Translated by Virginie Bonfils-Bedos
In 1943’s German-occupied France, Charles Bedos is a brilliant lawyer in his early forties. Successful and with connections in high circles, he has a good life despite the restrictions and pressures of the world at war. However, his passion for justice leads him to take controversial cases against the State and to support the French Résistance in secret. He openly criticises and ceaselessly fights the Vichy government in Court for their unjust laws and collaboration with the German occupant. So, he soon becomes a nuisance, warranting elimination. Betrayed by a so-called friend to the French police who gives him up to the Gestapo, he is sent to die in the Nazi death camps. However, they underestimated his fortitude and good fortune; Charles Bedos returns in June 1945. Once reunited with his strong young wife, he still had to face the traumas of the past, the struggles to adjust and the temptation of revenge.
On the 1st of September 1945, at the request of the National Federation For the Deported, Charles Bedos takes to the stage in the Roman amphitheatre of Nîmes, his hometown in the South of France. He gives an account of what he has witnessed and experienced in front of a full auditorium of 20,000 people. Charles Bedos, barrister and orator, never made another public speech about his months in deportation.
Ten months have passed since the great mass of political deportees – a poor, pitiful mass, in truth, of starving survivors – was repatriated. Since then, and even since all the liberators broke the barbed wire, world opinion has been informed of the hallucinating horrors that took place in the concentration camps created and run by the Nazis. A whole literature flourished about these hells. Photos and films were shown to the public. Numerous and passionate speakers, all the more moving because they spoke about their own ordeal, educated large audiences.
I have read this literature,
I have seen the photos and films,
I listened religiously to the speakers who, with different talents, tried to bring to life the atrocious hours they had lived through.
I observed the respect, the emotion and the reactions of the readers, spectators or listeners who were often shaken by shivers of horror.
I have seen many eyes filled with tears.
Well, in spite of this, I proclaim that no one, except those who have been there, can form an idea, however remote, of the regime of suffering and distress, of atrocities and killings, of agonies and deaths that reigned in the cursed camps. Whatever the precision and fidelity of still or filmed photography (obviously made after the liberation of the camps and therefore alien to their life); whatever the descriptive art of the writer and his power of evocation; whatever the talent of the speaker, the richness of the expressions, the colour of his images,
There are visions,
There are noises,
There are colours and smells,
There are sensations, feelings, emotions,
Above all, there are atmospheres, climates made up precisely of these noises, smells and sensations that escape all reproduction.
For example, you have been told, or will be told, about the convoys to Germany where the deportees were crammed by the hundred, by the hundred and fifty and up to two hundred and thirty in a single freight carriage.
You can imagine what life was like for these people who were forced to stay for three to eight days in the most foul atmosphere, overcome by heat, thirst, hunger and gradually led to insanity.
But no one will be able to make you relive those hallucinatory scenes with faces sweating anguish and suffering, with vain cries for help, with sobs and cries; with the agony and the rales of the people dying standing up, the calls to ‘mamas’, the laughter and the delirium of madness, some unfortunate people trying to strangle their neighbours or to gouge their eyes out.
Who will show you, in the camps, the long cohort of tortured people with hollowed out faces, haggard eyes, marked with all the stigmata of death, floating, like skeletons, in their striped convict clothes?
Either forced, during the long hours of the endless roll call, to immobility, lethal due to the bad weather.
Either going to work, in line and at a pace, under the insults, the kicks or the strokes of the sentries accompanied by mastiffs jumping at the slightest sign.
Or attending the hangings or marching in front of the hanged men to the sounds of an orchestra whose tunes, chosen from among the cheerful, fashionable songs, were throwing notes of acute tragedy.
What photos, what films will tell us of the scenes of killing and starvation, of the convicts eating grass and leaves, while I, who speak to you now, saw with my own eyes in the Ebensee camp, a week before the arrival of the Americans, a corpse in the bloody pit from which a large piece of flesh had just been cut.
And God knows how little flesh was left on that skeleton!
Others have seen livers and lungs eaten…
And the ferocious fights between certain prisoners (especially Russians and Poles) for a piece of bread or some soup dropped on the ground, while in the grip of hunger, it was the law of the jungle that ruled the men.
And the nurses rushed to the dead, their bodies still warm, to force open the clenched jaws and pull out the gold teeth for the SS.
Yes, you have often been told about the methods of the Gestapo and the violence in the concentration camps;
But what we are powerless to make you hear,
Are the screams that came from the torture chambers;
The dull sounds of blows raining down incessantly: punches, kicks, bludgeons, iron bars, shovels, pickaxes;
The screams of pain and screams of madness;
The howls of the mothers from whom the SS tore their babies to smash their heads against a wall or, sometimes, to throw them alive -do you hear, alive- into the mouth of the crematorium’s furnace.
Who will imitate the cries, the sobs and the moans of the dying?
In the Lublin camp, specially commissioned tractors ran their engines to cover the noise of the shootings and the cries of those shot. On 3 November 1943, to cover the shooting of eighteen thousand prisoners, music broke out in the camp, with deafening foxtrots and tangos, from dozens of loudspeakers.
The radio played music all morning, all afternoon, all evening, and all night.
Who will evoke in your ears the horror of the roar of the tractor or the music of the loudspeakers?
The furnaces of the crematoria!
You may have been shown or described them: as architecture, nothing very exciting.
But imagine what would make you feel this column of smoke rising from the chimneys, first intermittently, then continuously when the extermination had become permanent, and the bloody red glow that lit the night.
More still, the smell of grilled meat, which hung over the camp and haunted our nostrils.
In truth, we stopped paying attention to it towards the end.
And, while I’m on the subject of smells, do you know that during the days of the large exterminations in the Majdanek camp, the smell that spread from the camp to the outskirts of the city forced the inhabitants of Lublin to cover their faces with handkerchiefs?
These were the images, the noises, the smells that we constantly perceived.
But who could illustrate the feelings, the painful thoughts that inhabited the souls of those who were tortured? Moral tortures were added to the physical sufferings.
No news of our family or our homeland, if not false news that our torturers were spreading to crush what hope we had left.
Parked, lined up, led like animals, we wore a number which, in the Auschwitz camp in particular, was tattooed on the left forearm.
Dressed like convicts, ignominiously fed, subjected to the right of life or refined death, without the slightest possibility of revolt, we were a reserve from which the SS randomly drew on their whims, to send us:
– either to quick death by shooting or gas chambers,
– or to slow death by hard labour accompanied by atrocities,
– or even to a necessary death for the sake of research experiments or physiological biological vivisection.
Can you imagine the distress of those assigned to these famously lethal kommandos? Or to those sent to work in the underground factory of Dora, from which they often returned, if they returned, blind?
And the despair of the Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau, subject of daily pickings to feed the gas chambers and the seven crematorium ovens.
And on top of all this, the inexpressible sensation of death, the silence of death, the smell of death, illuminated only by the cynical smiles of the SS, happy with their work.
The anguish! It was permanent, because permanent too were the death threats, yet at times it became atrocious.
Do you want to know the hardest ones I’ve experienced?
It was in the Mauthausen infirmary where I had been admitted for double bronchopneumonia.
Certainly, some of the elders had strongly advised us not to request admission, because terrible things happened there, and few sick people ever came back.
But what to do?
I had a high fever. I could no longer stand on my feet, and the risk of standing around all day, poorly clothed, outside in the freezing cold with my lungs taken, would also be fatal.
So I went in, and immediately the three or four Frenchmen in there, drowned out by hundreds of foreigners, Russians, Poles, Czechs… prepared me for the visit of the ghost bus.
Do note that the infirmary beds were two-storey bunks and that we slept three and often four per level without the slightest concern for contagion.
A SS non-commissioned officer regularly passed, twice a week, through the barracks that made up the infirmary. He came to select patients destined for the sinister bus that was waiting at the door. Each time he passed by, he designated a dozen patients per barrack, moving between the beds and pointing the whip he played with cynical insolence at the victims.
What rule governed such a choice? None. No doubt, he implied he was just selecting the sickest.
But he was not a doctor, he did not conduct any examinations, and he picked out only by appearance.
And my informants recommended me to sit on the bed when he was announced, to appear in good health.
Because, as you’ve already understood, those who left in the ghost bus were never seen again.
Some claimed that they received the famous benzine shot in the heart.
Others that the interior of the coach was fitted out to receive the engine exhaust fumes.
Others said that the bus was going to the Dachau camp (200km away) to supply the vivisection and medical experiment pavilion.
The deported doctors, like us, believed that they were simply going to the nearest gas chamber, the antechamber of the crematorium.
But what is certain is that we never saw any of them again.
Oh, you, who are listening to me, do you understand?
Can you understand the unbelievable anxiety that gripped us in the deathly silence of the room, gasping for breath, cold sweat on our foreheads, as the SS came forward, cigarette and smile on his lips, playing his whip?
For four weeks, that is to say, eight times, I saw death with its scythe strike among us, revolted but powerless, and notably strike three young Frenchmen whom I knew, who, with the livid masks of the condemned, were taken away in the bus.
On eight occasions, I had to follow the movements of the whip.
And three times -do you understand, three times- I had the terror of seeing it pointed at my bed.
A moment of unspeakable terror, for I was coughing and had a fever of 40. Following the advice I had received, I had straightened up, puffed out my cheeks, and put on a calm air.
Was it my lucky star? I don’t know, but it was my unfortunate neighbours who were pointed out, one at my side, two on the upper level.
My heart had stopped beating.
Eight times I saw this show, repeated in all the barracks.
Three times I suffered this torture.
Do you believe me now when I tell you that it is impossible to depict those impressions?
With this, I hope to have made clear the first reason why even the most perverse and imaginative mind cannot comprehend what life in the extermination camps is like.
Nonetheless, there is also another reason that springs from deep within the heart of any civilised being: the implausibility of the survivors’ stories.
A poet once said: ‘The true can sometimes not be plausible.’
You, who are listening to me, cannot, must not, admit that in the year 1945 of our civilisation, human beings have invented and applied such tortures, such methods of killing which leave far behind, in terms of cruelty, the massacres of antiquity, the Chinese tortures or the procedures of the Inquisition.
Especially, I cannot repeat enough, as these were not isolated events resulting from the sadistic hatred of this or that camp commander, but from a global practice, propagated with precise instructions and implemented to all the camps of third categories, or KZ. The Germans themselves did not hesitate to call those camps ‘Vernichtungstager’, meaning ‘extermination camps’.
I want to tell you about a number of scenes, picked among a thousand similar ones, which, for us deportees, are an echo of the life we led there every day.
Still, I understand that they are not easily believable for you,, because I confess that if someone had reported such scenes before I experienced them myself, I would have considered my interlocutor to be a liar or a deluded and would have listened to him with a scepticism coloured with pity. Does this mean that we should give up? Of course not! For to remain silent would be another crime against civilisation and the universal conscience.
To be continued…
