I spent the next four days running after the columns. I felt as if I were struggling against a mudslide: I spent hours advancing, and when I finally found an officer in charge and showed him my orders, he would apply my instructions as grudgingly as possible. Here and there I managed to organize distributions of rations (elsewhere, too, they were being distributed without my intervention); I had the blankets of the dead collected to give to the living; I was able to confiscate carts from Polish peasants and pile exhausted inmates on them. But the next day, when I found these same columns again, the officers had had shot all those who could no longer get up, and the carts were almost empty. I hardly looked at the Häftlinge, it wasn’t their individual fate that concerned me, but their collective fate, and in any case they all looked alike, they were a gray, dirty mass, stinking despite the cold, undifferentiated, you could only grasp isolated details, the colored badges, a bare head or bare feet, a jacket different from the others; men and women could be distinguished only with difficulty. Sometimes I glimpsed their eyes, under the folds of the blanket, but they never returned a gaze, they were empty, completely eaten away by the need to walk and keep moving forward. The farther away we got from the Vistula, the colder it was and the more inmates we lost. Sometimes, to make room for the Wehrmacht, columns had to wait for hours by the side of the road, or else cut across frozen fields, struggle to cross the innumerable canals and embankments, before finding the road again. As soon as a column paused, the inmates, dying of thirst, fell to their knees to lick the snow. Each column, even the ones where I had put carts, was followed be a team of guards who, with a bullet or a blow from a rifle butt, finished off the inmates who had fallen or simply stopped; the officers left up to the municipalities the job of burying the bodies. As always in this kind of situation, the natural brutality of some was aroused, and their murderous zeal went beyond orders; their young officers, as frightened as they, controlled them with difficulty. It wasn’t just the simple soldiers who were losing all sense of limits. On the third or fourth day, I went to find Elias and Darius on the roads; they were inspecting a column from Laurahütte whose itinerary had changed because of the swiftness of the advance of the Russians, who were coming not just from the east but also from the north, almost reaching Gross Strehlitz, according to my information, a little before Blechhammer. Elias was with the column’s commander, a young, very nervous and agitated Oberscharführer; when I asked him where Darius was, he told me he had gone to the rear and was looking after the sick. I joined him to see what he was doing and found him in the process of finishing off inmates with gunshots. “What the hell are you doing?” He saluted me and replied without losing countenance: “I’m following your orders, Obersturmbannführer. I carefully picked out the sick or weak Häftlinge and had the ones who can still get better loaded onto carts. We’ve just liquidated the ones who are completely unfit.”—“Untersturmführer,” I spat out in an icy voice, “liquidations are not your job. Your orders are to limit them as much as possible, and certainly not to participate in them. Understood?” I also reprimanded Elias; Darius, after all, was under his responsibility.
Sometimes I found more understanding column leaders, who accepted the logic and necessity of what I explained to them. But the resources they were given were limited, and they were commanding narrow-minded, frightened men, hardened by years in the camps, incapable of changing their methods, and, with the relaxation of discipline that resulted from the chaos of the evacuation, returning to all their old failings and habits. Everyone, I imagined, had his reasons for his violent behavior; Darius had no doubt wanted to demonstrate his firmness and resolution in front of these men, most of whom were much older than he. But I had other things to do than analyze motivations, I was just seeking, with the greatest difficulty, to have my orders carried out. Most of the column leaders were simply indifferent—they just had one idea in their heads, getting away from the Russians as quickly as possible with the livestock that had been entrusted to them, without complicating their lives.
During these four days, I slept where I could, in inns, at the village town halls, in local houses. On January 25, a light wind had cleared the clouds, the sky was clean and pure, brilliant, I went back to Auschwitz to see what was going on. At the station, I found an antiaircraft battery unit, most of them Hitlerjugend assigned to the Luftwaffe, children, getting ready to evacuate; their Feldwebel, rolling his eyes, informed me in a monotone that the Russians were on the other side of the Vistula and that there was fighting in the IG Farben factory. I took the road that led to Birkenau and came across a long column of inmates climbing the slope, surrounded by SS men who were firing at them pretty much randomly; behind them, all the way to the camp, the road was strewn with bodies. I stopped and hailed their leader, one of Kraus’s men. “What are you doing?”—“The Sturmbannführer ordered us to empty Sectors IIe and IIf and to transfer the inmates to the Stammlager.”—“And why are you shooting at them like that?” He made a face: “Otherwise they won’t move.”—“Where is Sturmbannführer Kraus?”—“At the Stammlager.” I thought for a minute: “You might as well drop it. The Russians will be here in a few hours.” He hesitated, then made up his mind; he gave a signal to his men and the group left at a trot for Auschwitz I, leaving the Häftlinge there. I looked at them: they weren’t moving, some were looking at me too, others were sitting down. I contemplated Birkenau, whose whole extent I could see from the top of this hilclass="underline" the Kanada sector, in the back, was burning, sending a thick column of black smoke to the sky, next to which the little plume emerging from the chimney of Krema IV, still in operation, could scarcely be noticed. The snow on the barracks roofs sparkled in the sun; the camp looked deserted, I couldn’t make out a human form, aside from spots scattered in the lanes that must have been bodies; the watchtowers stood empty, nothing moved. I got back into my car and made a U-turn, abandoning the inmates to their fate. At the Stammlager, where I arrived before the Kommando I had encountered, other members of the Kattowitz SD or Gestapo were running all over the place, agitated and worried. The camp’s lanes were full of corpses already covered with snow, garbage, piles of dirty clothing; here and there I glimpsed a Häftling searching the bodies or slipping furtively from one building to another; when he saw me he promptly bolted. I found Kraus at the Kommandantur, its empty hallways strewn with papers and files; he was finishing off a bottle of schnapps and smoking a cigarette. I sat down and imitated him. “You hear it?” he said calmly. In the north, in the east, the hollow, monotonous booming of the Russian artillery resounded dully. “Your men don’t know what they’re doing anymore,” I declared as I poured myself some schnapps.—“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m leaving soon. And you?”—“Me too, probably. Is the Haus still open?”—“No. They left yesterday.”—“And your men?”—“I’ll leave a few to finish the dynamiting tonight or tomorrow. Our troops will hold till then. I’m taking the others to Kattowitz. Did you know the Reichsführer was appointed commander of an Army Group?”—“No,” I said, surprised, “I didn’t know.”—“Yesterday. It was named Army Group Vistula, even though the front is already almost on the Oder, or even past it. The Reds also reached the Baltic. East Prussia is cut off from the Reich.”—“Yes,” I said, “that’s not good news. Maybe the Reichsführer can do something.”—“That would surprise me. In my opinion, we’re done for. But we’ll fight to the end.” He emptied the bottle into his glass. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I finished the Armagnac.”—“That’s all right.” He drank a little and then looked at me: “Why are you so determined? For your workers, I mean. Do you really think a few Häftlinge are going to change anything in our situation?” I shrugged and finished my drink. “I have orders,” I said. “And you? Why are you so determined to liquidate these people?”—“I also have my orders. They are enemies of the Reich, there’s no reason they should get away while our nation is perishing. That said, I’m dropping it. We’ve run out of time.”—“Anyway,” I commented, looking at my empty glass, “most of them will only hold out for a few days. You saw the state they’re in.” He emptied his glass in turn and got up: “Let’s go.” Outside, he gave a few more orders to his men, then turned to me and saluted: “Goodbye, Obersturmbannführer. Good luck.”—“You too.” I got into my car and ordered Piontek to drive me to Gleiwitz.