The Holocaust (53 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
Day in, day out, in hundreds of cities throughout Poland and Russia, thousands upon thousands of Jews are being systematically murdered according to a preconceived plan, and no one seems to take our part. The bombing of Cologne, the destruction of thousands of buildings, the thousands of civilian victims, have slaked our thirst for revenge somewhat. Cologne was an advance payment on the vengeance that must and shall be taken on Hitler’s Germany for the millions of Jews they have killed. So the Jewish population of tortured Europe considered Cologne its personal act of vengeance. After the Cologne affair, I walked around in a good mood, feeling that, even if I should perish at their hands, my death is prepaid!
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On the day after the Cologne raid, at Monowitz, just to the east of Auschwitz, the first of a series of forced labour camps was opened for the construction of a massive synthetic oil and rubber factory, the Buna works.
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One of the labour camps was for Jews. Known as Auschwitz III, it drew off thousands of Jews from Birkenau, or Auschwitz II. If these Jews could survive the harsh conditions of work, the starvation and the brutality, they could hope to survive the war, and several thousand did so, unlike the hundreds of
thousands of adults sent to Chelmno, Sobibor and Belzec, where all, whether ‘able-bodied’ or not, were gassed.
GREATER GERMANY
THE AUSCHWITZ REGION
On June 1, in Bodzentyn, Dawid Rubinowicz wrote his daily diary early. The entry ended:
This morning two Jewish women, a mother and a daughter, had gone out into the country. Unfortunately the Germans were driving from Rudki to Bodzentyn to fetch potatoes and ran across them. When the two women caught sight of the Germans they began to flee, but were overtaken and arrested.
They intended shooting them on the spot in the village, but the mayor wouldn’t allow it. They then went into the woods and shot them there. The Jewish police immediately went there to bury them in the cemetery. When the cart returned it was full of blood. Who…
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Here Dawid’s diary ended. He was not yet fifteen.
On 1 June 1942 in Warsaw, the underground newspaper
Liberty Barricade
, the bi-weekly publication of the Polish Socialist Party, published an extensive account of the gassing at Chelmno. They had received the information from Ringelblum, who had prepared it from Grojanowski’s report. ‘Bloodcurdling news’, the report began, ‘has reached us about the slaughter of the Jews….’ Six months and three weeks after it had begun its slaughter, Chelmno was identified by name, and Grojanowski’s account of it given in detail.
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On June 2 there was a deportation of Jews from Vienna. They were taken by train to Minsk, and there, in the Minsk ghetto, shared the fate of tens of thousands of deportees to Minsk: starvation, sadistic cruelties, and mass executions. Among those deported on June 2 was a milliner, Elsa Speigel. It was three weeks before her thirty-third birthday. She was never heard of again. But in Vienna she left her tiny son, Jona Jakob Speigel, a baby of five and a half months.
Elsa Speigel’s decision to leave her baby in Vienna saved his life. Three and a half months later he was deported from Vienna to Theresienstadt. By a miracle, he was still in Theresienstadt on the last day of the war, when the camp was liberated by the Red Army.
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On June 4 it was the Jews of Cracow who faced the perils and uncertainties of a round-up. A Polish Catholic, Tadeusz Pankiewicz, whose pharmacy was situated in Harmony Square, the very centre of the ghetto, later recalled how rumours spread that night ‘that the Germans had disclosed secretly that the deportees will be taken to the Ukraine, where they will work on farms’. To add to the deception, German railway workmen spoke ‘of large barracks that are awaiting the deportees’.
That night, Pankiewicz witnessed the round-up of thousands of Jews on Harmony Square. By the following morning, seven thousand had been assembled. There they were kept throughout that hot summer morning, then driven to the railway station, and sent off to an unknown destination. The round-up was repeated on the following day, June 6. ‘The scorching sun is merciless,’ Pankiewicz wrote, ‘the heat makes for unbearable thirst, dries out the throats.’ The crowd was standing and sitting: ‘all wait, frozen with fright and uncertainty.’ Armed Germans arrived, shooting at random into the crowd. Then the deportees were driven out of the square, amid ‘constant screaming of the Germans, merciless beating, kicking and shooting’.
Pankiewicz’s account continued:
Old people, women, and children pass by the pharmacy windows like ghosts. I see an old woman of around seventy years, her hair loose, walking alone, a few steps away from a larger group of deportees. Her eyes have a glazed look; immobile, wide open, filled with horror, they stare straight ahead. She walks slowly, quietly, only in her dress and slippers, without even a bundle, or handbag. She holds in her hands something small, something black, which she caresses fondly and keeps close to her old breast. It is a small puppy—her most precious possession, all that she saved and would not leave behind.
Laughing, inarticulately gesturing with her hands, walks a young deranged girl of about fourteen, so familiar to all inhabitants of the ghetto. She walks barefoot, in a crumpled nightgown. One shuddered watching the girl laughing, having a good time. Old and young pass by, some dressed, some only in their underwear, hauled out of their beds and driven out.
People after major operations and people with chronic diseases went by….
Across the street from the pharmacy, out of the building at 2 Harmony Square, walks a blind old man, well known to the inhabitants of the ghetto; he is about seventy years old, wears dark goggles over his blind eyes, which he lost in the battles on the Italian front in 1915 fighting side by side with the Germans. He wears a yellow armband with three black circles on his left arm to signify his blindness. His head high, he walks erect, guided by his son on one side, by his wife on the other. ‘He should be happy that he cannot see, it will be easier for him to die,’ says a hospital nurse to us. Pinned on his chest is the medal he won during the war. It may, perhaps, have some significance for the Germans. Such were the illusions in the beginning.
Immediately after him, another elderly person appears, a cripple with one leg, on crutches. The Germans close in on them; slowly, in dance step, one of them runs toward the blind man and yells with all his power: ‘Schnell!’ ‘Hurry!’ This encourages the other Germans to start a peculiar game.
Two of the SS men approach the old man without the leg and shout the order for him to run. Another one comes from behind and with the butt of his rifle hits the crutch. The old man falls down. The German screams savagely, threatens to shoot. All this takes place right in the back of the blind man who is unable to see, but hears the beastly voices of the Germans, interspersed with cascades of their laughter. A German soldier approaches the cripple who is lying on the ground and helps him to rise. This help will show on the snapshot of a German officer who is eagerly taking pictures of all scenes that will prove ‘German help in the humane resettlement of the Jews’.
For a moment we think that perhaps there will be at least one human being among them unable to stand torturing people one hour before their death. Alas, there was no such person in the annals of the Cracow ghetto. No sooner were they saturated with torturing the cripple than they decided to try the same with the blind war invalid. They chased away his son and wife, tripped him, and rejoiced at his falling to the ground. This time they even did not pretend to help him and he had to rise by himself, rushed on by horrifying screaming of the SS men hovering over him. They repeated this game several times, a
truly shattering experience of cruelty. One could not tell from what they derived more pleasure, the physical pain of the fallen invalid or the despair of his wife and son standing aside watching helplessly….
‘The shots are echoing all over the ghetto,’ Pankiewicz added.
Among those shot in Cracow that day was the Yiddish song writer and poet, Mordche Gebirtig. In one of his last songs, written a month before his death, he had expressed his hope that, ‘from too much gorging, the invader’s end would result, Amen….’
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Dissatisfied by the number of Jews who had been assembled during the Cracow deportations, and critical of the ‘technique of delivery’ to Harmony Square, the Germans arrested the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Dr Artur Rosenzweig, and deported him together with his family.
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Unknown to Pankiewicz, or to the Jews left behind in Cracow, the seven thousand deportees of June 1 were sent to Belzec, and gassed. But to maintain the belief in ‘resettlement’, as Pankiewicz later recalled, German railway workers told those who begged them for news of the deportees that there were Jews from all over Europe in the resettlement camps in the Ukraine: ‘They have a good life, work hard, but have everything they need, food and clothes. Naturally they are heavily guarded, barbed wire encircles the barracks, nobody is allowed to come near; they are not allowed to write letters, and this is the reason why no news is forthcoming from them.’
Such were the ‘rumours’: and the railwaymen offered, for money, to bring back ‘news’ of the deportees, or to take messages to them. They accepted the money, walked off, and were never seen again.
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***
One more death camp was now nearly ready to begin operation. On June 1 the Germans had begun to build a short branch-line off the existing side-line which ran from Treblinka station to the nearby gravel pits. This new track led to buildings which had been constructed during April and May on a site specially cleared in the forest: a site enclosed by barbed wire. A Polish railwayman, Franciszek Zabecki, later recalled that the capacity of this branch-line ‘was estimated as twenty wagons and an engine’.
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Treblinka was being prepared for the Jews of central Poland, including the 350,000 surviving Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. Meanwhile, throughout June, the deportations to Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno continued. On June 1, in an attempt to make contact with the Jews of Hrubieszow, two girls from the Warsaw ghetto, Frumka Plotnicka, of whom Ringelblum had written with such admiration, and Hava Follman, by removing their armbands, bribing the ghetto policeman, procuring forged travel papers, and with considerable personal courage, took the train eastwards. At some junctions it stopped for up to ten hours. Each time it stopped, their documents were examined, but without incident. Hava Follman’s own account continues:
On approaching Hrubieszow, we became aware of an unusual commotion; big crowds were gathered on the platform. Unsuspecting, we alighted at the station. But we soon learned that the thousands herded there were Jews: men and women, old and young, children pressed among bundles of household effects; cries and shouts of the Germans.
Four stout, red-faced Germans, arms bare, gallop on horseback along the platform, ply their whips ceaselessly, tread on whomever they find in their way, vent their wrath on mothers holding babies in their arms.
A huge German, with the face of a murderer, leads off four youths clad in kapotes. Their faces are frozen; a few metres from the window of the waiting-room, where Frumke and I took refuge, they are ordered to dig. They are urged along with the whip: ‘Quickly, we have no time!’ A few minutes later, four shots are heard, and again the whip is used on those who are bidden to fill in the open grave.
Suddenly a horrible scream of a woman is heard, followed by a shot. A woman with a baby in her arms keels over. She wanted to throw the baby over the fence, in the hope that it would be spared. But a moment later she and the baby are trodden to death by the horses’ hoofs. A deadly silence descends on the platform. I hold fast to the window-sill; I feel terribly dizzy.
We start walking into town. The road is crowded with carts bearing old and sickly people who are unable to walk to their ‘destination’. They are guarded by Ukrainian police.
We are allowed to look our fill. Only a ‘trifle’ is required of us: a smiling face! Are we not supposed to be true Goyim and is not spring in the air?
We go through well known lanes and streets, we reach the house of Aaron Frumer, where we used to meet frequently. The door to his flat is wide open, the floor is littered with all sorts of household objects, but not a living soul in sight.
Where to now?
In the centre of the town two Germans walk, preceded by a group of Gentile boys. The Germans carry axes, the boys are leading them to a house, where Jews are hiding.
In order not to draw attention to ourselves, we quicken our pace in the direction of the church. There Frumka stays behind and I make a short tour. In a shop I learn that the Jewish youth has been concentrated back of the town. They are intended for the labour camps, whilst the ‘rubbish’ will go elsewhere. This remark by my informant is accompanied by a sly smile, which I have to return in kind.
Despite my efforts, we could not reach our comrades, and, as there was no train to Warsaw until eight the following morning, we had to spend the night at the hotel. We pass the inspection of the hotel-keeper satisfactorily and are given a room.
Needless to say, we passed a sleepless night. Early in the morning, another inspection is thorough; the policemen are not quite convinced, and we are ordered to report later in the day at the police station.
We decide that we cannot risk another inspection. We check out and find our way to the station by devious ways. If we succeed in reaching Warsaw, we intend to return and try again to contact our friends.
A ‘special’ train stands on the platform, filled to overflowing with Jews. The platform is strewn with bundles, pillows, prams, pots and pans. A number of Gentile boys are waiting: as soon as the train steams out, they will appropriate the loot.
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