The Holocaust (15 page)

Early on December 3 the march resumed. At the first village, three bearded Jews were led away: Shmuel Topocostok, Benjamin Rosenberg and a man by the name of Loewenberg. As Loewenberg was led away, Pachter later recalled, ‘his son jumped up and said, “Leave my father alone, I will take his place. Take me,” and they said, “You come along too,” and they took both of them and the other two.’ Pachter added: ‘They were all shot in the back of their heads and the bullets came out of their foreheads.’

The third day of the march, December 4, saw further shootings, the Germans competing as to the number of Jews they could kill in a specific time. ‘They would lay a hand on a man. He would lie down—whoever did not want to lie down would be hit on the head with a rifle butt and the blood ran. But most people were so tired that they could not resist. We were only shadows after all this marching. The slaughter on that day was horrible.’

Of the eighteen hundred Jews who had set off from Hrubieszow, more than fourteen hundred were murdered on that day. The surviving marchers had been given nothing to eat but a small bread roll each. Seeing a fifteen-year-old boy without any food at all, a fellow marcher threw him a piece of his own roll. When the boy bent down to pick it up, he was shot, by the commander of the march himself. ‘He shot him,’ Pachter recalled, ‘but he did not kill him, and he ordered another man to finish the job. The other one apologized in a way—as if to say that the boy had jumped out of the line, and if he had not done that he would not have been shot.’

Two hundred marchers reached the Soviet border on the morning of December 9, starving and in pain from their torn and bleeding feet. ‘The sun was rising,’ Pachter recalled. ‘We were told to sing. Whoever would not sit down and sing would be shot. We started singing Jewish melodies.’ All day the marchers sat, and sang. That night they were taken to a bridge across the River Bug, which marked the border, and ordered to march across it, hands held high, shouting, ‘Long live Stalin’.
¹⁹

In Warsaw, the reprisal actions continued. On December 8, six
Jews and twenty-five Poles were shot for ‘complicity in acts of sabotage’.
²⁰
‘There is no strength left to cry,’ Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary: ‘steady and continued weeping leads finally to silence. At first there is screaming; then wailing; and at last a bottomless sigh that does not leave even an echo.’
²¹

On December 11, all Jews living within the borders of the General Government were officially made liable to two years’ forced labour, with a possible extension ‘if its educational purpose is not considered fulfilled’.
²²
Further tasks were now devised for the Jews deported to labour sites: clearing swamps, paving roads, and building fortifications. Two days later, a secret instruction from SS headquarters in Poznan stated that any Jews still living in the western regions of Poland annexed to Germany ‘in disregard of the removal order’, even if they had gone to another province of the annexed areas, ‘are to be shot under martial law’. This ruling, the order added, ‘is to be passed on orally to the leaders of the Jewish communities, insofar as they still exist’.
²³

The Jews expelled from western Poland went mostly to Warsaw and Lodz, whose combined Jewish populations rose to well over one million. The indignities continued. In his diary on December 16, Chaim Kaplan gave two examples which had just reached him from Lodz. The first concerned some Jewish girls, seized for forced labour:

The second incident recorded by Kaplan was of a rabbi in Lodz who was forced to spit on a Scroll of the Law:

Mary Berg also recorded in her diary various Nazi ‘entertainments’ in Lodz, when five or ten Jewish couples would be brought to a room, ordered to strip, and then made to dance together naked to the accompaniment of a gramophone record. Two of her schoolmates had experienced this in their own home, when, as Mary Berg noted:

To those in authority, such obscenities and torments were a gratifying game. But they did not provide the answer to the future of Polish Jewry. ‘The Jews represent for us’, Hans Frank noted in his diary on December 19, ‘extraordinarily malignant gluttons. We have now approximately 2,500,000 of them in the General Government and counting half-Jews, perhaps 3,500,000.’ Frank could see no solution. ‘We cannot shoot 2,500,000 Jews,’ he wrote, ‘neither can we poison them. We shall have to take steps, however, designed to extirpate them in some way—and this will be done.’
²⁶

On December 27, as a reprisal for the death of two German policemen, shot in a tavern at Wawer, outside Warsaw, the Germans hanged 114 residents of the suburb. Almost all those executed were Poles: but eight at least were Jews.
²⁷
‘The screams of those suffocated and killed do not reach us,’ Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary two days later, ‘only the voice of the Nazi is heard in the newspapers. He publishes lies upon lies, spreads falsehoods upon
falsehoods every day, casts filthy epithets upon Jew and Pole alike.’
²⁸
The conqueror, Kaplan added a few days later, ‘preys upon and devours guiltless people, free of crime, and dips himself in the blood of innocents, even in the blood of children who have never known sin.’
²⁹

The Jewish refugees in Warsaw lived in conditions of growing hardship. ‘Some move in with a relative, a friend, or a distant acquaintance,’ Kaplan noted on December 30. ‘The poor ones fill the synagogues, which have become refugee centres. One cannot describe the crowded conditions, the congestion and filth in these centres.’ Sometimes, Kaplan noted, ‘you see a provincial Polish Jew, who truly presents an exotic appearance in a European city. Even his brethren, fellow Jews of Warsaw, are not accustomed to him, and in Gentile eyes he is the object of ridicule and mockery.’ Some of the newly arrived refugees, Kaplan added, ‘go out with their yellow patches in the shape of a Star of David. In such cases they are rebuked and forced to change them for the blue and white patch—symbol of the Jewishness of the Jews of Warsaw.’
³⁰

By the end of 1939, only a few Jews were able to find a means of escape from Greater Germany. A few still managed, however, to make their way southward, to Yugoslavia or Rumania, usually along the Danube, hoping to be able to proceed across the Black Sea by ship to Palestine. But it was not only the Germans who sought to close these escape routes. On December 30 a river boat,
Uranus
, reached the Iron Gates. On board were 1,210 Jews who had left Vienna and Prague in November, as an ‘illegal’ transport bound for Palestine, organized by a young Viennese Jew, Ehud Uberall.
³¹
At the Iron Gates, the Danube began to freeze over. The refugees were taken for shelter to the nearest Yugoslav port, Kladovo, to await the warmer weather, when they could continue their journey down the lower Danube. As a result of repeated British diplomatic protests, however, urging the Yugoslav government not to allow boats to proceed, lest they made for Palestine, the refugees were interned in Yugoslavia, for nine months, first at Kladovo and then at Sabac.
³²
There, early in 1940, 207 teenagers received Palestine certificates, and were allowed to proceed to Palestine by train. The remaining 1,003 were massacred at Sabac in October 1941, within six months of the German conquest of Yugoslavia.
³³

In spite of the Palestine White Paper of 17 May 1939, restricting
the number of Jews to be allowed into Palestine to twenty thousand a year, the British authorities in Palestine had allowed more Jews into Palestine during 1939 than in the previous two years: 27,561 immigrants for 1939 alone. This brought the total Jewish immigration to Palestine since 1936 to more than eighty thousand. But now the gates both of emigration and of immigration were being closed.

CENTRAL POLAND

In Warsaw, a book had been published in Yiddish that year, describing some of the worst moments in Jewish history: the Crusader massacre of Jews in the twelfth century, the Chmielnicki killings in the Ukraine in the seventeenth century, and the Ukrainian pogroms of 1918 and 1919. ‘But it did not occur to us’, Yitzhak Zuckerman, then a young Zionist in Warsaw, later wrote, ‘that the poison cup was not yet empty, and that we would have to drain it to its last dregs.’
³⁴

Starvation had begun to haunt the Jews of Warsaw; during the first week of January 1940 Emanuel Ringelblum noted ‘fifty to seventy deaths daily’, as against normal pre-war mortality of ten. The random killings also continued. ‘Tonight,’ Ringelblum wrote on January 1, ‘Dr Cooperman was shot for being out after eight o’clock. He had a pass.’ In Praga, a suburb of Warsaw across the Vistula, ‘A Jewish worker who belonged to the labour battalion was killed.’
¹
On January 2, a General Government ordinance forbade the posting of obituary notices.
²
On January 5, Jews were forbidden both to be in the streets between nine at night and five in the morning, and to do any trading outside the predominantly Jewish section of Warsaw.
³

As the deportations from western Poland continued, the pressures inside Warsaw increased. Elderly refugees died from the exhaustion of their journeys. Fuel was so hard to obtain that on January 6 Ringelblum noted that books from the library of the Socialist-Zionist movement Hashomer Hatzair ‘are being used by the refugees to stoke ovens at 6 Leszno Street’.
⁴
‘The Jews joke that they no longer have to travel to Carlsbad,’ Chaim Kaplan wrote in his diary that same day, ‘for the Spa has come to them. Their weight has dropped, and their drawn, thin faces show poverty and privation.’
⁵

Another hazard was the activity of those whom Mary Berg, who had returned to Warsaw from Lodz, described as Polish ‘hoodlums’: young men ‘who beat and rob every Jewish passer-by’, and who led the Nazis to the apartments of well-to-do Jews, and participated in the looting. Some Poles ‘not blessed with Nordic features’ had also been beaten up by these same roving gangs. For many days, Mary Berg noted, ‘a middle-aged Polish woman,
wrapped in a long black shawl and holding a stick in her hand, has been the terror of Marszalkowska Street. She has not let a single Jew by without beating him, and she specializes in women and children.’ The Germans, Mary Berg added, ‘look on and laugh’.
⁶

Away from the sight of passers-by, Jewish or non-Jewish, a death march similar in its cruelties to the death march from Hrubieszow at the beginning of December was taking place in the Lublin region. On January 14 a group of former soldiers in the Polish army, 880 Jews in all, were taken from the prisoner-of-war camp in Lublin and told that they were to be marched to the Soviet border where, as Jews born east of the new Nazi-Soviet demarcation line, they would be transferred to Soviet authority.

The 880 prisoners were escorted on the march by SS men armed with rifles and machine guns. Just before the town of Lubartow, the SS men opened fire, and more than a hundred of the prisoners-of-war were killed. ‘The invalids were the first to be shot at,’ one of the prisoners-of-war, Avraham Buchman, later recalled, ‘because they were too weak to walk. There was one man who was shot in the lung.’
⁷

The prisoners-of-war thought seriously of rebelling; there were only thirteen guards, albeit armed. But, as Ringelblum later learned, the guards told them that if any tried to escape ‘that would be a great catastrophe for all the Jews of Poland’. Some twenty prisoners-of-war did manage to escape. But the retaliation was immediate: three men were killed ‘with one bullet’, while the cruellest of the guards ‘wantonly killed people walking along the road’.
⁸