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The
German-Australian revisionist Frederick Toben has brought to our
attention the fact that today, beside the swimming pool at Auschwitz
I, there stands a signboard bearing, in Polish, English and Hebrew, a
notice intended to have the visitor believe that the pool was in fact
a simple reservoir for the fire brigade. It reads as follows:
Fire brigade reservoir built in the form of a swimming pool,
probably in early 1944.
He asks when exactly this signboard appeared. I myself have no idea
but the inscription is just as fallacious as any number of the
Auschwitz museum's other allegations or explanations. One fails to see
why the Germans, rather than settling for an ordinary reservoir, would
have made one in the fashion of a swimming pool... complete with
diving board.
The pool was a pool. It was meant for the detainees. Marc Klein
mentions it at least twice in his recollections of the camp. In an
article entitled 'Auschwitz I Stammlager' he wrote:
The working hours were modified on Sundays and holidays, when
most of the kommandos were at leisure. Roll call was at around noon;
evenings were devoted to rest and to a choice of cultural and
sporting activities. Football, basketball, and water-polo matches
(in an open-air pool built within the perimeter by detainees)
attracted crowds of onlookers. It should be noted that only the very
fit and well-fed, exempt from the harsh jobs, could indulge in these
games which drew the liveliest applause from the masses of other
detainees (De l'Université aux camps de concentration:
Télmorgnages strasbourgeois, Paris, les Belles-lettres, 1947,
p. 453).
In his booklet Observations et réflexions sur les camps de
concentration nazis he further wrote:
Auschwitz I was made up of 28 blocks built of stone laid out in
three parallel rows between which ran paved streets. A third street
ran the length of the quadrangle and was planted with birch trees,
the Birkenhaller intended as a walkway for the detainees, with
benches; there also was an open air swimming pool (booklet of
32 pages printed in Caen, 1948, p. 10; its text is a reproduction of
the author's article published in Etudes germaniques,
n° 3, 1948, pp. 244-275).
M. Klein, professor at the Strasbourg medicine faculty, took care
to point out that his first statement had been submitted "to the
reading and scrutiny of Robert Weil, professor of science at
Sarreguemines lycée," who had been interned in the same camps as
himself (p. 455).
In 1985, at Ernst Zündel's first trial in Toronto, I spoke of M.
Klein's recollections but the real specialist on the history of the
Auschwitz I swimming pool was at that time none other than the Swedish
revisionist Dietlieb Felderer. If I remember correctly, the Canadian
press headlined an article on his testimony about it. Moreover, in his
writings he often returns to this and other quite concrete, quite
precise subjects just as disquieting for the supporters of the
exterminationist argument.
N.B. The water of the swimming pool can obviously be used by
firemen in case of emergency. In his booklet, M. Klein wrote that
"there were firemen at the camp with very modern equipment" (p. 9).
Amongst the things that he had not expected to find on arriving, in
June 1944, "at a camp whose sinister reputation was known to the whole
world thanks to the Allied radio broadcasts," one may note, for the
detainees, "a hospital with sections specialised in line with the most
modern hospital practices" (p. 4), "vast and well fitted-out wash
houses along with communal W.C.'s built according to the modern
principles of sanitary hygiene" (p. 10), "the micro-wave delousing
process which had just been created" (p. 14), "the mechanical bakery"
(p. 15) the legal aid for the detainees (pp. 16-17), the existence of
"dietetic cooking" for some of the sick, with "special soups and even
a special bread" (p. 26), "a library where numerous reference works,
classic textbooks, and periodicals could be found" (p. 27), the daily
rolling by, next to the camp, of "the Krakow-Berlin express" (p. 29),
a cinema, a cabaret, an orchestra (p. 31), etc. M. Klein also notes
the horrible aspects of life in the camp and all the rumours,
including the "horrific stories" of gassings which he seems not really
to have believed until after the war, and then only thanks to the
testimonies in the "various trials of war criminals" (p. 7).
Addendum of 27 July. A wartime detainee and, like M. Klein
and R. Weil, a Jew himself, confirmed, in a short testimony written in
1997 entitled "Une Piscine à Auschwitz," that he saw, in July 1944,
dozens of his fellow prisoners busy at work on the said pool which, he
pointed out, had "a diving board and an access ladder"; he could have
added "along with three starting blocks for races." He wrote that
towards the end of that month "a newsreel director had some deportees
filmed swimming there." As one might expect, he enlivened his account
with the regular stereotypes of the SS men's or kapos' brutality and
he saw in the making both of the pool and of the film nothing but a
propaganda operation. His report ends with two interesting remarks.
First, that in 1997 no guide was "aware" of the pool (which
nonetheless was before the guides' very eyes and of which a photograph
accompanies the article: we read that this picture, showing a swimming
pool full of water, was taken in that year) and that the author would
like to know just where the newsreel might be today. His question is
akin to those put by some revisionists: might the film not be "at the
headquarters of the International Red Cross"? Doubtless he meant: at
the International Tracing Service (ITS) located at Arolsen-Waldeck in
Germany and operating under the direction of the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), with headquarters in Geneva. Since
1978, this body has barred revisionists from its archives, which are
known to be an exceptionally rich resource. For its part, the
Auschwitz State Museum probably possesses documentation relevant to
various aspects of this swimming pool's construction, e.g. the
project, the plans, the financing, the requests for and the supply of
building materials, the requisition of labourers, the inspection
visits.
(Reference for this account: R. Esrail, registration no. 173295, «
Une piscine à Auschwitz », in Après Auschwitz (Bulletin
de l'Amicale des déportés d'Auschwitz), n° 264/octobre 1997, p. 10).
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Queen
Victoria
