We were in Auschwitz
The first translation of a confusing, erratic memoir of life in Auschwitz, collaboratively written by three Polish survivors.
The authors offer a rarely seen view of life in Auschwitz. As political prisoners
(rather than Jews), all three were able to manipulate the deadly bureaucracy in their favor. The first third of the book depicts their rise from laborers on the cusp of extermination to well-fed
service providers within the camp.
We are taught the difference between good and bad work units (kommandos), we witness the horrors of disease and medical treatment in the camps, and we are given a glimpse of the starvation-crazed
nihilism that governed the existence of the prisoners. Arresting stuff, narrated with neither poetry nor insight, but effective enough. The three narrators, however, become something of a
triple-headed beast for the reader. Only rarely (and even then only accidentally) is it clear which of the three is narrating.
This difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that different voices are plainly at work, and these fluctuations become more noticeable as Siedlecki et al. find themselves in the somewhat safe
positions of hospital orderly, nurse in training, and "Kanada" corps member (the group that determined whether new arrivals would be sent to the gas chambers or made to work). Without starvation,
regular beatings, and the proximity of death, life in Auschwitz becomes banal—which
is, in many ways, the most horrifying aspect of the story.
As the smoke of burnt bodies clouds the air above, the authors were having sex with gypsy women, conducting petty arguments with SS officers, and conniving to increase their take of booty from the doomed prisoners. In a letter to a loved one, the
days are even described as "delightful." Perhaps originally intended to document horror, the past 54 years have rendered Siedlecki et al. strange ghosts of an uncommon Auschwitz. An odd drop in the unfillable bucket of Holocaust memoirs.
Pub Date : 01/08/2000
ISBN : 1-56649-123-1
Page count:212pp
Review Posted Online : May 20th, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue : July 15th, 2000
Author : Janusz Nel Siedlecki , Krystyn Olszewski , Tadeusz Borowski , translated by Alicia Nitecki