The Holocaust (44 page)

As the killing continued, there were disagreements among the German authorities. On February 10 the Commissar in Baranowicze, Gentz, protested in writing to his superior in Minsk, Wilhelm Kube, that the German army authorities in Baranowicze wanted Jews to be spared as ‘skilled workers’. But these Jews, Gentz insisted, were in fact ‘no more than office cleaners, housekeepers etc.’. It was not merely a question of ‘categories’, for, as Gentz told Kube, ‘even officers in responsible positions lack the instinct for the Jewish problem’.
⁶

The Jewish Councils continued to face the dilemma of compliance or opposition. On February 12, when three thousand Jews were rounded up in the Ukrainian town of Brailov, to be marched away for execution, the Council Elder there, Josef Kulok, refused an offer to join the skilled workers who were to be spared, and chose to die with the community.
⁷

In the ghetto at Dvinsk, now formally designated a concentration camp, a forty-eight-year-old Jewess, Chaya Mayerova, was arrested and shot on February 19 for giving a non-Jewish worker in the camp a piece of cloth in return for a two-kilogramme bag of flour. The Jews of Dvinsk were assembled in order to witness the execution. In reporting the episode to his superiors, the German commander of the concentration camp enclosed the bag of flour.
⁸

Beyond the area of Nazi control, the precarious fate of those who had succeeded in escaping was cruelly demonstrated when a small cattle boat, the
Struma
, was torpedoed in the Black Sea. On board
were 769 Jewish refugees, among them 70 children and 260 women. They had been on their way from the Rumanian port of Constanta to Palestine. But on reaching Istanbul their boat was halted for two months, while the British government tried to persuade the Turkish government not to let it proceed. Only a single person, Medea Salamovitz, who was in the last stages of pregnancy, was allowed to leave the ship. As the negotiations continued, the British prepared to allow the children to proceed to Palestine, but the Turks, impatient at the dragging on of the discussions, ordered the ship to turn back into the Black Sea. On the night of February 24 it was sunk.

All but a single refugee were drowned.
⁹
Thirty-six years later, a Soviet naval history disclosed that the ‘unguarded’
Struma
had been sunk by a Soviet submarine. The history added: ‘Sergeant Major V. D. Chernov, Unit Commander Sergeant G. G. Nosov, and the Torpedo Operator Red Navy man I. M. Filatov, demonstrated exemplary courage in the action.’
¹⁰

***

There had been no halt during February to the deportations to Chelmno. As the deportations continued, so too did the deception. In a second deportation of ten thousand Jews from the Lodz ghetto between February 22 and February 28, all of whom were sent to Chelmno and gassed, it was rumoured in the ghetto ‘that the deportees were set free in Koluszki’—a railway junction less than twenty miles from Lodz, on the main Warsaw-Cracow line, and in the opposite direction to Chelmno. Another rumour ‘had it that the deportees were in Kolo county and also in the vicinity of Brzesc Kujawski’: Chelmno was indeed in Kolo county, although it was situated twenty-five miles from Brzesc Kujawski, again in the opposite direction. ‘We mention these stories’, the Ghetto Chronicle recorded at the end of February, ‘only for the sake of accuracy in chronicling events, for in reality the ghetto has not received any precise information on which to base an idea as to the fate or even the whereabouts of the deportees.’

The Chronicle added that the ‘mystery’ of the destination of the deportees was depriving all the ghetto dwellers of sleep. One thing was certain: the ‘resettlement’ in February had been ‘significantly more severe’ than the one in January. Most of the German guards,
the Chronicle recorded, had ordered the deportees ‘to throw away their knapsacks and often even the bundles they were carrying by hand, including the food supplies they had taken with them for their journey into the unknown’.
¹¹

The first week of March 1942 saw the Jewish festival of Purim, a time of rejoicing at the defeat of Haman the Amalekite. It was Haman who had tried, in ancient days, to destroy all the Jews of the Persian Empire, intending not to leave ‘the least remains of them, nor preserve any of them, either for slaves or for captives’. Since the first days of the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Germans had used the Jewish festivals for particular savagery: these days had become known to the Jews as the ‘Goebbels calendar’.

In Minsk, on the eve of Purim, the Germans ordered the Jewish Council to hand over five thousand Jews for deportation ‘to the west’. The Council did not know what to do. Some members suggested that small children, and the elderly, might be sent away. But those Jews who wanted no collaboration whatsoever with the Germans in these demands insisted on ‘no trading in Jewish souls’. Hiding places had already been prepared in cellars and ruined buildings. Those who felt they were endangered hid.

On the morning of March 2 the Jewish labour battalions were sent out of the ghetto as usual. Then the Gestapo approached the Jewish Council for the five thousand, urging haste, ‘because the trains were ready and waiting’. The Jewish Council refused. In fury, the Gestapo sent German and White Russian policemen to search the ghetto. Reaching a children’s nursery, they ordered the woman in charge, Dr Chernis, and the supervisor, Fleysher, to take their children to the Jewish Council building.

The order was a trap. On reaching a specially dug pit on Ratomskaya Street, the children were seized by Germans and Ukrainians, and thrown alive into the deep sand. At that moment, several SS officers, among them Wilhelm Kube, arrived, whereupon Kube, immaculate in his uniform, threw handfuls of sweets to the shrieking children. All the children perished in the sand.
¹²

That night, when the Jewish forced labourers returned to Minsk from their tasks outside the ghetto, they were ordered to lie down in the snow outside the ghetto gates. Any who tried to get up and run into the ghetto were shot. Others were taken to the pit in Ratomskaya Street and killed. Some were marched away from the city, to
the Koidanovo forest, and murdered there. At least five thousand Jews were killed in Minsk during that Purim day.
¹³

The Purim destructions were widespread; on March 1 the Jews of Krosniewice, in western Poland, after having been ordered to assemble, were told by the German mayor that, on the following day, they were to be resettled in the south, in distant Bessarabia. They should go home, he said, and have a good night’s sleep in preparation for such a long journey. On the next morning they were all deported thirty miles westward, to Chelmno, and gassed.
¹⁴

In the Baranowicze ghetto, in White Russia, the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Joshua Izykson, and his secretary, Mrs Genia Men, were ordered, that same Purim, to draw up a list of all old and sick Jews, and to deliver these Jews to the Gestapo. They refused to do so. Both were shot.
¹⁵
But first, they had been forced to watch the torture and execution of some of the three thousand Jews rounded up that day.

The system chosen by the Gestapo to ‘select’ Jews of Baranowicze for destruction was one which they were to repeat in different cities at different times. Cards were issued, in this instance marked with the letter ‘O’, as alleged evidence that the holder was employed by the German authorities as a labourer. But the holders of the cards feared a trap, and hid. Even while the cards were being distributed in the ghetto square, White Russian police, known as ‘Ravens’, would strike at random with their rifle butts at the stomachs of those being given their cards.

On the following day, March 5, the holders of the cards were ordered to assemble. German, Lithuanian and Ukrainian police, brought specially to Baranowicze, dragged hundreds from their homes and hiding places. The local ‘Ravens’ were equally active. Then, as an eye-witness later recalled, ‘SS men made their selection, sending some people to the left and some to the right. Those on the left were beaten cruelly, while those on the right were compelled to look on at the spectacle. Those sentenced to death were carried away from the ghetto in lorries. Later it became known that these had been taken away to a grave near the railway line, some three kilometres from the town.’

Pits had been dug at this site by Russian prisoners-of-war. Ten Jewish policemen, led by their commander, Weltman, were then ordered to dig a further pit, for the Russians. Jews and Russians
were then murdered. As for the Jewish policemen, ‘not one of them returned’. In all, 3,300 Jews were murdered that Purim in Baranowicze.
¹⁶

Also during the Purim festival, at Zdunska Wola, thirty miles west of Lodz, the Gestapo asked the Jewish Council for ten young, healthy Jews, ‘for work’. Dora Rosenboim, an eye-witness of what followed, later recalled:

According to another account, the Chairman of the Jewish Council at Zdunska Wola, Dr Jakub Lemberg, had been ordered by the Germans to deliver ten Jews to the Gestapo, as ‘substitutes’ for the ten hanged sons of Haman, the Jew-hater, in the biblical narrative. But Dr Lemberg replied that he would only deliver four Jews, himself, his wife and their two children. In revenge for this defiance, Dr Lemberg was taken out and shot by orders of Hans Biebow, the chief of the German Ghetto Administration in Lodz.
¹⁸

The sadism of the murderers was in evidence throughout the lands of their occupation. In the Janowska labour camp at Lvov, on the first day of Purim, six Jews were forced to spend the night outside the barracks, on the grounds that they ‘looked sick’ and should not infect the others. The temperature was at freezing point. ‘In the morning,’ Leon Weliczker later recalled, ‘all six people were frozen lying down where they were put out the night before; completely white like long balls of snow.’

Two days later, early on the morning of March 4, eight more labourers were picked out at Janowska because, according to Dibauer, the Gestapo chief, ‘they didn’t look too clean’. Dibauer ordered a barrel of water to be brought. The eight Jews were then forced to undress, and to stand in it. It was early morning. All day
and all night they were not allowed to get out. ‘Next morning’, Weliczker recalled, ‘we had to cut the ice away. Ice. It was frozen. The men were frozen to death.’

A week after this incident, Dibauer was joined at the camp by SS Second Lieutenant Bilhaus. The two men decided to compete in a shooting game. They would stand at their windows while Jews were being marched to and fro carrying stones, and would shoot, ‘aiming at the tip of a nose or a finger’. In the evening, Weliczker recalled, these two ‘sportsmen’ would go round ‘picking out what they called the
kaput
people, those who were injured, because as injured people they were no good any more, and finish them off with a shot’.

Dibauer also had a reputation for enjoying strangling people. ‘In my group,’ Weliczker later recalled, ‘a man who was working alongside me happened to look away, didn’t look so busy; Dibauer approached, took him, and strangled him with his own hands on the spot.’
¹⁹

Confronted by such sadism, Jews everywhere sought some means of survival. But even in White Russia, where groups of Red Army partisan groups had begun fighting behind German lines, the path to resistance was perilous. After the Purim massacre in Minsk, many Jews had tried to escape from the ghetto to join the partisans. One group, led by Nahum Feldman, reached the forests just as a battle was being fought between the Germans and the partisans, and, unable to approach the battle zone, was forced to return to the ghetto. Others who escaped were caught by the Germans while on their way to the forests, and shot. One well-known Jewish Communist in Minsk, Hirsh Skovia, reached the partisans, but died when his feet froze during a German attack on the partisan base.
²⁰

News of one act of resistance, reaching the Jews of Warsaw in March, was published in one of the many underground newspapers which kept the ghetto population informed of whatever was known. This particular report came from the town of Nowogrodek, in eastern Poland, scene of the execution of five thousand Jews in December 1941. ‘In the city of Nowogrodek,’ the newspaper wrote, ‘there were two hundred Jews who refused to go to the execution site like beasts driven to the slaughter. They found the courage to rise, weapon in hand, against Hitler’s hangmen. Although they all fell in the unequal fight, before their own death they killed twenty of
the murderers.’ The newspaper added: ‘In wonder and respect we bow our heads at the grave of the heroes of Nowogrodek. They are a symbol of the end to surrender and slavish obsequiousness. They are a symbol of the proud bearing of human beings who wish to die as free men.’
²¹

Although this act of defiance at the massacre site in Nowogrodek has been shown by historical research to be a myth, the report of it certainly gave the Jews of Warsaw cause for pride. At the same time, south-east of Warsaw, in the forests near Wlodawa, a group of young Jews had begun to form a small resistance group. Their fate, however, showed in miniature the stupendous problems of all such resistance. In a remote wood, twenty-five Jews were in hiding, women and children as well as men. They lived in dug-outs in the forest. After some months, more than a hundred peasants, local Ukrainians, came to their hide-out and ordered them to leave it. There was a short fight, but the Jews were outnumbered and overwhelmed.