I Was Number 10291 – The Harrowing Testimony of Jenny Spreitzer – A Prisoner Who Was in Charge of the Records at ...

I Was Number 10291 – The Harrowing Testimony of Jenny Spreitzer – A Prisoner Who Was in Charge of the Records at the Auschwitz Extermination Camp

Ich war Nr. 10291 – ״I Was Number 10291״, by Jenny Spritzer

A harrowing personal testimony recounting Spritzer’s experiences as a Holocaust survivor who endured three years in Auschwitz and was reunited with her son at the end of the war. The number in the title, 10291, refers to the prisoner number tattooed on her arm at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. Published by Jack Schumacher, Zurich. Switzerland, 1946 – first edition. In German. At the opening of the book appears a photograph of the author, taken one year after her liberation. Rare.

“Almost every night we heard two or three shots. Then we knew that more women had ended their lives near the electrified barbed-wire fence. But the fence was almost never charged strongly enough to kill them instantly. The sentry would let them lie there and suffer for a while, and only then deliver the coup de grâce. This constant rushing, the meager and insufficient food, the few hours of sleep, the cold at night - all of this exhausted us so much that death soon appeared to many of us as a deliverance. I myself longed for death… I, who had endured with such courage and resilience almost a year of imprisonment in France…”.

Jenny Spreitzer was an Austrian‑born Jew; she was born in 1907 and later moved with her parents to Berlin. Before the Second World War, she lived in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. When the Nazis occupied the Netherlands, she fled with her husband and their young son to France, but was arrested there by the authorities and taken into detention, being told: “You and your son will be free tomorrow morning.” In July 1942 she was deported to Auschwitz, where she was forced to endure three years of daily fear for her life, fighting again and again to survive. She succeeded in staying alive in part thanks to the fact that she worked in Canada (the area of the camp where the belongings and clothing of the murdered prisoners were sorted), and later in the camp offices, where she was put in charge of the registration department for all the prisoners of Auschwitz‑Birkenau and its sub‑camps. Jenny was the one who marked the prisoner cards of those sent to the gas chambers with the letters S.B., meaning “special treatment.” She was the one who heard the officers’ orders to take prisoners for “special treatment, ” meaning the dispatch of thousands of prisoners to the gas chambers, and she also witnessed the burning of these lists after they were taken down to the basement. These positions gave her access to information and to somewhat better conditions, which enabled her to help other inmates as well. Her role as a camp secretary gives her testimony first‑order historical value, as it exposes the people she knew at close range, the senior camp administration made up entirely of SS officers, the guard personnel, and others. She witnessed up close the entire registration process for those slated for extermination, she closely followed the work of the railway clerks who brought the Jews to the camp, she knew precisely and on a daily basis who gave the orders for the executions of Jews in the camp, and more. Her book contains many harsh passages difficult to read, describing the cruelty of the SS toward the Jews more than toward any other group of prisoners in Auschwitz. 

Jenny remained in Auschwitz almost until the end of the war, until finally' during the German collapse in the spring of 1945, she managed to escape from a death march in a snowstorm together with her closest friend, a Ukrainian woman named Donia. Yet even then she was not safe, as the two young women found themselves in Poland, caught between fleeing German forces and the advancing Allies amid the chaos of the final battles. After further ordeals following her escape, she ultimately survived and was reunited with her son at the Austrian–Swiss border. 

In her book, Spreitzer describes the inhuman conditions endured by the women prisoners in the camp.

Complete copy with the original cover, which depicts a thin hand reaching beyond a barbed-wire fence, bearing Spreitzer’s prisoner number, 10291- a powerful image symbolizing the loss of human identity and the reduction of a person to a number within the Nazi concentration camp system.

Rare. Only a few copies listed in the WorldCat global library catalog.

For the full video testimony of Jenny Spreitzer (in German) about her life during the war and especially in Auschwitz see: here

157 pages. Good condition.