The Romanian Jewish Community

         My name is Otto Adler. I was born in 1929, in Cluj.

         In the late 1970’s, I had the opportunity to visit the Birkenau concentration camp – the so-called Auschwitz II – and I went upstairs to the SS watchtower located above the main gate. Once I got there, I experienced a phenomenon that I know about more from what my companions told me than from my own recollections of it. My companions claimed that, for several minutes, my face turned pale and I remained motionless and speechless.

         As I remember it, in those minutes, I relived my first days in the camp. Looking at the railroad tracks that were still there, I saw the sealed freight cars enter the camp’s premises. They made us get off and separated us into two groups: the men on one side and the women and children under 14 on the other side. I passed in front of a very spruce SS officer – I later found out he was the famous doctor Mengele. When we arrived, some inmates were ordered to get us out of the cars. Seeing how young I was – I was 15 at the time –, one of them taught me to claim I was 17. At the moment, I didn’t understand why, but I said to myself that he must know better, since he had been there longer. So, when Doctor Mengele asked me ‘Wie alt bist du?’ (‘How old are you?’), I said I was 17. As a result, I was directed to the right-hand side, together with my father. I didn’t know what that meant, but I soon learnt that it was the group of those who were chosen for labor. The left-hand side was for the ones who were going to the gas chamber and to the crematory. I later found out that my mother was sent to join the latter group. She was extremely tired and ill after that horrifying train ride in a closed car which lasted for days.

         I remember the men in our group were taken to a bathroom; they stripped us to the bone and we had to enter the showers holding the belt in the left hand and the shoes in the right hand. We had to leave the socks. I can’t remember any details about the bathing procedure. But I remember they shaved every thread of hair that was on us, made us put on a striped inmate uniform and sent us to our barracks yelling at us and kicking us with clubs. The place was extremely long – tens of meters long – and relatively narrow; it was an elongated rectangle with no beds inside. The floor and the walls were made of concrete. There was an elevated area two meters high or so that constituted the second floor; it had planks on it and this is where we all tried to find a place.

         We were so crammed that, during the night, if one wanted to turn around, he caused the entire row to turn around at the same time. They used to align us and count us several times. After the last count, they brought a cart loaded with large aluminum vessels filled with the famous Dorgemuse. It was a dish based on fodder beet. It was tasteless and semisolid. They distributed it in a particular way. They had 10 vessels that looked like the country saucers made of clay, only larger; they filled them with Dorgemuse using a ladle and passed them to the men in the first row. Every man in the first row had the right to sip five times, after which he had to pass the saucer to the man behind him who, in his turn, had the right to five sips and had to pass the saucer to the one behind him and so on. After the man in the last row had taken his five sips, the saucer returned to the first row and the ritual was resumed, until the saucer was empty. After the first ten rows were thus fed, the vessels moved to the next ten rows and this is how it went. Of course, I wouldn’t touch that food in the beginning. But, in the end, I had to. Then we just hung around until evening came, when they lined us up again.

         Let me tell you a secret. Some of the inmates acted as guards. They were armed with clubs and they used them from time to time, kicking the other inmates in the head or in the back. If they spotted an inmate who was wearing a good pair of shoes, they would just take them, giving him their worn out shoes in return. That never happened to me and, at some point, I realized that the reason I had got away was that, although I had a very good pair of boots, they looked worn out because of the trip and thus didn’t draw the guards’ attention. This routine lasted for days. We just stood there, not knowing what would happen to us. We were looking at a frightening black smoke that smelled like burnt flesh and was coming from the back of the camp – from a forest, it seemed. When I went back to the camp, in the 1970’s, I noticed that the distance that separated us from the crematory was actually very small. Back then, we thought the smoke was coming from far away. Of course, after a few days, we found out what the smoke was. That smoke has haunted me my entire life; I could never forget its smell and what it looked like.