Because others forget (Translated): Memoirs of a survivor of Auschwitz

By Bruno Piazza and David De Angelis

Few were given the opportunity to leave the concentration camp established by the German SS at Bir-kenau-Auschwitz II alive. To be able to narrate what happened there, to describe the scenes of horror, to recall with a thrill of horror the havoc that was wrought not only on the flesh but also on the human soul and on every civil feeling, is a privilege reserved for very few; and very few, like myself, had the good fortune to penetrate the most mysterious recesses of those accursed enclosures and to witness, while surviving, the destruction of thousands and thousands of human beings from almost all the nations of Europe; of all those nations that from September 1, 1939 until the early dawn of 1945, German brutality enslaved and tamed with the fear of its military power, deporting en masse the inhabitants that it could not immediately kill with weapons, to let them rot in the various concentration camps that swarmed throughout the Europe occupied by the Germans or their satellites, from Belgrade to Dachau, from Buchenwald to Gleiwitz.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stargatebook
• Release date: Sep 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9791220841832

Book preview

General Index

Introduction

The arrest

Deportation

Arrival at the camp

The Lager

The Kapo system

The first day

The Russian prisoners

Hope does not die

At work

Eleven miracles

At the lazaret

Liberation

The return

I dedicate this documentary to the sacred memory of all those who died victims of Fascism and Nazism, asphyxiated and thrown into the crematoria, after endless persecution and atrocious suffering.

Introduction

Few were given the opportunity to leave the concentration camp established by the German SS at Birkenau-Auschwitz II alive.

To be able to narrate what happened in those lands, to describe the scenes of horror, to recall with a shiver of horror the havoc that was wrought there, not only of the flesh but also of the human soul and of every civilised feeling, is given to few; and very few, like me, had the good fortune to penetrate the most mysterious recesses of those accursed enclosures and to witness, while surviving, the destruction of thousands and thousands of human beings from almost all the nations of Europe; of all those nations that from 1 September 1939 until the early dawn of 1945, German brutality enslaved and tamed with the fear of its military power, deporting en masse the inhabitants it could not immediately kill with weapons, to let them rot in the various concentration camps that swarmed throughout the Europe occupied by the Germans or their satellites, from Belgrade to Dachau, from Buchenwald to Gleiwitz.

Of all the concentration camps, those in Poland were certainly the most atrocious, both in terms of the number of victims and the fury of the torturers; the deportees, mostly Jews, after a long and spasmodic agony, found the end of their suffering in the crematoriums, which surrounded the camps with their sinister square chimneys.

Of these camps in Poland, the two punishment camps (Straflager) of Maidanek, near Lublin, and that of Birkenau-Auschwitz II, near Krakow, will remain most sinisterly in history, written in letters of blood.

Of the first, that of Maidanek, a great Soviet painter, Zinovij Tolkaczev, portrayed the miserable life in a series of paintings that were exhibited in the main cities of Poland and were also reproduced in a volume that immediately found wide circulation throughout Eastern Europe.

In the second, Birkenau-Auschwitz, after the German retreat from Lublin, the deportees from Maidanek were concentrated together with the worst common criminals in Poland. It was here that the SS dragged Jewish men, women and children from Italy, Greece, Holland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania in their gruesome transports, Greece, Holland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania, a large number of non-Jewish but suspected partisan and communist men and women, especially from Istria, Friuli and Veneto, and a small number of Russian prisoners of war.

I too was dragged into this field and I hesitate now to write these lines, mindful of Dante's precept:

Always to that truth, that has the face of a lie,

man closes his lips as much as he can,

but who without guilt is ashamed.

I myself found it hard to believe the horrible stories that circulated around those places of punishment and, even imagining, on the basis of my experiences in an Italian concentration camp, a life of hardship and mortifying misery, I would never have been able to convince myself that such execrable crimes could be committed as those perpetrated by the SS and their assassins in the Birkenau camp.

The exact and objective revelation of such misdeeds, however, is necessary, because it bears everlasting infamy to those who perpetrated them.

The arrest

My arrest took place in Trieste on 13 July 1944, a Wednesday, in a rather strange way.

An anonymous denunciation was enough for the SS to lash out at the denounced and take him to one of those Bunkers they had invented in order to torture the confessions out of him and prepare him for the subsequent tortures.

There were two charges against me. A captain of the SS informed me after my arrest, adding that I was accused of anti-fascism and aversion to the Germans while, crime without extenuating circumstances, I was to be considered of Jewish race according to the famous Nuremberg Laws.

They had taken me to the San Sabba resiera, where the delator was waiting at the door for me to be recognized.

The Risiera di San Sabba, a large building with enormous rooms with wooden beamed ceilings and a crematorium used by the Germans to incinerate their victims, was used by the SS as an antechamber for the collection of victims destined for concentration camps in Germany.

In the courtyard, in a kind of garage, were built very narrow cells, the so-called Bunkers, lined with concrete, with a wooden plank in the middle that served as a bed, and with a solid door in which there was a small hole for the entry of air. A man of average height could not stand upright. He had to lie down on the plank, and a dazzling lamp burned in his eyes.

The SS captain questioned me about the reasons for my departure from Trieste after the city had been occupied by German troops.

Why did you leave Trieste after the 8th of September? Where did you go? What did you do? Is it true that you hate the Germans, that you were never a member of the Fascist party, that you are of Jewish race? Race, race, religion don't count.

I replied that I had never harmed anyone, even though I had not joined the fascist party, and that I did not understand the reasons for my arrest.

After an imprecation against the Jews, who were all to be exterminated, the officer ordered the sentry to lead me to the Bunker. My answers irritated him.

You must spend one night, one night only, in this hole, the sentry said to me, pushing me into the cell with an expression almost of pity.

In the Bunker I had to lie down on the plank, under the dazzling light of the electric lamp. But I had been lucky, the sentry explained to me, because all those who ended up in there were first beaten and I had been spared the beating. And another fortune awaited me. On the plank, brought by I don't know what pitiful hands, I found a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches that helped me get through that horrible night.

As soon as the soldier had gone away, the voices of the night began to speak. From the Bunker next to mine I heard a man calling softly to me:

I've been buried alive for forty days, he said. I can't breathe, I'm thirsty. Give me a cigarette. Maybe tonight I'll be shot. Let me smoke my last cigarette.

How could I please him if I was barely allowed to move in the narrow cell, more like a coffin than a receptacle for living people?

And just then, on the other side, a woman's voice:

They kill a few every night. They bring them into the yard and then kill them with a shot in the back of the head. After each shot the dogs howl. You'll hear them again tonight maybe for me, maybe for that other one there. In a week, since I've been in here, I've heard thirty killed. All partisans...

Then he was silent. The footsteps of the sentry making his rounds approached.

I tried to sleep, but the lamplight hurt my eyes. Finally I fell into a painful torpor. I was awakened by the sound of locks clanging open. Cadenced footsteps in the courtyard. Rifle shots. Dogs barking. Silence.

They are all partisans...

I was struggling to breathe, my throat was parched and with my lips glued to the hole in the door I was drinking in the cool night air.

Suddenly the light goes out. Pitch blackness. That darkness is like a glass of ice water on your burning brain. We're on air raid alert. I think that the district of San Sabba is a dangerous area for bombings, right next to the arsenal, the ironworks and the shipyards. With the faint scream of the distant sirens in my ears, which at other times made me jump out of bed and run to the shelters, I slowly fall asleep.

When I wake up the lamp is burning above my head again. The danger has passed. Now it is dawn and through the hole in the door a dull grey light enters. Outside someone passes by carrying buckets. I ask for some water. No one answers. I ask louder, pounding my fist against the door. The footsteps get closer and a musket barrel penetrates through the hole in the door, almost touching my forehead, while a harsh voice orders me to be quiet. I obey.

An hour later the door opens and a soldier hands me a bowl of substitute coffee, bitter and diluted. Then they take me upstairs, to a large room on the third floor, where I find about forty of my companions in misfortune, men and women.

The room is dirty and dusty. On one side are cots for the women, on the other cots for the men. Among the prisoners are some acquaintances of mine, who immediately crowd around me and ask me for news of my whereabouts and find out about my capture.

I tell my story, short and painful, like that of many others. Arrested by the republican fascist police in February of that year, in Como, in the woods of San Maurizio, while I was trying to cross the Swiss border, I was kept under observation for four months in a concentration camp in that city and then, still as a prisoner, sent to the hospital of Camerlata. Later they released me, assuring me that I could consider myself free to go wherever I pleased.

I had written to my family in Trieste that I wanted to see them again. On the other hand, it was impossible to cross the border. Spies everywhere. Manhunts everywhere, without respite, without remission.

I had returned to my city immediately after the bombing of 10 June 1944: rumours made Trieste a heap of rubble. They had captured almost all the Jews who had not managed to cross the Swiss border. I hunkered down at home and waited in resignation. Without the denunciation of a renegade I would probably have avoided arrest.

My companions in segregation had been listening to me as one listens to a story already known. Most of them had walked the same road of the cross as me.

It was still hoped, it is true, to avoid deportation to Germany, because it seemed that the war was drawing to a close: the Allies had already occupied Rome and in France the Atlantic Wall had been broken and swept away. It was now a matter of time: to gain a week or a day meant a lot.

In the resiera of San Sabba we were certainly not well off: fleas ate us alive; thousands of these insects covered people's legs and arms with stings, day and night.

They were obliged to do heavy work: unloading wagons, removing manure from the stables, carrying sacks, barrels and chests. And there was no lack of beatings. The same captain who interrogated me beat a poor tailor from Rijeka who was among us to a pulp, forcing him to spend eighteen days in bed, just because he had spilled some manure in the stable.

There was the danger of bombs, in that third floor under the canopy already shaken by previous raids, with the window frames hanging down and the glass broken. During the alarms the Germans would double lock us in the big room.

There had also been, in those very days, a bad case. The case of Felice Mustacchi and Giuseppe Hassid. At 11 o'clock in the evening a German soldier came into the room, when everyone was already asleep. He had gotten Mustacchi, Hassid and three women up, and as they were, the two men in their pajamas and the women in their shirts, he had dragged them along. As he left, he assured them that it was an urgent job and that in about twenty minutes, at the latest, they would all be back in the dormitory. But shortly afterwards shots were heard and the howling of dogs. Nobody saw Mustacchi, Hassid and the women again.

We linked the disappearance of these five people to the discovery by the SS of some gold coins in the latrine. Not handing over all the valuables to the Germans was considered an act of sabotage, punishable by a gunshot to the back of the head. This was probably the fate of our comrades.

In spite of everything, and in spite of the company of the spies that the SS had put among us to guard the dormitory, the stay at the rice mill was preferable to deportation. At least we were still in our own country, with the hope of seeing the war end soon and of returning home immediately, alive and safe.

Instead, leaving meant abandoning all hope, even if you didn't yet know what you were getting into.

Meanwhile we didn't eat so badly that we had to starve. One of us, Nino Belleli, was a cook, and there was enough fat in the soup they distributed at midday. The bread was discreet, the water clear; one evening they even gave us some wine.

There was also a quantity of blankets and quilts robbed from private homes, and on those, despite the fleas, one could rest with sufficient comfort. There were chairs and even a table. There was also, but hidden, an electric stove, where we could secretly toast bread or some potatoes. We had two water taps for washing. Some people even received parcels of food from outside and the newspaper.

The men used to come down to unload heavy burdens, someone cleaned the room, I did nothing. On Sundays they let us take a walk in the courtyard.

A few days I stayed in the reservoir and in those few days other unfortunates were brought there, to end up, like me, in the hell of Auschwitz, where they found the saddest death.

A couple of days after my arrival at the reservoir, the guard who was guarding us, entering early in the morning into my large room, called aloud my name and surname, preceding them with the title, Mr. Lawyer. Up to this time I had been called tu, and not very courtly or curial appellations had accompanied my name.

The sentry let me down, and told me that I was to be considered free, and could go home. He gave me, with German meticulousness, all the valuables they had taken from me, made me sign a receipt, and then accompanied me to the large room.

You are free, he said, but I must still keep you under lock and key. In two hours the captain will come and sign the release order.

Slowly the two hours passed. More hours passed.

Of my fellow sufferers, some envied me. I could call myself lucky. So far, no one had been able to escape from that place. It was the first case. Some others were skeptical. It was just a trick, they said, a feint, perhaps a trap.

Everyone was giving me assignments for when I got out. The return of the watch, money and other items had impressed them. I accepted the assignments