History Forum / General / General Topics / December 2007

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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.

  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'Universit?ux camps de concentration:
T?orgnages strasbourgeois, Paris, les Belles-lettres, 1947, p. 453).

In his booklet Observations et r?exions 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 lyc?" who had been
interned in the same camps as himself (p. 455).

In 1985, at Ernst Z?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 ?uschwitz," 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 ?uschwitz ?, in Apr?Auschwitz (Bulletin de l'Amicale des
d?rt?d'Auschwitz), n? 264/octobre 1997, p. 10).