The death marches feature in many of the major Holocaust survivor memoirs, often as the closing section: the experience that survivors carried out of the camps and into the years after liberation. The march writing has a particular character. After hundreds of pages on the camps, the narrative shifts. The prisoners are outside, in weather, in landscape, sometimes with civilians watching them pass. The frame of the camp falls away. What remains is the cold and the shooting and the bodies along the road.
Primo Levi
Levi was at Auschwitz when the evacuation began in January 1945. He was in the camp infirmary with scarlet fever and was therefore among the prisoners left behind, judged too sick to march. His second book, The Truce, opens with the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz on 27 January 1945, but his account of the days immediately before, in If This Is a Man, describes the breakdown of the camp as the SS withdrew and the marches set out. Many of his closest friends in the camp went on the march. Most of them died on it.
Elie Wiesel
Wiesel and his father were on the Auschwitz march together in January 1945, walking from Auschwitz III at Monowitz to Buchenwald. The march and the freight wagon journey are described in the closing chapters of Night. Wiesel’s father survived the march but died at Buchenwald a few weeks before liberation, of dysentery and the effects of the journey.
Imre Kertesz
Kertesz, the Hungarian Nobel laureate, was a teenager when he was deported from Hungary in the summer of 1944. He was in Buchenwald when the camp was evacuated in April 1945. His semi-autobiographical novel Fatelessness describes the marches and the freight wagon transport in his characteristic flat, distanced prose, which makes the events more rather than less terrible.
Tadeusz Borowski
Borowski, the Polish writer who was at Auschwitz, did not march out: he was on a transport to Dachau. His short story collection This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen includes accounts that touch on the camp evacuation period. Borowski killed himself in 1951.
What the testimony shows
Read together, the survivor accounts of the marches give a consistent picture: extreme cold, no food, the constant shooting of prisoners who fell behind, the indifference or hostility of most local civilians, the few who risked their lives to help. Almost every account contains a moment of decision: whether to keep walking when the legs would no longer carry the body, when fall and die or fall and be shot were the only alternatives. The accounts that exist are by people who chose to keep walking. The much larger number who chose otherwise, or who could no longer choose, did not write.
See also
- Elie Wiesel
- Primo Levi
- Imre Kertesz
- If This Is a Man by Primo Levi
- The Death Marches
- The Auschwitz March, January 1945
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards