The Holocaust (52 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
As well as Western European Jews in the deportations of May 4 to May 15 were some three hundred Lodz Jews, ‘volunteers’ who hoped for a better life after resettlement, unable to see any way of avoiding starvation if they were to remain in the ghetto. On May 17 alone there were fifty-eight deaths, most of them as a result of hunger and exhaustion, one, the thirty-one-year-old Josek Zajtman, ‘shot to death a few feet from the building where he lived, which is located right by the barbed wire’.
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On May 17, the day of the deportation from Pabianice, the Germans separated all children under the age of ten from the parents, then asked for volunteers to ‘accompany’ the children. A leading Zionist in the town, Mordecai Chmura, although his children were not in the transport, being older, left his family and went over to the group of small children ‘in order to be of help to them’. As he was led away with them, ‘this proud Jew’, a witness later recalled, ‘was singing the “Hatikvah”, the anthem of hope’. All were taken to Chelmno, and gassed.
40
During May 17 more than two thousand Jews from Pabianice, including the parents of those children who had been sent to Chelmno, reached the Lodz ghetto. There they told the Jews of Lodz the harrowing story of how, that morning, at a football field outside Pabianice, as the selection was made, ‘infants were torn from mothers, children ran crying and screaming around the field looking for parents, while their parents, unable to regard these scenes with composure, beseeched the guards to allow them to take their children from there. In response, they were shoved back, their children were torn from their arms and thrown to the grass like balls, and even thrown over the fence.’
All the children under ten, as well as all adults judged by
the Gestapo as ‘unfit for work’, were then ‘loaded into peasant wagons and taken away on a different direction, to parts’, the Lodz Chronicle reported, ‘that remain unknown.’ A day later, the Chronicle noted, it was ‘terrible to see these desperate, lamenting women and men, wringing their hands from which those nearest and dearest to them had been rudely torn’.
41
On May 18, a further 1,420 Jews arrived in the Lodz ghetto from Brzeziny. Like the Jews from Pabianice, they reported how, that same morning, all children under the age of ten, ‘even babies at the breast’, were, ‘to the despair of their parents—taken from there and sent off to parts unknown’, together with many adults, ‘the weak, the sick, the elderly’, seventeen hundred people in all. Among the Jews who reached Lodz from Brzeziny was Michal Urbach, a doctor from Lodz who had gone to Brzeziny a few months earlier as a pharmacist; his only child, a boy of five, had been among the children taken away.
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All the children of Brzeziny, like those of Pabianice, had been sent to Chelmno, and gassed.
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Inside the Lodz ghetto, the news of the deportations from Pabianice and Brzeziny had a devastating effect. ‘The greatest optimists have lost hope,’ Bernard Ostrowski, one of the ghetto chroniclers, recorded, and he went on to explain: ‘Until now, people had thought that work would maintain the ghetto and the majority of its people without any break-up of families. Now it is clear that even this was an illusion. There were plenty of orders (for new work) in Pabianice and Brzeziny, but that did not protect the Jews against wholesale deportation. Fear for our ghetto’s fate is keeping everyone up at night. Our last hope is our Chairman; people believe that he will succeed, if not totally, then at least in part, in averting the calamities that now loom ahead.’
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Chaim Rumkowski was convinced that he could keep the Lodz ghetto in productive work and thus preserve life, and that he could find work for all the surviving 100,000 inhabitants. Ironically, part of that work derived from the belongings of the Jews gassed at Chelmno, and sent to the Lodz ghetto for sorting. On May 20 the Chronicle noted the arrival in the ghetto of ‘three hundred train cars of underclothes for cleaning’, as well as orders placed in the woodwork factory, for a million pairs of clogs, requiring the work of eight hundred people in three shifts. The straw-shoe workshop was now making army boots, and the metal workshop ‘is supposed
to have work enough for two years’.
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On June 1 the Chronicle recorded ‘sewing machines by the hundreds’ reaching Lodz, as well as the arrival on May 29 of four five-ton trucks bringing ‘enormous quantities of civilian footwear’. The trucks had come ‘from the direction of Brzeziny’. From each pair of shoes, the tops, or the entire heels, ‘had been torn off’.
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Thousands of Jews from Lodz were working in labour camps throughout the region, and taken from their labour camps to factories and other forced labour sites in Germany. Among these slave labourers was Leo Laufer, one of the survivors of Ruchocki Mlyn, who had been sent to a labour camp at Schwenningen. Later he recalled how, at Schwenningen:
A fellow went out from his barrack and he went to the toilet which was a separate barrack away from the camp. Evidently he couldn’t make it, and one of the guards saw him doing it against the barrack on the side. I’m sure he must have been sick, or had diarrhoea or whatever happened. The next morning they caught him; the next morning again we had to stay outside, and they actually opened a grave, and put him in alive, all the way to about his shoulder, and all of us looked at him when they put him in, then we left for work, and we were gone at least ten hours. When we came back, the man was barely living, and he had to die, slowly, in his own grave.
Laufer also recalled several attempts to escape from Schwenningen, all of them unsuccessful: ‘they hanged people who escaped.’
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In and around Berlin, on May 18, 27 Jews were shot for having organized a display of anti-Nazi posters, and for various acts of defiance, among them the setting fire to several exhibits at an anti-Soviet exhibition in the German capital. Led by Herbert Baum, a Communist, the group included twelve young women, among them Baum’s sister Marianne, aged thirty, the sisters Alice and Hella Hirsch, aged nineteen and twenty-two respectively, and Edith Fraenkel, aged twenty-one. A memorial in the Berlin Jewish cemetery of Weissensee records their fate.
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Also in May 1942, a group of Communist Jews living in Paris, some of them Polish- and German-born, took part in the first French acts of collective armed resistance against the Germans. These Jews
were members of Jewish units in the French Communist underground.
49
In a further selection of children, on May 22, in the town of Ozorkow, the Secretary to the Jewish Council, Mania Rzepkowicz, rejected an offer by the German ghetto-leader that her child should be excluded from the ‘resettlement’, and, together with her child, voluntarily joined a group of some three hundred children being deported, she knew not where. They too were sent to Chelmno, and gassed.
50
May 22 was the first day of Shavuot, the festival of Pentecost. In Mielec, the Gestapo organized a fictitious fight between Jews in the ghetto and themselves, pretending that the Jews were partisans, taking them to the forest, breaking their heads and arms, and then killing them. ‘I was present when they were buried,’ Eda Lichtmann later recalled, ‘and saw their mutilated bodies.’
Eda Lichtmann was also a witness to another Nazi ‘sport’, when some twenty orthodox Jews were taken from their homes, dressed in their prayer shawls, with prayer books in hand, and ordered ‘to chant religious hymns, to pray, to raise their hands in supplication to God—and then the officers went up to them and poured kerosene and petrol under those Jews and set fire to all the Jews, while they were in their prayer shawls, holding their prayer books in supplication to God. I saw it with my own eyes.’
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Also on this festival at Zdunska Wola, the Gestapo ordered the Jewish Council to ‘provide’ ten Jews. The Council members resisted, knowing that the last time ten men had been demanded, they had been hanged. The Gestapo then told the Council that if the men were not produced, a thousand Jews would be shot. ‘Having no choice,’ Dora Rosenboim later recalled, ‘and fearing that the Gestapo would carry out their terrible plan of shooting a thousand Jews, the Jewish Council, with bitter and broken hearts, had to give them another ten Jews for the gallows and the Jewish policemen had to hang them with their own hands in the presence of all twelve hundred Jews, men, women, old people and children.’ Among those hanged was Binyamin Pavel Radii and his son-in-law, Shlomo Zhelochovski. As Zhelochovski was brought to the gallows, ‘he cried out, with his head uplifted and his arms to heaven, “Jehovah is God”.’
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Courage in the face of death, and courageous actions, were a
source of inspiration for those Jews who heard them, an illustration of
Kiddush Ha-Shem
, sanctification of the name of God, through martyrdom. One example of such innocent, and indeed unwitting martyrdom, was recorded in Ringelblum’s collection of materials from all over Poland. It concerned a Jew, by the name of Ankerman, in the town of Wlodawa, and Ringelblum himself drew attention to it. On May 23, two thousand Jews were assembled in Wlodawa for deportation. The Gestapo then asked: ‘Where is the rabbi?’ Ankerman, thinking that the Gestapo wished to save the rabbi from deportation, pointed him out, in order to save him. The Gestapo at once shot Ankerman. The rabbi was then deported with the rest to Sobibor, where all were gassed.
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From Warsaw, no Jews had yet been deported. But each day, Jews were beaten or murdered. ‘The Gestapo men in the Pawia Street prison’, Ringelblum noted on May 23, ‘have to have their daily victims. Just the way a pious Jew feels bad if he misses prayers one day, the Gestapo men have to pick up a few Jews every day and break a few arms and legs.’
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During May, 3,636 Warsaw Jews died of starvation.
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‘Sometimes’, Ringelblum noted on May 25, ‘one comes across former students from the Institute of Judaic Studies, who ask for help in Hebrew.’ Some of the beggars were well dressed. On one street, Ringelblum wrote, ‘stands a beggar whose clothes are impeccable; he has a pretty child with him who is clean and spotless; he begs, not with outstretched hand, but with his eyes alone.’
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In Chelm, on May 28, four Jews were executed by a German firing squad, their last moments recorded by a German cameraman.
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Their ‘crime’ is unknown.
May 1942 saw the opening of yet another death camp, on the outskirts of Minsk. The site chosen was a former collective farm near the village of Maly Trostenets. Russian prisoners-of-war and Jews had been forced to build the barracks for the six hundred slave labourers and their guards. Beginning on May 10, and continuing every Tuesday and Friday, Jews were brought to Minsk from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, then driven by truck towards Maly Trostenets. The trucks were mobile gas-chambers; when they reached the camp all those inside them were dead. The corpses were taken out, as at Chelmno, by a special prisoners’ commando, which threw them into deep pits.
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‘If they have enough time, we are lost’
As the deportations to Belzec, Chelmno and Sobibor continued, reports reached Ringelblum in Warsaw of the destruction of sixteen communities. At Konskowola, Ringelblum learned, the Germans had taken the Jews to the banks of the Vistula and then ordered the rabbi: ‘Be Moses! Divide the waters of the Vistula!’ The Jews were then forced, with their rabbi at their head, into the water. Then, amid a barrage of shooting, all were shot, or drowned.
Warsaw itself, Ringelblum noted on 30 May 1942, had passed a ‘bloody week’. On the previous night, a Friday, eight or nine Jews had been killed. One of them was a man called Wilner, who lay sick in bed. ‘He could barely crawl out of bed at the command of the hangman; he sat down on a chair, unable to move any further. So they threw him out of the second-floor window, together with the chair, shooting after him as he fell. In the same apartment three other men were shot (a brother-in-law of his called Rudnicki, his son, and another person). Reason unknown.’
Ringelblum also noted the particular sadism of a German policeman, who had been dubbed ‘Frankenstein’, ‘a bloodthirsty dog who kills one or two smugglers every day. He just can’t eat his breakfast until he has spilled the blood of a Jew.’
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In the areas of Einsatzkommando killings, east of the River Bug, spring and summer had brought an upsurge of killings, now the ground was once again soft enough, but not too waterlogged, for the digging of pits for mass graves. At Radziwillow, in Volhynia, three thousand Jews were rounded up for slaughter on May 29. But a group of young men, among them Asher Czerkaski, organized a break-out. Fifteen hundred Jews were shot; but a further fifteen hundred reached the temporary security of the nearby forests.
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Another area in which the killings continued was south Russia. In
the Kherson region, more than seventy thousand Jews were murdered, many of them farmers. No hamlet, however remote, could escape the thoroughness of the search. On May 27, in the village of Chaplinka, three Jewish families were found and shot.
As the killings gained a new momentum, the urge to resist, and to escape, was visible in every region, and in every village. In the Kherson region, there was resistance by a Jewish partisan group, led by S. M. Khazanovich.
3
On May 30, over Germany, the British launched their first bombing raid with a thousand bombers. Their target was Cologne. Thirty-nine of the bombers were shot down. But for Richard Lichtheim, one of a group of Jews in Geneva, who were piecing together the evidence reaching them from Nazi-occupied Poland, it seemed that the war could be ‘finished this year by heavy bombardments from the air’.
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Even in the Warsaw ghetto, the news of Cologne had affected morale. The ‘Jewish jubilation’, Ringelblum noted, ‘was quite different from the general one’, and he went on to explain:
