At Auschwitz, there was a block that the prisoners did not look at like the others. He was apart, watched, withdrawn into himself. The windows had been boarded up with wooden planks that completely blocked out the outside light. The main door was locked from the outside. Between block 11 and block 10, separated by a wooden palisade that made invisible what was happening in the space between them, was the wall of death.
a wall of black planks covered with cork which absorbed bullets and against which from 1940 until the evacuation of the camp in January 1945, thousands of people were executed with a bullet to the back of the neck. Anyone who crossed the threshold of block 11 did not know what awaited them on the other side.
This could have been a Gestapo interrogation that ended with a return to the barracks. This could have been the sentence of 25 lashes which left the prisoner unable to walk, but alive. This could be the basement, the 90cm x 90cm standing cells where four people spent the night on their knees because there was no room for anything else.
This could have been the starvation cell where there was no water, only darkness and the time needed for the body to cease functioning. It could have been the inner courtyard, the black wall, the shooting, but some went in and came out alive. How could someone enter Block 11 and survive? The answer was not unique.
It was a set of circumstances that depended on the reason why a prisoner had been sent there, who he had sent there, what the interrogation revealed, what the system needed at that particular time from that prisoner, and something that the survivors themselves later described with different words, but which referred back to the same idea: the ability to keep a cool head throughout the experience, not to break down in a way that would hasten death.
Block 11 was not a homogeneous institution. It was a multi-functional institution that coexisted in the same building and produced radically different destinies. A prisoner could be sent there by the political section, the department of the Gestapo, which operated inside the camp and investigated political offenses.
Attempted escape, membership in clandestine organizations, contact with the outside world. He could be sent there by the camp command following a violation of the regulations. Theft, talking to a prisoner in the wrong block, not revealing oneself quickly enough to a guard. He could arrive directly from outside a [music] Gestapo prison in Krakow or Warsaw brought in to be questioned about something that was happening outside the camp.
and he could achieve this in the first months of his existence as a member of a group that the system had decided to eliminate without the formalities of any procedure. Each of its arrival routes had its own rhythm, its own logic, and its own probabilities. A prisoner arriving for questioning about an escape attempt had different chances than a man brought in as part of a reprisal group.
A prisoner who had stolen bread had a different chance than the leader of an underground resistance network. Block 11 did not produce a single type of result; it produced all results, and the difference between them depended on variables that the prisoner could influence in some cases and that he absolutely could not influence in others.
The Block 11 building was a two-story brick barracks like the other blocks in the main Auschwitz camp. Originally built as a Polish army barracks before the war, it was later adapted by the SS for their own purposes after the occupation. From the outside, the most visible difference from the other blocks was the boarded-up windows. Wooden planks were nailed from the outside, making it impossible to see in or out.
Prisoners in neighboring blocks could go weeks without seeing anyone enter or leave Block 11, and they could go weeks without hearing anything about what was happening there because the building’s acoustics and the distance allowed it. It was only on days when executions took place in the inner courtyard that one could hear if the wind was blowing in the right direction.
The sharp sound of a gunshot. The ground floor of the building was the administrative area. There was a room where the registration procedures for new arrivals took place, where names, prisoner numbers and the reason for internment in the block were noted. There was a room where some interrogations took place, equipped in a way that the testimonies of the survivors describe with an economy of detail that is not discretion, but a difficulty in saying, a chair, a table, guards who could stay in the room or leave it according to
instructions. The members of the political section who conducted the interrogations were Gestapo officials, trained in interrogation procedures that included physical violence as a regular instrument. The upper floor contained ordinary detention cells, insofar as anything in Block 11 could be described as ordinary.
Space for several prisoners, no heating, limited light, access to latrines restricted to specific times of the day and monitored by guards. The prisoners who were in the cells upstairs were waiting. They waited for the outcome of the interrogation, waited for the sentence of the SS summary court, waited to be taken back to the camp or led to the basement or the courtyard.
The basement was different. The basement of Block 11 contained four types of cells that the SS had designed to produce different degrees of suffering and different probabilities of death. The first category was that of ordinary punishment cells, dark, damp, without adequate ventilation, where prisoners spent the night after working during the day in the camp’s commandos.
The second category consisted of dark, hermetically sealed cells, without any source of light and with such reduced ventilation that prisoners who remained there for several days suffered the effects of lack of oxygen in addition to hunger and cold. The third category was that of starvation cells where no food or water was provided and where the prisoner remained until he died or until the sentence had fulfilled its objective of reprisal.
and that the SS decided to take him out. The 4th category was that of the Steizen, the upright cells. These were four compartments carved into the basement wall, each approximately 90 cm wide by 90 cm deep. To enter, the prisoner had to kneel and crawl forward . Once inside, there wasn’t enough space to sit or lie down. The only possible movement was to remain standing.
or crouching. In each steresel, four prisoners were locked up simultaneously, which meant that the four had to share a 90cm x 90cm space in complete darkness. They remained there from the end of the workday until the beginning of the next, when they were taken out to perform their work service in the camp before being locked up again at nightfall.
The prisoners sent to the stesalenes were not removed from daily work. During the day, he marched with the commandos, carried materials, respected quotas, and functioned in the camp with the same level of physical requirement as any other prisoner. At night, he would return to the basement. This combination, working during the day and extreme confinement at night, was designed to produce cumulative exhaustion which, in physically weakened individuals, could be fatal within days.
Those with a more resilient constitution could survive for weeks. There were prisoners who left the Stzelen. Their testimonies are the ones that most directly answer the central question about Block 11. How did people survive that? The answer that appears most consistently in these testimonies is not the one one might expect.
It’s not physical strength, even if physical strength mattered. It’s not the will to live, even though that also counted. The answer that keeps coming up is heat. The body heat of the three other prisoners in the cell. The 90×90 space, which was torture when you were the only occupant, became something else entirely when four people shared that space.
Four bodies in cm surv warmed each other in a way that made the night more bearable in purely thermal terms. The design of the stesenas had unintentionally produced a condition in which the extreme proximity of bodies was simultaneously the cause of suffering and one of the conditions of survival. Tadeus Borowski, a Polish writer who was interned at Huschwitz and who wrote about the camp with a precision that his contemporaries found unbearable to read, captured something of this logic in his accounts . The conditions that the camp
created to destroy people sometimes produced, as a side effect, forms of solidarity that the system had not foreseen and that it could not completely eliminate without also eliminating the conditions it needed for the prisoner to remain functionally useful. A prisoner in the Estézeline [music] who went out every morning to work had to be able to work.
This operational necessity of the system was also, from the prisoner’s point of view, a window of opportunity. On September 3, 1941, the basement of Block 11 was the scene of an experiment that would irreversibly change the nature of Auschwitz . Rudolp Hus, the camp’s first commandant, had received orders from Himler to develop methods of mass execution that were more efficient and less psychologically costly for SS personnel than the shootings and lethal injections used until then.
Hus had observed the use of zyclone B as a pesticide in the camp, a cydric acid absorbed in granules and used to disinfect louse-infested barracks, and he had proposed testing it as an execution agent. The first experiment was carried out in the basement of the block with about ten people, nearly 600 Soviet prisoners of war and about 250 camp prisoners who had been selected at the infirmary because they were too sick to work.
The basement was sealed, the ventilation openings were opened, and the Zyclone B granules were introduced. H and the officers who supervised the experiment waited outside. The experiment was considered a success from a technical point of view. The agent worked, but it was not immediately perfectly effective. The testimonies of the few SS officers present who testified after the war, including Rudolph Hus himself in the memoirs he wrote in prison before his execution in 1947, indicate that the process took longer than expected and that not all the
people in the basement died at the same rate. Some were still alive when H came in to check the results the next day. The additional Zyclone B granules then complete the process. What the experience of September 3, 1940 produced beyond the immediate result was the conviction in Hus’s mind that he had found the method that Himler had asked of him.
efficient, relatively fast, not requiring the direct presence of the executors in the same space as the victims during the process and can be expanded [music] by increasing the size of the rooms and the volume of the agent. Hus Heimler’s report after the experiment was positive. The system’s expansion began in the following months.
The consequences of this success are well known. The gas chambers at Birkenu, which at the height of their activity during the summer of 1944 killed between 10,000 and 15,000 people per day, derived directly from what had been learned in the basement of Block 11. In September 1941, the building where the first experiment was conducted remained Block 11 with its punishment cells and its sterilization units.
Without the basement being used again as a gas chamber, the experiment had found a more suitable place to be applied on a large scale. The political section of Auschwitz, the department of the Gestapo that operated inside the camp, had its administrative headquarters in another building, but it used Block 11 as its main workspace.
The interrogations conducted by the political section covered a wide spectrum. From questions concerning minor infractions, to regulations, to investigations into resistance networks that could involve dozens of prisoners inside and outside the camp. The procedure for an interrogation in the political section of block 11 began with the prisoner being led into the interrogation room.
The officer who was driving him was a member of the Guestapo, the name for the SS personnel at the camp. There was an important administrative distinction between the Gestapo and the SS in the camp, with practical consequences. The Gestapo had its own objectives, its own priorities, and its own reporting channels that were not entirely dependent on the camp’s chain of command .
This meant that a prisoner in the hands of the Gestapo was not exactly the same type of administrative problem as a prisoner in the hands of the camp’s lager. The interrogations could last for hours, days, weeks. Throughout the interrogation, the prisoner remained in block 11. If the interrogation did not produce the information the Gestapo was looking for, or if it produced information that was not significant enough to justify a death sentence, the prisoner could be sent back to the general camp. This return to camp, after
days or weeks spent in the block, had visible physical consequences . The returning prisoners had lost weight, bore the marks of interrogation, showed the effects of the block conditions, but they were alive and the question their barrack companion inevitably asked them [music] in a low voice was always the same.
What did they ask you? What did you say? Managing what was said during an interrogation was the variable that the prisoner could control most directly in the Block 11 process. It was not the only variable and it was not the most important [music] in any case. If the Gestapo already had enough information from other sources, what the prisoner said or didn’t say might have little influence on the outcome.
And in cases [music] where the interrogation sought information that only the prisoner possessed, the ability to manage this interrogation, to give true but not compromising information, to resist pressure techniques, without giving the Gestapo what it needed, could make the difference between returning to the camp and going to court; prisoners who had been trained to resist interrogations, members of resistance networks who had received instructions before their arrest on how to behave under interrogation, had an advantage that
other prisoners did not have. They knew that the objective of the first hours of the interrogation was to destabilize, to produce confusion and fear so that information would come out in an uncontrolled manner. He knew that it was necessary to maintain a simple and coherent version that said nothing useful but was also not so obviously evasive as to justify an immediate escalation of violence.
He knew, in the case of the most trained, that exhaustion and pain produced states in which the mind wanted to give in and that it was necessary to recognize these states without giving in to them. This knowledge was partially transmissible within the camp. Prisoners who had gone through interrogation and survived could pass on to others in whispered conversations in the barracks what they had been asked, what type of pressure had been used, and what answer had seemed to satisfy or temporarily calm the interrogators. This exchange
of information was a form of resistance that did not require any spectacular acts. It was simply shared knowledge about how to survive a specific institution within the camp. Wold Pilet arrived at Auschwitz on September 22, 1940. He was a cavalry officer in the Polish army and a member of the Polish underground resistance.
He went to Auschwitz voluntarily. He was not arrested by the Gestapo during an investigation. He was not captured during a raid. He deliberately presented himself at one of the street raids that the SS regularly conducted in Warsaw, allowed himself to be arrested and was transported to the camp in the next convoy.
His prisoner number was 4859. His mission, approved by Polish military intelligence in exile, was to infiltrate the camp, organize an underground resistance network, and transmit information about its operating conditions to the outside world. What Pileki accomplished in the two and a half years that followed at Auschwitz constitutes one of the most extraordinary documents of resistance of the Second World War.
[music] Inside the camp, he built a clandestine organization that eventually numbered several hundred members who produced systematic reports on the camp’s operations, including the first detailed reports on the gas chambers to reach the Allies, and who planned a possible revolt if circumstances allowed. All this while he performed forced labor in the camp, survived hunger and disease, and maintained the appearance of being just another Polish prisoner.
The reports that Piléqui smuggled out of the camp, sent by clandestine courier networks to Warsaw and then from there to the Polish government-in- exile in London, were the most detailed documents the Allies had on the inner workings of Auschwitz. He described the system of forced labor, the conditions of the barracks, the diseases, the executions and, with increasing precision as the scale of the camp grew, the gassing and extermination facilities.
Piletski’s reports arrived in London in 1940 and 1942. The Polish government- in-exile trans-Mediterranean. What the allies did with this information, or more precisely, what they did not do . is one of the most debated points in the diplomatic history of the war. The reports were received, archived and in some cases published in denunciation documents which had limited circulation.
They did not carry out any direct intervention against the camp. They did not lead to the bombing of the railways that brought the deportees to Auschwitz, which Jewish leaders in Europe and America had been demanding since 1944. Piléqui, who had risked his life for two years to get his information out, took it after the war and wrote about it with a sobriety more eloquent than any direct accusation.
At some point in 1943, Piléqui was summoned to Block 11 for interrogation. The Gestapo had detected something, a suspicious link, a conversation reported by an informant, an element that brought up his name on the sidelines of an investigation. Pileki entered Block 11. What happened during Pileki’s interrogation in Block 11 is not fully documented because Pileki did not write about this specific episode with the same level of detail as when he described other aspects of his experience in the camp.
What is documented, however, is the result. Pileki left Block 11. The Gestapo either didn’t find enough for what they needed or what they found wasn’t specific enough to justify a death sentence at that time. Piletsky was sent back to the camp. This return was also a sign that his time in the camp was reaching its limit.
If the political section had started to notice his name, the margin of safety he had enjoyed until then was shrinking. Pilequi began to prepare his escape. On the night of April 7, 1943, Pilequi and two companions escaped from the camp using an exit from a bakery where he worked, cutting through the outer barbed wire during a moment of negligence from the night watch.
Pileki reached free Poland, handed over his reports to the command of the resistance and the Polish army in exile, and continued his military activity for the remainder of the war. He participated in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. He survived the war and remained in Poland after the liberation, believing he could be useful in the reconstruction of the country.
The Polish communist government, which took control of the country after the war, arrested him in 1947. He was accused of spying for Western powers. He was tortured during the interrogation. He was tried in a summary trial and sentenced to death. On May 25, Wold Piletsky was executed in Warsaw, 3 years after the end of the war which he had survived, by the government of the country which he had risked his life to defend. He was 47 years old.
On July 29, 1941, during the evening roll call in the main camp of Auschwitz 1, one of the guards reported that a prisoner was missing from the count of commando 14A. The prisoner had not returned from work. The SS interpreted this absence as an attempt to escape. The camp’s response to an escape attempt was standard procedure.
10 prisoners from the same commando would be selected to starve to death in the basement of block 11 in retaliation. That night, the furious snitch Carl Fritz walked through the ranks of the commando and pointed. One of them was Francisek Gajonicek, a 40-year-old Polish sergeant who had a wife and children.
When Gajonichek’s name was read, he shouted something about his family, about the fact that he had children. The row remained silent. Then, a prisoner took a step forward from the ranks. It was number 16, 1670. His name was Maximilian Colb and he was a 47-year-old Polish Franciscan friar. Colb spoke to Fritz and told him that he was a Catholic priest, that he was old, and that he wanted to take the place of the man who had a family.
Fritch looked at him for a moment and then accepted. Gajon Jack returned to the ranks. Colb and the nine other men were taken to the basement of Block 11. The 10 men were locked in cell number 18 in the basement of Block 11, without food or water. The SS visited them periodically to check how many were still alive.
Some testimonies from the few survivors of the camp who had access to information about what was happening in the cell during those weeks, including that of Francijek Gadjonichek who lived until 1995 and spoke on several occasions about what he knew of Colbe’s fate. They describe the men in the cell praying aloud and singing hymns in the early days.
sounds that the guards passing through the basement could hear, and which gradually faded away as the days passed and the bodies gave way. Around August 14, weeks after their confinement in the cell, four men were still alive. The SS needed space for a new group. On August 14, an SS orderly named Bok entered the cell with a syringe of carbolic acid.
Three of the four men were unconscious or unresponsive . Colb, according to the testimonies of the guards who were in the basement at that time, was sitting against the wall, eyes open, conscious, his arm outstretched towards Boc as if he himself were offering his arm for the injection. The injection of carbolic acid caused death within minutes.
Colb was canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 10, 1982. At the ceremony in Rome was Francijek Gajoniche, the man whose place Colb had taken. then aged 81 who had survived the camp, [music] the war and the four decades that have passed since. Between block 10 and block 11, the death wall received thousands of people during the 4 years that the main Auschwitz camp was in operation.
The executions took place very early in the morning before the camp began its ordinary day so that the fewest possible number of prisoners could directly witness what was happening in the inner courtyard. The windows of block 10 located on the other side of the courtyard had also been boarded up in order to limit visibility.
Those who were executed at the death wall formed a heterogeneous group that reflected all categories of people who had passed through Block 11. There were camp prisoners sentenced to death by the summary court for escape attempts, acts of resistance, or serious breaches of regulations. There were people brought in from outside by the Gestapo and executed in the camp rather than in the city’s prisons because the camp’s infrastructure was more convenient.
There were groups of Polish prisoners, especially in 1940 and 1 and 1942, executed in reprisal for acts of external Polish resistance which had nothing directly to do with the camp, but which the SS used as a pretext to eliminate people who had been in the camp for a long time and represented an accumulation of knowledge about its operation.
The records kept on the executions at the death wall are incomplete because the SS destroyed documents before the evacuation of the camp and because some of the executions were never recorded. Officially, historians’ estimates of the total number of people executed at the death wall range from 4,000 to 6,000.
The SS summary tribunal operating in Block 11, the Stangerisht, was the institution that formally produced the sentences. determining the fate of the prisoners who arrived there accused of offenses. The tribunal was not a tribunal in any of the senses that the term normally implies. There was no defense, no appeal process, no presumption of innocence.
It was a meeting of two or three SS officers who listened to the accusation, consulted the prisoner’s file, and pronounced a sentence that could be any of the options provided by the system. The lightest sentence the court could impose was flogging. 25 blows applied to the prisoner’s naked body with a wooden stick in the presence of the rest of the camp formed in mandatory public.
The prisoners who received this sentence were escorted back to the general camp after the beatings. Many were unable to walk for days. Injuries caused by beatings became infected in the unsanitary conditions of the camp with the same probability as any other injury. But in the terms of the Block 11 system, the beating was a return.
The prisoner who received it had been in block 11 and had come out. The next sentence was the disciplinary company, the straf company. Prisoners assigned to the disciplinary company were separated from the general camp and sent to work in the most dangerous and exhausting commandos in the system: drainage ditches, quarries, demolition work, commandos that operated under conditions of maximum physical demand with minimal rations and the most brutal surveillance.
Mortality in the disciplinary company was extremely high, but it was not 100%. Some prisoners who were affected survived for weeks, months, and in exceptional cases, longer until a camp administration inspection or a policy change reduced the transport company or transfers. In the Auschwitz system, the disciplinary company was used at different times in the camp with different functions.
In those early years between 1940 and 1942, the Straf Company was assigned to the hardest work in the Birkeno area. Then under construction were the Bresinka marshes where prisoners dug drainage canals in the icy water, their feet in the mud for 12-hour days. Mortality in these works was so high that some historians estimate that a prisoner assigned to the disciplinary company during this period had a life expectancy of only a few weeks.
From 1942 onwards, with the expansion of the camp and the increasing demand for labor in different facilities, the disciplinary company was partially redeployed to other functions. Some of these members were transferred to other facilities within the Auschwitz complex, which paradoxically may have increased their chances of survival by removing them from the most deadly work.
This redistribution was neither systematic nor predictable. It depended on the operational needs of the camp at any given time and on the decisions of the SS officers who managed the allocation of labor. The prisoners who survived the disciplinary company after passing through the block describe the experience with a consistency that makes it possible to identify the factors contributing to survival.
The first was the physical condition at the time of assignment. A prisoner who arrived in the disciplinary company after months in the camp with a body already weakened by malnutrition and ordinary work had less reserve than a man who arrived in the first weeks of his internment. The second factor was the ability to find within the disciplinary company the same small margins that camp survivors found in the general camp.
the extra gram of bread, the position in the work line that required less physical effort, the hood whose brutality had a certain limit. The third factor that appears in several testimonies in a way that cannot be dismissed as mere anecdote was the ability to maintain a form of inner life during the experience.
not necessarily in a religious sense, although in some cases that is exactly what the testimonies describe, but in the sense of maintaining a frame of reference that placed the present experience in something larger than the present experience itself. prisoners who could remember who they were before the camp, who could activate specific memories of place, people, and conversation, who could maintain a mental project, even if only the project of surviving to bear witness, had a relationship to time that gave them
something the camp was trying to eliminate. The perception that the present time was not all the time that existed. The prisoners who returned to the general camp after a period in block 11, whether after an interrogation that had not produced a death sentence, after serving a sentence in a punishment cell or in the disciplinary company, came back changed in ways that their fellow Baraquem prisoners immediately recognized, even if they could not always formulate exactly what had changed.
It wasn’t just the physical aspect, although the physical deterioration was visible. It was something in the way they moved, responded to the stimuli of the camp, and related as much. Survivor testimonies describing companions who returned from Block 11 often use an image that reappears in accounts from different countries and eras. The gaze.
Those who returned from block 11 had a look that those who hadn’t gone there didn’t have . This was not the empty stare of Muselman, the prisoner in the terminal stage of deterioration whom Primo Levi described as someone who had already left before he died. It was a different, more introspective look, as if the person who returned from Block 11 was permanently at a certain distance from the world around them .
This distance was not a psychopathology in the clinical sense. It was the logical consequence of having been in a place where every hour could be the last, where the variables that determined survival escaped the individual’s control in an even more extreme way than in the general camp. A prisoner in the general camp had small but real margins of action. Regarding his situation.
A prisoner in the basement of block 11 had almost none. Returning from a condition where there was almost no room for error to the general camp, which was already an extreme condition, produced a cognitive reorientation that the body and mind processed for weeks or months. Herman Langbin was an Austrian prisoner who arrived at Auschwitz in 1942 and worked as secretary to the camp’s chief physician , SSTurm für Edward Wz.
This position gave him access to information and movement within the camp that most prisoners did not have. Longbin used this position to build a resistance network and to document what was happening in the camp, including the procedures of Block 11. After the war, Longbin was one of the most persistent activists in the search for justice for the crimes of Auschwitz.
His work was fundamental to the trial known as the Frankfurt Trial, which took place between 1963 and 1965 and which tried 22 members of the Auschwitz staff. This trial was the first in Germany to attempt in a comprehensive manner to bring to justice not only the camp commanders, but also the middle and intermediate rank staff members who had carried out the crimes [music] at the operational level.
The Frankfurt trial resulted in 10 convictions, including 6 life sentences . It was also a trial that forced German society in the 1960s to confront the magnitude of what had happened at Auschwitz in a way that the Nuremberg trials, which focused on the regime’s leaders, had been unable to produce.
Prosecutor Fritz Bower, himself a survivor of the Nazi persecution system, understood that the value of the trial was not only penal, but educational. Listening to testimonies, seeing documents, naming the precise acts and the precise names of those who had committed them were part of the work that Germany had to do to understand what it had produced.
The wall of death which was located in the courtyard between block 11 and block 10 was rebuilt after the war in its original location. The original wall had been destroyed during the evacuation of the camp in January 1945 when the SS attempted to erase the most visible evidence of what the camp had been.
The reconstruction of the wall is part of the current memorial at the main Auschwitz camp, Primeux. There are almost always flowers in front of the wall. Visitors to the memorial leave them there. These are ordinary flowers, the kind people bring to cemeteries, the kind left in places where something important has happened.
The wall against which thousands of people died, rebuilt in dark stone, receives its flowers with the same impassivity with which the original wall received bullets. Block 11 can be visited today in the Auschwitz memorial. Visitors can go down to the basement, see the buildings, [music] see cell number 18 where Colbe and the other nine men were locked up.
The cell has dimensions that visitors can physically grasp. Space is not abstract when you stand in front of it . There are also candles and flowers in this cell. The space where darkness and hunger produced death receives the same kind of gesture that human beings have always used to mark places where death has occurred.
Francisek Gajonichek lived 54 years after that July 1941 appeal during which Colbit took his place. He lived until 1995. [music] During his sixty-three years, he spoke about Colb on numerous occasions in interviews, during meetings with school groups, and at ceremonies. He spoke of himself with a precision that did not diminish [music] with the years.
He remembered the color of the light that afternoon, remembered his position in the line, remembered the exact moment Colb took a step forward. Something he was never able to fully explain in any of the interviews he gave over 5 decades. That was why, why had Colb taken that step? What was in that man that had produced that decision at that moment.
Gajon Jack had his own theories which changed slightly from interview to interview over the years. But what he invariably said was that the question was not closed, that 50 years of reflection had not produced an answer that seemed complete, and that this, the impossibility of completely closing the question, was in a certain way the answer itself.
Block 11 was producing this type of question. Not questions that can be answered by gathering enough data, but those that point to something in human nature that data cannot fully explain. How could someone get in there and come out alive? The technical answer exists and this script has gone through it, but behind the technical answer lies the other question, the one that Gadjonchek could not answer in 50 years.
What drives someone, in a moment of extreme pressure on their own survival, to make a decision that jeopardizes that survival for the sake of another? Colb did it. Pilequi did it in a different way. For two and a half years, every day he chose to stay in the camp, when he could have tried to escape earlier, the imprisoned doctors who used their knowledge to protect their patients did so.
The bloclt test who looked away when the situation demanded it did so . The camp not only produced destruction, it also produced those moments which were not enough to change what the camp was, but enough so that 50 years later, someone would still be unable to close the question of why they had taken place.
Block 11 is still standing in the main camp of Auschwitz 1. These windows are no longer sealed. From the outside, on sunny days, you can see the inside through the window. What we see is an empty room, brick walls, the original floor. Nothing at that distance indicates what kind of place it was. To do this, you have to go down to the basement.
To do this, you have to stand in front of the steres and calculate with your own body how much space there is in 90 cm by 90 cm. To do this, you have to read what those who came out alive have written about what happened inside. Some went in and came out again. They are the ones we can listen to.
