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After the morning roll call, which had lasted as it always did from four to eight hours, the SS made all the inmates leave in columns, a thousand women already numb from standing still. It was minus eighteen degrees centigrade. Five by five abreast in a field on the other side of the road facing the entrance to the camp, the women remained standing, without food or drink, until the end of the day. The SS, posted behind machine guns, where guarding the edges of the field. [...] Women were falling in the snow and dying. The others, tapping their feet, rubbing each other's backs, beating their arms so as not to freeze, watched the trucks pass loaded with the living and the dead on their way from Block 25 to the crematorium.
Around five o'clock in the evening, the whistle blew. The order to return. The columns reformed, five abreast. "When you get to the gate, run." The order was passed back through the ranks. Yes, we had to run. On either side of the camp's main street, in a tight edge, stood all the SS, male and female, all the kapos, the polizei, everyone with any rank. Armed with sticks, lashes, canes, and belts, they beat the women as they went by. We had to run to the other end of the camp. Swollen from the cold, chattering with fatigue, we had to run the gamut of blows. Those who could not run fast enough, who tripped or fell, were pulled out of the line, grabbed by the neck with a fist gripping cane, and tossed aside. When the race was finished and all the inmates were back in the block houses, the women who had been pulled aside were taken to Block 25. Fourteen of us were taken that day. In Block 25, you got almost nothing to eat or drink. People died there after a few days. Those not dead when the Sonderkommando (prisoners who worked in the crematorium) came to empty Block 25 left with the corpses for the gas chamber."The Race" - this is what we called it - took place on February 10, 1943, exactly two weeks after our arrival at Birkenau. Rumor had it we were being made to pay for Stalingrad.
Convoy to Auschwitz,
Charlotte Delbo
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