the ramp, separating men from women, selecting newcomers, taking children away from their mothers, then registering those admitted to the camp and sending those who have been declared unfit to work to the gas chambers. Meanwhile, the political prisoners sent to the camp were not subject to pre-selection. The selection of people unable to work was applied only to the Jews brought to Auschwitz on transports by the Reich Main Security Office. It was not a rule that chaos prevailed at the ramp during the reception and that SS men used blind, brutal violence against new arrivals. Indeed, such conduct often occurred during the arrival of transports carrying political prisoners, whom they tried to intimidate and force into submission from the very first moments. However, to the extent possible, more subtle manipulation techniques were used against the Jews brought to extermination, based primarily on an elaborate network of deception. The SS men wanted the arrival of the transport and transfer to the gas chambers to be as smooth as possible, rather than arousing panic and resistance in the crowd. To this end, they avoided taking children away from their mothers, rightly believing that this would trigger resistance and unnecessary confusion. Certainly, cases of violence may have occurred, but not as a rule and were not of the proportions described in the novels in question. This distinction is significant for education and understanding the events in Auschwitz.
Contemporary popular literature unifies the overall picture of the realities of prisoners' lives as if nothing changed in this respect over the years of existence of KL Auschwitz. However, both the appearance of the camp and its sanitary and social conditions, including the treatment of prisoners, changed. The lease of prisoners as a labour force to industrial plants forced them to take measures to ensure their capability to work. For this reason, for example, over time, arbitrary acts of violence against inmates were restricted, and they were permitted to receive food parcels that improved the food supply situation for at least some of them. Conversely, going to work outside the camp and the prisoners' contact with civilian workers forced the sanitary situation to improve so as to prevent the epidemic of infectious diseases from spreading outside the camp.
Another example of change is the fact that since mid-1943, non-Jewish prisoners were no longer subject to regular selections, especially in hospital blocks, during which emaciated and sick prisoners were sentenced to death. At about the same time, they also stopped killing non-Jewish children born in the camp. About the middle of 1942, they stopped using