Between Giants (22 page)
Authors: Prit Buttar
Tags: #Between Giants: The Battle for the Baltics in World War II
It seems that this was the first move to eradicate the better educated members of the ghetto.
As in Vilnius, there was at first a large ghetto and a small ghetto, though on this occasion they were connected by a wooden bridge. There was the same arrangement with a
Judenrat
and ghetto police, overseen by Hauptsturmführer Fritz Jordan. Rations were completely inadequate, and every attempt was made by the ghetto dwellers to grow whatever vegetables they could. There were repeated ‘actions’ to reduce the population; on 26 September 1941, perhaps 1,500 elderly, women and children – those without work – were taken to Fort IV on the outskirts of the city and shot. On 4 October, the small ghetto was cleared. Those with work permits and their families were separated into one location, while the rest were driven away for execution. There was a small hospital in the ghetto – there were no medical supplies, and it served merely as a place where the sick could be gathered together – and this was simply burned down with its inhabitants still inside.
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On 28 October, the inhabitants of the large ghetto were sorted in a similar manner. Those deemed as ‘unneeded’ were transferred to the small ghetto, and from there were taken to Fort IX and shot the day after.
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Many families that had survived together were now forcibly separated with individuals being sent to either side of the party responsible for sorting them, though in a few cases there were reprieves:
It took almost all day before our group stood before Rauca [Hauptscharführer Helmut Rauca] … Lena clung to my arm, her sister Rachel on the other side. It had been clear for a long time that the right side was bad. Most of our group were sent to the right. When we got there, Rauca merely waved his stick to the right. Our death sentence. I wanted to cry out that it was a mistake, that we were young and could work. But actually I only cried out in my thoughts. Then Rauca saw Lena. He stopped our row, called her out and ordered her to go to the left. ‘You are far too beautiful to die,’ he said. But Lena just shook her head proudly and replied that she wanted to share the fate of her family.
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Those who survived – it is estimated that there were now about 17,000 people left in the ghetto – faced constant danger. Many were required to work at the new Luftwaffe airfield on the edge of the city, and Luftwaffe personnel repeatedly came to the ghetto to round up people for work. Many were beaten if they showed reluctance, others were killed on the spot. Joheved Inčiūrienė took advantage of an opportunity to escape while returning to the ghetto from the airfield, and sought refuge with a schoolfriend who had already run considerable risks in bringing food to the ghetto. It was impossible for her to be sheltered indefinitely, so she tagged onto another work party returning to the ghetto, but continued to escape overnight from time to time, and then return with precious food. On one occasion, she was challenged by a Lithuanian guard, but to her great good fortune, discovered that she had attended school with his sister. The guard helped her, and his family sheltered her for a few nights. On another occasion, a Lithuanian woman betrayed her to a guard, and she was badly beaten. Eventually, she made a permanent escape, living in the countryside for several years before the arrival of the Red Army. Her family was less fortunate. Her mother and sister were transferred to a camp in Estonia, where they died, and her father perished in the Kaunas ghetto.
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Although the ‘actions’ ceased in the Kaunas ghetto during 1942, Jews continued to be shot at Fort IX. These were from within the Reich, and had originally been intended for internment in the ghetto established in Riga. However, as the Riga ghetto was full, they were diverted to Kaunas, and executed there. By the end of the year, about 6,000 Jews from Vienna, Frankfurt am Main, and Munich had been killed in the fort.
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The ghettos continued to function through 1942 into 1943, with a steadily falling population – despite the diminishing threat of ‘actions’, disease and malnutrition took a toll. In mid-1943, many of those in the Vilnius ghetto who were deemed to be the fittest for work were transferred to the Vaivara concentration camp in Estonia. At the end of 1943, the Vilnius ghetto was ‘liquidated’. Mascha Rolnikaite, whose eldest sister had already left the ghetto, was present when an announcement was made that the ghetto would be evacuated, with its remaining inhabitants transferred either to Vaivara or to a work camp near Šiauliai. The latter did not exist, and the people in this group were actually destined for an extermination camp. A day later, the family joined a column of Jews who were marched to a hall, where the few remaining men were separated and taken away. The women and children remained there overnight. The following morning, they were marched out, and suddenly, a soldier separated Rolnikaite from her family:
The soldiers had formed a chain across the entire width of the road. Behind this chain – and beyond another one on the other side – was a large crowd. Mama was there. I ran to the soldier and asked him to let me through. I explained that I had been separated from my mother by mistake. She was standing over there. It was my family, and I had to go to her.
I spoke to him, beseeched him, but the soldier took no notice of me whatsoever. He looked at the women who were coming through the gate. From time to time, he pulled another over to our side. The rest were pushed into the crowd where Mama stood.
Suddenly, I heard Mama’s voice. She cried that I shouldn’t come to her. And she asked the soldiers not to let me through, as I was still young and could work hard …
‘Mama!’ I cried, as loud as I could, ‘Come to me!’ She merely shook her head and called to me with an oddly hoarse voice, ‘Live my child! At least you should live! Take revenge for the little ones!’ She drew them close to her, said something, and lifted them laboriously up one at a time, so that I could see them. Ruwele looked at me strangely … he waved with his little hand …
They were pushed to one side. I never saw them again.
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Perella Esterowicz recalled that many of the guards during the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto were Estonians. She and her parents were able to survive the deportations and executions that attended the end of the ghetto through the actions of a remarkable man.
Karl Plagge was an army major in charge of a vehicle repair facility near Vilnius. Although he was a member of the National Socialist Party, believing that it was the only political party capable of restoring Germany to its rightful place, he was heavily criticised before the war for refusing to accept National Socialist racial theories. He was deeply shocked by the plight of Jews in Vilnius, and decided to take whatever steps he could to prevent killings. Like Schmid, he had given dozens of work permits to Jews since the formation of the ghetto, and he now took about 1,300 Jews from the ghetto, including the Esterowicz family, to a special labour camp that he had created next to his repair facility.
Plagge had gone to great lengths to establish the ‘slave labour’ camp, housed in buildings built before the war by a Jewish entrepreneur. He ensured that the workers received rations that, whilst still minimal, were at least sufficient to sustain them. He forbade his staff from mistreating the Jews, but was unable to prevent all attacks on the inmates of the camp. Taking advantage of Plagge’s absence, the SS visited the camp in late 1943 to demonstrate to the inmates that their continued existence was never to be taken for granted, as Perella Esterowicz recalled:
I do not remember the exact date … After all the workers had been mustered out on the yard where the Jewish police had built a gallows (on the command of the Germans) [as was the case in the ghettos, several Jews had been selected to form a police force to enforce ‘order’ in the camp], the gate suddenly opened and three Gestapo men, led by Bruno Kittel, the liquidator of the ghetto, drove in an open car. They brought with them two fugitives from our camp they had caught – a woman who belonged to a family of society’s dregs nicknamed ‘Pozhar’ [‘Fire’] and her unofficial husband. The deathly silence which had begun to reign as the Gestapo men moved towards the gallows with the condemned was broken by the piercing cry of ‘Mama!’ which suddenly sounded from a window on the upper floor of one of the buildings in which we saw a child’s head. Before the passing of even one minute a little girl, maybe eight or ten years old, ran out from the building and rushed with a joyous cry of ‘Mama!’ to embrace her mother. We witnessed here a horrible, heartrending scene – the joy of the child who thought that she had found the mother she was longing for, and the face of the mother, distorted by suffering, passionately embracing her child, knowing that she was walking to her death. When the whole group arrived at the place of execution, Kittel motioned to Grisha Schneider, the camp’s blacksmith … to step forward from our lines and ordered him to be the executioner. However, when the man (whom they were hanging first) fell twice when the noose tore, Kittel ordered him to kneel down and killed him by a shot in the back of his head. Afterwards, while he was killing the woman, one of the other Gestapo men killed the child. The Gestapo was not satisfied with this, however. Having decided to shoot 36 women the next morning after the men had gone to work as a punishment, to forestall any more flights from the camp, the Gestapo ordered the Jewish police to chase all the women and children out of the rooms onto the huge yard adjacent to the buildings.
When the policeman Miganz, a man my parents knew, chased us down onto the yard, we were immediately surrounded by rifle-wielding Lithuanian police. Kittel mustered us out into rows and stood before us with his arms crossed. My mother and I were in the first row, Kittel was standing just in front of us … Then Kittel smiled and, I guess on a sign from him, the Lithuanian police started to club us, herding us around the side of the building, toward where they were grabbing and dragging women into the black van standing in between the two buildings.
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Fortunately for Perella and her mother, her father managed to extract them from the women and children being herded into the van. The following March, again when Plagge was away from Vilnius, the SS returned:
In the early morning, after the men had left for their work places, the gates of the camp were opened suddenly and into the yard of our camp drove in trucks carrying a large contingent of officials of the Gestapo and of the Lithuanian police, led by Martin Weiss …
The new arrivals scattered swiftly over the dwellings from which they began dragging out children and teenagers up to the age of 15, as well as even those few elderly who had managed to get to our camp. They took the captured to the trucks into which they pushed their prey. Heartrending scenes took place in our camp when the sobbing children vainly looked to their parents for protection. Mrs Zhukowski … was killed by Martin Weiss with a shot from his revolver, after Mrs Zhukowski had called him ‘murderer’. … In some cases the mothers, not wanting to abandon their children in this terrible moment, shared their children’s fate voluntarily. The fate of the seized children was more than terrible. As we learned later after the cessation of hostilities … since the ‘gas chambers’ could not keep up with their task, the transports with the children were sent straight to the ovens. I avoided this horrible fate by hiding …
The ‘children’s action’ shook the camp to its very foundations. The air was filled with moans of disconsolate mothers, people moved around the camp like shadows.
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Eventually, in 1944, as the Red Army approached, the remaining inmates realised that the SS would in all likelihood kill them. They prepared hiding places, but had to wait for the last moment before trying to escape or hide. They waited for a sign that the moment had come, and Plagge did not let them down:
On Saturday, 1 July 1944, Major Plagge … came to talk to us. We clustered around him, eager to hear what he would tell us about what lay before us. Major Plagge warned us that the German army was leaving Vilnius and our camp would be evacuated westward in connection with the nearing of the Russians. To emphasize his warning Major Plagge informed us in his speech that we would stop being a HKP [
Heeres Kraftfahr Park
or ‘Army Freight Vehicle Pool’] work camp and would be entirely in the hands of the SS – he then carefully commented: ‘And you all know full well how well the SS takes care of their Jewish prisoners.’
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Acting on this clear warning, many of the camp inmates took to their hiding places, and endured several days in cramped conditions, exacerbated by inadequate ventilation. Some of the Jews became deranged, even attacking other inmates; a group of young men took it upon themselves to maintain order, and killed several of the more violent deranged individuals rather than risk discovery by the Germans. Those who did not attempt to hide were shipped off to Paneriai, where they were shot. A search of the buildings by the SS revealed about 200 more inmates, and they were executed within the camp. After the Germans had abandoned the camp, the remaining 250 Jews cautiously emerged from their hiding places. Perella Esterowicz and her parents were given shelter by a Lithuanian, and thus survived the final battle for Vilnius before the Red Army took control.
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Plagge survived the war, and was saved from prosecution by the testimony of some of those he had saved. He personally made little attempt to defend himself, but when some of the Jews he had saved heard of his trial, they sent a representative to the proceedings. He died in 1957, still wracked by guilt that he had not saved more Jews.
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The ghetto in Kaunas, too, came to an end in 1944. The previous year, it was taken over by the SS and turned into a concentration camp, and in September 1943 nearly 3,000 people were removed – the fittest were sent to Vaivara, the rest to extermination camps. In late March 1944, there occurred a particularly grim ‘action’, in which all of the children in the ghetto were taken away. As with other ghettos, pregnancy was forbidden, but during the lifetime of the ghetto, a few babies were smuggled out, and cared for by sympathetic Lithuanian women. Like the inhabitants of the Vilnius ghetto, many Jews took part in an active resistance movement, some of them armed, and over the years about 300 escaped to join the partisans. The Germans were aware that the
Judenrat
and ghetto police were at least sympathetic to the resistance movement, and executed 34 members of the police for failing to reveal the hiding places of the resistance fighters. In July, three weeks before the arrival of the Red Army, the camp was closed, with the remaining inmates being sent either to Dachau, near Munich, or Stutthof, near Danzig. The buildings were set ablaze, and many Jews died trying to escape the flames. About 500 survived by hiding in a well-constructed bunker or by escaping to the nearby countryside.
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