POLAND IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR 339Silesian frontier in the marshland at the junction of the Vistula and Sola rivers.
It started its career in June 1940 as an internment centre for 10,000 political pris-
oners drawn from neighbouring Polish and Silesian prisons. In March 1941 it
was extended to accommodate 30,000 inmates. At this stage, Auschwitz did not
differ significantly from its predecessors at Dachau (1933), Buchenwald (1937),
or Sachsenhausen (1936). The new arrivals were marched in to the strains of the
camp orchestra, through the iron gateway with its slogan 'Arbeit Macht Frei'
(Work makes you free), past the double line of electrified wire-fencing, past the
concealed machine-gun nests. Once inside, a camp number was tattooed onto
their forearms; they were given a striped prison uniform, assigned a billet in one
of the rows of grim prefabricated huts, and put to work. Their life expectancy
was three months. In October 1941, further enlargements were begun. Owing to
the war on the Eastern Front, and the Final Solution, several thousand acres of
adjoining land was obtained at Brzezinka (Birkenau), to provide for 100,000
extra inmates. The SS-Guard was raised to over 2,000 men, not counting the
thousands of Kapos (trusties) and special detachments drawn from the prison-
ers themselves. A female section was built, together with railway facilities,
fortified guard posts, and modern floodlighting. On 4 May 1942., the first of the
four gas-chambers and crematoria consumed their first victims from the camp
hospital. Thereafter, their average capacity rose to 8,000 bodies per day. At the
height of the Final Solution in 1942-3, a train would arrive approximately every
hour and unload its human cargo, living and dead, on to the long concrete plat-
form. The able-bodied would be marched off to work. The old, the infirm, the
young, and mothers with children were told they were to be deloused, were
ordered to strip and were driven directly to the gas-chambers. Twenty minutes
later, the special detachments would be shearing off the hair from the corpses,
looking for jewellery concealed in body orifices, tearing out gold dental fillings
with hooks, and carrying the mutilated remains on biers to the ovens. At the
other end of the crematoria, further groups of workers would be dealing with
the remains of the previous transport, draining off fat for the manufacture of
soap, or shovelling the ashes into bags of fertilizer. This was the Anus Mundi
whose motions were regulated with Prussian precision. Those of its countless
victims who died swiftly were fortunate. Those who were spared the gas-
chamber suffered far greater torments and degradation, whose details can only
be imagined: mass-starvation; cannibalism; the roll-call; the scheissmeister;
Boger's swing; the wall of death; pseudo-medical operations on 'experimental
persons'; sterilization; amputation; injected diseases; mock masses; theatrical
executions; sexual perversions; human lampshades; headshrinking; 'parachut-
ing'; Aktion-'Kugel'... The science of thanatology was brought to a pitch of
theory and practice never equalled. Its brutalized subjects were given a brief
reprieve for informing, bullying, and preying on their fellows; and then, as often
as not, were destroyed themselves. At the moment of Liberation on 27 January
1945 by the Soviet Army, only 7,500 live inmates could be found, including 90
pairs of identical twins. By that time, according to evidence submitted at the