If life was hell in Auschwitz during Spring and Summer, then what must the experience have been like in Winter? World leaders attending the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the camp this week are likely to be struck by this bitter coldness above all as their first impression of Poland.
However, whilst there may be thick snow all about and temperatures of -5C, this pales in comparison to the Winter of the liberation itself. January 1945 was a hellish month. When the Soviets liberated nearby Cracow the ice was so thick that Soviet tanks could park safely on the River Vistula. By 18th January, when the city was finally liberated, the river's surface was littered with the frozen corpses of the dead.
The actual experience of the camp is incredibly difficult to grasp. "A man has only a limited number of ways in which he can express strong emotions or violent passions' wroteTadeusz Borowski, a Pole who was imprisoned at Auschwitz as a young man."He uses the same gestures as when what he feels is only petty and unimportant. He utters the same ordinary words.'
Borowski's account, which took a literary form, was widely criticized on it's publication in 1948. An uncompromising work that pulls no punches in depicting what inmates had to do to get through the madness, it jarred with the heroic accounts of survival that were commonplace in the post-war epoch.
In Borowski's account, the camps emerge as like Kafkaesque boarding schools. There are the gangs, the bullies, the weaklings and above all the icy discipline.
Whilst there were undoubtedly heroic cases of survival when inmates drew on their religion and triumphed over the barbarity, these were in the minority, and it is Borowski's disturbing account that one feels rings true for the normal man.
Borowski himself survived the camp, and following the war he was briefly considered as the bright literary hope of the socialists. Like many inmates, he had rejected capitalism as a result of his experiences. The routine of the camps, in which exploitation and material bribery were fundamental practices, was considered by many inmates as a damning incarnation of capitalism itself. Borowski commited suciide in 1951, mentally sick and disillusioned with the communist system. His wife had given birth to his son the same day.
|