Hitler's Europe 1077

Map 26.5 Nazi Death Camps Sites of the death camps in Europe.

gesture, a small piece of soap. A recent, unknowing arrival at Auschwitz
inquired of another prisoner as to the whereabouts of his friend. 44‘Was he
sent to the left side?4... ‘Yes,’ I replied. Then you can see him there,’ I
was told. ‘Where?’A hand pointed to the chimney a few hundred yards off,
which was sending a column of flame up into the gray sky of Poland. It dis­
solved into a sinister cloud of smoke.” Those people sent to the right—
mostly the young in relatively good health—would continue to live until
they dropped dead of fatigue or were subsequently sent to the left side in
another “selection.” Almost all children were killed right away, because

they were too young to work as slave laborers in the I.G. Farben chemical
factory near the camp. At Auschwitz, the daily death count reached as high
as 15,000 victims. Overall, Hungarian Jews perished in the largest num­
bers, followed closely by Poles. One of the granddaughters of Alfred Drey­
fus, the Jewish French army officer falsely accused of treason in the 1890s
(see Chapter 18), perished there in 1944.