The Kindness When Faced With Hate

Throughout our tours of Auschwitz One and Birkenau our tour guide was telling us stories of survivors from the camps. These stories consisted of brutalities they faced at the hands of the SS officers although the ones that have stuck with me are ones of prisoners helping each other and the help they were given.

Birkenau was created to house more prisoners when Auschwitz One ran out of space. For this reason, many of the stories of kindness came from there. One story was of the building in the women’s section of the camp where they housed sick prisoners temporarily before they were sent to the gas chambers. (seen in the picture to the right) When the building was so cramped, they had the women stay out in the courtyard exposed to the elements, they were given no food or water. In the winter if there was snow other prisoners would make snowballs and through it over the wall for the sick to have some type of water. Another story from that barrack was of a female prisoner, that worked in the “Canada Houses” or the storage and sorting houses of the possessions that the prisoners brought with them. She made a friend, which was rare since the life span at the camps was an average of three months. The friend had gotten sick and was put into the barrack to wait to go to the gas chamber. The female prisoner smuggled some gold she found in the Canada houses and tried to bribe the kommando with it, although they refused and wanted a body for a body. The woman took the officer and dragged a dead body she found and exchanged it for her friend. This story really got to me because I thought about how much I treasure my friends and would want to be with them as long as I could in a hell like Auschwitz, Birkenau. That inmate as well as others who worked in the Canada houses would smuggle goods back. There were stories of a girl who wore shoes way too big for her in order to wear a second pair of shoes inside them to smuggle back to other inmates.

Smuggling was a kind gesture that saved lives inside and outside the camps. While here we went to a pharmacy in the Bohaterów ghetto in Krakow belonging to Tadeusz Pankewicz. Pankewicz was a Christian pharmacist who was told to move out but convinced the Germans that because there were going to be two hospitals in the area that it would make sense to allow him to stay to local. They agreed and Pankewicz stayed in operation giving medications to the Jewish people of the ghetto for free and allowing to use his back door for escape. Today we consider Pankewicz a righteous gentile which means, a non-Jewish person who helped save the Jews. In the book The Holocaust Kingdom, by Alexander Donat, the wife Lena Berg worked in a pharmacy which saved her. Donat recalled that to have a job kept you from being deported. Shops described in The Holocaust Kingdom and Pankewicz’s saved Jews in a multitude of ways.