Translated by Virginie Bonfils-Bedos
Normal transport
It was during the transports from France to Germany that we began to learn about the methods of the SS.
Indeed, experience has shown us that camps like Compiègne or Drancy, which had appeared odious to us, were paradises compared to what awaited us.
The norm was to pack in the classic freight carriages, 8 horses long for 40 men, at a rate of 100 to 120 per wagon, plus the bucket.
The carriage was locked from the outside. We were forced to stand, taking turns to allow some to sit down. No air, stifling heat, stale atmosphere. The journey took four to eight days due to the destruction or congestion of the rail lines.
No food, no water.
I will not describe to you the scenes of anguish caused by fatigue, hunger, asphyxia, and especially thirst. They were nothing but cries, appeals, sobs, delirium. We saw unfortunate people licking the wet walls of the wagon, others drinking their own urine, and others, overcome by madness, hitting their neighbours with a penknife or trying to gouge their eyes out. And I am far from having recorded everything. On arrival, the SS pulled out of the wagons haggard, drunken human wrecks, along with the corpses of those who had died during the journey. We will never know the exact number of these deaths, or of those who affected by the trip who succumbed shortly afterwards.
But I have only described the ordinary transports. There were horrible variations.
On 22 March 1944, in the convoy that left Compiègne for Mauthausen -in which, with other hostages from Nîmes, I had the honour of being a part- some escapes and attempts to escape had taken place, despite the surveillance of the SS escorts. The SS became furious and unleashed their fury: at first they talked about shooting a certain number of hostages per carriage, then they found something better. When we arrived at the small station of Novéan, in the suburbs of Metz, they made us get off on the platform, carriage by carriage, with a stick, of course, and that’s where I received my first blows of the bull’s sinew. They forced us to strip from head to toe, leaving our clothes in a jumble.
In the wagons where the escapes had only been attempts, they made us go back naked, in the same number, i.e. 100 to 110. But for the wagons where some escapes had been successful, they forced us to cram at the rate of two wagons in one, i.e. 220 plus the bucket. No one would ever have believed such compression of human bodies would be possible. 220 men, stuck upright, unable to make a move, unable even to fall down, urinating on themselves, shouting, screaming, moaning, supporting corpses.
But that’s not all.
The passengers in these two wagons – or rather those who survived – were forced by kicks of boots and rifle butts, to climb the five kilometre long hill between the station and the fortress in the snow, naked, staggering.
Who will speak of their martyrdom and heroism? But also who can tell how many fellows, all French, we lost in this epic?
Haven’t you heard of a death convoy?
On 2 July 1944, a convoy left Compiègne for Dachau. Due to the destruction of the railways, it took eight days to reach its destination.
8 days in the most stifling heat.
8 days without eating and especially without drinking!
When the wagons were opened, one thousand corpses were removed from the two thousand transported. In one of these wagons, only three men had survived among 97 corpses. Brought out, all three had gone mad!
Still, let us not lament too much, think of the layer of quicklime often spread on the floor of the wagons that carried the Jews from Drancy!
After transport, the most active agents of collective extermination, but with slower death, were hunger, exhaustion by work, roll calls and cold.
It was, in truth, a combination of all these elements.
Hunger
I will not say much about hunger, because you have often been told about our diet of hot water and pathetic bread made of foul stuff but flour. The only impression I must mention is that, from a strictly sensory point of view, hunger is the most bearable of sensations.
The work
The work was atrocious, especially for the old, the weak and more generally for all those who were not trained for physical effort.
Specialists (mechanics, carpenters, etc.) were favoured because they were able to carry out familiar work, usually sheltered.
But intellectuals, lawyers, professors, journalists, shopkeepers, employees etc., were dedicated to the most arduous of earthworks: clearing, building roads, digging tunnels, mining.
Shovel, pickaxe, jackhammer, wagon, and above all the transport of materials; heavy stones, bags of cement, wooden or iron frames.
Ten hours of actual work plus two hours for team training, and two for commuting, so a total of fourteen hours of standing per day.
In Melk, the camp was 6 kilometres from the galleries where I worked with a shovel. We had to travel twice a day, either by special train or on foot, under the snarling escort of SS sentries and their dogs.
These night kommandos were horrible!
The work, although exhausting in itself, is not deadly without the blows.
Beatings were commonplace to ensure the zeal of the convicts and the terror of the leaders.
But in reality, they were distributed without motive, out of pure cruelty. I will talk more about this in the chapter on individual massacres.
If only some blows were mortal, all slowly exterminated: few of us had a body that was not a mosaic of scars.
The blows were distributed by the SS, the block leaders, the kapos and even the civilian foremen of the firms to which our executioners had rented us. They were blows with rifle butts, with oxen, with iron bars, or worse, with pickaxes…
For my part, apart from countless kicks and punches, I had my scalp split by the edge of a shovel and two ribs broken by a kick. Thank God, there is nothing left of it!
All survivors agree that the most pernicious agent of the slow death was the roll calls.
All camps had, like the forum of the ancient city, its call square where collective events were held.
There, all the prisoners were gathered together, either to be counted, or to receive instructions, or to attend shows which were never, alas, anything but collective or individual punishments.
These calls were made at least twice a day, but more often on the slightest pretext. There, the thousands of prisoners making up the camp had to line up in rows of five or ten, in impeccable order according to Prussian discipline, and remain motionless until permission was given to break ranks.
It would have been a small thing if these calls had only lasted a few minutes. But they lasted for hours and in all weathers.
Woe betide anyone who stepped out of line or sought rest!
Woe betide anyone who fell down due to fatigue: he was beaten until he got up or died! The more inclement the weather, the longer our executioners waited.
When it rained heavily, or snowed heavily, or froze to death – and this is the case six months of the year on the windy plateaus of central Europe – we had to stand still, petrified, under the gleeful eyes of the SS, well wrapped up in their Canadian jackets and warmly leather boots.
Calls of 4 to 6 hours were common. I was told that in Buchenwald, one call lasted 72 hours!
You have guessed, haven’t you? The frozen feet, the pneumonia, the pleurisy, the oedema and the phlegmons that followed.
Knowing how we were treated in their caricatured infirmaries, you deduce – don’t you? – the resulting hecatomb.
The cold
But to me, the most dreadful slow suffering was the penetrating and enveloping cold against which no defence was possible.
Poorly dressed, wearing permeable clogs, we suffered from October to June, either during the interminable roll calls, or in the underground galleries, or in the wet barracks.
Shivering was our normal reflex.
Oh, those winter nights when, with our feet in the snow, we had to handle a shovel that our numb fingers refused to hold!
I have told you the most atrocious psychological suffering that I experienced in the paragraph on the ghost bus.
My night from 26 to 27 November 1944
Now comes the most terrible physical suffering.
It was the evening of 26 November 1944. Our leaders, having judged that at the 5 p.m. roll call, discipline had not been sufficient, decided to punish us.
I say “we”: it was a kommando of 150 men, the majority of whom were Hungarian Jews.
As we had just gone to bed – some of us were even asleep – we were told to get up, get dressed and go to the courtyard alongside the building. It was around 9 o’clock in the evening. There, the whistle blew, giving the command: line up by five.
Thirty rows of five men.
New command: “Undress!” and strikes with sticks to speed us up.
“Take off your shoes and get back in line!” So we put the little pile of our clothes at our feet and, completely naked, waited. We didn’t know what for yet. It had been snowing all day: a thick layer covered the ground and a biting breeze was pierced us. The kapos and sub-kapos were watching us and woe betide those who wiggled or rubbed themselves to give the illusion of warmth! They were quickly brought back to immobility.
The cold must have been around -6° to -10° Celsius.
Our heads tucked in our shoulders, we were frozen, paralysed.
The minutes and hours passed, endless, while from time to time one of us collapsed, stricken with congestion, without any one of us being able to help.
I was shivering, and, waiting my turn, my brain filled with the most sinister thoughts. I was so close not to make it, and every second I hoped that the order to break ranks would be given. And the minutes followed one another, and the hours added to the hours.
Do you know at what time we were released? At five o’clock in the morning, which means that we had held it for eight hours in a row.
At five o’clock we got dressed, carried the thirty-five corpses that lay on the ground between our lines, received our quarter of coffee and went to work.
Would it surprise you if I told you that I spent the day feeling my skin and body between shovels to see if I had a pneumonia fever?
And that on returning from work, tens of my comrades went into the infirmary, only to leave for the crematorium?
Do you understand why we, the survivors, ask ourselves, and will always ask ourselves, how are we alive?
Beside the mass executions by gas, the mass shootings or hangings, beside the slow death resulting from the diet and the methods I have described to you, there were what I will call the massacres of individual.
Here, we have passed the limits of horror; and even the limits of the believable. Here, we shall judge the degree of barbaric, though organised, perversity of the Nazi soul.
Description of the kapos
I have said and perhaps explained to you:
– that SS, block leaders and kapos had the right to life and death over us,
– that the block leaders were prisoners, like us, who were responsible, under the control of the SS, for ensuring cleanliness and discipline in the barracks and for distributing food rations,
– that the kapos had the task of commanding us during the work, of pushing for more zeal, of ensuring discipline.
In order to do this, they had received absolute powers. In return for such a delegation of powers, the kapos and block leaders had great material privileges: exemption from work, special food, the undisguised possibility of to help themselves in our rations, the right to dress as they pleased, and I am passing over other advantages, which were nonetheless not negligible. But they only had – or retained – these advantages insofar as they were devoted collaborators, i.e. worthy servants of the SS. That is why most of them, to demonstrate their zeal, showed themselves to be more royalist than the king, I mean more SS than the SS, in the number of murders and the way of murdering.
Competition between kapos
In some camps, we all knew it, some block leaders and capos had started a weekly contest between themselves to the great satisfaction of the “Krauts”, to honour the one who would count the most victims or the most original massacre.
But who were these monsters who could be so dishonourable to be used as killers?
Here appears the malevolent intervention of the German Nazis, unprecedented in history, at least to my knowledge.
There are no prisons in Germany comparable to ours where forced labour is carried out.
Serious criminals are sentenced to long prison terms (10, 20, 30 years or life), which they served in fortresses similar to our central prisons, but with a much stricter discipline.
However, the Nazis had the diabolical idea of taking out the major criminals, transferring them to the concentration camps among the deportees and giving them the functions of barrack leaders or kapos. What a boon for these bandits who had become bullies!
Nonetheless what worry as well to maintain their position, and so to show the zeal that was required of them!
Our executioners combined the brutality of a Nazi with the bloodthirsty imagination of a great criminal.
As killers, the SS could hardly have done better than the murderers by trade!
And their work will develop in all the camps, with little variety in truth, because for their different ways of killing were always reduced to about twenty specific types.
Contingent of dead
Every morning – depending on the needs of their statistics, but also on the state of the workforce – the SS set the number of deaths they required. They ordered the kapos to go to work with a kommando of so many men, to return only with so many men.
It was up to the killers to kill as they saw fit.
There were no rules governing the choice of victims: it was, to use a vulgar expression, according to the client’s head and the mood of the kapos.
The German is a coward and never disarms when faced with a victim lying on the ground.
Speaking of spikes, a trustworthy felllow told me the following scene he had witnessed first-hand: in the Mauthausen quarry, a kapo accosts another one and says: “I heard that you killed a prisoner with one blow; how did you do it?” “How did I do it? You’ll see!” He calls: “Komm hier!” (Come here!) to the first man from his kommando and orders him to lie down on his back. He takes a pickaxe and repeats his murder on this unfortunate man. “You see, it’s easy!”
This quarry of Mauthausen: what a sinister theatre of massacres, never counted! You had to go down 186 steps to get from the camp to the quarry site. It was a daily game to force the prisoners to climb back these steps by carrying heavy stones.
Those who failed were immediately executed, including being pushed off the cliff.
Those who resisted first were forced to go up and down the 186 steps several times carrying a burden. No one is known to have triumphed over such trials.
Other kapos would push the convicts out of the off-limits, so that the sentries would automatically shoot them from the top of the watchtowers.
A classic execution was to hold the prisoner’s head under water in a basin until he suffocated.
A kapo had imagined forcing a convict to walk on an icy river pushing a heavily loaded wheelbarrow: of course, the ice broke and the convict disappeared.
In Lublin, a kapo had women tied up and thrown alive into the crematorium.
The entertainments of the SS
As for the SS themselves, the omnipotence of their means allowed them to carry out more ‘refined’ killings.
For them, crime was a game and a subject for emulation.
Here are a few examples, apart from, of course, the countless kicks, riffle-butt and whip hits that they distributed at random, or at the look of you, when they were circulating among us.
Exciting their dogs, they threw them at the prisoners and only called them back when they had torn some of them apart.
In the Lublin camp, they had performed some special amusements.
The first witty entertainment consisted of this: an SS man would take a prisoner aside, telling him that he had broken some camp rule and deserved to be shot. The prisoner would be pushed up against the wall and the SS would press his gun to his forehead. Waiting for the shot, the victim, 99 times out of 100, closed his eyes. Then the SS man would shoot in the air while another approached stealthily and hit him on the head with a large plank. The prisoner collapsed unconscious.
When, after a few minutes, he came to, the SS who were standing there said to him, laughing: “You see, you are in the other world, and there are still Germans, there is no way to avoid them!
After that, and after having a good time, the SS actually shot him.
Entertainment No. 2 took place in a camp pond.
The victim was stripped naked and thrown into the pool. He would try to rise to the surface and get out of the water. The SS men who were crowding around the pool would push him back with their boots. If he managed to avoid the blows, he was allowed to get out of the water. But only on one condition: he had to get completely dressed within 3 seconds.
No one, of course, could manage it. So the victim was thrown back into the water and tortured until he or she drowned.
Entertainment No. 3 was more mechanical. The prisoner was brought before a gleaming white wringer and forced to slide his fingertips between the two large rubber rollers designed to wring out the laundry. Then one of the SS men, or an inmate on their orders, would turn the wringer’s crank.
The victim’s arm was grabbed up to the elbow or shoulder by the machine. The screams of the victim were the main entertainment of the SS.
After that, he was finished off!
Among the German perpetrators, there were some who specialised in this or that method of torture and murder.
They killed by blows to the nape of head with a stick, by kicks in the stomach or in the groin area, etc.
Circulating in the workcamps, they took out their guns and shot without any other motive than a dislike of the face or appearance of a convict. Sometimes, they set up shooting contests among themselves, from the top of a bank, targeting the prisoners. “I’ll take that one.” “And I’ll take that one.”
Speaking of shooting, you must have heard about the commandant’s wife of one of the Buchenwald camps, who made the tortured climb up to the roofs of the barracks and had fun shooting them with a rifle.
It was this same ogress who, under the pretext of art, was interested in tattoos. When the kapos would point out an interesting one, she would have the unfortunate one shot and his skin cut off, which she would then mount as a lampshade.
The Americans were able to get their hands on a few pieces of her collection, the photos of which have been published. No comment, right?
In Majdanek, the SS cremated women and children alive. To a mother, they took the child she was breastfeeding and, in her presence, they smashed the head against the barracks wall.
Or they would grab the child by one leg, holding the other under one foot, and next they would tear the child apart.
Or the victim was hanged by the hands tied behind his back until he died (this is the famous torture of the “strappado”, dear to the Gestapo).
At Mauthausen, there was the immersion chamber. Standing up, bound, the victim was left in a watertight room in which water was slowly poured: the torture lasted two to three hours.
For some, the imagination was even more perverse.
Would you believe that in several camps, they forced men to dig trenches in which other men were forced to stand up. On pain of death, their own comrades had to bury them so that only the head emerged. And, horror of horrors, these same comrades had to crush their heads under the weight of overloaded wheelbarrows.
Thus, death was permanently hanging over our heads, and it was just a lottery as to who would avoid it.
Often, indeed, kapos announced such ‘lottery’ results cynically, warning such or such they would be in the next batch to die.
So let’s not call cowards those who went, individually or in group of 3 or 4, touch the electrified wires to die faster and less horribly!
It was again in Mauthausen that the SS chief doctor of the infirmary asked, one day, for two vigorous 20 year olds with good teeth. He was given two Russians. An hour later, they were on the operating table where the surgeons removed their kidneys, lungs and stomachs for practice. Then their heads were cut off and the skin and bones were separated by boiling water.
And afterwards, the Chief Medical Officer used their jaws as paperweights.
Still no comment, right?
I would like to end these few gloomy frescoes by giving you an idea of one of the most striking scenes that can be burnt in a human memory: the hanging to music.
Hanging was common place in many camps, either massively for the extermination requirements, or individually as a punishment.
In Mauthausen, this was the punishment for any escape. And as the punishment had to be exemplary and spectacular, this is how it was done:
The whole camp was gathered, usually in a semicircle facing the gallows, on the place f roll calls;
The condemned man, his hands tied, was placed on a cart pulled by four prisoners, who first had to take him around the square two or three times.
And, – odious farce! – the procession was preceded by an orchestra, different depending the camps, playing the commander’s favourite tune.
In Melk-Mauthausen, the orchestra included an accordion and a violin and the designated tune was: “J’attendrai, j’attendrai le jour, j’attendrai la nuit …” by Lucienne Boyer.
Sometimes they forced the victim, by caning, to speak some words of apology.
Then the unfortunate man was hoisted onto a pile of stools, the noose was placed around his neck, after which those who had pulled the cart overturned stools.
And the orchestra continued to play. I almost forgot to mention that the executors were chosen from among the best friends, the ones closest of the condemned.
And then we had to parade, to the sounds of the orchestra, in front of the hanged man whose body would remain on display for one or two days.
Please understand, ladies and gentlemen, that I cannot now hear the tune of “J’attendrai” without shivering and without crying!
I have finished, ladies and gentlemen, my enumeration of this list of horrors. If you want to meditate on them, don’t forget to repeat that I have told you very few of the thousands that took place. Every deportee has his own collection!
So my point finished, what should we conclude?
Since the Federation of Deportees avoids any political activity, I do not want to tell you – at least not in this forum – what the world needs to learn in the areas of international politics and domestic policy.
But is it politics to proclaim to you that our suffering and the memory of our dead rebel against any idea of forgetting or forgiveness?
To forget or forgive such unique crimes in the history of civilisation would be a crime against that same civilisation and the universal conscience.
Those who are responsible for so many massacres – Germans or their French friends who helped them – must be sought out and executed without false pity.
One conclusion, however
In conclusion, I must tell you that if there are survivors, it is surely among those who have always kept a little spark of hope, through their anguish and despair.
This hope is the conviction that we would suffer and die for the noblest of causes, for freedom, our revived homeland.
Yes, how beautiful France was when, hundreds of miles away and beaten down by kapos, we recalled it from behind barbed wire.
So that our fellows may not have died in vain, so that so many sacrifices may be fruitful, we tell you one thing:
“Make the new France as we have dreamed it and as we have loved it!“
