56 pages • 1 hour read
Olga LengyelFive Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1947A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Cruel and Degrading Treatment at Auschwitz-Birkenau
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses antisemitism, the Holocaust, murder, and physical and sexual violence.
The absolute degradation suffered by the inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau begins before Lengyel and her family even reach the camp. Their treatment on the train car—where the guards show an absolute indifference to human suffering and death—will go on to characterize Lengyel’s life at the camp. On the train car, 96 men, women, and children are crowded into a space for eight horses, causing hysteria and extreme discomfort. The situation becomes more untenable as rotting corpses mount: “[T]he living piled on top of one another to avoid contact with the decaying corpses” (13). The absolute indifference to this loss of life is characterized in the Nazi guard’s retort to the car’s occupants to remove the dead: “‘Keep your corpse [...] you will have many more of them soon!” (11).
Lengyel’s life in Barrack 26 is characterized as horrific, in terms of the sleeping quarters, the overcrowding, the complete lack of hygiene, the treatment by guards, the scarce and disgusting food, and the experience of living alongside the gas chambers and crematorium. On the freezing wooden koias, the women have “one blanket for every ten persons,” characterizing the scarcity of the camp and the constant discomfort (46). Furthermore, the rations are meager and disgusting, such as the daily allotment of thin soup from which the women “fished buttons, tufts of hair, rags, tin cans, keys, and even mice” and have to block their noses to be able to consume (50).
Lengyel emphasizes the cruelty of the guards, such as when they take the women’s clothing, intentionally return an insufficient amount, and then beat those who are naked: Women without clothing “would have to go out nude,” and would be “subjected to horrible beatings by the Germans” (37). Lengyel herself is beaten many times, including for the ridiculous “crime” of having naturally thin eyebrows, which looked overly manicured for the destitute camp.
There was no water to wash with and no way to wash the one set of clothing allocated to each prisoner, leaving the women filthy and liable to sickness or disease, such as scabies, which was rife in the camp. The living conditions left the prisoners emaciated and dirty. Those extremely thin and despondent souls become known as “Mussulmen,” or walking skeletons. The appearance of the inmates characterizes their extreme neglect and ill-treatment. This is illustrated in Lengyel and Miklos’s shock at seeing each other after months in the camp: “At the sight of me, he grew pale. I stood there speechless. How feeble and aged he had become. His features were drawn and his hair was gray” (142). It is further illustrated in the condition of the deformed corpses Lengyel sees in her work at the infirmary: “From the bodies in the morgue we could determine what physical deterioration the camp life caused in the internees. After even a short stay [...] They had lost from fifty to sixty percent of their original weight and had shrunken in height” (63-64).
The Mass Genocide Committed by the Nazis
Lengyel witnessed the horrific mass genocide committed by the Nazis, including executions (hanging, beating, or shooting) conducted within the camp; deaths from medical experimentation; deaths related to malnutrition; the murder of mothers and babies; deaths on death marches; and the mass murders of the gas chambers and crematorium. Lengyel describes the intentionally misleading initial selection of deportees on the train station of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Lengyel unwittingly urged her oldest son, Arvad, as well as her mother, to join the group on the left, hoping that this would spare them from hard labor. She shares that the Nazi guards intentionally created the impression that the old and young would be cared for when, in fact, those sorted to the left were destined to die immediately at the gas chambers. Lengyel condemns the manipulation of the Nazi guards as they prepare to conduct mass murder: “The gas chamber waited, but the victims must be soothed first” (55). Lengyel observed this process at later selections:
[O]ther internees placed the sick into the Red Cross ambulances. They [Nazi guards] handled them tenderly until the marching columns were out of sight, then the behavior of these S.S. slaves changed completely. Brutally, they threw the sick into the dumping trucks, as if they were sacks of potatoes (55).
In other cases, the calming illusion was maintained up until the moment the gas chamber doors were sealed shut, further elucidating the intentional manipulation of the Nazis, who ensured calm cooperation until the moment of death: “The ‘Bath Director,’ in a white blouse, distributed towels and soap—one more detail in the immense show. Under the clothes hangers were plaques declaring in every European language, ‘If you want your effects when you go out, please make note of the number of your hanger’” (118). Inmates were made to believe, through carefully curated details, that they were going to shower, therefore simplifying the process of their murder for the Nazi guards.
Lengyel’s sardonic tone is evident when she observes that the efficient system of mass murder “speaks well for German industry” (112). Lengyel came to know the process well through her involvement in the camp’s underground resistance; offering concrete figures on the number of deportees killed: “Three hundred and sixty corpses every half hour, which was all the time it took to reduce human flesh to ashes, made 720 per hour, or 17,280 corpses per twenty-four hour shift” (112).
In particular, Lengyel is haunted by the memory of children’s supplies in the Canada warehouse: “[T]he row of baby carriages, which brought to mind all the unfortunate infants the Germans had murdered. The children’s shoes and toy section, always well stocked, was another heartrending place” (60). This collection is a stark symbol of the hundreds of thousands of innocent children who were killed during the Holocaust.
Lengyel also witnesses patients suffering in the aftermath of castration and sterilization experiments. Later, she learned the “geopolitical reason” for these experiments, which further positions readers to understand the scale of the Nazis’ plan for the genocide of non-Aryans: “[I]f they could sterilize all non-German people still alive after their victorious war, there would be no danger of new generations of ‘inferior’ peoples” (133). The text underscores the appalling nature of this intentional process of mass extermination.
