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The prisoners who feared her called her "Fat Katya", she was given a separate room with a Polish maid, drove around the camp in the commandant's Mercedes and had an affair with a cruel SS officer. This is the unbelievable story of Katerina Singer, who was sent to Auschwitz at the age of 21, received a senior position from the Nazis while saving hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women from the gas chambers. A story that unravels the "grey zone" and insoluble dilemmas faced by Jews in the Holocaust
On June 8, 1961, the 71st session of Adolf Eichmann trial was held in the District Court of Jerusalem. Vera Alexander, a native of Slovakia, took the stand to testify before a hall full of journalists and curious spectators about her experiences in Auschwitz.
Auschwitz is the collective name for a complex of 45 concentration and death camps in Poland, where some 1.3 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered during World War II. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the headquarters, and Auschwitz II (Birkenau) the main concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers.
Alexandra arrived in Auschwitz in early April 1942 in one of the first transports organized by Adolf Eichmann's "Department for Jewish Affairs" in the "Reich Security Main Office".
Each of these transports contained about a thousand Jewish girls and young women gathered from all over Slovakia. They were told that they were sent to work for several months in Poland, but when the doors of the freight train cars opened after spending a whole day in nightmarish travel, they found out the sinister reality. They were brought to Auschwitz to be used as forced laborers in the construction of the Birkenau camp and in other hard labor.
The life expectancy of female prisoners living under the horrible conditions at the camp was measured in weeks or months. Indeed, only a few hundred of the thousands of Slovak Jewish women deported to Auschwitz remained alive when the camp was evacuated in January 1945.
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Their survival was made possible as they managed to be either included in the group of prisoners who worked indoors or who collaborated with the SS in running the camp.
Vera Alexander testified to her appointment as 'Blockälteste' (a block elder), which means a privileged prisoner in charge of carrying out SS discipline and orders in one of the camp’s residential blocks, a few weeks after arriving in Auschwitz.
Each block contained about a thousand starving and exhausted female prisoners, who lived in uninsulated barracks, eight or more women squeezed on a single narrow wooden bunk. Unlike the other prisoners, the Blockälteste lived in a separate cubicle and was granted improved living conditions and "exemption" from selections for death in the gas chambers, which took place occasionally among the camp's female prisoners.
"How did you come to be appointed a Blockälteste?" Alexander was asked by the prosecutor, Attorney General Gideon Hausner. "One day, I was summoned by the Rapportschreiberin (registering clerk), her name was Katya Singer", Alexander replied. "She told me that I would have to be Blockälteste in Block 3. I said that I was not suitable for that." Alexander continued, recounting that Singer, who was also a Jew from Slovakia, pleaded with her to take it on because in her opinion, people with human feelings should take on this task.
The judges were interested how was it possible to maintain a human attitude toward the prisoners under her responsibility, and Alexander detailed the methods she used to harm the prisoners as little as possible, assist them and even save some of them from death.
Alexander's testimony was widely covered in the local and international press. "Emotions of admiration filled the courtroom as the witness told how she had saved prisoners and helped them," the Israeli newspaper 'Herut' wrote the next day.
The testimony changed the view about Jewish women who had police or other administrative functions in Nazi concentration camps. These women were called "Kapo" (which means a prisoner in charge of a "commando" - a nickname for a work group).
Until the Eichmann trial, the Israeli public believed that most Kapos were heartless sadistic and cruel collaborators. Holocaust survivors who served in these positions were publicly denounced, interrogated by the police, and some were even prosecuted under The Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law.
Upon hearing Alexander's testimony, the Israeli public breathed a sigh of relief and largely adopted her words about the Kapos that "most were good," as she stated.
Although Alexander's testimony sparked public discourse about the Kapos, Singer's figure remained in the shadows. It is strange that a Jewish prisoner, who was of such a high rank, capable of appointing Kapos herself, is rarely mentioned in the historiography of Auschwitz.
This is especially surprising in light of the many testimonies of camp survivors, who titled Singer the "Queen of Auschwitz." Moreover, even if there were Jewish female prisoners who feared and hated her, the testimonies unanimously indicated that Singer saved many women from death.
To mark the International Holocaust Memorial Day and in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi Auschwitz death camp, it is worth delving into the enigma of "the most important and influential woman in Auschwitz," as Singer was termed in one of the testimonies. What was her endeavor and why did she disappear from collective memory?
The favorite of the 'horse of death'
Katerina (Katya) Singer was the daughter of a secular and assimilated Jewish family, and she looked like a gentile. She was born on December 5, 1920, in the Czechoslovak town of Mariková, now Slovakia. After graduating with honors in high school, she studied at the Business Administration Academy at the prestigious Palacký University. On March 27, 1942, she was sent to Auschwitz with a group of about a thousand young Slovak Jewish women.
One of the SS officers who welcomed the Slovak Jewish women in Auschwitz was a professor of German at the Palacký University. He recognized the 21-year-old Singer as his former talented student. Thanks to his intervention, she was appointed Blockälteste of one of the blocks. This was in the earlier days of the camp, when the role of Kapo was reserved for veteran German prisoners, mostly convicted criminals and prostitutes, who had been brought from the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp.
Singer was responsible, among other things, for roll calls of the prisoners who lived in her block. Roll calls were held every morning and evening, during which the Blockälteste passed the numbers on to a senior SS inspector, Margot Drechsler, who served as the Rapportführerin (registering commandant).
During these roll calls, Dreschler got acquainted with Singer and was captivated by the charms of this beautiful and intelligent Jewish woman. In September 1942, Dreschler appointed Singer as her chief secretary - the Rapportschreiberin.
Dreschler was well known to the camp prisoners because she was in charge of the roll calls. Her presence at the barracks terrified the prisoners due to her cruelty and frightening appearance – her buck teeth were sticking out, even when her mouth was closed, a sign that earned her the nickname "the horse of death" among the prisoners (she was executed by the Soviets at the end of the war).
As chief Rapportführerin, Dreschler was responsible for the registration office of the women's camp in Birkenau. This office, which was the headquarters of the camp, located in a separate block, employed about a hundred educated, multilingual female prisoners, who were supervised by Katya Singer, herself multilingual.
The prisoners who served in the registration office lived in one of the block's wings in relatively comfortable conditions, and Singer was assigned a private room.
The registration office was full of ticking typewriters. Every day, the personal cards of the new prisoners who arrived at the camp and were not sent directly to the gas chambers were transferred to the office, as well as lists of older prisoners who were found either inside the camp or outside in the various work units, like the punishment block, the hospital, the infamous block 25 (where female prisoners classified as unfit for work were selected to death and awaited transportation to the gas chambers), or in the subcamps.
Lists of prisoners who had died of disease or were murdered also arrived at this office. The role of the Rapportschreiberin was to process all this vast information (in the summer of 1944, the camp held about 40,000 female prisoners) and to provide the Rapportführerin every evening with precise lists of the prisoners who were supposed to be included in each of the dormitory blocks.
Roll calls were one of the methods of making the prisoners miserable, causing them great suffering. The morning roll calls began even before dawn. The prisoners stood for many hours regardless of the weather conditions, abused by either SS men, or by the Blockälteste and her assistants.
Those who collapsed were often murdered by beatings and kicks or by dog bites. Both sick prisoners and the corpses of prisoners who had died during the night had to be present in the roll call grounds.
After standing outside for three hours, the SS inspectors arrived to receive a report on the number of prisoners. When there was a match with the number of prisoners from the night before, the Rapportführerin announced that the count was over, and the prisoners could get off for work.
If the numbers did not coincide, even if it was in just one of the dozens of blocks, the roll call would last for hours throughout the camp until the 'mystery' was solved.
The discrepancy in numbers could result from an error in the records or from the absence of prisoners. The reasons for the absences were varied. Some prisoners would hide inside the camp for fear of being sent to the gas chambers, others drowned and died in the camp's quicksand or took advantage of the darkness of the night to "walk to the fence" (commit suicide on the electric fence that surrounded the camp). Escapes from the camp were rare.
Until Singer was appointed Rapportschreiberin, the lists of prisoners kept in the registration office contained many errors. The SS overseer Dreschler, quite an illiterate woman, had difficulty dealing with the count task and the erroneous reports angered her superiors, as the extended morning counts delayed the prisoners from getting for work.
The wise Singer improved the data processing methods, and the frequency of errors decreased dramatically. She and her assistants also designed statistical tables that Dreschler was required to present to the Auschwitz command but was unable to do it herself. Dreschler, as well as the SS overseers and the prisoners all thanked Singer for the positive changes in the camp's operations. Singer's achievements turned her into a privileged prisoner, admired by senior SS officers in the women's camp. Camp commander Franz Hössler spoiled her with cookies baked by his wife and took her to ostentatious rides in his open-top Mercedes across the camp's main street.
The position of power she held allowed Singer to improve the living conditions of the female prisoners. Her recommendations to place Jewish prisoners in key positions instead of German female kapos who had been either dismissed or dead, were almost always accepted by the camp commanders.
Over time, Singer became the one who appointed prisoners to these positions, while trying to ensure to appoint appropriate decent women, such as Vera Alexander. Singer was also entitled to engage in the placement of prisoners in the various commandos. This enabled her to remove prisoners from commandos who were sent to hard labor and place them in indoor work instead, thus greatly increasing their chances of survival.
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Vera Alexander testifying in Eichmann trial. "Most kapos were good"
(Photo: Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Israel State Archive)
The highlight of her activity was deleting the numbers of the prisoners from the lists of women who were selected for execution in the internal selections in the camp (here again, taking advantage of the fact that Dreschler completely trusted her), and replacing them with prisoners who had already died in the camp. In these actions, which involved great personal risk, Singer saved the lives of hundreds and perhaps thousands of prisoners.
But Singer's power went to her head. The survivors of the camp who did not belong to her circle of acquaintances called her "Fat Katya" because of her dapper appearance and the collection of clothes and shoes that filled her room and were kept clean, ironed, and shiny by a personal maid, a Polish prisoner in the camp.
Auschwitz survivor Eva Feldenkrais testified to this aspect of Singer's personality: "She had beautiful clothes and plenty of food, which her Slovak friends who worked in the "Canada" section of the Birkenau camp (a compound where belongings left behind by Jews sent to their extermination) provided her.
Her hair was shiny with its light color, and her body was full, healthy and beautiful... She was arrogant, disdaining girls who were not from her country, but she did no harm to anyone. She would sometimes walk along the main road in the camp, tall, with rosy cheeks, passing by us like a queen, and we, wrinkled and worn out, envied her."
In the testimonies about Singer, one can also find much more severe criticism from survivors who did not belong to her circle of close friends. They claimed that she helped mainly her Slovak friends, while other prisoners received her help only in exchange for gifts.
Moreover, Singer arranged for her favorite female prisoners to work in secure places, while other prisoners who were not connected to her or who could not arrange gifts for her were sent to hard labor.
Anna Palarczyk who was a prisoner in Birkenau: "Katya's great contribution was that she managed to save a multitude of persons from the gas. Whatever other different things she may have done stupidly or wrong, it is undeniable that she was saving human lives".
The Polish-Jewish prisoner Susan Cernyak-Spatz, who worked under her in the registration office, wrote about Singer's problematic behavior: "It sounds indecent to behave like that in the midst of the horror and deprivation at the women's camp, but that was the surreal world of Birkenau... If you wanted any favor for yourself, your friend or acquaintance, you had to buy it from someone who could provide it." Singer's position allowed her to provide many favors.
"Walked over bodies"
One of the most intriguing stories that resonated in the women's camp was Singer's love affair with Gerhard Palitzsch, which almost cost Singer her life. The good-looking Palitzsch was one of the cruelest murderers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was nicknamed the "executioner of Block 11," as one of his duties was to shoot male and female prisoners in the back of the head in front of the "black wall" in the courtyard of block 11, the Gestapo's prison in the main camp.
He also participated in the first tentative gassing using Zyklon B to murder Russian POWs and Polish prisoners who were crammed in the basement of Block 11.
Palitzsch boasted to his SS fellows in Auschwitz that he had murdered 25,000 people with his own hands. Even if he was exaggerating, this is a considerable number for someone who was not yet 30 years old and who only held the rank of first sergeant major. Palitzsch also built a network of privileged prisoners who carried out acts of murder and theft for him.
Even the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, a mass murderer himself, detested Palitzsch, calling him "the most cunning and slippery creature that I have ever gotten to know and experience in the many concentration camps. He literally walked over bodies to satisfy his hunger for power. ″
Singer's beauty caught Palitzsch's attention, and he fell deeply in love with her. He said that she resembled his late wife Luise, who had died in the typhus epidemic occurred in Auschwitz in November 1941.
Singer caved in to Palitzsch's courtship, even though she knew that he was a sadistic murderer and that he had sent a gypsy prisoner, with whom he had intimate relations, to the gas chambers.
At the end of her life, Singer claimed that she did it as she had no other choice, and because she wanted to exploit their relationship to benefit herself and perhaps also other prisoners in the camp.
One way to benefit herself was to try to change her registration in the camp from Jewish to Christian. Singer convinced Palitzsch and her other escorts in the SS that she was born to Christian parents who had given her up for adoption by a Jewish family as an infant. Palitzsch went out of his way to help her, but to no avail. The suspicious Gestapo agents refuted Singer's claim after a thorough examination conducted in Slovakia.
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Gerhard Palitzsch. Was not executed but was removed from Auschwitz
(Photo: Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Israel State Archive)
An intimate relationship between an SS man and a female prisoner in general, or a Jewish woman in particular, was a serious violation of the SS policy and the Nazi racial laws. When rumors of the affair between Singer and Palitzsch reached the Auschwitz Gestapo, the two lovers were imprisoned in the main camp prison.
It is not clear why Singer was not executed in the camp. Perhaps her admirers in the SS, who saw her as a Christian, intervened in her favor.
On September 3, 1944, Singer was sent with several hundred other prisoners to the Stutthof concentration camp in northern Germany. One of the guards accompanying the transport of prisoners was given a document ordering Singer's execution as soon as she arrived at Stutthof, but the smart Singer managed to escape punishment. There is evidence that she bribed the guard with gold in her possession, and in return the guard tore up the document.
Gerhard Palitzsch was put on trial by the SS, accused of "racial defilement", but due to his great contribution to the murderous enterprise at Auschwitz, he was reprieved and instead dismissed from the SS, removed from Auschwitz and sent to a Waffen-SS unit that fought on the Eastern Front against the Red Army. He was killed in action in December 1944.
The Forgotten Interview
Katya Singer survived Auschwitz and Stutthof and moved to Prague after the war. She worked for the city hall as an art gallery curator and married Doctor of Law Vladimir Velensky.
Singer continued to correspond with her friends from the camp (including Vera Alexander) and even met with them occasionally in Prague.
But until her death in 1995, Singer hid her Jewish identity and past from her Christian husband and from all her new family members and relatives. A few years before her death, she gave an interview to the American magazine JewishCurrents, but she set a condition that it would be published only after her death and that of her husband.
The publication of the interview in 2011 did not make the headlines. Apparently, her stubborn hiding behind her new identity, Katarina Velenska, caused the "Queen of Auschwitz" to be erased from collective memory.
Primo Levi, himself an Auschwitz survivor, coined the term "grey zone" in his book "The Drowned and the Saved" to describe the complex moral space in which prisoners who collaborated with the Nazis operated. A space in which every choice was between bad and worse. Many philosophers agreed with Levi, asserting that those who had not experienced the inferno of Auschwitz were not entitled to and were unable to morally judge the actions of those who fell into the grey zone.
It is therefore appropriate to summarize the character of Katya Singer with a quote from the testimony of the Polish woman Anna Palarczyk who was a prisoner in Birkenau for two years and knew Singer well from the registration office: "Katya's great contribution was that she managed to save a multitude of persons from the gas. Whatever other different things she may have done stupidly or wrong, it is undeniable that she was saving human lives".
- Yoel Yaari is the Henri and Erna Leir Professor for Research in Neurodegenerative Diseases at the Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine in Jerusalem and a Holocaust researcher. His book "Portrait of a Woman" was recently published in Hebrew by Kinneret-Zmora-Dvir.