Medicine in articulo mortis in Nazi German concentration camps and jails. Part Three

Part Three

Gross-Rosen was an all-male camp, but unexpectedly, right before we were evacuated to Leitmeritz in the Sudetes in January 1945, it received a transport of women, who had walked all the way from Auschwitz. On foot, in bitterly frosty weather. Later they admitted only one in ten had any underwear, and one in three a light coat. So they had been plodding along, wrapped in rags and their old blankets. Two thousand of them left Auschwitz, and the number of those who arrived in Gross-Rosen was about 350. The rest did not survive the peregrination: they were shot on the way as unfit for walking.

I remember when the women entered the camp and stopped in Lagerstrasse, its thoroughfare, to be counted and examined by the doctors. No one knew why they had been sent over. It happened amid the turmoil and anarchy of evacuation when the German army was withdrawing before the approaching Soviet offensive. At that time we could hear the artillery fire booming near Breslau, which was about 70 kilometres away. The women prisoners, surrounded by SS guards, stood there for a long time. We were forbidden to approach them. Blocksperre was introduced, that is a ban to leave the barracks.

I was watching from the window of the block and saw that the doctors detached pieces of blackened frostbitten flesh from the women’s legs, sometimes large portions of calf muscles. Due to necrosis, it was not even painful. The women were then lodged in a separate barrack inside the camp, surrounded by barbed wire fencing so as to prevent any contact with the male inmates. They were left there for about a week. Whatever food we could spare, we threw over the fence, but of course, such tiny morsels could not relieve their hunger.

After a week they were allowed to wash a little bit but were so starved that they kept coming up to the fence (some of them crawled), begging us for any food. And we had almost none. But some of the Blockführers, Kapos, and other functionaries, who were still physically fit as they were not malnourished, realized that, after such a long break, there were women around, some of them ready to make any concession just for crumbs. So the youngest and the fittest were selected, and the men would pay them night-time visits, creeping under the fence and bringing a bite to eat, as if they were entering an animal cage. That hideous business, all for a mouthful of food, was carried out in public, in the presence of fellow-prisoners, without any sense of decency or shame. The women were hungry. That explains everything. They wanted to survive, to endure until the war ended. Many of them had been pros before, and some were led into depravity in the camp. I was quite relieved to see that there were no Poles among the male “paramours.”

The order to evacuate took us all by surprise. Whole blocks of prisoners, one after another, were to march to the railway station and get into the railcars. But first, we had to assemble in the roll call square. The camp was getting empty. The only people staying behind were the two thousand sick in the hospital wards who were unfit for travel. They were to be supervised by a dozen German functionaries who had volunteered to join the Volkssturm and, due to their uniforms, were called the “blacks.”¹ The Germans were given weapons and instructed, ridiculously, to “keep peace and order among the bedridden prisoners.” The sick from the hospital wards were never to be seen again.

We left the camp in the afternoon, one block after another. It happened that the women preceded my group. Yet no railcars were waiting for us at the station. As the winter evening came quickly, we were told to march back into the camp to spend one more night there. A command was given to turn round and we were rushed in the opposite direction, the prisoners from my block now being followed by the women. Those poor creatures were unable to walk any more. Utterly exhausted, they were oblivious to the world. Therefore each of the male prisoners was told to take two women by the arm and haul them along the road leading upwards into the camp. Those who were unable to keep pace or fell down were instantly shot dead by the SS men, and their bodies were abandoned in the wayside ditch.

I had to help two women whose faces I could not even see in the dark. In the lowest whisper, I inquired who they were and where they came from, and learned they were mother and daughter. The former was holding my left, and the latter my right arm. The young girl had finished her secondary school and became a photographer, running her own atelier in Budapest for a couple of years. In order to take her mind off the dismal situation, I started reminiscing about the best restaurants and cafés in her home town, as I had known them before the war, that is the Gellert, the Ritz, the Jägerhorn, and many other charming places. We talked in German, and I managed to draw her into that forgotten Budapest world, but her mother was drooping lower and lower on my other shoulder. At last, I virtually had to drag her, as I was feeling very weak myself. She was wilting at my side.

I asked the girl what the problem was, whether her mother was unwell. Apparently, she had left the Auschwitz camp in her clogs and had been walking in them all the way in the sub-zero temperatures of January. When the cloth heel-caps gave way and were torn off the sole, for fear of losing her footwear and trekking unshod, she found a length of wire to tie the clogs to her feet, which, frostbitten, were getting more and more swollen. The wire cut into the flesh, causing her immense pain, so every step was torture. Now it was impossible to remove it. What could we do?

One of the five prisoners walking in front of me was Zygmunt Stolarski, a master weaver from the city of Łódź and a former member of the Polish national football team. The Germans appointed him the coach of their camp football club and, though imprisoned, he could lead a relatively comfortable life. The most important thing was he had access to the clothes storeroom, so as to give his players sports shoes, shirts, and jumpers, which he regularly pilfered and passed on to his Polish fellow-prisoners. He was the foreman in my block and by various means obtained food both from the kitchen and pantries to help his compatriots. Thanks to him many prisoners survived periods of prolonged starvation in Gross-Rosen.² Hearing about the evacuation, Stolarski prepared us for the journey as well as he could, and also filled his rucksack with many stolen sports clothes. As the Lagerführer had a passion for, or rather was obsessed with football, Stolarski became a man of solid support and strong connections. After all, he was the coach of a German team!

During our march back to the camp, I accosted him, and he answered, again in a whisper, without turning his head round. He promised to find in his rucksack and drop a pair of football boots on the ground. Not some slip-ons, but regular lace-up football boots! My task was just to be careful and pick them up in the dark. After a while the boots fell down in front of me. I lifted them up and handed them over to the Hungarian photographer’s mother. For a long time she examined the gift with one hand, using the other arm to hold on to me. Suddenly she bowed down and … No, she did not collapse, but kissed my hand. I heard her muffled voice saying: “Das kann nur ein Pole tun,” only a Pole could do that.

Translated from the original article: Niewiarowicz R., Medycyna in articulo mortis w hitlerowskich więzieniach i obozach koncentracyjnych Przegląd Lekarski - Oświęcim, 1973.