1We Did Not Feel Pain Anymore

On September 1, 1939, German troops marched into Poland. Two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany as the invasion triggered the guarantees they had given to Poland, which was also attacked from the east by the Soviet Union, which in August had signed the Nazi-Soviet pact. Poland, an independent state since 1918, was swiftly partitioned, resulting in around one-third of the country’s estimated three million Jews finding themselves under Soviet rule. Thousands of Polish Jews fled eastward to avoid the Nazis and were mostly sent to work in labor camps in Siberia. Although conditions were brutal and anti-Semitism the norm, the Soviets saw the internees as useful forced labor in forests, mines and farms and did not follow the Nazi policy of deliberate genocide. Most of these relatively fortunate Polish Jews survived the war. Later in the war some Poles managed to enlist in special units such as the Polish Independent Carpathian Brigade, which went on to fight the Germans in North Africa. Other Poles in exile made substantial contributions to the Allied military effort throughout the war, fighting on land, sea and in the air in a variety of different theaters of war including the well-documented 145 Polish pilots flying under British command in 1940 during the Battle of Britain.

Meanwhile, the rest of Poland’s Jews under Nazi rule were in mortal danger. The extermination of the Jews, while not yet an official Nazi war aim, began as soon as Hitler’s troops crossed the Polish border. SS operational units roamed through newly captured Polish towns, lining up groups of Jews for execution, indulging in random killings and setting fire to Jewish-owned businesses.

These random killings rapidly escalated into systematic mass murder. By the end of 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazi killing squads had succeeded in exterminating tens of thousands of Jews in eastern Poland and the Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania, often aided by local communities with long-standing anti-Semitic hatreds. At the same time, the Nazis exported Germany’s existing concentration camp system into the conquered eastern territories to hold Jews destined for the gas chambers, as well as a vast range of other perceived enemies of the Third Reich across occupied Europe, from gypsies and Communists to nationalists and homosexuals.

Auschwitz—the German name for the medieval Polish city of Oświęcim, home to many Jewish families—was the hub of this vastly expanded concentration camp network. On April 27, 1940, SS Commander in Chief Heinrich Himmler gave orders for the founding of a camp complex on the site of a former Austro-Hungarian army barracks just outside the city center, near a disused tobacco factory. The work of clearing and building was undertaken by prisoners sent for the purpose. This original camp, called Auschwitz I, or Stammlager, remained the nucleus and administrative center of the vast camp complex, its infamous gate proclaiming Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work Makes for Freedom”) becoming the ultimate symbol of the Holocaust.

Auschwitz gradually evolved into a web of concentration and extermination camps as well as factories as the Jewish Holocaust gathered momentum. The network was situated in the southern Polish region of Upper Silesia, which was newly incorporated into Germany at the juncture of the Vistula and Sola rivers.

Logistically, Auschwitz’s location was ideal for the Nazis’ purposes, because it stood at the center of major road and rail networks which would facilitate transporting large numbers of people there from multiple points of departure around Europe. Yet it was also to some extent isolated from the outside world, despite its good connections with the now German-run General Government of Poland and proximity to the former states of Austria and Czechoslovakia.

The first commandant of Auschwitz I, Rudolf Höss, was an experienced thirty-eight-year-old SS officer who previously worked at the Nazis’ first concentration camp at Dachau, near Munich, and then at Sachsenhausen, which he headed from 1938 until his transfer to Auschwitz in May 1940. He was officially named commandant on May 4. At Auschwitz, Höss, his wife Hedwig and their four children lived in a comfortable two-story house with prisoners as domestic servants and a pretty garden within sight of the first crematorium.

Three SS officers socialize at Auschwitz (from left to right): Richard Baer (commandant of Auschwitz), Josef Mengele and Rudolf Höss (the former commandant)

For the first two years, Auschwitz was not in fact a concentration camp specifically for Jews. The original inmates were largely a mixture of male political prisoners and professional criminals drawn from across the greater German Reich, including Austria, Czechoslovakia and the annexed regions of western Poland. The first mass transport of prisoners, comprising 728 Polish men from Tarnow prison, arrived in Auschwitz on June 14, immediately after the Fall of France. They included Jews and Catholics, many of whom were arrested attempting to cross the southern Polish border to reach the newly formed Polish army in exile in France. As the influx of prisoners increased during these early months, Höss swiftly oversaw the establishment of Auschwitz II or Auschwitz-Birkenau, almost two miles from the initial camp. To make way for Birkenau, the village of Brzezinka and several surrounding smaller hamlets were demolished, evicting the local population of Poles and some Jews who still lived in the area.

Birkenau, which took its name from the birch tree groves in the area, was in operation by March 1942, even though the camp was far from finished. It would become the site of the main crematoria and so-called gas “chambers,” rooms disguised as shower rooms and called morgues by the SS on their building plans. By now, the Nazis no longer needed to rely on slow and cumbersome mobile gas units to kill their victims, having perfected a method of rapidly slaughtering large numbers of people, predominantly Jews, with canisters of Zyklon B gas, a cyanide-based pesticide.

Until 1942 the early Auschwitz camps were for men only. The first women began to arrive at the end of March 1942, soon including mothers with children who were dispatched immediately to be gassed. The surviving women were treated as slave labor and sent directly to work, mostly on demolition squads to clear space for expansion of the camp, without being quarantined or undergoing “selection,” the euphemism for the Nazi system of deciding on arrival in the camp who was fit enough to work and who should be immediately gassed.

There were rapidly proliferating sub-camps, some within marching distance of the main Auschwitz railway station. Many prisoners at these sub-camps were “sold” as slave labor to German industry, aiding the war effort. The largest of these Auschwitz slave factories, which eventually numbered forty, was the Buna synthetic rubber plant at Monowitz, established in October 1942 and known as Auschwitz III. It was run by the chemical conglomerate I G Farben and although the working conditions at Buna and other Auschwitz factories were brutal, prisoners who could tolerate the regime were at least safe from being selected for extermination.

For Auschwitz had become by the end of 1942 the largest of all the Nazi extermination centers, whose camps and sub-camps covered an area of approximately 40 square kilometers, the whole described as an “interest zone” by the Germans. In the summer of 1941, Himmler had informed Höss that Auschwitz had been chosen as a key location for the mass extermination of the Jews and by January the following year the plan that the Nazis came to describe euphemistically as the Final Solution was formalized by a small group of senior Nazi officials, including SS Lt Col. Adolf Eichmann, who specialized in “Jewish Affairs.”

Meeting at an impressive lakeside villa a few miles outside Berlin, the conference agreed that the remaining Jews in Europe would no longer be allowed to emigrate; they would instead be exterminated. The Wannsee Conference was chaired by thirty-seven-year-old Reinhard Heydrich, who used the event to assert his own authority over the process of systematic Jewish annihilation, which from now on was to replace randomized killing. This had been a fundamental plank of Hitler’s worldview and manifesto. In less than a day it was agreed that the entire population of Europe, whose Jewish contingent was estimated by Heydrich to stand at about eleven million, including countries which Germany did not then occupy such as Britain and neutral nations such as Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal and European Turkey, would be made free of all Jews—Judenfrei or Judenrein. Heinrich Himmler was the most senior Nazi charged with overall implementation of the Final Solution and therefore overseer of the camps.

Here, the Auschwitz women’s orchestra and its male counterparts enter this terrible narrative. Even as the Nazis committed themselves to eradicating all trace of the Jews, a core part of Jewish culture was being preserved at Auschwitz. Music was an integral part of life in almost all Nazi-run camps, although here the music was subverted, no longer allowed to give pleasure but used as an additional method of torture.

While the Auschwitz orchestras included non-Jews, at least half of all the players were Jewish, a delicate balance which the Nazis kept a close eye on. The balance might easily have tipped over in favor of the Jewish members partly as a natural consequence of Jews being by far the largest prisoner group. But it also spoke to the centrality of music for so many Jews of all social classes, wherever they lived, from street performers with little or no formal training to accomplished professional players. Prayers in synagogues had been accompanied by music and chanting since ancient times while klezmer, sometimes referred to as Yiddish without words, was a style of folk music which originated during the Middle Ages among the Jewish people of Eastern Europe, Greece and the Balkans. It was most often played at celebrations such as weddings or bar mitzvahs and also had its own rich tradition which borrowed from Jewish cantorial music, Hasidic intoning and Yiddish theater. Music as a reaffirmation of humanity was now being used as an additional tool in the struggle to destroy it.

The Auschwitz orchestras exposed the grotesque contradiction at the heart of the Final Solution—the Nazis’ inability to decide whether Jews were to be annihilated because they were the lowest of the low or because they ran the world in some form of evil conspiracy. An orchestra led by a Jew was a visible reminder of this confusion.

In February 1942, a few weeks after the Wannsee Conference, the first transports of Jews deliberately destined for death arrived in Auschwitz I. These victims were immediately gassed on arrival with Zyklon B gas, their bodies later incinerated using the old crematorium in the main camp, a grassy mound over a bunker just beyond the commandant’s spacious family house and garden. In March, the killings were moved to nearby Birkenau, where a vastly bigger murder operation was being hurriedly organized.

Initially two farm buildings, a red cottage and a white cottage, standing discreetly behind foliage and trees, were used as disguised gas chambers. After gassing, the corpses were taken out and buried in mass graves. Those prisoners involved in the burials, generally young fit male Jews, were then taken to the infirmary and killed with a phenol injection.1 A few months later construction began in Birkenau on four large, purpose-built structures to be used for extermination by gas, with associated crematoria. These buildings soon enabled the Nazis to kill on an industrial scale, leaving only ashes behind.

The start of mass transports of male and female Jews to Auschwitz in 1942 created the need for a separate women’s camp. On March 26, the first mass transport of 999 prisoners from the all-female camp at Ravensbrück was tasked with setting up this new women’s camp at Birkenau. The Ravensbrück group, who were not Jewish, included German women classified as asocial or criminal, and a few political prisoners. They were assigned to take charge of the Jewish women who now flooded into Auschwitz, even though Birkenau was not yet ready to receive them.

The same day, March 26, 1942, the first registered mass transport of 997* young Slovak Jewish women set off for Auschwitz, most of them rounded up under threat by the Nazi puppet government from their villages. They had no idea of what lay ahead, except that they were being sent away for some kind of public work service, and that if they did not comply then their parents, who for the time being remained, would suffer.


Copyright © 2025 by Anne Sebba