The Holocaust (99 page)

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On April 5, 835 Jews were deported from northern Italy to Birkenau. On arrival, 559 were gassed. The deportees included Jews who had found refuge in Italy for more than four years: Jews from all over Europe and North Africa, Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews. Some were from old Sephardi families expelled from Spain in 1492, like the Alkalai family from Sarajevo. The seventy-one-year-old Sara Klein had been born in Istanbul, the seventy-six-year-old Genia Levi in Moscow, the five-year-old Rosetta Scaramella in Venice, the three-year-old Roberto Zarfatti in Rome.
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On April 6, the day after this deportation from Italy, forty-three Jewish children and ten nurses were arrested at a small centre for children in Izieu, in the French province of Ain. All were sent first to Lyons, then to Drancy, then to Birkenau. Their fate is recalled today in a memorial opposite the village post office.
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Among the children deported from Izieu was the eleven-year-old Liliane Berenstein, who before leaving wrote a letter to God. The letter read:

Two of the children from Izieu, and the man in charge of the centre, Miron Zlatin, were deported to Reval, in Estonia, and shot.
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On the same day, in a raid on ‘Aryan’ Warsaw, three thousand Germans were deployed from four in the morning to nine in the evening in a search for Jews in hiding. In all, seventy ‘non-Aryan’ men and thirty-one ‘non-Aryan’ women were seized: all were executed five days later.
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There were other Polish Jews who believed they were on their way to safety; those who, with South American passports, often acquired at enormous cost, were being held in a camp at Vittel, in France. Negotiations to transfer them out of Europe altogether were making slow progress. But there was a precedent; on February 4 the 365 Spanish-protected Jews of Salonica had been sent, finally, from Bergen-Belsen camp to the safety of neutral Spain.
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Some of the Vittel Jews were fortunate, but not all. On April 8, the first night of Passover, a member of the Sonderkommando in Birkenau noted: ‘a transport from Vittel in France arrived.’ On it were ‘worthy Jewish notables’, among them Mosze Friedman, one of Polish Jewry’s leading scholars, and in the immediate pre-war years, Rabbi of Bayonne. ‘He undressed together with the others,’ the eye-witness wrote. Then ‘a certain SS Lieutenant came’. The Jews were about to be driven from the undressing room to the gas-chamber. Rabbi Friedman took hold of the SS man’s lapels and said to him, in German:

The eye-witness noted that the Rabbi spoke ‘in a strong lion’s voice and with great energy’. He then put on his hat and cried out, ‘with immense fervour’, ‘Shema Israel!’—‘Hear! O Israel’. All those present then cried out with him, ‘Hear! O Israel’—that prayer of all Jews in their moment of distress.

The young men of the Sonderkommando, so inured to suffering, so cauterized by the daily sight of death, were themselves overcome by this ‘rapture of profound faith’. It was, added the eye-witness, ‘an extraordinarily sublime moment, not to be equalled in the lives of men, and it confirmed the eternal spiritual power of Jewry.’
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Neither the squalor of death nor the debilitating force of fear could crush the spirit of hope. On April 11 Anne Frank, a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl who, as a pre-war refugee from Germany, was now in hiding in Holland, noted in her diary:

Literally in the depths of the pit, Jews still struggled to remain Jews, and to retain human dignity. At the Ponar execution site outside Vilna, Szloma Gol was among seventy Jews, and ten Russian prisoners-of-war suspected of being Jewish, who, as members of a ‘Blobel Commando’, had to dig up and then burn the bodies of those who had been murdered in 1941, 1942 and 1943. Each night the eighty prisoners were forced to sleep in a deep pit to
which the only access was by a ladder drawn up each evening. Each morning, chained at the ankles and waist, they were put to work to dig up and burn tens of thousands of corpses. These eighty prisoners were supervised by thirty Lithuanian and German guards and fifty SS men. Their guards were armed with pistols, daggers and automatic guns: one armed guard for each chained prisoner.

Two and a half years later Szloma Gol recalled how, between the end of September 1943, when their work began, and April 1944:

The Jews worked in chains. Anyone removing the chains, they were warned, would be hanged. As they worked, the guards beat and stabbed them. ‘I was once knocked senseless on to the pile of bodies,’ Szloma Gol recalled, ‘and could not get up, but my companions took me off the pile. Then I went sick.’ Prisoners were allowed to go sick for two days, staying in the pit while the others worked. On the third day, if they were still too sick to work, they would be shot. Szloma Gol managed to return to work.

As the digging up and burning of the bodies proceeded, eleven of the eighty Jews were shot by the guards: sadistic acts which gratified the killers, and were intended to terrorize and cow the prisoners. But inside the pit, a desperate plan of escape was being put into effect: the digging of a tunnel from the bottom of the pit to a point beyond the camp wire, at the edge of the Ponar woods.

While the tunnel was still being dug, a Czech SS man alerted the Jews to their imminent execution: ‘They are going to shoot you soon’, he told them, ‘and they are going to shoot me too, and put us all on the pile. Get out if you can, but not while I’m on guard.’
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One of the sixty-nine surviving prisoners, Isaac Dogim, took the lead in helping to organize the escape. Dogim had been placing the corpses in layers on the pyre one day, when he recognized his wife,
his three sisters and his three nieces. All the bodies were decomposed; he recognized his wife by the medallion which he had given her on their wedding day. Another prisoner, Yudi Farber, who had been a civil engineer before the war, joined in the preparations for escape.
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On April 15 the prisoners in the pit at Ponar made their bid for freedom. Forty of them managed to get through the tunnel, but a guard, alerted by the sound of footsteps on the pine branches, opened fire. In the ensuing chase, twenty-five Jews were shot, but fifteen managed to reach the woods; later, most of them joined the partisans in the distant Rudniki forest. Five days after the escape, the remaining twenty-nine prisoners were shot.
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Destruction and liberation travelled along parallel paths during the spring of 1944. Among the few Jews in hiding in Lubartow was Raya Weberman, who was a week short of her twenty-first birthday. Together with her father and her uncle, she had been in hiding since the final ‘action’ in Lubartow in November 1942. The three of them had hidden at first in a hole under the kitchen floor of a Polish farmer, Adam Butrin. Then, as the German searches began, they hid in a pit which Butrin dug under the floor of his stables.

After a further search, Raya and her father had to live for three weeks lying down in a field, and then in the nearby forest, drinking stagnant water. ‘The water was green, bitter and full of insects,’ she later recalled. Returning to the hole under the stable, Raya, her father and her uncle survived. ‘For two years we wore the same clothes,’ she recalled. ‘I read bits of newspaper, dozens of times each.’ When liberation came in late July, ‘Butrin joyously told us the good news. Afterwards he returned and announced sadly: “The Russians hate Jews too.”’
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In Hungary, the Germans were moving all Jews out of their homes and into specially designated ‘ghetto’ areas in each town. These ‘ghettos’ were often an abandoned barracks, a deserted brickworks, or a timber yard. The first deportation from Hungary to Birkenau took place on April 29, from the town of Kistarcsa. Only ‘able-bodied’ Jews between the ages of sixteen and fifty were deported.
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The Jewish leaders in Budapest were told that the Kistarcsa deportees had been sent to a labour camp at ‘Waldsee’. But when one of those leaders, Rudolf Kastner, questioned Eichmann’s deputy, SS Lieutenant-Colonel Hermann Krumey, about why not a single letter or postcard had been received from the deportees, the conversation was inconclusive, and disturbing:

On April 30 a second deportation, of two thousand ‘able-bodied’ Jews, left the Hungarian town of Topolya, also for Birkenau.
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To lull those who had stayed behind into a sense of false security, the SS arranged for some of those who had been deported to send postcards. The eighteen-year-old Moshe Sandberg later recalled how his father was one of a number of those who had sent such postcards to their home town, Kecskemet:

Even in the undressing rooms at Birkenau, some Jews were given postcards to write. Each had to contain the same brief message: ‘Es geht mir gut’, ‘I am well’.
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Also sent to Birkenau at the end of April were a further 238 Polish Jews being held at Vittel, in France: among them the poet Yitzhak Katznelson and his eighteen-year-old son. Katznelson’s wife and two youngest sons, Bension and Benjamin, had been murdered at Treblinka more than a year and a half before.
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While at Vittel, shortly before his own deportation, Katznelson had written, in his poem, the ‘Song of the Murdered Jewish People’: