Auschwitz by Laurence Rees Page B

heavy hand and it was a heavy stick. I wanted to yell but I bit my lips and I managed not to shout, not even once. And it paid off, because on the fifteenth blow he stopped. “You’re behaving nicely,” he said, “and so I’ll pardon you the last ten.” Out of twenty-five blows I got only fifteen—but fifteen sufficed. My arse was in colors from black to violet to yellow for two weeks and I couldn’t sit down for a long time.”
    Thrown out of the carpentry shop, Trojanowski still sought a job indoors. “That was decisive,” he says. “To survive you had to be under a roof.” He spoke to a friend who knew a relatively benign Kapo called Otto Küsel. Together with his friend he approached Küsel, exaggerated the amount of German he knew, and managed to get a job working in the kitchen preparing food for the Germans. “That’s how I saved my life,” he says.
    In this struggle for survival within the camp, two groups of people were singled out from the moment of their arrival for particularly sadistic treatment—priests and Jews. Although, at this stage of its evolution, Auschwitz was not a place where large numbers of Jews were sent—the policy of ghettoization was still in full swing—some of the intelligentsia, members of the resistance, and political prisoners who were sent to the camp were also Jews. They, together with Polish Catholic priests, were more likely than the other inmates to fall into the hands of the penal commando unit run by one of the most notorious Kapos of all, Ernst Krankemann.
    Krankemann arrived at the camp in the second batch of German criminals, transferred from Sachsenhausen on August 29, 1940. Many in the SS disliked him, but he had two powerful SS supporters in Karl Fritzsch, the Lagerführer (and Höss’s deputy), and Palitzsch, the Rapportführer (commandant’s chief assistant). Krankemann, who was enormously fat, would sit on top of the harness of a giant roller that was used for flattening the roll-call square in the center of the camp. “First time I saw him,” says Jerzy Bielecki, 36 one of the earliest prisoners to arrive in Auschwitz, “they were rolling the square between the two blocks, and because it was a very heavy roller the twenty or twenty-five people in the unit were unable to pull it. Krankemann had a whip and would hit them. ‘Faster, you dogs!’ he said.”

    Bielecki saw these prisoners forced to work without a break all day leveling the square. As evening fell, one of them collapsed on his knees and could not get up. Then Krankemann ordered the rest of the penal commando to pull the giant roller over their prostrate comrade. “I had got used to seeing death and beatings,” says Bielecki. “But what I saw then just made me cold. I just froze.”
    Far from being indifferent spectators to this kind of brutality, the SS actively encouraged it. As Wilhelm Brasse, and indeed all the Auschwitz survivors, testify, it was the SS that created the culture of murderous brutality in the camp (and often these men committed murder themselves). “Those Kapos that were especially cruel,” says Brasse, “were given prizes by the SS—an additional portion of soup or bread or cigarettes. I saw it myself. The SS would urge them on. I frequently heard an SS man say, ‘Beat him well.’”
    Notwithstanding the appalling brutality prevalent in the camp, Auschwitz was, from the Nazi perspective, still something of a backwater in the maelstrom of the brutal reorganization of Poland. The first sign that all this was to change came in the autumn of 1940. In September, Oswald Pohl, head of the SS Main Administration and Economic Office, inspected the camp and told Höss to increase its capacity. Pohl believed that the sand and gravel pits nearby meant that the camp could be integrated into the SSOWNED German Earth and Stone Works (DESt). Economic