THE HOLOCAUST
TEACHING LESSON 5
HANDOUT 5B
SUSAN

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: Susan’s ID photo which she carried as a refugee in Brussels in late 1945 after the war ended

I came into the Auschwitz death factory from one of the many collection camps for Jews in German-occupied countries. Before deportation to the camp called Theresiendstadt (pronounced Tur-RAYSH-En-Shtaht), my mother and I had lived in Prague, Czechoslovakia. That had been our home since we fled Austria in 1938 after Hitler seized power. But Hitler followed us into Czechoslovakia in 1939, and I found myself on a train to Auschwitz-Birkenau in January 1943. My transport consisted of 500 men and 500 women. Sixty women between the ages of fourteen and thirty-four, myself included, were selected for labor in the women’s camp; the same number of men went into the men’s camp. The rest were gassed at once. Men and women, separated in camps enclosed with electrified barbed wire, were guarded day and night by soldiers with machine guns.  

I was “processed” into the camp on January 28, 1943. I was shaved all over, given the summer uniform of a dead Russian prisoner, a kerchief to cover my bald head, and a tin bowl for food, drink, and other purposes. I had no spoon, coat, handkerchief or rag, nothing for care and maintenance of my appearance. This was a means to dehumanize prisoners so that guards would feel no pity when they treated us like vermin.

How did I survive such hell? I learned to accept the nightmarish camp as the real world and coped from one minute to the next. Blind luck also played a part. Twice a day the SS guards made random selections from the prisoners’ ranks. Those chosen went to the gas chambers. I have no explanation for why some lived and others died. Survival depended on getting through selection alive or finding a commando that worked inside the camp and was not subject to selections. Commandos were work units that performed tasks inside and outside the camp. An inside unit might have five prisoners while an outside unit contained 200 to 300 laborers. Outside jobs included road building, demolishing bombed houses, digging stumps, cultivating fields, carrying ties and rails for railroad construction, all without the help of machinery. For five months in 1943, between bouts of typhoid fever, jaundice, and scabies, I served on an outside commando and lived in a barrack built to house 300, but actually crammed with 600 to 800 women. Each three overcrowded barracks had one toilet and one water faucet.

The one advantage that I had when I came to Auschwitz was that I spoke both fluent German and fluent Czech. The Jewish women in the prisoner-adminis-tration commando, the Jewish office manager, and the block administrators were either Slovak, Polish, or non-Jewish Polish political prisoners. The languages they spoke were pretty similar to mine so I could communicate with them, giving me one leg up.

One of the things that probably saved me was that on the first day in the commando, not knowing the camp rules and regulations, I just acted on instinct. We were standing in line waiting to march out, and there was the work commander leader, an SS man. I just stepped up and said to him, “Reporting name so and so, number so and so, and I’m a secretary.” The man’s mouth fell open because nobody had dared to do that. I must have made an impression. He wrote my number down. Everybody in line said ”My God, he wrote your number down, you’re going to go to the gas.” But three days later, I was called to work in the political department, taking transcripts of investigations. Through that job, after about three weeks, I got a job in the political department, where it was clean and I was relatively well fed. But about a month later, someone in the secretarial commando was caught smuggling information out of a file. An example was made with me and two others on the bottom rung. We were kicked out of Auschwitz and back to Birkenau to the extermination camp.

A lot of people, when they came into Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was a nightmare situation, couldn’t accept the fact that they were there. They couldn’t live like that. They totally refused to adapt or even attempt to cope within the frame of that nightmare. From the first day on, whether it was walking around in Russian prisoners’ uniforms with a shaved head or using one bowl for eating and elimination, I accepted it. That was one of the most important things. I accepted the frame of the situation and lived from one minute to the next or from one day to the next, with no other aim but survival.

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USHMM: courtesy Instytut Pamieci Narodowej Entrance gate to Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. The gate bears the motto Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work makes one free”).

Then I had the good fortune to obtain an inside job in the administration office. In 1944 I was lucky to be assigned to “Canada,” the clothing commando that collected and processed all clothing and other property confiscated from Jews for redistribution to the German civilian population. Many suitcases contained food. The ability to use the food and clothing that came into the commando increased our chances of survival.

In January 1945, the Germans evacuated the camp because the Russians were too close. They did not release us. Instead we endured an infamous death march in the subfreezing Polish winter. Women who had survived for two or three years in Birkenau died on that march. Those who could not walk anymore got a bullet in the head. Survivors were stuffed into the overcrowded concentration camps in Germany proper. I spent three months after that death march in the Ravensbruck women’s camp near Berlin.

When the Russians entered Berlin, the Germans marched us deeper into Germany. They hoped to exchange their prisoners for German prisoners held by the Allies. But when we arrived at the first American checkpoint near a small German village, German hopes were dashed. The SS guards went straight into prisoner-of-war camps. The Americans put me in a displaced persons camp.

• Why did Susan and her mother leave Auschwitz?
• How did Susan get to Auschwitz? What happened to her at the selection site she describes? What happened to most of the people who came to Auschwitz on the train with Susan?
• Why do you think the Nazis made the prisoners wear uniforms and shave their heads? What were some other ways prisoners were dehumanized?   According to Susan, what was the purpose of this type of treatment?
• What mental strategies did Susan use to cope with life in the camp?
• What skills did she have that helped her survive? In what ways was she lucky?
• How did having a job in “Canada” help Susan survive?
• Why does Susan call Auschwitz a “death factory”?

Published in cooperation with the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust
Copyright © 2002 by the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust. Updated 2005.
North Carolina Department of Public Instruction
http://www.ncpublicschools.org/holocaust_council/