of them and ordered them to look after their health. The grotesqueness of it! The doctors were not given anything to facilitate the task – no bandages, no medicines; they had to do their doctor’s duties with their bare hands. Gradually, the same order spread to all the labour groups in the Sankt Georgen munitions plant.

The following episode must have looked tragicomic in prisoners’ eyes: a column of porters or other labourers carrying rocks or cement bags was walking along led by a Hilfskapo, at the rear there was a doctor, a Hungarian Jew, staggering along and hardly keeping up on his feet.

It was a bit similar with the employment of other experienced prisoners, engineers, lawyers or other specialists. Some of them were to keep an eye on the progress of the labour in the tunnels, of course with no access to construction plans or anything. Others were to look after prisoners’ safety at work and, if the need arose, draw up accident reports and send them to the construction office. Of course, they were not given any paper or pencils. All these situations were paradoxical. What mattered was that most of these chaps somehow reached the shore of this ocean of atrocity and human degeneration.

By late April many SS officers began to secretly look around for Jewish doctors who were dermatologists and plastic surgeons to have their SS tattoos removed.

The kapo of the Möglegrubekommando, Heinrich Remmer¹¹ from Wuppertal, a semi-literate petty thief who did not want to participate in murders, used to send me to clean up the SS officers’ barracks and scavenge for cigarette butts, or to the foremen’s accommodations on the vast construction site for the munitions industry in Sankt Georgen. The head of this group of Kommandoführers was SS Scharführer Alexander Peroutka,¹² who was pretty easy-going with me, because of my long time spent in the camp, but cruel and ruthless to other prisoners. He especially hated Russians and Jews. A couple of times I had to get him a basin of water, so he could wash the blood off his hands, mumbling under his breath that he had again managed to defang some “swinish dogs”. Inmates from the tunnel where he spent a lot of time told us that Peroutka’s “specialty” was hanging Muselmänner of various nationalities, that is people weakened by sickness, emaciated, inefficient at work. At times, it happened that the wretch whom Peroutka ordered to put the noose on his own neck did not want to do it. The healthy prisoners would scamper away to hide in the tunnels and Peroutka had to do the hangman’s job himself. In the last reflex of despair the victim would bite Peroutka’s hand. The show dragged on and the victim was not hanged until he had been put through a lot of torture.

In late April Peroutka ordered me to find the best dermatologist among the Hungarian Jews. I listed a few candidates to choose from. He chose one of them, reputedly a talented university reader from Budapest University. I do not know how the matter ended, because on 2nd May 1945 they stopped taking us out to work and we stayed in the camp until 5th May, when Gusen was liberated by the American army.

I have kept a vivid memory of my experiences and observations in the camp. I also remember the Jewish children, a memory which always reminds me of the situation of the Jewish prisoners in Gusen II in its final period, which has not been described to a very great extent in the literature.

Translated from the original article: Frankiewicz B.: Z pomocą dzieciom żydowskim w obozie Gusen II Przegląd Lekarski - Oświęcim, 1983.

Notes

1. They arrived on 10 August 1944 in Mauthausen.
2. The underground factory in St. Georgen an der Gusen (called project “Bergkristall,” where parts for German Messerschmitt planes were manufactured) was actually ca. 1 km away from the concentration camp Gusen. The place was, of course, located near Linz, as was Gusen (ca. 15 km) and Mauthausen (ca. 19 km).
3. They actually had to be either SS officers or civilian engineers, as there was no Gestapo there.
4. “Steyer” is an incorrect spelling given in the original version of the article.
5. The camp was called Gusen II.
6. Schulz was camp leader of Gusen II, where the prisoners who had to work in the Bergkristall tunnel were accommodated.
7. From September 1944 on, the number of the prisoners in Gusen amounted to over 20,000 (22,068 on 30 September, and 26,311 on 28 February, ca. 20,500 at the time of the liberation).
8. The author of the original article overestimates the number. “Up to six thousand” would be correct here.
9. The author means the “Bergkristall” underground factory.
10. His name was Alois Johandl. After the war, he was convicted to 20 years of imprisonment in an Austrian trial.
11. “Remmert” is a mistaken spelling of the surname given in the original version of the article. Remmer was executed in Poland in 1951.
12. The author of the article consistently employs a Polonised version of the surname (“Berutka”) and replaces the real first name “Alexander” with “Josef.” For the sake of clarity and accuracy, the Medical Review Auschwitz editing team decided to place the actual, correct name in the translated version of the article, based on information acquired from Gregor Holzinger, the project’s Expert Consultant on the Mauthausen complex. Alexander Peroutka was executed in Landsberg in 1948.

Notes courtesy of Gregor Holzinger, Expert Consultant on the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex for the Medical Review Auschwitz project.