is therefore nearly impossible to describe in detail or even to generalize satisfactorily about the conditions under which registered prisoners13 at Auschwitz lived, worked, and died, for those conditions varied according to each prisoner’s national or “racial” status, work assignment, and, not least, location in the complex. Whether a registered prisoner lived or died at Auschwitz was often determined by whether she or he survived the first weeks or months. Generally, those prisoners accustomed to relative comfort had the most difficulty in accommodating themselves to the severity of camp life, whereas those who had already been in prisons or ghettos, or who had been prisoners of war had less difficulty adjusting to the brutality and deprivation.
Upon arrival at the camp prisoners were not only stripped of any possessions, but they were also robbed of their identities. Names, as far as the SS was concerned, became irrelevant; each prisoner was assigned a serial number that was tattooed on the left forearm or, in the case of small children, on the leg.14 Prisoners were usually given a pair of clogs and an ill-fitting striped uniform on which was sewn a piece of cloth bearing the prisoner’s number as well as a symbol designating his or her category. Jews, for example, wore a Star of David; homosexuals, a pink triangle; political prisoners, an inverted red triangle; ordinary criminals, a green triangle; and the so-called “asocial,” a black triangle. Such markings made the prisoners easily identifiable to the camp guards and were immediately associated with a prisoner’s status in the camp hierarchy.
Not surprisingly, the markings on a prisoner’s uniform—both numbers and symbols—bore a relationship to his or her chances for survival. For instance, a German criminal with a low number had learned over the months or years many of the tricks of survival, was perhaps among the camp’s prisoner elite, and may have held some supervisory position. A Jew fresh off a transport, on the other hand, even when spared death upon arrival, was usually subjected to more severe treatment and was far less likely to survive. In general, Jews and Gypsies, regardless of their country of origin, were at the bottom of the camp prisoner hierarchy and were consequently the least likely to survive. Above them were the Russian POWs, and then civilian Slavs, mostly Poles, who were considered by the Germans to be conspiratorial and inferior but who, with the exception of the Polish intelligentsia, governmental leaders, and military elite, were not marked for annihilation. Members of other European nationalities formed the next category, and at the top of the rankings were German prisoners.
The topography of the different camps at Auschwitz certainly varied, but all camps were designed to keep prisoners under strict control and at the very edge of human survival. Describing his early impressions of Auschwitz-Monowitz, Primo Levi recalled:
[O]ur Lager is a square of about six hundred yards in length, surrounded by two fences of barbed wire, the inner one carrying a high tension current. It consists of sixty wooden huts, which are called Blocks, ten of which are in construction. In addition, there is the body of the kitchens, which are in brick; an experimental farm, run by a detachment of privileged Häftlinge [prisoners], the huts with the showers and the latrines, one for each group of six or eight Blocks. Besides these, certain Blocks are reserved for specific purposes. First of all, a group of eight, at the extreme eastern end of the camp, forms the infirmary and clinic . . . Block 7 which no ordinary Häftling has ever entered, reserved for the “Prominenz,” that is, the aristocracy, the internees holding the highest posts; Block 47, reserved for the Reichsdeutsche (the Aryan Germans, “politicals” or criminals); Block 49, for the Kapos [supervisory prisoners] alone; Block 12, half of which, for use of the Reichsdeutsche and the Kapos, serves as a canteen, that is, a distribution centre for tobacco, insect powder and occasionally other articles; Block 37, which formed the Quartermaster’s office and the Office for Work; and finally, Block 29, which always has its windows closed as it is the Frauenblock, the camp brothel, served by Polish Häftling girls, and reserved for the Reichsdeutsche.15
This account from one of Levi’s memoirs, although descriptive only of one part of the Auschwitz complex in early 1944, suggests that although all prisoners were subjected to strict control, there were clear discrepancies in status and in the severity of their treatment at the hands of the Kapos and SS. Because of this structure, tensions, resentment, and divisions were common, not only among prisoners of various nationalities, faiths, and Nazi-fabricated “racial” categories, but also between members of the various strata of authority. These included “ordinary” prisoners such as Levi, the Kapos in charge of work commandos, Lagerälteste (camp elders), the individual block supervisors, and those prisoners who enjoyed privileged and powerful work assignments, such as those occupying clerical and administrative posts. In Auschwitz I, Poles, the largest prisoner group there, held most positions of authority. In Birkenau, some official prisoner posts were held by Jews. German criminals, employed in functionary positions across the Auschwitz complex, were often the most feared. Regardless of the nationality of the functionary prisoners, differences in status added to existing rivalries, fears and resentments among inmates—a fact not lost on the SS. Moreover, the differing roles of prisoners in the camp structure and administration often blurred the dividing lines between perpetrators, bystanders, and victims at Auschwitz, placing many inmates into what Levi has called the “gray zone” of moral culpability located somewhere between the poles of good and evil, righteous and reprobate.16
Even if such discrepancies in status and moral culpability at Auschwitz had not existed, the camp atmosphere in general did not encourage solidarity and mutual support among the prisoners. As Yisrael Gutman writes, “In a world with all moral norms and restraints lifted and no holds barred, where congestion, severe deprivation, and nervous tension were ubiquitous, the prisoners easily succumbed to violence and rudeness. Conditions of life in the camp managed to undermine any solidarity that might be expected to arise among human beings who found themselves in identical situations. The assumption that common suffering bridges distances separating people was not borne out by camp reality.”17 Altruism and mutual aid were certainly not unknown in the camp, but Gutman’s observation challenges the myth of unwavering solidarity among camp inmates, a myth—like that of the prototypic prisoner—so prevalent in the various commemorative agendas that manifested themselves at Auschwitz in the postwar years.
The conditions of which Gutman writes were intended to breed competition, further divest the prisoners of their traditional notions of human behavior and morality, and, most importantly, keep the prisoners at the edge of survival. The quarters in which ordinary prisoners lived were stifling, poorly heated in the wintertime, rife with vermin and disease, and offered no privacy. “The ordinary living blocks,” Levi wrote,
are divided into two parts. In one Tagesraum lives the head of the hut with his friends . . . on the walls, great sayings, proverbs and rhymes in praise of order, discipline and hygiene; in one corner, a shelf with the tools of the Blockfrisör (official barber), the ladles to distribute the soup, and two rubber truncheons, one solid and one hollow, to enforce discipline should the proverbs prove insufficient. The other part is the dormitory: there are only one hundred and forty-eight bunks on three levels, fitted close to each other like the cells of a beehive, and divided by three corridors so as to utilize without wastage all the space in the room up to the roof. Here all the ordinary Häftlinge live, about two hundred to two hundred and fifty per hut. Consequently there are two men in most of the bunks, which are portable planks of wood, each covered by a thin straw sack and two blankets.18
In comparison to huts such as these in Monowitz, the two-story heated blocks of Auschwitz I were relatively comfortable. Far worse, however, were living conditions in Birkenau, where prisoners in sector BII (the largest and most populated part of the camp) were housed in prefabricated wooden huts originally designed as stables for fifty-two horses.19 At Birkenau they were intended to house some four hundred prisoners, but often held hundreds more.
While poor housing contributed in various ways to the death rate among inmates, the prisoners’ inadequate diet, combined with work that was usually physically exhausting, made their survival even more precarious.20 In the morning prisoners received a
