Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz

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).