THE CHILDREN
OF BLOCK 10
Yoel Yaari
A two-story, red-brick structure, Block 10 was considered one of the most horrific places in the hell that was Auschwitz. Beginning in April 1943, it accommodated several research laboratories, in which SS physicians conducted criminal “medical” experiments on many hundreds of Jewish women.
In her postwar memoir, Brewda recalls the moment she first arrived at her new quarters and place of work: “On the steps of Block 10 I saw three Jewish children playing … It was very surprising to see Jewish children in Auschwitz, because the Nazis saw them as being worthless and sent them to the gas chambers immediately upon their arrival”.
Indeed, for almost all the Jewish children who arrived with their families in Auschwitz on transports from across Nazi-occupied Europe, crammed into freight cars, the journey ended within
a few hours. On the platform after arrival the families underwent the brutal, life-or-death selection by SS phyicians. As a rule, children under the age of fourteen were sent straight to the gas chambers, usually with their mothers. Of the million Jews who perished in Auschwitz, about 220,000 were children.
Who, then, were the three Jewish children surprisingly observed on the steps of Block 10? What were the circumstances of their arrival in the camp, why were they kept alive in that ghastly place – and what became of them?
The most notorious laboratories in Block 10 were those run by Prof. Carl Clauberg and Dr. Horst Schumann, who developed methods for mass sterilization of “inferior” races. It also housed “Hygiene Institute” of the SS, which had been established in order to deal with the epidemic of typhus fever that had broken out in the camp, but was also used for other types of experiments on Jewish women. Dr. Brewda was appointed chief physician-prisoner of Block 10.
Two of the children she saw on the steps of Block 10 – Bronislaw Seeman, then ten years old, and five-year-old Karol Umschweif – had arrived in Auschwitz on February 7, 1943, in a regular train car. They were part of a group of eleven “privileged” prisoners: Jewish scientists and their families, who had worked in the bacteriological research laboratory of Dr. Ludwik Fleck, in the city of Lvov, Poland (today Lviv, Ukraine).
Also in the group were the two boys’ parents – Dr. Anna and Yaakov Seeman, and Natalia and Dr. Bernard Umschweif – along with Dr. Fleck himself, his wife, Ernestina, and their son, Ryszard. All of them entered the camp without undergoing the selection process, because they had been sent to Auschwitz for work, not annihilation.
A Jewish physician and researcher, Fleck was the pupil and assistant of Polish scientist Prof. Rudolf Weigl of Jan Kazimierz University, Lvov, who had been developing vaccinations for typhus. This grim disease, caused by Rickettsia bacteria, spreads by means of lice and develops into a deadly epidemic in densely populated areas. The authorities in Nazi Germany were desperate for a vaccine as the disease killed large numbers of its own troops, as well as people imprisoned in ghettos and concentration camps. Accordingly, they allowed Weigl and his team to continue their research, at a time when other Polish scientists and scholars were incarcerated or murdered by the Gestapo.
Fleck, who had developed an anti-typhus vaccine of his own, was also granted a special status by the Germans. After the Jews of Lvov were herded into a ghetto, in November 1941, severing him from Weigl’s lab, he was permitted to establish an independent laboratory in the Jewish hospital on Kuszewicza Street, where typhus patients were taken. Fleck’s staff and their families were granted temporary immunity from arrest and deportation. For a year and two months, his lab operated in the Lvov ghetto, while some 80 percent of its 120,000 inhabitants were murdered locally or sent to death camps.
In January 1943, Dr. Bruno Weber,
a German physician who was appointed to head the SS’ Hygiene Institute in Auschwitz, visited Fleck’s lab in the Lvov ghetto and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: to work at his institute or be killed. Fleck agreed to move to Auschwitz, but made his acceptance conditional on having his fellow researchers and their families accompany him. Weber acceded and placed the group under his protection. Four months later the Lvov ghetto was liquidated.
In February 1943, when Fleck’s group arrived at Auschwitz, the Hygiene Institute in Block 10 was still being built. The group was thus compelled to stay in Birkenau (Auschwitz II – the main extermination camp) together with regular inmates, experiencing the endless morning roll calls in extreme weather, the brutalities inflicted by the SS overseers and the cruel Kapos, the hunger and diseases. However, as
Dr. Alina Brewda, a Jewish gynecologist from Warsaw, was an inmate in the Majdanek concentration and annihilation camp. In September 1943, she was summoned to an interview with Dr. Enno Lolling, who served as the chief physician of all SS-run concentration camps. In Brewda he found what he was looking for: a knowledgeable and experienced gynecological surgeon. He ordered her to be transferred to Auschwitz I, the main camp in the Auschwitz complex. After being registered as a prisoner there and having a number tattooed on her left arm, she was taken to Block 10 – the only one of the camp’s twenty-eight blocks housing women.