[2019] Citizen 865

by Debbie Cenziper

  Soon, under the command of SS captain Karl Streibel, who had been appointed by Odilo Globocnik, the recruits would undergo basic training: military drills and lessons on how to use rifles, machine guns, and grenades. They would be taught German marching songs and German commands—March forward! Fire at will!—and attend lectures about the superiority of the German race.

  If they served with honor, they would be paid one half a reichsmark per day as Trawniki Wachmann. The rank was guard private, the lowest rank of all, but at least they would have bunks and full bellies. For that, Reimer was grateful.

  He had been born twenty-two years earlier in a farm village in the Soviet Ukraine, the sixth of seven children. His father had come from Holland, but his mother’s family was ethnic German, among the Volksdeutsche who had migrated to the Ukrainian countryside under the rule of Tsarina Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century. Drawn by the prospect of work in agriculture and of exemptions from German military service, thousands had settled in the region.

  Reimer’s village, along a half-mile stretch of dirt road, was filled with families from northwestern Germany that spoke a dialect known as Plattdeutsch. On a plot of land lined with rose bushes and fruit trees, Reimer’s father had grown wheat and taken it to the windmills to grind into flour. The family attended a small church in the village, and Reimer went to school with other Volksdeutsche children.

  In the 1930s, famine swept the countryside, and Soviet authorities confiscated the family farm, every pig and cow. Reimer’s father was sent to a labor camp and his older brother to Siberia. The Soviets likely would have sent Reimer away, too, if his mother hadn’t fled the village with her youngest children. Reimer had enrolled in a Russian school, a sure way to survive under the rule of Joseph Stalin. He would study to become a librarian.

  But he had been drafted into the Soviet army at the start of the war, and because he was well schooled and able to speak German, Russian, and a bit of Polish, he was commissioned an officer and given his own platoon of Soviet soldiers.

  In the barn at Trawniki, hundreds of miles from home and wearing the uniform of his enemy, Reimer studied the eclectic group of recruits: fellow ethnic Germans, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, the occasional Pole. Most were young, like Reimer, still in their early twenties. They were filthy and starving, but the Germans had offered food and straw for bedding, a much-welcome gesture after imprisonment behind barbed wire.

  Reimer would make do, just as he always had.

  IN MARCH 1942, seven months after Reimer arrived at Trawniki, the entire battalion prepared to head north for a first major deployment in the nearby Jewish ghetto of Lublin. Reimer, once again in charge of his own platoon, rounded up his men.

  The first months at the camp had passed quickly enough. Reimer and his new comrades trained until dinner and cleaned their weapons at night. They learned the German salute and the ideology of Adolf Hitler. Nearly a thousand recruits were training at Trawniki, divided into four companies. The camp would soon grow larger, with a dining hall, shops for boot making and sewing, and a stable for horses that Reimer would often visit.

  As the camp expanded, recruits with German-language skills had been elevated to leadership positions and offered higher wages and better living quarters. Some received more base pay than junior Reich German Waffen-SS men.

  By the time the recruits at Trawniki got word that they would soon leave for Lublin, Reimer bore the stripes of a platoon leader. Some of his men called him Sashka.

  The instructions in Lublin were clear. The Jewish ghetto would be emptied, save for the four thousand Jews who had a Sicherheitspolizei stamp on their identity cards because their jobs were considered critical to the Reich. They would be moved to a smaller ghetto on nearby farmland. The rest would be deported east, never to return to Lublin.

  German officials had issued an expanded shoot order: Shoot in place. Kill anyone who tries to escape or refuses to go.

  The Trawniki men arrived after nightfall to a sleeping ghetto and fanned out along the perimeter, with rifles cocked and ready. They lighted the street lamps and summoned families outside.

  Some of the Trawniki men panicked. Most were captured Soviet soldiers with weapons training, but the German and Polish rifles were new, the men hadn’t all mastered Germans drills, and they had received orders through interpreters. Some of the German personnel were new, too.

  Soon, gunshots rang out into the night air. Rifle butts cracked against bone. Whips snapped against flesh. Jews with work permits, told they would get to remain in Lublin, were mistakenly forced to the holding center for deportation.

  Years later, witnesses would recount how the men of Trawniki had tossed children out the windows of apartment buildings and shot the elderly and sick on the spot, how afterward bodies lay on cobblestone streets.

  The Lublin ghetto was one of the largest in Poland, packed with Jews from the city as well as thousands who had been sent on trains, famished and near frozen, from the surrounding towns of Piaski, Glusk, and Belzyce. Clearing the ghetto would take weeks.

  Fifteen hundred people a day were ordered to the Great Synagogue for deportation and then taken two miles away to waiting boxcars. Children in winter coats and old men with straw baskets. Mothers. Fathers. Babies in tight bundles.

  Every day, teams of three—a German police official, a Jewish policeman, and a Trawniki guard—went from building to building to round up those inside, leaving behind deserted rooms that still smelled of the families who had lived there, who had gone to bed the night before thinking that perhaps the four walls would keep them safe from the bedlam outside.

  Some Germans and Trawniki men went to the Jewish hospital, where two hundred patients were loaded onto trucks, taken outside the city, and shot. Residents of a nursing home and children from a Jewish orphanage were also murdered.

  Early one morning, a company of Trawniki men climbed onto SS trucks. The trucks headed north, winding fifteen kilometers along country roads to the entrance of the Krepiec Forest, hushed and still in the springtime. Another truck pulled up, this one filled with several dozen Jewish prisoners from what was left of the ghetto, a terrified mass of men, women, and children.

  The prisoners were told to drop their belongings on the ground by the side of the highway. The Trawniki guards drove the prisoners deep into the woods, down a trail with twisted branches and crushed leaves, the air chilled by a dense canopy of trees that blocked out the daylight.

  There was a clearing a kilometer away. Some of the Jewish men had been told they would be put to work in the woods, but they found only a large, jagged hole in the ground. Women started to wail as the Trawniki men used their rifle butts to prod the prisoners closer to the pit. Gunfire erupted. In seconds, the bodies were motionless, a mass of tangled limbs.

  More transports showed up, each truck filled with fifty people. The shootings lasted well into the night, and when it was over the forest floor was covered with blood.

  THE JEWS OF LUBLIN were taken to Belzec in southeastern Poland, where gas chambers were built only a few hundred feet from the train platforms. It was a convenient location for the SS because Belzec was linked by rail to Lublin, Krakow, Lwow, and other cities in southern and southeastern Poland, many with large Jewish populations.

  Belzec was built solely for death. For weeks, train cars filled with Jewish families eased into the railway station. When the train doors were opened, prisoners had no time to think or resist. Desperate and disoriented, they were made to turn over their valuables, undress, and run through a narrow passageway known as the “tube” into double-walled gas chambers insulated with dirt.

  When it was done, dentists hammered out gold fillings and crowns from the mouths of the dead before the bodies were turned over for burning.

  In May 1942, a second killing center opened, this one in a swampy pine forest at the edge of the village of Sobibor, about an hour and a half east of Lublin. Sobibor had three gas chambers, each with a capacity for two hundred people, b
uilt with a small opening for hand-pushed wagons that were used to move bodies to mass graves.

  A third killing center opened in July in a forest northeast of Warsaw, with two rows of barbed-wire fencing stuffed with pine tree branches between them to hide what was happening inside. On the train platform at Treblinka, the SS put up a wooden clock, fake ticket window, and fake rail-terminal signs to fool prisoners into thinking the facility was a transit camp for deportation east.

  It was the assembly-line killing that Globocnik had imagined. Only a few dozen SS personnel managed each killing center. Trawniki men did the rest, unloading the train cars long into the night, and shooting, beating, and screaming as thousands of people stumbled toward their deaths.

  Some guards used valuables looted from the prisoners to buy schnapps, chicken, sausage, and sexual services from Polish women. Others deserted the unit.

  But Globocnik and Karl Streibel, the Trawniki commander, had built a mostly reliable force of zealous executioners, some far more violent than their German supervisors. It was exactly the manpower the SS needed, brute force on the front lines of the most aggressive mass-murder operation in the war.

  In July 1942, Heinrich Himmler toured the Trawniki training camp, shaking hands with the recruits. Their work, he recognized, was invaluable. And as the months went on, the men of Trawniki would be needed more than ever.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Courage and Devotion

  Warsaw and Trawniki, Poland

  1943

  On April 19, 1943, in the days between winter’s end and the promise of summer, Jakob Reimer arrived in Warsaw.

  The largest ghetto in German-occupied Poland had once confined more than four hundred thousand people, squeezed into barely three square kilometers of space. By the time Reimer showed up, during the Jewish holiday of Passover, the SS and police had killed or deported to Treblinka most of the ghetto’s residents. About sixty thousand Jews were left, and there were whispers about an uprising.

  In 1940, when the German Department of Hygiene ordered the establishment of the Jüdischer Wohnbezirk in Warschau behind ten-foot walls, Jewish leaders had organized secret libraries, prayer houses, recreational facilities, concerts. Children attended schools disguised as medical centers and soup kitchens. But the ghetto was slowly starved, hundreds of thousands of people surviving on miserable scraps of bread, flour, turnips, and rotten potatoes, rations that totaled a mere 175 calories a day.

  Underground workshops manufactured goods that children smuggled outside the walls through tunnels and sewers, but the weak died from hunger or from diseases that spread quickly in rooms crammed with too many bodies. On Grzybowska Street in the southern end of the ghetto, the Jewish Council had set up orphanages and agencies for the destitute, the scavengers, the beggars, and the gaunt, mute children who squatted in the shadows of alleyways and public squares, puny bundles of rags and filth. Still, the death toll climbed.

  And then, in the summer of 1942, SS and German police forces, reinforced by a battalion of Trawniki men, had rounded up most of the ghetto’s inhabitants. Some were shot in their homes or on the streets. Tens of thousands were forced onto suffocating train cars bound for the gas chambers of Treblinka.

  Rumors spread about death camps, a place where Jews were turned into smoke and ashes. Those who remained in the ghetto had lost everything, bloodlines that spanned centuries. Soon, amid a desolate group of orphans and mourners, talk began of armed resistance. Leaflets circulated in the streets.

  Jews! Citizens of the Warsaw ghetto, be alert! Do not believe a single word, a single pretext of the SS criminals. Mortal danger awaits.…Let us defend our honor with courage and dignity! Let liberty live!

  When the SS and German police entered the ghetto for an early-morning round of deportations in January 1943, only a small group of people appeared at the assembly point with their identity papers. Jewish insurgents ambushed unsuspecting German troops with Molotov cocktails and handguns smuggled into the ghetto with help from the Polish Underground. One thousand Jews were shot in the main square in retaliation for the fighting, but the deportations were temporarily called off.

  WHEN REIMER ARRIVED in Warsaw in April 1943, a full-fledged uprising had begun. After his work in the Lublin ghetto, Reimer had been deployed to the Polish city of Czestochowa, an industrial and religious center on the Warta River northwest of Krakow.

  In 1942, on Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday of atonement, German police, reinforced by Trawniki men, began ordering the city’s forty thousand Jews to assemble on the streets with their hand luggage. The elderly and frail were shot on the spot. The rest, made to remove their shoes to deter the possibility of escape, were forced onto fifty-eight train cars bound for Treblinka.

  It was a second successful mission for Reimer, who had positioned guards in the ghetto and coordinated with the Germans and local authorities. He was promoted to Zugwachmann, a guard staff sergeant.

  Now in Warsaw, Reimer reported to the German security police just inside the ghetto. Three hundred and fifty Trawniki men were already there, ready to support the operation.

  Crushing the Jewish resistance was a matter of the utmost importance to the Reich, and Heinrich Himmler had chosen a particularly tenacious police official for the job. SS brigadier general Jürgen Stroop, the opportunistic son of a German police chief, had decided long before the war that Jews were cowards by nature and that Hitler had been placed on earth to purify all of Europe.

  The Germans had no idea how many resistance fighters were prepared for battle or what kinds of weapons they had managed to sneak inside the ghetto. Stroop had brought in combat engineers, demolition experts, a squad of flamethrower specialists, the German air force, tanks, armored carriers, machine guns, and explosives.

  On Stroop’s order, his men pushed through the gates and fanned out in every direction. In an instant, the sound of machine-gun fire filled the air. Stroop expected to round up thousands of people, pack the train cars one after another, but the apartments in the ghetto were empty, prayer books still open, kitchen tables set as if awaiting dinner guests.

  Later, the Germans would learn that Jews who still had means and access to the outside world had gathered in kitchens to celebrate Passover with smuggled wine and matzo, unleavened bread that for generations had symbolized the Israelites’ hasty exodus from Egypt. When lookouts on rooftops warned of the advancing assault, the inhabitants of the ghetto had fled to a labyrinth of dugouts, bunkers, cellars, and passageways dug deep beneath the earth, some equipped with cots and food supplies meant to last months.

  Stroop’s men moved north to Moranowski Square, which, in prewar Poland, had been a picturesque gathering spot with trees and trolley cars. The inhabitants of the ghetto, with some support from Polish resistance fighters, attacked with force, lobbing hand grenades and firing from carbine rifles and a smuggled machine gun.

  Shooters took aim from sniper holes. Several dozen fighters mounted a German truck and drove off. Jewish women fired pistols with both hands and tossed grenades that they had concealed in their undergarments. Later, on the roof of a building in the square, someone hoisted a Polish flag and a Star of David.

  It was the start of a fierce, bloody operation, and at nightfall Reimer and the men of Trawniki, armed with rifles, bayonets, and ammunition pouches, retreated to a bunker in a schoolhouse a half mile west of the ghetto.

  On April 23, after four days of fighting, Stroop issued a new order. Jews were hiding in underground bunkers and passageways, a bedeviling development. Some had blown up the valves of the city’s sewer system just before the Germans tried to have it dammed up and filled with water to drown those hiding inside.

  Stroop decided to burn the ghetto, street by street. “Utter ruthlessness,” he declared. He called in a group of sappers, demolition experts trained in heavy explosives. Soon flames charred apartment buildings, warehouses, stores, and workshops. The Trawniki men watched acrid plumes of smoke darken the sky above Warsaw. On streets filled
with soot, glass, and the bricks of fallen buildings, Jews jumped out of windows and off roofs to avoid the flames.

  German forces threw tear-gas bombs into sewers and poison gas into dugouts and bunkers. Those still in hiding scrambled out into the light, hands on their heads, dirt on their faces. A first glimpse of black leather boots. A final surrender into the eye of a cocked machine gun. Trawniki men stood over the bodies of the dead.

  The Warsaw ghetto uprising ended three weeks later, with all but eight buildings leveled, more than seven thousand Jews killed, seven thousand deported to the gas chambers of Treblinka, and forty-two thousand sent to the concentration camp at Majdanek or to the forced-labor camps at Trawniki and Poniatowa.

  Stroop praised his patchwork army for “pluck, courage and devotion,” including the men of Trawniki, who had suffered a dozen casualties in the gunfire. “We will never forget them,” Stroop would say.

  A lavish celebration followed at the Great Synagogue of Warsaw, which had been designed by Polish architect Leandro Marconi in the 1870s and was one of the largest in the world.

  “Heil Hitler!” Stroop shouted as he pushed a lever and blew the building to pieces.

  He would send a detailed accounting of the ghetto operation to Himmler, bound in leather and bearing a triumphant title:

  The Jewish residential quarter in Warsaw is no more.

  JAKOB REIMER NEEDED a break, and in July 1943, his commanders gave him two weeks off with pay. Some Reich Germans had invited ethnic German Trawniki men like Reimer to their homes during holidays or leave. But Reimer opted to find his sister in the Ukrainian countryside.

  He returned to Trawniki later that summer and was transferred into camp administration as a bookkeeper.