Selections

Selections in the camp occurred at rollcalls. Prisoners were forced to stand naked in the cold, often for hours at a time, while doctors and SS men examined them to determine who would live and who would die. Inmates knew to jog in place, show any energy they could, to avoid being sent to die.

The heaps grow. Suitcases, bundles, blankets, coats, handbags that open as they fall, spilling coins, gold, watches; mountains of bread pile up at the exits, heaps of marmalade, jams, masses of meat, sausages; sugar spills on the gravel. Trucks, loaded with people, start up with a deafening roar and drive off amidst the wailing and screaming of the women separated from their children, and the stupefied silence of the men left behind. They are the ones who had been ordered to step to the right--the healthy and the young who will go to the camp. In the end, they too will not escape death, but first they must work....

Here is a woman--she walks quickly, but tries to appear calm. A small child with a pink cherub's face runs after her, and, unable to keep up, stretches out his little arms and cries:'Mama! Mama!'

'Pick up your child, woman!'

'Its not mine, sir, not mine!' she shouts hysterically and runs on, covering her faced with her hands. She wants to hide, she wants to reach those who will not ride the trucks, those who will go on foot, those who will stay alive. She is young, healthy, good-looking, she wants to live...

Andrei, a sailor from Sevastopol, grabs hold of her. His eyes are glassy from vodka and the heat. With one powerful blow he knocks her off her feet, then, as she falls, takes her by the hair and pulls her up again....

'Ah, you bloody Jewess! So you're running from your own child! I'll show you, you whore!' His huge hand chokes her, he lifts her in the air and heaves her on to the truck like a sack of grain.

'Here! And take this with you, bitch!" and he throws the child at her feet...

Several other men are carrying a small girl with only one leg. They hold her by the arms and the one leg. Tears are running down her face and she whispers faintly: 'Sir, it hurts, it hurts....' They throw her on the truck on top of the corpses. She will burn alive along with them.

Borowski, 38-46.

A dozen SS men stood around, legs akimbo, with an indifferent air. At a certain moment they moved among us, and in a subdued tone of voice, with faces of stone, began to interrogate us rapidly.....'How old? Healthy or ill?" And on the basis of the reply they pointed in two different directions.

Everything was silent as an aquarium, or as in certain dream sequences. We had expected something more apocalyptic: they seemed simple police agents. It was disconcerting and disarming. Someone dared to ask for his luggage: they replied 'luggage afterwards'. Someone else did not want to leave his wife: they said,'together again afterwards.' Many mothers did not want to be separated from their children: they said 'good, good, stay with child.'...

In less than ten minutes all the fit men had been collected together in a group. What happened to the others, to the women, to the children, to the old men, we could establish neither then or later: the night swallowed them up, purely and simply. Today, however, we know that in that rapid and summary choice each one of us had been judged capable or not of working usefully for the Reich; we know that of our convoy no more than ninety-six men and twenty-nine women entered the respective camps of Monowitz-Buna and Birkenau, and that of all the others, more than five hundred in number, none was living two days later.

Levi, Survival, pp. 19-20.

Some described a quality of playfulness in his detachment, his "walking back and forth... [with a] cheerful expression on his face....almost like he had fun...routine fun....He was very playful."

[P]risoners were struck by the contrast between what he looked like and what he was. One survivor described him as "good-looking...very cultivated", declared that "he really didn't look like a murderer," but immediately added, "He hit my father with his stick on his neck and sent him in a certain direction [to the gas chambers]." Or, "he was brutal, but in a gentlemanly, depraved way." For Mengele's studied detachment could be interrupted by outbreaks of rage and violence, especially when encountering resistance to his sense of the Auschwitz rules. For instance, an arriving teenager, directed by Mengele to the right while her mother and younger sisters were sent to the left, "begged and wept" because she did not want to be separated from them: "[Mengele then] grabbed me by the hair, dragged me on the ground, and beat me. When my mother also tried to beg him, he beat her with his cane"....

Lifton, p. 343.

One feels the selections arriving. "Selekcja": the hybrid latin and Polish word is heard once, twice, many times, interpolated in foreign conversations; at first we cannot distinguish it, then it forces itself on our attention, and in the end it persecutes us...

Yet the result is hardly a wave of despondency: our collective morale is too inarticulate and flat to be unstable. The fight against hunger, cold and work leaves little margin for thought, even for this thought. Everybody reacts in his own way, but hardly anyone with those attitudes which would seem the most plausible as the most realistic, that is with resignation or despair.

All those able to find a way out, try to take it: but they are the minority because it is very difficult to escape from a selection. The Germans apply themselves to these things with great skill and diligence.

Whoever is unable to prepare for it materially, seeks defense elsewhere. In the latrines, in the washroom, we show each other our chests, our buttocks, our thighs, and our comrades reassure us: "You are all right, it will certainly not be your turn this time,...du bist kein Muselmann..."

Our Blockaltester knows his business. He has made sure that we have all entered, he has the door locked, he has given everyone his card with his number, name, profession and nationality and he has ordered everyone to undress completely, except for shoes. We wait like this, naked, with the cards in our hands, for the commission to reach our hut. We are hut 48, but one can never tell if they are going to begin at hut 1 or hut 60....

The Blockaltester and his helpers, starting at the end of the dormitory, drive the flock of frightened, naked people in front of them and cram them in the Tagesraum...a room seven yards by four: when the drive is over, a warm and compact human mass is jammed into the Tagesraum, perfectly filling all the corners, exercising such a pressure on the wooden walls as to make them creak....

Here, in front of the two doors, stands the arbiter of our fate, an SS subaltern... Each one of us, as he comes naked out of the Tagesraum into the cold October air, has to run the few steps between the two doors, give the card to the SS man and enter the dormitory door. The SS man, in the fraction of a second between two successive crossings, with a glance at one's back and front, judges everyone's fate, and in turn gives the card to the man on his right or on his left, and this is the life or death of each of us...

Nobody yet knows with certainty his own fate, it has first of all to be established whether the condemned cards were those on the right or the left. By now there is no longer any point in sparing each other's feelings with superstitious scruples. Everybody crowds around the oldest, the most wasted-away and most "Muselmann"; if their cards went to the left, the left is certainly the side of the condemned...

A double ration will be given to those selected. I have never discovered if this was a ridiculously charitable initiative of the Blockaltester, or an explicit disposition of the SS, but in fact, in the interval of two or three days (sometimes even much longer) between the selection and the departure, the victims at Monowitz-Auschwitz enjoyed this privilege...

Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen.

Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow...Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn?... If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn's prayer.

Levi, Survival, pp. 123-130.