piece of pencil that she lent in exchange for a bit of your soup. Pebbles were easy to find, and a thread pulled out of your dress would wrap the paper round the little stone. The messages were usually enquiries about relatives—‘is Josef Bloom from Warsaw among you? + return the paper’.
Once, the men sent us a small pencil and extra paper, and asked us where we came from. In reply we also asked about the date, since we had lost count of days and weeks. We often asked them the date; once we found it out we tried to keep time from then on, but the person who was counting the days died soon after and we were again confused on this matter. We were confused in many ways: rumour had it that barbiturates were added to our drinking water.
Sending messages over was my task, and involved waiting till the tower guard looked the other way, then throwing the message and pebble swiftly and far enough over the fence, and into a group of men, so that it was not seen landing on the open ground.
One day I was caught by the overseer and became the star of a public flogging. The ‘special assembly’ whistle ordered all to gather outside the nearby barracks. My crime was announced and I was put face down across a wooden box and lashed with a leather strap. The usual quota was fifty lashes. There was a strange silence, a lack of the usual noises in the camp. After forty lashes—counted aloud by the lasher—there was a sudden stop, and the whistle sounded to disperse. This started a rumour that the Germans were leaving the camp. It had to be something of that magnitude to cut short a public flogging. The reason remained a mystery. I remember staggering back to the barrack in the arms of a very distressed Frieda. She, Mother and Goldie spent the night putting wet rags on my swollen and bleeding back.
I think it was a few days after this that the front door of the barrack was opened for an inspection by high-ranking army officers. I was curled up on the floor nearby and heard the woman overseer say, ‘ Da haben wir unsere Untermenschen. ’ (Here we keep our sub-humans.) The men covered their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs and walked away quickly.
In a rare moment of reflection I thought that, yes, it was a fair description. We now barely resembled normal humans. Covered in lice, filth and festering sores, many of us with double incontinence, we fought for scraps of food and abused each other. The language we used matched the surrounding reality: we referred to our guards in strings of obscenities and used crude, single, angry words instead of sentences. The normal language used by newcomers sounded pompous and ridiculously out of place. I thought any form of aesthetics would seem incongruous here. Frieda agreed and said that, after five-and-a-half years of systematic deprivations, indignities and the special inhumanities practised in Stutthof, we were now, demonstrably, the sub-human ‘scum of the species’ that the Germans had pledged to remove. Mission accomplished!
There were frequent reshuffles of inmates from one section of the camp to another, either to fill vacancies or for no obvious reason. On such occasions we compared our experiences with the ‘newcomers’ who had been under different command. There was such variety in the modes of physical abuse, punishment and torture carried out: some were made to stand naked for hours in the freezing outdoors, others made to crawl on all fours in a circle under a cracking whip.
Drunk with total power over the lives of others, the section commandants added their own creative embellishments to the common task of extermination. (Thus, in testimonies of survivors, there are variations in the treatments they experienced. Holocaust deniers have seized on these variations, claiming that such ‘discrepancies’ invalidate all reports, and therefore the existence of this well-planned and efficient mass extermination.)
Late in 1944, groups of new inmates were put into our half-empty
Once, the men sent us a small pencil and extra paper, and asked us where we came from. In reply we also asked about the date, since we had lost count of days and weeks. We often asked them the date; once we found it out we tried to keep time from then on, but the person who was counting the days died soon after and we were again confused on this matter. We were confused in many ways: rumour had it that barbiturates were added to our drinking water.
Sending messages over was my task, and involved waiting till the tower guard looked the other way, then throwing the message and pebble swiftly and far enough over the fence, and into a group of men, so that it was not seen landing on the open ground.
One day I was caught by the overseer and became the star of a public flogging. The ‘special assembly’ whistle ordered all to gather outside the nearby barracks. My crime was announced and I was put face down across a wooden box and lashed with a leather strap. The usual quota was fifty lashes. There was a strange silence, a lack of the usual noises in the camp. After forty lashes—counted aloud by the lasher—there was a sudden stop, and the whistle sounded to disperse. This started a rumour that the Germans were leaving the camp. It had to be something of that magnitude to cut short a public flogging. The reason remained a mystery. I remember staggering back to the barrack in the arms of a very distressed Frieda. She, Mother and Goldie spent the night putting wet rags on my swollen and bleeding back.
I think it was a few days after this that the front door of the barrack was opened for an inspection by high-ranking army officers. I was curled up on the floor nearby and heard the woman overseer say, ‘ Da haben wir unsere Untermenschen. ’ (Here we keep our sub-humans.) The men covered their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs and walked away quickly.
In a rare moment of reflection I thought that, yes, it was a fair description. We now barely resembled normal humans. Covered in lice, filth and festering sores, many of us with double incontinence, we fought for scraps of food and abused each other. The language we used matched the surrounding reality: we referred to our guards in strings of obscenities and used crude, single, angry words instead of sentences. The normal language used by newcomers sounded pompous and ridiculously out of place. I thought any form of aesthetics would seem incongruous here. Frieda agreed and said that, after five-and-a-half years of systematic deprivations, indignities and the special inhumanities practised in Stutthof, we were now, demonstrably, the sub-human ‘scum of the species’ that the Germans had pledged to remove. Mission accomplished!
There were frequent reshuffles of inmates from one section of the camp to another, either to fill vacancies or for no obvious reason. On such occasions we compared our experiences with the ‘newcomers’ who had been under different command. There was such variety in the modes of physical abuse, punishment and torture carried out: some were made to stand naked for hours in the freezing outdoors, others made to crawl on all fours in a circle under a cracking whip.
Drunk with total power over the lives of others, the section commandants added their own creative embellishments to the common task of extermination. (Thus, in testimonies of survivors, there are variations in the treatments they experienced. Holocaust deniers have seized on these variations, claiming that such ‘discrepancies’ invalidate all reports, and therefore the existence of this well-planned and efficient mass extermination.)
Late in 1944, groups of new inmates were put into our half-empty
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