Holocaust Heroes

by Felton, Mark;

  Once through a gate, the Camp III Sonderkommandos started to run for the forest, several kilometres away. ‘We ran across swamps, meadows and ditches, with bullets pursuing us fast and furious,’ said Wiernik. ‘Every second counted. All that mattered was to reach the woods because the Germans would not want to follow us there.’ The closest help that the SS could count upon was a guard detachment from Treblinka I, which was dispatched very speedily in trucks and field cars towards the large column of black smoke rising from the ruptured fuel tank at Treblinka II. These fresh SS hastily disembarked from their vehicles and took off after the fleeing Jews, gunning down any within range. ‘Just as I thought I was safe, running straight ahead as fast as I could, I suddenly heard the command “Halt!” right behind me,’ said Wiernik. ‘By then I was exhausted but I ran faster just the same. The woods were just ahead of me, only a few leaps away. I strained all my willpower to keep going. The pursuer was gaining and I could hear him running close behind me.’27 Wiernik was being pursued by an SS Trawniki from Treblinka I. ‘Then I heard a shot; in that same instant I felt a sharp pain in my left shoulder.’ Wiernik turned and saw the Ukrainian pointing a pistol at him, but by his actions Wiernik could tell that the weapon had jammed. Pulling a hatchet from his belt, Wiernik charged at the SS man and buried the hatchet in the left side of his chest. The Ukrainian collapsed at Wiernik’s feet.28 A few moments later Wiernik made it into the trees.

  In Camp I, hundreds of Sonderkommandos charged the main gate and the fences, yelling and firing as they went, while others tried to pin the guards down with withering fire or hurled stick grenades into the SS quarters. But the Jews had only a very limited supply of grenades and ammunition, which was soon practically exhausted. The remaining twenty-five SS-TV and sixty Trawnikis were quick to react, the guards in the tall watchtowers opening fire with machine guns, the bullets scything down hundreds of desperate people. Dr Laycher was one of those killed in the melee, but the sheer numbers of people carried many to the camp gate and through it to freedom. ‘I simply climbed over the fence,’ recalled Teigman at the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem in 1961. ‘There had already been people who had escaped that way, and on the fence there were already blankets and boards, and we climbed over these.’29

  Hundreds of bodies soon littered the camp, or hung limply from the barbed wire fences. Commandant Stangl’s urgent calls for assistance meant that nearby SS Police and Wehrmacht units were soon piling into trucks and field cars and heading for the camp.

  On the day of the revolt there were about 850 Jews in Treblinka II. About 100 refused to attempt to escape and remained in the camp. Of the 750 Sonderkommandos who took part in the uprising, about 200 managed to escape from the camp. The rest were slaughtered in the camp, or its close environs, mostly mown down by machine guns. Another 100 were hunted down and killed by SS and Police search teams in cars or on horseback after the SS imposed a 5km cordon around the camp. The Polish Home Army was able to help some of the survivors, and ordinary Polish people took terrible risks to shelter and feed escapees. In the end, about seventy Treblinka II Sonderkommandos survived the war, or about one-in-ten of those who took part in the escape attempt. This may not sound very good odds, but it was still infinitely better than the zero per cent chance of survival that they all faced if they had remained as prisoners of the SS.

  There were differing fates for the Germans who ran the camp. Many served at Sobibor after Treblinka was closed down, and most of the Aktion Reinhard officers and men were later sent to northern Italy to operate against partisans.

  Of the more notorious SS men at Treblinka II, Kurt Franz worked after the war as a labourer and then a cook. Arrested in late 1959, the former Deputy Commandant was arraigned along with many other German SS at the Treblinka Trials. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Franz was released for health reasons in 1993 and died in Germany in 1998, aged 84.

  SS-Scharführer Heinrich Matthes was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1965. SS-Unterscharführer Max Moller served in Italy after Treblinka and vanished after the war. SS-Oberscharführer Kuttner was arrested but died before he could face trial in 1964. Josef Hirtreiter, who worked in the undressing barracks in Camp II, was arrested in July 1946 for his part in the T4 euthanasia programme. Released, he was re-arrested in 1951 and sentenced to life imprisonment for killing children in Treblinka II. Released due to illness in 1977, Hirtreiter died in November 1978. SS-Unterscharführer Franz Suchomel, who handled incoming transports and the confiscation and collection of valuables, later served at Sobibor. After the war, he worked as a tailor in Bavaria until arrested in July 1963. He was sentenced to six years in 1965 but released in 1967. He died in 1979, aged 72. Treblinka II’s first commandant, Dr Eberl, joined the Wehrmacht in 1944, serving to the end of the war. After the war, he practised medicine until arrested in January 1948. Eberl, 37, hanged himself to avoid trial. The commandant of Treblinka I, SS-Sturmbannführer Theodor van Eupen, was killed by Polish partisans in an ambush in December 1944, aged 37.

  Chapter 6

  The Choiceless Choice

  ‘The planned total measures are to be kept completely secret … the first prerequisite for the final aim is the concentration of the Jews from the countryside into the larger cities.’

  Reinhard Heydrich, 1939

  ‘Advance! Advance!’ shouted one of the leaders of the Jewish Fighting Organization. ‘We have nothing to lose!’ A German soldier lay moaning in the street, calling for a medic, caught in the initial crossfire between the Jews and the SS forces that were attempting to smash their way into the ghetto. Wooden buildings were on fire, thick, blinding smoke filling the streets, causing both sides to gag. The gate at Fabryezna Street was suddenly opened and through the smoke the fighters could make out the ominous squat shape of a German tank gingerly nosing through the opening, its metal tracks squealing and clinking on the hard road surface. Suddenly, bottles sailed through the air, smashing against and on top of the tank, flaring briefly into orange and yellow flames as the petrol they contained ignited. The tank ground to a sudden halt, fresh flames erupting from the engine at the rear. Suddenly, the hatches were flung open, and the black-clad German panzer crewmen struggled out of their burning vehicle, Jewish bullets clanking against the tank’s armour. A roar of victory rose from the Jews across the street as they viewed the demise of the German tank – a battle to the death had begun.

  Bialystok is the largest city in north-eastern Poland. In the Second World War, it was to be the scene of the second-largest ghetto uprising after that in Warsaw, and the scene of appalling atrocities against the city’s large Jewish population.

  When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Stalin’s rather than Hitler’s forces occupied Bialystok because of its close proximity to the Soviet border. This had been made possible under the terms of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact when the two dictators divided Poland between them. Under Soviet control, life in Bialystok continued mostly as before. All that abruptly changed with the launch of Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. After a brief battle, Bialystok fell to German forces on 27 June on a day that became known to its Jewish residents as ‘Black Friday’. Ordnungspolizei Bataillon 309, a unit of the Nazi Order Police, or Orpo, committed terrible atrocities against the Jews on that day of German victory over the city. They drove between 800 and 1,000 of the city’s estimated 50,000 Jewish population into the Great Synagogue and burned them alive. The battalion also set fire to buildings in the Szulhof, the yard of the Great Synagogue, and rampaged through the narrow street, randomly murdering another thousand or so Jews.1 The destruction in the Jewish quarter of the city terrorized the local population, just as it was designed to do. The destruction and killing went on all day. By nightfall, over 2,000 people were dead and fourteen streets and the fish market badly damaged. But the Germans had not finished.

  On 30 June, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler personally visited Bialystok. He addressed a meeting of senior SS and police officers
and pronounced that there was a high risk of Soviet guerrilla activity in the area, with the Jews being suspected of supporting them. The mission was therefore to destroy the NKVD collaborators, a mission handed to SS-Gruppenführer Artur Nebe and Einsatzgruppe B. Nebe would be aided in this task by Kommando SS Zichenau-Schroettersburg under the command of SS-Hauptsturmführer Hermann Schaper and Kommando Bialystok under SS-Hauptsturmführer Wolfgang Birkner. The ‘investigation’ into Soviet activities in and around Bialystok began with the disappearance of 300 members of the Jewish intelligentsia on 3 July. They literally disappeared without trace and became known locally as ‘The Thursday Victims’.

  Himmler visited again on 9 July, and this was followed by another round of murders. On 11 July, a second hunt saw 4,000 male Jews taken from the city by bus and shot at Pietrasze, 2km away, by Einsatzkommando 9, part of Einsatzgruppe B. In addition, the Jewish community was forced to pay a ransom to the Germans consisting of 5kg of gold and 20kg of silver, as well as all Soviet paper currency. All Jews would now have to wear the yellow star.2

  On 26 July, the Germans established a Jewish ghetto in Bialystok and appointed a Judenrat, or Jewish Council. The de facto head of the Judenrat was a highly respected Zionist and community leader named Efraim Barasz. His leadership was consistent and assertive, and he believed that now the initial madness and slaughter had passed, the Germans would want to keep the remaining Jews alive as labour for the nearly dozen factories that had been set up inside the ghetto, their products feeding the German war machine. This belief was termed ‘survival through work’, and it appeared to make perfect sense not only to Barasz but also to a good majority of the Jews in Bialystok. Largely because of Barasz’s likeability, this policy was acceptable to most of the ghetto population.3

  ‘Survival through work’ appeared to be a workable policy, as for fifteen months after the initial Nazi atrocities the ghetto was mostly quiet and people got on with working and surviving. The Judenrat looked credible in front of its people. But the Jews had no idea of how they would fit into Aktion Reinhard. They had no idea that their fate had already been decided long before any German action was taken, and that, in fact, the Jews of Bialystok, who numbered just over 40,000, had been due to die much earlier.

  Atrocities continued to be committed by SS and Police units in the region around Bialystok. In the city proper, 6,000 ‘non-workers’ were rounded up in autumn 1941 and sent out of the ghetto to Prizgany. On 14 November, there was a massacre at Slonim. The continuing deaths and a growing will to resist the Nazis had led numerous Jewish Underground groups to form, covering many different ideologies but staffed mainly by young idealists. In Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, the Germans had also established a ghetto. Mass murders had occurred around the city and some of the Jewish leaders had come to the conclusion that the Germans, regardless of their pronouncements about utilizing Jewish labour, were bent on eradicating the Jews through a genocidal programme. Others thought that the killings were isolated, but believed that the youthful fighters should relocate to somewhere quieter where they could regroup and plan. One such leader, Mordecai Tenenbaum, chose Bialystok. But getting from one ghetto to another was not easy, as Jews were forbidden from leaving their ghettos without special passes – the penalty for disobeying this rule was death. In Vilnius, assistance for Tenenbaum and his fighters was to come from the most unlikely of sources – the enemy.

  Oberfeldwebel Anton Schmid’s job was manning an office at Vilnius Railway Station. An Army sergeant, the 42-year-old Austrian’s task was reassigning soldiers who had been separated from their units. Because the railway station was used as a transport hub for Jewish shipments, Schmid, with barely concealed disgust, had seen Jews being maltreated and murdered on numerous occasions. He had decided to try and help the Jews of Vilnius. He employed several Jews in his unit as workers, provided official papers to some and managed to get several released from a notorious local Gestapo prison. Schmid used army trucks to smuggle small numbers of Jews out of the city to less dangerous places. He was running huge risks, but sought no reward. He even sheltered Jews at his apartment. Mordecai Tenenbaum made contact with Schmid, hoping that he could help smuggle himself and some of his men to Warsaw and Bialystok. Tenenbaum got out of Vilnius just before Schmid was betrayed to the Gestapo and arrested. Court-martialled for high treason, Anton Schmid was executed in April 1942. In 1964, Schmid’s bravery was recognised by Israel, who declared him to be ‘Righteous Among the Nations’.4

  In early October 1942, the Reich Main Security Office, the department of the SS responsible for the prosecution of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, had issued an order to the local SS authorities in the Bialystok district to liquidate all ghettos, including the big one in Bialystok city, and deport the Jews to the Aktion Reinhard death camps for ‘special treatment’. But the death order was postponed, not because of any humanitarian concerns on the part of the Germans, but for practical purposes. When the Wehrmacht and rich German industrialists got wind of the plan to liquidate the ghettos, they complained loudly about the losses to war production that would result from such a move. On this occasion the Army and its civilian friends won the day, and the liquidation order was rescinded, for the time being.5 But it remained the intention of Himmler and the SS leadership to progressively eradicate the smaller ghettos in the region and to eventually deal directly with Bialystok itself.

  Mordecai Tenenbaum was in Warsaw during the Uprising and then managed to move to Bialystok, arriving on 1 November 1942. He wanted to coordinate the various youth movements into a Jewish Combat Organization, just like the ones in Warsaw that had valiantly fought back against the Germans. A special relationship quickly grew between young resistance leader Tenenbaum and the leader of the Judenrat, Efraim Barasz. The older man understood perfectly well the desire of many Jews to resist the Nazis. But with relative peace in Bialystok, Barasz was also wary of upsetting the delicate balance by doing anything to aggravate the Germans. No one wanted to see more massacres or deportations. He did secretly help Tenenbaum’s group to procure some weapons and ammunition, and also passed on any useful information that he had gleaned from his German superiors, but he stuck resolutely to the concept of ‘survival through work’.6

  In early February 1943, the German attitude to the Bialystok Ghetto appeared to change when SS and Police troops suddenly surrounded the area and ordered the 200-man Jewish Police to help them round up a quota of Jews. The Jewish Police flatly refused, but the SS nonetheless took 10,000 people in one week of operations, and also shot a further 900 inside the ghetto.7 This action did not precipitate an armed response from the various Jewish resistance organizations in Bialystok. With the agreement of the Judenrat, the Jewish Underground decided not to actively resist unless the Germans tried to liquidate the entire ghetto. They couldn’t afford to show their hand just yet. The Underground had to play for time – they were still chronically short of weapons and ammunition, and were not unified. But the failure to resist in February 1943 actually strengthened the Judenrat’s position in front of the ghetto population – it still appeared that the Germans wished to keep the majority of the Bialystok Jews for labour.8

  The events actually further divided the Underground, rather than uniting it. Tenenbaum and his organization wanted to fight the Germans to the bitter end, while the communists and several other groups wanted to break out of the ghetto and join up with the Soviet partisans that successfully operated in the forests around the city. The Jews were faced with what many termed the ‘choiceless choice’: was it better to resist and perhaps die trying, or to try to join the partisans and perhaps live to bear witness?9 But such choices would shortly be removed from the Jews as the Germans set the pace and decided their future for them. For the Underground, their internal divisions were their greatest weakness.

  Himmler still itched to be able to liquidate the Bialystok Ghetto, and this time he was determined that the German Army and industrialists – grown fat and contented on the backs
of free labour – would not stand in his way. In the summer of 1943, Himmler issued an order to Gauleiter Erich Koch, under whose jurisdiction Bialystok fell, to liquidate the ghetto and deport the inhabitants to the General Government. Again, behind the scenes, the Army and civilian authorities complained, but Himmler did not accept their arguments.10 He would give the task of destroying the Jews of Bialystok to trusted Aktion Reinhard subordinates under the command of SS-Gruppenführer Odilo Globocnik. Globocnik in turn delegated one of his most trusted subordinates, SS-Sturmbannführer Georg Michalsen, to actually perform the action.

  Born Georg Michalczyk in Wendrian, Upper Silesia, in 1906, the son of a primary school teacher, he was an early adherent of Nazism. Michalczyk had been working as an accountant when he joined the party in 1928, and was leader of the local branch in Opole from 1930. In 1932, he joined the SS and was commissioned within a few years. During the invasion of Poland, Michalczyk commanded a seventy-man SS unit tasked with organizing and training locally raised paramilitary police units that played a vital part in the terrorization and murder of Jews. In 1940, acutely embarrassed by his Polish surname, he legally changed it to the more Germanic-sounding ‘Michalsen’. In August 1940, Michalsen joined Globocnik’s office, tasked with supervising the building of fortifications along the German-Soviet demarcation line in Poland. After Operation Barbarossa was launched in June 1941, Michalsen was sent to Riga to try and establish SS and Police bases. He was present at the Rumbala Massacre, when tens of thousands of Jews from the Riga Ghetto were shot in November 1941. Michalsen’s usefulness to Globocnik was as a ‘clearing expert’, and he demonstrated this by liquidating the Otwock, Wolomin, Piaski, Miedzyrzec Podlaski and Wlodawa ghettos. Intimately involved in the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, Michalsen came to Bialystok as one of the foremost SS experts in dealing with ghettos.