“It will hurt a little,” the German guards told the young girls who had just arrived.
The smell of cleanliness, the smell of bleach, chlorine, disinfectants. For you, it’s the smell of safety, of a hospital, of a well-kept house. It’s comforting. But for those who stepped off the train at Auschwitz-Birkenau, this smell was that of liquid hell. They had been promised a shower to wash off the grime of their journey.
They gave them a chemical burn on raw meat. Mary’s story is one of a welcoming ritual where hygiene becomes a weapon of torture. A story where a simple phrase like “it stings a little” becomes the most gruesome euphemism. Before you enter this disinfection block, I ask you for a simple gesture.
Subscribe, it’s your way of not looking away. Turn on notifications and tell us in the comments where you’re watching this video from. Lyon, Montreal, Algiers? Your presence helps us carry this voice further. Hold your breath. The air will become unbreathable. Pointless! Please! If you like it, that’s enough. Total nudity. My name is Mary.
I am 90 years old. I live in a very clean retirement home. The floors shine, the sheets smell of fresh laundry. But when the cleaning lady comes by with her mop and bucket full of disinfectant, I have to go outside. I have to go into the garden, even when it’s raining. The smell of chlorine still burns my skin years later.
It was August 1944. We had just arrived. The journey had taken three days, three days in a cattle car without water, crammed together in the stench of excrement and fear. When the doors opened, we dreamed of only one thing: not food, not sleep. We dreamed of washing ourselves, of feeling water on our skin, of removing the filth that clung to our souls.
The SS shouted at us. “Out, quickly!” They herded us toward a large brick building. Sauna—the irony was ironic. A sauna is a place of relaxation. Here, it was a factory for dehumanization. We were taken into a huge, cold room. “Take off your clothes!” shouted a Polish Kapo. “Everything—clothes in a pile, jewelry, shoes.”
I was 20 years old, a student nurse. I was incredibly ashamed. Undressing in front of strangers, in front of men walking by, was already an act of violence. But fear erases shame. Within five minutes, there were three hundred of us naked women, trembling, arms crossed, trying to conceal our intimacy with our dirty hands.
We thought the worst was over. We thought they’d give us soap. But before the water came the barbers. They were prisoners, men, armed with clippers and razors. They didn’t look at us like women; they looked at us like cattle that needed shearing. I was pushed onto a wooden stool. In a few seconds, my brown hair fell to the floor.
I felt naked a second time. Without hair, you lose your face. You become a skull, a number. But he didn’t stop at my head. Camp regulations required total body hair removal. “To combat the lice,” they said. “The man ordered me to raise my arms.” He ran the clippers under my armpits.
The blade was hot, the gesture brutal. Then he pointed at my lower abdomen. “Spread your legs!” he growled. I hesitated, I wept with shame. An SS guard, who had been watching the scene, struck me in the back with his boot. “Do you think you’re at the gynecologist, Princess? Open up.” I obeyed. The man no longer had electric clippers. He had used a straight razor.
An old straight razor. I saw the blade. It was gray and nicked. It had served hundreds of women before me, never cleaned, never sharpened. There was no shaving cream, no warm water to soften the skin. He would shave dry, on the most sensitive part of the body. He gripped my skin with his rough fingers and began to scrape.
The sound is what has stayed with me. Scritch, scritch, the dry sound of a metal blade scraping against dry skin, a sound like sandpaper. Imagine taking a jagged, worn butter knife and trying to peel a ripe peach with it, without water. Without gentleness. That’s what it did. The first stroke of the blade made me scream.
It wasn’t a clean surgical cut like with a scalpel. It was a bite. The blade, dulled by hundreds of other bodies before me, was no longer sharp. It caught on the hair, pulled at the root, and tore off the top layer of epidermis. “Don’t move,” the man hissed, “or I’ll cut it all off.” I froze.
I gripped the edge of the wooden stool until my knuckles were white. I felt the tears running down my cheeks, mingling with the dust of the journey. The shaving continued, brutal, fast. He didn’t follow the curves of my body. He just went straight ahead, as if mowing a lawn. With each stroke, I felt the fire.
The skin was sore; the labia and inner thighs are delicate and rich in nerve endings. If it was dry, it became irritated immediately. Then came the blood. Not bleeding. No, it was more insidious. It was a multitude of tiny red dots, beads of blood, oozing from every pore, every punctured follicle, every cut from the blade. I looked down.
My crotch was nothing but a single red, burning, inflamed patch, covered in bloody scratches. It was raw flesh, a huge abrasion. “Next!” the barber called, nudging me on the shoulder. I stood up. I struggled to walk. The friction of my own thighs against each other burned. I felt like I had shattered glass between my legs.
I wasn’t alone. Around me was a procession of mutilated women. Some had blood running down their legs. Others clutched their lower abdomens, writhing in pain from the irritation. The nurse in me analyzed the damage with horror. Massive risk of infection. Staphylococcus. We need to clean this. It needs a mild antiseptic, diluted hydrogen peroxide.
The SS grouped us together on the other side of the room. We stood there, disfigured women, shaved from head to toe, naked, trembling, with burning and bleeding genitals. We looked like plucked poultry, ready for the oven. A door at the far end of the room opened. A cloud of steam billowed out. A strong odor hit us. A pungent chemical smell.
“Shower, shower!” the guards shouted, the magic word, shower. A murmur of hope rippled through the group. Water. Finally, water. We thought the water would extinguish the fire. The water would cleanse the blood. The water would do us good. We rushed toward the door, almost pushing each other away, to get in. We wanted to feel fresh drops of water on our razor burn. We wanted to extinguish the fire between our legs.
We entered a tiled, damp room. There were showerheads on the ceiling, but they weren’t working. Instead, there were two men, prisoners, supervised by a bored-looking SS man. He wasn’t holding towels; he was holding buckets, large metal buckets, filled with a yellowish, murky liquid. The smell was suffocating, it constricted the throat, it made the eyes water.
It was the smell I fled from in the nursing home, the smell of industrial disinfectant, cresol, concentrated chlorine. The SS man smiled maliciously when he saw our hopeful faces, our bodies scarred by razors. He looked at our open wounds, our bloody scratches. He knew exactly what would happen. It was simple chemistry, acid on exposed cells.
He waved to the men with the buckets. “Come on, disinfect all this for me. It’ll hurt a little.” A little. It was the last lie before the roar. The first bucket flew. The yellow liquid formed an arc in the air, shimmering under the harsh light of the bare bulbs. It was almost beautiful, like amber-colored liquid.
She landed in the front row of women. There was no delay, not a second of comprehending the situation. The effect was immediate. Imagine pouring pure lemon juice on a cut finger. Now multiply that pain by 1000 and imagine that the cut isn’t on your finger, but on your entire groin, on your frayed labia, on your anus, on the insides of your thighs. The liquid touched my skin.
At first, a sensation of icy cold. A fraction of a second later: fire. It wasn’t a thermal combustion like a flame that passes by and then disappears. It was a chemical combustion, a living combustion. The liquid wasn’t content to simply lie on the skin. It ate its way in, searching for openings. It infiltrated the thousands of micro-cuts left by the dull razor.
It attacked my unprotected mucous membranes. A collective scream tore through the air. It wasn’t a human scream. It was the sound of a herd being slaughtered. Three hundred women screamed simultaneously with a single shrill, piercing, animalistic voice. I took the brunt of it on my abdomen. I thought I’d been hit with sulfuric acid. I felt like my pelvis was melting.
The pain was so intense, so piercing, it felt like it cut me in half. I reflexively doubled over, placing my hands on my genitals to try and remove the product. Fatal mistake. My hands were dirty, and rubbing only pushed the liquid deeper into the wounds. I spread it. “It burns, it burns! Stop!” All around me was the apocalypse.
Women jumped around. They leaped up and down like dancers. It was an uncontrollable reflex. Their bodies tried to escape the pain, to shake off the liquid, but the liquid clung to their skin. Some threw themselves to the floor, rolling back and forth on the wet tiles, trying to wipe off the poison, but the floor was covered with the same product that had run off.
As they rolled, they got it on their backs, their buttocks, their faces. The SS man laughed. He leaned against the wall, arms folded, watching the spectacle with the eye of a theater critic. “Look at them dancing!” he said to the prisoners holding his empty buckets. “The flea dance, that’s my favorite.” The nurse in me screamed in horror.
I recognized the smell now, as the product evaporated on our hot bodies. It was concentrated hot chloride, or perhaps an undiluted cresol solution. It’s a product used to disinfect latrines and to clean concrete floors in slaughterhouses. It’s a caustic product. On healthy skin, it irritates. On abraded mucous membranes, it causes necrosis.
I felt my tissue contract. I felt like my insides were boiling. The pain radiated to my kidneys, to my spine. I felt dizzy. I wanted to vomit, but the pain constricted my stomach so tightly that I could only gag. “Again!” the SS man ordered. Those at the very back hadn’t received any yet. The men refilled the buckets at a large tank.
They aimed for the far end of the room. The women recoiled in horror, scrambling over one another to escape the acid attack. It was a mass of pink and red flesh, panicked, screaming, crashing against the brick wall. The second wave began. Splash! Another scream, another dance, macabre. A girl next to me, who couldn’t have been older than 16, had fallen to her knees.
She got the liquid in her face as she tried to protect herself from the ground. She screamed and clutched at her eyes. The product blinded her. I wanted to help her. I wanted to tell her not to rub, but I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed by my own agony. I stood there, legs spread, trembling, letting saliva spill from my open mouth, praying it would stop, praying I would die so my nerves would burn out and stop sending that distress signal to my brain.
But it didn’t stop. Chemical burns have this peculiarity: they continue as long as the product is present. And we had no water to rinse with, no towel, nothing. We were trapped in our own skin, which was consuming us. The SS man stepped into the middle of the room, carefully avoiding getting the blood-spattered liquid covering the floor on his polished boots.
He looked at us, pausing, weeping, writhing in pain. “There you have it,” he said calmly. “Now you’re clean, you’re disinfected. The lice are dead.” He paused, a cruel smile on his lips. “And if it bites, that’s because it’s working.” He snapped his fingers. “Out, everyone out! Quick, we need the space for the next transport. Out!”
It was cold outside. The air was polluted with ash. But we had no choice. The Kapos came in with sticks to drag us out. We had to run, run with acid between our legs, run with raw meat rubbing against us with every step. And that was just the beginning of the reception. We were herded into the courtyard. Outside it was gray.
A Polish wind thick with coal dust hit us. The thermal contrast was brutal. Our naked bodies, boiling from the inside out because of the chemicals, were engulfed by the cold outside. For a second, just a single second, the cold felt good. It numbed the surface, but very quickly the chemicals took over again. The liquid, drying in the wind, became sticky.
It formed a film, an invisible crust that clung to the skin. It was as if we were being painted alive. The chlorine continued to bite, more slowly, but deeper. We stood there, 300 naked women, jumping on the spot, no longer for the product’s macabre dance, but to avoid freezing. We clung to each other. But the skin-to-skin contact was unbearable.
As soon as one thigh touched another, there was a scream. Our skin had become like cigarette paper on raw meat. “Get used to it.” A Kapo knocked over a huge wooden crate in the middle of the courtyard. Inside weren’t clean, striped uniforms, neatly stacked. It was a heap of rags, a mountain of civilian clothing stolen from previous transports, sorted, and perhaps superficially washed, but it reeked of decay and death.
It was the poverty lottery. You had to run to the pile and grab something. We pounced. It was panic. If we didn’t get anything, we’d freeze to death. I plunged my hand into the pile. My fingers caught a piece of gray fabric. I pulled. It was a dress. A short-sleeved synthetic summer dress. It was huge.
It had belonged to a strong woman. I had no underwear, no panties, nothing to protect my burned crotch. I put on the dress. The fabric fell over me like a sack. But the moment the fabric touched my thighs, it was a new kind of torture. Imagine rubbing burlap on a third-degree burn. The rough fabric rubbed directly against the areas already scratched by the razor and burned by the disinfectant.
With every movement, every step, the fabric lashed like a whip. I stopped, legs spread, trying to keep the dress from touching my skin, but the wind pressed the fabric against me. I saw wet patches appear on the gray of the dress at hip level. It wasn’t water; it was lymph fluid and blood seeping through my chemical wounds. The dress clung to the wound.
It melted into my skin. Around me, it was a carnival of horrors. Thin women swam in men’s coats. Strong women burst the seams of children’s blouses. Some had only found a skirt and remained topless, their arms crossed to cover themselves. We no longer looked human.
We were scarecrows, tragic clowns, shaved heads, faces contorted in pain, dressed in rags. The nurse in me knew what would happen. The wound isn’t breathing. The fabric is dirty. The chemical wasn’t rinsed off. It’s trapped against the flesh through the clothing. It will macerate. The necrosis will begin tomorrow.
But I had no time to think about tomorrow. The SS man who had been supervising the showers came out of the building. He lit a cigarette. He looked at us with satisfaction. “Roll call!” he shouted. “Line up in rows of five.” We had to line up. It was necessary to stand straight. I tried to walk. Left leg, friction, pain.
Right leg, friction, burning. I walked like a cowboy. Bow-legged, to limit contact. All the women walked like that. An army of lame ducks. The SS man laughed. “Look at them,” he said to the Kapo. “Looks like they’ve been riding all day.” We lined up in rows. I shivered with cold, but my pelvis was on fire.
I felt the liquid dry, pulling and tearing with every movement. Beside me, the girl who had gotten the product in her eyes wept in the silence. Her eyes were red, swollen, almost closed. She was holding the hand of an older woman. Perhaps her mother. “Mommy, it burns, I can’t see anything.” The mother could do nothing.
She couldn’t wipe her daughter’s eyes because her own dress was dirty. All she could do was squeeze her hand. We waited. The roll call lasted two hours. Two hours standing, motionless, while the acid finished its silent work of destruction beneath our stolen clothes. Every minute was a struggle not to pass out. If we fell, the dogs would come.
I stared at the back of the woman in front of me. She was wearing a blue floral dress. There was a large red stain spreading across her buttocks. She was bleeding. I said to myself, “This is hell.” It’s not the fire. It’s the filth. It’s the humiliation. It’s experiencing pain where we should be experiencing gentleness.
Suddenly, a female Kapo stopped in front of me. She looked me up and down. She saw my posture, my spread legs, my grimace of pain. She smiled. She had gold teeth, probably stolen from corpses. “Welcome to the camp, prisoner,” she said. She took a bottle out of her bag. “You still seem to be in pain. Would you like some medicine?” I was filled with desperate hope.
Perhaps some ointment, water? I shook my head. “Yes, please.” She opened the bottle. She threw the contents in my face. It wasn’t medicine, it was dirty water, cold, greasy dishwater. “To refresh your mind,” she mocked. “The only cure here is work or the fireplace.” She walked away laughing.
Dirty water flowed over my face, down my neck, and finally into my cleavage, where it mixed with the burns beneath my dress. I didn’t move. I didn’t wipe the water away. In that moment, I understood that my body no longer belonged to me. It had become a playground for her sadism, an object to shave, to burn, to defile. But deep inside, a small voice spoke very loudly.
A nurse’s voice, a cold and clinical voice. They can burn the skin, but they can’t burn what I know. I know how to heal, and as long as I know that, I’m still human. Night fell, and the night in the camps makes the burns worse because there’s nothing to distract the mind. The night in the block wasn’t a time of rest; it was a time of maceration.
We were crammed five or six of us together on wooden planks, naked, without mattresses, without blankets. Just our injured bodies, pressed together to avoid freezing to death. But that night, body heat was no comfort; it was a catalyst. The heat activated the chemical reaction. Beneath our gray clothes, in the stinking darkness of the barracks, the chlorine continued its destructive work.
I couldn’t sleep. Nobody slept. The silence was filled with small, damp, disgusting sounds. The sound of fabric peeling from wounds when someone moved. Scritch, plop, and groan. An ocean of stifled groans. My body had become a map of pain. The product had dried. It had formed hard, yellowish crusts that trapped my skin. But underneath, it festered.
I felt the lymph fluid pooling and blisters forming, toxic blisters beneath the epidermis. I felt like I was wearing underwear made of stinging nettles and crushed glass. The nurse in me made the diagnosis in the darkness: second-degree chemical burn. Beginning of a skin infection. Risk of gas gangrene if anaerobic bacteria enter the deep wounds caused by the razor.
I knew what was happening, and I knew I had nothing to stop it. No water, no sulfonamide ointment, nothing. But the worst part wasn’t the static pain. The worst part was the physiology. After hours of waiting, stress, and cold, my body needed to eliminate. My bladder was full. Going to the toilet is a simple thing. But when your urethra, your labia, and your entire perineum are raw, burned by acid, urinating becomes an act of torture.
I tried to hold it in. I clenched my teeth, I tensed my muscles, but the pain of holding it in added to the burning. I was trembling; we had to go there. There was a bucket at the end of the barracks, a toilet. If we went on the wood, we’d be beaten to death the next day for being unclean. I stood up.
Removing the dress from my thighs was a rip-off. I felt my skin tear along with the fabric. I walked through the darkness, stepping over the bodies, guided by the pestilent stench of the bucket. I arrived at the toilet. I squatted over it, without touching the soiled rim, and let nature take its course. I can’t find the words to describe the feeling. Urine is acidic and salty.
When the hot liquid touched the areas burned by the chlorine, I saw white. I thought I was going to faint. My legs buckled. I had to hold onto the rough wall to keep from falling into the bucket. It was as if someone were holding a blowtorch between my legs, an acute, blinding pain that shot straight to my brain.
I stifled a scream in my fist. I bit myself until I bled to keep from screaming. If I screamed, the night watchman would come in and strike me. I was done, still drenched in sweat, tears streaming freely down my face. I stood up. The friction of the dress returned instantly, mercilessly. I went back to my seat. I lay down on the hard wood. My teeth chattered.
The shock of the pain had given me a fever. Beside me in the darkness, I heard a faint voice. It was the girl who had gotten the product in her eyes. “Woman,” she whispered. “Woman.” I turned to face her, despite the pain the movement caused in my kidneys. “I’m here,” I whispered back. “I can’t open my eyes,” she said. “They’re stuck shut. It burns so much. Am I blind?” I held out my hand.
I touched her face in the darkness. Her skin was burning. Her eyelids were swollen like hard-boiled eggs, covered with crusts of dried chlorine and pus. “Don’t touch it,” I said gently, pushing away her hands, which were trying to scratch. “If you scratch, it will get infected.” “But I want to see!” she cried. “You’ll see tomorrow,” I lied. “Sleep, try to sleep.” She snuggled against me. She smelled the pungent scent of disinfectant and the sweet smell of fever.
I put my arm around her, ignoring the burning sensation that contact caused on my own skin. That was the true torture of disinfection. It wasn’t just the physical pain; it was the impossibility of comforting each other. We couldn’t kiss, we couldn’t hug. Every touch was painful. They had transformed tenderness into pain. I stayed awake, listening to the young girl’s whistling breath.
I felt the smell rising in the barracks. It was no longer the smell of chlorine; it was the smell of meat beginning to rot. A stale, heavy odor. Nazi cleanliness was taking its toll. By destroying the barrier of our skin, they had opened the door to every bacteria in the camp. We had been disinfected, but we were dying from the inside out. By early morning, I knew the night had taken its toll. The woman who had been sleeping on the other side of me was no longer moving. She was cold.
She died without a sound, probably from septic shock or exhaustion. Her body was stiff. Her gray dress clung to her thighs through a dark, dry stain. I looked up at the roof of the barracks. I thought of my bottle of 90-proof alcohol in the hospital, my sterile compresses, my clean hands. All of that belonged to another planet.
Here, medicine was a weapon. Hygiene was murder at daybreak. It was necessary to get up, to walk, to work with fire between your legs. I should have died. Statistically speaking, with extensive chemical burns and infected in a septic environment, death was the only logical outcome.
But the human body is a strange machine. Sometimes it refuses to shut down. After a week of delirious fever, the pus has dried. My skin hasn’t healed. It has mutated. It has transformed into a hard shell, thick, insensitive, like crocodile skin. My groin scarred, and on my thighs, the wounds closed, trapping the memory of the acid in my flesh.
I could no longer spread my legs without pain. I walked slowly, stiffly, like an old woman, even though I was only 20 years old. I never saw the young girl with the burned eyes again. Two days after our arrival, during a selection, an SS doctor pointed to her swollen and festering face. “Unfit,” he said. She was taken to the trucks.
She didn’t see where she was going, but she was holding the hand of another condemned woman. She walked into the darkness they had created for her. January 1945, liberation. When the Russian soldiers arrived, they found ghosts. They wanted to help us. They wanted to treat us. They set up field hospitals, white tents, clean.
Russian nurses, friendly and robust, welcomed us. “Come, Dawai, we’re going to wash you. We’re going to disinfect you.” The word disinfect. When I saw the nurse approach with a sponge and a bottle that smelled of alcohol, I screamed. I retreated to a corner of the tent, naked, skeletal, and bared my teeth like a wild animal.
“No, not the liquid, not the fire!” The nurse didn’t understand. She tried to insist. I scratched her. I fought with the strength of desperation. She had to understand. She had to see my scars, those patches of faded, stuck-together skin, to understand that for us, hygiene meant torture. In the end, they washed me with lukewarm, pure water, no soap, nothing, just water.
I wept beneath that water. Not from pain, but because it was the first caress I’d received in six months. Today I am 90 years old. I am an elegant old lady. I wear clothes made of soap and soft fabrics that never itch. I never wear synthetics, never wool directly against my skin. My body has aged, but my scars have remained young.
They’re still there, white, pearly, tugging at my skin when the weather changes. I could never have children. The chemical burns and repeated infections destroyed everything inside. The Nazi treatment worked. They sterilized my future. They killed the children I never had. But the hardest part is everyday life.
I can’t go to a public swimming pool. The smell of chlorine triggers instant panic attacks. I can literally feel my thighs burning, through a ghostly memory. I can’t use bleach in my house. I clean everything with vinegar or black soap. And sometimes, if I see a TV commercial for some ultra-practical household product that promises to eliminate 99% of bacteria, I change the channel.
I know what it costs to be clean by their standards. The Nazis were obsessed with purity. The purity of race, the purity of blood, the hygiene of the camps. They called it disinfection, but in reality, they were the filth. They poured acid on naked women, thinking they were cleansing us of our humanity. But the acid didn’t reach my soul.
I remained dirty, covered in crusts, stinking for months. But inside, I was cleaner than they were with their polished boots and white gloves, because my hands never emptied the bucket. Tonight, when you shower, when you feel the hot water and fragrant soap on your skin, close your eyes for a second. Savor that softness. It’s a luxury, it’s a miracle.
Never take your unblemished skin for granted. The use of caustic chemicals under the guise of hygiene was one of the most perverse methods used in the camps. It allowed executioners to hide behind health regulations to indulge their sadism while scarring women’s bodies for life. Mary survived, but her skin bears the memory of this unforgivable crime.
If this story has shaken you, if you’ve felt the burning pain of injustice, leave a mark, write the word “skin” in the comments for all those burned in the name of cleanliness. And don’t forget to subscribe. It’s the only antidote to forgetting. Share this video. Wash away the history of these lies.
Thank you for listening. Until the next story.
