From 2013 to 2017, I traveled with Holocaust survivor and Mengele Twin Eva Mozes Kor, following her story across Poland, Hungary, and Romania. I wanted to learn, not just from her words, but from the places themselves. I walked the dirt roads where she grew up in Romania, stood on the concrete where her family waited to be shoved into cattle cars in Șimleu Silvaniei, and pressed my hand against the cold stone of Block 10 in Auschwitz, where Dr. Mengele once looked down at her and said, “It’s a shame she’s so young. She only has a couple weeks to live.”
Eva never told me what to think. She never tied things up neatly. She only asked me to look, to listen, to understand: survival, real survival, was never just about strength. It was in the details. The ability to step over a dead body and keep moving, because stopping meant risking your own. The skill of slipping a potato from the commissary without getting caught. The discipline to dissociate, not from the rats that scurried over her at night, but from the fear of them, because sleep was necessary, and fear could not be allowed to strip her of the strength sleep afforded her.
It’s easy to imagine survival as something straightforward, a matter of strength or willpower. But in Auschwitz, survival was a negotiation, a constant weighing of the impossible.
“What would you do to survive? You can’t really know until your life is actually in danger. It was easy to die here. Survival took every ounce of strength you could muster.”
Standing in the humid summer breeze at Auschwitz-Birkenau, I contemplated Eva Kor’s words.
It is easy to die. It is difficult to live. Life is fragile. We come from the dust and to the dust we return. Beginnings and endings are consistently marked by celebration, comedy, tragedy, and pathos. Middles are different. The middle of a thing is where the human spirit grows. Middles churn with questions, collide with conflicting purposes, strain toward progress, and wrestle with the weight of stagnation.
Birkenau was an epicenter where middles and endings met. Survival was not simply a contest won by the fittest. It was a succession of choices; choices that rang in the soul of each individual, like the sound of a train dragging its way through the countryside on tracks of steel. Some survived by cultivating their minds to be like the birds that flew above the blood and mire. Some survived by making themselves useful. Some survived by climbing into a trough of human waste to escape the eye of the enemy. Because even here, in filth, there was something worth grasping, something worth staying alive for.
Latrines: A Place of Filth and Refuge
The Nazis allowed prisoners two visits to the latrines per day, one in the morning, one in the evening. That was it. The rest of the time, men, women, and children had to relieve themselves wherever they stood. The ground they walked on bore witness to their labor, their suffering, and the last remnants of their dignity.
The air of Birkenau was thick with an unholy stench: human waste, rancid sweat, the sharp tang of blood, and the sickly-sweet rot of decay. It clung to the skin, crawled into the lungs, and settled deep in the gut like a living thing, an inescapable reminder that suffering here had a scent. And with every breath, sickness followed. Dysentery oozed through the camp, rotting stomachs from the inside out, turning each bite of watery broth into a calculated risk, each swallow a step closer to collapse.
And yet, there was an odd paradox: working in the latrines was considered one of the best jobs in the camp.
Imagine a world where standing in human waste meant protection. In Auschwitz, it did.
The Paradox of the Latrine Workers
The latrines were a guard-free zone. And so, in this rancid, airless place, there was something invaluable: privacy.
For those assigned to the latrines, the absence of guards offered a rare and fragile freedom. In the stench and shadows, prisoners bartered stolen scraps, exchanged whispered news, and conspired in low voices. Some sought fleeting moments of physical intimacy, an urgent defiance against a world that had stripped them of choice. In a place built to erase them, the latrines became one of the few spaces where prisoners could still claim their own existence.
Here, in the thick of filth, they remembered they were still human.
The Work of the Scheisskommando
Their job was simple: lift the heavy concrete slabs covering the waste pits, lower themselves inside, and scoop out the accumulated filth.
If you’ve ever gagged while cleaning out your refrigerator after leaving leftovers for too long, imagine standing waist-deep in a sea of decay. The air was thick, humid, and alive with flies. The stench coated everything, clinging to their skin and settling into the creases of their clothes like an unshakable second skin.
But for those who had this job, it was a lifeline. They weren’t being worked to death in the fields. They weren’t being lined up for random executions. They weren’t subjected to the relentless gaze of the SS officers who delighted in tormenting prisoners for sport.
The latrines, for all their horrors, offered something rare in Auschwitz: predictability.
A Dignity That Refused to Die
Powerlessness is a disease that seeps into the soul. Strip away respect, dignity, and basic rights, and two things happen: the perpetrator swells with power, and the victim shrinks.
Allowing prisoners to stand ankle-deep in their own filth was not just a byproduct of poor sanitation, it was an act of control. The SS guards didn’t have to lift their legs and urinate on the prisoners to show their dominance. They merely had to stand still while the prisoners did it to themselves.
But in the darkest places, even where dignity was supposed to die, the will to live persisted. The latrine workers of Auschwitz-Birkenau found ways to carve out a space for themselves, to steal back fragments of their humanity, to keep moving forward when everything around them said they should fall.
Consider if you will, a woman falling from the sky into the deep ocean. She is surrounded by foreign creatures, disoriented by the sounds and weight of the water. She is not a fish. She has no gills. The water is her enemy. It presses on her lungs, reminding her with each second that this place does not belong to her.
She has a choice. She can panic and sink, or she can swim.
This is the paradox of survival. This is the choice of the Scheisskommando.
The Final Question
Eva Mozes Kor once asked a group of people this question as we stood inside a latrine at Birkenau:
“How many of you could survive here? What would you do to survive?”
Survival in the death camps was never about dignity. The prisoners carried that within them, untouchable even in the face of brutality. What was at stake was something else entirely. Life in exchange for one more day. Hopelessness held at bay for a sliver of hope. The certainty of an ending deferred, just long enough to stay in the middle a little longer.
We like to think we know ourselves. That in the face of unspeakable horror, we would know what to do. That we would have a plan. A way to resist. A way to bring order to chaos.
But the truth is, we don’t know.
We can’t know.
Not until we’re the ones at the edge of the pit, staring into the void.
Not until survival is no longer a question, but the only thing left.
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025
Jill Szoo Wilson 