“We hadn’t been soldiers, women didn’t serve in the army. In the beginning, we didn’t know what anything meant. Later we learnt what ‘Appell’ was. But it was a form of torture, nobody had been through it before, nobody understood it. … The Appell was at the center of everything. Everything revolved around the Appells.”

That’s how the Jewish Auschwitz survivor Helen Spitzer Tichauer described one of the central elements of daily life in the women’s camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp: Appell or standing at attention.

Helen Spitzer Tichauer, known later by her nickname ‘Zippi’, was born and raised in Bratislava in Slovakia. She was among the first Jewish women to be deported to Auschwitz in spring 1942. Later, Tichauer was forced to help build the women’s camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. When the SS discovered her graphic design talent, she was given a job as a secretary in the camp administration.

In that way, in contrast to most Jewish women, she survived two and a half years in Auschwitz. In January 1945, Spitzer Tichauer was sent on a death march with thousands of prisoners. The march brought them inside the German borders; Spitzer Tichauer ended up in a satellite camp of Ravensbrück concentration camp. She was liberated from there at the end of the war in May 1945.
Helen Spitzer Tichauer’s writings and interviews about her time in Auschwitz are extremely important. Her work in the camp administration allowed her to move between different areas of the camp and she witnessed many Appells and selections. During the latter, SS guards and SS doctors picked out sick prisoners or those who had been weakened by imprisonment for the gas chambers of Auschwitz. After the war, Spitzer Tichauer explained in an interview: “The foreign word ‘selection’ was chosen to mirror ‘natural selection’. But there was nothing natural about it, it was a selection by the SS. … They decided on a whim, according to looks, whether or not somebody was still fit to work, or fit to live.”

Often, these life or death selections were made during Appell. Every morning and every evening, the prisoners had to step out of the barracks and stand at attention in rows, often for hours.

Physical exercise was often used by the German guards as a method of checking the prisoners’ health. The SS called this ‘sport’. For the prisoners, these exercises were torture and punishment. For that reason, they often put the word sport in quotes in their testimonies.

As a prisoner in Auschwitz, Stanisława Gogołowska had to endure such punishment sport more than once. After the war she wrote: ‘As far as I was concerned, the only “sport” I remember was practiced at the orders of the SS men and women. It consisted of frog jumps, running, and dropping to the ground and getting up again on command. … I remember one instance of such ‘sport’ in particular, in April or March 1944. … Our entire work commando was taken out of the barracks and brought to a gravel path, where we had to spend the entire day alternating between marching and doing “sports”. … It was a very cold and rainy day, and many of the women paid for this “sport” with serious illnesses; some died of pneumonia.’

After liberation, Helen Spitzer Tichauer – known at the time by her nickname ‘Zippi’ – lived in Australia and New York City, among other places. She died in 2018 at the age of 99.