The Violence of Invisibility

Abstract

The trip to Auschwitz served as a kind of initiation. The freight cars, each carrying about 100 people, came from as far as Bordeaux and Rome and Salonika, voyages of a week or more, stifling in summer, arctic in winter. Sometimes the trains were shunted onto sidings for days on end, nights on end. The prisoners’ cries for food and water went unheeded. When they banged their fists on the doors, their guards usually ignored them. Occasionally, they answered by banging the outsides of the doors with their gun butts. Sometimes, by the time the sealed trains finally reached southern Poland, the dead outnumbered the living… Once the selection was finished, the prisoners chosen for the gas chambers were taken by truck to two neat little farmhouses, with thatched roofs and whitewashed walls, surrounded by fruit trees and shrubbery. Teams of Jewish prisoners who had been assigned to the Sonderkommando, or “special command” shepherded the victims onward, urging them to move along quietly into the shower rooms and to take off all their clothes.… Here, and later in the new crematoria at Birkenau, the Final Solution took place. What happened can best be described in the detached words of Rudolf Hoess, who was in command of all this: “The door would now be quickly screwed up and the gas discharged by the waiting disinfectors through vents in the ceilings of the gas chambers, down a shaft that led to the floor.