Masters of Death (37 page)

When I regained consciousness, it was already twilight. The bodies lying on top of me were still shuddering; the Germans were shooting them again to make doubly sure that the wounded would not be able to leave. At any rate, I understood the Germans to say that. They were afraid that there were many who had not been finished off, and they were right; there were many like that. These people were buried alive, since no one could help them even though they screamed and called for help. Somewhere above the corpses babies were crying. Most of them had been carried by their mothers and, since we were shot in the backs, they had fallen, protected by their mothers’ bodies. Not wounded by the bullets, they were covered up and buried alive under the corpses.

I began to crawl out from underneath the corpses. . . . When I had crawled out, I looked around: the wounded were writhing, groaning, attempting to get up and falling again. I began to call to Fanya in the hope that she would hear me, and a man next to me ordered me to be silent. It was Grodzinsky. His mother had been killed, and he was afraid that my shouts would attract the attention of the Germans. A small group of people were resourceful enough to jump into the trench when the first shots rang out, and they were unharmed. . . . They kept pleading with me to be silent, and I begged everyone who was leaving to help me find Fanya. Grodzinsky, who was wounded in the legs and could not walk, advised me to leave. I tried to help him, but I could do nothing alone. He fell after two steps and refused to go on. He advised me to catch up with those who had left. I sat there and listened. An old woman called out in a singsong voice: “Lieutenant, Lieutenant. . . .” There was so much horror in this endlessly repeating word! From somewhere down below someone shouted: “Sir, don’t kill me. . . .” By chance I overtook [an acquaintance]. She had been separated from her group. The two of us, undressed except for our slips and smeared with blood from head to toe, set off to seek refuge for the night, starting in the direction from which we could hear dogs barking. We knocked at one hut, but no one answered. Then we knocked at another, and we were driven away. At a third, we were given some rags with which to cover ourself and advised to go into the steppe. We did precisely that. In the darkness we found a haystack and sat in it until dawn. In the morning we returned to the farmstead. . . . It was not far from the trench, but on the far side. We could hear the screams of women and children until the end of the day.

After several days of wandering in the prairie steppe, moving from one haystack to another, on 24 October 1941 Sarra Gleykh found her way back to Mariupol and knocked on the Royanovs’ door. “They let me in and were horrified when they learned that everyone had died. They helped me get cleaned up, fed me and put me to bed.” In late November 1941 she crossed the lines to the Red Army side and found safety.

Romanian forces occupied Odessa, on the Black Sea due south of Kiev, on 16 October 1941 and announced the registration of the Jewish population the next day. Russian partisans blew up the building the Romanian command staff had made their headquarters on 23 October 1941. In retaliation, some ten thousand Jews were marched outside town the same day and murdered with machine guns. Two days later several thousand more were locked into a large barn, which was then blown up with dynamite. “On 23 and 24 October,” a Russian technical editor said after the war, “no matter in which direction you looked [in Odessa] you could see gallows. There were thousands of them. At the feet of the hanged lay the bodies of those who had been tortured, mutilated and shot. Our town was a terrible sight: a town of the hanged.” Odessa was quickly cleared of Jews, who were marched to concentration camps northeastward eighty miles from the harbor city along the Bug River. Across the Black Sea on the Crimean peninsula mass murder took a more inventive form. In the course of the war in the Crimea, according to the indictment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, “144,000 peaceful citizens were gathered on barges, taken out to sea and drowned.”

In Dnepropetrovsk, at the eastern apex of a great triangle with Kiev and Odessa as its base, on the Dnieper where it turns and bends south, a detachment of the Higher SS and Police Leader murdered a third of the city’s 30,000 Jews near a cemetery on 13 October 1941; by February 1942 only seven hundred were left.

At the other, Baltic, coast of the continent, in Estonia, more than half of that country’s small population of Jews—2,500 of about 4,500—had been evacuated before the Wehrmacht rolled through in mid-August 1941. Sonderkommando 1a (Einsatzgruppe A), commanded by Martin Sandberger, a lawyer, organized Estonian militia units to augment its forces. By mid-October 1941 Sandberger was able to report to Berlin that “all male Jews over sixteen, with the exception of the appointed Jewish elders, were executed by the Estonian self-defense units under supervision of the
Sonderkommando. . . .
The action is still underway since the search for Jewish hideouts has not yet been completed. So far, the total number of Jews shot in Estonia is 440. When these measures are completed, about 500 to 600 Jewesses and children will still be alive.” Sandberger planned to put these widows to work “farming and cutting peat” from a camp being prepared near Reval (now Tallinn, the coastal capital). “Thus the questions of feeding and financing are answered.” All the villages in Estonia, Sandberger added, were now
Judenfrei.

By October 1941, writes Latvian historian Andrew Ezergailis, the Arajs commando “had lost its function in Latvia: the Jews in the small towns had already been killed, and those of Riga, Daugavpils, and Liepaja were under the care of the
Generalkommissar
and driven into ghettos.” Stahlecker, in his long, comprehensive report of 15 October 1941, lists a total of more than 30,000 Jewish men, women and children murdered in Latvia up to that date by Einsatzgruppe forces. “The Arajs commando,” Ezergailis concludes, “in effect had run out of work.”

Two gated, barbed-wire ghettos had been established in Kaunas’s rundown Slobodka district in July 1941 for the Jews of that central Lithuanian city, a Big Ghetto that held about 27,500 people and a Little Ghetto, connected by a wooden bridge across an intervening street, that confined another 2,500. A hospital had been set up in several buildings in the Little Ghetto, with maternity, medical and surgical wards; patients with contagious diseases were housed in a separate two-story building. An orphanage had also been established in the Little Ghetto for the several hundred Jewish children whose parents had already been murdered by the Germans or in pogroms.

On 4 October 1941, the Sabbath after Yom Kippur, a detachment of Jäger’s Einsatzkommando 3 under Obersturmführer Joachim Hamann began liquidating the Little Ghetto. A rabbi, Ephraim Oshry, was an eyewitness:

Early that morning some 50 German soldiers along with around 100 Lithuanian collaborators—far more than we usually saw, which we found terrifying—piled into the Little Ghetto and drove the people, without exception, out of their houses.

They chased people out of bed without even giving them opportunity to dress. Into the streets they drove the old and weak, the children and women and men. Using their rifle butts as clubs, they stuck people left and right. Blood gushed like water.

The Jews were chased into Sajungos Square, which had once been the horse market of Slobodka. There the Germans began to divide the Jews, similar to the way one sorts sheep for slaughter: “Right! Left!” Death! Life!

The selection lasted several hours. People who held work passes— only five thousand had been issued throughout the two ghettos—were separated from those who did not. Patients were evacuated from the medical and surgical wards. In the maternity ward, the young Kaunas attorney Avraham Tory recorded in his contemporary diary, “the Germans wanted to see the babies who had just been born. They came up to the ledge by the window on which the six babies were lying. They stood there for a while watching the babies. The eyes of one of the Germans grew misty. ‘Shall we leave them?’ he asked his friend. They both left the room, letting the mothers and the babies stay. This time they survived.”

The orphans were not so lucky, Tory continues:

The Germans then started taking the children out of the children’s home. Out of 153 children, only 12 were left in the home. They were simply overlooked. The nurses were also taken away. Those children who were in swaddling clothes
³⁸
were taken out and placed on the ground in the stone-paved hospital courtyard, their tiny faces turned skyward. Soldiers of the third squad of the German Police passed between them. They stopped for a moment. Some of them kicked the babies with their boots. The babies rolled a little to the side but soon enough regained their belly-up position, their faces turned toward the sky. It was a rare spectacle of cruelty and callousness.

A heavy truck pulled up. First the children and then the nurses were thrown into it. The truck was then covered with a canvas cloth and drove off in the direction of the Ninth Fort.

The Little Ghetto Jews who had been selected were formed into columns of one hundred and marched off; the people with work passes who had been spared were sent over the bridge to the Big Ghetto. William Mishell watched the selection from the Big Ghetto. “A terrible human drama was unfolding before the eyes of the Jews on both sides of the fence,” he remembers. “It was clear: the people on the bad side were being taken to the Ninth Fort for a mass execution. Everybody on both sides of the street began to cry, and those on the Big Ghetto side tried desperately to catch a last glimpse of the loved ones who were being taken away.” In his 1 December 1941 summary report, Jäger would list “315 Jewish men, 1,107 Jewish women, 496 Jewish children” executed at the Ninth Fort on 4 October 1941, claiming absurdly that the selection was a “punitive action because a German policeman was shot at in the ghetto.”

But more were killed that day than those who marched or were trucked to the Ninth Fort. There had been sixty-seven patients, doctors and nurses in the contagious-disease hospital building that morning. An unknown number of healthy Little Ghetto residents had joined them there, thinking they might find sanctuary. At the beginning of the
Aktion
the Germans had locked the hospital gates on patients and fugitives alike. They transferred into the hospital surgical patients who had been too ill to attend the selection and then they boarded up the doors and windows. They set ten Jewish men digging a pit in the hospital courtyard. Tory describes what followed:

Opposite the hospital building, on the other side of the fence, a fur factory called Lape was situated. From that location the hospital courtyard could be seen clearly. The factory workers there saw the ten Jews digging the pit on that day; they saw how the residents of the old people’s home were lowered into it, how patients were thrown into it and then shot inside the pit; they saw how little children were thrown into the pit, as well as patients who could not stand on their feet. . . .At one p.m. smoke could be seen rising over the hospital building; later flames shot up from it. The hospital was burning. The fire burned all day and night.

Patients, staff and fugitives were thus burned alive.

If they had not understood before, the people of the Kaunas ghetto now knew that nothing protected them from death and that further
Aktionen
would follow. They began to depart from one another with a Yiddish joke, Rabbi Oshry remembers:
“Auf Wiedersehn in yenner
velt”
—“See you in the next world.” Later in October 1941 reports began to filter back to the ghetto of large pits being dug at the Ninth Fort by Russian prisoners of war. Optimists speculated that they were tank traps anticipating a Red Army counterattack; realists knew they were meant for mass graves.

The Black Day, as the survivors would call it, came late in the month with an order for everyone in the ghetto to show up at Democracy Square at six o’clock on the morning of 28 October 1941 or be shot. People were to report with their families according to their work assignments: the ghetto council under one sign, the workers building a Luftwaffe airbase outside Kaunas under another, tanners, road builders, fur workers, plumbers, tinsmiths each to be identified as such. Mishell worked for the Jewish Council, and his brother-in-law worked on the airbase crew, and so crucial did his family judge the decision to be of which sign to muster under that they stayed up all night debating it, finally concluding that people working for the German military would be considered more valuable and choosing the airbase position. “No one in the ghetto closed an eye on the night of 27 October,” Tory records. “Many wept bitterly, many others recited Psalms. There were also people who did the opposite: they decided to have a good time, to feast and gorge themselves on food, and use up their whole supply. Inmates whose apartments were stocked with wines and liquor drank all they could and even invited neighbors and friends to the macabre drinking party ‘so as not to leave anything behind for the Germans.’ ”

Twenty-eight thousand people left their doors unlocked, as ordered, posted notes on the door as ordered if someone too ill to be moved lay inside and walked through the ghetto streets that morning, “very chilly,” Mishell recalls, “a typical autumn day with a thin layer of snow covering the ground. It was still dark and the air was extremely damp. The last visible stars gradually disappeared as the crowd started to swell. One could see mothers with children in their arms, old people who could barely walk, small children holding the hands of their mothers, grownups supporting their elderly parents or grandparents and even invalids supported by canes. Some people who were unable to walk were carried out on stretchers.” Tory describes it gravely as “a procession of mourners grieving over themselves.”

Everyone stood waiting for three hours as the dawn finally broke. Tory saw then that “the ghetto fence was surrounded by machine guns and a heavy detachment of armed German policemen commanded by Captain [Alfred] Tornbaum. He also had at his disposal battalions of armed Lithuanian partisans. A crowd of curious Lithuanian spectators had gathered on the hills overlooking the ghetto. They followed the events taking place in the square with great interest, not devoid of delight, and did not leave for many hours.” Beefy, brutal SS-HAUPTSCHARFÜHRER
³⁹
Helmut Rauca arrived at nine a.m. with the deputy Gestapo chief, Captain Heinrich Schmitz, Tornbaum and SA Captain Fritz Jordan.