I thought of this in a current (recurring) thread about the “badness” of left/sinister in various cultures/religions.
When reading about or listening to survivors of Auschwitz, the terrible import of “right” and “left” is often mentioned. Immediately after being herded off the trains and separated into two lines of male and female-with-children, they faced the Auschwitz doctors–no one else–who directed them right or left: whether to be sent immediately to the gas chambers or to be temporarily spared until later murder.
This was called Selektion, the normal German word for “selection.” Like other words used by the Nazis, it is now never used when discussing choosing Jews in any context. (I’d be interested what baggage the word carries now otherwise in German usage, if any.)
The accounts are conflicting, because of the old “my-left–your left” confusion.
I do not want to rely only on maps of the train and the camp–which is huge–because the location of the gas chambers may not be the immediate direction of the death chain.
So, from the eyes of the condemned, which direction meant immediate death?
The place where the selection took place was changed at least once, in order to be closer to the gas chambers and facilitate the elimination of Hungarian Jews who were being sent to Auschwitz in exceptionally large numbers.
Two pictures of the selektion process I looked at show people organized in two files, parallel to the railway and facing the same direction.
In this picture old women and children are seen only on the left side. Since this is the perspective also of ‘the Selection Officer’, it means they had been sent to his left (and the old women and children to their right). (Note the other line is comprised, it seems, of men only - it was the line formed of those chosen to “work” and it is to the selectors’ right, the men’s left).
This may, or may not, be corroborated by the account of Shlomo Venezia who was one of the only, if not the only, survivor of Sonderkommando duty at Auschwitz who, when referring to his own selection said, “My brother and my cousins also ended up on the right side with me . . .” (emphasis added).
As an aside, I have read his book which was truly a chronicle of hell. Most people know of Auschwitz through the stories of those who survived the work camp. There are very, very few accountings, though, by those who were in the death camp.
If you wish to see what I read was the most accurate reconstruction of the Auschwitz death camp (with a story about the Sonderkommando to which Venezia belonged), I cannot recommend highly enough the extraordinary, exceptionally provocative, and generally outstanding movie, The Grey Zone.
Selektion, like Sonderbehandlung and a number of other terms from Nazi bureaucratese that had no baggage before, have joined the list of words for which it is Not Done to apply to people. (The word Auswahl, much more common anyway, is used for people).
BTW regarding the connotation of left/right in German culture, there is a slight connection of right to correct (rechts = right (direction), Recht = law/justice, gerecht = just), but no real connection of left to bad (except for rightist’s attitude to leftists - SS guards would have hated the political left but not considered their Jewish prisoners in that light). My guess, not informed by circumstances at Auschwitz but by general German culture, would be that it did not cross the guards’ minds to arrange matters with regard to connotations of the terms left and right.
That’s interesting, because the left = bad connotation goes back quite a ways to at least the Romans (IIRC), who really influenced later european culture. I would have guessed that the connotation would have been there at least a little bit.
(It may be worth saying that it’s not a super strong connotation in English–and hasn’t been for a while–but it’s definitely there.)
