The Holocaust (117 page)

With liberation apparently so near, the Jews were still not safe. In Stutthof, as this same Jewess wrote two months later, ‘If I had not seen with my own eyes how people were flung alive into the crematorium I would never have believed that any man could do anything like this to any other man. But that is the truth.’
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Stutthof, and Danzig, remained in German hands. But one by one the many branch camps around Stutthof were liberated by the Red Army. At one of these, Pruszcz, nine hundred prisoners had died, most of them Jewish women deported there in the summer and autumn of 1944 from Auschwitz and the Baltic States. Only two hundred women remained alive on March 21, when the Germans fled and Russian troops entered the camp. One of the Jewish women, Sonia Reznik Rosenfeld, later recalled:

For many of those on the death marches, the distance they were from the Red Army could be calculated only by the sound of distant artillery fire, as their German guards drove them further and further away from the front line. When the Red Army drew too near, the marchers would be put in trains. Aliza Besser, one of the two hundred survivors of the thousand Jewish women who had marched on foot from the camp at Neusalz to Flossenberg, was among those who were sent on the next stage of their horrendous journey, by sealed cattle truck, they knew not where. On March 21, after three days and nights in the train, she noted:

Three days later, the train reached Belsen. Of the thousand Jewish women who had set off two months earlier, less than two hundred reached Belsen alive.
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On March 30, at Ravensbruck, a number of women who were being led to their execution struggled with the SS guards. Nine managed to escape; but they were soon recaptured, and then executed.
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The Allied forces now stood on German soil both in the west and in the east, advancing steadily on both fronts. In southern Germany, French forces were on the edge of the Black Forest. In the forest, being marched towards Dachau, a group of eighty-three Jews agreed upon a plan to run away. Their password would be the Jewish greeting over a glass of wine, ‘Lehayim!’, ‘To life!’ Many of these Jews were survivors of a sequence of deportations and evacuations, from the Vilna ghetto to the Estonian labour camps, from the Estonian labour camps, by sea, to Stutthof, and from Stutthof to a camp in south-western Germany. One of them, Meir Dvorjetzky, later recalled, of the march towards Dachau:

Liberation did not always bring allies or safety: on 2 April 1945, on the liberated soil of Poland, Leon Feldhendler, one of the leaders of the Sobibor death camp revolt in 1943, was murdered by Poles.
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From the first days of April 1945 it became clear that the Russian and Western Allies would continue to advance until they met somewhere in the middle of Germany. But Hitler still hoped that the German army would be able to hold out in one of the mountainous areas that remained under his control, either the Sudeten mountains or the Austrian Alps, and from there to continue the war.

A new policy now drove the SS to prolong the agony of the death marches: the desire to preserve for as long as possible a mass of slave labour for all the needs which confronted the disintegrating German army: repairing roads and railway tracks, building up railway embankments, repairing bridges, excavating underground bunkers from which the battle could still be directed, preparing tank traps to check the Allied advance, and helping with the massive work involved in preparing mountain fortresses deep underground.

Sixty per cent of those on the death marches were non-Jews; for the Jews, there remained the all-pervading Nazi obsession that Jews were not human beings, that they must be made to suffer. ‘This hatred of the Jews’, Hugo Gryn, a survivor of the death marches, has commented, ‘was the one fixed function of the Nazi ideology: all else could change, but the Jew must continue to suffer, and to die’. The death marches and death trains continued, despite the increasing chaos on the roads and railways following the collapse of both the western and eastern fronts.

At the beginning of April, as Soviet forces approached Vienna, a group of thirteen hundred Jews, who had been set to work repairing Vienna’s badly bombed main railway station, were evacuated westward. Many of them were survivors of Theresienstadt, and of Birkenau. No food was issued on the march: the Jews ate whatever food they could find in the fields. Those who fell behind were shot. Only seven hundred reached Gusen camp, their destination, alive.
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On a march from a factory near Hanover to Belsen, Moshe Oster later recalled how prisoners had to pull three wagons full of SS men’s property for more than forty miles. During the march,
eighteen of the marchers were shot dead.
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On April 4, near Gotha, Jews working in quarries were driven to Buchenwald. Before leaving, some were shot.
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On April 4, United States forces reached the village of Ohrdruf. Just outside the village they found a deserted labour camp: a camp in which four thousand inmates had died or been murdered in the previous three months. Hundreds had been shot on the eve of the American arrival. Some of the victims were Jews, others were Polish and Russian prisoners-of-war. All had been forced to build a vast underground radio and telephone centre, intended for the German army in the event of a retreat from Berlin.
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Among the Jews who had been held at Ohrdruf was Leo Laufer. Four days before liberation, Laufer had been fortunate to escape, as the evacuation of the camp began. Running off with three fellow prisoners, they had left their wooden shoes behind in order ‘to run faster and not make any noise’. For four days they had hidden in the hills above Ohrdruf. When the American forces arrived, Laufer accompanied them into the camp. Many of the corpses which they found there were of prisoners who had been in the camp dispensary at the time of the evacuation of the camp four days earlier.
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The sight of the emaciated corpses at Ohrdruf created a wave of revulsion which spread back to Britain and the United States. General Eisenhower, who visited the camp, was so shocked that he at once telephoned Churchill to describe what he had seen, and then sent photographs of the dead prisoners to Churchill, who circulated them to each member of the British Cabinet.
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In Belsen, still under German control, thirty thousand prisoners watched in fear and agony as the SS prepared to leave the camp, but without knowing when liberation would come, or if it could possibly come in time. Fania Fenelon later recalled the first week of April:

Hastily built to last a few months, our temporary barracks were half-collapsing; the planks were coming apart. Looking at the damage, a scornful SS man said, speaking of us, the Jews: ‘They rot everything, even wood.’

It was true, we were rotting, but it was hardly our fault—their presence alone would taint the healthiest beings.

THE LIBERATION OF THE CAMPS

A few days later, I too had typhus. My last vision as a healthy person was of the women of the camp, like everyone else, outside naked, lining up to wash our dresses and underclothes in the thin trickle of water from the pierced pipe. On the other side of the barbed wire, the men were doing the same; we were like two troops of cattle at the half-empty trough of an abattoir.

Now the illness took me over entirely; my head was bursting, my body trembling, my intestines and stomach were agony, and I had the most abominable dysentery. I was just a sick animal lying in its own excrement.

From April 8 everything around me became nightmarish. I existed merely as a bursting head, an intestine, a perpetually active anus. One tier above, there was a French girl, I didn’t know; in my moments of lucidity, I heard her saying in a clear, calm, even pleasant voice: ‘I must shit, but I must shit on your head, it’s more hygienic!’ She had gone mad; others equally unhinged guffawed interminably or fought. No one came to see
us anymore, not even the SS. They’d turned off the water….
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On April 8, almost all the Jewish inmates at Buchenwald, many of whom had only reached there three months earlier, from Birkenau or Stutthof, were marched out, leaving the non-Jewish prisoners to await the arrival of the Americans. The Jews were driven east, then south, to the concentration camp at Flossenburg. Other Jews, in camps at Aschersleben and Schonebeck, were driven south, then north again, then back south, first on foot and in trucks, then by train, through the Sudeten mountains, to Leitmeritz. A third group was sent to nearby Theresienstadt, sixty being murdered at the village of Buchau.
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A few Jews had managed to hide in Buchenwald during the ‘evacuation’ of April 8. One of them, Israel Lau, was only eight years old. He had been kept alive by the devotion and ingenuity of his elder brother, Naftali, aged nineteen. Three days after most of the Jews had been marched out of the camp, American forces arrived. One of the American officers, Rabbi Herschel Schechter, later recalled how he pulled a small, frightened boy from a pile of corpses. The rabbi burst into tears and then, hoping to reassure the child, began to laugh.

‘How old are you?’ he asked Israel Lau, in Yiddish.

‘Older than you.’

‘How can you say that?’ asked the rabbi, fearing the child was deranged.

‘You cry and laugh like a little boy,’ Lau replied, ‘but I haven’t laughed for years and I don’t even cry any more. So tell me, who is older?’
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On April 10, Adolf Eichmann made his last visit to Theresienstadt. There, he was heard to say: ‘I shall gladly jump into the pit, knowing that in the same pit there are five million enemies of the state.’
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Three days later, one of the death marches, mostly of Auschwitz survivors, reached the area of Belsen. One of the survivors, Menachem Weinryb, later recalled: