The Holocaust (32 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
We were struck by their elegant sports clothes, their exquisite footwear, their furs, the many variously coloured capes the women wore. They often gave the impression of being people on some sort of vacation or, rather, engaged in winter sports, for the majority of them wore ski clothes. You couldn’t tell there was a war on from the way those people looked; and the fact that, during the bitter cold spells, they strolled about in front of the gates to their ‘transports’, and about the ‘city’ as well, demonstrated most eloquently that their layers of fat afforded them excellent protection from the cold.
Their attitude toward the extremely unsanitary conditions in which they were quartered was one of unusual disgust, though perhaps that was not without justification; they shouted, they were indignant, and beyond the reach of any argument.
The ‘Western European’ Jews protested to the ghetto dwellers that, ‘somewhere along the line, they had been led astray’. They had been told they were going ‘to some industrial centre, where each of them would find suitable employment’. Some of them even asked if they could not ‘reside in a hotel of some sort’. Losing their bearings, they began to feel ‘small and hopeless’.
The Ghetto Chronicle also recalled the arrival of the deportees from Hamburg. They had reached the Lodz ghetto on a Thursday evening, and were housed in a former cinema. On the Friday morning, Rumkowski called on them. ‘They were spread out on the floor,’ the Chronicle noted, ‘sleeping on their bundles, the old people and the women sitting in chairs lining the walls.’ That evening they arranged a Friday evening service, to welcome the Sabbath:
Dressed in their best clothes, with many candles lit, they said their first prayer to God with uncanny calm and in a mood of exaltation. Those who had left Judaism a long time before, even those whose fathers had broken any connection with their forefathers, stood there that day, festively attired, in a sort of grave and exalted mood, seeking consolation and salvation in prayer.
When their prayers were concluded, they went out into the lobby, the same words on all their lips: ‘Now we see that we are all equal, all sons of the same people, all brothers.’ This was either mere flattery or, perhaps, a genuine compliment to the
old population—or perhaps a premonition of the not-too-distant future.
The chronicler added, in the retrospect of six months:
Events outpaced time, people changed visibly, at first outwardly, then physically, and finally, if they had not vanished altogether, they moved through the ghetto like ghosts. The turnips and beets they had at first disdained, they now bought at high prices, and the soups they had scorned became the height of their dreams. Once it had been others, but then it was they who prowled the ‘city’ with a cup or a canteen on a chain to beg a little soup.
5
DEPORTATIONS FROM GERMANY
Among the Viennese deported to Lodz that October was Stephan Deutsch, the ‘dean of Viennese journalists’, who was to die in the ghetto six months later,
6
and Leopold Birkenfeld, a brilliant pianist, who from the moment of his arrival entertained the ghetto-dwellers to his music. Birkenfeld’s performances, noted the Ghetto Chronicle for November 1941, ‘deserve special mention’; each of his concerts ‘is truly a feast for the ghetto’s music lovers’. In all, more than thirty musicians, actors, singers and painters had arrived from Vienna, and were to contribute to the ghetto’s cultural activities.
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At a concert on December 3, Birkenfeld ‘literally enchanted the audience’, as the Ghetto Chronicle recorded, with his ‘absolutely marvellous piano performance’ of Schubert’s
Unfinished Symphony
, Beethoven’s
Moonlight Sonata
, Liszt’s
Rhapsody No.
2, and works by Mendelssohn.
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In the Lodz ghetto, as elsewhere, resistance and protests continued to be severely punished. The forty-four-year-old Dr Ulrich Schulz, a lawyer, was one of the deportees from Prague to Lodz. During the journey he had, the Chronicle recorded, ‘flown into a rage and slandered the police officials who were on the train as escorts’. Imprisoned on arrival in Lodz, Schulz was held in prison for three months and then shot by German policemen.
9
Non-Jews were also punished for seeking to help Jews: in Berlin, on October 23, a German Catholic priest, Bernhard Lichtenberg, who had been a military chaplain in the First World War, was arrested for his protests against the deportations to the East. Since the Kristallnacht in November 1938, Lichtenberg had closed each evening’s service with a prayer ‘for the Jews, and the poor prisoners in the concentration camps’. Sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, he was sent to Dachau, but died ‘on the way’.
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***
On October 24, in Vilna, after a distribution of about six thousand work passes, the Germans seized four thousand Jews without passes and took them to Ponar. In vain had the recently appointed head of the Jewish Council, Jacob Gens, appealed to the Germans for further passes.
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Thousands of Jews hid in cellars, or in attics, but groups of Lithuanians went from house to house in search of them,
often returning several times to the same house.
12
‘We feel like beasts surrounded by hunters,’ noted one fifteen-year-old boy, who survived these October raids.
13
In many of the cellars, Jews resisted the Lithuanian ‘hunters’, and refused to leave. They were shot dead on the spot.
14
In two days, more than 3,700 Jews were taken to Ponar and murdered, or killed in the cellars. Of those killed, according to the precise German statistics, 885 were children.
15
To the distress of the Einsatzgruppen, the local population in White Russia, one commander reported, had ‘not proposed to take part in any pogroms’, a fact which made ‘vigorous’ action by the Germans themselves all the more imperative. It was experienced repeatedly, according to one Einsatzgruppen report, that ‘Jewish women showed an especially obstinate behaviour’. For this reason, the report continued, ‘28 Jewesses had to be shot in Krugloje and 337 at Mogilev’. In Tatarsk, the Jews had left the ghetto to which they had been deported and had returned to their homes ‘attempting’, the report noted, ‘to expel the Russians who had been quartered there in the meantime’. As a result of this ‘act of defiance’, all male Jews, as well as three Jewesses, were shot. In nearby Starodub, ‘the Jews offered some resistance against the establishment of a ghetto, so all 272 Jews and Jewesses had to be shot’. In Mogilev also, the Einsatzgruppen reported, ‘the Jews attempted to sabotage their removal to the ghetto. 113 Jews were liquidated.’ This was in addition to four Jews ‘shot on account of their refusal to work’, and two more shot because they had allegedly ill-treated wounded German soldiers, and ‘because they did not wear the prescribed markings’.
In Bobruisk, according to this same Einsatzgruppen report, which was sent to Berlin on October 25, those executed included ‘rebellious Jews and persons who had shielded Red Army soldiers or who had acted as spies for the partisans.’ Some fifty-two Jews who had fled from Gorodok to Vitebsk, and ‘had made the population restive by spreading rumours’. They were given what the report of October 25 described as ‘special treatment’.
16
On October 16 Rumanian and German forces had occupied Odessa, after a two-month siege. Six days later, at 5.35 in the afternoon, an explosion blew up the Rumanian command headquarters in the city. Seventeen Rumanian and four German officers
were killed, including General Glogojeanu, head of the Rumanian Occupation Command. ‘I have taken steps’, telegraphed Glogojeanu’s deputy, General Trestioreanu, three hours later, ‘to hang Jews and Communists in Odessa squares.’
17
By noon on the following day, October 23, as the reprisals gathered momentum, five thousand civilians had been seized and shot, most of them Jews, of whom at least eighty thousand had been unable to flee before the city was surrounded in August.
The campaign which now ensued against the Jews of Odessa was reported by the Germans who witnessed it. That same morning, October 23, nineteen thousand Jews were assembled into a square near the port, which was surrounded by a wooden fence; they were sprayed with gasoline and burnt alive. In the afternoon, the gendarmerie and the police rounded up over twenty thousand persons in the streets—again, most of them Jews—and squeezed them into the municipal gaol. The next day, October 24, they removed sixteen thousand Jews from the gaol and led them out of the city in long columns, in the direction of Dalnik, a nearby village.
When the first Jews reached Dalnik they were bound to one another’s arms in groups of between forty and fifty, thrown into an anti-tank ditch and shot dead. When this method proved too slow, they were pressed into four large warehouses which had holes in the walls. Machine-gun nozzles were pushed into the holes, and in this manner mass murder was committed in one warehouse after another.
The soldiers who carried out the murders were under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel N. Deleanu and Lieutenant-Colonel C. D. Nicolescu. German soldiers also took part in the shooting. For fear that someone might escape nevertheless, three warehouses, which were filled mainly with women and children, were set on fire. Those who were not killed by the flames sought to escape through the holes in the roof, or through the windows; these were met with hand grenades or machine-gun fire. Many women went mad and threw their children out of the windows. The fourth warehouse, which was filled with men, was shelled the next afternoon, October 25, at 5.35, exactly three days after the bombing of command headquarters.
Following the massacres of October 23, 24 and 25, a further ten thousand Jews were deported from Odessa to three concentration
camps established near Golta: Bogdanovka, Domanovka and Acmecetca. There, they were murdered two months later, together with tens of thousands of other Jews who had been brought to these camps from northern Transnistria and Bessarabia.
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***
Throughout the autumn of 1941, methods of mass murder were being devised which were intended to be more efficient, and more secret, than the shooting hitherto employed in the East. On October 25, as news of the previous day’s slaughter in the streets of Vilna reached Berlin, Alfred Wetzel, an official in the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, noted that Dr Viktor Brack, a member of Hitler’s Chancellery and an expert on euthanasia, had already ‘coordinated the supply of instruments and apparatus for killing people through poison gas’. This was to be the new method. Wetzel noted that Brack ‘is ready to collaborate in the installation of the necessary buildings and gas plants’. He was willing to send his own chemist, Kallmeyer, to Riga.
Wetzel added that Eichmann ‘is in agreement with this procedure’. Eichmann had already informed the ministry, Wetzel noted, ‘that the camps are intended for Riga and Minsk, where even Jews from the Old Reich may be sent’. To judge from the ‘actual situation’, Wetzel added, ‘one need have no scruple in using Brack’s method to liquidate Jews who are unsuitable for work’. In this way, it would be possible to avoid ‘incidents’ such as occurred ‘during the shootings at Vilna—and these shootings were public, according to the report that I have before me’. Such public shootings ‘will no longer be possible or tolerated’.
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In the western Polish town of Kalisz, the Jewish community was informed by the Germans on October 26 that, in order ‘to reduce the danger of epidemics to a minimum’, patients in the Jewish old people’s home were to be transferred to convalescent homes in another town at ten in the morning on the following day. The patients were to be ‘washed and dressed in fresh underwear’. Nothing else need be done for them, ‘even bedding was unnecessary as everything had now been prepared’.
Jewish mechanics, returning to their homes in the ghetto later that day from their work at Gestapo headquarters, reported that ‘a large number of strange Gestapo men had arrived with a mysterious
large black lorry that was closed on every side and had no ventilation holes at all’.
Many inside the ghetto linked these facts with the order to evacuate the old people’s home. As one of those persons later recalled: ‘There were still many optimists, hoping for the best, but the majority were ill at ease and apprehensive.’
On the morning of October 27, precisely at ten in the morning, a large black lorry similar to the one described by the mechanics drove up in front of the old people’s home. ‘Its roof was as high as the first storey,’ an eye-witness later recalled, adding that it looked ‘like a great black coffin’. With the lorry came two shiny black cars filled with uniformed and unfamiliar Gestapo men. The eyewitness, Dr Gross, continued:
We had to fetch out those who were called by name, for they were mostly chronic patients and cripples. The Germans ordered us to carry them, seat the patients or stretch them on the benches within the lorry.
‘When you come down the steps, be careful nothing happens to the patient!’ ‘Take it easy, we’re not in a hurry.’ ‘Please put the man down here in the corner till he feels better!’ Meanwhile they saw to it that we should fill up the cold lorry. But they would not permit the younger folk to join their departing relatives.
The metal doors were banged to, the heavy bars were dropped in place, the large lorry set off silently but swiftly, followed by the gleaming cars. Next day, October 28, two more trips were made and about one hundred and ten persons were removed. Everything was done swiftly, in order not to spoil the weekend. They must have grown tired of putting on a show and stopped being polite, calming the weepers with their whips and shooting at anybody who looked out of the windows. The only ones who did not feel the general apprehension and bitterness were the lucky insane.
The two last groups left on Monday, 30 October, and included a few hospital patients. The chair of one of the old women was brought back on one of the trips. The Gestapo man who brought it explained, ‘She doesn’t need it any longer because she’s received a new one.’ That day the Council of Elders was required to pay the cost of transport at the rate of
four Reichsmarks a person, and to arrange all matters connected with the departure of 290 persons at the Economic Office.
