prisoners with special status they were not forced to do hard labor, particularly lethal, outside the camp.
During their stay in Birkenau, the members of Fleck’s group, including the children Bronislaw and Karol, were tattooed with numbers on their left forearm as was customary. Unlike the adults, however, the youngsters did not wear the telltale striped prisoners’ uniforms, because there were none that fit them.
On April 8, following completion of the construction of the labs in Block 10, the group was transferred to Auschwitz I. The women and children were quartered in a large room on the first floor along with some 50 female prisoners who served as “functionaries” – nurses, lab technicians, secretaries, room supervisors and so on – who had better living conditions than other prisoners.
Bronislaw and Anna Dattel shared one wooden plank of a three-tier bunk, as did Karol and Natalia Umschweif. The plank served as both living quarters and a bed for sleeping. The men were prohibited from staying in the women's block at night. Weber had them housed in Block 20, which stood opposite Block 10 and was used as one of the wings of the hospital in Auschwitz I.
Two large halls on the second floor of Block 10 accommodated about 400 Jewish women aged sixteen to sixty in three-tier bunk beds. Most had been sent to Block 10 directly from the train platform after the SS physicians found them suitable for the experiments being performed there. Others were selected by the medical officials during the daily roll calls in the women’s camp in Birkenau, which housed tens of thousands of female prisoners. Every day a few of them were taken to the operating and X-ray rooms on the ground floor, where they underwent invasive treatments and surgery at the hands of the SS physicians and the prisoner-physicians who were forced to collaborate with them.
For her part, Brewda refused to take part in this criminal activity. She and three other female Jewish physicians working in the block tried as best they could to ease the pain and help heal the unfortunate women, but many of them died from infections and other complications. Other women were murdered with lethal injections to the heart and their bodies were used for of pathological examinations of internal organs. Those who deemed of no further use to the SS physicians – whether alive or dead – were sent to the gas chambers in Birkenau. Their place was taken by newly selected Jewish women.
After moving to Block 10, Bronislaw and Karol aroused mixed feelings among the female prisoners there, many of whom grieved for their children, who had been violently wrenched from them on the train platform. Others were overcome by longing for sons and daughters who had been taken into hiding in their native countries, not knowing what had become of them. The two boys, who ran around and played in the block, were a painful reminder of what these women had lost. Over time, however, the women came to love and care for them.
Within less than a month, the scientists of the Fleck group were ordered to start work in
a new lab run by the Hygiene Institute, which had opened in Rajsko, an Auschwitz subcamp, about four kilometers southwest of the main camp. They still slept in Blocks 10 and 20 in Auschwitz I, and every day walked back and forth to their place of work, about an hour each way.
The two boys remained in Block 10 during the day, without adult supervision, witnessing appalling sights and hearing the cries of women who refused to undergo treatment or suffered agonizing pain. The children lived in constant fear that the SS would take them, too.
Adjacent to Block 10 was the infamous Block 11, the prison in Auschwitz. A yard surrounded by a wall separated the two structures. A few times a week, dozens of prisoners who had been incarcerated in Block 11 or were brought in from elsewhere, were executed by shooting. The windows of Block 10 that faced the “death yard,” as it came to be known, were covered with wooden shutters, in order to conceal the goings-on from its inmates. Although prohibited from approaching the windows, Bronislaw and Karol snuck up and viewed the executions through the slats.
Occasionally they were permitted to go out and play in the area between Blocks 10 and 9, or to join a group of female prisoners that occasionally left the camp, guarded by SS troops and dogs, to collect fruit, herbs and mushrooms in the nearby forests and along the Sola River. This enabled them to enrich their diet somewhat, as the food distributed in the block was meager in both quantity and quality.
Bronislaw and Karol lived in Block 10 for about two years. On January 18, 1945, the day of Auschwitz’s evacuation, they, along with their mothers and some 56,000 other prisoners from the huge camp complex, were forced to take part in a “death march” heading toward Germany. The prisoners trudged through deep snow at a temperature of -20 degrees Celsius without food or water. Those unable to continue were shot to death. After three days of abject misery, the survivors reached the train station in the Polish town of Wodzisław Śląski. The male and female prisoners were transported in coal flatcars to separate concentration camps in Germany. Still alive, Bronislaw and Karol clung to their mothers.
Anna and Yakov Seeman and their son Bronislaw survived in the camps until they were liberated by the Red Army in April 1945. They were reunited in Krakow. Karol Umschweif’s parents, however, were less fortunate: Bernard perished near Buchenwald, and Natalia died of typhus in Malchow,
a women’s concentration camp, shortly after its liberation.
Karol, now orphaned, was rescued by his mother’s friend, Ena Weiss, a Slovak Jew who was had served as chief prisoner-doctor of the hospital in the women’s camp at Birkenau, and held a similar position in Malchow. She took the boy under her wing and returned to Czechoslovakia with him.
* * *
The youngest of the three children in Block 10, Peter Daniel Dattel, arrived in Auschwitz in late June 1943, under completely different circumstances than those that had brought Bronislaw and Karol there seven months earlier.
Peter was four when he was sent to Auschwitz with his parents, Ruth and Hans, in a transport of Berlin Jews. An SS unit was waiting on the platform, and the camp’s physicians carried out a selection. Also present was Dr. Eduard Wirths, the chief SS physician in Auschwitz, who was looking for women who were suitable to use in experiments carried out in Block 10. He walked past the row of women, asked about their age and family status, and chose 65.
Ruth and Peter Dattel, and other mothers with infants and children, were ordered to board trucks waiting to take them to the gas chambers in Birkenau. However, as Ruth recalled long afterward, “A hunchbacked SS officer who was holding a heavy club” took her and Peter aside. The officer’s identity and his motivation for what was an exceptional act are unknown. Ruth never encountered him again. It is assumed that he was taken by their “Aryan” appearance: They were both blue-eyed and blond (Ruth had dyed her hair in Berlin to make herself look German). Dr. Wirths, whom the SS officer called over, was also impressed by Ruth’s appearance and assigned her to be
a nurse in Block 10, although she had no training. Exceptionally, he allowed her to take Peter along.
Miraculously, then, mother and son were spared immediate death. Moreover, whereas other women chosen by Wirths were destined for lab experiments, Ruth joined the group of so-called functionaries. However, her husband, Hans, who had separated from them on the platform, was sent to do hard labor in the Monowitz camp (Auschwitz III) and later murdered.
A few days after their arrival in Block 10, Ruth and Peter were tattooed with a number. Like Bronislaw and Karol who were already there, Peter also lived with his mother in the functionaries’ room. The women of the block quickly grew fond of the mischievous, lively boy. “Peter became the son of all of us”, one of the block’s survivors related afterward. “He became the mascot of the experiments block”.
Another survivor recalled an event that took place early one morning, when the inmates were forced to line up in groups of five ahead of roll call. “The SS bosses hadn’t yet arrived, and Peter took their place,” she related. “He marched quickly and confidently along our row and counted: five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twent-five. He didn’t yet know all the numbers, and couldn’t get past 200. We laughed so hard when we saw him marching like a little Nazi”.
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