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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and Operation
of
the Gas Chambers © | |
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Page 537 |
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POSTFACE
by the author |
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His position with respect to the
extermination
of the Jews at Birkenau and the personal
experiences that led him to undertake this study
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I am not a Jew and I was at one time a “revisionist”.
After reading this book, some will no doubt think that I still am
one. This is quite possible and I bear them no grudge. The
distinction between these two fiercely opposed schools, the
“exterminationists” and the “revisionists”, becomes meaningless once
a certain threshold of knowledge about the former Auschwitz-Birkenau
concentration camp has been reached. I have passed this point of no
return.
Any normal human being, visiting the Auschwitz
camp for the first time, feels a deep emotional shock. The weight of
history allows of no other response. An ordinary but motivated
tourist, I nearly did away with myself one evening in October 1979
in the main camp, the Stammlager, overwhelmed by the evidence and by
despair. I have often wondered how I would have been able to perform
this act of self-destruction. Since that lugubrious evening, I have
spent a total of almost three months, spread over ten visits between
1979 and 1984, studying the German archives in the Auschwitz State
Museum, examining the ruins of Birkenau, trying to understand and
put into place the pieces of this gigantic and incredible puzzle.
After the first few visits, I no longer saw the barbed wire fences
surrounding the camp, directly visible from the windows of the first
floor of Block 24 which houses the Archives. They had become
invisible to me, as I was myself, melted into the town of Oswiecim,
where it was impossible to identify in my Polish silhouette, hidden
among so many others, the Frenchman in his tie and three piece suit
who had disembarked from the “LOT” twin engined aircraft at Balice
the day before.
As the years passed, I experienced the fever
that overcame the country, sweeping aside all in its path, saw the
birth of Hope, the first inscriptions under the mantle of
“Solidarnosc”, patriotic songs sung by the family, almost open
listening to western radio broadcasts, the explosion of red and
white arm bands, strikes and sit-ins where production continued 24
hours a day, the waiting, in anguish but holding firm, for the
armoured divisions massed to the east, but which never came. I
experienced the curfew, totally deserted shops, meatless days,
coffee rationed to 100 grammes for two months and whose coupons
enabled one only to obtain a bottle of vodka. I experienced the
return to normal. In other words, I shared in the ordinary and
difficult everyday life of a town in the south of Poland called
Oswiecim, once known as Auschwitz.
I have brought back some
bad habits, such as drinking tea, knocking myself out with hard
liquor when things are going badly and all looks grey, skipping
meals, fiddling on the gasoline, knowing the value of the dollar,
understanding the meaning of the verb “to organize”. I have also
fallen under the spell of the “Lady in Ermine”, by Leonardo da
Vinci, jewel of the Czartoryski collection; learned to be satisfied
with little and to be patient, and finally, I came away with a great
love for Poland and its people. I emerged proud, not of being a
Frenchman from France, but of having a French mind and living in
France. And I am now innoculated for life against any form of
totalitarian system.
I became a historian of the Auschwitz
Krematorien purely by accident for I am a pharmacist by profession.
Looking for the origins of my interest in a past that does not
appear to have much to do with my own, and in such an uninviting
subject, means delving right back to my early childhood.
My
family came from Poitou. My parents moved to the Paris region before
the war, attracted by the capital and taking advantage of an offer
made by the government. They were caught there by the war. My
father, who was a captain in the reserve, fought a “splendid”
campaign in the north, culminating in Dunkirk and its Stukas, and a
Channel crossing in which he had to change boats half way across,
the first having been too badly damaged to continue. After three
days’ well-earned rest in England, he was sent back to the continent
to participate in the Battle of France, from which he emerged
unscathed, just avoiding capture by the Germans and anticipating the
Armistice by a few days. Demobilized in the free zone, he returned
to his civilian functions. He was not contacted by the Resistance
for the simple reason that his local chief, being a doctor and thus
being entitled at that time to the military rank of warrant officer,
did not want to recruit a clandestine fighter of higher rank than
himself. Although a Christian, my father did have a scare one day in
the street, when a German police control found that his nose had a
semitic look about it. It was not really possible for him to trace
his family tree back far enough to show that the Arabs had reached
Poitiers before being defeated there by Charles Martel in 732. But
his genes could remember this.
Born early in 1944, I was six
months old when the Germans departed. My knowledge of the war is
limited to my impressions as a foetus and young baby. Our family was
relatively little affected by the war except, according to my
parents, for some disagreeable periods as from 1944, when the food
supply became homoeopathic and barely edible. The allied bombing
forced my mother to take refuge in the cellar and her enlarged belly
bounced at each step. As we were living in Villepinte, famous before
the war for its sanatorium, we had to put up with the fighting
between the Americans and the Germans at the Liberation. I took all
this with Olympian calm, sleeping like a log in the midst of the
shooting, even though it appears that some shots passed through the
house . Despite the proximity of Drancy, nobody suggested to me, as
a purely Catholic baby, that I should take a trip to the disquieting
land of “Pitchipoï”, unlike some other dear little angels, some of
whom had a first name not unlike my own. They had this trip imposed
upon them and were deported some 1700 kilometres to the east, to the
void of “Pitchipoï”*. The hundreds of thousands of visitors to the
remarkable and famous exhibition held in the Berlitz Palace from 7th
September to 14th December 1941 ** had learned to distinguish at a
glance between them and me. Visual acuity has never been the same
since August 1944.
On the paternal side, all I had left was
my grandmother, who lived not far from Civray. She was a solitary
peasant woman whose husband had been killed in the “race for the
sea” in 1915. Then the Normandy landings came at last, and four days
later, on 10th June 1944, 75 kilometres from where she lived, there
was an event that has marked the region for ever, the tragedy of
Oradour-sur-Glane (Photo 1].
All the surrounding
populations were greatly affected, even distant families such as
ours, so strong were the bonds of kinship at that time. My earliest
memories were marked by the end of the world war and by this
tragedy. A tank of the 2nd Armoured Division, a jeep and some
soldiers made up a substantial proportion of my favorite toys, a
faithful reflection of the era. I rediscovered the Liberation, with
Leclerc, Juin, Tassigny and de Gaulle, in the magazines my father
had bought, as soon as I was old enough to be able to leaf through
them. The silhouettes of Sherman tanks and half tracks were more
familiar to me than that of the Renault car. The irruption of the
military universe into my existence is explained by the fact that we
had moved. As from the 50s, my parents were working at La
Boissière Ecole. La Boissière, “a smiling little village
in the outer suburbs of Paris”, received its scholastic suffix only
long after the opening, on 4th November 1886, of “L’Ecole
Militaire Enfantine Hèriot”, taking children from 5 to 13 years
old to be reared by the army and “brought up in the cult of Honour
and the Fatherland”. The proximity — [ only had to cross the road —
of the military college meant that my horizon was veiled in dark
blue, the color of the college uniform. It was not until very much
later that I realized this.
My grandmother came to stay with
us and enjoy the company of her grandson from time to time. On
Thursdays, when my parents went to Paris, she looked after me. She
would read me G Bruno’s “Le tour de la France par deux
enfants”, a classic work found in all our schools,
recounting the joys and sorrows of two young children from Lorraine.
An extraordinary tool of revanchiste propaganda, it served on our
side as an unconscious alibi for the generations of simple peasants
who massacred one another in the stupid butchery of 1914-18. It
remains famous for its caption on page 188, under the heads of four
men: “THE FOUR RACES OF MAN — The white race, the most perfect of
the human races...” Grandmother’s reading was just a pretext, or
rather an introduction, for her own anecdotes and tales. Oradour,
destroyed by the SS, could not fail to be one of them. During our
visits “to see the family” , it was not unusual for me to come
across a pamphlet or illustrated book dealing with this massacre.
The photographic montages with a dark SS shadow falling across the
white ruins and the red sky made a very strong impression on a young
mind. I think I visited the actual ruins of Oradour several times
during this period, but I remember very little of it. When I was
twenty I went back there in the height of summer. Life was
everywhere, with grass and other plants reclaiming their rights. The
contrast between my memories and the present reality seemed to me to
be ridiculous and irreconcilable. These thoughts within the the
ruined walls overgrown by vegetation no longer mean anything now
that Franco-German reconciliation and friendship are the main
pillars of Europe. I have never understood, and still do not
understand, why the village of Oradour, except for the church, has
not been rebuilt, and by the Germans. The human experience of
Oradour should be enshrined in itself, in its flesh and in its
spirit, not symbolized by paltry ruins.
At the age of ten,
completely conditioned by the military entourage of La
Boissière, I had to take the military schools entrance
examination in order to be able to continue my schooling at the
La Flèche Military Academy. I passed in spite of myself and
put on the uniform of the Brutions. Despite appearances, I was never
actually an army pupil — my parents paid a fee. admittedly very
modest, but in return for this I was free to leave the school if I
so desired, and the school administration was free to throw me out
if my school results were not up to scratch. It was an excellent
arrangement which, while it filled me with fear in the lower
classes, appeared highly profitable at the end of my schooling, by
giving me the opportunity of leaving free of all obligations towards
the army apart from the normal military service. So many pupils took
advantage of this possibility that the only ones left in the classes
preparing for entry to the army, navy and air force officers'
colleges were real “army boys ” trying desperately to rise above the
mediocre career of non-commissioned officer imposed as “payment” for
their free schooling. During the eight years I passed within these
“ancient”, walls, I only once heard a far-sighted officer deplore
this state of affairs. This was in a speech before my company one
day when the results were being announced. The lower classes of the
academy were of no use to the military and virtually invariably
turned the boys against the army. In a “Journal des
Voyages”, of 30th October 1904, I found an article on
the Academy by Major Annet, in which he wrote: “The fact is that the
pupils are subjected to a barracks regime too early, and this
sometimes turns them against the army, so that the results obtained
are perhaps not always in line with the sacrifice made by the
State”. The situation still remained unchanged half a century
later. |
| The transition from family to military life was
difficult. A solitary and individualistic boy, I was plunged into a
collective and prison-like milieu. I had to resign myself to this as
best I could. The intellectual and moral training I received was of
great value, but was suited to the years 1940-50 and totally
inappropriate for the years to follow. My only means of escape from
the austere way of life was to read and to dream. A book is freedom.
In a life based on discipline and school work, the good or bad
results of which directly influenced friendships, only |
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| Translator's notes: |
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| * |
Pitchipoï: Name given by the
Jewish children interned in Drancy to the unknown place in the East
where the Jews were go (Auschwitz-Birkenau). |
| ** |
Exhibition entitled “Le
Juif et la France”, [The Jew and
France]. | |
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AUSCHWITZ:
Technique
and operation
of the gas chambers
Jean-Claude Pressac
© 1989, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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