William & Rosalie: A Holocaust Testimony

five: “I wish I could have helped more people”

65 Outside the front gate at Auschwitz a dead man is bound to a post with ropes around his chest, thighs, and throat. He wears dull gray pajamas with fat navy stripes. Over his heart an upside-down yellow triangle points to a hole in his pajama top that matches the hole in his back. From these holes, a gallon of dark stain has drained into the uniform. While rows of bald prisoners file past the dead man a live orchestra on a bandstand plays an upbeat march. It’s a sparkling fall day. When Heinrich Himmler toured the camp the year before , commandant Rudolph Hess confided that he was having trouble with escapes. The SS National Leader told Hess to prop up every escapee his men shot as a display at the main gate. He felt that terror was the only language prisoners from more than twenty countries could all understand. When Himmler had taken charge of the SS in 1929 it was a street gang with 200 members. He now commands 800,000 men and the new army that grew out of the Death Head assassination teams. He runs thousands of secret prison camps, major industrial companies, a military spy network and the Gestapo political police. As Germany’s master of “inferior chapter five “I wish I could have helped more people” WRStxt.indd฀฀฀65 5/9/07฀฀฀10:17:02฀AM 66 William & Rosalie races” throughout the conquered lands he has authority to work slaves to death and to exterminate millions of non-workers . He chose Auschwitz as his main killing site because it has fabulous railroad access. The site will devour 1,200,000 Jews and half a million other prisoners. Some days, 20,000 people die in the gas chambers. During his visit, Himmler watched through a peephole while a trainload of Dutch Jews were put down. He believes in Hitler so fiercely regular army generals call him the Fuhrer’s dog. At Auschwitz, Himmler’s cult of blind obedience clones men like Josef Mengele, who jumps up and down in fury when a nurse refuses to kill a baby. “Befehl ist befehl!” Mengele screams. An order is an order. William stumbles into this regimented system in September 1943. As far as the schedulers at the German railway company are concerned there are only twenty “special passengers” in his boxcar, not twenty-one. The transportation authority charges the government a standard bulk freight rate to carry the men down the line. When the car stops at the Krakow station William can hear workers joking and laughing outside the car. A paycheck is all it takes for them to sign off on genocide. The trip from Krakow to the old Polish town of Oswiecim takes a few hours. Thousands have been shipped in these cars before and the wooden floorboards are sticky and slick. When the door finally jerks open William jumps down into gummy ankle-deep mud and a crowd of barking guards. Seven thousand Death Head soldiers work at Auschwitz and half of them seem to be on duty the day William runs the gauntlet of hard eyes and skull badges. WRStxt.indd฀฀฀66 5/9/07฀฀฀10:17:02฀AM Chapter Five 67 The guards beat us through the fence into a compound and made us strip in a shower facility. My first impression was how clean everything was compared to Goeth’s camp. I was standing there naked with an envelope folded up in my hand. There were three little photos in it—one of Rose, one of my mom, one of my sister Dorothy. A guard told me to give it to him. I hesitated for half a second and he punched me in the mouth and took it away. I could taste blood and I cried because it hurt and because it felt like these people were being taken away from me all over again. We got our tattoos in another room from prisoners sitting behind tables. The guards made us sit down and a little guy dipped his needle in ink and branded me like an animal. Number 774248. The barbers shaved our heads and bodies and we had our pictures taken and went into the showers where they made us get into tubs of strong-smelling chemicals. This dip killed lice. We ended up in a big cold room with a cement floor where they threw...