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Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski The German dehumanizing routine Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch' entrate. (Abandon hope, all you who enter here.) On a steamy August day in Tarnow, in 1941, in German-occupied Poland, German SS guards pointed machine guns at the heads of five Polish prisoners sitting in chains on a bench at the rear of a flatbed truck. The convoy of similarly loaded trucks was traveling (expeditiously) through town's business and residential areas (giving an impression) as if heading off to an execution site. Polish civilians (and especially women in residential areas )feared the worst and women openly cried (and covered the eyes of the children to spare them the fraightening sight, which was repeated 100 times throughout the day -- for a total of about 500 Polish prisoners. This was the German policy of "Schreklichkeit."(intimidating terror) In German terminology it stood for the policy intended to terrorize the population of occupied Poland by maintaining continuous atmosphere of fear and doom. From the trucks the prisoners were packed onto cattle cars of the train destined for Auschwitz Concentration Camp. After arrival at Auschwitz, the train was placed on a railroad siding, with the prisoners still on board, for two days without water or food. For whatever reason, a decision was eventually made not to unload the prisoners at the overcrowded Auschwitz camp which was in an early stage of its operation. Instead the train went to another camp in Oranienburg, near Berlin. I was one of the prisoners. I was on that train. This was the start of the eighth out of 64 months altogether of my descent into hell on earth at the hands of German executioners (captors). I had arrived, on August 10, 1940 at what became my final destination for the duration of World War II: the Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. Once I was outside the cattle car, I stretched and took a deep breath. An SS guard standing behind me noticed the stretching and immediately knocked me off my feet with a blow of his rifle butt on the back of my head. He shouted: "frecher Hund!" (you insolent dog!). I later realized that this behavior was part of a concerted and constant routine meant to terrorize the prisoners. A friend, Witek Wierzbicki helped me to get up and wiped fresh blood off my head. Witek was a student of comparative literature at the University of Warsaw, and recently recovered from an arm wound, which he suffered as a cavalryman during the September campaign. Soon we were formed into a marching column, five men abreast. After an hour march we crossed the camp gate. I have noticed an inscription above the gate, but I still had a blurred vision from the head blow. I asked Witek about it. He could plainly see that the inscription above him read "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work makes you free). Instead of repeating this, my friend perfectly captured the reality of the moment and wryly claimed that it was the quotation upon entering Dante's Inferno: Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch' entrate (Abandon all hope, you who enter here). When I think about the concentration camp, certain things stand indelibly in my mind: the camp terminology, and the roughly-barked German orders with their hate-filled words. Even now as an old man, it still pains me to think about the concentration camp, of the beatings, the shootings, the deaths, the stacked corpses. And for those of us in the camp who were not corpses yet, the Germans running the camp conducted a systematic campaign of dehumanizing routines to deprive prisoners of human dignity and of human individuality. They wanted break our spirits. They wanted us, like in Dante's Inferno, to abandon hope. Quarantine - "Stehkommando" (commando or an order to stand for hours or the whole day) The new arrivals (Zugaenge) were deloused (applying lice-killing liquid to their bodies), their hair was cut off; they were given "zebra" striped prison garb. Each inmate was given two number strips with red triangle and the letter "P" to indicate that we were Polish political prisoners (one for the left side of the coat and the other for the right legging of the pants) Most of men in my transport, including me, have previously spent many months in Gestapo prisons and were pale and not used to sunshine. There was no sitting down during the working hours (Arbeitszeit), which extended from the morning count of prisoners to the evening count in the camp main square called Apell Platz. The prisoners were nominally held as if in preventive captivity and therefore were called "Schutzhaeftlinge." Upon arrival we were directed to the quarantine section of the camp. There, as in the rest of the camp, each of the barracks was controlled by a "Blockaeltester" or "der Blockaelteste" (chief of the barracks), a hardened criminal (Berufsverbrecher) from German prison system and an expert in the browbeating intimidation. He wore next to his identification number a green triangle, identifying him as a criminal. Food distribution was under his control. German homosexuals were called "asos" for "asociale Elemente" (asocial elements). We were given shoes with wooden soles. Walking was forbidden during the "Arbeitszeit" (during the work time): we were ordered to run whenever we were going anyplace. The command was "im Laufschritt, marsch! marsch!" (run, march! March!). We were assigned to a "Stehkommando," which meant that we were to stand the whole day in front of the quarantine building with shorn heads exposed to the Summer sun. Soon the skin on our heads started swelling. In the worst cases victims looked as if they had helmets on. Some actually could not see anything as the swelling covered their foreheads and eyes. By any measure, life in the camp was indeed a hellish existence. Under the supervision of the SS-guards, several times a day the "Blockaeltester" ordered "sport." He and his helpers would make us lay down and get up in a hurry several hundred times and run a few steps in between hitting the ground. They shouted their commands in rapid succession: "hinlegen! auf! marsch! marsch!" (Lay down, up, march! march!). Then they would order us to jump like frogs shouting "Kniebeugen! huepfen!" (deep-knee bend, squat, jump!) Then they shouted "hinlegen! rollen!" (lay down on the ground and roll). It usually lasted until many prisoners started to vomit, sometimes with blood. After the "sport" the SS-men would order those who could get up to carry to the barrack those that could not walk despite beating and kicking. Over 3000 Polish Catholic priests were murdered in concentration camps and prisons by the Germans during the war. I saw two Catholic priests, monsignors in their sixties, collapsing after one of these dehumanizing "sport" routines. Some of these routines originated from military drill developed in the 19th century Prussian Army for soldiers, most of whom were Polish, did not speak German because they inhabited Polish provinces annexed by Prussia during partitions of Poland at the end of 18th century. Among prisoners who were on starvation diet, many were old and sick for whom this sport was murderous. Obviously the German intent was to eliminate the weak by exhaustion or outright killing in the plain sight of other prisoners, whose spirit was to be broken and remain so. Hitler's government treated human life as a natural resource to be systematically extracted with a high degree exploitation efficiency. The SS-men seemed to be motivated by German patriotism and the "Rassen wahn" or "racial delusion" mixed with sadism. Many of the SS-guards assigned to Sachsenhausen Konzentrationslager previously served in Spain in German expeditionary forces during the Spanish civil war. They used Spanish curse words, such as "carajo" and added them to vulgarities of their German repertoire. They also brought from Spain the feeling of contempt for Muslims. The slang expression coined by the SS-guards for rundown prisoners was "Musulmaenner." One monster SS-man - a heavy weigh boxer, Obersturmfuerer Bogdalle, was especially cruel. He would order a prisoner to stand to attention and then suddenly hit him in the stomach. Many of his victims suffered internal tears such as bursting of the liver or kidneys. Another killer, Untersturmfuehrer Schubert, spied on prisoners from a distance for a smallest infraction such as walking instead of running and then beat them mercilessly. The command: "alle Musulmaenner austreten" (all Muslims step forward) would start the selection by the "Blockaeltester" of the most rundown prisoners too sick and too weak to do any work. They were supposed to be further weakened and then killed. During the quarantine, a man from my transport, an electrical engineer named Owczarek, scaled the double electric fence. He used a ladder, on each end of which he tied a pair of tennis shoes in order to use the rubber sole as electric insulation. During the morning count he was missing and the prisoners were kept standing for three days in front of their barracks until the escapee was brought back to the camp. Since he was from our building we were extra worked over with nasty "sport" routines. The Canal Commando After about three months in quarantine barracks the "Zugaenge" or new arrivals were assigned to regular barracks and sent to work. Witek and I, as well as many other inmates from our transport, were sent to the "Canal Commando," which unloaded cargo at a port on a canal connecting rivers near Berlin. The cargo usually consisted of building materials and debris of broken up concrete pavements and buildings. We were unloading the cargo amidst swinging clubs and shouts: "Bewegung, schnell, faulenzer Drecksaeke " (move, fast, lazybones, you shit bags). I worked on the barge unloading materials while Witek was ordered to run while pushing (operating) a heavily loaded wheelbarrow. I did not have work gloves and the skin on my hands was heavily abraded and infected after I had to unload one hundred pound cement bags for days on end. Witek's war wound became reinfected. His wounded arm was shorter and often he was losing balance while running with the wheelbarrow . Each time it happened the SS-men clubbed him mercilessly and called him "bloede Sau" (stupid swine), etc. After several months of such an ordeal Witek committed suicide. He was terribly rundown and in pain. One morning, before going to work, he had deliberately thrown himself on the barbed wire of the electrified fence and brought on himself machine gun fire from nearby guard tower. He died on the spot. I remember him affectionately to this day. "Tongrube" (the clay pit) "Klinkerwerk" or brickyard consisted mainly of a large building, about 600x600 fteet. It housed twelve gas generators and twenty four canal baking ovens through which insulated platforms moved bricks through the fire zone. The raw clay was brought by narrow gauge railroad from a clay pit called "Tongrube." It was located few miles away from the main brickworks. Shooting of prisoners had to be reported and certified by special SS-officers. When I was working in the clay pit, such special SS-officers traveled each morning to the "Tongrube" to save time, as they expected to report daily prisoners' death by shooting. A digging machine equipped with buckets was mounted on two rails some ten fteet apart. It loaded clay directly on hopper wagons of the narrow gauge railroad. In order to accommodate the clay excavation schedule, the prisoners had to move the rails to a new position for the digging machine, as well as the narrow gage rails of track next to it. At the low point of the clay pit, there was accumulation of muddy water, which was more than ten feet deep in which a number of prisoners drowned. The rail sections were about ten meters (thirty feet) long. The rails were mounted on wooden railroad ties. Periodically rail sections had to be relocated by the prisoners. They had to stand between the ties, grab the rail and lift it so that they could get their shoulders under it in order to carry it through soft mud to the next location. Prisoners were not lined up by body height so that the shorter men actually pulled themselves up to avoid beating by SS-guards and "Vorarbeiters" as the prisoner-foremen were called This of course increased weight of the entire load. In addition the SS-men often remained standing on the ties in order not to have to walk in the mud and at the same time to have access to prisoners to kick and hit them. The inferno created by the repositioning of rail sections is hard to describe. I believe that the continuous hunger bangs of the prisoners created kind of stupor which to some extent isolated them from the awful reality of the atrocities. By that time the malnutrition took visible toll on my organism. My body weight dropped from the initial 180 to 97 pounds. My molar teeth were crumbling and gradually I lost most of them. X-ray survey and gassing of TB positive prisoners. In Summer of 1944 an X-ray survey was conducted in Sachsenhausen camp to identify prisoners ill with tuberculosis. Since I was coughing and spitting blood, a friend of mine who was a medical doctor, Stanislaw Kelles-Kraus, told me to try to get someone in a better health than I, to substitute for me during the X-ray exam. The substitute prisoner had to put on my prison clothing with my identification number. This was Kazio Wiecek, who after the war practiced law in Chicago. Of course he took great risk by doing so. It should be noted that in Sachsenhausen the identification numbers were marked on clothing but not tatooed on prisoners' skin it as was practiced in Auschwitz. (As it happened, Kazio's prison identification number differed only by one digit from mine, which was 28865.) After the war I have learned that I had a number of TB calcification-scars in my lungs and therefore very likely I would have been selected for the gas chamber, which was in the adjacent to the camp industrial yard or the "Industriehof of the Sachsenhausen Koncentrations Lager." The list of numbers of prisoners, who apparently were diagnosed with tuberculosis, were send to barracks in order to form a transport. Word spread that the men listed were to be gassed. During the following counting of prisoners, Janek (I think his last name was Olszewski) from Torun was missing. SS-men suspected that he was hiding in the camp and they used dogs to locate him under a man-hole cover in the camp sewers. Janek was brought to the "Raportfuehrer", the SS-man in charge, who asked him: "Why did you hide? The place where your transport is going is better than Sachsenhausen." Janek answered: "I know, but I would like to live longer." One day in the Spring of 1944 I was ordered to help load corpses onto a large flatbed truck for transport to the in-camp crematorium. I noticed signs of life in a man buried under several layers of corpses. I got him out from under the dead men and I recognized him. He was Jozef Kettner, a noncommissioned officer from Kalisz, Poland. He was both monstrously swollen and compressed. His bloated legs filled his pants and under the weight of bodies piled on top of him his legs were flatten to a thickness of two to three inches. He could not walk, so I carried him into a nearby building of the camp hospital called "Revier," where I knew several medics. It was truly a miracle that Josef Kettner survived the ordeal and was able to return to his family in Poland after the war. The carpet bombing In the Spring of 1945, I was reassigned to work in the main building of the "Klinkerwerk". By that time "Kninkerwerk" became a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen with sleeping quarters, however, the same prison identification numbers were maintained. By that time, the huge brick baking ovens were converted to serve as heat treatment of mortar shells. On April 10, the sirens sounded alarm because American flying fortresses were approaching. While the SS-guards hid in the bomb shelters, which were not available to prisoners, I climbed on the roof to see the airplanes. Suddenly I realized that smoke bombs, used for marking bombing targets, were released so that they were heading directly towards the building I was watching them from. I got down from the roof to the top of one of the 10 feet high brick backing ovens when I heard the explosions, which formed a uniform roar of the first wave of bombs of the carpet bombing attack that was in progress. I held my mouth open in order to equalize air pressure on my ear drums and I tried to get out of the building and into the open. After two waves of bombs exploded in the huge building I managed to get outside and get into a crater made by an earlier bomb explosion. Before the bombing was over I had to move from crater to crater as the sand was shifting by bomb explosions and was filling craters made by earlier bombs. When explosions ceased, after two hours of bombing I found a sizable piece of fragmentation bomb in my pocket. I was not wounded, however, I must have suffered a strong concussion because for several months I perspired only on one side of my head. Close friend of mine, Mieczyslaw (Mietek) Hildebrandt (now a chemical engineer in Paris, France) operated one of the generators during the night shift and was waken up by the roar of the carpet bombing. He got outside just in time before phosphorous bombs set the wooden barracks on fire. Near him a group of prisoners started to cut the barbed wire fence, which just lost the high voltage. An SS-man got out of his concrete shelter and took aim at the prisoners who were trying to get out through a hole in the fence. At that moment a phosphorous bomb killed the SS-man before he could fire. Cannibalism Some of the prisoners jumped from higher floors of the brickyard building on a large outdoor storage of coke, without realizing that it was already burning wothout producing visible flames. It was set on fire by phosphorous incendiary bombs in the earlier stage of the raid. Their bodies were literally baked. I later saw starved Soviet prisoners carving and eating flesh from the thighs of the corpses. Later on a Soviet officer, Ivan (Vania) Davidovich, captured in battle of Sevastopol, Crimea, and an inmate in Sachsenhausen told me how Lazar Kaganovich used hunger as a weapon in the early thirties to force collectivization. In Ukraine alone some seven million people were starved to death. Cannibalism became widespread. The effects of Soviet brutalization of they own people still could be seen a few years later in Sachsenhausen. Casualties of the American bombing There were about 2,000 prisoners in "Klinkerwerk" satellite camp during the American carpet bombing from 3.05 p.m. to about 4.50 p.m. Practically all prisoners were nationals of countries allied with the United States and therefore in present day terminology, the carpet bombing was a tragic case of a "friendly fire." By the time the bombing ended some 700 prisoners were dead and only about one thousand could walk back to the main camp of Sachsenhousen. Cleaning work was conducted during following days. Dead bodies of prisoners were loaded on trucks, and shipped directly to the crematorium. I was told that seriously injured prisoners were sent to the gas chambers and then to crematorium. SS-guards did not permit any rescue efforts on the part of the prisoners Death march of Brandenburg Ten days after the carpet bombing destroyed the satellite camp "Klinkerwerk," on Apr. 20, 1945, the nine-year existence of the Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp came to an end. On that day the camp was evacuated and the "death march of Brandenburg" of 33,500 inmates began. On May 2, 1945, the columns of remaining 18,000 inmates from Sachsenhausen found themselves in no-man's land near Schwerin; some one hundred kilometers north-west from Berlin. Corpses of 6,000 inmates shot by the SS-guards along the evacuation road were counted and are listed on the monument at the camp site. I have heard that the American commander in Schwerin ordered local German civilians to bury 900 dead shot by the SS-guards. Since all Jews were transported east in 1943, where most of them were murdered, there were no prisoners marked with the star of David among the thousands of inmates in Sachsenhausen at the time of the evacuation of the camp. I and Mr. Hildebrandt marched in column of prisoners from Sachsenhausen. When we were passing a column of women prisoners from Rawensbrueck Concentration Camp for women, one of the women prisoners shouted in Polish a question: "Did you get any food from the Red Cross?" Someone from Sachsenhausen answered: "No, instead we are getting hell from the Black Cross. (German Swastica)" Leon Kulikowski, now an architect in California, told me how he served in the First Polish Army (organized by the Soviets), which in the night of Apr. 17/18 successfully crossed the Oder River near Berlin along with Soviet forces. It was in fact the only not Soviet force storming the German capital. In the evening of Apr. 20, 1945 the German army retreated from Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen and the first regiment of the first division of the First Polish Army, took control of the entire area. This brought an end of the operation of the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. About quarter million inmates passed through Sachsenhausen during the camp operation in 1936-1945; 130,000 inmates of 41 different nationalities died there. The camp was equipped with gas chambers. Also equipped with gas chambers was the Rawensbrueck Concentration Camp for Women. It operated six years in 1939-1945; 130,000 women of twenty seven nationalities were held there including 40,000 Polish women. 92,000 women died there. www.pogonowski.com | |||
