Real History and what Happened at Auschwitz

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

By CNN’s Steve Goldberg

[Website
readers comment on anomalies and anachronisms in the
barber’s story]

OSWIECIM, [Auschwitz] Poland (CNN) —
Joszef Paczynski remembers the day in
1942 when he saw a group of fellow prisoners at
Auschwitz being gassed and cremated.

He was working as a barber to SS officers, including Nazi camp commander Rudolf
Höss.

ONE further reflection: Perhaps Mr Paczynski was lucky to have been captured by the Germans. If he had been captured by the Russians, he would have ended up with the 15,000 other Poles in the mass graves at Katyn. Given that the former Soviet archives reveal that the principal NKVD officers who signed the death warrants and carried out the
Katyn massacre were Jewish, we may well wonder whether an annual Katyn commemoration ceremony will ever be instituted – and whether the world’s heads

of states will see any profit in attending.

Prof
Van Pelt reveals: When Auschwitz was transformed into a museum in 1948, the Poles decided to fake a crematorium-cum-gas chamber for the purpose

It was a job that helped save his life — and gave him a
unique vantage point on the death factory Höss was
creating at the concentration camp.

“Höss was an expert at gassing people,” Paczynski says. “The Germans were constantly searching for a way to kill as many people at a time as quickly as possible.”

Paczynski worked in a building next to the crematorium, and some of his fellow prisoners worked in the clinic upstairs. One day at lunchtime, a group of prisoners was brought to the crematorium, and Paczynski went upstairs.

“I went to the attic of the building, stood on a
box and lifted the roof tiles a bit, and I could see
exactly what was going on,” he remembers. The prisoners
were herded into a small area outside the crematorium.

“The SS officers behaved in a very polite way, telling the prisoners to get undressed and to put their clothes in order, because after going out from the shower you’ll get them back.

“Then everyone was pushed into the cell, the door was shut, and one SS officer went to the roof of the building and poured powder inside an opening. He had a gas mask.

“Although the walls were very thick, I could hear loud screams from there. It lasted 15 minutes, then after, complete silence. Two engines were put to work on the sidewalk at the fullest so the screams would not be heard.

“Afterwards I went downstairs but did not realize what
I was doing. If anyone had seen me, I would have shared their fate.”

Paczynski’s testimony later helped convict some 40 SS guards of crimes against humanity.

After the war, Höss was sentenced to death by a
Polish tribunal and was hanged at a specially constructed gallows at Auschwitz in 1947.

But during the war, Paczynski — as barber to Höss and other SS officers — passed up plenty of chances to kill his captors.

Paczynski, now 85, was speaking to a German audience about the Holocaust when someone at the back of the room stood up and asked, “You saw Höss. You had a knife in your hand. Why didn’t you slit his throat?”

“Yes, I could have done it,” Paczynski replied.
“But I realized very well what the consequences would be.
All my family and half of the camp would be killed. And
of course I realized if this silent son of a bitch would
go, there will be another man who will take his place.”

Paczynski got work as barber in part by being one of the first inmates at Auschwitz.

A captain in the Polish army in 1939, he ran away as the
Germans invaded his country and headed for France, where
Polish soldiers were organizing. But he was arrested crossing the Polish-Slovak border, and the Slovakians handed him to the Germans.

After enduring numerous prisons and interrogations, he was put on the first train to Auschwitz. The date was June
14, 1940. Passing through his hometown of Krakow, unaware of his destination, Paczynski and the other 727 Poles on his train learned that Germany had defeated France as well.

On arriving at Auschwitz, Paczynski was photographed and given a number, 121. It was years before the Nazis would begin tattooing those numbers on prisoners’ left forearms.

“You do not realize where you are,” one of the overseers told the new arrivals, Paczynski recalls. “This is not a sanitarium but a German concentration camp. You can survive here at most three months. If there are any Jews or priests among you, they can live for six weeks.”

The prisoners were then herded into a basement, where the
SS took their personal details. Besides names and places of birth, they were asked about family diseases and how many gold fillings they had.

“Why? Because if they killed or shot you, the first thing they did was look inside your mouth to see if they could find gold teeth. And the family would get a message saying (their relative) died of a disease in the family,” Paczynski says. “This was the beginning of the camp.”

Some of the first prisoners at Auschwitz were chosen for basic duties, such as helping to run the infirmary, pharmacy and barber shop for the SS guards and officers. Paczynski was made a barber’s assistant, sweeping the floor and training to become a barber. After about a year, he was allowed to cut the hair of some of the less senior officers.

“We were guarded on both side and followed by two SS officers who never put away their guns,” he says. “Not all of us were as strong as I was, and some lost their strength along the way. They would sit down under a tree and say, ‘I don’t care what happens next, I can’t go any further.’ And the SS officers would shoot them and keep going.

“Because we were the last group and were following several other groups on the march, the road was covered with corpses. Afterwards, in the literature, they called it the
‘march of death.’ This was the end of my Auschwitz.”

Paczynski was taken to another camp, where he was freed by U.S. troops two days before Germany’s surrender.

“I can say that I was lucky.”

CNN’s Chris Burns contributed to this report.

Auschwitz
index

Elie
Wiesel index | Christopher
Hitchens on Wiesel in The Nation, Feb 2001: “Is there a
more contemptible poseur and
windbag” | Was
Wiesel ever at Buchenwald camp?

New
York Times: A Bear-Faced Lie? Time ‘Too Painful’ to
Remember

From
Misha Defonseca’s flight from Nazis to publication of her
memoir, life has been a battle against the
odds

NOTE: ASSHOL* member.
David Irving invented this fictitious ASSOCIATION of SPURIOUS SURVIVORS of the HOLOCAUST and OTHER
LIARS in a speech in Canada, to describe people like Wilkomirski and Wiesel and Foxman.

Focal Point 2005

write
to David Irving