We found the surviving Russians in a terrible state of degradation and neglect. They were billeted in the unfinished buildings, were exposed to the weather, and died in great numbers. Their corpses were superficially buried by hundreds and thousands. Later we had to dig up these corpses and bury [burn?] them.
The first French male transport also reached Auschwitz before ourselves. It contained 1,300 naturalized French Jews. The numbering of these French Jews began at about 27,500. As I mentioned before, our numbers began with 28,600, therefore, no male transport had arrived in Auschwitz between the French and ourselves.
(Women were processed separately and were numbered parallel with men; the girls from Slovakia who arrived before us were given numbers 1000–8000). We found the survivors of the French Jewish transport in Birkenau, about 700 men in a state of total exhaustion. The remainder died within one week.
6. Experiences at Birkenau April – May 1942
The following were billeted in the 3 completed blocks:
(a) The so-called "prominents," i.e., professional criminals and older Polish political prisoners who were entrusted with the leadership of the camp;
(b) Survivors of the French Jews (about 700);
(c) Jews from Slovakia, 634 at first, to which were added a few days later those who had stayed behind in Zward;
(d) Surviving Russians who were living in the half-completed houses or had no shelter at all, and whose numbers diminished so rapidly that they did not constitute a group to be accounted for.
We Jews from Slovakia had to work with the Russian survivors. French Jews worked separately. After three days I was sent with 200 Slovak Jews to work in the Auschwitz Deutsche Aufrustungswerke. We were billeted at Birkenau and went out to work early in the morning. Food was given us twice daily, one liter of carrot soup at noon and thirty dekagrams of bad bread in the evening. Working conditions were hard beyond imagination, so that most of us could not stand it. Weakened as we were from starvation and the inedible food, the death-rate took on frightening proportions; in our working group of 200, from 30-35 died each day. Many were simply beaten to death by the work supervisors and the so-called "capos."* The daily shortage caused by deaths was made good from the groups staying in Birkenau.
* “Capos” were inmates in concentration camps who held positions of authority. They often treated other inmates with extreme brutality – ed.
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