Under the onslaught of concentration camp despondency. Part Three

Part Three

The deformations of hope

The subject involves more than only just showing hope as a mental process in the context of activity and positive emotions, and loss of hope in terms of diminishing activity accompanied by a fall in negative emotions. A range of discharges could be observed between despondency understood as the loss of the potential to look forward to a better future prospect and despondency as the forfeiture of such a possibility. They varied in intensity and direction (moving forward or retreating). The day-to-day course of hope was not always accompanied by the “towards life” vector with positive emotional activity; neither was the despondent condition always under the dominance of activity which was negative from start to finish. In both phenomena positive and negative emotions were graded over a range. In my opinion this applied particularly to hope.

As regards despondency, if it did not receded but progressed and took the victim to her death, it killed her by extinguishing her activity. The thrust of despondency prevalent in the camp impacted on prisoners time after time and deformed their hope, which was manifested in various ways. These deformations affected the objects of prisoners’ hopes and the orientations associated with them. To present them in a demonstrable form, I shall have to identify and extract the most characteristic features of hope from its internal programme. These characteristic features were manifested in a prisoner’s activities and they reflected the internal aspect of the process in her.

On the basis of my own observations and those of other Auschwitz-Birkenau survivors with whom I am in contact, as well as on the grounds of the publications on the subject, I would say that the specific features of hope which underwent deformation were victims’ curtailment of their wishes and desires to those that concerned themselves, and their progressive deterioration and decline. These features could be observed either as separate or mixed phenomena. Quite obviously, if they were mixed the deformation intensified.

A survey of a person’s internal experiences is one of the most difficult examinations to conduct, all the more so if it is a survey of the mental experiences of the inmates of an extermination camp. Prisoners’ mental state could hardly be examined on the basis of categories of values applicable in normal conditions. Hence we need to exercise a great deal of caution when examining the various forms of hope that occurred in a concentration camp. After all, any tell-tale sign of an expansion to come to the rescue of the prisoner herself and other prisoners would have put her (and the others) in the utmost jeopardy. When we look at these phenomena retrospectively from today’s point of view we should refrain from making overhasty judgements, especially as there are many unknowns.

We shall have to consider curtailment a feature of all the kinds of hope which have been deformed. It is doubtful whether any inmate of a concentration camp could have dreamed of and looked forward to good future prospects absolutely freely, with no constraints at all. The camp and its plethora of ways to bully and apply pressure could stifle initiative in any and every field. We only need to remind ourselves that a prisoner had no right to be a human being, she was only a numbered working tool, and when she was worn out she was to be disposed of. It would have been impossible for prisoners not to reckon with the reality they were in. Not surprisingly, that reality must have impacted in one way or another on their hopes. Yet in spite of that prisoners’ hopes were an excellent antidote for what was going on in the concentration camp. Oriented towards a better future, they softened the burden of all the evil things that could smite the prisoner anywhere and at any time. They allowed her a moment’s respite from all the malice and meanness, reminding her that on the other side of the electric fence there were people whose minds were occupied with matters of freedom, and an expanse friendly to flowers and vegetation, birds chirping and merrily buzzing insects. And although her heart was homesick and missing her nearest and dearest, although the ever-present anxiety made her worry about various things, still the fact that she believed she would live to see better times let her feel stronger. In spite of everything, the hopes prisoners entertained made their predicament easier to bear.

The drastic shortage of all the necessities must certainly have had a negative effect on prisoners’ mental potential. A person who is permanently hungry will want to have more food rather than luxury cosmetics. A person who is freezing cold on chilly days will want to have a warm pullover, not a frock coat. What was worse, there was no end to the shortages in the camp. So, given the endless shortages, how could prisoners have built up their hopes without limit? What they dreamed of in the first place was a piece of bread, a bar of soap, underwear, clothing, being sent to work in one of the “easier” commandos, not to mention being lucky enough to be missed during selection.

Limiting themselves to wanting the biological necessities meant that prisoners reduced their intellectual demands, especially as they had no right to want them in the first place. All the time assailed by the remorseless offensive of despondency, they had to strive to preserve their hope, even though they were diffident that what they hoped for would ever come true. Even their homesickness for their loved ones and their Country was not so much a hope but more of a wish. They had to recognise that their desire of freedom and to return home was unrealistic, and therefore such hopes were necessarily curtailed. If what they wanted was to counteract the evil going on around them and to foil the camp overseers’ operations, the extent of such noble endeavours would also have been limited. Always and everywhere the onslaught of despondency was all too palpable.

In an atmosphere of infinite anxiety and boundless fear of what was going on and what might happen, a prisoner started to lose confidence that even her very limited hopes would come true. Many prisoners lost this expectation pretty soon. All that could save them was the superior type of hope, if they could muster the courage for that. How much mental vivacity could a prisoner have had in such an atmosphere of endless oppression and insecurity? Would she have been capable of joining others to defy the camp’s cruelty? And if she was, then to what extent? For the concentration camp was deliberately turning people into Muselmänner, deliberately letting them contract diseases and become invalids, deliberately treating them as automatons which had to obey orders blindly – in short, it was deliberately hitting out at their humanity.

Anyone who did not manage to keep their biological and mental powers in a reasonable condition was not fit to persistently stand up in defiance of the camp’s regime and its masters who applied any method they liked to wreak vengeance and destroy – no holds barred. You needed to be extremely tough to inspire other prisoners to defy the camp and join the nascent resistance movement operating within the camp and in touch with outside resistance units. The extraordinary powers needed for objectives and hopes of this kind must have aspired to the supreme, collective values. If Hitler’s Nazism had fully succeeded in carrying out its aims, most probably no prisoner at all would have lived to the day of liberation. So it is a tremendous achievement on the part of prisoners that despite the reign of terror and the infinite restrictions to which they were subject, despite their ruined health, they managed to stand up and resist the Nazi German monster. It was possible thanks to their persistent, heroic endeavour to preserve their humanity, which let them understand and believe that the duty of a human being is to rise up, not to decline and degenerate.

Some prisoners limited their hopes to their own person. Their hopes were directed “towards themselves” and “away from” fellow-inmates. However, to be exact we should distinguish such curtailment which was done out of necessity, from restrictions applied merely for selfish reasons. Sick prisoners and those suffering from depression restricted their aspirations to themselves out of necessity; while those who sought only their own advantage restricted their aspirations for selfish reasons.

What with the huge shortfalls, even those who availed themselves of “organising things” found it very hard to meet the needs of others. So when I speak of helping others, what I have in mind is primarily care and concern, good advice, and verbal consolation, although of course material aid meant a lot. One of the properties of hope is that all of its forms concentrate on the self. Even the habit of dispensing aid to others which some socially-minded prisoners had acquired before they were sent to the concentration camp diminished very substantially when confronted with the realities in the camp. Prisoners had to behave in this way in order to survive to the next day, and it was absolutely inevitable whenever it did not bring harm to others. If you are to maintain your hope you cannot disregard the personal aspect which applies to yourself. If you did, it would no longer be hope, but a plan that transcended the bounds of the self. So it was not a question of putting yourself outside the scope of your activity, but of making the object of your hope extend to cover others as well as yourself.

The object of prisoners’ hopes, apart from the socially-oriented kind, always involved everyday matters, which assumed drastic forms in the concentration camp. I learned this from what prisoners said and the way they behaved. A typical utterance was “I wish I could eat my fill at least just once.” What made such hopes selfish was not wanting to “eat your fill,” but limiting them exclusively to yourself. But in the concentration camp a prisoner’s desire to “eat her fill” was justified, because it did not necessarily imply she didn’t care that other prisoners were hungry as well.

It’s no novelty to observe that a prisoner crammed into a massive crowd which never left her alone for a single minute found it hard, indeed impossible, to enjoy a moment of privacy. In this respect each one of us was not so much her own self, but a tiny particle in a gigantic swarm of prisoners. Rarely does such a vast congestion of people occur in normal conditions. In the concentration camp keeping the appropriate social distance or body space was out of the question. I was tired of the sight of columns of people marching out to work; tired of prisoners collectively milling about in front of the blocks, in search of new ways to survive; but above all I was exhausted by the close crowd packed in my block. I became so irritated by the numbers and badges identifying prisoners that after a time I no longer saw a crowd of people passing before my eyes, but a series of numbers and badges – symbols of enslavement – sewn onto their clothes. I was so alarmed that I started to admonish myself that I would forget the people and their faces, and all that I’d remember would be their coloured badges and the tags with their camp numbers. I was harassed for a long time by this worry, which did not come to an end until I had a dream. In it I saw an assemblage of identical striped prison suits passing before my eyes, and the only thing that differentiated them were the badges and camp numbers. They moved on and on, saying their names out aloud. I woke up and rubbed my eyes; those striped togs seemed to be saying they wanted to have their human rights restored, I thought. From then on every time I met a prisoner and got to know her I asked her for her first name and surname. And each time a new hope came to me I put a name to it.

Staying in such a look-alike community annoyed me so much that I started desperately looking for ways of cutting myself off from this human whirlpool. The best places for that were the banks of the ditch running along what was known as the Wiese supposed to be a meadow, near the Postenkette (line of watchtowers), but not too near, otherwise the sentry might think I was going to throw myself on the electric fence and shoot me. That’s what those who’d had enough did, usually in the evening. Perhaps in broad daylight he’d refrain from using his gun on a prisoner slowly walking ahead.

These warnings passing through my mind did not manage to hold back my intensifying yearning. With a friend I made my way towards the ditch. When the sentry on duty pointed his gun at us we sat down. He was presumably so surprised by our behaviour that he didn’t pull the trigger. Most of the sentries were primitive and their minds worked along stereotypical lines. In situations which they didn’t expect, situations which were untypical, their reflex reactions floundered. By the ditch we had a good talk. A spell of a more balanced mood let us blot out the experience of concentration camp views for a while. But our hopes of relaxing in this way again fell to pieces. The sentry had warned us with his gun when we were still at a fairly long distance away that he would not tolerate our “whims.”

How much the fulfilment of a seemingly unimportant wish for a moment all to yourself is shown by the fact that I still remember the details of that episode. In normal conditions you are not obliged to stay in such a congested crowd all the time, at the mercy of such overpowering stimuli. Normally people can arrange their lives as they want, as least for a short spell of time, and choose the companions they want. As I’ve said, having such a choice should be regarded as an important premise determining our well-being. In the concentration camp this option was hedged with difficulties, if not ruled out completely.

I craved just a while of seclusion away from the nervously jittering human multitude, and in the company just of a person of my choice. The defence mechanisms keeping me relatively balanced between excitement and tranquillity longed to be to free of the surfeit of sensations and shortfalls. The fulfilment of a hope, or in fact the very effort to have it fulfilled helped a lot to keep me in a good mood.

Our dreams, wishes, and expectations were what made up for some of the wants we experienced in the camp. Even their stunted forms somehow helped to keep up our ability to defy the concentration camp and all of its works. Provided that defiance included a concern to preserve our humanity and was not just focused on its biological aspects.

Those who parted ways with their dignity inevitably followed the downward path to their doom – along with their hopes. You could tell from the hopes such prisoners made public to fellow-inmates how much of the human qualities they had lost. Prisoners in this category could be divided into two types: egoists who wanted vengeance, and individuals whose vengeance had a pathological streak to it.

The vengeful egoists, preoccupied with themselves, applied the activity they had to suspecting fellow-inmates of bad, or even malicious intent to them and to the concentration camp. I never saw them helping another inmate, on the other hand they liked to denounce people, oddly enough for no good reason. They hurt, or even – at the hands of others – killed fellow-prisoners. You never knew what you could expect of them by way of punishment. Sometimes it was only during roll-call that we learned that this or that prisoner had done something “to the detriment” of the concentration camp, for which she was punished by being locked up in the bunker, sent to the Strafkommando (penal commando), or even to Block 25, the antechamber to death. The grassers reported people to a sentry or Aufseherin (Ger. female guard), allegedly for wanting to escape. The penalty following such a grave accusation was death. The vengeful egoists seemed to regard each of us as an enemy.

Once, when I told one of these Anweiserinnen (instructors) that her suspicions were wrong, she said, “Just you wait, I’ll get you!” She built up a hope to take her revenge on me. And she did. When she noticed that I had gone slack at work she reported me to one of the vorarbeiterki (Ger. Vorarbeiterinnen, female chargehands). To avoid being punished I gave away some of my soup ration to the functionary prisoner. A hostile approach to other prisoners was probably the predominant attitude the vengeful egoists took in most of their actions.

We were very wary and afraid of prisoners who wore a functionary’s binda (Ger. Binde, armband) and had a pathological condition. These women had no qualms about engaging in the most despicable operations, often with the utmost brutality and in the hope of being able to carry on with such work. They did it to secure the best possible conditions for themselves and put off their own death. The pathological types tended to be functionaries of various kinds, kapos, chargehands, instructors, or even block functionaries. In Birkenau the ones who had the worst reputation were those appointed to supervise commandos sent out to work outside the camp.

In the autumn of 1943, which I think came early, I was sent to work in the Abbruchkommando (demolition commando), pulling down the buildings still up on the properties of people evicted from the land confiscated for the concentration camp. This area was still in the Sperrgebiet (enclosed zone), within the large ring of SS guardhouses. We had to demolish these houses using blunt pickaxes and shaky spades. We were watched by a female kapo we considered neither human nor animal, but something at a very low level [of evolution]. There was still a lot of time ahead of us to the end of the day, but we felt as if all the sinews in our arms and shoulders had snapped. The kapo stopped in front of one of the Russian women and looked like she was trying to find an excuse for unloading her pent-up anger on her. This Russian was a forthright girl. So when the kapo started yelling at her to work faster, the Russian dared to answer back that it would be much better to use dynamite to clear away foundations. At this the kapo jumped up to her with a stick and beat her until she lost consciousness. At first the Russian girl screamed and tried to cover herself with her arms, but once she was down on the ground she was an easy target for frenzied abuse. Knocking down the Russian girl did not relieve the kapo’s anger. When she saw that her victim was out she left her for a while, treating her as harmless, but once she tried to get up on her feet the kapo was back and trampled her to death.

There were plenty of sights like this in every part of the concentration camp. One day, as I was walking along the side of the Lagerstrasse (the camp’s “high street”) I saw a huge rollwaga (Ger. Rollwage, street roller) rolling along it, moved by a group of emaciated women prisoners bereft of all the attributes of a civilised appearance. They struggled to pull the heavy rollwaga with the last dregs of their strength, cursed and hurried on by the kapo with a stick which she applied in turn to each of the prisoners, in the usual concentration camp manner. As they were hauling the roller along the stony road one of the Aufseherinnen (female guards) arrived on Lagerstrasse. When the kapo noticed the guard the string of obscenities turned into a screechy yell, and the stick gathered even more momentum. But neither the yelling nor the cudgelling was of any avail, as by that time all the prisoners were flat out on the ground. The kapo jumped at them, still whacking her stick and trampling them with her boots. The SS-woman was watching all this with a show of disgust and contempt for the prisoners lying on the ground around the roller. She muttered, “Ordnung muss sein [We must have order],” and left in a hurry to continue her inspection of the camp.

These are just two typical examples of how prisoners sank into utter depravity, while their intellectual processes were interiorised and their personality dehumanised. There can be no doubt that the concentration camp only intensified and aggravated their perversions. Instead of pangs of conscience, what these kapos felt was a false sense of duty to supervise the camp, and a stubborn effort to protract their lives for as long as possible at a cost of forfeiting their humanity. The hopes of individuals of this kind ran in an outward direction “from” other prisoners “towards” themselves with no inhibitions to curtail their aggressive outbursts to release their anger.

These traits were so huge and powerful in them that even if there was any good in them it would be of no use to stop the disintegration of their personality. The pressure exerted by the work to supervise the camp on the biogenic and acquired resources of prisoners who let themselves be recruited as allies for destruction helped to confirm them in their perverted self-confidence, leaving no room for any outside regulatory influence. They lived in the hope of establishing as good a status for themselves as they could among the SS criminals, whom they looked up to and tried to emulate.

The fundamental conclusion from what I have presented, which comes as no surprise but is still worthwhile to formulate, is that even in the worst situations it is possible to preserve your hope, which serves as a singular elixir of life, a medicine for the psyche. But success in this task depends on the disposition of the individual assailed by despondency; it is determined by his or her moral attitude and resilience to the adversity, or even the nightmares which he or she has to face.

Translated from original article: Chylińska, M. Pod naporem beznadziejności w obozie. Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1987.