I Survived Auschwitz

"I included this book to go with the Buber-Neumann, because Buber-Neumann doesn’t see what happens in the death camps, but Krystyna Zywulska does. She was born Sonia Landau and she was in the Warsaw Ghetto. She appears to be this incredibly audacious person who was able to walk out from the Warsaw Ghetto one day. She was incredibly naïve, at the beginning. She had papers in the name of Zofia Wiśniewska. Her landlord knew right away they weren’t real but, luckily, he was in the underground and helped her out. She then went to work for the Polish underground. Later, she was caught and at that point she invented a third identity, she said she was Krystyna Zywulska and that she was a Christian Pole. That she was able to carry this off is probably the only reason that she survived, because while many Christian Poles were murdered at Auschwitz, it was not the same blanket policy of extermination that Jews faced. Being an able-bodied person with certain skills she was sent, eventually, to Auschwitz where she managed to get an administrative position. This book was really important for me to include because if you tell the story of Auschwitz, the biggest story is the extermination of the Jews. But how do you tell that story from the point of view of somebody who was there at Birkenau but was not exterminated? The answer for me, in terms of finding a really comprehensive memoir, was to have somebody who was Jewish, who saw the annihilation of her own people, but because of this mask that she wore was able to save herself. But what agonies to see this happening. “Initially, the camps were not supposed to be a death sentence. They were a reform tactic to control society and bend everyone to their will” In the book, she starts off at Auschwitz I, which was the original camp, and then is moved to Birkenau, which isn’t far away, but they are separate. Birkenau was built to house Soviet prisoners of war, but the war didn’t go quite as the Germans planned and they didn’t keep having this huge influx of Soviet prisoners. So, when they decided to create this whole network of death camps, Birkenau became a death camp and that’s where her office was. I thought it was important to have the voice of someone who was part of that community, even if they weren’t publicly identifying, in that moment, as part of the community. She witnesses what happens during Birkenau’s lifespan as a death camp. And then she flees at the end. As they are force marched away, she hides and is able to get away. What’s really interesting is that she kept that Christian Pole identity when she was writing her memoir after the war. In the 1960s, she did write a memoir about her Jewish childhood, and emigrated to West Germany a few years after it was published. Later, she was expelled from the writers’ union with a bunch of other Jewish writers, at a time when this was happening in the Soviet Union and its client states. Her fear that Poland after the war was also not a great place for Jews was substantiated, but I think some people had mixed feelings that she didn’t own her Jewish identity more clearly. It’s an amazing memoir. With both her and with Buber-Neumann there are moments where their political sympathies become clear. In the Krystyna Zywulska memoir, there are sections where she talks about the great Soviet fighters and how they showed up and saved people. It’s part of the rhetoric of the time that hasn’t weathered particularly well, but it’s pretty easy to spot. It’s in sharp contrast to her descriptions of morning roll call and the ways in which people were tortured. There are these really vivid images. She writes about this field by Auschwitz, where people were waiting to be taken in, and there’s a woman in her wedding dress who she still has her bouquet. It just descended on people and it took over their lives. In these memoirs, it’s the minute details that really help you to see the lives of people inside the camps. These are individual people’s lives that just got completely upended and in many cases were lost. At first she had to do some hard labour, farm work and digging rows. Later she would get cushier positions. She did not work in ‘Canada’ itself—Canada was the place where all the Jews’ belongings were catalogued and kept; the fancy things would be sent to high-ranking Nazis and the rest would be distributed—but she logged detainees’ possessions on arrival. After she gets out of the field and into administrative tasks, she’s never hungry again. There’s always the threat of being sent back to that place or even being killed, but on a day-to-day basis she’s not starving anymore. It’s poignant and painful to read. She is not suffering physical privation, but she is watching all these people lose their lives. It’s a very dramatic contrast. It’s a powerful book. There’s a lot to admire about Krystyna Zywulska. What happened after the war is also a tragedy. All that antisemitism wasn’t just something the Nazis imposed, Poland had and has its own issues. One of the lessons of concentration camps is that every country has its fissures and its weak points when it comes to having minority or vulnerable groups that the general public allows to be mistreated or exploited. Her memoir ,and what happened with her after it came out, shows part of how that history unfolded later. It isn’t magically over when the Nazis are defeated."