The Last Night at Auschwitz

By Cosmin Baiu

In the autumn of 1944, a young professor of ancient history is embarked on a freight train and, along with thousands of other prisoners, is deported to Auschwitz. He only has a few weeks to escape, until starvation would cloud his judgement, until his body would become too weak to fight.

Will he prevail? The outcome is unexpected and shocking...

Written in the first person, the novel The Last Night at Auschwitz transports the reader into the terrifying atmosphere of this death factory, where the air itself smells of despair, in the intimacy of the thoughts, motivations and dialogues of monsters with a human appearance like Josef Mengele, Rudolf Höss or the criminal Karl Fritzsch.

The main character, Severin Bosch – an Austrian intellectual, an exponent of Nietzsche’s Superman – unwittingly enters this well-organized machine and witnesses heinous crimes, dehumanization, and betrayal, but in just a few days he succeeds in organizing the opposition, becoming the leader of a resistance movement which aims at freeing all prisoners.

Inspired by actual events, well-documented, The Last Night at Auschwitz is a captivating and terrifying historical thriller, a descent into the inferno, which masterfully depicts the blind, mutilating struggle between dehumanized, indoctrinated monsters and their defenseless victims.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: May 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781685625719

Cosmin Baiu

Cosmin Baiu is a young Romanian writer who has successfully published a number of fiction and personal development books, all imbued with a fresh perspective and depth that have charmed readers in Romania and abroad. He has vast experience in the field of financial analysis and currently works as an EMBA corporate manager, while also being a relentless researcher of the depths of the soul and an inquisitive mind weighing delicate aspects of the human condition. His literary talent allows him to masterfully interpret and translate complex concepts in order to thrill and inspire his readers.

Book preview

Chapter I

A Voyage into the Unknown

‘Mister Severin, I reckon we won’t get out of this alive, will we?’ said the little guy.

I watched him somehow dispassionately, as much as I could see of him, buried as he was among thick, woolen overcoats and fur hats. It seemed unbelievable that after so many days spent there, down below, in that pestilent air, the little guy was still alive. His thin face was shrouded by a long, curly beard, which only revealed the glimmer of his moist, dark eyes. He had a terrible cough, and, at times, he would bend to spit on the floor, jostling us all with his elbows.

It was the second time he was asking me that question during the past hour, and that was after all the other people around him had ceased answering days before. I looked up at the wagon’s wooden ceiling again, for the thousandth time perhaps, and concentrated on its warped veins and knots, trying to find some pattern, some hidden meaning, a story that could keep my interest alive and help me escape from the hell in which I was cast, like in a cement block. It was my little game that I’d been practicing obsessively for days in a row, each time trying to give it new touches, new interpretations.

I had lost track of time along with the watch that German soldier had ripped off my wrist, grinning widely, when he pushed me into the wagon, back in Vienna. ‘Courtesy of Adolf Eichmann…!’ he had exclaimed, excitedly, turning it around in the morning light, making it shine. ‘Congratulations on your 40th anniversary…errr…from your loving wife, Elsa, and the children Frida and Marcel,’ he slowly spelled the engraved letters through his rotten teeth. I was convinced it was the longest phrase he had read in his life. He frowned at me, as if he’d just realized that I was a human being just like him, with a family and kids, and that made him feel bad. ‘Move, scumbag…!’ he gritted out, shoved the watch into his pocket and hurled me inside the wagon. I heard him yelling out of his mind at the next prisoners, barking pointless orders, probably only to ease his conscience.

Another reference point on the axis of time was the moment when one of the prisoners, who kept their eyes glued to a crack in the wagon’s planks, shouted happily, in the tone that Howard Carter probably used when he discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922: ‘Brno! We passed the station, but we’re not slowing down…! We’re in Czechoslovakia…!’ briefly animating the discussions that helped them kill time, as they were forced to stay crammed together, faces touching, breathing one another’s oxygen-deficient air.

‘I wonder how many cattle have been transported in this wagon…?’ I found myself asking aloud, my eyes fixed on a tiny hole above my head, where the knot in a plank was missing. You could see the late-autumn ashen clouds through it.

No one minded me, so I resumed my crazy reasoning on my own. This wagon could hold about thirty animals, on their way to the slaughterhouse. Once they reached their destination, they were most likely carefully unloaded, to avoid any unwanted fractures, then led in a single file toward the building that smelled faintly of death and burned meat. By means of quick, expert strokes, the animals would have their necks slashed with a long blade knife, leaving them there to die in their own blood, fighting for a last breath of air that would never come. Their bodies still warm, their minds locked in the sleep that usually precedes death, the animals would be then transported on mobile belts to the chopping room, where axes, milling machines and knives would tear their bodies apart. And the brain, its cells still alive, screaming its pain, would be torn out of the skull, packed in metal boxes, and thrown into industrial fridges. This wagon was displaying the evidence of thousands of such gruesome little stories: scattered strands of hair, a crack where a horse’s hoof had hit the wagon’s plank, a trace of dry blood about seven feet up.

‘Mister Severin, will we get out of this affair alive?’ the little guy asked again, interrupting my somber reflection.

I remembered that the little guy once told us that he used to own a bakery in Mariahilferstrasse, in Vienna, which made him see everything – including his own existence – as a business, good or bad, as the good Lord wills, he used to say.

During the first days, he had told us all how he used to make warm bagels with poppy and sesame seeds and even sunflower, provided they were fresh, delicious, well-baked and crunchy… Tourism was flourishing after the Great War and Joachim’s business was going like clockwork, despite the financial crisis that had befallen Europe. ‘Listen to me, crisis or not, there are three golden rules, which I have always abided by: location, location, and…again location! Never invest in outlying areas, in poor workers’ districts or in small towns, this is what my father told me, when he was alive, the poor soul…! Ahhh…if he could see me here…I think sorrow would break his heart into pieces…’

The little guy, Joachim by his real name, had kept on talking, not taking any notice of his neighbors’ long stares, as they were increasingly starving. He wouldn’t stop talking, not even when they asked him to, he insisted on reminding them of warm bagels and apple pies fresh from the oven even when they nudged him, overstraining his frail ribs. It was probably the way he could escape that filthy hell and relive the good times of his existence, when daily life was interwoven with the hope for a future, as it is for all sane people. At last, a math teacher, out of his mind with hunger, punched him in the mouth and the little guy’s face filled with blood at once. The punch caught him right when he was describing his technique for wrapping wieners in flaky pastry, and his lips smashed against his teeth, cracking like overripe grapes. Joachim went silent, but during the next hours he cried his despair in his palms, as we should all have done, but for some reason were ashamed to…or maybe we were afraid that on the other side of the door only madness awaited. We were uselessly trying to keep the appearance of some normality, of some form of civilization, in this dreadful place. For years on end, Nazi soldiers and politicians have been calling us sub-human, animals, and this probably motivated us to keep calm and detached at times like these, maybe to spite them, or maybe because there was no alternative, I really have no idea!

The physics professor, a once imposing gentleman with the intense look of a thoroughbred intellectual – now weak and shriveled – looked up at me with a desperate expression:

‘You are a historian, sir…have you ever encountered something like this in your reading and studies? Such hatred directed by man against his own kind?’

Of course, I could have asked him the same question regarding his specialty, but I had sufficient knowledge of the universe to reflect on this subject by myself. After all, at the same moment we were being transported in a cattle wagon toward an unknown but predictable destination, planet Earth was spinning through space orbiting the Sun as it had probably done for the past four billion years, undisturbed. On Mercury, volcanoes went on spitting out their metal and molten rock content, while on Mars some red dust blizzard went on carving the ancient rocks, flattening them down.

Beyond the frozen boundaries of our solar system, where the utter silence of inorganic cosmic space reigned, enquiring looks could behold the starry sky of the Milky Way, the galaxy to which the cattle wagon, the dead and the living in it somehow belonged. But beyond it there were billions and billions of other galaxies, an infinity impervious to the sufferings of Joachim or the famished and dehydrated physics professor, impervious to the damned politics, nationalism, demagogy, naïve voters and racial hatred that had made this genocide possible!

‘Oh, yees, mister Morritz,’ I answered sulkily. ‘Unfortunately, human history is littered with countless acts of genocide, as it seems it is deeply embedded in human nature itself. If evolutionism needed one more proof regarding our modest origin, it would undoubtedly be man’s criminal behavior toward his own kind. The will to kill lies dormant within us, like a lethal microorganism, waiting for the opportunity to come out. This virus is usually complacently hidden within the great masses of uneducated individuals, semi-literate or illiterate, mentally retarded individuals bordering on the animal condition because they do not know their history, they cannot reason with their own intellect, they don’t even have the experience of life, and the reality that they see before their eyes is to them the only one that has ever existed and that will ever exist! Well, these blind and hungry masses – because the triggering element is usually an economic crisis, or a crisis of social consciousness – are ready to follow as far as hell the herder that inevitably rises in its midst, the savior that will say the exact words they want to hear…They’ll follow him like a flock of sheep stepping behind the donkey…only in this case the flock only leaves death and despair behind.’

My gaze unwittingly slid toward little Joachim’s face, who was watching me with big, moist eyes, without giving any sign that he had understood my words. The blood had meanwhile dried on his face, forehead and cheeks, where he had smeared it with his coat sleeve.

Mister Morritz motioned me to go on.

‘An interesting example, that has always fascinated me, is that of the crusades. The fact that the gentry had willfully abandoned their wealth and plentiful lifestyle in Western Europe to endure enormous suffering through the deserts and winters of Syria, with the declared purpose of "freeing Jerusalem from a chimera, constitutes a research subject in itself, in the fields of philosophy and history as well as behavioral psychology. The way in which they unleashed their atavistic drives the moment the troupes led by Godefroy de Bouillon clambered over the city’s defense walls during the summer of 1099 surpasses our feeble imagination by far. They put the entire population to the sword, regardless of cult or ethnicity, age or gender, because they were too exalted and furious to stop and listen to supplications. The Arab chroniclers, as well as the European ones, speak of the fact that these liberator saints" were up to their ankles in blood…! After they were done slaughtering, the leaders of the crusade crawled up the Golgotha hill and to the Holy Sepulcher on their knees, crying and uttering fervent prayers to God.’

Mister Morritz shook his head bitterly, while Joachim kept on blinking with a dumb, vacant air.

‘Mister Severin, that is precisely the reason why history didn’t appeal to me, too much death, it seems that ever since the dawn of times man has constantly strived to find plausible reasons to kill. The fight for territory, this Lebensraum, as Nazi politicians call it today, the fight for power, the fight for religious ideas, for resources or for getting their hands on other men’s women, all these are just excuses, pretexts to kill your own kind. It’s human nature itself, sir, just as you mentioned earlier. Well, I took refuge in physics, here the fight is against dead matter, against the organic substance that constitutes the basis of life itself, against a piece of carbon! I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that I could spend my whole life studying the atom, its components and the laws that animate the entire universe!’

Joachim, who had meanwhile moved a little, pushing us with his elbows in vain attempt of getting some space, dared open his mouth, lips trembling, to ask me, ‘You said that there were other moments in history, comparable to those we have experienced for the past three years…’

I smiled at him, surprised by the fragility and suffering permeating his voice. During the past 24 hours Joachim had turned into a moribund, the moment he had been forbidden to dream his yeast dough recipes aloud. He had begun to cough spasmodically, in an increasingly suffocating crescendo, until he crouched down at our feet, out of my visual range. The ordeal that this tiny man was enduring down there, suffocated by overcoats and almost deprived of breathable air, made me truly appreciate my athletic build. When he got back among us, an hour later, the little guy’s face was scarlet and his eyes dull, opaque, and sunken in. I decided to answer his question nonetheless, to make him forget about our situation for a while. After exchanging a glance with Morritz, we pulled apart as far as we could, to make a bit more space for him.

‘Yes, my friend, there are other moments in history comparable to these wretched times, and we don’t even need to dig that deep into the past. The Great War was an absurd, utterly useless genocide in itself, where millions of so-called civilized people lost their lives. And behold, we haven’t learned anything from it, we’ve only refined our killing devices, we’ve sharpened our blade hilts only to start over again. All these crimes and atrocities have been committed in the spirit of relentless nationalism, of ethnicity and of nations’ independence…! I am firmly convinced though that one day these belligerent peoples will want to unite into a unique nation – United Europe – because all the economic, social and political levers will eventually lead to it. And these millions of deaths, of individuals that have given their lives for the abstract notion of homeland? They will have died in vain, as it happened with all wars, in all ages of history…’

The heartbreaking scream of a woman nearby silenced me.

‘He died…! God almighty, he died!’

An endless series of screams followed, but the crowd, brutalized by cold, hunger and thirst just ignored them, waiting for them to die out, from sheer exhaustion. Scenes such as these had generated much emotion a few days before, when the first people had died in the wagon, too weak and breathless to cope with the dreadful conditions, as we could barely move our hands without disturbing those around us. Information was travelling fast from mouth to mouth: ‘His father died…he was only 63, a remarkable man, a doctor…suffocated.’ ‘His younger brother died…of starvation…’

Now it was a small child, who couldn’t find a single drop of milk at his mother’s breast in the last 48 hours, but even this information had become commonplace and failed to arouse much interest. A simple statement, of the kin ‘maybe it’s better this way,’ accompanied by a curt nod, would seal the grave of the newly deceased, giving them consolation and guidance toward the next world.

The smell of putrid flesh mixed with that of feces was so heavy that the mere realization of the fact that they were prisoners in that place induced instant, involuntary stomach spasms to many of them, without being able to throw up, as there was nothing to throw up. At first, we were ashamed of each other, trying to abstain from physiological needs for as long as possible, but we had to cope with it as best we could in one of the four ‘toilets’ improvised from some bags piled up in the wagon’s corners. The urine would immediately drain through the thick oak planks, but the rest stayed there, to accompany us throughout the voyage. We all stank awfully, competing with the corpses that had started to swell next to us.

The excruciating screeching of the wagon’s breaks and the inertia that followed the abrupt braking rocked the crowd from side to side so hard that the frail ones got trampled underfoot. The wagon stopped and absolutely everyone held their breath to better listen to the sounds outside. You could hear the barking voices of some German soldiers, who were running alongside the train.

‘Can you see anything outside?’ dared an impatient voice, lost somewhere in the middle of the wagon.

A swift rumor followed, quickly extinguished by lack of information. In the end, the guy who could see outside through the planks exclaimed something, which was picked up by the curious crowd, from mouth to mouth.

‘Bielsko-Biala!’ said mister Morritz, who had in his turn been informed by an old lady behind him.

‘What can it mean?’ I asked. ‘Where are we…? Unfortunately, this name doesn’t ring a bell…’

The stunned faces around were an answer in itself.

Again, the Germans’ voices got closer to our wagon. This time we could hear clearly enough what they were saying.

‘There are few survivors in the first three wagons…they were probably airtight, they suffocated…I liquidated them. We’re detaching them from the rest of the train right at this moment, herr Obersturmführer, for disinfection.’

‘Check the state of the other four wagons.’

‘Understood…’

As soon as the deadbolts were unlocked, the massive wagon door started to glide rightward, letting in the light. It blinded us all and we instinctively covered our eyes with our hands. In the general bustle, both the dead and the living located near the door tumbled down, probably right at the German soldiers’ feet. Until we managed to sober up, we heard the metallic rattle of two bursts of gunfire, followed by the screams of the women in the wagon, frightened that their hour had come. The children were silent, hidden underneath their mothers’ skirts.

They heard the soldiers’ mocking laughter, which covered the hubbub of the terrified crowd.

‘A miracle…! They’re alive in here, almost all of them…!’

When my eyes adjusted to the light, I could see a glum person, dressed in brown clothes, probably SS, flanked by two soldiers armed to the teeth. The sky was light gray and it snowed sparsely, snowflakes blowing to-and-fro on occasional gusts of wind. Behind them, there was the platform of a small, partially wrecked train station, home to some dozens of crows patiently waiting for their meal.

‘Guten Tag,’ the person said slowly, breaking the glassy terror which had frozen us all.

Then he turned to the others.

‘Empty the wagon of debris, corpses, then re-seal it. Check the others also.’

The soldiers, holding napkins to their noses, rushed to the wagon and started pulling away the corpses, while the relatives were wailing despairingly. The crying was most probably driving them crazy because, for no reason at all, one of them grabbed a girl by the collar and, helped by the other, he pulled her out of the train, where they dropped her on the stone platform. Her every attempt to get up was met by boot kicks in the abdomen, so hard that the girl was soon inert. A woman wearing a scarf made way among the prisoners shouting something at the soldiers in a Slavic language, as far as I could tell. She was probably the girl’s mother. A gun butt across the head blew the woman’s scarf off and she dropped to the ground like a log.

The crowd around me pushed forward to get a better look, hiding the two women from my sight. However, two gunshots and the soldiers’ hysterical laughter forewarned me.

‘Did you see that bitch? She wanted to attack us, no less…Anyone else wants to protest…?’

The soldier who had spoken raised his submachine gun and aimed toward us. From where I was standing, I could well see the dark gun barrel and the muzzle through which Death could spit us in the face with lead. The crowd simmered down, staring in fascination at the gun in the fair-haired kid’s hand.

Within the next five minutes, under the supervision of the two soldiers with their guns pointing at us, all corpses had been silently unloaded. Only about two-thirds of those who had embarked in Vienna were still alive. Not for long though, because they brought other people from the other wagons, whom they pushed in with us as tightly as possible, constantly threatening to shoot them. Only when we were so crammed that we seemed packed like sardines were the soldiers satisfied and they shut the door. The sound of deadbolts locking was even harder to bear than the first time.

Still haunted by the killing of the two women, we all remained silent, striving to breathe, mouths greedy for air raised toward the wagon’s ceiling. In about half an hour, the locomotive signaled our departure and the wheels started turning, leaving the jokes and the pleasant journey wishes from the Nazis on the platform behind. It was only then that I could breathe a sigh of relief, casting meaningful looks at my neighbors, whom I could distinguish mostly from the glimmer of their eyes in the half-light.

‘Where do you think they’re taking us, mister Severin?’ said the physics professor, without any mention of what had just happened. We both knew that there was no point in reminiscing and commenting on the gruesome scenes we had witnessed.

‘I heard there’s a concentration camp somewhere in Poland…or maybe more, who knows? Some soldiers back from the front had made some comments and thus this rumor had spread in Vienna. It’s small wonder, as Hitler has declared himself in favor of them since the beginning. He even pointed out that he was doing nothing else than copying the model initiated by the British and the French in the colonies…’

‘And you think they’re taking us there…? Is it good news, I wonder…?’

We were silent for a while and I kept on looking straight into his panicked eyes. The little guy – who had been hiding at our feet until then – showed up, drinking in my every word.

’Frankly…yes! And you know why? Because they could have killed us right here, in Bilesko-B…B…whatever this place is called. Why so many scruples? We don’t mean anything to them, as you saw for yourself. This can only mean that they’re taking us somewhere to get us working in one of their many war factories. They need work force, after all, don’t they? Since all German men are on the front, someone has to produce those bloody bombs, arms and tanks, don’t you think?

Hearing my words, the little guy seemed to pick up again a little.

‘So, you mean to say that we’ll receive a warm meal…? Water and bread? But that is wonderful!’

‘Yes, but we’ll have to work your ass off, as the concentration camp is not a boarding school for young ladies…I’m certain of it!’

‘I would do anything for a bit of food, I’m dead serious! I’ve lost a