The Gas Vans: A Critical Investigation - Holocaust Handbooks

SANTIAGO ALVAREZ, THE GAS VANS 251
ulation among which it circulates. Bogey rumors are not uncommon
in time of war. The war creates the situation of ambiguity, cognitive
uncertainty and anxiety in which rumors flourish. […]
The specific conditions that have been shown to be conducive to
the proliferation of wartime rumor are even more pronounced in
concentration camps and prisons. It is there, more than anywhere
else that ‘life becomes subject to the vicissitude of events over which
individuals have little control,’ where ‘institutional channels (of
communication) are destroyed or impaired’ and where the flow of
communication is facilitated by the ‘disappearance of conventional
social barriers.” (p. 21)
Byford even gives some interesting examples shedding some revealing
light on other aspects of the Holocaust:
[…] Even while at Auschwitz, these girls remained terrified of
‘mass rape at the Russian front’ more than of anything else, death
included.” (p. 21)
This corroborates F.P. Berg’s observations that Auschwitz prisoners
were more terrified of Red Army soldiers than they were of their SS
guards, who are claimed to have tormented and butchered them for
many years (Berg 2003a).
Byford continues:
“Also common in concentration camps were rumors relating to
specific methods of killing. In situations where death was a daily occurrence,
the main source of anxiety and, by extension, the subject of
rumor mongering and speculation, was the time, place and method
of execution. In those contexts fear rumors took the form of accounts
of particularly horrific and feared ways of dying. At the Starachowice
labor camp in Poland, for instance, there was a rumor that at the
nearby Bugaj forest victims were being buried alive, rather than
shot. In camps throughout the Third Reich, stories about murder
with electric current in water, gassing on board trains, or about victims
being skinned alive or turned into soap, were rife. All these stories,
however, turned out to have been unfounded. Similar examples
of rumor can be found also in the Serbian context.” (Ibid.)
Byford next addresses the considerable social pressure witnesses experience
to testify what everybody expects them to have experienced,
that is, to cater to the historical clichés of a society:
“They [the witnesses] were expected to comment on events that,
in most instances, lay beyond their immediate knowledge. […] in