Auschwitz Birkenau Daily Life – Part 3
Part 3
NOTE: Tap directly on the Then and Now tabs to switch between images and photos.
13.Toilets
There was no privacy, very little water for washing and little or no opportunity for personal cleanliness in Auschwitz. Prisoners were often afflicted starvation syndrome, typhus, and other diarrhea-producing illnesses.
The toilets in each barrack were totally inadequate and prisoners were often beaten while using them. The toilets depicted here were a luxury, having running water.
In Birkenau latrines were cleaned by hand, another strategy of dehumanization. Author Terrence Des Pres described it as an “excremental assault” and wrote:
“How much self-esteem can one maintain, how readily can one respond to the needs of another, if both stink, if both are caked with mud and feces?”
[Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (Pocket Books: New York, 1976) p. 66.]
Watercolor: Jerzy Potrzebowski
Reproduction courtesy of Auschwitz
Museum Archive, 1980
These toilets are in the brick barracks in Auschwitz I. As the camp expanded and Auschwitz II at Birkenau was built, no such toilets existed.
There were, rather concrete slabs with many holes in them (see Birkenau Photos for another photo).
Photo: Alan Jacobs
14. The Washroom at Birkenau (Auschwitz II)
The wash troughs in this barrack, resembling those used to water horses or cattle, serviced several large barracks. In BIIa they sufficed for 7,000.
There was certainly not enough time for more than perhaps 500-1,000 to wash in the morning, and no more in the evening. There was no soap or hot water.
Disease was rampant: spotted fever, typhus, and starvation-diarrhea. Infectious diseases caused by lowered immune resilience, were common and often epidemic.
If a prisoner was to resist the various afflictions that beset the prisoners, maintaining a semblance of cleanliness, though still inadequate, was necessary.
Painting: Janina Tollik
Reproduction courtesy of Auschwitz Museum Archive, 1980
The wash troughs in this barrack, resembling those used to water horses or cattle, serviced several large barracks. In BIIa they sufficed for 7,000.
There was certainly not enough time for more than perhaps 500-1,000 to wash in the morning, and no more in the evening. There was no soap or hot water.
Disease was rampant: spotted fever, typhus, and starvation-diarrhea. Infectious diseases caused by lowered immune resilience, were common and often epidemic.
If a prisoner was to resist the various afflictions that beset the prisoners, maintaining a semblance of cleanliness, though still inadequate, was necessary.
Photo: Alan Jacobs
15. Digging Foundations for Block 15
Auschwitz was built by prisoner slave labor. Barely seen behind the SS officers at the extreme top left, are the chimneys of the camp kitchen.
The large building between the two trees is the camp administration headquarters. The camp was 1,000m wide and 400m long, and was to contain 33 blocks for housing prisoners.
In 1941 using prisoner labor and building material gathered from demolished house nearby, the prisoners under the harshest conditions constructed eight two-story buildings. As one can see the work was brutal.
Watercolor: Wladyslaw Siwek
Reproduction courtesy of Auschwitz Museum Archive, 1980
This photo was taken just to the left side of the barracks shown under construction in the painting. One cannot help but wonder about the number of souls who perished in its construction.
The large building is camp administration, now holding the Director of the Auschwitz Museum, the Documentation Archives, Historians, and many other offices and sections.
Photo: Alan Jacobs
16. “ Getting Up”
“NIGHT…. A brick has come loose from the low wall separating out cell from the next where other larvae sleep, moan, and dream under the blankets that cover them – these are shrouds covering them for they are dead., today, tomorrow what does it matter,… We feel that we teeter on the edge of a dark pit, a bottomless void – it is the hole of the night where we struggle furiously, struggle against another nightmare, that of our real death.”*
“MORNING From the edge of the darkness a voice shouted “Aufstehen” [German: get up]. From the darkness a voice echoed “Stavache” [phonetic spell of Polish: get up] and there was a dark stirring from which each withdrew her limbs. We had only to find our shoes and jump down. The whip whistled and lashed those who did not emerge fast enough from their blankets. Lash in hand, the stubhova [German: barracks leader] standing in the passageway would fly up to the third tier, to the centers of the cells, whipping faces and legs numb with sleep.”**
* Charlotte Delbo, Night (from Auschwitz and After: None of Us Will Return), (1995) Yale University Press, p56.
**Charlotte Delbo, Morning (from Auschwitz and After: None of Us Will Return), (1995) Yale University Press, p62.
Pen And Ink: Mieczyslaw Koscielniak, from the series: “A Day in the Life of a Woman Prisoner”.
Reproduction courtesy of Auschwitz Museum Archive, 1980
During those days and nights, straw often lined the bottom of these sleeping hutches. Being in the lower two tiers was not pleasant, diarrhea being so common an affliction.
Those on higher hutches were often too exhausted to use the bucket, often filled to overflowing, and relieved themselves where the lay. These facts are disgusting, however familiarization with such details is necessary if one wants to understand the conditions in these camps.
Photo: Alan Jacobs
17. “Marching Out to Work”
“You have these feet going forward, heavily, walking before you, these feet you are avoiding and you’ll never catch up with, feet preceding yours, always, even at night in a nightmare of trampling, these feet so fascinating that you would see them even if you were in the front rank, feet that drag or stumble yet keep on going….
Once the columns were formed, there was a long wait. Thousands of women taking time going out, five by five, counted as they pass. Passing through the gate made us tighten.
Passing under the eyes of the Drexler woman, of Taube, under the eyes of so many scrutinizers….In front of the control barracks, a woman SS touched with her stick the first woman of each rank and counted… up to a hundred., up to two hundred, according to the [work group’s] size.
When that one had passed through, two SS, each holding a dog on a leash, closed the line of march. Coil by coil, the camp cast out inot the daylight the entrails of the night.”*
* Charlotte Delbo, Night (from Auschwitz and After: None of Us Will Return), (1995) Yale University Press, pp 44, 45.
Oil on Canvas: Mieczyslaw Koscielniak
Reproduction courtesy of Auschwitz Museum Archive, 1980
This is the main street running down the center of the Birkenau, the largest slave labor and killing center.
To the left is the woman’s camp. Many of the barracks were dismantled just after the war. The brick one-story barracks still remain.
Prisoners marched to work, five abreast here. This street is just to the left of the unloading ramp, where close to a million people were unloaded from trains and sent along this street to slave labor or more probably the gas.
Photo: Alan Jacobs
18. Marching through the Gate
The gate at BIb where women prisoners were marched from their barracks to and from slave-labor.
This is another drawing in a series by former prisoner and survivor, artist Mieczyslaw Koscielniak, entitled “A Day in the Life of a Woman Prisoner”.
Drawing: Mieczyslaw Koscielniak
Reproduction courtesy of Auschwitz Museum Archive, 1980
The gate at BIb where women prisoners were marched from their barracks to and from slave-labor.
Not far from here there was another gate to the main street. Near it the women’s orchestra played classical music as prisoners marched by. Many of the musicians were members of symphony orchestars from all over Europe.
Photo: Alan Jacobs
