The Testimony by Halina Wagowska Read Free Book Online Page B

the ‘big picture’ she was able to view. At times I was exasperated by her lack of attention to the immediate; that in spite of my warnings of a particularly murderous guard on duty that day, or other approaching dangers, she focused on it only briefly. But she would go and give those warnings to Mother at the other end of the barrack. Frieda, Mother and Goldie often shared their thoughts.
    Along with regression came the slow process of brutalisation: a dulling of compassion and sensibilities, where the need to find a pebble to suck to fill our stomachs with saliva to relieve the hunger pains became stronger than the will to listen to a distressed inmate; where watching another hanging no longer had a lasting effect; and where devising ways of torturing our torturers became a creative pastime.
    After some particularly humiliating episodes, I would be consumed by hatred and devise instruments of torture to use on the Nazis ‘if we survive’. I told Mother about one: I would put our camp commanders in a wire cage, the two opposite walls of which are pushed by tanks, so as to slowly crush them to death while we watched and heard the cracking of their bones. I could not see why Mother got so upset. Later I heard her say, to a woman who kept talking about the damage to her property, that the greatest damage was being done to the minds of children—would they ever be normal if they survived? I must have been on the verge of insanity then. But in Frieda, as in Mother and Goldie, neither regression nor brutalisation was evident.
    The conditions were changing, and were so unpredictable, that one had to play it by ear when it came to what was the best survival technique: in some situations, it was safer to be a helpful and accepted member of a ‘pack’; in others, being left to one’s own devices was probably better. The most common way for inmates to help each other survive was to divert the overseer’s attention during a prolonged beating or if some illegal activity was going on. We would usually stage a fight between several inmates. The overseers often found these fights entertaining, but there was also a risk of punishment for it.
    Spying on other inmates was rewarded with extra food. In Stutthof, we suspected one older woman was informing the overseers about messages being sent to other sections, and about people who changed uniforms with dead or dying persons. She was seen speaking with the overseer and, on several occasions, seemed to have a larger than usual portion of bread. We gave her a beating one night, and a warning. She was not maimed; it was just another beating. And a measure of the degree to which we had been brutalised.
    I think, to survive, one needed a combination of the following: good physical and mental stamina at the outset; adaptability, in the sense of quickly learning a whole new set of reflexes and coping mechanisms and shedding those that had become a handicap; improvising and quick thinking was a help, while rigid attitudes were a drawback; the ability to retain hope against all odds; a strong will to live; and a strong sense of human dignity. Perhaps a black—and often sick—sense of humour helped. Wisdom or experience was of little use as there was no precedent, only total unpredictability. Sheer chance and luck were still decisive as life depended on the whim or mood of those in power at the moment. No quality obviates a hail of bullets.
    Our arrival at the barracks had caused such overcrowding that there was not enough room to stretch our legs at night, but this was soon relieved in the usual way: carrying out the dead in the morning was one of the few tasks of each day before the endless empty hours unfolded. We fought the lice, sucked pebbles and amused ourselves by watching the deranged in their bizarre activities. One of them recited incoherently and theatrically, another went through a series of movements as if she were at home. We would guess whether she was arranging flowers,