The Holocaust (50 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
Aviel managed to escape from the ghetto, and to meet his father in a nearby wood. But those with his father feared that the boy was too small to join them as fugitives. So he returned to the ghetto, where, as he recalled:
I tried to hide my smaller brother and my mother and the people who were with us in the house. I tried to hide them in the attic. I covered them with rags and boxes, then I went down and I tried to find out what was happening. As soon as I went down from the attic, I heard a terrible noise. Motorcycles were coming in. There were shouts.
Germans came in from the direction of Lida in battle uniform equipped with automatic weapons as if they were marching out to the front. It was a different uniform from what we had seen before. They had about the same uniform as that very first group had when they killed those forty people. I left the house and I saw a great mass of Jews being pushed from the edge of the ghetto, being driven on in the direction of Grodno. The same direction in which these groups with the spades had been going. And we knew something awful would happen.
At that moment a number of Germans entered our house. One of them stood at the entrance blocking it and the others scattered in the rooms and began searching and driving out people who were not yet in hiding. Whoever would pass through the entrance would absorb a blow from a rubber baton on his head and he would fall down right there. When I saw that, I wanted to avoid being beaten this way. I ducked and I jumped out and I managed not to receive this blow.
I mixed with that multitude. I tried to stop along the way to see whether I could find out what happened to my family. Whether they had been found or not. I thought if I was on the
edge perhaps I could see them coming and I could join them. Unfortunately, however, I saw my mother, my small brother, an uncle and other Jews included in the group of those people who were found and my little brother then told me later that they were beaten severely. Then we marched together in this direction in which we were driven.
In all, more than two thousand Jews were driven from the ghetto. As many as a thousand were refugees who had fled in the months earlier from the slaughter in Lithuania. As they were driven towards the pits, Aviel’s mother said to him: ‘Say “Shema Yisrael”—“Hear! O Israel”—die as Jews.’ That, he recalled, ‘is how they all walked, calling to their God, “Shema Yisrael”,’ the traditional last line of the Jew’s deathbed confession. Aviel added:
I repeated the words after her but I had inner resistance. I did not do this willingly. We were brought to the market place in the middle of the town. We were told to kneel, heads down. We were not permitted to lift our heads. Whoever did so would either be shot right through the head or would be beaten. Of course we saw from the corner of our eyes the people who tried to run away were shot right there.
Then we sat there in the centre of town for an hour or more. I can’t estimate this time. They lectured us. I didn’t hear what was being said. My thoughts were all concentrated on the possibility of escape. How could one get out of here, I thought. Then later we were told to get up and we were led out of town in the direction of the cemetery. The distance was about one kilometre. When we got there approximately one hundred yards from the cemetery, we were told to get off the road.
Again we had to kneel heads down. We were not permitted to lift our heads or look aside. We only heard shots from the sides. I was small then. I was shorter than the others so I could raise my head without being discovered and I saw in front of me a long trench about twenty-five or thirty yards long. They began leading us row after row, group after group. We were led to that trench. People were undressed. They would have to go on that little hill which was near the trench. Machine-gun bursts were heard and they would fall into the trench.
I saw one case of a Jewish girl who struggled. She refused to undress. They hit her and then she was shot too.
Children, women, family after family. The families were in groups together. At that moment I noticed a group of Jews who were digging those graves and knowing that my brother was in that group….
Aviel decided to try, at whatever cost, to join his brother. His thought, he later recalled, ‘was always: ‘One must survive—
uberleben
—and tell what happened.’ His account continued:
I took leave of my mother and started jumping over the heads of these people who were sitting next to me. I fell down and got up again—I didn’t give a thought to what would happen; and thus—I don’t really know how—I was not noticed, I was not discovered—it was a miracle, really.
I managed to reach the edge of the road, near the ditch there; I lay down in the ditch and they apparently did not notice me.
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Also in Radun during the destruction of the community were several families who had escaped the previous September from Ejszyszki in Lithuania, crossing into what had then seemed the comparative safety of White Russia. Moshe Sonenson, in hiding with his two sons, one an infant, later recalled that day in Radun:
The Germans were downstairs, shouting: ‘Where are the Juden?’ Could there be Jews here? My child began to cry at that moment. They were downstairs and we were upstairs, fifteen Jews. The situation was terrible. They were downstairs, and we were unable to quiet the child. There was one old man with us named Mendel who said: ‘Do we all have to end our lives here because of your child?’ And the child began to cry. It was awful. So they took a coat and put it over his mouth and he suffocated.
The 3,400 Jews of Radun were taken to the Jewish cemetery and shot at specially prepared pits. More than sixteen hundred were women, more than eight hundred were children. ‘It was terrible, terrible,’ Sonenson recalled. ‘I can’t forget it…. That’s all….’
Avraham Aviel, another of the few surviving witnesses of the destruction in that small village. ‘We went in the direction of the town,’ he recalled. ‘Behind us, we heard the continuation of the shooting and the crying of those led to death.’
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On May 8 a train left Ryki ghetto for Sobibor. One young boy, Abram Rubinsztein, who had celebrated his fourteenth birthday
five days earlier, managed to jump from the train. He survived, both the jump, and the war. His father Haim, a tinsmith, his mother Malka, his three sisters, and his two brothers, reached Sobibor with 2,500 others Jews from Ryki, and were gassed.
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SOBIBOR
On May 9, as the round-up for Sobibor was about to reach the village of Markuszow, four young Jews organized a mass escape to the nearby forests.
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The four were Shlomo Goldwasser, Mordechai Kirshenbaum and the brothers Yerucham and Yaakov Gothelf. For five months the escapees hid in the woods, but then a massive German manhunt tracked them down: men, women and children, all were killed.
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The perils after escape were as great as the perils of escape itself. On May 11 a member of the Jewish Council at Zdzieciol, Alter
Dworzecki, who had tried to organize resistance inside the ghetto but had been forced to flee, reached a Soviet partisan group in the Lipiczanska forest. The Soviet partisans had only one demand: give up your pistol. Dworzecki refused, and they shot him.
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In Warsaw, daily shootings had become a feature of ghetto life since that Bloody Friday, April 18. ‘Many a man has been killed or wounded by one of these wild street shootings,’ Ringelblum noted on May 12, as Gestapo agents, driving through the ghetto streets, opened fire at random. ‘The shooting of people in the streets has become a deliberate tactic since April,’ Ringelblum added. ‘The aim: to terrify the populace, to terrorize them.’ That very night, four Jews had been shot, Sklar, head of a food kitchen, Feist, Patt ‘a sportsman’, and Tenenbaum.
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Moshe Sklar had been a printer, ‘taciturn, obstinate, sarcastic’, as his friend S. Sheinkinder described him. As foreman in the printers’ shop of a Warsaw newspaper, ‘his word was his bond’. In the ghetto he had become manager of a food kitchen. On April 17 he had been taken to Pawiak, and held for three weeks. ‘It is assumed’, noted Sheinkinder on learning of Sklar’s death, ‘that he was tortured, that they wanted to get something out of him. They did not know the tough character, the obstinacy of Moshe Sklar. If he knew anything at all, it went down with him to the grave.’
Another of those killed on the night of May 12, Roman Patt, had been a popular Polish footballer between the wars. It had not been known that he was a Jew. He had risen to become an important member of the Polish Referees’ Council. In 1941 he was brought into the ghetto, and on May 16, at the age of forty-two, he had been shot in the street. Like Sklar, he was being held in prison at the time when he was taken out into the street and killed. ‘All sorts of things are reported,’ wrote Sheinkinder in his diary, ‘but Patt himself was taciturn and reserved, and he took his secret with him to the grave. There was only one secret that was revealed to me. He died a Jew.’
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‘Apparently’, Ringelblum noted, ‘these men were associated with the liberation movement.’
The Jewish efforts at self-help were considerable. That same May 12 Ringelblum recorded, of two Jewesses:
The heroic girls, Chajke and Frumke—they are a theme that calls for the pen of a great writer. Boldly they travel back and
forth through the cities and towns of Poland. They carry ‘Aryan’ papers identifying them as Poles or Ukrainians. One of them even wears a cross, which she never parts with except when in the ghetto.
They are in mortal danger every day. They rely entirely on their ‘Aryan’ faces and on the peasant kerchiefs that cover their heads. Without a murmur, without a second’s hesitation, they accept and carry out the most dangerous missions. Is someone needed to travel to Vilna, Bialystok, Lvov, Kowel, Lublin, Czestochowa or Radom to smuggle in contraband such as illegal publications, goods, money? The girls volunteer as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Are there comrades who have to be rescued from Vilna, Lublin, or some other city? They undertake the mission.
Nothing stands in their way, nothing deters them. Is it necessary to become friendly with engineers of German trains, so as to be able to travel beyond the frontiers of the General Government of Poland, where people can move about with special papers? They are the ones to do it, simply, without fuss, as though it was their profession. They have travelled from city to city, to places no delegate or Jewish institution had ever reached, such as Volhynia, Lithuania.
They were the first to bring back the tidings about the tragedy of Vilna. They were the first to offer words of encouragement and moral support to the surviving remnant of that city. How many times have they looked death in the eyes? How many times have they been arrested and searched? Fortune has smiled on them. They are, in the classic idiom, ‘emissaries of the community to whom no harm can come’.
With what simplicity and modesty have they reported what they accomplished on their journeys, on the trains bearing Polish Christians who have been pressed to work in Germany! The story of the Jewish woman will be a glorious page in the history of Jewry during the present war. And the Chajkes and Frumkes will be the leading figures in this story. For these girls are indefatigable.
Chajka Grossman and Frumka Plotnicka, whom Ringelblum had referred to by their affectionate nicknames ‘Chajke’ and ‘Frumke’, had just returned from a clandestine journey to Czestochowa,
where they had taken money and messages to the Jews trapped there in the ghetto. In a few hours, Ringelblum noted, ‘they’ll be on the move again. And they’re off without a moment’s hesitation, without a minute of rest.’
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Chajka Grossman survived the war. Frumka Plotnicka, in hiding in a cellar in Bedzin, was discovered in August 1943. She died fighting in the cellar, armed only with a hand gun. Her sister Chana had been caught by the Germans while trying to escape from the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943, and beaten to death.
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On 12 May 1942 yet more Jewish deportees were gassed at Auschwitz, fifteen hundred men, women and children brought from the nearby town of Sosnowiec.
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The old, the sick, and those without regular employment, they had been told that they were to be sent ‘somewhere else’. ‘The Germans spread rumours’, Frieda Mazia later recalled, ‘that they were on their way to Theresienstadt, where all the Jews were being gathered.’
23
At Auschwitz, as at Chelmno, Belzec and Sobibor, the Germans set up one of the most hellish aspects of the death camp system, the Sonderkommando, selecting a small number of Jews for a special team, whose job was to dispose of the corpses of those who had been murdered. At the nearby village and birch wood of Birkenau, in the summer of 1942, the task of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando was to dig up the burial pits near the camp, then to drag the corpses from the pits to specially constructed crematoria, where they were burnt to ash. Anyone who refused this work was shot on the spot by one of the SS guards. The first Sonderkommando team at Birkenau consisted of two hundred young Slovak Jews who had been deported from Slovakia at the end of March.
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