Bonigut informed the Gypsy Camp’s leadership that they were to be sent to the gas chambers the next night, 16 May.
On the night of 16 May, several grey Opel Blitz trucks roared up to the gate of the Gypsy Camp, disgorging between fifty and sixty heavily armed, steel-helmeted SS troops. The SS strode imperiously into the camp’s compounds, MP40 machine pistols and Mauser rifles at the ready, and started yelling ‘Los, los!’ at the darkened wooden huts. But instead of streams of terrified people emerging from the huts, the SS were met with an eerie, stony silence.
Inside the huts, the gypsies waited. They had barricaded the doors with furniture and the men had armed themselves with knives, tools, lengths of wood and rocks. Suddenly, a voice roared out from one of the huts, the SS listening with rising incredulity. ‘We’re not coming out!’ the voice yelled. ‘You come in here! We’re waiting here! If you want something, you have to come inside.’ There were 6,000 people in the Gypsy Family Camp at that time, facing at most sixty Germans. If the SS tried to compel the removal of the gypsies by force from the huts, it stood to reason that several SS men would be killed or injured in the resulting fracas. The gypsies might also succeed in seizing a few weapons from the SS, which would have led to even more SS losses. There was also a fear among the SS leadership that resistance by the gypsies could spread to the Jewish parts of the camp. The Auschwitz Gestapo was well aware that there was an underground Jewish resistance group active throughout the three camps. But the Gestapo had no idea of the group’s numbers, readiness for action or number of weapons. At the very least, the damage to the buildings in the gypsy camp caused by discharging automatic weapons, and the probable resulting fires, would negate the purpose of the raid and render part of Auschwitz II uninhabitable. The officer in charge hastily conferred with his subordinates. He decided to postpone the action. Red-faced, the SS climbed back onto their trucks and drove away.
But the SS was not done with the gypsies quite yet. It was decided instead to eliminate them in stages, rather than launching another overt assault on their section of the camp. Ten thousand Hungarian women duly arrived at the Gypsy Camp to be housed and were accommodated in odd-numbered blocks, the Romani being relocated into only even-numbered residential blocks. There was no resistance from the gypsies because the SS did not try and send them en masse to the crematoria.
At the end of June 1944, the Jewish Sonderkommandos were moved from their barracks in the main camp to live on site at Crematoria II, III and IV in Auschwitz II Birkenau. Among them were nineteen Red Army soldiers who had been transported from the concentration camp at Majdanek, and they incited the Jews to revolt. Among the Sonderkommandos there had emerged several strong-willed leaders who were determined to destroy the crematoria and escape from Auschwitz. Regardless of the calls for caution and delay issued by the Struggle Group leadership, the Sonderkommando leadership decided to press on alone and plan a revolt. It was all they could do to try and change their dreadful fates.
The main problem for the Sonderkommandos was that they possessed no weapons apart from work tools. The Sonderkommandos knew that for their planned revolt to stand any chance of success, they had to have arms and explosives. Birkenau, as well as being a place of death, was also a vast labour camp holding many of those prisoners who had been selected to become slaves for the SS. In order to take advantage of this slave labour, German companies had established factories close to Auschwitz. One such was the Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke munitions factory that manufactured artillery shells for the German Army. A considerable number of the slave workers were females who lived in the Women’s Camp at Birkenau and were marched daily to the factory. In January 1944, two Jews from the Men’s Camp, Israel Gutman and Yehuda Laufer, made contact with a small group of women prisoners in the hope that they might smuggle materials out of the factory for the Sonderkommando insurrection planners. The women the men made contact with, principally a Polish Jew named Roza Robota, worked in the area of Birkenau where victims’ clothing was sorted. But these female Sonderkommandos shared the same accommodation as the female prisoners who slaved at Weichsel-Union-Metallwerke, including a group of girls who worked in the ‘Powder Room’, where black powder explosives was stored.
Roza Robota, aged 23, had been born into a middle-class family in Ciechanow. She had been a passionate member of a socialist Zionist youth movement and later worked in the Polish Underground. Deported to Auschwitz after the liquidation of the Ciechanow Ghetto in 1942, Robota had been assigned to the Birkenau female Sonderkommando, working in the clothing depot adjacent to Crematoria III. She already knew Gutman and Laufer from the ghetto, so she knew that she could trust them implicitly.
Other brave women willingly joined the smuggling operations. Ester Wajcblum, aged 19, and her 14-year-old sister, Hana, had arrived at Auschwitz in spring 1943. Assigned to the munitions factory, there the girls met Regina Safirsztain and Ala Gertner, who had been passing small amounts of gunpowder to Robota concealed in their clothing. Robota then passed the powder on to Gutman and Laufer, who carried it to the Crematoria Sonderkommandos for manufacture into primitive hand grenades. Wajcblum and her sister joined Safirsztain and Gertner. This smuggling operation continued for eight months without the Germans finding out. The women risked instant death should their activities have been discovered. Robota lived for this act of resistance against the Germans. ‘Her eyes were alight with the fire of revenge when she succeeded in doing something against the oppressor.’9 Her strong feelings were undoubtedly shared by all of the other women who were risking their lives alongside her.
Ala Gertner came from a similarly comfortable middle-class background to Robota. Born in 1912 in Bedzin, Poland, in 1940 Gertner had been sent to Geppersdorf Labour Camp, part of a group of 177 camps organized by SS-Oberführer Albrecht Schmelt. He had 50,000 Jews labouring in this semi-private camp system, which included the original Oskar Schindler camp. Gertner, because she spoke fluent German, worked in the camp office at Geppersdorf. Though conditions were tough in the Schmelt camps, they were not of a level found in regular concentration camps. Gertner was actually allowed to return home in 1941 on completion of a period of service. She married, but sadly was deported to Auschwitz in August 1943. Gertner initially worked in the warehouses, sorting the belongings of the murdered. It was here that she became friendly with Roza Robota. She was then assigned to the office in the munitions factory, and Gertner was able to recruit other women to the conspiracy, passing stolen gunpowder back to Robota.
At the Gypsy Camp, the inmates were moved again to the rear blocks of their camp to accommodate the arrival of several thousand male Hungarian Jews. In July, Höss decided once more to finally destroy the gypsy presence in Auschwitz. On the morning of 1 August, those gypsy prisoners who were fit for work were supposed to report for transfer elsewhere. The next day, final transports to Buchenwald and Ravensbrück Concentration Camps were put together out of all male and female prisoners whom the SS judged to be fit for work in the General Government. A total of 918 gypsy youths and men were sent to Buchenwald, doubling its Romani and Sinti population. A further 490 female gypsies were sent to Ravensbrück on six work transports. The gypsies who remained at Auschwitz were the largely defenceless – the elderly, mothers with small children, fathers who refused to leave their families and orphans. It was decided that these people, unlikely to put up much resistance, should be gassed. During the night of 2–3 August 1944, the Gypsy Camp was finally closed. The remaining 2,897 people were loaded aboard trucks. They had no idea of where they were going until they arrived outside Crematorium V. Terror quickly gripped everyone. But if the SS thought that killing the remaining gypsies was to be an easy task, they soon realized this would not be the case. The gypsies had been prisoners in Auschwitz long enough to know what was going on at the crematoria, and they refused to go meekly to their deaths.
‘The room for removing clothing was stuffed full of people by midnight,’ recalled Jewish Sonderkommando Filip Müller. ‘The anxiety wa
s growing minute by minute … desperate cries could be heard from all sides, accusations, lamentations, remorse. The voices called out in chorus: “We are Germans of the Reich! We’ve done nothing wrong!” From elsewhere could be heard “We want to live! Why do you want to kill us?”’10 Commandant Höss recalled that the gassing operation on this occasion was difficult: ‘It was not easy to lead them into the chamber. I didn’t see it, but Schwarzhuber told me about it, that no liquidation action of the Jews had been as difficult as the liquidation of the gypsies.’11
‘The liquidation proceeded as usual,’ said Müller. ‘[SS-Hauptscharführer Otto Möll, the senior SS NCO commanding the Auschwitz crematoria] and his aides thumbed off the safeties on their pistols and rifles and uncompromisingly called on those who had taken their clothes off to leave the room and go into the three spaces where they would be poisoned with gas.’12
For the Jewish Sonderkommandos, efforts continued to gather or manufacture weapons for a putative uprising. The gunpowder was fashioned into primitive hand grenades by using empty sardine tins as cases, while knives and hatchets were also secretly manufactured. A small supply of hand guns were smuggled through the wire into the camp courtesy of Polish partisans. But it remained a pitiful arsenal when compared with the firepower that the SS had available to counter any rebellion by the prisoners. The nearly 7,000 SS that worked at Auschwitz were all routinely armed, but there was also a special security detachment that had little to do with the guarding of prisoners. Its function was to act as a regular military force to crush any rebellion, and it was well armed with infantry weapons, transport and grenades. The Sonderkommando workers knew that this special fast reaction force would swiftly descend on any attempted insurrection, with lethal consequences for all concerned.
Originally, the Auschwitz resistance organization had wanted to plan an action in coordination with Operation Tempest, the rising of the Polish Home Army against the German occupation forces, planned to commence in Warsaw on 1 August 1944. But the Home Army and Polish Government-in-Exile in London sent a message to the resistance group in Auschwitz that urged that no revolt should take place unless the prisoners faced certain death.13 By ‘prisoners’, Warsaw and London meant all of the prisoners, and not just the Jewish Sonderkommandos. This meant that, to all intents and purposes, the Sonderkommandos had to go it alone.
The SS had certainly got wind of something suspicious going on among the Sonderkommandos. In early August 1944, Oberkapo Jakob Kaminski, a Lithuanian who worked at Crematoria I and had managed to smuggle about thirty homemade grenades onto the premises, was summarily shot by 29-year-old SS-Hauptscharführer Möll.14 One evening soon after, the Crematoria I Sonderkommando was hurriedly called to parade, where Möll informed them that Oberkapo Kaminski had been executed. Möll told the 200 Sonderkommandos that details of their secret organization were known to the German authorities and that they were prepared to eliminate anyone they caught who was involved. A new Oberkapo was appointed, a German non-Jewish criminal brought in from Majdanek Extermination Camp. He abused the prisoners and was hated by them.
On 26 September 1944, 200 Romani youths who had been transported from the closed Gypsy Camp to Buchenwald arrived back at Auschwitz. They had been deemed unfit for work by the authorities at Buchenwald and were sent to Birkenau to be gassed.
With the Red Army nearing Krakow in Poland and the transports of Jews from Hungary gradually slowing down, the SS decided that the Sonderkommandos at Auschwitz were now too large and unwieldy to handle safely. It was decided to reduce their size by executing large numbers of them. A sudden order was given for a work party to clear out the hall of the disinfection station at Auschwitz I, the main camp. The building’s windows were sealed up with bricks and plaster. Three hundred Birkenau Sonderkommandos were sent to this room and killed on 29 September. This action by the SS convinced the Sonderkommando leadership that they had to act quickly if they and the rest of them still living were not to join their comrades in death, even though the Struggle Group wanted to postpone any action until the Soviets were closer to the camp.15 Any further delay in taking action could be too late.
Early on the morning of 7 October 1944, the Struggle Group sent an urgent message to the Sonderkommando leaders warning them that they had heard that the Germans intended to liquidate a further large proportion of the crematoria workers shortly. A little later, the senior Sonderkommando man at Crematoria IV was ordered by the SS to draw up lists for the ‘evacuation’ of 300 men out of the over 600 working in the crematoria complex. Towards noon, SS-Scharführer Busch, SS-Unterscharführer Gorges and a small group of SS guards arrived in the yard in front of Crematoria IV. All the prisoners were ordered to form up in ranks, except for fourteen who had already been sent away on other tasks. Busch carried a clipboard that contained the list of prisoners who ‘would have to go over to a different Kommando’,16 and beginning with the highest number, the SS man began reading down the list to the lowest number. Several prisoners whose numbers appeared on the list told the Sonderkommando leaders that they would resist the transfer. In hurried and muttered discussions, there were those who argued for immediate action, while others argued to refrain from independent or immediate action.17 But one prisoner decided to precipitate action, regardless of the views of many present.
Once Busch finished reading, those prisoners who had been selected were ordered to stand on the opposite side of the yard. The rest of the prisoners were dismissed and sent back to work in Crematoria IV. At this point, a prisoner fell out of the ‘evacuation’ group and walked purposefully up to Busch. There was a brief angry exchange before the prisoner, a young Polish Jew named Chaim Neuhof, suddenly yelled out ‘Hurrah!’, the code word to launch the rebellion, reached into his pocket and pulled out a small hammer. A moment later, Neuhof struck Busch, the other 300 prisoners hurling themselves at the startled SS, using hammers and homemade hatchets, or even stones, to drive the terrified SS men back across the yard. But within a few moments, the wail of a klaxon sounded across the camp and shortly afterwards the SS security detachment piled out of its barracks into vehicles and started racing towards the scene of the trouble.
Inside Crematoria IV, the other prisoners, who had not been selected to die, rose up against the handful of SS that oversaw them. Then the men of Sonderkommando 59-B used some of their homemade sardine tin grenades to blow up the crematoria, which burst into flames. As acrid black smoke plumed into the blue sky above the wrecked facility, some of the Sonderkommandos charged the perimeter fences in a desperate attempt to get clear of Birkenau, forcing their way through using homemade wire cutters and then running into the fields that surrounded the camp. Others stayed put and continued to fight the SS with their few firearms.18
At Crematoria II, Sonderkommando 57-B also rose in revolt. The Oberkapo at Crematoria II, Karl Konvoent, was another criminal who worked for the Germans, brutally enforcing their rigid discipline. He overheard some snatches of conversation as the Sonderkommando leaders quickly thrashed out a plan of attack and he threatened to reveal them to the SS. But before he could do so, Konvoent and an SS NCO were overpowered and thrown alive into the crematoria ovens,19 while the enraged prisoners beat another SS NCO to death. ‘The screams of the burning SS men were heard in the surrounding areas because it was the first time that the crematoria received living human beings, not the gassed bodies,’ recalled Sonderkommando Reisel Grunapfel-Meth. ‘It was also the first time that the smoke which had always emerged only from the tall chimneys now enshrouded the entire crematorium building.’ Grabbing their weapons, some of the Sonderkommandos opened fire on the surprised SS while others headed for the electrified wire, cut their way through using insulated cutters, broke through the fence that separated them from the Women’s Camp at Sector B-I-b and turned south-west towards one of Auschwitz’s numerous sub-camps located at Rajsko.20 The remaining SS guards, outnumbered many times over, fled from the rioting and shooting prisoners until heavy reinforcements could be sent to their ass
istance.
Sonderkommando 58-B at Crematoria III did not rise in revolt, and neither did 60-B at Crematoria V. Large numbers of well-armed SS arrived minutes later to secure both of these complexes, but before they did so the resistance leaders managed to dispose of their smuggled explosives down the latrines. There was no fighting, the SS corralling the prisoners under armed guard while they hastily searched the facility for weapons and bombs.
External camp security was in the hands of SS-Sturmbannführer Arthur Plorin’s Guard Battalion, a mix of SS-TV and Waffen-SS troops that manned the camp watchtowers and patrolled the perimeter wire. These soldiers had very little contact with the prisoners on a day-to-day basis but were the vital ‘ace in the hole’ for the commandant. During an emergency, such as a prisoner revolt, companies from the Guard Battalion would be rapidly deployed inside the camp. They were equipped as if going into battle, with steel helmets, web equipment, infantry weapons and stick grenades. The idea was to steamroller any revolt with maximum but carefully organized military violence, snuffing out Jewish resistance in a few minutes of bloody mayhem.
At Rajsko, where many of the escaped Jews had fled, the SS blocked the further passage of the escapees from Sonderkommando 57-B. Under heavy fire, they sought refuge inside a barn and prepared to defend themselves with their few small arms. But the SS had other ideas. They set the barn alight with flamethrowers and then shot the Sonderkommandos as they fled from the resulting conflagration. All were mercilessly killed.
At Crematoria II, large numbers of prisoners had failed to escape and the SS shot them down. About 250 were killed, including most of the revolt’s leaders. At Crematoria IV, SS overwhelmed Sonderkommando 59-B. A fire-fighting unit formed from prisoners at Auschwitz I main camp arrived to deal with the massive conflagration, and they witnessed the SS kill the survivors of Sonderkommando 59-B. Once the fire at Crematoria IV was contained, the fire-fighting unit was sent to Rajsko to put out the burning barn where the other members of 59-B had perished. A sudden air raid alert meant that the SS had to call off efforts to locate a few Sonderkommando who had managed to slip through their net, but the bodies of the slain were gathered up and all were returned to Crematoria IV, where they were counted and attempts made to properly identify them. All remaining Sonderkommandos were also sent to Crematoria IV.
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