The Holocaust (66 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
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On September 2 it was the Jews of Dzialoszyce who were marked out for destruction. Here was a town where, in 1939, seven thousand of the ten thousand inhabitants were Jews. ‘It was not a wealthy community,’ Martin Rosenblum, then eleven years old, later recalled. ‘Life was very hard. But people made a living. They were shopkeepers and craftsmen. And they lived a decent family life.’ In 1941, some three thousand Jews had been deported into Dzialoszyce from Cracow, Warsaw, Lodz, Poznan and Lask. ‘Hunger and starvation was the order of the day,’ Rosenblum recalled. ‘People risked their lives for a few potatoes or a piece of bread. The Jews sold their personal belongings in order to buy some food to survive, and were hoping for a miracle.’ On September 1 the Gestapo, together with Polish police and Ukrainians, surrounded the town. Rosenblum’s account continued:
I have no words to describe the Nazi terror and brutality of that day. They were shooting and burning! There was hell all
around us! The horrible things that happened exceeded all imagination. Who could have imagined such brutality and cruelty by human beings. The barbarism of past centuries is pale against what happened on that day of deportation. People were shot in the houses, in the streets, in the market square. There were dead Jews all over the town!
Two of Rosenblum’s schoolfriends persuaded him to try to run away with them to the nearby town of Wodzislaw, whose Jews had not yet been deported. He agreed to go with them:
I tried to tell my parents of this plan, but the words in my throat were choking me, paralysing my lips and not letting me say more. For the same reason, they could not say much either. It is impossible to describe the agony of those few moments before we parted. I will never forget the wise eyes of my father and the tears of my mother when we embraced for the last time. In my wildest dreams I would have never imagined that I was parting from my whole family forever, never to see them again.
Rosenblum was among some two hundred young men who managed to escape from Dzialoszyce on the day of the round-up. Soon, however, Wodzislaw itself was surrounded. Some of the young men from Dzialoszyce escaped again, into the nearby woods. Others, including Rosenblum, returned to Dzialoszyce, where they found a dozen Jews still alive. One of these survivors, Moshe Hersh Rosenfrucht, told those who returned what had happened on the day of the deportation itself. As Rosenblum recalled:
He told us that on September 2, that day after I had run away, the Jewish people were all summoned to the market place in the early hours of the morning, with only a minimum of their belongings.
There they were kept waiting for a whole day, men, women, children, the old, the sick, the invalids, the Gestapo savagely beating and shooting them indiscriminately for no reason. God could not have devised a worse torment in hell than that of standing and waiting there in the market place beneath a blazing sun. Death would have been preferable to that. At last there came the signal to leave and they were marched to the train station.
During the day the people were told by the Gestapo that
those who could not walk to the train station would be taken there in carts. Many horses and carts came into the square, driven by the Poles and Ukrainians. Those who found it hard to walk to the distant train station were told to get on to these carts. And while the other people walked to the railway station, the carts went in the direction of the Jewish cemetery in the Dolles, a valley.
There, in the valley, three large graves were already waiting for them. They had been dug out that same day. The old, the sick, pregnant women and small children, two thousand innocent Jewish souls, were shot and brutally thrown into those graves, one on top of the other. Many of them were still alive! For most of the children they didn’t even waste a bullet. They were just thrown in alive. And together with those who were only wounded, finished their lives under the pressure of the human mass.
The next morning, a few of the wounded were able to crawl out of the graves and managed to walk a few metres, but died shortly thereafter. I listened in horror and disbelief!
The larger grave contained a thousand bodies, and the two smaller graves contained five hundred bodies each. We learned of this massacre from the Polish police themselves. They told Moshe Hersh about it in minute detail, because they themselves had taken part in that slaughter.
On the following Sunday, they went to church with their families, as if nothing had happened. They suffered no guilt feelings. After all, they were only murdering Jews, with the blessing of their priests, who inflamed them from their pulpits on Sundays.
One more act in the savage drama had yet to be performed:
Moshe Hersh then told us that the next day, at dawn, we must go up to the cemetery and dig ditches around those mass graves, otherwise the water from the hills would wash out the dead bodies, and they would be left exposed.
And so, in the morning, with shovels in hand, we went up to the cemetery. God, O God, what a sight! What we saw there! What a massacre! What a slaughter! I cannot begin to describe that sight. Hundreds of bodies lay exposed, rotting and decaying. The stench of those corpses was intolerable. We threw
ourselves on to the graves. We did not want to go on living any more!
Of the ten thousand Jews in Dzialoszyce on September 2, two thousand had been slaughtered in the mass graves outside the town. The remaining eight thousand had been deported to Belzec and gassed. Among those who perished were Rosenblum’s father Joel, his mother Mirelle—who had been born in Warsaw—and his five brothers, Avrum Ire who was in his early twenties, Kalman Yitzchak aged twenty, Leibish Wolf aged twelve, Shimon aged seven, and Ezriel Shaptai aged four.
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The horrors of the massacre at Dzialoszyce were repeated all over Europe, and with them, many incidents of heroism. On September 2, in Oslo, the Chief Rabbi of Norway, Julius Samuel, was ordered to report to the Gestapo. His wife urged him to go into hiding, or to flee, but he told her: ‘As Rabbi, I cannot abandon my community in this perilous hour.’ He was then arrested, together with 208 Norwegian Jewish men.
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They were sent to an internment camp at Berg, just south of Oslo.
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On September 3, the day after Rabbi Samuel’s act of courage in Oslo, a whole community in eastern Poland, that of the Jews of Lachwa, was faced with destruction, when the ghetto was unexpectedly surrounded by White Russian police. On the following morning, September 4, the Gestapo entered the Jewish Council building, and ordered a member of the Council, Yisrael Dubski, to give them a list of Jews in the ghetto. When Dubski refused, he was shot. The Chairman of the Council, Berl Lopatyn, then went from house to house, warning the inmates that, when he saw that the action was about to begin, he would set fire to the Council building, and that they should then do likewise to their homes.
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As Chairman of the Jewish Council, Lopatyn was offered the chance of survival by the Germans. He refused. ‘No Jew’, he insisted, ‘was willing in this case to benefit from any special rights.’ He was not, he said, ‘master of life and death over anyone’.
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On Lopatyn’s advice, many of those in the ghetto armed themselves with knives and axes. When the Council building was seen to be on fire, the Jews then set fire to their own homes. One Jew, Yitzhak Rechstein, the leader of a clandestine youth group, split open the head of a German policeman with an axe. At this signal,
the Jews surged forward to the ghetto gates. Rechstein was killed at once, but Lopatyn managed to seize an automatic gun from a German, and to open fire. Lopatyn was wounded. The Germans then opened fire on the Jews, one of whom, Chaim Hajfec, a former soldier in the Polish army, seized a gun from one of the Germans and began to fire back. The Jews attacked the ghetto sentries with their knives and axes, seeking to break out.
The ghetto was ablaze, the fire spreading beyond its narrow confines to the German army headquarters, the post office, and the store containing goods stolen from the Jews in the previous months. All were burned.
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More than a thousand Jews were killed in Lachwa that day, but six hundred escaped. Of these six hundred, scarcely one hundred survived the ensuing manhunt. Among the survivors was Lopatyn, who formed a small Jewish partisan group in the Pripet marshes, armed at first with only one rifle and one pistol. Later he joined a Soviet military brigade, and in April 1944 was killed in action while checking a minefield.
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Berl Lopatyn had led his small ghetto in a courageous act of resistance. In the Lodz ghetto, on September 4, Chaim Rumkowski took another path, defending the imminent deportation of all children under ten, and of all adults over sixty-five. He had been ordered to deport ‘some twenty thousand Jews’, he told a meeting of Jews in the ghetto. The Germans had told him that if he refused, ‘we shall do it ourselves’. Rumkowski added: ‘I have to perform this bloody operation myself; I simply must cut off the limbs in order to save the body. I have to take away children, because otherwise others will also be taken.’ The days of those who were sick were also numbered. ‘Deliver to me those sick ones,’ Rumkowski asked, ‘and it may be possible to save the healthy ones instead.’
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An eye-witness, Oscar Singer, recalled the sequel: ‘Horror seizes the crowd. “Why do the Nazis want our children?” Pandemonium broke out in the ghetto. But Rumkowski knew he had to deliver. “I love children as much as you do,” he cried hysterically; “still I fear we must surrender the children as a sacrificial offering in order to save the collective, because should the Germans take matters into their own hands….”’
Rumkowski spoke ‘with a broken heart’, Singer added, ‘he who was a “Father” to thousands of orphans’.
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Another observer, Josef
Zelkowicz, one of the ghetto chroniclers, wrote in a special note of the ‘days of nightmare’, and of the decision to allow the elderly and the children to be deported:
The sorrow becomes greater, and the torture more senseless, when one tries to think rationally. Well, an old man is an old man. If he’s lived his sixty-five years, he can convince himself, or others convince him, that he should utter something like: ‘Well, thank God, I’ve had my share of living, in joy and sorrow, weal and woe. That’s life. Probably that’s fate. And anyway, you don’t live forever. So what’s the difference if it’s a few days, you’ve got to die, sooner or later, everything’s over, that’s life.’
Maybe they can talk the old man into telling himself these things, maybe they can talk his family into telling themselves. But what about children who have only just been hatched, children who have only seen God’s world in the ghetto, for whom a cow or a chicken is just a legendary creature, who have never in their lives so much as inhaled the fragrance of a flower, laid eyes upon an orange, tasted an apple or a pear, and who are now doomed to die?
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As the round-ups began throughout the Lodz ghetto, Jews who tried to rejoin those who were not to be deported were shot. This took place, as Josef Zelkowicz recorded in the Ghetto Chronicle, ‘right before the eyes of the assembled tenants of a building’. Zelkowicz added:
Dramatic scenes were played out in the hospitals. Escape attempts came to a bloody end. Anyone who attempted to save himself by fleeing and was spotted by the authorities had to pay for that attempt with his life. Because the operation proceeded so rapidly, the authorities gave no thought to the motives or causes for any particular act. At 38 Zgierska Street, an elderly woman from Sieradz did not understand if she had been ordered to go to the left or the right and, instead of going to a wagon, she walked over to a group of ‘remainers’. This the authorities interpreted as an escape attempt. The woman was shot to death on the spot. At 3 Zgierska Street, Rozenblum, a thirteen-year-old boy, attempted to hide in a dustbin; he was seen and shot dead. There were many such victims but even
more numerous were cases of people who were wounded when a crowd was fired on.
Sometimes the deportees were seized and taken away so quickly that they had no time to hand over any of their ration documents. In one case, Zelkowicz recorded, ‘a wife who was resettled along with her three children took all their cards with her and her husband starved to death after five days of nothing whatever to eat.’
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More than seven hundred children were left in the ghetto without parents, the parents having been rounded up and sent away.
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Often, it was the children who were seized and deported without their parents. On October 22 the Ghetto Chronicle recorded the suicide of the parents of two children who had been deported a month earlier. The forty-six-year-old Icek Dobrzynski jumped from the fifth floor of a building. His wife Fraidla, unable to find a sentry willing to shoot her at the ghetto wire, jumped from a bridge.
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On November 1 a highly respected ghetto official, Salomon Malkes, head of the ghetto’s information department, committed suicide by jumping from a fourth floor. ‘Malkes had recently been in a severe depression’, the Ghetto Chronicle noted, ‘that dated from the deportation of his mother.’
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Despite the September deportations, in which 15,685 Jews were ‘resettled’, the ghetto’s survival through productive work seemed assured. There were still 88,727 Jews in the ghetto.
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Orders were continuous: in the month following the deportations they included 5,500 decorative lampshades, and ‘several million’ toys. All were to go to Germany. ‘These products are so imaginative’, the Ghetto Chronicle noted, ‘that no one can tell that they are made largely of paper and refuse.’
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Throughout August, information had reached Jewish representatives in Geneva, telling of the deportations from Western Europe. It was certain that tens of thousands of Jews were being seized, interned and deported to the East, but where in the East was not known. Nor was the precise fate of the deportees, but when Richard Lichtheim learned that it was not only the able-bodied who were being deported, but women, children, the old and the sick, he wrote in a letter to London, New York and Jerusalem on September 3: ‘the
intention cannot be to get labour supply but simply to kill off the deportees.’ Lichtheim added: ‘All the relief organizations in Europe, Jewish and non-Jewish, constantly dealing with these horrors are in a state of despair, because no force on earth can stop them. Announcements lately made that the perpetrators would be punished after the war have of course no effect. Also there is no adequate punishment for those crimes.’
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