Finally, the most important aspect: such an event would have been remembered by practically all the Roma in the camp, who, shut in the barracks, would certainly have been aware of the danger. Survivors’ accounts, as have been presented above, include very few (and/or late) mentions of the sense of danger on that critical day or of the intention to begin the fight with the SS.
If the SS men really had retreated, for fear of confrontation with the Roma, from performing the order assigned to them, the news would have spread among other Birkenau prisoners. From that moment, the prisoners would have known that, in case of selection and transport to the gas chambers, they would be equally determined to save their lives. For this reason, the SS men, if they had really been confronted with the Roma refusing to perform the order, could have not showed any weakness or retreat.
The story includes a few more enigmatic threads. For example, it is not clear when this supposed attempt to liquidate the camp could have taken place. Bonigut very generally mentioned only “May or June”. Joachimowski, in turn, in his subsequent copies of the account, was later including important modifications, changing May 15 (when he was supposed to learn about the SS intentions) into April 15, 1944. Finally, in his next account he stated that the first attempt to liquidate the Roma camp took place “in early April 1944”.
Trying to find the most probable explanation of the events which took place in the Roma camp in the spring of 1944 among the pieces of very divergent information from former prisoners, as well as referring to preserved documents from the SS office, the authors of the present study have concluded that:
- In early April 1944 (before the deportation of Jews from Hungary), in the face of the growing deficit of workforce in concentration camps, the SS men decided to assign a bigger group of Roma to work in the industry, mainly young and strong men.
- This happened a month after partial liquidation of the BIIb camp in Birkenau was announced, where six months before, the Jews from the ghetto in Theresienstadt had been placed. It is necessary here to refer to the circumstances in which this crime was committed: on March 7, 1944, the SS men led the Jews, who arrived in September 1943 in the first transports from Theresienstadt to separated barracks in the BIIa quarantine camp. The reason was supposed to be to 'travel to work in Heydebreck' (Kędzierzyn-Koźle). At that time, the relocation of prisoners for such reasons was quite common in Auschwitz; therefore, it did not result in any major anxiety among those selected. The next evening, the SS men led these Jews to lorries which transported them directly to death in the gas chambers. The information on these events soon reached the Roma incarcerated in the BIIe camp; some of them had probably even witnessed this crime themselves, as their barracks were located at a distance of only 100 – 200 meters from the crematoria.
- When in early April 1944 the news about the planned big transport of Roma to work in a different concentration camp spread, some of them treated it as an SS plan to liquidate the next “family” camp in Birkenau – this time BIIe. Maybe the information was indeed transmitted to his Roma friends by report writer Tadeusz Joachimowski.
- Finally, when soon after the SS men appeared in the Roma camp and ordered young Roma men to leave for work in Germany, to their surprise they came up against passive resistance and the refusal to perform the order. Maybe only then they realized (or some prisoners explained to them) what the reasons of such behavior of the Roma were. The SS men, without the intention to provoke riots and wanting only to calm the mood in the camp, told Joachimowski to prepare the list of Roma able to work, which was supposed to ease these concerns. It all seems to show that the plan brought the result desired by the SS as nothing is known about the expressions of rebellion or resistance when the lists were being prepared or later, directly when the transport was formed and when it left.
It is also necessary to emphasize that no sources, including the account by Tadeusz Joachimowski, mention the confrontations which were supposed to occur between the Roma defending themselves and the SS. In such context, referring to an 'uprising', or a 'revolt', seems to constitute a semantic misuse.