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Under Total Eclipse We Will Tremble Like Birds Without Song
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The Auschwitz Chapter
1
I only wanted to walk in the sunshine once more. That was all. I’m young, I can’t be locked up all the time in a windowless attic. No-one can live without ever seeing the sky, without feeling its blueness, lifting you up. I can’t be alone and have no boyfriend and never feel the sun on my skin. My skin is made for kissing, see how soft it is. I am not even twenty, I cannot only sit, year after year, hiding alone in a dark attic while spring at last gushes open outside in the world. It gushes open inside me too.
I only wanted to walk in the sunshine again. To look at the sky. Two years hiding in the dark is too long. Nobody can do it. I couldn’t stand it for one more minute, it was such a beautiful spring day. I didn’t think they would pick me up, I never dreamed that anyone would set the Gestapo on me just because she saw me walking out in Cherbourg Square. I have known her in the town ever since I was a little child, she has lived only two streets away for all of my life. And anyway I was doing no harm, I was only walking, I was only breathing the fresh daylight air.
It doesn’t matter if I am a Jew, I have a right to be in the sunshine too. I shouldn’t be kept in a cage. The sunshine isn’t only for them. They have no right to take me off the street and pack me off in a cattle train like an animal.
Anna’s cattle train shunts slowly across a flat area of broken rock surrounded by high barbed wire fences. It is night and this is the Ramp, this is where the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau begins, here behind the iron sign over the entrance gate, Arbeit Macht Frei. Work Brings Liberty.
SS guards with machine guns man the observation towers overlooking the Ramp. SS soldiers stand ready with guard dogs to meet the train.
When the trains finally stops they quickly pull open the sliding doors and immediately begin shouting at the confused prisoners. ‘Out! ‘Quickly! Everybody out!’
As the doors slide open to free them, some people fall out on to the tracks thee feet below, they no longer have the strength to stand unsupported, only the crush of the doors were holding them standing.
Immediately bright searchlights from the observation towers hit the Ramp and the train, blinding the deportees. The SS guard dogs bark at them viciously. A metallic voice commands them from loudspeakers positioned high on poles.
‘Leave your luggage where it is on the train. Men go to the left. Women and children to the right. Hurry or you will be shot.’
The voice repeats itself over and over. Like the voice of a machine.
When Anna’s freight car door is slid open she almost crashes down on to the tracks with the others. She has been standing is this same spot for the entire journey, for days without food or water or sanitation, for two and a half days the freight car door has not even been opened and now she is completely exhausted.
She climbs unsteadily down on to the Ramp, one of the first, breathing the fresh night air deeply in, looking around in confusion at what looks like a railyard behind high barbed wire fences.
In confusion she stops a passing SS soldier with a dog, she does not yet know where she is, she does not yet know she has fallen off the human world.
‘There are many dead people in this car sir,’ she reports, ‘There was no air.’
The SS hits Anna hard with a wooden truncheon. ‘Move sow!’ he screams at her.
The loudspeakers are repeating their orders endlessly.
‘Leave your luggage where it is on the train. Men go to the left, women and children to the right. Hurry or you will be shot.’
Completely exhausted passengers spill from the train on to the Ramp.
The searchlights immediately blind them and SS soldiers with clubs move quickly through them, striking them while the dogs bark and snarl. This is the strategy, to confuse and pressure the deportees so that no concerted resistance is possible.
On the Ramp, crowds of men push in one direction while the women pull their children in the other. Male prisoners from the camp in special gray-striped uniforms and shaved heads run into the freight cars to throw out the dead bodies and the abandoned luggage on to the ground as fast as they can. These are the Sonderkommandos, the Special Command. Prisoners who are given special privileges and segregation from the other prisoners in exchange for assisting the Germans with the running of the camp. Their collaboration earns them food rations and an extra three months of life before a new group of Sonderkommando arrive to assist in their predecessors’ extermination. Their careful segregation is designed to maintain the secret that there are gas chambers in the camp in which the Jewish race is being systematically exterminated by the millions. The Sonderkommando are given liberal alcohol rations with which to ease their conscience, but still they will not ease, for the Sonderkommando know precisely what a man will do for an three extra months of life.
While they are working on the Ramp, the Sonderkommandos must always run or be shot. When the panicking deportees stop them to ask questions, the Sonderkommandos shake their heads in silence and run on. And from this alone, the deportees can tell that this is no ordinary place.
Anna is pushing through the swirling crowds on the Ramp, she looks up, half a mile away is an ominous square chimney belching thick black smoke. Above the chimney the sky glows hell-red. Anna grabs a passing Sonderkommando by the arm and points up at the chimney.
‘Where are we? What is this place?’ she begs desperately, ‘What’s that awful sweet smell in the air? Is it burning rubber? Burning fat? What is it?’
The Sonderkommando pauses for a second, lifting a suitcase, he whispers to her. ‘This is the kingdom of death.’
‘But why? Why?’ Anna asks desperately.
‘Here there is no why.’
He breaks free of Anna’s grip and hurries on.
Anna looks around in wild confusion.
They are going to murder us all..
Nearby in an open freight car, a pregnant woman lies on the floor, giving birth in the filthy squalor of a cattle car. A Sonderkommando kneels over her and mercifully wipes her brow. Although he is a man decimated and destroyed by his weakness, he is still a man and not an animal. He lifts the newborn baby and places it on her breast and she smiles at it. Before he can say anything to her an SS soldier jumps into the freight car and begins beating him with a truncheon. The SS screams at him, ‘What are you doing with that filth!’
The Sonderkommando cowers and the soldier turns and beats the mother with his truncheon as she wails. He kicks the newborn baby so violently that it flies off high into the darkness of the freight car like a loose football.
The soldier screams at the Sonderkommando, ‘Bring that piece of shit back over here!’
The Sonderkommando cowers and rushes off into the darkness of the freight car after the dead baby.
Anna stands watching, frozen in shock, she can only stare. There is no response a feeling being can make. It is simply so far beyond imagination, to witness such a thing.
This is not possible. It is something which cannot exist among humanity..
And yet it exists in Auschwitz.
Suddenly an SS soldier strikes her hard across the back with his stinging club and now she is running and screaming along with the others. Ahead, the crowds of women and children are hurrying into a passageway flanked by tree foliage woven into barbed wire.
When Anna gets into the passageway she sees it is lined by soldiers with trained shepherd dogs barking and snarling at her. As the women and children run past, weeping and howling, the soldiers strike them with their clubs, forcing them to them to run on. They strike Anna on her bare legs and she runs with the others, running and screaming with the others, mindless with terror, slipping in the mud, sightless, weeping.
Up ahead the frenzied crowd streams downstairs into the lighted entrance of an underground building.
Later in the underground building which is little more than a concrete bunker, Anna stares lifelessly ahead as she stands nude in a line waiting with hundreds of other naked women and children. The process of her systematic dehumanization is now complete after ten years of gradual persecution. All of them have been brought here, to finally stand naked and exposed in this underground room.
She has never felt so ugly. The prison barbers have shorn her thick long hair off until she is bald like a bedraggled rat. She has been selected out for this with the other Jewish women on her train. Some of these women are Orthodox Jews, since childhood they have never even been in public without their hair demurely covered, now they are naked and bald, their pubic hair shaved off too, showing to all their exposed cleft, until they are all alike in their nakedness and degradation. Not any one of them has ever seen herself with short hair before.
This is the deliberately pitiless Nazi strategy, to dehumanize people until they can be murdered without conscience. To humiliate these women through this public exposure, to remove their individuality by making them bald and alike, to turn them into cowering nude creatures. To make them less human by making them look like no woman has ever looked before. To make these Jews into a race inferior to the Aryans with the machine guns.
This very large room is brightly lit and windowless, only an underground bunker with square concrete supporting pillars. It is crowded with women undressing themselves and their children as they are hurried along by the urgent Sonderkommandos. Many of these women have never been seen naked by anyone in their entire lives, not even their husbands. The women struggle to cover their nakedness as the male Sonderkommandos push among them yelling at them.
‘Tie your shoes together! Hang them on the pegs.’
And just as when they arrived, there is again the metallic loudspeaker voice endlessly repeating the same orders.
‘Undress. Leave your clothes and shoes on the pegs. Do not forget your peg number. You will be allowed only ten minutes to shower.’
Against the walls around the room are wooden benches with numbered pegs above them on the wall. Signs in many languages on the unpainted concrete walls and pillars declaim, Cleanliness Is Good. Lice Can Kill. Wash Yourself.
SS soldiers with truncheons move among the naked and half-naked women, striking them if they hesitate for a moment to finish undressing.
‘Undress! Quickly!’ the SS scream and strike out at them mercilessly. The sting of the truncheons on their cold bare flesh keeps them moving.
And the metallic machine voice sounds relentlessly through loudspeakers; ‘Undress. Leave your clothes and shoes on the pegs. Do not forget your peg number. You will be allowed only ten minutes to shower.’
A woman SS officer in uniform stands supervising the proceedings. In the camp these SS women guards are considered crueler and even more merciless than their male counterparts. The SS woman examines the naked women with a practiced eye, these Jewish women who have come straight from the train are fleshy and shapely from the food they have been able to get while in hiding all over the continent. All the other women who come here directly from the camp are deathly white and sickly, no more than bags of skin. walking corpses with identification numbers tattooed on their forearms.
The lifespan for a healthy prisoner is only two or three months before they succumb to starvation or disease. Within three months of their arrival they are worked to death or dying of dysentery or typhus, which is spread through the lice which are everywhere in this camp with only a single cold water tap for thousands of people. Within three months the healthiest of arrivals is no more than a skeletal wraith ready for the flames.
Anna has never felt so naked before, she feels as if her very skin has been removed. She is more than naked, she is hairless and exposed, standing in this line shuffling forward towards a large solid oak door with metal straps across it. At eye level in the center of the door is a round glass peephole and above the doorway is a sign, Bath And Disinfection Room.
As the line shuffles forward through the doorway into the brightly lit room, everyone is subdued and afraid. Although there is no panic, people somehow know what awaits them in this room ahead. Mothers joke to comfort their crying children, struggling desperately to conceal the panic in their voices.
At the door the Sonderkommandos encourage people to hurry inside. So many thousands and thousands of naked people have shuffled past these men that they have become smooth liars.
‘Move along now! The shower water is getting cold..’
‘There will be hot coffee for everybody when you get out.’
‘Don’t forget your peg number to retrieve your clothes afterwards.’
And now as they shuffle through the oak door into the disinfection room, some of the naked women in line begin to recite Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead which is said by the living only for the recent dead. In all the endless sorrowful history of the Jewish race, no-one has ever said Kaddish for themself before. Not in all the thousands of years of Jewish history has this happened. And now it happens in Auschwitz.
When he hears it, a dazed Sonderkommando in his striped uniform walks up and pushes into the line of women waiting before the oak door. He pushes blankly through the crowded doorway into the disinfection room.
The two Sonderkommando at the door glance at each other in confusion, one calls call out to him. ‘Hey! Don't go in there.’
But the Sonderkommando continues inside as if in a trance, pushing through the crowd, deep into the room. The two Sonderkommando at the door hesitate uncertainly for a moment and then ignore him. It is not their business.
When Anna comes through the oak door into the disinfection room she senses something wrong immediately. It is not crowded, even though more than 350 women and children are already inside. The room is bright and windowless, with low ceilings and whitewashed walls. It is a pitiless room. Even the bare light bulbs are covered with wire cages.
She is the last in line and behind her the large oak door is swung shut with a solid click. It is sealed so tightly that immediately she can no longer hear anything outside.
In the room people wait, sobbing quietly, praying in low voices, hugging loved ones. There is a collective alarm so high that terror is ready to explode through the room like flame from a spark. But still nobody knows exactly what is going to happen. Always there is the hope of survival, carefully and strategically kept alive by the Nazis in order to prevent desperate uprisings and unruliness.
At intervals on the long low ceiling are metal shower heads. People look up at them waiting for the shock of cold water to come raining down from them. Even now they hope for water from these dry metal shower heads.
Anna is standing naked with her back against the door, her breath coming hard, lost in shock, staring straight ahead but seeing nothing.
Where is God where is God where is God..
The Sonderkommando is still in the disinfection room, standing alone in the far corner facing the wall. Standing away from all the others and staring straight ahead. The wall is only inches from his eyes, completely filling his vision. He is waiting and he knows what he is waiting for.
Suddenly a partition in the ceiling opens and for a moment the dawn sky is visible above. Two SS soldiers appear there in the open skylight, looking down into the room. They are wearing gas masks. One strikes a metal can labeled Zyklon B with a hammer. The top of the tin can springs off and he passes the cannister to the other soldier.
He quickly empties it down inside a hollow sheet metal pillar, the blue crystals falling down among the people cowering below. Four cans of blue granules in all. Then the partition slams shut again.
Even before the blue granules hit the floor inside the pillar they are already vaporizing into the gas hydrogen cyanide. It rises from the concrete floor and spreads towards the ceiling, the bitter almond smell of the gas already spreading through the room.
People stir and push back away from the rising gas, leaving a space in the center of the floor. Now they can taste the bitter almond of the cyanide gas in their mouths. The hollow metal pillars are perforated all the way up allowing, the gas to spread quickly over a wide area. People push back from the poisonous pillars harder, a murmur of panic begins to spread through the room. Panic flowing like electricity. The children are nearer the gas spreading low along the floor and they are already dying.
The Sonderkommando standing facing the wall in the corner begins deliberately inhaling in hard bursts. Breathing as deeply as he can, he closes his eyes and puts his hands over his ears. He knows what is about to happen..
And now the panic urgently rises and the screaming starts and spreads with the final realization of what is happening.
This is a gas chamber.
This is an extermination.
We will all die in this room.
Suddenly all the lights go out.
Anna is standing in the darkness, pressed helplessly against the door by the crush of people trying to get out. Her eyes are open but they are lifeless and unseeing. She can hear screaming and wailing, she can hear coughing and vomiting. Names are called out. The names of lovers and husbands. The names of mothers and children. Names are being called out like prayers in this death-filled darkness full of agony and sound.
Now Anna is pinned against the wooden door by the weight of people clambering over each other and panicking uselessly against the thick sealed door. Fingernails ripping on hard oak wood. Naked people are climbing desperately on top of each other to escape the rising gas. They are tearing mindlessly at each other. They are falling and tumbling back to the ground.
The crunching of bones..
Even though her eyes are closed, Anna can hear the most chilling sound that has ever broken silence on the face of the earth, the howling and grunting of hundreds of people in mortal terror.
The sounds of people being slaughtered like animals..
And now everything is drowned in sound, and Anna cannot keep it outside herself any longer, and when she reaches for God he is not there and something in Anna gives way and she throws her head back and she screams and screams and screams.
Anna is lying crumpled and lifeless on the floor of the gas chamber at Auschwitz when two Sonderkommandos lift her by her arms and feet. She is limp like a sack, her body tangled up with dozens of others piled high against the oak door.
It only takes ten minutes before everyone in the gas chamber has stopped screaming and is lying still. This is the function of the peephole in the oak door, to tell the SS when to turn on the ventilation fans so that the Sonderkommandos can go in to empty the chamber in preparation for another immediate extermination. The camp selection process is unending, and deportees who arrive now go directly into the gas chambers to speed up the cleansing of Europe.
But even without the overflowing trains of new people arriving, there are three hundred and fifty people to murder with each gassing, twice a day. Though the gas chamber itself is designed to take as many as nine hundred at a time, they cannot kill too many at one extermination, it makes too many corpses for the SS to dispose at one time.
Even after only ten minutes of chaos and suffocation in the darkness of the gas chamber, the Sonderkommandos need special metal hooks to force the pile of dead people apart when they go into the still and silent chamber, so tightly are the corpses tangled together in the struggle for life.
Two Sonderkommandos take Anna out through the side door and throw her on a wooden handcart on top of a dozen other nude corpses. Now she has become only freight. This is what the Sonderkommando call the dead bodies they must move around the camp. Not people or Jews or bodies or even corpses. Even in death these people cannot be granted the slightest humanity. They have lost their names to a number tattooed on their forearms, they have lost their individual appearances to shaved heads and nakedness and striped pajama uniforms, and now they have become mere objects to be disposed of. Now they have lost even their classification as beings. Anna is no longer a young woman who sings to her baby, no longer a woman who runs in joy when she sees the blue of the sky, no longer a woman who shivers when she is kissed. She is only freight which has to be moved from the gas chamber to the crematoria.
In the adjoining inspection room the barbers now cut the hair of those women whom they had no time to shear before gassing. There are simply too many customers to keep up with the living ones.
The hair is collected here and shipped to Germany to be used in the industrial process of making felt packing for weaponry. The dead are brought here to the inspection room for a final looting before they are burned. As soon the cart piled with bodies is wheeled in, a Sonderkommando moves to Anna lying atop the others and forces his fingers into her vagina to make sure she is not concealing diamonds or gold.
An SS guard watches everything carefully, for here is where valuables often disappear to become black market trade in the camp. Even though the penalty for such a theft is public execution by hanging in front of the entire camp at roll call. This is the punishment for almost every transgression of camp rules. Many evenings after roll call the entire camp must file past the hanging victims, their corpses swinging and turning in the icy night air. Sometimes, after an attempted escape, the prisoners are all made to stand outside in the snow overnight before the hanged men, barefoot and in thin burlap pajama-like uniforms. The winter temperature is far below zero here in southern Poland, after twenty hours of standing in the snow without food or water many prisoners simply fall dead to the ground.
After he finds nothing hidden inside Anna, the Sonderkommando pulls her mouth open and looks inside. When he spies a gold crown on her tooth, he takes up his pliers and rips out the tooth, he is a workman not a dentist and there is the crunch of other teeth breaking. Anna’s lip bursts open and blood spurts down her chin from her torn face, sending a swath of blood across her naked breasts and dripping into the dirt.
But blood is cheap here, the Nazis have not yet found a use for it. They have the hair collected, they have the gold teeth, they have the bones for phosphates and the camp lawns in front of their neat brick houses are spread with the ashes of bodies for fertilizer. They have soap made from human fat and even the skin of some of their victims is made into lampshades which throw a soft yellow glow over their bedside.
These monsters sleep peacefully by the light shining through the skin of their murder victims.
And what does such a beast dream of? Nothing unusual at all. They dream the banal dreams of any man. For they too were once like other men. It is only this place Auschwitz which has made them other than ordinary, which has given them unlimited godly power. These beasts are the most ordinary of men. Ordinary men who are glad to follow orders. These are the barbarians who made this Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, these most common of all men. This is the terrifying banality of evil, chilling in its very ordinariness. Done by men who failed to act against the evil welling up in them and spilling into the world, part of every person’s nature. Evil leaches out from man when the circumstances allow it. It leaches by immoral action and by passive assent the same, the difference only quantitative. Each man is morally and eternally responsible for himself and his actions or his failure to act, which is also an action. These rulers of Auschwitz are men who have existed throughout all time, and who will exist throughout all of the future of mankind. These prosaic men who do not own their own lives and do not wish to. These excuses for men who lack the awareness and authenticity to make any moral judgment on their own lives or actions. Faceless men who follow orders, who keep mindless rules because they are the rules. Bureaucrats who stuff government departments to overflowing, the blandly smiling company functionaries who greet us daily everywhere, without a trace of sincere humanity. This is who runs Auschwitz-Birkenau. Ordinary men in whom evil has been encouraged to blossom.
Anna is taken on the wooden cart with the other bodies into the elevator and up to the crematoria. The furnace room is overflowing with bodies and activity. All along the long row of brick ovens with metal doors, Sonderkommandos are working as hard as they can, plunging the naked bodies into the flames, sometimes two at a time, night and day. Thousands and thousands every day. Until the air is filled with a floating gray ash, drifting down and covering everything with the residue of the incinerated bodies.
Under the watchful SS guards, they are burning the evidence of the crime. A crime so monstrous that it does not yet have a legal category in which to place its name. A crime so unforgivable that it will come to be named something no crime has ever been called before, a crime against humanity. A crime so bestial that just to hear of it is an assault on the fundamental sensibility of any human being, on the moral well-being of all humanity. A crime so barbarous that it changes our view of mankind forever once we know of it. Once we know, it is impossible to think of people in the same innocent way ever again. Our childhood is over. After Auschwitz there can be no talk of childhood, childhood is at an end. After Auschwitz there is no return to innocence. It is a crime against all humanity. At Auschwitz humanity has shamed itself.
And now they make a place for Anna at the ovens with the open doors and the roaring flames. For years the German government have planned this for her, for more than a decade they have stealthily stalked her, relentlessly closing in on her year by year, until they could take her by the throat and bring her here to where they have always dreamed of bringing her. To extermination in flames.
The Nazis have been so successful in their careful plan that frequently now there is not enough crematoria capacity to dispose of everybody they have murdered. These monsters have industrialized murder. Sometimes as many as ten thousand people are murdered in Auschwitz in a single day, people from all across Europe, adding up to millions upon millions of Jews and homosexuals and communists and political dissenters and Slavs and gypsies and artists. Six million Jews exterminated. Two out of every three in all of Europe. The Nazis want to exterminate everyone who is not like them. In their eyes not to be like them is an unforgivable crime. It is a narcissism gone insane. The narcissism of the psychopath.
Now the industrious Nazis have produced too many dead bodies to conceal, not even with their extermination camps set up all over Eastern Europe and the anonymous burial pits hidden in the woods of Poland and the Ukraine. Now they must dig outdoor fire pits here at Auschwitz camp and simply toss the bodies into them by the thousands, sometimes even tossing people still alive into the flames along with the dead bodies. The Nazi’s do not want to waste their precious Zyklon B gas on the elderly and the sick, on those who do not require it in order to die. And so they are burning the living and the dead in great fire pits, pits smoking thick with the stench of human flesh like the fires of hell. The Nazis siphon off the flowing human fat in metal gutters running around the fire pits, and then pour it back on top of the corpses to keep them burning.
This is what has become of the glory of the Third Reich.
Their ovens cannot keep up with the productivity of the gas chambers and the industrious Gestapo with their helpers of the compliant national police forces. All across Europe the occupied police forces are helping to keep the Auschwitz furnaces roaring with flames, from Norway to Portugal, from Cherbourg to Athens and all the countries in between, even in the tiny, Nazi-occupied Channel Islands of England. From one edge of blood-soaked Europe to the other, the national police forces are willingly helping to exterminate the Jewish race.
The Sonderkommandos take Anna and they swing her by the feet and arms, as if she is only refuse, freight, as if she has never been a person. They dump her on a metal litter like a stretcher that rolls and slides on smooth trolley wheels. The oven door is open and waiting as a Sonderkommando pushes the stretcher forward and Anna is plunged feet first into the flames. Now she lies on her back in the flames, her head falling loose, her eyes wide open and looking out at the world flickering past outside the fire. As the stubble of her hair crackles and burns away, on the inside of the black metal oven door, just above her head, someone has scratched words with a steel nail.
This metal door will not keep us in silence
We will not remain shut inside these flames
Under total eclipse
Tear down the skies
Put out the stars
Let no birds fly over Auschwitz
Let there be no singing here
Let nothing exist in this place
Through all the ages of man to come
Except the awesome grief
Of what has been learned here
Let nothing grow at Auschwitz
Nothing
Except the will never to forget
Never
Of the darkness in the human heart
Ours
Which can put out even the sun
Forever and ever
At the top of the square brick chimney of Auschwitz, rancid black smoke and the flames of hellfire rise into the air. Anna is now only a wreath of smoke drifting up from the crematorium chimney into the gray leaden sky.
This is the only way out of Auschwitz.
Copyright Lee Vidor, 2010. All rights reserved.
Under Total Eclipse We Will Tremble Like Birds Without Song
315 pages, $3-99 ebook
Standard PDF for all eReaders and computers.
Immediate download.
