When I was in late high school and through college I worked in a department store. An old Jewish man ran the shipments/ stock area. He was a tough guy to work for but he and I got along well. He never talked about his experiences but I learned through others that he was a holocaust survivor. He passed away a number of years ago but I never forgot him. I went to the holocaust museum in Washington DC a few years back and looked up his name and information. He was actually from Czechoslovakia when he was originally captured very early in the war (1940?) and sent to Aushwitz (I think I remember that camp being his destination). How would one have survived the war in that environment, for that long? I can’t imagine the horrors to which he was exposed. God bless you Mr. B.
Auschwitz was something of a paradox in the expansive camp system. It was the center that had the most "industrial" killing apparatus with gas chambers and crematoria purpose-built for the agenda of mass murder. Other camps like Treblinka were more extemporized in terms of how they murdered their Jews. So the killing potential of Auschwitz was greater than the earlier Reinhard camps of Majdanek, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka.
But just as Auschwitz was more efficient compared to other death camps, Jews had a greater chance of survival there. This was because of two factors. One, and most important, the camp was a hybrid death-work camp. Inmates not selected for immediate death were put to work in places like the Buna factory. The other death camps had little to no work unrelated to mass murder. Most of the survivors from these camps survived by escaping as the SS would routinely murder these Sonderkommando and replace them with fresh recruits from the transports.
There often was no rhyme or reason behind survival; some individuals were selected for work because of their apparent health or skills, but the survival was capricious at the best of times. It was extremely difficult to survive these conditions living on officially-allotted camp rations and clothing. Survivors often had to organize rations and clothes. Labor details could turn quite violent as cruelty was not only a feature of the camp system, it was rewarded. Guards could receive leave for shooting escaped prisoners and one common game was for a guard to throw an inmate's hat into no man's land, order them to retrieve it, and then prevent an "escape." Inmates within Auschwitz had to walk a very fine line between obeying the camp's rules and looking after their own survival.
The other factor working in favor for survival in Auschwitz was its killing operations came into fruition relatively late in the war. The other death camps were winding down operations as Auschwitz got up to speed. As it became clear that fortune had turned against the Germans, it became apparent that the Third Reich had to use all the resources at its disposal to reverse or stem this tide. Thus inmates within the system became a "resource" for the state to use. The SS had already pioneered slave labor in its various concentration camps within Germany, but the reverses on the Eastern Front led to an expansion of this system. And the early SS approach to genocide favored using slave labor as a means to work Jews to death after a German victory over the USSR. So while inmates at Auschwitz were fed, the SS viewed them as fundamentally disposable workers.
What this paradox meant was that inmates at Auschwitz had a greater chance for survival there even though the facility was the acme of Nazi genocide.