The arrival process at the camps was the moment at which the prisoner stopped being a person and became a number. It was deliberately designed to disorient, to terrify, and to break what was left of resistance. By the time it was over, an hour or two after the train doors had opened, the people who had got off the train had either been sent straight to the gas chambers, or had been stripped, shaved, deloused, tattooed, dressed in striped uniforms, and assigned to barracks. The whole process was the work of a few hours, conducted by Sonderkommando prisoners and SS men who did the same work every day.
The arrival of the train
At Auschwitz-Birkenau the train pulled in on a rail spur built specifically for the purpose, the Judenrampe and from May 1944 a new ramp inside the camp itself. At the smaller killing camps the train arrived at a small siding outside the camp gates. The doors of the freight wagons were opened by the SS or by Sonderkommando men in striped uniform. Prisoners had been in the wagons for anywhere from a few hours to several days, sealed shut, with no food, no water and no sanitation. The first thing that hit the people on the platform, in the testimony of survivors, was the smell of the air and the unfamiliarity of the language being shouted at them in German.
They were ordered to leave their luggage on the platform with the assurance that it would follow them. It would not; their bags went straight to the sorting warehouses. They were ordered to line up in two columns, men on one side and women with children on the other. Then they were marched a few paces forward and the selection began.
The selection on the ramp
The selection was carried out by an SS doctor, often Josef Mengele but in fact by a rota of SS doctors who took the duty in turn. The doctor stood at the head of the line and pointed each arrival to the left or to the right with a small movement of his hand. To the left meant immediate killing. To the right meant entry to the camp as a labour prisoner. The categories were broadly: anyone who looked old, anyone who looked young, anyone holding a child, anyone visibly pregnant, anyone visibly ill, and anyone the doctor judged unfit for hard work, was sent left. Anyone judged able to work was sent right. The selection took a few seconds per arrival.
The proportions varied by transport. From the Hungarian deportations of summer 1944, with families arriving exhausted from days in sealed wagons, around 80 to 90 per cent of each transport went to the gas chambers immediately. From earlier transports, the proportion was lower. Across the camp’s entire operation, around three quarters of the people who got off the trains at Birkenau were dead within four hours.
The gas chambers
Those sent left were marched a few hundred metres to the gas chamber and crematorium complexes. They were told they were going to be showered and disinfected before being assigned to barracks. They were taken into a large undressing room, made to undress and to leave their clothes on numbered hooks, and given the instruction to remember their hook number for when they came out. Then they were taken into the gas chamber itself, which was disguised as a shower room with fixed fake shower heads on the ceiling. The doors were sealed. SS men on the roof poured Zyklon B pellets through specially built shafts. The gas killed everyone in the chamber within fifteen to twenty minutes. The bodies were dragged out by the Sonderkommando, the gold extracted from the teeth, the hair cut from the women’s heads, and the bodies burned in the crematorium ovens.
The intake of those selected for labour
Those sent right were marched, separately by sex, to the disinfection block. They were stripped, shaved of all body hair, tattooed with a prisoner number on the left forearm at Auschwitz (Auschwitz was the only camp where prisoners were tattooed), photographed in three poses, and showered. They were issued with a striped uniform, wooden clogs, a metal bowl and a spoon, and assigned to a barracks. Most prisoners were given no shoes that fit, no underwear, and no warm clothing. They were given a number to wear on their uniform. Their original clothes and possessions were sent to the sorting warehouses.
The transition was deliberately disorienting. From getting off the train to being in a striped uniform, with shaved head and a number on the arm, was at most three or four hours. By the end of it the prisoner had lost their family (taken to the gas chambers in the same building they had walked past on the way to disinfection), their clothes, their hair, their luggage, their name, their identity. They were now identified only by a number which they had to learn in German immediately because that was how the SS would call them.
What survivors remembered
The arrival is the most-described single moment in survivor literature. Primo Levi describes it in If This Is a Man; Elie Wiesel describes it in Night; Ruth Kluger and Imre Kertesz and Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and Kitty Hart-Moxon all describe it in their memoirs. The descriptions converge on a few common elements. The shouting in German that few of the arrivals understood. The dogs. The lights. The smell of the burning. The sudden separation of families, parents and children pushed in opposite directions, with no chance to say goodbye. The selection that was over before anyone realised it was happening. And, for the survivors, the realisation, sometimes hours and sometimes days later, of what the smoke from the chimney was.
See also
Sources
- Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, 1947
- Filip Muller, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, Stein and Day, 1979
- Robert Jan van Pelt and Deborah Dwork, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present, Norton, 1996
- USHMM: Auschwitz