Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} I Escaped from Auschwitz by Rudolf Vrba the One That Got Away
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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} I Escaped from Auschwitz by Rudolf Vrba The one that got away. Heinrich Himmler visited Auschwitz camp again in January 1943. This time I was glad to see him arrive, though not because I still nursed any faint hope that he would improve our lot through benevolence or any sense of justice. His presence was welcome to us all merely because it meant that for one day there would be no unscheduled beatings or killings. He was to watch the world's first conveyor-belt killing, the inauguration of Commandant Hoess's brand new toy, his crematorium. It was truly a splendid affair, 100 yards long and 50 yards wide, containing 15 ovens which could burn three bodies each simultaneously in 20 minutes, a monument in concrete, indeed, to its builder, Herr Walter Dejaco. Himmler certainly saw an impressive demonstration, marred only by a timetable that would have caused concern in many a small German railway station. Commandant Hoess, anxious to display his new toy at its most efficient, had arranged for a special transport of 3,000 Polish Jews to be present for slaughter in the modern, German way. Himmler arrived at eight o'clock that morning and the show was to start an hour later. By 8.45, the new gas chambers, with their clever dummy showers and their notices - "Keep Clean", "Keep Quiet" and so on - were packed to capacity. The SS guards, indeed, had made sure that not an inch of space would be wasted by firing a few shots at the entrance. An SS man, wearing a heavy service gas mask, stood on the roof of the chamber, waiting to drop in the Zyklon B pellets, which released a hydrogen cyanide gas. His was a post of honour that day, for seldom would he have had such a distinguished audience, and he probably felt as tense as the starter of the Derby. By 8.55, the tension was almost unbearable. The man in the gas mask was fidgeting with his boxes of pellets. Somewhere a phone rang. Every head turned towards it. A junior NCO clattered over to the officer in charge of the operation, saluted hastily, and panted out a message. The officer's face stiffened, but he said not a word. The message was: "The Reichsführer has not finished his breakfast yet." At last, however, everything was ready for action. A sharp command was given to the SS man on the roof. He opened a circular lid and dropped the pellets quickly on to the heads below him. He knew, everyone knew, that the heat of those packed bodies would cause these pellets to release their gases in a few minutes; and so he closed the lid quickly. The gassing had begun. Having waited for a while so that the poison would have circulated properly, Hoess courteously invited his guest to have another peep through the observation window. For some minutes Himmler peered into the death chamber, obviously impressed, and then turned with new interest to his commandant with a fresh batch of questions. Special lifts took the bodies to the crematorium, but the burning did not follow immediately. Gold teeth had to be removed. Hair, which was used to make the warheads of torpedoes watertight, had to be cut from the heads of the women. The bodies of wealthy Jews, noted early for their potential, had to be set aside for dissection in case any of them had been cunning enough to conceal jewellery - diamonds, perhaps - about their person. Himmler waited until the smoke began to thicken over the chimneys and glanced at his watch. It was one o'clock. Lunchtime, in fact. He shook hands with the senior officers, returned the salutes of the lower ranks casually and cheerfully, and climbed back into the car with Hoess. Auschwitz was in business. The ramp, symbol of Auschwitz for millions because they saw little else except the gas chambers: a huge, bare platform that lay between Birkenau and the mother camp and to which transports rolled from all parts of Europe, bringing Jews who still believed in labour camps. Scene of the infamous selections, where a handful of workers were sent to the right and the rest - the old, the very young, the unfit - were sent to the left, to the lorries, to the crematoria, still believing that somewhere ahead lay a resettlement area. There I worked for eight months. There I saw 300 transports arrive and helped to unload their bewildered cargoes. There I saw in action the greatest confidence trick the world has ever known; and there I had a profound change of mind about escaping. I was determined to get out, but no longer because I wanted freedom for myself. I wanted to warn those yet to come what lay ahead because I knew they would rise and fight, as the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto had fought. Once they knew the truth, they would refuse to walk meekly to the slaughterhouses. Every night I unloaded the wagons and watched the human cargoes line up for selection. Here the statistics I had been gathering so carefully, the numbers I held in my head, suddenly became men, women and children, the living, only inches away from death. These were not pleasant sights. They served a purpose, however, for they breathed reality into my task. Here before my eyes were the type of people who could be saved, if only one man with enough knowledge could escape and give it to the world; and I was confident that there would be no more sheep, queueing for the Auschwitz butcher, if only they could be warned of their fate before they were loaded on to the transports. For almost two years I had thought of escape; first, selfishly, because I wanted my freedom; then in a more objective way because I wanted to tell the world what was happening in Auschwitz; but now, in April 1944, I had an imperative reason. It was no longer a question of reporting a crime, but of preventing one; of warning the Hungarians, of rousing them, of raising an army one million strong, an army that would fight rather than die. Immediately I began studying the layout of the camp, searching for chinks in its defences; and what I noted I found depressing. The mother camp of Auschwitz - a similar system applied to Birkenau, I learned later - was divided into an outer camp in which we worked and an inner camp in which we slept. The inner camp in Birkenau was guarded by a trench six yards wide and five yards deep. It was filled with water. Then came two barbed-wire high-voltage fences five yards high. Arc lamps played constantly over the inner camp all night long and SS men with machine-guns surveyed it from their watchtowers. I had one friend, Fred Wetzler, from my home town, Trnava, whom I could trust implicitly. "You know the planks the Poles have stacked for the new camp they're building?" Fred said. I nodded. It was to be Birkenau Three and it was being built parallel to Birkenau Two to accommodate the flood of Hungarians. "Well, they've bribed some kapos [inmates, usually criminals, put in charge of the rest] to pile them so that there is a cavity left in the middle." I saw at once what they were trying to do. The planks were in the outer camp, which at night was undefended because all prisoners were securely behind the high-voltage wires and watchtowers of the inner camp. If they could remain hidden for three days, while all the guards stood to and the place was searched, they had a good chance; for at the end of three days it would be assumed that they had got beyond the confines of Auschwitz and the job of finding them would be handed over to the authorities there. The guard that ringed the entire camp for those three days would be withdrawn and they would merely have to wait until night before sneaking away past the unmanned outer watchtowers. I could see the wood now and the Poles on top of it, apparently working. Nobody spoke. The Poles moved the planks and gave us an almost imperceptible nod. This was it. For a moment we both hesitated, for we knew that, once we were covered up, there was no going back. Then together we skipped quickly up on top of the wood and slid into the hole. The planks moved into place over our heads, blotting out the light; and there was silence. The movements of the camp - movements we both knew by heart - drifted faintly into our hole in the wood, but somehow it all seemed far away in time, as well as in distance, for already my mind was free in advance of my body. Then the siren split my thoughts asunder, scattering them, pulverising them, whisking away fear, sweeping the cavity clean of depression, thrusting a challenge into my heart and into my mind. Boots scrabbled up over the planks above, sending a little shower of grit down on top of us. The pounding raised the dust and we covered our noses in case we sneezed. More boots and the heavy breathing of men. Then the dogs, snuffling, panting, their nails scraping the wood as they slithered and tumbled from plank to plank. My knife was out and I could see Fred poised, his teeth clenched in a smile of tense anticipation. Then the cacophony faded. Distance mellowed the grating discord, and silence filled our hideout, a silence that carried with it a strange sense of security.