DEATH MARCHES:
EVIDENCE AND MEMORY
“The train would pull up, the doors would open, and we had to throw the dead bodies out.”
This is an extract from testimony given by Eugene Black, a Jewish teenager who was deported from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, who survived a death march to Bergen-Belsen.
The death marches resulted in tens of thousands of people dying at the roadside of exhaustion, being shot for failing to keep up, or murdered in seemingly random massacres. The victims were totally at the whim of the guards, who left a trail of blood across Europe.
These “mobile concentration camps” overturn the idea that the brutality of the camps was kept entirely separate from the German population. No one could fail to observe the emaciated, weakened inmates, the dead bodies that littered the roads, and the brutality of the SS guards. Indeed, a broad spectrum of the German population persecuted these evacuated prisoners. Some civilians shot inmates, while others refused food. Local people also denounced prisoners who had escaped from marches to the SS. While there are instances of civilians helping inmates by sheltering them in their homes, resistance was rare.
The Wiener Holocaust Library’s new exhibition, Death Marches: Evidence and Memory, will bring to light this often unknown, overlooked and understudied aspect of the Holocaust and uncover how forensic and other evidence about the death marches has been gathered since the end of the war.
Lara Sebire-Hawkins, the Wiener Holocaust Library