The Holocaust (23 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
Even before the German killing squads reached a region, the local population often attacked the Jews who had lived in their midst for centuries. These attacks were not pogroms to beat and wound, to
loot and burn, but attacks to kill: to destroy a whole community at one swift blow. The records of these attacks are scant. Few Jews survived to recount what happened. In hundreds of smaller villages, no Jew was left alive.
THE GERMAN INVASION OF RUSSIA
Wherever possible, Jews tried to resist the killers. But the forces against them were overwhelming. Sometimes the Jews succeeded, if only briefly, in halting the tide of killing. At Lubieszow, Jews armed themselves with axes, hammers, iron bars and pitchforks, to await the arrival of local Ukrainians intent upon murder as soon as the Red Army withdrew, and before the Germans had arrived. The Ukrainians came, and were beaten off. But then, retreating to the nearby village of Lubiaz, they fell immediately upon the few isolated Jewish families living there. When, the following morning, the Jews of Lubieszow’s self-defence group reached Lubiaz, ‘they found the bodies of twenty children, women and men without heads, bellies ripped open, legs and arms hacked off.’
Ten days later, on July 2, a German cavalry patrol entered Lubieszow. As its first task, it hunted down and destroyed the local Jews who had dared to resist their attackers.
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There were many examples of bravery, amid the slaughter. When German forces entered Luck on June 25 they found Dr Benjamin From in the hospital operating room, performing an operation on a Christian woman. The doctor was immediately ordered to stop the operation. He refused, was dragged out of the hospital, taken to his home, and killed with his entire family. He was forty-seven years old.
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In Kovno, on June 26, hundreds of Jews were seized in their homes, taken to one of the fortifications which surrounded the city, the Ninth Fort, and murdered. A Kovno Jewess whose father was among those seized that day, later wrote: ‘We never saw him again, I suppose that his end was the same as the end of so many hundreds of thousands of European Jewry.’
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It was not always obvious, in those first days of the German occupation, what the future of the Jews would be. In the former Latvian city of Dvinsk, more than sixteen thousand Jews had been trapped by the rapid German advance. Hardly had German forces occupied the city, than all Jewish males between the ages of sixteen and sixty were ordered to report to the market place. The Jews were then divided into groups, each with a German or a Latvian overseer,
and taken to different parts of the city to clear rubble. Jews who tried to hide from these labour tasks were rounded up by zealous Latvians, members of a pre-war Fascist organization.
Hundreds of Dvinsk Jews were taken to work, going off ‘without suspicion or hesitation’, Maja Zarch, whose father was among those taken, later recalled. Her recollection continued:
The first day the men were in good spirits although the thought had crossed the minds of some of them that it was strange that only Jews had been singled out for the task. Even more strange was the fact that after work the men were not allowed to return to their homes. This created suspicion and they were given various reasons why this was so. Some said that it was to save time and would eliminate the difficulties in rounding up the men each morning for work. On several occasions my mother, like all the other wives and mothers, went to investigate the whereabouts of my father. Mother would return from seeing Father with bits of bread, soap or whatever the men had salvaged from their cleaning operations.
As the days passed it became known that some of the wives could not find their husbands with the working commandos. Rumours started to circulate that these men had been shot. As the town was beginning to be restored to order fewer and fewer men were to be found in town. Many conflicting reports were heard. Some doubted the stories regarding the shooting and dismissed them as impossible. Why should they be shot? What crimes had they committed? They were probably being sent away to do other work out of town. But rumours of the shootings continued.
One day my mother returned from town in a very agitated state. She could not find my father. The men she had found would not tell what had happened to the others. Rumours of shooting persisted. Someone who lived not far from the prison had heard shooting right through the night. She went to the prison and found my father in a most terrible state. His eyes were swollen and tears were running down his face. He told her of the horrifying night they had spent. Uncle Isaac, together with a lot of men, were called out, made to dig their own graves and then shot. He was sure that the same fate would befall him
and the rest of the men. Mother returned with this terrible news. My aunt, who had not accompanied her this time, fainted. We were all crying, mourning my uncle’s death.
The next day, when she went to see my father in prison again, no one was there—the prison was empty. The men were gone. All enquiries were futile. In a state of confusion, she was returning home and on her way she encountered someone who told her that they had seen lorry-loads of men being transported from the prison the previous night. They had been taken in the direction of the outskirts of the town. She went there hoping to find Father but instead she came across the most horrifying sight: horse-drawn carts full of men’s clothing were passing her. The ghastly truth dawned on her—he was no more.
She staggered into the house—there was no need to ask her what had happened. They are all gone, she whispered, murdered, in cold blood!
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The ferocity of hatred was not directed only against Jews. Russian prisoners-of-war were also murdered in cold blood by the occupying forces. These Russians were likewise unarmed, defeated, and at the mercy of the conqueror. But the Germans showed them no mercy: by the end of the war, two and a half million Russian prisoners-of-war had been murdered.
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Towards the Soviet soldiers as prisoners, as towards the Jews as a people, the Nazis inculcated a sense of loathing, wishing for their total removal, and rejoicing at their destruction. Throughout the newly conquered areas, revolting tortures were perpetrated upon Russian prisoners-of-war, towards whom the Germans did not recognize the pre-war Geneva Conventions which served to protect hundreds of thousands of British and French prisoners-of-war. As in the creation of a spurious racial concept of ‘the Jew’, the Germans had stimulated a similar hatred of the Russian prisoner-of-war, portraying him as a ‘degenerate Slav’, a coward for whom the honour and dignity of the ‘Aryan’ soldier were of no relevance, and of no avail.
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A young Jew, Shalom Cholawski, has recalled how, on June 27, the day on which the Germans entered Nieswiez:
Groups of Russian prisoners-of-war were brought into the synagogue courtyard. They lay hungry and exhausted. The
Germans moved among them, kicking them with their heavy shoes.
One of the soldiers began beating a prisoner. He raised the man to his feet and cursed him with every punch. The prisoner, a short fellow with dull Mongolian features, did not know why the German had singled him out or what he was raving about. He stood there, not resisting the blows. Suddenly, he lifted his hand and, with a terrific sweep, slapped his attacker powerfully and squarely on the cheek. Blood trickled slowly down the German’s face. For a moment they stared at each other. One man seething with anger, the other calm. Several Germans brusquely shoved the man to a place behind the fence. A volley of shots echoed in the air. I witnessed the scene from my window.
Jews stayed in their houses, Cholawski added, ‘still waiting and hoping; maybe the others would return.’ But with every hour, the Red Army was driven further eastward.
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In the early hours of June 27 the Germans entered Bialystok, a city which they had occupied briefly in September 1939, before handing it over to the Soviet Union under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Since September 1939, as many as ten thousand Jewish refugees from German-occupied Poland had found refuge in the city, raising its Jewish population to more than fifty thousand. On the morning of their entry into the city, ‘Red Friday’ in the annals of the Jewish community of Bialystok, a large German motorized unit gathered at one end of the Jewish quarter and began drinking ‘to death’. A few minutes later they besieged the Szulhojf quarter around the Great Synagogue. It was eight in the morning. The slaughter started at once. The Germans, in small units, armed with automatic pistols and hand grenades, started chasing Jews on the narrow, winding streets around the Great Synagogue.
‘Dante-esque scenes’, as the Bialystok historian Szymon Datner later wrote, ‘took place on these streets. Jews were taken out of the houses, put against the walls, and shot. From everywhere, the unfortunate people were driven in the direction of the Great Synagogue, which was burning with a great fire, and from which horrible cries came out.’ At least eight hundred Jews had been locked into the synagogue, before it had been set on fire.
The Germans then forced further victims to push one another
into the burning synagogue. Those who resisted, they shot; then they threw the dead bodies inside the burning building. ‘Soon the whole quarter around the synagogue was burning. The soldiers were throwing hand grenades inside the houses, which being mostly wooden, burned easily. A sea of flames which embraced the whole Szulhojf overflowed into the neighbouring streets.’
Until late in the afternoon, Jews were driven into the burning synagogue, shot on the streets and in the houses. The noise of exploding grenades, Datner had written, ‘mingled with the shots from the pistols, and with the drunken cries of the Germans, and the horrible cries of the murdered victims’. Among those who died in the burning synagogue were the well known Dr Kracowski, a pharmacist named Polak, a celebrated chess player, Zabludowski, and a popular comedian, Alter Sztajnberg.
At one moment, when the Germans were not watching, a Pole—his name is not known, he was the porter of the synagogue—opened a small window at the back of the synagogue, and several dozen Jews managed to escape. Among those saved was Pejsach Frajnd. By the end of that day of burning and shooting, two thousand Jews had been murdered.
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The last days of June 1941 also saw the first of the deportations from the Rumanian province of Bessarabia. Jews, uprooted from their towns and villages, were driven hundreds of miles eastwards, some on foot, some by train, in conditions of hardship and violence. On June 27 it was the Jews of Falesti who were the victims. Imprisoned in the Great Synagogue, where the women were assaulted by both German and Rumanian troops, they were then forced to walk eastward.
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In nearby Dombroveni, a Jewish agricultural village whose rabbi and communal leaders had been deported to Siberia in 1940, the remaining Jews were taken to a schoolyard and robbed of all their money and valuables, before being sent on the eastward march.
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Every day, Jews died on the march, or were killed by guards impatient with the slow pace of the sick or elderly.
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No day now passed without Jews being murdered. In Kovno, on Saturday, June 28, Lithuanian police joined with released convicts to hunt through the streets with iron bars, searching for Jews, and beating several hundred to death.
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On June 29, in the Rumanian city of Jassy, Rumanian soldiers and police went on the rampage,
watched by German SS men, killing at least two hundred and sixty Jews in their homes.
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At the same time, five thousand Jews were arrested, marched through the streets while being beaten continuously by Rumanian and German police, shot if they fell, and, at the railway station, forced to lie on the ground while all their money, jewellery, rings and documents were taken from them. Eventually they were put into sealed cattle trucks, a hundred people and more in each, in two trains, without food or water. One of the survivors of those on the train that travelled southward later recalled:
The heat and stench inside were fearful. Before our eyes our children fell, our parents and our friends. They might possibly have been saved if only we had had a few drops of water. There were some who drank their own urine or that of their friends. A little water was afterwards poured into the truck through its holes when the death train was halted at different stations. Meantime the heat in the truck became fearful, it was literally an inferno.
The journey of the living together with the dead lasted for four days; and then the train halted at Tromat so that the corpses should be removed.
On the way to Kalarash the train stopped at Mirteshet, near a pool of filthy water. The reckless victims or madmen, whichever we ought to call them, broke down the doors of the trucks and made for the pool. They paid no attention to the warnings of the trainmaster that they would be killed and refused to move away from the turbid water. Dozens of them were shot by the guards as they stood in the pool and drank the filthy mess.
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