This is part 2 of Candyce's seven-day walking tour from Krakow to the killing fields of Auschwitz and Birkenau, to the forests of the Tatras Mountains along the Polish and Slovakian border, and then to the vineyards of Hungary and the streets of Budapest. She traveled with her husband, David. Click here to read part 1.
Auschwitz surprised us. My husband and I weren't prepared for the sun, for the trees, for the rows of neat brick buildings, nor for the birds chirping in the courtyard of the "hospital" block where mad doctor Mengele ordered tortuous "medical" experiments. Somehow, I always imagined it to be raining at this killing complex. On a warm June day, Auschwitz, that synonym for mankind's evil, looked every bit like the German officers quarters that it was initially built to be.
The visit to Auschwitz and the adjacent camp Birkenau, was a large part of why my husband David and I chose a week-long walking trip from Poland through the Slovak Republic to Hungary with Butterfield & Robinson. We sought to combine a pilgrimage to the sites linked with our Jewish heritage with hikes through scenic mountains, hills and vineyards.
Of course we knew about the death camps and their horror stories, having read books and seen documentaries. But nothing prepared us for the impact of being there—of seeing the piles of confiscated glasses and the mounds of luggage with the carefully written owners' names—Hana Fuchs, Elise Hitschmann, Herman Pasternak—or of actually viewing the starvation cells, the execution yard, the barbed wire fences, and the gas chamber.
Among our tour's surprises, was a hand-picked guide, Dorita Nicz, whose two non-Jewish uncles were sent to Auschwitz for giving water to an escaped prisoner. One died and the other survived. But not his spirit. "I was a little girl, but I remember he never smiled, " said Ms. Nicz. "He talked only to my grandmother and he kept always a piece of bread in his pocket."
As she led us through the rooms, we felt heavier and heavier, weighed down by the atrocities. We gasped when we saw the map illustrating the railroad routes from Europe's shtetls to Auschwitz. A big black arrow led from "Witebsk," David's father's family's village, to Auschwitz.
There was only one sound as we walked through the gas chamber and then the crematorium: sniffling. The ovens, smaller than the ones at my local pizzeria, took 40-minutes to burn a body. Upon exiting the killing factory, David and I, overwhelmed, needed to do something. We recited Kaddish, the centuries-old Jewish prayer for the dead, and placed stones on the "shower's" window ledge. Little enough, but it made us feel better.
As more and more Jews arrived to be murdered, the Nazis required more space and they built Auschwitz II, known as Birkenau, and it had four gas chambers. The camp's vast size horrified us. Although the Nazis set fire to Birkenau as the Allies approached, a wooden barrack remains, complete with triple-tiers of bunks crowded together. Each barrack had a brick chimney, although coal for heat was rarely, if ever, supplied. Now, rows upon rows of chimneys stand like ghosts in precise formation, bearing witness to the huge number of barracks.
Our tour also arranged a special interview for our group with 86-year-old Kazimierz Smolen, a Polish partisan and survivor of five years imprisonment at Auschwitz, and also the former director of the Auschwitz Museum. In Polish, as our tour leader translated, he told us of life at Auschwitz.
For three months the SS kept him and others standing in a totally dark cell; many suffered strokes. Each morning and evening the SS conducted roll call outside. Weak, starving and barefoot, Mr. Smolen and the other prisoners were often made to do the "bear dance" by turning around in circles with their arms raised above their heads, sometimes for three or more hours. What happened when inmates stopped or lowered their arms? The SS beat or shot them. It was an amusing game for the SS. Another was forcing men to run to the barbed wire fences, then shooting them if they ran, or if they didn't.
Food consisted of one liter of herbal tea in the morning and 250 grams of bread in the evening, and sometimes soup. He was one of the 4,000 prisoners forced to build Birkenau, working from 5 a.m. until dark in muddy fields and marshes. Each day 10 to 15 men died of exhaustion.
When the Nazis learned Mr. Smolen could type, they gave him the indoor job of registering those about to be exterminated. By 1942, 3,000 to 5,000 Jews arrived each day at the camp. "We worked all day and night, but we couldn't give receipts for so many people," said Mr. Smolen. "So we only gave out numbers for about 500. The rest were soon burned in the crematorium." By 1944, 10,000 people arrived each day, but only about 4,500 could be burned daily, so bodies were stacked in piles. "You cannot imagine the smell," noted Mr. Smolen. "When a transport arrived, after the men, women and children were separated by the SS men, we would hear people crying out names of a sister, a son. And then hours later all was silent again," he said.
I asked Mr. Smolen what helped him to survive, how did he get through each horrible day. He looked at me, his blue eyes wide, and sighed heavily. "Friends," he said. "Each day we found new friends to help."
And that's when I cried.
Part 3: Hungary's Tokaj Region
All photos by Candyce H. Stapen
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Posted: Apr 15, 07 5:39pm
Although I will not be travelling to Poland or Hungary, I will be travelling to St. Petersburg soon and would like to explore Jewish heritage there. Part of my family migrated from Russia, although I can not say with any degree of precision from which part. As this may be my only visit to that country, I would like to learn whatever I can about Jewish life, then and now, in and around St. Petersburg. Any thoughts about how to do this?
Posted: Apr 16, 07 8:09am
The best way is to get a private guide, preferably one from the Jewish community who can tell you about past life as well as present. Ask to have lunch with arepresentative of the congregation to learn about Jewish life now and possibly in the past.
The St. Petersburg synagogue has recentlybeen restored and there is an old Jewish cemetery south of the city.
Contact the Russian Tourist Office for informaiton about a guide. Also, check Amazon.con. There's a list of some books that offer Jewish walks in St. Petersburg.
Posted: Aug 8, 07 7:08pm
I came upon your article here by searching for my great-great uncle's name and here I am...at your site. I'm the great-great niece of Herman Pasternak, the name on the suitcase you saw. Do you have any pictures of it? I'd love to see one.
I am glad to know having my great-great uncle's suitcase being there inpacted your trip.
Thank you for having this up. I love to know people have seen it. I haven't been there yet, but I hope to one day.
Posted: Sep 23, 07 4:34pm
Thank you so much for contacting me.
Unfortunately, I didn't save any of the images I took of the piles of suitcases as they didn't come out well.
I am really amazed and moved that we are able to "connect." My goal in including the names of the suitcases' owners was to show that these aren't just suitcases, but that each represents a life, a person.
In hearing from you, I feel like I have succeeded in a way I never imagined possible. Did your uncle survive Auschwitz?
Thank you again for writing.
Best,
Candyce
Posted: Sep 19, 07 5:30am
Just saw this in today's NYT
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September 19, 2007
In the Shadow of Horror, SS Guardians Frolic
By NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 — Last December, Rebecca Erbelding, a young archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, opened a letter from a former United States Army intelligence officer who said he wanted to donate photographs of Auschwitz he had found more than 60 years ago in Germany.
Ms. Erbelding was intrigued: Although Auschwitz may be the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, there are only a small number of known photos of the place before its liberation in 1945. Some time the next month, the museum received a package containing 16 cardboard pages, with photos pasted on both sides, and their significance quickly became apparent.
As Ms. Erbelding and other archivists reviewed the album, they realized they had a scrapbook of sorts of the lives of Auschwitz’s senior SS officers that was maintained by Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the camp commandant. Rather than showing the men performing their death camp duties, the photos depicted, among other things, a horde of SS men singing cheerily to the accompaniment of an accordionist, Höcker lighting the camp’s Christmas tree, a cadre of young SS women frolicking and officers relaxing, some with tunics shed, for a smoking break.
In all there are 116 pictures, beginning with a photo from June 21, 1944, of Höcker and the commandant of the camp, Richard Baer, both in full SS regalia. The album also contains eight photos of Josef Mengele, the camp doctor notorious for participating in the selections of arriving prisoners and bizarre and cruel medical experiments. These are the first authenticated pictures of Mengele at Auschwitz, officials at the Holocaust museum said.
The photos provide a stunning counterpoint to what up until now has been the only major source of preliberation Auschwitz photos, the so-called Auschwitz Album, a compilation of pictures taken by SS photographers in the spring of 1944 and discovered by a survivor in another camp. Those photos depict the arrival at the camp of a transport of Hungarian Jews, who at the time made up the last remaining sizable Jewish community in Europe. The Auschwitz Album, owned by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, depicts the railside selection process at Birkenau, the area where trains arrived at the camp, as SS men herded new prisoners into lines.
The comparisons between the albums are both poignant and obvious, as they juxtapose the comfortable daily lives of the guards with the horrific reality within the camp, where thousands were starving and 1.1 million died.
For example, one of the Höcker pictures, shot on July 22, 1944, shows a group of cheerful young women who worked as SS communications specialists eating bowls of fresh blueberries. One turns her bowl upside down and makes a mock frown because she has finished her portion.
On that day, said Judith Cohen, a historian at the Holocaust museum in Washington, 150 new prisoners arrived at the Birkenau site. Of that group, 21 men and 12 women were selected for work, the rest transported immediately to the gas chambers.
Those killings were part of the final frenetic efforts of the Nazis to eliminate the Jews of Europe and others deemed undesirable as the war neared its end. That summer the crematoriums broke down from overuse and some bodies had to be burned in open pits. A separate but small group of known preliberation photos were taken clandestinely of those burnings.
Auschwitz was abandoned and evacuated on Jan. 18, 1945, and liberated by Soviet forces on Jan. 27. Many of the Höcker photos were taken at Solahütte, an Alpine-style recreation lodge the SS used on the far reaches of the camp complex alongside the Sola River.
Though they as yet have no plans to exhibit the Höcker album photos, curators at the Holocaust Memorial Museum have created an online display of them on the museum’s Web site (ushmm.org) that will be available this week. In many cases they have contrasted the Höcker images with those from the Auschwitz Album. In one, SS women alight from a bus at Solahütte for a day of recreation; meanwhile, in a picture from the Auschwitz Album taken at about the same time, haggard and travel-weary women and children get off a cattle car at the camp.
Museum curators have avoided describing the album as something like “monsters at play” or “killers at their leisure.” Ms. Cohen said the photos were instructive in that they showed the murderers were, in some sense, people who also behaved as ordinary human beings. “In their self-image, they were good men, good comrades, even civilized,” she said.
Sarah J. Bloomfield, the museum’s director, said she believed that other undiscovered caches of photos or documents concerning the Holocaust existed in attics and might soon be lost to history.
The donor, who had asked to remain anonymous, was in his 90s when he contacted the museum, and he died this summer. He told the museum’s curators that he found the photo album in a Frankfurt apartment where he lived in 1946.
The photos of the Auschwitz Album were discovered by Lili Jacob, a Hungarian Jew who was deported in May 1944 to Auschwitz, near Krakow in Poland. She was transferred to another camp, Dora-Mittelbau in Germany, where she discovered the pictures in a bedside table in an abandoned SS barracks.
She was stunned to recognize pictures of herself, her rabbi and her brothers aged 9 and 11, both of whom she later discovered had been gassed immediately after arrival.
Höcker fled Auschwitz before the camp’s liberation. When he was captured by the British he was carrying false documents identifying him as a combat soldier. After the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, West German authorities tracked down Höcker in Engershausen, his hometown, where he was working as a bank official.
He was convicted of war crimes and served seven years before his release in 1970, after which he was rehired by the bank. Höcker died in 2000 at 89.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Posted: Sep 23, 07 4:21pm
Thank you so much for sharing this.
I appreciate it.
Best,
Candyce