MESSAGE OF
AUSCHWITZ SURVIVOR
BOGDAN BARTNIKOWSKI
When I found myself on the ramp in Birkenau on 12 August 1944, I was one of more than 500 Polish children deported from the Warsaw Uprising in the very first transport of civilians. On the spot, we were called "kleine Polnische banditen aus Warschau" by the SS men and camp functionaries-capos. 'Little Polish bandits from Warsaw.’
There were over 500 of us. Over 350 girls and small boys were incarcerated in the female camp, while myself and about 150 boys aged 10-14 were kept in the men's camp in Birkenau. When we once asked one of the capos who was in a good mood: "Mr. capo, after all, we are children. What have we done wrong to be here? We want to be free, to go home". His answer was... He laughed joyfully. The answer was: "Home, freedom... Do you see these chimneys? From here you can be freed through the chimneys. There is no other way from Birkenau to freedom”.
Recently, at a meeting with students from a secondary school, I was talking about our childhood camp experiences. After a dozen or so questions about the details of life in the camp, the question came up: 'And was there a school in Birkenau?' I burst out laughing. Birkenau? A school? But after a while I thought to myself: yes, it was a school. It was a school for survival. A school in which they wanted to make slaves out of us, when they wanted to deprive us of any hope for life, to prepare us to march in pairs, like animals, to the gas chamber. In accordance with the purpose of this camp. Birkenau at that time, perhaps earlier as well, was called not a Konzentrazionslager, but a Vernichtungslager. An extermination camp. There is no other way out except through the chimney.
We, however, did not allow our 'teachers' – the SS men and kapos – to break us. They tried to prepare us in this school, Birkenau, for a submissive death, and if the end did not come right away, then to submissive life, working as long as there was strength left. We, as a mass, survived, we retained our human impulses, we kept our dreams of freedom in these miserable conditions, where we every day starved and froze. This allowed us to survive to the end. Our paths were different, the paths of the boys from insurgent Warsaw imprisoned in Birkenau. Some were deported, evacuated to concentration camps, such as Mauthausen, where, on the death march from Auschwitz on January 18 or 19, the boys marched in the snow, in the cold, in the wind, towards Wodzisław Śląski, where open railway cars awaited them to take them further. Some, like me, were deported to Germany, where we worked as forced labourers, clearing the ruins of the Third Reich, which was then under bombardment. Only a small group of these children lived to see liberation here on 27 January.
I remember that in December we were in sector D. Next to our Polish block, there was a block for small Jewish children. I think they were the children shown on films made by Russian cameramen after the camp's liberation. Because our children, those who were liberated in Oświęcim, were moved to Cracow, treated there and only after a few months, when their families found them, we could return to normal life.
There are very few of us left. There are literally just a few people in this room right now, a few children whom I remember, with whom I was first in the FKL, in the women's camp, for one day, and then in the men's camp. We still meet, we talk about our camp past. These are our tragic personal memories. Each such recollection means tearing out of ourselves those terrible experiences, but we realise that we have to talk about it. To preserve the memory of what happened here, of what totalitarianism can bring about in its drive.
Bogdan Bartnikowski