My Visit To Hell

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More exhibits. The Nazis kept such meticulous records, which in the end only meant that there was a vast amount to destroy as the Red Army approached in January 1945. Every death—murder—was written down. Jarek points to a photocopy of a ledger that survived. “The reason given was never ‘bullet’ or ‘gas,’ but instead ‘heart attack’ or ‘kidney function’.” Deaths are listed in intervals of minutes.

In the next case are photocopies of transit passes for the trucks that brought the cannisters of Zyklon B pellets. The contents are listed as “material for the displacement of Jews.” Here are the minutes from the Wannsee Conference outside Berlin on January 20, 1942, the meeting of the board of directors of the corporation in charge of the Final Solution. These are free of euphemism. One page shows the goal: a column of numbers, country-by-country tallies, with a bottom line of 11 million.

Up a flight of stairs, around a corner. No more paperwork. Now it gets personal: two tons of human hair behind glass. Mounds on mounds, amorphous and hard to take in at first, until you focus and see the pigtails and braids. Jarek remarks that they were going to send some of this to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, but in the end it was declined as “too much.” The hair was shorn after the gassings, then efficiently dried in the crematoria so it could be industrially spun into carpeting.

Here is a large pile of spectacles, a spidery mass of rusted wire-frames and dusty lenses. These were left with the clothing in the dressing rooms, so the last things seen through these glasses would have been nervous kapos and Death’s-Head guards.

Behind another wall of glass is a jumble of rusted artificial limbs, canes, crutches, braces. Like the hair, it blurs into abstraction until the eye settles on a child’s fake leg. Now it’s into another room and the suitcases, piles and piles of shriveled leather suitcases. They wrote their names on them in large white letters. Jarek points out the word “orphan” in Dutch. Hundreds of names. I write down one: PETR EISLER 1942 KIND. The year of his birth and his child—kinder—status. In the next room comes the display of children’s clothing, pacifiers, rattles, hairbrushes. Then the shoes, a mountain. Finally the empty canisters of Zyklon B, perhaps a hundred or more, in a pile. By to the calculations of Rudolph Hoss, Auschwitz’s first commandant, it required seven kilos of Zyklon to murder—not the word he used—1,500 people, so this pile here might have sufficed for perhaps 75,000 or 100,000 human beings. It appears from the tops that they refined the process of opening the cans. Some are jagged, others have been smoothly cut, as if in one motion by a machine. Across from this display is a clay diorama of a gas chamber in action. Once everyone was inside, between 700 and 1,500, depending on which of the five gas chambers it was, the doors and windows were sealed tight. The bluish pellets of diatomite soaked in hydrocyanic acid were poured through chutes. Exposed to oxygen, the pellets gave off prussic acid, blocking the exchange of oxygen in the blood. Those close to the chutes died instantly, the ones farther away took longer. Hoss watched one gassing through a peephole. In his Reminiscences before he was hanged in 1947, he describes clinically that it took two or more minutes before the screams turned to moans. Still they didn’t open the doors for half an hour, just in case. After that it was safe for the Sonderkommando, the prisoner work crews, to wade into the tangle of bodies, vomit, and excrement to get the hair and the gold teeth and drag the bodies next door to the crematorium. The work paid well and was competed for: one-fifth liter of vodka, five cigarettes, 100 grams of sausage for each job.

It’s gotten colder outside. We’re approaching Block 10 now, where Professor Doctor Carl Clauberg, a university professor of gynecology described by Borowitz as “a man in a green hunting outfit and a gay little Tyrolian hat decorated with many brightly shining sports emblems, a man with the face of a kindly satyr,” sterilized women and men with chemicals and roentgens and infected children with disease, for science. He was released from prison by the Soviets in 1956. Jarek says, “He went back to Germany and took out an advertisement in the newspaper saying, ‘Dr. Clauberg is seeking an assistant.’ He did not even change his name.” A trace of a smile. “He was arrested and died the same year, of poor health.” Elsewhere at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dr. Josef Mengele performed his experiments on twins and dwarves.

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