ABSTRACT
This chapter tries to face a difficult topic: death in Auschwitz. Auschwitz should be considered as three camps in one. It was a labor camp, a concentration camp and an extermination camp. The number of labor camps located around Auschwitz I and II reached 27. The largest labor camp was Buna-Monovich (Auschwitz III), which manufactured synthetic rubber. The main extermination camp was Birkenau (Auschwitz II) where the four main crematoria were located. Therefore, in order to say anything about death in Auschwitz, we must first define the level we are discussing. The historical literature has dealt with three levels.1 It has depicted the horrifying labor conditions in Auschwitz and death caused by such conditions (Auschwitz as a labor camp). It has considered death caused by mental and physical abuse (Auschwitz as a concentration camp). It has traced the industrial process of killing (Auschwitz as an extermination camp). However, appalling labor conditions, mental and physical abuse, torture and systematic murder, terrible as they were, do not constitute the essence of Auschwitz. The focus upon Auschwitz as a labor/concentration/extermination camp was not only a historical but mainly a conceptual one as far as it concerned the meaning of death. The victim has always been presented in the historiography as having been ‘killed’/‘executed’/‘murdered’/ ‘exterminated’ in a physiological manner, with no regard to whether his death was caused by labor conditions, mental and physical abuse or a gas chamber. Such a concept of death, as an ending of physiological life, is the prevalent one and is defined as such in the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘Death: the final cessation of vital functions in an organism; the ending of life.’
