Because others forget (Translated) E-Book

Bruno Piazza

• Herausgeber: David De Angelis
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Few were given the opportunity to leave the concentration camp established by the German SS at Bir-kenau-Auschwitz II alive. To be able to narrate what happened there, to describe the scenes of horror, to recall with a thrill of horror the havoc that was wrought not only on the flesh but also on the human soul and on every civil feeling, is a privilege reserved for very few; and very few, like myself, had the good fortune to penetrate the most mysterious recesses of those accursed enclosures and to witness, while surviving, the destruction of thousands and thousands of human beings from almost all the nations of Europe; of all those nations that from September 1, 1939 until the early dawn of 1945, German brutality enslaved and tamed with the fear of its military power, deporting en masse the inhabitants that it could not immediately kill with weapons, to let them rot in the various concentration camps that swarmed throughout the Europe occupied by the Germans or their satellites, from Belgrade to Dachau, from Buchenwald to Gleiwitz.

Leseprobe

Bruno Piazza

Because others forget

memoirs of a survivor of Auschwitz

with original illustrations

Translation from Italian and Edition 2021 by David De Angelis

All rights reserved

General Index

Introduction

The arrest

Deportation

Arrival at the camp

The Lager

The Kapo system

The first day

The Russian prisoners

Hope does not die

At work

Eleven miracles

At the lazaret

Liberation

The return

I dedicate this documentary to the sacred memory of all those who died victims of Fascism and Nazism, asphyxiated and thrown into the crematoria, after endless persecution and atrocious suffering.

Introduction

Few were given the opportunity to leave the concentration camp established by the German SS at Birkenau-Auschwitz II alive.

To be able to narrate what happened in those lands, to describe the scenes of horror, to recall with a shiver of horror the havoc that was wrought there, not only of the flesh but also of the human soul and of every civilised feeling, is given to few; and very few, like me, had the good fortune to penetrate the most mysterious recesses of those accursed enclosures and to witness, while surviving, the destruction of thousands and thousands of human beings from almost all the nations of Europe; of all those nations that from 1 September 1939 until the early dawn of 1945, German brutality enslaved and tamed with the fear of its military power, deporting en masse the inhabitants it could not immediately kill with weapons, to let them rot in the various concentration camps that swarmed throughout the Europe occupied by the Germans or their satellites, from Belgrade to Dachau, from Buchenwald to Gleiwitz.

Of all the concentration camps, those in Poland were certainly the most atrocious, both in terms of the number of victims and the fury of the torturers; the deportees, mostly Jews, after a long and spasmodic agony, found the end of their suffering in the crematoriums, which surrounded the camps with their sinister square chimneys.

Of these camps in Poland, the two punishment camps (Straflager) of Maidanek, near Lublin, and that of Birkenau-Auschwitz II, near Krakow, will remain most sinisterly in history, written in letters of blood.

Of the first, that of Maidanek, a great Soviet painter, Zinovij Tolkaczev, portrayed the miserable life in a series of paintings that were exhibited in the main cities of Poland and were also reproduced in a volume that immediately found wide circulation throughout Eastern Europe.

In the second, Birkenau-Auschwitz, after the German retreat from Lublin, the deportees from Maidanek were concentrated together with the worst common criminals in Poland. It was here that the SS dragged Jewish men, women and children from Italy, Greece, Holland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania in their gruesome transports, Greece, Holland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania, a large number of non-Jewish but suspected partisan and communist men and women, especially from Istria, Friuli and Veneto, and a small number of Russian prisoners of war.

I too was dragged into this field and I hesitate now to write these lines, mindful of Dante's precept:

Always to that truth, that has the face of a lie, man closes his lips as much as he can, but who without guilt is ashamed.

I myself found it hard to believe the horrible stories that circulated around those places of punishment and, even imagining, on the basis of my experiences in an Italian concentration camp, a life of hardship and mortifying misery, I would never have been able to convince myself that such execrable crimes could be committed as those perpetrated by the SS and their assassins in the Birkenau camp.

The exact and objective revelation of such misdeeds, however, is necessary, because it bears everlasting infamy to those who perpetrated them.

The arrest

My arrest took place in Trieste on 13 July 1944, a Wednesday, in a rather strange way.

An anonymous denunciation was enough for the SS to lash out at the denounced and take him to one of those "Bunkers" they had invented in order to torture the confessions out of him and prepare him for the subsequent tortures.

There were two charges against me. A captain of the SS informed me after my arrest, adding that I was accused of anti-fascism and aversion to the Germans while, crime without extenuating circumstances, I was to be considered of Jewish race according to the famous Nuremberg Laws.

They had taken me to the San Sabba resiera, where the delator was waiting at the door for me to be recognized.

The Risiera di San Sabba, a large building with enormous rooms with wooden beamed ceilings and a crematorium used by the Germans to incinerate their victims, was used by the SS as an antechamber for the collection of victims destined for concentration camps in Germany.

In the courtyard, in a kind of garage, were built very narrow cells, the so-called "Bunkers," lined with concrete, with a wooden plank in the middle that served as a bed, and with a solid door in which there was a small hole for the entry of air. A man of average height could not stand upright. He had to lie down on the plank, and a dazzling lamp burned in his eyes.

The SS captain questioned me about the reasons for my departure from Trieste after the city had been occupied by German troops.

"Why did you leave Trieste after the 8th of September? Where did you go? What did you do? Is it true that you hate the Germans, that you were never a member of the Fascist party, that you are of Jewish race? "Race, race, religion don't count.

I replied that I had never harmed anyone, even though I had not joined the fascist party, and that I did not understand the reasons for my arrest.

After an imprecation against the Jews, who were all to be exterminated, the officer ordered the sentry to lead me to the "Bunker." My answers irritated him.

"You must spend one night, one night only, in this hole," the sentry said to me, pushing me into the cell with an expression almost of pity.

In the "Bunker" I had to lie down on the plank, under the dazzling light of the electric lamp. But I had been lucky, the sentry explained to me, because all those who ended up in there were first beaten and I had been spared the beating. And another fortune awaited me. On the plank, brought by I don't know what pitiful hands, I found a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches that helped me get through that horrible night.

As soon as the soldier had gone away, the voices of the night began to speak. From the "Bunker" next to mine I heard a man calling softly to me:

"I've been buried alive for forty days," he said. "I can't breathe, I'm thirsty. Give me a cigarette. Maybe tonight I'll be shot. Let me smoke my last cigarette."

How could I please him if I was barely allowed to move in the narrow cell, more like a coffin than a receptacle for living people?

And just then, on the other side, a woman's voice:

"They kill a few every night. They bring them into the yard and then kill them with a shot in the back of the head. After each shot the dogs howl. You'll hear them again tonight maybe for me, maybe for that other one there. In a week, since I've been in here, I've heard thirty killed. All partisans..."

Then he was silent. The footsteps of the sentry making his rounds approached.

I tried to sleep, but the lamplight hurt my eyes. Finally I fell into a painful torpor. I was awakened by the sound of locks clanging open. Cadenced footsteps in the courtyard. Rifle shots. Dogs barking. Silence.

"They are all partisans..."

I was struggling to breathe, my throat was parched and with my lips glued to the hole in the door I was drinking in the cool night air.

Suddenly the light goes out. Pitch blackness. That darkness is like a glass of ice water on your burning brain. We're on air raid alert. I think that the district of San Sabba is a dangerous area for bombings, right next to the arsenal, the ironworks and the shipyards. With the faint scream of the distant sirens in my ears, which at other times made me jump out of bed and run to the shelters, I slowly fall asleep.

When I wake up the lamp is burning above my head again. The danger has passed. Now it is dawn and through the hole in the door a dull grey light enters. Outside someone passes by carrying buckets. I ask for some water. No one answers. I ask louder, pounding my fist against the door. The footsteps get closer and a musket barrel penetrates through the hole in the door, almost touching my forehead, while a harsh voice orders me to be quiet. I obey.

An hour later the door opens and a soldier hands me a bowl of substitute coffee, bitter and diluted. Then they take me upstairs, to a large room on the third floor, where I find about forty of my companions in misfortune, men and women.

The room is dirty and dusty. On one side are cots for the women, on the other cots for the men. Among the prisoners are some acquaintances of mine, who immediately crowd around me and ask me for news of my whereabouts and find out about my capture.

I tell my story, short and painful, like that of many others. Arrested by the republican fascist police in February of that year, in Como, in the woods of San Maurizio, while I was trying to cross the Swiss border, I was kept "under observation" for four months in a concentration camp in that city and then, still as a prisoner, sent to the hospital of Camerlata. Later they released me, assuring me that I could consider myself free to go wherever I pleased.

I had written to my family in Trieste that I wanted to see them again. On the other hand, it was impossible to cross the border. Spies everywhere. Manhunts everywhere, without respite, without remission.

I had returned to my city immediately after the bombing of 10 June 1944: rumours made Trieste a heap of rubble. They had captured almost all the Jews who had not managed to cross the Swiss border. I hunkered down at home and waited in resignation. Without the denunciation of a renegade I would probably have avoided arrest.

My companions in segregation had been listening to me as one listens to a story already known. Most of them had walked the same road of the cross as me.

It was still hoped, it is true, to avoid deportation to Germany, because it seemed that the war was drawing to a close: the Allies had already occupied Rome and in France the Atlantic Wall had been broken and swept away. It was now a matter of time: to gain a week or a day meant a lot.

In the resiera of San Sabba we were certainly not well off: fleas ate us alive; thousands of these insects covered people's legs and arms with stings, day and night.

They were obliged to do heavy work: unloading wagons, removing manure from the stables, carrying sacks, barrels and chests. And there was no lack of beatings. The same captain who interrogated me beat a poor tailor from Rijeka who was among us to a pulp, forcing him to spend eighteen days in bed, just because he had spilled some manure in the stable.

There was the danger of bombs, in that third floor under the canopy already shaken by previous raids, with the window frames hanging down and the glass broken. During the alarms the Germans would double lock us in the big room.

There had also been, in those very days, a bad case. The case of Felice Mustacchi and Giuseppe Hassid. At 11 o'clock in the evening a German soldier came into the room, when everyone was already asleep. He had gotten Mustacchi, Hassid and three women up, and as they were, the two men in their pajamas and the women in their shirts, he had dragged them along. As he left, he assured them that it was an urgent job and that in about twenty minutes, at the latest, they would all be back in the dormitory. But shortly afterwards shots were heard and the howling of dogs. Nobody saw Mustacchi, Hassid and the women again.

We linked the disappearance of these five people to the discovery by the SS of some gold coins in the latrine. Not handing over all the valuables to the Germans was considered an act of sabotage, punishable by a gunshot to the back of the head. This was probably the fate of our comrades.

In spite of everything, and in spite of the company of the spies that the SS had put among us to guard the dormitory, the stay at the rice mill was preferable to deportation. At least we were still in our own country, with the hope of seeing the war end soon and of returning home immediately, alive and safe.

Instead, leaving meant abandoning all hope, even if you didn't yet know what you were getting into.

Meanwhile we didn't eat so badly that we had to starve. One of us, Nino Belleli, was a cook, and there was enough fat in the soup they distributed at midday. The bread was discreet, the water clear; one evening they even gave us some wine.

There was also a quantity of blankets and quilts robbed from private homes, and on those, despite the fleas, one could rest with sufficient comfort. There were chairs and even a table. There was also, but hidden, an electric stove, where we could secretly toast bread or some potatoes. We had two water taps for washing. Some people even received parcels of food from outside and the newspaper.

The men used to come down to unload heavy burdens, someone cleaned the room, I did nothing. On Sundays they let us take a walk in the courtyard.

A few days I stayed in the reservoir and in those few days other unfortunates were brought there, to end up, like me, in the hell of Auschwitz, where they found the saddest death.

A couple of days after my arrival at the reservoir, the guard who was guarding us, entering early in the morning into my large room, called aloud my name and surname, preceding them with the title, "Mr. Lawyer." Up to this time I had been called "tu", and not very courtly or curial appellations had accompanied my name.

The sentry let me down, and told me that I was to be considered free, and could go home. He gave me, with German meticulousness, all the valuables they had taken from me, made me sign a receipt, and then accompanied me to the large room.

"You are free," he said, "but I must still keep you under lock and key. In two hours the captain will come and sign the release order."

Slowly the two hours passed. More hours passed.

Of my fellow sufferers, some envied me. I could call myself lucky. So far, no one had been able to escape from that place. It was the first case. Some others were skeptical. It was just a trick, they said, a feint, perhaps a trap.

Everyone was giving me assignments for when I got out. The return of the watch, money and other items had impressed them. I accepted the assignments as a good omen. I would go to that family to inform them of the whereabouts of their loved one; I would write to that gentleman to take care of his niece; I would see to it that this one received a package of jam; and I would also provide the razor blades for the safety razor. I knew how dear so many little things were to the poor inmates of the San Sabba camp.

Meanwhile the two hours had become days. One Monday I was standing at the window, in spite of the prohibition, when I heard my name uttered by a German officer below. I don't know why I turned pale and a cold shiver ran down the back of my neck as if I had intended to pronounce my death sentence. The officer left at once, and shortly afterwards our guard came up and, throwing open the door of the large room, beckoned me to come out.

I went down the stairs and across the courtyard. At the exit door a truck was waiting with its engine running. It was already loaded with men and women escorted by soldiers with machine guns in their hands. I had to get in and the truck sped away.

I was simply transferred from the San Sabba concentration camp to the Coroneo prison.

The transfer, I learned later, was of enormous importance. It was a measure that was later to save my life and avoid asphyxiation and the crematorium. I was in fact transferred from the category of racial prisoners to the category of political prisoners, and while for the former, if they were over fifty years old or in any case unfit for heavy work, there was the crematorium immediately upon arrival at the camp, for the latter, whether able-bodied or not, there was the work camp. But all this, as I said, I learned later. For the moment I felt an atrocious disappointment.

In the Coroneo prison a wing was set aside for prisoners arrested at the disposition of the SS. It was always full and was only vacated a little on the occasion of the weekly transport of prisoners to Germany or the numerous mass executions, in reprisal for some attack committed in the city. Just in those days fifty prisoners had been shot and then hung in the window space of the "Soldatenheim"; it was a reprisal for the explosion of a bomb inside that building.

All the prison cells were packed. Cells for a single prisoner held at least five, that was the proportion. One cell contained only one detainee: the cell of lice. Locked in there was a sales representative, arrested in Udine. The wretch was already so full of parasites that the prison administration had deemed it appropriate to isolate him in there. Graffiti on the door and walls warned customers to avoid that cell.

Despite my good will to follow that advice, it was in that very cell that I spent my first night. Besides the lice, innumerable hosts of bedbugs wandered about the cell. I did not catch any lice, I killed a fair number of bugs (an exercise which I became familiar with throughout my detention in the various camps in Poland) and the next day I was transferred to another, cleaner cell with four other comrades in misfortune.

The stay at Coroneo was much more bearable than at the reservoir and later, at Auschwitz, I remembered it as a paradise. The prison administration treated us much worse than common criminals, but we were no longer in the direct custody of the Germans. Italian prison guards watched over us, counted us, and took us for air, one hour a day. The Italian prison guards were not Nazis, nor were they fascists. They didn't feel race hatred. They were "pietiste."

They brought us the newspaper and left us in peace. For a small fee they would even get us some news from the outside and give us the opportunity to buy food to add to the rations of soup and bread that the prison administration gave us.

One of these guards had gone from being a janitor to being our comrade. He was a southerner named Leone, whom the Germans had caught carrying a letter from a Jew to his family and had therefore sentenced him to five years' deportation to Germany. Leone was locked up in a cell opposite mine and then left with the same convoy as me, but for another concentration camp.

After the attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944, the end of the war seemed closer and closer, and some of us hoped to remain at Coroneo, forgotten. We received parcels from our families once or twice a week, we met with the women, who were locked up in another ward, during air time, and some of us had already become accustomed to that life of seclusion and idleness.

Fate didn't want me to stay long in the heavenly prison at Coroneo. I had to pass through the hell of Auschwitz, and I did, like the salamander of legend through the flames.

I had a fever of 39 degrees when the Gestapo subjected me to a second interrogation in the prison registry. The usual questions, the usual answers: Did you listen to radio London? Do you hate the Germans? What circles did you frequent?

And the fever persisted when I was transferred from the infirmary with five other comrades to a special cell, waiting to be transported during the night to the train that was leaving for the German interior.

It was July 30, 1944. On the wall of the cell we read an inscription: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!" But someone had scratched out the "lasciate" from Dante's verse and replaced it with a "abbiate."

"Have every hope," you who entered, in the cell of despair, the evening before the deportation. What hope could we have had by leaving Trieste for the concentration camp? But we willingly accepted to believe what we hoped and wished: in a work camp we would be treated as men, the rumours about Nazi atrocities were certainly exaggerated, in the end it was better to leave, because a camp would be better than a prison and we would no longer run the risk of being shot and hanged, in case some attack against the Germans was committed in the city.

Wine was sent for, eggs were cooked. I found a way to inform the family of my departure. Then we tried to sleep, at least for a few hours...

We were agitated, irritated. Although we tried to control our nerves and keep our spirits up by telling each other happy stories, none of us could really laugh. And then it was time to leave.

Women and men in column. A truck waits with an escort of soldiers. It's raining cats and dogs. Leaving in the rain is a good sign, but we all get wet. The sad convoy moves quickly through the deserted, dark city. Only the truck's headlights cast two cones of light that make the raindrops glisten.

Quick thoughts of escape. If the alarm sirens started to sound and the devices started dropping bombs, maybe it would be easy for me to get away. But then I think that escape would not be a solution. The Nazis have organized cruelty in such a perfect way as to make any attempt to escape futile. Even if I managed to escape, they would take away my wife and children, and my misery and despair would be greater.

Fear of reprisals against loved ones kept many from seeking safety in flight. Nazi savagery speculated on the feeling and pity of its victims. It killed sons for the escape of fathers, it killed fathers and mothers for the escape of sons. For one guilty person who escaped punishment he slaughtered a hundred innocents. The Nazis never hesitated. If in the ruthless selections of Auschwitz the chosen victims did not even try to rebel and, conscious of the ineluctable, resigned, went to their death in the gas chambers, it was because they knew that any attempt to revolt or escape would have meant not only their death but the death of another hundred, of another thousand innocent comrades.

Deportation

At the station. At the silos the cattle cars that are to transport us, we don't know where. The destination of the journey is a closely guarded secret.

Other lorries full of prisoners arrived: they were those who had remained at the San Sabba sanctuary until then, and were arrested only because they belonged to the Jewish race.

Along with my five cellmates, they put me in a carriage, where some women had found a place and were being deported under the accusation of having helped the partisans. Those from the rice plant, about eighty people, men, women and children, were put in two carriages behind ours. Among them I recognize Dr. Vivante and Mr. Elio Mordo, whom I had left in the rice mill a fortnight before.

It's still dark. The engine has not yet been attached to the train. I wonder if someone from my family will come to say goodbye to me, before leaving, maybe for the last time. I see Leone being pushed into another car. The SS men are walking around with machine guns in their hands. On a third class car they are loading some packages: the packages travel in third class, we are crammed in the cattle car.

Suddenly they close the heavy doors of the carriage. We are left in the dark and almost without air. Even the upper door, fitted with iron bars, is hermetically closed. I remember the night I spent in the "Bunker" and I tremble at the thought of having to spend a few days in those conditions.

There's a scraping noise, a jolt, and I have the feeling that the train has started. Then another jolt: we are stopped again. The doors open and air and light enter. An air saturated with the smoke of the locomotive, a strange light of a rainy dawn and of switched-on floodlights.

The families of some of us have arrived, and the German guards let us off. I get out too, but I don't see any of my people. I beg someone to run to my house and warn them that I am leaving. Perhaps my notice from the previous evening has not been received and I feel a spasmodic need to see my wife, to know something from home.