Daily life inside a concentration camp followed a routine designed to break the prisoner. The day started before dawn with a roll-call that could last hours, in any weather, with prisoners standing in thin striped uniforms in temperatures down to minus twenty Celsius. Then came twelve to fourteen hours of forced labour, with one short break for thin soup at midday. Then another roll-call, often at night, often longer than the first if a prisoner had escaped or been miscounted. Then back to the barracks, three or four prisoners to each wooden bunk, for a few hours of broken sleep before the next roll-call.
The food
The official ration in most camps was around 1,200 to 1,500 calories per day. The actual ration delivered was lower, often by half, because of theft by the kitchen staff and corruption all the way up the supply chain. The food was a watery turnip or cabbage soup, a slice of bread, sometimes a sliver of margarine or a teaspoon of jam. Heavy labour required around 3,000 to 4,000 calories per day. A prisoner sentenced to twelve hours of labour on a thousand calories was being murdered slowly, by mathematics. Most prisoners lost around half their body weight within three months.
The barracks
Prisoner barracks were often converted horse stables originally built to hold 50 horses and now holding 800 to 1,000 prisoners. There was no heating, no proper sanitation, and limited light. Prisoners slept three or four to a bunk, sometimes fully clothed against the cold, sometimes naked because their clothes were drying on them or had been stolen. Bedbugs, lice and fleas were universal. Disease ran through the barracks constantly. A typhus outbreak could kill thousands in weeks.
The labour
The work varied by camp. Some camps quarried stone. Some built roads or tunnels. Many had factory sub-camps where prisoners assembled aircraft engines, V-2 rocket components, synthetic rubber, ammunition. The work was supervised by SS guards with whips and dogs. Prisoners who fell could be beaten or shot. Quotas were set deliberately above what could be achieved, so that beatings for failure were assured. The phrase Vernichtung durch Arbeit, extermination through labour, was an acknowledged regime policy: prisoners were worked to death and then replaced from the next deportation transport.
The roll-call
The roll-call was the single most-resented daily routine of the camps. Survivors describe it more bitterly than the work, more bitterly than the hunger. It involved standing in formation, in any weather, while the SS counted the prisoners and reconciled the count with the official register. Any discrepancy meant the count was started again. A prisoner who had died in the night had to be carried out and counted with the living. A prisoner who had escaped meant the entire camp could stand for six hours or more in a snowstorm. Prisoners died in roll-calls, of cold or exhaustion, in numbers comparable to those killed by the labour itself.
The violence
Beatings were routine. SS guards beat prisoners with the leather whips called Gummiknuppel, with rifle butts, with anything to hand. Kapos beat prisoners under their charge. Beatings for trivial offences could be lethal: a prisoner who failed to remove their cap quickly enough on encountering an SS officer might be beaten to death. The pattern was made worse by the fact that there was no due process. The SS man on the spot decided what would happen, and there was no appeal.
The mental effort to survive
Survival required a deliberate mental discipline that survivors describe in remarkably similar terms. Pace yourself. Find a work assignment indoors if at all possible. Hide a piece of bread for tomorrow. Make a friend who will share your watch when you are sick. Learn the rules quickly and the unwritten rules even more quickly. Do not draw attention. Do not look the SS in the eye. Do not stand at the front of a column, because that is where they choose at random for punishment. Do not stand at the back, because that is where the dogs are. Walk in the middle. Walk steadily. Do not flinch.
Many of these rules were learned in the first week and saved lives for years afterwards. Some were learned too late and others learned them too late. The literature of survival has a striking emphasis on the moments when a prisoner was lucky: the SS man who turned away at the moment a piece of bread was being smuggled, the kapo who looked the other way during a roll-call, the doctor who let a sick prisoner stay in the infirmary one extra day. These moments were the difference between life and death. Most prisoners did not get them often enough.
See also
Sources
- Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, 1947
- Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell, Berkley, 1950
- Hermann Langbein, People in Auschwitz, University of North Carolina Press, 2004
- Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015