Bogdan Bartnikowski was 12 years old when he was sent to Auschwitz. He survived, but the nightmare he experienced continues to haunt him. This is how the horror of the camp recalls.
I remember. Who doesn't remember? Everyone has a lot of memories recorded in their heads, which, when they come back suddenly, years later, in memories, make them smile - oh, how beautiful it was then! Some unexpected meeting with someone's eyes, a smile, an exchange of a few trivial words that suddenly become important, the first - because everything that is the first can fall into the heart for life - a kiss. Probably everyone remembers such moments. Forever.
But we also have other events in it, ones that one would like to throw out of it. Is there anyone who has gone through life just treading on roses? It is hard to believe. I and many of my peers are not so lucky. We have memories that you would like to be wiped out of your mind once and for all. End! It was not there! Enough of those damn images that keep coming back day and night. They are a nightmare. For years. And there is no escaping them.
Nightmare Dreams
I press a piece of bread to my chest. A glance to the right, left - no one is there, I'll be eating in a moment. And suddenly the capo appears right behind me. He is aiming the stick, shouting something I don't understand . I start to run, but my legs are made of cotton wool. He's gonna get me. I fall into a corridor - sooner, sooner! This corridor becomes very narrow, my arms touch the walls, it is already difficult to squeeze into it, and the kapo is right behind me! He is already reaching me with his hand…
A tug on the shoulder. I open my eyes. There is no kapo. There is no camp. Someone is touching me. It's the wife.
- What's with you? You screamed, you were choking…
- Nothing, it's just a dream. I was there.
- Again…
- Again. But it's okay. Sleep.
The prisoners were brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau by freight trains.
I lie, I look at the ceiling. I close my eyes. Fall asleep… No! Because if the same dream comes and I'm there again? I slide out from under the covers. Quietly, tiptoeing, I go out onto the balcony. The street is completely empty. The sky in the east is red, the sun will be out soon. The first tram passed. I go back to the room. I'm shaking from the cold. Moment of reflection:what to do? It's very early. I look at the calendar. Oh August 10th!
Hidden
August 10th then… Twenty years ago. One would like to erase this date from memory, but it is impossible. August 10, one thousand nine hundred and forty-four . Warsaw. My district, Ochota. Kaliska Street. An overcrowded, foul-smelling basement. We've been crowding around candles for a week now, because it's dangerous in our apartments. And the cellars are stuffy. Stench. There's no water. And now, even though it's night, we are awake. We are listening.
The unit of "Gustaw" left in the night. In the evening, when it was already known that we would not hold out any longer, "Gustaw" decided:
- We go to the Chojnowskie Forests. Wounded and jerks stay.
It was a sentence on me and some other guys like me. Standing in the yard, with the rain pouring from the red sky, we watched them walk away. My father was among them. They squeezed through the gap in the fence. We were left alone. Women, children, some adult men . What will happen to us when they invade here? They. SS men. And with them from hearing the already known wild roners, Brigade of Russkoj Osvoboditielnoj Narodnoj Armii from the 29th Waffen-SS Division . A bunch of drunk robbers and bandits in uniform. And that they will come, that's for sure. When? In an hour, in two. There is nowhere to escape from them. You have to wait.
Until now, there was silence in the streets. Only explosions and shots came from a distance. But now the arrows are getting closer. They are already roaring next door. Are they shooting? Someone started In your defense but he broke off as a few people shouted
- Hush!
And in great silence, hardly breathing, we wait.
Expulsion
We have pierced passages in the cellars to neighboring houses in Sękocińska. And that's where the voices come from. They have already started the expulsion (…).
- Wychadiii! Be quick!
The soldier grabs my arm, pulls me against him, and pushes me hard until I fall down the stairs. I want to get up, but others are crowding and stepping on my toes. I move up on all fours, then get up and push my way to the street. Where is Mom? In front of me! Ronowiec pushes her against the wall of the house, rummages in her bundle, throws something on the pavement, puts something in his pocket, and screams around, crying, heat from the house that is burning right next to it . The whole crowd rush us to Białobrzeska Street and further, towards Zieleniak, where we fall into the crowd of people driven out of their homes, and then in a large column, march to the station, to the train. freight train.
Bogdan Bartnikowski was sent to Birkenau
- Get in! Quick! - The gendarmes 'help' us climb the steps with their butts and shouting.
I sit on the floor against the wall. Extremely cramped, hard to move around. And the door screams shut. Darkness. Mum whispering next door. How good it is so close. A jerk of the wagon. The train starts. They're taking us somewhere. How long has this night dragged on ... There is a lot of whispering around, someone is crying, someone is praying. More and more stuffy. I close my eyes, but sleep does not come. There is still night darkness behind the wired window, sometimes the dim light turns yellow only for a moment as we pass the station. More and more annoying stench in the car . The train goes fast, slows down, stops, moves, drags ... We're going into the unknown.
Journey into the unknown
Twenty years I haven't been where they took us then. I didn't want to go back there. I wanted to forget, but it was impossible. (…) So many years have passed, and that time resides in me. Why?! Shouldn't I forget those memories anymore? I think we must finally go to that damned Birkenau. Maybe it will be easier for me if after twenty years I again enter the barrack in the quarantine sector . Maybe I can get rid of the nightmare that has been tormenting me for so many years.
I overcame myself. I'm going. The train starts slowly, barely perceptible from the platform. It's not that smelly, crowded grocery store anymore. I look at flashing housing estates outside the window. Comparison with that trip? It does not make sense. Then I was driven into the unknown. Now I know where I am going. For what. I close my eyes. I see that wagon immediately. Not! I do not want to see him! (...) But I decided:I have to go there. How was it then…
Already bright in the wagon. We drove all night. I push someone's legs away from me. The stench because someone pissed in the corner. I would also like to. I can take a little longer. Mom is napping against my shoulder. The train screeches and stops. The SS men lingo outside the window. Screams, then a shot. There is already movement in the wagon, everyone woke up. The man at the counter says:
- It's Częstochowa. The platform is full of gendarmes. And women with water.
- Drink! To drink… - A choir of several voices.
- Not! There will be no water. They chase these women away…
A siren roared, a jerk, the faster clatter of wheels. We continue to the unknown. More and more stuffy in the wagon. The nuns, of whom there are a few here with a whole bunch of kids from some orphanage, start praying Under your protection but few pray.
Wires, wires, wires…
Let's move on. We are standing somewhere in the field, as the man at the window says. We're going again. The train slows down, crawls, accelerates, stops for long minutes and starts moving again. It is getting darker and darker in the wagon. It's evening already. When will this journey finally end? The wheels on the rails are knocking less and less. We roll slowly, slower and slower, the screech of the brakes. We stand. Suddenly, the hurgot of the sliding door. And then screams:
- Schnell! Alles schnell! Get out!
Numb after hours of driving in the crowd, we lift ourselves from the floor and push us to the exit. The blinding light of the headlights straight in the eyes . And when I stand in the door for a moment, I notice those who throw us out of the wagon - people in striped clothes, as if in pajamas, behind them a line of soldiers and even further, in dim light, lots of barracks with flat roofs - and wires, wires, wires. And I also notice two high chimneys, from which flames burst a few meters up. And above all this, some unfamiliar, suffocating odor that is impossible to breathe. Where are we? Where did they bring us?
The text is a fragment of the memoirs written by Bogdan Bartnikowski in the book "Returns to Auschwitz" (Prószyński i S-ka, 2022).
(…) The train slows down, a few people in the compartment get up, get together to leave, the corridor gets crowded. The name of the OŚWIĘCIM station is slowly moving behind the window. (...) Everything here is foreign to me, completely different than what comes back to me in dreams and what stuck in my memory. Am I wrong? Oh, I am already approaching the brick two-story buildings with the crowd thickening. I can already see the gate with the inscription ARBEIT MACHT FREI - I have seen it many times on the TV screen, but I do not remember it. I go to the one-story house where the museum guards are standing.
- I was here in '44. From Warsaw, from the uprising. And I don't recognize anything. I was twelve at the time.
- Because they brought you to Birkenau - says the guard (…).
From here you only go through the chimney
Not! I will not pass! For nothing! Because… because maybe I won't be able to come back. After all, then SS men and capos, if they wanted to answer our questions at all:what are we here for? when are we going to be released? they said mockingly:
- Free ... From here you leave only through the chimney. There is no other way out.
(…) I stop, look back, look at the gate. This is the first time I see her from this side, because I looked at her every day from the camp. However, I will go in there ... And I am already in Birkenau. After a few steps, I stop on the rails. Our transport rolled on these rails. The first one with the inhabitants of the insurgent Warsaw. I look to the left - rows of low brick blocks. I've seen them! I remember, I remember everything!
Bogdan Bartnikowski survived the hell of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp as a boy
The picture of Birkenau stayed in my head exactly. These brick single-story buildings are a women's camp. My mother was imprisoned there. I look to the right - oh, there's a whole row of wooden blocks with no windows, just a row of skylights under the roof. Behind the blocks there is a huge square with rows of chimneys. So much today is left over from further sectors of the Birkenau men's camp. But there is this first row of blocks. We lived in them until October 1944. For us, the boys from the Warsaw Uprising. Nam, as they called us here, kleine polnischen Banditen aus Warschau .
Yes! Little Polish bandits from Warsaw. It was us. I was a bandit too.
Birkenau camp
Only one thing is wrong for me in the painting by Birkenau. At that time, there was a crowd of striped prisoners, tramping in clouds of dust when it was dry or in the mud. There was not an iota of green. The grass was plucked up, eaten or trampled by the prisoners. And now there is lush greenery around, and tired visitors are sitting in crowds on it - they are resting, eating ... (...) And I can't see the crematorium chimneys. Piling up where they used to be, a pile of rubble.
I'm going to my wooden barracks. Because they are ordinary barracks, then called blocks. I walk for a long time along the uneven camp street to the place where she stands in the first row. Then there are only concrete rectangles of foundations. There was a kitchen here, with barbed wire behind it and a gate leading to the next sectors of the men's camp . I crossed it in a group of boys on the way to the bathhouse or harnessed with friends to the rolwaga, sometimes we also went this way to work in "Mexico" - a new sector was to be built there, but they did not have enough time for it.
I turn back, walk along the street, counting the barracks I pass. I stop at the fifth in a row. We were stuffed here right after they were brought from Warsaw. I look at the square between the barracks. We stood on it every day for the roll call. Next to our immobile column, placed at attention in fives, against the wall of the barracks lay, also in fives, one on top of the other, a pile of dead or killed prisoners. They waited, sprinkled with lime, for transport to the crematorium. We stood next to them for several days before the camp commando collecting the bodies of the dead threw them on carts and took them to the crematorium.
The life of children in Auschwitz
Heading towards the Gate of Death, I count the barracks I pass. Groups of visitors look into those that are open, but I keep going and so I reach the one who used to be number thirteenth above the door. The door is ajar, I can go inside. It's empty. Right behind the entrance there is the hearth of the stove heating the barracks. There are bunks at the sides. Our bunks. The same ones we slept on then. Three levels. It so happened that I usually slept on the highest one. Five of us slept side by side, sometimes six. One blanket. What kind of blanket? - a rag with holes actually, one for all.
How strange such an empty barracks look to me now. There were a hundred and fifty of us here at the time. Only boys from Warsaw. Age:ten to fourteen. The incessant buzz, sometimes broken crying, sometimes the scream of the kapo. They were different to us. Some were indifferent, they only made sure that there was peace in the room, that is, on two three-story bunks, because it was the kingdom of one room room supervisor, but there were also a few rascals, prisoners wearing black triangles next to the camp number, after a year or two of the camp, convicted of murder , theft, rape or other criminal offenses.
One hundred and fifty of us were here then. Only boys from Warsaw. Age:ten to fourteen.
One of them was Bloody Olek, a thug imprisoned for robberies; as a kapo he willingly took advantage of us:kick us, hit us with a cane - you could see that it was a joy for him. Or Mr. Kazio ... He was the one who distributed our bread, and sometimes - rarely, but it happened - he walked along the bunks with a bucket of marmalade. Yes! Sometimes we got a beetroot delicacy. Mr. Kazio knocked the spoon with marmalade on the piece of bread he had put in place, licked the next spoon with it, smacked another on the cheek with it and continued walking. He was left with half a bucket after such splitting.
Fight for survival
Spoon… I remembered how Mr. Kazio was dividing the marmalade, and immediately remembered the day when I got the spoon in Birkenau. Because I didn't have it! When we were driven out of our house in Warsaw, who thought about something like a spoon ... And then, in the camp, I stood in line for soup in the evening. Before that, I found a bruised, dirty pot. I ran to the wash basin to wash it a little and rinsed it for a long time because it was obvious that it hadn't been washed in a long time.
I crammed myself into the barrel with the soup, the kapo poured some of this lura into the pot - it was even warm - but I didn't have a spoon! How to eat it? I tilted the pot and lapped it all up. It was running down my chin, my shirt, because how can you eat soup without a spoon? There were a few pieces of cabbage and swede left at the bottom. I picked them up with my fingers. And the next day, when they chased us to the square next to the barrack, I found a spoon. What a joy! It only had a small piece of the shaft, but that's fine because you could put it in your pocket. I rubbed it on the gravel for a long time to scratch off something that had dried completely, because it was probably lying in the mud for a long time.
And when the kapo again poured me into the pot of the camp soup in the evening, I already had a spoon!
Source:
The text is a fragment of the memoirs written by Bogdan Bartnikowski in the book "Returns to Auschwitz" (Prószyński i S-ka, 2022).