Voices from the Holocaust

by Jon E. Lewis

  (2) For the preservation of German economic interests in the occupied territories, it is obvious that Jewish-owned essential or war industries and enterprises, as well as those important for the Four Year Plan, must be kept up for the time being.

  In these cases also, prompt Aryanization is to be sought, and the emigration of the Jews is to be completed later.

  (3) Finally, the food situation in the occupied territories must be taken into consideration. For instance, as far as possible, real estate owned by Jewish settlers is to be provisionally entrusted to the care of neighbouring German or even Polish farmers, to be worked by them together with their own, so as to assure harvesting of the crops still in the fields or renewed cultivation.

  With regard to this important question, contact is to be made with the agricultural expert of the Chief of the Civil Administration.

  (4) In all cases in which the interest of the Security Police on one hand and those of the German Civil Administration on the other cannot be reconciled, I am to be informed in the fastest way before the particular measures in question are carried out, and my decision is to be awaited.

  IV

  The chiefs of the Einsatzgruppen will report to me continuously on the following matters:

  (1) Numerical survey of the Jews present in their territories (broken down as indicated above, if possible). The numbers of Jews who are being evacuated from the countryside and of those who are already in the cities are to be reported separately.

  (2) Names of cities which have been designated as concentration points.

  (3) Deadlines set for the Jews to migrate to the cities.

  (4) Survey of all Jewish-owned essential or war industries and enterprises, as well as those important for the Four Year Plan, within their areas.

  If possible, the following should be specified:

  a. Kind of enterprise (also statement on possible conversion into enterprises that are truly essential or war-related, or important for the Four Year Plan);

  b. Which of these enterprises need to be Aryanized most promptly (in order to forestall any kind of loss)?

  What kind of Aryanization is suggested? Germans or Poles? (This decision depends on the importance of the enterprise.)

  c. How large is the number of Jews working in these enterprises (including leading positions)?

  Can the enterprise simply be kept up after the removal of the Jews, or will such continued operation require assignment of German or Polish workers? On what scale?

  Insofar as Polish workers have to be introduced, care should be taken that they are mainly brought in from the former German provinces, so as to begin the weeding out of the Polish element there. These questions can be carried out only through involvement and participation of the German labour offices which have been set up.

  V

  For the attainment of the goals set, I expect total deployment of all forces of the Security Police and the Security Service.

  The chiefs of neighbouring Einsatzgruppen are to establish contact with each other immediately so that the territories concerned will be covered completely.

  VI

  The High Command of the Army, the Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan (Attention: Secretary of State Neumann), the Reich Ministries of the Interior (Attention: Secretary of State Stuckart), for Food and for Economy (Attention: Secretary of State Landfried), as well as the Chiefs of Civil Administration of the Occupied Territory have received copies of this decree.

  [Signed] Heydrich

  Mass Arrests in Łódź, October 1939

  DAWID SIERAKOWIAK

  Sierakowiak was one of the 200,000 Jews living in Łódź when the Nazis occupied the city. It lay in the western half of Poland as defined by the Pact with the Soviet Union, which took the eastern part of the country.

  It’s been three days since the mass arrests began. Thousands of teachers, doctors, and engineers, Jews and Poles, have been taken from their homes together with their families (infants have not been spared), and hurried to the market halls, and from there to various German jails. All old activists, former legionnaires, even simply rich people share the same fate. Groups of more prominent people are often dispatched immediately into the next world. The repairman who came to fix the tap said that his wife and some engineers have been arrested. They could not touch the engineer because he’s sick (the last phase of tuberculosis). So the Germans sealed the apartment with him and his servant inside. They were, for all practical purposes, condemned to death from hunger. His merciful neighbours lowered a string with bread (challah) so the servant could catch it through the window.

  In the evening Mrs Pomeranc came for a visit. She had been to the Jewish Community Council and learned what’s really going on. It’s true that Łódź is to be cleared of Jews. All the poor who register at the Jewish Community Council receive 50 złotys per person and are literally thrown out of the city: they are taken to Koluszki by train, and are let loose into the world from there. Mrs Pomeranc was advised at the Jewish administration to wait. We, too, considered various plans for departure, but in the end nothing came of them, and we have to wait. Either they will throw us out, or they will not ... In any case, the Hitlerjugendpartei [Hitler Youth Party] leader gave a huge speech, and what he said could be summed up in one sentence: ‘We will exterminate the Jews because there is no place for them in the Reich!’

  With the Nazi invasion of Poland, two million Polish Jews came under German authority. In line with Heydrich’s directive of that month, Jews – invariably stripped of their worldly goods – were herded into ghettos. Sierakowiak was one of them. He died in the Łódź ghetto, probably from tuberculosis, in 1943.

  Perhaps as many as 5,000 defenceless Polish Jews were executed by German soldiers and SS between September and October 1939. Everywhere Jews were robbed at gunpoint. One witness, David Wdowinski, a psychiatrist in Warsaw, recalled an incident that befell one Jewish family:

  They [three German officers] demanded money and jewellery and threatened the woman at the point of a gun ... Suddenly one of the officers noticed a small medallion hanging around the neck of the little boy. This child had been ill from birth. He had petit mal, a form of epilepsy ... The only thing which gave this child any comfort was this very medallion. In the presence of the officers the child was taken with a seizure ... One of the officers watching the child said: ‘I see that the child is ill. I am a doctor, but a Jew-kid is not a human being,’ and he tore the medallion off the neck of the little boy.

  A Konzentrationslager is Built at Oświęcim, Poland, February 1940

  SS-OBERSTURMBANNFÜHRER RUDOLF HOESS

  Fifty miles west of Kraków, Oświęcim lay in the zone of Poland annexed by Nazi Germany in 1939. The Germans knew it as Auschwitz. The first transports of prisoners arrived there in May 1940, these being criminals relocated from Germany. A transport of Poles – including Jews – arrived in the following month. Under Hoess, Auschwitz grew to become the largest concentration camp in the Third Reich, consisting of Auschwitz I (Administration), Auschwitz II–Birkenau (the extermination camp from 1942 onwards) and Auschwitz III–Monowitz (also known as Buna, a labour camp for the nearby I. G. Farben works). There were also forty-five satellite camps.

  When the question of building a new camp at Auschwitz became urgent, the authorities had not far to go for a commandant. Loritz was glad to let me go, so that he could find a commander of the protective custody camp more to his liking. This was Suhren, later to be Commandant of Ravensbrück, who had been Loritz’s adjutant in the General SS.

  I therefore became Commandant of the quarantine camp which was to be built at Auschwitz.

  It was far away, in the back of beyond, in Poland. There the inconvenient Hoess could exercise his passion for work to his heart’s content. That was what Glücks, the Inspector of Concentration Camps, had intended. It was in these circumstances that I took up my new task.

  I had never anticipated being made a commandant so quickly, especially as some very senior prote
ctive custody camp commanders had been waiting a long time for a commandant’s post to fall vacant.

  My task was not an easy one. In the shortest possible time I had to construct a transit camp for 10,000 prisoners, using the existing complex of buildings which, though well-constructed, had been completely neglected, and were swarming with vermin. From the point of hygiene, practically everything was lacking. I had been told in Oranienburg, before setting off, that I could not expect much help, and that I would have to rely largely on my own resources. In Poland I would find everything that had been unobtainable in Germany for years!

  It is much easier to build a completely new concentration camp than to construct one quickly out of a conglomeration of buildings and barracks which require a large amount of constructional alteration. I had hardly arrived in Auschwitz before the Inspector of the Security Police and of the Security Service in Breslau was enquiring when the first transports could be sent to me!

  It was clear to me from the very beginning that Auschwitz could be made into a useful camp only through the hard and untiring efforts of everyone, from the Commandant down to the lowest prisoner.

  But in order to harness all the available manpower to this task, I had to ignore all concentration camp tradition and customs. If I was to get the maximum effort out of my officers and men, I had to set them a good example. When reveille sounded from the SS rankers, I too must get out of bed. Before they had started their day’s work, I had already begun mine. It was late at night before I had finished. There were very few nights in Auschwitz when I could sleep undisturbed by urgent telephone calls.

  Deportation, Plock, March 1941

  MOSCHE SHKLAREK

  In the early hours of that morning the house shuddered from violent knocks on the door and from the savage cries of the Germans, ‘Filthy Jews, outside!’ Within a few moments we found ourselves huddled together in a crowd of the town’s Jews on Sheroka Street.

  With the help of the Volksdeutsche and with cruel blows and many murders, they loaded the assembled ones on to trucks, crowding them tightly, and the long convoy drove out of town. We were not permitted to take anything with us, not even something else to wear other than what we had put on in our terrified haste.

  On the same day, after hours of difficult travelling, the trucks came to a stop in the midst of Dzialdowo camp, at the entrance to the town of Mlawa. Two rows of Germans, equipped with clubs and whips, stood in a line several tens of metres long, extending from the trucks to the camp gate.

  We were ordered to jump out of the trucks and run the gauntlet towards the gate. Before the first ones to jump had managed to set foot on the torture-pass, the clubs and whips flew and a torrent of blows rained down on the runners’ heads. With difficulty and desperate haste, each one hurried to reach the camp gate, people falling and being trampled under their brothers’ feet in their frantic race.

  Only an isolated few managed to get through the gate without being wounded by the blows and lashes of the Germans. In the aftermath of this act of terror, scores of slain bodies were left lying and were buried next to the single privy which was provided for the men and women who lived in the camp.

  The hundreds of wounded and injured lay without any medical care in the stables that were full of mud and dung, and into which we had been squeezed and packed without room enough to free our aching limbs. In this camp we endured days of torment and distress, thirst and hunger.

  Shklarek was later sent to the ghetto at Częstochowa.

  A Jewish Girl Risks a Visit to the Cinema, Vienna, 1940

  RUTH KLUGER

  Unable to afford the Reichsfluchsteuer, the tax paid to the Reich which allowed Jews to emigrate, Ruth Kluger and her mother ‘got stuck’ in Vienna. Almost every public activity was denied to Viennese Jewish children, including going to the cinema.

  In 1940, when I was eight or nine, the local movie theatre showed Walt Disney’s Snow White. I loved movies. I had been weaned on Mickey Mouse shorts and traded pictures of Shirley Temple with classmates. I badly wanted to see this film, but since I was Jewish, I naturally wasn’t permitted to. I groused and bitched about this unfairness, until finally my mother proposed that I should leave her alone and just go and forget about what was permitted and what wasn’t.

  I hesitated a bit at this unexpected go-ahead, for it was a Sunday, we were known in the neighbourhood, and to go to a movie right there in broad daylight was a kind of dare. My mother couldn’t accept the absurdity of blatant discrimination. She assured me that no one would care who sat in an audience of children. I shouldn’t think I was that important, and I should stop being a coward, because she was never a coward, not even when she was my age. So of course I went, not only for the movie, but to prove myself. I bought the most expensive type of ticket, thinking that sitting in a loge would make me less noticeable, and thus I ended up next to the nineteen-year-old baker’s daughter from next door with her little siblings, enthusiastic Nazis one and all.

  I sweated it out for the next ninety minutes and have never before or afterwards understood so little of what happened on the screen. All I could think of was whether the baker’s daughter was really glaring at me, or if I was only imagining it. The wicked queen of the film merged with my neighbour, her fairy-tale malice a poor imitation of the real thing, and it was I, and no innocent princess, who was lost in the woods, offered poisoned apples, and in fear of glass coffins.

  Why didn’t I get up and walk out? Perhaps in order not to face my mother, or because any move might attract attention. Perhaps merely because one doesn’t leave a theatre before the film is over, or most likely, because this solution didn’t occur to me, frightened as I was. Consider that I still wonder why my people didn’t leave Vienna in time – and perhaps there is a family resemblance between that question and why I stayed glued to my seat.

  When the lights came on, I wanted to wait until the house had emptied out, but my enemy stood her ground and waited, too. She told her little brothers to hush and fixed me sternly. There I was, trapped, as I had surmised. The baker’s daughter put on her gloves and coat and finally addressed me.

  She spoke firmly and with conviction, in the manner of a member of the Bund Deutscher Mädchen, the female branch of the Hitler Youth, to which she surely belonged. Hadn’t I seen the sign at the box office? (I nodded, what else could I do? It was a rhetorical question.) Didn’t I know what it meant? I could read, couldn’t I? It said ‘No Jews’. I had broken a law. She was using her best High German – none of Vienna’s easygoing dialect for this patriotic occasion. If it happened again she would call the police. I was lucky that she was letting me off this once.

  The story of Snow White can be reduced to one question: who is entitled to live in the king’s palace and who is the outsider? The baker’s daughter and I followed this formula. She, in her own house, the magic mirror of her racial purity before her eyes, and I, also at home here, a native, but without permission and at this moment expelled and exposed. Even though I despised the law that excluded me, I still felt ashamed to have been found out. For shame doesn’t arise from the shameful action, but from discovery and exposure. If I had got away with my transgression, I would have been proud of my daring. But I had been unmasked. W. B. Yeats writes of a man ‘among his enemies’:

  How in the name of Heaven can he escape

  That defiling and disfigured shape

  The mirror of malicious eyes

  Casts upon his eyes until at last

  He thinks that shape must be his shape?

  The common lot of the outcast is self-contempt. I might have felt better had I known this poem, which I committed to memory some ten years later.

  It was over pretty soon. The girl had asserted the superiority of her Germanic forefathers as opposed to the vermin race I belonged to, and there was nothing more to say. I was in a state of shock. This was new and terrible. Tears welled up, but I held them back. The usher, an older woman, helped me into my coat and handed me my purse, which I was abou
t to leave on the seat. She was sorry for me and said a few soothing words. I nodded, incapable of answering because I was choking on my tears of humiliation, but grateful for this bit of kindness, these alms for the poor.

  Kluger was later transported to the ghetto at Theresienstadt, then Auschwitz. She survived the Holocaust.

  ‘People were being hanged for nothing’: Terror in the Łódź Ghetto, c. 1940

  MICHAEL ETKIND

  In some ghettos the Jews were forced into labour on behalf of the Nazi war economy, in others they were simply left to die by the ‘natural’ means of starvation and disease, but in all these places there were random acts of Nazi terror. Etkind was a Jewish schoolboy in Łódź in 1940.

  ... various notices appeared; for example, Jews were not allowed to walk on the main street which was renamed Adolf Hitler Strasse. They were not allowed to go into parks, swimming pools, or cinemas and theatres. All the money in the bank was frozen, all property belonging to Jews automatically confiscated. Then Jews had to wear an armband with the Star of David on it to show that they were Jews; somebody started making them and you bought them at the street corners. The death penalty was imposed for the slightest deviation from the order. People were being hanged for nothing, just to terrorize the population. I am very squeamish and found it strange that, out of morbid curiosity, people would go to where corpses were hanging in the square.

  Medical Experiments at Dachau, 1941–5

  FRANZ BLAHA

  This is taken from Blaha’s deposition to the post-war military tribunal at Nuremberg.

  I, Franz Blaha, being duly sworn, depose and state as follows:

  I was sent as a prisoner to the Dachau Concentration Camp in April 1941, and remained there until the liberation of the camp in April 1945. Until July 1941 I worked in a Punishment Company. After that I was sent to the hospital and subjected to the experiments in typhoid being conducted by Dr Mürmelstadt. After that I was to be made the subject of an experimental operation, and only succeeded in avoiding this by admitting that I was a physician. If this had been known before I would have suffered, because intellectuals were treated very harshly in the Punishment Company. In October 1941 I was sent to work in the herb plantation, and later in the laboratory for processing herbs. In June 1942, I was taken into the hospital as a surgeon. Shortly afterwards I was directed to conduct a stomach operation on twenty healthy prisoners. Because I would not do this I was put in the autopsy room, where I stayed until April 1945. While there I performed approximately 7,000 autopsies. In all, 12,000 autopsies were performed under my direction.