The Holocaust (97 page)

The order was then given, as Lewental noted, to conduct the women ‘into the road leading to the crematorium’.
³

***

In the Lodz ghetto, where eighty thousand Jews were still living in the hope that their productive work would ensure their survival, deaths from hunger were increasing. ‘People are faced with the catastrophe of inevitable starvation,’ the Ghetto Chronicle noted on 20 January 1944.
⁴
On the following day, Professor Wilhelm Caspari, one of the deportees from Berlin to Lodz, died in the ghetto, at the age of seventy-two. A specialist in cancer research, Caspari had been a professor in Frankfurt until 1933. He had also been a German delegate at the 1930 International Congress of Physicians in Madrid.
⁵

A month later, the Ghetto Chronicle recorded the death of Adam Goetz, an engineer from Hamburg, and one of the pioneers of the rigid dirigible airship. In the ghetto, at the age of sixty-eight, Goetz had founded a research group to promote the cultivation of medicinal herbs.
⁶

The workers in the Lodz ghetto continued to survive because, unknown to them, other ghettos were being destroyed. On February 9 the ghetto received machines from what the Chronicle called ‘an evacuated buckle factory’ at Poniatowa. With the arrival of these machines, yet another factory was to be established, thus ensuring further productive work for the ghetto.
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Unknown to those who worked the new machines, they had been sent to the Lodz ghetto, together with hundreds of sewing machines from Poniatowa, only because the Jews held in Poniatowa, most of them deportees from Warsaw, had been murdered the previous November.
⁸

The Germans continued to round up the remaining Jews from the
smallest hamlets. Even in the remote French countryside, Jews were not safe, either from round-ups or from reprisals. On January 10, two German Jewish refugees, Professor Victor Basch and his wife, who had spent two years in the safety of the village of Saint-Claire-à-Caluire, in the Lyons region, were executed as a reprisal for the death of a French collaborator, killed by French partisans. On the corpse of Professor Basch the Germans placed a placard: ‘Terror against terror. The Jew pays with his life for the death of a National’.
⁹

On January 15, among the Jews deported from Belgium to Birkenau were the Polish-born Meir Tabakman and his wife Raizl. Tabakman had been deported some months earlier, but had jumped off the train. Later he had been caught. Now, branded as a ‘flitzer’, one who had tried to flee, he was locked into a special goods wagon with many other former escapees. At Birkenau, his wife later recalled, ‘not one of them entered the camp’. All went straight to the gas-chamber.
¹⁰

In the woods near Buczacz, more than three hundred Jews had been in hiding for more than nine months. On January 18 the whole area was surrounded by German tanks, and in a systematic military sweep and search all were found and killed.
¹¹
In Warsaw, hundreds of Jews in hiding were suddenly at risk when one of the surviving liaison men of the Jewish Fighting Organization was caught and tortured. Under torture, he broke; many of those in hiding were then rounded up and killed.
¹²
Among those whose hiding place was not betrayed, was Emanuel Ringelblum. He was on a list of nineteen former Jewish underground leaders whom the Polish Government in London agreed to rescue, through the Home Army underground. By the time the list could be acted upon, however, only three of the nineteen were still alive. Ringelblum, who was one of the three, declined to leave, as did his two colleagues, ‘because’, they informed the Polish underground, ‘we must fulfil our duty to society’.
¹³

Ringelblum remained in hiding, but the German pressures to force Poles to betray and abandon Jews were relentless. On January 29, in Cracow, a special court sentenced five Poles to death for helping Jews. One, Kazimierz Jozefek, was hanged in a public square.
¹⁴
Four weeks later, on the night of February 23, in the remote Polish village of Zawadka, the Germans arrested a former primary school headmaster, Aleksander Sosnowski, and his seventeen-year-old daughter, together with two Jewish women whose father and daughter he had hidden and sheltered in an attic for a year and a half. All four were killed.
¹⁵

In Lublin, a ten-year-old girl had managed to hide in a barn during the last of the deportations. Her hiding place was a hole under a beam, where she could only stay lying down. Eventually, her whole body was covered in sores. Only with difficulty could she crawl to a corner of the barn where there was some bags of grain.

The girl’s name was Irena Szyldkraut. In 1938, at the age of six, she had starred in the Polish film
His Great Love
. Known as ‘the Polish Shirley Temple’, she gained fame on the screen. Her father, a pharmacist in Warsaw, served in the Polish army in 1939, and was among the hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers who surrendered to the Russians. He spent the rest of the war years, first in Siberia, then with the Polish forces in Italy.

After many months hiding in the barn, Irena Szyldkraut was discovered by a Christian overseer who came to look for the bag of grain. Seeing ‘a human foot’ peeping out from under the beam, he discovered the girl, and brought her food and drink. Later she was discovered by the Gestapo. Then, as a post-war inquiry into her fate revealed:

‘Such’, commented the inquiry, ‘was the German’s life-guarantee.’
¹⁶

***

On February 3, yet another train left Drancy for Birkenau, the sixty-seventh in less than eighteen months. Among those on it was the thirty-nine-year-old Rabbi of Mulhouse, René Hirschler, who, as chaplain to all foreign-born Jews interned in France, had carried out considerable relief work on their behalf, as well as for hundreds of Jews in hiding.
¹⁷

Of the 1,214 Drancy deportees that day, 985 were gassed on arrival at Birkenau, among them 14 people who were over eighty years old, and 184 children under eighteen. Neither Hirschler, nor his wife Simone who was deported with him, survived. Another of those who perished was the thirty-three-year-old Betty Zilberstein, who had been born in London. Before the war she had left England for France, to marry a Frenchman. They had three children. At the time of Betty Zilberstein’s arrest, her husband was with the resistance. Her children, too, had a chance of hiding, and two of them were saved. But because her youngest son, Harvey, who was not yet five years old, had a bad earache, she decided not to send him away from her, but to take him with her into the unknown. After the war, her husband was told that the young boy’s cries of pain from his earache were such that he was shot by one of the guards during the journey. Nor did Betty Zilberstein survive.
¹⁸

On February 8, five days after this deportation from Drancy, a thousand Jews were deported from Holland to Birkenau. Among them were 268 of the camp’s hospital patients, including children with scarlet fever and diphtheria. ‘Of all these diabolical transports,’ one eye-witness, Philip Mechanicus, later recalled, ‘perhaps this was the most fiendish.’ Many of the sick were brought to the train on stretchers. ‘All the while,’ Mechanicus recalled, ‘wet snow was falling out of a dark sky, covering everything with slush.’
¹⁹

This Westerbork train reached Birkenau two days later: 142 men and 73 women were taken to the barracks, the remaining eight hundred deportees, including all the children, were gassed.
²⁰

At Birkenau, the SS had learned of a second escape plan by members of the Sonderkommando. As a protection against such escapes, they decided to reduce the growing number of Sonderkommando
members, and on February 24, two hundred of the eight hundred prisoners in the Sonderkommando were transported to Majdanek. There they were shot, their shooting reported by nineteen Soviet prisoners-of-war who were brought from Majdanek to Birkenau a year later.
²¹

‘The Jews are a race which must be wiped out,’ Hans Frank told a meeting of Nazi Party speakers in Cracow on March 4. ‘Whenever we catch one—he will be exterminated.’
²²
That same day, in Warsaw, four Jewish women, caught in the city, were shot in the ruins of the ghetto, together with eighty non-Jews. The bodies of those who had been shot, some of whom had not been killed outright, were thrown into the basement of a ruined house. The basement was then doused with an inflammable liquid and set on fire. ‘For four to six hours,’ the historian of this episode had written, ‘there could be heard the screams of the wounded as they burned alive.’
²³

The names of the four Jewish women killed in Warsaw on March 4 are unknown, like most of the millions who perished. Some of the victims, their names and careers, are a part of Jewish history. On March 5, at Drancy, while awaiting deportation, the sixty-year-old Max Jacob died of bronchial pneumonia. A poet of the Cubist and Surrealist movements, he had been baptised in the Catholic Church in his late thirties. Picasso had been his godfather. Despite his devout Catholicism of more than thirty years, Max Jacob was still forced to wear the yellow star, and sent to Drancy for deportation.
²⁴

Also at Drancy, and there on the day of Max Jacob’s death, was another poet, David Vogel, who had been born in Tsarist Russia fifty-two years before. For one year, in 1929, he had lived in Palestine, before settling finally in France. On March 7 he too was deported to Birkenau in a transport with 1,501 other Jews, of whom only twenty survived the war. Vogel perished.
²⁵
So too, among the children from that same transport, did Henriette Hess, aged eleven, and her brother Roger, aged nine, who had been deported without their parents.
²⁶

At Birkenau, one group of deportees had not only been kept alive, but whole families had been kept together in a special family camp. These were some 3,860 Czech Jews, survivors of the 5,000 Jews who had been brought to Birkenau from Theresienstadt six months
earlier. At the beginning of March they were visited by a German Red Cross delegation, which was not allowed to see the rest of Birkenau. Then, on March 3, the inmates of the family camp were told to write postcards to their relatives who were still in Czechoslovakia, saying that they were alive, well, and working. They were also made to date the postcards March 25, 26, or 27, and to ask their relatives to send them food parcels.

Four days later, the 3,860 ‘Czech family camp’ inmates were told that they were to be resettled at a nearby labour camp, Heydebreck. No such ‘resettlement’ was in fact planned. All 3,860 were to be sent to the gas-chambers only a few hundred yards away from their ‘haven’.

On March 6 a Slovak Jewess, Katherina Singer, who worked as a secretary to the senior SS guard in the women’s camp at Birkenau, overheard by chance an SS remark about ‘special treatment’ for the family camp inmates. Aware that in the SS language ‘special treatment’ meant gassing, she at once passed on the news to two young Jewish prisoners who were at that moment, as maintenance men, repairing cauldrons in the kitchen of the women’s camp. These two, under the pretext of ‘urgent repairs’ needed elsewhere, managed to pass the news that same day to Freddy Hirsch, one of the leaders of the family camp, while urging Hirsch to act.

Hirsch was convinced that there was nothing whatsoever to be done to save the family camp. That night he took poison. It was not strong enough to kill him, however, and on the following day, March 7, while still in a state of unconsciousness, he was taken by truck, together with the 3,860 other survivors of the family camp, to the gas-chamber.
²⁷

Themselves deceived, these victims of a wider deception were driven into the undressing room of the gas-chamber. Realizing suddenly that they really were about to be gassed, they tried to resist, attacking the guards with their bare hands. The SS were quick to answer back, first with rifle butts and then, when the resistance spread, with flame-throwers. Filip Muller, a member of the Sonderkommando at Birkenau, and one of the few men to survive it, was then on duty in the undressing room. He later recalled how these Czech family camp victims, ‘heads smashed and bleeding from their wounds’, were driven across the threshold of the gas-chamber. As the gas pellets were released, they began to sing the Czech national
anthem, ‘Kde domov muj’, ‘Where Is My Home’, and the Hebrew song ‘Hatikvah’, ‘Hope’.
²⁸

Of this whole Jewish group of 3,860 men, women and children, only thirty-seven were spared, among them eleven pairs of twins, who were kept alive so that medical experiments could be performed on them by Dr Mengele.
²⁹

The destruction of the Czech family camp at Birkenau on March 7 was paralleled that same day, in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw, by the betrayal of thirty-eight Jews in hiding in a bunker. Among those caught when the bunker was raided was Emanuel Ringelblum.
³⁰

Ringelblum was taken, with the others who had been caught, to the Pawiak prison, together with his wife Yehudit, and their thirteen-year-old son Uri. Another Jewish prisoner in Pawiak, Julian Hirszhaut, was involved in an attempt to move Ringelblum out of the condemned cells, to those with prisoners who had every expectation of being sent to work for the Germans as shoemakers and tailors. Four years later Hirszhaut recalled how he managed, four days after Ringelblum’s arrest, to enter the prison cell in which the historian was being held: