When a Razor Erased My Name: Inside the Nazi System That Turned Human Beings into Inventory

After the razor passed over my scalp—and then over parts of my body I had never imagined would be exposed to strangers—I stopped feeling the cold in the ordinary sense. Cold became permanent, a background condition, like hunger or exhaustion. What truly unsettled me was something else entirely.

Silence.

Not the absence of noise. The camp was full of sound—cries echoing through corridors, commands barked in clipped German, whispers in Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Yiddish. What vanished was the inner voice that once narrated my thoughts. I did not stop resisting because I accepted what was happening. I stopped because resistance through language became a luxury my body could no longer afford.

We were marched barefoot through a narrow concrete corridor slick with water. Chlorine clung to our skin, our pores, our lungs. The showers had ended minutes earlier, but no one was allowed to dry themselves. No towels. No clothes. No pause. We moved in single file, arms folded instinctively over our chests, knowing even that gesture no longer protected anything.

Each step on the frozen floor carried the same message: this body no longer belongs to you alone.

At the end of the corridor waited a large room flooded with white light. This was where they conducted what the paperwork would later describe as selection. Not by name, education, profession, or history—those markers of identity had already been stripped away—but by a simpler binary that governed the entire Nazi concentration camp system.

Useful.
Useless.

Doctors, nurses, seamstresses, metalworkers, translators—anyone who could be immediately exploited for forced labor—were pushed to one side. The elderly, children, visibly pregnant women, the sick, and those who looked weak were sent the other way. Orders were reduced to two words.

“Links.”
“Rechts.”

Left. Right.

I was sent left. Not because I was useless. I was a nursing student; I knew how to clean wounds, assist with injections, manage fevers. But my hands were shaking uncontrollably. An SS officer looked at me for less than a second, then gestured left as one might discard a defective item. I did not argue. I no longer had the strength to explain myself as a person.

That moment taught me something essential about systems of dehumanization: competence matters less than appearance, and fear itself becomes a liability.

We were issued uniforms—thin, striped fabric that provided no insulation. No underwear. No socks. Wooden clogs that rubbed skin raw within hours. Each of us received a small square of cloth to tie around our head where hair had been shaved away. It was not for warmth. It was so we could tell one another apart.

In the early days, identity survived only in fragments: the color of a head cloth, the way someone tied a knot, a scar that had not yet healed, a mole the razor missed.

Then came the tattooing.

Five at a time, we were brought into a stark room. A prisoner—likely a doctor or nurse captured months earlier—held the needle. No anesthesia. No sterilization. Just ink, metal, and bright light aimed directly into the eyes.

I extended my left arm. He did not look at my face. He worked quickly.

A-14792.

Each digit burned as the ink spread beneath the skin. But the pain itself was not the most devastating part. That came with understanding what the tattoo meant. From that moment forward, the name Mary was irrelevant to the Nazi bureaucracy. I no longer existed as a person in records, schedules, or orders.

Only the number mattered.

We were herded into the yard, still wet, shivering in the August wind. Despite it being summer, the cold cut sharply. An officer delivered what he called the camp induction. His voice was flat, administrative. An interpreter translated into multiple languages.

You are not individuals.
You are numbers.
You will work.
If you cannot work, you will die.

There was no third option.

The barracks were long wooden structures with low ceilings and almost no ventilation. Inside, three-tiered bunks stretched wall to wall. No mattresses. Straw that scratched the skin. Torn blankets stiff with old sweat. The air was thick with ammonia, fear, and human exhaustion.

Each person was assigned less than half a meter of space. We slept pressed together on our sides. If one person turned, everyone moved.

That first night never truly ended. Women cried quietly. Others prayed. Someone vomited from swallowing chlorinated water during the shower. A young woman beside me—Rivka, twenty-three, from near Lviv—held my hand until morning. We did not speak. When dawn came, our fingers were bruised from gripping one another so tightly.

Roll call began at 4:30 a.m.

We stood outside for hours, barefoot in mud or snow depending on the season. Anyone who swayed, fainted, or bent their knees was beaten immediately. Not because discipline required it, but because order was the mechanism that made cruelty efficient.

Work assignments followed. I was sent to Kanada—the sorting area where belongings taken from new arrivals were processed. Suitcases. Shoes. Letters. Eyeglasses. Family photographs. Children’s toys. Wigs. Prayer books.

The task was physically easier than quarry labor, but psychologically devastating. Every object told a story. Every folded dress had once been smoothed by a loving hand. Every photograph had been carried close to someone’s heart.

If we found food—crumbs of bread, a wrapped sweet—we could keep it only if we hid it perfectly. Discovery meant lashes or the bunker. I once saw a sixteen-year-old girl beaten unconscious for hiding a piece of chocolate. After that day, she never spoke again.

Time stopped being measured in days. It was measured in losses.

Winter of 1944 arrived early. Snow fell as we stood for roll call, sometimes five or six hours at a time. Some women froze to death while standing upright, eyes open. We called them Muselmänner—those who had given up internally long before their bodies failed.

I nearly joined them in January 1945. Fever. Blood in my cough. Bones visible beneath skin. Rivka had died two weeks earlier from dysentery. Before she did, she whispered, “Promise me you will live to tell it.”

That promise kept me standing.

Liberation came without ceremony. No siren. Just artillery in the distance, then closer. Shouting. Panic among the guards. Gunfire. Silence.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers entered the camp. They said almost nothing. One young soldier—no older than twenty—fell to his knees and cried when he saw us. Only then did I understand that even those who arrive as victors can be wounded by what they witness.

In the field hospital, they fed me spoonfuls of thin porridge. They cleaned my feet. They asked my name.

“Mary,” I said, my voice unfamiliar to my own ears.

They wrote it down. Someone called me by that name. It should have restored something. It didn’t.

Trauma does not leave when the gates open.

Decades later, I still flinch when I hear gloves snap or syringes clink. The phrase “This will hurt a little” never left me. It lives beneath the skin, waiting.

I do not tell this story only as history. I tell it because systems that reduce people to numbers have not vanished. They have adapted. Whenever bodies are lined up, inspected, numbered, processed without consent—whether in camps, detention centers, prisons, or emergency institutions—the same lesson is taught.

Your identity is conditional.
Your pain is negotiable.
Your consent is optional.

Without hair, you lose recognition.
Without recognition, resistance weakens.
And when resistance becomes abstract, control becomes easy.

At ninety years old, I still wake sometimes smelling chlorine, convinced I am naked under white lights again. The body remembers what documents prefer to forget.

And the question remains—now, as it did then:

Who decides what “a little pain” means?
And who gets to decide it for someone else?