The Holocaust (17 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
The Jews of Lublin decided to protest to Berlin. In their letter, which was forwarded to Himmler, they described how:
Among others, a mother who was carrying a three-year-old child in her arms, trying to protect him from the cold with her own clothes, was found dead, frozen in this position. The
half-frozen body of a five-year-old girl was found wearing around her neck a cardboard sign with words, ‘Renate Alexander, from Hemmerstein, Pomerania’. This child was visiting relatives in Stettin and was included in the deportation; her mother and father stayed in Germany. Her hands and feet had to be amputated at the Lublin Hospital.
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On March 22, after Hans Frank had protested to Berlin about the ‘dumping’ of Jews in the General Government, Hermann Goering ordered a halt to the expulsions to the Lublin region.
Inside the Gestapo there were a few Germans who sought to warn the Jews of what was impending. Heinrich Grüber, a Protestant pastor in Berlin, who was later imprisoned for helping Jews, recalled one such German at Gestapo offices in Berlin. The Gestapo always sought to employ those who might have some pathological or personal animus against the Jews. For this reason, they had taken on the father of the murdered German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath. Vom Rath senior was given an official position because, as Grüber later recalled, it was thought ‘he would certainly like to get his own back on Jews and would be particularly severe with regard to Jews’. But this, Grüber added, ‘was certainly not the case. Our relationship was rather friendly, and I must say that this man helped us clandestinely on many occasions.’ Vom Rath senior would, for example, leave out on his desk the latest orders and decrees so that Grüber could see them, and report them to those who might then still have time to take measures to avoid them.
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With the Soviet Union still neutral, a number of Polish Jews who had fled eastward in Soviet-occupied Poland and Lithuania were able to escape from Europe altogether, as a result of a curious diplomatic arrangement. In Kovno, the representative of the Dutch firm of Phillips was prepared to issue certificates to the effect that travellers wishing to enter the island of Curacao, in the Dutch West Indies, did not need an entry permit or visa.
Armed with this document, Jews persuaded the Japanese Vice-Consul in Kovno, Sempo Sugihara, to issue them a transit visa through Japan, ostensibly to the Dutch West Indies. Travelling to Moscow on this transit visa, the Jews then received permission to leave the Soviet Union through the Far Eastern port of Vladivostok. Once in Tokyo, many of the Jews went to the Polish Ambassador
there—the Ambassador of the Polish government in London—who gave them documents to enable them, as Polish citizens in exile, to travel to Canada. By such stratagems, several thousand Polish Jews reached safety in the summer and autumn of 1940. Among them was Leon Pommers, a twenty-six-year-old music student from Warsaw, who, more than a year after leaving Kovno, having travelled through Japan to Shanghai, Hong Kong and Australia, finally reached San Francisco in February 1942.
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In Shanghai were twenty thousand Jews, two thousand refugees from Communist Russia, who had found a haven there before 1933, the majority refugees from Germany, who, since 1933, had been able to take advantage of the fact that, alone of all states or cities, Shanghai since 1933 had not required a prior visa or permit to enable a Jew to live there.
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The Japanese government also took in several hundred Jewish refugees who had managed to cross the Soviet Union during this period of Soviet neutrality. One small Jewish community in Japan, that of Kobe, gave the Japanese authorities a guarantee that refugees would not become a financial burden on Japan. Following this guarantee, refugees who landed at the port of Tsuruga from Vladivostok were admitted to Japan without question, welcomed at Tsuruga by members of the Jewish community, and brought to Kobe by train. In this way, ‘many hundreds’ were housed and cared for, a German Jewish refugee, Kurt Marcus, later recalled. But the task of financing the refugees was beyond the resources of the Kobe Jewish community; they therefore sought, and received, help from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Recalling his nine years as a refugee in Japan, Marcus added: ‘At no time did I experience even the slightest hint of anti-Semitism.’
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While Nazi terror in Poland tightened its grip, Britain and France, at war with Germany since September 1939, had made no military move against Hitler’s Reich. These were the months of the Phoney War. In Warsaw, Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary on 7 March 1940, ‘Those who understand the military and political situation well are going about like mourners. There is no ground for hope that the decisive action will come this spring, and lack of a decision means that our terrible distress will last a long time.’
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War in the West:
terror in the East
In April 1940, German forces occupied Norway, forestalling a British move, and defeating the British, French and Polish exile forces sent against them at Narvik. ‘Misery over the defeat in Norway,’ Ringelblum noted. ‘Our spirits have fallen.’
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In Norway, seventeen hundred Jews, of whom three hundred were refugees from Germany, came under German rule. In Denmark, which German forces occupied as part of their Norwegian campaign, seven thousand four hundred more Jews were now within the Nazi orbit, fourteen hundred of them refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. But neither the Norwegian nor the Danish Jews were molested, at the insistence of the Danish and Norwegian authorities, who retained certain minimal powers of internal administration.
In German-occupied Poland there was no relaxation in the restrictions, the persecutions, or the hunger imposed on the Jews. On May 9 Ringelblum recorded how, in a centre for Jewish refugees from outside the city, ‘an eight-year-old child went mad. Screamed, “I want to steal, I want to rob, I want to eat, I want to be a German.” In his hunger he hated being Jewish.’
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A day later, on May 10, German forces struck at Belgium, Holland and France. The speed and scale of the German advance, accompanied by air bombardment, soon overwhelmed the Belgian and Dutch forces. In north-eastern France, a large British army, trapped at Dunkirk, was forced to evacuate, leaving much of its equipment behind. The Germans then turned towards Paris.
Confident of a German victory, on May 25 Himmler sent Hitler ‘some thoughts’ on the post-war treatment of non-Germans in the East. ‘I hope’, he wrote, in his only reference to the Jews, ‘that, through the possibility of large-scale emigration of all Jews to
Africa or some other colony, the concept of Jew will have completely disappeared from Europe.’
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As the German armies drove through Holland on May 15, a further 140,000 Jews, among them several thousand refugees from pre-war Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, had been trapped behind the German lines. A few thousand managed to escape southwards through France, travelling on roads crowded by other refugees and constantly strafed by German aircraft: several hundred reached the distant safety of the Pyrenees, and of neutral Spain and Portugal. Others reached sanctuary in Switzerland.
In Amsterdam, a non-Jewish woman, Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer, who had been in charge of Jewish refugees from Germany, decided, as German troops approached Amsterdam, to make one last rescue bid. Assembling half a dozen coaches, she quickly gathered two hundred Jewish refugees, among them eighty children. One of the children, the fourteen-year-old Harry Jacobi, later recalled the drive from Amsterdam to the port of Ijmuiden, where British troops were still landing in a last-minute attempt to bolster the Dutch defences. At Ijmuiden, Geertruida Wijsmuller persuaded the captain of a Dutch freighter to take the Jews on board, and to set sail across the North Sea for England. ‘At 7 p.m. we sailed,’ Harry Jacobi later recalled. ‘Far away from the shore we looked back and saw a huge column of black smoke from the oil storage tanks that had been set on fire to prevent the Germans having them. At 9 p.m. news came through, picked up by the ship’s radio. The Dutch had capitulated.’
Harry Jacobi and the two hundred other Jewish refugees reached Britain and safety. Neither his parents, who were still in Berlin, nor his grandparents, then in Holland, were to survive the war. There had been no room for his grandparents on the crowded coaches.
Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer remained in Holland, where she continued to seek to smuggle Jews into neutral Spain and Switzerland.
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Another non-Jew who helped save Jews was Captain Foley, the former Passport Control Officer in Berlin, now, briefly, at Bordeaux, with thousands of retreating soldiers and civilians. But the swiftness of the German advance usually made escape impossible. The German military victories, wrote Chaim Kaplan in distant Warsaw, ‘beat upon our heads like hailstones’:
Today it is Copenhagen, in which there is a Jewish community; the next day it is Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rotterdam, full of Jews who until now dwelt quietly and peacefully in their homeland. Just now the news has reached us that Brussels too has opened its gates to the Nazis. All the military activities of the past nine days prove that the earth trembles under the feet of the Nazis. It seems that these are not chance victories, but rather that the balance of power is such as to make these victories inevitable. Anyone with any perception can clearly see that the Western Powers are incapable of withstanding the military force of the Nazis. This is a gigantic military power in whose path there is no obstacle. And so the day after tomorrow Paris, too, will fall into their hands. And what then?
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On 14 June 1940 German forces entered Paris. Tens of thousands of French Jews were trapped: and with them, several thousand refugees from pre-war Germany and central Europe. Among these refugees was Ernst Weiss, the Austrian novelist, pupil of Freud, friend of Kafka, medical officer in the 1914–17 war in the Austro-Hungarian army, and master of the psychological novel. In March 1938 he had fled Vienna for Prague. In March 1939 he had fled Prague for Paris. As German troops marched down the Champs Elysées, he committed suicide. He was fifty-six years old.
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In Poland, the Germans had decided to set up a new concentration camp, organized by SS men with previous experience of similar camps in Germany. The camp was intended to serve as a place of punishment for Polish political prisoners. The site chosen was in East Upper Silesia, a region annexed by Germany: the town, Oswiecim, was known in German as Auschwitz.
The Commandant of the new camp, Rudolf Hoess, had arrived on April 29 with five other SS men. On May 30, thirty more Germans, almost all of them convicted criminals, had been sent from the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin, to serve as barrack chiefs, or Kapos. Then, in the first two weeks of June, three hundred Jews from the town of Auschwitz were brought in to clean the site, a former Austro-Hungarian artillery barracks of the First World War. The Jews, having worked under the supervision of fifteen SS cavalrymen, were then sent back to Auschwitz town, whose six thousand Jews were later dispersed to other towns in the region.
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The first deportation to Auschwitz concentration camp came from the city of Tarnow. It consisted of 708 Poles, then held in Tarnow prison. Some were in prison because they had been caught trying to escape southwards into Slovakia. Others had been arrested because they were community leaders: priests and schoolteachers. About twenty Jews were also deported to Auschwitz in this first deportation among them Maximilian Rosenbusz, the director of the local Hebrew school, and two lawyers, Emil Wieder and Isaac Holzer.
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As the passenger train in which the deportees were being taken to Auschwitz passed through Cracow station, the deportees heard an excited station announcer trumpet the fall of Paris. On arrival in Auschwitz, the prisoners were put to work digging ditches and moving earth. Of the first 728 deportees, only 137 survived the war. The Jews among them perished.
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The fall of France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark and Norway, recalled Mania Feferman, then living in the Polish town of Kielce, ‘did not inspire much hope for a quick end to the war. Father would say, “If these nations cannot withstand the Nazis, what could we possibly do, without any weapons in such a hostile country?”’
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Throughout Poland, the number of forced labour camps was growing. On July 17, Dr Zygmunt Klukowski noted in his diary that ‘about five hundred Jews’ had been taken from Szczebrzeszyn to various work camps.
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On the following day it was announced that all Jews between the ages of sixteen and fifty must report daily to the Jewish Council. No Jew was allowed outside the town without a pass. Able-bodied Jews were sent to work camps. Conditions in these camps, Klukowski wrote on July 23, were ‘extremely hard’, and he added:
The worst consists of digging ditches to drain the marshes. They have to work standing in water. They are really badly fed because their families can rarely afford to send them food. They sleep in terrible barracks amidst filth—with a complete lack of space. The barracks are several kilometres from the places of work, and they have to walk this distance every day, and are continuously beaten. They are plagued with lice. Some
of their clothing looks as if it has been sprinkled with poppy seeds. I was able to see it for myself as there was an epidemic of typhus and all the sick from the work camps were sent to me.
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To defend their frontier with the Soviet Union, the Germans were constructing a fortified line, the ‘Otto Line’, in south-eastern Poland. Tens of thousands of Jews were sent to the construction sites: to dig anti-tank ditches and artillery dugouts. Of two thousand young men and women sent from Radom to work in the Zamosc region, ‘almost all of them perished’.
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Of a thousand young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five sent from Czestochowa in August 1940, ‘almost none survived’.
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Thousands more were brought from independent Slovakia, a state delighted to comply with the German request for labour-deportees.
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