“The Scribe” Zofia Posmysz. A witness to history between truth and post-truth
In the light of Auschwitz and the Holocaust the language of words and the language of images are utterly helpless. They simply resist their content. All attempts to elicit an expression from these languages, all attempts to get them to reveal the truth of what happened – a truth that is utterly unbelievable – remain frustrated because of the sheer amount of emptiness. For this reason, from time to time it is worth limiting the languages and reducing their role to a neutral and subdued account of the facts, which neither attempts to violently substantiate them nor to evaluate them from a moral point of view. Zofia Posmysz uses such a form of language in her accounts of Auschwitz. And I have chosen to use such language in order to pass on her report.
Maria Anna (Masza) Potocka, September 2017
Addition by the ed.:
Zofia Posmysz died shortly before her 99th birthday on 8 August 2022 in Oświęcim.
Published by MOCAK (Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow):
Maria Anna Potocka: Zofia Posmysz. Die Schreiberin [Szrajberka]. 7566. Auschwitz 1942–1945, Kraków/Göttingen 2019 + DVD [pol.: Kraków 2018 & 2. rev. ed. 2021]
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Extracts from the report of the “scribe” Zofia Posmysz, compiled by Maria Anna (Masza) Potocka:
Whispering can be loudest
After a six-month period of investigation during which I was interrogated on four occasions I was moved from Kraków to Auschwitz and although I had already heard a lot about Auschwitz the information did not worry me. I was even delighted, because it meant that I would no longer be summoned to the headquarters of the Gestapo. At the time interrogations were our worst nightmare.
As I approached the gates of the camp and saw the writing “Arbeit macht frei” (Lit: Work makes you free), I naïvely thought that it certainly can’t be that bad. I thought that if I worked, they would free me for I had not been subject to any serious trial. I thought that I could work for my freedom.
At the start, when I was assigned to the “External Kommando”, they woke us at 3:30 in the morning. Without a doubt this was so early because the SS was still in array at the time. First you had to bring the cauldron with the coffee and tea from the kitchen to the blocks and dish out the contents into beakers and plates. They called it breakfast. Some prisoners were disciplined enough to keep back a slice of bread from the evening before. By contrast others only had a liquid breakfast in the morning and went to work hungry.
The work in the first half of the day lasted until 12.30. Then trucks arrived with cauldrons of soup. After this we had a half hour break during which we were allowed to lie down. Some people even managed to doze off. This was followed by the next phase of work, which lasted until 6 o’clock. On our return to the camp, we were immediately ordered to line up for the evening roll call. Here an SS man or woman checked the names of the people living in the block along with one of the prisoners who was on the list. Then a whistle ended the roll call. After that we went to the kitchen to get our evening coffee or tea and our ration of food, above all bread. Each prisoner was allowed one third of a kilogram from the loaf. But in fact we never got such a portion because the woman who was in charge of the block kept some of it for herself. For the bread there was a small piece of margarine or cheese, which they called quark. This was a German or Austrian speciality, a sort of Camembert, and I even liked the taste of this cheese.
Our first work after arriving in house consisted of breaking up clods of earth on a field some kilometres away from the camp. This was cruel, bone-breaking work. On top of which came hunger, appalling heat and a lack of liquid. After work we lined up in the evening in front of the well with our plates or half-litre beakers. A problem arose: what can you do with so little water? Most people drank it all. Others washed their faces. But I also saw girls who went behind the latrine to wash their lower parts with water. I thought this was absurd and extravagant.
After our return from the punishment battalion, we were tattooed with a number in Birkenau. This was done by a woman prisoner sitting on a tiny stool behind a small table. She had a funny tool which reminded me most of a fountain pen. She used this gadget to prick our skin and tattoo the number. The woman who did this, a Jew, well that’s the way she looked to me, told me to roll up my sleeves so that she could tattoo my number higher up.
One day when we were coming from the direction of the camp street, I saw the figure of a prisoner hanging from the barbed wire. She had been unable to stand the reality of the camp and committed suicide by clutching the electrified barbed wire. With her hands clinging to the wire, she deliberately posed in a dramatic fashion. It was an appalling sight. Since such situations occurred often, I learnt not to look at them. At night we often heard appalling screams – suicides primarily happened at night – which wrenched us from our sleep. I did not know that a person who got an electric shock could utter such a terrible scream. After we had woken, we knew that someone was hanging from the barbed wire once again. In such a situation I always turned my head away. I preferred to see nothing. Now when I think about it, I consider my reaction was more one of shock than pity, and perhaps even resentment against the person who had disturbed our night’s rest. The first thing I felt was a sense of shock, beneath which was helplessness. I was shocked by my own helplessness people in the camp feared pity because pity demands a reaction. By contrast on several occasions, I saw how people were beaten, beaten till they were unconscious and I was able to do nothing. When you are helpless your instinct for survival demands that you look away. Could I have rushed to help this person and struggle with the murderers? Looking away and refusing to hear were a sort of self-defence. What did I feel at the time? Anger? That too perhaps, but rather helplessness. Anger at my own helplessness perhaps. That’s the way I would describe it.
During this time, it was the end of January 1942, an SS man came into the block looking for new women to work in the kitchen. I ventured to step forward submissively and informed him that I had just recovered from ill health, that I used to work in the kitchen and that for this reason I would like to return there. He agreed. That very day I was taken back into the kitchen block.
Around the middle of 1943 all the SS men in Birkenau were replaced by women in the service of the SS. They came from Ravensbrück to Auschwitz in order to impose order. One of these was a guard whose surname was Franz. She learnt that I could speak German. She looked me up and down and said that [from now on] I would be in charge of the books registering the people who went in and out. I was to work at the end of the kitchen where there was a small table full of account books with drawers. On the next day the guard Franz arrived in the kitchen with a Polish prisoner who was wearing the sign “P” for “political”. She brought him to the table where I was working and explained that this prisoner would teach me how to use the books to register the goings and comings. He told me that his first name was Tadeusz.[1]
My meeting with Tadeusz – and certainly the fact that I survived Auschwitz – is to a great extent thanks to the guard, Franz. Much in the camp was dependent on the individuals one met. For this reason, I looked her up and down carefully the first time she came into the kitchen. She was a rather unobtrusive person, not very big, with dark hair, of average appearance and somewhat plump. She was some years older than me. Right at the start she gave a speech. She announced that the women SS had arrived here in order to turn this mess into an orderly camp like Ravensbrück. Auschwitz was intended to be a model camp. In order to achieve this, it was vital for all the prisoners to cooperate. She added – and I noted this carefully – that that she would never hit anyone because she did not want to dirty her hands. She also said that we would have a peaceful life provided we worked conscientiously. She warned us that any contraventions of the rules would be heavily punished. Sadly, it was impossible to avoid contravening the rules because almost everything we did in the camp was a crime.
[1] Tadeusz Paolone (1909-1943), prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp with the number 329, was shot because of his conspiratorial activities in the camp. Zofia Posmysz described her meeting with him in her story Chrystus oświęcimski [The Christ of Auschwitz].
In June 1943 I began work as a scribe. Immediately after the roll call, I went to my office. This was roughly around seven or 8:30. At 8 o’clock the kitchen guard arrived, as a rule this was Frau Franz, to replace the night guard. Immediately after I arrived, I began work on adding up and checking those present in the blocks. I also had to write down the regulated portions, i.e. the food rations assigned to every prisoner. Then I had to work out the corresponding amount of products for the particular day. Each day there was bread and also something to put on the bread. I had to work out all this and adjust the total to the number of portions required.
When the guard Franz took a break at midday, I had a little time to be able to write for myself. As a sort of secretary I had access to writing materials. I began by making notes about everyday life but soon moved over to poems. Today I do not regard them as poetically valuable. I wrote the outlines for the poems on loose pieces of paper. One day I received a notebook into which I transcribed the poems. At last, I was able to collect them all together. Most of the poems were prayers or memories of freedom. Some of them referred to the death of Tadeusz. One of these poems is also important to me: List do Matki [A Letter to my Mother]. Writing poems came from my wish to tear myself away from the inhuman reality which surrounded us. And this reality became increasingly more horrifying. True, we people who were working in the kitchen and the bread storage room had things much easier and better than the other prisoners; that said, the events on the ramp and in the gas chambers had an appalling influence on our lives. We knew about the hecatomb, the apocalypse that reigned there every day. Day and night we could hear the trains arriving, one transport after the other. Whether we wanted it or not, we were witnesses to everything that happened and somehow also participated in it. My writings were probably an attempt to tear myself away from this appalling reality. That said, not all my poems were a flight into another world. There are also some that I might call political. One of them accused England of being an accomplice to the Holocaust because it had done nothing. In Auschwitz people were dying, the crematoria were alight, the chimneys were smoking day and night, we were stifling in the camp from this stench of burning bodies and England is doing nothing. I thought, for this it should itself stifle to death out of shame.
My last meeting with my guard, Franz, was directly before she left Auschwitz. Along with the leading members of the camp, all those decorated SS men and the prisoners, she abandoned the camp before it was evacuated. I had the impression she wanted me to come with her. She never said that directly, but at the time I thought it better to distantiate myself from the action so I went to Frau Doktor Stefania Perzanowska[2], who was working in the camp hospital. I asked her to hide me in the hospital for a few days because I wanted to wait until the SS group had left. Frau Doktor Perzanowska understood me only too well and allowed me to come the next day: “I shall give you something to make you run a high temperature.”
I was given a simple injection of milk in one of my buttocks. I had no idea that it could be so effective. In any case I quickly ran a high temperature. My guard, Franz, was so curious about my sudden illness, which she heard about from the other prisoners, that she came to the hospital to check what had happened. Doktor Perzanowska accompanied her to my bed and began to explain that such a high temperature might mean I had a serious contagious sickness. She also told her something that infuriated her: “Rubbish” she said, turned around and went. That was the last time I saw her.
After the war I followed the trials of the SS men. I observed and waited until my guard, Franz, arrived before the court. I knew that I would surely then be invited to be a witness. All the time I was considering what I could say about her, how I should say it, what situations I should mention … I recalled various facts about her behaviour, her reactions … I never managed to arrive at a psychological characterisation: these were only my suppositions and thoughts. But I was thinking about them the whole time. Finally, I came to the conclusion that I was unable to say very much about her, just that she treated me fairly. These considerations led to my idea of writing a tale about an accidental meeting with an SS woman. The upshot was a novel entitled “The Passenger” which was inspired by a strange event in Paris.[3]
[2] Stefania Perzanowska (1896–1974) arrived in Auschwitz on 15 April 1944 on a transport from the Lublin (Majdanek) concentration camp, where she was a hospital doctor. She was given the number 77368.
[3] Zofia Posmysz met a group of German tourists on the Champs-Élysées. The voice of one of the women sounded almost like the voice of the guard Franz.
