Survivors of Auschwitz Relive the Nightmare

On the morning of Jan. 27, 1945, white-clad Soviet reconnaisance troops of the First Ukrainian Front moved down out of the snowy hills west of Krakow in southern Poland to a marshy bend on the frozen Vistula River.

Scattered remnants of the collapsing German army put up token resistance, but with the appearance of Soviet tanks, the Germans fled. By mid-afternoon, battle-weary soldiers of the Red Army stood at the gates of a vast barbed-wire compound where an iron sign overhead declared in German, “Arbeit Macht Frei”-- Work Makes You Free.

This was Auschwitz, the most infamous of the Nazi death camps, the single bloodiest killing ground in recorded history, where as many as 4 million people--the vast majority of them Jews--were systematically exterminated through forced labor, starvation, disease, shooting, lethal injection and gassing, their bodies to be burned in industrial-scale crematoria.

Half-Starved Survivors

Forty years ago Sunday, the few thousand half-starved survivors abandoned by their SS guards were free at last. The image of this moment is burned in the minds of those among them who still live, and who still suffer, as permanently as the identity numbers tattooed on their skin.

“I remember as much as a 4-year-old can,” Lydia Maximowicz, one of about 200 children liberated that day, recalls.

The figures of her identity number, 7072, are oddly enlarged. They were small when tattooed on the right forearm of a toddler. The numbers grew as she did.

“I see it as still pictures in my mind: It was cold, then soldiers came in uniforms I had never seen before, and I felt very happy that they were friendly,” said Maximowicz, a tall, blonde woman who now lives near Oswiecim, the town whose name the Germans rendered as Auschwitz.

“I remember the piles of corpses, but I didn’t react to death anymore, I had seen so much of it. A dead or dying man was a normal sight to me. I was a little animal. I did not know what a toy was. The only language I spoke was camp jargon.”

“Most of all, I remember the food they gave us that day,” she said. “It was bread with margarine and coffee. I will never forget the taste of that food.”

Auschwitz, the largest of six such extermination camps in Poland, still stands. The wooden watch towers and the encircling barbed wire once charged with 6,000 volts, the barracks, the underground torture cells, the gas chambers and the crematoria remain virtually as the Germans left them 40 years ago. Poland has preserved it all as a heart-rending monument to a calculated catastrophe.

This year, as every year, Polish officials marked the anniversary of the camp’s liberation with a quiet ceremony. Wreaths were laid, there were speeches declaring that Auschwitz and what it stood for should never be forgotten. Two Soviet colonels and a general put in a brief appearance Saturday to commemorate the deaths of perhaps 300,000 Soviet prisoners of war at Auschwitz.

Poignant Pilgrimages

But the pilgrimages to Auschwitz by former prisoners are far more poignant than any formal ceremony could be.

About 150 Polish inmates came during the weekend, some as part of a yearly ritual of personal self-renewal and tribute to the 99% who perished. Others came for the first time in 40 years or more, in a brave, not always successful attempt to confront the latent terror that has dogged them through the years.

Most walked in silence down the orderly, poplar-lined streets, past the red-brick barracks to “Block 11,” the Gestapo’s torture house where, as one man said, “the only way out was through the side door to the execution wall” where 20,000 people were marched out naked in the course of four years and shot in the back of the head.

The silent ones, some with identity numbers pinned to their lapels, placed flowers by the wall, lit a candle and left. By walking through those gates again, another survivor explained, it was possible to relive the rush of joy one felt at the moment of liberation.

Others seemed to have succumbed to obsession. Like old war veterans, they traded tales of atrocities and argued over the dates of ghastly beatings and mass executions, of times when blood literally ran in the streets of Auschwitz.

Still others, paradoxically, seemed drawn back to Auschwitz and its much larger satellite work camp of Birkenau, three miles away, in search of emotional relief, as if to look Satan in the eye and find him only human.

“I returned to Auschwitz last year for the first time in 39 years,” said Elzbieta Bogucka, a retired economist from Warsaw.

She was 13 years old in 1944, captured after the Warsaw uprising when the Germans reduced the city to rubble, transported in a freight car to Auschwitz, freed when the camp was liberated.

Can’t Erase Memories

“Coming back was a very hard experience,” Bogucka said in a voice that began to tremble. “I thought that all my experiences had been erased from my mind, but it wasn’t true. I developed two ulcers and had to seek psychiatric help.”

“I promised myself that I would not come back again, but I did. I’ve met some friends this year. But I don’t think I’ll ever return.”

The Poles were followed Sunday by one of the most remarkable groups of Auschwitz survivors to revisit the camp in the postwar years--eight twins from the United States, Israel and Switzerland. Twins were singled out as guinea pigs for medical experiments by Dr. Josef Mengele, the most infamous of the death camp physicians, who fled to South America at the end of the war.

Mengele is the most wanted of Nazi war criminals still at large. According to Polish authorities, he personally supervised the “selection” of about 400,000 people for the gas chambers at Birkenau as they arrived in railway freight cars from all of occupied Europe.

1,500 Sets of Twins Spared

However, Mengele spared about 1,500 sets of twins and triplets from the gas chambers to conduct experiments aimed at finding ways to increase the birthrate of German women. Most of them died either from surgery or lethal injections, but about 160 of the children are believed to have survived the war, and more than 100 are thought to be still living.

Over the last two years, several dozen of these survivors--mostly in the United States and Israel--have banded together in a group they call “Candles,” to press the search for Mengele, who has long been reported living in Paraguay. The Paraguyan government asserts that he has not lived there since the early 1960s.

To dramatize their quest, eight of the twins and members of their families toured the camps Sunday and, in driving snow, candles flickering in their hands, walked the three miles from Birkenau to the main Auschwitz camp.

“We are among the last of the witnesses,” said Menashe Lorenczy of Netanya, Israel, and added: “We are not looking for revenge. We are looking for justice.”

Ironically, some of them said, while thousands owe their deaths to Mengele, the twins owe him their lives.

‘His Little Guinea Pigs’

“We were his little guinea pigs. He could have killed us at any moment, and perhaps he should have. But he didn’t,” said Marc Berkowitz, 52, of New City, N.Y. “We were a thing, less than a stone that’s in your way, that you kick out of the way.”

He vividly recalls lying under a muslin sheet alongside his twin sister, Fransceska, as Mengele gave them spinal injections of an unknown substance two or three times a day.

“I felt a weight in the lumbar area, then something would slip into the spine. I felt a warm sensation, first in my stomach, then all over my body, and then a kind of paralysis,” said Berkowitz, who was 12 years old at the time. He said his sister chose not to come with him on this first visit since 1945.

“My little sister and I decided we must poke at each other through the muslin. Every time I felt she was losing movement, I kept jabbing her, and somehow or other she would respond with a little tear or a sob or a quiver.”

Wobbled Back to Quarters

“After about two hours the paralysis would start to go away. We would be told to dress, get on our feet, and with the other little guinea pigs we would wobble back to where we were living.”

Later, Berkowitz said, Mengele seemed to favor him and made him an errand boy. “Perhaps it was because I looked like his nephew. Who knows?”

On Jan. 27, 1945, after the Germans had fled, Berkowitz says, it was he who flung open the gates of Auschwitz to advancing Soviet troops. Inside one of the barracks that now serves as a museum, a picture taken of him that day can be seen on a wall, huge eyes set in the face of a starving boy staring out through the barbed wire.

Two weeks earlier, the main body of camp guards had evacuated abut 56,000 inmates of Auschwitz and its satellite Birkenau on a westward death march in freezing weather that claimed about 9,000 lives. About 8,000 of the weakest inmates and the 200 children were left behind.

Used as Human Shield

On the morning of the 27th, Berkowitz said, the SS emptied out the Birkenau camp and began a new march, apparently hoping to use the several thousand remaining inmates as a human shield against advancing Soviet forces. At the first sign of the white-clad Soviet reconnaisance troops, though, the Germans fled and the evacuees, Berkowitz among them, took refuge in the main Auschwitz camp down the road.

“We had heard firing for days, the sound of the Russians’ Katyusha rockets. Then sometime between 1 and 3 in the afternoon, I was trying to cook some beans in a pot with melted snow when I looked up and saw this big dirty machine at the gate.”

It was a Soviet tank. The Russians hesitated to open the gate for fear the entire camp had been rigged to explode.

“I knew the gate wasn’t mined because I’d been through it earlier,” Berkowitz said. “So, I opened the gate.

“I was filthy, covered with lice. But a soldier came up out of the turret, and he was hugging me and hugging me. I’m sure he scratched all the way to Berlin.”

Why, after all these years, had they come back?

In part, Berkowitz and others said, to see that Mengele is brought to justice. As he expressed it: “We owe it to the little guinea pigs who didn’t make it.”

For some, it has only now become possible to confront the place that annihilated their families and their childhood.

“I can only answer for myself,” said Eva Kor, 50, a co-founder of the Candles group from Terre Haute, Ind., who walked Sunday arm in arm with her twin sister, Miriam Czaigher of Israel.

“Five years after liberation, I hardly knew who I was,” Kor said. “Twenty years ago, I could not have come back. Until three or four years ago, I could not let myself feel the pain I felt here. I suppose it takes 30 or 40 years to be able to deal with such memories.”

Horrible as it was, the camp and Dr. Mengele remain part of the identities of the children of Auschwitz and Birkenau. Lydia Maximowicz, freed at the age of 4, says she was told by a woman in the camp who cared for her that Mengele drew her blood for use in his experiments. Later, as an adopted child in Poland, Maximowicz played the role of Mengele in games with other children, “selecting” them for mock gas chambers.

“We never left,” said Marc Berkowitz, who opened the gates of Auschwitz.

“One does not leave a place like this.”